The American empire

The contrast between growing American land and sea power, and American self-image, is rather reminiscent of the Sir John Seeley’s famous description of the British Empire in The Expansion of England (1883):

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of thinking; nor have we even now ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe. We constantly betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our colonies as really belonging to us; thus if we are asked what the English population is, it does not occur to us to reckon-in the population of Canada and Australia.

Of course, the original inheritors of the War of Independence may have been more forthright about their designs on Indian territories.

Yes, but by your definition, every “New World” country is an empire. Mexico is an empire. Brazil is an empire. Australia and New Zealand are empires. France, which only permanenently acquired Alsace-Lorraine after WWII (from Germany) is an empire. Big deal.

The ‘is America an empire’ question hinges on intentional confusion. First, define ’empire’ in a way that is reasonably benign (i.e. a people that expanded, a nation with economic influence in other nations, a nation with military bases in other nations, etc etc etc). Second, declare ’empire’ and accept the non-benign impact of that statement-the word ’empire’ doesn’t call to mind Australian settlers moving into the outback (and displacing the natives), it calls to mind the British, owning 1/4 of the globe. Or Rome, conquering all of the known world.

You want it both ways-define empire to be able to call the US an empire, then use ’empire’ (or, EMPIRE!!!) to accuse the US of being evil (or, EVIL!!!!).

There are similar sloppy uses of language all the time. I had a professor that used to call the Japanese internment camps in WWII ‘concentration camps.’ He wanted to do the same thing: both the US and Germany locked up minorities behind barbed wire (i.e. concentration camp=locking people up), then ignore that redefinition of concentration camp in order to get the rhetorical effect (ergo US HAD CONCENTRATION CAMPS!! US=NAZI GERMANY!!!!). Anytime anyone calls Bush, or the US military, or policemen, or anyone else Nazis, they are doing the same thing.

Its just intentional sloppy use of language for rhetorical effect. Very Orwellian.

Steve

just like Britain and France

Chris, here, not with Russia or China, your supposed neutrality of language (and neutering of ‘imperial’) is belied.

Okay, another good and useful word bites the dust. As Bro. Steve demonstrated with the evolution of the word “concentration camp” and I could toss out several other words that are evolving as we write. So, let’s grasp American Empire and see what we can come up with. Of course we share many traits in common with the Roman Empire, for under both empires science, technology, religion, language, trade, economics, human rights, and liberty have all been advanced. And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.

And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.

Are you absolutely sure the classical idea of freedom was a product of imperialRome?

The “idea” of freedom. Just as the idea of cacti was absent in the lexicon of the Inuit, the idea of freedom was absent to many of the folks that Rome imperiled.

“I’m curious about your claim that Rome ‘advanced’ religion”

Of course it all depends on your definition of ‘advanced’ and I suppose ‘religion’ … but during the Byzantine period, from the reign of … say, Theodosius I.

The difference you’re discussing hinges on whether the empirial power considered itself to be conquering states or merely populated land. it also hinges in the historians answer to that question. Are tribes states? Empire is merely a word.

As far as American self-image is concerned, I think most people here assume that we’ve been an empire for a long time now. But many Americans still defend their self interest in terms of its supposed civilizing influence. Foreign policy ‘wonks’ -professional political intellectuals for hire- if they are liberals, can be no more than liberal nationalists, and as such defend the status quo, which is empire. see these people and most of the politcal yuppies at TPM cafe (“Starbucks”).

The other problem is that Chomsky’s moral puritanism, while equally American, isn’t a very practical response.

And what was Imperial Romes greatest contribution to the world? The idea of freedom.

Ye Gods, man. One of the Roman Republic’s contributions to the world was the idea of freedom (though the Athenians might have had something to say about that). Imperial Rome was a dictatorship of a fairly absolute kind, with appallingly restrictive laws and massive lack of freedom.

I feel that Steve has some very solid points on the use of language in his posts. For me, personally, that something should be “Imperial” is more a question of a despotic reign, as I would link it to the contrast of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. I think that it is quite clear that the Chinese Empire, or the Japanese Empire, were far, far different entities, with almost no real similarities in what the Imperial system truly meant for those countries. Now in terms of cause and effect, I think that there is a vague conception that any nation that has succeeded in reaching “Empire” status is very influential, and so if we could accept that “Imperialism” is a question of massive power in modern colloquial usage, with negative connotations, well we could agree that it is a negative way of talking about US power.

From Wikipedia:

“The term imperialism was a new word in the mid-19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it dates back to 1858. The Latin root is imperium (command or supreme power).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary(OED), imperialism was generally used only to describe English policies.

The term imperialism was used to describe the American war supporters in the Spanish American War by the now defunct Anti-imperialists. Many historians, such as Stuart Creighton Miller, author of “Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903″, use the term imperialist and anti-imperialist to describe the two rival factions.

In the 20th century, the term has often been used to refer to the actions of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan during the 1930s and World War II. Later, during the Cold War, it was also used in reference to the policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, although these differed greatly from each other and from 19th-century imperialism. Furthermore, the term has been expanded to apply, in general, to any historical instance of a greater power at the expense of a lesser power.

Since the end of World War II and following the collapse of the Soviet Union , accusations of imperialism have almost exclusively been levelled at the sole remaining superpower, the United States.”

I think it is curious that I have rarely heard of Nazi Germany or the former USSR referred to as “Empires”. Could this be linked to the fact that Lenin was the principle exponent of capitalist imperialism?

Forgot to add:

Just looking at the British Isles, it is clear that successful native peoples were “displaced” and replaced by settlers. Look at the Highland clearings, the potato famine, and the Pale as clear examples of official policy to get rid of troublesome natives and replace them with settlers.

Steve,

Even under the Nazi regime not all concentration camps were places ‘where people were sent to be gassed and burned’. And Chris is quite right that the Boer War saw the use of concentration camps, as the Parliamentary documents of the day called them. You can read a little about this and view some of the original documents online, thanks to Stanford University.

Bro. Bartleby,

It’s risky to accept the opinions of imperialists about the colonized, but I don’t think the Romans certainly believed they were bringing freedom to the conquered, or that those they conquered had no idea of liberty. In Gallic War, 3.10, Julius Caesar notes that ‘all men likewise, by nature, love liberty and hate the condition of slavery’. And look at the speech he places in the mouth of his enemy the Gaul Critognatus (Gallic War, 7.77):

The Cimbri, after laying Gaul waste, and inflicting great calamities, at length departed from our country, and sought other lands; they left us our rights, laws, lands, and liberty. But what other motive or wish have the Romans, than, induced by envy, to settle in the lands and states of those whom they have learned by fame to be noble and powerful in war, and impose on them perpetual slavery? For they never have carried on wars on any other terms. But if you know not these things which are going on in distant countries, look to the neighboring Gaul, which being reduced to the form of a province, stripped of its rights and laws, and subjected to Roman despotism, is oppressed by perpetual slavery.

(Quotations from the Bohn translation at the Perseus Digital Library.)

Tietjens,

Shouldn’t this discussion be about the modern use of power by nations, international organizations, and global corporate powers who seem to be transforming our world before our eyes?

But thinking about modern states in terms of empire is just one method of of putting them in historical perspective. And it allows historians and pundits to use related concepts, like ‘imperial overstretch’, to analyse the potential and limits of US hegemony. Or to put it another way, thinking in terms of empire is a way of thinking ‘about the modern use of power’.

Of course it all depends on your definition of ‘advanced’ and I suppose ‘religion’ … but during the Byzantine period, from the reign of … say, Theodosius I.

So by “religion” you mean “Eastern Christianity,” and by “advanced” you mean “turned into an instrument of centralized social control”?

Chris– what are the parallels between British detention camps that they ran during Anglo-Boer war camps and Nazi camps ? Secondly why is one interested in drawing these parallels ? On the first question the camps held only women and children ( idea here was to prevent the men who were fighting a guerila war from slipping home at night and receive shelter from their families.) no intentional mistreatment was involved . What you got was suffering ( bad food and bad hygiene ) caused by neglect essentially. Observe : when British press got hold of the fact that conditions were unhygenic in the camps ( fotographs of starving children ) there was an outcry and the British army dispached inspectors to check the situation out. The result was general elevation of hygene etc. Detainees were allowed to keep their possesions etc.

