Against a backdrop of recent Western interventions in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, the general question of geopolitical sovereignty and the re-assertion of what has been called âliberal imperialismâ have clearly returned to the agenda of global politics.1 In this paper, I want to consider certain elements pertaining to the general phenomenon of what I shall call Western geopolitical interventionism, with an emphasis being given to its unilateral as opposed to multilateral form. This kind of intervention will be considered in its relation to the way we think about democracy and the politics of self-determination. It is then argued that we cannot fully understand the dynamics of interventionism, in isolation from the geopolitics of imperial power which is propelled by a deeply rooted phenomenon of invasiveness.
Potentially, what we have here is a series of links between expansionism, intervention and invasiveness. Expansionism is a characteristic feature of all imperial politics but I would argue that although it is a necessary feature of imperial power, it is not a sufficient feature. What is crucial to understand are the driving forces behind the will to expand, and the associated perceptions of the societies into which the imperial power is to expand. In some ways, the term âinterventionâ does not fully capture the reality of penetration, since there is an underlying sense of coming between, which has a rather neutral sound to it. In the interventions that are mentioned in this article, the United States is not passively present; it is active, disruptive and invasive. In the history of Western imperialism, the invasive power does not act as a peaceful âcoming betweenerâ â rather it deploys all forms of power to achieve its objectives. This is why invasive interventions are a key part of the way we conceptualize imperial power â they encourage us to think more effectively about the imperial in contemporary world politics.
With these ideas in mind, the first two sections of the paper deal with the invasiveness of geopolitical interventions and the fragility of popular sovereignty in the shadow of US power. It is suggested that there are five concepts that are useful in considering the meaning of geopolitical interventions: (a) desire, (b) political will; (c) capacities; (d) justification and (e) resistance. Within these early sections of the chapter, there is also an attempt made to characterize the specificity of the United States as a post-colonial imperial power.
Moving on to the next section, I give some attention to what I refer to as the imperial nexus. Having distinguished imperialism from imperiality, the latter term being defined as the right, privilege and sentiment of being imperial, or of defending ideas of empire. I suggest that it would be beneficial to the analysis if we (a) make a connection with both raciality and sexuality, (b) examine the linkage between the imperial at home and the imperial abroad and (c) examine, no matter how briefly, the relevance of centre-periphery relations; I call these connections the imperial nexus.
My analytical attention falls on to the relationality between the United States as the worldâs key imperial power, and the societies of the global south, especially the Latin South, or what is traditionally called Latin America. In this analysis which concentrates on US-Latin American relations, I do not want to imply that these relations can always be extrapolated to a First World/Third World level. They are illustrative and symptomatic of those First World/Third World relations but they do not exhaust the terrain of those relations. I conclude by stressing the point that the geopolitics of the imperial is most appropriately looked at as a potentially creative analytical node that can generate many new insights. Equally, this nodal point can help us begin to rethink the accumulated knowledge concerning imperialism in a global setting (see, e.g., Mignolo, 2005). In this context, I would suggest that it is important to move away from a narrowly economistic approach to the issues at hand, and develop a more multidimensional perspective which keeps open space for new ideas and fresh lines of enquiry.
Situating geopolitical interventions
The geopolitics of Western interventionism can be highlighted as exemplifying the longevity of an invasive logic. This invasive or imperial logic can be seen as incorporating an official discourse of democracy and progress, whereby Occidental interventions are frequently portrayed as being part of a long-term project to democratize the planet, albeit within the overall diffusion of the founding tenets of Western civilization. However, contrary to this uncritically top-down perspective, it can be argued that the West, and specifically the United States, has been responsible for both the termination of democratic governments in the global south and the buttressing of pro-Western military regimes, which, especially in the era of the Cold War, established various forms of tyranny.
With respect to Anglo-American terminations of democratic governments, one can mention Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Uruguay in 1973, Grenada in 1983 and Nicaragua during the 1980s, although the last-named case did not include a military take-over.2 As far as support for military regimes is concerned, we can mention Argentina in 1976, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Uruguay in 1973, and the list becomes considerably longer if we also include African and Asian examples. Moreover, it needs to be recalled that the West continues to support non-democratic regimes as is transparent in the Middle East (such as with Bahrain, for a long period Egypt and Saudi Arabia and all with an appalling human rights record).
What we need to emphasize here is that those metropolitan societies in particular the United States and the United Kingdom, which have projected a Panglossian perspective on their place in the world, have histories of imperial penetration of societies of the global south, and these penetrations reflect an asymmetrical relation between imperializing and imperialized societies which ought not to be forgotten. The way these events are remembered will vary markedly between north and south, and they will also constitute a significant part of the different nature of the political unconscious of Euro-American societies on the one hand and non-Western peripheral societies on the other. We can note here that events such as the overthrow of a democratic government may well be riveted in the memory of a third world people, whereas in the metropolitan country, there may be little if any recollection of, for example, a military coup dâĂ©tat which took place in a faraway country. It is in this context that Jameson (1992) made a distinction between first and third worlds whereby, whilst the first world has both the power and the propensity to forget the geopolitical history of third world regions (although this is changing with security issues), the third world has much less parallel space of manoeuvre and has far more dependency on the first world.
