The United States provides one of the most interesting examples of this evolution since it both was one of the first nations to explore a forward-looking reliance upon bloc politics and was one of the last to entertain old-fashioned ambitions of being the dominative force in a unipolar world.
From World War I onward, the United States, although consistently demonstrating strong isolationist tendencies, also showed keen interest in establishing a global forum for the resolution of differences and for the regulation of interests between nations. Although many of the proponents of such an organization were unity-minded idealists, at least as many of its (often less vocal) supporters were isolation-focused realists. They understood that such an organization was the best means of defusing any conflicts that might threaten to embroil the United States, and thus, had a vested interest in promoting the evolution of this species of global council as a buffer against “foreign entanglements.”
Ultimately, although the League of Nations was a stillborn failure, and the United Nations an impossibly crippled and hamstrung attempt to improve upon and expand it, the United States almost single-handedly enacted what many consider to be the first, true “proto-bloc” formulation: the Marshall Plan. The strange, underlying mix of American pragmatism and compassion was certainly a noteworthy feature of the superpower’s resolve to “rebuild Europe.” While accelerating the restoration of safe and comfortable living conditions for untold millions of Europeans (but particularly Germans), the United States was also creating a ready market for its own products and media, a foundation of Americentric infrastructural and educational reconstruction, and a rapidly strengthening bulwark against the encroachment of Soviet Russia and its allies.
However, it is the evolution of the relationships forged through the Marshall Plan that truly distinguish it as the first of the bloc-building initiatives of the post-Imperial era. The most productive contrast is evident in the international political and social dynamics of its outgrowth alliance—NATO—and those of its eastern rival, the Warsaw Pact.
Clearly, in both cases, the superpower sponsor of each collective had a vastly disproportional balance of power within its own organization. But the methodology of maintaining and strengthening the relevant international ties could not have been more different.
Russia followed the well-known imperial model: a high degree of centralized control, nonconsensual arrangement of economies and militaries, and sharp exclusivity concerning such strategic elements as space programs, nuclear arsenals, and technological diffusion. In contrast, NATO was noteworthy for its decentralized and consensual political and economic bases, cooperative programs in developing both military and domestic technologies, and freedom to evolve other organizations that often complicated the relationships among the members, and drew nonmembers into the mix (e.g., the European Common Market). Member-states entered or left NATO at will—often to the great consternation and discomfiture of the others (e.g., France’s infamous departure) while the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellite states were kept in line by guns and tanks where necessary (e.g., Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland).
The purpose of this comparison is not to praise NATO. It had many irremediable flaws and proved a difficult organization to validate once its historical counterpoise—the Warsaw Pact—fell apart. However, its evolution out of the groundwork laid by the Marshall Plan, and the various transatlantic ententes and organizations that rose up to perform similar coordinating functions, were the harbingers of today’s bloc politics.
The European Union—as the first of the true blocs—was the next, obvious step in the evolution toward bloc-politics. However, with the nation-state impulse still predominant in most of the older gatekeepers of political power, the maturation of this first bloc was a difficult and often painful process that foreshadowed the ongoing challenges of all bloc formations: common military, monetary, educational, medical, and linguistic forms. The constant tension between maintaining sovereign control over one’s own directions in these urgent matters vied mightily with the impetus toward combining them so as to move quickly to higher levels of uniformity of service across the bloc.
The Dominant Paradigm of Bloc Evolution: The EC-EU Progression
By 2040, with the Megadeath looming as an inevitable resource-blight on the horizon and protectionism rampant in most markets, an increasing number of analysts and advisors were asserting that humanity’s next great endeavors were too expensive to be borne by the ever-more fiscally strapped nations on an individual basis. Citing various joint aerospace and defense technology programs, they made increasingly compelling arguments for a more systematized integration of economies if various strategic goals were to be achieved. High among these were stalled efforts at revising the energy ecology of the world, which despite overcoming most of the technological impediments to a thorough reworking of energy production and delivery, remained unexecutable due to entrenched corporate and national interests.
The arrival of the Megadeath era and the sharp, decade-long market retraction, prompted the first wave of trade pacts that ultimately evolved into modest agreements to integrate certain elements of each country’s economy to serve a greater, combined objective.
Not surprisingly, the first, small shifts toward greater integration were achieved by amplifying agreements that dated from the establishment of the Common Market (arguably the precursor of the EU). Spain and Portugal formed the Iberian Union in 2034 to consolidate debt and increase their political influence in both EC and EU affairs. The Scandinavian nations formed the Nordic League in 2041, thereby indirectly bringing its non-EU member-states into greater alignment with that bloc’s interests and influence through their strong relations with their neighbors and cultural cousins. Benelux began the process toward unification in 2043. Similar preunification movements became increasingly common from 2050-2075, as the EU membership moved toward more centralized control, albeit slowly.