So what are the parallels you see exactly apart from the boring once ? We all use the term ‘concentration camp’ to mean death camp playing a role in *intentional* killing of people or it means organised mass murder.In other words what British did and what the Nazis did is morally apples and oranges. But you know this and this brings me to the second question of motivation . Well its a game called ‘character assasination’ Bush is a Hitler, American prisons are gulags on so on down the line .
It seems to me that intellectually one does this sort of thing when one runs out of good argument since what you do is use an ad hominem argument. But secondly you argue in a dishonest way because you know that the comparison wont stand up but you *pretend* that it does and insist on using it.

[CB replies: Zdenek, God knows what you are smoking, but a cursory inspection of my post and the thread would reveal that it was “Steve” who raised the matter of concentration camps. My role was to inform him that the modern use of the term originates not with the Nazis, as he appeared to believe, but with the British during the Boer war. ]

The difference you’re discussing hinges on whether the empirial power considered itself to be conquering states or merely populated land. it also hinges in the historians answer to that question. Are tribes states?

Are you claiming that:

there was a substantial difference between pre-conquest african and american locals?

no imperialism happened in africa?

something else?

In pragmatic terms, an empire is any country that someone thinks they might be able to get away with changing the boundaries of, either by breaking a bit off or adding a bit. If they succeed, they were right (see trad. definition of treason).

soru

William Everdell, in his book the First Moderns, traces the history of the concentration camp back to Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish officer who used the word “re-concentration” for his policy of uprooting rebel villages in Cuba and moving them to barbed wire camps. Everdell remarks upon the fact that Weyler had been sent by the spanish as an observer during the American Civil War, and he had acquired an admiration for General Sherman, and particularly the tactic of total warfare employed by General Sherman in the March to the Sea.

When thousands of Cubans died, the U.S. protested to Spain. When the U.S. fought Spain and took possession of the Philipines, the Americans re-thought their objections and decided that Weyler’s reconcentration camps were just the thing to subdue the rebellious Fillipinos. And of course we are seeing them apply a version of the same methods in Iraq, now — Fallujah being one example, and Samara another. From a recent AP story about Samara:

“Since 2003, Samarra has come to symbolize the trials and errors of U.S. strategy in Iraq – a cycle of military offensives, lulls and new waves of lethal insurgent attacks.

In recent months, U.S. forces have resorted to draconian tactics to try to drive insurgents from Samarra and keep them out. In late August, Army engineers used bulldozers to build an eight-foot-high, 6 1/2-mile-long dirt wall around the city, threatening to kill anyone who tried to cross it. Entry into Samarra was limited to three checkpoints. Since then, attacks have fallen sharply, and voter turnout was high for the Dec. 15 national elections.”

Weyler lives on.

Chris,

You haven’t actually established that the US is an Empire comparable to Russia and China. After all, Russia and China control far more people in a far more dictatorial fashion than the US does. Russia and China are amazing imperialists. They continue to hold large numbers of people under colonial control, while the US does not. If anything, the UK is more imperial than the US if we consider Northern Ireland and the failure of self-rule there.

Yes, the US is powerful, and yes the US has client states. But in the sense of empire, as you have defined it, in the present day, the US isn’t actually that significant.

Many, many interesting things to pick through in the Galt post, but this quite hilarious claim:

bq. A propos of absolutely nothing, I haven’t seen many Americans going over to Europe to inform them what they think, and then grandly disabusing them of their illusions.

seems to me to sum up in one sentence Ms. McArdle’s particular style of contributing to our understanding of world affairs.

Chris,

Whilst I must admit to having never thought to compare shoe factories in Malaysia to what King Leopold did to the Congo (which in fact was nothing as it was his son Leopold II that decided Belgium would be a colonial power – try reading that sentence without grinning), I prefer this from the same post:

“No one in America is unaware of what happened to the Indians; no one that I have ever met has tried to justify it, though we are all awfully glad that we have a country”

Here’s my version: I killed a family and took their house. Now, I’m not going to justify it but I’m awfully glad I’ve got a house.

Tib,

In the terms of those who think the United States has an empire, I think it would be more accurate to say that the neocons believe that the United States should stop practicing ‘soft’ imperialism (e.g. using economic incentives and international legal structures to keep client states in line) and start practicing ‘hard’ imperialism (e.g. military regime change in unruly client states). That switch has indeed been less than entirely satisfactory, not least because, as empires go, the United States has an admirable commitment to the welfare both of its own troops (from what I remember, this particularly irked Ferguson) and of the people they conquer (within various notorious limitations), including a belief that they should enjoy at least a Potemkin democracy. Of course, there are incentives to have such a commitment, when rival great powers are armed with nukes. The Romans and the Brits, in their imperial heyday, never faced those.

(Sorry if this gets posted twice.)

Is the US an empire? Beats me. But if we’re using the standard of “subjugation of native peoples and colonial settlement” so are Britain (and I mean the island of Britain), France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, and practically every other country I can think of. You might want to narrow that definition a trifle.

After all, Russia and China control far more people in a far more dictatorial fashion than the US does.

Irrelevant to whether the US is an empire, although one of the reasons one might be interested in whether the US is an empire is because there is a long controversy in historiography whether imperials powers can be governed with republican institutions for any length of time. (The Bush administration appears to be tacitly arguing that they can’t.)

Russia and China are amazing imperialists. They continue to hold large numbers of people under colonial control, while the US does not.

No, one way or another we killed off most of ours. But direct colonial control is not the only possible form of empire.

If anything, the UK is more imperial than the US if we consider Northern Ireland and the failure of self-rule there.

Again, this is irrelevant, unless you’re claiming that there can be only one imperial power on the planet at any one time. Does the US exercise power over other countries comparable to the power exercised by the late classical Roman imperium or the nineteenth-century British empire? That’s the only question here. If the answer is no, then that’s that; if the answer is yes, we can move on to other questions, of motive and effect and possible alternatives. But “every other country did it too” isn’t responsive, except as an implied and reluctant “yes.”

Hogan,

(1) The reason I discuss Russia and China is that Chris wanted to make a direct comparison between the US and them in the present day. (Read the last sentence of the initial post.) That comparison is not instructive, for the reasons I have mentioned above.

(2) Russia and China also have killed off many of their colonial subjects. They just happen to have gone after larger groups of people, and continue to go after them to the present day. So there is a difference in quantity. If the US still ruled the Philippines and Cuba, there might be more basis for comparison, but the US doesn’t.

(3) Almost every country you can name has been imperialist at some point. That’s a useless designation. What do you mean by imperialist? If you are comparing US actions to current colonialist actions by Russia and China, then I don’t accept the comparison.

If you want to make a claim that the US wields great power in the world and has client states, then I agree with you. But that isn’t necessarily implied by the word “imperialism”. Decide what you mean by power or imperialism, then we can discuss what you mean.

Hektor,

Chris wasn’t making a comparison in the present day. He was picking up on Colley’s definition of “empire” as applied to China in its era of expansion and pointing out that that definition applies just as well to the US in its era of expansion (something no supporter of manifest destiny would ever have dreamed of denying). And the point was not gratuitous US-bashing (as if the word “imperialism” were nothing but an epithet–it is an epithet, but that’s not all it is), but pointing out the hollowness of the “Golden Age” myth some liberal anti-imperialists invoke of an innocent, pre-imperial US that we must now restore. That US never existed; it was Jefferson who spoke of an “empire of liberty” stretching across the North American continent, right there at the founding.

I’d argue that while Brazil probably qualifies as an empire if the US does, not all Latin American states do. Mexico is largely inhabited by descendants of its pre-colonial population. Its maintenance of mestizo nationalism hides a population that’s actually a whole lot less mixed than that. It’s true that it still has communities that define themselves as aboriginal and deem the existing state as the result of a theft of their lands, but they are only a small part of the population.

