Twilight of the new Rome - "Compare the United Kingdom's influence in its heyday with that of the United States today"

Résumé du document

Empire and hegemony. Two very similar words to describe two very different realities. Many authors have chosen to use either while others make it a priority to distinguish the terms. An empire is often defined as a political unit which has an extensive territory and one single authority to rule over it. On the other hand, a hegemonic state is a state which is able to impose a set of rules, in any sphere. This last definition does not include any sort of territorial conquest, and this is probably the main aspect which differenciates empire from hegemony, Great Britain from the US.

Extraits

[...] Most specialists agree that by 1914 the British empire had become «overstreched»: this concept, thought of by Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Power, refers to the fact that an empire is capable of extending geographically beyond its military and economic ressources. After World War many argued that the United States had surpassed the British superpower and installed itself as the world leader. How is it possible to explain such a downfall from the British Empire and how does it apply to the United States today? [...]

[...] At its peak, the empire was 150 times the geographical size of Great Britain and covered about 28% of the world's land surface. This is of course the biggest modern example of an empire and no country had come nearly close to this amount for centuries. Along with this conquest, there was an imposition of western values to try to permanently convert the populations of the conquered regions, like we can see with the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. [...]

[...] Furthermore, when a superpower falls, another one emerges to take leadership: this is the law of transition. At the beginning of the XXth, the United States took the place of Great Britain as world leader and today the power of the United States is threatened by emerging powers like India and China, although it is no where near leaving its leadership status. Nevertheless, let's keep in mind the following phrase, which is almost premonitory if we look at when it was written: Might Washington, like Rome, fall victim to imperial overstretch? [...]

[...] The main reason lies in the way the empire managed its colonies: at that time Britons thought colonies were good for everyone, including the colonized population. Indeed, for the British empire, colonizing remote countries in Africa or Asia was known as the white man's burden a sort of obligation to eduquate the masses in poor countries. For the british power, the slaughter of thousand of civilizians in the colony was in part done for the common good, so that it could reach more and more remote populations. [...]

[...] Britain is the first power to have colonies in all continents and it had at that time no intention of giving any amount of self-rule to territories in Africa and Asia. In this sense, the United States are not an empire because they do not conquer countries in which they intervene. This is a tradition in American politics: the US are either isoliationist (completely contrary to the logic of imperialism) or they are interventionist like during World War 2 or in the war in Vietnam. [...]