Nationalism: a Higher Phase of Imperialism

What Lenin failed to understand - and it was a fateful, disastrous failure - is that nationalism is a higher phase of imperialism.  Thus, by supporting the right of nations to self-determination, he was supporting imperialism.  

The Leninist error is undialectical, and thus presents a one-sided interpretation of imperialism, which pits the struggle for national self-determination (good guys) against imperialists (bad guys).  A more dialectical approach to history recognizes nationalism not as simply opposed to imperialism, but as raising the contradictions of imperialism to a higher level.   

People like Lenin, who have been thoroughly indoctrinated by a western (capitalist) ideology, tend to think that nationalism is just a natural thing that humans have always done and always will do.  The reality is that nationalism is a very recent invention in human history, and that nationalism was and is a project of imperialism.  In the 19th Century, the British Empire, and to a lesser extent others such as the French Empire, set out to cartograph the world, to map it, to assign clear boundaries, capitals, flags, etc..  A place for everything and everything in its place.  Collect them all.  Vexillologists (flag enthusiasts) emerged, as did philatelists (stamp collectors), numismatists (coin collectors), etc..  The Royal Numismatic Society emerged in 1836, and the Royal Philatelic Society in 1869.  This fever for archiving, categorization, cataloging, curation, at once intellectual and consumerist, was not entirely new: centuries earlier, of course, the retainers and followers of William the Conqueror wrote the Domesday Book, also known as the "Description of England," surveying, measuring, and cataloging every acre of every shire in England, and for centuries, it became people's job to chronicle the heraldry, the motto, and so on of every piece of land.  But it was in the Victorian Age that this enthusiasm for details erupted into a passion that was totalizing and global.  The completionists had prevailed - no vagaries and ambiguities could remain on the map.  The world must be organized.  Divide et impera.

Lenin, from his little London flat at 21 Tavistock Place, between the University of London and the British Library, followed this general trend that was sweeping England and the world.  The nationalism that Lenin would later impose upon Russia and its surrounding republics was essentially an English nationalism - a "commonwealth," as it were.  For that matter, the international nationalism that Woodrow Wilson would attempt to impose on the western world was also an English nationalism - a National Review nationalism, so to speak, learned from Wilson's deep study of Walter Bagehot and cemented in his friendship with David Lloyd George (who, interestingly enough, was a champion of Welsh nationalism) and, to a lesser extent, Georges Clemenceau (who, interestingly enough, was a champion of American democracy).  And of course the "14 points" that Wilson and his friends would propose reflected Lenin's own ideas in many ways - partly because they were in competition with them, trying to win over a similar audience, and partly because they arose from the same source: British imperialism.

To help us understand this process, it may help to turn to a very interesting and complex theorist.  I refer here to the former student of A. J. Ayer at University College London, Kwame Nkrumah, of Ghana, who wrote his famous, short book, "Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism" in 1965.  Here he acknowledges that a shift has occurred between an older form of direct colonialism and a more recent, subtler form of colonialism, in which the oppressed country is no longer officially a colony of the hegemonic power - on paper, the oppressed people have their "national self-determination".  They have their own flag, stamps, currency, and national anthem.  But economically, that is to say, in reality, they remain subject to the whims of the ruling class of the hegemonic colonizer. 

As he put it:

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. 

[...] 

Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case. 

The paradox of neo-colonialism is that, by achieving de jure "independence" from the colonial powers, often through revolutionary activity, the peoples of the third world wound up with less democratic control, less ability to determine their own destiny - precisely because the colonizing power, being, on paper, no longer connected to the colony, was now no longer politically accountable to the former colony's subjects.  The shift from classical colonialism to neo-colonialism was a shift from political subjection (with both economic effects and motives) to pure economic exploitation.  In other words, it was a shift from "exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions" to "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."  The revolutionary anti-imperialist struggles around the world for home rule can thus (despite how they often saw themselves) be best understood as bourgeois revolutions.  

By calling neo-colonialism the "worst" form of imperialism, Nkrumah was, quite understandably, putting this in moralistic language, but the point still stands.  To put it more scientifically, we can say that neo-colonialism is more efficient for the imperial power in subduing and exploiting the resources (including the human resources) of the subject population.  It is a more cost-effective strategy for the capitalist powers, and thus in a competitive world of imperial gamesmanship, we can expect, and we do indeed find, a historical shift from traditional colonialism to neo-colonialism.  This became most evident as the UK faded as the global hegemon and the United States grew to replace it as the neo-colonial power par excellence.  It would be the United States in the 20th century that would guarantee and defend the "outward trappings of international sovereignty" even as it consolidated its position as the greatest power on Earth.  But, truth be told, the shift from traditional colonialism to neo-colonialism had already begun within the British Empire, imposed from the top down, starting quite far back in the 19th century, long before the United States had seriously entered the global imperialist game. 

All of this Nkrumah grasped quite accurately.  But Nkrumah had failed to engage fully in "the relentless critique of all that exists" and was thus still operating under the Leninist illusion.  One can see, in Nkrumah's otherwise exemplary work, a mind struggling against the bounds of the Leninist dogma of national self-determination.

Nkrumah was writing this in 1966 as the elected leader of Ghana, after having led the country to "independence" from the British empire in 1957.  As if to prove his point correct - that the supposed "independence" of Ghana was a fig-leaf, an illusion that conceals the continuing domination by the imperial hegemon - mere months after he wrote this famous essay, British and American interests fomented a political coup in Ghana in February of 1966, which removed Nkrumah from office.  Seymour Hersh of the New York Times reported on CIA involvement in the coup, but cited an unnamed source within the CIA, which has never officially admitted to responsibility.  John Stockwell, former CIA chief of the Angola task force, acknowledged as much in his book, "In Search of Enemies."  Four years after the coup, Nkrumah was dead, of a mysterious, unknown illness.

Tragically, Nkrumah had spent much of his political life fighting for an illusion, even as he knew it to be an illusion.  He understood, better than most, that national self-determination was a fraud perpetrated upon the people of Ghana - and yet he became a fervent nationalist, caught up more than anyone in this ideological deception.  The paradoxes of the dialectic played themselves out through his story.  The problem is precisely that Nkrumah did not go far enough in his analysis of neo-colonialism.  If he had taken his own ideas to their rational conclusion, he would have gone far beyond the limited scope of Leninist nationalism.

The global shift from traditional colonialism to neo-colonialism began as a top-down reorganization from the imperialist cores themselves - especially the British Empire.  But they got into gear through anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles, led by movements with confused and, at best, incomplete analyses of imperialism.  One early example was the Russian Revolution.  I would call it the first neo-colonialist revolutionary struggle. but the Boer War came even earlier.  The Boer War is really a perfect example: a national war of independence, (supposedly) against imperialism, by imperialists, on behalf of imperialism.  But though it is not the first, the Russian Revolution is an early and influential neo-colonialist struggle - and thus, a bourgeois revolution.

Lenin thought of himself as an implacable enemy of the Russian Empire, Russian imperialism, and, as he put it, "Great Russian chauvinism."  But Lenin's naivete and insufficiently dialectical approach resulted in a state of affairs in which Russian imperialism was able to persist, and indeed to become even more entrenched and exploitative, precisely in and through the nominal independence of the 15 non-Russian constituent republics of the USSR, as well as the entire global Russian "sphere of influence," from the German Democratic Republic to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and beyond.

To understand the truth of this, one merely has to open one's eyes.  All the imperialists of the world today are nationalists.  The "Realists," whose policies have dominated Washington at least since the days of Kissinger, and who have acolytes from Obama to Clinton and beyond, are all unabashed nationalists - as are their supposed opponents, the "neoconservatives."  The most flagrant, brutal imperialist leaders, from Putin, to Mohdi, to Xi, to Erdogan, to Netanyahu, to Trump, are also the most extreme nationalists.  Again and again, imperialism inevitably stirs up nationalism and uses nationalism to achieve its ends.

In order to defeat imperialism, we must oppose all nationalism!