FOCUS | Stirling Newberry: The Rage of Days

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FOCUS | Stirling Newberry: The Rage of Days

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:30:24 -0700

 

FOCUS | Stirling Newberry: The Rage of Days

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/060705X.shtml

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/060705X.shtml

 

The Rage of Days

By Stirling Newberry

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Tuesday 07 June 2005

 

It came with dawn, a banging of pots. First one, and then another,

until there formed an incessant chorus, like the waking of the birds.

Wave upon pattering wave. In late 2001, the sound of banging pots came

to Buenos Aires, and they sang the song of discontent. The Peso was in

crisis, and within weeks it would be unpegged from the dollar,

dropping to a fraction of its previous value. Early in the new year,

men would be shuffled through the presidency, ending the comic parade

with a huge default and a massive economic recession.

 

What followed was a rage of days, where presidents came and went,

and confusion and uncertainty hung over the fate of the nation. In the

wake of this collapse, an entirely unexpected political stability was

reached. Foreign lenders were told to stand in line behind everyone

else, and the standard prescription of " shock therapy " was ignored.

Foreign economists would throw tantrums about the " Great Bank Robbery "

and wring their hands about the problems of " moral hazard " in lending

to developing nations. Desperation and gloom descended on the capital

city, and people crowded into milongas to wash away their

frustrations, immersed in the rhythms that reached to the roots of

tradition: the tango. And in those halls, out of jostling fragments,

there emerged a whirling motion, a hive of humanity captured by the

swirls of the dance. Argentina debated its future as much in gesture

as in words. There was something there, something beyond cogent

enunciation, that did not flee with capital, and was not devalued with

the peso.

 

It was in the solace of nation that Argentines eventually were to

place their faith, and in the wreckage of the economy they found

something that had been lost in the years of chasing the dollar:

autonomy. They had taken their country back. And even though

unemployment remained high, and poverty curled its fingers around the

lives of hundreds of thousands who had not long before known

affluence, this was the hard-won profit of their pain.

 

What was not understood at the time was that Argentina's fiscal

crisis was Janus-headed: the end of one era and the beginning of the

next. It was the last of the financial crisis moments, in which money

fled a local currency for the safety of dollars. But in the aftermath

came the rejection of the International Monetary Fund's shock therapy

and an assertion that Argentines would go it alone into an uncertain

future.

 

The " No " votes on the proposed European Constitution have been

framed in ideological terms, with some blaming " socialism at the end

of its tether " and others, an excess of " liberalisme. " Instead, it

should be seen as part of an ever-increasing torrent, a rejection of

internationalism and the international institutions that were

architected in the wake of World War II.

 

It should be seen as of a kind with America's growing

unilateralism, expressed in going to war in Iraq. It should be seen as

of a kind with the transformation of jobs riots in China into

anti-Japanese riots. It should be seen as of a kind with Putin's

re-nationalization of Russia's mineral resources. It should be seen of

as a piece with the attempt to topple the Liberal Party of Canada by

an alliance of the Bloc Quebecois and the National Alliance - two

parties seeking to dismantle the federal nature of Canada and break it

into semi-sovereign states. Economic and political nationalism are not

separate, but conjoined expressions of a deeper urge, an urge for a

tie that binds people and power together by more than appeals to

abstract self-interest.

 

Internationalism is, almost by its nature, a creature of reason

and of rigor. It is explanatory and discursive. The European

Constitution asked to be graded by the pound. What was lacking was a

visceral sense of the kind of Europe it would create, and what rhythms

that Europe would dance to. The public of France and Holland could not

grasp what it meant, and so, they rejected it. Some part of this was

fear, and some part was motivated by a hard-core revulsion toward what

was seen as alien - whether Turkish nationality, muslim culture, or

English economics. But as much of what is " Non " welled up from the

diaphragms of French workers who did not see a place for themselves in

the Europe that was coming to be.

 

The logic of nation is the logic of emotion. If it is to produce

an authentic expression, this logic must go from turbulent and

narrowing anger to an expansion of perception and that peculiar

clarity that only crisis affords. It is too early to tell whether this

moment of rejection is merely a convulsive reflex or the turning of a

tide. However, it cannot be dismissed as a political movement of the

fringes, because it has flowered in so many different places, in so

many different forms. This rejection of internationalism is neither

uniformly good nor uniformly bad but is, instead, a force unto itself

that obeys a law unto itself. With the rejection of the EU

Constitution, Europe enters into its own rage of days, without

consensus as to direction or the means to solve its looming economic

problems. For the time being, the centrifugal forces have overwhelmed

the drive to convergence, and yet neither side can answer the simple

question, " what next? "

 

What causes long-seething passions to break forth is a deep need,

a need for people to be able to feel their way through the intricacies

of the world, as the gestures of the tango allow men and women to

thread their way from introduction to intoxication. If

internationalism in its myriad forms is to survive, it must become

this infinite dance within which people may find themselves.

Otherwise, as has happened so often before, they will leave the larger

public squares and crowd into smaller spaces whose shape they can

understand, and whose forms are familiar to their hands and feet.

 

The international order has been very kind to some, opening doors

and creating rivers of trade, created by flows of people, goods, and

money. But it has not given millions and millions a sense of their

place in it, nor has it given them any reason to believe that they

even have a place in it. Without an inevitable emotional logic, there

is no connection between the words written in documents and the will

of the peoples that must enact those words.

 

And that is the crux of the matter, and only that.

 

Stirling Newberry is an internet business and strategy consultant,

with experience in international telecom, consumer marketing,

e-commerce and forensic database analysis. He has acted as an advisor

to Democratic political campaigns and organizations and is the the

co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, Jay Rosen and Matt Stoller,

of BopNews, as well as being the military affairs editor of The Agonist.

 

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