In any event, there is no mystery about the proximate source of concern: An American President who has scorned U.S. Similarly, the name “Liberal International Order” resonates with American values and enables many to persuade themselves that the United States has been a benign power, famously called an “empire by invitation.” Names such as these function as ideological nests, psychologically cozy and generative of new energies. It provided a symbol of continuity even when reality disappointed hope. The “Holy Roman Empire” linked the leaders and the peoples of the HRE to the legal, religious, and aesthetic legacy, however distorted and idealized, of the (Christianized) Roman Empire. Why dredge up the Holy Roman Empire? Because many fear that we are fast approaching our own “1806,” except that the extravagantly named, soon perhaps to be deceased three-word symbol now to hand, we call the Liberal International Order. And it was not an empire in the ordinary sense of the term, since the emperor’s powers were quite limited amid a crazy quilt of duchies, principalities, “free” states, and heaven-knows-what else and in the whole very long history of this particular political contraption, which lasted from the time of Charlemagne, crowned in December of the year 800 (or, some persuasively say, Otto I, crowned in 924), until 1806, it never conquered anything. The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was utterly temporal, not holy just because the Pope blessed the emperor upon his coronation. “Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire,” * famously wrote Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet) in his 1756 book, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations.
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