East, West, Rome's best? The imperial turn

Abstract

The emergence of China and other ‘rising powers’ has effectively ended the period of unipolarity that followed the end of the Cold War. The gradual shift of power to the East entails both provisionalisation of the role of the United States as global hegemon and the provincialisation of Europe. Modernity and modernisation will continue but their pursuit is no longer synonymous with incorporation into the West. At the same time, this shift does not necessarily imply any fundamental challenge to the values of capitalism or ‘empire’ (however defined), but rather a transfer of power within a functioning global system. The combination of a change of epic dimensions with a strong element of continuity is redolent of the Roman concept of translatio imperii, of a succession from one ephemeral empire to the next, thereby attaining a semblance of eternity that empires aspire to but, almost by definition, do not achieve.

Keywords:

• empire myth
• translatio imperii
• rising powers
• vertical and horizontal empire
• Roman empire
• imperial succession
• United States and China

Introduction: the Eagle and the Dragon

Comparative research into the Roman and Chinese empires has enjoyed a higher profile in recent years, notably through the Stanford research (Scheidel 2009) and the work of Mutschler and Mittag (2008), the latter stating openly that there are possible analogies with contemporary China and America (2008, xiv).

Such an analogy appeared to inform the advertising of a major exhibition, held in Rome in 2010–2011, to celebrate contacts between China and Ancient Rome. The exhibition, entitled ‘The Two Empires, the Eagle and the Dragon’, was advertised via two contrasting posters. In one, which appears only to have been printed in Italian, two statues, Roman and Chinese, confront each other from a distance. In the second, the English language version of the poster, the two statues were placed shoulder to shoulder, as if allies looking jointly towards the future.

It would be difficult to find a more succinct depiction of the ambiguity of the West's emerging relationship with China – whether it is one of bi-polar competition or shared unipolarity. A similar theme, competition or collaboration, informed a conference the same year on ‘the Eagle and the Dragon in Africa’ at the Virginia Military Institute. An analogous dilemma informed the earlier debate between Brzezinski, who predicted peaceful collaboration, and Mearsheimer, who predicted a collision over who will be global hegemon (Brzezinski and Mearsheimer 2005).

The ambiguity is not over whether the West, or specifically the United States, will be superseded by other powers, but whether its successors, primarily China, will maintain the global system created by the West, enabling the United States, when its time comes, to enjoy the same peaceful retirement and accommodation with any new superpower as did the European powers after 1945.

The ‘Global Turn’

As Kupchan (2012, 86) has noted, there is a widespread, but unfounded assumption that the rising powers will have no alternative but to pursue the western path of modernity, in which case, the coming ‘global turn’ – the shift of power away from the West – would occur smoothly, an outcome that Kupchan, in stressing the range of modernities that may supersede that of the West, regards as far from guaranteed. According to the world-system theorists, Bergesen and Lizardo (2004):

such transitions are not peaceful given the absence of a world state or any sort of global constitutional agreement for politically passing on productive advantage from one region-state to another. The principal transition mechanism appears to be Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ of Great Power war. (2004, 48)

Phillips (2011, 318–320) similarly sees the possibility of the waning of unipolarity, leading to a period of ‘contested constitutions’ but mitigated by the possibility of a rationally conceived dual hegemony of America and China, like that of Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century, the two serving respectively as the maritime liberal and continental autocratic anchors of an uneasy but nevertheless relatively stable international order – the aim being to avoid the trauma associated with a ‘transformative crisis’ in the international order (2011, 321).

Western relay or eastern cycle

The symbolism of the ‘Eagle and Dragon’ posters hints at a second ambiguity, that of the relationship of the West with its Roman precursor. That the imperial motif of the ‘dragon’ may be used to refer to the same geopolitical entity over thousands of years may not elicit surprise, given the perceived continuity of the Chinese history – although this may be overstated, see Liu (2004, 78) on the construction of the referent, ‘China’. However, the continuity in the symbolism of the ‘eagle’ is no less striking, even if it's geographical location has changed more than once over the same period.

