In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, the Week news magazine published an opinion by Ryan Cooper arguing not only that the United States is “the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century” but that this is a bad thing. It’s not a new or an uncommon comparison. In the book The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire, A. Wess Mitchell argues that the United States occupies an analogous geopolitical position to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and could learn from its successes and failures. As an analogy, though, it manages to be unfair to both the United States and the Holy Roman Empire. The desire for centralization and control misses exactly what made both powers survive and thrive.
Cooper is more dismissive than Mitchell. He calls the original empire’s legal institutions “complicated and illogical.” He claims the empire was “[s]urpassed by history” and “doomed.” Similarly, America’s basic mechanisms of government are “malfunctioning kludges.” He writes: “Countries that fail to maintain themselves to this degree often do not survive.” Cooper believes that like the vast collection of political entities that occupied Central Europe in the early modern period, the United States is “ripe for the picking by an opportunistic tyrant.”
