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American Anti-Imperialism vs. Imperialism

Anti-imperialism vs. Imperialism

American imperialism, beginning prominently in the 1890s, had a number of motives. The dominant directive motive was the demand for markets for profitable investment. There was also the element of inevitable expansion, the “frontier mentality” and the need to secure world standing in order to remain competitive. Finally, there was a religious motivation, the providential charge to bring Christian civilization  to foreign cultures. Simultaneously, anti-imperialists argued on behalf of a variety of objections to the pursuit of colonialism categorized into broad categories as constitutional, economic, diplomatic, moral, racial, political, and historical. Quintessentially, the most influential arguments were the economic argument for imperialism and the moral argument for anti-imperialism.

One argument was imperialism. Albert Beveridge of Indiana was a leading advocate of American imperialism. In his 1898 March of the Flag   speech he presents a case for overseas expansion. Americans were producing more than they could use and foreign markets would increase national prosperity. Acting on Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History , American imperialists felt the need to protect expanding mercantile trade through a strong two-ocean navy, coaling stations in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and a canal. Additionally, imperialists felt a moral and civil obligation to expand. As a “Christian” nation that saw itself as “God’s chosen,” many Americans viewed imperialism as a way of spreading the Christian Gospel to so-called “heathen nations.” This motive was a part of President William McKinley’s decision to keep the Philippines. The United States had a moral duty to uplift peoples in lands considered uncivilized. Rudyard Kipling, the literary apostle of imperialism, expressed similar views in his poem the White Man’s Burden  in which he classifies colonial peoples as “half devil, half child.” The great missionary movement that saw the establishment of countless missionary boards and organizations coincided with national imperialistic movements, which may be why critics have difficulty separating the two movements.

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On the other hand, not all Americans supported imperialism. Even President Cleveland was opposed to the annexation of Hawaii in 1894. In fact, imperialism was so controversial that it became the key issue in the 1900 presidential campaign between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. By then, an influential association opposed to expansionism had been organized, the Anti-Imperialist League. Its members included politicians, literary figures, economic leaders, and scholars. The Anti-Imperialist League which condemned American action in the Philippines and denounced “the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror.” Imperialism was defined as the “pursuit of un-American ends.” Their opposition to imperialism ran the breadth from distress over the costs necessary to maintain an empire to the immorality of denying others self-determination to the racial notion that incorporating “lesser” cultures into a US empire would weaken American “purity.” Business, government, and labor leaders also opposed imperialism, most notably the occupation of the Philippines which erupted into a bloody war in 1899. Labor leaders like Samuel Gompers believed that cheap foreign labor might become a detriment to American workers. Carl Schurz, a founding member of the Republican Party, decried imperialism as contrary to the principles of Democracy and American freedom. Similarly, Mark Twain wrote, “I am opposed to the eagle putting its talons on any other land.”

The most influential anti-imperialist argument was their attack the imperial policy from the perspective of morality and the American tradition in diplomacy. The situation in the Philippines grew worse as the American army engaged rebels who wanted independence for Philippines. Consequently, the deteriorating situation brought more strength to the Anti-Imperialistic movement. Foundationally, the Anti-imperialists argued that Imperialism is incompatible with the ideals that are so eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence. This was powerful because the very doctrine our nation was founded on historically swayed the opinion of the public, the average American. Moreover, the anti-imperialists argued whether or not it is right for this country to kill the natives of a foreign land because they wish to govern themselves – to enjoy the freedom our fathers declared the inalienable right of every human being. In fact, many anti-imperialists believed that imperialist policy was against the spirit of the Constitution, a document that stood the test of time and often served as a source of guidance for citizens of America. They believed that a self-governing republic based on representative rule and protection of liberties cannot govern another country without contradicting its own ideals. Many argued that a nation based on self-government couldn’t subjugate other people. There are others who argued that both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution prohibited the establishment of the colonies. Some argued that there cannot be one law for a citizen and another law for a colonial inhabitant. The phrase – “Constitution follows the flag” – sums up the argument put forth by many anti-imperialists. There was also a moral dimension to the Anti-Imperialist arguments. They believed that it was simply wrong for the United States to control the destiny of other people and other countries, a philosophy the average American could sympathize with even relate to considering the increasing number of immigrants. Anti-imperialists primarily cared about the United States which convinced many that they would act in the best interest of its people. They were worried about its traditions, destiny, security, domestic and foreign policies. They were not preoccupied with Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba or Puerto Rico. Though they defended the liberties and rights of the colonial people, their primary concern was the United States. They simply believed that Imperialism was not in the best interests of the United States.

         The most influential argument for imperialism can be seen in the economic motivations for expansion. Despite the enormous productive capabilities of U.S. capitalism, the nation in the late nineteenth century was experiencing a period of economic stagnation and social and political instability, not unlike what was occurring in other capitalist nations. In order to combat these problems, the United States, like other capitalist nations, needed to adopt a dual plan. Domestically, the government attempted to reform capitalism by addressing the problems that led to discontent. The Progressive Era was a period of intense interest in reform. Internationally, the government adopted an expansionist- imperialist- foreign policy. Nevertheless, the decision to adopt this foreign policy option was based on policy-makers’ perceptions of what an imperialist policy could achieve in short and long term. Specifically, the U.S. and other world leaders believed an imperialist policy would have several effects. An imperialist policy would bring the economy out of immediate financial crisis- a severe depression struck the US in 1893. It would help create conditions that would allow for future investments. It would reduce domestic conflict- for example, between the working class and the capitalist class as industrialization and rapid capital accumulation brought on serious confrontations between labor and capital that had been around since the Civil War. This could be achieved by reducing the extent of unemployment because of the favorable conditions imperialism would bring, such as increased demand from overseas colonies, passing on some of the economic benefits derived from imperialism to the working class, and appealing to the patriotism of the working class to mute class tensions.

Instead of seeking empire for God, glory or gold, some would argue that American imperialism sought markets for industrial overproduction. Under consumption or overproduction convinces governments to adopt an imperialist policy: the colony becomes a source of demand for the commodities that go unsold in the imperialist nation. Furthermore, access  to foreign markets rather than actual political control  of markets was the goal. In earlier mercantilist philosophies, nations sought colonies as outlets for their finished goods and as sources of raw materials for their extractive economies. American imperialists, though, wanted colonies that would serve to keep foreign markets accessible and open, not colonies that would be the markets themselves. The Philippines were important not only for a population of 7 million, but because the island provided room for a naval base from which the US could protect its business interests in Japan and China. In this way, through a subtle dominance based on economics rather than direct politics, the US was able to create the same economic relationship that European powers had with their colonies. Under this view, the colony grabbing of 1898 (Guam, Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico) was only the most obvious episode of American imperialism; it was the short period before the US discovered more subtle methods of economic domination, known as "neo-imperialism". What really made the difference was a sudden shift in opinion among a "Foreign Policy Elite" consisting largely of businessmen, intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats, and newspapermen. Partially, this shift might have occurred because of economic motivation, especially the search for new markets and the need to protect those markets with coaling stations, as advocated by Mahan. Alternatively, imperialism could have been a continuation of "Manifest Destiny", the ideology that fueled westward expansion. With the West mostly won, people now looked elsewhere to expand. The "Foreign Policy Elite" also may have justified imperial expansion using the theory of Social Darwinism, which suggested that only the strongest nations would survive, and that fierce competition was natural and necessary. Finally, the Foreign Policy Elite might have looked to Europe and followed the example set by European imperialists, in particular Great Britain. Most likely is that some mixture of these various factors all worked together to change the mind of the Foreign Policy Elite regarding the acquisition of an American empire.

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• Word Count 1575
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• Level International Baccalaureate
• Subject History

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George Washington Williams and the Origins of Anti-Imperialism

Initially supportive of Belgian King Leopold II’s claim to have created a “free state” of Congo, Williams changed his mind when he saw the horrors of empire.

Historian George Washington Williams died in the English coastal town of Blackpool in 1891, frustrated at a moral, political, and social catastrophe he had witnessed, one that would alter the Black radical tradition for good. Williams discovered, in his trips in the Belgian Congo, a problem that had not yet been named: imperialism. It was barbarism and cruelty thought to have been extinguished with the abolition of slavery. The “free state” of Congo was put to work for King Leopold II of Belgium. Children and old men had their hands cut off for the slightest infractions, an indigenous force founded by the king (the notorious Force Publique ) could, without reservation, destroy whole villages if they refused to work. All subjects of the Free State of Congo were forced to extract rubber from rubber figs. Only free in name, every Congolese citizen was effectively still a slave. Everybody was forced, with a labor tax by Leopold.

When George Washington Williams saw this suffering up close, it was as if he was looking into a mirror, a mirror that showed a bygone age he risked his life to abolish. It looked like chattel slavery.

Empire was as old as hierarchical society itself. Settler colonialism was seen as a solution to the “social problem” of unruly unemployed workers at home in Europe. Steamships took settlers to European-carved “protectorates” to start life anew. In struggles for land and labor, racial segregation, backed by the powerful imperialist state, would soon follow. The barbarisms that were being reported, from the Nama and Herero genocides in present-day Namibia by the Germans to the concentration camps in South Africa by the English to the war crimes by the US in the Philippines, spurred a global movement which called itself “anti-imperialism.”

Williams, however, died before this movement began to take shape. He died before people identified as anti-imperialists, before the American novelist Mark Twain and his contemporaries founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1898. He died before the English social scientist J. A. Hobson wrote his influential study, Imperialism: A Study (1902), after witnessing horrors in the Second Boer War in South Africa in 1903.

Williams was a deeply Christian man. He was trained in theology and believed that God directly ruled the affairs of humanity. In his worldview, God tested the patience of humanity but ultimately pushed world affairs toward the arc of justice. The American civil war, which he ran away from home to join at the young age of fourteen, seemed to prove to Williams that behind the Union army—and the end of American slavery—there worked a divine hand. And there was good reason for his optimism: his own life story.

