Is the United States an empire? To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Is the United States an empire? To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Introduction

The English word empire and its cognates are derived from the Latin word imperium, whose literal meaning is the supreme power or command. From very early on, however, empire also came to connote military, legal, and economic control over large swaths of territory encompassing different political and cultural communities. A number of empires have fit this twofold definition, including those of Persia and the ancient Near East, Asia (particularly Chinese and Mongol), India, and Africa, as well as the various Muslim empires and those of the ancient Americas. Nevertheless, when political theorists discuss the topic of the empire, they are almost always referring to Western empires, and that will be the approach taken in this entry. Despite its obvious limitations, a focus on the West is appropriate if we want to sketch the relationship between theory, empire, and the shape of political modernity, which is the goal here. The globalization of Western ideas, institutions, and social practices, often spread by the vehicle of empire, defines many of the most important debates of our time. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the various theoretical critiques of empire without focusing on the West, which is their primary target. There is no single and authoritative definition of empire, and it could even be claimed that any attempt to assert such a definition would itself be an imperializing act. Despite this, differing conceptions of imperialism and its root cognate—empire—do converge on certain principal geopolitical characteristics. Most broadly, imperialism entails the usurpation by an alien power of another's territorial autarchy. This usurpation often takes the form of conquest by force, albeit to varying degrees depending on the place and time. The specifics of alien rule are highly contingent on the cultural practices and material needs of the rulers and those they rule, yielding multiple, varied, and complex “imperial regimes of rule.” One very general illustration of this would be the predilection of European empires for acquiring territory, as contrasted with Southeast Asian empires' focus on the capture and mass relocation of populations. Furthermore, within the European empires there are significant differences between those beholden to monarchical versus republican models of internal governance or between those established chiefly through state military exercises versus those outsourced to private adventurers and mercantile enterprises.

United States imperialism is the process of forcibly expanding state authority over autonomous overseas territory by means of military conquest. More broadly, United States imperialism is the complex of practices through which one population establishes and maintains instrumental control over the spaces, resources, and everyday lives of another. This is also the ideology through which a population is persuaded to support its domination of another and persuades that other to accept such domination. Variations notwithstanding, United States imperialism can be understood through the world-systems concept of intertwined core and periphery regions, according to which global wealth is concentrated in core ...