And yet America is also nowhere. America is vanishing. If we stare, or glare, at it long enough, it may disappear before our eyes. It is already slipping away into an Atlantic paradigm, that of the “Americas,” in which the very invocation of America as the name of the United States is deemed potentially offensive to those who live proximate to the nationstate that has selfishly seized that signifier. Their lives, it is assumed, are subsumed by an imperialist superpower that casts its dark shadow over the borderland that separates the United States, Los Estados Unidos, from its neighbors to the south. Hundreds perish each year trying to cross this fatal frontera, to reach a New World whose shadow now extends into the Old. From the detonation of its atomic power over Japan in i945 to the current “war on terror,” do we not all live in the shadow of this superpower, a shadow now filtered through the floating fragments of the World Trade Center and rendered darker still by the retribution that followed that atrocity?
For those who fear the still further extension of the power of the last superpower, there may be hope. America’s perceived cultural, military, and political dominance can be countered, negated, diminished, some assume, by denying it the name it took to itself. Through the power of language, it is anticipated, an imperial power will be brought down to size and forced to accept that it is not first among nations, primus inter pares, the “indispensible nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described it in 1998. It is portrayed instead as, in sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, an “incoherent empire,” and in hues so dismal that one can only be grateful that its imperial and militarist ambitions have not achieved greater coherence. For others, the very lack of coherence and concomitant absence of a strong imperial impulse is a problem both for America and for a world in need of what historian Niall Ferguson perceives as a “liberal empire,” a new “Colossus” driven as much by conscience as by commerce to effect global stability and security. For still others, more interested in America’s internal constructs rather than its external impact, the United States is simply a nation among nations, with all the complexities and contradictions that accrue to the modern nation-state. Yet some would deny it even that status. Some would deny that America is even a nation at all.
In the upsurge of academic interest in nationalism that accompanied the end of the Cold War, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, all of which prompted the reemergence of nationalist impulses long buried beneath an externally imposed overarching social and political ideology, the ethnic origins of the modern nation came under scrutiny once more. Yet no ethnic paradigm could accommodate the United States. A nation of immigrants could, at best, be described as a plural nation. At worst, it could be relegated to a category all of its own, a non-nation; a collection of competing ethnies, riven by racial, religious and linguistic wrangling, out of which only cultural confusion - certainly no coherent nation, let alone empire - could emerge.
As the debate continued, however, the idea of the United States as a civic nation, one held together by a civic nationalism, began to gain ground. In fact, this was little more than the application of new terminology to what some were perhaps more used to thinking of as the “American creed.” Although the debate recognized that, from the outset, natives and nonwhites, women and non-Protestant religions were often relegated to the margins of an American identity predicated on an exclusive white ethnic core, nevertheless the emphasis turned increasingly to focus on its inclusive civic ideal. This ideal was predicated on the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s founding document, its mission statement, its rejection of Old World values, the beginning of a New World republic.
That New Word republic today comprises more than 300 million people. It is the third largest nation on earth, both in terms of population and geography. Only China and India have (much) larger populations; only Canada and Russia are physically bigger. America’s geographic and oceanic coverage, at 9,826,675 square kilometers (9,161,966 on land), is still twice that of the European Union. Bordered to the north by the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence seaway, separating it from Canada, and to the south by the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) River, separating it from Mexico, it occupies a geographical middle ground and, arguably, a national one, too.
This was not a land, however, that the population always took care of. America’s abundance of natural resources, from silver to oil, gas, coal, timber, and fauna, was overexploited to the point of near-extinction of the buffalo (bison) herds on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century. Deforestation, too, inevitably accompanied the nation’s population and industrial growth over the centuries. A land that seemed limitless to early settlers too soon became a man-made, or degraded, landscape; however, since the same nineteenth century, the contrary impulse to protect that land emerged in the establishment of the nation’s National Parks. Today, indeed, the National Park Service (NPS) is about much more than just land husbandry and natural resources. It is fundamentally about heritage, a contentious and potent political and cultural issue, one often fought over, with the battlefield sites that the NPS is responsible for as much the flashing point as the wilderness sites such as Yellowstone (the nation’s first National Park) or Yosemite. Under the administration of George W. Bush, and partly in the context of the national security imperative, land that came under either NPS or Indian Nation jurisdiction was designated available for oil exploration and mining once again, thereby threatening to destroy a national landscape while simultaneously trying to defend it.
Before defense of the homeland became an issue, establishing that homeland was the main focus for America’s peoples. For much of the nation’s early history, populations and markets mainly functioned on a north-south axis, one aligned along the Mississippi River that runs through the middle of America from Minnesota in the north to the Gulf of Mexico. Settlers from the east seeking to reach the west coast along what became known as the Oregon Trail had, before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, to negotiate the Rockies, the mountain chain that runs from New Mexico up to Alaska. Today, with the wagon trains that traveled the Oregon Trail long gone, much of the nation’s wide-open spaces remain relatively empty. The bulk of America’s population - more than 80 percent - is urban. More than 80 percent of that population designates English as their first language, and 10 percent Spanish. Protestants remain in the majority, but only just, at some 51 percent. Of that population, the majority are still classified as white (almost 80 percent), almost 13 percent as black, some 4 percent as Asian, and some 15 percent as Hispanic. Sometimes Hispanic can be designated “white,” which is why the figures appear to exceed i00 percent.
The question of ethnic designation is more than a census peculiarity, however. It goes to the heart of the question of American national identity, of what it means to be American and what the nation stands for. At less than i percent of the population, for example, Native Americans nevertheless comprise more than 2 million people, subdivided into hundreds of tribal units. Whether one is, or is not, “native” depends on a combination of genetic inheritance and cultural affiliation; some groups emphasize the former, others the latter. Similarly, whether one is deemed black or white tends to be geographically and/or linguistically determined. Hispanic covers pretty much everyone living, or coming from, south of the