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Imperial Cosmologies: the American Case
Dr. Philip S. Golub
We want the earth - not consciously as a formulated program, but
instinctively, with a desire that is too deep for consciousness, too constant
and too regular ever to be questioned or thought of. H.H. Powers, 1898i
In 1902, at the height of the Pax Britannica, Cecil Rhodes wrote: “Expansion is
everything… the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being
divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at
night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could”.
This statement of imperial hubris recently prompted the American studies scholar
Stephen Whitfield to remark that the “imperial self does not know how to stop, indeed
does not see the point of stopping in struggling to gratify its desires even at the expense
of others”. The remark was meant not so much as a judgment on the British or European
imperial experience but as a critical commentary on American imperial present since, as
Whitfield perceptively noted, “the attributes of the imperial self have… been more
pronounced in America [than in Europe]”. ii My aim in this paper is to systematise that
insight through a review of the ideational dimensions of American expansionism and a
reinterpretation of the United States’ role in the late modern inter-imperial system. By
excavating an imperial past that has never really passed, I intend to highlight continuities
over long periods that shed light on the present and help to explain some of the puzzles
of recent international history. My argument is that nearly continuous American
expansion in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was an integral part of the
general movement of late modern imperialism, and was founded on and nurtured by
representations of race, space and cultural hierarchy inherent to all the late-modern
imperial and colonial projects. Expansion, which is coterminous with domination, nurtured
and was nurtured by a set of deeply embedded assumptions about order and hierarchy
that naturalise constructed international inequality, for which I have coined the concept
of imperial cosmologies. Drawing on the work of post-colonial and other critical scholars,
in particular the concept of coloniality developed by Anibal Quijano, iii my approach
assumes that representations and material structures are inseparable, mutually
constituting parts of the complex systems of domination that constitute “modernity”. iv To
make my case, I proceed by situating the US as an integral part of the late modern EuroAtlantic imperial system, synthetically discussing the cycles of American expansion and
engaging the question of imperial cosmologies and coloniality. In conclusion, the paper
briefly addresses the implications of this discussion for the contemporary transition
towards a polycentric world political economy.
The US in the Euro-Atlantic System
The United States’ present position in the international system derives from two
successive cycles of expansion: a first cycle of continuous expansion the course of the
late eighteenth century and the nineteenth centuries, which combined continental and
international dimensions, and a second cycle of broad international expansion in the
latter part of the twentieth century. In the course of these two cycles, the United States
moved from being a relatively small but essential component of the late modern EuroAtlantic imperial system to being the centre of the western-dominated world political
economy. Both cycles should properly be analysed as an integral part of a single process
of global Western expansion in the modern and late modern era. Contra the mythologies
of liberal American historiography, which assert a liberal democratic American exception
in the history of modern imperial states, the British Mainland American colonies and the
early United States were a geographically eccentric but increasingly economically
important component of the single economic system, thoroughly studied by Joseph
Ikinori,v that came into being with the colonisation of the Americas and was founded on
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resource extraction and international commodity chains based on slavery. Prior to
Independence, the Mainland American colonies were a vital hub in the transnational
linkages of the “Atlantic World”, playing a decisive role in stimulating British economic
growth, consequently helping to usher in the industrial revolution and creating the
conditions of possibility of British imperial expansion. After Independence, constantly
rising British demand for colonial staples, cotton in particular, transformed the U.S. into
the dominant New World exporter of colonial goods, the Southern U.S. states becoming
the “leading edge of a dynamic, expansive slave regime incorporated politically into the
United States and firmly tied to the transatlantic system of commodity exchange”.vi
Deepening economic linkages generated a unified transatlantic economy, of which
Great Britain was the centre, which shaped the conditions of expansion of both Britain
and its mainland American settler colonies. Between the mid-seventeenth century and
the end of the eighteenth century, the annual value of exports from British America vii
grew explosively, multiplying by a factor of 46 (£421,000 to £19,545,000) and then
again by a factor of three over the next fifty years (£54,797,000, or 61 per cent of total
exports from the Americas in 1850). Transatlantic trade rose continuously “down to the
war of Independence, survived the creation of the United States and prospered
thereafter”viii despite temporary disruptions in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
The future United States’ share of total exports from the Americas thus rose from 0.02
per cent in 1650, to 22.2 per cent in 1800 to just over 56 per cent in the mid-nineteenth
century.ix Most of the increase from the early 1800s on was attributable to cotton, which
was the “pacemaker of industrial change” during the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
The cotton industry in Britain had the highest rate of growth of all early industries – six to
seven per cent per annum from 1815 to 1840 – and accounted after 1815 for 20 per cent
of total net imports and “something like one half of the value of all British exports”, or a
sixth of total output in 1800. In 1850, textiles accounted for over half of all British
exports in value terms. In short, Britain’s position at the centre of a worldwide system of
economic exchanges and its status as the world’s leading imperial power depended
singularly on slave labour in the American South. As Eric Hobsbawm writes: “The most
modern centre of production thus preserved and extended the most primitive form of
exploitation”. x
That most primitive exploitation was a determining factor in stimulating American
economic growth and stimulating territorial expansion. By the mid-nineteenth century,
the southern plantation economy accounted for over two-thirds of the total value of U.S.
