outbreak. let's take over. american empire als wille ... - Rainer Rilling

exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return
home.ʺ127
Für Panitch / Gindin gibt es aber auch politische Grenzen oder
Selbstbeschränkungen der Logik des informellen Imperialismus: “But
however close the relationship between the American state and capitalist
classes and their counterparts in the informal empire, this did not extend to
anything like a sense of patriotic attachment to the American state among
the citizenry of the other states. Nor did the American state ever take responsibility
for the incorporation, in the Gramscian sense of hegemony, of
the needs of the subordinate classes of other states within its own construction
of informal imperial rule. Their active consent to its informal imperial
rule was always mediated by the legitimacy that each state could retain for
itself and muster on behalf of any particular American state project -- and
this has often been difficult to achieve in the case of American coercive interventions
around the globe over the past fifty years.” 128 Allerdings gibt es
jenseits des hier angesprochenen Politikmusters der Mobilisierung aktiver
und explizit politischer Legitimation und Konsensbeschaffung ein breites
kulturelles Feld “ungleicher Interdependenz” (Albo) innerhalb des informellen
Empire, in dem sich Superiorität als durchdringendes Element eines
kulturellen Selbstverständnisses der USA ausdrückt. Sie baute sich in
einem langen Zeitraum im 20. Jahrhundert auf und fand ihre Grundlage in
allen Funktionssystemen der amerikanischen Gesellschaft: „The outer
frame of American superiority among nation-states includes the components
of political, social, moral, technological, and cultural ascendency”,
schreibt Steven D. Williams: ”The political component is articulated in
American advancement of particular party politics (democracy and equal
political opportunity) where competing systems (monarchies, constitutional
or otherwise; various so-called autocracies; and all variations on socialism
or communism) are seen as only varying degrees of totalitarianism
and selfevidently both inferior and undesirable. The social aspect is manifested
in part through idealized concepts of capitalism (free enterprise and
equal economic opportunity) that promote “healthy” competition designed
to actualize a potential for greatness and prosperity limited only by one’s
desire for success. Self-identification with a moral superiority, at least partially
an outgrowth of the social/political nexus, is promoted in the ideals of
freedom (speech, assembly, worship, the press), an avowed avoidance of
imperialism, and a collective sense of responsibility to protect and promote
such ideals on an international scale. The official separation of church and
state as well as the proliferation of such mythologies as the classless meritocracy
and equality of opportunity along race/gender lines supports this
127
http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/20203.htm
128
Panitch/Gindin: Empire.
72