The world today is in the midst of the most monumental social, political and economic upheavals in human history – a state of continual protests, uprisings and what may be considered inevitable revolution on a global scale. Power that had been centralized for roughly 500 years among the Atlantic powers of Western Europe and North America is rapidly shifting to include the rise of the East, as China, India and others operating within established, institutional frameworks of power get wooed by the former Western imperial managers to become colluders in empire, instead of competition.
To add to this, global wealth and power is being centralized among a highly interconnected and transnational ruling class: a small global elite who own and operate the major banks, corporations, foundations, think tanks, universities and international organizations. It is this numerically minute group of plutocrats whom empire serves. Long established among the Western elites, this group of plutocrats is attempting to bring the oligarchies of other powerful and rising states firmly within its organizational and ideological structure.
Think of it as an established Mafia that helped build up a few other crime families in order to extend its influence – and which now has to contend with the increasing autonomy and competition that these strengthened crime families pose, as it attempts to bring them closer within the established ‘Family’ instead of risking an all-out Mafia war in which all parties would surely lose. The changing structures of global power, along with the ever-increasing unrest of populations around the world, has created perhaps the most challenging situation for any empire in human history.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has written and spoken for years on the issue, publishing in establishment journals and speaking at elite think tanks about what he calls the "Global Political Awakening." Brzezinski is not a casual observer nor a resigned academic; he sits within the heart of the intellectual and institutional foundations of the American empire alongside other notable figures such as Henry Kissinger and Joseph Nye. Brzezinski was even recruited as a foreign policy adviser to the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who referred to Brzezinski as “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”
Brzezinski wrote in 2005 that the United States needed to face “a centrally important new global reality: that the world’s population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power.” Thus, the “central challenge” for the U.S., noted Brzezinski, “is posed not by global terrorism, but rather by the intensifying turbulence caused by the phenomenon of global political awakening. That awakening is socially massive and politically radicalizing.”
In a 2004 speech to the elite-populated Carnegie Council, Brzezinski explained that the global awakening was partly “spurred by America’s impact on the world,” by virtue of the fact that America is able “to project itself outward” and “transform the world,” creating an “unsettling impact, because we are economically intrusive, [and] culturally seductive.” In other words, American imperialism is – by its very nature – creating its antithesis: the global awakening.
The awakening “is also fueled by globalization,” Brzezinski further explained, “which the United States propounds, favors and projects by virtue of being a globally outward-thrusting society.” The process of globalization, however, “also contributes to instability, and is beginning to create something altogether new: namely, some new ideological or doctrinal challenge which might fill the void created by the disappearance of communism.”
In other words, since the end of the Cold War, when Marxism and Communism represented the largest and most organized global ideological challenge to Western state-capitalist democracy, Brzezinski maintains there has been an ideological vacuum in terms of ideas opposing the present global order. The global awakening, however, is changing the circumstances. As he stated: “I see the beginnings, in writings and stirrings, of the making of a doctrine which combines anti-Americanism with anti-globalization, and the two could become a powerful force in a world that is very unequal and turbulent.”
Brzezinski noted in 2005 that, “the population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest,” having become “acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree, and often resentful of its perceived lack of political dignity.” A “community of shared perceptions” was being created by the spread of radio, television and Internet access, creating the potential for energies to be galvanized which “transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches.”
The youth of the Third World represent “a demographic revolution,” and being “particularly restless and resentful,” they also represent “a political time-bomb... creating a huge mass of impatient young people.” The “potential revolutionary spearhead” of the Third World youth was, in Brzezinski’s view, “likely to emerge from among the scores of millions of students” concentrated in the educational institutions of the developing world. Having largely originated from “the socially insecure lower middle class and inflamed by a sense of social outrage, these millions of students are revolutionaries-in-waiting... connected by the Internet... Their physical energy and emotional frustration is just waiting to be triggered by a cause, or a faith, or a hatred.”
In 2008, Brzezinski wrote in the New York Times that “global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.” In his view, the necessary course of action “is to regain U.S. global legitimacy by spearheading a collective effort for a more inclusive system of global management.” Brzezinski noted, in a speech he gave that same year to Chatham House, that "in the current post-colonial era, it is too costly to undertake colonial wars” which is why the U.S. should attempt to avoid getting further “bogged down” in the Middle East and Central Asia, where America would be “engaged in a protracted post-imperial war in the post-colonial age, a war not easy to win against aroused populations.”
Later, in a 2010 speech to the Canadian International Council (CIC), an elite think tank based in Canada, Brzezinski explained the “total new reality” of the awakening of mankind, explaining that “most people know what is generally going on... in the world, and are consciously aware of global iniquities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. Mankind is now politically awakened and stirring.”
In a 2012 speech at the European Forum for New Ideas (EFNI), Brzezinski stated that 20 years following the end of the Cold War, “a truly comprehensive American global domination is no longer possible [because] in recent decades, worldwide social change has experienced unprecedented historical acceleration, particularly because instant mass communications... cumulatively have been stimulating a universal awakening of mass political consciousness."
"The resulting widespread rise in worldwide populist activism is proving inimical to external domination of the kind that prevailed in the age of colonialism and imperialism," he continued. "Persistent and highly motivated populist resistance of politically awakened and historically resentful peoples to external control has proven to be increasingly difficult to suppress, as protracted guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, Algeria, or Afghanistan have amply demonstrated; and as the rising turmoil in both the Middle East and Southwest Asia are foreshadowing.” (“The Role of the West in the Complex Post-Hegemonic World,” Speech at the European Forum for New Ideas, 26 September 2012)
As Brzezinski explained to his fellow elites and imperialists in the United States and other powerful Western societies: “The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” As he stated at Chatham House in 2008, the world’s major powers, “new and old, also face a novel reality: while the lethality of their military might is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at a historic low. To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.”
Institutional and imperial power structures have never been more globalized or concentrated in human history; yet, simultaneously, never have they been under more threat from an awakened humanity. We have unprecedented access to information and communication; never have we had a greater opportunity to transform the world for the better and to challenge – or make obsolete – the prevailing global power structures.
Yet, simultaneously, never has humanity – collectively – faced such a monumental challenge: a combination of a massive global economic crisis, growing levels of poverty and hunger, tens of millions dying from poverty-related causes every year, massive global land grabs, high-tech police states and surveillance societies, murder by remote control drone terror campaigns, a more distanced decision-making apparatus than perhaps ever before, and an ecological crisis of such proportions that it threatens the very survival of the human species, let alone all other life forms on Earth.
The World of Resistance (WOR) Report is a new Occupy.com series that aims to provide greater context and understanding about the causes, and the consequences, of social unrest, protests, riots, resistance, uprisings, rebellions and revolutions spreading across the globe. What form is the "global political awakening" taking in different regions, under different conditions, and with what differing degrees of success and failure?
This series aims to explore the evolution of the long road to world revolution so that we may better understand, and support, the causes of human and biological survival to ensure that people's “central challenge” to elites – that is, the quest for “human dignity” – is made all the more impossible for 1% institutions and ideologies to undermine or repress.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is a 26-year old researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is project manager of the People’s Book Project, chair of the Geopolitics Division of The Hampton Institute, research director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project, and hosts a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost.
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