The Sun Set on One,
But It Rises on Another
By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
If a Martian historian with Methuselah's life span devoted himself to
observing from afar the broad patterns of human activity over the past
millennium, he would see an explosion of energy in the British Isles from
the 16th century onward. In particular, between the early 1600s and the
1950s more than 20 million people emigrated from Britain and settled in
other lands. The British also developed dense patterns of trade with such
faraway areas as India and Africa. Only a few of them emigrated to those
countries, yet they reshaped them in line with their own practices.
From the standpoint of Mars, 1776 hardly registers. Eighty percent of
British emigrants ended up in America, before and after independence.
"Manifest Destiny" looks like a local instance of the
emigration that was fueling Britain's imperialism. In any case, the same
liberal principles -- free trade, the rule of law, representative
institutions -- shaped both the U.S. and Britain's possessions.
Altogether this Anglo-American network of emigration, trade and rule
amounted to the first global order. What might puzzle our Martian was why
this order broke down in 1914 -- and why, when it reappeared in 1989, its
center had moved from London to Washington.
Or has it? Niall Ferguson believes so. The neologism he coins to describe
the British Empire is "Anglobalization." He concludes
"Empire" (Basic Books, 392 pages, $35), his brilliant survey of
its rise and fall, with an appeal to the U.S. to overcome its
anti-imperialism and accept the responsibilities that the end of the Cold
War has thrust upon it. So he must rescue British imperialism from the
obloquy that descended upon it in the age of de-colonization.
Mr. Ferguson's main defense is an economic one. He notes that the British
Empire, by establishing a world order based on free trade and free
capital movement, assisted the development of poorer countries and raised
living standards in its far-flung colonies. Imperial rule also spread
institutions and practices favorable to good government, such as secure
private property, personal liberty and impartial law. These often took
root. Seymour Martin Lipset points to a marked correlation between being
a former British colony and enjoying liberal democratic government today.
If this sounds dry, far from it. Though "Empire" is scrupulous
scholarship, it is also a rattling good tale, with vivid accounts of the
settlement of America, of the piracy waged against Spain by Britain's
semi-official pirates, or "privateers," of David Livingstone's
fearless wanderings in Africa and much else. Like the American frontier,
the British Empire was an arena in which buccaneers, merchants, soldiers,
bureaucrats and clergymen struggled for dominance.
Mr. Ferguson enjoys the irony that the idealistic NGOs of their day, such
as the Church Missionary Society, caused more disruption than the
practical-minded soldiers and money-grubbing merchants. To their credit,
the idealists ended suttee and achieved the world-wide abolition of the
slave trade, courtesy of the Royal Navy. But their Christian
proselytizing was also partly responsible for the Indian Mutiny (1857)
and its bloody suppression, after which the sun began to set on the
empire even as it continued to expand into Africa and the Mideast.
Americans avid to spread democracy abroad might conclude that remedying
flagrant evils is a wiser course than remaking entire societies in one's
own image of virtue.
Nor does Mr. Ferguson shrink from recounting the more straightforward
atrocities in imperial history, such as the 1919 Amritsar massacre in the
Punjab and the "genocide" of Tasmanians in Australia. He may
even be insufficiently skeptical here. The Australian historian Keith
Windshuttle has recently demonstrated that most allegations of Australian
atrocities have little or no foundation in fact. Even if we take the
harshest view of such events, however, Mr. Ferguson points out that they
are isolated episodes in imperial history by comparison with the genocide
and militarism central to the far more ruthless empires that challenged
Britain in the 1940s.
And when that challenge came, its subject peoples rallied to the empire's
defense. Gandhi's "Quit India" campaign of 1942 collapsed after
a few weeks, but more than two million Indians served in the British
forces, 250,000 of them outside India. Their loyalty signified something
important: Most subjects of the king had never been better governed than
by the young men of the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Office.
So when the balance sheet is added up, one wonders why someone as
sympathetic to imperialism as Mr. Ferguson scorns Curzon's judgment that
"the British empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for
good that the world has ever seen." Given the record of other human
institutions, Curzon had a point.
It is a point that Americans are reluctant to grasp even when the empire
is their own "informal" one -- and even when U.S. troops
intervene to remove threats to international stability, as in Afghanistan
and Iraq. The more forthright Mr. Ferguson believes that the U.S. should
sustain networks of trade, aid, investment and defense that will mimic
the British world order. Rogue states will be curbed, failed nations
healed and brushfire wars smothered -- by aid and investment where
possible, by arms where necessary.
It will, of course, be an imperialism that dare not speak its name. Some
of the imperialists in progressive NGOs will even believe that they are
anti-imperialist. And the logos under which they operate will be derived
from the United Nations or the IMF rather than from the U.S. itself. But
the underlying networks of cooperation that sustain this shy imperialism
are likely to link the U.S. with such "Anglosphere" nations as
Britain and Australia and perhaps, in due course, India and South Africa,
which share the liberal world outlook.
Our Martian, observing current events from afar, might think that this
was already happening.
Mr. O'Sullivan is editor in chief of United Press
International.
Updated April 10, 2003
I like this view from Mars.
Imagine that you are a Martian anthropologist specializing in Terran
studies and equipped with the finest telescopes and video equipment. You
have not yet deciphered any Terran language and so you can only record
what earthlings do, not their shared misconceptions as to what they're
doing and why. However, you can gauge roughly when they're doing what
they want and when they're doing something else.
Your first important discovery is that earthlings devote nearly all their
time to unwelcome activities. The only important exception is a dwindling
set of hunter- gatherer groups unperturbed by governments, churches and
schools who devote some four hours a day to subsistence activities which
so closely resemble the leisure activities of the privileged classes in
industrial capitalist countries that you are uncertain whether to
describe what they do as work or play. But the state and the market are
eradicating these holdouts and you very properly concentrate on the
almost all-inclusive world-system which, for all its evident internal
antagonisms as epitomized in war, is much the same everywhere. The Terran
young, you further observe, are almost wholly subject to the impositions
of the family and the school, sometimes seconded by the church and
occasionally the state. The adults often assemble in families too, but
the place where they pass the most time and submit to the closest control
is at work. Thus, without even entering into the question of the world
economy's ultimate dictation of everybody's productive activity, it's
apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the
ordinary adult is not the state but rather the business that
employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more
"or-else" orders in a week than the police do in a decade.
If one looks at the world without prejudice but with an eye to maximizing
freedom, the major coercive institution is not the state, it's
work. Libertarians who with a straight face call for the abolition
of the state nonetheless look on anti-work attitudes with horror. The
idea of abolishing work is, of course, an affront to common sense. But
then so is the idea of abolishing the state. If a referendum were held
among Libertarians which posed as options the abolition of work with
retention of the state, or abolition of the state with retention of work,
does anyone doubt the outcome?
Libertarians are into linear reasoning and quantitative analysis. If they
applied these methods to test their own reasoning they'd be in for a
shock. That's the point of my Martian thought experiment. This is not to
say that the state isn't just as unsavory as the Libertarians say it is.
But it does suggest that the state is important, not so much for the
direct duress it inflicts on convicts and conscripts, for instance, as
for its indirect back-up of employers who regiment employees, shopkeepers
who arrest shoplifters, and parents who paternalize children. In these
classrooms, the lesson of submission is learned. Of course, there are
always a few freaks like anarcho-capitalists or Catholic anarchists, but
they're just exceptions to the rule of rule.
Unlike side issues such as unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws,
the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian
literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings
against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on
dissidents by the Soviet press, and Sunday-school platitudinizing that
there is no free lunch – this from fat cats who have usually ingested a
lot of them. In 1980, a rare exception appeared in a book review
published in the Libertarian Review by Professor John Hospers, the
Libertarian Party elder state's-man who flunked out of the Electoral
College in 1972. Here was a spirited defense of work by a college
professor who didn't have to do any. To demonstrate that his arguments
were thoroughly conservative, it is enough to show that they agreed in
all essentials with Marxism-Leninism.
FROM
http://ri.xu.org/arbalest/alembic2c.html