What is so American about the American empire?

Original Article

What is so American about the American empire?

Srdjan VuceticGraduate School of Public and International Affairs, Faculty of Social Sciences, 55 Laurier Avenue

East, Desmarais Building, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.

Abstract This article argues that the American empire cannot be fully under-stood without reference to the ways in which American imperial identities havebeen associated with the historical experience of England/Britain. To make thisargument, the article considers four discourses of identity in particular – Anglo-Protestantism (religion), Anglo-Saxonism (ethnicity/race), Anglo-Saxon capitalism(institutions) and English (language). US imperial development was conditioned bymany forces, but none match the aggregate power of America’s ‘Anglo-ness’.Although it is too early to assess the ways in which these discourses are negotiated,critiqued and reproduced in the ‘age of Obama’, the American empire is likely tocontinue to protect and project Anglo-ness vis-a-vis to the rest of the world.International Politics (2011) 48, 251–270. doi:10.1057/ip.2011.14

Keywords: American empire; anglo-saxonism; exceptionalism; Obama

‘As well as being as imperialist to Britain, America was also imperialist in mostof the same ways’, wrote recently Bernard Porter (Porter, 2006, p. 7, italics inoriginal). Porter’s sentence stands against the backdrop – perhaps on the top –of the volcanic mountain of text dealing with the ‘American empire’ penned inthe past decade. Much of this writing has been organised as a ‘debate’revolving around questions such as ‘is the US an empire or not (and so what)?’,‘should the US be an empire?’, and ‘can the US empire last?’1 Central to thisdebate have been historical comparisons – analogical references to past empiresused to illuminate or complicate aspects of present-day American policies andpractices. The most frequent – and the most typical – parallel was the one withthe British empire.2 But although there are obvious political, methodologicaland practical rationales for exploring the functional resemblances, to usePorter’s terms, between the British empire and the American ‘superempire’,very few approaches have ventured beyond it to consider possible similaritiesamong the ontologically deeper, slower and muddier structures of modernity.

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The main representatives of these approaches are neo-Gramscian critiquesof global capitalism on the one hand and whiggish, Anglocentric histories ofthe modern world on the other. The former tend to foreground the role oftransnational, yet predominantly Anglo-American financial capital,3 whereasthe latter are keen to treat Britain and the United States as a single socio-cultural entity unified by liberal democracy, capitalism and the Englishlanguage.4 If the reader would forgive my reduction of such rich and richlydifferent approaches to a single sentence, it is in these schools of thought thatthe American empire tends to extend back in time and out in space to become,at the very least, an Anglo-American empire.

Such broader and deeper perspectives can be very useful in thinking aboutthe US empire in historical, as well as presentist terms, including in the ongoing‘age of Obama’. The election of Barack Obama to the American presidencyis a phenomenon on which lakes of ink will long be spilt, but here we shallbegin with The Economist ink: ‘When they voted to send a Black man to theWhite House at the end of 2008, Americans performed one of the mostremarkable acts of rebranding in the history of their remarkable nation’.5

The focus on Obama’s Blackness is, of course, partially misleading. The saidact of rebranding involved a whole plethora of signifiers currently regarded asnovel or atypical when associated with the White House: liberal, socialist,center-left, post-racial, post-ethnic, cosmopolitan, global, urban, urbane andso on. Could it be that the age of Obama represents a significant rupture inthe broad and deep links between the United States and its Anglo-imperialidentity? To consider this question, let us proceed from an assumption that noempire can be understood without a reference to its discourses of identity. In anygiven context, empires emerge in relation to its significant, others by deployingsome discourses over others. The focus of this article is on four discourses,each corresponding to a familiar ideal-type category of meaning and implyingAmerica’s association with the historical experience of England/Britain:Anglo-Protestantism (religion), Anglo-Saxonism (race/ethnicity), Anglo-Saxoncapitalism (institutions) and English (language). My argument is that thesefour discourses have shaped some of the most important decisions, institutions,policies and practices through which the United States emerged as an empire,first on the North American continent and then globally. In turn, thesediscourses are responsible for much of the historical continuity and coherenceof the Anglo-American empire. And although it is too early to assess the waysin which these discourses are negotiated, critiqued and reproduced during theObama administration, I will suggest that Anglo-ness is likely to remain rele-vant in American imperial development because of the global spread of Englishabove all, but also thanks to the considerable rhetorical elasticity of Anglo-Protestantism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. As for Anglo-Saxonism, thoughObama’s presidency has irrevocably changed America’s old ethno-racial brand,

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it has also boosted the attraction of the American variety of the liberalmulticultural model, which, too, has an imperial potential. In the final analysis,the age of Obama, too, belongs to the age of empire.

The article is short, schematic and impressionistic. Doubtless, Anglo-nesshas dramatically varied in its effects on the making of the American empire,depending on the political contests at home and abroad, as well as on the struc-tures and processes of self-other interactions in given contexts. As with theterm empire, the usual definitional contestations of the word Anglo are left toothers.6 And last, my barebones discourse-based approach to the Americanempire is inspired by a continuum of works in the discipline of InternationalRelations, which at the very least began with David Campbell’s WritingSecurity (1992). This literature has dealt extensively with the idea that identitycan be (or should be) conceptualised as discourse for the purposes of causaland/or constitutive analysis, a topic I therefore need not to engage here.

