[Continued from here]
Lichtheim protested that multiple meanings of 'imperialism' were bandied about, and blurred into each other. It could mean the dominance by pre-1914 empires (Austria-Hungary, Russia) of national minorities. Or it might mean the mix of colonialism and mercantilism exemplified by Britain's early dominance of India. Then there was 'liberal imperialism', that is, the British and later American quest to secure markets for Western capital. And all these seemed to have become interchangeable with discriminatory trade structures that benefited richer lands at the expense of poorer ones. 'By running these different meanings together one can achieve startling rhetorical effects,' observed Lichtheim, 'without coming any closer to a genuine theory of imperialism.'
Lichtheim saw imperialism as 'a relationship' between 'a controlling power' and those 'under its dominion', whether in a formal way so or not. Hegemony is the key, that is, power and its justification. There were really 'imperialisms' because imperialism varied in times and places. It was not reducible to capitalism. Moreover, earlier theorists of imperialism in the age of capitalism – Hobson and Schumpeter, or Marxists like Hilferding, Luxembourg, Lenin – had made many distinctions that seemed to have dissolved in the heat of the late 1960s. Lichtheim surveyed all the theories with a useful, critical eye, but intended his book to be 'a contribution to an ongoing political discussion'. Some of his most striking contributions were plain but inopportune questions that upset some common assumption. They often make you say: that should have been obvious.
For instance, when he discusses the development of free trade as a chief tenet of post-1945 US ideology - Americans picked up where the dismantling British Empire left off - he asks if it made 'economic sense after 1949 for the US government to boycott mainland China instead of entering trade relations with it'. Likewise, consider his question about the Maoist-flavoured contention, popular in some academic circuits, that Third World 'underdevelopment' is the Siamese twin of 'dependence' on industrial superpowers (the US and the Soviet Union). Lichtheim - recall it is 1970 - simply asks: 'What economic damage has the "loss" of China done to American capitalism since 1950 or to Soviet State Socialism since 1960?' And he answers, 'Plainly, none at all. It has rather freed the superpowers of the tiresome obligation to provide development funds for China, thus throwing an additional burden on the Chinese people.'
His targets were bad intellectual habits, and it is unfortunate that they are still with us. For instance, how often do we hear that oil was the sole issue in the Iraq War and that President George Bush was nothing but the handmaiden of Texas Oil? If we pose Lichtheim-like questions, this becomes comic book neo-Leninism. Was oil a crucial factor? Of course. Does Bush come from Texas oil country? Of course. Are his economic views and energy policies appalling? Of course (again). Could Saddam and the Oil Companies have reached a mutually profitable agreement in about, oh, 20 minutes? Obviously, yes. Would Bush have concurred? Obviously, not. This makes no argument for or against the war; it does argue against facile formulas in making sense of complicated and dangerous matters.
Lichtheim traces imperialism's plural ideological and historical meanings from ancient Rome - 'imperium' first meant Roman rule over Romans and then later over others - through Mao. Counsel against economic determinism speckles his pages: 'if one is determined to make imperialism rhyme with capitalism, one will have to ignore all empires save those that were built overseas by the nation-states of Western Europe in the age of their maritime predominance.' Capitalist imperialism won't help you understand the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and certainly not Sino-Soviet clashes.
