The first decade of the 21st century, like the first decade of the 20th, is an age of empire. A hundred years ago, however, there were many empires. They included both the overseas empires of the national states of western Europe--particularly those of Britain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands--and the overland empires of the multinational states ruled by the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman dynasties. Today, there is only one empire--the global empire of the United States, a state which is neither national nor multinational in the traditional sense, but which is more accurately described as multicultural and transnational. This new and historically strange American empire is the context and the arena in which all the great and global events of our time are taking place.

The first decade of the 21st century, like the first decade of the 20th, is also an age of immigration. A hundred years ago, large numbers of people were leaving the national states and imperial metropoles of western Europe to emigrate to their colonies or to the United States. At the same time, many people were leaving the rural hinterlands of the multinational states of central and eastern Europe to migrate to their metropolitan centers, or, again, to the United States. Today, however, the direction of imperial migration is largely the reverse of the western pattern, while reminiscent of the former central and eastern one. Large numbers of people have left the former colonies of the west European empires to emigrate to their once-imperial metropoles. At the same time, many people have left the current dominions of the American empire to emigrate to the United States. A century ago, the United States was receiving many immigrants from Europe, but not from its recently-acquired empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Today, the United States is receiving many immigrants from its long-established empire in Latin America and East Asia, but not from Europe.

The Double Dynamic

The former age of empire re-invented the national states of western Europe into imperial states, but the imperial metropole remained a national state in the classical meaning. It still made sense to talk of the national interest of Britain, France, Portugal or the Netherlands, and it still made sense to talk of international politics. Our own age of empire is reinventing the United States into an imperial state. Because of the impact of imperial immigration, however, the United States is no longer a national state in the classical sense, or even in the traditional American sense as understood during much of the 20th century. The conjunction of American empire (America expanding into the world) and American immigration (the world coming into America) has made the very idea of the American national interest problematic. There is a causal connection between empire and immigration, and the two are now coming together as a dynamic duo to utterly transform our world. Empire and immigration are reinventing the traditional ideas of national interest and international politics and perhaps will even displace them with the new ideas of transnational interests and global politics.

While empire and immigration are interesting enough topics for professional analysts of American foreign policy and international (or global) politics, they would probably seem rather theoretical and abstract to others but for one fact: these two features of the first decade of the 21st century have intersected with the first war of the 21st century, the war between the United States and Islamist terrorists. It has been often observed that Al-Qaeda and other transnational networks of Islamist terrorists with global reach are another version--part of the dark side, so to speak--of the globalization process that the United States has so vigorously promoted, and which has become a central feature of the American empire. And, of course, central components in these transnational terrorist networks are some of the Muslim immigrants who reside within Europe and the United States. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the most pronounced symbols of, respectively, the economic and the military power of the American empire. The attacks upon them were planned and prepared by Muslim immigrants living within Europe and the United States. The continuing threat of new terrorist attacks emanating from Muslim immigrants has pushed the issue of immigration to the top of the agenda of what was once called national security, but what is now more accurately seen as imperial security. The conjunction of empire, migration and terrorism now lies at the very heart of the U.S. national security predicament. It would be wise, therefore, to start devoting some systematic attention to it.

Versions of Empire

At first glance, it would seem that the European experience with empire and immigration has little relevance to Americans. For one thing, the Europeans explicitly and officially referred to their imperial systems with the term "empire", and referred to their subordinate territories as "colonies" and "dependencies." In contrast, Americans have rarely used these terms to refer to their own imperial relationships. The closest American counterparts to European-style colonies and dependencies were the territories that the United States acquired after its victory in the Spanish-American War, particularly the Philippines and Puerto Rico. However, each of these countries was soon designated a "commonwealth", and there was a common understanding that each could eventually achieve independence if it wished to do so. At any rate, these and several smaller formal dependencies of the United States (American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Panama Canal Zone), when taken all together, never approached the levels of importance that the European dependencies held for the metropolitan nations of Europe.

