Neocolonialism
Based on Wikipedia: Neocolonialism
The Empire That Never Left
In 1960, the Belgian Congo became independent. Flags changed. Anthems were composed. Diplomats shook hands and posed for photographs.
Yet within months, a single Belgian company—the Société Générale de Belgique—still controlled an estimated seventy percent of the Congolese economy. The colonial administrators had packed their bags and sailed home. The colonial system, however, had merely put on a new suit.
This is neocolonialism: the continuation of colonial power relationships after formal independence has been declared. The term describes a situation where a country possesses all the visible markers of sovereignty—its own flag, its own seat at the United Nations, its own president—while its economic system and political decisions are effectively controlled from abroad. The puppet strings remain; they've simply become invisible.
Who Named It
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term in 1956, but it was Kwame Nkrumah who made it famous. Nkrumah served as president of Ghana from 1960 to 1966, leading one of the first sub-Saharan African nations to achieve independence. He wasn't content merely to celebrate freedom. He wanted to understand why freedom felt so hollow.
In 1965, Nkrumah published Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. The title deliberately echoed Vladimir Lenin's 1917 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, extending Lenin's analysis into the postwar world. Nkrumah's argument was stark: political freedom without economic independence is meaningless. A nation that controls its own flag but not its own resources has simply traded one master for another.
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
The term spread quickly through African political circles. By 1963, it appeared in the preamble of the Organisation of African Unity Charter. Moroccan political organizer Mehdi Ben Barka called it al-isti'mar al-jadid—Arabic for "the new colonialism"—and used the concept to describe political trends across the continent.
How It Works
Traditional colonialism was blunt. European powers planted flags, stationed soldiers, and appointed governors. Everyone understood who was in charge.
Neocolonialism operates through subtler mechanisms. There are no foreign governors. Instead, there are structural adjustment programs. No occupying armies. Instead, there are conditional loans. No direct political control. Instead, there is economic dependence so profound that political autonomy becomes theoretical.
The Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara described the economic mechanism in a 1961 speech:
We, politely referred to as "underdeveloped", in truth, are colonial, semi-colonial or dependent countries. We are countries whose economies have been distorted by imperialism, which has abnormally developed those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement its complex economy.
Guevara identified what he called "the great formula for imperialist economic domination": the single crop, the single product, the single market. A country that grows only coffee, or extracts only copper, and sells only to one buyer, has no negotiating power. The buyer sets the price. The seller takes it or starves.
Dependency Theory
Economists formalized these observations into what became known as dependency theory. The theory divides the global economy into a center and a periphery. Wealthy industrialized nations sit at the center. Poor nations supplying raw materials occupy the periphery.
The relationship between center and periphery is not neutral exchange. It is extraction. Human and natural resources flow outward from poor countries toward wealthy ones. The poverty of peripheral nations isn't an accident or a temporary condition to be overcome through development. It's a structural feature of the system itself.
This differs sharply from standard theories of economic development, which treat poverty as a problem to be solved through investment and modernization. Dependency theorists argue that the integration of poor countries into the global economy is precisely what keeps them poor. They don't need more integration. They need a fundamentally different relationship.
Françafrique: The Model
If you want to understand how neocolonialism operates in practice, study France.
The term "Françafrique" was originally positive. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of Ivory Coast, used it in 1955 to celebrate the social, cultural, and economic ties between France and its former African colonies. Over time, the word curdled. Critics repurposed it to describe something darker: a system of continued French control over nominally independent states.
The system had an architect. Jacques Foccart served as the principal adviser on African affairs to French presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou from 1958 through 1974. Under Foccart's guidance, France maintained military garrisons in its former colonies, granted monopolies to French corporations for mineral extraction, and cultivated relationships with African leaders who functioned more as agents of French interests than as sovereign heads of state.
The list of these leaders reads like a who's who of postcolonial African strongmen: Omar Bongo of Gabon, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo, Idriss Déby of Chad, Hamani Diori of Niger. Each maintained close ties to Paris. Each presided over economies dominated by French companies. Each received French military support when threatened.
Defense agreements between France and its former colonies often contained secret clauses permitting French military intervention. France could deploy troops to rescue friendly regimes, to fight insurgencies threatening its interests, or to end civil wars in ways favorable to French policy. Over the decades, French forces intervened in Chad, Togo, Gabon, Rwanda, Djibouti, Zaire, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Mali, Libya, and Cameroon.
The recent withdrawal of French troops from several African nations marks what some observers call the end of an era. Whether it marks the end of neocolonialism or merely its transformation into new forms remains to be seen.
