Whoever expects an orderly world under the heading world order is mistaken. In today’s order “hot spots” accumulate. War and the threat of war, deterrence, externally provoked civil wars, failed states and chaos -- all this is the normal condition. The largest and most important states of the globe are actively engaged in every massacre. For years the USA has waged a large-scale war for the reorganization of the Middle East with the aim of destroying, firstly, Islamist enemies and Arab nationalism, and, secondly, enforcing thereby the allegiance of the rest of the state world to American leadership. The EU powers, Russia and China present temporizing resistance or make diplomacy. But not in order to help the Americans and bend to their leadership, but so as to not surrender the field of military reorganization of the globe to them alone and allow them to gain even more stature as a menacing power monster, and to force the USA to give consideration to their national claims. In the competitive struggle over the relations of domination between states, the political sovereigns command and commit not only their own citizens, but also struggle to make the political rule of other societies pliant and servable to themselves. That much is fact. But the question remains: why don’t communities today leave each other in peace? Why doesn’t international commerce take place without a fight for dictation and allegiance between state powers? Here is a brief answer.
The state on its territory establishes capitalism, protects it and makes it flourish, and opens the way for its domestic companies to go abroad by obtaining permission from other state powers and the agreed upon conditions so that its businessmen enjoy the same protections of their property in foreign sovereign realms that they do in their homeland: to buy, sell, invest and exploit people. From the beginning, the opening of other states -- unilaterally or mutually, as well as the setting of terms for international transactions between sovereign states -- is a matter of violence.
If the state expands the playing field for its capitalists – by now to the whole world -- if it serves private business interests, it is nevertheless not their selfless servant, it is not driven and compelled, not even under today’s conditions of “globalization”; rather, the expansion of business opportunities to foreign countries aims to accelerate the growth of capital on the national territory so as to transport the foremost lifeblood of the capitalist nation and the material basis of state power.
The bourgeois state makes foreign sources of wealth its own; however, this use and appropriation also exposes it to the process of capitalistic private competition. It is not a neutral guardian of the international course of business according to the Olympic motto: “The most important thing is not to win but to take part,” but an interested party. It takes part in international business transactions only if it enriches itself off the partner country and does not let itself be used as the source of wealth of other nations to its detriment. Therefore, it is in a constant struggle with “partner nations” to correct trade and investment conditions, with the aim that these conditions will be agreed upon so that they guarantee its use of the partner state’s economy, but exclude adverse effects to its own. The “arguments” in this struggle are: a) what a state has to offer to the other by granting access to its market. It can b) thus also deprive its market from the other and cause it damage as a result. The decisive argument in this diplomatic dispute always remains, however, c) political-military power itself.
Therefore, apart from their economic competition -- and as a basis for it -- the capitalist states stand in a never-ending competition for superior violence; their ideal, which is directly aimed at by the USA, is a monopoly on violence over the world of state powers. Every sovereign requires of the others with whom it is in commerce that it recognize itself as the power that it is, and on that basis to respect its demands as its good rights. This violent competition is divorced from the various economic treaties, from economic upswings and crises. It is absolutely not an effect of any non-functioning, be it internal accumulation or external use relationships. Rather, it is the basis for all economic and diplomatic commerce between states. There is peace if the two sides are content with the existing relations of domination and subordination between them. War “breaks out” when one side (or both) comes to the conclusion that its rights are essentially ignored by the other.
In their competition as deterring and threatening powers, states think strategically, i.e. they anticipate war between themselves, they maintain and arm enormous armies in times of peace; they refuse to tolerate the efforts of potential enemies to amass armaments. They organize the world into major fronts that threaten their enemy, and struggle in alliances for the classification and subordination of the partners under their leadership. For the military strengthen of their nation and the weakening of rival states, all domestic and global sources of the wealth of the nation are at their service (economic war, sanctions, armament costs and costs of war) and if necessary national capitalism is sacrificed to the self-assertion of the military apparatus -– in the event of war, including the destruction of their own own country.
The former relationship of the United States to its European NATO brothers in arms and the current struggle for European parity, and the degradation of the former allies to assistant troops in the anti-terror war (“coalition of the willing”) only underscores these fundamental observations.