Seymour - American insurgents: a brief history of American anti-imperialism

About the Author

Richard Seymour is a socialist and writer, raised in Northern Ireland and living in London. He is the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and The Meaning of David Cameron , and his work is published regularly in the Guardian . Seymour is currently researching a PhD dissertation at the London School of Economics.

American Insurgents

A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism

2012 Richard Seymour

Published in 2012 by Haymarket Books

PO Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

7735837884

ISBN: 978-1-60846-162-2

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

Cover design by Josh On. Cover image of antiwar protesters

at an ROTC ceremony at Ohio State University in 1970.

Associated Press Photo.

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation

and the Wallace Global Fund.

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

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Contents

Preface

It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other.

Mark Twain

Empire, Naked and Unbound

That the United States is an empire is no longer a matter of controversy. Until 2001, Americas awesome global dominion had been referenced only in coy euphemismsleadership, diplomacy, dominance, or, if you were a particularly brazen Realpolitiker, hegemony. American statesmen would respond with a mixture of bemusement, indignation, and faux-naivet to the idea that the United States was an empire. What, us? You misspeak. We lead, we provide an example, we may even exercise a certain power due to our unique gifts. But we are not imperialists, by no means. And perhaps in official disavowals, there was the spirit of a saying attributed to Jimmy Hoffa: Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to say you are, you probably aint.

But the World Trade Center attacks changed this, just as they changed everything else. Journalists, academics, intellectuals, and even on the down-low politicians suddenly found that they rather liked the idea that America was an empire. The liberal journalist and former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff provided the moral warrant for this turn, arguing that the United States was already an Empire Lite and should embrace its imperial responsibilities with more vim, in the name of humanitarian empire.

It wasnt just 9/11 and its intimations of weakness and mortal vulnerability that produced this sudden fervor. Things had recently been going very wrong. There had been a sharp decline in corporate profitability, leading to the bursting of the stock market bubble and a recession. A series of corporate scandals, and a stolen election, had undermined the legitimacy of the dominant institutions. The neoliberal globalization project was meeting new challenges as each new round of trade talks stalled.

And now there was a moment in which one could openly declare for empire, and it would be intelligible and perhaps even on the right side of history, or the right side of a paycheck. Thus, in the febrile atmosphere of the war on terror, the language of imperialism emerged from the margins of radical critique or neoconservative veneration into mainstream academic journals, newspapers, and magazines. This opened up critical possibilities, and it became feasible, with some scrupulous hedging, to mention that the United States was engaging in a little more than leadership, and a little less than diplomacy. In the large antiwar movements, of course, it is a different matter. US imperialism has been an established object of analysis, as well as a term of abuse, at least since the Vietnam Warand, as I aim to show here, well before even that cataclysm.

This is a history largely concerning actors who, barring some exceptional periods of tumult, exercised little power. They didnt usually win their immediate battlesin fact, they often lost catastrophicallythough they made it possible for others to win theirs. The effects of their struggles were usually cumulative and gradual, and their standing in American history is often barely registered in the vast literature. And few would think of trying to explain their collective efforts in terms of a tradition of anti-imperialism. The telling of this recondite history may be justified by furnishing present-day anti-imperialists with the lessons of past experience. Yet readers encountering tales of womens peace groups, military defectors, Central American solidarity movements, segregationists opposed to the Spanish-American War, African American communists, and Native American resistance will wonder what could possibly unite them all. So I have some explaining to do. What is anti-imperialism, if it can be this capacious?

To track down the anti-imperialists of American history, and find out what, if anything, connects the minutemen of the eighteenth century with the GI refuseniks of today, it will be necessary to define, early on, precisely what is meant by imperialism here. The lazy tendency to speak of imperialism as if it were reducible to its colonial forms will not wash, as colonialism did not constitute the full range of imperialist practices even at the zenith of colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So we must be clear in what sense it is relevant to speak of American imperialism outside of its relatively limited experiment in formal colonialism.

This is no simple matter. If you subscribe to Realism in international relations, imperialism is just what states dostates are power-maximizing entities that operate in conditions of international anarchy, and thus the rich and powerful states do what they can, while the weak do what they must. This account rests on bleak Hobbesian precepts about human behavior and political authority, in which the latter arises because of the need to control the natural human propensity to expropriate, cheat, and murder one another. The state emerges to suppress conflict and, paradoxically, secure liberty in doing so. But in the international system, something like the state of nature, anarchy, still prevails. In this system, predation and submission are the rule, and states adopt whatever strategies they canpower-balancing, for exampleto ensure that they will not be the prey of some other state. Global violence and conquest, in this view, is unavoidable. To call it imperialism is at best a tautology, and at worst adds a pejorative layer to sober analysis. I reject this account on various grounds, largely in that it mystifies the real basis for state conduct by eliding the fundamental differences between a myriad of different kinds of states and their basis in different modes of production, and thus works to naturalize and universalize predatory behavior. It is worth pointing out that this school is gaining a surprising following on the liberal left, some of whom greatly esteem the writings of realists such as John Mearsheimer.

The obverse tendency to treat imperialism as a particular policy, which characterized the arguments of the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the twentieth century (see chapter 2), is also of little use here. Such an approach cannot explain the consistency with which multifarious actors working within the dominant states have pursued imperialist strategies. A long-standing rebuke to the league has been that it failed to generate or take on board any systematic theory of imperialism based on geo-economic competition of the kind that was becoming popular at its zenith. This can be overstated, and the narrow political liberalism which undergirded the leagues approach to imperialism did provide some powerful resources with which to critique the colonial project in the Philippines. And there were features of the political environment that made such an approach plausible. It made a certain amount of sense, for example, when there were actually political and business elites willing to mobilize against imperialism, to speak of it as a policy. Nonetheless, this is an aberrant case.