2005): Pax Americana or the empire of insecurity

My aim in this article is to set the role and position of the United States in a broad conceptual and historical context and to try to escape from the imme-diacy of the current discussion of the strategic choices that Washington has made, is in the course of making, or should make in the future. The article is divided into three sections. In the first, I would like to unsettle some of the assumptions that are often made about empire, in particular about the inevitability of the end of empire, the redundancy and outmodedness of empire as a form of political order, and the consequent implication that the natural focus of international relations should be the relations among states or nation-states. The sheer extent of the power of the United States and the apparent obviousness of the view that we are living in a unipolar world have brought back the language of empire and have led many to see the United States as an imperial power. The second section considers how we should understand that power. I argue that notions of informal empire provide some analytical purchase but neglect both the consistently important role of military power and coercion in the evolution of US foreign policy, as well as the importance of rules, norms, and institutions – what one might call the formal side of so-called informal empire. I also argue that it is analytically more useful to understand the United States as a hegemonic rather than an imperial power, because doing so forces the analyst to focus directly on the crucial questions of negotiation, legitimacy, and ‘followership’. Compared with empire, hegemony is com-monly seen as a shallower and less intrusive mode of control. Although this is in some ways true, I suggest that US hegemony is complicated by a number of historical and structural forces which have pushed the United States towards deeper and more intrusive involvement and that are likely to continue to complicate the exercise of US power