book Spring 2005 - American Academy of Arts and Sciences · 2019-12-14 · coming up in Dædalus: Jonathan R. Cole Academic freedom under ½re 5 Niall Ferguson America, unconscious

coming up in Dædalus:

Jonathan R. Cole Academic freedom under ½re 5

Niall Ferguson America, unconscious colossus 18

Kenneth Pomeranz ‘Civilizing’ missions, past & present 34

Anthony Pagden Empire, liberalism & the quest for perpetual peace 46

Jack Snyder A paradoxical tool for democratization 58

Robin Blackburn Emancipation & empire, from Cromwellto Karl Rove 72

Molly Greene The Ottoman experience 88

Henk Wesseling Imperial roots of the Great War 100

Akira Iriye Beyond empire: the new internationalism 108

Franz Wright Lesson & The Choice 117

Margaret Atwood Four short pieces 119

Barry Mazur & Peter Pesic on mathematics & imagination 124

Michael Hechter on the 2004 presidential election 131

Morris E. Fine& Peter W. Voorhees on the education of engineers 134

DædalusJournal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Spring 2005

comment

on imperialism

poetry

½ction

dialogue

notes

Dæ

dalusSpring 20

05: on im

perialism

U.S. $13www.amacad.org

Howard Gardner, Lee Shulman, William Sullivan, Geoffrey GaltHarpham, Jeanne Nakamura & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, WilliamDamon, Anne Colby, Kendall Bronk & Thomas Ehrlich, andHarvey Goldman

plus poetry by W. S. Merwin, Charles Wright, Peg Boyers, JorieGraham &c.; ½ction by Robert Coover, Ree Davis &c.; and notesby Donald Green, Robert F. Nagel, Jeri Laber, Dipesh Chakrabarty,Alvin Goldman, Edward D. Lazowska, Norbert Schwarz, RodolfoDirzo, Joel Handler, Joan Bresnan, Lyman A. Page, Robert J. Sharer,Gustavo Perez Firmat, Lisa Randall &c.

on professions& professionals

Antonio & Hanna Damasio, A. S. Byatt, Carol Gilligan, GeraldEdelman, Jorie Graham, Richard Davidson, Raymond Dolan &Arne Öhman, and Mark Johnson

on body in mind

Henry J. Aaron, Paul Baltes, Frank Kermode, Linda Partridge,Dennis J. Selkoe, Caleb E. Finch, Sarah Harper, Chris Wilson,Jagadeesh Gokhale & Kent Smetters, Hillard Kaplan, and LisaBerkman

on aging

Akeel Bilgrami, Wendy Doniger, Amartya Sen, Stephen Greenblatt,Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sidney Shoemaker, Susan Green½eld,David A. Hollinger, Claudio Lomnitz, Carol Rovane, Todd E.Feinberg, and Courtney Jung

on identity

William H. McNeill, Adam Michnik, Jonathan Schell, JamesCarroll, Breyten Breytenbach, Mark Juergensmeyer, StevenLeBlanc, James Blight, Cindy Ness, and others

on nonviolence& violence

FOUNDED 1780

18 Dædalus Spring 2005

What is an empire? In the words ofone of the few modern historians to at-tempt a genuinely comparative study ofempires, it is

First and foremost, a very great powerthat has left its mark on the internation-al relations of an era . . . a polity that rulesover wide territories and many peoples,since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is one of the great perennial di-lemmas of empire . . . . An empire is by def-inition . . . not a polity ruled with the ex-plicit consent of its peoples . . . . [But] by a process of assimilation of peoples anddemocratization of institutions empirescan transform themselves into multina-tional federations or even nation states.1

It is possible to be still more precisethan this. In the table below, I have at-tempted a simple typology intended tocapture the diversity of forms that canbe subsumed under the heading em-pire. Note that the table should be readas a menu rather than as a grid. For ex-

ample, an empire could be an oligarchyat home, aiming to acquire raw materialsfrom abroad, thereby increasing interna-tional trade, using mainly military meth-ods, imposing a market economy, serv-ing the interests of its ruling elite, andfostering a hierarchical social character.Another empire might be a democracy athome, aiming to ensure security, provid-ing peace as a public good, ruling mainlythrough ½rms and ngos, promoting amixed economy, serving the interests ofall inhabitants, and fostering an assim-ilative social character.

The ½rst column reminds us that im-perial power can be acquired by morethan one type of political system. Theself-interested objectives of imperialexpansion (second column) range fromthe fundamental need to ensure the se-curity of the metropolis by imposingorder on enemies at its (initial) borders,to the collection of rents and taxationfrom subject peoples, to say nothing ofthe perhaps more obvious prizes of newland for settlement, raw materials, trea-sure, and manpower–all of which, itshould be emphasized, would need to be available at prices lower than thoseestablished in free exchange with inde-pendent peoples if the cost of conquest

Niall Ferguson

The unconscious colossus: limits of (& alternatives to) American empire

Niall Ferguson is professor of history at HarvardUniversity, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution,and senior research fellow of Jesus College, Ox-ford. His latest book is “Colossus: The Price ofAmerica’s Empire” (2004).

© 2005 by Niall Ferguson1 Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empireand Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000), xiv.

and colonization were to be justi½ed.2At the same time, an empire may providepublic goods–that is, intended or unin-tended bene½ts of imperial rule flowingnot to the rulers but to the ruled and be-yond to third parties: less conflict, moretrade or investment, improved justice or governance, better education (whichmay or may not be associated with reli-gious conversion, something we wouldnot nowadays regard as a public good),or improved material conditions.

The fourth column tells us that impe-rial rule can be implemented by morethan one kind of functionary: soldiers,civil servants, settlers, voluntary associa-tions, ½rms, and local elites can in differ-ent ways impose the will of the center on the periphery. There are almost as manyvarieties of imperial economic systems,

ranging from slavery to laissez-faire,from one form of serfdom (feudalism) to another (the planned economy).

Nor is it by any means a given that thebene½ts of empire should flow simply to the metropolitan society. It may onlybe the elites of that society–or colonistsdrawn from lower income groups in themetropole, or subject peoples, or theelites within subject societies–that reapthe bene½ts of empire.

Finally, the social character of an em-pire–to be precise, the attitudes of therulers toward the ruled–may vary. Atone extreme lies the genocidal empire of National Socialist Germany, intent onthe annihilation of speci½c ethnic groupsand the deliberate degradation of others.At the other extreme lies the Roman Em-pire, in which citizenship was obtainableunder certain conditions regardless ofethnicity. In the middle lies the Victori-an Empire, in which inequalities ofwealth and status were mitigated by ageneral (though certainly not unquali-

2 For an attempt at a formal economic theoryof empire, see Herschel I. Grossman and JuanMendoza, “Annexation or Conquest? The Eco-nomics of Empire Building,” nber WorkingPaper No. 8109 (February 2001).

Table 1An imperial typology

Metropolitansystem

Self-interestedobjectives

Socialcharacter

Cui bono? Economic system

Methods ofrule

Public goods

Tyranny

Aristocracy

Oligarchy

Democracy

Security

Communi-cations

Land

Raw materials

Treasure

Manpower

Rents

Taxation

Peace

Trade

Investment

Law

Governance

Education

Conversion

Health

Military

Bureaucracy

Settlement

ngos

Firms

Delegation to localelites

Plantation

Feudal

Mercantilist

Market

Mixed

Planned

Ruling elite

Metro-politan populace

Settlers

Local elites

All inhabitants

Genocidal

Hierarchical

Converting

Assimilative

Dædalus Spring 2005 19

Limits of(& alter-natives to)Americanempire


NiallFergusononimperialism

½ed) principle of equality before the law.The precise combination of all these var-iables determines, among other things,the geographical extent–and of coursethe duration–of an empire.

All told, there have been no more thanseventy empires in history, if The TimesAtlas of World History is to be believed.The question is whether the UnitedStates should be numbered among them.Applying the typology set out in the ta-ble, it is certainly not dif½cult to charac-terize the United States as an empire. Itgoes without saying that it is a liberal de-mocracy and market economy (thoughits polity has some illiberal characteris-tics, and its economy a surprisingly highlevel of state intervention). It is primari-ly concerned with its own security andmaintaining international communica-tions and, secondarily, with ensuringaccess to raw materials. It is also in thebusiness of providing a limited numberof public goods: peace, by interveningagainst some bellicose regimes and insome civil wars; freedom of the seas andskies for trade; and a distinctive form ofconversion usually called Americaniza-tion, which is carried out less by old-style Christian missionaries than by theexporters of American consumer goodsand entertainment. Its methods of for-mal rule are primarily military in charac-ter; its methods of informal rule relyheavily on corporations and nongovern-mental organizations and, in some cases,local elites.

Who bene½ts from this empire? Somewould argue, with the economist PaulKrugman, that only its wealthy elitedoes–speci½cally, that part of its weal-thy elite associated with the RepublicanParty and the oil industry.3 The conven-

tional wisdom on the Left is that theUnited States uses its power, wittingly orunwittingly, to shore up the position ofAmerican corporations and the regimes(usually corrupt and authoritarian) thatare willing to do the same.4 The losersare the impoverished majorities in thedeveloping world. Others would claimthat many millions of people around theworld have bene½ted in some way fromthe existence of America’s empire (notleast the Western Europeans, Japanese,and South Koreans who were able toprosper during the Cold War under theprotection of the American empire byinvitation); and that the economic los-ers of the post–Cold War era, particular-ly in sub-Saharan Africa, are victims notof American power, but of its absence.For the American empire is limited in itsextent: It conspicuously lacks the vora-cious appetite for territorial expansionoverseas that characterized the empiresof the Western European seaboard. Evenwhen it conquers, it resists annexation–one reason why the durations of its off-shore imperial undertakings have tendedto be, and will in all probability continueto be, relatively short.

How different is the American empirefrom previous empires? Like the ancientEgyptian Empire, it erects towering edi-½ces in its heartland, though these housethe living rather than the dead. Like theAthenian Empire, it has proved adept atleading alliances against rival powers.Like the empire of Alexander, it has stag-gering geographical range. Like the Chi-nese Empire that arose in the Chi’in eraand reached its zenith under the Mingdynasty, it has united the lands and peo-ples of a vast territory and has forged

3 Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: LosingOur Way in the New Century (New York: W. W.Norton, 2003).

4 For two recent diatribes, see Michael Mann,Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), andChalmers A. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

them into a nation. Like the RomanEmpire, it has a system of citizenshipthat is remarkably open: Purple Heartsand U.S. citizenship were conferredsimultaneously on a number of the sol-diers serving in Iraq last year, just asservice in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus. Indeed, with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States isperhaps more like Rome than any previ-ous empire–albeit a Rome in which theSenate has thus far retained some holdon would-be emperors. In its relation-ship with Western Europe, too, the Unit-ed States can sometimes seem like a sec-ond Rome.

