Original Article

What is so American about the American empire?

Srdjan Vucetic
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Faculty of Social Sciences, 55 Laurier Avenue East, Desmarais Building, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.

Abstract This article argues that the American empire cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which American imperial identities have been associated with the historical experience of England/Britain. To make this argument, the article considers four discourses of identity in particular AngloProtestantism (religion), Anglo-Saxonism (ethnicity/race), Anglo-Saxon capitalism (institutions) and English (language). US imperial development was conditioned by many forces, but none match the aggregate power of Americas Anglo-ness. Although it is too early to assess the ways in which these discourses are negotiated, critiqued and reproduced in the age of Obama, the American empire is likely to continue to protect and project Anglo-ness vis-a`-vis to the rest of the world. International Politics (2011) 48, 251270. doi:10.1057/ip.2011.14 Keywords: American empire; anglo-saxonism; exceptionalism; Obama

As well as being as imperialist to Britain, America was also imperialist in most of the same ways, wrote recently Bernard Porter (Porter, 2006, p. 7, italics in original). Porters sentence stands against the backdrop perhaps on the top of the volcanic mountain of text dealing with the American empire penned in the past decade. Much of this writing has been organised as a debate revolving around questions such as is the US an empire or not (and so what)?, should the US be an empire?, and can the US empire last?1 Central to this debate have been historical comparisons analogical references to past empires used to illuminate or complicate aspects of present-day American policies and practices. The most frequent and the most typical parallel was the one with the British empire.2 But although there are obvious political, methodological and practical rationales for exploring the functional resemblances, to use Porters terms, between the British empire and the American superempire, very few approaches have ventured beyond it to consider possible similarities among the ontologically deeper, slower and muddier structures of modernity.
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The main representatives of these approaches are neo-Gramscian critiques of global capitalism on the one hand and whiggish, Anglocentric histories of the modern world on the other. The former tend to foreground the role of transnational, yet predominantly Anglo-American financial capital,3 whereas the latter are keen to treat Britain and the United States as a single sociocultural entity unified by liberal democracy, capitalism and the English language.4 If the reader would forgive my reduction of such rich and richly different approaches to a single sentence, it is in these schools of thought that the American empire tends to extend back in time and out in space to become, at the very least, an Anglo-American empire. Such broader and deeper perspectives can be very useful in thinking about the US empire in historical, as well as presentist terms, including in the ongoing age of Obama. The election of Barack Obama to the American presidency is a phenomenon on which lakes of ink will long be spilt, but here we shall begin with The Economist ink: When they voted to send a Black man to the White House at the end of 2008, Americans performed one of the most remarkable acts of rebranding in the history of their remarkable nation.5 The focus on Obamas Blackness is, of course, partially misleading. The said act of rebranding involved a whole plethora of signifiers currently regarded as novel or atypical when associated with the White House: liberal, socialist, center-left, post-racial, post-ethnic, cosmopolitan, global, urban, urbane and so on. Could it be that the age of Obama represents a significant rupture in the broad and deep links between the United States and its Anglo-imperial identity? To consider this question, let us proceed from an assumption that no empire can be understood without a reference to its discourses of identity. In any given context, empires emerge in relation to its significant, others by deploying some discourses over others. The focus of this article is on four discourses, each corresponding to a familiar ideal-type category of meaning and implying Americas association with the historical experience of England/Britain: Anglo-Protestantism (religion), Anglo-Saxonism (race/ethnicity), Anglo-Saxon capitalism (institutions) and English (language). My argument is that these four discourses have shaped some of the most important decisions, institutions, policies and practices through which the United States emerged as an empire, first on the North American continent and then globally. In turn, these discourses are responsible for much of the historical continuity and coherence of the Anglo-American empire. And although it is too early to assess the ways in which these discourses are negotiated, critiqued and reproduced during the Obama administration, I will suggest that Anglo-ness is likely to remain relevant in American imperial development because of the global spread of English above all, but also thanks to the considerable rhetorical elasticity of AngloProtestantism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. As for Anglo-Saxonism, though Obamas presidency has irrevocably changed Americas old ethno-racial brand,
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it has also boosted the attraction of the American variety of the liberal multicultural model, which, too, has an imperial potential. In the final analysis, the age of Obama, too, belongs to the age of empire. The article is short, schematic and impressionistic. Doubtless, Anglo-ness has dramatically varied in its effects on the making of the American empire, depending on the political contests at home and abroad, as well as on the structures and processes of self-other interactions in given contexts. As with the term empire, the usual definitional contestations of the word Anglo are left to others.6 And last, my barebones discourse-based approach to the American empire is inspired by a continuum of works in the discipline of International Relations, which at the very least began with David Campbells Writing Security (1992). This literature has dealt extensively with the idea that identity can be (or should be) conceptualised as discourse for the purposes of causal and/or constitutive analysis, a topic I therefore need not to engage here.

