Imperialism Intervention and Development

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• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429763847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Originally published in 1979 Imperialism, Intervention and Development provides an introduction to key issues in international politics in the post-World War II era. The emphasis is on conflict – particularly the confrontation between East and West and the contention between rich industrialised nations and the poor 'developing' nations. The book debates the causes of Western intervention, expansion and counter-revolution in the Third World and the consequences of that intervention for economic development. The spectrum and depth of the articles is both comprehensive and varied, including examples of 'mainstream' academic perspectives on the issues examined, incorporating many of the radical critiques of these mainstream approaches. Other more basic material, presupposing little prior knowledge in the field is concerned is also included.

PART I

IMPERIALISM AND INTERVENTION

Introduction

The selection of articles in this reader is intended to provide an introduction to some of the key issues in international politics in the post-World War II era. As the title implies, our concern is with conflict and in particular with the various manifestations of the confrontation between East and West on the one hand; and the growing conflict between North and South, the rich industrialised nations and the poor ‘developing’ nations, on the other.

In our choice of papers, we have tried to avoid both the behavioural social science predilection for producing ahistorical theory and the international historian’s tendency to create atheoretical history. We have attempted to provide examples both of ‘mainstream’ academic perspectives on the various issues examined, and some of the radical critiques of these ‘mainstream’ approaches. We have also tried to select material which assumes no previous knowledge of the subject and which eschews unnecessary jargon.

Given the enormous range of conflict issues which this period encompasses, it has been necessary to be brutally selective. At the risk of oversimplification, we may note that the readings in Part I concentrate on the debates over the causes of various forms of Western (primarily American) counterrevolutionary intervention in the Third World since World War II. Part II consists of a series of papers which examine some of the causes of ‘underdevelopment’ in the Third World. Whereas Part I is concerned more with the causes of various forms of Western expansion into the Third World, Part II examines some of the consequences of that expansion for development. Both Parts I and II have been subdivided into four sections, each of which contains two or more papers which concentrate on fairly specific issues raised by the general debate.

Overview of Part I

The first section of Part I examines the origins and evolution of the decolonisation struggle in the Third World in the post war period. This essentially North/South conflict was deeply affected by the contemporaneous development of the conflict between East and West, which is the focus of the second section of Part I. In the third and fourth sections, we present a series of papers which examine some patterns and techniques of counterrevolutionary interventions in the Third World and the ongoing debate about the causes of these interventions.

In 1945, Europe’s vast colonial empires were still virtually intact. By 1965, more than forty countries had rebelled successfully against alien rule, and only vestiges of direct colonial rule remained. Yet, despite formal political independence the new nations of the Third World (with a few significant exceptions) remained bound by close political, ideological and, above all, economic ties to the West. Radical critics argued that ‘independence’ had meant little more than a change of flag and national anthem. While formal political control had been abandoned by the metropolis, the more subtle forms of domination, which had created the ‘dependency syndrome’ and were now labelled ‘neo-colonialism’, had been strengthened.

There is no doubt that colonial rule - and the parallel penetration of Western institutions and values in areas not under direct European political domination (e.g. Latin America) - had created wrenching social change in the Third World. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, new social and economic gulfs opened between the indigenous ‘modernising Elites’, whose members aspired to European lifestyles, and the mass of the population, which lived either in the countryside or in the swelling slums which were growing up around the major cities. Self-sufficient subsistence economies had been largely destroyed and replaced by production systems oriented towards the export of primary commodities and minerals to the West.

The stresses wrought by this western-induced ‘modernisation process’ also provided the social impetus for revolutionary change. The radical movements which emerged in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1950s, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, were occasionally inspired and sometimes aided by the Soviet Union or China. But whether or not there was any direct link between indigenous radical revolt and the international communist movement, Third World revolution was perceived in Washington as being inspired by Moscow or Peking. The American response was consistently hostile. In fact, there is no doubt that a major thrust of US foreign policy since World War II has been to contain, and where possible, suppress revolution. The key question, one to which all the articles in Part I of this reader relate either directly or indirectly is, “why”?. Why should the world’s richest, most powerful and most secure nation go to such lengths to repress radical revolts in weak underdeveloped countries thousands of miles from its frontiers? At this point, a word of explanation is perhaps necessary. Our concentration on United States policies throughout much of Part I (and some of Part II) does not arise from any particular sympathy for, or animus against, the US or American foreign policy, but simply because the United States has been the dominant global superpower in post-war international politics.

