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Retrenchment increases military efficiency and is a tool to
strengthen hegemonic power
MacDonald and Parent 11(Paul K., Assistant Professor of Political Science
at Williams College, and Joseph M., Assistant Professor of Political Science, Spring
2011, Vol. 35, No. 4, Pages 7-44, accessed 7/29/15)
*Modified to avoid ablest language
logic of neorealism is clear, but it is not clear how quickly that logic applies.41 Kenneth Waltz, neorealisms
founder, argues that explaining foreign policy outcomes is too specific for a theory at such a high level of
abstraction. He speculates that systemic pressures might manifest themselves in foreign policies over tento fifteen-year time spans, maybe longer.42 Colin Elman argues that a neorealist theory of foreign policy is
logically possible, but he preaches agnosticism on whether such theories are useful. Like Waltz, Elman
does not contend that neorealism functions as a theory of foreign policy over brief time spans.43 Despite
their differences, neither Waltz nor Elman generates a detailed neorealist theory of foreign policy. We
that states are most likely to retrench when they have lost their position in the rank order and that loss
does not appear to be temporary. We measure relative power by examining a countrys share of gross
domestic product (GDP) among the great powers since 1870the period for which we have reliable
data.46 If a countrys ordinal share of GDP drops a rank and remains there for at least five years, we
classify this as a period of acute relative decline. To be included in the study, states must have at least a
10 percent share of total great power GDP. We also rank the severity of relative decline by calculating the
total decline in great power share of GDP for the five years following the shift in ordinal rankings. To take a
familiar example: in 1908 Germany accounted for 15.69 percent of great power GDP, surpassing Great
Britain for the first time in German history. Over the next five years, Great Britain continued to lose ground
relative to Germany, with its share of great power GDP reduced by a total of 1.41 percent. No measures
are perfect, even when they are the best among flawed alternatives. Although parsimonious, crossnational GDP data must be viewed with skepticism, especially over long periods of time. GDP was invented
as a concept relatively recently, and projecting it backwards in time is a difficult feat. For some countries in
the data set, we have had to estimate total GDP using less reliable measures of output from specific
economic sectors.47 Furthermore, GDP is not the optimal measure for this study. GDP, like income, is a
flow measure and gauges the market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in
a given year. If money were power and it is only imperfectly sothe best measure would be national
wealth, a stock measure.48 Unfortunately, no one keeps such a measure for the period under
consideration. Ultimately, the rank ordering depends on who makes the most, year in and year out. In any
given year, a lackluster income can be compensated for by a large nest egg from prior years. Conversely,
poor investment, profligate consumption, or high debt can mute the advantages of an enviable income. In
this sense, GDP, like income, is a leading indicator, but one whose effect can be dampened or amplified by
the national balance sheet. Lastly, economic decline may not be the best measure of relative decline
overall. States could care more about military, political, or cultural declineor about some dynamic basket
of these. Decisionmakers may not have a clear ranking of great powers, may not even know an ordinal
transition is taking place, and have only an inkling that their decline is significant and sustained. One must
keep in mind that many policymakers had faulty or imprecise GDP data for large stretches of the period we
consider, while others had no GDP data at all.49 As a rebuttal to these concerns, we argue that using GDP
data is an elegant and conventional approach to analyzing relative power. Most studies of the balance of
power use some measure of economic output, whether energy consumption, steel production, or GDP.50
We assume that decisionmakers acted as if they had access to GDP data, or something close to it. This is
not unrealistic; political elites monitor a variety of economic indicators including agricultural production,
industrial output, commodity prices, tax receipts, and import and export totals. These measures may have
been imperfect, but many of them correspond to what we now call GDP. With regard to the income versus
wealth distinction, we address this by examining periods of ordinal transition. Fundamentally, states
cannot maintain their position in the system if others have a persistently higher share of GDP. No other
form of power is as fungible as economic power, and it can be converted, with various lags, into political,
military, or cultural clout. Other, more nuanced forms of decline may also encourage retrenchment, but if
there is a situation that should elicit a retrenchment response, relative economic decline is it. It should be
noted that measuring great power relative decline using GDP has advantages over well-known
alternatives. The Correlates of War national material capabilities data, for example, is often used to track
the relative balance of power among the great powers. By aggregating measures of economic output with
military indicators, however, this index conflates the causes of relative decline with its consequences. A
decision by a great power to reduce its military expenditures, for example, may reflect a decision to
retrench, and thus be an outcome rather than a marker of relative decline. coarse-grained overview
Based on our universe of cases, the predictions of retrenchment pessimists receive little support. In
contrast to arguments that retrenchment is rare, we find that great powers facing acute relative decline
adopted retrenchment in at least eleven and at most fifteen of the eighteen cases, a range of 6183
percent. By any accounting, a majority of the countries in these cases retrenched shortly after their ordinal
transition. Nor does the evidence support the view that domestic interests constrain retrenchment. Every
one of the great powers in our sample that chose to retrench did so within five years of the ordinal
transition. This suggests timely responses to external constraints rather than domestic intransigence.
Moreover, there does not appear to be a strong connection between regime type and retrenchment.
Democracies account for about two-thirds of the great powers in our study, and are slightly more likely to
face acute relative declines, accounting for thirteen of our eighteen cases, or 72 percent. Of the twelve
democracies, seven retrenched, two did not, and three are debatable, yielding parameters from 58 to 83
percent. There are only three cases of autocracy, which makes comparison among groups difficult, but of
these, two retrenched and one case is arguable, producing a range of 67100 percent.59 In short, evidence
at the coarse-grained level tentatively supports the neorealist approach outlined above: during acute
relative decline, a significant majority of great powers of differing regime types elected to retrench.
war in only four of the eighteen cases, and in only one of these
cases1935 United Kingdomdid the declining power go to war with
the power that had just surpassed it in ordinal rank. 60 In addition,
in six of fifteen cases, declining great powers that adopted a policy
of retrenchment managed to rebound, eventually recovering their
ordinal rank from the state that surpassed them . These findings suggest that
retrenching states rarely courted disaster and occasionally regained their prior position. Further, even if
retrenchment was not successful, this does not prove that a preferable policy existed.61 In many cases of
decline, there are few restorative solutions available; politics is often a game of unpalatable alternatives.
Short of a miracle, it is hard to say what great powers such as Britain, France, or the Soviet Union could
have done to stay aloft, even with the benefit of hindsight. There is more room for debate on how well a
neorealist approach helps explain the extent of retrenchment. Seven cases do not appear to fit our
explanation: 1883 France; 1935 and 1956 United Kingdom; 1924 France; 1903 Russia; 1931 Germany; and
1992 Japan. Six additional cases are arguably borderline cases: 1873 and 1893 France; 1908, 1872, and
1930 United Kingdom; and 1967 West Germany (this last case, if it works, may do so for the wrong
reasons). Depending on how one codes the half dozen controversial cases, the depth of decline correctly
predicts the extent of retrenchment in somewhere from 28 to 61 percent of the cases. Although we believe
the actual figure to be on the high end of this range, even the low end is a respectable performance for a
single variable. The cases that failed to t our predictions did so at the margins. There were a handful of
cases of great powers facing moderate declines that retrenched more aggressively than we predicted and
another handful of cases of great powers facing large declines that retrenched more cautiously than we
anticipated. With the exception of the 1992 Japan case, however, none of the great powers facing large
declines ignored systemic pressures and refused to retrench. Conversely, none of the great powers
experiencing small declines erred by conceding too much, too quickly. Great powers may not perceive
decline perfectly, but they appear to have the capacity to judge the magnitude of their decline within a
general range, and to respond accordingly.
<Specific Link>
This imperialism creates a violent global police state
which normalizes endless cycles of racism, sexism, and
heterosexism
Mohanty 06 (Chandra Talpade, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006,
US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship,
complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
The clearest effects of US empire building in the domestic arena are
thus evident in the way citizenship has been restructured, civil
rights violated and borders repoliced since the commencement of the
war of drugs, and now the war on terrorism and the establishment of the
homeland security regime. While the US imperial project calls for
civilizing brown and black (and now Arab) men and rescuing their
women outside its borders, the very same state engages in killing,
imprisoning, and criminalizing black and brown and now Muslim and
Arab peoples within its own borders. Former political prisoner Linda
Evans (2005) calls the US a global police state one that has adopted
a mass incarceration strategy of social control since the Reagan
years. Analyzing the militarization of US society, Evans argues that the new
Links
profiling, at home and abroad, did not simply stand in contrast with
the states proscription of citizen vigilantism and calls for tolerance.
Rather, it was legitimated by this proscription and these calls; as
long as the state implores its subjects to be peaceful , law-abiding,
and without prejudice, it can use its prerogative power and even
mobilize the citizenry for the opposite practices . The state can
Horn of Africa
All strategic military activities in the Horn of Africa
perpetuate American imperial desires for dominance in
Africa
Azikwe 13 (Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, an electronic press
agency6/12/13 The war on Africa: U.S. imperialism and the world economic crisis Pambazuka News
accessed 8/1/15 from http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/87805 LC)
For more than two decades the United States and other Western
European imperialist states have been escalating their military
intervention in Africa and other geo-political regions of the world. This
has been taking place during the so-called Post-Cold War era with the collapse of the Eastern European
economic and political hegemony of Washington and Wall Street. During the Second World War the U.S.
established military outposts in Algeria, Libya and Liberia. After 1945, the struggle for national
independence in Africa, the Middle East and Asia would accelerate. In Latin America, even though an
independence struggle was waged in the 19th century, the phenomena of neo-colonialism became the
dominant character of relations between the states in South America and the U.S. In the Caribbean, the
struggle for genuine independence was waged from the 19th through the 20th century in Cuba, Puerto
In the
U.S. itself with the advent of Cold War ideology and political
repression under McCarthyism, perspectives and political organizing
around Africa became a highly contentious arena of struggle. The
Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)
during the early 1950s came under fierce attack by the U.S.
government and were driven out of existence. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley
Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and other territories.
Graham Du Bois, both leading figures in the CAA and the CRC, were persecuted in the early 1950s for their
interventions in the movements for world peace and solidarity with African liberation. The Du Bois wrote in
December 1958 for the All-African Peoples Conference held in Accra, Ghana that the future of Africa lies in
socialism. The Du Bois said that Africa, ancient Africa, has been called by the world and has lifted up her
hands! Africa has no choice between private capitalism and socialism. The whole world, including capitalist
countries, is moving toward socialism, inevitably, inexorably. You can choose between blocs and military
alliances, you can choose between political unions; you cannot choose between socialism and private
capitalism because private capitalism is doomed! (The World and Africa, p. 307) IMPLICATIONS OF U.S.
DOMINANCE IN THE WORLD IMPERIALIST SYSTEM Later during the 1960s when the various national
liberation movements and independent African states embarked upon the armed struggle as a necessity to
fight the U.S. and NATO backed colonial and settler-colonial states in Africa, Pan-Africanist and socialist
strategist Kwame Nkrumah identified U.S. imperialism as the major force in the movement for genuine
territorial sovereignty on the continent. The U.S., although paying lip service to supporting the anti-colonial
movements, sought to stifle and manipulate the national liberation movements for the benefit of Wall
p. 5, 1969) Nkrumah continued noting that The US-European post-war alliance not only enabled the USA
to benefit from the advantages of the European market, which had hitherto been largely closed to its
penetration; but also opened up new horizons in Asia, Africa and Latin America where the USA had already
superseded European supremacy and established neo-colonialist domination. The militarization of the US
economy, based on the political pretext of the threatening rise of the USSR and later of the Peoples
Republic of China as socialist powers, enabled the USA to postpone its internal crises, the first during the
hot war (1939-1945) and then during the cold war (since 1945) (ibid., p. 6) The postponement of these
dominance has focused a tremendous amount of attention on Africa and the so-called Middle East. The
founding of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008 under Bush has enhanced its operations under
Obama. The first full-scale operation of AFRICOM was the war of regime-change carried out against Libya
in 2011 in cooperation with other European imperialist states and their allies. It is no accident that Libya
has the largest known oil reserves in Africa and had under the Jamahiriya, the highest living standards on
the African continent. In Somalia, the CIA and AFRICOM have been involved in propping up the Ethiopian
2011 had been planned by the Pentagon for at least two years. Despite efforts by Washington and its
allies, the situation in Somalia is by no means stable. A French Special Forces commando units attempt to
free intelligence officials from Paris being held in Somalia proved to be a disaster as Al-Shabaab wiped out
the entire crew and eventually executed the leading commander of the failed raid. In Mali and Niger, the
U.S. is backing up French military intervention. The Pentagon had trained the Malian army prior to the
March 2012 coup and is largely responsibility for the incapacity of the national military to address the
Tuareg rebellion in the north.
competition. Hence, U.S. grand strategy integrates military power with the
struggle to control capital, trade, the value of the dollar, and strategic raw
materials. Perhaps the clearest ordering of U.S. strategic objectives has been
provided by Robert J. Art, professor of international relations at Brandeis and
a research associate of the Olin Institute, in A Grand Strategy for America. A
grand strategy, he writes, tells a nations leaders what goals they should
aim for and how best they can use their countrys military power to attain
these goals. In conceptualizing such a grand strategy for the Untied States,
Art presents six overarching national interests in order of importance:
First, prevent an attack on the American homeland; Second, prevent greatpower Eurasian wars and, if possible, the intense security competitions that
make them more likely; Third, preserve access to a reasonably priced and
secure supply of oil; Fourth, preserve an open international economic
order; Fifth, foster the spread of democracy and respect for human rights
abroad, and prevent genocide or mass murder in civil wars; Sixth, protect
the global environment, especially from the adverse effects of global
warming and severe climate change. After national defense proper, i.e.,
defense of the homeland against external attack, the next three highest
strategic priorities are thus: (1) the traditional geopolitical goal of hegemony
over the Eurasian heartland seen as the key to world power, (2) securing
control over world oil supplies, and (3) promoting global-capitalist economic
relations. In order to meet these objectives, Art contends,
Washington should maintain forwardbased forces in Europe and
East Asia (the two rimlands of Eurasia with great power concentrations) and
in the Persian Gulf (containing the bulk of world oil reserves). Eurasia is
home to most of the worlds people, most of its proven oil reserves, and most
of its military powers, as well as a large share of its economic growth. It is
therefore crucial that the U.S. imperial grand strategy be aimed at
strengthening its hegemony in this region, beginning with the key
oil regions of South-Central Asia. 10 With the wars on and occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq still unresolved, Washington has been stepping-up its
threats of a preemptive attack on these states more powerful neighbor,
Iran. The main justification offered for this is Irans uranium-enrichment
program, which could eventually allow it to develop nuclear weapons
capabilities. Yet, there are other reasons that the United States is interested
in Iran. Like Iraq before it, Iran is a leading oil power, now with the second
largest proven oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia and ahead of Iraq. Control of
Iran is thus crucial to Washingtons goal of dominating the Persian Gulf and
its oil. Irans geopolitical importance, moreover, stretches far beyond the
Middle East. It is a key prize (as in the case also of Afghanistan) in the New
Great Game for control of all of South-Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea
Basin with its enormous fossil fuel reserves. U.S. strategic planners are
obsessed with fears of an Asian energy-security grid, in which Russia, China,
Iran, and the Central Asian countries (possibly also including Japan) would
come together economically and in an energy accord to break the U.S. and
Western stranglehold on the world oil and gas marketcreating the basis for
a general shift of world power to the East. At present China, the worlds
fastest growing economy, lacks energy security even as its demand for fossil
fuels is rapidly mounting. It is attempting to solve this partly through greater
access to the energy resources of Iran and the Central Asian states. Recent
U.S. attempts to establish a stronger alliance with India, with Washington
bolstering Indias status as a nuclear power, are clearly part of this New
Great Game for control of South-Central Asia reminiscent of the nineteenthcentury Great Game between Britain and Russia for control of this part of
Asia. 11 The New Scramble for Africa If there is a New Great Game afoot
in Asia there is also a New Scramble for Africa on the part of the
great powers.12 The National Security Strategy of the United States of
2002 declared that combating global terror and ensuring U.S.
energy security required that the United States increase its
commitments to Africa and called upon coalitions of the willing to
generate regional security arrangements on that continent. Soon
after the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germanyin
charge of U.S. military operations in Sub-Saharan Africaincreased
its activities in West Africa, centering on those states with substantial oil
production and/or reserves in or around the Gulf of Guinea (stretching
roughly from the Ivory Coast to Angola). The U.S. militarys European
Command now devotes 70 percent of its time to African affairs, up from
almost nothing as recently as 2003. 13 As pointed out by Richard Haass,
now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his foreword to the 2005
council report entitled More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S.
Approach Toward Africa: By the end of the decade sub-Saharan Africa is
likely to become as important as a source of U.S. energy imports as the
Middle East. 14 West Africa has some 60 billion barrels of proven oil
reserves. Its oil is the low sulfur, sweet crude prized by the U.S. economy.
