Imperialism is as old as civilisation. It denotes the extension of power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas.

Because it involves the use of power, whether military force or some subtler form, imperialism has often been considered morally reprehensible.

However, arguments justifying imperialism have always existed. Both religious and secular worldviews and ideologies have, down the ages, fired the imperialist passion and vision.

The historical record of imperialism looks roughly like this. In the ancient period, the most famous imperialist ambition was nurtured by Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), who set out to establish a world empire and conquered vast territories in eastern Mediterranean and western Asia and established his eastern-most province in present-day Pakistan.

It was followed by the Roman Empire, which conquered vast territories in Europe and western Asia and established an elaborate system of taxes and law and indeed trade that brought great glory to Rome and established it as the centre of world affairs.

The advent of Christianity and the conversion of Constantine to that faith resulted in the Roman Empire becoming the Holy Roman Empire. It gradually embarked upon the crusades thereby added a missionary zeal to the secular concerns for conquest and aggrandizement.

The next spectacular imperialist project of world government emanated from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula with the consolidation of the Umayyad Caliphate in the later half of the 7th century AD.

The Arab-Islamic Empire not only overran the Middle East but also North Africa, central Asia, Iran and reached the southern province of Sindh in present-day Pakistan.

That Empire lasted until 1258 and was replaced by regional powers centred on Spain and Egypt and later the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. The Islamic expansion was also motivated by the commitment to proselytise the world to the Islamic faith.

Imperialism thus combined with a proselytising mission by both Christian and Muslim powers. At one time in history, the Christian and Islamic movements constituted two contemporaneous rival imperialist powers that confronted each other with all the power they could muster. The crusades are testimony to such violent competition.

The Islamic imperialist project receded into the background from the 16th century onwards while the Europeans developed their naval and military power and began a long period of conquest and colonisation all over the world.

The Christian missionary project subsided in the 18th century. It was supplanted by a new, essentially temporal, project that prioritised economic and political advantages over missionary gains.

Thus, in the middle of the 18th century, England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain established empires in the Americas, India, and the East Indies that aimed primarily at economic exploitation.

The highpoint of secular imperialist ideology was the 19th century, when a belief in the civilising mission of the West — the white man’s burden — was widely shared by European philosophers as well as politicians.

It was argued that imperialism was necessary to liberate people from tyrannical rule and bring them the blessings of a superior way of life.

Another argument in favour of imperialism that developed in the same period and which continues to be advanced is that maintaining world peace and stability and indeed security of a major power necessitates obtaining bases, strategic materials, buffer states, ‘natural’ frontiers and control of communication lines so that threats that crop up can be effectively defeated.

The period between the middle of the 19th century and World War I was again characterised by intense imperialistic policies, mostly directed at the occupation and annexation of the African continent.

The League of Nations temporarily put in abeyance the imperialist project, but then Japan embarked upon empire building with an attack upon China in 1931. It was followed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy joining forces to establish empires. The result was World War II.

World War II ended not only in the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan but also completely exhausted the European imperialists and after 1945 decolonisation – in accordance with the United Nations Charter – started and by the middle of the 1970s the Asian and African possessions of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal terminated.

The era of classical imperialism in the form of transcontinental empires gave way to ideological competition between the USA and USSR.

The nation-state or the territorial state with fixed, internationally recognised borders became the organising unit of the world system.

They created military alliances and power blocs in which although territorial nation-states constituted the formal structure of the world political system the overwhelming military and technological power of the two superpowers meant that national sovereignty of the weaker nations and client states could be rather easily breached in a de facto manner even when the states were de jure regarded as sovereign and independent.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the eastern bloc of Communist states, the USA now alone enjoys pre-eminence in world affairs.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 rudely shocked the USA and the world. The war on terror began with worldwide sympathy for the USA, but Bush and his neo-conservative cronies converted into a typical imperialist venture when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, without any reliable evidence that the Iraqi regime had anything to do with that attack or evidence that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The invasion and occupation were described as a mission to bring democracy and freedom to that country.

However, a fierce and bloody resistance has been offered to the US-led occupation forces.

This has also resulted in a fierce sectarian conflict between the Sunnis and Shias that will probably result in Iraq ceasing to remain a united country. The Kurds in the north are already enjoying virtual independence.

It might be interesting to note that all such perverted expansion and occupation have lent legitimacy to an Islamic argument in favour of imperialism.

The three main fundamentalist ideologues of the contemporary period, Abul Ala Maududi, Syed Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini, are champions of worldwide jihad which is supposed to bring the fruits of Islamic justice and peace to the world and to eliminate the era of Jahiliyya (Age of Ignorance).

This is exactly the argument the 19th century Europeans employed and the neo-conservatives in America invoke at present.

So, the world may have to pay a very heavy price for the vain ambitions of imperialists of one sort or another. Ishtiaq Ahmed/The News

tags: imperialism  empire  civilization  

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