(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
Where is the push for globalisation coming from? It is no secret that the driving force behind the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a key strategy in the ‘globalisation’ process, is American big business and finance represented by the US Council for International Business. US officials have openly stated that the objective of the MAI is to ‘protect US investors abroad’. But a big business lobby group, no matter how powerful, can hardly bring about single-handedly what President Clinton has described as ‘a great tide of change sweeping the world’, and Australia’s Alexander Downer has called ‘the great political dichotomy of our age, as fundamental as the old conflict between capital and labour’.(1) So who else is behind it?
On 11 February 1998, a group of prominent Americans including former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and 137 senior government figures and business leaders placed an open letter to the US Congress across a double-page spread in the New York Times and Washington Post. In it they complained about America’s “dangerous drift toward US disengagement from the responsibilities of global foreign leadership”. “Modern isolationism” they said, “seriously damages American interests.” The message, under the title ‘A Time for American Leadership on Key Global Issues’, was intended to be a warning to representatives in Congress who the signatories believed were ‘sacrificing American influence abroad’.(2) In other words, according to these people, America was not interfering enough in the affairs of other nations.
Now Carter, Ford and Kissinger have been long gone from official government office. What they have in common, however, is membership in a non-government policy ‘think tank’ called the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a body with about 3,000 members including (at least in 1995) Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan. The CFR was incorporated in New York on July 29, 1921, essentially by the international bankers to bring about a global economy and world government. Its members include leaders in politics, industry, banking, academia and the media, the people who determine American economic, social, political and military policy.(3) It has a British affiliate in the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and it is no ‘conspiracy theory’: it has an official web site at http://www.foreignrelations.org/studies/pub.
The United Nations itself was a creation of the CFR, the outcome of the Informal Agenda Group formed in 1943. The American delegation to the San Francisco meeting that drafted the Charter of the United Nations in 1949 included 47 CFR members who effectively controlled the preceedings and the outcome. Since that time the CFR and its friends in the mass media have lobbied consistently to grant the UN more authority and power. The objective is to bring about the surrender of national sovereignty and independence to a single undemocratic world government.(4)
James Warburg, son of CFR founder banker Paul Warburg, and himself a CFR member, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950, “We shall have world government whether or not you like it....by conquest or consent.” In the CFR official journal ‘Foreign Affairs’ in April 1974, former deputy assistant US Secretary of State Richard N. Gardner stated: “In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down....An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish more than the old fashioned assault....”(3)
Although the CFR’s website states that “The Council takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the US government”, the prevalence of CFR members in top positions in all institutions of governance in the US, including the Presidency, suggests that the CFR is not affiliated with the government, it is the government, de facto. The elected Congress, like the Australian Parliament at the moment, is there to provide an appearance of democracy, and to rubber-stamp decisions taken elsewhere behind closed doors and by people who clearly see themselves as having more authority to govern than the elected representatives of the people.
So what is the determining factor in America’s ‘foreign relations’? Historically, the United States emerged from World War II with its economic power at a peak and its main economic rivals either weakened or destroyed. Corporate executives and political leaders were worried that without the stimulus of war the American economy might sink back into its pre-war Depression state. The solution was seen as American economic expansion abroad. In 1944 Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson said to a congressional committee studying the issue, “....no group....has ever believed our domestic markets could absorb our entire production under our present system. Therefore you find you must look to other markets and those markets are abroad.”(5)
So America did. It needed to feed its corporate beast on ‘economic growth’, and there were two ways to do it: export from home, or build a factory abroad. In the post-war era America chose the latter because it happened to be more profitable. By 1964 the value of US overseas output resulting from US foreign investment was $143 billion, compared with only $25 billion in exports produced at home, almost 6 times as much.(6) Post World War II America became the world’s foremost economic neo-coloniser, with far more money invested in other people’s countries than in its own.
At the same time the world saw the rise of the transnational corporation (TNC), which was made possible initially by business concessions gained from the countries of Europe in return for American aid in the post-World War II Marshall Plan.(7) Like big business itself, the TNC was originally an American phenomenon, and like big business it grew under the patronage and protection of the US government, Democrat or Repubican. The American government and American big business have intimate ties. As Michael Tanzer showed, economic interests, not military security, invariably determine US foreign policy.(8) This applies even more so now, in the ‘post Cold War’ era.
