The Future of Geopolitical Aligments

RUA TIRADENTES, 17 - ING, NITERI / RJ TEL.
: (021) 717-1235 FAX: (021) 719-3286
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL FLUMINENSE FACULDADE DE ECONOMIA
GREMIMT Grupo de Estudo sobre Economia Mundial, Integrao Regional & Mercado de Trabalho
The Future of Geopolitical Alignments THEOTNIO DOS SANTOS Textos para discusso
Srie 1 N 8, 2002
RUA TIRADENTES, 17 - ING, NITERI / RJ TEL.: (021) 717-1235 FAX: (021) 719-3286
TEXTOS PARA DISCUSSO
Este texto encontrado tambm no site da Ctedra e Rede UNESCO UNU sobre Economia Global e Desenvolvimento Sustentvel www.reggen.org.br
"We don't know like we used to know" General Colin Powel, American Military Commander, answering a question about who are the possible enemies that will be confronted by the new US Special Forces (International Herald Tribune, May 20).
* A first version of this paper was presented orally in the XI International Colloquium on
the World Economy: "1989: The End of an Era?" Starnberg, June 28 to 30, 1991. This paper is a result of my research activity from 1990 to 1991 with the financial support of the CNPq and the Ford Foundation of Brazil. I dedicate this to my 12-year-old step-son Rafael who was under the tension of my work in this period, debating with me with warm intellectual curiosity on these complex international problems.
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1. Looking for an Interpretative Model: The Foundations of the New Geopolitical Changes
The world is changing drastically. We are at the border of a new economic, social, political and cultural era. What defines this new age is essentially the creation of a global dimension of life which is the starting point for a planetarian civilization. At this moment, we are being obliged to confront with the process of globalization of economic, social, political and cultural life and its demands and consequences, and we are just creating the theoretical instrument for that. To describe this new reality we use indiscriminately the words globalization, world system, world economy, and world order that evoke or precede the formation of a planetarian civilization. However, they are different faces of a common historical phenomenon, as we can see by the following attempts to define them: GLOBALIZATION (that corresponds to the French word "mondialisation") means essentially the global management and tends to reproduce themselves as part of a global world creation of several world phenomena that transcend all national boundaries, demand a system, even when they can depend yet on national or local systems to assure their total reproduction. The concept of globalization or "mondialization" is the highest level of the concepts of internationalization, multi-nationalization and transnationalization which were discussed very intensively in the 60's and 70's. WORLD ECONOMY is a concept that stresses the growing autonomy of the world market and the interdependence among different branches of local industrial economics and between the three economic sectors (agriculture, industry and service) on the world scale, forming an international division of labor. This conception affirms also the role of monopolic economic relations on the world scale, and the presence of the national states in this process of world integration, but puts special emphasis on the role of the multinational corporations as a cell of this process. This concept has its roots in the definition of imperialism as a stage of world capitalism, but tried also to explain the interrelations between monopolic and dependent capitalism and the socialist economies as different social formations in the contemporary world.(1) WORLD SYSTEM is a broader concept that searches to integrate the global and the inter, multi and transnational realities. According with the concept, the reproduction of the world system is still based on the national states. Michel Beaud, for example, insists particularly on these interrelations establishing the notion of "systme national, mondial hirarchis" (world national hierarchical system). Braudel and Wallerstein developed the concepts of conomiemonde and world economy. They analyze the historical formation of different conomiesmonde until the emergence of modern capitalism that gives to this concept the universal character of a world system. Andr Gunder Frank gives to the concept of world system a very large meaning. He claims to identify a world system that started in the early ancient age and continues through the Greco-Roman period and the Byzantine Empire and several other imperial formations (Arab, Mongol, Ottoman, etc) until the creation of the modern world system. This system was based on permanent interconnections and systemic relations that were de-structurized and re-structurized several times.(2) In the seventies the concept of a new world order tried to relate the idea of world system with the question of governability. Concrete measures were proposed to assure a more equal distribution of wealth on a world scale(3). The Trilateral organization tried to respond to the challenges of the Third World with the concept of a trilateral schema of governability of the contemporary world based on the Alliance among United States of America, Europe and Japan(4). The concept of World Order reappeared in 1991 pub by the Bush administration after the victory against the Iraqi government in the 1991 Gulf War. The real meaning of this
concept is still not clear. It seems that it is associated with the idea of an American Pax based on the end of the Cold War and the consolidation of parliamentary and multi-party democracies. This world order would be established under North-American hegemony. The possibility of this hegemony and its limits will be discussed later (5). The concept of a planetarian civilization is based on the idea of convergence of cultures andcivilizations toward a plural convivium or conviviality in a unique planetarium system. This new stage of civilization has not yet arrived but is already requested by the common interests of all countries and all governments that need to survive in a common planet integrated by modern means of communication and transportation. All those dependent on the same global natural resources and their populations depend on a common biological and cultural heritage of all humankind. But before we describe and define this new planetarian civilization (that we can conceive also as the consolidation of the world system that is in large part based on a world economy) we need to analyze the historical reasons for its creation as a new radical historical formation. What has changed so radically in the world that de-stabilized the institutional base of the present international system? What happened that went beyond the limits of the national states that was until now the foundation of the world order? In my understanding the reason behind this new historical age is the change in the productive forces that support the production and distribution of goods and services in the contemporary world. The scientific and technological revolution that was consolidated in the 1940's changed the relation between the productive base of society and its super-structural elements (6). The hegemony of science over technology and of technology over production gave a hegemonic role to knowledge, education, formation and development of human resources in relation to other aspects of productive forces. Consequently society depends more and more on the existence of a large economic surplus created by automation and technological changes to develop these new conditions of production. At the same time, the emergence of a systematic and institutional process of research and development (as a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution) change the role of innovation in the accumulation and reproduction of capital. In this new historical pattern of production, the innovation, the technological change, and the mutation of the material base of society are more and more permanent elements of the accumulation and reproduction of capital. Until now culture, taboos, and religion sought to educate human being to restricted consumption and to reproduce what humankind has accumulated. The industrial revolution started to put technological and social change as an important objective of daily life. Today education, morality and ideology need to prepare the individual to accept and promote the substitution of accumulated old means of production and obsolete knowledge by new technologies, new knowledges, new rules, new morality, new ideological context, new esthetical patterns, etc. Man must be prepared for fundamental changes during each decade of his life. Humankind can not reproduce itself as the same one but as a new economic, social, political and cultural structure adapted to these constant qualitative changes. These changes lead humanity to a new stage of development as part of a world system in constant change (7). Each new stage of development requires more subjective capacity to manage human nature, human biology, human psychology, human interrelations and human relations with the human and non-human environment. These stages are related with cyclical movements of the world economy that are profoundly related with world system and the planetarian environment. We can even admit that the world economy evolve under the pattern of cyclical waves of rise and fall and that each new long economic cycle is based on a new technological paradigm (8) and that the new technological paradigm in emergence will suppose very radical changes as a
consequence of the global impact of scientific and technological revolution. Maybe we are participating in a profound historical mutation. At present, we are in the end of a depressive phase of a long wave of 50 years identified by Kondratiev. This b phase started in 1967 when the world economy began to diminish its rate of growth, the dollar starts to be detached from gold (which was definitely established in 1971) and gives origin to the fluctuation of world currencies. The unitarian capitalist world created by Bretton Woods around the United States currency, commerce and investment, was definitely broken. The united ideological front around the United States that gave origin to the cold war and entered crisis. And only now, after 20 years, it is finishing under the Soviet initiative of perestroika, glassnost and the new mentality. At this new period, the mass productive process, that founded the economic growth from the 1920's to 1980s, based on the "scientific administration" or taylorism or fordism was also surpassed. This "scientific" management was in fact a systemic appropriation of workers' activity and of their knowledge of productive processes by capital or the "scientific" observers payed by it. It was used to establish a regularization of production in the highest levels of productivity. It was the time of the production line and other forms of authoritarian submission of labour to the machine or more concretely to the system of decision of the capital (9). The new technological pattern that is emerging from the scientific and technological revolution is completely different. It is based on the substitution of labour by flexible and programmed robots and by systems of production commanded by computer through very sophisticated programs. If in the former period we had a process of automatization that substitutes human labour by machines, in this new period we are moving to the automation process that eliminate human direct labour and substituted human management and control of production by electronic and informatic systems of information and decision (10). At the same time that automation made a serious advancement in the 1980's - with the application of robots to production - we had changes in the relative position of economic sectors. The central articulator of industrial economy was steel and metal industry that was the fundamental base of industrial development. In the last decades they were replaced by new materials from the most different origins. Construction, textile, transportation and communication changed (and are still in the process of changing) radically the materials on which they were based. Radical innovations change completely the role of these basic industries. The new materials are a part of a new set of technologies that are already in the process of industrial integration or that are still emergent technologies (11). Both come from constant advances in basic and applied sciences, particularly in bio-technology, nuclear physics, physico-chemical of new materials, space, laser, optics, informatics (with special emphasis on artificial intelligence) and other fields in the process of development. Among those fields it is important to take in consideration the ecological or environmental industries that are transforming in industrial demand the appeals to ecological equilibrium and defense of environment on a world scale (12). This interdependence among production, new technologies, research and development and applied and basic sciences is creating a new economic reality that obliged the economic and social actors like national, multi-national and global enterprises and particularly the national states or alliances of national states to take new radical decisions, in the place of the private economic actors of liberal economy. The scale of production is also changing in a very fast way, to gigantic dimensions that are measured in terms of megamarkets or even world markets. The implantation of some new revolutionary technologies only can be made on a world scale to be economically viable. The case of high definition television (HDT) is an important example. Japan has already had the technology to install it since 1985 but was obliged to wait for a unique world system of production and regulation of this new revolutionary technology. The United States accepts it but Europe is trying to create its own HDTV. Even when Japan decided to start its own production in 1991, it depended on: a) international regulation of the utilization of the system;
b) space technology to send satellites with new transmissions in HDTV. We can see a similar situation in a traditional sector like the automobile industry that is surviving with local plants in the US and Europe only based on a strong protectionism against Japanese technological superiority, based on the adoption of new materials, and more favourable scales of production because of its highest concentrationm combined with flexible subcontracting integration. The same problem is passing in an advanced sector like electronics and in the information industry where all enterprises of the sector are obliged to integrated its computers and programs in compatible world logical systems or softwares (13). We can find similar cases in all sectors of the productive process because these new changes in the productive forces affect all of them by the implant of a new technological paradigm or pattern. In this new pattern we have two very fundamental aspects: a) the dependency of new technologies on research and development is being completed by the dependency of R&D on applied and basic science. This obliged the State to finance more and more science and technology, to define industrial policy and to articulate itself with an enterprise system that is becoming more and more dependent on scientific and technological research and development. The dependence of technological changes on basic sciences is obliging big firms to develop their own centres of basic research (14). new scales of production exacerbated the international fight for domination of markets. This conduced to the management of complex enterprises to combine global geographical perspective and global sectorial approach with specialisation. These new planetarian scales of production obliged firms to develop the flexibility of industrial structures. They need to be capable, in a very short period, to substitute old technologies, or to transfer them to subcontractors or inter-related sub-economic national powers (the case of Japan with Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and in part Hong Kong and other emergent new industrial countries in Asia). It created the need for a new international division of labour highly dynamic to permit the leaders to be always concentrated in the key technologies (15).
b)
In this new world, regional integration represents a possible solution to these needs, even though temporary. It is important to emphasise the fact that regionalization creates stronger confrontations between coalitions of economic and political forces, creating some powers and disintegrating some others, producing anarchies and irrationalities at an international level. In consequence, we can perceive a highest degree of unequal and combined development among developed, underdeveloped and developing nations, among local, multinational, and global enterprises, among national states, local or regional government, among ethnic and nationalistic groups, etc (16). This new technological pattern is related also with a new internal division of labour that affects several levels of relations between countries, regions or relations between firms relations. It creates new rates of labour exploitation, changes the work day, modified substantially the process of working, the role of labour in production and its responsibility and qualification. It also changes the structure of employment the rate of unemployment and underemployment and informal labour. All these changes destabilised old social movements, social categories and groups and stimulate an important intervention of old and new social movements in the definition of new social and moral behaviour, political parties and strategies and social policies of the state (17). It is important to take into consideration that this new technological pattern - that will impulse a new period of growth and capital accumulation on a world scale (since 1994
presumably), according with the Kondratiev cycle - will be based in an intensive automation of production that is already producing and will produce even more drastic diminishing of the quantity of labour socially necessary to produce the same products we have today. This is affecting and will affect the costs of industrial products but also employment and the length of the working day (18). Consequently we will have two big problems in the next decades: a) The diminishing of the working force and specifically the manual labour demand will produce unemployment in these sectors and this will be a dramatic problem, even in the period of growth. The extension of this problem will depend on the diminishing of working day (at present all labour unions are fighting for a labour week of 36 hours) and of the extension of the time of education of the population and the growing of the time for the formation of human resources (extension of basic, graduate and post graduate studies, continuous education, technical formation, re-training of labour force for new functions, etc.). All these are related with the position of working movement in the new society based on scientific and technological revolution, and the influence of socialist ideology of the old working movement in the new labour force that is also a wage force but living in very different social condition and participating in a new process of production (new discipline, timing, external constraint, etc.) and participating in a new pattern of consumption (19). The demographic changes in process in developed countries will lead the aged sector of the population to prevail demographically at the same time that in developing and underdeveloped countries young populations will be strongly majoritarian for a large period (20). As job opportunities increase in developed countries, these populations will press hard a strong tendency towards emigration or will develop rebellious and radical behaviour in their own countries. Urban and rural marginality is creating a new social category with its own culture and behaviour. Fundamentalist religious radicalism, nationalism or tribalism are part of this context (21).
b)
The emergence of new technologies will fortify also the oligopolistic competition at an international level. Lowest prices of production are diminishing the barriers of entry in several industries and new enterprises - more specialized and flexible - can intensify their competitiveness on a world scale. These new enterprises are fighting and will fight also to liberate the state apparatus from the control of old monopolistic group and can utilize the liberal ideology in favour of their entrance in the protected sectors (22). It is evident that, in this situation, the big investors that created large and heavy economic empires are in a bad competitive position. Installed capacity can be a negative weight. Big firms of the past are in an unfavourable position if they can not be liberated of their old assets. We need in consequence a period of devaluation of speculative and obsolete assets. This will permit us to devaluate the fixed capital necessary to new investments and consequently, this will favour a new wave of economic growth based on new technologies. False liquidity based on easy credit, financial, land and estate speculations are in decline since 1989 and they need to be more strongly devaluated (23). The present recession (1989-91-92) will define who will be sufficiently determined to purges their economic backwardness and create the basis for a new phase of investment that will incorporate actively the technologies of the new paradigm. We can expect for the middle of the 1990's a recuperation of the world economy (24). According to our belief, this will be the beginning of a new phase of growth and consequently the question of the hegemonic power that can integrate this new phase of expansion of the world system will be put. This hegemonic power will function like the core of capital
accumulation on a world scale. Around this core will be displayed the dependent or "peripheral" and "semi-peripheral" economies (accepting the Wallerstein concepts that follows the Prebish perception of world economy) (25). The periods of decline in the long waves (the phases b) are marked by a disintegration of the world economy and a fight for hegemony. The periods of growing (the phases a) are characterized by the establishment of a centre or core of world economy that is in general related with political and military hegemony.
2. Looking for a New Hegemonic Center and the "New World Order"
Geopolitics pretended to be a "science" of distribution of power on a world scale. This discipline tried to study the distribution of natural resources, economic, political and military power in the international arena to establish the strategic objectives of each nation. It was conceived as a foundation to military and political national state strategy. Its identification with Germany related it to Nazism and put it in a second rank of academic and scientific thought. However it continues to be studied in the military academies and in the head-quarters of all national armies (26). Today we need to be very cautious about the principles that orient geo-political analysis. We saw in the former chapter the main economic factors that can influence distribution of power on a world scale in the next twenty or thirty years. The world system that was the common base for the capitalist economy in the last five centuries is going through a radical change. The scientific and technological revolution that emerged during the Second World War is assuring the basis for a world accumulation of capital and a self reproduction of the world economy. The multinational, transnational or global enterprises are trying to substitute in part the national states as the foundation of the world economy. But they still depend on the economic power of the centralized capital - these collective capitalists that are the national states. States provide subsidium, financial and cultural background to the expansion of MNE. At the same time, states cooperate among themselves and create regional and international institutions to manage and organize this new phase of the world economy. These national states still have their geopolitical strategies but they need to submit them to the objective of economic, military and political alliances (inter-state alliance) that organize international life in the present moment. The end of the Second World War created a world economic system around the hegemony of the United States that represented at that moment about half of the world economy and had the military leadership of the world with the atomic bomb, only shared with Britain (27). In this situation the institutional framework of the world system was completely based on the US hegemony: World Bank, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), United Nations. These institutions were completed by the cold war institutions like the Marshall Plan, Point Fourth, NATO and others that tried to stabilize or "contain" (28) the military and ideological influence of the Soviet Union (that was, in reality, militarily and economically destroyed even when its morale was extremely high because of the military victory against Fascism). The Soviet Union was obliged to accept the rules of the Yalta Conference. It was a victory to her to occupy the role of marginal power in this world system under North American hegemony. I am completely in agreement with Wallenstein and other authors that do not accept the idea that mere existed a bipolar world. The Soviet Union never had the economic, political or military power to be an alternative pole (or core) to the United States (29). After the Second World War there existed only one world power: the United States. After her, Britain and the Soviet Union stay as important military power but very distant from the American standards.
A.