A narrow focus on explicit and official dependencies alone would be misleading, however. Some European empires included vast areas in which imperial rule was informal or indirect. Local leaders could even be given the title of king, prince, sultan or sheik, and retain many elements of sovereignty. This was the case with much of the British Empire (e.g., the Indian princely states, the Federated Malay States and the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf) and even the French Empire (e.g., Morocco, Tunisia, Laos, Cambodia and Annam). These forms of imperial rule were not that different from the kind of hegemony the United States exercised at the same time over the countries of the Caribbean and Central America (backed up in the 1910s-20s by ongoing U.S. military occupations in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua, and thereafter by the clear potential for further U.S. military intervention).

Beginning in the 1920s, the European nations themselves started to replace the term "empire" with words that connoted more equality between the various territories in the imperial system. This development was partly due to the example and influence of the United States after World War I. It was also accentuated by the rhetoric of freedom and democracy that the Western Allies used so frequently during World War II. At the end of 1945, Europeans could reasonably think that there was not that much difference between the three great imperial systems of Britain, France and the United States--by then officially designated as the British Commonwealth, the French Union and the Inter-American System.

Of course, each of the European overseas empires soon went through a painful and often violent period of decolonization. The British fought and more or less won wars in Malaya and Kenya; the French fought and lost wars in Indochina and Algeria; the Dutch much the same in Indonesia. (The Portuguese Empire remained somehow frozen in amber for another decade and a half.) Surely, it might be said, the United States never experienced anything like this violent decolonization, which might seem to be proof that it never really had colonies to begin with.

From a European perspective, however, the long series of abortive Marxist governments or movements in the Caribbean and Central America--Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Grenada and El Salvador--represented attempts by local populations to achieve decolonization. These efforts failed because American power (and military intervention) was still overwhelming, whereas European power had been drastically weakened during World War II. Furthermore, Castro's revolution in Cuba represented a successful (if Pyrrhic) effort at decolonization, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis it might have issued in the greatest violence imaginable.

The American experience with empire in the 20th century, therefore, did have much in common with the European one. Americans today argue that their global role--and rule--in the 21st century is something new and unique. If there is now an American empire, it is best defined by the "soft power" of information networks and popular culture rather than by the hard power of economic exploitation and military force. It is an empire representative of the information age rather than the industrial age. Whatever they may think about their empire, however, Americans should not be surprised if Europeans and almost all other peoples around the world persist in perceiving the new American empire to be similar enough for their purposes to the earlier empires of their own historical experience. We can tell them they're wrong, but it won't do us any good.

Imperial Immigration

The contemporary American experience with immigration also has much in common with the European one. For both the United States and for several European states, the vast immigration of the last several decades has been closely connected with the nature of their empires. Let us see how.

Decolonization was not the last chapter in the long narrative of the European empires. A new chapter has been written since the 1960s by the massive migration of formerly-colonial peoples into the European metropoles. Thus, Britain has received immigrants especially from India, Pakistan and the former British West Indies; France especially from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and the former French West Africa; the Netherlands from Indonesia and Surinam; and Belgium from what had been the Belgian Congo. For the most part, large-scale immigration from the colonies into the metropole commenced about the same time or not long after decolonization was occurring. It has continued to the present day; post-imperial immigration thus has been under way for four or five decades.

What explains this massive and prolonged immigration from the successor states of the European empires into their former imperial metropoles? Why has it occurred after the empires came to an end rather than at some earlier time? The answers to these questions lie principally within the metropoles themselves.

Some historians of Europe have seen the period 1914-45 to be another Thirty Years War. It certainly was a period of successive catastrophes--World War I, the communist revolutions in Russia and in parts of central Europe, the Great Depression, the Nazi and fascist dictatorships, World War II, the Holocaust, and the omnipresence of class conflict throughout the entire period. After 1945, it was natural that creative and constructive political leaders were determined to remove, once and for all, the causes of these catastrophes.

