Reflections on Modernization Redux and the Imperial Present

Abstract:  With the ending of the Cold War in 1989, the global situation was irretrievably altered and the new temporal present was ominously marked by the American entry into the first Gulf War, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the conversion of a mission to hunt down a terrorist in Afghanistan into what now seems like a permanent military involvement dedicated to 'nation-building' that promises to be America's 'Thirty Years War.'  Once actually existing socialism left the scene, new fundamentalisms appeared to respond to their perception of contemporary misfortune by repudiating the bankruptcy of what once was pledged to realizing the prospect of progress shaped by programs of capitalist and Stalinist modernization dedicated to development and make-over. 

With the disappearance of the bipolar strategies of modernization and the apparent victory of the 'free market,' the perspective shifted to the releasing of an unbridled capitalism and its aptitude for global expansion, now driven by a hegemonic United States, which momentarily was positined to merge imperial ambition to its previous commitment of capitalist modernization as if they constituted a natural coupling. This presumption of a natural kinship between imperial aspiration and modernization (often thwarted in the Cold War by the Soviet Union's own ambitions) derived from the experience of the American military occupation of Japan after World War II, became the basis of the temporal form called "long postwar" (reaching down to our present)--living in the eclipse cast by the American imperium--to become the model for subsequent imperial adventures. The purpose of my paper is to explore this relationship and how modernization, once employed as a developmentalist strategy to win over the unaligned, was continued in a new register by turning to the vocation of imperial achievement.