Re: <nettime> Germany's geopolitics

Three cheers for ditching Schmitt, it's a crude and populist "why" explanation. I only mentioned the name because Pit offered a critical article about German geopolitics. What Pit actually has to say is much different and much more valuable:

"What is needed are new types of assemblies that will facilitate the green transition in record time, which at first has to be a
technological project, and from there is engineered by social, cultural, political, economic processes. the planetary organisation
that will facilitate this is most likely not simply following the USA as the internal systemic contradictions are obviously too great."

This is exactly what I am concerned about. I think the entrenched interlinks between US corporate, financial, diplomatic and military strategies - revealed in undeniable detail by the Wikileaks cables - are just too sedimented on the Cold War model, which aims at commercial hegemony backed by military force. This is the model that produced the "Great Acceleration" by the way, or what I call the Anthopocene mode of production (1). In the past the US delivered many global public goods that made this hegemony work: military security; Taylorist/Fordist organization; public science and advanced education; global norms and standards; multilateral diplomacy; pop culture and global English (2). In the course of the neoliberal period especially, all of these except maybe the norms and standards began turning to global public bads. But the point is not to just dump the US, as Pit is careful to point out. If the EU and its "Franco-German locomotive" do not play the bridging role, then the rebooting of the NATO alliance system will prolong the agony of the Cold War hegemony, and we will miss the narrow window of maybe-opportunity to do something about climate change. The hopes that were invested during the last decade in the Tian Xia/All Under Heaven philosophy will just collapse into great power rivalries, proxy wars, and worse.

Who are the thinkers, statesmen, policy-makers in the EU that are advancing a positive bridging role? How to make the Old Continent into something more than a big consumer market? How to keep China from pursuing a great-power type hegemony, and instead, encourage it to provide the global public goods of the climate-change era? Such ideas are urgent right now.

It is clear that Germany, unfortunately, has pursued a geoeconomic competition strategy with respect to China, which itself appears dead set on that kind of competition. Recently Germany has aimed at a strategic "decoupling" not so different from the US approach, in the face of China's own attempt to position itself at the top of crucial value chains, especially in the less-developed world. In his book on the Belt and Road initiative, Bruno Macaes captures the precise turning point:

"In Germany the general view of China has been steadily changing, as many in the German industry realize that the times when the two economies benefited from perfect complementarity are almost certainly behind us. The strategic industries where China wants to become the dominant global player are just those that Germany chose for its own industrial plans: robotics, automated vehicles, aerospace, artificial intelligence. Whereas one or two decades ago Germany could export its machinery to China sure in the knowledge that no Chinese firm could make the same sophisticated machines - and these were the machines China needed for its industrial and infrastructure boom - now Chinese competitors are present in the same sectors, a shift that was accelerated by European suppliers selling co-designed parts to the Chinese. In early August 2018 the German government decided to ban for the first time the sale of a German company to a Chinese suitor - a watershed moment. The decision to block the sale of machine tool company Leifeld Metal Spinning AG to a Chinese company came after an extensive review that led the government to conclude that such a transaction would be a risk to “public order and safety”. Chancellor Merkel's government wants to keep the company’s expertise in the field of rocket and nuclear technology out of Chinese hands. It remained unclear whether national security arguments were being used to address economic concerns about the loss of key technologies to China."(3)

I do not have the antennas to go deep into German or EU industrial policy, much less grand strategy. But the slightest appeal to the Reuters newswire shows that these trends continue today (4). I would be glad to hear more about it.

Pit's ideas on "new types of assemblies" are in pretty good sync with Bruno Latour's reflections in his last, co-written publication, "On the emergence of an ecological class." Except Latour would probably put the cultural factors first. I'm not sure about that, but culture is the only thing I could begin to work on. My friends at Casa Rio in Argentina are now engaging a collaboration with researchers in China to better understand what happens to the soybean exports that are deforesting the lungs of the world, and destroying the hydrological cycle in South America. Our first principle is not to demonize the Chinese people. They just want enough to eat. What we are looking at in the world today is a massive trap. Ukraine has, through no fault of its own, become the place where the trap is being sprung, but its mechanism is far bigger. It's the twentieth-century industrial model, the "Anthropocene mode of production," with deeper foundations in European colonialism, nineteenth-century imperialism and many dynamics further afield. How do we grasp all this? How do we take apart all those springs and gears and hamster wheels?

Here's to the future of the "international extra-parliamentary and intersectional peace movement, perhaps to the sound of Korean pop with synthetic voices co-composed by AI" !!!

best Chicago ciaos, Brian

1. Those who think I provide only phoney 'why' explanations could check out an attempt to retrace the multiple threads that came together in the atomic bomb project that became the centerpiece of US hegemony in the mid 20th century: "Born Secret: A Field Guide to the Anthropocene Mode of Production," published in The Anthropocene Review, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053019620975803. Seriously tldr though, don't bother, just watch the video instead, https://vimeo.com/374696808.

2. The best book by far on the components of US hegemony, and hegemony generally, is Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (Columbia UP, 1987).

3. Bruno Macaes, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (Hurst and Co, 2018).

4. See for example: https://www.reuters.com/world/germanys-new-china-strategy-guided-by-ideology-ambassador-says-2023-01-08 and https://www.reuters.com/markets/exclusive-german-economy-ministry-reviews-measures-curb-china-business-2022-09-08.