The Belgian Congo: Independence as Strategy
Belgium's handling of the Congo provides an almost textbook case of neocolonialism by design rather than accident.
When pressure for decolonization mounted in the late 1950s, Belgium didn't resist. Instead, it embraced rapid independence for the Congo—but with a calculated expectation. Belgian planners anticipated that the newly independent state would immediately become dependent on Belgium for expertise, capital, and market access. Formal independence would thus paradoxically strengthen Belgian control by laundering it through local intermediaries.
The strategy largely worked. After independence, the Société Générale de Belgique maintained its grip on roughly seventy percent of the Congolese economy. The mineral-rich province of Katanga, controlled by the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (a subsidiary of the Société), became the site of an attempted secession—a crisis that served Belgian interests by destabilizing the central government.
When the Congolese government attempted to nationalize the mining industry in the 1960s, the effort failed. The country was eventually forced to reopen to foreign investment on terms favorable to outside powers.
Fish and Dependency
The mechanisms of neocolonialism aren't always dramatic. Sometimes they're as mundane as a fishing contract.
In the West African nations of Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Mauritania, fishing has historically been central to both the economy and daily life. Coastal communities depended on the catch for food, employment, and cultural identity.
Beginning in 1979, the European Union negotiated contracts with these governments for fishing rights off the West African coast. European factory trawlers arrived. They were vastly more efficient than local fishing boats.
The result was predictable. Fish stocks collapsed. Local fishermen found empty waters where their fathers had found abundance. Unemployment spread through coastal communities. Migration followed, as people who could no longer feed their families by fishing sought opportunity elsewhere.
This outcome violated the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which explicitly recognizes the importance of fishing to local communities and requires that fishing agreements with foreign companies target only surplus stocks—fish that exceed what local communities need. The European agreements didn't follow this principle. They extracted resources from African waters for European tables, leaving African communities with depleted oceans and broken livelihoods.
The Debt Trap
No discussion of neocolonialism is complete without addressing debt.
By the early 2000s, African nations collectively owed approximately two hundred billion dollars to international creditors, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (commonly known as the IMF). These institutions had lent money for development projects, often attaching conditions that required borrowing countries to restructure their economies along lines favorable to Western investors.
American economist Jeffrey Sachs, hardly a radical, called the situation unsustainable. He recommended complete debt forgiveness:
The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts, I would suggest obstruction; you do it, yourselves. Africa should say: "Thank you very much, but we need this money to meet the needs of children who are dying, right now, so, we will put the debt-servicing payments into urgent social investment in health, education, drinking water, the control of AIDS, and other needs."
The logic is simple. A country spending its revenue on debt service cannot invest in its own people. Schools go unbuilt. Hospitals go unstaffed. Clean water systems go uninstalled. The population remains poor, uneducated, and unhealthy—and thus remains a source of cheap labor and raw materials for wealthier nations.
Debt service, in this analysis, isn't just a financial obligation. It's a mechanism of control.
The Cold War Dimension
For much of the twentieth century, neocolonialism operated within the larger context of superpower rivalry.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union accused each other of neocolonial practices. Both accusations had merit. Each superpower maintained networks of client states and proxy relationships. Each intervened—sometimes covertly, sometimes openly—to install or protect friendly governments. Each used economic aid, military assistance, and political pressure to shape the behavior of smaller nations.
Cuba, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Warsaw Pact countries accused the United States of supporting anti-democratic regimes that served American interests while oppressing their own people. They pointed to American involvement in overthrowing elected governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The Cuban Tricontinental Conference, held in 1966 under the leadership of Mehdi Ben Barka, formally recognized revolutionary anti-colonialism as a legitimate means for colonized peoples to achieve self-determination. This position infuriated both the United States and France. Barka himself, as chair of the conference's Commission on Neocolonialism, argued that the United States, as the leading capitalist power, had become the world's principal neocolonial actor.
The American Question
Whether American foreign policy constitutes neocolonialism remains contested.
Critics point to a pattern: the United States establishes relationships with governments that provide favorable conditions for American business, supports those governments against domestic opposition, and intervenes—diplomatically, economically, or militarily—when regimes unfriendly to American interests come to power.
Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political commentator, has been among the most persistent critics of what he calls "American imperialism." He argues that American foreign policy aims to create "open societies"—but open in a specific sense, meaning open to American economic and political influence, open to American corporations, and closed to movements that might challenge American interests.
Chomsky regularly cites American actions in Vietnam, the Philippines, Latin America, and the Middle East as examples. He argues that official accounts of these interventions consistently present American motives as benevolent—spreading democracy, protecting human rights, fighting terrorism—while obscuring the economic and strategic interests actually at stake.