U.S. agencies and think tanks project that one in every five new barrels of oil
entering the global economy in the latter half of this decade will come from
the Gulf of Guinea, raising its share of U.S. oil imports from 15 to over 20
percent by 2010, and 25 percent by 2015. Nigeria already supplies the United
States with 10 percent of its imported oil. Angola provides 4 percent of U.S.
oil imports, which could double by the end of the decade. The discovery of
new reserves and the expansion of oil production are turning other states in
the region into major oil exporters, including Equatorial Guinea, So Tom
and Principe, Gabon, Cameroon, and Chad. Mauritania is scheduled to
emerge as an oil exporter by 2007. Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east
and Chad to the west, is an important oil producer. At present the main,
permanent U.S. military base in Africa is the one established in
2002 in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, giving the United States
strategic control of the maritime zone through which a quarter of
the worlds oil production passes. The Djibouti base is also in close
proximity to the Sudanese oil pipeline. (The French military has long had a
major presence in Djibouti and also has an air base at Abeche, Chad on the
Sudanese border.) The Djibouti base allows the United States to dominate the
eastern end of the broad oil swath cutting across Africa that it now considers
vital to its strategic interestsa vast strip running southwest from the 994-
mile Higleig-Port Sudan oil pipeline in the east to the 640-mile ChadCameroon pipeline and the Gulf of Guinea in the West. A new U.S. forwardoperating location in Uganda gives the United States the potential
of dominating southern Sudan, where most of that countrys oil is to
be found. In West Africa, the U.S. militarys European Command has
now established forwardoperating locations in Senegal, Mali,
Ghana, and Gabonas well as Namibia, bordering Angola on the
southinvolving the upgrading of airfields, the pre-positioning of
critical supplies and fuel, and access agreements for swift
deployment of U.S. troops.15 In 2003 it launched a counterterrorism
program in West Africa, and in March 2004 U.S. Special Forces were directly
involved in a military operation with Sahel countries against the Salafist
Group for Preaching and Combaton Washingtons list of terrorist
organizations. The U.S. European Command is developing a coastal security
system in the Gulf of Guinea called the Gulf of Guinea Guard. It has also been
planning the construction of a U.S. naval base in So Tom and Principe,
which the European Command has intimated could rival the U.S. naval base
at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon is thus moving
aggressively to establish a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea that will
allow it to control the western part of the broad trans-Africa oil strip and the
vital oil reserves now being discovered there. Operation Flintlock, a start-up
U.S. military exercise in West Africa in 2005, incorporated 1,000 U.S. Special
Forces. The U.S. European Command will be conducting exercises for its new
rapid-reaction force for the Gulf of Guinea this summer. Here the flag is
following trade: the major U.S. and Western oil corporations are all
scrambling for West African oil and demanding security. The U.S. militarys
European Command, the Wall Street Journal reported in its April 25th issue, is
also working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to expand the role of U.S.
corporations in Africa as part of an integrated U.S. response. In this
economic scramble for Africas petroleum resources the old colonial
powers, Britain and France, are in competition with the United
States. Militarily, however, they are working closely with the United
States to secure Western imperial control of the region. The U.S.
military buildup in Africa is frequently justified as necessary both to
fight terrorism and to counter growing instability in the oil region of
Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2003 Sudan has been torn by civil war and
ethnic conflict focused on its southwestern Darfur region (where much of the
countrys oil is located), resulting in innumerable human rights violations and
mass killings by government-linked militia forces against the population of
the region. Attempted coups recently occurred in the new petrostates of So
Tom and Principe (2003) and Equatorial Guinea (2004). Chad, which is run
by a brutally oppressive regime shielded by a security and intelligence
apparatus backed by the United States, also experienced an attempted coup
in 2004. A successful coup took place in Mauritania in 2005 against U.S.supported strongman Ely Ould Mohamed Taya. Angolas three-decade-long
civil warinstigated and fueled by the United States, which together with
South Africa organized the terrorist army under Jonas Savimbis UNITA
lasted until the ceasefire following Savimbis death in 2002. Nigeria, the
regional hegemon, is rife with corruption, revolts, and organized oil theft,
with considerable portions of oil production in the Niger Delta region being
siphoned offup to 300,000 barrels a day in early 2004. 16 The rise of
armed insurgency in the Niger Delta and the potential of conflict between the
Islamic north and non-Islamic south of the country are major U.S. concerns.
Hence there are incessant calls and no lack of seeming justifications for U.S.
humanitarian interventions in Africa. The Council on Foreign Relations
report More than Humanitarianism insists that the United States and its
allies must be ready to take appropriate action in Darfur in Sudan including
sanctions and, if necessary, military intervention, if the Security Council is
blocked from doing so. Meanwhile the notion that the U.S. military might
before long need to intervene in Nigeria is being widely floated among
pundits and in policy circles. Atlantic Monthly correspondent Jeffrey
Taylor wrote in April 2006 that Nigeria has become the largest
failed state on earth, and that a further destabilization of that
state, or its takeover by radical Islamic forces, would endanger the
abundant oil reserves that America has vowed to protect. Should that
day come, it would herald a military intervention far more massive than the
Iraqi campaign. 17 Still, U.S. grand strategists are clear that the real
issues are not the African states themselves and the welfare of
their populations but oil and Chinas growing presence in Africa . As
the Wall Street Journal noted in Africa Emerges as a Strategic
Battlefield , China has made Africa a front line in its pursuit of more global
influence, tripling trade with the continent to some $37 billion over the last
five years and locking up energy assets, closing trade deals with regimes like
Sudans and educating Africas future elites at Chinese universities and
military schools. In More than Humanitarianism, the Council on Foreign
Relations likewise depicts the leading threat as coming from China: China
has altered the strategic context in Africa. All across Africa today, China is
acquiring control of natural resource assets, outbidding Western
contractors on major infrastructure projects, and providing soft
loans and other incentives to bolster its competitive advantage.
18 China imports more than a quarter of its oil from Africa,
primarily Angola, Sudan, and Congo. It is Sudans largest foreign
investor. It has provided heavy subsidies to Nigeria to increase its
influence and has been selling fighter jets there. Most threatening
from the standpoint of U.S. grand strategists is Chinas $2 billion
low-interest loan to Angola in 2004, which has allowed Angola to
withstand IMF demands to reshape its economy and society along
neoliberal lines. For the Council on Foreign Relations, all of this
adds up to nothing less than a threat to Western imperialist control
of Africa. Given Chinas role, the council report says, the United States and
Europe cannot consider Africa their chasse gard [private hunting ground], as
the French once saw francophone Africa. The rules are changing as
China seeks not only to gain access to resources, but also to control
resource production and distribution, perhaps positioning itself for
priority access as these resources become scarcer. The council
report on Africa is so concerned with combating China through the expansion
of U.S. military operations in the region, that none other than Chester
Crocker, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Reagan
administration, charges it with sounding wistfully nostalgic for an era when
the United States or the West was the only major influence and could pursue
its...objectives with a free hand. 19 What is certain is that the U.S empire is
being enlarged to encompass parts of Africa in the rapacious search for oil.
The results could be devastating for Africas peoples. Like the old scramble
for Africa this new one is a struggle among great powers for resources and
plundernot for the development of Africa or the welfare of its population. A
Grand Strategy of Enlargement Despite the rapidly evolving strategic
context and the shift to a more naked imperialism in recent years,
there is a consistency in U.S. imperial grand strategy, which derives
from the broad agreement at the very top of the U.S. power
structure that the United States should seek global supremacy, as
President Jimmy Carters former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski put it. 20 The Council on Foreign Relations 2006 report on More
Than Humanitarianism, which supports the enlargement of U.S. grand
strategy to take in Africa, was cochaired by Anthony Lake, National Security
Advisor to Clinton from 19931997 and Christine Todd Whitman, former head
of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush. As Clintons National
Security Advisor, Lake played a leading role in defining the U.S. grand
strategy in the Clinton administration. In a speech entitled From
Containment to Enlargement, delivered to the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University on September 21, 2003, he
declared that with the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States was the
worlds dominant power...we have the worlds strongest military, its largest
economy and its most dynamic, multiethnic society....We contained a global
threat to market democracies; now we should seek to enlarge, their reach.
The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of
enlargement. Translated this meant an expansion of the sphere of world
capitalism under the U.S. militarystrategic umbrella. The chief enemies of
this new world order were characterized by Lake as the backlash states,
especially Iraq and Iran. Lakes insistence, in the early Clinton era, on a grand
strategy of enlargement for the United States is being realized today in the
enlargement of the U.S. military role not only in Central Asia and the Middle
East, but also in Africa. 21 U.S. imperial grand strategy is less a
product of policies generated in Washington by this or that wing of
the ruling class, than an inevitable result of the power position that
U.S. capitalism finds itself in at the commencement of the twentyfirst century. U.S. economic strength (along with that of its closest
allies) has been ebbing fairly steadily. The great powers are not likely to
stand in the same relation to each other economically two decades hence. At
the same time U.S. world military power has increased relatively with the
demise of the Soviet Union. The United States now accounts for about half of
all of the worlds military spendinga proportion two or more times its share
of world output. The goal of the new U.S. imperial grand strategy is to
use this unprecedented military strength to preempt emerging
historical forces by creating a sphere of full-spectrum dominance so
vast, now encompassing every continent, that no potential rivals will
be able to challenge the United States decades down the line. This is
a war against the peoples of the periphery of the capitalist world and for the
expansion of world capitalism, particularly U.S. capitalism. But it is also a war
to secure a New American Century in which third world nations are viewed
as strategic assets within a larger global geopolitical struggle The lessons
of history are clear: attempts to gain world dominance by military means,
though inevitable under capitalism, are destined to fail and can only lead to
new and greater wars. It is the responsibility of those committed to
world peace to resist the new U.S. imperial grand strategy by
calling into question imperialism and its economic taproot:
capitalism itself.
AFRICOM
Military Strategy change in Africa risk the same
imperialist outcomes that lead to Americas occupation of
Africa, a quest for natural resources and a paternalist
approach to control the markets.
Hermann 13(1/12/13, Burkely, Activist for Nation of Change. Information
Clearing House. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33597.htm
accessed 7/31/15)
January 12 2013 "Information Clearing House" - In the morning after
Christmas, I listened to a video from Democracy Now! detailing the days
headlines. What I heard announced by Amy Goodman angered me greatly:
U.S. Army teams will be deploying to as many as 35 African countries early
next year for training programs and other operations as part of an increased
Pentagon role in Africa. The move would see small teams of U.S. troops
dispatched to countries with groups allegedly linked to al-QaedaThe teams
are from a U.S. brigade that has the capability to use drones for military
operations in Africa if granted permission. The deployment could also
potentially lay the groundwork for future U.S. military intervention in Africa.
President Obama echoed this sentiment when he nominated John Kerry; he
congratulated his previous Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on restoring our
global leadership and declared triumphantly: the United States will continue
to lead in this world for our lifetimes. These statements and the headline
from Democracy Now! didnt surprise me one bit. Already, I had heard that
an imperialist intervention will begin in the West African state of
Mali next year, fighting over uranium deposits, gold deposits and
untapped oil deposits, which is exactly what I predicted back on
November 3rd. I had already written a year earlier, criticizing the war for oil
in Libya for the same reasons, saying that the extent of imperialism in
this war is very troubling[and] is not debatableThe war is
imperialist, unconstitutional and illegal[and] is very costly. If this
isnt enough, the latest data from the Pentagon notes that 851
soldiers are already stationed in countries across Africa. Still, one
might argue these are isolated incidents. That is incorrect. Michael T. Klare, a
defense correspondent for The Nation magazine noted in his movie, Blood
and Oil, that the four-year old military command, AFRICOM (Africa
Command) was the first new regional command created since the
Central Command was created in 1980and [its creation] in my view
is directly related the growing importance of African oil in the United
States. The question that begs to be answered is: does AFRICOM want to
spread imperialism across the continent in the name of American
democracy, or is it working for noble purposes? One hint at answering this
question comes from the director of the AFRICOM office of public affairs,
Colonel Tom Davis said a revealing statement. After saying that the
amount of troops in the continent wasnt fast growing, he admitted
that We also conduct some type of military training or military-tomilitary engagement or activity with nearly every country on the
African continent. This is part of our effort to enable African nations
to increase their defense capabilities. This statement is very telling of
US intentions to come. Nick Turse conveys this clearly, a process which seems
to have sped up since Obama has been in office. Turse writes that since 2003,
the modern American scramble for Africa, has begun, as in quiet and
largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their
forces across the continent. Todaythe U.S. maintains a surprising
number of bases in AfricaUnder President Obama, in fact,
operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited
interventions of the Bush yearsTo support these mushrooming missions,
near-constant training operations, and alliance-building joint exercises,
outposts of all sorts are sprouting continent-wide, connected by a sprawling
shadow logistics networkThe U.S. is now involved, directly and by
proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding
list of regional enemies [in the continent]U.S. special operations
forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating
posts on the continentU.S. troops are also working at bases inside
UgandaThey now supply the majority of the troops to the African Union
Mission protecting the U.S.-supported government in the Somali capital,
Mogadishuthe U.S. is conducting counterterrorism training and equipping
militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia
[recently] AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham explained the
reasoning behind U.S. operations on the continent: The absolute
imperative for the United States military [is] to protect America,
Americans, and American interests; in our case, in my case, [to]
protect us from threats that may emerge from the African
continentWith the Obama administration clearly engaged in a twenty-first
century scramble for Africa, the possibility of successive waves of
overlapping blowback grows exponentially. These words are
confirmed by the evidence from the Congressional Research Report,
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2012, which
shows, among other aspects, the amount of military interventions in Africa
since 2008: 1. 2008:The President reported that various U.S. combatequipped and combat-support forces were deployed to a number of
locations[including] Africa Command areas of operation and were engaged
in combat operations against al-Qaida and their supporters 2. 2009:The
United States has deployed various combat-equipped forces to a number of
locations [including]African Command areas of operation in support of
anti-terrorist and anti-al-Qaida actionsthe United States continues to
deploy U.S. combat-equipped forces to assist in enhancing the
counterterrorism capabilities of our friends and alliesin the Horn of Africa
region 3. 2010:...The United States has deployed combat-equipped
forces to a number of locations [including]African Command areas of
operation in support of anti-terrorist and anti-al-Qaida actions 4. 2011:
America and NATO have the worst records in their dealings with the
African people. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the connivance of the US and Belgian
governments. Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown with the assistance of Americas CIA. In recent years the
American government and its British ally have plotted regime change in Zimbabwe. In Libya it is America
and NATO that bombed the country and got Colonel Muammar Gaddafi killed. This has happened inside
Africa. How much easily and frequently will this happen, now with the Africom operating inside this
continent? America has sophisticated weapons and intelligence gathering that Africa cannot match at
The ill-intentions of the USA and its NATO allies towards Africa were
exposed recently when these allies made it impossible for a delegation
of the African Union to enter Libya to mediate and bring peace to
Libya between the rebels and Gaddafis government. America and NATO
treated the African Union with contempt and disdain. They literally sabotaged the AU
efforts to bring peace to Libya as well as to Ivory Coast. Africom will
presently.
destroy Africa. Africom will undermine the United Nations and the
African Union. It will deeply divide Africa into moderates and
militants. Africom is a handy imperialist tool for regime change. It
will be used to install puppet governments on the African people to
serve the interests of imperialism .
Northeast Asia
The attempt to have control of logistic spaces in
Northeast Asia is part of an US imperialistic and
militaristic tradition
Davis 15 (Sasha Davis, Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Science at the
University of Hawaii-Hilo, 6/2/15 Chinas New Islands: Dueling Imperialisms and Military Escalation in East
Asia accessed 7/31/15 from http://www.towardfreedom.com/28-archives/asia/3926-china-s-new-islandsdueling-imperialisms-and-military-escalation-in-east-asia LC)
where states are trying to facilitate certain movements rather than blocking them. Of course the two logics
of this borderland are often working at cross-purposes. Territorial boundaries function to keep spaces
bounded and to restrict movements and flows, whereas the constellation of ports, ships, and open sealanes function to make the spaces more permeable. The imperatives of states to keep out what they aim to
keep out, while facilitating the quick movement through of what governments and transnational entities
they both
promote militarization. While it is fairly obvious that contests over territory
rely on marshalling military power, the logic of networks and facilitating flows relies on
it as well. Militarization is desired for these "logistic spaces" for two main
reasons. First, militarization serves to determine which state is able to
control these flows. Second, militarization serves to safeguard the
system of trade from disruption by other states, natural disasters, or
threatening non-state actors like smugglers and pirates. This is where
American interests come into the story. The history of American militarization in
the Pacific is marked much more by the logic of controlling and
maintaining flows than territorial acquisition. Even when territorial
ambitions were present - as with the US taking of Hawai'i, the Philippines, and
Guam in the late 1800s, or Okinawa after World War Two -these ambitions
were usually not ends in themselves, but rather a means to create
bases that would allow the US to wrest control over trade with Asia
from competing powers. There is little difference today . US government
want to move through, may clash in some ways but they are symbiotic in another way:
officials - and the transnational business interests that heavily influence them - are not nearly as
concerned with which country gets control over disputed piles of rocks in the South or East China Sea as
they are with making sure that trade is not disrupted around these rocks. They are also concerned that
China, through its aggressive moves in the seas around the region (and its increased military
technologies), may develop the capability to deny the US control over these spaces of trade.
Okinawa
The affirmatives attempt to liberate Okinawa women is
the same radical feminist approach that designates
indigenous as unable to take care of them selves, and
posits the white feminists as the savior. Although the aff
is INFORMED by imperialism, it necessarily represents
imperialism through erasures of how race implicates
prostitution and perceptions of whiteness in Japan due to
militarization
Shigematsu 15
Setsu. Associate Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department of
University of California, Riverside Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia
and the Pacific. Issue 37. March, Intimacies of Imperialism and JapaneseBlack Feminist Transgression: Militarised Occupations in Okinawa and
Beyond accessed 7/31/15
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue37/shigematsu.pdf)
Rethinking Afro-Asian encounters through Okinawan-Black-Japanese transgression 17. The first film
sequence begins with Hara stating that Takeda left Tokyo in 1972 and went to Okinawa with another
young woman from the movement named Sugako.[24] After arriving in Okinawa, these young feminists,
who were in their early twenties, began working at a club for Black American soldiers. Their decision was
likely informed by their limited understanding of the Black struggle against White oppression in America.
