At the time of the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Great Britain had a population of 7 million. India had a population in excess of 200 million. Britain could not conquer India outright. However, the subcontinent’s massive population was divided into myriad language and ethnic groups ruled by a vast number of princes and potentates with competing interests and long-running disputes. By leveraging one group against another, Britain was able to maintain dominance over a country larger, more populous, and more heavily armed than itself. The economics of coal provided the energy for global hegemony, and demanded global territorial claims in order to provide resources and refueling depots for a coal-powered shipping and naval fleet. As coal gave way to petroleum, a new kind of empire emerged. In the midst of the world wars and the decade following them, the great European empires shed nearly all of their colonial holdings. Direct government of vast, global empires became impractical; instead, petroleum favored a new order, one that fit well with the British strategy in India. It replaced territorial control with hegemony, de jure dominion with de facto control, and the conventional empire with a globalized, neocolonial order.

This pattern is certainly not without precedent. Julius Caesar used the same strategy that the British employed in India to take Gaul, and the Roman network of client kingdoms operated in much the same fashion as today’s neocolonial system. Before that, the Persian Empire showed little interest in direct control, and allowed local authorities varying degrees of autonomy, so long as tribute to the empire was forthcoming. In the New World, the Triple Alliance (a.k.a., the Aztecs) likewise allowed local authorities to remain in place, so long as tribute found its way to Tenochtitlan. Rome found that “peace” and “prosperity” were zero-sum resources that could be shuffled about geographically: the Pax Romana was a golden age—for Italy. The provinces suffered poverty, famine, and a nearly chronic state of war. The spoils of constant war flowed to the imperial center and financed the prosperity of Rome, and with Rome’s prosperity came the unquestioned power of the emperor, which brought peace to the imperial core. Essentially, the imperial enterprise was, for Rome, an exercise in the exportation of violence and suffering themselves.

D’Altroy used the “Territorial-Hegemonic Continuum” to describe these variances of imperial systems: territorial empires claim large swaths of land that they rule directly, while hegemonic empires co-opt local authorities, establish client-kingdoms, and on the most informal end, simply create large-scale systems of dependence that put countries in the position of relying on the hegemonic center.

The shift from coal to petroleum that took place over the world wars made the territorial empire untenable, unattractive, and far too costly. It eliminated the need for refueling depots abroad, but necessitated a network of economic dependency that would ensure the flow of petroleum from those countries that possessed it to the traditional European powers that needed it. Independence movements around the world gained traction, and European powers granted that independence—but in such a way that the surrender of de jure dominion would not jeopardize their de facto control. An excellent example of this can be seen in Iraq, a country with no pre-colonial history whatsoever. As Bernard Lewis writes, “Even their names reflect this artificiality: Iraq was a medieval province, with borders very different from those of the modern republic, excluding Mesopotamia in the north and including a slice of western Iran…” (Lewis, 2003) T.E. Lawrence explained that the Kurds would want their own state, for instance. But boundaries that observed natural cultural and bioregional divisions would also make the region stable—and a stable region would have no need for British intervention, and thus, no need to keep supplying the British with the petroleum they needed. Instead, the British drew the boundaries of Iraq specifically to make it unstable. With vying interests in the Kurdish north and the Shi’ite south, the country could only be held together by the hated Sunni minority in the center. The Sunnis had cooperated with British authority in the colonial period, making them already a hated minority in the country; to preserve themselves and their power, they would need British assistance, and by making Iraq’s elite dependent, Britain also secured the flow of oil. Iraq’s borders were drawn specifically and intentionally to make it a hand grenade, with the pin in Baghdad—remove whatever despot that was ruling Baghdad, and the entire country would explode—as the United States has discovered in recent years by removing Saddam Hussein, and pulling that pin.

