or many Pakistani youngsters hailing from the upper middle economic echelon of the society, the phrase “banana republic” will likely invoke the image of an upscale, trendy clothing store. A store by the name, owned by Gap, Inc, was started in 1978 to sell “safari-inspired” clothes. The first few stores had safari-themed decorations, such as real foliage and jeeps. The name was taken from the derogatory term for poor, unstable countries in Latin America, where consumers hailing from the affluent parts of the globe could now travel in style.

In the so-called banana republics, state institutions and the justice system had been made pliable to the wishes and aspirations of the privileged minority. Most major decisions in the statecraft, implemented by local agents serving the capitalist/ imperialist interests, were taken at faraway centres of the metropolitan world. The law was applied selectively and state institutions could be bullied into submission by the powerful. The banana republics, to sum it up, were agent states — that is, they operated at the behest of more influential states. Naturally, their relationship with big powers had important consequences in terms of the ways and means they employ vis-à-vis their own people.

In some banana republics, high government officials (on numerous occasions including the military top brass) pressured other officials to carry out vendettas against political rivals and to defend their friends against judicial institutions.

Typically, a banana republic was associated with a society having extremely stratified social classes – usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political and military elites. The ruling class controlled the primary sector of the economy by way of the exploitation of labour. Thus, banana republic was a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that – for kickbacks – abetted and supported the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation. A banana republic was a country with a state capitalism economy. The countries were operated like private commercial enterprises for the exclusive profit of the ruling classes. Over time, some people began using the term to describe actual countries throughout Latin America — including Guatemala and the Dominican Republic — that had precarious economies and political systems, manipulated by US agricultural interests. The word “banana” referred to the fact that the fruit was a major export from these countries.

Many countries that became formally independent from colonial powers after the World War II, have at times thereafter tended to share some traits of the banana republics due to the influence of large private corporations in their politics. Salient examples of this phenomenon included, the Maldives (resort companies) and the Philippines (tobacco industry, US government and some multinational corporations). Another classic example was the Kingdom of Hawaii, now the US state of Hawaii, which was once an independent country. American sugar plantation owners there pressured the KingKal kaua to write a new constitution in 1887 that benefitted American businessmen at the expense of the working class. Due to the threat of use of force, this constitution is known as the “Bayonet Constitution.“ In the case of Hawaii, the US was also conscious of the strategic military significance of the islands. It leased Pearl Harbour and later acquired Hawaii as a Territory.

In the 19th Century, the American writer O Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910) coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe the fictional Republic of Anchuria in the book Cabbages and Kings (1904). It is a collection of thematically related short stories inspired by his experiences in Honduras, whose economy depended heavily on the export of bananas. His stay there was for six months until January 1897. He was then hiding in a hotel there while he was wanted in the US for embezzlement from a bank. The novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a bestseller by the Columbian literary maestro Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), depicts the imperialist capitalism of foreign fruit companies as voracious socio-economic exploitation of natural resources of the fictional South American town of Macondo and its people. At home, the corrupt national government of Macondo abets the business policies and labour practices of the foreign corporations, which brutally oppress the workers.

In the early 20th Century, the United Fruit Company, a multinational American corporation, was instrumental in the creation of the banana republic phenomenon. It all started with the introduction of the banana fruit to the US in 1870, by Lorenzo Dow Baker, captain of the schooner Telegraph, who bought bananas in Jamaica and sold them in Boston at a 1,000 percent profit.

Christopher Hitchens, in his article published in Vanity Fair, mentions that the chief principle of banana-ism is kleptocracy; those in influential positions use their time in office to maximise personal gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by the unfortunate people whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it. There can, therefore, be no accountability. It is resisted at all costs. Hitchens underscores, “In a banana republic, the members of the national legislature will be (a) largely for sale and (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes sometime after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere.”

Another feature of a banana republic is the tendency for tribal and cultish elements to flourish at the expense of reason and good order.

Sounds familiar?

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk