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A New Imperialism
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11863 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
5,144 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
"This is the new imperialism, and I don't like it." It was strange to hear Edward Heath, a former Conservative prime minister of Britain, talking in this way. He was, essentially, defending the immunity of Saddam Hussein, with whom he had just been negotiating about British hostages, from any attack by non-Arab troops. It is an interesting political assortment of people who condemn imperialism and fear its revival: Third World intellectuals and "conservative" Soviet generals might be expected to use such language, and one would expect a variety of Western radicals to do so, but a former Conservative prime minister? Seems odd. During the Anglo-Argentine war over the Falkland Islands in 1982, we also had the anomaly of fascist generals of wholly European extraction, representing a country that had exterminated its indigenous peoples, using the language of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism to solicit international support.
To understand this odd alliance it is necessary to analyze the meaning of "imperialism," and in more than one sense. In terms of their origins, there ought to be a fundamental distinction between imperialism and colonialism. The Latin imperium suggests jurisdiction, sovereignty, legitimate rule; in imperio refers to supreme authority. Thus, to claim sovereign legal authority over a territory, as Britain once did over a quarter of the world's surface, might be called imperialism, as might the belief that such a claim was justified and its consequence justifiable. The original coloniae were planted colonies of about three hundred Romans, stationed at points around the Italian shore as a kind of coast guard, an alternative to fleet defense. By the second century B.C. they had become a system of giving land to military veterans and other landless free men. To "colonize" means to populate with a new population. From a European perspective, the Americas, the Antipodes, and South Africa are colonies; Israel is a modern form of colonialism. Thus, etymology provides us with a fairly precise distinction between colonialism and imperialism. But this distinction is not used: Colonialism, imperialism, and "neo-" versions of both are interchangeable and equally suggestive of vague images of the domination or exploitation of one discrete people by another.
IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE
Imperialism does not, of course, require an "empire" in the sense of the sovereignty of an emperor. Perhaps the most thorough and lasting imperialism of the ancient world was achieved by the Roman Republic, and, even when Rome had emperors, there was a persistent legal fiction and aspiration that the state was a republic. Thus, there is
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