The Economics and Sociology of Imperialism
Empires, historically, have been of enormous financial benefit to your heart. That, traditionally, is a powerful reason why nations set out in search of colonies. The American empire, however, has not translated into economic dominance. In global terms, the US has become a net debtor, mortgaging its future with current account deficits of five percent or more, seemingly for the indefinite future. Such deficits, because they undermine stability, have been banned from members of the European Union and would bankrupt a developing country from the World Bank.
To make matters worse, the United States has been trying to make up its current income shortfall by borrowing: from itself, from future generations, and from other states. Whereas, from 1960 to 1976, the United States had a balance of payments surplus with respect to its transactions with other states, since 1982 this has turned into a deficit of three trillion dollars. At the same time, Americans have been selling their assets. Foreign investors now own about $ 8 trillion of these. However, even this is not as threatening to American power as a global loss of confidence in the future stability of the dollar and its economy would be. That, sadly, is no longer such a remote possibility. If foreign investors in dollar-denominated securities got tired of our sluggish economy, our minimal returns on capital, they could stop buying our debt and start collecting. Certainly there are warning signs. The dollar has depreciated against the euro by almost 25 percent in the last 16 months. One begins to hear whispers about inflation that almost always follows the imbalance that now exists between national income and expenditures. It seems quite possible that the quest for empire does for the United States what the grueling arms race did for the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, historically the persecution of the empire has had a mobilizing effect on the society of metropolitan power. In America today, however, there is very little sense of the Victorian spirit of “Rule Britannia.” The nation feels less united, not more. This can also be attributed, at least in part, to the economic cost of the US role as the sole superpower in the social fabric. According to (Republican) economist Kevin Phillips, in the past twenty years the gap between the richest one percent and the poorest twenty percent of the population has more than doubled, from a ratio of 30: 1 in 1979 to more than from 75: 1 in 1999. Additionally, the nation is poised to cut spending on basic necessities like education, healthcare, and infrastructure by $ 100 billion. One consequence is that most American cities are nearly bankrupt. This does not describe a very flexible socio-economic springboard from which to launch the leap to empire. Rather, it seems to predict the social division that marked the era of the Vietnam War.
The mobilizing civic pride of the empire has also historically depended on how others view the imperial enterprise. When a quarter of the world map was tinted red, there was envy of the British Empire, but also grudging admiration. The rain-soaked counties of Britain enjoyed the warmth of the sun that, everywhere, was recognized never to set on their empire.
The role of the United States as the sole superpower was also initially acclaimed. Finally, people everywhere thought, the world has a benevolent imperium, a preeminence that is imagined to arise from respect for law, freedom and democracy. On September 11, 2001, all the nations of the world expressed their support for the victim: not only the innocent people killed, but also the decent nation unjustly raped. Now, opinion polls reveal, citizens of almost all nations regard the United States as the gravest threat to world peace. This negativity is based not only on the invasion of Iraq, but on other one-sided moves, all taken with an arrogant disregard for the rest of the world’s agenda and values expressed in the treaty banning landmines, the Kyoto Protocol. on environmental pollution, the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court and other recent multilateral initiatives.
Burdened with so much international animosity, the United States can no longer count on the kind of burden-sharing that once animated its creative engagement in instruments of multilateral diplomacy like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At large companies, nations excluded from takeoff are understandably reluctant to share responsibility for landing. That, in turn, fuels the argument in Washington of acting without much respect for international institutions and “old Europe,” ignoring history and the economic and social implications.
