Dying Empire

U.S. Imperialism and Global Resistance

Francis Shor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415778237
• eBook ISBN: 9781135262440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By the 1970s the global hegemony established by an American Empire in the post-World War II period faced increasing resistance abroad and contradictions at home. Contextualizing that hegemony, resistance and contradictions is the focus of Dying Empire.

Presenting a wide-ranging synthesis of approaches, the book attempts to shed light on the construction of and challenges to the military, economic, and cultural imperial projects of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Opposing US imperialism and global domination, Francis Shor combines academic and activist perspectives to analyze the crises endemic to empire and to propose a vision for the realization of another more socially just world. The text incorporates the most recent critical discussions of US imperialism and globalization from above and below to illuminate the practices and possibilities for global resistance.

Offering insights into the political and cultural convulsions of recent decades whilst raising profound and compelling questions, this book will be of interest to activists, students, and scholars of American political culture, US foreign policy, globalization, imperialism, international relations, and social movements.

Part I
Imperial constructions and deconstructions

1 Imperial burdens: constructing and contesting the U. S. empire

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. ... It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American century.

Henry Luce

Where there is imperialism, all you find is exploitation and the pillaging of natural resources. With no imperialism there is development, justice, and there is freedom.

Evo Morales

Surveying the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape, neoconservative political scientist, Ernest W. Lefever, acknowledged that the U. S. had an imperial burden to fulfill. However, according to Lefever, that “burden does not involve conquest or vainglory, but a commitment to work for greater peace and freedom in a conflicted world; anything less would be unworthy of a second American Century.”¹ For Lefever and his fellow ideologues, fighting a culture war against so-called revisionist historians, the obliteration or obfuscation of the imperial past is essential to project U. S. geopolitical power for securing “greater peace and freedom in a conflicted world.” But the history of how the U. S. expanded that empire of freedom is replete with anything but peace and hardly absent of conquest and vainglory. In fact, imperial wars and interventions have been integral to the establishment and expansion of the United States and its emergence after World War II as the pre-eminent superpower in the world.

To understand the imperial threads woven throughout the past and the ways in which the United States established its global hegemony is to confront how empire has been embedded in the rise and decline of that hegemony. Part of the process of revealing the patterns of empire is to underscore the degree to which race and gender have intersected with class as integral factors in the construction of empire. In his glowing review of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot, the Wall Street Journal’s resident macho imperialist, Thomas Donnelly, one of the key architects of the Project for a New American Century, the ur-text for the Bush Doctrine of empire-building, conveniently obfuscates the racial and gender dimensions of past savage wars. Donnelly brazenly transcodes Kipling’s iconic imperialist reference to the “white man’s burden” into the “free man’s burden” in order to sanitize the savagery perpetuated by U. S. imperialism.² Nevertheless, Donnelly’s construction of the “free man’s burden” affords an obvious opening to explore, in conjunction with other constituent elements, the racial and gender dimensions of U. S. empire-building.

Of course, the consistency, complexity, and contradictions of those racial and gender dimensions have been susceptible to changing ideological and cultural constructions which, in turn, have been subject to economic, social, and political conditions. On the other hand, a constant thread of “empire as a way of life” could be traced to how the “routine lust for land, markets, or security became justifications for noble rhetoric about prosperity, liberty, and security.”³ Such rhetoric provided the ideological cover for the genocidal displacement of Native Americans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the foreign interventions in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. What follow are brief, and by no means complete or unproblematic, highlights of the racial and gender coding of the imperial ideology underlying U. S. empire-building from its national inception to the present day.⁴ In particular, this overview of imperial constructions is intended not only to underscore the deep roots of empire as a way of life but also to provide insights into the persistence of certain ideological threads in the more recent constructions of U. S. imperialism, especially those under the discursive designation of the American Century. Finally, the chapter will conclude with a brief overview of specific political formations that contest the perpetuation of U. S. imperialism and hegemony.

