US Hegemony in Latin America and Beyond

Is globalization merely US imperialism masked as the philanthropic diffusion of neoliberalism into the Third World? In Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations, David Slater—drawing primarily from the deconstruction methodology of James Derrida (1992), the critical theory of Michel Foucault (1979, 1980), the structural theory of World Systems Theory (although Wallerstein is not cited), and the postcolonial perspectives of a myriad of Latin American scholars—argues that it is. More specifically, Slater asserts that the United States (with the aid of such neoliberal organizations as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) has sought to liberate the Third World from its indigence for the purpose of establishing a Southern hemisphere of “quasi-sovereignties” (see Jackson 1996:60) that can be easily manipulated politically.