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

Economic Engagement Link

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.

The affirmative uses trade as a method of dominating the world and creating a colonial empire

Koshy ‘99

[Susan Koshy, “From Cold War to Trade War: Neocolonialism and Human Rights”, Social Text, Spring 1999, http://www.jstor.org/stable/466713, pages 1-16]

Neocolonial strategies of power are increasingly articulated not through the language of the civilizing mission as in the nineteenth century, or through the American-sponsored discourses of anticommunism and mod- ernization that superseded it, but through a new universalist ethics of human rights, labor standards, environmental standards, and intellectual property rights. In the New World Order, neocolonial power operates less through military force than through economic domination. What we are witnessing in our time is the scramble among developed countries (which now no longer refers exclusively to the former colonial powers) not for territory but for the competitive edge in trade and commerce, especially through monopolistic control over vital sectors of profitability (informa-tion, biotechnology, and technological innovations).2 Consequently, the shaping of trade policy has become increasingly crucial to the assertion of global domination, and the political changes of the post-Cold War era have worked to establish closer linkages between trade and human rights standards. Within this context, the human rights arguments of many Western liberals and labor activists, while ostensibly oppositional within a nation-state framework, are often complicitous with neocolonial domina- tion in an international framework. Simultaneously, the oppositional dis- courses of Third Worldism have been undercut by the collapse of social- ist states; they have also been co-opted in many arenas to serve statist and corporate agendas, thus rendering the articulation of resistance a more vexed project, especially at a time when resistance has become more frac- tured, local, and issue-specific. In the face of these challenges, what are we to make of the idea of human rights both as a philosophical concept and a politicohistorical pro- ject? Does the imbrication of much current human rights discourse in global capitalism and Eurocentrism mean that it should be abandoned as a vehicle for social transformation?3 What is its potential as a counter- hegemonic discourse? This essay will critique the deployment of human rights discourse in international relations, while simultaneously affirming the political necessity of retaining the project of universal human rights as an ongoing and historically specific endeavor. A brief summary will help to illuminate the growing importance of trade control in the post-Cold War era. Following World War II, "imper- ial overstretch" rendered the pursuit of economic and political power through colonial domination a more costly and problematic enterprise. Imperial overstretch refers to the weakening of a country's economic base through high military spending and the diversion of resources involved in the acquisition and domination of additional territory. The shift from colonialism to neocolonialism thus effected, in part, a transition to a more efficient form of domination. As a result, trade rather than conquest came to be seen as a critical means of international control. However, the threat of Communism and the ideological conflicts of the Cold War created an environment where political strength still depended heavily on military strength. So, it was only with the end of the Cold War that the focus on trade intensified, inaugurating the shift from the Cold War to the Trade War era. For the United States, the end of the Cold War deprived the state of ideological justification for equating human rights protection with anti- communism as had been the case, particularly in the Reagan years. How- ever, the temporary lack of focus in U.S. foreign policy dealings was rapidly replaced by a growing recognition of the crucial importance of trade to the consolidation of power and the possibility of coupling trade and human rights concerns. The strategies to acquire and retain trade control are currently in the process of being worked out with several important groups (transnational corporations [TNCs], labor, environmental groups, consumer protection groups, human rights activists, media) competing to define the "national interest." Inconsistencies and vacillations on trade and foreign policy are symptomatic of this contest. Although the "national interest" is frequently invoked as if it signified a fixed and determinate agenda, it is further com- plicated by the contradictions between global capitalism and the nation- state that have disrupted the ready accommodation between big business and big government that had been worked out during the Fordist era. As David Harvey observes, the state is now in a much more problematic position. It is called upon to regulate the activities of corporate capital in the national interest at the same time as it is forced, also in the national interest, to create a "good business climate" to act as an inducement to trans-national and global finance capital, and to deter (by means other than exchange controls) capital flight to greener and more profitable pastures.38 Harvey goes on to say that under a regime of flexible accumulation, state intervention is more crucial than ever "particularly regarding labour con- trol." However, it should be pointed out that while the weakening of the nation-state is a global phenomenon, there are still vast discrepancies between the relative power of various nation-states. Furthermore, although developed nations are also subject to the forces of global capital, they have succeeded in shoring up the regulatory powers of their own states, while simultaneously breaking down those of developing nations. As Raghavan explains, the transnationalisation of the world economy has been going on at an accel- erated pace. But the TNCs are now coming up against the reality of the nation state and the postwar order, and finding it constraining. The US which still is the dominant home of the TNCs and the leading country in outward foreign direct investment (FDI) is hence directing its effort to limit the national space of others, through demands for "liberalisation" and "deregulation." But this is confined to selected areas and sectors, and there is little talk of it in the high technology areas, which are subject to high degrees of regu- lation and state support and intervention. Often in these areas mercantilist concerns for goods, services, patents and other industrial property protec- tion to ensure monopoly rentier incomes, are masked under pleas of "secu- rity" and safeguarded and protected.39

The spreading of America’s economic might subordinates the nation state it is directed at and allows the US to brutally enforce imperialism throughout the region

Jameson ‘10

[Fredric Jameson, “Valences of the Dialectic”, November 8 2010, Wiley Interscience]

In discussions of globalization at the political level, one question has predominated:¶ that of the nation-state. Is it over and done with, or does it still¶ have a vital role to play? If reports of its demise are naïve, what then to make¶ of globalization itself? Should it, perhaps, be understood as merely one pressure¶ among many on national governments—and so on? But lurking¶ behind these debates, I believe, is a deeper fear, a more fundamental narrative¶ thought or fantasy. For when we talk about the spreading power and¶ influence of globalization, aren’t we really referring to the spreading economic¶ and military might of the US? And in speaking of the weakening of¶ the nation-state, are we not actually describing the subordination of the¶ other nation-states to American power, either through consent and collaboration,¶ or by the use of brute force and economic threat? Looming behind¶ the anxieties expressed here is a new version of what used to be called imperialism,¶ which we can now trace through a whole dynasty of forms. An earlier¶ version was that of the pre-First World War colonialist order, practiced by a¶ number of European countries, the US and Japan; this was replaced after¶ the Second World War and the subsequent wave of decolonization by a¶ Cold War form, less obvious but no less insidious in its use of economic¶ pressure and blackmail (“advisers”; covert putsches such as those in Guatemala¶ and Iran), now led predominantly by the US but still involving a few¶ Western European powers.¶ Now perhaps we have a third stage, in which the United States pursues¶ what Samuel Huntington has defined as a three-pronged strategy: nuclear¶ weapons for the US alone; human rights and American-style electoral¶ democracy; and (less obviously) limits to immigration and the free flow of¶ labor.3 One might add a fourth crucial policy here: the propagation of the¶ free market across the globe. This latest form of imperialism will involve¶ only the US (and such utterly subordinated satellites as the UK), who will¶ adopt the role of the world’s policemen, and enforce their rule through¶ selected interventions (mostly bombings, from a great height) in various¶ alleged danger zones.¶ What kind of national autonomy do the other nations lose under this¶ new world order? Is this really the same kind of domination as colonization,¶ or forcible enlistment in the Cold War? There are some powerful answers to¶ this question, which mostly seem to fall under our next two headings, the¶ cultural and the economic. Yet the most frequent themes of collective¶ dignity and self-respect lead in fact less often to social than to political considerations.¶ So it is that, after the nation-state and imperialism, we arrive at a¶ third ticklish subject—nationalism.

American economic intervention in Latin America is intrinsically tied to military conquest, and the “engagement” the aff claims enforces imperialism

Knauft ‘07

[Bruce M. Knauft, “Provincializing America: Imperialism, Capitalism, and Counterhegemony in the Twenty‐first Century”, Current Anthropology, December 2007, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521415]

