fearlesshistory

Did you know that America is an Empire? Not in the truly “conquer and rule” kind, but an empire none the less. Beyond the fact that the United States is in control of Puerto Rico and Guam (they are “protectorates”) and the U.S. Virgin Islands (they are “territories”), the United States has perfected the art of the cultural Empire. Very few academicians, or even Neoconservative pundits, would deny - in their heart of hearts - that America is a post-colonial Empire.

America sort of lucked into becoming an Empire, to be truthful. Until World War Two, our military was pitiful and our navy aging rapidly; new ships and troop increases were alarming to Conservative members of the Senate, like Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. Conservatives saw increased troop levels during the Great Depression as a way to militarize the working poor who would have loyalty only to the President (a kind of Praetorian Guard, if you will). World War Two may very well have turned out differently had not Pearl Harbor been attacked; though the loss of life and horrific barbarity of the surprise attack was widely mourned, it did offer the United States an unprecedented opportunity to build a modern Navy (and Army, by the way) from scratch. The majority of the ships sunk in Pearl Harbor were left-overs from World War One or even earlier, having been converted from steam engines to oil-burning engines only in the 1920’s and 30’s. Compared to the Japanese Navy, which was top-of-the-line, the American Navy, though large and well-trained, was vastly inferior technologically.

War, in essence, jump started the American Empire; military spending (what Eisenhower would later dub the “Military-Industrial Complex”) was born and with it, lucrative military contracts, increased mining, manufacture, agriculture, and technical research (computers, code breaking, the Manhattan Project).  By the end of World War Two, the United States accounted for 50% of the world’s manufacturing capacity, with Canada a close-ish second at about 11%. The wealth generated by selling arms to the Russians and British (as well as the few French troops left) allowed the United States to acquire the majority of the world’s gold reserves as well; Britain was so cash-strapped they issued IOUs to the American government that were to be paid back over the next 100 years. American money did not sit in our coffers, however. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe was a brilliant move both economically and politically. Economically,  the plan was really loans with provisions that allowed the United States to strongly influence politics in post-war Europe (for instance, any country receiving Marshal Plan aid must purge Communists from their political systems). The interest rate on the loans was very, very small even compared to relatively-low home loans. But, the amounts lent were so large, that Germany is still paying the United States back for Marshal Plan Debt. In 1956 when the French and British conspired to take land away from Egypt and remove Gamal Abd al-Nasser from power, it was American threats to make the loans come due decades earlier that eventually reigned in the two former world powers; neither could afford to have to pay back the loans, no matter what their pretensions and former glory dictated (Charles DeGaulle once said “France is not France without glory!”).

Politically, the loans allowed Europe to rebuild; in the wake of the massive, almost total devastation of World War Two, there was very little money and very little productive power (Almost all the trees in Germany today began life after World War Two). By loaning the money to the governments of European countries, the American government ensured that not only would Europe be rebuilt, but that it would become a profitable investment for American companies. American companies invested in rebuilding Europe and were paid (through round-about means) by the very money the American government had loaned to Europe. This generated jobs (and taxes) at home which drove the prosperity of the late 1940’s and 1950’s.

Politically, the United States, particularly Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, had realized that the trouble with Europe was that it was too fragmented, too nationalistic and that - if nothing was done about it - there would be another World War. Also, weak, fragmented nations fell easily to the advancing Soviet political influence, particularly in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Poland. By 1949, the United States had forged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with almost every Western European country participating (Western Germany was precluded from joining NATO by the British and French for almost a decade; when the French temporarily left NATO it was more over the inclusion of Germany than almost any other reason). As the head of the financial West and the military West, the United States became the prime exporter of almost everything, from refrigerators to Coca Cola and Rock and Roll.

But it was not through the barrel of a gun or the might of her armies that the United States became an Empire (though, to be sure, it definitely helped to keep the Soviet Union in check), but the might of her culture. Ideas of “popular culture” filtered into Europe and were adopted much to the chagrin of traditional Europeans who thought such popular drivel would ruin their “high” culture of classical music, representative art, and “pure” languages (the French have a mechanism by which new words are put into Francophile terms rather than transliterations of new words, for example a “computer” isofficially called an “ordinateur,” but “computer” is used more frequently). Elvis Presley, James Dean, Jerry Lewis, David Hasselhoff, McDonald’s, Buick, Hershey’s chocolate, Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola were the physical manifestations of American cultural hegemony. Culturally, American insisitence on multinationalism began to change European perceptions. By the 1990’s, when Europeans enthusiastically backed the American initiative to intervene in Kosovo, even former radicals in the German parliament and former anti-American Communists in the Italian government sang the praises of international cooperation.

