To be an imperialist

The lack of blogging is due to the start of the semester, studying for a major exam, and writing a prospectus. Since Friday night I ignored that stuff and played Empire: Total War until the sun came up, and periodically reading Patrick Jackson’s Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. In between long conversations with roommate and good friend Onur Bilginer and reading Jackson’s book, I posted Steve “is civilizing the enemy” onto Facebook (the bane of my destruction), to which Ortho replied “you sound like an imperialist. I could blame this on the fact that in Empire: Total War, my Prussian Empire is currently building a mitteleuropa centered on the conquest of the Austria. However, given the fact that I pretend to write about counterinsurgency theory, a Freudian slip is more likely.

It is an established argument against intervention that the result is imperialism, and that all capitalist states have engineered political conditions in other territories to create favorable economic outcomes. In Europe, this mostly took the form of colonial imperialism, while the American tradition is more recently characterized by covert action against ’sovereign’ states.(see Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973). While labor-intensive (occupational) forms of imperialism concurred prior the assumption of global capitalist hegemony (the Spanish-American War), one could argue that imperialist practice and the violations of sovereignty have been revived with Afghanistan and Iraq. One could even say it never really had a historical pause if we include the failed intervention in Vietnam (where where a legitimate state could never have emerged out of the development program of the United States), the eternally ongoing intervention in Bosnia (where a ‘Bosnian’ people cannot exist because of the consociational institutions we coercively imposed). From a Marxist perspective, The United States has sought to build states in those nations that are pliable and quiescent to a global capitalist organization of labor, and renounce any claim to regulate, in their own territory, the organization of citizens into workers. This condition is essential to a democracy since most of the population is composed of workers. If they are the majority, they should vote their class interest and check the bourgois impulse to bend over backwards for capitalism (creating a ‘natural ‘market’ through deregulation). Intervention is a imperial way of dominating the structure of their institutional regulation of capital, and interventions have failed most disasterously when the institutions we impose have no cultural content and no legitimacy.

It is interesting to apply this relationship to imperialism/capitalism and intervention to Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally this begins with common refrain that ‘we invaded for oil’ or ‘natural resources’. Which is true in a way, because the ‘we’ is not the United States but capitalism – the US will never control the means of production of those resources. Instead, it will be Chinese companies, which are heavily investing in oil and natural gas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet at the same time, the states we are attempting to build are structured to be democratic, and ideally should permit groups called ‘Iraqis’ or ‘Afghanis’ to regulate capitalism’s organization of their labor and resources. There is an inherent tension then between indirect incorporation of those states in global capitalism and the indirect creation of democratic institutions that can self-regulate their economies. Most importantly, and contra to traditional imperialism, we have to recognize the particular and subjective value of those institutions to Iraqis and Afghanis, and thus give sovereignty real meaning. In doing so, we socially construct the boundary between Self and Other (the US and Iraq/Afghanistan): we refrain from judging their mode of ‘civilization’ by comparing it to ours and instead empathically recognize their common normative value of democracy because we both accept each other’s subjective interpretation of democracy. This avoids the purely instrumentalist (and immoral) form of intervention that treats other nations as objects that must subjected to capitalism. In a purely political sense (in terms of ‘violating’ sovereignty), this is still imperialism but only in the short term, as the long-term goal is to create intersubjectively recognized (by all other states in the world) sovereign institution that no longer requires direct forms of intervention. This would be devoid of selfish conceptions of identity and value structures that is characterized by the exploitative relationships between core and peripheral states. In this way, the phrase ‘civilizing the enemy’ is completely wrong. By restraining ourselves from treating others as objects, we really civilize ourselves.

Finally, I mean to describe this reflexive form of ‘imperial’ action as an ideal-type, that can be compared to modes of ‘imperial’ action as practiced by the United States. It has only occurred in rare moments in history, and it may be true that it is happening to some extent now. Special thanks to Onur, with whom these ideas were developed as part of a reflexive solution to the dialectical tension between capitalism and democracy.