Empire and International Order [1 ed.] 9781317144403, 9780754679936

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Empire and International Order

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Empire and International Order

Edited by Noel Parker University of Copenhagen, Denmark

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Noel Parker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Noel Parker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Empire and international order. 1. Geopolitics. 2. imperialism. 3. international relations--philosophy. i. parker, noel, 1945327.1'01-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Empire and international order / [edited] by noel parker. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. iSBn 978-0-7546-7993-6 (hbk) -- iSBn 978-0-7546-9975-0 (ebook) 1. imperialism-Case studies. i. parker, noel, 1945- editor of compilation. JC359.E435 2013 325'.32--dc23 2012034723 ISBN 9780754679936 (hbk) ISBN 9781315579313 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures   Notes on Contributors   Introduction: Empires and the International – in History or throughout History   Noel Parker

vii ix

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Part I: Mechanisms of Empire and ‘the International’ 1 2 3

Empires, Past and Present: The Relevance of Empire as an Analytic Concept   Hendrik Spruyt

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Imperial Administration: Comparing the Byzantine Empire and the EU   Magali Gravier

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Empires and the Sovereign State Order: A Revisionist History   Noel Parker

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Part II: Newer Articulations of Empire in International Politics 4 5

Empire, Specialness: Exploring the Intersections between Imperial and Special Relationships   Kristin M. Haugevik



Imperial Discourse in a Post-Imperial Russia: Where Will It Float To?   Andrey Makarychev

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American Liberalism and the Imperial Temptation   Paul Musgrave and Dan Nexon

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113 131

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Afterword   Yale H. Ferguson

Index  

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List of Figures 1.1 1.2

Internal characteristics of empire compared with other logics of rule   Inter-relations of distinct polities  

6.1 6.2

Empire with four peripheries   Liberal empire and liberal hegemony  

23 25 134 140

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Notes on Contributors Yale H. Ferguson is Professorial Fellow, Division of Global Affairs and Emeritus Professor of Global and International Affairs, Rutgers University – Newark. Also Honorary Professor, University of Salzburg. Magali Gravier is Associate Professor at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. Kristin M. Haugevik is Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Andrey Makarychev is Research Fellow at the Institute for Eastern European Studies, Free University of Berlin. Paul Musgrave is a PhD candidate at international relations at Georgetown University. Dan Nexon is Associate Professor at the Department of Government of Georgetown University. Noel Parker is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Henrik Spruyt is Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations and Director of the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, at Northwestern University.

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Introduction: Empires and the International – in History or throughout History Noel Parker

The Case for Learning from Empires In January 2012, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, two of the widest-ranging historians of empires of the present time, presented a telling case to the readers of Le Monde Diplomatique: ‘The nation-state is an ideal of recent origin and uncertain future and, for many, devastating consequences’, they argued. It is from the history of empires that we can gain most insight into ‘the organisation of political power in the past, the present and even the future’ (Burbank and Cooper 2012). This book brings together scholars from different places (literally and figuratively) who, like Burbank and Cooper from the history discipline, feel that ‘international’ politics has more to gain from analysing empire as a powerful factor in any international order. For a century and more, in polemic and even in academic literature, the concept of empire has had pejorative import. Whoever spoke of empires suggested in the same breath that they were simply political forms of the past (Doyle 1986; Snyder 1991 – together with a vast literature on colonialism and post-colonialism). In other cases, empires that might come about in the future, deserve to be consigned to the past (Khanna 2008). Defenders of American foreign policy – since the United States is the most obvious candidate for the status of an empire – have normally spoken not of ‘empire’, but of US ‘hegemony’ as the benign exception in a world formerly dominated by empires (Brzezinski 1997, 2005). In the worst case, accounts of the United States that refer to any imperial tendencies have been critical, as if this is an unwelcome throw-back (for example, Bacevich 2002; Ikenberry 2002; Fox Piven 2004). However, recently we have seen historians and students of politics who are either free of prejudices about the failings of empire or even positively disposed to the possibilities of the form – as Burbank and Cooper (2010) are. See the above citation. The international affairs journal, International Studies Perspectives, 2008, volume 9, issue 3 (which included three contributors to this volume: Yale Ferguson, Dan Nexon and Hendrik Spruyt) was typical of the trend. If, across the length of historical time, empires have been a dominant ‘figure’ in any geopolitical

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order, there is ongoing potential for the concepts in interpreting current geopolitical trends (Parker 2010). Looking Back Over History: Empires in International Order Over recent years, a number of theoretical analyses have come from within the politics disciplines broadly defined that take empire on board. There has been a renaissance in adapting forms of state theory to the historical experience of empires. Its roots lie in an earlier sociology of empires’ bureaucracy (which is taken in an unfamiliar direction in Magali Gravier’s chapter in this volume), analysing the socio-political dynamics of earlier, primarily oriental, and in that sense pre-modern, empires (Wittfogel 1957; Eisenstadt 1963), mostly in other parts of the world.1 The effect of Charles Tilly’s writings on the European state (especially Tilly and Ardant 1975; Tilly 1990), which classically made the central characteristic of modern states’ structure their war-making capacity, has been central (Neumann 2008), with Tilly himself having a hand in the trend towards studying empires (Tilly 1997). It has been as if Tilly-style structural analysis of the state spread its wings and took off from the modern sovereign state to examine other forms of political construction and the relations between them. Taking the point of departure in the historical sociology of states, that work moved from statehood as such to inter-state relations. There have been many participants in this trend. David Lake developed and explored typologies of international relations in which empires had a place at one extreme of a continuum stretching from anarchy, depending on the coercion/consent in the relationship between the parties (Lake 1993, 1996, 2009). Alexander Motyl, specializing in Central–Eastern Europe, argued that empire as a form was possibly on its way back in the region (Motyl 1999, 2001). Alexander Cooley (2005) compared ‘U-form’ and ‘M-form’ organizations within empires, to generate an abstract model of different empires’ transaction costs. Dan Nexon, closer to the source of inspiration in Tilly, defined a type of ‘composite state’ characteristic of the early modern period, and proceeded to a detailed historical examination, accompanied by an abstract demonstration of the dangers that were inherent to the type (Nexon 2009). Hendrik Spruyt, who has been one of the first to challenge Tilly’s position on states (Spruyt 1994), considered the challenges to European states so long as they remained attached to their empires (Spruyt 2005). In the present book, Hendrik Spruyt substantially extends his thinking about the role of empires within international orders over the course of historical time – and, coincidentally, one can refer to his chapter to get the feel of these last two decades of American international politics theorizing.

1  Although Skocpol (1979) later brought this style of analysis closer to the European heartland with her account of revolutions in ‘bureaucratic absolutisms’.

Introduction

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In the meantime, Herfried Münkler, an established figure within Germanlanguage historical sociology, took the American conception of empire’s place in the international order of the past (Doyle, 1986) back to its roots in Weber’s account of modernity. Münkler explained the enormous sweep of empires in history by their location in the global pattern of civilized (developed) societies (Münkler 2007). Münkler leaned on the historical sociology of Weber and a tradition of historical study, such as Hintze’s, of modernization in the German Empire. Indeed, there have always been strong roots in the European tradition of historical thought about empires. Born at the same time as the long-standing critical-liberal, and then Left, tradition, the sustained analysis of the mechanics of empire was a major counter-voice within Enlightenment liberalism and nineteenthand twentieth-century modernity. The European Enlightenment struggled to distinguish its admiration for the ‘pagan’ order of the Roman Empire from the prospects of contemporary Europe (Gibbon 1953, especially chapters iii and viii; Pocock 1999, volume 2, part vi and volume 3, parts iv–vi), and that view was further inspired by the American example of contemporary rebellion against the British Empire. Such thinking remained strong in Europe throughout nineteenthand early twentieth-century Europe (Mommsen 1981), even as Europe’s great powers were indulging in empire-building for all they were worth. While maintaining a current of liberalism throughout (Burke 2000; Hobson 1902; Williams 2007; Fox Piven 2004 and numerous other critics), the tradition later became primarily associated with Marxism. Latterly masked in the rhetoric of Soviet strategic doctrine, it was too implicated to emerge unscathed from the ending of the Cold War (Halliday 1999). That coincided with the peak of rhetoric about the ending of all ‘evil empires’. Yet, regardless of its political position or ideological reputation, in itself the tradition of thought about empire exhibits many strengths and subtleties. By that, I refer to such figures in the 1970s as Galtung (1971), Emmanuel (1972) and Wallerstein (1979), who in the 1970s maintained innovation in spite of a preponderance of dogma on the Communist Left. While Marxist thinking proved capable of yet further development after 1990 (Galtung 1996; Wallerstein 2000), any serious attempt within the international relations discipline itself had to wait until 1986, and Michael Doyle. However, it remains fair to say, though, that Doyle, restricting his view to European cases in the pre-modern period or the nineteenth-century, locates empires theoretically as an exception to the norm of ‘modern international relations’. Meanwhile, outside North America, there was continuing interest in the historical lessons of empires in international politics (Reus-Smit 2004; Todorov 2005; Zielonka 2006; Hobson 2012). It is the aim of this book to pick up this current of reviving interest in empires in the international system, pursue (recalling Burbank and Cooper’s point) the long-standing historical presence of empires in the context of international order,

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and look afresh at the implications of thinking about empires and, as appropriate, imperialism.2 Empire: Structure, Product or Setting? The authors here are agreed that we have much to learn regarding the international order from empires. However, they are far from agreeing as to what should be the dominant perspective on empire as such. Over the length of the book a reader sees empires presented in the form of units within an overall structure of international order; as terrains of hard-won stability over international disorder; as frames for developing concepts of order at first sight not compatible with empire in itself; as discursive tropes referring to an imagined past; and as a discreet policy ‘temptation’ for incautious leadership. How can this be? And how can this variety of perspective, instead of merely perplexing the reader, manage to enrich the multiplicity that empire is seen in, so as to supplement empire’s relevance to questions of international order? It is true that the book is divided between a section that is primarily historically grounded and theoretically significant, and another section of present-day cases where concepts of empires can be useful, yet the division itself is neither watertight nor mutually exclusive. The variety of perspectives in different chapters remains. Hendrik Spruyt shares much with Doyle’s approach, but has taken it towards further differentiation. In his book Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Spruyt 2005), he explored the degree to which domestic political formations in European states holding empires exhibit common structural features – regardless of their being authoritarian or democratic, pre-twentieth century or twentieth century. Spruyt’s chapter (Chapter 1) proceeds to develop 2  Note on difference between empire and imperialism: it is most normal to refer to an empire as a specific type of power structure and, a fortiori, as thought, analysis, theory, etc. about empires in so far as that concerns itself with a form of power. ‘Imperialism’, by contrast, was an expression invented in the nineteenth century, around the time that all the great political ideologies were developed. These were ideas that may have had roots before that period, but it was then that they took the form of ideologies, i.e. diffuse, loosely coherent and potentially persuasive sets of ideas representing interests, often distorted to match political identities. That is to say, the term ‘imperialism’ came into use to describe (and often most criticize) a set of assumptions to back up certain policies. Thus, the term belongs alongside Western nationalisms (often dismissive of rival nations), racism (mutatis mutandis, of ethnic groups), orientalism (Said 1978), anglo-saxonism (Hofstader 1971), etc., together with scientific thinking only in so far as that resembles or partakes of political attitudes (e.g. Darwinism, modernism – both of which can easily be political). That said, the two terms have often been used to mean the same thing, namely, the historical reality of empires, especially in the case of European colonial empires. The authors of this book primarily concentrate upon ‘empire(s)’ as a study object in the former sense, but occasionally refer to it as ‘imperialism’ when circumstances require.

Introduction

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a systematic model of the variance in the structure of the international system. He theorizes that the character of the system in any historical period can be determined according to: the ‘discreteness’ of the players; the ‘polarity’ between them; the degree of ‘hierarchy’ in the system as a whole; and the ‘dynamic density’ of interactions within it. This leads him to specify differently structured systems (plural) of international relations, each with a characteristic presence or absence of empires that can be derived from the structure of the system in question. These are the ‘classical’, ‘early modern’, ‘modern’ and ‘global’, where the key transition occurs between the early modern and the modern, when a tension between capitalism and formal empire gradually begins to show. As already mentioned, we begin with this chapter in part because it pursues the issues that have been formulated over two decades of primarily American research into the place of states and empires in the structure of international order in modernity – as is suggested by the titling of Spruyt’s state systems. Yet it also is – inevitably – the first contribution to the divergence between different perspectives on the nature of empire from which the authors see issues of international order. As already explained, there have been debates in Europe which those in America drew on, and which provided them with key notions in turn. Yet, that said, the next chapter does shift to a plainly European concern, and hence insight into empire. The differences already show in the chapter’s opening, with remarks from European Commission President Barroso in praise of the empire concept – remarks that might have raised eyebrows, but significantly did not. The distinct focus of Magali Gravier’s chapter (Chapter 2) is a concentration on empires as polities with administrative structures that are more or less able to manage the maintenance of extended territorial order. Gravier addresses the analysis of a particular empire in Europe’s past, the Byzantine. She specifically compares the problematíque in that case with that of the ‘post-national empire’ that is the European Union (Habermas 2001; Zielonka 2006; Colomer 2007; Haldén 2011). This invites a quizzical eye from the perspective of Spruyt’s structural analyses of international systems – primarily for lack of power at the centre, especially military power. However, rather than military capacity, she attends to the role and functions fulfilled by bureaucracy, equally necessary as military power for ensuring the largely orderly polities of both the Byzantine Empire and the European Union. That is to say, empire in her chapter is a continuous product of organizational enterprise. The Byzantine Empire had the striking features of long survival and of gradually shifting territorial extent, with roots in the empire of Rome, that ended in the slowly depleted territory around the city or Constantinople (now Istanbul). Gravier makes the point that the comparison is especially significant for contemporary Europe, in so far as, then as now, the European continent confronts the problem of diversity (diverse political orders, languages, etc.), together with proximity in a dense population (Haseler 2004; Østergaard 1997). The contemporary Europe of the European Union experiences the long-standing European quandary of the need to integrate an extended European territory under a loose, and largely non-coercive, order.

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My own chapter (Chapter 3) interprets the sovereignty of sovereign states, which at first sight appears to be the cornerstone of the ‘modern’ state system, as the handiwork of empires themselves. This entails the perception that empires, singly or in concert, produce the setting for others’ action: in this case, a formula for international order ostensibly at odds (at least, in modern eyes) with the very idea of an empire. According to this ‘revisionist history’, as I call it, there is a dynamic relation between an empire and its periphery that can perfectly well lead to the balance of advantage for any empire lying in the periphery’s being nominally independent, but limited in its scope for challenging the empire in question. This means that empires have the motivation to organize the very sovereign-statehood ostensibly characteristic of the modern international system as such. This interpretation of history of relations between territorial units conveys a message of continuity that is at odds with what we have assumed in our conceptualization of the modern, sovereign state; namely, that its rise spelt the end for empires, which it replaced. Empires have always been the major force in forming the international system, so the history of the ‘international system’ is continuous, and the creativity of one or more empires has been continuously present shaping it.3 Switching focus entirely to present-day concerns, Kristin Haugevik’s chapter (Chapter 4) surveys the many possibilities that modern scholarship sees in sharing concepts between past empires and ‘special relationships’. These embrace a range of historical survivals; new forms developed to maintain (willingly or otherwise) something from past history; and efforts to build new relationships that are ‘special’ without being either historical or subordinate. Thus, the term applies equally to remnants, mere hangovers from one-time empires; to cases of active neoimperialism, sustaining the earlier relationship of the metropole to periphery under a new, veiled guise; and to the existence of comparable epistemological ideals that evince sound mutual relations between the state parties (perhaps under the rubric of ‘relational contracts’). Haugevik’s final potential focus for further research (into ‘everyday practice’ that actively maintains a special relationship) has the least fully fledged research to its name, but it lies within evolving patterns of action by diplomats and the like that repeat, sustain and modify special relationships. Hence, special relationships have to be seen as diplomatic products sometimes aimed at obtaining some of the gains of imperial relations without the manifest drawbacks. Andrei Makarychev’s explicit reliance of the constructivist Wendt’s concept of role-identities (Wendt 2004), joined to a thoroughgoing post-structuralist manner of political analysis, makes his chapter (Chapter 5) a further variation of perspective on empire. Makarychev’s methodology (derived from Laclau’s concepts of ‘empty’ and ‘floating’ signifiers) shifts the object of study from all ‘real pasts’ of empire to present discourses referring (explicitly or not) to the 3  This account derived from international history has a comparable outcome to Van der Pijl (2007). He is a Marxist with anthropological insights who interprets empires within an overall ‘ethnogenesis’ of modes of exploitation in social orders. The modes of exploitation determine the need for territorial expansion.

Introduction

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earlier imperial experience – in this instance, Russia’s. According to his mode of analysis, the present and future of Russia’s relations to the world are conducted in a setting of contending discursive figures that evoke the country’s past as an empire. These figures are unavoidable in the formulation and legitimization of Russia’s internal and foreign policies. Conversely, there are multiform possibilities within the figures of ‘the imperial’, which leaves a degree of freedom (and also responsibility) to all present-day shapers of opinion who engage with the discourse. It is as if the past is continuously present in Russian politics, yet it can be worked over and creatively transformed. At times Russia’s ‘imperial’ thinking may appear as bullishness on the international scene, but at times it also produces cooperativeness with the United States and the European Union – which are also spoken of as empires but have nonetheless the pretension to speak for ‘international’ society. Sometimes the motive of Russian state action is in pursuit of a monopoly in resources, but it can equally well be values of liberal governance entirely compatible with ‘international’ norms. Sometimes ‘imperialism’ in domestic politics imposes the will of Moscow, but sometimes it can draw Russia’s disparate centres closer together. In the last analysis, these are political choices that the users of the discourses of empire can develop. Dan Nexon is known for work on empires that places actors centre-stage by showing how dynamics inherent in power structures nonetheless give players different settings at any time – what Nexon has referred to as ‘shifting relational contexts of collective action’ (Nexon 2009, 287). That approach suggests that the historical moment is an arena for human action, in which the recurrence and modification of the patterns of action may be pursued over time. Here, Nexon and Paul Musgrave begin by re-casting the model of empire into tendencies within organizational forms. Whereas this would make a basis of a comparison between any empire and/or any power regime, the focus of the chapter is on the presentday ‘imperial temptations’ (as John Ikenberry refers to them) of the United States itself, that is, the temptation to slip into imperial forms as extensions of its own liberalism. This has implications, as Musgrave and Nexon argue, for the very basis of international relations theory as a whole – not, according to them, the problem of fundamental anarchy, but rather the risk of quasi-imperial relations in order to achieve international order. If that is the fundamental problem in external relations, ‘empire’ can well appear as an attractive option even for a ‘liberal’ regime. The problem of international relations is how to mitigate that with truly ‘internationalist’, multilateralist institutions of governance. The Need for Fresh Historical Perspectives on International Order Thus, there are many perspectives on empires’ place in the international order. Yet, that does no more than reflect the diversity of perceptions in international politics itself. Following the West’s 1990 victory in the Cold War, there has been a considerable growth in accounts of global relations. That was in many respects a

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disorientating development. Did it mean the beginning of an international order of nation-states, or the end? The apparent universality of the Western model initially left nothing to say, as reflected in the wide acclaim of Fukuyama’s arriviste story of an end of all ideology in universal liberalism – in spite of its subsequent whittling down (Fukuyama 1992). There followed at a pace widely and/or officially canvassed new accounts of the strategic picture. However, who now remembers the ‘New World Order’? Following that, the New American Century, for all its ostensible lack of universal appeal, was persuasively canvassed for a while.4 The War on Terror briefly re-shaped the dominant account of international order (Barnett 2004; Bobbitt 2008), before appearing to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions (Buzan 2006), in due course to become an embarrassment even to the body that might have remained its principal proponents. From amongst researchers, there came a number of new, or amended, concepts of international order. The Democratic Peace Thesis was quickly eclipsed by the marked tendency for conflict, not least over democracy itself (Russett 1993; Brown, Lynn-Jones and Miller 1996; Tibi 2007; Petersen 2008). Globalization, although genuinely innovative, developed apace, but was soon scattered into so many shards: the universal liberal-democracy of a Fukuyama, neo-liberal financial deregulation, hollowing-out of the state, democratic or cosmopolitan politics, world history, international law, the ‘netsphere’, world community, world society. It was a suggestive lead, but not a coherent story. Much the same might also be said of ‘disaggregated order’ (Rosenau and Durfee 2000; Ferguson and Mansbach 2007) and post-modernity (Hansen and Heurlin 2000, 81–111): these were invitations to bring fresh theoretical and empirical content onto the menu, not polished accounts of a new international order. The progress of the development agenda (in itself an echo of earlier discussion of the future of global relationships after decolonization) maintained the attention of governments. However, in the hands of some interpreters, it was in itself an extension of the older imperialisms (Edkins and Walker 2000; Etzioni 2004; Odysseos and Petito 2007; Duffield 2007; Bobbitt, 2008; Bell and Evans 2010). In international relations theory, unipolarity appeared to recast the neo-realist model in ways that accommodated to the most abstract level, but left out much that required attention in the international order (Hansen and Heurlin 2000, 1–17; Hansen 2010). All this time, there was one particular historical elephant in the room – empires – which is what lends Burbank and Coopers’ position its force. Yet, as R.B.J. Walker remarked in posing the difficulties of closing our eyes to history: ‘Some of the most familiar and enduring analysis of world politics has been facilitated by a certain forgetting of history’ (Walker 1989, 172). Furthermore international relations had already experienced a ‘historiographical turn’ after 1990 (Bell 2001), even if the treatment of empires was not a major element in it. Political 4  See Project for the New American Century (1997) ‘Statement of Principles’ (http:// www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm). For a questioning view of the original principles from an earlier sympathizer, see also Fukuyama (2006).

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theory moved smoothly into ‘international’ political theory in the last decade of the twentieth century (Brown 2000). English School thinking, which had originated in historical study, has already produced a post-Cold War account of the transformations of the international system (Buzan and Little 2000). Hence, we, with the weight of the history of empires behind us, do more than piggy-back on a willingness to see lessons in history. Yet there is variety also here. John Hobson and George Lawson (2009), considering developments in international relations since the end of the Cold War, found four conflicting ‘modes’ to integrate historical studies into international relations, depending on the degree of historicism (in the Rankean sense) present. The typology notwithstanding, it remains the case that international relations is not sufficiently aware of historicity as such (Vaughan-Williams 2005), that is, of the fact that we are in an ongoing history. So what might be the benefits of addressing empires from an historical point of view? If the page has turned on empires once and for all, history will be divided into two, unrelated phases: one in which empires dominate the scene, and one where sovereign states do so. This was an outcome of the so-called ‘behaviouralist revolution’ of the 1950s and 1960s (Hobden and Hobson 2002, 50), whereby, as Nick Vaughan-Williams put it (referring back to Walker), ‘structure and space gradually became privileged over time and context in analyses of world politics’ (Vaughan-Williams 2005, 115–16). The resultant version of realism has been expressed in the ahistorical implication of anarchy among sovereign states with perpetually shifting balances of power between them. Yet Walker’s ultimate point is that any choice between structure and history is invidious: ‘to privilege either history or structure rests upon historically constituted philosophical options’ (Walker 1989, 168 – emphasis added). However, a subtler conception of history would see the possibility of repeated structures and hence comparisons applying across the historical periods. The ambition of historical sociology, from its roots in Max Weber, opposed the spirit of any once-and-for-all dualism in history. Even though it has an historical ontology of transition from empires to a modern international system, it was not assumed that the ‘modernity’ is unique and distinct from all elements of the past. In his classic historical sociology study, Michael Doyle presented empires as an intermittent formation in the international political order that might be explained by which conditions obtain. Hendrik Spruyt, sharing much with Doyle’s approach, develops here a major refinement of that: a systematic model of the variance in the structure of the international system. Many classics of the Enlightenment period and later had a comparable progressivist historiography in the background. That accepted past empires as major geopolitical features in the same long-term historical flow – at least as part of the pre-history of the modern states. The Marxism of the following century added an overarching history of modes of production, with revolutionary cleavages to accommodate the one-way transition from the pre-modern world to the modern world of states. In the hands of historical analysts such as Rosenberg (1994) and

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Teschke (2003), this is still a highly productive tradition to understand the scope and meaning of the transition to ‘modernity’. That is not to say that those engaging with historical continuities can always remain confident in their assumption of progress. In itself, an awareness of the continuity of history may equally be expressed in a sense that history may go into reverse, albeit temporarily, so as to revert to the status quo ante. In a later edition of his The Anarchical Society, Hedley Bull gave qualified assent to the notion of a ‘new medievalism’ (Bull 2002, 254–66; Falk 2000, 106–16).5 Similarly, for Motyl (2001), the former, empire-dominated condition (or influences from it) survives into the 1990s in a potential for recrudescence in central Europe. It is as if the older historical structure has been swept aside, only to survive (or even threaten) from the edges of the historical present. The spirit behind English School thinking represents, however, a distinctive take on history in which empires have contributed an accumulation of values for the world society of the present. This is visible in Martin Wight’s formative post-World War II text Power Politics (1995, chapters 2 and 3), which repeatedly gives priority to the growth across history of ideas originating in the service of ‘dominant’ powers (i.e. the colonial empires). Wight, and the English School more broadly, looked within history for the appearance of values in tension with the straightforward pursuit of power. Wight, and Hedley Bull after him, give international law an independent chronology, originating in Europe long before the appearance of modernity.6 Hence, Wight cites it as ‘[t]he most essential evidence of the existence of an international society’ (Wight 1995, 107). Their supposition is that international law is an independent, trans-historical product of the actions of humans in history. Bull is the more explicit: formulating the importance of human action in making, communicating, administering, enforcing and legitimizing rules that enable ‘international society’ to exist (Bull 2002, 51–4). In the final analysis, the lack of awareness of the historicity of the history of empires may be resolved by an understanding of structures in comparison, accompanied by a sense that empires are background settings for the arena of present-day human actions. In short, this book confronts the historicity of empires that have dominated much of recorded time. It brings the history of empires centre stage in the international order. By systematic comparison and survey in an overall, and still ongoing, history of empires and comparable forms of power, it presents the international order afresh, allowing us to understand the continuing presence of empire in history, or throughout it.

5  Compounded by a fin-de-siècle mood. See Umberto Eco (1986, chapter 2) on ‘The return of the Middle Ages’. 6  As Andrew Hurrell writes of Hedley Bull, he looked for the appearance of values but distrusted ‘abstract, ahistorical rationalism’ (Bull 2002, x).

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References Bacevich, Andrew. 2002. American Empire: The Realities and the Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, Thomas P.M. 2004. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Bell, Colleen and Brad Evans (eds). 2010. Post-intervention societies. Journal of Intervention and State Building, 4, no. 4. Bell, Duncan S.A. 2001. International relations: The dawn of a historiographical turn? British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3, no. 1, 115–26. Bobbitt, Philip. 2008. Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Knopf. Brown, Chris. 2000. International Political Theory – a British Social Science? British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2, no. 1, 114–23. Brown, M.E., S.M. Lynn-Jones and S.E Miller. 1996. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1997. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 2005. The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. New York: Basic Books. Bull, Hedley. 2002 [1977]. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn, edited by Stanley Hoffman and Andrew Hurrell. London: Palgrave. Burbank, Jane and Frederik Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burbank, Jane and Frederik Cooper. 2012. How empire ruled the world. Le Monde Diplomatique, January. Burke, Edmund. 2000. On Empire, Liberty, and Reform – Speeches and Letters, edited by David Bromwich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Buzan, Barry. 2006. Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold War? International Affairs, 82, no. 6, 1101–18. Buzan, Barry and Richard Little (eds). 2000. International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Colomer, Josep M. 2007. Great Empires, Small Nations: The Uncertain Future of the Sovereign State. London: Routledge. Cooley, Alexander. 2005. Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Nations in Transit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Doyle, Michael W. 1986. Empires. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press. Duffield, Mark. 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Cambridge: Polity. Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.

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Edkins, Jenny and R.B.J. Walker (eds). 2000. Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Eisenstadt, S.N. 1963. The Political Systems of Empires. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1972. White-settler colonialism and the myth of investment imperialism. New Left Review, I/73 (May–June), 35–57. Etzioni, Amitai. 2004. From Empire to Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Falk, Richard. 2000. A ‘new medievalism?’ In Contending Images of World Politics, edited by Greg Fry and Jocints O’Hagain, 106–16. London: Macmillan. Ferguson, Yale H. 2008. Approaches to Defining ‘Empire’ and Characterizing United States Influence in the Contemporary World. International Studies Perspectives, 9, 272–80. Ferguson, Yale H. and Richard Mansbach. 2007. Post-internationalism and IR theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35, no. 3, 529–49. Fox Piven, Frances. 2004. The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush’s Militarism. New York: The New Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Galtung, Johan. 1971. A Structural Theory of Imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 8, no. 2, 81–117. Galtung, Johan. 1996. Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization. London: Sage. Gibbon, Edward. 1953 [1776]. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by D.A. Saunders. London: Penguin. Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, edited and translated by Max Pensky. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Haldén, Peter. 2011. Stability without Statehood: Lessons from Europe’s History Before the Sovereign State. New York: Palgrave. Halliday, Fred. 1999. Revolution and World Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hansen, Birthe and Bertel Heurlin (eds). 2000. The New World Order: Contrasting Theories. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2010. The mixed constitution versus the separation of powers. Monarchical and aristocratic aspects of modern democracy. British Academy Annual Lecture. London. Haseler, Stephen. 2004. Super-State: The New Europe and its Challenge to America. London: IB Tauris. Hobden, Stephen and John Hobson (eds). 2002. Historical Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, John Atkinson. 1902. Imperialism: A Study. New York: James Pott and Co.

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Hobson, John M. 2012. The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, John M. and George Lawson. 2009. What is history in international relations? Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2, 415–35. Hofstader, Richard. 1971. Racism and imperialism. In The Dimensions of History, edited by Thomas N. Guinsburg. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 133–53. Ikenberry, John G. 2002. America’s imperial ambition – the lures of preemption. Foreign Affairs, 81, no. 5, 44–60. Khanna, Parag. 2008. The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. New York: Random House. Lake, David. 1993 Leadership, hegemony, and the international economy: Naked emperor or tattered monarch. International Studies Quarterly, 37, no. 4, 459–89. Lake, David. 1996. Anarchy, hierarchy, and the variety of international relations. International Organization, 50, no. 1, 1–33. Lake, David. 2009. Hierarchy in International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1981. Theories of Imperialism, translated by P.S. Falla. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Motyl, Alexander J. 1999. Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities. New York: Columbia University Press. Motyl, Alexander J. 2001. Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires. New York: Columbia University Press. Münkler, Herfried, 2005. 2007. Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity. Neumann, Iver. 2008. Imperier: Introduksjon. Internasjonal Politikk, 66, no. 1, 85–94. Nexon, Daniel. 2008. What’s This, Then? ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’? International Studies Perspectives, 9, 300–308. Nexon, Daniel. 2009. The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Odysseos, Louiza and Fabio Petito. 2007. The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. London: Routledge. Østergaard, Uffe. 1997. The failure of universal empire in Europe. Historiallinen Arkisto, 110, no. 4, 93–114. Parker, Noel. 2010. Empire as a geopolitical figure. Geopolitics, 15, no. 1, 109–32. Petersen, Karen K. 2008. There is more to the story than ‘us-versus-them’: Expanding the study of interstate conflict and regime type beyond a dichotomy. Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 14, no. 1, article 4. Pocock, J.G.A. 1999. Barbarism and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Reus-Smit, Christian. 2004. American Power and World Order. Cambridge: Polity. Rosenau, James N. and Mary Durfee. 2000. Thinking Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rosenberg, Justin. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations. London: Verso. Russett, Bruce. 1993. Grasping the Democratic Peace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Snyder, Jack. 1991 Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spruyt, Hendrik. 1994. The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spruyt, Hendrik. 2005. Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press. Spruyt, Hendrik. 2008. ‘American empire’ as an analytic question or a rhetorical move? International Studies Perspectives, 9, 290–99. Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso. Tibi, Bassam. 2007. Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-Islam versus Global Jihad. London: Routledge. Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital and European States, ad990–1992. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tilly, Charles. 1997. How empires end. In After Empire. Multiethnic Societies and Nation-building, edited by K. Barkey and M. v. Hagen. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1–11. Tilly, C. and G. Ardant (eds). 1975. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2005. The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European. Cambridge: Polity. Van der Pijl, Kees. 2007. Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Vol. 1. London: Pluto. Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2005. International Relations and the ‘Problem of History’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34, no. 1, 115–36. Walker, R.B.J. 1989. History and structure in the theory of international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 18, no. 2, 163–83. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. Globalization or the age of transition? A long-term view of the trajectory of the world-system. International Sociology, 15, no. 2, 249–65. Wendt, Alexander. 1994. Collective Identity Formation and the International State. American Political Science Review, 88, no. 2, 384–96.

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Wendt, Alexander. 2004. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wight, Martin. 1995 [1963]. Power Politics, edited by Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad. New York: Leicester University Press. Williams, William Appleman. 2007. Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative. New York: Ig Publications. Wittfogel, K. 1957. Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power. New York: Random House. Zielonka, Jan. 2006. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part I: Mechanisms of Empire and ‘the International’

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Chapter 1

Empires, Past and Present: The Relevance of Empire as an Analytic Concept Hendrik Spruyt

Introduction1 Inevitably, any joint scholarship on empire invites discussion about the meaning and conceptualization of the term empire.2 It cannot be otherwise. While one can denote empire by looking for material indicators – such as the particular nature of bureaucratic organization, the flows of trade and so on; the presence of empire, as a social relation among human agents, also depends on the inter-subjective understanding of ruler and ruled. Material factors as well as collective beliefs are part and parcel of the phenomenon. Consequently, if we wish to use the term in any analytic fashion we must pay attention to the material factors as well as the mutual perceptions that indicate the existence of this particular logic of organization. The analytic study of empire, however, confronts a problem that is common to all concept formation. As Wittgenstein points out, concepts derive their meaning from the specific language game in which the words are embedded. The meaning of the term thus varies depending on the particular discursive context (Pitkin 1972: 3, 7). While this is true for all concepts, it holds a fortiori for ‘empire’. Scholars, politicians and pundits use the term to invoke a wide variety of meanings. For example, those critical of a given foreign policy might use the term for political effect because in today’s context it has taken on a distinctly pejorative tone. The change in the legitimacy of imperial rule signifies a sea change in how empire has been perceived in the post-World War II period compared with earlier centuries. 1  I am greatly indebted to Noel Parker for his comments and his organization of several meetings on the question of empire in the modern world. I am similarly grateful for critical observations by Michael Desch, Magali Gravier, David Lake, Dan Nexon and Jesse Dillon Savage, as well as comments from the audience at the International Studies Association conferences in New York 2009 and New Orleans 2010. 2  One of the most extensive discussions to which I was part culminated in an edited volume by Dawisha and Parrott (1997) comparing western maritime empires with the USSR. For the first day and a half, however, the participants debated the merits of different understandings of the term ‘empire’. See particularly Dawisha (1997).

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Whether one agreed with the claim that US policy during the George W. Bush administration was imperial depended as much on one’s political views as on any reading of the particular characteristics of empires in general. The Bush administration eschewed the term, explicitly denouncing any such ambition (Boot 2003). Critics of the administration, by contrast, were eager to embrace the term with all its pejorative connotations (Colás and Saull 2006; Johnson 2004). To make matters even more complicated, the term is sometimes used without nuance and without recognizing differences in the material and ideational grounding of the specific form of rule. The Holy Roman Empire was ruled by an emperor who was the viceroy of God and held in the orb (purportedly) soil from the four corners of the world to signify this supremacy. Empire, in other words, was based on a claim of legal, moral and political supremacy, second to none. Yet we speak similarly of a British Empire even though it had no emperor and recognized other (European) powers as juridical equals. The former Soviet Union vociferously denounced all empires, claimed to forge a new citizenry of equals, and created a multi-ethnic structure with unprecedented access for non-Russians to the highest ranks of power. Stalin, after all, was a Georgian. Even more telling, towards its end, the Russian core territory saw itself as a victim of the specific form of rule engendered by the USSR. Some Sovietologists thus questioned whether the USSR should be viewed as an empire (Beissinger 1995). Yet, many in the other Union Republics had no doubt that the Soviet Union constituted imperial rule (Barkey and von Hagen 1997; Motyl 1992a, b). Given the various types of empires across time and given the rhetorical use of the term in recent years, it is imperative to come to a clearer understanding of the specific configuration of material factors as well as of the dialectically created identities of core–periphery, superior–inferior, that denote empire. Furthermore, we must distinguish the inter-subjective understanding of imperial rule in the minds of the dominator and dominated from the inter-subjective understanding of the concept ‘empire’ among students of the phenomenon. The former constitutes part of the defining elements of empire, while the latter denotes agreement between scholars about what those defining elements are. While admitting that the applicability of the term empire depends partly on the understanding of the specific form of rule by those subjected to it, this does not diminish the need for those who study this form of political rule to specify its key characteristics. Not to do so runs the risk of stretching the concept and diluting its analytic value (Sartori 1970). The inter-subjective understanding of the participants of empire, while variable, can be studied as any other empirical phenomenon. By contrast, the inter-subjective agreement on what the term empire entails, among those who study empire, is a meta-level issue. Consequently, in the following essay I aim to develop and advance a particular understanding of ‘empire’ that might lead to a shared frame of reference. No doubt others may advance their own preferred language game in which to embed the particular meaning of ‘empire’. Taking Wittgenstein’s perspective seriously, I do not claim to provide an ontologically ‘true’ reflection of a particular state

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of affairs. However, a shared frame of reference is necessary for any dialogue about the particular causes and consequences of imperial rule. I put forward an understanding of empire that reflects both the material aspects of this particular form of rule as well as the shared understanding of the individuals subject to such rule. Following Weber’s methodology of ideal-typical taxonomization I consequently argue for ‘the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct’.3 No doubt the empirical manifestations of empire are many. Indeed, exactly because of that variation, one inevitably ends up debating whether this or that example actually constituted an empire, or hegemony, or something yet different. However, it is exactly in such debates that the ideal type performs its function. How does this form of rule differ from empire? Why does it differ? What are the consequences of the difference? When and why does imperial rule start shading into something else? This is also where Wittgenstein’s notion of language games shows its limits. Despite the infinite variation of forms of rule throughout history, we attach the label ‘empire’ to certain forms of rule but not others. That is, we see a universal among the particulars, even though scholars of empire might debate what that ‘universal’ is and when it applies. With that aim in mind, what then is the understanding of ‘empire’ proposed in this essay?4 Formal Empire as a Specific Logic of Internal and External Organization Empire constitutes a particular logic of organization – a synergistically linked configuration of specific military, economic, ideological and political elements of power.5 These elements are inter-related and together form a unique pattern of rule. A close understanding of what formal empire entails will allow us to see the variegated patterns of rule that occur between formal empire at one end of a spectrum and sovereign, territorial states who can autonomously make decisions at the other end of that continuum. 3  Weber (1997), 88. 4  Arguably the relation of concept and that which is denoted by that concept, warrants a deeper discussion of knowledge formation in general – involving a dialogue of nominalism, realism, idealism and pragmatism. Admittedly, I do no justice to such a discussion in this essay. I merely advance a pragmatic, relativist argument by proposing a particular understanding of imperial rule that can lead to interesting research questions, and that requires us to reflect on specific features of rule in general and the variations in which authority is exercised. 5  These are the four dimensions of power that inform Michael Mann’s (1986) taxonomy of rule across history.

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The Internal Organization of Empire I argue that formal empire can be distinguished from other logics of political organization by how it structures its internal as well as external relations. Internally, empire constitutes a single, hierarchical governance structure. Formal empire in this sense has several features. First, it consists of distinct entities. That is, an empire is composed of differentiated parts. In many cases these component parts correlate with distinct ethnic and racial categories.6 Second, imperial rule is a distinctly asymmetric exercise of power. Ultimately empire rests on coercion of the subject polity by the dominant power, the imperial metropole. No doubt there are coercive elements in any form of governance. Nation-states, too, restrict certain actions of their citizens. However, such coercion ultimately rests on the consent of those governed, based on the social contract. Terms such as ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ are thus meaningless in nation-states, but essential to understanding how empire functions. Coercion in formal empire does not rest on the explicit or implicit consent of the ruled, as the subjects lack voice in their own governance. To give one example, only several thousand Algerians had French citizenship and thus, although the indigenous population constituted the majority, they were unable to vote or run for office. In the end, the boot of the empire rests uncomfortably on the neck of those subject to it. Third, not only is power exercised asymmetrically, but the dominant core exercises its power heterogeneously. Its relations with the subjected parts form a hub and spoke pattern with bilateral relations between core and periphery, none of which are the same (Motyl 1992b; Nexon and Wright 2007). The subjected parts, the periphery of the empire, interact only sparsely. This is partially by design. The lines of communication and transport in the empire are constructed to serve the metropole’s reach into the periphery, while denying such means to the peripheral entities. In addition, because of the diversity in bilateral relations between centre and periphery, the subjected polities face diverse incentives for rebellion against, or conversely accommodation with, the metropole. This typology allows us to differentiate empire from other types of rule. Federal polities, although they also consist of various distinguishable units, differ fundamentally from formal empire in that the relation between the composite entities is symmetrical and contractual. Quebec, for example, could opt out of the federation. Indeed, one of the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement was to make such secession from the Canadian federation a distinct possibility in the mid-1990s (Polèse 1985; Meadwell and Martin 1994). Moreover, in federations, the relations between the central government and the component parts (states, provinces, Länder) are relatively uniform. While it is the case that Quebec negotiated special deals with the federal government, and raised the ire of 6  My definition of empire and my claim that concept specification is a prerequisite for understanding history relies heavily on Motyl (1992b). For the definition of empire also see Doyle (1986).

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Degree to which polity forms a singular entity/composite

Relations between parts of the polity contractual/coercive

Pattern of juridical relations and governance homogeneous/ heterogeneous

Formal Empire

Composite

Coercive

Diverse (hub and spoke)

Federation

Composite

Contractual

Uniform

Singular

Contractual

Uniform

Type

Nation-State

Figure 1.1

Internal characteristics of empire compared with other logics of rule

other provinces, it did not constitute a hub and spoke pattern of rule that Ottawa might have imposed on the provinces to keep them subjugated. Instead these were instances where loyalty to the federal government had to be negotiated rather than imposed. Indeed, other provinces followed suit and similarly tried to obtain special arrangements. Some multi-national states aspire to become nation-states, as arguably Lenin thought the USSR would evolve. Or they might pursue federalist or even looser confederalist ties. Conversely, multi-national entities might shift to empire. Critically, where multi-national states preclude voluntary exit, the polity shades to empire, as arguably happened when the Serbian government sought to prevent the breakup of the former Yugoslavia by force or when the Soviet government precluded autonomy for the Union Republics (Bunce 1999). Indicators of Formal Empire How might we operationalize the concept? A variety of indicators denote a polity as a formal empire, federation or nation-state. First, following our admonition that political rule is based partially on self-definition and mutual understanding, the particular legitimation of rule will be important. As I will discuss below, traditional forms of empire explicitly justified their right to rule on their superiority of arms, status and racial uniqueness. Second, the specific nature of the armed forces will indicate to what extent the relation is symmetrical. Given that empire ultimately relies on the possible use of force, often only select component parts will be allowed to participate in the imperial army (the loyal subjects – Gurkhas, Sikhs in the British army, the Ambonese in the Dutch colonial army and so on). In most cases – such as in the French empire, the USSR, the Austrian–Hungarian empire – the officer corps will be largely populated by ethnics from the core. Third, unequal economic relations provide further evidence. While it might be debated whether India provided a net gain for Britain, in many cases, the periphery

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existed in a subject economic status for the benefit of the centre (Boulding and Mukerjee 1972). Fully one-third of Dutch gross national product derived from Indonesia in the mid nineteenth century (van den Doel 1996). Fourth, the particular incorporation, or lack thereof, of local elites into the government structure distinguishes empire from the government bureaucracy of a nation-state. As Benedict Anderson noted, the fact that very few Latin Americans had risen to high rank revealed their subject status in the Spanish Empire (Anderson 1991). Simon Bolivar’s lament was true. Of the hundreds of governors, virtually all had their origins in Iberia. Similarly, most western maritime empires had glass ceilings on how far indigenous administrators might rise. Material indicators, such as extant laws, composition of the military, distribution of resources, and vertical and horizontal mobility for indigenous elites, thus provide important clues. At the same time the perception of the subject entities of those material characteristics form an important component in our classification. For example, looking at the distribution of resources, Russia could legitimately argue, as Yeltsin did, that it financed many of the other Union Republics. Indeed 40 per cent of Tajikistan’s budget emanated directly from Moscow (Rubin in Mandelbaum 1994). Subsidized energy flows to other Union Republics put further strains on the Russian economy. Nevertheless, the other Union Republics saw Russia as the imperial centre, while the Russian Republic by 1990 viewed many of the other Republics as deadweight, dragging down the welfare of many Russian citizens. Similarly, the Soviet informal empire in Eastern Europe depended on subsidies from the USSR (Bunce 1985). Yet, here too the East Europeans saw the relation as imperial. Empire and External Relations Empire, furthermore, constitutes a particular set of inter-relations between distinct polities, a particular configuration of external relations with those outside the empire proper. In this sense formal empire stands at one end of a spectrum while a system of independent sovereign states would analytically occupy the other end. Along this spectrum relations between these polities will differ in the degree of formalization and the degree of control exercised by the dominant power (Cooley and Spruyt 2009; Lake 1996, 1999). With formal empire, the dominant state incorporates the subjected territory into the institutionalized governance structure of the metropole. Following Doyle’s description, the core controls all aspects of the subjected polity’s external relations and its internal politics (Doyle 1986). Indeed, formal empire might try to integrate the subjected polity into the core entirely. Thus, Algeria was governed by the French Ministry of the Interior, rather than administered as an overseas territory (Kahler 1984, 342). With informal empire, the metropole seeks to influence the policy of the subject territory as well. Informal empire still affects the internal governance of the targeted state with coercion as the ultimate resource. However, with informal

Empires, Past and Present Integrated governance structures (More hierarchy-juridical asymmetry)

Distinct governance structure (Less hierarchy-increased juridical symmetry)

← Formal Empire

Figure 1.2

25

 → Informal Empire

Hegemony

Alliances

Sovereign States

Inter-relations of distinct polities

empire the dominant power relies to a greater extent on local allies among the indigenous elites and does not seek territorial annexation. Although formal imperial rule no doubt also rests on local collaborators, the latter have greater latitude in informal imperial rule. Moreover, in formal imperial administration the core tends to rely more on its own metropolitan representatives, giving them ultimate decision-making power over the lower-level indigenous administrators. In sum, with informal empire the core entity does not seek full integration of the periphery into the core. Hegemonic relations weaken the hierarchical ties even further. The major power seeks influence over the external relations of the weaker polity but is less concerned with its internal politics. In the classical sense of the term hegemony might come close to informal empire. Athenian hegemony, for example, was quite restrictive. In the recent neo-liberal version, by contrast, hegemony has largely been interpreted as benign leadership (Keohane 1984). Alliances are weaker still in their level of institutionalization. In many cases alliances might simply be agreements to pursue common objectives without necessarily forming even a loose governance structure. Short of combating a shared enemy, there is little interference in the domestic politics of the allied partners. The analytic distinction of these types of inter-relations allows us to acknowledge and study different types of rule. Thus, if imperialism is meant to denote the extension of formal empire, then American policies under the last two Bush administrations would not be construed as imperial. However, if it is understood as control over internal and external politics of another polity through local intermediaries who are favoured by the dominant power, it comes close to informal empire. Types of Empire: Diverse Legitimations and Internal Contradictions Empire thus diverges in important ways from other types of rule. However, across time and space empires have also differed fundamentally from each other. Differentiating among these is more than simply an analytic exercise. It allows us to understand the particular logic of rule – its mode of legitimation, the particular

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nature in which power was exercised – and thus helps us to understand why empire as a logic of organization endured for so long while it has seemingly become an anachronism in today’s international system. I say seemingly, because despite the lack of governments justifying their rule as imperial, certain multi-national states show traits that are not that distinct from formal empire. Underlying these distinctions is a key contention: the particular nature of the unit in question is logically intertwined with the particular nature of the overall international system. System and unit are mutually constitutive. Pre-modern empire lasted for much of human history because it internalized external relations and thus minimized exogenous pressures on the core. In modern history, as I will show below, formal empire fits uneasily in a system of globalized interactions. Ancient and Modern Empires: Modernity and Mobilization Pre-modern empires differed fundamentally from the empires of modernity. Arguably, the period of modern empire started roughly with the Iberian breakout from the European geographic space. Whereas empires until then were roughly self-contained within particular spheres of interaction in that they constituted world systems (Wallerstein 1978), the European period saw a dramatic increase in the global reach of empire across spaces and cultures. With the advent of industrialization and more advanced communications, modern empires faced a globe contracted in space and time with interactions that could not be contained in any fixed territorial space.7 As Ernest Gellner, John Hall, Patricia Crone and others have argued, premodern governments were capstone polities (Gellner 1983; Crone 1989; Hall 1985). While imperial elites were horizontally stratified (communicating with each other in an elite language, such as Latin, adhering to the same culture and religion), their subject communities were vertically segregated. These communities possessed their own languages, religious practices and social structures. As long as Roman authority was obeyed, Rome did not need to dictate or homogenize the various entities in its empire.8 Pre-modern empires cast their authority far but not deep. ‘Imperial government was capstone government par excellence … It made emperors specialists in … extensive power, that is the ability to organize large 7  While one cannot provide a specific date at which modern empires emerged, it is possible to distinguish a variety of features of such empires. Modern empires operated in an increasingly global economy that separated the sphere of economic interaction from the area of political control. Economic interactions overflowed political boundaries. Second, modern empires, particularly from the Peace of Westphalia on, operated within an emerging system of sovereign territorial states. Third, modern empires increasingly justified their rule not in terms of universal claims but by the purported inferior development of the subject areas. 8  As Michael Mann points out, it was the ability of the Christian community to bridge these vertically segmented communities that concerned Rome. It posed a rival horizontally unified – and thus dangerous – network (Mann 1986).

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numbers over large distances for minimal co-operation … But it did not make emperors good at intensive organization’ (Crone 1989, 57). Modern forms of rule, however, seek to homogenize society. Development requires standardization of language, education and culture which in turn favours industrial development, popular mobilization and taxation. In Europe itself such homogenization required a displacement of local vernaculars and the severing of ancient bonds of clan, family and village. When the process was in full swing with highly mobilized national states emerging in Europe, these states could turn their military and economic position to dominating other areas (Posen 1993). Thus, the maritime imperial powers sought to gradually transform their subject territories and increase their benefit to the centre – the mise en valeur argument as the French expounded by the late nineteenth century. Militarily, the imperial powers started to demand ever heavier contributions; more than 1.3 million Indians served in World War I, and more than half a million Africans (Albertini 1969; Kupchan 1994; Michel 1973). The interwar period brought a dramatic increase in roads and infrastructure (Betts 1985). Some of this might have been inspired by ethical responsibility as the Dutch claimed, but in the subtext one might easily discern naked self-interest. (The Dutch slogan was that, without Indonesia, it would become no more than Denmark). France in turn had staked its military salvation from the growing German threat on the support of the empire (Ageron 1982). However, in so doing, the colonizers also created the subaltern ‘other’. Colonial administration and modernization homogenized previously distinct political and cultural communities. Thrown together in artificially created political units, they formed the basis of colonial nationalism. As Far as the World Stretches: Universalist and Bounded Empires Empires may also be distinguished by their universalist or bounded character. Many pre-modern empires were universalist. Empires defined themselves as supreme rulers. Logically then an empire could not recognize another authority as equal to its own. Imperial rule was, of course, de facto constrained by rival powers. Yet de iure no other ruler was considered to have equivalent legitimate claims to authority. The gods had given Rome an empire without end, proclaimed Virgil. Similarly, Oriental rulers and CentralAmerican kings ruled as god-kings. Such empires had frontier zones, not borders (Kratochwil 1986). In addition to the particular legitimation of ancient emperors as supreme authorities without equal, universalist ambitions made economic and political sense. Expansion and territorial conquest yielded wealth, while imperial hierarchy diminished insecurity (Crone 1989, 62–4). Empires thus tried to organize the relevant spheres of cultural, economic and political interaction under one rule. In these quasi-autarkic empires the ‘most tangible feature is the overall coincidence of economic and political boundaries’ (Unger 1987, 113). Modern empires, by contrast, emerged against the template of a nascent territorial state system in Europe. There, the contest between Holy Roman

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Emperor and Pope had fragmented power. The imperial crown was contested as either a papal theocracy or German empire. In the space provided by their contest, kings were quick to claim equal supremacy: rex est imperator in regno suo – the king is emperor in his own kingdom. As this state system solidified in the centuries thereafter, the imperial powers in Europe emerged with a system of recognized borders rather than the frontier zones that marked pre-modern imperial systems (Spruyt 1994). The European empires of the sixteenth century and onwards, thus, arose with an increasingly solidified state system in the core, premised on the notion of juridical equality (although not material equality) and mutually negotiated borders. Authority was territorially defined, geographically contained and non-universal in its legitimation. The expansion from the European system outward could only proceed by denying the juridical equality to non-European entities. However, in order to settle rival claims to the world beyond Europe, the imperial states had to transpose the notion that claims to authority were territorially circumscribed. One ruled over a given territory rather than, say, a particular people or religious community. Thus, the European powers came to demarcate and define respective spheres of rule by cartographic fiat – signified nowhere better than by the Treaty of Tordesillas where an arbitrary line, the meridian several hundred leagues west of the Cape Verdes, divided the rest of the World between Spain and Portugal. Occasionally some modern empires reverted back to older universalist declarations. Arguably, the aims of Charles V of the Spanish Habsburg line, and Napoleon’s attempts at European domination came close to the universalist pretensions of pre-modern rulers. And even the ideational premises of Nazi Germany or teleological Soviet Marxism approach pre-modern universalism. None of these proved sustainable for long in a world populated by states. Democracy and Empire Formal empires in modern history differed in another significant way from their predecessors. Since democratic government only emerged in the last few centuries, and full-fledged democracy is arguably even more recent, it follows that historically most imperial metropoles were authoritarian – often having royal or aristocratic dynasties as the ruling elites. Even classical Athens could hardly be conceived as a democracy. Thus the unequal relationship of core and periphery paralleled a similar inequality in the metropole itself. However, as western maritime empires evolved, some of the imperial metropoles shed their aristocratic elites or greatly reduced their privileged position. While Portugal and Spain maintained authoritarian systems into the 1970s, most western empires had to reconcile a fundamentally unequal relationship between core and periphery with the fundamental equality in the metropole’s own political system. There was, therefore, an inherent tension between the legitimation of rule in the democratic core, based on juridical equality and popular voice, and the unequal

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relation between the democratic core and the subject colony, which denied those very conditions. While the Britain of Burke and Mill hardly constituted a modern democracy, we can already see in their discussions and challenges to despotic and corrupt imperial rule the precursors of things to come. Empire had to be justified as somehow reconcilable with moral sentiments in the centre (Whelan 1996). Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century this was done under the rubric of the civilizing mission for Britain. The Dutch for their part proclaimed a new ethical imperial policy, while the French made much of their mission civilisatrice. While President Wilson’s 14 Points gained little traction in the West (not in the least because the American Senate refused to participate in the League of Nations), the message calling for an ‘impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’, and its subsequent renunciation by the United States and European powers was keenly observed in the colonies (Manela 2007). Nationalist leaders utilized the West’s own rhetoric against the colonial powers. After World War II the unequal status of the periphery proved increasingly difficult to maintain with significant voices within the metropole itself as well as in the colonies calling for an end to empire. Initially, the metropolitan demands for a retreat from empire were subdued. While leftist governments had on occasion proclaimed their solidarity with workers in the colonies, when jobs seemed at risk even left-wing governments chose the course of self-interest. Thus, when Algeria rebelled on V-E day, the communists joined with the right-wing counterparts to denounce the uprising (Horne 1978). In the subsequent decade and a half, however, metropolitan populations lost their taste for colonial policies (Ansprenger 1981; Hargreaves 1996; Smith 1981). The Ambiguous Consequences of Contiguity It is sometimes argued that there is a critical distinction between contiguous empires and non-contiguous ones. However, this is not as straightforward as might seem. At first glance contiguity would seem to matter. Contiguity might facilitate the transition from multi-national, imperial entity to a multi-national state and ultimately a nation state. Today’s France after all is the compilation of what was once the Angevin empire, Normandy, Burgundy and other territories in which rulers had proclaimed themselves dukes or even kings. While France was not a fully blown nation-state even by the nineteenth century, as Eugen Weber convincingly argues (E. Weber 1976), today’s citizenry in the hexagon would clearly identify itself as a nation. Many ‘nation-states’ today were once asymmetric multi-national entities that have covered their tracks; this is particularly clear if one accepts Gellner’s (1983) argument that there are potentially thousands of nations, and fewer than 200 states. In other words, to follow Ian Lustick’s characterization, such empires have traversed several thresholds, such that the once subjected and distinct territory has now become an inseparable entity from the perspective of the erstwhile centre (Lustick 1993). Going one step further, one might add that

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nation- and state-building succeeds only when the subjected territory no longer sees itself as a distinct and potentially independent entity but as part of the core. The subjected populace no longer sees itself as ‘subjected’ but as equals. Conversely, according to this argument, territorial separation would preclude homogeneity and unification. Indeed, few British, Dutch or French would see their Asian holdings as part of the homeland. Thus, challenges from the periphery for their independence were not perceived as challenges to the integrity of the metropolitan homeland, and in most cases did not even constitute challenges to the stability of the incumbent regime. There is no doubt some truth to this intuition. Contiguity, by and large, should make territorial integration easier. However, these observations should not be overstated. Territorial discontinuity might make integration more difficult but does not preclude integration of core and periphery altogether. Ireland, so argued London, constituted an integral part of the kingdom proper. Algeria, claimed politicians in Paris, was as French as the île-de-France itself. While that perception ultimately was not shared by the French population in the hexagon, it was strong enough to compel the government to fight a brutal eight-year war in an effort to retain its imperial holdings. Today, Alaska and Hawaii form integral parts of the United States. Territorial separation also did not prevent close ties from developing between Britain and distant holdings in Canada and the antipodal states. Indeed, it was this close affinity of kith and kin that made it impossible to maintain the asymmetric power relations that underlay traditional empire. While the dominions did not constitute distant elements of a United Kingdom, one might recall the significant sacrifices of men and material during the two world wars to understand the bonds of perceived racial and cultural similarity. Territorial contiguity, conversely, did little to create a sense of homogeneity in the Tsarist empire, the Austrian–Hungarian or the Ottoman. In other words, while contiguity might matter, other factors such as access for indigenous elites to the centre and increased equality might matter more in the long run. Formal Empire and its Contradictions in the Contemporary International System Although formal and informal empires have existed for most of recorded history, the last half-century has made empire seemingly obsolete. Although the foreign policies of the major powers might verge on informal empire, there can be little doubt that most examples of formal empire have disappeared. The western examples of maritime empires have largely disappeared save for a few, relatively small, territories. Russian repression of some secessionist movements and Chinese control over Xinjiang and Tibet arguably come much closer to formal empire, although Moscow and Beijing have granted some of these contested territories significant autonomy. Furthermore, their varied agreements with the different

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semi-autonomous regions resemble the hub and spoke heterogeneity that marked earlier formal empires.9 In order to understand why formal empire has receded one does well to reflect on the characteristics of most pre-modern empires. Virtually all pre-modern empires were universalist in ambition and authoritarian in government, and most were territorially contiguous. Some of these elements survived in the continental empires of the modern period. Tsarist Russia, the Austrian–Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire all contained some elements that came close to the premodern characteristics. The Tsar, after all, was the supreme head of the Orthodox faith, while the Ottoman rulers claimed to rule over all the faithful. By contrast, the western maritime empires of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century differed dramatically from earlier forms of imperial rule: they were bounded, had democratic cores and were discontiguous. Western maritime empires were doomed because the bifurcated international system they created faced internal contradictions. The system contained dual and incompatible features. In the core the major powers recognized each other as sovereign territorial states that were juridically equal, but they denied such sovereignty outside of Europe. While legitimating domestic authority on the principles of equality and voice, ultimately cumulating in popular sovereignty, those same principles were denied to the subject population in the periphery. The apparent contradiction could temporarily be resolved with allusions to improving the subject population. By creative translation the ‘white man’s burden’ became an ethical responsibility to improve the colonies’ standard of living. If certain prerequisites were met and if colonies were deemed fit for independence, then the imperial centre would not stand in their way. However, this logic of justification became less and less tenable in the post-war period (Jackson 1993; Spruyt 2000, 2005). Another contradiction arose from the very logic of the state system itself. Given that the international system was increasingly premised on the notion that authority can make no claims to rule outside of a given fixed territory, then denial of that principle became impossible (Zacher 2001). That is, the juridical equality that was first granted to European states, or states that met European standards of ‘civilization’, was demanded by all states as the twentieth century progressed. The principle was only fully articulated in 1960 when the United Nations General Assembly declared in Resolution 1514 that ‘all peoples have the right to self determination’ (article 13). However, an even larger contradiction loomed in the tension between the logic of empire and an increasingly global and increasingly capitalist international system. Empire constituted a method for dealing with inter-relations with other polities. In many pre-modern forms, interactions between formerly distinct polities were internalized. As noted earlier, pre-modern empires constituted world systems. No doubt interactions with other empires occurred, but these were incidental military encounters – those territories were yet to be conquered, or were segmented from 9  On Chinese minority populations, see Gladney (1994).

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the empire by frontier zones. Most cultural and economic exchanges occurred within the sphere of direct imperial control (Wallerstein 1978; Abu-Lughod 1989; Unger 1987). The failure of universal empire in Europe meant that cultural and economic transactions occurred across distinct jurisdictions. The emergence of territorial sovereignty and subsequently making sovereigns the gatekeepers for external interactions solved this problem. Rather than through universal hierarchy, the European system solved the problem of crosscutting and overlapping jurisdictions by monopolizing the various sources of power (economic, political and cultural) in the sovereign. The upshot of the Treaties of Augsburg, Münster and Osnabrück was that even religious authority would be controlled by the sovereign ruler of that realm (cuius regio eius religio). Cross-border economic interactions were thus regulated by the domestic law in which the activity took place and by agreements between governments. Markets and states were thus not antithetical. In fact economic interaction required ever-increasing intervention and delineation by sovereign rulers. Universal empire was limiting because it contained most economic activity to the area under direct political control. The worldwide economic interests of the European powers thus clashed with this notion of universal imperial power and confined economic space. The notion of relatively self-contained imperial systems, with each imperial metropole tied to its colonies in a hub and spoke pattern, also contradicted the logic of liberal capitalism as it started to emerge from the late nineteenth century on. Empire takes mercantilism as an article of faith. Control over peripheral territories leads to direct gains for the imperial centre while denying such gains to rival powers. However, British attempts and subsequent US policies to erode barriers to global commerce challenged mercantilist logic. First, the leading capitalist powers insisted on access to territories controlled by other imperial powers.10 The lesser powers, such as the Netherlands, could only hold Indonesia, for example, by granting access to British and American firms. Second, liberal capitalism was premised on the notion of diminished barriers to trade, but diminished barriers to trade also meant that it became less imperative for the colonial power to actually hold territory under control. At the same time lower barriers also changed the patterns of interaction. In the Orient, for example, Japan made headway in the interwar years in those areas in which imperial preference schemes did not restrict their entry. While imperial preference schemes returned during the crisis of the 1930s, they were explicitly turned back by the United States after the war.11 10  In the 1930s Britain lacked the power to maintain an open international system, while the United States refused to take on the leadership role and indeed led the world into a spiral of protectionist policies (Kindleberger 1979). Subsequently, the Roosevelt administration during the war opted for internationalism, reduction of the colonial powers and liberal trade (Kimball 1991). 11  For a discussion of the return to imperial preference schemes in Britain and attempts to roll those back, see Rooth (1992).

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Modern empires – maritime and continental, authoritarian and democratic alike – face another contradiction. Empire can be maintained as long as the subject territory remains fragmented and less developed than the core, but modernity and industrialization change both conditions. Modernization brings with it communications and interactions within and between the subject areas. As Benedict Anderson noted with regard to the Americas, the emergence of the printing press facilitated the creation of a common subaltern identity (Anderson 1991). Moreover, increasing demands by the core on the subject populations led to the development of those areas. In order to make the most use of the colonies, they had to be developed to serve the metropole, particularly as the twentieth century progressed. However, improved infrastructure and rudimentary education also enabled the rise of nationalism (Betts 1985). Sukarno thus noted that the Dutch, in administering the disparate islands of the archipelago as one colony, had in fact created ‘Indonesia’ (Hering 1992). The Relevance of Empire to the Study of International Relations In the past decade some scholars have wondered whether we are witnessing a return of empire. One strand of thought has concentrated on the militarily dominant position of the United States. With the decline and eventual fragmentation of the Soviet Union, the bipolar post-war era came to an end. With the United States spending more than all the major powers combined, its pre-eminence has created a unipolar environment. The wars in Afghanistan and the Iraq War in particular have led to a flurry of literature denouncing the pursuit of an American empire (Johnson 2004). A smaller body of scholars has instead welcomed what it perceives as a renewed American purpose (Ferguson 2002), but even many conservatives in the Republican camp have distanced themselves from the term. A different set of arguments wonders whether the calls for external intervention in war-torn or failed states signal the return of imperialist practices. African leaders, in particular, have decried such an impulse as harking back to the colonial past. A third group, taking a more fungible conceptualization of empire than the one I have advanced, sees empire in various forms of political consolidation. For example, some scholars, such as Magali Gravier, wonder whether the European Union (EU) shows certain imperial aspects. With regards the latter (pace Gravier’s contribution to this collection), I see few parallels between the EU and imperial rule. Following the distinctions that I drew earlier, the multi-national nature of the Union alone is not evidence of imperial rule. It lacks the asymmetric power relations between an identifiable core and subject units. Nor does it evince a hub and spoke pattern of relations, with the subject areas having diverse relations with the core but not with each other. If there is a Frankish-German core, the weighted voting system in fact curtails their authority. Indeed, the weighted voting system, which privileges the smaller populations, goes against the key notion of empire – that of inequality favouring

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the materially dominant power. Supranational arbitration poses further limits to the autonomy of even the most powerful economic actors in the Union. Whatever the consequences of a democratic deficit in the EU, this it is still a far cry from empire. Its component states voluntarily chose to join, and while no state has left the Union, it is difficult to imagine a military response to any state that wished to exit from the agreement. Moreover, EU legislation aims to homogenize rather than exploit heterogeneity. The question of a democratic deficit goes to the nature of popular input into the elitist decision-making process, but this is a problem that faces all states in the Union. The lack of popular consent to the EU process holds across the board. A stronger case might be made that external intervention in the politics of other states might constitute, if not the pursuit of formal empire, then at least informal empire. However, the arguments for intervention differ from traditional imperial justifications and the older logic of formal empire in some fundamental ways. For one, the traditional pursuit of empire aimed at achieving military or economic gains, additional manpower, and markets and resources (Hobson 1961; Schumpeter 1955; Scammel 1981). The zero-sum nature of imperial competition and the mercantilist logic of relative rather than absolute gains were the key motivating forces. External intervention today is driven by different aims and various justifications. For some, intervention endeavours to reduce the effects of transnational refugee flows, piracy, mercenaries and terrorist networks. In this sense, intervention follows from the major powers’ calculations of self-interest. Other motivations, however, might be more humanitarian in character. Intervention is called for when populations are suffering at the hands of their own governments. According to this view, the international community has a responsibility to protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.12 While one can reasonably question the depth of commitment by the international community to intervening in egregious human rights violations in the Sudan, Congo and Rwanda, it is difficult to see the older imperial cost–benefit calculation at work. The foreign policies of the major powers provide evidence for a more incisive claim that empire has not receded. Even though most instances of formal empire have disappeared, imperialist policies have not. The reasons behind the imperial temptation are several. Internally, formal empire is a mode of organizing multi-national or multiethnic polities into a hierarchical whole. It is ultimately premised on coercion. Russia’s repression of Chechen secessionist demands might serve as one possible example, in which a core government (Russia) seeks to bind another entity to the core by brute force, all else failing. Yet imperial governance cannot rely on repression alone. Even the brutal actions of the Roman Empire who laid the land waste, while calling it peace, as Tacitus reminds us, had to be yoked to positive incentives. The gradual extension 12  On the Responsibility to Protect, see Stedman et al. (2009).

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of citizenship and incorporation of local elites into the imperial administration, as in Rome or the USSR vis-à-vis the titular elites, provided one such set of incentives (Miles 1990; Miller 1977). Indeed, when such imperial administrations open up even further, the empire might transition into something resembling a multi-national state. Externally, imperial temptation might arise by the desire to structure the international system in one’s own image. The premise that liberal democracies are less inclined to go to war with each other, the democratic peace argument, has thus informed recent American and to lesser extent British foreign policy. At the same time this might spark a desire to transform authoritarian regimes into democratic states by force of arms, derived from a deeply held strand of liberal ideology. These imperialist temptations, however, differ from past universalist justifications of empire. Even if liberal states, in both the political and economic sense, prefer to see like-minded regimes in power, they do not deny the legal equality of states that do not possess such governments. For all the talk about the United States making the spread of democracy a key tenet of its foreign policy, liberalism has not stood in the way of alliances with distinctly authoritarian regimes. Conclusion As the other chapters in this collection demonstrate, reflecting on empire as a key analytic concept provides leverage for engaging in several promising research agendas. First, as I have suggested, empire simultaneously denotes a specific mode of organizing the internal relations of a composite entity, as well as a particular mode of organizing external interactions. Most pre-modern empires were in fact international systems in which relations were hierarchically ordered and thus political and economic regulation was internalized. Interactions between systems were relatively sparse (Buzan et al. 1993). However, as global interconnections increased, the connection between hierarchical political control and the relevant economic area of interaction was severed. Global capitalism, as the name suggests, encompasses a vastly wider area than even the largest universal empires of the past. Moreover, in terms of their logic of organization, global capitalism and formal empire are at odds, particularly when imperial powers pursue imperial preference schemes as Britain and France did in the 1930s. In the post-1945 liberal trading system trade and finance can easily straddle the borders that come with territorial states, and thus the United States consciously sought to end the exclusivist hold of the European powers over their subject territories. In other words, by understanding the particular key features of empire, we can better understand how empire stood in relation to the overall international system. Indeed, it is because formal empire in the traditional sense stood in tension with the constitutive rules of the current international system, which is based on

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territorial sovereignty, that formal empire has receded from the stage, even if it has not disappeared altogether. The current system demarcates domestic and international spheres of jurisdiction, making sovereign governments the conduits between domestic regulations and the international sphere, thus allowing for the global spread of capitalism. While the maritime empires of the West spread capitalism to the far corners of the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the latter half of the twentieth century global capitalism and its concurrent regulation by inter-state agreements had eclipsed empire. Second, studying empire also allows us to see how post-imperial relations differ from past imperial practices. As the essays by Haugevik and Makarychev in this volume indicate, imperial relations might transform into preferred partners (Haugevik) or neo-imperialism (Makarychev). Following my argument above, this means that, when relationships become less hierarchical and less formalized, they are more appropriately categorized as hegemonic or arms-length contractual agreements between sovereign states (Cooley and Spruyt 2009). Thus, the relations between France and its West African colonies changed from imperial to informal imperial (with continued presence of the French military), to hegemonic (with France dominating the Franc zone), to preferential agreements with the EU. In the former Soviet space, the move away from imperial rule has been less dramatic. While the Baltics quickly asserted their independence and developed strong ties with the western and middle European states, the Caucasus and Central Asian states have faced far greater barriers (Menon and Spruyt 1997). Finally, studying the internal logic of formal empires sheds light on how such an empire differs from, but nevertheless can be transformed into, a more equitable multi-national federation. Given that the roots of many nation-states often lie in a not too distant imperial past, the study of how those transitions occurred can illuminate problems of state and nation-building today. It is for this reason that reflection on some of the critical constitutive elements of formal empire is fruitful. As I indicated at the outset, inevitably any empirical analysis will invite considerable debate on whether a specific political configuration constitutes formal empire, informal empire, hegemony or something else. In this sense, the applicability of the term to a specific empirical manifestation provokes the search for shared a Wittgensteinian intersubjectivity. However, this still requires that we develop a rigorous analytic scheme. As Alex Motyl reminds us, ‘history can be given meaning only by scholars and other interpreters … the only logical approach is to construct conceptual – that is, causal – schemes and then to impose them quite explicitly on the historical “record”’ (Motyl 1992b, 17). Consequently, I submit that seeing formal empire as a particular logic of organization, which synergistically links formal institutional patterns of rule with inter-subjective perceptions of ruler and subject, provides a useful starting point for analysis. It provides a template against which to evaluate and discuss the permutations that differ from the ideal type. The analyst’s exposition of criteria thus enables, and indeed makes possible, the discussion of how a specific empirical phenomenon comports with the abstract concept.

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Spruyt, Hendrik. 2005. Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stedman, Stephen; Jones, Bruce and Pascual, Carlos. 2009. Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Unger, Roberto. 1987. Plasticity into Power. New York: Cambridge University Press. van den Doel, H.W. 1996. Het Rijk van Insulinde. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1978. The Modern World System, vols 1–2. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1997. Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited and translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press. Whelan, Frederick. 1996. Edmund Burke and India. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Zacher, Mark. 2001. The territorial integrity norm: International boundaries and the use of force. International Organization, 55(2), 215–50.

Chapter 2

Imperial Administration: Comparing the Byzantine Empire and the EU Magali Gravier

Introduction Even if the concept of empire is used in a fairly neutral way in the context of empires of the past, it often becomes value-laden when used to describe contemporary polities. It was always used negatively in the context of the USSR, and it is almost always used with a negative connotation in the context of the USA. However, things become surprisingly blurred in the context of the EU: a good illustration of this is when José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, said during a press conference in 2009: ‘Sometimes, I like to think of the European Union as an empire’. Even if he immediately said that the EU was not quite an empire because it does not use coercion, he nonetheless used this metaphor and he did it without a negative connotation. It is just as much worth noting that nobody really reacted to his words! We cannot imagine Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush, risking saying: ‘Sometimes, I like to think of the USA as an empire’. The fact is that most Europeans share a different historical experience of empires from Americans. Hence, they are less sensitive to the term ‘empire’, or at least are sensitive in a different way. Some even see virtues in empires, probably because ‘in its time empire was often a force for peace, prosperity and the exchange of ideas across much of the globe’ (Lieven 2002, 414). These very different perceptions of empires raise two questions. First, what were empires really like? Even though this should be an evident methodological point of departure, political scientists still have a lot to learn from historians. Accurate historical knowledge should be our first concern: how can we accurately analyse empires if we do not know with sufficient accuracy what empires were like? What would be the value of an analysis of empires based on a caricature of empires at best partly sustained by historical knowledge? This leads to my second question: can empires be used for the purpose of a comparison with contemporary polities? In other words, is it possible to use the notion of empire as a hard concept referring to a historical reality of both the past and the present? This chapter has the aim of showing that the notion of empire can be used as a hard concept accounting for present as well as past polities, and consequently used for the purpose of comparison with contemporary polities. I will present a paired comparison between one particular empire, the Byzantine Empire, and an

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ambiguous case, the European Union. Given this limitation, the comparison does not indicate a general theory of empire. Its more modest ambition is to explore a path for further comparisons which could, though, lead to improved theories of empires. I have argued elsewhere that the EU is not an empire, but that it displays imperial features (Gravier 2009), and that it is undergoing, among other things, a process of imperialization that might end up in an empire or not (Gravier 2011). Therefore, the goal of this chapter is not to say whether the EU is an empire, but to explore this process of imperialization by focussing on one particular imperial feature. Choosing the Byzantine Empire is not self-evident, especially for a political scientist. Political scientists know very little about this empire, which is often conflated with the Ottoman Empire, possibly because it was defeated by it and because its Greek-speaking and Christian Orthodox capital – Constantinople – became the Turkish speaking and Muslim capital of Turkey – Istanbul. However, there are good reasons for choosing a pre-modern empire like Byzantium for a comparison with the EU. Pre-modern European empires were essentially contiguous empires spreading over adjacent areas that, taken together, overlap significantly with today’s EU (with the exception of ‘border’ regions like Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, the Baltic states and parts of Eastern Europe). In other words, these imperial historical moments offered (and sometimes imposed on) today’s EU member states their first common ‘supranational’ experiences over significant periods of time, lasting up to several centuries. Because of this, one can contend that these empires are the ancestors of Europe’s current supranational moment. Of course, much of their political culture and institutions have disappeared, but some aspects – mainly inherited from the original Roman Empire – are still present, such as official symbols (for instance, the eagle symbolizing the German and Austrian states, and the fasces (bundle) on the insignias of French MPs and senators inherited from the Roman lictors), the legal system of civil law (for instance, written legal codes) and some political vocabulary (‘republic’, ‘senate’, ‘prefect’). The Byzantine Empire is particularly interesting because of its administrative sophistication, the diversity of territorial statutes ruling the peripheries and the changing relations between the centre and the periphery, as well as its capacity to deal with multiculturalism and multilingualism (by, for instance, the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet). Many aspects remind us of the EU, especially its preWeberian administrative system and some of the challenges it faced. In particular, the Byzantine Empire offers a good example of a structure of governance able to last in spite of the cultural diversity over which it ruled. However, pre-modern empires also constitute a real methodological challenge: they developed in a drastically different era. Comparing such empires with present polities requires us to find a way to bridge the effects of the time gap, which brings up the issue of theories and methods. To express it in the categories of Münkler (2005), this chapter builds on ‘theories of empire’ (Imperiumstheorie) and not ‘theories of imperialism’

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(Imperialismustheorien). In particular, I look at empires using the structural theory developed by Motyl (2001), and from the point of view of comparative politics, not international relations. These choices have important theoretical and methodological implications. Indeed, while scholars of international relations study relations between states, scholars of comparative politics study the internal functioning of political systems and compare these systems with one another. Therefore, my focus on the structure of empires is not meant to lead to better a understanding of the international system and how it changes over time (Nexon 2009), but to a better understanding ofa particular type of polity. In other words, I do not consider empires as international networks of influence and domination: trying to control other states and territories is what empires do, among other things, but this is not what they are. Considering empires as polities leads me to shift away from approaches focusing almost exclusively on the external action of empires and concentrate on a view from within. Within the methodological approach and theoretical framework that underlie this chapter, as soon as an empire has gained control over a new territory, we are no longer in the realm of international relations. The act of incorporation transposes the relation between a political centre and the new territory into the realm of domestic relations. This is the reason why, as opposed to the usual approaches, this chapter will not deal with warfare, the role of wars in the acquisition of territory or the importance of military capacity. Granted studying such issues is important to understand how empires protect themselves and, to some extent, gain additional territory, but it does not tell us how empires survive once wars stop and once new territories have been incorporated or old ones lost. Tackling this issue, all too often ignored, this chapter will show how the Byzantine Empire organized and maintained its internal order in such a way as to ensure its longevity despite its high degree of diversity. In this chapter, I will analyse one of the main instruments that contribute to the sustainability of imperial systems of governance: the administrative system – that is, the task of holding the empire together, and getting it to function day by day. For this purpose, the Byzantine Empire is a much better case to study and to compare with the EU than, say, the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, while the highly sophisticated administrative system contributed to holding the Byzantine Empire together for more than 10 centuries, the Holy Roman Empire, especially in the earlier centuries, did not really have an administrative system (probably because it never had a geographical core) and because its emperor – as an institution – was, from a certain point of view, extraordinarily weak.1 However, studying the administrative system of the Byzantine Empire is not an easy task. First, information on the 1  Unlike most emperors, the Holy Roman Emperor did not have an imperial army under his command. Even worse, the elections of the Holy Roman Emperors were moments when the prince electors imposed conditions on the emperor (which, after 1519, were put in written form – the so called ‘Capitulation’ – and constituted a major basis of the imperial legislation). So, while it is a very good idea to compare the EU with the Holy Roman Empire (Haldén 2011) if one wishes to study the relations between the core and the

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topic is scarce. Second, since the goal of this comparison is to see to what extent Byzantium can help us shed light on the EU, we need a concept that can grasp both cases. In other words, this raises the issue of the capacity of concepts to travel, well known to scholars of comparative politics (Sartori 1970). We need a concept which can travel above all through time. This is the reason why I use the concept of the administrative system and not public administration. The latter concept, well adapted to the analysis of present Western states, would be too narrow in the context of the Byzantine Empire, which rested on three administrations (civil, military and ecclesiastical), each of which weighed differently according to the period of time envisaged (Carney 1971) and which were not always as sharply separated as they ostensibly are in today’s Western states. Following Olsen, for whom a public administration is ‘an organizational apparatus for getting things done’, and in particular ‘a tool for executing the commands’ of political leaders (Olsen 2006, 3), I will take the administrative system to be the whole set-up that fulfils the administrative needs of a political system: the organization of the imperial territory, the staffing system, and the administrative mission and capacity. The analysis will start with remarks on the temporal delineation of the Byzantine Empire and on its methodological implications. Temporal Delineation of the Byzantine Empire as a Case for Comparison with the EU Choosing to study the Byzantine Empire as a political scientist raises two issues. The first concerns its duration and the second the implications of its duration. The particular and long process that gave birth to the Byzantine Empire has led some to consider that the Empire did not exist as an autonomous entity in its early years: some maps of this period still represent it as the Eastern part of the Roman Empire even after the division of the empire. Some Byzantinists like to remind us of the provocative position of the famous Irish Byzantinist, John Bury (1861– 1927), according to whom ‘No Byzantine Empire ever began to exist; the Roman Empire did not come to an end until 1453’ (Ahrweiler 1976, 184; Zakythilinos 1984, 237). It is a fact that this empire started as the Eastern part of the Roman Empire – hence its name ‘Eastern Roman Empire’. Its inhabitants, who considered themselves Romans despite their different ethnic origins, as well as its neighbours called it ‘Roman Empire’ or ‘Romania’ until the fifteenth century. The use of the term ‘Byzantine’ to designate the Empire first developed in the sixteenth century (Zakythilinos 1984). The splitting of the two empires is difficult to date, because it occurred stepwise and over a fairly long period of time. It is probably not wrong either to say that the

peripheries, on the very issue of administration, it is certainly more fruitful to compare the EU and the Byzantine Empire.

