Published: 12:33 AM, 16 July 2018
America's ugly game between hegemony and empire
One may identify the current moment as a critical one for US hegemony, with a possibly decisive shift toward reliance on empire as the key characteristic of emerging US government geopolitical reasoning of looting wealth of other countries and posing threat to be supreme over the present world order.
One limitation of this strategy, however, is that the institutions and mores of US marketplace society do not readily support the imperial mantle. US hegemony, it is crucial to point out, is not congenial to a reinstatement of an explicitly territorial empire. It has created a new geography of power associated with the term globalization.
Therefore, by way of judgment, one should emphasize the likelihood that empire will fail and, as a result, globalization will become increasingly free of an independent US hegemony to be regulated by a complex of markets, states, and global institutions rather than by a single hegemon with the passage of time. And that time is not very far.
The makers of the first US constitutional state, which was founded in revolt against British colonialism, balanced popular sovereignty against the rule of law. This framework required carefully constructed rules about the conduct of representation and the limits of government intervention.
The fear that public virtue would be corrupted by private interests, however, was difficult to assuage once the revolution against Britain was over and the essentially liberal political economy inherited from the past proved more significant in integrating the vast new country than did its institutions.
Geographical size and cultural heterogeneity worked against the popular participation and public virtue promised by the-then fabric implicit in the US Constitution.
The United States proved too big to be governed by such tenets. The cloth also necessitated formally breaking with the dynastic tensions and balance-of-power politics of eighteenth-century Europe.
Raison d'état was widely seen as antithetical to the American experiment in democracy, as leading to foreign entanglements, and as increasing the role of the military in domestic politics.
Yet, at the same time, the fledgling United States has to adjust to a world that worked according to different rules and made decisions about its territorial shape in other countries of the world and the character of American internal political economy that pointed away from the erstwhile ideal.
Though distant from Europe, the United States was immediately implicated in European power politics, not least in how to respond to European claims to territory in the continental interior of North America.
Likewise, the living republican model offered little by way of how to direct or limit private economic activities within and beyond American borders, not least because it was premised on both limiting government powers and seeing America as a fixed territorial enterprise without interests beyond its immediate geographical confines.
In practice the republican model has always failed to contain the expansionist impulse. Though claiming impeccable republican credentials and therefore, requiring assent, cooperation, and consent from those governed by its actions, the US government has consistently expanded its grip territorially and economically beyond the juridical limits of America itself.
This urge to empire initially took a largely territorial form as in continental expansion, but in the twentieth century has been mainly based on constructing alliances, such as, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) building international institutions, such as, the United Nations (UN) system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), etc. and using economic and military leverage, such as, the US Dollar and the threat of nuclear weapons.
Given the origins of the United States, however, explicit territorial control over other places, at least those judged as moral and political equivalents unlike the native Indian groups of North America, has been considered problematic unless it could be placed in some positive relation to the republican model existing during those times.
This is where hegemony arose, as a solution to the American dilemma. Exercising power beyond national boundaries does not require territorial control. Indeed, it can be enabled and pursued through the cooperation, assent, and acceptance of others as a result of their socialization into seeing it as right, proper, and rewarding.
This required a shift in the geography of power from a strictly absolute territoriality bounded, absolute space to a functional, relational spatiality involving command over the rules of spatial interaction for trade, capital flows, etc. Intended or not, this fundamental alteration in the practice of foreign policy is what laid the foundation for later globalization.
By the 1940s, the United States was particularly prepared for this transformation by its worldwide business interests, the centrality of international finance capital to the US economy, the perception that territorialized economic blocs had deepened the depression of the 1930s, and the need to square its republican tradition with a global role. A global role had long been problematic in American domestic politics because of the threat it posed to the ideal of a new sort of polity.
The Mexican-American War had been condemned by then-congressional representative Abraham Lincoln because it favored territorial expansion at the expense of good and honest government in the country, as it then was.
Lincoln was particularly exercised by President James Polk's fabrication of a pretext for going to war with Mexico, a scenario remarkably similar to that of the build-up to the 2003 war in Iraq involving claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be specious. Again, between 1890 and the 1920s, as the national economy soured, the solution of territorial expansion again became popular.
The clear failure of this strategy by the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929 suggested that some other path was necessary to resolve the contradiction between the bounded national spiritual landscape and the unbounded, materialistic marketplace.
The idea that republic and empire are inherently contradictory was resolved after the 1940s by attempting to practice and portray the expansionist impulse as conforming to at least minimal republican principles, both abroad and at home: bringing so-called good government, building international community and achieving so-called global consensus.
This was particularly the case after the United States was faced with an especially potent global foe created by their own faulty free-will representing a very different model of government and political economy: the Soviet Union.
There is evidence that the US government was beginning to orient itself to hegemony as a global political strategy as early as 1934. The presence of a powerful global competitor, however, meant that it had to tread carefully for fear of alienating potential allies from its republican promise.
The end of the Cold War has removed this constraint. At the same time, the US government has become impatient with international ties and more willing to exercise its military power in pursuit of its interests without the backing of the international community.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as it is widely and deliberately spread provided a more immediate impetus to unilateral action, by signifying that the US homeland is not as geographically distant and sheltered from the rest of the world as many Americans had come to think. But the temptation to go it alone has much deeper historic roots. It has been present since the founding of the United States.
The American government does not want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. What's happened over the last hundred years in the world because of American ugly desire of hegemony? It is well known to everybody.
It prevents peace by sponsoring terror globally. With the ultimate weapon that it is deceptively developing, the American establishment aims to gain hegemony over the entire world and holds the world's economy hostage.
People in the world consider the US as an evil hegemony that has tainted their culture. Trump is the worst. I mean, he is like a shape shifter. You can't nail him down. It is like the last gasp, the last bastion of old white males, of white supremacy and hegemony.
The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes.
It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.
One cannot discuss the world without understanding US imperial hegemony, both globally and certainly in Europe, Middle East and elsewhere in the world as it stands. The scope of America's global hegemony is admittedly great, but its depth is shallow, limited by both domestic and external restraints.
It is not pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation like America which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind, but not American like hegemony all over the world?
America poses to be supreme over the present world order. Its futile struggle between hegemony and empire on the global state of affairs will not last long. Evilness of American hegemony shall be condemned in the harshest language to stop it from doing further damage to the present world order.
Peace is of the essence for mankind throughout the world, not of American hegemony or of its supremacy over the other nations with ulterior motives.
Let peace prevail everywhere, not war, destruction, murdering of mankind. If America ceases its ugly and brutal game with other nations of the world, the whole world will be better place for peaceful living of mankind.
The writer is a freelance
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