A subtler variant of imperialism characteristic of the late twentieth century and beyond in which the U.S. role looms large and where such U.S. foreign policy projects as the so-called “war on terror” are symptomatic. The roots of neoimperialism lie in both colonialism and the cold war. The war that was fought against fascism in Europe and elsewhere from 1939 to 1945 by Britain, the United States and other Allied countries, and in which many colonized peoples (including Afro-South Africans) participated on the side of the European colonial powers, was, despite the propaganda of the Allies, a war fought for the freedom of only the OD nations—not the colonized elsewhere. Hence, hopes of liberation from European colonialism that the colonized of the Afro-Asian ecumene had begun to entertain as a result of their support of the Allied cause, or lending credibility to documents such as the Atlantic Charter, were to quickly founder on the rocks of post-World War II reality in which a new “war” was being fomented by the United States and its allies: the cold war.[1]
Those in London, Washington, and Paris who saw the imperialism of the Nazis as an evil that had to be destroyed took a different (hypocritical) view when it came to their own imperialism vis-à-vis the peoples of the Afro-Asian ecumene; they deemed it a good thing—even for its victims! Therefore, despite the U.S. stance (at least at the level of rhetoric) during the war, of anticolonialism and support for majority rule—as evidenced in the speeches of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and others—the United States at the end of World War II would inaugurate an era in which the old European form of imperialism (colonialism) would eventually be supplanted by a new and modern form of imperialism: that of “neoimperialism” (for want of a better word) in which the United States would become a dominant partner, involving the subordination of the legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy among the colonized peoples to the requirements of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Initially, however, the commencement of the cold war, as the decade of the 1940s came to a close, would be accompanied by a renewed effort on the part of the European colonizers to cling to their colonial possessions, even as they began the long and arduous task of rebuilding their own war‑torn countries and even after having saved themselves from the same fate that they were now so keen to continue foisting on other peoples. In this ignoble task, however, they would have behind them the unexpected, tacit and sometimes overt, support of the United States. From the point of view of the United States, the struggle for freedom and democracy in the colonies, it was felt, could only lead to expansionary opportunities for its cold war opponent, the Soviet Union; therefore such struggles had to be opposed. Consequently, many colonies in Africa and Asia discovered that contrary to war‑time promises made, or expectations falsely engendered, freedom from colonization would entail their own “mini‑world wars.” Colonies ranging from Vietnam through India to Algeria all found themselves involved in various types of bitter, anticolonial struggles in which thousands among the colonized would perish.
While many of these colonies would eventually achieve political independence by the early 1960s, that is, once it had become clear to the European colonizers that the costs of maintaining direct political control had been rendered prohibitively high by the anticolonial insurrections (hence indirect control via economic domination was preferable), in one part of the world political independence and democratic majority rule would be a longtime coming: in Africa, especially Southern Africa. There, in the countries of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, Portuguese colonialism and racist minority rule would continue well into the 1970s and 1980s. Behind this awful fate that dogged the black majorities of these countries was the ubiquitous hand of U.S. administrations, sometimes hidden and sometimes overt. Thus tyrannical minority rule in Southern Africa would receive nourishment from the U.S. administrations, ironically on grounds that such rule was the guarantor of freedom! But freedom for whom? And freedom from what?
The story of U.S. relations with much of the PQD world in the post‑World War II period, right up to the beginning of the closing decade of the twentieth century, must therefore be seen as a story of the contradiction between, on one hand, the ideological dictates of historically-rooted notions (of support for freedom and democracy and opposition to imperialism) that abound in a country that itself had once fought a war of liberation, and, on the other hand, the reality of the demands of waging a global “cold” war with the former communist nations of Eastern Europe over the Western world’s need to continue to preserve at all costs the dominance of capitalism within the international economic system—but set against the ideology of whiteness.[2]
[1]. The Atlantic Charter, which was a press release issued on August 14, 1941 (following a secret meeting on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland between the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), had made reference in Article III to the right of all peoples to self‑determination of government and political freedom. (“Third, they [the United States and Britain] respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Note: the document is available on the Internet.) Even though the charter was formulated with the European peoples in mind, elites in the PQD countries, in bouts of grandiose optimism, looked upon the document as the death knell for imperialism everywhere. The United States was perceived by many Asian and African leaders as the harbinger of their freedom. This was an illusion; for, as Noer (1985: 17) says, the United States did not really include the PQD colonies in its rhetoric on self-determination, freedom, and human rights. (Of course, in a very different sense, both Britain and the United States were indirectly responsible for the present freedom of these former European colonies. One only has to surmise with horror what their fate would have been had the Germans and their fascist ally, Italy, won the Second World War.)
[2]. Among the many theoretical weaknesses of mainline international relations theory—see, for example, Chowdhry and Nair (2002); Dunn and Shaw (2001); Jones (2001); and Scott (2002)—and here the Marxists are also at fault, has been the deafening silence on the matter of “race” despite the fact that race has always been an integral element of international relations going all the way back to the Crusades, and most certainly in the post-Columbian period. Writing some three decades ago Bandhopadhyaya (1977/78) reminded us that a fuller comprehension of international relations required consideration of what he called “global racism” as a legitimate independent category of analysis. (What is more, even in the current post-9/11 era, the race problematic has not withered away but has, instead, transmuted into a race-plus-xenophobia problematic that may be termed as “Islamophobia.”