Chosen People, Imperial Choices

Before they became Americans, most White Europeans who lived in the 13revolutionary colonies of British North America considered themselves ‘Anglo’in some way. In the First (1774) and Second (1775) Continental Congress,revolutionary leaders framed the American resistance to London in terms ofthe ‘rights of Englishmen’ and only switched to the universalistic language inthe Declaration of Independence (1776). Yet, the grammar and semantics ofthe document were still English. And with good reason: though the UnitedStates emerged in a war against the British empire but the revolutionaries –propertied White males who ruled the member states of the newborn republic –continued to live within a civilisational and/or cultural zone centered on theformer imperial metropole.7 According to the argument made by SamuelHuntington in his last book, despite being long espoused to the countervailingwinds of modernisation and immigration, the American Self could – and, heunderscored, should – be distinguished by its ‘Anglo-Protestant’ core or, to usehis preferred metaphor, ‘heart’ (2004: 68). Whatever the analytical and norma-tive merits of Huntington’s argument, the power of Anglo-Protestanism inAmerican history is not in doubt. Here, the canonical text, so to speak, is theOld Testament, the first of the two-part Christian Biblical canon, which rose inprominence during the Reformation, a period in which England positioneditself against the Catholic, continental European others.8

Significant for my argument is the early establishment of a close and positiveassociation between Anglo-Protestants and ancient Hebrews. The Puritans, theshock troops of the English Reformation, took this particular Biblical readingto Plymouth Rock in 1620 and the rest is American history, as told in


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retrospective and contemporary sound bites such as the New or Second Israel,Light of the World, New Zion, new Garden of Eden, City on the Hill, InnocentNation and Promised Land. What Clifford Longley has called the ‘ChosenPeople syndrome’ had indeed found fertile soil in America, even after theestablishment of a new republic based upon the separation of church and statedoctrine (Longley, 2002, p. 155). Since Tocqueville, possibly earlier, manyobservers have written how religion and modernity were nearly perfectlycompatible in the United States and how the rhetoric of providential agency,destiny and purpose slipped into the key speeches not only of ‘preacher’ and‘born-again’ presidents like James Garfield, Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush,but also of various vociferous secularists from the original president GeorgeWashington to the presidential frontrunner of early 2004 Howard Dean.9 Atthe time of independence, indeed, one of the more pervasive variations of thediscourse of choseness was philo-Hebraism. Most founding fathers belonged tochurches in one way or another associated with beliefs in the divine election ofthe Anglos and/or Americans as spiritual descendants of the ancientIsraelites.10 Among others, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, PatrickHenry, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin all studied Hebrew at somepoint in their lives and there was some fleeting post-revolutionary talk aboutintroducing Hebrew as the official language of the republic.11 Franklin andJefferson even commissioned designs for the new Great Seal symbolising theIsraelites’ crossing of the deserts of Egypt en route to Canaan (Meyer, 2001, p. 30).Such ideas were related to American ‘restorationism’, a political and religiousmovement, which sought to re-establish Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land inorder to prepare the ground for the Second Coming. This concept obviouslypredated America, as evidenced in England, in poems by John Milton or in thephilosophical writings of John Locke. But it was in the nineteenth century thatrestorationism exerted a major influence on US foreign policy.

A case in point was a strong missionary effort in the Middle East, which canbe seen as a part of a more general and one of the most durable practicesconstitutive of the American empire. In Palestine, restorationism even inspiredAmerican colonialism, like in the case of the Adams colony in Jaffa, whosefailure was described by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad (1869), or inthe case of the Spafford colony in Jerusalem, abandoned in the 1950s. Among‘evangelical’ Americans, today there are perhaps 25 million Christian Zionistswho yearn for the return of Christ. But note that neither restorationismnor philo-Hebraism necessarily translate into support for the Jewish state inIsrael or contemporary Jews in general. Like the ancient Greeks in WesternRomanticism, in this Biblical reading, the ancient Hebrews are primarilyvalued for their spiritual qualities, not for their historical continuities or theirphysical presence in the Holy Land. Thus, evangelical Christians typicallysupport Israel on the condition that all Jews will convert in the Second

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Coming (Marsden, 2008: 179–184). America’s support for Israel has moreto do with this particular discourse of identity than with any other factor(Mead, 2008).

Since the early years of the republic, in-office politicians had encouraged thespread of Protestant versions of Christianity, first in the American Southwest,then beyond the water’s edge, in Africa and Asia. ‘If in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century, Britain was a country of “absent-minded imperialists” ’,suggests H.J. Sharkey, ‘then the United States in the same period can be seenas a country of “absent-minded evangelists” ’ (2008: 3). To the extent that it ispossible to imagine various forms of informal empire – say, the empire of tradeand investment – it is then also possible to conceptualise a missionary empire.Verbal, institutional and even financial support was readily given to missionaryNGOs such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionsestablished in 1810 with the purpose of coordinating efforts to spread ProtestantChristian love, as well as Anglo-style freedom around the world. To variousdegrees, major architects of the American empire, beginning with WilliamHenry Steward, secretary of state between 1861 and 1869, all the way toGeorge W. Bush might be described as restorationists.