The same applies to Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, and I should think most of the rest. (Not Argentina, Chile or Uruguay though.) The dominant language, religion and culture of those nations was changed by conquest, and they were once part of a genuine empire. But that empire has now completely retreated and the descendants of the aboriginal population form the bulk of the population.

In order for those nations to still be empires – by the definition given – we would have to deem France to be an empire because it was conquered and its population converted and absorbed to an alien language and culture by the Romans. Modern Frenchmen still mostly trace their ancestry to pre-Roman Gaul, and those that don’t certainly don’t belong to cultures that ever conquered France. But, the language and culture of France owes far more to Roman than Celtic roots. If European France – seen in isolation from its present and former colonial empire – doesn’t qualify as an empire, than neither does Mexico.

If historical conquest by an expansive power, and the existence of some form of continuity between that conquest and the present government, were enough to make an empire, than the term really has lost all meaning. There is no inhabited corner of the earth that has never been conquered and assimilated by somebody.

Perhaps we need to differentiate between the fact that a lot of state-building has involved imperialism, on the one hand, and ongoing imperialism, on one hand. That is, we need to stipulate a fuzzy line at which people’s perceptions have changed so that what were once imperial territories have become part of the nation. Such boundaries can be complex (e.g. between Cornish, and English, and British). British involvement in Ireland, or American involvement in Iraq, involve a much earlier stage of imperialism than the English conquest of Wales or the American annexation of Texas.

Or to put that all another way, we need to incorporate theories of imperialism into our general notions of state formation, state power, and international relations.

Imperialism can’t be used to characterise all state formation, because states can although group together in a federation which eventually becomes a superstate. But that’s not how most modern nations were created.

You may support the inclusion of NI in the UK

I don’t, though. I support any decision about the continuing inclusion in the UK of that part of the island of Ireland being made by the Irish people who live there. (Republicans would say the same, of course; they simply have a more restrictive notion of who Irish people are than do I.)

You want to learn a bit more Irish history before making grand pronouncements about it, by the way. ‘Britain’ didn’t ‘opt for partition’; Irish unionists insisted on it. (Just as Irish nationalists insisted on a partition of their own — unionists did vis-à-vis the Free State only what nationalists did vis-à-vis the UK.) Was partition an ideal solution? Hardly; it was merely the least bad one available at the time.* (Mind you, the border would have run rather differently if I’d been consulted.) For its part, the British government of the day expected that partition would be a brief and transitional thing, and that in due course they’d be shut of the whole damned island. They were wrong about that, but then they were wrong about a lot of things having to do with Ireland.

Anyway, back to the larger point. Me, I think it’s neither accurate nor useful to describe NI’s problems as ‘imperial’ in nature. But if you want to do so, fine. It’s simply that it is, as others have pointed out, no more an ’empire’ than is the USA, and if anything rather less of one.

* Plausibly available. In retrospect, it would probably have been for the best if nationalism had kept its shirt on for a few more generations. Had the Home Rule question been decided at the time Scotland and Wales got their devolutions, I don’t think we’d have seen anything like the violence and sectarian divisiveness that we had in the real world, do you? But of course, deferring until the late 20th century the decision on whether to split from the UK wasn’t on the cards. And after all, why should it have been — why should early 20th c. nationalists have deferred gratification merely because that would, in the long run, have been better for Ireland? Ireland’s dead generations owe us as little as we owe them.

Hmm, do Imperial Powers allow such debates as this? Just wondering.

I think it is curious that I have rarely heard of Nazi Germany or the former USSR referred to as “Empires”.

“The Soviet Empire”‘s a fairly well-known term, actually (but perhaps it is/was used mainly by students of the F/SU).

For the US see, in particular but certainly not solely

Arthur Schlesinger, The ImperialPresidency

my apologies for the lack of spaces in the title, Firefox seems to be playing up again.

Is not one essential aspect of Empire the central rule of “outer provinces”? Aside from the few excontinental US territories, the US does not have a “formal” system of provincial viceroys “reporting” to a central power, e.g. the US administration.

If at all, imperial control is exerted via “business ties” and through strongly US influenced international entities like the IMF or WTO, and large corporate players. It strikes me it is not primarily the US administration ruling the empire/conglomerate of trade “partners”, but an entangled system of (multinational) corporate interests, with the administration partially acting on its behalf.

Mrs. Tilton,

I do think we are straying from the point a bit now, but I’ll just respond to a couple of your points.

First off, I’m not a republican, but I will say that my impression is that republicans say that the issue of Northern Ireland should be decided by Irish people as a whole, that is, that it should be voted on by the whole island and not by the rump bit that was created in 1921. (Obviously, this would favor their political position.) It wasn’t until the Good Friday agreement that this changed. I don’t actually think there has been in recent memory a strong call for only certain people in Ireland to be able to vote and not others. So I don’t know where you are getting that from. I don’t see it from Sinn Fein, for example.

Britain always “opts” for partition because the “squabbling natives” demand it. They did it in Ireland, then in India and Palestine. It’s the default British mechanism for resolving their colonial pursuits, and it has in general led to irridentism and continuing bloodshed. There were certainly groups in Ireland that wanted partition, and other groups that did not. Britain had both the power and the authority to side with whatever group it wished. It chose partition.

By the way, I’m hardly the only one to compare Ireland to Algeria, which I imagine you would agree was an imperial problem. It’s a pretty mainstream position. For example, take _Postwar_, by Tony Judt, page 466: “Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland — Ulster — was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself.”

It’s also pretty clear that independence for Ireland has been good for the country in the long run. After all, it was always the poorest part of the British Isles while in the UK, but now it is one of the richest.

Scott Martens,

You are entirely too forgiving of South and Central America. Bolivia, despite having an indigenous majority, we can definitely characterize as an empire until fairly recently. Similarly for Peru, with large numbers of indigenous. Every country in Central America is similar, except Costa Rica, which is more like Argentina. Paraguay is the only counterexample I can think of, since the Guarani also completely dominate the state and most people speak it, from the president on down.

Chris,

One other point. Australia and America are functionally the same in your analysis. They are both debris states which spawned societies independent of the imperial initiator of the project. You could throw Canada in there too.

Like cm, I think the distinction between programs of territorial expansion, consolidation and incorportation (i.e., the United States, Russia and China) differ substantially from systems of client states, subjugated overseas territories and economic hegemony.

In the former, the ultimate goal is to make the seized territory part of the nation (often through direct settlement by the conquering ethnic group) and the fate of the aboriginal population is assimilation or death. The United States annexed the Oregon Country in order to make it an integral part of the U.S. and people it with Americans.

I’m not sure if “empire” sufficiently captures this concept, if only because the British Empire of the 19th and early 20th Centuries seems to be the prime mental definition of the term these days, and it is squarely of the second type. Sure, the British did settle Canada and the Antipodes, but I doubt anyone thought there was going to be mass migration to the Gold Coast or Burma. These were states that were being controlled by the English crown for economic and security reasons, not for eventual assimilation.

The Russian and Chinese projects, though run by titular emperors, seem much more like American “expansionism.” The Soviet “empire” of the Cold War, though run by titular presidents, seems close to the British Empire.

Whether the U.S. seems to be trending toward an British/Soviet imperial style in its dealings with other nations is certainly a question worth debate. Whether the U.S. territorial expansion paralleled the Russian and Chinese ones seems beyond it.

So, at what point does an empire become a former empire? Or is it a permanent condition? It seems to me the US has not done any of the conventional “imperial” things in the past century or so; conquering new territories, etc. It certainly has extended its influence, but generally by mutual exchange; it’s not as though even “client” states such as Taiwan will comply with the US’s whim.

Isn’t the US something of a post-Empire state at this point? Whereas China and Russia are still shooting and forcibly migrating restive occupied populations, making the term fit them better.

First off, I’m not a republican, but I will say that my impression is that republicans say that the issue of Northern Ireland should be decided by Irish people as a whole, that is, that it should be voted on by the whole island and not by the rump bit that was created in 1921.

By the orginal definition, that would make them inperialists, as they strive to conquer by force of arms a populace that doesn’t want to be ruled by them.

Taking a vote across the whole British Empire, when it covered a third the map, whether or not it should invade some particular country of a few million people would not have made it a non-empire.

soru

A nation has one “people” who all consider themselves to be members of the same club. There can be minorities but there arent definable sub-territories that would rather be separate countries.

An empire is where one nation subjugates another and the people in that subjugated nation remain distinct and remain subjugated.

The US isnt really an empire because though we did indeed subjugate another people we KILLED THEM ALL AND TOOK THEIR LAND. Rightly or wrongly, the fact that we have now peopled our land with the winners and either killed or absorbed nearly all the losers means that there arent any areas left that are populated with subjugated people who would like to secede from the US.

Now, as for those foreigners over there in the Middle East, well that is a story for a different post.

The US isnt really an empire because though we did indeed subjugate another people we KILLED THEM ALL AND TOOK THEIR LAND. Rightly or wrongly, the fact that we have now peopled our land with the winners and either killed or absorbed nearly all the losers means that there arent any areas left that are populated with subjugated people who would like to secede from the US.

Not all were killed, and not all of the survivors have been “absorbed.” Many live on land regarded as the sovereign, or at least more or less self-governing, territory of their tribes, albeit under the supervision of our Colonial Offi–sorry, Bureau of Indian Affairs. It would probably be hard to get a considered answer to the question of whether they want to secede, because they realize there’s no way in hell the Great White Father is going to let that happen; but their current lack of active resistance doesn’t make them less subjugated.

JLW,

Your definition that ties together an outflow of the population of the imperial center towards the colonies is, I think, pretty good. But according to Niall Ferguson, at least, the statistics for the outflow from the British Isles strongly show that tendency. Australia, Canada and the U.S., Ireland,South Africa, Kenya, and India, show evidences of that massive outflow.

America does something different — it absorbs the influx from the periphery. Instead of depending on American planters in Guatamala, this country depends on Indian doctors in El Paso and Indian engineers in Silicon Valley. That is pretty interesting, actually, since it diagrams the difference between the U.S. and, say, the Russian empire.

I think the real interest in this question of empire has to do less with whether empire captures a certain configuration of America’s behaviors in comparison with other empires and more with analyzing America’s foreign policy interests. One of the most irritating things about the pro-war discourse of the past couple of years has been the almost absolute lack of acknowledgment that nation’s have interests that may be peculiar to the nation itself. The U.S. isn’t a moral force, but a powerful nation that has, at times, been an instrument for moral good – but has never been merely an instrument for moral good — it has always served its interests, and the universal good has always been secondary to those interests. This isn’t to criticize — this is just what nations, and empires, do. To legitimate what they do, however, imperially inclined nation’s present themselves as a civilizing force, or the lynchpin of democracy, or some such thing. By talking about empire, we are reminded that you can’t erase the question of interest.

I don’t see how can clearly know anything about US intentions. Bush is, ah, not very forthcoming, and for the next three years the US intentions are George Bush’s intentions. We don’t know who will succeed him.

Thare have been lots of trial balloons by respectable, well-connected people about empire or an empire-like world order. When respectable, well-connected people talk about a monopolar world or “the world’s only superpower”, empire is one direction they can be going.

A lot of the rage at liberals you see on the right is because of liberal foot-dragging about America’s military world mission. Plenty of Bush’s supporters support his policy on the understanding that it’s really much more aggressive and less defensive than it pretends to be.

Wow Chris, you really do have trouble with context don’t you?

Quick context quiz. In the portion you quote from my post am I more likely talking about Puerto Rico, Texas, or Taiwan? When Colley talks about US bases is she talking about California, Virginia, or Germany?

I presume you don’t want to figure out the difference, since you aren’t actually an idiot.

Hector and Sebastian: I didn’t say Mexico or any other country was necessarily run by any kind of ethnically representative government. But most Latin American nations actually have populations that identify with it, even if not with the rulers. The US also rules over a black population that isn’t represented in the ruling class in anything like its proportion to the population. This is wrong, but not necessarily imperial.

In order to be an empire, somebody has to be displaced by people from somewhere else. The aboriginal population of Mexico, and most of Latin America, was not displaced. Enslaved, massacred, treated like dirt, forced to speak Spanish and attend Catholic churches – yes, those things all happened and I’m not endorsing them. But majorities in every Spanish-speaking South American and Central American country with the exception of Argentina and Uruguay counts majorities of primarily aboriginal descent who identify with their nations, even though not always with their ruling classes.

The notion that I should have made plain is that the displacement of aboriginal population is a key component of what makes America, Russia and China empires, and a part of what once made Rome an empire. Not all empires are like that: The French empire rarely displaced people, but it ruled over a large territory with a large population to the benefit of a part of its population living in a small part of the empire.

As for the rest of you arguing the point, if the word “Empire” can be applied to the United States, China, Russia, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Belgian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Seljuk Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire, then the term has no real analytic value. First declare the terms in which you propose to analyze empires, then define the term in such a way as to include those empires that lend themselves to comparison in thse terms and exclude those that don’t.
None of you are really interested in analysis, you are interested in rhetoric. If the United States can be called an empire, you figure, it can be tarred with the same brush as the British or Chinese or Russian or Belgian empires. If empires are bad and the United States can be called an empire then the United States is bad. Sloppy thinking. There are plenty of critiques to be made of the US past and present. Applying the term “Empire” may even be germain in the context of some of those critiques. But none of this is critique. It is simply name calling.

Apologies for the late, Aquavitted post, but :

You could find in lots of the reasonings of the pro war people – remember, back when it was oh so shrill to oppose it? – that complacent self image of the kinder, gentler, not-as-bad-as-19th-century-europe-anyways u.s. imperium (see Galt’s post for another helping if you feel so).

This is preoccupating, because it’s preoccupating that the current big military power is lost in a nationalist dream. And maybe some real examination of the history of the country would help for that. Really, it’s sooo, like, 2 centuries ago, y’know.

It’s plain that 19th-century America was an actively growing empire. Radicals like Henry David Thoreau recognized the Mexican War as an aggressive expansion and protested it as such.

There’s a worthwhile distinction to be made, however, between the assembling of the nation back in the day and the overseas military web — 300-odd bases in 170-odd countries, isn’t it? — that we have assembled.

“A statement that can only be explicable in terms of some kind of odd mental comparmentalization according to which the whole experience of the “frontier” doesn’t count as conquest or the seizure of territory from other peoples.” (Chris #59)
Our plains Injuns would have been mightily puzzled over your claim that we seized territory from them. Ignorant savages, they could not conceive of the idea that anyone could “own” the land, and therefore they never made any ownership claim to it. Our culture, of course, saw it differently, and when the noble savages objected to our fences, we merely rounded ’em up and put ’em in concentration camps–er-uh–reservations, whatever. Imperialist? Naah. We saw it as claiming heretofore unclaimed and nearly empty lands occasionally traversed by simple nomads intent on stealing our cattle, horses and corn.

To be honest, Ken, I read the original post on Chris’s part as quite the opposite–Colley was trying to construe China as a present-day empire (and thus tarring it with all the negative connotations of empire) and Chris was taking a piss at her by showing how difficult it is to call an nationalist power expanding across contiguous landmasses an “empire” without ensnaring the United States in the definition.

From then on, I don’t know. But I certainly saw a lot agreement initially with your and Sebastian’s and my (#71 and 74) points than either of you two do.

Scott Martens,

You need to include Brazil in that group with Argentina and Uruguay. The ethnic makeup of Brazil includes a large portion of descendants of involuntary immigrants from Africa as well as, especially in the south, European immigrants from Poland, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, and Spain in addition to a substantial Japanese population.

Also, what is now Costa Rica, upon the arrival of the Spaniards had a small indigenous population. It’s nothing like Guatemala, Southern Mexico or Honduras.

American empire is to real empire as American cheese is to real cheese.

