Breaking Down NATO/G8 and Rising Up Against Austerity and Militarism
To mark the NATO summit held in May in Chicago and the simultaneous G8 summit held in Camp David, Maryland, the War Resisters League and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance released a new popular education resource.
This participatory workshop explores:
- The story of NATO and G8: who makes them up, what they do, and how they have grown over time;
- How NATO and G8 have worked together to profit from and control most areas of the world, especially the global South;
- How the countries that control NATO/G8 have imposed an economic and/or military agenda on the people of Afghanistan, Libya, Greece, Iraq, and other countries throughout the world, including the United States;
- How specific banks central to NATO/G8 countries’ economic policies profit from militarism;
- How struggles against economic austerity, war, and militarism are connected across the globe; and
- What we can do make the connections for our networks and communities between global and local struggles for justice.
What follows is an excerpt from the curriculum. Download the entire curriculum as a pdf file, plus get a supplemental slide show, at warresisters.org/allofourscurriculum.
General Framing (5-7 Min)
Note: This section aims to draw the connections between NATO and G8 as global power formations that play a role in imposing austerity on people and nations around the world and coordinating military actions against them for the purpose of advancing the interests of the global economic elite. It may be used by facilitators for general background. After this framing piece are key take-aways.
Today’s domination and control is not new. It is a continuation of more than five centuries of development of the global political economy to secure global markets where maximum profit can be made, to produce with the cheapest global labor
and natural resources, and to maintain political stability. From the 1400s to 1700s, the global market system spread worldwide through colonialism—including military conquest and wars of genocide against indigenous peoples—the transatlantic slave trade, and extensive use of slave labor in production for the world market; gender, racial and national domination; and the general exploitation and oppression of working peoples by the developing capitalist class. The United States, in the 1800s, became the dominant imperialist force in the Western Hemisphere. Under the strategic direction of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, the United States prevailed in the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War. The victory of the North in the Civil War concentrated power in the United States within the industrial capitalists.
Coming out of World War II, the United States was able to establish hegemony within the Western world. At the same time, the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 led to socialism in the Soviet Union, and in the post-WWII period the Warsaw Pact formed as the core of the socialist bloc. The Cold War between the socialist and capitalist spheres of influence ensued. In this period the global economic expansion was driven by the destruction of WWII and the need to rebuild and, thus, the development of industrial and financial global corporations that pushed outward the globalization of the political economy.
Popular struggles for workers rights, racial and gender justice, and anti-colonial/anti-imperialist liberation movements gripped the countries of the world. Major reforms were won, new social contracts between the popular classes and the ruling class negotiated, and national liberation was in the air. For all these reasons new global financial and military institutions had to be created to expand, to contain, and to dominate the new world order.
From the 1940s to the early 1970s the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, GATT), the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program), and NATO as the military arm were able to carry out their role in the global political economy. The oil shocks in 1973 and the global economic recession necessitated another economic and political formation to help manage the crisis. The United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Japan and France gathered in Washington, DC, in 1973 and formed the Group of Five (G5). Italy joined in 1975, making it the G6; and in 1976 Canada joined, so it became the G7. NATO and the G7 met together for the first time in 1977 in London to take stock of the current global crisis and to chart a course that led to their neoliberal policy agenda and increasing militarism.
In the 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the landscape of the global political economy changed, as did the institutions controlling and containing it. Russia joined the G7 in 1997, making it the G8. In 2005 the G8+5 (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa) formed. G8 summits, designed to manage increasing crises, addressed a broad range of problems and extended invitations to many nations and global institutions and agencies.
NATO’s military mission also expanded in the 1990s to deal with the breakup of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And its membership incorporated several new nations stemming from these breakups. In the 21st century NATO, as global capitalism’s military arm, extended its sphere of activity to the Middle East and Arab world (most notably Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya), and to Africa—including Sudan and the Indian Ocean coastal waters off Somalia, allegedly to combat piracy. Its new “strategic concept” includes environmental and food crises—mainly because the popular response to these crises is viewed as cause for military intervention.
Intensifying economic crises, ecological collapse, and a wave of austerity sweeping the globe characterize the 21st century.
Local, national, and global struggles from below are arising across the world. The major response from the global 1 percent is increasing repression and militarism, linking more deeply the war abroad and the war at home.
Take-Home Messages
- NATO emerged as the military arm to enforce agreements coming out of early global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank), the United Nations (GATT), and the United States (Marshall Plan)—all of which operated in the interests and on behalf of the ruling class. Note: IMF = International Monetary Fund; GATT = General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (it later was institutionalized as the World Trade Organization).
- Over time, as other global economic institutions were formed, such as the Group of 5/7/8, NATO became the military formation to offensively and defensively protect their decisions—decisions that served the economic interests of member nations, decisions that imposed measures of austerity directly (structural adjustment policies) or indirectly (devaluing of currency). Note: G8 nations imposed these policies not directly in G8 meetings, but indirectly through their influence in these various international economic institutions.
