H E G E M O N Y U N R AV E L L I N G

The ' E ' and ' I ' words, empire and imperialism, are back in fashion. Their return is not due, pace John Ikenberry, to the advent of the 'American unipolar age' in which "[ f ]or the first time in the modern era, the world's most powerful state can operate on the global stage without the constraints of other great powers". (1) That age had begun with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, yet throughout the 1990s the buzz-word was 'globalization', not empire or imperialism; and as Ikenberry himself notes, the unparalleled global power of the United States was generally discussed under the rubric of 'hegemony'. Even critical thinkers including many Marxists found the concepts of empire and imperialism of little analytical use.(2) In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Bruce Cumings claimed that it would have taken an electron microscope to detect the use of the word imperialism to describe the United States' role in the world.(3) Hyperbole, of course; but the exaggeration contained an important element of truth.

Nor did the publication of Empire in 2000 significantly alter this situation, for Hardt and Negri's work simply repackaged and gave a radical twist to the central tenets of globalization-speak, including the proposition that under the present conditions of global economic and informational integration no nation-state, not even the US, can form the centre of an imperialist project. Indeed, Hardt and Negri presented Empire as a logic and structure of world rule that was in key respects antithetical to the imperialism that Marxists had theorized in the twentieth century.(4)

The real break with the 1990s occurred only in 2001, when the Bush Administration responded to the events of September 11 by embracing a new imperial programme - that of the Project for a New American Century. There is a curious resemblance between this reflex and the actions that, sixty years earlier, had ushered in the first American Century.

new left review no. 32 March/ April 2005
 http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR32.shtml
 http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR33.shtml

 http://www.kapitalismus-reloaded.de/arrighi.pdf