Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

America's First Bid for Empire

1986; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cras-017-01-06

1710-114X

Gordon Martel,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

John W. Coogan. The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899-1915. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981.284 pp. John Milton Cooper, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983.442 + xiv pp. Lloyd C. Gardner. Safe for Democracy: The Anglo- American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.383 + xii pp. Lester D. Langley. The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900-1934. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. 255 + viii pp. Arthur S. Link, ed. Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.241 + viii pp. Empires are suffused with the imperial mentalité; they are not to be confused with states having colonies. All states have colonies, i.e., areas under the control of the central authority that are treated as dependencies, that are deprived of some of the customary political privileges, that are given special treatment in economic, legal and cultural affairs. The error that confuses colonialism with imperialism imagines that, because a body of water separates the central authority from the dependency, an empire has been created. What distinguishes imperialism is ideology. Imperialists take the long view, are entranced by the big picture; they disparage temporary solutions, special interests and local concerns; they speak the language of universality—of natural rights, of new ages, of acting on behalf of all mankind. They compare themselves with empires of the past, and find the past wanting. Their empire will be of a higher morality: not for them are the empires founded upon the evil institutions of slavery, race or the bourgeoisie. In our own time, when empires have come to be tied to the memories of a wicked past, imperialists have had to eschew imperialism. This has produced the supreme intellectual muddle of our age.