Tom Bender
I think that their recovery of [category] “empire” is extremely important. I think that there may be three categories in the world: empires, nation-states, and what I would call – and something I would think that the United States in the 20th century is, and most 20th century nations who’ve at least aspired to this, I think certainly the Soviet Union was too – a “nation/empire” with some of the characteristics of a nation-state but some of the ambitions of an empire.
And I think that empire, at least to an americanist, is quite striking because empires did not demand the kind of homogeneity that nations do – because of the nature of citizenship, which is a fundamental part of the nation-state – they are less interested in borders, it’s the dynasty that has to survive. If they lose a province, it’s not fatal; to a nation-state, this is catastrophic.
They don’t even have to have all their provinces continuous: you can have colonies in all kind of places, so I think that thinking about that solves a lot of multicultural problems that we have in the nation-state because you don’t demand uniformity, in fact there are different rules for several sub-units of the empire. The nation-state looks for a certain kind of homogeneity, at least formally equal citizens although we know that socially they’re not, and so that’s a whole set of alternative problems.
[...]
Q: In your book, you insist on the fact that the USA has been a “self-denying empire» since the end of the 19th century. You also write that “Americans have always found it difficult to imagine themselves as an enemy, as a problem for other people”. Could we say that the Americans’ refusal of seeing themselves as having imperial powers explain George W. Bush’s foreign policy during the last eight years ?
T.B.:It was the first time in American historiography and American public discussion that the Right and the mainstream were using the word “empire” in an affirmative sense. That didn’t change, however, the problem which goes all the way back to the beginning and hasn’t changed: this inability to see how we appear to other people. We look at our motives. We don’t look at our consequences. So Americans say, even if they’re doing terrible things, “It’s our goodness that brought us to Iraq, why don’t they understand that?”, “It’s our goodness that brought us to Vietnam; we just wanted to save them from Communism”.
(отсюда)
=============
пост-Имперские процессы — Горбачев-Ельцин у нас,
Обама у них (помашем дяде ручкой) — чрезвычайно опасны.
И внутренне, и для окружающих.
Но хоть здесь мы “перегнали Америку”, хо-хо. 
У нас, предположу, имперская энергия не вся сгорела
в катастрофе и направляется сейчас вовнутрь,
в самоотрицание империи, во Внутреннюю Империю,
в “рождение нации”, в самоопределение России.
И это часть процесса создания Большой Европы,
куда мы и можем войти (лишь) как сильный,
самостоятельный, самоопределенный субъект.
Отсюда, кстати, следует, что сильная Россия –
европейская Россия, а всяческие “деструкторы”
(анархисты, квази-либералы, необольшевики и т.п.)
противостоят “европейскому выбору”.