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splitting process started in 286 when the Roman Emperor Diocletian (284–3052) appointed a second emperor (or ‘augustus’). The process was furthered seven years later, in 293, when he appointed – in agreement with his co-emperor – two junior emperors (or ‘cæsars’), one to each augustus. Thus, the empire was no longer governed by one augustus, but by four ‘tetrarchs’ leading to the so-called ‘Tetrarchy’. At the end of the reign of the augusti, the cæsars were to become the next augusti, and two new cæsars would be appointed, on the sole basis of their personal qualities (Carney 1971, 90; Ostrogorsky 1969, 34). The empire was also divided into four administrative districts or ‘prefectures’. Rome was still the official capital of the empire, but the tetrarchs had their quarters in the capital of the prefecture that they were in charge of: augustus Diocletian in Nicomedia (today Izmit), his cæsar Galerius in Sirmium (today Sremska Mitrovica), augustus Maximian in Mediolanum (today Milan), and his cæsar Constantius in Augusta Treverorum (today Trier). The Tetrarchy rapidly proved unstable: the system of rotation of power worked only once, in 305, when Diocletian and Maximian retired and their cæsars were elevated to the rank of augusti, while two new cæsars were appointed. As soon as 306, at the death of Constantius, his troops declared his son Constantine (306–337) augustus without consulting anyone. In 308, there were four candidates to the post of augustus and only one to the post of cæsar. This unusual system of governance, originally meant to ‘offset separatist tendencies and attempts at usurpation’ (Carney 1971, 90), lasted until 313. By then, only two rival augusti were left: Constantine in the West, and Lucinius in the East. In 324, Constantine defeated Lucinius, reunited the empire and moved the capital of the empire to Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople in 330. If the year 324 is usually considered an important landmark in the creation of the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire remained officially united until the end of the reign of Theodosius I in 395. This overview reminds one that it took more than a century for the two Empires to split. During this time, the Western Empire gradually declined, while the political centre of the Empire moved from the Western part to the Eastern part, which was finally separated. One can consider that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453 (the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans), with an interruption between 1204 (Constantinople’s fall to the Fourth Crusade) and 1261. This brings us to the second methodological challenge. By their nature, institutions evolve over time. More or less quickly, more or less smoothly, but they evolve to adapt to new circumstances. The longer an institution is active, the more it is likely that this institution experiences dramatic changes. If we consider 395 as the latest starting date for the Byzantine Empire and 1453 as its end, we can say that this empire lasted at least 1058 years.3 Byzantium lasted more than one millennium. During these 1058 years and unlike what was long believed, it 2  The dates indicate the duration of the reign. 3  Warren Treadgold (1997) considers that the Empire lasted from 285 to 1461 (the fall of Trezibond) – 1176 years, almost 12 centuries.

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experienced many institutional changes (Haldon 2009), including a change of the imperial and institutional language from Latin to Greek. In its later centuries, the Byzantine Empire is indeed also known as the ‘Greek Empire’. The very title of the emperor also changed over time. He was called augustus in the early period of the Empire, then bore different titles until the title basileus was legally adopted in 629 by Heraclius (Bréhier 1970). The epoch that had given birth to this Empire had long ceased to exist when it fell. Its exceptional longevity means that we are almost dealing in practice with several empires, for which we do not always have sufficient information – especially on the administration. Some periods are better documented on this issue than others. For instance, much of what is known on the Empire’s early administrative institutions is due to a volume published (probably around 551/554) by John the Lydian, an ‘average’ bureaucrat of the Byzantine Empire. The fact that we deal with several pictures of the Byzantine Empire that evolved over time, and that are more or less complete, implies that the main characteristics and challenges also changed. This, in turn, implies an additional task of temporal delineation of the object of analysis. For political scientists, focusing on the latest stage of evolution of the contemporary polities they study is a selfevident methodological choice. Otherwise, it is labelled as a historical approach. Conversely, the choice to study a polity of the past inevitably confronts scholars with the question of the temporal delineation of the object, especially if this polity has lasted for a long period. Should they choose one particular ‘picture’ of this polity? If yes, which one? The first one? The last one? One considered reflecting the ‘golden age’ of this polity? Should they choose several pictures? If yes, which ones? Or can one study the whole polity across time, in other words study it as a whole: a dynamic object? In the following sections, I will analyse the Byzantine Empire across time, that is, as a dynamic object. This choice is better suited to the purpose of a comparison with the EU, since the EU evolves constantly, and since it defines itself through the dynamic expression, ‘an ever closer-union’, which has been present in the treaties since the their adoption. The Administrative Organization of Territory When one observes the evolution of the administrative organization of Byzantium’s territory, the predominant impression is that of incremental transformations mainly in response to military pressures,4 but also fiscal constraints.5 This capacity to adapt 4  The Empire faced multiple attacks on its borders over the centuries: from the Lombards, the Avars, the Slavs, the Seljuk Turcs, etc. 5  The Empire needed enormous resources to finance its high standard of living, its diplomacy, its administration, but also its military campaigns. The Empire often ‘bought’ peace from its enemies and, worst of all, loss of territories deprived the empire of parts of its fiscal resources, forcing it to restructure itself and modify its fiscal system to maintain more or less sufficient fiscal revenues.

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(Haldon 2009) most probably explains the fact that the Byzantine Empire was able to outlast the Roman Empire despite its inferior military capacity (Luttwak 2009). In terms of territorial administration, Byzantium is inescapably associated with the so-called system of the ‘themes’ (described below). Three main periods can be distinguished: that from Diocletian until the seventh-century, which witnessed the establishment of the themes; that as the system of the themes reached its full potential, from the seventh until the tenth/eleventh centuries; and that of the decline of the themes, from the eleventh century to the end of the empire. Diocletian, who introduced the system of the Tetrarchy, also reformed the administrative organization of the imperial territory. The Empire was organized in a centralized and hierarchical way, divided into four prefectures, which were subdivided into dioceses (between 12 and 14), and the dioceses into provinces (between 100 and 120). The cities were the lowest administrative level (Haldon 2008). Italy ended up losing its special status and dominating position. It was divided into provinces and submitted to the obligation to pay taxes, like all other provinces. The prefectures, and more particularly, the dioceses and provinces, ‘were responsible for the major public taxes and for the administration of justice, the maintenance of the public post, the state weapons factories and provincial public works’ (Haldon 2008, 539–40). Under Diocletian (or maybe under Constantine; Bréhier 1970), civil and military matters were separated and put under the control of separate authorities. They were partly merged again under Justinian (527–565), who reformed the administration in order to ensure that taxes were collected more efficiently, but in a non-systematic way: some provinces were put under the control of a military authority, others of a civil authority. Under the pressure of various invasions,6 the territory of the Empire was transformed to improve the defence capacities (Ostrogotrsky 1969). This seems to have led to the introduction of solutions where the military and civilian powers were put again under the control of a common authority – which happened to be a military commander. The first experiences were the so-called exarchates of Ravenna and Carthage, which are considered as ancestors of the themes, since they had the same institutional particularities (Diehl 1905). The new system of the themes was first introduced during the seventh century, but it took more than two centuries to organize the whole Empire in themes (Ostrogorsky 1969). The triggering factor for this profound territorial reorganization is probably the important territorial losses (in Italy, Egypt and Syria), which left the Empire weakened and without its most important sources of wealth and food. The ‘themes’ or ‘themata’ were the ‘backbone of Byzantine administration and defences’ (Ostrogorstky 1969, 402). Originally, themes were not territorial units but garrisons, which they were named after (Diehl 1905, 56). Garrisons were posted on a permanent basis in different areas of the empire (Bréhier 1970). This also meant that the army was no longer concentrated at the empire’s borders but spread throughout the Empire (Treadgold 1997). Themes were 6  Slav and Avars in the Balkans, Persians in the Orient, Lombards in northern Italy.

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subdivided into smaller units called ‘tourmai’, which were themselves subdivided into even smaller ones called ‘droungoi’ (Guillou 1984; Treadgold 1997). The title given to the commander of the themes varied, but by the tenth century the expression strategus was used uniformly. In the thematic system, the strategus was the highest military and civil authority (Diehl 1905). Within each theme, parcels of land were granted to soldiers according to two important principles. First, soldiers were recruited more or less locally among the peasantry. Second, these soldier peasants received a parcel of land against the hereditary obligation to serve the military and to finance their own military material, including their horses. Later on, when it appeared that the parcels of land were not big enough for each small-holder to finance his military material, it was allowed for several peasants to join their financial efforts to pay for the military material of one of them. The themes were regulated by special laws ensuring that the pieces of land could not be alienated or usurped by their holders, who were compelled to fulfill their obligations. Progressively, the term ‘theme’ evolved to designate the territorial units on which the garrisons were encamped (Bréhier 1970). The number of themes changed over time. As the system of themes was generalized throughout the Empire, the other administrative units inherited from the old administrative system of Diocletian and Constantine were transformed into themes. However, historians also agree that the number of themes varied along with the size and the military and fiscal needs of the Empire. In the seventh century, there were only four themes. Two centuries later, their number had gone up to 10. At the beginning of the tenth century, there were 29 themes, and in the eleventh century, Byzantium counted 38 themes (Encyclopædia Britannica Online: ‘theme’). Originally, additional themes came essentially when the Empire conquered new territories, but later on, during the slow collapse of the Empire, new themes were created by dividing older ones. By the end of the twelfth century, although the size of the Empire had significantly shrunk, the Empire counted twice as many themes (Ostrogorsky 1969). The Byzantine military capacity did not only rely on the soldier peasants of the themes, but the thematic system served three specific goals. Being mostly composed of local people, it saved the Empire from the unpredictable behaviour of foreign mercenaries. It also provided the Empire with fully financed military forces. Finally, it spared the Empire the unpopular practice of conscription. Comparing the territorial organization of Byzantium with that of the EU reveals four main points. First, the organization of the imperial territory evolved constantly to adapt to the changing size and needs of the Empire. It expanded, but it also shrank. For the moment, the EU has not really experienced periods of territorial shrinkage.7 In fact, it was not clear on what legal basis a member state could withdraw from the Union until the Treaty of Lisbon introduced a formal

7  Up to now, only Greenland has withdrawn from the EU after a referendum held in 1982, but this is an autonomous territory of Denmark, not a state.

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and unilateral right to withdraw.8 Second, the pace of reforms was very slow – at least for the human witnesses. This most certainly gave the contemporaries of the Empire an impression of immobility. However, the bigger picture over 10 centuries takes account of the depth of territorial and, more broadly, institutional transformations. Social sciences are very poorly equipped to assess the speed of institutional change. They cannot say what is a ‘normal’ period of time for this or that type of institutional change. Changes almost always appear too slow to human witnesses, who are often impatient and want changes to occur overnight. However, the time of human actors and that of institutions are not the same. The first runs quicker than the second; that is about all we can say. Therefore, when we compare the territorial changes in the EU and in Byzantium, we cannot make an absolute comparison on an objective scale to measure the pace of institutional reforms, but only a relative one, comparing one object with another. If we compare the case for which we have a complete picture (Byzantium) to the one still in the making (the EU), we must admit that we do not have the temporal distance from the EU to draw any solid conclusions. Even if the majority of the EU population was born after the creation of the EC/EU and may have the impression that the EU is old, let us not forget that it took more than two centuries to implement the thematic system in the Byzantine Empire, which is more than three times as long as the EU has existed. So the comparison between the EU and Byzantium is necessarily biased and it suggests deeper changes in Byzantium than can be observed in the EU. This methodological premise must be kept in mind when developing the comparison between the cases. The third important point concerns the structure of the empire. As opposed to later ‘colonial empires’ (e.g. the British, Spanish or French Empires), the Byzantine Empire was not organized around a state but around a city – Constantinople. We can note here a similarity between Byzantium and the EU, since the EU is not organized around a state dominating other neighbouring states, but around three cities (Brussels, Luxemburg and Strasburg). Over the years, Brussels has become more important than the two other ‘capitals’, which is reflected by the common use of the term ‘Brussels’ to designate the EU – as one uses ‘Washington’ in the case of the United States. If this evolution continues, it could be that one day Brussels will be the only capital of the EU. This structural particularity reflects the fact that Byzantium, like the Europolity, does not so much express the domination of a given people over its neighbours as that of an institutional and cultural order over the given territories. Fourth and last, the historical overview reveals the capacity of the political centre of the Empire, Constantinople, to impose throughout the imperial territory a fairly unified system of administration even if several systems co-existed at times (owing to the slowness of reforms), and pragmatism led to regional variation within the main model. On the assumption that the member states are the functional equivalent of Byzantine provinces and themes, today’s EU is far 8  Article 50, Treaty on the European Union.

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from being able to dictate to its member states how to organize their territory, and it has no influence on the location of their borders. A major difference between the two polities lies in the fact that Constantinople, at least until the eleventh century, was a real and strong capital, from which the whole Empire was governed and controlled. The basileus, provided (s)he was a strong ruler, was at the head of a polity, which from this point of view was governed like a state rather than like a network of states. The EU is not centralized enough to command this kind of political power. It was not designed to be governed by a political centre that would have the possibility of imposing top-down, rational administrative reforms on its constituent units like Byzantium did –as defenders of intergovernmental theories of European integration would want to remind us. However, the different capacity of action of both polities is probably not just the result of political design per se, but also of different historical challenges, which imply different political designs. Byzantium often needed to defend its territory. It would have never been able to survive without a significant capacity to organize its territory in a way that sustained its military needs. Conversely, since the creation of the very first European Community in 1952, the EC/EU has never been subjected to military attacks. However, it has long faced economic challenges owing to regional disparities. The development of its ‘cohesion policies’, now called ‘regional policy’, has been a response to this. Today, ‘the EU stands out internationally as one of the political units that has the most explicitly and deliberately attempted to reduce regional disparities among its constituents’ (Funck and Pizzati 2003, xi) and it is probably the world’s most powerful ‘machine of convergence’ (Gill and Raiser 2012). While scholars seem to agree on the fact that the EU’s regional policy did not have as much economic impact as the European Commission had hoped, it has nonetheless affected the territorial organization and distribution of power in the member states. Since the EU does not have a direct power to change the territorial organization of its member states, it can only use indirect methods. The introduction of new rules for the allocation of structural funds at the end of the 1980s offers a good example. The reform implied that national governments could no longer decide without the Commission how to distribute the funds at sub-national level between regions. This new rule pushed member states to transform their internal structure of power, so as to maximize their chances of obtaining structural funds. The response of member states varied significantly from one case to another. Some already had regions, others did not. Many states devolved power from their central government to regions (Hooghe 1996). Ireland, under pressure from the Commission, ended by creating regions, which transformed power relations between the central government and local authorities (Laffan 1996). In this respect, the diffusion of the region as a significant territorial unit throughout the EU shows that the EU has contributed to a more harmonized organization of the territories among the member states, even though this change was not dictated by ‘Brussels’, but rather a strategic adjustment of the member states to a central rule.

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Comparing the capacity of the two polities to organize their territory reveals of course a great difference. Byzantium, functioning almost like a state (Bréhier 1970; Laiou and Morrisson 2007), had the power to impose profound reforms throughout its territory. It was also able to overcome external as well as internal challenges by adapting its territory in a creative way, implementing reforms throughout the whole territory with local variations. It is the combination of both (the power to act and flexibility) that contributed to the longevity of the Empire. For the moment, the EU does not need such a reactive capacity, since, as opposed to Byzantium, it neither has big fiscal needs nor is confronted by territorial attacks. However, if it needed this territorial capacity, clearly, it would not have it – at least not given today’s rules. Despite some structural similarities between the two polities, in comparison to Byzantium, the EU displays a very modest capacity to impact on its territorial organization. However, this does not mean that the EU has no capacity to impact on the territorial organization of its member states, as has been explained. The EU has different goals, it faces different challenges and it does not have an open-ended policy tool box but a limited one. However, in both cases, we see composite polities that manage to have impact on the territorial organization of their components. Administrative Staff and Staffing System Comparing systems of civil service to understand how big composite polities manage to last over several centuries is probably very important. In a study comparing public administrations of 35 states, Rauch and Evans (Evans and Rauch 1999; Rauch and Evans 2000) have shown that the quality and performance of public administrations impact on the development and wealth of less-developed countries. In particular, merit-based recruitment and, more generally speaking, ‘Weberian’ bureaucracies are correlated with a higher level of development and wealth than those with other types. While the study does not tackle directly the question of sustainability of political systems, we may formulate the hypothesis that properly performing administrations contribute to the longevity of political systems, because political systems able to develop further and produce more wealth are likely to last longer than systems that do not. According to Rauch and Evans the capacity to develop further and produce wealth depends partly on the performance of public administrations. Byzantium’s civil service was organized in a fairly complicated way. Let us not forget that the Byzantine experiment has left us the adjective ‘byzantine’, meaning ‘inflexible or complicated’ (Collins English Dictionary 1995). Even if the analysis of the evolution of Byzantium’s territorial organization has shown that the Empire was more flexible than is often believed, the epithet ‘complicated’ certainly applies to its civil service. Byzantium first continued within the broad framework of the West Roman model (for instance, the existence of praetorian prefects) but this model was transformed progressively. Reforms were sometimes made to adapt

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to new territorial realities (conquest or loss of territory), or they were motivated by the need to end rivalries either between military commanders or between civil and military authorities. Reforms were also needed to fight the corruption of civil servants, abuses of fiscal authorities collecting too many taxes, the misbehaviour of powerful land-owners or broader insecurity, which caused the population to flee (Bréhier 1970: 94). However, one of the reasons why the byzantine civil service appears so complicated is that the successive reforms did not just replace old titles and functions with new ones; they more often added new ones to the old. In Byzantium, like in today’s Western administrations, there were two more or less related hierarchies. One organized functions or posts (e.g. today’s ‘head of unit’, ‘head of section’), the other one titles (e.g. ‘administrative officer’, ‘finance officer’, ‘chief administrative officer’). Today, even if there is some flexibility between both hierarchies, they roughly complement each other: one can hold a function at different moments of a career and therefore with different titles. However, in Byzantium, the creation of new titles did not necessarily reflect a structural transformation of the administrative apparatus. Sometimes, it merely reflected the evolution of a powerful instrument of social distinction. Therefore, one of the factors increasing the degree of complication of Byzantium’s bureaucracy is a particular rationale behind the allocation of titles – which we can call, after Bourdieu (1979) – the ‘art of distinction’. In other words, administrative titles did not always reflect a particular function; they were also used for the purpose of social distinction and as a mark of honour (Bréhier 1970). Endless lists of ranks were established and updated so as to be able to say exactly where each title stood in the imperial protocol. The ranking evolved over time because, like many instruments of social distinction, as soon as titles were offered to too great a number of people, they lost their capacity to create distinctiveness and henceforth their social value. Therefore, they needed to be replaced by new titles. These would at first be allocated on a very restrictive basis, which granted prestige to their holders, until they too started being offered to too large a circle, lost their social value and needed to be replaced, and so on. For instance, the title ‘nobilissimus’ was initially used by the members of the imperial family, but it started to lose some of its prestige as more people gained the right to use it. Therefore a new function was created – the ‘protonobilissimus’ – and then another one in the twelfth century – the ‘protonobilissimo-hyperatus’. As the Empire was experiencing its terminal decline, the title was left to provincial bureaucrats (Carney 1971, II, 148). Reforms also affected the structure of the administrative apparatus. For instance, in the palace administration, the praetorian prefect, considered the highest function under Diocletian, started to decline under Constantine and became a regional civil office. Only the praetorian prefect of Orient, the most important praetorian prefect, continued to reside in Constantinople and remained a member of the central government (Bréhier 1970). The crucial new administrative function was the Master of Offices, which combined several important responsibilities (Carney 1971). He met regularly with the holders of the other big offices (justice, finances and the municipality of Constantinople) in the Consistory. The Consistory

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had competence in all administrative issues and coordinated the measures taken by regional authorities. In this respect, it was the expression of imperial unity (Bréhier 1970). The Consistory reminds one of a council of ministers without a prime minister: its members stood directly under the authority of the emperor. Later on, this handful of top officials was joined by state councillors (‘comites consistoriani’) with expertise in various administrative issues. The members of the Consistory were assisted by the corporation of notaries, who helped carry out decisions and were often in charge of their implementation. In the provinces, following the reforms of Constantine, the praetorian prefects were redefined as regional authorities. They were deprived of their military attributions and were from then on heads of the civil administration. This did not mean that they were powerless: Bréhier considers that within their jurisdiction they were genuine ‘vice-emperors’ (Bréhier 1970, 88). Among others, they were in charge of maintaining order, and publishing legal decisions subordinate to imperial decisions. They managed the imperial post and public works. They supervised commercial activities, the collection of taxes in kind (e.g. the ‘annona’) and even higher education. They were in charge of the payment of salaries to soldiers and civil servants of the dioceses. If the governors of the provinces were put in office by the emperor, once in office they were under the jurisdiction of the praetorian prefects. In order to fulfil their tasks, they were helped by a large number of bureaus (‘scrinia’), which were more or less specialized: taxes, budget, public works, etc. (Bréhier 1970). A fairly numerous staff (‘scrinarii’) worked in the bureaus: under Emperor Justinian, for instance, the praetorian prefect of Africa was allocated around 400 people. Under Justinian, an important evolution started to occur that went hand in hand with the territorial transformations already described. In the central administration, one notes essentially that the hierarchical structure of offices started losing its pyramidal form. Except for the Master of Offices, all big offices started losing some of their prerogatives while their subordinate heads of bureaus gained more responsibilities (Bréhier 1970). New functions and titles were created in order to increase the prestige of the Court and to flatter bureaucrats (Bréhier 1970). Reforms were most important in the Provinces, but had different goals and contents according to the local problems they were expected to solve. For instance, in the Oriental provinces, reforms were essentially meant to deal with issues of corruption and malfunctioning of the administrative machinery: abolition of the venality of functions, reduction of the staff, increase in salary, and oath of loyalty on the Bible (Bréhier 1970). In other cases, reforms were meant to put an end to rivalries between competing authorities, which sometimes meant the creation of ad hoc functions (Bréhier 1970). A good example of this was the creation in 536 of the quaestor Iustinianus exercitus, a civil and military governor of five different continental and maritime provinces. This function was the first to merge civil and military powers (Bréhier 1970). Interestingly enough, it put under the authority of one person regions that were not contiguous at all and in today’s world belong to different countries (among others, various regions of Bulgaria,

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Greece and Cyprus). In some further cases, reforms were meant to increase the capacity to resist invasions. This led to the creation of the first exarch, probably at the end of the sixth century, in Ravenna. The exarch, originally a modest military function, suddenly became an extremely powerful one, which left the Praetorian Prefect with hardly any power since the exarch centralized all powers in a given territory: defence, finances, justice and public works (Bréhier 1970). Between the seventh and tenth centuries, when the thematic system blossomed, the central government was further reformed. In continuation of the trend started under Justinian the former hierarchy definitively lost its pyramidal structure. Most of the former big offices were replaced by an important group of heads of bureaus (60 in the tenth century), which stood directly under the authority of the Emperor. The idea behind this reform was to increase the Emperor’s control over the heads of bureaus by avoiding an intermediary level of hierarchy (Bréhier 1970). By then, the Palace prevailed over the rest of the imperial administration, and developed into a voluminous and complex apparatus, with its own administration. In an attempt to rationalize the complicated system of titles and functions, a unique nomenclature of offices was created. However, the reform was inescapably doomed to fail since the new nomenclature introduced two categories: some offices were conferred ‘by tradition’ and could not be taken back, while others were conferred ‘by law’ and could be withdrawn and given to someone else. The same person could hold offices of both kinds, but, while some were honorific, others implied a concrete function in the state apparatus. Holders of offices by law were granted a subordinate staff to help them carry out their mission (Bréhier 1970). Eunuchs, which previously comprised a subordinate group of servants, were organized in a similar and parallel hierarchy (Bréhier 1970). This blooming period ended after military defeat at the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the epoch of the Comneni, which Ostrogorsky (1970, 351) calls the ‘rule of the military aristocracy’. Bréhier too considers the Comneni era as a breaking point in the hierarchy of civil service (Bréhier 1970). Indeed, the important territorial losses inflicted by the defeat initiated a new period of recentralization and of territorial reorganization. At the lower hierarchical levels, the rank and file of the Byzantine civil administration was made up of administrators whose career sounds somewhat familiar to us. During the sixth century, the typical career of an administrator progressed over a period of about 41 years, in theory at least, since in practice, corruption and the effects of bottlenecks meant that one could not always progress as quickly as anticipated (Carney 1971). Over these years, the individual progressed through positions at the lower hierarchical levels to more senior posts. Competence and recruitment were two important issues. Administrators were recruited on the basis of their general knowledge, on their capacity to master the arts of writing and of rhetoric and, especially for lawyers and judges, their knowledge of legal issues. The importance given to the knowledge of law, at least for higher ranking administrators prompted the creation and successive reforms of the university system, in particular the reorganization of law studies so as to provide

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future administrators with the required knowledge (Bréhier 1926). Between the late seventh and the tenth centuries, the knowledge of law became less important for recruitment of administrators, but it gained importance again in the eleventh century, at least for senior staff (Haldon 2008). Literacy, however, was always important because Byzantium was grounded on ‘a literate and record-keeping state administration which depended upon the transmission of vital information in written form, not just between officials, but from one generation to the next’ (Haldon 2008, 542). In the early centuries of the Empire, recruitment was open to all. Students of modest provincial origin could make it up the social ladder on the basis of the knowledge they had acquired at the university in Constantinople. Gradually, however, recruitment was restricted to what appear to have become real ‘dynasties’ of administrators. Bréhier (1970) uses the expressions ‘administrative nobility’ and ‘aristocracy’ to describe this phenomenon. Two other social groups were progressively integrated in the administration and given an increasing importance in the hierarchy: foreign princes who had come to Byzantium sometimes sought protection from it and took functions in the administration; the other group was eunuchs, as already mentioned. The third and last mode of recruitment was rather a pestilence and was fought by several emperors (without much success): venality. The purchase of functions was considered a poor mode of recruitment because it meant recruiting people lacking the necessary competencies, which led inescapably to bad administration. Over time, different solutions were tried to eliminate such practices, but none of them ever worked (Bréhier 1970). Beyond its flaws (essentially corruption and nepotism) and its complicated structure, Byzantium’s civil administration displays features that were unusually developed for its time in the European context. Byzantium was indeed ‘a type of centralized state in which the impulse, generated at the centre, reached the most remote provinces, capable of imposing a unique will on populations of different races and languages, even with diverging interests’ (Bréhier 1970, 128). This might not have been possible without a particular conception of the state inherited from Rome (but lost in Western Europe), as well as its powerful and fairly obedient administration. Byzantium’s administrators acted as holders of the authority of the empire and were responsible to it (Bréhier 1970). They took orders from the basileus and were expected to implement them or get them implemented. Failure to do so would lead to punishment. Several emperors tried to organize systems of control, elaborate mechanisms of fiscal and legal guarantee, and formulate ethical norms to make sure that imperial administrators fulfilled their tasks correctly rather than serving their private interests. Subjects were even encouraged to notify abuses. However, these measures remained ineffective most of the time (Bréhier 1970), especially after the Empire was ruined and no longer able to pay its administrators sufficiently. In the heyday of the Empire, administrators received two kinds of payment: first, an annual payment, originally in kind and later in money; second, gifts that were given on particular days. Towards the end of the Empire, this second part of their payment became more irregular and of a lower value. In the end, some gifts were first given and then taken back. Reduced income

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combined with a growing institutional autonomy led administrators increasingly to pay themselves out of the taxes paid by the subjects under their authority. This reflected a degree of imperial decay beyond any hope of recovery (Bréhier 1970). Comparing the civil administrations of Byzantium and of the EU reveals very different challenges and characteristics. To start with, Constantinople repeatedly fought corruption and nepotism. One may recall that issues of corruption have once led to the resignation of a Commission (Topan 2002; Craig 2000), but all in all, the EU’s bureaucracy has never experienced a degree of corruption approaching the Byzantine experience. The Greek empire also struggled to professionalize its civil administration, including the issue of education and the qualification of its staff. The University of Constantinople was used to train future civil administrators of the Empire, albeit with uneven results, in so far as Byzantium was able at times to impose a particular type of training on its future staff but the Empire also experienced long epochs of declining quality in recruitment. There is no equivalent in the EU: the EU does not train its staff itself. It does not have educational institutions to do so. Despite its name, the European Administrative School is not an EU version of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. The European Administrative School offers training to EU staff after recruitment, but does not train future civil servants like the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. The EU entrusts the universities of its member states with providing potential EU staff with relevant knowledge.9 Its recruitment strategy is limited to the organization of competitions to select the best applicants on the basis of criteria comprising a mix between job-specific knowledge, general knowledge on the EU and the knowledge of at least two EU languages (or three for language-related careers). Since 2002, competitions have been organized by a recruitment service common to all EU institutions: the European Personnel Selection Office. The EU must also take geographical balance into account, but only as a secondary criterion after merit: quotas are forbidden in the EU (Gravier 2008). Finally, the EU’s system of civil service, certainly inspired by the French system (Rogalla 1982) and probably also by the German one, is a career system. In other words, EU civil servants are not recruited to occupy a particular post but in a career, within which they progress from the lower echelons to the higher ones until they retire or step down. In a nutshell, the EU has a fully professionalized Weberian civil service, unlike Byzantium, because that type had not been invented yet. However, various reforms reveal attempts to establish an administrative system that would have come close to that in some respects (bureaus, careers, hierarchy, fairly clear division of labour between bureaus), but not in all (for instance, irregularity over time of recruitment criteria, nepotism, venality, corruption). So from this point of view and according to Rauch and Evans (Evans and Rauch 1999; Rauch and Evans 2000), the EU has a better system of civil service than Byzantium ever had. The type of civil administration (Weberian or not) is only part of the story, however. Technically speaking, the EU may indeed have a better performing civil 9  Interview with the Head of the European Administrative School.

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administration, but the territorial reach of its staff is much more limited than that of Byzantium. Judging by its system of civil service, the Byzantine Empire was a fairly integrated polity. The creation in 536 of the quaestor Iustinianus exercitus is a telling example: in response to a local issue of governance, the Empire could create an ad hoc administrative function with competence over discontinuous territories belonging to different cultural and political groups. This is totally unthinkable in the context of the EU, because the EU is not integrated enough. Whereas Byzantium had one system of civil service, several co-exist on the EU territory. Since the 2007 enlargement, there are 28 civil-service systems on EU territory: one per member state and a tiny additional one at the EU institutional level.10 Differences between European systems of civil service can be fairly large (Bossaert and Demmke 2003; Auer et al. 1996). Above all, each of these systems is closed and functions according to a specific body of legal norms – national norms in the member states and EU norms for the EU staff. The immediate consequence of this is that no authority within the EU (neither the member states nor the EU institutions) is able to create an administrative function outside of its own territory/jurisdiction like the quaestor Iustitianus exercitus. This also means that staff mobility between the civil services of the member states is not really possible and that staff mobility between the member states and one of the EU institutions is fairly complicated. If possible at all,it is rather a one-way ticket from the member state to one of the EU institutions – unless an expert is ‘lent’ for a limited period of time and then reintegrated in his/her administration of origin (Suvarierol and van den Berg 2008). Because of the territorial aspect, the comparison between both staffing systems is not clear-cut. Rauch and Evans’s study tell us that the EU has a better civil service than the Greek Empire. It is better trained, recruited on the basis of merit, and much less prone to corruption. However, first, Byzantium’s civil administration was very efficient in comparison to its contemporaries. Second, the Empire’s capacity to keep a fairly obedient staff throughout the Empire and to decide upon the administrative apparatus of the whole Empire constituted a major asset for its sustainability. Here the EU cannot compete and the initial advantage of its high-performing civil service seems to lose relevance. Things are not as clearcut when one scrutinizes the EU’s strategy to find a way to control its administrative action throughout its territory, despite the compartmentalization of its components. This raises the question of the EU’s administrative missions and capacity, which will be developed in the next section. As a concluding remark on the issue of administrative staff, it seems important to draw attention to the fact that the two systems appear as kindred, probably because one is in a sense the ancestor of the other. Even the duration of a typical career is comparable. We also see two composite polities that rely strongly on their bureaucratic apparatuses and 10  The EU has a very, very small administrative staff – around 45,000 staff, among which some 32,000 are at the Commission (all categories of staff put together). This is much less than in the biggest member states.

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which deploy significant efforts to ensure a sufficient level of efficiency, even if here too recipes are adapted to each polity, historical era and set of challenges. Administrative Mission and Capacity Presenting the territorial organization and the civil service of different administrative systems informs us about the lands to which given systems apply and who is in charge of them. The ability of a political centre to reform these two systemic aspects gives us a first hint on the power a centre has over the territories under its control – the more power, the stronger the ability to impose reforms (as in Byzantium); the less power, the weaker the ability to impose reforms (as in the EU). Yet even if this information is important when comparing administrative systems, it does not tell us enough. For instance, it does not show us what the system does (administrative mission) and with what means (administrative capacity) it operates. This is what this section will focus on. Putting to one side the military and ecclesiastical administrations, the Byzantine Empire had four main services: justice, finances, diplomacy and the imperial post. It would be impossible to present all four in detail, so only one of them will be presented – finances – because it was fundamental to the survival of the Empire, and because it represented the major part of the imperial administration (Luttwak 2009). The financial administration offers an example of a very complex and sophisticated administration, the efficiency of which was unmatched in its time (Luttwak 2009). Let us start by recalling that Byzantium was known for its currency – the nomisma – a standard gold coin created by Constantine I (306–337) that remained stable for eight centuries (Bréhier 1970; Hendy 1999). Owing to its exceptional stability, it was used as a universal currency in international trade. Its credibility started to decline when, owing to a deep political and economic crisis of the Empire (Bréhier 1970; Ostrogrosky 1969), and to fiscal issues (Hendy 1999), it was seriously debased from a content of gold of 24 carats in 1040 to only 8 carats in 1080, until a monetary reform reintroduced in 1090 a new gold coin, the hyperpyron, replacing the age-old nomisma (Hendy 1999). A good currency was not all. Byzantium had very effective administrative bureaus, even if they were also known for their corruption and harshness on tax payers. Financial resources were composed of two main revenues. On the one hand were the revenues from the ‘patrimonium principis’ – the public domain of the crown (which was distinct from emperors’ private fortune) – and, on the other, a complex and harsh system of taxes. The most important were property taxes (Bréhier 1970; Luttwak 2009), but the Empire also taxed any other source of revenue, such as the circulation of merchandise, commercial profits and heritage (which was sometimes merely confiscated). For the purpose of collecting taxes, arable land in all provinces was divided into fiscal units. While some taxes were individual, others were collective – implying that, if one tax payer could not pay, the others had to make up the balance. Taxes were paid in kind and in money. Over time, payment in money

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gradually replaced payment in kind – except the annona collected in Egypt (as long as it remained part of the Empire), which continued to be paid in kind (Constantinople’s and Alexandria’s food supply depended on it). In the early phase of the Empire, the fiscal system relied on the one hand on an efficient pyramidal system of information. Financial officers calculated the amount to be paid and each taxpayer was informed of the amount due. Everybody had to pay taxes unless an exemption was granted by law, which implied a very thorough collection of information and bookkeeping. Tax payers were divided into three categories: persons, monasteries and villages. Lands that could be taxed were catalogued in a register comprising information on size, surface area, location, place, people and animals living on it, fiscal obligations, etc. Goods exempted were listed in a separate register. These registers were regularly revised by inspectors. Before each 21 September, the Prefect of Orient informed the provinces of the amount to be paid (Bréhier 1970). The information was published in the forum and agents of fiscal services informed taxpayers of their obligations. On the other hand, the Empire enjoyed an efficient (and severe) system of collect of taxes. Part of the taxes was used locally to pay civil servants and soldiers, and to finance churches and monasteries. Since there was no real centralization of public treasury (e.g. in the sixth century, there were seven independent treasuries), the rest of the taxes were sent either to public storage places (for taxes paid in kind) or to central services (Bréhier 1970). Even if there was probably no unique budget in the Empire (Bréhier 1970), information on provincial and local budgets as well as on partial budgets reveals efforts to keep balanced budgets. Under Justinian (527–565), officials called ‘logothetes’ were given the responsibility of public accountancy (Bréhier 1970). Just as themes characterized Byzantium’s provincial administrations, so did logothetes the Empire’s central services (Ostrogorsky 1969). They levied taxes with such harshness that they often had a fearsome reputation among the population. However, because of the importance for the Empire of fiscal resources, they gained power in the administrative hierarchy and rose from being simple civil servants to top-ranking officials. In the tenth century, there were four main logothetes: those of the central public treasury, of the army, of the imperial post and of herds (Guilland 1971). In the fourteenth century, two further important logothetes were added: the logothete of the private treasury and the Grand Logothete, considered a Prime Minister by Guilland (1971), even if this function never formally existed in Byzantium (Bréhier 1970). The logothetes were not spared the fate of others functions before them. Owing probably to the feudalization of the empire, and certainly to the growing importance of the imperial family within the imperial institutions, they progressively lost prestige towards the very end of the empire (Treadgold 1997). As the old system of provinces was replaced by the themes, the financial administration, together with the other central administrations, experienced a ‘retrograde process’ (Ostrogorsky 1969, 99). Previously in the hands of three topranking civil servants – the Praetorian Prefect of Orient for the provinces, and the Counts of the Sacred Largesses and of the Private Estate for the central services

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– the imperial finances were eventually put in the hands of the heads of bureaus formally subordinate to these three office holders. Despite the fragmentation, the financial services remained highly organized, with increasingly specialized units, as can be seen in the example of the services of the logothete of the central treasury, who was in charge of checking and distributing taxes, organizing controls, and keeping and updating land registers. This logothete gained in power over the centuries and around the ninth/tenth century, he had become a top official, ranking first among the other logothetes (Guilland 1971). He headed a large staff of civil servants working in 12 different bureaus: archive of properties submitted to taxation; treasury of the central departments and themes; tax assessment and collection; water pipes; public works; tax inspectors and customs; fiscal revenues of imperial properties; mines and precious metals; district tax collectors for direct taxes; and three others the functions of which are not clearly identified (Bréhier 1970; Guilland 1971). In the themes, tax assessment was conducted by special financial officers, who headed a team of district tax collectors, while another set of officers was in charge of collecting imperial taxes, as well as additional taxes partly for their own benefit (which at times gave rise to excesses almost doubling the amount to be paid). The importance of a well functioning (albeit unpopular) financial administration was enormous in an Empire that was constantly at war (often to resist invasions from various neighbours) and had an endless need to finance its armies, defence and diplomacy. If this administration had served the Empire well during centuries, progressive feudalization and the territorial dismantling of 1204 marked a turning point after which the Empire was never really able to rebalance its finances. The financial administration is one example of the mission of Byzantium’s administrative system. The details we have on this administration reveal a very effective system owing to the delineation of precise tasks, a sophisticated hierarchical and horizontal division of labour, regular updates of crucial information, adaptations to maximize as much as possible potential resources, as well as a staff competent and reliable enough to carry out this mission successfully. Of course, corruption and unfairness tainted this administration, but all in all the empire’s durability is proof enough of a sustainable system and of a powerful administrative capacity – at least for Byzantium’s time. On the issue of administrative mission and capacity too, Byzantium and the EU differ. However, comparing them is an even bigger challenge because scholars of the two polities work with different concepts and do not come from the same disciplines. Historians describe the institutions and the administration or bureaucracy of Byzantium, while EU scholars on the issues of interest here are predominantly political scientists and specialists of public administration who study governance and policy or decision-making. Only a few scholars study the administration of the EU as such: it is mostly studied as part of the broader system of governance. This does not mean that it is impossible to compare administrative missions and capacities, but we must bear in mind that we work with unbalanced sources and analyses, giving a much more complete vision of the EU than of Byzantium.

