Given a WTO-driven free trade regime in a world without enforceable international law and with large accumulations of capital emerging from the supply of consumer wants (including guns, sex, labour, drugs, untaxed goods and unregulated financial services), the lifting of capital controls by the Reagan-Thatcher generation also meant the globalisation of criminality in all its forms. What happened between the mid-1990s (when the great debate on post-Soviet security took place) and today cannot be defined solely by the threat of terrorism. 9/11 provided merely an extreme example of what was being predicted by many analysts would happen in any case. The dangerous anarchic effects of free markets without regulatory structures would come to threaten state security, particularly when unemployed and unemployable Cold War ‘political soldiers’ had no alternative gainful employment and kept friends in high places.
Most people in power today have come to accept that globalisation is either inevitable (as the born-again Marxists who underpin the contemporary Western Left have gloomily concluded) or desirable (as the ultra-liberals of The Financial Times and The Economist would have it). There is no power in the West or in the elites that are allied to the West that is now not wedded to some variation of the inevitability/desirability thesis. The security services of the West are now trained to see anti-globalisers, nationalists and socialists as all equal threats to security.
They may often wear suits but our global security services are still soldiers with the ethic of soldiers and they must accept the premises of their masters much as their predecessors accepted the premises of Marxism-Leninism or the traditional idea of national interest answerable to Crown or President. Once the ideology of global liberalism is presented to them as politically legitimate, they must, as technicians, collaborate cross-border and start to watch us with ever-increasing vigilance. The reasons why are what this article is about.
What parapolitical investigation can do
Let us pause here and be self-critical. Are we making assertions about reality? Or are we presenting an hypothesis for testing against the few facts we seem to have? Parapolitics is like Zen or some great art: it deals with the meaning of silences, lacunae and absences. It inhabits a space between ‘true’ history, which is an interpretative discipline based on what actually exists as evidence in the record, and investigative journalism, which is a provisional but vital trade in uncovering ‘stories’ from evidence that might be flawed, placed for a purpose or manufactured. It suits authority that our accepted vision of reality treats this intervening space as non-existent because authority is in effective control of what exists on either side of that space and likes us to believe that where there is silence, there is no truth or meaning.
Between two poles of ‘evidence’ that can be placed before the court of peer groups and public opinion, a vast area of human political activity is consigned to a land marked ‘Here Be Monsters’. Anything in this land is a marvel, mere fable (or rather ‘conspiracy theory’). Vast swathes of contemporary history and current state practice simply do not exist not, at least, until the files can be opened and academic experts can get at the data (or what data is allowed to remain). There are some truly great contemporary historians but even the best of these have to be complicit, like national newspaper editors, in the system that they study and report upon. Meanwhile, the destinies of billions (their lives, their property, even their identity) are at the mercy of surprisingly small elite groups who engage in wars and plots in which the operatives are unaccountable and, on occasions, downright unhinged.
In this sense, if the printed book was the birth-document of the academic mode of analysis, so net tools like Wikipedia, a constantly revisable draft of ‘reality’, scrutinised by knowledgeable and disciplined peer groups, could be the new model for describing and evaluating the world of executive unaccountability as it slips through the net between paper-based evidence and the gossip of ‘unconfirmed sources’. ([1]) We need to move away from the two extremes of quasi-legalistic, pure, evidence-based technical assessments on the one hand and the laziness of obsessive conspiracy theory on the other. Some surviving facts cannot be allowed to speak for all possible facts.
So let us return to the subject of our studies the problem of globalisation and what the ‘men in the dark’ are doing about it. Where exactly should we be concentrating our investigative skills today? How can we develop a hypothesis about the new security elite that we can test against the facts?
The ‘war on terror’ and the tax base
If massive capital accumulation is taking place outside the Western state system and if this accumulation can finance illegitimate enterprise, then the current war on terrorist financing has to be seen in this context. It is as important to have Saudi Arabia join the WTO (a process which should be completed by the end of this year) as to have its government police the zakat system. Core Europe, for example, is concerned not only about violence and disorder against its citizens but about a world system where the wealthy can now call on free trade legalities to move their assets anywhere in the world where taxes and costs are going to be cheaper. If taxes cannot be raised, then more people must be brought willingly or unwillingly into the tax net. Expenditure (as in the Euro-pean defence sector) has to be focused ever more precisely on ‘efficient ends’.
So, a great deal of security and intelligence activity is not about our personal security at all (otherwise, we might see a policeman on our streets occasionally or a different attitude to the licensing laws) but about ‘intelligence-based’ policing (i.e. letting drug dealers sell drugs to our kids for a while so that they will lead the police to the bigger fish). The target is ‘economic crime’ (a wonderful return to Soviet terminology) such as fraud and tax evasion. Identity cards are thus much more about managing identity in the context of fraud (including benefit fraud) than about any threat from terror groups. Parapolitical enthusiasts would do well to investigate not only the good things that the police do (and they do many good things) but the very much more ambiguous, political things they do like constructing a framework of global financial controls to enable state reinvestment in ever more ambitious security arrangements that are designed to protect authority rather than ourselves.
