The Historical Development of Imperial Globalization
By C. René Padilla
Globalization is a historical process. As such, it does not happen suddenly. In the case of present-day imperial globalization, it is the culmination of a process which started five centuries ago and that, throughout this period, has had different Western countries as protagonists and has affected “all other living societies, whether pre-civilizational or civilized” in different ways. My intention in this lecture is to show the connection between the first moment of imperial globalization and its present-day moment. My claim is that, despite the very deep differences between these two historical moments, there is also a real continuity between them—a continuity which in fact makes of present-day globalization one of the greatest challenges to the Christian mission.
The Roots of Imperial Globalization
October 12, 1492, may be regarded as representing the beginning of the era of
Western worldwide expansion. The “discovery” of America by Christopher (“the Christ-bearer”) Columbus was not merely an amazing feat of navigation but also the opening of a new world of bountiful treasures which in time provided the economic basis for Western development. The Genovese sailor, whom John A. Mackay described as “a mystic in no small degree” (1933:24), saw himself as sent by God to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah 60.9: “For the coastlands shall wait for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from far away, their silver and gold with them for the name of the Lord your God.” Therefore, according to Bartolomé de las Casas in his Historia de las Indias (Book 1, chapter 28; 1981:149), he offered, first to the king of Portugal and subsequently to King Fernando de Castilla and Queen Isabel de León, to discover “extensive lands, isles, and beautiful solid lands, very wealthy in gold, silver, and precious stones, and many people,” and to reach the eastern extremities of the Asian continent, including India and the kingdom of the Great Khan.
The epic that followed Columbus’ accomplishment—the conquest of America—was marked by three ominous factors: greed, ethnocentrism, and religious justification.
In the first place, greed. The role that economic interests played in the conquest and colonization of what would later be called Latin America cannot be exaggerated. According to John A. Crow,
During the first century (between 1492 and 1600) approximately two billion pesos´ worth of gold and silver was shipped from the colonies to the mother country. This was at least three times the entire European supply of these metals before the discovery of America…. At the close of the colonial period the annual output was about forty million pesos, or ten times the known production of all the rest of the world (1992:216).
The combination of economic exploitation and violence which marked the conquest is symbolized by the gigantic ransom that Francisco Pizarro demanded from the Inca monarch Atahualpa for his release: one room full of gold and two of silver. The ransom arrived in Sevilla in 1534. It was paid but Atahualpa, after being kept in prison for nine and a half months and “a farcical trial,” was sentenced to death by burning, with the offer to have that sentence commuted to death by strangulation if he became a Christian. He accepted, was baptized with the name of John in memory of the Evangelist, whose day it was, and then he was strangled “while the Spaniards stood around and chanted the creed” (Mackay 1933:38).
Silvio Zavala (1984) has marshaled the evidence to show that the Spanish conquest of the New World was not exclusively motivated by greed and exploitation. In his view, a decisive factor in the conquest was a classical political philosophy regarding the relationship between wise people and barbarians. On the basis of that philosophy, which had its roots in secular European culture and could be traced back to Aristotle, a number of scholastic thinkers maintained that since the native population was made up of barbarians and as such born to be slaves, the European conquerors had the right to rule over them.
Despite the implicit ethnocentrism of this philosophy, it was adopted by Christian theologians who claimed that the conquest was God’s means to put the Indian population and its lands under subjection to the Pope as Christ’s representative on earth. This thinking had already been taken for granted in the special Bull by virtue of which Pope Alexander VI, as early as 1493, delegated to King Fernando and Queen Isabel both temporal and spiritual dominion over the territories of the New World, since the See could not be directly engaged in spreading the Christian faith. Later on this thinking provided the basis for the so-called requerimiento, a document which the Spanish conquerors were supposed to read to the Indians explaining basic Christian doctrine and summoning them to recognize the Church and the Pope, and to accept the King and the Queen as legitimate owners of the land. The alternative responses were then clearly defined: the Indians could submit and be left free together with their wives and children, without being compelled to become Christian, or they could fail to submit and, as a result, face war, loose their family, and be enslaved and sold. As
Zavala has put it,
In fact, already in the sixteenth century one can see the choice that characterizes modern imperialism: either it is accepted that the resources of the land providentially or naturally assigned to the local people belong to them, making sure that the needs and justification for international commerce are preserved, or it is decided that the distribution of the land and the people are subservient to the absorbing interests of “superior” or stronger groups (1984:60).
Enough has already been said in the previous paragraphs to demonstrate thathat Christianity was co-opted to justify the conquest. The cross and the sword became close partners invested with the mission of conquering the New World for Christ and King Fernando and Queen Isabel. This partnership, vigorously defended by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and other theologians, was based on the assumption that the war against the resistant Indian population was a just war because it opened the way to evangelization. In Sepúlveda’s own words,
For many and very serious reasons, these barbarians are obliged to accept the dominion of the Spaniards according to natural law, and this will be more profitable to them than to the Spaniards, because virtue, humanity and the true religion are more precious than gold and silver (quoted in Zavala 56).
In his well-researched work on this topic, Luis N. Rivera Pagán (1990:14-21) has shown how the cross and the sword working together turned the “discovery” of America into a supposedly legal “appropriation” of the new lands—regarded as res nullius, “nobody´s property”—on behalf of the Spanish empire. This sordid union of “evangelization and violence,” which may be regarded as a mark of Spanish Christianity, gave birth to modern Roman Catholic Christendom. “For the first time in history,” rightly says Rivera Pagán, “a genuinely ecumenical, global perspective of human reality is projected. It is, however, an imperial ecumenism, at the same time civilizing and enslaving, capable of the maximum religious sublimity and, simultaneously, the most terrible bellicose cruelty” (28, my translation from Spanish). Void of ethics, the Christianity which was thus portrayed failed to accomplish true evangelization among the Indian population. Against that background one can appreciate the relevance of the Dominican monk Bartolomé de Las Casas’ prophetic ministry and his insistence that the evangelization of the Indian population should be carried out on the basis of love (cf. Gutiérrez 1992).
What resulted from the Iberian conquest in the first half of the sixteenth century was a colonial theocracy that lasted until the War of Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. Mackay 1933:42-56). Fernando I, Carlos V and Felipe II were successively appointed by the Pope as Patriarchs of the Indies, a hierarchical title that authorized them to play the most decisive role in the propagation of religion and in the government of the Church, including the appointment of bishops. The Christianity that Spain established in the New World was a Christianity co-opted by the imperial power of the day—a corporate Christianity that covered serfdom with a religious veneer but failed to demonstrate the liberating power of the Gospel. As a result, among the native population, as John A. Mackay has put it, “The heart was not changed, the mind was not enlightened, and worship was offered to rebaptized idols” (47).
Neo-Colonial Imperial Globalization
For Protestant Christians in Latin America who are aware of the heavy restrictions that the Roman Catholic Church imposed in the past on the spread of their message and the establishment of their churches it is self-evident that Protestant missionary work, whose beginning coincided with the formation of republics politically independent from Spain within the first three decades of the nineteenth century, brought to the region a new era in the history of Christianity. To be sure, the restrictions continued in varying degrees well into the second half of the twentieth century, sometimes even with the support of the civil authorities in countries where the Pope passed the right of patronage from the Spanish king to the republican government. The fact remains, however, that independence from Spain was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church, “the mystic column of Spain’s colonial empire” (Mackay 1933:59).
What Protestant Christians in Latin America oftentimes fail to see is the similarities between the Roman Catholic colonial imperial globalization fostered by Spain beginning in 1492 and the basically Protestant neo-colonial imperial globalization fostered by the United States today. Admitting the need to explore the subject much more in depth than it is here possible, I would tentatively suggest that contemporary USA-based imperialism is marked by the same notes as those that we have seen in relation to Spanish colonial imperialism, though in a different key: greed, ethnocentrism, and religious justification.
The central place that material wealth has in Western culture does not need to be proved. Our concern here is, first of all, to show the philosophical rationale behind the capitalist system, which is built on greed, and the way in which economic interests become the determining value in contemporary USA-based imperial globalization.