Although a variety of religious public discourses have profoundly shapedUS politics throughout the republic’s history in diverse ways, it was a specificrecourse to the ethos of the ancient Hebrews that sparked the earliest talk of‘American exceptionalism’, an idea that the United States was uniquelyendowed to lead the world by example, if not by other means as well. In a stan-dard interpretation, it was the Puritans and their fellow travelers who imbuedthe American Self with a sense of self-righteousness and, in sharp contrast toan Old World experience, universalism. On the last dimension, the AmericanRevolution arguably resembles only the French Revolution, which, also, initiallyattempted to overturn the course of history by introducing the Enlightenmentideas of self-determination against empire, democracy against monarchy andindividual rights against a mass society. But this interpretation is overstated:self-righteousness and universalism are neither new nor unique to America.Most empires in history tended to conflate their own foreign policy aims withglobal public goods; arguably, there is hardly a better public justification forexpansion. If anything, it may be that it is an exceptionally Anglo rhetoricto claim that empire is a way of life characteristic of the significant others, andnever of the English-speaking Self. At its imperial zenith, Britain too regardeditself as exceptional – uniquely free, prosperous and blessed. Washington offici-als have traditionally denied empire, citing America’s promotion of demo-cracy or self-determination, but it was the case that the British, too, used toclaim benevolence of their conquest on the basis of certain unique and positivecharacteristics such as naval power, trade, indirect rule and so on. Londonoften boasted that its empire provided goods and services that people and



governments in all quarters of the world wanted but could not gain withoutBritish leadership – venture capital, telegraph communication, protectionagainst the sea pirates and, at times, a mission to liberate dependent peoples.12

Like the majority of US presidents, Obama has not been shy to declare himselfreligious – good politics in a polity whose religiousness has not diminished instrength since the time of Tocqueville – or to express his beliefs in Americanexceptionalism.13 Although few of us expect the age of Obama to correspondto some post-Christian secularisation of the American society a la, say, 1960sCanada or 1990s Ireland, it may come as a surprise that the new president deci-ded to retain two ‘holdover’ pastors from Bush’s religious advisory council, aswell as several evangelical organisations his predecessor embedded in USAID(Marsden, this volume). When it comes to religion and empire, the Obamapresidency so far spells more continuity than change.

Anglo-Saxonism

It is sometimes said that slavery dominated the American political landscapeuntil 1865, until racism took over. The record of organised religion is decidedlymixed in this trajectory: some religious groups supported abolitionism and later(and in different phases), equal rights for all, whereas others worked hard tokeep Americans apart. Anglo-Saxonism is a discourse that supported one ver-sion of social inequality based on both religion and race/ethnicity: the superiorityof White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males over other human beings.14

Like all racialised discourses, Anglo-Saxonism can be regarded as ‘anechoing cavern of banalities out of which even a well-lit historian might neveremerge’ (Kramer, 2002, p. 132), yet its historical power is considerable. Aspromulgated in the 13 colonies, this discourse regarded the American Revolu-tion as entirely continuous with history, which, in addition to the spiritual nodto the Middle East, racially began in the British Isles.15 Thus, in addition towanting the Exodus imagery on the aforementioned Great Seal, Jeffersonwanted to include the figures of Hengest and Horsa, the two brothers thoughtto be the first Anglo-Saxon settlers who brought common law and represen-tational government to England and, in turn, America (Horsman, 1981, p. 22).That new American polity, although constituted as a republic/democracyagainst an empire/monarchy, still mirrored the mother country in institutionsshould not be surprising from the perspective of racialised Anglo-Saxon identity.Rather than introducing some radically republican, democratic or uniquely‘new world’ discursive practices, most American citizens continued to liveby what later historians identified as English/British ‘folkways’ or ‘mores’.16

It is on the basis of their own Anglo-Saxonism that the founders elected tokeep the traditional racialised hierarchy intact, quickly passed discriminatory

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immigration and naturalisation laws and otherwise enabled the continuingdominance of Anglo-ness in America. Anglo-Saxonism dominated everyAmerican anti-immigrant movement until at the least the second half of thetwentieth century.

Anglo-Saxonism drove American imperial development in many ways, butnowhere as explicitly as in the westward expansion of the 1840s and in theimperialist boom of the 1890s. In both periods, Anglo-Saxonism workedtransnationally as well, creating at least a tacit understanding with the BritishEmpire. According to Reginald Horsman, the US-Mexican War of 1846 wassparked by a growing sense that it was America’s national mission to extendthe ‘boundaries of freedom’ against the imperially deluded mongrel other thatwas then Mexico. The war left immense political changes in its wake, includingan establishment of Anglo-Saxonism as a discursive resource for the legiti-mation of future imperial conquests. Note that Anglo-Saxonism was at oncenational and transnational: American missionaries abroad, to go back to theprevious discussion, generally acted in unison with their Protestant counter-parts in Britain.17 Here, America’s Anglo Self was thus twice reproduced, firstthrough Protestantism at home and then through Anglo-American missionaryevangelism abroad.

It was trans-Atlantic Anglo-Saxonism that also legitimated the gentlemanlydivision of North America between London and Washington. Indeed, theacceptance of the British proposal to place the US–British boundary in Oregonon the 49 parallel in April 1846 enabled Washington to shift its attention tothe southwest. A similar dynamic occurred in the 1890s, when a profoundlyAnglo-Saxonised ‘Manifest Destiny’ re-emerged to motivate additionalexpansion, culminating in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Once again,the war against a Latin other was facilitated by a previous understanding bet-ween the ‘two branches’ of a single Anglo-Saxon race. It was the unspeakablehorror of a possible ‘fratricidal war’ during the Venezuela crisis of 1895–1896that compelled London and Washington to work together to find a way tobasically outlaw war within the English-speaking world. Scores of leaders evencalled for outright unification. It is in this period that we see the rise of theAnglo-American ‘special relationship’ and, in turn, of a broader English-speaking identity in the international society then known as ‘Greater Britain’,which today echoes as the ‘Anglosphere’.

