Is the US running an empire?

[omarali50]

Professor Manan Ahmed (Pakistani-American, now at Heidelberg) has an article about lack of expertise in the American empire: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd....html#comments

The point about expertise or lack of it is interesting and worth discussing, but professor Manan (like most left-liberal academics) likes to use the term "empire" a lot...of course, some right-liberal academics use it too (Niall Ferguson?)..I wrote a comment about the usage of this term (you can see it at the above link) because I thought "empire" is not the best description of what the US does in the world today. Descriptions are maps of reality and are necessarily simplified and so on, but even as an oversimplified map, I thought this was not accurate. I dont think Obama wakes up every morning thinking about his far flung empire AS AN EMPIRE. But being a naive amateur, I am doing what I usually do in such circumstances, I am going to go ahead and ask: is "empire" a useful/good way to describe what the US does in the world?

[carl]

Omar:

I read a very interesting book called Empires of Trust that compared Republican Rome to the US. It argues that both are primarily interested in defense and both insure that by pushing the perimeter outward by acquiring and supporting allies. It also says a critical factor is the allies trust that power will be used responsibly so they don't mind being a part of the "empire". In the case of Republican Rome they minded so little some of them fought the Romans so they could be Roman.

Supposedly, this differs from empires of conquest, obviously, but also from empires of commerce which are established for trade rather than defense.

The perimeter of the "empire of trust" keeps getting pushed out because you can't have hostiles directly abutting the perimeter and that results in it always expanding. Imperial Rome had to consciously stop the process but in our case, the oceans may affect it.

Anyway, it was a very interesting book and I wonder if the concept might be of interest to you.

[Dayuhan]

This kind of question has to start with a definition...

empire

Pronunciation: /ˈɛmpʌɪə/
noun

1 an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state: [in names]: the Roman Empire

[mass noun] supreme political power over several countries when exercised by a single authority: he encouraged the Greeks in their dream of empire in Asia Minor

2 an extensive sphere of activity controlled by one person or group: the kitchen had once been the school dinner ladies' empire

a large commercial organization owned or controlled by one person or group: her business empire grew

OED. QED.

The operative terms: "ruled over", "supreme political power", "control".

Unless someone can tell us who America rules or controls, there is no empire. The term may be used as a rhetorical flourish, but there's little substance to it. The only way you can speak of an American Empire is to dilute the definition of the term "empire" to a point where it no longer means anything at all.

[5th_Req]

Dayuhan, I'd say the United States is an Economic Empire, and has always hd imperial desires in its mercantile pursuits.

The US dollar dominates world markets, and is the reserve currency of choice around the world. Even now.

That's just one obvious example of how the US has considerable control over world markets and international trade. Control enough that I'd call the US an Economic Empire, and without flourish, and without diminishing the term "empire."

[Dayuhan]

If the US is an economic empire, it's a bloody inefficient one. What kind of economic empire runs a gargantuan trade deficit every year? What's the point in an economic empire that loses money?

The omnipresence of the dollar doesn't increase American control, it diminishes it. Because foreign banks can and do lend dollars, often with minimal restrictions on the ratio of loans to deposits, they are effectively able to create dollars, which means the US no longer has even vestigial control over the number of dollars in circulation.

If the US "has considerable control over world markets and international trade", why hasn't the US been able to use that control to skew those markets in its favor? Again, look at that trade deficit. From a trade perspective the whole point of an empire is the ability to enforce favorable terms of trade. Obviously the US is a long way from doing that.

[ganulv]

If the US is an economic empire, it's a bloody inefficient one.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as an efficient empire in any case. They’ve managed to bring interesting things to our world, but often in terribly convoluted ways.

[Tukhachevskii]

This kind of question has to start with a definition...



OED. QED.

The operative terms: "ruled over", "supreme political power", "control".

Unless someone can tell us who America rules or controls, there is no empire. The term may be used as a rhetorical flourish, but there's little substance to it. The only way you can speak of an American Empire is to dilute the definition of the term "empire" to a point where it no longer means anything at all.

Empire is very much a flaccid / non-rigid designator (to use Kripke’s suggestive term) as it seems to possess different qualities or denote differing activities depending upon the purpose of the enunciator. This is a problem that socio-linguists call “field specific vocabulary”. Very often the sense and reference of a word or proper noun (&c) may diverge in actual usage (often called semantic slippage). Dictionary definitions (and I’ve said this before) don’t really help considering (quoting Wittgenstein) that usage defines meaning. Can you guess that I despise analytical philosophy / logical positivism That said I agree with Prof. Finley when he says ...

