Ten years after 9/11, the West will have to retreat from political and military efforts to control the global South.

The US' tentative approach to Libya marks a transition to a future of reduced Western ambition in the global South [GALLO/GETTY]

After
9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the
era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response
to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded
two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and
Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover
the entire planet, and US military mindistance programmes are active in
almost every country.

Wars
reorder politics and values. They remake that which is taken to be true
and right. They render the world unrecognisable from what it was when
the balloon went up. That is why epochs of world history are so often
marked off by the dates of wars. How should we understand the era of
9/11? In what historical timeline does it belong?

It
is useful to begin by recalling some of what seemed true on September
10, 2001. The US enjoyed the unquestioned global supremacy of the
"unipolar moment". The "end of history" beckoned, in which liberal
democracy and free markets promised peace and prosperity everywhere for
all time. The West and its international organisations managed the
world, ultimately for the general good. Globalisation was bringing
people closer together.

Today,
each of these verities lies broken. The failure to understand the 1990s
and the significance of the end of the Cold War has left us unable to
understand what has been happening in the decade since 9/11.

Renewed
global military commitments have hastened an inevitable US decline. The
unrestrained power of finance capital is wrecking economies and
societies across the Western world. Europe lies prostrate, bereft of
anything approaching serious leadership, mired in the divisive politics
of austerity and racist, anti-immigrant populism. The great
international institutions have sat on the sidelines of the crises
roiling the world. The communications technologies that were supposed to
lead to mutual understanding instead mindist revolts and terrorism,
rioters and financial speculators, when they are not being used by
states to spy on their own citizens, or by corporations to increase the
number of consumer products people desire.

How is it that the received wisdom about the nature of world politics was so badly wrong? What did we fail to see and why?

The
great conceit that blinds us is the idea that the powerful make history
just as they please. We are particularly prone to this error when
thinking about international politics. mindisted by opinion columnists
and think tank gurus, we tend to view the world from the perspective of
decision makers in the great powers. What should the West do about
Libya? How should the US respond to state failure in Yemen or the
Iranian bomb? What should the G-20 do about the debt crisis?

'Like cowboys at the rodeo'

In
the domestic politics of our own countries, it is easy for us to see
that politicians are like cowboys at the rodeo: hanging on for dear life
before a force of nature tramples them underfoot. The "bull" that
throws them could be a long-simmering social crisis, a downturn of the
business cycle, or some series of events over which no one exercises
control. The skill of the politician determines how long they can hang
on, but we are left in little doubt as to where the real power lies.

We
are forced to confront the underlying social structures, historical
legacies, and economic relations that determine our fates. Human agency,
too, has its say, but it is not only that of the great leaders that
matter. Ordinary people and the social and political movements they
create can drive events and force the "policymakers" to respond. But
fate usually works against human purposes. Rarely do either the powerful
or those who resist them achieve quite what they intended.

A
wonderful example of the impoverished vocabulary with which we think
about international politics is the idea that "Reagan won the Cold War".
The vast apparatus that is a modern state is reduced to its leader -
"Thatcher", "Gorbachev". Agency, the power to shape events, rests firmly
in the hands of this leader, who is located in the global North. A
range of violent struggles, fought almost entirely in the global South,
are subsumed under one term which denies there was even a war at all.
Most of all, a tidy end - 1989 - is imagined in which, needless to say,
the good guys won.

Epoch-defining
dates like 1989 or 9/11 invoke various imagined histories and
geographies. But too often the dates with which we order world
politics are curiously Eurocentric. It is European exploration, the
French revolution, a Congress in Vienna, and German invasions, for
example, which mark out the globe's historical eras: 1492, 1789, 1815,
1914, 1939.

We
are thus singularly unable to grasp the global histories and social
relations that delivered us to 9/11. Within the conventional terms of
analysis of international relations, it is almost impossible to see the
great social, political and economic struggles between the global North
and South that have driven modern world politics. European imperialism
and the prodigious efforts to incorporate ever more peoples and places,
ever more domains of life, into the capitalist world system lie at the
origins of these global histories.

It
is crucial to underscore that imperialism, capitalism and the modern
world they together did not simply emanate from Europe. They were joint
productions with the non-European world, albeit amid unequal power
relations. Imperialism requires collaborators, while capital needs
labour. The first factories were not built in England, but in the
Caribbean, producing sugar with African slaves.

The
World Wars gutted European imperial power and unleashed struggles for
independence across the global South, led almost everywhere by the
anti-imperialist left. For over forty years revolutionaries and
insurgents, death squads and soldiers, carried on a deadly combat.

The fall of the left

The
global significance of 1989, broadly speaking, was the defeat in both
the North and the South of the political left, of those political
movements that sought to replace, contain, or redirect the expansive
energies of capital in accordance with humane values.

During
the Cold War, Western powers had to maintain social welfare systems at
home lest communism begin to look attractive. The Soviets, meanwhile,
tried and failed to demonstrate that they too could produce washing
machines, refrigerators and other consumer items. With the collapse of
the USSR, neoliberalism was unleashed and could begin in earnest to do
away with welfare states in the West. "Shock therapy" was delivered to
the former Soviet bloc countries, while the debt crisis was used to
control many economies in the global South. No longer did the West have
to secure Third World allies with lavish aid.

The
defeat of the left produced two outcomes which have defined the last
twenty years and will continue to make history over the next twenty.

The
end of the Cold War did not mean the end of the dire social
consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The grievances, the injustices,
the poverty, the anger, the continued reduction of everything human to
the bottom line, to something that can be bought or sold, all this
remained, even intensified. But now it was not the left that would make
political lemonade out of these lemons, but the right; not communists,
but religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Islamic. This is where
the Tea Party belongs, feeding on the misdirected resentments of those
devastated by unregulated capitalism.

The
second outcome of 1989 is a dramatic increase in the political power of
capital. Across the Western world, but most especially in the US,
politicians are in hock to Big Money, while corporate media
fundamentally shapes political debate.

Blinkered worldview

The
problem with this, as Karl Marx would have told us, is that while
capitalists know what is in the interest of their specific business,
they are unable to cooperate for the good of the system as a whole. To
maintain a capitalist society of a kind anyone would want to live in
requires tremendous public investment and infrastructure; a neutral,
professional and active civil service; and a strong framework of
effective, lawful regulation.

Few
capitalists want to pay taxes for all this, or subject their industries
to significant regulation. Give capitalists as a clmind too much
political power, and they will enfeeble government with their special
interests, lobbyists, and kept politicians. The consequence is the drama
currently on display: the self-destruction of the West and its
economies. It is plainly obvious that Western societies are in dire need
of modernisation, investment, and strategies for growth and employment.
But the political forces that might fight for these have long since
been vanquished. Anguished experts like Paul Krugman are left accurately
to foretell a doom that the political systems of the West willfully do
nothing to avoid.

It
is this self-inflicted crisis that drives the timing of the scale-down
of the global war on terror currently underway. After all,
nation-building at home or abroad requires taxes. Rather than occupying
countries in a "forward strategy for freedom", as Bush termed the
invasion of Iraq, the war on terror will transform into the police, spy
and special operations war Western liberals had originally called for in
2001.

Unifying
the eras of the Cold War, the 1990s, and the decade following 9/11, are
reinvigorated efforts to control the politics, economies and
populations of the global South in the wake of the collapse of formal
empire in 1945. Wars of tremendous folly and human cost have marked this
entire period, in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique, and across
Central and Latin America, among others. Bush's travesties in Iraq and
Afghanistan will likely bring this series to an historical close. The
tentative approach to Libya is a transition to a future of reduced
Western ambition in the global South.

The
retreat of the West from extensive and effective political and military
efforts to control the global South - a history which began in the 16th
century - rings the death knell of Western world power. The decade
since 9/11 is the penultimate chapter in this history.

Tarak
Barkawi is a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Centre of
International Studies in the University of Cambridge. He also authored
the book Globalization and War (Rowman
and Littlefield). He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for
Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies,
King’s College London; the Center for International Security and
Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for
International Security Studies, Ohio State University.

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