# Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003). 1.29-30

Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003)., Lines 1.29-1.30. Latin.

Canonical: https://interlinea.aeterna-institute.org/library/latin/imperialisms-ancient-and-modern/cumings-bruce-is-america-an-imperial-power-current-history-november-2003/1.29

Other parts of this military territory are harder to specify. Panama and the Philippines were "in" for a long time, whether by virtue of their many American military bases, or the ease and frequency with which the Marines came ashore (the three-year war to subdue Philippine insurgents in the early 1900s, many expeditions into Panama since the turn of the past century). But today the Panama command is gone, and so are Subic Bay and Clark Air Force base in the Philippines. Does that make Panama and the Philippines independent? Perhaps not, but it puts them outside the territorial realm of the "lily pad" archipelago. The second—and third—largest economies in the world, Japan and Germany, now America's primary economic competitors, remain part of the archipelago with American bases dotting their homeland. A country like Brazil or Poland falls out of this empire, but within the realm of hegemony. Both suffered severe foreign debt burdens in the 1980s, as does Brazil today, both eventually succumbed to the zealous ministrations of the IMF, and both remain firmly ensconced in the developing world.
"Empire" in this light is the relative and contingent, historically bound term; "hegemony," the name of the realm. The liberal world system did not necessarily need an American empire of military installations. Their spread resulted from the struggle with the anti-system and, as Roosevelt imagined in the 1940s, it did not have to happen that way. (Socialist regimes could have been accommodated within the hegemonic realm.) The world system did need a hegemon, however, which was the singular testimony of a singular decade: the 1930s. What England no longer could do the United States was not ready to do; the results were depression and war and the collapse of the old order.

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Imperialisms, Ancient and Modern, Cumings, Bruce, "Is America an Imperial Power?," Current History (November 2003).. Text: The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com), used with permission. Changes: HTML markup removed and the text divided into reading sections by Interlinea.
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