The second part of George Kerevan’s essay on imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. You can read the first part here. The third and final instalment will be published next week.
Once established, classic neocolonialism suffered from its own contradictions. The new local elites were trapped between serving the emerging neocolonial system and meeting the needs of their insurgent population by promising economic development. But such so-called development strategies – usually based on industrialisation, nationalisation and import substitution – were problematic. They conflicted with the interests of foreign multinationals and colonial settlers, and they required massive investment. Frequently these contradictions led to revolutionary crises and military coups fomented by America in conjunction with local elites. Neocolonial regimes proved anything but stable.
For instance, in Bolivia in 1952, the tin miners and peasantry launched an incipient socialist revolution against the neocolonial regime, with Trotskyists vying with liberal nationalists for leadership. Unfortunately, the Bolivian masses were too isolated and organisationally weak to create a workers’ state, but the neocolonial oligarchs were forced to concede land redistribution to the peasantry. In Argentina in 1956, the ultra-nationalist regime of Juan Peron was overthrown by a military-oligarch clique after a collapse in commodity prices. In Ghana in 1966, a CIA-backed military coup deposed Kwame Nkrumah’s quasi-Marxist government, again after a fall in export commodity prices.
These examples reveal a complex pattern of class struggle inside the neocolonial states – a pattern not reducible simply to foreign, metropolitan intervention. The typical fault line was the unfulfilled land hunger of the peasant masses versus the desire – benign or self-serving – of the new, post-colonial regimes to industrialise. This was often against a background where the former colonialists had expropriated the best farmland or, in the Arab world, where the land was owned by feudal aristocracies. Forced industrialisation for export was promoted both by the Soviets (who had gone down that road with disastrous consequences for the peasantry) and Western liberal “experts”. The result was a new phase of class struggle. In most cases, the peasant masses remained landless and were forced to migrate to the cities where they formed a poor, lumpen mass that – exacerbated by tribal rivalries manipulated by local elites – further added to the social and political instability of the neocolonial regimes.
In the Ghanan case, the Nkrumah regime imposed high taxes on peasant farmers in order to fund industrialisation from domestic resources, rather than borrow. This created resentments that worsened when export prices fell. This left Nkrumah vulnerable to being overthrown by the army (with American backing). The obvious conclusion is that attempts at “socialist industrialisation in one country” were bound to fail. To give Kwame Nkrumah his due, he saw the need to create a pan-African response to neocolonialism, including economic cooperation and integration. But the very act of trying to create such an anti-Western bloc caused the CIA to bring him down.
Where land reform was attempted, this met resistance from big landowners. In South Vietnam, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem attempted a major land reform in order to create local support for his regime. But resistance from big landowners blocked progress. Diem also launched a “denounce the communists” campaign, which was used to imprison and execute numerous anti-government elements as well as actual communists. The net result was a collapse in support for Diem’s regime and an upsurge of support for the insurgent Viet Cong. This opened the road to direct American military intervention. Diem was assassinated in 1963 in a CIA-backed military coup.
The new elites attempted to keep a balance between supporting Western interests and fending off internal discontent. In the 1950s, the newly independent regimes still had a degree of political manoeuvrability which they used to launch the so-called “nonaligned” movement, starting with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. This brought together 29 independent countries in Africa and Asia (representing around half the world’s population) ostensibly to oppose colonialism and forge greater cooperation outside the two rival Cold War power blocs. In some respects, the Bandung initiative was more for diplomatic show than practical effect. It allowed a number of neocolonial stooges to claim the mantle of being anti-imperialist – Japan, America’s closest Asian ally, attended as did the Philippines, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. However, the very thought of the newly de-colonialised independent states showing any degree of political independence drove Western imperialism into delirium. The US State Department refused passports to leading black activists W.E.B DuBois and Paul Robeson to travel to Indonesia.
Yet in retrospect, Bandung – whatever its political flaws – proved a beacon to anti-colonial struggles in the years to come, threatening the whole neocolonial project. Which may explain why, in the immediate aftermath of Bandung, the Western powers launched a major offensive against the more truculent of the “nonaligned” nations. The year after Bandung, Britain and France (in secret alliance with Israel) launched a full-scale invasion of Nasser’s Egypt. In 1958, US marines invaded Lebanon to put down a local uprising which aimed to unify the country (a French neo-colony) with Nasser’s United Arab Republic. The late 1950s also saw Britain launch a bloody anti-colonial war in Cyprus, whose (Greek) nationalist leader, Archbishop Makarios, had had the temerity to attend the Bandung conference.
