Incoherent Empire

by Michael Mann

In this book, noted sociologist Michael Mann argues that the “new American imperialism” is actually a new militarism. Dissecting the economic, political, military and ideological resources available to the US, Mann concludes that they are so uneven as to generate only an ‘incoherent empire’ and increasing world disorder.

The US is a military giant, though it is better at devastating than pacifying countries. It is a political schizophrenic, its personality split between multilateralism, unilateralism and an actual inability to rule over foreign lands or to control its own supposed client states. It is only a backseat driver of the global economy. It cannot steer it, but it prods poorer countries toward an unproductive and unpopular neo-liberalism.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.

Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.

In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.

Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.

Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Bryan]

Rome wasn't burnt in a day: Michael Mann's "Incoherent Empire" is a good addition to the recent raft of books shining a much-needed light on America's descent from republic to empire. However, I found it flawed in its tone, and in its easy acceptance of Leftist dogma. More seriously, its historical perspective is too short.

To his credit, Mann does a fine job proving his thesis (articulated on page 13), that the employment of military unilateralism by the Bush Administration is not the policy of "realism" it's made out to be. With his thorough focus on ongoing and potential military threats and ample documentation of global, especially Middle Eastern, opinions of American actions, Mann proves that we're not winning any friends worldwide. Indeed, burdened as we are with a particularly parochial viewpoint, "Americans, insulated within their self-censorship, do not even know how isolated they are" (p. 261). Worse, many Americans who do recognize this don't seem to care.

This is where I think Mann's tone comes into play. His casual deployment of Leftist smear-words (describing the 2000 election, for example, as "a neo-conservative chicken-hawk coup" [p. 252], as just one example), or constant mis-identification of America's mercantilist trade policy as "capitalism" or "free trade," no doubt endear him to a certain segment of his readership. But it undermines what I think is a far more important mission: helping potentially sympathetic audiences (even conservative ones) see the strengths of his arguments. In this area, Chalmers Johnson's recent "The Sorrows of Empire" is a much better work.

The other area where Johnson's book is far stronger than Mann's is in his long-term historical perspective. Mann is too quick to paint the new militarism as a product of a neo-conservative cabal. Unquestionably, the neo-cons play a major role in the growth of the Empire, especially the current emphasis on military unilateralism. But Mann writes as though the "Incoherent Empire" was conceived in Defense Department memoranda during Bush the Elder's term, and midwifed by Bush the Younger following 9/11. In fact, Johnson makes an almost ironclad (in my opinion) case that the roots of Empire sink far back into America's past. The old cliché about Rome not being built in a day has a literal, and precise, application here.

And if Rome wasn't built in a day, it won't be burnt in one either. Mann writes on his last page that the "political solution" to the situation he describes is to "throw the new militarists out of office" in November 2004. But to turn out the neo-cons and replace Bush the Younger with someone different (and the differences between Bush and Kerry are much smaller than either man would have us believe), would simply mean changing the Emperor. The apparatus of imperial power would remain in place.

Mann's book is a good start, but I believe he needs to widen his field of vision somewhat. This is about far more than a few "chicken hawks."

[Eric Hopkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF 30-something% of the way through.

0/10, terrible. This is just neoliberalism with a red-fetish.

I filled the margins of the first 90-odd pages of this book with so many notes there was no sense in going on any longer.

The problems started near immediately on page 7, talking about America's rise to the status of a singular world super-power he says:

But the Democrats would not have reached it unaided, and nor would Republican Party elders brought up on more pragmatic policies.

Then how did it happen?! Did they all just sleep walk into the position of hegemonic world power? In the previous decades of the Cold War did these politicians seek to undermine the Soviet Union without considering the outcome. Like "well shucks, boys. I never thought about it before; but now that the Soviets are gone I guess we're the only major world power."

Later in the paragraph we get this:

In Bosnia and Kosovo ethnic and civil wars were raging and intervention was begged for by the groups suffering most and aided by the UN and NATO. True, the interventions were not even-handed, and bombing unaccompanied by troops who could control events on the ground worsened this (that was my view at the time). But in these cases American militarism was more or less normal for the post-1945 period.