Yet in its capacity for spreading itsown language and culture–at oncemonotheistic and mathematical–theUnited States also shares features ofthe Abassid caliphate established by theheirs of Mohammed. And though it issometimes portrayed as the heir as wellas the rebellious product of the WesternEuropean empires that arose in the six-teenth century and persisted until thetwentieth–in truth the United Stateshas as much, if not more, in commonwith the great land empires of Centraland Eastern Europe. In practice, its polit-ical structures are sometimes more remi-niscent of Vienna or Berlin than they areof the Hague, capital of the last great im-perial republic, or London, hub of the½rst Anglophone empire.

To those who would still insist onAmerican exceptionalism, the historianof empires can only retort: as exception-al as all the other sixty-nine empires.

It is perfectly acceptable to say in somecircles that the United States is an em-pire–provided that you deplore the fact.It is also acceptable to say in other circlesthat American power is potentially bene-

½cent–provided that you do not de-scribe it as imperial. What is not allowedis to say that the United States is an em-pire and that this might not be whollybad.

In my book Colossus, I set out to do justthat, and thereby succeeded in antago-nizing both conservative and liberal crit-ics. Conservatives repudiated my con-tention that the United States is and, in-deed, has always been an empire. Liber-als were dismayed by my suggestion thatthe American empire might have posi-tive as well as negative attributes. As inGilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, so in theUnited States today, it seems to be ex-pected “That every boy and every gal /That’s born into the world alive / Iseither a little Liberal, / Or else a littleConservative!” But I am afraid my bookis neither. Here, in a simpli½ed form, iswhat it says: that the United States hasalways been, functionally if not self-con-sciously, an empire; that a self-consciousAmerican imperialism might well bepreferable to the available alternatives;but that ½nancial, human, and culturalconstraints make such self-conscious-ness highly unlikely; and that thereforethe American empire, insofar as it con-tinues to exist, will remain a somewhatdysfunctional entity.

By self-conscious imperialism, pleasenote, I do not mean that the UnitedStates should unabashedly proclaim it-self an empire and its president an em-peror. I merely mean that Americansneed to recognize the imperial charac-teristics of their own power today and, if possible, to learn from the achieve-ments and failures of past empires. It is no longer sensible to maintain the½ction that there is something whollyunique about the foreign relations ofthe United States. The dilemmas thatAmerica faces today have more in com-mon with those of the later Caesars





than with those of the FoundingFathers.5

At the same time, however, the bookmakes clear the grave perils of being an“empire in denial.” Americans are notwholly oblivious to the imperial roletheir country plays in the world–butthey dislike it. “I think we’re trying torun the business of the world too much,”a Kansas farmer told the British authorTimothy Garton Ash in 2003, “like theRomans used to.”6 To such feelings ofunease, American politicians respondwith a categorical reassurance: “We’renot an imperial power,” declared Presi-dent George W. Bush last April, “We’re a liberating power.”7

Of all the misconceptions that need to be dispelled here, this is perhaps the most obvious: that simply becauseAmericans say they do not do empire,there cannot be such a thing as Ameri-can imperialism. As I write, Americantroops are engaged in defending govern-ments forcibly installed by the UnitedStates in two distant countries, Afghan-istan and Iraq. They are likely to be therefor some years to come; even PresidentBush’s Democratic rival John Kerryimplied last September that if he wereelected, U.S. forces would be withdrawnfrom Iraq within four years–not, inother words, the day after his inaugura-tion.8

Iraq, however, is only the frontline ofan American imperium that, like all thegreat world empires of history, aspires to much more than just military domi-nance along a vast and variegated strate-gic frontier.9 On November 6, 2003, inhis speech to mark the twentieth anni-versary of the National Endowment forDemocracy, President Bush set out avision of American foreign policy that,for all its Wilsonian language, stronglyimplied the kind of universal civilizingmission that has been a feature of all thegreat empires:

The United States has adopted a new poli-cy, a forward strategy of freedom in theMiddle East . . . . The establishment of afree Iraq at the heart of the Middle Eastwill be a watershed event in the globaldemocratic revolution . . . . The advance offreedom is the calling of our time; it is thecalling of our country . . . . We believe thatliberty is the design of nature; we believethat liberty is the direction of history. Webelieve that human ful½llment and excel-lence come in the responsible exercise ofliberty. And we believe that freedom–the freedom we prize–is not for us alone,it is the right and the capacity of all man-kind.10

He restated this messianic credo in hisspeech to the Republican National Con-vention in September of 2004:

5 It is symptomatic that John Lewis Gaddisinterprets the present predicament of the United States with reference to John QuincyAdams: Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the Amer-ican Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004).

6 Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: Why a Cri-sis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of OurTime (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 102.

7 Text of President Bush’s speech, The NewYork Times, April 13, 2004.

8 David M. Halb½nger and David E. Sanger,

“Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Time-table,” The New York Times, September 7, 2004.

9 On the signi½cance of the frontier in imperialhistory, see Charles S. Maier, Among Empires:American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (forth-coming).

10 Remarks by the president at the twentiethanniversary of the National Endowment forDemocracy, November 6, 2003, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html>.

The story of America is the story of ex-panding liberty: an ever-widening circle,constantly growing to reach further andinclude more. Our nation’s founding com-mitment is still our deepest commitment:In our world, and here at home, we willextend the frontiers of freedom . . . . We areworking to advance liberty in the broaderMiddle East because freedom will bring afuture of hope and the peace we all want. . . . Freedom is on the march. I believe inthe transformational power of liberty:The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.11

To the majority of Americans, it would appear, there is no contradictionbetween the ends of global democratiza-tion and the means of American militarypower. As de½ned by their president, thedemocratizing mission of the UnitedStates is both altruistic and distinct fromthe ambitions of past empires, which (soit is generally assumed) aimed to imposetheir own rule on foreign peoples.

The dif½culty is that President Bush’sideal of freedom as a universal desidera-tum rather closely resembles the Vic-torian ideal of civilization. Freedommeans, on close inspection, the Ameri-can model of democracy and capitalism;when Americans speak of nation build-ing, they actually mean state replicating,in the sense that they want to build po-litical and economic institutions that arefundamentally similar to their own.12

They may not aspire to rule; but they doaspire to have others rule themselves inthe American way.

Yet the very act of imposing freedomsimultaneously subverts it. Just as the

Victorians seemed hypocrites when theyspread civilization with the Maxim gun,so there is something ½shy about thosewho would democratize Fallujah withthe Abrams tank. President Bush’s dis-tinction between conquest and libera-tion would have been entirely familiar to the liberal imperialists of the early1900s, who likewise saw Britain’s far-flung legions as agents of emancipation(not least in the Middle East during andafter World War I). Equally familiar tothat earlier generation would have beenthe impatience of American of½cials tohand over sovereignty to an Iraqi gov-ernment sooner rather than later. Indi-rect rule–which installed nominallyindependent native rulers while leavingBritish civilian administrators and mili-tary forces in practical control of ½nan-cial matters and military security–wasthe preferred model for British colonialexpansion in many parts of Asia, Africa,and the Middle East. Iraq itself was anexample of indirect rule after the Hashe-mite dynasty was established there inthe 1920s.

The crucial question today is whetheror not the United States has the capabili-ties, both material and moral, to make asuccess of its version of indirect rule.The danger lies in the inclination ofAmerican politicians, eager to live up totheir own emancipatory rhetoric as wellas to bring the boys back home, to un-wind their overseas commitments pre-maturely–in short, to opt for prematuredecolonization rather than sustained in-direct rule. Unfortunately, history showsthat the most violent time in the historyof an empire often comes at the momentof its dissolution, precisely because–assoon as it has been announced–thewithdrawal of imperial troops unleashesa struggle between rival local elites forcontrol of the indigenous armed forces.

11 President Bush’s speech to the RepublicanNational Convention, The New York Times, Sep-tember 2, 2004.

12 See Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Gover-nance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004).





But is the very concept of empire ananachronism? A number of critics haveargued that imperialism was a discreethistorical phenomenon that reached itsapogee in the late nineteenth centuryand has been defunct since the 1950s.“The Age of Empire is passed,” declaredThe New York Times as L. Paul Bremer IIIleft Baghdad:

The experience of Iraq has demonstrated . . . that when America does not disguise its imperial force, when a proconsul leadsan “occupying power,” it is liable to ½nditself in an untenable position quicklyenough. There are three reasons: the peo-ple being governed do not accept such aform of rule, the rest of the world does notaccept it and Americans themselves donot accept it.13

In supporting the claim that empire isdefunct, one reviewer of Colossus citednationalism as “a much more powerfulforce now than it was during the heydayof the Victorian era.”14 Another cited“the tectonic changes wrought by inde-pendence movements and ethnic andreligious politics in the years since theend of World War II.”15 Meanwhile, afavorite argument of journalists is–per-haps not surprisingly–that the power of the modern media makes it impossi-ble for empires to operate as they did inthe past, because their misdeeds are soquickly broadcast to an indignant world.

Such arguments betray a touchingnaivety about both the past and the pres-ent. First, empire was no temporary con-

dition of the Victorian age. Empires, aswe have seen, can be traced as far back asrecorded history goes; indeed, most his-tory is the history of empires preciselybecause empires are so good at record-ing, replicating, and transmitting theirown words and deeds. It is the nation-state–an essentially nineteenth-centuryideal–that is the historical novelty andthat may yet prove to be the moreephemeral entity. Given the ethnic het-erogeneity and restless mobility of man-kind, this should not surprise us. Onclose inspection, many of the most suc-cessful nation-states started life as em-pires: what is the modern United King-dom of Great Britain and Northern Ire-land if not the legatee of an earlier Eng-lish imperialism?

Secondly, it is a fantasy that the age of empire came to an end in a globalspringtime of the peoples after 1945. Onthe contrary, World War II merely sawthe defeat of three would-be empires(the German, Japanese, and Italian) byan alliance between the old WesternEuropean empires (principally the Brit-ish, since the others were so swiftly beat-en) and the newer empires of the SovietUnion and the United States. Thoughthe United States subsequently ran, forthe most part, an empire by invitation,to the extent that it was more a hegemonthan an empire, the Soviet Union wasand remained until its precipitous de-cline and fall a true empire. Moreover,the other great Communist power toemerge from the 1940s, the People’sRepublic of China, remains in many re-spects an empire to this day. Its threemost extensive provinces–Inner Mon-golia, Xinjiang, and Tibet–were all ac-quired as a result of imperial expansion,and China continues to lay claim to Tai-wan as well as numerous smaller islands,to say nothing of some territories inRussian Siberia and Kazakhstan.