At the root of the rhetoric of “free men” deployed in the struggle against the British Empire by colonial Americans was the ideology of possessive individualism. That possessive individualism necessarily implied the dispossession of others’ land, rights, and way of life. As William Appleman Williams contends, “Locke said it as well as anyone and more honestly than most: empire as a way of life involves taking wealth and freedom away from others to provide for your own welfare, pleasure, and power.”⁵ In effect, the ideology of possessive individualism inscribed the idea of freedom and the “free man” inside the instrumentality of capital and what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”⁶ Although constrained by property rights and exchange values, the free man was obsessed with self-ownership and its multiple and paradoxical meanings, even when such self-ownership was based on the appropriation of the lands and liberty of others. Thus, the formation of an American empire had at its core an ideological commitment to a particular set of constructions about “free men.”

Most prominent among the paradoxical meanings of “free men” were the universalist pretensions and its white supremacist and patriarchal formulations. In particular, given the subjugation of Africans through disciplinary regimes that obliterated their freedom, liberty, and self-ownership, the ideology of republicanism concerning “natural rights” in a society committed to slavery was obviously an artificial and violent construction. According to Barbara Jean Fields, “racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights.”⁷ Yet, the very same racial ideology was interpenetrated by patriarchal presumptions that infantilized not only Africans, but American Indians. Perceived as unruly and backward children, neither blacks nor American Indians were entitled to the exercise of liberty and certainly not to the possession of land and liberty. Thus, in the early stages of empire-building, a racialized and patriarchal form of internal colonialism developed in tandem with the emergence of free men in the American republic.

The empire-building incorporated into Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy relied upon racial and gender constructions that restricted the definitions of free men while expanding the territory such free men were “entitled” to claim and administer. Jefferson’s commitment to the ideology of self-ownership extended only to whites who could control their savage instincts. In turn, Jefferson’s civilizing mission to turn Indians into willing supporters of possessive individualism by converting them to yeoman farmers guaranteed the actual dispossession of massive amounts of tribal territory. Appropriating the symbol of the “Great White Father,” both Jefferson and Jackson expanded the imperial reach of the United States. Jackson’s indebtedness to slavery, according to Michael Paul Rogin, helped him “define the paternal state in whose name he removed Indians. Marrying paternalism to liberal egalitarian assumptions, he provided a structure for American expansion. But that slave model of paternalism, appropriate enough to Indian removal, contained force and violence at its core.”⁸

Viewing the westward expansion fostered by the policies of Jefferson and Jackson, the French political observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, revealed insights into the ideological dynamics of white approval of the dispossession of Indian lands:

The world belongs to us (white Americans), they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. ... In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.⁹

Tocqueville’s implicit indictment of such reasoning carries with it the further understanding of how such expansion in the creation of a white republic was disconnected from the actual victimization of those who stood in the way. Untroubled by the inevitable march of progress and, seemingly, blessed in the efforts to extend that progress westward, the white patriarchal racial order blissfully undertook its divine mission.

On the other hand, some of those proponents of a slave republic were often wary of expansionist efforts in the nineteenth century. In particular, the debates surrounding annexation efforts during the Mexican War underscored the complexities of deploying racial arguments. While slave apologist Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina favored annexing Texas, he feared absorbing Mexico with its “mixed blood” population. For Calhoun, the Union should be preserved for “the Caucasian race.”¹⁰ Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglas, who opposed both the Mexican War and a slave republic that excluded those of African descent from citizenship, would condemn the war as “disgraceful, cruel and iniquitous ... Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo-Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.”¹¹ Hence, expansion and empire in the early republic raised questions and contradictions that would define and confound the very meanings of freedom.

