First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Jon V. Kofas 2005
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ISBN 13: 978-0-815-38971-2 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-351-15572-4 (ebk)
This book would not have been possible without the kind and generous assistance of a major research grant from Indiana University Graduate School, Indiana University, Office of International Programs, and Indiana University-Kokomo, Summer Research Grants. I am very grateful to all of them. I am also grateful for having access to the Greek Foreign Ministry Archives, Karamanlis Foundation, Public Record Office in the UK, the National Archives in College Park, MD, World Bank Archives, IMF Archives, and the Libraries of presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan.
Introduction
Synopsis of Postwar U.S. Transformation Policy
Divergent Models under One World System
Five hundred years after capitalism's nascent stage in northwest Europe, the manner by which the system creates poverty as it concentrates wealth, social inequality, unequal exchange, and uneven world development have remained the most compelling political issues in the postwar era. Since the 1950s, United Nations Economic and Social Council studies, and scholars like Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Nicos Poulantzas, and many others have argued that the advanced capitalist countries have historically exercised a far reaching influence on shaping the international division of labor, national institutions, and the status of underdeveloped areas (periphery) in relationship to the economically advanced countries (core).
At the dawn of the 21st century, the international political economic structure remains unaltered, and it appears much stronger after the collapse of Communist regimes in the early 1990s. While integration advocates emphasize the benefits of increased trade and the futility of autarky in the age of globalization, critics question whether national sovereignty is sacrificed in the process along with social justice. Besides social polarization inherent in the market economy, uneven development and asymmetrical trade relationships between the advanced and underdeveloped countries, capital concentration and chronic balance-of-payments deficits leading to cyclical Third World debt crises are realities of macroeconomics that impact billions of people at the microeconomic level from Jakarta to Santiago de Chile, from Manila to Cairo. The inexorable link between increased global integration and inequality is too overwhelming to be glossed over by econometric models or analytical studies trying to find the exception to the rule, or to apportion blame on indigenous cultural elements.
It would be easy dismiss as captive to Hegelian-Marxist historicist ideology the nexus between capital concentration in the metropolis and poverty in the periphery, or to engage in post-modernist intellectual exercises where process obfuscates substance and evades the complex sources of polarization. World Bank and the United Nations (UN) studies concur that poverty has been growing along with social and geographic inequality on a world scale in the past forty years just as asymmetrical integration has
During the tumultuous decade of the 1970s amid sharp rise in political violence and revolutions from Managua to Tehran, Third World scholars and political observers cried out that America's pets enjoyed a better diet and medical care than half the world's people who barely subsist on a couple of dollars a day. In 1995 the U.S. had about 4 percent of the world's population, but owned 26 percent of the world's GNP share, while Japan accounted for 18 percent, and Germany, France, UK, and Italy for another 21 percent, leaving 35 percent GNP share for the rest of the world which makes up about 80 percent of the people. The average per capita income discrepancy between the G-7 and the Third World rose from 10 to 1 in 1960 and 14 to 1 in 1970. By the end of the 20th century more than 1.2 billion of the 6 billion people in the world lived on less than $1 per day.
With the triumph of markets over states at the dawn of the 21st century, poverty has doubled, malnutrition and epidemics are ravaging millions around the world, sex-worker global traffic is third in the world behind illegal drugs and weapons, the environment is devastated in the name of progress that is synonymous with globalization, and all because of a narcist and pathological quest for quick high profits rooted in a political economy that has capital accumulation as a core value. A tragic reality that is at the root of political violence and instability, lack of social justice has immense costs for the political and social elites and the masses alike. Decades after Franz Fanon published his illuminating study Wretched of the Earth there has been no structural change in the cycle of endemic poverty, the cycle of debt, and foreign dependence and decapitalization of the wretched of the Third World.
More than just World Bank and UN statistics, global inequality, poverty, disease, and environmental devastation are tragic realities of every day life that one sees on the faces of women and children in the slums of Jakarta, Lagos, Lima, in any Third World city where opulence for the local and foreign elites coexists within a few kilometers of where the masses struggle to live another day. From the mining workers of Peru to the oil workers in Nigeria and Indonesia, ubiquitous inequality and social injustice are contributing causes of social, ethnic, racial, and political violence.
Concerned that rising poverty poses a threat to long-term global economic and political harmony, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recently questioned whether democracy is facing an uncertain future amid growing socioeconomic and geographic gap of an integrated world system.
As World War I changed the global balance of power, the great powers and the League of Nations laid the foundations for expanding global trade and investment, and providing development loans. The continuity of colonialism, the absence of international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, and the absence of financial and political leadership combined with the chaos of the Great Depression precluded the successful implementation of a global integration model.