13 Roger Cohen, “‘Imperial America’ Retreatsfrom Iraq,” The New York Times, July 4, 2004.

14 Daniel Drezner, “Bestriding the World, Sortof,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2004.

15 Michiko Kakutani, “Attention De½cit Disor-der in a Most Peculiar Empire,” The New YorkTimes, May 21, 2004.

Empires, in short, are always with us.Nor is it immediately obvious why themodern media should threaten theirlongevity. The growth of the popularpress did nothing to weaken the BritishEmpire in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries; on the contrary, themass-circulation newspapers tended toenhance the popular legitimacy of theempire. Anyone who watched howAmerican television networks coveredthe invasion of Iraq ought to understandthat the mass media are not necessarilysolvents of imperial power. As for na-tionalism, it is something of a myth thatthis was what brought down the old em-pires of Western Europe. Far more lethalto their longevity were the costs of ½ght-ing rival empires–empires that werestill more contemptuous of the principleof self-determination.16

Another common misconception isthat the United States can and shouldachieve its international objectives–above all, its own security–as a hege-mon rather than an empire, relying on‘soft’ as much as on ‘hard’ power.17

Closely allied to this idea are the as-sumptions that there will always be lessviolence in the absence of an empire andthat the United States would thereforemake the world a safer place if it broughthome its troops from the Middle East.

One way to test such arguments is toask the counterfactual question: WouldAmerican foreign policy have been moreeffective in the past four years–or, if youprefer, would the world be a safer placetoday–if Afghanistan and Iraq had notbeen invaded? In the case of Afghani-stan, there is little question that soft

power would not have suf½ced to oustthe sponsors of Al Qaeda from theirstronghold in Kabul. In the case of Iraq,it is surely better that Saddam Hussein isthe prisoner of an interim Iraqi govern-ment rather than still reigning in Bagh-dad. Open-ended ‘containment’–whichwas effectively what the French govern-ment argued for in 2003–would, on bal-ance, have been a worse policy. PolicingIraq from the air while periodically ½ringmissiles at suspect installations was cost-ing money without solving the problemposed by Saddam. Sanctions were doingnothing but depriving ordinary Iraqis.As for the United Nations’ Oil-for-FoodProgramme, we now know that it wassimply breeding corruption while bol-stering Saddam’s economic position.

In short, regime change was right;arguably, the principal defect of Ameri-can policy toward Iraq was that the taskwas left undone for twelve years. Thosewho fret about the doctrine of preemp-tion enunciated in the president’s Na-tional Security Strategy should bear inmind that the overthrow of Saddam wasas much ‘postemption’ as preemption,since Saddam had done nearly all themischief of which he was capable sometime before March of 2003. Meanwhile,those who persist in imagining that theUnited Nations is a substitute for theUnited States when it comes to dealingwith murderous rogue regimes shouldsimply contemplate the United Nations’lamentably sluggish and ineffectual re-sponse to the genocide currently beingperpetrated in the Sudanese region ofDarfur. Events there furnish an unfortu-nate reminder of the United Nations’failures in Rwanda and Bosnia in the1990s.

Yet it would be absurd to deny thatmuch of what has happened in the pastyear–to say nothing of what has beenrevealed about earlier events–has tend-

16 See my Empire: The Rise and Demise of theBritish World Order and the Lessons for GlobalPower (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

17 See Joseph Nye, The Paradox of AmericanPower (New York: Oxford University Press,2002).





ed to undermine the legitimacy of theBush administration’s policy. To put itbluntly: What went wrong? And has thevery notion of an American empire beendiscredited?

The ½rst seed of future troubles was theadministration’s decision to treat sus-pected Al Qaeda personnel captured inAfghanistan and elsewhere as “unlawfulenemy combatants” beyond both Amer-ican and international law. Prisonerswere held incommunicado and inde½ni-tely at Guantánamo Bay. As the rulesgoverning interrogation were choppedand changed, many of these prisonerswere subjected to forms of mental andphysical intimidation that in some casesamounted to torture.18 Indeed, JusticeDepartment memoranda were written torationalize the use of torture as a matterfor presidential discretion in times ofwar. Evidently, some members of theadministration felt that extreme mea-sures were justi½ed by the shadowy na-ture of the foe they faced, as well as bythe public appetite for retribution afterthe terrorist attacks of September 11,2001.

All of this the Supreme Court rightlydenounced in its stinging judgment de-livered in June of 2004. As the justicesput it, not even the imperatives of resist-ing “an assault by the forces of tyranny”could justify the use by an Americanpresident of “the tools of tyrants.” Yetpower corrupts, and even small amountsof power can corrupt a very great deal. Itmay not have been of½cial policy to floutthe Geneva Conventions in Iraq, but notenough was done by senior of½cers toprotect prisoners held at Abu Ghraib

from gratuitous abuse–what the inquirychaired by James Schlesinger called“freelance activities on the part of thenight shift.”19 The photographic evi-dence of these activities has done morethan anything else to discredit the claimof the United States and its allies tostand not merely for an abstract libertybut also for the effective rule of law.

Second, it was more than mere exag-geration on the part of Vice PresidentCheney, the former cia Chief GeorgeTenet, and, ultimately, President Bushhimself–to say nothing of Prime Minis-ter Tony Blair–to claim they knew forcertain that Saddam Hussein possessedweapons of mass destruction. It was, wenow know, a downright lie that went farbeyond what the available intelligenceindicated. What they could legitimatelyhave said was this: “After all his eva-sions, we simply can’t be sure whetheror not Saddam Hussein has got anywmd. So, on the precautionary princi-ple, we just can’t leave him in powerinde½nitely. Better safe than sorry.” Butthat was not enough for Cheney, whofelt compelled to make the bald asser-tion that “Saddam Hussein possessesweapons of mass destruction.” Bushhimself had doubts, but was reassuredby Tenet that it was a “slam-dunkcase.”20 Other doubters soon fell intoline. Still more misleading was the ad-ministration’s allegation that Saddamwas ‘teaming up’ with Al Qaeda.Sketchy evidence of contact between thetwo was used to insinuate Iraqi complic-ity in the 9/11 attacks, for which not ashred of proof has yet been found.

Third, it was a near disaster that re-sponsibility for the postwar occupation

18 By the end of August of 2004, there hadbeen around 300 allegations of mistreatmentof detainees; 155 had so far been investigated,of which 66 had been substantiated. See TheWall Street Journal, August 26, 2004.

19 Ibid.

20 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2004), 249.

of Iraq was seized by the Defense De-partment, intoxicated as its principalsbecame in the heat of their blitzkrieg.The State Department had spent longhours preparing a plan for the aftermathof a successful invasion. That plan wassimply junked by Secretary Rumsfeldand his close advisers, who were con-vinced that once Saddam had gone, Iraqwould magically reconstruct itself after aperiod of suitably ecstatic celebration atthe advent of freedom.

As one of½cial told the Financial Timeslast year, Under Secretary Douglas Feithled

a group in the Pentagon who all along feltthat this was going to be not just a cake-walk, it was going to be 60–90 days, aflip-over and hand-off, a lateral or whatev-er to . . . the inc [Iraqi National Congress].The dod [Department of Defense] couldthen wash its hands of the whole affairand depart quickly, smoothly and swiftly.And there would be a democratic Iraq thatwas amenable to our wishes and desiresleft in its wake. And that’s all there was toit.21

When General Eric Shinseki, the armychief of staff, stated in late February of2003 that “something of the order ofseveral hundred thousand soldiers”would be required to stabilize postwarIraq, he was brusquely put down by De-puty Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz pro-fessed himself “reasonably certain” thatthe Iraqi people would “greet us as liber-ators.” Such illusions were not, it shouldbe remembered, con½ned to neoconser-vatives in the Pentagon. Even GeneralTommy Franks was under the impres-sion that it would be possible to reducetroop levels to just ½fty thousand after

eighteen months. It was left to ColinPowell to point out to the president thatregime change had serious–not to sayimperial–implications. The PotteryBarn rule, he suggested to Bush, wasbound to be applicable to Iraq: “Youbreak it, you own it.”22

Fourth, American diplomacy in 2003was like the two-headed Pushmepullyouin Doctor Doolittle: it pointed in oppositedirections. On one side was Cheney, dis-missing the United Nations as a negligi-ble factor. On the other was Powell, in-sisting that any action would requiresome form of un authorization to belegitimate.

It is possible that one of these ap-proaches might have worked. It was,however, hopeless to try to apply both.Europe was in fact coming around as aconsequence of some fairly successfuldiplomatic browbeating. No fewer thaneighteen European governments signedletters expressing support of the im-pending war against Saddam. Yet thedecision to seek a second un resolu-tion–on the ground that the language ofResolution 1441 was not strong enoughto justify all-out war–was a blunder that allowed the French government toregain the initiative by virtue of its per-manent seat on the un Security Council.Despite the fact that more than fortycountries declared their support for theinvasion of Iraq and that three (Britain,Australia, and Poland) sent troops, thethreat of a French veto, delivered with aGallic flourish, created the indelible im-pression that the United States was act-ing unilaterally–and even illegally.23

21 “The Best-laid Plans?” Financial Times,August 3, 2003.

22 Woodward, Plan of Attack, 150, 270.

23 See the remarks of un Secretary GeneralKo½ Annan in an interview with the bbc inSeptember of 2004, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3661640.stm>.





All these mistakes had one thing incommon: they sprang from a failure tolearn from history. For among the mostobvious lessons of history is that an em-pire cannot rule by coercion alone. Itneeds legitimacy–in the eyes of the sub-ject people, in the eyes of the other GreatPowers, and, above all, in the eyes of thepeople back home.

Did those concerned know no histo-ry? We are told that President Bush wasreading Edward Morris’s Theodore Rexas the war in Iraq was being planned;presumably he had not got to the partwhere the American occupation sparkedoff a Filipino insurrection. Before theinvasion of Iraq, Deputy National Secu-rity Adviser Stephen Hadley was heardto refer to a purely unilateral Americaninvasion as “the imperial option.” Didno one else grasp that occupying and try-ing to transform Iraq (with or withoutallies) was a quintessentially imperialundertaking–and one that would notonly cost money but would also takemany years to succeed?

Had policymakers troubled to consid-er what befell the last Anglophone occu-pation of Iraq they might have been lesssurprised by the persistent resistancethey encountered in certain parts of thecountry during 2004. For in May of 1920there was a major anti-British revoltthere. This happened six months after a referendum (in practice, a round ofconsultations with tribal leaders) on the country’s future, and just after theannouncement that Iraq would becomea League of Nations mandate underBritish trusteeship rather than continueunder colonial rule. Strikingly, neitherconsultation with Iraqis nor the promiseof internationalization suf½ced to avertan uprising.

In 1920, as in 2004, the insurrectionhad religious origins and leaders, but itsoon transcended the country’s ancient

ethnic and sectarian divisions. The ½rstanti-British demonstrations were in themosques of Baghdad, but the violencequickly spread to the Shiite holy city ofKarbala, where British rule was de-nounced by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqial-Shirazi, the historical counterpart oftoday’s Shiite ½rebrand, Moktada al-Sadr. At its height, the revolt stretchedas far north as the Kurdish city of Kirkukand as far south as Samawah.