At this point, it is important to recall the American polity has been charac-terised by multiple identities, including by various tensions and contradictionsamong them. In the pre-WWII period, against Anglo-Saxonism stoodAnglophobia, a significant discourse of identity, which defined the Britishother as hypocritical, greedy and otherwise threatening to the American Self.The 1890s were the zenith of Anglophobia, partly because of the institutio-nalisation of this discourse in a populist movement led by the presidential



hopeful William Jennings Bryan, which catered to southern and (mid)westernagrarians (Crapol, 1973, p. 13). With the growing immigration of the Irish,Germans and few other White but non-Anglo-Saxon groups, this discourseeventually received a so-called ethnic dimension (Jacobson, 1998; Moser,1999). But Anglophobia failed to dominate the discursive field for two reasons.First, it never managed to deny America’s ethno-racial Anglo-ness; instead ittypically zoomed on softer targets such as the financial preponderancy ofLondon or commercial competition in South America and Asia. Once theBritish Empire gave in to its American successor, the discourse lost its bite.

Second and more importantly, Anglophobia was always somewhat schizoid:that the despised English/other was simultaneously feared and admired isevident in the texts left behind Secretary of State James Blaine, Senator HenryCabot Lodge, the Chicago Tribune editor Robert McCormick and evenJefferson, at least judging by the founder’s lifelong interest in the Anglo-Saxonlanguage and history. Anglophobia never overwhelmed the archetypical WASPs– the middle- and upper-income, Ivy League-educated, White Protestant men inthe American Northeast who have perpetuated themselves in national leadershiproles in much of American history. These individuals thought and acted withinan Anglocentric worldview, already developed within their own national context,but their Anglocentrism was also facilitated by overwhelmingly positive andclose recognition of identity coming from the rest of the Anglosphere – firstracialist and civilisational, later liberal democractic and even post-racial.

The political rise of Obama can be regarded as the triumph of America’s‘egalitarian transformative’ racial order (King and Smith, 2005). Its content todayis defined mostly by liberal multiculturalism, a discourse that calls for the appli-cation of liberal values of freedom, democracy and equality to ethnically definedgroups of people (Kymlicka, 2007). Thanks to the civil rights movement, aswell as to the institutional and demographic shifts, which followed the 1964Hart-Cellar Act, this discourse has been on the upswing for four decades, causingmulticultural politics, policies and institutions to become tightly coupled with theidea and practice of liberal democracy. The United States, in this reading, is acountry of multiple and hybrid cultures, not of anglophone White settlers; it willbe ‘normal’ and ‘modern’ – to say nothing of ‘advanced’ or ‘leading’ – liberaldemocracy only to the extent that it continues to recognise minority, indige-nous and, to varying degrees, ‘new immigrant’ claims (ibid, p.43). To invokeHuntington again, with the advent of liberal multiculturalism, America hasbecome more African American, more Asian American, and, most worryingly forhim, more Latino American.18 If US Census Bureau population projections arecorrect, within the next four decades America will reach the so-called ‘majority-minority’ status, which may be very familiar to the residents of Hawaii orChicago but rather strange to the readers of national history textbooks. In thisstoryline, Obama invokes both a desirable and inevitable future.

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Once we scratch behind the rebranding acts made during the 2008 elections,however, we re-label the ‘age of Obama’ as the age of ‘simulacrobama’ – a‘mediated spectacle whose message is that the United States is now a post-racial,or post-racist, society’.19 That America’s racial hierarchy has so far beenrelatively impervious to the liberal multicultural project is sometimes explained asan unintended consequence of the civil rights movement, which defined group-differentiated rights rather narrowly on a Whiteness/Blackness continuum(Jacobson, 1998, p. 272; cf. Kymlicka, 2007, p. 91). But this problem could infact be multiplied in the liberal multicultural era, given that it forcesidentifications with racialised majority–minority boundaries, whereas puttingaside the prior problem of the history of slavery and racism. Further, considerthat only 2.4 per cent of Americans checked off the new ‘multiracial’ (other-race)option in the last decennial census, whereas around 80 per cent of HispanicAmericans self-identified as ‘White’. As a result, the near-absolute majorityremained with the taxonomical Whites, which suggests both the resilience ofthe old hierarchy and the limits of the ethnoracially defined equality, multiplicityand hybridity.20 Could it be that America Whiteness is a form of cultural capitalthat will continue to operate parallel to majority–minority realities? If so, thedemographic and institutional shifts will change the face of American politicsonly in conjunction with a larger shift in what it means to be American.

Also important is the presence of a variety of multiculturalisms in the world,what Will Kymlicka’s (2007) calls the ‘international politics of diversity’. Hereis another site in which imperial identities are made and remade. In the pastcommunautarisme-laıcite debates of 1980s and 1990s, the French state officiallyrejected the idea and practice of multiculturalism for the same reason that itrejected Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the less-than-strict Anglo-Saxon secularism– as historically and ideologically threatening to the French Self. Conversely,the English-language press was quick dismiss France’s ‘headscarf ’ bans in1989, 1994 and 2004 as retrograde and so as a confirmation of the Anglovariety of multiculturalism. And when the disaffected youth in differentadministrative departments of Paris rioted in 2005, more than a few Americancommentators were quick to suggest that France (and the rest of continentalEurope) should look to the United States (and Britain) for institutional andmoral lessons on how to deal with cultural diversity within a shared politicalspace (for example, Zakaria, 2005). Similar readings surrounded the election ofObama to the American presidency in 2008: even if its ‘problem of the colourline’ persists, went this argument then, the United States has managed tocultivate its cultural diversity rather well compared to other advanced liberaldemocracies (to say nothing of the illiberal world). The more-or-less directimplication is that the others should learn from the American model and it isprecisely here that the myth of the Ellis Island becomes as imperial as that of thePlymouth Rock (cf. Jacobson, 2006: 6–10). In sum, there is little evidence that



liberal multicultural America has become multiracial, much less post-racial. The‘problem of race’ has unsettled all historical versions of the American Self andthe age of Obama may be no exception. But even if the new American societycomes to radically change the American state, this might not necessarily changethe American empire.

The Market Empires

It was in the twentieth century that the materialist identities associated with‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ replaced Anglo-Protestant piety and Anglo-Saxonracial virtue as one of the main dynamos behind the US empire.21 Models orvarieties of capitalism are used as ideal-type in comparative political economyand as stereotype in the vernacular, but there is usually an agreement thatAnglo-Saxon capitalism refers to a mode of economic production and exchangebased on industry, free market, mass consumption, respect for private propertyand, that most ephemeral quantity, limited government. In this discourse, it isthe age-old liberalism’s debate on how to nourish human freedom and equalityat the same time that leads to, and accommodates, a variety of contradictionsand paradoxes such as private entrepreneurship versus public spending,solidarity or altruism versus self-help and greed. Without some reference tothe real or virtual dialogue between the ‘liberal’ Hayek and the ‘statist’ Keynes itwould be difficult to talk of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.22

Among discourses transplanted, and then co-jointly developed, across theAtlantic, Anglo-Saxon capitalism is arguably the most important politicallyand historically, not least because it has been promoted as the model for globaleconomy for at least a century, notwithstanding significant interruptions anddeviations such as the economic crisis that has engulfed the world since 2008.23

The model has now departed from its more extreme expressions known as‘neoliberalism’ and the ‘Washington consensus’, yet the discourse itself remains onsolid grounds mainly because its version of modernity is still widely accepted aslegitimate. Consider the idea of free markets, which is an essential feature inany discourse on the distinctiveness and superiority of Anglo institutions. Thefreedoms of speech and assembly are predicated upon the private/public dis-tinction; in turn, the private sphere – and private property rights more speci-fically – is regarded as necessary for the exercise of these freedoms in the firstplace. Conversely, without private property, not only can there be no freemarkets, but no human freedom also. The economy is therefore regarded askey to politics, not the other way around, as exemplified in the slogans suchas ‘let the markets decide’ or in the constant ‘need’ for ever more markets and,within them, for more mobility, flexibility, efficiency, productivity or compe-titiveness.24 In this version, the American empire rests a consumerist and

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nominally egalitarian modernity and confronts various traditional forms ofauthority and class hierarchy.

In the tradition of the ‘Wisconsin school’ of American foreign relations, itwas the Yankee capitalists who orchestrated the rise of the American empire.After the closing of the internal economic colonisation in North America, theUnited States moved to open new free markets across oceans. Traditionally,much has been made about Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Notes toChina, but America ‘market empire’ proved its worth first in continentalEurope, where its discourse on modernity swept community- and solidarity-based ideas.25 A far more expansive imperial policy was formulated after 1945,when the United States, as the leader in a clash against Soviet communism,strove to sustain its versions of capitalism at the global scale, all the way to thepost-1990 ‘neoliberal triumph’ (Hunt, 2007, p. 266). But like the ‘carving up ofChina’ in the nineteenth century, neoliberalism, too, was a joint venture.America’s reach became far more extensive and universalising than anythingseen under Victorian Britain, but both empires spread free markets with equalzeal, particularly when they were running unchallenged. In Niall Ferguson’smemorable pun, the process of globalisation in the 1990s this was nothing but‘Anglobalization’ at its best – a macro-historical process sparked by the Britishempire in the Victorian era (Ferguson, 2003, p. xxvi).

Much of the mainstream media has been keen to interpret the post-2008economic crisis as a clash of civilisations, in which the Anglo version ofcapitalism – denigrated as cowboy or casino capitalism – is the rogue side,having caused a global calamity by encouraging deregulation, financial risk-taking and extreme excesses. The G20 summit in London, hosted by Britain’sprime minister Gordon Brown in April 2009, was caricatured as a sensationalshow-down between Brown and Obama on the one hand and GermanChancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on the other,as representatives of alternatives to Anglo-Saxon capitalism (for example,Economist, 2009a). What is interesting is how seamlessly, and without anyirony, Obama became Anglo-Saxon in this reading (Ibbitson, 2009).