Didn’t Ike tell Soviet commanders when they met in 1945 that they would get on fine because unlike the nasty Brits neither of them had ever had an empire?

“Steve,

First, I didn’t say anything about anyone being evil.”

“Sebastian H.:

It is misleading because it is attempting to apply the imperial label to situations where the US is clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries, nor is it attempting to gain colony-like control.

Then. 13 colonies.

Now. 50 States.

clearly not attempting to expand its territorial boundaries

Sometimes I worry about you Sebastian.”

Chris-
Your two quotes, above, clarify your original position (your original post) quite a bit. But is it what you really intended? To take the two above quotes seriously, the original post then states, essentially, that
1) America is an ’empire’ similar to the Russian and Chinese empire, because it was expansionist. But this form of expansion took place in roughly 1810-1890 (before 1810, America was largely restricted to the Eastern seaboard, and in the 20th Century, Alaska and Hawaii were added. If you want to quibble by a decade or so on either end, feel free). and,
2) there isn’t necessarily anything ‘evil,’ or wrong, with this type of empire. You are making an observation, not a moral critique.

Really? The point of the original post is to say that America was an empire in the 19th Century, and that there’s nothing wrong with being that kind of empire?

Alot of the language in the post suggests otherwise (even the title: The American Empire, not the Former American Empire), and obviously, much of the discussion here concerns America’s present self-image, not its 19th-Century self-image. But if the post is really as banal as an observation of US behavior 100 years ago, I suppose it may or may not be right, but its really not terribly relevant or enlightening.

(The whole question of Time is really interesting, too. Because America in the 19th Century behaved similarly to Russia in the 17th-19th Centuries, and China over several centuries in the past, we are supposed to conclude; what?).

Note: by defining ’empire’ traditionally, (say, similar to the British, Roman, or French empires of the past), it would be more appropriate to say that America was an empire (with its peak in 1945) that has been in decline ever since. In 1945, the US economy was equal to the rest of the world combined (i.e. was 1/2 the total world economy), US military force spanned the globe (far far more than today), the US military represented an enormous part of the US economy and manpower (a military of 10 million out of 150 million citizens, compared to today a military of about 2 million out of 300 million citizens. I don’t recall the military budget size, but I’m thinking it was 1/3 of GDP?). Nobody wants to conclude that FDR was an emperor far more than GWB is, though, so I can see why you would want to redefine ’empire’ to suit your purposes.

Steve

the racist and historically ignorant “Ronzoni Rigatoni”

I read RR’s comment as satirical.

‘Grozny is a ghost town..

‘The scale of destruction is far worse than Iraq’.

‘Chechnya is an imperial war ‘

‘The majority of the population supported the invasion’.

I stand corrected.

brendan, if you’re going to disagree with the claim that a is worse than b, saying b is bad isn’t going to cut it.

Isn’t the US something of a post-Empire state at this point?

With military bases in 125 countries and a military budget equaling the next ten countries combined? No, it is not anything of a post-Empire state.

“With military bases in 125 countries and a military budget equaling the next ten countries combined? No, it is not anything of a post-Empire state.”

And so we return to the somewhat more modern definition of empire that Colley and Adloyada were trying to talk about before all the confusion. I think the lots of bases=empire formulation is rather weak. But if you want to argue that Germany is a client state of the US, could would please just say so explicitly? Then we could deal with the odd contradictions of that kind of statement head on instead of beating around the bush.

And so we return to the somewhat more modern definition of empire that Colley and Adloyada were trying to talk about before all the confusion. I think the lots of bases=empire formulation is rather weak.

How about the “we get to overthrow governments in Central America and the Caribbean and maybe elsewhere = empire” formulation?

This entire disagreement has resulted from conflating a general definition of “empire”, the 18th & 19th century mercantilist variety, and whatever it is that Marxists’ think it means today.

Sebastian:

There is a perfectly good term for the relationship of the U.S. to Western Europe since World War II–hegemony. (the predominant influence of one state over others sez the AHC 3rd.)

I mean, for anyone to say that Germany, Greece, Italy and most other NATO states were completely independent actors during that period would be to willfully misunderstand the historical record. But there (usually) wasn’t direct control either, as a suzerainty (or indeed, an empire a la Britain) would imply. The U.S. used its wealth, its military might, considerable personal ties among the elites, and the fear of a common enemy to make things happen to its liking. There were defeats, so obviously this did not amount to absolute power, but it is certainly fair to say that the ability for most Western European countries to act in whatever they decided was their individual self interest was constrained.

And the clearest sign that this was not some alliance of equals is that no American president weighed the reaction of Belgian or Norwegian leaders before making a decision. American leaders had essentially unlimited freedom of action.

Does this make for an empire? No. And this was certainly a different breed from the control that Soviets had on the Warsaw Pact nations.

I think what disconcerts many who are aligned against the neo-conservatives, however, is that we fear that they are actively trying to move toward an imperial relationship toward other nations, rather than a simply imperious one.

Now, you may also classify US/UK actions in Iraq as imperialism, but it would be helpful to describe exactly what you mean by that.

Perhaps it’s of a piece with claiming the right to decide who may or may not govern other countries? And the fear is not that the US will start doing that, because we’ve been doing it for decades, but that we’re now dramatically and not very intelligently expanding the list of countries where we claim that right? And that claiming that right is, to say the least, consistent with earlier imperial practice, from Rome to Great Britain to the USSR?

I am hesitant to get into this debate, since most of it seems to be over definitions. Definitions are never right or wrong; merely useful or not useful.

A definition of “client state” which includes the United Kingdom in regards to the United States is not useful. Since no state has an economy as large as the U.S. or a military as powerful as the U.S., such a definition would make any American ally into a “client state.”

A useful definition of “client state” is a state whose ability to make sovereign decisions is restricted by the deliberate ability of a foreign government to impose military or economic sanctions. An obvious corrollary is that the foreign government in question must be able to wield its coercive tools at an acceptably low cost. (What those “costs” are, of course, varies wildly with the domestic and international context within which the foreign government operates.)

This definition can be used to analyze the meaning of U.S. bases on foreign territory. Can a sovereign state remove said U.S. bases with no fear of coercive punishment? If so, then said country is not an American “client” in any serious way. A ally, or an ally of convenience (with the “convenience” for the country involved being lease payments or foreign aid or whatever), but not an indicator of an American “empire” over the country in which said bases are located. A recent example in Central Asia comes immediately to mind.

In 1956, the U.S. clearly punished the U.K. when it undertook a policy against American desires. Then again, the policy in question was the invasion of another sovereign state — was the U.S. willing or able to use its coercive force to dictate British domestic policy or other, less confrontational bits of its foreign policy? I’m not sure, and therefore I’m not sure if I’d call Britain a “client,” even at a time when the relationship was clearly more asymmetrical than it is today.

Did the U.K. ally itself with the U.S. in 2003 out of fear of American coercion? If not, then I don’t think that Britain can be called a “client” of the United States. That, of course, begs the question of why London so often allies itself with Washington, but I doubt American coercion is at the root.

On the other hand, the Republic of Panama is quite clearly a client of the United States. Mexico, not so much. Venezuela, not at all, unless we define “client” to mean “if Venezuela invades Guyana, then the U.S. will use its coercive power to punish Venezuela quite badly.” That, of course, is a very bad definition of client, since on the one hand it so broad as to apply to any sovereign state that lacks the military power to oppose the U.S. in a conventional war, and on the other hand is so narrow as to apply only to the very specific “policy” of invading another state.

Of course, I may be overlooking something in this analysis with regards to specific cases. I would prefer, however, that we don’t debate definitions. The definition I have given of a “client state” seems a good one, if the purpose is to define the scale and scope of the current American empire, should such a beast exist.

This, of course, defines “empire” as a “relationship of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies,” and implicitly defines the American political society as consisting of citizens and legal residents of the U.S. who enjoy the full protection of the U.S. constitution. (What this says about Guam or Puerto Rico, whose citizens are full Americans but where the U.S. constitution does not fully apply, I leave up to others to debate.)

