12.27.10

Empire vs imperialism

Posted in General at 1:13 pm by nemo

Is American in decline?
We have discussed this issue here many times, and Kennedy’s take is actually good.
The problem here is the ‘decline and fall of the Roman Empire’ analogy applied to American history, which won’t work. It took almost a millennium from the start of the Roman Republic to the ‘fall’ of the Empire, with the transition to Empire in the middle. The discussion confuses ‘empire’ in the sense of the Roman brand and ‘imperialistic construct’, often economic, which characterizes modern systems. Such constructs can have a moderate or democratic government, often waning under the influence of imperial corruptions. Unfortunately the usage is not consistent, and since the British Empire concept uses the term ‘empire’, our distinction won’t make it. But it helps to distinguish the cases in one’s mind.
The point is to see the right analogy: the case of ancient Athens as a propsperous enonomic imperialism that came to dominate its siblings. Followed by its fall after the Peloponesian War.
The perspective of Kennedy is reasonable: the USA is destroying itself, as did Athens, in its imperialistic nexus. It needs to abdicate this imperialism before it is too late, and to recover the integrity of its beginning. But the American system unfortunately slide into empire from the moment it began to expand westward, in the process losing control of the originally compassionate treatment of Indians. The tone of imperialism seeped in from the start.
Then the American system became the policeman of the atomic weapons technology, and it a field where things could have been worse, the coming of imperialism was a step claiming global security, etc, etc… It can be argued it was sacrificed on the altar of global cop for a greater good. I find that debatable, but…
In any case it is good to study the eonic effect (history-and-evolution.com) to see in perspective the difference between Athenian imperialism, the Roman Republic, soon to become imperialistic, and the Roman Empire, which followed the loss of republicanism. These issues have an historical meaning not only in a semantics of political systems, but in the absolute chronology of the evolution of civilization as such, with the onset of a new epoch, often dubbed the Axial Age, just at the time of the Roman Republic. A similar analog, for readers of World History and The Eonic Effect to explore, lies in the rise of the modern democratic revolutions in their absolute timing, which, surprise!, is not chance.

Whatever the case the USA is in deep trouble. Whether the first stages of a republic becoming an imperialism will degenerate into a full empire remains to be seen.

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