Empire or Republic?
Empire or Republic?
Imperialist policies undermine the constitutional principles of the Republic
The concentration of industrial enterprises during the second half of the nineteenth century greatly increased the productive capacity of the U.S. national economy, which had the unintended consequence of the problem of overproduction, that is, the production of goods in excess of the capacity of the national market to buy. The problem became evident during the Great Depression of 1892-1893, and it led the financial/industrial elite to formulate a new expansionist foreign policy as a solution. The basic goal of the new policy, which its promoters called “imperialism,” was to find new markets outside the United States for U.S. manufacturing and agricultural products.
Imperialist policies first appeared in public discourse in the Republican Party platform of 1896, which challenged the prevailing isolationism of the political culture; the platform advocated an expansion of military expenditures and the establishment of military bases abroad. The Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba were viewed as strategic locations for U.S. military bases, because control of the Caribbean and the Far East were considered central to imperialist goals.
The first practical implementation of the new expansionist foreign policy was the U.S. intervention in 1898 in the Cuban war of independence, which resulted in the U.S. acquisition of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Seeking to obscure the colonial character of these acquisitions of lands beyond the continental territory of the United States, the U.S. government claimed to be pursuing a civilizing mission, consistent with the values of democracy, liberty, and justice. The discourse of the representatives of the elite was effective in convincing the people that the new imperialist policies were defending freedom and were the fulfillment of a “new manifest destiny,” standing in contrast to the decadent European colonial empires.
Subsequent U.S. interventions during the first three decades of the twentieth century ensured that the governments of the region would adopt economic policies enabling access to their markets, natural resources, and labor. Especially notorious for their blatant undemocratic character were U.S. military interventions in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to a “Good Neighbor” policy with respect to Latin America and the Caribbean. Adapting to anti-imperialist popular movements in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as to isolationist tendencies in domestic politics, Roosevelt pursued U.S. imperialist goals through means other than direct military intervention. The strategy was to strengthen the military forces of Latin American governments, so that they could play a more active role in maintaining social control. Although it was a softer form of U.S. domination, the new approach of FDR represented the pursuit of an imperialist agenda through alternative means. The Good Neighbor policy did not abandon imperialist goals; rather, it adapted imperialist policies to new economic, ideological, and political conditions.
World War II had significant effects on world dynamics. In the first place, it had stimulated the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa, which had initially emerged as a force in the 1920s, undermining the sustainability of the European colonial empires. Immediately following the war, there began an increasingly evident transition to a new world order that formally respected the sovereign equality of all nations.
But a true post-colonial world order did not emerge. Instead, what came into being was a neocolonial world order, in which the former colonial powers held the former colonies in an economic stranglehold, in spite of their formal political independence. Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, heads of state in Ghana and Tanzania, respectively, wrote widely read books, informing Western progressives that true independence had not yet been attained, due to the maneuverings of the former colonial powers and the United States.
The second important effect of the Second World War was its significant impact on the economic, political, and ideological development of the United States. The global military conflict had made necessary a rapid conversion of U.S. national production to arms and military equipment and supplies, for its own war needs and those of other bellicose nations, thus breaking the U.S. ideological tendency toward isolationism. And in elevating the productive capacity of the United States and destroying or weakening the productive capacity of rivals, the Second World War resulted in the elevation of the United States to a position of dominance on the world stage. The USA emerged from the war as the unrivaled economic, financial, and military power, not only in the region of the Americas, but in the entire world, enjoying immense prestige for its leadership role in the victory of representative democracies over fascism.
A potential U.S. reconversion to a post-war peacetime economy confronted problems, including high levels of unemployment, difficulties in the reinsertion of armed forces personnel in the economy, and the emergence of the war industries to a dominant position in the U.S. economy. However, in spite of the difficulties, a turn toward a permanent peace economy was objectively possible for the United States in the late 1940s, as a dimension of the development of a post-colonial, as distinct from a neocolonial, world order.
The United States was strategically positioned in the late 1940s to lead the world in the development of a true post-colonial world-system. The USA held the economic advantage over rival core powers of the colonial world-system, and it could have exploited its productive and commercial strength to maintain its advanced economic and technological development, through mutually beneficial cooperative relations with the developing nations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The developing nations would have welcomed initiatives toward cooperative relations. In such a geopolitical context, the developing nations would have consistently pushed for structural reforms and for mutually beneficial trade, thus advancing their road to development, and creating, piece by piece, an alternative world order.
