Energy Imperialism for Climate Organisers
This blog is the first of a four part write-up of our ‘Energy and Imperialism for Climate Organisers’ workshop, delivered at the Tenegas Climate Camp, Rotterdam the 30th August this year. Thank you everyone who came along and to the organisers who kindly hosted us.
We began with the basics. What is imperialism?
The practice of states expanding their power by controlling land, gaining political influence or securing economic leverage beyond their borders. It’s a capitalist ideology that functions overtly, eg. through military violence, and covertly, eg. through the influence of multinational corporations.
Imperialism then
From 1492 to 1914, European colonial empires occupied 80% of the landmass of the entire world. These empires were built on genocide, enslavement and dispossession of indigenous people from their lands. They also relied on active processes of racialisation as part of the colonising process. By imposing hierarchies of value onto colonised people based on anglo-centric, Christian ideologies of civilisation, European colonisers justified their violent imposition of Western language, culture and political systems. This value system, white supremacy, was also used to compel territorial and resource domination, for financial and political interests.
If empire is mentioned at all in Western European schools or political systems, it’s largely taught as something that happened in the past.
This is an inaccurate view of how global capitalism operates today: a system still completely predicated on imperial violence and domination…
Imperialism now
From the 19th century until the mid-20th century, Western powers forced the places they had colonised to restructure their economies around the extraction and export of resources, including fossil fuels and other raw materials required for their industrial revolutions. Eventually, the success of anti-colonial revolutionary struggles saw colonialism end formally in many places. However, the dynamics of resource transfer from less wealthy economies to the imperial cores of Europe, America and some of the gulf states, were preserved, as were the racialised violence that enabled this unequal global distribution of power and wealth.
A key way these imperial dynamics were kept alive was through the production of debt which exacerbated the already acute economic inequalities between coloniser and colonised. Haiti, for example, won independence in 1804. Yet in exchange, France demanded compensation for their loss of income from slavery. This saw the Haitian government pay over 90 million gold francs to their coloniser over the 122 years that followed.
These independence debts made it very hard for the many anti-colonial governments to escape their peripheral role as exporter of raw materials and provider of cheap labour, placed on them by colonial empires. This culminated in economic crises of the 1980s and the structural adjustment programmes led by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that followed as a solution. In exchange for development loans, former colonised nations were encouraged to make their economies ‘more friendly’ for foreign investment, by liberalising public services and nationally owned resources. This created fertile ground for wealthy companies and state bodies from abroad to integrate themselves into the economies of former colonised states, continuing the empire in a softer way.
Another way imperial states held onto power was via military interventions. In 1953 Iran, the UK and the US overthrew elected president Mohammad Mossadegh in a coup d’etat, after he nationalised the countries’ oil reserves which had been owned by the Anglo- Iranian Oil Company (now BP). He was replaced by Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was Shah for 26 years with US backing.
The proxy war currently happening in Sudan and the genocide in Gaza are both clear examples of how imperialism today is just as violent and racist as it was in the past.
Why is it important for us as climate organisers think of energy and imperialism together?
Energy is the capacity making device of late-racial capitalism. It is the fuel in the tank of our industrialised global political economy. Without racialised practises of dispossession and domination, our energy system as it currently operates cannot exist. Without a critique of the modes of power and subordination used to keep our energy system and therefore racial capitalism alive and thriving, we will not be able to build systemic analysis of why of energy system operates the way it does, who is disproportionately harmed, where our solidarity should be and who we should be targeting in our resistance.
For example…
The recent protests against the Tesla factory being built near Berlin have been inspiring and impressive. To make space for the factory which is set to produce 500,000 cars/year, over 500,000 trees have already been felled. Yet, without a view of the imperial dynamics that are the making of this picture, we miss an enormous piece of the puzzle. In DRC, mine workers earn around 30p an hour to harvest cobalt, a key ingredient in the Tesla electric vehicle (EV) battery. Against a backdrop of nearly 30 years of genocide in the Eastern Congo, resulting in the deaths of over 10 million people, our resistance to imperial corporations like Tesla must have its eye on global supply chains and the role of military funding from imperial cores such as the UK and US, as well as the ecological impacts on our own localities.
Our struggle for climate justice must be synonymous with our collective liberation from racial capitalism, and the imperial dynamics woven into our energy system that it relies upon to continue.
Coming soon on our blog...
1. Incarceration, militarisation and gas: the case of Gaza.
2. Counter-insurgency: why repression and energy expansion go hand in hand.
3. Greenwashed imperialism: German hydrogen in Namibia and EU development policy.