The shared hegemony of the United States
But the hegemony of the United States could not be eternal. The recuperation of European (mainly German) and Japanese economies, the reconstruction and growing of the Soviet economy (today so misrepresented), the Indian and Chinese revolutions and their Asian effects generated new centres of capital accumulation, of scientific and technological development, and of economic expansion. The anti-colonial revolutions with the emergence of the Third World States and their coordination after the Bamdung Conference and the NoAlignment Movement permitted the appropriation of their fundamental natural resources by these countries. The nationalization of oil in Mexico, in the end of the 30's, and of Brazil in the 50's continued in the Middle East and Venezuela in the 70's and 80's. These nationalizations completed a process initiated during the 30's and 40's. Several other basic resources were converted to state property and explored by state enterprises diminishing the area of action of private capital, as with the case of copper in Chile in 1972. In this new world, the United States can not exert the same hegemonic power any longer. Their relative economic position decayed very strongly from 1945 to 1967 and from the end of the Vietnam War to the present. Even in the Reagan period and in the recent Gulf War, when the United States pretend to have important military and economic victories, this country is experiencing an irreversible loss of economic and military power at international level (30). Historically, hegemony was a condition for the positive functioning of the World system during the periods of uprise. But one of the characteristics of the negative or recessive phase b of Kondratiev's long waves was exactly a dissolution of a clear hegemony in the world system and a consequent loss of a central source of capital accumulation on a world scale. But the systemic functioning is in a difficult situation when we have a non-clear hegemony in the phases a, characterised by economic rising or ascent. In this sense, the present period can be assimilated to the 1890-1914 period when the world economy had a new important expansion at the same time that Great Britain was losing her power and Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia and specially the United States were arriving to the world system as competitive central powers or core economies. At the present moment, when the post Second World War institutional system based on US hegemony (and its subsystem that was the Cold War) is completely dismantled, we are in a transitional period in which a new system of Alliances will be built. This system - as I will try to show - can not be other that a system where the United States will have a shared hegemony with the other possible central powers. It means: integrated Europe, under German leadership, Japan Asia-Pacific system and Soviet Union that are very wrongly being marginalized from the core of world system by some ideological attitudes. This "shared hegemony" will try to assimilate in a second rank the New Industrial Economies (NIEs) from Asia (through Japanese leadership) and will try to open a way to NIEs countries like Mexico and Brazil and also the Middle East powers to participate in a subordinate and regional position in this new system of decision. Countries like China and India will have also to find their geopolitical space in this new phase of the world system, as regional and international powers. The United States is still the biggest relative world power. But they can not stop their decine. The new phase of development of productive forces on a world scale needs the highest level of market competitiveness (31), state intervention (32), and economic concentration (33) that cannot be exclusive of a country or region. From the other side, the United States is being dominated by a new militarist and technocratic bourgeoisie that was created and grew under the Pentagon's purchase power and its subsidies to research and development. Even against a
clear opposition of the old American oligarchy and a large sector of public opinion, they continue to obtain a very high military budget that maintains and even expands the fiscal deficit in the country. The fiscal deficit creates at the same time a financial bourgeoisie that depends on this irrational fiscal policy (34). The deficit creates new demands internally and externally. This demand is the source for the tremendous growth of export of Japan, Germany and the new industrial countries during the 80's. But it also origins the American commercial deficit and the American external debt that appeared in the 1980's with tremendous force and energy. This economic model created economic growth in the world economy from 1983 to 1989 (35) and permitted the United States to advance in military technology that was used in the Gulf War as a demonstration of military and technological power. But this model is not sustainable because it is based on a non-manageable fiscal and foreign debt of the United States. Both tend to produce a strong devaluation of the dollar that will transform the United States into a non-hegemonic power. At the moment, we are in the process of creation of a new world monetary system with three basic currencies (dollar, german mark and yen) (36). Until now, Japan and Germany have been sustaining the dollar in the world market because (among other reasons) they have enormous assets in dollars. But they will not be capable of doing it indefinitely. The dollar will decline to permit North America to increase its export and diminish its trade deficit to a more "acceptable" level (around 50 to 70 billion dolars per year). At this moment, North America will confront the fact of its transformation to a regional power. But this situation can prolong to about 15 or 20 years the moment of truth when it will be clear that the US will not have the means to maintain the deficit. This intermediary period will coincide more or less with a new Kondratiev Wave of investment between 1994 and 2020. During this period United States will be obliged to reinforce her regional power (37). US will need to promote not only the North American common market with Canada and Mexico but also to promote regional integration at a Latin American level. Not in the terms of the present modest "Initiative of America" but the United States will need to communicate and negotiate with the Latin American countries and accept in part their integration (38). During these years of shared hegemony, the United States will see - impotent - the emergence of new world powers and alliances. In this period, the world will look for a new hegemony/, or we can expect a mutation in the world system and the appearance of the conditions for a planetarian civilization based on cultural pluralism and economic and political concert of nations. Before that mutation will be possible, I believe that we will have a period of instability because of the fight for world hegemony or for relative power in a shared hegemony with the United States. It is very possible also that the US will try to reinforce their relations with the Pacific Basin. But this policy will have a strong co-participation of Japan and can not assure the US of recuperation of her hegemonic power in this large region. On the contrary, retreat to the Pacific Area, as a consequence of losing power in the North Atlantic area will reinforce the power of negotiation of Japan that, at this moment, will be in a much more globally strategic position.
B.
Japan: from the exclusive Pacific power to the expansion in the Asian continent
The most commented on alternative to the US hegemony is at present Japan's economic success. But Japan has very decisive limits to becoming a world hegemonic power even with its good economic performance. The recent history of Japan is very much determined by its failure to build an empire and to conduct a war mainly with the United States in the Pacific. This failure is also tragically related with the first and unique case of detonation of an
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atomic weapon. Hatred and frustration are part of this very recent history. And it has produced a strong anti-militarist feeling in a large part of the Japanese people. But the humiliation of the defeat to such a perseverant nation was also a stimulus to rebuild the Japanese power in a new base (39). And even when the United States supported the progressive forces of Japan against the old oligarchy that made the war (dismantling the keiretzus, doing agrarian reform, suppressing military investments) the United States was also responsible for the atomic bombing of the Japanese people. In this so complex and tragic context we can understand how contradictory can be Japanese behaviour and their deep feelings as people, culture and civilization. This is the first limit to the Japanese world hegemony. Japanese dominant classes did not develope a planetarian vision of geopolitics and strategy and was restricted toward their regional drama (40). And also Japanese culture has not conceptual tradition of world scale visions and models. This is also related with its territorial limit and isolation that could only be compensated by imperial conquest (already rejected as an alternative) or a policy of regional development capable of putting Japan in the leadership of a strong and developed South Asia and Pacific region. Japan's dependency on the US after the Second World was not only economic but also military and strategic. This obliged Japan to adopt the conception of a Global Alliance with the US that means a complete abandonment of any global autonomous strategy. At the same time, Japan is profoundly afraid of the hatred that its colonial power generated. Anti-Japanese feelings are very strong especially in Korea but also in other regions of its old empire. Japan justified its empire as an anti-west alternative and this kind of ideological propaganda can not be used at the present time, even when anti-west feelings have strong foundations (41). At the same time, the Pacific Basin approach was based on the American market and a strong connexion with the West coast of the United States. Japan invested too much in this market to dissociate from it (42). But we also need to think from the other side: that the global situation is changing every day. First of all the decadence of the United States and the artificial base of their market stregnth, supported by fiscal debt, is obliging Japan to rethink its global alliance (43). Japanese investment in the US is more and more oriented toward safest assets, mainly estate investment, direct investment and new ventures with enterprises of strategic importance. It is not a time any more to put all eggs in the American economic basket, particularly in the bounds based on the American debt. At the same time American and European pressure against the expansion of Japanese capital and its competitiveness obliged Japan to look for new markets and fields of investment. As well as obliging Japan to think by itself and rebuild its world strategy, this time more global and self-sustained. This obliged Japan to remake its relationships with the regions of its old empire on a new basis. But it means re-finding an old Asian vocation of Japan. China was part of this vocation and it is open now to a very strong complementarity with Japanese economy, culture and politics. The amount of Japanese investment in China is surpassing that of all Western countries and everything makes us think that it will be more and more historical tendency.
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South Korea was integrated in Japanese industrial policy and strategy. Today South Korea is trying to escape from its Pacific Basin limits in reaction to the decay of the North American market. It is looking for new zones of investment and Siberia is certainly the most important region to create a whole new economy that is already emerging in this Asian region (44). And Korea has the absolute support of Japanese capital for this new strategic direction. At the moment Japanese strategists feel as a great danger for their relations with the United States to force a direct economic intervention in so important a region. At the moment the unification of South and North Korea is absolutely necessary. And it will means the appearance of a new economic power in the Asian region. If Japan wants to have strong neighbours to protect it from external pressures, this will be a good way. The integration of the Japanese economy and the regional production of raw materials and agrarian products was enriched by the MITIs policy of a regional division of labour. This policy is based on sub-contractist industries producing for Japanese, American or other markets. It supposes also a certain transference of technology (semi-obsolete, less strategic or polluted technology) to concentrate the specializsation of Japanese industry in high and most advanced technology. This system is being imitated by South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan that are passing also technologies to a third zone of investment in the ASIAN countries. At the same time, the countries that forme the old Indochina are looking for Japanese help for their economic development. Vietnam, Laos and mainly Cambodia can be highly complementary to the Japanese economy. The United States is getting out of this conflictive region and even passed the management of the complicated Cambodian situation to the Japanese government. In summary, we see a tendency of Japan to assume growing responsibilities in the Asian continent with a very important perspective at long term: to recreate a powerful Asian economy very much around heras a centre of accumulation of capital, a monetary framework and a technological power (45). At the same time, Japan is increasing its influence in Latin America where it is being perceived as a source of direct investment in place of to North American and European capital that abandoned the region in favour of East Europe or as a result of the restriction imposed by the loss of economic power as in the case of the United States that was transformed in an importer of capital and a debtor country. In some cases, like Mexico, Japanese capital has an open space of investment to penetrate the United States markets through North American integration. Brazil is also very interested in Japanese capital that has a very favourable perception in the region. Peruvian president Fujimore was elected using his Japanese ethnic origin to assure him as a possible negotiator for Japanese investment in the country. But Japan does not have a clear policy with regard to Latin America. It is afraid to confront North American interests in the region. Japan has also important gaps in its global vision of the world. It does not have a policy towards the Middle East, wich it considers only as a source of oil. The same happens to Africa, India or Pakistan, where Japan has no interest at all. In Europe, Japan is shifting from a wrong alliance with Britain towards a more incisive approaching with Germany (46). Its vision of East Europe and the the Soviet Union is very vague and indefinite. It is using a minor issue of two islands lost during the Second World War as a principle of foreign policy in relation to a very large and key country, the Soviet Union... After all, the possibility of an agreement with the Soviet Union for a direct exploitation of Siberia and the possibility of a large maritime and spacial collaboration with the Soviet Union will permit Japan to be much more close to a world power than now. Anyway, the next two decades will be a period of strong reorientation of Japanese international policy and will give place to its appearance in the international arena as a growing independent geopolitical force. As representative of Asian culture and civilization, an independent Japan
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will reverse very much the directions of the winds. They will come more and more from the Orient, but they will not be hegemonic yet.
C.
