Contenu du sommaire : Politiques impérialistes

This paper defines the various types of empire seen in recent centuries and attempts to categorize American imperialism in these terms. It then discusses two recent intensifications of American imperialism: the US-headed neo-liberal/ floating dollar offensive that began in the 1970s, and the military imperialism intensifying during the 1990s and 2000s. It asks whether the two were closely connected as, for example, world systems theorists argue. It concludes they were not. They were pushed by different interest groups with different motivations and with very different consequences. Whereas the economic intensification was carefully calibrated to American interests and succeeded in preserving American global dominance, military intensification was much more ideological and emotional and has failed, to a degree undermining American dominance.

This article stresses the continuities between the US policy of moral imperialism, implemented during the colonization of the Philippines in the early 20th century, and the strategies of symbolic domination that buttressed US hegemony during the Cold War. The Wall Street lawyers who sought to make colonialism legitimate also happen to be the founding father of the foreign policy establishment, which later mobilized its networks to oversee the strategies and the institutions of the Cold War. In both cases, imperialism blended idealism and clientelistic policies locally, within state institutions, but also internationally, through the establishment of educational and philanthropic networks that ensured the selection and the training of modernist professional elites upholding democratic norms. This hegemonic policy that unfolds in parallel to military interventions is relayed and amplified by the influence of these elites in the periphery, often reconverted into “friends of the United States”. The article then proceeds to analyze these homologies by tracing the trajectories of the heirs of colonial jurists, first expelled from power by Sukarno and later reinventing themselves, with the assistance of the Ford Foundation, as both defenders of a law-based ideal of justice and corporate law entrepreneurs, following a model imposed by the US legal elite.

This paper bridges the neo-Weberian and sociocultural approaches to explaining colonial state formation by focusing on colonial governors as principals in the state building process stretching between metropole and colony. I argue that native resistance was central to state formation by “interfering” in the political-economic and ethnographic rationalities of colonial governing emphasized by the two approaches respectively. Resistance was interpreted by governors in the frames of both political-economic interests and ethnographic representations, therefore creating contradictory rationalities that define the field of political contestation over colonial policy, particularly between conservatives and technocrats. In Malaya and the Philippines, these contradictory rationalities produced trajectories of contrastive state formation from protectorate indirect rule to centralized bureaucratic rule in the former and vice-versa in the latter. Both trajectories saw conservative and technocratic policies succeeding each other, culminating in political crisis and causing colonial decay, where resistance emerges finally as anti-colonial nationalist movements.

The emergence of a colonial form of political power in India between 1760 and 1810 can be considered as a gradual dispossession, in favor of the British Crown, of the commercial, legal and political privileges granted by the London Parliament to a powerful private merchant company, the East India Company. This process was the outcome of several developments: the internal crisis triggered by the Company's Indian policy, the rise of economic interest groups promoting the values of free trade, and the emergence of protestant missionary movements. All these actors demanded the free circulation of capital, men as well as cultural and religious goods between England and India. They contributed to the emergence of a specific social universe, the field of colonial power, divided between the metropole and its colony, subjected to a form of domination made legitimate by principles reflecting exclusively the interests and the values of the British elites.

During the first decades of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) sought to establish itself on the coasts of Java in order to enjoy a direct and lasting access to the spices of the Insulindian world. But Java was not a politically virgin land: the VOC established its outpost on the outskirts of the Banten Sultanate, with which it intended to have commercial relations, and in 1628-1629 it had to sustain the assaults led by the armies of the lord of Mataram. Explaining the conflict-ridden relations between the representatives of the VOC and these Javanese political powers in terms of “cultural differences” is not very useful: it is better to analyze them in the light of the objective social attributes and explicit moral visions specific to the various protagonists of this “contact situation”. This was not an encounter between “the Netherlands” and “Java”, but between merchants from Hoorn and Amsterdam who had to negotiate, under very particular circumstances, with the highest members of the Javanese aristocracy. The VOC was neither at the service of a monarchical project, nor the expression of a consensually defined “national” consciousness: it was travailed by multiple allegiances, as the Prince of Orange had to constantly negotiate with the Grand Pensionary of Amsterdam and with the States-General, dominated by the rivalries between municipal potentates and by the representatives of the merchants. The Company asserted in no uncertain terms its autonomy vis-à-vis the States-General and the House of Orange. From its inception, its personnel was multi-national and came primarily from the merchants circles and from the world of the docks. The VOC was thus attuned to the various forms of urban commerce, which provided the social foundations of the power of the Regents of the seafront cities adamantly opposed to the old landed nobility. Conversely, at the same time, the Javanese nobiliary elites consistently ridicule the character of the merchant motivated by financial gain, in the name of an ideal of ascetic life. As a result, they also perceived the Dutch through the lens of the “moral wars” that the Javanese elites waged between themselves. The Dutch thus became, in the last instance, the characters of a specifically Javanese history.

Most of the states that exist nowadays are the direct institutional descendents of colonial states, yet very little is understood about these colonial predecessors. Social scientists have tended to reduce the colonial state to an expression of economic practices and structures. This article argues that the modern colonial state was relatively autonomous from the environing colonial society and from metropolitan government, and that it took on some of the characteristics of a “field” as described by Bourdieu. Different European social groups competed for a specific form of symbolic capital within the ambit of the colonial state, and these conflicts shaped the colonial state's policies. These effects are most evident when we examine colonial native policy. This theoretical approach can help to explain why some pre-1914 German colonies engaged in economically-irrational genocide (Southwest Africa), some pursued programs of cultural re-traditionalization (German Polynesia), and others moved from racialized segregation to respectful civilizational exchange with members of the colonized society (German Qingdao/Kiaochow).