Takeda and Sugako were representative of a small number of uman ribu activists who chose to work in the
This practice
was motivated by a feminist critique of the patriarchal and classist
double-standard that divided women into either good/chaste wives
versus bad/promiscuous women, a binary these feminists sought to
deconstruct through their deliberate participation in this industry.
sex-entertainment industry (mizushobai) during the early years of the movement.
This work also served the pragmatic need to earn money to support their activism and communal life.
cleavages between an anti-imperialist feminist critique of gendered violence and an effective decolonial
feminist practice. I make an analytical distinction between anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist
from the racism they faced in the US through companionship with Asian women. What further complicates
the visual representation of Black GIs in EPE is a voice-over during a montage sequence of scenes of this
Asign bar. The voice-over is a dialoguespoken in broken Englishbetween a bargirl named Kaylie (a
friend of Takeda) and an anonymous Black GI client. The dialogue raises questions about the dynamics of
Black-Asian-White power relations and provides viewers with the opportunity to hear the marginalised
perspective of a bargirl working in Okinawa. Bargirl: White people fool Black people right? Ok? Soldier:
White people? Bargirl: White people use Black male right? Ok, long long time ago, right? Remember?
Soldier: That's why we still hold it against them now. The bargirl then states that Black GIs have come to
the "Orient" (sic) and treat Japanese women in the same manner, as if they are doing the same thing that
Whites have done to Blacks. Although it may be a crude comparison, Kaylie expresses her critique of this
racialised-gendered power relation. The Black GI protests her racial analogy. You know that's not true. All
people not do same thing. All GI no come Okinawa, Japan, and treat Oriental woman the same way. Some
come and treat Oriental woman good, you know 23. Even though the bargirl accuses the Black
American GI of acting like the White man vis--vis the Oriental woman, the racialised status of the Black
GI is not equivalent (or even accurately analogous) with that of a White man in these zones of military
occupation. The conditions of White domination over Black people through the history of chattel slavery is
neither equivalent to nor commensurate with the imperial militarism that has brought Black GIs to Asia.
However, the bargirl's critique of the status of the Black GI does attest to an exploitative and contested
gendered-racial hierarchy mediated by the sexual labour of the Asian bargirls. Although Black GIs can
purchase sexual services, these bargirls are not the enslaved property of the soldiers.[30] Rather, as
draftees, GI bodies are disposable property of the US government. Moreover, it is the heterosexist
collusion of Okinawan and Japanese club owners and managers with the US military who support the
maintenance of these gendered and racialised relations of power. Masakazu Tanaka has described this
complex status of the American GI as occupier. In The Sexual Contact Zone in Occupied Japan, Tanaka
writes: Although the US military is on the power end of occupation/colonisation, the American soldiers that
the girls solicited cannot be mass-labeled as the conquerors because of the hierarchy that exists
within the military system. The soldiers are mostly single men who are at the lower end of the military
organisation. The American soldiers, although on the buying end of prostitution, are more intermediary in
their existence than being direct representatives of those in power. They are potential critics of the
military and of racial discrimination (if they are African-American), as well as potential deserters during
the Vietnam War, they (re)emerge within Japan as military deserters, civil rights activists, and soldiers
declaring solidarity with local civilians. In other words, they are rebels.[31] This quote distinguishes
between the status of low-ranking soldiers and African American soldiers compared to those who are in
power (as policy-makers). Black American soldiers are situated as occupiers within a larger racial
hierarchy and have agency to oppress and resist against structures of domination. 24. EPE projects the
image of the Black male as rebel by including scenes of the Black Power salute. This recognition of the
Black Power movement was part of the late 1960s and early 1970s Japanese New Left and student
movement culture. Black liberation movements in the US also informed the Japanese New Left. In 1969,
for example, two Black Panther members (Roberta Alexander and Elbert Big Man Howard) were invited
by student movement activists on a speaking tour in Japan.[32] In the wake of their visit, their works were
translated by well-known leftists such as Muto Ichiyo and others, who formed the Committee to Support
Black
liberation thought also served as an inspiration for activists in the
women's liberation movement. The leading philosopher-activist of
the Japanese uman ribu movement, Tanaka Mitsu writes about how
US-based Black liberation thought helped crystallise her own radical
feminist philosophy. In 1972, Tanaka wrote: By calling White cops pigs, the Blacks struggling
the Black Panthers. These are a few examples of transpacific cross-racial solidarity work.[33] 25.
in America began to constitute their own identity by confirming their distance from White centered society
in their daily lives. This being the beginning of the process to constitute their subjectivity, who then
liberation, but she did not engage in anti-racist solidarity work and
lacked an intersectional analysis of race, class and gender.[37] Uman
ribu discourse described Japanese women as a discriminated group,
analogous to Japan's racialised minorities such as Okinawans,
indigenous Ainu, and also former colonial subjects such as resident
Koreans and Chinese. However, the claim to the same status of
oppression conflates forms of domination without sufficient
attention to different histories and structures of colonialism . Indeed, the
lack of a racial/ethnic analysis of power differences informs how the activists of uman ribu did not
prioritise solidarity with other ethnic groups in Japan, but initially focused more on their own liberation,
The focus
on one's own liberation (or the liberation of one's own identity
group) is a significant and vital aspect of any liberation struggle.
However, an exclusive focus on one's own liberation can reinforce
individualist/self-centred modes of empowerment and conflict with
other liberation movements.[38] The lack of an anti-racist and antibecause they considered themselves analogous to these other oppressed minorities. 27.
Asian anti-Black racism unexamined.[41] It is this under-explored gendered-racial dynamic to which I now
turn. Asian bargirls mediating blacknessChi Chi's remix 28. The fourth film sequence is about an
Okinawan bargirl named Chi Chi. Donning an afro-wig and heavy make-up, Chi Chi's very appearance
transfigures self-expression through a racialised fashionaesthetic that signifies an intimacy with blackness.
[42] The audience is informed by Hara's voice-over that Chi Chi is a fourteen year-old Okinawan girl. The
scene continues with Chi Chi telling Takeda that she is pregnant and does not know who fathered the
child. This young teenager says her mother would kill her if she had the child, revealing her troubled
situation at home. The sequence ends with the camera positioning the viewer in Chi Chi's room, as she
gets undressed and begins having sex with an anonymous Black GI. Hara's camera lens implicates the
viewer in this transgressive moment. Voyeuristic desire and curiosity are at once hailed and potentially
disturbed. By confronting the viewer with this cross-racial scene between an anonymous young Black
American soldier and a fourteen year-old girl the viewer is exposed to a spectacle of the transgressive
intimacies of imperialism which is all the more provocative and unsettling given Chi Chi's age.] Figure 3.
A fourteen year-old Okinawan bargirl named Chi Chi and an anonymous Black GI Source. Hara Kazuo's
film, Extreme Private Eros, Love Song 1974 29. Hara's voice-over refrains from any overt criticism of how
the US military sex industry impacts on Okinawan girls and women, but through the exposure of a
By revealing Chi
Chi having sex with an anonymous Black soldier, the film arguably
stages the Okinawan girl as corrupted, and the Black soldier as an
ambivalent subject of desire and an agent of defilement. His body is
fourteen year-old girl, EPE potentially conjures a narrative of lost innocence.
without a name, without a distinct story. He is client, lover and polluter, and a potential part of a collective
enables viewers to see and consume this Black-Okinawan sexual liaison while the White imperial subject
remains outside the frame. The near complete absence of White American GIs from the film erases White
agency from the constructed and transplanted racial hierarchy.[43] White heterosexist military
governance structures these Afro-Asian relations as the authoritative power that imposes the segregation
of entertainment venues by utilising Asian women as mediators of racial power. Although there is no
explicit indictment of the racism of US imperialism in EPE, the Japanese-Black-Okinawan relationships are
constituted within a larger structure of anti-Black racism that meshes with Japanese economies of
light/white skin privilege. 31.
sequence in the film, Hara's voice-over reads the contents of a letter from Takeda. The letter informs him
that Takeda is pregnant and she writes that she thinks that the father is Okinawan. After ten months in
Okinawa, Takeda travels back to Tokyo. She carries out her intention, stated earlier in the film, to give
Figure 4. Takeda gives birth on camera in Hara's Tokyo apartment Figure 5. Kobayashi Sachiko records
sound and Takeda's son Rei witness his mother giving birth. Source. Hara Kazuo's film, Extreme Private
Eros, Love Song 1974 36. The narrative creates the expectation for Takeda (and the viewer) to anticipate a
mixed OkinawanJapanese child. After a highly graphic birthing scene where Takeda pushes out her baby
onto the newspaper-covered floor of Hara's apartment, the child lies crying as Takeda briefly rests and
The birthing
of her Black-Japanese daughter on camera captures the
unanticipated outcome and progeny of her sexual liberation that
transgresses Japanese familial-imperialism. The racial significance of this birth is
recovers. To her surprise, Takeda discovers that her baby daughter is Black-Japanese.
prefigured and contextualised by Takeda's ambivalence about birthing a Black child expressed earlier in
the film.[52] During one of Hara's visits to Okinawa, he and Takeda argue about her relationship with her
Black GI lover, Paul. During this argument (in sequence 7), Takeda states that her relationship with Paul
would only last while she was in Okinawa and that she was holding back because he is Black. One of
Takeda's reasons for holding back is rooted in a fear about the colour of her progeny. During her argument
with Hara, Takeda shouts, What do you think is going to come out? A White kid?![53] This exclamation
reveals her anxiety about the colour of her offspring. This holding back due to Paul's blackness reveals
how her transgressive sexual practice crosses the racialised boundaries of Japanese familial nationalism.
Takeda desires to experience sexual relations with Paul, but she is reluctant to embrace the prospect of
giving birth to a Black child. 37. After giving birth, Takeda phones her mother to tell her about the birth
and that her baby is mixedrace. After discussing the child's skin colour, Takeda says, I can't kill her now,
so I will raise her. Her response to her mother reveals the stakes involved in the economies of cross-racial
(anti-Japanese) sexual practice. This conversation with her mother also reveals Japanese discrimination
against mixed-blood (konketsu) children, and how anti-Black racism can manifest despite the relative
absence of Black bodies in Japanese society. Takeda's phobia of having a Black child is thus arguably
informed by her recognition of the anti-Black racism that she also tries to challenge through her choice to
raise her daughter. 38. While Takeda was in Okinawa, as noted above, she tried to adopt a BlackOkinawan baby boy named Kenny. Although she wanted to adopt a Black baby, she disclosed her
The opportunity
for solidarity with Okinawan women or Black soldiers was
underdeveloped and delimited by an emphasis on one's own
liberation. This distinction between striving for one's own liberation and struggling with others for
groups, despite their (mis)understanding of themselves as analogous with them.
collective liberation is a relational dynamic that remains as a tension in the strategic pursuit of liberation.
Imperial feminist critique/critiquing imperial feminisms 40. EPE thus documents and exposes the various
contradictions that arise in Takeda's attempts to forge a transgressive feminist politics.
This
narrative focus on Takeda's will to liberate herself centres her
desire as the driving force that takes the viewer to Okinawa as the
colonised stage for her liberation process. Takeda's desire to have
sexual relations with Okinawan men and Black GIs trumps the
imperative to struggl e for political solidarity with them.
The focus on
sexual liberation in this radical feminist movement was its hallmark and its frontier. 41. After the scenes
of Takeda's argument with Hara about her relationship with Paul, the sequence ends with the following
inter-title: Her relationship with Paul lasted for three weeks. There is no further information provided to
explain their break up. No reasons are offered as to why Takeda proceeds to take an extremely hostile
stance toward all Black GIs. In one of the final sequences of her stay in Okinawa, Takeda writes a
pamphlet to give to Okinawan bargirls in Koza, an entertainment district for the US military. The pamphlet
ends by encouraging Okinawan bargirls to do harm to Black GIs. Takeda specifically warns Okinawan
women, 'Don't fall for Black guys with big cock. Don't ever have sympathy for them. They should all be
castrated.'[57] Through such an expression, Takeda disavows her own desire, and instead calls for
gendered-racial violence against Black soldiers. Clearly, Takeda's conception of women's liberation (for
Okinawan bargirls) is placed in direct conflict with Black American GIs.
Takeda's pamphlet
epitomises a first-world imperialist feminist desire to save brown
(Okinawan) women from Black men. Her discourse demonstrates a
first world (imperialist) feminist desire to rescue the colonised by
giving directives to Okinawan women, telling them what they need
to do to liberate themselves from Black GIs. Indeed, the freedom and
pamphlet provides an apt example of the distinction between first world anti-imperialism (what we may
call imperialist antiimperialism) and decolonial praxis. Even though uman ribu activists were informed by
an anti-imperialist critique (as seen in the ribu pamphlet cited above), articulating such criticism should
A decolonial
feminist praxis requires that those from the imperialising/colonising
side take heed of the anti-colonial desires and directives of the
colonised, rather than focusing on one's own liberation or telling the
colonised how they need to liberate themselves. Thus, although EPE was in
be distinguished from engaging or sustaining a decolonial feminist praxis.
many ways inspired by a broader antiimperialist leftist sentiment, this analysis demonstrates how such a
highly transgressive and visually pioneering film can reinscribe and expose colonial modalities of being,
seeing, consumption and abandonment.
Persian Gulf
Persian Gulf withdrawal strategies are always a lie told by
imperialists to maintain US regional strength. Strategy in
the Persia Gulf extends from a history of desire to control
the oil and resources in the area
Everst 11(10/27/11, Larry, author for Revcom focusing on the US agenda
in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and India. The Revolution. An imperialist War of Lies
and Horrensoud Crimes Against the Iraqi People
http://revcom.us/a/248/us_troop_withdrawal_from_iraq-en.html accessed
7/31/15)
On Friday, October 21, President Barack Obama announced that all
40,000 remaining U.S. military forces would be withdrawn from Iraq
by the end of this year: "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will
be over," he said. Obama presented the end of the war as the fulfillment of a
campaign promise, and a proud moment for the U.S. in fulfilling a noble
mission: "The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with
their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American
people stand united in our support for our troops...This December will be a
time to reflect on all that we've been through in this war. I'll join the American
people in paying tribute to the more than 1 million Americans who have
served in Iraq. We'll honor our many wounded warriors and the nearly 4,500
American patriotsand their Iraqi and coalition partnerswho gave their
lives to this effort." Obama also called the withdrawal from Iraq part of "a
larger transition." He said, "The tide of war is receding...Now, even as we
remove our last troops from Iraq, we're beginning to bring our troops home
from Afghanistan..." He claimed "the United States is moving forward from a
position of strength." While Obama talks about "the tide of war
receding," the U.S. is increasing its military presence and aggression
in Libya and Africa. It's escalating drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia. It's waging a bloody war in Afghanistan, where there are still
close to 100,000 troops. And no, the U.S. military role is not being
ended in Iraq either. The U.S. has been forced to withdraw its
military unitsin part because it couldn't forge a new "status of
forces" agreement with the Iraqi government. But thousands of U.S.
diplomats, military contractors, CIA operatives, and other support
personnel will remain in Iraq after the end of the year. The U.S. will
still have tens of thousands of troops, as well as air and naval
power and various military alliances in the Middle East and Central
Asia . And it continues to rattle its sabers against Iran and Syria. The 2003
Iraq InvasionA Towering War Crime, Based on Lies This announcement by
Obama should make people reflecton how and why this war was
launched, what it was actually about, and what it says about the
nature of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist system. Obama and the ruling
class and media have deliberately obscured, covered up, and lied about these
issues for a decadeever since the run-up to the Iraq war began in the hours
after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This war was justified on the basis
of bald-faced lies that were cooked up through a deliberate campaign of
deceit that began soon after Sept. 11. There was the lie that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction. Then there was the lie that Saddam Hussein
had ties to Al Qaeda and was somehow involved in September 11. U.S.
government "investigations" and the media have blamed "faulty intelligence"
or being "suckered" by Iraqi sources for their failure to find a single cache of
WMD in Iraq. This is just another cover-up. There is overwhelming
evidencefrom many sourcesthat prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt that these were deliberate liesconcocted at the highest
levels of government, repeated endlessly by both Democrats and
Republicans, and by the imperialist media, which served as
cheerleaders for the war. And these lies were enforced by threats, smear
campaigns, and retaliation against any government and/or military officials or
former officials who tried to challenge or expose them. (For instance,
government officials and experts knew full well that Hussein was hostile to
Islamic fundamentalism and that Al Qaeda essentially didn't even exist in Iraq
before the U.S. invasionit was only until after the invasion that they arose
within Iraq.) Obama and the rest of the rulers want us to forget about all this.
These lies were designed to cover up the nature of the U.S. invasion: a naked
act of aggression against a small, weak, Third World country which had not
attacked the U.S., and which had been subject to over 20 years of U.S.
military assaults, covert attacks, and political and economic strangulation.
This aggression included the Iran-Iraq War (green lighted and prolonged by
the U.S.), the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and a decade of U.S.-UN sanctions.
These sanctions were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 children
and perhaps as many 1.7 million Iraqis overall. In short, the U.S. invasion of
Iraq fit the textbook definition of a criminal wara war crime. This basic
and obvioustruth has systematically been censored, suppressed,
and covered up by a decade of ruling class lies and double-talk.
