Archbishop dubs US 'imperialist'
The archbishop of Canterbury has called on the US to revise its foreign policy by focussing on aid
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Sunday, 25, Nov 2007 08:52
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has called US foreign policy imperialistic and termed the approach the "worst of all worlds".
In an interview with Muslim magazine Emel, the clergyman said the US was acting in a hasty manner that was harming the interests of people around the world.
He told the publication: "We have only one global hegemonic power at the moment. It is not accumulating territory; it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That's not working.
"It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly that’s what the British Empire did – in India for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things back together - Iraq for example."
Dr Williams said the US had harmed its image in the world through its actions and had now lost the moral legitimacy for its policy that it had after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001.
The longstanding critic of the war in Iraq called for a revision in the superpower's approach to the world in order to meet the needs of those affected by its policies.
"A generous and intelligent programme of aid directed to the societies that have been ravaged; a check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories; a demilitarisation of their presence. All these things would help."
In the interview, the clergyman also said that there was something fundamentally wrong with the west's relationship with modernity. He said that people were too involved in daily activities which meant they were missing out on the spiritual side of life.
He explained: "There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul. If the soul is, to give the most minimal definition, that dimension of us which is most fundamentally in conscious relation with the creator, then those things which speed us up and harden us are going to get in the way of the soul."
The archbishop called for people to pick and choose the activities they engaged in and to try and make religion a part of their daily life.