Walking a Fine Line: Germany and the Question of Imperialism

Imperialism is back in our everyday vocabulary to describe Russian expansionism. Yet the theoretical contours of the term imperialism are notoriously hard to pin down and its analytical added value is often disputed. 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, Prof. Dr. Kai Koddenbrock investigates this dual meaning of imperialism with a view to Germany’s history, policy, and political economy. He suggests 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, the paper focuses 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. In conclusion the paper shows that imperialism as an analytical term allows to go beyond the overly generic term of capitalism and is uniquely placed to make sense of a more openly violent world engulfed in war and crisis.

This presentation is part of the Faculty Colloquium Series.

Kai Koddenbrock is a professor of political economy at Bard College Berlin. He is working on economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South and particularly on the role of the international monetary system and global and domestic financial markets in helping and constraining this quest. Located at the intersections of international relations and international political economy, he also works on geopolitics and geoeconomics and the new scramble for rare earths.

He co-founded with Ndongo Sylla and Maha ben Gadha the African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences, which have been held in Tunis and Dakar in 2019 and 2022. He leads the Politics of Money Network with Benjamin Braun, funded by the German Research Council, and heads a research group at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth.

Kai has held academic positions at several German universities, worked for the United Nations in NYC, the World Food Programme in Rome, and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Sciences Po, University of Sussex, as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies and the École des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris.

He has contributed essays to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and to Jacobin and Soziopolis among others. His most recent academic articles are: "Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South" and "International financial subordination: a critical research agenda." He has recently edited Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (Routledge), with Benjamin Braun, and African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century (Pluto Press), with Maha ben Gadha, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Fadhel Kaboub, and Ines Mahmood. His latest monograph was The practice of humanitarian intervention: Aid workers, agencies and institutions in the DR Congo (Routledge, 2015).

Kai tweets @kaikodden and his publications can be accessed through Google Scholar and on this PDF.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: P24 Seminar Room 8

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