"After the Empire — What?"

Kirkpatrick Sale and Thomas H. Naylor

[A call to a Radical Consultation in Middlebury, Vermont, to discuss issues involving secession, November, 2004.]

No empire has ever survived the test of time — Greek, Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, French, British, or Soviet. Is there any reason to believe that the United States will prove to be an exception to the rule?

Our government's dogged, mean-spirited, zero-surn pursuit of the war on terrorism, and a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch, appear to be leading us into a death spiral. So too is its unwavering commitment to globalization and environmental degradation at any cost. There is resounding evidence that it is only a matter of time before corporate behemoths implode and then the fragile house-of-cards economy and its otherworldly stock market collapses.Not only has our highly partisan, divided nation become virtually ungovernable, but it has most probably become unsustainable economically, politically, militarily, agriculturally, socially, culturally, and environmentally.

So the fundamental question that must confront all Americans is, "Do we go down with the Titanic, or do we seek alternatives while they are still available?" What are our options? To us they would seem to be denial, compliance, or political "reform," the dead-end processes that will bring no real change; or rebellion and revolution triggered by economic meltdown and governmental repression, which seem similarly doomed; or simply waiting for the United States to implode and dissolve like the Soviet Union, with the attendant chaos and catastrophe. OR the ones that, whatever their difficulties, offer real promise for reliable and sustainable future: devolution of power from the central U.S. government or dissolution of the U.S. (and by extention the nations within its empire) into smaller entities.

We are interested in talking about those last options. The kinds of arrangements we might think of putting in place after the fall of empire are myriad: decentralization such as Switzerland achieved; strong power-at-the-periphery federations such as Canada and Sweden; the secession of states, as is advocated by the Second Vermont Republic, extricating itseif peacefully, legally, and democratically from the U.S.; the complete dissolution of the U.S. government to 50 sovereign states (or 100 selfgoverning bioregions); independent anarcho-communalist settlements of varying sizes and areas. And we don't have to stop there.

For those who realize that the problem is not what the nation-state (and the American government) does, but rather what it inevitably is, and who see the solution in the eventual elimination of that nation-state for more democratic, egalitarian, ecological, and independent entities, this Radical Consultation is a unique chance to formulate some perspectives and even consider some strategies.