The New Imperialism

A prominent theme in scholarly analyses of contemporary international affairs concerns the extent to which the unrivalled power and activities of the United States can be said to constitute a form of imperialism. Typically, the contours of this debate center on the ostensible differences between “old” and “new” varieties of imperialist practice. Yet the concept of “new imperialism” remains one on which little consensus exists. Wide differences of opinion on its origins, dynamics, and characteristics are evident, as is an analytical bifurcation between distinct “economic” and “geopolitical” explanations. This absence of conceptual unity leads to accounts of new imperialist strategy that are partial, limited, and incomplete. If the theoretical value of new imperialism is to be realized, a more holistic approach is needed. To this end, some of the key differences between the contexts of new and old imperialism are explored.A prominent theme in scholarly analyses of contemporary international affairs concerns the extent to which the unrivalled power and activities of the United States can be said to constitute a form of imperialism. Typically, the contours of this debate center on the ostensible differences between “old” and “new” varieties of imperialist practice. Yet the concept of “new imperialism” remains one on which little consensus exists. Wide differences of opinion on its origins, dynamics, and characteristics are evident, as is an analytical bifurcation between distinct “economic” and “geopolitical” explanations. This absence of conceptual unity leads to accounts of new imperialist strategy that are partial, limited, and incomplete. If the theoretical value of new imperialism is to be realized, a more holistic approach is needed. To this end, some of the key differences between the contexts of new and old imperialism are explored.

2016

Emanuele Saccarelli y Latha Varadarajan, Imperialism: Past and Present, New York, Oxford University Press, 2015, 256 pp.

A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012), £20 As the world commemorates the centenary of the First World War (with limited awareness of its meaning) a book by two leading Marxists that explores contemporary imperialism demands our careful assessment. A century ago there were two broad Marxist approaches to imperialism. Firstly, there was Karl Kautsky's theory of " ultra-imperialism " which suggested the potential for the replacement of rivalry by an alliance of the imperialist countries against subordinate parts of the world. The second approach, the classical Marxist perspective of inter-imperialist rivalry developed by Lenin and Bukharin, argued that competitive capital accumulation produced giant firms that operated increasingly internationally and enlisted their home states in their conflicts with other nations' capitals. The bloodshed and horrors of the war and subsequent decades showed that rivalry provided a superior explanation of international capitalist dynamics. By 1971 Bob Rowthorn noted the emergence of an additional perspective. He argued that a new US super-imperialism had developed in which the US dominated other capitalist powers and had become the " organiser of world capitalism " , able to contain such antagonisms as did appear. 1 Panitch's and Gindin's work sits squarely in this camp, with occasional nods towards ultra-imperialism. Based on earlier collaborative work and an impressive amount of research, The Making of Global Capitalism (henceforth TMGC) provides a comprehensive history of US capitalism and the economic statecraft mobilised to open the global economy to US influence over the last century or so. 2 TMGC's focus is captured in its first two sentences: This book is about globalisation and the state. It shows that the spread of capitalist markets, values and social relationships around the world, far from being an inevitable outcome of inherently expansionist economic tendencies, has depended on the agency of states—and of one state in particular: America. 3 What has emerged from the US state's role in the development of globalised capitalism, including the imposition of US-designed rules for the global economy, is " the American informal empire, which succeeded in integrating all the other capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis ". 4 This is not Michael Hardt's and Toni Negri's Empire, within whose post-national space the idea of rival national imperialisms is outdated. 5 Nor does it neatly correspond to the transnationalist perspective developed by Marxists like William Robinson, because neither a transnational capitalist class nor a global state based on the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) is emerging. In the first place, TMGC notes that capital's national roots and institutional linkages remain important, and that US multinational corporations, however international, remain American rather than transnational. 6 Meanwhile, the IFIs were an expression of US postwar power and remain sites of negotiation and coordination between separate " national systems of regulation among the advanced capitalist states ". 7 Nevertheless, TMGC shares with these perspectives the view that US hegemony has so successfully contained conflicts within the West that the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry is no longer helpful. Appearance and essence

Monthly Review, 2019

Situated largely within the Marxist debates on imperialism—but addressing the liberal formulations too—The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism is an important intervention regarding the material basis of imperialism and its three-hundred-year-old history of unequal power relations. The book broadly addresses five issues: (1) the nature of finance capital and the novel yet familiar processes of value extraction; (2) the world of capital; (3) global production networks and labor regimes; (4) the institutional system of nation-states in the new global order; and (5) the nature of integration from colonial regimes to now.

Internationalism, imperialism and the formation of the contemporary world, 2017

This volume offers innovative insights into and approaches to the multiple historical intersections between distinct modalities of internationalism and imperialism during the twentieth century, across a range of contexts. Bringing together scholars from diverse theoretical, methodological and geographical backgrounds, the book explores an array of fundamental actors, institutions and processes that have decisively shaped contemporary history and the present. Among other crucial topics, it considers the expansion in the number and scope of activities of international organizations and its impact on formal and informal imperial polities, as well as the propagation of developmentalist ethos and discourses, relating them to major historical processes such as the growing institutionalization of international scrutiny in the interwar years or, later, the emerging global Cold War. “This volume of essays is the most vehement caution yet that historians of the twentieth century cannot ignore the complicating place of imperialism in the pasts of the present, regardless of whether we trace those pasts back by picking up the strands of national or international institutions, practices or thought.” (Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History, University of Sydney, Australia) “Just as empires were global phenomena, so, too, the administrative agencies, international organizations, and oppositional networks engaged by those empires' decolonization were global in vision and reach. This essay collection highlights the intersections involved. The issues addressed retain a powerful resonance, from the consideration of international organisations as sites of internationalist innovation to the public diplomacy of anti-colonialism and the imperial foundations of modernisation theories and development strategies. From first to last, it's a rewarding read.” (Martin Thomas, Professor of Imperial History, University of Exeter, UK) “This elegant edited volume innovates in terms of methodology and historiography thanks to the work of the editors. They set up a very coherent and consistent editorial project and asked a number of well-known outstanding contributors to reflect and write individual chapters that pondered, connected and intertwined the role of internationalism and imperialism in the making of our world. All authors went beyond labels, trends and buzzwords; in their respective chapters they zoomed in and out providing compelling analyses. This sophisticated and nuanced volume will trigger new research. It will be read and greatly appreciated by undergraduate, graduate students and scholars alike.” (Davide Rodogno, International History, Professor and Head of Department, The Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland)

in Ronaldo Munck and G. Honor Fagan (eds.) Globalisation and Security- An Encyclopaedia. Vol.1: Economic and Political Aspects and Vol. 2: Social and Cultural Aspects., 2009

The twenty-first century opened with the world's sole superpower fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and threatening war against several other states in a new unilaterally aggressive and militarist mode. Only a decade before, having triumphed over communism, the United States had attempted a combination of multilateralism and commercialism, festooned with themes of human rights and democracy, in the discourse and practices of globalization. Although many had legitimately criticized globalization and its military interventions in the name of human rights and democracy as imperial, the brazen swagger of the new imperialism of the twenty-first century seemed a dramatic reversal. The tide of literature on globalization, which had risen so high so fast during the 1990s, now ebbed just as rapidly, and the waters of a new wave of writing on imperialism rushed in.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2020

2004

Socialist Register, 2009