Chosen People, Imperial Choices

Before they became Americans, most White Europeans who lived in the 13 revolutionary colonies of British North America considered themselves Anglo in some way. In the First (1774) and Second (1775) Continental Congress, revolutionary leaders framed the American resistance to London in terms of the rights of Englishmen and only switched to the universalistic language in the Declaration of Independence (1776). Yet, the grammar and semantics of the document were still English. And with good reason: though the United States emerged in a war against the British empire but the revolutionaries propertied White males who ruled the member states of the newborn republic continued to live within a civilisational and/or cultural zone centered on the former imperial metropole.7 According to the argument made by Samuel Huntington in his last book, despite being long espoused to the countervailing winds of modernisation and immigration, the American Self could and, he underscored, should be distinguished by its Anglo-Protestant core or, to use his preferred metaphor, heart (2004: 68). Whatever the analytical and normative merits of Huntingtons argument, the power of Anglo-Protestanism in American history is not in doubt. Here, the canonical text, so to speak, is the Old Testament, the first of the two-part Christian Biblical canon, which rose in prominence during the Reformation, a period in which England positioned itself against the Catholic, continental European others.8 Significant for my argument is the early establishment of a close and positive association between Anglo-Protestants and ancient Hebrews. The Puritans, the shock troops of the English Reformation, took this particular Biblical reading to Plymouth Rock in 1620 and the rest is American history, as told in
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retrospective and contemporary sound bites such as the New or Second Israel, Light of the World, New Zion, new Garden of Eden, City on the Hill, Innocent Nation and Promised Land. What Clifford Longley has called the Chosen People syndrome had indeed found fertile soil in America, even after the establishment of a new republic based upon the separation of church and state doctrine (Longley, 2002, p. 155). Since Tocqueville, possibly earlier, many observers have written how religion and modernity were nearly perfectly compatible in the United States and how the rhetoric of providential agency, destiny and purpose slipped into the key speeches not only of preacher and born-again presidents like James Garfield, Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush, but also of various vociferous secularists from the original president George Washington to the presidential frontrunner of early 2004 Howard Dean.9 At the time of independence, indeed, one of the more pervasive variations of the discourse of choseness was philo-Hebraism. Most founding fathers belonged to churches in one way or another associated with beliefs in the divine election of the Anglos and/or Americans as spiritual descendants of the ancient Israelites.10 Among others, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin all studied Hebrew at some point in their lives and there was some fleeting post-revolutionary talk about introducing Hebrew as the official language of the republic.11 Franklin and Jefferson even commissioned designs for the new Great Seal symbolising the Israelites crossing of the deserts of Egypt en route to Canaan (Meyer, 2001, p. 30). Such ideas were related to American restorationism, a political and religious movement, which sought to re-establish Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land in order to prepare the ground for the Second Coming. This concept obviously predated America, as evidenced in England, in poems by John Milton or in the philosophical writings of John Locke. But it was in the nineteenth century that restorationism exerted a major influence on US foreign policy. A case in point was a strong missionary effort in the Middle East, which can be seen as a part of a more general and one of the most durable practices constitutive of the American empire. In Palestine, restorationism even inspired American colonialism, like in the case of the Adams colony in Jaffa, whose failure was described by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad (1869), or in the case of the Spafford colony in Jerusalem, abandoned in the 1950s. Among evangelical Americans, today there are perhaps 25 million Christian Zionists who yearn for the return of Christ. But note that neither restorationism nor philo-Hebraism necessarily translate into support for the Jewish state in Israel or contemporary Jews in general. Like the ancient Greeks in Western Romanticism, in this Biblical reading, the ancient Hebrews are primarily valued for their spiritual qualities, not for their historical continuities or their physical presence in the Holy Land. Thus, evangelical Christians typically support Israel on the condition that all Jews will convert in the Second
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Coming (Marsden, 2008: 179184). Americas support for Israel has more to do with this particular discourse of identity than with any other factor (Mead, 2008). Since the early years of the republic, in-office politicians had encouraged the spread of Protestant versions of Christianity, first in the American Southwest, then beyond the waters edge, in Africa and Asia. If in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Britain was a country of absent-minded imperialists , suggests H.J. Sharkey, then the United States in the same period can be seen as a country of absent-minded evangelists (2008: 3). To the extent that it is possible to imagine various forms of informal empire say, the empire of trade and investment it is then also possible to conceptualise a missionary empire. Verbal, institutional and even financial support was readily given to missionary NGOs such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions established in 1810 with the purpose of coordinating efforts to spread Protestant Christian love, as well as Anglo-style freedom around the world. To various degrees, major architects of the American empire, beginning with William Henry Steward, secretary of state between 1861 and 1869, all the way to George W. Bush might be described as restorationists. Although a variety of religious public discourses have profoundly shaped US politics throughout the republics history in diverse ways, it was a specific recourse to the ethos of the ancient Hebrews that sparked the earliest talk of American exceptionalism, an idea that the United States was uniquely endowed to lead the world by example, if not by other means as well. In a standard interpretation, it was the Puritans and their fellow travelers who imbued the American Self with a sense of self-righteousness and, in sharp contrast to an Old World experience, universalism. On the last dimension, the American Revolution arguably resembles only the French Revolution, which, also, initially attempted to overturn the course of history by introducing the Enlightenment ideas of self-determination against empire, democracy against monarchy and individual rights against a mass society. But this interpretation is overstated: self-righteousness and universalism are neither new nor unique to America. Most empires in history tended to conflate their own foreign policy aims with global public goods; arguably, there is hardly a better public justification for expansion. If anything, it may be that it is an exceptionally Anglo rhetoric to claim that empire is a way of life characteristic of the significant others, and never of the English-speaking Self. At its imperial zenith, Britain too regarded itself as exceptional uniquely free, prosperous and blessed. Washington officials have traditionally denied empire, citing Americas promotion of democracy or self-determination, but it was the case that the British, too, used to claim benevolence of their conquest on the basis of certain unique and positive characteristics such as naval power, trade, indirect rule and so on. London often boasted that its empire provided goods and services that people and
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governments in all quarters of the world wanted but could not gain without British leadership venture capital, telegraph communication, protection against the sea pirates and, at times, a mission to liberate dependent peoples.12 Like the majority of US presidents, Obama has not been shy to declare himself religious good politics in a polity whose religiousness has not diminished in strength since the time of Tocqueville or to express his beliefs in American exceptionalism.13 Although few of us expect the age of Obama to correspond to some post-Christian secularisation of the American society a` la, say, 1960s Canada or 1990s Ireland, it may come as a surprise that the new president decided to retain two holdover pastors from Bushs religious advisory council, as well as several evangelical organisations his predecessor embedded in USAID (Marsden, this volume). When it comes to religion and empire, the Obama presidency so far spells more continuity than change.