European Integration, East Europe and the Role of The United Germany
Willy Brandt, defending Berlin as capital of the unified Germany, made a very surprising historical comparison. For him, to accept Bonn as the capital of the unified Germany would be the same as if the French accepted Vichy as capital of liberated France (47). This historical comparison shows how much the Second World War injuries are still alive. And how much Germany feels herself having submitted to and been occupied by external forces all these years of good relations with an apparently untouchable Atlantism. The English geopolitician H. Mackonder views, in the beginning of the 20th century, the world "pivot" as the continental mass dominated by Eurasia, or the "heartland", that constituted at that time a potential menace to the maritime power of Great Britain, that passed to the United States after the Second World War. the United States geopoliticians continued this perception of an unified Eurasian heartland as opposed to the American hegemony. The opposition between Atlantism and European integration is in part an expression of this perception. The incorporation of the Soviet Union in a common policy of integration with Germany is a very dangerous and definitive event to the American strategy as a hegemonic force in the world. United Europe is essentially a German geopolitical conquest. This policy was capable of neutralizing the Atlantism of Mitterand's first presidency during the begining of the 80's. The United States played a completely and radically different role in the 80's. In this period, a unified policy between US and Great Britain (the Reagan-Thatcher Alliance) was a drastic offensive of conservative forces to support an anti-United European conception of the Atlantism. As a reaction to this conception we had the final adhesion of France to Europeism, in the end of 80's. A decadent Britain was isolated at the side of a decadent the United States (48). The East European "revolution" was in great part a consequence of this new geopolitical situation. Confronting the concrete possibility of a Unified Europe with German hegemony on one side, and a rising Japan on the other side, the Soviet Union was induced to abandon an unconfortable geopolitical position based on an artificial confrontation with the United States. The Soviet Union started to articulate new world politics outside the framework of the cold war and gave valorous steps in these direction with the support of II International (Social-democracies), American liberals and even conservatives forces (trilateral, for example) that are against the strategy of high military technological expenditures of the Pentagon (particularly the Star War or IDS), the Pope and other religious forces including Christian Democracy, the Non-Alyned Movement, social movements for peace and defense of environment, and many other political and cultural forces. This very strong left-center and even conservative alliance of forces led the Russian diplomacy to an active leadership in the conception and execution of world policy, through "perestroika", "glasnost", and the "new mentality" initiated by Michael Gorbachev. But this new political phase was progressively determined by the Russian perception of the Soviet Union and of world geopolitics. According to the Russian people, the the Soviet Union and East Europe were a negative weight to their nation (Russia). Contrary to other imperialist powers that received economic surplus from outside by exploiting their empires, Russia was obliged to transfer its economic surplus (particularly agrarian surplus but also raw materials, particularly oil) to the backward regions of the Soviet Union and to the East Europe and other allies. At the same time, Russia was obliged to buy bad industrial products from these regions as a consequence of its isolation from the world economy and according to egalitarian and socialist division of labour. All that impedes Russia to participate in the modern conspicuous consumption.
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This perception determined a growing Russian consensus against Soviet domination of East Europe and against the federative union of Soviet republics. These ideas influenced more and more the Russian "intelligentsia", Russian populist nationalism, and religious ideology (that is still very strong in this country) and culminated by influencing the reformist sector of the Communist Party and the key group from the KGB that organized in great part this reformist movement. From the original group of Perestroika, Boris Yeltsin first and several other (even an anti-Russian like Schevarnatze), accepted these basic ideas. If we added to that the juncture of a Gorbachev surrounded by non-reformist forces internally and very conservative apparatinicks in East Europe we can understand the need of Gorbachev with the reformist group of the Communist Party and the KGB apparatus to force the elimination of old communist bureaucracies from power in East Europe. This policy conduced to the juncture of 1989 when we had pressure from above (Gorbachev and reformists in the Soviet Union) to put down very weak communist governments created by Soviet troops of occupation in each East European country, in alliance with very weak local political socialists or populists (or even conservatives forces, like the case of Poland). Where a mature opposition existed like in Poland and Hungary, these changes were more or less managed. Where they did not exist, the changes were pushed in any way. Popular reaction was much more radical than was expected originally and a blend of anti-Soviet nationalism, anti-communism and anti-bureaucratic privileges feelings conflued to an antisocialist and pro-liberal popular movement. These tendencies were already very superficial and ideologically confusing. They will be temperated by social democrats and socialist forces, that historically opposed, much more radically than conservatives and rightist liberals, the stalinism, the autocracy and the East Europe occupation. But the important factor in this new context is the opening of East Europe to reincorporate their economy in West Europe where they historically belong. But this should be done without losing the important expansion to the East made during the integration with the Soviet Union and COMECON (that was dismantled now but that will need to be rebuilt in the near future). To Germany (49) this situation is very favourable. It opens a large market in East Europe and a bigger one to the Soviet Union to be conquered by Germany, using East European investment to penetrate internally in the Soviet Union. Will this be the integration of the heartland: the Europe from the Mancha Canal to Wlativostok (50) is a much more vast Europe that De Gaulle conceived? Will it mean the consolidation of Euro-Asian hegemony and the decline of maritime powers, mainly the United States? The answer is: only in part. Today the globalization of technology - that we discussed in the first part of this article - is creating new geopolitical conditions that are based much more on education, training, research and development and advanced technology. But the Union of German (and European) science and technology with Soviet science and advanced technology (mainly military and space), will create a new economic, social, political, military and cultural power that humanity never knew in the past. It is very difficult to predict the effect of such a collaboration in the evolution of humanity. In any case this will destabilize completely the hegemony of the United States. Even during a period of transition, the collaboration of the United States will be asked and the local European powers (including the Soviet Union) will accept a secondary position in a world coalition of forces hegemonized by the United States (shared hegemony), at the end of a new period of economic growth and of concretization of these virtual tendencies, this hegemony will be completely jeopardized and only a new mentality, a planetarian ideology and action, will permit to manage the enormous disequilibrium that will be created in the period.
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D.
Soviet Union: a dead dog?
We live in a moment where the Soviet Union is being considered an economic and political "disaster", almost finished as an economic regime, political system and as a federation of nations. These easy conclusions are very superficial propaganda. The world press continues with a "cultural cold war" that impedes a real knowledge of events, tendencies and global situations. The Soviet Union is not a death dog. It is alive and very alive. And it will influence very decisively the evolution of world economy and world system in the next years and decades. What is dead (since 1954 but it is finally decisively dead) is Stalinism as a political doctrine and as an ideological system. What is also dead (since 1967 when the United States started to lose its hegemony at world level) is the cold war. It means the capacity of the industrial and military complex and North American rightist forces to command international diplomacy. Stalinism is not the inventor of the cold war. On the contrary, Stalin was the Soviet leader more enlogized and supported by Western leaders (during the Second world War very clearly and enthusiastically and during the "purges' of 1935 also, when the western press covered and justified the Stalinist process of Moscow that "legally" assassinated the Bolchevique leadership in the Soviet Union). Stalin was transformed into a "monster" by the western press after the Second World War, as part of the Cold War. And the Cold War was in part an external containment and in part a "self" containment (according to Yalta's agreements) of the Soviet Army in Europe and Asia (that could not impede Chinese and Yugoslav and other revolutions). But it was also an instrument of ideological consolidation of American influence and hegemony over the "western" christian world (including in the "West" and "christian" world Japan and other Asian regions). But in part the "Cold War" was also a justification for American militarism (and its Soviet counter-part that used Stalinism as an ideological support) that gave origin to what Einsenhower called the "Industrial Military Complex" and that grew and imposed American policies until the failure of the Vietnam War. And this interest was restored to government during the Reagan and in part the Bush administrations. This time the new military industrial complex was developed at a new level of postindustrial research and development military complex that showed its efficiency (and limits!) in the Gulf War. The Reagan policy was based on the CIA thesis according to which the growing of military expenses will oblige the Soviet Union to make a military effort impossible for her. As a consequence, the Soviet Union will be confronted with economic shortage and political national crisis that will destroy its military and economic power. The CIA thesis exposed at the end of the 70's was correct, except in one point: the capacity of Soviet leadership - with support of a large number of forces on a world scale and specifically in the United States - to take the initiative of an anti-militarist world policy and to abdicate its military, political and economic expansion at the regional and world level. The Soviet Union could very quickly escape the trap of Reagan's cold war revival and create a new international situation where it will finally find a place in the world economy (as all its political and ideological leaders wanted from Lenin to Gorbachev passing by Bucharin, Stalin, Kruschev, Brechnev and their opposition like Trostky, Beria or Andropov). So, to understand what is happening in the Soviet Union we need to dissolve this ideological and propagandistic confusion that involves its historical experience. From the side of the anti-socialist ideology there existed the tendency to identify socialism with the historical problems of Soviet economy and policy. From the side of pro-socialists though existed the intent to identify the "treasons" that the practice of "real" socialism represents to "true" socialism. From the side of Stalinism existed the process to convert in a closed official philosophical, economic and political doctrine the rationalization of this historical experience
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(producing one of the most monstrous ideological constructions ever built in all history - that was exactly Stalinism, also called very erroneously* as "Marxism-Leninism"). *The concept of "Leninism" was created by Stalin in his famous article "Principles of Leninlsm" in 1926. Lenin will never identify himself with a scholastic exercise of political thought like this article and what follow it. Other followers of Lenin like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukarin were eliminated by Stalin. If we study the Soviet Union's experience outside this ideological - and scientifically irrelevant - context we need to start by contesting several consensual untruths: First, "The post-Second World War period was characterized by a bi-polar confrontation between two super-powers: the United States and the Soviet Union". This is an absolute untruth transformed in unquestionable truth. The Soviet Union was a backward country, essentially peasant, in 1917 and still in the 1950's. At the end of the Second World War, despite its military victory over Germany, it was a country destroyed by nazi invasion (20 million Soviet deaths, the cities and a large part of countryside were completely destroyed, terrible military expenses, etc), it had no atomic bomb (that it could obtain only in 1950 with the help of industrial intelligence in the US and Britain) and was in consequence strategically completely dominated by North American and British military power. The Soviet Union only started to have an independent (not alternative) technology in 1958 when she started space technology with the Sputnik. From 1960 to 1985, the Soviet Union had a fantastic technological, industrial, scientific, social and urban development that finished with all geopolitical and social basis of Stalinism. She established a military equilibrium with the United States (at a very high social cost, as the CIA forecast). She established an enormous scientific apparatus, limited by war investments that drew her scientific and technological energy, and by the need to compete in the very expensive activities of advanced science and technology (because of the COCOM boycott of transference of exist technology to the Soviet Union, and because of the Cold War in general). In this period the Soviet Union developed a majoritarian urban population with a very particular employment composition in relation to capitalist economies (a larger working class than western countries, a larger scientific and technological, intellectual, entertainment and artistic population, a restricted business, commercial, financial population, a large bureaucratic population not only in the state and in the enterprises, like in the West, but also in the party, converted in a bureaucratic clone of the state). All these changes converted the ideological building of Stalinism into an empty phantom. Stalinism that started its development in the middle of the twenties was the ideology of "socialism in one country" and, after the Second World War, of "Socialism in one area". It tried to justify and defend the model of socialist primitive accumulation that was developed in the Soviet Union as an intrinsical and exclusively and desirable model of socialism. Its difficulties resulted from backwardness and from external pressure and the consequent internal isolation and its necessarily authoritarian and even despotic form was transformed into positive and necessary aspects of socialism. When these geopolitical conditions were surpassed by industrial and scientific development and military and political international equilibrium, the stalinist doctrine and its political survival were transformed into a disgusting and oppressive historical dinosaur. It means that the Soviet Union is developing now a new socio-economic and political system that will be an adjustment between her historical experience and her ideological framework (a fusion between religious absolutism and enlightened modernization under the form of a "marxist" economic, political, social and intellectual thought).
