GloboCop: Empire State of Mind
The first ship bearing the non-separatist religious sect of English hopefuls washed ashore in the early 17th century, carrying settlers of the New World who would begin the tell-tale creation of their utopian society—agrarian, isolationist, and effectively rid of the European evils of the era... What they were all too unaware at the end of their arduous journey to the New World was that they had brought along with them a stray passenger, a new strain of conservatism which would infect the hopes and dreams of generations to come, that of “a forward-looking commercial republic” bent on utter global dominion (Micklethwait 314).
Pejoratively given the name 'Puritans' by those who believed their methods to be too extremist, these English hopefuls lived by an ideology which was rather democratic in nature: the Bible was to their governing system as the Constitution is to America's. An interesting parallel, and it comes with no surprise that the national narrative of the United States, still chugging its merry little way along to this day unchallenged, has its derivatives within the cultures of this Protestant sect. The “'first new nation'[...] was influenced by two beliefs: first[...] that Americans are a 'chosen people' and that America is God's country, the site of a 'new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice'; and second[...] that Americans had,” through the institutionalization of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, “created a unique political order—the constitutional democracy[...] an 'innovation of universal importance',” (Fuchs 249). The cohesion of these two particularities produced the foundation for the everlasting American (or simply Puritan, as one might argue) creed: an unrelenting devotion to the God-given civic liberties with which supposedly all have been blessed—one of the most important being 'the pursuit of happiness'. In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, democracy was only a very pragmatic means to a higher end, not an end in and of itself; the emphasis on 'pursuit' showcases their devotion to this higher end, “a very moderate sort of liberty: the freedom for individuals as far as possible to pursue their own ends,” whether social, political, or (most importantly) economic, “unconstrained by government interference. It was this overriding commitment to civic liberty which gave the American Revolution its conservative edge,” (Micklethwait 318). The pursuit of the individual towards something more, something better—what is commonly referred to as the 'American Dream'—is all but a conservative fantasy based on the religious ideals of the Puritans, who themselves “had a distinctively capitalist frame of mind;” the entire country was “moved by the same motives: the desire to make a profit, to accumulate dollars, to get ahead in the world and flaunt your wealth as a sign that you had [gotten] ahead,” (Micklethwait 328). But success would be yours only if you could manage it, and if you could not, well, then it was not the fault of the government, or of the people, but solely your own; you had simply missed out on the opportunities which had been so graciously laid before you. This mantra was developed through the cultivation of “strict moral conduct by stressing the ethical principles of self-responsibility, a strong work ethic, and a meritocratic orientation,” engendered by the ideological fusion of Puritan religiosity and New World market economy (Fuchs 249). The Protestant non-separatists (or capitalist revolutionaries, your choice) behind the secession from England proper were, as previously mentioned, far from the usual radical suspects—naturally rebellious higher intellectuals or peasants enraged by the lack of governmental care—but instead were businessmen, “landed gentlemen[...] prudent and prosperous men who initially argued that they were fighting on behalf of the principles of the British constitution, not against them[...] fighting to preserve ancient British rights (trial by jury, due process, free assembly and no taxation without representation, for example) rather than establish new ones,” (Micklethwait 318). These were men who were harkening back to the glory days of yesteryear in an attempt to resurrect the individual rights of the marketer; in the blessed words of Herbert Ellington, deputy counsel to Ronald Reagan, spoken at a 'financial success seminar' in 1981, “Economic salvation and spiritual salvation go side by side.” But even within this revisit to the Old World, one can plainly witness this exceptionally deadly strain of conservatism attaching itself at every covalent bond to the DNA strands of the American identity. The personal freedoms established by the Founding Fathers were only allocated to a selected group, a group which did not readily include women, non-landowners or slaves; the ships which brought the 'chosen ones' to their Heaven had used the tides of distrust to navigate the Atlantic, which eventually poured over into a sea of fear for over-centralized rule that is still ebbing and flowing in current politics; and, maybe most notably, the regulated separation of church and state only served to metamorphose the embedded rugged religiosity of the Puritans into an industriously booming economic system. This amalgam of religion and economy established a free religious market which was given both the civic power of the democratic individual and the supernatural backing of the all-mighty God. These three main features of American Protestant institution mark the beginnings of a long and vicious cycle of hypocrisy; of the indestructible and crippling political duopoly we call 'American politics'; and of the historically omnipresent self-manufactured grandeur which has been adversely affecting the image of the United States within the global sphere since its inception.
