The claim to represent an order with universal validity

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Intervenes on the side of the weak, it launches crusades against "heathens", "pirates", "infidels", "the uncivilized", "the barbarians" in the name of "God", "civilization", "progress", "democracy", "the born-to-rule", "the true faith", "the civilized world". Altruistic in name an empire is self-seeking in its ambition, claiming all power for itself and tolerating no economic or political rights independent of its own laws. It enforces altruism at the point of a sword and it puts a stop to "barbarian practices" through the exercise of exemplary terror and the power which comes from more effecient military or technical logistics.

An empire is mother, monitor, policeman, creator of laws and guardian of order, arbitrator and moral guardian; but also looter, rapist, humilator, alienator and exposer, a giant whose dark shadow falls on the threshold of the vulnerable, a robber and a dispoiler of the wealth of others. To its enemies outside its borders an empire is a threat job function email list when strong and a temptation when weak, a source of anxiety or of provocation; to its enemies within its borders it is a condescending force, hypocritical, deadening, exploitive, monopolistic, parasitical, impious, oppressive, the denier of rights, whether individual, national or natural; but for its friends it is the bringer of light, the bearer of superior culture and of progress, the liberator from savagery, the tamer of the wilderness, the hygenist, the buildier and the law giver, the destroyer of disease and ignorance, the settler, the peace giver, the rationalist, the cleanser, the torch-bearer of civilization.

Empires have a Janus-like character. Common to every empire and every kind of empire is. An empire sets itself no limits; its frontiers (one seldom talks of its borders) exist in a state of tension with the non-conquered lands without. Either the frontiers are due to advance or they feel threatened from the little known, "non-civilized" world without, the world of the hunter and gatherer, the world of the lawless savage, in a word, the barbarian. The world where the imperial insignia does not hold sway is viewed as the pre-civilized chaos, and the empire builds walls and dikes to keep the half-human, the barbarian, out. Nationalism it regards as ochlocracy. In Die Hermannschlacht by the German Romantic dramatist Christian Dietrich Grabbe, an incident in the first scene illustrates the contrast well. The Roman commander Varus has been invited by Thusnelda, Hermann's queen, to join her and her subjects at dinner: