In November 2001, U.S. forces seized a rural part of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, and in a staged display jubilant marines hoisted an American flag on the highest point of the terrain. The reference to Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders on San Juan Hill (1898) at the dawn of U.S. global ambition, or to U.S. marines on Iwo Jima (1944) during a second moment of that ambition, was deliberate and as revealing as it was precise. Officially the Afghan war was a »war on terrorism« fought by an »international coalition,« but the marines were under no illusion as to where the nexus of global power lay or who the ultimate victors would be. At the zenith of what can be seen as the third moment of U.S. global ambition, this conflation of national (U.S.) self-interest with global beneficence has become starkly evident around the world.

The rise of the American Empire has been the most commanding event in the political and cultural economy of the twentieth century and it casts a long shadow over the twenty-first. In retrospect we can identify three formative moments in the U.S. rise to globalism. A barely formed nation at the end of the nineteenth century with a dramatically expanding industrial economy, the United States flexed military-geographical muscle and supra-national ambition in the acquisitive, classically colonial wars of 1898. But with entry into World War I and the promise of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, a different and more ambitious global amplitude was announced. This was the first formative moment, connecting 1898 with Wilson’s dream of a global Monroe Doctrine. But it was a dream deferred. The second moment came with the next world war. Henry Luce’s announcement of the American Century may have seemed ambitious, even brazen in 1941, but by war’s end the ascendancy of U.S. capital and culture seemed assured. However truncated and transformed by anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War, it was this American globalism that flowered, however partially, after 1945.

But that era too was short-lived. After the 1970s, with U.S. power facing stringent global competition (political as well as economic), scholars began to perceive the closure or at least shortening of the American Century. Outmaneuvered in Vietnam and Nicaragua and held hostage in Iran, faltering U.S. power also suffered serious economic decline. The Japanese and German economies threatened U.S. control of finance and markets, deep domestic deindustrialization followed stiff competition from the low-wage economies in Asia and Latin America, and U.S. city centers were devastated as capital was sucked to the suburbs.¹ That much of the global competition was actually U.S.-financed and funneled profits back to the US was beside the point. The postwar period of U.S. superiority waned; uneven development now seemed to work increasingly against the United States rather than in its favor.

No sooner did that judgment seem secure, however, than the picture changed again. The partial internationalization of many production systems and labor markets; the emergence of secondary and tertiary financial markets around the world since the 1970s; the greater integration and deregulation of previously national financial markets, the wilting of the Japanese economic challenge in the 1990s; the aggressive restructuring of the US economy; and the implosion of official communism after 1989: all these developments made the mounting death notices for the American Century conspicuously premature. The smashing of the Berlin Wall and the modern day sacking of Baghdad two years later were heralded in Washington in the very same language used by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt: it was, George Bush Sr. told us, the advent of a »new world order.« »Make no mistake,« announced Reagan's ex-assistant secretary of the treasury in 1994, »a capitalist revolution is sweeping the world« - and the United States was comfortably in its vanguard.² This was the third formative moment in the U.S. rise to globalism, and it encouraged Bill Clinton, in his 1999 State of the Union address, to envisage a »next American Century.«

The self-congratulatory geography of this capitalist revolution was global and its language utopian. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the »end of history« while Margaret Thatcher insisted »there is no alternative« to global capitalism. Capitalism, western democracy, and Hollywood had won. Not just the end of history but the end of geography seemed to follow from the new world order. In business schools throughout the United States and East Asia and in financial board rooms around the world, the new message for the 1990s held that a borderless world now prevailed and nation states were fatally weakened by new global flows of capital, information, people and ideas.³ The rise of new financial markets and their virtually instantaneous technological accessibility rendered space, place and borders superfluous. In the symptomatically Americanized tones of a 1997 British Telecom advert: »Geography is history.«

Hatched from the rarified personal experiences of a small coterie of financial executives, traders and cybersleuths, but nurtured by a more widespread revolution in electrical, computer and televisual communications, this assumption of a borderless world is quite literally utopian in the sense that it assumes or anticipates a spaceless world, and it has migrated well beyond the borders of its own significance. It has more progressive variants, as in Manuel Castells' powerful claim that the world now comprises a space of flows, a network society, rather than a space of places. And it has become a leitmotif of globalized culture as well as finance. For French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, the »end of geography« is the apogee of dialectical critique, a utopia already achieved in and as America. Even the cultural critic Paul Virilio finds himself in the surprising position of mirroring finance capital when he too declares »the death of geography.«⁴

The puzzling thing is that this powerful »end of geography« rhetoric is emerging alongside quite antithetical trends. Since the early twentieth century, geography as an academic discipline in the United States has declined consonant with the fortunes of geography as a discourse of power. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a forceful reassertion of geographical consciousness ranging through political, cultural, and especially academic institutions. Even in the hearth of the American Empire, the US Congress in 1987 established an annual »Geography Awareness Week« in response to polls demonstrating lamentable popular ignorance of geography. Two years later the ex-Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, appealed to Harvard University to initiate a widespread reintroduction of Geography in schools and universities. (Harvard did not immediately oblige but symptomatically, perhaps, has reintroduced Geography teaching in the curriculum of its Business School.) Historians, economists and other scientists have begun to rediscover geography too, albeit often in quite determinist tones.⁵ Even more powerfully, the so-called cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, from Foucault to feminism, postructuralism to postmodernism, has been underwritten by a broad deployment of spatial metaphors that makes the cultural turn simultaneously a spatial turn. Oxford literary critic Terry Eagleton has captured this shift, announcing that Geography, »which used to be about chaps and maps, now looks set to become the sexiest discipline of all.«⁶ National Geographic Magazine went further: they sponsored millenium-ending radio, television and internet programs proclaiming the twentieth century to have been »the geographic century.«

By one account, then, the American Century took us beyond geography; by another, it was the geographic century. Mapping the American century reveals the geographical politics of American globalism, exposing the fact that the contradiction between a spaceless and a spatially constituted American globalism is latent in the global history of the twentieth century. It rose to the surface at crucial points, was strongest during the formative moments of the American Empire, and points to the powerful necessity of understanding the preludes to globalization in a geographical register. Claims concerning the »end of geography« express less the realities of a new world order than a certain ideological apprehension about how the future will turn out. They issue during periods of particularly intense spatial transformation - such as »globalization« - accompanied by wide public interest in the connections between economic and political change, and they obscure rather than illuminate the very real geographical shifts that have framed the history and the politics of the American Empire. The pretense of an end to geography is symptomatic of a certain self-flattery of the American Century and provides a distorted, one-dimensional perspective on the origins of U.S. globalism, its trajectory and politics.

Montesquieu once proposed that most imperial states »have made commercial interests give way to political interests« whereas England »has always made its political interests give way to the interests of commerce.«⁷ However that may be looking back from the 18th century, any dominance of economic over political interests in Britain now pales in comparison with the American empire. Postwar U.S. dominance was organized first and foremost through the world market. This is not to say that political interests wilted after 1945, that military power languished or that exceptions did not exist. The war in Vietnam was certainly a political battle (and defeat), but it was premised on a Cold War that itself was provoked amidst a 1940s battle by U.S. capital and the U.S. government for global economic access to labor and commodity markets. The binary geographies of the Cold War actually frustrated US global ambitions.

From the 1980s into the twenty-first century, a crisis-induced frenzy has sought to fit the pieces of a fragmented global jigsaw puzzle back together again, remake the map of the world both conceptually and in practice. Viewed this way, »globalization« after 1989 can be seen as a contemporary remapping strategy and as a fervent attempt to redress the geographical divisions established after 1945 - a second chance at Yalta, the wartime conference where the global geographical carve-up among the three most powerful allies was consummated and the Cold War took on an increasingly spatial identity. The deep sighs of epochal relief from the Western ruling classes after 1989 were mixed with unconstrained glee as the »capitalist revolution« engulfing the erstwhile Second World reverberated globally in ever-intensifying reaffirmations of neo-liberalism. Capitalism was strategically conflated with democracy. The failures of the second moment of the American Century were swept away as if by magic wand, and so too were the failures and frustrations of the first moment, not just in Paris and Washington, but most crucially the Russian revolution of 1917. »Globalization« therefore represents yet a third attempt at Wilson's new world order - a global Monroe Doctrine.⁸ The global universality of U.S.-centred capital seems again within reach, the end of history as well as of geography centrally on the agenda.

The supposed spacelessness of globalization works today as it did in the first and second moments of U.S. global ambition, namely to camouflage the location of power, to occlude alternative political futures, to depoliticize the history of the present and near future. Recuperating the geographies of the American Empire therefore simultaneously achieves a repoliticization of global economic and political power and reveals vividly that there is nothing inevitable about the global geographies of U.S. ruling class hegemony. It allows us to follow through on John Berger's brilliant insight that »Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us.«⁹ We are only beginning to open up that archive of created geographies, but, as we do, it becomes increasingly evident that re-introducing the largely hidden geography of the American Empire invites a fundamental rethinking of the history itself.

The historical geography of American globalism has everything to do with understanding the causes of the first major war of the twenty-first century. Just as the earlier two moments of U.S. global ambition were punctuated by war, so too after 7 October 2001 is the third moment. Earlier conflicts such as the 1991 war against Iraq were limited, and conceived as such, compared with the declared global scope of this new war. Initiated on the pretext of revenge for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the new war began with the U.S. military targeting an already devastated Afghanistan. It continued with an escalation of »anti-terrorist« assaults from Chechnya to the Philippines, Indonesia to Colombia, and with a brutal Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Labeled a »war on terrorism, « the new war is actually something much more dangerous: an unprecedented quickening of the American Empire. This is a war intended to bring the third moment of U.S. global ambition to successful fruition.

The conflation of narrow national self-interest with global good has been more acute since 11 September 2001 than at any time in the American Century. Ominous enough were the post-9/11 calls by President George W. Bush for a »new American crusade« in the Middle East and the repeated declaration that »either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.« Most sharply redolent of the new American globalism, however, was the challenge to the rest of the world that if you don't share »our values« you can expect only retribution. For those living outside the nationalized U.S. boundaries of »our values,« there were few beneficent ways of interpreting that statement.

Franklin Roosevelt aspired to have the world run by »Four Policemen,« among whom he calculated the U.S. would have the superior power. The new global landscape after 2001 posits a much more ambitious unilateralism as the U.S. ruling class acts in the confidence that it can be the solitary global police force, and that ruling classes across the world will follow in its coattails. This is the real meaning of claims that the U.S. won the Cold War and that, as a result, it stands as the only remaining superpower. Just as the scale of capital accumulation has increasingly outgrown the nation state, giving the global state institutions of the second moment (UN, IMF, World Bank, GATT/World Trade Organization) a heightened relevance, part of U.S. global ambition has involved the reinvention of the national (U.S.) state at the global scale. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided an extraordinary moral and military opportunity to solidify that agenda.

Prior to 2001 the seemingly isolationist-leaning George W. Bush would surely have seemed an unlikely leader for such a global campaign. A multi-millionaire with all the means, his geographical curiosity about the rest of the world was so limited that upon assuming the presidency at the age of 54, apart from vacations in Mexico, he had only been out of the United States twice. He did not even have a valid passport. Even so, some historical events are predictable, within limits. The U.S. government obviously seeks to expand the war. While not yet comparable in any way to the global conflagrations of the twentieth-century, the limits to this war's expansion are by no means clear. Also, it is far from clear, except perhaps in the case of Iraq and the Palestinians, which states and cities, governments and mountain hamlets will find themselves in the cross-hairs of global revenge and ambition. One other very important thing is predictable too: this projection of U.S. global command will ultimately fail. I will return to this point momentarily.

