While prognosticating a geopolitical future is fraught with contradiction, historical determinism and perhaps an imprudent dose of wishful thinking, the signing of the EU-China Investment Agreement is the latest agreement signifying a seismic shift in global governance. Following another article written last week on the subject, the signing of this agreement is perfectly timed.
Since the 2008 Wall Street financial collapse, we have seen a growing list of non-US-aligned multilateral agreements that began with the signing of the BRICS Fortaleza Declaration and the push for new regional agreements away from the kind of neoliberal privatization agreements born out of the Washington Consensus. These US-led agreements like KORUS, the USMCA or the ill-fated TPP were primarily driven by private interests promoting corporate governance from a yachts captain view of the world.
Even if the EU-China agreement does not in anyway indicate a reversal of the capitalist program, we should still celebrate the liberation of our planet from what should be seen as a criminal empire’s legalized theft over the last thirty years. We must still remain vigilant and not be lured into thinking that the Agreement is more that what it is.
Washington has been very active protecting this neoliberal corporate governance and the advantages of the top corporate 1%. Over the decade, their allegiance to big donors has not only inspired military operations, but manufactured the hybrid warfare of fake news and the interventionist lawfare of national courts to facilitate global “legal” coups.
The number of trumped up corruption cases against the popular and progressive governments of Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and Yemen (in no particular order), and further coupled with militarized containment schemes like the S0uth China Sea provocations, has been to undermine, contain, and obstruct BRICS-led multilateralism.
What was it about BRICS that motivated this obstructionist conspiracy of regime change and hostile takeovers? What was contained in the Fortaleza Declaration that would propel this hybrid warfare?
In a nutshell, the Fortaleza Declaration embraced multipolar revisions of global rules in investment and trade enforcement, while opposing the unipolar schemes of the neoliberal Washington Consensus. This paper from 2006 concludes:
“Over the next few years, Latin America will become the focal point of the debate over Neoliberalism and globalization as leftist nationalism rises in protest to the Washington Consensus. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Ollanta Humala embody the political backlash to globalization. Whether these experiments in “21st century socialism” succeed or fail will likely determine the direction of global economic policy as it is applied to the developing world.”
Besides the signing or the EU-China Investment Agreement, we have also recently just seen the signing of the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) by the ASEAN countries, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. India withdrew from the negotiations, not because of trade imbalances or China’s “cheap goods” as the west likes to claim, but more a result of Modi’s militarism and his participation in the Trump-led Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral Discourse as a bulwark against the BRI which has brought infrastructure development and access to Pakistan.
The EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) is a Russia-led cooperation that the Ukraine, under Yanukovych was joining until the US initiated a 2014 coup that not only installed a fascist government in Ukraine but also led to a civil war and the Russian annexation of Crimea.
The AfCFTA (African Continent Free Trade Area), which was recently ratified into force was a regional agreement inspired by Qaddafi, to promote a regional cooperation based on unity and the pan-African concept of Uhuru. In 2013, the US initiated another coup which led to the very public execution of Qaddafi.
Also in 2013, the US backed the Philippine dispute against China around the issue of the South China Sea which was already under a dispute venue in the regional China-ASEAN Code of Conduct in the SCS. This was a kangaroo court decision in the Permanent Court of Arbitrations, designed to build capacity around the US Freedom of Navigation that would place the US Navy front and center in the South China Sea and obstruct China’s administration over shipping, sustainable fishing and transport. The US would also seek to undermine China’s monitoring of shipping traffic in one of the busiest maritime routes in the world.
Even though these agreements may seem aspirational in terms of meeting their deadlines, postponing the timetable for enforcing these agreements is a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and our own insurmountable $27 trillion dollar public debt.
Also, there is a direct correlation between our economic stability and climate stability which cannot be underestimated. Just as there are historic long swings in economic cycles that respond to global events like war and revolution, even without aggregate charts, it is intuitively evident that the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era is likely to have exacerbated the warnings of environmentalists and economists when it comes to climate change.
All together, the listing of regime change across the planet is so big and so global that the idea that the US is somehow involved in all this instability as part of a strategic Grand Design, a hybrid warfare of fake news, lawfare and interventionist politics seems like a conspiracy plan hatched from paranoid delusions. But when one steps back, what we are really looking at is the vast expansion of corporate governance that evolved from the hyper-capitalist ambitions of wealth accumulation and the execution of the neoliberal privatization campaigns of the Washington Consensus. There is no bigger conspiracy than this.
Comparing the BRI with the post war US-led Marshall Plan may resemble its ambition and scale, but that is where the similarities end. The differences are that the Marshall Plan drove a wedge into the global economy by excluding the communist countries and drawing the Iron Curtain shut. The BRI has no such conditions as it robustly re-imagines the post-colonial world based on just, fair and equitable access and infrastructure development. While we have yet to see how that will become manifest in the 21st century, it is important to note that it should be we, the global citizens, that will create this future, and not the rentiers of the privatization 1%.
We are in process of realigning the geopolitical world away from the unipolarity of the Washington-Wall Street neoliberal cabal towards a multilateralism that now enshrines the China-led Belt and Road Initiative as the defining economic bulwark of the 21st century. New digital technologies in AI, communication, and finance, as well as changes to our economic and ecological landscape driven by both the pandemic and climate change are already changing how we think about trade and globalization. There is no room for old world systems of wealth accumulation and the rigid partitioning of our legal and economic structures. Trans-localism and inter-globalized economies are going to define the economic future of the world.
The global economy is like our shared ecological biodiversity. Standing on the shore looking out at the horizon past 2021, the world looks bright and I want to be a part of it, but as we turn to look at our own landscape between our options and our futures, Washington still looks like shit.