In constructing a more just and democratic world-system through reform of structures imposed by European colonial domination of the world, the governments of the world would have been reaffirming the historic tendency for human development and civilizational advances to be built from domination, but now on a global scale. This was indeed the proposal of the leaders of the emerging Third World project of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who envisioned the common economic development of all as the only possible just resolution of their colonial situation and all the social problems emerging from it.
In such a proposed construction of a post-colonial world-system, U.S. imperialism, previously developed in political practice in Latin America, would have been outdated and unnecessary. The new world order would not have required that the political processes of peripheral nations be controlled by the core, undermining the sovereignty of the peripheral nations.
However, beginning in the late 1940s, the United States did not take the possible anti-imperialist road toward a more democratic world order. It cast aside real objective possibilities for permanent structures that would sustain world peace. The political leadership of the time put forth the supposed need for the expansion of the war industry, rather than reconversion of industry for a peace economy. They directed the nation toward the expansion of the war industries and the construction of a permanent war economy.
The post-World War II military expansionism was justified before the people by the Cold War ideology, which maintained that the strengthening of U.S. military forces was necessary as a counterweight to the expansionist tendencies of the Soviet Union. This was an ideological distortion, because in reality, Soviet foreign policy was not expansionist, as has been documented by many scholars. The Soviet Union sought peaceful co-existence with the United States, in which the Soviet area of influence close to its borders in Eastern Europe and Asia would form a cordon of security around its territory. The Soviet approach implicitly left vast areas of Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia to U.S. neocolonial or postcolonial exploitation, in competition with the European ex-colonial powers, which had to accept as unavoidable the disintegration of their colonial empires, before the force of the anti-colonial revolution of the colonized. The extraordinary success of the Cold War ideology, in spite of its mischaracterization of Soviet foreign policy, was due to its legitimation of an arms race, which served the interests of the arms industries that had emerged to become dominant in the economy during the Second World War, and whose interests were now shaping the U.S. political decision-making process.
Thus, in the post-war era, defense expenditures became the principal driving force of the economy and of scientific development, in a militarist application of Keynesian theory. And the militarization of the U.S. economy shaped the cultural and ideological formation of the people. Communism was presented as a ghostlike force that intended the domination of the world, thus fabricating a climate of fear and insecurity in order to justify military expenditures. “We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method” was the characterization of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his famous “Military-Industrial Complex Speech” of 1961.
The Cold War ideology altered perceptions of the Third World, falsely presenting as communist those governments and revolutions that sought the sovereignty of their nations, downplaying their essentially nationalist and anti-imperialist character. The United States became the “global policeman,” claiming to act against “communism” and in defense of “democracy,” when in reality it was defending the short-term interests of America’s great corporations. The distortion was widely accepted by the people, and it distorted the views of the policymakers themselves, as Robert McNamara makes evident in his memoir on the war in Vietnam, written four decades after the events.
With the collapse of real socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ideological justifications for a permanent war economy had to be reconstructed. At first, the ideological reconstruction took the form of a global war against terrorism. In the twenty-first century, with the ascent of China and the revitalization of Russia, and with many nations of the Global South participating in the cooperative construction of an alternative world order, a New Cold War has been waged, using methods that U.S. State Department manuals call “unconventional war,” directed against states throughout the world that are falsely portrayed as “authoritarian.”
Where are the structures of representative democracy?
In the period since the end of the Second World War, why did the people not use the structures of representative democracy to promote the construction world peace on a foundation of mutually beneficial trade among nations, serving as the principal (but not the only) means of national security? On this question, there is much evidence to suggest that the objective interest of the American people in world peace and mutual politically-stable security among nations was checked at the outset by the fourth power, the corporate power, which had de facto control of the executive branch of the federal government as well as de facto control of the public discourse, through its financing of elite universities, the major media, and foreign policy think tanks, as was argued by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite and empirically documented by G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America?
From the vantage point of the dominant U.S. corporate interests, a permanent war economy was rational. It guaranteed a never-ending supply of buyers for products that it was advanced in producing, reinforcing a national economic dependency on major industries that it controlled.