exports.xi If international trade was not the sole determinant of early American economic
development, it is generally recognised that it played a vital role in stimulating growth
and “proved critical to the maintenance of national prosperity”.xii The cotton trade not
only promoted southern expansion but also capital accumulation in the northern states,
which served as the hubs of the United States’ international trade and were the centre of
the country’s own textile industry. Northern merchants were the intermediaries of
transatlantic commerce and built a significant proportion of the ships that carried the
trade. Financing came from both Britain and northern U.S. economic institutions: “A
major reason New York City emerged as America’s economic capital was its dominance of
the trade between Southern cotton growers and British manufacturers”.xiii As continental
expansion southwards and westwards proceeded, the cotton industry stimulated interregional specialisation in the national American economy. Early economic development
and aggressive U.S. territorial expansionism - legitimated and interpreted by American
expansionists as the country’s “Manifest Destiny”xiv - was thus in great part shaped by
the slave economy which came into existence and grew as part of the worldwide
capitalist dynamic of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In short, as I
argue in my forthcoming book,xv which spends some time examining the transnational
linkages of the Atlantic system and their impacts, British economic expansion, and hence
the global territorial expansion of the British Empire, and American expansionism were
expressions of a symbiotic “development” dynamic. (To digress a bit, this analysis has a
number of important implications that deserve closer attention than they can be given in
this space. The most important is that it disconfirms neo-weberian culturalist accounts
that the “rise of the West” and the divergence between the Euro-Atlantic area and most
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of the rest of the world is primarily attributable to “superior” forms of rationality and
social organisation, reflecting longstanding cultural advantages. As Kenneth Pomeranz
emphasises, “the exploitation of the New World and of the Africans taken there to work…
did more to differentiate Western Europe from other Old World cores than any of the
supposed advantages over these other regions generated by the operation of markets,
family systems, or other institutions within Europe”.xvi Until the late 1760s the British
cotton industry was “backward, small and unable to compete with Indian calicoes or
muslins in either quantity or price unless protected”. xvii Later advances in textile spinning
machinery that began to be widely used in Britain in the last two decades of the
eighteenth century would not have had world-transforming outcomes had British
manufacturers and traders not had ready access to abundant and cheap New World
cotton resources worked by slaves, and had the imperial state not imposed
manufacturing and trade restrictions on India and other Crown colonies.xviii)
American expansionism, rather than being an exception in the history of late modern
imperial states, was thus an integral part of a general movement. It was rooted in
material forces and cultural outlooks common to all the late modern colonial empires and
was from the start nurtured by imaginings of cultural superiority and the construction
racial difference. While common to all the late modern colonial states, xix the construction
of otherness and subalterness was if anything more deeply rooted in the United States
since it reflected the daily and lasting experience of the master-slave relationship.
Indeed, the institutionalisation of a domestic despotism is a singular feature of American
coloniality. In other respects too, the total American experience, far from being
characterised by “pervasive liberalism” as the still-dominant national narrative would
have it,xx was deeply shaped by the wider settler colonial project. Like the European
imperial states, the American state was constantly at war in the course of the nineteenth
century as it extended its sovereignty and territorial reach.xxi The settler colonial project
led to the century-long war and “removal” of Native Americans and to one major war of
conquest (Mexico, 1846-1848). At the same time, economic expansionism bred ever
widening international imperial operations and commitments. Continental territorial
expansion and armed international imperial interventions, which intensified in number
and scope in the last half of the nineteenth century, rested on a liberal state whose
“success in claiming, protecting and extending sovereignty was unprecedented in
scope”.xxii There was, writes Ira Katznelson, a “tight fit between the military and
westward settlement activity… by the positioning of its troops, the United States defined
U.S. boundaries; literally, it was a state whose shape and limits were marked by military
garrisons… the nation’s small military was constantly in motion, its forts often only fixed
for short periods, its navy always on the move, searching for pressure points and keen to
deter interference with the country’s considerable commercial and geopolitical
ambitions”.xxiii Like all the settler colonial powers the U.S. state engaged in mass
deportations, scorched-earth tactics, and massacres to establish, consolidate and extend
its rule. Even if a systematic genocidal intent cannot be demonstrated, in a manner
similar to settler colonies such as Algeria or Australia where collapses in the human
ecology were consequent on intrusion and colonial rule led to mass deaths, Anglo-Saxon
settler expansion destroyed Native American culture.
In the aftermath of the Civil War (1861-1865), which abolished slavery but not fierce
racial inequality, the American state intensified its war against Native Americans, aiming
to open large territories in the Indian Country to white settlers. The latter, said General
Ulysses Grant in 1868, would be protected “even if the extermination of every Indian
tribe was necessary to secure such a result”.xxiv General William Tecumseh Sherman
likewise said: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their
extermination, men, women and children."xxv Two years later, prior to General Sheridan’s
winter campaign to “force Indians into reservations” by starving them into submission,
Sherman wrote: “the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next
war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be
killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply
ridiculous”.xxvi In the twenty years that followed, the U.S. Army waged a “campaign of
annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction”, in General Philip Sheridan’s infamous
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words, against Native Americans that culminated in the crushing of the Sioux uprising in
1890, eight years before the war with Spain that led to the creation of an overseas
American colonial empire. When it conquered the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. applied
the same scorched earth tactics and indiscriminate violence against Filipino independence
fighters that it had used against Native Americans and set up a system of colonial rule
that was modelled on U.S. practices and jurisprudence applied to Native Americans. xxvii If
the Americans developed a specific republican idiom of empire, there is therefore no valid
reason to distinguish the continental American colonial project and the overseas settler
colonial expansionism of Europe. In both cases, the state was continuously at war,
imaginings of ontological racial difference and of “empty spaces” authorising limitless
violence against the de-humanised colonial subject. The potential for genocide was
implicit in the settler-colonial assumption that indigenous populations were “superfluous”
and “utterly disposable” and were to be “removed” from “empty” lands. xxviii The core of
the ideology of “Manifest Destiny” and the core assumption of the “Anglo-Saxonism of
the last half of the [nineteenth] century… assumed that one race was destined to lead,
others to service, one race to flourish, many to die. The world was to be transformed… by
the power of a superior race”.xxix
Continental expansion and international imperial “operations” were coextensive
movements. The war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, which was financed
through the Mexican war loans sold in London, was synchronous with the rising frequency
of armed interventions in Asia and the Pacific: five American punitive operations and/or
demonstrations of force in China between 1843 and 1866; four in Japan between 1853
and 1868; and five in the Fiji islands, Samoa, and the Hawaiian islands between 1840
and 1870. Military operations were of course still more frequent in the Western
Hemisphere, with fifteen military operations between 1848 and 1868. xxx In other words,
by the mid-nineteenth century the U.S. had become a vigorous participant in the
international imperial system. The U.S. won extraterritorial rights in China in 1844 under
the unequal treaties that followed the first Sino-British Opium War, and retained them
until February 11, 1943.xxxi American traders participated in the opium trade, the profits
from which were invested, among other things, in “infrastructure for westward expansion
in the United States”.xxxii The British and American settlements in Shanghai were
amalgamated in 1863. Alongside the British, French and Dutch navies, the United States
participated in the 1863-1864 military interventions to “compel Japan” to re-open the
Straits of Shimonoseki, an intrusion that helped to catalyse the Meiji Restoration.
