Empires and Their Ideologies

Historians of empire tend to stress political, social, and economic motivations, both at the metropole and in the periphery, as the mainsprings of empire. These are important considerations that will all receive treatment in due course. Rather newer to the historians' toolbox is the subject of ideology. Ideology seems to be a part of every empire, though its importance has undoubtedly intensified in the modern period as democratic mass society has emerged as an important authorizing context for imperial policy. Imperial ideology, of greater or lesser intensity, is characteristic of all empires and, while it may not constitute one of the purposes of empire as outlined by Professor Colás (expansion, hierarchy, order), it is nevertheless essential.

By ideology I mean the more or less coherent set(s) of animating ideas that win the participation and loyalty of people whom otherwise might balk at the pursuit of empire. Ideology constitutes the patterns by which humans understand a) how the world operates and -- even more importantly perhaps -- b) how the world should be. Homo sapiens is a pattern recognizing species. As the data that barrages our senses becomes overpowering, especially in human relations and human society, ideological pattern-seeking becomes even more important. Ideology is the term we give to those mental patterns of belief that help us make sense of the streams of data that assault our senses on a constant basis. As such, ideology provides both a filter to that data, sorting out what we believe important from what we believe trivial, and a shortcut to articulating solutions in a world of overwhelming challenge. At its best, ideology helps us sort the data of the world into manageable, correct, and just categories. At its worst, ideological patterns force us into maladaptive behavior even in the face of obvious contradictions.
 
Ideology is a basic feature of humanity but is particularly important to empires. Empires differ from non-imperial states in at least one very crucial way: while nation-states generally try to accommodate themselves to an international status quo, empires assert the need or desire to change that status quo, often radically. Empires are agents of normative, even revolutionary, change in the world (more on that later), which is the point of imperial expansion. Empires assert the need to transform, restore, or in some other way alter the present course of history. In this sense, empires see themselves as trans-historical (more on empire and history later too!). Imperial ideology offers a vision of what that change should be and what might be needed to bring it into effect.
 
But imperial ideology has an additional, paradoxical, task. Ironically, even as they assert a need for international change, empires are also agents of order, peace, and stability. Order is especially crucial if empires are to deliver the economic benefits promised to the imperial citizenry. Like all ideology, imperial ideology can help to reconcile this apparent contradiction between revolutionary change and (often reactionary) stability: most empires proclaim an ideology wherein order is the fulfillment of the imperial revolutionary mission. All empires are in this regard utopian, promising a coming paradise, be it a worker’s paradise, or the banishment of human conflict (the “end of history”), the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, the final liberation of the Germanic peoples, or any one of a number of religious, quasi-religious, or economic utopias.
 
Thus, empires style themselves as revolutionary and unchangeable at the same time. Much of the reconciliation of this paradox is accomplished through ideology, in particular notions of temporality: FIRST the barbarian must be subdued, THEN peace will ensue. It is also accomplished geographically, at the frontier: here on one side peace and order prevails, on the other all is savage chaos. One thinks immediately of classic ideological statements such as “the war to end all wars” which attempts to banish the very paradox it airs. Thus through the workings of imperial ideology geographical, political, and even historical stability are asserted even in the face of (often) revolutionary violence.
 
Scholars have examined the ideological basis of the British empire, to give one example. David Armitage identified the seeds of the great global British empire in an idea, not about maritime colonization of the western hemisphere but rather an idea about the unification of the three kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland. The empire, in other words, coalesced around the idea that England, Scotland, and Wales should be united, not in a co-equal state but in a British Empire, sorted into a classic hierarchical structure. Empire would solve the disorder of contested patrimonies and divided loyalties that characterized feudalism, making order out of disorder. Later evolution of British imperial ideology would come to incorporate the maritime sphere and the idea that British commerce, with its promises of free trade and alleged open markets, brought with it liberation from local and petty economic tyrannies. Neither English lords in the earlier period nor British voters in the latter were likely to make the exertions necessary in the absence of these apparently compelling ideological arguments.
 
Imperial ideology is sometimes expressed in formal policy, but it doesn’t need to be. It may be articulated in a speech, an epic poem, or a poorly conceived jailhouse memoir. Ideology can also be carried on the winds of popular culture, especially in the democratic and technological age in which we live, infusing the tropes and stereotypes by which a people come to know themselves. Like all ideologies, imperial ideas can combine, recombine, and accelerate each other, producing an imperial consensus greater than the sum of its parts.
               
The ideology of the American empire has given recent scholarship no end of avenues of exploration. How an anti-imperial republic gave rise, in very short order, to a globe-bestriding continental empire, is just the beginning. The massive and extraordinarily costly deployment of American power – economic, military, and cultural -- throughout the twentieth century and across the globe in alleged support of democratization, free markets, individual liberty, and global cooperation – known to scholars as “liberal internationalism” or, sometimes, “Wilsonianism” – constitutes only a more recent paradox. That so many Americans see no paradox there whatsoever is testimony to the seductive power of ideology at work.
 
Further reading: David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)