Quotes from Beyond US Hegemony? by Samir Amin

- ‘The title for the French edition of this book, Pour un monde multipolaire, should already be indicative of the author’s political position. Yes, I do want to see the construction of a multipolar world, and that obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet. In my eyes it is an overweening project, criminal by its very nature, which is drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance, not only in the countries of the South but also, to a seemingly lesser degree, in those of the North. In this connection, I wrote as long ago as 1991 of the emergence of an ‘empire of chaos.’ ’ (1)

- ‘My idea of the multipolarity that is necessary today entails a radical revision of ‘North-south relations,’ in all their dimensions. This revision must create a framework that makes it possible to reduce the power of forces within the system (the capitalist system, to call it by its name) that operate in such a way as to exacerbate the polarization of wealth and power.’ (2)

- ‘From the Industrial Revolution (early nineteenth century) to the decades following the Second World War, the monopoly in question was an industrial monopoly; core and periphery were then synonymous with industrialized and non-industrialized countries. We can understand why national liberation movements in the periphery made industrialization their priority, within a wider perspective of ‘catching up.’ Their success forced imperialism to adapt to this demand. This does not mean that they actually took the road of ‘catching up,’ nor that we entered a ‘post-imperialist’ period of history. For the core countries then reorganized around new monopolies, which gave them control over technologies and access to the world’s natural resources, over international financial flows, communications and the production of weapons of mass destruction. These monopolies cannot fail to reproduce and deepen polarization on a world scale.’ (3-4)

- ‘The analyses in this work are ‘geopolitical,’ but I should stress that they are in no way inspired by the methods of conventional geopolitics. That discipline, which originated in the nationalist ruling-class thought of the imperialist countries, treats nation-states as homogenous invariables, with ‘interests’ dictated by their geopolitical location and economic ambitions usually identified with those of the dominant sections of capital. These are the limitations of otherwise excellent works of mainstream geopolitics, such as Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.’ (5-6)

- ‘The phase of the global deployment of capitalism, which began in 1945 but was impeded until the collapse of the post-war social orders (welfare state, Sovietism, national populism in the South), is characterized by the emergence of a collective imperialism. The ‘triad’ (that is, the United States plus its Canadian external province, Europe west of the Polish frontier, and Japan – to which we should add Australia and New Zealand) defines the area of this collective imperialism. It ‘manages’ the economic dimension of capitalist globalization through the institutions at its service (WTO, IMF, World Bank, OECD), and the political-military dimension through NATO, whose responsibilities have been redefined so that it can in effect substitute itself for the United Nations.’ (8)

- ‘The project that the US ruling class has cherished since 1945 now has five objectives: (i) to neutralize and subjugate the other triad partners (Europe and Japan) and to minimize their capacity to act outside the American fold; (ii) to establish military control over NATO and to ‘Latin Americanize’ the former parts of the Soviet world; (iii) to assert undivided control over the Middle East and its oil resources; (iv) to break up China, to ensure the subordination of the other major states (India, Brazil), and to prevent the constitution of any regional blocs that might renegotiate the terms of globalization; and (v) to marginalize regions in the South that are of no strategic interest…The main instrument in the current US drive for hegemony is therefore military.’ (9-10)
- ‘The ruling class of the United States freely proclaims that it will not ‘tolerate’ the reconstitution of any economic or military power capable of challenging its global domination. To this end, it has given itself the right to wage ‘preventive wars,’ with three main potential adversaries in mind. First, the dismemberment of the Russian Federation, following that of the USSR, is a major strategic objective for the United States. Until now the Russian ruling class does not appear to have understood this. It seemed convinced that, having lost the war, it could go on to win the peace – as Germany and Japan did before it. What it forgot was that Washington needed the recovery of its two wartime enemies, precisely in order to face down the Soviet challenge. The new conjuncture is different, as the United States no longer has a serious rival. Its option is therefore to destroy its defeated Russian adversary once and for all. Has Putin finally understood this? Is Russia beginning to shake off its illusions? Second, the huge size and economic success of China are such that the United States is seriously worried, and here too has a strategic goal of dismembering the country. Europe comes third in the list, as seen by the new lords of the earth. Up to now, however, the North American establishment does not appear to be so uneasy about its relations with Europe.’ (10-11)

- ‘The prevailing opinion is that US military power is only the tip of the iceberg, prolonging its economic as well as political and cultural superiority. In my view, however, the United States has no decisive economic advantages within the system of collective imperialism.’ (11)

- ‘…the fact that the US trade deficit keeps growing year after year, having soared from $100 billion in 1989 to $500 billion in 2002, and that this deficit involves practically every segment of the productive system. The competition between Ariane and NASA space rockets, or between Airbus and Boeing, testifies to the vulnerability of the American advantage. Indeed, without extra-economic means that violate the ‘liberal’ principles imposed on its rivals, the United States would probably not be able to compete with Europe or Japan in high technology, with China, Korea and other industrial countries of Asia and Latin America in ordinary manufactured products, or with Europe and the Southern Cone of Latin America in agriculture.’ (12)

- ‘The US economy lives as a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no national savings of its own. The world produces while North America consumes. The advantage of the United States is that of a predator whose deficit is covered by what others agree, or are forced, to contribute. Washington uses various means to make up for its deficiencies: for example, repeated violations of the principles of liberalism, arms exports, and the hunting down of oil super-profits (which involves the periodic felling of producers: one of the real motives behind the wars in Central Asia and Iraq). But the fact is that the bulk of the American deficit is covered by capital inputs from Europe and Japan, China and the South, rich oil-producing countries and comprador classes from all regions, including the poorest, in the Third World – to which should be added the debt-service levy that is imposed on nearly every country in the periphery of the global system. The American superpower depends from day to day on the flow of capital that sustains the parasitism of its economy and society.’ (12)
- ‘The hegemonist strategy of the United States, which operates within the framework of the new collective imperialism, seeks nothing less than to establish Washington’s military control over the entire planet…Military control of the planet is the means to impose, as a last resort, the draining of ‘tribute’ through political violence – as a substitute for the ‘spontaneous’ flow of capital that offsets the American deficit, the Achilles heel of US hegemony.’ (12)

- ‘I would make the first priority the construction of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow political and strategic alliance, extended if possible to Beijing and Delhi. It would be political because its aim would be to revive international pluralism and all the functions of the UN; and it would be strategic because it would seek to rebuild military strength at a level required by the challenge of the United States. These three or four powers have the technological and financial means to go through with it, and even the United States pales besides their traditional capacities in the military arena. The American challenge, and Washington’s criminal designs, make such a course necessary.’ (17)

- ‘The other formative elements of American political culture – slavery and its racist legacy, the Indian genocide and the contempt for other peoples that it expressed – are equally specific and have no parallel in Europe. Whether based on slavery or not, Europe’s colonies (though often associated with massacres) remained outside its own continent.’ (19)
- ‘The vanished terms: state, politics, power, classes, class struggle, social change, alternatives and revolutions, ideologies. Their insipid replacements: governance, communities, social partners, poverty, consensus, alternation.’ (22)

- ‘Japan in the forefront of research and development, Japan the great saver buying up American industry! Such ideas never made much impression on me, as they seemed to disregard the structural weaknesses of the Empire of the Rising Sun. First there is Japan’s geographical position, which makes it a prisoner of the United States. This was true in relation to the USSR, a major military power and potential enemy that has now disappeared. And it is true in relation to China, which – like Korea even – will never agree for a moment to follow in Tokyo’s wake. Next, the success of Japan’s industrial development and export drive, so impressive at the time in comparison with Europe and the United States, did not in any way guarantee that it would move into a hegemonic position.’ (23)