“Racial Anglo-Saxonism” was the cultural glue underlying transatlantic imperial
cooperation. As Paul Kramer argues: “Anglo-Saxonism and U.S. nationalism were
congruent enough that in the mid-nineteenth century, in discussions of the white
conquest of Native Americans and Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons were proclaimed the racial
embodiments and shock troops of American Manifest Destiny”.xxxiii Notwithstanding
enduring American republican exceptionalist beliefs, “Anglo-Saxon racism developed as a
self-conscious bond connecting Britons and Americans… forged on their violent imperial
frontiers and solidifying at points of elite Anglo-American social and intellectual
contact”.xxxiv Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the British and American
elites envisioned a common civilising purpose of the two Anglo-Saxon empires. Great
Britain supported the United States during the 1898 war with Spain and the conquest of
the Philippines. In the words of an American historian, Britain was “delighted at American
entry into imperialism”.xxxv At the same time, American elite opinion looked to Britain as
a model for overseas colonisation. A jurist from Yale University who participated in a
workshop of the American Historical Association in 1899 devoted to “tropical
colonisation”, one of many such study groups on empire, some of which were
government sponsored,xxxvi wrote for instance: “We find the very general opinion that the
British system is best worth copying… The results (of British rule in India) have been
splendid” thanks to a “picked class, drawn from the flower of the race… that makes a
science of the business of governing dependent races”. xxxvii During the South Africa War
(or Second Boer War, 1899-1902), Theodore Roosevelt, despite widespread sympathy for
the Afrikaner cause in American public opinion, backed Britain unreservedly because he
thought that the future of the “race” was at stake: “I should regard the downfall of the
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British empire as a calamity to the race and especially to this country”.xxxviii As Walter D.
Mignolo rightly emphasises, racism is the matrix of the modern and late modern colonial
world system.xxxix [find exact quote]
Imperial Cosmologies and Imaginings of World Empire
The establishment of Euro-Atlantic dominance in the nineteenth century bred a
totalising cultural scheme, a master narrative of modernity founded on the fiction that
the “West”, conceived as a coherent cultural unit, was a historic singularity, the fount and
matrix of rationality and progress, indeed the arrow of historical evolution – point omega
in a supposedly ascending trajectory of modernity. These fictions were supported by the
binary classifications established by the emerging social sciences that divided the world
into “modern” and “pre-modern”, “civilised” and “primitive”, dynamic and “static”
cultures. Positing an “ontological and epistemological” distinction between “East and
West”, the new social sciences and western philosophy framed the non-West as
inherently incapable of generating the modern from within. The western intellectual
canon was built on these dualist assumptions, which over the centuries have become a
substratum of the western mind, of the way in which the world is represented.
Representations of the non-Western societies as backward, “immobile” or a-historical
solidified the newly constituted hierarchies of the world, becoming part of the
construction of dependence, subalterness and “underdevelopment”, an instrumentality of
domination. Imperial discursive formations are not external or epiphenomenal but
consubstantial to what Edward Said calls the “relationship of power, of domination… of
complex hegemony” that the West has historically maintained with non-Western
societies.xl
I needn’t belabour this general point. What does require emphasis is the way in which
U.S. elites, from the late nineteenth century onwards, interpreted their historical role as
the heirs of earlier empires. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, American elite
opinion became saturated with imaginings of world-empire, interpreting the United
States’ growing power as the necessary outcome of a process of imperial selection and
succession. If Britain’s imperial caste imagined that they had been given “by the Almighty
a gift of a lease on the universe for ever”, xli their American counterparts became
convinced that they were ultimately destined to supplant Britain at the centre and apex
of the world. In the late 1890s, an American expansionist wrote: “We have long been
accustomed to look upon the western half of the earth’s surface as ours while England’s
ambition seems to be to dominate the whole. To a certain extent, therefore, we both
desire the same thing.xlii Imperialism was understood as the natural outcome of
continuous continental expansion, the discursive repertoires of which were effortlessly
transposed to the new circumstances of American power. In 1895, Henry Cabot Lodge
stated the matter plainly: “The United States has a record of conquest, colonization, and
territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century… We are not to
be curbed now”.xliii A few years later, as the U.S. embarked on its overseas colonisation,
the Washington Post editorialised: “A new consciousness seems to have come upon us –
the consciousness of strength – and with it a new appetite… the taste of Empire is in the
mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle”. xliv Or, in the hubristic
words of another commentator: “The United States is a great imperial Republic destined
to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of
the world as the world was never affected even by the Roman Empire”. xlv These
statements exemplify a common elite attitude at a crucial moment of formation of the
imperial self: the “imperialist urge of the 1890s”.xlvi
Overseas colonial expansion under Theodore Roosevelt instituted American territorial
and strategic commitments stretching “over an immense section of the surface of the
globe” that included “the defense of territory from Alaska to Luzon, from Greenland to
Brazil, from Canada to the Argentine”.xlvii Along with the fact that the U.S. was displacing
Great Britain as the world’s leading economy, these worldwide strategic commitments
fuelled expectations that the United States would in near future become the predominant
partner in a reconfigured Anglo-Saxon world imperial order, a worldwide pax anglosaxonica. In a series of essays published in 1900 under the title America’s Economic
Supremacy, which was circulated to all members of the Cabinet and the Justices of the
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Supreme Court,xlviii Brooks Adams, an influential imperialist, borrowed from Hegel’s
teleology of history,xlix arguing that the “seat of empire” had for millennia been inexorably
moving from East to West. Wealth and power were now shifting from the Thames to the
Hudson. Adams advocated an “Anglo-Saxon coalition” to police the world’s seas and to
contain German and Russian imperial ambitions in Asia, if necessary by warring over “the
carcass of a dying civilization” (China). Nonetheless, he was convinced that Britain was
“decaying” while America was rising. In a letter to Roosevelt, Adams wrote: “You have a
greater place than Trajan, for you are the embodiment of a power not only vaster than
the power of the empire, but vaster than men have ever known”. l In Supremacy he
suggested that if only America showed the necessary determination to build a strong
state committed to world power “there is no reason why the United States should not
become a greater seat of wealth and power than ever was England, Rome or
Constantinople”.li (Not coincidentally, Adams’ book was republished in 1947).
From the late nineteenth century onwards, the notion that the United States was
destined to be “the center of the cosmos with other nations in orbit around it”lii, became
embedded in the American imperial mind. Prior to the Second World War, which ended
Europe’s period of world dominance and led to the globalisation of American economic
and strategic interests, Walter Lippman, a highly influential American internationalist,
wrote: “In the lifetime of the generation to which we belong there has been one of the
greatest events in the history of mankind. The controlling power in western civilization
has crossed the Atlantic”. What “Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has
been to the modern world, America is to the world of tomorrow”.liii In 1944, when the
outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, Lippmann enthused that the outcome of the
conflict would be that America would henceforth be at “the centre, no longer on the
edges… of the first universal order since classical time”.liv Surveying the post-war world
landscape, Harry Truman said: “From Darius I’s Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Hadrian’s
Rome, Victoria’s Britain, no nation or group of nations has had our responsibilities”.lv The
imperial republic had become the heir and successor of the world empires of the past.
Maintaining Disparity
Because of its conditions of emergence during the Second World War, a war that was
waged against two forms of racial despotism, as well as the ideological challenge of
ostensibly egalitarian communism, the post-war Pax Americana could not and was not
founded on explicit assertions of racial or cultural superiority. (For the same reason, the
war helped to spur desegregation in the United States, though it took two decades more
for African Americans to finally obtain full citizenship rights). Revolutionary conditions in
the colonial areas, and the nearly global reach of the United States, likewise made it
unimaginable that the American Empire would be based on formal territorial
commitments. Still, the differential assertion of American authority in Europe and the
plural post-colonial worlds reveals the colonial archaeology of the Pax. In Europe, the
United States mostly promoted liberal democratic state forms and integrated the newly
subordinate European states in a wider democratic order. In East Asia, by way of
contrast, the U.S. consistently sustained authoritarian or dictatorial regimes and explicitly
aimed to maintain hierarchy. In a 1948 policy memorandum that helped define U.S. postwar policy, George Kennan wrote: in the “Far East”, the U.S. should “cease to talk about
vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards,
and democratization”.
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its
population. This disparity is particularly great between ourselves and the
peoples of Asia… Our task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security”.lvi
The imperial pattern of relationships that developed in East Asia was based on a vision
of “Asians as part of an alien, and in important ways, inferior community”.lvii An
extraordinarily telling example of this racialised attitude is the statement made by Paul
Nitze, one of the architects of U.S. post-war policy, after the war: “the emotional effect of
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seeing what happened in Darmstadt was greater, in a surprising way, than it was in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.lviii The same attitudes shaped the way in which the U.S.
behaved in other colonial and post colonial societies. The post-war American power-elite
was convinced, at best, that non-Western peoples were unprepared and unfit for selfrule. Deeply embedded assumptions about cultural hierarchy, race and the role of the
West as a source of civilisation and modernity translated into paternalistic policies
predicated on the idea that non-western societies had to go through decades of tutelage
and “modernisation” before achieving “maturity”. This was manifest, for instance, in the
United States’ dealings with democratic India after Independence, where the State
Department reproduced the racially tinged cultural gaze and stereotypes of the British.lix
The statement of one of President Eisenhower’s aides, exasperated over India’s policy of
Non-Alignment, exemplifies this: “The Western world”, he wrote, “has somewhat more
experience with the operation of war, peace and parliamentary procedures than the
swirling mass of emotionally super-charged Africans, and Asiatics and Arabs that
outnumber us”.lx At worst, the United States used extraordinary violence to impose its
will and preferences when American imperial interests were challenged in the colonial or
post-colonial periphery. Without seeking to apportion blame for the origins of Cold War
conflict in East Asia, nearly ten million people were killed in the interstate or
revolutionary civil wars in which the United States was overtly or covertly involved.lxi
Walter Russell Mead notes that the violence was indiscriminate: the ratio of civilian to
combat deaths in Korea and Vietnam surpassed “the ratio observed in Germany’s eastern
theatre of operations during World War II”. Hence his sombre observation: the U.S. “is
the most dangerous military power in the history of the world”.lxii Concisely, like the
British Empire, which, in J.R. Seeley’s well known words, supported “despotism in Asia
and democracy in Australia” (once cleared of its indigenous peoples), lxiii the American
empire generally sustained authoritarian regimes and oligarchical rule in the “Third
World”, and democracy in north-western Europe. In the former world regions, the “Cold”
War warped development pathways, bred local militarization,lxiv and altered social
systems. In that sense, Pax Americana should be considered a continuation, under new
historical conditions, rather than a break with the nineteenth century European imperial
system. As Janet Abu Lughod emphasises, American world “hegemony” after the Second
World War “rather than marking the beginning of a new phase… represent[s] the end of
an old one”.lxv
Ideational Continuities Over Long Periods
Basic assumptions regarding the U.S.’ world historical role and international hierarchy
have persisted, varying only slightly from one historical period and one administration to
another. Like the imperialists of the 1890s who envisioned the U.S. as the coming “heart
of the world”,lxvi post-1945 American leaders have with few exceptions perceived the U.S.
