A significant portion of the world’s people benefit from the ideas and practices of the modern global culture. The young especially find it attractive. Their adoption of it generates conflict with the old order. Elders throughout the world see it as the imposition of American values and a challenge to their power. The old orders also argue that American imperial power forces foreign ways on reluctant natives. They ignore youthful enthusiasm for modernity as a driving force for change. The elders argue that native ways are better than those of foreigners; but that does not impress the young. They simply try to do what makes sense to them, which is usually the modern way.

Empire is the imposed rule of a nation by another country’s nationals. The current old order often paints modernity as a present-day tool of American empire. The old order cannot accept that the challenge stems from the astonishing success of modernity. The valuable attributes in native cultures will survive; the attributes that are impediments to overall well being will not. No elder can change that. 

The elders’ argument against American empire is wrong on several counts, not the least of which is the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century. Empires, largely supported by specific commodity trading in the nineteenth century, lost the power to oppose local rule as global war weakened their hold. Woodrow Wilson set the elimination of empires in motion with his announcement that every nation should be able to govern itself. It took two world wars to see Wilson’s goal become a reality. What the Greeks had gained in the early nineteenth century by forcing out the British — independence — would become the way of the world in the twentieth. 

The United Nations was founded by 60 nations in 1945; it is now a 193-member body. There are also dozens of multinational bodies in existence, many of which

have America as a member. None of them are part of some nefarious American imperial activity; they are all part of a larger scheme that facilitates trade, transfers money and ideas, or handles elements of such mundane tasks as the international postal system. Many local elites cannot accept that there is a single global culture that has existed since 1959, when a treaty made Antarctica an international area and prohibited national claims to any land there. The treaty is still in force and is adhered to voluntarily by the 212 nations of the world.

Empires are by definition multi-ethnic. The problem with empire in the twentieth century was simple: local ethnic groups being ruled by foreign ethnic groups wanted to be their own rulers. The nineteenth century empires, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and the short-lived American, were all victim of locals defeating foreigners for governance.

The Jaffa orange dominated in the nineteenth century British market because the British imperial system gave it an advantage over Italian, Moroccan and Spanish fruit. The banana was promoted by an international American company, United Fruit, as a Caribbean export. The company’s earlier power over the economies of the small countries that grew the fruit is now being eroded by UN-supported development. There is little industry in what were once known as “Banana Republics,” because these nations were too small to resist the company’s domination. However, as globalization continues, it can be expected to bring a growing economic attractiveness to them that will lessen United Fruit’s impact.

Companies are becoming increasingly international to better survive in the emerging unitary global market. Displacement of workers in their home countries by globalization is producing a noisy, if futile resistance. There is no going back; the globe is now the setting for economics, social life, and, increasingly, even government, as international bodies like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or European Union involve member nations in a shared sovereignty that is still being defined, and added to, by the nations of the world.

Admittedly, American currency, language, retail outlets, even entertainment, can be considered to dominate the global culture. But America rules only sixteen territories outside the United States. Of these, five are inhabited. All are islands, and include Guam and Puerto Rico. The combined population of this minuscule holding is a little over four million. They are governed as American territories and their inhabitants are America citizens, except American Samoa, whose inhabitants are American Nationals. Puerto Rico has an active independence movement, which was recently voted against, when American statehood won a thin majority in a referendum. Only by stretching the definition of empire beyond the limited sense of imposed foreign rule, could this be considered an empire, which is pitifully short of what empire was historically. The reason America holds even these territories is that it enables their residents, who are more than willing, to have the benefits of American citizenship, knowing that they do so without its obligations.

There are Americans who feel as threatened by the global economy as those in other nations may feel. Few nationals are as uncomfortable with the global economy as Americans are. Such are the paradoxes of overlaying an emerging global system on the nation states of the world. They were first conceived as such in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the treaty of Westphalia (1648). Global commercial dominance may reside in a handful of nations, but social dominance is due to wide acceptance of predominately American ways, not a forced imposition. America may be first, but it is a first among equals, that itself has to deal with foreign pressures as much as any other nation has to deal with them in today’s global system.