Cold War Legacies
Thus into the 1960s, the idea of neocolonialism was increasingly shaped and characterized by the polarities of the Cold War.[2675] Although occasionally used to condemn Soviet methods in garnering influence with newly independent states, it became more commonly associated with a leftist critique of capitalist intrigue.
This was assiduously cultivated by the Kremlin, with leading figures expounding on the dangers of Western neocolonialism, not only in the individual machinations of the former imperial powers, but also via the collective bargaining of the European Common Market.[2676] Nikita Khrushchev took every opportunity to raise the alarm against a “conspiracy of the colonizers against all of the peoples of Africa.”[2677]Yet the Soviet Union by no means monopolized the term. The most effective counter came not from the West but from the leaders of Communist China, who had grown increasingly skeptical of Russia’s presumptive leadership of the developing world. China’s prominent role at the 1955 Bandung conference had provided a potential foundation for an alternative set of alignments that bypassed European influence entirely.[2678] By 1963, as Sino-Soviet tensions multiplied, the Chinese Communist leadership openly sought to supplant the Russians as the purveyor of socialist doctrine to emerging African nations. In a widely publicized press circular entitled “The Apologists of Neocolonialism,” Khrushchev was vilified for paying cynical and self-interested lip service to the cause of colonial liberation while himself displaying the qualities of “great power chauvinism” and “national egoism.” Moreover, the Soviets were stigmatized by their ethnicity, through which they inevitably viewed the liberation struggles of Asia and Africa as “a movement of colored peoples against the white race.”[2679] The first Chinese state visit to Africa—an extended sojourn by Premier Zhou Enlai lasting from December 1963 to February 1964—was presaged by official pronouncements that “the Chinese people and the people of Africa have shared the same historical destiny” in the struggle against colonialism, clearly signaling their superior credentials as the model revolutionary pathway.[2680] Throughout his tour of 10 countries—Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia—Zhou repeatedly invoked the “spirit of Bandung” as a synonym for the struggle against neocolonialism.[2681] His recurring metaphor of the eternal Yangtze flowing in tandem with interchangeable African rivers, coupled with the depiction of China and Africa as “poor friends in the same boat pulling oars together,” underlined in none-too-subtle terms China's special affinity with Africa.[2682] As the Times acutely observed: “China's interest in Africa began when decolonization gathered momentum, and sharpened when China began to contest with Russia the leadership of the Afro-Asian group.”[2683] The Russians, for their part, responded by accusing the Chinese leadership of “aiding neocolonialism” in their drive to displace Soviet influence in Africa.[2684]
In the meantime, it was events in Africa that continued to lend shape and meaning to the shadowy threat of colonialism by proxy.
Only a short time after the publication of Neocolonialism (while en route to Communist-controlled North Vietnam), Kwame Nkrumah was deposed by a military coup in February 1966. For the rest of his life he remained convinced (on the basis of disputed evidence supplied by the KGB) that his downfall had been orchestrated by the CIA.[2685] Nkrumah had been the most vocal and consistent opponent of neocolonial influence in Africa, but there was considerable variation in African leaders' inclination to criticize the West. Nigeria's Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, for example, with his teetotaler temperament and faintly Etonian demeanor, was generally regarded as more conciliatory— a “statesman” in the eyes of his English friends, a “British stooge” to his enemies. In 1965 he declared that “phrases like neocolonialism, anti-colonialism” had outlived their purpose: “We are independent and have passed the stage of using such catchy phrases.”[2686] Less than a year later (and only weeks before Nkrumah's demise) he was found murdered under a tree on the outskirts of Lagos. His overthrow was greeted with scenes of jubilation, with the national daily West African Pilot voicing pride in the defeat of the “fumbling feudal and neocolonialist regime. Today, independence, which is said to have been granted by the British five years ago, is really won.”[2687] Neocolonialism, it seems, was a two-edged sword, wreaking vengeance on its apologists and critics alike.Neocolonialism became closely associated with economic “dependency theory,” which became influential in the 1960s and 1970s in its emphasis on import substitution and tariff protection as the best means of breaking the colonial pattern of exchange. In more recent years, however, the concept has tended to fade from view. Many of the grievances once associated with neocolonialism—foreign exploitation of natural resources, the asymmetrical division of labor between rich and poor countries, the insidious influence of multinational corporations—now tend to go by the name of “globalization.” At the same time, the notion of the “failed state” has emerged as the flipside of neocolonialism, shifting the blame for enduring patterns of political and economic instability onto the internal dysfunction within postcolonial states themselves.
It would seem more than a mere coincidence that both “globalization” and the “failed state” came into vogue in the early 1990s in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the easing of Cold War tensions.[2688] That neocolonialism should have been among the conceptual casualties only underlines the formative influence of its Cold War origins.Ironically, one international development where charges of neocolonialism have recently been reinvigorated is Chinese economic involvement in Africa, where the diminishing polarities of the Cold War have turned the tables on China's anticolonial credentials. Recent decades have witnessed a sustained increase in Chinese commercial, diplomatic, and development activities south of the Sahara “on a scale never before seen.”[2689] China's capacity to produce cheap consumer items ideally tailored to Africa's limited purchasing power, coupled with a growing interest in extracting African resources (copper, aluminum, nickel, timber, ivory, oil) has produced an asymmetrical commercial relationship that is increasingly likened to the European colonists of old.[2690] Whereas some African leaders have warmly welcomed Chinese investment, others have signaled a degree of trepidation - such as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, who voiced concern in 2006 that Africa could become mired in “an unequal relationship” with China, akin to its colonial past.[2691] Others have drawn similar parallels. The encroachment on local businesses by expatriate Chinese traders in Zambia has been decried as a “new scramble for Africa,” while Chinese investors in Gabonese development projects have been labeled a “new breed of colonialists.”[2692] Journalistic bylines heralding an oriental “conquest of the dark continent” or a “China safari” reinforce the sense of a rekindled neocolonialism.[2693] US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a veiled swipe at the Chinese, warned a Zambian audience in 2012 of a “new colonialism” looming over Africa: “We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave.”[2694]
China's response has invariably been to reiterate Zhou Enlai's 1960s rhetoric of a common cause with the developing world, and to dismiss concerns about neocolonialism as symptomatic of Western anxieties and prejudice.
Accusations of Chinese indifference to the human cost of their African sojourn have been met with high indignation, typified by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang in 2006: “We will not repeat the record of the then Western colonists who bloodily plundered and violated human rights. China is a responsible country.”[2695] More creatively, the Chinese government has financed archaeological explorations off the East African coast in a bid to establish a presence that predates that of Western colonial influence, thereby countering charges of neocolonialism with evidence of deeper affinities and enduring ties.[2696] What this suggests is that neocolonialism still matters, although the rules of engagement have altered markedly in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, the whole terrain of commercial, cultural, and political influence in Africa has been transformed to the point where continuities with the colonial era become difficult to sustain. Taylor and Xiao offer the more plausible argument that China's increasing influence and involvement in Africa, however problematic, is a consequence “not of colonization but of globalization and the somewhat chaotic reintegration of China into the global economy.”[2697]