La séance est organisée dans le cadre du Groupe de recherche « Capital, Coercition, Prédation » de l'AFSP, co-dirigé par Sophie Russo et Laurent Gayer.

 

Imperialism is back in our vocabulary to describe Russian expansionism. Yet its theoretical contours are notoriously hard to pin down. The term exists as a descriptor of government action to qualify Russia or the US as ‘imperialist’ states. It also denotes the structural logic of capitalism on the world scale which tends towards war, value extraction and the bifurcation of the world into core and peripheries. In this paper, we investigate this dual meaning of imperialism with a view to Germany’s history, policy and political economy. We suggest a contemporary analysis of imperialism focusing on domestic state-capital relations, military violence and the extraction of value from the Global South. Applying this troika of imperialism to German state-capital relations, we focus on its corporate giants Volkswagen and BASF, recent shifts in security and economic policy as well as the quest for mineral supplies from the Global South and argue that Germany can be – with some qualifications – called an imperialist state.

 

Intervenant:
Kai Koddenbrock, Bard College Berlin 

 

 

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Responsable scientifique : Laurent Gayer, Sciences Po-CERI