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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (43507)	12/27/2005 6:17:05 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

>><<a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority; especially : one having an emperor as chief of state>> It's fair to discuss the US's powerful position in the world, but not to change the definition of a word. << I don't think I am changing any definition. Here is the reference to the Wikipedia Empire definition. The relevant point is highlighted: ... Modern "empires" The concept of "empire" in the modern world, while still present politically, has begun to lose cohesion semantically. The only remaining country nominally ruled by an Emperor, Japan, comprises a constitutional monarchy with a population of approximately 99% ethnic Japanese. Just as monarchies (as opposed to constitutional monarchies) have largely fallen out of favor in modern times, the term "empire" itself may now become somewhat of an anachronism. The former Soviet Union had many of the criteria of an empire, but nevertheless did not claim to be one, nor was it ruled by a traditional hereditary "emperor" (see Soviet Empire). Nevertheless, historians still occasionally classify it as an empire, if only because of its similarities to empires of the past and its sway over a large multi-ethnic bloc of Eurasia. Most modern multi-ethnic states see themselves as voluntary federations (Switzerland, for example, or Belgium) or as unions (United Kingdom, Spain), and not as empires. Most have democratic structures, and operate under systems which share power through multiple levels of government that differentiate between areas of federal and provincial/state jurisdiction. Where separatist groups exist, internal and external observers may disagree on whether state action against them represents legitimate law-enforcement against a violent or non-violent fringe group, or state violence to control a broadly unwilling population. A list of multi-ethnic states with ongoing violence by and against separatists might swamp this article, although China, Russia, Indonesia and India distinguish themselves by sheer size. The United States of America, widely categorized as a federation, offers another example. The North used coercion to keep the Union together during the American Civil War, which made this characterization more ambiguous in the minds of many. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as an unrivaled superpower, and although the country has not engaged in formal territorial expansion since the acquisitions of Hawaii, of Puerto Rico, of the Philippines and of the Virgin Islands, many suggest its powerful military and economic influences allow it to exert a sort of informal neo-imperial hegemony on much of the modern world (see American Empire, corporate colonialism).