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If we try to understand the present Soviet situation as a consequence of the failure of an economic system as the Cold War press is doing (with tremendous intellectual effects) we can not understand anything about what is happening in the world now. Second, "the 1989 'revolution' in East Europe was an anti-Soviet movement that happened without her will and against Soviet objectives". This is another completely wrong idea. Anti-Sovietism and anti-Russian feelings were not something new in this region. What was absolutely new in 1989 was the determination and political will and action of the Soviet Union leadership (through the party, the government but mainly by KGB action) to annihilate the bureaucratic establishment (created, nourished and supported by Soviet occupation forces) in these countries under the name of Communist Parties. The social forces that pressed in this direction in the Soviet Union were very strong and clearly majoritarian after the Yeltsin election to deputy by Moscow. What was their argument? To a large part of Russians (mainly European Russians) the Soviet Union,
COMECON and proletarian internationalism were a very unfavourable political context to

Russia. The peasants from Russia were obliged to pay for the primitive accumulation to the development and industrialization of backward regions of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War the price of re-building East Europe was also paid by Russian industry obliged to buy bad technological products from these regions in a name of the socialist division of labour. Russia had not the imperialist surplus that enriched Britain and West Europe and on the contrary was obliged to pay for the development of backward regions of the Soviet Union, East Europe, Cuba, Vietnam and recently Africa and Afghanistan. These expenses and the military expenses to defend the country from world capitalist economic blockage and military encirlement produced a framework of poverty and retard that European Russians don't want to pay for anymore. Catholic Orthodoxy, old Russian monarchical revival, European proximity and particularly the possibility to join European unity, all that create an ideological framework to the idea of "be free of East Europe". No more direct exchanges! Payment in hard currencies! No more subsidized oil! No more obliged importation of East Europe products but possibility to buy from West Europe, the United States and Japan or anywhere. Free trade! Why not? These questions go deeper and deeper. And surrpass these limits. Why not liberal democratic and parliamentary regimes that function so well (?) in Europe, the USA and Japan? Why not a party system similar to Europe to permit Russia to be full part of this continent? Why not do everything to create the European House? It is evident that social conquests of Russian Revolution must be maintained. How? Let's see! But the specificity of Russia? Her orthodox religion? Her Asian cultural background? Her historical perspective? Peter The Great and Saint Petersburg or Petrograd or even Leningrad should be the vanguard of Russia again? But the rest? It is evident that these Russophilous (pro-European) feelings exacerbated national conflicts in the Soviet Union. Russians started by supporting Baltic claims for independence. Small countries, coming later and counterfeitly to the Soviet Union, they were the ideal spearhead to redefine the the Soviet Union in a more favourable way to Russia. That is why we had this strange situation: in 1990 a plebiscite about the destiny of the Soviet Union shows the core of the "empire" voting for the dissolution of it and the "periphery" voting for its conservation. This shows that may be the Russian rhetoric corresponds to reality. Soviet "Imperialism" was against the interest of the Centre (Russia). On the contrary, an idependent Russia in relation with "independent" national states of the Soviet Union maybe will permit Russia to exploit these countries. So, East European independence and the end of the Soviet Union was not a product of external opposition but very clearly internal - Russian - political will and cultural, economic and social movements. The same can be said about democratic evolution of Russia in the direction of, on one side, a Christian Democratic or Populist Party, on the other side, a Social Democratic or Democratic Socialist Party, and may be a small Liberal pro-western party in
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the middle. But the rest of the Soviet Union, except the Baltics, Ukraine and Bielo Russia) will be much more populist- or socialist- oriented for the reasons we discussed. That is why it is still difficult to know what kind of common agreement will be made in the new the Soviet Union pact or common-wealth. It is necessary that all these forces measure their power to establish a common political framework. This new the Soviet Union will be not actively related to the Third World by the reasons we gave. Except for some important points: The Soviet Union is an important producer of raw materials and minerals (mainly gold and oil) and she can not ignore the interest of Third World countries to have better prices of these basic products. The Soviet tentative approach to South Arabia on a common oil policy with OPEC was one of the reasons of North-American hard line against the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. It was necessary to establish a strong American presence in the area to contain these kind of agreements. Russia is also a buyer of agrarian products from the Third World, mainly Argentina, paying better prices than Europeans or Americans. This can create good relations with Third World economic policies to obtain more diversified food exportation and better prices. But no more than that. The Soviet Union will diminish her military aid and other forms of aid to underdeveloped countries. The case of Cuba will always be special, because of the Island's special historical relation with the Soviet Union and because of her geopolitical position at the side of the US. But these special relations will not be permanent. The new the Soviet Union that will emerge from all these adjustments will put her strongest effort and energy in her integration to Europe, particularly with Germany and in the peace agreements with the United States. But this Russian approach will be corrected by reality: Asian frontiers of the Soviet Union will count strongly. Relations with India, China, Japan and the Siberian development will create a new geopolitical context for the Soviet Union (and for Europe that see in these frontiers of the Soviet Union a new frontier for Europe). The geopolitical wiseness of Europeans will compensate for the lack of expertise of Russians. But Europe (and Germany in particular) have their eyes also in the islamic part of the Soviet Union: a very important door to the Middle East. The Soviet Union is an oil power and an islamic country. These are two very important geopolitical advantages of the Soviet Union that russophiles can not perceive. Military and space high technology, the biggest world scientific apparatus, new frontier zones, basic raw materials, a very educated population in the final process of modernization, very strong cultural background, all that make the Soviet Union a basic card in the future. The fact that she get a large part of these advantages in a very short historical period and that a post capitalist social regime and philosophical point of view was the inspirator of a large part of these conquests is also a very positive factor, even when the present changes will try to ignore it because of a dialectical historical movement against her recent past. The Soviet Union can not substitute for the United States in this new historical phase (and she never could be a world hegemonic power, much more clearly in the past) and she is completely in agreement to accept the share hegemony of the United States on the World scale. But in the next 20-30 years this country will advance very strongly and will occupy (in Alliance with Europe and particularly with Germany) a very strong position in the making of a new world society. Maybe her non-private economic structure; her scientific and technological relation with the space industry; her historical links with a dialectical philosophical thought (even deformed by the Dialect - Materialist, Soviet version of marxism) and the humanists elements of the cultural formation of her people will be very strong factors in favour of a more
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planetarian approach of the world economy and system. These elements are already present in her new international policy based in the "new mentality" and in the philosophical conception of "perestroika" and "glasnost".
E.
The Third World Still Exists?
