Imperial Trauma: The Powerlessness of the Powerful: Part 1: Introduction: Some Difficulties of Empire--Past, Present, and Future

Introduction: Some Difficulties of Empire—Past, Present, and Future

Empire, Joseph Nye remarked recently, "has come out of the closet"—and superficially this appears to be the case. The United States's deployment of its unparalleled military power to enforce regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with shifts in political language and style in Washington (and to a lesser degree in London), have brought into wider public consciousness arguments and anxieties that have been building up for some time.¹ Scarcely a week goes by now without the appearance of a new book, newspaper article, conference, speech, or television discussion on whether America can appropriately be styled an empire, and, if so, whether this development is necessary and benign or irremediably sinister.² Such questions are canvassed just as relentlessly outside the United States, but in a far more one-sided fashion. Throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, recent events have multiplied—many times over—the kinds of suspicions of U.S. actions and intentions that Graham Greene gave expression to in The Quiet American (1955). Yet for all this highly charged controversy, public discourse both about empire in general, and about purported American versions of it, remains historically shallow and insufficiently comprehensive. These deficiencies are sometimes in evidence even in academe, where in recent decades empire has been the object of intense and impassioned scrutiny.

Hence the decision to devote a multipart symposium in Common Knowledge to questions of empire. The writers involved in this project are, like everyone else, caught up in contemporary dilemmas and the arguments about them, and take varying positions regarding them. But defending and opposing positions will not be our primary concern here. We will address very different topics, countries and continents, and widely differing periods of time, but we are united by several common convictions. We believe that there is a need to broaden and enhance the intellectual strategies that are brought to bear on the discussion of empire, and we believe that doing so is of critical importance outside as well as within the academy. Our intended audience cannot be merely other scholars; the matters we will address are too serious for our discussion to become just a showcase for new research and new research methods. In few other areas is it more desirable that new thinking be communicated widely; in few other areas is it more vital that historically informed thinking take adventurous turns.

I have been asked to introduce the first installment of this symposium by reflecting on some connected difficulties to do with empires: difficulties of perception and understanding in the present, as well as difficulties of execution in the past. I glance first at some recent arguments about America's purported new imperialism and at the reluctance to situate it in an appropriately long and comparative perspective. My second and linked concern is to evoke some of the practical and ideological traumas experienced by the old European maritime empires, especially Britain, and not only in order to make historical points. A wider appreciation of how empire can lay constraints and burdens on its exponents—and not just on its obvious victims—would be of public utility as well as being intellectually legitimate. Finally, I touch on some issues connected with empire likely to pertain in the future. For—to paraphrase and expand on Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic—you may not be interested in empire, but manifestations of empire may still be interested in you.

I

One of the more thought-out, though scarcely unbiased, treatments of our present troubles has been the historical sociologist Michael Mann's book Incoherent Empire (2003). Lucid, intelligent, and angry, the book is unapologetically an excoriation of "Bush the Younger" (styled thus, Mann remarks, so as to recall Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and "the days of the British empire"). George W. Bush himself is denounced as "a desk-killer...