Cox, Michael (2004) Empire, imperialism and the Bush doctrine. Review of International Studies, 30 (4). pp. 585-608. ISSN 0260-2105
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Abstract
It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world. If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Official URL: | http://titles.cambridge.org/journals/journal_catal... |
| Additional Information: | Published 2004 © Cambridge University Press. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (<http://eprints.lse.ac.uk>) of the LSE Research Online website. |
| Divisions: | International Relations |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States) J Political Science > JZ International relations |
| Date Deposited: | 11 May 2006 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Apr 2024 06:21 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/765 |
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