- ‘Investment of Japan’s external trade surplus in the United States always struck me as a sign of weakness rather than strength, for it was the result of economic policies imposed by Washington, in order to force a subaltern ally of finance, and offset, the inadequacies of its ‘rival’ and master. In just the same way, the EU’s surplus today is the result of deflationary policies within the EU that serve to enhance North American interests, allowing Washington to pursue an expansionist policy without sufficient means of its own to fund it. Japanese and European surpluses, American deficits: these are two sides of a coin that spells leadership for the United States and dependent adjustment for its partners.’ (23)
- ‘In the foreseeable future, then, it is hard to imagine that Japan will play an active role in reconstructing the global system. Most probably, it will be carried along by Washington’s militarist project – unless the popular classes enter the arena and, through the intensification of their struggles, begin to develop a challenge to the system.’ (24)
- ‘[The vision of burgeoning Chinese hegemony] seems inadequate in a number of ways. First of all, it does not take account of the policies that Washington intends to deploy against the Chinese project; nor does it see that, since Europe is still unable to imagine a break with the Atlanticism that keeps it in America’s wake, and since Japan, for similar or special reasons, remains deferential to its protector across the Pacific, the days of collective triad imperialism are still far from numbered. Second, it is deceptive to measure success purely in terms of economic growth rates, especially as it is doubtful whether they can be projected more than a few years into the future.’ (26)

- ‘The first wave of capitalist transformations, in the Italian cities of the Renaissance, well and truly ended in failure, but the second wave, located in the north-west Atlantic quarter of Europe, resulted in the historical capitalism whose essential forms have remained the same down the present day.’ (29)

- ‘The Chinese ruling class has chosen the capitalist road, if not already with Deng, then at least since his disappearance from the scene. But it does admit that this is what it has done, because it draws all its legitimacy from a revolution that it cannot repudiate without committing suicide.’ (30)

- ‘We can leave it to crude American ideologues to place an equals sign between market and democracy. The reality is that, under certain condition, capitalism functions in parallel with a given democratic form so long as it can control its uses and prevent the (anti-capitalist) ‘deviations’ that democracy inevitably involves. But, when it is incapable of doing this, capitalism simply dispenses with democracy and is none the worse for it.’ (32)

- ‘A collective triad (USA, Europe, Japan) has taken over from the imperialism of earlier history.’ (33)

- ‘I conclude that capitalism has entered its phase of senile decline, as the logic governing the system is no longer capable of ensuring the mere survival of a half of humanity. Capitalism is becoming barbarism and directly leading to genocide.’ (38)

- ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt that the reason for China’s success is its radical peasant revolution and the equal access to the land that it guaranteed.’ (42)

- ‘From 1840 to 1949 China was the victim of constant imperialist aggression by the Western powers and Japan, as were all the nations of Asia and Africa. The aggressors knew how to forge alliances with reactionary ruling classes in China – ‘feudal classes,’ ‘compradors’ (a word first coined by the Chinese Communists) and warlords. The liberation war led by the Communist Party gave China back its dignity and rebuilt its unity, the Taiwan issue now being the only one still unresolved. All Chinese people know this.’ (43-44)

- ‘A military and political superpower…Through the success rather than the failure of its construction, the USSR succeeded in working its way up to the rank of military superpower. It was the Soviet army that defeated the Nazis, and then, after the war, succeeded in record time in ending the United States’ nuclear and conventional weapons monopoly. These successes are at the origin of its political presence on the post-war world scene.’ (54)

- ‘ ‘Open’ Russia is not only an ‘exporter of raw materials’ (oil first and foremost), it is liable to become no more than that. Its industrial and agricultural production systems no longer benefit from the attention of the authorities and are of interest to neither the national private sector nor foreign capital. There has been no investment worthy of the name to make their progress possible and they only survive at the expense of the continued deterioration of their infrastructure. The capacity for technological renewal and the high-quality education that underpinned it in the Soviet system is being systematically destroyed.’ (56)

- ‘Imperialism benefits from and supports the country’s decline to the rank of minor periphery. Essentially, so far as Russia and other former USSR republics are concerned, the United States plans to reduce them to the rank of minor deindustrialized and therefore powerless peripheries: in other words, to ‘Latin-Americanize’ the former Soviet East (the former USSR and Eastern Europe). The methods are designed in varying proportions depending on the case, ranging from total destruction for countries with a revolutionary past (Russia and Yugoslavia) to a milder form of subordination in ‘conservative’ Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, etc.).’ (56)

- ‘The capitalist forms of the new Russia exclude all democratic progress. Autocracy is no longer a ‘vestige of the past’ here but a necessary form of existence of the comprador oligarchy’s power. The new constitution of 1993 established, to serve it, a presidential regime that reduces the powers of the Duma (elected parliament) to nothing. As we know, western governments pretend to ignore it, saving their reproaches for the democratic deficit in the only regimes that resist liberalism while they approve the dictatorship of those that serve it.’ (57-58)

- ‘It is known that the terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere, which have not been proved to be the work of Chechens, have fulfilled similar functions to 11 September, exploited as we know by the Bus administration.’ (60)

- ‘Russia could derail the US plan aimed at reducing its economy to the status of a minor subordinated periphery. It could do so by playing an active role in the revival of a ‘southern front,’ in the first place by drawing closer to China. But Russia did not choose this way; rather the opposite. Russian calculations are based on the illusion that only the country’s alliance with the USA can protect it from eventual Chinese expansionist ambitions in Siberia and central Asia. By doing so, Russia strengthens the chances of the US strategy aimed at isolating its major potential competitor – China. I do not believe that Russia will be rewarded for this ‘service,’ which, on the contrary, will accelerate its decline.’ (61-62)

- ‘The fact remains that all these balances (or imbalances) which benefit the United States remain fragile and the certain failure of its intervention in Iraq will sooner or later end up calling them into question.’ (62)

- ‘The fact remains that the ideological discourse of the new Russian regime has not real hold over its people. Evidence for this can be seen in its increasing need to resort to elections that are openly falsified on a large scale. In other words, we are dealing with a power devoid of legitimacy and credibility.’ (63)

- ‘Either American plans will be derailed (and that has become a prerequisite for the construction of an alternative on all levels, from the national to the global), or they will (for a time) continue to undermine the potential for democratization and social progress in all countries.’ (66)

- ‘Europe’s responsibility is no less important. Europe must stretch out its hand to Russia. It must relinquish its self-image as a partner of the collective imperialism of the triad that is aligned with the plans of US hegemony.’ (66)

- ‘When Walesa [Polish Solidarity leader] came into office he did not donate the factories to the workers; he sold them gratis to Western capital!’ (67)

- ‘The geometry of possible alliances between the United States, Europe and Russia will weigh heavily on the determination of future globalization. Two configurations are possible here: the first governed by a privileged Euro-Russian partnership, the second by the consolidation of a ‘Russian-American alliance’ based on Russia’s choice to become a major exporters of oil to the United States.’ (67)

- ‘It is clear that we are dealing with a completely asymmetrical partnership, which is nothing other than the implementation of Washington’s plan to which is nothing other than the implementation of Washington’s plan to destroy Russia…This configuration cannot therefore constitute an element of the construction of an alternative globalization.’ (67)

- ‘British colonization essentially transformed India into a dependent agricultural capitalist country. To this end, the British systematically established forms of private ownership of agricultural land that excluded the majority of the peasantry from access to it. This reorganization gave rise to the development of large dominant estates in the north of the country but was less disadvantageous to the medium-sized properties of the comparatively comfortably off peasantry of the south. The majority of the peasants found themselves transformed into a poor, practically landless, peasantry. The price paid for taking this ‘capitalist approach’ to agricultural development is the incredibly poverty-stricken conditions in which the vast majority of Indian people live.’ (69-70)

- ‘The widely accepted way of organizing land management is not through private ownership, as modern minds deformed by Eurocentrism automatically believe, but ownership emanating from a political community.’ (70)

- ‘The British promoted those responsible for this political management, with varying degrees of authority, to the rank of ‘private owners.’ ’ (70)

