Pit Schultz on Wed, 1 Mar 2023 07:44:44 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Germany's geopolitics |
Tentative Annihilationism As written before, the main global conflict today is between the US and China, and the bridging role of Europe, and within the "dynamo" of Germany and France, would be to take a more decisive stance towards China (and thus towards the BRICS and the Global South), of course without leaving NATO or breaking ties with the US, these transitions need to be peaceful, non-violent and not just based on apocalyptic deterrence. If the future world markets were reduced to those "friendly" countries that supported the sanctions against Russia, the German export model would be doomed and would lose its capacity to facilitate a green transition. Ukraine has become a pledge for the unhealthy expansion of Western democracy (including NATO and the EU) to effectively distract Europe from finding a better geopolitical position in a post-neoliberal, post-globalised, new multipolar world order. The current expansion is not organic and too homogeneous, as the US capitalist (Wallstreet) system, as the main motor of the externalized costs of climate crisis, isn't sustainable enough to run a planetary order. It is clear that China is no longer just an extended workbench, but a partner in science and technology that is at least as relevant as the US. after the Trump experience and the flawed democracy of Russiagate vs. MAGA, the risks of China's autocracy should not be underestimated either. it should not need any more shock doctrines to complete the "Zeitenwende" that could be provided by the unfolding of Russia's attack on Ukraine to an open endedness. China will be needed again to put a decisive pressure on Russia. The goal is not merely territorial as it iseems, but to pressure the west to renegotiate its hegemonial claims, and open up to a less hirarchical more multilateral planetary order, not at last to coordinate climate change processes, and facilitate legitimate institutions, this time without a complete capitulation and the annihilation of millions. It is clear that new forms of semi-war economy and top-down Keynesian planning are emerging to emulate the ability to organise rapid technological/industrial transformation, as in China. It is not the end of capitalism, but a fundamental change in its oligarchic superstructure, the ideology of the invisible hand, the Washington Consensus. The Schmittian Grossraum is in a perspective of interlocking worst-case scenarios, of reterritorialisation along telluric identitarianism, of digging into polarised camps and deciding the fate of countries, disregarding their autonomy, drawing borders and trade flows from the point of view of a handful of superpowers. i am not an advocate of this, but neither am an advocate of green neoliberalism and the moral superiority narratives of the german greens. What is needed are new types of assemblies that will facilitate the green transition in record time, which at first has to be a technological project, and from there is engineered by social, cultural, political, economic processes. the planetary organisation that will facilitate this is most likely not simply following the USA as the internal systemic contradictions are obviously too great. Specific geographical inequalities, which today translate into climatic dependencies and weather catastrophes, are more likely to be redressed when the financial mechanisms of the IMF/World Bank are likely to be replaced by a network of recalibrated CBDCs. So transatlanticism needs to be balanced with tianxia - especially to enable the shared green transition and to give the global south a more confident and dynamic position, not just as a lithium resource. So the Silk Road and big infrastructure projects, the Kantian Konfuzianism of "under one sky", need to be repositioned against the ever-fading American dream. This is not in the tradition of anti-Americanism, but of American romanticism, which is quite common in post-war Germany and which, strangely enough, goes down well with the more patriotic Americans and their view of Biden's latest expansionist adventures. There is a long list of filmmakers, intellectual gadflies and musicians who are defined by a deep and complex relationship with the American way. nettime itself can be seen as a form of transatlantic enterprise, but more along the lines of discussions about the thing nyc and "goofy leftists sniping at wired". even the ARPANET protocol was a combination of pragmatic US-engineering (tcp/ip) and visionary Euro-abstration. (OSI/CYCLADES) With the rise of psychological hybrid warfare, psy-ops such as blaming COVID-19 on China while concealing the own role in gain-of-function research at the WIV. We're being prepared for war with China in a late stage simulacrum of supposed supremacy. It may take another rupture to escape this reality tunnel, or it may be possible with an international extra-parliamentary and intersectional peace movement, perhaps to the sound of Korean pop with synthetic voices co-composed by AI. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: