J OHN C ARLOS R OWE European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America Washington, September 3. United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. … According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. Peter Grose, “U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote; Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror,” New York Times (4 September 1967), 2. On January 20, 2005, President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address that the United States would take up the “cause of liberty […] to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Although the President claims that “this is not primarily the task of arms,” he insists “we will defend ourselves and friends by force of arms when necessary.” The rhetoric of global domination by military means, especially in the names of “freedom” and “democracy,” merely confirms the assumption of many critics that this administration has fully committed itself to an aggressive imperialist agenda. The President properly terms this new global agenda a “mission” and “vocation,” and his second inaugural is organized around religious language, biblical verses, and references to hymns. 1 When he claims that “Liberty comes to those who love it,” he clearly means to equate the name of “liberty” with the being of “God”: “Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.” The President’s ability to make such sweeping generalizations about humankind is based on his confidence in the teleological drive of history toward human liberation, concluding only with our divine salvation: “History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.” The “shock 1 In “The Inspiration behind Bush’s Words,” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2005, A22, Maura Reynolds notes that “like many of the signature speeches of his first term, President Bush’s second inaugural address was laced with religious language, biblical verses and references to hymns,” citing five separate examples (there are many more) in his seventeen-minute speech. 38 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE and awe” accompanying the U.S. military invasion of Iraq will now become the apocalyptic tongues of fire, the Pentecostal vision of a purifying global warfare in the causes of “liberty” and “justice: ” “By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well: a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” 2 The rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration have encouraged many critics to compare them with such modern predecessors as: German and Italian fascism, nineteenth-century British imperialism, and America’s own Manifest Destiny. Still other intellectuals have insisted that the combination of nationalist rhetoric of liberty and justice with Christian fundamentalism signals an even more reactionary appeal to premodern models, such as those holding together what Benedict Anderson termed the great “religious empires” of Islam and Catholicism in the Middle Ages. It is not really necessary to choose between these historical eras, because nationalism relies fundamentally on the religious politics it claims to displace. From within the modernization process, intellectuals like Max Weber could imagine optimistically that the nation-state might eventually replace faith with reason and religious hierarchy with social democracy. 3 Yet because nations had to legitimate themselves in competition with each other for economic and cultural reasons, they often drew upon the available rhetoric of belief to develop “national” or “civil” religions, whose symbologies were both deeply dependent upon and thus as irrational as formal religious orthodoxies. 4 The effort to specify the historical precedent for the current Bush Administration’s frightening mixture of nationalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is quixotic and should not detain us very long. U.S. foreign policies and the aggressive advocacy of human rights are logical consequences of nationalism at its historical limit; history is “repeating itself” simply because we have not imagined how to transcend the national form. Predictions of specific consequences of this “neo-nationalist” enthusiasm are bound to be either disappointed or exceeded, but what we can say at this particular moment is that alternatives to the nation-state are desperately needed. And because in this same crisis intellectuals, especially in the United States, have been abandoned as irrelevant, we need to reaffirm how 2 “Vow for ‘Freedom in All the World’: Text of the Inaugural Address,” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2005, A22. 3 Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001). 4 For a good account of the “civil religion” in U.S. social history, see Jay Mechling, “Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies,” Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 63-80. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 39 necessary intellectual imagining is for a world desperately in need of a “new world order.” By the “intellectual imaginary” I want to include explicitly the imagination as an aesthetic function that operates in many different media, ranging from specialized scholarship to literature, film, and television with broad appeals to diverse audiences, often transnational in scope. If there is indeed a revival of the aesthetic function, then I want to argue that it should be the means of creating political coalitions among intellectuals and artists with the powers to remain outside or at least marginal to the existing and growing U.S. hegemony. I suggest that my advocacy of the particular European perspectives on American Studies developed in this lecture might also be extended to what I see as a new U.S. expatriate, whether remaining within the United States or choosing to live and work outside its geopolitical boundaries, who will continue this critical work and help build such coalitions for as long as it takes us to create new habitats for humanity. Since 9/ 11, terrorist acts around the globe have dramatized the international aims of al Qae’da and its related organizations. To be sure, the United States is a major target, which now looms even larger for Islamic terrorists precisely because of our response to such attacks, not just in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. on September 11, but over Lockerbeigh, in Nairobi, in Beirut, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bali, Morocco, and Madrid. Some of the early intellectual responses to 9/ 11, especially those coming from Europe, stressed the “human” and “international” costs of such terrorism and argued vigorously for transnational solidarity to oppose further civilian murders. These appeals to “humanity” were not overtly “unpatriotic” or “anti-patriotic,” but I now want to suggest that their tacit critique of patriotism should today be made explicit. “Nationalism” in the modern period binds us to a fictitious entity, which can be sustained only by elaborate symbolic means confirmed by “real” historical events. 5 Among the most “real” are those events which are so profoundly “imaginary” in their conception: wars. 5 Not all scholars agree that the nation is a fiction. Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2001), p. 332, advocates what he terms the “primordialist” view, which argues “for the ‘reality’ of nations, and the almost ‘natural’ quality of ethnic belonging” on which so many nations based their original social contracts, ranging from legal foundations to symbolic bonds. Smith argues that “National sentiment is no construct, it has a real, tangible, mass base. At its root is a feeling of kinship, of the extended family, that distinguishes national from every other kind of group sentiment” (333-334). But Smith’s very definition of the ethnies (“ethnic core”) on which most nations are built is composed of fictions historically justified and socially chosen. 