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Thread ID: 18874 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-06-28
2005-06-28 03:41 | User Profile
[SIZE=4]"Bush's Geopolitical Legacy"[/SIZE]
[I]Commentary No. 158, April 1, 2005 by Immanuel Wallerstein[/I]
The newspapers these days tell us that George W. Bush is concerned with his historical legacy. For what will he be remembered by historians writing twenty-five years from now? Apparently, he thinks that he will be remembered for advancing "liberty" in the world, and perhaps particularly in the Middle East. This seems to me most unlikely. I think he will be remembered for having anchored a major geopolitical shift that will be lasting - the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. This comes to mind just now because on March 18 this year, there was a meeting between the leaders of these three countries (plus Spain) in Paris. Nothing extraordinary was decided at that meeting. It was rather just an ordinary, but now fairly regular, occurrence. It is the quiet regularity of these meetings one should notice. Geopolitical shifts are analogous to the movement of tectonic plates on the earth. Tectonic plates move beneath the visible surface. They move continuously. The plates both converge and diverge. At certain points the pressure of converging plates or the fissures between diverging plates lead to an explosion we call an earthquake. In the geopolitical arena, analogously, we note the explosions resulting from convergence in the outbreak of "world wars." World wars cannot be missed but we are less likely to notice the divergence phenomena, which lead to lasting reconfigurations of the geopolitical arrangements, what in geological terms would be the creation of new separate continents. The geopolitical world had a major convergence/world war from 1914 to 1945 between Germany and the United States, out of which emerged a new world order that resulted from the hegemony of the United States in the world-system. This new world order had a major fault line defined by the Cold War, but the two plates of this world order never converged. There never was a hot war between the two adversaries. On the other hand, at the same time, there were divergent tendencies. The one the United States always feared most was the possibility of Europe pulling away from the North Atlantic alliance, and then leading to a Paris-Berlin-Moscow alignment. There were many small movements in this direction. The idea of a Paris-Moscow link was suggested in various ways by Charles de Gaulle, who saw this as a mode of restoring France's and Europe's centrality to the world-system. But the Franco-Soviet treaty he signed in 1944 was submerged by the strength of the Cold War alignments, and it must be said also because of the strength of the French Communist Party at that time, an element that De Gaulle worried about and felt he had to work to constrain. The United States and the Christian Democrats in Germany worked hard to prevent the realization of a reunited and "neutral" Germany, which might have been the forerunner to a second Rapallo Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union. But the possibility was suggested again by the so-called Ostpolitik of Willi Brandt, which the United States opposed quite strongly. And when Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, he offered the vision of the "common house" of Europe, an idea that was subsequently dropped when Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev. The fact is that all these attempts to move in the direction of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis were not only opposed by the United States but opposed successfully, primarily by the brandishing by the United States of the ideological fissure of the Cold War. This argument however was something that became more difficult to make after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of the Communisms in east-central Europe. The underlying geopolitical plates were now slowly but definitely moving in a divergent direction. What happened after 2001 is that George W. Bush, in his failed attempts to intimidate western Europe and Russia, accomplished the remarkable feat of speeding up the divergence between Europe and the United States to a point where a major fissure is in the process of being consolidated. We shall recognize how permanent this is perhaps only a decade from now. But, when the historians of 2025 look back at this period, they will mark this realignment as Bush's great geopolitical legacy, the one transformation that will be credited directly to the activities of his administration. The question, of course, is what difference this will make for the ongoing life of the world-system. This anchoring of Europe as a political actor quite separate from the United States will combine with the toppling of the dollar from its role as the only reserve currency, each reinforcing the other. The United States will emerge from this much weakened, not merely in real strength but in perceived strength, including perceived military strength. And then we shall all find ourselves in another ball game. There will be three geopolitical stories to watch. One will be the economic competition between Europe and East Asia for the central role in the accumulation of capital in the coming decades. The degree of political cohesion that Europe and East Asia will each achieve separately will have a major impact on the outcome of this competition. The second will be the struggle of what might be called some middle economic powers that are also regional giants - India, Brazil, South Africa, at least - to maintain their balance and assert their role (and alliances) in this new geopolitical arena. The third is to see how the United States will be able to adjust to these new realities in which its real and perceived role will be much less than it is now. If one is to observe this realignment and its effects soberly and intelligently, it is crucial not to analyze the daily, weekly, even yearly shifts in political positioning by the states. These will go up and down with some volatility, just as the stock market goes up and down all the time. What matters are the longer-run trends. Furthermore, it is important to take public stances of leading figures with a pinch of salt. All politicians have to talk to multiple audiences, and all engage in disinformation tactics. It is less what they say (although sometimes the public rhetoric is very revealing), or what they promise to do, but what they really do. In any case, within the overall framework of the declining power of the United States, there is more immediately the declining significance of what George W. Bush himself says and does. He is past the pinnacle of his internal political strength, and will soon be reaping the full reward of the geopolitical setbacks the United States will be facing. He will be blamed more perhaps than is just analytically. But others will think he will only be getting his just deserts.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[SIZE=1][Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at [email]immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu[/email]; fax: 1-203-432-6976[/SIZE]
[url]http://www.paris-berlin-moscou.org/img/Bush_Geopolitical_Legacy.pdf[/url]
[SIZE=4]Boreas Rising:White Nationalism and the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis[/SIZE]
[I]Michael O'Meara
"History is again on the move." -Arnold Toynbee[/I]
For a half-century, we nationalists stood with the "West" in its struggle against the Asiatic Marxism of the Soviet bloc. There was little problem then distinguishing between our friends and our foes, for all evil was situated in the collectivist East and all virtue in the liberal West. Today, things are much less clear. Not only has the Second American War on Iraq revealed a profound geopolitical divide within the West, the social-political order associated with it now subverts our patrimony in ways no apparatchik ever imagined. Indeed, it seems hardly exaggerated to claim that Western elites (those who Samuel Huntington calls the "dead souls")1 have come to pose the single greatest threat to our people's existence.
For some, this threat was discovered only after 1989. Yet as early as the late forties, a handful of white nationalists, mainly in Europe, but with the American Francis Parker Yockey at their head, realized that Washington's postwar order, not the Soviet Union, represented the greater danger to the white biosphere.2 Over the years, particularly since the fall of Communism, this realization has spread, so that a large part of Europe's nationalist vanguard no longer supports the West, only Europe, and considers the West's leader its chief enemy.3
For these nationalists, the United States is a kind of anti-Europe, hostile not only to its motherland, but to its own white population. The Managerial Revolution of the thirties, Jewish influence in the media and the academy, the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex have all had a hand in fostering this anti-Europeanism, but for our transatlantic cousins its roots reach back to the start of our national epic. America's Calvinist settlers, they point out, saw themselves as latter-day Israelites, who fled Egypt (Europe) for the Promised Land. Their shining city on the hill, founded on Old Testament, not Old World, antecedents, was to serve as a beacon to the rest of humanity. America began—and thus became itself—by casting off its European heritage. The result was a belief that America was a virtuous land, dedicated to liberty and equality, while Europe was mired in vice, corruption, and tyranny. Then, in the eighteenth century, this anti-Europeanism took political form, as the generation of 1776 fashioned a new state based on Lockean/Enlightenment principles, which were grafted onto the earlier Calvinist ones. As these liberal modernist principles came to fruition in the twentieth century, once the Christian, Classical vestiges of the country's "Anglo-Protestant core" were shed, they helped legitimate the missionary cosmopolitanism of its corporate, one-world elites, and, worse, those extracultural, anti-organic, and hedonistic influences hostile to the European soul of the country's white population.4
This European nationalist view of our origins ought to trouble white nationalists committed to a preserving America’s European character, for, however slanted, it contains a not insignificant kernel of truth. My intent here is not to revisit this interpretation of our history, but to look at a development that puts it in a different racial perspective. So as not to wander too far afield, let me simply posit (rather than prove) that the de-Europeanizing forces assailing America's white population are only superficially rooted in the Puritan heritage. The Low Church fanatics who abandoned their English motherland and inclined America to a biblical enterprise, despite their intent, could not escape their racial nature, which influenced virtually every facet of early American life. Indeed, the paradox of America is that it began not simply as a rejection but also as a projection of Europe. Thus, beyond their ambivalent relationship to Europe, Americans (until relatively recently) never had any doubt that their race and High Culture were European. As such, they showed all the defining characteristics of the white race, taming the North American continent with little more than rifles slung across their backs, and doing so in the European spirit of self-help, self-reliance, and fearlessness. As Yockey writes: "America belongs spiritually, and will always belong to the [European] civilization of which it is a colonial transplantation, and no part of the true America belongs to the primitivity of the barbarians and fellaheen outside of this civilization."5
As long, then, as Americans were of Anglo-Celtic (or European) stock, with racially conscious standards, their Calvinist or liberal ideology remained of secondary importance. Our present malaise, I would argue, stems less from these ideological influences (however retarding) than from a more recent development—the Second World War—whose world-transforming effects were responsible for distorting and inverting our already tenuous relationship to Europe. For once our motherland was conquered and occupied (what the apologists of the present regime ironically refer to as its "liberation") and once the new postwar system of transnational capital was put in place, a New Class of powers with a vested interest in de-Europeanizing America's white population was allowed to assume command of American life. The result is the present multiracial system, whose inversion of the natural order negates the primacy of our origins and promises our extinction as a race and a culture. The only possibility of escaping its annihilating fate would seem, then, to be another revolutionary transformation of the world order—one that would throw the existing order into crisis and pose an alternative model of white existence. The "Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis" formed during the recent Iraq war, I believe, holds out such a possibility. Genesis of an Axis
As part of its Mobiles Géopolitique series, the Franco-Swiss publisher L'Age d'Homme announced in April 2002 the release of Paris-Berlin-Moscou: La voie de l'indépendance et de la paix (Paris-Berlin-Moscow: The Way of Peace and Independence). Authored by Henri de Grossouvre, the youngest son of a prominent Socialist party politician, and prefaced by General Pierre Marie Gallois, France's premier geostrategic thinker, Paris-Berlin-Moscou argued that Europe would never regain its sovereignty unless it threw off American suzerainty and did so in alliance with Russia.
In recommending a strategic alliance between France, Germany, and Russia for the sake of a Eurasian federation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Grossouvre's thesis seemed entirely utopian. For although the prospect of such an alliance had long animated the imagination of revolutionary nationalists, it seemed more fantasy than possibility, even when proposed by a well-connected and reputable member of the governing elites. Fantasy, however, rather unexpectedly took hold of the international arena. Within months of the book's publication, its thesis assumed a life of its own, as the new Likudized administration in Washington started beating the drums for another war on Iraq.
[I]----[snip]---- To read the entire article, click here to subscribe to a combined print/online subscription via credit card or here via PayPal for either an online only subscription or a combined print/online subscription [/I]
No one should be surprised, then, that when the inevitable collapse comes, white America's frontfighters will not mourn the eclipse of the so-called American Century, for they are nationalists not in the nineteenth century sense. They do not fight for the petty-statism of the so-called "nation-state"—which is now made up of peoples from many different nations. The American, German, and French states—none of these entities any longer represent the descendants of those who founded them. As Sam Francis puts it, "the state has become the enemy of the nation."88 And as a thousand years of European history demonstrate, whenever the state and the nation come into conflict, the latter inevitably proves the stronger. I think it is no exaggeration to claim that only on the ruins of the existing political order will white America be reborn—and reborn not as another constitutional "nation-state" which elevates abstract rights above biocultural imperatives, but as a northern imperium of white peoples who, as Bismarck exhorted, "think with their blood."
Those who would dismiss the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis as a temporary happenstance, a product of convenience, inflated with purely speculative significance, should be reminded that the twenty-first century will decide if white people have a future or not. From this perspective, collapse and realignment are necessities—and necessities have a way of engendering the imagination appropriate to them. For when the world's population reaches ten billion, when China, India, and all Asia challenge the white man's dominance, when the colored multitudes crossing our borders are magnified by ten or a hundred, when oil is depleted and raw materials are used up, when all the forests have been cut down and all the cultivable lands claimed, and—hopefully—when the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis has established an alternative realm of white existence, the ensuing chaos cannot but sunder whatever misbegotten allegiance white Americans have had to the present system. Then, in alliance with their kinsmen in Europe and Russia, they—if they are to survive as a people—will have no choice but to accept that they are made not in the multihued images of a deracinated humanity, but in that of the luminous Boreans, whose destiny opposes the darkening forces of Bush's America.
Let us prepare for the coming collapse.
[SIZE=1]Michael O'Meara, Ph. D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and modern European history at the University of California. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004). [/SIZE] [url]http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol4no4/mo-boreas.html[/url]
2005-06-28 05:04 | User Profile
[font=Arial] [QUOTE]America beganââ¬âand thus became itselfââ¬âby casting off its European heritage.[/QUOTE] This is at best an overblown simplification, and at worst an outright myth. There is an excellent study entitled "In English Ways", by David Grayson Allen, which details how the settlement of New England was done by trying to replicate England as much as possible in the New World. The more recent "Albion's Seed" addresses the same issue but I haven't read that one so I cannot properly comment. The rejection of Europe thesis is usually based around the Puritan experience in New England, (leaving aside that Puritanism and Puritans came from Europe rather than appearing Minerva-like in the Americas out of nowhere), though it is ignored that what was being rejected was at most the physical reality of Europe. But that is a moot issue as it is impossible to leave Europe without, well, leaving Europe. And the same region later was the same soil where the Kantian Idealism inspired transcendentalist movement sprouted. For many years New England may well have been the most "European" part of what was once the colonial empire, and later the early United States.
Creating something new from nothing is hardly an un-European trend, it should be noted.
[QUOTE]
The result was a belief that America was a virtuous land, dedicated to liberty and equality, while Europe was mired in vice, corruption, and tyranny. Then, in the eighteenth century, this anti-Europeanism took political form[/QUOTE] Europe was in many ways mired in vice, corruption, and tyranny. The 1700s were the apex of these behavoirs. Much of European history from about 1500 on is an attempt to redress these complaints. This is something people as varied as Luther, Voltaire, Napoleon, Proudhon, and even perhaps the fascists set out to correct, with results as varied. Romanticizing the past is one of the easiest ways of avoiding the realities of the present.
[QUOTE] "America belongs spiritually, and will always belong to the [European] civilization of which it is a colonial transplantation[/QUOTE] The USA has always been in a tough spot here, if our ways are derivitive of those of Europe, we are called copiers, when we are original, we are called anti-European. It is a no-win situation when dealing with narrow-minded critics
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2005-06-28 05:52 | User Profile
[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "America beganââ¬âand thus became itselfââ¬âby casting off its European heritage."[/I][/B][/COLOR]
Michael O'Meara, an Irish Catholic, is biased against English Puritanism, which he seeks to interpret as somehow inherently "un-European". (It's typical for Roman Catholic apologists to brand the Protestant Reformation itself as "Judaizing.")
Petr
2005-06-28 08:43 | User Profile
A Catholic, then? I did think it odd he slams American founding stock, then our early Republic's founding principles, then proceeds to say
[QUOTE]
This European nationalist view of [u]**our **[/u]origins ought to trouble white nationalists committed to a preserving Americaââ¬â¢s European character[/QUOTE]
The piece does make some valid points but it can't seem to decide its focus own. The allusions to Calvinism as some sort "American problem" overlooks the the fact much more of Europe would be Calvinist or Protestant if not for the counter-reformation and Wars of Religion which allowed the Romanists to recover many of their losses. France itself nearly went Protestant a few times, and that it didn't is the explanation for some of my own ancestors migrating to the British colonies.
And the same goes for liberalism, another failing the author attributes to the American essence. Europe had a period of popular liberalism, which fell into decline and was mostly superseded by socialism and watered-down socialism. Christian Democracy could arguably be considered as such, as well, though I think to a lesser extent. Many problems are to be found in the USA, but the unpopularity of those political movements are certainly not one of our failings. Communism always has been a greater force in Catholic or traditionally Catholic nations (the Catholic heartland of Italy required at one time a coalition of 5 parties to keep the communists out of the government), and though I would not blame that on the Catholic Church, there is never a short supply of those who are lined up to blame the faults of liberalism as something essential to the Protestant character.