Imperialism of Our Time
In the essay ‘Imperialism of Our Time’, Aijaz Ahmad grounds the 2003 invasion of Iraq in its historical conjuncture, following the defeat of the Soviet Union and in the context of imperialism’s long assault on the Third World and national liberation struggles during the 20th century. He also analyses the character of the George W. Bush presidency, including both its continuities as the culmination of a long-term backlash by the US New Right to the anti-war, Black liberation and women’s struggles of the 1960s, as well as its unique ‘will to radically re-make the United States itself as it sets out to re-map the globe’.
Deeming as inadequate both the contemporary ideas of ‘New Imperialism’ as well as overly rigid readings of Lenin’s thesis in characterising this new era for imperialism, Ahmad describes the ‘imperialism of our time’ as being the ‘first fully post-colonial imperialism, not only free of colonial rule but antithetical to it’ and being structurally dependant on preserving the nation-state form for the operation of globalised capital and commodities.
The essay identifies Iraq ‘03 as inaugurating a new phase of imperialism following the inter-imperialist rivalries of the early 20th century and the ‘inter-systemic rivalry’ between the US and the Soviet Union, with the Bush government presiding over a ‘moment when history’s greatest concentration of force can be exercised without any restraint.’
In contextualising the new doctrine of the ‘War on Terror’, the essay narrates the West’s older war on the Third World, with the undermining of communist, socialist, and radical nationalist governments alike – including through nurturing reactionary ‘Islamist’ movements upon whom the US had now set its guns: ‘Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until not long ago.’
Elsewhere in the essay, Ahmad describes the high hubris of the G.W. Bush administration as a government seizing the opportunity presented by global dominance without challenge: ‘The post-Second World War settlement was based on a combination of a clear-cut US leadership and a complex network of multilateral institutions… With hindsight, one can now see that the great emphasis on multilateralism in the past was itself perhaps a function of the fact that the US faced challenges from communism and Third World nationalism… Now, with those challenges gone, the leadership firmly secured, and a much more belligerent US Administration in office, many aspects of this multilateralism are being allowed to lapse.’
In subsequent years, both with the strategic ‘failures’ of the Iraq invasion remaining a blight on its resume and as systemic challenges have rendered that dominance more fragile, the question of US global leadership and multilateralism has become a vexed issue for its governments today.
It is with the backlash to Iraq in mind that Obama pursued a stated strategy of ‘leading from behind’ in Libya, enabling France’s Sarkozy government to ostensibly take leadership in NATO’s destruction of the state in 2011, while Obama’s similarly ‘covert’ approach in Syria helped give rise to the myth of American absence from the war on that state. Trump’s infamous rhetorical attacks on multilateralism provoked extreme discomfort from America’s allies, and it was with this that the Biden government entered the fray with frequent affirmations of the ‘rules-based order’ – a rebranding of US leadership under the auspices of multilateralism – all the while ratcheting up the US policy of illegal unilateral sanctions without UN approval. And the latest administration’s headline achievement of galvanising support for NATO in light of the Russo-Ukraine war has served to subordinate its European allies to US leadership at a huge cost. It remains a unity riven by contradictions, which are likely to develop in potentially ugly forms as Europe lurches further to the right.
Not all of the essay’s assessments have been borne out completely. While correctly describing Europe’s ultimately subordinate role to the US, its claim that ‘The most the Europeans do in the Third World is look for markets and investment opportunities. There is no power projection, for the simple reason that there is no power’, stands against the reality of France’s aggressive imperialist intervention in the Sahel region of Africa since 2013, for one. It is also belied by the fact that EU ambitions for its own ‘strategic autonomy’, still flickering in the hearts of some of its leaders despite its prostrations before Biden’s America, take the form of an independently militarised EU, seeking to export military soft (and likely hard) power into strategic regions such as Africa.
Yet despite the many ways that history has asserted itself in curious or unexpected ways over the past two decades, it remains, fundamentally, a history written in the blood of the Iraqi people. Ahmad remains prescient and precise with his sobering assessment that the G.W. Bush government – as another incarnation of US imperialism – represented ‘a force so overdetermined in their ideology and projects that they recognize no limits to their own venality or criminality or global ambition.’
With the efforts to exculpate leaders, on both sides of the Atlantic, for their role in the destruction of Iraq, and the manifold attempts to cleanse the public’s palette for warfare since, the singular fact remains that – twenty years on – Iraq and the region remains a site of unconscionable injustice. With the devastation of the invasion and the many interventions since, the people of the Arab World found themselves thrown back a century, with their futures held hostage to the imperialism of our time. The twentieth anniversary of this invasion remains a fitting time, as ever, for the British left to recommit to its fundamental responsibility to set itself against the gears of imperialism at home.