As Scheidel (2007) has demonstrated, the Roman and the Chinese empires pursued convergent paths (with a majority of the human race being governed by one or other) until around 600 CE. Subsequently, their paths diverged. China saw repeated reinventions of the same empire, through a cycle of bureaucratic integration leading to decay and rebellion (see Pines 2012), but with a high degree of geographical continuity and an emphasis on the principle of unity. In the West, by contrast, not only did the location of the empire change, with power passing in a relay between successive would-be hegemons, but there was also a high degree of competition between different pretenders to fill the vacuum left by Rome – until the USA became the only power to have fully neutralised all serious challenge from within the West. Whereas in China, although forces might compete, they competed for power over the whole, rather than having that whole divided between rivals for any long period, as occurred in the West, which even at the height of US power has included a partial competitor in the form of the European Union. The United States, the European Union, the Russian Federation and (if it were to be re-created) the Islamic caliphate may all be seen as successors or heirs of the Roman empire, and that this gives the rivalry between them (with the exception of Europe/US relations) a long-term legitimacy as competing pretenders to supranational power that is absent from the Chinese pattern of rebellion, collapse and consolidation.

The idea of subsequent empires being successors of Rome might invite scepticism in a way that analogous claims about contemporary China would not, but the collapse of the Roman empire in the West remains a potent symbol of the ephemeral nature of global power. Smil (2010) sets out to counter what he regards as facile comparisons between the United States and ancient Rome (in its imperial heyday or in its decline, according to taste), through a detailed examination that serves to emphasise fundamental economic, political and technological differences. However, for all its empirical rigour this approach may miss the point: popular comparisons with Rome reflect the pervasiveness of the myth of Rome as the archetypal western empire rather than a misconception about whether the United States will repeat Roman experience – the comparison emphasises the degree to which the United States and the West as a system of global organisation may be understood as a descendant of the Roman empire, rather than its reincarnation.

This implies not so much repetition of the Roman precedent as a degree of continuity with it, at least at a subjective level, Rome provides the generic reference point for western civilisation (however defined) to a degree that is unimaginable for any previous (or subsequent) empire or state, more effectively through its incorporation and re-modelling of its closest rivals in this respect – Ancient Greece and Christianity.

Imperial unity or competing powers

Here, western thinking is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand cultural or institutional connection with Greece and Rome has traditionally been a source of legitimacy for western supremacy, or that of individual western nations. On the other hand, the rise of Europe was associated with the rise of individual nation states whose power was to be incarnated in the form of detachable maritime empires rather than the organic, continental empires of Asia and elsewhere. Competition between nation states paradoxically strengthened European states (see Munkler 2007), so that Landes (1998, 36–37) could argue that the fall of Rome was Europe's good fortune. There was thus an irony whereby each competing European state established empires, legitimised through reference to a Roman empire which, in its aspiration to be universal was the antithesis of the competitive pluralism of modern-era Europe.

This opposition between empire and competitive growth is rejected as simplistic by Lal (2004, 43), who emphasises the cycle of growth and decline as empires initially enable growth through expansion, but become increasingly unable to meet the costs of maintaining and are replaced by another empire.

However, in the case of Rome (in the West) no single successor emerged, and its scale was not surpassed by any western state until the nineteenth century (2004, 39). The project of re-creating the unified power of Rome during the medieval period was never fulfilled either by papacy or emperor and, following a period of anarchy in the seventeenth century, the universalism of Christendom was formally superseded by a system of separate sovereign states from the seventeenth century on. However, despite being repeatedly consigned to history, the myth of Rome and of the universal empire was difficult to break with. Fasolt (2001) has described the lengths to which the seventeenth century German intellectual Hermann Conring went in order to conceal and obscure his early work which had argued that the Roman empire no longer existed and that the German kings should cease to regard themselves as Roman emperors – many at that time still believing, or pretending to believe, that the Roman empire was the last of the empires referred to in the book of Daniel and therefore deemed to be eternal (2001, 189). As Phillips (2011) describes, however, ‘universalistic visions of order’ remained predominant despite the failure of the Church or empire to bring them about – indeed the ‘lustre of Rome’ was such that a surfeit of pretenders meant that a ‘clash of competing universalisms perversely served only to further entrench particularism and fragmentation as the dominant features of Europe's political landscape (2011, 105).