These liesand the lie that this war was about "liberating" the Iraq
peopletwisted the truth inside out, in true Hitlerian fashion. In
reality, this was a war launched by the world's most violent and globally
oppressive power. It was part of a plan to seize on 9/11 to launch a war to
strengthen and extend its empire of exploitation and military domination.
The U.S. imperialists aimed to turn Iraq into a U.S.-controlled
military and political outpostand imperialist gas stationin the
heart of the Middle East. It was to be a first step toward reshaping
the whole region to suit U.S. capitalism-imperialism. It was meant to
be part of defeating and socially undercutting Islamic fundamentalist forces in
the region, which were posing obstacles to U.S. plans. The U.S. rulers planned
to use this oil-rich and strategically located region as a club against any rivals
regional or global. They were driven by a real fear that their "unipolar
moment" of global dominancewhen the U.S. was the only imperialist
Superpower after the demise of the USSRcould be slipping away. And the
important to recall what exactly the Bush regime dreamed of in Iraq. A March
21, 2003 Wall Street Journal piece spelled some of it out: "[Bush's] dream is
to make the entire Middle East a different place, and one safer for American
interests. The vision is appealing: a region that, after a regime change in
Baghdad, has pro-American governments in the Arab world's three most
important countries, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In the long run, that
changes the dynamic of the region, making it more friendly to Washington
and spreading democracy. Reducing the influence of radicals helps make
Palestinians more amenable to an agreement with Israel." But the U.S. began
to encounter big problems within a few months of invading Iraq. The Bush
regime thought it could quickly and totally remake Iraqi society and start
"fresh"creating a fully subservient neocolony, designed to fit the global
needs of U.S. capital and the regional needs of U.S. power. The U.S.
disbanded the Iraqi Army, barred most Sunnis from holding government
positions, and attempted to install a hand-picked U.S. puppet council to rule.
It even tried, under Paul Bremer, the U.S. "Administrator" of Iraq, to ram
through drastic "free market" capitalist economic restructuring. These
predatory and nakedly imperialist measures soon sparked a growing
armed resistance, centered among Iraqi Sunnis, that led to a 5-plus
year civil war and threatened to both tear Iraq apart and render the
U.S. occupation untenable. The American invasion, coupled with the end
of Hussein's essentially secular regime, fueled Islamic fundamentalismboth
Sunni and Shia. It provided an opening for Al Qaeda and other Islamist forces
to gain a foothold in Iraq. The U.S. was forced to abandon its chosen lackeys
(who had little following inside Iraq) and turn to reactionary Shia religious
forces and parties, willing to work with and under the U.S., to attempt to
govern and stabilize the country. (A majority of Iraqis are Shias, and these
parties have a long history in the country.) These forces have varying ties to
and tensions with Iran; and they have tensions and differences, as well as
common interests, among themselves and with the U.S. Being a foreign
occupying power and creating a new state from the ashes of the Hussein
regime proved to be extremely difficult. Toppling the regimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan, other regional developments, and the hatred the U.S. wars
spawned across the region ended up strengthening Iran. Such tensions and
contradictions, including the mood of the people in Iraq, and the Iraqi rulers'
fear of the kind of popular uprising sweeping the region (perhaps triggered by
a too-close public embrace of the U.S.) factored in to the impasse in
negotiations over U.S. forces continuing in Iraq. None of this is to say that
the U.S. is giving up on control and domination of Iraq, or that it
won't continue to have a presence and shape events there
including with new assertions of political and military intervention.
Iraq's economy, politics, and military remain subordinate to and
dominated by imperialism (even as there are complex, shifting, and
multi-layered contradictions at work). The largest U.S. embassy in the
world is in the heart of Baghdad, Iraq's capital. ABC News reported that the
State Department will continue to have some 5,000 security contractors and
4,500 other support contractors in Iraq, as well as a significant CIA presence.
And U.S. officials have stated there will be a continuing military relationship
with Iraq that will include the training of Iraqi forces. "So we are now going to
have a security relationship with Iraq for training and support of their
military," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, "similar to what we have
around the world from Jordan to Colombia." (Democracy Now, 10/24) Further,
the U.S. has built up a regional military infrastructure over the past 30 years,
and officials have made clear they are not leaving the region: "We're going to
maintain, as we do now, a significant force in that region of the world,"
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, including some 23,000 troops in
Kuwait and about 100,000 in Afghanistan. "So we will always have a force
that will be present and that will deal with any threats." ("U.S. Withdrawal
Plans Draw Suspicion, Fear in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, Oct 23) Containing,
weakening, perhaps overthrowing Iran's Islamic Republic of Iran has been a
central objective of U.S. strategy since the launch of the "war on terror" in
Sept. 2001. Yet in many ways, the U.S. war and other events have
strengthened Iran. And now, it's possible that the U.S. military
withdrawal from Iraq may strengthen Iran furtherin Iraq and
regionally. "The withdrawal from Iraq creates enormous strategic
complexities rather than closure," one imperialist think tank analysis posed.
"Therefore, if the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq results in substantial Iranian
influence in Iraq, and al Assad doesn't fall, then the balance of power in the
region completely shifts. This will give rise to a contiguous arc of Iranian
influence stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea running
along Saudi Arabia's northern border and along the length of Turkey's
southern border." ("Libya and Iraq: The Price of Success," STRATFOR, Oct 25
2011) This possibility has driven the U.S. to ramp up its threats against Iran.
As soon as the troop withdrawal was announced, Secretary of State Clinton
warned, "Iran would be badly miscalculating if they did not look at the entire
region and all of our presence in many countries in the region." (CNNState
of the Union, 10/23) Grand Schemes.... Profound Difficulties Obama's hollow
claim that "the United States is moving forward from a position of strength"
cannot hide the fact that this entire decade of war has cost the U.S.
enormously. It has greatly aggravated deep stresses in the U.S. empire, and it
has intensified a whole cauldron of contradictions the U.S. faces in the
strategically crucial Middle East-Central Asian regions. Dominance in this area
has been a pillar of U.S. global power in the post-World War 2 era, and to its
current and future status as the world's superpower. So the U.S.
imperialists are compelled to attempt to find ways to maintain their
power, presence, and preeminence in the region. But they're finding
this an increasingly difficult and uncertain endeavor. So yes, let's
reflect on these nearly nine years of war and occupation in Iraq. They
demonstrate that the U.S. is willing to employ massive violence and
commit savage crimes to advance its imperialist interests and stave
off reversals or defeat. It shows that the rulers of this country are chronic
liars who will say anythingincluding the most blatant and obvious liesto
bamboozle people into going along with their program. These eight plus
years prove, once again, that nothing good can come of U.S. intervention and
aggressionno matter how it's dressed up. And they underscore the moral
imperative of exposing the crimes and opposing the aggressions committed
by this country. At the same time, the war's unfolding and now the
U.S. military's ignominious exit from Iraq, also illustrate the empire's
profound and growing vulnerabilities, and how quickly its grand
schemes can backfire. All this points to the potential for even deeper
shocks and crises to jolt U.S. capitalism-imperialism, and the
urgency of revolutionary work today to prepare for such a moment in
order to be able to seize such an opening to sweep this warmongering system away. Then we won't have to mark anniversary after
anniversary of imperialist war after imperialist war.
region; in fact, the largest Arabic daily newspaper, printed simultaneously in twelve cities, is the London-
from Latin, meaning land of the rising sun, hence East. (The term Occident, referring to the West, but
Oriental Studies were set up in numerous Western universities for the study of the Orients languages,
culture and history. Artists tried to capture the essence of the Orient in their paintings, compositions and
literary works. Among the best-known are the operas Aida and Madame Butterfly and the musical The
King and I. Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are examples of literary
genres that embraced the Orient. These artistic works were avidly consumed by a European and
imperialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by casting the Oriental as
uncivilized, backward and in need of Western supervision. The inhabitants of the Orient were
placed low on the racial hierarchy in which Europeans held the
highest position and justified their imperial ambitions.
Democracy
Democracy perpetuates imperialismcreates cycles of
endless violence and oppression
Itwaru 09 (Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on
the project named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at
the University of the West Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and Gory
Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism,
Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)
Democracy" is the globalizational credo of the new Western
imperialism. It resounds with the incessant chant of freedom. It talks of
liberating the world. This is its totalitarian thrust. It is about global
control. This means reducing the entire world into a Western
capitalist monopoly and the destruction of other and more
humanizing forms of the organization of political and economic
livelihood. But this seems lost to those who are caught the clamor for
democracy. We have a situation where capitalist White supremacist
Western liberal democracies are invading and destroyirlg people and
countries to increase their exploitative control while the chant for
democracy goes on in other places. This is an ideologized chant. It is
where "democracy" is erroneously seen as a panacea for the resolution of
the forms and practices of oppressive rule everywhere. The spread of
"democracy" is the restructuring of target societies, the reorganization of political and economic formation in the world to
accommodate the interests of the White supremacist West , united
under capital. Democracy is used as the medium for the brutal
globalization of capitalism, and its insertion is enforced by the most
undemocratic of measures - authoritarian, command-obedience violent
totalitarian military control. The use of the concept "democracy" both
romanticizes and violates its Greek originary, demos which idealizes the
notion of people's rule - which has never happened in the history of Greek
imperial state culture. We should note that in its political inception in
Greece women were not included in the state craft of "Democracy."
Democracy was the purview of the male order of state power . It was
the phallocentric elitist politics of the state rule of people through select
male representatives who constituted the echelon of political power. Far
from being people's rule, it was rather the ruling of people by giving
them the illusion that they had a significant say in the rule of the
state over them. And its contemporary Western deployment is.
about the regulation of the lives of peoples to ensure their
exploitation. But there is a great deal of dissembling going on.
Eurocentric master race culture has attempted to sanitize itself of
the odiousness of racism and the smear of racial mastery in its
development of the discourse of "democracy" which it thinks is the
actually militate against grassroots participation because the NGOs it helps to bring about are perceived as
depoliticised, too closely aligned with donor service delivery agendas, too dependent on external funding,
and out of touch with the grassroots (Howell and Pearce, 2001). Taken together, these factors meant that
Laclau, Lefort and Mouffe there is an assumption that one is dealing with a territorially intact polity, that
the conceptual terrain can be developed in accordance with a guiding assumption of territorial sovereignty.
However, in the context of imperial powers one needs to remember that the autonomy of other democratic
experiments has been terminated by interventions organised by Washington (eg Guatemala in 1954, Chile
that there is a logic of democracy for export and a logic of terminating intervention for other democratic
processes that have offered a different political pathway. Furthermore, interventions which have led to the
overthrow of dictatorial regimes, as in Iraq in 2003, ought not to lead us into forgetting the realities of
Western support for military dictatorships in the global South throughout the 20th century.12 Nor, as
Callinicos (2003: 24) reminds us, should we turn a blind eye to the fact that there are contemporary
examples of support for non-democratic regimes, as shown in the case of the Bush administrations
backing for the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, despite its numerous violations of human rights, and for
Musharrafs regime in Pakistan, which receives US support yet is scarcely to be considered a fully fledged
of emerging
American imperial powerexpressed for instance in the phrase that the USA has a
hemisphere to itselfwith
spread democracy and liberty to the rest of the world. This juxtaposition, which is also closely
tied to the founding importance of the self-determination of peoples, is characterised by an
inherent tension between strong anti-colonial sentiment and the
projection of power over peoples of the Third World. Discourses of
democracy are deployed in ways that are intended to transcend such
dissonances and to justify the imperial relation, even though such a relation is
frequently denied (for a critical review, see Cox, 2005). What is also significant in this context is the idea
that democracy US-style is being called for, being invited by peoples yearning for freedom, so that more
imperial power is being invited to spread its wings (see Maier, 2005).
Rather than democracy being imposed, it is suggested that the USA is
responding to calls from other societies to be democratised, so that through
a kind of cellular multiplication a US model can be gradually introduced; the
owners will be the peoples of other cultures who will find ways of adapting the US
template to their own circumstances. As it is expressed in the National
Security Strategy for 2006, it is the policy of the United States to seek and
support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture (White
House, 2006: 1). What is on offer here is a kind of viral democracy, whereby the
politics of guidance is merged into a politics of benign adaptation.13 Nevertheless,
at the same time, a specific form of democratic rule is being projected and
alternative models that include a critique of US power and attempts to introduce
connections with popular sovereignty and new forms of socialism are
singled out for opprobrium. This is reflected in the commentary on Hugo Chavezin
Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and seeking
to destabilize the region (White House, 2006: 15). This is despite the fact that the
Venezuelan leader has won more elections in the past seven years than any other Latin
generally
American leader.
Hegemony
U.S. military interventions in foreign countries are
steeped in imperialist ulterior motivesensures backlash
and violence
Grossman 02 (Dr. Zoltan, faculty member in Geography and Native American &
World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The Evergreen State College, February 05,
2002 New US Military Bases: Side Effects Or Causes Of
War? http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/grossmanbases.html)
Whether we look at the U.S. wars of the past decade in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the
Balkans, or Afghanistan, or at the possible new wars in Yemen, the Philippines,
or Colombia/Venezuela, or even at Bushs new "axis of evil" of Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea, the same common themes arise. The U.S. military
interventions cannot all be tied to the insatiable U.S. thirst for oil (or rather
for oil profits), even though many of the recent wars do have their roots in oil
politics. They can nearly all be tied to the U.S. desire to build or rebuild
military bases. The new U.S. military bases, and increasing control over oil
supplies, can in turn be tied to the historical shift taking place since the
1980s: the rise of European and East Asian blocs that have the potential to
replace the United States and Soviet Union as the worlds economic
superpowers.
Much as the Roman Empire tried to use its military power to buttress its weakening
economic and political hold over its colonies, the United States is aggressively
inserting itself into new regions of the world to prevent its competitors
from doing the same. The goal is not to end "terror" or encourage
"democracy," and Bush will not accomplish either of these claimed goals. The
short-term goal is to station U.S. military forces in regions where local
nationalists had evicted them. The long-term goal is to increase U.S.
corporate control over the oil needed by Europe and East Asia, whether the
oil is in around the Caspian or the Caribbean seas. The ultimate goal is to
establish new American spheres of influence, and eliminate any obstacles-religious militants, secular nationalists, enemy governments, or even
allies--who stand in the way.
U.S. citizens may welcome the interventions to defend the "homeland" from
attack, or even to build new bases or oil pipelines to preserve U.S.
economic power. But as the dangers of this strategy become more
apparent, Americans may begin to realize that they are being led down a
risky path that will turn even more of the world against them, and lead
inevitably to future September 11s.
http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/PEC/gadconf/papers/flint.html
region where the U.S. had never before had a foothold. The U.S. military is
inserting itself into strategic areas of the world, and anchoring U.S.
geopolitical influence in these areas, at a very critical time in history . With
the rise of the "euro bloc" and "yen bloc," U.S. economic power is perhaps on
the wane. But in military affairs, the U.S. is still the unquestioned
superpower. It has been projecting that military dominance into new
strategic regions as a future counterweight to its economic competitors, to
create a military-backed "dollar bloc" as a wedge geographically situated between its
major competitors. As each intervention was being planned, planners focused
on building new U.S. military installations, or securing basing rights at
foreign facilities, in order to support the coming war. But after the war
ended, the U.S. forces did not withdraw, but stayed behind, often creating
suspicion and resentment among local populations, much as the Soviet forces
faced after liberating Eastern Europe in World War II. The new U.S. military bases
were not merely built to aid the interventions, but the interventions also
conveniently afforded an opportunity to station the bases. Indeed, the
establishment of new bases may in the long run be more critical to U.S. war
planners than the wars themselves, as well as to enemies of the U.S. The
massacre of September 11 was not directly tied to the Gulf War; Osama bin
Laden had backed the Saudi fundamentalist dictatorship against the Iraqi secular
dictatorship in the war. The attacks mainly had their roots in the U.S. decision to
leave behind bases in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The permanent
stationing of new U.S. forces in and around the Balkans and Afghanistan
could easily generate a similar terrorist "blowback" years from now. This is
not to say that all U.S. wars of the past decade have been the result of some
coordinated conspiracy to make Americans the overlords of the belt between Bosnia
and Pakistan.But it is to recast the interventions as opportunistic responses to events, which
have enabled Washington to gain a foothold in the "middle ground" between Europe to the
west, Russia to the north, and China to the east, and turn this region increasingly into an
American "sphere of influence." The series of interventions have also virtually secured U.S.
corporate control over the oil supplies for both Europe and East Asia. It's not a conspiracy; it's
just business as usual.
Terrorism
The War on Terror is a guise for imperial eurosupremacismensures continual violence
Itwaru 09 (Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on
the project named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at
the University of the West Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and Gory
Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism,
Colonialism, Racism, Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)
The murderous mode of reasoning is situated in and informs the
glorification of mass murder institutionalized in the West as "war." It has
been instrumental in history of the White supremacist European
colonizational practice of murdering people whose land they were
occupying and exploiting wherever they imposed themselves in the
world. The gruesome pyres of hundreds of millions of racialized bodies upon which
the empyres of Western supremacy proudly and imperiously stand, grimly attest to
this. The current "War on Terrorism" which has so far killed and
maimed more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan alone in this
century of Western aggression, is the blatant demonstration of the
murderous means through which the White supremacist Americanled West is expanding its conquest project of global domination.
This is the fundamental objective of globalization, despite the
nice ties in which it continues to be dressed and promoted. These
self-professed Christian states have joined forces in what amounts to their unstated but
nevertheless holy war against an imputed terrorism which so far has been aimed at Islamic
peoples and cultures for the strategic implementation of additional Western control and economic gain.
