New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

CAMMACK: U.N. Imperialism 233
link between the U.N. system and the national government, and the
promotion of “country ownership” of integrated poverty-reduction
strategies revolving around private investment, entrepreneurship, and
competition. At the same time, it has taken a leading role in the preparation
of key policy documents, most notably the Secretary-General’s
report to the September 2005 “World Summit” in New York. 3 As a consequence
of this closely coordinated activity, the “World Summit” saw the
consummation of the parallel processes of institutional reform and the
reorientation of the U.N. towards the promotion of capitalism on a
global scale, with the M.D.G.’s as ever the focal point: the endorsement of
the proposals for reform set out under Annan’s name in In Larger
Freedom set the seal on both the new imperialist project and U.N.’s claims
to leadership of it.
The novel form of contemporary imperialism – the promotion of
capitalism on a global scale by international organizations – reflects the
fact that the phase of monopoly capitalism within which Lenin and
others situated their analysis is long behind us. The “neoliberal
revolution” of the late 1970s, with its objective of restoring the social
efficacy of the law of value, and the phase of “completion of the world
market” which culminated in the incorporation of the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe into the global capitalist system, have
combined to propel capitalism into a new age of competition on a global
scale. This is the context within which the new imperialist project has
emerged at the heart of the U.N., and it embraces rather than resists the
logic of competitiveness. Entrepreneurship is to be unleashed everywhere,
in developed and developing countries alike, among the rich and
among the poor, as poverty reduction requires economic growth which
in turn requires private investment, and “[g]overnments and intergovernmental
agencies can facilitate private sector development only by
fostering properly functioning competitive markets.” 4 This chapter
sketches the emergence of the project, analyses its content and identifies
its characteristic discursive strategies, with extensive direct reference to
the official documents in which it is set out. Its central argument is that
the M.D.G.’s, far from representing a rejection or attenuation of the
“neoliberal revolution” of the late twentieth century, have been envisaged
and deployed from the outset as a vehicle for its realization and legitimation
on a global scale.