On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 6:13 AM Stefan Heidenreich <mail@stefanheidenreich.de> wrote:

oh yes: we're being prepared to see China rise and shine as the next big
enemy. You can bet on "Chinagate" coming soon :)

but: that's exactly how far the Schmittian aproach holds. No inch
further. Let's face it: the reference to Schmitt builds an intellectual
phantasy with very little explanatory power (and that counts also for
all the Schmittians: Dugin ...)

given the fact we're dealing with former democracies turned into
oligarchies and former semi-sovereigns downgraded to vasalls - one
cannot simply ascribe each nation its own homogenuous agency. that is
utterly naive. the chessboard image derived from this kind of analysis
is an intellectual disgrace with no real world correspondance.

which are the oligarch fractions fighting each other? how does the flow
of decision making work? where do economic interests gang up?

could we please leave the sandbox of Schmittian toddlers and upgrade to
a network-centric view of the geo-economic situation?

s

Am 01.03.23 um 07:44 schrieb Pit Schultz:
> Tentative Annihilationism
>
> As written before, the main global conflict today is between the US
> and China, and the bridging role of Europe, and within the "dynamo" of
> Germany and France, would be to take a more decisive stance towards
> China (and thus towards the BRICS and the Global South), of course
> without leaving NATO or breaking ties with the US, these transitions
> need to be peaceful, non-violent and not just based on apocalyptic
> deterrence.
>
> If the future world markets were reduced to those "friendly" countries
> that supported the sanctions against Russia, the German export model
> would be doomed and would lose its capacity to facilitate a green
> transition.
>
> Ukraine has become a pledge for the unhealthy expansion of Western
> democracy (including NATO and the EU) to effectively distract Europe
> from finding a better geopolitical position in a post-neoliberal,
> post-globalised, new multipolar world order. The current expansion is
> not organic and too homogeneous, as the US capitalist (Wallstreet)
> system, as the main motor of the externalized costs of climate crisis,
> isn't sustainable enough to run a planetary order.
>
> It is clear that China is no longer just an extended workbench, but a
> partner in science and technology that is at least as relevant as the
> US. after the Trump experience and the flawed democracy of Russiagate
> vs. MAGA, the risks of China's autocracy should not be underestimated
> either. it should not need any more shock doctrines to complete the
> "Zeitenwende" that could be provided by the unfolding of Russia's
> attack on Ukraine to an open endedness.
>
> China will be needed again to put a decisive pressure on Russia. The
> goal is not merely territorial as it iseems, but to pressure the west
> to renegotiate its hegemonial claims, and open up to a less
> hirarchical more multilateral planetary order, not at last to
> coordinate climate change processes, and facilitate legitimate
> institutions, this time without a complete capitulation and the
> annihilation of millions.
>
> It is clear that new forms of semi-war economy and top-down Keynesian
> planning are emerging to emulate the ability to organise rapid
> technological/industrial transformation, as in China. It is not the
> end of capitalism, but a fundamental change in its oligarchic
> superstructure, the ideology of the invisible hand, the Washington
> Consensus.
>
> The Schmittian Grossraum is in a perspective of interlocking
> worst-case scenarios, of reterritorialisation along telluric
> identitarianism, of digging into polarised camps and deciding the fate
> of countries, disregarding their autonomy, drawing borders and trade
> flows from the point of view of a handful of superpowers. i am not an
> advocate of this, but neither am an advocate of green neoliberalism
> and the moral superiority narratives of the german greens.
>
> What is needed are new types of assemblies that will facilitate the
> green transition in record time, which at first has to be a
> technological project, and from there is engineered by social,
> cultural, political, economic processes. the planetary organisation
> that will facilitate this is most likely not simply following the USA
> as the internal systemic contradictions are obviously too great.
> Specific geographical inequalities, which today translate into
> climatic dependencies and weather catastrophes, are more likely to be
> redressed when the financial mechanisms of the IMF/World Bank are
> likely to be replaced by a network of recalibrated CBDCs.
>
> So transatlanticism needs to be balanced with tianxia - especially to
> enable the shared green transition and to give the global south a more
> confident and dynamic position, not just as a lithium resource. So
> the Silk Road and big infrastructure projects, the Kantian
> Konfuzianism of "under one sky", need to be repositioned against the
> ever-fading American dream.
>
> This is not in the tradition of anti-Americanism, but of American
> romanticism, which is quite common in post-war Germany and which,
> strangely enough, goes down well with the more patriotic Americans and
> their view of Biden's latest expansionist adventures. There is a long
> list of filmmakers, intellectual gadflies and musicians who are
> defined by a deep and complex relationship with the American way.
> nettime itself can be seen as a form of transatlantic enterprise, but
> more along the lines of discussions about the thing nyc and "goofy
> leftists sniping at wired". even the ARPANET protocol was a
> combination of pragmatic US-engineering (tcp/ip) and visionary
> Euro-abstration. (OSI/CYCLADES)
>
> With the rise of psychological hybrid warfare, psy-ops such as blaming
> COVID-19 on China while concealing the own role in gain-of-function
> research at the WIV. We're being prepared for war with China in a late
> stage simulacrum of supposed supremacy. It may take another rupture to
> escape this reality tunnel, or it may be possible with an
> international extra-parliamentary and intersectional peace movement,
> perhaps to the sound of Korean pop with synthetic voices co-composed
> by AI.
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