Global Policy Forum

By G. Pascal Zachary

The scene seemed out of the 19th century. The entire cabinet of the government of Ghana, including the West African country's president, gathered together this April in a swank hotel to explain their goals and achievements to an array of foreigners, soliciting advice on how to improve policies and government programs.

Ghanaian President John Kufuor and his ministers were not simply swept up in a mania for sharing. They have never invited their own citizens to survey their activities. But foreigners carry much bigger checkbooks than voters. After three days of meetings, the representatives of foreign governments, including the United States, agreed to collectively donate $ 750 million to help make Ghana's large budget deficit a lot smaller.

Around the world, governments of former colonies (Ghana belonged to Britain until 1957) increasingly sing for their supper, trying to please a range of well-heeled foreign donors in order to get more aid. This is not imperialism, of course, since leaders of poor governments can always say no. But they rarely do, and the line between independence and surrender to foreign powers is blurry. Does anyone consider Afghanistan a sovereign nation simply because it agreed to "allow" foreign soldiers to remain on its turf following the fall of the Taliban government? Afghanistan is not alone as a ward of foreign powers. Kosovo remains a U.N. protectorate, and until its independence last month, so was East Timor. Sierra Leone is essentially administered by the U.N., with help from the British who staff many key government offices, including the police, and whose military ensure order. In Cambodia, an array of international organizations keep the Southeast Asian country from reverting to disorder.

Defenders of these interventions assay their value on humanitarian grounds. If a country is falling apart, why not send in troops or technical experts to restore order or take over the running of schools, hospitals, police? From this position, there is only a short leap to the conclusion that "failed" states and "rogue" governments can be overthrown and turned into colonies of the international community. Such is the vision that some have for Iraq post-Saddam Hussein.

Advocates have devised a friendly term for these interventions: "reluctant imperialism." Writing in the March issue of Foreign Affairs, an editorial writer for the Washington Post argued that "anti-imperialist restraint is becoming harder to sustain" and that the United States and Europe should get back into the business of running colonies -- albeit through the machinery of the United Nations. One of the advisers to British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been more blunt in his published reports: In carving up the world among the Great Powers to increase international security, "we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era -- force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself."

If imperialism -- the scourge of the Victorian era -- is making a comeback in the political arena, there are signs of its rediscovery elsewhere. Many talk today about a "new imperialism" promoted by financial capital and multinational corporations. Others see threats in the form of powerful non-governmental organizations that have the money and clout to force governments to respond to their complaints. Much credit for the renewed interest in imperialism stems from discomfort, especially in Europe and Asia, with American power. In recent years, opposition to American imperialism mainly organized around cultural symbols of leisure and entertainment. Disney and McDonald's became convenient targets against which critics of American pop culture could vent their rage.

There may be new forms of imperialism, but observers have been seeing something "new" in imperialism for more than a century. In 1969, Harry Magdoff, editor of the Marxist Monthly Review, published an influential book titled The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was consumed by a battle against "Yankee imperialism" before he was killed in the jungles of Bolivia in 1967. Fifty years earlier, in the carnage of World War I, Lenin penned his most important pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he identified the political annexation of territories by the Great Powers as "the monopoly stage of capitalism" and described "an essential feature of imperialism [as] the striving for hegemony."

The father of all analysis of new imperialisms was an obscure economist and prolific English writer named J. A. Hobson. One hundred years ago this month, Hobson published Imperialism: A Study, in which he demolished the 19th-century justifications for imperialism that sprang from a Darwinian understanding of world relations. More civilized nations, it was believed, had a duty to colonize "lesser" nations in order to bring them up to standard.

Hobson, on whose work every other writer on imperialism depends, recoiled at this benevolent explanation, finding that economic gain drove political annexations and the formation of colonies. Influenced by Marx, Hobson searched for the economic motives for seizing faraway peoples and places, using the British Empire as his central case. What he found, however, seemed contradictory: Colonies and imperialism were a drain on the national treasury -- such a drain that the benefits of trade with colonies failed to offset the costs of acquiring the colonies. Economically, then, imperialism was a failure. So then, what was, in his words, "the economic taproot of imperialism"? Hobson found, again drawing on Marx, that elements of the financial and economic elite benefited from imperialist adventures. "Although the new Imperialism has been bad business for the nation, it has been good business for certain classes and certain trades within the nation."

If we are indeed entering a new period of imperialism, Hobson is a sound guide to what may come. He writes boldly and clearly, and his pithy insights into the world economy stand as a model of economic writing. "We moderns wish the lower races to exploit their own lands for our benefit," he writes, giving a succinct explanation of how Americans justify consuming 25 percent of the world's resources. Surveying the many instances in which the British government intervened to protect the foreign interests of companies, he writes: "There is no support for the dogma that 'Trade follows the flag.'"

At base, he insists, imperialist endeavors flow from the central crisis of capitalism: overproduction. "The rich," he writes, "will never be so ingenious as to spend enough to prevent over-production." Trade is the answer to overproduction, and imperialism is an effort to capture foreign markets. Yet Hobson sees only "a false economy" arising from imperialism, for the simple reason that "it is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or invest capital with it."

Reading Hobson, I am struck by the many parallels between 2002 and 1902. One hundred years ago, he saw that globalization -- then known as imperialism -- meant that it was impossible for one country to leave another country alone. World capitalism made isolation, even if desirable, an impossibility. "Complete isolation is no longer possible even for the remotest island; absolute self-sufficiency is no more possible for a nation than for an individual." The interconnectedness of the world's peoples meant, in Hobson's mind, that a "sane" imperialism must arise -- an imperialism in which the foreign power is genuinely "devoted to the protection, education and self-development of a 'lower race.'" Hobson essentially endorses what is known today as "humanitarian intervention."

While he believes an imperial project can be carried out for "the good of humanity," Hobson is alert to the barriers against success -- because imperial projects often bring one country into contact with an alien people and place. In practice, Hobson saw a multitude of failures in imperialism. He found British imperial rulers to be "distinctly parasitic . . . their chief work being that of organizing native labor for their support." The British project of civilizing India, he concluded, "is a complete delusion."

As Americans embark on a new imperial project -- of rescuing failed states and winning the "clash of civilizations" so that terrorists have no haven -- we should be alert to the possibility that we will record our own "complete" delusions. The U.S. defense and occupation of Kuwait ten years ago had much to do with insuring oil supplies, and the Afghan war is motivated at least in part by the prospect of Central Asian oil flowing through the war-torn country. Hobson is vague, unfortunately, on how we can defend ourselves against imperial quagmires that benefit only "certain classes." But his general warning rings as true as it did a century ago:

The power of the imperialist forces within the nation to use the national resources for their private gain, by operating the instrument of the State, can only be overthrown by the establishment of a genuine democracy, the direction of public policy by the people for the people through representatives over whom they exercise real control. Whether this or any other nation is yet competent for such a democracy may well be a matter of grave doubt, but until and unless the external policy of a nation is "broad-based upon a people's will" there appears little hope of remedy.

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