What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate

Abstract

Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and their peripheries. These features endow them with a distinctive network-structure from those associated with unipolar and hegemonic orders. The existence of imperial relations alters the dynamics of international politics: processes of divide and rule supplant the balance-of-power mechanism; the major axis of relations shift from interstate to those among imperial authorities, local intermediaries, and other peripheral actors; and preeminent powers face special problems of legitimating their bargains across heterogeneous audiences. We conclude with some observations about the American empire debate, including that the United States is, overall, less of an imperial power than it was during the Cold War.

Cyber Security and Middle Power Diplomacy

“…Relatively durable, but fundamentally dynamic interactions constitute the structural conditions in which actors operate (Nexon 2009). In short, structure is not a kind of fixed entity reducing to actors' internal properties or attributes, but a social relationship among or across actors (Nexon and Wright 2007).…”

Empire, imperialism and conceptual history

“…In juxtaposition they display some clear historical differences. Two elements are necessary in a minimal definition of 'empire': It is a political unit governed from a centre via mediators, and the mediators have different types of relations with the centre (Nexon and Wright 2007). Historically, there have been many counter-concepts to 'empire', but one deserves special mention, namely the concept of 'state'.…”

“…The parameters for our tracing of the concept are not only genealogical, but also analytical. We follow the work of Tilly (2000, 2002, compare Spruyt 1984Motyl 1999Motyl , 2001Cooley 2005;Nexon and Wright 2007;Nexon 2009) and hold empires to be polities where middle men with a territorial base play a central role in key practices, and where the power bargains between the centre and the middlemen are not uniform, neither ideally nor in practice. A more technical way of phrasing this double ambition, taken from the German tradition we discuss at some length below, would be to say that we proceed both 'semasiologically', tracing the different meanings and uses of the concept 'empire', and 'onomasiologically', documenting the different words used to refer to one and the same set of relations or events (Koselleck 1972: XXI-XXII).…”

Beyond hypocrisy? Debating the ‘fact’ and ‘value’ of sovereignty in contemporary world politics

“…As such, the international realm, both during the modern era and further back in history (Kaufman et al eds., 2007), can better be characterised in terms of imperial or hegemonic hierarchy rather than by sovereign equality (Watson, 1992;Cooley, 2005). Indeed, the principal question in IR now appears to be less geared at establishing the importance of hierarchy to world historical development than in exploring the various logics under which different forms of hierarchy operate (Nexon and Wright, 2007). The key point is that the broader age of hierarchy/empire subsumes the Westphalian moment within its canvass, leading us to see the logic of reciprocal sovereignty bounded or caged within the nation state as both recent and limited.…”