Anyway, I hope that the above definition is clear enough to allow some coherence to be imposed on the discussion, without making too many arbitrary political judgments.

P.S. Sebastian is on to something important which does lack a good name. Gaddis calls it “empire by invitation,” and Mandelbaum calls it “government,” but neither term quite captures the concept. “Hegemony” perhaps? No, that doesn’t sounds right. The German term “ordnungsmacht” seems to capture what Sebastian is getting at, but has the drawback of not being in either Spanish or English, and just being a word I can’t pronounce correctly. Either which way, the U.S.-European relationship isn’t empire, at least not as of 2005, as Sebastian points out.

Aw, crap. My comment is awaiting moderation.

It’s very late at night here, and I won’t have time to answer all the points raised above: but, briefly, to answer Rilkefan’s: my point is NOT that ‘a’ is worse or ‘better’ then ‘b’: my point is that the behaviour of ‘a’ and ‘b’ is the same kind of thing : which is a rather different point. My point, in other words is not that the behaviour of Russia is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the US’/UK’s in Iraq. It is that it is the same kind of thing. The fact is that the pretext (or, if you are Russian, reason) for the invasion of Chechnya was a defence of ‘democratic’ values against ‘Islamofascism’. It is also the case that, according to the Russians, what has happened is not a neo-imperialist power grab, but instead a bringing of democracy to a state at risk of falling to ‘Islamo-fascists’: an action that Putin has been pretty quick to claim is indeed part of George Bush’s war on terror.

My key point is very simple. WE do not argue about whether or not this is true, because WE (being outside the ‘reach’ of Russian propaganda, and not being part of the Russian cultural framework) see the concept that Russia invaded Chechnya to bring democracy not as a serious point for debate, but simply as a joke.

Ipso facto, as opinion polls show, other cultures and nations, who have not been the ‘victim’ (if I can put it that way) of Bush and Blair’s propaganda war, and who have not had the ‘benefit’ of an education system that systematically ignores the horrors of British imperialism whilst ramming home (for the millionth time) that, yes, Hitler was a very bad man and that we did a Good Thing in stopping him, these people, to repeat (in South America, and the Middle East, and Africa) do not see Bush’s protestations about Democracy and the War on Terror as being serious points, but instead as being self-evidently cover for other motives.

More details tomorrow if anyone still cares.

an empire you say?

you can ask monroe

or for people that have been dead for a slightly shorter period of time, try asking the hawaiians, the filipinos, the grenadians, haitians, colombians and maybe even the somali while you are at it.

not to mention dudes like allende and noriega or for a slightly better chance at getting someone to talk to you instead of talking to a patch of land, you could try asking castro or chavez, though they may be a teensy bit biased.

“I should like you to make out what he is and bring him to light in a discussion; for at present we are only agreed about the name, but of the thing to which we both apply the name possibly you have one notion and I another; whereas we ought always to come to an understanding about the thing itself in terms of a definition, and not merely about the name minus the definition.”
–Plato (Sophist)

Tietjens said:

My only responsibility is to support fair treatment now and to champion the truthful teaching of our history as a people. If a family was killed and their house stolen 100 years ago, you cannot lay guilt on the house’s current occupants who were transferred from out of town.

This is incorrect, at least in nation-states that utilize the English common law: Recipients of stolen property must either return that property, or compensate the true owner(s) for it. It doesn’t matter if one’s family arrived here one hundred years ago or yesterday. This isn’t a matter of “guilt” (although people who benefit from property acquired through genocide are welcome to feel guilty) as it is a simple matter of property law.

Struggling to stave off this thread’s impending decline into whataboutery, I’ll raise a classic issue from the historiography. Does “empire” necessarily mean territory? It was traditionally held that Britain transited from a less-imperialist state to a “high imperialism” in the late 1800s and that this was analogous to the move away from Free Trade at the same time; suddenly, rather than seeking open markets, the Victorians plunged into a Scramble for Africa driven by the hope of walling off resources and markets behind tariff barriers.

In the 1950s, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson threw this upside down with a famous article called The Imperialism of Free Trade, in which they evolved the idea of informal empire and pointed out that a) the economically important bits of the British empire were acquired long before the “scramble”, b) that the actual control or influence exerted by the “scramblers” over their new territories was very limited, particularly by the Treasury’s power of the purse, and c) that the UK had arguably more real power over, and economic interest in, states outside the *formal* limits of the empire, for example South America or even the US, than in the new colonies.

Gallagher and Robinson went on to argue that the “official mind” had a structural preference for informal power over formal imperial rule – after all, it cost enormously less and involved fewer complications with other great powers – which was mirrored in the actual forms of government implemented in the new colonies (rule through local chiefs), and that formal imperial government was usually the result of a local crisis (the “crumbling frontier”) tipping the balance of power between the “man on the spot” and the “official mind”. Sometimes, this meant that the same territory would be annexed, then de-annexed, such as happened in the 1840s with British Kaffraria and the Sand River Convention.

The classic statement of all this is their Africa and the Victorians (note the order), in which they present an explanation of the colonisation of Africa as the result of a reactive, game-theoretic working out of European politics.

I think there’s a strong argument that much of the world is more or less part of the American informal empire..

Good catch, Sebastian. But…

“because the US is uninterested in making citizens of those who inhabit Taiwan”

Is this really how you understand the difference between “empire” and non-empire? Because you’ve just eliminated many of the “big” historical empires from the former category…

Actually, given both the classic example, Rome, and the Webster’s definition, it is quite apparent that one of the main, perhaps the main, determinants of empire is the internal make up the political unit. An empire is ruled by an emperor or maybe an autocrat.

See the change from Roman Republic to Roman Empire.

The second determinant is territory. Vastness is part of it but what is left unsaid is that empires rule of over disparate peoples(the more the better the definition) who would prefer to be ruled by their own political units.

Given that, it makes some sense to say China was an empire that has re-positioned itself as a nation state.

It also makes a bit of sense to say that Russia/Soviet Union was an empire.

It also makes a bit of sense to say that Great Britain was an empire. (No autocrat or emperor but 1/4 of the globe and quite a few disparate peoples who would have preferred to been ruled by their own political units.)

It makes much less sense to say that the US was or is an empire. Sure Native Americans and Southerners etc but it really fits a good deal less. Military and cultural annihilation and displacement and secession are different from being ruled by an empire.

Bigmacattack – reread what you’ve written vis-a-vis Native Americans and then say again, with a straight face, that US westward expansion was not colonial imperialism.

As for forms of rule, well, most scholars would argue that Athens had an empire, that the Roman Republic had an empire (before and after Augustus), as did France and other non-autocratic entities… so I hardly see how having aspects of democratic rule eliminate the possibility of also having an empire.

“because the US is uninterested in making citizens of those who inhabit Taiwan”

Is this really how you understand the difference between “empire” and non-empire? Because you’ve just eliminated many of the “big” historical empires from the former category…

No it is not. But it is a huge part of how Chris defines it in his initial post, and there is not the slightest hint that he has changed his mind since. He makes exceptions for colonies, but I don’t think he would argue that Germany is a colony of the United States.

And his approach on empire now suggests that he apparently still thinks that Colley was being misleading by using empire in a way that was not at issue in her discussion.

The reason it says plenty about the present is because present-day Americans are enamoured of the idea that their country is special, different, exeptional on a particular dimension. And that dimension concerns the fact that whereas Britain, France etc have an imperialist past, the US allegedly doesn’t.

Your repeated failure to discern a difference between the border-consolidating past and the history beyond that is a huge blind spot for you. Was the United States forced out of Germany as France was forced out of Algeria? Was the United States forced out of West Germany even so much as the USSR was in East Germany. No it was not. Why? Because the United States was not acting as an empire vis-a-vis Germany. That makes for a rather interesting difference in more recent history. That might suggest to some, but apparently not to you, that even the border-consolidating definition of ’empire’ might mean vastly different things later. This would make logical sense because nearly every major country would be counted as an empire at one point in their history under your definition, rendering it a rather non-helpful definition in discriminating between those historical empires which might leave Germany a functional country after crushing it in war (the US) and those which would not (Russian).