The last of these beginnings is the consequence of an antagonistically policing, messianic kind of behavior typical of the United States which not only implies that it should be seen as “a special place with a special role in God's plan—a city on a hill, a beacon to the rest of the world” representing true freedom—but also dictates that God Himself has given these divine mandates to the settlers of the New World under the impression that they will maintain His will and combat any force which would rise up against it (Micklethwait 326)... This is the American national narrative, that of a new nation not defined by the usual factors of nationality—“a set of boundaries, a long-established polity, or a common 'race' or ethnicity—but [by] a special destiny 'to enlarge the happiness of mankind'.” It is a watering of “the seeds of liberty, planted in Puritan New England,” which reached “their inevitable flowering in the American Revolution and westward expansion.” This same narrative has been used and abused over the last couple centuries in more ways than one; that is to say, any who stood “in the way—European powers with legal title to part of the North American continent, Native Americans, Mexicans—were by definition obstacles to the progress of liberty,” that of God's liberty, to be precise (Foner 6). Territorial expansion thus became justified in every context, and the term 'empire' found itself a new home and a new meaning in the rhetoric of the American narrative. The economically-driven religiosity which supported 'manifest destiny', a notion fiercely believed by the American masses of the 19th century which utilized an Anglo-Saxon racial superiority complex (a pre-pubescent predecessor to the same Hitler would use in the next century) to warrant “levels of violence that approached genocide,” was the basis for westward expansion, the Mexican War, and later the Spanish-American War. It was a holy commission “by God to spread the universal blessings of freedom to benighted people” that “was not racist but universalist,” that was not colonialist but religiously democratic (Mauch 15). And the adherence thereof also allowed for the general acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine, a message reiterating the same isolationist foreign policy (in regards to Europe specifically) America was founded upon, but adding a cherry on top of that in the form of including South America as a part of the New World, the 'Western Hemisphere of good', standing for democracy, freedom, and the power of the people, as juxtaposed to the 'Eastern Hemisphere of evil', which still stood for the monarchical and totalitarian governments of civil oppression. Though this employment of polarity is not a new trick in strengthening the voice of a national narrative, it can be said that the United States, rather exceptional in its religiously imbued conservatism, was able to restructure its own narrative at every turn, whenever and wherever it suited its interests best. With freedom as its sole convention, the goals of the nation-state could be mutably justified at any time, simply by strategically changing the 'other' with which it would compare itself. In this way, 'othering', what had once been an unrecognized method of self-preserving national and/or personal identities, was economized by American conservatism, and the definition of freedom—the rhetorical DNA of the United States' national narrative—was infected by it, with no possibility for a cure. The term 'freedom' as it is represented by the narrative has gone through quite a few distinctive identity crises, all tinged with a sprinkle of hypocrisy. Its meaning has shifted from anti-imperialism, the cause of the American Revolution, to the American edition of the anti-colonial empire through the developments of westward expansion and the Monroe Doctrine; from isolationism and agrarianism in the drafting of the Constitution to free market economy and the abolition of slavery during the Civil War; and even from the liberal democracy for God's 'chosen ones' to de-territorialization and de-racialization of the American society as a whole and a push for universal democracy at every end of the modern world. It is as Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed in his final inaugural address: “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away.” And with that, everyone became the 'chosen ones', became 'American' by definition. Everybody deserved the American Dream—'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', as it were—and the duty to make it so that everyone received these indisputable human rights rested on the hegemonic shoulders of the United States, who would see to it (by any means necessary) that no global American was left behind. This was and is the heart of American empire.
Yet that isn't to say that it beat without murmur. While the 17th and 18th centuries required little to no self-reflection in regards to national narrative, the duplicity therein was definitely realized by the 19th century, rearing its ugly head with the advent of the Civil War; “once slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, the former mother country represented freedom more genuinely than the United States,” which “pointedly drew attention to the distinction between the 'monarchical liberty'” of Britain and the “'republican slavery'” which America had decidedly labeled 'freedom' at that time (Foner 7). The United States was beginning to feel the pressure of what it meant to be 'the land of the free', and as its area of influence grew larger well into the 1900s, and economic globalization took its toll on the world, it found itself in command of one of the leading roles on the global stage... but, “With great power...” they say. The 20th century brought along with it yet another charming revisit to the notion of empire: the First World War, starring the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire), who represented standard colonial imperialism, and the Allies (Britain, France and later, the United States), who represented the more neocolonialist approach, saw the world's leading economic powers in a struggle for defining modernity within its three dimensions: what did it mean to be politically modern? Economically modern? Socially modern? Unfortunately, the end of the war didn't bring any answers but instead brought about more questions, exacerbating the desire for a quick and direct solution to the problem of 'modern empire'. These were questions that the United States was all too prepared to answer, but Germany would have its shot at answering, as well. The latter, profoundly humiliated by its defeat in World War I and with a much more traditional national narrative to uphold (unlike the religiously empowered conservative narrative of American freedom), found solace in the racially-charged political aims of Hitler, in the centralized socialist structures of his economy and government, and in the importance it had gained in becoming a co-star on (let's face it) America's global stage. The two “quintessential modern nations” of the 20th century “transatlantic world” had both “been re-founded in the mid-nineteenth-century wars: the American Civil War and the Prussian wars of unification, respectively[...] originally founded and then re-founded as nation-states, as self-conscious alternatives to empires as normality,” (Mauch 13). Yet for these two transatlantic superpowers, the idea of modernity became all too entangled within the paradigm of imperialism. On one side of the coin, you had the American empire, pluralist by definition, inclusive by nature, conservatively capitalist by economy; on the other, you had the Nazi empire, unilaterally militaristic in its territorial conquests, exclusive in its definitions of an 'Aryan' race, and die-hard national socialist in its political agenda. What used to be 'manifest destiny' for religious America became Lebensraum for Nazi Germany, for its “imperial ambitions,” like America's, had been “conditioned by early nineteenth-century developments.” Proximity to the military superpower that was 19th century France engendered feelings of German national insecurity; a necessity to mark its territory (literally and figuratively) among the politically divided world powers was fostered by Germany's envious admiration of those powers, the countervailing forces of imitation and self-assertion giving birth to the cleansing nativism and inexorable hypernationalism so characteristic of the Nazi empire. But the most relevant cause of German society's acceptance of Nazi ideologies as a foundation for 20th century German empire stems from the emergence of a “right-wing populism, a populism that was 'anti-modern' in its fear that the nation had been taken over by evil forces such as capitalism, feminism, socialism, Judaism, hedonism, and materialism. However, these explanations confuse nostalgic memory[...] with actual history,” and “the dream of restoring the glory of old empire” remained ever “at odds with the dynamic modernity of German nation-building,” (Mauch 17). The fact of the matter is that, though Germany wanted to reestablish the empire of the Old World, it was already more entwined in the international free market that the hegemonic globalization of American economy had created than exceptionally conservative America itself. Modernity and all its dimensions underwent commodification through this hegemony—political, social, and economic American values infecting every edge of the global stage, and Germany, like the rest of the world, was unable to disentangle itself from the DNA strands of what was now evolving into the American international narrative. World War II was the second installment in the struggle for imperialistic dominion and the question of 'modern empire'. Based on its resolution, culminating in the invasion of Germany by the Allies (now Britain and its Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, France and, of course later, the United States) and its division into politically and economically polar opposites for the next half century by those aforementioned, it seemed to suggest once again that neocolonialism, a.k.a. the way of conservative American empire, was the only possible form of imperialism which could survive within the context of globalization. It would lay the groundwork for the new global modern empire, a free religious market economy to be spearheaded by the truest victor of the war, a nation-state which on all accounts was becoming the global policing authority, the one and the only 'land of the free'.