‘New’ countries like the EU or defrocked imperial countries like Russia have to construct a tax base from nothing and create the ability to control capital flows within the over-arching WTO framework without losing control of the benefits of the WTO system. This is why our security services are becoming so heavily engaged in business intelligence, energy security and regulation of capital at the relative expense of effective border control and community policing.
The aim of European policy (for example) is to make single European and global markets work and not to compromise on the working of those markets even where they create the opportunity for crime. There is thus no other policy available than increased surveillance and trans-national co-operation once the pass has already been sold on free movement of peoples, goods, services and pathogens.
The security forces’ role as agent of state formation and of socio-political control needs to be taken much more seriously in this context the terrorism that fuels acceptance of surveillance and restrictions on liberty is merely a symptom of a greater pathology.
Creating a New World Order
Talk of a New World Order is where we usually find the ‘nutters’ the idea that there is some conspiracy, usually associated with grey-haired, late middle-aged men put out to pasture from NATO and high office and ensconced in the Bilderberg group. We are looking in the wrong place. What we should be looking at is the increasing effort being taken into control of the institutional structure of global governance. This is a big subject but the investigator might find it interesting to see how NGOs have been drawn into the global institutional structure and then seduced into ineffective political campaigns that draw the sting of the crisis in the emerging world without making any substantive change to core issues of redistribution. He or she might look at how corrupt, decadent talking shops like UNESCO are allowed to continue to exist and others like UNDP to become agents for ‘modernisation’; or why France, a sovereign nation, is having such great difficulty in bringing Mr. Mandelson to heel at the Doha Round.
What is going on is the systematic infiltration and attempted capture of the entire body of international law and regulation by one ideology (that of the liberal West) which has the resources and determination to effect such a revolution. The UN in particular is in danger of becoming little more than the creature of the foreign policy ambitions of the superpower and its closest allies. We must put our sentimental attachment to the United Nations of 1945 aside: within a few years this may no longer be the same organisation that had the admittedly theoretical potential to keep any power in check according to its original Charter. ([2])
The security and intelligence role lies in providing the soft power tools to ensure that fundamental reform (that recognises the changes in the global community since 1945) does not take place anywhere in the international institutional structure; that the UN and other organisations fight only the battles that the Anglo-Saxons want fought (and other big powers will tolerate); and that progress is made towards the type of reform that will make the ‘international community’ a vector of global liberal change rather than (its original intention) the basis for reducing the chances of war and setting benchmark standards for the world.
We should be looking at every UN investigation designed to expose some ‘abuse; and should ask questions not on the terms of the investigators but on the terms of the context. Who staffs the investigations? From where are they seconded? Where will they make their careers? Who constructed the terms of reference? How was the data compiled on which accusations are based? Even the UN Secretariat is known to be uncomfortable about becoming a Middle Eastern investigations agency.([3])
The European Connection
There is probably no more important task for investigators than to turn to the construction of a very recent European security elite and how this new security establishment has spun off far from national Parliaments that never were more than weak restraints on the Crown or the Republic throughout the 20th Century. This European judicial system is a very recent phenomenon. The European Judiciary Network for criminal matters was founded in 1998. Eurojust emerged in 2003. Europol’s powers are currently being extended (albeit that national police agencies continue to resist its intrusions). The EU idea is of a European Area of Justice that will be integrated into global police operations. In other words, this entire system has emerged in under a decade.
None of this is accountable except to the odd generally under resourced legislative committee that can escape governmental expectations and to the intervention of the occasional journalist who can persuade an editor that perhaps, just perhaps, the executive does not always tell the truth and that process and detail are worthy of space. None of this is democratic in any meaningful sense except insofar as some party lackey in executive office rubber stamps an appointment over which they have no subsequent control. States, as geographical agents or branch offices of a collaborative system of professional elites, are now spinning off out of control as a condominium of unaccountable executive authorities, securing their financial and democratic base through soft power management and increasingly inclined to force as an instrument of policy outside its own territories. This is the thesis that needs investigation.
Interim Conclusions
None of the allegedly liberal players is truly liberal but each follows (and this is explicit in security thinking) the line that liberal conduct is in the best national interest and not a ‘good in itself’. The idea of nation has been subverted from being the interest of the peoples of a territory to the protection of a system of global interdependence operated by more or less benign elites. In international relations, the executive supported by the security elite is thus engaged in a project to construct a sufficiently useful international legal system with a sufficient cover of democracy (based on our system of elective dictatorships) to ensure a sufficient veneer for the use of force. In domestic affairs, national security is now about preserving state authority against threats from the unregulated parts of the global economy and from the demands of its own population.
