I agree with the article's title but much less with its content, which seems to claim that returning imperial soldiers will always cause some sort of trouble for the (soon to be former) empire.
I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to find a historical precedent for his claim. Especially since the Hundred Years War could be described as many things (succession war, civil war...) but certainly not an imperial or colonial war. Why not take an example from the end of the British Empire, the French Empire or the Japanese Empire - all great colonial powers in the 20th century? Or Spain, Portugal and Netherlands before that? Because they are very few. I can only think of the loss of Algeria and the coup attempt by the French military in that context - but in the end that hardly destabilized the country.
>I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to find a historical precedent for his claim.
To me, it is just a period with an anecdote the author was familiar with. The War of the Roses, while an important event in British history, isn't the type of nation destabilising event you're looking for either. It is yet another succession crisis that happened in monarchies time-to-time that was militarised. The argument being that the militarisation is the result of failed foreign military campaigns.
>Why not take an example from the end of the British Empire, the French Empire or the Japanese Empire
All fell more or less as a protracted result of the Second World War followed by the Cold War. I don't think that is comparable. The Vietnam War and the cultural effect it had on the US probably more apt. That is probably where this first began, and then continued with Afghanistan and Iraq.
>Spain, Portugal and Netherlands
The history of both Portugal and the Netherlands are quite intertwined with Spain and its (ie. the Hasburgs') imperial ambitions. Take the War of Spanish Succession for example, the Spanish ceded what was left of the Spanish Netherlands (after the Dutch revolt) to Austria, and arguably had much more impact than the War of the Roses.
It's a widely accepted view that the imperial activities of these powers in foreign lands (both in Europe and beyond) aggravated the conflicts in Europe over several centuries, culminating in the World Wars.
The Blutmärz Era was quite different too, there a social democrat administation asked for, or at least tolerated, the aid of right wing forces (Freikorps) to stop significant strikes of Spartakist Communists, about 2000 of them were killed.
That schism and distrust on the left also significantly helped the Nazis a decade later in not having a unified left to their opposition.
The conflict here was a fundamantal post war struggle about the course of action in the first ever German Republic. Germany was not an established Empire like the others either. It was not even 50 years since the German Unification 1871 under Prussian Dominance.
Your argument persuaded me, but the content of the article can be seen in a different thought still relevant lens - a misplaced analogy drawing attention to the fact that the United States has rapidly decaying political institutions (the Congress has lost all respect if I recall the polling data, the office of president isn't doing great and the mob justice style of the internet will eventually start clashing with the judiciary).
This is an excellent time to start looking at the circumstances of combat veterans and making sure they don't have an incentive to get involved in trouble. The US political infrastructure is vulnerable and nobody is proposing anything better. That suggests things will get worse if it gives way.
It's not that the soldiers will randomly turn against the public, it's that the tactics developed in building empire are also very good at subjugating the population at home.
Look at Germany in the late 1800's and early 1900's they tried to colonize a couple of regions in Africa,and developed military and social tactics to coerce and control indigenous populations. This colonization effort was largely a failure, and these same tactics turned against German citizens to seize and hold power.
I didn't read (or skim) the article, but there are recent examples. Chechen vets coming back to Russia and forming into what Russia calls "OPGs" Organized Criminal Groups. Now that I think about it, Mexico has this without the colonial wars in the form of cartel enforcers.
Then we had the US vet running around South America this year and embarrassing the US.
There are several examples of ex-troops assassinating presidents.
The French Foreign Legion started trouble in France when bored after multiple deployments.
Right, but this is a problem of not knowing how (or not wanting) to manage returning vets, nothing specific to imperial bellicose ventures overseas.
Most ancient societies had strict purification rituals for returning warriors, so that they could cleanse themselves spiritually and socially of the violence committed on the battlefield. Modernity and rationality have gotten rid of these religious rituals but not of their psychological necessity.
But how many applications of soldiers overseas are there other than in the advancement of imperial aims? Dubious peace keeping claims? I understand this is a very subjective topic, but its at least understandable that someone should make this connection.
I read the article as arguing that the USA is an empire, and as such its soldiers are overseas furthering those imperial aims. So in that sense it is the imperial ventures that are creating the vets who need to be managed at home.
An imperial ruler losing a war, let alone an underhanded one, is most clear signal to Brutuses in waiting that the empire is weakened, demoralised, and it is "now, or never."
The later is the most important. The moment the emperor start to reconsolidate power, the first ones whose heads, or wallets he will reap will be them — nobles of uncertain loyalty, who usually thrive under such circumstances.
Almost as a rule, empires do not fall when their oppression peaks, but, after it, when they run out of steam to maintain pressure, and they are crushed by all old adversaries springing up at the same time.
It's odd to me, the need to over-complicate things like this. We've had escalating protests like this for 10+ years, plus recurring bursts over the last literal century. And the conclusion is... it's the Iraq war causing all this?
We had active, publicly-supported policies in place to militarize the police before Iraq and Afghanistan. The last civil rights movement included much more violent anti-protester crackdowns than Portland (Kent Stake & Selma come to mind, let alone the implicitly-supported KKK). Hell - who remembers the images from Ferguson 6 years ago?
Just because sh*t is going down doesn't mean it's the barbarian hordes marching on Rome. This has been going down for a WHILE. The president hasn't changed that.
The fatalism around America’s relative decline is so tiring to read about. Apparently the only thing that can occur is a sudden and disastrous collapse of Pax Americana, even though as shortly as 15-20 years ago America enjoyed total and complete hegemony over the rest of the world (militarily, economically, politically and culturally).
That period was a historical fluke, in my opinion. At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was, and to a certain extent continues to be. To assume that its relative decline can only continue and exacerbate and end in complete and utter disaster in our lifetimes reads to me as simplistic binary thinking.
> At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was
Imperial Britannia says otherwise.
Before that Spain/ottermans/muhgals.
But, to tackle your main point. The USA is suffering from two things: a crisis of self identity, and a yawning prosperity gap.
The whole point of america is that a pennyless immigrant can land in some backwater of the USA, work hard and become a millionaire. But that can't happen now(if it ever could is another matter).
America worked because you had the freedom to get a new job, raise a family and live in relative comfort, even if you didn't go to further education. None of that really holds true anymore.
This is being played on by those in power (both left and right). Unless and until measurable changes happen, the USA will continue to have civil unrest.
What will make that change? someone/somepeople uniting and sorting out some of the endemic social problems. be that jobs, health care or addiction. The biggest barrier to that is the default position of polarisation. (Us vs them)
> The whole point of america is that a pennyless immigrant can land in some backwater of the USA, work hard and become a millionaire. But that can't happen now(if it ever could is another matter).
No, the point of America was that a pennyless immigrant can land in the US, work hard, find a better life and give their children a chance at much more. And that happens regularly. I grew up overseas and I can't tell you how many people from the places I grew up in have done exactly that. Similarly every day I work with people who have moved to the US for work. And many of these people never leave, which must say something about America.
You are basically saying the same thing. The point of the American Dream is the promise of improvement on one's status. Different groups decline that promise in different ways: for the migrant, it means an untroubled existence in a land under a stable rule of Law; for the working classes, it means doing better than your parents ("becoming a millionaire"); for the wealthy, it means more personal empowerment ("freedom").
Some of these promises can still be fulfilled, which is why people still come to America and follow the script. Others have not kept up with the times, maybe because social and economic institutions are struggling to keep up with the rate of change.
> At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was, and to a certain extent continues to be.
The US is influential in a broad way but not in any particular deep way. Even Russia still has significantly more ability to penetrate the culture of countries where it is present.
If you visit a city like Astana this becomes blatantly obvious, the way the Russian language and politics influences daily life is present everywhere. In the Middle-East that is evident as well as Russia has re-established historical ties.
Whenever the US has gone somewhere militarily the way to build influence was basically with guns or coffers full of money, but it could never compete with the sort of influence historical empires or cultures can built that have deep religious, linguistic or ethnic ties, the US is in a very real sense isolated and fundamentally disconnected from history.
In the same sense exactly like the British Empire was, and we can see where the UK is now and it didn't even take 100 years. Bruno Macaes recently wrote a great piece about the comeback of the 'civilisation-state'[1], and here the US cannot compete.
> The US is influential in a broad way but not in any particular deep way.
Depends whom you want to credit/blame for things like Hollywood, x86, the internet, wikipedia, google, facebook, jeans and tee-shirts and sneakers, apple, microsoft, smartphones, laissez-faire capitalism, private car ownership, crossover suvs, climate-change scepticism, the post-British-empire popularity of the english language...
Perhaps some people are so immersed in American culture they can't see the forest for the trees, but American culture has been hugely influential over the past century.
>Depends whom you want to credit/blame for things like
no it doesn't, which is the point. Free market capitalism or common law or the internet is not culture, it's a sort of operating system and infrastructure to build stuff with, which can be adopted or discarded as a civilisation sees fit.
China now has capitalism, is China now liberal? What are a hundred years? China and India are thousands of years old. Britney Spears and Steve Jobs and Disneyland are exciting for a few decades. Are they exciting for three thousand years? No, and that's something that the US has painfully experienced over the last few decades. It's sold its operating system to other societies the same way Microsoft sells copies of Windows, but it hasn't touched their culture.
> Free market capitalism or common law or the internet is not culture,
In the current age social media can replace local news sources; smartphone cameras can produce a mass of video evidence of authority figures abusing their power; messaging apps can allow protesters to coordinate with their conversations unreadable by the government; foreign corporations' automated censorship copyright, fact-checking and truth-in-advertising decisions arguably have more power over what citizens see and what apps they can run than local laws; and a important chunk of your white-collar worker citizens have to learn a foreign tongue to access the tools of their trades.
If you think these are "not culture" your definition of culture is very different to mine.
The system can of course continue to grind & lurch for a very long period of time. However, here we have a global forcing function: climate change, and the likely mass refugee crisis. America is not set up politically to welcome those refugees. The plan is to let them die at the border. It's unlikely a sizable portion of the American population will accept this solution.
The United States welcomes more immigrants than any other country in the world with fewer restrictions on who can immigrate than any other country in the world. What more can America do?
The US is now actively hostile to immigrants - travel bans (prior to covid19), border walls, detention camps, separating young children from parents, denying visas for students with online courses (the government wanted this, the courts stopped it). That may change, but the current US administration is very hostile to immigration.
The US has always been hostile to low skill immigrants. Reading the civil laws in any "progressive" northeast state is basically a big game of "were they trying to screw the Irish or the Italians back when they wrote this."
The US is among the least hostile developed nations when it comes to low skill immigrants. Few other nations allow them in, much less in such massive numbers. Half of all US immigration is low skill chain migration. The US is one of the few developed nations not operating primarily on a merit-style immigration system.
See: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.
Just try immigrating into those countries and becoming a citizen if you can't support yourself and or are low skill. Good luck, you'll need it.
But none of that hostility made much of a dent in any immigration statistics I was able to find. In fact, legal immigration under Trump even increased by a few percent compared to under Obama: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/tab... (latest year for which data is available)
All except for one of your examples are entirely bogus in support of your "any more" premise.
Border walls? Nope. Close to zero new miles of border wall has been constructed under Trump. Almost exclusively what they've done is repair existing border wall that was built under prior administrations.
Detention camps? What is your suggestion for what should be done with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that are caught illegally crossing the border into the US every year? Every developed nation on the planet has some form of detention centers for illegal immigrants that are caught, including our neighbor to the north. Canada doesn't just let you freely wander into their country and become a citizen, they have a strict process; they must be super xenophobic and racist eh. Detention centers for illegal immigrants have existed for decades in the US. Calling them "camps" is language stretching at best, it's obvious what that's meant to bring to mind. Are they camps in Sweden, Italy, Greece, France and Canada too?
Want to discuss Canada's low skill immigrant policies and why they're only 1.5% Hispanic (the Americas are ~73% Hispanic)? Somehow people think they're very immigrant friendly, it's fascinating, double-standards abound in judging US immigration policies.
Travel bans? Every country implements travel bans when it's convenient. Check out the travel bans going on right now. The US has routinely implemented travel bans, including against Muslim majority nations, in decades past.
Separating young children? That shouldn't have happened, that's a super fair point. It's no longer a policy; it ended two years ago and only existed for a very brief period of time.
The US does have a lot of immigrants in absolute terms - but its a huge country. Per capita relative to the size of the existing population immigration to the US isn't that large:
> fewer restrictions on who can immigrate than any other country in the world
Citation needed? This seems obviously false if you include non-OECD countries, and even within the OECD, it's surely untrue? For instance, immigrating to Germany is much easier than immigrating to the U.S., especially if you include the fact that anyone who has a European grandparent can usually get a passport.
That's just laughably wrong. In fact the US issues near-zero green cards for the jobs immigrants are actually doing, and not near enough for the "prestige" employees we claim we want.
> What more can America do?
Fix its regulatory setup so that the immigrants arriving to do real work are doing it legally, like everyone else in the world does.
Sadly, I have less faith in my fellow Americans. I think Trump has proven that a sizable portion of America is happy to embrace "America first." A sizable portion of America is even unphased by policies that will kill tens of thousands of fellow Americans, we are now learning with COVID-19.
Maybe I'm imposing my own, um, biases, onto the OC: methinks many of the replies here are wide of the mark.
It's pretty simple. The costs and consequences of war will be felt at home as well as abroad.
First, creating a weapon means it's more likely to be used. An underlying feared consequence of the military industrial complex is that the build up increases the potential for violence at the expense of diplomacy.
Second, the wages of war are paid by the people. Returning veterans discarded by the war machine. Families ravaged. PTSD, addiction, domestic violence, broken homes. Etc.
Third, everyone's keying off the title, is the chaos in the aftermath of war, every where. The OC gives a historical example. This story is as old as humanity. I have nothing new to add here, but will note that some tried to mitigate these effects with stuff the League of Nations & United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and so forth. Stabilizing institutions which have been under continuous attack, from before they were even enacted.
Those who ignore history are fated to repeat it, cliche, blah blah blah.
A related insightful take by Jacob Levy (an important political theorist) on the capacity of border lawlessness to undermine the rule of law at home: https://www.niskanencenter.org/law-and-border/
I think there is a simpler explanation for the fall of empires: They are built on assumptions about the world in which they are founded, and they come with coping-mechanisms to deal with the kinds of problems that their founders expect them to face, based on their own experiences and their understanding about what went wrong in previous empires. In this way they are like a code base, built to be easy to extend in the ways where extension is expected, but rigid in the directions where it is not. But the world changes, and eventually it will change in ways the founders could not have predicted, and which the empire is incapable of fully adapting to. Not only that, but as the empire grows, power is concentrated in its midst, so it becomes more and more lucrative to game the system, to find ways of exploiting the rules and institutions of the empire to gain access to this accumulation of power. (In startups this is similar to when the MBAs start running the company and all the creative people leave). These adversarial attacks further break down the coping mechanisms that were supposed to help the empire adapt to a changing world. It leads to consolidation and inflexibility. And as the center of power increasingly attracts those with no interest in the sustainability and well-being of the empire, unrest increases as the common man loses faith in the empire, and its ability to deal with the issues of today. The empire is now in crisis, and it will either adapt through a massive change (a civil war that is swiftly resolved, a 'New Deal' or similar) that 'resets' its alignment, and makes it capable of change in new needed directions (not unlike a pivot in startup parlance), or it will fall apart (typically through a civil war that never really ends).
The US has managed to survive several such crises (e.g. the Civil War and the Depression) but there are many ways in which the coping mechanisms that its founders created have been hamstrung. The 2nd amendment made perfect sense when the biggest perceived risk to the wellbeing of your citizens was a foreign tyrant occupying their land - but today it is far, far more likely that you will be shot by your neighbor. Guaranteeing free speech makes perfect sense, but the founders never predicted a world of multimedia broadcast, where the person or company with the most money can drown out the speech of everyone else. Letting everyone be free to pursue happiness on their own is a great principle, but it never predicted a world where people and corporations could be rich enough to suppress social mobility as much as an aristocracy does. The three branches of government were supposed to provide checks and balances on each other, but this breaks down when massive partisan polarization puts the executive and legislative branch in bed with each other, and they join forces to appoint politically motivated judges. The electoral collage, a mechanism that was supposed to prevent the majority from ignoring the will of the minority instead became a tool for the minority to ignore the will of the majority. The list is long.
As an outside observer, I really hope the US can pull through its current crisis (the world could do with fewer empires, but I don't particulalarly want the stage to be left for China or Russia instead). But as far as I can tell, it requires not only that the US changes, but also that it changes the ways in which it can change. That's a tall order considering the current state of affairs.
This phenomenon was also described by Foucault, and is now usually called Foucault's Boomerang[0]:
"It should never be forgotten", Foucault said, "that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”
On a practical note there isn't anything mystical or karmic about this. If you have a bunch of people with experience acting in a certain way in an overseas setting, and then those same people come back to positions of power in a domestic setting, they're going to act according to their past experience. If you have a surplus of weapons, armor, and vehicles developed for overseas engagements being given out to domestic police forces, they will be used according to their design.
Sometimes the link is even direct and explicit: Israel trains American police forces in tactics they've developed in Palestine[1].
A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself
I keep thinking a lot of today's identity politics are the direct result of colonialism and its racial hierarchies. A lot of post-Apartheid South Africa's affirmative policies transferred some of the priviledges of the former whites to the groups that Apartheid had marginalized, but the legitimacy of identities developed by a colonial system were never really questioned. (Saying this as a coloured man, who still can't see how such a category could ever be considered meaningful).
You could even say that affirmative action evolved as a kind of colonial science of imperial management. Following brutal colonial repression and subsequent rebellion in the late 19th century European empires adopted a softer type of rule that - on the surface - provided more advantage or more recognition to colonized people. Japan itself learned the technique from Europe and implemented a similar ruling style for its Empire until WWII, giving more visibility to Manchu, Koreans... and representing itself as a multicultural Empire. A historian called the USSR the "Affirmative Action Empire"[0] because this was their preferred way to maintain control over minorities while giving them the sense that they could "make it" in the Soviet Union.
I think affirmative action dates back to the 60's in the US, which follows its rise as a global empire with the Japanese occupation, Korean War, Vietnam War and influence over South America...
One way of seeing the Nazi treatment of Jews and ethnic Slavs is as colonialism brought a little bit too close to home, against people who looked too similar to the colonizers. When directed against white people in Europe, forced labor, mass executions, and an ideology of superiority felt as abhorrent as they should have felt, but didn't, when directed against dark-skinned people on other continents.
(Sure, the Irish had to become white and all, but it's plausible that invisible differences, or differences only visible to race scientists, do not afford as much emotional distance from brutality as visible ones.)
Israel is an extension of American interests in the Middle East, an esteemed member of the empire. Palestine is, among other things, used as a test lab for riot control tactics & equipment [0]. Maybe you're from the UK where it's become fashionable to cast anything but glowing reviews of Israel as antisemitism, but others can see clearly what's happening there with eyes unclouded by hate.
Bringing up Israel in causes that have nothing to do with Israel politics is antisemitism. The way your question is formulated suggests you think it's OK to toss Israel to any discourse unrelated to Palestinian cause, and is highly problematic.
Every time there is a broad popular movement, all kind of people come out of the woods and try to freeride their sometimes less than noble cause on that. Certainly the cause with BLM: you see people making it about socialism, "anti-imperialism", and of course the good old fallback of anti-semitism.
> Bringing up Israel in causes that have nothing to do with Israel politics is antisemitism.
Israel was invoked in a discussion of how American foreign policy colors domestic affairs. When a foreign ally is training our domestic police on tactics they have developed to enforce a racial apartheid, what could be more germain?
American police forces have training exchange programmes with multiple national police forces. Yet you'd never hear that say Mexico police is responsible for Georgia police brutality. Not germain enough I guess.
If you keep using HN for ideological flamewar, we're going to have to ban you. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Please stick to the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The Portland protests of the last 60 nights have burned no buildings (they shot off some retail fireworks on the courthouse steps, which suddenly becomes "arson"), they have fired no shots at anyone I'm aware of. They sing, smoke weed, dance, light fires, grill ribs, play drums, apply a metric ton of paint as graffiti, and frankly don't hurt anyone at all.
And they get tear gassed every night (seriously: every single night), because people like you want to conflate every single incidence of violence with a single movement.
Americans don't want to live in a country where a violent mob attacks a federal courthouse every single night. The original "cause" was police reform and justice for people unfairly killed by the police. That's gone by the wayside now. The "protesters" you so readily defend have maimed and blinded multiple police officers. How you people still believe you're going to be on the right side of history is beyond me. I'm not sure you're capable of rational thought.
I'm not "conflating a single incidence of violence" with a single movement. You're sitting here pretending BLM/Antifa hasn't already murdered multiple children during their violent riots. How many more people will the commies kill before the useful idiots abandon them?
The only evidence for federal officers being injured in Portland comes from a high level DHS press conference. If this were a violent confrontation, wouldn't some of the literally thousands of cameras turned on it be turning up something... violent? I don't doubt that a few cops have turned ankles or suffered equipment mishaps in an environtment like this, but I'll want to see actual evidence and not a talking head before I believe that a "violent rioter" did it with a weapon or whatever. I mean, if you just want to count physical injuries, there's a kid still in the hospital who took an impact munition to the face.
I'll say it again: there are effectively no "violent rioters" in Portland. There are a bunch of people like you citing other stuff as indirect evidence that the violent rioters must be there. There are no shots of riots. You don't find that strange?
I should not respond to this red meat but I am human after all. From what I see, we have a largely peaceful protest with a few bad actors. "Congress shall make no law ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." What I see are a "Wall of Moms", a "Wall of Dads", and a "Wall of Vets". These people are being gassed, attacked, and abducted by the Federal Government, in clear violation of federal, state, local, and city statues to say nothing of their Human Rights. When you say the political establishment is losing power, do you mean the one started during the Enlightenment or the one founded during the new world order established after World War II? And which communists are you referring to? Do you really believe these protesters are supportive of the ideas of Karl Marx? Or are they asking for justice and for fair and equal treatment under our laws, as guaranteed by the Constitution?
Always appreciate your insights Patrick, but you are completely off base here. USA has far fewer working age combat veterans now than it did in the 1950s through 1980s, and violence isn't anywhere near the levels that pervaded American society from the late 1960s through early 1990s. Trump's harshly criticized immigration policy is quite tame - compare it to the mass deportations under Roosevelt and Eisenhower.
The scenes in Portland and elsewhere are completely understandable - organized black clad rioters are attacking federal buildings. Is the government supposed to let them storm the buildings? No government would allow such a thing to happen, though perhaps the USA will.
America is a dying country, her people destined to be a small & hated minority surrounded by masses of her former subjects. Your own state legislature even recently voted to legalize discrimination against people like you (Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 5).
>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s empire coming home.
The federal agents in Portland are using technology to reduce harm. Over 50 nights they have had mobs trying to come in and destroy a federal courthouse, but instead of reenacting the Boston Massacre, at worst there has been non-life threatening injuries.
Empires and countries grow weak when they divide against themselves. This is obvious, and the main way power structures fall apart. Articles like this are trying to further this division by suggesting that trying to keep a mob from destroying courthouses is authoritarian. Would Putin be so patient as to allow mobs to lay siege to a courthouse for 50 days?
It's unbelievable how hyperbolic the rhetoric has gotten on this issue. My guess is that people like the author are not actually seeing what's happening in Portland. He's seeing what the federal agents are doing, but not what the mob does to provoke these responses. I won't go so far as to say the city is burning down, but if the federal agents left the courthouse to the mob, it would be burned to the ground that very day.
> Empire is a spectrum or a continuum, not an either/or proposition, and it’s a little bit like the old saying about pornography: You know it when you see it. The United States is an empire, and nobody who works seriously on the subject of empire would be likely to argue otherwise.
What does "empire" mean? I thought it meant "a group of nations or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government" (from dictionary.com) but clearly he's not using it in this fashion. Is it now another word for hegemon?
If the concept of empire is a spectrum would that mean the US is a very large but relatively very weak empire, as it exerts a lot of influence but little direct control over a lot of its "territory" in the style of other past empires? Does that mean Luxembourg is an empire now, but only at a very very low level of empire?
I guess there's Puerto Rico (and maybe more like that?) – but I don't think this is the sense he means it.
He talks about global military bases making an empire: as both the US and UK have bases in Germany and Bahrain, does that mean that Germany and Bahrain are both part of overlapping US and UK empires? Empires can overlap? Or is the UK too weak and powerless to make an empire - and that means there's now no such thing as a small empire? Does empire just mean "Very powerful and influential country"?
Before I read this article I thought I knew what an empire was and would know it when I see it – now I feel have no idea what an empire is...
I don't mind changing the meanings of words when it makes them more useful - what specific concept beyond "Very powerful and influential" does "empire" now identify?
Undisputed hegemon over large portions of the world.
I think you're hung up on the PR fictions -- it used to be, empires would indulge in the fiction of an absolute authority vested in the emperor when of course it was more complicated than that with feudal and tributary relationships. Now, in this political era, we spin things the other direction.
That's interesting! So that would mean that as we've studied empires we've realized that they were never particularly about ruling countries directly as we thought (and so as the word originally meant), the important identifying concept behind them was hegemony, power and influence?
There's a continuum between direct central administration and tributary/vassal status. The Roman Empire, for example, often had big chunks of land that were entirely run by local people, but were 'part of the Roman Empire' as far as public perception. Look strong and all that. (this went back and forth in different places at different times, sometimes there was very strong central bureaucracy).
The US, by contrast, insists that we're merely allies with all of these countries that host more US military power than they even have domestically, only buy US weapons, trade using our currency, scrupulously respect US intellectual property law, vote with us in the UN nearly 100% of the time.. it's a different political posture for a different time.
I think it's quite telling the author had to go back to the 15th century to find a historical precedent for his claim. Especially since the Hundred Years War could be described as many things (succession war, civil war...) but certainly not an imperial or colonial war. Why not take an example from the end of the British Empire, the French Empire or the Japanese Empire - all great colonial powers in the 20th century? Or Spain, Portugal and Netherlands before that? Because they are very few. I can only think of the loss of Algeria and the coup attempt by the French military in that context - but in the end that hardly destabilized the country.