From national bourgeoisie to rogues, failures and bullies: 21st century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third World

Abstract

The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strategy is now more openly based on the direct control of productive assets and territory. This historical moment has also marked the definitive end of the idea of the Third World and its associated ideology of Third Worldism. Although this end has, of course, been repeatedly proclaimed, and contested, over the past two decades, this article argues that the idea of the Third World, and the associated ideas of development and non-alignment, were predicated upon the core concept of the national bourgeoisie and associated notions of the inherently progressive potential of nationalism. It traces the historical emergence of this idea in the work of Lenin and its subsequent trajectory during its cold war heyday. I emphasise that the idea of a united and rising Third World had a greater reality as a hope than it had as an objective historical possibility. The present moment in US imperialism is one where even that hope cannot be sustained—thus the definitive end of the idea of the Third World.

Notes

Radhika Desai is in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050 STNCSC, Victoria, British Colombia, V9W 3P5 Canada. Email: [email protected].

I would like to thank Prabhat Patnaik for his comments on a much earlier draft and Stewart Scott for his help with typing and editing.

Cited in A Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin: The Political Origin of the New Diplomacy, New York: Meridian Brooks, 1963, p 229.

C Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Nairobi: James Currey, Indiana University Press and East African Educational Publishers, 1996, p 4.

Ibid, p 44.

Ibid, p 8.

Ibid, p 9.

Ibid, p 12.

Colin Leys' critique of udt is, to my mind, the most thorough and clear headed. See particularly the title essay, ‘Underdevelopment and dependency: critical notes’, in ibid. It rests on transcending the vexed issues of autonomy under imperialism and the ‘national bourgeoisie’ by conceptualising the problems and prospects of human welfare in the developing world in general, and Africa in particular, and focusing on the prospects of the development of reasonably stable, equal and productive relations of production— either capitalist or socialist. Never, however, shy of the requisite ‘pessimism of the intellect’ he does not disagree that in contemporary world economic conditions and the configuration of world power, both may be impossible in sub-Saharan Africa. On this see his assessment of the African predicament in the same book.

B Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980.

For example, see B Cumings, ‘The North East Asian political economy’, in F Deyo (ed), The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. See also S Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; and MT Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

P Patnaik, ‘Capitalism in Asia at the end of the Millennium’, Monthly Review, 51 (3), 1999, p 67.

M. Bernard, ‘East Asia’s tumbling dominoes: financial crises and the myth of the regional model', in L Panitch & C Leys (eds), Socialist Register, London: Merlin Press, 1999, pp 196, 203.

The clearest, most succinct discussion of the nature and political implications of this relative decline for the UK itself is C Leys, Politics in Britain, London: Verso, 1990.

The literature on ‘late development’ and its institutional requirements is also extensive. Its beginnings are usually located in Friedrich List's 1841 writings on National Economy as against the Manchesterian ‘Free Trade’ orthodoxy. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1962, is another milestone.

P Patnaik, Accumulation and Stability under Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 9. He clarifies that this is not a mere restatement of underdevelopment theory, mainly because what keeps the periphery in this role of ‘stabiliser of the metropolis’, even though it is home to substantial manufacturing, is not imperial political control per se but the nature of class relations within the periphery. But there is a radical inconsistency here, for the nature of class relations in the periphery is also importantly determined by imperialism, as his own account betrays. When he argues that ‘even if the periphery embarks on the production of what today are “frontier goods”, by the time it has mastered this production, product innovation in the metropolis shifts the concept of “frontier goods” … The relative prices in this situation are not very consequential for reversing the absolute preference … for the goods of the metropolis. The periphery’s … capacity to undertake a conscious development effort on a scale that would release it from the status of being a stabiliser of the metropolis remains forever impaired … because the periphery is incapable of being an innovator. It is incapable not because it lacks innovativeness per se but because tastes, including within it, and the definition of what constitutes innovation, are defined by the metropolis. The mere institution of import-substituting industrialisation cannot alter this predicament.' If the ‘tastes’ of the imperial and imperialised world are constituted in a certain way, what but the structures of imperial cultural control account for this?

‘By 1913 the USA had already become the largest economy in the world, producing over one third of its industrial output—just under the combined total for Germany, Great Britain and France. In 1929 it produced over 42 per cent of the total world output, as against just under 28 per cent for the three European Industrial powers … In short, after the end of the first World War the USA was in many ways as internationally dominant an economy as it once again became after the Second World War. It was the Great Slump which temporarily interrupted this ascendancy.’ E Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The History of the World 1914 – 1991, New York: Pantheon, 1994, p 97. The World Development Report puts the gnp of the USA in 1998 at $7921.4 billion, with that of Japan at $4089.4 billion and Germany at $2122.7 billion. The fourth and the fifth largest economies were France ($1466.2 billion) and the UK ($1263.8 billion).

For elaboration of the relationship between the universalisation of the nation-state system and US hegemony, see P Gowan, ‘The American campaign for global sovereignty’, in L Panitch & C Leys (eds), Fighting Identities: Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism, London: Merlin Press, 2003; and Berger, The Battle for Asia.

M Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, New York: Holt Reinhart Winston, 1972, p 6. See also M Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance, London: Pluto Press, 2003.

Hudson, Super Imperialism (1972), pp 6–7.

Ibid, p 5.

‘It would be false to say that the United States provoked World War II … It is true, however, that no act, by whatever nation, contributed more to the genesis of World War II than the intolerable and insupportable burdens which the United States deliberately imposed upon its allies of World War I and, through them, upon Germany. In essence, every American Administration, from 1917 through the Roosevelt era, employed a strategy of compelling repayment of the war debts, specifically by England, to so splinter Europe that, politically, the whole of Europe was laid open as a possible province of the United States.’ Ibid, p 34.

The literature on the historically different national capitalisms is also extensive. Perry Anderson's discussion of these capitalisms in Western Europe, aimed at highlighting the historical lack of anything like this in England, is particularly incisive. See P Anderson, ‘The light of Europe’, in Anderson, English Questions, London: Verso, 1992. On Japan see WK Tabb, The Postwar Japanese System, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

A Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’, paper presented at the Fifth International Conference in Economics organised by the Economic Research Centre of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 11–13 September 2001, mimeo; and R Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, London: Verso, 2002.

Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’, p 19

Ibid. The same contradiction is noted by Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble.

P Gowan, ‘After America?’, New Left Review, 13, 2002, pp 139–140.

Ibid, p 136.

Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’, p 18.

Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’, p 18.

This is the chief argument of Robert Brenner in his, ‘The economics of global turbulence’, New Left Review, 229, 1998.

I owe this point to Prabhat Patniak.

P Patniak, ‘Political economy of economic liberalisation’, Social Scientist, July–August, 1985, pp 3–17.

Ibid, pp 9, 11.