Anglo-Saxonism
It is sometimes said that slavery dominated the American political landscape until 1865, until racism took over. The record of organised religion is decidedly mixed in this trajectory: some religious groups supported abolitionism and later (and in different phases), equal rights for all, whereas others worked hard to keep Americans apart. Anglo-Saxonism is a discourse that supported one version of social inequality based on both religion and race/ethnicity: the superiority of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males over other human beings.14 Like all racialised discourses, Anglo-Saxonism can be regarded as an echoing cavern of banalities out of which even a well-lit historian might never emerge (Kramer, 2002, p. 132), yet its historical power is considerable. As promulgated in the 13 colonies, this discourse regarded the American Revolution as entirely continuous with history, which, in addition to the spiritual nod to the Middle East, racially began in the British Isles.15 Thus, in addition to wanting the Exodus imagery on the aforementioned Great Seal, Jefferson wanted to include the figures of Hengest and Horsa, the two brothers thought to be the first Anglo-Saxon settlers who brought common law and representational government to England and, in turn, America (Horsman, 1981, p. 22). That new American polity, although constituted as a republic/democracy against an empire/monarchy, still mirrored the mother country in institutions should not be surprising from the perspective of racialised Anglo-Saxon identity. Rather than introducing some radically republican, democratic or uniquely new world discursive practices, most American citizens continued to live by what later historians identified as English/British folkways or mores.16 It is on the basis of their own Anglo-Saxonism that the founders elected to keep the traditional racialised hierarchy intact, quickly passed discriminatory
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immigration and naturalisation laws and otherwise enabled the continuing dominance of Anglo-ness in America. Anglo-Saxonism dominated every American anti-immigrant movement until at the least the second half of the twentieth century. Anglo-Saxonism drove American imperial development in many ways, but nowhere as explicitly as in the westward expansion of the 1840s and in the imperialist boom of the 1890s. In both periods, Anglo-Saxonism worked transnationally as well, creating at least a tacit understanding with the British Empire. According to Reginald Horsman, the US-Mexican War of 1846 was sparked by a growing sense that it was Americas national mission to extend the boundaries of freedom against the imperially deluded mongrel other that was then Mexico. The war left immense political changes in its wake, including an establishment of Anglo-Saxonism as a discursive resource for the legitimation of future imperial conquests. Note that Anglo-Saxonism was at once national and transnational: American missionaries abroad, to go back to the previous discussion, generally acted in unison with their Protestant counterparts in Britain.17 Here, Americas Anglo Self was thus twice reproduced, first through Protestantism at home and then through Anglo-American missionary evangelism abroad. It was trans-Atlantic Anglo-Saxonism that also legitimated the gentlemanly division of North America between London and Washington. Indeed, the acceptance of the British proposal to place the USBritish boundary in Oregon on the 49 parallel in April 1846 enabled Washington to shift its attention to the southwest. A similar dynamic occurred in the 1890s, when a profoundly Anglo-Saxonised Manifest Destiny re-emerged to motivate additional expansion, culminating in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Once again, the war against a Latin other was facilitated by a previous understanding between the two branches of a single Anglo-Saxon race. It was the unspeakable horror of a possible fratricidal war during the Venezuela crisis of 18951896 that compelled London and Washington to work together to find a way to basically outlaw war within the English-speaking world. Scores of leaders even called for outright unification. It is in this period that we see the rise of the Anglo-American special relationship and, in turn, of a broader Englishspeaking identity in the international society then known as Greater Britain, which today echoes as the Anglosphere. At this point, it is important to recall the American polity has been characterised by multiple identities, including by various tensions and contradictions among them. In the pre-WWII period, against Anglo-Saxonism stood Anglophobia, a significant discourse of identity, which defined the British other as hypocritical, greedy and otherwise threatening to the American Self. The 1890s were the zenith of Anglophobia, partly because of the institutionalisation of this discourse in a populist movement led by the presidential
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hopeful William Jennings Bryan, which catered to southern and (mid)western agrarians (Crapol, 1973, p. 13). With the growing immigration of the Irish, Germans and few other White but non-Anglo-Saxon groups, this discourse eventually received a so-called ethnic dimension (Jacobson, 1998; Moser, 1999). But Anglophobia failed to dominate the discursive field for two reasons. First, it never managed to deny Americas ethno-racial Anglo-ness; instead it typically zoomed on softer targets such as the financial preponderancy of London or commercial competition in South America and Asia. Once the British Empire gave in to its American successor, the discourse lost its bite. Second and more importantly, Anglophobia was always somewhat schizoid: that the despised English/other was simultaneously feared and admired is evident in the texts left behind Secretary of State James Blaine, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Chicago