Pursuit of Hegemony is Manifest Destiny – it justifies interventions and promulgates racial hierarchies – even the 1ACs claim itself triggers the impact

Meghana V. Nayak PhD, Christopher Malone, “American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of Us Hegemony”, International Studies Review Vol. 11 No. 2, June 2009,

We claim that American Orientalism is a style of thought that gets grounding through American Exceptionalism, a particular and specific form of Orientalism intended to produce "America." Exceptionalism, as America's foundational nar- rative, holds that the United States has a unique place in history, differing fundamentally and qualitatively from all other countries; it also emphasizes a "God-given destiny" to guide the rest of the world according to the mainstream US political, social, and economic worldview (Lipset 1996). Orientalism and Exceptionalism share in common the discursive deployment of ontological differ- ence and epistemological claims underlying the American providential mission to provide order to the world, the justifications for conquering and occupying territories, and the racial hierarchy that prioritizes Anglo-Saxons. However, we argue that American Exceptionalism differs from American Orientalism because it is rooted in American political thought about the development and articula- tion of the American nation in contradistinction to Europe. Accordingly, while criti- cal IR analysis of Orientalism can help to critique and understand the positional superiority of Western countries in relation to the Othering of the non-West, both inside and outside of Western borders, it needs to interrogate American Exceptionalism so as to better explain and interpret American "othering" of Europe and the concomitant historical and contemporary clashes within the so- called Western world.5

Critical IR should be better equipped to challenge the clash of civilizations thesis not simply because it smacks of overly polemic and divisive rhetoric, but, as we argue, it obscures the significance, implications, and timing of perceived "clashes" between Western powers. In particular, we note there are contentious differences between the United States and Europe, as well as within Europe, regarding intra-European relationships and Europe's relationship with the United States. Examples include the relative roles of the US and various European powers in the world; differences on who or what constitutes Europe; the distinction between the policies of "old" and "new" Europe; immigration; secularism; whether to admit Turkey to the European Union; appropriate responses to terrorism; policy positions on situations regarding, among others, Russia, Iran, Israel, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea; relationships emergent powers such as China and India; the role of the state vis-à-vis corporations and regional organizations; and how to participate in neoliberal governance via the United Nations, international finance agreements and zones, and nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Further, scholars and political pundits alike have accused the Bush administration of not only exerting violence against the Muslim and/or Arab Other, but also of creating conflict with the United States' key allies in Europe.

Critical discussion of these tensions would help to challenge coherent Western civilization. In other words, we contest that there is a mono- lithic, hermetically sealed "West" that posits itself against the rest of the world. While the United States and Europe seem all too similar in their Orientalism, we must understand such othering practices in the context of the aforementioned transatlantic and European conflicts. At stake is a deeper examination of how and when the United States and Europe may both invoke Orientalism but con- tend differently with the realities of US hegemony. What are the implications, for example, of the increasingly voiced opinion that Europe, specifically through the European Union, is potentially creating a collective, non-violent sovereignty that is markedly different from the US statecraft?6 We also wish to challenge the perception that Europe, while confronting its own forms of state and border vio- lence and disagreeing over the future of the European Union, can and should cohesively counter US hegemony.

In order to address this issue and the multiple questions it implies, we criti- cally rethink the assumptions of and the literatures on American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism. In the first section, we trace the explanatory power of American Orientalism posited by Said and expanded upon by other scholars. This sets the stage for the second section, which aims to explain why American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism should be explored concur- rently. As such, we point out that US unilateral behavior after 9/11 and the con- sequential "transatlantic divide" is not specific to the Bush administration but is indicative of the staying power of American Exceptionalism - the foundational narrative of "America." We also claim that American Exceptionalism' s funda- mental distinction between "America" and "Europe" can help us to better and more critically understand transatlantic relations. In addition, we explore how the American logic of othering non-western countries, via Orientalism, is differ- ent from the logic of othering Western countries, via Exceptionalism. The third section further illustrates by first clarifying the elements of Exceptionalism that leverage Orientalism, such as the providential mission, racial superiority, and conquest encompassed in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. We simultaneously demonstrate that American Exceptionalism is as much about a distinction among "civilized" countries, particularly with European countries, as it is about a differ- ence between the "civilized" and "non-civilized" world. Through a critical gene- alogy of the "becoming" of "America," ranging from John Winthrop's 'City on a Hill' speech with the arrival of the Puritans, to Manifest Destiny, to the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries, to Wilsonian and postwar liberal internationalism, to the Cold War, and to the so-called post-9/11 era, we show the enduring role of American Exceptionalism in ensuring that it is the United States and not Europe that will wield normative power over the rest of the world, the non-Western Others. We use discursive analysis of speeches, political thought, andarticulations of various canons of American diplomatic practice to compare and contrast the different relevance of American Orientalism and American Excep- tionalism for understanding US foreign policy, state identity, and hegemony. We conclude with a call to explore the staying power of American hegemony and to understand the implications of European challenges to US foreign policy.

