Refutation of the Capitalist Western Thought by Hizb Ut Tahrir

The nation in the capitalist West is based on the notion of the nation state. The land and its government belong to this nation state and are defined upon its basis. It is the people who define the nation state, based on their accepted borders. The people can be defined in the Western thought based on single or multiple factors, such as geography, history, race and linguistic heritage. These are the factors that make a distinctive, collective identity for the people, according to their view. So the people act as one body and they have a right to self-determination. They can choose to live in a sovereign state, independent of other people.

In all cases, the West views people as having fixed, territorial boundaries. The meaning of this is that the borders of a nation state are supposed to remain fixed forever, within a maximum availability for its own people. There is no legitimate basis for a nation state to expand beyond its determined borders. Westerners say that fixed borders are the best way to avoid war. However, this is in addition to the material benefit, as a measure for controlling individuals and society. Moreover, contrary to their claim, the nation state led to exacerbating the need for imperial colonialist expansion. The emerging nations in Europe found themselves incapable of regional land expansion and so they turned to colonialist expansion. This was how the colonialist expansion emerged in its characteristic of being a method of the capitalist ideology to spread itself. Colonialist imperialism persisted during the rise of the West, whether openly or covertly. It is present even now. Indeed, perhaps colonialism has now reached more extreme and more pervasive forms, than any previous era of the Western history.

Thus, the West has exercised colonialist expansion. It has colonialized and enslaved almost all the nations of the world, within the last two centuries. The Western colonialist greed is not merely reprehensible; it is consistent with their perception of material benefit. If an individual is to roam the world for his material needs and desires, then this is translated, at the state level, into material and national interests.

The Western nations utilized military force initially to enter every non-European continent and control it. The West had mostly taken the specific approach of colonializing the land formally, whilst eradicating existing ruling systems. The Westerners then formed or reformed the political elites in order to build a pro-Western ruling class, that is committed to implementing Western systems in their lands.

Imperialism had remained present, even after the official end of colonialism, through formal independence of colonialized nations. What really happened was simply a transition of explicit, official colonialism into a disguised form of enslavement, by the Western powers, which unleashed even greater enslavement of those people. On a massive scale, the West has been able to exploit the global resources and wealth, through a complex, colonialist economic order. This capitalist order forces the colonies, i.e. weaker nations, to export the greater portion of their resources and work forces at unjustly low costs. The colonialized nations then import Western services and ready-made goods at expensive prices, to the point of extortion.

As for the soft campaigns implemented by the West internationally to spread the ideals of freedom and democracy, it is in fact secondary to its colonialist method. In fact, it is only a part of this method and a tool to facilitate it, whilst masking its reality.