~ Alex Severson, Class of 2012, Political Science and International Studies student
“Let arms yield to the toga.” – Marcus Cicero
The dissemination of ideas, the transmission of cultural memes, the evolution into and trend toward a technological world was not instant. There was no sudden Eureka! moment. Globalization’s origins are disputed. Some scholars maintain that the world started to become more globalized with the advent of the Roman Empire. Others claim the Industrial Revolution. Others maintain that it is a relatively more recent phenomenon, inextricably linked to post-WWII consumerism, the rise of what some view as the American corpocracy, the infamous McDonalds, Starbucks and Wal-Mart triune. Whatever the case, it is necessary to put forth a working, multifaceted definition of globalization, one that is not narrowly economic for to put forth a strictly economic definition would only relay a half-truth devoid of a necessarily human impact. Globalization in this sense refers to a diminution of borders, a denationalization of sorts. A diminution of borders neither in a politically anarchic sense of the word nor a demographically territorial sense but in an intangible sense, a blurring. What Friedman refers to as a flattening of the world. An equalization. Broadly speaking, a transnational sort of cohesiveness that arises as a consequence of trade, whether this trade be in dollars, bullets, warheads or ideas. Yet this is all rather broad and nebulous. The real question remains unanswered. How has this come about?
Globalization as an economic principle is rationalized by the idea of economic liberalism and free trade. The actualization of a common market. The diversification of worldwide production markets. Ease of access. Information flow. Cultural diffusion. A whole plethora of anthropological and sociological textbook terms. In a drastic oversimplification, here is the breakdown. All of these things helped to spawn a revolution in knowledge. This, in consequence, spawned innovation. What followed is what we know today. Innovation beget a broad, competitive worldwide market. It engendered competition and this in turn had the tendency to reduce prices. Things got dirt cheap. It provided poorer countries with an opportunity to make themselves better off. Technology promised much. Technology was a way of salvation, or so it seemed. Quasi-corporatic countries made it well. Industrialization and progress were key and the weaker nations wanted to emulate. Or so it goes.
As globalization has become a fiercer polemic in recent years, so has, in proportion, the arms trade grown. Arms companies now operate from stations and headquarters all over the world, whether they export component weapons pieces or the whole she-bang. Countries that do not even manufacture guns find themselves inundated with Kalashnikovs and Glock 45s, particularly in Africa. Countries have companies, seemingly innocuous enough in their names (for instance, Germany’s Mercedes-Benz), exporting components and weapons systems to sensitive, warring countries such as Sudan and Uganda to be used in mass slaughter[1]. Mercedes Benz – the company’s car make touted in modern rap songs to be the social equivalent to a gangstuh g thug’s ideal pimped out ride – is sanctioning killing, albeit indirectly. However, the paradox of this is that there is no clear contradiction within extant national laws, no slap-in-the-face abrasively obvious jurisdiction. What legislation does exist is for most countries tied up with the spirit of the Cold War and consequently antediluvian in a society that seems to think that disarmament is only just now becoming imperative and where procurement (whether it be of nuclear or small arms) is backwards, even immoral. Outsourcing has provided some companies and countries with an opportunity to avoid the legal entanglement of their own nation’s arms export controls by just shipping components overseas and voila, behold the cha-ching of cash flow and cheaper labor while tanks get assembled and plutonium gets extracted from nuclear waste. Witness the strong ‘empower’ the weaker countries, masquerading ill-intentions behind the guise of ‘aid toward development‘ or the baby-skin chastity of ‘providing nuclear technologies and materials for peaceful sustainability or energy purposes.’ This is all done with impunity. In these cases and in recent years, it has seemed to be the trend that globalization has transferred the bulk of the ‘dirty work’ from the G8 countries, from the rich and wealthy and developed countries, to developing countries. This has created a class of emergent exporters who are irreparably dependent on arms production, whose economies become suckered into this increasingly classless addiction. Just to name a few countries in the past twenty years who have fallen victim to this siren nicotine – Israel, India, South Korea, Brazil, Singapore, South Africa, China and now, while not necessarily primary arms exporters, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. While legislative efforts have been undertaken in recent years by organizations such as the European Union, the Organization of American States and the Wassenaar Group of 39 arms producing countries, these efforts have been undermined by a lack of agreement on the proposals, simple repudiation and somewhat relatedly, the establishment of a grey market, a sort of hybrid ambiguously-legal interbreeding of government production and black market. The very existence of a grey