We would have never learned about Williams were it not for a graduate student in 1946, John Hope Franklin, uncovering his comprehensive history of Black America, one of the first of its kind.

During his childhood (in the US), most who shared Williams’ complexion had been condemned to a life of slavery. By his adulthood, during reconstruction, he had stints as a storekeeper for the internal revenue department, as secretary of the four-million-dollar fund to build the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, and served in the State Legislature of Ohio. At one time, Williams was considered for the position of ambassador of the United States to Haiti, a decision made by a Republican administration, but rescinded by Democrats. Williams’ patriotism never wavered, and his optimism was directed toward the improvement of the lot of Black peoples worldwide.

But just as he had come of age in a hopeful moment in American history, i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation, another process had been in motion beyond its shores. From 1800 to 1878, six and a half million square miles of Earth were added to the possessions of Europe. In 1800, that meant Europe owned 55% of the world’s landmass. By 1878, its shared increased to 67%. On the eve of World War I, that became 84% of the globe. Africa was a late target in this partitioning of the world, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, it too was becoming swallowed up by Europe.

In 1884, Bismark claimed southwest Africa, Togoland and the Cameroons, New Guinea and East Africa, Tanganyika within a year. The British had already claimed Egypt and were vying for control with the French in the north of the continent. Tunisia and Algeria were already under French control. Portugal, the oldest colonizer in Africa, had retained her centuries-old claims, and with the collapse of the Dutch East India Company, the British took over present-day South Africa, and shortly after introduced British settlers to the already established polis of the Dutch. This was a messy and dangerous process.

There is a persistent myth that, in 1885, the West African Conference of Berlin divided Africa among Europeans. But by then, the “scramble for Africa” was already well in motion. What the conference did is draw armistice lines for the empires that were now clearly in control of the continent. It was a way to ensure peace so that Europeans could establish “protectorates” over the land they already colonized, according to the late imperial historian George Shepperson.

In Berlin, the scramble for Africa was only recognized, formalized, legitimized, and intensified. Fifteen powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and the Ottoman Empire—had gathered in Berlin for two purposes: to recognize European claims to Africa and officially demarcate them on the map, and more importantly, to follow the US in recognizing King Leopold II’s personal claim to the Congo.

Leopold II insisted that designating a colony of his own and calling it the Congo Free State would help abolish slavery in Africa, spread Christianity to its natives, and open up the continent to free trade. Only few, like the first Black Protestant Episcopal Bishop, Theodore Holly, realized that what happened in the Berlin Conference instead was empires who “had come together to enact into law, national rapine, robbery and murder.”

Williams, typical of his time, thought that Leopold was a sincere king. As the historian Robin D. G Kelly puts it : “Scholars as diverse as George Washington Williams, Benjamin Brawley, and Rayford Logan understood imperialism a bearer of modernity for the colored world.” The American poet Hunt Hawkins, based out of Florida State University, demonstrates that Williams appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1884 to urge US recognition of King Leopold’s claim to the Congo. In addition, “he attended an Anti-Slavery Conference in Brussels and proposed to Leopold a scheme for bringing black Americans to work in the Congo.”

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Leopold was alarmed at the idea that Williams wanted to see the Congo for himself, even urging him to wait. But Williams went anyways. What he witnessed, according to the American journalist and historian Adam Hochschild, was so brutal that, in a confidential letter, Williams accused King Leopold of crimes against humanity, decades before the term would reappear in the Nuremberg trials and become recognized by international law. In an open letter to the King that shook the world, he accused Leopold of having a government which “had sequestered their land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail.”

A month later, the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad followed the same trail that Williams took. His notebook, which made note of the numerous crimes he witnessed, provided the material for his timeless novel Heart of Darkness . Both of them had come back from the Congo, witnessing “the horror!, the horror!” of Leopold’s rule, and avowed a complete renunciation of Empire.

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Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League

As the United States gained an overseas empire, Mark Twain and others spoke out against imperialism in general and American imperialism in particular.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the major nations of Europe rushed to develop colonies in Africa and Asia, often justifying their actions with the claim that they were bringing the “blessings of civilization” to those unenlightened continents. Not surprisingly, many of the unenlightened peoples resisted being ruled by foreign powers, and the Europeans found themselves facing insurgencies such as the Boer Wars in southern Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China. The United States somewhat belatedly joined the Europeans as a colonialist power following its victory in the 1898 war with Spain, which left it in possession of such formerly Spanish territories as Cuba and the Philippines.

Opposition to American Imperialism

The 1898 Treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War essentially allowed for the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. A Filipino independence movement begun earlier in the decade to free the islands from Spanish rule now was directed against the new foreign ruler, America. While many, if not most, Americans favored annexation, there were notable opponents, including William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, John Dewey, William James – and Mark Twain. They, along with many others, formed the Anti-Imperialist League, which briefly served as the organizational center for opposition to the developing American Empire.

Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism

Twain told the New York Herald on October 15, 1900: “I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” The following month he spoke to the Berkeley Lyceum about the peasant insurgency in China: “The Boxer is a patriot,” he said, and added, “I am a Boxer.” As Twain biographer Ron Powers notes, by identifying himself with the opponents of foreign rule, he anticipated by over sixty years President Kennedy’s declaration to the citizens of West Berlin, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Twain continued his fierce criticism of American imperialism in his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” in which he excoriated not only imperialist governments, but also their supporters: the business interests always coveting new markets, and the missionary interests always coveting new converts. These three constituted what Twain called the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust,” a satirical take on what Rudyard Kipling had called “the white man’s burden.” In our dealings with the Filipinos, Twain wrote: “There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil…. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and ninety per cent. of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty State Legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.”

The Silencing of Mark Twain

In the same years that Twain was establishing himself as the voice of the nation’s conscience, forces were developing in American society that would effectively silence that voice. As Ron Powers points out, these were the same forces that are present today, narrowing our own public expressions of opinion: media consolidation, corporate control of editorial content, and a focus on “celebrities” and entertainment. In an attempt to broaden circulation and increase revenue, the leading newspapers began including comic strips, puzzles, dramatic front page photographs and sketches, and lavish advertisements for department stores. By 1905, what would have been unthinkable a few years earlier was becoming all too common: magazines were rejecting articles by Mark Twain. Essays now considered classic, such as “The War Prayer” and “The United States of Lyncherdom,” were not published until after Twain’s death. Twain himself withheld an essay called “As Concerns Interpreting the Deity,” knowing the bitter reaction that it was likely to provoke. “I will leave it behind,” he wrote, “and utter it from the grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.”

Mark Twain’s writings unquestionably grew darker and more pessimistic towards the end of his life. Whether this was because of his own increasing infirmities and the deaths of his wife and two of his three daughters, or the increasing madness of the world around him with its assassinations, wars, and rumors of wars – or both – is open to debate. What is certain is that, whatever the circumstances in which he wrote them, Mark Twain’s words remain as fresh and relevant today as they were a century and more ago.

• Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2005, pp. 603–610.

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1917 as a black swan event, the view from the café odeon, the phantom of world revolution, 1917 and the current crisis in global capitalism, anti-imperialism: the leninist legacy and the fate of world revolution.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2017

The most important of Lenin's writings was, arguably, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. That work shifted the focus from workers’ struggles within one country to the dynamics of capitalism as a global system. The Leninist project thereby inextricably linked the causes of economic justice and national liberation, a fateful step in light of the transformation of the world wrought by decolonization. As capitalism stumbles through yet another global crisis today, what parts of Lenin's fevered vision remain relevant 100 years later?

Political scientists moved on from studying the 1917 revolution some time ago. The collapse of communism meant that there was no longer a rival system to study, and hence less interest in understanding its origins in 1917. These days few political scientists study revolutions, 1917 or any other. Footnote 1 Instead, they are focused on the role different political institutions and social movements play in achieving generally-agreed goals of peace, democracy, and prosperity. For example, the Arab Spring is seen more as a social movement than a revolution (or a failed revolution).

The 1917 revolutions created institutions that “failed” the test of history—a “workers’ state,” a ruling Communist Party, central planning—and the corresponding ideology of world revolution and the destruction of capitalism. Political scientists are more interested in studying the revolutions which created the institutions of liberalism and nationalism that dominate the contemporary world, at least as seen from Washington: the French Revolution, the American Revolution (Hamilton!), and even England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. Footnote 2

But political scientists should be interested in 1917. It represents a unique case of total systemic breakdown, with sobering lessons for the stability of political and economic systems through to the present day.

We live in a world of increasing complexity and volatility. The revolution in transport and communications that began in the 1950s–60s radically accelerated the share of trade in the world economy, which was followed by the deeper integration of financial markets. With the information revolution that coincided with the collapse of communism (the first web site was launched one week after the fall of the Berlin Wall), the pace of technological change has continued to accelerate, and with it growing uncertainty. Footnote 3

The financial crash of 1998 began with a fall in export earnings in Indonesia and triggered a wave of financial panic that nearly brought down the US banking system. Russia defaulted on its debts and the old era of unrestrained oligarchic capitalism came to an end, thanks to a resurgent state headed by Vladimir Putin.

In the wake of the 1998 crisis, mathematician Nassim Taleb coined the phrase “Black Swan” to describe events that have a very low probability of occurrence but a very high impact when they do take place. Taleb argued that the number of Black Swan events would increase, since “globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability.” Footnote 4 Sure enough, the continued liberalization of international finance in the 2000s culminated in the 2008 crash, a cataclysm which all the economists and financial authorities not only failed to see coming, but whose models (such as the efficient markets hypothesis) insisted could not happen.

Similarly, on the political front we have seen a series of unpredicted and unpredictable events in recent decades: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the embrace of capitalism by the Chinese Communist Party, the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, the September 11 th attacks, the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election. It wasn't just that political scientists failed to predict these events—their very occurrence seemed incompatible with the prevailing theories that were being used to analyze the world. Even after they occurred, we had a hard time coming up with a convincing narrative to explain them. Footnote 5

Political scientists have generally shied away from trying to embrace Taleb's thinking. Footnote 6 Outside academia, there is an entire industry of political risk analysis, attaching probabilities to future scenarios and trying to advise governments and corporations how to adapt to a range of developments. Footnote 7 But risk is not uncertainty: according to the classic definition by Frank Knight, risk can be measured and insured against, but uncertainty cannot. Footnote 8 Academic political scientists, however, have not seriously engaged with the study of why political systems suffer catastrophic failure. In 1984, sociologist Charles Perrow laid out a useful model for explaining catastrophic accidents such as Three Mile Island. Footnote 9 Like Taleb, Perrow stresses organizational complexity and “tight coupling” between disparate systems that may interact in unpredictable ways. One useful contribution by Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton analyzed the factors behind state failure, arguing that “although one cannot predict what events will befall a country, one can predict how events will affect a country.” Footnote 10

This sort of approach is useful in trying to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—something that has attracted surprisingly little attention from social scientists. Footnote 11 It exemplifies the interaction of overlapping complex systems. Mikhail Gorbachev's struggle to reform the Soviet economy and ruling party triggered an opening for groups in the Baltic and Caucasus republics to pursue their nationalist agendas. These domestic systems in turn were closely connected to the politics of Soviet imperialism from Afghanistan to Poland, and with Ronald Reagan's post-Iran strategic assertiveness. Gorbachev knew that some sort of dignified withdrawal from Afghanistan would only be possible with help from the Americans—that, plus fears of Star Wars technologies, led him to pursue arms control negotiations with the United States, and to borrow heavily from the west to fund his ill-fated economic modernization program.

No single model could incorporate all these elements and attach probabilities to their likely path of development. Just as the Soviet collapse defies a deterministic social-scientific explanation, so too does the system's chaotic birth in 1917.

If we are now living in the second wave of globalization in the modern era, then the first wave came in the period 1870–1914. New technologies (the train, the steam ship, electricity, the telegraph, industrial chemistry, and so on) facilitated massive industrial growth and a surge in international trade, which reached 9% of global GDP by 1914, a level not reached again until the 1970s (since when it has doubled, to 18% of GDP). Footnote 12 These and related new technologies (such as lithographic and off-set printing, photography, cinema and radio) also brought a wave of disruptive political developments—the enfranchisement of the majority of male citizens, and the rise of mass movements inspired by socialism and nationalism. These processes culminated in the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent collapse of the European state system in 1917–18.

Vladimir Lenin witnessed the turmoil of WWI from his political exile in Zurich. Sitting in the Café Odeon (now a gay bar), between January and June 1916, he penned the short book Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism , a brilliant analysis of the disruptive logic of global capitalism. Footnote 13 When students read Lenin nowadays, the most popular works assigned are What is to Be Done? (1902) and State and Revolution (1917), which address the political innovations for which he is best known—the creation of a vanguard party, and the advocacy of violent use of state power to fulfil his eschatological vision. Footnote 14 However, Imperialism is his intellectual masterpiece, and the only work that really has continuing relevance for our understanding of the present.

The economic analysis in Imperialism was not original—Lenin was drawing on well-known works by John Hobson, Rudolph Hilferding, and his Bolshevik comrade Nikolai Bukharin. Footnote 15 What was distinctive was Lenin's ability to combine that economic analysis with a political analysis of class struggle within the various capitalist countries and their colonies, and on top of that display a grasp of the international military rivalry. Lenin was thus integrating developments across a multiplicity of systems. His “Copernican revolution” was to see that class struggle within the advanced capitalist countries was less important, because of nationalism and the emergence of a “labor aristocracy,” than political struggle between countries. This was manifested in the rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements in India, the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere, and in the awkward position of Russia as simultaneously colonizer and colonized. Footnote 16 This meant that Russia represented the “weakest link” in the chain of global imperialism. Footnote 17 Lenin therefore hypothesized that a working class revolution could succeed first in Russia and not in Germany or England, as most orthodox Marxists supposed; and from there it would spread globally until the entire system of world capitalism was destroyed. When revolution broke out on the streets of Petrograd in February 1917, most Marxists assumed that this would lead to a transitional bourgeois government, and that socialist forces were too weak to try to seize power themselves. On his return to Russia, however, Lenin insisted that global revolution was at hand, and that the workers’ movement should seize power. Footnote 18 Stikhiinost’, or spontaneity, had long been a central concept in Lenin's revolutionary writings. Footnote 19 He grasped both the contingency of events and the contours of the bigger forces at work. He saw the scope for agency while large power structures were in fateful disarray, and he acted on that knowledge. The Bolsheviks were able to seize and hold power in Russia, but Lenin's assumption that this would necessarily lead to global revolution proved wrong. Footnote 20

Lenin was not alone in foreseeing the impending catastrophe, of course. For example, a memorandum written for the Tsar in February 1914 by former interior minister Petr Durnovo outlined the deadly consequences for Russia of the impending “fight to the death” between England and Germany. He warned that “the financial and economic consequences of defeat can be neither calculated nor foreseen, and will undoubtedly spell the total ruin of our entire national economy,” and that “there must inevitably break out in the defeated country a social revolution which, by the very nature of things, will spread to the country of the victor.” Footnote 21

But none of the European leaders who took their country to war in 1914 imagined that it would result in the collapse of the great land empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. Still less could they have anticipated that a group claiming to represent the world proletariat would seize—and hold—state power in Russia. The German government, of course, sponsored Lenin's return to Russia, so they also exercised agency in this chain of events. Footnote 22 They presumably thought Lenin would cause problems for the Provisional Government, and hopefully take Russia out of the war. But they could not have foreseen that he would actually succeed in taking power and creating a state that, just 28 years later, would crush and occupy Germany itself.

Lenin's fateful connection of imperialism with capitalism meant that initial Bolshevik policy made revolution in Europe the indispensable condition of their own survival. Though Bolshevik attempts to bring revolution by force or conspiracy were stopped in Poland, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, the commitment of Moscow to the propagation of world revolution transformed the nature of international relations, and it undermined early Soviet attempts to gain the measure of economic cooperation that they sought to begin the reconstruction of their economy after seven years of nearly uninterrupted warfare. This ultimately exposed a dilemma that had been hidden in Lenin's conflation of revolution in Russia with the fall of the global imperialist-capitalist system: what to do when the interests of the Soviet Union and that of world revolution were in conflict? Though Communist leaders around the world generally claimed that the interests of the Soviet Union and that of world revolution were necessarily identical, in practice Soviet control over the activities of Communist Parties in other countries through the Comintern and other channels belied this vision of revolutionary unity. Footnote 23 From Jiang Jieshi's massacre of Communists in Shanghai in 1927 to the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the Polish Communist Party by the NKVD in 1937, communists around the world paid the price for believing in a united world revolution. By the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the golden age of Soviet sympathizers, at least in the west, was at an end.

The Soviet victory in World War II seemed to provide a renewed opportunity to connect the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions on a world scale, given the dramatic rise in Soviet power and influence. Despite short-term successes in eastern Europe and east Asia, however, two long-term factors upset the Soviet vision of a revolutionary march to the west: the failure of the capitalist world to return to a state of economic depression, and the explosion of revolution in the colonial world. This meant that the Soviets were faced with a choice of whether to stick to the original plan and prioritize revolution in the industrialized countries or instead write those countries off for a time and become the patron of the anti-colonial struggle. The latter choice would take Moscow into uncharted territory. The Comintern approach to the colonial and developing world saw it as a means to an end, namely the destabilization of the metropoles with the assumption that independence for the colonies would only come with the fall of capitalism in the west. Footnote 24 Embracing the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism in the post-WWII era, though, meant finding a way to promote socialism in pre-industrial economies while conducting something like a war of attrition with the west under the cover of “Peaceful Coexistence.” Footnote 25 In accordance with the imperialism-as-final-stage-of-capitalism hypothesis, the Soviets tried to do both, with the consequence that their neglect of the perceived interests of the workers in the west weakened communist parties there while their lukewarm support of revolution in the developing world led many to seek other patrons. Footnote 26

This shift of the revolutionary battleground to the developing world, and the inability of the Soviets to successfully adapt, led to something like a Socialist Reformation. While Moscow's claim to be a sort of Vatican of the international communist movement had never gone completely unchallenged, the 1960s saw a proliferation of alternative potential leaders with their own models, some of whom held the reins of political power, mostly importantly Mao Zedong. With the United States at war in Vietnam, students and others marching in Paris, Berlin, Berkeley, Mexico City and elsewhere, and wars raging from Southern Africa to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the vision of a global revolution against the imperialist-capitalist system never seemed more compelling. Chasing the elusive dream of restoring a measure of unity in order to re-assert control and affirm its legitimacy, the Soviet leadership tried to embrace these new causes and constituencies, finding itself by the 1980s mired in conflicts in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and beyond. While there were occasional local victories, on a global scale pursuing the anti-imperialist chimera hurt the viability of socialism by draining its resources and reducing its attractiveness to millions of potential adherents, who saw little to admire in the new Soviet client states. Footnote 27

While the Soviet Union proved unable to bring about a comprehensive overthrow of the global system of imperialism and capitalism, Lenin's idea nevertheless grew in popularity as new groups sought to connect their own struggles to global phenomena in innovative ways. From the Trotskyite Fourth International to Maoism, Guevara-ism, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction and numerous other groups, the idea of a necessary connection between imperialism and capitalism, between ethnic oppression and economic oppression, as the analytical key to the system of global injustice galvanized agendas and imaginations far beyond the bounds of Marxism-Leninism.

