Download US foreign policy, intersectional totality and the structure of empire

Third World Quarterly, 2014
Vol. 35, No. 9, 1566–1581, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.970865
US foreign policy, intersectional
totality and the structure of empire
John Munro*
Department of History, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada
Debates about US empire have subsided somewhat in the aftermath
of the George W Bush presidency but the issues underlying such
debates have not gone away. In arguing that the history of the United
States is an imperial one, this article proposes that US empire is the
expression of an intersectional totality, one shaped by various vectors
of power but reducible to none. To make this case, the article
presents a sketch of US imperial history in order to show how this
intersectional totality has evolved over time. Such an exercise can
give useful context to the foreign policy initiatives of the Barack
Obama administration, one that differs from that of its immediate
predecessor but is not outside the structure of imperial history’s
longer duration.
Keywords: US empire; intersectional totality; historical contextualisation
During the presidency of George W Bush, one could hardly turn around in a
book store without seeing another new book about the United States with the
word ‘Empire’ in the title. Given the aggressive unilateralism of that administration, particularly the Bush Doctrine of preventative war, this effusion of scholarly and popular analyses of US imperialism was understandable, as was its
abatement with the election of Barack Obama. The current president’s differences from his predecessor in style, self-presentation and themes of emphasis
have undoubtedly led to the relative decline of imperial motifs in commentary
about his administration. And, of course, under Obama, US ground troops have
departed (at least for now) from Iraq, the invasion of which in 2003 did so
much to intensify the US empire discussion during the first decade of the
twenty-first century.
These changed circumstances have not put an end to the empire debate, with
some observers continuing to argue that the United States is unexceptional in its
imperialism, others contending that the US is an empire but decidedly in decline,
still others lamenting that the Obama administration is not imperial enough, and
some continuing to deny that the country is an empire at all.1 Much of this conversation remains focused on US foreign policy, and for good reason: presidential
administrations, and the differences between them, matter. But in arguing that the
*Email: [email protected]
© 2014 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
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United States is an empire, and that it is as important as ever to come to terms with
this reality, I will not focus exclusively on policy here, for two reasons. The first is
that we already have some excellent current scholarship that does just this.2 The
second is that, in attempting to describe US empire as more a system than a set of
policies, I want to follow the lead of sociologist James Parisot in attempting to
‘theorize empire as a social totality’.3 Instead of adopting Parisot’s helpful move
of embedding US empire in the totality of global capitalism, however, I aim to
present US empire as an expression of an intersectional totality.4 Economic relations are important, but not determinative, in coming to terms with our object of
study, which I hope to make clear by way of an historical overview. Although I
can only sketch out the course of US empire in the roughest outline here, my broad
brush approach is meant to give historical heft to a theoretical position and to convey a sense that continuing to think of US history in imperial terms enables us to
see how the present arrives already fundamentally shaped by past economic disparity, racial inequality, hetero-patriarchal oppression and a deep interrelation
between the realms of foreign and domestic.
What and when
US empire lacks one essential or even primary cause, operating at material and
ideological levels in ways that condition one another. It is a structure of power
that stretches beyond homeland territory to dominate other societies and
accumulate unevenly distributed benefits along intersecting axes of inequality.
Historically it developed from European imperialism, then gradually emerged
triumphant from the clash of empires in the Americas and has entailed the
development of capitalism, racism and hetero-patriarchy. It is a category of
analysis indispensible to understanding, and perhaps reconfiguring, the present
conjuncture.
