by GREG ALBO
It has become commonplace to observe that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been re-making the symbols and practices of the Canadian state. Canada, in this view, was once the social democratic heartland of North America. But under Harper, Canada has been transformed into a hyper-regime of neoliberal market fundamentalism. Nowhere, it is argued, is this makeover more evident than in Canada’s dealings with the rest of the world. Canada was once the preeminent middle-power, peace-keeping nation. But now Canada operates like a renegade state: abandoning peace-keeping; deploying troops in combat missions across several continents to discipline wayward states; attacking the United Nations (UN); money-wrenching climate change negotiations; and on it goes.
There is, indeed, something to these charges. Neoliberal regimes like Harper’s have been strengthening their military and security apparatuses. They have been deploying their international economic policy to undergird the internationalization of capital. But the view of a pre-Harper internationalist and just Canada spins illusions about Canada’s past. Canada has been long time engaged as an ally of British and American imperialism (going back to the era of the Atlantic slave trade triangle). More tellingly: it fails to situate Canada properly as an imperialist state in its own right advancing and protecting the international interests of Canadian and Western capital.
The Harper regime did not invent Canadian imperialism. It has long been a central feature of the governance and organization of Canada’s foreign policy. It is necessary to avert misplaced hopes that a Liberal or NDP government might usher in a new era of cosmopolitan enlightenment in Canada. The Harper government administers a core capitalist state, with particular imperial interests, secured and cultivated through its foreign policy and international branches.
What Kind of Imperialist Power?
Imperialism cannot be dispensed with by a simple shift in foreign policy. Capitalism is a social system with an essential contradiction between the locally specific production and appropriation of value, the global accumulation of capital, and the territorially based states. These states simultaneously protect domestic investments and facilitate the internationalization of capital in the world market. The inter-state system forms into a hierarchy of dominant core states and peripheral zones in an imperialist chain. Hegemonic states like the U.S., and international institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, and the UN Security Council, politically enforce and manage the inequalities of the world market.
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