Then, as in 2004, much of the violencewas more symbolic than strategicallysigni½cant–British bodies were mutilat-ed, much as American bodies were atFallujah. But there was a real threat tothe British position. The rebels system-atically sought to disrupt the occupiers’infrastructure, attacking railways andtelegraph lines. In some places, Britishtroops and civilians were cut off and be-sieged. By August of 1920 the situation inIraq was so desperate that the general incharge appealed to London not only forreinforcements but also for chemicalweapons (mustard gas bombs or shells),though, contrary to historical legend,these turned out to be unavailable and sowere never used.24

This brings us to the second lesson theUnited States might have learned fromthe British experience: reestablishingorder is no easy task. In 1920 the Britisheventually ended the rebellion through acombination of aerial bombardmentsand punitive village-burning expedi-tions. Even Winston Churchill, then theminister responsible for the Royal AirForce, was shocked by the actions ofsome trigger-happy pilots and vengeful

24 Daniel Barnard, “The Great Iraqi Revolt:The 1919–20 Insurrections Against the Britishin Mesopotamia,” paper presented at the Har-vard Graduate Student Conference in Interna-tional History, April 23, 2004, <http://www.fas .harvard.edu/~conih/abstracts/Barnard_article.doc>.

ground troops. And despite their over-whelming technological superiority,British forces still suffered more thantwo thousand dead and wounded. More-over, the British had to keep troops inIraq long after the country was grantedfull sovereignty. Although Iraq was de-clared formally independent in 1932,British troops remained there until 1955.

Is history therefore repeating itself,with one Anglophone empire unwitting-ly reenacting its predecessor’s Meso-potamian experiment in indirect rule?For all the talk there was in June of re-storing full sovereignty to an interimIraqi government, President Bush madeit clear that he intended to “maintainour troop level . . . as long as necessary,”and that U.S. troops would continue tooperate “under American command.”This implied something signi½cantly lessthan full sovereignty. For if the new Iraqigovernment did not have control over awell-armed foreign army in its own terri-tory, then it lacked one of the de½ningcharacteristics of a sovereign state: amonopoly over the legitimate use of vio-lence. That was precisely the point madein April by Marc Grossman, under secre-tary of state for political affairs, duringcongressional hearings on the future ofIraq. In Grossman’s words, “The ar-rangement would be, I think as we aredoing today, that we would do our verybest to consult with that interim govern-ment and take their views into account.”But American commanders would still“have the right, and the power, and theobligation” to decide on the appropriaterole for their troops.25

There is, in principle, nothing inher-ently wrong with limited sovereignty; in

both West Germany and Japan sover-eignty was limited for some years after1945. Sovereignty is not an absolute but arelative concept. Indeed, it is a commoncharacteristic of empires that they con-sist of multiple tiers of sovereignty. Ac-cording to what Charles Maier has calledthe “fractal geometry of empire,” the ov-erarching hierarchy of power containswithin it multiple scaled-down versionsof itself, none fully sovereign. Again,however, there is a need for Americanpolicymakers and voters to understandthe imperial business they are now in.For this business can have costly over-heads. The problem is that for indirectrule–or limited sovereignty–to be suc-cessful in Iraq, Americans must be will-ing to foot a substantial bill for the occu-pation and reconstruction of the coun-try. Unfortunately, in the absence of aradical change in the direction of U.S.½scal policy, their ability to do so is set to diminish, if not to disappear.

In the ½rst four years of the Bush pres-idency, total federal outlays rose by anestimated $530 billion, a 30 percent in-crease. This increase can only be partlyattributed to the wars the administrationhas fought; higher defense expendituresaccount for just 30 percent of the totalincrement, whereas increased spendingon health care accounts for 17 percent,that on Social Security and that on in-come security for 16 percent apiece, and that on Medicare for 14 percent.26

The reality is that the Bush administra-tion has increased spending on welfareby rather more than spending on war-fare.

Meanwhile, even as expenditure hasrisen, there has been a steep reduction in the federal government’s revenues,

25 “White House Says Iraq Sovereignty CouldBe Limited,” The New York Times, April 22,2004.

26 These are my own calculations based on “Budget of the United States Government,”2005 historical tables, <http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/multidb.cgi>.





which have slumped from 21 percent ofgross domestic product in 2000 to lessthan 16 percent in 2004.27 The recessionof 2001 played only a minor role in creat-ing this shortfall of receipts. More im-portant were the three successive taxcuts enacted by the administration withthe support of the Republican-led Con-gress, beginning with the initial $1.35trillion tax cut over ten years and the $38 billion tax rebate of the EconomicGrowth and Tax Reform ReconciliationAct in 2001, continuing with the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act in2002, and concluding with the reform ofthe double taxation of dividend incomein 2003. With a combined value of $188billion–equivalent to around 2 percentof the 2003 national income–these taxcuts were signi½cantly larger than thosepassed in Ronald Reagan’s EconomicRecovery Tax Act of 1981.28 The effect ofthis combination of increased spendingand reduced revenue has been a dramat-ic growth in the federal de½cit. Bushinherited a surplus of around $236 bil-lion from the ½scal year 2000. At thetime of writing, the projected de½cit for2004 was $521 billion, representing aswing from the black into the red ofthree-quarters of a trillion dollars.29

Government spokesmen have some-times defended this borrowing spree as astimulus to economic activity. There aregood reasons to be skeptical about this,however, not least because the principalbene½ciaries of these tax cuts have been

the very wealthy. Vice President Cheneybelied the macroeconomic argumentwhen he justi½ed the third tax cut in thefollowing candid terms: “We won themidterms. This is our due.”30 AnotherCheney aphorism that is bound to bequoted by future historians was his as-sertion that “Reagan proved de½citsdon’t matter.”31 But Reagan did nothingof the kind. The need to raise taxes tobring the de½cit back under control wasone of the key factors in George H. W.Bush’s defeat in 1992; in turn, the sys-tematic reduction of the de½cit underBill Clinton was one of the reasons long-term interest rates declined and theeconomy boomed in the late 1990s.

The only reason that, under Bush jun-ior, de½cits have not seemed to matter isthe persistence of low interest rates overthe past four years, which has allowedBush–in common with many Americanhouseholds–to borrow more while pay-ing less in debt service. Net interest pay-ments on the federal debt amounted tojust 1.4 percent of the gdp last year,whereas the ½gure was 2.3 percent in2000 and 3.2 percent in 1995.32

Yet this persistence of low long-terminterest rates is not a result of ingenuityon the part of the U.S. Treasury. It is inpart a consequence of the willingness of the Asian central banks to buy vastquantities of dollar-denominated securi-ties such as ten-year Treasury bonds,with the primary motivation of keepingtheir currencies pegged to the dollar, andthe secondary consequence of funding

27 “Budget of the United States Government,”2005, table 1.3, <http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/sheets/hist01z2.xls>.

28 “Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush Tax Cuts in Historical Perspective,” <http://www.taxfoundation.org/bushtaxplan-size.htm>.

29 “Economic Report of the President,” tableB-81, <http://wais.access.gpo.gov>.

30 Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W.Bush, the White House, and the Education of PaulO’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004),291.

31 Ibid.

32 Congressional Budget Of½ce, The Budget andEconomic Outlook, January 2005.

the Bush de½cits.33 It is no coincidencethat more than half the publicly heldfederal debt is now in foreign hands–more than double the proportion of tenyears ago.34 Not since the days of tsaristRussia has a great empire relied so heavi-ly on lending from abroad. The troubleis that these flows of foreign capital intothe United States cannot be relied oninde½nitely, especially if there is a likeli-hood of rising de½cits in the future. Andthat is why the Bush administration’sfailure to address the fundamental ques-tion of ½scal reform is so important. Thereality is that the of½cial ½gures for boththe de½cit and the accumulated federaldebt understate the magnitude of thecountry’s impending ½scal problems be-cause they leave out of account the hugeand unfunded liabilities of the Medicareand Social Security systems.35

The United States bene½ts signi½cant-ly from the status of the dollar as theworld’s principal reserve currency; it isone reason why foreign investors are

prepared to hold such large volumes ofdollar-denominated assets. But reserve-currency status is not divinely ordained;it could be undermined if internationalmarkets took fright at the magnitude ofAmerica’s still latent ½scal crisis.36 A de-cline in the dollar would certainly hurtforeign holders of U.S. currency morethan it would hurt Americans. But a shiftin international expectations about U.S.½nances might also bring about a sharpincrease in long-term interest rates,which would have immediate and nega-tive feedback effects on the federal de½-cit by pushing up the cost of debt serv-ice.37 It would also hurt highly gearedAmerican households, especially the ris-ing proportion of them with adjustable-rate mortgages.38

Empires need not be a burden on thetaxpayers of the metropolis; indeed,many empires have arisen precisely inorder to shift tax burdens from the cen-ter to the periphery. Yet there is littlesign that the United States will be able toachieve even a modest amount of ‘bur-den sharing’ in the foreseeable future.During the Cold War, American alliescontributed at least some money andconsiderable manpower to the mainte-nance of the West’s collective security.But those days are gone. At the Demo-

36 Niall Ferguson, “A Dollar Crash? EuroTrashing,” The New Republic, June 21, 2004.

37 See Paul Krugman, “Questions of Interest,”The New York Times, April 20, 2004. For a differ-ent view, see David Malpass, “Don’t Blame theDe½cits for America’s Rate Hikes,” FinancialTimes, May 3, 2004.

38 Niall Ferguson, “Who’s Buried by HigherRates,” Fortune, June 14, 2004. On the macro-economic implications of the decline of theAmerican savings rate, see Lawrence H. Sum-mers, “The United States and the Global Ad-justment Process,” Third Annual Stavros S.Niarchos Lecture, Institute for InternationalEconomics, Washington, D.C., March 23, 2004.

33 See Michael P. Dooley, David Folkerts-Lan-dau, and Peter Garber, “An Essay on the Re-vived Bretton Woods System,” nber WorkingPaper No. 9971 (September 2003), and “TheRevived Bretton Woods System: The Effects ofPeriphery Intervention and Reserve Manage-ment on Interest Rates and Exchange Rates inCenter Countries,” nber Working Paper No.10332 (March 2004).

34 Treasury Bulletin, June 2004, <http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/>. Cf. PýiviMunter, “Most Treasuries in Foreign Hands,”Financial Times, June 14, 2004.

35 See, most recently, Peter G. Peterson, Run-ning on Empty: How the Democratic and Republi-can Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and WhatAmericans Can Do About It (New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2004). According to theApril 2004 report of the Medicare trustees, thesystem’s obligations to future retirees are un-funded by $62 trillion; see Joe Liebermann,“America Needs Honest Fiscal Accounting,”Financial Times, May 25, 2004.





cratic National Convention in Boston,John Kerry pledged to “bring our alliesto our side and share the burden, reducethe cost to American taxpayers, andreduce the risk to American soldiers” inorder to “get the job done and bring ourtroops home.” “We don’t have to go italone in the world,” he declared. “Andwe need to rebuild our alliances.”39

Yet it is far from clear that any Ameri-can president would be able to persuadeEuropeans today to commit signi½cantresources to Iraq. In accepting his par-ty’s nomination, Kerry recalled how, as a boy, he had watched British, French,and American troops working togetherin postwar Berlin. In those days, howev-er, there was a much bigger incentive–symbolized by the Red Army units thatsurrounded West Berlin–for Europeanstates to support American foreign poli-cy. It is not that the French and the Ger-mans (or for that matter, the British)were passionately pro-American duringthe Cold War; on the contrary, Ameri-can experts constantly fretted about thelevels of popular anti-Americanism inEurope, on both the Left and the Right.Nevertheless, as long as there was aSoviet Union to the east, there was oneoverwhelming argument for the unity ofthe West. That ceased to be the case½fteen years ago, when the reforms ofMikhail Gorbachev caused the Sovietempire to crumble. And ever since thenthe incentives for transatlantic harmonyhave grown steadily weaker.