The Roman precedent would continue to be used to legitimise Europe's competing empires, despite the fundamental contradiction between (at a conceptual level) the multi-cultural universalism of Rome and the homogenising nation states that provided the basis for the competing European empires. However, with the collapse of the system of great powers in the period of 1914–1945, it could be argued that there was a reversion to the earlier universalist Roman paradigm, but now with two pretenders (the USA and USSR) to that status.

Finally, with the end of the Cold War, America's unipolar moment (1991–2008) reintroduced the idea of universalism in a way that was arguably without precedent since the heyday of the Roman empire – hence the rejuvenation of the ‘America as Rome’ trope over the last decade. The claim by Morley (2010) for example, that the Roman empire still, in effect, rules the world via a system of ‘empire without end’ had a degree of plausibility in the early twenty-first century that it would not have had in the era of the ‘great powers’ of the more anarchic late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

Defining empire

That understanding post-Cold War, Europe might require pre-Westphalian concepts has been argued by Waever (1997) who argues not only for the empire's use as a metaphor for overlapping supranational jurisdictions but also, in its loose form, as a more typical form of human organisation than the formally bounded nation states that make up the ‘international society’ of English School international relations. As Parker (2010) has argued, empire is ‘re-emerging as the historic epitome of an ordering power stretching out over territory’, and a potential antidote to the chaos brought about by the erosion of the nation state under globalisation. Colomer (2008) emphasises empire as a territorial category distinct from any issue relating to democratic governance or its absence, and seeks to rehabilitate empire as the appropriate concept for analysing large political units such as Europe, China, Russia and the US and regards European unity as a positive attempt to recreate empire as a means of ending centuries of conflict wrought by competing nation states. The notion of empire as a default state in Europe was not as far from US opinion as might have been expected:

The European knew quite well that, economically, the Austrian Empire had been far more successful than the group of states emerging from it after World War I … But the empires had gone, and nobody, it seemed, wanted them back. (Berle 1954, 128)

Ziolonka (2011, 338) argues that both the European Union and the United States may justifiably be termed empires, in contrasting ways. The United States, on account of its near-monopoly of force in large areas beyond its borders, which (as Ikenberry 2004, has noted), goes far beyond the logic of the Westphalian system, the European Union through its strong, normative influence on states beyond its borders (even though the whole of the EU itself might be seen as falling within the periphery of an American informal empire). Noting that empires may be centralised and decentralised (to which, one might add, either homogenising or diverse) Ziolonka (2011, 341) defines empires (for contemporary usage) as vast territorial units with global influence in material, institutional and ideological terms, but also with a subjective element (argued also by Chaudet, Parmentier, and Pelopidas 2007) in the sense that empires have an imperial vision of themselves as the subjectivist and cross-border elements are crucial in order to distinguish the concept of empire from that of nation state – as Raffass (2012) has argued, the widely cited definitions of Doyle (1986) and of Motyl (2006), which emphasise hierarchy, subordination and core-periphery distinctions could equally be applied to nation states (2012, 201–205).

Definitions of empire may emphasise either what might be termed vertical elements (hierarchy, subordination, inequalities based on status/ethnic core-periphery differences) or horizontal elements (supranational culture, citizenship independent of ethnicity, shared cosmopolitan culture). Although the horizontal elements might be seen as soft power, and as a means of overcoming resistance, or part of a wider strategy of domination through ‘cultural imperialism’ (see Tomlinson 1991, 19–24), they also constitute the attractive aspects of empire – although a post-colonial theory tends to emphasise connections between culture and coercion, even Fanon's (1961) account demonstrates the degree to which imperial cultures work through attraction. Whatever its origin, the hybrid imperial identity which tends to transcend traditional barriers becomes part of the inheritance even of those politically opposed to the empire in question. The notion of horizontal versus vertical empire was first raised by Bonn (1943), the implication being that coercive empire gradually gave way to a co-operative empire. The idea has an ambiguous relationship with Burbank and Cooper's (2010, 458) distinction between empires of conformity and of difference. For example, indirect rule and tolerance of difference may be seen as vertical, in that the local elites are tied to the Centre rather than to other elites, whereas equality and co-operation might emerge in an empire of conformity.

