shape the contours of the nation from one ocean
to the other, and finally, when it confronted the
rest of the world from that magnetic core, this
would become “the American Century” ’ (1991:
48). Fundamentally, however, for Bell, it has
been the strength of its civil society in relation to
state power that has given the United States its
exceptional nature. American civil society is
couched in terms of an emphasis on the voluntary
association, on the church and community, on the
self-management of resources on a local scale,
outside the bureaucracy and the state, and above
all in terms of a transformation that has gone
from a version of ‘republican virtue’ through to
the contrasting but complementary practices of
rugged individualism and radical populism.
These lines provide us with a flavour of one
reading of the ‘exceptionalism’ of America,
which contrasts with an earlier article by the
political geographer John Agnew (1983) who out-
lined a more critical vision of ‘American excep-
tionalism’ in relation to US foreign policy. More
recently, other writers have sought to place the
‘American Century’ in a relatedly critical context
(see, for example, Guyatt, 2000; Slater and
Taylor, 1999). However, for the purposes of my
argument here I simply want to signal the exis-
tence of three specificities of the United States
which are particularly pertinent to a consideration
of the relations between the US and the non-
western world, distinctions which are important
for our understanding of ‘Euro-Americanism’.
The first specificity is that the United States,
in contrast to west European nations, as well as
Japan, has a history of spreading imperial power
that is also rooted in post-coloniality. Today, the
United States is not only the lone superpower,
but also the only post-colonial imperial power,
whereby a project of empire emerged out of an
original anti-colonial struggle for independence
from British rule. In the proliferating literature
on post-colonialism the United States is custom-
arily listed as a post-colonial country together
with a whole range of Third World societies, but
the ‘exceptional’ juxtaposition of post-coloniality
and imperial power is often ignored. There are
two facets to this juxtaposition.
First, in looking at the geopolitics of US inter-
ventionism in the countries of the global south,
the coalescence of these two realities, of a belief
in the rightness of the self-determination of peo-
ples, together with a belief in the global destiny
of ‘America’, constitutes a salient and frequently
contradictory specificity. Historically, the con-
tradiction between a belief in the rights of peo-
ples to decide their own fate and a belief in the
geopolitical predestination of America has been
ostensibly transcended through an invocation ofdemocracy that is valid at home and abroad. In
the 1960s, for example, in a context formed by
military intervention in the Dominican Republic
(1965), the war in Vietnam and a social crisis in
the cities of the United States, President Lyndon
B. Johnson made it clear that the domestic and
the foreign were two sides of the same coin, that
promoting democracy at home meant securing it
abroad, that the United States was a great, liberal
and progressive democracy up to its frontiers,
and ‘we are the same beyond’. Let us never
imagine, he continued, ‘that Americans can wear
the same face in Denver and Des Moines and
Seattle and Brooklyn and another in Paris and
Mexico City and Karachi and Saigon’ (1969: 7).
This sense of indivisibility, of global pre-
eminence in the proclamation of liberal demo-
cracy, carries a universality that is based in the
particularity of the United States, and by provid-
ing a horizon for other peoples this kind of enun-
ciation also attempts to encapsulate the struggles
and destinies of non-American peoples within an
American vision.
Second, the primacy of self-determination is
important in explaining the dichotomy fre-
quently present in American interventions where
a split is made between the governed (the people)
and the governors (the rulers). Given the historic
differentiation of the New World from the Old,
and the support for anti-colonial struggles, per-
ceived threats to US security have not infre-
quently been accompanied by this kind of
separation between an oppressed people and
tyrannical rulers. For example, in the context of
past revolutionary breaks that were associated by
the US government with ‘communist subversion’,
it was the people who needed to be rescued from
their undemocratic rulers, as clearly represented
in the case of US military intervention in
Grenada in 1983. In the long-standing case of US
hostility towards the Cuban Revolution, a strong
distinction has been made between the Cuban
people, who are portrayed as being oppressed by
their communist rulers, and the Castro regime.
For example, in the earlier sections of the Helms–
Burton Act of 1996, one reads that ‘the consis-
tent policy of the United States towards Cuba
since the beginning of the Castro regime ... has
sought to keep faith with the people of Cuba’,
whilst ‘sanctioning the totalitarian Castro
regime’. Further on, the document continues,
‘the Cuban people deserve to be assisted in a
decisive manner to end the tyranny that has
oppressed them for 36 years, and the continued
failure to do so constitutes ethically improper
conduct by the international community’.^1 The
Act specifically argues that measures are needed
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