Empire vs. merger.

Political analysts who see the U.S. mutating into an empire "assume that empire is the only model for a state seeking to project power and influence--ignoring the alternatives from the business world," writes UCLA professor Richard Rosecrance in the Summer 2005 issue of The National Interest. Rosecrance, senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center and (predictably) a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, declares that multinational "merger" is a sensible alternative to unilateral hegemony and its attendant costs.

If a company "reaches the limits of its economic market, it may consider a merger with like-minded companies to cope with a competitor," states Rosecrance in his essay "Mergers and Acquisitions." "States [that is, nation-states] reaching the limits of their viability as self-sufficient actors can adopt merger strategies, too. Indeed, to preserve its global influence throughout the course of the 21st century, this is a path the United States must consider."

That's right: to be viable as a global power, the U.S. must abandon its independence, according to Rosecrance.

Mergers among private corporations, Rosecrance points out, are intended to reduce costs and enhance profits. Mergers among nation-states, however, "are arrangements that combine political leaderships to project greater power and influence in the world at large."

Such arrangements do not necessarily mean the end of domestic political arrangements (such as electoral procedures), but "merged nations ... accept a common code of behavior that their electorates sustain. They create merged bureaucracies and common decision-making councils that give effect to their unity. Approval by democratic publics lends credibility to the merger commitment on all sides." Which is to say that the people have the privilege of "democratically" ratifying the decisions taken by transnational bureaucrats who are beyond accountability.

Rosecrance properly cites the European Union as a model of political merger, and points to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as "the core of the U.S. response" to Europe's political merger. But even if the Western Hemisphere were to become a consolidated, EU-style political bloc, this would be inadequate to deal with what Rosecrance calls the "greatest long-term foreign policy problem facing both the United States and the European Union ... what to do with China two decades from now."

To deal with an insurgent China that is building its own regional bloc in Asia, concludes Rosecrance, "the appropriate recourse of the two Western power blocs"--the EU and its embryonic Western Hemisphere counterpart--"is successful merger with each other." This would effectively create the triangular global power structure anticipated by Orwell's 1984, in which the world was organized into three regional superstates--Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania--which, in various configurations of alliances, fought a constant conflict with each other.