Historians, we are told on all sides, have signally failed to clarify the terms 'empire' and 'imperialism', though they employ them all the time. The man in the street, curiously enough, sees no great problem, and I shall argue that he is right. Much of the trouble in the professional literature stems from a elementary confusion between a definition and a typology. It would not be a useful definition of empire, for example, that excluded either the Athenian or the Persian empire because Athens was a democratic city-state or Persia an autocratic monarchy; whereas that distinction might be important in both a typology and an analysis.

Here, here. Historians and international relations theorists have pro-offered their own definitions. Alexander Moytl, in Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires offers this definition...

• I define empire as a hierarchically organized political system with a hub like structure—a rimless wheel—within which a core elite and state dominate peripheral elites and societies by serving as intermediaries for their significant interactions and by channelling resource flows from the periphery to the core and back to the periphery.
• Continuous empires are tightly massed and, in all likelihood, territorially contiguous; discontinuous empires are loosely arranged and often involve overseas territories.
• The core elite’s rule of the periphery may be formal, involving substantial meddling in the personnel and policies of the periphery, or informal, involving significantly less interference and control.
• Decay is the weakening of the core’s rule of the periphery.
• Decline is a reduction in the imperial state’s power in general and military capability in particular.
• Disassemblage entails the emergence of significant interperiphery relations and spells the end of empire as a peculiarly structured political system.
• Attrition is the progressive loss of bits and pieces of peripheral territories.
• Collapse is the rapid and comprehensive breakdown of the hub like imperial structure.
• Revival, or reimperialization, is the re-emergence of empire—that is to say, the reconstitution of a hub like structure between a former core and all or some of the former periphery. (p. 4-5)

Moytl’s “hub-like structure” is similar to the that discussed in “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate”.


Peter Turchin, in War and Peace and War, offers this...

An empire is a large, multiethnic territorial state with a complex power structure. The key variable is the size. When large enough, states invariably encompass ethnically diverse people; this makes them into multiethnic states. And given the difficulties of communication in pre-industrial times, large states had to come up with a variety of ad hoc ways to bind far-flung territories to the centre. One of the typical expedients was to incorporate smaller neighbours as self-contained units, imposing tribute on them and taking over their foreign relations, but otherwise leaving their internal functioning alone. Such a process of piecemeal accumulation usually leads to complicated chains of command and the coexistence of heterogeneous territories within one state.( p.3)

I think a working definition of empire would be command (which includes the fuzzier notion of influence) –itself derived from the ancient Greek notion of Hegemony- of one territorial polity over another whether formally or informally (often also called hegemony in some circles). This approach deployed by David Healy in his article ‘Imperialism’, in the Encyclopaedia of American Foreign Policy, Vol. 2, 2nd Ed which takes his analysis through the US’s formal imperial phase (i.e., continental expansion, the annexation of Texas, the Philippines, etc.) through to its modern informal stage (I highly recommend this to Dayuhan). However, Prof. Finley’s typology is also helpful ...

A crude typology of the various ways in which one state may exercise its power over others for its own benefit will be helpful at this point:
1) restriction of freedom of action in interstate relations;
2) political, administrative, or judicial interference in local affairs;
3) military and naval conscription;
4) the exaction of 'tribute' in some form, whether in the narrow sense of a regular lump sum or as a land tax or as transport tolls or in other ways;
5) confiscation of land, with or without subsequent emigration of settlers from the imperial state;
6) other forms of economic subordination or exploitation, ranging from control of the seas, trade embargoes, and 'Navigation Acts' to compulsory delivery of goods below the prevailing market price, and the like.

I stress the word 'may': inclusion in the 'empire' category does not depend on the presence of all these forms of exploitation together.

I think those with more time on their hands than I currently have can provide examples for the US for each of these (and, of course, for other countries!).


A different typological definition would be that of archaeologists Michael E. Smith and Lisa Montiel (cf. JPEG below). Jan Nederveen Pieterse seems to be using a number of these when discussing U.S. “Neoliberal Empire” ;

‘Universalistic empires, in their dominant political culture and/or political practice, do not recognize other polities as legitimate equals.’ This is in other words ‘empire without end’ (as Virgil described the Roman Empire). Neoliberal globalization was universalistic as an economic regime (free markets are the sole effective system); the war on terrorism is universalistic in giving the United States the exclusive and combined roles of prosecutor, judge and executioner. Major previous empires claimed legal status. That the Roman and British Empires brought the rule of law was the basis of their claim to constitute a ‘Pax’. Neoliberal globalization was rules-based, but the new empire is founded on the rule of power, not the rule of law. The United States doesn’t endorse the International Criminal Court, claims exemption from its mandate for American nationals and uses this in negotiating trade and aid. The US exists in a state of ‘international legal nihilism’ with a steadily growing record of breaches of international law. These features are encoded in the Bush Doctrine: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’; and the threat of preventive strike, including nuclear strike. The former sets the terms for universalism and the latter places the United States outside international law (p.121).