Such popular caricatures speak neither of Obama nor of the ‘special relation-ship’ so much as of the institutional advantages enjoyed by the UnitedStates and its closest allies in the contemporary capitalist order. The very firstG20 summit of November 2008 – dubbed the ‘crisis summit’ – convened inWashington, DC, the Federal Reserve assumed the role of the world’s centralbank and the US government tried to coordinate fiscal stimulus packages ata global scale. Attempts to create the old world order anew are subject toconstant legitimation contests and it is here that the discursive flexibility ofAnglo-Saxon capitalism comes to the fore. The ability to claim ownership over,or close association with, J.S. Mill and the Chartists, boom-bust capitalism and‘New Deal’ social democracy, market fundamentalism and the Third Way



helps disable alternative visions of the world and directly contributes to theremarkable staying power of the Anglo-American market empire. Obamahas shown that he can play this rhetorical game rather well, as exemplified bythe support he received from both corporations and trade unions duringhis presidential campaign or by the way he promised to ‘stand up’ to WallStreet, whereas simultaneously preserving the multibillion-dollar bank bailoutintroduced by his predecessor.

If discourses and institutions are mutually constituted, then the future of thecurrent imperial grip on the direction of the world’s economy is likely to hingenot only on the health of the Federal Reserve or the continuing lock-up ofthe accumulated global capital on Wall Street (and in the City), but also on theability of those who invoke and reflect Anglo-Saxon capitalism to co-opt thenext definition of modernity. For one, one of the more important politicalbattlegrounds in the Obama era will be how to keep its working definition ofcapitalism legitimate whereas simultaneously claiming sovereignty over therepresentations of the ‘sustainability’ and ‘stability’ of energy and climate.

Linguistic Imperialism

It was a decade ago that Kevin Phillips suggested that the English languagehad already become the primary engine of the Anglo-American empire(Phillips, 1999, pp. 597–602). The spread of English has indeed been staggering:in early 1950s, around 250 million people spoke English; today, a quarter of theworld’s population may be in some way fluent in this language – makingEnglish the world’s first ‘global language’.26 A standard British Council-styleclaim that ‘English now belongs to everyone’ is comparable to the claim thatthe market forces are beyond control; both can alternatively be regarded aspolitical programmes with implicit and explicit hegemonic tendencies, a pro-cess sometimes called ‘linguistic imperialism’.27 At stake here are not simply theissues of ‘soft power’, ‘cultural imperialism’, important as these are, but aboutthe movement of ideas embedded in English, as well as of people speakingEnglish, between the imperial metropole and peripheries, as well as among theputative peripheries themselves.

The modifiers preceding the noun – global, international, world and so on –each represent a particular brand of thinking on the causes and consequencesof the global diffusion of English as a loosely unified and multidialecticallanguage. Using the broadest of brushes, this literature can be approachedfrom two broad ontological and/or theoretical perspectives predictably binari-zed as rationalist versus constructivist, economic versus cultural or instrumen-talist versus symbolic. At one end of the continuum, language is regarded as atransaction cost. To the extent that it facilitates social and economic exchange

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in a community – for example, Switzerland, the European Union, the world –a facility in English therefore brings an economic advantage comparable tothat enjoyed by literate individuals over analphabets. Here, the spread ofEnglish disproportionately benefits Anglophone societies and states: withouta need to invest in the teaching of English as a second language, they aresubject to various savings effects, measured in billions of US dollars.28

At the other end of the continuum, language is said to constitute identity.This perspective stresses semantics over syntax and suggests that each languagecarries a specific way of seeing the world. One may therefore learn to deploygrammatically correct sentences in English, but also not without adopting thediscourses particular to societies and states where ‘Anglo English’ or ‘innercircle English’ dominates such as the US. Fundamental for this perspective isthe work on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in linguistics (as well as anthropologyand cognitive sciences), which holds that differences in language structurecause humans to perceive the world differently.29 Anglo English, some argue,privileges ontologies that emphasize individual autonomy, control of theenvironment and reason (Wierzbicka, 2006). The global diffusion of Englishthrough politics, economics, entertainment, education, travel, the media andthe Internet therefore also involves the diffusion of in-built, unconscious onto-logies that favour, in the words of the Australian writer David Malouf, the‘magic circle of Anglo-Saxon thinking’ (cited in ibid, 9). The question whetherthere are now multiple ‘world Englishes’ is irrelevant so long as the putativeAnglo-Saxons remain the ‘touchstone and guarantor of English-based globalcommunication’ (ibid: pp. 13–14). A clear example of this hegemony is thepowerful English-as-a-second-language education industry, which privileges‘native’ Anglo English teachers over equally skilled and experienced Asianand African teachers.30 The same applies to the media and the academia – thedominance of English in the production, reproduction and circulation ofknowledge privileges the discourses internal to the Anglosphere and disciplinesother.

The massive expansion of the English language around the world is a pheno-menon whose consequences scholars are only beginning to grapple with, butprima facie parallels with the observations made above are obvious. First,despite multiple efforts in the nineteenth century to codify American English,the United States remains an Anglo English-speaking state. Without it, theUnited States would be ontologically, if not constitutionally, impossible.31 Tothe extent that language is always more than syntax or transaction costs,America’s Anglo-ness is therefore beyond doubt. Second, linguistic imperial-ism is probably the most successful aspect of the American empire. Languagealone cannot sustain an empire, yet it can significantly postpone its death.Therefore, although the aforementioned ‘neoliberal triumph’ might look shakyto most, few doubt ‘the triumph of English’ (Economist, 2001). And to the



extent that the Anglo identity writ large – inclusive of the discourses of indi-vidual autonomy and social competition – is deeply interwoven in the fabric ofthe globally expanding Anglo English, then the American empire has a ratherbright future.

