Conciliation and cooperation are the catchphrases of the liberal world. However, only a short time ago (even if it now seems like a long time ago), Western civilisation was busy imploding. It was only after the Second World War that the Western powers decided to spend more time sharing the spoils rather than fighting over them. Keep in mind that it is Europeans who have been responsible for the most number of deaths through organised combat through recorded human history, and have been piling up the dead for centuries. It just so happens that the new form of global domination that has been established by the United States has managed to avoid most traditional warfare altogether (on its own soil the record is blotched up by that wretched new enemy, terrorism).
The development of finance has also radically altered the struggle for control over the means of production. While many actions of the empire are still in the form of direct swoops for physical resources, there are now significantly different considerations for the metropolitan capital core as compared to even 50 years ago. For a while there was even talk of the new "knowledge-based economy". However, the crash of the virtual economy in the United States two years ago put paid to the delusions that money can continue to be minted in thin air. Even so, the coming to age of financial capitalism has brought a whole new set of 'values' and corporate 'cultures' to the fore.
In any case, it would appear that the so-called liberal values have started to become as global as capitalism itself. In the 1990s, supposedly ingenious new means of attacking poverty were devised including many of the component practices of community development approaches, based on the notion that poverty and exploitation should not be discussed in the same breath. Rather than go on about how poor people are victims of the prevailing set of social and economic relations, why not directly address poverty through partnership and compassion?
In actuality, the public relations effort of imperialism, as has always been the case, focuses on distracting from the crux of the matter. In other words, let us forget that thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed as a direct consequence of the US invasion, and instead let us talk about freedom, democracy, and importantly for the capitalist in us, reconstruction. The imperial effort culminates in the glorious fact that certain norms and values start to permeate what can loosely be termed culture. The question that sticks out like a sore thumb for the ideologues of capitalism as well as for those of us who resist is: Are these values and norms starting to displace previously existing norms and values in the form of a new global consciousness? Or have these norms and values always prevailed and the only difference now is by matter of degree?