ON EMPIRE

Eric Hobsbawm. On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (2008)

--Over the past thirty years or so, however, the territorial state has, for various reasons, lost its traditional monopoly on armed force, much of its former stability and power, and, increasingly, the fundamental sense of legitimacy, or at least of accepted permanence, which allows governments to impose burdens such as taxes and conscription on willing citizens. The material equipment for warfare is now widely available to private bodies, as are the means of financing nonstate warfare. In this way, the balance, between state and nonstate organizations has changed...The novelty of this situation is indicated by the fact that the most powerful state on the planet, having suffered a terrorist attack, feels obliged to launch a formal operation against a small, international, nongovernmental organization or network lacking both a territory and a recognizable army. [27-28]

--In the middle of the last century, we suddenly entered a new phase in world history which has brought to an end history as we have known it in the past ten thousand years, that is to say since the invention of sedentary agriculture. We do not know where we are going. ... Within a few decades we will have ceased to be what humanity has been since its emergence, a species whose members are chiefly engage in gathering, hunting, or producing food. We shall also cease to be an essentially rural species. ... Let me note only one significant fact. There are today twenty countries in which more than 55 percent of the relevant age groups continue studying after their secondary education. But with a single exception (South Korea) ALL of them are in Europe (old capitalist and ex socialist), North American, and Austalasia. In its capacity to generate human capital, the old developed world still retains a substantial advantage over the major new-comers of the 21^st century. [35, 38, 39-41]

---...armed force is no longer monopolized by states and their agents. ...Almost equally striking is the decline in the acceptance of state legitimacy... I very much doubt whether ANY state today—not the United States, Russia, or China—could engage in major wars with conscript armies ready to fight and die “for their country” to the bitter end. Few Western states can any longer rely, as most so-called developed countries once could, on a population that was basically law-abiding and orderly, except for the expected criminal or other fringes on the margins of the social order. The extraordinary rise of technological and other means of keeping the citizens under surveillance at all times ... has not made state power and low more effective in these states, though it has made the citizens less free. [43,44]

--Frankly I can’t make sense of what has happened in the USA since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy. I believe it indicates a growing crisis within American society, which finds expression in the most profound and cultural division within that country since the Civil War [or the same damn division—SRB] and a sharp geographical division between the globalized economy of the two seaboards, and the vast resentful hinterland, the culturally open big cities and the rest of the country. Today a radical right-wing regime seeks to mobilize “true Americans” against some evil outside force and against a world that does not recognize the uniqueness, the superiority, the ;manifest destiny of America. What we must realize is that American global policy is aimed inward, not outward, however great and ruinous its impact on the rest of the world. It is not DESIGNED to produce either empire or effective hegemony. ... the most obvious danger of war today arises from the global ambitions of an uncontrollable and apparently irrational government in Washington ... To give American the best chance of learning to return from megalomania to rational foreign policy is the most immediate and urgent task of international politics. [57-59]

--empires were mainly built, like the British Empire, by aggression and war. And in turn it was war [usually] that did them in. Winning big wars proved as fatal to empires as losing them... [69]

--[The USA] is the only major empire that has also been a major debtor. [86]