Guide To Documents

"If Imperialism may no longer be regarded as a blind inevitable destiny, is it certain that imperial expansion as a deliberately chosen line of public policy can be stopped?
"We have seen that it is motivated, not by the interests of the nation as a whole, but by those of certain classes, who impose the policy upon the nation for their own advantage. . . . The essentially illicit nature of this use of the public resources of the nation to safeguard and improve private investments should be clearly recognized.
" . . . Analysis of Imperialism, with its natural supports, militarism, oligarchy, bureaucracy, protection, concentration of capital and violent trade fluctuations, has marked it out as the supreme danger of modern national States. The power of the imperialist forces within the nation to use the national resources for their private gain, by operating the instrument of the States, can only be overthrown by the establishment of a genuine democracy."

"Here we find that we have penetrated to the historical as well as the sociological sources of modern imperialism. It does not coincide with nationalism and militarism, though it fuses with them by supporting them as it is supported by them. It too is – not only historically, but also sociologically – a heritage of the autocratic state, of its structural elements, organizational forms, interest alignments, and human attitudes, the outcome of precapitalist forces which the autocratic state has reorganized, in part by the methods of early capitalism. It would never have evolved by the 'inner logic' of capitalism itself. This is true even of mere export monopolism. It too has its sources in absolutist policy and the action habits of an essentially precapitalist environment. . . . But export monopolism, to go a step further, is not yet imperialism. And even if it had been able to arise without protective tariffs, it would never have developed into imperialism in the hands of an unwarlike bourgeoisie. If this did happen, it was only because the heritage included the war machine, together with its socio-psychological aura and aggressive bent, but because a class oriented toward war maintained itself in a ruling position. This class clung to its domestic interest in war, and the pro-military interests among the bourgeoisie were able to ally themselves with it. This alliance kept alive war instincts and ideas of overlordship, male supremacy, and triumphant glory – ideas that would have otherwise long since died. It led to social conditions that, while they ultimately stem from the conditions of production, cannot be explained from capitalist production methods alone. And it often impresses its mark on present-day politics, threatening Europe with the constant danger of war.
"This diagnosis also bears the prognosis of imperialism. The precapitalist elements in our social life may still have great vitality; special circumstances in national life may revive them from time to time; but in the end the climate of the modern world must destroy them."

"Despite the changes in our attitude towards the imperialist age now that the classic type of formal imperialism has become a thing of the past, a remarkable degree of continuity can be seen in both bourgeois and Marxist studies of the subject. The broad lines of a possible interpretation of imperialism were already laid down by such classic theorists as Hobson, Hilferding, Schumpeter and Lenin; later writers have endeavored, on the basis of these studies, to produce more differentiated models taking into account recent research and developments in the world situation. An important new light is cast by recent British research, which on the one hand has developed the idea of 'informal imperialism' and thus widened the scope of the enquiry in general, and on the other has drawn attention to the independent role of the 'periphery,' especially the indigenous ruling classes, which have often had much to do with the character, timing and direction of imperial expansion.
"It must be said that the older theories of imperialism have lost much of their usefulness because they are too Eurocentric and also tend to reduce the whole phenomenon to a single cause. A modern theory which gives due weight to the periphery, while recognizing that its so-called crises were themselves the result of informal European penetration, is better able to comprehend the phenomenon of third-world underdevelopment without necessarily subscribing to the tautologies of neo-Marxist theory. The 'objectivist' argument that imperialist processes were generally stimulated by the marginal groups in European society, in conjunction with 'men on the spot,' gives sufficient reason to review the 'endogenous type of theory' according to which imperialism is a necessary outcome of the policies or economic structures of the industrial states. Finally, it seems as though the long discredited political theories of imperialism are to some extent enjoying a 'comeback,' chiefly in combination with sociological and socio-economic explanations. The 'official mind' is certainly not nowadays conceived as brashly imperialist, as was formerly the case. The picture is rather one of statesmen who were powerless to control the self-propelled course of imperial expansion, which began with more or less informal methods and then called for the use of formal power in one case after another, often against the wishes of the politicians concerned.
"Classic economic theories of imperialism, whether Marxist or bourgeois, have lost much of their attraction.... In the present state of research into the subject it appears to us that a new form of theory is required which would not simply repeat the traditional formulae.... On the other hand, a new theory should not, as is frequent in the Western world, content itself with regarding imperialism as a thing of the past: it must take account of the after-effects of imperialism in the world as we know it, not least the disturbing fact that the gap between rich and poor nations is growing steadily wider. Many may even develop nostalgia for the days of formal colonial rule, when the European powers were, at least in principle, responsible for developments at the periphery, whereas today they are formally relieved of the burden. But the question remains of how far these developments are rooted in the era of formal imperialism, and whether the forms of economic, cultural and political dependence which have survived the end of colonialism are not partly to blame for the 'development of underdevelopment' in many parts of the third world. Any modern theory of imperialism must face the question of how far the international capitalist system contains latent or manifest imperialist tendencies, or even whether it is manifestly imperialist."