The continuity between the first, second and third moments of U.S. global ambition is more in view today than ever it was in the late twentieth century, but there are also vital discontinuities. Global unilateralism has never before been the rule and although it is much too early to announce the completion of some kind of U.S. global hegemony, that is the trajectory of change. The extent of American unilateralism after 2001 is certainly unprecedented. There are really two discontinuities here. First, the guiding vision involves the establishment of what we might think of as the first truly global empire. From China to Greece, Rome to Britain, empires were national and/or international but never totally global in scope. The American Empire strives to be planetary. Second, whereas the third moment is also now punctuated by war, the difference this time round is that while the U.S. participated in the world wars of the twentieth century, it initiated neither. This time, by contrast, the U.S. stands as the original belligerent state.

The contradictory spatiality of the American Empire is thrown into sharp relief, expressing a new disjuncture between an assumed geographical privilege and exceptionalism on the one hand and the peculiarly anti-geographical ideology of post-nineteenth century Americanism on the other. That the assumptions of geographical exceptionalism embody and express this anti-geographical ideology does nothing to lessen the contradiction. Somehow, throughout the American century U.S. territory has barely been touched by the succession of brutal wars - an estimated 10 million dead in World War I, more than 30 million in World War II, and many more millions in other wars on four continents. Not since the war of 1812 was there a significant foreign incursion on the U.S. mainland. No other nation has been so immune to the terror that made the twentieth century the most deadly in history and yet so implicated in it; nowhere else has a populace had the luxury of deluding themselves that geography is salvation, that geography protects power. With that illusion punctured after 2001, national exceptionalism is reinventing itself as the elixir of a putatively post-national globalism.

The geography of empire and in particular its scale - simultaneously national and global - therefore becomes more, not less, pivotal. The U.S. Defense Department understands the contradiction precisely. Several days after the marines restaged San Juan Hill and Iwo Jima near Kandahar, marine colonels quietly conveyed to their troops that the U.S. flag was no longer to be hoisted as a victory symbol for the international coalition. This particular sign of the conflation between national and global interests gave too much away.

For some, this insistence on the geography of empire might lead to a focus on oil, and indeed numerous socialists have argued that beneath the rhetorical veneer of the war on terrorism lies a traditional war for oil. Oil is certainly a significant part of the equation but it would be a mistake to convert the new war into the old language of resource-driven geopolitics. It is not that geopolitics is irrelevant, but today geo-economic calculation trumps geopolitical concerns. What characterizes the American Empire is precisely that power is exercised in the first place through the world market and only secondarily, when and if necessary, in geopolitical terms. War forces geopolitics to the fore, but it should not blind us to the deeper geo-economic aspiration for global control.

Viewed this way, we can see the so-called war on terrorism as something less, yet also more, than simply a war for oil. It is a war to fill the interstices of globalization. These interstices may be cast as entire nation states (Afghanistan, Iraq) but also as smaller regions (the occupied West Bank), neighborhoods, households, individuals; they are constituted as nodes or fields in a network of terror that is said to span the globe. They can be anywhere (even in the United States) that terrorists (real or imagined) organize, congregate, plot. Viewed from the White House or from Wall Street, the war against terrorism is a war to eliminate these interstices in an otherwise globalizing world in which the alchemy of »our values« has achieved a perfect fusion of freedom, democracy and capitalist profit. Only the interstices of »terror« threaten the triumph of that achievement at a global scale. The apparent normality of capitalist globalism is the unspoken backdrop against which all alternatives, from al Qaeda to anti-globalization protestors, are treated as spores of terror. It only takes a minor adjustment of vision, a gestalt shift, a twist of the kaleidoscope, to bring globalization rather than terror into critical focus. Viewed that way, the so-called war on terrorism is in fact the endgame of globalization. Masquerading as a war on terrorism, it is actually a war devoted to the completion of the geo-economic globalism of the American Empire.

