BY MULUGETA GUDETA
One could never find a more succinct portrayal of modern colonialism or neocolonialism than in the Encarta encyclopedia in the following terms. “Since the end of World War II, when most of the formal empires were dissolved, what might be called modern economic imperialism has come to predominate. Control is exercised informally and less overtly.
“The U.S., for instance, exerts considerable influence over certain Third World nations, as a result of its national economic power and its dominance of certain international financial organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Similarly, European powers have continued to affect significantly the politics and the economics of their former colonies, and they have consequently been accused of neocolonialism—the exercise of effective sovereignty without the formality of colonial rule.”
What is absent in this definition of neocolonialism is however, the role of force or violence exercised on many occasions to enforce the rule of the peripheral states by the powers at the centre of world always defined as a relationship between the dominant and the dominated entities. In his sense we can be absolutely certain that we are still living in the post neocolonial moment which is simply the continuation of colonialism and neocolonialism by other violent means.
Among the third world countries that was subjected to the will and might of the neocolonial powers is Ethiopia, at least under the pro-Western regimes right after the end of WWII. This neocolonial rule through cultural and intellectual domination lasted for almost 50 years under the Haile Sellassie regime and continued more subtly under the rule of the defunct EPRDF for an additional 30 years.
The Derg was, at least rhetorically, anti-neocolonial and pro-communist the present phase of Ethiopian history is being marked by a vigorous rejection of the neocolonial relationship at the political or diplomatic levels. when Ethiopia decided to build the GERD and refused to bow to Western and US diktat, it is a sure manifestation of anti-neocolonial politics in action. When the West tried to manipulated the current political crisis in Ethiopia to its favor and the regime in power made it clear that it is not going to compromise on this issue, this is also another manifestation of anti-neocolonial foreign policy in practice or a diplomatic protest action against the so-called great powers of the West that came on the side of the forces that are militating against Ethiopia’s independent domestic and foreign policies.
This has inevitably created an ongoing crisis in the relationships between the dominating Western powers and the rising vices of anti- neocolonial politics as expressed in the current attitude of the Ethiopian government which is fighting on two fronts, against neocolonial powers and their domestic underlings.
Let us put aside for the time being the long arms of Western and American cultural domination that has been often portrayed as the “modernizing mission” of the white race against the so-called underdeveloped people of Africa, Asia and Latin America as Franz Fanon predicted. America created social media and is now the victim of its own creation by indirectly assisting in the suppression of media ethics and its replacement by vulgar “people journalism” that is causing great havoc everywhere in the name of civilization or modernity.
Western neocolonialism has passed through various stages of developments. Its rise and eventual fall is defined with crisis that touch upon its cultural, political and economic powers. Politically neocolonialism is in crisis because it has lost or abandoned its old democratic ideals. Culturally, modern neocolonialism is facing protests within and outside its areas of domination with the rise of various forms of protest music and dances and arts and literature.
In the protest literature against neocolonialism, Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Black Skin White Masks” stand as genuine classics that not only reflect the realities of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa but also proved prophetic in projecting neocolonialism’s detrimental manifestations against the aspirations of black people in general and Africans in particular. In these two works, Fanon has clinically dissected the psychological dilemma into which black people everywhere in the world face in their lives, whether under direct rule or under the pseu-independence of the post 1960s period.
Meanwhile, any analysts agree that Western and more specifically American political culture is fast changing in the wake of the newly emerging international realities that have already exposed the Achilles heels of a global system based on the domination of the poor and the weak by the richest and the strongest. Otherwise, how could America, the once mightiest global superpower that was the dream and hope of the entire world has succumbed to such a depth of moral and cultural degeneration as it pick quarrels left and right with countries that are trying to rise from the state of poverty and humiliation that were kept in for much of their histories?
A good example of this kind of perceptual or cultural shift in American foreign policy would be illustrated by its ongoing distorted view of Ethiopia as a country that is trying to do away with the shame of poverty that had kept its people in darkness using its natural resources to the benefits of its disadvantaged people. Washington should have encouraged and supported this kind of initiative from a good friend like Ethiopia that has aligned itself with and accepted American global influence on world affairs for much of its modern history.
