Today “empire,” like “fascism,” is often used as a term of abuse. Political enemies use both terms deliberately and unscientifically to place their opponents on the rhetorical and intellectual defensive. Already there is a growing tendency, for example, to talk of the US’s “imperial agenda” in the Middle East. Ironically, some defenders of the US even wish this were true, since in their eyes the Middle East and other parts of the world would be better off politically and economically under US rule. Yet the US has never been an empire in the sense of wanting to incorporate subject peoples as client states into an overarching imperium. Marxist-Leninist theories of imperialism may be used to reach the opposite conclusion, but these are now intellectually discredited.
George Washington, it is true, often did refer to the US as an empire, but by that he meant merely that it was an independent country – just as Henry VIII, after his break with Rome, had parliament declare that “this realm of England is an empire.” Washington was also aware that the new US represented a great experiment in republicanism that would be closely scrutinized by the rest of the world. Yet he was optimistic of success. Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg demonstrated his own awareness that the experiment was still continuing (although it was now the future of democracy not just republicanism that was at stake) and in my opinion American presidents thereafter, aware of their responsibility to make democracy work, were more interested in promoting it abroad by example rather than by force. Unfortunately, German policy and the two world wars dragged the US into world affairs and a more active role. It is noteworthy that no president before Woodrow Wilson in 1917 felt the need to address foreign policy in an inaugural address.
Critics may counter that the US nonetheless exterminated many tribes of Indians, seized the Philippines in 1898, opened up Japan to international trade, and interfered regularly in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean states. All this is true, but most Indian tribes had already died out from disease, the remaining ones were numerically insignificant compared to the millions of immigrants arriving from Europe, so that they had little alternative but accept US concepts of “manifest destiny.” (Canadians and Latin Americans are not regarded as “imperialists” on account of similar pasts). As for the Philippines, US politicians soon realized that annexation had been a mistake and they promised independence as soon as possible. (World War Two delayed it.) Japan, despite Commodore Perry, never became a colony or protectorate (in fact, it was to become a great power rival), while the US felt compelled to interfere so often in Central America, precisely because it refused to establish an empire there. (It never gave backing to the “filibustering expeditions” of the 1850s either.) It took decades before the US agreed to annex Hawaii, and Cuba was not annexed after the war of 1898 (which the US understood as a war to save Cuba from Spanish imperialism). The truth is that the US does not want territory abroad, likes to pull its boys back home quickly after any wars it fights, and has been ideologically opposed to “empire” since 1776. Its position in Western Europe after 1945 was famously referred to by a Scandinavian historian as “empire by invitation” – the invite coming from Western Europeans who were terrified of a Soviet takeover.
So much for the US. Real empires do annex or occupy territory abroad and for a variety of reasons – strategic, economic, religious, ideological, cultural, or a combination of these factors. Annexation may come about as a result of planning, war, preemption, or competition, or even by accident. In all cases, empire is rationalized, usually in terms of some kind of civilizing mission – bearing the white man’s burden, bringing peace, order, and stability, abolishing the slave trade, converting heathen, introducing medicine and technology, or bringing learning, civilization, humanity, and progress to weaker peoples or inferior cultures. All empires from the Roman to the British to the Chinese have claimed (or still claim) this civilizing purpose. Moreover, there is often an element of truth involved, sometimes a considerable one. Who can deny the benefits of the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica? The British Empire did bring about the abolition of slavery in most of the world (although it had encouraged the trade in the first place). The world’s most stable and largest democracies – the US, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (and South Africa?) – are all the products of the British Empire.
Yet nobody asked for empire to be imposed. It was always imposed by force – and the degree of brutality involved has varied enormously. Force, however, would eventually give way to accommodation, and accommodation would always be regulated by collaboration. The modalities of collaboration, however, would later become absolutely crucial when empire approached its end. If collaboration took the form of assimilation (e.g., as in the French Empire) decolonization became much more problematic (cf., Algeria and Vietnam). However, if – as in the case of the British Empire – collaboration left local elites a fairly free hand domestically, there was little trouble. Britain also had few worries about decolonization since, first, she had accommodated herself to the idea of colonial territories gaining independence after the American War (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa all had independence by the early twentieth century, and Macaulay in the 1830s had already said that the greatest day in the history of the Empire would be when India got her independence – a project set back, unfortunately, by the 1857 Mutiny) and secondly, by the fact that the Empire represented no economic advantage.
Decolonization or end of empire came outside Europe partly as a result of World War Two, but more often because ideas of democracy, parliamentarianism, nationalism, socialism, and self-rule had spread from the metropolises to native elites, who, armed with western ideals, could no longer be politically resisted. Economics in the end proved less potent than culture and cultural exchanges in determining imperialism’s demise.
The Habsburg Empire was an anomaly in all this. A collection of hereditary possessions, largely inherited through marriage (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Galicia, and Lombardy-Venetia were the exceptions), and ruled over benignly by a popular dynasty, there was no need for its dissolution before 1914. Like the other economically, politically, culturally, and socially absolutely viable empires of Eastern and Central Europe (see the last chapter of the second and enlarged edition of my Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918. London and New York, 2001), it was killed off by the First World War. Clearly it had had its weaknesses and domestic critics before 1914, but all these critics called merely for some measure of reform under the Habsburg dynasty.