Imperialism replaces limited national-interest goals with limitless, directionless power expansion.

Evidence

Nothing was so characteristic of power politics in the imperialist era than this shift from localized, limited and therefore predictable goals of national interest to the limitless pursuit of power after power that could roam and lay waste the whole globe with no certain nationally and territorially prescribed purpose and hence with no predictable direction. This backsliding has become apparent also on the ideological level, for the famous domino-theory, according to which American foreign policy feels committed to wage war in one country for the sake of the integrity of others that are not even its neighbors, is clearly but a new version of the old “Great Game” whose rules permitted and even dictated the consideration of whole nations as stepping-stones, or as pawns, in today’s terminology, for the riches and the rule over a third country, which in turn became a mere stepping-stone in the unending process of power expansion and accumulation. It was this chain reaction, inherent in imperialist power politics and best represented on the human level by the figure of the secret agent, of which Kipling said (in Kim), “When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before”; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 28

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the structural shift from nation-state territorial objectives to endlessly self-justifying power accumulation — a key mechanism distinction between nationalism and imperialism.
• XREF: The concept of limitless, non-territorial power accumulation feeds directly into the machinery of exclusion and total domination examined in later sections of this book. — connects to: Raison d’Etat abandoned imperial ambition for permanent competitive equilibrium among states. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 154