100 years later we are back in another systemic crisis whose contours are only dimly understood, and which has already produced a series of black swans which went against all the models of economic and political behavior, based on extrapolation of past experience. In the 2000s, all countries experienced financial crises of greater frequency and depth—and recovery times from the 2008 crash have been particularly protracted. Footnote 28 This has produced numerous reincarnations of the imperialism-capitalism hypothesis which, despite being politically at odds, bear a rhetorical and at times tactical similarity that reveals their common origins, almost like lexical and syntactical evidence of a common linguistic origin. These sorts of connections can be drawn between the anti-globalization movement that burst onto the scene with the WTO protests in Seattle in 2000, China's appeal to African leaders on the basis of anti-imperialism through the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and even movements committed to global jihad. The alliance of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in the 2000s would be nearly inexplicable without Lenin's 1916 pamphlet.

For Russia, Lenin's key insight was that its problems must be understood in a global context, as the result of complex forces operating far beyond Russia's borders. The same admonition applies globally to the current crisis—people are searching for solutions at the national level (trade barriers if you are a protectionist, investment in R&D and human capital if you are a liberal), but the stagnant wages and rising inequality of the advanced economies are the product of tectonic shifts in global economic power towards China and other emerging economies that are rapidly building the institutions and infrastructure to connect them to the global division of labor. This means that, once again, the solutions to rapidly rising inequality due to the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization cannot be found inside national borders, any more than “socialism in one country” could produce lasting prosperity for Soviet citizens. Though the politics of national preservation seem ascendant in the west at the moment, geopolitical rivalry will make it impossible to completely stop globalization, as China's assumption of the Trans-Pacific Partnership mantle in the wake of the US election indicates. A century after Lenin wrote, with the movement of capital, information and technology increasing ever more rapidly, no country can hope to achieve sustained prosperity and stability by isolating itself from the global economy.

Nowhere are these contradictions more visible than in Russia itself. Russia's economy is heavily dependent on the sale of oil and gas to Europe. But Russia has been excluded from European institutions such as NATO and the European Union, and Moscow has turned to denouncing European values in increasingly strident terms since 2011. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian nationalists urged Putin to cut Russia's economic dependence on the west, but he has not yet fully embraced their agenda. Global integration serves Russia's crony capitalists all too well. Footnote 29

Russians are also in a conundrum when it comes to marking the centenary of the 1917 revolutions. Footnote 30 Lenin is no longer venerated as the founder of the Soviet state. Russians themselves are acutely aware that it was global integration that led to the destruction of their state twice in the past century—in 1917 and 1991. Footnote 31 For Russia, therefore, the conception of a hostile imperialist world order directed against them remains. Socialism proved unable to defeat it, and the search for an alternative approach has been bloody and fruitless. Putin's attempt to return to Russia's imperial past, though popular, seems like another dead end. Despite its best efforts to create a sort of far-right “international” in Europe as a way of positioning itself as the alternative to the west, Russia, bereft of its empire and lacking its former political and ideological attractiveness, will be hard-pressed to create an international coalition to battle its perceived imperialist enemies. Perhaps, contra Lenin, Russia would be best-served by finally getting its own house in order.

1. For an overview, see the book by sociologist DeFronzo , James , Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, 5th ed. ( Boulder , 2015 ) Google Scholar .

2. As for example in North , Douglass , Wallis , John and Weingast , Barry , Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History ( Cambridge, UK , 2009 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

3. Giddens , Anthony , Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives ( London , 2002 ) Google Scholar ; Beck , Ulrich , Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity ( London , 2010 ) Google Scholar .

4. Taleb , Nassim , The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable ( New York , 2007 ) Google Scholar .

5. One of the Russian biographies of Donald Trump refers to him as a “ Black Swan. ” Benediktov , Kirill , Chernyi lebed’: politicheskaia biografiia Donalda Trampa ( Moscow , 2016 ) Google Scholar .

6. One exception is the special issue of Critical Review 21 no. 4 ( 2010 ) Google Scholar . See the introduction by Blyth , Mark , “ Coping with the Black Swan: The Unsettling World of Nassim Taleb ,” Critical Review 21 , no. 4 (December 2009 ): 447 –65 CrossRef Google Scholar .

7. Bremmer , Ian and Keat , Preston , The Fat Tail. The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing ( Oxford, UK . 2009 ) CrossRef Google Scholar . “Fat tail” is a term used by Nassim Taleb.

8. Knight , Frank H. , Risk, Uncertainty and Profit ( Boston , 1921 ) Google Scholar .

9. Perrow , Charles , Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies ( New York , 1984 ) Google Scholar .

10. Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton, “The Calm before the Storm,” Foreign Affairs, January 2015, at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/calm-storm (last accessed June 13, 2017).

11. The best treatment remains Kotkin , Stephen , Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000, updated ed., ( Oxford, UK , 2008 ) Google Scholar . See also Miller , Chris , The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR ( Chapel Hill , 2016 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

12. Maddison , Angus , Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity ( Washington , 2005 ) Google Scholar ; Michael D. Bordo, Barry Eichengreen, and Douglas A. Irwin, “Is Globalization Today Really Different than Globalization a Hundred Years Ago?” (paper presented at the Brookings Trade Policy Forum on “Governing in a global Economy,” Washington, April 15–16, 1999).

13. Available online: Lenin , Vladimir , “ Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism ” ( 1917 ), in Lenin Selected Works, vol. 1 ( Moscow , 1963 ), 667 – 766 Google Scholar , at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ (last accessed June 14, 2017).

14. Harding , Neil , Lenin’s Political Thought ( London , 1977 ) Google Scholar .

15. Lenin read over 150 books and made 900 pages of notes in preparing Imperialism . Labica , Georges , “ From Imperialism to Globalization ,” in Budgen , Sebastian , Kouvélakis , Stathis , and Žižek , Slavoj (eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth ( Durham , 2007 ), 222 –37, here 223 CrossRef Google Scholar . Lenin wrote the preface for Bukharin , Nikolai , Imperialism and the Global Economy ( Moscow , 1915 ) Google Scholar , available at: www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/intro.htm (last accessed June 14, 2017).

16. The idea that Russia was self-colonizing is of continued relevance to understanding the ambiguities of Russia identity, see: Etkind , Aleksandr , Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience ( Cambridge, UK , 2011 ) Google Scholar .

17. The phrase was used by Lenin in a June 9, 1917 article in Pravda entitled “The chain is no stronger than its weakest link.” Lenin , Vladimir , “ The Chain Is No Stronger than its Weakest Link ,” Pravda, June 9, 1917, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 24 ( Moscow , 1964 ), 519 –20 Google Scholar , at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/27.htm (last accessed June 14, 2017).

18. Lenin , Vladimir , “ The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution ” [The April Theses], Pravda , April 7, 1917, in Lenin Collected Works vol. 24 ( Moscow , 1964 ) 19 – 26 Google Scholar , at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm (last accessed June 14, 2017).

19. We are grateful to Alexander Semyonov for this point.

20. Lenin’s ideas nevertheless continue to cast a long shadow over leftist intellectuals in the world today. See for example Hardt , Michael and Negri , Antonio , Empire ( Cambridge, MA , 2001 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; Žižek , Slavoj (ed.), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 ( London , 2011 ) Google Scholar ; and Budgen, Kouvélakis, and Žižek (eds.), Lenin Reloaded .

21. Petr Durnovo, “Memorandum to Nicholas II,” February, 1914, at: http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/his242/documents/Durnovo.pdf . He warned against annexing Galicia if Russia won the war, because it would fuel Ukrainian separatism. If only Stalin had heeded that warning in 1945.

22. Merridale , Catherine , Lenin on the Train ( New York , 2017 ) Google Scholar .

23. See, for example, Pantsov , Alexander , The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 , ( Honolulu , 2000 ) Google Scholar ; Caballero , Manuel , Latin America and the Comintern, 1919–1943 , ( Cambridge, UK , 2002 ) Google Scholar ; Louro , Michele , “ Rethinking Nehru’s Internationalism: The League against Imperialism and Anti-imperial Networks, 1927–1936 ,” Third Frame: Literature, Culture, and Society 2 , no. 3 , (September 2009 ) pp. 79 – 94 Google Scholar .

24. See Karl Radek, address to the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, September 2, 1920, at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/ch02.htm (last accessed June 15, 2017); “Theses on the Eastern Question,” Fourth Congress of the Communist International, December 5, 1922, at www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/eastern-question.htm (last accessed June 15, 2017).

25. See Friedman , Jeremy , Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World ( Chapel Hill , 2015 ), 60 – 83 CrossRef Google Scholar .

26. For example, on the Soviet failure to support the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algeria out of consideration for the French Communist Party, see: Byrne , Jeffrey , Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order ( Oxford, UK , 2016 ), 59 CrossRef Google Scholar . On the tensions that the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence produced with North Vietnam, see: Asselin , Pierre , Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War: 1954–1965 ( Berkeley , 2013 ), 34 – 36 Google Scholar .

27. For the impact on Soviet resources, see Kotkin , Stephen and Gross , Jan T. , Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment ( New York , 2009 ), 50 Google Scholar ; Light , Margot , “ Introduction: The Evolution of Soviet Policy in the Third World ,” in Light , Margot , ed., Troubled Friendships: Moscow’s Third World Ventures ( London , 1993 ), 21 Google Scholar .

28. Jacobs , Michael and Mazzucato , Marianna , Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth ( Chichester , 2016 ) Google Scholar .

29. Rutland , Peter , “ The Place of Economics in Russian National Identity Debates ,” in Kolstø , Pål and Blakkisrud , Helge eds., The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity, and Authoritarianism 2000–2015 ( Edinburgh , 2016 ), 336 –61 Google Scholar .