Sovereign debt crises
The instability of the new neocolonial regimes extended to the financial: the new client states were incapable of meeting their debt repayments, especially given the rip-off interest rates they were being charged. The Western financial system loaded the newly independent counties with easy debt, extracted vast amounts of local capital through high interest rates, then found itself facing a wave of defaults that threatened financial stability in the metropoles themselves. Thus, the whole capitalist order in the Long Boom years began to implode under its own contradictions.
The writing was on the wall very early. In 1956, following the ouster of Peron, the new regime in Argentina faced imminent default on its international debt and requested a payment deferment. France offered to host a meeting of Argentina’s main creditors in Paris that took place in May 1956. This led to the creation of the so-called Paris Club, a secretive cartel of the imperialist lenders which still exists. The Club imposes debt rescheduling for favoured client states but imposes an extra financial charge for the privilege. Between 1956 and 1976, debt payments were rescheduled for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in Latin America, and in Asia for Indonesia and Pakistan. The first African country to conclude a debt treatment agreement with the Paris Club was Zaire in 1976. The Paris Club mechanism imposed a further level of backdoor imperialist control over the former colonies.
However, even the Paris Club was not prepared for what happened next: a wave of simultaneous defaults that threatened to bring down the entire Western banking system. In 1982, Mexico’s President Jose Lopez Portillo y Pacheco announced a default on his country’s sovereign debt. This kick-started contagion in the market for neocolonial debt. First to Argentina and Brazil but within a year the crisis had extended to Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay in Latin America, and directly affected Yugoslavia, Turkey, Nigeria and Morocco.
The cause of this new default cycle was radically different from previous iterations. Desperate for cash, the neocolonial administrations (especially the new dictatorships) started issuing bonds denominated in local currencies rather than dollars. Debt ratios soon reached multiples of GDP. Greedy Western finance capital was able to charge a risk premium of up to 50 per cent over similar dollar bonds. Western banks bought the local currency with dollars, made the loan, then often bought their dollars back very cheaply on the local black market. Essentially, neocolonial regimes were printing (inflated) currency to lend back to themselves at vast rates of interest. This hyperinflationary cycle led to a flight of hard currency from the countries concerned and a collapsing exchange rate (which destroyed the value of foreign capital in the country). Result: neocolonial countries lacked the wherewithal to import food and energy, while there was a flight of foreign capital.
As the contagion spread at the start of the 1980s, some military dictatorships turned nationalist in an attempt to fend off domestic unrest – for example, the invasion of the Falkland-Malvinas Islands by the Argentine junta. But the iron financial logic of Western neocolonialism ultimately forced an end to the era of dictatorships, the creation of a democratic façade to cool revolutionary movements, and the inevitable debt restructuring.
The obvious lesson is that at the heart of Western-imposed neocolonialism is a massive contradiction. Neocolonialism was meant to create a controlled environment in which the metropoles can exploit the periphery while containing popular resistance. But that exploitation – especially through loading the neocolonial world with debt – ultimately undermined the stability of the system, and even threatened the domestic Western banking system at home.
Solidarity movements
The anti-colonial struggles that ran from 1945 to 1975 (with the fall of Saigon) intersected and interweaved with solidarity movements in the metropoles. Class struggles in the neocolonial periphery and the imperial centres were dialectically connected. Thus the imperialist bourgeoisie were faced with domestic resistance to their neocolonial project as well as uprisings abroad. At the same time, the neocolonial struggles received material and political support from the metropoles.
In two cases – France and the United States – the degree of metropolitan solidarity was such as to threaten the domestic bourgeois political order itself, over Algeria and Vietnam. But in Britain, popular support for neocolonial struggles – while significant – never reached such levels. In fact, domestic opinion – even in swathes of the British working class – remained captured by colonial and racist attitudes. This gave the British ruling class relatively more room for manoeuvre, especially in its most sordid and bloody colonial wars in Kenya (1952-1960) and Malaya (1948-1960), where the use of forced resettlement, defoliation, routine torture, and indiscriminate use of air power was pioneered. The (conservative) estimate of the death toll arising from both conflicts amounts to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000.
In only one instance in Britain did public anger at a neocolonial adventure provoke significant mass discontent. This was in reaction to the Franco-British invasion of Egypt in 1956 (with Israeli connivance), aimed at retaining Western control over the Suez Canal. However, the biggest anti-war demonstration against the invasion, in London on 4 November 1956, garnered only 30,000 protestors – though it was certainly the biggest anti-establishment demo since 1945 and there were angry clashes with the police. Certainly, Suez helped trigger the start of a new, radicalised left in Britain that led directly to the creation of the militant Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, the year after the invasion. But much working class opinion remained stubbornly patriotic and pro the attempt by the Tory government to topple Nasser, who was presented as a new Hitler.
The real lesson of the Suez crisis is that it represents a political inflexion point where the British ruling class was forced finally to abandon traditional direct rule over its colonies and protectorates in favour of the emerging neocolonial model. The Eden government was made to withdraw from Egypt less by public opposition and more because of overt American pressure. The Eisenhower administration was desperate to foster benign client states in the Middle East and old-style European gunboat diplomacy did not for the bill. (The fact that the US later switched to open military intervention in Vietnam, with disastrous consequences, merely proves the neocolonial rule.)
The history of anti-imperialist solidarity in France is very different from Britain. The Algerian colonial war was on a vastly different scale from Britain’s conflicts. The war cost France 25,000 dead soldiers and 65,000 wounded. Some two million French troops were deployed to Algeria, including one million (mostly unwilling) conscripts. In metropolitan France itself, over 5,000 died in terrorist attacks by the FLN and right-wing groups such as the OAS. The war was fought to keep the fiction that Algeria was a part of metropolitan France and over the fate of one million French settlers (who subsequently fled). The political mayhem saw the Paris police – led by a man later convicted of collaboration with the occupying Nazis to deport French Jews – murder as many as 300 protesting Algerians on the single night of 17 October 1961, dumping their anonymous bodies in the Seine. The sheer bloodiness of the Algerian conflict helps explain the deeper ruptures in French society compared with the British experience.
In the 1960s, the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam led to a large, domestic public anti-war movement in the US. This proved to be the catalyst for the emergence of broader radical currents especially in the black community and among young people. As in France, the use of an unwilling conscript army, coupled with the obvious excesses of high-tech warfare used against a peasant people (and shown nightly on television) robbed the war of its political and moral legitimacy. This de-legitimisation – a classic Gramscian collapse of the ideological defences of the whole capitalist system – spread quickly to the main political structures. In short order, President Johnson was forced out of office, the Democratic Party tipped into civil war, and the subsequent criminal Nixon presidency collapsed in resignation.
This historical balance sheet suggests that metropolitan imperialism in this period was weak in preventing the outbreak of mass solidarity movements in the metropoles. Equally, solidarity movements in the metropoles were important elements in undermining the neocolonial project. And not just politically. For instance, the early FLN depended heavily on weapons experts, forged passports and money laundering provided by the tiny Trotskyist Fourth International in Europe (drawing on its Second World War resistance experience). Thus the anti-imperialist and metropolitan solidarity movements reinforced each other – a lesson for the future.
Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism
Another (largely forgotten in the West) aspect of solidarity was the rise – and fall – of the pan-African and pan-Arab movements, and later the Havana Tricontinental initiative of 1966. This was solidarity expressed across the neocolonial world itself rather than between it and anti-establishment forces in metropoles. If the neocolonial model had any lasting success, it was in undermining such early internationalism. These internationalist initiatives were different from the Bandung project (which was state led) in that they were primarily ideological movements from below.
Pan-Africanism emerged out of the early anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles, especially in the United States and Caribbean. It took a serious organisational form after the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. The first half of the 20th century spawned a vast agitational literature written and read by black activists promoting African unity in the struggle against the colonial empires. In the aftermath of the Second World War, as independent African states began to appear, the popular inference was that the new countries would seek closer cooperation and even unity on the basis of their common anti-imperialist heritage.
But the very act of creating myriad bourgeois nationalist states on the Western model created a dynamic that cut across such unity, undermining the ideological basis for pan-Africanism. The borders, population and economic basis of the new states were all predicated on the accident of colonial history, creating artificial barriers to cooperation. Above all, the Western metropoles went out of their way to keep their African neocolonial client states separate and divided – a process aided and abetted by indigenous elites unwilling to give up their new-found privileges. A key figure involved was the French stooge leader of Ivory Coast, “Papa” Félix Houphouet-Boigny. With French support, Houphouet-Boigny was instrumental in opposing and systematically undermining fellow African governments that espoused pan-Africanism, in particular that of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. With CIA as well as French aid, Houphouet-Boigny was involved in the coup that ousted Nkrumah in 1966. Certainly pan-African suffered from ideological vagueness and the fantasy that different classes could find common ground once independence had been achieved. But there is plenty of examples to show that a conscious, integral element of the neocolonial project was to keep Africa divided.
