Op-ed: America: An empire to rival Rome?
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| Tue, 01-27-2004 - 10:10am |
Is America really in any sense an empire like Ancient Rome or Victorian Britain? Yes? No? Differences?
See link for complete article & interactive maps.........
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3430199.stm
"America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves - safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life."
So declared President George Bush in the traditional graduation address at the US Military academy at West Point in June 2002.
But despite his insistence that the US has no imperial ambitions, the word "empire" is increasingly used by academics and pundits alike when talking about America's role in the world.
We thought long and hard about the title for this series. Would Age of Empire prejudge the issue? Is America really in any sense an empire like Ancient Rome or Victorian Britain?
It is a question I put to virtually everyone I spoke to.
'Not quite right'
The answers differed dramatically.
The young British historian Niall Ferguson, for example, had no doubts.
"The United States," he said, "is an empire in every sense but one, and that one sense is that it doesn't recognise itself as such."
He called it "an empire in denial."
Strobe Talbot, former Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, found the notion of the US as an empire "grotesque, bizarre or laughable, depending upon what mood I'm in and who says it."
He said that, if anything, it was an anti-empire. "There is no interest among American people to set themselves up as an imperial power."
For others, like Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, America's current position is unique - there simply is not an adequate word to describe it.
As he put it: "Empire is not quite right but it seems to be closer than anything else we have in common usage, so we employ it."
Empire or not, there is a growing feeling around the world that America's unrivalled power is in some sense a problem.
It is something that Strobe Talbot recognises with regret.
"When our friends around the world get together behind our backs, they talk about the problem of American power, how to cope with it, manage it, even how to contain it.
"That is not the way we want others to think about us."
Globalisation meets 9/11
Today one of the buzz-words of international politics is globalisation.
It too is not an easy term to define; it encompasses the spread of market capitalism and the new communications technologies .
These seem to be shrinking the world and eliminating diversity.
Globalisation and US dominance are inextricably bound up.
The world of globalisation that was opened up by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War seemed almost designed for the US, accelerating the emergence of American superpowerdom.
For Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, US dominance has been a fact for years.
But it was the tragedy of 11 September which presented America's position in a stark new light.
Indeed, we began our series at Ground Zero in New York, the site of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Many people believe that it was from the rubble of the towers that a more assertive and ideological foreign policy emerged.
Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded. President Bush proclaimed a new doctrine of pre-emptive military action.
Military, economic, cultural
So how does the current position compare with the great empires of the past. Is America just the latest in a long line of dominant powers? Or is it really unique?
Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek International, fast-becoming one of America's most interesting foreign policy pundits, insists that there has never been anything quite like America's dominance of the world.
There have been other great powers, like the British Empire, but none have towered over their rivals in the way the United States does.
US defence spending dwarfs any of its rivals.
American dominance is not just military; it is economic.
US popular culture has spread around the globe.
There is what Mr Zakaria terms "a comprehensive uni-polarity" that nobody has seen since Rome dominated the world.
Niall Ferguson believes it is the British Empire that offers one of the best parallels.
He argues that if you look at what the US has long tried to do - expand the global reach of free markets and ultimately representative government - it bears an uncanny resemblance to what he characterises as the project of Victorian Imperialism.
Needing friends
But there is another side to this whole debate. Joseph Nye of the Kennedy school of Government believes that all the talk of US dominance and influence obscures a much more fundamental reality.
He calls it "the paradox of American power", by which he means that for all its global might, the US is unable to get the outcomes it wants by acting alone.
He argues that in terms of issues like countering transnational terrorism, dealing with the spread of infectious diseases, global climate change, international financial stability, none can be managed by any one country.
The message for US policy-makers, he says, is simple.
"We are the strongest nation the world has seen for some two millennia and yet we can't get what we want by acting alone".


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Thanks for the interesting article. I am again struck by the simularity between personal interaction and national interation--which only makes sense. I agree most Americans don't see themselves as belonging to an empire; it requires "the eyes of the other" to
see beyond personal intentions.
There are people in the US who want to see their personal power increased. As with personal power you need to act through and with others to succeed, unfortunately when the goal is greed there is no balancing principle. What really bothers me is not government action but the actions of businesses. The purpose of business is profit, with no concern for the human cost. We are, in my opinion, heading for another type of empire building. Anolther form of masculine dominance with no mediating concern for humanity.
Not in the traditional sense.
"The left-wing spin is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. That opens the door for a big power-grab by the left in the name of "fairness" or "social justice" or whatever other rhetoric resonates with the unwary and the ill-informed.
Unfortunately, this theory does not also resonate with the facts. Whether domestically or internationally, investors looking for the highest rates of return usually steer clear of poor areas and put their money where there are people with more advanced skills, living in more prosperous countries, even if they have to pay much higher salaries in such countries.
The United States, for example, has long invested more in Canada than in all of poverty-stricken sub-Saharan Africa, where wage rates are a fraction of Canadian wage rates. If the facts mattered — and if the poor really mattered to their supposed saviors — the implications of that would have been understood long ago."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell.html
Renee
The elitists who scorn it, are not thinking of the 'lower orders' who benefit from it the most. Did you know that in a survey of best places to get coffee in Paris, Mc Donalds won hands down? How can that be? We know the French disdain McDs; we know how they treasure their sidewalk cafes and their rich high quality coffee served in real cups that's worth lingering over and relaxing with and spending $3 or $4 dollars on.
What we seldom here about are the working poor and retirees who can't afford such luxuries but who appreciate that they can buy a reasonably good up of coffee at a reasonable price and sit at a table that doesn't cost an additional fee.
With 15,000 elderly people dying from the 'heatwave' last summer, you can probably thank Mc Donalds that the number wasn't higher since it's one of the few places people can go to find a/c, and I'm sure there will be a lot of elderly people enjoying a few hours in the warmth at McD's this winter before going back to their cold apartments.
Renee
>"other countries really do not like us.....they are envious."<
Are you talking about individual citizens of
I will agree that education and skills matter, but the cheaper these can be purchased the happier the business men. It makes no sense for a business to pay higher salaries if the skill sets are the same. This is why so many high paying American jobs are going to India, China and Mexico. Manufacturing jobs that required skills but not education went long ago.
It is now pretty well known why France, Germany and Russia were against any use of force in Iraq, and it will be interesting to see how the UN handles the infractions of the embargo on Iraq by those countries, especially France and Russia.
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