Perhaps, in recognition of the power of the horizontal elements of empire, these have been the focus of much post-colonial writing, including post-colonial perspectives on Rome as the antecedent of subsequent empires. Parsons (2010) emphasises the coercive and exploitative reality underlying the ‘myth of the civilizing empire’ associated with Rome, although the account seems to read Rome through the prism of late nineteenth century European colonialism in Africa, thereby giving arguably too little recognition to Rome's cosmopolitanism. This aspect, now regarded positively was seen by some in the colonial era as a weakness – Tenney (1916) demonstrated the degree to which the proportion of Roman citizens of Italian origin decreased over time, which he advanced as a cause of the empire's decline and fall. The potential for a twenty-first century audience to take the opposite view and regard Romanisation as presaging the positive aspects of globalisation may explain the efforts made to undermine the notion of Romanisation.

Mattingley (2011) applies a post-colonial perspective to the effects of Roman occupation, the implication being to reject the alleged benefits of Roman rule as a justification for more recent imperial activity. Westland and Cooper (1996) had also applied a post-colonial analysis in the awareness that the perspective of earlier ‘imperial’ generations of classicists may have been overly sympathetic to Rome, and the role of classics in the development of British imperial ideology is explored in more detail in Bradley (2010). As with Parsons, what is striking in these accounts is the trend for post-colonial scholars to read imperialism back into Roman times rather than following the classic Bukharinite view of imperialism as specific to capitalism in Europe in the modern era. Also noteworthy is the emphasis on Rome's power rather than its fall, which has become less of a preoccupation in the post-imperial era in Europe. This has meant that the idea of a catastrophic collapse of civilisation together with Roman power has been played down or denied in accounts of ‘late antiquity’, against which Ward-Perkins (2005) provides evidence of the degree to which normal trade, comfort and culture did collapse as Roman power in the West retreated. However, even if the ‘late antiquity’ account plays down the catastrophic aspects of the fall of Rome, the concern to emphasise continuity implies a degree of identification with Rome whereas the catastrophic account placed Rome and its achievements and evils at a safe distance. The relative blindness of western scholars, following Gibbon, to the continuation of the Roman empire (in the form of Byzantium) for a 1000 years after the sack of Rome, also served this purpose – so that the West becomes the heir of Rome but not Rome itself, because Rome in the West became defined by its fall.

The ambiguous myth of Rome: Ovid versus Virgil

One of the reasons for the endurance of the myth of Rome is that it is ambiguous, it may be taken to represent both the durability and the ephemerality of power and, long before Rome's fall, this duality was recognised in its epic literature. On the one hand, there is the Rome of Virgil's Aeneid, to which Jupiter has granted unlimited and eternal power. On the other, there is the Rome of Ovid's Metamorphoses, written only also at the zenith of Rome's prestige but which is preoccupied with change, flux and impermanence. Even when the final section (Book XVI) of the poem celebrates Rome's rising from the ashes of Troy, to become what is expected to be a universal empire (When the round world shall be contain'd in Rome), this is juxtaposed with the succinct assertion that its power can only be ephemeral and that others will replace it: Nations and empires flourish and decay, By turns command and in their turns obey (Ovid 2010, 307, Dryden's translation). It is a bleak zero-sum view of what happens when, to use Ikenberry's (2011) phrase, the ‘great wheel of power turns’.

For Dryden and fellow neo-classicists of the seventeenth century, the shadow of Rome's fall, presaged by Ovid, hung over Britain's own already perceptible rise towards global power. Empire was seen ‘not as a secure or peaceful future but as a contingent and self-limiting process that leads to inevitable loss’ (Brown 2004, 73). The ambiguity in Ovid's approach derives from the interplay of two distinct ideas: on the one hand the Aristotelian notion of transmutation of elements, in which nature is subject to perpetual change and order is ephemeral (see Quainton 1980, 38), on the other the notion of translatio imperii, the Roman foundation myth, originally expounded by Virgil, according to which Rome was the successor to long-vanished Troy (1980, 186).

