Summary - США в XX–XXI веках. Либерализм. Демократия. Империя.

США в XX–XXI веках. Либерализм. Демократия. Империя. Согрин В.В. 2015 г. 225 Р

Professor Vladimir V. Sogrin, Chairman of the Russian Association for Advancement of the USA history studies, analyzes internal and foreign policy of the United States of the 20th—21st centuries through the prism of three fundamental factors of American civilization — liberalism, democracy, empire. The originality of the author’s intention is to disclose interaction and correlation of three basic factors in historical practice of the USA.

The approach of Vladimir Sogrin differs in many respects from vision of other scholars. In the USA majority of authors believe that empire exists only under totalitarian (left or right) or authoritarian regimes and that the democratic United States in no period can be called „an empire“. Minority of authors consider the USA an empire but concentrating their attention on the U.S. foreign policy they ignore as a rule democratic and liberal basics of American civilization or try to prove that those basics are distorted by the ruling class and turned into false values.

Vladimir Sogrin shows that democracy and liberalism in the USA with all their faults and distortions developed and received important innovations in the 20th— 21st centuries, especially in the Progressive and New Deal Eras and in 1960s—1970s. But foreign policy of the liberal-democratic USA at most periods was imperial. Not possessing colonies like classic empires, the United States established such economic, political, cultural, military domination or influence over a huge part of the global space which none of preceding formal empires reached. Main basics of imperial policy of leading liberal democracy were market demands of it’s most developed world economy, political and geopolitical interests of permanently enlarging Leviathan State and messianism inherited by the American nation from it’s founding periods. Imperial policy deformed democracy mostly on international arena. USA continually relied in political practice on the formulas „all means are good to achieve the goal“ and „the end justifies the means“ which discredited the very core of democracy.