The geographical focus on the Middle East is crucial, not simply because of oil but because of the fundamental challenges emanating from this region toward the American Empire. During its second moment of global ambition, the United States took over from Britain and France as the major world power in the Middle East, but its power eroded almost before it was fully established. Especially in the decade after 1973, U.S. power diffused significantly: OPEC asserted its leverage over oil resources in ways that enriched the multinationals but marginalized the U.S. state; the 1978-79 siege of the embassy in Tehran and the accompanying revolution which ousted the Shah represented an ignominious defeat for U.S. policy; this was compounded by the bombing of the U.S. embassy and marine compound in Beirut several years later. At the same time, however, various strands of Islamic fundamentalism were challenging pan-Arab or Arab nationalist models of state-making that were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by western models of development. In an effort to reassert control, and in the context of the Cold War, the United States government opportunistically supported a wide variety of governments and movements. Against Iran they armed and subsidized the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in full knowledge of his deployment of chemical weapons; against the Soviet Union they likewise supported fundamentalist movements such as the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. For the latter, the major target was not only foreign intruders but the »capitulationist,« westernized governments of various Arab states in the region. In the process, the U.S. fueled rather than blunted the crystallization of Islamic alternatives to the vision of globalization being promulgated from Washington and New York, London, Tokyo and Frankfurt. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the opportunity for the U.S. to challenge and eliminate the threat of that alternative globalism.

As the enormity of ambition for an American Empire comes more fully into view again after 2001, so does the impossibility of its fruition. A good war on terror would be one that reduced rather than increased the terror people feel around the world, but that has not happened. If anything, for ordinary people, the opposite is true. There has been a globalization of fear. These are neo-liberal times, we are told, and the central contradiction of neo-liberalism pits the state against the private market. There is no reason to think that terror would not accommodate itself to the same practical and ideological grooves. This raises the prospect of a neo-liberal global economy cross-cut and always potentially disrupted by a contest between the private market terror of the al Qaeda sort on one side and state-sponsored terror of the U.S., British, Israeli or Iraqi sort on the other. Yet at the same time, even as expanded conflict looms, the United States finds itself more isolated on the global stage than at any previous moment. From the start the U.S. war has been transparent to the masses of Latin America, Africa and much of Asia, and by early 2002 popular opposition has also spread in Europe and even North America. As with the earlier moments of U.S. globalism, the internal contradictions are glaring and the planetary projection of power increasingly hollow.

As in prior moments of U.S global assertion, however, today’s nationalist globalism confronts its own contradictions. The nationalism at whose behest the global reach is sought eventually ceases to be capable of carrying that ambition. There is a dramatic, political mismatch of geographical scales. The national scale is no longer a sufficiently sturdy vehicle for the payload of globalism. It is not, as some would have it, that the national is being crushed under the weight of the global. Rather the burden of the global simply overflows the capabilities of any national container. On 11 September itself, U.S. airports were closed, the borders with Canada and Mexico were closed, currency markets and stock markets were all closed. The ensuing »war on terrorism,« pursued to make the world safe for »our values,« brought with it a whole architecture of »homeland security« that seriously hinders, prevents or delays the movement of goods, people, capital and ideas into and out of the United States. Not just air travelers but Wall Street financial transactions, truckers on the Mexican and Canadian borders, senior citizens crossing to Windsor, Ontario, for a day's gambling or to Nogales for cheap prescriptions, are all disrupted. The imposition of steep tariffs on steel imports, U.S. rejection of the Kyoto environmental accords, sabotage of the Durban world conference on racism, refusal to sign the International Declaration on the Rights of the Child, withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, unprecedented agricultural protectionism all intensify the increased isolation of the national state that has done most to champion globalization. Just as an isolationist U.S. Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson's global Monroe Doctrine, and the clumsy effort a quarter-century later to make the United Nations an instrument of U.S. policy hobbled that institution, U.S. nationalism is again the Achilles' heel of American globalism.

After 2001, the American right increasingly celebrates the rise to empire. 11 September 2001 may well come to symbolize not the final flowering of the American empire but the first intimation of its defeat. The real issue, of course, is the level of destruction that will be visited on the world in this contest of terrors before the disintegration of empire becomes a reality and a more just and more humane internationalism can be put in its place. As in the first and second moments of U.S. globalism, it was not the internal nationalism alone that defeated the quest for global power. Workers’ struggles, decolonization struggles, anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles all contributed to the frustration of U.S. ruling class ambition. The time is right for the anti-globalization movement to advance its own geographically astute remapping of the world and to begin drawing a picture of alternative global futures.

 

 

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