Revised by UCSC Politics Graduate Students
Empire is commonly defined as the rule of one monarch, oligarchy, or sovereign state over another group of states or countries (Lexico). While sometimes conflated with imperialism, empire is generally considered distinct in that imperialism is seen as a policy or system of extending a country’s power over another society through colonization or military force (Lexico). This practice of imposing foreign control over another territory is commonly known as colonialism, or the practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, including occupation and economic exploitation (Lexico). Whereas imperialism is the mechanism of colonialism, colonialism is the arrangement of political control of one country over territory via military force and occupation. Again, these terms are often conflated, however they are considered distinct and in the case of empire, the onus is on the absolute control of one political entity (the state) over another. Looking at Michel Foucault (2008), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), and Matthew Sparke’s (2005) works can help us explore the concept of empire in two ways: “Empire” as a distinct, “decentered global space,” and empire as an “informal imperialism operating in and through increasingly globalized networks” linked to American hegemony after the end of World War II (Sparke 2000, 244-245).
While connotations of words usually relate to their social construction, as in, how people generally perceive of the word and what they might think of when they consider it, looking at its root can open the door to different ways of looking at the word, and help us understand a deeper meaning of what the word might convey. The word empire comes from the Latin root imperium which comes from the word imparare: (im-/in- meaning either “within/throughout” or sometimes “without/not”) and (-parare meaning order, prepare, command and provide, which is derived from the root -pere meaning to produce/bring forth/grant/allot, and also encompasses the reciprocals of these words). Related to these are words like “imperative,” or “operate.” In Latin, the word imperium means supreme power, command, and authority – bearing similarity to the English definition of empire, which refers to an extensive group of states under a supreme authority, or as the absolute control over a person or a group.
Delving deeper into the inner workings of the concept, empire can be conceptualized as not only invasive, that is, a dynamic of power in which the supreme commands and rules what is under it, but also pervasive, “within and throughout,” that which orders, prepares, commands, and provides. It is control over, and management throughout. It is the dye which colors the structures, architectures, livelihoods, and social lives of all that it encompasses (Hardt & Negri 2000). Empire is thus related to Foucault’s conception of “biopower,” which is understood as the power over human bodies, including the management of populations of people (Foucault 1978). Foucault conceives of it as the circumstance in which power in the modern world has become encoded into the social order of human beings. It is distinct from discipline, which by ways of deterrence and punishment of people seeks to enforce the status quo of a ruling power and manifests as the project of protecting the biological livelihood of people, who constitute the power of the body politic. According to Foucault, the state in the modern world has become a ‘scientific’ apparatus of ‘truth’, meaning that the state has restricted its own self from “over-governing” in modern times as it submits to the logic/rationale or truth of the political economy (less governance equals less interference with the truths that arise from the logics of the market, like ‘true prices’). In becoming so, things like the “health of the workforce” become precious to the state as the efficiency of the population is tantamount to the establishment of the “truths,” which rule the style of governance. As scientific discoveries become a hegemonic force for the establishment of truth in the modern day, people submit to the truths of science, which promise to illuminate the path towards the optimum well-being of people.
Therefore, while the rational indicates the new style of the state, one which strives towards maximum efficiency, it also lays claim to the behavior and social life among people, who perpetuate the rational through their behavior and interaction, and contribute to the creation and reification of this empire. Essentially, history, defined as sets of practices which extend backwards into past time-space and relay the truths of that time-space, has eventually culminated into this new set of practices and thus “truths” in which we find ourselves in today, and these truths and logic (of efficiency, particularly economic/market efficiency) require that we submit to them as the best path towards human well-being, but also that we continue to perfect them and discover more of these truths to submit ourselves to. This is what births biopower: the entirety of the state has a vested interest in the biological efficiency of the population, and ultimate authority over births, lives and the deaths of mutineers of this rationale. Thus, the empire is: invasive, it commands; and it is pervasive, it is lived.
In part of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) book Empire, the authors conduct a historical review of the transformations of power in authorities and societies to show how it has culminated in the “empire” that we live in today. Hardt and Negri examine the European origins of “Empire” and link the concept of Empire with “the Christian origins of European civilizations” (10). They write that “Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths” (10). To maintain the social order and achieve social peace, the conductor is given the power to do whatever is necessary, from launching “just” wars against external enemies to fighting against threats within. However, physical force itself is not the basis of “Empire.” Hardt and Negri argue that “the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace” is paramount (15). It is called into being to resolve conflicts and it enlarges the “realm of consensus that supports its own power” (15).