The idea of a Third World was a product of the process of de-colonization after the Second World War. The decadent Britain and European powers opened their colonial space for a new competitive economic domination under the hegemony of the United States. In other countries, the national and democratic movements that grew after the First World War and during the 1929's crisis produced new nation-states with ambitions of autonomy and produced a new historical subjectivity that looks to leninism as an alternative thought to liberalism and to the Soviet Union as an alternative power to imperialism. This produced a new ideological framework on a world scale. These new movements in Asia and Africa converged with the Latin American nationalistic, democratic and anti-imperialist culture. Even if the countries from this region had their national independence and established national states in the beginning of XIX century, they could not assure their economic independence and would have been subjugated under semi-colonial or dependent economic condition first from Britain and after from the US that affected also their political independence. Consequently, it was natural that Latin American countries or their nationaldemocratic movements adhered or supported the Asian-African movements of independence. This common framework led to the creation of Tri-lateral organization as a militant revolutionary instance and the non-Aligned Movement as a state organization. The Bandung conference of 1955 unified Afro-Asian leadership under the influence of Yugoslavian socialist experience and Tito's conception of a no-cold war international arena. The acceleration of de-colonization after Bandung stimulated the creation of several organizations and movements under the inspiration of a new world order. Opposition to cold war and affirmation of the possibility of world peace was a main principle of this new ideological framework. Conceptualization of international negative terms of interchange was an objective Latin American contribution to this movement that led to the formation of the Group of 77s and the creation of UNCTAD. The criticism of monopolic international domination, of the formation of multinational enterprises in conflict with national-state regulations, aggregated with the propositions of national autonomous development, state autonomy and the international right of self-determination created the Third World ideology, or perspective, or approach. Here is not the place to criticize this ideology and established her historical possibilities and limits (51). It is important to see also that this ideological framework was so majoritarian and consensual at a certain moment that it was incorporated by completely opposing points of view like liberalism and marxism. Both have in common that they are by nature internationalist and cosmopolitan or planetarian points of view. These theoretical paradigms take cousciousness of the emptiness of their conception of humanity, totality, globality and universality and they were obliged to accept more and more a pluralistic conception of humanity, world, development, etc. As a result of these historical movements and of the world presence of these new economic forces with a new subjectivity, the world strategy needs to change, needs to admit the hypothesis of the generalization of development, democracy, egalitarianism for all the world, all nations, all people, all ethnic group, all minorities and so on. In a certain moment, in 1968, all the subjectivities converged to a new global and radical ideological context at an economic, political and ideological level. But this new general framework was too abstract to include the concrete historical reality. The seventies were characterized by the emergence of a completely new world: new social movements challenge the core of the world system and the economic and political and ideological principles in which it was based; the Soviet Union established a
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military equilibrium with the United States and surpassed Europe military power; the OPECs oil cartel established new prices and generated a big surplus of financial and monetary resources (the petrodollars) and developed new military and economic powers in the Middle East and Persian Gulf; the US was militaryly and ideologically defeated in Vietnam; Europe and Japan gained strategic and political relative independence in the world system based on a growing economic power; the new industrial countries emerged as important economic powers but also as new sources of political will and strategic power; India and China developed their own strategic conceptions as nuclear powers. All these events indicate a growing complexity of the world system and a growing of the political agents and the social actors at local and international levels. In this new reality the Third World countries gained a new position that led to the North-South talks in the seventies. To assure this new challenge was conceived the tri-lateral strategy (52), whose basic elements still survive, as coordination among the three basic regions of the North (US, Europe and Japan) to confront Third World challenge and its socialist support. The Soviet Union that was very hostile to a Third World Strategy in the fifties and sixties started to change her position in the seventies promoting a common action with OPEC, the New International World Order, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, the UNCTAD, the UNESCO new international information order, and so on. This new strategy changed completely the world correlation of forces and obliged to adopt a new strategy in the core. The Iranian revolution was the maximum expression of this situation that should be "corrected" by the core. The US needed to be more active and aggressive and re-establish her hegemony. This new strategy starts with the Reagan new economic and diplomatic policy that reestablished economic growth and American leadership at the world level. But the cost of this policy was a bigger and bigger fiscal deficit, a tremendous balance of payments deficit and an equally important international debt of US. The real weakness of the dollar was delayed and covered by a policy of high interest rates, that attract capital to the US but could not impede the decline of industrial production (de-industrialization) and of productivity in key sectors. The definitive economic weakness of America was the price for the maintenance of the dollar and of the consumer power of US. This power was based in the fiscal deficit that produced a strong financial decline at the end of the decade. But the fiscal deficit financed mainly the military technology and power (in check today because of its absence of economic sustenance). This unrealistic economic policy was completed with a diplomatic policy that diminished the role of multi-lateral and international institutions to favour the US free action. At the same time an aggressive military strategy of low profile wars created an economic and moral deterioration of revolutionary regimes but created at the same time a clandestine apparatus in the US. This policy had important impacts on the Third World. First of all it accentuate the division between successful industrial exporter countries, old primary product exporters, internal market industrialised and marginalized countries (53). The successful industrial exporters are the countries that were positively affected by the growing of North American market based on the fiscal deficit and the consequent world recovery from 1983 to 1988 (54). Among these countries we need to distinguish the "Asian tigers" that had not important external debts and could use the surplus of balance of payment to reinforce their industrialization (like South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and the Latin American successful industrial exporters like Mexico and Brazil that used their surplus of balance of payments to pay the services of external debt and to other transfers of resources to the developed countries and entered in a process of economic weakness, social deterioration and general impoverishment (55). Some traditional exporters like Argentina had also enormous commercial external surplus that was used to pay for the service of foreign debt and to finance foreign illegal
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investment of Argentineans. As in this period remittance of profits from foreign enterprises was very high, without new investments in the region, the transfers of surplus to the developed countries was much higher than in any other phase of the history of these countries (56). It is evident that the situation of all traditional exporters was even worse with the deterioration of terms of trade as a consequence of lower prices of primary products, at the same time that all international surplus was immediately remitted abroad to pay a fictitious service of a fictitious debt. If we aggregate to this grave situation a strong logic of destruction of old self-sustained economies (mainly agrarian) completely ruined by the diminishing prices of the food products and raw materials of developed countries (because of the subsidies, discussed in the Uruguay Round, and also because of the technological change in the sector), we can have the picture of a marginalization of the world market without local alternative investments or economic activities. Both logics affect negatively the industrialized Third World countries (like India, in part Brazil, and others) that have important internal markets and growing populations and can not specialize their industrial park only to export and to very efficient high technology and world competitive production (like small and very export-oriented countries like Chile, Hong Kong or Singapore can do). These countries can not diminish so drastically their productive apparatus without marginalising larger and larger quantities of people. Even if the industrialization continues, its capacity to generate employment (with its high technologicallyoriented industrialization, only capable to resist in the international market) is very restricted. Even the most successful cases of dependent export-industrialization based on the growing of the international market (the NIEs) will be confronted with the growing masses of marginal population (coming from the declining sectors, mainly the remnants of the self consumption economy, and from the high rates of birth in the poor abandoned populations) concentrated more and more in huge urban centres (Third World megalopolises). Internal marginality, restricted productive apparatus and low opportunities of work for middle class educated people will push these persons to emigrate to developed countries, accentuating world inequality and the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries and north/south contradictions. Several observers of the international scene think that this contradiction will dominate the next years. It is not so clear because the "shared hegemony" will be affected also by strong internal conflicts as we formerly saw. But it will be common to all these developed countries to try to contain Third World claims to share the wealth of developed countries and mainly the aspiration of important Third World Powers to participate in the definition of World policy. The price of successful containment of Third World development will be marginality and an important world demographic disequilibrium that will jeopardize all intent to create a stable world order. Abandoned and marginalized, Third World masses will go more and more to support messianic and fundamentalist religious or ethnic or national movements. Growing democracy in these countries will open the way for these masses to live between aspiration for modern consumption - stimulated by modern means of communication and its concrete marginalization, impoverishment or even misery. A profound spiritual deception will conform these urban no-employed masses (that will have also important segments among the unemployed population of developed countries) and a profound rejection of modernity will be a way to protest against this situation and articulate some kind of action without clear historical objectives. Some sectors of these masses can be utilized also by the increasingly richer systems of contravention: mainly drug, contraband, clandestine sex activities, prostitution, robbery, assaults and other crimesthat are growing in this contradictory world situation. This criminal world is certainly a door of escape and even an improvement of the level of life for the most
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intelligent individuals in this extended marginal and semi-marginal world. The valorization of the "informal economy" is the result of a complete failure of capitalism to prevent these kinds of phenomena. The informal economy is nothing more that an organization of this growing marginality in its different levels and stages. While this marginality is beeing reduced to misery and hunger, there are no grave problems to the core of the system. But when they start to be armed and organized by a rich criminality they will start to be a challenge. And when we see as examples of economic recovery in the Third World the countries that are related to drug, and that open their economic system to the drug economy (like Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Thailand, etc.) we can understand the extension of the organized crime intervention in the economy and politics and in the spiritual dimension of the Third World (57). It is also clear that force and violence will be utilized to change this negative situation. Not only revolutionary movements (that will not disappear) but mainly state action will be used against theses conditions of world marginality. The Iraq fight to maintain an independent international strategy had a parallel in the intent of Argentinan and Chilean military regimes to have their own military strategy. Ayatholah's Iran, or Maghreb reaction against French participation in the Gulf War, or Pakistan intent to produce nuclear bombs, or Brazilian military ideology of "Brazil as a Big Power", or India's aspiration to be a world military power, or China's determination to build a technologically independent power, and so on, are all expressions of discontent with a world order that excludes these nations from the power of decision. The dangerous policies that try to ignore the Third World and that refuse to open institutional space for its participation in the world order will accentuate these kinds of reactions and will not create space for equilibrium and peace.
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3. Is It Necessary and Possible to Manage such a Complex World?

