The last empire? From nation-building compulsion to nation-wrecking futility and beyond

Abstract

Even as the literature on US imperialism proliferates, US military and political failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have become apparent, and the hollowness of the economic and financial foundations of the US imperial enterprise has been revealed. This article attempts a new interpretation of the more important dynamics of US imperialism from the birth of the republic to its present quagmire in the oil-lands of the East, focusing on its weaknesses. It argues that, while the US state has been expansionist and imperial from its earliest days the reality of its imperial achievement has been shallower than that of any previous empire, prompting the need for qualifiers like ‘empire like no other’, ‘soft power’, etc. The article concludes tentatively by pointing to the chief elements in the contemporary conjuncture which lead us to expect the end of empires altogether.

Notes

1 Among those who have warned of the dangers of contemporary US imperialism are A Bacevich, American Empire, Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2002; D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; C Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004; M Mann, Incoherent Empire, London: Verso, 2005; C Leys & L Panitch (eds), The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005, London: Merlin Press, 2006; N Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003; and Smith, The Endgame of Globalization, New York: Routledge, 2005. Among its advocates are M Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003; N Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, New York: Penguin, 2004; and C Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. See also various writings of M Ignatieff, R Kaplan, S Malaby and D DeSouza and, of course, the Project for the New American Century.

2 See Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire; Maier, Among Empires; and Ferguson, Colossus.

3 G Arrighi, ‘Hegemony unravelling’, I & II, New Left Review, 32 and 33, 2005.

4 A perusal of the writings of neo-conservative writers of the Project for a New American Century make this clear, as does J Mann's account of the group of neo-conservative members of the George W Bush team, who call themselves the ‘Vulcans’ and include Armitage, Cheny, Powell, Rice and Wolfowitz. Mann The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, New York: Viking, 2004.

5 But see Arrighi, ‘Hegemony unravelling’, I, pp 56 – 57 for an even more dismal comparison of the two.

6 For a brief survey, see W Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980. Schumpeter, whose views on imperialism, as on so much else, were formed as a response to Marxist theories, is an exception.

7 P Anderson, A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso, 1992, p 290.

8 Cited in ibid, p 290.

9 See Acton, ‘Nationality’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed), Mapping the Nation, London: Verso, 1996.

10 See A Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin: The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917 – 1918, New York: Meridian, 1964.

11 See E Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism, London: Pluto Press, 1991.

12 Intensified inter-imperialist competition, signalled by the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the closing decade of the 19th century and leading up to the First World War, called, however, for a more systematic analysis. J Hobson's 1902 Imperialism: A Study, Ann Arbour, MI: Univesity of Michigan Press, 1965, was the earliest. Though not strictly Marxist, it formed the backdrop against which the classical Marxist tradition theorised imperialism in this period. It was followed by R Hilferding's 1910 Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; R Luxemburg's 1913 The Accumulation of Capital, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951; Lenin's 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1939; and N Bukharin's 1918 Imperialism and the World Economy, New York: H Fertig, 1966.

13 Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin, pp 161 – 162 (emphasis added).

14 In pointing out this problem Arrighi sees England's conformity with the model of finance capitalism as a matter of its declining position in the world order. G Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism: The Limits of Hobson's Paradigm, trans P Camiller, London: New Left Books, 1978. However, the English configuration of capital was of longer standing. See G Ingham, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development, New York: Schocken Books, 1984; and C Leys, ‘Still a question of hegemony?’, New Left Review, I (181), 1990.

15 The term is from Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London: Verso, 1993. Arrighi traces the continuities between his own theories and theories of imperialism from the early 20th century, as well as Hobson's and Marxist theories, in The Geometry of Imperialism.

16 Karl Marx, ‘The future results of British rule in India’, in Marx, Surveys From Exile: Political Writings, Volume 2, London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1973, p 323.

17 B Warren, ‘Imperialism and capitalist industrialization’, New Left Review, I (81), 1973, pp 3 – 44. See also his posthumously published Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: New Left Books, 1980.

18 R Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, I (104), 1977, pp 25 – 92.

19 While Brenner's work on the origins of capitalism in England was theoretically the keystone of much of this literature, there were many other contributors. In addition to B Warren, a brief list would include E Laclau, Ideology and Politics in Marxist Theory, London: nlb, 1978; J Banaji, ‘Modes of production in a materialist conception of history’, Capital and Class, 2, 1977; and G Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, London: Macmillan, 1978.

20 B Teschke, The Myth of 1648, London: Verso, 2003, following from the work of J Rosenberg, E Wood and R Brenner, among others.