There are very few historical empires which would have allowed, nay HELPED, Japan and Germany become economic superpowers after defeating them in battle. We know for a fact that the USSR was not such an empire. We know that the British and French did not do so for Germany after World War I. The experience of South Korea (not a colony, not part of the borders of the United States, quite successful by any local comparison) suggests that the North Koreans would have been noticeably better off if we had won in that war.

The US is exceptional in the fact that we have had a number of opportunities in the last hundred years to act as an empire. We are not Russia in Chechenya. We are not China in Tibet. When we have won in the wars with other ’empires’ we have left behind Japan, Germany and South Korea. When other ’empires’ won they left Vietnam, North Korea, East Germany, Rumania. The worst outcomes in recent history have tended to come where the fighting was less ‘hot’ and had less decicive outcomes. But even Chile, a very bad case to be sure, is far better off than North Korea (or to be more fair by not picking the worst case, compare the result of being led by murderous thugs in Chile GDP per cap. $10,700 to Romania , $7,700. Even then you can look at what it took to remove Pinochet vs. CeauÅŸescu as indicative of some important difference. Pinochet is one of the uglier fruits of American reach. CeauÅŸescu was for decades much more warmly embraced by those in Western Europe than Pinochet ever was and was considered one of the ‘better’ Communist leaders almost until his fall.)

The US has had many recent chances at empire under your more strict definition, and has had very many chances at very nasty forms of control that wouldn’t be ‘imperial’ under that definition. In any historical look at a very strong power, the US has been exceptional in a postive way. Your definition of empire doesn’t speak to the idea of American exceptionalism nearly as much as you think.

I would never say that the US is always, or nearly always wonderfully benevolent. But for a world power, it is now and very often in the past has been in fact exceptionally good.

All of which, by the way, is more of an argument along the lines of Colley and Adloyada (in that it talks about the issues they raise, not that they would necessarily agree with my viewpoint) than it is about your definition of empire. Funny how even on your very most current terms (attacking American exceptionalism) their discussion of empire might be more revealing.

Sebastian,

You keep concentrating on US behavior in Europe, as if US behavior in non-European regions has no bearing on the question of imperialism. There is a long and continuing pattern of US intervention, military and para-military, in countries in Central and South America (and, less consistently, elsewhere, like Iran and Indonesia) who select for themselves governments that we find unacceptable, a pattern that pre- and post-dates the Cold War. We’ve never denied it and we’ve never resolved to give it up. (If we haven’t gotten rid of Chavez, it’s for pragmatic reasons, not because “that would be wrong.”) The fact that we’re nice to other white people is to our credit, but it’s hardly the end of the story.

I’ve blogged at length on the subject of how to define empires. In my view, we have to be very careful about how we proceed with this sort of discussion.

• “Empire”, like “nation-state”, “republic”, and other political forms are ideal types. Real political communities seldom, if ever, approach the ideal form specified in whatever definition we choose for such categories. In fact, most real political communities combine aspects of one or more forms.

• “Empire” and “imperialism” are distinctive concepts.

• “Empire” describes a form of political control involving (in my view) (a) heterogeneous subordinate political communities, (b) rule through intermediaries who enjoy significant-but not unlimited-lattitude over rule-making and enforcement within a subordinate political community, and (c) a core-periphery structure characterized by limited political ties between peripheries.

• “Imperialism” is a strategy of expansion involving the subordination of previously independent political communities for the purpose of extracting resources from those communities (land, raw materials, tax revenue, military manpower, strategic position, and so forth). Colonialism, for that matter, is a form of imperialism that involves settling populations from the core (or inner periphery, e.g., Scotland and Ireland) in peripheries.

• The political structure of relations-both domestic and international-may have emergent qualities. This is particularly salient in the context of putative informal empires, where a state may never engage in “imperialism” but nonetheless ultimately wind up in a relationship which has imperial elements. A state may engage in imperial expansion but ultimately form a political order that looks, on balance, more federal, confederal, or nation-state in character.

• Informal empires, as international-relations scholars such as David Lake, Alex Wendt and Daniel Friedhiem, and myself, argue, are extremely difficult to detect. This is particularly true when we ask whether a relationship is hegemonic or informal-imperial, since these are very similar forms of rule. Often, we only know an informal empire when we see “off-the-path” behavior, i.e., when a subordinate polity departs from implicit rules and suffers from highly asymmetric coercive sanction. Lake uses the example of US intervention in the Carribean Basin, which is a rather good one.

All of this has a number of implications. For one, successful imperialism always leads to imperial forms of rule, but the “empire” it creates may be transitional. Empires may voluntarily or involuntarily cede control of a periphery; empires may transition into confederal or federal arrangements in the long-term, or even to nation-states. Every major European state, for example, passed through a stage that we can indentify as broadly imperial as it expanded within Europe. In the end, this process sometimes culminated in reasonably successful consolidation of a nation-state (e.g., France and Burgundy, Provence, and Aquitaine, for example) or tendentious quasi-confederacies/quasi-nation-states (e.g., Spain and Catalonia, Valencia, and Basque country). This is why US westward expansion ought to be characterized as imperial (and colonial), even though the relationship is now more federal than imperial (at least when we exclude Native American reservations, which combine elements of imperial and federal control).

Similarly, the US did opt for empire after the Spanish American War in a number of places, e.g., the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and even for empire in some Pacific islands after World War II. It nevertheless abandoned-in the main-imperial control in almost all of those territories.

Similarly, as long as it occupied Germany and Japan it had a clearly imperial relationship with those polities. It was not, however, imperialist vis-a-vis these polities (in any formal sense) because it did not seek permanent empire.

Now, we can have a very interesting argument about whether this is a function of the “exceptional” character of the United States (an avowedly anti-imperialist polity) or simply a fact of adaptive response. Some people who argue the latter point out that the US: (i) didn’t need to establish formal imperial control over Western Europe because it wasn’t that worried about defection from the US security architecture, (ii) the the US simply realized before a lot of other polities did that imperial control wasn’t worth the candle in its formal empire-nationalism, the Cold War, and other factors made it too “costly”, and (iii) that the US domestic political arrangement and distribution of interest groups made abandonment of formal empire more politically expedient than it was in states such as Belgium and the Netherlands. I suspect political culture was important, but not determinative.

Furthermore, this all bears on the question of US informal empire. Relations with Europe are a terrible place, as other posters have noted, to look for anything more than traces of imperial relations. Relations with Iraq and Afghanistan are another matter. Even though US aims aren’t easily described as imperialist (leftist argument aside), it is pretty hard to argue that the relationship as it currently stands doesn’t involve imperial elements. Somewhere inbetween we find relations with states such as Pakistan and those in Central America. I don’t have an answer to how to characterize those relationship (which might account for some of the difficulty I’ve had with the scholarly version of these arguments), but I think there’s at least an interesting debate to be had about these issues.

Anyway, I’ve gone on too long.

Dan Nexon,

Ok so we don’t really disagree all that much on the definition just on the application.

I just don’t see America’s westard expansion really resulting in empire at any point or time.

Mass displacement and ghettoization are different from empire.

As I noted for a brief period with the Phillipines I can see the definition fitting. But that is pretty narrow empire for a pretty small scope in time.

Slavery and empire are linked all through the historical record.
How nice for everyone that we’ve developed ways to implement the beneficial aspects of both while avoiding the strict definitions of either.
All-volunteer slavery – providing folks who would otherwise starve sub-subsistence employment that they’re free to reject anytime they want – isn’t slavery.
The imperium is as shadowy and indefinite in its way. All roads don’t lead to anywhere in particular – at least for now they don’t.

There are very few historical empires which would have allowed, nay HELPED, Japan and Germany become economic superpowers after defeating them in battle. We know for a fact that the USSR was not such an empire. We know that the British and French did not do so for Germany after World War I. The experience of South Korea (not a colony, not part of the borders of the United States, quite successful by any local comparison) suggests that the North Koreans would have been noticeably better off if we had won in that war.

