The Paradox of American Global Power

Abstract

This paper will address these two questions: 1 Can the US be meaningfully seen as an empire in the ways it has behaved since entering the world stage as a central player after World War II? 2 If it is an empire, how has this affected the quality of its democratic life and institutions? One central hypothesis connects both explorations. It can be formulated as follows: if there is a logic to the life of empires that one might call the imperial imperative—a logic according to which the pursuit of hegemonic control to the far periphery of empire calls for ever greater concentration of power at the center—the US too will show the effects of this logic. In spite of its creed of democracy and republicanism the US, acting as an empire, cannot escape this imperial imperative. An obvious test case is offered by the two recent presidencies of George W. Bush and of Barack Hussein Obama. Although the latter presented himself as the anti-Bush, opposing all transgressions of constitutional constraints that his predecessor had stood for, and promising to take America back to its first republican principles, the imperial imperative, according to our hypothesis, would prevent Obama from pursuing such a course.