Fifty years later, we can see that these political leaders succeeded. To remove the causes of the two world wars, the Nazi and fascist dictatorships and the Holocaust, they promoted supranational and pan-European institutions, and also postnationalist and post-racist ideologies. The most recent, and most pronounced, versions of these ideologies are multiculturalism and universal human rights. To remove the causes of the Great Depression, they promoted the managed economy and European economic integration. To remove the causes of class conflict and communist revolutions, they promoted the welfare state and the elevation of the working class into a middle-class way of life. Together, these great and successful projects to remove the causes of the great catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century represent the finest achievements of European civilization in the second half of that century.

The last of these great achievements, however--that all their citizens were entitled to middle-class amenities--had embedded within it an intrinsic flaw. As this achievement advanced, ever fewer citizens of modern, affluent Europe wanted to do the decidedly non-middle-class work necessary to any modern economy--the dirty (and sometimes dangerous or degrading) jobs in the farms, factories, streets and hospitals of that modern economy. Thus, as soon as the welfare state and middle-class expectations were fully established for the citizenry of Western Europe (by the early 1960s in most cases), there developed a need for workers who were not citizens; i.e., immigrants or "guest workers" (the term tellingly invented at the time).

One obvious place where European nations could find these immigrant workers was in the countries to their south--for example, Algeria for France, and Turkey for West Germany. (At the same time, Mexico and Puerto Rico were performing a similar role for the United States.) More generally, the obvious place to find immigrant workers was among the former colonies or other dependent territories of the nation's recently devolved empire. The colonial peoples had already been doing a good deal of the dirty work of the empire for several generations--in the plantations, factories, streets, homes and hospitals of the colonies. This included working to maintain the European civil officials, military officers and other emigrants to the colonies in a comfortable middle-class life style. It was natural, then, that as the working-class citizens of European nations ascended into some version of middle-class life (or at least middle-class pretensions), their necessary and essential working-class functions were filled by working-class immigrants from the colonies. Colonial workers not only knew how to work, they were also more likely than non-colonial peoples to know the distinctive national language, codes and customs of the citizens within the metropole.

The sociological phenomenon of the ascending working class was reinforced by the demographic phenomenon of the descending birth rate. The 1960s saw the end of the postwar baby boom and its replacement with a birth dearth, which has continued to the present day. Demographers observe that, in order for a population to sustain itself, it should have an average reproduction rate of 2.1 births per woman. The reproduction rate for every European nation (except Albania) has fallen beneath 1.5 during the past few decades. When one projects these demographic statistics forward, it would appear inevitable that, in half a century, most European nations (or more precisely, European-descended peoples) will have less than two-thirds of the population they have today. Furthermore, a much larger percentage of that population will be old and no longer able to work. The only peoples in Europe whose birth rates are high enough to sustain or increase their populations are the communities composed of immigrants from the former imperial territories.

As it happens, the largest of these immigrant communities in most European countries are Muslim. These Muslim communities already form 5-10 percent of the population of some European countries, and much higher percentages of younger age cohorts. That percentage is steadily increasing both from continuing immigration and high natural increase among immigrant populations. These immigrant populations now perform functions essential to the economic system and are poised to make a significant impact on the political system as well, becoming a force in democratic elections, multiparty politics and coalition governments.

One might have expected the European nations to develop a strong resistance to admitting immigrants--particularly Muslim immigrants--whose culture was obviously very different from their own traditional national or European ones. However, this potential resistance has been aborted by one of the other achievements of the European political leadership in its successful efforts to remove the causes of the great catastrophes of the 20th century--the aforementioned development of post-nationalist, post-racist and multicultural ideologies. In doing so, however, the Europeans prepared the ground for a different kind of great conflict in the 21st century: a form of war-cum-terrorism that has already visited the United States and that will, very likely, visit Europe as well.