30. Fedor Krashchennikov, “Politicheskii Dnevnik: Neudobnyi 17-i god” (Political Journal: The Inconvenient Year of 1917) Vedomosti, November 2, 2016; Mark Edele, “Friday Essay: Putin, Memory Wars and the 100 th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution,” The Conversation , February 9, 2017 at http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-putin-memory-wars-and-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-russian-revolution-72477 (last accessed June 15, 2017).

31. Gazenko , Roman and Martinov , Aleksei , Ideal’nyi shtorm”: Tekhnologiia razrusheniia gosudartsva (Perfect Storm: The Technology of State Destruction) ( Moscow , 2016 ) Google Scholar .

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• Volume 76, Special Issue 3
• Jeremy Friedman and Peter Rutland
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2017.166

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The Blessings of Civilization: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism and the Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands

Mark Twain Annual no. 6 (2008): 51-63.

This essay examines the commentary by Mark Twain on Hawai‘i —not only in “Following the Equator” but also in letters written to the New York Tribune in 1872, “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” (1866) and his first lecture “Our Fellow Savages from the Sandwich Islands” (1866)—as the deep background to Clemens’s thinking about colonialism and American empire at the turn of the century. What I show is how his representations of Hawai‘i serve as a prelude to the scathing tone of a late satire, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”

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When I look at critical work on Mark Twain, I am struck by the extent to which it has been invested in establishing Twain as the symptomatic American writer. He is seen as the creator of a new national American literary vernacular idiom, promulgator of quintessentially American values such as frontier spirit, and a champion of free speech and social criticism. These virtues in turn are then distilled as the defining elements of national character. As a non-American national, I find something troubling in this approach. I do not dispute the validity of the established nationalist reading of Mark Twain per se. But I have found that my interest in the texts and the history with which they are involved is continually frustrated by this other insistence on the national parameters of the texts. I have always thought that I enjoy and value the texts, and yet am also aware that I do not value them for this reason. Is my valuation of the texts then invalid? What in any case is the basis for ...

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“Unclasping the Eagle’s Talons: Mark Twain, American Freethought, and the Responses to Imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 17, No. 3, (2018): pp. 524-545. This article situates Mark Twain's anti-imperialism within the wider atheist and freethought response to debates about the American turn to empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians have been alert to the ways in which religion influenced debates around empire at this time, there have yet to be any studies of the views of American atheists and freethinkers on this question. I examine Twain and Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker of the era, as well as some of the major freethought periodicals in the United States, the Truth Seeker, the Blue-Grass Blade, and the Free Thought Magazine, and argue that their irreligious views informed their responses to imperialism, from the initial support for a war against Catholic Spain, to opposition to the war against the Philippines motivated in large part by a hostility toward organized religion and its role in American expansion. More broadly, I argue for the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of anti-imperialism within an American religious landscape that was basically Protestant, to a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the diversity of religious and nonreligious perspectives.

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Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League Paperback – February 13, 2013

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American Imperialism Essay

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Introduction

Criticism of imperialism, outcome of the policy in the twentieth century, reference list.

Imperialism is the establishment of political and economic dominance over other nations. Many nations took part in colonial empires including the U.S. during the nineteenth century. America, on its own, is not supposed to be an empire. It was a rebel colony initially being the first system to dispose British rule.

Imperialism was first practiced in Samoa which motivated the rest of the America. The United States had positive motives when they got involved in the task. Their reason for participation was to control economy and compete with other industrialized nations as well as to maintain their reputation in other countries. Another motive was to obtain a constant market for gainful investments. There was also the religious motivation with the desire to introduce Christianity to foreign and traditional cultures (Streich, 2009, p.1).

Americans viewed imperialism as a way of uplifting the uncivilized people in the world in a moral way. Production was very high and America needed to protect its expanding foreign markets. Hawaii had been dominated by Americans way before the war. America had already started investing in Cuba’s natural resources while Hawaii’s best ports, already under America’s control, was used to access China for efficient trading. The state’s secretary pressured Europeans to stop blocking America’s participation in China’s trade.

America had a war with Spain in 1898 which after its conclusion, America was given the ownership of Cuba, Philippines and Puerto Rico which were previous possessions of Spain. America wanted an efficient and easier access of its navy to the Pacific and the Caribbean oceans.

A negotiation between American officials and Britain confirmed the America’s domination and regulation over the canal. A French canal company official gave Americans a central section of Panama to build the canal. He also gave America rights to take more land or use troops on Panama when necessary.

The Panamanians were to be given their independence only if they accepted the treaty, but they refused to sign it so the Americans took ownership of the canal region (Bella, 2003, p.1). The United States therefore destroyed all European empires after taking over Cuba and Philippines from Spain.

They built a navy ready for European in case they became troublesome or destabilized. In 1939 to 1945, the then American president, Roosevelt, extracted British colonies including the Caribbean and West Africa and in exchange He offered assistance to Britain during war. After years after the World War II, America was already exercising authority and power in Belgian Congo which was previously dominated by Britain, and French Indochina (Selfa, 1999, p.1).

Despite the fact that many Americans believed in overseas expansion, many other Americans opposed the move. They formed the American anti-imperialism league in 1899. However, their campaigns were not successful. The league argued that the imperialism policy was intimidating to personal liberty.

They argued that all human races no matter the color have the right to live and pursue happiness at all times. The group maintained that the government should obtain their rightful powers from the citizen’s consent. They insisted that forced control is criminal assault and lack of devotion to government principles.

The league firmly condemned the national administration in the Philippines and demanded an immediate stop to the discrimination against human liberty. They required Spain to initiate the process since it was one of the first countries to practice imperialism. They had the aim of forming a congress that would officially inform the Philippines of America’s intentions to grant them their rightful independence.

The group also disapproved strongly the American soldiers for being involved in an unjust war. Their arguments were based on the fact that the United States had always detested international laws which allowed forceful control o f the weak by the strong party. The obligation of nation’s citizens to support its government during hazardous moments did not fit applicably for this situation of imperialism (Halsall, 1997, p.1).

An obvious outcome is America now stretches from Atlanta the Pacific. With this entire region where there are no import and export tax barriers, it has been quite easy for America to increase its per capita. However, America was left with the heritage of oppression which is no different from slavery.

However, some positive effects have been felt especially through the Panama Canal that was constructed then which has helped improve the region’s economy. Transportation and communication services were extensively improved. Uncivilized areas got the opportunity of adopting higher livelihood values. The countries that were colonized were affected negatively as well especially in the economic sector where most of the key and productive elements are up to date owned or controlled by foreign economic agencies.

Imperialism can never be a good practice no matter the circumstances. It does not matter whether the imperialistic country has good intentions or not. If any nation at all feels the need to offer help to another country, it should do so in a better way and certainly not by controlling the other depriving them of their freedom and rights. Assistance can be offered as ideas and policies that the country should implement on its own depending on what suits the situation it is faced with.

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• Casco Vieto in Panama. A Brief Overview of History and Politics of Panama
• Jimmy Carter and the Panama Canal
• The Economy of Panama After the Covid-19 Pandemic
• American History (1492-1870)
• The Watergate Scandal
• Patriot Act Importance for the American Citizens
• Imperialism or National Protection: What is the Definition of the United States of America?
• 1900 Storm: The Great Galveston Hurricane
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Anti-Colonialism and Imperialism (1960s–1970s)

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• Christos Mais 3  

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Anti-Imperialism ; Antiwar Movements ; Imperialism ; Socialism

The 1960s was crucially marked by anti-colonialism, as the states that gained their independence during that decade were twice as numerous as those of the previous two decades combined. This essay aims at addressing the different aspects of anti-colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the way it was expressed in the former colonies and in relation to the impact it had within imperialist countries. This impact was visible in the formation of antiwar and anti-imperialist movements, as well as movements inspired by anti-colonial struggles.

Introduction

In 1971, Ariel Hoffman and Armand Matterlard published How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic in Chile during the short period of Salvador Allende’s presidency. Soon after Pinochet’s coup d’état, the book was banned and the remaining copies were destroyed. In just a decade, this title had been published in 15 different countries...

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Mais, C. (2020). Anti-Colonialism and Imperialism (1960s–1970s). In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_290-1

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Policing the borders of anti-Asian violence

• April 29, 2021

Race & Resistance

Amidst calls for militarized state “protection,” it is urgent we expand the concept of anti-Asian violence towards a systemic and global diagnosis of imperialism.

• Mark Tseng-Putterman

This is New York City, not Vietnam!

Detail of the Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. Photo by Kamira / Shutterstock.com.

That is how Le My Hanh, a high school student in Queens, New York, reportedly appealed to the man who had followed her into her Queens apartment building, tied her up in a vacant apartment, and accused her of being a Vietcong. That man was Louis Kahan, a 30-year-old ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran who later claimed that the New York heat and construction rubble had triggered memories of his time on the frontlines.

Le’s brutal rape and murder at the hands of Kahan in 1977 collapsed the neat spatial segregation between violence “abroad” and “at home.” Le had been marked by the US for the good life, having been resettled during the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1975. The Saigon-born daughter of a Vietnamese professor and an honor roll student at New York’s Jamaica High School, the apparent success story of Le’s resettlement served as a symbolic vindication of the US wars in Southeast Asia and a testament to the freedoms to be found in American society.

But in the eyes of her murderer, she was just another “gook” to be subjected to the same policy of indiscriminate violence which Kahan had been indoctrinated to exercise abroad. In the face of the raw racial hatred of a disturbed veteran, the US state’s sophisticated scaffolding which delineated a burgeoning refugee “model minority” at home and dehumanized “enemy combatants” abroad fell apart.

