On Geopolitics

My previous post was, well, quite theoretical and maybe not particularly connected to anything, um, real, I suppose. So I'd like to bring in a bit of direct connection to history past and present. Specifically a loose theory of conflict and  resolution.

I also ground quite a lot of my views of geopolitics in the ideas espoused in "Unrestricted Warfare" by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Let's take the argument that "War is the continuation of politics by other means [... "with the admixture of other elements" ... is a better translation]. Then we could argue that economic sanctions, tariffs, export subsidies, international law, hacking and espionage can all be seen as methods of waging war. This is not a normative judgement. I'm not making a morality call here. It's just a way of expressing the conflict and competition inevitable to some degree between societies. 

Anyhow, "Unrestricted Warfare" was written in 1999, and discusses these various measures as methods of making war in the context of there being a conventional military superstate in the USA, which could easily crush any conventional military threat. The ineffectual flailing of the US armies in the middle east and their absolute failure to achieve (or, in fact, to lay out) any kind of goal suggests something is a bit lacking in the idea of conflict as armies slugging it out, and when the other side give up you've won*.

I think that their analysis is a very apt and general analysis of what it means to be in conflict, and how conflicts are started, escalate, are ended and won. If I can give a contemporary example, China is currently providing a 91% export subsidy to their steel manufacturers. The UK has to imposed tariffs on this, which means that UK steel has to compete with Chinese steel selling at around 10% of market value. This means that a strategic industry in the UK is collapsing**. Now, I don't mean to say that "Ooooh, scary, China has declared war on us. And our government is on their side." It's more that taking this analysis, we can look back on the history of Britain and see that it used all kinds of similar economic policies (e.g huge import tariffs on Indian calico) to give it's own industry a leg up. And rather than saying oh well, just jolly good old British ingenuity, we can see it for one of the oldest tricks in the book. The book of conflict, advantage, competition. Politics by other means one could almost say.

 *I'm ignoring the whole domestic aspect to US wars in this post by the way. GWB was right to call it a crusade, as it's definitely an ill thought out and futile war based entirely on misconception and misunderstanding, which has basically been arranged in order to displace serious conflicts in American society and government onto some unfortunate people on the other side of the world.

**This is an important but often overlooked point. There are a lot of types of steel. Used for everything from construction to surgical instruments to precision tools to god knows what all else. Seriously, try googling "Table of steel grades". This table is basically a recipe book for being able to have a modern industrial society. And don't be fooled thinking that you can just mix up a batch 904L or LDX 2404 without knowing what your doing and how to heat, mix, melt, work and cool the stuff properly. You lose the steelworks you lose all the people who know how to make the stuff. And god forbid you need a job-load of 153 MA^TM steel for a bit of high temperature work now there's no works in the country to smelt it and nobody who knows how to forge it.

Post Scipt to Beginnings

Well, I attempted to neatly sidestep producing a fully referenced article by writing in blank verse. This has the advantage of sitting on the less offensive side of the polemic. I hope that it might be inspiring.

As some context for why and how I am writing, and where my theoretical and factual groundwork comes from.

My predominant theoretical framework is grounded in the work of Fernand Braudel, specifically the three volumes of "Civilization and Capitalism: 15th - 18th Century". Braudel is probably best described as a dialectical materialist. He is especially interested in the "longue duree" or long duration of economic history. He derives some interesting ideas about the roots of long period economic swings (the so called Kondratievs) related to changes in communication and the maturation of relationships, the codification of what are initially innovative means of exchange into established facts of life. To encapsulate this, economic realities are grounded in long term arrangement between many individuals and institutions which slowly change over time. These changes, following naturally from the interplay of human creativity and competitiveness with changing technologies, social values and moralities, lead to long term up- and down-swings in the world economy.



I wouldn't say I'm a dialectical materialist however. For two almost opposite reasons. One is, that as a natural scientist I recognise that there is a material aspect external to humanity which is largely missing from the discussion. That is, we actually live on a planet, wherein there are given physical constraints on human behaviour. My wife (well, in two weeks anyway. Feels like we're already married so ...) uses the word metabolism to describe these relationships, and I think that's pretty apt. So the relationship between humans must also include a metabolic relationship with the earth and with each other. In fact we have to conceive of economic activity as part of a larger metabolic cycle. Jared Diamond is a real pioneer of this approach, specifically with "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," in which he discusses a number of societal collapses in the historical or archaeological record*.

It's a general concept: Human beings are part of the metabolic cycle of the earth. Not in a cutesy "We're all one with nature" way, but more a "all that trash ends up in the guts of fish and seagulls and rats" kind of way.

