 Prague is a beautiful city under any circumstances, but sometimes the universe determines to speak with even greater magic, and purpose. Ten years ago this month I accompanied my ex-wife an on academic fellowship to the Czech Republic. We had our indefatigable four-year-old, Dashie, in tow. Her job was to teach, ours to explore this glorious and historic city. It was a hot summer, uncharacteristic for Prague—the heat radiated off the stone walks and buildings. Dashie and I took refuge in a basement bowling alley many of those days. But before the weather turned oppressive, we walked. And walked. And we started to see connections that I had not anticipated.
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 In a recent social media post, President Trump made the claim that the European Union was “formed for the primary purpose of ‘screwing’ the United States of America.” This is, like nearly every other historical claim Mr. Trump has made for more than a decade, a totally false statement. It is not a mis-statement, but rather an obvious lie intended to mislead, misrepresent, and confuse his ill-informed audience. What follows is a capsule history of the European Union, with special emphasis on the proactive and energetic role the United States played in establishing the EU. The internal politics of EU formation is fascinating and highly complex and worthy of study in its own right. The story recounted here is less about those intra-union dynamics than about the EU-US relationship.
Public goods and services are in the news these days, as President Trump and Elon Musk continue their efforts to dismantle American civil society. The administration’s strangulation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) shines a light on the connection between public goods and empire. What do public goods have to do with empire? A LOT, it turns out.
The relationship of capitalism to modern empire is of paramount importance, but unclear significance. For some, like Hobson and Lenin, empire is the apotheosis of capitalism, its logical and inevitable product and endpoint. For others, like the economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism is antithetical to empire, its free markets a solvent of empire’s inherent tyranny. Capitalism is undoubtedly a crucial component of early modern empires, including the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British empires. But vital and dynamic empires existed long before capitalism as we know it. We will continue to explore in detail the relationship between capital and empire, especially in the modern context. For now, let’s register a few broad points about the political economy of empire.
We’ve been discussing frontiers lately, a concept that extends to the cultural realm as well. The American concern with the cultural frontier reached its pinnacle during the early Cold War. Beginning in the late 1940s, as fears of Soviet expansion and then communist military incursions took center stage in the foreign policies of the Western allies, officials in Washington grew increasingly concerned to project an image of U.S. leadership not only as benign, but as reliable and trustworthy. They were aware of traditional stereotypes about American superficiality, impertinence, and unreliability and sought to counter negative stereotypes of America with positive portrayals that would shore up Western morale. We call this effort “public diplomacy,” and the outreach involved multiple U.S. agencies, from the Economic Cooperation Administration, which ran the Marshall Plan and, along with it, what is likely the largest peacetime propaganda effort in human history, to the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Eisenhower administration. The State Department ran the Fulbright and Foreign Leader exchange programs, the Department of Defense took pains to maintain solid public relations among allied nations, and the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcast to both sides of the Iron Curtain. Of course the CIA got involved as well, with a hand in everything from election manipulation to promoting the work of anti-communist intellectuals.
We often think of style as a kind of literary signature: the punch-you-in-your face brevity of a Hemingway versus the get-lost-in-the-woods prolixity of a Faulkner. Style is certainly a major factor in our enjoyment of fiction, and it undoubtedly plays a role in non-fiction as well. The truthfulness of a poorly-written story cannot overcome its stylistic deficiencies. A well-written and engaging account elevates the experience for your readers.
Style is important in non-fiction, though in most cases our choices are more constrained than in fiction. Because the aims of non-fiction, generally, are to impart meaning in as precise a way as possible (as opposed to fiction, which is freer to aspire to the poetic), the conventions of English-language prose dictate some choices are better than others. For this reason, most publishing houses demand adherence to a style sheet. If you publish a book with a publisher, you will certainly be supplied with a style sheet with which you are expected to conform. This style sheet, likely derived from one of the major guides in use, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, will offer direction about how to conform your prose mechanics. Questions such as capitalization, abbreviation, proper spelling of technical terms, and so forth will generally be answered. Many of these rules are developed to help make your prose more comprehensible, your meaning more precise. By regulating certain choices, style guides take the guesswork out of meaning for writers and readers alike. We are several days out from Black History Month. Since it has been at least a hundred years, and perhaps more, since we've had a U.S. presidential administration signal such clear intent to discriminate on racial terms--even going so far as to bring actual Nazi sympathizers into its close orbit--I may be forgiven for a premature post. The Trump administration's attack on what it labels diversity initiatives, critical race theory, and "woke" is being advanced in the name of American meritocracy. But while the proponents of those initiatives are bad-faith actors who surely know better, I still have hope that much of the public support for the racist backlash they represent derives from ignorance rather than unalloyed malevolence. The anti-CRT/DEI/"woke" advocates claim to be defending American values against a stultifying intellectual dogma. In fact what they are railing against is American history itself. In my ongoing hopes to generate a greater level of intellectual and historical honesty among readers who may have only a passing grasp of the racism inherent in that history, I offer the following:
Several years ago I attempted to visualize for classroom use how racism and discrimination function in American life and throughout American history. It is of necessity a crude attempt to render such a complicated topic in a single visual format. But nevertheless I present for my readers’ consideration the following graphic: In a city overflowing with prime tourist attractions, the Anne Frank house may be Amsterdam's greatest. A visit to Amsterdam must include a stop to see the house, an extremely well run and highly affective museum. A new traveling exhibit recreates Anne Frank's secret annex for American visitors (Bringing Anne Frank’s Secret Annex to New York, and the World - The New York Times), and a new book (The Many Lives of Anne Frank) examines the construction and lasting influence of the world's most famous diary. After the break, a brief excerpt about Anne and her diary from my own forthcoming book:  The first diary bought as a present for Anne Frank by her parents. Courtesy of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. If you’ve never visited, you may be inclined to think of China’s Great Wall as a singular installation, as a very great wall, as perhaps the greatest of walls. In fact, the so-called “Great Wall of China” is a series of walls and fortifications built over centuries as the Chinese empire expanded northward. Walls were built for protection from marauding nomads outside of the empire, but new structures were extended northward and westward as the empire expanded. Grand as they were (and are), the walls did not demarcate the limit of the empire; instead, they ratcheted the empire ever further outward. “Build and move on was the principle,” historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe about these walls, “not setting up a fixed border for all time.” Protection was one function of the wall to be sure, but “the wall” was never intended strictly to demarcate the empire from non-empire. Rather, in their successive geographical march, the walls offered the ongoing contact with the outsider, non-imperial subjects–-“barbarians,” if you will--that is the hallmark of imperial frontiers.   And now for something completely different: In honor of the GOAT’s birthday, one day early, I present a list of the top fights in Muhammad Ali’s career, ranked. Highly subjective justifications follow. My criteria, such as they are, center on Ali’s greatness writ large, and not solely for his boxing acumen, significance as an activist, or humanitarian greatness. I remain inspired by the Greatest of All Time, no less in these trying days. Comments and counter-takes welcome!:
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AuthorI am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations. Archives
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Why empire?This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof. |
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