Empire, Hegemony and Globalization in the Americas

...At the other extreme, the subordinates repudiate such intentions and are kept in check by force or the threat of force...

...Empire” or “hegemony” remains marginal to the contemporary debate...

...power is undeniable.1 But Niall Ferguson, one of a new breed of polemical right-wing historians, has gone even further: from lauding the British Empire as an Empire of free trade and economic development, to lamenting that U.S...

...Latin American elites, however, often had a vested interest in talking up the threat in order to extract benefits from Washington: a classic case of the collaborating tail wagging the imperialist dog (an old story, which is again being repeated in Iraq...

...Some empires have fenced off sections of the world in defiance of globalization: think of Spain’s attempt to maintain a mercantilist monopoly over its empire in the Americas...

...sought to create congenial stable regimes and avert European—particularly, German—threats, whether real or imagined...

...An Argentine government facing bankruptcy can no longer invoke the specter of Communism in order to induce U.S...

...Progressivism...

...As a White House aide told a bemused reporter in 2002, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...

...But Lula is not the first leader to be confronted with the economic impositions of a globalized system...

...The scramble for Africa, for example, was triggered— or decisively accelerated—by the 1882 British occupation of Egypt, which responded to British fears of both domestic (Egyptian) nationalist protest and potential rival (French) intervention...

...interventions in the circum- Caribbean had little to do with markets or investments...

...The first is a domestic activity, while the second involves a defensive stance against perceived “threats,” however subjective or imaginary...

...In addition, previous phases of globalization were followed by renewed fragmentation and introversion...

...pulled out, but not before ensuring that pro-American regimes were set up and supported by military forces trained and equipped by the U.S...

...Advocacy of Empire thus goes beyond narrow national self-interest—increasing U.S...

...Thus, Latin America, sharing with the United States longstanding republican and capitalist traditions, offers far better prospects for collaboration, certainly at elite levels...

...Several U.S...

...And there have been several other crucial moments of globalization: among them, the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas and the eighteenth century commercial revolution pioneered by the English and the Dutch...

...We might recall how the old triumphalist British refrain “Britannia rules the waves” was reformulated as “Britannia waives the rules...

...The Americans, he argues, should slough off their moral scruples and build an Empire with the same confidence as the Victorians, thus bringing to the world the benefits of stability, security, trade, investment and growth...

...As a result, the long Latin American experience with U.S...

...It was an ambitious effort to mold Latin American societies in a liberal-capitalist fashion and thus fend off the (much exaggerated) threat of Soviet and Cuban Communism...

...Meanwhile, U.S...

...Cuba was already within the U.S...

...hence the contorted logic of the Platt Amendment, which laid down that “Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power … which will tend to impair the independence of Cuba...

...The Cuban Revolution confirmed U.S...

...from the 1930s onward, but U.S...

...support...

...In between, inhabiting the gray area, stood a range of regimes and leaders who avoided both extremes and juggled the situation as best they could, seeking limited pay-offs...

...hegemony...

...Significantly, the nineteenth century industrial revolution coupled with improved transportation and communications (railways, steamships, telegraphs) along with massive migration (chiefly from Europe to the Americas) for the first time knitted together diverse markets in a genuinely global system.11 While we may be living through another episode of globalization, characterized by yet faster communications, a more complex division of labor and rapid industrialization in some developing countries—notably, in China—we should see this as a chapter in a long book, whose plot stretches back generations, if not centuries, with many more chapters to come...

...Between the two extremes, however, stands an ample gray area where the status quo is maintained neither by eager endorsement, nor by the threat or actuality of repression...

...In fact, globalization has been happening since homo sapiens first trekked out of Africa...

...FIRST, A BROAD VIEW OF EMPIRE WOULD EMBODY THE well-established distinction between “formal” Empire, involving colonies or protectorates governed by the imperial power, and the “informal” kind, which avoids hands-on government in favor of informal control and influence mediated through “collaborating elites...

...now faces an unusually congenial and reassuring scenario in the Americas: there is no serious rival and—for reasons of both pragmatic self-interest and genuine belief—the Washington Consensus has penetrated the Latin American policymaking establishment to its bones...

...NAFTA was just as much a Mexican project, conceived by the ardently neoliberal government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari...

...Benjamin Disraeli, often seen as an arch-imperialist, called colonies “millstones around our neck...

...globalization is not an endless one-way street...

...The Platt Amendment, which was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution of 1902 and lasted until 1934, gave the United States formal rights of intervention in Cuba (Guantánamo Bay remains a legacy of that arrangement...

...Averting the Soviet threat proved feasible, because the United States enjoyed military supremacy in the Americas and, even more important, the appeal of Communism was actually quite limited...

...imperialism is not more strenuous, committed and explicit.2 The problem in Iraq is not that the Americans invaded in the first place, says Ferguson, but that they want to get out prematurely...

...Contrary to popular belief, Great Britain was not always gung-ho for colonies...

...did not need to pry open closed economies in Latin America, because they had been opened up in the nineteenth century, and the U.S...

