Development and globalization as imperialism

Both development and globalization can be understood as imperialism as different faces of the same dynamics arising out of a project of world domination and longstanding efforts of the United States to establish its hegemony. This paper reconstructs some of the major dynamics of international development, both as a strategic project and as an objective process of economic progress. It then turns toward the discourse on globalization and the argument that globalization is little more than a mask for the imperialist agenda of the US superpower. The paper argues that the "new imperialism" as presented and constructed by its neoconservative ideologues is based on the overt projection of political power and military force: as war rather than local development or the projection of economic power (aid, trade, investment, globalization). It concludes that NGOs and other elements of civil society have been pressed into imperial service, providing strategic assistance to the empire to quell the fire of revolutionary ferment on the southern periphery of the system, particularly in the countryside of rural development and social movements.