The end of an empire (USA) is given by the collapse of "intellectual elite" (original) (raw)
Related papers
2022
The articles of this comprehensive volume offer a multidisciplinary and-in fact-global approach to the history of empires, analyzing their ends over a long spectrum of humankind's history. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume asked for the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires. All texts locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes the very diverse texts comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes. Since the contributions of this book examine a very long period of history and historical events that took place in different regions of the world as well as in different time periods, the empires analyzed here were obviously highly divergent in nature. This also implies that their declining processes were largely different. Some empires rose to power very quickly, based on rapid military successes, such as the Timurid, the Napoleonic, or the National Socialist Empire. As history shows, they were often unable to maintain their territorial
The disappearance of the concept of empire
The Empire is a wife without dowry, a resounding and majestic word that is neither of any use nor any advantage. Neither Ferdinand II nor any of his predecessors possessed any province, any fortress, or even a palace in the entire empire in his capacity as Emperor.
Empire Discourses : The »American Empire« in Decline ?
2009
»In all ages, the regular rise and fall of great nations has passed unperceived.« Sir John Glubb »America has never been so powerful, but its citizens have rarely felt so uneasy.« Charles S. Maier »We don't do empire !« Donald Rumsfeld 1. Empire Talk Discourses about »empire« have been fashionable in the past decade among American intellectuals, pundits and commentators. Like the »civil society« and the »ancient hatreds« of ethnic conflicts in the last decade of the twentieth century, the notion that the United States is an empire after all has fired up the imagination of academics and pundits alike, particularly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York of 9/11. Nary a self-respecting man of letters in the United States who does not believe he must contribute his book on empire to this lively public debate. Yet most Americans, throughout their history, have been adverse to the idea »American empire« and leery to speak of »American imperialism«. Americans have used all kinds of euphemisms to circumscribe American superpower status during the Cold War and »hyper power« eminence after the Cold War-»Pax Americana«, »American preponderance«, »American primacy«, »American ascendancy«, and »hegemony«. President George W. Bush assured us : »America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refusedpreferring greatness to power, and justice to glory« (Ferguson 2004 : 6). In spite of his Yale degree, G.W. Bush's knowledge of American history seems to be spotty. If Americans thought in terms of empire it only occurred along the lines of the Jeffersonian notion of »empire of liberty«, or John L. O'Sullivan's idea of civilizing benevolent expansionism on the American continent, which he called the U.S. 's »manifest destiny« (Maier 2006 : 2ff). Prior to Bush ascendancy American President »American Empire« was a dirty word that did not dare to speak its name. This changed after the brutal 9/11 attacks. Many Americans, especially the neoconservative kamarilla that advised President Bush, eagerly embraced the notion that the United States constituted a »new empire« with global interests, even though arch-imperialist Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld confidently asserted that »we don't do empire«. Is the United States an empire in the traditional sense ? If yes, what kind of empire ? Scholars are very circumspect in defining empire. The best among them apply strict criteria to what constitutes an empire (
The Fate of Empires in Perspective to its Six Stages and their Origins
The Fate of Empires in Perspective to its Six Stages and their Origins, 2020
On the internet I found a lot of references to a short essay called ‘The Fate of Empires’, apparently its theory is used to predict the collapse of the contemporary ‘American Empire’ and the decline of the Western world in general. Therefore ‘The Fate of Empires’ struck my attention, with it underpinning such radical statements. I however do not support the author Sir John Glubb’s theory, which is obviously biased by his conceptions regarding the fall of the British Empire as caused by agents of modernity. Overall it is stated within this theory that an empire lasts around two hundred fifty years, which is a gross simplification of the truth. To name a few examples that contradict this statement; the Roman Empire lasted 503 years (from 27 BC to 476 AD), the Byzantine Empire lasted 1058 years (from 395 to 1453), the Abbasid Caliphate lasted 508 years (from 750 to 1258) and the Ottoman Empire lasted 623 years (from 1299 to 1922). I am not going to further explicate why Sir John Glubb’s ‘The Fate of Empires’ is debatable (to say the least), a matter which I take to be rather self-evident given the broad scope and limited length of Sir John Glubb’s essay and the absence of academic references to other sources on this topic. Within this essay, my interest lies in finding out where Sir John Glubb’s ideas come from, what exactly are the etymologies of the six stages that he uses to describe his life cycle of empires? In the Essay the following research question is to be answered; “What exactly do the six stages of empire as described in The Fate of Empires by Sir John Glubb entail and where does their terminology originate from?”
The Afterlives of Empires: Notes toward an Investigation
The Historicity of International Politics. Imperialism and the Presence of the Past, edited by Klaus Schlichte and Steffan Stetter, 2023
Scholars in international relations may have little difficulty in seeing the world as a shatterspace of present-day empires and a palimpsest of past ones. For others, however, seeing the world through the filter of colonialism and imperialism requires a kind of Gestalt switch. Empire seems to be invisible, not omnipresent, in the US as in Europe. The core social science disciplines (economics, political science, and sociology) in US universities remain doggedly focused on “domestic” questions framed by theories devoid of any reference to time and place. Polls show that a majority of Americans still support the traditional postwar US foreign policy goals such as international trade backed by strong international alliances and U.S. military superiority, with its inevitable complement of US-led foreign interventions.The idea of America as a (declining or robust, democratic or oligarchic) empire is only slowly gaining resonance beyond journalistic, academic circles, and some political circles. where it has gone through several cycles. In Europe, a cloud of colonial amnesia descended almost immediately following the independence of the former colonies. Even the argument that empires existed in the hearts and minds of European populations during the colonial era has been vigorously denied. In the end, only those on the receiving end of imperial violence seem to readily frame the world in terms of empire. The present essay examines the historical sociology of empires and colonies and the afterlives of colonialism.
The Last Empire? From Nation-Building Compulsion to Nation-Wrecking Futility and Beyond
Third World Quarterly, 2007
Even as the literature on US imperialism proliferates, US military and political failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have become apparent, and the hollowness of the economic and financial foundations of the US imperial enterprise has been revealed. This article attempts a new interpretation of the more important dynamics of US imperialism from the birth of the republic to its present quagmire in the oil-lands of the East, focusing on its weaknesses. It argues that, while the US state has been expansionist and imperial from its earliest days the reality of its imperial achievement has been shallower than that of any previous empire, prompting the need for qualifiers like ‘empire like no other’, ‘soft power’, etc. The article concludes tentatively by pointing to the chief elements in the contemporary conjuncture which lead us to expect the end of empires altogether.
America: An Empire In Decline (Part 2)
This article discusses the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and its effects on US foreign policy. It also discusses the Bush Administration's foreign policy from the attempted coup in Venezuela to the change in military doctrine of the war in Iraq, as well as the Color Revolutions in eastern Europe, ending with a brief discussion of the 2007 financial crisis.