Washington’s utterly distorted perception of Africa started from the years of Donald Trump Washington’s global behavior and global leadership as a force for good against evil is undergoing a fast metamorphosis, turning a once respected and envied power into a laughing stock of the world. The new American political culture of bullying smaller nations is best expressed in the context of the ongoing GERD controversy. Washington is trying to turn it into a diplomatic weapon for promoting its interests in the fast changing political world of this part of Africa where other claimants of superpower status have already made important economic and diplomatic inroads.
However, Washington’s attempt to use a country like Ethiopia that is only trying to rid itself of the shame of poverty by generating electricity should not be used by the big Western honchos to force it abandon or compromise its humble efforts at self-betterment. The diplomatic proxy war Washington is waging against Ethiopia is similar to the Biblical David versus Goliath fight.
Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and communism made a series of retreats in Europe and elsewhere, many analysts prematurely predicted the end of history and the final victory of democracy in the world. Alas, those predictions were not only misplaced and myopic as they later on proved. They were also causing massive conceptual and practical disruptions in the behaviors of governments around the world that subscribed to Western triumphalism.
The end of the Cold War and American self-aggrandizement in the midst of the preachers of its global triumphalism had temporarily created new expectations that were quickly dashed. These events had caused at least two sets of cultural shifts that have deepened the rifts between the two worlds, i.e. the world of the rich West and the poorest parts of the world that have not seen anything resembling the much-vaunted benefits of the new century.
As we said above, the new realities have already caused cultural shifts in at least two areas, namely in politics and the media. They have caused the rich countries with the United States at their head to lose its old identity as a land of opportunities for all, a heaven of democracy and social justice and a pole of attraction for millions of the wretched of the earth and the hope of poor countries that spent much of the seven decades after the last great war expecting to recreate the economic and political miracles under the global leadership of Washington and its Western allies.
America’s political image and political culture has made radical shifts from its old benevolent, compassionate and humanist credos or pretensions to the present- day state of a global role akin to those of authoritarian regimes Washington has been criticizing and sometimes abusing for their shortcomings. America under former president Donald Trump increasingly looked its real self as a policeman of the world and a bully that had lost all its glamour and politico-economic might that was evident in the past. It is increasingly resorted to the business of hounding any Third World country that refused to accept its new cultural shifts.
By the turn of the new century, the Western-dominated unipolar world has given way to the rise of a multi-polar one with other economic superpowers claiming the mantle of leadership or a share from the pie of global superpower posturing. America failed to recognize the new realities and continued to indulge in political attitudes that were shaped during its decades of world domination. It has lost touch with the new realities of the newly rising multi-polar global relations where poor or weak countries are asking for political and economic justice and its old rivals that are rising once against to question the old or waning global relationships in expectations of a legitimate place in the sun.
Afghanistan 2021: A fundamental question is asked. Has Afghanistan marked the end of the old American century and the birth of a new one without the ubiquitous and symbolic Uncle Sam’s iconic figure? Will this event shape our fears, loves and hates of the West in the post-WWII world as it had shaped our admiration and nostalgia of everything American and by extension Western in the immediate post-war years? The sight of American soldiers fleeing Kabul in haste reminds us not only of the last gasps of what is known as Vietnam misadventure later known as the Vietnam syndrome.
Afghanistan is a rude awakening and a hard blow to the American psyche, image, dream and illusion of grandeur. This not because evil is replaced by goodness. Far from it. Sometimes in history, one form of evil is replaced with another one, maybe heralding the birth of a new century without the domination of a single power. America has never been humiliated as it was by its departure from Kabul without even consulting the friends that had contributed to its invasion disguised as a long war against terrorism.
It also abandoned its own troops that later on joined the last flights from Kabul. The humiliation of neocolonialism is leaving deep wounds in Western psyche which is not yet healed from the wounds of its colonial past. Double trouble for a wounded world. Rays of light for the oppressed and humiliated peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Will Ethiopia serve as a beacon of hope for black people everywhere by rejecting Western diktat as it did with its anti-fascist resistance in the 1930s? Time will tell.
The Ethiopian Herald October 2/2021