In a book that is supposedly critiquing the role of American military intervention in the 20th and 21st century; this is a pretty wild way to open the book. For an opening that should hopefully hook me, Mann brings out the kid gloves. The idea that he doesn't consider the US intervention in Yugoslavia to be an issue is just... not only do I not know what to say, it doesn't even fit his timeline. The quote about America accidentally becoming a global super-power is from the Gulf War (1991), but the intervention in Yugoslavia was after that (1999).

And if you're thinking it's just a rocky start, it isn't. It just keeps going like this. The rest of this review is just some really bizarre stuff I highlighted and am sharing for fun.


Here's a great line from page 13:

Hopefully, this ["imperial incoherence"] will be followed by voluntary abandonment of the imperial project by Americans, and this would preserve most of the US hegemony.

So...... he's hoping that an incoherent foreign policy will cause "Americans" to voluntarily abandon empire building? My usage of quotes is intentional because it's not clear who he's referring to. Does he mean the average citizen living in the United States? That would contradict a (correct) point he makes a few pages earlier that foreign policy is never on the ballot because both parties are in near lock-step on the subject. So what would "voluntary abandonment" mean for them?

Does he mean "The Americans" as in the Federal government? That would make more sense as most of this book is concerned with the people who make foreign policy decisions. But if so the idea these people would give up on Empire building over a few strategic disagreements is just.... a bruh moment.

But then, just as you're trying to process that you get hit with "...and this would preserve most of the US hegemony". This is some 8-D chess. What could he possibly mean by a passage that suggests anti-imperialism (possibly on the part of the Federal Government) as a means of maintaining the Empire??? How did this even get past an editor?

Speaking of getting past an editor on page 29 we get:

Southern countries now seeking [nuclear weapons], like North Korea.

You may be unsurprised to hear that North Korea is uhhh not in the South.

On page 32 there's an unsourced assertion that the Soviet Union (and Russia later) continued to secretly stockpile biological and chemical weapons after signing a 1985 treaty (that goes unnamed) to ban them.

There's a dual problem in this book of weasel words and motte and bailey style arguments. This excerpt from page 44 shows both of them well

A staggering 81 percent of all attacks against US citizens or interests in 2001 occurred in Colombia. Up to now these Marxist-influenced guerrillas have targeted American property (oil pipelines) not Americans. Leftist revolutionaries have not taken naturally to suicide bombing, since they are materialists. But this luck may not hold. Some may carry their war onto US soil and attack Americans.

So right away you're caught by that stat, and at least I didn't notice the little "or property" on the end of the sentence. By the next like he admits that "oh by the way, I don't mean humans being targeted I mean oil, and I don't mean individual Americans, I mean American multi-national corporations". So, yeah that sentence is really stretching the definitions of those words.

He then, apropos of nothing, brings up that they don't do suicide bombings because it doesn't fit with their beliefs. Cool? BUT! They may start! Why? uhhh.. yeah dunno it's because of "luck" now I guess, not something to do with their ideology. But they could even do it on American soil! So, watch out!(?)

In a book that is allegedly "leftist" and published by Verso, it's really weird to end a section on global terrorism with "The Colombian marxists are gonna come and do suicide bombings on American soil.", that is unironically an Info Wars level zany conspiracy theory.

The next chapter actually gets a little better, but only buy cutting down on some of the really oddball stuff I've been quoting. It makes a passing reference to NAFTA, and I do mean passing, it just mentions that it happened. It mentions the Millennium Challenge and how Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Djibouti can't be in it because they're "corrupt"; but then skips right over Saudi Arabia having no issues getting in it.

I didn't last much longer after this point. In a weird way the wild takes made the book more enjoyable because I was at least reading to see what the next off-the-wall assertion he would make would be.

Without them the book is just insufferably boring and occasionally factually wrong.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mann's background in the history of colonial empires gives him a highly realistic perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the USA as a superpower. Although his assessment is over ten years old, most of his insights remain relevant, especially concerning the counterproductivity of unilateral force in controlling other nations.