By Reason Wafawarova

14 February 2007

WHEN Kofi Annan appealed for global leadership from the United States in his farewell speech in December 2006, all he might have been inadvertently asking for was perpetuation of Western imperial authority.

The appeal will go down in history as the irony of the leader of the United Nations, wielding legitimate authority from 192 member states and using that legitimacy to invite illegitimate global leadership from a war-mongering member state. Leadership, that by any measure of analysis, comes down to brute imperial authority.

When Lenin wrote his "popular outline" in 1916 denouncing monopoly capitalism and imperialism as the direct cause of the First Wold War imperialism was still publicly regarded as a favourable term. This was because the expansion of the West by way of creating colonial empires had always been represented in unambiguously positive terms. In fact as late as the 1920s, it was fashionable in Anglo-American circles for one to profess themselves as being imperialist, just like as one professed oneself to be a missionary, a conservative, a liberal or a socialist.

However, the First World War put imperialism under the microscope and when Lenin published his book Imperialism in 1916, the West went on the defensive through their intellectuals, politicians, spin doctors, clerics, journalists and even their military. The major offending issue for the West was Lenin’s indictment of America, Europe and Japan as the major culprits of imperial politics, especially through their relationship with what we now call the developing countries, commonly called Third World countries throughout the twentieth century.

Despite all the propaganda against Lenin’s work, the impact of his works was so massive that US President Woodrow Wilson had to make concessions and compromises by declaring his "14 points" which included the right to self-determination of nations. This marked the beginning of the fall of colonial empires as the West responded more to Lenin’s politics and its pressures than to the needs of the afflicted people in Africa, Asia, Arabia and South America.

While crude imperialism through colonialism and monopoly capitalism seemed to have died with the dawn of political independence and self-rule in almost all former colonies, there has been an ignominious return of a new edition of imperialism since the 1990s when the United States assumed unipolar supremacy in world politics.

It has been an era of imperial authority and increased Western military intervention as the West’s ruling elites have found themselves under immense uncertainty as western institutions are discredited, the economies rather stagnant, the societies deeply divided amid general disillusionment over environmental issues, particularly global warming.

The panacea to the growing discontent in the West has always been the reminder that things are much worse in the developing world and in Eastern Europe. This comparison is what gives the Western ruling elite like Tony Blair of Britain and the US’ George W. Bush the temerity to publicly label themselves as "the civilised world". It is also this "civilised" world label which has been used or is it abused to encourage the ill-conceived belief that the West has a moral responsibility to curb outbreaks of "barbarism" whether such barbarism may be deemed to be in Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, Somalia or East Timor.

It would appear like everyone in the West agrees that they know what is best for the poor and "primitive" non-Western countries. One way or the other the solution can never exclude the West, in fact it often lies in the hands of the Westerners. This way of thinking is what is driving imperialism in the 21st century.

This is the century in which Westerners are the only ones with the solution to terrorism, clues on how to deal with alleged dictatorships, knowledge to tame "barbaric policies" like the ones President Mugabe is accused of pursuing, the only ones to handle "rogue" states like Iran and North Korea. This is the century in which the West is the undisputed yardstick of freedom, liberties and human rights.

Iraq is currently bleeding and its not bleeding for the freedom of its children, no; it is bleeding for the perpetuation of American and the West’s imperial interests. The US bestowed upon itself imperial authority in 2003 and invaded Iraq not on behalf of Iraqis or for purposes of peace or development but to check on Iraq’s influence in OPEC and its continued refusal of US domination.

The US has announced that it is coming to Africa to establish military command centres, reportedly in West Africa for the imperial purposes of pursuing the US’s oil interest on the continent, which currently accounts for 15 percent of America’s oil needs amid plans to push it to 30 percent over the next five years. Cursed be the customer that buys at gunpoint, one would say.

Robert Jackson, a scholar in international relations, has remarked that in as far as the West-Third World relations are concerned, "the West is now more secure and confident in the superiority of its values than it has been at any time since the end of the Second World War".

Such certainty and confidence is evident in the gait of the West’s darlings in the developing world. One can easily identify them by their lofty positions on democracy indices or absence from the negative political doses on Africa on the BBC or CNN news bulletins and writings. This, despite the fact that some of these countries are poorer than the proverbial church mouse and have no infrastructure to talk about. Anyway, such certainty and confidence obviously lacks in countries like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Chavez’s Venezuela, Castro’s Cuba and Ahmadenejad’s Iran.

These are the countries whose policies are often described as unsound, populist, direct threats, unusual threats or simply dictatorial. In fact some of the countries are the permanent members to the club referred to as the "axis of evil" by the US’s political leadership.

The "evil" nature of these countries is not because they have any proven moral shortcomings outside the propaganda in the Western media; no — it’s all because the countries in question are pursuing policies which do not advance the Western agenda and their leaders do not submit to imperial authority. That authority given Western governments by the unelected executives of multinational corporations.

The owners of global imperial capital have literally elected themselves as the sole constituency represented by the US’ political hegemony and they are the reason why Iraq is burning, why Chavez is a growing "dictator", why Gaddafi is considered reformed, why Castro is an ailing "totalitarian", why President Mugabe is an African "dictator" and why North Korea and Iran are "rogue states".

All these people and countries mentioned but Gaddafi, who has shifted his traditional hard line posturing of late; are largely seen as major stumbling blocks to the flow of imperial capital and a big threat to western economic interests.

As it stands right now, the West is preoccupied with legitimising its imperial authority through media propaganda, manipulation of public opinion through the film industry and an arrogant propensity for the arbitrary use of military force.

Why would the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and East Timor have Australian Police Commissioners and military leaders? Why would Ghana boast of a fiscus made up of 70 percent foreign (read Western) aid? The list is endless but as it stands the West has been enjoying imperial authority for the major part of the twentieth century as well as the first six years of the 21st century.

The only meaningful check to that immoral authority seems to be the Indo-Chinese economic rise as well as the resurgence of Russia. That, coupled with the headaches from Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, North Korea and little Zimbabwe might be what is needed to dissolve the undesirable imperial authority currently claiming global leadership of the world.

One hopes that the coming world order will shift more towards equitable international relations as well as global trade patterns. Anything short of this positive move will see people of this world resisting and discrediting those with superior military power and that has always been the way of empires, they come and collapse.