An empire, if you can keep it

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Stephen Peter Rosen

WITHOUT TOO much difficulty, an interested reader can in these early months of 2003 find numerous references to contemporary American imperialism in newspapers and journals of opinion. Attacks on American imperialism were, of course, easy to find in the 1960s and 1970s. What is new is that many such references are neither hostile nor apologetic. Writers from the political Left and Right such as Michael Ignatieff, Paul Kennedy, Max Boot and Tom Donnelly not only discuss American imperialism but call for more of it in the name of humanitarian nation-building or global stability. Moreover, what is being discussed is not simply the reach and influence of American capitalism or culture, but the harder kind of imperialism--the kind exercised by coercive intimidation and actual soldiers on the ground.

Nearly every discussion of alleged contemporary American imperialism notes that America is far more powerful than any other nation or effective group of nations-which is perfectly true, of course. But primacy or hegemony is not the same as empire, and if it has been made so by virtue of some novel definitional fiat, then "empire" becomes too loose a term and hence a useless concept. No one would argue that all empires are alike, or that the global position of modern post-industrial America is the same as that of ancient, agrarian Rome. But empires really are different, in form and function, from merely powerful states. This is why certain questions emerge repeatedly in the study of empire that do not emerge in the study of conventional interstate relations. It therefore matters a great deal whether, for analytical as opposed to rhetorical purposes, contemporary American power is indeed imperial in nature.

Is America an Empire?

IF THERE IS, or soon will be, an American empire, it will be faced with questions different from those to which it is accustomed, and it will need to learn forms of statecraft different from those to which it has become habituated in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is because the range and nature of the issues facing an empire differ qualitatively from those facing a merely powerful state.

Empire is the rule exercised by one nation over others both to regulate their external behavior and to ensure minimally acceptable forms of internal behavior within the subordinate states. Merely powerful states do the former, but not the latter.

The central--one may say the necessary but nor sufficient--imperial task is the creation and management of a hierarchical interstate order. From that key task of regulating the external behavior of other states proceeds the imperial problems of maintaining a monopoly on the use of organized military power, and of using its monopolistic but still finite military power efficiently--a problem captured in the military concept of "economy of force." But an empire must also ensure the security and internal stability of its constituent parts, extract revenue to pay the costs of empire, and assimilate the elites of non-imperial societies to the metropolitan core, tasks that presuppose influence over the internal affairs of other societies.

By this definition, for example, the Wilhelmine empire was an empire over the Germanies, but not over central Europe. Imperial Britain included its crown colonies, but not Argentina or, for very long, Afghanistan or Persia. As for the United States, it was a de facto imperial power in much of the Western Hemisphere beginning in the late 19th century, and formally over the Philippines from 1898 to 1946.

Today, the picture for the United States is mixed. It exercises effective, if less than formal, hierarchical authority in the Western Hemisphere, in the Asian rimland, on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf and in the NATO area. At the start of 2003, it was tying to extend its hierarchical interstate order to the Balkans and Afghanistan, and was preparing to intervene in the internal affairs of Iraq. China, Russia and India cooperate opportunistically with the United States, but have been willing to challenge American dominance when possible. They certainly reject the right of the United States to intervene in their internal affairs, and thus remain the major countries outside the U.S. hierarchical order.

But what of the three internal governance functions of empire? The United States does tend to the internal security and stability of its constituent parts, but it does so selectively. Its methods are manifold: humanitarian intervention, aid and assistance programs, intelligence sharing, stationing U.S. military forces abroad and other means besides. The new post-September 11 concern with the security implications of failed states suggests an even greater focus on internal governance issues, and indeed the language of the new National Security Strategy points in that direction. As for extracting revenue to pay the costs of empire, only the 1991 Gulf War stands as a direct example of that. American influence over the main international economic organizations--the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank--may be construed, at least indirectly, as a revenue extraction process, as may the international role of the dollar, but this is really to stretch the imperial point. And as to the absorption of elites from the peripher y to the core, the nature of globalization changes how we even think about such a question. (1) If the United States does do this, it is not a function of an imperial governmental core that can tightly manage or control such things, but a by-product of social and economic phenomena intrinsic to the culture.