In a nonjury trial, Kahan was found “not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect” for Le’s tragic murder. By chalking up Le’s murder to the paranoid delusions of a traumatized veteran, the criminal justice system and mainstream media deferred a broader reckoning with the policy of institutionalized dehumanization that had governed US military violence in Southeast Asia. Official delineations between war and refuge, enemy and ally, and “gook” and refugee required painting Kahan as an exception rather than the rule. Kipling’s old axiom had been updated for an era of permanent war and multiculturalism: Vietnam was Vietnam, New York was New York, and never the twain shall meet.

This official distinction between institutionalized military violence in Asia and individualized racial “hate” domestically continues to constrain attempts to understand and challenge the roots of anti-Asian violence. More than one year of racist attacks and harassment stoked by pandemic racism, coupled with the targeted murders of six Asian women in Atlanta and four Sikh community members in Indianapolis, has brought newfound political visibility to the persistence of anti-Asian racism. Yet popular framings such as the hashtag “#StopAsianHate” obscure the institutional and international roots of anti-Asian violence in favor of a liberal vision of domestic civil rights enforcement and “raising awareness” to combat individual prejudice.

The domesticating of anti-Asian “hate” enables a strange contradiction: the relative visibility of anti-Asian violence in the US has been accompanied by the quiet expansion of the US military footprint in Asia, a bipartisan inheritance of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and the virulent China-bashing of the Trump era. To insist on the link between the two is to challenge the state’s self-designation as the face of anti-racist enforcement rather than racism’s institutionalized form. Such connections are obscured by the dominant lens of liberal anti-racism, which is increasingly used to naturalize the role of repressive state apparatuses — from local police presences to international military buildups — to “protect” targeted Asian and Asian American communities.

At a time when the US simultaneously targets the “Indo-Pacific” as its primary military theater and pledges itself to the defense of Asian American communities, the critique of empire emerges as the connective tissue necessary to reject these carceral discourses of state protection. Rising abolitionist, anti-imperialist calls for self-determination and community-based visions of safety and solidarity demand that we expand the conceptual borders of anti-Asian violence towards a systemic and global diagnosis of militarism, imperialism and racism.

A different timeline of anti-Asian violence

In a national culture steeped in amnesia and exceptionalism with regards to the Asian American experience, the so called “spike” in anti-Asian violence has sparked renewed attempts to historicize the roots of this racism. Donald Trump’s “China virus” rhetoric quickly prompted historical comparisons to 19th century associations between Chinese migrants and disease. Graphic footage of street violence against unsuspecting Asian victims sparked invocations of Vincent Chin, the Chinese American groom-to-be bludgeoned to death in Detroit in 1982 by two white men who saw in Chin’s East Asian face a proxy for the Japanese automobile industry they blamed for their declining livelihoods. Historians further alluded to precedents of vigilante and state violence against Asian Americans, naming 19th century anti-Chinese massacres such as that of Rock Springs, Colorado in 1885 and the state-sanctioned incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.

These well-trodden timelines of anti-Asian violence reveal as much as they obscure. Generally absent from these historical accounts are events such as the 1906 Moro Crater Massacre , during which US forces killed more than 800 Filipino independence fighters before posing with their bodies in mass graves; or the My Lai massacre of 1968 , when 504 Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US troops. While the March 16, 2021 murder of eight people in Atlanta, including six Asian women, brought important national scrutiny to the specific violences faced by Asian women and sex workers, mainstream media accounts largely evaded the important interventions of grassroots activists and scholars, who placed the tragedy in a global context in which Asian women are frequently the targets of gendered racial violence by US military personnel in “ camptowns ” in Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines and beyond.

In the early months of the pandemic, Asian American progressives roundly chastised the callous patriotism emblematized by Andrew Yang’s call to combat anti-Asian violence by “[wearing] red white and blue.” But many have nonetheless clung to conceptual borders of anti-Asian violence which place preeminence on the US nationality of its victims. In contrast, movements against imperialism and militarism in Asia have long been guided by a critique of racial violence, especially towards women in general and sex workers in particular. The murders of Yun Geum-i in Korea in 1992, Jennifer Laude in the Philippines in 2014, and Rina Shimabukuro in Okinawa in 2016 all sparked renewed national movements for demilitarization and self-determination, yet these tragedies did not spark corresponding conversations in the US about the violence this country inflicts in Asia. These silencings are not accidental but strategic, enabling the cleaving of domestic anti-racist movements from internationalist struggles against empire.

Yet at the height of the Vietnam War, it was exactly these linkages between anti-Asian racism “at home” and US imperialism abroad that Asian American anti-war activists insisted on. As Mike Murase wrote in the pages of Gidra , a radical Asian American magazine published out of Los Angeles, the racism facing Asian Americans was intrinsically linked to the war in Vietnam. Describing the need for an Asian contingent to the national anti-war rallies of May 1972, Murase argued: “The systematic dehumanization of ‘gooks’ in the military affects Asians in America as well, because it is to America that trained killers of Asians return.”

Alan Takemoto for Gidra Magazine, from the Densho Digital Archives .

In the eyes of Asian American anti-war activists, racial ideology transcended national boundaries, uniting Asian peoples in shared struggle against the myriad violences of global white supremacy. Chinatown organizer Mike Eng captured this interrelationship when he likened LAPD patrols in Los Angeles Chinatown to an occupying force abroad. Reporting in Gidra on the physical violence and racial abuse hurled by police towards Chinatown youth in the summer of 1971, Eng saw a “My Lai mentality” that had “returned home with the troops.”

In such moments of racial encounter, the Asian body served as an avatar for the transference of imperial ideologies which painted Asians as official enemies marked for destruction. An illustration by Alan Takemoto featured on the May 1972 Gidra cover crystallized the dialectics of race and imperialism in provocative terms: an Asian American soldier, confronted by what appears to be a Vietcong woman, asks his commander: “What should I do now, Joe?” The commander’s response: “Kill that gook you gook!”

Confronting an “anti-racist” empire

The conspicuous absence of US imperialism within conversations about anti-Asian racism was on full display when Secretary of State Antony Blinken took a moment during his diplomatic tour of Asia to denounce the Atlanta massacre. From a press conference in Seoul, Blinken said he was “horrified by this violence which has no place in America.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin similarly condemned what he called a “horrific crime.”

This imperialist hypocrisy is worth naming. Blinken’s and Austin’s Asia tour had the express aim of shoring up support for further US military buildup in the region. Lloyd’s Pentagon is rolling out a $27 billion Pacific “ deterrence ” initiative to expand US military bases, missile capacity and war exercises in a region the US now declares its primary theater of war. While the 20th century hot wars in Korea and Vietnam have receded into generational memory, Blinken and Lloyd inherit — and seek to expand — the infrastructure of permanent militarization those wars instantiated.

This Cold War military apparatus has swelled into an “ empire of bases ” with a quarter of a million US military personnel staffing over 800 official overseas military bases. Increasingly, this imperialist network is triangulated around China: even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged on, Obama officials were defining the 21st century as a “Pacific century” which required a military and economic pivot to Asia to face a “rising” China. That Obama-era consensus was escalated both by the Trump administration’s declaration of China as a “strategic competitor” and the Pentagon’s “ number one priority ” and Biden’s bellicose campaign promise to get tough on “ thugs ” like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un.

Critics have pointed out that the Atlanta shooter’s language describing Asian women as “temptations” is itself part of an imperialist discourse which paints Asian women’s bodies as part of the spoils of US war. In this context, Blinken’s and Austin’s self-righteous denunciation of anti-Asian violence stands in stark contrast to their role as architects of a global military apparatus which enables the endemic violence of US military bases in Asia. In Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa and beyond, this violence — often sexual violence — is silenced through joint status of forces agreements which protect US soldiers from being tried by local courts for violence they commit, obstructing justice for the victims of US occupation.

The ease with which figureheads like Blinken and Austin can safely denounce anti-Asian violence while advancing a historic military buildup in Asia thus speaks to the thorough excising of imperialism from popular understandings of racism. But Blinken’s claim to “stand with the Korean community and everyone united against violence and hate” in the wake of the Atlanta massacre is also illustrative of the longstanding uses of similar rhetoric of freedom, protection and deterrence to cloak the ambitions of US empire.

Blinken’s remarks inherit a longstanding paradigm of liberal war which poses the US military not as a purveyor of violence but a righteous watchdog against it. In this sense, denunciations of violence by the figureheads of imperial violence are not simply hypocritical, but paradigmatic. The conceit of US imperialism is to frame its myriad interventions and occupations not as destructive — of sovereignty, ecosystems and local livelihoods — but as productive — of freedom, liberal personhood and free market capitalism. Underpinned by a liberal discourse of defense, the bloody post-World War II order of US supremacy is rendered instead a benevolent “Pax Americana.” Historian Monica Kim describes the paradigm shift marked by the Korean War: “War would have to be conducted in the name of ‘humanity’… conducted as a disavowal of war itself.”

These militarized conceptions of freedom continue to structure US geopolitics in Asia and beyond. The Trump and Biden administrations have both advanced the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” as the strategic cornerstone of US regional policy. But a declassified 2018 strategic framework document outlines just what policymakers believe “freedom” entails. The top priorities outlined for US Indo-Pacific strategy are to “preserve US economic, diplomatic, and military access,” “maintain US primacy,” and “advance US global economic leadership.” No doubt, the discourses of liberal intervention — premised as necessary defense against regional bogeymen like China and North Korea — continue to provide cover for a project of US regional hegemony.

Blinken’s promise to “stand with the Korean community” in the wake of the Atlanta tragedy thus parallels the US commitment to “defend” South Korea from its supposedly belligerent and trigger-happy northern neighbor — in contradiction to cross-border movements for peace and reunification. Both narratives position the US state not as the primary purveyor of racial violence but as a benevolent watchdog tasked with regulating “hate” in the form of either individualized prejudice or “rogue states” which challenge the US hegemonic order.

