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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Imperialism after Bush Obama’s Foreign Policy during the Global Financial Crisis and the ‘Pivot to Asia Leoni, Zeno Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact librarypure@kcl.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Imperialism after Bush Obama’s Foreign Policy during the Global Financial Crisis and the ‘Pivot to Asia Zeno Leoni Department of European and International Studies King’s College London Doctoral thesis submitted on September 30, 2017 This page intentionally left blank 2 Declaration This thesis reflects my original research work unless clearly indicated by references. The copyright rests with the author but quotation of this document is encouraged. 3 Abstract This dissertation makes a contribution to the third-wave of Marxist debates on capitalist imperialism and to the literature on both American imperialism and Obama’s foreign policy. The theoretical challenge is to bridge the divide between Marxism and International Relations caused by the former’s lack of a comprehensive analysis of the state. This work develops a Marxist analysis of both structures and agencies of imperialism looking at the relation between systemic, societal and individual levels of analysis and it constructs an argument to explain the politics of imperialism. The synthesis between structure and agency is sought, along these analytical levels, within the tension between America’s global geoeconomy and its nationally-informed geopolitical strategy. In the case-study, the discussion on imperialism goes beyond the aftermath of 9/11 and it provides an update about the post-2008, increasingly fragmented global order. It does so by exploring on systemic, societal and idiosyncratic levels of analysis the Obama presidency and the US geostrategic shift to the Asia-Pacific. It highlights both structural and agential factors of domestic politics and foreign policy of Obama’s administrations and it explores the “pivot to Asia” from a global perspective, looking at military, economic, diplomatic and ideological as much as structural and agential forces on a pan-regional scale. Overall, this work concludes that US-China relations manifest a systemic inter-imperialist rivalry. However, it demonstrates that different agencies of American imperialism adopt different approaches to American grand strategy, an argument further confirmed by the final section on the Trump presidency. 4 Acknowledgements The PhD is often described as a frustrating and almost insurmountable job. But if I look back at the last few years it would be unfair to make this statement without considering the difficulties posed by the environment where I worked. While the initial stages of the PhD were a challenging brainstorming, life in London was definitely harder despite this global city with its rampant capitalism is a privileged point of observation for understanding society. The cost of living and studying in the city brought me to explore all sorts of jobs. I started as a “sandwich chef” in an industrial kitchen in Park Royal’s industrial estate – West London – making meals which were delivered to week-ends tube workers, for £7 an hour without any taxation. While my foreman was an Italian citizen later arrested for some drug issues in Colombia, the owner of the business was a middle-aged Englishman who had won the contract to provide food for tube workers by bribing a Brent councillor –eventually the owner also won the management of the work site canteen where the new council was built, in Wembley. The instability of that job threw me into the bitter reality of London’s unskilled labour market as I ended up working for one of the many bars owned by EAT for £6.19 an hour. There, I not only learned how little money one could earn with a part-time job, but I also saw mass production first hand as in each sandwich the amount of ham, cheese, tuna, salad, peppers and rocket was measured to the gram according to the company’s guidelines. More sadly, this made me discover something I previously had little familiarity with – given my rural origins – such as the existence of poor workers or “new slaves”. As I went to work at 5.30 in the morning in order to open the bar, it was impossible to forget the Latin American cleaners of offices who I met on the bus and who worked at difficult hours for a miserable pay. After a period of transition thanks to my father’s support and the not too generous Jobseeker Allowance, I started the PhD and a four years long work with a young BBC and Sky News journalist affected by cerebral palsy and Asperger syndrome. This was an incredibly challenging time with a very difficult individual who saw his life complicated by the unhappy circumstances of his family: his father was a bipolar individual and former businessman who had lost his company in the US; his mother died of cancer just after her new partner kicked her son out of the US – before the 5 funeral. During this time I was made aware of how class-driven is British society – particularly inside Sky News – and I recognised the hypocrisy of a professional environment where people only pursue happiness through hard work, at the cost of physical and mental health and a façade of fulfilment. In addition to achieving a more comfortable London living wage – £8.15 an hour when I started, 9.15 when I left, plus roughly one pound every hour for holiday pay – it is during this experience that I developed a substantial part of my thesis. Radio 4 and Sky News offices, along with the train going from central London to Ealing Broadway, Osterley and Feltham were my working spaces. Certainly, it would not be exaggeration to say that one-fifth of this dissertation was done on a train. This was not ideal but it was effective in the attempt to get the reading and writing done while paying expenses. As the breakfast TV programme Sunrise started at 6am, my shifts began at 4am. Certainly the image of me trying to go through Poulantzas’ books at that time of the morning after only a few hours of sleep, is emblematic of the hardship of students-workers in London and PhD students in general. During this period I moved house ten times in seven years, and the last two were a consequence of Brixton’s gentrification. But the housing issue opens a more important section for this dissertation. As I relocated from the countryside to a big city, and from a Southern European to a Anglo-Saxon country, the culture-shock was difficult. What’s more important though is that it brought me to think about “affection for territory”. Italy remains a country without a solid nationalist tradition – this probably goes back to the fact that it was born out of an imperialist project while too many people did not want the unification of the country. However its tradition of small states and local diversity is alive and present in people’s perception of the value of natural environment, agricultural products and historical customs. Personally, I find irreplaceable that ensemble of social relations, local kinships, characteristic landscapes and natural places for exploration. Surely, all these national qualities are undermined by people’s bigotry, but – to echo Marx on “Hindustan” – such a conservativism is for me a reassuring symbol of a society that remains slightly less contaminated by the universalist ideology of capitalism. The value of territory and identity therefore are real sentiments, despite history and elites can shape these feelings. Somehow this dissertation reflects experiences of my old – and hopefully future – life in the Italian countryside, and my current – and 6 hopefully soon past – life in London. It is almost impossible to resist the temptation of saying that this work is only the product of my efforts and patience within a hostile socio-economic environment, where even metropolitan PhD colleagues seemed to be speaking a different language from mine. However many other people were involved in this project. First of all, this dissertation would not exist without the unquestioned support of my parents Filippo Leoni and Raffaella Borgognoni – an important detail given that often parents may find irrelevant the study of unproductive subjects such as politics – together with the certainty that they would have intervened to overcome any financial difficulty. Money apart, they transmitted me the great value of happiness through small things, the best inheritance one might ask to his or her family in this time of crisis.

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