Europe, like America

I have participated, for the first time, in the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), in New York city. I presented in a set of panels on ‘Empires: European and American Reflections’, effectively organized by Noel Parker (U. of Copenhagen). After spending several hours with about the same people in the same room, two different subjects had clearly appeared:

* ‘empire’ as a polity,

* and ‘imperialism’ as a policy.

‘Empire’ is indeed a form of political community, which can be characterized by encompassing a vast territory, having mobile frontiers, a variety of local formulas and a diversity of links with the center, which has existed for most of human history. In contrast to empire, ‘state’ is another form of polity implying fixed borders, homogeneity and a unique center of ‘sovereignty’, which has successfully existed only on a minority of the world territory for only about three hundred years.

‘Imperialism’ is a different thing: an expansive, proactive form of foreign policy which may be developed by both states and empires. But there are non-imperialist empires as they are imperialist states, and viceversa.

Some confusion between ‘empire’ and ‘authoritarian command’ (close to the original meaning of ‘imperium’ in Latin) derives from the fact that many empires existed in the past when no formulas had been invented to make a vast territory and varied population compatible with democratic rule –as was noted by Jan Zielonka (Oxford U.). Only since the United States of America were created in the late eighteenth century, there can be and there are democratic ‘empires’, typically evolving into more stable federations. Among them we have nowadays–as was widely discussed in the ISA convention—the ongoing European Union.

It can even be hold that in modern times, ‘imperialist’ policies are more characteristic of states than of empires. The colonial empires were indeed built by the most powerful nation-states in Europe, especially Britain, France and Spain (but also by Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy and the rest). When those empires faded, those states experienced great internal crises. In particular, the loss of the next-to-last colonies of Spain at the Spanish–American war in 1898 generated an intellectual crisis of identity which is still visible and became the foundational moment for the Catalan and Basque nationalist movements in search for alternatives to Spain. The colonial crises of France in Indochina and Algeria provoked a military coup d’etat and the replacement of the Fourth Republic with the Fifth one in 1958. The lost of the British empire is seen by some analysts as a major factor in the emergence of the current Scottish nationalist movement. In fact, after the Second World War, the nation-states located at the center of the territory historically covered by the Holy German and Roman empire, as they lost their colonial empires, began to build a new empire among themselves, this time under market and democratic principles, that is, the current European Union. It’s still expanding and not yet a stable federation. This was the subject of mine and other papers in the ISA convention.

On building the American and the European ‘empires’

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