This essay is an edited excerpt of Aijaz Ahmad’s essay Imperialism of Our Times as published in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time (Leftword books: 2004).
Imperialism of Our Time
One of the salient features of the present conjuncture is that the United States, the leading imperialist country with historically unprecedented global power, is today governed by perhaps the most rightwing government in a century. The chickens of the most hysterical forms of authoritarianism that the US has been routinely exporting to large parts of the globe seem to be coming home to roost, with national as well as global consequences, including military consequences.
I also use the simple phrase ‘imperialism of our time’ with the more modest aim of avoiding terms like ‘New Imperialism’ which have been in vogue at various times, with varying meanings. Imperialism has been with us for a very long time, in great many forms, and constantly re-invents itself, so to speak, as the structure of global capitalism itself changes.
The first fully post-colonial imperialism
The fundamental novelty of the imperialism of our time is that it comes after the dissolution of the two great rivalries that had punctuated the global politics of the twentieth century, namely what Lenin called ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ of the first half of the century as well as what we might, for lack of a better word, call the inter-systemic rivalry between the US and the USSR that lasted for some seventy years.
The end of those rivalries concludes the era of politics inaugurated by the First World War and it is only logical that the sole victor, the United States, would set out most aggressively to grab all possible spoils of victory and to undo the gains that the working classes and oppressed nations of the world had been able to achieve during that period.
This new face of imperialism arises not only after the dissolution of the great colonial empires (British and French, principally) and colonial ambitions of the other, competing capitalist countries (Germany and Japan, mainly) but also the definitive demise of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie in much of the so-called Third World (anti-colonialism, wars of national liberation, the Bandung project, non-alignment, the protectionist industrialising state) which had itself been sustained considerably by the existence of an alternative pole in the shape of the communist countries.
The three objectives for which the US fought a war of position throughout the twentieth century – the containment/disappearance of communist states, its own primacy over the other leading countries, the defeat of Third World nationalism – have been achieved.
Far from being an imperialism caught in the coil of inter-imperialist rivalries, it is the imperialism of the era in which
(a) national capitals have interpenetrated in such a manner that the capital active in any given territorial state is comprised, in varying proportions, of national and transnational capital;
(b) finance capital is dominant over productive capital to an extent never visualized even in Lenin’s ‘export of capital’ thesis or in Keynes’ warnings about the rapaciousness of the rentiers; and
(c) everything from commodity markets to movements of finance has been so thoroughly globalized that the rise of a global state, with demonstrably globalized military capability, is an objective requirement of the system itself, quite aside from the national ambitions of the US rulers, so as to impose structures and disciplines over this whole complex with its tremendous potential for fissures and breakdowns.
Empires without colonies have been with us, in one corner of the globe or another, throughout the history of capital, sometimes preceding military conquest (commercial empires), at other times coming after decolonization (South America after the dissolution of Spanish and Portuguese rule), and sometimes taking the form for which Lenin invented the term ‘semi-colonial’ (Egypt, Persia etc). However, this is the first fully post-colonial imperialism, not only free of colonial rule but antithetical to it; it is unlikely that the current occupation of Iraq will translate itself into long-term colonial rule, however long the quagmire may last and even if the superhawks of the Pentagon take US armies into Syria, Iran or wherever.
It is not a matter of an ideological preference for ‘informal’ empire over ‘formal’ empire, so-called. It is a structural imperative of the current composition of global capital itself. The movement of capital and commodities must be as unimpeded as possible but the nation-state form must be maintained throughout the peripheries, not only for historical reasons but also to supplement internationalization of capitalist law with locally erected labour regimes so as to enforce what Stephen Gill calls ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ in conditions specific to each territorial unit.
Europe subordinates itself before Bush
During the decision-making process over the invasion of Iraq, Britain threw in its lot with the US, with complete disregard of even procedural consideration for the EU but in keeping with the role of loyal subordinate that the US imposed upon it soon after the second World War, and from which neither Wilson nor Thatcher nor Blair have ever deviated.
Then, as France and Germany sought to distinguish themselves from that position and the US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed them contemptuously as ‘old Europe’, everyone from Derrida to Habermas marched to television studios to express dismay on Europe’s behalf. Eventually, Rumsfeld did line up Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal and a host of little/new countries of ‘Europe’ on his side, and it was in the Azores that Bush made the final decision to ignore the Security Council and proceed with the invasion.
Equally significant is the fact that in the last round of negotiations at the Security Council before the invasion began, the Franco-/German alliance proposed a thirty-day warning to Saddam (and the inspectors) after which they too were willing to condone the invasion.
