The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (21 page)

A Geographic Expression

You can tell that India is a strange land not by looking at snake charmers but by observing its election results: In what other country would sizzling economic growth make you unpopular? In 2004, the ruling BJP coalition went to the polls with the economic wind at its back—the country was growing 9 percent. But the BJP lost the election. A cottage industry of intellectuals, many of them socialist in orientation, quickly explained that the prosperity had been hollow, that growth hadn’t trickled down, and that the BJP had forgotten about the real India. But this explanation simply does not bear close examination. Poverty rates in India had fallen rapidly in the 1990s, in numbers large enough to be visible to all. And in any event, the puzzle continued after 2004. The Congress coalition (currently in power) has sustained average growth rates over 8 percent for six years, and yet it has fared poorly in many regional elections. Even with legitimate concerns over inequality and the distribution of wealth, there is a connection between robust growth and government popularity in almost every country in the world. Why not in India?

India is Thomas (Tip) O’Neill’s dreamland. “All politics is local,” the former Speaker of the House of Representatives famously said. In India, that principle can be carved in stone. India’s elections are not really national elections at all. They are rather simultaneous regional and local elections that have no common theme.

India’s diversity is four thousand years old and deeply rooted in culture, language, and tradition. This is a country with seventeen languages and 22,000 dialects that was for centuries a collection of hundreds of separate principalities, kingdoms, and states. When the British were leaving India, in 1947, the new government had to negotiate individual accession agreements with over five hundred rulers—bribing them, threatening them, and, in some cases, militarily coercing them into joining the Indian union. Since the decline of the Indian National Congress in the 1970s, no party in India has had a national footprint. Every government formed for the last two decades has been a coalition, comprising an accumulation of regional parties with little in common. Ruchir Sharma, who runs Morgan Stanley’s $35 billion emerging-markets portfolio, points out that a majority of the country’s twenty-eight states have voted for a dominant regional party at the expense of a so-called national party.

Uttar Pradesh in 2007 provides a perfect example. U.P., as it is called in India, is the country’s largest state. (Were it independent, its population would make it the sixth-largest country in the world.) During the 2007 campaign, the two national parties tried to run on what they saw as the great national issues. The BJP worked assiduously to revive Hindu nationalism; the Congress stressed its secularist credentials and boasted of the country’s growth rate. The two parties came in a distant third and fourth, behind local parties that stressed purely local issues—in this case, the empowerment of the lower castes. What worked in U.P. might not work in the south, or even in Mumbai. The Hindu-Muslim divide might be crucially important in one set of states, but it is absent in others. Political leaders who are strong in Tamil Nadu have no following whatsoever in the north. Punjab has its own distinct political culture that relates to Sikh issues and the history of Hindu-Sikh relations. Politicians from Rajasthan have no appeal in Karnataka. They cannot speak each other’s language—literally. It would be like holding elections across Europe and trying to talk about the same issues with voters in Poland, Greece, France, and Ireland. Winston Churchill once said that India was “just a geographic term, with no more political personality than Europe.” Churchill was usually wrong about India, but on this issue, he had a point.

This diversity and division has many advantages. It adds to India’s variety and societal energy, and it prevents the country from succumbing to dictatorship. When Indira Gandhi tried to run the government in an authoritarian and centralized manner in the 1970s, it simply didn’t work, provoking violent revolts in six of its regions. Over the last two decades, Indian regionalism has flourished, and the country has found its natural order. Even hypernationalism becomes difficult in a diverse land. When the BJP tries to unleash Hindu chauvinism as a political weapon against India’s Muslim minority, it often finds that lower-caste Hindus, as well as south Indians, are alienated and rattled by the rhetoric, which sounds exclusionary and upper-caste to them.

But this diversity and division also complicate the work of the Indian state. The constraints of the past decade are not transient phenomena that will fade; they are expressions of a structural reality in Indian politics. They make it difficult for New Delhi to define a national interest, mobilize the country behind it, and then execute a set of policies to achieve its goals, whether in economic reform or foreign policy. The prime minister cannot command national power the way that Nehru did, and in all probability no prime minister will ever do so again. The office has gone from commander in chief to chairman of the board, and the ruling party has become first among equals in a coalition. The central government often gives in to the prerogatives and power of the regional governments, which are increasingly assertive and independent. In economic terms, this means a future of muddling along, minor reforms, and energy and experimentation at the state level. In foreign policy, it means no large shifts in approach, few major commitments, and a less active and energetic role on the world stage. India will have a larger role in international affairs than ever before. It will dominate South Asia. But it may not become the global power that some hope for and others fear. At least not for a while.

If there ever was a race between India and China, it’s over. China’s economy is nearly four times the size of India’s and is still growing at a faster clip. The law of compounding tells us that India can overtake China economically only if there are drastic and sustained shifts in both countries’ trajectories that last for decades. The more likely scenario is that China will stay well ahead of India. But India can still capitalize on its advantages—a vast, growing economy, an attractive political democracy, a vibrant model of secularism and tolerance, a keen knowledge of both East and West, and a special relationship with America. If it can mobilize these forces and use them to its advantage, India will still make for a powerful package, whether it is technically number two, or three, or four in the world.

One experience relevant to India today is that of the United States of America in the late nineteenth century. Domestic constraints substantially slowed America’s political rise to world power. By 1890, America had overtaken Britain as the world’s leading economy, but in diplomatic and military terms, it was a second-rung power. Its army ranked fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria’s. Its navy was one-eighth the size of Italy’s, even though its industrial strength was by then thirteen times bigger. It participated in few international meetings or congresses, and its diplomats were small-time players in global affairs. Washington was a small, parochial town, its government had limited powers, and the presidency was not generally regarded as a pivotal post. That America was a weak state in the late nineteenth century was undeniable, and it took decades, large domestic changes, and deep international crises for this to change. In the aftermath of depressions and world wars, the American state—Washington—grew, centralized, and gained unquestioned precedence over the states. And presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson began defining America as a world power.

Ultimately, the base of American power—a vibrant American society—was its greatest strength and its weakness. It produced America’s gigantic economy and dynamic culture. But it also made its rise halting, its course erratic, and its involvement on the world stage always fragile. Perhaps India will have a similar experience: it will have a society able to respond superbly to the opportunities of a globalized world, one that will grow and prosper in the global economy and society. But India’s political system is weak and porous and thus not well equipped to play its rightful role in this new world. A series of crises might change all this, but absent a shock to the system, India’s society will stay ahead of the Indian state in the new global game.

This tension between society and the state persists in America to this day. In fact, it’s worth keeping in mind as we turn to the single most important player in the twenty-first century and ask how America itself will react to a post-American world.

6

American Power

O
n June 22, 1897, about four hundred million people around the world, one-fourth of humanity, got the day off. It was the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The eleven premiers of Britain’s self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of fifty thousand soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, Gurkhas from Nepal, and many, many others. It was, as one historian wrote, “a Roman moment.”

The jubilee was marked with great fanfare in every corner of the empire. “In Hyderabad every tenth convict was set free,” wrote James Morris. “There was a grand ball at Rangoon, a dinner at the Sultan’s palace in Zanzibar, a salute of gunboats in Table Bay, a ‘monster Sunday-school treat’ at Freetown, a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus in Happy Valley at Hong Kong.” Bangalore erected a statue of the queen, and Vishakapattnam got a new town hall. In Singapore, a statue of Sir Stamford Raffles was placed in the middle of Padang, and a fountain was built in the middle of the public gardens in Shanghai (not even a colony). Ten thousand schoolchildren marched through the streets of Ottawa waving British flags. And on and on.
¹

Back in London, young Arnold Toynbee, an eight-year-old boy, was perched on his uncle’s shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that watching the grandeur of the day it felt as if the sun were “standing still in the midst of Heaven, as it had once stood still there at the bidding of Joshua.” “I remember the atmosphere,” he wrote. “It was: ‘Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.’”
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But, of course, history did happen to Britain. The question for the superpower of our own age is, Will history happen to America as well? Is it already happening? No analogy is exact, but Britain in its heyday is the closest any nation in the modern age has come to the American position today. When we consider whether and how the forces of change will affect America, it’s worth paying close attention to the experience of Great Britain.

There are many contemporary echoes of Britain’s dilemmas. America’s recent military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq all have parallels with Britain’s military interventions there decades ago. The basic strategic dilemma of being the only truly global player on the world stage is strikingly similar. But there are also fundamental differences between Britain then and America now. In Britain, as it tried to maintain its superpower status, the largest challenge was economic rather than political. In America, it is the other way around.

Britain’s Reach

In today’s world, it is difficult even to imagine the magnitude of the British Empire. At its height, it covered about a quarter of the earth’s land surface and included a quarter of its population. London’s network of colonies, territories, bases, and ports spanned the entire globe, and the empire was protected by the Royal Navy, the greatest seafaring force in history. During the Diamond Jubilee, 165 ships carrying forty thousand seamen and three thousand guns were on display in Portsmouth—the largest fleet ever assembled
*
. Over the preceding quarter century, the empire had been linked by 170,000 nautical miles of ocean cables and 662,000 miles of aerial and buried cables, and British ships had facilitated the development of the first global communications network via the telegraph. Railways and canals (the Suez Canal, most importantly) deepened the connectivity of the system. Through all of this, the British Empire created the first truly global market.

Americans talk about the appeal of our own culture and ideas, but “soft power” really began with Britain in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the empire, English spread as a global language, spoken from the Caribbean to Cairo and from Cape Town to Calcutta. English literature became familiar everywhere—Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes,
Alice in Wonderland, Tom Brown’s School Days
. Britain’s stories and characters became more securely a part of international culture than any other nation’s.

So, too, did many English values. The historian Claudio Véliz points out that in the seventeenth century, the two imperial powers of the day, Britain and Spain, both tried to export their ideas and practices to their Western colonies. Spain wanted the Counter-Reformation to take hold in the New World; Britain wanted religious pluralism and capitalism to flourish. As it turned out, Britain’s ideas proved more universal than Spain’s. In fact, modern society’s modes of work and play are suffused with the values of the world’s first industrial nation. Britain has arguably been the most successful exporter of its culture in human history. We speak today of the American dream, but before it there was an “English way of life”—one that was watched, admired, and copied throughout the world. For example, the ideas of fair play, athleticism, and amateurism propounded by the famous English educator Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby (where Tom Brown’s School Days was set), heavily influenced the Frenchman Baron de Coubertin—who, in 1896, launched the modern Olympic games. The writer Ian Buruma has aptly described the Olympics as “an English Bucolic fantasy.”

Not all of this was recognized in June 1897, but much of it was. The British were hardly alone in making comparisons between their empire and Rome. Paris’
Le Figaro
declared that Rome itself had been “equaled, if not surpassed, by the Power which in Canada, Australia, India, in the China Seas, in Egypt, Central and Southern Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean rules the peoples and governs their interests.” The
Kreuz-Zeitung
in Berlin, which usually reflected the views of the anti-English Junker elite, described the empire as “practically unassailable.” Across the Atlantic, the
New York Times
gushed, “We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet.”

Britain’s Descent

Britain’s exalted position was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, the United Kingdom entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when its global power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours, while losing only 48 soldiers of its own.
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Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was “the British empire against 30,000 farmers.”

The war was ostensibly fought for virtuous reasons: the rights of South Africa’s English-speaking people, who were treated as second-class citizens by the ruling Dutch migrants, the Boers (Boer is the Dutch, and Afrikaans, word for “farmer”). But it did not escape the attention of London that, after the discovery of gold in the region in 1886, South Africa had been producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply. And in any event, the Afrikaners launched a preemptive strike, and war began in 1899.

Things went badly for Britain from the beginning. It had more men and better weapons and was fielding its best generals (including Lord Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman). But the Boers were passionate in defending themselves, knew the land, had the support of much of the white population, and adopted successful guerrilla tactics that relied on stealth and speed. Britain’s enormous military superiority meant little on the ground, and the British commanders resorted to brutal tactics—burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world’s first), sending in more and more troops. Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops in southern Africa fighting a militia of 45,000.

The Boers could not hold Britain back forever, and in 1902 they surrendered. But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war. It had sacrificed 45,000 men, spent half a billion pounds, stretched its army to the breaking point, and discovered enormous incompetence and corruption in its war effort. Its brutal wartime tactics, moreover, gave it a black eye in the view of the rest of the world. At home, all of this created, or exposed, deep divisions over Britain’s global role. Abroad, every other great power—France, Germany, the United States—opposed London’s actions. “They were friendless,” the historian Lawrence James wrote of the British in 1902.
⁴

Fast forward to today. Another all-powerful superpower, militarily unbeatable, seems to win an easy victory in Afghanistan and then takes on what it is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein’s isolated regime in Iraq. The result: a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition. The analogy is obvious; the United States is Britain, the Iraq War is the Boer War—and, by extension, America’s future looks bleak. Iraq is now relatively peaceful, but the cost of getting to that point was massive. During the course of the war, the United States was overextended and distracted, its army stressed, its image sullied. Rogue states like Iran and Venezuela and great powers like Russia and China took advantage of Washington’s inattention and bad fortunes. And now, to a significant extent, Afghanistan has taken the place of Iraq. The familiar theme of imperial decline is playing itself out one more time. History is happening again.

But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War, say some. If only it had stayed out of Africa, say others. Niall Ferguson provocatively suggests that, had Britain stayed out of World War I (and there might not have been a world war without British participation), it might have managed to preserve its great-power position. There is some truth to this line of reasoning (World War I did bankrupt Britain), but to put things properly in historical context, it is worth looking at this history from another angle. Britain’s immense empire was the product of unique circumstances. The wonder is not that Britain declined, but that its dominance lasted as long as it did.
⁵
Understanding how Britain played its hand—one that got weaker over time—might help illuminate America’s path forward.

The Strange Rise of British Power

Britain has been a rich country for centuries (and a great power for most of that time), but it was an economic superpower for little longer than a generation. We often make the mistake of dating Britain’s apogee by the great imperial events, such as the Diamond Jubilee, that were seen at the time as the markers of power. In fact, by 1897, Britain’s best years were already behind it. Britain’s true apogee was a generation earlier, from 1845 to 1870. At the time, Britain was producing more than 30 percent of global GDP. Its energy consumption was five times that of the United States and Prussia and 155 times that of Russia. It accounted for one-fifth of the world’s trade and two-fifths of its manufacturing trade.
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And all this with just 2 percent of the world’s population!

In 1820, when population and agriculture were the main determinants of GDP, France’s economy was larger than Britain’s. By the late 1870s, the United States had equaled Britain on most industrial measures and actually surpassed it by the early 1880s, as Germany would about fifteen years later. By World War I, the American economy was twice the size of Britain’s, and together France’s and Russia’s were larger as well. In 1860, Britain produced 53 percent of the world’s iron (then a sign of supreme industrial strength); in 1914, it made less than 10 percent.

There are, of course, many ways of measuring power. Politically, London was still the capital of the world at the time of World War I. Across the globe beyond Europe, London’s writ was unequaled and largely unchallenged. Britain had acquired an empire in a period before the onset of nationalism, and so there were few obstacles to creating and maintaining control in far-flung places. Its sea power was unrivaled for over a century. It had also proved to be highly skilled at the art of empire. As a result of the empire, it remained dominant in banking, shipping, insurance, and investments. London was still the center of global finance and the pound still the reserve currency of the world. Even in 1914, Britain invested twice as much capital abroad as its closest competitor, France, and five times as much as the United States. The economic returns of these investments and other “invisible trades” in some ways masked Britain’s decline.

The reality, however, was that Britain’s economy was sliding. In those days, manufacturing still accounted for the bulk of a national economy, and the goods Britain was producing represented the past rather than the future. In 1907, it manufactured four times as many bicycles as the United States did, but the United States manufactured twelve times as many cars. The gap was visible in the chemical industry, the production of scientific instruments, and many other areas. The overall trend was clear: British growth rates had dropped from 2.6 percent in its heyday to 1.9 percent from 1885 onward, and falling. The United States and Germany, meanwhile, were growing at around 5 percent. Having spearheaded the first industrial revolution, Britain had been less adept at moving into the second.