IMF/World Bank, Globalization and US Militarism
By Richard Becker
"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." --Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999
It is impossible, without mutilating reality and doing great disservice to the people's movement, to separate the struggle against the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the World Trade Organization from the struggle against U.S. imperialism, its military aggression abroad and repression at home.
Big demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank on April 16-17 in Washington are now in the final planning stages. Many organizations have poured time, energy and resources into these actions, which are aimed at shutting down the semi-annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank.
The opposition to these two predatory institutions--which have wreaked such great suffering on the oppressed countries and peoples of the world for more than a half-century--comes from a wide range of organizations including progressive religious groups, unions, anarchists, and solidarity and political groups.
Some organizers have billed the DC protests as "Seattle East"-- a follow-up to the mass actions that disrupted the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late November/early December of last year. The events on April 16-17 promise to be the biggest manifestation of opposition to the IMF and World Bank yet seen inside the United States.
As generally progressive and important as this mobilization is, there is a glaring omission in much of the organizing. There is almost no mention of the relationship between globalization and U.S. militarism and repression. This is not a secondary or side issue.
U.S. imperialist domination is the number-one problem, the main obstacle to real development and progress for the people of the world. And military superiority above all is what makes the United States the leading imperial power.
From Washington's point of view, the aim of globalization-- breaking down all barriers to capital's worldwide exploitation--is not just "corporate domination" in the general sense, but U.S. corporate domination. To achieve this domination, the ruling establishment often uses economic, political, diplomatic and military means in an integrated strategy, as they have against Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Maximizing profit is, of course, what drives the system. But maintaining its dominant position in the world economic and political order is the guiding principle of U. S. strategic doctrine. Globalization yes, but globalization with U.S. capital in the driver's seat.
In its drive to maintain global hegemony, the IMF, World Bank and WTO are instruments of U.S. policy. The enforcing arm is the Pentagon.
IMF & World Bank set up by the U.S.
From their very beginnings in 1944 at Bretton Woods, N. H., Washington saw the International Monetary Fund and World Bank--originally called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Developmentas a means to facilitate U.S. world economic domination.
World War II was coming to an end. The Bretton Woods agreement creating the IMF made the U.S. dollar the standard to which all other country's currencies were pegged. The IMF and World Banks headquarters were established in Washington, where they have remained until today.
The IBRD/World Bank's original priority was to extend reconstruction loans to countries that would become importers of U.S. goods. The idea was to help rebuild war-shattered, non-profit-making infrastructure like roads and ports with government-backed loans, so that later they could serve as the means for private-sector trade and profit.
The aim, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau said at that time, was "a world in which international trade and international investment can be carried on by businessmen on business principles." Morgenthau and other government officials made it clear that they were referring first and foremost to U.S. "businessmen." (Kolko, The Politics of War, 1990, Pantheon Books, p. 257, footnote)
Establishing the IMF and World Bank was part of the re-ordering of the world economic system by the United States in the aftermath of World War II. They were designed to assure U.S. global domination. This new order also involved the United States becoming the dominant power in the declining empires of its wartime allies--Britain, France, Netherlands, etc.--as well as of its enemies Italy, Germany and Japan.
The imperialist allies/rivals were cut in on the new post-war arrangement as distinctly junior partners of the United States. Today they make up the G-7 group: United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
At the same time, the United States and its class allies were fighting to stop the revolutions rising across Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Seeking to roll back the revolutionary tide and secure its new status and possessions, the United States never demobilized its military after World War II. On the contrary, it embarked on a vast military build-up of all types of high-tech and conventional weaponry including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Since 1940, Washington has spent the unimaginable sum of $20 trillion ($20,000,000,000,000!) on the military--enough money to have provided for adequate nutrition, clean water, electrification, housing, literacy, and basic health care for the world's entire population.
In the next four years alone an additional $1.2 trillion will go down the military rathole.
Today the U.S. military budget is bigger than that of the rest of the United Nations Security Council members combined. This bloated military establishment exists to protect and serve U.S. capital--not only to extend and maintain its domination in what used to be called the Third World, the oppressed countries, but also vis-a-vis its imperialist allies and rivals.
The IMF and the Pentagon
U.S. strategy employs economic, financial, diplomatic, political and military means to achieve its ends. As Thomas Friedman, a leading mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, put it in his New York Times column, the military is the indispensable "hidden fist" making imperialist globalization work. Friedman wrote this column four days after the start of the 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia.
In the early 1980s, Yugoslavia was one of the first countries to have a Structural Adjustment Program imposed on it by the IMF. The country had taken major development loans beginning in the 1950s. The worldwide economic recession of 1979 hit Yugoslavia hard and it needed to re-finance its loans.
The economic austerity that the IMF demanded as a condition for refinancing the country's loans played a major role in heightening the tensions between the different republics and provinces of Yugoslavia and exacerbating widely varying levels of living standards within the federal state. This development had the effect of strengthening nationalist and secessionist elements from Slovenia to Kosovo.
The threat of trade sanctions, a credit cut-off and other penalties by the United States and the European Community was used to support the secessionist movements in Yugoslavia in 1991and 1992 when civil war broke out. In 1992, the United States forced economic sanctions, a total blockade of the country, through the UN Security Council, and threw Yugoslavia out of the UN and all other international bodies.
The sanctions blockade was enforced by military means, as all blockades--including the current one against Iraq--must be if they are to be effective. The U.S. Navy, along with its NATO allies, began patrolling the Adriatic Sea and Danube River, stopping all vessels that might be bound for Yugoslavia.
NATO jets prevented any air traffic to and from Yugoslavia, and in the summer of 1995 launched a major bombing campaign in Bosnia. In late 1995, Yugoslavia signed the Dayton Accords.
Even after Dayton, Washington maintained an "outer wall of sanctions" against Yugoslavia--i.e. blocking credit and loans. This meant preventing Yugoslavia from receiving new loans from international institutions and banks, which the country badly needed.
But the United States, while securing control of much of the former Yugoslavia, had still not fully achieved its objective of subjugating the entire region. So in 1999 came the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing war, the occupation of Kosovo province, followed by new sanctions and an oil embargo against Yugoslavia.
The 10-year war against that country continues, using, as it has since the beginning, the IMF, World Bank, UN and Pentagon as elements of an integrated strategy.
To be effective, the movement resisting imperialist domination must fight against U.S. wars and intervention everywhere, at the same time that it struggles against the IMF, World Bank and WTO.
It also must resist any attempt to line the movement up with one faction or another in the U.S. ruling class in its struggle against the People's Republic of China. This emerging movement would be disoriented and eventually demobilized if it supported the call to exclude China from the WTO or deny it normal trade status.
Posted: 3/26/ 2000
