argi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London. She is the author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008) and Traffick (Pluto, 2005).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Traffick
The Illicit Movement of People and Things
By Gargi Bhattacharyya
Pluto Press
Copyright © 2005 Gargi Bhattacharyya
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2047-2
Contents
Acknowledgements, vi,
1 How Did We Get Here?, 1,
2 Underbelly of the Global, 31,
3 Winning the Cold War: The Power of Organised Crime in the Global Economy, 61,
4 Drugs, Territory and Transnational Networks, 90,
5 Nuclear Holocaust or Drive-by Shooting? Arms in the New World Economy, 122,
6 Circulating Bodies in the Global Marketplace, 153,
Conclusion: Violent Endings and New Beginnings, 189,
Bibliography, 197,
Index, 214,
CHAPTER 1
How Did We Get Here?
When I first started to plan this project, in the summer of 2001, few people I met seemed to agree with my suggestion that we were living through a step-change in the rhythm of globalisation. I wasn't yet confident about the parameters of the book, and the account I could give of the tangled interconnections between the trades in arms, drugs and people seemed as old as human trade itself. Nothing new in that seedy world, certainly no sign of a new phase of globalised relations. Then, from September 2001, everyone started to talk about the need to regulate global movements, of the dangers of untraceable transnational transactions, of the urgent need to put a break on globalisation. It has since been hard to escape the suggestion, made by all kinds of people in a whole range of places, that we are in a new era where we must learn to regulate and contain the excesses of our insistently interdependent world (for some examples see Amin, 2003; Brennan, 2003; Mertes, 2004). We may not have agreed a method for doing this, or a membership for this imagined regulatory body, or even an ultimate goal – but that first shift in consciousness, the one that says that there are dangers in leaving global processes to regulate themselves, has hit home hard. What follows is an account of how we come to this place.
Sometimes, when reading famous attempts to narrativise the tumultuous events of the nineteenth century that seek to register what it felt like to be alive in this best and worst of times, I have wondered what it must have been like to live through these world-changing processes without any sense of where things are going or how they might end. We present-day readers approach these documents – the novels and the political treaties, the famous essays, the diaries, the amateur investigations that form the basis of social science as we know it – with the lazy seen-it-all-before of our hindsight. We have no doubts about how it ends. Of course, it ends with us.
The massive social changes that swept across Europe in the nineteenth century seem to us to be no more than the building blocks of our everyday reality. The transitions to becoming urban, industrial, literate, governed by the state, internationally networked and nationally identified – all of these cataclysmic changes now represent no more than the most tedious and predictable components of contemporary life in the West. For the contemporary reader, it is hard to imagine that the world has ever been anything otherwise.
But something is lost in that easy acceptance of what is. Certainly, our imaginative grasp of the process of change is dampened by an unwillingness to consider that things could have been different, and, by all accounts, once were so. How can we understand epochal change unless we have some way to access that breathless uncertainty, the mixture of fear and anticipation, the jitters and rejiggings that come from things being as yet undecided? This work argues that we are all living through some wondrous and horrific world changes – and that attempts at understanding what is happening must make space for both the wonder and the horror of our times.
When I first read Marshall Berman's groundbreaking account of cultural change, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I was struck by the sense of high excitement that pervaded this study of the cultures of modernity. Although this cultural production emerges from the most turbulent times, and runs parallel to immense and intense barbarism, there is something important about acknowledging that sense of excitement. Most of all, I took that elation as a sign that things were not yet decided. Berman himself writes in this vein of the modern voice:
It is a voice that knows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come through. Grave danger is everywhere, and may strike at any moment, but not even the deepest wounds can stop the flow and overflow of its energy. It is ironic and contradictory, polyphonic and dialectical, denouncing modern life in the name of values that modernity itself has created, hoping – often against hope – that the modernities of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow will heal the wounds that wreck the modern men and women of today. (Berman, 1982, 1988, 23)
That heightened sense of simultaneous possibility and danger is Berman's chosen subject. His argument that modernity, in all the many varied processes that this term includes, at once renders us hopelessly broken and endlessly powerful, always torn between mourning what has been lost and welcoming what could be, embodies the doubleness of modern experience. The suggestion that all that is solid melts into air is both a threat and a promise. Everything known and certain in the world, the good, the bad and the indifferent, drifts away leaving us without any of the comfort of knowing where we are or of being at home. Yet that uncanny sense of rootlessness also promises that the shape of the world and our destiny in it are yet to be written. Anything can happen and there is no way of knowing whether that anything will be good or bad – only that our modern consciousness tells us that it is ours to shape:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. (Berman, 1982, 1988, 15)
We are now passing through a time of similarly tumultuous change. I am not making a case here for the end of modernity, and neither is this a belated addition to the fractious debates about postmodernity (see for example Bauman, 1997; Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 1992). Rather, the parallel I wish to draw is with that feeling of living through huge and unpredictable change. Perhaps this is an extension of the same long process, with all that is solid still melting into air. It is certainly arguable that the multiple processes that are gathered together as globalisation represent a continuation of the seemingly endless refinement of modernity. That long discussion is beyond the scope of this project. Instead, my interest is in our ability to register and understand these changes as we live through them. I hope that what follows goes some way towards registering this moment, and offering some clues towards its understanding, while recognising that its end is not yet decided.