For whatever reason, Europeans donot regard the threat posed by Islamistterrorism as suf½ciently serious to justifyunconditional solidarity with the UnitedStates. On the contrary, since the Span-ish general election last year, they haveacted as if the optimal response to the

growing threat of Islamist terrorism is to distance themselves from the UnitedStates. In a recent Gallup poll, 61 per-cent of Europeans said they thought theEuropean Union plays a positive rolewith regard to peace in the world; just 8 percent said its role was negative. Nofewer than 50 percent of those polledtook the view that the United States now plays a negative role.40

So the United States is what it wouldrather not be: a colossus to some, a Go-liath to others–an empire that dare notspeak its name.41 Yet what is the alterna-tive to American empire? If, as so manypeople seem to wish, the United Stateswere to scale back its military commit-ments overseas, then what?

Unless one believes that internationalorder will occur spontaneously, it is nec-essary to pin one’s faith on those supra-national bodies created under U.S. lead-ership after World War II: the UnitedNations, the International MonetaryFund, the World Bank, and the WorldTrade Organization. There is no short-age of liberal thinkers willing to makethe case for global governance on thebasis of these institutions.42 Unfortu-nately, their limitations are all too obvi-ous when it comes to dealing with (touse the now hackneyed but convenient

39 “Kerry’s Acceptance: There Is a Right Wayand a Wrong Way to Be Strong,” The New YorkTimes, July 30, 2004.

40 Robert Manchin and Gergely Hideg, “E.U.Survey: Are Transatlantic Ties Loosening?”<http://www.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=12247&pg=1>.

41 “An empire that dare not speak its name” isCharles Maier’s phrase.

42 See, for example, David Held, Global Cove-nant: The Social Democratic Alternative to theWashington Consensus (Cambridge, Mass.: Poli-ty, 2004). Rather more pessimistic–and moreaware of medieval visions of a global ‘civil so-ciety’–is Ian Linden, A New Map of the World(London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2003).

phrase) failed states and rogue regimes,and with the non-state actors–above all,terrorist organizations–that flourish inthe conditions they create. It is a sad factthat the total budget of the United Na-tions and all its ancillary organizations isequal to barely 1 percent of the federalbudget of the United States.

If the United Nations tries to fashionitself as some kind of alternative toAmerican power, it is bound to fail; itsonly future lies in playing the role itsarchitects intended for it, namely, as anagency through which the United States,in partnership with the other Great Pow-ers of the postwar era, can build somemeasure of international consensus fortheir Grosse Politik. In doing so, it will nomore prevent the United States frombehaving like an empire than the regularmeetings of the sovereigns, foreign min-isters, and ambassadors of the GreatPowers prevented the United Kingdomfrom behaving like an empire in thenineteenth century. But it may helpAmerican policymakers from stumblinginto that less than splendid isolationabhorred by the later Victorian imperial-ists.

Empires are not all bad; nor shouldanyone claim that they are all good.They are inevitably compromised by thepower they wield; they are doomed toengender their own dissolution at home,even as they impose order abroad. Thatis why our expectations should not bepitched too high. It is hard enough to bean empire when you believe you have amandate from heaven. It is still harderfor the United States, which believesthat heaven intended it to free the world,not rule it.

Sadly, there are still a few places in theworld that must be ruled before they canbe freed. Sadly, the act of ruling themwill sorely try Americans, who instinc-tively begrudge such places the blood,

treasure, and time they consume. Yetsaddest of all, there seems to be no bet-ter alternative available to the UnitedStates and to the world.

Once, a hundred and sixty years ago,America’s imperial destiny seemed man-ifest. It has since become obscure. But itis America’s destiny just the same.




For at least two generations, ‘empire’and ‘imperialism’ have been dirty words. Already by 1959, when neitherthe French nor the British Empire hadyet quite ceased to exist, Raymond Aar-on dismissed imperialism as a “namegiven by rivals, or spectators, to the di-plomacy of a great power”–something,that is, that only others did or had. Bythe 1970s, a consensus had emerged inliberal circles in the West that all em-pires–or at least those of European orNorth American origin–had only everbeen systems of power that constituted adenial by one people of the rights (aboveall, the right to self-determination) ofcountless others. They had never bene-½ted anyone but their rulers; all of those

who had lived under imperial rule wouldmuch rather not have and ½nally theyhad all risen up and driven out their con-querors.

Very recently this picture has begun tochange. Now that empires are no more(the last serious imperial outpost, HongKong, vanished in 1997), a more nuancedaccount of their long histories is begin-ning to be written. It has become harderto avoid the conclusion that some em-pires were much weaker than was com-monly claimed; that at least some of thecolonized collaborated willingly, for atleast some of the time, with their colo-nizers; that minorities often fared betterunder empires than under nation-states;and that empires were often more suc-cessful than nation-states at managingthe murderous consequences of religiousdifferences.

Ever since 9/11 and the war in Afghan-istan, a few intrepid voices have evenbeen heard to declare that some empiresmight in fact have been forces for good.Books both for and against–with suchtitles as The Sorrows of Empire, America’sInadvertent Empire, Resurrecting Empire,and The Obligation of Empire–now ap-pear almost daily. As these titles suggest,the current revival of interest in empireis not unrelated to the behavior of thecurrent U.S. administration in interna-

Anthony Pagden

Imperialism, liberalism & the quest for perpetual peace

Anthony Pagden is a professor in the departmentsof history and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His main area of re-search is the prolonged contact between Europeand the non-European world. He is the author ofmore than a dozen books, including “Lords of Allthe World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Brit-ain, and France c. 1500–c. 1800” (1995) and“Peoples and Empires: A Short History of Euro-pean Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, fromGreece to the Present” (2003).

© 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

tional affairs, and to the widespreadassumption that the United States hasbecome a new imperial power. Even so,most Americans continue to feel uncom-fortable with the designation, which(forgetting Hawaii, the Philippines, andPuerto Rico) they have long regarded asa European evil. Yet ever since the mid-1990s, the rhetoric of U.S. internationalrelations has become increasingly impe-rial. “If we have to use force, it is becausewe are America,” declared MadeleineAlbright in 1998, taking care not to pro-nounce the word ‘empire.’ “We are theindispensable nation, We stand tall, Wesee further into the future.”1 No Britishproconsul could have put it better.

But for all the talk about a new Ameri-can empire, is the United States todayreally, in Niall Ferguson’s words, “theempire that does not dare to speak itsname–an empire in denial”?2

This would appear to suggest that theUnited States behaves like and pursuesthe recognized objectives of an empirewhile being unprepared to commit itselfideologically to imperialism, or to takethe necessary measures to ensure thatthose objectives constitute a long-termsuccess. Is that really so?

Before these questions can be an-swered, we need to answer a rather morefundamental one–namely, what is anempire? The word has been used todescribe societies as diverse as Meso-american tribute-distribution systems

(the so-called Aztec and Inca Empires),tribal conquest states (the Mongol andOttoman Empires), European compositemonarchies (the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian Empires), and even networksof economic and political clientage (thecurrent relation of the First to the ThirdWorld)–not to mention the British Em-pire, which combined features of all ofthese. Faced with such diversity, simplede½nitions will clearly be of little use. Itis, of course, possible to de½ne the wordso narrowly as to exclude all but themost obvious European (and a fewAsian) megastates. On the other hand,de½ning it so widely as to include anykind of extensive international powerruns the risk of rending the conceptindeterminate.

So let me begin by saying that an em-pire is an extensive state in which oneethnic or tribal group, by one means oranother, rules over several others–roughly what the ½rst-century Romanhistorian Tacitus meant when he spokeof the Roman world as an “immensebody of empire” (immensum imperii cor-pus).3 As such, empires have always beenmore frequent, more extensive politicaland social forms than tribal territories ornations have ever been. Ever since antiq-uity, large areas of Asia were ruled byimperial states of one kind or another,and so too were substantial areas of Af-rica. Vishanagar, Assyria, Elam, Urartu,Benin, Maori New Zealand–all were, inthis sense, empires.

All empires inevitably involve the ex-ercise of imperium, or sovereign author-ity, usually acquired by force. Few em-pires have survived for long without sup-pressing opposition, and probably allwere initially created to supply the

Imperialism,liberalism & the questfor perpetualpeace

1 Quoted in Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire:essai sur la décomposition du système américain(Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 22. Ironically–or per-haps not–she was justifying a missile attack onIraq.

2 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise ofthe British World Order and the Lessons for GlobalPower (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 317; Fer-guson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire(New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 3–7.

3 See P. A. Blunt, “Laus imperii,” in Peter Garn-sey and C. R. Whittaker, eds., Imperialism in theAncient World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1978), 159–191.



AnthonyPagdenonimperialism

metropolis with goods it could not oth-erwise acquire. In 1918, the great Austri-an economist Joseph Schumpeter de-scribed territorial expansion as “thepurely instinctual inclination towardswar and conquest” and relegated it to an earlier atavistic period of human his-tory that he believed was now past.4 Hewould have to wait another half centu-ry for the ½nal dismemberment of theworld’s last signi½cant colonial outposts.But he could see that in the new globaleconomies that he projected for theworld in the wake of the Great War, con-quest would no longer be possible andthat without conquest there could be noempire

But Schumpeter’s view is only part ofthe picture. War and conquest wouldhave achieved very little if that is allthere had been. To survive for long, all empires have had to win over theirconquered populations. The Romanslearned this very early in their history.5“An empire,” declared the historian Livyat the end of the ½rst century b.c., “re-mains powerful so long as its subjectsrejoice in it.”

Rome had a lot to offer its conqueredpopulations–architecture, baths, theability to bring fresh water from distanthills or to heat marble-lined rooms invillas in the wilds of Northumberland.(The historian Tacitus acidly comment-ed that in adopting baths, porticos, andbanquets, all the unwitting Britons haddone was to describe as “humanity”what was in reality “an aspect of theirslavery.”) Ultimately, however, Rome’sgreatest attraction was citizenship–a

concept that, in its recognizably modernform, the Romans invented and that,ever since the early days of the Republic,had been the main ideological prop ofthe Roman world. Of course, not allRome’s subject peoples wished for suchthings; but if a substantial number hadnot, its empire could not have survivedas long as it did.