Pan-Arabism had a different experience. The religious and linguistic affinities of the Arab peoples held out the possibility of an easier passage to political unity, before and after independence. Early advocates of pan-Arabism – such as the Lebanese Christian journalist Jurji Zaydan – were involved in cultural struggles to create a common, modern Arabic literature and history. A robust political ideology emerged among the urban petty bourgeois intelligentsia in shape of Baathism, a secular revolutionary movement influenced by European corporatism (as opposed to Marxist conceptions of class struggle). Baathism was also remorselessly anti-feudal and anti-monarchical, seeing the Hashemite monarchs in particular as reactionaries incapable of modernising the Arab world in the face of Western domination. Baathism was therefore a difficult ideology for the West to co-opt easily. Early Baathism as a “modernising” creed proved popular in the young officer class across the region.
However, by the 1950s hardcore Baathism (heavily centred in Syria and Iraq) found itself in conflict with Nasserism – the pan-Arab project centred around the charismatic Gamal Nasser, who had overthrown the British client monarchy in Egypt in 1952. As a result, Nasser was highly popular in the Arab street and more so after he seized control of the Suez Canal and the subsequent Anglo/French/Israeli invasion of Egypt. Nasser was also quick to secure personal support among the Egyptian peasantry by introducing a major land reform. As Nasser gained personal popularity, his pan-Arab vision became increasingly based on Egyptian supremacy of the movement, which caused tensions then ruptures with the nationalist movements in neighbouring countries.
Part of these tensions can be traced to rivalry between the military-Bonapartist regimes that emerged in the early, neocolonial era. In a whole series of Arab states, independence from the metropoles produced a conflict with the old, compromised, feudal monarchies and the military officer caste. Joining the latter was the obvious career path for ambitious, intelligent young men from the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie. It is no surprise that radical, anti-imperialist, anti-feudal currents emerged among young officers. These currents sized power after independence across the Arab world, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. But military-Bonapartism proved factious. As well as internal coups and counter coups, the new regimes were only too happy to mobilise against each other. The Stalinist communist parties – which were relatively strong in the Arab countries in neocolonial times – also had a bad habit of supporting rival military cliques, as a short cut to influence rather than mobilising the masses. But this merely led to the physical liquidation of local communist parties themselves. At the same time, America and the European imperialisms turned to supporting the remaining Arab monarchies – in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan and Morocco – as a bulwark against revolution. Thus any hope of Arab unity was destroyed and along with it the secular nature of the early Arab revolution. The subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalist millenarianism as a political movement has its roots in this historic failure.
Role of the Soviet bloc
It is not possible to fully understand the early, neocolonial episode without examining the highly contradictory role of the Soviet Union, Maoist China and the other Soviet bloc countries. Stalin in the period between 1945 and his death in 1951 was highly suspicious of the emerging, post-colonial states, believing them to be Western stooges. Added to this was the ailing Stalin’s increasing paranoia. This led, for instance, to Stalin ordering Mao not to seize power at the end of World War Two, but to collaborate with the Nationalists. Stalin initially recognised the new State of Israel, seeing it as a potential local ally ranged against the pro-Western Arab monarchies. Indeed, with Stalin’s approval, the Czechs supplied military equipment to Israel and IDF Flying Fortresses bombed Cairo (still a British protectorate) from bases in Czechoslovakia!
The start of the Cold War pushed the Soviets towards supporting neocolonial struggles as a way of gaining leverage against America – but strictly in Russia’s chauvinist interests. Stalin’s support for the invasion of South Korea in 1950 was linked in part to keeping Russia’s pre-revolutionary treaty access to Chinese Pacific ports. With Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s (mild) de-Stalinisation and turn to “peaceful coexistence” – to allow a switch of resources away from Russia’s militarised economy – was balanced with a more positive turn to supporting neocolonial struggles. This did three things. First it brought Moscow potential allies. Second, it provided ideological cover – internally and externally – for Khrushchev’s attempt to reach an accommodation with the West. Third, it allowed Khrushchev to counter the increasing influence of Maoist China in the post-colonial world.
