War and peace and war, p.40
War and Peace and War, page 40
The same imbalance exists with epidemics. AIDS had the potential to be another Black Death, if not for the advances in molecular biology and medicine. If not for molecular genetics, we would not even know why we are dying. But just knowing the cause (even without a cure) allowed societies to control the spread of the epidemic. In Africa, AIDS did result in a pandemic—that is still growing. In fact, several African countries have experienced during the late twentieth century what appears to be a classical demographic-structural collapse, in which overpopulation led to state breakdown and bloody, even genocidal civil wars (for instance, Somalia and Rwanda).
The prevalence of liberal democracy today also distinguishes us from the agrarian societies studied by historians. At least in theory, democracy should channel intra-elite competition into less-violent forms. By allowing orderly and peaceful transfer of power, modern democratic societies should prove to be more resistant to state collapse. However, because true liberal democracies have been around only for a century or so (it is only in the early twentieth century that the suffrage began encompassing more than 50 percent of the adult population), they have not yet been around long enough to experience a secular cycle.
The world has changed. Several cause-effect chains, operating in agrarian societies, have been completely ruptured, or at least transformed in a big way by the industrial revolution. On the other hand, many of the economic and social trends during the last half-century or so have been moving together in highly suggestive ways. For example, we know that twentieth century was an era of inflation, which came after a period of relatively stable prices (Fischer’s equilibrium of the Victorian era). Most people tend to explain persistent inflation as just another characteristic of modernity, but every previous secular wave, without exceptions, saw a “price revolution” that ended up in crisis.
A rise in crime rates has afflicted Western countries since 1960. It has been observed not only in America, but also in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries. This rising trend is especially baffling to the experts because for at least a century before 1960, crime statistics in all of these countries had been declining. Could it be that crime statistics reflect an increase of some sort of social pressure? In past secular cycles, we typically see a rise in crime rates in the pre-crisis period.
Another important indicator is the degree of economic inequality. Again, the 1960s is a breakpoint: Before that date, inequality was declining in the United States; after that date, it started increasing. In the decades right after World War II, a huge gap did not exist between the salaries of common workers and the compensation of CEOs. Adjusted for inflation, the incomes of the lowest 20 percent of workers have been stagnating and actually declining since 1970. The Matthew principle is in full operation.
Moreover, the official inflation rate, calculated by Bureau of Labor Statistics, does not tell the whole story. Many big-item purchases, most notably the prices of homes and the cost of education and health care, have been growing much faster than inflation.
The trends in education are particularly revealing because it is one of the best indicators of intra-elite competition. During the twentieth century, ever-increasing numbers of school graduates in America went to college. By the late twentieth century, just finishing college was not enough to enter the increasingly more competitive job market, and the number of college graduates earning Ph.D.s started increasing. The “price” of a Ph.D. in terms of years necessary for completion has been growing even faster. Between 1967 and 1995, the average length of time until finishing a Ph.D. increased in physical science from 6 to 8.4 years, and in social sciences from 7.7 to 10.5 years. In the humanities, the average time to a Ph.D. is 12 years, and in education 19.9 years!
These trends are signs of a credentialing crisis, which reflects increased intra-elite competition—more and more is required of adults to maintain familiar standards of comfort. Similar trends have been observed during pre-crisis phases of previous secular cycles. At the University of Paris, it took eight years to earn a Doctorate degree in the thirteenth century (five years to obtain a Bachelor degree, then three more to achieve the Doctorate). In the fourteenth century, it took 16 years to earn a Doctorate. The cost of education increased much faster than inflation in sixteenth-century France. Enrollments in Oxford and Cambridge peaked just before the Great Revolution, and then declined during the eighteenth century.
Finally, there has been a troubling trend in the American asabiya. Robert Putnam asserts in Bowling Alone that at least since the times of Tocqueville, the American society has always enjoyed large stocks of social capital. But, beginning in 1960, several indicators of social capital started declining. Putnam writes, “We have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues.” Thirty years ago, people invited friends for dinner twice as often as today. Social trust also seems to be declining. Certainly, the proportion of people saying that they trust the government in Washington has been steadily declining—from between 70 and 80 percent in the late 1950s to between 30 and 40 percent in the 1990s. Forty-five percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago. The message of Bowling Alone is one of the increasing isolation of individuals, alone in cars, alone at work, divorced, bowling under fluorescent lights alone. Surely that is a sign of impending danger for any society.
If this trend of social disintegration does not correctly foretell more trouble, it will be because new kinds of integration are now at work. My last chapter is a hopeful one about how the trend toward greater communication and interconnectedness might affect our secular cycle, might change what asabiya means geographically, and might indeed change the very idea of what empire is.
Chapter 14
The End of Empire?