- ‘In India, the hindrance to progress constituted by this colonial inheritance is aggravated by the persistence of the caste system. People of this lowest caste (today known as Dalits) and the tribal populations given the same status account for a quarter of the population of India (around 250 million people). Devoid of all rights, access to land in particular, they are a mass of ‘quasi-slaves’ and are the collective property of the ‘others.’ ’ (71)
- ‘China has had the advantage of the legacy of its radical revolution, whereas India is handicapped by the unchallenged legacy of colonization. This is why economic growth in China, supported by investment systems that are more favorable to the development of the whole production system, continues to exceed that of India and is accompanied by a pattern of redistribution of income more favorable (or less unfavorable) to the popular classes.’ (75)

- ‘Where India is concerned, the creation of such an alternative necessarily means that appropriate, progressive responses must be found to meet the four main challenges. 1. To find a radical solution to the Indian peasant problem based on the recognition of the right of all peasants to access to land in the most egalitarian conditions possible. This, in turn, means the abolition of the case system and the ideology that legitimizes it…2. To create a united workers’ front that integrates segments of the relatively stabilized working classes and those that are not…3. To maintain the unity of the Indian subcontinent, and to renew the forms of association of the various peoples that make up the Indian nation on strengthened democratic foundations…4. To focus international political options on the central issue of reconstructing a ‘front of the peoples of the South.’ ’ (81)

- ‘The political and social forces that prevent India from moving in the above-mentioned directions are considerable. They constitute a ‘hegemonic bloc’ that accounts for a fifth of the population – behind the great industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie and the big landowners, the great mass of well-off peasants and middle classes, the high bureaucracy and technocracy. These 200 million Indians are the exclusive beneficiaries of the national plan implemented so far.’ (81)

- ‘South Africa is not easy to place in any of the usual categories: it is a kind of microcosm of the world capitalist system, which brings together in a single territory a number of features peculiar to each constituent category of that system. It has a white population which, in its lifestyle and standard of living, belongs to the ‘first world,’ while the urban areas reserved for blacks and coloreds belong to the modern industrial ‘third world,’ and the Bantustans (now ex-Bantustans!) containing the ‘tribal’ peasantry do not differ from peasant communities in Africa’s ‘fourth world.’ ’ (95)
- ‘The British, not the Boers, invented apartheid at the end of the nineteenth century. To be more precise, they created a number of overpopulated ‘native reservations’ within the Union, and two others as the protectorates of Basutoland and Swaziland, which lacked the capacity to support their population in the absence of any investment to step up food production. The deliberate result was that workers living in these reservations were forced to supply the manpower needed for the mines.’ (95)

- ‘A first group comprises industrial countries that have managed to become competitive, or at least could become competitive through relatively minor adjustments: the countries of Asia, communist or capitalist, and some of the major Latin American countries, especially Brazil. A second group, including South Africa, Egypt and Algeria, consists of industrial countries that have not become competitive, and that, in order to achieve this, would have radically to restructure their productive system and income distribution. A third group still remains at a pre-industrial stage, where economic growth, if any, is based on exports of primary products.’ (96)

- ‘The Gulf oil region, separated from the rest of the Arab world and placed under US military tutelage, has lost all margin for autonomous political or financial action.’ (101)

- ‘The [region], for its part, is the object of an ongoing US-Israeli ‘Middle East project’ to create a totally integrated economy with three partners: Israel, the Occupied Territories (planned to be a kind of non-sovereign Bantustan) and Jordan, to which Lebanon, Syria and Egypt can be added later on. The idea, then, is to create an area for Israeli economic expansion, protecting Israeli exports from the competition of countries much more competitive on world markets.’ (101)

- ‘The European Union functions in the same way that the planned expansion of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement0 is meant to achieve for the whole continent from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – in terms of content, of course, independently to the institutional forms peculiar to the two regions in question, perhaps even of their different ‘intentions’ (which may thus be no more than illusions). For the ‘opening of the market’ in eastern Europe will produce nothing other than a serious deterioration of its social situation.’ (105)
- ‘Compradorization has largely discredited regimes geared to the requirements of neoliberal globalization. It follows that a ‘remake’ of Bandung, uniting peoples behind their governments, is today an illusory prospect. The solidarity that is needed today will have to be built primarily by the peoples themselves. Only then can hope be reborn, only then can governments be forced (or new governments created) to shake off the grip of neoliberalism and to lay off the basis for a new active front of the South.’ (107)

