NYTimes.com Article: Europe Seems to Hear Echoes of Empires Past

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by threehegemons@aol.com.


So people in this 'Europe' place believe the US is acting in an imperialist 
manner?  As an American, I must quarrel with that view!  They believe the US is 
trying to take over the world?  Sounds strange and paranoid to me!  Never heard 
of any Americans who believe such things--only virulent and hostile writers in 
papers that never miss a chance to cast the US in a negative light...

Steven Sherman

threehegemons@aol.com

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Europe Seems to Hear Echoes of Empires Past

April 14, 2003
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN 




 

BERLIN, April 11 - As the United States began the task of
finding Iraqi leaders to take power after the war is over,
there were many in Europe and elsewhere who were reminded
of an earlier period in global history - the era of
imperialism. 

"What cannot now be disguised, as U.S. marines swagger
around the Iraqi capital swathing toppled statues of Saddam
Hussein with the stars and stripes and declaring `We own
Baghdad,' is the crudely colonial nature of this
enterprise," wrote Seumas Milne, a columnist in The
Guardian, the leftist British daily. 

Mr. Milne's comment, in a newspaper that rarely misses a
chance to cast the United States in a negative light, was
an especially virulent and hostile expression of a view
that has become common in recent days. 

That view, which Mr. Milne shares with many other
commentators and government officials, is that the war in
Iraq confirms the status of the United States as no longer
just a superpower, but an unambiguously imperial power. It
is seen as a country that uses its might to establish
dominion over much of the rest of the world, as Rome once
did, or as Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Many Americans will quarrel with that view, convinced not
just of the absence of any American ambition to control
foreign territory but persuaded by the Bush
administration's assurance that power in Iraq will be
turned over to Iraqis as swiftly as possible. It is not
generally part of the American self-conception to associate
the United States or even the Pax Americana with the great
empires of the past. 

But elsewhere in the world, the United States is being seen
in a new way, as the latest - and perhaps most powerful -
of the imperialist powers that bestrode the globe over the
centuries. As evidence, critics cite not just the sudden
collapse of Iraqi resistance, but the stunning American
military triumphs in recent years, in Afghanistan, Kosovo
and in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. 

With this observation, that the United States represents
what the respected German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung this week called a "hegemonic internationalism,"
comes the question: will it turn out to be a good thing or
a bad thing for the rest of the world? 

"The key terms of the new imperialism will be the ability
of the U.S. to provide security and stability for other
nations without imposing an American way of life,"
Karl-Otto Honrich, a sociologist at Goethe University in
Frankfurt, said in a telephone interview. After the war in
Iraq began, Mr. Honrich wrote a much noted article
subtitled "Without a Hegemonic Power There Can Be No
Peace." 

"Over the last 10 years, U.S. hegemony has become clearer
as a function of what America has done in the world," he
said. "It has taken on the role of world police in several
cases, and successfully done so. 

"The function of the U.S. right now is to tell the world
there is someone who is ready to fight in cases of big
security and disorder," Mr. Honrich said. "The U.S. has
taken on this role, and hence its leadership has become a
social reality." 

To some in Europe, the operative word is not so much
imperialism as it is unilateralism. The frequently repeated
American contention that the United States led a broad
coalition into Iraq has not been very convincing to those
who feel that the war illustrates a new twist on imperial
behavior: the use of pre-emption in the face of widespread
opposition even from close allies. 

"The neo-conservatives in the U.S. have developed a new
imperial vision," said Guillaume Parmentier, the director
of the Center on the United States at the French Institute
of International Relations. Senior Bush administration
advisers, like Paul D. Wolfowitz and Richard N. Perle, are
commonly seen in Europe as having gained decisive influence
over foreign policy to the disadvantage of Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell, who is viewed as a sort of defeated
multilateralist. 

The speed of the victory in Iraq is being seen as likely to
bolster the prestige and influence of those in Washington
who, Europeans believe, would now like to embark on further
military conquests, in Syria, Iran or possibly North Korea.


"Traditionally, the U.S. has emphasized its great
convincing and coercive power on other states," Mr.
Parmentier said. "Its foreign policy managed to convince
other heads of state that what they were doing was in their
national interest, and this was American's great strength. 

"Today, the U.S. is affirming a much more blunt and brutal
stance," Mr. Parmentier continued. "Its vision for foreign
affairs has somewhat retrograded to a more national or even
nationalistic definition, in the most limited sense of the
term, as it was understood in the 19th century." 

Outsiders wonder whether the United States will use its
power from now on as it has in Iraq, free of the
constraints of multilateralism and dismissive of its
allies. 

Some answer that question with a stark new definition of
the American goal, which is not so much to control
unconventional weapons or to bring about government change
in Iraq, but to establish unchallenged global dominance.
This view, which would seem strange, almost paranoid, to
many Americans, is heard in serious and respectable places
in Europe. 

"The `war against terrorism' is certainly an excuse, and an
organizing principle, but not in and of itself a primary
motive for a strategic new direction in international
relations and American world policy," Stefan Frölich, a
German scholar and a professor of international politics at
Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, wrote in the
"hegemonic internationalism" commentary in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative daily with a long
tradition of pro-American views. 

"In this sense, the war against Iraq can be seen as a
logical and necessary defense of American predominance,"
Mr. Frölich wrote. Critics of "the increasing imperial
assertion of the Bush regime," he continued, "are judged to
be promoting a policy of `appeasement' toward rogue states
like Iraq." 

No historical period is exactly like another, and few
people are arguing that the United States is a new Rome or
a new colonialist Britain. In the main view being expressed
in Europe, it is not the classic imperialist goal of
national wealth and resources that is driving the United
States. 

In the more radical view of American power - represented by
The Guardian or by Mr. Frölich - the United States is
seeking global dominance almost for its own sake. The more
moderate view is that Washington has reacted, or perhaps
overreacted, to the threat of terrorism. The American
destiny, as the German newsweekly Der Spiegel put it
recently, is "to bring peace to the world through war." In
other words, the motive is good, even if the actions are
violent and possibly unjustified. 

But there seems to be a strong emerging view that the
immensity of American power amounts to something different
in the world. 

"Throughout the history of mankind, certainly no country
has existed that has so thoroughly dominated the world with
its politics, its tanks and its products as the United
States does today," Der Spiegel said. 

What are the consequences? Some commentators are waiting to
see whether new military actions stem from the Iraqi
victory, which, they believe, would be final confirmation
of the new American imperium. 

"Does the policy remain on this trajectory and they go off
hunting other regimes that are judged undesirable and
dangerous?" said Michael Emerson of the Center for European
Policy Studies in Brussels. "Or do they say: `Whew, that
was a sweat politically, the Iraqi campaign. We better slow
down and attempt to reconstruct multinational understanding
and consensus.' " 

Echoing this view, but with eyes on another potential
crisis, an influential South Korean commentator, Kim Young
Hie, a columnist for the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, worries
that American success in Iraq will backfire when it comes
to North Korea. 

"For Pyongyang, Iraq was the second shock and awe after
Afghanistan," Mr. Kim wrote. "When Bush is determined to do
something, he just goes ahead. And America undoubtedly has
the military prowess to carry out his will. This message is
sinking in with Kim Jong Il." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/international/worldspecial/14EURO.html?ex=1051366310&ei=1&en=a120b01978ff362a



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