Empire

At work the other day I made a quip about the “World Bank/IMF Empire”, my point being that those two institutions undeniably trump national sovereignty for the sake of structural economic reform. Lower your trade barriers or we’ll not lend you that extra billion. Don’t even think about nationalizing that oil sector or we’ll refuse to restructure your debt. That sort of thing. I meant it as a witty sort of quip, and a barb against those who think that America is the only bullying empire these days.

I got a strong and impassioned retort. Empire and colonialism, I was told, were about stealing resources (whereas the World Bank/IMF is about development). Empire and colonialism were about moving into a place, sucking up indigenous labor to pull out indigenous materials, and send them away to the imperial center.

My colleague was right historically, if wrong logically. Empire as an idea does not mandate expropriation of resources any more than it does racism—but we’ve arguably never seen an empire that hasn’t been tainted by one or the other. That got me thinking.

The English word empire, dictionary.com tells me, stems by way of French from the Latin imperare, to command. The basic idea of imperium is authority (the first imperator, or emperor, was a military victor). A thing is an empire if it has authority over other things; a nation is an imperial power if it rules other nations.

One nation ruling another isn’t bad in itself, unless you’re an unreformed Wilsonian. Rule needn’t be domination; it can be wise and just governance based on the rule of law. The United States’ direct administration of Japan in the aftermath of World War II might be an example. Only a belief—ideologically charged and historically fraught, I might add—that every single people and nation must rule itself would insist that even a just governance is unjust if provided by another nation.

In historical practice, no nation has weathered well the temptation of so much power. Selfishness, racism, or simple arrogance set it. Good empire, after all, should there ever be such a thing, requires dispassionate, disinterested, humble devotion—and what nation was ever like that? The rule of law is subverted over time, and the governance sours. Maybe empires rule best when their rule is brief. The US was only in Japan as a direct administrator for a few years.

Which bodes well for the imperial phase America seems to be going through. Whether you believe the official rhetoric about our lack of imperial ambition or not, one thing is certain: most regular Americans don’t want an empire. Sooner or later, that’ll flow upward, and the politicians will campaign on promises to bring the boys home and stop spending money building roads in desolate faraway lands. Our empire will not fall like Rome’s or Russia’s, but it will fall in one great act of forgetting. Sooner or later we’ll forget why we tangled ourselves up in the messes of ancient politics and cultures, and we’ll leave.

If we leave before we grow selfish, cynical, and cruel, but after we’ve permanently stamped some American can-do naïveté and love of liberty on the place, it’ll be a good empire.