However, this process had one notable casualty. England grew increasingly distant from the opinions and motivations of the Continent as the pressure toward a common currency intensified, along with pressure to establish uniform banking, health, and military practices and administration. A particularly sharp blow to integrating the UK into the EU occurred when Germany assumed air-defense responsibilities for Austria in 2072. English responses were decidedly negative when the two German-speaking nations touted this as the “wave of the future” and the “signifier of a new age of trust and mutuality.” England was not alone in its reservations regarding this onerous reprise of pre-Anschluss maneuvering. France and Italy began more joint incorporations as a counterbalance to Germany’s expanding military leadership within the EU. But of course, in the long run, the increasing ties between France and Italy only accelerated the process toward broad amalgamation.
Eastern Europe and the Balkans were a different story. Poland and the Czech Republic ultimately became fully normalized members within the EU’s economic and service frameworks as did the Baltic Republics. The remaining Balkan and Eastern European states slowly evolved through a series of pacts similar to those binding together the Baltic nations, but with far more fits, starts, disruptions, and angry defections. Hungary maintained dual membership, its sympathies and affinities divided between the EU and the ever-fluctuating Eastern European Collective. These rather tempestuous revisions were particularly common in the territories of the former nation of Yugoslavia, where regional disputes persisted. The steady, core states of the Eastern European Collective (regardless of its changes in conformation and nomenclature) included Slovakia, Moldava, Bulgaria, and Rumania.
Ultimately, much of the churn in the East European Collective was the result of strong pan-Slavic impulses from (and for) Russia. Which, despite differences and bickering, generally found enough common ground to maintain relations with the Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in a loose federation. The combination of population, resources, and industries assisted this combine’s reemergence back into the world market, first
as a major energy and raw materials exporter, and later, as a manufacturer of median- and high-tech goods. This impacted China’s attempt to continue expanding its share in those markets, reigniting old rivalries. At the same time, equally old European fears of Russian expansionism loomed larger as the giant’s recovery accelerated in the 2060-2070 period. Oddly, given intermittent trepidation (and historical resentment) for the US in certain EU circles, and the US support of Russia in its bricolage with Beijing, these events combined to push the US and Russia into closer relations. It was also an illustration of bloc stability based on functional congruencies between the two polities. It has long been (accurately) observed that, structurally, the US- and Russian-led blocs are the most similar, insofar as they have smaller populations with markedly higher cultural uniformity, spread across large, productive landmasses that provide them with a baseline sufficiency in all natural resources.
Russia’s continuing challenges along its southern peripheries changed character in this period, becoming both less sporadic and more fixed. Many of its former fringe republics known collectively as “The Stans” drifted into increasing exchange and trade agreements with the Pan-Arab League, which then underwent a welter of conflicting and often brief name changes: the Pan-Asian League, the Pan-Islamic League, and more. However, as the re-aligned nations of the post-Arab Spring decades stabilized, their influence came to stretch like a belt across the north of Africa and midriff of Asia. Strong tensions between traditional and secular visions, and intermittent coups, prevented steady progress toward political integration. However, this League’s desire for joint action was clear and unequivocal, rising above the chaos generated by its repeated attempts to create durable transnational bonds.
Indeed, the solitary stabilizing influence in the evolution of what ultimately came to be known as the Pan-Islamic League was its relationship with (some would say mentorship by) China. China, larger than most blocs all by itself, had limited needs for coordination with foreign states. Many Traditionalist extremists had no desire for bilateral relations at all. Sinosupremacy and cultural protection evolved as linked tenets among Beijing’s political elite up through, and beyond, the Megadeath. After the economic shocks and restructuring occasioned by that sustained disaster, a great deal of political emphasis shifted south to Shanghai and the Transformists, largely due to their superior handling of international relations and fiscal negotiations in those trying years. Beijing, although cautious when relinquishing any control, did so carefully—but did so. A notable exception is to be found in its direct recruitment of the Pan-Islamic League (and many of the mutually aligned states of South America) to aid it in the High Ground and Belt Wars with the Russian-led Slavic nations (and then, nominally and briefly, against the pro-Russian US “intervention force”).
However, after the Belt War, the PRC leadership underwent its first truly democratic change, resulting in a more decentralized government and new overtures to both historical and new trading partners in an attempt to find an exit from its monetary woes (attempts to fully valuate the yuan as an unprotected traded currency had foundered no less than six times in the prior six decades). Strong Traditionalist power brokers in Beijing maintained close relations with the equally (if differently) traditionally-minded leaders of the faltering Pan-Islamic League (whose petrodollars were finally evaporating as new energy ecologies in the developed world sharply reduced its reliance upon foreign oil).
Beyond China, Japan’s attempts to compete with the evolving bloc structures on an equal footing met with frustration from a number of directions. Firstly, it lacked the cultural collectivism that was clearly functioning as political glue in Europe, the Slavic nations, and the former British Colonies, just as it lacked the unilateral scope and potentialities of China. Thrown back upon the need to build agreements and consolidate without assistance from either of those natural amalgamating forces, the Japanese discovered that their prior unwillingness to fully apologize for the violent excesses of their troops in World War II had not been overlooked or forgotten. As they attempted to evolve a Pacific Rim organization, they found themselves not only undermined at every step by Chinese interests, but frequently deemed insufficiently trustworthy by many of the nations which they had occupied during that century-past global conflict.