Conclusions

This article has explored some ways in which Anglo-ness has driven Americanimperial development, broadly understood to include anything from the missio-nary efforts in the nineteenth century to the contemporary English teachingindustry. The age of Obama, I have suggested, remains lodged in the age ofempire. The self-other relations set in Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon capitalismand, most strongly, English still define the United States as an Anglo-Americanempire, rather than some other polity. And though the discourse of Anglo-Saxonism now belongs to history, the triumph of liberal multiculturalism,cosmopolitanism and post-racialism that the rise of Obama simulated in 2008may turn out to be an imperial triumph as well.

The historical illustrations have suggested that different discourses ofidentity implied different imperial practices in different contexts. But ratherthan any one of these ideal-typical identities, it has been their general andspecific interaction that has shaped the American empire. In the first centuryof the republic, Protestant evangelism and Anglo-Saxonism justified settlercolonialism on the continent and, in the 1890s, a formal overseas empire aswell. Some American imperialists who called for an understanding and unitywith Britain on the basis of Anglo-Saxonism thus posited that Americanexceptionalism actually predated America (Kramer, 2006, p. 121). Arguably, itwas much easier for the government in Washington to justify overseasconquest to its selectorate as somehow historically predetermined (and so‘beyond control’) than in terms of a cost/benefit calculation done by mostlynortheastern industrialists. Similar arguments were used to diffuse the power ofthe isolationist discourse in the interwar period, defined as a systematic non-entanglement with the world beyond the North American continent, as well asto dismiss criticisms about the Washington consensus in the 1990s.

Judging by their historical record, America’s home-grown anti-imperialistsare losers. Imperial urges do tend to be followed by anti-imperial urges, butthe latter then tend to be weak and short-lived, with the anti-Vietnam Warmovement as an exception. The United States is yet to see an emergenceof a discourse at home, which would precipitate major and lasting changes inthe way Washington runs its affairs abroad (Hunt, 2007, pp. 5, 21–22). At thesame time, interactions among multiple pro-imperial discourses can and doopen space for complexities, inconsistencies, as well as outright discursive

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clashes – witness the uneasy relationship between Anglo-Saxonists andrestorationists in the post 1945 Middle East. Discursive conflict also arose ininteractions with undercurrents not directly examined in this article suchas other forms of liberalism, conservatism or, indeed, the readiness to resortto armed struggle (Mead, 2007, pp. 79–82, Phillips, 1999, pp. xi–xii). Overall,however, the American empire has protected and projected an Anglo identityin the world, much like the British empire that preceded it. This broader anddeeper historical process may continue not only beyond the age of Obama,but also beyond the age of America, especially if recall that empires are aboutthe discursive definitions of the centre-periphery relationships. The capitalof a post-American Anglo empire may turn out to be Singapore, New Delhi,Brussels or some other post-racial, capitalist and predominantly English-speaking global city.

About the Author

Srdjan Vucetic is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public andInternational Affairs. His research interests are in American and Canadianforeign policy, international security and international migration. He iscurrently working on a book dealing with the ‘Anglosphere’. Before joiningthe GSPIA, Srdjan was the Randall Dillard Research Fellow in InternationalStudies at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.

Notes

1 Predictably, this literature has been characterized by a definitional anarchy, but perhaps modal

is a ‘broad’, ‘post-territorial’ and ‘informal’ view of empire as an international hierarchy in

which political authority sits at the center against some consenting periphery (Howe, 2002; Cox,

2005; Hunt, 2007; Berger, 2009; MacDonald, 2009; Nexon and Wright, 2007 and Porter, 2006).

2 Ferguson (2004, p. 301); MacDonald (2009, p. 48) and Hunt (2007, p. 40–41).

3 Cox (1996 [1981]) and Panitch and Konings (2008); cf. Ashley (1984).

4 For Andrew Roberts, America and Britain are thus eminently comparable to the republic and

empire of ancient Rome (Roberts, 2006, p. 1). Also see Mead (2007) and Phillips (1999).

5 The Economist (2009b); cf. Klein (2010). The ‘age of Obama’ comes from Gwen Ifill (2009).

6 Especially relevant are discussions in Belich (2009, pp. 58–65) and Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 5,

299–301).

7 See, inter alia, Burk (2007), Belich (2009) and Olwell and Tully (2006, part 3). Importantly, this

point was made by scores of ‘foreign’ observers at the time of the revolution such as Hector de

Crevecoeur, Frederick the Great, Bernardo de Galvez, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, Francisco de

Miranda, Comte de Rochambeau, Francis Vigo and, later, Alexis de Tocqueville.

8 See, inter alia, Colley (1992) and Maltby (1971). This positioning arguably persists to this day,

continuing in and through various ‘Euroskeptic’ discourses in Britain.



9 See, inter alia, Tocqueville (2000 [1840]), Longley (2002), Noll (2002), Lambert (2003), Mead

(2007, pp. 310–317), Jacoby (2008) and Lieven (2005, pp. 32–36). For a philosophical

consideration of the compatibility of Christianity and modern secular politics, including liberal

democracy, see Gray (2008).