American Orientalism: The Discourse on "The West and the Rest"

Edward Said (1979) shatters the taken-for-granted status of colonial and post colonial knowledge about the developing world with his analysis of Orientalism. As he notes, European intellectual, artistic, archeological, and literary examin tions of - and claims about - the bodies and borders conquered and mapp justified the necessity and endurance of colonial European empires. Furth there is an internal consistency of the Orientalist discourse, despite any lack correspondence with a ''real" Orient, in order to confer an objective and inno cent status to the knowledge production that both prompted and rationalized the brutality of imperialism (Said 1979:5-7). However, this does not mean that Orientalism is just a play of meanings and ideas, for, as constructivist IR scholars argue, the more we act toward an entity as if it has a particular representation meaning, the more that entity can take on that representation (Wendt 19 Doty 1996). For example, the more European colonialists perceived coloni territories as incapable of self-governing, the more Europeans treated the territories as in need of governing. Indeed, Orientalism is a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said 1979 acting "dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales" (Said 1979:12). Said (1979:12) also claims that Orientalism has much less to do with the "Orient" and much more to do with the making of "our" world. Knowledge claims about the Other (the Orient/the East) actually cement way the Self (Europe/the West) sees and constructs itself. The "Orient" - a mysterious, erotic, dark, dangerous mass of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Arab, South Asian, East Asian natives - is a deep and recurring image in Western identity making.

The impact of Said's work, particularly Orientalism, on critical IR is threefold. First, it creates space for critical IR scholars to examine representational prac- tices and international hierarchy in international politics, in dialogue with schol- ars in other fields, such as literary criticism, anthropology, postcolonial thought, feminist studies, political geography, and others. Said's contrapuntal analyses of culture, colonial discourses, nationalism, power, and representational practices in his body of work opens the way to explore the nuances, contradictions, and shifting and hybrid contexts of Othering (Chowdhry 2007). The Other is that through which the subject is represented as privileged and superior, with the Other being devalued, feared, reviled, even desired, in some way. The Other stands as a potential disruption of the Self, but at the same time, as critical IR theorist Campbell (1998b) points out, the Self cannot fully contain or "resolve" the anxiety over the difference from or the encounter with the Other; without the production of this anxiety, insecurity, and danger, statecraft and nation- making would have nothing against which to assert themselves. Indeed, for the West, the encounters of slavery, colonialism, and genocide have to be repre- sented as trysts with danger, backwardness, and ever-threatening barbarism - any- thing but illegitimate violence - in order to naturalize Western superiority.

Second, the various debates about Said's work have inspired and fortified cri- tiques of rationalist methodology of mainstream IR scholars and of how their ontological presumptions about and methodological studies of the "West" and the "rest" obscure more than they explain (Allain 2004; Chowdhry 2007). Third, the American variant of Orientalism allows for an analysis of the discursive deployments in which (1) the United States assumes and relies upon an ontological distinction between the United States and Others (Weldes ter-Montpetit 2007); (2) the United States employs authoritative epistemological claims and representations about Others' bodies, habits, beliefs, feelings, and political sensibilities, thereby justifying interventions, sanction within, across, and outside of its borders (Persaud 2002); and icy relies on a rationalist methodology consisting of finding ' reports and fact-finding missions, of foregone conclusions a the United States need to assert its position (Tetreault 2006).

Research in this vein, both within and in conversation with critical IR, has examined both the US relationship with the Middle East since the 1940s7 as well as American aggressions since the nineteenth century (Sadowski 1993; Ngai 2000; Little 2002; Mamdani 2004; Khalidi 2005). Orientalism, or at least the con- troversies over its conclusions, has featured prominently in the debates since 9/11 over whether Huntington was right about Islam (Fox 2001; Abrahamian 2002; Elshtain 2004; Lewis 2004), and in claims that the United States is Othering Islam/Arabs with disastrous results (Little 2002; Khalidi 2005; Alam 2007). Further, many find that an understanding of Orientalism "within" the United States, particularly toward Arab Muslim and South Asian Americans, after 9/11, is crucial (Hagopian 2004). Agathangelou and Ling's (2005) stinging critique of the 9/11 Commission Report's treatment of the Muslim Other dem- onstrates the overwhelming reasons why we should understand the reasons for and consequences of constructing the quintessential Muslim/Arab/Middle East- ern Other both within the United States and "elsewhere."