40 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE However concrete and material warfare may be, it is always predicated on symbolic actions and resolutions. The very “occupation” of “territory” by “military personnel” rests on a fantastic assumption that the “control” of any “state” can be so managed. In fact, the “control” of a state is finally the work of social, legal, political, economic forces that operate within a nominal geopolitical “territory.” All of this is perhaps self-evident and yet often enough ignored at the peril of invading and occupying armies. The British attempted to “fence off” Malaya in order to trap and contain insurgents, as nineteenth-century colonists in Tasmania tried to “march” across that small island in the infamous “Black Line” campaign to eliminate the Aborigines. The DDR with the military support of the Soviet Union attempted to “wall off” East Germany, and Eastern European colonies of the Soviet Union virtually maintained an “Iron Curtain” to preserve totalitarian control of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia during the Cold War. In the nineteenth century, the United States forced native peoples westward, away from growing population centers, then attempted to control them on reservations ultimately surrounded by Euroamerican communities. In the twentieth century, the U.S. has supported the partition of several nations, notably Israel-Palestine and Korea and Vietnam, resulting in political tensions so powerful as to erupt into open warfare in all these regions and producing no peaceful resolutions to date. None of these imperial efforts was ultimately successful, even if the harm done to generations of people living in these states still remains incalculable and unimaginable. Very few wars have resolved in lasting ways the conflicts that provoked them. To be sure, the human and financial cost of wars often lead to new balances of power that give the appearance of political solutions, but in most instances merely distort or refunction the underlying problems. Certainly this is the case in the present, ongoing war in Iraq, which now threatens to spread to Syria, Iran, and has related campaigns in the West Bank and Gaza - what the Bush Administration now terms “the Greater Middle East,” as well as Indonesia and the Philippines, among other sites. Although it is not yet a “world war,” it threatens to grow into one, especially if we listen to the rhetoric of the current U.S. administration and the President’s ambitions to “defend liberty” against “all tyrants” around the globe. History teaches us that such military conflict will do little to resolve today’s underlying global problems: the inequitable distribution of wealth, the concomitant inequality of the consumption of natural and human resources, the exploitation of labor especially along what Du Bois termed the “equatorial black belt,” the growing disregard for environmental protection by the industrialized elite, and the widespread neglect of pandemics like AIDS/ HIV and famine in regions and among peoples without “global representation” or other modes European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 41 of “visibility.” When such problems are stated this baldly, it seems incredible that first-world peoples have continued to ignore them or impossible that they will avoid the consequences of such neglect. The insistent emphasis in contemporary U.S. culture on patriotism legitimates such quixotic warfare by reaffirming the “friend/ enemy” binary and reinventing American Exceptionalism as a new Manifest Destiny: the adoption of American-style democracy around the globe as the only effective means of toppling tyrants and defending “human rights.” Living in the United States today, intellectuals are faced with the nearly impossible task of criticizing a rhetoric of patriotism deployed by the current Administration, reinforced by cultural work, and reproduced symbolically and psychologically by the majority of U.S. citizens, whatever their backgrounds or political affiliations. 6 I have argued under less dangerous historical circumstances that the critique of patriotism is urgently needed, even as I am aware that this is one of the riskiest tasks for intellectuals to undertake, in large part because the rhetoric of patriotism is so deeply entangled with an affective psychology that nationalist ideology, especially in the United States, has successfully manipulated. Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is now more than three decades old, but its focus on the psychological processes of interpellation offer us a renewed starting point for understanding the powerful personal appeal of patriotic sentiment. 7 My first claim, then, for how European perspectives on American Studies can be helpful in this particular historical crisis is that European scholars can use their intellectual and social positions outside the geopolitical and institutional authority of the U.S. nation to criticize the rhetoric of patriotism. If there are signs of a “new” expatriotism of intellectuals intent on reaffirming the promise of U.S. democracy by criticizing the imperial “democracy” 6 In a recent controversy, former University of Colorado (Boulder) Professor Ward Churchill has received death threats, been accused of being “inept” and “un-American” (by conservative commentator Bill Horowitz), and threatened with termination by Colorado Governor Bill Owens for Churchill’s comparison of workers in the World Trade Towers as “little Eichmanns,” on account of their complicity with the first-world nations’ hegemony in the new global economy and with U.S. military domination of the world. The issue has been tied to liberal criticisms of Harvard University President Larry Summers, who publicly claimed women did not have the same aptitudes as men for mathematics and science. The “free-speech issue” has now deflected the serious question about intellectuals’ rights to criticize the U.S. government’s foreign policies (even if I personally defend both Churchill’s and Summers’ rights to free speech, however stupid I consider both of those statements). For more on the free-speech issue at this moment in the U.S., see National Public Radio’s website and the specific link: www.freespeech/ npr.org. 7 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 42 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE demanded by the current administration, then such an outside perspective should draw on the work of non-U.S. scholars in our field. I am asking for nothing new from the generations of European scholars in the field who have done just this sort of work, but today the opportunity to substitute alternative social models for the U.S. nation-state and versions of “worldcitizenship” for the model of U.S. citizenship should be led by intellectuals outside the borders of the United States. Since the First Gulf War, conservative political interests in the United States have coopted “American patriotism” for their own purposes, relegating the traditional role of the self-conscious, skeptical, and questioning citizen to the social and political margins and sometimes into effective exile. “Support our troops” was a popular slogan in the First Gulf War, which in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a nearly hysterical mantra to silence dissent and control a large but still minority anti-war movement in the United States. Displayed proudly on the windows of cars and trucks, the doors of businesses, even on T-shirts and jackets and dresses, the twisted “ribbon” used first to represent the solidarity of those people committed to fighting