Globalisation and the Caribbean in the Age of Neo-Mercantilist Imperialism

• Author: Hilbourne Watson
• Pages: 27-62

Globalisation & The Caribbean 27

Introduction

Historically, realist and liberal theories of international relations have

shared a commitment to the idea of the self-interested individual. Traditional

realism projected individual self-interestedness onto societies and states and

the international system where they discovered anarchy and state’s interest

defined in terms of power and tamed both with a rationalistic disposition which

they yoked to organic sovereignty and the balance of power. Liberals remained

faithful to individual and state self-interestedness and rationalistic economism,

and stressed the role of order through international rules, institutions and

organisations to mediate power. At the core, both theories have remained

committed to the centrality of the national state with all its contradictions.

They have been partial to global white supremacy (Eurocentrism) and,

increasingly, they have converged along lines of methodology and are less

divided in terms of how they see the world. The shift to neo-liberalism reveals

this convergence to the point where it is useful to speak of a realist-liberal

position on the key issues in contemporary international relations. It is on

questions such as the role of the state in contemporary globalisation, the question

of imperialism, the use of the power of the United States of America in the world,

and world order that the convergence is most obvious.

My main concern in this chapter is to provide a context for analysing the

September 11, 2001 events within an alternative theoretical framework to

liberalism and neo-liberalism in order to explain contemporary global change.

To this end, I will discuss some of the problems with liberalism, discuss global

governance within the context of the deployment of the financial, economic

and military power of the United States (US), provide an alternative theory of

globalisation to counteract liberal globalisation theory, connect contemporary

war and crisis to neo-mercantilist imperialism and explore some of the

GLOBALISATION AND THE CARIBBEAN IN

THE AGE OF NEO-MERCANTILIST

IMPERIALISM

HILBOURNE WATSON

CHAPTER three

28 GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

implications for the contemporary Caribbean. I argue that liberal globalisation

theory displaces imperialism and distorts the explanation of contemporary global

change. Contemporary global restructuring via states, science and technology,

industry, finance, markets, and military and geopolitical processes turns on the

restructuring of imperialism. The crisis that grips Caribbean states and their

societies is integral to the larger crisis of capital accumulation, with myriad

implications for diverse interests in those societies. I locate the September 11

events within this broad context and I treat those events as an aspect of the

broader shifts within the geopolitics of contemporary imperialism.

At the core, international relations theory turns on questions and problems

of world order where many questions about legitimacy, justice, rationality, ethics,

and human rights abound. Such questions extend to issues of political economy

as opposed to economics, which is dominated by neoclassical concerns. The

idea that contemporary economic globalisation is an unprecedented

development that marginalises and/or empties national states fails to account

for major changes in the global political economy. It is an argument that favours

the class and other interests of dominant states and corporate capital and diverts

attention from contemporary imperialism. Another concern is that liberalism

romanticises the scientific and technological revolution which is based on

computers and the application of computer-based technology for the production

of goods and services. Capitalism in the age of electronics is a very contradictory

process that has not delivered what liberals and neo-liberals have asserted to be

its most prominent achievements (Petras 2002). Global instability and US

unilateralism and militarism have been among the most prominent features of

neo-liberalism. In relation to capitalism and imperialism the term crisis refers

to fundamental “turning points” around “discontinuities of history, … breaks

in the path of development, ruptures in a pattern of movement, variations in the

intensity of time” (Holloway 1995: 5-6). Crisis necessitates a restructuring of

the productive base of the political economy and the broader material and

subjective aspects of social life. Under capitalism, crisis inheres within the capital

relation itself, though it unfolds in the capital accumulation process.

A core cultural construct of liberal philosophy and political theory is that

valuing freedom in the West is a peculiar contribution the West has made to its

own development and that of the world. In reality, values and institutions like

freedom, liberty, justice, and equality have been conditioned by protracted

struggles that humans have waged against exploitation, oppression and other

exclusions along lines of geographical origin, race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.

Such oppressions and exclusions have included the genocidal removal of

population groups from their lands along with other strategies that modern

imperialism has employed to clear the earth for capital. Capitalism is the

foundation upon which liberal conceptions and practices of liberty, freedom,

justice and equality have been built, and capitalism is a system of production,

Globalisation & The Caribbean 29

exchange, and accumulation that necessitates one group to produce and alienate

its own surplus labour to reproduce another group as the precondition of its

own reproduction. Liberalism bases its commitment to universal humanism on

this very foundation that necessitates the naturalisation of material, economic

and social inequality. The construction of liberal institutions on foundations of

inequality means that all forms of freedom, rights and justice within liberal

capitalist societies are already prefigured and compromised by inequality and

the myriad forms of exclusion and violence on which capitalism and the nation-

state are based.

Liberalism invents a self-interested individual with properties that refer to

an “abstraction inherent in each single, isolated, individual” that approximates

an “unencumbered self”, an idealised “antecedently individuated self” (Ramsay

1997: 24-27) who begins as a subject mired in alienation. Liberalism makes the

historical institutions and social relations that humans create and in which

they are embedded secondary and relatively passive means to the private ends

of self-interested individuals. The subjugation of social interests to market-

determined individualist impulses is based on the myth that the market and the

“antecedently individuated self” have natural origins. Humans acquire

individuals with human agency through a process of internalising the values

and institutions of society but liberal philosophy and political theory make the

individual in capitalist society prior to society, in effect subordinating the social

aspirations of all individuals to market necessity (Marx 1968: 29; Marx 1973:

84, Castoriadis 1991). Liberalism lodges a false dichotomy between nature and

culture and assigns to capitalism, markets and labour approximate values that

derive from a pre-social human ontology. In the liberal schema markets become

a natural amalgam of distillated individual strivings and labour is reduced to a

technical entity that humans naturally alienate in their striving toward self-

interestedness. The effect is to separate labour from the social relations of

capitalism and to disconnect it from any worthwhile relationship to its particular

productive ontology under the political economy of capitalism. Thus the three

categories of capital, labour and the market are separated from the social relations

of which they are integral parts, humans become miraculously capitalistic by

nature and the way is left open for the reification of categories, the banishment

of social relations and the abolition of historical facts. In this scenario theory

atrophies, liberal commonsensical pragmatism takes the high ground, a false

dichotomy is imposed between market rationality and state irrationality, markets

and capital are equated to autonomous technical forms, bad government policy

is blamed for economic crisis and capital is shielded from its historical

contradictory nature and processes.

The liberal way of naturalising individual self-interestedness through

competition and egotism does not only make it difficult to understand liberal

democracy as a form of class power and class rule in the state and civil society,