The Tidal Empires of War
Lee on Jul 30 2008 at 3:37 am | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page, Uncategorized
(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)
Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.
Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:
Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)
That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.
Attitudes toward such a reversal in labor and capital investment itself appear to have been changed by the experience of physical engagement. Something that might not have materialized absent the war that brought troops across the border.
In 1957, nationalist Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatli denounced the Eisenhower Doctrine of American investment in the Middle East as a new imperialism, more likely to bring on conflict than abate it. Lebanon alone in the Middle East accepted financial investment under its aegis (one may notice that Beirut’s predicament has often been that she is surrounded by socialist protectionists). For a long time thereafter, Syria acted as if it merely envied the anti-American propaganda’s vision of controlling states through investment. Sadly to say, she was largely blind to the reality that Eisenhower was interested in increasing prosperity as a defense against communist infiltration, rather than conditioning Syrian political servitude.
But what happened in 2005 when the Syrian army folded up her sad little Lebanese empire and went home, is that many Lebanese followed. Those Lebanese adventurers have begun to prosper in the capital of their former master, in that peculiar way that all former imperial subjects seem to do.
A professor of mine –a pacifist of the free trade sort, which became so popular in the posthistorical 1990s– used to be fond of quoting the early libertarian theorist Frédéric Bastiat as the ultimate truth: “where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.” The thought being that trade itself can preclude war and that the interruption of it inaugurates or even necessitates conflict. Michael Shermer, who is also fond of Bastiat, argued a lengthier exposition on the same quote not long ago.
But Bastiat himself took his own sentiment further — even to the borders of utopia itself. He contended that under a regime of global free trade, all the causes, materials and advantages of war would inevitably evaporate:
If nations remain permanently in the world market; if their interrelations cannot be broken without their peoples’ suffering the double discomfort of privation and glut; they will no longer need the mighty navies that bankrupt them or the vast armies that weigh them down; the peace of the world will not be jeopardized by the caprice of a Thiers or a Palmerston; and war will disappear for lack of materials, resources, motives, pretexts, and popular support.
(Economic Sophisms by Frédéric Bastiat)
Such was the enthusiasm of liberal theory in Bastiat’s 19th century. We living in the new age of ethnic nationalism and transnational religious terrorism know it isn’t true. But there is a further reason to question the presumption, and that is the allegation that the pacific, ameliorative effects of trade are created by trade itself, with war being its natural ruination. Even in Bastiat’s day it should have been obvious that wasn’t the case.
When Lenin rejected economic liberalism some fifty years after Bastiat’s death, he noticed something very real. That was where armies crossed, trade seemed to follow in large quantity. For Lenin, the liberal order championed by Bastiat naturally gravitated toward imperial dominion enforced by military power, rather than rendering it obsolete. Imperialism would become the last stage of capitalism said Lenin, where the remaining independent markets of the world would be pried open with the bayonet as prize for the conquerer. But here Lenin made a different error, concluding that it was the invading army that owned the market and extracted value from it for its sole benefit.
The new Syrian-Lebanese relationship hints at a more common historical outcome. War opens human arteries of trade that accrue mutual benefit after hostilities end. The tide of war that rises to send an army across borders to invest territory, will inevitably bring people and trade with it when it recedes in the evening of conflict. In a way, war is the great breaker of protectionism historically. Interestingly, something that many political factions seem to innately perceive.
In our own experience, Pat Buchanan might represent the perfect, emblematic and entirely rational concord between protectionist and antiwar sympathies in this country. He’s not entirely at the moment of self-realization in this, but he has understood for some time that it was World War II that created conditional globalization. Absent that war and it’s scale, the world could look very much like the states untouched by it. That is like proud Shukri al-Kuwatli, denouncing unconditional foreign direct investment on the grounds of national integrity and peace itself.
Similarly as an opponent (and someone generally inclined toward Bastiat’s perscription in part), Thomas Barnett frequently recognizes the political phenomenon as a broader electoral trend: “[T]he alliances that work right now in DC [are] those favoring disconnectivity in both economics and security.” Of course, that is entirely in keeping. In the present election, who is antiwar and antitrade? Rarely have the two been disconnected in moments of conflict.
We might notice in conclusion that Leonard Wibberley’s plot device in The Mouse that Roared –where the fictional duchy of Fenwick declares war on the United States, solely to surrender and thereby beneficially trade with it– is actually more often inverted, as it is in Syria. The great lion that attacks the mouse, is often followed home to the lair when he departs. By consequence it shouldn’t be so surprising that well over half of the foreign direct investment in London today, comes from lands once conquered and occupied by the British army in the age of Bastiat.
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