Welt am Sonntag, Germany
March 17 2006
The Empire of Europe
The English version of my article for “Internationale Politik”,
journal of the German Council on Foreign Relations. The Spring issue
of the journal’s Transatlantic Edition included this piece, in which
I argue that Europe, not the USA, is following an imperial path –
something I’d be the last person to criticize.
The Empire of Europe
The United States is not today’s empire. The European Union is
Europe is taking on its imperial heritage and acting like an imperial
power, not only in the Balkans. The European Union’s problem,
however, is that neither its citizens nor the majority of its
politicians have faced up to this reality. So they frequently discuss
the wrong questions.
The apostle Paul was almost lynched as a traitor to the faith in the
temple in Jerusalem. At the last minute the intervention of a Roman
cohort rescued him from the hysterical mob. During the ensuing
interrogation the tentmaker, rabbi, and Christian from Tarsus let it
be known he was a Roman citizen: “The commander rushed in and asked
Paul, ‘Is it true? Are you a Roman citizen?’ ‘I am,’ answered Paul.
The commander then observed, ‘It cost me quite a sum to get my
citizenship.’ ‘Ah,’ said Paul, ‘but I am a citizen by birth!'”
That meant that Paul could be subjected neither to Roman torture nor
to the rough justice of the Jews. The Roman governor vouched for his
safety. The story is recounted in detail in the Acts of the Apostles,
which offers a fascinating view of the Roman Empire from an unusual
perspective-from the periphery instead of the center of power.
As a Roman, Paul grew up with the idea of a universal regime, a
universal law, and an imperial citizenship that transcended the
strictures of race and religion and applied equally at any time and
any place. Probably only someone with such a background could have
transformed Christianitity from a Jewish sect into a world religion.
The Roman Empire anticipated the kingdom of God, the Pax Romana
anticipated the Pax Christi. Since then, Empire has never been merely
history, but always utopia as well. A vision of power, to be true –
czars, shahs, and kaisers all adopted and corrupted the title
“Caesar”- but also a utopia of freedom – freedom of travel, trade,
residence, and religion. The Roman Empire was a cultural melting pot
where, even in remote Galilee, a Jewish carpenter’s son could
encounter settlers from Greece and legionnaires from Gaul. From the
northern border of England to Amman in present-day Jordan, one can
find the legacies of Roman civilization: streets, baths, market
squares, theaters, and amphitheaters. The Roman citizen was a citizen
of the world in a sense that has been replicated only by today’s
business traveller who, in every city of the globalized world, moves
about in identical planes, airports, rented cars, hotels, bars, etc.,
for which he pays in the same plastic, global currency. Whether he
can be as assured of protection against local harassment as Paul was
2000 years ago is another matter.
Curiously, it was not so much the Empire’s achievements as its
decline and fall that captured the imagination of the West. In 1984
the German historian Alexander Demandt counted no less than 500
theories of the fall of Rome. Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to
find out how the empire managed to survive for half a millennium
despite huge distances, difficult communications, and cultural
divergence? The negative view of Rome also predominates in popular
culture, whether in Hollywood films (from Quo Vadis? to Gladiator) or
the Asterix comic books. Shortly after France had to liquidate its
own colonial empire and during the ascent of Gaullism as the founding
ideology of the fifth republic, Asterix celebrated the barbaric life
of the Gauls as the ideal of freedom while portraying the Romans as
stupid and decadent. It’s no accident that one of Rome’s few
justifications in popular culture comes from Britain. In a scene from
the film Life of Brian, the Popular Front of Judea (PFJ) is planning
an attack on the Roman occupiers:
Reg: … And what have they [the Romans] ever given us in return?
Xerxes: The aqueduct.
Reg: What?
Xerxes: The aqueduct.
Reg: Oh, yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
Commando 3: And the sanitation.
Loretta: Oh, yeah, the sanitation. Reg, remember what the city used
to be like?
Reg: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation
are two things that the Romans have done.
Matthias: And the roads.