as an “imperial state… primarily responsible for shaping and maintaining a necessary
modicum of world order”.lxvii There is plentiful evidence from the post-Cold War to back
up what has just been said. In the aftermath of the Cold War, American leaders of
various political and philosophical persuasions developed a restored and indeed inflated
sense of imperial purpose. A small but representative sample of elite opinion suffices to
illustrate this. In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote:
The scope and pervasiveness of American global power today are unique. Not
only does the U.S. control all of the world’s oceans and seas, but it has
developed an assertive military capability for amphibious shore control that
enables it to project its power inland in politically significant ways. Its military
legions are firmly perched on the western and eastern extremities of Eurasia,
and they also control the Persian Gulf. American vassals and tributaries, some
yearning to be embraced by even more formal ties to Washington, dot the
entire Eurasian continent.lxviii
He added: “To put it in terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of
ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant
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and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together”.lxix In 2001, Henry
Kissinger likewise asserted: At the dawn of the new millennium, the United States is
enjoying a pre-eminence unrivalled by even the greatest empires of the past. From
weaponry to entrepreneurship, from science to technology, from higher education to
popular culture, America exercises an unparalleled ascendancy around the globe.lxx
“American pre-eminence”, in his view, would be “a fact of life for the near and almost
certainly the mid-term future”.lxxi Neo-conservative expansionists most clearly expressed
the new “imperialist urge”, arguing that the “U.S. should begin to accept some
uncomfortable truths, not least of which is the reality of an America that now acts as a
global empire, rather than as one of two rival superpowers, or a normal state… the
United States at the end of the twentieth century is [in fact] a global empire [and needs]
an imperial strategy”.lxxii The invasion of Iraq, by a new administration committed to a
radical agenda of power expansion, was the culmination of this broad ideational trend.
(By that I do not mean Iraq was a necessary outcome of the structural imbalance postCold War. Rather, it reflected the imperial agenda of a group of nationalist expansionists
who sought to exploit the disparity of power to establish global empire). As a leading
academic exponent of universal empire put the matter in 2003: “The organizing principle
of empire rests on the existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the
principle of hierarchy, but is not itself bound by such rules… If an American empire does
endure, we may, in retrospect, come to understand the era of independent nation-states
as something of an historical anomaly”.lxxiii
The imperial visions of the present U.S. foreign policy elite bear remarkable kinship
with those of the late nineteenth century imperialists, and with the aspirations of the
architects of Pax Americana who developed an “extravagant imperial creed of global
responsibility and perfected the techniques of expansionism”.lxxiv Indeed, they are
ontogenetically related, reflecting deeply rooted and pervasive assumptions about world
order and international political and cultural hierarchy. The ensemble of representations
derived from the lengthy Western experience of domination constituted an imperial
cosmology that is at the root of the postulate, shared by historical actors and many
mainstream contemporary American international relations theorists, that the world
needs a “benevolent despot” to guarantee international order. The postulate, formalised
in “hegemonic stability theory”, that concentration of power in the hands of a
predominant state engenders order logically implies that pluralism is risk-laden. In the
absence of a centre setting the rules, putting into place regimes of international
governance, and imposing the disciplines of world order, the international system tends
to decay, leading to “chaos and an interim of troubles” until a new order is established.lxxv
The corollary is that the perpetuation of empire is in the universal interest since, as
George Liska wrote in 1967, the “globally paramount state [establishes an order that
harmonises] the particular interests of the imperial state with the interests of the
commonweal”.lxxvi Habituated since 1945 to being at the centre and the apex, American
policy makers and mainstream theorists appear incapable of thinking outside of this
conceptual box.
Contemporary American authors assume that “a world without U.S. primacy will be a
world with more violence and disorder”lxxvii or that “the benevolent hegemony exercised
by the United States is good for a vast portion of the world’s population”.lxxviii There are
variations on these themes. “Benevolent despotism”, writes Charles Kindleberger, “is the
most efficient system” even if “like a pluralist system of cooperation among equals or the
balance of power” it is “subject to entropy”. Sooner or later, the despot tires, loses
control, ceases to be benevolent and stops working in “the overall interest of the
totality”.lxxix According to John Ikenberry the problem facing “leading or hegemonic
states” that have acquired a “preponderance of material power capabilities”, such as the
U.S. in the post-Cold War, is to choose between dominating, abandoning or transforming
the international system. Since states having acquired such a position rarely abandon
them voluntarily, the real choice is to dominate or to “transform [the] favourable postwar
position into a durable order than commands the allegiance of the other states within the
order”.lxxx Or, as Stephen Walt framed the issue recently, the problem is how to get the
“rest of the world to welcome U.S. primacy”, rather than trying to tame U.S. power, by
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encouraging other “states to see its dominant position as beneficial (or at least
bearable)” and by convincing them that “American power… will be used judiciously and
for the broader benefit of mankind”.lxxxi The U.S., he believes, does not have terribly
much convincing to do since “America’s Asian and Persian Gulf allies… leap to offer
Washington new facilities and access agreements and go to great lengths to conform
their foreign policy to ours” whenever they “begin to fear that the U.S. role might
decline”.lxxxii These and like statement simply reproduce the imperial conceit that the
U.S., like Athens or Rome, was invited to acquire world-empire simply accepted it “when
it was offered”.lxxxiii
Conclusion
“Spokesmen of leading powers”, write Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, “do not take
readily to the idea that the end of their period of dominance is not necessarily the end of
the world. Accordingly, they find it hard to envisage pluralistic alternatives to the rule of
a single power”.lxxxiv They might have added that such states generally seek to inhibit
pluralism for fear that they would lose their position of power and centrality. Until now,
for reasons sketched above, the United States has proved incapable of imagining much
less accepting a plural world. Under more far-sighted leaders, it has sustained the “fiction
of equality” and of collective decision making with its closest Western allies, making the
alliance systems of the Pax Americana appear less hierarchical and asymmetrical than in
fact they were. Sometimes the U.S. has sought “world order bargains” and more inclusive
global forums to accommodate the demands of other states. In most cases however, it
has attempted to impose its preferences coercively, particularly in the post-colonial
periphery, which the late John Kenneth Galbraith aptly characterised as “the disaster
area of [U.S.] foreign policy.lxxxv Today, very large parts of that “periphery” have become
or are becoming semi-autonomous cores in a reconfigured global political economy.
