GLOBALISATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER: THE DYNAMICS OF CONFLICT OVER EURASIA

Sungur SAVRAN

The tragedy of 11 September 2001 should not blind us to the immense significance of what has been called by the US administration Operation Enduring Freedom. This, it should be remembered, has been defined as a "campaign" to uproot "terrorism" that will possibly last for decades. The war on Afghanistan was only the first phase of this campaign, which, in addition to US military involvement in the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen and now Indonesia, will in all probability be continued with a full-fledged war on Iraq in the very near future. The Afghanistan war, however, has already given us an indication of the objectives of US imperialism underlying Operation Enduring Freedom. By far the most important among these is imperialist domination over Eurasia, itself the key to the imposition of a new order on the entire continent of Asia. The long-term nature of the US engagement in Central Asia is graphically shown by the setting up of US bases in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan. This is the first time in modern history that Western capitalism has secured a military foothold in Central Asia and the first time imperialist troops have established a consented presence on the former territory of the October Revolution. It is one of the central ideas to be defended in this paper that, for roughly the next two decades, Eurasia, the vast region extending from the Balkans, through Russia, Turkey and Iran to the Caucasus and Central Asia, will in all probability experience a storm beside which the events that unfolded in the Balkans in the 1990's will pale to insignificance.

In its turn, the NWO cannot be understood in isolation but only as the political superstructure of the economic strategy of "globalisation". Hence the structure of the present paper. The first section will deal with the reality and the myth of "globalisation" and seek to understand the major driving forces behind this new wave in the contradictory history of the internationalisation of capital. The next section will build on this to identify the specific characteristics of the strategy of the NWO as imperialist politics. This will then allow us to situate the developments in Eurasia in the overall context of imperialist strategy at this dawn of the twenty-first century. The concluding section will try to bring out the contradictions inherent in the world imperialist system under the combined strategies of globalism and the NWO, provide a prognosis for the foreseeable future and draw lessons for the struggles against imperialist capitalism.