Empirehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmpireAn empire is defined as "an aggregate of nations or people ruled over by an emperor or other powerful sovereign or government, usually a territory of greater extent than a kingdom, as the former British Empire, French Empire, Russian Empire, Byzantine Empire or Roman Empire".[1]
An empire can be made solely of contiguous territories such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or of territories far remote from the homeland, such as a colonial empire. Aside from the more formal usage, the term "empire" can also be used to refer to a large-scale business enterprise (e.g. a transnational corporation), a political organisation controlled by a single individual (a political boss) or a group (political bosses).[2] The term "empire" is associated with other words such as imperialism, colonialism, and globalization. Empire is often used to describe a displeasure to overpowering situations.[3]
An imperial political structure can be established and maintained in two ways: (i) as a territorial empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power. The former method provides greater tribute and direct political control, yet limits further expansion because it absorbs military forces to fixed garrisons. The latter method provides less tribute and indirect control, but avails military forces for further expansion.[4] Territorial empires (e.g. the Mongol Empire and Median Empire) tend to be contiguous areas. The term, on occasion, has been applied to maritime empires or thalassocracies, (e.g. the Athenian and British empires) with looser structures and more scattered territories. Empires are usually larger than kingdoms.
This aspiration to universality resulted in conquest by converting ‘outsiders’ or ‘inferiors’ into the colonialized religion. This association of nationality and race became complex and has had a more intense drive for expansion.[5]
DefinitionAn empire is a multi-ethnic or multinational state with political and/or military dominion of populations who are culturally and ethnically distinct from the imperial (ruling) ethnic group and its culture.[6] This is in contrast to a federation, which is an extensive state voluntarily composed of autonomous states and peoples. An empire is a large political party who rules over territories outside of its original borders.
Definitions of what physically and politically constitute an empire vary. It might be a state affecting imperial policies or a particular political structure. Empires are typically formed from diverse ethnic, national, cultural, and religious components.[7] Empire and colonialism are used to refer to relationships between powerful state or society versus a less powerful one.
Tom Nairn and Paul James define empires as polities that "extend relations of power across territorial spaces over which they have no prior or given legal sovereignty, and where, in one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces for the purpose of extracting or accruing value".[8]
Sometimes, an empire is a semantic construction, such as when a ruler assumes the title of "emperor". That ruler's nation logically becomes an "empire", despite having no additional territory or hegemony. Examples of this form of empire are the Central African Empire, or the Korean Empire proclaimed in 1897 when Korea, far from gaining new territory, was on the verge of being annexed by the Empire of Japan, the last to use the name officially. Among the last of the empires in the 20th century were the Central African Empire, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Manchukuo, the German Empire, and Korea.
The terrestrial empire's maritime analogue is the thalassocracy, an empire composed of islands and coasts which are accessible to its terrestrial homeland, such as the Athenian-dominated Delian League.
Furthermore, empires can expand by both land and sea. Stephen Howe notes that empires by land can be characterized by expansion over terrain, “extending directly outwards from the original frontier” [9] while an empire by sea can be characterized by colonial expansion and empire building “by an increasingly powerful navy”.[10]
CharacteristicsEmpires originated as different types of states, although they commonly began as powerful monarchies. Ideas about empires have changed over time, ranging from public approval to universal distaste. Empires are built out of separate units with some kind of diversity – ethnic, national, cultural, religious – and imply at least some inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Without this inequality, the system would be seen as commonwealth.
Many empires were the result of military conquest, incorporating the vanquished states into a political union, but imperial hegemony can be established in other ways. The Athenian Empire, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire developed at least in part under elective auspices. The Empire of Brazil declared itself an empire after separating from the Portuguese Empire in 1822. France has twice transitioned from being called the French Republic to being called the French Empire while it retained an overseas empire.
Weaker states may seek annexation into the empire. An example is the bequest of Pergamon to the Roman Empire by Attalus III. The Unification of Germany as the empire accreted to the Prussian metropole was less a military conquest of the German states than their political divorce from the Austrian Empire. Having convinced the other states of its military prowess, and having excluded the Austrians, Prussia dictated the terms of imperial membership.