Bush pointedly snubbed them by keeping to the schedule set by the Pentagon and ignoring the Security Council from that point on. The US instructed the UN to withdraw its inspectors forthwith and Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, did not even bother to call the Security Council in session, even though the inspectors had been sent there not by the US but by a Security Council Resolution; Annan simply instructed the inspectors to comply with US orders.
Hans Blix, the chief inspector, was to say later that he had long believed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and the whole thing was a charade anyway. Once the invasion got into full swing, even the Franco-German alliance began to pray publicly for a quick US victory and, only slightly less publicly, began begging for contracts for European firms in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. When the US decided to establish itself as the occupying force and grant the UN no appreciable role in it, the Franco-German alliance complied.
Meanwhile, on the completely different issue of a Belgian law which grants Belgian courts the jurisdiction to try foreign nationals for war crimes, a stern warning from Rumsfeld that he might move the NATO headquarters from Brussels if the laws were not changed brought a swift promise of compliance from the Belgian government.
So much for the claim by high-minded European intellectuals that respect for universal human rights is an integral aspect of the emerging European identity. Belgium apparently has no right to have laws of its own even on issues such as war crimes, even though these laws have no relevance to global trade, finance or commercial contracts. The doctrine of limited sovereignty that is emerging as a major component in US policy, with its vast implications for the new imperial constitutionalism, is to be applied, apparently, not only to the Third World countries but even, selectively, to Europe’s own ability to promulgate laws for itself.
The declaration of the Bush administration that it has the sovereign right to make war – what it calls ‘pre-emptive war’ – against any or all states that it perceives as a threat, while reserving the right to judge what constitutes a threat, is in fact an extension of a doctrine already in place since earlier Administrations. What we are witnessing is the making of an imperial sovereignty claimed for itself by a state which is at once the state of a nation as well as a globalized state of contemporary capitalism. The US arrogates to itself a limitless sovereignty which is arbitrary by nature, and can only exist in so far as its might is so superior to that of all others that its action would necessarily go unchallenged by other components of the global state system however resentful they might be otherwise.
Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be
The US fought as hard against radical Third World nationalism, as it did against communism during the second half of the century.
Having championed decolonization as a precondition for the emergence of a globally integrated empire under its own dominion, it set its face against national liberation movements, whether led by communists (as in Indochina) or by radical nationalists (as in Algeria); against non-alignment (the rhetoric of ‘for us or against us’ of Bush Jr. today comes straight out of John Foster Dulles’ speeches during the 1950s); as well as against particular nationalist regimes, be it Nasser’s or Nkrumah’s or Sukarno’s or even Prince Sihanouk’s in Cambodia.
Instead, it kept monarchies in power where it could and imposed dictators wherever it needed to. The failure of the national bourgeois project in the Third World has all kinds of domestic roots but the implacable undercutting of it by the US was a very large part of it.
One now tends to forget that in his post-war vision, Keynes himself had recommended not only state restrictions on rentiers in the advanced capitalist countries, but also regular long-term transfers of capital to the underdeveloped countries to guarantee real growth, and hence domestic peace, and hence stability of the global capitalist system as a whole, not to speak of more prosperous markets for the advanced capitalist countries’ own commodities.
This latter recommendation was rejected out of hand by the US which kept a tight control over the making of the Bretton Woods architecture. This undercutting of the national-bourgeois project – precisely because the project required high levels of protectionism, tariffs, domestic savings and state-led industrialization, with little role for imperialist penetration – certainly made all those states much weaker in relation to foreign domination but also made those societies much more angry and volatile, eventually even susceptible to all kinds of irrationalism, with little popular legitimacy for the indigenous nation-state.
This phenomenon itself has required not only globalized supervision but also an increasingly interventionist global state. Little fires have – more and more – to be put out everywhere and now the whole system has to be ‘re-ordered’, as Bush and Blair keep saying. The Cold War was never cold for many outside the NATO and Warsaw Pact zones, and US military interventions in the Third World, direct and indirect, was a routine affair throughout that period. Now, winning the Cold War has opened the way not to world peace but for an ideology of permanent interventionism on part of the United States: ‘a task that never ends’, as Bush put it some ten days after the 11 September catastrophe.
Defeat of all the forces which Hobsbawm cumulatively and felicitously calls ‘the Enlightenment left’ – communism, socialism, national liberation movements, the radical wings of social democracy – has led to a full-blown ideological crisis across the globe. Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until not long ago
‘Regime change’ is a catchy phrase
War against Iraq began not in 2003 but in the course of the so-called ‘Gulf War’, in 1991, which continued through sanctions and no-fly zones, for over a decade – longer than the combined duration of the First and Second World Wars – under three consecutive US Presidents, two Republicans (father and son) and one Democrat (Clinton, the ‘New Democrat’ who inspired ‘New Labour’ across the Atlantic).