Indeed, the most important structural feature of the present transitional moment in world
politics is the emergence or rather the re-emergence of world economic centres in Asia
and Latin America. This transformation has already altered the conditions of operation of
the world economy and should over time close the historic period of dominance of the
Euro-Atlantic state system. The way in which the transition unfolds – whether it will be
peaceful or not – depends however very much on the actions and reactions of the United
States, which remains a “very special state with an enormous amount of power”. The
recent American elections have created a moment of opportunity. President Barack
Obama, certainly the most cosmopolitan and multicultural leader the U.S. has ever had,
appears uniquely suited to ushering in a new plural post-modern world order. But, like
British Liberal and Labour leaders who once in power found that “a worldwide Empire…
cannot change direction overnight”,lxxxvi he inherits and will briefly preside over an
imperial system whose logic of world power inhibits change. Given the historic record, it
would be wise to remain agnostic. Indeed, the “imperialist urge” of the late twentieth and
early twenty first century shows just how lively the American imperial imagination
continues to be.
H. H. Powers, “The War as a Suggestion of Manifest Destiny”, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 12: 2 (1898), p. 8.
ii
Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Imperial Self in American Life”, Columbia Journal of American Studies, 4:1 (2000).
iii
Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America”, International Sociology, Vol. 15,
No. 2, 215-232 (2000).
iv
This point is also made by Walter D. Mignolo [add note]
v
Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and
Economic Development, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hereafter, Inikori, Africans.
vi
Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2005), p. xi.
vii
The estimates, based on Inikori, include the Caribbean and Mainland British America, but exclude Canada.
viii
Peter J. Cain and Anthony J. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, (London: Longman-Pearson, 2002),
p. 63 (hereafter Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism).
i
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These ratios are my own computations based on two different sets of figures in Inikori’s study, Africans and
the Industrial Revolution, pp. 197-214. Since those sets use different timelines, I smoothed out irregularities to
arrive at the results. They are therefore approximate but nonetheless sufficiently close to the original sets to be
considered accurate representations of the relative trade ratios under discussion.
x
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day [1968], (London-New York: Penguin
Books, 1990), p. 58
xi
Inikori calculates that the share, in value terms, of export commodities produced by African slaves in all the
Americas was 80 per cent in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and 68.8 per cent in 1848-1850.
Inikori, Africans, p. 197.
xii
Prior to 1812, writes Bradford Perkins, international trade was “an extremely important factor in the economy”
and played a vital role in the country’s prosperity. Bradford Perkins, The Creation of a Republican Empire,
1776-1865, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 7 and 201 (hereafter Perkins, The Creation of a
Republican Empire). See also Peter A. Coclanis, “The Wealth of British America on the Eve of the Revolution”,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21: 2 (Autumn 1990), p. 245. Coclanis points out in a different study that
the factor that mattered most in the wealth of the Southern states was “the area’s integration into the Atlantic
economy, that is, into a network of factor and product markets of intercontinental scope”. Peter A. Coclanis, The
Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 91.
xiii
Martin Shefter, “War, Trade and U.S. Party Politics”, in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (eds), Shaped by
War and Trade, International Influences on American Political Development, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2002), p. 115.
xiv
Originally coined by John O’Sullivan in 1845, the expression “Manifest Destiny” was later mobilised by
O’Sullivan, who was an Editor of the Democratic Review, and other expansionists close to the Review to justify
slavery, the annexation of Texas (which became a slave state in 1845) and the war with Mexico. It was also used
in the post-civil war context to legitimise further continental expansion and the international territorial expansion
of the late 1890s. See Julius W. Pratt, “The Origins of Manifest Destiny”, American Historical Review, 32: 4
(July 1927), pp. 795-8. On the racialist outlooks that fuelled territorial expansion see Reginald Horsman, Race
and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999) (hereafter Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny). On the Democratic Review, see Robert J.
Scholnick, “Extermination and Democracy: O’Sullivan, the Democratic Review, and Empire 1837–1840”,
American Periodicals, 15: 2 (2005), pp. 123-141.
xv
Philip S. Golub, Power, Profit and Prestige: A History of American Imperial Expansion, Pluto Press, London,
(forthcoming 2010).
xvi
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) p. 283.
(hereafter Pomeranz, The Great Divergence)
xvii
Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 88.