The growing power and influence of the United States during the twentieth century is closely associated with the spread of neoliberal capitalism, the increasing military superiority of the United States, and the extension of American politicoeconomic and political influence by international financial, political, and economic organizations. Though ideologically separated, political economy and militarism are integrally rather than contingently related. Though September 11, 2001, is often taken as a turning point, the United States has intervened militarily against 24 countries since the end of World War II, an average of one country every two‐and‐a‐half years. In the past two decades this intervention has included military operations against El Salvador, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, Iran, Panama, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq and proxy interventions and “black‐bag” wars ranging across parts of Latin America and extending to countries such as the Philippines. These incursions have typically attempted to topple political regimes or, alternatively, repress political resistance.¶ In American government discourse, the link between U.S. military objectives and American economic interests is typically played down, as with the relationship between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and access to Iraqi oil (see Harvey 2003a). These connections were often made more explicit during the earlier part of the twentieth century, especially in Latin America, which had been claimed by U.S. presidents as a special sphere of American influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 (Rosenberg 1999). Over the decades, parts of Latin America and especially Central America have provided test cases and training grounds for aggressive assertion of U.S. political and economic interests overseas, even by means of armed intervention or proxy insurgency (Grandin 2006).6 U.S. interventions in Latin America have seldom been opposed by other major world powers (cf. Smith 1994).¶ In these and other cases, the line between military and politicoeconomic objectives is hard to draw. Though the United States differs from classic or colonial empires such as ancient Rome or Victorian Britain in its lack of formal or colonial control over foreign lands, prior empires had their own ebb and flow between indirect control, vassalage, tribute, economic exploitation, formalized rule, and what Stoler (2006a) terms “degrees of imperial sovereignty” (see also Steinmetz 2006; Garnsey and Saller 1987; Whittaker 1994). Combinations of economic exploitation with spotty or selective political control are evident in Portuguese influence during the sixteenth century and Dutch imperialism during the eighteenth. Beyond direct colonialism, this pattern is evident during the mid‐nineteenth century in the Opium Wars and other military incursions that “opened up” East Asia to Western trade and national government and in the U.S. incursions associated with and facilitated by the Spanish‐American War. Spreading with the intensification of global capitalism, these trends range from what Gallagher and Robinson (1953) call the mid‐nineteenth‐century British “imperialism of free trade” to what Wood (2003a) calls “an empire of capital” for the contemporary United States.¶ Absence of formal American control over the political sovereignty of other countries is consistent with capitalist neo‐imperialism, dependence on transnational contracts, nation‐state enforcement, and transnational organizations and the neoliberal development industry (cf. Hardt and Negri 2000). During the cold war era, as the leader of the “free world” economy and its financial infrastructure, the United States asserted international economic dominance through the Bretton Woods agreement on monetary policy, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then the World Trade Association (WTO) (Hudson 2003). Over the decades, these organizations have furthered American and more generally Western interests via international monetary and currency‐exchange policy and by alternately ameliorating and abetting national debt crises, including those in Mexico in 1995, Southeast Asia in 1987–90, and Argentina in 2000–2001. Because of its superpower status, the United States is immune from such sanctions, though the IMF (2004) has reported that American debt to foreign countries amounts to approximately 40% of the U.S. economy—a situation that in other countries would court harsh IMF sanctions.7¶ Politically, the nation‐state system of ostensible sovereignty that has become global during the twentieth century is a strong condition rather than a declining feature of American imperialism (contrast Guéhenno 2000; Appadurai 1996). International standards for economic contracts, banking, credit, and repayment have promulgated, manipulated, and enforced neoliberal capitalism and its benefits. Especially since 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, the connection between global capitalism and nation‐state sovereignty has become the geopolitical analogue to the relationship ascribed by Marx to capitalism, free markets, and free labor. In both cases, an emphasis on freedom and liberty structures differential enrichment and obfuscates relations of dominance and inequality both between countries and within them (Harvey 2005, 2006). The end of classic imperialism in Europe and Japan following World War II has marked not the end of imperialism but its evolution through new patterns of American influence and control (Steinmetz 2006; Maier 2006).

Generic Link
Wood-03 Historian and Scholar
Ellen Meiksens Wood, “Empire of Capital”, Verso Publications, 2003, http://books.google.com/books?id=N74C0f-h0wEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false,pg. 4-6

What makes class domination or imperialism specifically capitalist is the predominance of economic,¶ as distinct from direct 'extra- economic' — political, military, judicial — coercion. Yet this certainly does ¶ not mean that capitalist imperialism can dispense with extra- economic force. First, capitalism certainly does not rule out more traditional forms of ¶ coercive colonization. On the contrary, the history of capitalism is, needless to say, a very long and bloody story of ¶ conquest and colonial oppression; and, in any case, the development of economic imperatives powerful enough to replace older ¶ forms of direct rule has taken a very long time, coming to fruition only in the twentieth century. But, more particularly, capitalist ¶ imperialism even in its most mature form requires extra-economic support. Extra-economic force is clearly¶ essential to the maintenance of economic coercion itself. The difficulty, again, is that the role of extra-economic force, in capitalist ¶ imperialism as in capitalist class domination, is opaque, because in general it operates not by intervening directly ¶ in the relation between capital and labour, or between imperial and subordinate states, but more indirectly, ¶ by sustaining the system of economic compulsions, the system of property (and propertylessness) and the operation ¶ of markets. Even when direct force is applied in the struggle between classes — as when police arrest strikers — the nature of the transaction is likely to ¶ be obscured by the ostensible neutrality of the coercive power. Especially in liberal democracies, with universal suffrage and fairly well established civil liberties, ¶ the police are not employed by capital but represent a state that, in principle, belongs to all citizens. Today, when powerful states launch military actions ¶ against weaker ones, we are given to understand that, here too, force is operating not imperially but neutrally, in the interests of an 'international community'. ¶ To question this is not to say that police action, domestic or international, can never do anything but operate in the interests of a dominant class or imperial power. ¶ The point is simply that, in capitalism, even when it does so operate, its purposes are not transparent, as they were when feudal lords exercised their ¶ own coercive force against their peasants, or when old imperial states set out explicitly to conquer territory, establish colonies and impose their rule on subject ¶ peoples. To understand the 'new imperialism' indeed to determine whether it exists at all — requires us to understand the specificities of capitalist ¶ power and the nature of the relation between economic and 'extra-economic' force in capitalism. It will be argued in ¶ what follows that capitalism is unique in its capacity to detach economic from extra-economic power, and that this, ¶ among other things, implies that the economic power of capital can reach far beyond the 7 grasp of any existing, or ¶ conceivable, political and military power. At the same time, capital's economic power cannot exist without the ¶ support of extra-economic force; and extra-economic force is today, as before, primarily supplied by the state.¶ The argument here is not that the power of capital in conditions of 'globalization' has escaped the control of the ¶ state and made the ^territorial state increasingly irrelevant. On the contrary, my argument is that the state is more ¶ essential_than_ever—to, capital, even, or especially, in its global form. The political form of globalization is ¶ not a global state but a global system of multiple states, and the new imperialism takes its specific shape from the ¶ complex and contradictory relationship between capital's expansive economic power and the more limited reach of the ¶ extra-economic force that sustains it. The conviction that we live in an increasingly stateless world - or, at least, a world in ¶ which an increasingly irrelevant state has been subordinated to a new kind of global 'sovereignty' - belongs not only to the ¶ mythology of conventional globalization theories. A fashionable book such as Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles, for all ¶ its claims that the state as such is not dead, insists that the territorial nation state has been replaced by the 'market state', ¶ in essence, a state with no boundaries. This is also the central premise of an ostensibly radical and iconoclastic work ¶ like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, which argues that the nation state is giving way to a new form of stateless ¶ 'sovereignty' that is everywhere and nowhere.² The contrasting prem^-i^-se of My book is that such views not only miss something ¶ truly essential in today's global order but also leave s powerless to resist the empire_ of capital) This book is not a history of imperialism. ¶ Although much of its argument will be historical, the purpose of its excursions into the history of empire is to bring into relief the ¶ specificity of capitalist imperialism by observing it against the contrasting background of other imperial forms. Some major cases, ¶ European and non-European, will not appear at all, or only in passing, such as, among others, the Inca, Portuguese, ¶ Ottoman and Mughal empires. The historical chapters will concentrate on a few important examples that were marked by one ¶ or another characteristic commonly associated with capitalism - the dominance of private property or the centrality of commerce – ¶ in order to highlight the essential ways in which even these cases differ from capitalist empire. Nor does the book claim to¶ be a comprehensive history of capitalist imperialism itself. Here, too, readers will no doubt think of cases that could and perhaps ¶ should have been mentioned, or they may object that there is not enough discussion of US imperialism before it matured into its present ¶ form. But the main objective of the book is not to present a thorough historical narrative. My purpose is rather to define the essence ¶ of capitalist imperialism, the better to understand how it operates today. In Chapter 1, I shall briefly outline how the economic power of capital¶ has detached itself from extra-economic force, sketching out, in very broad strokes, the relation between economic and political power in capitalism ¶ and what implications this has for the relation between the capitalist economy and the territorial state. Chapters 2 and 3 will consider several ¶ non-capitalist empires, to exemplify what I call the 'empire of property' (the Roman and Spanish), as against the imperial dominance of ¶ a bureaucratic central state (as in China), and the 'empire of commerce' (the Arab Muslim Empire, the Venetian and the Dutch). The ¶ remaining chapters will deal with the development of capitalist imperialism, and the expansion of capitalism's economic imperatives, from ¶ the English domination of Ireland to their extension overseas in America, and from the 'second' British Empire in India to today's ¶ US-dominated 'globalization'. The final chapter will explore the role of military force in the new imperialism and the contradictions of a system ¶ in which a globalized economy is sustained by a system of multiple states - a system in which the extra-economic force of military power is ¶ becoming essential to imperialism in wholly new ways, taking new forms in the theory and practice of war.¶