Muslim Immigrants

The specter of Islamic terrorism that now haunts the West has focused attention upon Muslim immigrants in Western countries. These immigrants form communities that have long been hostile to the culture--whether seen as Christian or as secular--of the host countries, and they now pose serious problems for domestic security. Muslim immigrants thus have an anomalous position in both Europe and America. The particular nature of the anomaly is different, however, in the two regions of the West.

For Europe, Muslim countries comprised major parts of the British, French and Dutch empires. Accordingly, Muslim communities in these post-imperial states comprise 5-10 percent of their populations. Muslims also comprise more than 5 percent of the population of Germany and several other west European countries. European political leaders will have to take Muslim political demands into account, and Muslim leaders may gain veto power over some policy issues, most obviously in regard to foreign policy toward the Middle East.

For the United States, in contrast, Muslim countries have not been long-established parts of the American empire. Even such putative allies as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have often engaged in independent, unfriendly and distinctly un-colonial behavior toward the United States. Accordingly, Muslim immigrant communities comprise only a small part (about 1 percent) of the U.S. population. Furthermore, given the uninviting environment in America for Muslim immigrants since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslim immigrant communities probably will not form a much larger part of the American population anytime soon. Consequently, American political leaders will not have to take Muslim political demands into account. On the contrary, they very likely will reject any such demands, particularly in so far as they conflict with those put forward by American Jews, most obviously in regard to foreign policy toward the Middle East.

The clear differences between Europe and America in regard to the relative strengths of their Muslim and Jewish communities--Muslims being strong in Europe and weak in America, and Jews being weak in Europe and strong in America--have already helped to crystallize a great divide between Europe and America with regard to their respective Middle East policies (though that divide has other, more important sources). It will take major efforts on the part of both European and American statesmen to ensure that this double and reverse asymmetry in communal structure does not contribute to a great divide between Europe and America on other policy issues, as well.

The most important division created by Muslim immigrants, however, will not be between Europe and America, but within the European states themselves. Over the next few decades, the prospects are for several European states, particularly the once imperial ones, to become two nations. The first will be the European nation: descended from the European and imperial peoples, it will be secular, rich, old and feeble. The second will be the anti-European nation: descended from the non-European and colonial peoples, it will be Islamic, poor, young and virile. It will be a kind of overseas colony of a foreign nation, an obviously familiar occurrence in European history. But this time the foreign nation will be the umma of Islam, and the colonized entity will be Europe. As the umma forms the beginnings of a kind of settler state, the two nations will increasingly regard each other with mutual contempt, but in the new anti-European nation there will be a growing rage, and in the old European nation there will be a growing fear. This will provide the perfect conditions for endemic Islamic terrorism to be deployed against a terrified, once-imperial people.

At the same time that some European states are becoming two nations, they are becoming subordinate states within the European Union--conforming to economic policies made by the European Commission in Brussels and to monetary policies made by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. They have also become subordinate dominions of a sort within the American empire (or perhaps within an American commonwealth of nations)--conforming to military policies ostensibly implemented through NATO in Brussels but which are actually made in Washington. In short, post-imperial immigration has resulted in European states that are becoming bi-national, while quasi-imperial subordination has resulted in European states that are becoming post- or even sub-national.

This is, to understate the matter, a long way from where European nations and national consciousness were less than two centuries ago, in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The European metropoles began their imperial narratives as nation-states. The creators and exemplars of the nation-state were Britain and France, and the creators and exemplars of the overseas empires of the industrial age were the British and the French Empires. In the first half of the 20th century, at the highest point of the modern and industrial age, these were respectively the largest and second-largest overseas empires in the world.

Today, however, the long imperial narratives of Britain and France have reached the point that, in many ways, they are no longer nations at all. For about a century (from about the 1830s to the 1940s) the imperial narrative seemed to provide the latest chapters, indeed the fulfillment, of the much longer national narrative, and for both Britain and France this was a narrative that reached back more than a thousand years. The British and French Empires both, in their own way, seemed to be the consummation of the longest and grandest historical drama since that of the Roman Empire. But now, a half century after the end of these two empires, it seems that a boomerang effect of empire--in particular, immigration from the empire into the metropole and the heartland--may be bringing about the end of the British and the French national narratives themselves.

