New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

6 The New Imperialists
overwhelming military might becomes the only way of policing capitalist
interests. When terrorist violence beyond the state is thrown into the
mix, the problem becomes even more intractable. For these reasons, a
more or less permanent state of warfare – war without end – has become
definitive of twenty-first-century capitalism: “Boundless domination of a
global economy, and of the multiple states that administer it, requires
military action without end, in purpose or time.” 12
If a state of permanent war has become the “new normal” of our time,
it is clear why the discourse of empire has become so vital to those who
defend this new order of things: the domestication of war and imperial
conquest has become an urgent ideological imperative.
The essays compiled here are intended as a challenge to these new
ideologies of empire; their goal is to engage a broad range of the apologies
for the new imperialism that have appeared in recent years.
In the opening chapter, Ellen Meiksins Wood discusses why the new
imperialism also requires a new concept of democracy, one that further
removes the economic interests of capital from popular control and
places the state more firmly than ever in the service of capital. Through a
contemporary reading of Tocqueville’s views on American democracy,
Aziz Al-Azmeh explores the irrational and illiberal roots of American
political culture and their contemporary expression in U.S. attitudes
toward the Arab world. Al-Azmeh warns of a deep compatibility between
the Puritan communalism and libertarian multiculturalism that informs
American thinking and the religious and communal sectarianism now
being entrenched in the political and constitutional structures of the
“new” Iraq. In chapter 3, Tariq Ali challenges the rhetoric of “civilizational
clashes” put forward by Samuel Huntington and others, and its
long-term consequences for the Middle East. Shahrzad Mojab debunks
the claim that Western imperialism can end the religious and social
oppression of women, arguing that the twin realities of imperialist war
and religious fundamentalism threaten to worsen dramatically the
situation of women in the Middle East. David McNally, in chapter 5,
deconstructs Michael Ignatieff ’s concept of “imperialism lite,” revealing
its fetishistic foundations. Ignatieff ’s imperialist narcissism, McNally
argues, blinds him to the contradictions of a philosophical “ethics” which
excuses torture and tolerates systematic human rights violations as
“lesser evils.” Chapter 6 critiques the rehabilitation of British imperial
history by the conservative historian Niall Ferguson and his call for a