The anti-racist racial state

Unsurprisingly, Blinken’s and Lloyd’s denunciations of anti-Asian violence have been echoed by stateside officials: President Biden ahistorically described recent attacks on Asian Americans as “un-American.” Even Donald Trump was compelled to tweet in defense of Asian Americans last March, calling for the US to “totally protect” the community amidst rising hate violence stoked by his own politicization of the pandemic for the purposes of a hawkish geopolitical agenda vis-a-vis China.

While it is reasonable to press political leaders to denounce such violence, the function of this official antiracism is more circumspect. Empty state disavowals of anti-Asian “hate” serve to delink individual racist acts from their systemic corollaries: the Biden administration’s continued deportation of Southeast Asian refugees, the criminalization of sex work and the expanding US military footprint across Asia.

In this sense, liberal antiracism can be seen as the domestic complement to liberal war, in which the structure of racism itself is increasingly predicated on its own disavowal. Both discourses reinscribe the state’s responsibility to police the very violence it creates. Here, the United States’ self-designation as a “ global policeman ” is instructive: the “defensive” posture of US military occupation abroad mirrors renewed calls for police to “protect” Asian American communities from racial violence.

Such calls have quickly gained momentum in providing a progressive pretense to police expansion. For instance, the New York Police department formed an anti-Asian hate crimes task force in August 2020, much to the dismay of local Asian American community organizations which consider the NYPD itself a source of systemic violence which targets Asian American tenants, undocumented immigrants, sex workers and elders. Following suit, President Biden announced in March that the FBI would be giving “nationwide civil rights training events” as part of a presidential action to address anti-Asian violence. These carceral moves have less to do with keeping Asian American communities safe than with reifying the punitive state’s role as an official arbiter of anti-racism.

The police murders of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center and Adam Toledo in Chicago further intensify the ideological uses of promoting “anti-racist” policing to combat anti-Asian violence. Long positioned as a “ racial bourgeoisie ” used to discipline Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities, the simultaneous unfolding of anti-Asian hate crime task forces amidst national demands for police abolition raises the specter of wielding Asian Americans to reinforce the moral legitimacy of the police as an institution. In this divide-and-conquer scheme, the moral goodness of police tasked with “protecting” vulnerable Asian communities will be posed as a symbolic negation of the systemic violence police inflict on working class communities of color.

Once more, the linking of abolitionist and anti-imperialist critique helps us to see through these ruses of state protection and reform. While images of militarized police forces in American cities often provoke criticisms of a “war come home,” we might instead see the police and military as conjoined arms of a repressive apparatus designed to enforce the conditions necessary to sustain racial capitalism at both a domestic and global scale. These overlapping, mutually constitutive circuits of Orientalism and anti-Blackness form a regime of racial capitalism whose dismantling requires a language and lens beyond any individualized, identity-constrained vision of combating hate or prejudice.

Beyond “belonging”

In an emotional exchange last month, Ohio politician Lee Wong addressed racism against Asian Americans at a local community meeting. “People question my patriotism, that I don’t look American enough,” Wong protested. Revealing a long scar across his chest sustained during service in the US Army, Wong cried out: “Here is my proof…Is this patriot enough?”

Footage of the exchange went viral, amassing tens of millions of views on YouTube and Twitter from viewers who applauded Wong’s patriotism and service. Yet the logic that Americanness is a prerequisite to shelter from racial violence — let alone that such Americanness is best demonstrated through war — is troubling.

These claims to Asian American belonging are complicated by the historical uses of multiculturalism as a tactic of liberal war. The genre of “ military multiculturalism ” has long posed US militarism as a crucible of racial progress rather than an instigator of racist war. The desegregation of Army units in the Korean War, for instance, cloaked that genocidal intervention in terms of Black-white national unity. The decorated military service of all-Japanese American units in World War II similarly provided a redemptive arc to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans.

This pernicious multiculturalism allows selective incorporation into the arms of the racial state in order to provide legitimacy to the persistence of racist systems in an era of official antiracism. Under this paradigm, the structures of the racial state may be entrenched not by a phobic exclusion but a -philic embrace. If Vietnam War commander William Westmoreland’s callous declaration that “life is cheap in the Orient” represents one register of imperial racism, Antony Blinken’s recent ode to sundubu-jjigae represents an imperialist discourse now defined less by explicit dehumanization than by a multicultural embrace of de-politicized “difference.” The apparatus of a global military empire and the violence it deals has not changed — only its enabling fictions.

The ruse of liberal antiracism takes on a new urgency in a moment in which the justifying discourses of US hegemony are faced with a crisis of legitimacy on all sides. From a catastrophic pandemic response, to the January 6 siege of the “city on the hill,” to ongoing Black abolitionist insurrections — the common sense of US moral leadership of the world is increasingly under question. In this context, official antiracism, as a legitimizing discourse of racial rule, threatens to subsume the contradictions of these crises into progressive notions of slow, benevolent reform. Depoliticized symbols of racial liberalism do this work of legitimation: Black Lives Matter banners hang from the US embassy in Seoul and are painted on the streets of Washington D.C. A Black Secretary of Defense is lauded as a figure of progress — deep ties to the weapons industry be damned. Exceptional acts of violence are denounced as “un-American” — leaving uninterrogated the structures of racism that enable them.

The renewed visibility of anti-Asian violence is a critical invitation to expand our conceptions of racial violence beyond metrics of belonging, nationality, class or kinship. To the contrary, discourses of militarized “deterrence” in Asia and local police “protection” seek to domesticate a radical critique of systemic violence in favor of a legitimizing discourse which proffers militarized state enforcement as the adjudicator of racial violence rather than its primary, constitutive form. At a time when the “Indo-Pacific” is targeted as the primary theater of US military power and “stopping Asian hate” is deployed as a mandate for state intervention in racialized communities, to return imperialism to the frame is to instead expose the inextricable global circuits of racism, imperialism and capitalism at the root of racial violence.

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• Yuval Noah Harari on how to prevent a new age of imperialism

Non-Western powers have a stake in bringing peace to Ukraine, argues the historian

W E FULLY APPRECIATE our knees only when they stop working. The same is true of the global order: its former benefits become apparent only as it collapses. And when order collapses, the weak usually suffer most. This law of history should be on the minds of world leaders in the run-up to the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland on June 15th. If peace cannot be restored and the international rules-based order continues to unravel, the catastrophic results will be felt globally.

Whenever international rules become meaningless, countries naturally seek safety in armaments and military alliances. Given events in Ukraine, can anyone blame Poland for almost doubling its army and military budget, Finland for joining NATO or Saudi Arabia for pursuing a defence treaty with the United States?

Unfortunately, the increase in military budgets comes at the expense of society’s weakest members, as money is diverted from schools and clinics to tanks and missiles. Military alliances, too, tend to widen inequality. Weak states left outside their protective shield become easy prey. As militarised blocs spread around the world, trade routes become strained and commerce declines, with the poor paying the highest price. And as tensions between the militarised blocs increase, chances grow that a small spark in a remote corner of the world will ignite a global conflagration. Since alliances rely on credibility, even a minor challenge in an insignificant location can become a casus belli for a third world war.

Humanity has seen it all before. More than 2,000 years ago Sun Tzu, Kautilya and Thucydides exposed how in a lawless world the quest for security makes everyone less secure. And past experiences like the second world war and the cold war have repeatedly taught us that in a global conflict it is the weak who suffer disproportionately.

During the second world war, for example, one of the highest casualty rates was in the Dutch East Indies—today’s Indonesia. When the war broke out in eastern Europe in 1939, it seemed a world away from the rice farmers of Java, but events in Poland ignited a chain reaction that killed about 3.5m-4m Indonesians, mostly through starvation or forced labour at the hands of Japanese occupiers. This constituted 5% of the Indonesian population, a higher casualty rate than among many major belligerents, including the United States (0.3%), Britain (0.9%) and Japan (3.9%). Twenty years later Indonesia again paid a particularly heavy price. The cold war may have been cold in Berlin, but it was a scorching inferno in Jakarta. In 1965-66 between 500,000 and 1m Indonesians were killed in massacres caused by tensions between communists and anti-communists.

The situation now is potentially worse than it was in 1939 or 1965. It’s not only that a nuclear war would endanger hundreds of millions of people in neutral countries. Humanity also faces the additional existential threats of climate change and out-of-control artificial intelligence ( AI ).

As military budgets rise, so money that could have helped solve global warming fuels a global arms race instead. And as military competition intensifies, so the goodwill necessary for agreements on climate change evaporates. Rising tensions also ruin the chance of reaching agreements on limiting an AI arms race. Drone warfare in particular is advancing rapidly, and the world may soon see swarms of fully autonomous drones fighting each other in Ukraine’s sky, and killing thousands of people on the ground. The killer robots are coming, but humans are paralysed by disagreement. If peace isn’t brought to Ukraine soon, everyone is likely to suffer, even if they live thousands of kilometres from Kyiv and think the battle there has nothing to do with them.

Breaking the biggest taboo

Making peace is never easy. It has been said that nations march into war through a barn door, but the only exit is through a mousehole. In the face of conflicting claims and interests, it is difficult to assign blame and find a reasonable compromise. Nevertheless, as wars go, the Russo-Ukrainian war is exceptionally simple.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine’s independence and borders were universally recognised. The country felt so secure that it agreed to give up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the Soviet Union, without demanding that Russia or other powers do the same. In exchange, in 1994 Russia (as well as the United States and Britain) signed the Budapest Memorandum, promising to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence” of Ukraine. It was one of the biggest acts of unilateral disarmament in history. Swapping nuclear bombs for paper promises seemed to Ukrainians like a wise move in 1994, when trust in international rules and agreements ran high.

