Re: Imperialism? Yes, please....

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

> Welcome the new imperialism
>
> The US must make the transition from informal to formal empire
>
> Niall Ferguson
> Wednesday October 31, 2001
> The Guardian
>
> ... Lurking inside us all there is a little Marxist who would like to
> believe that the complex political world around us can be explained by
> simple economic realities.

of course, the meaning of "economic" is different for Marxists than for
liberals. For the latter, it refers to markets, exchange, greed, etc. For
the former, that's part of the picture, but there's also class, domination,
exploitation, alienation, imperialism, etc. Modern Marxism introduces the
dimensions of ecology, patriarchy, ethnicity, and the like (following the
lead of the "new social movements" of the 1970s).

> Somehow there must be a link - I have heard this argument made repeatedly
> - between global inequality and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Is
> globalisation to blame? Compared with the late 19th and 20th centuries,
> the world economy is not very global at all. That is the main explanation
> for widening equalities.

says he. I'd like to see an argument that the absence of globalization
causes inequality. As the US has globalized in recent decades, the degree
of inequality has _increased_. If nothing else, the advocates of
"globalization" systematically ignore transition costs, which
disproportionately hit the poor, disenfranchised, and working classes.

> ... We have to understand what the alternative to failure is. We have to
> call it by its real name. Political globalisation is a fancy word for
> imperialism, imposing your values and institutions on others. However you
> may dress it up, whatever rhetoric you may use, it is not very different
> in practice to what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries. We
> already have precedents: the new imperialism is already in operation in
> Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor. Essentially it is the imperialism that evolved
> in the 1920s when League of Nations mandates were the polite word for what
> were the post-Versailles treaty colonies.

this "new imperialism" (formal imperialism of the old British sort, with
formal colonies, as compared to the generally informal imperialism that the
US practices) is what I've called the nascent world state (dominated by the
US), though the terminology doesn't matter a lot. (A despotic world state
dominated by US, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, etc., roughly in that
order, would clealy be imperialistic.)

The problem with this fellow's conception is not only his moral
wrongheadedness. Crucially, it's the creation of a world state that helps
create the Osama bin Ladens of the world, just as British colonialism in
the Sudan helped create the Mahdi. Domination from the outside a country
almost automatically produces nationalistic or some similar type of
resistance. These days, with nationalism discredited for many,
religious-fundamentalist and ethnic radicalism seem to prevail. In other
words, the imposition of a world state causes a movement against that
state. If we're lucky (i.e., if there's a break from the current trend),
the movements against the world state will coalesce into a movement for a
_democratic_ world state.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine