From firepower to finance:the evolution of colonial and neo-colonial power - Research Paper Example

? From Firepower to Finance: The Evolution of Colonial and Neo-Colonial Power Post-World War 2 Colonialism From Firepowerto Finance: The Evolution of Colonial and Neo-Colonial Power The decline of the old colonialist system traced a sharp downward trajectory in the years after World War 2. Its fall was much more than a reaction to the second global conflagration: the imperialist system had actually begun to devour itself before the onset of war in 1914. France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and other European players on the world stage had for decades covetously eyed under-developed countries in all corners of the globe, each jealous of that greatest and most successful of all imperial powers, Great Britain. The consequent land-grab brought Europe’s industrialized nations into direct conflict, a cynical process that led to mass exploitation of native populations and a game of international “brinksmanship” that dangerously raised the pressure across an already confrontational geo-political landscape. In the century that followed, the nations of Europe and the United States would find colonialism to be an unwieldy and ruinous practice born of hubris and a misguided belief in the efficacy and sustainability of force. As the chaotic aftermath of World War 2 gave rise to the Cold War, old notions of colonialism morphed into new forms designed to serve the political agendas of the U.S. and Soviet Union. This “neo-colonialism” has given way to “corporate colonialism,” a product of economic globalization and the technology-enabled interconnectedness of business and banking interests the world over. The concept of colonialism is still with us but the old imperial model of “guns, guts and God” has long since evolved into a far subtler and more lethal form that uses high finance to hold entire nations in thrall. Finance has replaced firepower as the primary means of enforcing aggressive international policy. And Name 2 corporations are more and more acting in the role of “colonialist” aggressors. Setting the Stage – End of an Epoch Finance, of course, has always been an indispensable element of colonialism. It was unquestionably the “tail” that wagged the political/military “dog” in the classic European sense long before World War 2. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, considered by many the architect of Great Britain’s “modern” empire, depended greatly on the backing of his friend Baron Lionel de Rothschild, scion of Europe’s greatest international banking house.1 Rothschild famously secured funding – literally overnight – so that Disraeli could arrange for purchase of the Suez Canal ahead of the French (the scene in which Rothschild was informed that the security for his canal loan was the British government has become legendary in the annals of imperialist literature).2 The imperial ambitions that Germany’s Hohenzollern Kaisers pursued in Africa and the Far East would have been impossible without the financing schemes worked out between German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian banker Gerson von Bleichroder.3 The powerful financial interests that backed colonialist initiatives in the 19th and 20th centuries did so out of the same deadly combination of greed and nationalist fervor that drove most of the era’s most prosperous states in the race for empire. There is no better example of this scenario than the British Empire, which was forged from a curious hodge-podge of motives Name 3 ranging from wealth acquisition to a fervent evangelical desire to bring Christianity to “heathen” nations desperately in need of “saving.” The great drama of British imperialism was a grand prelude to the foundation of the world we know today. It played out against a backdrop of racism, heroism, revolution, savagery and finally devolution. The end of the British imperial epoch is a fascinating study of the demise of old-world political ideology as well as racial preconceptions. Revolt and devolution – the decline of the British Empire Despite its size and prestige, Great Britain’s empire had become a model of inefficiency, complacency and greed by the mid-20th century.4 Two world wars had badly eroded the British ability to maintain so many far-flung possessions (or a Navy large enough to protect them). At the “grass roots” level, the system by which the colonies were governed had become so flawed and unprofitable for the British government that Parliament was compelled to relieve itself of the vast majority of its possessions. “The Colonial empire as a whole…did not pay for itself. Individual planters and merchants grew rich from colonial trade, but the British taxpayer was accustomed to paying for the frequent small wars and the occasional small ones.”5 This top-heavy state of affairs proved too much for the management model put forth by Neville Chamberlain in the early 20th century. Chamberlain’s policy was specifically aimed at correcting what was by then recognized as a dire threat to the survival of Britain’s entire imperial system. It stipulated that the colonies should pay for themselves and that the overburdened taxpayer should not be strapped with their upkeep. This intended stop-gap measure was too Name 4 little, too late to correct a centuries-old system that had, by Chamberlain’s time, become far too large to effectively implement, not to mention enforce.6 By World War 2 the “rot” was firmly in place. The defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan by Great Britain and its allies was soon followed by the loss of hundreds of British colonies. The empire that King George VI had so recently presided over was truly one on which the sun never set. Less than a decade after the king’s death his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was forced to preside over a kind of imperial “fire sale.” It had taken a string of humiliating military reverses in the Far East during the war to convince the British that their colonial supremacy was at an end. It was here, where the Japanese had seized all Crown colonies east of Ceylon, that Great Britain was shown “the full precariousness of her position as the largest owner of overseas possessions in a world of growing nationalism – a world, moreover, in which she would herself no longer be a first-class power…”7 That distinction had fully and irreversibly passed to the world’s only two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Devolution became the official policy of the British government in 1948, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s administration set down in a government White Paper its intentions and the means by which Britain would transition its colonies in every part of the world from dependent vassal states to independent nations. The great lever that fully committed the government to decolonization was the loss of India in 1947, Britain’s most valuable overseas possession, the “jewel” in its imperial crown according to Queen Victoria. The document that Attlee published laid out the government’s rationale for decolonization, describing the extent of Britain’s responsibility to its former colonies. It said that British colonial policy would Name 5 henceforth be designed to “guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government with the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression in any quarter.”8 The seriousness of Britain’s economic problems were reflected in the urgency with which Attlee’s government began this massive undertaking. Those colonies that expressed a desire to maintain the status quo were generally ignored. The once-great empire that had long been the envy of the world had at last come to an end. All that remained was to ensure that its former colonies not be allowed to disintegrate into anarchy, or worse, come under Communist rule. Neo-Colonialism and the onset of the Cold War World War 2 tore away the veneer of superiority the great European powers wore so convincingly for so long. The Japanese military dominated the Far East, pushing the British out for good and fighting the United States to a standstill until late in the war. Europe’s colonialist nations, staggered by war, were prostrate and utterly reliant on America’s economic power to protect them from the newest militaristic threat, the Soviet Union. In the 20 years following the war, more than 40 Third World countries became independent of their former colonial overlords, most in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.9 It hadn’t taken long for the Europeans to realize that retaining their overseas possessions would be impossible in the new world order due to three factors: “an international climate that no longer regarded colonialism as appropriate; the post-war Name 6 weakness of the leading colonial powers, such as Britain and France; and the increasingly confident demands for decolonization expressed by nationalist politicians.”10 The playing field was wide open. The world was now a power vacuum that was soon to be filled by new actors with new political agendas. The Third World became the ostensible battlefield of the Cold War, with the U.S. and Soviet Union jockeying for supremacy, using the world’s newly minted nations like pieces on a chess board. This was colonialism by any definition, but with a lethal new twist popularly known as neo-colonialism. “During this time, Third World states were defined essentially by their position in the situation of superpower rivalry, implying for some a ‘positive neutralism’ in the context of the superpower imbroglio.”11 American and Soviet interests in their “client” states extended only as far as each could be exploited for political and military gain. Ideologies provided a new imperialistic grammar, with the United States claiming that it strove to “make the world safe for Democracy,” bywords for establishing a favorable environment for American business interests. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau went so far as to say that it was incumbent upon his country to ensure that international trade be carried out according to acceptable business principles.12 The Soviet Union’s strategic backing of China, Cuba, and other politically vulnerable nations inclined toward Communism was intended to counter Western expansionism. Not surprisingly, many of the new countries that emerged in the post-World War 2 environment had little opportunity to develop on their own terms. The only two remaining Name 7 colonial powers were too busy carving out their own empires, or pseudo-empires, as some prefer to call them. Africa, which had taken center stage in the pre-World War 1 race for empire, became a hotbed of political intrigue in the 1960s and ‘70s. Many African leaders, particularly those who had grown up in the old colonialist system, recognized the self-interested motives exhibited by their new Communist and Capitalist suitors as symptomatic of an all too familiar phenomenon. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah basically said that the old game was still the same, though public relations and “spin” had fostered a more subtle new version. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political system is directed from outside.”13 In other words, overt control and administration by foreign powers may have melted away but outside political influence was still very much in evidence (and all-too keenly felt). The history of the Congo has been determined by “outside influences” perhaps more profoundly than any other African nation. Belgium’s depredations in this part of Africa gave new meaning to the word “exploitation.” Viciously racist Belgian administrators routinely maimed and executed native men, women and children for nothing more than failing to gather enough rubber, the natural resource that made the Congo such a coveted possession. King Leopold’s genocidal functionaries turned this colonial nightmare into the world’s first publicized human rights catastrophe.14 (Belgium’s rapacious behavior inspired Joseph Conrad to write Heart of Darkness.) Name 8 Belgium had left the Congo so utterly dependent that when its independence finally came in 1960, political chaos was inevitable. This was a classic case of criminally negligent decolonization and of political predation that invariably occurred in such situations in the years after World War 2. Belgium’s “inept decolonization” opened the door for the U.S., Soviet Union, France and others to step in and “inject their own interests, while allegedly trying to bring order to a land whose people had never been allowed to enjoy the riches their country possessed.”15 The Congo’s dazzling resource wealth offered the world’s new superpowers a convincing pretext for inserting themselves into African politics. As it turned out, it became the latest chapter in a long, sad story of political manipulation in the Congo. The Congo was one of the more extreme examples of a fundamental problem. One of the most diabolical by-products of colonialism was its effect on the clan systems and traditions that had governed Africa’s tribal populations for centuries.16 Many African countries spawned warlord cultures that parroted the worst characteristics of their colonial patrons. In Somalia, the native clan structure was the social system by which kinship groups interacted and settled disagreements. The effect of post-World War 2 neo-colonialism eroded this natural system of checks and balances. When “following the cynical manipulations of both the United States and the Soviet Union – Somalis got access to AK-47s and truck-mounted artillery, clan conflict took on an altogether different aspect.”17 Clan leaders used these deadly new advantages to gain the Name 9 upper hand on rival tribes. The resultant bloodshed in places such as Zaire and Sierra Leone was the legacy of this latest manifestation of the old colonialist system.18 No region was of greater concern to the post-World War 2 super powers than Asia. From China to Singapore, the U.S. and Soviet Union sought to position themselves for supremacy as former colonial possessions broke away and formed nascent governments. Korea and Vietnam were, of course, the most notable examples but the drama of decolonization played out nearly everywhere in the Far East. The situation in Singapore in the 1950s was quite sensitive, with fears over a Communist takeover dominating the negotiations between the British and leaders of Singapore’s People’s Action Party, which had broad appeal in the late ‘50s. Singapore was one of the most important naval ports in the entire British empire, though the Japanese victory there during the war helped hasten the end of colonialism in this part of the world. It fell to the British to see that power was handed over to a sufficiently pro-Western independent government. In 1959, Stewart Easton wrote an appraisal of the political situation in Singapore, a blow-by-blow account of the negotiations then going on between the PAP officials and British administrators responsible for overseeing the transfer of power. It’s an interesting history of a once-commanding colonial power trying to convince itself to trust the assurances of native leaders who promised they could control their party’s leftist faction. “The government claims to be ‘non-Communist,’ free, democratic, and socialist…the PAP promised so much before the elections that it will without doubt find it hard to deliver.”19 The British retained the option of suspending Singapore’s new constitution but had no other power when it came to delaying the course of independence. No doubt the British found it reassuring that the PAP secretary was a Name 10 Cambridge-educated lawyer named Lee Kuan Yew, however, there was no doubt that the Communists had a foothold among the country’s rank-and-file. “Many of the other leaders of the party had been closely connected with the Communists, and indeed some had been imprisoned under the emergency regulations…Thus PAP, even though not dominated by actual Communists, has always had considerable sympathy with them and no doubt counts hundreds of true Communists among its members.”20 Despite British misgivings, the PAP took power in 1959 and has dominated electoral politics in Singapore ever since. Lee Kuan Yew proved to be devoted to regional security, which motivated his government to establish relations with China in 1970.21 Immigration Who’s to say whether the old or new colonialism was worse? Under the old model, when native populations were armed it was usually to serve as foot soldiers in locally organized units that were under the direct command of European officers. One could make the argument that Cold War politics represented a much worse state of affairs in which warlord “clients” were equipped to battle it out without direct military intervention by the U.S. or Soviet Union. The ripple effect of this bloodthirsty brand of international power politics kept Africa in the news throughout the rest of the 20th century. The world watched as men, women and children were slaughtered indiscriminately. In the latter parts of the century and into the early 21st century, the stream of immigration from Africa to the United States and Europe took a marked upswing. This was not just a matter of blacks fleeing a dangerously unstable political situation. White Name 11 Europeans had been in place for generations as colonial administrators, businessmen or simply fortune-seeking adventurers. These fled in droves as their countries began the process of decolonization. For most it was a simple matter of survival: without European-backed justice and military power, places like Kenya were no longer safe. In Kenya, it was a difficult time for British settlers. Africa was the only home many had ever known. The British had made the Kenya in which they grew up a virtual facsimile of Great Britain in which few had significant interaction with the native black population. Remaining in Kenya meant a radical change in lifestyle. The emigrants “felt unable to remain in a Kenya ruled by the African majority and one in which Africanization policies seemed to promise a loss of employment and/or business opportunities and of economic status.”22 Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau party was one of the more notable African nationalist movements. Nevertheless, Kenyatta’s government proved to be a pragmatic one, realizing early on that their success depended on the continuation of the system against which they had rebelled. “Institutions such as the provincial administration, police and army were taken over intact.”23 The Mau Mau even went so far as to keep some British officials in important positions of administrative power in the military and the Ministry of Agriculture.24 But emigration from this once key British possession continued at a rapid pace. The post-colonial period witnessed the establishment of policies in Europe and the U.S. aimed at slowing the rate of immigration among native populations set adrift by the scuttling of Name 12 the old colonial administrations. The human cost of decolonization could be seen on television and read about in newspapers. It was a process which provided little for former native subjects, who played out the saga of exile in every corner of the globe. Newly independent countries were plunged into bloody civil wars, their people the victims of power-hungry warlords and the political fallout of the Cold War. Natives sought safe harbor in the prosperous nations of Europe and in the U.S., but many met with an unpleasant surprise. “With the political pressure on governments to control the tide, many officials used all manner of tricks to stem this tide, for example, many asylum seekers found themselves branded economic migrants and detained or deported.”25 The British had for all intents and purpose invented the modern concept of the internment camp during the Boer War in South Africa, where the Boers had been herded en masse into camps in order to weaken their resolve to fight. This practice became de rigueur after World War 2. In Palestine, the camps were used to control the flow of immigrants in and out of Palestine, a post-war British possession that descended into one of Great Britain’s worst colonial debacles, comparable to the violence it had faced in Ireland. “Britain’s policy was to release Jewish refugees from these camps to Palestine according to a monthly quota. However, these camps soon became a publicity nightmare for the British government.”26 This troublesome situation led the British government to formulate an immigration policy that left the line between “legal” and “illegal” immigration purposely vague and subject to interpretation - in other words, favorable to British interests. Name 13 Corporate Colonialism It’s doubtful the British officials who carried out the tasks