Neo-Colonialism: A Kantian Lens

In Neo-Colonialism (1965), Kwame Nkrumah claimed: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” Further: “neo-colonial control may be exercised by a consortium of financial interests which are not specifically identifiable with any particular State.” On this view, one mark of neocolonialism is that nations are independent formally but *not* materially. A second mark is that neo-colonising powers act beyond the state-based forms of international law. In this paper, I propose a Kantian account of this. The pivotal element is the transnational business corporation (TNC). As part of colonialism, Western powers exported their corporate law regimes worldwide; this has enabled TNCs – networked bodies that act across borders through the governmental power of shareholding. TNCs represent *the* legal form essential to every neo-colonising “consortium of financial interests.” Rich or powerful states often support such activities, but TNCs are the principals. As Kant noted in ‘Perpetual Peace,’ however, “trading companies” (8:359; e.g. the Dutch and English East India Companies) could not be trusted with cosmopolitan rights to visit. TNCs differ from these companies: they are not direct agents for “commercial states” (ibid). Instead, they are legally structured by the governmental power of shareholding: they are agents for anyone wealthy enough to hold shares. TNCs have neither colonising nor cosmopolitan ends; their ends are market share and financial returns. At the same time, TNCs are mostly invisible in international law. In the United Nations in the early 70s, formerly colonised nations proposed a “New International Economic Order” to govern TNCs’ activities. Richer countries defeated this. As a result, each state has to deal with TNCs on its own. Formerly colonised states lack the power and resources to do this: they cannot set terms for their “visitors.” This undercuts their “right of a state” to act as “supreme proprietor” of its territory (6:325). From a Kantian perspective, we might still feel relief that TNCs are not direct colonial agents. But richer countries’ refusal to bring them under international law has had the boomerang effect long feared by critics of colonialism. TNCs can relocate activities wherever laws and policies suit them. So richer states have also lost the power to regulate them. Richer populations benefit from cheap goods, but the largest benefits flow to shareholders – that is, to the world’s wealthiest people; Nkrumah’s “consortium of financial interests.” At the same time, TNC’s negative externalities multiply, unregulated; the worst, greenhouse gas emissions, are essentially global. The resulting “neo-colonialism” subverts all three aspects of Kantian public right. TNCs undercut international right because international law, by ignoring them, has made them into right-holders without duties. They undercut the “right of a state” since states can hardly regulate their activities. They undercut cosmopolitan right: states cannot set terms for their “visitors”; TNCs’ loyalties are to wealthy shareholders, not to the world.