The end of empires: America's failure to realise a cohesive global discourse after the cold war

Abstract

Economic and political forces that we loosely call modern developed in Atlantic nations like Britain, France, the Netherlands and the USA, and had destroyed all ancient empires by the time of the First World War. WW II saw the destruction of nation-states like Germany, Italy and Japan, which started modernising around 1860. Following WW II, a Cold War developed between the Atlantic nations and communist forces. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, a single superpower was left. However, over the last 15 years, the USA has failed to achieve discursive unity throughout the globe commensurate with its military and economic power. Attempts at using neo-liberalism, human rights and democracy to legitimise American power ended after Sept 11 , 2001. While wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and conflicts in Yugoslavia, Palestine and elsewhere undermine global unity, moral decadence in high places within domestic politics and economics puts American right to global power into question. Despite possessing very real global power, the USA has failed to construct a unifying discourse conducive to the sustenance of that power. This paper discusses the impossibility of a hierarchic global order in an increasingly egalitarian-conscious world.