The second issue against dialectic materialism is that it doesn't take into account that human beings have a psyche. There's an argument that colonising other planets would be impossible because our spacecraft would have to perfectly reproduce the entire metabolic cycle that the earth performs for us now. There's another argument that says it only takes one hormonal teenage boy man (yay testosterone. It doesn't switch off) getting dumped before he wanders over to the airlock and blows the entire atmosphere out into space**. So, we have to consider the human psyche as a deeply irrational entity. Our rationality is something we had learned and developed culturally. It's not some innate thing that all humans are just programmed with. It's what you learn as you grow up and relate to people around you, as you play and find out what happens when you drop this or smash that against the other thing over there and make a load bang. And don't get a smack on the wrist for being a nuisance.

So we have a strange concept of our reality and our place in the world which doesn't actually sit quite right with the objective reality we occupy. This is basically Slavoj Zizek style transcendental materialism. That is, physical object and systems can have entirely unique qualities which actually have no objective existence, but are based on our perceptions and emotional attachments to them. My favourite example is Slavoj Zizek's description of a toilet as a powerful machine of ideology. You see, when you flush it, it makes your shit disappear. Yes, I know, doesn't seem to profound. Now, if you've ever taken a wild poo, you'll know that the place you went is something that stays in your mind, as you don't want to go stepping in it the next day, or get a drink downstream from it. Whilst the toilet makes that disappear. Clever!

Many human constructions have ideological (i.e. mass psychological) functions. Michel Foucaults "Discipline and Punish" is great for this kind of analysis of prison and school architecture and its wider context in society. Buildings are an example of physical ideological machines. There also exist institutional, social and moral 'machines' which serve to maintain and preserve relationships between people, but have no physical existence.

Well, that's enough for one post. Next - Geopolitics. Yay.

Ah, I assure you all I will be writing more in the future. So hopefully this can serve as something of a reference for some of my conclusions. When I'm jotting down some quick thoughts I'd rather not try to "show my workings" as it were.



*I'm not going to take a specific example, I'm largely unconcerned if new evidence shows that, well actually this particular society didn't collapse, it actually moved somewhere else and downsized, or the concept of collapse is just an imposition, the people were fed up of living in cities and having kings. Whatever. The point is to situate humanity within a metabolic cycle, within natural systems.

 
**By the by, I don't think astronauts would behave like this. They are pretty awesome people. But colonisation means you need to take all sorts with you, and maybe even raise several generations. But we're getting off topic here.

Beginnings ...

I suppose I should introduce myself. But I won't.

The decades from 1950 to 1970 saw the most consistent rate of economic growth recorded in the Western world. These decades also saw the rapid transformation of social orders.

This ended in 1973. An oil embargo was imposed, by Saudi Arabia, in retaliation for the US support of Israel in the 1973 war. This embargo caused a dramatic slowdown in the economies of the UK and US. Oil had become the energy source of choice.

Oil became the energy source of choice out of efficiency. It has a very high energy to weight ratio, and the energy can easily be liberated by combustion.

Oil fueled power plants, oil fueled transport. More than anything else, oil fueled agriculture and fed the world. It was easy, and most importantly, cheap, to build this world. A man could make a lot of money. By 1973, women could make a lot of money too.

So profit follows the easiest route. Water flows downhill. In 1973 the easiest route was for the economies of oil dependent countries was to invest heavily in oil exploration. A lot of money could be sunk into the North sea to recover the newly expensive oil.

Economies were flush with energy and money. Most importantly, this had secured domestic sources of energy. Once their energy supplies and finances were secured, money flowed.

In the UK, investment in research and development was slashed. A disproportionate amount was slashed from energy research. We had the energy now. Water flows downhill.

Investment in industry was slashed. We had the money, we could buy what we needed.

Money from oil, and the energy it gave us, was plowed into farms and invested in the City of London.

Farms grow food, so food became cheap. Money grows money, so money became cheap.


We knew that oil worked. We knew that farms worked. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why invest in new ways and means. Why invest in new people. Everything works just fine. The oil flows, and the money grows.

In the past four decades, the technology in our pockets has changed. We imagine a high tech future. Everything is smart. Except.

The growing miniaturisation of our computers is matched by the stagnant bloat of technologies barely changed in forty years. Ships are ships, they burn diesel. Airplanes are airplanes, they burn kerosene. Except for when they are drones and then they burn people.

Farms are farms. Diesel tractors turn soil, eroding away seasons. We burn oil to power the chemistry of fertilisation and mix it into the earth.

There's no blame here. It's just that we've set ourselves up to take the easiest route. It's the way that makes the most money. We reward risk takers but we don't take risks as humanity. We just accept the inevitable end.

We need to understand energy, and how our lives are powered. Most importantly, we need to appreciate that doing things differently isn't just more expensive. It's more expensive because it's worth more.

I'm a scientist. It is my job to try and achieve the impossible and fail repeatedly. That's what has built our modern world. And it's a complete waste of money. But it makes everything worth more.



The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The more parts, ever greater the whole.