This idea of a preordained succession from one empire to the next, was revived during the Middle Ages not only by the Holy Roman empire but by a series of rising powers (notably France, Spain and England), to demonstrate that they were the direct heirs of Troy and Rome. Ovid's central role in the development of this discourse is ambiguous; James (2007, 27) argues that Ovid's retelling subverts the straightforward teleology of Virgil's myth, and that Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, was to do the same with the ‘Troy-Rome-England’ version of the myth (2007, 30). Hardie (2002), on the other hand, sees Ovid as an ideologue of imperialism, incapable of conceiving equality – one is either a conqueror or conquered – his work serving to internalise the imperial projects among the colonising agents (2002, 59). Knox (2009) by contrast, sees the ‘great Ovidian flux’ undermining the certainties of Augustan politics, through the predicted popularity of Metamorphoses ‘wherever Roman power extends’, so the empire's very power provides a wider audience for an account of its imperial vocation that nonetheless emphasises uncertainty and eventual oblivion.

Messianic succession

This ambiguous image of a drive towards universal order confronted by the inevitability of perpetual change and flux seems characteristic of the legacy of the Roman empire in western Europe, the aspiration towards a World-State and universal citizenship (see Pagden 2002, 43), combined with an awareness of its impossibility. However, as the notion of imperial succession moved beyond the confines of western Europe, the shadow of doubt cast by the memory of the fall of Rome also receded. After the fall of Byzantium, the notion of Muscovy as the third Rome, heir of the eastern Roman empire, first entered the discourse – the monk Philotheus famously declaring to Tsar Basil III ‘Two Romes have fallen but the third stands and a fourth there will not be’, this being seen as ordered by God (Runciman 1965, 178). More recent scholarship has rejected this view (Poe 2001), emphasising the marginal and primarily ecclesiastical status of Philotheus, while Rowland (1996) has demonstrated the possibly more significant symbolic identification of Kievan Rus as a new Jerusalem or a new Israel – the idea of a Holy Land rather than a universal empire (compare the later British notions of a ‘New Jerusalem’ and American ‘City on a Hill’). Berdyaev even criticised Dostoyevsky for a ‘Judaic’ view of Russia as a holy land rather than thinking in universal terms (Berdyaev 1957). These ideological tensions may still be felt in debates over whether Russia is an empire or nation-state. Regardless of the significance of the original ‘Third Rome’ idea, however, the scale of Russia's identification with Rome from the seventeenth century onwards was such (see Baehr 1978; Kahn 1993; Kalb 2009) that even if Pilotheus' dictum was not a major causative factor, it may be seen as presaging or reflecting a genuine trope of Russian state mythology – drawing, according to Van den Bercken (1997) on pre-Muscovite sources. The Roman myth in Russia did not have the pessimistic elements associated with western Europe, as Byzantium, from whom the translatio imperii was to take place, had outlived Rome by a millennium and its fall could be ascribed to apostasy through links with the West. Unlike Rome, there was little time lag between Byzantium's fall and the rise of its successor. Also, rather than collapsing before a chaotic barbarian onslaught, Byzantium had fallen to the forces of the Ottoman empire, which also began to see itself as a successor to the eastern Roman empire.

When the translatio imperii idea emerged in America in the mid-eighteenth century (see Malamud 2010), it shared with the Russian version the sense of being the final empire. The popular eighteenth century poet Timothy Dwight referred to America as ‘the Last and Brightest Empire’ and shared the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for Bishop Berkeley's concept of civilisation following the sun from East to West (Gamble 2007). The idea became further entrenched in the late nineteenth century, with the notion of ‘heliotopism’, whereby the translatio imperii was seen to follow the sun, moving inexorably from East to West, an idea that underwrote not only the expansion of American power compared with European decline but also an increasingly special role for China in US policy, and the notion of a Pacific era (Nordholt 1995, 195–196). Both the Russian and American adaptations of the idea of translation imperii may be seen as ‘messianic’ in that the empire is conceived as somehow eternal rather than part of the rise and fall of terrestrial powers.

