Empire and Democracy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Social science debate is now refocused on an old concept, that of empire. In the decades following the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism, some scholars, notably Chalmers Johnson, suggested that the empire theory best characterizes the rise of the United States as the hegemonic economic and military power in the post–cold war era. The influential authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri maintain that the American “empire” now equates with the global spread of capitalism, both as an idea and assets of power relationships. They say that the triumph of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with democracy’s decline in the United States and certain of its close allies, such as Great Britain, and paradoxically the rise of democratization in the rest of the world.

Other writers, most notably Niall Ferguson, argue that there are strong parallels between the British empire at its zenith at the end of the nineteenth century and the United States at the end of the twentieth century. The twin commitments to free trade overseas and democracy within are common features. Ferguson warns that in the same way that the free trade phase of British imperialism collapsed dramatically after World War I (1914–1918), the underpinnings of the United States’s international power are equally vulnerable. The link between the British and the American centuries was explicitly made by that notable defender of imperial values, Rudyard Kipling, whose invitation to “take up the white man’s burden” was issued to the U.S. Congress at the turn of the twentieth century. Based on that type of comment, the question must be raised as to whether empires are necessarily exclusionary.

Debates about empire have become intertwined with the emerging controversies about globalization. The empire theory has as its core the concept of hegemony or control, has tended to place a premium on structure rather than agency, and ignores unintended consequences. Globalization theory, in contrast, has too often spoken about more nebulous and benign flows of ideas and cultural exchanges while ignoring the iron fist in the velvet glove. Some analysts of globalization theory, for example, Joseph Stiglitz, have also discussed democratization, arguing that neoliberalism has promoted free markets and democratization. Most writers on globalization, however, such as Zygmunt Bauman and David Held, have been staunch critics of globalization, arguing that it has narrowed life opportunities for most, has weakened the nation-state, and is an entirely new phenomenon.

The empire and globalization models are essentially dichotomous in nature, understanding reality in terms of winners and losers (globalization) or centers and periphery (empire). It is suggested here that the processes of globalization and of empire are contradictory and paradoxical. In contemporary times the unfettered processes of globalization, according to some—such as Stiglitz—have also generated market failures domestically in the United States. To put it another way, the invisible hand of the market has created problems domestically and internationally, and the visible hand needs to be reinstated. Calls for a third way between unfettered capitalism and state socialism have gained greater force since the economic recession of 2008. Whereas in the late twentieth century the third-way approach was specifically related to the political programs of specific labor parties, especially the Labour Party in the United Kingdom under Tony Blair, in the early twenty-first century the third-way model is linked with the project of democratizing international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund.

Arguments around the implications of imperialism were prefigured by the dependency theorists of the 1970s, notably Andre Gunder Frank, who argued that imperialism necessarily stifled future industrialization and economic growth, and postcolonial scholars who maintain that imperialism stifles political developments. And in the same way as research has discovered economic growth and industrialization under British and other nineteenth-century imperialisms—such as in valuable work on the political economy of the Commonwealth Caribbean—political research on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand has discovered that political experimentation flourished in those colonies, often to be exported back to the so-called mother country of Britain.

Another example of the paradoxical nature of empire at the political level is the uneven experience of politics that continues into the twenty-first century. For the settler fragments, the process of settlement created an enhanced democratic experience; this was not usually so for the indigenes of those places according to scholars such as Nira Yuval-Davis. British imperial processes also created political and constitutional experimentation, whether through new models of federalism, early enfranchisement of women, proportional and fairer electoral systems, and in some places, new types of political rights for indigenes.

Bibliography:

Ferguson, Niall. Empire:The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Held, David, and Anthony G. McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader. Malden, Mass.:Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.
Johnson, Allan G. The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology. Malden, Mass.:WileyBlackwell, 2000.
Payne, Anthony, and Paul K. Sutton. Dependency under Challenge: The Political Economy of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984.
Simms, Marian. “Gender, Globalization and Democratization: Some Lessons from Oceania.” In Gender Globalization and Democratization, edited by Rita Mae Kelly, Jane H. Bayes, Mary E. Hawkesworth, and Brigitte Young, 15–26. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Stiglitz, Joseph. “Globalization and the Economic Role of the State in the New Millennium.” Industrial and Corporate Change 12, no. 1 (2003): 3–26.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997.