THE END OF EMPIRE?

For the US Empire to be replaced by a new empire, a potential candidate must exist. Rome had an obvious successor in Byzantium and possibly the revived Persian Empire. At the end of WW1 everyone knew the US was about to replace Britain. We do not have any obvious candidates to succeed the USA. The most powerful economy in the world is the European Union, the most important states of which are ex-empires and are aware of what a terrible burden the imperial mantle can be. The citizens of these countries would be against the resumption of empire. Other potential candidates are India and China. Both countries have internal problems that make the social, political and economic difficulties of the USA look mild by comparison.

China and India are such huge and populous nations they are virtual empires or worlds to themselves. They have enough problems of their own without taking on the rest of the world. Problems like massive demographic and environmental disasters, towering corruption, minority nationalist movements, and three quarters of the population in abject poverty. As well, China has yet to undergo a transition from dictatorship to “democracy”. Both economies are fundamentally weak, being dependent on cheap exports to the developed world – a free ride that could end suddenly with high petroleum prices or political changes in the importing nations.

The old empires could rely on military power alone. A modern empire must have some level of appeal, some aspect of universality allowing it to expand and hold populations. The road to empire for America was paved by several hundred years of “Occidentalization”, a result of European colonialism. American culture, attitudes and politics were not altogether foreign to peoples who had already imbibed Western notions of “democracy” “rationalism”, science, education and clothing styles. Keep in mind these Western notions, now universal in at least half the world, were initially adopted at gun point. The cultures of China and India, no matter how much the rest of us might appreciate their cuisine, philosophy or the music of Ravi Shankar, are cultures still too “national” to have universal appeal.

Consciousness plays a major role in empire building. Arrogance, xenophobia, racism, chauvinism and militarism are the attitudes that underlie the imperial ideology the majority of the population must possess in order to successfully pursue empire. One must hold others in contempt in order to dominate them. The ordinary person must believe in the righteousness of empire to willingly pay the taxes and give their lives in the inevitable imperial wars. The imperial ideology was at its height in the first decades of the 20th Century. Today, other than the Neocon lunatic fringe, it has few takers. As shown by the world-wide opposition to the Iraq War, most people reject militarism and empire-building.

The people of the world reject the Globalist’s New World Order – for what it is, a US dominated and driven global corporate state, Theirs is a new vision, of a world without empire, militarism and corporate greed. Theirs is a vision of grass roots, and therefore true cooperation among peoples, not states. Theirs is a vision of justice and peace, and thus the antidote to the disease of empire.