Obvious as the answer may seem, it is a question worth asking because the word has been so overused that important distinctions are being lost. Stephen Howe writes: “Ideas about empire have . . . seemed to spread and multiply beyond all limit or control. ‘Imperialism’, as a word has gone imperial; ‘colonialism’ has colonized our languages . . . They have come to be used, at the extreme, to describe anyone’s, any group’s, or anything’s supposed superiority, or domination, or even just influence, over any other person, or group, or thing. Some of these uses are clearly metaphorical; others seem to be intended literally.” Alexander Motyl similarly has asked “Is Everything Empire? Is Empire Everything?”
An influential book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt defines empire as “a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘civilized’ world.” In this system the “United States does indeed occupy a privileged position.” But “no-nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.” There has been, they say, a transition from imperialism to Empire: “Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.” Rather, “sovereignty has taken a new [capitalist] form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule.” Thus, “the concept of Empire presents itself . . . as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity”; indeed, it “is always dedicated to . . . a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.” Empire “operates on all registers of the social order” and “not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature.” As Yale Ferguson comments, Empire by this definition “seems to be about capitalist globalization as a whole.”
Because of this, some scholars have made an effort to define the term more precisely, and more traditionally, in political terms. David Abernethy, for instance, defines empire as “a relationship of domination and subordination between one polity (called the metropole) and one or more territories (called colonies) that lie outside the metropole’s boundaries yet are claimed as its lawful possessions.” Other sorts of control will be included, but the political control is central.
Abernethy offers a series of clarifying standards. There is empire when “the dominant state claims the right to make authoritative decisions affecting the weaker territory’s domestic affairs and external relations”; when “the weaker territory is not recognized as a sovereign state by major actors in the interstate system”; when “the dominant state establishes and staffs administrative structures that extract resources, allocate resources, and enforce regulations within some economically or strategically significant portion of the weaker territory.”
On the other hand, “empire” does not include unequal relations between nations in which the dominant state makes no claim to control the weaker states affairs, when the weaker territory is recognized as a sovereign state. Even when the stronger state’s institutions exert marked influence on the weaker state, and even when the stronger state exploits the weaker, it is not an empire-colony relation. Abernethy thus finds that the notion of “informal imperialism” covers too much ground, since any sort of influence can be described as “informal imperialism.”