Imperialism and Neo-imperialism

 Partha Chatterjee, the noted scholar of post colonial development, has in his seminal study of British Imperialism in Bengal, The Black Hole of Empire, defined imperialism as - the privilege to declare the exception to the norm. He extends the definition of the political theorist Carl Schmitt with regard to sovereignty within an European nation as the power to decide on the exception to the liberal norm to maintain law and order in times of emergencies, to the colonial world where there is a continuous exception to the norms by the imperialist powers so as to subjugate the colonies. So, while in the internal governance of Britain itself utilitarian liberalism prevailed, the British deemed their colonial subjects to be inferior and not yet ready for liberal self governance and better ruled by despotism, ostensibly to allow them to become capable of ruling themselves later. This was done to mask the actual historical reality of imperial extraction of surpluses from the colonies which became blatant during the late nineteenth century when even this figment of liberalism was dispensed with and there was a brazen capture of colonies in Asia and Africa by the European powers.

Chatterjee goes on to say that his definition of imperialism applies even more truly in the post colonial era where neo-imperialism predominates. Especially so in the Muslim dominated Middle East where beginning with the settling of the Israeli state in Palestine and immediately afterwards the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime in Iran and down to the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and now once again Iran, the United States of America, in conjunction with other European powers, has continually made untenable exceptions to the liberal norm to subjugate other nations. The crucial resource in these cases is of course petroleum, which since the turn of the twentieth century has driven capitalist accumulation globally.
Chatterjee has also noted that the post colonial nation states themselves have adopted the imperialist ruling paradigm in their states after independence and frequently made exceptions to the liberal norms to suppress mass dissent as is now happening in India over the protests against the arbitrarily conducted Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls which has deleted a huge 130 million voters from the draft electoral rolls.