the pandemic of HIV/ AIDS, then adopted as the symbol of those contributing to the fight against breast and other cancers, is now the national symbol for those who “support our troops” in Iraq. The twisted ribbon as a sticker or decal invokes the “yellow ribbons” tied around trees during the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980-1981 in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations to show support for the release of the 52 Americans held hostage by students in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. When those hostages were finally released by the Iranian government on January 21, 1981, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s 1973 popular hit, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” was played as a joyous homecoming theme. During the First Gulf War in 1991, the George H.W. Bush Administration urged Americans to “display” yellow ribbons outside their homes to “support the troops” by expressing our desires to “welcome them home,” combining thereby the original populist and ostensibly anti-war sentiments in the Iran Hostage Crisis to “bring the hostages safely home” with the tacit conservative criticism of how veterans returning from the Vietnam War had been mistreated by anti-war demonstrators. 8 8 In the historical and imaginary “revisions” of the Vietnam War worked out in U.S. culture after 1975, conservative critics of our military and political failure in the Vietnam War often cited the American public’s failure to “support the troops.” In Coming Home, Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) picks up her demobilized husband, Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), at the Oakland Naval Air Station driving a sporty and classic (and expensive! ) Porsche Speedster. As he upshifts out the gate of the military base, he turns to the assembled anti-war demonstrators outside the fence and gives them the finger. Audiences cheered Dern’s “rebellious” gesture of contempt European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 43 Tony Orlando and Dawn’s song was based on an actual incident on board a southern bus heading for Miami, Florida. One of the passengers told the driver that he had just been released from prison, where he had served three years for passing bad checks. While in prison, the man wrote his wife to tell her she did not have to wait for him to serve his sentence, but if she was still interested she should let him know by tying a yellow ribbon around the only oak tree in the city square of White Oak, Georgia. When the bus passed through town, the driver slowed down and to the convict’s tearful relief the wife had tied a yellow ribbon around the town’s central oak tree. The driver phoned this story to the wire services, which spread it all over the country. Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown read it in the newspaper, then composed their million-selling song, which was released by Bell Records in February 1973 and by the week of April 23, 1973, was the number one popular song in the United States. Although Saigon did not fall to the North Vietnamese and the U.S. did not hastily evacuate military and diplomatic personnel until 1975, 1973 is the year of the negotiated peace accords between the U.S. and North Vietnam. Tony Orlando and Dawn’s popular song certainly owes its success not only to its reliance on the conventions of country pop music, a hybrid musical genre of growing popularity in the early 1970s, but to the optimism in the United States that the Vietnam War was finally over and at that date had been concluded “honorably.” The prisoner returning home to his devoted wife was a figure for the POW, many of whom like today’s Senator John McCain, had been tortured in the “Hanoi Hilton” and in explicit violation of the protections of prisoners-of-war guaranteed by the Geneva Convention. Of course, insofar as the Vietnam War remained to the very end an “undeclared war,” claims to violations of the Geneva Convention’s protections of combat troops could not be legally maintained. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the “yellow ribbon” originally representing public relief at the end of an unpopular war and personal hopes for the anti-war demonstrators. During the 2005 NFL Super Bowl broadcast on the Fox Network on February 6, 2005, the St. Louis brewing company Anheuser-Busch showed U.S. troops returning from Iraq and walking through an airport to the spontaneous applause of strangers, culminating a black-out screen with the words, “Thank you,” followed by “Anheuser-Busch.” The next day’s NBC Evening News (February 7, 2005) did a special story on this advertisement and the overwhelmingly positive response it received from viewers, even though some critics noted that the advertisement was still designed to urge consumers to “buy beer.” Capitalizing on the “moral values” and “social responsibility” displayed in this advertisement, the Anheuser- Busch Co. assured Americans that the advertisement would be shown only once, marking thereby its special purpose. Written by Steve Bougdanos of DOB Chicago Advertising, the sixty-second advertisement clearly attempts to reverse the “Vietnam- Effect” of protesters challenging veterans returning from the Vietnam War. 44 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE for family members to come home safely, has come to represent an unequivocal patriotic zeal that substitutes “troops” metonymically for “our foreign policies.” The “yellow ribbon” has now taken on numerous different color combinations, the most popular of which is the red, white, and blue ribbon arranged to combine the American flag with the ribbon’s multiple connotations. “Support” for “our troops” means that we must support foreign policies of a State Department now controlled by the neoconservative philosophy identifiable with Vice President Dick Cheney, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz (President of the World Bank from April 2005 - June 2007), and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. For most political analysts, President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address announces the return to power of these and other foreign policy neoconservatives in the place of so-called political “realists,” like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, current foreign policy critic Brent Scowcroft, and even former President George H.W. Bush, whose refusal to pursue the First Gulf War all the way to Baghdad to end Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship is considered by such neoconservatives to have been a fatal foreign policy and military error. 9 Patriotism employs a flexible rhetoric adaptable to a wide array of public discourses and cultural genres to substitute “feeling” for “thought,” sentiment for reason. What causes me to choke back the tears as my favorite sports team wins the championship, especially when it represents a city or a region in which I have never lived? How is it possible that large numbers of people from many different backgrounds, most of whom will never meet each other or, if they did, would find they have nothing in common, will embrace and sing together as “their” flag is displayed and “anthem” is played? In the County-and-Western hit, “Arlington,” Trace Adkins sings in the voice of a dead veteran of the Second Gulf War, who has recently been buried at National Arlington Cemetery, “a thousand stones” away from his “grandad,” who died fighting in World War II. 10 The veteran’s reward for service to his country is “this plot of land … for a job well done,” just below “a big white house [that] sits on a hill just up the road.” The “white house” is, of course, the Custis-Lee Mansion, the original estate on which National Arlington Cemetery was built when Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs appropriated the house and established a cemetery for the Union war dead on June 15, 1864. But Adkins’s “white house” also refers to the Executive branch of the government, thus aligning the dead veteran’s sacrifice and 9 Doyle McManus, “Bush Pulls ‘Neocons’ Out of the Shadows,” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2005, A1, 19. 