Of all the major combatants in World War II, only the United States emerged richer and more powerful in 1945 than in 1941. Only the United States had the material capability and political inclination to assume a truly global role in 1945. And in the years which followed, it was American economic power which flooded Europe with Marshall Aid to help successfully rebuild a vigorous anti-communist Europe to confront a resurgent Soviet Union. It was American economic power which created a new, post-war international economic order, following the Bretton Woods conference, held in 1944, even before the war was over. The core institutions of this new Western economic order, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were American-dominated.

United States’ military power was also unsurpassed. On every continent, America’s military presence was felt directly, in the form of US garrisons, or indirectly via a vast global network of military aid and assistance programmes. And with the progressive weakening and final demise of European colonialism, America’s self-imposed responsibility for what was euphemistically described as ‘world order’ was broadened even further. Thus the United States, with its global commitments to counter-revolution in a revolutionary world, forms the central reference point for most of the key issues under discussion in this reader.

It is our contention that the relationship between revolt and counterrevolution in the Third World cannot be understood without reference to the East/West confrontation in Europe at the close of the Second World War. This confrontation, now known as the Cold War, was rooted in the struggle over the carve-up of post-war Europe between Russia and the West. In Section II, we move back in history from the end of the Third World decolonisation period in the mid 1960s, to the Europe of the 1940s, when the long simmering conflict between bourgeois democracy and the Soviet revision of Marxism first became deeply polarised.

Understanding, or attempting to understand, the origins of the Cold War is important for at least two reasons. Firstly, because the assumptions underlying the US doctrine of containing communism were accorded such wide assent in US foreign policy circles that they became a virtually unassailable conventional wisdom. Providing the ground rules for the conduct of US foreign policy for two decades, these assumptions remained unchallenged even though the configuration of world politics was to change dramatically during this period. The second reason for examining the outbreak of the Cold War is that the controversies over its causes foreshadow the later debates surrounding the motivations of US counter-revolutionary policies in the Third World. We turn to these policies and the debates over their motives in Sections III and IV.

Section III contains two papers which examine in some detail both the patterns of US intervention in the Third World and the evolution of American counterinsurgency methods. Both papers also discuss the motivations which underly these policies, but neither does so in any great detail. In Section IV, we turn to the question of cause or motive - “why has the US foreign policy been counterrevolutionary?”. We examine in particular the debate surrounding the radical thesis that US foreign policy is primarily a response to the economic imperatives of American capitalism and that without secure access to expanding markets and to raw material and investment outlets, the US corporate system cannot survive. Since revolution in Third World countries is seen as threatening secure US access to Third World economic resources, revolution must be suppressed. This thesis is vigorously opposed by those (both critics and supporters of US foreign policy) who argue that economic interests rarely have more than peripheral salience in determining American opposition to radical revolt in the Third World. As we hope to show later, a number of interesting and important problems are raised when attempting to weigh up the rival claims of the protagonists of ‘power politics’, ‘ideology’ or ‘economic imperialism’ interpretations of the roots of American foreign policy.

The Concept of Imperialism

Throughout this reader the term ‘imperialism’ occurs frequently. Various concepts of imperialism and their associated theories are the source of considerable current controversy; many of these theories are central to the debates which occur in both parts of this reader. For this reason we have felt that a brief - and necessarily crude - introduction to the concept of imperialism, the different meanings assigned it and some of the debates which surround it would be of value.

The marked upsurge of interest in Marxist theories of imperialism during the past decade has been stimulated in part by the traumas of the Vietnam War, and in part by the increased awareness of the growing North/South development gap and the failure of the First UN Development Decade. These theories of imperialism have sought to explain counterrevolution and underdevelopment in the Third World from a radical perspective, and, in attempting this, they have frequently stood established and Establishment theories on their heads. Thus instead of seeing US foreign policy as oriented defensively towards a hostile and expansionist Soviet Union, theories of imperialism have argued that the reverse was true: that the US was the aggressor. US counter-revolutionism, it was argued, was a characteristic and indeed necessary response to the economic and political imperatives of the US capitalist system. The conventional wisdoms of development theory have come under a parallel attack. Whereas the liberal theories of underdevelopment in the 1950s and early 1960s argued that the causes of Third World poverty were to be found within the Third World itself, the imperialism theories argued that Third World poverty arose from rich country exploitation.

The term ‘imperialism’ is problematic: many different and sometimes incompatible meanings have been assigned it. Theories of imperialism often seek to explain quite different phenomena, or the same phenomena from different perspectives, and this complexity has led some social scientists to argue that the term ought to be banished from the vocabulary of serious scholarship. This argument has alarming implications since, if the same logic were applied to political science, we should be forced to jettison many of the discipline’s core concepts - ‘power’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘structure’ and ‘democracy’ to name but a few\ It must be admitted, however, that the coexistence of many different theories of imperialism - sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory and sometimes dealing with completely different events, does pose problems.

The ‘New Imperialism’

The literal meaning of the term ‘imperialism’ is ‘rule by emperor’; no theories of imperialism use the term in this sense today. The first modern theories of imperialism are those which sought to explain the competitive scramble for overseas colonies between the major European powers in the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Known as the ‘New’ Imperialism’, this dramatic episode in world history is important for our purpose for at least three reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, the expansion overseas of European capital and institutions transformed the world. Secondly, the debate about the causes of this expansion introduces the Leninist theories and the work of J.A. Hobson, which still provide the central reference point for contemporary Marxist imperialism theories. Thirdly, this debate - between theories emphasising economic determination and others which deny it - foreshadows the later controversies over the origins of the Cold War and the causes of American interventionism in the Third World in the post World War II period.

a) The Leninist Theories

Of all the theories of imperialism, that of V.I. Lenin is still the best known. Produced as a political pamphlet rather than a scholarly study, Lenin’s polemic still retains a powerful political and intellectual resonance sixty years after it was published.

The core proposition of Lenin’s theory is that the pressure to expand overseas which led to ‘the grab for colonies’ was an expression of the economic imperatives of mature capitalism; imperialism was quite simply the ‘highest stage of capitalism’. Lenin and his Marxist contemporaries argued with considerable force that once a capitalist mode of production reaches a certain stage of development it confronts a series of inevitable crises. Crudely expressed, these arise out of the tendency for the productive capacity of industrial capital to outstrip the capacity for consumption of the mass of the population - this being limited by their low wages. (Note: this ‘underconsumptionist’ interpretation of Lenin’s theory is an oversimplification of a very complex argument.) The Marxists further argued that, since any redistribution of income to augment the buying power of the masses was impossible under capitalism, an external solution to the crisis was necessary. The problem of ‘excess capacity’ or ‘surplus capital’ could be and was, resolved by exporting it to the so-called backward countries. Here, as Lenin had observed, profits were high; capital scarce; and land and raw materials cheap. Without this expansion overseas, capitalism would collapse from its own internal contradictions. Imperialism thus became an institutional necessity for the survival of capitalism at the highest stage of its development. Since each of the capitalist states of Europe confronted similar internal economic crises, all felt compelled to expand overseas. Expansion overseas necessitated political protection for the new foreign markets, investments and raw material sources, and colonial annexation served this purpose while keeping rivals out.

Lenin’s study of imperialism did not deny that political motives for European colonial expansion might be important, but the theoretical basis for his analysis of imperialist expansion was the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist system. A few liberal economists like J.A. Hobson (whose research Lenin had drawn on to produce his own theory) also argued that imperialism was economically motivated. But, Hobson had argued against the Leninist thesis that imperial expansion was necessary for the survival of capitalism. He believed that the ‘under-consumption’ problem could be resolved by socio-economic reforms which would have the effect of increasing aggregate consumption levels and thus avoiding the crisis which Lenin and Marx had predicted.

Ever since Lenin’s pamphlet ‘Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism’ first appeared in 1917, the theory it espoused has been subjected to intense criticism. Most has come from liberal historians and economists who were antipathetic to Lenin’s revolutionary politics, but some influential neo-Marxist theorists like Michael Barratt Brown and Harry Magdoff have also taken issue with some of Lenin’s core theoretical precepts. Today, there can be little doubt that Lenin’s theory is seriously, perhaps irreparably, flawed in a number of its central arguments. But the general thesis (which many liberal historians of the era rejected) of a clear, though not necessarily direct, relationship between the evolution of the capitalism in Europe and its expansion overseas seems incontestable.

b) Non-Marxist Approaches

The non-Marxist, non-economistic explanations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Imperialism and Intervention
• Part II: Imperialism and Development