- ‘With regard to economic management of the world system, the interests of all the countries in the South are convergent and we can again see the broad outlines of an alternative that they might collectively champion. 1. The idea of controls on international capital transfers is making a comeback. In fact, the ‘liberalization’ of capital accounts, which the IMF imposes as a new dogma, has no other purpose than to facilitate the massive transfer of capital to the United States, to cover a growing American deficit due to problems in the US economy itself as well as the costs of its strategy of global military control…2. The idea of foreign investment regulation is making a comeback…3. Many countries in the South again realize that they cannot dispense with an agricultural development policy…4. The external debt is no longer felt to be only economically unbearable; its very legitimacy is beginning to be questioned. Demands are being raised for unilateral repudiation of the odious and illegitimate debts, and for moves towards proper international legislation on debt.’ (110)

- ‘The ruling classes of the triad consider that the United Nations has ‘had its day’ and have substituted for it the G8 and NATO, thereby revoking the functions of the General Assembly. What is involved is a real coup de force, a negation of the sovereignty of states (or, to be more precise, of the South) and even of international law. If the triad states persist in this course, the ‘multipolar’ concepts that they now and again support will express a mere wish to ‘rebalance Atlanticism,’ nothing more.’ (112)

- ‘It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the heyday of the United Nations came at just this time – the rather brief period from the 1960s to 1975 or 1980 that coincided with what are called the ‘development decades.’ (115)

- ‘The United Nations did not die a natural death: it was murdered in 1990-91 by decision of the United States, with the support of its triad allies, which ended the responsibilities of the organization for the management of polycentrism and the preservation of peace. The UN was murdered when Washington decided to implement its project of spreading the Monroe doctrine to the whole planet.’ (117)

- ‘The map of Europe during this transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era looked liked a veritable jigsaw of princedoms, seigneuries and semi-autonomous cities, each of them increasingly dependent on trade networks that eluded their powers. It is a model that contrasts with that of the central tributary worlds, where the subordination of market economy to the ruling powers was a major obstacle to the birth of thoroughly capitalist forms. The chaos was eventually overcome and a market/state (or economic/political) overlap rebuilt through the emergence of the modern nation-state.’ (120)

- ‘I have described the future it has in mind for humanity as ‘apartheid on a world scale.’ Permanent war against the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America is therefore inevitable if the project is to be successful – which means, of course, that the United Nations no longer has any role of its own to play: either it agrees to become a docile instrument of those running the permanent war against the South, or it has to disappear.’ (122)

- ‘It remains to be seen whether Europe will begin to revise its stand following the war in Iraq.’ (123)

- ‘The so-called clash of civilizations is an integral part of the barbaric downhill slide of capitalism; in no way is it an obstacle to the unfurling of the US hegemonist project.’ (123)

- ‘Amid this general regression, the United Nations no longer has any particular functions to fulfill.’ (126)

- ‘The conditions must be created for the UN to fulfill its functions as the guardian of peace. The first of these conditions is disarmament: a multipolar world is a disarmed world. But we have to be clear that this means, first and foremost, disarmament of the most powerful – the United States, above all.’ (129)

- ‘Removal of the US military bases covering the planet is a preliminary condition for general disarmament.’ (129)

- ‘There should be action (i) to deploy a UN force between Israel (in its pre-1967 green line ‘frontiers’) and Palestine, it being understood that Israel would not be able to resist economic sanctions as severe as those imposed on other states; and (ii) to deploy UN peacekeeping forces in countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia) and Kosovo), and in African countries that have been the victim of so-called ‘civil wars.’ Such operations may be planned in close relationship with any regional organizations concerned (the European Union, wider Europe, the African Union).’ (132)

