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Blair's Bobby Cooper for Colombian president? Héctor Abad Faciolince advises passive resistance as a last resort in coping with British and U.S. defensive imperialism. AFGHANISTAN,
Sierra Leone, Somalia, Haiti, Chechnya and Colombia belong to an exclusive club
of countries that First World academics in Europe, the USA and Japan have now
begun to define ‘failed states’. In a recent article published by The
Observer, Robert Cooper, one of British premier Tony Blair’s leading
experts on foreign policy, divided the countries of the world into three
categories: postmodern states (notably the EU, Japan, Canada and the USA, though
he found the latter particularly difficult to classify), modern states (which
include China, India, Pakistan and in certain respects Russia) and pre-modern
states, a group composed of so-called ‘failed states’. The latter comprise
some ex-Soviet republics, almost the whole of Africa, Afghanistan and most
Latin-American countries that do not hold the monopoly of power and are among
the world’s major drug producers. Although this last sentence makes no
explicit mention of Colombia, the reference is fairly obvious. According
to Cooper, who supports the need for a new imperialism or “postmodern
colonialism”, developed countries – now redefined as postmodern states –
have the right to apply a form of “defensive imperialism” in order to defend
themselves against possible terrorist threats from the pre-modern world. We
must, writes Blair’s advisor, “start to get used to double standards. Among
ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But,
when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern continent of
Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force,
pre-emptive attack, deception […]. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when
we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” Note
that this is not the thesis of an extremist advisor to Berlusconi or of Le
Pen’s right-hand man. It is a plain and literal statement by the advisor to
the British Labour party – that same party which was until the Thatcher era
considered to be Britain’s left. Must we then place our hopes in dispatching
air troops to these jungles in order to apply jungle law and get rid of
unmanageable whites, sinister blacks, nasty indigenous Indians and dreadful
half-castes? Not necessarily. For this precise purpose we have the financial
institutions of “postmodern imperialism”, namely that consortium which is
made up of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other global
economy organisations in order to oblige those pre-modern countries to return to
“the virtuous circle of investment and prosperity”. It
is not even worth protesting at such statements. There is no point in growing
indignant or attempting to argue for such stale “modern categories” as human
rights, equality before the law, antiracism or nonsense of the sort. Given the
situation and the fact that they (i.e. those in the postmodern world) hold full
economic power and crushing military superiority, it would be best to give up
our hypocrisy and return plainly and simply to the old colonialism, this time
rendering it even purer and more extreme. Just as Puerto Rico belongs to the
United States (and it was more fortunate than Cuba or Haiti), Haiti should
return to French hands; Mexico should be a US colony; Central America and the
Caribbean should submit to a British protectorate; Colombia, Venezuela and
Ecuador should return under the magnanimous umbrella of the Spanish sovereign
(as Don Álvaro Mutis has been demanding for decades); Chile and Peru should
genuflect before Germany; Argentina and Uruguay should be Italian colonies, the
Guayanas and Surinam should return to Holland; and Bolivia and Paraguay should
be left as a harmless indigenous experiment since they are not, after all, very
well-off and do not even possess a sea coast. On
his first trip abroad as president elect, Colombian premier Álvaro Uribe met UN
secretary-general Kofi Annan, US president George W. Bush and the directors of
the international financial consortium (International Monetary Fund,
Interamerican Development Bank and World Bank). This was, of course, quite
natural. The globalised world is not the old postcolonial world but the new
neocolonial one. Without the flow of arms (from the US), of money (from
international banks) and transnational troops (from UNO), the humble pre-modern
nation of Colombia could progress from failed state to ultra-failed state (a
category that does not yet exist but that we could always invent). All of this
seems rather like the last desperate kicks and dying efforts of a drowning man.
If those who command in the world desire a new imperial order, then why not save
time, surrender completely, close down the government and tell King Juan Carlos,
Queen Isabella and Bush (or his viceroys – Bobby Cooper, for example) to come
over and govern us? Note:
This article was first published in English by JUST Response on August 15
2002. Héctor
Abad Faciolince is
a leading Colombian journalist, novelist and academic who resides in Medellín.
Robert Cooper’s article Why
we still need empires appeared in The Observer on April 7 2002.
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