But what should we expect from the Manchester Guardian?

In 1914 the Austrian (and Hungarian?) nobility didn't give a hoot about international trade. The Junkers didn't care about it, either -- except to ban it.

Hobson seems to have thought that all Germans were or should be Rathenaus and Bleichroders. History proved they weren't.

Perhaps, Putin and the Russian elite don't care, either.

I have always been suspicious of these great cyclical theories of history, the ones that predict some millennial paradigm shift--from Marx to Spengler to Fukuyama.

Until the day comes that large-scale genetic engineering is used to alter the nature of Man, human nature will not change fundamentally, and human nature in the mass--societies and nations--will not change fundamentally.

For example, the religious/mystical impulse was responsible for some of the bloodiest wars in human history. (And I consider German Nazism, which drew on pagan mysticism, as part of this category.) And as we saw on 9-11, that impulse still packs a potent punch, even in the 21st century. You've got many thousands, perhaps several millions, of Islamist radicals whose dream is a worldwide holy war. And they don't give a damn about interdependence, the Internet, globalization, or anything else worldly. They think they are serving the supernatural.

You've also got the very human propensity to bully and trample others, as an expression of national will and triumph. Dictators, regimes, whole nations actually prefer to do that on occasion.

It's because humans are NOT always economically rational beings that violent conflicts occur. You can always think of a rational reason why violence is not the answer or hurts one's economic status in the end. But those arguments don't sway people as much as their adrenal glands and gonads often do.

the only thing holding us back from tearing up the global system--that is, surrendering to the selfish national ends we might satisfy immediately in war, which is, after all, an organized form of theft--would be some long-term (and rather effete) conception of our international interest in peaceful trade.

Organized forms of theft: for oil and for elections, huh?

I'm not at comforted by these economically deterministic theories, based as they are on highly idealized models of the evolution of historical circumstance, seemingly under the sole influence of economic rationality.

People fight wars, in part, because people are violent, stupid and impulsive animals with abundant warlike itches that they cannot resist scratching from time to time. Going to war is intensely pleasurable for many of us, and the pleasures include those ecstatic martial waves that sweep through whole populations, enervate people's senses, spark their imaginations and bind them into committed teams - the "war fever" that makes them feel more awake and alive. Human beings have a built in war-making functionality, forged in the deep evolutionary past. They take pleasure in exercising these capacities from time to time, and all sorts of stimuli can activate those capacities.

It takes all our might to resist the short term emotional pleasures of aggression and catastrophe, especially when these sports are more spectator than participatory, in order to keep our noses to the grindstones of our long term interests, and restrict ourselves to the boring, intellect-based pursuit of commerce and the long-term pleasures of material gain. Rationality is a discipline that is an achievement of culture, and is held in place by tenuous dikes, levees and pipelines that are always in danger of breaking. You don't need to tell a complicated social and economic story to explain why wars occur. But you do need to tell a complicated social and economic story to explain why they don't occur during any sustained stretch of time.

Then, integration was the product of the (more or less) free exchange of goods among a dozen or so great nation-states. Today, it comes from (more or less) open, cosmopolitan networks within a thousand or so great companies

Bah, these globomanical 90's era fantasies about the withering away of the state, and its replacement by corporate "networks" are wishful thinking, at least at the present time.

Even if we accept the predominant influence of economic rationality, the biggest economic enterprises of all remain nation-states, by far. And nation-states are the enterprises who own most of the military hardware, provide the relatively peaceful spaces in which commerce can take place, and are ultimately responsible for the commercial benefits that can be delivered by those networked corporations that operate, globally or locally, in the peaceful spaces they provide.

Nation-states do contract out their services to other corporations, and are interdependent on them. But the Marxist notion that they exist wholly to serve these other corporate entities is mistaken. Nation-states are organized into their own competing networks, and are in business for themselves. They are in the business of providing physical security, and threatening physical destruction, to large populations of human beings, and take payment for delivering the security or withholding the destruction.

And making wars on other militarized nation-states is just part of the natural competitive process for them; its how they sometimes do business, although they would prefer to do it in as risk-free a way as possible. Their peaceful corporate subsidiaries and clients in other businesses are important to them, but they will cut those other firms loose in periods of catastrophic downsizing, when their own economic survival is at stake in the competitive struggle of nation states. Like any industry, the industry of nation-state networks sometimes goes through peaceful and relatively stable periods, and other times through more dynamic phases with the potential for lots of destruction.

Until Toyota and Siemans et al, - and all the rest of us for that matter - collectively own the power to make war, and own it as a single network rather than being distributed among separate competing networks, wars are very likely to happen. Right now, those corporations are merely clients, and those tools are still in the hands of antiquated and reactionary governments - i.e. protection rackets - organized on nationalistic lines and principles, sometimes even religious and ethnic lines.

And don't be dazzled by terminology. We do have different names for things now. We don't call all of the overseas interests organized under the competing protection networks "colonies", and we have different legal institutions of control that sound friendlier on paper. But states still compete for the acquisition of clients and interests, for privileged relations with suppliers, and ultimately for outright ownership of supplies. What America Inc. or Russia Inc. or China Inc. actually owns or controls is different from the territories that are designated "America", "Russia" or "China" on international legal documents.

You give a great a priori argument for thinking that the pursuit of control over energy resources shouldn't guide the behavior of nations so much, because we are talking about a relatively small percentage of the economy. Unfortunately that a priori argument runs into the undeniable empirical fact that nation-states are pursuing control over energy resources, and doing so rather aggressively and single-mindedly. Maybe the point here is that the interests of nation-states don't coincide with the aggregate interests of the corporate clients they protect. The energy supplies on which the military machines that are their core business essentially depend are worth much more in their considerations than are the other businesses that pay them for protection, but which they can survive without.

Even if things were as rationally organized as the globalized corporate network you imagine, and the economic incentives were as you describe them, and even if no powerful enterprises had a longterm interest in war, wars would still happen from time to time. People fall into war because they are in perpetual competition, which is perpetually destabilizing, and they sometimes can't prevent natural downward cycles of suspicion, preparation for war, more suspicion, and the rising importance of the use-it-or-lose it motive for preemptive action. We're just not that smart and calm, and these cycles are hard to stop once they get going. People can easily get into a situation in which all the major parties start to believe war is going to happen, whether they want it or not, and that they are all going to suffer long-term damage, at which point their calculations become focused on who is going to experience the most damage, and who the least damage.

Information is the most closely guarded and valued commodity on earth and always has been. Rockefeller didn't make a great fortune selling oil, everyone was selling oil, Rockefeller made a fortune because he controlled the information needed to sell the oil.

Alexander Hamilton created the manufacturing base by buying and stealing the intellectual property needed to create the base.

This notion that we're all going to free base on information because it's so available now is fallacious. The more access to information and intellectual property people have the more authoritarian, nationalistic and proprietary governments become. Soon, all information becomes classified and people are more dependent than ever on the largesse of government control of that information.