The complexity of the present world, the presence of such important new actors and not only a new international juncture, create the obsolescence of the Post Second World War institutions. These institutions were based on a post-liberal world. After years of world economic crisis, victory of fascism and its expansion at world level, growing of monopoly and state capitalism, particularly during the war, emergency of a centrally planned socialist economy with the victory and expansion of the Soviet army in Europe, and the power of the anti-nazi resistances in several countries, it was very difficult to think in a world directed by the invisible hands of the free market. The Post Second World War institutions were based on the idea of intervention on a world scale and in all aspects of the economy and society. These institutions will be led by the triumphant powers of the Second World War and particularly by the United States, whose economic, military and ideological hegemony was not contested. The cold war was a superdetermination that imposed the exclusion of the Soviet Union and new socialist powers from this new institutional world. Both contexts are completely surpassed. The exclusion of defeated powers in the Second World War from the centres of decision is not possible any-more because Germany, Japan and Italy are today powerful economie, political and diplomatic (and potentially military) powers. The exclusion of the Soviet Union and China, and Korea, and so on... is now completely impossible because of the multiplication of this kind of socio-economic regime and their growing economic, technological, political and military power. For these reasons the world war and cold war institutional framework are obsolete today. The imertial forces that led to their preservation create new circumstantial or transitional institutions, but we need an acceptable and rational institutional framework to manage this new complex world system and relations. At the present moment, with the creation of the "shared hegemony" system, the United States is interested in conserving all this institutional paraphernalia without a clear systemic rationality, because she is the only nation that can participate in almost all world institutions and consequently have a power of global influence. For this reason American diplomacy developed the thesis of the interdependence of the different instances of world diplomatic policy. At the same time that the Post Second World War and the Cold War created their diplomatic institutions, the post colonial situation and its economic, political, ideological and diplomatic consequences created also their own institutional framework and also influenced other institutions, changing their nature (this is essentially the case of the United Nations and UNESCO, but also several other global institutions). If it is true that a large part of these new institutions do not include the the United States, because of her regional nature, it is also true that the United States is in general the main interlocutor or interface of these institutions. It is the interest of the United States to preserve some of these organizations, and to finish with some others (mainly the Non-Aligned Movement because of its large range, its representative character and its ideological autonomy). Consequently, we can distinguish four levels of world or global institutional frameworks: a) b) c) The Post Second World War institutions marked by the will of the winners of the war and by North-American hegemony; The Cold War institutions marked by the opposition between pro-"West" and pro-"East" organizations; The post-colonial institutions with their North-South evolution;
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d)
The post-Post Second World War and post-Cold War institutions that want also to avoid the North-South context (by a magic exclusion of this reality) but that have not yet a complete profile.
A.
The Post Second World War and Cold War Institutions
The main product of Second World War allied victory was the creation of the United Nations (UN). The UN had originally two basic institutions: the General Assembly and the Security Council. The General Assembly was a wide and democratic instance with important but limited powers. This instance was pervasive to the changes of the Post Second World War period. The General Assembly created at her side the socio-economic council and a large number of institutions dedicated to the economic and social development by which post-colonial states, in alliance with Latin American dependent states, infiltrated their influence on the UN system. The importance of the General Assembly had its maximum moment in the Seventies when Arab countries with Non-Aligned Movement and the more or less consistent support of the Soviet Union and East Europe created a solid majority (almost consensual-excluding the US, Israel, South Africa, Chile votes and other reactionary dictatorships and eventually Britain and Japan). This new political internal context of the General Assembly does not express a real correlation of forces because the United States still represents (with the support of Japan and Germany, a very large economic, political and military power that is perfectly capable of opposing what Henry Kessinger called "the dictatorship of majority". In fact, during the 80's, the US isolated more and more the decisions of the General Assembly and punished the socio-economic council development institutions with her boycott of the budget of UN, strongly dependent on the US money. At the same time the US abandoned the global institutions due to the influence of the "dictatorship of the majority" like ILO and UNESCO. Today, the General Assembly of the United Nations is a very empty instance of world policy and diplomacy and the socio-economic council still survive but his institutions have a very diminished profile. The Security Council was a particular arena of the Cold War. The power of veto was the main instrument of the Soviet Union in a completely minoritarium situation until the integration of the Republic Popular of China in 1972 (during 27 years the the US satellite Taiwan represented China in the Security Council!). Popular China was included in a moment of alliance with the US and anti-Soviet ideological and strategic positions but in any way she represented a real world power and not a satellite like Taiwan. China represents also the Third World interests and creates a political problem for a simple repartition of the World by dominant powers. But with the end of the Cold War the Security Council shows its limits. The absence of Germany and Japan gives to this instance an obsolete character. The non-representation of new Third World powers like India, Brazil, Iran and other possible future powers (like a unified Korea, Indochina, Middle East etc.) will make the Security Council more and more irrelevant and object of possible reforms that will not be definitive and conclusive. The other important institutions of the post-war period are the economic instances of World Bank, IMF and GATT. They suffered very important limits: 1) The Cold War character of these institutions led to the exclusion of the Soviet Union (one of the founders of IMF and World Bank) and other socialist countries (except Yugoslavia because of her confrontation with the Soviet Union). The World Bank and IMF are presented as final expressions of liberal economy but they are absolutely the opposite.
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Liberal economy excludes by principle a national and still more an inter-national intervention and planning of the financial and monetary markets. The imposition of a fixed rate of dollar (and pound ...) to gold, conflicted with liberal principles and was the start of a managed and planned world economy. The intervention of the IMF to guarantee international liquidity and to assure economic equilibrium on a world scale is not a liberal policy (even when they propose and impose "liberal" or "free trade" measures in Third World countries). So it is absurd to think of these organizations as necessarily excluding socialist countries. This exclusion was part of cold war policy and not of economic doctrinary reasons. This situation needs to be corrected and is being corrected, with some resistance from the US, to permit the effectiveness of these institutions in the post Cold War period. Another limit of these economic institutions is the hegemony of the US over them. The majority of votes that the US still has in IMF and World Bank operates against facts: the German and Japanese participation should be altered. As a consequence of the integration of the Soviet Union in these institutions all this participation will be re-discussed. Since 1971, the US had abandoned unilaterally the official gold convertibility of the dollar and we have not anymore a unique world currency. In reality, we have now a competition of a still dominant dollar with an ascendent mark and yen currencies (the pound has still some weight but it is completely regionalised, and, against all anti-Soviet phantasies, I can affirm that a convertible rouble will be also an important regional currency). So, we will see during the next two or three decades a fight at the interior of these institutions to reform their economic doctrines and policies, to extend their influence and to make of them real global institutions, and to reverse their internal correlation of forces. The GATT represents another context. Pretending to be the arena of liberal trade, it is in fact a framework of negotiated market relations (some kind of practically recognised state and oligopolic markets). The needs of an organization like the GATT is the most complete demonstration that the free market is a completely obsolete idea. World trade is based more and more on intra-firms trade and interstate bi-lateral or multi-lateral agreements (with "quotas" on other "liberal" mechanisms of oligopolic commerce and partition or official cartelization of markets) (58). The GATT is becoming more and more an absolutely necessary multi-lateral mechanism to adjust and rationalize this enormous oligopolic and stated trade. It means: to plan world market relations, to build free market at an international level! It means: absolutely the contrary to what official ideology maintains! The new period of a Kondratiev's cycle (that should start in the second half of the 90's) will give origin to a long period of economic up-swing and will need some kind of stable financial and monetary equilibrium that will permit a stability of national currencies with some system of world currency reference, world regulation of economic life (labour relations, capital and markets), economic aid and economic cooperation as a mechanism of "correction" or "compensation" of sectorial, regional, local and world growing desequilibrium. As the free market does not exist anymore these mechanisms need to be more and more based on negotiation and consensus and explicit human-planned subjective intervention, even at the cost of new bureaucracies and institutions and of the imposition of the powerfuls over the weaks, and of the monopolic powers over non-monopolic ones. These economic regulations need to be completed evidently by a juridical framework. The Hague Court was not an important instance during the post war period (59). Regulations established by the United Nations to a large number of sectorial and regional activities are being respected only in part. Regional integration instances are being more effective in deregulation at the national level and create new regulations at regional level, essentially at European level. It is very possible that we will have a strong tension in the next decades between regulative mechanism and instruments to apply it.
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In this sense, the problem of exercise and monopoly of violence that is a natural corollary of soveranity, law and justice will be strongly debated and will be an arena of violent tensions. The post war and the pos cold war military alliances system are completely obsolete. It was built under the conception of containment of the Soviet Union expansion and the installation of North American military bases all over the world. The bases were financed in part by local economies, and particularly North American defense of Europe and South Asia excluded Germany and Japan as military powers. The evolution that we described demolished all these assumptions: first, the Soviet Union augmented intensively her power: from a local East European power without atomic weapons and without technology, after the Second World War, she was transformed into an advanced nuclear power with influence and military presence in all Europe (menace of European Finlandization), in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in Indian peninsula and ocean, in West and East Africa, in the Caribbean area (!), in the North Atlantic and in the Pacific. Her space technology could even give to her a military supremacy in space and her long distance weaponry permitted her to reach the North American territory and gave origin to the situation of common annihilation, or mutually-assured destruction (MAD), and consequently led to deterrence, disarmament and end of nuclear competition capable to annihilated the world. The cold war policy that presented the US as responsible for European and Asian defense was always a critical problem. De Gaulle was the first to disclose the European opposition to this situation and Germany's disconfort with her military constrainment was always a NON explicit reality. In the measure that the US lost their economic power to finance their world military occupation and Europe recuperated her economic power it was clear that NATO's policy will be finished and De Gaulle's conception of a unified Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals will prevail. This could be accepted as a geopolitical determination. The ambition of a unified Europe started with Napoleonic plans and was stopped by the flourishing Great Britain and the feudal Russia, and it continuos with World War I and II, with the Nazi reactionary intent to repeat by arms this European unification on an anti-communist and anti-liberal basis. They were stopped by decadent Britain, ascendant the USA and revolutionary Russia. Now who will stop this historical tendency to European unification? Mature socialist Russia is in favour of the European House and Great Britain is a completely decadent power opposing it. The United States has not anymore the hegemonic power to oppose it but only to impose their participation on it. In this sense the European Security Council will consolidate this new strategic realities with the survival of NATO as a decadent Alliance. So, a new military global strategy under American leadership will need to integrate Soviet global power with a moderate profile, Germany and Japan still restricted but sufficiently important regional military powers, and the other regional but strategic centres of military power such as Britain, France, China, India and the Middle East. The aspiration of North-American techno-scientific-bureaucratic-business alliance to be a world unique military power is a completely insane dream (or nightmare!). Very powerfull internal and international forces wich will impede this pretension appeared during the Gulf War of 1990-91.This was not the beginning of a new era but the final strain of an old era. The only consensus that will survive from the Gulf War is the containment of new military powers in the Third World, which Iraq's Army and Hussein's strategy represented (60). The strategy of non-proliferation of nuclear and scientific and technological military power can unify the "establishment" of the new "shared hegemony" and certainly it will be a source of conflict between North and South in the next decades (61).
