This is the fourth in a five-part series on the politics of power. Earlier articles asked what makes rights real, why some prevail over others, and how that hierarchy is reproduced through the state and its institutions. This article follows that machinery beyond the border.
In September 2024 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Apple owed Ireland €13 billion in unpaid tax. Few states have fought so hard not to be paid. For eight years the Irish government stood in court beside the company, arguing that the money was not owed. In the middle of a housing emergency, an elected government treated the recovery of public revenue as a danger to the national interest.
Corruption or poor judgement does not explain this. The decision made sense from inside a model of development that depends on keeping the world’s largest corporations content to remain here.
Imperialism is usually understood as invasion and occupation: armies crossing borders and flags raised over other people’s land. That remains real. But it is the most visible part of a wider relationship. Formal colonial rule has largely ended, yet the world is still divided between a small number of states and corporations that own, finance and direct production, and a far larger number of peoples who depend on them.
More than a century ago, Lenin argued that capitalism had entered a new stage. Ownership had concentrated into giant monopolies, banking and industrial capital had merged into finance capital, and the export of capital, not only of goods, had become the decisive way the strongest economies extended their reach. What matters for us is the conclusion: imperialism is a system for organising accumulation on a world scale, not a foreign policy that a government adopts one day and drops the next. Wars, sanctions and occupations are its instruments, not its whole substance.
Dependency is the other face of that system. A country can have its own flag, parliament and constitution while the decisions that shape its economy are taken elsewhere. Political independence does not automatically bring economic sovereignty.
Ireland is a clear case. In 2025 foreign-owned multinationals paid 87 per cent of corporation tax in the Twenty-Six Counties, and just ten corporate groups paid 59 per cent. Tax policy, planning priorities and the electricity grid, where data centres now consume over a fifth of metered power, are organised around attracting and keeping that investment. When capital can move and the state cannot, the investor holds the stronger hand. No threat needs to be made; it is enough that everyone knows one could be.
The same discipline runs through technology and credit. The patents, platforms, chips and cloud systems on which modern production depends are owned by a handful of mostly American corporations, and access can be granted, priced or withdrawn. In 2010 the European Central Bank pressed the Irish state to stand behind the debts of private banks, and the Troika programme that followed turned those debts into austerity for working people. Whoever controls access to credit can set the terms on which a society is allowed to function.
This is not the story of an innocent nation pushed around. Irish capital has prospered as an intermediary: the banks, developers, tax advisers and governing parties who built their position by managing the country’s integration into foreign capital. Dependency is reproduced from within as much as it is imposed from without.
That dependency is held in place by institutions. The European Union presents itself as a community of shared values, but its treaties lock in the freedom of capital. Rules on state aid, competition, deficits and procurement narrow what an elected government may own, fund or plan. The EU is an imperialist bloc in its own right, competing with the United States while largely aligned to it, and increasingly bound into the military strategy of NATO. Ireland’s entry into EU defence structures and the Government’s plan to abolish the Triple Lock on overseas deployments show neutrality being worn down by bloc discipline rather than by any popular decision.
Partition belongs here too. The Six Counties remain under British rule, their economy dependent on transfers from London and their territory part of a NATO state. Partition divides the working class, gives Britain a permanent foothold on the island and leaves both parts more exposed to outside power than a united economy would be. It is a material structure of dependency, not a constitutional footnote.
These constraints shape even acts of solidarity. Ireland’s 2026 law banning trade with Israeli settlements covers goods only. Services, where the multinational sector actually operates, were left out after the US ambassador warned that American companies could be “damaged” and members of Congress warned of “potentially severe implications” for the Irish economy. A measure with broad public support was trimmed to fit the requirements of dependency.
Enforcement extends to ideas. In July 2026 the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, gathered 66 states in Washington for a ministerial on what he called “far-left terrorism”, urging a coordinated international crackdown. “We have no choice but to confront this menace together,” he declared. Ireland attended, as did every other EU member state. Whoever defines “terrorism” decides whose politics may be criminalised. A coalition to police the left is an attempt to contain alternatives before they can be organised.
Cuba shows what happens when a state refuses the rules. In 2026 Washington added a fuel blockade to its long economic siege: tariffs threatened against any country supplying Cuba with oil, sanctions on the state oil company, and pressure on Mexico until Mexican shipments stopped. Because world trade and payments run through the dollar, a bank or shipping company anywhere risks punishment for dealing with Havana. The results have been blackouts of up to twenty hours a day and hospitals short of medicines. The aim is to make the alternative fail, so that its failure can be cited as proof there never was one.
Palestine reveals the same system from another angle. Israel’s occupation does not sustain itself. It rests on imperialist sponsorship: billions in US military aid each year, preferential access to European markets, and diplomatic protection at the Security Council. Palestinians therefore confront not one state but the alliance that underwrites it.
Yet the order is no longer unchallenged, and the cracks are real. China is now the main trading partner of more than 120 countries. Through the Belt and Road Initiative it finances ports, railways and power stations across the Global South without the privatisation and austerity conditions attached to IMF loans, and presents this as mutual development rather than discipline. For states long confined to Western credit, that is a genuine choice where there was none.
The war on Iran shows how seriously Washington takes those cracks. Since February 2026 the United States and Israel have bombed Iran, killed its Supreme Leader and blockaded its ports. Whatever judgement one makes of the Iranian state, its offence is plain: it is the last large state in the region that refuses to bow to US or Israeli power. Here the defence of the existing order, and of Israel as its regional enforcer, is being fought out directly.
Even so, multipolarity is not liberation in itself. The blockade of Iran has held, other powers pursue their own interests, and exchanging one creditor for another does not end dependency.
The international system as it stands, the so-called rules-based order led by the United States, therefore does not merely reward conformity. It actively disciplines any attempt to escape its rules, through markets, debt, sanctions, alliances and, where necessary, force. Sovereignty, then, is a material capacity: the power to decide what is produced, how investment is directed, and with whom a people trades and makes alliances, and to withstand the pressure that follows. No government acting alone, however determined, possesses that capacity while the forces ranged against it are organised across ownership, finance, technology and military power.
If power is organised on that scale, resistance must develop a comparable capacity for coordination and endurance. The final article asks what kind of organised power working people must build to overcome it.