market alone stands as a solitary question mark on a blanked out page when it comes to regulation under national and transnational laws because of its very hard-to-define, or perhaps more fittingly, hard-to-implicate nature. These complications in addition to inadequate government attempts at curbing trafficking have given birth to an almost stateless state of weaponry. Courtesy of manipulative and sprawling global business enterprises, wimps are annually becoming metamorphosed into wimps with guns (or a little bit of U-235, some neutron activators, some ultra-centrifuges and some steel), redefining and protesting international stability, trying to chance scoring in the precarious hegemonic balance of power. It does not really help that military spending has increased in recent years to embarrassingly egregious amounts. Just in the United States alone, the total base spending for the 2009 military budget is $515.4 billion dollars, with billions being thrown into missile defense, various stealth fighter planes, Future Combat Systems and other miscellaneous military constructions[2]. In the 2008 fiscal year, the military budget for the United States accounted for a mind boggling 21% of our total federal budget. Military expenditures have increased in recent years worldwide; the trend is not exclusively American. Consider this. According to a report compiled by the Control Arms campaign, “After year-on-year increases since 1999, global military spending this year is estimated to reach an unprecedented $1,058.9bn, which is roughly 15 times annual international aid expenditure.[3]” The sheer expansion of defense industries (in direct relation to governmental military contracting) has been an enabling factor in the aggrandizement of the global arms marketplace. It does not help that it is all legal too. This is all just a case of growing pains. More money floating around, more weaponry floating around, more demand floating around all at a vertiginous, dizzying speed. The world has come to the realization that no one country is self sufficient anymore when it comes to arms production or the defense industry. Part of the United States’ own military industry is foreign-owned now. Think about it. As such a patriotic and arguably jingoistic, quintessentially ‘American’ thing as our own military, the boys in blue, is owned by other nations, the consequence of a post-1990 progression toward mergers and acquisitions within the defense industry[4]. If that does not cause some uneasiness, stop reading now.
Yet perhaps the best example of how globalization has made possible this arms bazaar is given by the mere fact that there exists a fear of nuclear terrorism and not so much in the actualization of nuclear terrorism itself. There is now the fear of nuclear terrorism as the global underclass has become more cognizant of the relative ease of smuggling fissile material. While it has become almost normative in lieu of the Cold War for countries to practice abstinence from the use of their nuclear arsenals (this in turn reflective of an international almost self-fulfilling gravitas that spawned forth from the Cold War), the threat has nonetheless come about not only from rogue states but from stateless terrorist organizations, most predominantly to the Western eye, al Qaeda. Building a nuclear bomb is no walk in the park, though it is rocket science. It requires many things and rests on so many intricate calculations and infinitesimal measurements. Uranium must be enriched to a certain criticality threshold (90%) or, if one prefers plutonium, one must undertake the rigorous process of extracting it from nuclear waste and purifying it. Then comes the steel casing in the bomb component, the trickiness with uranium in inhibiting the natural random firing of a speeding neutron, calculating the distance to keep the two uranium components apart from one another, figuring out what mass to use and what grade, bam, physics, physics, physics. All of this to say that while procurement may be relatively easy given the viscous flow of global component transactions, actual assemblage requires a degree of technical adroitness. It requires an expertise that is unlikely to be found within the Huxlean realm of savages, the Afghan cave and mountain dwellers, unless there is a hostage taken in the form of a nuclear physicist or an engineer or two. However, genius can be found anywhere in any form, pledging allegiance to any flag or paying lip service to any fleeting ideology. These are by no means idle considerations to be brushed aside either. That poorer nations are becoming nuclear in the ‘dirty’ sense of the word lends itself naturally to such concerns. The thought process goes if poor states with poor track records for upholding international humanitarian law start flaunting around nuclear ambitions haphazardly like a drunk throwing darts, when will it end and where is the line drawn? What is there to stop these nations from acting in their perceived ‘self interest’, from outsourcing away their nuclear successes to state-supported terrorist organizations in return for a few George Washingtons? Will sanctioning be enough to quell the desire for power and overcome the global predilection for blind exportation and money making,? Yet perhaps the broader and more pertinent question is can anything at all truly halt globalized nuclear ambitions undertaken for defensive reasons or is the perceived threat to security, is the ambition itself untouchable and unyielding?