If there is a common, uniting theme to the nightly news, it is the legacy of colonialism. Civil war often followed independence, as the arbitrary boundaries drawn by Europeans became sources of contention for the people living there. More often than not, Western-backed despots rose to power out of these civil wars and enforced the European order with brutal military regimes. From this pattern, we inherit the world we have today: mostly ruled by Western-backed despots and broiling with rebellion ruthlessly and continuously put down. The pattern is quite similar to that of ancient Rome, with peace and prosperity bought for the imperial core by exporting violence and poverty to the periphery. A few examples to illustrate this trend:

• Chad, for example, was granted its independence from France in 1960. Its first president, François Tombalbaye, was an authoritarian whose rule sparked a civil war that ultimately resulted in the rise of Hissène Habré, with the aid of France and the United States. Habré served as a foil to Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya, but he was also an even more brutal dictator, ruthlessly eliminating all who opposed him. “Once Habré took power, the United States later provided him with tens of millions of dollars in military aid each year and gave financial and logistical support to his secret police while it engaged in torture and other atrocities. The United States also used a clandestine base in Chad to train captured Libyan soldiers whom it was organizing into an anti-Qaddafi force that was said to be armed by another Qaddafi enemy as well: Saddam Hussein.”¹
• In Somalia, independence was achieved by 1960, and by 1969, the assassination of Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke had led to a military take-over. The regime invaded Ethiopia, supposedly to reclaim Somali lands given to Ethiopia by European cartographers. Jaalle Siyaad, the head of the government, originally was backed by the USSR, until the Soviets suddenly changed their allegiance to Ethiopia, and Siyaad turned to the United States. The U.S. strongly supported Siyaad until 1989, sending nearly $100 million per year in economic and military aid. As the U.S.-backed government became increasingly totalitarian, resistance groups proliferated, leading to civil war in 1991 and the eventual breakdown of the Somali government. Today, Somalia is an “empty state,” divided between various warlords, several of whom have strong alliances with al-Qa’ida for helping them coordinate their efforts against the United States and its proxies.
• The United States promised independence in return for the aid of Filipino resistance movements in taking Manila, but then reneged on that promise and made the Philippines a territory of the U.S. The Philippine-American War resulted, as those same resistance movements turned to fight for independence from the United States. The U.S. used scorched earth campaigns, torture and concentration camps to wipe out nearly one-ninth of the Filipino population. After achieving independence in 1946, the Philippines faced instability and constant struggle with rebel groups until the rise of Ferdinand Marcos. The United States increased military aid to Marcos’ Philippines by 300%. Unlike some of his predecessors, Marcos allowed U.S. businesses to operate in the Philippines. When he ran into term limits, Marcos declared himself dictator. By 1977, the Philippine’s military had quadrupled, and some 600,000 Filipinos had been arrested for political reasons. Dissidents were tortured. In 1981, then vice president George Bush praised Marcos for his “adherence to democratic principal and to the democratic processes.” In 1986, Marcos was overthrown by followers of Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated opposition leader. The current president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has been charged with corruption and rigging the election, and has had to put down numerous coup attempts. Islamic seperatist movements and other resistance groups remain strong.

The potential list goes on: Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, Indonesia’s General Suharto, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Liberia’s Charles Taylor, et cetera ad nauseum. The list of Western “client kingdoms” is no mere matter of chance, nor even an artifact of global power, but an active policy. In the wake of World War II and the transition from coal to petroleum, the United States found itself ascendant as a world power. Possessing the world’s largest oil production at the time, the United States was in a position to secure its own global hegemony in the post-war period. Oilmen with the experience and capital from the Texas fields were able to establish the first oil fields in the Middle East, and ensure the place of the “petrodollar,” the denomination of the global oil trade in U.S. dollars. At the same time, the United States began instituting its first permanent, large-scale military establishment. Classified top-secret at the time, U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study #23 in 1948 was quite clear about the position the United States would have to take. Authored by Secretary of State George Kennan, it quite explicitly urged the President to take on a neocolonial enterprise.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Neocolonialism operates on several simultaneous fronts, but it is primarily economic. The original boundaries drawn by European powers established deliberately unstable situations, allowing Western powers to hold sway over countries by offering support to one of the combatants. This plan suffered some complications as the Cold War set in, putting the USSR and the United States into a race to acquire more of these “client-kingdoms” than the other, but it did succeed in making the “Third World” a tool to be used, whether by the First or the Second. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine offered little variation on the neocolonial pattern as part of a Soviet containment policy.