Tribune editor Robert McCormick and even Jefferson, at least judging by the founders lifelong interest in the Anglo-Saxon language and history. Anglophobia never overwhelmed the archetypical WASPs the middle- and upper-income, Ivy League-educated, White Protestant men in the American Northeast who have perpetuated themselves in national leadership roles in much of American history. These individuals thought and acted within an Anglocentric worldview, already developed within their own national context, but their Anglocentrism was also facilitated by overwhelmingly positive and close recognition of identity coming from the rest of the Anglosphere first racialist and civilisational, later liberal democractic and even post-racial. The political rise of Obama can be regarded as the triumph of Americas egalitarian transformative racial order (King and Smith, 2005). Its content today is defined mostly by liberal multiculturalism, a discourse that calls for the application of liberal values of freedom, democracy and equality to ethnically defined groups of people (Kymlicka, 2007). Thanks to the civil rights movement, as well as to the institutional and demographic shifts, which followed the 1964 Hart-Cellar Act, this discourse has been on the upswing for four decades, causing multicultural politics, policies and institutions to become tightly coupled with the idea and practice of liberal democracy. The United States, in this reading, is a country of multiple and hybrid cultures, not of anglophone White settlers; it will be normal and modern to say nothing of advanced or leading liberal democracy only to the extent that it continues to recognise minority, indigenous and, to varying degrees, new immigrant claims (ibid, p.43). To invoke Huntington again, with the advent of liberal multiculturalism, America has become more African American, more Asian American, and, most worryingly for him, more Latino American.18 If US Census Bureau population projections are correct, within the next four decades America will reach the so-called majorityminority status, which may be very familiar to the residents of Hawaii or Chicago but rather strange to the readers of national history textbooks. In this storyline, Obama invokes both a desirable and inevitable future.
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Once we scratch behind the rebranding acts made during the 2008 elections, however, we re-label the age of Obama as the age of simulacrobama a mediated spectacle whose message is that the United States is now a post-racial, or post-racist, society.19 That Americas racial hierarchy has so far been relatively impervious to the liberal multicultural project is sometimes explained as an unintended consequence of the civil rights movement, which defined groupdifferentiated rights rather narrowly on a Whiteness/Blackness continuum (Jacobson, 1998, p. 272; cf. Kymlicka, 2007, p. 91). But this problem could in fact be multiplied in the liberal multicultural era, given that it forces identifications with racialised majorityminority boundaries, whereas putting aside the prior problem of the history of slavery and racism. Further, consider that only 2.4 per cent of Americans checked off the new multiracial (other-race) option in the last decennial census, whereas around 80 per cent of Hispanic Americans self-identified as White. As a result, the near-absolute majority remained with the taxonomical Whites, which suggests both the resilience of the old hierarchy and the limits of the ethnoracially defined equality, multiplicity and hybridity.20 Could it be that America Whiteness is a form of cultural capital that will continue to operate parallel to majorityminority realities? If so, the demographic and institutional shifts will change the face of American politics only in conjunction with a larger shift in what it means to be American. Also important is the presence of a variety of multiculturalisms in the world, what Will Kymlickas (2007) calls the international politics of diversity. Here is another site in which imperial identities are made and remade. In the past communautarisme-lacite debates of 1980s and 1990s, the French state officially rejected the idea and practice of multiculturalism for the same reason that it rejected Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the less-than-strict Anglo-Saxon secularism as historically and ideologically threatening to the French Self. Conversely, the English-language press was quick dismiss Frances headscarf bans in 1989, 1994 and 2004 as retrograde and so as a confirmation of the Anglo variety of multiculturalism. And when the disaffected youth in different administrative departments of Paris rioted in 2005, more than a few American commentators were quick to suggest that France (and the rest of continental Europe) should look to the United States (and Britain) for institutional and moral lessons on how to deal with cultural diversity within a shared political space (for example, Zakaria, 2005). Similar readings surrounded the election of Obama to the American presidency in 2008: even if its problem of the colour line persists, went this argument then, the United States has managed to cultivate its cultural diversity rather well compared to other advanced liberal democracies (to say nothing of the illiberal world). The more-or-less direct implication is that the others should learn from the American model and it is precisely here that the myth of the Ellis Island becomes as imperial as that of the Plymouth Rock (cf. Jacobson, 2006: 610). In sum, there is little evidence that
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liberal multicultural America has become multiracial, much less post-racial. The problem of race has unsettled all historical versions of the American Self and the age of Obama may be no exception. But even if the new American society comes to radically change the American state, this might not necessarily change the American empire.

The Market Empires

It was in the twentieth century that the materialist identities associated with Anglo-Saxon capitalism replaced Anglo-Protestant piety and Anglo-Saxon racial virtue as one of the main dynamos behind the US empire.21 Models or varieties of capitalism are used as ideal-type in comparative political economy and as stereotype in the vernacular, but there is usually an agreement that Anglo-Saxon capitalism refers to a mode of economic production and exchange based on industry, free market, mass consumption, respect for private property and, that most ephemeral quantity, limited government. In this discourse, it is the age-old liberalisms debate on how to nourish human freedom and equality at the same time that leads to, and accommodates, a variety of contradictions and paradoxes such as private entrepreneurship versus public spending, solidarity or altruism versus self-help and greed. Without some reference to the real or virtual dialogue between the liberal Hayek and the statist Keynes it would be difficult to talk of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.22 Among discourses transplanted, and then co-jointly developed, across the Atlantic, Anglo-Saxon capitalism is arguably the most important politically and historically, not least because it has been promoted as the model for global economy for at least a century, notwithstanding significant interruptions and deviations such as the economic crisis that has engulfed the world since 2008.23 The model has now departed from its more extreme expressions known as neoliberalism and the Washington consensus, yet the discourse itself remains on solid grounds mainly because its version of modernity is still widely accepted as legitimate. Consider the idea of free markets, which is an essential feature in any discourse on the distinctiveness and superiority of Anglo institutions. The freedoms of speech and assembly are predicated upon the private/public distinction; in turn, the private sphere and private property rights more specifically is regarded as necessary for the exercise of these freedoms in the first place. Conversely, without private property, not only can there be no free markets, but no human freedom also. The economy is therefore regarded as key to politics, not the other way around, as exemplified in the slogans such as let the markets decide or in the constant need for ever more markets and, within them, for more mobility, flexibility, efficiency, productivity or competitiveness.24 In this version, the American empire rests a consumerist and
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nominally egalitarian modernity and confronts various traditional forms of authority and class hierarchy. In the tradition of the Wisconsin school of American foreign relations, it was the Yankee capitalists who orchestrated the rise of the American empire. After the closing of the internal economic colonisation in North America, the United States moved to open new free markets across oceans. Traditionally, much has been made about Secretary of State John Hays Open Door Notes to China, but America market empire proved its worth first in continental Europe, where its discourse on modernity swept community- and solidaritybased ideas.25 A far more expansive imperial policy was formulated after 1945, when the United States, as the leader in a clash against Soviet communism, strove to sustain its versions of capitalism at the global scale, all the way to the post-1990 neoliberal triumph (Hunt, 2007, p. 266). But like the carving up of China in the nineteenth century, neoliberalism, too, was a joint venture. Americas reach became far more extensive and universalising than anything seen under Victorian Britain, but both empires spread free markets with equal zeal, particularly when they were running unchallenged. In Niall Fergusons memorable pun, the process of globalisation in the 1990s this was nothing but Anglobalization at its best a macro-historical process sparked by the British empire in the Victorian era (Ferguson, 2003, p. xxvi). Much of the mainstream media has been keen to interpret the post-2008 economic crisis as a clash of civilisations, in which the Anglo version of capitalism denigrated as cowboy or casino capitalism is the rogue side, having caused a global calamity by encouraging deregulation, financial risktaking and extreme excesses. The G20 summit in London, hosted by Britains prime minister Gordon Brown in April 2009, was caricatured as a sensational show-down between Brown and Obama on the one hand and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on the other, as representatives of alternatives to Anglo-Saxon capitalism (for example, Economist, 2009a). What is interesting is how seamlessly, and without any irony, Obama became Anglo-Saxon in this reading (Ibbitson, 2009). Such popular caricatures speak neither of Obama nor of the special relationship so much as of the institutional advantages enjoyed by the United States and its closest allies in the contemporary capitalist order. The very first G20 summit of November 2008 dubbed the crisis summit convened in Washington, DC, the Federal Reserve assumed the role of the worlds central bank and the US government tried to coordinate fiscal stimulus packages at a global scale. Attempts to create the old world order anew are subject to constant legitimation contests and it is here that the discursive flexibility of Anglo-Saxon capitalism comes to the fore. The ability to claim ownership over, or close association with, J.S. Mill and the Chartists, boom-bust capitalism and New Deal social democracy, market fundamentalism and the Third Way
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helps disable alternative visions of the world and directly contributes to the remarkable staying power of the Anglo-American market empire. Obama has shown that he can play this rhetorical game rather well, as exemplified by the support he received from both corporations and trade unions during his presidential campaign or by the way he promised to stand up to Wall Street, whereas simultaneously preserving the multibillion-dollar bank bailout introduced by his predecessor. If discourses and institutions are mutually constituted, then the future of the current imperial grip on the direction of the worlds economy is likely to hinge not only on the health of the Federal Reserve or the continuing lock-up of the accumulated global capital on Wall Street (and in the City), but also on the ability of those who invoke and reflect Anglo-Saxon capitalism to co-opt the next definition of modernity. For one, one of the more important political battlegrounds in the Obama era will be how to keep its working definition of capitalism legitimate whereas simultaneously claiming sovereignty over the representations of the sustainability and stability of energy and climate.

Linguistic Imperialism
It was a decade ago that Kevin Phillips suggested that the English language had already become the primary engine of the Anglo-American empire (Phillips, 1999, pp. 597602). The spread of English has indeed been staggering: in early 1950s, around 250 million people spoke English; today, a quarter of the worlds population may be in some way fluent in this language making English the worlds first global language.26 A standard British Council-style claim that English now belongs to everyone is comparable to the claim that the market forces are beyond control; both can alternatively be regarded as political programmes with implicit and explicit hegemonic tendencies, a process sometimes called linguistic imperialism.27 At stake here are not simply the issues of soft power, cultural imperialism, important as these are, but about the movement of ideas embedded in English, as well as of people speaking English, between the imperial metropole and peripheries, as well as among the putative peripheries themselves. The modifiers preceding the noun global, international, world and so on each represent a particular brand of thinking on the causes and consequences of the global diffusion of English as a loosely unified and multidialectical language. Using the broadest of brushes, this literature can be approached from two broad ontological and/or theoretical perspectives predictably binarized as rationalist versus constructivist, economic versus cultural or instrumentalist versus symbolic. At one end of the continuum, language is regarded as a transaction cost. To the extent that it facilitates social and economic exchange
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in a community for example, Switzerland, the European Union, the world a facility in English therefore brings an economic advantage comparable to that enjoyed by literate individuals over analphabets. Here, the spread of English disproportionately benefits Anglophone societies and states: without a need to invest in the teaching of English as a second language, they are subject to various savings effects, measured in billions of US dollars.28 At the other end of the continuum, language is said to constitute identity. This perspective stresses semantics over syntax and suggests that each language carries a specific way of seeing the world. One may therefore learn to deploy grammatically correct sentences in English, but also not without adopting the discourses particular to societies and states where Anglo English or inner circle English dominates such as the US. Fundamental for this perspective is the work on the SapirWhorf hypothesis in linguistics (as well as anthropology and cognitive sciences), which holds that differences in language structure cause humans to perceive the world differently.29 Anglo English, some argue, privileges ontologies that emphasize individual autonomy, control of the environment and reason (Wierzbicka, 2006). The global diffusion of English through politics, economics, entertainment, education, travel, the media and the Internet therefore also involves the diffusion of in-built, unconscious ontologies that favour, in the words of the Australian writer David Malouf, the magic circle of Anglo-Saxon thinking (cited in ibid, 9). The question whether there are now multiple world Englishes is irrelevant so long as the putative Anglo-Saxons remain the touchstone and guarantor of English-based global communication (ibid: pp. 1314). A clear example of this hegemony is the powerful English-as-a-second-language education industry, which privileges native Anglo English teachers over equally skilled and experienced Asian and African teachers.30 The same applies to the media and the academia the dominance of English in the production, reproduction and circulation of knowledge privileges the discourses internal to the Anglosphere and disciplines other. The massive expansion of the English language around the world is a phenomenon whose consequences scholars are only beginning to grapple with, but prima facie parallels with the observations made above are obvious. First, despite multiple efforts in the nineteenth century to codify American English, the United States remains an Anglo English-speaking state. Without it, the United States would be ontologically, if not constitutionally, impossible.31 To the extent that language is always more than syntax or transaction costs, Americas Anglo-ness is therefore beyond doubt. Second, linguistic imperialism is probably the most successful aspect of the American empire. Language alone cannot sustain an empire, yet it can significantly postpone its death. Therefore, although the aforementioned neoliberal triumph might look shaky to most, few doubt the triumph of English (Economist, 2001). And to the
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extent that the Anglo identity writ large inclusive of the discourses of individual autonomy and social competition is deeply interwoven in the fabric of the globally expanding Anglo English, then the American empire has a rather bright future.

Conclusions
This article has explored some ways in which Anglo-ness has driven American imperial development, broadly understood to include anything from the missionary efforts in the nineteenth century to the contemporary English teaching industry. The age of Obama, I have suggested, remains lodged in the age of empire. The self-other relations set in Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon capitalism and, most strongly, English still define the United States as an Anglo-American empire, rather than some other polity. And though the discourse of AngloSaxonism now belongs to history, the triumph of liberal multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and post-racialism that the rise of Obama simulated in 2008 may turn out to be an imperial triumph as well. The historical illustrations have suggested that different discourses of identity implied different imperial practices in different contexts. But rather than any one of these ideal-typical identities, it has been their general and specific interaction that has shaped the American empire. In the first century of the republic, Protestant evangelism and Anglo-Saxonism justified settler colonialism on the continent and, in the 1890s, a formal overseas empire as well. Some American imperialists who called for an understanding and unity with Britain on the basis of Anglo-Saxonism thus posited that American exceptionalism actually predated America (Kramer, 2006, p. 121). Arguably, it was much easier for the government in Washington to justify overseas conquest to its selectorate as somehow historically predetermined (and so beyond control) than in terms of a cost/benefit calculation done by mostly northeastern industrialists. Similar arguments were used to diffuse the power of the isolationist discourse in the interwar period, defined as a systematic nonentanglement with the world beyond the North American continent, as well as to dismiss criticisms about the Washington consensus in the 1990s. Judging by their historical record, Americas home-grown anti-imperialists are losers. Imperial urges do tend to be followed by anti-imperial urges, but the latter then tend to be weak and short-lived, with the anti-Vietnam War movement as an exception. The United States is yet to see an emergence of a discourse at home, which would precipitate major and lasting changes in the way Washington runs its affairs abroad (Hunt, 2007, pp. 5, 2122). At the same time, interactions among multiple pro-imperial discourses can and do open space for complexities, inconsistencies, as well as outright discursive
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clashes witness the uneasy relationship between Anglo-Saxonists and restorationists in the post 1945 Middle East. Discursive conflict also arose in interactions with undercurrents not directly examined in this article such as other forms of liberalism, conservatism or, indeed, the readiness to resort to armed struggle (Mead, 2007, pp. 7982, Phillips, 1999, pp. xixii). Overall, however, the American empire has protected and projected an Anglo identity in the world, much like the British empire that preceded it. This broader and deeper historical process may continue not only beyond the age of Obama, but also beyond the age of America, especially if recall that empires are about the discursive definitions of the centre-periphery relationships. The capital of a post-American Anglo empire may turn out to be Singapore, New Delhi, Brussels or some other post-racial, capitalist and predominantly Englishspeaking global city.

About the Author

Srdjan Vucetic is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests are in American and Canadian foreign policy, international security and international migration. He is currently working on a book dealing with the Anglosphere. Before joining the GSPIA, Srdjan was the Randall Dillard Research Fellow in International Studies at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.

Notes
1 Predictably, this literature has been characterized by a definitional anarchy, but perhaps modal is a broad, post-territorial and informal view of empire as an international hierarchy in which political authority sits at the center against some consenting periphery (Howe, 2002; Cox, 2005; Hunt, 2007; Berger, 2009; MacDonald, 2009; Nexon and Wright, 2007 and Porter, 2006). 2 Ferguson (2004, p. 301); MacDonald (2009, p. 48) and Hunt (2007, p. 4041). 3 Cox (1996 [1981]) and Panitch and Konings (2008); cf. Ashley (1984). 4 For Andrew Roberts, America and Britain are thus eminently comparable to the republic and empire of ancient Rome (Roberts, 2006, p. 1). Also see Mead (2007) and Phillips (1999). 5 The Economist (2009b); cf. Klein (2010). The age of Obama comes from Gwen Ifill (2009). 6 Especially relevant are discussions in Belich (2009, pp. 5865) and Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 5, 299301). 7 See, inter alia, Burk (2007), Belich (2009) and Olwell and Tully (2006, part 3). Importantly, this point was made by scores of foreign observers at the time of the revolution such as Hector de Crevecoeur, Frederick the Great, Bernardo de Galvez, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, Francisco de Miranda, Comte de Rochambeau, Francis Vigo and, later, Alexis de Tocqueville. 8 See, inter alia, Colley (1992) and Maltby (1971). This positioning arguably persists to this day, continuing in and through various Euroskeptic discourses in Britain.
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9 See, inter alia, Tocqueville (2000 [1840]), Longley (2002), Noll (2002), Lambert (2003), Mead (2007, pp. 310317), Jacoby (2008) and Lieven (2005, pp. 3236). For a philosophical consideration of the compatibility of Christianity and modern secular politics, including liberal democracy, see Gray (2008). 10 Among 55 delegates who participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, more than four fifths identified as Episcopalian/Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist or Methodist (Lambert, 2003, pp. 246252). Protestantism indeed evolved: Puritanism (and Presbyterianism) in early-modern colonial America split into the so-called dissenting churches, moving from Baptism and Methodism in the nineteenth century to Evangelism in the twentieth. On the role of Protestantism in English (and Scottish) early-modern colonialism, see Stevens (1993). Native Americans also had a place in this reading, as one of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel a belief still held by some Mormons (Goldman, 2004, pp. 1523). 11 The last anecdote may be apocryphal for there is no written record of it, but Hebrew was indeed central to the curricula in Americas 10 original colleges (Goldman, 2004, p. 29). Note that Franklin and John Adams, and later Theodore Roosevelt, were in favour of linguistic uniformity based on English. Also note that Aramaic, the other language of the Bible, never gained popularity in the Anglo-Atlantic. 12 One can, of course, still maintain that the United States empire differs from the rest because of its unique ability to combine a sense of exceptionalism with unprecedented hard and soft power (Porter, 2006) or because of the presence of novel situational factors like globalization, the proliferation of nation-states or the very informal and sector-specific character of Americas imperial relations (Nexon and Wright, 2007). 13 On the latter, see Fallows (2009). Notably, Obama also embraced exceptionalism in his Nobel Peace Prize speech on 10 December 2009. 14 That redundant acronym WASP came much later (cca. 1950s). For historical reasons, WASP is now the preferred term in US public discourse, whereas elsewhere in the world, including Britain, Anglo-Saxon remains very much in the vernacular. 15 If one Anglo identity arose in opposition to the European others on the religious dimension, then putatively internal relationships with the Celtic fringe produced another Anglo identity on the racial/ethnic dimensions, starting in the sixteenth century (Hechter, 1999). AngloSaxonist discourse varied over time in the readiness of claim Celts as others, as demonstrated in the case of Scots and even Irish Catholics (Jacobson, 1998). 16 See Hackett Fischer (1989), Kirk (1993). Compare with Jordan (1968) and, especially, Hartz (1955). 17 Although the idea of overseas evangelisation can be historically found in most Protestant societies, the magnitude and frequency of cooperation among English-speaking missionaries and their governments dwarfed that between comparable social groups (Kramer, 2006; Sharkey, 2008). 18 Huntington (2004). Compare with Lopez (2005) and Laitin (2008). A corollary to liberal multiculturalism is immigrationism, a discourse that holds that immigration is inevitable and always positive (Taguieff, 2006). 19 Friedman (2009, p. 342), cf. Holinger (2008), Roediger (2008, pp. 212230) and Wingfield and Feagin (2010). 20 The 2010 census will give us further data and spurn further debate on whether contemporary Latinos and Chicanos are becoming White, like it was the case with the Irish, Jews, Italians and other ethnics or dark Whites in the past, thus perpetuating and entrenching Americas longstanding White dominance (cf. Jacobson, 2006). 21 See, inter alia, de Grazia (2005) and Hunt (2007, especially, pp. 8589). 22 See, especially, Gamble (1996), but also Cronin (2000), Bourdieu (2001), Giddens, ed. (2001). For an influential statement on the models of capitalism, see Albert (1991).
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23 The Anglo stamp on the global economy is even deeper historically: in much of the period between 1717 and 1971 either the British pound sterling or the US dollar (sometimes both) served as the international equivalent of gold. The flaws are typically explained away by history, as in the claims that Anglo-Saxon capitalism had been sabotaged by its own hubris before, yet it survived and self-corrected (as if self-healing powers are an inherent feature of the model). 24 In terms of objectivist measures, of course, American capitalists are no less aided by their government than capitalists elsewhere, whether through Washingtons management of tariffs for industry, minimal protections for labour, or through relatively lenient bankruptcy regimes. As Mead correctly notes, what matters more is the cult of the invisible hand, not the lack of statist economic policies (Mead, 2007, p. 298). 25 The market empire comes from de Grazia (2005). Compare with LaFeber (1998 [1963]) and Williams (1972 [1959]). 26 See Crystal (2006, pp. 424425, 2008); Graddol (2006, p. 14) and Holborrow (1999, pp. 5460). 27 See Ives (2006) and Phillipson (1992, 2008). Compare with Hamel (2005), Crystal (2008) and Kayman, 2004). 28 See the findings of Francois Grin, as discussed in Phillipson (2008). Also see De Swaan (2001), Grin (2001) and Van Parijs (2004). 29 How, when, why and to what extent this phenomenon occurs is a matter of much theoretical and empirical debate and controversy (Lucy, 1997; Gentner and Goldwin-Meadow, eds. 2003). 30 See, inter alia, Holborrow (2006), Lin and Luke (2006) and Ryan (2006). For an argument that Englishes spoken in Asia and Africa are capable of expressing indigenous values without succumbing to the hierarchies implicit in the Huboldtean circles, see Kachru et al (2006). What this school of thought emphasizes is linguistic transmission, not imperialism. 31 Constitutionally speaking, the United States does not have an official language; the so-called English Language Amendment has been before Congress since 1981, but the measure is yet to come to a vote, even in committee. Language issues are regarded in terms of education policy at the state level or as civil rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

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