Translatio imperii

Mainstream western historical tradition has regarded the substitution of the medieval belief in translatio imperii (in the sense of the eternal survival of a universal Roman empire with supernatural legitimacy) with a republican narrative of ‘Decline and Fall’ as the dividing line between the medieval and early modern eras (see Nederman 2005). As Nederman demonstrates the line was more blurred given that the translation imperii and Decline and Fall narratives were not necessarily mutually opposed – the translatio did not always imply universality, nor did it always employ a supernatural perspective. In addition, it may be plausibly argued that the Decline and Fall narrative may be absorbed into Ovid's, although not so easily into Virgil's version of the translatio. Nonetheless, if the fading of the concept of transcendental empire was central to the transition from medieval to early modern – and to the rise of Europe in a global context – then it is perhaps fitting that the concept of empire (in a broader, global sense than that implied by European colonial empires) should have re-emerged in the early twenty-first century, in an era of creeping neomedievalism (Bull 1977), fading Westphalianism and declining European influence.

In recent years, the theme of continuity after the fall of Rome in the West has become linked to debates around the idea of imperial identity. The Romanisation thesis of Haverfield (1912), the notion of a homogenising Roman ‘globalized’ identity is rejected (see Hingley 2005) – and by extension – the attempts by nineteenth century imperialists to legitimatise a Eurocentric narrative on the classical past. However, the degree to which Rome is implicit in the West's identity is only strengthened by Hingley's study, which emphasises modern parallels. The idea that continuity with the classical world was exploited in the nineteenth century does not refute the prior existence of a sense of continuity, which may have been present in different forms since the fall of Rome itself. In some respects, the opposite may have occurred – imperialists and post-colonialists alike may have projected the experience of late European colonialism back onto the Roman empire. By contrast, Rome may be regarded not so much a homogenising, as a cosmopolitanising force. The ability to assimilate outsiders has been argued to be as crucial to Rome's expansion, this rather than its warlike propensities being seen (Eckstein 2012) as what distinguished Rome from its neighbours and competitors. Eckstein's emphasis on Rome as providing hierarchy to replace interstate anarchy in the Greek East is echoed in Phillips’ account of ‘anarchy without society’ after the fall of Latin Christendom. Finally, current preoccupations with post-imperial and hybrid identity find echoes in studies of the survival of Roman culture, for example in Wales where Rees (2012) has demonstrated that the national epic, the Mabinogi, was an artefact primarily of a cosmopolitan classical culture, left from the Roman period rather than issuing forth from a primordial Celtic tradition. Similarly, White (2011) has emphasised the survival of Roman culture in Wales and the role of rivalry over the Roman succession as underlying the suppression of Wales, with its preserved elements of cosmopolitan Roman culture by the Norman English, for whom Rome was the chosen source of legitimation. The ambiguity of Rome that emerges from these debates is that of horizontal empire, the legacy of conquest includes systems of voluntary co-operation and shared or hybrid identities.

Horizontal empire and capitalism

The re-popularisation of the concept of empire might be attributed to the success of Hardt and Negri's (2000) ‘Empire’ which elaborated the notion of empire as a supreme systemic global power characteristic of a post-modern capitalist era of immaterial labour. However, it could argued that the Hardt and Negri's ‘Empire’ constituted not the return of empire as a concept but its transformation into an abstract (capitalist/neoliberal) system divorced from any actual terrestrial empire – the authors are at pains to emphasise that the empire is not the United States but the capitalist world order and one that erodes and transcends modernity and its construct, the nation state. Indeed, empire is even seen as having played a role in the destruction of colonialism and imperialism (2000, 43).

Imperial issues come to the fore when a hegemonic power comes under pressure from rivals, from overstretch and from internal economic factors, and begins to decline. The upsurge of interest in American empire and empire in general over the last decade (see below) might thus be explained not by the endurance of the US as sole superpower but by an awareness that the status quo is finite. As Chaudet, Parmentier, and Pelopidas (2007, 46) have demonstrated, the ascendancy of the neoconservative ‘imperial’ ideology occurred against the backdrop of a fear of the ‘declinist’ analysis of Kennedy (1988). Whilst terms such as superpower, hegemon or world order have been either new or timeless, if the US is conceived of as an empire, it becomes merely one of a series.