10 Trace Adkins, “Arlington,” Songs about Me (Liberty, 2005). Adkins declares himself a singer of “working class anthems,” so his sentimentalizing of death in the Second Gulf War helps legitimate the ongoing U.S. military exploitation of working-class military personnel (<http: / / www.traceadkins.com/ bio>). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 45 patriotism with unquestioning support of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Adkins’s lyrics pun on the veteran’s “hometown” and his ultimate coming “home” to Arlington National Cemetery, glossing the “big white house … on a hill” as the proper destination for “the chosen ones” who have made such a sacrifice. The cemetery is “this peaceful piece of property,” which as “sacred ground” where the young man can “rest in peace.” Playing on the promises of the Bush Administration to protect Americans against “terrorism” and guarantee their “homeland security,” Adkins suggests that such policies represent a national consensus: “We’re thankful for those thankful for the things we’ve done,/ We can rest in peace, ‘cause we are the chosen ones,/ We made it to Arlington, yea dust to dust,/ Don’t cry for us, we made it to Arlington.” Of course, the Biblical reference links the Bush Administration’s foreign policies with the civil religion, just as allusions to the “city” (in this case,“a white house”) on “a hill” and the “chosen ones” recall the Puritan doctrine of supralapsarian Election. We know from Benedict Anderson and many other scholars that patriotism is an elaborate fiction sustained by countless cultural and symbolic acts, but we still find ourselves “stirred” and “moved” as flags wave, anthems play, and footballers score points. 11 It is still difficult to understand how such patriotism motivates individuals to die for a foreign policy toward a distant and relatively powerless nation - Vietnam or Iraq - posing no immediate threat to those individuals before they enter combat. As we know, Immanuel Kant was a vigorous opponent of wars and an early proponent of a “League of Nations” to avoid future wars. He considered nationalism to be the greatest stumbling block to his ideal of “world citizenship” that would discourage wars and achieve peaceful, rational human existence. 12 Although he does not condescend even to comment on the “irrational” character of patriotic sentiment and rhetoric, his critique of nationalism tacitly condemns emotive patriotism. Horace’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mourir” has been derided down through the ages, but sustained criticism of patriotism as an ideological tool and as a complex psychological interpellation is harder to find, in part because institutions of learning and cultural media are so often tied, whatever their critical perspectives, to the 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 37- 46, suggests that in print cultures much of this work is done by a shared national language and by the cultural work - from literary texts to daily journalism and news - that reinforces the “official language” or, in the cases of nations with several languages, reinforces the bilingual or polylingual character of that “imagined community.” 12 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983). Perpetual Peace was first published in 1795. 46 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE theocracies, kingdoms, republics, nations, or other states they inhabit and thus on which they depend. Some neoconservatives have attempted to equate “civic virtue” and “good citizenship” with “patriotism.” In his recent jeremiad, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington complains that “elements of America’s business and intellectual elites [identify] more with the world as a whole and [define] themselves as ‘global citizens’. …” 13 Huntington takes a populist stance in the book, lumping liberal academic and multinational corporate “elites” together in an improbable conspiracy to denationalize the United States with immigrants, who in their refusal to accept the American consensus end up working out the “cosmopolitan” agenda of their allies in the university and corporations. Fixing on immigrants with legal or de facto dual citizenship and tagging them “ampersands,” Huntington fuels the recent rage against undocumented workers in the United States by insisting: “Previous immigrants maintained an ethnic identity as a subcomponent of their American national identity. Ampersands, in contrast, have two national identities. They eat their cake and have it too, combining the opportunity, wealth, and liberty of America with the culture, language, family ties, traditions, and social networks of their birth country.” 14 What links together these unlikely forces is finally their unpatriotic, anti-national, and perversely destructive impulses. We are saved only by the grass-roots Americans who constitute what Huntington terms the nation’s “‘patriotic public,” which is “foremost among peoples in their patriotism and their commitment to their country.” 15 As rational or historically accurate argument, Who Are We? makes no more sense than the shifting symbolism of those “yellow ribbons,” but in both cases a vague rhetoric of “patriotism” as necessary “consensus” holds both symbolically in place. Samuel Huntington is a frequent target of liberal criticism, of course, because his arguments rely so centrally on neoconservative rhetoric, especially by linking “values,” “faith,” and “nationalism.” Yet even more sophisticated and less obviously politically interested criticism has been directed in recent years at the new “cosmopolitanism” or what Robbins and Cheah have positively formulated as “cosmopolitics.” 16 The new “world or global literatures,” “post-nationalist” and “transnational” cultural and political projects, “traveling theory,” and “postcolonial theory” have been criticized 13 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 274. 14 Ibid., p. 192. 15 Ibid., p. 273. 16 Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 47 for their totalizing impulses, their impracticality, and their tacit acceptance of (or at least failure to distinguish themselves from) unilateral, first-world globalization. In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues eloquently for the transnational ethics of the cosmopolitan, who takes “seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.” 17 Appiah’s approach respects human differences, including those established by national boundaries and customs, but in doing so tries to develop an ethics that is not restricted to nation-specific knowledge and morality. As Appiah acknowledges, it is difficult for us to acknowledge the cosmopolitan ideal “that we have obligations to strangers,” but even the smallest “nation” is composed primarily of strangers. 18 What allows us to identify with “fellow Americans” (or Swiss or Ugandans) whom we do not know personally and not make the same connection with other human beings? The problem is in part the result of nation-specific knowledge, especially in the disciplines associated with culture and history. Whatever critical and educational purposes these disciplines may serve in the interpretation of the nation, they have done considerable work toward the legitimation of nations as discrete “objects” of study. 