Goudzwaard and de Santa Ana (2003) have summarized the basic characteristics of modern capitalism in three principles: 1) The Galileo-Descartes principle of the primacy of the mathematical method, which implies the possibility of reducing physis (nature) to a series of calculated entities and is directly linked with the operational or instrumental side of modernity. 2) The Hobbes-Rousseau principle of social-constructive rationality, which regards natural law as the basis for a logical (re)construction of human society. 3) The Locke-Spinoza principles of individual freedom and equality, which started from the recognition of individual rights, including private property, but were also related to a positive evaluation of self-interest. Eventually modernity and individual freedom came to be regarded as two sides of the same coin and found their way into the United States Declaration of Independence, into the new French Constitution, and into the structuring of economic life, for which Adam Smith laid the scientific basis. A further step was taken later on by Jeremy Bentham, the first thinker who used a mathematical method to check all types of social reconstruction with the motto, “the maximum happiness for the greatest number,” thus relating the ordering of society to the fulfilment of human wishes as the ultimate goal.
These Enlightenment principles became the basic assumptions of the ideology of modernity, which have permeated the Western spirit throughout the last three centuries. It was taken for granted that a rational approach would lead to socio-economic reconstruction, that the mathematical-mechanical method was the way to attain economic efficiency, that autonomous will, individual self-determination and private property were the main actors in economic development, and that utilitarian intervention in society was to be encouraged as long as it promoted the (material) well-being of all. On this basis, freedom and welfare became the political goals to be achieved not only in private but also in public life. Moreover, the relative rise in the standard of living and the achievements of science and technology led people to believe in the inevitability of progress—knowledge was increasing and, provided that the principles were faithfully applied, it would result in improvements in every area of human life. In time, this faith in progress through economy, science, and technology was firmly established and found its way into a modernization program, of which today’s imperial globalization, with its transnational concomitants, may be regarded as the latest stage.
According to Leslie Sklair (2002:8), the capitalist globalization which, as a result of a long historical process, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, is a “particular way of organizing social life across existing state borders” and includes three inter-related transnational elements or (as he calls them) “practices”: 1) the transnational corporation, “the major locus of transnational economic practices”; 2) the transnational capitalist class, “the major locus of transnational political practices,” and 3) the transnational culture-ideology of consumerism, “the major locus of transnational culture-ideology practices.” The primary moving force of today’s economic global system is the transnational capitalist class—a class made up of globalizing bureaucrats, politicians, and professionals— that, according to Sklair (9), “derives its material base from the transnational corporations. . . and the value system of the culture-ideology of consumerism” and engages in “practices that cross [national] borders but do not originate with state actors, agencies, or institutions.”
There is plenty of evidence, however, to demonstrate that the validity of the assumptions of the Enlightenment, which underlie the inter-related transnational elements or practices of present-day globalization, can no longer be taken for granted. Far from attaining “the maximum happiness for the greatest number” through utilitarian individualism, the imperial globalization built on those assumptions has become the main contributing factor in both the deepening and the worldwide extension of a major scourge—poverty.
To a very large extent, the world economy is controlled by transnational corporations, the latest and most sophisticated embodiment of the assumptions that took shape in Europe before the eighteenth century. It is estimated that among the largest economies in the world today the number of corporations is higher than that of nations. The dominant role that the economic interests of these transnational corporations play in U. S. foreign policy would deserve much more attention than we are able to give here to this important subject, intimately related to present-day imperial globalization. Suffice it to mention two areas in which that role is strongly felt: the area of security and the area of international trade.
With regard to security, the problem is illustrated by the document issued in 1999 by the U. S. National Security Council on the use of violence in order to protect U.S. “vital interets”—“the physical security of our allies; the security of our citizens; our economic well-being.” This document affirms the intention to “knock down the commercial barriers abroad in order to create jobs in the country,” and concludes: “We will do whatever is necessary to defend our interests. We would even use our military power in a unilateral and decisive way, if that is necessary” (quotes in Bilbao 2001:1). The war in Iraq clearly demonstrates that the U.S. government is quite ready to implement that policy even if all the arguments to wage war are proved to be false. How can it be denied that, as in the case of the violence used by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to conquer the New World, this war is motivated by greed? Is not this war a clear illustration of a foreign policy marked by state terrorism in the service of big corporate interests?
With regard to trade, the problem is made visible in terms of the enormous pressure on the part of the U.S. government to impose so-called free trade on a global scale through the World Trade Organization (WTO). In a world in which more than a billion people live with less than $1 per day, in 2002 the government of the United States allocated $180 billion to subsidize large agribusiness instead of small farming businesses in this country—20% of the farms received over 80% of the subsidies. These subsidies lead to the massive “dumping” of USA agricultural products on world markets, causing the bankruptcy of local farmers, who cannot compete with prices that are below their production costs. Should we be surprised at the strong resistance at the Fourth Presidential Summit recently held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on the part of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela to the U.S.A. plan for the integration of the economies of this hemisphere on the basis of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)?
The economic power of the corporations is closely connected with the political power of the transnational class, made possible by a massive restructuring of society on the basis of economics. In fact, the most dramatic result of the free-market formula for economic development has been the emergence of what Leslie Sklair has called a “class polarization”: the polarization between the direct descendants of the Enlightenment—a transnational aristocracy of materially wealthy and politically powerful people—and increasing masses of poor and deprived people everywhere, unable to satisfy their basic needs. The disparity between the rich and the poor is epitomized on an international level by the amazing distance between the so-called G-8, with the U.S.A. as the largest economy on the planet, on the one hand, and the poor nations around the globe, on the other hand. Yet the class polarization becomes most visible in the Two-thirds World. At the top of the social ladder are “the elect” who benefit from the system—the owners and managers of transnational corporations and financial assets, the politically powerful, the market consumers par excellance. At the bottom are “the excluded,” the increasing mass of people whose role with regard to the market is limited to that of (largely uninformed) spectators. They are excluded from the market, although not from society, because they are regarded as totally redundant in relation to the national and international financial transactions that take place at the top of the economic system, yet at the same time they are fertile soil for the seed of social unrest and violence. They are the first to suffer the consequences of drastic budgetary reductions in education, health, housing, social security, retirement programs, etc., imposed by the power holders. Unable to cover their basic needs, they pay the so-called social cost of macro-economic development. They are the victims that the system sets aside for the human sacrifice required by the “idolatry of the market”! (Assmann and Hinkelammert 1989).
Modern world history would definitely not be what it is without the amazing scientific and technological accomplishments of Western civilization. As Toynbee claimed, these accomplishments, beginning with the conquest of the ocean five hundred years ago, made possible the contact, “on Western terms,” between the West and all other living societies, both pre-civilizational and civilized. As a result, “the frail social fabric of the surviving pre-civilizational societies . . . has been pulverized” and “the living non-Western civilizations too have been convulsed and corroded by this literally world-wide revolution of Western origin (1972:398).
As we have seen in the previous section of this paper, the success attained in the conquest of the New World laid for the conquerors the basis for ethnocentrism. From their perspective, the native population was made up of barbarians born to be slaves; consequently the European conquerors had the right to rule over them. Several philosophers and theologians took charge of articulating that position, sometimes appealing to supposedly Christian arguments, to justify the oppression of the Indians and the massive plundering of their natural resources.
A similar kind of ethnocentrism is behind neo-colonial imperial globalization. A few years before the end of the nineteenth century, at the height of “Manifest Destiny” in the U. S., Herman Melville wrote:
We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world. . . . Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of the earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world (quoted in Minear 1975:28)
A contemporary reiteration of “Manifest Destiny”, revised in order to justify the war in Iraq, was provided by President George Bush, Sr. in his speech on February 3, 1991, declared a national day of prayer on behalf of Operation Desert Storm, when he said:
As one nation under God, we Americans are deeply mindful of both our dependence on the Almighty and our obligations as a people He has richly blessed. . . . Entrusted with the holy gift of freedom and allowed to prosper in its great light, we have the responsibility to serve as a beacon to the world—to use our strength and resources to help those suffering in the darkness of tyranny and repression (quoted by Scott 2003:141).