This melancholy tale of empire, immigration and national disintegration may not be relevant only to Europe. Perhaps it provides a warning, or a prophecy, for America as well.

Imperial Immigration to America

The contemporary American experience with immigration can be usefully compared to other periods of massive immigration, particularly the American experience of a century ago and the European experience in recent decades.

Contemporary immigation to America does share some similarities with the massive immigration of the 1890s-1910s. Latin-American immigrants seem to be recapitulating the earlier path of Italian immigrants, and Asian immigrants seem to be recapitulating the earlier path of east European Jews. In the early 20th century, there was widespread concern that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe could not be assimilated into the American way of life. By the 1960s, however, these groups were largely integrated into American society. By analogy, one might expect Latin American and Asian immigrants to be largely integrated within a few decades.

However, it is also useful to recall important differences between the circumstances of immigration a century ago and those today. First, the United States was then a self-conscious and self-confident national state. The American political class promulgated "the American Creed" and vigorously promoted what was known as the Americanization program--assimilation of immigrants into "the melting pot." Second, the growing industrial economy of the time enabled immigrants to gain a step up on the ladder of social mobility (and also outward geographical mobility and dispersion). Third, the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 sharply curtailed immigration for four decades, until the passage of the very different and unrestrictive Immigration Act of 1965. This converted immigrant communities from the turbulent streams of the 1890s-1910s into the settled masses of the 1920s-50s, upon which the Americanization program could steadily and relentlessly work its way. Fourth, almost none of the immigrants came from areas that were in the American empire of the time (Latin America or the Philippines). This meant that they did not bring with them the resentments and grievances of colonized populations. On the contrary, many immigrants were fleeing foreign empires that persecuted or limited them.

Even with these four factors favorable to assimilation, some immigrants brought with them particular ideologies prevalent in the lands they had left behind (anarchism among some Italians, Marxism among some Jews). For a few immigrants, these ideologies legitimated their sense of separation from and opposition to the dominant American culture of liberal democracy, the free market and competitive individualism. This produced a few obstacles on the road to assimilation (the "Red Scare" of 1919-20 and the deportation of some anarchists and Marxists, the activities of the Communist Party in the 1930s-40s, McCarthyism in the 1950s).

These four factors favorable to assimilation have been largely absent during the contemporary era of American immigration, however. In particular, the reigning ideology of multiculturalism has placed far greater obstacles on the road to assimilation than anarchism or Marxism ever did.

The contemporary era of immigration into America began with the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated previous restrictions on immigration from non-European regions (and, in effect, increased restrictions on immigration from Europe). Americans have been living under this immigration regime for almost four decades, and the result is manifest.

In contrast to the earlier American experience with immigration, in the contemporary era most immigrants to the United States have come from the various regions of the American empire. By far the majority has come from the oldest domains of the empire, namely, those countries that fell under the hegemony of the United States as a result of its 19th-century wars with Mexico and Spain: Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the countries of Central America and the Philippines. In addition, many immigrants have come from countries within the empire America established in the western Pacific after World War II, or more precisely, after the Korean War--particularly from South Korea and Taiwan and also from the abortive domain of Indochina.

With respect to immigration coming principally from the territories of one's own empire, the contemporary American experience has been similar to the contemporary European one. However, whereas in Europe the great surge in immigration has come in its post-imperial era, in the United States it has come in the high imperial era, at a time when the American empire has been in its ascendancy.