19 Cultural, economic, and political globalization makes patriotism and nationalism appear increasingly naive and irrational. At the same time that U.S. popular culture reinforces sentimental patriotism with work like Trace Adkins’ “Arlington,” it also calls attention to an ineluctable global awareness critical of the provincialism of the nation. The cross-over Folk-Country musician Steve Earle explains in the liner notes for his disc The Revolution Starts Now that he felt a special urgency when composing this album to “weigh in” on “the most important presidential election in our lifetime,” seven months away from the album’s release in May 2004. 20 The Country-and-Western melodies sound much like those employed by Adkins in patriotic songs, like “Arlington,” but Earle’s message is distinctly radical - in the spirit of what he terms the “radical [U.S.] revolution” - and global in perspective. The lyrics in “Home to Houston” recall countless Country songs celebrating the hard work of truckers, but Earle’s driver is making the 17 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. xv. 18 Ibid., p. 153. 19 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1981; rpt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 64, makes a similar claim about how “Literature” and “History” serve the “functional fantasy” of Western Civilization. 20 Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now (Sarangel Music, 2004). 48 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE run from Basra to Baghdad “with a bulletproof screen on the hood of my truck/ And a Bradley on my backdoor.” The trucker’s refrain - “God get me back to Houston alive/ and I won’t drive a truck anymore” - repudiates the conventional celebration of the trucker’s hard but honorable life, as well as the freedom of the open road. 21 Earle’s trucker may want to get back to Houston as quickly as possible, recognizing his mistake in participating in a war so far from home, but Earle makes it clear that one lesson of the Second Gulf War is that working people share common bonds that reach beyond national borders. In “Rich Man’s War,” Earle argues that U.S. grunts, like Bobby, are fooled by patriotism - “Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm/ Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar” - in order to fight “a rich man’s war,” leaving at home “a stack of overdue bills” while “the finance company took his car.” In the same song, the Palestinian “Ali,” “the second son of a second son,/ Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come/ Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play/ Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way.” Both Bobby and Ali answer the same call of “rich men,” who manipulate their workers as if they were children. When Ali gets “the call,” he “Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah/ A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door/ Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war.” 22 Customarily represented as religious fanatics in the U.S. media, Palestinian suicidebombers are identified by Earle as sharing a transnational cause with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cheah, Robbins, Appiah, and Earle are working out a new cosmopolitanism that should guide our efforts to “internationalize” American Studies. The curious hybrid term “international American Studies,” which in its very name appears to combine incompatible categories of world and nation, offers us an excellent opportunity to offer a sustained criticism of nationalism and its emotional complement “patriotism” from perspectives both transnational and “rational.” Much as I admire Kant’s intellectual rigor and his criticism of war and nationalism, I do not propose to revive the Enlightenment rationality he did so much to establish in the modern era. To be sure, I will not even be so foolish or daring as to attempt the elaboration of a post-enlightenment, genuinely “global” Reason, but I will suggest instead that whatever sort of analysis we identify with such an ideal cognition must be predicated on some capacity to think beyond the boundaries of discrete nations or other so-called 21 “Home to Houston,” The Revolution Starts Now, lyrics from <http: / / www.steveearle. com>. 22 “Rich Man’s War,” The Revolution Starts Now, lyrics from <http: / / www.steveearle. com>. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 49 “sovereign” states. Perhaps such “global reason” can only emerge as a cognitive, analytical, polylingual method of understanding once we have begun to offer serious alternatives to the geopolitical entities that today constrain, provincialize, and structure “knowledge” and “reason.” The first task in this work is, then, profoundly theoretical: how can we disarticulate “reason” and “knowledge” from specific national or state interests? Denationalizing knowledge complements the work of decolonizing knowledge advocated by the postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, especially if we understand the historical relationship between the nation-state and colonial expansion. 23 And can we do so in ways that will escape the totalizing universals of the past, especially noticeable in the Enlightenment heritage of modernity? Another related task is more manageable, I think, and that is the work of theorizing alternative states to the “nation,” both drawing on premodern examples and late-modern, even postmodern alternatives. Liberalism within the nation-state is no longer a possible alternative to a “neoliberal ideology” that is profoundly conservative in its politics and yet rhetorically liberal. The failure of the Democratic Party in the last two presidential elections can be explained in part as the successful appropriation of liberal discourse not just by the Republican Party, but by most nationalist interests in the United States. John Kerry immediately engaged George W. Bush in terms of patriotism, and the only debate that really mattered was the one that pitted Kerry’s military service against Bush’s record in the National Guard. Once the campaigns focused on patriotism and its ineluctable complement, war, then it no longer mattered which candidate won. Had Kerry been elected, we would still be increasing troop numbers, military spending in Iraq, and postponing any coherent plan or timetable for withdrawal. European scholarly approaches to American Studies do not provide ipso facto the outside perspective on the United States I think we so desperately need. European views of the United States, even if we were able to generalize about them (which we cannot), are certainly not objective, and their intellectual models are often shaped by the national situations of the educational institutions and analytical methods on which they rely. A great deal of post- World War II European scholarship in American Studies reflects the impact of the cultural colonialism of the United States during and after the War. 24 23 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 20, describes his method as “a pluritopic hermeneutic,” which allows the differences between Mexica (Aztec) and Spanish national knowledges, for example, to appear, thus challenging the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge. 24 Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, trans. Diana F. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 50 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Reading that scholarship today with President Bush’s triumphalist call for the urgent “spread of democracy and freedom,” we might understand how this earlier enthusiasm for U.S. liberal democracy now sounds strangely like the neoliberal rhetoric of current U.S. foreign policies. Even with these qualifications in mind, we ought to remember that a good deal of postwar European scholarship about the United States focused on minority cultures, the unfulfilled promise of equal civil and economic rights, and the discrepancy between the realities of classist, racist America and its democratic ideal of a society free from class and racial hierarchies. To be sure, the European scholarship in the post-World War II period stressed these issues in part as a response to the racial nightmare of National Socialism and to a lesser extent the lingering legacies of aristocratic and monarchical class hierarchies. U.S. scholars visiting European universities in the 1960s and 1970s were often impressed with the institutional presence of courses, even curricula and programs, in African American Studies, Latin American Studies, North American Studies that included Canada, and Native American Studies. When academic reformers in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s struggled to establish curricula and programs in these (and other fields less represented in European universities, such as Women’s and Gender Studies), they were often reminded by their European colleagues that the U.S. was “behind” its European counterparts. I have long been convinced that had the U.S. professional organizations, such as the Modern Language Association and American Studies Association, taken more cognizance of these developments in Europe, we would have gained valuable knowledge and political allies in struggles that in the U.S. often took decades to be successful and survive to this day in constant states of fiscal and institutional crisis. To be sure, the inextricable relationship of nationalism and imperialism is another legacy that European scholars might have brought from their own histories to the revision of American Studies. With some notable exceptions, post-World War II European scholarship did not address the extent to which the United States in the twentieth century explicitly took on responsibility for the waning British and French empires, especially in the Caribbean, Pacific (Hawaii, Samoa, and the Philippines), Africa, Asia (the postwar Occupation of Japan; the “invention” of Taiwan), and Southeast Asia (Vietnam after the collapse of colonial French Indo-China). In certain respects, this neglect of U.S. imperialism is both curious and understandable, in light of the peculiar postwar occupation of Europe by the U.S. military, the beginning of what Chalmers Johnson has termed the U.S. “empire of [military] bases” in the late-modern period. 25 Despite the vigorous cri- 25 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2004), pp. 151-185. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 51 tiques of U.S. “internal colonialism” by American Studies’ scholars in the U.S. in the Vietnam War years (1965-1975), a more far-reaching critique of the U.S. as a traditionally imperial or neo-imperial power was not part of the Western European scholarly approach to the U.S. between roughly 1945 and 1990. Of course, one notable exception would have to be orthodox Marxist interpretations of U.S. imperialism in Soviet-controlled satellites in the DDR and the rest of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, although those critiques vary drastically from versions of Leninist propaganda to tacit criticisms of Soviet-style imperialism. 26 Even today, only a handful of U.S. scholars have proposed to interpret U.S. cultural history in relation to a venerable and consistent (albeit changing) set of policies intent on North American, Western Hemispheric, and global territorial and economic expansion. Yet U.S. political history cannot be understood apart from very traditionally defined programs to control peoples and territory, ranging from “Manifest Destiny” through the colonization of peoples stolen from Africa to do slave labor in North America to the systematic removal and destruction of native peoples in western territory variously purchased and taken by force west of the Mississippi, to mention only the most familiar examples of “internal colonization.” Especially in the current political climate in the United States, I cannot overestimate the difficulty and yet the social and civic importance of educating the American people about their own imperial heritage and the democratic alternatives to it. In this work, I appeal to my European colleagues in American Studies, who bring their considerable expertise in the many different peoples and cultures of the Western Hemisphere, their traditional “area-studies” emphases on “North America” and “Latin America” for a more culturally and lingusitically comparative approach to the United States, and finally their intimate understanding of the United States as late-modern inheritor of modern European imperialism. In the United States, scholars like the late Edward Said, Amy Kaplan, Richard Slotkin, and myself represent the category of “tenured radicals,” whose opinions increasingly are contained within academic circles and are routinely dismissed as irrelevant by conservative public intellectuals, like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Francis Fukuyama, and Samuel Huntington. Of course, the very phrase “U.S. imperialism” invokes an orthodox Marxist critique long considered an empty slogan and thus easily dismissed by association with the totalitarianism of bureaucratic state 26 See Ileana Marin, “Communist Romania on Imperialist America,” Communism, Capitalism, and the Politics of Culture Proceedings of the East-West American Studies Conference at the Center for North American Studies, June 2003, Frankfurt: ZENAF Conference Proceedings 4/ 2004, pp. 90-104. 52 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Communisms around the globe. Western European scholars often face similar obstacles to the use of the term “U.S. imperialism,” insofar as they must struggle to distinguish Western-style Left intellectual views from those of orthodox (or “vulgar”) Marxism. We can avoid the problems of invoking the old Communist (and more recent Islamic) slogan “American Imperialism” by insisting on a globally and historically comparative approach to the term. U.S. imperialism must be understood historically in conjunction with nineteenth-century British imperialism and in competition with nineteenthcentury French and twentieth-century Soviet imperialisms. In addition, we may also need some new terms to discuss the U.S. legacy of imperial expansion and the control of populations, economic production, and markets, but we should not lose ourselves in the terminological, effectively nominalist, problems posed by the more substantive question: how can international scholars bring their different knowledge bases and their historical experiences to bear on the analysis of U.S. imperialism and its European heritage? Postcolonial theorists have explained at great and helpful length how non-Europeans, especially those from the colonized regions of the globe, bring the special understanding, along with the unique problems, of the colonized to the “critical study of colonial discourse.” Contemporary postcolonial theory attempts to get beyond colonial realities by understanding how they were socially, economically, militarily, even psychologically constructed. Postcolonial theory is always already the study of colonial and imperial histories. 27 And postcolonial theory has had a growing influence on American Studies, especially the international, comparative “new American Studies” which I advocate. 28 This intellectual tendency follows a more general critique of Eurocentrism extended in recent years to include Euroamerican privilege in the new global order. This critique of the Euroamerican hegemony has been reinforced by postcolonial calls for a new decolonization, which in some cases goes far beyond intellectual and cultural projects to verge on appeals for open resistance, in some cases revolution. What Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term “the global multitude,” the core of their conception of a new proletariat, may be identified and thus organized in all the major cities of the world, as well as in the marginalized regions of “undeveloped,” third and fourth world nations, but they identify this new collective as coming from beyond the first-worlds of the U.S., Asia, and Europe: 27 John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. xvi-xvii. 28 See, for example, C. Richard King, ed., Postcolonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 53 Is it possible to imagine U.S. agriculture and service industries without Mexican migrant labor, or Arab oil without Palestinians and Pakistanis? Moreover, where would the great innovative sectors of immaterial production, from design and fashion, and from electronics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia, be without the “illegal labor” of the great masses, mobilized toward the radiant horizons of capitalist wealth and freedom? Mass migrations have become necessary for production. … This is how the multitude gains the power to affirm its autonomy, traveling and expressing itself through an apparatus of widespread, transversal territorial reappropriation. 29 Hardt and Negri envision a new, third-world proletariat forging transnational coalitions that will topple late capitalism, finally achieving a Marxist global revolution. When read in the aftermath of 9/ 11 and the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the final pages of Empire seem nearly clairvoyant with respect to the ongoing “war against terrorism” waged by the Bush Administration and the “resistance” offered by ever more loosely defined “terrorist” networks and cells. Yet their utopia is romantic and nostalgic, because they do not adequately take into account the enormous imbalances of military, political, economic, and technological power in the world today. There is another way to understand Hardt and Negri’s anticipation of our current global crises, if we conclude that the ongoing conflicts between the U.S. and guerilla factions are not likely to galvanize the “proletariat of the South” into any sort of effective reaction to growing U.S. hegemony. What is likely and seems to be unfolding is a succession of local instabilities, now “policed” almost entirely by the United States, sometimes with the mere patina of “allied support,” as is the case with Great Britain’s participation in Iraq, and unlikely to result in anything more than further, often unpredictable hostilities, either internal to the specific nation or in an entire region, as is certainly the case at present in Bush’s “Greater Middle East.” 30 Since the January 31, 2005 elections in Iraq, the “center” has failed to hold, and civil war has been well underway for more than a year, despite efforts in the U.S. media and government to “predict” the precise date when such an inevitable internal conflict might begin. Given the inequitable distribu- 29 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 397-398. 30 In applauding the “success” of the January 31, 2005 elections in Iraq, despite substantial evidence of the exclusion of significant portions of the population, especially Sunnis, President Bush claimed that “Today … the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East,” as if to suggest he has already initiated his plan for “expanding liberty and democracy” to the very center of a region tacitly defined by him as undemocratic. Such “centering” of the region is entirely fictional, of course, albeit obviously self-interested. (“President Bush’s Speech” on the Elections in Iraq, January 30, 2005, Los Angeles Times, 31 January 2005, A12). 54 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE tion of economic, political, military, and cultural power, which does indeed leave the United States as the lone superpower, no successful “revolution from the South” (or any other region, for that matter) is at present imaginable, simply a continuing, increasingly undemocratic series of conflicts or a global “guerilla warfare,” in which human misery and suffering escalate. As Seymour Hersh has argued persuasively in “The Coming Wars,” the growing number of conflicts will increasingly be hidden from public view as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld succeeds in consolidating military intelligence and thus covert activities in the Pentagon and “downsizing” the C.I.A., in part due to the latter’s intelligence failures with regard to the Middle East and 9/ 11. 31 In the face of such prospects and in the absence of real social and political alternatives, the open advocacy of U.S. imperialism as promising a Pax Americana may seem strangely attractive to people from many different political positions. The preludes to such an imperial destiny, even cultural and political crusade, offered by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington in the 1990s have now assumed near canonical authority in all U.S. quarters, except among the “tenured radicals” of the American professoriate. 32 One reason why the Bush Administration’s enthusiastic use of imperialist rhetoric in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was not more vigorously criticized may well have been a certain begrudging acceptance of the idea that the only viable path to global stability could come from U.S. hegemony. Niall Ferguson’s Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003) is a testament to this position, arguing as Ferguson does that the United States is the proper heir to what Ferguson considers the “virtues” of British imperialism, among which he numbers: - the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization; - the Anglicization of North America and Australasia; - the internationalization of the English language; - the enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity; and, above all, - the survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s. 33 31 Seymour Hersh, “The Coming Wars,” The New Yorker (January 24 and 31, 2005), 40-47. Hersh quotes a former senior C.I.A. officer: “‘It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. is a chimpanzee’” (46). 32 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992) and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 33 Niall Ferguson, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. xxviii (first published: London: Allen Lane, 2002). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 55 Finding many analogies between the historical situations in which Great Britain reluctantly undertook the management of a global empire in the Victorian era with the United States embarking on a formal empire in the twenty first century, Ferguson urges the U.S. to take up the “White Man’s Burden” Kipling in 1899 so infamously urged us to do at the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of the Philippine-American War, arguably the historical moment in which U.S. empire begins. Ferguson echoes Kipling: “The reality is nevertheless that the United States has - whether it admits it or not - taken up some kind of global burden, … It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.” 