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When an Empire is not an Empire: The US Case1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Desmond King
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Abstract

This paper critically assesses the description ‘empire’ as applied to the United States in the twentieth century, proposing that US policy makers lack the territorial and occupation motives pre-requisite to being an imperial power. It is proposed that the USA is better described as an empire by accident than by design. Americans’ domestic experience of nation-building within the USA, since the early twentieth century, helps account for their unwillingness to permit the USA to be an imperial nation.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , 2006 , pp. 163 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2006

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on the Inaugural Tocqueville Visiting Scholar Lecture delivered at the Tocqueville Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, in November 2003. The author wishes to thank Professor Sven Steinmo, the centre's director, for the invitation to speak at the centre; and the referees and editors of Government and Opposition for comments on this paper. The author currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for his project on the American State and thanks theTrust for support while revising this paper.

References

2 There is, of course, a substantial historical scholarly literature addressing US imperialism before 1900, a topic beyond the scope of this essay. For valuable accounts see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, New York, Hill and Wang, 1995; Horne, Gerald, ‘Race from Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of “White Supremacy” ’, Diplomatic History, 23 (1999), pp. 437–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarJames H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2002; Anthony J. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999; Andrew Bacevich (ed.), The Imperial Tense, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2003; and William A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, New York, Vintage Books, 1970.

3 There are some ideological and political differences amongst those employing the concept of ‘empire’ to describe US policy at present, determined by whether writers favour or oppose an American imperial role. For a valuable engagement with the literature in these terms see Cox, Michael, ‘Empire by Denial? Debating US Power’, Security Dialogue, 35 (2004), pp. 228–36;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand also Andrew Hurrell, ‘Power and the International System’, Security Dialogue, 35 (2004), pp. 254–7; and also G. John Ikenberry, ‘Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order’, Foreign Affairs, 83: 2 (March/April 2004), pp. 154–62; and Campbell Craig, ‘American Realism versus American Imperialism’, World Politics, 57 (October 2004), pp. 143–71.

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69 Crawford, Neta C., ‘Just War and the U.S. Counterterror War’, Perspectives on Politics, 1 (2003), pp.5–25;CrossRefGoogle Scholarothers see continuity in US policy – Bacevich, American Empire.

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