New technologies and techniques of terror, torture and killing have been
implemented in the murderous mode of scientific reasoning and used to
continue the same heinous historical killing of racialized peoples. This has
been a central feature in the history of Western imperial culture. It has
procured the blood money upon which much of its pompous wealth is
based, and has informed much of the social and political psyche in these
racist orders. There is strong support for these atrocities from the
majority of patriotic Western citizens who ironically believe they are
such citizens to believe they are defending their country when they
support the preemptive attacks of the invading American led White West
who have been directing their assaults against the peoples and cultures
thousands of miles and continents away from the domesticities of the
imperial Western fortress homeland. The culture informed by this mode of
reasoning is where the murderous patriot-subject is produced and highly
exalted. In the supra-militarized, settler-occupier, armed, aggressive and
dangerous, United States of America and its fawning settler-occupier northern
neighbor and reliable ally, the Dominion of Canada, waning troops are tearfully loved
and admired by sections of the patriotic populace as they are deployed to attack
the racialized evil Enemy-Other. This emotional display is in effect the militarization
of affection and patriotism in the culture of murderous aggression. These troops are
the state trained military killers who are patriotically loved as "our troops" as they
go out in "harm's way" - to do what they are trained to do - to kill, to maim, to
destroy people. These are not the "nice guys" and "nice gals" we are repeatedly told
they are. "Nice guys" and "nice gals" do not undergo military training to go out and
kill people. And we should seriously rethink the repeated claims being made that
when these "nice guys" and "nice gals" slaughter innocent and helpless people in
distant regions across the world that they are ensuring safety "at home," given that
there is no verifiably credible danger "at home" in the first place. The murderous
mode of reasoning celebrates military killers and deifies them as heroes. This
mode of reasoning has historically framed the imposition of the racial
mastery of euro-supremacism in its colonial conquests which for hundreds
of years have debased, enslaved, exploited and murdered, willfully and
knowingly killed large numbers of people, to assert its domineering
control.
Economic Growth
Globalization is a form of imperialism
Vilas 02 (Carlos, Professor of Sociology and Political science, UNAM,
Globalization as Imperialism, Latin American Perspectives, November,
http://hmb.utoronto.ca/Old%20Site /HMB303H/weekly_supp/week-0809/Vilas_GlobalizationImperialism.pdf, 70-71)
Considered from a historical perspective,
economic imperialism.
State
State action requires a build up of empire through the
militarization of daily life. This propels racist, sexist, and
directly violent policies on the population.
Mohanty 06 (Chandra Talpade, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006,
US Empire and the Project of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship,
complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
In an earlier essay charting the colonial legacies and imperial practices of the
late twentieth century US State, Jacqui Alexander and I (1997) argued that
the US State facilitates the transnational movement of capital within
its own borders as well as internationally. We referred to the US
State as an advanced capitalist state with an explicit imperial
project, engaged in practices of re-colonization, prompting the
reconfiguration of economic, political, and militarized relationships
globally. We argued that postcolonial and advanced capitalist states
had specific features in common. They own the means of organized
violence, which is often deployed in the service of national security.
Thus, for instance, the USA Patriot Act is mirrored by similar post-9/11 laws in
Japan and India. Second, the militarization of postcolonial and
advanced capitalist states essentially means the re-masculinization
of the state apparatus, and of daily life. Third, nation-states invent and
solidify practices of racialization and sexualization of their peoples,
disciplining and mobilizing the bodies of women, especially poor and third
world women, as a way of consolidating patriarchal and colonizing processes.
Thus the transformation of private to public patriarchies in multinational
factories, and the rise of the international maid trade, the sex tourism
industry, global militarized prostitution, and so on. Finally, nation-states
deploy heterosexual citizenship through legal and other means.
Witness the US dont ask, dont tell/gays in the military debate in the Clinton
years, and decade-long national struggles over the Defense of Marriage Act
of 1993, as well as similar debates about sexuality and criminalization in the
Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.3 The deployment of race, gender,
sexuality, and class in the internal and external disciplining of
particular groups evident in the Bush/Cheney war state necessitates
looking at these analytic and experiential categories simultaneously,
and, since 9/11, the acceleration of the project of US empire necessitates
developing a feminist antiimperialist frame. US feminists have always
engaged the US nation-state, but it was always the democratic nation-state
that merited such attentionnot the imperialist US State. Feminist
engagement in the latter context requires making the project of empire
visible in the gendered and sexualized state practices of the US, looking
simultaneously at the restructuring of US foreign and domestic policy. It also
Rove, principal advisor to the president; Dick Cheney, vice-president of the United States; and Donald
Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, among others, adopted by the Bush administration in the aftermath of
Billy Budd to undertake a fullscale rehearsal of Agambens (and others) richly resonant and highly
complex philological and historical analysis of the state of exception or to spell out his chilling
representation of the polyvalent cultural and sociopolitical effects of its normalization in modernity. It will
Impacts
Racism
Imperialism is grounded in racism and strips countries of
their culture
Thiongo 86.[Ngugi wa, Distinguished Professor of. Comparative
Literature and English University of California, Irvine Decolonising the Mind:
The Politics of Language in African Literature.London:Heinemann Kenya, New
Hampshire http://www.swaraj.org/ngugi.htm]
For these patriotic defenders of the fighting cultures of African people,
imperialism is not a slogan. It is real; it is palpable in content and form and in
its methods and effects. Imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance
capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has
affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the
remotest corners of our countries. If you are in doubt, just count
how many African countries have now been mortgaged to IMF the
new International Ministry of Finance as Julius Nyerere once called it. Who
pays for the mortgage? Every single producer of real wealth (use-value) in
the country so mortgaged, which means every single worker and peasant.
Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and
psychological consequences for the people of the world today. It could
even lead to holocaust. The freedom for western finance capital and for
the vast transnational monopolies under its umbrella to continue
stealing from the countries and people of Latin America, Africa, Asia
and Polynesia is today protected by conventional and nuclear
weapons. Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the struggling
peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy .and
socialism with the ultimatum: accept theft or death. The oppressed
and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from
theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed
by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb.
The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a peoples belief in
their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately
in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of
non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves
from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which
is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples
languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which
is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their
own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral
rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as
remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair,
despondency and a collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland
which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and
demands that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain:
Theft is holy. Indeed, this refrain sums up the new creed of the neo-colonial
bourgeoisie in many independent African states. The classes fighting
against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form, have to
confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of
resolute struggle. These classes have to wield even more firmly the
weapons of the struggle contained in their cultures. They have to
speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their
languages. They must discover their various tongues to sing the song: A
people united can never be defeated.
identities evaporate into thin air; they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were essential.
This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign that an anti colonial politics is possible. In the
needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually.
The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even
unwantedviolence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing colonialism as a
negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a
thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of
recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward
full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign
identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that
through negativity will move history forward.
Ethics
Imperialism destroys ethics by valuing security risks over
collateral damage
McNally 06 (David, Professor of political science at York University ,The
new imperialists Ideologies of Empire Ch 5 Pg 92) JL
Yet, even on Ignatieff s narrow definition, in which human rights are about
stopping unmerited cruelty and suffering, the crucial question is how we are
to do so. What if some means to this ostensible end say, a military invasion
can reasonably be expected to produce tens of thousands of civilian
casualties and an almost certain breakdown in social order? Ignatieff s
doctrine of human rights provides absolutely no ethico-philosophical criteria
in that regard. Instead, he offers a pragmatic judgement and a highly
dubious one that only U.S. military power can be expected to
advance human rights in the zones where barbarians rule. But
note: this is an utterly ad hoc addition to his theory. In no respect can it be
said to flow from any of his reflections on human rights per se. Moreover,
others proceeding from the same principle of limiting cruelty and
suffering have arrived at entirely opposite conclusions with respect
to imperial war. Ignatieff s myriad proclamations for human rights
thus lack any demonstrable tie to his support of empire and imperial
war. This is convenient, of course, since the chasm between moralizing
rhetoric and imperial advocacy allows Ignatieff to pump out empty
platitudes as if these contained real ethical guidance. Concrete
moral choices, involving historical study and calibrations of real
human risk, never enter the equation. So, Ignatieff can drone on
about the world being a better place without Saddam, never so much
as acknowledging the cost of this result: some 25,000 Iraqis killed as a
result of armed conflict since the start of the U.S. invasion, and probably
more than 100,000 dead as a result of all the consequences of the U.S.
war.24 Nowhere does he offer any kind of calculus for determining if
these tens of thousands of deaths are ethically justified. Instead,
banalities about being rid of Saddam are offered up without even
countenancing the scale of human suffering that Ignatieff s preferred course
of action war and occupation has entailed. But then, Ignatieff shows little
regard for ordinary people in the zones of military conflict. His concern is for
the security of the West and of the U.S.A. in particular. Ruminating about
Americas new vulnerability in the world, for instance, he writes, When
American naval planners looked south from the Suez Canal, they had only
bad options. All the potential refuelling stops Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti,
Eritrea and Yemen are dangerous places for American warships. As the
attack on the U.S.S. Cole made clear, none of the governments in these
strategically vital refuelling stops can actually guarantee the safety of their
imperial visitors.25
Environment
U.S. Imperialism has environmental and lethal
consequences
LLCO 11 [Leading Light Company, Imperialism kills and keeps on killing in
Vietnam, Iraq, etc LLCO Publisher, July 6th, 2013 http://llco.org/imperialismkills-and-keeps-on-killing-in-vietnam-iraq-etc/]
turtle" and is told that whenever he turns on a light bulb powered by nuclear
energy, he is "adding to the number of anecephalic babies in the world"
(Roszak 36).
War
Imperialism leads to warWWI proves
TAHC 12 [The Authentic History Center, The Origins of WWI Primary
Source for American Pop Culture, July 6th, 2013,
http://www.authentichistory.com/1914-1920/1-overview/1-origins/index.html]
border clashes with North Korea beginning in 1948. The North Korea
government claimed that by 1949 the South Korean army committed
2,617 armed incursions. It was a myth that the Soviet Union ordered
North Korea to attack South Korea. (1,2) The U.S. started its attack
before a U.N. resolution was passed supporting our nations
intervention, and our military forces added to the mayhem in
the war by introducing the use of napalm. (1)During the war
the bulk of the deaths were South Koreans, North Koreans and
Chinese. Four sources give deaths counts ranging from 1.8 to
4.5 million. (3,4,5,6) Another source gives a total of 4 million but does
not identify to which nation they belonged. (7) John H. Kim, a U.S. Army
veteran and the Chair of the Korea Committee of Veterans for Peace,
stated in an article that during the Korean War the U.S. Army, Air
Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about
three million civilians both South and North Koreans at many
locations throughout KoreaIt is reported that the U.S. dropped
some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm
bombs, during the Korean War. It is presumed that this total
does not include Chinese casualties.
War Spanos
The promise of peace through the ending of war conceals
the Western truth discourse that turns those "wasteful"
Other subjects into a productive mass to be harnessed by
the supervisory gaze of the dominate culture.
Spanos 2K(William V. [professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Binghamton University] America's Shadow: Anatomy of Empire). p. 51
wasteful economy of power, this is the seductive ruse of the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie
that strategically represents knowledge (of the Other) as external to and the essential agent of
deliverance from the constraints of power. It is the ruse that conceals the complicity between
(Western) truth and power: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it
What should be remarkable to anyone attuned to the dissonance of the actual history of
this century is not only the failure of oppositional discourses for example,
deconstruction, Marxism, the new historicism, feminism, cultural critique, and even postcolonialist criticism
to
Wara process further abetted by Richard Haasss, and, as I will show later, Samuel P. Huntingtons and the numerous Straussian
neoconservatives realisitic representation of the post-9/11 worldit is surprising, in other words, that these oppositional discourses should
have been blind to his arrogant (or incredibly naive) re-visionary/recuperative strategy, to the fact that this end-of-history discourse of what,
a rationale
that reverts to the very epistemethe ground of legitimacythat
the singular event of the Vietnam War and the theory it
precipitated had decisively delegitimized by revealing the truth
discourse of liberal capitalist democracy to be a social construction
that of the Anglo-Protestant core culture, as Huntington will put it after 9/11 infused by a
totalizing will to power that is characterized by its suppression or
accommodation, the colonization, as it were, of the entire relay of
Others composing the continuum of being to its polyvalent Identity.
since then, has come to be called the American Century relies on a now anachronistic ontological justification. I mean
To put that which these oppositional discourses overlook succinctly, Fukuyamas representation of the end
of the Cold War or, to emphasize that
history discourse
culture they and their neoconservative colleagues represent acknowledge the possibility of future setbacks
such thinking first as politically correct, a new McCarthyism of the Left, by the victors has contributed significantly to the demise of the
little authority it originally achieved, indeed, as I will show, to their demonization after 9/11 as complicitous with, if not acts of, terrorism as
such. It thus bears emphatic witness to the success of the dominant cultures recuperative project of delegitimizingwhich is to say, of
colonizinga thinking that would think the spectral difference that cannot finally be contained by the imperial (onto)logic of liberal democracy.
More tellingly, the success of this imperial project is also witnessed by the seeming indifference of most alternative discoursesthose that
have emerged in the wake of the demise of theory to oppose the New World Orderto Fukuyamas and the contemporary policy elites
representation of the post-Cold War occasion and by their seeming blindness to this representations synecdochical cultural status.25 That is,
The affs attempt to establish plan solvency as a prerequisite and necessary condition of peace and stability is
imperialistic and relies on intolerable forms of violence to
sustain American security.
Spanos 00, William, Professor of English & Comparative Literature at New York
State University of Binghamton, 2000 (Americas Shadow, pg.191-192// Petey G)
the
euphoric annunciation of the end of history and the advent of
the New World Order by the deputies of the dominant
American culture at the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of
the achievement of the global hegemony of "America"
understood not simply as a political order, but as a way of
thinking. I have claimed that this triumphant "American" way of thinking is not exceptionalist, as it
What I have argued in this book about the relationship between philosophy and imperialism is that
has always been claimed by Americans, especially since de Tocqueville's announcement of the advent of
an imperial thinking,
whose provenance resides in Roman antiquity, that sees the
being into which it inquires as a totalized spatial image, a
"field" or "region" or "domain" to be comprehended, mastered,
democracy in America, but European, which means metaphysical:
and exploited.
But this way of putting this imperial metanarrative, though necessary in the
context of the amnesiac imperatives of thinking the Enlightenment as an epochal emancipatory moment in
world history, is too general. It does not account for the historically specific transformation of this
European mode of knowledge production accomplished in the wake of America's emergence as a global
power: the fulfillment of the Enlightenment's "developmental model" in the effacement of the visible
imperial logos informing traditional metaphysics by way of the apotheosis of the "objectivity" of empirical
science and the advent of the classificatory table. Under the aegis of a triumphant America, the narrative
that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us in all
that belongs to it and all that stands together in it as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being
acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture,
what is, in its entirely, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he
therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive
sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a
picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in
such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents
and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in
its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.1
Reconstellated into the context of this Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity, the American end-of-history
discourse undergoes a resonant estrangement.
as "good news"
Indeed,
references to the end of history and the New World Order have
all but disappeared from mediatic and theoretical
representations of the contemporary occasion. But I interpret
this modification not as a tacit admission of the illegitimacy of
the end-of-history discourse, but rather as an accommodation
of these contradictory events to its universalist scenario, an
accommodation that, in fact, renders this end-of-history
discourse more powerful insofar as the apparent
acknowledgment of their historical specificity obscures its real
metaphysical basis. This accommodational strategy of
representation, for example, is epitomized by Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush
intervention; and the emergent threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
administration and now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, in his book The
Eschewing Fukuyama's
Hegelian eschatological structure in favor of theorizing the
actual practices of the United States in the international
sphere Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and so forth Haass frames the post-Cold
War conjuncture in the totalizing image of a "deregulated
world" (in contrast to the world "regulated" by the Cold War scenario) and the role of the
United States in the trope of a sheriff leading posses (the appropriate
members of the United Nations) to quell threats to global stability and
peace posed by this international deregulation. Despite
Haass's acknowledgment that conflict is inevitable (which, in
fact, echoes Fukuyama), the triumphant idea of liberal
capitalist democracy remains intact in his discourse. That is,
his commitment to the "laissez-faire" polity (deregulation) to the fictional
concept of the sovereign subject continues to be grounded in the
metaphysics that informed America's global errand in the
"wilderness" of Southeast Asia. Indeed, Haass gives this representational framework
Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (1997).4
far more historical power than Fukuyama's disciplinary discourse of political science is able to muster. For,
But I wish to
make it clear at the beginning that, in doing so, I am referring
not to a particular theory, but to a fundamental American
tradition whose theorization extends from de Tocqueville
through Frederick Jackson Turner to Fukuyama and Haass.
refer to Fukuyama's version of the post-Cold War American end-of-history discourse.
Indigenous Rights
better and worse coexist in this world, there are no such absolutes in
this world. The United States should not be able to relentlessly force
other nations to accept its definition of what is good and just or
even modern. Fortunately, many victims of American cultural
imperialism arent blind to the subversion of their cultures.
Terrorism
Imperialism encourages fundamentalism which leads to
terrorist organizations.
