39

This article stresses the continuities between the US policy of moral imperialism, implemented during the colonization of the Philippines in the early 20th century, and the strategies of symbolic domination that buttressed US hegemony during the Cold War. The Wall Street lawyers who sought to make colonialism legitimate also happen to be the founding father of the foreign policy establishment, which later mobilized its networks to oversee the strategies and the institutions of the Cold War. In both cases, imperialism blended idealism and clientelistic policies locally, within state institutions, but also internationally, through the establishment of educational and philanthropic networks that ensured the selection and the training of modernist professional elites upholding democratic norms. This hegemonic policy that unfolds in parallel to military interventions is relayed and amplified by the influence of these elites in the periphery, often reconverted into “friends of the United States”. The article then proceeds to analyze these homologies by tracing the trajectories of the heirs of colonial jurists, first expelled from power by Sukarno and later reinventing themselves, with the assistance of the Ford Foundation, as both defenders of a law-based ideal of justice and corporate law entrepreneurs, following a model imposed by the US legal elite.