Politically, it was typical for either a monarchy or an oligarchy, rooted in the original core territory of the empire, to continue to dominate. If governmental authority was maintained by controlling water supplies, vital to colonial subjects, such régimes were called hydraulic empires.
Europeans began applying the designation of "empire" to non-European monarchies, such as the Qing Empire and the Mughal Empire, as well as the Maratha Empire, eventually leading to the looser denotations applicable to any political structure meeting the criteria of "imperium".
Some empires styled themselves as having greater size, scope, and power than the territorial, politico-military, and economic facts support. As a consequence, some monarchs assumed the title of "emperor" (or its corresponding translation, tsar, empereur, kaiser,shah etc.) and renamed their states as "The Empire of ...."
Empires were seen as an expanding power, administration, ideas and beliefs followed by cultural habits from place to place. Empires tend to impose their culture on the subject states to strengthen the imperial structure. This can have notable effects that outlast the empire itself, both positive and negative.
Empire versus nation stateEmpires have been the dominant international organization in world history:
The fact that tribes, peoples, and nations have made empires points to a fundamental political dynamic, one that helps explain why empires cannot be confined to a particular place or era but emerged and reemerged over thousands of years and on all continents.[53]
Empires … can be traced as far back as the recorded history goes; indeed, most history is the history of empires... It is the nation-state—an essentially 19th-century ideal—that is the historical novelty and that may yet prove to be the more ephemeral entity.[54]
Our field’s fixation on the Westphalian state has tended to obscure the fact that the main actors in global politics, for most of time immemorial, have been empires rather than states ... In fact, it is a very distorted view of even the Westphalian era not to recognize that it was always at least as much about empires as it was states. Almost all of the emerging European states no sooner began to consolidate than they were off on campaigns of conquest and commerce to the farthest reaches of the globe… Ironically, it was the European empires that carried the idea of the sovereign territorial state to the rest of the world…[55]
Empire has been the historically predominant form of order in world politics. Looking at a time frame of several millennia, there was no global anarchic system until the European explorations and subsequent imperial and colonial ventures connected disparate regional systems, doing so approximately 500 years ago. Prior to this emergence of a global-scope system, the pattern of world politics was characterized by regional systems. These reginal systems were initially anarchic and marked by high levels of military competition. But almost universally, they tended to consolidate into regional empires… Thus it was empires—not anarchic state systems—that typically dominated the regional systems in all parts of the world… Within this global pattern of regional empires, European political order was distinctly anomalous because it persisted so long as an anarchy.[56]
Similarly, Anthony Pagden, Eliot A. Cohen, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper estimate that “empires have always been more frequent, more extensive political and social forms than tribal territories or nations have ever been.”[57] Many empires endured for centuries, while the age of the ancient Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese Empires is counted in millennia. “Most people throughout history have lived under imperial rule."[58]
Empires have played a long and critical part in human history... [Despite] efforts in words and wars to put national unity at the center of political imagination, imperial politics, imperial practices, and imperial cultures have shaped the world we live in ... Rome was evoked as a model of splendor and order into the Twentieth century and beyond… By comparison, the nation-state appears as a blip on the historical horizon, a state form that emerged recently from under imperial skies and whose hold on the world's political imagination may well prove partial or transitory… The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary, and inevitable….[59]
Political scientist Hedley Bull wrote that "in the broad sweep of human history…the form of states system has been the exception rather than the rule."[60] His colleague Robert Gilpin confirmed this conclusion for the pre-modern period:
The history of interstate relations was largely that of successive great empires. The pattern of international political change during the millennia of the pre-modern era has been described as an imperial cycle… World politics was characterized by the rise and decline of powerful empires, each of which in turn unified and ordered its respective international system. The recurrent pattern in every civilization of which we have knowledge was for one state to unify the system under its imperial domination. The propensity toward universal empire was the principal feature of pre-modern politics.[61]
Historian Michael Doyle who undertook an extensive research on empires extended the observation into the modern era:
Empires have been the key actors in world politics for millennia. They helped create the interdependent civilizations of all the continents… Imperial control stretches through history, many say, to the present day. Empires are as old as history itself… They have held the leading role ever since.[62]
Universal empireExpert on warfare Quincy Wright generalized on what he called "universal empire"—empire unifying all the contemporary system:
Balance of power systems have in the past tended, through the process of conquest of lesser states by greater states, towards reduction in the number of states involved, and towards less frequent but more devastating wars, until eventually a universal empire has been established through the conquest by one of all those remaining.[63]
German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck finds that the macro-historic process of imperial expansion gave rise to global history in which the formations of universal empires were most significant stages.[64] A later group of political scientists, working on the phenomenon of the current unipolarity, in 2007 edited research on several pre-modern civilizations by experts in respective fields. The overall conclusion was that the balance of power was inherently unstable order and usually soon broke in favor of imperial order.[65] Yet before the advent of the unipolarity, world historian Arnold Toynbee and political scientist Martin Wight had drawn the same conclusion with an unambiguous implication for the modern world:
When this [imperial] pattern of political history is found in the New World as well as in the Old World, it looks as if the pattern must be intrinsic to the political history of societies of the species we call civilizations, in whatever part of the world the specimens of this species occur. If this conclusion is warranted, it illuminates our understanding of civilization itself.[66]
Most states systems have ended in universal empire, which has swallowed all the states of the system. The examples are so abundant that we must ask two questions: Is there any states system which has not led fairly directly to the establishment of a world empire? Does the evidence rather suggest that we should expect any states system to culminate in this way? …It might be argued that every state system can only maintain its existence on the balance of power, that the latter is inherently unstable, and that sooner or later its tensions and conflicts will be resolved into a monopoly of power.[67]
The earliest thinker to approach the phenomenon of universal empire from a theoretical point of view was Polybius (2:3):
In previous times events in the world occurred without impinging on one another ... [Then] history became a whole, as if a single body; events in Italy and Libya came to be enmeshed with those in Asia and Greece, and everything gets directed towards one single goal.
Fichte, having witnessed the battle at Jena in 1806 when Napoleon overwhelmed Prussia, described what he perceived as a deep historical trend:
There is necessary tendency in every cultivated State to extend itself generally... Such is the case in Ancient History … As the States become stronger in themselves and cast off that [Papal] foreign power, the tendency towards a Universal Monarchy over the whole Christian World necessarily comes to light… This tendency ... has shown itself successively in several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, and since the fall of the Papacy, it has become the sole animating principle of our History... Whether clearly or not—it may be obscurely—yet has this tendency lain at the root of the undertakings of many States in Modern Times... Although no individual Epoch may have contemplated this purpose, yet is this the spirit which runs through all these individual Epochs, and invisibly urges them onward.[68]
Fichte's later compatriot, Geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769 –1859), in the mid-Nineteenth century observed a macro-historic trend of imperial growth in both Hemispheres: "Men of great and strong minds, as well as whole nations, acted under influence of one idea, the purity of which was utterly unknown to them."[69] The imperial expansion filled the world circa 1900.[70][71] Two famous contemporary observers—Frederick Turner and Halford Mackinder described the event and drew implications, the former predicting American overseas expansion[72] and the latter stressing that the world empire is now in sight.[73]
Friedrich Ratzel, writing at the same time, observed that the “drive toward the building of continually larger states continues throughout the entirety of history” and is active in the present.[74] He drew "Seven Laws of Expansionism." His seventh law stated: "The general trend toward amalgamation transmits the tendency of territorial growth from state to state and increases the tendency in the process of transmission." He commented on this law to make its meaning clear: "There is on this small planet sufficient space for only one great state."[75]
Two other contemporaries—Kang Yu-wei and George Vacher de Lapouge—stressed that imperial expansion cannot indefinitely proceed on the definite surface of the globe and therefore world empire is imminent. Kang Yu-wei in 1885 believed that the imperial trend will culminate in the contest between Washington and Berlin[76] and Vacher de Lapouge in 1899 estimated that the final contest will be between Russia and America in which America is likely to triumph.[77]
The above envisaged contests indeed took place, known to us as World War I and II. Writing during the Second, political scientists Derwent Whittlesey, Robert Strausz-Hupé and John H. Herz concluded: “Now that the earth is at last parceled out, consolidation has commenced.”[78] In "this world of fighting superstates there could be no end to war until one state had subjected all others, until world empire had been achieved by the strongest. This undoubtedly is the logical final stage in the geopolitical theory of evolution."[79]
The world is no longer large enough to harbor several self-contained powers ... The trend toward world domination or hegemony of a single power is but the ultimate consummation of a power-system engrafted upon an otherwise integrated world.[80]
Writing in the last year of the War, German Historian Ludwig Dehio drew a similar conclusion:
[T]he old European tendency toward division is now being thrust aside by the new global trend toward unification. And the onrush of this trend may not come to rest until it has asserted itself throughout our planet… The global order still seems to be going through its birth pangs … With the last tempest barely over, a new one is gathering.[81]
The year after the War and in the first year of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein and British Philosopher Bertrand Russell, known as prominent pacifists, outlined for the near future a perspective of world empire (world government established by force). Einstein believed that, unless world government is established by agreement, an imperial world government would come by war or wars.[82] Russell expected a third World War to result in a world government under the empire of the United States.[83] Three years later, another prominent pacifist, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, generalized on the ancient Empires of Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Greece to imply for the modern world: “The analogy in present global terms would be the final unification of the world through the preponderant power of either America or Russia, whichever proved herself victorious in the final struggle.”[84] In 1951, Hans Morgenthau concluded that the “best” outcome of World War III would be world empire:
Today war has become an instrument of universal destruction, an instrument that destroys the victor and the vanquished … At worst, victor and loser would be undistinguishable under the leveling impact of such a catastrophe… At best, the destruction on one side would not be quite as great as on the other; the victor would be somewhat better off than the loser and would establish, with the aid of modern technology, his domination over the world.[85]
Expert on earlier civilizations, Toynbee, further developed the subject of World War III leading to world empire:
The outcome of the Third World War ... seemed likely to be the imposition of an ecumenical peace of the Roman kind by the victor whose victory would leave him with a monopoly on the control of atomic energy in his grasp... This denouement was foreshadowed, not only by present facts, but by historical precedents, since, in the histories of other civilizations, the time of troubles had been apt to culminate in the delivery of a knock-out blow resulting in the establishment of a universal state...[86]
The year this volume of A Study of History was published, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced "a knock-out blow" as an official doctrine, a detailed Plan was elaborated and Fortune magazine mapped the design.[87] Section VIII, “Atomic Armaments,” of the famous National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), approved by President Harry Truman in 1951, uses the term “blow” 17 times, mostly preceded by such adjectives as “powerful,” “overwhelming,” or “crippling.” Another term applied by the strategists was “Sunday punch.”[88]
One of the most sweeping universal conquests in world history was performed by Qin in 230-221 BC. Chinese classic Sima Qian (d. 86 BC) described the event (6:234): "Qin raised troops on grand scale" and "the whole world celebrated a great bacchanal." Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation criticized to an assembled group of SAC officers their war plan (SIOP-62). He did not use the term bacchanal but he invented on the occasion an associating word: "Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a wargasm!"[89] History did not completely repeat itself but it passed close.
Circumscription theoryAccording to the circumscription theory of Robert Carneiro, "the more sharply circumscribed area, the more rapidly it will become politically unified."[90] The Empires of Egypt,[91][92] China[93] and Japan are named the most durable political structures in human history. Correspondingly, these are the three most circumscribed civilizations in human history. The Empires of Egypt (established by Narmer c. 3000 BC) and China (established by Cheng in 221 BC) endured for over two millennia. German Sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck, criticizing the Western idea of progress, emphasized that China and Egypt remained at one particular stage of development for millennia. This stage was universal empire. The development of Egypt and China came to a halt once their empires “reached the limits of their natural habitat."[94] Sinology does not recognize the Eurocentric view of the “inevitable” imperial fall;[95][96] Egyptology[97][98] and Japanology pose equal challenges.