10 Among 55 delegates who participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, more than four

fifths identified as Episcopalian/Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist or Methodist

(Lambert, 2003, pp. 246–252). Protestantism indeed evolved: Puritanism (and Presbyterianism)

in early-modern colonial America split into the so-called dissenting churches, moving from

Baptism and Methodism in the nineteenth century to Evangelism in the twentieth. On the role

of Protestantism in English (and Scottish) early-modern colonialism, see Stevens (1993). Native

Americans also had a place in this reading, as one of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel – a belief still

held by some Mormons (Goldman, 2004, pp. 15–23).

11 The last anecdote may be apocryphal for there is no written record of it, but Hebrew was indeed

central to the curricula in America’s 10 ‘original’ colleges (Goldman, 2004, p. 29). Note that

Franklin and John Adams, and later Theodore Roosevelt, were in favour of linguistic

uniformity based on English. Also note that Aramaic, the other language of the Bible, never

gained popularity in the Anglo-Atlantic.

12 One can, of course, still maintain that the United States empire differs from the rest because of

its unique ability to combine a sense of exceptionalism with unprecedented hard and soft power

(Porter, 2006) or because of the presence of novel ‘situational factors’ like globalization, the

proliferation of nation-states or the very informal and sector-specific character of America’s

imperial relations (Nexon and Wright, 2007).

13 On the latter, see Fallows (2009). Notably, Obama also embraced exceptionalism in his Nobel

Peace Prize speech on 10 December 2009.

14 That redundant acronym ‘WASP’ came much later (cca. 1950s). For historical reasons, WASP

is now the preferred term in US public discourse, whereas elsewhere in the world, including

Britain, Anglo-Saxon remains very much in the vernacular.

15 If one Anglo identity arose in opposition to the European others on the religious dimension,

then putatively internal relationships with the ‘Celtic fringe’ produced another Anglo identity

on the racial/ethnic dimensions, starting in the sixteenth century (Hechter, 1999). Anglo-

Saxonist discourse varied over time in the readiness of claim Celts as others, as demonstrated in

the case of Scots and even Irish Catholics (Jacobson, 1998).

16 See Hackett Fischer (1989), Kirk (1993). Compare with Jordan (1968) and, especially, Hartz

(1955).

17 Although the idea of overseas evangelisation can be historically found in most Protestant

societies, the magnitude and frequency of cooperation among English-speaking missionaries and

their governments dwarfed that between comparable social groups (Kramer, 2006; Sharkey,

2008).

18 Huntington (2004). Compare with Lopez (2005) and Laitin (2008). A corollary to liberal

multiculturalism is immigrationism, a discourse that holds that immigration is inevitable and

always positive (Taguieff, 2006).

19 Friedman (2009, p. 342), cf. Holinger (2008), Roediger (2008, pp. 212–230) and Wingfield and

Feagin (2010).

20 The 2010 census will give us further data and spurn further debate on whether contemporary

Latinos and Chicanos are becoming White, like it was the case with the Irish, Jews, Italians and

other ‘ethnics’ or ‘dark Whites’ in the past, thus perpetuating and entrenching America’s long-

standing White dominance (cf. Jacobson, 2006).

21 See, inter alia, de Grazia (2005) and Hunt (2007, especially, pp. 85–89).

22 See, especially, Gamble (1996), but also Cronin (2000), Bourdieu (2001), Giddens, ed. (2001).

For an influential statement on the models of capitalism, see Albert (1991).

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23 The Anglo stamp on the global economy is even deeper historically: in much of the period

between 1717 and 1971 either the British pound sterling or the US dollar (sometimes both)

served as the international equivalent of gold. The flaws are typically explained away by history,

as in the claims that Anglo-Saxon capitalism had been sabotaged by its own hubris before, yet it

survived and self-corrected (as if ‘self-healing powers’ are an inherent feature of the model).

24 In terms of objectivist measures, of course, American capitalists are no less aided by their

government than capitalists elsewhere, whether through Washington’s management of tariffs

for industry, minimal protections for labour, or through relatively lenient bankruptcy regimes.

As Mead correctly notes, what matters more is the ‘cult of the invisible hand’, not the lack of

statist economic policies (Mead, 2007, p. 298).

25 The ‘market empire’ comes from de Grazia (2005). Compare with LaFeber (1998 [1963]) and

Williams (1972 [1959]).

26 See Crystal (2006, pp. 424–425, 2008); Graddol (2006, p. 14) and Holborrow (1999, pp. 54–60).

27 See Ives (2006) and Phillipson (1992, 2008). Compare with Hamel (2005), Crystal (2008) and

Kayman, 2004).

28 See the findings of Francois Grin, as discussed in Phillipson (2008). Also see De Swaan (2001),

Grin (2001) and Van Parijs (2004).

29 How, when, why and to what extent this phenomenon occurs is a matter of much theoretical

and empirical debate and controversy (Lucy, 1997; Gentner and Goldwin-Meadow, eds. 2003).

30 See, inter alia, Holborrow (2006), Lin and Luke (2006) and Ryan (2006). For an argument that

Englishes spoken in Asia and Africa are capable of expressing indigenous values without

succumbing to the hierarchies implicit in the Huboldtean circles, see Kachru et al (2006). What

this school of thought emphasizes is linguistic transmission, not imperialism.

31 Constitutionally speaking, the United States does not have an official language; the so-called

English Language Amendment has been before Congress since 1981, but the measure is yet to

come to a vote, even in committee. Language issues are regarded in terms of education policy at

the state level or as civil rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

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What is so American about the American empire?

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