- ‘The weight of debt service is strictly unbearable, not only for the poorest countries but also for others in the South. We should recall here that after the First World War, when Germany was ordered to pay reparations to the value of 7 percent of its exports, liberal economists of the day concluded that it was an intolerable burden to which Germany’s productive apparatus would be unable to adjust. Yet today, economists belonging to the same liberal school have no qualms about proposing the ‘adjustment’ of third world economies to levels of foreign debt service five to ten times higher.’ (137)

- ‘Debt service is today a way of pillaging the wealth and labor of the peoples of the South (and East), an especially lucrative way because it has even turned the poorest countries on earth into exporters of capital to the North. It is also a particularly brutal form, which releases dominant capital from worries and uncertainties about the management of companies and hired workforces. The debt service falls due – that’s all they need to know. It is up to the states concerned (not to the capitalist lenders) to extract it from the labor of their peoples.’ (137)

- ‘Not only odious and immoral debts should be unilaterally repudiated (after due audit); the same applies to payments already made to service them, which creditors should reimburse after capitalization at the same rates of interest that the debtors had to bear.’ (138)

- ‘It would then be clear that, in fact, it is the North which is in debt to the South.’ (138)

- ‘The stated aim is to ‘relieve the burden’ for the very poor countries, but at the same time to impose on them further draconian conditions that would make them akin to colonies under direct foreign administration.’ (138)

- ‘The UN should oversee management of water, as a common good of humanity…if it is relatively scarce, access to it has to be rationalized; the cost of its use must be shared among all the inhabitants of the country in one way or another – that is, through market regulation or an acceptable system of taxes and subsidies.’ (141)

- ‘The main immediate task is to frustrate Washington in its military project: this is the absolute prerequisite for creating the leeway we need, and without it any social or democratic progress and any advance towards a multipolar world will remain vulnerable in the extreme.’ (147)

- ‘The overweening character of the US project means that it is bound to fail in the end, though at a terrible human cost.’ (147)

- ‘The resistance of its victims – the peoples of the South – will grow stronger as the Americans become bogged down in the many war fronts to which they are forced to commit themselves. The resistance will eventually defeat the enemy, and perhaps also awaken public opinion in the United States, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War.’ (147)

- ‘In the longer term, a ‘different globalization’ will involve challenging the options of neoliberal capitalism and the way in which collective triad imperialism runs the affairs of the planet within the framework of an extreme, or more ‘balanced,’ Atlanticism.’ (147)

- ‘The present moment is characterized by the deployment of a North American project for world hegemony, the only one that today occupies the whole stage. There is no longer any country-project to limit the area under US control, as there used to be in the era of bipolarism (1945-90). The European project, apart from its inherent ambiguities, has gone into a period of withdrawal. The countries of the South (the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement), which in the Bandung era (1955-75) aimed to oppose a common front to Western imperialism, have given up the project. China itself, going it alone, seeks little more than to project its (anyway ambiguous) national project, and does not present itself as an active partner in the reshaping of the world.’ (148)

- ‘A Eurasian rapprochement (Europe + Russia + China + India), which would certainly carry with it the rest of Asia and Africa and isolate the United States, is certainly desirable. There are even a few signs pointing in that direction. But we are a long way from seeing its crystallization put an end to Europe’s Atlanticist option.’ (149)

- ‘Multipolarity will then provide the framework for the possible and necessary overcoming of capitalism. The stable and genuinely multipolar world will be socialist or it will not exist at all.’ (149)

- ‘The project of a humanist response to the challenge of globalized expansion is not at all ‘utopian;’ on the contrary, it is the only realistic project.’ (152)

- ‘What Europe needs to do is stop investing its surplus capital on the New York finance markets – a practice that enables the United States to overcome its main handicap (the savings deficit) and to pursue its hegemonist [sic] offensive.’ (157-158)

- ‘There appears to be no threat to the monopoly of what I call the oil dollar standard (which links the dollar, as the only really international currency, to Washington’s largely military control of the main oil-producing regions in the Middle East and the Gulf of Guinea).’ (158)