The high points of this turn were The Soviet threat to use force against the Franc-British invasion of Egypt, and the stationing of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. The Soviet bloc soon became a major supplier of military aid to the new nations in Africa and the Middle East, and famously supplied loans to build the Aswan High dam in Egypt after the West withdrew financing. The Soviets also established a major educational and training scheme for African and Arab technicians, engineers, doctors and military personnel.
But Soviet aid was not all positive. The Russians fostered a disastrous economic model of instant heavy industrialisation unsuited to the new nations and which created largescale indebtedness. The Soviet Union also expected its client states (which is what some became) to blindly follow Moscow’s dictates, replicating neocolonial attitudes. This led to friction with the local elites and ending in the physical liquidation of local Communist Parties (seen as Moscow’s tools).
For instance, an early Soviet client state in Africa was Guinea. Under the leadership of Sekou Toure, Guinea rejected the 1958 French referendum on constitutional union. Outraged, de Gaulle cut off relations with Guinea – a vacuum the Soviets were only too happy to fill. Eventually, Toure got tired of Soviet paternalism. In April 1960, he declared that “if certain people wished to found a Guinean Communist party they should realize that the PDG (Toure’s party) would oppose them…”. Toure also began to complain about the quality of Soviet goods. After a brief flirtation with Maoist China, Toure did the obvious thing to secure his dictatorship by switching back to French influence in 1978.
By the 1970s, Moscow and its client regimes in the neocolonial world were losing influence. The declining Soviet bloc simply lacked the economic means to compete directly with the West. In a dangerous move, Moscow turned to military intervention to protect what was left of its friends in the neocolonial zone. Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and Cuban proxies were dispatched to fight for the murderous Derg regime in its war with Somali. Behind a cloak of supposed Marxism-Leninism, the Derg regime led by Mengistu Haile Mariam succeeded in killing several million Ethiopians, a genocide on a par with the worst the West was able to offer.
Overall, the balance sheet of Soviet bloc intervention in the neocolonial world between 1945 and the fall of the Iron Curtain was negative, propping up military-Bonapartist regimes and adding to the endemic instability of the post-colonial world. Ultimately, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan suffered the same fate as US imperialism in Vietnam: an unwinnable war and mounting casualties led to popular discontent at home, ultimately forcing a retreat and triggering a domestic political crisis. In one sense, the Afghan adventure led directly to the collapse of the Soviet regime itself.
Resistance to neocolonialism
We cannot leave our analysis of the actuality of neoliberalism without concluding that the new imperialist project was contested vigorously. The victory of a Vietnamese peasant army over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 not only shattered Western colonial invincibility, it triggered a world-wide belief among the downtrodden and oppressed that imperialism could be beaten. The election of radical governments, and urban and peasant uprisings, rocked the US fiefdom in Latin America throughout the period, forcing repeated military or proxy interventions: Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Guyana (1961–64), Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1970–73), and Nicaragua (1981 and after).
Latin America was the scene of a major defeat for the neocolonial project. In 1959, nationalist Cuban insurgents led by Fidel Castro unexpectedly overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Cuba was a classic early US neocolonial fiefdom serving as a conduit for US sugar and Mafi investments. However, resulting from a combination of US arrogance and insouciance, the Castroist nationalist uprising soon turned into a full-bloodied break with the neocolonial system. Cuba duly exited the American sphere of influence in favour of Soviet tutelage.
However, for a time the Cuban revolution – whatever its subsequent evolution and however we characterise the Castro regime – served as the beacon for a new generation of indigenous struggles against both neocolonialism (especially in Latin America) and the remaining remnants of old-style settler colonialism. Unfortunately, the Castroist focus on armed struggle by a small vanguard proved to be a disastrous model when applied elsewhere. In Latin America, guerrilla war and urban terrorism was substituted for mass political action. These substitutist movements were soon crushed mercilessly with the aid of the US. But that does not detract from the heroic resistance of the continent to US imperialism. The Old Mole of revolution never vanished.
This was proven by the Cuban-like Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, which overthrew the hated Somoza neocolonial regime. The Sandinista government proceeded to institute land reform, mass literacy programmes, and nationalise industry. The Reagan administration reacted in typical US fashion by orchestrating and arming the Contra counterrevolutionaries. In the final analysis, the neocolonialist version of imperialism was always willing to resort to force when faced with popular resistance.
