The us uses economic engagement as a disguise to hide their colonialist efforts towards Latin America

1NC

The US uses economic engagement as a disguise to hide their colonialist efforts towards Latin America

Ryan ‘99

[David Ryan, “Colonialism and Hegemony in Latin America: An Introduction”, The International History Review, June 1999, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40109004, pages 290-296]

Colonial sentiment underpinned US policy towards both the inter- American economic and world systems. Following the Second World War, US policy-makers opted to seize the opportunity to integrate the world economies wherever possible. The assumed lessons of the 1930s taught that fragmentation in the global political economy was perilous as well as inefficient: economic autarchy inhibited growth in the world sys- tem, restricted the performance of the US economy, and at times restricted its access to strategic resources. The United States regarded economic nationalism, which 'peripheral' countries associated with national self- determination, as a rejection of modernization and, at times, as a threat to the hegemonic model. Economic multilateralism, integral to the Bretton Woods system and promoted through its affiliate institutions - the Inter- national Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Recon- struction and Development (IBRD, later known as the World Bank) - became a tradition, albeit an invented one, of US diplomacy. The colonial characteristics of dollar diplomacy are evident in the post- war operations of the IMF, in that loans were accompanied by fiscal supervision.2 Much of the advice given did not conform, however, to the traditions of the United States's economic history, only to its ideology and needs at the time. US economic development was marked by state inter- vention in the form of protective tariffs, import quotas, and subsidies to the export sector in the form of state-financed promotions. Yet modernization theories forbade foreigners to emulate these practices, while simul- taneously claiming that universal models of development existed, of which the United States was the finest.3 Thus, the combination of the world system and the international system created an uneasy conceptual alliance, which at times could only be maintained through the use offeree or covert action. In the immediate post-war period, the weight of US political and eco-nomic power limited the self-determination of the Latin American states. When the United States, at the inter-American conference at Chapultepec in 1945, reaffirmed its belief in free trade to 'a sceptical Latin American audience', Latin American governments faced a dilemma. As the growth of imports showed no signs of slowing down, they had either to find add-itional sources of foreign capital to pay for them or to restrict them. Such restrictions had been necessary after the crash of 1929 and during the sub- sequent depression, but in the post-war period such limitations aggravated the world system and required internal structural adjustment. The propensity to opt for Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), fuelled by the rise of nationalism and the knowledge that the European countries could no longer purchase primary products in their former quantities, followed from widespread scepticism of 'models of development that required an open door to foreign goods and capital'.1 Coupled with the cold war, ISI gave the United States opportunities to disguise its colonialism in Latin America through the banks and newly created multilateral lending institutions. Given that ISI required consid- erable capital injection in the form of aid programmes or direct investment, and that both were contingent on accepting economic and political pre- scriptions, the United States had the opportunity to enhance its influence over the structural and political outcomes. The Latin American states were told that they would not benefit from an equivalent of the Marshall Plan despite their wartime co-operation: their capital demands would only be met in the 'right' political environment. Thus, most of them responded to the United States's anti-Communist message; promising to fight Commun- ism throughout the Western Hemisphere by introducing anti-Communist legislation and bringing labour and the left under greater control. In resisting what labour and the left regarded as US colonialism, they oscillated 'between authoritarian nationalist projects . . . and a commitment to revolutionary politics' that at times erupted in revolution.2 The string of reform and revolutionary movements from the 1940s to the 1990s, from Bolivia and Guatemala to the Sandinistas and Zapatistas, was partly a reaction to the exclusion of the left from the political system and revulsion against regimes identified with US interests.

Unlimited imperialist conquest inevitably results in extinction, every modern war has been a byproduct of the spread of colonialism

Harvey ‘06

[David Harvey, “Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development”, May 17 2006, Chapter 13]

At times of savage devaluation, interregional rivalries typically degenerate into struggles over who is to bear the burden of devaluation. The export of unemployment, of inflation, of idle productive capacity become the stakes in the game. Trade wars, dumping, interest rate wars, restrictions on capital flow and foreign exchange, immigration policies, colonial conquest, the subjugation and domination of tributary economies, the forced reorganization of the division of labour within economic empires, and, finally, the physical destruction and forced devaluation of a rival's capital through war are some of the methods at hand. Each entails the aggressive manipulation of some aspect of economic, financial or state power. The politics of imperialism, the sense that the contradictions of capitalism can be cured through world domination by some omnipotent power, surges to the forefront. The ills of capitalism cannot so easily be contained. Yet the degeneration of economic into political struggles plays its part in the long-run stabilization of capitalism, provided enough capital is destroyed en route. Patriotism and nationalism have many functions in the contemporary world and may arise for diverse reasons; but they frequently provide a most convenient cover for the devaluation of both capital and labour. We will shortly return to this aspect of matters since it is, I believe, by far the most serious threat, not only to the survival of capitalism (which matters not a jot), but to the survival of the human race. Twice in the twentieth century, the world has been plunged into global war through inter-imperialist rivalries. Twice in the space of a generation, the world experienced the massive devaluation of capital through physical destruction, the ultimate consumption of labour power as cannon fodder. Class warfare, of course, has taken its toll in life and limb, mainly through the violence daily visited by capital upon labour in the work place and through the violence of primitive accumulation (including imperialist wars fought against other social formations in the name of capitalist 'freedoms'). But the vast losses incurred in two world wars were provoked by inter-imperialist rivalries. How can this be explained on the basis of a theory that appeals to the class relation between capital and labour as fundamental to the interpretation of history? This was, of course, the problem with which Lenin wrestled in his essay on imperialism. But his argument, as we saw in chapter 10, is plagued by ambiguity. Is finance capital national or international? What is the relation, then, between the military and political deployment of state power and the undoubted trend within capitalism to create multinational forms and to forge global spatial integration? And if monopolies and finance capital were so powerful and prone in any case to collusion, then why could they not contain capitalism's contradictions short of destroying each other? What is it, then, that makes inter-imperialist wars necessary to the survival of capitalism? The 'third cut' at crisis theory suggests an interpretation of inter-imperialist wars as constitutive moments in the dynamics of accumulation, rather than as abberations, accidents or the simple product of excessive greed. Let us see how this is so. When the 'inner dialectic' at work within a region drives it to seek external resolutions to its problems, then it must search out new markets, new opportunities for capital export, cheap raw materials, low-cost labour power, etc. All such measures, if they are to be anything other than a temporary palliative, either put a claim on future labour or else directly entail an expansion of the proletariat. This expansion can be accomplished through population growth, the mobilization of latent sectors of the reserve army, or primitive accumulation. The insatiable thirst of capitalism for fresh supplies of labour accounts for the vigour with which it has pursued primitive accumulation, destroying, transforming and absorbing pre-capitalist populations wherever it finds them. When surpluses of labour are there for the taking, and capitalists have not, through competition, erroneously pinned their fates to a technological mix which cannot absorb that labour, then crises are typically of short duration, mere hiccups on a general trajectory of sustained global accumulation, and usually manifest as mild switching crises within an evolving structure of uneven geographical development. This was standard fare for nineteenth-century capitalism. The real troubles begin when capitalists, fating shortages of labour supply and as ever urged on by competition, induce unemployment through technological innovations which disturb the equilibrium between production and realization, between the productive forces and their accompanying social relations. The closing of the frontiers to primitive accumulation, through sheer exhaustion of possibilities, increasing resistance on the part of pre-capitalist populations, or monopolization by some dominant power, has, therefore, a tremendous significance for the long-run stability of capitalism. This was the sea-change that began to be felt increasingly as capitalism moved into the twentieth century. It was the sea-change that, far more than the rise of monopoly or finance forms of capitalism, played the crucial role in pushing capitalism deeper into the mire of global crises and led, inexorably, to the kinds of primitive accumulation and devaluation jointly wrought through inter-capitalist wars. The mechanisms, as always, are intricate in their details and greatly confused in actual historical conjunctures by innumerable cross-currents of conflicting forces. But we can construct a simple line of argument to illustrate the important points. Any regional alliance, if it is to continue the process of accumulation, must maintain access to reserves of labour as well as to those 'forces of nature' (such as key mineral resources) that are otherwise capable of monopolization. Few problems arise if reserves of both exist in the region wherein most local capital circulates. When internal frontiers close, capital has to look elsewhere or risk devaluation. The regional alliance feels the stress between capital embedded in place and capital that moves to create new and permanent centres of accumulation elsewhere. Conflict between different regional and national capitals over access to labour reserves and natural resources begins to be felt. The themes of internationalism and multilaterialism run hard up against the desire for autarky as the means to preserve the position of some particular region in the face of internal contradictions and external pressures - autarky of the sort that prevailed in the 193Os, as Britain sealed in its Commonwealth trade and Japan expanded into Manchuria and mainland Asia, Germany into eastern Europe and Italy into Africa, pitting different regions against each other, each pursuing its own 'spatial fix'. Only the United States found it appropriate to pursue an 'open door' policy founded on internationalism and multilateral trading. In the end the war was fought to contain autarky and to open up the whole world to the potentialities of geographical expansion and unlimited uneven development. That solution, pursued single-mindedly under United States's hegemony after 1945, had the advantage of being super-imposed upon one of the most savage bouts of devaluation and destruction ever recorded in capitalism's violent history. And signal benefits accrued not simply from the immense destruction of capital, but also from the uneven geographical distribution of that destruction. The world was saved from the terrors of the great depression not by some glorious 'new deal' or the magic touch of Keynesian economics in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of global war.