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At the overall level, let us start by noting that, whereas Byzantium presented a very ‘byzantine’ system of civil service, the EU offers a simpler picture because member states and EU institutions all have rationalized Weberian bureaucracies. Things are different, almost inverted, when it comes to administrative mission and capacity. Here, the EU is clearly very ‘byzantine’ owing to the extremely complicated distribution of policy competences between the two main levels of governance (EU and member state), between the main EU institutions (European Parliament, European Commission and Council) and across policy sectors, for which four different legislative procedures have been set up over time, depending on the policy area considered (‘assent’, ‘co-operation’, ‘consultation’, ‘co-decision’). Over time, the number of policies dealt with at EU level has increased significantly from a handful in the Treaty of 1957 establishing the European Economic Community to 32 in 2011 (according to the list of policy areas published on the website EUROPA). The creation of the ‘pillar system’ with the Treaty of Maastricht (1993) could appear as a rationalization of the policy set-up by organizing policy areas in three pillars (one ‘supranational’ and two ‘intergovernmental’), but in practice, the system remained fairly opaque to the lay person. Among other things, growing problems of legitimacy as well as difficulties for EU citizens in understanding the EU’s political system explain a further effort of rationalization with the Treaty of Lisbon (2009). The complicated pillar structure was suppressed, and some procedures were simplified or sometimes merely renamed (for instance the ‘co-decision’ procedure is now called ‘ordinary legislative procedure’). However, the Treaty is not a panacea: a detailed reading shows that a complex organization of decision-making and legislative procedures still remains, with many exceptions to the ‘normal’ rules. For our purpose, it is important to recall the complicated and evolutionary character of EU governance. Indeed, in so far as public administrations, as defined earlier in this chapter, are tools for executing the commands of political leaders (Olsen 2006), the EU’s structure of governance impacts directly on its administrative mission and capacity. Furthermore, as opposed to the Byzantine Empire, the EU is not totally sovereign. Consequently, while Byzantium had the ‘competence of its competences’, the competences of the EU ‘are governed by the principle of conferral’.11 In other words, the EU is merely competent to act in areas in which the member states have explicitly conferred a competence. All other areas remain competences of the member states. Therefore the EU relies on the good will of the member states to increase its competences, whereas Byzantium could decide for itself which areas it wished to intervene in, and impose this decision on its territories. Because the Byzantine Empire was, in a sense, a state, its administration was in charge of traditional state powers: diplomacy, coinage and taxation, justice, the army, as well as the postal services. Since the EU is not a fully fledged state most of these core state powers remain prerogatives of the member states. Of course, the EU has progressively gained some power in those areas, but they remain limited: 11  Treaty on the European Union, article 5.

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the Euro, the timid development of a diplomatic service (the European External Action Service), the Eurocorps, a fairly powerful Court of Justice and a legal order directly applicable in the member states. However, today’s states also deal with a number of policy areas that were normally not established state powers in the days of Byzantium: competition, environment, energy and research, to name but a few. Owing to the particular institutional design of the EU, its most significant powers over the member states actually lie in these policy areas. The Single Market offers an interesting example where the EU has had a strong impact on its member states. In particular, it has contributed to transforming the administrative activity of its member states by developing administrative cooperation between both Brussels and the member states and amongst the member states themselves. Such cooperation is even expected to increase in the coming years. This example is interesting for my purpose because it illustrates the fact that, to further the development of the Single Market, Brussels does not just act according to a top-down rationale; it also aims at improving this policy area by encouraging better collaboration between the national administrations. This is a totally different rationale from the Byzantine Empire: Brussels is not a centre imposing administrative solutions on its subordinates, but a broker encouraging and persuading its components such that they end up coordinating and harmonizing their actions and ways of getting things done. In other words, Byzantium and the EU are examples of two very different models of administration. While Byzantium (in its heyday) illustrates a typical hierarchical system, which could be seen as an imperfect and distant ancestor of a Weberian administration, the EU exemplifies a ‘post-Weberian’, ‘network-based mode of governance’ (Schout and Jordan 2005, 2008). This ‘post-Weberian’ model is fairly recent. According to Schout and Jordan (2005), it appeared in the early 2000s at a time when the widening and deepening of the integration process confronted the Commission with several challenges. Among them were the increased workload of the Commission (more member states, more policies to deal with) and the greater need for coordination between policy areas and levels of governance. In this historical context, the Commission’s 2001 White Paper on Governance expressed a new vision of governance and administration where the Commission shifted away from ‘central steering’ (Schout and Jordan 2005) and law-making as a main tool of governance, to implementation issues and the development of a system in which Commission and member states combine resources to improve their administrative and policy capacities. This shift seems a good choice given the characteristics of the EU and the limited institutional authority of the Commission over the member states: it can make up for the compartmentalization of the administrative systems as well as the very modest size of the EU’s own bureaucratic apparatus. Even if EU institutions and member states do not need identical administrative structures and administrative sub-systems, they still need to be able to work together. Successful implementation of EU policies depends on this: studies on the transposition of EU directives in the national orders show that transposition is not so much done

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by national parliaments (only 10–40 per cent of the cases) as it is ‘predominantly bounded by administrative processes’ (Steunenberg and Rhinard 2010, 499). In other words, in a ‘network-based’ system of governance, the capacity of national administrations to work with one accord is central to the EU’s administrative capacity. The network model is still at an early stage, too early to tell whether it will serve the EU well, but Schout and Jordan’s studies (Schout and Jordan 2005, 2008; Schout et al. 2010) already point to potential weaknesses owing to an overconfidence in the capacity of networks to self-organize in a context where a higher degree of coordination is probably necessary to reach the full potential. In part, this is due to the fact that the EU is a multilevel of system of governance with too many players to rely on self-organization. However, one can also raise the hypothesis that cultural issues play a significant role here. Among other things, historical legacies (e.g. the communist experience), political legacies (e.g. the habit of thinking ‘national’ first) and state structures (unitary vs. federal states) have produced different views on and practices of administrative centralization and networking. Cultures do not change easily or quickly: Byzantium’s experience shows that. Much time will therefore be required to spread throughout the EU the new common network-based administrative system, which also means that the Commission should stick to this model long enough before deciding whether it works. Here, Byzantium tells us that we need to think at least in terms of decades. Concluding Remarks The presentation of chosen aspects of Byzantium’s and the EU’s administration leads to three concluding remarks. First, and despite its reputation, Byzantium does not appear as a rigid Empire. Quite the contrary, since it was able to adapt to changing conditions in its environment. The flexibility of its institutions (even if slow in the eyes of contemporaries) helps to explain without a doubt the fact that the Empire lasted for more than a thousand years. Second, the ability of the Empire to last that long shows that it is possible to govern a culturally and linguistically highly diversified polity over a very long period – albeit with ups and downs. No European nation-state has lasted for this long. The EU may seem atypical in a time where nation-states are (still) the dominant model of political organization, but the history of the European continent clearly shows that being as culturally and linguistically diversified as the EU is not a handicap per se, even if it is a challenge that must be dealt with. Lastly, the initial choice in this chapter to consider empires as polities and not networks of states dominated by one powerful centre made it possible: (a) to show the importance of an effective functioning administrative system for the sustainability of empires; and (b) to reveal the highly elaborate administrative machinery of an empire like Byzantium. The case of Byzantium may not be generalizable; not all empires had such a degree of

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institutional sophistication. However, this is why Byzantium is so interesting for a comparison with the EU. Administratively speaking, twenty-first-century Europe is Weberian, or maybe post-Weberian, while Byzantium is pre-Weberian. In any case, both polities rely on a very sophisticated administrative system. From this point of view, Byzantium looks like the EU more than any other empire. Historians seem to agree on the fact that its administrative capacity – extraordinary for its time – was a key to its longevity. It helped to finance its needs. That also led to its superiority over some of its less advanced neighbours, which made it possible for the empire to last and expand without necessarily using violent methods: its superiority attracted outsiders, making it desirable to be part of the Empire. Conversely, imperial decay was reflected widely when this system experienced lapses, either because a new emperor was less competent or less interested in state affairs or, towards the end, because of the feudalization which split up the power of Constantinople. Above all, the Byzantine Empire was able to elaborate a particular administrative system tailored to its needs and peculiarities and to adapt continually to keep it as effective as possible. The thematic reform played an essential role, as well as the regular modernization of bureaucracy, which on the whole served the empire well enough – at least as long as the Empire treated it well. The example of Byzantium’s financial administration illustrates the meticulousness of the administrative machinery: empires are not just networks of states, they are not just international politics; they can be very complex polities with very sophisticated domestic institutions. However, the other big administrative services contributed just as much to the grandeur of Byzantium: its justice and legal system, especially after it was reformed by Emperor Justinian, gave the Empire a very modern legal system in comparison to many neighbouring societies (Obolensky 1971); its diplomacy made it possible to avoid some expensive conflicts and maintain its power without systematically needing to wage war; its postal system enabled the transport of goods and money across the Empire as well as communication (of orders, laws, tax measures, etc.) between the centre and its peripheries. In a nutshell, the example of Byzantium shows that it is above all crucial for an imperial polity to elaborate an administrative system adapted to its particular needs. This is why the Greek empire abandoned parts of the administrative system inherited from the West Roman Empire and kept (and reformed) other aspects, provided they were still relevant to its functioning. For its part, the EU does not shy away from institutional experimentation. The EU has inherited from its founding member states a particular model of administration and civil service. Yet it cannot retain a system similar in all points to that of its member states because it is very different from them. The efficient Weberian model of administration developed in so-called Westphalian states – in other words, in states that had, among other things, a sovereign authority over the territory they controlled and over the population(s) living on this territory. The EU is not a Westphalian state. It does not have the same level of authority over territory and citizens. Therefore

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it cannot control an administrative staff that would convey its authority and orders throughout its whole territory. So if the EU wants to survive, it most probably needs to experiment further so as to elaborate an administrative system adapted to its needs and peculiarities. From this point of view, one can draw a parallel between the thematic reform that gave Byzantium its institutional strength and identity and the reform of the system of governance initiated by the European Commission in the early 2000s, which could give the EU its institutional strength and ultimately its own identity. The new system may not yet have reached its full potential, but its design seems better adapted to the particularities of the EU. Like Byzantium, the EU is a big composite polity, but their powers are not identical. A paired comparison can easily lead to an implicit measurement: which case performs better? Which is more powerful? There is more to this comparison than measuring the EU on the Byzantine scale of administrative capacity. Beyond the evident differences, the comparison shows similarities between both cases and similar challenges; if the EU were to take one lesson from Byzantium, it would be that of institutional creativity and adaptability. References Ahrweiler, H. 1976. L’empire byzantin. Formation, évolution, décadence, in Byzance: le pays et les territoires, edited by Ahrweiler, H. London: Variorum Reprints, 181–98. Auer, A., Demmke, C. and Polet, R. 1996. Civil Services in the Europe of Fifteen: Current Situation and Prospects. Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration. Bossaert, D. and Demmke, C. 2003. Civil Services in the Accession States: New Trends and the Impact of the Integration Process. Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration. Bourdieu, P. 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bréhier, L. 1926. Notes sur l’histoire de l’enseignement supérieur à Constantinople. Byzantion – Revue Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, 73–94. Bréhier, L. 1970. Les institutions de l’Empire byzantin. Paris: Albin Michel [Reprint of the 1949 edn]. Carney, T.F. 1971. Bureaucracy in Traditional Society. Romano-Byzantine Bureaucracies viewed from within. Book I: A Survey of Roman and Byzantine Bureaucracies, Book II: Byzantine Bureaucracy from within, Book III: John the Lydian, ‘On the Magistracies of the Roman Constitution’. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press. Collins English Dictionary. 1995. New York: HarperCollins. Craig, P. 2000. The fall and renewal of the Commission: Accountability, contract and administrative organisation. European Law Journal, 6(2), 98–116.

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Diehl, C. 1905. L’origine du régime des thèmes dans l’Empire byzantin. Études byzantines, 276–92. Evans, P.B. and Rauch, J.E. 1999. Bureaucracy and growth: A cross-national analysis of the effects of ‘Weberian’ state structures on economic growth. American Sociological Review, 64, 748–65. Funk, B. and Pizzati, L. (eds). 2003. European Integration, Regional Policy and Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gill, I.S. and Raiser, M. 2012. Golden Growth: Restoring the Lustre of the European Economic Model. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gravier, M. 2008. The 2004 enlargement staff policy of the European Commission: The case for representative bureaucracy. Journal of Common Market Studies, 46(5), 1025–47. Gravier, M. 2009. The Next European Empire? European Societies, 11(5), 625– 626. Gravier, M. 2011. Empire vs. federation: Which path for Europe? Journal of Political Power, 2011, 4(3), 413–31. Guilland, R. 1971. Les Logothètes. Études sur l’histoire administrative de l’Empire byzantin. Revue des études byzantines, 29, 5–115. Guillou, A. 1984. Géographie administrative et géographie humaine de la Sicile byzantine (VIe–IXe siècle), in Philadelphie et autres études, edited by Ahrweiler, H. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 133–9. Haldén, P. 2011. Stability without Statehood. Lessons from Europe’s History before the Sovereign State. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haldon, J. 2008. Structures and administration, in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, edited by Jeffreys, E., Haldon, J. and Cormack, R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 539–53. Haldon, J. 2009. Towards a Social History of Byzantium, in A Social History of Byzantium, edited by Haldon, J. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1–30. Hendy, M.F. 1999. Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, Vol. 4. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Hooghe, L. (ed.). 1996. Cohesion Policy and European Integration: Building Multi-level Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laffan, B. 1996. Ireland: A region without regions – the odd man out?, in Cohesion Policy and European Integration: Building Multi-level Governance, edited by Hooghe, L. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 320–41. Laiou A.E. and Morrisson C. 2007. The Byzantine Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, D. 2002. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Luttwak, E. 2009. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Motyl, A.J. 2001. Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Münkler, H. 2005. Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft – vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten. Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag. Nexon, D.H. 2009. The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe. Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires and International Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Obolensky, D. 1971. The Byzantine Commonwealth. Eastern Europe 500–1453, London: Phoenix Press. Olsen, J.P. 2006. Maybe it is time to rediscover bureaucracy. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16(1), 1–24. Ostrogorsky, G. 1969. History of the Byzantine State. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rauch, J.E. and Evans, P.B. 2000. Bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic performance in less developed countries. Journal of Public Economics, 75(1), 49–71. Rogalla, D. 1982. Fonction publique européenne. Paris: Nathan. Sartori, G. 1970. Concept misformation in comparative politics. The American Political Science Review, 64(4), 1033–53. Schout, A. and Jordan, A. 2005. Coordinated European governance: Selforganizing or centrally steered? Public Administration, 83(1), 201–20. Schout, A. and Jordan, A. 2008. The European Union’s governance ambitions and its administrative capacities. Journal of European Public Policy, 15(7), 957–74. Schout, A., Jordan A. and Twena M. 2010. From ‘old’ to ‘new’ governance in the EU: Explaining a diagnostic deficit. West European Politics, 33(1), 154–70. Steunenberg, B. and Rhinard, M. 2010. The transposition of European law in EU member states: Between process and politics. European Political Science Review, 2(3), 495–520. Suvarierol, S. and van den Berg, C.F. 2008. Bridge-builders or bridgeheads in Brussels? The world of seconded national experts, in The New Eurocrats, edited by Geuijen, K., ‘t Hart, P., Princen, S. and Yesilkagit, K. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 103–28. Topan, A. 2002. The resignation of the Santer-Commission: The impact of ‘trust’ and ‘reputation’. European Integration online Papers (EIoP), 6(14), http:// eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/2002-014a.htm Treadgold, W. 1997. A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zakythilinos D.A. 1984. Continuité de l’Empire romain à Constantinople, in La nozione di ‘Romano’ tra cittadinanza e universalità, Atti del II seminario internazionale di studi storici ‘Da Roma alla terza Roma’. Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane.

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Chapter 3

Empires and the Sovereign State Order: A Revisionist History Noel Parker

Introduction For all the sustained discussion about the inclusion of bodies other than states (Ruggie 1993, 1998; Ferguson and Mansbach 1996, 2007; Nancy 2007; Walker 1993, 2010) the object of analysis of international politics, the ‘IR system as such’, remains largely focused (as the name suggests) upon the totality of relations between independent sovereign states. So the ‘question of empires’ and international relations can be formulated as: what role might empires have in the context of international order that has been widely understood to comprise first and foremost autonomous states? Hence my title. Is it, for example, adequate to imagine a world of states with occasional interference from one or more empires to cover anomalies or exceptions where standard models of international order do not seem to work? That still leaves the idea of empires on the sidelines, an intrusion, a sticking plaster for the occasional lesions in the model of the international system ‘as such’. It does not think through the implications of their historical presence: empires’ role in the past, present and possible future of the international system or systems. The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider, in the light of empires’ preponderance over the length of historical time, how empires are cast in the narrative of the international relations system. The Revisionist History of European Sovereign States This chapter intersperses a narrative of key moments in the history of the development of Europe’s sovereign states with theoretical interludes, showing how this development could perfectly well be adapted to the needs of Europe’s empires at the given moment. For, if we look at the formative moments in the modern international order of states, we can discern how the emergence of an ‘international system of sovereign states’ is, against all normal expectations, contingent upon the expansionist drives of pre- (and also currently) existing empires. How could a world order founded on the action of one or more empires generate the sovereign autonomy of subordinate units that are not empires? My claim is that the preferences of empires can account for this out-turn rather well.

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Its proponents will have to concede that the ‘sovereignty’ deemed to be so fundamental to the international order is not, and never has been, quite what is claimed. Both admiring and sceptical commentators on the Westphalian order agree that the order of ‘sovereign’ European states associated with the name of Westphalia has always been qualified to a greater or lesser extent.1 A fresh consideration with the established international relations blinkers removed suggests that order founded on the action of one or more empires fostered the sovereign independence of the states that later came to be taken as the fundamental components of the modern international order. To substantiate this claim, I will consider three historical moments: the Peace of Westphalia itself; the formation of the European system of nation-states after Napoleon, up to and including the Berlin Conference of 1884; and the post-World War I order, where the United States became a player, through to the outcomes of post-World War II decolonization that left the United States dominant. At each of these moments, we can see that sovereignty was being assigned to subordinates by empires themselves. Howcould sovereignty, of all principles of the modern international order, be a natural corollary of something, the order of imperial states, which is usually taken to be categorically distinct from it? To acknowledge that would undermine that distinction of principle between the world where empires once dominated and the ‘modern’ world of sovereign states. Hence it would undermine the historically unique status of the modern international order. It would also undercut a foundational principle of an international relations supposed unique to the modern world: inter-state legal anarchy. The radical alternative that I am pursuing through this ‘revisionist history’ is that sovereignty in the ‘modern period’ has emerged from the expansionist ambitions of one or more empires. Peace of Westphalia and After: The Uses of Sovereignty Even if its significance may be quite other than commonly supposed, it is difficult not to be impressed by the work of the treaty-makers at Westphalia. To bring to an end in one go 30 years of violent disputes, major and minor, amongst monarchs, princes, noble families, churchmen, faiths and cities is a major technical achievement if nothing else. One understands why the delegates’ portraits preserved in the town hall at Münster are so numerous. The 128 articles of the final treaty2 stipulate detailed terms agreed on numerous minor disputes. There is a distribution of attention that indicates the priorities. First (IV–LXX) comes the restoration of peace and good order within the Holy Roman Empire, including the restoration of various rights and properties to its noble houses, prelates, orders, confessions and cities. Then (LXXI–XCVI) 1  Under the first category (Philpott 1999), under the second (Krasner 1999; Ferguson and Mansbach 1996). 2  The Treaty signed at Münster in October 1648, incorporates a separate document agreed at Osnabrück a few months earlier between the Empire and the King of Sweden.

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come the terms of settlement of the supervening dispute between the Emperor and the ‘most Christian King’ of France. Thereafter (XCVIII–CIV) is a short passage settling matters in Italy, especially to the advantage of the Duke of Savoy. Finally (CIV–CXXVIII), the practical details of the publication and enforcement procedure to achieve the withdrawal of hostile forces within the Empire, together with precise terms about who is responsible for carrying out and adjudicating the treaty’s provisions, occupies considerable space. What, then, appear to be the principle concerns of the Peace? They are to reestablish peace and order in the Holy Roman Empire (slightly reduced in size), and to settle the gains of two expansive powers, France and Sweden,3 that are not named formally as empires, but now figure as equals to the older Holy Roman Empire.4 The early sections on peace within the Empire in fact constitute some retrenchment of Imperial authority over the autonomy of component parts of the Empire. Notably, in the particular instance of the freedom of princes over the religion in their territories, their position after the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg is crucially weakened: the power of ‘cuius region, eius religio’ in the German lands is withdrawn in favour of an entrenchment of confessional practice as of the year that the War had begun (article XXVIII). What is sovereignty in the Treaty? Whilst signatories are occasionally referred to as ‘sovereign’ (apparently to establish the dignity of, for example, the ‘Sovereign Count’ of Neufschaftel), the term ‘sovereignty’ is used almost exclusively to characterize the rights (in Alsace–Lorraine) transferred to France as part of the settlement (LXXI–XCVI). What the transfer must mean is that the King receives in those lands all the entitlements previously supposed to be vested in the Emperor. Now, this clearly does not imply that sovereignty is new, for it must already have existed if it is to be transferred. Furthermore, it is clear that sovereignty could be possessed equally by the Holy Roman Empire and/or monarchs outside the Empire, since the former is transferring it to the latter as an equal. Note, finally, that the French king’s newly acquired ‘sovereignty’ does not abrogate the unaltered privileges of those below him, such as the Duke of Lorain (article LXXII), who now owes him fealty. Sovereignty is, then, neither new, nor unique to states, nor unqualified. It entails rights, but also obligations and limitations. Sovereignty figures in the Peace because it is a distinctive marker for what is being transferred between some the parties, France and the Empire.5 What 3  My breakdown above understates the space occupied by issues between the Empire and Sweden, since their resolution in the Osnabrück Treaty is taken as read in articles XXIX–XXXVI of the final Peace. Sweden is also intermittently grouped alongside the allies of France subject to the provisions that the French monarch has accepted. Sweden was, however, the other major winner in Westphalia; as Teschke comments (2003, 244), it ‘established a system of collective security which tried to “freeze” a legal, confessional, and territorial status quo favourable to the two victorious powers, France and Sweden’. 4  It has since been normal, however, to refer to both the French and the Swedish monarchs’ territories as empires. See also note 17 below. 5  Strictly speaking, together with one French ally, the Duke of Savoy (in article CI).

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its use entails is that, in so far as they are held as ‘sovereign’, the recipients’ newly acquired rights, powers and obligations cannot be reversed by the sovereign equal that held them before: i.e. the Holy Roman Emperor. As Croxton (1999) points out, it is significant that sovereignty appears in Westphalia as an offer from the Empire to France. The Empire proposed French ‘sovereignty’ over Alsace, not to insinuate a new principle into states’ mutual relations, but as a way of containing expansionism on the part of one of those states, France. The French were exhibiting a disturbing tendency to interpret their domestic Salic Law in such a way that the French monarch might claim sovereign authority over any of the many bits of territory that had once been ruled by any of his ancestors. The Empire, while conceding on Alsace–Lorraine, wished to embed that degree of expansion in a framework where France was also contained: sovereignty was merely transferred within a framework of equals. In seventeenth-century doctrines of the authority of the monarch, sovereignty first begins to appear as the special authority of the French king, unchallengeable by any earthly power – and that was principally directed against rival domestic powers (nobles, prelates, parlements). Then it characterized the French monarchy alone, rather than being fundamental to any actor in the international system. All the players in the negotiations ‘wished to protect their own sovereignty’ (Croxton 1999, 589) and to retain what they had achieved by the time of the Peace. This sovereignty is not a radical innovation creating the international order, but a component of the existing order, used as a negotiating device in a game of musical chairs over rights and obligations. As Osiander has indicated (1994, 47), sovereignty, including the right to make alliances and conduct war,6 had furthermore long been an accepted legal quality of various of the Emperor’s subordinates. It was not in itself incompatible with the Emperor’s acknowledged suzerainty over the states under his authority. Hence, such authorities and rights in the possession of component parts of the Empire were rarely challenged by the Empire itself: ‘in this period there was no perceived incompatibility between a strong desire to enhance the power of individual monarchs (enabling them to pacify their dominions) and an equally strong commitment to the Christian commonwealth’ (Osiander 2001a, 144). The Christian monarchs of Europe were for centuries willing to acknowledge a community of Christendom around them, entailing rules for their relations with each other, for which the Holy Roman Empire functioned as a point of reference – although a less and less impartial one with time. Even in the Peace document, the Emperor and/or the judicial institutions of the Empire are repeatedly invoked as an authority to resolve specific disputes, and monarchical states continued well into the eighteenth century to talk of the importance of a just Christian peace amongst them (ibid.). Perhaps, nonetheless, the Empire’s move amounted to imperial order stumbling, and conceding implicitly a new conception of ‘sovereignty’ that eighteenth- and 6  Already contained in the Golden Bull of 1356 (Teschke 2003, 241).

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nineteenth-century states could later develop to unseat all imperial systems. Looking back from the vantage point of late-twentieth-century norms of sovereign-state realism, where rights entail anarchy in the international sphere, one might well take the very idea of sovereignty for a fifth column admitted in 1648 to the heart of the imperial power in Europe. Yet the idea of sovereignty in no way entails that in itself. Sovereignty as authority within one’s area had an established role in the Empire to specify and contain parties bound by obligations to each other and to the general peace of the Empire. Peter Haldén (2011) has argued that sovereignty is entirely consistent with the pre-existing ‘republican’ construction of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1648, the Empire sought to use that to specify French claims at the boundary of Alsace.7 A defined sovereignty over one or other area, acknowledged by other rulers, was then something monarchs already possessed within Christendom, and they left the negotiations with that idea very much intact.8 Autonomy in Empires’ Subordinates So are autonomies within the order of an empire inimical in themselves to an imperial order? Far from it. The medieval Holy Roman Empire is not unique in acknowledging specific autonomies amongst subordinates. In many historical instances, empires have accepted that extensive local autonomy is best left within their subordinates’ scope for action. From the Romans in North Africa (Mattingly 1992) to the British in India or the so-called ‘dominions’, empires have frequently viewed local autonomy with equanimity. As the historian Ronald Robinson classically showed in the case of the British Empire, local elites will frequently

7  Successfully, until at least the accession of Louis XIV, when France became progressively more dissatisfied in the role of external guarantor (Haldén 2011, 72–3). 8  All this leaves unanswered, of course, the question of how the idea of a modern state system with sovereignty, anarchy, etc. appeared in the thinking of international relations theorists. Osiander attributes it to the move in Hobbes, which makes sovereigns not just the supreme authorities over societies, but the unique basis of societies’ existence. A somewhat similar answer can be found in Jens Bartelson’s conceptual history of ‘sovereignty’ (1995, chap. 5), which traces a cross-over from the modern conception of man as actor motivated by irrefragable interests, to private interests beyond the boundaries of the given monarch’s power, to states pursuing irrefragable reason of state. There is even a measure of agreement between this story and the Marxist ones presented by Rosenberg (1994, 129; for whom nation states are ‘the social form of the state in a society where political power is divided between public and private spheres’), and Teschke (2003, chap. 8; for whom properly modern class relations intruded into international relations only in the nineteenth century, when Britain’s balancing of rival powers came to permit the open international commerce that suits modern capitalism).

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accept the power of the empire without a fight, or even go so far as to advocate it, so long as it sustains the conditions for their own prosperity.9 The key move in grasping the continuous role of empires in international relations is to recognize that, under the right circumstances, empires can see sovereignty amongst subordinates as their own best option. In the dynamic interplay between extending power and reducing the cost of maintaining it, more or less independence for subordinates is a crucial variable (Burbank and Cooper 2010, chap. 1; Cooley 2005). Too much independence locally and the subordinates start to have ideas of ousting the metropole’s domination; too little and the metropole is forever intervening with costly coercion so as to maintain order. The solution has frequently taken the form of recognizing the some form of ‘sovereignty’ in a party that is subordinate but nonetheless has to be left able to maintain order within its area. As Osiander writes: ‘there was no perceived incompatibility between a strong desire to enhance the power of individual monarchs (enabling them to pacify their dominions) and an equally strong commitment to the Christian commonwealth’ under the leadership of the Holy Roman Empire (Osiander 2001, 144 – my emphasis). It is possible to understand from the theory of empires that this is actually likely to be the case. A light, non-intrusive imperial order will often fare better than one that seeks to perpetually confront and suppress local powers. Negotiating local autonomies is often crucial to the very survival of an empire. For no empire can prosper for long unless it finds territory to expand into where it can obtain yields without perpetually suppressing local powers by coercion. Herfried Münkler (2007, chapters 3 and 4) implicitly makes this point through his distinction between ‘civilized and barbarian frontiers’: empires dominant over civilized societies prosper because, whereas unproductive barbarian peoples cost a lot in military confrontation and yield little in return, civilized societies can easily be persuaded to accept order from the empire and will yield handsome revenues. Empires as Settings for Action Empires have been continually present across, or even formative settings for action in history. Instead of placing empires and sovereign states side by side in discrete historical periods with briefly overlapping phases, by taking seriously empires’ capacity to shape historical change, we can grasp the extent of their 9  Robinson’s work in the 1970s (Robinson 1972; Robinson and Gallagher 1953) transformed the historiography of colonial empire by showing precisely how it existed on the basis of assent from substantial elites in subordinate polities, who could actually seek subordination to the given empire as a way of ensuring their own position and/or altering their societies along the lines of the given imperial order. An empire’s expanding order can, that is to say, be seen by those from adjacent societies as something to piggy-back on. The empire’s order is not only accepted by those at the empire’s centre; it can also be sought, embraced and emulated by outsiders.

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historical primacy. That move can easily entail that, over historical time, a socalled international system be seen as derivative from the impact of empires in the historical dynamics of global change. This approach must confront the seminal presupposition of the autonomous sovereign state. Before taking on that issue, however, I adumbrate an account of empires that highlights their peculiar proclivity to expand over their own boundaries.10 I will argue later that a corollary is that an empire can aspire to ‘make a world’ around it, that is, generate order in which others’ actions are played out. I begin by putting forward as a proper axiom that any definition of a type of entity within a field, such as a global order, must be capable of covering that entity’s relationships to others in the field – which in this case refers potentially to the political entities over the entire globe. For this reason, we must formulate any definition of empires (and, of course, much else besides) with a view of their relationships, which also accords with the ground principles of major points of reference in the historical sociology of empire (Doyle 1986; Galtung 1971; Münkler 2007). A relational definition must, on the other hand, be consistent with the internal structures inherent to empires. Now, the idea of ‘dominion’ is at the origin of the word ‘empire’, and dominion can extend as much over what we call ‘domestic’ space as over what lies beyond the empire or beyond its centre of power.11 So, we can take as our starting point the claim to ‘dominion’, and then seek to locate it in relation to a wider order. The first essential feature of empires concerns, then, their relations to the rest. In the ‘classics’ of historical sociology, empires’ relations ‘beyond’ take two different but related forms: intrusion and an unequal relationship with what lies beyond their boundaries. Thus Galtung defines an empire in terms of a special type of dominance where one centre establishes a bridgehead into one or more dominated nation. Michael Doyle defines an empire as: ‘a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society’, or alternatively as ‘[t]he political control exercised by one polity (the metropole) over the domestic and foreign policy of another polity (the periphery), resulting in control over who rules and what rulers can do’ (Doyle 1986, 45, 130). Doyle goes onto analyse how empires operate in terms of three ‘sources’ of penetration by the metropole into the periphery.12 These are, in effect, ‘levels of analysis’ (in the jargon of international relations theory) to track penetration from the metropole: the capacity for penetration of an expansive centre; the resources for penetration available in the larger environment; and, finally, the penetrability

10  This argument is set out more fully in Parker (2010). 11  Empire and centre of power have to be named separately because, as subsequent argument will claim, empires do not observe any clear-cut version of boundaries, nor therefore that of an inside/outside relationship as would be suggested by the use of the expression ‘beyond the empire’ without qualification. 12  See discussion of Doyle below.

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of the periphery. We are, in short, entitled to take a potential to intrude on the part of the centre as a defining feature of empires. A close parallel of this can be found in Herfried Münkler’s (2007, 4ff.) account of empires: the assertion that empires’ relationship to what lies beyond them is founded on inequality across the boundary. For an empire, as against the concept of ideal-type sovereign state, other political units do not possess equal status. The principle of a mutually recognized border13 is a cornerstone of the sovereign states’ co-existence, and accordingly fundamental to what we normally take as the international system. However, empires do not acknowledge that; rather, they have boundaries, frontiers or lines that they are in principle entitled to overreach. I take this to be a second defining feature of empires. However, in the absence of the grounds characteristic of the equal standing between sovereign states (such as claims to aggression or infringements of international law), on what principle can an empire base its activities at, or more probably over, its boundaries? This must lie in the ‘order’ that the empire itself claims to realize, in opposition to the ‘disorder’ that exists beyond its boundaries. Empires, that is to say, meet other political and/or military formations with a consciousness of their own order, but without the normal (to us) presumption that others are at root fundamentally equal as orders. In the perception inherent to an empire, the world beyond is perceived as a disorderly space, that is, a space without a regularity that can be understood, relied upon or taken for granted. This is a further fundamental feature of empires, which can be derived from the first two. It is easy to show that the most admired empires of history have in fact exhibited this third feature. By imposing the common rule over the world, Pax Romana abolished disorder, ending conflict with subject peoples, and therefore suppressing conflict between them. Claude Nicolet has shown how this notion arose in the case of Rome. With the restructuring of the Roman Empire under Augustus, the space of the world open to the empire was universalized in Roman thinking. Roman imperial rule could be thought congruent with the ‘orbis terrarium’, the order of the globe itself – now seen as a geographical totality rather than as space to be travelled through.14 This universalization of Roman space marked what Doyle dubbed Rome’s ‘Augustan threshold’ (1986, 136–8): a transition to bureaucratic integration of, and for the empire as a whole, which fostered legitimacy and reduced the need for 13  Even if the actual border is in practice often disputed. 14  This was the material of earlier ‘chorographia’ and ‘itineria’. In Nicolet’s words, there occurred an ‘expansion of knowledge and relations [that] denotes … a system of relationships, and ‘opening up’ between the world of the empire of the orbis Romanus …, and the rest of the world, entirely new and very different from the world that had been passed down by the Hellenistic period. It involves the western world, tamed, known, and penetrated … Rome certainly had not, strictly speaking, “conquered” the ancient world: but all the ancient world could come to it’ (Nicolet 1991, 88).

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the centre to exercise coercion. An Augustan threshold formulates an expansionist notion of space to be imbued with order. Furthermore, it renders expansion potentially amenable to those subject to it, by the empire’s propounding that the ‘universal’ order is in the interests of all within the universal whole. Comparison with Pax Americana is clearly in order. While the term has frequently been used critically, the less contentious ‘empire by invitation’ of the United States in Europe (Lundestad 2003) gives more comfortable expression to an analogous achievement on the part of American global power in the Western world after World War II: American order was widely seen as a condition of any decent political order.15 Likewise, the universal order imposed, albeit loosely, by the (now poorly regarded) Holy Roman Empire was, at the time it was in force, broadly agreeable to those subject to it (Osiander 2001b). Let us take, finally, the thoroughly unpromising instance of the Mongol empire. Our dominant histories paint a uniquely destructive empire – a representative of disorder, one might think, rather than a source of order. However, Genghis Khan the empire-builder did indeed see himself as a bringer of order where there had been disorder. We can learn this from the Genghis-friendly study by Jack Weatherford, heavily informed by a direct reading of the history of his doings that Genghis himself had written. Whilst this is a poor source for plain realities, it is revealing about what the Mongol empire-builders thought they were doing. Weatherford reveals a god-fearing, dutiful, forward-planning Genghis, who understood his success on the battle field as the universal deity’s reward for his just rule, and took seriously his responsibility to police the Silk Road. ‘[T]he Eternal Blue Sky’, wrote Genghis in a letter of his declining years, ‘had condemned the civilizations around him because of their “haughtiness and their extravagant luxury”’. ‘He was no longer a tribal chief’, adds Weatherford (echoing the principles of an ‘Augustan threshold’), ‘and now he sought to be the ruler of all people and all lands from where the sun rises to where the sun sets’ (Weatherford 2004, 129–30).16 Such words lose their capacity to surprise if one grasps that an empire requires a construction of the world compatible with its unequal relationship with that beyond, with which it has only a porous, unstable boundary. An empire is always disinclined to understand external conditions as sufficiently ‘orderly’ without its own intervention. Thus I can argue that sovereignty in ‘modern international relations’ can be a natural derivative of empires’ dynamic to expand. Hence empires, singly or (the rarer case) together, can decide to recognize sovereign standing in a subordinate party. In Europe, for example, ‘sovereignty’ in territories that were – as we shall see – too awkward for direct rule was an increasingly popular option. When an 15  For a somewhat jaundiced version of this, see the Marxist account by Arrighi (1994, 58ff.). 16  Nor did Genghis stint to convey the same message to the cowed populations he conquered, such as those of Bukhara, who were told: ‘it is the great ones among you who have committed these sins. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you’ (Weatherford 2004, 7).

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inter-imperial war was brought to an end, the diplomatic settlement comprised two devices: swapping territorial gains and losses (especially outside Europe, on the part of European empires); and agreeing to recognize sovereignty where the risk of renewed conflict was too strong. In short, the sovereignty that is held to be a fundamental and original part of modern international relations can also paradoxically be a natural device of empires. The Revisionist History Continued … The ending of the Thirty Years War can easily be interpreted to demonstrate that sovereignty can be a functional device for an empire itself, as it had been for the Holy Roman Empire in previous times – and as it has been for others before and since. For it makes functional good sense for an empire to acknowledge autonomy amongst subordinates. Re-jigging the International Order after Napoleon: Empires as National States The overall situation with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 is clearly a new moment in the evolution of the international order in and around Europe – and likewise for seeing its emergence from out of the actions of empire(s). The Holy Roman Empire, first weakened by the rise of the rival Prussian and Russian empires (Darwin 2007, chap. 3), and then overrun by the French empire of Napoleon, had been formally wound up by the latter in 1806 – although an Austrian empire inherited the position. With Napoleon’s Continental System, France’s earlier expansive empire-building had been articulated afresh in the domination of the entirety of continental Western Europe. However, British, Prussian, Russian and Austrian empires17 had finally defeated this renewed imperial expansion over the continental landmass. Reorganizing the international order among the victorious empires into what became known as the Congress System was no straightforward matter. It was made harder by the fact that Napoleon’s success had demonstrated the effectiveness of a new, and, for many subjects, persuasive kind of social order: the post-revolutionary sovereign people, as against the personal power of a monarch. A telling device in the settlement of 1815 was the creation, in the space between the victorious empires, of new ‘sovereign’ states, under friendly ‘constitutional’ monarchs, notably by establishing on France’s northern fringe what was initially the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and then became the two national monarchies of Belgium and the Netherlands. As Birthe Hansen (2000) has shown, the creation of autonomous ‘nations’ is a characteristic device in post-war situations. Hence, 17  I refer to all four as empires, even though the first two only attributed imperial status to their monarchs in the 1870s. Such usage does not offend common sense, and is theoretically reinforced by the account presented in the previous section.

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it has been a frequent recourse amongst winners under many circumstances (Ikenberry 2001; Hansen 2002). From my earlier analysis of the dynamics that empires create around them, I deduce (which Hansen would not) that, where they cannot agree on the future domination of the territory of the defeated power, imperial parties will agree that independent units be placed between them. Thus, the idea of sovereign autonomy in lesser states was called on after 1815 when the victorious empires needed to order the spaces where their power might clash. However, with the revolutionary/Napoleonic cat out of the bag, ‘sovereignty’ now changed its meaning as far as many populations were concerned: from the divinely sanctioned free scope of a monarch within his/her territories, to the legitimacy of the supposedly self-aware nation, united in its historic destiny. The dominance of this latter version of sovereignty was not universally accepted, though. The Czar’s short-lived ‘Holy Alliance’ with Prussia and Austria is indicative of conservative emperors’ desire to return to the normative status quo ante in place of a model of the formally elective national power granted to the commoner Napoleon – witness the re-imposition of the Bourbon dynasty in France. However, by the end of the 1830s, these conservative initiatives were effectively defunct. The first of them had never received support from modernizing, liberal Britain. As regards the second, monarchy in France stumbled in 1830, then limped along in one or other version until the crisis year 1848 – when national-liberal upheavals sent a demand to monarchies all over Europe that they gradually submitted to. Finally in 1871 a freshly victorious Prussia–Germany was instrumental in the establishment of a secular national republic in France. This rounded off the process whereby, as David Armstrong says (1993, 111), ‘[t]he revolutionary ideas of nationality and popular support gradually displaced dynastic convenience as principles of legitimacy’ in the international order. The order achieved by the four post-war empires together had absorbed a new principle for mutual recognition, ‘national’ sovereignty amongst its associates. This is not, I wish to insist, a break with empires’ earlier practices regarding the autonomy of subordinates. It was problematic for any of the victorious powers to rule directly in the Netherlands, not least because they would not permit each other to expand their influence there. Instead they agreed on national sovereignty for some spaces between them. In due course they learnt to live as well with this unfamiliar, ‘modern’ kind of sovereignty in one of their historically awkward interlocutors, France – just as they came to expect it to some degree as normal in each other. This does not mean that they had abandoned the earlier imperial dynamic, as is clearly seen from the recourse to the title ‘emperor’ to enhance popular legitimacy in late nineteenth-century German and British monarchs. It appears even more forcibly from the Great Powers’ continued empire-building beyond Europe, which gave them success on the field of battle against under-armed savages and benefits to their domestic and colonizing populations. Bismarck’s

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skilful diplomacy18 usually managed to take the heat out of the conflict, not so much in Central Southern Europe (where the 1878 Congress of Berlin resolved little), but after the 1884 Conference, which secured mutual recognition of each other’s colonizations in Africa. The trick was to deflect Europeans’ continuing expansiveness to the territory away from Europe, where empires were too close to each other for comfort. What obstructs us from recognizing nineteenth-century development as an adaptation of earlier European imperial expansionism? Most probably it is the appeal of the idea of new-minted sovereign nationhood, fed by those same popular demands à la French Revolution, which, with the collusion of nineteenth-century historiographies of Westphalia, wanted to believe in the total victory of the nation over other forms of authority.19 One historiography, the French, integrated the nineteenth-century accommodation to the innovative principles of the French Revolution in an image of the sovereign peoples/nations ascending to their rightful place on the international scene. Another, German, historiography referred to Westphalia so as to substantiate an analogous sense of that nation’s unstoppable destiny: Westphalia was the ‘culmination of Habsburg failure to fulfil its allotted role in creating a German nation-state [at last realized during the nineteenth century], distracted as they were by imperial ambitions’ (Stirk 2007, 5). It is not difficult to envisage how both historiographies were tailored to fit into the post-Napoleon legitimations of empires, as I have outlined above. The first popularizes sovereign autonomy, including that of the empires dominating the international, by interpreting it as (in post-revolutionary language) ‘people/ nations’ participating in a ‘law of nations’. The second exploits the national rhetoric, admitted against the resistance of the regime of empires, to legitimize the standing of a new member of the imperial group, Prussia, now come-of-age as the German ‘nation-state’ and an empire. I argue that both these historiographies of the primacy of sovereignty should properly be viewed as the new (deceptive) re-articulations of empires’ longestablished practice of according autonomies to subordinate parts. In sum, I have sketched a picture of the nineteenth-century international ‘Congress’ system that is compatible with my account of the role of empires in constructing international orders, including a degree of independence for subordinates. Ergo, developments 18  It may be significant that one of the shrewdest commentators on the post-Iraq-war situation of the United States commends Bismarck-style diplomacy as the way for the US power to remain centre-stage even though it cannot aspire to total dominance (Zakaria 2008). 19  As Peter Stirk has plotted them. Stirk’s account (2007, 14–16) also demonstrates that French late-nineteenth-century thought reconsidered Westphalia in terms of the founding of a Europe-wide ‘law of nations’, which might usefully restrain a threatening unified Germany. This performed a neat reversal of the play at Westphalia itself: instead of the German Holy Roman Empire using sovereignty to try to restrain France, France is using the law of ‘sovereign nations’ to restrain Germany.

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in the nineteenth century do not disprove the idea that international order is an emergent outcome of the expansiveness of empires. Versailles to Decolonization: ‘Old’ Empires, US Expansion, and an International Order of Sovereign States I come to my last historical moment in the evolution of the European/Western international order: the twentieth-century reordering of international relations around the time of World Wars I and II. The most obvious feature of the period is the entry and gradual rise to dominance of US power, with its pronounced distaste for associating with empires (Bachevich and Mallaby 2002). I will again consider the matter in terms of the contingent emergence of an ‘international order’ out of empires’ expansionist drives. It is usual to see the Versailles Conference as a moment in the triumphant accession of national ‘self-determination’ as the foundational principle of the international system over the world at large. However, one should also notice that three of the four leading players at the Versailles conference20 were known imperial powers – even if one, Italy, was relatively less successful than its elder brethren, Britain and France, and withdrew just before the negotiations ended. It would be surprising if this influence was not decisive in shaping the set-up that actually emerged from the War. Although the emergence of national self-determination accords with much of the public rhetoric, particularly that of America’s President Wilson, it emerged principally as a popular, potentially disruptive, rhetoric. Yet in real outcomes, we see instead sovereign autonomy for subordinates once again used according to need as a device in negotiations between imperial players. The obstacle to seeing this lies in the public visibility of ‘self-determination’, deliberately engineered by Wilson21 and enthusiastically embraced by publics in Europe and by the representatives of various aspirant ‘nations’. This rhetoric was, however, clearly secondary in the real outcomes, whose most salient feature is the enlargement of victorious empires (Britain, France, Italy) at the cost of losing empires (Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire). As Macmillan (2001, especially chap. 7) shows, the device of ‘mandating’ to winners parts of the losers’ territory permitted a range of imperial ambitions to be fulfilled, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. To be sure, the principle of the self-determination of nations was also applied – but very selectively: avoiding any reference to Ireland or to the Americas; ignoring the hopes of the Kurds and the Palestinians; envisaging self-determination for those whose representatives were clever or well-placed enough, such as Greeks and Jews; and granting to others (South Africa, India) merely a privileged place within their empire’s negotiating team. Of course, the Conference could not decide everything: in spite 20  That is to say, parties to the protracted negotiations amongst the victors, prior to the terms being presented as a fait accompli to the losers. 21  In a triumphal progress to Italy and France on his way to the Conference.

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of Greece’s favourable treatment, their incautious action on the ground provoked a counterattack from resurgent Turkish militarism, in the form of Ataturk’s new republic, which the big powers were unwilling to confront. The conference also simply could not fathom out how to deal with revolutionary Russia, the only empire to have manifestly given up territory (Macmillan 2001, chap. 6) – albeit under duress when it had withdrawn from the War. By and large, then, what emerged, with the Versailles parties’ assent, looks suspiciously like the nineteenth-century set-up amongst empires, with some musical chairs between them: small, sovereign states on the European mainland as buffers between the big players together with acknowledged imperial spheres for the same winners in the rest of the world. In contrast to power on the ground, the institutional outcomes of Versailles (the League of Nations and so on – notably without American membership) limped on to become known as a text-book instance of how not to do things. The lesson learnt for 1945 was that you cannot hope to have order without the imperial powers having the biggest say in world affairs. Once again, the winners of a World War were accorded the spoils in terms of power – with this difference, that their group was now formally incorporated, as the Security Council, and accorded explicit responsibility for world order.22 Prompted by that institutionalization of world power, many (notably John Ikenberry 2011) have seen a new type of international relations developing, that is, liberal institutionalism. Musgrave and Nexon in their chapter (Chapter 6) develop this strand to argue that the key difference between two versions of the American empire is that one of them accepts the restraints of liberal institutions. From the perspective of the present historical account, however, that would merely mean that the empires have learnt to treat other lesser nations better (as it has always been wiser to do), and hoped for a brief moment at least to behave better amongst themselves. The Special Case of the United States What about the United States, which had openly declared its opposition to empires and did not make colonial gains on the pattern of European powers? Even in this case, the principle of independent self-determination after 1918 was hedged in practice around the interests of expanding power. Central and South America were, as mentioned, not up for discussion, much less the Philippines. Even in the classic formulation of anti-imperialism, the ‘Fourteen Points’ speech to Congress, Wilson’s idea that empires be replaced according to the principle of selfdetermination reveals an awareness of the necessity for realpolitik qualifications. The speech neatly avoids referring to the imperialism of the United States’s allies, 22  It does not affect the issue that the members of the Council quickly fell into disaccord amongst themselves, or that the presence of some of them was more an expression of hope than of real power. Under the first head, one thinks of the Soviet Union, and to some extent France; under the second, nationalist China is an obvious case, but also France and Britain to a lesser extent.

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Britain and France, by instead castigating its enemies, Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire, for their supposed imperialistic militarism.23 It is as if Wilson (like American presidents after him) knows full well that he will have to go along with his allies’ imperialist war aims. So far, though, we have only a picture of the United States as a self-declared non-empire, tolerating the imperialism of allies for lack of the will to do otherwise. On that basis, Versailles could have appeared another Westphalia, with doomed empires not forced to abandon imperialism of the past yet – although they would after World War II. Such an alternative account fits the rhetoric, but ignores the longer-term realities of the position of the United States in the world over the period from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. At least in the sense given US ambitions by William Appleman Williams (2007), the United States continued the (thoroughly imperial) habit of expansion.24 However, by the turn of the century, its expansion over ‘its own’ North American continent – avoiding the parallel expansion into the Canadian space of the British Empire – had reached its limit. An expansionist order, which looks suspiciously like colonizing Europeans in Africa (overwhelming poorly armed challengers) but one that operated alone in its continental space, had hit a geographical limit, the Pacific Ocean. The expansive ‘destiny’25 of the American nation, we might say, had been temporarily stopped.26 Yet over the coming decades, American strategic thinking was to resolve the country’s problem as an expansionist order running out of road in its own North American space. There were nonetheless one or two American experiments

23  For example, ‘For whom are the representatives of the Central Empires speaking? Are they speaking for the majorities of their respective parliaments or for the minority parties, that military and imperialistic minority which has so far dominated their whole policy and controlled the affairs of Turkey and of the Balkan states … To whom have we been listening, then? To those who speak the spirit and intention of the resolutions of the German Reichstag of the 9th of July last, the spirit and intention of the Liberal leaders and parties of Germany, or to those who resist and defy that spirit and intention and insist upon conquest and subjugation?’ 24  See also Burbank and Cooper’s account of American intra-continental expansion, comparing it with the expansion of Czarist Russia (2010, chap. 9). 25  The expression, which had chimed with the entire nineteenth century’s popular expansionist politics, was O’Sullivan’s phrase from 1845: the ‘manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us’ (quoted in Boyer et al. 2002, chap. 13). 26  A fact that Frederick Jackson Turner famously worried about in the 1890s, wondering indeed if it would sap the very impact of the American national model upon history. Turner sensed that it would undermine the ‘key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history [the United States] reveals luminously the course of universal history’ (Turner 1947, 11). Turner held the United States up as a worthy competitor to Europeans in Africa – even without a history.

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in colonial takeover à la European empires, which lasted into the late 1920s.27 However, the broader answer for the United States’s expansionist order was formulated by the chief US adviser at Versailles, who thereafter became a key figure in America’s geopolitics: Isaiah Bowman. Neil Smith’s (2003) study of Bowman has shown him to be a key force in a reconfiguration of the world in the dominant official thinking of the United States – comparable with the Augustan orbis Romanus according to Nicolet. An adviser to presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt, Bowman recast world geography in terms adapted to an expanding American power outside North America and to the gradual collapse of the world role of the European empires.28 Bowman’s single most influential text, The New World: Problems in Political Geography, which went through many editions in the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to provide ‘the men who compose the government of the United States’ with ‘scholarly consideration to the geographical and historical materials that go into the making of … foreign policy’ (Bowman 1928, iii). Under the heading ‘Foreign relations imposed by civilization’,29 Bowman expounded a post-World War I world role for the United States, founded on relationships distinctive from the colonial one of the European empires. In a world where ‘[t]he European nations have become so absorbed in their mutual relations’, the United States will act differently, he wrote. Heedless of territorial aggrandizement, the ‘American habit of thought in relation to international things is not imperialistic [but] … commercial’; it ‘seeks above all commercial equality’ (Bowman 1928, 732 – my italics). If there is equal access to commercial possibilities, Americans could extend their trade with a minimal need for top-down imperial governance. According to Bowman, a modest demand for commercial egalitarianism should guide the post-World War I stipulations of the United States to the European powers: ‘the same trading rights and privileges as the subjects of the [European] mandatory powers’ (Bowman 1928, 739). Such egalitarianism will function in a world of independent states freely choosing a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. A world (in President Wilson’s formulation) of ‘self-determined’ nations seeking mutually agreeable commercial relationships with others fits perfectly the need that Bowman envisages for the United States to extend its relationships over the world beyond the Americas. Hence, Bowman bequeathed to American strategic thinking the aim of a ‘liberal empire’, that is, a global space for free trading partners – in due course with intermittent policing from the United States.30 27  Although, in the case of the Philippines, formal independence was delayed by war until 1946. 28  In this sense, Bowman signifies in American thinking what Smith calls the ‘prelude to globalization’ in the 1990s. 29  By which we are entitled to understand ‘civilized relations’ between states. 30  It is a characteristic illusion of ‘liberal empires’ to imagine that no policing at all may be required (Bishai 2004). Compare, of course, British nineteenth-century ‘free-trade imperialism’ (Robinson and Gallagher 1953).

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In short, we should not jump to easy conclusions regarding the US ‘exception’ and a twentieth-century ‘imperial order’. If we approach the case mindful of the history of expansionist imperial orders generating an ‘international order’ around them, then the appearance of the United States on the world stage looks to be a variation on that well-established theme. To be sure, the manner of the expansion of US power resembles little the diplomatically formalized claims to territorial sovereignty that marked the nineteenth-century order. Yet it fell far short from consistently respecting formally sovereign independence in other states (Shaw 2000; Elden 2009). However, a claim to sovereign territory was only a norm in the nineteenth century, and did not cover even the British and French Empires around the Mediterranean at that time. American expansion is not a departure from the historical pattern of expansionist empires forming emergent international orders. The post-World War II decline of European colonial empires leaves the US form of imperial order the dominant twentieth-century version. That is why the period after World War II sees the globally extended US power increasingly called an ‘empire’ – initially by its critics, but in due course also by its friends (Ferguson 2004; Lundestad 1986; Maier 2006). The overall historical picture holds even in the case of the United States: an empire – combined with other factors and others empires, generating an ‘international’ environment around its power. Empires as World-makers On the basis of the fundamental features already explained together with the history as I have interpreted it, I argue that empires can ‘make a world’ for human action, including for action in the international system. Empires, thanks to their aspiration to extend an order in place of disorder, are natural, self-selected agents for developing and controlling order. By virtue of their acting in a setting of (according to them) order versus disorder, they appear ready-made for the task of bringing order about. Notice that I do not wish, or need to argue that empires are necessarily fully successful in their efforts to ‘make a world’ in accordance with their own order. One theoretical impediment in the way of advancing this position is its reliance on the idea of empires ‘acting’ in various ways.31 Who or what is it that engages in these actions? It is clearly easiest to say that, as titular ruler of the whole, it is the emperor who ‘acts’. However, that notion immediately runs up against the limitations of one person’s capacity – especially those of a figure so remote as an emperor usually is. Therefore, the empire must at least act in and through the actions of those who realize the will of the emperor and/or act under his authority or under the rules of the empire in question. That group clearly embraces imperial officers and agents of various kinds. Yet once we have included those specifically appointed to realize the will, authority or rules of emperor/empire, why should we 31  I owe the challenging of this issue to an objection framed by Lene Hansen.

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not go further, to include a large group of persons acting along lines laid down by the order of the empire – colonists, for example? They too will be parties to the empire’s perceiving the ‘disorderly’ outside world and intruding into it. What is more, this group does not have to be confined to those from the centre or from the empire’s domestic territory. Those elites whose action brings a territory or society closer to the empire’s orbit could also be said to participate in the empire’s actions, for they too ‘realize the will, authority or rules of emperor/empire’. This wider grouping comes close to including all those who believe that the ways of the empire are, or should be, a dominant social reality. To head off an objection, I am not arguing that the purposes of the empire should be their sole motive, but even so, does this group have no limit, then? Yes: it does not include those who confound or oppose the ways of the empire, or those – normally the vast majority – who simply act without reference to anything of the empire. To include such a large class of people within the action ‘of the empire’ may stretch credibility. It is, however, entirely consistent with the theorization of empires that stem from Robinson (1972), which precisely draws attention to the way empires are extended through deliberate cooperation on the part of people beyond their immediate boundaries. It is simply drawing upon what Hall and Taylor (1996, 14) called ‘sociological institutionalism’: namely, the priority given to ‘specific sets of institutional forms, procedures or symbols … [emphasizing] how such practices are diffused through organizational fields or across nations’. The action of the given empire in this sense is therefore equivalent to that of all who act as part of the empire in its role of, to use Nexon’s expression above (2009, 287), accepting the empire’s ‘relational context of collective action’. All the above actors – ranging from the emperor and his/her officials to those who merely replicate the empire’s rules – contribute to the empire ‘making a world’ where its order obtains. Now let me turn finally to empires and the international system. We may conceptualize empires’ ordering activity in two ways. On the one hand, the order imposed by one or other empire may be made possible by a pre-existing international system. This is how Michael Doyle (1986, chap. 10), together with others, conceptualized empires when he made dynamics between empires (in the plural) a function of the contemporary structure of the international system – in which they are therefore implicitly embedded. However, if we remove the assumption of one or other prior order, an alternative view emerges. The alternative is to suppose that different empires themselves constitute different ‘world orders’. These may (contingently) come to dominate in the world. Under this dispensation, what we know as ‘the international order’ would be the emergent structure of one or more expansionist imperial orders. At one time or another, one or more of a skein of such orders would generate the dominant ‘order’ over different parts of the globe, or even over the whole. That dominant order would constitute ‘the’ international order. A further objection to this theorization might occur to the reader. The empires in this picture of the world would most probably create a number of potentially incompatible orders, rather than one international system of the kind

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that is referred to in the normal view of international relations. In consequence, the objection would run, how can we specify or identify any ‘international order’ at all? Disagreeable as those prospects might appear to us, however, if they accord with historical experience, then we have to acknowledge their possibility. What is more, both an absence of order and more than one contemporaneous imperial orders have existed at various times in history. In many periods of the past, there was more than one empire extending an order over substantial parts of the globe, with very little incompatibility between them. The Chinese and the Roman empires could each perfectly well extend their ‘universal’ orders in the same period and yet not make contact. More frequently, empires have existed at the same time as each other, and only come into conflict intermittently, where their ‘worlds’ happened to overlap. Much of the time, non-conflict obtained between the Persian and Roman empires, for example. Even within the mainland of Europe, over substantial periods of time there was no conflict between the imperializing drive from Germanic lands (Charlemagne’s, the Holy Roman, Prussian and German empires) and that of French empires (from Bourbon expansionism to French Revolutionary/Napoleonic empire-building). Yet there have, of course, also been periods of conflict. The picture of conflicting contemporaneous empires covers various periods, notably including the Cold War, when two empires with a marked tendency to overlap were more or less perpetually in conflict. In short, empires can be theorized as ‘world-makers’ constituting an international system regardless of whether they are in conflict or not. If we agree to that picture of frequently limited, or low-conflict relationships between contemporaneous empires, however, two awkward anomalies seem to appear: nineteenth-century European colonial empires, whose peculiar form is that their metropoles exist close to each other in intensive contact but relative peace, whilst they expanded in muted conflict away from their territorial centres;32 and the so-called unipolarity of American power from 1990 to the early 2000s, when it appeared to be alone over the entire globe. However, such anomalies in the sweep of history should be neither the basis of the normal account of empires, nor that of international relations. A fortiori, we should not make the contiguous sovereignstate empires of the nineteenth-century European colonial empires the basis of a standard model of empires or of international order at all times. Nor should we be content with a standard model that leaves only a singular place for US unipolar hegemony unrelated to a broader discussion of empires.

32  As Martin Wight (1995, 43) drily puts it, the Concert of Europe achieved pacification by virtue of there being ‘limitless opportunities for independent expansion outside Europe for Britain, Russia and France, while Prussia was busy conquering Germany’.

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Conclusion In the setting of a single chapter, this ‘revisionist history’ can hardly be substantiated in a fully worked-out historiography. Yet, showing that this history of sovereignty fostered by empires is perfectly compatible with sovereignty as it is formulated in the modern ‘international system’, I have sought to overcome resistance to my account of the full role of empires in forming international order(s). I have presented a model to account for each phase of ‘the international order’ which substitutes the effects of one or more empires’ expansionist orders for the established view: the foundational primacy of states and their sovereignty. The ‘revisionist history’ shows that the contingent emergence of international order from empires is able to account even for the appearance of the widely established value of sovereign national independence in the modern international system. I should close by restating some things I have not been arguing. I have not sought to say that empires are the only basis for international order(s) – as should be clear from the role in my own ‘revisionist history’ of, for example, ideological developments such as French Revolutionary nationalism. Nor am I saying that, where empires ‘make a world’, the ‘world’ that emerges from their efforts is a replica of anything they envisaged in advance. Such a model of human action and its outcomes has precious little purchase on the realities of human enterprises, which always turn out differently from what was expected beforehand. So why should it apply to empires? It may be emperors’ and empires’ own fault, though, if a capacity to outwit contingency is wrongly ascribed to them, for they, like other political actors, have a bad habit of claiming to possess an all-decisive power. I have, on the other hand, argued this about the implications of considering empires and their historical prominence in connection with international order. Empires, with their proclivity for expanding their (version of) order, have frequently been the biggest figures in the formation of international relations. One or more empires has had that role, at the given time, in relation to whatever may be called at the time ‘international order’. As for the future international order, in so far as the developing future spawns different kinds of ‘disorder’, we can expect that the expansionist order of one or more empire will be present, trying to promote and/ or re-impose order – further grounds for giving empires, their structure and their history a formative role in what is known as the ‘international order’. I have pursued an approach that takes empires to be continually present as formative settings for action in global history. International order(s) can be understood to have emerged contingently out of the expansionist activity of one or more empires. The approach puts a particular spin on historical development, which contrasts radically with the approaches to history otherwise adopted in international relations theory.

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Ikenberry, J.G. 2001. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Ikenberry, J.G. 2011. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Krasner, S.D. 1999. Sovereignty. Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Lundestad, G. 1986. Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952. Journal of Peace Research, 23(3), September, 263–76. Lundestad, G. 2003. The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From Empire by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Macmillan, M. 2001. The Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and its Attempts to End War. John Murray, London. Maier, C.S. 2006. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Mattingly, D. 1992. War and Peace in Roman North Africa. In Ferguson, R.B. and Whitehead, N.L. (eds), War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM, 31–60. Münkler, H. 2005. Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States. Trans. Camiller, P. Polity, Cambridge. Nancy, J.-L. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. Raffoul, F. and Pettigrew, D. State University of New York Press, New York. Nexon, D.H. 2009. The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Nicolet, C. 1991. Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Osiander, A. 1994. The States System of Europe 1640–1990: Peacemaking and the Conditions of International Stability. Clarendon, Oxford. Osiander, A. 2001a. Before Sovereignty: Society and Politics in Ancien Régime Europe. Review of International Studies, 119–45. Osiander, A. 2001b. Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalian Myth. International Organization, 55(2), Spring, 251–87. Parker, N. 2010. Empire as a Geopolitical Figure. Geopolitics, 15(1), 109–32. Philpott, D. 1999. Sovereignty, Nationalism and Self-determination. Political Studies, 566–89. Robinson, R. 1972. Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration. In Owen, R. and Sutcliffe, R. (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. Longman, London, 119–42. Robinson, R. and Gallagher, J. 1953. The Imperialism of Free Trade. Economic History Review. Second Series, 6(1), 1–15. Rosenberg, J. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations. Verso, London.

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Ruggie, J. 1993. Territoriality and Beyond. Problematizing Modernity in International Relations. International Organization, 1(1), 139–74. Ruggie, J.G. 1998. Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization. Routledge, London. Shaw, Martin. 2000. Theory of the State: Globality as an Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Smith, N. 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Favourite Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Stirk, P.M. 2007. Origins of the Westphalian Model. Government and International Relations. University of Durham, Durham, NC. Teschke, B. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class Geopolitics and the Makng of Modern International Relations. Verso, London. Turner, F.J. 1947. The Frontier in American History. Henry Holt, New York. Walker, R.B.J. 1993. Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Walker, R.B.J. 2010. After the Globe/Before the World. Routledge, London. Weatherford, J. 2004. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Three Rivers Press, New York. Wight, M. 1995 [1963]. Power Politics, Bull, H. and Holbraad, C. (eds). Leicester University Press, New York. Williams, W.A. 2007. Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative. Ig Publications, New York. Zakaria, F. 2008. The Post-American World. Norton, New York.

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Part II: Newer Articulations of Empire in International Politics

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Chapter 4

Empire, Specialness: Exploring the Intersections between Imperial and Special Relationships Kristin M. Haugevik

Introduction1 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, empires gradually disappeared from the international scene as distinct, formal territorial polities. Formal empires such as the British were dissolved, and through decolonization, new sovereign nation states came into being. The concept of empire, however, has remained alive in political as well as scholarly discourse, and could even be said to have experienced a revival in recent years (Spruyt 2008). Indeed, the literature on possible manifestations of empire in present-day world politics is steadily growing (e.g. Lundestad 1986, Chandler 2006, Zielonka 2008, Williams 2011), as is the literature seeking to identify the archetypical characteristics, theoretical premises and empirical implications of empire and the imperial as analytical categories (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000, Barkawi and Laffey 2002, Nexon and Wright 2007, Ferguson 2008, Lake 2008, Spruyt 2008). A central challenge identified in much of this literature concerns how empires relate to and can be distinguished from more or less associated concepts such as ‘hegemony’, ‘unipolarity’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘intervention’ and ‘alliance’ (e.g. Lake 1996, Krahmann 2005). The present chapter adds another complex, little studied concept to this crowd, seeking to explore the connection between empires on the one hand and so-called special inter-state relationships on the other. Like empire, ‘special relationship’ is a term frequently used by politicians, journalists and scholars with reference to certain types of international relationships or structures in international politics. Like empire, however, its use is highly inconsistent, and its contents and meaning remain in doubt. In the following, I argue that approaching empire and special relationships together can add value to both scholarly dialogues. Empires and special relationships, I suggest, can be seen to intersect with one another in at least four ways. First, special relationships can be approached as imperial remnants, as 1  I am grateful to Morten S. Andersen, Iver B. Neumann, Noel Parker and the publisher’s anonymous referee for valuable comments to previous versions of this chapter.

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prolongations, successors, replacements or echoes of past imperial structures and practices in a post-imperial form. Second, special relationships can be approached as neo-imperial articulations, a contemporary way in which powerful centres exercise power and govern over less powerful peripheries. A third connection between empires and special relationships can be made at the level of comparable analytical ideal-types of polities or inter-state relational contracting. Finally, empires and special relationships can be seen as manifestations of systematic micro-level practices for interaction between at least two political entities that, formally or informally, are closely tied together. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the conceptual debates on empires and on special relationships, respectively. I then turn to the four possible linkages between empire and special relationships one after another, presenting them in more detail and placing each within the framework of existing scholarship. At the end of each section, I identify possible analytical gains and challenges in linking them to one another, as well as some key research questions that suggest themselves based on the linkage in question. I conclude with a brief summary and a recommendation for future research. Defining Empire, Defining Special Relationships The question of what empires are, how they emerge and what role they play in international politics has engaged historians and international relations scholars for decades, and continues to do so today. The result is an extensive scholarly literature discussing the emergence, duration and fall as well as quantity, function and wider impact of empires and empire-like polities and constellations. The empirical foundation for this literature is a large quantity of detailed case studies on specific historic instances of empire, including the Roman, British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian empires. Furthermore, scholars have in recent years taken much interest in the question of whether present-day political entities or constellations such as the United States and the European Union (EU) qualify as empires, or can be meaningfully discussed as new forms (e.g. Lundestad 1986, Zielonka 2008, see also Gravier, this volume). Empire has also been linked to contemporary political and scholarly discussions about international interventions, for example, with regard to the US-led military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq (Ferguson 2004, 373–7, Williams 2011), state- and nation-building (Ignatieff 2003, Chandler 2006) and foreign aid and humanitarian intervention. Other literature has taken the form of theoretical discussions addressing the value of empire as an analytical concept or category more generally, and whether it is most fruitfully approached as a polity, structure, relation, foreign policy strategy, governance mechanism or the like (for an overview, see Spruyt, this volume). In a classical realist understanding, empires are mainly seen as the product or expression of great powers’ territorial ambitions – which are always formulated on the basis of national interests defined in terms of (material) power

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(Morgenthau 1948). To structural realists, empires represent a means of balancing an inherently anarchical world – they are ‘examples of great powers managing, influencing, controlling, and directing world or regional affairs’ (Waltz 1979, 205). In Michael Doyle’s liberal understanding, empire is ‘effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society’ (Doyle 1986, 30). To David Lake, empire represents one out of four possible forms of relational contracting between polities, one that comes into being when expected opportunity costs and expected governance costs make it the most rational foreign policy choice for the parties involved (Lake 1996, 2009). With the ‘constructivist turn’ in international relations scholarship in the 1990s, the number of publications promoting an alternative understanding of empires also increased. Many of these suggested that empires are socially and rhetorically constructed phenomena, whose contents and social meaning are subject to constant change. In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s view, for example, empire is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii, emphasis in original)

Other scholars have drawn attention to the relational aspect of empires, suggesting that empire can be seen as a ‘social relation among human agents [that] also depends on the inter-subjective understanding of ruler and ruled’ (see Spruyt, this volume) or as a particular logic of ordering relations between states, an ideal typically characterized by heterogeneous contracting between centre and periphery, asymmetric power distribution and governance through locally appointed middlemen (Nexon and Wright 2007). Like empire, the concept of ‘special relationship’ has also been used with reference to many real-life instances, in many different contexts, by many different players and for so different purposes, so that it is difficult to identify a consistent political or analytical meaning. In political, journalistic as well as scholarly discourses, the concept is used both unsystematically and incoherently. Scholars report that the United States has ‘at least two [special relationships] for each region of the world’ (Ferguson 2006, see also Dumbrell and Schäfer 2009). Indeed, since 1945, American presidents have claimed that the United States enjoys special relationships with a wide range of countries, including France (Eisenhower 1960), Japan (Nixon 1971), Mexico (Ford 1974), Canada (Reagan 1981), Israel (Bush 1992, Obama 2009), Australia (Clinton 1996), Pakistan (Bush 2003) and Egypt (Bush 2004). To Britain, the English-speaking Commonwealth nations Australia, Canada and New Zealand have maintained a special position, and recently the British government stated that it sought to establish ‘a new special relationship’ with India (Her Majesty’s Government 2010, 20). Beyond Anglo-America, the relationship between Germany and France has been described by its politicians

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as ‘something special’ (Chirac and Merkel 2005), as have Finland’s relations with Russia, Sweden and Estonia (Halonen 2000). The common denominator amongst these examples will probably not be obvious to most observers. Whether a particular inter-state relationship is claimed to be, or comes across as, special, it seems, varies not only with times, contexts, issues and governments, but also in the eyes of different observers. As has often been the case with empire, scholars disagree as to whether the analytical category ‘special relationship’ can be most fruitfully approached as a foreign policy strategy or outcome; a particular form of inter-relational interaction, cooperation or structure; or indeed a mechanism or articulation of global or regional governance. There is, as one scholar observes, ‘no absolute standard and no fixed requirement’ when it comes to the definition and general understanding of special relationships (Danchev 1998, 744). Still, as Lily Feldman has pointed out, the efforts to unpack and specify the phrase ‘special relationship’ clearly exceed a ‘mere exercise in semantics’ (Feldman 1984, 5). She observes that imprecise and careless use of the phrase in some cases can have significant political implications and, particularly when used in the diplomatic field, constitutes and constrains states’ room for manoeuvre: Ambiguity is often the intention of diplomacy, but the generation of unwarranted expectations through the deceptive characterization of bilateral relations courts many risks. Nations constantly seek assurances of where they stand with other nations. If relationships are “special”, they plainly cannot be “special” with everyone. (Feldman 1984, 5)

Part of this challenge, it seems, is that, while ‘special relationship’ has been well-established among political actors and journalists as a category of practice, it has to a much lesser degree been developed as a distinct category of analysis (see Brubaker and Cooper 2000). As is well illustrated in the case of empire, categories of practice and analysis may well exist simultaneously. However, it can become analytically messy if the boundaries between the two categories become blurred and analytical categories are established merely on the basis of practical categories. As will be discussed in more detail below, an increasingly preferred way out of this analytical muddle is to approach special relationships as ideal types in the Weberian sense, that is, as a deliberate over-simplification of a complex empirical actuality for the purpose of highlighting certain themes or aspects that are never as clear in the actual world as they are in the ideal-typical depiction of it. (See Jackson 2010, 37)

Ideal types do not claim to be universally valid, but provide us with a ‘stereotype’ that gives us a reference frame for discussing rhetorical claims and empirical manifestations. As such they tend to be particularly analytically useful when it comes to study objects such as empires and special relationships where we,

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as argued elsewhere in this volume, tend to ‘see a universal among the particulars’ without having a shared understanding of ‘what that “universal” is and when it applies’ (see Spruyt, this volume). Summing up this section, empire and special relationship both remain contested as analytical categories and as categories of practice. They are also concepts that often appear as part of the same political, journalistic and scholarly dialogues, at the same time as they are rarely explicitly or systematically studied together. In the following, I identify four possible intersections between empire and special relationships, suggesting how greater awareness of these can help us acquire a better analytical understanding of both phenomena. Special Relationships as Imperial Remnants The first intersection between empire and special relationships suggests itself when special relationships are approached as imperial remnants – as echoes, successors or prolongations of certain inter-state structures and practices established under empire. Indeed, many of the inter-state relationships claimed to be special today have their roots in historical empires. Most notably, Britain has been said to enjoy special relationships with several former dominions of the British Empire following their formal independence. Such special relationships exist both in groups and bilaterally inside the framework of the Commonwealth of Nations, as well as through the institutionalized security and intelligence cooperation between Britain and the four other Anglosphere countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (e.g. Richelson and Ball 1985). It has also been suggested that special relationships exist bilaterally between Britain and other former colonies, such as India, Sierra Leone and South Africa. In a similar fashion, France and Spain have continued to enjoy close relations with colonies of the former French and Spanish empires. In all cases, it could be argued that present-day special relationships are constituted by historical ties between former imperial centres and dominions which have been replicated and continued postempire (Brysk et al. 2002). The argument about special relationships being imperial remnants can be integrated both into a ‘rationalist’ claim that states in their foreign policies are likely to seek to maintain their material concerns and acquired territories postempire (see Haugevik 2008); and into a ‘constructivist’ claim that shared imperial pasts, collective memories and interrelated identifications are likely to constitute special bonds between states. From a rationalist viewpoint, special relationships echoing former empires might be seen as the expression of a post-imperial foreign policy, a way of preserving power and material gains after the collapse of empire. This could be compatible both with classical realism’s expectation that states’ behaviour on the international political arena is motivated by the aspiration to acquire, uphold or demonstrate power (Morgenthau 1948), as well as with the liberal institutionalist suggestion that, in cooperation with others, states will

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always seek to balance expected opportunity costs against expected governance costs. The outcome of this balancing is eventually what decides whether states become engaged in empires or other forms of relational contracting (Lake 1996). Scholars have, for example, observed that Britain after the fall of its empire had every intention of remaining a world power, and thus wanted to prevent any degradation to an inferior power position. Against this backdrop, the establishment of special relationships with former imperial dominions could be interpreted as a way of fulfilling this strategic ambition. As one observer notes, ‘in the British imperial imagination, Anglo-America [has] at times often played the role of a lost empire – the Anglo-Saxon federation, the Greater Britain which was never consummated’ (Gamble 2003, 85). An alternative explanation, focusing on social rather than material factors, would be more concerned with how continuity in social identities and norms which were developed under empire is likely to result in a replication of imperial relationships post-empire, albeit in a new form, and often as so-called special relationships. In the cases of Britain, France and Spain, relationships that were formerly imperial have now become special relationships in the form of ‘metaphorical families of nations’ or ‘post-imperial family ties’ (Brysk et al. 2002). Approaching special relationships as imperial remnants would essentially mean treating special relationships and empires as similar types of polities or relational structures, which are likely to occur sequentially over time: one is a likely, if not predetermined, successor of the other. Taking stock of this possible connection can arguably be useful both for the study of how imperial relationships develop post-empire and for understanding the rationale behind and emergence of special relationships. At the same time, at least two critical remarks can be made as regards the idea of special relationships as imperial remnants. Firstly, while a shared imperial past is undoubtedly a recurring factor in many present-day special relationships, it does not seem to be a sufficient factor by itself. Far from all former imperial relations end up as special relationships, and far from all alleged special relationships have their roots in a formal empire. Secondly, as Kathleen Burk reminds us, a shared imperial past is just as likely to complicate contemporary bilateral relationships as to strengthen them. In the case of Britain and the United States, she notes, the transition from formal empire to special relationship was neither immediate nor trouble-free: It is undeniable that the fact that the United States had to fight for her independence from the Empire, to become the first new nation, seared the collective American memory and stamped Great Britain as the hereditary enemy: after all, it was only with the Korean War that the two had fought together against a common foe more often than they had fought each other. Certainly during the nineteenth century, the relationship was very complicated. Politically and diplomatically, they were now separated. There were numerous conflicts between them during the century, particularly over the boundary with Canada – especially in the Oregon Territory – and over British actions during the American Civil War, and

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war between them actually threatened more than once. The relationship was between two, theoretically equal, countries. In reality, of course, it was between the world’s supreme global power, whose Royal Navy and currency dominated, and a power whose primary focus was on extending her dominion over the continent and perhaps further south, but whose international clout was relatively weak. This relationship would only begin to change near the end of the century. (Burk 2009, 25)

These critical points notwithstanding, the idea of special relationships as imperial remnants yields important new research questions. They include why some imperial relationships continue as special relationships and others do not; how the transition from one form to the other takes place; what role historical empires play in present-day special relationships and whether the reverse transition order is thinkable – that is, whether special relationships can develop into empire or empire-like relationships. Special Relationships as Neo-Imperial Articulations A second way in which empires and special relationships could be seen to intersect is to see the latter as a neo-imperial articulation – a contemporary way in which powerful states govern and exercise their powers over other states. From this point of view, special relationships would constitute a subtype of empire, or at least a modern variant. This would not exclude a historical linkage through formal empire between the parties involved; however, the centre of attention would instead be the similarities in the structure and logic of empires and special relationships. Some empirical support for this argument is found in the volume America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance, edited by John Dumbrell and Axel R. Schäfer. In their introductory chapter, the two editors explicitly link the volume’s wide collection of cases studies of some of the United States’ special relationships to the ‘debates over American hegemony and its implications, and over the imperialist and unilateralist tendencies of the younger Bush’s foreign policy’ (Dumbrell and Schäfer 2009, 3). To John G. Ikenberry, the contemporary US-dominated international order is quite unlike more traditional empires, inasmuch as it emerged as ‘an open, negotiated, and institutionalized order among the major democracies’. At the same time, he observes, recent changes in the international political arena seem to have strengthened ‘both liberal and neo-imperial logics’ within this order, and the United States has at times been seen to practise ‘old-style imperial policies’ (Ikenberry 2005, 135–6, 149–51). He claims that both the liberal and the neoliberal logics have been expressed in US diplomacy of late: The liberal logic has been manifest most fully in the Atlantic community, and its institutional expressions include NATO and multilateral economic regimes. The

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Although Ikenberry distinguishes between how the US unipolar or hegemonic order is expressed in East Asia and Europe, he hints that the ‘hub and spoke’ logic might hold true also on more general level, as a ‘basic organizing logic’ of US hegemony and unipolar order: Countries that cooperate with the United States and accept its leadership receive special bilateral security and economic favors. More so than multilateral agreements, “hub and spoke” bilateral agreements allow the United States to more fully translate its power advantages into immediate and tangible concessions from other states – and to do so without giving up policy autonomy. (Ikenberry 2005, 147)

It could be argued that the distinction between concepts like unipolarity, hegemony and empire is becoming increasingly blurred in the contemporary scholarly debate. Niall Ferguson, for example, holds that ‘hegemony’ and ‘empire’ are but two variations on the same theme, and that ‘the very concept of “hegemony” is really just a way to avoid talking about empire’ (Ferguson 2003, 160). From his point of view, empire does not require direct or formal authority ties between the core and the periphery, and hence one may very well observe imperial structures in contemporary international politics: “Empire” has never exclusively meant direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. Students of imperial history have a far more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. During the imperial age, for example, British colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by the British historians Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade”, in which the authors showed how the Victorians used naval and financial power to open markets well outside their colonial ambit. There is an important and now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal” empire. (Ferguson 2003, 160)

In an article discussing the nature of the present international political and military pre-eminence of the United States, Elke Krahmann (2005) observes as well that the concepts unipolarity, hegemony and empire too often are used interchangeably, something which tends to confuse the scholarly debate. She suggests linking the three concepts explicitly to the three attributes ‘capabilities’,

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‘influence’ and ‘policies’. Unipolarity would then refer mainly to the relative distribution of capabilities and power in the international political system, at a time when one single state holds supremacy over all others. Hegemony, moreover, would say something not only about one single state’s dominant power position, but also about this supreme power’s ability to exert influence over and govern other states. Finally, empire would presuppose both of the above – supreme capabilities and the ability to exert power – but would in addition say something about the concrete policies through which the dominant power upholds its powers (Krahmann 2005, 533). Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon’s argument that the US overseas basing network after World War II has contributed to upholding empire-like structures suggests what such structures might look like today (Cooley and Nexon 2007). This example arguably also makes the connection to special relationships more logical, inasmuch as many supposed present-day special relationships involving the United States have their origins in security and defence cooperation established in the early years of the Cold War. Seeing special relationships as neo-imperial articulations also brings new questions worthy of scholarly attention. Is it the case, for example, that special relationships first and foremost are established between hegemons and client states? Moreover, to what extent is internal distribution of power a factor in special relationships, that is, do special relationships more often occur when there are asymmetric power relations between two states? Can concrete policies for upholding special relationships be identified, and if so, how do these compare with those of empire? Empire and Special Relationship as Analytical Ideal-types A third way in which empire and special relationships can be seen to intersect with one another is as comparable ideal-typical categories of polities or inter-state relational contracting. Special relationships would then represent an archetype in their own right – one that is of equal status to, and can be organized at the same level as, empire on a horizontal scale of variations in state-to-state relational structures. Empire thus becomes, in the words of Hendrik Spruyt, ‘but one type among a varied pattern of relations’ (Spruyt 2008, 293, see also Nexon and Musgrave’s discussion, this volume), while special relationship represents a second. Such an approach would mean treating both concepts as analytical categories, in principle independent of their real-life materializations. One concrete way to go about this would be to insert special relationships on a scale distinguishing between different types of relational contracting, as proposed by Lake: When confronted by a common threat, a state and its partner may choose to pool their resources, abilities, and efforts with one another in what I call here a security relation. Security relations can take a variety of different forms and

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Empire and International Order can vary by dyad. The dyadic nature of these relations is particularly important. Each state has many potential partners, and there are many degrees of hierarchy within each possible relationship … Accordingly, relations can differ across dyads, taking one form with one partner and another with its neighbor, depending on circumstances … All relationships, whether entered into voluntarily or as a result of coercion, can be considered as based upon some “contract” between the two parties specifying explicitly or implicitly the terms under which they will pool their defense efforts and the residual rights of control retained by each. (Lake 1996, 6–7)

Lake distinguishes between four varieties of inter-state relational contracting, depending on the power balance between the two states. His scale ranges from full anarchy at one extreme to full hierarchy at the other. The former indicates power balance and formal equality between the two parties, what one would typically find in an inter-state alliance, and the latter indicates the asymmetrical power relationship characteristic of formal empire. The question of how the relationship came into being – voluntarily or by coercion – is not relevant to the form of relational contracting. Lake notes that between the two ‘extremes’ alliance and empire ‘lie at least two intermediate relationships’ (Lake 1996, 8, emphasis added). Special relationships, it could be argued, could be placed somewhere between the alliance and the protectorate: foreign affairs are presumably strongly influenced by them, and the internal power balance between the entities tends to be more or less uneven. Ole Wæver has made a similar point about the European Union (EU), observing that it is a centered formation (which is the reason why it works), and some are closer to the centre than others. If one talks in terms of the separate “member states”, this can be phrased as relations of power and dependence, but if one views the whole as a formation, it is a polity somewhere in-between anarchy and hierarchy … This emerging polity might explain some of the peculiarities met above, e.g. that there is a certain political identity (and a we-feeling among the elite), but much less cultural identity (and we-feeling among the people). This is different from the modern nation state – but not from empires and various other historical polities. (Wæver 1998)

On a similar note, Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright (2007) have argued that the scholarly debate on empire is in need of an ideal type definition of ‘imperial rule as a relational structure’, that is, a universal and precise description that highlights frequent and/or archetypical characteristics of cases that can be described as such. Ideal type definitions, they emphasize, are not intended to fit with all individual empirical instances or observations, but rather to provide an analytical tool that can help us structure our discussion as well as keep related concepts apart. In this particular context, ideal types may help us to discuss and distinguish more systematically and straightforwardly between how unipolar/hegemonic/imperial

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relational ‘logics may be embedded in different domains of world politics’ (Nexon and Wright 2007, 254). Accordingly, they identify two key features that can be seen as typical of imperial relational structures, namely ‘rule through intermediaries’ and ‘heterogeneous contracting’ between imperial cores and their constituencies. With reference to the latter, they explain that [i]deal-typical empires comprise a “rimless” hub-and-spoke system for authority, in which cores are connected to peripheries but peripheries themselves are disconnected – or segmented – from one another. (Nexon and Wright 2007, 253)

The identification of these two distinctive features – the role of intermediaries and the lack of regularized interaction between the various constituencies – also helps distinguish empires from unipolar and hegemonic relational structures. ‘The most important differences between unipolar, hegemonic, and imperial orders’, Nexon and Wright observe, ‘concern variation in the strength (intensity) and density of ties’ (Nexon and Wright 2007, 256–7, especially figure 1). In their typology, an ideal type unipolar relational structure does not entail any direct or indirect (formal or informal) authority ties between the predominant power and the minor powers in the system. An ideal type hegemonic relational structure, in contrast, suggests direct, yet weak and informal authority ties between the centre and each periphery as well as a certain degree of contact between peripheries. Nexon and Wright also include a third ideal type closely related to hegemonic order, which they refer to as a constitutional relational structure. Within this ideal type, an established institutional site maintains ties of authority between the hegemon and the lesser powers that are not only formal, but to a larger extent also reciprocal and allencompassing (Nexon and Wright 2007, 258). Finally, within ideal-type imperial relational structures, the authority ties between the predominant power and the minor powers are strong and formal yet typically indirect; there are intermediaries or ‘middlemen’ who enforce everyday imperial rule. There is little or no contact between the peripheries, making the hub-and-spoke structure rimless. This, the authors note, is one of the most distinctive characteristics of empire vis-à-vis other types of relational structures (Nexon and Wright 2007, 257–8). Ideal-type imperial relations, then, combine strong, formal authority ties, asymmetry in power, indirect rule through local intermediaries and heterogeneous contracting with a low degree of contact between the various peripheries. In contrast, special relationships suggest voluntariness and formal equality between the parties. Furthermore, collective and bilateral special relationships are clearly more loosely coupled than imperial ones; they are to a larger degree founded on informal structures. There are no intermediaries appointed to enforce regulations, and everyday cooperation, interaction and management seem instead to be regulated through a combination of formal agreements, custom and informal practices. The cooperation between the five Anglosphere countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States) on security, military and intelligence

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matters may serve as an illustrative example in this regard. These countries’ close cooperation on such matters has its basis in a wide range of formal cooperation agreements. At the same time, the present-day ‘centre’, the United States, could be said to enjoy ‘individually tailored’ special relationships with each of the ‘peripheries’, corresponding to Nexon and Wright’s point about heterogeneous contracting. These peripheries, however, have more contact with one another than Nexon and Wright’s ideal-type imperial model would imply. Instead of formally appointed intermediaries, acting on behalf of the centre in the periphery, it could be argued that special partners interact with one another at the domestic level, through diplomatic middlemen. Further research could look into whether special relationships might qualify as a supplementary ‘fifth’ ideal type in Nexon and Wright’s typology of relational structures. Or, alternatively, it could be argued that special relationships represent such a multifaceted phenomenon that they require an ideal typical typology of their own. The question then becomes what this typology should look like, and whether, and if so how, imperial and hegemonic dimensions would be reflected in it. Empire and Special Relationships as Everyday Practice A fourth and final intersection between empires and special relationships could be found by studying the two as forms of everyday practices for interaction. In other words, how do special relationships between states manifest themselves on a dayto-day basis, and how does this compare with the everyday workings of empire? To answer this question, a few words need to be said about the study of practices more generally. The so-called ‘practice turn’ in international relations theory over the last decade or so finds its underpinnings in the work of philosophers like Max Weber, Ludvig Wittgenstein, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and could be seen as part of a broader trend in social theory more generally (Schatzki 1996, Schatzki et al. 2001). In short, scholars who are part of this research programme have called for greater attention to, and more systematic study of how regularized social action manifests itself at the practical level, and in turn contributes to ordering world politics (see e.g. Neumann 2002, Mitzen 2006, Pouliot 2008a, b, Adler and Pouliot 2011). Simply put, practices can be defined as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action’ that develop and continue over time, sometimes with intent and sometimes unthinkingly (Adler and Pouliot 2011, 4). Individual actions can be seen as part of a practice once they occur inside some kind of ‘organized nexus of activity’ (Schatzki et al. 2001, 48). Furthermore, they tend to be constituted and upheld by ‘inarticulate, practical knowledge that makes what is to be done appear “self-evident” or commonsensical’ (Pouliot 2008a, 258). Hence, practices could be said to guide and limit political actors’ room for manoeuvre on the international arena, and in this way contribute to constituting and upholding particular kinds of social order (Schatzki et al. 2001, 48).

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A closely related argument is that states – consciously or unconsciously – often will contribute to upholding certain established relational identities and social structures through their participation in ‘routinized interaction’ with others. Through such participation, the states become attached to certain practices, and come to take them for granted or see them as part of ‘who they are’. Paradoxically, this can sometimes mean that they will continue to engage in routine interactions that, while confirming their identity or sense of self, actually impact negatively on their physical security (see Mitzen 2006, Steele 2008). In the literature on historical empires, detailed descriptions of the everyday structures and routines forming the interaction between the core and its periphery are relatively common (e.g. James 1997, 1998). Few scholars have, however, proceeded from such individual case studies to studies of the quotidian, microlevel practices of interaction within empires as such, and how such practices contributed to establishing, and upholding, empires as particular types of relational social structures (but see Andersen 2011, especially 21–3). An analogous observation can be made with reference to special relationships. Although some scholars have provided detailed analyses of how special partners interact through diplomatic middlemen at the domestic level (e.g. Mowat 1925, Burk 2007), there have to date been few systematic efforts to uncover more general or archetypical patterns of how the diplomatic interaction of special relationships manifests itself in practical politics and on a day-to-day basis. Such a study might include both textual or rhetorical practices, as well as organizational or ‘physical’ ones. More systematic information about which diplomatic practices (if any) are characteristic of special relationships, and the ways in which these practices are played out on a daily basis and over time, can in turn provide us with a better understanding of special relationships as such, and how and why they come into being and are maintained. An added analytical value of discussing empire and special relationships as comparable social practices is arguably that it allows us temporarily to bracket the discussion of what empires and special relationships are, and proceed to study the observable everyday transactions and manifestations of the relational structures that are referred to as such. Conclusion Empires and special relationships are both contested concepts, with a demonstrated capacity to stimulate scholarly debate. This chapter has argued that placing the two in the same scholarly dialogue can add analytical value to our understanding of both. Accordingly, four possible analytical intersections between empires and special relationships have been suggested: the first is that special relationships may be approached as imperial remnants, that is, as echoes, successors or prolongations of historical empires. This would essentially mean treating empires and special relationships as two forms of empirical manifestations that are expected to occur sequentially in time. By combining studies on the dissolution of empires and post-

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imperial dynamics with studies on the emergence of special relationships, new empirical data will become available to both scholarships. Moreover, alternative analytical angles might suggest themselves. At the same time, approaching special relationships as imperial remnants is clearly of limited analytical value, inasmuch as many imperial relations did not develop into special relationships, and many special partners do not share a historical past. Secondly, special relationships can be approached as neo-imperial articulations, a contemporary way in which powerful ‘centres’ exercise power and govern over less powerful ‘peripheries’. From this perspective, the analytical focus would be less on the historical linkage between formal empires and special relationships, and more on the similarities in the structure and logics shared by empires and special relationships. Moreover, the analytical perspective would be a macrolevel one, approaching empires and special relationships as manifestations of a particular international power structure, and as possible means of ordering and governing world politics. Thirdly, empire and special relationships can be seen as comparable analytical ideal types of polities or inter-state relational contracting. This would mean treating special relationships as an archetypical relational structure, at the same level as, and of equal status to, empire. Such an approach would arguably allow us to discuss differences and similarities between the two phenomena at a more general level, and the environmental context in which such relations occur, while at the same time freeing us from the many real-life instances. Finally, empires and special relationships can be approached as comparable empirical manifestations of everyday, micro-level practices for interaction – between partners or entities that are (formally or informally, symmetrically or asymmetrically) closely intertwined. While some studies of individual imperial and special relationships have sought to identify and map such concrete, practical transactions, there have to date been few scholarly efforts to carry out systematic and theoretically informed analyses of the everyday practices within historic empires and the diplomatic practices of present-day special relationships. In this way, there seems much unrealized potential that the study of special relationships can suggest, empirically as well as analytically, to the study of empires. With each of these suggested linkages between special relationships and empire, new and important research questions arise, of potential value for the contemporary scholarly dialogue on both phenomena. Doing justice to them all is not possible within a single book chapter. Future research efforts, however, both can and should explore these intersections more systematically. References Adler, E. and V. Pouliot. 2011. International practices, International Theory, 3, 1, 1–36.

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Andersen, M.S. 2011. How Empires Emerge. Working Paper. Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Barkawi, T. and M. Laffey. 2002. Retrieving the imperial: Empire and international politics. Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 31, 1, 109–27. Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper. 2000. Beyond ‘identity’. Theory and Society, 29, 1–47. Brysk, A., C. Parsons and W. Sandholtz 2002. After empire: National identity and post-colonial families of nations. European Journal of International Relations, 8, 2, 267–305. Burk, K. 2007. Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America. London: Little, Brown. Burk, K. 2009. Old World, New World. Great Britain and America from the beginning, in J. Dumbrell and A.R. Schäfer (eds), America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance. London: Routledge, 24–44. Bush, G. 1992. The President’s news conference with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, Kennebunkport, 11 August. Bush, G.W. 2003. News conference with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan at Camp David, Maryland, 24 June. Bush, G.W. 2004. News conference with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in Crawford, Texas, 12 April. Chandler, D. 2006. Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building. London: Pluto Press. Chirac, J. and A. Merkel. 2005. Joint press briefing, Paris, 23 November. Clinton, W.J. 1996. News conference with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia in Canberra, 20 November. Cooley, A. and D.H. Nexon. 2007. Bases of Empire: Globalization and the Politics of U.S. Overseas Basing. Oslo: NUPI. Danchev, A. 1998. On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Doyle, M.W. 1986. Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dumbrell, J. and A.R. Schäfer (eds). 2009. America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance. New York: Routledge. Eisenhower, D.D. 1960. Remarks of welcome to President de Gaulle of France at the Washington National Airport, Washington, DC, 22 April. Feldman, L.G. 1984. The Special Relationship Between West Germany and Israel. Boston, MA: George Allen and Unwin. Ferguson, N. 2003. Hegemony or empire? Foreign Affairs, 82, 5, 154–61. Ferguson, N. 2004. Empire. How Britain made the Modern World. London: Penguin Books. Ferguson, N. 2006. We think we’re special, but she is seeing someone else, The Daily Telegraph, 2 February.

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Ferguson, Y.H. 2008. Approaches to defining “empire” and characterizing United States influence in the contemporary world. International Studies Perspectives, 9, 3, 272–80. Ford, G.R. 1974. Remarks on departure of President Echeverria of Mexico, Tucson, Arizona, 21 October. Gamble, A. 2003. Between Europe and America: The Future of British Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Halonen, T. 2000. Urho Kekkonen lecture by President Tarja Halonen of the Republic to the Paasikivi Society, Helsinki, Paasikivi Society, 31 August. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haugevik, K.M. 2008. Det britiske imperiet, Internasjonal Politikk, 66, 1, 143–55. Her Majesty’s Government. 2010. The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. London: Cabinet Office. Ignatieff, M. 2003. Empire lite. London: Vintage. Ikenberry, G.J. 2005. Power and liberal order: America’s postwar world order in transition. International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 5, 133–52. Jackson, P.T. 2010. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations. Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics. London: Routledge. James, L. 1997. Raj. The Making of British India. London: Abacus. James, L. 1998. The Rise & Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus. Krahmann, E. 2005. American hegemony or global governance? Competing visions of international security, International Studies Review, 7, 531–45. Lake, D.A. 1996. Anarchy, hierarchy, and the variety of international relations, International Organization, 50, 1, 1–33. Lake, D.A. 2008. The New American empire? International Studies Perspectives, 9, 3, 281–9. Lake, D.A. 2009. Hieararchy in International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lundestad, G. 1986. Empire by invitation? The United States and Western Europe 1945–1952. Journal of Peace Research, 23, 3, 263–77. Mitzen, J. 2006. Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma. European Journal of International Relations, 12, 3, 341–70. Morgenthau, H.J. 1948. Politics Among Nations. The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: McGraw Hill. Mowat, R.B. 1925. The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and the United States. New York: Longmans. Neumann, I.B. 2002. Returning practice to the linguistic turn: The case of diplomacy. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31, 3, 627–51. Nexon, D.B. and T. Wright. 2007. What’s at stake in the American empire debate. American Political Science Review, 101, 2, 253–71. Nixon, R. 1971. Toasts of the President and Minister for Foreign Affairs Takeo Fukuda of Japan at a dinner honoring members of the Japanese Cabinet, Washington, DC, 10 September.

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Obama, B. 2009. Remarks following a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and an exchange with reporters, Washington, DC, White House, 18 May. Pouliot, V. 2008a. The logic of practicality: A theory of practice of security communities. International Organization, 62, 2, 257–88. Pouliot, V. 2008b. Security communities in practice: The symbolic power politics of NATO–Russia diplomacy, D.Phil. thesis, Toronto, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Reagan, R. 1981. Remarks of the President and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada before a joint session of the Parliament in Ottawa, 11 March. Richelson, J.T. and D. Ball. 1985. The Ties that Bind: Intelligence Cooperation between the UKUSA Countries, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Schatzki, T.R. 1996. Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T.R., K.K. Cetina and E.V. Savigny (eds). 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Spruyt, H. 2008. ‘American Empire’ as an analytic question or rhetorical move?, International Studies Perspectives, 9, 3, 290–99. Steele, B.J. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations. Self-Identity and the IR State. London/New York: Routledge. Wæver, O. 1998. Insecurity, security and asecurity in the West European nonwar community, in E. Adler and M. Barnett (eds), Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 69–118. Waltz, K. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Williams, M.J. 2011. Empire lite revisited: NATO, the comprehensive approach and state-building in Afghanistan, International Peacekeeping, 18, 1, 64–78. Zielonka, J. 2008. Europe as a global actor: Empire by example? International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–), 84, 3, 471–84.

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Chapter 5

Imperial Discourse in a Post-Imperial Russia: Where Will It Float To? Andrey Makarychev

Introduction The idea of empire, which is steadily coming back as a seemingly rehabilitated tool of constructing political subjectivities across the world, is one of the most contested and polarizing, yet least conceptualized, ideas in Russian discourse. Politicians, experts and journalists squabble over whether one should celebrate or, rather, denigrate the comeback of imperial self-conceptualizations; yet alas much rarer are discussions about the contexts in which they are actualized, and the political functions this re-actualization begets. The research puzzle I am going to address in this paper boils down to the following question: what are the sources not of survival but rather strong appeal of the imperial discourse in a situation widely and customarily described as ‘postimperial’? Only a small minority in Russian academia would disagree that the Soviet Union was the inheritor of Russian centuries-long imperial traditions. It is widely believed that the post-1991 Russia is moving from empire to its seeming alternative – nation state, but this teleological trajectory is complicated and contaminated by multiple comebacks of resurfacing imperial ‘syndrome’, or imperial ‘inertia’. As a prominent Russian scholar put it, ‘empire no longer exists, but it still hurts’ (Yasin 2007, 5). Yet in the West many believe that Russia is only hiding its allegedly irremovable imperial nature and concomitant ambitions in pseudo-democratic rhetoric. Although it is undeniable that the concept of empire can be applied as characterization of some aspects of today’s Russian foreign policy conduct (Orban 2008), it would be an essentializing oversimplification to assume that Russia is an empire. In a much less reductionist reading, which I am adhering to in this chapter, empire represents not a more or less established reality but rather a certain type of discourse, which competes with other discourses in shaping Russia’s identity. The surprising resilience of apparently defeated imperial discourse, whatever forms it takes, can be explained by huge elasticity of the term, its ability to encapsulate a wide gamut of meanings, from nationalist (celebratory of the hypothesis that Russia’s feeling of national conscience is only thinkable in the form of imperial identity) to liberal (in the words of former prime minister Mikhail Kasianov, Russia is destined to become an ‘empire of freedom’).

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In the meantime, Russia diverges very much from the West in terms of the political contexts that the concept of empire is embedded in. In the West the semantics of the concept point to the distinction between the imperial and the international (Walker 2009) as two models of structuration of world politics. The imperial, along the lines of R.B.J. Walker, is grounded in (a) ‘verticality’ (in other words, hierarchies predicated on subordination), (b) exceptionality (i.e. the proliferation of the state of emergency (Fletcher 2004, 58) legitimating the imperial subject’s acting beyond the existing institutional frameworks), and (c) unilateralism as a form of sovereign decisionism. In contrast, the international connotes ‘horizontality’ (coordination, as opposed to submission), ‘normality’ (i.e. playing by the rules) and multilateralism (states’ collective – as opposed to individual – actions). This tripartite formula is one of the possible ideal types of imperial subjectivity, but in practice it is very rare that a country builds its foreign policy conduct along all three of Walker’s lines. Usually one or two of them are more pronounced, while other(s) might be non-existent or poorly articulated. This is why imperial qualities are matters of degree, and their detectability represents a fascinating academic exercise. Walker’s scheme seems to be reflecting a Western liberal tradition, and needs at least two readjustments for Russia. First, it appears that, for Russian adherents of the imperial idea, the borderline between the imperial and the international is much fuzzier: even in its imperial capacity, most of them would argue, Russia can be not only a fully-fledged member of international society but also its constitutive pillar. Russia is a multi-ethnic empire, which expanded without submitting indigenous populations (which is not true) and as an integrative core for a vast Eurasian area that roughly corresponds to the territory of the former Soviet Union. Second, Russian imperial discourse is more domestically centred, and is mostly aimed at uncovering the internal dimensions – or repercussions – of Russia’s imperial identity. This bias appears to be explainable by the ongoing process of Russia’s nation-building and the still unresolved conflict between Russia as a civic and an ethnic nation. Growing gaps within Russian national identity, including the sociologically determined alienation of Far Eastern regions from Russia’s western (European) territories and the negative impacts of the instability in the Northern Caucasus, certainly complicated the picture. Against this backdrop Russia’s imperial temptation can be discarded as a type of ‘false conscience’, yet it is not my aim in this paper to challenge the content of the imperial idea, or to ask the question why the imperial idea is so resilient. The key set of questions is different: how does the concept of empire function? In which discursive fields it is embedded? Is the imperial discourse a unitary one or split into several narratives? And, finally, how do these imperial discourses constitute Russian international identities and what consequences might they lead to in foreign policy domain. There are three key arguments that I will present in this paper. First, I will claim that the conceptual fluidity of the notion of empire leads to the fragmentation of imperial discourse and its dispersal across a large segment of political spectrum.

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Second, I will show how the concept of empire depends upon the variety of outside discourses. Third, I will argue that the actualized imperial discourses are among the chief hindrances to Russia’s integration with the most important structures of international society. Empire and/as Role Identity: A Theoretical Prelude Conceptually, there are two competing explanatory platforms that appear to be instrumental for the study of the transformations of the imperial discourse in postSoviet Russia. One of them is social constructivism with Alexander Wendt’s idea of ‘role identities’ as ‘subjective self-understandings’, ‘representations of Self and Others’ (Wendt 2004, 227–9), or social niches that persist as long as someone fills them with certain meanings. It is basically due to the constructivist legacy that the concept of empire was increasingly interpreted as one of instruments for identity-making. In the constructivist reading, the imperial role identity is always contextual (imperial qualities/features are matters of degree) and relational, that is, it depends upon – and thus can be (re)interpreted through – its various opposites. It is within this logic that such dichotomies as empire vs. domestically decentralized state, empire vs. nationhood, empire vs. democracy, etc. have to be understood. As I will show, the polarity of these dichotomies can be questioned, since Russia’s imperial identity often can be quite compatible with its seeming opposites. Yet in the meantime the constructivist perspective might shed some light on the popularity of the idea of empire among other – seemingly competing – interpretations of Russia’s collective Self. Arguably, this can be explained by its capacity to carry out two functions of primordial political salience – ordering and bordering. First, the imperial discourse is meant to impose some kind of order in an increasingly volatile world (Andreani 2005, 63–80). Empires are ‘self-selected agents to bring geopolitical order where there is disorder’ (Parker 2009), and are parts of a wide semantic ‘chain of equivalence’ to include ‘great powers’, ‘super-powers’, ‘world leaders’, hegemons, etc. (Mezhuev 2003, 28). Apart from geopolitical aspects of ordering, its domestic dimension is also important: empire may play a unifying community-building role and consolidate nation in opposition to its – imagined or real – challengers from the outside (Laclau 2005, 191). Second, imperial discourse is always about drawing and redrawing borderlines of two different kinds. On the one hand, the border-drawing process has a domestic dimension: the imperial identity dissociates/detaches itself from the competing articulations of the Russian collective Self. On the other hand, imperial identity ascertains itself through contrastive dissociation with external imperial identities. Yet these lines of demarcation and the oppositions that sustain each of them usually prove to be rather fuzzy, producing vast zones of overlap and indistinction. It is the critical theories, the second source of theoretical thought to be used in my analysis, that challenge the very possibility of fixing the meanings attached to the imperial role identity through delineating them from their opposites. This

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approach seems to boost the argument that role identity constructed by and through Russia’s imperial discourse is highly inconstant and volatile. Paradoxically, it is the dislocated nature of Russian imperial role identity that is a strong additive to its hegemonic proclivity. From a critical theory perspective, there is nothing new in claiming the dislocated character of any identity. What could be new is an explanation of how these dislocations are manifested in each specific case and what effects they entail for the concept of empire itself and its interrelatedness with other concepts embedded in Russian discourses on power and identity. The two theories briefly introduced above give different explanations of the endurance of the imperial role identities in Russian discourse. According to the constructivist reasoning, the concept of empire keeps its validity owing to its bordering and ordering functions, while for critical theory it represents a battlefield for clashes between interpretations that are bound to co-exist. This is what makes imperial discourse politically relevant and attractive. Apparently, a combination of constructivist and critical approaches is quite possible. The dichotomous oppositions are indispensable mechanisms in the attempt to define the content of the concept of empire, yet these oppositions lack rigour and are hard to delineate strictly from each other. This pivotal argument for the complementarity of the two approaches will be substantiated in this chapter. There are two aspects in which the concept of dislocation will be considered. One is grounded in the idea of the empty signifier, while the second can be conceptualized in terms of inter-subjective relations. On the one hand, by dislocation we may understand indeterminacy and uncertainty that are intrinsic for imperial identity. Russia can be portrayed as a political subject incapable of speaking with a single voice and deeply fragmented by its desire to simultaneously use economic arguments and normative appeals, to portray itself as both a destroyer/opponent of the Soviet Union and its inheritor, to have recourse to institutional commitments with its partners and to a strategy of quasi-imperial unilateralism. On the other hand, there is an external dimension of dislocation manifested by the dependence of discursively constructed role identities ‘upon an outside which both denies that identity and provides its conditions of possibility at the same time’ (Norval 2008, 3). Thus, Russia’s self-representations through the concept of empire are closely connected to European and American discourses on their ostensible imperial identities (Aalto 2004). The external aspects of dislocation appear to be crucial: ‘on the one hand, it is an outside that threatens the inside; on the other hand, it is an outside that is formulated from the inside … Identity is in part constituted by what it opposes’ (Newman 2001, 12–18). In this light, the imperial identitybuilding projects of the United States and the European Union may be perceived as challenges to Russia, but nevertheless the Russian role identities are constructed through some kind of communication with – and reference to – them. Russia’s inevitable references to other imperial experiences in the process of distinguishing its own imperial identity from other variants of collective self-identification testify to its non-self-sufficient nature.

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Empire’s ‘Floating’ Potential Dislocations of Russia’s imperial role identity may be problematized through the concept of floating signifiers introduced by Ernesto Laclau within a wider concept of empty signifiers. From his perspective, the semantic role of both (floating and empty) types of signifiers ‘is not to express any positive content but … to function as the name of a fullness which is constitutively absent’ (Laclau 2005, 96). This ostensible ‘fullness’ may come in different versions, be it nation, society or community. In other words, ‘there can be empty signifiers within the field of signification because any system of signification is structured around an empty place resulting from the impossibility of producing an object which, none the less, is required’ (Laclau 2007, 40) for fulfilling the ordering function. To put it differently, each potentially ordering concept functions as an empty signifier (Laclau 2007, 15), which is the very condition of hegemony (Laclau 2007, 43), since to hegemonize something is to infuse meanings into the original absence that is itself constitutive of the emptiness of empty signifiers. Critical theorists argue that terms may differ from each other in meaning depending on which type of ‘chains of equivalence’ they are integrated into: ‘there is an essential unfixity in the meaning attached to some contested signifiers as a result of the operation of a plurality of strategies in the same discursive space’ (Laclau 2000a, 305). The empty signifier, Laclau continues, has to be detached from any precise content while paradoxically it still remains an integral part of a system of signification. When we talk about empty signifiers, ‘we mean that there is a place, within a system of signification, which is constitutively unrepresentable; in that sense it remains empty, but this is an emptiness which I can signify’ (Laclau 2005, 106). ‘This emptying of a particular signifier of its particular, differential signified is … what makes possible the emergence of “empty” signifiers as the signifiers of a lack, of an absent totality’, he suggests further (Laclau 2007, 42). Since the signifier ‘empire’ ‘names an undifferentiated fullness, it has no conceptual content’ and is arguably open for divergent interpretations (Laclau 2000b, 185). In the meantime, empire while remaining ‘empty’ as a signifier in the above sense has more of a floating character. In other words, it migrates between the ‘systems of signification’ without belonging to or being ‘anchored’ in one of them. To illustrate this point, it may be useful to place the concept of empire in a group of other – competing – interpretations (and ‘equivalential chains’ that sustain each of them) of how Russia can be conceptualized. There are at least three different yet interrelated ‘modes of floating’ for a signifier ‘empire’. The first one is a ‘judgmental floating’: from predominantly negative appraisals of empire to either neutral or even positive ones. Both polar (dis)positions are identifiable in the Russian discourse. There are those who argue that ‘empires denote a pathway to historical deadlock’ (Buzgalin 2004, 114), and those who applaud Russia’s imperial past as presumably containing much potential for the future. These two articulations construct two different identities for today’s Russia, either as a country denouncing its historical experience of

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imperial hegemony, or as a neo-imperial great power able to, at minimum, secure its spheres of influence (namely, the ‘red lines’ rhetoric to which the Russian leaders repeatedly referred in rejecting Georgia’s and Ukraine’s prospects for NATO membership), or, at maximum, to balance the dominance of the West. Second, what might be dubbed ‘temporal floating’ denotes the capacity of the concept of empire to transcend historical epochs, and thus remain open to various historical interpretations. The inevitable historical parallels with Romanov and Communist empires add yet more inconsistency to Russian imperial discourse. Yet, of course, not all imperial legacies are equally actualized in the contemporary Russian discourse, and some historical memories are left out. For example, there are voices in Moscow calling for ‘forgetting’ the most sensitive episodes of the Soviet history – like, for example, the Katyn story of the Polish officers murdered by the Red Army. Russian official discourses are powerless to suppress the Circassian population in North Caucasus, whose activists have become increasingly vociferous in their calls to boycott the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, where many of their ancestors were murdered. Third, empire as a signifier migrates from political discourse where it was originally conceived for non-political ‘language registers’, such as commercial advertisement (where it symbolizes abundance) and mass culture, including artistic representations, as well as literary and cinematographic narratives. A few examples can be quite illustrative for a variety of cultural narratives of empire. The documentary movie The Downfall of Empire. A Byzantine Lesson (filmed by Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov) presents a historical narrative by extrapolating the Byzantine role in Russia and thus demonstrates that the historical image of Byzantium has always constituted one of the basic archetypes of the genesis of the Russian consciousness. The temporal conceptualizations of imperial identity are rendered even more picturesque with the introduction of imaginaries of the future. The Third Empire, by Mikhail Yuriev, is one of the harshest utopias of extreme nationalism. In the author’s anti-utopian fantasy, in the aftermath of Putin’s presidency Russia has voluntarily and democratically voted for the reintroduction of monarchy, followed by the pursuit of isolationist foreign policy towards the West, forceful reassembly of the USSR and consequent military conquest of the United States and the occupation of the whole of Europe. Interestingly, it was exactly in these seemingly non-political discursive domains where the rehabilitation of the term started after the fall of the Soviet Union, being then transferred to political discourse. In cultural narratives the concept of empire became even more variegated. There are many voices arguing that cultural interpretations of empire are important tools for sustaining Russia’s great-power ambitions (Condy 2006, 299), while others deem that those narratives invite more critical distance from Russia’s imperial past (Mezhuev 2008, 142–51). Despite these perceptual gaps, it is important that the idea of easily empire spreads across different types of discourse and seeks to hegemonize them.

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Russia’s Imperial Role Identity and its ‘Opposites’ In this section I will venture to distinguish the concept of empire from three other role identities of Russia. The first of these is Russia as a nation state defined through a number of adjacent signifiers: ‘sovereign democracy’, integrity, unity, national interest, the ‘vertical of authority’, patriotism, recentralization, etc. Second, Russia could be portrayed as a country of regions, which requires such concepts as federalism, decentralization, grass-roots democracy, subsidiarity, devolution of powers, local self-government, etc. Third, Russia may be viewed as a corporate state, which is modelled after the business firm and is thus motivated by the entrepreneurial logic of profit-making. A corporate state is a sort of business project, a de-politicized and ostensibly pragmatic actor motivated basically by material gains and profit-making (‘energy super-power’ might be one of the appropriate self-descriptions of this sort). Empire in this semantic row is another ‘name’ (universalizing signifier) for Russia and represents a set of equivalential meanings to include control, domination, patronage, expansion, absorption, projection of power, unilateralism, etc. The crucial point here is that the imperial interpretation of Russian identity is separated from others not by strict semantic borders but rather by more or less mobile frontiers so as to leave ample space for overlays and interpenetrations. The concept of empire might coexist with nation state and embrace important regional ingredients, and also be compatible with the understanding of Russia as a corporate actor. Let us start with overlaps between empire and nation state. In political theory there is a long tradition of treating empire as ‘the most historically powerful alternative to the nation-state’ (Hurrell 2007, 144). There are those in Russia who are keen to divorce these two notions by arguing that ‘the imperial ideology is in open conflict with the interests of Russian people … Either empire or Russian identity’ (Yakovenko 1997, 91). The key argument of Russian liberals is that empire suppresses individual freedoms and thus is detrimental for national consolidation. In the judgment of Emil Payn, those who argue that the model of civic nation is compatible with the ‘imperial project’ in fact camouflage empire in the colours of nation state. Empire, in his view, is a power based upon coercion, authoritarianism and a racist type of discourse grounded in the primacy of ethnic majority. Along these lines empire has to be politically delineated from nation state with its characteristics, such as democracy, people’s sovereignty and national self-determination. Civic nations are unthinkable in empires, Payn (2007, 42–53) argues, where horizontal relationships are elided. Yet there are opposing voices insisting that the imperial type of statehood is not incompatible with the ‘Westphalian’ nation-state model. As Viacheslav Morozov (2008) argues, the subjectivity of the European Union (EU) encompasses a strong ‘imperial moment’, which coincided with the appearance of more accentuated transformation in the direction of ‘sovereign territorial state’ model. Valery Tishkov

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(2007, 25) adds to this that ‘European empires for quite a long time retained their imperial qualities but in the meantime were gradually becoming egalitarian nation states’, which made him conclude that empires and nation-states are not ‘social organisms with presumably objective sets of traits’, but concepts which depend upon perceptions and are embedded in certain contexts. ‘Imperialism as a European enterprise must be viewed as a concerted and purposive contribution to the creation of material wealth and international power for the nation, as well as identity formation of the nation precisely as an imperialist power’ (Fitzpatrick 2008, 4), hence the powerful idea of liberal imperialism in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Similar approaches could be applicable to Russia as well. The Romanov empire functioned as a Russian national state, which legitimizes such constructs as ‘imperial nationalism’ (Yasin 2007, 5). For Russian conservatives, empire is a means to the nation’s existence (Dragunskiy 2007/2008, 7), and histories of many other countries know no sharp contrast between empire- and nation-building (Miller 2005, 15). The revival of national identity in contemporary Russia is arguably grounded in its imperial legacy. To rephrase a Western historian, it is not so much that Russia created the empire; it is the empire that constructed Russia (Miller 2007, 23). The idea of empire seems to be compatible with a regional model of Russia as well. Suffice it to mention that one of the strongholds of imperial tradition in Russia is the city of St Petersburg, located at country’s western margin; the same is believed to be true for Orenburg, which may be dubbed the Russian Empire’s window to Asia (Kaganskiy 2001, 126). The local identities of the eldest Russian cities like Nizhny Novgorod are largely grounded in historical remembrances of their contributions to the defence of the Russian empire against foreign invaders. Therefore, historically Russia’s regions were important sources of imperial impulses and keepers of imperial traditions. Again, Russia does not seem to be unique in this respect: rather than expecting homogeneity within imperial space, ‘we need to recognize that there is an inherent paradox of similarity and variability’ within Roman identity (Revell 2005, 109–18; also see Bekker-Nielsen 2005, 109–18). Seemingly, there is much less compatibility between ‘imperial’ and ‘corporate’ (‘pragmatic’) interpretations of Russia’s role identities. The most exemplary cases of Russia’s resurgent imperial instincts in recent years – the war in Georgia, the attempts to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the tug-of-war with Estonia over the removal of the Bronze Soldier monument – have seriously questioned the attempts to construct a corporatist Russia reacting mainly to economic and financial incentives or challenges. Suffice it to mention how negatively the Russian market reacted to what might be interpreted as imperial moves by the Kremlin in the Northern Caucasus in August 2008, including the war against Georgia and the unilateral recognition of its two break-away territories, Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia.

