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A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State

Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics. / Last Part XII

Peter Dale Scott - Relatively open societies produce wealth, and wealth, unregulated, tends to convert what were once relatively open societies, perhaps even republics (as in the case of Athens, Rome, and the Netherlands) into empires. Institutions and relationships outside the bounds of these civil societies will tend to consolidate into meta-groups, groups outside the state, and often offshore, that have the wealth and de facto power to influence the policies of the state.

This has been particularly true in America since the so-called Reagan Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. U.S. bases have now appeared in previously unthinkable outposts like the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, but only after U.S. oil majors had already secured multi-billion dollar contracts for oil exploration in the Transcaspasian basin.

Insofar as this expansion into Central Asia was a matter of geostrategic policy, it was a policy primarily directed by private oil companies and PMCs, not the state. The sense of powerlessness that pervades American civil society, and even Congress, derives in part from this awareness that the state only mediates in foreign imperial expansion today after crucial decisions have already been made by institutions over which the state has no control.

Since the year 2000 the American state has been, to an unprecedented extent, dominated by these outside forces. Thus, in studying recent developments, I have come to articulate further the distinction I have made previously between parapolitics, the covert actions and policies which can be traced back to secret state agency, and deep politics, the entire field of political practices and relationships, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.

I now see a third level, still deeper and even less documented, for which I can only think provisionally of the abused term transpolitics: actions and policies which are deliberate, but which have been determined by overworld groups and agencies beyond the reach of the domestic state.

The “Pristina dash,” if truly an action not initiated by the Kremlin, would constitute an example of transpolitics.

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies.