THE CONCEPT OF

“EMPIRE” AND U.S.

FOREIGN POLICY
DURING THE COLD
WAR AND AFTER
The connotation of the term “empire”
has changed greatly over the past
two centuries.

In the nineteenth century, the great

powers in Europe unabashedly
sought colonial empires and adopted
imperialist policies. Being an empire
was a mark of prestige, and any state
that wanted to be regarded as a
great power was apt to seek imperial
holdings.
The connotation of “empire” and “imperialist”
changed drastically in the 20th century, the
connotation of “empire” and “imperialist”
changed drastically, in part because of
rhetorical changes introduced by Vladimir
Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, who
promoted an “anti-imperialist” line (even as
they themselves set about restoring control
over most regions ceded under the Brest-
Litovsk treaty), and in part because of what
Erez Manela has called the “Wilsonian
moment,” the impetus given to decolonization
and anti-colonial movements by Woodrow
Wilson’s declared commitment to “national
self-determination.”
The subsequent rise and defeat of
the Nazi German Reich in Europe
and the rise and defeat of Imperial
Japan and its Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere in East Asia,
and the resulting leftward
political shift throughout Europe
in the aftermath of World War II,
led to a further discrediting of the
term “empire,” which acquired a
pejorative sense.
By and large, European states
no longer wanted to be seen as
“imperialist.” Although most of
them initially were wary of
decolonization (and even tried to
resist it, as in Indochina and
Algeria), they ultimately were
willing to grant independence to
dozens of former colonies after
the war.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
the negative connotation of the term
“empire” proved useful to radical
leftwing critics of U.S. foreign policy,
who denounced the war in Vietnam
as an “imperialist” venture and
accused the United States of
seeking to build a global empire.
These accusations ebbed after the
U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended,
but the stigma associated with the
term “empire” persisted.
In the late 1980s, nationalist groups
in the non-Russian republics of the
USSR increasingly referred to the
Soviet Union as an “empire.” Their
use of an anti-imperialist discourse
was intended to legitimize their own
claims to independence and to
discredit the Soviet state. By the
time the Soviet Union ended, the
term also had gained favor among
Russians, who argued that Russia,
too, had been exploited by the
Communist regime.
In the scholarly world as well,
characterizations of the Soviet Union as
an “empire” suddenly became
commonplace. To the extent that
“empires in the modern world,” as Ian
Lustick has pointed out, “are expected to
break apart,” this new fashion was
perfectly understandable. Before
December 1991, some scholars had still
been leery of describing the Soviet Union
as an “empire,” lest they imply that the
state would definitely come unraveled, but
those concerns became obsolete once the
USSR was formally dissolved.
In the post-Cold War world, many observers
began to view the United States as an
“empire,” though not necessarily with the
same pejorative connotations as earlier.

Indeed, some analysts, such as Michael

Ignatieff and especially Niall Ferguson, saw
the U.S. imperial role as a positive thing and
offered advice on how the U.S. “empire”
could be maintained more effectively.

Others, such as Chalmers Johnson and

Andrew Bacevich, used the term much more
disparagingly.
Scholars have also used the term
to refer to current-day China. A
sophisticated and illuminating
study that does this is Odd Arne
Westad, Restless Empire: China
and the World Since 1750. Less
successful is the book published
in 2015 by Sulmaan Wasif Khan
Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy:
China's Cold War and the People
of the Tibetan Borderlands.
Is in fact the concept “empire” at
all useful in understanding the
United States or U.S. foreign policy
over the past 20 years?

The concept of empire is relevant

only if the United States is or has
an empire and only if the foreign
policy environment in which it
pursues its supposedly imperialist
aims is comparable to that of past
empires.
In Among Empires, Charles
Maier tries to get around
this problem by claiming
that "the United States
reveals many, but not all --
at least not yet -- of the
traits that have
distinguished empires."
But the problem with Maier’s argument
is that if the United States does not
share all the defining characteristics of
empires, then it is not an empire, and
there is little reason to believe that the
concept of empire will be useful. After
all, the United States shares "many, but
not all" traits (such as bigness,
multiethnicity, and arrogance) with
numerous non-empires such as India,
Brazil, Canada, France, and Indonesia,
so why not apply the concept of
“empire” to them with equal
justification?
Empires of the past have included
large contiguous entities: Tsarist
Russia, Habsburg Empire, Ottoman
Empire, Chinese empires (Ming,
Qing)
Other empires were non-
contiguous: the British, French,
Dutch, and Portuguese empires.
What is the common feature of all
of these?
An empire is best thought of as a
political configuration in which (a) an
imperial “center” subjugates
“peripheral” regions, which may or may
not be contiguous, (b) the imperial
center prevents the outlying regions
from exercising any attributes of
sovereignty and from having significant
links with each other (apart from those
coordinated by the center); and (c) the
political and juridical status of the
outlying regions is permanently inferior
to that of the imperial center.
Although the rulers of empires
usually will attempt to rely on
blandishments as well as
coercion vis-à-vis the outlying
regions, domination and
exploitation by the center are the
condiciones sine quibus non of
an empire, backed up by force
whenever needed.
In other words, the central features of
all past empires are: (1) domination
and coercion, (2) a hierarchical core-
periphery relationship with a dominant
core and subordinate periphery, (3)
involuntary participation by the
periphery in the core’s system, and (4)
an internal structure in which the
periphery entities interact almost
exclusively via the core (the hub and
spokes model).
In that sense, the United States
has never qualified as an
empire: Participation in the
U.S.-created international
economic order and in the U.S.-
created international security
framework (a worldwide
network of alliances and
bases) after World War II has
been entirely voluntary.
Membership in NATO and other
U.S.-led organizations is
voluntary. No coercive
structures have been set up.
When countries have asked the
United States to remove its
military bases from their
territory, U.S. officials have done
so — something no empire would
have contemplated doing with its
imperial territories.
What caused the recent
condemnation of the United
States as an “empire” was not the
sudden appearance of imperially
structured U.S. power, but the
seemingly arbitrary use of that
power. The U.S. invasion of Iraq
and the Bush administration's
unilateralist rhetoric made the
difference.
Empire talk suddenly
proliferated in 2003 and after
not because the United States
suddenly had become an
empire, but because the
exercise of vast power of the
United States seemed imperial
to some in its potential
beneficence and wisdom and
imperious to others in its
arrogance and arbitrariness.