Getting Inside Political Warfare Techniques
The third area for investigation having explored the security systems’ engagement in the increase of state power (especially through ‘homeland security’ networks) and their role in capturing the international institutional system in order to effect state policy (which is more the territory of, say, SIS) is to investigate the application of ‘technique’ to subversion and regime change on a global scale. Investigators are missing a trick we do not need to get conspiratorial. Our investigation can take place by observing, questioning and interpreting events taking place on broadcast, in the web and in the print media every day simply by exercising our critical faculty. We need to develop these faculties not only about the information being provided to us but how it is presented psychological and political manipulation is not only about Goebbels and Soviet era disinformation. We need to go back and look at the ‘silences, lacunae and absences’.
Manipulation is about the somewhat school-boyish but influential techniques of the vaguely psychopathic Sefton Delmer. It is about the rise of a public relations industry in which 90% of all global PR firms are headquartered in the US. It is about the politicisation of the global media (of which the Murdoch case is merely the most obvious). It is also about the emergence of an ideology of public diplomacy and ‘soft power’ and about the creation of techniques that started with People Power in the Philippines when Marcos was removed and have not ended with the latest round of privately funded ‘orange revolutions’.
Above all, we have to stop the childish view that governments simply lie. Most government information is accurate as far as it goes. The investigative task is often the more mundane one of asking whether the headline matches the body text (i.e. we have to read the stuff in full), what seems to be missing, what other events are happening which the news may relate to and what interest does it serve. If we can say that this or that bit of news is misleading, fails to include material contextual data or serves a particular purpose, then we will already be doing more than the bulk of contemporary journalists are doing.
In short, investigation is not only about the plots, deals and cover-ups beloved by the older generation of journalist, it is all about ideology and policy formulation and the techniques used to communicate ideas and mobilise mass action in support of those ideas. Above all, we need get inside the mind of the secret state, to start thinking a bit harder about why it behaves as it does domestically and internationally. What it thinks as a group is intimately connected to what its individuals do on the ground.
Some Final Conclusions
This new system of security originated over a decade ago and is being accepted by stealth, without debate because it is unrecognised as a system. It is now time to see matters in a global institutional perspective. The security and intelligence community is now trans-national and no more accountable than when it was nationally based. The centre of gravity, increasingly in the post-9/11 homeland security community, is shifting from Washington towards a polycentric Western security elite-in-formation. There is now often more tension between types of trans-national intelligence agency (homeland security, treasury and defence) over methodologies than there is between the national units of these types over ends. In this environment, global media management, disinformation when necessary, special service skills, superior armed force, control of international institutions and preservation and extension of Western state power are all integrated elements in a vision that is partly about trade and energy supplies, partly about prestige and place in history and partly about an ideological vision of a better world.
But, above all, it is about the practical management of an ideology of globalisation. Once the decision was made that global free trade based on free capital flows was a good thing, then a lot followed from that assessment: the need to secure trade forward into new territories, the need to create a regime that restricts disruption from ‘known unknowns’ and the need to deal with ‘blowback’. Moreover, this new ideology must be seen to displace the old, so that traditional national interest conservatives and corrupt Cold War allies have been purged ruthlessly.
But the worm in the bud is the utter lack of accountability and even informed democratic authority for the system that is being put in place. It is as if the judgement has been made that only democracy that endorses benign elites is democracy that is tolerable because only such elites can guarantee a culture of rights and duties, the rule of law, basic human rights, sufficient forms of democracy and free trade. It is as if liberals are deeply worried about ordinary, stupid people being allowed to make emotional mistakes.
As result, the elite has adopted a deeply pessimistic view of human nature based on the Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebenica. This may be the clue to the interest of these elites in faith-based collaboration and their fear of the mob its leaders have genuinely lost faith in human progress. It is in this scary new world that parapolitical investigation has a major role to play.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia is not here set up as a flawless model of knowledge. There are already signs of attempted content management as its importance as arbiter of fact slowly displaces the Encyclopedia Britannica, but the methodology of Wikipedia permits, through Open Source technology, anyone (in principle) to set up a similar model to place peer review at the centre of knowledge dissemination. The Wiki model is moving from the accumulation and assessment of data to the collation and comparison of opinion. I and three other critics of the current system of policy formulation in politics started work on a programme to create a policy platform tool using Open Source technology last year but we could not sustain the project because we all had other priorities. However, we noted on October 14th that a team from New York Law School was experimenting with a similar Policy Wiki see http://dotank.nyls.edu/PolicyWiki.html and this is well worth looking at.
Another imaginative project which may happen one day, is the use of new technology to givea direct voice to people on the ground in a crisis. Cheap internet and laptops with equally cheap digital cameras can supply live material as web broadcasts from almost anywhere in the world and the only constraints are, of course, the dangers to individuals in oppressive regimes and, equally dangerous, the ability of wealthy individuals and their Western backers to finance protest against inconvenient regimes to give the illusion of mass protest using these tools. Nevertheless, there is a potential for ‘real news’ mediated by communities or activist networks alongside the news mediated by large-scale news corporations.
[2] Dan Plesch has argued forcibly for the democratisation of the United Nations and a reversion to the principles of the original Atlantic Charter.
[3] ‘UN resolution over death of Hariri threatens heart of Syria’s regime’ Financial Times, 1 November 2005