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Yet in the meantime the concept of a ‘liberal empire’ promulgated since 2004 by a number of Russian liberal economists, mostly by Anatoly Chubais, could serve as a possible meeting ground and a compromise between the ‘pragmatic’ and the ‘imperial’ versions of Russia’s international identity. The ‘liberal empire’ idea echoes the model of British colonial rule (Fergusson 2004, 198) and, in more policy-oriented terms, evokes Russian economic expansion into its ‘near abroad’ and favours the development mostly of financial forms of Moscow’s influence over former Soviet republics. As one Russian commentator puts it: ‘today’s empire with worldwide ambitions simply can’t afford being totalitarian; liberalism for such an empire is not a luxury but a means of survival’ (Pavlov 2005). Present Day Paradoxes in Imperial Russian Identity Against this background it becomes apparent that under closer scrutiny the concept of empire, claiming to have ordering effects on the political space it embraces, conceals a number of deep dislocations. First, imperial identity not only fails to identify the boundaries of an entity named Russia – it blurs these boundaries. Russia’s imperial imagination includes territories where Russian-speakers and holders of Russian passports live (Kaganskiy 2001, 380; the ‘Russian world’ concept). Imperial identity thus treats borders as a relative construct: ‘in Russian empire it was never known where Russia’s borders are … It is still not clear today where the boundary is to be drawn between Russians and Bielorussians, Russians and Cossacks, Russians and Ukrainians, etc.’ (Furman 2008). This indeterminacy of/scepticism about post-imperial borders may have become a source of today’s conflicts. A good illustration for that is political claims that Sevastopol is ‘a Russian city’ due to Russia’s imperial legacy (Bailes et al. 2003, 39), or that Russia has a duty to protect militarily its compatriots (holders of Russian passports) in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Second, the way Russia actualizes the Soviet imperial legacy in its efforts at identity-building remains very inconsistent. Two different discourses seem to coexist with each other. On the one hand, some authors argue that ‘anchoring national identity in the Soviet past is a genealogical feature of Putin’s regime’ (Morozov 2008), which explains, in particular, why Ukraine’s rejection of the USSR ‘was perceived in Russia as being also a rejection of Russia’ (Kuzio 2003, 7). Within this reasoning Stalin, for example, might be portrayed as the greatest Soviet leader to win World War II. Yet, on the other hand, a counter-discourse is also visible. Suffice it to say that the conservative platform developed by the ‘United Russia’ party is openly presented as an opposition to the Soviet-times ideology. The October 1917 revolution is baptized an ‘extremist event’ orchestrated by revolutionary radicals with foreign sponsorship. In this context, the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is negatively dubbed an ‘heir to Stalin and Beria’. Moreover, according to Putin, ‘those who insist that Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia ought to belong to Georgia are Stalinists, since they sustain the decision taken by Stalin’ (Putin 2008).

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What is a matter of debate is to what extent post-imperial Russia feels trapped in the Soviet imperial identity. Too much concentration on the World War II triumphalist narrative does not seem to legitimize anything but the demise of the USSR, since none of the CIS countries supported Russia in her ‘historical’ dispute with Estonia in 2007 over the removal from Tallinn’s downtown of the monument to Soviet soldiers. This isolation of Russia proves that historical parallels fail to construct a common communication space for its ‘near abroad’ where fears of Moscow’s resurrected imperial instincts are evidently stronger than normative/ value-driven commitments. Third, in Russian political discourse the concept of empire is always a matter of selective interpretations that are battlegrounds for hegemony: some elements in the imperial past are artificially accentuated and elucidated, while others are intentionally obscured or expelled. As I have mentioned with the reference to Laclau, the meanings attached to empty/floating signifiers might vary according to the context they are placed in, while role identities and identity-driven imaginaries may well be organized around them. This makes empire a relative concept, akin to a metaphor leaving much space for arbitrary usage at one’s discretion. It comes with a variety of adjectives – empires can be colonial and anti-colonial, liberal and orthodox, cosmopolitan (Magun 2007, 34) or even ‘sanitary’ (Kholmogorov 2005, 143). It is precisely this elasticity that opens the concept to political interpretations that can easily change their meanings from negative to positive (Kortunov 2007, 311). There will always be policy contexts in which a great power’s policies may be interpreted as imperial, owing to the multiplicity of the meanings of empire. It is this point that constitutes the theoretical platform of a ‘new imperial history’ school, in particular, of the Ab Imperio journal based in the city of Kazan. Its associates distance themselves from a more traditional approach that perceives empires in predominantly negative terms, in contrast to the inevitable (and, ostensibly from a historical viewpoint, more progressive) ‘social order of nation states’. In an ‘old’ logic, empires were dubbed ‘vestiges of the past’ and thus opposed to nation states as deficient deviations from the norm (Gerasimov et al. 2010, 20). Such an approach not only challenges the teleological inevitability of transition from empires to nations, but in a wider sense questions the very idea of structural constants. Instead, the Ab Imperio group prefers to focus on so-called ‘imperial situations’ (or ‘imperial formations’), concepts that are instruments to uncover the ‘imperial momentum’ in the logic of all great powers. This approach seems to be fully consonant with Frederick Cooper’s advocacy of ‘the potential of empire’, or situations when sovereign nations ‘could become empires’ or are ‘acting like empires’. ‘Imperial situations’ can be based on free trade (‘free trade imperialism’) or on democratic governance (‘Rome was an empire when it was a republic’; Burbank and Cooper 2010, 22–44). What further complicates the situation is the gap between Russia’s domestic and international role identities. In the words of Emil Payn, Russia seems to be a ‘democracy for others’ (i.e. it tries hard to present itself as a democratic state

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while dealing with the West) and an ‘empire for itself’ (Payn 2007, 103). The institution of plenipotentiary representatives of the President in federal districts, as well the practice of appointing regional governors, justifies the portrayal of Russia as ‘internal empire’, fully aware of its inability to expand beyond its borders (and unwilling to incorporate such pro-Russian territories as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transdniestria and Nagorno-Karabakh, for example), and therefore left with no choice other than to keep its vast expanses united and under a single – almost authoritarian – command. The way the bloody rebellion in Chechnya was suppressed can also be described as imperial: that is, substituting the initial use of force in the 1990s, with delegation of control over the break-away territory to the strongest faction of the local elites under Ramzan Kadyrov’s despotic rule. It is against this background that empire might be called a ‘floating’ signifier: it easily ‘floats’ from its ‘own’ domain to other interpretations of Russia as a nation, a business corporation and a regionalized state. According to Laclau, a floating signifier is an equivalent ‘whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interrupting each other’ (Laclau 2000a, 305). This is exactly what we see in the intermixture of different versions of Russia’s identity. Floating signifiers appear within ‘the logic of the displacements’ of frontiers and, by and large, do not contradict the idea of empty signifiers. The distance between the two does not appear to be that great: ‘floating and empty signifiers should be conceived as partial dimensions in any process of hegemonic construction’ (Laclau 2005, 133). In our case this distance appears to be of some significance since it allows for ‘de-bordering’ the empire-based ‘regime of signification’ and for exposing the areas of compatibility between it and other regimes. Inter-subjective Dimensions of Imperial Dislocation In a wider sense inter-subjectivity signifies a possibility to influence the constitution of other subjects’ identities. In an inter-subjective relationship, the parties constitute each other (Casula 2007), which explains why these positions are immanently fluid, mobile, flexible and by no means pre-given. That is why it would be a gross oversimplification to treat inter-subjectivity as relations between two (or more) already given political subjects. The subjects in/of communication are in the process of constant re-formation where the external impact is crucial. One of striking features of Russia’s dislocated imperial identity is its imitative character. In constructivist accounts, imitation takes place ‘when actors adopt the self-understanding of those whom they perceive as successful’ (Wendt 2004, 325). The references to the empire-building practices of Russia’s alleged competitors – including the US and EU – are inherent parts of Russia’s imperial discourse. In many cases, Russia overtly ventured to imitate US international behaviour. As Russian authors put it, the Kremlin ‘read the American verbal message as a certain semiotic code and then adapted it to its own needs’ (Zvelev and Troitskiy 2006, 33). The Moscow political elite all through the 1990s, as frankly admitted by a Russian

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analyst, ‘looked at the United States with a mixed feeling of indignation and admiration. Even illegitimate actions in defence of the United States’ own interests were perceived [in Moscow. – A.M.] as examples to be followed and reproduced by Russia itself: if Washington does so, why can’t Russia?’ (Oznobischev 2008, 125). In the words of Russia’s deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin (Vremia novostei 2009), Russian military bases in South Ossetia and Abkhazia were deployed on the same grounds as the Americans deployed theirs in Romania and Bulgaria. In the same vein, Russia borrowed from the United States the concept of preemptive strikes, zone of vital interest and peace enforcement. One may agree that most of the time Russia was – although tacitly – fascinated by the United States as a successful country relying upon force without much reflection about following the norms and avoiding repercussions. As a Russian author assumed, Russia’s inclination to imitate American imperial conduct conceals Russia’s own proclivity to imperial great-power status (Kara-Murza 1996, 32). In particular, Chubais’s articulation of the liberal empire thesis appears to echo ‘the Bush administration’s grand strategy that may be imperial, but … aims at creating liberal, rather than autocratic or totalitarian, governance’ (Rhodes 2003, 137). This is also true with regard to Europe. One of conservative voices in Russia presumes that the formation of the EU subjectivity in an imperial form is a feasible perspective for the future, since the EU potentially has its own ambitions, interests and ideology that will push it to take certain actions of its own (Kholmogorov 2002). This trajectory could be beneficial for Russia since it might be instrumental in balancing the US geopolitical preponderance. As a Russian author reports, ‘should a new, Anglo-Saxon empire take shape, Russia, instead of resisting, should busy itself with recreating its own empire’ (Lurie 2003–2004, 107). The strategy of imitation was conducive to drawing parallels between the cases of Kosovo, on the one hand, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia, on the other. The August 2008 events in the Caucasus (i.e. the Russian military intervention against Georgia and Kremlin’s recognition of independence of the two break-away territories) were marked by multiple references to the Kosovo precedent. It was the case of Kosovo that Russian authorities used as a legitimating excuse for its actions in defence of the two secessionist republics in the Caucasus. Well before the 2008 war, Russian experts admitted that ‘in fact, we are doing in Abkhazia what NATO did in Kosovo, having separated it from Serbia’ (Krasnosiolov 2003, 123). Russia’s diplomatic recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the aftermath of the Georgia war of August 2008 was very much modelled after the US-inspired proclamation of the Kosovo independence half a year earlier. Russian political discourse was ostensibly saturated by alleged similarities between the Balkans and the Northern Caucasus. The main paradox of drawing the lines between Kosovo, on the one hand, and Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, on the other, consists in Russia’s reluctant acceptance of the legitimacy of unilateral proclamation of independence overlooking international procedures.

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Towards a De-politicized Empire? Where does Russia stand in the dilemma between the international and the imperial? The Putin–Medvedev regime is widely believed to have reinvigorated the imperial model of Russian policy that had been denigrated by their predecessors since the mid-1980s. This model is based upon the mutually sustaining ideas of exceptionality (in its relations with the major Western institutions Russia demands special status for itself, as verbalized by the lexem of ‘strategic partnership’) and unilaterality (the entire spectrum of Russian security policy. From Medvedev’s proposals on new security architecture in Europe to his subsequent harsh reaction to the US anti-missile buildup in Eastern Europe: that model is manifested in unilateral speech acts, although the issues touched upon have clear bearing for Russian allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Collective Security Treaty Organization). Russia’s nervous reaction to the attempts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to equalize the historical roles of Communism and Nazism makes it a defender of the Stalinist legacy, at least in the eyes of the Europeans. Imperial discourses might thus complicate efforts to construct Russia as a constitutive member of international society and might rather push it into an ‘insider/outsider’ position. Arguably, it was not until harvesting the controversial results of the Georgia war of August 2008 that Russia returned to the philosophy of the international, which includes ‘resetting’ Russia–United States relations, the recognition of the security actorship of EU and finding a compromise with NATO. The reasons behind this conceptual shift could be discussed from at least two perspectives. Some commentators tend to explain Russia’s growing sympathies with the discourse of the international by the Kremlin’s comprehension of its weakness and the inadequacy of its resources for sustaining its imperial ambitions. One of striking pieces of evidence of the weakness of Russia’s imperial agenda is the failure of the Kremlin to hammer out special relations – as one of the most important elements of any imperial identity (Haugevik 2009, 9) – with other international actors, including the former Soviet republics and ex-socialist countries. It turned out that Russia’s integrative capacities are meagre – the country lacks soft power resources and is limited in its own version of neighbourhood policy, even in comparison to that of the EU. Yet there is an additional, less materialist and more constructivist explanation of the gradual change in Russia’s attitudes, which questions the practicability of the imperial policies. The key argument of this reasoning is that Russia, having acted within the imperial logic, was ultimately forced to take actions that either it initially considered as inappropriate or too risky (the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), or left Moscow in international isolation (like the conflict with Estonia over the World War II memorials) and, therefore, marginalized it within the international society structures. Consequently, it was the step-bystep comprehension of futility of the imperial logic that pushed Russia to accept

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the reverse logic of the international, as exemplified by President Medvedev’s proposals on the ‘new security architecture’ in the Euro-Atlantic region. Yet the idea of re-institutionalization of Euro-Atlantic security is open to different interpretations. It might come in a ‘democratic’ version implying the inclusive nature of security arrangements that ought to accommodate all actors of this area without exceptions. By the same token, it may also be developed as a version of ‘imperial management’ (a replica of Bull’s great power management concept) predicated on the joint crisis prevention efforts of the United States, European Union and Russia. Whether the three imperial projects – and the different logics sustaining each of them – might be compatible with each other is an open question. As for the effects of Russia’s dislocated imperial identity, they may be observed from two perspectives. On the one hand, the reformulation of Russia’s identity in imperial terms is doomed to remain an inherently unfinished and incomplete discourse, mixed up with alternative representations on Russia’s Self. On the other hand, the inter-subjective nature of Russian imperial identity ought to increase the chances for Russia’s inclusion into – rather than exclusion from – the internationalsociety milieu. The idea of ‘joint management between empires’ (Grosjean and van Ermen 2009: 14) is acquiring some currency in international discourse. According to the Russian reading, the concept of empire – despite multiple voices from Eastern/Central European and Baltic countries – does not move Russia away from the West. Concomitantly, the imperial role identity turns into Russia’s particular leverage not only to achieve world power status, but equally to play the role of a fully-fledged interlocutor in dialogue with Europe (Kantor 2008). It likewise constitutes an antithesis to barbarianism and chaos, whose return is thus associated with the collapse of the imperial order. Yet this is not to say that this Russian self-perception is shared by the Western countries that might rightfully claim that, unlike Russia, they did make their political choices by relinquishing certain models of development rooted in their histories. Thus, the rejection of colonialism, fascism and communism was engrained in the European identity, grounded in such key signifiers as democracy, civil liberties, human rights and freedoms. Against this background, Russia’s reluctance to unequivocally associate itself with European values provides Western countries with a weighty argument for othering Russia, or representing it as a non-Western country. The political actualization of the concept of empire turns it in a kind of ‘moving target’, an attractive metaphor that always remains debatable and ambiguous, and thus requires adjectives – ‘informal empire’, ‘energy empire’ or ‘non-colonial empire’ (Steinmetz 2006, 200). Russia in this sense is a ‘quasi-empire’: its imperial discourse is dispersed over the entire gamut of the political spectrum and shared between national patriots, liberal pragmatists and partisans of regional identity. This finding challenges one of the key points of the critical theory arguing that it is the existence of empty and floating signifiers, as well as dislocations of identities, that makes politics possible (Laclau 2007, 44). Yet the Russian case

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opens a different perspective suggesting that split identity may equally produce de-politicizing effects. The case of the Kremlin’s legal retrieval of a major Russian Orthodox cathedral in Nice built by the Russian czar before the revolution of 1917 gives a good illustration of this argument. By doing this in January 2010, Russia has openly declared itself the heir to the Romanov dynasty. This self-identification appears to be in clear contradiction to Russia’s role identity as the legal successor of the Soviet Union. This bifurcated – yet, in both cases, imperial – identification, in spite of all its controversies, has at least one rather obvious effect: by avoiding making political choices between the two imperial models (the czarist and the Soviet ones), the Kremlin discourse tends – quite paradoxically – to de-politicize the imperial discourse by simply reducing its content to the issue of either material possession (the case of the Orthodox cathedral in Nice) or territorial control in the areas of its ‘near abroad’ legitimized by the references to ‘natural bonds’ purportedly linking Russians to other Slavic nations. The total glorification of its history can eventually deprive Russia’s neo-imperial identity of a strong political appeal. This depoliticization is likely in the long run to undermine the political meanings that imperial identity embraces. References Aalto, Pami. Empire Europe Encounters the Post-Soviet North. Background paper presented at the workshop ‘Laboratory in the Margins? The EU’s and Russia’s Policies in Northern Europe’, 2004. Andreani, Gilles. Imperial Loose Talk, in Beyond Paradise and Power. Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Alliance. Edited by Tod Lindberg. London: Routledge, 2005, 63–80. Bailes, Alyson J.K., Oleksiy Melnyk and Ian Anthony. Relics of Cold War. Europe’s Challenge, Ukraine’s Experience. Stockholm: SIPRI Policy Paper no. 6, November 2003, 39. Bekker-Nielsen, Tonnes. Local Politics in an Imperial Context, in Rome and Black Sea Region. Domination, Romanization, Resistance. Edited by Tonnes BekkerNielsen. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2005, 109–18. Burbank, J. and F. Cooper. The Challenge and Serendipity of Writing World History through the Prism of Empire. Interview with Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Ab Imperio, 2, 2010, 22–44. Buzgalin, Alexander. Imperskaya model mira i alternativnye ei perspektivy. International Trends. Journal of International Relations Theory and World Politics, 2, 5, 2004, 114. Casula, Philipp. The Loss of the Constitutive Outside: Changing Discourses in East and West after the End of the Cold War. Paper presented to the Panel ‘Metaphors and Power’ at the 6th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Turin, 15 September 2007.

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Condy, Nancy. Perezhivaya chuzhuyu katastrofu. Pro et Contra, July–August 2006, 299–337. Dragunskiy, Denis. Izderzhki imperii. Kosmopolis, 3, 19, 2007/2008, 7. Ferguson, Niall. Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 198. Fitzpatrick, Matthew. Liberal Imperialism in Germany. Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008, 4. Fletcher, Paul. The Political Theology of the Empire to Come. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17, 1, April 2004, 58. Furman, Dmitry. Ot Rossiiskoi imperii do raspada SNG, 19 September 2008, http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2005/10/05/furman_print.html. Gerasimov, Ilia, Sergey Glebov et al. Novaya imperskaya istoria i vyzovy imperii. Ab Imperio, 1, 2010, 20. Grosjean, Philippe and Raymond van Ermen. The Three Sea Alliance. Eyes on Europe, Autumn 2009, 14. Haugevik, Kristin M. Dominance Lost? Exploring the Transition from Imperial to Special Relations. Unpublished manuscript. Oslo: NUPI, 2009, 9. Hurrell, Andrew. One World? Many Worlds? The Place of Regions in the Study of International Society. International Affairs, 83, 1, 2007, 144. Kaganskiy, Vladimir. Kulturniy landschaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo. Moscow: NLO Publisher, 2001, 126. Kantor, Vladimir. Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo: imperia ili natsionalizm? 2008, www. polit.ru/lectures/2008/02/22/russia.html. Kara-Murza, Alexei. Mezhdu imperiei i smutoi. Moscow: Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996, 32. Kholmogorov, Egor. Evropa ot zakata do rassveta. Russkii zhurnal, 18 June 2002, www.russ.ru/politics/20020618-holm.html. Kholmogorov, Egor. Ot sanitarnogo kordona k sanitarnoi imperii. Strategicheskiy zhurnal, 1, 2005, 143. Kortunov, Sergey (ed.). Mirovaya politika. Moscow: Higher School of Economics, 2007, 311. Krasnosiolov, Alexei. Tak kto poterial Gruziyu? International Trends. Journal of Theory of International Relations and World Politics, 1, January–April 2003, 123. Kuzio, Taras. EU and Ukraine: A Turning Point in 2004? Paris: Institute for Security Studies, Occasional Papers no. 47, November 2003, 7. Laclau, Ernesto. Structure, History and the Political, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000a, 185. Laclau, Ernesto. Constructing Universality, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000b, 305. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005, 133. Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 2007, 40. Lurie, Svetlana. Imperskoe vospitanie gosudarstva-gegemona. Kosmopolis, 4, 6, 2003–2004, 107.

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Magun, Artemiy. Otstranionnoe prostranstvo Imperii. Levaya politika, 1, 2007, 34. Mezhuev, Boris. Imperia ili global’naya gegemoniya. Kosmopolis, 3, 5, 2003, 28. Mezhuev, Boris. Nostalgiya kak predchuvstvie. Russkii zhurnal, May 2008, 142– 151. Miller, Alexei. Natsionalizm i imperia. Moscow: Polit.ru and OGI, 2005, 15. Miller, Alexei. The Value and the Limits of a Comparative Approach to the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery, in Kimitako Matsuzato (ed.), Imperiology. From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire. Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007, 23. Morozov, Viacheslav. Evropa: Orientatsiya vo vremeni i prostranstve. Rossiya v globalnoy politike, 3, May–June 2008. Newman, Saul. Derrida’s Deconstruction of Authority. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27, May 2001, 12–18. Norval, Aletta J. Theorising Dislocations. Paper presented at the workshop ‘New Stability, Democracy and Nationalism in Contemporary Russia’, Basel, 26–27 September 2008, p. 3. Orban, Anita. Power, Energy, and the New Russian Imperialism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. Oznobischev, Sergei. Kogo lechit’ ‘ot Gruzii’? International Trends. Journal of International Relations Theory and World Politics, 6, 2(17), May–August 2008, 125. Parker, Noel. Empires as a Geopolitical Figure, 2009, www.wiscnetwork.com. Pavlov, Arkadiy. Zachem nam imperia. Znamia, 7, 2005. Payn, Emil. Rossiya mezhdu imperiei i natsiei. Pro et Contra, 3, 37, May–June 2007, 42–53. Putin, Vladimir. Interview with CNN, Sochi, 28 August 2008, http://www. government.ru. Revell, Louise. Roman Imperialism and Local Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 4. Rhodes, Edward. The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda. Survival, 45, 1, 2003, 137. Steinmetz, George. Imperializm ili kolonializm? Prognosis, 4, 8, 2006, 200. Tishkov, Valeriy. Chto yest Rossiya i rossiikskiy narod, Pro et Contra, 3, 37, May– June 2007, 25. Vremia novostei, 97, 5 June 2009, 2. Walker, R.B.J. After the Globe/Before the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wendt, Alexander. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 227–9. Yakovenko, Igor. Proshloe i nastoyaschee Rossii: imperskiy ideal i natsional’niy interes, Polis, 4, 1997, 91. Yasin, Evgeniy. Fantomnye boli ushedshei imperii, in Posle Imperii. Edited by Igor Kliamkin. Moscow: Liberal Mission Foundation, 2007, 5.

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Chapter 6

American Liberalism and the Imperial Temptation Paul Musgrave and Dan Nexon

The first decade of the twenty-first century marked a new iteration of debate about ‘American Empire’. The 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the promulgation of the so-called Bush Doctrine, and the debate preceding the invasion of Iraq drove interest in the idea that the United States was, or was becoming, an imperial power. The proposition was not new: critics of American foreign policy had long criticized its putatively imperialist nature. However, this time many defenders of the US role in the world embraced the notion of American Empire. Numerous scholars and commentators seized the notion and ran with it. The debate transformed Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian dedicated to rehabilitating the image of the British Empire, into a major public intellectual in the United States.1 Michael Ignatieff published two well-read articles in the New York Times Magazine about the lessons of empire for the United States. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay (2003) argued in the New York Times that the United States has been an empire since it acquired the Philippines after the Spanish–American War in 1898. The choice, they maintained, was not ‘if’ the United States had an empire but ‘what kind’ of empire it would have: whether it would be a multilateral empire of consent or a unilateral one of coercion. Others argued for more precise understandings of ‘empire’ and its relationship to the United States. G. John Ikenberry warned against the ‘imperial temptation’ generated by the War on Terror, and specifically criticized the Bush administration’s foreign policy for its neo-imperialist character. In contrast to Daalder and Lindsay, Ikenberry argued that liberal–internationalist multilateralism is an alternative to empire. After World War II, the United States built an international order composed largely of multilateral institutions. This order signalled precisely that the United States would not exploit its dominant position to engage in empirebuilding (Ikenberry 2001, 2004, 2011). The choice, then, was whether Washington 1  Prior to his ascendency, Ferguson was perhaps best known outside of Britain for arguing that Germany engaged in World War I for defensive reasons, and that the UK should have allowed a German victory. Doing so, according to Ferguson, would have enabled London to retain its global empire and led to a peaceful European order. For an evisceration of Ferguson, see Michael Lind (2011).

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would consolidate a rule-based order along liberal internationalist lines or pursue a self-defeating imperial agenda. As he argued, advocates of Bush foreign policy: Call for American unilateral and pre-emptive, even preventive, use of force, facilitated if possible by coalitions of the willing – but ultimately unconstrained by the rules and norms of the international community. At the extreme, these notions form a neo-imperial vision in which the United States arrogates to itself a global role of setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice. It is a vision in which sovereign becomes more absolute for America even as it becomes conditional for countries that challenge Washington’s standards of internal and external behavior. (Ikenberry 2006, 214)

Ten years on, two important issues remain to be settled in the ‘American Empire’ debate: • What is the relationship between liberal foreign policy and empire? Does liberalism account for the American ‘imperial temptation’, as some argue, or are liberal internationalism and American Empire alternatives to one another? • What specifically renders the Bush Doctrine imperial? Despite the many caricatures of George W. Bush as a Roman emperor, there is nothing obvious about the connection between unilateralism and empire. Unilateralism, especially in defence of national security, is a prerogative of sovereignty. Answering both these questions requires a defensible conception of empire. Those who want to claim that the United States is certainly, definitely, ineffably an empire base their claims on what we might charitably call ‘loose’ definitions of the term. ‘Empire’ too often becomes a synonym for any state that possesses a large territory, a big military, force-projection capability and lots of influence. For their part, many of those who deny that the United States is an empire also stack the deck by introducing irrelevant criteria. Examples of both forms of hyperbole come from Bush administration insiders. Journalist Ron Suskind (2004) recorded one senior Bush aide in 2004 as crowing that ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ By contrast, Vice President Richard Cheney declared, ‘[I]f we were an empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the Earth’s surface than we do. That’s not the way we operate.’2 In this chapter, we put forth a better definition of empire. We offer an idealtypical account of the structure of empires that allows us to spot the existence of imperial relations in international and domestic politics. This approach makes 2  Quoted in Schmitt and Landler (2004).

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clear which aspects of international liberalism generate an impulse toward empire and which mitigate it. Neoconservatism creates an imperial temptation not because of its putatively illiberal characteristics, but because of its emphasis on expanding the zone of democratic governance at the domestic level. To the extent that states pursue the aggressive democratization of other states, they inevitably form informal imperial relations with other states. Given that the core of imperial relations is a hierarchical relationship between the core and the periphery, the imposition of a new form of rule, even one that is quintessentially liberal, is inescapably imperial. By contrast, liberal internationalism of the type endorsed by Ikenberry emphasizes liberal global governance, which militates against the formation of informal empires among states. However, rather than replacing informal empire altogether, liberal internationalism displaces imperial relationships and functions into the hands of international organizations and multilateral coalitions. How (Not) to Think About Empire What are empires? Empires are a specific kind of political community – one organized along different principles from nation-states, city-leagues and any number of other ways that human beings have exercised authority over one another. Empires are rimless hub-and-spoke systems in which lines of authority run from an imperial core (or metropole) to distinctive peripheries (or segments), but not between peripheries themselves (see Figure 6.1). The core’s position as the crucial broker between peripheries provides it with important political advantages over each individual imperial province, including its ability to direct the allocation of resources in the imperial system. Critically, empires are both hierarchical (in that the core is superordinate to peripheral actors) and based upon distinct bargains (heterogenous contracting) between the core and each segment of the periphery. The rimless hub-and-spoke character of empires has much to do with the way that empires combine indirect rule with heterogeneous contracting. In empires, central authorities – the emperor and other imperial officials residing in the core (whatever their title may be) – rule indirectly via local intermediaries who enjoy significant latitude over many areas of rule-making and enforcement. Whether called ‘governors’, ‘proconsuls’, ‘viceroys’ or ‘satraps’, these intermediaries may hail from the core, from other provinces or from the periphery in which they exercise authority. Some, such as in so-called ‘indirect rule’ systems, may be indigenous rulers incorporated into the imperial system – such as the Princes of Muscovy under the Golden Horde – while others may be imperial bureaucrats appointed to run a periphery on behalf of the empire (Tilly 1997; Nexon and Wright 2007; Barkey 2008; Nexon 2009, chap. 4). Imperial polities resemble federations insofar as constituent units retain – or are created with – different institutional personalities. The core is not merely distinctive from the periphery, but peripheries are distinctive from one another in terms of (variously) language, cultural identity and political organization. In federations,

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Empire with four peripheries

however, the basic contract that binds units together – that specifies their rights and obligations – is the same. The 50 US states, for example, are all subject to the US Constitution (Tilly 1997). In empires, the distinctiveness of individual units is further enhanced by the existence of different terms of incorporation for each of them. Consider the difference between Rome and different provinces in the early empire, how Ottoman rulers treated different ethnic groups, or the broad range of relations that characterized London’s authoritative interactions with Ireland, Indian principalities, Hong Kong, Egypt and Rhodesia during the late nineteenth century (see Newbury 2003; Barkey 2008; Burbank and Cooper 2010).3 3  This account of empire has its limits and exceptions. We tend not to describe Canada as an empire, but its constitution treats the francophone province of Quebec differently than its Anglophone provinces. One reason is that rule does not simply flow from the centre, but flows to the centre from localities via principles of elective representation. However, another is that the definition of empire we offer is ideal-typical in character; it provides a stylized definition of empire against which to judge real political entities. We will return to this point in short order.

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Conceptualizing empire as a political-organizational form not only helps clarify the relationship between liberal order and empire, but also highlights a number of common mistakes made in discussions of empire and contemporary order. Many scholarly and popular definitions of empire associate the term with great-power status or with overwhelming power. Lieven (1995: 8) argues that ‘an empire has to be a great power’. Some go even further and render ‘great power’ and ‘empire’ conceptually equivalent. For example, Lefever (1999: 4–5) defines ‘an imperial power’ as ‘an established state having the military, technical, and economic capacity to influence, often profoundly, the daily lives and culture of peoples beyond its territory’. It is true, of course, that most great powers have controlled empires – for most of human history empire has been the most successful and enduring means of acquiring significant military and economic might. However, the two concepts are logically independent. Twenty-first-century Japan, Germany and France are all great powers, but they are not, in the main, imperial ones. Nor are all empires great powers. No sane person would consider prewar Belgium a great power, yet, as the Congolese can attest, it was most certainly an imperial one. Making this distinction highlights that conflating relative international power with imperial status biases the debate in favour of those who want to identify the United States as an empire. It is undeniable that the United States is a global hegemon – albeit a declining one – and the world’s sole military superpower. Even as its relative decline continues, Washington will remain one of only a handful of great powers, and likely primus inter pares among that select group. Some advocates of the existence of an ‘American Empire’, of course, argue that ‘hegemony’ is merely a euphemism for informal empire (e.g. Ferguson 2003), but they are wrong. Hegemonic powers do not exercise rule over the domestic affairs of weaker states. Nor do hegemonic orders blur the distinction between international and domestic politics that typically characterizes relations among sovereign states. Imperial relations operate differently than those found in unipolar anarchy or hegemonic orders precisely because of the importance of imperial penetration into the domestic sphere (Doyle 1986; Nexon and Wright 2007; Nexon 2008). The definition we employ differs from that presented by Spruyt in this volume in our strict emphasis on structure. Like Spruyt’s definition, the structural view of empire is one that applies to empires across time and space; moreover, we share his goal of elaborating an ideal-typical conception of the phenomenon. We also converge on a shared understanding of empire as inescapably hierarchical, asymmetric and heterogeneous. Our differences are thus outnumbered by our similarities. However, whereas Spruyt focuses on formal empire, we believe that contemporary manifestations of imperial phenomena are almost certain to be ‘informal’. Given the opprobrium that attaches to the term ‘empire’ in contemporary international discourse, even a perfectly imperial polity would probably decline the title. Finally, and most important, we do not consider the ‘mode of legitimation’ of empire in this typology. This is an important topic, but it is not one that contributes much to the understanding of the subjects we investigate in this chapter. Indeed, the grammar of such legitimation claims (if not the specific

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content) seems to vary little across empires. Our wager is that a structural account of empire yields a parsimonious and powerful account of the conduct, expansion and weaknesses associated with imperial strategies, which is our concern. Ideal Types and Structural Similarities In our view, concepts such as ‘unipolar anarchy’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘empire’ are best conceptualized as ideal types. Actual political relationships and organizations invariably depart from idealized definitions; they often combine elements of different types. For example, the United States did form imperial relationships with Iraq and Afghanistan during the first decade of the twenty-first century by virtue of occupying them, ruling them through a variety of different intermediaries, and developing different asymmetric bargains with them. However, those imperial relationships did not mean that the totality of US foreign relations had an imperial character. Washington’s relations with the UK, France, Russia and China contained few or no imperial characteristics. Furthermore, US relations with Iraq and Afghanistan deviated in important ways from ideal-typical empires. In particular, the United States did not monopolize the external relations of either Iraq or Afghanistan. By the same token, aspects of US–Japanese and US–Korean security relations have had an imperial cast. For instance, in wartime, South Korean troops will fight under American command (an arrangement set to expire in 2015) – a classic example of imperial rule (Yonhap News Agency 2011). How do we identify relationships as being imperial in character? We look for structural similarities between them and our ideal-typical description of imperial systems. However, this is not simply a matter of definition. Rather, it is because similarly structured relationships operate according to similar mechanisms and processes. Indeed, we agree with those who argue that similarities in the formal properties of relationships will lead to similar dynamics even if the content – the meanings associated with those relationships – are distinctive. It follows that a variety of different motivations can produce – whether intentionally or unintentionally – imperial modes of organization, and that the status of any set of relations as imperial is independent of what people call them. The fact that US officials rejected the label ‘empire’ to describe the occupation of Iraq – and that international legal opinion agrees that occupation is not the same as empire – does not change the fact that, for close to 10 years, US–Iraqi relations took on an imperial form. Nor should it distract us from how imperial dynamics operated in that relationship.4 In sum, an adequate account of liberalism and the ‘imperial temptation’ derives from understanding ‘empire’ as an organizational form, recognizing that imperial relationships may form for a variety of reasons, and identifying those relationships by comparing them with a baseline derived from historical empires. 4  It is no accident that various counterinsurgency principles used in Iraq derived from the lessons of wars of imperial pacification in Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

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Other approaches, particularly those that equate empire with ‘powerful states’ or refuse to recognize a distinction between empire and hegemony, confuse the issue by rendering all post-1945 US foreign relations ‘imperial’ by definitional fiat. Neoconservativism and Internationalism as Flavours of Liberalism As we noted at the outset, one of the most interesting aspects of the ‘American Empire’ debate was the way it cut across ideological boundaries. Many supporters of the Bush Administration not only embraced the characterization of the United States as an empire, but also described it as the heir of the British Empire. They argued that, like Britain before it, the United States must use its imperial might to promote international liberalism and democracy.5 Mainstream critics of Bush foreign policy, in contrast, accused it of abandoning international liberalism. The specific policy dimensions of this debate also cut across ideological lines. A number of prominent liberals endorsed the culmination of the Bush Doctrine – the US-led invasion of Iraq – while a number of traditional conservative establishment foreign-policy figures opposed it. Indeed, the rise of neoconservative foreign-policy principles in their postCold War variant scrambled the conventional realist–liberal divide embraced by both pundits and international relations theorists. Neoconservative foreign-policy principles adopt elements of liberal internationalism, such as the importance of liberal values like freedom, democracy and open markets, in foreign policy decision-making. While many realists decry the tendency of the United States to engage in ideological crusades, neoconservatives, like liberals, argue that Washington should use its influence to enlarge the community of democratic nations. Unlike liberal internationalists, they express intense scepticism about the power of international law, norms and institutions to restrain power-political competition. The neoconservative call for the United States to embrace power-maximization strategies, its dismissal of international institutions and its penchant for unilateralism each reflect realist criticisms of liberal internationalism. These positions, however, do not place them outside the liberal fold. For some neoconservatives, the problem with existing international institutions lies in their illiberalism – specifically, the influence they grant to non-democratic and illiberal regimes. The United States therefore must embrace unilateralism out of necessity: not only does the influence of illiberal regimes hamper effective multilateral responses in institutions such as the United Nations, but democratic allies – whether from corrupt economic entanglements, a lack of commitment to liberal principles or willful ignorance – sometimes fail to recognize the threat posed by the enemies of liberal order. Even when United States allies acknowledge the dangers posed by terrorists, rogue 5  We put aside the contentious issue of how much Britain actually exported democratic governance.

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states and authoritarian great powers, they often lack an appreciation for the key role of military force in protecting civilization from such anti-democratic threats (see, e.g., Kagan 1998, 2007; Boot 2004). For others, faith in international institutions is almost always misplaced; rather, the United States should combine military power with democratic purpose. Joshua Muravchik (2007), a prominent neoconservative foreign-policy pundit, argues: The military historian Max Boot has aptly labeled [neoconservativism] “hard Wilsonianism”. It does not mesh neatly with the familiar dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists”. It is indeed idealistic in its internationalism and its faith in democracy and freedom, but it is hardheaded, not to say jaundiced, in its image of our adversaries and its assessment of international organizations. Nor is its idealism to be confused with the idealism of the “peace” camp. Over the course of the past century, various schemes for keeping the peace – the League of Nations, the UN, the treaty to outlaw war, arms-control regimes – have all proved fatuous. In the meantime, what has in fact kept the peace (whenever it has been kept) is something quite different: strength, alliances, and deterrence. Also in the meantime, “idealistic” schemes for promoting not peace but freedom – self-determination for European peoples after World War I, decolonization after World War II, the democratization of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, the global advocacy of human rights – have brought substantial and beneficial results.

