Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (63 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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The nature of this partnership would be a straightforward ‘deal’:
On our side: provide more aid, untied to trade; write off debt; help with good governance and infrastructure, training to the soldiers ... in conflict resolution; encouraging investment; and access to our markets ... On the African side: true democracy, no more excuses for dictatorship, abuses of human rights; no tolerance of bad governance ... [and] the endemic corruption of some states ... Proper commercial, legal and financial systems.
 
Nor was that all. In the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September, Mr Blair declared his desire for ‘justice’:
Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world ... The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.
 
Not since before the Suez Crisis has a British Prime Minister talked with such unreserved enthusiasm about what Britain could do for the rest of the world. Indeed, it is hard to think of a Prime Minister since Gladstone so ready to make what sounds remarkably like undiluted altruism the basis of his foreign policy. The striking thing, however, is that with only a little rewriting this could be made to sound an altogether more menacing project. Routine intervention to overthrow governments deemed to be ‘bad’; economic assistance in return for ‘good’ government and ‘proper commercial, legal and financial systems’; a mandate to ‘bring ... [the] values of democracy and freedom’ to ‘people round the world’. On reflection, this bears more than a passing resemblance to the Victorians’ project to export their own ‘civilization’ to the world. As we have seen, the Victorians regarded overthrowing rogue regimes from Oudh to Abyssinia as an entirely legitimate part of the civilizing process; the Indian Civil Service prided itself on replacing ‘bad’ government with ‘good’; while Victorian missionaries had an absolute confidence that it was their role to bring the values of Christianity and commerce to the same ‘people round the world’ to whom Mr Blair wishes to bring ‘democracy and freedom’.
Nor do the resemblances end there. When the British went to war against the dervishes in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s, they had no doubt that they were bringing ‘justice’ to a rogue regime. The Mahdi was in many ways a Victorian Osama bin Laden, a renegade Islamic fundamentalist whose murder of General Gordon was ‘9/11’ in miniature. The Battle of Omdurman was the prototype for the kinds of war the US has been fighting since 1990, against Iraq, against Serbia, against the Taliban. Just as the US Air Force bombed Serbia in 1999 in the name of ‘human rights’, so the Royal Navy conducted raids on the West African coast in the 1840s and even threatened Brazil with war as part of the campaign to end the slave trade. And when Mr Blair justifies intervention against ‘bad’ regimes by promising aid and investment in return, he is unconsciously echoing the Gladstonian Liberals, who rationalized their military occupation of Egypt in 1881 in much the same way. Even the widespread feminist disdain for the Taliban regime’s treatment of women recalls the way British administrators in India strove to stamp out the customs of
sati
and female infanticide.
In an article published a few months after Mr Blair’s speech, the British diplomat Robert Cooper had the courage to call this new policy of ‘re-ordering the world’ by its correct name. If rogue ‘premodern’ states became ‘too dangerous for established states to tolerate’, he wrote, it was ‘possible to imagine a defensive imperialism’, since: ‘The most logical way to deal with chaos, and the one most employed in the past is colonization’. Unfortunately, the words ‘empire and imperialism’ have become ‘a form of abuse’ in the ‘postmodern’ world:
Today, there are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the opportunities, perhaps even the need for colonization is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century ... All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the supply and demand for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment and growth – all of this seems eminently desirable.
 
Cooper’s solution to this problem was what he called ‘a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values ... an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organization but which rests today on the voluntary principle’. The precise nature of this ‘postmodern imperialism’, he suggested, might be extrapolated from the existing ‘voluntary imperialism of the global economy’, meaning the power of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and what he called ‘the imperialism of neighbours’, meaning the perennial practice of interference in a next-door country whose instability threatens to spread over the border. The institutional locus of Cooper’s new imperialism, however, was none other than the European Union:
The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralized absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state ... A cooperative empire might be ... a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal. The lightest of touches will be required from the centre; the ‘imperial bureaucracy’ must be under control, accountable, and the servant, not the master, of the commonwealth. Such an institution must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy as its constituent parts. Like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its citizens with some of its laws, some coins and the occasional road.
 
Perhaps what the Blair speech and the Cooper article both illustrate most clearly is how tenacious the grip of empire remains on the Oxford-educated mind. Yet there is a conspicuous defect in both of their arguments which suggests that idealism has got the better of realism. The reality is that neither the international community (Blair) nor the European Union (Cooper) is in a position to play the part of a new British Empire. This is for the simple reason that neither has the fiscal or the military resources to do so. The total operating expenses of the UN and all its affiliated institutions amount to around $18 billion a year, approximately 1 per cent of the US federal budget. For its part, the European Union’s total budget is little more than 1 per cent of total European GDP; expenditure by national governments accounts for just under 50 per cent. In this respect, both the UN and the EU resemble not so much the Rome of the Emperors as the Rome of the Pope – of whom Stalin famously asked: ‘How many divisions has he?’
There is, in truth, only one power capable of playing an imperial role in the modern world, and that is the United States. Indeed, to some degree it is already playing that role.
Bearing the Burden
 
What lessons can the United States today draw from the British experience of empire? The obvious one is that the most successful economy in the world – as Britain was for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – can do a very great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies. It is nothing short of astonishing that Great Britain was able to govern so much of the world without running up an especially large defence bill. To be precise, Britain’s defence expenditure averaged little more than 3 per cent of net national product between 1870 and 1913, and it was lower for the rest of the nineteenth century. This was money well spent. No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism; but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British Empire enforced it.
By comparison, the United States today is vastly wealthier relative to the rest of the world than Britain ever was. In 1913 Britain’s share of total world output was 8 per cent; the equivalent figure for the US in 1998 was 22 per cent. Nor should anybody pretend that, at least in fiscal terms, the cost of expanding the American Empire, even if it were to mean a great many small wars like the one in Afghanistan, would be prohibitive. In 2000 American defence spending stood at just under 3 per cent of gross national product, compared with an average for the years 1948 – 98 of 6.8 per cent. Even after big cuts in military expenditure, the United States is still the world’s only superpower, with an unrivalled financial and military-technological capability. Its defence budget is fourteen times that of China and twenty-two times that of Russia. Britain never enjoyed such a lead over her imperial rivals.
The hypothesis, in other words, is a step in the direction of political globalization, with the United States shifting from informal to formal empire much as late Victorian Britain once did. That is certainly what we should expect if history does indeed repeat itself. Like the United States today, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface. As we have seen, its empire began as a network of coastal bases and informal spheres of influence, much like the post-1945 American ‘empire’. But real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism. That was how so much of the atlas came to be coloured imperial red.
No one could deny the extent of the American informal empire – the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies and even of TV evangelists. Is this so very different from the early British Empire of monopoly trading companies and missionaries? Nor is it any coincidence that a map showing the principal US military bases around the world looks remarkably like a map of Royal Navy coaling stations a hundred years ago. Even recent American foreign policy recalls the gunboat diplomacy of the British Empire in its Victorian heyday, when a little trouble on the periphery could be dealt with by a short, sharp ‘surgical strike’. The only difference is that today’s gunboats fly.
Yet in three respects the process of ‘Anglobalization’ is fundamentally different today. On close inspection, America’s strengths may not be the strengths of a natural imperial hegemon. For one thing, British imperial power relied on the massive export of capital and people. But since 1972 the American economy has been a net
im
porter of capital (to the tune of 55 per cent of gross domestic product last year) and it remains the favoured destination of immigrants from around the world, not a producer of would-be colonial emigrants. Britain in its heyday was able to draw on a culture of unabashed imperialism which dated back to the Elizabethan period, whereas the US – born not in a war against slavery, as Mr Blair seemed to suggest in his conference speech, but in a war against the British Empire – will always be a reluctant ruler of other peoples. Since Woodrow Wilson’s intervention to restore the elected government in Mexico in 1913, the American approach has too often been to fire some shells, march in, hold elections and then get the hell out – until the next crisis. Haiti is one recent example; Kosovo another. Afghanistan may yet prove to be the next.
In 1899 Rudyard Kipling, the Empire’s greatest poet, addressed a powerful appeal to the United States to shoulder its imperial responsibilities:
Take up the White Man’s Burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons in exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
 
 
Take up the White Man’s Burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard ...
No one would dare use such politically incorrect language today. The reality is nevertheless that the United States has – whether it admits it or not – taken up some kind of global burden, just as Kipling urged. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost. That was the point made by John Buchan, looking back on the heyday of Milner’s imperialist kindergarten from the dark vantage point of 1940:
I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands ... We believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world ... The ‘white man’s burden’ is now an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.
 

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