and ceremonies of decolonization would have recognized the brand of imperialism practiced by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. America’s presence in the Middle East has come to more closely resemble the commercially motivated rule of India by the British East India Company before the Crown took control. The Bush administration’s privatization of services in Iraq was ostensibly intended to reduce the logistical and economic strain that management of an occupied nation places on the military. From a practical standpoint, it gave the U.S. government an opportunity to bestow patronage upon American corporate interests. This arrangement may not be unusual in the 21st century, when large companies wield unprecedented influence on government. But it begs the question of who is really in charge. “The colonial corporations become the instrument of the nation-state, in this case to undertake the reconstruction of Iraq. They, not the government, are the purveyors of laws and customs and democratic ideals.”27 This particular form of “corporate colonialism” is in part an outgrowth of the hard lessons the U.S. learned from Vietnam. It is also a uniquely American way of marrying corporate prosperity and government policy (i.e., the business of America is business). Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater were just a few of the commercial players with a stake in the occupation of Iraq. The that come with empowering such a heavy corporate presence half a world away have been well-documented, particularly the difficulty of maintaining sufficient oversight. As such, it’s a wildly lucrative new market opportunity for big business. For the Bechtel Corporation, which had oversight responsibility in Iraq, it meant nearly $700 million, with the Name 14 potential to make many times that in the rebuilding of infrastructure and the re-establishment of basic services. It’s a thoroughly modern system of exploitation in which a formerly occupied country is “reinvented” in accordance with its patron’s long-term aims. To all appearances, power is handed back to a local government and life returns to normal. But the “debtor” nation becomes so reliant on its benefactor that it amounts to an economically enforced colonialism, in which large companies and mega-banks do the work that armies and governments once did. “A free-trade landscape sloped to the interests of corporate colonialism leads to what progressive economists call a ‘race to the bottom.’”28 Corporate colonialism is now omnipresent, enabled by Internet technology and the borderless global business environment. Big businesses and financial institutions no longer exist only as corporate citizens of a given nation-state. They have, to a great extent, supplanted the old nationalist paradigm that provided the impetus for colonialism. Corporations and countries doing business has become commonplace, as have the problems that go along with high-stakes investment and international financial dealing. An alarming number of countries that seek out partnerships with international corporate interests find themselves in financial relationships structured in ways that are decidedly not to the advantage of the government in question. “Nations compete to offer the best prices and the fewest obstacles for corporations to come set up shop.”29 “Business-friendly environments” can mean anything from tacit approval to operate polluting factories to child labor. It’s a form of Name 15 blackmail in which corporate client nations are unable to free themselves from legitimized, predatory business practices. In David Korten’s book When Corporations Rule the World, the development of corporate power is traced to a projected apex, a point at which a relatively small number of men will have accumulated such power that they will amount to an international oligarchy with unprecedented authority over the fates of nations. Korten describes this phenomenon as a “conscious and intentional transformation in search of a new world economic order in which business has no nationality and knows no borders. It is driven by global dreams of vast corporate empires…and a universal ideological commitment to corporate libertarianism.”30 In 1993, Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, published an open letter in which he put those “global dreams” into very specific words. Morita’s message was that the time had come for companies like his to band together and level national boundaries. In calling for the removal of all economic barriers, Morita said “we should seek to create an environment in which the movement of goods, services, capital, technology, and people throughout North America, Europe, and Japan is truly free and unfettered.”31 What Morita was talking about in his letter (which echoed sentiments shared by government and business leaders in many countries) essentially described a new world order rather than a system in which an external aggressor dominates other nations. Still, its call for an international economic government (and enforcement mechanisms) would remove the right and Name 16 the ability of local governments to determine what is best for their own people. From a practical standpoint, removing economic