21 A Lipietz, ‘Marx or Rostow?’, New Left Review, I (132), 1982, pp 48 – 58.

22 A Emmanuel (ed), Unequal Trade: A Study in the Imperialism of Trade, London: New Left Books, 1969.

23 It is now clear that the spectacular capitalist growth in South Korea and Taiwan were not the best examples to hold up to the rest of the Third World, since their development had enjoyed exceptionally benign international conditions thanks to their position as front-line states against communism. See MT Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. In that sense more modest instances of industrialisation in an India or a Brazil seem more worthy of study.

24 See F List, The National System of Political Economy, Fairfield, NJ: AM Kelly, 1977, first published in 1841; H Carey, The Past, the Present and the Future, Philadelphia, PA: Carey and Hart, 1848; and A Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962. A good overview of the literature on the developmental state can be found in H Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder, London: Anthem, 2004.

25 T Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London: Verso, 1978.

26 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p 332 (emphasis added).

27 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p 335 (emphasis in original).

28 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, pp 335 – 336.

29 A Freeman, ‘The inequality of nations’, in A Freeman & B Kagarlitzsky (eds), The Politics of Empire, London: Pluto, 2004, pp 46 – 93.

30 J Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, London: Verso, 1994.

31 Teschke, The Myth of 1648, p 265 (emphasis in original).

32 Ibid, p 11.

33 Ibid, p 12 (emphasis in original).

34 Bacevich, American Empire, p 8.

35 WA Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York: Dell, 1972, p 21.

36 Ibid, p 22.

37 Bacevich, American Empire, p 17. He is referring to CA Beard & MR Beard, America at Midpassage, Vol 1, New York, 1939, p 381; and CA Beard, The Open Door at Home, New York, 1935, pp 301, 37.

38 B Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991, ch 2.

39 Bacevich, American Empire, 2002, p 15.

40 Ferguson, Colossus, p 43.

41 J Blaine, Secretary of State, quoted in Ferguson, Colossus, p 43.

42 G Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, New York: Holt, 2006.

43 Grandin, Empire's Workshop, p 23, emphasis added.

44 Quoted in Grandin, Empire's Workshop, 2006, p 25.

45 Arrighi's distinction between the UK's ‘free trade’ imperialism and the USA's ‘free enterprise’ imperialism may be relevant here. Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism, p 103.

46 Grandin, Empire's Workshop, p 26.

45 Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, pp 56 – 57.

48 E Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century, 1914 – 1991, New York: Pantheon, 1994, p 97.

49 M Hudson, Superimperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance, London: Pluto Press, 2003, p 53.

48 Ibid, pp 6 – 7.

51 Ibid, p 66 – 67.

52 As Hudson remarks, ‘It would be false to say that the United States provoked World War II … It is true, however, that no act, by whatever nation, contributed more to the genesis of World War II than the intolerable and insupportable burdens which the United States deliberately imposed upon its allies of World War I and, through them, upon Germany. In essence, every American Administration, from 1917 through the Roosevelt era, employed the strategy of compelling repayment of the war debts, specifically by England, to so splinter Europe that, politically, the whole of Europe was laid open as a possible province of the United States.’ Hudson, Superimperialism, p 112.

53 This point is made with equal force, albeit from a very different angle, in N Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

54 JM Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, New York: Norton, 1963, pp 179 – 185.

55 Quoted in Hudson, Superimperialism, p 150.

56 Moshe Lewin, Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2004.

57 D Chandler, ‘International justice’, in D Archibugi (ed), Debating Cosmopolitics, London: Verso, 2003, p 30, emphasis added.

58 Ibid.

59 R Brenner, ‘The economics of global turbulence’, Special Issue of New Left Review, I (229), 1998.

60 A Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’, paper presented at the Fifth International Conference in Economics organised by the Economic Research Centre (erc) of the Middle East Technical University (metu), Ankara, 11 – 13 September 2001.

61 See Mann, Incoherent Empire.

62 See P Gowan, The Global Gamble, London: Verso, 1998; and Hudson, Superimperialism.

63 I develop this conception of globalisation in R Desai, ‘When was globalization?’, paper presented at the ‘New Directions in Marxist Theory, Historical Materialism’ annual conference, London, 8 – 10 December 2000.

62 Freeman, ‘Europe, the UK and the global economy’.

65 R Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, London: Verso, 2002.

66 Desai, ‘When was globalization?’.

67 R Murphy, ‘East Asia's dollars’, New Left Review, II (40), 2006.

68 R Brenner, ‘New boom or new bubble?’, New Left Review, II (25), 2004.

69 J Stiglitz, ‘Can the world economy be saved?’, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 12 October 2006.

70 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century; and Arrighi, ‘Hegemony unravelling’, I and II.