Europe's transition to political modernity was marked, in Lichtheim's view, not simply by capitalism remaking the world, but by an emerging distinction in statecraft between economic aims and non-economic purposes (religion, for example). As Holy Warriors concluded their Wars of Religion – another of history's ends of ideology - and as local lords were subordinated to central powers, sovereign states arose. They could accommodate religious diversity, and enhanced themselves by mercantilist means and overseas quests. Alliances between Catholic and Protestant kings became conceivable for their states' sakes. This patriotism was driven by dynamics different from those of later capitalist expansion, that is, the imperialism and empires that came of industrial revolution and the ideology of free trade. But when the British-dominated system of free trade began to falter in the later 19th century, this was because Britain's competitors refused to play 'the game' according to the old rules:
One must decide what one is talking about. There grew up in the nineteenth century a British empire in India, a Russian empire in central Asia, and a French empire in Africa. These empires were not obliged to clash, and in fact never did. The owners were satisfied with the status quo and only asked to be left in peace so that they might digest their conquests. The trouble was started by newcomers who did not possess an empire: Germany and Japan. Once this has been grasped, we can stop arguing over the meaning of 'empire'. Imperialist powers are not by definition obliged to own large tracts of land inhabited by conquered peoples. It is quite enough... if they are animated by a political will to bring about a forcible rearrangement of the global system controlled by their rivals.
Nationalism, then, was essential to this new 'mentality'. Lichtheim insisted that German and Japanese calculations were not economic or utilitarian – or else, 'they did their sums wrong'. And if we look at France and Britain, we find that 'nationalism transformed itself into imperialism wherever the opportunity offered'. In other words, imperialism then was a popular ideology based significantly on nationalist sentiment. It was not 'merely a conspiracy got up in secret to enrich a few monopolists', and its popularity extended genuinely to the working classes. Lichtheim found little persuasive in Lenin's attempt to demonstrate how imperialism born of finance capital accounted for World War I and the failure of Europe's workers to fulfil Marx's predictions. It is unsaid, but Lichtheim's account of imperialism does something akin to Weber's treatment of capitalism. Weber argued for the impossibility of explaining an economic system, capitalism, by economics alone, and so pointed to the Protestant ethic as its precondition. Lichtheim argues for the impossibility of understanding imperialism by economic dynamics alone, even in the capitalist era, and points to the influence of nationalism. (But Lichtheim's book might have been well-served had he considered the historicity of terms like nation, nationalism, and patriotism).
Lichtheim didn't write out of the least sympathy for imperialism, but because he was out of sympathy with the clichés (and the political implications of the clichés) espoused by Maoists or Third-Worldists, Trotskyists or neo-Marxists, neo-Leninists or neo-this-ists and neo-that-ists. I'll call them all 'Neos' for shorthand (admitting, readily, it's too short). Influential Neos like Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, and those in comparable orbits, insisted on a necessary link – chain might be the better term – between capitalist exploitation of the Third World and the Third World's inability to 'develop'. For Lichtheim, this is one formula substituting for another: 'bourgeois versus proletariat' becomes 'imperialist versus anti-imperialist'. (Nowadays, it's 'Empire versus Multitude'.)
'The ideological frenzy of the 1950s – reinforced by Stalinist psychopathology on the one hand and Dullesian drivel on the other – is taken literally by these writers,' says Lichtheim. In other words, they didn't distinguish ideology from reality. Instead, they inverted the world depicted by 'standard US cold war literature', and simplified 'to the point of absurdity'. That done, Third Worldism and anti-Imperialism together became for Neos the alternative to the superpowers. Their minds still worked through apocalyptic bifurcations.
Here's another way of putting it: Cold Warriors, both intellectuals and power-holders, ought not to have been taken at their words, let alone their shouts. What near-sighted intellectuals perceived as world-ideological struggles of 'capitalist democracy versus communist totalitarianism' or, alternatively, 'imperialism versus liberation' might really have been neo-superstructures of older kinds of geo-political conflict. Perhaps while intellectuals argued ideology, power-holders acted on entirely different bases. Those who thought in the 1990s that history had just ended because the Liberal Idea vanquished the Totalitarian Idea might want to glance at pre-1917 relations between Russia and Georgia before discussing current commotions in light of 1989. They might even want to recontextualize a good deal of Cold War politics within the complicated history of Russia's great power ambitions and its relations with its neighbours before and after Communism.
