From colonialism to neocolonialism

Beyond the false “human rights” frame of the representative democracies

     I do not know who invented the term “neocolonialism,” but it was widely disseminated in the late 1960s through Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (published by International Publishers, New York, in 1966).  The book describes the structures through which the ex-colonial powers held the newly independent nations in an “economic stranglehold,” thus facilitating not independence but a new stage of colonialism.  Nkrumah was Prime Minister of Ghana, and his analysis was based on the experience of the newly independent state.  Along with Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nkrumah was a leading force in the African nationalism of the era.  He was a leading advocate of African unity, and he was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961, along with Tito, Nasser, and Nehru. 

     In previous posts, I drew upon the work of Immanuel Wallerstein to describe four stages in the development of the world-system.  The first was the stage of…