All the later European empires did thebest they could to follow at least part ofthe example Rome had set them. TheSpanish and the French both attemptedto create something resembling a singlesociety governed by a single body of law.Similarly, the British in India could nev-er have succeeded in seizing control ofthe former Mughal Empire without theactive and sometimes enthusiastic assis-tance of the emperors’ former subjects.Without Indian bureaucrats, Indianjudges, and, above all, Indian soldiers,the British Raj would have remained aprivate trading company. At the Battle ofPlassey in 1757, which marked the begin-ning of the East India Company’s politi-cal ascendancy over the Mughal Empire,twice as many Indians as Europeansfought on the British side.6

It was this process of absorption–andwith it the ambition to create a singlecommunity that would embrace, as theRoman Empire had, both the mothercountry and the indigenous inhabitantsof its colonies–that allowed EdmundBurke to speak of the victims of the bru-tal regime of Warren Hastings, governorof Bengal, as “our distressed fellow-citi-zens in India.”7 Empire was a sacredtrust, “given,” as Burke insisted, “by an

4 Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and SocialClasses, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: A. M.Kelley, 1951), 7.

5 This has been described most recently andwith great brilliance by Clifford Ando, ImperialIdeology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Em-pire (Berkeley: University of California Press,2000).

6 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and theWorld, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape,2002), 259.

7 “Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts,”quoted in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism andEmpire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Lib-eral Thought (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1999), 157.

incomprehensible dispensation of Di-vine providence into our hands.” Toabuse it, as Hastings had, was not justmorally offensive; more signi½cantly forBurke, it threatened the very existencenot only of the “British constitution,”but of “the civilization of Europe.”8

Yet the idea of empire based upon uni-versal citizenship created a paradox. Ifall the inhabitants of the empire wereindeed fellow citizens, then a new kindof society, universal and cosmopolitan,would have had to come into being toaccommodate them. With hindsight itwas possible to argue, as Edward Gibbondid, that in the second century, when“the Roman Empire comprehended thefairest part of the earth and the most civ-ilized portion of mankind,” a new kindof society had indeed arisen.9 But in theeighteenth century, things did not lookquite so harmonious. Instead of oneworld community, the European over-seas powers had created what the Frenchphilosopher and economist the Marquisde Mirabeau described in 1758 as “a newand monstrous system” that vainly at-tempted to combine three distinct typesof political association (or, as he calledthem, esprits): domination, commerce,and settlement. The inevitable con-flict that had arisen between these hadthrown all the European powers into cri-sis. In Mirabeau’s view, the only way for-ward was to abandon both settlementand conquest–especially conquest–infavor of commerce.

He was not alone. For those like Mira-beau and his near-contemporary AdamSmith, what in the eighteenth centurywas called ‘the commercial society’

seemed to provide a means to create anew, more ecumenical form of empirethat now would bene½t all its members.For, in theory at least, commerce createda relationship between peoples that didnot involve dependency of any kind andthat, most importantly, avoided any useof force. In these new commercializedsocieties, the various peoples of theworld would swap new technologiesand basic scienti½c and cultural skills asreadily as they would swap foodstuffs.These would not be empires of con-quest, but “empires of liberty.”10

But this vision never materialized be-cause, as Smith fully recognized, the Eu-ropean empires were not, nor had everbeen, merely means to economic ends;they were also matters of internationalprestige.11 Smith knew that withoutcolonies Britain would be nothing morethan a small European state. The dispari-ty in size between the mother countryand the rest of the empire remained aconstant worry. Furthermore, as DavidHume pointed out, the “sweet com-merce” in which Montesquieu and oth-ers had placed such trust was, at best, anuncertain panacea for the ills of man-kind: in reality, even the most highlycommercialized states tended to “lookupon their neighbours with a suspiciouseye, to consider all trading states as theirrivals, and to suppose that it is impossi-ble for any of them to flourish, but attheir expence.”12

8 Edmund Burke, On Empire, Liberty, and Re-form: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,2000), 15–16.

9 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Ro-man Empire, chap. 3.

10 See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and Francec.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1995), 178–187.

11 Adam Smith, “Thoughts on the State of theContest with America,” in Ernest CampbellMossner and Ian Simpson Ross, eds., Correspon-dence of Adam Smith, vol. 6 (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1977), 383.

12 David Hume, “On the Jealousy of Trade,” inEugene F. Miller, ed., Essays, Moral, Political, and





Hume’s skepticism proved all tooaccurate. It was in the long run morepro½table, as both the British and theDutch discovered in Asia, to exercise di-rect control over the sources of supplythrough conquest than it was to tradewith them. But the Enlightenment vi-sion of the future transvaluation of em-pire was ½nally swept aside not so muchby the actual practice of the “empires ofliberty” as by Napoleon’s attempt tobuild quite a different kind of empirewithin Europe itself.

Initially the very brevity and bloodi-ness of the Napoleonic ambition totransform Europe into a series of satel-lite kingdoms seemed to the liberals whohad suffered from it–Alexis de Tocque-ville and Benjamin Constant in particu-lar–to have rendered all such projectsunrepeatable. In 1813, with Napoleonapparently out of the way, Constant feltable to declare that, at last, “pleasureand utility” had “opposed irony to everyreal or feigned enthusiasm” of the kindthat had always been the driving forcebehind all modes of imperialism. Napo-leon, and, above all, Napoleon’s fall, hadshown that postrevolutionary politicswere to be conducted not in the name of “conquest and usurpation,” but in ac-cordance with public opinion. And pub-lic opinion, Constant con½dently pre-dicted, would have nothing to do withempire. “The force that a people needsto keep all others in subjection,” hewrote,

is today, more than ever, a privilege thatcannot last. The nation that aimed at suchan empire would place itself in a moredangerous position than the weakest oftribes. It would become the object of uni-versal horror. Every opinion, every desire,every hatred, would threaten it, and soon-

er or later those hatreds, those opinions,and those desires would explode and en-gulf it.13

Like Smith, Constant also believedthat commerce, or “civilized calcula-tion,” as he called it, would come to con-trol all future relationships between peo-ples. Nearly a century later, Schumpeterexpressed, in characteristically unques-tioning terms, the same conviction. “Itmay be stated as beyond controversy,”he declared, “that where free trade pre-vails no class has an interest in forcibleexpansion as such.”14

Ironically, in view of the similarity of these claims, what separated Schum-peter from Constant in time was a phaseof imperial expansion that was more ata-vistic, more “enthusiastic” even than theone Constant hoped he had seen the lastof. For what in fact followed Napoleon’s½nal defeat was not a return to the En-lightenment status quo ante, but theemergence of modern nationalism. Afterthe Congress of Vienna, the newly self-conscious European states and, subse-quently, the new nations of Europe–Belgium (founded in 1831), Italy (1861),and Germany (1876)–all began to com-pete with one another for the status andeconomic gains that empire was thoughtto bestow. Public opinion, far from turn-ing an ironical eye on the imperialisticpretensions of the new European na-tions, embraced them with enthusiasm.National prestige was, for instance, themain grounds on which Tocqueville sup-ported the French invasion of Algeria in1830.

13 Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquestand Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization in Political Writings, ed. and trans.Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), 79.

14 Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes,99.

Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985),328.

The new imperialism turned out to bevery different from the kind of empire ofliberty for which Burke and Smith andMirabeau had argued. No “sacred trust”was involved here–only, in Joseph Con-rad’s famous phrase, “the taking away[of the earth] from those who have a dif-ferent complexion or slightly flatternoses than ourselves.” In the new na-tionalist calculus, the more of this earthyou could take away, the greater you be-came. By 1899, imperialism had indeedbecome, as Curzon remarked, “the faithof a nation.”15

There was something else that wasnew about the new imperialism. Withthe exception of the Spanish, the earlierEuropean powers had been only margin-ally concerned with changing the lives,beliefs, and customs of the peopleswhose lands they had occupied. Mis-sionaries–Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran,Calvinist–were present in British andFrench America, and even in British,French, and Dutch Asia, but their activi-ties were always of secondary politicalimportance and generally looked uponby the civilian authorities as somethingof a nuisance.

In the nineteenth century, however,Africa and even India became the testinggrounds for a new missionary zeal. Dri-ven partly by Christian ideals, partly by a belief in the overwhelming superiorityof European culture, the new imperial-ists sought to make of the world oneworld–Christian, liberal, and, ultimate-ly (since none of the virtues peddled bythe missionaries could be sustained inany other kind of society), commercialand industrial.

In this vision of empire, the ‘natives,’Rudyard Kipling’s “new-caught sullen

peoples, half devil and half child,” hadnot merely to be ruled, they had to beruled for their own good–howevermuch they might resent it at ½rst–andhad to be made to recognize that oneway of life was the inevitable goal of allmankind. This was empire as tutelage.Ironically, and fatally for the imperialpowers as it turned out, it also impliedthat one day all the subjects of all theEuropean empires would become self-governing.

“By good government,” Lord Macau-lay had declared as early as 1833, “wemay educate our subjects into a capacityfor better government; that having be-come instructed in European knowledgethey may, in some future age, demandEuropean institutions.” He did not knowwhen this would come about, but he wascertain that when it did, “it will be theproudest day in English history.”16 Inpractice, self-determination would bepostponed into the remote future. ButMacaulay was forced to acknowledgethat, theoretically at least, it could notbe postponed inde½nitely.

Nationalist imperialism, however,brought to the fore a question that hadremained unanswered for a long time: inthe modern world what, precisely, wasthe nature of empire? Ever since 1648,the modern nation-state has been one inwhich imperium has been regarded asindivisible. The monarchs of Europe hadspent centuries wresting authority fromnobles, bishops, towns, guilds, militaryorders, and any number of quasi-inde-pendent, quasi-sovereign bodies. Indi-visibility had been one of the shibbo-leths of prerevolutionary Europe, andone which the French Revolution hadgone on to place at the center of the con-

15 Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The LastPhase, 1919–1925: A Study in Post-War Diploma-cy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,1934), 13.

16 Quoted in Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies ofthe Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), 34.





ception of the modern state. The mod-ern person is a rights-bearing individual,but–as the 1791 Déclaration des droits del’homme et du citoyen had made clear–heor she is so only by virtue of being a citi-zen of a single indivisible state.17

Such a strong notion of sovereigntycould apply, however, only within Eu-rope. In the world beyond, things werevery different. It had been impossiblefor any empire to thrive without sharingpower with either local settler elites orwith local inhabitants. As Henry Maine,a renowned jurist, historian, and legalmember of the viceroy’s council in In-dia, had declared in 1887, “Sovereigntyhas always been regarded as divisible ininternational law.”18 Failure to cede thispoint had, after all, been the prime causeof the American Revolution, and, after1810, of the revolt of the Spanish colo-nies in South America–and had almostdriven the French settlers of Saint-Dom-ingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique intothe waiting arms of the British.