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B.
The Post colonial institutions and the new phase of the conflict NorthSouth
Even if the United States had a very important role in the process of decolonization, supporting very actively the more moderate movements of Africa and Asia, and also supporting Latin American new reformists and liberal movements like Christian Democracy in Chile, Democratic Action in Venezuela, and many others similar, the institutional framework that emerged from this process excluded naturally all imperialist powers. But the US could not be presented as a non-imperialist power because she assumed largely the heritage of imperialist powers on the world scale. That was the main reason for her exclusion. We can divide this institutional framework into three levels: The state economic and political and diplomatic level where we find the Non-Aligned Movement as the largest expression of Third World interests, even if Latin American countries had a very limited participation in it. The Non-Aligned Movement vacillated between a more moderate policy inspired by Yugoslavian point of view and a more radical and pro-socialist version inspired by Cuban conception. It is true that a socialist Non-Aligned corresponded to a certain tendency of the seventies in consequence of the emergence of pro-socialist regimes in Africa, but it was not representative of the overall movement where liberals had an active presence and even reactionary regimes had their places. This radicalization was in part responsible for a certain marginalization of the Non-Aligned Movement by the imperialist powers, world media and so on. The Soviet Union's international changes and East Europe's political reorientation affected very negatively this movement. But it is also true that the coherence of the Movement was also affected by the differentiation of interests among Asian NIEs and debtor countries, oil producers and non-oil producers, regional interests, internal and regional divisions,insentivate by low intensity wars, division about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, fights among several participant countries, different political orientation, and several other issues that only could be solved in the context of a very open and broad ideological and strategic orientation. The fact that the Non-Aligned Movement is less active at the present moment does not mean that it is finished. There are sufficient common problems to revitalize the movement in the next decades.
UNCTAD is the most sophisticated expression of economics issues common to Third World countries. As part of the United Nations this organization is the privileged forum for negotiations between North and South. UNCTAD is activated by the group of 77 that really congregates 114 countries from the Third World. But in the last years UNCTAD was affected also by the marginalization of Third World requirements on a world scale. As we saw, the marginalization of the General Assembly of UN was one of the reasons for this new juncture. The fortification of institutions where the Third World has not representation, like the Group of Seven, the European Community and others had the same role. But the internal differentiation of interests among the Third World countries was a very important factor to the weakness of the organization. It is also very important to consider the effect of the shift of international economics from trade problems (appropriated almost completely by the Uruguay Round in the interior of the GATT) to the growing role of services in the international economy (particularly with the acceleration of financial internationalization in the 80s) which obliged the UNCTAD to re-orient its strategy (62). This process was still not completely absorbed by the national diplomatic strategies. It is evident that the present changes in the world economy will obligeus to change the agenda of UNCTAD and Third World objectives and strategies.
Among these new tendencies the most important is the strength of regional organizations. This is a consequence of the global tendency to reinforce regional integration as the principal strategy of globalization of world economy. he limits of national markets as a base for the new scales of production led to regional integration as the most immediate amplification of the primaries markets for new products or the restructuring of old ones. This
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tendency - that formally starts in Europe - was also advanced (on an informal basis) in the relations between Japan and Asian dragons, and in US-Canada and US-Mexico integrations that complete this movement in the core of the system. In Asia, ASIAN countries try to follow these tendencies (63). In Latin America regional integration was revived with regional and subregional initiatives, completed by political coordination that finished with realization of the first meeting of Latin American presidents in Mexico inat August 1991, and the creation of the Ibero-America permanent Conference that will meet each year (64). In Africa the Maghreb countries are intending to integrate and we can expect other regional initiatives, particularly around a democratic South Africa that will change very much the perspectives of the subsaharan region (65). At the time that African countries try to aggregate an economic dimension to their diplomatic and political coordination, Latin America will try to aggregate a political dimension to her former initiatives on economic integration. The most important of in all these facts is the neutrality of the US to these initiatives that historically were radically opposed by their diplomacy and weapons (66). All these initiatives create regional networks that will be difficult to destroy and that will be part of a future global network that will reinforce the Third World theoretical, doctrinaire and practical objectives.
C.
The Institutions of the Immediate Future
This process of changes determines the need of new institutions and the reorganization of new ones. The Group of Seven was a product of the trilateral response to the confrontations between north and south and capitalist and socialist countries. It was created to unify the common interests of North America, Europe and Japan and permitted to these countries to formulate common policies and politics for all the developed countries. The Reagan administration diminished the role of the Group of Seven and transformed it in a meeting between a hegemonic the US and "the others". Bush was obliged to re-establish the importance of this instance of coordination because this is the only international organization where Germany and Japan occupy a role correspondent to their power. But the Group of Seven does not include the Soviet Union, which is a definite limit to her new role of coordinating the hegemonic forces that will share the hegemony of the world over the next decades. This situation will certainly be corrected in the next meetings.
OECD is the technical coordination of industrial countries and has an important role in the coordination of economic and social policies. But there is a great hole in it: the nonparticipation of the NIEs, the medium industrial countries, East Europe and the Soviet Union. It will certainly be necessary to integrate - at this more technical level - these industrial powers, to transform OECD in to a more effective expression of the new world correlation of forces.
The appearance of the European Bank of Development to rebuild East Europe economics in a more favourable international framework and to integrate their economies in Europe and the world is the beginning of a new re-evaluation of the regional instruments of development and integration like the IDB in America. The idea to create a similar instrument for the Middle East appeared at the end of the Gulf War and will certainly be possible as an instrument of canalization of the surplus created by the oil industry. We can never forget the criminal way in which the Western financial establishment dissipated the large amount of petrodollars, in the very depressive moment of the Kondratiev's cycle. We cannot expect a similar behaviour in a phase of expansion that we will have after 1994. In these periods of
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upsurge the productive capital is more active and tends to take the leadership of the system. That is why the resistance of private financial system against regional banks may not succeed. In this context Interamerican Bank and Asian Bank will be revitalized. The European Security Council - even if it was created in the seventies - is a model of the new security conceptions of the Post Cold War and the Post Second World War period. This concept of security points to the idea of the European Home, centre of a large euro-Asian territorial mass that will integrate the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. At the side of this big territorial integration we have the Pacific Ocean Basin as another strong integrative force. These two big centres of integration will diminish seriously the role of North Atlantic coordination in world security, and will permit the natural integration of some regions that were blockaded by the North Atlantic hegemony. Mediterranean countries will re-discover their common interest. The Persian Gulf will be incorporated into its original regional space at the side of the Middle East, in the West, with its circulations to the North through the Soviet Union and to the East through the Indian Ocean. And the South Atlantic region will finally be filled by integrating Brazil and Africa, particularly South Africa, in a common historic destiny that will bring together also Latin America and Africa and the Indian Ocean. Slovak and Balkanic unity will also reappear and Turkish old Ottoman empire can be re-built. Great South Asian and Pacific unity can re-appear. At the side of this big regional integration we have new geo-economic spaces with strong and energetic growth like the North Europe, the SiberianKorea, the Chinese industrial ring, the Mediterranean complex, etc. All that means a completed revision of the World geopolitical chart. This process will not be immediate but will operate during the next twenty years. If we add to that our analysis about the internal contradictions of the "shared hegemony" and the growing complexity of world equilibrium of forces it is easy to see that at the end of this period humanity will be obliged to create some kind of global mechanism of government. The United Nations can be perhaps the centre of this mechanism but it will need to be profoundly reformulated to accomplish this new role. The Security Council will need to be enlarged with the participation of Germany and Japan in a permanent base and a presence of non permanent member countries must be based on a well-distributed participation regional powers. The General Assembly needs to recuperate her power and prestige, even if her role can be more legislative and instrumental, to create basic principles. The UN will need also more resources and military power and to be respected as a mediator of conflicts. It is evident also that the Hague Court of Justice will need to be more integrated in the diplomatic and world policy context. Wars and acts of force should be sanctioned by her presence. At the end, but not less important, we need to straighten the role of non-governmental organizations in the definition of world politics. It is true that the force of media had controlled public opinion and blockaded the role of civil society during the Gulf conflict and other world crises. But this is a basic reason why society needs to straighten her capacity to intervene in the orientation of world politics. Peace movements, environmentalist movements, anticriminalist, anti-racist, civil rights, human rights, women's liberation, and several other social movements create a new world sensibility to these questions that is affecting more and more the formulation and application of policies. Coordination among political parties (divided today in four international groups: socialist, social-democratic, liberal and conservative - it is important to see that the Communist International self-disbanded in the sixties - anticipating the self-disbanding of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 - and that "green" parties have not yet an international) is an important factor in the creation of a mediation between social movements and political power on a world scale, as they were and still are mediators of classic trade-unions, professional, young and peasant international organizations. These classical organizations have developed strong bureaucracies and were in part appropriated by ideological and doctrinaire tendencies that diminished their representativeness. But this is a
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natural tendency of all organization and they need to be permanently disrupted and pressed by their bases. But this only occurs in exceptional circumstances when important issues are in question. There is no political guarantee of correct representation of social forces at any institution. This is a historically permanent arena of conflict. But it is true that more and more people find instruments of organization to guarantee their historical conquests.
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The Future of Geopolitical Aligments

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The shared hegemony of the United States

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Soviet Union: a dead dog?

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COMECON and proletarian internationalism were a very unfavourable political context to

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The Third World Still Exists?

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3. Is It Necessary and Possible to Manage such a Complex World?

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The Post Second World War and Cold War Institutions

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The Institutions of the Immediate Future

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