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Very few modern political words have had such complex and contested histories as "empire", "imperial" and "imperialist". In the political discourse of the twentieth century's second half, they were almost always used pejoratively. Even the rulers of systems which everyone else thought of as empires denied that the label applied to theirs. British publicists insisted that their fast-declining global system was no longer an empire, but a "Commonwealth". Soviet ones urged that by definition - a definition formulated by Lenin early in the century - their expansionism was not imperial, since only capitalist states could be imperialist. Antiimperialism and anti-colonialism were perhaps the most globally ubiquitous ideologies, or slogans, of the post-1945 world. It followed almost inevitably that only the fiercest, most hostile critics of United States foreign policy described it as either imperial or imperialist.
In just the last couple of years, this has changed rapidly and radically. The notion of an American empire has become a central figure in contemporary global political discourse. And it is employed now from a far wider range of viewpoints. It is, naturally, still favoured by many negative critics of the phenomena concerned. But it is used also by those who seemingly intend the term in a neutral, essentially descriptive way, like Andrew J. Bacevich, Charles S. Maier, or Michael Ignatieff.1 Most strikingly, it is employed in tones of warm approval, by people like the neo-conservative American polemicist Dinesh D'Souza, but also by more thoughtful commentators like Robert Kagan, Sebastian Mallaby and the senior British foreign service official Robert Cooper.2
Some of what is going on here is, quite simply, an argument about definitions - one strongly coloured by political, ethical and emotional concerns of the kinds which the ideas of empire and imperialism have almost always carried. But on another, more substantive level, current debates engage with questions of continuity or discontinuity, with the relevance or otherwise of "lessons from history", be it the earlier history of the United States and its international role, or that of older imperial systems. This article tries to approach the question with (so far as limitations of space allow) a somewhat greater historical depth than that of many recent polemical treatments. It tries briefly to trace how current disputes relate...