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 The political economy of development |
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| Maldevelopment - Anatomy of a global failure
4. Complexities of international relations: Africa's vulnerability and external intervention African economies' vulnerability vis-à-vis the challenge of
capitalism's new worldwide expansion The arguments of the preceding chapters have put a finger on the spot: the African continent is par excellence one of extreme vulnerability to foreign interference. Here we shall consider the forms and effects of this vulnerability in regard to the following questions:
African economies' vulnerability vis-à-vis the challenge of capitalism's new worldwide expansion If the quarter century (1945-70) after the Second World War was one of worldwide expansion reaching a qualitatively new stage (with the inter-nationalization of imperialism, and US hegemony that provides the framework for this almost unprecedented upsurge), for the particular region of Europe and Africa the period was one of European construction (with an impact on southern Europe) and of development of the Arab plan for unitary and popular liberation (and its confrontation with the Palestine issue) and of independence for Africa in general. European construction, initiated with the Marshall Plan and formalized with the Treaty of Rome, which came into effect in 1958, reached a new stage with its extension to Southern Europe, not without worsening the contradictions of interest between the latter and the wealthier Europe, and in a period of crisis. The post-war upsurge has, however, already had a substantial impact on the givens of the North-South issue in Europe. For the upsurge has, with its wider world impact, entailed a substantial speeding-up of the modernization of the European peripheries to such an extent that the states of Southern Europe are now so integrated into the European and world system that it is virtually impossible for the dominant political forces of these countries to envisage a response to the crisis by a withdrawal into themselves. There is a striking illustration of this change in the contrast between the attitudes of these countries in response to the crisis of the 1930s - a semi-autarkical withdrawal of populist or fascistic bent - and the current belief that acceptance of the rules of the game of worldwide competition is 'unstoppable', as is said on the right and the left. Nevertheless, European construction remains ambiguous in meaning and prospects; and the challenges of the current crisis, far from attenuating these ambiguities, serve rather to reveal the irresolute and indecisive attitudes of the European partners. The European construction had, from the outset, been conceived as a necessary venture to avoid the spectre of 'communism' that has today totally disappeared, if it ever really existed. In this sense, it was conceived as an integral part of the economic, political, military and ideological strategy of US domination. European economic integration, far from aiming at the creation of a new autonomous pole competing with the United States, was conceived as a sub-set of the worldwide whole. Europe was open to the Atlantic military alliance and the penetration of the US transnationals who have played a decisive role in its economic modernization. It remains so. First since it remains under the supposed protection of the United States nuclear umbrella and has not developed an autonomous defence, in the absence of which an autonomous economy is inconceivable. With a touch of bizarre economic shortsightedness, it has been suggested that savings on military expenditure will allow a better economic performance. The intention of autonomy, which De Gaulle obviously favoured, never went beyond the stage of irresolute actions. Furthermore, in response to the challenges of the crisis. Europe has rallied behind the United States in a common Western offensive intended to 'recompradorize' the Third World. This final ambiguity leads us to the issue of imperialism in general, and of European imperialism towards the Arab and African worlds in particular. Great Britain and France had virtually shared out the Arab and African world between them: and on the morrow of the last world war they did not yet suspect that they would have to bow to the decolonization that was imposed upon them by the liberation movement and acceptable under certain conditions to American hegemony. Decolonization did not come about without conflict' and the Algerian war was colonialism's death throe. European construction had prepared nothing in this regard, except to put the former French colonial empire in Africa at the disposal of the capital of the Community of the Six, with collective neo-colonialism replacing the former imperial colonialism and little more. Without taking up time with issues that are treated elsewhere, it is necessary to recall here:
The European view of the Arab world, especially North Africa, scarcely goes any further, except that it had to take into account the greater stability of the local ruling classes. The association agreements, drawn up with Morocco and Tunisia, made do with providing preferential and provisional access to the European market for the countries' agricultural exports (until the integration of Southern Europe into the EEC provoked a crisis for these exports), and with relocation (also provisional) of labour-intensive (mainly textile) industries directed towards European exports (until the current crisis called these concessions into question). The strategic view implicit here plunged the Arab partners deeper in the impasse of peripheral capitalism clinging to expansion of the European centre. It was the same in the end for the other Arab countries. If the oil producers among them (Algeria, Libya, Iraq and the Gulf states) believed they could mobilize their financial resources to speed up their industrialization, their ruling classes could imagine only a kind of industrialization that would offer a new outlet for the exports of developed capitalism - European, but American and Japanese too. This could only strengthen the tendency towards worldwide expansion and not offer a decisive step towards an autocentric national or regional development. Once the crisis had come, this closer entanglement proved deeply catastrophic, as is evidenced by the external debt' rudely aggravated by the conjuncture of stagnation and the impact of the American counter-attack. In these circumstances, Saudi Arabia, Washington's traditional client, has opted, as might be expected, for unconditional support to the financial and monetary system that is the instrument of worldwide expansion and the counter-attack aimed at restoring US hegemony. If there has been any attempt at autocentric development, it has been incomplete, erratic, limited by the very character of the ruling classes of the progressive countries engaged upon it, whether they were oil producers (Algeria and Iraq) or not (Egypt and Syria). What should be noted here is that these attempts, supported by the USSR, have been fought by the West as a whole, Europe included. To what can one ascribe this European refusal to envisage any relations with the Arabs and Africans other than neo-imperialist relations, whether they are chiefly open to US and Japanese competition (above all when the local partner insists) or relatively reserved for the Europeans? An examination of Europe's structural and conjunctural position in international competition sheds light on this question. Europe covers the deficit on its relations with the United States and Japan by the surplus on its exchanges with the Third World and the countries of the Eastern bloc. To remain a player in the worldwide game, Europe has to maintain unequal relations within the sphere of its particular dependencies. Europe has found the main outlet for its expansion through modernization of its own peripheries (Southern Europe to be precise) and its own internal modernization. Unlike the United States and Japan who export their capital more widely (especially to Latin America and South-East Asia) in order to dominate the process of export-oriented relocation of industry in the Third World, Europe is open to massive importation of Third World manpower necessary to keep up with the rate of its internal expansion. It is also not by chance that this immigration is, in the main, precisely by those in areas of European dependence (the Arabs, the Africans, the West Indians] that are much more affected than Latin America and South-East Asia by the unequal capitalist development that Europe's strategy entails. It is now well-known just how far this immigration has created a political atmosphere inimical to improved relations with the Third World. Finally, Europe, with a paucity of natural resources in comparison with the United States, attaches much greater importance to securing its supplies. As it has renounced autonomous military powers, Europe has condemned itself to dependence upon American good will, and relies only on its rapid intervention forces {directed against the Third World of course) that are now almost entirely the essence of the European military vision. All this inspires little confidence in the European talk of the Third World, along the lines of a Euro-Arabo-African 'trialogue'. We should not necessarily go so far as to conclude that it would be better to be dependent directly on the masters of the world -hegemonic imperialism - than on its lieutenants. That would leave out of account the military dimension of the problem, and rule out the possibility of internal change, less difficult to imagine in Europe perhaps than in the United States. Does the crisis open new and different prospects for Euro-Arab relations? How will the conflict of economic interests henceforth between Europe and the United States be resolved, or the East-West and North-South conflicts? We shall consider these questions in Chapter 8. The Berlin Act of the 1880s divided the African continent that was almost entirely subject to direct colonialism by the European powers, mainly Britain. France, Belgium and Portugal. Already by that time Britain's hegemony was declining, and until 1945 the world system was marked by constant conflict between the main imperial powers over the inheritance. It is understandable that from 1880 to 1945, the British and French metropolises should treat their colonies as preserves. The crisis of the 1930s further emphasized these 'imperial boltholes' by giving the Sterling area and Franc zone a system of strict preferences. But, at the same time, it must be admitted that Africa as a whole (apart from South Africa and North Africa) played only minor subordinate roles in imperialist exploitation of the world, in