Starting from the assumption that one cannot assign explanatory primacy to material or ideational variables in accounting for late modern western imperial expansion since they are mutually constituting parts of a single social reality, this paper revisits American Empire and explores the ideational dimension of the American expansionary experience. Its core argument is that, notwithstanding the anti-colonial idiom of American political discourse, American expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an integral and dynamic component of Euro-Atlantic imperial expansion, and that it nurtured and was nurtured by visions of international hierarchy and world order founded on assumptions of cultural and racial superiority common to all the late-modern imperial states. In the course of expansion, continental and global, American leaders developed what I call an imperial cosmology, that is a belief system about the ordering of the international system that naturalises hierarchy and inequality by assuming the need for a “benevolent despot”, an authoritative and disciplinary centre of world gravity. Shared by historical actors and many mainstream American international relations theorists, this cosmological scheme is derived from the Western experience of domination and the derived teleological assumption that the West was/is the sole subject and end of international history. Contemporary debates regarding American “decline” or revitalisation and a “second American century” reflect the persistence of the cosmological scheme.

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Philip S Golub teaches International Relations and International Political Economy at the University of Paris (Institute of European Studiesm Universite Paris 8) and the American University of Paris. He is also a Contributing Editor of the international monthly, Le monde diplomatiaue. A widely published author, his research areas include: late modern colonial and imperial history with a special focus on the Untied States, US Foreign Policy, and Asia's rising role in the world political economy. A forthco;ing historical sociological study of the role of the United States in the modern world system, entitled Power, Profit qnd Prestige: A History of Amercan Imperial Expansion will be published by Pluto Press in London and New York in 2010.

Empires by their very nature do not have any theory of outside. The paper seeks to argue that (a) present-day democracies are constituted as empires; (b) by privileging the electoral minorities, democratic empires either constitute them as ethno-democracies or make them ‘multicultural’ by ingenuously devising ever-newer political technologies. (c) Democratic empires keep some groups of people perpetually outside their ambit. Their absence is constitutive of democratic empires. (d) These people live on the edge of democratic empires constantly negotiating between the inside and the outside. They live in a shadowy zone where the inside and the outside meet together and test the empires on their margins.
They are the ‘people without shadows’ whose existence does not matter in the eyes of the sovereign because they remain outside without being seen as such and hence leave no residue behind them - who exist and perish, come and go, live and die without the sovereign gaze ever being fixed on them. It is by way of being reflected in the eyes of the sovereign that one acquires one’s visibility. Law recognizes one’s presence by making one visible, by enumerating one into any of its complex categories and thus subsuming one under the grids of governmental rationality. We prefer to call the people out of focus as the ‘people without shadows’. While much of contemporary Political Theory dwells extensively on how the sovereign gaze is fixed, how the sovereign constantly calibrates the density and distribution of gaze while turning an unwieldy mass of people into identifiable and governable objects by bringing them inside the democratic empire, the present paper instead focuses on those who remain outside it and those who are not considered as governable at all in the first place. Much of the existing literature focuses more on the optics of the sovereign gaze than on what remains outside it and as we argue, what remains outside it does not stand in a state of splendid isolation but is implicated in it.
Yet at another level, the paper proposes to take a more nuanced view of them and concentrate on how they negotiate their existence while trying to become legal-juridical personalities firmly ensconced in democratic empires. They instead want to be treated as common citizens at par with others and thereby be entitled to rights that others enjoy. But in order to make this claim, they need to constitute them as political subjects. While much of political subjectivity consists in their attempts at establishing them as legal-juridical subjects, there is reason to believe that the very process of constitution itself seldom remains bound by the legal norms and rules of democratic empires. Behind every legal subject, there is a political subject and a political subject that invariably tells us a story of political struggle. The paper draws our attention to three rather interconnected moments of such constitution.

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