barriers is a form of control that subverts the autonomy of local governments. The good news is that technology and global commercial agreements give everyone access to goods and services from around the world. But the perspective of colonialist ideology, it represents a potentially dangerous level of external control that places all manner of economic factors beyond the means of local business and government leaders to regulate. This is a sobering prospect when one considers the corporate interests run amok in the Middle East, free from government restraints. The logical question becomes, at what point does the corporate become the government? That was the burning question in Seattle in 1999 when protestors at the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference turned violent. This was a collective cry of fear and anger against what protestors considered a dangerously nebulous force, one that defies the ability to adequately monitor and control. It’s worthy of note because it is symptomatic of a growing unease over the erosion of power at the local level. It isn’t hard to conjure up images of violent protests in Palestine in the late 1940s, or in India where natives banded together to demand sovereignty and the right of self-determination. Superficially, the circumstances are different but the underlying threat of outside domination is quite similar. A year after the Seattle incident, protestors again turned out to make their voices heard at a WTO meeting in New Jersey. A group called the New Jersey/New York Mobilization for Global Justice took credit for the April 2000 protests. The group’s position statement summed up the fears of many over the prospect of a worldwide economic government. The coalition Name 17 blamed the “W.T.O., the World Bank and the I.M.F. for the globalization of the world economy.”32 Part of the group’s accusation was that the mission of the World Bank and IMF, which is to improve economic conditions in developing countries, is a thinly veiled disguise for a far more nefarious purpose, that of forcing “countries into debt while enriching corporations and degrading the environment.”33 These may be baseless accusations, but it’s worth noting that corporate entities typically exist for the purpose of maximizing profit to a far greater extent than they are involved in improving quality of life for foreign populations. Countless examples of human and environmental needs sacrificed to profit motive give testament to the nature of large corporations. The trappings and outward appearance of colonialism have changed profoundly over the past 150 years. Yet the primary motivation for exploiting the peoples and resources of a foreign country remains essentially the same. The warships that enabled the British to create and maintain a global empire were tools aimed at achieving the same basic goal that animates the growing cabal of modern international corporate players seeking a borderless business landscape. Profit is the common motivator, the exploitation of foreign resources and markets. As long as that rationale exists, and as long as there are new gains to be made, colonialism will persist and continue to evolve. Name 18 Bibliography Burchell, S.C. Building the Suez Canal. New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1966. Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Easton, Stewart C. Easton. The Twilight of European Colonialism: A Political Analysis. London: S.C. Easton, 1960. Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman. Catastrophe and Creation: The Transformation of An African Culture. Amsterdam: Harwood Press, 1991. Matthew Grant, The British Way in Cold Warfare: Intelligence, Diplomacy and the Bomb, 1945- 1975. London: Continuum UK, 2009. Haynes, Jeffrey. Third World Politics: A Concise Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999. Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism and War: The Role of U.S. Imperialism. Gulf War Literature, chapter 2. http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/gulfwar/ch2.html. “Immigration.” Mixed in Different Shades, 2011, Web. http://www.mixedindifferentshades.net/mixing-through-the-ages/immigration.html. Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, Inc., 2001. Ogot, Bethwell A. & Ochieng, William R. Decolonization and Independence in Kenya. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995. Page, Melvin E. An International Social, Cultural and Political Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2003. Name 19 Parliamentary Affairs. Oxford Journals 10, no. 2. 1956. Ridgeway, James. ‘Corporate Colonialism,’ The Village Voice, 22 April 2003. Rushkoff, Douglas Rushkoff. Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, New York: Random House, 2009. Silburn, Percy A.B. The Evolution of Sea Power. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1912. Smith, Paul. Disraeli: A Brief Life. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1996 Stern, Fritz R. Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Thomson, Alex. An Introduction to African Politics. New York: Routledge, 2000. “With Seattle in Mind, Police Show Strength at New Jersey I.M.F. Rally,” Associated Press, 2 April 2000. Read More