The periodisation of US empire is an open question, and a political one. Cold
War timelines, while not incorrect in drawing our attention to already well known
projections of US imperial power since 1945, fail to take in the deep-rootedness of
the phenomenon in question. The decade surrounding the turn of the 20th century
is another reasonable starting point, given the significance of the overthrow of
Reconstruction, the closing of the frontier, the accelerated development of US capitalism, the Open Door Notes regarding China, and of course the acquisition of
Hawai’i, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and the Panama Canal. But
this set of events had as its prerequisite the annexation of the northern half of
Mexico and the imperial practices of subjugating Indigenous polities and importing enslaved labour. These last two processes also indicate that 1776 left unbroken
a continuity with the policies of the European powers in North America. Such policies were themselves the product of European and Mediterranean encounters
between peoples, although it was only with the onset of the Atlantic system that
the coalescence of the plantation complex and the power of Europe’s divisive
taxonomies were given systematic expression.5
Before 1898
Since it marked the completion of Castile and Aragon’s conquest of Spain, and
began Spain’s invasion of the Americas, 1492 is a key date in the founding of
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what would become US imperialism. The first transatlantic voyage of the Niña,
Pinta, and Santa María was itself possible because a cluster of northern Italian
city-states had been leading a Mediterranean cycle of capital accumulation since
the early 15th century.6 Furthermore, 1492 had been preceded by feudal expansion within Europe, the emergence of a European bourgeoisie, defensive and
offensive European wars against Islam throughout the Mediterranean world, early
English attempts at colonisation in Ireland and Portuguese expansion into the
African continent. Non-Europeans were of course co-creators in the new social
relations produced through these encounters, but in European accounts their contributions were often effaced. The world that Columbus brought to the Americas,
then, cast a long shadow on subsequent events in the western hemisphere.7
Spain’s empire, and to a lesser but still important extent that of Portugal, established material and epistemological precedents that have shaped American history
since the end of the 15th century.8 The invasion of the Americas ushered in a tremendous transformation in the global system, in which modernity and coloniality
were melded in a Eurocentric crucible to create an intellectual matrix that subjugated knowledges not internal to its linear world-view.9 The Iberian precedent for
North Atlantic imperialism was not, however, only ideational. Columbus himself
brought sugar cane to the Americas on his second voyage in 1493, and the Spanish
empire established sugar plantations with enslaved African labour, thus providing
a model for what would come later and further north.10 In terms of Spanish imperial ideology, all that was air crystallised into solid practice on American soil in
ways that mutually constituted, rather than determined, one another. American colonies were not spaces of exception, but products of a European drive to engage in
an expansion of power.
At their rosy dawn, the Spanish and Portuguese empires took in tremendous
wealth from Africa and America, but their days of primitively accumulated
enrichment were numbered by the rise of northern Europe – especially England
with its naval superiority and, in time, incipient industrialisation.11 English
ascendancy within the Atlantic world had important consequences. First of all,
the English arrived with their own ideologies of property, gender and race.
Second, their expanding capabilities in combat, technology and trade drew the
Atlantic network more tightly together. Third, they established themselves on
the North American landmass, thereby establishing a considerable territory upon
which to construct their old world system on what to them was new soil.
Colonisation in what became the United States was not indistinguishable
from elsewhere – Roanoke was not Cuzco, Plymouth wasn’t Cape Town – but
it was unexceptional. In the early 17th century, Jamestown, much like contemporaneous Spanish settlements at St Augustine and Santa Fe, or the Dutch outpost of New Amsterdam, represented an uncertain quest for permanent survival
in unfamiliar, already occupied territory. As such, early European colonies were
connected through oceanic expanse to places like Kongo , the Canary Islands,
Southampton, Cartagena and São Salvador, each located within spaces of nascent nation-state formation.12 As they became more established, the English
wrought great ecological transformations in the landscape, fixing lines of private
property, expanding a colonial commons and destroying the fields and hunting
areas of their original human occupants.13 Furthermore, colonisation in North
America involved a rhetorical feminisation of the land which intertwined the
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domination of men over women with that of Europeans over Indigenous peoples. Ubiquitous references to ‘virgin’ land were central to this ideological construction, one that racialised domestic space as it domesticated colonial territory.
