http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/27/obama-white-house-foreign-policy
Obama the imperialist
Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic
liberal interventionist mould
* Richard Seymour
* The Guardian, Tuesday 27 January 2009
• Richard Seymour is the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder
[email protected]
The first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an
anti-war ticket is also, to the relief of neocons and the liberal
belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan, his foreign
policy selections also indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and Iran.
During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile attacks in
Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children. And his
stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing
administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his
supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency
whose commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least,
questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will need
the support of those "liberal hawks" who gave Bush such vocal support.
It is tempting to dismiss the "pro-war left" as a congeries of
discredited left-wing apostates and Nato liberals. Their artless
euphemisms for bloody conquest seem especially redundant in light of
over a million Iraqi deaths. Yet their arguments, ranging from a
paternalistic defence of "humanitarian intervention" to the championing
of "western values", have their origins in a tradition of liberal
imperialism whose durability advises against hasty dismissal. In every
country whose rulers have opted for empire, there has developed among
the intellectual classes a powerful pro-imperial consensus, with
liberals and leftwingers its most vociferous defenders.
Liberal imperialists have resisted explicitly racist arguments for
domination, instead justifying empire as a humane venture delivering
progress. Even so, implicit in such a stance was the belief that other
peoples were inferior. Just as John Stuart Mill contended that despotism
was a "legitimate mode of government in dealing with the barbarians"
provided "the end be their improvement", so the Fabians contended that
self-government for "native races" was "as useless to them as a dynamo
to a Caribbean". Intellectuals of the Second International such as
Eduard Bernstein regarded the colonised as incapable of self-government.
For many liberals and socialists of this era, the only disagreement was
over whether the natives could attain the disciplined state necessary to
run their own affairs. Indigenous resistance, moreover, was interpreted
as "native fanaticism", to be overcome with European tuition.
The current liberal imperialists are not replicas of their 19th-century
antecedents. Cold war priorities, including the need to incorporate
elements of the left into an anti-communist front, transformed the
culture of empire. If the "anti-totalitarian" left supported US
expansionism, they often did so under the mantle of anti-colonialism.
Decolonisation and the civil rights struggle meant explicit racism had
to be dispensed with in arguments for military intervention.
This was a slow process. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations
were terrified of "premature independence" for colonised nations. The
state department asserted that "backward societies" required
authoritarianism to prepare them for modernity. Irving Kristol, a cold
war liberal who became the "godfather of neoconservatism", justified the
Vietnam war in part by asserting that the country was "barely capable of
decent self-government under the very best of conditions", and thus
needed its US-imposed dictatorship. Nonetheless, such arguments today
tend to be rehearsed only on the wilder shores of the neoconservative right.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, some paternalistic
mainstays of liberal imperialism have been reinvented under the impress
of "humanitarian intervention". Just as Victorian humanitarians saw the
empire as the appropriate tool for saving the oppressed, so the 1990s
saw demands for the US military to deliver Somalians, Bosnians and
Kosovans from their tormentors - notwithstanding the fact that US
intervention played a destructive role in each case.
The agency of the oppressed themselves is largely absent from this
perspective. And, as New York University's Stephen Holmes pointed out:
"By denouncing the United States primarily for standing by when atrocity
abroad occurs, these well-meaning liberals have helped re-popularise the
idea of America as a potentially benign imperial power."
The catastrophe in Iraq has produced a reaction against humanitarian
imperialism even from former interventionists like David Rieff, who has
warned against the "rebirth of imperialism with human rights as its
moral warrant". Even so, among liberal intellectuals there is a broad
coalition favouring intervention into Darfur, though humanitarian
organisations have opposed the idea. And there is little resistance to
the escalation in Afghanistan, where "native fanaticism" is once more
the enemy. Liberal imperialism is in rude health: it is its victims who
are in mortal peril.
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