Empire in the Global Commons: American Exceptionalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Environmentalist Dilemma

Abstract

Nationalism, in the U.S. case, has a messy connection with the ideology of exceptionalism, which as Daniel Rodgers argues, is associated with a need to "imagine everyone else's history" as much as its own. Exceptionalist ideology is thereby not simply confined to an internal conception of uniqueness; it frequently drives a program for external action, often as conquest (as in British exceptionalism or German Sonderweg), or in America’s case, as a quest to reshape the world along a moral axis that it casts in universalist terms. Universalist, perhaps, but the nation that sits outside of history and refuses connection with the rest of the world prefers to think in terms of an eventual convergence to its norms (think “democracy” and “markets”). I use Thomas Friedman (journalist) and Mathias Risse (political philosopher) as interlocutors to show how their resistance to cosmopolitanism betrays an underlying anxiety driving an agenda of "explanatory nationalism" (Thomas Pogge's phrase). Both, I argue, are "convergence theorists," i.e., believers that the economic and political order of the rest of the world could converge (for Friedman, explicitly towards the American ideal; for Risse, nothing quite so crude, but nevertheless pointing in the same direction) as long as countries themselves take the initiative. Together, they act as gatekeepers of a liberal moral order in a post-Cold War globalized world with a single remaining superpower. The risk is that in a world increasingly haunted by environmental catastrophe as well as global social dissent, this gatekeeper tendency could backfire badly to empower neoconservatism. American environmentalists are especially likely to be caught on the wrong foot unless they avow an unambiguous cosmopolitan agenda that is driven by principles of global justice.

Keywords: exceptionalism, nationalism, USA, environmentalism