By naturalising patriarchy where matrilineal social organisation had often been
the norm, European invaders gave theoretical cover to the sexual violence that
attended imperialism from the 17th century into the twenty-first.14
Beginning in 1619, the ownership of human beings within what would
become the United States was one of the ultimate expressions of how property
rights in Virginia and its colonial counterparts were embedded in racial domination. Slavery was instrumental to the historical construction of white racial identity, not only by welding the rewards of white supremacy to the rights of private
ownership, but also by offering intangible comfort, however empty, to all who
could avail themselves of whiteness’s ‘public and psychological wage’.15 Like
imperialism itself, the slave trade operated at an irreducibly ideological level for
all whose lives were touched by the practice. In the British case the English language itself was already replete with negative metaphors attached to blackness
in the abstract before Atlantic slavery’s aggrandisement in the 17th century, but
this economic acceleration also required a new regime of racial representation,
especially in light of the ways that the magnification of slave economies was
accompanied by escalated resistance. The result was an intensified pro-slavery
discourse that propagated delusions of Black sub-humanity.16
Upon such foundations the ideological house that race built found secure
American footing, albeit with some transatlantic renovations. After independence, theological conjecture regarding polygenesis and Anglo-Saxon providential claims to the continent joined ideas about craniometry, and later intelligence
and human improvability, to justify ongoing white privilege and Black deprivation.17 In addition to religion and science, in a country where ‘Black slavery
enriched the country’s creative possibilities’, African American bondage provided the context for literary meditations on white freedom, themselves bound
up in racialised themes of national reproduction.18 Not only justifying the material reality of slavery’s dehumanising exploitation, both of physical energy and
skilled know-how, ideas were essential to its continuation.19
Material conditions were nonetheless of consequence to this cornerstone of
the Atlantic imperial system. Slavery in the Thirteen Colonies and United States
was obstructed by resistance actualised through culture, leisure, organised rebellion, music, strikes, escape, speeches, publications and ultimately the Union
army. But since racial slavery had become so integral to the profitable production of commodities like tobacco, rice and cotton, societies with slaves receded
as the aristocracies in slave societies reasserted their authority, the promises of
the Declaration of Independence and the Haitian Revolution notwithstanding.20
The peculiar institution also provided the ballast for finance capital, in turn propelling transatlantic commodity circulation, enriching merchants and financiers,
and giving rise to a logic of economic equivalence that counted human property
on balance sheets as one might rum or sugar. The calculated massacre of 132
enslaved people aboard the Zong in 1781, and the ensuing insurance claims that
chillingly tallied the monetary value of this lost ‘cargo’ to its Liverpudlian
owners, was in its extremity emblematic of the more quotidian ways in which
slavery merged notions of European superiority with colonial capitalism.21
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Slavery and empire were also intertwined as spatial phenomena. In the Mississippi Delta the plantation was only able to form a pillar of capitalism after
the combined colonialism of Spain, France and England separated many Indigenous peoples from their land and ensnared them in the chattel slave trade that
spanned the South. This displacement was achieved through a process of continuous warfare that commenced with Hernan de Soto’s crusade from Florida to
the Delta between 1539 and 1541; it was mostly completed with the removal of
Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Cherokee and Choctaw nations in the 1820s
and 1830s.22 After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded half of Mexico’s
land base to the United States in 1848, the conquering nation faced a question
to which only civil war would provide a definitive response: whether capitalism
with or without racial slavery would be the means of organising the newly
acquired territory. The Thirteen Colonies and United States were thus aspects of
a continuous, if uneven, process that expanded Europe’s racial projects, in which
African Americans and Indigenous peoples played essential roles.
As for most African Americans, so for many Indigenous peoples: US independence from England generally heralded bad news, and the years following
1776 saw consolidation, rather than curtailment, of the colonial structure.23 The
nearly two centuries between English invasion and US independence comprised
a long period in which imperial competition left considerable room for Indigenous influence when all sides sought accommodation, but it was also a time of
epidemics and ongoing violence that escalated into full-scale war that pitted settlers and their allies against, for example, the Pequot nation in 1636–37, the
Algonquin coalition led by Metacom in 1675–76, or much of the Iroquois Confederacy in 1777–81.24 Despite the spiritually motivated and relatively unified
Aboriginal struggle against colonialism from Florida to the Great Lakes between
the mid-18th century and the conclusion of the War of 1812, it was US imperialism that triumphed in the clash of empires, thus establishing a regime of land privatisation that made even the British appear relatively respectful of cultural and
collective rights.25 After independence, conquest continued, as did profit accumulation and the hardening of racial lines. The western part of the continent was the
meeting ground for miners, Mormons and many besides, but it was also a space
in which white racial formation was bolstered through attempts to subjugate people of colour.26 On the Plains and in the Southwest, empire was a way of life
long before the arrival of the US Anglos. By the time the United States annexed
Mexico’s northern half, Spanish colonial and Pueblo, Ute, Paiute and Shoshone
communities had interacted for centuries, as had customs of honour, violence,
slavery and kinship that reproduced themselves in the Great Basin and southwest
borderlands until these regions were finally incorporated into capitalist social
relations after the US Civil War.27 On the Plains horses brought from Spain
enabled the emergence of colonial structures among Comanche and Kiowa societies, whose raiding hinterland in Northern Mexico inadvertently facilitated the
region’s appropriation by the United States.28 In ways comparable to events
further east, US empire emerged victorious from inter-imperial confrontation.
