http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3550
Empires
drive history. But the empires of the past 100 years were short lived,
none surviving to see the dawn of the new century. Today, there are no
empires, at least not officially. But that could soon change if the
United Statesor even Chinaembraces its imperial destiny. How can they
avoid the fate of those who came before them?
Empires, more than nation-states, are the
principal actors in the history of world events. Much of what we call
history consists of the deeds of the 50 to 70 empires that once ruled
multiple peoples across large chunks of the globe. Yet, as time has
passed, the life span of empires has tended to decline. Compared with
their ancient and early modern predecessors, the empires of the last
century were remarkably short lived. This phenomenon of reduced
imperial life expectancy has profound implications for our own time.
Officially,
there are no empires now, only 190-plus nation-states. Yet the ghosts
of empires past continue to stalk the Earth. Regional conflicts from
Central Africa to the Middle East, and from Central America to the Far
East, are easilyand often gliblyexplained in terms of earlier
imperial sins: an arbitrary border here, a strategy of divide-and-rule
there.
Moreover, many of todays most important states
are still recognizably the progeny of empires. Look at the Russian
Federation, where less than 80 percent of the population is Russian, or
Britain, which is, for all intents and purposes, an English empire.
Modern-day Italy and Germany are the products not of nationalism but of
Piedmontese and Prussian expansion. Imperial inheritance is even more
apparent outside of Europe. India is the heir of the Mughal Empire and,
even more manifestly, the British Raj. (An Indian Army officer once
told me, The Indian Army today is more British than the British Army.
Driving with him through the huge barracks at Madras, I saw his point,
as hundreds of khaki-clad infantrymen leapt to attention and saluted.)
China is the direct descendant of the Middle Kingdom. In the Americas,
the imperial legacy is apparent from Canada in the north to Argentina
in the south. The Canadian head of state is the British monarch; the
Falkland Islands remain a British possession.
Todays
world, in short, is as much a world of ex-empires and ex-colonies as it
is a world of nation-states. Even those institutions that were supposed
to reorder the world after 1945 have a distinctly imperial bent. For
what else are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council
if not a cozy club of past empires? And what is humanitarian
intervention, if not a more politically correct-sounding version of
the Western empires old civilizing mission?
Imperial Dating
We
tend to assume that the life cycle of empires, great powers, and
civilizations has a predictable regularity to it. Yet the most striking
thing about past empires is the extraordinary variability in the
chronological as well as geographic expanse of their dominion.
Especially striking is the fact that the most modern empires have a far
shorter life span than their ancient and early modern predecessors.
Take
the Roman case. The Roman Empire in the West can be dated from 27 B.C.,
when Octavian became Caesar Augustus and emperor in all but name. It
ended when Constantinople was established as a rival capital with the
death of the Emperor Theodosius in 395, making a total of 422 years.
The Roman Empire in the East can be dated from then until, at the
latest, the sack of Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a total of
1,058 years. The Holy Roman Empirethe successor to the Western
empirelasted from 800, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the
Romans, until Napoleon ended it in 1806. The average Roman empire
therefore lasted 829 years.
Such calculations, though
crude, allow us to compare the life spans of different empires. The
three Roman empires were uncharacteristically long lived. By
comparison, the average Near Eastern empire (including the Assyrian,
Abassid, and Ottoman) lasted a little more than 400 years; the average
Egyptian and East European empires around 350 years; the average
Chinese empire (subdividing by the principal dynasties) ruled for more
than three centuries. The various Indian, Persian, and West European
empires generally survived for between 200 and 300 years.
After
the sack of Constantinople, the longest-lived empire was clearly the
Ottoman at 469 years. The East European empires of the Habsburgs and
the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries. The Mughals
ruled a substantial part of what is now India for 235 years. Of an
almost identical duration was the reign of the Safavids in Persia.
It
is trickier to give precise dates to the maritime empires of the West
European states, because these had multiple points of origin and
duration. But the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires can all
be said to have endured for roughly 300 years. The life span of the
Portuguese empire was closer to 500.