The use for the Third World is primarily economic. Political control is unnecessary to make the Third World impoverish itself as an engine of First World prosperity. One of the chief tools for this has been Third World debt, through agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. In Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins outlined the methods he used to strong-arm Third World governments into taking out loans they could never repay. When his tactics of deceptive economic forecasts failed, the “jackals”—CIA hit men—came in to eliminate such governments, so that other governments, more amenable to American economic interests, could be installed. A movie like Syriana may be fiction, but the events it depicts are all too typical to ignore.

Like U.S. citizens in general, most MAIN employees believed we were doing countries favors when we built power plants, highways, and ports. Our schools and our press have taught us to perceive all of our actions as altruistic. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard comments like, “If they’re going to burn the U.S. flag and demonstrate against our embassy, why don’t we just get out of their damn country and let them wallow in their own poverty?”

People who say such things often hold diplomas certifying that they are well educated. However, these people have no clue that the main reason we establish embassies around the world is to serve our own interests, which during the last half of the twentieth century meant turning the American republic into a global empire. Despite credentials, such people are as uneducated as those eighteenth-century colonists who believed that the Indians fighting to defend their lands were servants of the devil. (Perkins, 2004)

The root need for such a subtle system of economic exploitation lies in the economics of petroleum, and its tendency to “overshoot,” by providing the beginnings of a lifestyle it cannot support in depth. The prosperity of the West has far outrun the capacity to sustain it. Particularly since the peaking of North American petroleum production in 1970 and the ensuing oil crisis, the “American way of life” has become something that no American could ever possibly afford. The key to its continuation lies in one of the most bone-chilling euphemisms of the modern world: “externalities.”

British economist A.C. Pigou was instrumental in developing the theory of externalities. The theory examines cases where some of the costs or benefits of activities “spill over” onto third parties. When it is a cost that is imposed on third parties, it is called a negative externality. When third parties benefit from an activity in which they are not directly involved, the benefit is called a positive externality. The study of such situations, a part of welfare economics, has been an active area of research since Pigou’s efforts early in the twentieth century.

There are standard examples given to illustrate both types of externalities. Pollution is a typical case of negative externality. Let’s say I operate a factory along a river, making foozle dolls. As a byproduct of my manufacturing, I dump lots of foozle waste into the river. This is a terrible cost to people downriver because, as everyone knows, foozle waste stinks to high heaven.

If neither my customers nor I have to pay this cost, our choice as to how many foozle dolls to produce will be, in a sense, incorrect. If we had to pay these costs, we would have chosen a smaller number of dolls. Instead, we chose to produce “too many” dolls, while the people downriver are forced to foot the bill for part of our activity.²

In the documentary The Corporation, Interface Carpets CEO Ray Anderson said, “A corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. Each one is designed in a very particular way to accomplish certain objectives. In the achievement of those objectives there isn’t any question of malevolence or will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, thosecharacteristics that enable it do that for which it was designed.” Externalities make the “American way of life” possible by allowing us to underestimate its cost. Even with current prices sparking news reports and political campaigns, Americans are paying a small fraction of the true price of gasoline. The United States military, through interventions in oil-rich countries over the past decade or more, has borne much of the externalized cost in social turmoil involved in the reliable production of gasoline, and the despots necessary to ensure its continued supply. Yet most of our externalities are levied on the Third World.

Government subsidization for corn has ruined the small farmer, leaving the Midwest in the hands of agribusiness and producing a glut of cheap corn. This puts Third World farmers in a position where it is more economical for them to produce cash crops like coffee and cotton for sale to Western markets than to grow food for themselves. The lack of food crops and the over-reliance on these cash crops played a key role in the Rwandan genocide. The desperate economic situation of the Third World, created by the post-colonial context, provides a pool of cheap labor that can provide the goods for Western materialism; meanwhile, Third World debt provided by the World Bank and the IMF, as well as the constant wars of brutal Western-backed dictators and the often equally brutal rebels that seek to displace them keep the situation desperate enough for the situation to continue (while the latter also provides markets for Western arms dealers).

The division between the public and private sectors has also become largely illusory. The website “theyrule.net” has fallen somewhat out of date, but it remains a powerful illustration of the fact that corporate CEO’s, Boards of Directors, government agencies and heads of state all come from the same, tightly-knit pool. Before becoming Vice President, Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton; Paul Wolfowitz left his government position to become heard of the World Bank; George Bush, Sr. left the presidency to take a job with the Carlyle Group.