In the past four decades or so, too, there have been powerful factors common to both Europe and America that have generated the need for immigrants. As it happens, the United States has its own version of the sociological, demographic and ideological factors that we have described for Europe: the ascent of working-class American citizens into a middle-class lifestyle, or at least into middle-class pretensions; the decline in the reproduction rate of the European-descended majority; and the establishment of a post-national, multicultural ideology. This has resulted in a similar structural demand for immigrant workers in the United States as in Europe. Once the structure of demand has been established in the imperial center, the imperial territories become the most practical source of supply, for reasons that are similar in both Europe and America.

There have also been some distinctive aspects about the U.S. relationship with its domains in the western Pacific that shaped U.S. immigration policy. In the early 1960s, South Korea and Taiwan were on the front lines of the Cold War, and they also suffered from poor and distressed economic conditions. They pushed hard for the abolition of restrictions on their U.S.-bound immigrants, and given their central importance in the Cold War conflict, U.S. policymakers complied. This was a major factor in bringing about the new openness embodied in the Immigration Act of 1965.

However, the largest immigrant communities in the United States are Latin American in origin. Latino-Americans now compose the largest minority in the United States, having recently surpassed African-Americans. Latino immigrants obviously already perform functions essential to the American economy, and they are steadily acquiring political power, including a kind of veto power on many issues for which they have a particular concern. They have been successful, for example, in preventing consistent enforcement of laws and regulations directed against illegal Latino immigrants and, particularly in California, in deterring discussion about the darker aspects of Mexican history in the public schools or in official discourse.

Might imperial immigration cause the United States to become two nations, as is now the prospect for some European countries? The first nation could be the Euro-Anglo nation, English speakers descended from European peoples. As in Europe, much of this nation would be secular, rich, old and feeble. The second nation could be a Latino nation, descended from Latin American peoples. Much of it would be Christian (evangelical and Pentecostal Protestant as well as Roman Catholic), poor, young and robust. These two nations could well come to regard each other with mutual suspicion and, in some quarters, with contempt. It is probably too much to predict that there will be a widespread fear of Latino terrorism in the Euro-Anglo nation, although young Latinos in the United States may learn something from their Islamic counterparts in Europe. However, it is not unlikely that there will be a widespread perception of Latino crime. The gated communities of Euro-Anglos, which are already widespread in the southwestern United States, are likely to become an even more central part of the Euro-Anglo way of life, and to define the distinctive architectural style and urban design of the Euro-Anglo nation.

Still, Latino-American culture is much closer to Anglo-American culture than Muslim is to European, if only because the two American cultures share a common Christian origin. This may retard or abort the development of two distinct nations within the United States. More likely, perhaps already happening, is the development in the Southwest of a blend of American and Mexican features, a sort of "Amerexico." This is a society whose upper or capital-owning class is Euro-Anglo, whose professional and middle classes are largely Euro-Anglo but partly Mexican-American, and whose working and lower-class members--those who do the dirty work--are overwhelmingly Mexican-American. It is characterized by a rough correlation between class and color, which amounts to a racial division of labor. As such, it has important similarities to the colonial societies of the European empires, which were also characterized by a racial or ethnic division of labor.

Indeed, as the ratio of Mexican-Americans to Euro-Anglo-Americans increases, Amerexico may come to resemble something like Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, or perhaps even all of Ireland as it was during the British Empire. If so, the United States would have become not only an empire abroad, but also one at home.

Empire and Emigration

ESSENTIAL TO every empire is an imperial class--the civil officials, military officers and business managers who go forth from the empire's metropole to its dominions and colonies to carry out its policies and practices. In other words, it is inherent in an empire that certain people will be imperial emigrants. Imperial emigrants are even more essential to an empire than are the imperial immigrants that have been the focus of our attention so far.

Who will comprise the imperial emigrants, the imperial class, of the American empire? Here it is useful to distinguish between the three different components of an imperial class--civil, military and business.