...In the wake of the debt crisis and the turn to neoliberalism in the 1980s, the Washington Consensus exerted a genuine appeal in Latin American policymaking circles...

...It remains to be seen whether it is these dismal “nation-building” projects in the tropics, or the more positive experience of postwar Germany, that more closely parallel current events in Iraq...

...Given their strategic concern for Suez, the British invaded and converted informal to formal control...

...interventions in the Americas have been too brief and halfhearted to achieve any comparable transformation (save in the large chunk of northern Mexico that, in the 1840s, became the southwestern United States and, perhaps, in Puerto Rico...

...Such claims happily consort with notions of globalization and hegemony, chief among them being that the free movement of factors of production— goods, labor and capital—will maximize economic growth...

...In the 1920s, U.S...

...In the twentieth century, the United States—which for decades championed protectionism and imported capital—emerged as a creditor nation, exporting goods and capital, and committing to an open global trading system institutionalized in the post-1945 Bretton Woods regime...

...power has actually been deployed and how these contentious notions of “empire,” “hegemony” and “globalization” might best be defined and understood...

...government— Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Duvaliers in Haiti and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic...

...In the Middle East, by contrast, we can see pragmatism guiding the House of Saud, but much less evidence of genuine belief in neoliberal, still less democratic, principles...

...settled for informal controls, or what is sometimes loosely termed “hegemony...

...In this respect, British and U.S...

...12 That is, ultimately, the privilege and prerogative of an imperial power...

...claims to progressive political mentorship, the economic appeal of the United States remained...

...The Washington Consensus mandates fiscal stringency, while Washington runs up the largest deficits in history...

...we don’t seek an Empire...

...preferred informal mechanisms of control and influence, geopolitics and security have tended to trump globalization (meant here as the free movements of factors of production within a global trading system...

...Even in Mexico and South America, where the U.S...

...Both Britain and later the United States have been leery of costly over-commitment and have preferred cheaper, more flexible, informal relations with weaker powers, so long as these served their interests...

...Similar claims are made about U.S...

...The Cuban nationalist hero José Martí drew inspiration from the U.S...

...The U.S...

...At one extreme, the subordinates readily endorse the benign intentions of rulers and their proclaimed norms...

...For Antonio Gramsci, hegemony was exercised within states by ruling classes who combined coercive and non-coercive methods to sustain class rule...

...imperialism stretching back at least to the 1840s, Latin America offers abundant examples of how U.S...

...But, as suggested earlier, imperialism also involves warding off rival imperialist threats...

...1915-1934 in Haiti...

...fears and reinforced such policies, culminating in the Alliance for Progress initiated by the Kennedy Administration...

...With its deep pockets to reward its friends and punish its enemies through primarily financial/economic means, Washington could make or break fragile administrations to the south without sending in the Marines or the gunboats...

...Constitution, and the Mexican revolutionaries of 1910 sought to emulate U.S...

...hegemony in the second half of the twentieth century, which, it is argued, has provided valuable “public goods,” thanks to which the global economy has prospered...

...The United States continues to protect its agriculture, while policing its borders against illegal migrants (as does the European Union...

...intervened for geopolitical reasons: to protect the approaches to Panama, to avert European (including Soviet) infringements of the Monroe Doctrine, and to prevent the establishment of unfriendly regimes in the region...

...Thus, the British Empire was painted red on the map and was considered British, while the U.S...

...Thus, the U.S...

...tolerance of economically regressive and even politically authoritarian regimes...

...The ending of the Cold War, of course, has removed the external threat, deprived Latin American elites of their trump card and further shifted the balance in favor of the hemispheric hegemon...

...interventions in the circum-Caribbean lasted, at most, about a generation (1898-1934 in Cuba...

...With its long and tumultuous experience with U.S...

...The United States, too, created a formal colony in the Philippines, which it later relinquished (something it did not do with Puerto Rico...

...6 But the Marines proved ill-suited to inculcating representative government among populations that lacked democratic experience, resented military occupation, and suffered racist abuse and repression...

...Because the end of the Cold War roughly coincided with the Latin American debt crisis and the headlong rush to neoliberalism, the U.S...

...With notable exceptions (such as Cuba), it compares more closely with the United States’ “empire by invitation” in Western Europe...

...After 1945, the Cold War stoked U.S...

...interventions in the circum-Caribbean between 1898 and 1934 obeyed a similar dual logic that received official formulation in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.5 When a swath of the map was deemed strategically crucial (for Suez, read Panama), the U.S...

...The U.S., clearly, can also make up—and bend— the rules to suit itself...

...Whatever the costs and benefits of NAFTA, it clearly reinforced Mexican dependency on the United States...

...Thus, a casual U.S...

...While the Cold War—and the U.S...

...fears of imperial Germany (1898-1918) and later Nazi Germany and Japan (1933-1945) strongly influenced policy towards Latin America, sometimes provoking outright intervention and sometimes encouraging détente with friendly governments (such as those of Batista, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and the Somozas...

...decision on tin-pricing helped precipitate the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, while Clinton’s rapid bailout of Mexico in 1995 helped avert economic and perhaps political meltdown...

...became the major beneficiary of that opening in the twentieth...

