>I'll take a bite at Paul's question. I'll preface this by >saying that I haven't re-read Lenin on imperialism lately, and >that I'm not super-clear on what super-imperialism means, but >I'm inclined to say, Yes, we live in an era of >super-imperialism. At least if that means that the metropolitan >capitalist powers have foregone the use of military force in >pressing their individual imperial claims, in favour of >cooperation vis-a-vis the rest of the world, while restricting >their mutual rivalry to diplomatic and commercial channels. > >When was there last a real fight between metropolitan capitalist >powers over access to sources of raw materials or markets? >Over the last couple of decades the sites of military conflict >have primarily been arenas of historically-rooted ethnic >conflict (e.g. Ireland, Palestine, the Balkans), or local >power-grabs (Iraq/Kuwait). When the major capitalist powers >have intervened, it has been to defend a common interest in >property rights, or oil supplies, or the limitation of the >contagion of incendiary ethnic feuding. > >Allin Cottrell. there remains the threat of the fracturing of global markets into antagonistic regional trading pacts under the hegemony of certain capitals while whole continents (Africa) and subcontinents (South Asia) are left out in the dark. there is also the question of unilateral US actions which in the jargon of political science unravel cooperative regimes. This is explored in the latest book by perhaps the leading American theorist of international relations--Robert Gilpin. There is also the irony mentioned by the director of the influential Institute of International Economics C Fred Bergsten: the collapse of the Soviet Union has removed the basis for imperial cooperation and allowed for increasingly antagonistic inter-imperial relations. So it has taken the collapse of the Soviet Union to give contemporary plausibility Lenin's thesis, he mused in a lecture four years ago at UC Berkeley. rb
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