Abstract
Imperialism rarely receives discussion in mainstream philosophy. In radical philosophy, where imperialism is analyzed with some frequency, European expansion is the paradigm. This essay considers the nature and specificity of American imperialism, especially its racialization structures, diplomatic history, and geographic trajectory, from pre‐twentieth century “Amerasia” to present‐day Eurasia. The essay begins with an account of imperialism generally, one which is couched in language consistent with left‐liberalism but compatible with a more radical discourse. This account is then used throughout the rest of the essay to illumine, through consideration of US foreign policy, structures of American dominion in Latin America, the Pacific, and Asia—and subsequently Eurasia. The overall analytic and geographic portrait offers critical context for both philosophy of race, which tends to be domestically oriented, and just war theory, which tends to ignore wider structures of diplomatic domination.
Notes
In 1993, an agenda‐setting anthology was published, calling upon American Studies and other scholars to take seriously our cultural and scholastic amnesia regarding US imperialism. It is interesting to note that no philosophers contributed to this unusually large volume. See Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds), The Culture of U.S. Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
A provocative examination of this phenomenon, specifically in the work of John Rawls, has been offered by Jeffrey Paris, one of the few philosophers addressing the problem I have described. See his “After Rawls,” Social Theory and Practice, 28, no. 4 (Oct 2002): 679–99. An important attempt to address this lacuna, and from which I have learned a great deal, by Eduardo Mendieta, is “Eurasia and Asia: American Empire and World History,” ms.
There are at least three notable exceptions to the general neglect by mainstream American philosophers in addressing US imperialism. The first was the formation of the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1969. It was created out of the general desire to maintain philosophy's relevance to public issues and to be a voice to “challenge the widespread complacency about American institutions and practices.” As one might have guessed, at the heart of this formative impulse was the “concern, outrage, and sense of helplessness aroused in varying degrees among philosophers by the Vietnam War.” And in spite of the fact that it might “seem pointless to detect three nonsequiturs and four evasions per dropped megaton,” they hold out the prospect that philosophy might bring valuable critical perspective to the public debate. These convictions of the Society led to an edited volume of essays on international ethics, the introduction for which is the source of the quotations in the earlier sentences: Virginia Held, Sidney Morgenbesser, and Thomas Nagel (eds), Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Since then, I do not know of any essays published in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs that directly engage the issue of imperialism, though again proximate topics do receive attention. The second exception is Bertrand Russell, who took the initiative to form an international war crimes tribunal to determine, among other things, whether the US was guilty of genocide in Vietnam. The commission, which included Jean‐Paul Sartre, did condemn the US of genocide. See Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967). The third major exception to the norm of silence from the mainstream of the profession is virtually an institution unto himself: Noam Chomsky. No longer satisfied with working solely, and of course brilliantly so, in linguistic theory, he began in the 1960s a long career as an outspoken critic of the US empire, beginning with American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969). In fact, the acclaim he has received for his work in politics may confound my initial placement of him under the rubric of mainstream philosophy. It does seem clear, however, that in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, his superb work in philosophy of language ensured that controversies over him at the time would be relegated to issues like deep grammar rather than, say, the military‐industrial complex. Interestingly, Chomsky and Russell converged to an extent in their practical politics: Chomsky wrote for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, “Two Essays on Cambodia,” The Spokesman, pamphlet no. 5 (1970).
For philosophical discussion of Asia and Asian Americans in the race dialogue, see Craig Ihara and David H. Kim (eds), Asian Pacific American Philosophy: Other Bodies and Other Borders in the Philosophy of Race, a special edition of The American Philosophical Association Newsletter (on the Status of Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies), 2, no. 2 (Summer 2003).
It is interesting to observe that in the theory of internal colonialism, which was popular in the late 1960s and the 70s, the conception of America's domestic racial communities was absorbed into the originally externally focused framework of racial imperialism.
