Empire or Awsdef

Nathan talked about this subject in his blog entry for the week but I would like to add on a little bit more http://irdebate.blogspot.com/2006/04/empire-who-cares.html.

In class on Thursday we were arguing over what the meaning of empire is and who fits that model. Everything from Rome to the Catholic Church to the US to big business were mentioned. Yet all three of these entities are very different. The constructivist answer to that would be to say that the meaning of empire is changing. We are recreating the world and how it functions. But I would say that the meaning of empire has not changed, instead we are just too lazy to come up with new words for new situations.

Big business clearly can not force governments to do what it wants them to do. Yet they do span the globe and have a lot of power in the economic interactions of the world. Now maybe we could stretch the definition of empire to include this kind of actor but instead I am going to call them an awsdef, and from a new word. From now on awsdef will mean an actor that is very much identical to big business c. 2005 (I’ll leave it to Miriam Webster to come up with a better definition). But I know that somewhere out there in an IR class in China (since it is tomorrow there already) someone is trying to stretch the meaning of my new word and destroying its initial meaning. Maybe I should also make up a word for doing that. How about, to lokjih? So people stop lokjihing awsdef. You have already lokjihed empire so stay away from awsdef.

I think a problem in both the “real world” and the academic world is an inability to see situations as new. We couldn’t see Saddam Hussein as just Saddam Hussein, people had to try to compare him to Hitler or Bin Laden. People can’t understand America as America we have to try to compare it to Rome or China or Britain. Maybe new things can happen and appear in the real world. There are plenty of examples out there so I’m not going to list them, but if you want an example come ask me in class. But trust me, not everything has a comparable event in the past so stop with the lokjihing already.

Matt Bank