This issue of specificity (US an empire as none before) versus series (empires as an enduring category, not confined to the West or to capitalism, monopoly or otherwise) is the key point of difference between scholars of imperialism working within the Leninist tradition of imperialism as a stage in the development of the capitalist system, and scholars of empire, such as Darwin (2007, 491) who uses a longer timescale, thereby decoupling empire from capitalism, and who emphasises the particularity of each empire and the inability of any one empire or any single idea of modernity to hold sway across the Eurasia. This places the notion of the US as global superpower in perspective, and recognising the continuing existence of non-Western empire. However, given that an orthodox Marxist approach focused uniquely on the US would be outflanked by the rise of China, Callinicos, a leading exponent of Marxian imperial theory, avoids a dogmatic position by redefining capitalist imperialism as the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition, the latter have existed since pre-capitalist times. In this way, the gap between imperial specificity and series is bridged and Callinicos (2009) is able to deride the idea of: the imperial purple … passed on from one capital to another, from Amsterdam to London and then on to Washington, and some day perhaps to Beijing (2009, 21).

Callinicos explicitly challenges Darwin's notion of empires as the ‘default state’ in world history (2009, 491), implying that the imperial purple is capitalist and the fall of empire will be the fall of capitalism and vice versa. However, Callinicos seems to neglect the converse – if geopolitics is accepted as existing before capitalism, it can survive it, therefore so empires may continue to exist as the default state without capitalism. In contrast, Morley (2010, 21), also working within a broadly Marxian framework, and noting that even Lenin recognised that pre-capitalist Rome practised colonialism and imperialism, builds up a case for regarding Rome as the archetypal (western) empire.

Wood (2003) presents a convincing case for capitalist empire, as created by the British and perfected by the United States, being a distinct category not only from bureaucratic empires such as China, where wealth was derived directly from public office and from Rome where economic power was devolved to local land-based elites but even from immediate commercially oriented maritime predecessors such as the Venetians or the Dutch on the basis that their empires were based on non-competitive control of trade routes rather than (with the exception of India) an emphasis on competiveness and enhanced value of assets, which leads ultimately to the use of non-economic instruments (armed forces, notably naval power) not to protect specific monopolies but to protect an international and ultimately global competitive market system. In its fully developed form, the US empire after 1945, the territorial element is no longer present, force is only used to defend the functioning of the system across a global network of nation states, which becomes genuinely global after 1991. This introduced a new type of contradiction: ‘global capital needs local states’ (2003, 155), the empire becomes increasingly (because of the complex demands of globalised economy) dependent on the nature and capacity of a large number of states ‘which are vulnerable to challenge by truly democratic struggles’ (2003, 168). The wishful-thinking rhetoric of Wood's closing statement is reminiscent of Hardt and Negri's and her model shares with theirs the notion of a worldwide capitalist empire, no longer based on territorial control but maintenance of an economic system. However, in Wood's model the empire is unequivocally that of the United States rather than some amorphous trans-national entity, and also emphasises the continuing relevance of nation states as necessary constituent parts of the system.

There are two problems with Wood's model of the current position. First, the assumption that the contradiction will be manifested primarily in internal resistance movements, while closer to observable reality than Hardt and Negri's (2004) political fantasy of the ‘multitude’ and in line with the trend, noted by Hobsbawm (2008, 21) toward intra-state rather than international conflicts presumes international capitalist empire and democratic movements to be mutually opposed, when this has often clearly not to be the case – eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War saw democratic reform accompanying re-integration into the world economy, to cite only the most obvious example (although others such as the Arab Spring are more ambiguous. Second, it appears that great power rivalry under this system is confined to economic competition so that there are only asymmetrical wars between the empire and local elements or smaller nations rather than the inter-power conflicts that occurred in times when competition involved more non-economic elements and seems to ignore the role of competitor empires in supporting resistance within each other's sphere of influence. Third, it appears to assume that nation states have more or less the same subaltern status in the face of global empire. These points are perhaps all reflections of a larger error, the assumption that, with the arrival of global capitalism in the twentieth century, one system must also mean one empire.