The leading individuals of the corporate power in the post-World War II era were of the interlocking directorates of the largest corporations, with a strong majority having social origins in the upper class, and with one-third of them having social origins in the upper-middle class, nurtured by education at the elite universities of the nation and by membership in the appropriate social clubs.
The corporate power has a strong and narrow class consciousness. Its members have a profound disdain for the people, and its view of enlightenment involves the broad view of the corporate class as a whole, and not the interests of the nation, the people, or humanity. It is incapable of responsible stewardship of the American national economy, to the benefit of middle America; and even less of stewardship of the world-economy, to the benefit of the developing nations.
The corporate power sees only its short-term interests. It has demonstrated itself to be incapable of true enlightened leadership, which James Madison in The Federalist Papers envisioned would emerge from the carefully designed architecture of the American Republic. The corporate power is fundamentally different in its sources and its motivations from the power of the people, which is mediated through the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the federal government, and is naturally oriented to personal freedom and opportunity and to the good of the nation.
The corporate power has financed the development of the elite universities of the nation. Under corporate direction, the universities have fragmented fields of study into separated disciplines, imposing obstacles to the investigation of such questions as the historical and social causes of global inequality or the global and historical factors that enabled the spectacular U.S. economic ascent. In the second half of the twentieth century, most young professors who persisted in professing on such questions were soon sent packing, in accordance with established bureaucratic procedures, which are designed to discredit the quality of their scholarship. Far from being central to public discourse, scholars were reduced to irrelevant and powerless survivors of an elite-financed bureaucratic process.
The major media of communication are owned by the corporate power. Young journalists found that their reports on what they were observing, anywhere in the world, were edited, or completely rejected, to the extent that they were perceived by the editorial staff as not acceptable for the owners. Journalists established themselves by mastering the art of self-selection and self-editing, thus surrendering personal autonomy and integrity in their development. Others preserved their integrity by drifting to alternative media, but at the cost of the marginality of their work. Such tendencies are reinforced by think tanks, financed by the wealthy, which function to select and frame the issues for public debate.
Meanwhile, the careers of politicians, especially those in the highest offices of the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, became increasingly dependent on the financial and political support of the corporate power. There has always been a certain degree of fluidity with respect to the occupant of the White House, in part because of the constitutional manner in which the president is selected, and in part because the president is the face before the people of both the corporate and the executive powers. But even presidents will not be able to navigate the waters ruled by the ships of the corporate power, except in a case of a president with exceptional personal capacities, appealing directly to the people. It could perhaps be said that President John F. Kennedy’s peace initiatives and peace speeches of 1963 were an indication of the possibilities in this regard.
If the principal institutions of the nation had not been under the influence of the fourth power, perhaps leaders emerging from the breast of the people would have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, pointing out the advantages to the nation, the people, and the world of a world-system in which the national security of each nation is built on the security of all nations, constructed on the solid foundation of mutually beneficial trade. Their explanations certainly could have included the fact that the United States was strategically positioned from the late 1940s to the early 1960s to lead the world toward the construction of a post-colonial and post-imperialist world order, structured to establish world peace as the norm.
A world structured for peace would not imply that states would no longer need military forces, which would be an idealist view. To the extent that is possible, each state would develop a strong military, functioning as a back-up security force designed for self-defense, used in situations in which the structures designed for permanent peace break down. Strong military forces have benefits other than national security, in that they provide employment opportunities, and they can be used in non-military national emergencies and in programs of solidarity with other nations. But in spite of the presence of strong militaries as a reserve structure of national security, the new world order would be constructed on a foundation of national security based primarily in the common interest of all in sustained mutually beneficial trade.
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The persistent proposal of the Third World project
Because the corporate power finances higher education and owns the media, and because imperialist war includes an ideological dimension, the people of the United States have very limited understanding of world dynamics, particularly with respect to the anti-imperialist movements and revolutions of the Global South and East during the last 100 years. In my Substack column, “Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times,” I seek to educate myself and my readers in this regard. Accordingly, I have written numerous commentaries on the persistent claim and demand for an alternative world order structured for peace, which has been put forth by the peoples and states of the Global South and East since 1955. In the following, I provide a succinct summary of the points noted in said commentaries.
The Third World project of national and social liberation was launched at the Bandung Conference of April 18-24, 1955, which was held in Bandung, Indonesia, and attended by delegations of twenty-nine governments from Asia and Africa. Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou En-lai played leading roles in putting forth the strategy of Third World unity in opposition to European colonialism and Western imperialism and in formulating the principle of economic cooperation without exploitation among nations.