Nowhere was the question of dividedsovereignty so acute as in the BritishEmpire, which by the early nineteenthcentury had become larger and morewidespread, and consequently more var-ied, than any of its rivals or predeces-sors. “I know of no example of it eitherin ancient or modern history,” wroteDisraeli in 1878. “No Caesar or Charle-magne ever presided over a dominion sopeculiar.” If such a conglomerate was tosurvive at all, it could insist on no singleconstitutional identity. It was this fea-ture of the empire that led the historian

Sir Robert Seeley in 1883 to make his fa-mous remark that it seemed as if Eng-land had “conquered and peopled halfthe world in a ½t of absence of mind.”19

Nothing, it seems, could be further re-moved from the present position of theUnited States. Is then the United Statesreally an empire?

I think if we look at the history of theEuropean empires, the answer must beno. It is often assumed that becauseAmerica possesses the military capabili-ty to become an empire, any overseasinterest it does have must necessarily beimperial.20 But if military muscle hadbeen all that was required to make anempire, neither Rome nor Britain–toname only two–would have been one.Contrary to the popular image, mostempires were, in fact, for most of theirhistories, fragile structures, always de-pendent on their subject peoples for sur-vival. Universal citizenship was not cre-ated out of generosity. It was created outof need. “What else proved fatal to Spar-ta and Athens in spite of their power inarms,” the emperor Claudius asked theRoman Senate when it attempted to de-ny citizenship to the Gauls in Italy, “buttheir policy of holding the conqueredaloof as alien-born?”21

This is not to say that the UnitedStates has not resorted to some of the

17 See Anthony Pagden, “Human Rights, Nat-ural Rights and Europe’s Imperial Legacy,” Po-litical Theory 31 (2003): 171–199.

18 Quoted in Edward Keene, Beyond the Anar-chical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order inWorld Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2002), 63.

19 Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of Eng-land (London: Macmillan, 1883), 12.

20 This, for instance, is the argument behindRobert D. Kaplan’s Warrior Politics: Why Leader-ship Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: RandomHouse, 2002), and in a very different and moremeasured tone, Chalmers A. Johnson’s, The Sor-rows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End ofthe Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books,2004)–although Kaplan approves and Johnsondisapproves.

21 Tacitus, Annals II, 23–24.

strategies of past empires. Today, for in-stance, Iraq and Afghanistan look re-markably like British protectorates.Whatever the administration may claimpublicly about the autonomy of the cur-rent Iraqi and Afghan leadership, theUnited States in fact shares sovereigntywith the civilian governments of bothplaces, since it retains control over thecountries’ armed forces. What, however,the United States is not committed to isthe view that empire–the exercise ofimperium–is the best, or even a possi-ble, way to achieve this.

In a number of crucial respects, theUnited States is, indeed, very unimperi-al. Despite allusions to the Pax America-na, twenty-½rst-century America bearsnot the slightest resemblance to ancientRome. Unlike all previous European em-pires, it has no signi½cant overseas set-tler populations in any of its formal de-pendencies and no obvious desire to ac-quire any. It does not conceive its hege-mony beyond its borders as constitutinga form of citizenship. It exercises no di-rect rule anywhere outside these areas;and it has always attempted to extricateitself as swiftly as possible from any-thing that looks as if it were about to de-velop into even indirect rule.

Cecil Rhodes once said that he wouldcolonize the stars if he could. It is hardto image any prominent American poli-cymaker, even Paul Wolfowitz, even se-cretly, harboring such desires. As Vis-count James Bryce, one of the most as-tute observers of the Americas bothNorth and South, said of the (North)Americans, “they have none of theearth-hunger which burns in the greatnations of Europe.”22

The one feature the United States doesshare with many past empires is the de-

sire to impose its political values on therest of the world. Like the ‘liberal’ em-pires of nineteenth-century Britain andFrance, the United States is broadlycommitted to the liberal-democraticview that democracy is the highest pos-sible form of government and shouldtherefore be exported. This is the Amer-ican mission to which Madeleine Al-bright alluded, and it has existed in oneform or another ever since the creationof the republic.

In addressing the need to “contain”Communist China, Harry Truman–comparing America to AchaemenidPersia, Macedonian Greece, AntonineRome, and Victorian Britain–claimedthat the only way to save the world fromtotalitarianism was for the “whole world[to] adopt the American system.” By thishe meant, roughly, what George W. Bushmeans by freedom–democratic institu-tions and free trade. Truman, knowinglyor unknowingly, took the phrase “Amer-ican system” from Alexander Hamilton,who ½rmly believed that the new repub-lic should one day be able to “concur inerecting one great American system su-perior to the control of all transatlanticforce or influence and able to dictate theterms of the connections between theold world and the new.”23 “For theAmerican system,” Truman continued,could only survive “by becoming a worldsystem.”24 What for Hamilton was to bea feature of international relations, forTruman was to be nothing less than aworld culture.

But even making the rest of the worldadopt the American system did notmean, as it had for all the other empiresTruman cited, ruling the rest of the

22 Quoted by Arthur Schelsinger, Jr. in “TheMaking of a Mess,” The New York Review ofBooks 51 (14) (September 2004): 41.

23 Federalist 11 in The Federalist Papers, ed.Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1987), 133–134.

24 Quoted in Ferguson, Colossus, 80.





world. For Truman assumed, as hasevery American administration since,that the world’s ‘others’ no longer need-ed to be led and cajoled until one daythey ½nally demanded their own demo-cratic institutions. American values, asBush put it in 2002, are not only “rightand true for every person in every socie-ty”–they are self-evidently so.25 Allhumanity is capable of recognizing thatdemocracy, or ‘freedom,’ will always bein its own best interest. All that has everprevented some peoples from graspingthis simple truth is fanaticism, the mis-guided claims of (certain) religions, andthe actions of malevolent, self-interestedleaders. Rather than empire, the UnitedStates’ objective, then, is to eliminatethese internal obstacles, to establish theconditions necessary for democracy, andthen to retreat.

There can be little doubt that this as-sumption has been the cause, in Iraq asmuch as in El Salvador, of the failure toestablish regimes that are democratic inmore than name. Humanity is not, asIraq and Afghanistan have demonstrat-ed, destined to ½nd democracy moreenticing than any other alternative. Youmay not need to be an American to em-brace ‘American values’–but you cer-tainly need to be much closer to Ameri-can beliefs and cultural expectationsthan most of the populations of the Mid-dle East currently are. Tocqueville madea similar point about Algeria. It wouldhave been impossible to make Algeriainto a modern nation without “civiliz-ing” the Arabs, he argued, a task thatwould be impossible to achieve unlessAlgeria was made into not a “colony,”but “an extension of France itself on the

far side of the Mediterranean.”26 TheFrench government chose to ignore himand made it into a colony nonetheless.

But such an arrangement has neverbeen an option for the United States. Ifonly because the United States is the onemodern nation in which no division ofsovereignty is, at least conceptually, pos-sible. The federal government sharessovereignty with the individual states of which the union is composed, but itcould not contemplate, as former em-pires all had to, sharing sovereignty withthe members of other nations. Only verybriefly has the mainland United Statesever been considered an empire ratherthan a nation. As each new U.S. territo-ry was settled or conquered it became,within a very short space of time, a newstate within the Union. This implied thatany territories the United States mightacquire overseas had, like Hawaii, to beincorporated fully into the nation–orreturned to its native inhabitants. NoAmerican administration has been will-ing to tolerate any kind of colonialismfor very long. Even so resolute an impe-rialist as Teddy Roosevelt could notimagine turning Cuba or the Philippinesinto colonies.27 The United States doespossess a number of dependent territo-ries–Guam, the Virgin Islands, Samoa,etc.–but these are too few and too smallto constitute an overseas colonial em-pire. The major exception to this rule isPuerto Rico. The existence of a vigorousdebate over the status of this ‘common-wealth’–a term which itself suggests

25 Quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Em-pire: Western Footprints and America’s PerilousPath in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press,2004), 3.

26 “Rapport fait par M. Tocqueville sur le pro-jet de la loi relative aux credits extraordinairesdemandés pour l’Algérie,” in Seloua Luste Boul-bina, ed., Tocqueville sur l’Algérie, 1847 (Paris:Flammarion, 2003), 228.

27 Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Impe-rialism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers,2001), 75.

that Puerto Rico is an independent re-public–and the fact that the status quostrikes everyone, even those who sup-port its continuation, as an anomaly,largely proves the rule.28

Those advocating a more forceful U.S.imperial policy overlook that if Americais in denial, it is in it for a very good rea-son. To become a true empire, as eventhe British were at the end of the nine-teenth century, the United States wouldhave to change radically the nature of itspolitical culture. It is a liberal democracy(as most of the Western world now con-ceives it)–and liberal democracy andliberal empire (as Mill conceived it) areincompatible.29 The form of empirechampioned by Mill existed to enforcethe virtues and advantages that accom-panied free or liberal government inplaces that otherwise would be, in Mill’slanguage, “barbarous.” The time mightindeed come when the inhabitants ofsuch places would demand European institutions–but as Mill and even Ma-caulay knew, when that happened, theempire would be at an end.

By contrast the United States makesno claim to be holding Iraq and Afghan-istan in trust until such time as theirpeoples are able to govern themselvesin a suitable–i.e., Western–manner. Itseeks, however imperfectly, to conferfree democratic institutions directly onthose places, and then to depart, leavingthe hapless natives to fabricate as bestthey can the social and political infra-structure without which no democraticprocess can survive for long.

In the end, perhaps, what Smith, Con-stant, and Schumpeter prophesied hascome to pass: commerce has ½nally re-placed conquest. True, it is commercestripped of all its eighteenth-centuryattributes of benevolence, but it is com-merce nonetheless. The long-term polit-ical objectives of the United States,which have varied little from adminis-tration to administration, have been tosustain and, where necessary, to create aworld of democracies bound inexorablytogether by international trade. And thepolitical forms best suited to interna-tional commerce are federations (such as the European Union) and tradingpartnerships (the oecd or nafta), notempires.

In Paradise and Power: America and Eu-rope in the New World Order, Robert Kaganboasts that whereas the “old” Europeanshad moved beyond “power into a self-contained world of laws and rules andtransnational negotiation and coopera-tion . . . a post-historical paradise of peaceand relative prosperity, the realization ofImmanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace,’” theUnited States

remains mired in history, exercising pow-er in an anarchic Hobbesian world whereinternational rules are unreliable, andwhere true security and the defense andpromotion of a liberal order still dependon the possession and use of militarymight.30

It is dif½cult to know just what Kagantakes the words ‘Kant’ and ‘Hobbes’ tostand for. But on any reasoned under-standing of the writings of ThomasHobbes and Immanuel Kant, he wouldseem to have inverted the objectives ofthe Europeans and the Americans. For it

28 See Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Mar-shall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: PuertoRico, American Expansion, and the Constitution(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

29 On this term, see Michael Mann, IncoherentEmpire (London: Verso, 2003), 11.

30 Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: Americaand Europe in the New World Order (London: At-lantic Books, 2003), 3.





is the Europeans (or at least the majorityof them) who–by attempting to isolatethe European Union as far as possiblefrom all forms of external conflict thatare considered to pose no immediate do-mestic threat–are the true Hobbesians.And in most respects the objectives ofKant’s conception of a “universal cosmo-politan existence”–which would consti-tute the “matrix within which all theoriginal capacities of the human racemay develop”31–is, mutatis mutandis,what the current U.S. governmentclaims to be attempting to achieve.

