Musings on British and American Imperialism

It is always interesting to reflect on the similarities and differences between British and American imperialism. Both British and American civil religion and imperialism, of course, were grounded in notions of national chosenness, national destiny, and Anglo-Saxon superiority. The British, unlike the Americans, however, revelled and gloried in their imperial chosenness, destiny, and superiority, consciously seeing themselves as on a mission to civilise the known world. They recognised that they were imperialists and justified and rationalised it by, in the case of England's posh aristocratic toffs, seeing their mission as one of "civilising" the "unfortunate" and "backward" hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists of the planet while imperialism gave the male English working classes a sense of power and manhood they didn't always have in everyday life (though English working class males could express their power in their relationship to women and minorities). It gave them a sense of being the biggest cock on the block in a world where their everyday lives were relatively miserable even after World War II.

The United States replaced Great Britain as the biggest and greatest imperial cock on the block in the wake of World War Two, something exemplified by Canada's move, one not always sought, from the British to the American imperial orbit after the Second World War. America's sense of chosenness was grounded in the American sense that they were the new Israel, the New Zion, and, after evangelicalism became the official unofficial religion of an empire that was born in imperialism, it after all pushed the First Peoples ever westward or simply cleansed the chosen land of them, in an evangelicalism that gave an evangelical cast to the sense of chosenness and evangelical mission that was at the heart of the American civil religion, public religion, or civic religion from the nineteenth century to today. 

This evangelical dominance of American culture helped manufacture an American civil religion with a sense of innocence akin to the American evangelical Christian primitivism that fantasised about a possible return to a utopian eden characterised by chosenness and perfectionist purity or perfection. As a consequence, Americans, who were generally absorbed into the culture of the American civil religion with its sense of evangelical chosenness and evangelical innocence via socialisation, made their chosen mission to Christianise the world an innocent and righteous (some might say self-righteous) one. Over time American style capitalism, American style oligarchic politics masquerading as "democracy", and American style culture, particularly its manichean melodrama, became central to America's holy and righteous mission to civilise the world, its manifest destiny, in other words, and its sense of self.

As an aside, Mormons had their own version of chosenness and mission. It undergirded Mormon culture and played itself out in the Mormon colonisation of parts of the American, Canadian, and Mexican West.

But back to the American culture of imperialism, ever since this ideology of American innocence, an ideology tied to the virgin land motif in American culture and the ideology that the US was new--it wasn't, of course, but empirical reality is generally irrelevant to how social groups see themselves--and to a manichean melodrama starring themselves as the good guy in this tale of good and evil (something Hollywood and particularly Hollywood westerns have imbibed) has tended to make Americans amnesiac when it comes to the American empire. The latest iteration of this amnesia, of course, is the tendency of most Americans to elide the fact that NATO is an imperial organisation that has, since the fall of "communism", spread ever eastward in Europe and looks to spread across the rest of the globe. Americans, in other words, have made NATO as innocent as they made themselves. Fiction made real.

Americans have drunk the artificial kool-aid of forgetfulness and innocence, a beverage that immunises most of the faithful from reality. And that, of course, is a very human trait. Humans, after all, are ethnocentric.

On a normative level, I appreciate the British honesty about their imperialism. I don't appreciate the American dishonesty, obfuscation, and amnesia about their imperialism. The English may not have recognised that their imperialism was ultimately grounded in an ethnocentrism that was a cultural and ideological construct, believing that their imperial status was god given or nature given. But at least they had the self-awareness and ethical and moral honesty to recognise themselves for who they were, imperialists.  

Most Americans, on the other hand, because of the ideology of innocence at the heart of the post World War I American national faith, didn't and don't have the level of self-awareness necessary to see themselves for who they really are, imperialists. As a result they have to engage in all sorts of intellectually questionable mental gymnastics, including making normative politically correct ideology the standard for misinterpreting reality, an "approach" akin to interpreting all music on the basis of whether it is like Bach or not, in order to dissemble about what their country really is, namely, a great power that acts like any other great power that has existed over the course of history and is as imperialist as any other great power that has existed over the course of history. 

These amnesiac Americans make one yearn for the moral and ethical honesty of self proclaimed American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and others in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America who knew that they were imperialist, proclaimed that they were imperialist, justified their imperialism, and promoted it, arguing that Guam, for instance, was absolutely essential for the proper functioning of the modern American Pacific naval fleet if it was to rival Britain and Japan in the Pacific

America's nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialists may have been parochial and selective and situational but at least they were honest about it. And that is why they are more deserving of respect than the dissembling dishonesty and immorality of the morally and ethically challenged who see the US as the emodiment of a perfect and pure and innocent god or as the highest evolutionary achievement of nature.