Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

Folks,

thank you for these insightful reflections on the situation in the US;
I would like to come back to a point that Felix made in his initial
question:

> I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the
> fracturing of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe,
> over the last 70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and
> bad).

Which trends of "usually following the US" do you have in mind here?

I don't know how to agree, seeing a very diverse picture in the EU and
beyond - governments run by a range of liberal, liberal-nationalist,
social democratic, populist right, populist left, etc. etc. parties;
a rather stable, if weak, set of foreign policies; a general support
for international cooperation and institutions; a general turn towards
more "green" politics.

I'm not saying that all is good in Europe, but I see "trends" in
Europe that are decoupled from, if not in opposition to, what has
been happening in and around the US in the last 20 years. What you
say may have been true for the 50 years before that. (From a German
perspective, and in terms of foreign policy, a crucial shift was
during the Schroeder-Fischer red-green coalition, when Germany went
from supporting the 1999 NATO airstrikes against Serbia, to declining
to join the US-led alliance in the war against Iraq in 2003.)

(And parallel developments of decoupling could probably be described
for other countries and global regions that in the 20th century were
more dependent on the political influence from the US, than they are
now - with other influences and dependencies coming in their place, of
course.)

Others have already argued that what we might be seeing during these
years is the withdrawal of the US from global leadership, and a
self-isolation from what is happening elsewhere. In the past, it would
have been unthinkable to have a global consensus without the US - on
military issues (but now: Syria, Libya), or on ecological/industrial
development (but now: the Paris agreement that most countries hold on
to, despite the US). But it is now becoming not only a possibility,
but even a necessity, to develop international institutions like the
WHO or UNESCO without the USA.

Whether and how all of this is related to the internal situation
in the US, and whether this isolationism is an effect of the white
nationalism of which Trump-as-president is a symptom, I don't know.
What I see are the self-destructive cynicism of the isolationism (like
the US, in the hope for autarchy, using extensive fracking and thus
destoying the environment in their own lands), and I can only hope
that a more solidary imagination will guide political developments
post-Corona - there and elsewhere.

Felix, to conclude, I doubt that the situation in the US elicits a
global leadership crisis. It must be taken seriously as something that
can have major repercussions also on an international level, both
regional and global. But it needn't be a blueprint for anyone.

Maybe, here in Europe, and in Asia, and elsewhere, we have to start
worrying about the US in a different, in a new way...

Regards,
-a




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