While slavery would be contested by abolitionists who attacked its violation of the universalist implications of self-ownership, some of those same abolitionists were involved in articulating a racial construction of Anglo-Saxonism that endorsed empire-building as “manifest destiny.” As noted by Richard Slotkin, the abolitionist Theodore Parker “declared that expansion was inevitable as a consequence of racial gifts and that it would bring a regime of Anglo-Saxon dominance.” Slotkin further contends that the

use of “Anglo-Saxon” rather than “White” signaled the emergence of a crucial distinction in the language of American racialism, a need to differentiate not only Whites from Blacks and Indians but to distinguish between different classes of Whites – for example, to mark a difference between Anglo-Americans and the Irish or German immigrants or the Mexicans in Texas and the Far West that would entitle Anglo-Americans to subordinate or subjugate them.¹²

In effect, racial constructions were integral to the incorporation and subordination of others into the empire of free men.

However, for proponents of U. S. “manifest destiny”, conquest of new territories did not mean subordination or subjugation; it meant liberation from tyranny, as well as the enactment of “martial manhood” and “manifest domesticity,” gendered representations of aggressive expansionism.¹³ In the original formulation of Manifest Destiny by John L. O’Sullivan, he points to the “defense of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement,” even as a slaveholding Texas republic where O’Sullivan resides prepares to become the launching pad for the Mexican War.¹⁴ But that war would be waged, as other wars, in the name of rescuing unfree racial others.

The Spanish-American War became another site of “rescue” for the oppressed of Cuba and the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century as the U. S. joined the imperial race for global empire. While racial constructions and masculinist presumptions in Cuba and the Philippines quickly led to exclusionary control in Cuba and brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines, one of the outspoken advocates for U. S. imperial expansion, Theodore Roosevelt, still touted the virtues of empire building for “free men.” According to Roosevelt,

the timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the overcivilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains” – all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag.¹⁵

On the other hand, resistance to the annexation of Cuba and the Philippines, in particular, was often expressed in racial terms. The inhabitants of the Philippines were seen as a “savage” and “alien” race, unfit for incorporation into an Anglo-Saxon culture. While debates over the fate of the Philippines were invariably focused on protecting white civilization in the continental United States, that very civilization was undergoing rapid transformation away from a bastion of Anglo-Saxon privilege. Hence, fears of the immigrant hordes and absorbing foreign peoples at home and abroad led many to reject empire-building in the Philippines. Anti-imperialists from capital and labor, e.g. Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers, decried the erosion of homogeneity and inclusion of “semi-barbaric laborers.”¹⁶

Because of racial and other complications about imperialist interventions, empire-building in the twentieth century reformulated its objectives “through the more abstract geography of the world market rather than through direct political control of territory.”¹⁷ On the other hand, in developing his 1903 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt continued to display masculinist discourse in calling for U. S. intervention as “an international police power” against “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in the general loosening of the ties of civilized society.”¹⁸ Other racial and masculinist constructions were transcoded into abstract references about “making the world safe for democracy.” As noted by Chalmers Johnson,

(Woodrow) Wilson ... provided an idealistic grounding for American imperialism, what in our time would become a “global mission” to “democratize” the world. More than any other figure, he provided the intellectual foundations for an interventionist foreign policy, expressed in humanitarian and democratic rhetoric. Wilson remains the godfather of those contemporary ideologists who justify American imperial power in exporting democracy.¹⁹

For Wilson and the other outspoken advocates of an imperial brotherhood in the twentieth century, the civilizing mission of the United States requires real men to take up the cudgel of war-making, albeit in the case of those imperial presidents in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, minus the overt white supremacist ideology that informed the geopolitical orientation of Roosevelt and Wilson.²⁰ Yet, the racial and masculinist dimensions of U. S. imperialism still persist. As argued by Zillah Eisenstein, “U. S. empire-building Americanizes the globe in its particularly racialized and masculinist form.”²¹ Given the present focus on the Middle East,

the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the world turned over
• Part I Imperial constructions and deconstructions
• Part II Whose globalization?
• Part III Other publics, other worlds
• Conclusion: it's the end of the world as we know it
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index