Empire Falls

Washington May Be Imperious, but It Is Not Imperial

Do past empires hold lessons for U.S. foreign policy today? Many people evidently think so, as the recent flood of books and articles purporting to explain what those lessons are attests. These two latest examples of the genre come from authors with impeccable scholarly credentials. But like so much of this literature, their efforts yield little payoff.

The distinguished contributors whose writings are assembled by the Social Science Research Council (ssrc) in Lessons of Empire disagree on what an empire is, whether the United States is one, whether scholars have anything to say to policymakers, and even whether history has anything to say to scholars. The authors do agree that overreach, arrogance, racism, stupidity, mythmaking, and ignorance are bad, and that the opposites of those things are good. But these lessons are obvious, and one does not need to study empire in order to know that the United States, like other countries, would be wise to heed them.

Harvard University historian Charles Maier, meanwhile, offers a breezily written tour d'horizon of past empires and a detailed, straightforward narrative of the United States' rise to global supremacy after World War II. Although he raises important questions about imperial behavior, he assiduously avoids answering most of them, and the two parts of his book fit together uneasily.

Both volumes have interesting things to say about empires, but the only real lesson they convey, albeit unwittingly, is that the concept of empire is unnecessary for understanding the United States' current role in the world -- and that both policymakers and scholars would be better off discussing contemporary foreign policy issues without recourse to false analogies from a distant past.

name game

Matthew Connelly begins his contribution to the ssrc's Lessons of Empire with a puzzle: "Scholars of empire have to ask themselves why, after several decades of research and teaching, almost all of it critical of imperialism and its legacies, we seem not to have had the slightest impact." One good answer can be found in the conclusion to George Steinmetz's essay in the same volume: "A preferable way of avoiding having one's work functionalized for empire, to avoid the 'ear of the prince,' is to try to create accounts that are ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the processual, conjunctural, contingent nature of social life, and hence irreducible to simple policy statements." Ontological and epistemological adequacy may not do the trick, but stylistic opacity and intentional irrelevance will surely kill a putative prince's interest in academic writing.

Sheldon Pollock's piece wanders even further into academic obscurantism, arguing that "contemporary discussions of the lessons past empires may have for present ones make several assumptions that must come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the debates on historical knowledge over the past few decades. One is that we really can acquire true knowledge of history; another is that this knowledge is useful to us, that we will benefit by acting upon its truth." Oddly enough, the book's editors share some of this skepticism about the relevance of history to the present, writing that "the lessons of studying past empires reinforce a cautious attitude toward claims made about the present." That may be so, but if historians really believe that they have little to say to policymakers, why write such books in the first place?

One can draw lessons from the past only if one believes that history is real, that knowledge of history is possible, and that such knowledge can be packaged appropriately. Assuming one accepts these propositions, one then has to identify conceptual similarities between the objects to be compared and the contexts within which they exist and then develop meaningful theories of causality. Lessons of empire can be drawn, in other words, only if the United States is or has an empire and only if the foreign policy environment in which it pursues its supposedly imperial aims is comparable to that of past empires. It is that simple. If the United States is not an empire, or does not have one, there is nothing more to say about this particular subject.

In Among Empires, Maier tries to sidestep this problem by claiming that "the United States reveals many, but not all -- at least not yet -- of the traits that have distinguished empires." But if the United States does not share all the defining characteristics of empires, then it is not an empire, and there is little reason to believe that valid lessons of imperial history will apply to it. After all, the United States shares "many, but not all" traits (such as bigness, multiethnicity, and arrogance) with non-empires such as Brazil, Canada, France, and Indonesia, so why not draw lessons from their experiences with equal justification?

There is thus no avoiding the definitional question that bedevils all such discussions. One common mistake is to conflate empire and imperialism, even though the first is a type of polity and the second is a type of policy. The distinction gets lost in Jack Snyder's argument, in the ssrc volume, that overexpansion destabilizes the states that practice it. Such a statement is plausible, but why is it a lesson of empire? Overexpansion, after all, is not usually a weakness of established empires, which are exceptionally durable and not necessarily expansionist.