We helped Western Europe & Japan/Korea/Taiwan because we thought we needed all the help we could get to contain COMMUNISM, if you look at the way we have behaved when communist containment (Latin America, Philipines, Indonesia, Iran, etc…) was not a priority, you will notice that we have not behaved any differently than any other imperial power.

What I do not understand is what this has to do with anything, or why it was felt that this was a point worth raising.

As Vietnam showed, the US could ultimately accept defeat in Iraq, and just leave, no matter what kind of situation it would leave behind (multi-million casualty civil war, mass-murdering dictator, whatever: ‘far away country of which we know nothing’). Everyone would just collectively turn off the TV every time a news report came up, which means pretty soon mainstream news reports would all but dry up.

Pretty massive economic impact, of the type that kills millions of africans, but the US is rich and could ultimately shrug off the impact by changes at the level of driving smaller cars and hiring fewer lawyers.

If Iraq was where Mexico is, that would not be an option – it would pose an existential threat to the US, a fight it would simply have to win, whatever the cost. With an unpolicable border, bombs would be going off by the dozen in midwestern states, there would be no shortage of volunteers, and few scruples of tactics.

The only existing example of the occupation of an entirely unconsenting populace by a democracy is that of Israel and Palestine, and that is unimaginable if the countries did not share a border.

soru

This, “If Iraq was where Mexico is, that would not be an option – it would pose an existential threat to the US, a fight it would simply have to win, whatever the cost.” and other such statements belie the reality.
If Iraq was where Mexico is, Iraqis would have a huge population in California, many of their relative who became US citizen could be found holding elected offices, such as the mayor of Los Angeles, and the flow of Iraqis across the border would go unimpeded (except for a feeble effort to close the borders). For again, America is an idea, not a tribe or race. You might even say that the landmass of America is the conquerored land of all the foreign imperialist, in other words, conquerored by the peoples of every country on earth. Even the Native Americans can trace their ancestors to Asia, making them the vanguard of the landmass of Americas conquest.

“Incidentally, Iraq is now, so we are told, a democracy, and yet there are no signs of a UK or US withdrawal yet….(nor in Afghanistan either)…strange, don’t you think?”

Do you think Germany is a democracy?

Milken (#162)

Don’t know enough about the actual history, so I’ll just do what everyone else does and side with Thucydides :-). Imperialist and empire.

1) Some of the colonies.
2) The transformation of the Delian League.

Change the timeframe and your mileage will vary on both issues.

Abb1, your last paragraph is inane. I agreed with you completely until you suddenly defined hosting foreign bases as the equivalent of being an imperial satrapy. Not as an indicator, not as a contributing factor, but the actual definition of being an imperial satrapy. That is entirely inane.

The “you can’t be serious” part didn’t help.

So, yes, Abb1, I am serious. A useful definition of empire is: “(1) heterogeneous subordinate political communities, (2) rule through intermediaries who enjoy significant-but not unlimited-lattitude over rule-making and enforcement within a subordinate political community, and (3) a core-periphery structure characterized by limited political ties between peripheries.”

Sometimes the presence of military forces indicates an imperial relationship; sometimes it just indicates an alliance. As in the case of Germany and the United States. Of course, if you can convince me that the U.S. restricts German foreign and domestic policies, and that the threat of using the military forces stationed in Germany provides the force behind those restrictions, then I’ll say that you’ve indeed found a case where bases indicate empire. On the other hand, if you have no evidence that such is the case, then I’ll have to conclude that you’re not being serious.

On the other hand, if this is the extent of the exercise of “indirect rule” than we aren’t looking at much of an empire.

How is this the extent? The Soviet military stationed in Eastern Europe had to actually come out and kill some Hungarians and Czechs only a couple times in 45 years. 99.9% of the time having military there was enough to keep the locals in check. So, why should we assume that the purpose of the basing agreements is just to have basing agreements? That’s not logical. The purpose is to subjugate, to maintain hegemony, to project power. Is it not obvious?

abb1: I think the question you pose is important, but that it can’t be resolved simply by saying “there’s a base, there’s an empire.”

Reread my initial post (#155) or take a look at my extended version on my group blog. Informal empires operate in a kind of gray zone between hegemony and formal empire. Influence isn’t sufficient for informal empire, but will lead to results in countries that would be different in the absence of such influence. Indirect rule – which does take us into the domain of informal empire – also produces changes in a periphery from its “natural course” (if there is such a thing).

We know, I think, that Soviet control over Eastern Europe was imperial because we have evidence from “off the path” behavior. When the Hungarians or Czechs deviated too much, they got punished with overwhelming coercive force. When Gorbachev decided to abandon the regimes, they fell apart. We can infer from such events decent answers to the counterfactual questions raised by the question “hegemony or informal empire”?

I agree, moreover, that the US once did exert imperial control over Japan (I illustrated this point on my blog post with the first page of the US policy of occupation), but I’m very skeptical of claiming that such a relationship exists now. I guess we’d have our best evidence if the Japanese tried to do something that ran totally against the “bargain,” and the US reacted with some sort of very costly stick. The problem, though, as I think you isolate well, is that an informal empire that ran very well would (1) generate consent from the governed and (2) involve far more subtle uses of power. So I default back to the need for careful analysis using a variety of different metrics.

One thing I will add, however, is that there’s an implicit issue here: does it matter whether the US is more like an informal empire or a hegemon vis-a-vis a particular lesser power? Very little of the existing literature convinces me that it makes any difference for questions of grand strategy or policy, although I’ve been trying to argue that there is a great deal at stake in my own work. In this respect, what matters is what dynamics we think flow from the distinction, and whether those dynamics help us to understand contemporary politics.

Seems that ‘interdependence’ has been left out of the equation. What was absent in the former USSR, PRC, and all others that repute ‘Western style’ modernity, was interdependence of the corporate world. Between 1995 and 2005 over 8,000 U.S. companies were sold to foreign owners for $1.3 trillion USD. When the UK owns Amoco, when Germany owns Chrysler, when France owns Mack Trucks, when Japan owns Firestone, and perhaps most importantly of all, when the UK owns Miller Brewing …
… and with immigration levels now at about the same levels as when some of our grandparents or great-grandparents arrived (1901-1910), the U.S. is now so intermixed, interdependent, and interlocked, that we need to come up with new terms to describe this new elephant composed of all the tribes on earth that is now occupying each of our living spaces.

May I just make one point that struck me immediately and that no-one seems to have made? If China and Russia were and are “empires” this does not show that America (or, the US) is one, because contrary to Chris Bertram’s point their historical “expansions” are quite different. The Chinese expanded their rule, so that now they rule over many different minorities, eg the Uighars in the northwest, Mongolians in the north, Tibetans and about 50 other less well-known ones. Note: the Han Chinese expanded their rule, but they did not displace these peoples and drive them out of their homelands, let alone to extinction or near-extinction. The Tibetans and the rest still, by and large, live where they have always lived, but they are ruled over by the Han Chinese (although of course the minorities have the same political rights as Han people so it is not like ancient Rome either). In the US (and to a lesser extent south America) the situation is quite different: here the ruling people of European extraction came as settlers and drove out the indigenous peoples. Now, the latter process may be worse or more culpable than what the Chinese (or the Russians) did, or it may not, but it is not the same. If China, in other words, is an empire, this does not show that the US is one too – though if it is not, it may be something worse than an empire. Likewise Australia. Today, to a considerable extent it would be possible for Russia to renounce what remains of its empire and for the peoples it rules – Chechnians etc – to rule themselves independently. To a lesser extent this might be conceivable for China. But it is not conceivable that America could withdraw in the same way and leave the Cherokee, Apache and all the other tribes to rule themselves in their ancient territories once again. For a start, this would entail the white Americans all departing and returning back to Europe – not to mention the black ones to Africa and so on; even then it is utterly inconceivable the old native cultures could be reformed as they or where they were.
So Chris Bertram’s point, or case, was, I submit, based on a false analogy.