BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Jay wrote:

The empire definition fails unless you count multinational companies that happen to be headquartered in America like Coca-Cola and McDonald's which extract wealth from the rest of the world and bring it here. Empires were never really about land control, they were built on trade and exploiting colonies for natural resources to trade. The British didn't hold India because they wanted a bunch of land, they did it to control the spice and tea trades. The British Empire was mostly just a series of trade ports/refueling/re-victualing stations on the way to India. Unnecessary today with the speed of commerce. We have far too much competition, and next to no overseas monopolies though, so to call us a modern day empire is a stretch and a half.

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-12-09 08:15:03)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

It's not an attempt to obfuscate our history at all. It doesn't matter if you're doing so proudly, deprecatingly, or are just following a trend without knowing why; calling America an empire is incorrect. Our companies aren't expanding overseas for the benefit of the "empire," it's for the benefit of their own profits, and occasionally to escape the regulative clutches of our own government. The hawkish disposition of high-ranking officials also means fuck-all. If you are basing "empire" off that, then every country that ever started a war is an empire. If you are thinking in terms of US influence and military projection, the term you are looking for is superpower. Use of the term "empire" is sloppy and laughable.

Also, Portugal was an empire.

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-12-09 08:25:18)

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-12-09 08:28:25)

Characterizing some aspects of American foreign policy and international behavior "American Empire" is controversial but not uncommon. Stuart Creighton Miller posits that the public's sense of innocence about Realpolitik (cf. American Exceptionalism) impairs popular recognition of US imperial conduct. Since it governed other countries via surrogates — domestically-weak, right-wing governments that collapse without US support.[15] G.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: "We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic; we never have been"[16] — directly contradicts Thomas Jefferson, in the 1780s, awaiting the fall of the Spanish empire: "...till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece".[17][18][19] In turn, historian Sidney Lens argues that from its inception the US has used every means to dominate other nations.[20]

Since the European Union began, in 1993, as a west European trade bloc, it established its own currency, the Euro, in 1999, established discrete military forces, and exercised its limited hegemony in parts of eastern Europe and Asia. This behaviour, the political scientist Jan Zielonka suggests, is imperial, because it coerces its neighbour countries to adopt its European economic, legal, and political structures.[21][22][23][24][25][26]

In his book review of Empire (2000) by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Mehmet Akif Okur posits that, since the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S., the international relations determining the world's balance of power (political, economic, military) have been altered. These alterations include the intellectual (political science) trends that perceive the contemporary world's order via the re-territorrialisation of political space, the re-emergence of classical imperialist practices (the "inside" vs. "outside" duality, cf. the Other), the deliberate weakening of international organisations, the restructured international economy, economic nationalism, the expanded arming of most countries, the proliferation of nuclear weapon capabilities and the politics of identity emphasizing a state's subjective perception of its place in the world, as a nation and as a civilisation. These changes constitute the "Age of Nation Empires"; as imperial usage, nation-empire denotes the return of geopolitical power from global power blocs to regional power blocs (i.e. centred upon a "regional power" state [China, Russia, U.S., et al.]) and regional multi-state power alliances (i.e. Europe, Latin America, South East Asia). Nation-empire regionalism claims sovereignty over their respective (regional) political (social, economic, ideologic), cultural and military spheres.[27]

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-12-09 08:44:14)

Macbeth wrote:

The CEOs and major shareholders of all those corporations that expand in every direction are either American or European. China, Japan, India, and Brazil have companies that expand in every direction that are also have a majority ownership of the company residing in their state as well as CEOs that are from the nation and have close political ties with the state's leaders. Saying that these companies are totally detached and usupported in large part by the state is laughable. Like I pointed to the Hugo Chavez example of the U.S. protecting American oil companies assets in a foreign country. We are actively undermining a country that hurt an American business by taking away their profit making compatibilities in that country.

Spearhead wrote:

Here's an incomplete list of what we own around the world :

Panama Canal
Suez Canal
Strait of Hormuz
Japan
Korea
Europe
Israel
South America

I guess it's just a coincidence to these Aussies that Mark Twain was a member of the Anti-imperialist League which was founded in 1898?  lol