Compelled to focus upon purely economic linkages, Japan shifted its search for an initial partner to Brazil, in which a large Japanese émigré community had gained increasing social and political influence. This was welcomed by the Brazilians, whose experience in the Belt War made them eager to leave the PRC’s domain of control, largely due to the veiled but very real autocratic prerogatives which Beijing exerted in its relations with the members of its incongruously named Developing World Coalition (DWC).
With the commitment of this first partner, the Japanese proved highly adept at leveraging themselves into sequentially greater relationships. Although the organization was at first weak and diffuse, Japan’s efforts to secure new members for inclusion in its loose commercial consortium highlighted the nation’s strong ability at advantageous deal-making. Slowly bringing the majority of Brazil’s aligned South American states into their transglobal trade organization, the Japanese then made common cause with other states that were, in one regard or another, problematic fits with any of the other emerging blocs. South Africa, possessing a strong technological sector but a persistent image as a troubled nation, responded readily enough to Tokyo’s overtures. Other, select African nations responded similarly. With this membership in place, and the constant (if ultimately elusive) expressions of interest from Mexico a matter of global record, Japan approached India and Indonesia—with whom final negotiations persist today, as each nation strives to glean maximum benefit from the relationship.
Critics have called this loose amalgam of states a “non-bloc” but that dismissive label pales beside the fact that, left without a ready pathway to political and international parity, the Japanese built a bloc from common interests and the promise of mutual benefit, and have thereby created the largest of all the blocs, when measured by population and general resources.
South America’s move toward bloc politics was one of disappointment, change, and uncertainty. After the Megadeath madness gutted so many of its cities, and after its unfortunate (and in many ways, hapless) peripheral involvement in the Belt War, Brazil and the rest of South and Central America parted company from China’s Developing World Coalition and resolved to chart their own course. Increasingly successful modernization initiatives and responsible resource allocation from 2070-2085 onward began to prove that this continent was not destined to become another Africa, and attracted the aforementioned interest, and wooing, of Tokyo’s global commerce initiative. While South America’s collective pride quickly rose to an all-time high, Central America and Mexico found themselves vexed by conflicting desires. On the one hand, they had strong impulses to join their larger and culturally akin southern cousins; on the other, strong countervailing forces of extant agreements and traditional partnerships pulled them more in the direction of the United States.
The United States had, in many regards, both the easiest and hardest time moving into the era of bloc politics. Already well versed in many of the mechanisms and methodologies that might be employed to establish a bloc, and furnished with relationships that had the potential of readily moving in that direction, it also contended with its own reluctance to share the smallest iota of sovereignty with another state, and found the same attitude in its potential partners. Indeed, the wary circumspection that was evinced by any state entertaining the notion of moving into closer alignment with the United States was most pronounced in the nations that were its strongest and oldest allies. The cultural phenomena underlying this, being unique, want special explication.
Firstly, the fierce independence of Americans is at least as present (albeit often expressed differently) in its other New World cousins, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. America’s “special relationship” and int
imate military and intelligence coordination with the United Kingdom similarly did not translate into ready acceptance of shared sovereignty there, either.
This situation was exacerbated by America’s peculiar combination of striving for dominance in world affairs, yet having the most vocal criticisms of those tendencies often coming from its own population. In short, criticism of America—from both inside and outside its borders—led to an understandable (and arguably prudent) awareness of the large, powerful country’s appetite for control. By the same token, the very openness of that criticism, and the critics’ practical freedom from any worry of retaliation, were both constant testimonies to these nation’s fundamental (if imperfect) commitments to liberty, free expression, and plurality. More than one analyst of America’s world image in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has touched upon its “tendency toward an almost schizophrenic expression of both genuine goodwill and overbearing presumption.”
Nowhere is this conundrum better illustrated than the episode which occasioned its closer integration with Canada. Prompted by the need to redraw NAFTA along lines that made success far less dependent upon Mexico’s ability to meet projected goals and fiscal benchmarks, Washington and Ottawa began the delicate process of crafting additional economic coordination between the two states without raising (mostly Canadian, and particularly French-Canadian) hackles over the long-feared usurpation of the maple leaf by the bald eagle.
As news of these talks began to leak out, the name of the agreement, the Unified Commerce Agreement, was being floated and rigidly scrutinized for any potential to occasion fear on the part of Canadians, or triumphalism on the part of a sizable minority of ultra-nationalist Americans. Unfortunately, one of the first reporters entrusted with the title of the agreement disclosed it to a blogger friend, who promptly turned around and “scooped” the imminence of the new UCA agreement. Unfortunately, the blogger did not clearly indicate what each letter in the acronym UCA stood for.
Fire with Fire, Second Edition Page 54