comparison with Asia and Latin America. As can be seen, the primitive forms of the exploitation of peasant labour reduced the potential size of the colonial African market. Colonization in Africa, predicated on the exploitation of mineral resources, gave no thought to industrialization and intensified agriculture. But by the end of the Second World War the United States emerged as the new, world hegemonic power, and in this capacity insisted on relinquishment of the preserves; this was its motive for 'an/i-colonialism'. Britain and France tried for a while to resist American pressure, and the adventurist Suez War of 1956 marks the end of their colonial nostalgia. The Franco-British defeat in this adventure hastened the process of decolonization of Africa, at the same time as it was an encouragement to join the path of 'European construction' inaugurated in the Treaty of Rome signed in 1957. As London was for a long time blackballed from membership of the EEC, Paris had to play the decisive political role, even if the gradual rebirth of Germany was to shift the centre of gravity of the European economy to the east of the Rhine. France brought as dowry to the EEC its African colonies, not without first ensuring the permanence of its own political and control, among other means by maintaining the rigid structures of the Franc zone. The conventions of association between the newly independent African countries and the EEC put a legal garb on European privileges in Africa, while the dual membership of former British colonies and other African countries in this association, and of Britain in the EEC, broadens the Euro-African association. But if for a decade or so there was nothing more remarkable on this theme, the general crisis the world system entered from the 1970s reopened the discussion. New prospects for reorganization were opened. The decline of US hegemony, beginning in the crisis, put on to the agenda contradictory reactions from its partners in the world system. Would Europe embark on a road ensuring it greater collective autonomy with regard to Washington? Would it therefore envisage a tightening-up of neo-imperial control over Africa? Or would it rather commit its future to a polycentric approach more favourably balanced towards the Third World, accept revision of its privileged links with Africa and agree to support a process of autocentric popular development to the south of the Mediterranean and the Sahara? The entire ambiguity of the Euro-African association comes within this purview. The significance of the Euro-African association goes beyond the limited framework of the association 'agreements'. The Yaoundé and Lomé conventions grant preferences on the European market for some African products (those that do not compete with European agricultural products), and - in the other direction - some trading advantages to the European partners. But in fact these 'mutual advantages' are virtually negligible. The conventions envisaged financial aid from Europe to Africa. But, so far, this has been scarcely more than to carry on the bilateral aid that the former metropolises would probably have gone on supplying the states, which it must be said are often client states. The conventions also envisaged 'establishment rights' ensuring that the African countries would be open to European capital. But so far, to our knowledge, Africa is not closed to other capital (notably the American): moreover, the European negotiator has never denied that these establishment rights were not synonymous with an open door, and the states could set - even strict - limits on their extent, and control the investments in question, provided that they put their European partners on an equal footing with third parties (American or Japanese). In other words, the African countries could determine that the 'association' should be devoid of content: a symbolic preference would be enough, without excluding control over foreign trade or over investments by local authorities, in return for which the states might benefit from financial and technical aid they could still turn down. Their sovereignty therefore remained virtually limitless. This recognized sovereignty has no greater limits than those of African inter-state relations. These are not expected to follow the same approach as in regard to the European partner preferences actually granted to some may be less for others, an open door for some may be closed to others. So what is at stake in association? Whether or not an associate, what difference does it make to Africa? Why does Europe cling to the symbol and the US fuss about it with such force? Are the Europeans so ingenuous as to believe that, in competition with the United States, a symbolic duty of half a per cent of value on exports is decisive, and are the Americans for their part afraid of this 'injustice'? Certainly not. If these things occur it is because both know that what is at stake goes further than the letter of the agreement. It is a question of whether the governments in Africa will initiate a 'pro-European' policy - it has to be seen whether this conceals a singular or plural component - or hence 'an/i-American' policy, or the reverse. Accepting or refusing the association agreement is, therefore, a political act, a very broad statement of intent on this issue. The trick was in seeing in the texts only secondary issues, the 'inheritance', and not foreseeing the true lines of debate, the issues that would arise along with the 'development' of Africa. Hence, positions should retain the flexibility that international uncertainty enjoins. It has already been shown in Chapter 2 how, in the 1970s, the Third World waged a battle for a revision of the international division of labour to enable it to embark on industrialization, and how the world redeployment of capital related to this change. Over the next 15 years or so the international division of labour was changed, although more slowly than the plans for the NIEO and redeployment expected. But if these changes have occurred, it is certainly not in Africa that they have changed the terms of international specialization, but in Latin America, India and East Asia. The decline in status of Africa - trapped in its (ruinous) agricultural and mining role - is the other vector of this global evolution. Is Europe to blame? In part it is, since the EEC-ACP asociation and other forms of its presence in Africa - gives it a particular responsibility. To say the least, the association has not been mobilized to hasten the evolution of Africa. Of course it is still true that responsibility for the disaster also and primarily falls on the local ruling classes. But were not the latter largely the traditional clients of Europe? In these circumstances, competition between Europe and the United States disguised in the crisis operates on African territory only within the narrow limits of mercantile competition. Special links with France: the Franc zone2 In addition to the special relations the African continent enjoys with the EEC, France has retained, in most of its former sub-Saharan African colonies, a position that is unmatched anywhere else in the Third World. The monetary system of these countries is, in effect, based on the principle of free and absolute movement of capital at a fixed exchange rate (subject to change by common agreement) guaranteed by the metropolis. In return for this guarantee the local central banks are permitted to support African treasuries only within very narrow limits. Furthermore, the main commercial banks operating in these countries are branches and subsidiaries of metropolitan banks, and can therefore always counter the monetary policy that the local central banks want to pursue, in the event that this policy is not attractive to them, by the simple expedient of transferring funds to or from their Paris headquarters. There is no lack of examples of this: local banks have been known to make massive transfers of their capital to France to take advantage of higher interest rates. In these circumstances the country's monetary integration in the metropolitan finance economy is total, equivalent to that of a metropolitan province; the local central banks do not deserve the description as they are no more than issuing houses circulating a French Franc printed with an unusual design: there is only one central bank for the whole of the Franc zone: the Banque de France. We have suggested calling this system the 'zone of the Franc' rather than the Franc zone. For the African countries in question, IMF membership makes no sense, and is something of a legal fiction: and the IMF interventions make no more sense, as the metropolitan system is responsible for the monetary administration of these countries. As can be seen, the system is that of total liberalism that the 'theories' made fashionable under Reagan, proposed as a model on the world scale. To the extent that France is wide open to the worldwide financial system, this total liberalism has no boundaries. The theory of the market on which it is based is, in turn, a manifestation of the assumption that the only development 'possible' requires the open door. A malicious mind would note that the African countries in question belong to the group of least developed countries; consequently, reasoning on the basis of the correlation to which the advocates of these economic theories are so partial, would show the opposite of their assumption as the widest open door is associated with the least satisfactory performances. In fact even on the view that the structures of the centres-peripheries imbalance are not based on monetary integration, which is only a consequence, and after the illusion is dropped that there can be a 'monetary solution' to this profound imbalance, it has still to be admitted that the forms of this monetary integration are an additional severe handicap to any attempt at autocentric national or regional development. All the African states that did hope to guide their development in this direction had to break out of the yoke of the Franc zone. If they have sometimes 'become bankrupt', and have even sustained the monetary illusion we are criticizing, the reasons have nothing to do with an inevitable failure of national monetary management. The monetary management of African countries in the Franc zone is, as has been shown over and over again, 'passive', in the sense that the currency issue is adjusted to the needs of the system's reproduction without giving it any power to play any significant part in its qualitative evolution. It follows 19th century style financial orthodoxy, which has no match in other Third World countries, or in modern developed capitalism, including metropolitan France, again despite the assertions of the fashionable Reaganite-lMF theology. This systematically deflationary policy at local level does not prevent the automatic importation of possible inflation from the metropolis. We add that the organic ties between the local banks and the old colonial trading monopolies, who own the industrial plants in most of the countries in question, provide a de facto privilege to the economic interests of the metropolis that is no less obvious, however difficult to quantify. The inherent faults of this system are such that it seemed to be on the verge of explosion in the 1970s. Reasonable reform proposals were put forward, to allow more substantial monetary and financial co-operation with local treasuries (for development purposes) and the expansion of productive activities, plus flexible controls over transfers. Moreover, the proposals in question were for the purpose of maintaining regional monetary unions, while taking into account the variety of situations inherited from unequal regional development; they therefore contradicted the argument currently advanced that the Franc zone was a 'factor for unify' in Africa. The general drift the African economies have suffered since the end of the 1970s put a stop to these proposals. The Franc zone in its most traditional form is again flying high, has regained some of the countries that had left and is attracting new members. This innovation is part of the widespread compradorization under way. Evolution in Euro-Arab relations: interwoven economics and politics The intensification of Euro-Arab relations that occurred after the Second World War must be reassessed in the context of the overall worldwide expansion.3 It is not even necessary to draw a detailed picture of these economic relations as they are today, or as they have developed in recent history. It is enough to reiterate, as is well-known, that these relations are highly intensive in all fields. In the field of commercial exchanges, the flow from South to the North, namely Europe, assures the North the major part of its energy supplies. The flow from North to South is also significant for the Arab region: Europe is second in meeting the Arab agriculture and food shortfall and first in meeting the import requirements in producer goods for the Arab countries. This means that the relations are not only important quantitatively (revealing growth rates after the Second World War faster than the overall rate of growth in world trade), but also qualitatively crucial for both sides. The commercial exchanges are reinforced and completed by financial flows, especially since 1973 when, through the recycling of part of the surplus of some Arab countries (but less and less) some of the surplus has been invested through Euro-Arab financial institutions. These flows have considerably speeded up the transfer of technology or to be more precise the sale of turnkey factories. The earlier contribution of the Arab world to the creation of the labour force in Europe was significant; it has now become of vital importance. This migratory flow from South to North, although slowing down in the current crisis, seems destined to play an increasing role in the long term. Post-war expansion was, however, also characterized by the deployment of a plan for national bourgeois development throughout the Third World, and especially in the Arab region. Thus from 1945 to 1970, along with the rise of the national movement, there has been apparent in the Arab world an attempt at crystallization of an Arab national bourgeoisie, or Arab national bourgeoisies, believing itself capable of forming a hegemonic political and social force at national level and becoming an equal partner in the world system. If the Arab national plan has proved impossible to achieve, as is demonstrated by its current degeneration occasioned by the crisis, the failure is due also to internal causes (the bourgeois character of the plan) and to the fact that the West, far from supporting the development, has fought against it and continues to do so. An analysis has already been made of the plan's internal contradictions, its historical limits and extreme vulnerability, which have in the end led to its failure (cf. Chapters 2 and 3). We insist on the point too often hidden that the internal causes' have not operated in isolation, or in an atmosphere conducive. Or even neutral, to the plan. On the contrary, the world system - central domination, with or without hegemony (US in this case) - is far from being favourable to homogenization of the system by the gradual crystallization of new partner centres (as all versions of the 'stages' of development theory suppose), but has had rather the reverse effect of further reproduction of the centres/peripheries asymmetry In the Arab region, the Nahda plan began an attempt at unitary national construction, of which Nasserism was the highest point. The distant past is of great significance here despite the eight or nine centuries of degeneration that followed - a past including the character of social formations in the Arab world in its first glory (the first three or four centuries of Islam) marked by unification of the dominant class on the basis of statist/mercantile centralization of the surplus (in contrast with European feudal fragmentation), and hence the unification of culture and language. The renaissance that appeared on the horizon from the beginning of the 1 9th century was built progressively on Arab unitary nationalism, breaking with Ottoman influence and Pan-lslamism. But the arrival of the necessary elements for the plan's implementation, namely liquidation of the Ottoman Empire and British and French colonizations, set up obstacles. The Arab states, one by one, regained their independence but in disunion. Gradual reinforcement of these new realities, far from narrowing the differences that had been opened in the preceding centuries and worsened by colonization, served rather to entrench the differences. The Arab bourgeoisie began to be aware of its possible collective emergence only when it had given way to a series of local bourgeoisies, each integrated separately into the world system. For all kinds of reasons, some general and fundamental (the West's hostility to the emergence of new centres in Asia and Africa), others more specific to the region (the markedly popular dimension of the national liberation struggles, conflict between states, the Palestinian question to which we shall return), the hostility of the capitalist West was unyielding and particularly violent. To recall the facts: the 1956 aggression against Egypt, the decision taken by the Americans in 1965 to go to war to bring Nasser down, and put into effect in 1967 by Israel and its sleeping partners, the prolonged Algerian war (l954-62), the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the annexation of the Golan Heights and the West bank of the Jordan by Israel, and so on. What is important to note here is that while this constant conflict between Arab nationalism (bourgeois though it be) and imperialism has been one of the ways in which the USSR escaped the isolation to which the Atlantic alliance sought to confine it. Europe has never dissociated itself from the United States in the conflict. The supply of Soviet weapons to Egypt in 1955 clearly marks the Soviet Union's entry on the Arab scene. On another tack. Europe, one need hardly recall, after dragging out its efforts to hold on to colonial possessions (the Algerian war and the Anglo-French attempt against Egypt in 1956 are evidence of this) simply walked off-stage to leave the US policeman and its Israeli subordinate to act for the entire West. At least until 1973 when the 'oil crisis' sharply woke up the Europeans and reminded them of their own vulnerability and of the selfishness of the United States. But what has Europe done since? Its 'comeback' in the Orient coincided with the decline of the Arab nationalist plan; Europe was happy to show a good face - for the sake of business - to the new ruling Arab forces, especially the most reactionary and the most susceptible to accepting the compradorization underway. This cannot be said to be 'supporting an Arab attempt at autonomous development', but merely enrolling as a partner - albeit a trading competitor - in the US plan for the region. The post-war upsurge, followed by the crisis, far from narrowing the North-South gap has widened it, setting the two shores of the Mediterranean further apart than ever, through the closer integration of Southern Europe on the one hand and the rejection and sinking of the Arab plan on the other. How do these conflicts relate to the East-West conflict? This conflict must be situated in the context of the broad offensive of imperialism against the South in general and the Arab world in particular. Europe, through the Atlantic alliance, has opted so far to act against the Arab revival. In the West, the media often portray the Middle East conflict as an East-West conflict, in which the Soviet Union is currently embroiled through Syria, and in the past through Egypt. This in no way corresponds to the truth. But the argument is used to justify the shift of NATO's military strategies towards the South and the placing of missile bases in Sicily, not aimed at the Soviet Union but at the Arab world. So under cover of a hotting up of conflict with the East, conditions are created for aggression against the South. The Mediterranean is no longer NATO's southern flank against the Soviet Union, but NATO's central flank against the South. The strategy seeks, therefore, to recompradorize the enormous space that covers, among others, all the Arab and all the African peoples. Seen in this perspective, Euro-Arab relations are unlikely to develop in a way favourable to the liberation and progress of the Arab peoples. Euro-Arab relations are currently at a conjuncture highly unfavourable to Arab popular interests. On one side we have a Europe that after erratic changes of heart towards the Arabs between 1973 and 1980 has totally gone over to the US and Zionist plan for the region. On the other, there is the Arab world of infiath, a disintegrating Arab world where a half or more of the powers are already openly compradorized. Does this mean there is no room for any other economic and political relations between Europe and the Arab world? There is, but on condition that the relations are within the prospect of reinforcing the autonomy of the states and peoples in regard to dominant US imperialism. In such a perspective of widening European and Arab states' and peoples' autonomy, one might imagine that some kind of mutual support is not impossible, despite the past and despite the difference in levels of development. This is the prospect of a non-alignment reinforced by a European non-alignment and a restored Arab non-alignment. |