This question is not endemic to a discussion on nuclear arms. It extends to the realm of small arms as well. One need only look to the doubling in defense spending between 1985 and 2000 in some of the world’s poorest non-nuclear countries, such as Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda to see evidence of such a sad transformation[5]. Money that could have been used to provide for an education for their nation’s children is jettisoned into a military (or militia’s) budget and to what end? Observe the international complicity in supplying military aircraft to Sudan by Russia and Belarus, tanks and artillery supplied to Sudan by Poland, France, Iran and Siberia[6]. These nations are circumventing existing yet weakly enforced regulatory laws and profiteering off of the laxity of arms license controls which have not kept pace with globalization. People need to consider that what is nominal here does not matter. What is by the books legal, is not necessarily morally right. Nominally, these transfers are legit. Legally, they are questionable but obviously not enough to galvanize an uproar. These things, this scrap metal, these bullets, these tanks, they come at an agonizingly human cost. And this is not just a cost in terms of a body count. Intimidation. Rape. Displacement. The cycle finds itself on woeful repeat. Consider the child in Darfur, in Mexico, in Haiti. The inculpable, blameless child and his role as victim in all of this. A victim of a world lacking in the international political will to put an end to this inhuman bazaar, to modernize international law. A victim of a trade whose regulation is irregular and scrambled, of a worldview that insists that mankind is inherently evil and violent and that the ends always justify the means.
So what does the future hold in store? The old adage that before things get better, they will get worse is one approach, however cynical, to take. As technologies become more advanced and as the world becomes more connected, transport will only get easier and weaponry the more deadlier. More states will deify the warhead and intoxicate themselves with bullets and tanks and the line between peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons research will vanquish due to so much blurring. Instead of Doctors Without Borders, underground militia groups and complicit governments will parody this with their own ‘betterment’ program of Tanks Without Borders, blasting away at villages, secularly and coldly ruthless in the chaos they seek to inspire. Yet we need remember that trend is not destiny, that humanity’s direction is neither fixed nor prescribed. This drifting towards arms enculturation will most likely be countered by the current and augmenting international stigmatization of proliferation efforts and by commitments toward disarmament, military budget reductions and in a similar vein, more comprehensive and unequivocal legislation. All of this to say that globalization and the arms trade as we know them will not suddenly die. Their hearts pump gold, or Almighty Dollars, and no siren can tempt them to stasis. While states do have a legitimate right to self-determination and self-defense, it is necessary that we do not over-exercise this right or distort it in such a way that results in an over-exuberant arms melee free-for-all battle, the world pitted against itself, with rivers becoming bloodbaths and the world ablaze with fiery damnation. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
[1] Caims, Edmund. “Arms Without Borders – Why A Globalized Trade Needs Global Controls.” Amnesty International. Amnesty International, Oxfam International, International Action Network on Small Arms, 2 Oct. 2006. Web. 29 July 2009. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/POL34/006/2006/en/30873344-d403-11dd-8743-d305bea2b2c7/pol340062006en.html.
[2] Kaplan, Fred. “What’s Really in the U.S. Military Budget?” Slate. Washington Post, 04 Feb. 2008. Web.
29 July 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/2183592/.
[3] Caims, Edmund. “Arms Without Borders – Why A Globalized Trade Needs Global Controls.” Amnesty International.
Amnesty International, Oxfam International, International Action Network on Small Arms, 2 Oct. 2006. Web. 29 July 2009. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/POL34/006/2006/en/30873344-d403-11dd-8743-d305bea2b2c7/pol340062006en.html.
[4] SIPRI Yearbook 2006: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
[5] Smith, Dan. The Atlas of War and Peace. London: Earthscan, 2003. Print.
[6] Caims, Edmund. “Arms Without Borders – Why A Globalized Trade Needs Global Controls.” Amnesty International. Amnesty International, Oxfam International, International Action Network on Small Arms, 2 Oct. 2006. Web. 29 July 2009. <http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/POL34/006/2006/en/30873344-d403-11dd-8743-d305bea2b2c7/pol340062006en.html>.
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