The
empires created in the 20th century, by contrast, were comparatively
short. The Bolsheviks Soviet Union (192291) lasted less than 70
years, a meager record indeed, though one not yet equaled by the
Peoples Republic of China. Japans colonial empire, which can be dated
from the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895, lasted barely 50 years. Most
fleeting of all modern empires was Adolf Hitlers Third Reich, which
did not extend beyond its predecessors borders before 1938 and had
retreated within them by early 1945. Technically, the Third Reich
lasted 12 years; as an empire in the true sense of the word, exerting
power over foreign peoples, it lasted barely half that time. Only
Benito Mussolini was a less effective imperialist than Hitler.
Why did the new empires of the 20th century prove so ephemeral? The
answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power,
economic control, and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
The
new empires that arose in the wake of the First World War were not
content with the successful but haphazard administrative arrangements
that had characterized the old empires, including the messy mixtures of
imperial and local law and the delegation of powers and status to
certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century
nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; these were more
like empire states than traditional empires. The new empires
repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of
force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of
existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old
political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness.
In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole
categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than merely the armed
and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was
entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler
accused the British of excessive softness in their treatment of Indian
nationalists.
The empire states of the mid-20th century
were to a considerable extent the architects of their own downfalls. In
particular, the Germans and Japanese imposed their authority on other
peoples with such ferocity that they undermined local collaboration and
laid the foundations for indigenous resistance. That was foolish, as
many people who were liberated from their old rulers (Stalin in
Eastern Europe, the European empires in Asia) by the Axis powers
initially welcomed their new masters. At the same time, the territorial
ambitions of these empire states were so limitlessand their combined
grand strategy so unrealisticthat they swiftly called into being an
unbeatable coalition of imperial rivals in the form of the British
Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Why We Fight
Empires
do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local
consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to
unite against them. The crucial question is whether or not todays
global powers behave in a different way than their imperial forebears.
Publicly,
the leaders of the American and Chinese republics deny that they harbor
imperial designs. Both states are the product of revolutions and have
long traditions of anti-imperialism. Yet there are moments when the
mask slips. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheneys 2003 Christmas card
asked, And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice,
is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? In 2004 a
senior advisor to President Bush confided to journalist Ron Suskind,
Were an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. Were
historys actors. Similar thoughts may cross the minds of Chinas
leaders. Even if they do not, it is still perfectly possible for a
republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in
denial about its loss of republican virtue.
The American empire
is young by historical standards. Its continental expansion in the 19th
century was unabashedly imperialistic. Yet the comparative ease with
which sparsely settled territory was absorbed into the original federal
structure militated against the development of an authentically
imperial mentality and put minimal strain on the political institutions
of the republic. By contrast, Americas era of overseas expansion,
which can be marked from the Spanish-American War of 1898, has been a
good deal more difficult and, precisely for this reason, has repeatedly
conjured up the specter of an imperial presidency. Leaving aside
American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and
the U.S. Virgin Islands, which remain American dependencies, U.S.
interventions abroad have typically been brief.
During
the course of the 20th century, the United States occupied Panama for
74 years, the Philippines for 48, Palau for 47, Micronesia and the
Marshall Islands for 39, Haiti for 19, and the Dominican Republic for
8. The formal postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan continued
for, respectively, 10 and 7 years, though U.S. forces still remain in
those countries, as well as in South Korea. Troops were also deployed
in large numbers in South Vietnam from 1965, though by 1973 they were
gone.
This pattern supports the widespread assumption
that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq will not last
far beyond President George W. Bushs term in office. Empireespecially
unstated empireis ephemeral in a way that makes our own age quite
distinct from previous ages.
In the American case,
however, the principal cause of its ephemeral empire is not the
alienation of conquered peoples or the threat posed by rival empires
(the principal solvents of other 20th-century empires) but domestic
constraints. These take three distinct forms. The first can be
characterized as a troop deficit. In 1920, when it successfully quelled
a major Iraqi insurgency, Britain had one soldier in Iraq for every 23
locals. Today, the United States has just one soldier for every 210
Iraqis.
The problem is not strictly demographic, as is
sometimes assumed. For the United States is not short of young people.
(It has many times more males aged 15 to 24 than Iraq or Afghanistan.)
It is just that the United States prefers to maintain a relatively
small proportion of its population in the armed forces, at 0.5 percent.
Moreover, only a small and highly trained part of this military is
available for combat duties overseas.
