Common Ground? Anti-Imperialism in UK Anti-War Movements

When the leaders of Stop the War Coalition, the organization at the heart of the anti-war campaigns in England, published a ‘guide for the movement’ in 2003, they did so under the title Anti-Imperialism. ¹ This reflected the language of the anti-war movements in Britain and other countries. In Vancouver, Canada, an anti-war, anti-occupation demonstration in March 2006 was presented as fundamentally anti-imperial: ‘Against the Imperialist War Drive,’ read posters produced by the organizers, Mobilization against War and Occupation. ² This was not isolated rhetoric. Many different people had been speaking about imperialism, and not only in the context of the protests against the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Former colonial subjects, leaders of ex-colonies and their allies and friends in the west all found occasion to speak out against imperialism. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, for example, blaming the British (particularly their nineteenth century land grabs) for the ongoing crisis in his country; ³ and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela accusing King Juan Carlos of Spain of an ‘enduring colonial superiority complex’. ⁴ At the same time, others have spoken about imperialism in more nuanced or even positive terms: (then Chancellor) Gordon Brown insisting that British people should be proud of their imperial history; ⁵ Gideon Rachman using his column in the (London) Financial Times to discuss ‘whether it is analytically useful to think of America as an imperial power’; ⁶ historian Niall Ferguson lecturing students, television audiences and most recently a hedge fund on British imperialism (past) and American imperialism (present). ⁷ So there was nothing particularly new about the discourse of anti-imperialism in the anti-war movements. On the contrary, it was possible for activists to speak in these terms because the words they used already had some currency in a wide variety of places: from some deeply rooted predicaments (such as land disputes in Africa) to others that are or appear to be newer (the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in reality have deep historical roots). In the war on terror, many of these disparate peoples, each with their own traditions of thinking and speaking about imperialism, were able to converge, to forge an eclectic anti-imperial movement. Anti-imperialism was the raw material from which a new, metaphorical geography of connection was forged.