For Hardt and Negri, “Empire” is a concept of a single logic of rule that controls economic and social production and exchange (xii). This rule became a “new global form of sovereignty” following the globalization of the 20th century which saw the decline of nation-state sovereignty and the inability of nation states to control their economic and cultural exchanges. “Empire” developed in step with capitalism and became the global form of sovereignty that best furthered its processes (xvi). This makes “Empire” a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii).
“Empire” is a concept characterized by a lack of boundaries to its rule, which Hardt and Negri outline in four parts (xiv). First, this concept posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or rules over the entire world without territorial boundaries. Second, it operates as an order that does not originate from conquest, suspends history and fixes its existence to eternity; in other words, a regime without temporal boundaries outside of history or at the end of history. In this view, the “Empire” is all that ever was or will ever be. Third, the “Empire” operates on all parts of the social order (it is totalizing). Beyond its control over territory, population and human interaction, the “Empire” creates the world it inhabits and seeks to directly rule over human nature and social life, making “Empire” a paradigmatic form of biopower. Lastly, “Empire” is always dedicated to a perpetual and universal peace despite the violence encoded within it (xv). It “presents its order as permanent, eternal and necessary” (11). The new Emperor is not a fixed point of supreme authority which reigns over the “Empire,” but rather, the Emperor exists within and without the social order, the subjects and the sovereign mutually constitute one another, though all seem to be subordinate to this empire.
Although Hardt and Negri believe that European imperialism is over, they do not place the US at the center of their “Empire” (and in fact would argue there is no central state that forms the heart of “Empire”), though it is still important to sustaining capitalism’s logic of rule. For Panitch and Gindin (2012), however, the US is the central state that has shaped the international order post World War II and worked to shape laws and institutions within states, making it a kind of informal empire. The supranational world power through which US as an empire arose is in part due to the United Nations and the international order it shaped following the end of World War II that was at once built on state sovereignty as much as it acted above state sovereignty. Rather than force other countries via colonization or imperialism to adopt capitalist economic policy, the US helped create the international institutions that governed the international order, including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and so forth. By setting the parameters under which countries could operate, and enforcing this order through coercive actions unilaterally and multilaterally, it became the aegis of capitalism in the 20th century, a new kind of empire. This conception of the US as an empire of finance capitalism is noted by former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism: “Here is the ‘empire’, the empire of finance capital, in fact if not in name, a vast sprawling network of inter-continental activity on a highly diversified scale that controls the lives of million of people in the most widely separated parts of the world, manipulating whole industries and exploiting the labour and riches of nations for the greedy satisfaction of a few” (35-36). Attending to the ways that the current global system of finance capital (or global capitalism) has been shaped and constructed by states, especially the American state, is crucial for Panitch and Gindin, and others. The end of the Bretton Woods system, rise of neoliberalism and globalization requires examining the United States’ role as an informal empire and the tensions and contradictions that American hegemony brings. Matthew Sparke (2005) discusses this at length in “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Imperialism,” and argues that the “Empire” of Hardt and Negri smooths over the global space to develop a singular force acting as the sovereign, which “obscures and enables the privileges that accrue to the United States as the major structuring and steering influence of contemporary global capitalism” (258). If there is an actual existing empire tied to global capitalism, the US is closer to the center of it than any other state. Sparke makes a prescient note of this empire that goes a bit further than Hardt and Negri’s conception of “Empire”: the dynamics of neoliberalism and globalization have facilitated a “biopolitically productive regime that has actually worked to legitimize and consolidate ongoing and generally informal forms of American imperialism” (Sparke 2005, 311).
(See Accumulation, Geopolitics, Neocolonialism)
Bibliography
“Colonialism.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/colonialism.
“Empire.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/empire.
“Imperialism.” Lexico. Accessed May 1, 2021. https://www.lexico.com/definition/imperialism.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism. Panaf Books, 1970. First published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., London. Accessed 1965. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/.
Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso, 2012.
Sparke, Matthew. “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Imperialism.” In The Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.