Funferal

American Imperialism

Among the other annoyances over the last few days was listening – for some ungodly reason – to the pundits on CNN prattle on about how Bush’s mandate meant ‘old Europe’ should now fall in behind them. This immediately troubled me, essentially because this belief – emerging from the idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’ presumably – ignored the fact that the United States is only one of several sovereign nations, and citizens of those other nations had no [meaningful] input into the American decision. So from where does the legitimacy of Bush to overcome the will and wishes of these foreign leaders arise?

I was further disturbed this morning to see a commentary – emerging this time, I think, from Europe – saying that European leaders’ responses to the Bush victory reflected their acceptance of this Bush mandate to push them about. But then, somewhere, I got pointed to an essay by Nancy Fraser (I’m afraid I forget who did the pointing) where she said the following:

A central premise is that public opinion has normative validity if and only if it is formed in conditions that enable all those potentially affected to participate as peers. Thus, I assume that inclusion per se is not sufficient for democratic legitimacy; rather, parity of participation is also required. Parity of participation, in turn, depends on two further social conditions: fair distribution of resources and reciprocal recognition of participants’ social standing.

She’s obviously specifically addressing problems within democracies, but the comments can be applied to the situation at hand. On this basis, the exclusion of the rest-of-world from debate and input in the United States fails even the first test.
I’m reminded of a defence of imperialism mentioned (and repudiated) in conversation with fellow UIUC blogger zwichenzug. The argument (crudely put) goes that U.S. imperialism is defensible, because it brings about a form of world government. The obvious response is, as above, that this is not democratic government – where those ruled have some form of input – but rather governance, where most people have no input.
Oh, and on a final interesting note. While looking for information today, I browsed the CIA factbook entry for the United States. For those who deny that the US has colonies, they avoid the term ‘colony’ but they list 14 different ‘dependent areas’ – such as Puerto Rico and American Samoa – apart from the three countries (Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Island) that have signed a Compact of Free Association with the US.