Postmodern imperialism is beneficial imperialism in the post-colonial age.[1] It is based on providing developing nations with order and organization, voluntarism and stability.[2] Postmodern imperialism negates the widespread belief that imperialism holds negative consequences for the populations of the globe.[3]
The European Union has often been viewed by critics as a form of imperialism.[4] A postmodern imperialistic view of the European Union states that it can be a force for positive change:
The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralized absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state . . . A cooperative empire might be . . . a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal.[5]
The foreign policy of the European Union has been considered as a vestige of postmodern imperialism.[6]
Niall Ferguson has labeled the United States of America as a post-colonial empire.[7]
Critic Nayna J. Jhaveri, writing in Antipode, viewed the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a form of "petroimperialism," believing that the U.S. was motivated to go to war to attain vital oil reserves, rather than to pursue the U.S. government's official rationale for the Iraq War ("a preemptive strike to disarm Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction").[8]
Some critics viewed the spread of Western cultural influence as a form of postmodern imperialism; George Ritzer coined the term "McDonaldization"[9] and Mark Pendergrast wrote of "Cocacolonization."[10] The spread of capitalism has been seen as a form of imperialism.[11]