Article Category: Vol. 51, No. 02 (June 1999)

Kosovo and the New Imperialism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

June 1, 1999

Note: We have no way of knowing what the status of the war in Yugoslavia will be when the following reaches you. Since its completion, there have been more NATO “mistakes”: the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and of many Kosovar Albanian civilians in Korisa.We can only hope that such events will bring the U.S. government and its NATO allies to their senses. But whatever happens in Yugoslavia, the global dangers posed by the United States and its long-term objectives will persist so long as this country's imperial project remains intact

NATO’s Balkan Adventure

by Tariq Ali

June 1, 1999

NATO decided to celebrate its fiftieth birthday with a bang in keeping with the changing character of the “defensive alliance.” It assumed that a short, sharp war in the Balkans would rapidly bring Milosevic to his knees, and Kosovo would become the second NATO protectorate in the region. As I write, this ugly war is over a month old. It is a war that has little, if anything, to do with the people of the old Yugoslavia. This has been a war for U.S. hegemony in Europe and the world, the act of a triumphant imperialism designed to rub the face of its old enemy in mud enriched with depleted uranium

Is Overcompetition the Problem?

by John Bellamy Foster

June 1, 1999

Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950-98 (Special issue of New Left Review, no. 229, May/June 1998), 262 pp.

It is tempting perhaps to attribute all the problems of capitalism to excessive competition. After all, capitalism is generally presented within contemporary ideology as a system which is nothing more than a set of competitive relations governed by the market. Is it not possible then that the economic contradictions of capitalism, and indeed the present world crisis, can be explained in terms of the globalization of competition which now knows no bounds, and is undermining all fixed positions, resulting in a kind of free fall? This seems to be the view of the distinguished Marxist historian and social theorist Robert Brenner in his ambitious attempt to account for the present global economic turbulence

Turbulence in the World Economy

by David McNally

June 1, 1999

Two years ago, the tectonic plates of the world economy shifted. Within a matter of months, the crisis in Thailand had engulfed East Asia. Global financial markets were rocked a year later when Russia defaulted on forty billion dollars in foreign loans. Just as markets were starting to shrug that one off, economic panic hit Brazil this January, sending stock markets crashing and knocking down the country's currency, the real, more than 40 percent. Pundits are no longer asking if another country will be next, but who will be next

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