The Imperial Fallacy

from The American Prospect:



The Imperial Fallacy

Is the United States an empire, a hegemon, or what? And whatever happened to the idea of the U.S. as an exemplary liberal democracy?

Michael Lind | October 10, 2007



Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- and Why They Fall by Amy Chua (Doubleday, 432 pages, $27.95)
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors by Charles S. Maier (Harvard University Press, 373 pages, $27.95)


The age of imperialism is ended," Sumner Welles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's under secretary of state, declared in 1942. Welles would have been shocked to learn that six decades later a number of American foreign policy thinkers would matter-of-factly describe the United States as an empire. "The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days," Thomas Donnelly, a neoconservative foreign policy analyst, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2002. Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department asked selected historians what lessons Americans could learn from empires of the past. Marxists, to be sure, had always described the United States as an empire, and for generations conservative isolationists have complained that the American republic gave way to an empire with the Spanish-American War, or the world wars, or the Cold War. The America-as-empire theme has now been taken up by two eminent scholars who do not belong to the neocon, radical, or isolationist traditions. But the popularity of an idea does not necessarily indicate that it is well-conceived.

In Day of Empire, Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, writes that her book is a response to Samuel Huntington's claim in Who Are We? (2004) that immigration is weakening American society by dividing it between Spanish and English speakers. On the contrary, Chua asserts, diversity is strength: "For all their enormous differences, every single world hyperpower in history -- every society that could even arguably be described as having achieved global hegemony -- was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case, tolerance was indispensable to the achievement of hegemony."

Chua's first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002), is a brilliant and provocative study of economic conflicts between ethnic majorities and minorities. But her attempt in her second book to build a monocausal ethnic-diversitarian theory of how to succeed in world politics is flawed in its conception.

Chua lumps societies as different as the 21st-century United States, the 17th-century Dutch Republic, and the Persian, Roman, Chinese, Mongol, Mughal, Spanish, and Ottoman empires together in the elastic category of "hyperpowers." This broad definition elides key distinctions. Great powers in a system of multiple states are fundamentally different from universal empires whose boundaries are those of a civilization. Militaristic continental land powers also need to be distinguished from countries such as the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States that achieve financial and commercial hegemony and maritime supremacy without militarily dominating other great powers. The United States today has the world's primary reserve currency and what the political scientist Barry Posen calls military "command of the global commons" of sea, air, and space, but it lacks the power to dictate policies to France, Germany, or Japan, much less China, Russia, or India. In the same way, British and Dutch naval mastery and financial supremacy never translated into British or Dutch military hegemony in the European state system.

Besides blurring these critically important distinctions, Chua conflates two radically different conceptions of tolerance. "By tolerance, I don't mean political or cultural equality. Rather, as I will use the term, tolerance simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society -- even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons." By this standard, illiberal, autocratic empires that were indifferent to the religions and customs of the ethnic groups on which they preyed were as "tolerant" as modern liberal democracies that grant equal rights to citizens of different ancestries and beliefs. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_imperial_fallacy

Best way to describe us is in a state of turmoil and power struggle.

Nothing gets done except by accident or stealth.

Nobody's in charge (What, Me Worry?) and the armed forces are checking the Vice President in his warmongering.

If we have an Empire, it's slipping away like sand in the tide.

The People are battered, bewildered, and soon will be Mad as Hell.