As Schmidt and Williams (2008: 200) argue, by ‘embracing democracy as the universally best form of government, and by committing themselves to spreading democracy across the globe, neoconservatives are in important respects the heirs of Wilsonian liberalism’. All of this helps make sense of one dimension of the relationship between empire and liberal order. In his essay ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, Immanuel Kant (1991) argued that the elimination of warfare requires a world composed of republican regimes, linked by trade and joined together in a federation of states. For Kant, each of these conditions reinforced one another, leading to an equilibrium in all three conjoined to eliminate warfare. However, contemporary international liberals disagree – both in terms of policy and theory – over the relative importance of each (see, e.g. Ray 2003; Chernoff 2004). For our present purposes, we should distinguish between two extreme positions on the proper character of ‘liberal order’: one that exclusively focuses on the liberal character of the states that populate the international system, and another that overwhelmingly privileges the existence of a liberal order among states. We might term the first liberal enlargement and the second intergovernmental liberalism. The former concerns itself most with state-society liberal practices, and the latter with inter-state liberal practices. Whatever Kantians might think about the direction of historical processes, in practice these two extremes generate tensions with one another. For example, a commitment to intergovernmental liberalism – in

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the form of such principles as the recognition of sovereign equality, mutual selfrestraint and multilateral decision-making – effectively shields autocratic regimes against international pressure to liberalize their policies and institutions. A robust commitment to liberal enlargement, on the other hand, implies a relaxation of state sovereignty. The tradeoff for liberals, then, is between the degree of hierarchy in inter-state relations that they are willing to tolerate in the advancement of their values. The typology of empire we present depends on establishment of strictly hierarchical relationships between core and periphery. Yet we could imagine a powerful United States that, in the (mostly rhetorical) tradition of the ‘city on a hill’, promoted liberal enlargement via exemplarism, without establishing authoritative control over targeted illiberal states. Such an American policy would not be tantamount to empire. Taking empire seriously should also inoculate us to the belief that multilateralism is a cure for empire. Because the typology is indifferent with respect to the composition of the actors that fill its structure, there is no reason why the core could not be a grouping of several liberal states that pursued liberal enlargement by pursuing a strategy of establishing imperial relations with target states. Our explanation of how liberal dynamics intersect with imperial structures thus makes Ikenberry’s ‘imperial temptation’ more than poetic. Instead, the temptation arises from the fact that contemporary liberal states are powerful enough to eschew exemplarism and pursue enlargement via more direct, imperial means. In the United States, much of the debate between neoconservatives and liberal internationalists hinges on the relative importance of transnational and intergovernmental liberalism. Neoconservatives privilege transnational liberalism over intergovernmental liberalism. Liberal internationalists, in contrast, tilt in favour of the latter. Hierarchy, Liberalism and Empire Liberal intergovernmentalism and liberal enlargement become most relevant to the question of ‘American Empire’ in terms of how they interact with international hierarchy. The relationship between liberal order and empire is illustrated in Figure 6.2. The vertical axis represents different degrees of commitment to liberal intergovernmentalism and liberal enlargement; the middle point constitutes a balance between them. The horizontal axis represents growing hierarchy, understood as an increasing concentration of relative power among fewer and fewer political communities. The contemporary international order contains significant elements of hierarchy (Lake 2003, 2009; Hobson and Sharman 2005; Donnelly 2006). For example, the United States took the lead role in creating a liberal order after World War II, and it has used its superior military and economic influence to sustain it for the intervening six-and-a-half decades (Kindleberger 1973; Ruggie 1982; Deudney and Ikenberry 1999; Ikenberry 2001). The overall character of the international

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Figure 6.2

Liberal empire and liberal hegemony

system matters to the relationship between liberalism and empire; as we delineate below, a dominant power that evinces a strong preference for liberal enlargement will tend to form imperial relationships with other states. However, what matters more than the degree of hierarchy in the international system is the degree to which authority matters in the relations among specific states. Our claims are straightforward: • Genuine multilateralism tends to predominate when relations among relevant states are relatively equal and those relations are governed by a range of balances between enlargement and intergovernmentalism.6 • As power relations become more hierarchical but liberal intergovernmentalism predominates, we will tend to see the formation of liberal

6  The figure may be somewhat confusing, insofar as we associate liberal hegemony with the creation and maintenance of multilateral institutions, for example, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and so forth. In this case, ‘liberal multilateralism’ refers simply to a multilateral order comprising roughly equal liberal-democratic states.

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hegemonic orders, that is, multilateral institutions and regimes undergirded and inflected by the leadership of dominant powers.7 • As power relations become more hierarchical but liberal enlargement predominates, we will tend to see the formation of liberal empires, that is, dominant states enforcing and maintaining elements of liberal order within the domestic spheres of other political communities via indirect rule and heterogeneous contracting. Treating intergovernmentalism and enlargement as two competing – and often contradictory – impulses in liberalism clarifies the liberal ‘imperial temptation’ better than a number of existing accounts. Desch (2007/2008), for example, argues that liberalism over-determined Washington’s embrace of imperial policies after 11 September 2001. Caverley (2010) claims, in contrast, that neoconservativism is illiberal because it rejects the pacifying effects of trade and institutions. Both neglect the fact that liberalism cashes out in a variety of different ways when it comes to foreign (and, for that matter, domestic) policy. Indeed, one need not adopt a particularly close reading of different forms of liberal ideology to understand why powerful states that embark on aggressive liberal enlargement tend to form imperial relationships with other polities. Through occupation, the use of coercive diplomacy, and other means, such states create patterns of formal and informal indirect rule and heterogeneous bargaining. They do so in order to consolidate, maintain and expand the liberal writ, thereby maximizing the geopolitical space in which markets, individual rights and/or democracy predominate. When states adopt a more intergovernmental form of liberalism, they may also seek liberal enlargement, but they restrict their ability to utilize informal interstate empire as means to that end. Hence the neoconservative frustration with the ways in which the United Nations, as well as a number of other international institutions, empower autocratic states and provide them with a mechanism to constrain Washington’s ability to promote liberal democratic principles. We should keep in mind, however, that the practice of post-war US foreign policy has usually involved attempts to balance these competing impulses – not simply with one another but also with power-political imperatives. Thus, most administrations have pursued some mix of liberal enlargement and liberal intergovernmentalism. Even the Bush administration, much derided for its unilateralism and antipathy towards international institutions, worked through international institutions in a variety of different policy arenas. By the same token, both so-called neoconservatives and liberal internationalists have advocated – and even played an important role in bringing into being – policies that favour the formation of imperial relations. The US-led occupation of Iraq rendered the latter a temporary imperial province: Washington ruled Iraq 7  On these features of US hegemony, see Ruggie (1982); Deudney and Ikenberry (1999); Ikenberry (2001, 2011).

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via local intermediaries – first Westerners in the Coalition Provisional Authority and then Iraqis in the provisional government – based on evolving bargains that differed from those involved in US relations with other client states. However, liberal internationalists, not neoconservatives, imposed agreements on Germany and Japan after World War II that gave the US significant control over their security policy (see Cooley 2008; Cooley and Spruyt 2009).8 The issue is not so much one of ‘neoconservativism’ vs ‘liberal internationalism’, but how specific actors balance the competing pulls of liberal enlargement and intergovernmentalism. As Jon Monten (2005) notes, the champions of US formal empire after the Spanish– American War could hardly be described as ‘neoconservatives’: indeed, much of the impetus for Washington’s colonial experiments in the Philippines and other former Spanish territories was rooted in progressive ideology. International Liberalism and the Displacement of Imperial Functions Liberal internationalists often argue that their focus on intergovernmentalism need not come at the expense of a growing sphere of domestic liberal governance. Although autocratic regimes have, for example, subverted the United Nations Human Rights Council, liberal internationalists argue that there is no way that the United States (or any other great power) could compel many of those states to respect human rights. Indeed, the United States itself frequently supports illiberal regimes when doing so advances its power-political interests. At the same time, they contend that liberal international order ultimately spreads domestic liberalism by: • encouraging and enforcing compliance with liberal norms and practices, such as respect for human rights, peaceful resolution of disputes and open trade; • empowering individuals and groups to push for political liberalization within autocratic states; • facilitating pro-democratic and pro-liberal actions by sovereign states, such as humanitarian interventions; and • engaging in nation-building, security-sector reform and peacekeeping activities. These positive effects, liberal internationalists argue, outweigh the negative ones that stem from autocratic and illiberal states using their voice opportunities and votes to stymie institutional action. In the long run, they claim, multilateralism will advance both liberal international order and liberal domestic order. Regardless of the truth of the neo-Wilsonian argument, it does call attention to an important aspect of the evolving post-1945 liberal order, which now includes 8  The United States also renegotiated the terms of these agreements over time so as to make them significantly less imperial in character. See also Sandars (2000).

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the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade process, the World Trade Organization and NATO. In many ways, the postwar order constitutes an attempt to preserve the benefits of (liberal) imperial order without its costs. Empires often promote public order and facilitate trade; they deal with what we now call ‘failed states’; and they spread technology, knowledge and ideas.9 Contemporary liberal internationalism values all of these public and private international goods, but it sees empires as inherently illegitimate owing to their reliance on coercion, their denial of self-determination to imperialized peoples, as well as the killing, pillaging, starvation and destruction that tends to accompany their rise and rule. The solution they offer, in effect, is to ‘democratize’ imperial functions by handing them over to institutions that can claim – even if often in a rather strained sense – to represent the ‘international community’. Such displacement of imperial activities involves more than simply ‘functions’: it leads to the formation of empire-like arrangements. Recall our earlier claim that imperial relationships do not depend on the specific meanings associated with them or the specific actors implicated in them. Businesses may be organized along imperial lines, with a central authority exercising authority indirectly over segmented departments via differential bargains – such as in some multinational corporations or particularly unpleasant office environments. We can speak of an informal US empire to the extent that Washington forms imperial relationships with other, nominally sovereign and independent states. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent an imperial relationship from existing in which an international organization, multilateral alliance or collection of actors occupies the position of the core/central authorities. The telltale signs would, as before, be the establishment of inter-actor hierarchy and heterogeneous contracting. For example, peacekeeping and stability operations often are composed of multiple countries, international institutions and even non-governmental organizations. After the 1995 Dayton Accords Bosnia and Herzegovina became, in effect, a trustee of a body known as the Peace Implementation Council, the majority of whose representatives are drawn from NATO member states and which operates under the authority of the UN. The Peace Implementation Council appoints the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, who in turn has significant authority over Bosnia’s central and regional governments, including the right to dismiss public officials and implement binding decisions.10 Although it

9  Those seeking to rehabilitate the image of empires often stress these benefits while downplaying their cost. They tend to laud the British Empire, in particular, whose former colonies do tend to be disproportionately democratic and whose mantle the United States arguably took up. See, for example, Ferguson (2004); Lal (2004). 10  Office of the High Representative and EU Special Representative, ‘General Information’. Accessed 4 June 2011: http://www.ohr.int/ohr-info/gen-info/.

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has been roughly 16 years since the Dayton Accords, most observers believe that Bosnia would collapse in the absence of foreign troops and oversight.11 Conditional aid offered by the IMF and other organs of liberal global governance sometimes also positions them as central authorities in imperial relationships. The crisis in Greece and other peripheral European states (including, as of the time of writing, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal) demonstrates how international institutions as such can find themselves playing the role of imperial cores deeply interested in the governance of states. Although Athens and other capitals forced to accept international assistance from the European Union and the IMF have tried to resist those bodies’ calls for the remaking of their government and their economy, there is nonetheless a point at which fiscal urgency begets political concessions. The colonial nature of these interventions was clear to the Irish Times in November 2010, as ‘the Germans’ (as they were called) took suzerainty over the Irish economy: It may seem strange to some that The Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. … The Irish people do not need to be told that, especially for small nations, there is no such thing as absolute sovereignty. We know very well that we have made our independence more meaningful by sharing it with our European neighbours. We are not naive enough to think that this State ever can, or ever could, take large decisions in isolation from the rest of the world. What we do expect, however, is that those decisions will still be our own. A nation’s independence is defined by the choices it can make for itself. (Editors 2010)

In the Greek and Irish cases, as with many states on the receiving end of conditional assistance, the hierarchical and asymmetric nature of the contractual relationship between the core and the periphery is perhaps more evident to those in Athens and Dublin – or Jakarta and Bangkok – than to those in Washington or Brussels. Efforts to bring dependent regimes into compliance with liberal norms have been written into World Bank policy as well (Mallaby 2004). We therefore need to be careful about the relationship between liberal intergovernmentalism, liberal enlargement and empire. Liberal-intergovernmentalist tendencies do, as its advocates claim, restrain imperial impulses within liberal 11  As of 4 January 2001, 1600 European troops remained in Bosnia. The United States and NATO engage in significant defence-institution building activities in the country designed to enhance not only the effectiveness of its military but also its interoperability with NATO forces. See US Department of State, ‘Background Note: Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Accessed 6 June 2011: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2868.htm.

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polities insofar as they reduce the likelihood of, for instance, Washington forming an imperial relationship with another state. However, they also transfer imperial functions onto multilateral organizations and international institutions. In consequence, liberal intergovernmentalism itself promotes the formation of imperial relationships. Conclusions Liberalism produces an imperial temptation: it holds that the spread of liberal democracy renders the world more peaceful, more cooperative and better able to improve human welfare. These beliefs imply that, in one way or another, liberal governments ought to promote their values and generally expand the sum total of global political freedom. In the United States, this viewpoint has led to a variety of strategies. Some have held that Washington best serves the cause by standing aloof from foreign entanglements and providing an example to the rest of the world. Others have advocated more active measures in support of liberalism, including the assumption of formal empire.12 However, these beliefs also suggest two different layers of liberal governance, one operating in the domestic sphere and one regulating relations between states. These two threads stand in tension with one another insofar as liberal intergovernmentalism restricts the ability of the liberal states to compel others to respect human rights, hold free elections and otherwise liberalize their domestic spheres. This tension helps explain why liberal internationalists (who privilege intergovernmentalism) accuse neoconservatives (who privilege liberal enlargement) of being imperialists. However, unilateralism does not, of itself, render a liberal state and imperial power. Rather, the pursuit of liberal enlargement generates imperial relationships in which Washington acts as a central authority ruling over other states via local intermediaries. As we have argued, however, intergovernmentalism generates its own set of imperial relationships – even if the position of ‘central authority’ is occupied by a variety of international institutions and agents of sovereign states. It should come as little surprise that these relationships usually involve the imposition of liberal policies and principles – whether economic or political – on nominally sovereign states. Indeed, what we might call the ‘empire problematique’ stands at the centre of questions of global order. International relations theorists have tended to see the primary problem of world politics as how to achieve order in the face of anarchy, that is, the absence of a central authority to make and enforce rules. However, it might be more accurate to say that the primary problem of world politics is how to achieve order if we reject the legitimacy of empire. The liberal internationalist 12  For good overviews, see Stephanson (1995); Jackson and Nexon (2003); Jackson (2006).

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solution is not so much to abandon imperial logics, but to attempt to displace them onto putatively legitimate agents, such as the UN and the IMF. In that sense, Daalder and Lindsay were right: the debate between liberal internationalists and neoconservatives is not whether empire, but in what form. However that, in turn, implies that there is little uniquely ‘American’ about the ‘American Empire’ debate. It is instead merely the latest manifestation of a fundamental tension of liberalism. The shift of economic and political power to emerging states may resolve this question, at least in the medium term, by simply removing the neoconservative option. No major rising country – certainly not China – appears set to legitimate regime change, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, with as comparatively little resistance as Washington has faced since the end of the Cold War. (Similarly, we might well wonder whether even the American foreignpolicy establishment will be eager to repeat the experience of establishing imperial relationships with newly conquered provinces.) The real test, however, will be whether such countries will sustain the Bretton Woods and other institutions that Western powers have used to promote liberal ideas through quasi-imperial means. References Barkey, Karen (2008). Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Boot, Max (2004). ‘Think Again: Neocons’. Foreign Policy (January): 20–28. Burbank, Jane and Frederick Cooper (2010). Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Caverley, Jonathan D. (2010). ‘Power and Democratic Weakness: Neoconservatism and Neoclassical Realism’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38(3): 593–614. Chernoff, Fred (2004). ‘The Study of Democratic Peace and Progress in International Relations’. International Studies Review 6(1): 49–78. Cooley, Alexander (2008). Base Politics. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press. Cooley, Alexander and Hendrik Spruyt (2009). Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Daalder, Ivo H. and James M. Lindsay (2003). American Empire, Not ‘If’ but ‘What Kind’. New York Times, 10 May 2003, A19. Desch, Michael (2007/2008). ‘America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy’. International Security 32(3): 7–43. Deudney, Daniel and G. John Ikenberry (1999). ‘The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order’. Review of International Studies 25(2): 179–96. Donnelly, Jack (2006). ‘Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Security’. European Journal of International Relations 12(2): 139–70. Doyle, Michael (1986). Empires. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

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Editors (2010). ‘Was it All for This?’ The Irish Times. Ferguson, Niall (2003). ‘Hegemony or Empire?’ Foreign Affairs 82(5): 154–61. Ferguson, Niall (2004). Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York, Penguin. Hobson, John M. and J.C. Sharman (2005). ‘The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change’. European Journal of International Relations 11(1): 63–98. Ikenberry, G. John (2001). After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major War. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Ikenberry, G. John (2004). ‘Liberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar Age’. Review of International Studies 30(4): 609–30. Ikenberry, G. John (2006). Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics. Malden, MA, Polity. Ikenberry, G. John (2011). Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus (2006). Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press. Jackson, Patrick and Daniel Nexon (2003). ‘Representation is Futile? American Anti-Collectivism and the Borg’. In To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (ed.), Jutta Weldes. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 143– 68. Kagan, Robert (1998). ‘The Benevolent Empire’. Foreign Policy 111: 24–35. Kagan, Robert (2007). ‘End of Dreams, Return of History’. Policy Review 144: 17–44. Kant, Immanuel (1991). Political Writings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kindleberger, Charles (1973). The World in Depression 1929–1939. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Lake, David A. (2003). ‘The New Sovereignty in International Relations’. International Studies Review 5(3): 303–24. Lake, David A. (2009). Hierarchy in International Relations. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press. Lal, Deepak (2004). In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order. New York City, Palgrave Macmillan. Lefever, Ernest W. (1999). America’s Imperial Burden: Is the Past Prologue? Boulder, CO, Westview. Lieven, Dominic (1995). ‘The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities’. Journal of Contemporary History 30(4): 607–36. Lind, Michael (2011). ‘Niall Ferguson and the Brain-Dead American Right’. Retrieved 24 June 2011, from http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_ room/2011/05/24/lind_niall_fergsuon.

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Mallaby, Sebastian (2004). The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York City, Council on Foreign Relations. Monten, Jonathan (2005). ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy’. International Security 29(4): 112–56. Muravchik, Joshua (2007). ‘The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism’. Commentary. Newbury, Colin (2003). Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Nexon, Daniel (2008). ‘What’s This, Then? “Romanes Eunt Domus”?’ International Studies Perspectives 9: 300–308. Nexon, Daniel (2009). The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Nexon, Daniel and Thomas Wright (2007). ‘What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate’. American Political Science Review 101: 253–71. Ray, James Lee (2003). ‘A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Peace Research Program’. In Progress in International Relations Theory (ed.), Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman. Cambridge, MIT Press, 205–43. Ruggie, John Gerard (1982). ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’. International Organization 36(2): 379–415. Sandars, C.T. (2000). America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Brian C. and Michael C. Williams (2008). ‘The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconseratives Versus Realists’. Security Studies 17(2). Schmitt, Eric and Mark Landler (2004). Cheney Calls for More Unity in Fight Against Terrorism. New York Times, 10. Stephanson, Anders (1995). Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York, Hill & Wang. Suskind, Ron (2004). Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush. New York Times, 17 October, 44. Tilly, Charles (1997). ‘How Empires End’. In After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-building (ed.), Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen. Boulder, CO, Westview, 1–11. Yonhap News Agency (2011). Presidential adviser calls for swift reform of top military command. Retrieved on 5 November 2012 from http://english. yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2011/06/08/13/0301000000AEN201106080101003 15F.HTML.

Afterword Yale H. Ferguson

What a difference a few years can make in the evolution of ‘buzz’ words and concepts in the popular media and imagination, policy-making circles, as well as what one might hope would be the more sober writings of public intellectuals and social scientists. Parker’s Introduction in his role as Editor of this thoughtprovoking collection notes the rise of and at least relative decline in the currency of New World Order, New American Century, War on Terror, the Democratic Peace and Globalization. (I take his point, although as a longtime analyst of globalization, I believe that we are going to be viewing it as a multidimensional/ non-unilinear process and debating its various pros and cons for many years to come.) The Nexon and Musgrave chapter in this book uses as a springboard the fact that ‘American Empire’ was also a hot topic during the early years of the George W. Bush administration in the United States. Many neoconservatives relished the notion, as did Marxist and radical critics of the United States. How silly all that now seems, when US control over its closest allies in NATO is at a post-World War II low ebb, the shaky Afghan and Iraqi governments (such as they are) regularly thumb their noses at Washington, and domestic political gridlock has recently been so paralysing as to threaten US default on its sovereign debt. Sic transit gloria, although surely there was always a lot more gloria than imperial substance. Imperialistic – or better, imperious (Motyl 2006) – behaviour, outrageous hubris, militant unilateralism and delusions of grandeur do not themselves an ‘empire’ make. Nevertheless, it should be equally obvious that it would now also be a serious mistake to underestimate remaining US political/economic/military assets and influence in the contemporary world. As is the case with ‘globalization’, the meaning of the central concept of ‘empire’ is still extremely contested, which allows for much loose and confusing talk and writing about the subject. Thankfully, the authors of the chapters in this collection are keenly aware of the problem of definition, try to be more precise and yet also explore linkages with related concepts. Indeed, Spruyt’s chapter specifically on empire as an analytic concept or ideal type is the best such discussion I have seen. My frequent co-author, Richard W. Mansbach, and I (Ferguson and Mansbach 2008; see also Ferguson 2008) argue that there are at least four approaches to defining ‘empire’, each of which has its particular utility and also consequences. The first simply accepts as ‘examples’ or a sort of informal ideal type the familiar list of empires that practically everyone accepts: Roman, Spanish, British, Ottoman, Tsarist Russian, and so on. The second approach is more determinedly

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empirical in that it attempts to extract from historical cases what might be termed the ‘essence of empire’ and refine that into a formal ideal type. I shall have more to say about informal and formal ideal types shortly. A third ‘constructivist’ approach bases its notion of empire in a substantial part on the way those both inside and outside a particular polity appear to describe or regard it. For instance, Gravier’s essay draws an interesting parallel between the Byzantine Empire’s bureaucracy and that of the EU. On the one hand, it is intriguing (as she mentions) that José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, said during a press conference in 2009: ‘Sometimes, I like to think of the European Union as an empire’. On the other hand, he quickly denied that the EU was an empire and, in fact, most EU officials and attentive publics would shy away from that language, preferring to think (at most) of federal or confederal comparisons instead. Makarychev in his chapter on present-day Russia, comments on ‘the strong appeal of the imperial discourse in a situation widely and customarily described as “post-imperial”’. Yet the Russian government has as yet failed to establish the sort of firm ‘special relationships’ (see also the Haugevik chapter) that might seem to presage a re-establishment of empire and many official and unofficial voices have seriously questioned whether imperial policies would have any chance of success. Spruyt maintains that today ‘formal empire has [largely] receded from the stage’ because it ‘is in tension with the constitutive rules of the international system’ that emphasize ‘territorial sovereignty’. A fourth and final approach is overtly normative or even pejorative. It labels a polity an ‘empire’ either for the purpose of praise or condemnation and, in some instances, amounts to little more than name-calling. Thus, as Spruyt observes: ‘Whether one agreed with the claim that US policy in the George W. Bush administration was imperialist depended as much on one’s political views as any reading of the particular characteristics of empires in general’. Ironically, even those neoconservatives who applauded the concept of ‘American Empire’ adamantly insisted that ‘boots on the ground’ in various parts of the world by no means signalled imperial intent. For their part, Marxists from Lenin to Hardt and Negri (2000) have long railed against capitalist imperialism, the latter going so far as almost to divorce ‘empire’ from any political centre and make it practically synonymous with ‘globalization’ as a whole. Theirs is a beautiful example of the triumph of ideology and rhetoric over any pretence of strict empiricism. Of course, there is some overlap among these four approaches to definition. The search for a formal ideal type usually begins with a careful comparison of well-known historical cases. Spruyt stresses that it is important to recognize both the ‘material’ and ‘ideational’ foundations of any form of rule. In fact, any good social scientist must readily acknowledge that all concepts and analytical approaches – indeed, ‘knowledge’ itself – are themselves ‘constructs’, rest on normative foundations and also inevitably have normative implications. There are many reasons why the search for the essence of empire – that is, for empire as formal ideal type – is so difficult. The traditional list of empires includes a very mixed bag of polities, each of which was somewhat distinctive

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and also evolved over time. For instance, the Roman Empire looked very different when it had ‘merely’ conquered other Italian territories, when it was at the height of its political expansion, and when it had to be split into two. All empires rise and decline, but the Chinese case illustrates that the cycle can sometimes be repeated several or many times. Parker wisely notes that ‘history may go into reverse’. Moreover, like contemporary sovereign states and any complex polity, historical empires exhibit enormous variety. Some were continually ‘in motion’, some were little more than regular raiding parties coupled with a sophisticated protection racket, some were mainly a string of trading posts, some were seaborne and others land-based, some had a strong cultural dimension, some were tightly administered, some featured but a thin veneer of imperial law and administration beneath which local rule and customs continued to flourish, some (see Spruyt) were universalistic in inclination, some in fact constituted world systems in their day, some were clearly bounded, and so on. If there is to be one ideal type for empire, what are its subtypes? Any number of analysts, including most of the authors in this volume, wrestle with a different question: what is the relationship between the empire ideal type and other political forms? How does it differ from and perhaps share some characteristics with the likes of ‘special relationship’, great-power ‘spheres of influence’, trusteeship, suzerainty, hegemony, federation or the ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ that (say Nexon and Musgrove) transfers ‘imperial functions onto multilateral organizations and international institutions’? For Ferguson and Mansbach (2008), Ferguson (2008), Watson (1992), and here particularly Spruyt, the answer lies in thinking in terms of a spectrum (Watson) or continuum. Spruyt makes the crucial point that an ideal type actually ‘performs its function’ when it is observed either not to capture all potential subtypes and/or to be shading off in the direction of another ideal type of rule. Well might we ask, especially if formal empires are out of fashion and even informal empires are almost impossible to establish (let alone maintain) in what Rosenau (see, for example, 1997) described as today’s world of an expanding range of actors and enormous ‘complexity’, ‘turbulence’ and ‘fragmegration’, why is it still useful and even important for us to be interested in empires? Part of the reason is that it encourages us to research and think about history. To be sure, as Parker points up, history is to some extent a ‘foreign country’ and there are perennial debates about how much of history is of our own construction and/or only in limited ways comparable to our own time. However, history does provide us with an almost limitless data set and also vastly extends the variety of actors and ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson’s famous term) for our consideration beyond the nation-state that was Anderson’s main concern. Despite all the work on globalization, which also has a usually neglected history of several millennia, most of the study of international relations – astonishing as it always seems to me – remains stuck in a state-centric time-warp that begins (at best) with Westphalia and boldly goes no further than relatively recent intergovernmental regimes.

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If blinkered state-centric scholars would read more about the past, they would readily discover, as Parker emphasizes, that the main political actors throughout the long stretch of human history have been empires rather than what Mansbach and I label ‘Westphalian states’. Furthermore, the emergence of most of the principal territorial states of Europe, where sovereignty and everything associated with it was supposed to have begun, is almost inseparable from empires. No sooner did fledgling states get themselves sort of together (e.g. Ferdinand and Isabella plus the reconquista), than they were off on imperial adventures to what were for them the farthest corners of the globe. Imagine what many European states today might have been like had they not simultaneously had empires. Hence it is no exaggeration to observe that states are frequently embedded in empires, empires profoundly shaped the evolution of states, and imperial memories frequently live on long after empires expire. Parker so rightly comments that empires ‘present the international order afresh, allowing us to understand the continuing presence of empires before it, and within it’. In fact, I submit that one of the most useful things about empires is that they can take us out of our familiar political universe of state boxes, interstate relations and intergovernmental institutions into a very different world of political forms and possibilities. Gravier’s chapter on Byzantium and the EU, for example, is a case in point. What strikes me is how ‘advanced’ that particular ancient empire’s bureaucracy was, far more sophisticated than European states managed to create until fairly late in modern times. Her chapter also points up yet again how truly unprecedented (not to say weird) the European experiment is and how fundamentally unclassifiable. I close by proposing that what may be most significant about our contemporary world is not ideal types like empire or sovereign state as such, but the ever-evolving range of subtypes and myriad other points along the continuum of polities. References Ferguson, Yale H. (2008). Approaches to Defining ‘Empire’ and Characterizing United States Influence in the Contemporary World. International Studies Perspectives 9: 272–80. Ferguson, Yale H. and Richard W. Mansbach (2008). Superpower, Hegemony, and Empire. In A World of Polities. London: Routledge. Hart, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Motyl, Alexander J. (2006). Empire Falls: Washington May be Imperious but it is not Imperial. Foreign Affairs 85: 190–94. Rosenau, James N. (1997). Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Adam (1992). The Evolution of International Society. London: Routledge.

Index

Abkhazia/South Ossetia and Kosovo parallels 124 action, political, empires as settings for 74–8, 134, 135 actors in empires 85–6 administrative systems, Byzantine Empire/ EU comparison civil service 51–8 financial 58–63, 64 mission and capacity 58–63 territorial organization 46–51 Afghanistan, 33, 96, 131, 136, 146 American empire see United States America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance (Dumbrell and Schäfer) 101 ancient empires 26–7 Anderson, Benedict 24, 33 armed forces, participation in 23 Armstrong, David 79 asymmetry in power 22 autonomy in empires’ subordinates 73–8 Barroso, José 41 Bartelson, Jens 73n8 Bonaparte, Napoleon, international order following 78–81 bounded empires 27–8 Bowman, Isaiah 84 Bréhier, L. 59 British Empire 20 Bull, Hedley 10 Burbank, Jane 1 Burk, Kathleen 100–101 Bush administration 20 Byzantine Empire/EU comparison administrative system 63–5 civil service systems 51–8 financial 58–63, 64

mission and capacity 58–63 territorial organization 46–51 themes system 47–8 use of for comparison 44 changes in empires 45–6 cities as centre of structure 49 defence of territory 50 different perceptions of empires 41 diverse polity 63 duration of Byzantium 44–6 expansion/shrinkage of empires 48–9 flexibility 63 network-based mode of governance of EU 62–3 political power, capacity for 49–50 reactive capacity 51 reasons for comparison 42 reforms, pace of 49 regional policies of the EU 50–51 structure of empire, focus on 43 temporal delineation 44–6 capacity, Byzantine Empire/EU comparison 58–63 capitalism, contradictions arising from 31–2 Caverley, J.D. 141 centre/periphery pattern 22 civic nations 119 civil services, Byzantine Empire/EU comparison 51–8 coercion in formal empires 22 Cold War, disorientating developments following 7–9 contiguity, consequences of 29–30 Cooley, Alexander 2, 103 Cooper, Frederick 1, 122 Crone, Patricia 26 Croxton, D. 72 Daalder, Ivo H. 146

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Danchev, A. 98 de-politicized empire, Russia as 125–7 democracy, development of in empires 28–9 democratic peace thesis 8, 35 Desch, M. 141 development, lack of in the metropole, as needed for empire 33 development agenda as post-Cold War development 8 disaggregated order as post-Cold War development 8 dislocation 116, 121 Downfall of Empire. A Byzantine Lesson, The (Shevkunov) (film) 118 Doyle, Michael 3, 9, 24, 75, 86, 97 Dumbrell, John 101 economic relations, inequality in 23–4 empire(s) adaptation of state theory to 2 alternative understanding of 97 ancient/modern 26–7 armed forces, participation in 23 asymmetry in power 22 bounded 27–8 capitalism and global trade 31–2 coercion in formal 22 contiguity, consequences of 29–30 defining 20–21, 96–7, 132–6, 134, 149–51 democracy, development of in 28–9 different perceptions of 41 economic relations, inequality in 23–4 European traditional thought 3 and external relations 24–5, 25 formal contemporary international system 30–33 indicators of 23–4 and hegemony/unipolarity, blurred distinction between 102–3 hierarchical governance 22 historical point of view, benefits of 9–10 hub and spoke pattern 22 and imperialism, comparison of meaning 4n2 informal, external relations of 24–5

inter-state relations trend, participants in 2–3 internal organization of 22–3, 23, 43, 132–6, 134 international relations, relevance of to 33–5 and intervention in other states 34 legitimization of rule 23 local elites in government, lack of 24 meaning of dependent on discourse 19–20 modern features of 26n7, 27 internal contradictions 31 perception of indicators of 24 perjorative import 1 positive attitude currently 1–2 relational definition of 75–6, 97 state system, contradictions arising from 31 temptation towards, reasons behind 34–5 types of 25–30 universalist 27 usefulness of studying 151–2 values contributed by 10 variety in 151 variety in perspectives on 4 empty signifiers 116, 117, 123 Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Spruyt) 4 English School thinking 10 European Union 119–20 as lacking imperial features 33–4 power balance 104 Russia, imperial discourse in 124 see also Byzantine Empire/EU comparison Evans, P.B. 51, 57 expansion/shrinkage of empires 48–9 external relations of formal/informal empires 24–5, 25 federations, symmetrical and contractual relations of 22–3 Feldman, Lily 98 Ferguson, Niall 102, 131

Index financial administration, Byzantine Empire/EU comparison 58–63, 64 floating signifiers 117–18, 123 formal empires contemporary international system 30–33 indicators of 23–4 Fukuyama, F. 8 Furman, Dmitry 120 Galtung, J. 75 Gellner, Ernest 26, 29 global trade, contradictions arising from 31–2 globalization as post-Cold War development 8 Gravier, Magali 33 Greece 144 Guilland, R. 59, 60 Haldén, Peter 73 Hall, John 26 Hall, P.A. 86 Hansen, Birthe 78–9 Hardt, Michael 97 hegemony as benign leadership 25 not identical with empire 135 and unipolarity/empire, blurred distinction between 102–3 hierarchy governance through 22 international and the US 139–40, 140 Hobson, John 9 Holy Roman Empire 20, 43, 43n1, 72, 78 homogenization of language, education and culture 27 hub and spoke pattern 22 identity, role, empire as 115–16, 119–23 Ignatieff, Michael 131 Ikenberry, John G. 101–2, 131–2 imperialism and empire, comparison of meaning 4n2 indigenous elites in government, 24, 25, 30 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 144 international relations developments since Cold War 7–9

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relevance of empire to 33–5 see also sovereignty in international relations international system, formal empires in the contemporary 30–3 intervention in other states aims and justification for 34 and empire 34 Ireland 144 Iraq 33, 80n18, 96, 131, 136–7, 141–2, 146, 149 Jordan, A. 62 Kant, Immanuel 138 Karasin, Grigory 124 Khan, Genghis 77 Kosovo and South Ossetia/Abkhazia parallels 124 Krahmann, Elke 102–3 Laclau, Ernesto 117, 123 Lake, David 2, 97, 103–4 Lawson, George 9 Lefever, E.W. 135 legitimization of rule 23 liberal capitalism 32 liberal-internationalist multilateralism as alternative to empire 131–2 liberalism 137–46 Lieven, D. 135 Lindsay, James 131, 146 local elites in government, 24, 35, 73, 123 Lustick, Ian 29 Macmillan, M. 81 Marxism 3, 9 mission and capacity, Byzantine Empire/ EU comparison 58–63 modern empires features of 26n7, 27 internal contradictions 31 modernity as changing empire 33 Mongol empire 77 Monten, Jon 142 Morozov, Viacheslav 119, 121, 129 Motyl, Alexander 2, 10 Münkler, Herfried 3, 74, 76

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Empire and International Order

Muravchik, Joshua 138 Napoleon Bonaparte, international order following 78–81 nation states multi-national states’ aspiration for 23 overlaps with empire 119–20 Negri, Antonio 97 neoconservatism 137–42 New World: Problems in Political Geography, The (Bowman) 84 Nexon, Dan 2, 103, 104–5 Nicolet, Claude 76, 76n14 Olsen, J.P. 44 ordering activity of empires 86–7 organization of empires, internal 22–3, 23, 43, 132–6, 134 Osiander, A. 72, 73n8, 74 Payn, Emil 119, 122–3 periphery/centre pattern 22 ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (Kant) 138 post-modernity as post-Cold War development 8 Power Politics (Wight) 10 practices, study of 106 pre-modern empires 26–7, 31 Quebec 22–3 Rauch, J.E. 51, 57 regional model of Russia 120 relational contracting 103–5 relational definition of empires 75–6, 97 Robinson, Ronald 73, 74n9, 86 role identity, empire as 115–16, 119–23 Roman Empire 26, 44–5, 76–7 Rosenberg, J. 9–10, 73n8 Russia, imperial discourse in border-drawing 115, 121 as corporate state 119 as country of regions 119 critical theory perspective 115–16, 117 de-politicized empire, Russia as 125–7 dislocation 116, 121 empire as type of discourse 113

empty signifiers 116, 117, 123 floating character of empire 117–18, 123 imitative character of Russia 123–4 imperial/international distinction 114 inter-subjective relations 116, 123–4 internal empire. Russia as 123 and the international 125–7 Kosovo and South Ossetia/Abkhazia parallels 124 as nation state 119 nation state/empire overlaps 119–20 ‘new imperial history’ school 122 ordering 115 present day paradoxes 121–3 regional model of Russia 120 role identity, empire as 115–16, 119–23 social constructivism 116 Schäfer, Axel R. 101 Schmidt, B.C. 138 Schout, A. 62 settings for action, empires as 74–8 shrinkage of empires 48–9 signifiers, floating 6, 117–18, 122–3, 126 social constructivism 115, 116 South Ossetia/Abkhazia and Kosovo parallels 124 sovereignty in international relations actors in empires 85–6 after Napoleon 78–81 appearance of idea of states 73n8 autonomy in empires’ subordinates 73–8 benefit to empires 73–4, 74n9 disorderly, world beyond empires as 76–7 as emerging from expansionist empires 70, 77–8, 80–81 as functional device 78–85 ordering activity of empires 86–7 Peace of Westphalia 70–73 relational definition of empires 75–6 settings for action, empires as 74–8 United States 82–5 Versailles Conference 81–2 world-makers, empires as 85–7 Soviet Union 20 special relationships alternative understanding of empires 97

Index defining and use of term 97–8 empire, defining 96–7 as everyday practice 106–7, 108 as ideal-types 98–9, 103–6, 108 as imperial remnants 99–101, 107–8 as neo-imperial articulations 101–3, 108 relational contracting 103–5 relational definition of empires 97 United States 101–2, 103 Spruyt, Hendrik 2, 4, 9, 103 staffing systems, Byzantine Empire/EU comparison 51–8 standardization of language, education and culture 27 state system contradictions arising from 31 see also sovereignty in international relations Stirk, Peter 80n19 Sukarno 33 Suskind, Ron 132 Sweden 71n3 Taylor, R.C.R. 86 technology as changing empire 33 temporal floating 118 Teschke, B. 9–10, 71, 73n8 Third Empire, The (Yuriev) 118 Tilly, Charles 2 Tishkov, Valery 119–20 unipolarity and hegemony/empire, blurred distinction between 102–3 as post-Cold War development 8 United States Afghanistan 136 debate over as empire 131–2

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defining empire 132–6, 134 disorderly, world beyond empire as 77 displacement of imperial functions 142–5 expansionist character of empires 82–5 hierarchy, international 139–40, 140 Iraq 136, 141–2 liberal-internationalist multilateralism as alternative to empire 131–2 liberalism 137–46 neoconservatism 137–42 and return of empire 33 Russia as imitating 123–4 sovereignty in international relations 82–5 special relationships 101–2, 103 structural definition of empire 132–6, 134 universal liberal-democracy as post-Cold War development 8 universalist empires 27 Vaughan-Williams, Nick 9 Versailles Conference 81–2 Walker, R.B.J. 8 Wæver, Ole 104 Weber, Eugen 29 Weber, Max 3, 9, 21 Weberian administration/bureaucracy 43, 51, 57, 61, 62, 64 Westphalia, Peace of 26, 64, 70–73, 80, 80n19 Wight, Martin 10 Williams, M.C. 138 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 19, 20–21 world-makers, empires as 85–7 Wright, Thomas 104–5