Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Not since Rome has any nation had so much economic, military, and cultural power. Through the accumulation and development of economic and military power, combined with the allure of its cultural power, the U.S. has been able to hold the hegemonic position into the 21st century. Yet, today the U.S. is facing criticism for its go-it-alone foreign policy under the Bush administration. The invasion to Iraq and the conduct of the U.S. troops in Iraq are bringing worldwide scorn onto the abuse of its power. In spite of the attraction of American culture, which is being spread through the media and the movie of Hollywood, its ideals such as democracy and liberty behind which the U.S. stands and gains legitimacy are being undermined by the blatant disregard and the hypocrisy in the application of these ideals to Iraq.The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the U.S. will likely remain the world's sole most dominant country well into the 21 st century. This is to be accomplished by assessing how the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, and the British Empire had dealt with a challenge to them and by investigating why these three Empires enjoyed an "Indian Summer" the term indicating that the hegemons were able to recuperate ephemerally their hegemony after a seeming decline. Usually, the Indian Summer occurred after a great battle. Imperial Spain, for example, was challenged to war by both Muslin and Protestant powers during the 1560s. The United Provinces also were mostly provoked by England in the 1650s and 1660s. The First British Empire was challenged by Spain and France in the 1750s; the Second British Empire was confronted by both France and Russia from the 1850s. These challenges blew up as military conflicts which took the hegemons by surprise. However, the hegemons immediately recovered their commitment. They faced the challenge head on, amplified their military efforts, and regained their preeminence. There were a resurgence of greatness and expansion, and a resurrection of national glory, pride and confidence. But rather, the hegemons enjoyed an Indian Summer: a spectacular but temporary afterglow of former hegemonic splendor. Through exploring the previous hegemons' experience, that is the Indian Summer, this paper will argue that even though the U.S. eventually might succeed in the war on Iraq, the U.S. role in world affairs will be more likely to be forever changed by the war. The U.S. has already shaken its prestige, and its dominance will rest on more uncertain bases. The continued maintenance of global pre-eminence will carry a higher price tag. Regardless of how well the U.S. will recover from the challenge, its resurgence will never truly recapture the golden age of hegemony.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores the impact that status (or rang) occupies in the bilateral relationship between France and the United States. The title is an allusion to André Tardieu’s 1927 book Devant nous, l’obstacle, which remains one of the classic works on a r

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Two limitations on the findings of Weberian historical sociology (WHS) have been its temporal and spatial focus on early modern Europe (Hobson 1998). These limitations tend to push WHS theorists to underestimate and under-theorize the role of territoriality. Using the Roman Empire as a case study to address one of the problems, this paper argues that understanding the territorial organization of the Roman Empire helps to explain the specific process of decay that led to its fall. This paper considers and rejects many of the existing explanations of the fall of the empire including imperial overstretch, stagnation, and the classic focus on Christianity and barbarians. Instead it argues that Rome’s decreasing ability to order its territory as it had because of changing principles of social organization explain the fall. It was not a lack of innovation as Mann has suggested, but an increasing inability to provide a cohesive vision of what Rome was and how its subjects fit into the empire that led ultimately to the fall. It was the idea of Rome that fell first. This paper explains how and why.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper addresses the interplay of national and transnational ideologies in state-building in the late Ottoman Empire. In retrospect, it may appear that the process of building modern states follows, if somewhat belatedly, the pattern established in the Western Europe, i.e. the demise of imperial regimes and the ascendance of the nation-state as the dominant political form. This paper suggests, in contrast, that these two processes are considerably different, and that their differences are mainly due to the strong and active role that transnational ideologies—such as religious ideologies or communism, which transcend the boundaries of a particular ethnic or cultural community—played in their state-building. The struggles of empires to keep their territory and people together, especially in the face of nationalist movements emerging as strong threats to their existence, led the ruling elites to experiment with alternatives hoping they could renew the legitimacy of the state. While scholars of nationalism tend to ignore all the models besides nation-state model as ‘paths-not-taken’, or failed experiments, transnational ideologies that states experimented with during these periods of transition provided the basis of the political, cultural and ideological structure of the nation-state that followed. It is only the understanding of the distinctive features of this period of transnational ideologies compared to earlier periods of imperial ideologies and later periods of nationalist ideologies that would give us the clues about the contingencies carried out from one legacy to another: such as the Islamic character of Turkish nationalism.