Indiana Jones And The Real New World Order

By: Andrew_McKillop

From G7 to G20 and Back Again

Although attempts are made, from time to time, to define “the New World Order” these attempts are almost exclusively made by leaders of the G7 group of “mature postcolonial democracies”, which only these past few days shrunk back from G8 including Russia, to G7 excluding Russia. The much larger and more representative world grouping of the G20, which was formalized only in 2008 at the Washington Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, has already moved to head off any exclusion of Russia from the next G20 summit, to be held in Brisbane in November.

Writing in 'The Diplomat', 31 March, Zachary Keck noted how the major non-G7 powers headed by China, India, Brazil and South Africa quickly warned Australia about excluding Russia. Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop suggested her country might ban Russia’s participation in the G20 summit it will be hosting. The BRICS foreign ministers meeting in The Hague, at the Nuclear Security summit rapidly warned Australia against that course of action, saying :  “The custodianship of the G20 belongs to all Member States equally and no one Member State can unilaterally determine its nature and character”, adding:  “The escalation of hostile language, sanctions and counter-sanctions, and force does not contribute to a sustainable and peaceful solution, according to international law, including the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter.” 

The Postcolonial World

The G7 group now has a stark choice. Draw in its horns, shrink back to an exclusive group only representing the debt-mired, slow-growing “postindustrial nations”, or fully accept that the New World Order that it proclaimed, from the 1990s, really does exist, is global, and they have no “overweening right” over its operation and functions.

In the immediate, the already blatant attempt to use the G20 as another lever to act against Putin's Russia, has failed. G7 leaders will learn to practice what they preach.

G7 posturing in a post-colonial world, using mindsets dating from the colonial era which ended mostly in the 1960s – 50 years ago – is starkly dangerous. The BRICS are in no way a homogenous and united group of countries, but their massive unity behind an anti-Western stance, or at least a post-Western position, is a clear indicator of how the wind is blowing. Their action was made all the easier by political grandstanding of the grotesque type used by leaders including Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Francois Hollande and David Cameron – four of the G7's leaders – on the Ukraine-Crimea issue and Putin's “lack of reason”. This was quickly transformed by their tame media into Putin's Madness.

The quick reaction by BRICS foreign ministers is motivated by not-lingering, but still burning suspicion of Western attempts to place limits on sovereignty, except when the G7 decides to do so. The BRICS basically reject the fundamental underlying rationale of the New World Order which, as already noted has never been fully defined, but features the concept of “humanitarian intervention to protect or enable democracy, the rule of law, the free market economy and to prevent weapons proliferation”. As The Hague Nuclear Security summit noted, nuclear proliferation including “dirty bombs” and deliberate sabotage of NPPs (nuclear power plants), is a real and somber threat to world peace – and the market economy! Just as important, the West has no exclusive or permanent control over who owns and develops weapons of mass destruction.

Increasing all the time, there is now frequent and sharp divergence between G7 leaders and leaders of the BRICs, in particular, but also with the leaderships of several other key G20 member countries, on supposed “humanitarian-motivated” military intervention by G7 countries in non-Western countries. One key example was the Nato-led military campaign against the forces and regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Disapproval of this campaign, without in any way endorsing Gaddafi's regime, was widespread in the BRICS. This disapproval was repeated, and intensified, by the ongoing attempt of several G7 countries, especially the US, France and UK, to get UN Security Council approval for bombing raids on the Bashr al-Assad government in Syria.

Despite Russia fomenting and enabling secessionist action by Crimean separatists to break up the unity of Ukraine, Western neocolonialism is seen by BRICS leaders as a greater evil. Their voting in the UN, on this subject, is starkly clear. The UN General Assembly approved the resolution condemning the Crimea referendum, but 69 countries including all the BRICS either abstained or voted against it. 

The net result is forced multipolarity. The Western “legacy model” of clone-like Western style democracies and consumer societies, where Western military special forces can intervene with Indiana Jones-style invincibility whenever the West chooses, will certainly not be the New World Order.

Suspicion and Multipolarity

Many of the large G20 countries and most of the smaller G20 members are former Western colonies or “satrape” quasi-colonies. Their suspicion of Western claims that sovereignty can be ignored, by the West, when the West decides, invoking “universal principles of humanitarianism and anti-proliferation” runs deeper than Western leaders will admit. The additional and spurious economic claim by the West concerning the wonders of the free market and untrameled financial speculation – leading to the 2008 crisis and it sequels – have in many cases been sharply rejected and criticized, for example by former IMF chief economist and present Indian central bank governor Raghuran Rajan.

Rajan has accused the West of riding roughshod over the economy and finances of non-Western countries, using them as “disposable adjustment mechanisms”.

In interview with Bloomberg TV India, January 30, he said:  “Industrial countries have to play a part in restoring [co-operation], and they can’t at this point wash their hands off and say, we will do what we need to and you can do the adjustment.” Central bank chiefs and leading economists in other BRICS, especially Brazil, have echoed this outright criticism of Western “neocolonial attitudes”, and indicate a growing resentment of Western interference in the global economy.

Among the key claims for Western-style “new world order”, by the West, is that it has the right to strike any non-Western nation, with deadly military force, to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation but this self-assigned “right or duty” washes very thin with the BRICS, of course starting with Russia. China is also a UN Security Council “declared nuclear power”. India, if not “declared nuclear” as defined by the tortuous wording of UN Security Council texts, is a major nuclear weapons power. Brazil, until the 1980s, operated a major nuclear weapons program and its development was “near critical” at the time, according to many analysts. South Africa, during the Apartheid era developed and probably tested several nuclear weapons.

The BRICS are therefore no strangers to nuclear weapons, and in no way have to “bow and curtsy” to the G7 countries holding nuclear weapons (US, UK, France).  Apart from the BICS (BRICS minus Russia), G20 countries include Pakistan which is an “openly declared” nuclear weapons power, while others can be considered as “near critical” in nuclear technology and industrial terms.

The economy has globalized – so have nuclear weapons. The suspicion of BRICS leaders is that the West, for a number of “legacy thought” reasons, is not aware of this or “likes to imagine” that it still holds, and can use, massive pre-emptive military force whenever it chooses.

Postcolonial Trauma

The Oxford dictionary defines trauma as an “emotional shock following a stressful event”, which can include a physical injury, or may be purely psychological, but without aid and skilled medical treatment can lead to long-term neurosis. Classic trauma-inducing events include, for example, the loss of a loved child.

The West's loss of its colonies on a massive basis, in the 1960s, and in the American case the loss of it virtual or inherited Western colonies, notably Vietnam inherited from the French, may retrospectively have been traumatic. The key term is retroactive or retrospective. The wave of European decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which mainly but not exclusively concerned Africa, was at the time widely popular among voters in the West. The US, in particular, often acted to accelerate European abandonment and retreat from Europe's former African colonies – while itself deciding it had to perpetuate French colonialism in Vietnam with a long and dirty colonial war. Such is greatness!

Hollywood did what it could to comfort “the American psyche” with gory and racist Sylvester Stallone and John Wayne movies.

In reality the traumatic shock of the loss of colonies was purely psychological, due to the economic case for decolonization being massive. As the works of French economic historian Jacques Marseille have proven, in detail, French colonization in North Africa was a long zero-sum economic game for France. The costs of colonization always outweighed the gains. The “adventure” was purely emotional or psychological, racist, or only the “Bully Boy” schadenfreude of being able to cause unnecessary suffering among those militarily unable to rout the White colonists and push them back into the ocean.

In reality, the wave of European decolonization in the 1960s was based on the premonition that colonial wars would spread across Africa. The USA's total defeat in 1975 in the Vietnam war provided the final proof that the West fears – and understands - organized military resistance to colonialism. Indiana Jones-style Western neocolonialists were forced to understand that their time is up when “the natives” possess AK47s and RPGs!

Thus the argument that today, in 2014, the West is still suffering from some kind of “postcolonial trauma” has to be questioned. The economics of colonization are at least as bad as the 24/7 casino of worthless asset creation and its inflation called “free market forces”. The West could recenter its trauma and neurosis on more suitable cases for treatment, get its economy right, and accept the multipolar world that exists, and has existed for some time. Time out for Indiana Jones!

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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