This account differs from the one offered by Sidney Morgenbesser, one of the very few mainstream philosophers to address the nature of imperialism. See his essay, “Imperialism: Some Preliminary Distinctions,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 3–44, reprinted in Virginia Held, Sidney Morgenbesser and Thomas Nagel (eds), Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Very quickly, let me note that on his four‐part account of a sufficient condition for imperialistic state action, he cites that the state in question must be “the center of an empire,” which he goes on to elaborate in terms of annexations and colonization. This strikes me as circular because part of what we want in an account of imperialism is what makes a nation the center of an empire. See pp. 11–14.
Clearly, this analogy is inspired by Harry Frankfurt's work. See his The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
One highly developed account of exploitation is Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Henry M. Christman (ed.), The Essential Works of Lenin (Mineola, NY: Dover Pub., Inc., 1987); Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Peter J. Cain and Mark Harrison (eds), Imperialism: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies [vols. 1–3] (New York: Routledge, 2001); Ronald H. Chilcote, Imperialism: Theoretical Directions (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000).
My account leaves open the question of whether a relationship like a UN trusteeship can be formed without it simply being a pretext for, or devolving into, imperialism. This is important because I do not wish to pack into the content of the definition every sort of non‐reciprocal international relationship. As a purely conceptual point, it seems that there could be a just form of a legally paternalistic international relationship, not unlike extraordinary cases in which caretakers can within bounds dictate and tend to the interests of the adult individual who is under their care. In practice, of course, a UN trusteeship may simply amount to a subtler variant of imperialism. With the many lessons of history, a nation's assurances of just paternalism should be met with the most stringent scrutiny possible, and perhaps even that is not enough of a safeguard to permit such a relationship.
I have learned from many works on this theme: J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Routledge Press, 2003); Christman, The Essential Works of Lenin; Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism: Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955); W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., Inc., 1945); Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De‐Colonization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964); Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House Inc., 1979); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991); Jim M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995); and Chilcote, Imperialism: Theoretical Directions.
After all, Lenin had to write an involved little book on the topic. And in it, he criticizes some exceptional theorists, like J. A. Hobson and Karl Kautsky, for mischaracterizing the role of economics in imperialism.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
I personally am not wedded to every detail of the account of imperialism I have advanced. The desiderata of maximum plausibility (not defensibility) and maximum compatibility with other accounts lead me to characterize imperialism in the way I have.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 180–82. This is but one example. Interestingly, they too offer a historical account of the distinctive character of the rise of US empire. See pp .160–82.
Of course, their view could be that, technically speaking, what they call “Empire” is not a new phase of imperialism, but a wholly new and total social condition that dates imperialism in the historical past and makes the notion of empire merely a useful analogy. If this is their view, then it is not eliminativist and I need not worry about showing its reductive powers because quite simply it is not a theory of imperialism, but of post‐imperialism.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 20–21.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 37–39.
Ronald Sundstrom, “Race and Place: Social Space and the Production of Human Kinds,” Philosophy and Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 83–95. See also David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), chap. 8, and Mills, The Racial Contract, chap. 2.
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
Goldberg, The Racial State, chap. 5.
Jason Burke, “Roll Credits,” Guardian Unlimited, Thursday 17 April, 2003.
Cpl. Jeremy M. Vought, “Big Screen Cunny visits the 1st FSSG in Kuwaiti Desert,” Story Identification Number: 200352813378. Submitted by 1st Force Service Support Group.
Tony Karon, “Iraq is not Vietnam, but …,” in Viewpoint: Tony Karon, Time Online Edition, Tuesday, 24 June, 2003.
I ignore here the implications of the Vietnam fantasies. See Marilyn Blatt Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991); Darrell Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); and H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
Stuart C. Miller, “Our Mylai of 1900: Americans in the Philippine Insurrection,” in American Expansionism: The Critical Issues, ed. Marilyn Blatt Young (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., Inc., 1973), 104.
