Chartbook 258 War, peace and the return of history in 2023

In 2023 the escalation of violence around the world was horrifying. As the FT remarked:

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

How do we locate this surge in violence in contemporary history? One can, as the FT does, point to a variety of contingent causes, such as failures of intelligence and deterrence, weak state power and the perception that Western power is fading.

Whilst recognizing the diversity of causes, we should go deeper than this.

In 2023, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Myanmar all witnessed intense violence. In each case one can point to drivers that can be located in 20th-century history: fragile postcolonial states, the stresses of the Cold War and the emergence of Islamic radicalism. Conflicts are also impelled by local scrambles for resources and power and by regional and global forces. But all of them are instances of a worrying new trend, internationalized intrastate conflicts. It is not just “western weakness”, but the new rivalry between the US, Russia, China and regional players like the Emirates and Saudi Arabia that is fueling these conflicts.

Source: Visions of Humanity

Though these poor-country conflicts are in no way separate from global trends, the influence is largely one way. The fighting is escalated by wider global and international forces, but the wider ramifications of the conflicts themselves are relatively limited. That in turn helps to account for the fact that despite their scale, the conflicts receive relatively scant coverage. As a consumer of mainstream news one has to make a conscious effort to insert them back into the bigger picture. Chartbook 256 on Myanmar and 209 on Sudan and the Sahel Gold Rush were gestures in that direciton.

At the other end of the spectrum, in 2023 the two largest economies in the world – China and the USA - squared off in the latest phase of a global great power struggle, a clash that could upend the world as we know it. This conflict hogs the headlines practically every day. In Chartbook 249 I sketched a history of the first war scare of this new era, which stretched between October 2022 and the spring of 2023. To my mind, the article on the “Second Cold War”, published in Geopolitics by the team of the Second Cold War Observatory is the most interesting piece so far on this emerging conflict and its historical location.

Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine continued the slogging match that began with Russia’s invasion in February 2022. As I argued in Crashed, this conflict has to be read against the unresolved tensions of the 1990s and 2000s and the uneven and combined development of capitalism since then. Of the major post Cold War great power clashes, it broke into the open first, initially with Russo-Georgian war of 2008 and then in Ukraine in 2013-2014.

But there is no doubt that in 2023 it was the violence in the Middle East that has done more than anything else to heighten the sense of alarm and dismay in the Western public, policy circles and the media.

This has to do with the risk, remote or not, that the conflict could escalate by way of Iran into a major regional war. But it also reflects the particular investment of Europeans and American politics in the Middle East as an arena and in the fate of Israel in particular. The violence unleashed by Hamas against Israel on October 7 evoked the long history of violence against Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. The Israeli assault on Gaza is the most extreme escalation to date of Israel’s long-running campaign against the Palestinian people, a campaign that goes back to the Nakba of 1948. Israel’s bombing campaign ranks as one of the most high-intensity in the annals of modern warfare.

For those of us operating on a trans-Atlantic axis anchored on New York and Berlin, the politics of this moment have been particularly fraught.

The year ended with an unseemly row triggered by the withdrawal of the Heinrich Boell Foundation (The Green Party Foundation) from the award ceremony for the Hannah Arendt prize, given this year to Masha Gessen. The Boell Foundation took this inexplicable decision in reaction to a piece by Gessen in the New Yorker in which Gessen insisted that rather than talking about Gaza as an “open air prison” we should see it as analogous to one of the Jewish ghettos created by the Nazi regime. The point being that a prison is a permanent detention facility, whereas everything about Gaza suggested that it, like a ghetto, was being prepared for destruction. Whether you agree with Gessen or not, the decision by the Boell Foundation was indefensible. And the efforts by the leadership to justify themselves in a public debate in Berlin fell pathetically flat.

For my own part I find trans-historical analogies less interesting than actually trying to situate the Middle Eastern conflict in its historical context. I sketched one possible framing in an op-ed I did for the FT in November and expanded on that in a keynote I did for a conference on geoeconomics organized by CEPR and the Kiel Institute for International Economics, hosted, of all places, in Hjalmar Schacht’s former Reichsbank building, which is now home to the German Foreign office. You can watch the livestream of day 1 of the conference here. My keynote starts on day 2 starts at the 4 hours, 15 minute mark.

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The Berlin keynote made two moves to situate the conflict in the Middle East in historical and political economic terms.

The first is that Zionism has to be understood as a product of its era i.e. as a settler-colonial project, typical of European global thinking in the late 19th and early 20th century. What is distinctive about it, is that the Israelis are the last group of (mainly) Europeans to engage in the wholesale arrogation of non-European land, justified in their mission by theology, claims to civilizational superiority and nationalism. Of course, land grabs go on, all over the world, all the time. But, in the present day, the Israeli project is uniquely coherent and uniquely unapologetic as an instance of “classic” settler-colonial ideology.

Due to the relatively limited resources initially at the disposal of the Zionists and the relative size of the Palestinian population, the removal of Palestinians was incomplete. The extension of the zone of Israeli settlement and the displacement, confinement and fragmentation of the Palestinian population stretches is ongoing.

The most illuminating thing I have recently read on the logic of Zionism as settler colonialism is Alon Confino’s brilliant article in the History Workshop Journal of the Spring of 2023. It spells out how something that was initially considered implausible by most Zionists i.e. a Jewish Palestine with fewer Palestinians, became the achieved reality of the new state of Israel.

This did not need to be the initial grand design of Zionism, or peculiar or particular to it, because it was such a common place and accepted vision at the time. As Confino points out:

When Ben-Gurion considered a homogenous Jewish state a dream fulfilled following the Peel Commission (1936-7), when he wondered in 1941 what sort of transfer he could and should contemplate, his Zionist imagination fitted within the nationalist imagination of the period as well as within a postwar international context that looked favourably on forced population movements. In the 1940s massive ethnic cleansing became the order of the day in eastern Europe, creating homogenous nation-states condoned by the international community. The expulsion of ethnic groups continued until 1948 and expanded beyond Europe to India and Pakistan. These expulsions were part of a larger European process whereby the borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, geographical areas of multiethnic co-existence, turned in the first half of the twentieth century into a locus of ethnic cleansing and genocides in state-authorized suppression of ethnoreligious difference. Palestine was part of this wider process of nationalist state-formation, from the Baltic Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The scale of the more or less coercive population movements in the 1940s - the historical context within which the state of Israel (and modern Pakistan, India, Germany, Poland, Czechia to name just the most prominent cases) was formed - is staggering.

World War II forced perhaps 60 million people out of their homes. At the end of the war, border rearrangements and ethnic cleansing set tens of millions more on the move. In Europe perhaps as many as 20 million people were newly displaced after the war or in its very final stages. Often this took the form of chain migrations, with Poles displaced to the West by a Soviet landgrab moving into the homes vacated by Germans who had been shipped to the West. It was everywhere a violent process, driven by resentments and anger, but also haunted by moral qualms, guilt and a sense of risk and fear of impermanence. The right of return is not a question limited to Palestine.

Source: Charnysh 2022

In many parts of Eurasia the conflicts of the 1940s echo down to the present day. Burma became independent as a nation state in 1948, but remains a patchwork of ethnicities and cultures. The Taiwan dispute dates to the Chinese civil war and the nationalist evacuation of 1949. The two Koreas remains technically at war. Japan is at peace with all its neighbors, but relations with both Korea and China are extremely fraught.

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict has continued since the 1940s makes it no exception. What is exceptional is the intensity of the violence and the complicity of Western powers with Israel’s ongoing settler-colonialism.

In a world in which deep continuities of conflict are common, the grand exception is Europe where two ultra-violent wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) and an extremely violent process of peace-making after 1945, followed by the dangerous Cold War standoff, were transmuted, first into peaceful integration of Western Europe and then the extension of the EU to much of the former Warsaw Pact as well. Even German unification was achieved without unleashing the demons of resentful nationalist irredentism, demons that were still being indulged by the German right-wing in the 1980s.

By the time of the 2+4 talks, a conservative German government was finally willing to accept the postwar boundaries of Eastern Europe. German leaders and their counterparts in the rest of Europe showed considerable courage in coming to terms with the past. Czech leaders even apologized for the violence done to 3 million Germans expelled after World War II. Of course, this pacification also rested on economic success. Political integration in turn enabled economic growth in a virtuous circle. Superintending the entire process was American power and money.

It was these conditions that allowed Europe’s precarious success story to congeal into a cliché for export.

It is not without irony that it was precisely in the Middle East in the 1990s that the European example was taken up. This is how Ari Krampf summarizes Israeli peace politics in the 1990s:

The link between liberalized markets and a dovish perception of security issues was embodied in the political vision of Shimon Peres, the political figure who played a key role in the realization of the internationalist neoliberal vision. Peres, one of the patrons of the (1985Israel financial) Stabilization Plan, regarded the Plan as a central element in his geopolitical vision, encapsulated in the notion of the New Middle East (Peres, 1993; see also, Ben Porat, 2005a). One cannot avoid noticing that Peres was inspired by the process of European integration, where free markets had been endorsed as a regional pacifying mechanism: “Ultimately, the Middle East will unite in a common market—after we achieve peace. And the very existence of this common market will foster vital interests in maintaining the peace over the long term” (Peres, 1993, p. 99). Guy Ben Porat describes Peres’ book as a “blue- print for the future of the region based on economic rationality, peace, democracy, cooperation, mutual gain and general prosperity.” The Middle East, according to Peres’ vision, argues Ben Porat, needs to choose between “peace, global integra- tion and progress” and “continuing conflicts and backwardness” (Ben Porat, 2005a, p. 39). The link between economic and national security interests was also based on the interest of the Israeli private sector, which was expected to benefit from the realization of the New Middle East vision. It was also supported by the Israeli intellectual and professional elites (Keren, 1994). Economic cooperation and economic development of the Palestinian Authority were (supposed to be) an essential element in the New Middle East policy agenda. The internationalist neoliberal agenda was manifested in the “Paris Protocol” signed in April 1993 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which specified that “The two parties view the economic domain as one of the cornerstone in their mutual relations with a view to enhance their interest in the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” (Gaza-Jericho Agreement, 1994).

As Krampf goes on to argue, this vision was derailed by the resistance of the Second Intifada, the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the lurch to the right in Israel. But regardless of events on the ground, Europe and the US clung to the Two State vision of the 1990s. The horror of October 7 consists in no small part in the fact that that vista has now been blown apart.

And the shock of 2023, as I argued in my final FT piece of the year, was that this disillusionment was not confined to the Middle East alone. This is clearly also the deep realization with regard to Russia and China: The model of economic convergence leading to geopolitical and political alignment, is dead. Indeed, it has long been a vain hope.

We were able to ignore this fact, because global economic integration did produce very real effects. The situation was thus objectively ambiguous. Though Putin remained recalcitrantly committed to his Russian nationalist revisionism, economic growth did allow the integration of much of Eastern Europe and did produce a westernized Russian middle class. The same effect was produced in China, despite the increasingly assertive leadership in Beijing. In the Middle East too there is a peace interest, with a globalized business class eager to achieve an updated and expanded version of Peres’s New Middle East, over the heads of the impoverished and powerless Palestinians.

These were very real effects. But they were no guarantee that history would develop in a direction congenial to the West. What was actually taking place was something closer to a tug of war. And powerful as economics and global commercial culture may be, the forces were very unequal. Beijing never surrendered. Moscow did not accpet the rollback of its empire. Militants on both sides in Middle East preferred to subvert the momentum of peace by acts of of provocation and violence.

What made the situation even harder to read was that even those bent on challenging the power of the West did not forsake the world economy, but profited from it. As a result, forces of Westernization often found themselves more or less willingly coopted as an outward facing interface for governments bent on contrary long-term objectives.

Again, Israel is a good case to think with. As Krampf remarks:

The era of internationalist neoliberalism reached an end with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. Following Rabin’s assassination, the Labor Party was defeated by the Likud under Netanyahu’s leadership. Netanyahu served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, was re-elected in 2009 and has been Israel’s prime minister since. Between 2003 and 2005, Netanyahu served as the minister of finance. Despite his hawkish national security position, Netanyahu did not try to turn the clock back on liberalization and globalization. Rather the opposite has proven true: he pushed the process further.

A tell tale marker is the accumulation of giant reserves. Israel and Russia have both built reserves well in excess of 20 percent of gdp. China’s reserves are even more enormous, but so too is its economy. In relative terms, they are less dramatic than they at first appear. But it nevertheless seems fair to see all three as examples of self-insurance.

Of course, reserves are themselves claims on a global economy, in global currencies that presume access to that world. Russia’s reserves have proven vulnerable to confiscation. But the more significant point is that the politico-economic regime that enabled Moscow to accumulate those reserves in the first place has proven resilient in the face of Western sanctions. And the important role that Russia plays in the global energy economy, the driver of its reserve accumulation, has made the West reluctant to declare all-out economic war for fear of triggering massive collateral damage.

So the West now faces the bankruptcy of the vision of global development on which it anchored itself in the wake of the victorious end to the Cold War in Europe. We now know that the European experience of successful integration under American leadership does not generalize. The question is how it responds to this defeat.

The risk, all too obvious in the Biden administration, is that the US faced with this shock, goes back to the future. Casting off the platitudes of the 1990s and neoliberalism, American strategists are tempted to return to the mid 20th century as their reference point, to the moment of America’s rise to globalism, to the heroic narrative of World War II and the Cold War. This is an important part of Biden’s rock-jawed commitment to Israel.

In so doing the political class of the West misunderstand not only the world as it has developed in the 80 years since, but what the West and the United States have become as well. That misrecognition is a recipe for further frustration, shock and likely for violent confrontation. It means that history will return as catastrophe rather than constructive and deliberate change. The catastrophe may start with the American electorate once again rejecting centerist Democrats in favor of Donald Trump.

That prospect dramatizes the urgency of developing a progressive politics that is not a return to America’s hegemonic past but accepts and responds to the huge changes within the United States and in the wider world. What that politics looks like on the domestic front is clear enough - to make good on the missing dimension of Bidenomics i.e. a dramatic domestic welfare program. With regard to foreign policy it is less obvious. But faced with the grim reality of Biden’s foreign engagements, insisting that the question is open whilst refusing the blackmail of American exceptionalism would itself be a step in the right direction.

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