Carneiro explored the Bronze Age civilizations. Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little and William Wohlforth researched the next three millennia, comparing eight civilizations. They conclude: The "rigidity of the borders" contributed importantly to hegemony in every concerned case.[99] Hence, "when the system’s borders are rigid, the probability of hegemony is high."[100]
The circumscription theory was stressed in the comparative studies of the Roman and Chinese Empires. The circumscribed Chinese Empire recovered from all falls, while the fall of Rome, by contrast, was fatal. "What counteracted this [imperial] tendency in Europe … was a countervailing tendency for the geographical boundaries of the system to expand." If "Europe had been a closed system, some great power would eventually have succeeded in establishing absolute supremacy over the other states in the region."[101]
The ancient Chinese system was relatively enclosed, whereas the European system began to expand its reach to the rest of the world from the onset of system formation… In addition, overseas provided outlet for territorial competition, thereby allowing international competition on the European continent to … trump the ongoing pressure toward convergence.[102]
His 1945 book on the four centuries of the European power struggle, Ludwig Dehio titled The Precarious Balance. He explained the durability of the European states system by its overseas expansion: “Overseas expansion and the system of states were born at the same time; the vitality that burst the bounds of the Western world also destroyed its unity.”[103] Edward Carr causally linked the end of the overseas outlet for imperial expansion and World Wars. In the Nineteenth century, he wrote during the Second World War, imperialist wars were waged against “primitive” peoples. “It was silly for European countries to fight against one another when they could still … maintain social cohesion by continuous expansion in Asia and Africa. Since 1900, however, this has no longer been possible: “the situation has radically changed.” Now wars are between “imperial powers."[104] John H. Herz outlined one “chief function” of the overseas expansion and the impact of its end:
[A] European balance of power could be maintained or adjusted because it was relatively easy to divert European conflicts into overseas directions and adjust them there. Thus the openness of the world contributed to the consolidation of the territorial system. The end of the ‘world frontier’ and the resulting closedness of an interdependent world inevitably affected the system’s effectiveness.[105]
Some later commentators drew similar conclusions:
For some commentators, the passing of the Nineteenth century seemed destined to mark the end of this long era of European empire building. The unexplored and unclaimed “blank” spaces on the world map were rapidly diminishing ... and the sense of “global closure” prompted an anxious fin-de-siècle debate about the future of the great empires... The “closure” of the global imperial system implied ... the beginning of a new era of intensifying inter-imperial struggle along borders that now straddled the globe.[106]
The opportunity for any system to expand in size seems almost a necessary condition for it to remain balanced, at least over the long haul. Far from being impossible or exceedingly improbable, systemic hegemony is likely under two conditions: "when the boundaries of the international system remain stable and no new major powers emerge from outside the system."[107] With the system becoming global, further expansion is precluded. The geopolitical condition of "global closure"[108] will remain to the end of history. Since "the contemporary international system is global, we can rule out the possibility that geographic expansion of the system will contribute to the emergence of a new balance of power, as it did so many times in the past."[109] As Quincy Wright had put it, "this process can no longer continue without interplanetary wars.”[110]
One of leading experts on world-system theory, Christopher Chase-Dunn, noted that the circumscription theory is applicable for the global system, since the global system is circumscribed.[111][112] In fact, within less than a century of its circumscribed existence the global system overcame the centuries-old balance of power and reached the unipolarity. Given “constant spatial parameters” of the global system, its unipolar structure is neither historically unusual nor theoretically surprising.[113]
PresentChalmers Johnson argues that the US globe-girding network of hundreds of military bases already represents a global empire in its initial form:
For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the homeland usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so. Commonly, preparedness for a possible resumption of hostilities will be invoked. Over time, if a nation’s aims become imperial, the bases form the skeleton of an empire.[114]
Simon Dalby associates the network of bases with the Roman imperial system:
Looking at these impressive facilities which reproduce substantial parts of American suburbia complete with movie theatres and restaurant chains, the parallels with Roman garrison towns built on the Rhine, or on Hadrian’s wall in England, where the remains are strikingly visible on the landscape, are obvious … Less visible is the sheer scale of the logistics to keep garrison troops in residence in the far-flung reaches of empire ... That [military] presence literally builds the cultural logic of the garrison troops into the landscape, a permanent reminder of imperial control.[115]
