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markets, almost the only effective outlet for the increased productive
capacity of these rivals is the US itself. Equally, the consumer boom in
the West, and particularly in the US, is credit-led, marked by the cap-
acity of US oligarchies and its coalition to corner surplus liquidity.41
So international economic relations are increasingly marked by a
dependency of the greatest consumer of world manufactures and
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174 Philosophy of International Law
natural resources, the United States, on the producers, Western
Europe, Japan, and the Pacific Rim, through the medium of increas-
ing American debt. An advantage that the US has had from the time
after 1945, when it dominated world production and trade, is the
dollar. By fixing the value of its own currency as the world currency,
it can pay its debts by printing money.42 This is where the Stiglitz cri-
tique can become focused. The absence of world monetary reform has
nothing to do with the money, money everywhere rhetoric of Hardt
and Negri, but has everything to do with the usefulness of the fiscal
and monetary control of one world currency by a single power.
However, the full context of the usefulness of this power can only
be understood if another aspect of the concentration of wealth and
avoidance of income redistribution is stressed. The way out of surplus
production for the US, since the 1930s, has been the war economy,
military production financed by the state, first through domestic
43
income, but eventually through the control of world liquidity. That
is, the US found its way out of the Great Depression by adopting
the warfare welfare economy of armaments, which retained its
impetus, after the defeat of Germany and Japan, through the Czech
Crisis (the Prague communist coup of February March 1948) and the
Korean War.
Since then the US has remained primarily a war economy driven
by the need to confront external danger at a global level. This feeds
effectively on the paranoid style that is fundamental to US foreign
policy. Harvey explains that the internal configurations of power that
were able to resist Roosevelt s modest attempts during the New Deal
to rescue the economy from its contradictions through redistribution
of wealth, meant instead the paranoid style of politics. The difficulty
of achieving internal cohesion in an ethnically mixed society charac-
terized by intense individualism and class division made for the con-
struction of US politics around the fear of some other (such as
bolshevism, socialism, anarchists).44 This aggressive policy extends to
an unequal military alliance system which ensures transfers of profit
back to the US through compulsory purchases of American arma-
ments, an effective export of the warfare welfare economy.45
It is widely recognized that these economic contradictions accen-
tuate further political contradictions. First, there is the changing char-
acter of American military dominance at the global level. This dates
from 1945 and the US reconstruction of Germany and Japan as semi-
sovereign states, as US protectorates. Under a US military umbrella,
they were free to redevelop their own industrial potential. By the time
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Marxism and International Law 175
of the Korean War the US had ringed the Soviets and Chinese with an
unprecedented number of military bases, which meant that not
merely were there only two superpowers, there were, in fact, in the
classical (Westphalian) international law sense only two (maybe
three) sovereign states in the world, states with the power to declare
and wage war. Turkey, Israel, Japan, Germany, the UK, Italy, and
many others were no longer autonomous, even legally.
The major distinction of the argument in Arrighi and Silver is to
place in historical context the limitations of the Westphalian system
of international law, based upon the sovereign equality of states. This
was reflected in the original Dutch system of hegemony, which pre-
vailed from 1648 until the Napoleonic Wars. When British hegemony
replaced the Dutch in the nineteenth century other states enjoyed only
nominal independence at a time when British industrial and naval
supremacy guaranteed a global Pax Britannica. Britain called into
independence the Latin American states, but they remained under
British economic tutelage until 1914. With the coming of American
hegemony after 1945, even the semblance or fiction of the
Westphalian system disappeared. However, since the 1970s there has
been a radical bifurcation of military and financial global power. This
has been most remarkable since the 1980s when the Reagan military
buildup was financed through manipulation of interest rates on the
dollar to siphon world liquidity into the United States.46
The difficulty with overwhelming US global military dominance at
present rests in the transformation of its capital base. As long as the
military production was financed from within the US the latter saw
no security threat to itself. Once the finance to support these military
structures has started to come from outside, the picture becomes more
uncertain. American military power is accompanied by increased
indebtedness of the American state to foreign capital seeking profit
within the US, either on the private stock exchange or in government
securities. This began in the 1970s, but it has become acute in the
course of the 1990s. These concrete developments are central to the
whole global financial expansion that in the 1980s and 1990s
reflated the power of the U.S. state and capital and correspondingly
deflated the power of the movements that had precipitated the crisis
of US hegemony . . . 47
The US has become financially dependent upon its industrial pro-
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