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One of the unique realities of both British and American imperialism is that Empire was and is not central to the national identity of either people.
British Imperial identity was, as many historians have relatively well argued, invented wholesale in the last thirty years of Empire. In fact, the greatest and only real grand celebrations of Empire occurred between 1918 and the Second World War, when Britain’s relative global power had been in decline for more than fifty years. At the true height of Empire in the mid-19th century, identity was more English than Imperial, and international competition was more focused on the French than anyone else (even as the opium wars raged, as the scramble for Africa slowly began, as British money surged into South and Central America, as settlement in Australia grew rapidly etc etc etc). Pomp and ceremony in the colonies, even India, was very limited until the 1920s.
Similarly, in America, most American identity has nothing to do with America’s global power or prestige. America is much larger and more geographically diverse than England, unlike that country it doesn’t really even need to trade with its regional peers. Unlike those final days of the British Empire, most American media doesn’t really reference American imperialism. Most stories are set solely domestically, while even most international ones treat the rest of the world the way a pre-imperial American might have a century and a half ago, with a certain distance, a foreignness from petty domestic conflict (see Indiana Jones versus James Bond, for example). Most Americans have no major opinions on foreign policy.
America is often called a reluctant hegemon. I disagree, it’s an incidental one. The empire is not important to the American psyche, to American identity. I won’t comment on the Russian or Soviet empires, but I get the feeling they may have meant more to their inhabitants, at least some of them, than the American Empire does. In part, this is reflected in the fact that even most Americans consider the wars in which America participates done either for moral reasons or self-interested ones. Economists say that American hegemony makes the world safe for profitable American companies, but most of these still make the vast majority of their revenue in-country. I think, on balance, this is like an Englishman in 1910 extolling the virtuous export of Britannic Civilisation, namely a very nice just-so story to explain how things came to be so.
This is true even for more politically aware, heterodox thinkers. People will say America goes to war for powerful banana companies, for oil, for revenge, because of the Jews, because of some leader’s personal grudge. An earnest interest in world domination and American political hegemony is considered laughable, even if it’s mentioned in a PNAC leaflet everybody treats it as a ruse. Nobody believes in it. “America’s mission is to export liberal democracy to the world”. No, I don’t think even Hillary Clinton believes that.
But America can cope spiritually with the collapse of its global power better than most other historical empires for one reason. Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely, and because the domestic market is so large, and because they have so many resources, Americans can simply stop caring about the outside world if the news gets worse.
It’s the rest of the world that will be less lucky, and which will experience radically more upheaval. The Chinese will need to solidify their offer for new vassal nations though, because currently it isn’t particularly compelling, and they have a quality around them that seems to make a lot of enemies, which means their hegemony might be resisted more than the present arrangement.
To what extent is there a British non-imperial identity though? I doubt one can divorce Britishness from the project of colonialism.
The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:
Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.
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