In the second of an eight-part series, John Keane shows how the American empire deployed the idea of ‘liberal democracy’ to bolster its own interests.
Historians teach us that durable empires always try to camouflage their own immodesty by convincing both their heartlands, and their clients and subjects abroad, that their power is a force for good.
Empires aim to get under the skin of the people whose lives they shape at a distance. The priority is to transform the empire into a whole way of life so that its power to shape the world at large – to tell stories that persuade others of its superiority and to nurture among the empire’s subjects a sense of ‘masochistic wallowing’ (Tsitsi Dangarembga’s phrase in her novel, Nervous Conditions) – comes to be seen and accepted as ‘natural’, and as the way things must forever remain.
In the buildup to their military victories in Europe and Asia in 1945, America’s leaders knew that legitimacy really matters in global affairs. Telling their story well was for them of exceptional strategic importance. In their embrace of a comprehensive story about America’s past, present and future, a persuasive summary of its global achievements and wealth and wellbeing, its leaders were in one sense doing nothing new.
Empires of old typically ruled through a rigid set of legitimating symbols portrayed as intrinsically consistent and globally universal. Portuguese and Spanish emperors were proselytes for monarchy and the church. ‘I believe in the British Empire’, boasted Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, ‘and I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen.’ The Ottoman Empire that confronted and outflanked Christian Europe in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the lands bordering the Volga River for over five centuries (between 1400 and 1922) wielded power in the form of a gaza, a holy war conducted in the name of Islam against its non-Muslim doubters and enemies.
Seen in another way, the triumphant American empire was unusual. It was the latest of a small handful of empires whose rulers talked the language of democracy. The list is short: imperial Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE; revolutionary France for two decades following the events of 1789, when troops marched into the Low Countries, northern Italy and all the way to the Russian lands in the name of the droits de l’homme et du citoyen; and imperial Britain, which extended ‘responsible self-government’ – bilingual, Catholic-dominated government with its own civil code in Québec; the secret ballot and local constitutions founded on adult male suffrage, female suffrage in the Australian colonies, for instance – to a handful of loyal, white-dominated colonies.
America’s leaders deployed plenty of pragmatic, business-like patter about peace and ‘free market’ development and prosperity, but it was the American way of life centred on ‘liberal democracy’ that was its gift to the whole world. To paraphrase Hugo Grotius: in the post-1945 period, American governments and more than a few of their citizens supposed that democracy was the comprehensive ‘natural law’ binding on all states and their peoples.
This overwhelmingly white-skinned rhetoric of democracy had deep taproots. The mid-1840s war on Mexico. The decision of Congress in 1867 to ‘reconstruct’ and bring ‘democracy’ to the South. The invasion and occupation of the Philippines in 1898. Wilsonian commitments to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ in Latin America and, after 1918, in central and eastern Europe. The military conquest and forcible democratisation of Japan and Germany after 1945. John F Kennedy’s promotion of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America and talk of Vietnam as ‘a laboratory of democracy’. Carter’s human rights campaigns. Reagan’s prediction of an international ‘democratic revolution’. Clinton’s declaration that America’s ‘overriding purpose must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-
based democracies’.
George W Bush’s talk of bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. American political historians’ appeal to pursue serious research on the historic importance of ’liberal democratic internationalism’ (Tony Smith). Francis Fukuyama, the ideologist-in-chief of liberal democracy, peddling talk of the ‘end of history’. Robert Dahl, America’s doyen political thinker, praising the merits of ‘polyarchy’. The ill-fated Biden administration launch of an ‘Alliance of Democracies’ designed to unite democratically elected governments against China, Russia and other ‘autocracies’.
It transpired that this was the last gasp of the rhetoric of liberal democracy, which throughout the post-1945 period had served the rulers of the United States well. ‘Liberal democracy’ endowed its empire with a benignly acephalous appearance. The country’s aggressive political economy, military interventions, secretive counterinsurgency operations and racialised treatment of distant clients came clothed in the fine language of liberal freedoms and democratic self-government. Talk of liberal democracy and a liberal democratic international order functioned as a powerful distraction, a means of mystification and bamboozlement. For reasons to be explained, the camouflaging talk has now been terminated. The gloves of American power are off. Democratic cheating has come to an end.
A Democracy at war
Viewed historically, the avowed post-1945 commitment by America’s leaders to a democratic rules-based order was unsurprising. It was certainly no coincidence. Historians of empire tell us that durable empires, especially when on the rise and at their peak, for the sake of their overall hegemony cede a measure of independence to the distant peoples and lands they rule over. China does this in its affirmations of non-intervention in the affairs of other states, as did the Ottomans in their millet system of courts of law run by different confessional communities, and as the British did by granting parliamentary rule to their loyal white colonies.
During the post-1945 period, the earliest and best-known example of the United States’ self-interested imperial self-restraint was the Marshall Plan (1948–1951). Described at the time by Secretary of State George Marshall as a contribution to ‘the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist’, it aimed to rebuild war-ravaged cities and regions through the modernisation of productivity, the renewal of transport systems, the reduction of tariff barriers, the repayment of state debts (as in Great Britain), and the expanded non-dollar purchase of American manufactured goods and raw materials thanks to the general economic integration of Europe in the form of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation.
In the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, the spending program was designed to favour the interests of the United States by targeting and countering the expansion of the Soviet empire. But the Marshall Plan and its successors also played to public opinion at home. The historian William O’Neill has noted the powerful domestic role played by the language of democratic ideals in the American military campaigns in Europe and Asia. His thesis is compellingly unstraightforward: the United States won its victories in the Second World War not, as legend has it, because of superior numbers, organisational competence, and material strength. Reluctant even to enter the war, the American government preceded by costly half-measures even after committing to fight. Official resonance and bureaucratic bungling led to inferior and effective weapons, too few infantrymen, the squandering of GI’s lives in strategically useless attacks, and other tragic mistakes. The Sherman tank was a death trap and the torpedoes of American submarines routinely malfunctioned. Afraid to alarm voters, Congress failed to act on many issues, such as the decision to increase military spending before thewar, which could have brought the conflict to a faster end, with less bloodshed. O’Neill traces much of the official bungling to domestic politics and paradoxically to the democratic process itself, which limited Roosevelt’s flexibility in wartime. Yet, despite these obstacles, O’Neill points out that the blood and courage of the men and women who fought, and the strength and struggles of those who remained at home, compensated for an overly cautious and ambivalent democratic leadership. When the chips were down, the language of democracy really mattered. The rhetoric roused millions of Americans who had until then ignored or been ignorant of the world to defend ideals they considered to be both precious and of universal significance. The democratic spirit of the whole war effort was manifested, for instance, in the massive two-million-strong Times Square V-J Day rally (15 August 1945), streets filled with ticker tape, coast-to-coast orgies of kissing, drunkenness and rape, children singing ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty’, and the amusing, officially commissioned short film on the merits of ‘democracy’ and the dangers of ‘despotism’ authored by the director of war communications research in the Office of War Information, Harold J Lasswell.
This article was drawn from Notes on Empire, America and the Decolonisation of Democracy – notes prepared for the TODA Global Challenges to Democracy meeting, Oxford, June 18 -20, 2026
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. Renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy, he is the author of the best-selling Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995), The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), Power and Humility (2018), The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has been published in more than a dozen languages. He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. His latest book is China’s Galaxy Empire.