Modern development as colonialism

by Edward Goldsmith

Position paper

It all started centuries ago with the "Age of Discovery", the process of colonisation led
by Portuguese and Spanish exploration of the Americas, the coasts of Africa, the Middle East,
India, and East Asia. France, England and Dutch republic were dominating the world and
since then, the struggles and fights for power, interest, dominance and the most powerful
nations’ control on the weakest in order for them to obtain benefits and strenghten their
influence never ceased. In time, the spread of Western „values” created a big hole where
Third World countries and ancient colonies and poorer nations were buried, doomed to
depend on the „great nations” and trying to recover themselves. As the French banker
François Partant said, after the decolonisation process, „the developing nations have
discovered for themselves a new mission – to help the Third World advance along the road to
development . . .which is nothing more than the road on which the West has guided the rest of
humanity for several centuries.”

In his essay, Edward Goldsmith’s main idea is that this “modern development” is in
reality a new form of imperialism, the face of “colonialism repackaged and ferociously
applied via transnational corporations, compliant local elites and global institutions such as
the World Bank and the IMF-all underwritten by the threat of military force”. So, according
to his theory, there is continuity between the colonial era and the development, because
development and colonialism represent in fact “the same process under a different name”
sharing the same goal: to find new lands from which could be easily obtained raw materials
and from which cheap slave labor can be exploited, providing also “a dumping ground for the
surplus goods produced in our factories”; but this could not, at the same time, provide a
market for local producers and a source of labour and raw materials for the country’s own
productive enterprises, so the idea is for those countries „to look exclusively to the mother
country”, which means loss of seoverignty and everything but independence.
In order for all this to work properly, a legal framework in which capitalist relations
could operate was established, with the purpose to satisfy commercial interests of the Western
countries: free market and very permissive trade rules, allowing to the developed countries
access to all Third World countries, especially through the elites (most of the times corrupted)
of these countries. Why the elites? Because if suitably armed, these can impose the „economic
development” in that country.
We so often hear about „Development aid programmes” and we say „oh, this sounds
so altruistic, solidary etc., it is so good that this exists, we are helping the poor, we are
working for a better world…”. Well, this is what I tought at the beginning, that things are
working this way. But it turns out that this is most of the times a lie, because in reality these
programmes lead to the expropriation and impoverishment of most of the people of the
„helped countries”, because those people become exclusively dependent on the „donor
countries”. Plus, how much of the money or aid gets to the people that really need it? And
how much gets „lost” in the pockets of the governors, administratives of the programmes. Aid
programs and lending money to the non-industrial countries seems to be the most effective
method of controlling them and thereby of obtaining access to their market and their natural
resources and after that they are forced to purchase the goods from „the mother country”. This
is the same system as in the colonialism age, when colonies were forced to buy their
manufactured goods from the country that had colonised them, aid recipients must spend
much of the money that is supposed to relieve their poverty and malnutrition, on irrelevant
manufactured goods that are produced by the donor countries.
This represents another way to maintain dependency of the poorer nations on the
richer, because even though we always talk about and fight for the equality and equity, human
rights, improvement of living conditions etc., it is impossible to have someday a world where
every country and every person on this planet will have everything that she needs, without
worrying about tomorrow. History proved that there has always been a hierarchy, and there
will always exist those ho have less and those who have more and the richer will rule the
poorer. There are too many gaps accumulated through hisory between the World’s nations
and it is impossible for a country like, for example South Sudan, to reach the level of, let’s
say, France, even in 100 years, taking into account the current situation. It is also a matter of
culture, heritage, starting point and administration. Countries who have always been powerful
tend to stay so and those which couldn’t develop more from the beginning for different
reasons, are condamned to be „supported” by the other countries, in the idea to help them fill
the gaps and to „lipt them up”. So what they do, the rich? They start to extend their influence
through companies and corporations in the poorer countries, in order to „create jobs”, support
their economy, creating the opportunity of a better live. Well, it seems that this is only the
appearance. In fact, this is another form of colonialism, the corporate one, established in
reality through economic or political force. Corporations locate areas with weak or corruptible
governments and significant quantities of resources or labor and establish themselves there.
Colonialism is an attractive concept to corporations because it allows to the colonial power to
extract resources and profits from the host country without having to worry about giving
anything back. In short, corporate colonialism is when wages are low, public services are cut
so that money can be given to multi-national corporations, and money pools offshore, in the
hand of the privileged few. This happens for example in the case of the great clothes
producers like Zara, H&M or United Colors of Benetton (clothes produced in countries like
China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia or African countries etc., violating the human rights and
promoting child labor) or in the case of the deforestation of the lands in Indonesia, Brazil or
D.R. of Congo.
So what happens basically is that they/we take advantage of their lack of power and
their rich resources, we exploit them to improve our economies, not theirs, under the image of
solidary better world militants. What will happen when their resources will or will not be
exploitable anymore because of overexploitation? Or if they will all die from exploitation and
bad working conditions or epidemics? Or if they go all on Japanese strike and refuse our
help? We will use the “military aid” to settle them down? We will let them die of hunger
because they are not “useful anymore” – unexploitable resources?
I could not say that all the intentions are bad, but since a “mother country” should
protect her children, I think measures should be taken by the donor states and owners of the
companies in order to review and reevaluate the working environment, the living conditions
and the rights of the people in these “children countries”. As a good mother, one should raise
her children in the best way possible, following not only her interests, but especially
children’s ones.
I will finish my paper with my own example of corporate colonialism, used even in
Romania. There are actually more international and multinational companies than national at
this moment in our country. Skilled people, cheap labor force, employees always under
pressure. I am actually working in a French multi-national corporation and I have a good
entry-level salary for a Romanian citizen, compared to my mother’s, who is working for about
25 years for the same national company and has a quarter of my monthly revenue. It is
cheaper for the French client company to pay Romanians to deal with the complaints of the
French clients. My colleagues working in same company in France are paid four times more
than I am and they do half of the work we do here in Bucharest. The pressure is always high
and the requirements for quality and productivity are sometimes too high compared to our
volume of work. I call it exploitation; not that French people would have a big history on
exploitation (since we can’t apply the French legislation here - 35 hours of work/week,
mandatory 2 hours break at 12:00 and 2000 euro salary for the graduates). The idea is that
we, the young Romanians, are colonized by foreign corporations because we have good skills,
we work a lot and we accept salaries that in their countries are very low, but here are
considered decent. This is the main principle of colonization: reach new territories in order to
exploit their resources cheaply: a high-profit, low-cost strategy. If we try to go to work in the
colonizer countries, we have to face discrimination, bureaucracy and a lot of struggles. Same
thing for the Africans, the people from China, Indonesia or Vietnam and others. Therefore,
why we/they accept all this? Because, in the end, like them, we want more, to do more, to
have more. And if they have maybe a choice, I know that most of the time we quite don’t.