A Guide to Liberal Colonialism

Tony Blair and George W. Bush meet at Camp David

The liberal assumption that regional differences can be ignored and that cultural vacuums can flourish has led to a global project to export liberalism. The cherished liberal values of unremorseful individualism and representative democracy are believed to be eternal truths that can be exported globally at the expense of local customs. This project of exportation is best described as the liberal colonialist order. Liberal colonialism is so pervasive that it has entrenched itself in the apparatus of the state; in Western nations, governments spend trillions of dollars on the exportation of liberalism via military occupations and foreign aid.

 The West's 21st-century involvement in Afghanistan is just one front of a campaign waged by the liberal colonialist order. When redcoat-style imperialism fell out of favour after World War II, Western nations that wished to exert a level of influence on the rest of the world devised new mechanisms to ensure the hegemony of the liberal political order. By attempting to create new liberal governments and enacting social change in desired regions, colonialism lives in a new skin. 

 In the same fashion as Victorian imperialists, the architects of the democratic project - liberal colonialists - in Afghanistan profess their practices to be the most moral. Tony Blair's claim to be acting the most morally was evident to the Conservative Opposition of 2006; in an edition of Prime Minister's Questions, Conservative MP Peter Tapsell quipped "Which archangel is now beckoning him towards southern Afghanistan?". In his response, Blair portrayed the issue of British involvement in Afghanistan to be "standing up for democracy against terrorism". Such simple framing hushed all possible detractors and threw the West into years more of fatal conflict.

Fifteen years later, the "forever war" is over. Upon the withdrawal of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Afghan National Army, the Taliban rolled through the country, taking Kabul without significant resistance. Although the United States achieved its stated aim of removing al-Qaeda from the country, the continued American presence in Afghanistan demonstrated that it was fully invested in constructing a liberal, Westernised state. Since the 2001 invasion, the Western powers have sought to establish an Afghan government satisfactory for Western spectators. Hence, the Afghan state craftsmen of the early 2000s were required to write their Constitution under the auspices of the United Nations, the world's great liberal watchman. In the spirit of pioneer liberal John Stuart Mill, an "inferior" nation was subject to a force that shaped it to accept a new liberal democracy.

The cost of the War, human and fiscal, demonstrates the prevalence of liberal colonialism as a philosophy. Official data from the US Department of Defense places the total expenditure for war and reconstruction at $1 trillion, but Brown University researchers, after including the costs of support supplied to veterans and operations in Pakistan, estimate the total cost to be over $2 trillion. 3,562 soldiers of the Western coalition have died in the conflict, with 22,773 more wounded. Liberal colonialism is backed by the full apparatus of the state and is not merely the ambition of fringe groups.

The liberal colonialist project is also recognisable in its effort to establish universal standards of human rights and thus impose a universal standard for the law. This approach professes the existence of moral absolutes while ignoring the possibility that such moral absolutes have a source. It is no coincidence that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations itself followed shortly after World War II. When it became increasingly less possible to impose a value system by outright territorial occupation, it became necessary to manufacture institutions that could do so. The UDHR, although portrayed as a document of universally accepted truths, was drafted and adopted by a political class that David Goodhart referred to as "anywheres", to inflict upon masses of "somewheres." The liberal colonialist approach seeks to flatten the cultural sphere by homogenising localities and converting the millions of colourful somewheres into a bleak, grey anywhere.

Despite trillions of dollars, moral arrogance and twenty years, the "fall of Kabul" proved that liberalism is neither invincible nor inevitable. The liberal assumption that every land can and should look the same is failing. Even if one abhors the values of cultures other than our own, we must first consider whether such disapproval must materialise as war and foreign interference.