Deane emphasises that in the 1760s total British cotton textiles sales amounted to a mere £600,000, with exports
averaging £200,000, compared to the £5.5 millions for woollen goods.
xviii
When the British textile industry lost its source of supply in the United States in 1865, India was transformed
into Britain’s primary source of raw cotton, leading to systematic deindustrialisation and crop-substitution that
generated famines. For a concise discussion of deindustrialisation see Bairoch, Victoires et déboires.
xix
Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments [Retrieve]. Chaterjee characterizes the colonial project as
"...the normalizing rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group".
xx
The liberal exceptionalist American master narrative frames the national experience as a singularly successful
Jeffersonian liberal democratic experiment, characterised by “pervasive liberalism” at home and a relatively
consistent record of struggle against despotism abroad. The liberal school of U.S. historiography argues that the
American exception is attributable to the anti-colonial and bourgeois conditions of emergence of the nation and
the state, leading to the formation of a mature liberal capitalist society that avoided the traumatic experience of
the revolutionary transition from absolutism to democracy and feudalism to capitalism, as in the case of France,
or the wrenching process of late industrialisation and fused state formation that led countries such as Germany or
Japan down the path of militarism and tyranny. Like all master narratives, the function of which is to create the
set of meanings that found imagined communities, the American liberal narrative elides contradictory features of
the national experience that put into question constructed collective identity. Though it still permeates national
life in visible and invisible ways, slavery and its legacy of social violence and inequality are thus relegated to the
past and rewritten as terrible but now overcome deviations in an otherwise relatively smooth and ascending
liberal democratic trajectory. The continuous war waged against Native Americans is likewise framed as a
deeply unfortunate consequence of modernisation and continental state formation, rather than as a deep-seated
expression of coloniality. See Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Liberalism in America: A note to Europeans”, in The
ix
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Politics of Hope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). The major twentieth century formulation of the liberal thesis
is Louis Hartz’ The Liberal Tradition in America [1956], (Fort Washington, Pa.: Harvest Books, 1991).
xxi
As Karl Polanyi remarks, “an almost incessant series of open wars accompanied the march of industrial
civilisation into the domains of outworn cultures and primitive peoples”. Despite its Eurocentric bias, the remark
lays bare an essential truth of the expansionary movement of the West. The Pax Britannica and Western
globalisation were coterminous with ever widening extra-European conquest, coercive systems of control and, in
the case of colonial settler projects, the “removal” of indigenous populations. Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1973), p. 6.
xxii
Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: the Military and Early American Statebuilding”, (hereafter Katznelson,
“Flexible Capacity”), in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (eds), Shaped by War and Trade, p. 89
xxiii
Ibid., pp. 98-9, 101.
xxiv
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: a History of United States Military Strategy and Policy,
(New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 158-9.
xxv
Ibid, p. 158.
xxvi
Ibid., p. 156-60.
xxvii
87 per cent of the officer corps deployed in the Philippines had participated in the Indian Wars and the
counter-insurgency tactics used were modelled on practices of the “Indian Wars”. On the transposition of
endogenous models of coloniality to the Philippines, see Philip S. Golub, Power, Profit and Prestige.
xxviii
Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust. Towards an Archeology of Genocide” in A. Dirk
Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian
History, (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 49-76. Expanding on and critiquing Arendt’s remarks in The Origins
of Totalitarianism regarding German and Belgian colonial genocide, Zimmerer suggests that there are structural
similarities, though not identity, between colonial genocide and the later “extremely radicalized variant” of
biological interpretations of history and racial hierarchy that took hold under National Socialism in Germany. If
there were genocidal tendencies in colonial expansion, “genocide is one if not the main characteristic of national
socialism”. In the same volume, editor A. Dirk Moses notes that “vastly more scholarly and popular attention has
been devoted to the Holocaust… and to state sponsored killing in the twentieth century in general” than to
colonial mass deaths. The paradox, he writes, is that “the largest of the modern empires, Great Britain, was at
once an implacable opponent of totalitarianism and the source of those settlers who swept aside millions of
indigenous peoples to establish progressive democracies in North America, New Zealand and Australia.
Bulwarks of liberty, Britain and its former colonies also have blood on their hands”. Moses, Genocide and Settler
Society, pp. 4-5.
xxix
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 303.
xxx
I am basing myself on the list of American military interventions compiled by Richard F. Grimmett,
“Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2007”, CRS Report for Congress, (Washington
D.C., Congressional Research Service, January 14, 2008).
xxxi
The Treaty of Wanghia signed on July 3, 1844, gave the United States the same extraterritorial rights as
Britain was awarded in the Treaty of Nanking. Article XXI of the Treaty asserted: “Subjects of China who may
be guilty of any criminal act towards citizens of the United States shall be arrested and punished by the Chinese
authorities according to the laws of China, and citizens of the United States who may commit any crime in China
shall be subject to be tried and punished only by the Consul or other public functionary of the United States
thereto authorized according to the laws of the United States”. The new Treaty, negotiated under Franklin D.
Roosevelt a hundred years later abrogated all of the provisions of previous treaties and agreements that gave the
United States jurisdiction over its citizens in China, its rights in the International Settlements, and its rights of
navigation and police in the coastal and inland waters of China.
xxxii
John Paton Davies, “Two Hundred Years of American Foreign Policy: the U.S. and East Asia”, Foreign
Affairs, 55: 2 (January 1977), p. 369.
xxxiii
Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United
States Empires, 1880–1910”, The Journal of American History, (March 2002), p. 1315 (hereafter Kramer,
“Empires, Exceptions”).
xxxiv
Ibid, p. 1318.
xxxv
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power [1956],
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p.149.
xxxvi
See Philip S Golub, Power, Profit and Prestige.
xxxvii
Woolsey, “The Government of Dependencies”, p.8.
xxxviii
Cited in Beale, Theodore Roosevelt , p. 95.
xxxix
Walter D. Mignolo [add note]
xl
Edward Said, Orientalism [1979], (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), p. 5.
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Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914-1956. (London : Chatto and Windus, 1963.),
p. 131.
xlii
Lindley M. Keasbey, “The Nicaraguan Canal and the Monroe Doctrine”, The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 7 (January1896) pp. 1-31.
xliii
Cited in William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959]. (New York: Delta Books,
1962.) p. 34.
xliv
Editorial of the Washington Post, cited in Howard Zinn, People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003).
xlv
Cited in Healy, US Expansionism, The Imperialist Urge of the 1890s (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1970), p. 46.
xlvi
Ibid.
xlvii
Walter Lippmann: U.S. Foreign Policy, (New York: Overseas Publishers, 1943), pp. 18-26.
xlviii
See William Appleman Williams, “Brooks Adams and American Expansion”, The New England Quarterly,
25: 2 (June 1952), p. 219.
xlix
In Hegel’s famous formulation, “the history of the world travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely
the end of History, Asia the beginning”. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J.
Sibree (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), p. 103-04.
l
Cited in David P. Calleo and Benjamin M. Rowland, America and the World Political Economy: Atlantic
Dreams and National Realities, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 50.
li
Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, (New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1900),
p. 51.
lii
George Ball, Diplomacy in a Crowded World: An American Foreign Policy. (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1976), p. 9.
liii Walter Lippmann, The American Destiny, (New York: Life Magazine, 1939). See also James L. Baughman,
Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American Century, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 132;
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, (Boston: Littlebrown and Co., 1980), p. 363.
liv Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims, (New York: Overseas Publishers Inc., 1944), p. 251-2.
lv
Cited in Donald W. White, “History and American Internationalism: The Formulation from the Past After
World War II,” Pacific Historical Review, 58: 2 (May 1989), p. 151 (hereafter White, “History and American
Internationalism”).
lvi George Kennan, Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Secretary of State
and the Under Secretary of State (Lovett)”. Policy Planning Study 23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign
Policy. Foreign Relations of the United States, FRUS, 1948, Vol. 1, Section 2, pp. 524-5. p. 524.
lvii Christopher Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity,
Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism”, International Organization, 56: 3 (Summer 2002), p. 575.
lviii
Cited in Jerald A. Combs, “The Compromise That Never Was: George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and the Issue of
Conventional Deterrence in Europe”, Diplomatic History, 15: 3 (Summer 1991), p. 367-8.
lix Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S Foreign Policy. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987),
p. 164.
lx Ibid.
lxi
Though statistics vary according to different sources, it is generally estimated that the total death toll of wars
in East Asia approximates the death toll of the First World War. Anywhere from 2.5 million to 3.5 million
people, military and civilian, died during the Korean War (1950-1953), one million in North Korea alone; two to
three million during the Vietnam War (1963-1975); many hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as one
million during the Indonesia civil war (the 1965 overthrow of President Sukarno and the subsequent liquidation
of the Communist Party by the Indonesian Armed Forces led by General Suharto); 200,000 to 300,000 during
Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 which was sanctioned by the United States; and tens of thousands in
the suppression of insurgencies in Thailand and the Philippines. One should properly add the millions who died
in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a genocidal regime that received tacit diplomatic support from
the United States after 1975 as a “counterweight to North Vietnam”. See Philip Golub, Power, Profit and
Prestige.
lxii
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and how it Changed the World, (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 219.
lxiii John R. Seeley,The Expansion of England [1883]. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), p. 141.
lxiv
Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, “Dependent state formation and Third World militarization”, Review
of International Studies, 19: 4 (1993), pp. 321-47.
lxv
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, pp. 370-1.
xli
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Brooks Adams cited by John P Mallan in “Roosevelt, Brooks Adams and Lea: The Warrior Critique of
Business Civilization”, The American Quarterly, 8: 3 (Autumn 1956), pp. 213-30.
lxvii
George Liska: Imperial America : The International Politics of Primacy. (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 10.
lxviii
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and its Geostrategic 0bjectives, (New
York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 23 (hereafter Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard).
lxix
Ibid, p. 40.
lxx
Henry Kissinger: Does America Need a Foreign Policy: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21 st Century. (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 19.
lxxi
Ibid., p. 469.
lxxii
Eliot Cohen, “Calling Mr. X: The Pentagon’s brain-dead two-war strategy”, The New Republic (January 19,
1998). Cohen, on leave from the School of International and Advanced Studies (SIAS), Johns Hopkins
University, was named Counselor of the State Department and Special Adviser of Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, “particularly with regard to matters of war and peace”, on April 30, 2007.
lxxiii
Stephen Peter Rosen, “An Empire if You Can Keep It”, The National Interest, 71 (Spring 2003), pp. 51-61.
lxxiv
Richard J. Barnet, cited in John C. Donovan, The Cold Warriors: A Policy-Making Elite, (Lexington, Mass:
D.C. Heath and Company, 1974) (hereafter Donovan, The Cold Warriors), p. 280.
lxxv
Liska, Imperial America, p. 10.
lxxvi
Ibid.
lxxvii
Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters”, International Security, 17:4 (Spring, 1993),
pp. 68-83.
lxxviii
Robert Kagan: “The Benevolent Empire”, Foreign Policy, 111 (Summer 1998), pp. 24-35.
lxxix
Charles Kindleberger, World Economic Primacy: 1500-1990. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p. 227.
lxxx
J. John Ikenberry: After Victory. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). p. 4.
lxvi
lxxxi
Stephen M. Walt: Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy. (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006), p. 26.
lxxxii
Ibid, p. 243.
lxxxiii
Statement of an Athenian envoy to Sparta, cited by Thucydides in History of the Peloponnesian War, I.76,
(New York: Prometheus Books, 1998). For an argument in favour of the thesis of empire by invitation, see Geir
Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952”, Journal of Peace
Research, 23: 3, (1986), pp. 263-77.
lxxxiv
Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 656.
lxxxv
John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Plain Lessons of a Bad Decade”, Foreign Policy, 1, (Winter 1970-71), p. 35.
lxxxvi
Monroe, Britain’s Moment, p. 142.
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