Martin Shaw
Exploring imperia: Western-global power amidst the wars of quasi-imperial states
Martin Shaw, International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex
www.martinshaw.org / m.shaw@sussex.ac.ukExploring Imperium, University of Sussex, 11 December 2002
Questions of the workshop: Are we witnessing the emergence of a global political entity, or is Imperium merely a transient phenomenon? What can we learn from an examination of historical empires, especially Athens and Rome? Does Imperium resemble empires of the past, or is this a new development, one that we must conceptualize apart from those empires? Can there be such a thing as a neo-liberal empire organized around military power?
(Introduction written for the workshop; rest of paper revises a previous work.)
Introduction
This paper follows the line of argument of my recent book (Shaw 2000) to argue that that there is an emergent globally dominant political entity, which I call the Western-global state. This has been developing since the terminal crisis of the classic inter-imperial system (1939-45), and has evolved from the Western bloc-state that developed in the inter-bloc system of the Cold War (1945-89). With the collapse of the internally weaker, quasi-imperial Soviet bloc (1989-91), the Western state has increasingly extended its reach and its institutions to the globe as a whole, and has simultaneously harnessed the legitimate global institutions of the United Nations system to its dominance. Hence the Western-global state of the early twenty-first century.
It will be evident that in my understanding, the new political form of our times is not entirely the product of the post-Cold War era. Nor of course is it simply the product of the crisis that has developed since the terrorist massacre in New York and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001 (911). However, just as the Western state assumed 'global' form in the aftermath of the Cold War, so the emergent Western-global political formation has taken a radically new shape under the impact of the Bush administration's response to 911. In particular, the accentuated dominance of the USA, its drive towards worldwide coalition-making with the larger non-Western powers, and the crisis between the USA and UN have had important effects. They have both transformed the external relations of the Western state with other states, and have sharpened two of the chief internal contradictions of the new formation that I discussed in my book (Shaw 2000: 232-58). (Both the divisions between Europe and the USA and the inadequacy of the global legitimation of Western power are very sharply exposed.) The Iraq crisis threatens to bring these contradictions to a new peak, and the question of how to characterise the new, post-911 phase is an important question.
One way of characterising the new crystallisation of the Western-global state since 911 (I take the idea that states crystallise in variable ways from Mann, 1993) is as a relatively 'imperial' form. Certainly the new aggressiveness of US military power invites this characterisation, and emphasises the gap between global power networks under Bush and their form in the Clinton presidency of the first 'global' decade. It is not difficult to see this, as I argued in an early post-911 commentary, as a 'regressive crystallisation' (Shaw 2001b). However I persist in believing that the idea of 'empire' is wide open to substantial theoretical and political error (Shaw, 2002). As I argued at a previous Sussex conference prior to 911, the 'new imperialism' is 'a profoundly misleading, indeed ideological concept that obscures the realities of power and especially of empire in the twenty-first century. This notion is an obstacle to understanding the significance, extent and limits of contemporary Western power. It simultaneously serves to obscure many real causes of oppression, suffering and struggle for transformation against the quasi-imperial power of many regional states.' (Shaw, 2001a)
Empire in general is a slippery concept, as Hardt and Negri's eponymous work (2000) unintentionally proves. And yet it has a hard core, that metaphorical formulations (like Justin Rosenberg's 'empire of civil society' (1994)) may obscure. This lies clearly in a direct form of political domination. Historically imperial power was generally thin domination (Mann 1986: 16): in this sense empires reproduced on a larger scale the remoteness of all state power, as a particularly concentrated, centred form of social power, from most everyday social relations. However, the modern concept of empire clearly suggests thicker domination and entails the idea of the systematic domination of one society over others. Thus we may agree with Michael Doyle's 'behavioural definition' of empire 'as effective control, either formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society'. (Doyle 1986: 16) This is especially characteristic of modern (19th and 20th century) imperial powers, with their more developed bureaucracies and intensified communications and command systems.
So while the late-modern, Western-global system of power can be seen as empire in a looser and thinner sense - and it certainly has, in Mann's terms, an 'imperial' crystallisation alongside others - problems arise if we use 'empire' (however Latinised) to describe the Western system of power as a whole. I explore these difficulties in some detail in what follows, but I will summarise them up front. They are of two main kinds. One is to do with the changing character of Western power itself. In the heartlands of Western capitalism, state power has undergone a triple transformation since 1945:
The other kind of difficulty is that Western power has not developed in isolation. My paper substitutes 'imperia' for 'imperium', first of all for the simple reason that the West is not the only or the most 'imperial' major centre of state power. On the contrary, many - perhaps most, and certainly most major - states can be described as 'quasi-imperial', and most of them are much more manifestly imperial than the West. Moreover, Western power has developed in relation not just to subordinate peoples or political entities, but to rival centres of state power. The recent development of Western power has been overwhelmingly reactive - the latest 'war against terrorism' stimulated by 911, belated Western intervention in the Balkans in response to the serial provocations of Milosevic, the original Gulf War a response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. It does not make sense to try to understand Western power sui generis, but only through the ongoing conflicts that surround it. It is the argument of this paper that these can only be grasped as the direct contradictions of the many quasi-imperial centres of state power in the non-Western world, as well as the indirect contradictions of Western-global power structures. Both contradictions have been accentuated by the collapse of the Cold War and the rising tide of democratic (and with it, secessionist) challenges to established power.
The key to understanding the post-911 conjuncture is the changed relations between Western-global power and the main non-Western, quasi-imperial centres. George W Bush has sought, much more ambitiously than his father or Clinton, to galvanise Russia, China, India and Pakistan, as well as many other states, into his global anti-terrorist crusade, , through bilateral deals involving a combination of bribes and threats, while treating the UN in a manifestly instrumental fashion that pays little heed to the ideals of the first global decade. This grand coalition represents little more than the naked alliance of great power interests, and Bush is more than willing to pay the price of legitimating each and every 'anti-terrorist' campaign that the powers are undertaking against subordinate national movements. If the united West is already a late modern form of 'ultra-imperialism' (in Kautsky's terms - see Salvatori 1979) then this coalition is the beginnings of an 'ultra-ultra imperialism' - however intrinsically unstable, because it lacks the deep alignment of interests, institutions and ideologies that constituted the original Western bloc. The tensions between incorporation and conflict, in the relations of the West and the non-Western powers, are constantly stimulated by lower-level conflicts of emergent states and paramilitary movements. This is the context of world power in the present period - it will be seen that the simpler ideas of 'empire' do little to enlighten us.
Contents
'New imperialism' and old; Imperialism and empire; Assessing Western power; State failure and new imperialisms; The abuses of anti-imperialism
Tables
And yet there are powerful forces at work, even in academia, that see the problem in these terms. The ideology of anti-imperialism clearly needs the problem of 'a new imperialism'. In order to explore the intellectual and political difficulties that this poses it is necessary to do several things. Obviously, we must explore the old imperialism, but before we can do that we must look at the roots of the concept in the idea of empire itself. Indeed, my argument is that the coherence of the concept of 'imperialism' lay partly in its connection with the idea of empire. In analysing imperialism, classic Marxist writers (see Table 1) linked the new economic relations of late nineteenth-century world capitalism to the phenomenon of political empire. Late twentieth-century anti-imperialists have struggled with the problem that modern Western power has almost entirely abandoned formal empire. Hence the idea of neo-imperialism, rooted in economic exploitation buttressed only by indirect political dominance, has already a history of half a century. The problem that these critics have faced is that their chosen concept has become more and more abstracted from the real politics of empire.
I argue that in the global era, this separation has finally become critical. This is for two related reasons. On the one hand, Western power has moved into new territory, largely uncharted -- and I argue unchartable -- with the critical tools of anti-imperialism. On the other hand, the politics of empire remain all too real, in classic forms that recall both modern imperialism and earlier empires, in many non-Western states, and they are revived in many political struggles today. Thus the concept of a 'new imperialism' fails to deal with both key post-imperial features of Western power and the quasi-imperial character of many non-Western states. The concept overstates Western power and understates the dangers posed by other, more authoritarian and imperial centres of power. Politically it identifies the West as the principal enemy of the world's people, when for many of them there are far more real and dangerous enemies closer to home. I shall return to these political issues at the end of this paper.
The classic modern writings on imperialism took for granted the concept and the reality of empire, in a formal political sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, unlike the turn of our new century, the whole world was largely divided into the huge imperial spheres dominated mainly by European states. The division of Africa and the subordination of China had completed European dominance -- offset only by the rise of Japan (and of course the United States, although that was in a real sense an extension of European power). The first European world empires, those of Spain and Portugal, had been emasculated by independence struggles in South America. No one doubted, however, the power of the strongest European empires, those of Great Britain and France -- nor that this was an 'inter-imperial world order' as Murphy (1994) has more recently called it. It was to take huge slaughter, in two inter-imperial world wars, to smash this system of power. At the turn of the twentieth century, not even the fiercest critics of imperialism could imagine either the monstrosity of the killing episodes that were to come, nor the actual ways in which they would lead to the transcendence of this world order.
Precisely because empire was so fundamental a part of the realities of power, the critics of imperialism took it largely for granted. They did not underestimate the significance of European military and political control of non-European regions: this was the starting point of all theories of imperialism. Nor did they doubt the importance of military relations between imperial centres. For V.I. Lenin (1973), the importance of imperialism was that it explained why the European powers had descended into a 'war of re-division' in Europe itself. Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky shared similar perspectives, while other Marxist accounts emphasized the state level of imperialism. Thus for Nikolai Bukharin (1972) imperialism had developed to a new stage where military rivalry between states had taken over from economic competition. For him, imperialist states were 'pirate' states, characterized by brutal, all-out struggles for domination, in which national economies were mobilized for war in a form of state capitalism.
These radical Marxists who came to dominate thinking about imperialism were in no doubt that it marked a new stage of degeneracy in European capitalism and the state-system. In particular, they all believed that democracy was doomed within Western capitalism. For Lenin, this was the decisive reason why the capitalist state had become bureaucratized, repressive and unreformable. For Luxemburg, it formed the context of the choice between 'socialism and barbarism'. For Trotsky, it came to explain the growth of fascism. Clearly these were perspectives which had much cogency in the age of violent counter-revolution and war in the heartlands of European civilization.
However since the Second World War, classic theories of imperialism have lost much of their purchase. In particular, it is clear that the central thesis of declining democracy has lost its validity. In the heartlands of Western capitalism, state power underwent a triple transformation:
None of these changes were the results of a simple, benign or automatic development. On the contrary, they were the outcomes of war and revolution that in turn came out of the contradictions of the inter-imperial system. They were produced by three interrelated processes:
Post-1945 developments were outside the framework of traditional anti-imperialist thought. They were, however, anticipated by one of the classic Marxist writers, Karl Kautsky. He argued before the First World War that there were two possible outcomes to the coming clash of imperialisms. Either there would be a continuing cycle of war, which would have the negative consequences for democracy that other Marxists foresaw. Or the war would lead to the victory of a single 'ultra-imperialism', which would suppress the violent contradictions between Western capitalist states. Ultra-imperialism would lead to a new phase of democratic, internationalist consolidation and give capitalism, for the time being, a new moral superiority. (See the excellent summary of Kautsky's writings in Salvatori, 1979.)
Kautsky's ideas appear prophetic from today's standpoint, although because he was a 'reformist' denigrated by Lenin and the dominant Communist tradition in Marxism, they have largely disappeared from the Marxist canon. Kautsky was wrong on timing and process: the First World War did not resolve the contradictions between European empires and did indeed lead to fascism and a new war, rather than the democratic ultra-imperialism that he foresaw. However, the Second World War did lead to many of the features of the ultra-imperialism that he outlined. The conclusion of the Cold War, with the victory of the Western bloc leading to 'unipolar' Western world dominance, has undoubtedly brought to the fore many of the issues he raised.
In particular, the new strength of a unified, post-imperial, democratised West has given particularly sharpness to his idea that 'ultra-imperialism' would restore the moral and political superiority of capitalism. New Left Review (1999) undoubtedly meant the title of their Kosovo issue, 'The imperialism of human rights', ironically. If, however, Western 'imperialism' was in some meaningful sense concerned with the defence of human rights (albeit among other things), then surely it could claim some kind of superiority over other kinds of rule? And what was the alternative in Kosovo? If Milosevic's Serbia offered only an 'imperialism of genocidal repression' to the people of the province, then surely Western power did represent a priori a superior form of power in this struggle? These rhetorical questions are intended to pose serious analytical points. If
In what follows, I discuss in detail both assumptions just proposed, namely the post-imperial character of Western state power and the quasi-imperial character of many non-Western states. But before I do this I want to deal with two further preliminaries: the necessary relation between statehood and empire, and the intrinsic difficulties of 'neo-colonial', 'civil society' concepts of empire.
It is a key part of my argument that a concept of imperialism that reduces the state dimension to economic exploitation is invalid. Empire is above all a concept of rule, even if the links of certain kinds of rule with given economic conditions may be important. Indeed we can say that there is an imperial dimension to all state power. The state is a uniquely centred form of power: part of the meaning of state is that power 'radiates from a centre', as Mann (1993: 55) puts it. The key question, of course, is the nature of the inequality of power between 'centre' and 'periphery' as well as within each of these. In pre-modern history, the stretching of rule over relatively long distances (and in terms of the means of communication and transportation, most distances were long by today's standards) inevitably meant the imposition of the centre's interests and values on divergent peripheral communities.
In modern times, it has become possible to construct much larger 'imagined communities' (in Benedict Anderson's famous phrase) with much faster and more two-way communication within national entities. Thus the modern rule of London over the English regions does not appear imperial; neither did London's authority in Scotland did have this cast - so long as English and Scots ruled a common world empire - although its power in Ireland did. Empire appears more as a relation between discrete national or ethnic groups, in which minority (or even majority) nationalities are subordinated by a state linked to the central nation. It has to be said, however, that from the standpoint of their minorities, virtually all modern states have had this imperial characteristic to a greater or lesser degree. Empire is, in this specific sense, a general characteristic of the modern state.
While a useful definition of empire must incorporate these general characteristics of statehood in general and modern statehood in particular, it should also go beyond them, to define the principal forms of imperial rule in a given historical period. This is what was done, more or less successfully, by some of the theories of the 'inter-imperial' order of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century West that are listed in Table 1. The dominance-in-rivalry of successive forms of European empire characterised the world system as a whole for several centuries. However, as we have seen, this period culminated in the Second World War transformation of the world system. We need a theory of 'empire' in the post-war, and now the post-Cold War, periods.
In the post-Second World War system, there were radical changes, as we have already indicated. Rivalries of national empires were replaced by those of world blocs. Traditional European colonial empires were both absorbed into a wider Western system of power, centred on the USA (whose domination was not based on formal empire), at the same time as national liberation movements and new national elites created post-colonial state forms. The post-imperial character of the Western bloc was real in important senses, and it was linked to democratization and internationalization.
This is not to say that 'post-imperialism' did not entail important continuities with empire. Politically, these were evident in the continuing links of post-colonial states with former colonial powers; in the continuing imperial pretensions of Britain and France; and in the economic domination of post-colonial states by the West, a model of 'informal empire' already pioneered by the USA in Latin America. This latter element provided, of course, the basis for critiques of 'a new imperialism', of 'dependency' and 'neo-colonialism', in the Cold War era. Ultimately it led to the argument that modern empire was not a form of rule as such but an 'empire of civil society' in Justin Rosenberg's apt but ultimately misleading metaphor (1994).
However, despite the partial validity of these accounts, reinforced by the military domination of the USA in some Third World countries during the Cold War, there were serious limitations to them. On the one hand, they suggested that nothing 'really' had changed in the nature of the Western state. On the other hand, they underestimated the changes in the non-Western world. There were three principal limitations:
Let us take the last point first. After 1945, formal Western empires were being reformed/liberated out of existence and the Western bloc was undergoing real internationalization/democratization. The Soviet bloc, however, was consolidated after 1945 as a quasi-imperial formation, with crude political and military domination of the peripheral or 'satellite' states by the centre. This characteristic of the Soviet bloc produced sharp internal contradictions, which made it the prime region of democratic national revolutions between the 1950s and the 1980s, and led to its unravelling through popular action in 1989-91. Ultimately the quasi-imperial character of the Soviet bloc was a major contributory factor to its failure in the Cold War, in contrast to the success of the Western bloc. The superiority of the Western state form, which despite inequalities of power was based on genuine broad support in both national elites and society, was clearly demonstrated.
One question that arises today is whether the major successor-state to the Soviet bloc, the Russian Federation, has escaped the quasi-imperial mode of rule in which its predecessor was mired. It is difficult for anyone who examines post-Soviet Russia to argue that this 'nation-state' is not, in important respects, a truncated version of the historic Soviet and indeed Russian empires. As Chechnya shows, Russian rule over peripheral regions remains highly contested and repressive.
However the same questions arise with the other major non-Western centres of 'national' state power that have been consolidated since 1945, not only China and other remaining Communist states, but also major non-Communist, often pro-Western 'nation-states' ranging from India and Pakistan to Indonesia and Turkey. Despite significant differences in their political regimes, and despite their different relations to the Cold War and the post-Cold War West, it is striking that in all cases there are highly unequal relations between centres and peripheries, mired in authoritarianism of different kinds. It is plausible to argue that contemporary non-Western state forms suffer from similar disadvantages, as forms of state power, compared to the West, from which the Soviet Union suffered.
I have tried to summarise these differences in Table 2. What is particularly important to note is that the tendency in Western state entities is for quasi-imperial contradictions to be increasingly controlled in ways that prevent extensive violence. National/regional conflicts have been largely contained, with only limited violence, e.g. in Canada (Quebec), Belgium (Flanders/Wallonia), UK (N. Ireland, Scotland, Wales), Spain (Basque country, Catalonia), Italy, etc. If anything, the tendencies are for state and paramilitary leaders to
seek political solutions, even if these are not always successful and criminalisation tends to reinforce low-level paramilitarism.In contrast, in what I am calling quasi-imperial nation-states, conflicts between state power and secessionist/autonomist movements in the peripheries are much more likely to become violent. There are some cases, in relatively prosperous and relatively pro-Western states, where there have been serious and partially attempts to manage these contradictions in political ways: e.g. the peaceful splitting of Czechoslovakia, and the avoidance of all-out war in South Africa between the ANC, the apartheid regime and Inkatha. It is possible now that the peace process between the new Fox administration and the Zapatistas will avoid continuing violence in Mexico; even that the long-standing war between Turkey and the PKK has come to a conclusion and will lead to genuine reform. However it is clear that the problem of empire is deep-rooted in many quasi-imperial nation-states, and not only the largest, as Table 3 shows:
Furthermore, it can be argued that because of deep-rooted, imperial and authoritarian modes of power (both Communist and anti-Communist) democratic change in quasi-imperial nation-states throws up contradictions that are often managed by state violence. In these states, rulers do not see democracy as involving real recognition of minority rights, still less the possibility of secession. Likewise, traditions of political struggle are often not democratic, but highly militarised, and oppositional movements often (but not always) look to violent means of change.
From these assumptions, we can argue that new phases of conflict linked to democratisation may actually intensify the quasi-imperial character of rule. A prime case of this tendency is Yugoslavia, where the Communist Federation was a multinational state with intricate balancing of nationalities. The challenge of democratisation led Milosevic to reconstruct Communist rule by accentuating the 'central' Serb nationality and oppressing subordinate nationalities such as the Kosovar Albanians. The new 'apartheid' of 1990s Kosovo was the product of a more extreme imperial form of Serbian rule than previously existed. Similar tendencies may be identified in other cases, although as Table 3 emphasises, there are contradictory outcomes, as the forms of rule are the subject of acute political as well as military struggles.
Thus this paper has offered two crucial points for the theme of this conference:
However there is also a third issue:
A striking feature of wars in the last quarter-century is that where they have had at least partially an interstate character, they are fought between quasi-imperial nation-states. In the cases where they are the results of relatively clear-cut aggression, this has been committed by one particular quasi-imperial centre. Thus China invaded Vietnam in 1979, Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, and the Serbian-Yugoslav state committed aggression against Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia in 1991-92. It is with good reason that many came to regard Iraq and Serbia as particularly dangerous regimes.
Although clearly these medium-sized states have lacked the world stages of the classic European empires, they have reproduced on regional levels the phenomena of aggressive militarism that emerged among the latter in the first half of the twentieth century. Halliday (1978) noted this type of development in his analysis of the Shah's Iran: he coined the term 'sub-imperialism' to designate an ambitious regional hegemon. Although the Shah's regime was a Western ally, it clearly had imperial ambitions of its own in the Middle East, and was widely feared in the region. (It was not only because of the fear of Islamic revolution, but also because of populous Iran's potential for regional dominance, that many conservative Middle Eastern states backed Iraq's war with Iran.)
The phenomenon of aggressive militarism among quasi-imperial nation-states had, like classical imperialism, its economic basis. In the case of Iran and Iraq, this was clearly the financial surplus handed to oil states by the huge price hikes of the early 1970s. In the case
of China today, a more broad-based and sustained economic expansion is clearly fuelling a drive towards expanded military power. It is wrong to conclude from the latter, as a conservative theorist like Gray (1998) does, that a new cold, or even hot, war between China and the US/West is inevitable. Clearly the modernisation of China will involve an involvement in Western-dominated global institutions, and we cannot rule out the kind of implosion of quasi-imperial authoritarian power that has happened, in different ways, in the Shah's Iran, the Soviet Union and currently in Indonesia.This analysis raises, it seems to me, critical questions for the perspective of this symposium. However a key question not so far addressed directly is the role of larger structures of Western dominance in reproducing these forms of rule and/or controlling the contradictions which erupt. Is Western power greater or lesser than in the past, how new are the forms that it takes, and do these amount to imperialism?
In order to answer these questions, we need once again a sense of historical perspective. In the classic inter-imperial period, most local conflicts were directly conflicts of Western and local actors. During the early Cold War, many important wars such as those in Vietnam and Algeria were still wars of decolonisation against Western states. However, in the later Cold War period, by which time most colonies had achieved independence, Table 4 suggests that:
The central questions that arise in the discussion of the 'new imperialism' thesis are whether this pattern - which itself is problematic for a Western-centred view - has been modified in the post-Cold War period. The issues would appear to be as follows:
Table 6 is an attempt to itemise the post-Cold War pattern. It confirms that, even more than during the late Cold War, the causes of many conflicts lie in the internal crises of major and minor non-Western states, often in repressive responses to secessionist movements that have taken advantage of democratisation. Many wars are at least in part about a new kind of national liberation struggles, except that the enemy is the 'new', i.e. post-colonial or even 'revolutionary', quasi-imperial state.
Western power has contributed to the causes of conflicts indirectly. This is particularly true where, as in Iraq, Indonesia and Rwanda, Western states had helped build up a local dictator during the Cold War period, but then partially withdrew support in response to changes in local or regional struggles. It is also partially the case in Yugoslavia, where the pressures of financial restructuring put additional pressure on a fragile state structure (although to see this as the prime cause of the Yugoslav crisis is perverse). The evidence tends to suggest, however, that the West was less directly involved both in the causation and the prosecution of local wars than during the Cold War period.
Similarly, there has clearly been a partial transformation in the character of Western intervention. As Wheeler (2000) carefully charts, Western states and international organizations have taken on board a 'humanitarian' rationale for assessing conflicts in the non-Western world. Thus more of the interventions undertaken in the 1990s have had a partially humanitarian character, although of course no intervention is ever undertaken without assessment of the West's own interests. There are only two cases in which the West has had an important direct military role, in Iraq and Kosovo. In both cases, the causes of the wars lay in crises of local state power, the wars had been initiated by Iraq and Serbia respectively, and the West intervened (much less determinedly in Kosovo than in Iraq) in response to military action by the local powers.
State failure and new imperialisms
The question of state failure is complex. As Table 2 suggested, in the most profound sense of an inability to deliver to citizens anything like conditions of safety, prosperity and freedom, state failure is a general problem of the semi-authoritarian, quasi-imperial state power that prevails across much of the non-Western world. In the sense of degeneration into armed conflict, state failure has been an extremely widespread feature of non-Western states. The sources of state failure are hardly to be found in Western dominance in any simple form. Major examples, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are actually outcomes of twentieth-century revolutionary states; other contemporary 'failing' states include many that were sustained during the Cold War by the Soviet as well as the Western bloc.
States have failed in the fundamental sense that they have difficulty in reproducing their rule. The prime reason for this is that quasi-imperial and authoritarian power structures fail to satisfy the needs of their populations - only secondarily because they are becoming unacceptable to the West. It has been popular democratic movements, from east-central Europe to Latin America to Asia and Africa, that have launched the most decisive challenges to authoritarian regimes of all stripes. All the evidence is that Western policies have followed locally driven transformations rather than precipitated them. US democracy-promotion has responded to democratic movements in key pro-American authoritarian states, from the Philippines in the 1980s to South Korea and Indonesia in the 1990s. The US has abandoned its clients, from Marcos to Suharto, only after it became clear that they had lost their local bases of power support. The West's tentative moves to promote democratic change in the Soviet bloc itself, through the Helsinki process, were overshadowed by Gorbachev's own reform movement. This was overtaken in turn by popular movements in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania that shifted world politics beyond the reformed Soviet-Western relationship sought by Western leaders.
Furthermore, Western leaders have consistently sought to shore up failed and failing (semi-) authoritarian state structures, rather than supporting their break-ups. The West has supported central Russian power throughout all the vicissitudes of the Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin regimes. The West has maintained a 'constructive' relationship with Chinese Communism through Tiananmen Square and all subsequent phases of repression. The eastern advances of NATO and the European Union have responded largely to the demands of local elites and populations - as well as to the fear of further state breakdown in regions close to Western Europe.
Even after the West had defeated the Saddam regime in the Gulf War, and even as the latter waged genocidal war on Shi'ites and Kurds, it was reluctant to countenance the break-up of the Iraqi state. Likewise, the West's early response to the Yugoslav crisis was to try to shore up a federal state that was ceasing to exist, condoning the early atrocities of the Yugoslav National Army; after several years of war, it still backed Milosevic's Serbia as a force for stability. Only long after it became clear that the latter was leading to new wars, in Kosovo and (threatened) in Montenegro, did Western leaders move reluctantly to confront Serbia. Thus it was not only in East Timor, where the historically pro-Western Indonesian regime was the oppressor, that the West supported the existing centre and was late in coming to the rescue of the victims of genocide.
Generally, therefore, Western power generally supports the maintenance of state structures even where these are dominated by regimes that are anti-Western as well as repressive. More extreme cases of 'state collapse' have tended to occur in countries like Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone that have been of minimal or declining strategic and economic significance. In these cases, even more than in Iraq or Yugoslavia, Western elites have generally been extremely reluctant to intervene. The more credible charge against the West is not that it intervenes widely in support of its own interests, but that:
In what sense, then, can contemporary Western power be said to represent an advance on historic European empires and Cold War American power? The above is hardly a positive appraisal. Indeed, the main positive advantages of Western power lie in its internal characteristics (internationalisation and democratisation) rather than in the development of a positive post-imperial relationship with the non-Western world. The principal challenges to empire, authoritarianism and repression come today from civil society and social movements, rather than from the Western state.