The U.S. military has had more than a half century of experience of peacetime service overseas, especially in Germany, Japan and South Korea, but also elsewhere. More than any other American institution, the military knows how and why it serves. They are the true heirs to the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire. Nor does America lack business entrepreneurs, managers and professionals who are willing to go overseas, especially to long-established (and more predictable) realms of the American Empire, particularly Latin America, Europe and East Asia. These American business people are the counterparts to the merchants, managers and engineers of the British Empire.

The problem, perhaps the void, in the American imperial class lies in the civil officials. There is no obvious equivalent of the Indian Civil Service or the Colonial Civil Service of the British Empire, that distinguished cadre of graduates from Oxford and Cambridge who served for long and hard years as district officers in the remote regions of the empire. The graduates of the best American universities are "organization kids" intent on a successful career within America itself.  In any event, the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency can hardly be compared to the civil services of the British Empire, either in regard to effectiveness or morale.

The real civil servants of the American empire are not American in their physical origin. They are, however, American in their intellectual apparatus. They are the foreign students who come to American universities and learn American principles and practices. In particular, they are the economics majors and business school students who come to believe in the free market, and the political science majors and law school students who come to believe in liberal democracy and the rule of law. When (or if) they return to their home countries, they will know both the culture and customs of their own society and the principles and practices of American society. These foreign students are both imperial immigrants--when they arrive in America for their studies--and imperial emigrants--when they return home for their careers.

Moreover, those who stay in America, as a great many do, form a kind of corpus colosseum between the American metropole and its hinterland. This goes for scientists and engineers as well as businessmen and lawyers. The computer whizzes from the subcontinent who live and work in America are the empire's most efficient and effective links to the considerable talents in Bangalore, for example. They and others (Chinese, Israelis, Australians) perform functions voluntarily--indeed, eagerly and unassumingly--for the American empire roughly analogous to those of the population transfer policies of the Habsburg Empire and especially of the Ottoman Empire. They help integrate the elites of the imperial periphery to those of the imperial core, though in an Internet world they do so in less materially obvious ways.

From the perspective of the American empire, these imperial immigrants/emigrants--local in their outer appearance, American in their inner attitudes--are perfect candidates for political and economic leadership in the empire's outer and even inner domains. And, indeed, a significant number of current officials in Latin America, Europe and East Asia are graduates of American universities, and an even larger cadre of graduates is now entering into official careers. The ability of the American empire to govern its domains will depend upon its success in producing this distinct kind of immigrant/emigrant to serve as its distinct kind of imperial civil official. In the empires of the past, the metropole served as the mind, and the colonies served as the body. The American empire is attempting to solve the imperial mind-body problem in a new way. In a sense, it seeks to perform a series of brain-transplants, to put an imperial mind into a colonized body.

The earlier European empires--the empires of the industrial age--also made some effort to educate and enculturate the best and the brightest from the colonies in the principles and practices of the empire. These efforts were successful in important ways (for example, they resulted in some exceptionally creative works of literature), but in the end they could not prevent--indeed they helped to cause--the rise of colonial nationalism and the demise of the empire. The American empire--the empire of the information age--is based even more upon ideas than the empires of the past. They are, in the recent formulation of Michael Mandelbaum "the ideas that conquered the world-peace, democracy, and free markets." In essence, these are the same ideas that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the birth certificate of the United States, the Declaration of Independence--"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As long as the American empire appears to be providing some semblance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happin ess to the peoples of its vast realm, it has a good chance of thriving.

If, however, the American empire fails to prevent a series of wars, or a new plague of sinister dictatorships, or a global economic depression, or the alienation of its own elite, then its ideas clearly would no longer dominate the world, and its particular and peculiar imperial civil service could no longer control the empire's domains. The empire would then come to an end, like the European empires before it. This, ultimately, is what is at stake in the war on terrorism, and why the United States must decisively win it. If it does not and the empire weakens, there would still be one massive legacy left from the imperial age. That would be the vast population of imperial immigrants within a now-diminished metropole, within the territory of the United States itself.

James Kurth is Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where he is chairman of the Study Group on America and the West.