...In his recent book, Colossus, Ferguson devotes some 25 ill-informed pages to the U.S...

...dependency for just seven months in 1914...

...The result was a Machiavellian relationship, premised on neither direct coercion nor shared principles...

...Thus, with the partial exception of the ephemeral Alliance for Progress, Latin American elites could usually count on U.S...

...the imperialist deployment of U.S...

...Even leftists, like Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have to tread carefully and defer to the market...

...Which brings us to the final topic: globalization...

...Intermittently, the United States has supported— and not just rhetorically—principles of civil rights, representative government and self-determination...

...One reason why Lula has to defer to the market is because—we are told—in a globalized world, the market will punish those who transgress its principles: “There is no alternative...

...The U.S...

...They have also been similar regarding their basic modus operandi, which involves both molding the host or weaker society to the advantage of the imperial power and fending off threatening imperialist rivals...

...economic orbit in 1898...

...7 In the end, with the German threat removed and the costs of occupation apparent, the U.S...

...The Mexican port of Veracruz was a de facto U.S...

...At the other extreme stood non-collaborators who resisted hegemony and incurred the risk of reprisals: Fidel Castro and, to a lesser degree, Hugo Chávez...

...Here, authority—whether within the state or the international system—depends on pay-offs, patronage and other forms of corruption.9 In keeping client states and societies under its influence the United States can rely on a measure of genuine endorsement...

...fears, leading to renewed interventions, such as Guatemala in 1954, as well as more systematic, “hearts-and-minds” policies of aid, propaganda and cultural diplomacy that had been pioneered during World War II...

...policies it mandated in Latin America— tended to dissipate U.S...

...imperialism, however, had little to do with globalization and free trade...

...imperialisms have been broadly similar...

...The relationship between globalization, Empire and hegemony, then, is a highly variable one...

...or Francophone Africa a century later, where decolonization involved a switch from formal back to informal control...

...3 The formality of “formal” Empire involves two elements: direct political control and legal control, sanctioned by international recognition...

...More than most, the British Empire practiced free trade, but then, it could afford to, because Victorian Britain was the workshop of the world and the chief beneficiary of free trade...

...The United States thus emulated, extended and refined the kind of “informal imperialism” that Britain had exercised in Argentina a century earlier: an imperialism which depended not on gunboats, but on economic imbalance, financial muscle, and the partnership of collaborating elites who deferred to the hegemon out of pragmatic self-interest or, in some cases, genuine belief in “hegemonic” values...

...financial missionaries had preached the gospel of the Gold Standard and sound monetary policy to Latin American governments.10 But 60 years later, those governments were often run by U.S.- educated technocrats who were fervent converts to market economics...

...Globalization is favored in some sectors (capital flows) but not others (labor...

...Gramsci recognized that regimes could also adopt a range of hegemonic practices and these could be usefully transposed to international relations...

...Latin American protectionism, or inward-oriented development as it was called, caused some concern in the U.S...

...The choice between formal and informal Empire, then, often seen as a deliberate ideological choice related to notions of “democratic” political culture, is much more a matter of self-interest, calculation and capacity...

...corporations proved adept at supplanting European rivals (with the aid of World War II) and at making money in protected Latin American markets...

...This, Ferguson argues, was the great gift of Victorian imperialism, which opened up closed economies, promoted trade and investment, and thus became a great engine of international development...

...Globalization therefore remains partial, and the partiality reflects the balance of power...

...Mexico’s neoliberal rulers are probably the clearest examples of collaborating elites who, perhaps rationally, bought into U.S...

...Maintaining colonies requires blood and treasure, whereas informal control is usually preferable, because it is cheaper and more discreet...

...The Nicaraguan and Haitian markets were minimal...

...As national policymakers, they needed U.S...

...Under formal Empire, the metropolis assumes major costs and responsibilities, but in return it has the opportunity to bend the colony to its will, as Spain did for three centuries in Spanish America, leaving an enduring cultural, linguistic, religious and legal legacy.8 Direct U.S...

...As individuals or party leaders they perhaps benefited from specific favors, kickbacks and subsidies...

...The British Empire did, as Ferguson rightly notes, batter down closed economies: hence, the opium wars against China in the 1840s and the futile blockade of Argentina’s Río de la Plata in the same decade...

...recognition, trade, investment, credit and (sometimes) arms...

...Like previous Empires or “hegemons,” the United States wants to have its cake and eat it, too...

...and Latin America, but he devotes about twice as many to Iraq, swapping history for journalism...

...Hegemony, however, is a tricky concept...

...presence around the world, though cartographically less striking, is underpinned by a host of treaties, alliances and military bases.4 Of course, the line between these two forms of Empire is blurred and often crossed: think, for example, of the scramble for Africa, during which loose control of local elites gave way to direct British rule...

...did not force NAFTA down reluctant Mexican throats...

...interventions in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua were justified by Washington, at least initially, in terms of freedom and selfdetermination...

...Absent the enduring direct control that Hispanicized the Americas (or, to a lesser degree, Anglicized India), the U.S...

...power and profit— to claims that Empire-building serves the common global good...