Since the fall of the Wall and the emergence of new commercial and financial powers, at both state and private level, international economic confrontations have evolved and multiplied against a background of ‘global non-governance’. These conflicts result either from competitive economic rivalry between companies, the fruit of a more aggressive market economy, or from power strategies engineered surreptitiously by a few dominant nations that are both economically nationalist internally and interventionist externally (Russia, China, etc.). These states have no qualms about providing political, financial or commercial ‘backing’ for strategic global companies in their own self-interest; such companies may be private or public, or financial groupings, termed ‘takeover funds’: Gazprom (gas), Rosneft (oil) and Severstal (steel) in Russia; Petrobras (energy) and Embraer (aeronautics) in Brazil; Huawei (telecoms), Petrochina, Sinopec and CNOOC (energy) in China; Cemex (building materials) in Mexico; and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technology fund in the United States, tasked with acquiring innovative foreign SMEs; etc.

Non-Governance

Such economic confrontations are often very much ‘gloves-off’ affairs and not conducted on equal terms. For many of those involved, the final outcome takes precedence over all other considerations, and the end justifies the means.

As a typical example, in a stable African country in 2001-02 a listed Western company with significant financial resources and influence in the construction sector attempted to protect its local monopoly, firstly by physically eliminating the founding chairman of a leading competitive African company with multilateral funding, then immediately afterwards by assassinating the democratically elected head of state of the same African nation, as he was suspected of providing direct support for the competing project. Without the ‘timely’ intervention of the security services of the Western nation in question (who managed to bring the operation to a halt in extremis after suspect weapons had been delivered to the African head of state’s presidential escort), the Western company would probably have succeeded. This example, reminiscent of the US company United Fruit, which created and destroyed Honduran governments purely to support its banana industrial strategy, shows that today, as a result of globalisation, some private companies now consider themselves powerful enough not only to circumvent but even overturn the existing government of a fragile state if it is seen as a possible troublemaker.