See the website of the Department of Defense, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (DIOR): http://web1.whs.osd.mil/diorhome.htm.
This idea of pre‐1898 American isolationism can be found as far back as J. A. Hobson's 1902 classic, Imperialism: A Study [reprint 1965], 22.
Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967); David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); and Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York: Schocken Books, 1990).
Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire [rev. ed.] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo‐Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
A great book on the Cold War context of the civil rights is Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Ernest R. May, The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); and Walter La Feber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1993), The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).
La Feber, The Panama Canal, 44.
La Feber, The Panama Canal, 40.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 251.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti‐Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 273–74.
Indeed, many of the demeaning political cartoons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century depicted the Chinese as beastly. See Marlon Hom, Lorraine Dong, and Philip Choy (eds), Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
Thanks to Eddie Glaude Jr. and Gary Mar for pointing out to me this important feature of Harlan's dissent.
Brook Thomas (ed.), Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 1997), 58.
Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” The Journal of American History, 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 67–92.
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 4.
Senator Alfred J. Beveridge, “Our Philippine Policy,” in The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, eds Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephan Rosskamm Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 23–26.
Richard H. Miller, American Imperialism in 1898: The Quest for National Fulfillment (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1970); La Feber, The New Empire; Julius W. Pratt, America's Colonial Experiment: How the United States Gained, Governed, and in Part Gave away a Colonial Empire (New York: Prentice Hall, 1951); James C. Thomson, Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981); Marilyn Blatt Young (ed.), American Expansionism: The Critical Issues (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., Inc., 1973).
Guerilla warfare continued after 1902, but that year is often designated as the official end. As I noted in the earlier section of this essay, so little—too little—focuses on this important first US war in Asia and first major overseas US colonial war.
Space does not permit fuller discussion of US‐Philippine relations. See Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippine‐U.S. Literary Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Vincente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Sexual Economies in the Asia‐Pacific Community,” in What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder: Westview Press, Inc., 1993); Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (eds), The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Ronald Sundstrom, “Falling into the Olongapo River,” in The American Philosophical Association Newsletter (on the Status of Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies), 2, no. 2, (Summer 2003).
Theodore Roosevelt, Colonial Policies of the United States (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1937), 74.
Hawai'i had a different trajectory. The Hawaiian kingdom was overthrown by US business interests in 1893, was annexed in 1898, and made a state in 1959. American Samoa was acquired from Germany in 1899.
For more on the complicated legal history, see Owen Fiss, Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888–1910 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1993); Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall (eds), Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Juan R. Torruella, The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1985).
An existentially probing account of this can be found in Sundstrom, “Falling into the Olongapo River.”
Arguably, the Philippines is still linked to the US by an informal or neo‐imperialism. See note 46 for more details on such a case.
Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American‐East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 27.
See Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangements: Japanese and American Experience, 1897–1911 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) and Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American‐East Asian Relations (Chicago: Imprint Publications, Inc., 1992).
Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
For more philosophical aspects, see the excellent essay by Yoko Arisaka, “The Nishida Enigma: The Principle of the New World Order,” Monumenta Nipponica, 511 (Spring 1996): 81–99.
For more on US‐Japan relations, see The Clash: U.S.‐Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
For analysis of some of the complexity of Japan's racial views, see Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (New York: Routledge, 1998).
John W. Dower, “Other Japanese Occupation,” The Nation, 7 July, 2003, p. 12.
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
For more critical perspectives on US‐Asia relations, see Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Arif Dirlik (ed.), What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Cumings, Parallax Visions; David Palumbo‐Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Lowe, Immigrant Acts; and Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History (WA: University of Washington Press, 1994); Dower, War without Mercy; T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (eds), Perilous Memories: The Asia‐Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); and Martin Hart‐Landsberg, Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
Edward Said, Orientalism, 1–2.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xiv. Thanks to Eduardo Mendieta for suggesting this book to me and for critical discussion of it.
Beveridge, “Our Philippine Policy,” 23–26.