and, above all, the sovereign and national right of
self-determination to the Cuban people. The
mode of representation at work here can be
explained in terms of the presumed right to be
able to designate the political future for a people
whose sovereignty is envisaged as being usurped
by a posited unrepresentative and tyrannical
regime.
These two elements lend specificity to a
certain post-colonial nature of imperial power
that distinguishes the United States from other
western societies, and gives a significant vector
of meaning to the term ‘Euro-Americanism’.
The second specificity is that, in the territorial
formation of the United States, a formation that
was intrinsically tied to war and the expansion of
a ‘civilizing’ frontier, there were encounters with
three significant others: the indigenous peoples
of North America (the ‘Indian’), the Hispanic and
Indian population of Mexico in the US–Mexico
War of 1846–8, and the African American in the
initial context of slavery and the Civil War of the
1860s. In the constitution of mission, destiny and
an Anglo-Saxon Americanization of the continent,
the identification of internal enemies and shifting
frontiers came to play a key role in the formation
of a new nation. In the example of the decimation
of the native peoples of the continent, white
America’s violent encounter with its Indian other
came to form a deeply significant element of the
nation’s collective memory. It not only figured in
the production of films about how ‘the West was
won’ but also found expression in twentieth
century warfare and foreign policy. In the 1960s,
for example, during the Vietnam War, American
troops described Vietnam as ‘Indian country’
and President Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam
justified military escalation by citing the necessity
of moving the ‘Indians’ (the North Vietnamese)
away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could
plant ‘corn’ (Slotkin, 1998: 3). More recently
too, as Campbell (1999: 237) indicates in his
analysis of the contradictions of a lone superpower,
an American diplomat referred to Bosnian Serb
territory as ‘Indian country’, whilst US units
named their bases and areas using frontier refer-
ences (for example, Fort Apache).
Since there is no space here to develop this
argument in further detail, I simply want to state
that my overall contention is that, notwithstand-
ing the historical and cultural differences
between them, these foundingthree encounters
with internal others generated forms of subordi-
nating representation and mechanisms of power
that prefigured subsequent relations of power
over Third World societies (Slater, 1999). Before
the United States became a global power, these
encounters provided an original reservoir ofimperial experience that was not irrelevant to
many of the interventions pursued by the United
States in the twentieth century. In comparison to
the colonizing nations of western Europe,^2 in the
case of the United States the internal territorial
constitution of the nation-state comprised a
series of violent encounters with other peoples
that took place on its own soil and intimately
moulded its evolving sense of empire and mis-
sion, which in many ways has been most acutely
reflected in the continuing significance given to
notions of ‘the frontier’.
The third specificity is that, historically, the
United States has been portrayed by its leading
political figures as the original haven of a New
World. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and
Thomas Jefferson’s twin notion of ‘America’
having a ‘hemisphere to itself’, and being an
‘Empire for Liberty’ , through to the Roosevelt
Corollary of 1904 and the Rio Pact of 1947, the
United States has staked out for itself an original
heartland that was clearly delineated as a
separate domain from the Old World of Europe.
This demarcation of geopolitical domains, or the
establishment in the western hemisphere of a
‘grand area’ of geo-strategy, constituted what I
consider to be the first phase of a US strategy of
containment. This first phase, which dated from
the Monroe Doctrine, was characterized by a
strategy for the establishment of US hegemony
in the Americas, and the setting of limits for
European influence. The second phase of con-
tainment, which was initiated with the Cold War
and the rivalry between the superpowers, saw the
United States as a global power developing a
strategy of containment for what was perceived
to be the communist threat to the ‘free world’.
This classic phase of containment was played out
on the global stage from the late 1940s to 1989,
with a short intermezzo in the late 1970s under
the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The final phase
of containment, in which we are living in the
current era, relates to the specific targeting of
what are portrayed as ‘rogue states’ such as Iraq,
North Korea and Libya – states which are con-
sidered to be the instigators and/or protectors of
terrorist groups and organizations. The contain-
ment and isolation of these specific states is part
of an American strategy aimed at ‘global pre-
eminence’ (Klare, 2000), a strategy which has
important implications for the way we frame our
discussions of the global and the democratic.
The evolution of these interconnected phases
in the development of ‘global America’
(Valladão, 1998) provides a further specificity to
the treatment of the United States within a western
context. In sum these three points, schematically
presented above, capture the existence of important424 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 424