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formally established as an organization of governments during its First Summit, held September 1-6, 1961, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Most notably present were Algeria, Cambodia, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, and Yugoslavia; as well as Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Congo-Leopoldville (DRC), Cyprus, Ethiopia, Guinea, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen.
From the outset, the Movement stressed the need for the newly independent nations to be truly sovereign in order that they would be able to mobilize human and natural resources to attain economic development, which they understood as the most important human right. They criticized the structures of the world-economy and the policies of the Western imperialist powers for creating obstacles to their economic development, as the powers sought to control the world-economy in accordance with their particular interests. NAM also criticized the United Nations for violating the principles of the UN Charter in establishing undemocratic structures that restricted the influence of the newly independent nations on world affairs.
The Group of 77 was created on June 15, 1964, by seventy-seven nations during the First UN Conference on Commerce and Development (UNCTAD), for the purpose of promoting the collective economic interests of its members. It called upon Third World nations to develop new forms of mutually beneficial trade among one another in order to ameliorate the effects of imperialist exploitation. G-77 now has 134 member-states in alliance with China.
In 1974, the Third World brought its vision to the General Assembly of the United Nations, which approved the Non-Aligned Movement’s proposal for a New International Economic Order. The non-binding declaration affirmed the principles of the right of self-determination of nations and the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources. It advocated: the creation of raw materials producers’ associations to give raw materials exporting states control over prices; a new international monetary policy that did not punish the weaker states; increased industrialization of the Third World; the transfer of technology from the advanced industrial states to the Third World; regulation and control of the activities of transnational corporations; the promotion of cooperation among the nations of the Third World; and aid for Third World development.
In 1979, ninety-three nations at the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana reaffirmed “their deep conviction that a lasting solution to the problems of countries in development can be attained only by means of a constant and fundamental restructuring of international economic relations through the establishment of a New International Economic Order.”
In the period 1983 to 1999, in the context of the imposition of neoliberal economic policies on the nations of the Third World, the leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement was taken over by accommodationists who advocated adaptation to Western neoliberal policies and ideology. However, in the wake of the strong reaction of the peoples to the negative socioeconomic consequences of neoliberal policies for the majority, the Non-Aligned Movement retook in the twenty-first century the classic principles of the Movement.
The return to the historic principles of the Non-Aligned Movement was evident in the 2006 Declaration of Havana, emitted by the Summit held during the inaugural year of the second Cuban presidency. The 118 member states reaffirmed the historic principles of the movement, including the equality and sovereignty of nations, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and “the free determination of peoples in their struggle against foreign intervention.” Subsequently, at the Seventeenth Summit of the Non-Aligned movement in Venezuela in 2016, the 120 member states called upon the peoples of the Third World to struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism and to participate in the construction of a more just world, established on a foundation of solidarity and cooperation.
At the foreign ministers meeting of the Movement in Caracas, Venezuela, held on July 21, 2019, in preparation for its 2019 Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, a 241-page document was approved. The document “reaffirmed the Movement’s irrevocable political and moral commitment, and determination to and full respect for the Bandung Principles and those adopted at the Havana Summit in the Declaration on the Purposes and Principles and the Role of the NAM in the Present International Juncture, the Bali Commemorative Declaration on the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the UN Charter.”
The document released by the Ministerial Meeting asserted that the attainment of a peaceful, prosperous, just, and equitable world order confronts obstacles, such as the lack of resources of the developing countries, unequal terms of trade, lack of cooperation by the developed countries, coercive and unilateral measures imposed by some of them, and the use of force or the threat of the use of force. It noted that “the rich and powerful countries continue to exercise an inordinate influence in determining the nature and direction of international relations, including economic and trade relations, as well as the rules governing these relations, under the pretext of ‘Democracy’, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Anti-Terrorism.’”
The document affirmed the principle that nations have the right to control their national resources. “The Ministers emphasized the need for enhanced policy space for developing countries to allow them to undertake their own development strategies and policies, in accordance with the principle of national ownership and leadership of the development process.”
The ministerial document expressed the need for a New Global Human Order. “The Ministers reaffirmed the need for a New Global Human Order aimed at reversing growing disparities between rich and poor, both among and within countries including through the promotion of poverty eradication, full and productive employment and decent work, and social integration.”