A foreign policy which saw America as ‘the leader in world affairs’ was obviously also good for business, and the ‘captains of industry’ strongly advocated this. Leo D. Welch, treasurer of Standard Oil of New Jersey (Rockefeller) defined the postwar US foreign policy in a speech in 1946 as follows: “That responsibility is positive leadership in the affairs of the world....political, social and economic....and it must be fulfilled in the broadest sense of the term. As the largest producer, the largest source of capital, and the biggest contributor to the global mechanism, we must set the pace and assume the responsibility of the major stockholder in this corporation known as the world....Nor is this for a given term of office. This is a permanent obligation.”(9)
The public statement of Messrs. Ford, Carter, Kissinger and others indicates that nothing has changed in the American elitist world-view. America is still seen as having some prima facie right to treat the world as its own. If it suits the purposes of American big business and investment to have the world rearranged on a global basis, then that’s the way the world will be rearranged.
With the help of the world media, the United States successfully created the illusion that it is on a moral crusade (albeit uninvited) in defense of freedom. Pre-globalism the mission was ‘to make the world safe for democracy’. That has now become ‘democracy-and-free-trade’ (President Clinton’s words). But as Michael Tanzer pointed out, America does nothing abroad which does not further its own economic interests. Underneath every foreign policy initiative fulfilling the ‘responsibilities of global foreign leadership’, there is a motive of either protecting or furthering an American economic interest. ‘Free trade’ means the ability of TNCs and investors, particularly American TNCs and investors, to move investment around the world at will, without hinderance from national governments trying to protect their countries or their people from exploitation. The ideology underpinning it is that ‘what’s good for big business and global investors is good for everybody’, a globalised version of the old slogan ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’. The Australian government swallowed it. Whatever it involves, it’s now ‘good for Australia’ too.
Today, on the one hand America claims a moral responsibility for ‘global foreign leadership’ and leadership on ‘key global issues’. On the other hand, ‘modern isolationism....seriously damages American interests’.(2) As President Clinton declared on October 17, 1997, in Buenos Aires, “Isolationist voices must be ignored as efforts proceed to fully integrate the political and economic future of the Americas....Globalization is irreversible....Protectionism will only make things worse.”(10) Isolationism is the term applied now to a nation wanting to be independent, self-governing and not ‘globalised’. Such an attitude stands in the way of American big business’ plans for the world. So that while claiming a right to be the world ‘peace keeper’, America is also preserving and promoting its own economic interests: a curious combination of self-appointed referee, and key player in the game.
The correspondence of America’s foreign policies with the global interests of big business is achieved firstly through a ready interchange of people between the corporate sector and the executive branch of government which advises the President. Leaders of industry and banking routinely are appointed to top jobs in the bureaucracy for a term before returning again to the corporate sector. A ‘good working relationship’ between the executive government and big business, with ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘shared values’ is the result. Australia now has a home-grown variant of this practice, with former politicians, including ex-prime ministers, taking up lucrative ‘consultancy’ jobs in the corporate sector after having proved their worth in parliamentary office.
Another way to ensure American foreign policy coincides with the interests of global big business is through the Council on Foreign Relations, which is the promotional arm of the ruling elites in the USA. Most influential politicians (including almost all presidential candidates), industry leaders, bankers, academics and media owners and personalities are members, and it uses its influence to infiltrate globalism into American life. Its ‘experts’ write scholarly pieces to be used in decision making, the academics expound on the wisdom of a ‘united world’, while the media members disseminate the message.
Where does Australia figure in this? After a Cabinet meeting on 20 January 1966 Robert Gordon Menzies, who was reluctant to involve Australia in Vietnam, suddenly and unexpectedly resigned after 17 years as Prime Minister of Australia, nominating as his successor then Treasurer Harold Holt. Holt announced almost immediately that Australia was to go ‘all the way with LBJ’ [then US President Lyndon Baines Johnson] into the Vietnam War. At that crucial point Australia severed ties with Britain and the British Commonwealth, and hitched itself behind the stagecoach of the United States of America. Australia has been going ‘all the way with LBJ’ ever since.