Gagnon 12[Jean, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Greater China
Studies, Journal of South Asian Development, The Taliban Did Not Create the
Taliban, Imperialism Did, vol. 7 no. 1]
Sir Karl Poppers (2002) method of historicism has been neglected in the analysis of the radicalization of
Afghanistans society in the form of the Taliban. Poppers historicism is the idea that the past may allow the
forecasting of the future by understanding the state of the present in one specific line of historical inquiry.
reverse so as to minimize radical behavior. This article has implications for international relations, foreign
policies and aid.
Terror takes
a situation that looks hopelessly doomed and finds the
essential within it, but terror contains its own demise, too. We flee from it. We
respond to it with a hardening of our own ways; we reaffirm
the identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others. The
American response to terror has been one of Americanism, there can be no doubt about that. Terror
ends in this, and there is no commemoration, just a forgetting. The
Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced. It trembles.
commemorative aspect of terror allows us to remember the fallen and understand how they can still be
of being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however,
and terror in its trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-
Terrorism is
metaphysical because it touches everything, every particular
being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The
circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of
value among things with a resulting worldlessness where
existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and
or, "becoming-desert," Vendiistung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the desert.
replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially. They are not fully
Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to
say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be the
effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an
absence in and through presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change
in being would lack a corresponding change in beings. This change in' the nature of
being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are
terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of
destruction via -terrorist acts. There would be no terrorist
threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be no
possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only
present when here.
"effect" of this absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this
regard.
war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls
into question all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical
determination of being. Terrorism makes everything a possible
object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it.
Everything is a possible target, and this now means that all
beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this
should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with
destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature ofthe being itself. The being can
no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not reside outside of the being.
Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the
taken place, -and this regardless of whether an attack comes or not. Beings exist as endangered, as
terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, in terms of pure presence,
Alternative
318). In the pursuit of our scholarly goals, we often do not stop to think or ask questions about why, for
example, research agenda A seems more important to us than research agenda B? What is the ideology
that operates in us that makes research agenda A seem more significant than research agenda B? How are
we always already interpellated into examining A but not B? What does that interpellation say about our
role in reproducing and participating in the hegemonic global domination of the rest by the West? What
does it mean, for instance, when I am told that there is a market for research agenda A but none for
research agenda B? Or that if I did pursue research agenda By I would have to do it in a way that would
is to recognize the latent ideological structures that inform our scholarship and practices. As Van Dijk
(1993) puts it, often under the surface of sometimes sophisticated scholarly analysis and description of
other races, peoples, or groups . . . we find a powerful ideological layer of self-interest, in-group favoritism,
configuration of socio-political [and racial] interests this privileging, displacing, and legitimizing has
this means
engaging in some serious soul searching to uncover why
scholarship in our discipline has been and continues to be so white
served (and continues to serve) (Conquergood, 1991, p. 193). For one thing,
(Rakow, 1989, p. 2l2). It is through such postcolonial self-reflexivity of our discipline, as well as our
individual scholarship, that we will be able to continue the task of pushing the traditional paradigms of
rhetoric further in order to create spaces for racially and culturally marginalized voices and perspectives on
rhetoric to emerge - voices and perspectives that would comprise sensitive postcolonial responses to the
neocolonial and racist circumstances of our present time. Second, the postcolonial critique of Western
discursive imperialism that constructs racial others and that legitimizes the contemporary global power
structures has important implications for rhetorical criticism, in that it beckons us to recognize
postcolonialism as a timely and important critical and political perspective. As Williams and Chrisman (1
994) emphasizes with great urgency in their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, it
is alarming how many of the attitudes, the strategies, and even how much of the room for manoeuvre of
the colonial period [still] remain in place (p. 3) in contemporary social, cultural, and I would add,
academic practices. Given this, it is unfortunate that in our literature we hardly find articles, especially in
our mainstream journals, that examine neocolonial representations of racial others or that analyze, for
instance, the discursive processes through which the (white) West gets constantly legitimized in political,
cultural, and social discourses.
The present - day strength of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the
Americas, in Africa, in Asia, in Australasia and in the Pacific is a direct consequence of
European expansion throughout the world since 1492 and of successive waves of
colonization. The languages have accompanied political and
economic influence, being invariably backed up by military might . The
promotion and hierarchization of languages often dovetailed with missionary activity: Christianity thus
accompanied several European languages world - wide, just as Arabic has been an integral part of the
spread of Islam, and Russian of Soviet communism. While Europeans were experiencing industrialization
and the consolidation of national (that is, dominant) languages, they were deeply involved in overseas
expansion, which contributed to economic boom in Europe. Many of the features of what is now known as
globalization were presciently described by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 (1961) .
This text stressed global economic markets, class interests, and ideological legitimation of an oppressive
world order. The project of global dominance has been articulated since before the USA achieved its
independence; for instance George Washington saw the United States as a rising empire (Roberts
2008 : 68). US national identity was forged through massive violence, the dispossession and extermination
of indigenous peoples, the myth of unoccupied territory, the surplus value extorted from slave labor, and
an active process of national imagination used to form a common identity, one deeply permeated by
that colonial Americans arrogated to themselves has been explicitly linked, since the early nineteenth
century, to English being established globally: English is destined to be in the next and succeeding
centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age
(John Adams to Congress, 1780, cited in Bailey 1992 : 103). The whole world should adopt the American
system. The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system. (President Harry
Truman, 1947, cited in Pieterse 2004 : 131). The role of scholars in facilitating US empire is explored in Neil
Smith s American Empire. Roosevelt s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003) , which traces
the shift through territorial, colonial dominance (the invasion of the Philippines in 1898) to the attempt to
dominate globally through a strategic recalibration of geography with economics, a new orchestration of
world geography in the pursuit of economic accumulation (2003: xvii xviii). Academia services the
global needs of the political project, perpetuating a system in which [ ] global power is
disproportionately wielded by a ruling class that remains tied to the national interests of the United States
(ibid., p. xix). In US colonies and in the British Empire, English was privileged and other languages
marginalized. Today s global ruling classes tend to be proficient in English. In the twenty - first century,
empire has increasingly figured in the political discourse of advocates and critics. Englers How to Rule
the World. The Coming Battle over the Global Economy (2008) distinguishes clearly between the
corporate globalization of the final decades of the twentieth century and its successor, imperial
globalization based on military dominance. Alternatives to Economic Globalization ( 2002 : 19) lists the
following eight key features of economic/corporate globalization (neo - liberalism): 1 promotion of
hypergrowth and unrestricted exploitation of environmental resources to fuel that growth; 2 privatization
and commodifi cation of public services and of remaining aspects of the global and community commons;
3 global cultural (and, we would add, linguistic) and economic homogenization and the intense promotion
of consumerism; 4 integration and conversion of national economies, including some that were largely self
- reliant, to environmentally and socially harmful export - oriented production; 5 corporate deregulation
and unrestricted movement of capital across borders; 6 dramatically increased corporate concentration; 7
dismantling of public health, social and environmental programs already in place; 8 replacement of the
traditional powers of democratic nation states and local communities by global corporate bureaucracies.
Alternatives to Economic Globalization fails to mention language among the features listed under cultural
homogenization, despite referring to a global monoculture and to the unrestricted flow of production and
marketing, needed by large multinational corporations. It seems that not even the best globalization
experts are aware of the tendencies toward linguistic homogenization and of the threats to linguistic
diversity mentioned above. Much of the literature on English as a global or international language
has tended to be celebratory and failed to situate English within the wider language ecology or to explore
the causal factors behind its expansion (on these subjects, see Phillipson 1992 and 2008a and Pennycook
1998 ). Influential work by Crystal, Fishman, and Graddol is critically analyzed in Phillipson 2000 , and
books on the world language system by De Swaan and Brutt - Griffler are critically analyzed in Phillipson
2004 . One of the controversial questions today is to what extent corporate globalization is leading toward
greater homogenization or greater diversification (for instance through localization), as some researchers
claim. For instance Mufwene ( 2008 : 227) claims that McDonaldization does not lead to uniformity because
the McDonald menu is partly adapted to the local diet. Even if McDonald s in India may serve
vegetarian burgers in Hindi, this reduction to superficial adaptation disregards completely the structural
and process - related aspects of homogenization (see n. 3 for examples; also, for a discussion of
McDonaldization, see Hamelink 1994 ; Ritzer 1996 ; and Defi nition Box 6.3 in Skutnabb - Kangas 2000 ). 3
capitalist imperialism is a
contradictory fusion of the politics of state and empire
(imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of the actors
whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its
human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military
ends) and the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time (imperialism as a
language (Phillipson 1992 ). For Harvey ( 2005 : 26),
diffuse political economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes
primacy). (Emphasis added) The first of these components of the contradictory fusion is the top - down
process of what a state, a combination of states, or an institution such as a corporation or a university
does to achieve its goals which includes the way it manages linguistic capital. The second is the way
territory that hitherto was the preserve of national languages in Europe or Asia, what is occurring is
linguistic capital accumulation , over a period of time and in particular territories, in favor of English. When
Singaporean parents gradually shift from an Asian language to the use of English in the home, this
represents linguistic capital accumulation. If users of German or Swedish as languages of scholarship shift
to using English, similar forces and processes are at work. When considering agency in each of these
examples, the individuals concerned opt for the neo - imperial language because they perceive that this
linguistic capital will serve their personal interests best, in the false belief that this requires the sacrifice of
their own language. When language shift is subtractive, and if this affects a group and not merely
individuals, there are serious implications for other languages. If domains such as business, the home, or
scholarship are lost, what has occurred is in fact linguistic capital dispossession . Analysis of the
interlocking of language policies with the two constituents of Harvey s contradictory fusion can
highlight both the corporate agendas, which serve political, economic, and military purposes, and the
multiple flows that make use of English for a range of purposes. New discourses and technologies are
adopted and creatively adapted, but in a rigged, so - called free global and local market. The active
promotion of other major international languages such as Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish also
aims to strengthen the market forces and the cultures associated with each language; but at present the
linguistic capital invested in these languages does not seriously threaten the current pre - eminence of
English. A Chinese global empire may be on the way. International language promotion itself needs to be
seen in economic terms, dovetailing as it does with media products and many commercial activities.
TESOL (the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) teaching materials, examinations, know
- how, teachers, and so on is a major commercial enterprise for the British and for the Americans and a
vital dimension of English linguistic neo - imperialism. The English language teaching sector directly
earns nearly 1.3 billion for the UK in invisible exports and our other education related exports earn up to
10 billion more (Lord Neil Kinnock, Chair of the British Council, in the Foreword to Graddol 2006 a
work that charts many variables in the global linguistic mosaic, challenges British monolingual
complacency, and aims, as Kinnock stresses, to strengthen the UK s providers of English language
teaching and broader education business sectors ). The major publishing houses are now global. For
instance Pearson Education s international business has been growing rapidly in recent years, and we
now have a presence in over 110 countries ( http://www.pearson.com/index.cfm?pageid=18 ). The
website of Educational Testing Services of Princeton, NJ, which is responsible for the TOEFL (Test of English
as a Foreign Language) for language profi ciency, declares as their mission: Our products and services
measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and
The
entrenchment of English in many countries world - wide and for many cross national purposes leads Halliday (2006) to make a distinction between
indigenized and standardized Englishes, which he categorizes as international and
professional development for all people worldwide ( www.ets.org , About ETS).
global : English has become a world language in both senses of the term, international and global:
international, as a medium of literary and other forms of cultural life in (mainly) countries of the former
British Empire; global, as the co - genitor of the new technological age, the age of information. [ ] they
obviously overlap. [ ] International English has expanded by becoming world Englishes, evolving so as to
adapt to the meanings of other cultures. Global English has expanded has become
global by taking over, or being taken over by, the new information technology, which means everything
label, since he is in effect referring to local forms and uses of English, comprehensible within a country, for
instance. His terms also elide the anchoring of global English in the English - dominant countries, where
This
terminology is a minefield which obscures power relations and
hegemonic practices, nationally and internationally.
this is the primary national language and one that also opens international doors.
Debate Key
True representations of history are key to show the kind
of integration of cultural differences that open
communities in the real world.
Besse 04
(Susan K., Professor in the City College division of the CUNY agency, 2004,
Hispanic American Historical Review 84.3 (2004) 411-422, Placing Latin
America in Modern World History Textbooks,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hispanic_american_historical_review/
summary/v084/84.3besse.html, Accessed 7/5/13)
Studying the physical and cultural borderlands where Europeans,
Native Americans, Africans, and Asians met opens important
discussions about the varying and continually changing ways
humans have defined the supernatural, physical space and nature, time,
value and exchange, health and illness, community and identity, gender,
and the other. It points to the schisms between abstract, formal
scientific knowledge and local forms of knowledge; furthermore, by
questioning the possibilities of subaltern forms of knowledge, it
challenges the notion of a universal reason. As nonwhite and nonChristian immigrants to the United States and Europe are changing (or
upsetting, in the view of many) the demographic and cultural landscape of
the West, the history of Latin America can provide illuminating
examples of how heterogeneous cultural communities came into
being through interaction across boundaries of race, religion,
language, and cultural differences. If we seek to tame the violence that
has characterized most of such encounters up until now, we would do well
to introduce our students to some of the literature on cultural
encounters and ethno-racial hybridity. Perhaps greater
understanding of the complexities of such encounters can help
reduce the cultural myopia that breeds fear.
Vote Neg
Voting negative reveals the gaps and omissions of the
knowledge produced by the aff, this is the first step to a
true understanding of the world and eliminating
imperialism
Tikly 04
[Leon , Professor in Education at the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Bristol, UK, Education and the New Imperialism, Comparative
Education, May http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134648]
The question remains, however, as to whether there can be an alternative to the 'regime of truth' that
operates around the education and development problematic and whether alternative visions of the
future, of education and even of 'development' itself are possible? After all, as Mudimbe (1988) reminds
us in relation to Africa, even in the most Afrocentric of perspectives on change, the western
epistemological order remains as both context and referent. Indeed, it will not have escaped the
attention of the reader that the present article, like so much 'postcolonial' scholarship, is also written
largely within a western frame of reference, whatever its intentions or commitments! For critics of the
problem within the social sciences. It is a problem of how to go beyond the existing order of knowledge
whilst being obliged simultaneously to work within its frameworks. For some critics this has meant
abandoning the whole 'development' problematic entirely. Against this kind of nihilism, however, another
view is that such an abandonment is itself a betrayal of the poor and marginalized. As Tucker (1999)
points out, 'If we were to follow this logic, we would also need to abandon concepts such as socialism,
cooperation and democracy because they have also been abused and manipulated for purposes of
domination and exploitation' (p. 15). In relation to formal education in particular, it is often the poorest
and most marginalized communities that have struggled hardest, both during the period of European
colonialism and subsequently, to create educational opportunities for their children because formal
schooling is still perceived by those with the most to lose as a way out of poverty and destitution. At a
theoretical level I find Santos' (1999) work to be particularly useful in beginning to reconstruct a role for
education. He sets out what he describes as a postmodem critical theory (but for our purposes might
equally be described as a new anti-imperial critical theory). Santos starts by pointing out that
Foucault's great merit was 'to show the opacities and silences
produced by modem science, thus giving credibility to alternative
"regimes of truth", for other ways of knowing that have been
marginalised, suppressed and discredited by modern science' (1999, p.
33). Part of this process or silencing has been to obscure the nature and origins of western science itself.
To begin with, modern science developed in the crucible of Enlightenment thought owes much to the
Islamic world of scholarship. Secondly, modern science from its inception has had both emancipatory and
regulatory dimensions. It was emancipatory to the extent that it sought to bring the threatening chaos of
unmastered natural forces under control in relation to an emerging liberal notion of freedom and equality.
It was regulatory because it excluded from this and indeed sought to dominate and regulate large
Santos'
plea is for a reinvention of 'knowledge as emancipation' based on
the principle of solidarity, and a commitment to praxis. That is to combine a new
knowledge as emancipation with a commitment to meeting localized
needs (here his theory intersects with that of other scholars such as Freire). The principles of
knowledge as emancipation are firstly, that it must move from monoculturalism
towards multiculturalism based on the recognition of the 'Other'
(indigenous and colonized peoples, women, rural dwellers etc.) as producers of knowledge.
sections of humankind including slaves, indigenous peoples, women, children, the poor, etc.
(1999)
This means recognizing the silences, gaps and omissions within and
between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge
so as to begin to unearth alternative ways of knowing the world.
However, this also entails a recognition of difference (see also Crossley & Watson,
2003). Rather than posit one 'knowledge as emancipation' it requires recognizing a multitude of voices of
the historically marginalized and to work towards a theory of translation, a hermeneutics that makes it
possible for the needs, aspirations and practices of a given culture to be understood by another. Thirdly,
views and according to their own norms and values. This means that
create a whole new body of knowledge,
Block Stuff
Discourse First
Discourse shapes reality specifically in the context of
education about Latin America - even if they win that
their plan isnt imperialist, the way they frame it makes
the link exponentially bigger
Beech 02
[Jason,
much of the writing by Martinez Boom (2000) and Corragio (1997). Even though the sharing of similar
problems amongst Latin American nations and the processes of cultural imperialism can be noted, this
article suggests a different perspective- based on the analysis of discourse-to understand the similarities in
the Latin American educational reforms. A perspective that puts discourse at the centre of the analysis
explains the similarity in the latest educational reforms in Latin America by the existence of a regional
educational discourse: a discourse that has Latin American education as its object.
The way in
which we view the world, the way in which we think and speak or
write about the world affects the way in which we act upon it. Thus,
the existence of a regional educational discourse creates the
conditions of possibility for certain things to be said and done in
Latin American education, but at the same time this discourse
implies a limit on educational thought and action. In other words, why is it that
of all the things that could be said and done in Latin American education only certain things are said and
done? Overall, then, this essay offers an analysis of the process by which the Latin American discursive
space is constructed in the educational literature. The argument is that there are a number of themes that
dominate contemporary 'Latin American educational discourse' and that this can partly explain the
similarities in the latest educational reforms in the region. This closed discursive space creates the
conditions for the production of certain ideas and practices, but at the same time it becomes a limit for
the production of other ideas and practices.
Epistemology Stuff
The affs approach to globalized knowledge subverts local
knowledge and prevents opposition, their epistemology is
upheld through the destruction of local knowledges
Alcadipani and Rosa 11
[Rafael, Associate Professor of Organizational Studies in the Sao Paulo School
of. Management of Getulio Vargas Foundation and Alexandre Reis Rosa,
Professor of Management, Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES).
Organization Studies, Public and Nonprofit, Discourse Analysis,From global
management to local management: Latin American perspectives as a
counter-dominant management epistemology, Canadian Journal of
Administrative Sciences, January 4, Wiley interscience]
This approach raises arguments both for and against globalization (Kellner, 2002). Those in favour of
globalization see an end to borders as a positive thing, which will create new economic, political, and
widespread phenomenon. It is taught at almost all the worlds universities, and practiced professionally
this
global aspect also implies that management knowledge and
practices generated and developed in Western countries, especially
in the United States (US), can then be seamlessly transferred to
other contexts (i.e., Jack, Calas, Nkomo, & Peltonen, 2008). The assumption is that
knowledge in management can be universally applicable and is, supposedly, neutral.
The resultant view is that management globalization is positive, and
is indeed an opportunity created by globalization. On the other hand, if
analyzed from a critical perspective and from the viewpoint of Latin America a
region that is a recipient of management knowledge and practicesthe process can pose
many problems. This is especially because globalized management tends to
impact management knowledge and experiences developed locally. The logic behind
this impact is linked to a wider context in which epistemologies are based on a
dividing line that creates a hierarchy of knowledge and that
subordinates local thinking (which is considered as particular) to global thinking
(which is considered universal. This unequal knowledge-power relationship, which
undermines the particular knowledge of many colonized peoples, is called
and nonprofessionally in all corporations, governments, NGOs, and so forth. However,
coloniality of power by Quijano (2000), and the manner in which this epistemological difference was
(re)produced is called abyssal thinking by Santos (2007). Both of them define lines that divide
On
one side is the hegemonic, useful, intelligible, and visible knowledge
produced by the North (or First World), and on the other is the inferior,
useless or dangerous, and unintelligible knowledge produced by the
South (or Third World), which is meant to be forgotten . In management terms,
experiences, knowledge, and social players into two groups that inhabit each side of the abyss.
this means that the colonial meeting between Northern and Southern knowledge has created a
naturalized view that useful, intelligible, and visible ways to manage an organization are necessarily
found in the knowledge produced in the North. Here North refers to the countries in the Northern
Hemisphere formed by Europe and the US and South refers to countries in the Southern Hemisphere,
formed by regions that were colonized by Europe but which have not achieved the same level of
development as the North (Santos, 1995).
In a
world so profoundly shaped-damaged, I would argue-by colonialism and
imperialism, it is imperative that scholars focus on celebrating the
colonized, on hearing the voices of "others." We must understand all
the ways in which Western civilization has come to depend directly
on forms of domination. Indeed, it makes perfect sense, as David Spurr has noted in The
environment. Post-colonialism, at its best, means recuperating the objects of the traveler's gaze.
Rhetoric of Empire (1993), that "works once studied primarily as expressions of traditionally Western ideals
are now also read as evidence of the manner in which such ideals have served in the historical process of
colonization."16
reorganized such disparate practices as museum displays and traveling abroad within a much more
inclusive network of linguistic and extra-linguistic practices that naturalized imperial norms. Conn
highlighted this discourses hegemonizing effects when he remarked that American imperialism was not
exclusively, or even most importantly, an episode in American foreign relations, presidential policy, or
military history. The
the discourse of
imperialism forged a hegemony out of linkages between such
unrelated cultural terrains as travel and ethnographic exhibits, I propose an addendum to
museum and imperial travel in producing it. In discussing the means whereby
Conns and Endys fine essays. In what follows, I hope to track one of the relays whereby imperialism
became an American way of life through an analysis of three interdependent aspects in evidence in Conns
and Endys discussions. The analysis shall begin with an account of how Wilsons museum displaced the
distinction between (Europes) territorial and (U.S.) commercial expansionism from a contested point
within the field of debate into a normative presupposition that regulated its terms. Discussion will then
and Endys knowledges and the hegemonizing discursive formation they analyze will shape the contours
of this entire discussion.
languages, by installing itself as a "standard" against other variants which are constituted as
"impurities,"or by planting the language of empire in a new place-remains the most potent instrument of
cultural control. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995, p. 283) Perhaps no language is as much implicated in
colonialism as English is. Several postcolonial commentators have pointed out that the same ideological
climate informed both the growth of English and the growth of Empire. In her pioneering study Masks of
Conquest, Viswanathan (1989) argues that in colonial India, the English literary text functioned as a
mask that camouflaged the conquering activities of the colonizing authority. She wonders at the historical
"irony that English literature appeared as a subject in the curriculum of the colonies long before it was
institutionalized in the home country" (p. 3) of England. Noting that "the superiority of English rested on a
racialized and gendered equation between language and nation" (p. 20), Krishnaswamy's (1998)
Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire shows how colonialists relied "heavily upon a vocabulary of
effeminacy to describe and codify Eastern languages and literatures while defining European languages
and literatures, especially English, as hard, energetic, rational, and masculine" (p. 20). Connecting this
line of thinking specifically to English language teaching (ELT), Pennycook (1998), in English
and the Discourses of Colonialism, offers an in-depth analysis of what he calls "the continuity of cultural
constructs of colonialism" (p. 19) and demonstrates how ELT is deeply
education remained in
missionary hands, although as schooling increasingly became
subject to government control in many countries, it was used by
emerging elites as a tool for transforming colonial subjects into new
kinds of postcolonial identities linked to alternative forms of
sovereignty. In some instances, the receivers of formal education remained
as subjects of a new illiberal sovereignty under dictatorial and
oppressive regimes or under one party rule. In other cases, they were constituted
more as citizens of an emerging liberal form of state. Postcolonial education was not just
disciplinary technology in both senses of the term. To begin with,
disciplinary in the sense that it sought to forge postcolonial subjectivities in relation to new political
to be a flexible and resilient discursive resource (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989; Ilon, 1996; Rose, 2002; Little,
human capital
was primarily conceived of in terms of its contribution to raising
GNP. In this discursive context, the World Bank and the other agencies supported a range of projects
2003). As Ilon (1996) has argued, in the post-war period and until the late 1970s,
to expand the skills base of low-income countries to provide the necessary human capital to kick-start the
the de-politicization of development discourse mentioned above through removing reference to the role of
cultural context of skills acquisition. By way of contrast, more recent work, within a skills formation
framework has emphasized these dimensions as a key to understanding different skills paths adopted by
different countries and regions (Brown 1998; Tikly et al., 2003). In these formulations, social, cultural and
political factors and differences in context are seen to play a key role in determining the skills formation
strategy adopted. Human capital theory also has a distinctive cultural bias. In the 1960s and 1970s, for
example, the development of human capital through education was seen as a key means to promote
'modernization' (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989). This was achieved through the further institutionalization of a
form of western education in the post-independence era. The nature of this bias has, however, changed in
return to different levels of education was significant. In relation to rates of return analysis, primary
education is seen as a principal means to eradicate poverty because of its relatively high social rates of
return to gross domestic product (GDP) and growth. In this way, human capital theory became linked to
structural adjustment lending and the increased use of development targets by multilateral agencies.
This new role for education, however, only serves to reinforce the
new imperialism through further limiting the capacity of low-income
countries to determine their own educational agendas. Dependency and the
resulting incapacity generated are reinforced through the disciplinary mechanisms of poverty-conditional
lending, poverty reduction strategies and international target setting, as highlighted above. Firstly, as
has been argued elsewhere and is gradually being recognized by some of the multi-lateral development
agencies themselves, the over-emphasis on primary education at the expense of other levels of education
removes the indigenous capacity for research and innovation which is centrally important if countries are
to link education to indigenously determined future development priorities (Crossley, 2001; Tikly, 2003b;
Tikly et al., 2003). Secondly, as Rose (2003) points out, education and training are treated as a black box
in relation to the underlying processes that take place. In this context, and given the continued hegemony
show off his or her power or (b) gives to mobilize a cycle of reciprocation
in which the receiver (i.e., the minority) will be indebted. It is for these
reasons that the majority gives. This explanation is not the same as authentically
supporting the cause of equality in furtherance of a cultural politics of difference
and recognition.
resist a specific landlord's hired guns trying to drive them off the land they need for subsistence or a
specific agency that privatizes their water supply and triples the rates. In Mexico they resist a golf course
concrete
manifestations of a global logic that disempowers people who lack
capital and ignores their right to establish their own priorities . A
growing number of movements in Latin America are engaging in
innovative organizing against the injustices of the neoliberal paradigm
(Gills, 2000), departing from the revolutionary focus on seizing state
power (Foran, 2003). Privatization, fiscal austerity, and economic liberalization have resulted in the
in Tepoztl?n, an air
contraction and redeployment of the state, shifting the locus of political struggles away from direct
contestation for state power and opening new spaces to contestation (by new movements and old) over
whether they will be controlled from above or below. The Mexican state acts increasingly as a broker for
global capital as it attempts to re-regulate the conditions for accumulation on a global scale.
Neoliberalism involves not simply a headlong retreat of the state but rather a renegotiation of state-
Program?PRONASOL. These somewhat contradictory efforts to create a reformulated clientelism for the
neoliberal era (Hellman, 1994) one more selective and flexible than the old corporatist structures had
allowed did not entirely succeed in shielding the dominant-party form of the Mexican authoritarian state
increasingly
independent social sectors formulated their demands not in terms of clien
telistic expectations but in terms of citizenship rights (Fox, 1997). This discourse
of rights is characteristic of the newly constituted social subjects confronting
neoliberalism throughout Latin America by simultaneously claiming
indigenous and other collective rights that markets deny and the citizenship rights that
market left state authorities in control of fewer resources for co-optation,
the neoliberal state pretends to offer equally to all (Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley, 2003). The
Zapatistas organize in newly contested spaces paradoxically created by neoliberal globalization itself
(Stahler-Sholk, 2001), joining independent peasant and liberation-theology organizing that predated the
elaborate structures of labor control were constructed in the centuries after colonization by grafting
them onto co-opted "traditional" religious/civic hierarchies in indigenous communities. Changes in the
Imperialism K Answers
No Link
They confuse the distinction between hegemony and
imperialism. By reducing troops we are maintaining the
hegemonic peace by umpiring, not empiring.
Yilmaz 10
[Sait, Professor and Chief of Strategic Research Center (BUSRC), Beykent
University, State, Power, and Hegemony, December,
http://www.ijbssnet.com/journals/ Vol._1_No._3_December_2010/20.pdf
According to Cox, theories like Realism and Neo-realism were coined to preserve the status quo serving the
interests of rich dominant Western countries and their elite (Cox, 1981: 16-155). Those theories aimed to
make the international order seem natural and unchangeable. Hegemony enabled the dominant state to
spread its moral, political, and cultural values around the society and sub-communities. This was done
through civilian society institutions. Civilian society consists of the net of institutions and practices that are
three; hegemony implied by conviction, kind but forceful hegemony, and colonialist hegemony based on
force (Snidal, 1986: 579-614). Discrimination between hegemony and dominance is another study subject
argued by many scholars including Machiavelli, Gramsci, and Nye. According to those three intellectuals, a
major power should not just rely on dominance, force, and hard power. Machiavelli advocates respect as a
source of obedience to a major power (Wright, 2004). Gramsci says that a major power itself evokes
a superior power
becomes a hegemonic power by persuading others to cooperate .
willingness and cooperation instinctively (Cox, 1993: 49-66). Nye believes that
Persuasion would be ensured by the utilization of soft power that makes other countries believe in common
another definition, hegemony is the position of having the capability and power to change the rules and
norms of international systems based on ones own motivation and desire (Volgy, 2005: 1-2). If you dont
have enough power to affect global events in line with your own road map, that would be a dangerous
illusion. Susan Strange envisages that hegemony requires two kinds of strength; relational and structural
based (Strange, 1989: 165). Relation based power is the strength to persuade and force the other actors
one by one or in groups. Structural power is the essential capacity to realize the desired rules, norms, and
Permutation do both
Permutation do both an approach will facilitates policy
action is key to re-conceptualize power. The alt alone
ensures cooption, vote aff to use the masters tools to take
down the shed
Park and Wilkins 05
(Jane, lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the
United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Karin, Professor of
Media Studies, Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair, Global
Studies Bridging Disciplines Program at the University of Texas at Austin, ,
Global Media Journal, Re-orienting the Orientalist Gaze,
https://www.academia.edu/609540/_Re-orienting_the_Orientalist_Gaze_
accessed 8/2/15)
By implication, the north/south and west/east divisions conventionally
understood as the way to organize national settings within a global system
are now less relevant. A dominant geometry of development (Shah &
Wilkins, 2004), divides countries along political (communism in east vs.
democracy in west), economic (industrialized north vs. agricultural south),
cultural (modern vs. traditional), and hierarchical (first =west; second
=east, and third=south) lines. However, the validity of these regional
distinctions should be questioned. This model has been critiqued for its
ethnocentric and arrogant vision, collapsing diverse communities
with a wide range of cultural histories into monolithic groups. More
often than not, the interests of domestic elites in poorer countries are
identical to the interests of the elite in the wealthier countries. These
categorizations, such as West/East, are problematic, given rapidly shifting
political-economic contexts involving changing patterns of political and
economic dominance among national actors, the strengthening of regional
institutions and identities, the globalization of economic and communication
systems, and the privatization of industries (Hagopian, 2000; Schuurman,
2000). New global categorizations may need to focus on access to
resources, whether economic, political, social or cultural, within and
across geopolitical territories. Inequity in terms of access to resources
then becomes the overarching concern (Schuurman, 2000). Although we
need to foreground tangible issues related to basic human needs, the broader
concern with access to resources addresses the intangible as well, touching
on social, cultural, political and spiritual resources (Steeves, 2002). Access to
resources builds from ones position within a socio-political network. This
vision offers a more nuanced framework of power, in which networks
offer the possibility for some to reach certain goals, such as
employment, education, media production, policy making, and more.
Power is not only activated within state and corporate institutions,
but also within social groups, though these networks tightly
intersect. While issues of territory are still relevant, particularly when clearly
many groups, such as Palestinians, are struggling for a sovereignty rooted in
place, and nation-states are still critical actors in the global sphere
(Morris & Waisbord, 2001), we need to rethink relationships of power as
partly connected with spatial arrangements (Escobar, 2000; Escobar et
al., 2002), and not just in terms of place. And when we do consider
place, we may need to attend to the critical role of regional actors
and not just the US.
Perm - Methodology
Permutation do both. Engaging in one methodology falls
short. Institutional debate about these issues creates the
possibility for difference
Lander 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of
Venezuela and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views
from South, Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin
American Social Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html,
Accessed 7/5/13)
These debates create possibilities for new intellectual strategies to
address the challenges posed by the crisis of modernity for Latin
American critical theory. In view of the fact that we are at a point in our
work where we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial
context of our studies (Said 1993,6),it is absolutely necessary to question
whether postmodern theories offer an adequate perspective from which to
transgress the colonial limits of modern social thought. Some of the main
issues of postcolonial perspectives have been formulated and taken anew at
different times in the history of Latin American social thought of the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries (Mart 1987; Maritegui 1979; Fals-Borda
1970; 526 Nepantla Fernndez Retamar 1976). There have been
extraordinary developments associated with the revitalization of the
struggles of indigenous peoples in recent decades.5 Nonetheless,
these issues paradoxically have been of relatively marginal concern
in the academic world, outside anthropology and some areas of the
humanities. Western social sciences, which must be applied creatively to the
study of the realities of Latin America, are still assumed to be the best of
universal thought. Due to both institutional and communicational
difficulties, as well as to the prevailing universalist orientations
(intellectual colonialism? subordinate cosmopolitanism?),6 today the Latin
American academy has only limited communication with the vigorous
intellectual production to be found in Southeast Asia, some regions of Africa,
and in the work of academics of these regions working in Europe or the
United States. The most effective bridges between these intellectual
traditions are being offered today by Latin Americans who work in North
American universities (Escobar 1995; Mignolo 1996a,1996b; Coronil 1996,
1997).
[s]ome groups, like United for Peace and Justice, suggested the protests
might avert the war. Of course, they were totally wrong, and the protests
totally ineffective. The invasion occurred as planned, despite the millions of people
nominally, peacefully, and powerlessly opposed to it. So how do we
switch our peace movement from marching in the streets to actually
resisting our government and creating change? It is this question that
Gelderloos has a difficult time answering. How Nonviolence Protects the
State is not meant to change any minds. Instead, it reads as a
reassurance for those who already know the ineffectiveness of peace
movements. Gelderloos language is aggressive at times, as he conflates
peace activists with good sheep. But perhaps this is his point . Maybe if
we started to realize that marches and nonviolent protests were ultimately
tools of society to make people feel as if they are creating change, then we
would actually find a way to resist our government and create the change
we want on our own terms. Covering a diverse range of topics, from how
Too Dualistic
Perm solves Their absolutist rejection of imperialism is
too dualistic
Angus 04
(Ian, Professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University, Empire, Borders,
Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negris Concept of Empire.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event /v007/7.3angus.html)
how can one find a limit to the
expansive tendency of empire? The inscription of a border and a politics
of place both pertain to the construction of a limit to expansion and thus
to hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges (xii). While
deterritorialization cannot be exactly reversed, it is not true that this
implies that emancipation must lie in further deterritorialization and that
all reterritorializations are perverse, or fundamentalist. They are
artificiala matter of human artificeto be sure. However, it can be argued that the most profound
and effective anti-neoliberal globalization politics in recent years has
been inspired precisely by inventive reterritorializations, localizations
that retrieve that which has been pushed aside by empire and preserved
by borders. It is a politics of limit to empire so that a plurality of
differences can occurdifferences from empire, not the putative
consumer differences that are equalized by exchanges . Leonard Cohen has pointed
The two critical points that I have made converge on a central issue:
to the problem of empire in this fashion. Things are going to slide in all directions. Wont be nothing. Nothing you can
measure anymore.24 How exactly to define limits, draw borders, to open a space where measure can be taken, will
take a great deal of political debate and action in deciding. There is a lot more to be said and done about this, but I
Their
concept of abstraction is too dualistic, their concept of border too onesided, their concept of history too uni-linear, their concept of place too
shallow, to have much long-term resonance in the anti-neoliberal
globalization alliance. I would put my bets on the construction of borders that allow Others to flourish, a
doubt whether the perspective put forward in Empire will be of much use in this important matter.
politics of place and a defence of communities against exchange value. This is a very different politics whose
difference is perhaps now obscured by the common opposition to empire. But it is different enough that one may
expect it to become generally visible before too long.
radically so vis-a`-vis this social phenomenon. As a critical scholar, I am especially interested here in the
question of power differentials in terms of the condition of transculturalarity how can we most usefully
and effectively understand, theorize, and address such differentials in a transcultural world while keeping
the question of inequality squarely in view? Conclusion: melding the macro and micro, the global and local,
and production and consumption Kraidy and Murphys call for a comparative, empirically grounded
translocalism and Rogers appeal to a transcultural approach represent the leading edge of global
easy, nor necessarily unproblematic, task. Indeed, the difficulty of perhaps the impossibility of putting
aside ones assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the human social whole and the
individual is surely one of the primary reasons for the often heated debates that have swirled around, and
which will continue to swirl around, how best to approach theorizing and studying the relation between the
global and local and culture and media. As contentious as these debates have been and as passionate as
they continue to be, it seems clear that, as Fornas (2008), Jansson (2009), and others have noted, global
communication and media studies has generally moved beyond the polarization that once characterized
the field. Thus, there appears to be general agreement that one cannot adequately grasp the nexus
between globalization and culture by looking exclusively at the realm of cultural production or by zeroing
in only on local, individual acts of creative cultural appropriation. This doesnt mean that disagreement and
debate have disappeared from global communication and media studies, or that the disagreement that
remains does not revolve around some of the same issues that it has in the past, most notably, the
question of where the balance of power primarily resides in the global local equation. However, it does
mean global communication and media studies is moving toward building approaches to engaging and
understanding the global local-culture media dynamic in more sophisticated and productive fashion than
it has in the past. In short, it shows that the field is not stagnant and that it is not being held back by
entrenched thinking. Indeed, it is, as Rogers (2006) and Kraidy and Murphys (2008) recent work shows,
very definitely moving forward. In the end, this is exactly what ought to be happening with theory, whether
its focused on the interplay between globalization, media and culture, or, more broadly, on the general
nature of human social being in the world.
Impact turns
Imperialism is necessary to solve poverty, democracy,
human rights, warwe are not the type of empire the neg
claims
Barnett 11
(Thomas P.M. Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research
Department, U.S. Naval War College,The New Rules: Leadership
Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads, March 7
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rulesleadership-fatigue-puts-u-sand- globalization-at-crossroads,)
It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of
arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet
endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being
its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to
delivered.
Unis! The value of The Case for Goliath does not lie in its central conceit
the United States as the worlds governmentbut in the arguments
Mandelbaum advances for why American power serves the interests of
other countries. The case he makes is not particularly novel (William
Odom and Robert Dujarric made similar points in their 2004 book,
Americas Inadvertent Empire), but it bears repeating at a time when the
publishing industry is churning out reams of paranoid tomes with titles
like Rogue Nation, The Sorrows of Empire, and The New American
Militarism. Mandelbaum begins by listing five security benefits the United
States offers the world. First, the continuing deployment of American
troops in Europe is a reassurance that no sudden shifts in
Europes security arrangements would occur. Second, the United
States has reduced the demand for nuclear weapons, and the
number of nuclear-armed countries, to levels considerably below
what they otherwise have reached, both by attempting to stop
rogue states from acquiring nukes and by providing nuclear
protection to countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
that would otherwise go nuclear. Third, the United States has
fought terrorists across the world and waged preventive war in
Iraq to remove the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Fourth, the
United States has undertaken humanitarian interventions in such places
as Bosnia and Kosovo, which Mandelbaum likens to the practice,
increasingly common in Western countries, of removing children from the
custody of parents who are abusing them. Fifth, the United States has
attempted to create the apparatus of a working, effective,
decent government in such dysfunctional places as Haiti and
Afghanistan. Mandelbaum also points to five economic benefits
of American power. First, the United States provides the security
essential for international commerce by, for instance, policing
Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes. Second, the United States
safeguards the extraction and export of Middle Eastern oil, the
lifeblood of the global economy. Third, in the monetary realm,
the United States has made the dollar the worlds reserve
currency and supplied loans to governments in the throes of
currency crises. Fourth, the United States has pushed for the
expansion of international trade by midwifing the World Trade
Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other
instruments of liberalization. And fifth, by providing a ready market for
goods exported by such countries as China and Japan, the United States
became the indispensable supplier of demand to the world. Naturally,
the United States gets scant thanks for all these services provided gratis.
But Mandelbaum points out that, for all their griping, other countries
have not pooled their resources to confront the enormous
power of the United States because, unlike the supremely
powerful countries of the past, the United States [does] not
threaten them. Instead, the United States actually helps other
A2 Root Cause
Their root cause claims are false-there is no single cause
of events, rather many different causes
Wallerstein 97
(Immanuel, American sociologist, historical social scientist, and worldsystems analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated,
1997, "Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science," New
Left Review 226: 93-108,
http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed: 7/6/13)
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore
so to speak on the reality of the phenomenon, we have actually
explained very little. For we must then explain why it is that Europeans,
and not others, launched the specified phenomenon, and why they did so at a
certain moment of history. In seeking such explanations, the instinct of
most scholars has been to push us back in history to presumed
antecedents. If Europeans in the eighteenth or sixteenth century did x, it is
said to be probably because their ancestors (or attributed ancestors,
for the ancestry may be less biological than cultural, or assertedly
cultural) did, or were, y in the eleventh century, or in the fifth
century B.C. or even further back. We can all think of the multiple
explanations that, once having established or at least asserted some
phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,
proceed to push us back to various earlier points in European
ancestry for the truly determinant variable. There is a premise here that
is not really hidden, but was for a long time undebated. The premise is that
whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held responsible in the sixteenth
to nineteenth centuries, this novelty is a good thing, one of which Europe
should be proud, one of which the rest of the world should be envious, or at
least appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and
numerous book titles bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.There seems
to me little question that the actual historiography of world social
science has expressed such a perception of reality to a very large
degree. This perception of course can be challenged on various grounds, and
this has been increasingly the case in recent decades. One can challenge the
accuracy of the picture of what happened, within Europe and in the world as
a whole in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. One can certainly challenge
the plausibility of the presumed cultural antecedents of what happened in
this period. One can implant the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries in a longer duration, from several centuries longer to tens of
thousands of years. If one does that, one is usually arguing that the European
"achievements" of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries thereby seem
less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or less like achievements that
can be credited primarily to Europe. Finally one can accept that the novelties
were real, but argue that they were less a positive than a negative
accomplishment.
has been cast on the very ethical foundation of solidarity: a belief in universal
human rights and the possibility of a solidarity based on such rights. Critical
engagement with the region is now often caught between a denunciation of
the West's failure actively to pursue the democratic and human rights
principles it proclaims and a rejection of the validity of these principles as
well as the possibility of any external encouragement of them. This brings
the argument back to the critique of Western policy, and of the relation of
that critique to the policy process itself. On human rights and
democratization, official Washington and its European friends continue to
speak in euphemism and evasion. But the issue here is not to see all US
involvement as inherently negative, let alone to denounce all international
standards of rights as imperialist or ethnocentric, but rather, to hold the US
and its European allies accountable to the universal principles they proclaim
elsewhere. An anti-imperialism of disengagement serves only to
reinforce the hold of authoritarian regimes and oppressive social
practices within the Middle East.
Alt fails
Studying imperialism fails to produce effective epistemic
change. Scholars contest every claim about it.
Howe 08
Stephen, Professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, Imperial and Colonial
History, http://www.history.ac.uk/
makinghistory/resources/articles/imperial_post_colonial_history.html
The very core terminology of the subject(s) is deeply contested.
Keith Hancock, seen by many as the greatest of all historians of the
British empire, famously proclaimed that imperialism is no word for
scholars.(2) A distinguished historian of early modern Ireland, Steven Ellis,
suggests that whether the British-Irish relationship was a colonial one is
merely a matter of opinion, since colonialism as a concept was developed by
its modern opponents and constitutes a value-judgement which cannot be
challenged on its own grounds.(3)
If I agreed fully, I wouldnt have the chutzpah to engage in this field at all. But
a kind of permanent vigilance and self-questioning about the very nature,
even the validity, of the titular subject seems to me utterly necessary. What
if anything is generically colonial about all the various situations labeled
thus? What if anything do empires have in common across history? What is at
stake in arguing over whether a particular mode of rule, cultural
phenomenon, ideological formation or indeed bit of landscape is colonial or
imperial, or whether particular modes of behaviour constitute imperialism,
colonialism, anticolonialism, resistance or collaboration? Behind these
arguments lie others, which revolve around radically divergent evaluations of
the strength or weakness of imperial and colonial states, their relationships
with cultural formations and identity-claims, and most sweepingly the
historical significance or otherwise of systems of alien rule.
Much colonial and postcolonial theory has exhibited a tendency to
see colonial power as an all-embracing, transhistorical force,
controlling and transforming every aspect of colonised societies. The
writings and attitudes of those involved with empire are seen as constituting
a system, a network, a discourse in the sense made famous by Michel
Foucault. (Though the notion of colonialism as a system goes at least as far
back as Sartre, and I would argue for Georges Balandier as the crucial
precursor for much which today is mistakenly hailed as new in the field.) It
inextricably combines the production of knowledge with the exercise of
power. It deals in stereotypes and polar antitheses. It has both justificatory
and repressive functions. And, perhaps above all, it is a singular it: colonial
discourse and by extension the categories in which it deals (the coloniser, the
and so on, while almost invariably failing to specify the relationship of their
projects to colonial state power. Insofar as it is at all theoretically explicit,
other than about its relations to earlier literary theory, it takes much of its
inspiration from the later Foucault, with his rejection of attention to the state
as privileged source or instance of power.
Much poststructuralist theory, of course, goes further, spurning not only the
state but society as an object of analysis. Here colonial discourse analysis
connects with the linguistic turn in social and historical studies more
generally in its rejection of social explanation and very often of totalising
explanation tout court. Or rather, its ostensible rejection; for in fact very
sweeping kinds of general claim, often unsupported by any evidence and
indeed premised on glib denial of the necessity for any coherent criteria as to
what might constitute evidence for the propositions advanced, are
characteristic of the genre. At the extreme, as for Timothy Mitchell, it seems
that colonialism is modernity and vice versa: Colonising refers not simply to
the establishing of a European presence but also to the spread of a political
order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms
of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the
real.(5)
Another sphere of contention is that over appropriate levels and
units of analysis. The British new imperial history has included a sharp
critique of nation-centred historical models, with sometimes a suggestion that
notions of imperial cultures as global networks should be put in their place.
British history could form the centre of a worldwide web of interconnecting
stories; but in tracing those connections, the centre itself would be
decentred. Some others including some who would in this over-polarised
debate be characterised as old historians, like A. G. Hopkins also urge that
important trends in the contemporary world both give the history of empire a
renewed relevance, and enable new perspectives on it. If the great
historiographical shift of the 20th centurys second half was from imperial to
national history, there are strong grounds for this now to be reversed. Yet the
resistances against such a move will be substantial: not only among those
committed, whether on scholarly or political grounds, to narratives of a
national past in Britain, Ireland and other European states, but from their
counterparts in many former colonies too.
The key questions here often revolve around how far or in what ways if,
indeed, at all notions of themselves as being imperial enter into, or even
become in some strong sense constitutive of, collective identities among both
colonisers and colonised, their relationship to ideas about race and ethnicity
and of course, though I am shamefacedly conscious of adding this in utterly
tokenistic style, ideas about gender. If relationships to ideas of Britishness
among a wide range of people in different parts of the empire, for instance,
were complex, contested and rapidly changing (as clearly they were), and if
they often included feeling British in some sense and among other things,
then evidently it follows that the colonialness of colonial rule was also a
Whenever I read or hear the phrase colonial India, it hurts me. It hurts like an
injury that has healed and yet has retained somehow a trace of the original
pain linked to many different things memories, values, sentiments.(6)
My last theme is perhaps still more emotive and contentious. This is the role
of violence, repression and atrocity in empire, and in its representations and
memories. In Britain right now, some politicians urge that it is time to stop
apologising for the imperial past and instead celebrate its positive
achievements and the abiding virtues of Britishness: several recent
statements by Gordon Brown are striking cases in point. Countering this,
critics press for renewed attention to past British colonial atrocities, drawing
above all just now on important books about 1950s Kenya which reveal
patterns of abuse and massacre far wider than previously acknowledged.
Repeatedly and inescapably, the historical arguments are linked with images
of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Arguments over the relationship
between alien rule and violence including stark claims that colonialism is
inherently bound up with extreme, pervasive, structural and even genocidal
violence, whose most famous early proponents were the French-Antillean
thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire have today a vigorous new lease of
life. Some historians suggest that most episodes of genocide and mass
murder in world history have been associated with empire-building: and in a
particularly thought-provoking and disturbing twist, Michael Mann has
recently argued that democratic colonisers are the most likely to be
genocidal.(7)
goods are framed and displayed to entice the customer, and shopping has become an event in which individuals
valuable commodity. The refashioning and reworking of commoditieswhich are themselves carefully selected
according to one's individual tastesachieve a stylistic effect that expresses the individuality of their owner. 48
institutional forces of capitalist modernity actually operate in specific settings of cultural contact. The practices of
transnational corporations are crucial to any understanding of the concrete activities and local effects of globalization.
A state-centered approach blurs the main issue here, which is not whether nationals
or foreigners own the carriers of globalization, but whether their interests are driven by
capitalist globalization.
Both Fukuyama and Huntington produced important books as a response to the new situation.
Fukuyama, obsessed with Hegel, saw liberal democracy/capitalism as the only embodiment of the
world-spirit that now marked the end of history, a phrase that became the title of his book.3 The
long war was over and the restless world-spirit could now relax and buy a condo in Miami. Fukuyama
The
philosophy, politics, and economics of the Other each and every variety of
socialism/Marxism had disappeared under the ocean, a submerged continent
of ideas that could never rise again. The victory of capital was
irreversible. It was a universal triumph. Huntington was unconvinced, and
warned against complacency. From his Harvard base, he challenged Fukuyama with a set of
insisted that there were no longer any available alternatives to the American way of life.
theses first published in Foreign Affairs (The Clash of Civilizations? a phrase originally coined by
Bernard Lewis, another favourite of the current administration). Subsequently these papers became a
book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The question mark had now
continued importance of religion in the modern world, and it was this that propelled the book onto the
bestseller lists after 9/11. What did he mean by the word civilization? Early in the last
century, Oswald Spengler, the German grandson of a miner, had abandoned his vocation as a teacher,
turned to philosophy and to history, and produced a master-text. In The Decline of the West, Spengler
counterposed culture (a word philologically tied to nature, the countryside, and peasant life) with
civilization, which is urban and would become the site of industrial anarchy, dooming both capitalist
advent of Caesarism would drown it in blood and become the final episode in the history of
theWest.Had the Third Reich not been defeated in Europe, principally by the Red Army (the spinal cord
of the Wehrmacht was broken in Stalingrad and Kursk, and the majority of the unfortunate German
soldiers who perished are buried on the Russian steppes, not on the beaches of Normandy or in the
Ardennes), Spenglers prediction might have come close to realization. He was among the first and
fiercest critics of Eurocentrism, and his vivid worldview, postmodern in its intensity though not its
language, can be sighted in this lyrical passage: I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear
history, the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil
of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its
material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and
feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet
discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks
and stonepines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves. Each Culture has its own new possibilities of selfexpression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return.6 In contrast to this, he argued, lay the
destructive cycle of civilization:Civilizations
Framework
Our framework is socially productive forcing students to
assert policy solutions has tremendous research and
education benefits and encourages them to become
advocates for change rather than mere spectators
Joyner 99
[Christopher C., Professor of International Law in the Government
Department at Georgetown University, Spring, 5 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377,
Accessed on July 5, 2013]
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social
sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help students