Towards the 20th century
National expansion entailed spatial reorganisation from Indigenous sovereignty
towards genocide and capital accumulation, but it was also more than that.
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Teleological narratives that draw a line of westward movement across the continent – however thematically divergent from Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous
1893 claim that ‘the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession,
and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development’ – can reify the sometimes arbitrary border between empire within and
beyond the nation.29 As we have seen, imperial space was organised to meet the
exigencies of empire within national boundaries and without as the Thirteen
Colonies became the United States. The realms of economics, culture, race and
gender remained similarly intertwined during the decades between Civil War and
World War, when the United States shifted from being one of European imperialism’s derivatives to becoming its principal competitor.
During this period the relationship between capital and the state changed
dramatically. Industrialisation and 19th-century laissez faire policies sought to
disembed the market from social relationships; such a project buckled under its
own contradictions of overproduction, under-consumption and the opposition of
workers and the unemployed. Capitalists needed a solution to this crisis. They
found it in a transformed liberalism which accorded greater organisational power
to both the modern corporation and the state. As it passed from the competitiveness of its 19th-century proprietary form towards administration by corporation,
capitalism and the social, political and legal relationships which constituted it
were reinforced, if changed.30 The result was market expansion and the rise of
investment imperialism, which sought to quell class resentment and provide a
spatial fix by siphoning ‘surplus’ workers, capital and goods to areas reorganised to demand the products of US manufacture while supplying raw materials.
Once again, economics were not, in the last or any other instance, entirely
determinative of events. Capitalist crises and transformations encouraged US
imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific around the turn of the 20th century,
but so did culture. The obligatory forgetting necessary to create a unified
national memory about the Civil War was integral to solidifying the white
nationalism so helpful for extending US power through war against Spain and
the independence movements of its last colonies. After the North abandoned
Reconstruction and Southern ‘democracy died save in the hearts of black folk’,
whites reconciled across the Mason-Dixon Line by expunging emancipationist
remembrances of the war between the states.31 Such selective commemoration
paved the way for the culture associated with Southern white supremacy to
become national at the end of the 19th century. From the heights of foreign policy-making circles to editorial cartoons, from popular novels to the bench of the
Supreme Court, and from the museum to the moving picture theatre, the ubiquity of this racist culture made its regional appellation a little misleading.32 New
technologies of culture and capital, film prominent among them, showcased the
early 20th-century attempt to substitute centuries of contested images of blackness with more uniformly – though not themselves unchallenged – derogatory
presentations that rationalised post-Reconstruction and imperial rule. The hard
work that this racial hegemonising entailed was required to meet investment
imperialism’s challengers, since McKinley-era projections of power led to US
encounters with specifically anti-colonial, anti-racist and anarchist global traditions already dangerously connected to left political currents within the United
States.33
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In this context, the late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw physical barriers to immigration raised. National racial gatekeeping was enshrined in official
policy with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which affected a diversity of
communities by trying to exclude and contain racial Others while re-inscribing
the nation’s identity as white.34 Often with the aid of modern medical discourses
of science, hygiene and public health, state authorities and culture industries limited the number of entrants into the United States from Asia and Latin America,
while rendering these communities within the US subject to surveillance and
control by associating them with contagion and disease.35 White identity was
nonetheless neither monolithic nor static. During this same period, eugenics
served to place Anglo-Saxon Protestants above other European immigrants and
their descendants, whose place in the racial order remained uncertain, while
whiteness also became more homogenised because the encounter with Indigenous populations in newly acquired overseas territories served to remake and
renew racial stratification on the domestic front.36
That protecting and arranging domestic space was so often directed by men,
even when carried out by women, again indicates that gender formation was
hardly incidental to US empire.37 In the elite circles of foreign policy makers
and influential pundits of the 1890s, racialised assumptions about proper social
roles for men and women made the war option against Spain and its colonies
popular. Military service, and the politicians who publically supported it, reinforced a manliness threatened by women’s reform movements and the lack of
large-scale war since the 1860s.38 White male concern about protecting womanhood eschewed substantive rights and stopped at lines of colour, class and
sexuality. Thus in ways not reducible to one particular vector of power, but
rather produced through the interlocking relationship between them, demarcations between domestic and foreign spheres of US empire were as blurred as the
hierarchies of their respective spaces were mutually constituted.
With the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, corporate liberalism and
notions of white superiority became personified in the head of state. Wilson
favoured the rise of the corporation, re-segregated federal government facilities,
screened Birth of a Nation at the White House, refused to condemn the racial
terrorism of East St. Louis’s 1917 race riot, and promoted a Eurocentric conception of self-determination as World War I came to an end.39 Wilson’s administration also launched the nearly two-decades long occupation of Haiti, through
which, as Glenda Gilmore explains, ‘the Southern Solution became US foreign
policy’.40 Wilson’s presidency was significant for two further reasons: it
installed a lasting internationalist vision of how the USA should relate to the
rest of the world, and it coincided with two of the paramount events in
20th-century anti-colonialism: the European destabilisation caused by World
War I, and the emergence of the Soviet Union.
The USSR may have unintentionally been the saviour of global capitalism by,
in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, ‘enabling the West to win the Second World
War against Hitler’s Germany and by providing the incentive for capitalism to
reform itself’.41 London and Washington had nonetheless recognised a clear and
present international danger to the imperial system, and taken corresponding
action in an attempt, as Winston Churchill put it, ‘to strangle the Bolshevik baby
in its cradle’.42 Under the changed circumstances of the Great Depression, the
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USSR was offered diplomatic recognition with Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration, and the Soviet Union’s alliance with the United States against fascism
enhanced Russia’s reputation after June 1941. Their common enemy defeated in
1945, the ideological and imperial contest between what was now the world’s
two superpowers only sharpened.
The Cold War clash of empires
As World War II ended, a new triangular and transnational relationship came into
being as the US empire of liberty faced off against the less powerful Soviet
empire of justice, and each had to contend with the growing, though less unified,
power of what came to be called the Third World.43 As the wartime alliance
unravelled, US policy makers and much of the public drew upon and magnified
their perception that communism imperilled a stable world order and the maintenance of capitalism and liberal freedom at home. In 1945 the Red Army dominated the European landscape from Moscow to Berlin, and had expanded its
reach in East Asia, where Soviet entry into combat played an even greater role
than US atomic bombs in bringing about Japan’s surrender.44 Possessed of the
world’s largest military establishment, the Soviet Union was able to keep its new
colonial satellites in Eastern Europe.45 But, in terms of the economic power
required to take on the United States, the USSR was fundamentally lacking: collectivisation-induced famine, waves of state terror and colossal wartime devastation were just some of the factors that skewed the Cold War starting-line between
the superpowers.46 The US and USSR were also qualitatively different in scalar
terms, and in ways favourable to the former. The Soviets controlled a continuous
imperial domain arrayed on one land base, while the proclivities and abilities of
the United States lent themselves to geopolitical arrangements of more global,
and ultimately outer-wordly, reach, featuring transnational economic ties, military
interventions, coups, bases and cultural influence that surpassed Soviet efforts.47
Even as the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev rediscovered an anti-colonial
heritage that had been shunned by Joseph Stalin, it did so from a position of
weakness that sought to take the struggle against the US to the far flung domains
over which it already enjoyed hegemony.48
The Soviets challenged the United States in ways no other single imperial or
national entity could, but US empire building continued apace after World War
II. Central to the ongoing project was sustaining and rebuilding international
capitalism, which after the ruination of war and the enhanced political legitimacy of the left in defeating fascism, was an undertaking that impelled US leaders to assume truly global ambitions. In Europe, US empire’s relative
informality lent itself to invitation, both from that continent’s Western elites and
through quotidian commercial transactions.49 Widely held fears of the Soviet
ambitions, the relatively benign form of investment imperialism in Europe and
at some level feelings of racial solidarity made the US presence in Europe less
severe than elsewhere. At the same time, US popular culture portrayals of
Asians as in need of Western tutelage and protection combined with fears of
postcolonial independence and communism to produce cultural, political and
violent integration into the US-led system.50 In the Middle East, the Arab
nationalist challenge embodied by Gamal Abdel Nasser led President
Eisenhower to commit US forces in an attempt to discourage neutralism and
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block Soviet inroads to the region, while within the United States a raft of cultural products buttressed notions of Christian superiority and the idea that such
riches as pharaonic treasures and petroleum were not really legitimate Arab
property.51 The relatively favourable reputation that the United States enjoyed at
the end of World War II, meanwhile, was steadily eroded by US partiality
regarding Israel and Palestine, the establishment of military bases and general
interference in Middle Eastern politics.52
For Latin Americans, US empire building during the Cold War reached
back at least to James Monroe’s casting rhetorical dominion over the entire
western hemisphere in 1823. But the economic and military might of the
United States brought its weight to bear on the region with renewed force after
World War II.53 Decades of US-supported violence in Guatemala, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations covert intervention in British Guiana and the Kennedy
administration’s promotion of military modernisation through the Alliance for
Progress programme in Bolivia were but three of many instances of postwar
US imperialism south of the Río Grande.54 In Africa, US foreign policy hinged
on the issue of timing. Keeping Europe at the centre of global geopolitical
strategy meant placating imperialist allies, yet US policy makers and the interests they represented wanted access to African labour and especially resources,
a goal achievable through the appeasement of cumbersome European colonialism. The resulting situation was one in which US representatives often counselled that African colonies delay independence in order to ensure that
communism would not take hold.55 To replace the European powers as continental hegemon while avoiding a situation where independence might lead to
genuine autonomy or allegiance to the USSR was a principal aim of Cold War
US empire building in Africa.
In this new scramble for the continent, the US, and Soviet, record was hardly
less benign than that of centuries of European underdevelopment. To be sure,
there were US liberals with access to power who took stands against South
African apartheid and some of the worst elements of European colonialism.
People like student leader Allard Lowenstein, NAACP executive secretary Walter
White, assistant secretary of state for African affairs G. Mennen Williams
(1961–65) and the committed though numerically negligible group of African
American diplomats within the US State Department tried to ameliorate the
harshest consequences of imperialism in Africa.56 But their ability to speak to
power while assenting to its compulsory anti-communist tenets afforded precious
little critical ideological space. This narrow spectrum of opinions governed US
Cold War interference in almost every nation on the continent. Cold War culture, and its naturalisation of intersecting inequalities, provided the modality in
which such policy making took shape.
Instances of imperial control featured their share of direct interventions; they
also saw the further innovation of informal empire as a means of commanding
dominance amid decolonisation. Active involvement of postcolonial elites was
integral to this process, as was the smooth passing of power from Britain to the
United States, whose growing experience with informal modes of imperial rule
positioned it favourably in terms of insuring that declining European power did
not turn to the advantage of the Soviets or the people of the former colonies.