Political scientist Chalmers Johnson offered a related but distinct analysis. He argued that America's version of the colony is the military base. Where European empires planted governors, America plants garrisons. Johnson documented how American military installations around the world create relationships of dependence and influence that function similarly to colonial administration, even without formal political control.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq brought these debates into sharp focus. Some analysts, like Nayna Jhaveri, described the invasion as "petroimperialism"—a war fought to secure access to Iraqi oil reserves rather than to achieve the stated goals of eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy.
The Pipeline Problem
Contemporary examples continue to emerge.
The East African Crude Oil Pipeline, known as EACOP, runs from Uganda to the Tanzanian coast. It is majority-owned by TotalEnergies, a French multinational corporation. Ugandan activists opposing the project describe it as "an example of typical neo-colonial extraction."
The pattern is familiar. Raw crude oil will be pumped from Ugandan ground, transported through Ugandan territory, and shipped abroad for refining. The economic value of refining—the sophisticated industrial process that transforms crude oil into usable products—will accrue elsewhere. Uganda provides the resource. France and other wealthy nations capture the value.
The same dynamic operates across commodity extraction throughout the Global South. A 2024 Oxfam report titled "Inequality, Inc" concluded that multinational corporations headquartered in wealthy nations perpetuate "a colonial style 'extractivist' model." Economies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America remain "locked into exporting primary commodities, from copper to coffee," while the profitable stages of processing and manufacturing occur in the Global North.
Conservation as Colonialism
One of the more surprising criticisms of neocolonialism targets the modern conservation movement.
Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, both influential analysts of the global economic system, argued that international conservation organizations—including groups like the World Wide Fund for Nature—have inadvertently developed neocolonial relationships with developing nations.
The mechanism operates through well-intentioned efforts to protect wilderness and wildlife. International organizations identify areas for conservation, often in African or Asian countries. They advocate for the creation of protected zones. Local populations—sometimes indigenous communities who have lived sustainably in these areas for generations—find themselves excluded from ancestral lands.
Conservation priorities set in European or American headquarters override local needs. Funding flows from wealthy nations to support projects designed according to wealthy-nation values. The result, critics argue, is a form of ecological colonialism: outsiders determining how land in other countries should be used, regardless of the preferences or needs of people who actually live there.
What Makes It Different
Understanding neocolonialism requires distinguishing it from related concepts.
Globalization, in its standard sense, refers to the increasing interconnection of economies, cultures, and populations across national boundaries. This process can be exploitative, but it isn't inherently so. Trade between equals, cultural exchange, and the movement of people and ideas all fall under globalization without necessarily constituting neocolonialism.
Development aid, similarly, can serve various purposes. Aid that genuinely helps recipients build capacity, improve infrastructure, and develop autonomous economic systems differs fundamentally from aid designed to create dependence or extract political compliance.
Neocolonialism specifically describes relationships characterized by dependence, subservience, and financial obligation toward the more powerful party. The former colony remains subordinate to the former colonial power, even though the formal structures of colonialism have been dismantled. The relationship extracts value from the weaker party and transfers it to the stronger party. Political independence coexists with economic servitude.
The opposite of neocolonialism would be genuine post-colonial development: former colonies achieving both political sovereignty and economic autonomy, building relationships with former colonial powers on terms of equality rather than dependence.
The Ongoing Debate
Not everyone accepts the concept of neocolonialism. Critics argue that the term oversimplifies complex economic relationships, attributes too much agency to powerful nations and too little to developing countries, and obscures the genuine benefits that international trade and investment can bring.
They point out that many former colonies have achieved substantial economic development while maintaining relationships with former colonial powers. South Korea, Singapore, and other Asian economies modernized rapidly while integrated into global trading systems. The relationship between economic engagement and exploitation, these critics argue, is more complicated than neocolonialism theory suggests.
Defenders of the concept respond that exceptions don't disprove the rule. Some nations have managed to develop despite neocolonial pressures, often through deliberate state intervention to capture value that would otherwise flow abroad. But the structural tendency of the global economic system, they argue, still favors wealthy nations at the expense of poor ones.
The debate continues. What remains clear is that formal decolonization, however significant, did not automatically create a world of equal nations. The power relationships that colonialism established did not simply disappear when flags changed and anthems were composed. They transformed, adapted, and in many cases persisted.
Understanding how they persisted—through debt, trade relationships, military agreements, and economic structures—is essential to understanding the contemporary world. Whether you call it neocolonialism or something else, the pattern is real: some nations remain far more able to shape international outcomes than others, and that ability maps suspiciously well onto which nations were colonizers and which were colonized.