Other Voices

“The United States has denied the existence of its own empire,” says Ryan Irwin.

Irwin is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany and has written books about the shifting world order.

“Gordian Knot: Aparthied and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order” explores how African independence altered the international system at the height of the Cold War, and “Vast External Realm: America and the Invention of the Free World” probes some of the assumptions that underlay American world power.

Irwin spoke to The Enterprise on Friday, the day after the Russian army started its attack on Ukraine.

When African states first joined the United Nations, Irwin posits, the United States was challenged in profound ways. South Africa was an “unapologetically racist state” and so was thought to have no place in the United Nations yet the United States itself was practicing Jim Crow.

The United States has expanded its influence over the course of the 20th Century while denying its existence as an imperial power, Irwin says. He sees liberal institutions equating freedom with certain rights, like the right of expression, the right to life, and the right to property — and thereby naturalizing and extending American power.

Even decolonization fits this pattern. “We’re going to take apart these old European empires, grant self-determination, but then make sure that those states have a seat at the United Nations, which happens to be located in New York City,” says Irwin.

“We’re watching that argument fall apart,”said Irwin in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Today, far fewer Americans than in the 1990s or early 2000s are willing to see the United States as something other than an empire, he said.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/03032022/historian-irwin-notes-no-empire-has-expanded-forever