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In keeping with Edward Said’s foundational argument about imperial hegemony’s realisation being premised on the furnishing of rulers with knowledge of
the ruled, Cold War US foreign policy adventures were supported, for the most
part indirectly, by a set of intellectual state apparatuses.57 Beyond CIA cultural
fronts and state psychological warfare programmes, one of the clearest links
between knowing and ruling during the Cold War and after has been that connecting modernisation theory to US foreign policy.58 More broadly, universities
during the Cold War produced libraries of scholarship that elevated AngloSaxon leadership, contrasted binary notions of tradition and modernity, and
offered teleological depictions of human progress from primitive to advanced
stages. While this assortment of ideas cannot be reduced to the exigencies of the
US policy-making strata or its partners in the global South, it did in part comprise an intellectually supportive environment in the United States for Cold War
empire building.59 After 1945, as had been the case before it, the intricate US
imperial system was daily reproduced through a complex web of race, gender,
culture, scholarship, policy, economics and the military. Nevertheless, there were
anti-colonial challengers, not only in the spaces of empire beyond the United
States, but also within domestic imperial territory.60
Triumphalism and tribulation
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the Cold War came to an end. A quartercentury on, what is perhaps most remarkable about the moment which marked
the shift to post-socialism with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to a so-called
post-racial form of postcolonialism with the demise of apartheid, is the durability of patterns of imperial rule.61 As the Cold War took its bow, the culture wars
moved to centre stage within the United States, alternatives to liberal capitalism
and authority-driven conservatism remained at bay, industrial jobs were evacuated from the traditional metropoles and economic exploitation intensified in the
old colonies. Put simply, in the wake of the Cold War episode, another wave of
imperialism roiled the globe, its power drawing upon those surges of conquest
and exclusion that had come before.62 ‘Globalisation’ became a ubiquitous
buzzword, although what it meant, as Frederic Jameson has pointed out, was
essentially a new and increasingly unstable round of post-Cold War US power.63
Perhaps Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran and long-time activist Moe Fishman
put it best when he stumbled over the word ‘globalisation’ during a protest
against the phenomenon. ‘It was so much easier to say when we called it
imperialism’, he reportedly remarked.64 So much for the end of history.
By the start of the new millennium it had become increasingly clear that,
although the global power of the United States and the power of global capital
had increased after the Cold War, the two were not quite the same thing. The
relative decline of US hegemony, combined with potent US nationalisms of long
standing, combined to bring about yet another new imperialism, albeit one challenged within the global system by rival aspirants, and from below by radical
democratic movements.65 As the contrast between George Bush I’s and George
Bush II’s wars against Iraq revealed, US empire building could prove unpopular,
even among transnational elites. The United States will nonetheless remain the
world’s pre-eminent imperial power for the foreseeable future. It will also continue to be shaped by its long imperial history, the totality of which comprises
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more than the decisions of its foreign policy establishment, and operates along
multiple and intersecting vectors of power. Such a historical contextualisation
helps us put the presidency of Barack Obama – its formal departure from Iraq,
planned pull-out from Afghanistan and announcements about multilateralism
and soft power notwithstanding – into clearer perspective.66
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jordan Camp, Sheyda Jahanbani, Nelson Lichtenstein, George Lipsitz, Alice
O’Connor, Cedric Robinson, Howard Winant and Antoni Wysocki for helpful suggestions on earlier versions
of this article. All errors are the author’s.
Notes on Contributor
John Munro is an assistant professor in the History Department, Saint Mary’s
University. His articles have appeared in the Canadian Review of American
Studies, Left History, Labour/Le Travail, and in Decolonization and the Cold
War: Negotiating Independence, edited by Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake.
Notes
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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27.
See, respectively, Go, Patterns of Empire; McCoy, “The Decline and Fall”; Kaplan, “In Defense of
Empire”; and Hoffman, American Umpire. The best overview of the literature on US empire is Kramer,
“Power and Connection.”
See, for example, Herring, From Colony to Superpower; and Immerman, Empire for Liberty. My
approach here is closer, and indebted, to Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy; and Roediger, How
Race Survived US History.
Parisot, “American Power,” 1159.
Some of the works that have most influenced my thinking here are Combahee River Collective, “A
Black Feminist Statement”; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”;
Collins, “The Social Construction”; and Chun et al., “Intersectionality.”
Winant, Racial Conditions, xiii; and Blackburn, “The Old World Background.”
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 109–126.
Robinson, Black Marxism, 10–99; and Sweet, “The Iberian Roots.”
Fernández-Armesto, The Americas; Elliott, Empires; and Gould, “Entangled Histories.”
Quijano, “Coloniality of Power”; and Mignolo, Local Histories.
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 32–33.
Karl Marx’s memorable description of primitive accumulation can be found in Volume I of Capital, esp.
915. See also the indispensible rethinking of Marx’s primitive accumulation in the context of North
American colonialism in Coulthard, “From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition?”
Kupperman, “International at the Creation.”
Cronon, Changes in the Land; and Greer, “Commons and Enclosure.”
Maracle, “Racism, Sexism, and Patriarchy”; McClintock, Imperial Leather; and Smith, Conquest.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700; and Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.
Robinson, Forgeries, 36.
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; and Baum, The Rise and Fall of
the Caucasian Race.
Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
Knight, Working the Diaspora.
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.
Woods, Development Arrested, 6, 41–45; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; and Hixson, American Settler
Colonialism, 36–44.
Horne, The Counter-revolution of 1776.
White, The Middle Ground; Jennings, The Invasion of America, 220–225; Richter, Facing East from
Indian Country, 90–105; and Taylor, The Divided Ground, 77–108.
Martin, Sacred Revolt; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance; and Hall, The American Empire.
Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; and Roediger, Colored White, 121–137.
Brooks, Captives and Cousins; and Blackhawk, Violence over the Land.
Third World Quarterly
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29.
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32.
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34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
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41.
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66.
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Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall.”
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier.”
Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction; and Furner, “Structure and Virtue.”
Quotation from Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 30. See also Blight, Race and Reunion.
Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 92–120; Hunt, Ideology, 46–91; and Robinson, Forgeries, 180–202.
Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Anderson, Under Three Flags; and Streeby, Radical Sensations.
Lee, At America’s Gates; and Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues.
Shah, Contagious Divides; and Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Kramer, The Blood of Government.
See, for example, Jacobs, White Mother.
Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood.
Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 419; Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 162–163; Robinson, Forgeries,
107–108, 118; James, Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 94–95, 42–43; and Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment, 19–34.
Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 25.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 84.
Quoted in Powaski, Toward an Entangling Alliance, 18.
Westad, The Global Cold War, 8–109; and Prashad, The Darker Nations, 3–15.
Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy.
Judt, Postwar, 117; and Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 363.
Judt, Postwar, 17–18; Scott, Seeing like a State, 193–222; Lewin, The Soviet Century, 106–125; and
Snyder, Bloodlands.
Maier, Among Empires, 156–157; and Duvall and Havercroft, “Taking Sovereignty out of this World.”
Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 540.
Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation?”; and de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.
Klein, Cold War Orientalism; Logevall, Embers of War; and Hunt and Levine, Arc of Empire, 120–250.
Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism; and McAlister, Epic Encounters.
Khalidi Resurrecting Empire, 34–35.
Rabe, The Killing Zone.
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; Rabe, US Intervention; and Field, “Ideology as Strategy.”
Gibbs, “Political Parties”; Kent, “United States Reactions”; and Thomas, “Innocent Abroad?”
Chafe, Never Stop Running; Anderson, “The Histories of African Americans”; Noer, Soapy; and Krenn,
Black Diplomacy.
Said, Orientalism.
Saunders, The Cultural Cold War; and Simpson, Science of Coercion.
Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity”; Mazrui, “From Social Darwinism”; Escobar, Encountering Development; Schiffrin, The Cold War; Latham, Modernization as Ideology; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future;
and Engerman, “Social Science in the Cold War.”
Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane; Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Young, Soul Power; and Seymour, American Insurgents.
Chari and Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts.”
Singh, “Culture/Wars”; Chomsky, “A View from Below”; Sivanandan, “New Circuits”; Wilson, ‘“Race’,
Gender and Neoliberalism”; and Prashad, The Poorer Nations.
Jameson, “Globalization and Global Strategy.” See also Amin, “Imperialism and Globalization.”
“Moe Fishman dies at 92.”
Harvey, The New Imperialism; Hopkins, “Capitalism”; Antoniades, “Recasting the Power Politics of
Debt”; and Conway and Singh, “Radical Democracy.”
Such historically minded contextualisations can aid, I hope, in the kinds of reflections on the relationship
between the United States and the world called for in Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.
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