What They Think of Us (2007)

22 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 needs a big idea. Empires have another potentially beneficial value: they can nurture group tolerance, granting religious pluralism or a special role for diasporas: they also allow for enclaves of autonomy within their extensive spatial domains. They often welcome immigrants , especially those from the peripheries that they dominate. North Africans, Pakistanis, and Latinos have flowed into the countries that have often dominated diem. Nation-states often impose greater conformity on their peoples than do empires. The imperial syndrome also involves a particular relationship of rulers to ruled. An imperial regime searches not for discussion and deliberation, but for approval and acclamation. It measures popularity . The media replace parliamentary debate, and if there is any symptom of empire, it is the attrition of representative bodies. Perhaps they are formally kept in being—even Hider preserved a mock Reichstag . But government by debate loses its integrity and capacity. Granted, these tendencies afflict modern democracies in general, especially when they face complex social choices. Indeed, the attrition of legislative procedures in a democracy usually arises from the complexity of issues; in a proto-imperial situation it results as a response to alleged security dangers. Parliamentary delegates accept the executive 's diagnosis of danger rather than risk being seen as antipatriotic. They pass blanket delegations of power. And even if they insist on legislation, the executive claims the right to interpret the laws that they might pass. Popularity becomes the ultimate measure . If rulers fail in their enterprises, they can lose popularity very quickly. But until public opinion turns adverse, acclamation, photo-ops, spectacular games, and staged pageants replace debate. There are exceptions: rule by committee or by party can continue, as it did in die French Third Republic. But even here the issues that define empire and foreign policy are withdrawn from the arena of debate and discussion. Empire, like authoritarian government more generally, involves the rule of the exception: there is always an exceptional danger that defines imperial politics. The imperial syndrome embodies Carl Schmitt's notion that he who controls the exception in effect controls even democratic politics. The imperial syndrome involves a rampant growth of privilege and inequality that corrupts civic spirit. Empires can be democratic at home—the British expanded the suffrage as they expanded their empire; the French Third Republic was Europe's most democratic regime and it conquered Vietnam and Morocco—but empires cannot let their subject peoples share the same democratic ground rules. And even as they may extend formal equality, and even income equality, toward the bottom, they give die top immense new opportunities for enrichment. This presents grave difficulties of judgment. If millions of middle-income families are each given a small tax rebate, while at the same time several thousand wealthy citizens can each reduce their bill by tens of thousands or more, the redistribution may increase formal measures of equality. But who can doubt which distribution has a greater impact on civic participation? And this is the transaction that the imperial syndrome usually involves: not robbing the poor to pay the rich, although the periphery may be despoiled to pay the center, but fobbing off the humble so that privilege becomes more and more spectacular. For a while, public games, reality TV, philanthropy, and the admirable but hardly taxing charitable deeds of those enriched may counteract the emergence of populist class politics. How long that will last is not at all clear. Let me return to the initial question: Is America an empire? Does it diminish historical understanding , when asked whedier die U.S. is an empire, to say that it has come to behave (at least in recent years and perhaps decades) like an empire and exhibits the syndrome of empire? As a political and moral challenge , perhaps even more than an epistemological one, we must take the current analog of empire very seriously. Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006). 1 I am not trained as a philosopher and the philosophical problems of analogy are difficult. But for some recent discussions I...