Suchergebnisse

Much has been written over the past two decades on globalisation, especially on its political and socioeconomic impacts on Western liberal democracies on the one hand, and on the more vulnerable countries and communities around the world on the other. The victory of "globalised capitalism," Alain Badiou argues, has resulted from the evolution of old forms of imperialism into new imperialist practices.1 While nineteenth-century Western imperialism relied on the concept the nation-state, its new forms depend on the weakening of those same states. Imperialist European nation-states used to exert their power, managing and controlling the resources and peoples of the "uncivilised" colonised countries, from their metropolitan centres. In the last decades, by contrast, as Badiou argues, the "areas of non-state pillaging" (29) to which the military interventions of Western countries in Iraq, Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic have given rise, demonstrate that one of the main drives of the new imperialism is to destroy, rather than manage, other states. Today the control exerted by the metropolitan centre has been replaced by the unrestrained power of capitalist firms, which find in the withered state a lawless space where they can freely operate for their own profit (24–30).