Global Policy Forum

By Lee Siegel*

That stubborn imperialist term appears timely today, but is nothing more than an all-purpose banality.

I am writing this in New York, the Empire state, where I happen to be late for lunch with a friend at the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue—though I'm still digesting the Imperial Chicken I consumed last night at Empire Szechuan—after which I have to run to my bank (right across the street from the Empire State Building) and then to Empire Office Equipment to buy a new desk chair.

In other words, a sure sign that a highly charged concept has become outmoded, or irrelevant, is when the term signifying it becomes downgraded into a harmless, all-purpose banality. You can bet that in Queen Victoria's imperialist England, no one was hawking Empire Pudding. Empire was then a living, unfolding, unresolved reality. And it was also a turbulent social issue.

Then why, you might ask, now that empire has become an irrelevant historical fact, are pundits, intellectuals and sundry other commentators debating whether America is an empire or should be an empire, or whether the United States has what it takes to succeed as an empire? By using the word "empire" as if it were a living possibility, even people opposed to the idea of an American imperialism make it easier for the pro-empire crowd to make their fantastical case. But a country doesn't decide to be an empire the way a person decides to wear black rather than brown shoes to a party.

From our historical vantage point, we can argue the moral and political benefits of an imperialist policy because imperialism came to an end, thus presenting a complete story for later generations to read and make sense of. But for the European powers that were engaged in empire-building, empire wasn't an issue to be debated. It was a chaotic, incalculable course of life that the years, and the decades, and the centuries drew them further and further along. Historians regard the late 15th century as the starting point of European imperialism. Yet the British, the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese of that time thought they were expanding their commercial frontiers into sparsely populated parcels of land unattached to a national entity. Conquest, the slave trade, colonial administration, all the structures and practices of imperialism came later, step by unforeseeable step.

But here we are, arguing about whether America should be an empire as if we were discussing this or that type of repair with our car mechanic. Should we be an empire today or not? For that matter, should we make Iraq a liberal democracy, and should we do that this week or over the weekend? Options, options, options. It is like the star of "The Bachelor" trying to decide on a girl. No, even better—it is the "CSI" theory of history. We suffer the delusion that with the right technology, we can cure a country's tragic history the way the brainy detectives on that series solve a crime.

Lacking the slightest sense of what the United States will look like in the future, it's natural that in such a suddenly confusing time we would reach back to a familiar framework from the past. But not only is the debate about the dead concept of empire delusional, it's dangerously misleading. By assuming that we have the option of becoming or not becoming an empire, we construct a fantasy of American power and blind ourselves to American weakness. When the next jolt comes from the outer, non-American world, we are not going to know what hit us.

Yet "empire" is a stubborn notion. Neither the left nor the right wants to give it up. For the right, it summons up a Cecil B. DeMillean grandeur: pomp and ceremony, good manners, waltzes, plumes. For the left, it produces images of oppression on an imposing, almost hysterical scale. But what the United States really practices is the opportunism that Thucydides way back in the fifth century B.C. described as the fundamental, if hidden, policy of all nations. To speak of America as opportunistic, though, sounds pedestrian, demeaning and unpatriotic. So rather than discuss the pros and cons, the motives and reasons that surround this particular opportunity in Iraq—and whether it's an opportunity at all—one can get a lot more air time enlarging opinions into historical proportions by presenting them against the panoramic backdrop of Victorian England.

And strangely, the imperial model people refer to is almost exclusively England. To listen to the empire-debaters, you'd think there never was a Mongolian or an Athenian or a Roman or an Ottoman or a Soviet empire. Not surprisingly, in this country so enamored of experts, a British historian named Niall Ferguson is leading the debate, for who knows better about England's foreign policy in the 18th and 19th centuries than an Englishman living right here with us in present-day New York!

Like so many British academics and journalists, Ferguson has a teleological nose for power's beckoning behind. His very recent book, "Empire," argues lopsidedly that England's imperial policies had thoroughly beneficial effects on its subject populations. In an article for The New York Times Magazine in April, he pushed his myopic thesis further. Not only did he complain that America's "young elites," unlike imperial England's, would rather "be a CEO" than go off and rule another country, he also derived disastrous consequences from the fact that the American soldiers in Iraq were not elite at all. No, he wrote, they "are first-generation immigrants to the United States—men like Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse." What a nonelite-sounding name. Though men like Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse were still getting their youthful heads blown off by the subject population, no one made a peep of protest against Ferguson's unlovely attitudes. Nor did anyone observe that imperial England's "elite" colonial administrators were actually often venal, soused-up layabouts who couldn't have gotten a job selling beach umbrellas in Brighton. In culturally insecure America, nothing has a more imperial effect than a cute British accent.

We are looking at the Great Empire Debate from the wrong perspective. It is not a prescriptive argument; rather, it could well be a symptomatic phenomenon. Empires broke up when home governments liberalized their politics. Rome's dominions contracted as Diocletian implemented political and social reforms; in modern times, the first world war's destruction of the old, rigid social order, followed by the rise of left-of-center governments after World War II finished off the last European empires. America, on the other hand, is—historically speaking—the most liberal society that ever existed. No empire ever came out of a politics based so radically on individual freedom.

But since empire depends on a rigid social hierarchy in the home country, as well as on implicit or explicit assumptions about the ruling nation's (i.e., that nation's ruling-class') moral superiority, we should be debating not empire but the meaning underlying the anachronistic debate about empire. Maybe then, instead of indulging in the videogame fantasy of deciding what type of history we want, we can catch a glimpse of what history is deciding it wants for us.

About the Author: Lee Siegel is a contributing editor of Harper's, the television critic for The New Republic and a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is writing a book about New York.

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