Under the protection of the United States’ military and economic power, Europeans were able to develop social programs, political methods, and a reputation for negotiation - essentially playing the “good cop” to America’s “bad cop.” Europeans eventually came to see themselves not primarily as Germans, or spanish, or Dutch, but as Europeans, as American foreign policy makers had always desired; a unified Europe would be a bastion against the Soviet Union and would ensure that another European-based war would never be possible again. As European nations developed in the half-century or so since the end of World War Two, they began to exert pressure back along the system, toward the United States. Mostly, it came in the form of allowing economic protections for French farmers, or for British beef, or for German automakers.

September 11th, 2001, was a moment when the United States had again (I would argue) “lucked” into a chance to expand the cultural Empire even further. The reprehensible, cowardly, horrific act galvanized the world. In Japan, popular sentiment rose to the point that there was serious consideration of altering the pacifistic nature of their constitution. Iran, long time “nemesis” of the United States, called for a day of mourning for those New Yorkers who had died; President Khateimi sent condolences to the President of the United States and offered any aid they could render in apprehending the criminals (a promise that would be kept during the invasion of Afghanistan a short while later). NATO forces participated in the Afghanistan campaign.

World sentiment began to turn against the United States with the saber rattling and later invasion of Iraq. German officials were dubious about claims of secret meetings between the Iraq regime and al-Qaeda operatives. The French government  found assertions of mobile biological warfare labs spurious.Of course, matters were not helped much by Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” remark. Anti-American sentiment has been gaining ground, making allies in the strangest of places all over Europe. Islamic extremists found common cause with hard left radical groups in European society, such as the remnants of the Red Army Faction. Even moderate Europeans found Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and “extraordinary rendition” distasteful. The American “coalition of the willing”dwindles from34 participating countries in 2003 to a mere handful (even Britain pulled troops out, leaving mostly Eastern European troops to assist American troops in Iraq; Poland and Georgia most notably maintain troops in Iraq, but mostly because they want to keep America on their good side as Russia seems to be determined to reconstruct the Soviet Union). 2007 marked a nadir in American diplomatic and cultural strength; a retreat of America’s Empire, as it were.

Will the election of Barack Obama revive the dwindling American Empire? Maybe; the world certainly seems willing to listen to a “new direction” in American foreign policy. World leaders have taken it upon themselves to call Obama and offer suggestions and advice. Spain’s Zapatera, Britain’s Gordon Brown, Germany’s Merkel, and even Iran’s Ahmedinijad and Russia’s Medvedev have all written or called Obama to offer their perspective upon the world. This kind of sea change in the perception of the United States is an unusual one; the 2000 and 2004 elections, for instance, were not as hotly anticipated by other country’s citizens as the 2008 race. To many non-Americans, it was a test of American democracy and of American ideals more than the person of Barack Obama - could the United States live up to multi-ethnic propaganda it had been preaching to Iraq, Rwanda, Sudan, the Balkans, and the Middle East? Al Ahram, Egypt’s main daily newspaper put it this way:

“It is understandable why Kenyans should identify so closely with Obama, but what is it that draws the underdogs of this world to such a suave and sophisticated politician? His resonant, melodic voice is heard as the voice of the voiceless, or so the toiling masses of Africa, Asia and the Americas believe. Obama’s genius is that he appeals to the well-heeled liberals in Western nations as much as the penniless peasants of impoverished nations, the teaming millions eking out a meagre existence. They are indignant and yet expectant and he fulfils their aspirations vicariously, inspires their hopes.”

As any Arab politician will tell you, it is “the street” (the poor people with nothing left to lose) that determines politics in the Arab world. The Street, it seems, also dictates European politics; tens of thousands of French, German, Polish, British, Malaysian, Indonesian, Saudi, Egyptian, and Palestinians each sat glued to their televisions awaiting the returns, each feeling a personal stake in the American elections.

The saying goes that one rarely gets a second chance to make a first impression. In the case of and American cultural Empire, this may be the proverbial “second” chance to recapture America’s reputation and legacy which had fallen into disrepair and ill-repute over the past five years. Can America do it? Yes we can.

———————-Sources—————————-

Hinckley, M. “Selling A bulwark Against the Evil Empire: how NATO Opened the World to American” unpublished 2004

Yaqub, S. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Borchers, H. “Hollywood as Reeducator: The Role of Feature Films in U.S. Policies Directed at Postwar Germany” in Paedagogica Historica. 1997;33(1):301-317.

Romero, F. “The American Half-Century in Europe” in The Cultural Shuttle: The United States of/in Europe No. 57 (2004) P.71

“Dwindling allies; With Britain cutting its forces in Iraq to 2,500, the U.S. ‘coalition of the willing’ is on its last legs” (2007, October 9). Los Angeles Times, p. A.16.

Al Ahram “Dream Come True ” and “The Perfect Storm “

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