Now consider Lichtheim's approach to Maoism and Third Worldism. For him, recent anti-imperialist 'neo-Marxist' theory presented new world-historical protagonists, national liberators, by means (again) of bad rhymes. He writes:
This nationalism is identified with socialism, the peasantry with the proletariat, anti-imperialism with anti-capitalism, until all the distinctions painfully elaborated in Marxist literature for a century are cast overboard in favour of a simple dichotomy between Western imperialism versus the starving masses of the Third World. People equipped with this kind of perspective no longer need a theory: practice grows out of populist sloganeering, as power is supposed to grow from a gun barrel.
This, I think, could be added: studying Chinese history may tell you much more about Maoism than a theory of totalitarianism that imposes neat categories on multi-textured and many-hued history, and on varied political culture. Lichtheim pointed out that Maoism asserted the unity of 'the people' in an overwhelmingly agrarian land, but gave 'the people' a mostly urban leadership championing national interests. The result was unrecognizable as 'authentic socialism', at least of any Marxist variety. It was, however, 'fully integrated with Chinese nationalism and ethnocentrism'. Thus Mao's revolutionary nationalism was truly popular.
While Lichtheim doesn't say it, his point is reinforced by a small fact: Mao did not announce in 1949 that the world proletariat had cast off its chains. He proclaimed that 'The Chinese People has stood up'. Lichtheim does, however, point out that Maoism identified China as a 'proletarian nation'. (This notion, he notes, has a heritage in fascist explanations of Italy's 'backwardness' and its need to stand up.) There may be a time, Lichtheim conjectured, 'when China feels able to get along without Maoism'. But its industrialization would be unlike that of the west, and would be one part of a transformation of Asia that would alter, inevitably, the world's balance of power. We read at the end of Imperialism that 'changes of this magnitude are rarely accomplished peacefully'.
China certainly left Maoism behind. Certainly, there are new balances of power in today's world. As to peace... it's safer to predict the past, as the old cliché has it. We are now three and a half decades beyond Lichtheim's world. The Chinese Communist party still rules, but it fosters market economics. The combination seems more like Pinochet's dictatorship than pursuit of a classless society. In the meantime, there is an academic industry addressing 'Post-Colonialism'. A reader of Lichtheim's Imperialism who wants some updating would do well to look at Stephen Howe's Empire (Oxford, 2002). This judicious, very brief text doesn't harbour the same ambitions as Lichtheim's essay, but it also distinguishes among ideology, intellectual posturing, junk-scholarship, and thoughtful treatments of its subject.
Its author discerns a problem like one lamented by Lichtheim. 'A minor oddity of modern academic – and political – language,' Howe writes, 'is that the word "imperialism" has undergone a sharp decline in popularity, while "colonialism" has zoomed up the citation charts.' However, 'colonialism is being used just as variously and contentiously as imperialism ever was. Its younger relative "postcolonialism" seems ever more elastic. To some people it's an all purpose label for the entire state of the contemporary world. To others it's just a tag for a few professors of English Literature, their books and courses... [A] recent book of literary studies is rather mind-bendingly entitled The Postcolonial Middle Ages.'
My mind bent a bit recently when I read some literature devoted to 'post-colonial theory'. I found in it virtually no discussion of history, of the impact of struggles for independence on post-colonial political systems, of political culture, of changes in social authority patterns following independence, of the transformation of post-colonial economies or their relation to the 'developed' world. I found nothing about what political scientists or sociologists or historians or economists in, say, India, can teach us about imperialism or the world after colonialism. Instead, I found political claims made chiefly through literary criticism - by addressing fiction and nothing but fiction. Actually, I sympathized with many of the political points; and I think literature can be useful in exploring politics. But I also recalled a sentence in George Lichtheim's Imperialism: 'Propagandists use words like flags.' Perhaps it is time to lower the flags (or their substitutes) when we think of these things – of empire or imperialism or colonialism or post-colonialism - in our unsteady 21st century.
[All the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, are listed here, here, here and here.]