Alternative text: engage in scholarly analysis of imperialism as it relates to micro and macro level politics. This allows us to see the origins of imperialism within the political and education realm and separate ourselves from them

Shome ‘06

[Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An “Other” View”, Communication Theory, March 17 2006, Wiley interscience]

The importance of a postcolonial position to any scholarly practice is that it urges us to analyze our academic discourses and connect them to the larger political practices of our nations. This means that in examining our academic discourses, the postcolonial question to ask is: To what extent do our scholarly practices-whether they be the kind of issues we explore in our research, the themes around which we organize our teaching syllabi, or the way that we structure our conferences and decide who speaks (and does not speak), about what, in the name of intellectual practices - legitimize the hegemony of Western power structures? In posing this question, the postcolonial perspective does not suggest that as scholars writing in the West all that we do is legitimize the imperial political practices of Western nations. Rather, the argument is that we need to examine our academic discourses against a larger backdrop of Western hegemony, neocolonial, and racial politics. We need to engage in “contrapuntal lines of a global analysis” where we see “texts and worldly institutions . . . working together” (Said, 1993, p. 318). In the pursuit of our scholarly goals, we often do not stop to think or ask questions about why, for example, research agenda A seems more important to us than research agenda B? What is the ideology that operates in us that makes research agenda A seem more significant than research agenda B? How are we always already “interpellated” into examining A but not B? What does that interpellation say about our role in reproducing and participating in the hegemonic global domination of the rest by the West? What does it mean, for instance, when I am told that there is a market for research agenda A but none for research agenda B? Or that if I did pursue research agenda By I would have to do it in a way that would make it marketable? And what way would that be? Whose way would that be? Who decides what is marketable? What does the decision have to do with the political practices of our nations? How does this market serve the capitalistic and racist hegemony of Western nations? And what is my position, as an intellectual, in reproducing this hegemony? The point in asking such questions is to recognize the latent ideological structures that inform our scholarship and practices. As Van Dijk (1993) puts it, often “under the surface of sometimes sophisticated scholarly analysis and description of other races, peoples, or groups . . . we find a powerful ideological layer of self-interest, in-group favoritism, and ethnocentrism” (p. 160). In fact, even when we do sometimes try to break out of the Eurocentric canons informing contemporary academic scholarship by including alternate cultural and racial perspectives in our syllabi, we often do not realize that instead of really breaking free of the canon, all that we do is stretch it, add things to it. But the canon remains the same and unchallenged. Our subject positions in relation to the canon remain the same and challenged. Instead of examining how the canon itself is rooted in a larger discourse of colonialism and Western hegemony, we frequently use the canon to appropriate “other” voice^.^ The question than arises, so what is to be done? Perhaps the first step here is to do what Spivak (1990) suggests: to unlearn our privilege (p. 9). And the first step toward that unlearning requires self-reflexivity; it requires seeing ourselves not sequestered in an academic institution but connecting things that we think or not think, say or not say, teach or not teach, to the larger political and ideological practices of our nations in their interactions with the rest of the world. The solution, however, is not merely to do more rhetorical studies on nonwhite people (e.g., Campbell’s, 1986, study on African American women speakers), for that only becomes a matter of extending, instead of displacing or challenging, the canon by adding “others.” Rather, the solution is to critically examine and challenge the very value system on which the rhetorical canon and our scholarship is based. For instance, rhetoric as a discipline has been traditionally built on public address. But historically public address has been a realm where imperial voices were primarily heard and imperial policies were articulated. The colonized did not always have access to a public realm, or if they did, their speeches were not always recorded in mainstream documents, since the means of production rested with the imperial subject. All this perhaps means that we have built a lot of our understanding of rhetoric, and the canon of rhetoric, by focusing on (and often celebrating) imperial voices. This calls for a reexamination of our paradigms. The move here is parallel to that made by feminists in their challenges of the masculinist biases of the discipline. If rhetorical scholars are to reexamine the discipline in relation to issues such as imperialism, neocolonialism, and race, then they need to perhaps do what Spivak (see explanation) suggests, “unlearn” a lot of the rhetorical tradition and evaluate critically what kinds of knowledge have been (and continue to be) “privileged, legitimated [and] displaced” in our texts and theories and “what configuration of socio-political [and racial] interests” this privileging, displacing, and legitimizing has served (and continues to serve) (Conquergood, 1991, p. 193). For one thing, this means engaging in some serious “soul searching” to uncover why scholarship in our discipline has been and continues to be so white (Rakow, 1989, p. 2l2).’ It is through such postcolonial self-reflexivity of our discipline, as well as our individual scholarship, that we will be able to continue the task of pushing the traditional paradigms of rhetoric further in order to create spaces for racially and culturally marginalized voices and perspectives on rhetoric to emerge - voices and perspectives that would comprise sensitive postcolonial responses to the neocolonial and racist circumstances of our present time. Second, the postcolonial critique of Western discursive imperialism that constructs racial “others” and that legitimizes the contemporary global power structures has important implications for rhetorical criticism, in that it beckons us to recognize postcolonialism as a timely and important critical and political perspective. As Williams and Chrisman (1 994) emphasizes with great urgency in their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, it is alarming “how many of the attitudes, the strategies, and even how much of the room for manoeuvre of the colonial period [still] remain in place” (p. 3) in contemporary social, cultural, and I would add, academic practices. Given this, it is unfortunate that in our literature we hardly find articles, especially in our mainstream journals, that examine neocolonial representations of racial “others” or that analyze, for instance, the discursive processes through which the (white) “West” gets constantly legitimized in political, cultural, and social discourses.