Inevitably, this work shows the influence of the anti-capitalist movement, and especially of the intellectual renaissance that has emerged in resistance to globalisation (Gills, 2000; Klein, 2000; Mertes, 2004). However, the present study is not quite in the tradition of these anti-corporate critiques. There is a resonance with this other work, and some points of political agreement, but my primary goal here is to construct a framework for understanding. There is something uncomfortable about identifying your enemies too easily and too quickly. The teacher in me is concerned that we register the complexity of the situation, even as we line up in our respective teams. In the end, I want to argue that understanding needs to be, in part at least, distinct from political allegiance, although I hope that there will also be some informative relation between the two.
The other characteristic that distinguishes this work from much other related literature is my wish to register something of the excitement of the globalising process. The chapters that follow focus on various extremes of human hardship and danger. The underbelly of globalism is not a pretty thing, except in the terms of the exploitative anti-glamour that gets off on death and suffering. But there is something missing from any account of the global integration of the shadows that does not make space for the sense of adventure and possibility that is also apparent. For this reason the discussion to come tries to register both the horror and the elation of what we are living through.
CHAOS AND ORDER
The strange and exciting processes of globalisation can be characterised as an ongoing and irresolvable battle between forces of chaos and forces of order. Of course, the discussion of globalisation has more often concentrated on the apparently chaotic aspects of this era. So we learn, with some sense of relief, that the era of increasing global integration decentres us all. No more master subjects of empire, now even the rich and powerful have become vulnerable to forces beyond their control (Sardar, 1998).
This is the account of globalisation as 'accidental'. Here the economy grows in unexpected and unplanned ways and we have no choice but to live with the consequences of this cultural earthquake. Here globalisation has not been subject to planning or conscious development by any party; it is portrayed as an anti-human force, resistant to control or intervention. In this telling, the various attempts by human beings to co-operate at an international level – be this in terms of political agreement or economic contract – come to be seen as the antithesis of globalisation.
Against this, I shall argue that the globalisation we encounter today is a product of earlier and ongoing international aspirations. The chaos has been a byproduct of one style of ordering. In fact, the chaos ensures that the order can be maintained.
Many of the debates about globalisation have seemed to assume that it is akin to a natural disaster, a strange event that happens to us and which we can only hope to survive. Although some brave souls have attempted to suggest that perhaps these happenings are not inevitable, the notion that globalisation could be halted or turned back has been ridiculed as unrealistic and Luddite.
My interest is not in halting or reversing these processes. Whatever the many and extreme deprivations that have resulted from movements within the global economy, it is not the case that the poor were better served by what happened before this. There is no state of grace to which we can return, as usual. Instead, along with many others, my interest is more in the possibility of adapting and reshaping globalisation in order that it might better meet the needs of ordinary people all over the world. This is one of those pesky lessons of modernity – any better tomorrow must come out of the debris of today.
However, the main focus of this book is the notion that the global structures we inhabit have not emerged spontaneously, inevitably, and without historical context. In fact, others have argued quite the contrary, namely, that globalisation represents a plan for world domination. Mark Rupert, for instance, argues that the whole debate about globalisation and its emergence has been conducted in deeply ideological terms that mask the political project of a particular neoliberal vision of global integration:
There is no reason to believe that liberal globalization is ineluctable. Contrary to much of the evolutionary imagery or technological determinism which is often invoked to explain it ... globalization has been neither spontaneous nor inevitable; it has been the political project of an identifiable constellation of dominant social forces and it has been, and continues to be, politically problematic and contestable. (Rupert, 2000, 42)
While I agree with some aspects of this account, in that the formal institutions and processes of economic integration have been part of an explicit plan instigated by a self-proclaimed interest group, the implication that the multi-layered processes of globalisation can be explained away as a conspiracy by the powerful is problematic, to say the least. Technology may not be determining, but technology has played an important role in shaping the manner of global integration. It may be true that the metaphor of an unstoppable evolution has formed part of the propaganda of neo-liberalism, but global integration has been shaped by more complex and contradictory forces than this embodiment of capitalist will. Even if the powerful have a plan, history will always complicate its implementation. We have been living through a time when the forces of globalisation have seemed to belong exclusively to the rich and powerful. As the world changes, it can feel as if ordinary people everywhere have no choice but to suffer – there is little sense that we can shape the new day that is arriving: that privilege belongs to someone else. Yet even the unstoppable juggernaut of globalisation can be rattled by unplanned complications. In particular, recent rumblings from international institutions have suggested that there exists a criminal and illegitimate set of global networks that threatens to destabilise the more celebrated transactions of the global economy proper. It is this parallel world that forms the focus for this volume.
In the discussion that follows, I want to return to some old and seemingly forgotten arguments.
AN EDUCATION IN CURRENT AFFAIRS
When I began thinking about this book I wanted to pull together a number of key debates, and to provide some kind of route map for the complex suggestions coming from different disciplinary fields. In this sense, then, while I am entering these debates very much as an amateur, my hope is that a cross-disciplinary approach may open up connections and insights to a wider audience.
As a teacher, I have found that students are highly engaged with debates about the nature of globalisation and its impact on our everyday lives, and are eager to think about the emerging political context and challenges that are facing us all. However, much of the material that discusses the emergence of contemporary globalisation remains somewhat remote from their concerns. In my most recent courses I have found that students share my concern to understand contemporary events as they unfold before us. This desire to develop some critical insight into the confusion of recent happenings, most especially when what happens is so very frightening, has been shared by my students and myself.
As a result, this work has been motivated by a strong belief that education can help you to understand your world, however quickly that world may be changing and however alarming those changes may be. I also think that these turbulent times offer excitement as well as alarm, and that the adventure of social change is a story well worth telling. What follows, then, is an attempt to pull together some disparate threads in the bloodcurdling but eventful adventure tale of recent global events. There has been a strange tension in many spheres of social science discussion in recent years – good sense tells us that there are no sustainable metanarratives, just broad conceptual frameworks that must be filled with local detail to bring any insight; yet the new catch-all of globalisation theory seems to promise a welcome return to our dreams of totalised knowledge. Everyone seems to be looking for some story that will link the disparate confusions of our world and, despite its varied chapters and approaches, the saga of globalisation appears to offer this longed-for handle on all human life. It is hard not to be painfully aware of the allure of this promise. In response, this volume also tries to link the segments of some diverse globalising trends while remembering that this is not a new universalism. Most of all, what follows is an attempt to describe the collection of events that have come to be known as the most recent phase of globalisation as historically particular, as the events of a particular context rather than as a new master narrative for all time.
GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR IMPACT
The remainder of this chapter will review the formation of the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the IMF and GATT, and the project of global economic integration that has been undertaken through these structures. That is one theme in this discussion – the formative role played by international economic institutions in the creation of what we now regard as the global economy. Alongside this, there is the role of foreign policy decisions that are not easily mapped onto pure economic interests. I hope that what follows shows something of the manner in which these two forces shape and contain each other, and lead us to the encounter with contemporary forms of globalisation.
The return to more economically informed modes of analysis that comes with the widespread take-up of globalisation-speak is welcome. Better to know than not about the stitch-ups of trade agreements and the unstoppable calls of national and transnational interests. Without some awareness of this not-quite-visible element of all our lives, it seems impossible to understand anything of the changes we are living through. However, there is a danger that a desire to understand the workings of economic life can become an acceptance of one account of what economic life could and should be. Much of the discussion that portrays globalisation as an unstoppable force in one direction, as an inevitable linking of the world into a particular form of global market, accepts the free market as the natural state of economic life. Somehow the market will out, regardless of the actions of individual actors. Samir Amin has mounted a long-running critique of the apparent naturalness of the terms of capitalist development and the seemingly magical powers attributed to that mysterious entity, the market:
'The market', a term referring by nature to competition, is not 'capitalism', of which the content is defined precisely by the limits to competition implied by the monopoly of private property (belonging to some while others are excluded). 'The market' and capitalism are two distinct concepts. (Amin, 1997, 15)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from
Traffick
by
Gargi Bhattacharyya
. Copyright © 2005 Gargi Bhattacharyya. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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