For Negri, the assertion of US unilateralism by the neo-conservatives and the consequent opposition from the ‘old’ Europe also appeared to render obsolete the empire as all pervasive system of the original ‘Empire’ and replace it with a ‘true Imperial polycentrism’, with the US encircled by competing powers, including Europe – although it is left ambiguous whether these are separate powers or competing sub-divisions of a single imperial system (Negri 2009, 102–105). Either way, this is a big step away from the world system of ‘Empire’ towards a multi-imperial world.

Imperialism and federalism

The notion of an opposition between Imperialism and Federalism lies at the centre of Kropotkin's critique of the State (1969). Kropotkin inveighs against the imperial principle of the Roman empire, against which the prosperity of self-governing cities in the middle ages is raised as an ideal. This is somewhat mistaken in that cities under the Roman empire had been largely self-governing and prospered under Roman protection (see Reynolds 1988), although Kropotkin is presumably thinking of the Russian appropriation of Roman imperialism which was, and is, less tolerant of municipal self-government than Rome. However, the principle of federalism was, according to Commager (1978) the means by which the United States escaped the colonial problem that Britain had been able to solve, by acquiring new states with equal status.

Federalism informs the tradition of liberal internationalism in US foreign policy, represented by the tradition of Truman, Talbott and (to some extent) Bush Senior. Talbott (2008, 183–184) relates cites approvingly how Truman always carried with him a verse by Tennyson advocating a unified world government. Advocates of world government do not always see the connections between this idea and that of empire, especially in its ‘universal’ Roman form. Talbott, having shown the genealogy of internationalism to derive from ancient empires, nonetheless derides (2008, 122) as ‘smug’ the much-quoted statement by Joseph Chamberlain from 1904 that the future lay not with small states but with empires.

However, Chamberlain's statement was anything but smug, but reflected frustration with his failed attempts to turn the British empire into a federal or unified political body (Greirson 1972) or to build an alliance capable of containing German power. With the earlier disappearance of both the Concert of Europe and of the Pax Britannica and with the re-emergence of international balance of power politics, Chamberlain realised that Britain needed to either form or join a larger integrated unit in order to survive, whether this was an imperial federation or an alliance with the United States. Talbott's misunderstanding of Chamberlain's comment reflects different definitions or assumptions about empire, on the one hand as a player in a great game of the global balance of power, on the other as a step towards ultimate global unity.

Conclusion

Pelopidas (2011), following Chaudet et al. emphasises the subjective elements in empire – empires are not just large or expanding, nor are they simply great powers; they have a national vocation to transform the world (2011, 128). This definition would exclude the British empire of Chamberlain's era (arguably the pragmatic creation of a great power seeking to limit the power of other great powers – although this is in some respects a global mission), the Russian empire or federation (despite messianic rhetoric more a regional hegemon rather than a would-be global power – except for part of the soviet era), but not the United States of Truman or Talbott with its global mission.

The debate between great power and internationalist concepts of empire was crystallised in Berdyaev's (2006, 63) inter-war formulation that the future contained three scenarios: either a ‘Roman-style’ world empire, or a (British-style) system of sovereign states arranged against other in terms of the balance of power, or (his preferred option) a world-wide federation, with states freely giving up sovereignty to a world-wide organisation – in effect the choice between a vertical empire and two types of horizontal empire (conflict or co-operation-based). It is possible to see these three scenarios as a historical progression from the lost unity of empire emerges a system of competing powers which ultimately gives way to a global federation. A similar formulation underlay Brzezinski's (2004) notion of a strategic choice for the USA between global domination (vertical empire) and global leadership (horizontal empire).

Among the reasons why this is unlikely to come about – as Mazower (2012, 427) states, ‘the idea of Governing the world is becoming yesterday's dream’ – is that the concept appears to be rooted in the a specifically western frame of reference – the mythic power of Rome as a global empire, its fall and fragmentation into rival powers that become powerful vertical empires in their own right and their conflicts become unprecedentedly destructive, until the largest, final successor to Rome, which incorporates the horizontal principles of federalism, re-establishes the lost unity of the world via a worldwide system of nation states. Had Rome been the only archetypical empire, this scenario would have been plausible, at least at the level of a workable myth. Instead, it is unclear whether the future order will emerge via the orderly succession of Virgil or the flux and confusion of Ovid.