The role played by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the “academic” defense of ethnocentrism in the colonial period is played by Michael Novak (1985), the well-known representative of the neoconservative intelligentsia in the United States, in the “academic” defense of ethnocentrism today. He claims that in the face of poverty in Latin America “The question is not, what causes poverty, the question is how do we create wealth?” (18). He then goes on to answer his own question with an impressive array of arguments intended to prove that the U.S. has been able to create wealth on the basis of democratic capitalism, which allows people to use their minds—“the only one, basic, natural resource”—in the context of a free political system, without government interference. In the final analysis, he says, “it is not nature but system and intellect that make people wealthy” (21). Clearly, the implication is that the poor are poor because they lack both the system and the intellect that would make them wealthy. Novak does not say that in so many words; after all, his purpose is not to discuss the causes of poverty but the creation of wealth. Nevertheless, his thesis seems to lead to that conclusion because it does not take into account that, under the rule of imperial globalization, so-called democratic capitalism does not by any means affect all people in the same way: the very same system and the very same intellect that make some people wealthy make many others—the large majority—poor!
In light of the foregoing discussion, it is obvious that present-day imperial globalization is destroying human life around the world. Add to this the undeniable ecological unsustainability of the neo-liberal economic system, and one cannot avoid raising the question as to how it is possible that the myth should persist that laissez-faire capitalism will lead the whole world into an era of bonanza in which “the maximum happiness for the greatest number” will be attained. The answer lies in a revised version of modernity, which Sklair has aptly denominated the “transnational culture-ideology of consumerism,” effectively spread all over the world through the mass media (2002:108-115). As he has put it,
Without consumerism, the rationale for continuous capitalist accumulation dissolves. It is the capacity to commercialize and commodify all ideas and the products in which they adhere, television programmes, advertisements, newsprint, books, tapes, Cds, videos, films, the Internet, and so on, that global capitalism strives to appropriate. Habermas. . . pointedly termed this “the colonization of the lifeworld” (116).
In fact, the mass media today play a predominant role not only in creating a global consciousness of participation in a supposedly developed world but also in facilitating the wide acceptance of the values of the consumer society, including the priority of money and material things in all areas of life. When public opinion is subjected to manipulation on the part of big economic interests, questions regarding social justice, quality of life, and ecological sustainability are indefinitely postponed for the sake of short-term profit-maximization and economic growth. To this end, the mass media make a very big difference as to the way in which power is today exercised by the powerful.
At the initiation of imperial globalization in the fifteenth century, Roman Catholic Christianity was used to legitimise the Spanish conquest. Contemporary neo-colonial imperial globalization finds religious legitimacy in what Michael Budde and Robert W. Brimlow have rightly called “Christianity Incorporated” (2002)—a type of Protestant Christianity that has privatized faith and has exchanged the values of the Kingdom of God for the values of the consumer society.
Christians who have privatized faith and reject the call for Christian involvement in issues of social and economic justice may appeal to Scripture in order to support their arguments. They may, for instance, quote Jesus’ saying according to John 18.36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” or Paul’s injunction in Romans 13.1 to submit to the governing authorities, “for there is no authority except that which God has established.” Taking texts out of context is a common way to defend one’s own position. A much more difficult task, however, is to marshal Biblical evidence to provide a rationale for the massive accommodation of the church to the consumer society—an accommodation which may be the strongest factor disabling many Christians living under the rule of contemporary imperial globalization, not only in the United States but all over the world, to show in practical ways a real commitment to justice.
Imperial globalization promoted by the wealthy countries and especially by the wealthiest of all, the United States, is the culmination of a historical process which started five centuries ago and is deeply affecting “all other living societies, whether pre-civilizational or civilized”. Characterized by greed, ethnocentrism, and religious justification, it has become the greatest threat to life on the planet Earth and, as such, the greatest challenge to the Christian mission around the world. If Jesus Christ came in order that people may experience shalom—that they may have “life, and have it abundantly”—how can Christians participate in the fulfillment of that purpose in a world under the sway of Pax Americana?