This was a close-knit fraternity of a few men with shared goals, and the fraternity’s members moved easily and often between corporate boards and government positions. It struck me that the current president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, was a perfect example. He had moved from a position as president of Ford Motor Company, to secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and now occupied the top post at the world’s most powerful financial institution. (Perkins, 2004)

The decentralized, subtle imperialism of neocolonialism has leant itself to the ascendancy of the multinational corporation as an entity that could weave through the appropriate corridors of economic power and influence, but the unforeseen result has been the weakening of the state in the imperial center, as it too has become largely an agent of the ascendant corporation.

Globalization creates a positive feedback cycle by both benefiting from and causing the destruction of the territorial exclusivity of the Nation-State. Multi-national corporations play one Nation-State against another for advantageous labor status, environmental regulation, and tax breaks, using the ideology of “free trade” to ensure that neither goods nor capital are constrained by the sovereignty of any state. In order to remain competitive in the global marketplace, Nation-States must continually erode the very policies and regulations that safeguard the welfare of their constituent nation, or risk losing the economic basis for that welfare entirely. Much like the Cold War’s dilemma of the nuclear arms race, any concession by one Nation-State to attract global capital merely raises the ante for all others, creating a downward spiral of decreasing protections for the welfare of constituent nations. This results in the lowering of the Cartesian barriers that stand as the backbone of the Nation-State system. (Vail, 2006)

The corporation is an entity created from economic relationships, without notions of political sovereignty or Cartesian territory, and as such, it poses a direct challenge to the traditional view of the state. Meanwhile, the constant failure of rebellions to unseat the Western-backed dictators that emerged from the deliberate post-colonial instability Western powers hoped to exploit has created a new breed of rebellion, typically labeled as “terrorists.” They have adopted the same approach as corporations, favoring networks over territory, and have used these networks—most famously al-Qa’ida, or “the Base,” a loose network of various localized efforts against various U.S.-backed dictators, most notably the Saudi regime—to challenge state power. However, as networks, they cannot offer an alternative to the state; rather, they create “hollow states.”

The Nation-State system is predicated upon the twin principles of sovereignty: a domestic monopoly on the use of violence, and a singular focus for inter-state violence. Terrorism invalidates both claims. Exacerbated by reactionary ideologies and the expanding economic inequality brought by globalization, terrorism undermines the state’s role of security provider. Additionally, as independent international actors, both terrorist organizations and multinational corporations represent their own interests, unconstrained by either a Cartesian notion of Nation-State borders or the prevailing interests of a national constituency. Terrorism represents the merger of the military force of the state and the overlapping, non-Cartesian geography of non-state networks. In a world freed of the rigid boundaries of the Nation-State system, and with the substantial, overlapping web of affiliation and connectivity created by emerging, global terrorist organizations, the stage is set for a defining conflict that will replace the last vestiges of the Nation-State with the New Map. (Vail, 2006)

Vail’s “New Map” is one of relational networks rather than territorial sovereignty, leading towards a defining, epochal conflict between rhizome networks (with nascent modern forms found in both corporations and terrorist networks) and the Cartesian Nation-State. The exploitation of divisions that set the pattern for neocolonialism proved to be a model uniquely adapted to the economics of a petroleum-based economy, but this more “liquid” form of empire also shows clear signs of volatility, and lurches towards collapse. The proliferation of recognized states since the end of World War II is a classic sign of collapse; meanwhile, established centers of government power have given way to a plurality of corporate power centers. While the rise of multi-national corporations increasingly puts the world into a globalized economic system, that system continues to marginalize the very notion of the Nation-State and thus, its own foundation. By ignoring their externalities, the corporate world has entered an unsustainable pattern of laying waste to the foundation of its own order.