It was during the Clinton Presidency that the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998. When the sanctions regime was estimated by some UN agencies to have killed half a million Iraqi children, and journalists asked Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright whether their death was worth the price of upholding the sanctions, she said ‘the price was worth it’.
The so-called no-fly zones in northern and eastern Iraq were declared by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General, to be illegal, and yet under that scheme the Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq became the longest aerial campaign since the Second World War; in 1999 alone 1800 bombs were dropped and 450 targets hit. Cumulatively, over some twelve years, the tonnage dropped on Iraq came to equal seven Hiroshimas.
‘Regime change’ is a catchy phrase, and the Bush Administration has undoubtedly raised it to the status of a legitimate right of imperial sovereignty. However, the US has been doing it for decades. It did so in Iraq itself when the CIA helped overthrow the progressive regime of Abd al-Karim Kassem in 1964 and brought in the Ba’ath party regime (‘We came to power on a CIA train’, exulted the General-Secretary of Saddam’s parent party), paving the way for the eventual personal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein who remained a close US ally throughout the 1980s when he fought a US-assisted war against Iran.
‘Regime change’ is what the CIA brought to Iran in 1953 and the US military to Grenada and Panama more recently. And the history of the US coming as ‘liberators’ and staying as occupiers goes back to the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century.
Continuities and ruptures
What is specific to the Bush regime is the combination of an intensification of such long-standing trends as well as a cluster of novelties which, taken together, amount to something of a historic break.
Intensification of trends is obvious enough. What are the novelties internal to Bush Jr’s Presidency? First, the manner of his election: he was elevated to the Presidency by a judicial decision of dubious merit, combined with widely suspected disenfranchisement of a considerable section of the black electorate in the state of Florida which happened to be run by his brother, Jeb. Jeb Bush’s other major contribution to Bush Jr’s campaign was that he was the one who assembled that cabal of the neo-conservatives, drawn from the think-tanks of the far right and supervised by Dick Cheney, who came to define the domestic as well as foreign policies, the civilian as well as military structures, of the United States after the elections: they captured the Pentagon, hence the US military machine, just as the Bush brothers captured the White House.
The second novelty of this Presidency, which distinguishes it from the preceding ones, is the will to radically re-make the United States itself as it sets out to re-map the globe. Dick Cheney’s bland prediction that the war against terrorism may last for fifty years or more, and General Tommy Frank’s prediction even before the invasion of Iraq that US troops may have to be stationed there fairly indefinitely, on the model of Korea, is matched by a politics of permanent hysteria at home, invoking a mixture of extreme insecurity and atavistic patriotism.
Meanwhile, the already existing policies of shifting incomes upward and offering tax bonanzas to corporations and the rich while bankrupting the social state have been accelerated to a degree that a successor government may not even have the resources to save such things as Social Security in its present form even if it had the desire to do so. What is being reversed, thus, is not only the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’ but even aspects of American social life dating back to the New Deal.
In ‘Re Building America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century’, a report prepared by an impressive cross-section of the neo-conservative elite including Paul Wolfowitz, and issued by The Project for a New American Century in September 2000, the authors remarked that the kind of sweeping changes they are proposing may take some time unless some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbour, were to occur.
11th September 2001 was the event they were waiting for. Condoleeza Rice urged her colleagues the next morning that ways be found to ‘capitalize on these opportunities’, while Donald Rumsfeld urged immediate invasion of Iraq.
We may be witnessing an imperial overreach. Overdetermined by their own ideological delusions, Bush’s neocons may be pursuing policies that far exceed the logic of global capitalism or the requirements of the imperial US state; even George Soros seems to think so. Two former Presidents, including the current President’s father, opposed the invasion of Iraq before it happened. Ever the mildly Presbyterian Trilaterist, Bush Sr. emphasized that the US needed alliance with Europe and the war on Iraq would undermine it. As we have seen, the Franco-German alliance has accepted the consequences, however resentfully. But Iraq may yet prove to be a quagmire that cures the US populace of any appetite for the real wars that are fought on the other side of their TV screens. They may yet come to comprehend what a menace this Administration is for their own security, especially as old age sets in, and to the security of their children.
At the same time, the global revolt against imperial America that we witnessed on the eve of the Iraq invasion may regain momentum. This moment of neo-conservative extremity may yet pass as one of many murderous episodes in imperial history.