Reg: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go
without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation,
the aqueduct, and the roads-
Commando: Irrigation.
Xerxes: Medicine.
Commando 2: Education.
Reg: Yeah, yeah, all right. Fair enough.
Commando 1: And the wine.
Francis: Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss if the Romans left,
right Reg?
Commando: Public baths.
Loretta: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it.
They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine,
education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water
system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Xerxes: Brought peace.
Reg: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
In this scene, the comedy troupe Monty Python subverted the
politically correct conventional wisdom in post-colonial Britain and
spoke a truth that was seldom acknowledged in the media, academia,
the schools, or in politics: that the British Empire had – as had
Rome – accomplished a gigantic civilizing mission. Within just over
200 years, huge areas and millions of people had been rescued from
disease, ignorance, and the whims of local despots, and brought into
the modern age. The global empire created global trade and a global
market, established global legal norms (including the abolition of
slavery, torture, the burning of widows, and blood feuds) and
internationally binding business practices ranging from banking,
credit, and insurance to bookkeeping. It also set up a global lingua
franca, and the ideals of personal, transnational mobility and equal
rights for all. The globalized world of today is a product of the
British Empire.
A half century of decolonization has not led to democracy and peace.
On the contrary, tyranny and war are more the rule than the exception
in the postcolonial world, and especially in Africa. Neither has
decolonization brought prosperity. In fact, the income gap between
the former colonies and the former colonial powers has increased
practically across the board since decolonization. When Sierra Leone
was released into independence in 1965, per capita income in Britain
was eight times higher than in its poorest colony. Now it is 200
times higher. (Incidentally, British troops recently returned to the
country amid cheers to end a bloody civil war that was caused in part
by Sierra Leone’s dire poverty.) Of all former colonies, only
Malaysia and Singapore have managed to improve their positions
relative to their former colonial master; India may be about to join
them.
In Praise of Empire
We have grown accustomed to viewing history as an evolutionary
process in which the nation state has replaced the empire, yet there
is little actual progress to be seen. The nation state that developed
in late medieval Europe was certainly preferable to the chaos it
replaced, in which local warlords (“noblemen”) were constantly
engaged in mutual slaughter. Yet with few exceptions, the history of
nation states is less edifying than that of the great empires;
domestic intolerance and external aggression have been the chief
characteristics of political entities founded on homogeneity of race,
culture, and above all, religion. Homogeneity in nation states was,
by the way, never what it claimed to be. Long before the population
migrations in the second half of the 20th century, practically every
nation state had minorities that diverged ethnically, religiously, or
culturally from the dominant culture. Almost every nation state is a
multiethnic, multicultural empire in miniature.
Yet since the nation defines itself ideologically through race,
language, culture, religion, and history, the nation state tends to
be intolerant – to the extreme of committing cultural and physical
genocide. The dissolution of empires is always bound up with orgies
of violence. Witness the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire’s
last days, the massacres during the separation of India and Pakistan,
or the mayhem committed by Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians
alike during the collapse of the socialist mini-empire of Yugoslavia.
These are not the only examples. Not that long ago, the international
community sought to come to grips with the nation state’s natural
intolerance by legitimizing ethnic cleansing. Think of the
“population exchange” between Greece and Turkey organized by the
League of Nations or the “westward displacement” of Poland resolved
by the United Nations – which presupposed the expulsion of the
Germans from their eastern territories.
The “right of national self-determination” proclaimed by US President
Woodrow Wilson in 1917 was probably – with the obvious exception of
communism and National Socialism – the most harmful idea of the 20th
Century, an age that produced more than its share of harmful ideas.
Wilson’s Kantian utopia of a band of democratic republics that would
administer eternal peace through the League of Nations was
well-meaning, but it was also hypocritical and blind to history. The
United States itself had fought a horrendous civil war half a century
earlier to make clear that there could be no right of
self-determination for individual states or groups of states within
the Union. And while in America the claim of every minority to
constitute a state was rightly subordinated to the viability of the
Union, in Versailles the negotiators invoked the principle of
self-determination to deconstruct the generally successful, peaceful,
and multicultural Habsburg Empire into hate-filled mini-republics. At
the same time, the Germans and the Austrians were forbidden from
uniting in a democratic republic. (Once Hitler had brought the
Austrians “home into the Reich”, however, he was permitted to carve
up Czechoslovakia, with explicit reference to the Sudeten Germans’
right of self-determination).
The United Nations, founded by Wilson’s disciple Franklin D.
Roosevelt, is based on the false presumption that the nation is
comparable to a natural person, and is thus the sacrosanct smallest
unit of the international community. Of course, a process of
reconsideration has been going on since the attacks of September 11,
2001. The nation has lost its mystique; the individual citizen with
his or her human rights is back in focus. Moreover, with each
additional failed state that comes under UN mandate, the world body
itself becomes more of a quasi-imperial entity, a kind of empire by
proxy on behalf of the great powers. This causes its own kinds of
problems, as the scandal over child prostitution in UN refugee camps,
corruption within the oil-for-food program, failure to protect Its
dependents against terror in Rwanda and Srebrenica or to respond to
humanitarian disasters such as in Kashmir have shown. These are the
problems of an imperial power.
The white man’s burden-around his waist?
Perhaps this metamorphosis of the United Nations has something to do
with the new way in which some academics have been looking at the
project of empire, most notably Niall Ferguson in Britain and
Herfried Munkler in Germany. Ferguson’s view of empire is more
generous and eccentric than that of Munkler, who maneuvers carefully
within the mainstream. Neither author directly addresses the issue of
the United Nations, however. But both assume that today’s world is
dominated by an empire and that we should get used to it. That empire
is, of course, the USA.
In his book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire,
Ferguson criticizes the United States because it shies away from the
imperial responsibility that Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s
Burden”. For Ferguson’s taste, the Americans are not imperialist
enough. “Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line,
inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings…this conjures
up an image of America as a sedentary colossus – to put it bluntly, a
kind of strategic couch potato…” Between 1991 and 2001 the number
of obese Americans grew from twelve to twenty-one% of the population.
“Today,” writes Ferguson acerbically, “the white man’s burden is
around his waist.” Munkler, meanwhile, in his new book Imperien
explores ways of reining in the overly imperialistic United States
and, true to the German historiographical tradition since the
Romantic age, establishes a contrast between the nation state and
empire in which the former is characterized per se as peaceful:
“States are embedded in an order that they have established together
with other states and that they do not control alone. Empires, on the
other hand, understand themselves as creators and guardians of an
order ultimately depending on them which they must defend against
chaos. Looking at the history of empires, we see that phrases such as
‘axis of evil’ and ‘outposts of tyranny’ are neither new nor special.
Whereas states halt at the borders of other states and leave it to
them to regulate their own affairs, empires interfere in the
conditions of others to help fulfil their own mission.”
First, note how Munkler replaces political analysis with linguistic
criticism. Are the states that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
was referring to – North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe -tyrannies or
not? And if they are, why not describe them as such? Secondly, how
can a German historian claim with a straight face that “states halt
at the borders of other states”? At most, one might say looking at
European history, temporarily, while their armies are advancing or
retreating. More important, however, is the fact that both the
imperialist Ferguson and the nationalist Munkler base their arguments
on a false premise. If the word has any definition other than “very
large and strong state,” then the US is not an empire.
Forcing elections, then pulling out
The British socialist H.G. Wells was completely right when he stated
in 1921 that the United States is “an altogether new thing in
history…We want a new term for this new thing.” He explicitly
rejected comparisons with present and past empires. “Those were
associations of divergent peoples…there has never been a single
people on this scale before…We call the United States a country
just as we call France or Holland a country. Yet they are as
different as an automobile and a horse-drawn shay.” Elsewhere Wells
writes of the United States as the “first of the great modern
nations.” Since then, Canada and Australia have emerged as countries
similar to the USA in type and potential, and constitute, together
with New Zealand, Great Britain, and America, the “Anglosphere,” the
most important pole of the globalized capitalist and democratic
world. Brazil, India, and Indonesia are huge democracies that could
also play global political roles, while China and Russia are empires
in transition. It is still completely unclear whether they will
become “modern nations” or aggressive opponents of the democracies in
the struggle for the future of the earth.
The behavior that Ferguson and Munkler criticize from their opposing
standpoints is actually determined by the fact that the United States
neither is nor wants to be an empire. The nation is big enough for
armed isolationism to remain an option, and so individualistically
constituted in its politics, economy, and society that the consensual
national will required for the sustained maintenance of a global
imperial presence simply cannot be produced. The global order that
this novel entity seeks is not an “association of divergent peoples”
for whose fates in a Hobbesian world the military establishment in
Washington and the taxpayers of the midwest would be responsible.
What this entity wants is the Wilsonian-Kantian vision of an
association of free republics, willing and able to take their own
fates into their own hands. As early as 1913, the US ambassador
Walter Page explained this difference of approach to British Foreign
Secretary Edward Grey. Their subject was Mexico, yet one could safely
insert the name of any other country in the world.
Grey: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
Page: Make’em vote and live by their decisions.
Grey: But suppose they don’t want to live like that?
Page: We’ll go in and make’em vote again.
Grey: And keep this up two hundred years?
Page: Yes. The United States will be here for 200 years and it can
continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote
and to rule themselves.
America is too democratic to become an empire – that is what so
frustrates Ferguson. America is too big to be tempted to give up
sovereignty to some imperial holding company like the United Nations
– this is what Munkler bemoans. Yet the criticism of America’s
unilateralism is both unfair (the United States has, both under Bill
Clinton and both Bushes, always sought to resolve international
conflicts through the UN) and naive, given the totally instrumental
relationship with this world body that America’s imperialist
competitors, including China and Russia, had and have not to mention
various Arab, African, European, and Central Asian dictators. When
Europe finally resolved to take action against one of its own
dictators – Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic – yet failed to gain the
blessings of the United Nations because Milosevic was a client of
Moscow, the Europeans discovered that NATO, an alliance of democratic
states, was just as good at legitimizing the use of force to protect
human rights as the United Nations. The principle of the “coalition
of the willing” was invented not by George W. Bush, but by the
Europeans and Bill Clinton.
An imperially administered crazy quilt
The Balkan wars and their aftermath illustrate the role of the
European Union in a multipolar world. Europe’s function in the
Balkans is that of heir to the mini-empire of Yugoslavia, which
itself inherited parts of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Europe is
only the most recent imperial power to control the Balkans – where
the nation state exists only as an artificial construct; the region’s
natural form of existence is that of an imperially administered crazy
quilt of nationalities and confessions. European politicians express
precisely this when they claim that the problems of the protectorate
of Kosovo can be resolved only through a “European perspective,”
meaning that Serbia, Albania, and Kosovo must become European Union
members. Much the same applies to Bosnia. Europe has acted and acts
as an imperial power not only in the Balkans, but also in Eastern
Europe after the withdrawal of the occupying Soviet forces, and
around the Black Sea, where Turkey, the Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia
are pressing to join Romania and Bulgaria under the wing of the
European Union and NATO.
The European Union’s problem is, however, that neither its citizens
nor the majority of its politicians have faced up to this reality.
One can see this reflected in the discussions over “widening versus
deepening” or in warnings against “overburdening” the union by
accepting new members. The demand to “deepen” the European Union is
driven by the utopian vision of turning Europe into a “great modern
nation” like the United States, the “United States of Europe.” The
failure of the constitutional referendum in two states of what is
supposed to be “core Europe” has shown what the people have grasped
before their politicians, namely that this vision is neither feasible
nor desirable. Tony Blair came closest to defining Europe’s destiny
when he said it was a matter of “becoming a superpower, not a
superstate.” Instead of avoiding the issue with phrases like “Europe
is something between a federation of states and a federal state,” the
Europeans should admit that they are an empire. Granted, a new type
of empire, but an empire nevertheless. One might object that this
empire has neither a center nor a solid structure. Yet when one
compares the rigidly centralized Czarist or Bolshevik empires to the
British Empire, that ultimately functioned on a consensual basis and
dissolved – peacefully – when the colonies became states, one sees
that empires can be structured in completely different ways.
Austria-Hungary and France-Algeria offer still other models, other
relationships between center and periphery.
One could also say that the European Union’s basic unit is the same
old nation state, but this will cease to be true at the latest when
territories in the Balkans are taken into the European Union chiefly
because they cannot become viable nation states that coexist
peacefully with their neighbors. The contours of a new European Union
are emerging, one that consists of core states plus others on the
periphery with a different status (Turkey, Georgia, Israel), as well
as territories in between that can only formally be constituted as
states. The function, not the structure is decisive.
One only has to compare the conduct of the United States in Iraq,
which it defeated militarily and occupied, with that of the European
Union toward its nominally independent neighbor Turkey. The Americans
will withdraw from Iraq as soon as the country is halfway capable of
providing security for its citizens. They will leave behind a
relatively (compared to other Arab states) democratic, federal
Islamic republic. It certainly is not a republic in the United
States’ own image – and its future remains open.
Negotiating to join the empire
Turkey, by contrast, will be working through the 80,000 pages of the
acquis communautaire, which regulates all aspects of political,
legal, and economic activity in the European Union. The Turks will
have to prove that they have implemented these regulations, even
before the country joins the European Union! The countries formerly
under Russian domination had to achieve the same feat of
homogenization. Their process of adjustment also took 15 years and
often led to domestic turmoil. Not even the Romans or British
demanded so much conformity to their culture. One could say that the
European empire consists of a core of member states on equal footing,
comparable to the first provinces that joined the Roman Republic or
the English-speaking Dominions of the British Empire. To this core is
added an expanding periphery of aspirants who are denied full EU
membership rights but required to adopt European laws, with the
prospect of taking part in Europe’s prosperity and security.
Still, Europe will not fulfill its own destiny as long as it does not
consciously and confidently place itself in the ranks of empires and
their civilizing achievements. It will remain ensnared in debates
about its “identity” and borders instead of recognizing that in
contrast to nations, empires have no natural limits. A democratic
nation such as the United States reaches its limits at the point
where going further would mean becoming an empire-which is why the
nation never expanded south of the Rio Grande. An empire, on the
other hand, finds its frontiers where they collide with the interests
of other empires or stronger nations. Europe’s borders will be set
soon enough by others. Yet it is not inconceivable that in fifty
years, not only the Black Sea but the Mediterranean as well could
become European lakes.
Given prospects such as this, it is a shame that Herfried Munkler
doesn’t even begin to discuss “Europe’s imperial challenge” until the
closing pages of his book. And there he gives in to the modern German
anti-imperialist reflex: “Europeans stand before the – paradoxical –
danger of becoming imperially overstretched without themselves being
an empire.” Indeed, if Europe were not an empire (albeit a new type
of empire) but a “supranational nation” or a Christian identity
project, its enlargement to the frontiers of Russia and the Arab
republics would indeed be an overstretch. If, however, Europe
acknowledges its imperial destiny, this expansion simply becomes a
necessary precondition for its security, not to mention a civilizing
task that could breathe new life into Europe’s weary elites.
The imperial project as a modernizing mission undermines all
reactionary dreams of the European Union as a fortress, either of a
“Christian West” or its secular twin, the paternal social welfare
state. It is the opposite of the claustrophobic conditions implied in
the ominous phrase of an “ever closer union.” Rather, a European
Empire expanding in competition with Russia and China and
strategically allied with the Anglosphere would be a space of
unfolding possibilities, where a single market and mutual security
constitute the foundation for individual, entrepreneurial, regional,
and national freedom.
lypso/nebenwidersprueche/2006/03/17/the_empire_of_ europe