How the Mobile Phone Is Changing Cliodynamics
In 1918, as the victors of the First World War were dismantling the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, while revolutions were tearing apart Russia and Germany, many thought that the age of empires was over. The death of imperialism was next proclaimed in the 1960s when England, France and other European colonial powers shed their overseas empires. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, commentators of international affairs held another wake for empire. Is this the end of history? Or at least the end of the cycles of empires? Or are rumors of empire demise exaggerated? Will the insights from cliodynamics about historical empires remain as purely academic knowledge, fit to be enjoyed only by armchair historians, sitting snug by the fire and sipping an after-dinner cognac? Or do these insights have relevance to international politics today?
Recently, there has been much discussion of whether the United States today is an empire that can and should be compared with imperial powers of the past. Empire seems to be in fashion, even if some (generally those with left-leaning politics) hate the idea, whereas others (such as neoconservatives) love it. According to Charles Krauthammer, a frequent contributor to the neoconservative Weekly Standard, “We are not just any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperium.”
In 2001, a team of scholars, led by former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich (who was trained as a historian), was commissioned by the Pentagon to write a report on historical empires, and make recommendations on how the U.S. could sustain its military and political predominance in the world. Fundamental issues were addressed such as whether the U.S. even was an empire; and if so, is that good or bad? And, most interestingly, the question was raised whether history offers useful lessons for America. The report concluded, “If we can take lessons from history it is this: For the U.S. to sustain its predominance it must remain militarily dominant, but it must also maintain its preeminence across other pillars of power.” Not everybody agrees. A classical scholar, Bernard Knoz, told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, “Empires are pretty well dead; their day is gone.” The British historian Niall Fergusson, author of the 2003 book Empire, said, “The technological and economic differences between modernity and premodernity are colossal.” Finally, officials of the George W. Bush administration insist that America is not an empire.
According to my definition, an empire is a large multiethnic territorial state with complex power structure. Nobody would dispute that the U.S. is a large territorial state. As to its multiethnic composition, Chapter 2 discussed that the American melting pot had definite racial boundaries. As a result, the modern U.S. includes many minorities—Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos, to name only three. Certain political scientists have recently argued that some large minorities, most notably the Latinos, are resistant to the assimilation of the formerly dominant WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture. A particularly interesting case is the Chicanos (Mexican Americans), a growing and fairly cohesive subculture. Chicanos do not consider themselves to be immigrants to the U.S., because the areas where they are numerically strong were conquered by the U.S. from Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. Chicanos, it is claimed, have different values, stressing more the extended family and less freedom and democracy than would be the case for the mainstream U.S. culture. Such claims might be overstated, and have been vociferously disputed. Nevertheless, they serve to remind us of the limits of the melting pot metaphor—the U.S. is not a monoethnic nation, even if we discount recent immigrants.
The U.S. also has complex power structure, especially when we consider it as a global power. Although the internal arrangements of the U.S. are reasonably simple—it directly controls the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and dependent territories (such as Puerto Rico and a number of Pacific islands), its external influence reaches across the globe. It militarily occupies Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It has a strong degree of indirect control via heavy military presence (for example, in South Korea) or economic subsidies (Israel). Given the economic and diplomatic help that Israel gets from the U.S., it is essentially an American client state. The U.S. wields a great deal of political control by means of such organizations as NATO. Finally, using a variety of overt and covert means, the U.S. has been largely successful in installing friendly governments, traditionally in Latin America, more recently in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine. As one Latin American joke goes, “Do you know why there are no coup c’états in America? Because they don’t have American embassies.”
Such a complex structure of power is a hallmark of a typical empire, especially during its expansion phase. Republican Rome, for example, had its core territory inhabited by voting citizens, colonies peopled with Romans and Latins, territories inhabited by nonvoting citizens, allied cities, and client states such as Massilia in southern Gaul. The degree of political control declined from the center to the periphery. With time, however, the periphery was more closely integrated with the center.
Some might object that the U.S. cannot be an empire because it is democratically governed. However, not all empires have emperors. There were democratically governed empires such as the Athenian and the British. The Roman Empire under the Republic was governed collectively by several hundred noble and wealthy senatorial families. The political arrangements by which a state is governed are irrelevant to the definition of empire.
Retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who headed the National Security Agency in the 1980s, and Robert Dujarric, a Council on Foreign Relations Hitachi fellow, estimate in their book, America’s Inadvertent Empire, that the American empire “comprises 17 percent of the world’s population but controls about 70 percent of the gross world product. Because nearly all of the developed countries are included, the network’s share of science, technology, and corporate resources is closer to 90 percent of the world’s total.”
So what can the theories that we discussed in this book tell us about the dynamics of the world’s current hegemonic empire? As we have seen, what makes empires function are the qualities of their core nations, of which the most important is asabiya. American asabiya might be on a decline, if recent trends in social capital are good indicators, but the U.S. still has an abundance when compared to other large contemporary countries. The response of the American nation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is clear evidence that the U.S. is highly capable of collective action. Most tellingly, there was no attempt by the mainstream opposition party, the Democrats, to use the events of 9/11 and the subsequent course of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as a means of political infighting against the ruling Republicans, even though the Bush administration arguably committed a number of grave errors.