Twenty years later, in 2014, the Russo-Ukrainian war began when Russian forces occupied Crimea and fomented separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. The war ebbed and flowed for the following eight years, until in February 2022 Russia mounted an onslaught aimed at conquering all of Ukraine.

Russia has given various excuses for its actions, most notably that it was pre-empting a Western attack on Russia. However, neither in 2014 nor in 2022 was there any imminent threat of such an armed invasion. Vague talk about “Western imperialism” or “cultural Coca-Colonialism” may be good enough to fuel debates in ivory towers, but it cannot legitimate massacring the inhabitants of Bucha or bombing Mariupol to rubble.

For most of history the term “imperialism” referred to cases when a powerful state such as Rome, Britain or tsarist Russia conquered foreign lands and turned them into provinces. This kind of imperialism gradually became taboo after 1945. While there has been no shortage of wars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—with horrendous conflicts ongoing in Palestine and Israel, and in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere—there have so far been no cases when an internationally recognised country was simply wiped off the map owing to annexation by a powerful conqueror. When Iraq tried to do that to Kuwait in 1990-91, an international coalition restored Kuwaiti independence and territorial integrity. And when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, there was never a question of annexing the country or any part of it.

Russia has already annexed not just Crimea but also all the territories its armies are currently occupying in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin is following the imperial principle that any territory conquered by the Russian army is annexed by the Russian state. Indeed, Russia went as far as annexing several regions that its armies merely intend to conquer, such as the unoccupied parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk oblasts.

Mr Putin has not bothered to hide his imperial intentions. He has repeatedly argued since at least 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, and has promised to rebuild this empire. He has further argued that the Ukrainian nation doesn’t really exist, and that Russia has a historical right to the entire territory of Ukraine.

If Mr Putin is allowed to win in Ukraine, this kind of imperialism will make a comeback all over the world. What will then restrain Venezuela, for example, from conquering Guyana, or Iran from conquering the United Arab Emirates? What will restrain Russia itself from conquering Estonia or Kazakhstan? No border and no state could find safety in anything except armaments and alliances. If the taboo on imperial conquests is broken, then even states whose independence and borders won international recognition long ago will face a growing risk of invasion, and even of again becoming imperial provinces.

This danger is not lost on observers in former imperial colonies. In a speech in February 2022 the Kenyan ambassador to the UN , Martin Kimani, explained that after the collapse of the European empires newly liberated people in Africa and elsewhere treated international borders as sacrosanct, for they understood that the alternative was waging endless wars. African countries have inherited many potentially disputed borders from the imperial past, yet, as Mr Kimani explained, “we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited…Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.” Referring to Mr Putin’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet empire, Mr Kimani said that although imperial collapse typically leaves many unfulfilled yearnings, these should never be pursued by force. “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

As Mr Kimani hinted, the driving force behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is imperial nostalgia. Russia’s territorial demands in Ukraine have no basis in international law. Of course, like every country, Russia does have legitimate security concerns, and any peace agreement must take them into account. During the past century Russia has suffered repeated invasions that cost the lives of many millions of its citizens. Russians deserve to feel secure and respected. But no Russian security concerns can justify destroying Ukrainian nationhood. Nor should they cause us to forget that Ukraine too has legitimate security concerns. Given events of the past decade, Ukraine clearly needs guarantees against future Russian aggression more robust than the Budapest Memorandum or the Minsk Agreements of 2014-15.

Empires have always justified themselves by prioritising their own security concerns, but the larger they became the more security concerns they acquired. Ancient Rome first embarked on its imperial project because of security concerns in central Italy, and eventually found itself fighting brutal wars thousands of kilometres from Italy because of its security concerns on the Danube and Euphrates. If Russia’s security concerns are acknowledged as a legitimate basis for making conquests on the Dnieper, they too may soon be used to justify conquests on the Danube and Euphrates.

Humanity’s next leaders

To prevent a new age of imperialism, leadership is needed from many directions. The upcoming Ukraine peace summit can provide the stage for two particularly important steps.

First, European countries, some of which could be the next targets of Russian imperialism, should make a firm commitment to support Ukraine no matter how long the war lasts. As Russia intensifies its campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, for example, Europe should guarantee Ukraine’s energy supply from power stations in NATO countries. And no matter what happens in the American elections in November, Europe should commit to providing Ukraine with the money and weapons it needs to continue protecting itself. Given the isolationist tendencies of the Republican Party and other segments of American society, Europe cannot rely on the United States to do the heavy lifting.

Such commitments are the only thing that will convince Russia to negotiate for peace in earnest. Russia has much to lose from a prolonged war. Every month the war drags on, Mr Putin’s dream of making his country a great power fades, because Ukrainian hostility towards Russia deepens, Russia’s dependence on other powers increases and Russia falls further behind in key technological races. The prolongation of the war threatens to turn Russia into a Chinese vassal. Nevertheless, if Mr Putin thinks Europeans are getting tired of supporting Ukraine, he will play for time in the hope of finally conquering the country. Only when it becomes clear that Europe is in this for the long haul can serious peace talks begin.

The second important step is greater leadership from non-European countries. Rising powers like Brazil, India, Indonesia and Kenya often criticise Western powers for past imperialist crimes and for present incompetence and favouritism. There is indeed much to criticise. But it is better to take centre-stage and lead than to stand on the sidelines and play the game of whataboutism. Non-Western powers should act to protect the international order not to oblige a declining West, but for their own benefit. This will require powers like Brazil and India to expend political capital, take risks and, if all else fails, take a stand in defence of international rules. This will not be cheap, but the price of doing nothing will be much higher.

In September 2022 Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India told Mr Putin that “today’s era is not the era for war”. When Mr Modi later recalled their conversation he added that today’s era “is one of dialogue and diplomacy. And we all must do what we can to stop the bloodshed and human suffering.” Many months have passed since Mr Modi expressed these sentiments. Unless decisive action is taken by world leaders, it seems that the era of dialogue will be over, and a new era of unlimited war will be upon us.

Leaders from around the world should therefore attend the forthcoming summit, and work together to bring a just and enduring end to the war. Securing peace in Ukraine would position these leaders as global pathfinders who can be trusted to resolve other conflicts, tackle climate change and runaway AI , and guide humanity in the troubled 21st century. ■

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher and author of “Sapiens”, “Homo Deus” and the children’s series “Unstoppable Us”. He is a lecturer in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s history department and co-founder of Sapienship, a social-impact company.

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CfP: Working-Class Anti-Imperialism, the Global Left and Beyond

European Labour History Network (ELHN) conference University of Uppsala, 11-13 June 2024

Labour & Empire Working Group – Call for Papers

“Working-Class Anti-Imperialism, the Global Left and Beyond”

In the wake of the one-day conference “Working-Class Anti-Imperialism and the Global Left: New Directions of Study” held at the University of Bristol on 30 June 2023, our working group is eager to further explore the rich and complex questions debated on that day.

Inspired by new imperial history, global labour history, post-colonial studies, and the transnational turn more generally, we seek to present panels that revisit the imperial experience from below, examining the part played by workers in the rise, persistence and fall of empires (both formal and informal, both continental and maritime), from the 1870s to the 1970s.

International organisations, in particular those populated by socialists, communists, anarchists and syndicalists, had an important role to play in the global formation of anti-imperial movements. At the same time, in some occasions they represented an obstacle or a factor slowing down the growth of anti-imperialism. With this in mind, a first broad topic we want to discuss is the formation of anti-imperialism outside organised labour organisations. We seek papers that innovate our usual geographical patterns, tracing connections both within the same imperial entity or trans-imperially. We want to explore anti-imperial activism aimed at and promoted by all kind of workers (industrial labour, peasantry, domestic labour and so on), active in public and private spaces, and employed across the various contractualised, coerced and indentured forms adopted in empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. A focus on south-south connections and on the transfer of antiimperial ideas and practices from the colonies to the metropole will be especially welcomed.

A second topic we want to explore is the self-representation of workers across lines of class, gender, race, language and ethnicity. How did workers taking part in antiimperial activism describe themselves? How relevant was their own selfidentification in the definition of their anti-imperial political activism? Were, for example, whiteness or blackness, masculinity or femininity, language, national and ethnic belonging deciding factors in seeking solidarity and collaboration across national and imperial lines? Critical reflections seeking to deconstruct strategies of self-identification deployed by groups, organisations or individuals proactive in antiimperial movements will be at the centre of our analysis.   

The convenors welcome 250-word proposals for papers which address one or more of the following themes:

• Anti-imperial activism outside organised labour;  
• Transnational and international movements, particularly those concerned with race-based and gender-based activism (e.g. Pan-Africanism and feminism);
• Globe-trotting subaltern activists in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts;
• Alternative geographies of radical anti-imperialism;
• Gender, productivity and anti-imperialism; 
• Anti-imperialism among coerced and indentured workers;
• Racialised immigration regimes, with a particular focus on movements that supported or opposed race-based immigration laws;
• The internationalisation of the labour question;
• Trans-imperial relationships between anti-imperial movements and transfers of ideas and practices from the colonies to the metropole; 
• The consumer-centred forms of resistance to imperialism in the South and its relation with the production and circulation of goods;
• Domestic labour and resistance to empire in the private space;
• The self-representation of workers within anti-imperial movements;
• Patterns of solidarity and collaboration across racial, class, gender, national and language lines in global anti-imperial movements. 

Proposals should be submitted to [email protected] by 15 September 2023 .

Papers should focus on either the 19th or 20th century (or both). They can focus on any geographic location, but proposals that are decentred and/or written from the perspective of the global South in colonial and postcolonial contexts are particularly welcome. The organisers will promote the publication of a selection of the papers as an edited volume or as a special issue in a leading journal of the field (more details TBA).

For more information about the ELHN Labour&Empire group and its activities, please visit: https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn/wg-empire .