Röpke on Imperium & Dominium
In addition to advocating the Social Market Economy, for which he is most famous, Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966) distinguished between two types of colonialism that are of immense relevance to understanding the world today, as we transition from multiple capital/labor national economies to an integrated knowledge/service global economy.
Röpke referred to these as Imperium and Dominium. [warning: PDF] Imperium refers to political sovereignty, and it is projected at the point of a gun. Dominium refers to economic sovereignty, and it is projected at the point of a pen used to sign a contract.
Röpke recognized that both Imperium and Dominium are forms of domination, and that Imperium is by far the more violent of the two. In other words, if one were going to be dominated by a foreign power, one would be better off if that power were Nike and not the CIA. Still, one would be dominated, and one might be expected to chafe at that.
Historically, Imperium has been more potent than Dominium, e.g. the Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, British, etc. Empires. It was not until the 20th Century and the birth of the multinational corporation that Dominium began to emerge as a potent political force. As borders become increasingly meaningless today, corporate Dominium is supplanting government Imperium as the predominant means for projecting influence and power worldwide.
While agents of the US military drop bombs, executives of Chinese firms are buying controlling interests in the Panama Canal, Freeport (Bahamas), and other Western Hemisphere commercial infrastructure. In the long run, US taxpayers will tire of paying for adventures in nation building on their behalf, while one expects that the demand for global transportation will continue for the foreseeable future.
(And, make no mistake of it, the Americans might be flat-footed and incompetent imperialists, but they are master dominialists!)
As we have seen in the Middle East in 2011, when enough individuals realize that the real power is in transnational commerce, and that politicians and regulators govern at the pleasure of the people, their relationships with their rulers can change radically.
Colonialism
This is not to say that that future will be all roses, ice cream, and singing unicorns. Quite the contrary, colonialism and other forms of domination will persist, but in different forms from before.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a colony is that it is a jurisdiction that exports raw materials and imports finished goods from the jurisdiction to which the raw materials were exported.
For example, historically, British weavers imported cotton and silk from India and exported finished cloth and apparel to India. In this way, the weavers were able to acquire raw materials at commodity prices and sell their output at significantly higher monopoly (one producer) or oligopoly (a small number of producers) prices.
Independence from British weavers was such an issue for Gandhi that he wove his own cloth as a sign of protest, and the spinning wheel became such an important symbol of Indian independence that it adorns the national flag of India.
Over the past century, the economic center of gravity has shifted away from agriculture to manufacturing to knowledge, and the nature of colonialism has changed.
Today, China, India, and Russia export large numbers of students and entrepreneurs — the raw materials of a knowledge economy — to North America and Western Europe, where they conduct research and produce commercial goods that find their way into textbooks, software, and other information goods that are then exported back to their homelands.
From this perspective, one can argue that colonialism never went away; it just changed industries. The raw material today is not fiber, grain, or rubber, but human capital.
As Röpke pointed out, today’s colonialism is not based on the imperialism of the past, which was imposed at the point of a gun in the employ of an East India Company; it is based on ‘dominialism’, which originates in commercial transactions.
While such distinctions have merit, and they appeal to academics and public intellectuals, from the perspective of the student in Shanghai, Bangalore, or Lahore… or São Paulo, or St. Petersburg, or Kiev, or La Paz, or pretty much anywhere outside of the G7 countries, such distinctions might ring hollow. Technically, it is true that one chooses to engage in transactions, but when those transactions relate to food, shelter, clothing, textbooks, and entertainment, the balance of economic power is tilted toward the supplier of the finished goods and away from the individual consumer.
Fading Power
The seat of global power is shifting from parliaments to boardrooms as corporations supplant governments, and today’s colonial masters of the people of the middle-income countries of the world are not France, the UK, or the USA, but Microsoft, Sony, and Wiley & Sons.
Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is irrelevant. The fact is that the individuals in the middle-income countries outnumber the individuals in the G7 countries nearly 10:1, and they bear the brunt of Dominium. There was a time in India, when the British Empire seemed impervious… till Gandhi came along.
Today, Microsoft, Sony, and Wiley & Sons might seem impervious, but they enjoy their monopoly positions only so long as the people in the Middle Income countries do not realize that nothing stops them from being home to BookBoon, Khan Academy, or any of a multitude of other information services that requires effectively no capital investment.
As there is a cost for every benefit, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is a benefit lurking with every cost, and chaos equals opportunity. The real game is not political but commercial. Currently, is being played in Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Mexico City, Miami, Shanghai, Singapore, and Bangalore.
Nothing stops it from being played in Accra, Addis Ababa, Dhaka, Kingston, Jakarta, Lahore, Montevideo, Tegucigalpa, or anywhere else.
Invest accordingly.
Prof. Evans