As another Act played itself out on the global stage, the spotlight that had been recently shone on Germany slowly repositioned itself, now adding extra brightness to the silhouette of the United States, once again comfortably situated downstage center—and it was all too ready to give its monologue: the American international narrative, an inspiring soliloquy on what it means to be 'free' in the 20th century. Throughout the events of the Second World War, America had, in the eyes of its fellow actors, more than proven itself worthy to take on the hefty mantle of global hegemony, lest another less compromising, more exclusive, genocidal form of empire take its place... and not surprisingly, the aftermath of the war already foreshadowed the potentiality of an opposing empire species materializing, lurking in the depths of the unstable pact which had existed between the Western and Soviet blocs and initially served its purpose in enabling the defeat of their common enemy. This pointed out the elephant in the room: Nazi Germany had been conquered and re-appropriated amongst the victors, but the victors now found themselves on opposite sides of the playing field, and a thorough defense strategy was all too necessary. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949 as a preemptive response to the dangerous entity which opposed the God-almighty American hegemony, the Soviet Union (which indeed formed its own military alliance in the drafting of the Warsaw Pact six years later), and thus the policing power of the American empire was once again in danger, finding itself yet another competitor in the triathlon for global dominance, a contest weighing economic, political, and cultural aptitudes. In his 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Sir Isaiah Berlin “distinguished sharply between [American] 'negative liberty'—the absence of external obstacles to the fulfillment of one's desires—and [Soviet] 'positive liberty', which led to the subordination of the individual to the whole by identifying the state as the arbiter of social good,” (Foner 9). The American posse (NATO) was prepared to back up their commanding officer in the good ol' fight for negative liberty (or the more neutrally qualifying 'active' liberty, as opposed to the 'passive' liberty of the Soviet empire) and freedom from communist oppression, yet some members found themselves at odds with certain methods of approach concerning the Soviet problem. The question of West German rearmament post-WWII—whether it was the best idea to so suddenly give that much power to a country which had within the last decade almost taken over Europe—turned out to be the first crisis of many the organization would have to overcome. Another, the Suez Canal Crisis of 1959, saw the authority of the United States undermined as France and Britain coerced Israel into invading Egypt, which had nationalized the canal and thus threatened the oil supply of the two major European powers, without NATO consent. By then, French president Charles de Gaulle had arrived onto the scene looking for his own co-starring role, and he obviously had quite a few qualms with the current setup; French actions within NATO during his presidency have come to be known as 'the Gaullist challenge': “first, de Gaulle sought to tighten Franco-German relations and so pull Germany away from the Anglo-American center of gravity inside the alliance; second, he sought to free France from what he saw as NATO's control over French military and nuclear policy.” Within five years, de Gaulle withdrew the French fleet from the joint NATO Mediterranean Command, denied Britain access to the European Economic Community (EEC), and tried to seduce Germany with the signing of the Franco-German Friendship Treaty, all in an attempt to regain partial control (supposedly on behalf of Europe) of what had become America's global stage. While his actions may have been irrational, his argument was not: “was Europe to become an independent, powerful community of states, using its economic, military, and cultural assets to influence world affairs? Or would Europe remain a group of cautious, sheltered, inward-looking states, dependent on the United States for its security and its foreign policy choices?” Sadly, de Gaulle was at that time the only one who “desired greater independence from Washington,” (Anderson 63). The other European constituents of NATO were more than willing to let America take the wheel, an acquiescing which came to a head with the next transatlantic crisis of the 20th century, caused by what could be considered one of America's last gos at any pretense of isolationist foreign policy—the Bosnian War. Much less a war than it was a controlled genocide, it developed into a crisis due to a very belated and not at all constructive response from Europe, and a lack of response from the United States altogether. Since it was already focused on winning wars in Kuwait and Iraq, sending troops to the Persian Gulf to secure Western access to oil, and putting the finishing touches on the Soviet tombstone, America decided to leave the Bosnian issue to the other side of the pond. The dilemma with this was that “Europe viewed the [Bosnian] conflict as part of a long-term ethnic contest that had been underway for many centuries and lay in the murky Balkan past,” and only deployed UN troops under a “mandate to monitor troop movements in Bosnia and protect humanitarian aid convoys” with “no authority to use military force.” What came to follow was the “long slow strangulation of Bosnian Muslims” and an even longer exhibition of European ineptitude in terms of international security policy (Anderson 68). When it came down to it, America was the only able-bodied global police officer in town, and though its intimidating air strikes and fierce diplomacy methods eventually quelled the state of affairs, it had made a big mistake in allowing the situation to get so out of hand. It began to understand the profound amount of responsibility that accompanied such great hegemonic power. The United States still had “a national interest not only in European security but also in the institutions that underpin that security,” (Anderson 71). And this concept spanned more than just the Atlantic: if the GloboCop wanted to maintain its tripartite hegemony across the board, then it would have to not only ensure the God-given human rights within its own domain, but also work endlessly towards the institutionalization of those freedoms across the globe.
'Freedom' as defined by America had undergone strategic metamorphoses since its initial usage as an operating oppositional narrative to the European monarchies of the 17th century, utilized each time as a means of justifying a war on the tyrannical 'other'; at first, a war on the Old World of totalitarian hierarchical society, then, on the Slave World of the liberty-inhibiting socialism, and presently, on the Middle East, a world full of anti-American-driven terrorism. Yet this type of operating system was very thorough in its polarity measures; for example, the United States' definition of freedom vis-à-vis the Soviet Union mutated itself to encompass not merely an adversity “to one-party rule, suppression of free expression and the like,” but included amongst its nemeses those societal conventions which also used to stand for 'freedom' at one point or another in the American narrative, such as “public housing, universal health insurance, full employment, and other claims that required strong and persistent governmental intervention in the economy,” (Foner 9). Therefore, we cannot see American freedom as something that hasn't been intrinsically impressed by the hypocritical conservatism of its Puritan Founding Fathers; it is a freedom which is inescapably trapped within the web of its own traditions, a freedom that can only exist within the paradigm of relationship, an 'othering' process which in and of itself has been the grounds for most if not all of American social change under the pseudonym of 'freedom'. And with this realization, the idea that the GloboCop operates on some higher level of moral propriety should be reexamined: “America's relationship to the outside world” has since the beginning “helped establish how freedom is understood within the United States. To a considerable degree, the self-definition of the United States as a nation-state with a special mission to bring freedom to all mankind depends on the 'otherness' of the outside world,” and in the end, it is the 'evils' existing in that outside world which force the American empire to get up off its high horse and defend the claim that it is, indeed, the land of the freest. The action is but a self-preserving one. The Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement... these were identity crises—all the lashing out of American society as it struggled to continuously redefine itself juxtaposed to the newest entity it had decreed as 'other'. But seeing as you can only tango with two, the theoretical others in this paradigm were also infected at a very fundamental level by the virulent American conservative culture. As the United States made its way to the head of the pack, and the rest of the world began to look to American empire as a mirror for self-imaging, the late 20th century mutation of America's exceptionally conservative freedom sang its hymns now to the 'global American', since American culture (irreversibly entwined with both its initial religious and economic ideas) had become “so omnipresent that everybody [had], as it were, a virtual American buried inside their brains,” (Micklethwait 294). A friend once described the situation with an allusion to the theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; the United States could be considered the 'signifier'—the rest of the world, its 'signified'. All other nations began to view themselves through the lens of American hegemony, of American empire. That meant that the conservative element of American religiosity had finally permeated the membrane of global society; in other words, the strict moral code of the Puritans had, despite the feigned separation of church and state, subtly embedded itself into the rationality of the civil mind. Global American freedom, then, became inseparable to the ideological beliefs associated with the Bible and God, the symbols of the exceptionally conservative freedom America was founded upon. Thus, the war on terrorism is not merely a war on Middle Eastern aggression against American empire but includes within its resistance an even stronger yet irrelevant opposition to Muslim culture and religion, which are not the sources of terrorism in the first place. This is the major symptom of American exceptional conservatism: it does not allow for distinction within the other-ing process. Once an 'other' is selected, freedom must stand for anything and everything that isn't associated with that other. The process is cyclically convoluted: selection of an 'other'; defining of freedom as juxtaposed to the freedom of the other; creation of identity; international commodification and policing of said identity to the signified; selection of another other; redefining of freedom; identity crisis; international commodification and policing of the new identity to the signified; identity crisis of a signified group; selection of another other; redefining of freedom; and so on and so forth...
The question I long to propose is loaded, yet short and maybe a little sweet: is American empire the right man for the job? While the overarching effects of the incurable exceptional conservatism that has hacked into the American psyche are perhaps in line with Western civilization's ideas of human rights and eventually (in layman’s terms, very inefficiently and sheerly out of a desire to hold onto the title of 'freest') bring about the peace and freedom promised to every individual by the Puritan American God, the ways in which religion has come out on top of every dimension of modernity is rather questionable. Many of the social freedoms—i.e. abortion, LGBTQ rights—still debated today, not only within society but also in the political sphere of the United States, find their most sizable controversy in religious guidelines and conservative conventions, the same able to be said of those civil rights movements which denizens of American empire had previously fought for (abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, desegregation, etc.). American opinion has been split down the line since Day 1, and American identity has been consequently thrust into unending turmoil, a disconnect which prevails to this day, because of this inherent desire to 'other' by clinging for dear life to conservative religiosity, an utter reliance on that which America began its ascension to empire. But as globalization spreads and more actors recognize their role on the global stage, the weaknesses of American empire, its moral hypocrisy and multiple personality disorder, are showcased under the spotlight it soaks in. The poisonously religious nature of American global policing—both of its domestic subjects and its international ones—is now being seen for what it truly is, and the 'free religious market' is coming to a slow and steady crash. My suggestion: if GloboCop hopes to remain even a deputy within the police force of the 21st century empire of freedom and global human rights, then it should probably take another stab at Amendment I. This time around, maybe we should try for Separation of Church and State of Mind.
Anderson, Jeffrey J., G. John. Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse-Kappen. "The Ghost of Crises Past." The End of the West?: Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. 52-81. Print.
---. "American Exceptionalism or Western Civilization?" The End of the West?: Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. 247-62. Print.
Foner, Eric. History Cooperative. "American Freedom in a Global Age." The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, Issue 1. September 26, 2006. Print. <http://www.historycooperative.org/ journals/ahr/106.1/ah000001.html>
Mauch, Christof, and Kiran Klaus Patel. "Empires: Might and Myopia." The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century: Competition and Convergence. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2010. 13-31. Print.
Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. "America the Different." The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. New York: Penguin, 2004. 291-313. Print.
---. "Right from the Beginning: The Roots of American Exceptionalism." The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. New York: Penguin, 2004. 314-333. Print.