The Foreign Ministers meeting in Venezuela declared:
The Ministers noted with concern that highhandedness and arbitrariness are rampant while justice and truth are ruthlessly trampled underfoot; the core principles of sovereign equality, territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs in international relations are overtly disregarded on the international arena; the sovereignty and rights to existence and development of the NAM Member States are severely infringed upon; and political upheavals, armed conflicts, escalation of disputes and humanitarian disasters such as refugee flow occur in an unabated manner due to aggression, intervention, sanctions and pressure by the imperialist forces.
The document reaffirmed the principles expressed at the Fourteenth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana in 2006:
The Movement will continue to uphold the principles of sovereignty and sovereign equality of States, territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of any State or Nation; take effective measures for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of peace to defend, promote, and encourage the settlement of international disputes by peaceful means; . . . develop friendly relations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples in their struggle against foreign occupation; achieve international cooperation based on solidarity among peoples and governments in solving international problems of a political, economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character; and promote and encourage the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.
The document lamented the “increasing and deepening tendency of certain States to resort to unilateralism, arbitrariness and the imposition of unilateral coercive measures, to the use and threat of use of force.” It expressed its opposition to “unilateralism and unilaterally imposed measures by certain States which can lead to the erosion and violation of the UN Charter.” It declared that “every State has, and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over all its wealth, natural resources and economic activity.”
I want to remind here that we are speaking of a declaration unanimously approved by 120 foreign ministers that represent the states of the Global South, including those that in certain economic and political ways are allied with the United States.
I also should note that the nations constructing socialism in the Global South and East have evolved considerably in their approach to their national economies. As they reflected on their experiences, they appropriated more from capitalistic forms than they initially thought wise, moving beyond over-dependence on state ownership of economic enterprises and toward a model of state stewardship of mixed economies with private and public forms of property, guided by plans approved by the delegates and deputies of the people.
On the other hand, with respect to international affairs, in observing the new and aggressive forms of imperialism implemented by the USA and other Western powers, nations constructing socialism have arrived to unwavering commitment to the principle that each nation has the right to decide for itself on the characteristics of its political-economic system, without interference from foreign powers. The anti-imperialist states are moving toward unity in defense of this principle.
Space does not permit me to reproduce from other commentaries similar declarations of the BRICS group and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Such projects of integration are not projects of ascent in the established world-economy. Rather, they are projects of mutually beneficial trade that seek the construction of an alternative world order, consistent with the Spirit of Bandung.
Nor does space permit me to draw from previous commentaries to summarize the role of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, which today enjoys great prestige among the nations of the Global South and East. I will confine myself to reference to Xi Jinping’s address at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 2021, in which Xi declared that the peoples of the world, more than ever before, desire peace, development, equality, and social justice, and they are determined more than ever to attain these hopes through win-win cooperation. China has put forth various initiatives designed to stimulate in practice an alternative, multipolar world order based in win-win cooperation: the Belt and Road Initiative of 2013; the Global Development Initiative in 2021; the Global Security Initiative in 2022; and the Global Civilization Initiative in 2023.
China is seeking to play the leadership role that the USA could and should have played in the period 1946 to 1960. China is compelled to play this role in conditions of opposition by the Western powers, whereas the United States could have counted on the support of the other Western powers and the Soviet Union in the earlier period. However, in spite of the economic sanctions and ideological distortions directed against it, China persistently calls for the Western powers to rethink their foreign policies, and to join in the construction of a more peaceful world, in which the national security of all is protected through mutually beneficial commerce.
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Further considerations
Corporate power has not heard the calls for an alternative world order emerging from the Third World from 1955 to the present. The corporate power has demonstrated itself incapable of giving reasoned consideration to the call of the Third World, distorting the truth in the process. The corporate power overrides the founding constitutional principles of the American Republic in the defense of its class interests and its myopic ideological objectives. It has become the unchecked fourth power, standing above and orchestrating the three powers of representative government, designed with insight and commitment by the framers of the Constitution.
We today must reflect on how to revitalize the three powers of the federal government as the mediated voice of the people, in defense of the American Republic, so that the worldwide anti-imperialist movement can be reasonably engaged, from the vantage point of a free and united American people.
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