The Cellar - View Single Post

warch · 02-26-2003, 03:59 PM

This is an interesting bit from Out of the Wreckage:
By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term, corporate interests, the United States is, paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the Second World War, have permitted the US to develop its international commercial and political interests more effectively than it could have done alone. The institutions through which it has worked - the Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US, as it is already beginning to do,to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission, in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it.Effective resistance would create the political space in which their citizens could begin to press for a new, more equitable multilateralism.

I wonder what that would look like?

02-26-2003, 03:59 PM	#2
warch lurkin old school Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Minnesota Posts: 2,796	This is an interesting bit from Out of the Wreckage: By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term, corporate interests, the United States is, paradoxically, threatening its own tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international agencies, fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the Second World War, have permitted the US to develop its international commercial and political interests more effectively than it could have done alone. The institutions through which it has worked - the Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided a semblance of legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US, as it is already beginning to do,to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission, in turn, forces other nations to seek to resist it.Effective resistance would create the political space in which their citizens could begin to press for a new, more equitable multilateralism. I wonder what that would look like?