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EMPIRE.
Excuse the deja vu.
About 30 years ago, at the start of a scholarly career in Political Science which these writings collect, I began a doctoral dissertation on U.S. imperialism. Specifically, on its most flamboyant contemporary spectacle: the U.S. war with Vietnam.
This is the war I went to graduate school in order to study — at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and (from ’71 to ’75) in the Ph.D. program at Harvard University.
The Nixon years, for the most part — against a backdrop of near-genocidal brutality abroad as well as turbulent dissent and soul-searching at home.
Why are we in Vietnam?
Why are we escalating or expanding the war?
Why do we refuse to withdraw?
Those were questions animating the moment.
By the early 1970s, anyone studying American foreign policy would be told: first, that the policies of the current administration would be shrouded in shadow and secrecy, open to polemic but not to scholarly grasp; and second, that from current accounts, U.S. war policy seemed ‘locked in’: still rutted in the premises that underlay the original large-scale escalations of the Johnson era, particularly those of 1964 and 1965. So, to understand the continuing imperial war, a student would need to make sense out of the earlier and massive unleashing of violence during the Johnson administration.
To figure a way out — or to imagine a possible future policy able to relinquish these imperial ambitions — involved a
prescription. For policy change, if not for social change more broadly. And in the midst of protests about the present, this called for an
explanation of the recent past. Not to retrace the steps that propelled the U.S. into Vietnam (a familiar preoccupation of journalists, as if chronology were explanatory), but to interpret its
meaning, to grasp the point of the 1960s escalation.
To explain empire to get beyond empire. (Recent titles by my graduate supervisors were revealing: Robert W. Tucker’s
Nation or Empire?, George Liska’s Imperial America, Stanley Hoffmann’s
Gulliver’s Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy).
At the time (a period of raging polemic), so much of this was up for grabs:
1) Washington’s ‘official line’ (designed to justify the war) had virtually zero explanatory leverage for anyone but the true believers. [The debunking of official rhetoric had been a great triumph of the anti-war movement — with a timely assist from a new cohort of revisionist historians of American diplomacy, charting the continuities of the U.S. empire even further back than the misleading ‘origins of the Cold War’: this was an era when the ‘generation gap’ and the President’s ‘credibility gap’ with the general public were more than figures of nostalgia.];
2) scholars of international politics and foreign policy had developed a bewildering array of theories and conceptual models which had not been applied very often to current, controversial policies;
3) these disciplinary protocols in political science and IR (international relations) were embarrassingly narrow and blunted. Scholarly literatures in philosophy and social theory — able to provide a solid basis for explanation and interpretation — were still beyond the pale for the more complacently ‘policy-oriented’ afficianados of foreign affairs;
4) the vast heritage of critical theory was finally coming to light (and to translated availability) just in time to rev up the movements for social change and to make available entirely new modes of inquiry and interpretation.
Why did U.S. leaders refuse to budge?
What was the point of imperial aggression?
What was the broader foreign policy (and its plans for world order) designed to accomplish on the domestic social level?
What were the domestic sources and the domestic functions of empire?
How was I going to arrive at a place where I could say something about all of this?
Or: how to bite off more than I could chew?
To make sense out of Vietnam — and to keep faith with the dramatic (and across-the-board) radicalism and widespread push toward social change: these would be the self-serving replies to questions about what I was doing in graduate studies in political science. Asking questions and getting ready to ask questions (or, ‘getting ready to have been frightened’: to repeat a title of a poetic sequence from that time). It meant:
a) studying the ‘debate’ (between critics and apologists) over Vietnam and over U.S. hegemony and expansionism — to tease out the explanatory resonance of the arguments;
b) studying the conceptual work in I.R. and comparative foreign policy, to see how a set of
competing, alternative explanations could be constructed out of it (from so-called Rational Actor models, investigations of ‘nondecision-making’, studies of bureaucratic politics or Presidential psychopathology, to the rule of public opinion and domestic pressure);
c) studying a terra incognita of work outside of political science to underprop the task of explanation (from the philosophy of science and history to Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy and ethnomethodology, and even to the early rumblings of semiotics and structuralism shaking up the interpretive strategies in the arts and humanities);
d) finally, before this was incorporated into mainstream curricula (as it was in later decades, if only in the humanities), becoming an impassioned student (and book collector!) of critical theorizing (from Marxist political economy and Frankfurt School studies to the beginnings of post-structuralist analysis on the post-Leninist Left).
[These were, parenthetically, the years in which I became committed to a lifelong project of making radical or experimental art and to permanent residence within the (sometimes glamorized and more often demonized) intellectual Left. Looking back, without the inspiring backdrop of forceful opposition to American imperialism and the push, on the Left, of hope that a drastically different America could be imagined as well as struggled for, very little of my own effort would have turned out in the way it did. Blessing and curse: the legacy of the ‘long 1960s’, from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate.]
In 1975, I finished a doctoral dissertation on the interpretation of the U.S. escalation of the war at its most decisive period (1964 + 1965) — by laying out the conceptual building blocks of possible competing accounts of that war. Spookily, it was defended almost simultaneous with the last U.S. helicopters scrambling out of Saigon in the face of Vietnamese triumph: EMPIRE AND SOCIETY: Toward A Contextual Explanation of American Aims and Policy in Vietnam.
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