Colonial legacies in a Neo-liberal world

I've been sitting on this one for awhile, but my recent viewing of "Battle of Algiers" has prompted my blogging about it. For those whoa ren't familiar with the film, the quick rundown is, it's a fictional-yet-realistic story about Algeria's struggle for independence from France in the 1950s. It takes a very pro-Algerian stance, which some may agree with, some may not, but that's irrelevant.

What it did for me was remind me of conversations I repeatedly found myself getting stuck in last summer while traveling in Brazil. Many European travelers would want to discuss politics with me, basically looking to blame the US for the world's problems today (additionally presuming that Bush = the American people, carte blanche, refusing to consider political differences and seemingly unaware that, while Bush had won re-election, Kerry had also finished with more votes than any other president in history). Now, let me give my honest disclaimer by saying that, without a doubt, the economic, political, and social policies of the US have negatively affected many parts of the world throughout the past 50 years, and while my expertise is limited mostly to Latin America, there are no doubt examples throughout the world, from the IMF and World Bank's ability to get countries to become indebted to foreign interests, harming them for generations, to the US removal of leaders such as the Shah of Iran to the support of mujahedeen in the 1980s (how's that working now?)

However, I found the tendency to blame the US solely for the world's problems to be narrow at best and hypocritical at worst, especially from people from England, France, Belgium, etc. First of all, these countries have often supported at least portions of US policy, and are equally involved with IMF/World Bank type administrative policies. It does no good for the French or Italian or fill-in-the-blank European country to act like the US is interested only in its own economic potential, when these countries have also followed similar approaches (see France's interaction with Iraq over the food-for-oil program). Indeed, and particularly in the case of England, I often find myself in a geopolitical question similar to Obi Wan Kenobi's "Who's more foolish - the fool, or the fool who follows him?" in regards to Tony Blair, whose appaerntly sheer subservience to all the Bush administration does leaves me wondering where he fits on the not-at-all-objective "evil scale".

However, there are two grander problems with placing every trouble in the world at the US's door. The first is the fact that the use of the US as a scapegoat refuses Europe's role in the current situation. Again, much of the economic turmoil and exploitation can be traced to the US, but the Europeans who I spoke with (I will not pretend that they represent Europe carte blanche, but they were intelligent and informed) seemed to completely forget the entire legacy of European colonialism in Latin America, Asia, and particularly, Africa. While the US has been none-too-quick to aid Africa in any way, tending to ignroe it at best or use it to its own economic and corporate advantage at worst, a majority of the problems in Africa have their roots not in US economic policies, but in European forms of colonization. While the legacy is not as strong today in Latin America, one can still see how colonial legacies and the Enlightenment shape economic, social, and racial thought in Latin America today. Again, it may be redundant, but while the US has certainly not always sought to stem the effects of colonialism, neither is it the sole culprit.

Finally, the other item I find particularly troublesome in sole blame of the US is that it denies local agency of political, economic, and social elites. For every policy that the US has tried to impose on places (and again, I draw on my knowledge of Latin America here - Africa and Asia may prove me wrong for those areas, which is fine), it has found support at the grassroots levels within the countries it is involved with. Thus, the CIA involvement in the coup of 1973 in Chile had mass popular support, and indeed, many Chileans had been mobilizing against Allende since late-1971 and early-1972 without the CIA prompting them. Additionally, if one looks to the economic crises much of Latin America faced (with Argentina being the paradigm, but not the sole example) in the late-1990s and early-2000s, it's easy to forget that, when Bill Clinton initiated the Washington Consensus of 1994, promising neo-liberal unity across Latin America and the US, we can't forget the importance of the Latin American leaders of the time who had also embraced neo-liberalism policies, leaders like Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who were as positive as Clinton that neo-liberalism was the way of the future, and that these "backward" countries could only finally achieve their full potential with a full-on neo-liberal program. Thus, people like Cardoso sold out their countries as much as Clinton coerced them.

While I certainly hope all of this does not come off like a "poor US - it gets such a bum rep", it still may. However, I pray the reader not mis-interpret me, for this is in no way an apologia for the US. Rather, i hope you readers in the so-called "blogosphere," regardless of race, creed, or especially "nation", see it as a lament of a narrow quest for blame for modern geopolitical and geosocial crises. If we seek to blame only one country, one economy, one model, one leader, we deny the complexity of processes of the last 50 years, and of the complexities of today.