[cont. below]

[Tukhachevskii]

It would appear from a book review in Orbis that various authors also see the US as an empire but with varying accents on “empire” as a concept. However, I feel only a dictionary definition, for all its non-rigidness (an oxymoron I know given the purpose of dictionaries) will suffice for Duyahan. As such, I see your definition and raise you this, with the aid of my magnifying glass, from The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1, A-O (I knew it would come in handy some day);

Empire:

Owing partly to historical circumstances, and partly to the sense of the etymological connexion between the two words, empire has always had the specific sense ‘rule or territory of an Emperor’ [which see Finley’s comments above-T] as well as the wider meaning which it derives from its etymology.
I. Imperial Rule or dignity.
1. Supreme and extensive political dominion; esp. that exercised by an ‘emperor’ (in the earlier senses), or by a sovereign state over its dependencies.
2. transf. and fig. Paramount influence, absolute sway, supreme command or control [NATO anyone?! I would have included S. Korea but C&C reverts to them soon!- T]
3. The dignity or position of an emperor also the reign of an emperor.
4. A government in which the sovereign has the title of emperor.

II That which is subject to imperial rule.
5. An extensive territory (esp. an aggregate of many separate states) under the sway of an emperor or supreme ruler; also, an aggregate of subject territories ruled over by a sovereign state.
6. transf. and fig. (cf. realm).
7. A country of which the sovereign owes no allegiance to any foreign superior.

III. 8. attrib. and Comp., as empire-plan, -race, etc.; (in matters of dress, of the first Napoleonic empire) Empire City, State; in U.S. a name for the City and State of New York.
(p.854)

So much for clarification.

[ganulv]

Dictionary definitions (and I’ve said this before) don’t really help considering (quoting Wittgenstein) that usage defines meaning.

Lexicography has come a long way since Herr Wittgenstein’s time. Any contemporary dictionary worth consulting has utilized corpora in the process of article creation.

Very often the sense and reference of a word or proper noun (&c) may diverge in actual usage (often called semantic slippage).

I’m guessing that anyone who has spent any amount of time in the military could probably act as an expert witness in spotting this phenomenon.

A different typological definition would be that of archaeologists Michael E. Smith and Lisa Montiel (cf. JPEG below).

Professor Smith’s work is interesting enough, but IMHO he’s still trying to formulate typologies and explain the real world by hammering facts into them. My own take is that trying to explain complexity is bogged down by the formulation, justification, and reformulation of typologies. A 1:1 map of the world doesn’t do a bit of good, either, of course…

[Dayuhan]

This is getting into a generic discussion of US foreign policy, and drifting away from the initial question of whether or not the US is an empire. Going back a ways (I've been busy)...

Empire is very much a flaccid / non-rigid designator (to use Kripke’s suggestive term) as it seems to possess different qualities or denote differing activities depending upon the purpose of the enunciator.

If a term means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, it means nothing at all. We might as well ask whether the US is a zucchini.

However, I feel only a dictionary definition, for all its non-rigidness (an oxymoron I know given the purpose of dictionaries) will suffice for Duyahan.

I don't necessarily need a dictionary definition, but a discussion of whether or not the US (or anyone) is an empire has to be built around some consensus over what an empire is, or there's nothing to talk about.

I realize that, as Omar points out, in much of the world the idea of an American Empire is simply taken for granted. That perception seems less around any clear idea of what an empire is than around a vague notion of size and power that controls all.

There is a curious human attraction to the idea of what might be called "malevolent design"... the idea that all that happens is planned by some omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force intent on advancing its own designs. For much or the world the "US Empire", usually through some combination of the CIA, the military, The Oil Companies, etc, or all of them working in concert, fills this role. For Americans it's more likely to be The Bankers, or the Global Financial Elite.

Of course none of these theories hold up to serious scrutiny, but it doesn't matter: people believe them anyway. Somehow the belief is more comforting that a chaotic, undesigned and generally blundering reality.

It might approach accuracy to say that while the US is not an empire by any accepted or reasonably arguable definition of empire, the perception of imperial presence and design is widespread and does affect people's decisions and actions, and therefore must be taken into account. Since that perception will prevail no matter what the US says or does, there's little point in trying to reverse it, but its impact on reactions and decisions must be taken into account in planning.