There have however important changes in the worldwide role of the Western state with the end of Cold War. Anti-Communism no longer supplies an automatic rationale for sustaining authoritarian and military regimes. The West can now afford to recognise the chronic instability of such regimes and see more open, formally democratic forms of rule as more coherent with its interests (in the terms of Robinson, 1996, there has been a shift to 'promoting polyarchy'). In this context, the West is bound to a certain extent by its own ideology to support modest developments of global institutions. Even conservative Western governments can be caught between the demands of oppressed peoples for justice and the growth of powerful NGO, media and public-opinion pressures for intervention on behalf of the victims of quasi-imperial power. Hence the hesistant, inconsistent and partial character of moves towards 'humanitarian' intervention in the wars of the 1990s.
These demands are deepening tensions within the Western state. European, and especially social-democratic, Western leaders are more committed to internationalisation and human rights, less bound to the cruder forms of realpolitik that still have powerful resonances in the US. American leaders, on the other hand, remain much more within a narrowly national concept of interests, and the election of Bush has reinforced these tendencies.
Given the relative strength of the West, militarily, economically and culturally as well as in the development of state institutions, there are undoubtedly powerful echoes of historic empire and Cold War dominance in current 'global' restructuring. But there is much to suggest that far from being uniquely powerful, the West is actually less able to determine events in the non-Western world than in these earlier periods. Western power penetrates chiefly in indirect ways into major non-Western centres like China and Russia. Western power is hardly able to contain relatively modest enemies like Saddam's Iraq and Milosevic's Serbia. The most serious intervention of the last decade, in Kosovo, was manifestly half-baked and its full impact was only achieved when the opposition in Serbia finished the job of overthrowing a weakened Milosevic. Western power has frequently been humiliated by minor local players - Serbian generals at Srebrenica, génocidaires in Rwanda, and militia in Mogadishu and Dili - at serious cost to its own credibility as well as the lives of local people.
This is not a 'new imperialism' so much as a West which finds itself with great advantages of economic power, political organization and military capability, but often does not know how to deploy them effectively faced with even moderately serious local challenges in the non-Western world.
The abuses of anti-imperialism
It is worth asking how the politics of anti-imperialism distorts Western leftists' responses to global struggles for justice. John Pilger, for example, consistently seeks to minimise the crimes of Milosevic in Kosovo, and to deny their genocidal character - purely because these crimes formed part of the rationale for Western intervention against Serbia. He never attempted to minimise the crimes of the pro-Western Suharto regime in the same way. [In a more academic way, Kees van der Pijl also minimises the responsibility of the Serbian dictator and his regime - see Shaw 2002b.] The crimes of quasi-imperial regimes are similar in cases like Yugoslavia and Indonesia, but the West's attitudes towards them are undeniably uneven and inconsistent. To take as the criterion of one's politics opposition to Western policy, rather than the demands for justice of the victims of oppression as such, distorts our responses to the victims and our commitment to justice. We need to support the victims regardless of whether Western governments take up their cause or not; we need to judge Western power not according to a general assumption of 'new imperialism' but according to its actual role in relation to the victims.
The task for civil society in the West is not, therefore to oppose Western state policies as a matter of course, à la Cold War, but to mobilise solidarity with democratic oppositions and repressed peoples, against authoritarian, quasi-imperial states. It is to demand more effective global political, legal and military institutions that genuinely and consistently defend the interests of the most threatened groups. It is to grasp the contradictions among and within Western elites, conditionally allying themselves with internationalising elements in global institutions and Western governments, against nationalist and reactionary elements. The arrival in power of George Bush II makes this discrimination all the more urgent.
In the long run, we need to develop a larger politics of global social democracy and an ethic of global responsibility that address the profound economic, political and cultural inequalities between Western and non-Western worlds. We will not move far in these directions, however, unless we grasp the life-and-death struggles between many oppressed peoples and the new local imperialisms, rather than subsuming all regional contradictions into the false synthesis of a new Western imperialism.
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