When we look at lists of injustices in the world, it is not unusual to find that the sorts of geopolitical interventions highlighted above are rarely if at all mentioned; they tend to remain invisible. For example, in a short article on the nature and range of international justice, Sen (2009: 26), writing for a wide audience, lists the following types of injustice: slavery, the subjugation of women, the extreme exploitation of vulnerable labour, the gross medical neglect of the bulk of todayâs world population, the continued practice of torture and the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger. Of course, these are all relevant sources of injustice, and neither are they new.3
Although the above are all highly relevant sources of injustice, surely the repeated violation of popular sovereignty in the global south needs to be on the list. In fact, I would argue that such violations of international law and abnegations of the rights of peoples constitute a cardinal or foundational form of international injustice.
The gravity of interventionism is sometimes legitimized through the Western assertion that it is diffusing democracy to a country that needs it, for example Iraq or Afghanistan. But how can the imposition of one form of democracy on to another society be justified? As Judith Butler (2010: 36â37) concisely puts it âwhat does democracy mean if it is not based on popular decision and majority rule ⊠can one power âbringâ or âinstallâ democracy on a people over whom it has no jurisdiction?â
Furthermore, as Butler points out, those who kill in the name of democracy or security, or those who make incursions into the sovereign lands of others in the name of diffusing freedom or human rights often do so as if they are executing a kind of âglobal responsibilityâ. How justifiable is such an assumed responsibility? It is surely quite unjustifiable since it is embedded in imperial reason or what Gill (2012) has recently called âimperial common senseâ. What is required is a rethinking and reimagining of the meanings of global responsibility so that to start with the geopolitics of imposition and the imperial appropriation of the concept of responsibility can be countered and transcended.
When we look at the geopolitics of interventionism on a broad canvass, it becomes clear that the justification or legitimization of Western invasiveness (e.g. the spreading of the US model of market-based democracy) is intimately linked into the desire to intervene which is more multifaceted than the traditional idea that interventionism must be explained in relation to the search for raw materials, resources and cheap labour; these are important factors which should not be ignored, but the desire to intervene brings together the pressures of the geopolitical, the cultural, the military the psychological and the economic.
Above all, I would argue that this multidimensional nature of desire requires, within the emerging imperial society, a continual articulation and justification of expansion and intervention, or as Kiernan (1974: 100) the Marxist historian, put it some time ago, â⊠empires must first have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into âŠâ In other words, rather than solely repeat well-established socio-economic arguments about the expansionist drive of imperialism, we might benefit from an analysis of the formation of an imperial reason or common sense within certain societies, certainly visible in the nineteenth century of the United States. Hence, a concern with desire can lead us into an initial discussion of imperiality â a perspective that rests on a sense of Occidental privilege and supremacy, which is deeply sedimented in Western society (I shall return to this point later).
Although desire is crucial, it is not sufficient. For desire to be effective, it has to be channelled, and here political will is necessary. It is within the political space of the state that the various societal compulsions and perspectives are mediated and crystallized into a specific strategy. In the example of foreign policy, the production of a number of doctrines, for instance, the Truman Doctrine, or the Reagan Doctrine, were the work of policy intellectuals concentrated in the arena of governmental power. Any theory of imperialism must, one can argue, include an appreciation of the role of state intellectuals in formulating a global strategy, and the Project for a New American Century exemplifies this particular point.
Moreover, it is equally necessary to underscore the importance of capacity. That is to say, if we suggest that an imperial political will is developed in the arena of state or governmental power, such a political will not be effective if there has been no development of the military capacity to carry out or implement the key points of that given political will. For example, the British took over the Malvinas in 1833, ten years after the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, but the United States did not have the naval capacity to confront the British; however, by the end of the nineteenth century it was a different matter since the United States had by that time a powerful navy, and in a frontier dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, the United States was able to take the upper hand, favouring Venezuelaâs position. Moreover, Secretary of State Richard Olney asserted quite categorically that the United States was practically sovereign âon this continentâ (see Olney, 1895: 64â67, quoted in Holden and Zolov, 2000).
Desire, political will and capacities require a justification. This has been provided by the notion that the West is diffusing and exporting a variety of beneficial modes of societal organization, through, for example, spreading âcivilizationâ, âdemocracyâ, âmodernizationâ and âfreedomâ. These four elements or concepts (namely, desire, political will, capacity and justification or legitimization) provide us with a possible frame for understanding geopolitical interventionism but we need to add a fifth element, which is the role played by resistance. Here, we have a number of examples from different parts of the world, and the essential point remains linked to the intervenorâs perception of the society to be invaded, which naturally will be strongly affected by the history of the relations between the two countries. Broadly speaking, in the case of Latin America, the development of nationalism from the early part of the twentieth century was to be seen as a response to âgun-boat diplomacyâ and the kind of imperial politics that was expressed in the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904.
Growing nationalism was also a response to the need for an indigenous identity, which expanded across the Latin South during what came to be called âThe American Centuryâ. Subsequently, Washington modified its approach to interventions, and introduced in the early 1930s what Franklin D Roosevelt called the âgood neighbourâ policy so that matters of aid and trade could be given more priority within the overall context of Inter-American relations. Thus, as an example, when political turbulence broke the surface in the Cuba of the 1930s, the US Administration preferred to underline the relevance of dialogue and the search for consensus, rather than reaching for the nearest weapon of war.4
It can be argued, as my examples demonstrate, that a Western invasive logic has been a constant feature of international relations, within which the asymmetries of geopolitical power are rooted in the history of the colonial/imperial encounter. In addition, it is useful to remind ourselves that in the West the reality of this invasive logic has often been little more than a shadowy presence in the studies of globalization, modernity and democracy. Also, when examining this theme, it is worthwhile indicating that US interventionism has a longer ...