Members of this elite
group are not easy to sacrifice. Nor are they easy to replace. Each
time the newspaper reports the tragedy of another death in action, I am
reminded of the lines of Rudyard Kipling, the greatest of the British
imperial poets:
A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail
The Crammers boast, the Squadrons pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
The
second constraint on Americas unstated empire is the U.S. budget
deficit. The costs of the war in Iraq are proving significantly higher
than the administration forecast: $290 billion since the invasion in
2003. That figure is not much in relation to the size of the U.S.
economyless than 2.5 percent of gross domestic productbut it has
clearly proved insufficient to achieve the swift postwar reconstruction
that might have averted todays incipient civil war. Other spending
priorities, such as the ballooning unfunded liabilities of the Medicare
system, have precluded the Marshall Plan for the Middle East that some
Iraqis had hoped for.
Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, there is the American attention deficit. Past empires had
little difficulty in sustaining public support for protracted
conflicts. The United States, by contrast, has become markedly worse at
this. It took less than 18 months for a majority of American voters to
start telling pollsters at Gallup that they regarded the invasion of
Iraq as a mistake. Comparable levels of disillusionment with the
Vietnam War did not set in until August 1968, three years after U.S.
forces had arrived en masse, by which time the total number of
Americans killed in action was approaching 30,000.
All
kinds of pat theories exist to explain the diminished durability of
empires in our time. Some say that the reach of the 24-hour news media
makes it too hard for would-be imperialists to conceal abuses of power.
Others insist that military technology has ceased to confer an
unassailable advantage on the United States; improvised explosive
devices are the ten-rupee jezails of our time, negating at a stroke the
superiority of American weaponry by rendering most of it superfluous.
Yet
the real reasons why todays empires are both ephemeral and undeclared
lie elsewhere. Whether we acknowledge them or not, empires repeatedly
emerge as historys actors because of the economies of scale that they
make possible. There is a demographic limit to the number of people
most nation-states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less
constrained; among its core functions are to mobilize and equip large
military forces recruited from multiple peoples and to levy the taxes
or raise the loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of
more than one nationality.
But why fight wars? Again,
the answer must be economic. The self-interested objectives of imperial
expansion range from the fundamental need to ensure the security of the
metropolis by defeating enemies beyond its borders, to the collection
of rents and taxation from subject peoplesto say nothing of the more
obvious prizes of new land for settlement, raw materials, and treasure.
As a general rule, an empire needs to procure these things at lower
prices than they would cost in free exchange with independent peoples
or with another empire if the costs of conquest and colonization are to
be justified.
At the same time, however, an empire may
provide public goodsthat is, benefits of imperial rule that flow not
only to the rulers but also to the ruled and, indeed, to third parties.
These can include peace in the sense of a Pax Romana, increased trade
or investment, improved justice or governance, better education (which
may or may not be associated with religious conversion), or improved
material conditions.
Imperial rule is not just about
boots on the ground. Not only soldiers but also civil servants,
settlers, voluntary associations, firms, and local elites can all, in
their different ways, serve to impose the will of the center on the
periphery. Nor must the benefits of empire flow exclusively to the
empires rulers and their clients. Colonists drawn from lower income
groups in the metropolis may also share in the fruits of empire. Those
who stay at home may derive emotional gratification from the victories
of distant legions. Local elites may also figure among the winners.
An
empire, then, will come into existence and endure so long as the
benefits of exerting power over foreign peoples exceed the costs of
doing so in the eyes of the imperialists; and so long as the benefits
of accepting dominance by a foreign people exceed the costs of
resistance in the eyes of the subjects. Such calculations implicitly
take into account the potential costs of relinquishing power to another
empire.
At the moment, in these terms, the costs of
running countries like Iraq and Afghanistan look too high to most
Americans; the benefits of doing so seem at best nebulous; and no rival
empire seems able or willing to do a better job. With its republican
institutions battered but still intact, the United States does not have
the air of a new Rome. Although the current president has striven to
empower the executive, he is no Octavian.
But all these
things could change. In our ever more populous world, where certain
natural resources are destined to become more scarce, the old
mainsprings of imperial rivalry remain. Look only at Chinas recent
vigorous pursuit of privileged relationships with major commodity
producers in Africa and elsewhere. Or ask how long a neoisolationist
America would remain disengaged from the Muslim world in the face of
new Islamist terrorist attacks.
Empire today, it is
true, is both unstated and unwanted. But history suggests that the
calculus of power could swing back in its favor tomorrow.
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