on empires
Published by zibblsnrt April 27th, 2004 in Memetic GoodnessThanks to Larry over at Silence is Consent, I came across an article from the Cato Institute which discusses whether the United States is an empire or not at the moment, with the added question of empire is necessarily good or bad.
But while the president may shy away from the term empire, the conduct of our foreign policy is clearly guided by a presumption that the United States is, and should be, the world’s only superpower. The National Security Strategy declares that the United States shall maintain its predominant position in the world at all costs, even acting preemptively if and when would-be rivals emerge, or appear likely to emerge.
But while the possession of a military force that is second-to-none might appear on the surface to be a manifestation of imperial domination, the proponents of empire claim that the United States is not really an empire because it has noble intentions. The Bush National Security Strategy pledges to reshape the world according to our image, and establishes as a core object of U.S. policy the creation of a world that is “not just safer but better.”
Christopher Preble’s article argues that yes it is, and it is bad, respectively, and does so in a decent and readable manner. The article is a plug for the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an organization which calls for an alternative to might-makes-right politics.
The issue of whether the US - or any country which doesn’t explicitly identify itself as such - is an empire is of course going to be a sticky one, composed mostly of semantic juggling. Traditionally, empires have kind of stuck to the pornography rule for identification - you know them when you see them - but there’s a large gulf between entities such as the Third Reich or Rome, the British Empire, and whatever the current US geopolitical organization is. Is it possible for a benevolent empire to exist? Does the intent of imperialism shape the quality of the empires created by it? How do you measure any of these qualities, anyway?
I don’t expect the issue of whether or not the US is - or is trying to be - an imperial power to exactly show up during the election campaign; it would step all over too many traditional American sensibilities to be a safe topic of conversation by either candidate. On the other hand, the argument’s been coming up more and more in the past couple of years, from organizations like the CRFP, other organizations which support the idea of an imperial superpower quite openly, and more grassroots discussion at levels like this one.
Whatever happens over the next year, I predict that the imperialism meme will become an increasingly hot topic for discussion (or bar-fights), and not just by the activist fringe, either.
What do you think?
Oh geez.
It’s not an empire for any other reason than it’s NOT.
If you look at the British Empire or the Third Reich, they all had DIRECT CONTROL of what went on in many, many places other than their home state after coming in and completely taking over. France was a direct extension of Germany, India of Britain, etc.
It’s a great insult to Rome or the Mongols or Alexander’s Greece, or even Carthage or Persia or the Zulus, to call the US an “empire”. It’s no more an empire than Russia was once Peter got it on its way — its influence grew and it “internally” grew (I use that loosely), but it certainly wasn’t an empire. Instead it was that it joined the rest of the world finally (like, say, Germany) in going from the medieval kingdom method to a more-unified and governed state.
– Primis.
So where does hegemony - and it’s not debateable that the US has that over much of the world - end and empire begin?