Imperialism

= Imperialism =

** Imperialism is Capitalism, with five features: **
1. Capital led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism. A monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into a monopoly. Cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. A monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. 2. Finance capital replaces industrial capital, as industrial capitalists rely more upon bank-generated finance capital. 3. Finance capital exports replaces the exportation of goods. 4. The economic division of the world, by multi-national enterprises from international cartels. 5. The political division of the world by the great powers, exporting finance capital to their colonies allows their exploitation for resources and continued investment.

- What is a monopoly?

Consequences of Imperialism This was a difference to monopolies and free enterprise where multinational corporations under colonial rule established mines and plantations. Under these enterprises, all the profit left the country, which only left benefits to the multinationals. The United Stares supported the leaders who wanted to develop free market economies. However these leaders wanted to support the status quo without any interference of a mother country. Civil wars happened a lot when the conflicting ideologies of socialism, free market economies, and democracy competed for dominance, or power. During this period, the global appetite for natural resources grew as the industrial countries depended on the imports of minerals and energy. The developing countries were eager to sell their resources, which became a cheap source of raw materials for industrial countries. Also, agricultural plantations provided coffee, tea, bananas, sugar cane, natural rubber, and meat products at affordable prices. Both the production of natural resources and agricultural products was a poorly educated, quickly spreading workforce in developing countries. Those countries could be exploited for low wages and less then desirable working conditions. Controls and monopolies on hiring gave employers the opportunity to keep workers under control from moving within a region in search of better paying jobs.
 * Legacy of Imperialism in different Countries **
 * The mother country was telling the colony what kind of government they had to be. This created a society that was not natural, which made the class structures fixed and social mobility impossible, or illegal.
 * The mother country exploited both the human, and natural resources of the colony. The infrastructure was created to make a collection of resources efficient and therefore didn’t met the needs of the people that lived in the colony. Similarly the education system established ways of changing the colonial population as oppose to simply educating them. The Cold War occurs at the same time as the fight for independence. The superpowers and their conflicting ideologies were used as the spark of the new independent countries as a way to protect political and geographic convenience over each other. The Soviet Union often supported the leaders who wanted to see changes in land and changes in the governments control in natural resources. The transfer of resources and industries would put the ownership of these resources, and the benefits from them, into the hands of the people.

- What was the mother country telling the colony?

[|Imperialism]


 * Compare Independence movements **

It was only after the end of World War II that most of the South East Asian countries gained their independence from western colonial rulers. After centuries under foreign dominion, these countries have to go through difficult processes of transformation to protect their new found sovereignty and territorial integrity especially against the threat of communism during the Cold War. More significantly, the peoples of the new independent states found greater incentives and opportunities to identify themselves with ethnic groups along common decent, shared experiences and cultural factors. This social dynamics led to the emergence of tensions and conflicts not only between ethnic groups and the state, but also between ethnic groups and other groups of society. The causes of such conflicts are complex and varied, such as discrimination, repression, political disenfranchisement and the like.

During the Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, European powers divided Africa and its resources into political partitions at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. By 1905, African soil was almost completely controlled by European governments, with the only exceptions being Liberia and Ethiopia. Britain and France had the largest holdings, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal also had colonies. As a result of colonialism and imperialism, Africa suffered long term effects, such as the loss of important natural resources like gold and rubber, economic devastation, cultural confusion, geopolitical division, and political subjugation. Europeans often justified this using the concept of the White Man's Burden, an obligation to civilize the peoples of Africa.

With the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 the political landscape of the Eastern Bloc, and indeed of the world, changed. In the German reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany peacefully absorbed the German Democratic Republic in 1990. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Many European nations which had been part of the Soviet Union regained their independence (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus). The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell apart, creating new nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Macedonia. Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was later renamed to Serbia and Montenegro and, in 2006, it broke up into these two countries. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Many countries of this region joined the European Union, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Three other states, Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey are currently negotiating membership in the EU.

-Due to the independence movements, Yugoslavia fell apart, which nations did Yugoslavia create?

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