34 Published less than two years before President George W. Bush’s second inaugural, Ferguson’s conclusion seems both prediction and promotion of that speech. There is, however, a third possibility that offers some optimism about the social, economic, and political promise of the future beyond the nation-state and imaginably beyond imperialist systems of global control. I propose that American Studies scholars everywhere take more seriously the model of the European Union with its economic cooperation among member nations, its rules for admission of new members, its gradual dismantling of political boundaries, and the emphasis within its member nations on social programs for their citizens. Is it possible to imagine a return today to a certain highly qualified “Eurocentrism” without reviving older Hegelian models of the relentless “evolution” of Western Civilization and the privilege accorded to European traditions? I do not wish to romanticize the present political realities of the European Union any more than I wish to embrace the quixotic utopian hopes of Hardt and Negri for a new proletarian revolution emerging from the South. On the issue of immigration alone, Europe is hardly setting an example of post-nationalist thinking at the current moment. Indeed, the governments of the Netherlands and Germany have instituted “tests” for admission of guest workers to their nations that are deeply troubling. The recent violent demonstrations by immigrant workers in Paris and the involvement of British-born immigrants in the July 7, 2005 underground and bus bombings in London are further indications that member nations of the European Union need to think differently, more in keeping with the transnational ambitions of their federation. 34 Ferguson, p. 370. 56 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Several European intellectuals are attempting to imagine just such a transnational utopia for the European Union, including Jürgen Habermas in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998) and Étienne Balibar in L’Europe, L’Amérique, La Guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européene (2003). In different ways, Habermas and Balibar consider the European Union one place to begin to theorize “cosmopolitan democracy,” even a “cosmopolitan community of world citizens.” 35 Habermas warns us that the European Union cannot unilaterally lead us to such cosmopolitan politics, especially in the face of the entrenched nationalism (and its commitment to modernization) of the United States: Of course, a renewed political closure of an economically unmastered world society would be possible only if global powers also involve themselves in the institutionalized procedures for building a transnational will-formation regarding the preservation of social standards and the redress of extreme social inequities. They have to be willing to broaden their perspectives on what counts as the “national interest” into a viewpoint of “global governance.” 36 For Habermas, any workable theory of “global democracy” would depend on coordinated reforms of such international organizations as the United Nations and “the institutionalized participation of non-governmental organizations in the deliberations of international negotiating systems.” 37 Étienne Balibar argues persuasively that Europe has learned the historical lessons of its national wars, of the terrible consequences of colonization and decolonization, and on the basis of such historical knowledge is capable of leadership in such areas as: collective security in a public international order; advocacy of progressive control and eventual universal disarmament (especially with respect to nuclear weapons); the primacy of political localism in negotiating regional conflicts exacerbated by the forces of globalization; and as a model for new glocal relations, the articulation of a European-Mediterranean confederation that might serve as an example of how to reduce the “fractures” in our presently warring conceptions of “civilization.” Balibar proposes such a utopian “Europe” not as a competitive military, economic, or political force, struggling to compete with the United States (or any other global power), but instead offering its own increasingly inclusive model of different states, cultures, languages, religions, and peoples as one of 35 Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 109. Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays was first published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1998. 36 Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” The Postnational Constellation, p. 111. 37 Ibid. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 57 ongoing “translation” and “mediation,” rather than “control” and “domination.” 38 Habermas and Balibar’s “postnational” theories and different bids for “global democracy” remain speculative and represent their shared indebtedness to Marxian internationalism, but they are especially interesting as approaches emerging out of European intellectual debates. Indeed, they impress me as integral to the sorts of public debates about such practical matters as disputes among member nations regarding the status of guest workers, the future of immigration, the European Union’s Constitution, and the future of the Euro as a unified currency. In the United States today, discussion of “postnational” alternatives to U.S.-style democracy seems restricted to academic conferences and even in their virtually ignored corridors the “postnationalist” and “cosmopolitan” possibilities are often dismissed as aery fancies. Even the obvious transnational implications of the current debates regarding the future of undocumented workers in the U.S. and their proposed criminalization in House of Representatives Bill 4437 have been quickly resolved by partisans on both sides as issues of U.S. citizenship and national affiliation. 39 Despite the reality of dual citizenship for many born in the U.S. to Mexican parents, public discourse has largely avoided alternatives to the binary of U.S. citizen or “foreigner.” Of course, just how the member nations of the European Union will address their complex and diverse immigration issues remains to be seen, but consideration of possibilities that go beyond national affiliation might well set an agenda for the transnational consideration of the future of immigrant workers that would influence Pan-American social and economic policies. Adapting such European perspectives as Habermas’s and Balibar’s to American Studies might thus help develop a new “counter-force” to U.S. globalization by comparing and contrasting the complex and intertwined histories of Europe and the United States as they work through nationalism, colonial expansion, imperial institutions, decolonization, and either recolo- 38 Étienne Balibar, L’Europe, L’Amérique, La Guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européene (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003), pp. 56-61. 39 The first public demonstrations against HR 4437 included prominent displays of the Mexican, Salvadoran, and other flags of the undocumented workers’ home nations, but these symbolic gestures were vigorously criticized by conservative politicians. In the demonstrations around the United States on May 1, 2006, the American flag was the most conspicuous national symbol. Although protesters insisted that “American citizenship” for the 11-12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. is their political goal, they still managed to challenge unilateral conceptions of the U.S. nation with such slogans as “We are Americans, too,” and “If God blesses America, then why do they hate U.S.? ” The latter sign was carried by a twelve-year old boy in the demonstration at MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles. 58 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE nization or a genuinely postcolonial transnational, international imaginary. There are, of course, many possible topics of interest in the comparative study of Europe and the United States, but none today is more urgent than models of viable transnational governance, of transitional situations and their histories, of polylingual and multicultural collectivity, and of economies with at least some significant component of social care for humans less fortunate than us, wherever and however they struggle to live.