The obverse side of internal cohesion, in fact one of the important factors sustaining it, is the “us versus them” mentality. Observers of current American politics, especially those from outside the U.S. (from where such matters are easier to see), have commented frequently on what they often characterize as the nationalistic, even xenophobic, strain in America, which has become particularly apparent in the post-9/11 era, but was discernible even before. The British journalist and writer Anatol Lieven, now at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently argued that American patriotism has two faces. The first is the “American Creed,” a civic ideology that espouses liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. A powerful integrative ideology with elements of messianism has always been extremely important in the success of world empires. The Byzantines had their Orthodox Christianity, the Arabs had Islam, the French had la mission civilisatrice, and the Soviets had Marxism-Leninism. The American Creed impels its adherents to extend the Western values and Western democracy to the whole of the world. Much is admirable in this ideology, but there is also a dark side. Many nations (not just their rulers, but the population at large), most notably in the Muslim world (but not only there), do not desire to be “civilized” in this way. They have their own culture and traditions and would prefer to be in control over which elements of Western civilization they adopt and integrate into their own, and which they reject.
The second aspect of the American patriotism is what Lieven calls “Jacksonian nationalism.” President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) is best known for his victory against the British at New Orleans in 1815. But he achieved prominence as an Indian fighter and leader of local militias on the Tennessee frontier. Most of his campaigns were against the Cherokee, Creek, and other Indians. Lieven argues that “although ‘Jacksonian nationalism’ contains other important elements, including nativism, anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and dislike of the Northeast, a strong sense of White identity, and violent hostility to other races, was long at its core.”
In 1831, during Jackson’s presidency, the Cherokee Nation appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court against new laws passed by the state of Georgia, which laid the basis for the Indians’ expulsion from the lands they held long before European settlers appeared in America. These laws were in violation of several treaties with U.S. governments, and a majority of the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled in favor of Cherokees.
As Lieven relates, “To this Jackson reputedly replied, ‘John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.’ Although the president may not actually have said this, these words certainly reflected the spirit in which he acted. The U.S. government refused to defend the Cherokees against Georgia, Jackson warned them that they had no choice but to leave, and within a few years (although after Jackson himself left the office) they were driven out of their ancestral lands onto the ‘Trail of Tears’ to Oklahoma, on which a great many died of disease and malnutrition.”
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the radio show host Michael Savage, after referring to Arabs as “nonhumans,” said “conversion to Christianity is the only thing that probably can turn them into human beings.” As Lieven reports, he then declared: “Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing to what I’d like to see done to these people.”
The comparison that Lieven draws between the struggle of settlers against Indians on the American frontier and the clash between U.S.-led Western and Muslim civilizations fits with the principles of cliodynamics. I have argued in Chapter 2 that the origins of the American nation and the source of its high asabiya are found in the settler-Indian frontier during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The frontier is long gone, but cultural idioms and techniques of dealing with challenges are being adapted to the new challenges and adversaries.
ON MARCH 25, 1957, in a spectacular Renaissance palazzo in Rome, six European nations—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—signed the treaty establishing the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union. A glance at maps of Europe in 1957 and A.D. 800 shows that the combined territory of the six founding members traces almost precisely the empire of Charlemagne. The symbolism is heavy. It was in Rome, on Christmas Day of A.D. 800, that the pope crowned Charlemagne as emperor. Is the E.U. a new kind of empire?
In terms of its size, multiethnic population, and complex power structure the E.U. fits my definition. Furthermore, during the half century of its existence, the E.U. has been aggressively expanding, adding most recently six central European and two Mediterranean countries during the writing of this book. The core state of the E.U., Germany, meanwhile gobbled up former East Germany in 1990. However, all expansion to date was accomplished entirely by peaceful and consensual means. Historical empires do not always need to conquer new territories. As discussed previously, there were voluntary admissions to the Roman and Russian empires. Many medieval European states grew by dynastic unions. Still, the entirely peaceful expansion of the E.U. is unprecedented in world history—ultimately, all historical empires had to counter external or internal threats with force. Member states have used armed force, as the United Kingdom in its 1982 war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, but the E.U. as a whole has not done it—so far? The Europeans are moving in the direction of creating a unified military force, but we will have to wait and see whether the E.U. will prove capable of using the force when threatened. More importantly, how strong is the European asabiya? Will it motivate people to sacrifice their comforts, treasure, or blood for the sake of the unified Europe? So far, the main financial burden of empire has been borne largely by the Germans. It is customary for core nations of empires to bear the main brunt of its costs, but how long will the Germans consent to this state of affairs? Will the years of slow economic growth and high unemployment, which as of the time of this writing show no signs of ending, eventually sap the willingness of the Germans to sacrifice for the sake of the dream of a powerful united Europe?