Kenneth Pomeranz and Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson share the above-cited views: "With American military bases in over 120 countries, we have hardly seen the end of empire.” This “vast archipelago of US military bases … far exceeds 19th-century British ambitions. Britain’s imperium consisted of specific, albeit numerous, colonies and clients; the American imperial vision is much more global…”[116]
Conventional maps of US military deployments understate the extent of America's military reach. A Defense Department map of the world, which shows the areas of responsibility of the five major regional commands, suggests that America's sphere of military influence is now literally global … The regional combatant commanders—the 'pro-consuls' of this imperium—have responsibility for swaths of territory beyond the wildest imaginings of their Roman predecessors.[117]
Another Harvard Historian Charles S. Maier opens his Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors with these words: "What a substratum for empire! Compared with which, the foundation of the Macedonian, the Roman and the British, sink into insignificance."[118]
One of the most accepted distinctions between earlier empires and the American Empire is the latter’s “global” or “planetary” scope.[119] French former Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine wondered: "The situation is unprecedented: What previous empire subjugated the entire world...?"[120] Historian Paul Kennedy, who made his name in the 1980s with his prediction of the imminent US “imperial overstretch,” in 2002 acknowledged about the present world system:
Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Napoleon’s France and Philip II’s Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne’s empire was merely western European in stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is … no comparison.[121]
Walter Russell Mead observes that the United States attempts to repeate “globally” what the ancient empires of Egypt, China and Rome had each accomplished on a regional basis.[122] Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Zygmunt Bauman, concludes that due to its planetary dimension, the new empire cannot be drawn on a map:
The new ‘empire’ is not an entity that could be drawn on a map… Drawing a map of the empire would also be a pointless exercise because the most conspicuously ‘imperial’ trait of the new empire’s mode of being consists in viewing and treating the whole of the planet … as a potential grazing ground…[123]
Times Atlas of Empires numbers 70 empires in the world history. Niall Ferguson lists numerous parallels between them and the United States. He concludes: “To those who would still insist on American exceptionalism, the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other 69 empires.”[124] Fareed Zakaria stressed one element not exceptional for the American Empire--the concept of exceptionalism. All dominant empires thought they were special.[125]
FutureIn 1945, Historian Ludwig Dehio predicted global unification due to the circumscription of the global system, although he did not use this term. Being global, the system can neither expand nor be subject to external intrusion as the European states system had been for centuries:
In all previous struggles for supremacy, attempts to unite the European peninsula in a single state have been condemned to failure primarily through the intrusion of new forces from outside the old Occident. The Occident was an open area. But the globe was not, and, for that very reason, ultimately destined to be unified… And this very process [of unification] was clearly reflected in both World Wars.[126]
Fifteen years later, Dehio confirmed his hypothesis: The European system owed its durability to its overseas outlet. “But how can a multiple grouping of world states conceivably be supported from outside in the framework of a finite globe?”[127]
During the same time, Quincy Wright developed a similar concept. Balance-of-power politics has aimed less at preserving peace than at preserving the independence of states and preventing the development of world empire. In the course of history, the balance of power repeatedly reemerged, but on ever-wider scale. Eventually, the scale became global. Unless we proceed to “interplanetary wars,” this pattern can no longer continue. In spite of significant reversals, the “trend towards world unity” can “scarcely be denied.” World unity appears to be “the limit toward which the process of world history seems to tend.”[128]
Five scholars—Hornell Hart,[129] Raoul Naroll,[130] Louis Morano,[131] Rein Taagepera[132] and the author of the circumscription theory Robert Carneiro[133][134]—researched expanding imperial cycles. They worked with historical atlases but the advent of YouTube provided us with a better visualization.[70][71] They reached the same conclusion—that a world empire is pre-determined—and attempted to estimate the time of its appearance. Naroll and Carneiro found that this time is close at hand: around the year 2200 and 2300 respectively.
The founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, writing yet in 1943, drew a more specific and immediate future imperial project: After the War America is bound “to take over the command of the skies.” The danger of “the utter annihilation of all enemy towns and lands” can “only be prevented by the air superiority of a single power … America’s air role is the only alternative to intercontinental wars.” Despite his outstanding anti-imperialism, Coudenhove-Kalergi detailed:
No imperialism, but technical and strategic problems of security urge America to rule the skies of the globe, just as Britain during the last century ruled the seas of the world… Pacifists and anti-imperialists will be shocked by this logic. They will try to find an escape. But they will try in vain… At the end of the war the crushing superiority of American plane production will be an established fact… The solution of the problem … is by no means ideal, nor even satisfactory. But it is the minor evil…[135]
Coudenhove-Kalergi envisaged a kind of Pax Americana modeled on “Pax Romana”:
During the third century BC the Mediterranean world was divided on five great powers—Roma and Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt. The balance of power led to a series of wars until Rome emerged the queen of the Mediterranean and established an incomparable era of two centuries of peace and progress, the ‘Pax Romana’… It may be that America’s air power could again assure our world, now much smaller than the Mediterranean at that period, two hundred years of peace…[136]
This period would be necessary transitory stage before World State is eventually established, though he did not specify how the last transformation is expected to occur. Coudenhove-Kalergi's follower in the teleological theory of World State, Toynbee, supposed the traditional way of universal conquest and emphasized that the world is ripe for conquest: "…Hitler's eventual failure to impose peace on the world by the force of arms was due, not to any flaw in his thesis that the world was ripe for conquest, but to an accidental combination of incidental errors in his measures…" But "in falling by so narrow a margin to win the prize of world-dominion for himself, Hitler had left the prize dangling within the reach of any successor capable of pursuing the same aims of world-conquest with a little more patience, prudence, and tact." With his "revolution of destruction," Hitler has performed the "yeoman service" for "some future architect of a Pax Ecumenica... For a post-Hitlerian empire-builder, Hitler derelict legacy was a gift of the Gods."[137]
The next “architect of a Pax Ecumenica,” known more commonly as Pax Americana, demonstrated “more patience, prudence, and tact.” Consequently, as President Dwight Eisenhower put it, the NATO allies became “almost psychopathic” whenever anyone talked about a US withdrawal.[138] According to a much debated thesis, the United States became “empire by invitation.”[139] The period discussed in the thesis (1945-1952) ended precisely the year Toynbee theorized on "some future architect of a Pax Ecumenica.”
Dissociating America from Rome, Eisenhower gave a pessimistic forecast. In 1951, before he became President, he had written on West Europe: “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers. What we must do is to assist these [West European] peoples.” Two years later, he wrote: When it was decided to deploy US divisions to Europe, no one had “for an instant” thought that they would remain there for “several decades”—that the United States could “build a sort of Roman Wall with its own troops and so protect the world.”[140]
Eisenhower assured Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev on Berlin in 1959: “Clearly we did not contemplate 50 years in occupation there.” It lasted, remarks Marc Trachtenberg, from July 1945 to September 1994, 10 months short of 50 years.[141] Notably, when the US troops eventually left, they left eastward. Confirming the theory of the “empire by invitation,” with their first opportunity East European states extended the “invitation.”
Chalmers Johnson regards the global military reach of the United States as empire in its “initial” form.[142] Dimitri Simes finds that most of the world sees the United States as a "nascent" imperial power.[143] Some scholars concerned how this empire would look in its ultimate form. The ultimate form of empire was described by Michael Doyle in his Empires. It is empire in which its two main components—the ruling core and the ruled periphery—merged to form one integrated whole. At this stage the empire as defined ceases to exist and becomes world state. Doyle examplifies the transformation on the case of the Roman Emperor Caracalla whose legislation in AD 212 extended the Roman citizenship to all inhabitants of the Mediterranean world.[144]
International Relations scholar Alexander Wendt in his 2003 article “Why the World State is Inevitable…” supposed the pathway of universal conquest and subsequent consolidation provided the conquering power recognizes all conquered members.[145] Replying on criticism, Wendt invoked the example of the Roman Empire: A "world empire would be an unstable equilibrium, still subject to the struggle for recognition." However, conquest can "produce a proper ‘state’ if, as a result of internal reform, the world empire eventually recognizes all of its members (like the Roman Empire did, for example).”[146]
To the case of Caracalla, Toynbee added the Abbasid cosmopolitan reformation of 750 AD. Both "were good auguries for the prospect that, in a post-Modern chapter of Western history, a supranational commonwealth originally based on the hegemony of a paramount power over its satellites might eventually be put on the sounder basis of a constitutional partnership in which all the people of all the partner states would have their fare share in the conduct of common affairs.”[147]
Historian Maks Ostrovski finds above mentioned cosmopolitan reformations to be the characteristic fate of persistent empires. When such a reformation occurs in our world, he writes, the green card would be abolished since all earth inhabitants would have it by birth. This cosmopolitan World State, as the records of earlier circumscribed civilizations suggest, will last millennia.[148]
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Topic: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! (Read 976622 times)
