3 Body No Problem
Well-known member
Imperialism has 'has not been practised by the advanced capitalist states for a long time'?
When was the last time it was practised in your opinion?
I apologise for being imprecise here. What I should have said was: Imperialism has not been practised by procedural democracy with a capitalist economy for a long time. I used to term "advanced captialist" as a shorthand for such states (which also feature a free press, independent judiciary and so on). I should have made that clear. Calling them "Advanced capitalist" is problematic, because of entities like Singapore.
The history of US and UK aggression against, and inteference with other nations in the 20th century alone has been well documented and makes a mockery of that claim.
I agree, however the UK can reasonably be called a democracy only after the loss of the empire in the 1950 or 1960s. The US is the most interesting and most problematic case for me. Internally, the US can be said to have become a democracy (in the conventional sense of the word of all citizens being allowed to vote) only when blacks got effectively the same formal rights as whites, which happened in the 1960s. To this day the US still dominates many countries on this planet without giving the citizens of these places adequate democratic representation. So it is on some level questionable if the US can be called a democracy in my sense (i.e. the real sense) of all subjects -- citizens or otherwise -- having electoral franchise. But there are mitigating factors.
- The kind of dominance that the US practises in e.g. Western Europe, is very different from, and much more benign than the imperialist dominance of, say France in Viet Nam, or Belgium in Kongo, or the Soviet Union in the Baltics.
- Internally the US is very democratic (in the sense of procedural democracy), with the electoral franchise being extended to almost all its (adult) citizens. This is very different from, and much better than the feudal regimes of Europe, or the autocracies of the communist world.