In the United States, frequently called “the world’s first hyperpower,” political power is divided between two parties, who differ primarily in their view of what the Nation-State should be. The Democratic Party clings to a pre-petroleum, imperial ideal that harkens back to FDR’s New Deal and the Nation-State as a benevolent mother. The Republican Party, on the other hand, sees the state as little more than a pool for externalizing the costs of the corporate world; the U.S. military as a tool for securing neocolonial enterprises, and the government as a means to force the publci to foot some of the bill for necessary externalities. Both agendas play into the pattern of globalization, and thus, ultimately, collapse. While corporations are driven to externalize as much of their cost as possible in order to increase profits, and while multi-national corporations have set Nation-States into a self-reinforcing escalation of effective suicide, such corporations need Nation-States to enforce a neocolonial order, and to provide a public poll to bear the costs they hope to externalize. Thus, the pattern is unsustainable; it is ever-accelerating, but its endpoint can only be the collapse of the Nation-State and the multi-national corporation alike.

By the same token, terrorist networks have become “catastrophically superempowered,” they are still systematically incapable of providing an alternative to the Nation-State, however capable they become at hollowing such states out. Terrorist networks form because Western-backed dictators cannot be defeated by conventional military means; such efforts have been attempted exhaustively, and the backing of the Western military establishment makes such figureheads unstoppable. Terrorism developed in the Middle East because it was the only method of effectively attacking entrenched, Western-backed despots. Al-Qa’ida managed to unite many of these movements into a loose network by focusing them on the common enemy that supported and empowered all of their local enemies, the neocolonial powers who used such despots to maintain power, principally the United States. These groups have proven effective at hollowing out states in the Middle East, but not at raising any alternative to them. The hyper-concentration of military power, such as the United States has done, makes traditional military confrontation suicide, and promotes the development of terrorist strategies. But these strategies are systematically incapable of providing any alternative to the state; rather, they can only hollow out the state. Thus, the terrorist networks in the New Map likewise work towards the dissolution of the Cartesian Nation-State.

The “War on Terrorism” sparked by al-Qa’ida’s success has accelerated this process. In Iraq, al-Qa’ida has declared that it is pursuing the same strategy it employed against the USSR in Afghanistan—to trap U.S. forces in a “quagmire” and “bleed” them there. More importantly, the United States has embraced the conflict as a carte blanche excuse to advance their neocolonial agenda, externalizing the costs of companies like Bechtel, Halliburton and others with enormous expenditures from U.S. taxes, and more importantly, the cost of human suffering and conflict in the Middle East. As rhizome structures mature and proliferate, traditional hierarchies will be under increasing pressure to adapt or die, facing the prospect of either embracing rhizome themselves, or being hollowed out by those that do.

Globalization has traditionally been shown as a sign of strength, and in many ways, civilization at peak oil is at its peak energy, peak power and peak dominance. It is certainly at peak population, for instance. But in many other important ways, we can see the signs of collapse that have already begun: the breakdown of European empires into many (at least nominally) independent countries, the succession of a more distant and subtle form of neocolonial control over the more direct and expensive territorial control, the breakdown of power in central governments with the ascension of private corporations, the role of terrorists and multi-national corporations in roles reminiscent of other collapse phenomena like the Gallic Roman bacaudae, and so on. Whatever else can be said, as a means of centralized control, there can be no doubt that the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, multi-national corporations, international terrorism and globalization all represent desperate attempts to fill a void left by the disappearance of an established order of complexity: the Old World Empire. On those grounds alone, we can recognize the current situation as the beginning of collapse. That the situation is untenable and directed towards further disintegration only points out that collapse will continue to undo further forms of social complexity. We may stand at peak energy now, but it is increasingly clear that we passed the point of diminishing returns on complexity over a hundred years ago. Petroleum, and the social and economic forms it has inspired, allowed for a significant stop-gap, and we should expect similar stop-gaps in the future, but there can be little doubt that the process of collapse is already firmly underway.

All these examples prove beyond doubt that neo-colonialism is not a sign of imperialism’s strength but rather of its last hideous gasp. It testifies to its inability to rule any longer by old methods. Independence is a luxury it can no longer afford to permit its subject peoples, so that even what it claims to have ‘given’ it now seeks to take away. (Nkrumah, 1965)

Works Cited

• Lewis, Bernad. 2003. The Crisis of Islam. The Modern Library.
• Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism. Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd.
• Perkins, John. 2004. Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Vail, Jeff. 2006. “The New Map: Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State in a Post-Cartesian World” PDF