A Modern Translatio imperii
The idea that the executive branch of
the U.S. government should have a legitimate power to wage an imperial war of
conquest and colonization, and to do so with only a modicum of congressional
approval and oversight, was first tested at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries when the U.S., taking full advantage of Spain’s definitive
collapse as an empire, conquered and colonized Spain’s erstwhile colonies in
the Caribbean and the Pacific. What
occurred on a grand scale at this juncture was a translatio imperii or imperial transfer of power from Spain to the
United States of America. But if the
medieval concept of the translatio
imperii construed such transfers of power from one emperor or empire to the
next as a linear continuum that was destined, according to the prophecies of
Daniel, to reach the end of times, in the modern era this apocalyptic vision of
imperial decline is turned back on itself.
Rather than a continuum of successive transfers of power destined for
eventual collapse, the modern understanding of the translatio imperii is optimistic; it sees this transfer of power as
a modernizing and enlightening advance.
According to the positivistic logic
of this modern view, American imperialism is superior in kind and quality to
Spanish imperialism because the American brand of imperialism, as conceived
originally by the nation’s Founding Fathers, seeks to spread liberty and
Enlightenment, while the tyranny inherent to the Spanish brand of imperialism
only served as an impediment to Enlightenment.
It was in such cheerful terms that American imperialists of the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would defend the expansion of U.S.
dominion over Spain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. America, they claimed, was a liberating and
civilizing empire. There is, of course,
a much less flattering interpretation of this imperial transition of power from
Spain to the United States of America.
According to the anti-imperialists, this transition rather marked a
regression of the American republic toward the unenlightened and tyrannical
forms of a pre-modern Spanish imperium. Instead of a modernizing advancement destined
to spread enlightenment around the globe, anti-imperialists viewed U.S.
imperial expansion as evidence of the republic’s decline into a sinister state
of political and cultural decadence.
Considered in this darker light, the
U.S. conquest and colonization of the Philippines was just as savage and cruel
as Spain’s conquests in the Americas at the start of the sixteenth
century. But the similarities between
U.S. and Spanish imperialism that this anti-imperialist perspective identifies
were not limited to cruelty alone. The
connection, as both the apologists for U.S. imperial expansion and their
critics made clear, ran much deeper.
U.S. imperialism was a continuation of Spanish imperialism in that, like
the Spanish before them, U.S. imperialists, such as Josiah Strong, imagined and
justified U.S. imperial expansion as an evangelical crusade; and much as the
Spanish conquistadores had done, imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt glorified
as heroic, acts of conquest and colonization that would have been more
accurately depicted as acts of brutality.
By defending American imperialism in these terms, American imperialists
in effect eliminated the liberating dimension of Enlightenment from their
would-be civilizing mission and they essentially reverted to primitive forms of
authority. American anti-imperialists
like Mark Twain and William James did not sit idly by; they rather attacked the
imperialists and their ideas in open and public debate. At issue in this debate was America’s legacy
of Enlightenment: the legacy, that is, that ambiguously combines republican
with imperial virtues.
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