I'm guessing I'll be getting a lot of flames after this, so my only request is to keep an open mind. This issue is pretty contentious, and people usually have pretty fixed views on such topics.
This topic was motivated partly by the goings on at Wall Street and other things, which made some of the dormant things in my head pop up again. To get to it, lets first look at great empires. History, or rather historians offer plenty of examples, be it the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and many more. The Romans are usually held as kind of the template used by future great empires of the region, like the Byzantines, even the erstwhile British empire to a certain extent. Whether calling the British empire a great empires is right or not, but the sheer size of the region under its control is an attestation to its glory. All these, and other civilizations are always remembered for their architecture, how they established large cities where earlier there were none, and the spread of education. You'll find volumes over volumes of books and numerous historians who can tell you explicit details of these civilizations. There is the obvious dark thread as well that ties them together, which is that all of them relied heavily on slave labour for many and most of their great architectural achievements. It was a model perfected by the Romans I believe, and used for aeons to come. One more common thread was that these were military empires, they conquered places and stationed troops to maintain order. That perhaps is the biggest defining characteristic of an empire, the ability to maintain control and order. In the ancient and medieval eras, military domination and controlling trade routes was the only option to keep the empire running. And what almost always brought about the end of an empire was the failure to keep these two conditions satisfied. To keep one part of the world in luxury, some other parts must be overworked, overtaxed, and essentially exploited. Plus, to keep things politically sound, there always needs to be an overarching philosophical justification for the actions of the elite. As it is, exploitation usually breeds revolution, and seeds for the destruction of the empire. I concede my examples are exclusive to european empires, but they are the ones about which we know the most.
Stepping into the modern era, military empires are untenable. Public opinion and the easy dissemination of information have meant that the previous philosophical justifications can no longer hold. Obviously there do exist more sophisticated arguments for other kinds of control and dominance, but fighting wars is very difficult, as the americans have realised. Wars create such a barrage of bad publicity, let alone the terrorist responses, that it's difficult to stem the flow of public outrage from around the world. But the crux of my article is not really military empires, I've discussed them to death earlier as well. In the modern era, philosophical and economic dominance is the a-la-mode (well blogger doesn't allow french accents, or atleast I don't know how to get them) method. If I may, I'll borrow Mr. Ahmadinejad's almost favourite term, the american empire. I obviously don't mean it in the way he does, I only intend it to mean the dominance of the USA over the financial markets of the world. A financial crisis has hobbled the markets around the world. There are obviously those around the world who are gladdened by these developments, I, frankly am not. My reasons primarily centre around the money I have myself lost in my stock portfolio (yes, I do have shares). I'm always amazed by the amount of control USA, through its companies, wields over the financial, so to say, ecosystem. I like to see the source of all major developments in some conflict, and I consider the second World War as the major turning point for USA. It hobbled Great Britain, which frankly was destroyed by war, in addition to losing all its colonies. It was essentially reduced to what someone said, the inconsequential island in the Atlantic. Plus, Britain, and most of europe, owed USA huge amounts for war supplies and reconstruction costs. Plus the huge navy developed helped USA control the largest resource on earth, the seas and oceans. They essentially controlled trade, and with the capitalist model of mass production, they made huge profits and established massive trade surpluses with just about everyone. With that, the dollar became the base currency for the world, a stable currency which is used by everyone to trade in. 50 years on, things started to change. The former Asian and African colonies started to come up. Now, China, and to a much lesser extent, India are starting to wield considerable influence, or so I'd like to believe. India, sad to say, never adopts controversial stances on anything, but the Chinese do. They are fiercely competitive of their interests, and they essentially used the same model the USA used to create their dominance. Mass production, at varying levels of quality, is swamping the world with Chinese goods. I'm really not concerned whether that's a good or bad thing, the Chinese are fiercely proud, and will try their level best that major snafus, like the recent milk adulteration problems, are not repeated. The simple thing is, that Chinese firms are beating the USA at its own game. China now has a substantial dollar reserve, and is on the lookout for takeover. Years of trade deficit at the USA end have led to such an outflux of dollars that it is difficult to prevent the world from amassing them in huge quantities. The problem is that the USA's production edge is gone, almost all commodity level production has been shifted abroad. Their only major control lies in the financial markets. And with the ongoing financial crisis, that major pillar of the American "empire" is threatened. Probably the government realises this at some level. This is where I come back to control, for the survivability of an empire, it must maintain control and order. When it doesn't, a new empire usually takes its place, for how long, it's difficult to predict. In the current scenario, China &, to a somewhat lesser extent, Europe is starting to present a viable alternative to the USA for having a financial centre of world. It's hard to overlook China, when most of the things are made there. The thing is that, if Wall street caves, it'll be the coup-de-grace (pardon the french again :D ) for American dominance in the economic sphere. The military can only do so much in such a scenario. USA cannot dominate negotiations using the power of force alone in today's world. Of course, the collapse of such a magnitude would take years to complete, but the period of chaos that indicates a transition is underway, and if it's not stemmed, one can only imagine the outcome, not for the world, but for the USA.
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