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Article Excerpt
OF COURSE, MANY AMERICANS DENY THEY ever had an empire. But this is not unique. So did many nineteenth-century Brits, for whom the term also possessed negative connotations. They said they were only spreading freedom around the world. Since British history textbooks of the time had as their main theme the growth of freedom, most of them took the American side in the War of Independence (Porter 2005:66-72). Of course, British actions often differed from rhetoric. Prime Minister Gladstone was a noted anti-imperialist, an upholder of "the rights of the savage," but under his administrations the Empire expanded more than under his supposedly proimperial predecessor Disraeli. So to equate empire with freedom, or to avoid the word while doing empire, is nothing new.
CONCEPTS AND THEORIES
The frequency of empire denial makes it essential to define what we mean by empire. The word derives from the Latin imperium, the power wielded by a general commanding an army and a magistrate armed with law--a combination of political and military power. Modern usage adds a geographical element--power exercised over a peripheral by a core power. Thus my definition is
an empire is a centralized, hierarchical system of rule acquired and maintained by coercion through which a core territory dominates peripheral territories, serves as the intermediary for their main interactions, and channels resources from and between the peripheries.
As Motyl says (2001:4), an empire is like a rimless wheel: the peripheries communicate to and through the core but not directly to each other, so that the core controls the flow of all major resources. All roads led to Rome, all gold flowed to Cadiz, all 5-year plans were made in Moscow, while today imperial authority flows from two capital cities, Washington (the political/ military capital) and New York (the capital of capital).
Empires initially grow mainly through military power, deployed or threatened, and repeated if rebellions occur. Empires often claim to be charities, selflessly bringing good to the world. They may indeed bring benefits to those they rule. But this is not the point of acquiring empire in the first place. If you want to help others, you do not march into their homes, kill young men, rape young women, steal their possessions, and then impose an authoritarian political regime from which some benefit may later flow. You do not more modestly even dictate the terms of trade. The initial point of empire is to plunder the land, possessions, and souls of others precisely because you have the military power to do so. Of course, then an empire may dominate by wielding other sources of power--political, economic, and ideological--and benefits may perhaps flow. Modern empires have contained an unusual degree of economic imperialism, because capitalism can better integrate the economies of core and periphery than did previous modes of production. This has been prominent in the British and especially the American empires.
Obviously, empires have been very varied. I distinguish several types and subtypes of empire.
(1) Direct empire occurs where territories are conquered and then politically incorporated into the realm of the core. Historic examples were the Roman and Chinese empires in their maturity. In direct empire, the sovereign of the core also becomes the sovereign over the periphery. Once institutionalized, a fairly uniform set of political institutions radiates outward from the center to the periphery. The logo SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus--the Senate and People of Rome) was emblazoned on the standards of all the legions and on drainpipes throughout the Roman territories. Roman law came to govern all. Provincial economies also became fairly integrated, and finally the empire completed a peaceful "disappearing act" when the conquered peoples became ideologically incorporated, acquiring a "Roman" or "Han Chinese" identity. Power had thus moved successively through military to political to economic to ideological forms. But modern empires have been unable to perform this disappearing act. They have been racist, preventing conquered peoples from identifying themselves as British or French or Japanese, while nationalism presented a barrier to cultural assimilation from below. Without large numbers of settlers, direct rule has been difficult to accomplish and expensive to maintain, especially overseas. So modern empires have turned more to:
(2) Indirect empire involves a claim of political sovereignty by the imperial core, but the rulers of the periphery retain autonomy and in practice negotiate the rules of the game with the imperial authorities. As British Pro-Consul Lord Cromer said, "We do not govern Egypt, we only govern the governors of Egypt" (Al-Sayyid 1968:68). Locals staff most of the army and administration, and dominate provincial and local governments. This was the real practice on the ground in most modern colonies and protectorates. The British would retain some central power through a "Resident" or "advisers" wielding substantial military power in the background, so that they could repress any revolts, but rule required collaboration between them and native elites.
These first two types involve colonies, unlike those that follow.
(3) Informal empire occurs where peripheral rulers retain sovereignty but with autonomy constrained by intimidation from the imperial core. This became the predominant modern form, because it centered on capitalist coercion) Gallagher and Robinson (1953:2-3) developed the concept, saying that in the nineteenth century British policy was "trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary." Robinson (1984:48) later summarized its policies: "Coercion or diplomacy exerted for purposes of imposing free trading conditions on a weaker society against its will; foreign loans, diplomatic, and military support to weak states in return for economic concessions or political alliance; direct intervention or influence from the export-import sector in the domestic politics of weak states on behalf of foreign trading and strategic interests; and lastly, the case of foreign bankers and merchants annexing sectors of the domestic economy of a weak state." The concept has been criticized for imprecision about coercion, and so I distinguish subtypes involving differing degrees of military or economic coercion.
(a) Gunboats. Here military force is flourished threateningly and occasionally deployed in the form of short, sharp military interventions. The gunboat cannot conquer or rule, but it can administer pain by shelling ports and landing marines who may force a change of policy on the local regime. The European Empires, the United States, and Japan all jointly administered such pain for China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through "unequal treaties," supervised by controlling Chinese customs revenues and budgets reinforced by intermittent military interventions where necessary. The United States followed on in its own hemisphere at the beginning of the twentieth century with "Dollar Diplomacy." This is direct military intimidation, but without colonies.
(b) Proxies. In the 1930s, U.S. subcontracted coercion to sovereign local despots backed by a local comprador class who supported U.S. foreign policy in return for a promise of nonintervention plus limited economic and military aid. They were dictators because the local population had to be coerced to follow the policies desired by the United States. Then in the post-World War II period, the United States added more covert, deniable military operations of its own, including through the newly formed CIA. These are both less direct forms of military intimidation.
(c) Structural adjustment. Here military is replaced by economic coercion. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain tired of the cost of launching gunboats across the globe and turned toward more purely economic coercion. Take Argentina. Its trade with Britain was more crucial to it, since it contributed only about 10% of Britain's trade, while Britain received over 50% of Argentina's. Britain also provided the vast bulk of its investment capital. Argentina tried to raise more capital in New York, Paris, and Berlin, but failed. So Britain could say to the Argentine government, "You adopt this policy, or we will strangle your economy." Britain actually did apply devastating sanctions on Peru in 1876, which helped persuade Argentina to become something of a client state in matters of concern to Britain. Today comparable policies are called "structural adjustment," purely economic interventions in peripheral economies by international banks in which the United States has the predominant power. But if such policies are applied routinely, they may become institutionalized and begin to blur into my fourth type of domination.
(4) Hegemony is used here in the Gramscian sense of routinized leadership by the core over peripheral sovereign states, which is regarded by them as "legitimate" or at least "normal." (2) Because hegemony is built into peripheral everyday social practices, if needs little coercion. Whereas indirect and informal empire both depend upon local clients feeling constrained to serve the imperial master, they see themselves as deferring voluntarily to a hegemon, accepting its rules of the game as normal, natural. Hegemony involves more than Joseph Nye's notion of "soft power." He defines this purely in terms of ideological power, as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies" (2004:x). This seems naive. I doubt whether the United States could command other states merely by offering attractive values and policies. Sweden or Canada cannot. The United States differs because some of its practices are built into the everyday lives of others, compelling them to act in certain ways, as those of Sweden or Canada are not.
The British wielded for a time a degree of economic hegemony (though hot a more general hegemony). The imposition of free trade, sterling and "sound finances" on Argentina was initially experienced as coercion, because it trimmed the powers of the Argentine government and harmed locals in sectors needing tariff protection. Yet since most Argentine political elites were not drawn from these sectors, and they were desperate for foreign investment, they came to see British terms as being in their own interests. Thus they eventually adhered fairly unthinkingly to them (though there was discontent among their compatriots) and they self-regulated along British lines (Cain and Hopkins 2002:244-73). Today, the rule of the dollar results in foreigners investing in the United States at extremely low rates of interest, benefiting Americans disproportionately. Yet most foreigners see this as simply what one does with one's export surpluses. The Cold War period gives an example of political and ideological hegemony: the Western part of "the free world" accepted U.S. leadership as legitimate because it needed the United States to defend it against communism. But hegemony will do a "disappearing act" if its benefits allow peripheral states to become autonomous of the hegemon. The British brought economic benefit to their white settler colonies and to European states, and they became fully autonomous of and equal to Britain. By 1900 sterling was being maintained as the reserve currency of the world only with the help of the German and Russian central banks. British hegemony transmuted into mutual interdependence, which means no domination at all. There have also been American tendencies in this direction.
My typology involves descending levels of military and ascending levels of political, economic, and ideological power as we move from direct to indirect empire, through the subtypes of informal empire, to hegemony, and finally to mutual interdependence. Overall, this lightens empire. Of course, since these are "ideal-types," no real-world empire has fitted neatly within any single category. In fact, they generally contain bits of all of them--as have American Empires. My first task is to place the American Empire amid this typology.
I will also attempt some explanation. Doyle's (1986: esp 22-6) overall model of empire makes much sense. He says explaining it must include three main elements: forces from within the core, from within the periphery, and from the overall international relations system. He says we must go beyond "metrocentric" explanations based on the core, like the Hobson/Lenin theory of imperialism, the "gentlemanly capitalism" thesis of Cain and Hopkins (1986), or an exceptionalism located in distinctive American traditions. Ditto with "pericentric" explanations focused on the periphery, like Gallagher and Robinson's (1953) explanation of informal empire in terms of instability in the periphery luring imperial expansion forward. Ditto with "structural realist" theories reducing empires to the systemic properties of international relations. Doyle uses this model to analyze the so-called New Imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. In a single paper I cannot do likewise across the whole of the American Empire, though I will make a few suggestions as to why empires are desired and why they grow.
At one level, the answer is easy. All motives for empires presuppose a perceived preponderance of military power, enabling seizure of desired things by force (Waltz 1979:26). Only if that exists will there be imperial expansion; and when it does, the temptation to expand may be irresistible. But perception may be inaccurate. Military power has a delusional simplicity, luring would-be empires forward toward hubris. Battlefield victory may be easier than sustained pacification or rule. Disaster may follow if past expansion has brought great success but the world has changed, or because the success was due to unrecognized reasons which no longer apply. Military hubris is not uncommon, as we shall see. But at the level of motives, confidence in military success has been primary in determining expansion.
Historians of most empires then tend to identify two further main motives, economic gain and strategic security--and then they vigorously debate their relative strength. Economic motives are obvious: one may gain wealth by seizing it from others by force. "Security," as the word implies, often portrays itself as "defensive," against a potential threat to the core state or against the new threats that expansion itself may bring. All expansion brings new potential rivals and new frontier anxieties. The bigger and more rapidly acquired the empire, the more diffuse the sense of threat. If rival empires are expanding at the same time, then they may seek to "defensively" preempt each other--as in the "Scramble for Africa" at the end of the nineteenth century. Today the United States is preempting the actions of peripheral actors. It is often difficult to distinguish economic and strategic motives from each other, because they are so often bound together in what is generally called "realist" policies.
Historians also identify a fourth, usually subsidiary motive, an ideological and ideal sense of Mission to the world. The Romans said they brought order and justice, the Spanish the Word of God, the British civilization and free trade, the French la mission civilisatrice. The American Mission has been to bring freedom in the sense of democracy, free enterprise, and free markets. Mission statements typically strengthen after an expansion has begun, for they offer more elevated motives than mere profit or security, they deflect attention from the underlying militarism of the project, and they are useful in giving moral uplift, to the imperialists themselves as well as to the public back home. Of course, once elevated, a Mission may take on a life of its own, and drive on further expansion. Some have seen U.S. expansion as being especially driven by missionary "Wilsonian" values, usually liberal, though today perceived as conservative (e.g., Ninkovich 1999, 2001; Mead 2001). Is this claim to American exceptionalism valid? There are also ideological influences on motives that make them less commendable or less rational. Racism dominated early modern empires, though more recent enemies have been demonized as "communists" or "terrorists." It is difficult to deal rationally with such "demons," as Americans have shown. A sensed imperial "dignity" also makes empires reluctant to "lose face" or accept "humiliation" at setbacks inflicted by lesser powers. The lives of imperial soldiers and civilians become "sacred." Such sentiments may lead to a ferocity of retaliation which is appalling and perhaps counter-productive. Nor is it easy for empires to accept their own decline. The French Empire fought to the bitter end in Algeria and Vietnam, though the British chose a wiser course, pretending to become instead a "Commonwealth of Nations." Which choice will Americans make?
Of course, we should not reify "the Empire" as a single, rational actor. Imperial expansion seems often somewhat accidental, while the expansionists on the ground may be settlers, missionaries, trading companies or armed adventurers, all with some autonomy. They may provoke native resistance, making the core state feel compelled to intervene to protect them, sometimes against its better judgment. Domestic pressure groups are also important. Yet since such actors are beyond my scope here, I will engage in stylistic reification, crediting action to "the United States" or "the administration," though the actors and pressure groups involved were always plural and varied.
PHASE 1: CONTINENTAL EMPIRE 1783 to 1883
In its first phase of imperialism (white) Americans conquered and settled what is now known as the continental United States. This was the most colonial phase of American imperialism. It was also the most lethal, causing the deaths of about 97% of the 4-9 million natives living there. Little was distinctively American about this. The early settlers were mainly British. True, the pace of settlement and of ethnocide/genocide quickened when the United States attained independence from Britain and when California and the Southwest were wrested from Spain and Mexico. But this quickening also happened in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, when the white settlers achieved self-government. Settlers were usually more ferocious in their imperialism than were colonial or church authorities. The more the de facto self-government, the greater the killing. I have documented this in The Darkside of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005, chap. 4). This phase was normal settler colonialism, whose main motive was economic, to seize the land and its resources (usually without native laborers). If it involved more settlers and more deaths than elsewhere, this was merely due to its being in the most fertile of the temperate zones where Europeans could comfortably settle. There was no liberalism and little uniqueness in this phase.
More distinctive (though to the Americas as a whole) was to replace native labor with slaves imported from Africa. The Portuguese reinvented modern slavery, and the British became the main carriers, but after slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, the United States became the main home of slavery (apart from Africa itself). Thus this first phase of U.S. imperialism also generated a racial hierarchy: "civilized" whites on top, above "decadent" Latinos below, then "primitive," unfree African Americans, with the natives seen as incapable of "improvement" on the margins of society altogether. This had consequences for phase 2 of U.S. imperialism, where the same racial groups were involved in the hemisphere.
PHASE 2: HEMISPHERIC EMPIRE 1898 to 1941
During this period U.S. imperialism was largely confined to Central America and the Caribbean, plus a few islands in the Pacific. I focus here on...
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