Embarrassingly I can't tell if you're being serious now. I wasn't, but the 'you know' is throwing me off.
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Yeah, I can see Portugal and Britain being a good example. Not sure about AH meeting the same threshold but w.e.
Also India prior to the official takeover by the UK depended more or less on a corporation (The East India Company) with heavy foreign military support for muchof its military capability. In fact it’s a good comparison. The Mughals in principal had access to vast manpower, wealth and military capability. In practice though the various ‘princely states’ of India were perfectly willing and able to hold back the military capacity they were supposed to contribute to the common good and use it for their own independent ends instead. This is rather similar to the condition of the EU where the bulk of the military forces are contained in the states it is composed of and used for their ends - not central ones. The difference is that the Mughal empire was in the process of coming apart and the EU one in coming together. Another good example might be the various Turkish tribes that swept into Anatolia in the collapse of the byzantines. They were a motley collection of many tribes and ‘nations’ often only vaguely connected to one another. The key first step in creating the Ottoman Empire was getting these different groups to work together towards common goals. The Ottomans were never fully effective at doing this, hence the rise of the Janissaries as a political alternative to the traditional armed forces which were politically difficult to get moving in the same direction.
To look at the EU military forces for comparisons, don’t look at empires ‘in their prime’. Look at those just starting or about to collapse. Once you do that the parallels are remarkable, right down to the details; who’s in charge of what, what language(s) to use, what arms to get, exactly when cooperation is essential, how command is organized, when the forces can be used (defense of the homeland of course - offenses somewhere else? A whole other matter) what constitutes an emergency requiring cooperation, when forces are ‘returned’ to the contributing area, of support for forces is paid for by the local state that raised them, the location they are at now, or the central organization, etc. none of these questions exist in a nation state, or if they do they crop up one time, get answered and then it’s over. See how the Austrian-Hungarian empire operated in WWI to see how it works (failure case study), or the British empire in WWII (success case study)
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I was specifically thinking about reliance on a single, more powerful empire's military for the majority if not nearly all of another empire's defensive capabilities. Not just cooperation or assistance by a motley collection of foreign powers.
I'm not sure some of the nascent empires you're referring to are actually empires at that point. I haven't been looking at empires "in their prime", I just haven't been looking at confederations or sophisticated alliances/other entities without a coherent, consistent leadership/state structure. Since I don't consider those empires- which is the issue. You seem to have a different definition of empire from me. It doesn't need to be strong by any means- AH was weak from it's inception. But there are key things missing from the EU right now that prevent it from being an empire- not to say it isn't close or isn't moving in that direction but I just don't see it at the moment.
You know, I've gone over my textbooks and it looks like there's a great deal of contention regarding the use and relevance of the concept. Definition on hand (exclusive political authority over a territory and any people within, World Politics in a New Era 2015) is neither in agreement with how I've been using it nor in the way I've seen it used elsewhere in IR (*final* political authority etc..). Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
