The Nature of the ‘New’ Imperialism
Victoria Colloquium
September 30, 2005
James Tully
Introduction
This is a lecture in the Victoria Colloquium. However, it is also a lecture related to the
Demcon Conference on Supranational Communities.
1. I see the two venues fitting together in the following way:
For the Victoria Colloquium I would like to say a few words about the logic of the new
imperialism, and for the Demcon Conference I would like to say that we can learn much
about the character or logic of ‘supranational communities’ by studying what I will call
‘imperial communities’.
I will suggest that imperial communities, old and new, are a species of supranational
communities. I will also suggest that imperial communities are the paramount form of
supranational communities today.
By the ‘logic’ or ‘nature’ of supranational and imperial communities, I mean the ways in
which the actors within these communities interact in the relationship that are constitutive
of these communities.
2. Let’s start from where we are: Indigenous and Newcomer supranational Communities
2.1. Indigenous supranational communities
1. This conference is taking place on the site of interaction of 2 overlapping Indigenous
supranational communities: the Songhees and the Saanich First Nations and their broader
communities of association with other first peoples on Vancouver Island and the
Mainland: the Straits Salish, the Coast Salish, the Nuu Chah Nuulth, and so on. This is
their traditional territory and a particularly important site of interaction between these two
Indigenous Supranational Communities (ISNCS) for thousands of years.
2. We are guests on their traditional territories and within their ISNCS. Just in virtue of
coming here we are recognized and welcomed as guests of various kinds and recognized
under the appropriate relationships for guests in the broader network of relationships that
make up these ISNCS. We, in turn, recognize that these are their traditional territories
and that we are entering into relationships or partnerships as guests within these
communities.
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3. When Indigenous people come to Victoria from other ISNCS throughout North
America, they are recognized and welcomed in another set of community relationships,
usually a clan relationship, and enter into citizenship networks under this relationship
within the broader community (such as Val and Dawnis).
4. Moreover, when Europeans first arrived here, the Spanish and British were welcomed
and the first peoples tried (and continue to try) to bring them into these already existing
ISNCS and their complex networks of relationships on the West coast of this island,
especially through treaty relationships.
5. So, Indigenous SNCS do not have a sharp boundary between inside/outside or
nation/supranational community, but, rather, an infinite gradation of types of
relationships under which actors or partners are recognized and communities established,
often in the language of ‘kin’ relationships’ and analogies on these (Glen Coulthard).
6. We can say that the first ‘nations’ are themselves only one type of actor within these
larger ISNC and their complex logic of kin-like relationships that describe all the
members and their modes of interaction, including the non-Indigenous newcomers.
2.2. Imperial Communities.
1. Now Let’s remember also that when the Spanish and British arrived, they did not come
as European ‘nations’ bur, rather, as the British and Spanish empires, that is, as
representatives of two global imperial communities, and they treatied (or refused to treaty)
with Indigenous peoples under this description. And these two imperial communities
have complex ways of recognizing and entering into relations with others, some less
‘imperial’ than others.
2. So, this afternoon we are literally ‘in’ what we might call two very complex clusters of
supranational communities and their interaction over 100’s of years: the indigenous
supranational communities and the non-indigenous imperial communities.
3. We can speak of ‘first nations’ and the Canadian ‘nation’, but, as I have tried to
suggest, these national forms of community are themselves actors within much larger
communities of relationships that precede them historically.
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1. The paramountacy of Imperial Communities
This introduction to the lived experience of supranational communities brings me to my
main point:
1. The phrase ‘supranational communities’ is often taken to mean that ‘national
communities’ (nations) come first historically and conceptually, and then supranational
communities come along and are built on the basis of, and up from, modern nations and
nation states. Nations and Nation states are somehow historically and logically prior to
supranational communities, or transnational, or global societies, and so on, which are
often seen as just emerging in the present.
2. This way of thinking is reinforced by the emergence of an officially recognized world
of nation states after 1945; the projection of this framework back to 1648 as the
‘Westphalian system’; by theories and histories of nation state building over the last 400
years; by various pictures of globalization, TNC, GCS, SNC, ‘altering’ or ‘superceding’
the system of states, of compromising state ‘sovereignty’; and so on (Edinburgh paper).
3. But, I would like to suggest that we can learn much about supranational communities
by turning this orientation around and thus by taking certain forms of supranational
communities as prior to nations and states, both historically and formatively, and still
paramount today.
4. The kind of SNCS I have in mind are ‘empires’ or what I will call ‘imperial
communities’: that is, communities made up of the unequal relationships among the
hegemonic and subaltern actors (partners) within any imperial system.
By ‘hegemonic’ and ‘subaltern’ actors within an imperial community, I just mean the
actors who are differentially situated with respect to each other in virtue of the
relationship among them in an imperial system.
Classically, the major actors are ‘imperial states’ and their ‘economic corporations’ or
‘companies’ on one side and ‘colonies’, ‘dependencies’, ‘protectorates’, and so on, on the
other;
And, the unequal relationships among them, which constitute the imperial community,
are economic relationships, political relationships, military relationships, legal
relationships, educational relationships, linguistic relationships, aid relationships, etc.
But, as we have seen in the background papers, these relationships of hegemonization on
one side and subalternization on the other, take a multiplicity of forms of interdependency,
especially in the current period of informal imperial communities after decolonization.
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5. My argument, as I lay it out in the two background papers, is, in 10 theses:
a. Imperial communities are the oldest forms of SNCS in the West,
b. Nations, nation states, and supranational communities have been formed historical
within imperial communities,
c. Imperial Communities did not disappear with decolonization, nation-state building, and
the formal recognition of the former colonies as independent nation-states in the late 20th
century. While limited powers of self-determination and nation-building were transferred
to the former colonies, the former colonies found themselves within the persisting
unequal economic, legal, educational and military relationships of dependency and
subordination that had been established during the long period of colonial imperialism.
d. A new form of informal, interactive imperial rule of ‘global governance’ arose to
govern the former colonies indirectly through their limited powers of self-rule and on the
basis of the persisting inequalities. The European colonial empires and the US informal,
rule over Latin America were ‘internationalized’ after WWII and a set of Bretton Woods
‘global’ institutions were established to govern their former competing imperial
communities informally (IMF, GATT, WB). The US took the leadership role from the
old European imperial powers, sometimes leading by coalition, sometimes unilaterally.
e. So, the ‘new’ imperialism of the ‘Bush administration’, the WB and IMF, the G8, and
so on, is really more accurately understood as a transformation of the older competiting
imperial communities and their formal colonies of the 19th century to a new international
informal imperial community that tries to govern its former colonies, not through formal
colonies, but informally through the Bretton Woods’ institutions of global governance,
and, when these fail, through the US global military full spectrum dominance.
f. When we speak of the European Union or NAFTA as ‘supranational communities’ we
can, on this perspective, see them as the reconfiguration of ‘actors’ within these larger
imperial communities, trying to adjust to the new, informal, post-WWII form of global
imperial community.
g. And, this perspective is just as illuminating for studying the attempts of Indigenous
peoples to try to find new forms of global supranational communities in this new era of
informal imperialism, as Robert Hershey, Anthony Hall and others suggest.
h. If this is at all plausible, then we can learn much about the logic of various kinds of
supranational communities by studying the logic of hegemonic and subaltern
relationships of the informal imperial communities within which these smaller
supranational communities, such as the EU and NAFTA, have emerged.
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i. Specifically, we can study the ways in which subaltern actors are rendered subordinate
and dependent in informal imperial relationships today; and, conversely, what freedom
they may have to modify and perhaps even transform the unequal relationships in which
they find themselves,
j. This approach to the logic of the unequal relationships among members of an informal
imperial community is not different in kind in studying any supranational community.
II. The logic of the relationships of imperial communities
1. Now, an ‘informal imperial relationship between hegemon and subaltern’ consists in
three main features:
1.1. It is a relationship of economic, political, legal, cultural, educational, linguistic
power that is unequal to the extent that one partner (hegemon) in the relationship is able
to structure, or at least anticipate and co-opt, the field of possible actions of the other
partner (subaltern) by various means. The more powerful actors act ‘strategically’
whereas the less powerful actors are constrained to act ‘tactically’. (This is of course a
general characterization of an unequal relationship of governance in almost any approach
to actor-network relationships.)
1.2. What makes these general kinds of unequal relationships specifically ‘imperial’ is
that the hegemons are states, MNCS, coalitions of states; subalterns are states, peoples,
whole regions, and so on; and means are global institutions such as WB and IMF,
military, financial, infrastructural control, education, westernization, NGOS, and a
bottomless bag of tools by which the former imperial powers are able to control the
development of their former colonies by diverse means.
1.3. What is characteristic, then, of the relationships within imperial communities
between hegemonic and subaltern members is thus that the relationship is not ‘under the
shared authority of those who are subject to it’. That is, the less powerful actors are
subject to a relationship - of norms, of governance, and of subjectification – over which
they do not have an effective say.
2. Although imperial relationships are not under ‘the shared authority of those who are
subject to them’, the subordinated members are not completely dominated and controlled
by the powerful:
2.1. The subaltern members do have a certain room to manouever within the relationship,
as with all relationships of governance, and this freedom varies from direct military
intervention and domination, formal colonial control, WB programs of detailed
‘structural adjustment’, at one end, to the more open relationships of informal and
infrastructural control over the economic and political affairs of subaltern peoples that
MNCS are able to exercise through the global market, international private law, GATT,
TRIPPS, and so on.
