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3. Market Patriotism: Liberal Democracy Unmasked David Whyte
We are living in confusing times. This is an age in which liberal democracy is being extended across the globe by ever more awesome and terrifying forms of policing and military violence. It is an age in which liberal democracy is being imposed without choice upon the most vulnerable economies by faceless and unaccountable financial institutions. And it is an age in which the most extreme forms of violence and economic force are produced by liberal democracies. Yet a close look at world history shows us that there is no contradiction between the model of liberal democracy and the violence that is necessary to ensure its prevalence. The history of both British and American Imperialisms, although their paths of development have been wholly different, show this umbilical connection between extreme violence and the spread of the model of liberal democracy most openly. In the British Empire, the open acknowledgment of this close connection is written into the blueprint for colonisation. Simply read John Locke’s theory of property; which is nothing less than a rationale for a very Christian form of pillage and theft (Meiksins Wood, 2003). At the height of the American Empire, in the late 20th century, the doctrine of liberal democracy was rhetorically trawled out in US foreign policy as the same government sponsored and ensured the survival of regimes that routinely practised torture and organised death squads (Herman, 1982). The starting point for the argument I will develop here is not a particularly new one. Yet it is one that is - perhaps as a result of its obviousness - commonly missed in debates about the nature of power in