LESSONS MOTHER TAUGHT US:

America: an Empire in Denial (Niall Ferguson, 3/28/03, Chronicle of Higher Education)

As I traveled around that empire's remains in the first half of 2002, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls -- which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but these vast metropoles remain cities founded and built by the British.

It is of course tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power; perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else, too. Maybe the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe too the great movements of population that transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.

Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows, and migration could have been "naturally occurring" in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to wipe away.

When the British governed a country -- even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles -- there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:

1. The English language
2. English forms of land tenure
3. Scottish and English banking
4. The Common Law
5. Protestantism
6. Team sports
7. The limited or "night watchman" state
8. Representative assemblies
9. The idea of liberty

The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the empire -- the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals -- far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves. [...]

What lessons can the United States today draw from the British experience of empire?

It would seem that the most important lesson may be that we can imperialize places without actually having to exercise effective control over them. Several of the distinctive features above are fundamentally ideas and are spread far and wide just by the global dominance of
Anglo-American culture--including what he correctly calls the most important, the idea of liberty, but also the English language, and the importance of legislatures, protestantism, etc.. So we see phenomena, like that pj mentioned earlier in the week, where the Palestinians envision an ideal state that will resemble Israel-- their hated enemy, rather than that of any of their Arab "friends" and neighbors, Arab Showplace? Could It Be the West Bank? (JAMES BENNET, April 2, 2003, NY Times):

"The State of Palestine is a sovereign, independent republic." So--perhaps wistfully, perhaps with promise--begins the new draft of the Palestinian constitution.

It may seem paradoxical that a people without a state would have the institutions of a democracy--an elected legislature, an elected president, a constitution that has been in the works for four years. Yet the paradox runs deeper than that. It is because of their experience of statelessness that Palestinians have a chance to build a democracy, though the Bush administration now seems more intent on creating a model Arab government in Iraq. Lessons learned in the Palestinian diaspora, and from struggling against and living alongside Israelis, have made many Palestinians yearn, not just for a state, but for a democratic state.

There may be no need to colonize Palestine and impose democracy because they've already been infected by and succumbed to the ideas.

Other features--protection of property rights, dependable banking, independent and precedential legal system--are more deeply institutional in nature and are therefore much harder to create and maintain (obviously a legislature is an institution, but seems a shallow one, which can be tinkered with a great deal). However, the pressures exerted by the globalized economy (an economy whose tenets are a product of Anglo-American ideas) seem to offer strong incentives to develop these structures. We basically then have a system in place where these features get disseminated without our ever having to set foot in a country.

If we consider that so much of what we have to offer can be spread in this relatively passive way and that--though the influence that Britain exercised on its colonies, chiefly by planting these features, was more beneficial than not--the colonized in most places never stopped wanting independence, we may conclude that the "new" American empire can and should be one of very limited physical intervention. In the case of a Palestine or an Iraq, rather than us or the Israelis trying to run the respective countries and build institutions ourselves, which will necessarily bear our taint, we might better leave the bulk of the work to the natives, but assist them by training lawyers, judges, bankers, newspaper editors, and the like and by lending them some of ours while they get banking and legal systems and a free press up and running. This will keep us involved with and allied to the emerging nations, without creating the foolish resentments that led to things like the American Revolution or Indian Independence.

Likewise, these states should be offered, but not required to accept, trade treaties and pledges of mutual defense. So long as Palestine and Iraq remain on a reformist path, let us share their destinies as equals and friends, at least in theory, rather than try to impose our will on them, as fathers so often do their sons, with decidedly mixed results. There should be no doubt in our minds that we can improve "colonies" by getting them to adopt the "distinctive features" that characterize the old British system, but we should have no delusions that if we set ourselves up as masters and impose the system from above we will be thanked for it. We should strive to make the American Empire as organic as possible, as if it was these peoples' own idea and we're only there to offer assistance. The more natural and self-determined it is the more likely to thrive. As the greatness of the British Imperium lay in its ideas, so the weakness lay in not knowing enough to loosen the grasp once the ideas had taken root. If we can imperialize with a delicate grip we may reap the benefits and avoid the detriments.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2003 9:08 AM