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2.2. Within these relationships, subalternised peoples have the limited freedom to
exercise various degrees of internal self-determination since the 1970s, and the informal
system actually operates on this basis, rather than the unilateral imposition model of the
colonial period.
2.3. And, subaltern peoples are now able to enter into negotiations over these unequal
relationships to some limited extent, on the ground, at the UN, and in other shared
institutions and practices.
I have sketched out 4 types of de-imperializing activities engaged in by subaltern actors
today in ‘Two Meanings of Global Citizenship” III.19-13: alternative legal and political
pluralism, living democracy movements, the journey back of colonized people to the
metropole, and counter-hegemonic networks.
2.4. Precisely because the unequal relationships are relationship of long-standing imperial
communities, subalternised peoples have been able to use the tools used to ‘civilize’ and
‘modernize’ them – to make them good members of the imperial community – to turn
and use these tools to try to reshape the relationships in which they find themselves:
That is, subordinated peoples are able to write back and act back in a diversity of ways.
And this freedom has made a huge difference in creating much more pluralistic and
diverse imperial communities in many respects since decolonization.
2.5 One of the most striking features of the scholarship on the ability of subalterns to
modify the relationships to which they are subject is that there is no privileged agent of
resistance or privileged location of resistance. The possibilities of acting to make imperial
relationships less imperial exist, in potential, in any node within the networks of
relationships, from peasant farmers to the World Bank.
I think that these 5 features of the freedom of subalternised members of imperial
communities are present also in other forms of supranational communities.
3. However, due to the enormous inequalities, what they have been unable to do is to
bring these dense and historically layered global relationships of inequality under their
effective shared authority: that is, where the various actors who are subject to a
relationship with the imperial community are able to have an effective say over the
relationship itself. Rather, they are governed by and subject to international legal,
economic, and military relationships that are imposed on them without their say to a large
degree.
3.1 Hence, Subaltern actors are ‘conscripts of modernity’ rather than free citizens of
modernity, since they are constrained to act within a 500 year old community of imposed
and unequal imperial relationships (see ‘Two Meanings’ III.5-8 for the inequalities).
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Conclusion
1. This brings me to my final point. What would make the unequal relationships of
present-day imperial communities ‘non-imperial’, (given this definition of an imperial
relationship)?
1.1. The answer is the answer that the Consortium on Democratic Constitutionalism gives:
“A relationship, and so the community it constitutes between partners, is non-imperial to
the extent that the relationship is under ‘the shared authority of those subject to it”.
1.2. If it is a relationship that is open to the fair and effective dialogue and negotiation of
all those actors who are subject to it, small and large, then it is, by definition, a
democratic relationship, in the sense that the people have a say over the rules by which
they are governed. A democratic relationship, in this ‘high intensity form’, is by
definition ‘non-imperial’, or so it seems to me.
1.3. This normative commitment is precisely what the term ‘democratic
constitutionalism’ refers to. And, it seems to me that an analogous principle applies to
other forms of supranational communities. That is, they are ‘legitimate’ in the
‘democratic’ sense just in so far as the relationships that constitute the members of the
community rest on the shared authority of those subject to them through dialogue
(arguing) and negotiation (bargaining) over time. I have suggested that the World Social
Forum is a forum for this kind of democratization.
1.4. It follows from this that all the scholarly work on democratizing supranational
communities through dialogue and negotiation that has been done by all the great
scholars who have come to the Demcon conference applies just as well to imperial
communities. Their nature or logic is similar in general, while different in specifics (as I
have indicated). They are not different fields or different problems in the present, but,
rather, a shared field of cases. I owe this crucial point to Neil Walker.
1.5. If I may return to the Indigenous supranational communities from which I started, I
would like to make one final observation. When you enter into an Indigenous
supranational community and are recognized under a relationship and a name, this whole
process of recognition involves an enormous amount of protocol, preparation, discussion,
dialogue and negotiation, and even revision or ‘repolishing’ over time. One could almost
say (as Bill Reid has said) that many indigenous communities on the North West Coast
are oriented around democratic processes of reaching agreement on the relationships
among members and the responsibilities to the community that these relationships entail.
The whole open-ended network of relationships of recognition and governance are under
the shared authority of the differentially situated members who are subject to them.
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1.6. So, I think we can learn a lot about the logic of imperial supranational communities
and attempts to de-imperialize them by studying the nature of the ‘new’ imperialism. And
I think we can learn a lot about non-imperial supranational communities by listening to
Indigenous peoples telling us how they govern themselves in their own supranational
communities.
END
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