Kant argued that the peoples of theworld would never be at peace so long as the existing world powers–what hecalled “universal monarchies”–werelocked into internecine competitionwith one another. They had, he said, tobe persuaded to join a league for theirown mutual protection. To make thispossible, however, it was not enough torely on international trade agreementsor peace treaties, because in the long runthe parties to such agreements wouldhonor them only if they perceived themto be in their interests. A true world fed-eration could only come about once allthe states of the world shared a commonpolitical order, what Kant called “repre-sentative republicanism.” Only thenwould they all have the same interests,and only then would those interests beto promote mutual prosperity and toavoid warfare. The reason he believedthis to be so was that such societies werethe only ones in which human beingswere treated as ends not means; the onlyones, therefore, in which human beingscould be fully autonomous; and the onlyones, consequently, in which no people

would ever go to war to satisfy the greedor ambition of their rulers.

With due allowance for the huge dif-ferences between the late eighteenthcentury and the early twenty-½rst, andbetween what Kant understood by rep-resentative republics and what is meanttoday by liberal democracies, the UnitedStates’ vision for the world is roughlysimilar: a union of democracies, cer-tainly not equal in size or power, but allcommitted to the common goal of great-er prosperity and peace through freetrade. The members of this union havethe right to defend themselves againstaggressors and, in the pursuit of defense,they are also entitled to do their best tocajole so-called rogue states into mend-ing their ways suf½ciently to be admittedinto the union. This is what Kant calledthe “cosmopolitan right.”32 We mayassume that Truman had such an ar-rangement in mind when he said thatthe American system could only surviveby becoming a world system.

For like the “American system,”Kant’s “cosmopolitan right” was intend-ed to provide precisely the kind of har-monious environment in which it waspossible to pursue what Kant valuedmost highly, namely, the interdepend-ence of all human societies. This indis-putably “liberal order” still depended“on the possession and use of militarymight,” but there would be no perma-nent, clearly identi½able, perpetual en-emy–only dissidents, ‘rogue’ states, and the perverse malice of the excluded.Kant was also not, as Kagan seems to im-ply, some kind of high-minded idealist,in contrast to Hobbes, the indefatigablyrealist. He was in fact very suspicious of high-mindedness of any kind. “This

31 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal His-tory with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in HansReiss, ed., Political Writings (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1991), 51.

32 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals,trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 156.

rational idea of a peaceful, even if notfriendly, thoroughgoing community ofall the nations on the earth,” he wrote,“is not a philanthropic (ethical), prin-ciple, but a principle having to do withrights.”33 It was based quite as ½rmlyupon a calculation of reasonable self-interest as was Hobbes’s suggestion forexiting from the “war of all againstall.”34

Kant, however, was also aware thatbringing human beings to understandjust what is in their own self-interestwould always be a long and arduoustask. In order to recognize that autono-my is the highest human good, humanshave to disentangle themselves from the“leading strings” by which the “guard-ians”–priests, lawyers, and rulers–have made them “domesticated an-imals.” Only he who could “throw offthe ball and chain of his perpetual im-maturity” would be properly “enlight-ened,” and only the enlightened couldcreate the kind of state in which true au-tonomy would be possible.35 Because ofthis, the cosmopolitan right still lay formost at some considerable distance inthe future.

It still does–few states today ful½llKant’s criteria. And of course Kant neveraddressed the problem of how the tran-sition from one or another kind of des-potism to “representative republican-ism” was to be achieved (although heseems to have thought that the French

Revolution, at least in its early phases,offered one kind of model).

Kant’s project for perpetual peace hasoften been taken to be some kind ofmoral blueprint for the United Nations.But in my view, it is far closer to the ½nalobjective of the modern global state sys-tem in which the United States is un-doubtedly, for the moment at least, thekey player. It is also, precisely because itis a project for some future time, a farbetter guide to the overall ideologicalobjectives of the United States than any-thing that now goes under the name of‘empire.’

33 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 158; Antho-ny Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism andthe Legacy of European Imperialism,” Constella-tions 7 (2000): 3–22.

34 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philo-sophical Sketch,” in Reiss, ed., Political Writings,112.

35 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Ques-tion: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Reiss, ed.,Political Writings, 54–55.




On its face, using military occupationas a tool to promote democratization isabout as intuitive as forcing people totake a self-improvement class to learnhow to be more spontaneous. And yetthe two most recent U.S. administra-tions, though on opposite ends of thepolitical spectrum, have used America’smight to try to advance the cause of de-mocracy in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, atleast nominally, Afghanistan. The Bushadministration’s major statement of itsstrategic policy, known mainly for itsjusti½cation of preventive war, dwells on the need to “shift the balance of pow-er in favor of freedom.”1

Scholars and public intellectuals haveplayed a prominent role as drummers on

this bandwagon. Historian Niall Fergu-son, in a colorful collection of storiesthat ends with a paean to empire, con-tends that “without the influence ofBritish imperial rule, it is hard to believethat the institutions of parliamentarydemocracy would have been adopted bythe majority of states in the world, asthey are today.”2 Indeed, most of thepostcolonial states that have remainedalmost continuously democratic sinceindependence, such as India and someWest Indian island states, are formerBritish possessions. Still, as Fergusonacknowledges, many former British col-onies have failed to achieve democraticstability: Pakistan and Nigeria oscillatebetween chaotic elected regimes andmilitary dictatorships; Sri Lanka hasheld elections that stoked the ½res ofethnic conflict; Malaysia has avertedethnic conflict only by limiting democ-racy; Singapore is stuck in a pattern ofstable but noncompetitive electoral poli-tics; Kenya is emerging from a long in-terlude of one-party rule; and Iraq in thelate 1940s flirted with electoral politicsthat played into the hands of violent rad-

Jack Snyder

Empire: a blunt tool for democratization

Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Profes-sor of International Relations in the political sci-ence department and the Institute of War andPeace Studies at Columbia University. His booksinclude “The Ideology of the Offensive: Mili-tary Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914”(1984), “Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics andInternational Ambition” (1991), and “From Vot-ing to Violence: Democratization and NationalistConflict” (2000). He has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1999.

© 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

1 Of½ce of the President, “National SecurityStrategy of the United States,” September 2002,<www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>.

2 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made theModern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 358.

icals. The list continues with even moreparlous cases, from Burma to Zimbabwe.

Despite this mixed track record, it isworth looking back on imperial Brit-ain’s strategies, successes, and failures in attempting to prepare its far-flungpossessions for democratic self-govern-ment. From the 1920s onward, the Brit-ish undertook systematic efforts to writetransitional democratic constitutions forcountries they expected would soon beself-governing. At the same time, theydevised political, economic, administra-tive, and cultural strategies to facilitatethis transition.

In other words, they attempted rough-ly what the United States and the UnitedNations have been trying to accomplishon a shorter timetable in Iraq, Bosnia,Kosovo, and East Timor. What problemsand trade-offs they faced in this enter-prise help illuminate, at least in a generalway, the kind of troubles that the democ-racy-promoting empire still confrontstoday.

To illustrate these processes, I draw onseveral examples, particularly those ofIraq in the late 1940s, India in the 1930sthrough the 1940s, Sri Lanka in the 1930sthrough the 1950s, and Malaysia in the1940s through the 1960s.

Democratization by imperial ½atsounds paradoxical, and it is. The impe-rial power insists not only that the so-ciety it rules should become democratic,but also that the outcome of democrati-zation should be one that it approves:namely, that the new democracy shouldcontinue to abide by the rules laid downby the departing imperial power, shouldbe stable and peaceful, and should main-tain good relations with the former over-lord. This is dif½cult enough when theempire has actually succeeded in install-ing the full set of tools the postcolonialstate will need to make democracy func-

tion: a competent civil service; impartialcourts and police that can implementthe rule of law; independent, profession-alized news media; and the rest. Evenwhen these institutions are well estab-lished, outcomes may not conform tothe empire’s wishes, because the self-determining people may have their ownideas and interests that diverge from theempire’s.

When democratic institutions are on-ly partially formed, as is commonly thecase at the moment of decolonization,the problem is much worse. Transition-al regimes typically face a gap betweenhigh demand for mass political partici-pation and weak institutions to integratesociety’s conflicting needs.3 The imperi-al power may have put in place some ofthe institutional window dressing of de-mocracy, but daily political maneuver-ing, energized by the devolution of pow-er, is shaped more by ties of patronageand ethnicity, and by unregulated oppor-tunism, than by democratic processes.This situation is ripe for the turbulentpolitics of ethnic particularism, coups,and rebellions.

The imperial ruler sometimes imag-ines that politics will take a holidaywhile the democratic system is being es-tablished–that groups contending forpower will not exploit the weakness oftransitional arrangements. In Malayashortly after World War II, for example,the British hoped that a battery of socialand economic reforms inspired by Fabi-an socialism would depoliticize class andethnic conflicts during democratization.When it turned out that reform inten-si½ed the expression of competing de-mands, the British temporarily revertedto their earlier reliance on indirect rulethrough undemocratic traditional elites

Empire: a blunttool fordemocra-tization

3 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order inChanging Societies (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 1968).



Jack Snyder onimperialism

of the Malay ethnic group. “Colonialpolicy,” says historian T. N. Harper,“lurched between authoritarianism anda missionary adherence to the rule oflaw.”4

Imperial strategists of the democratictransition often thought of this simply asa problem of the speed of reform. A 1960Foreign Of½ce memorandum, for exam-ple, stated that the task in East Africawas “to regulate the pace of political de-velopment so that it was fast enough tosatisfy the African desire for self-govern-ment but not so fast as to jeopardize eco-nomic progress or the security situa-tion.”5 Actually, the problem is far morecomplex than this. Temporarily puttingon the brake, as in the Malayan example,often involved ruling undemocraticallythrough traditional elites or minorityethnic groups in the classic strategy ofdivide and rule. This was not simply amatter of “freezing colonial societies.”6

Rather, this process actively created newdivisions, altered the political meaningof traditional identities, and distributedpower in ways that would complicatesubsequent efforts to install a sense ofnational unity.

Both in public and private, of½cials ofthe Colonial Of½ce sounded well mean-ing: “the present time [1947] is one ofunprecedented vigour and imagination”

in British colonial policy, “one cheerfulthing in a depressing world.”7 “The fun-damental objectives [for 1948] in Africaare to foster the emergence of large-scalesocieties, integrated for self-governmentby effective and democratic political andeconomic institutions both national and local, inspired by a common faith in progress and Western values andequipped with ef½cient techniques ofproduction and betterment.”8 The problem, at least at this stage of impe-rial stewardship, was not primarily badintentions. Rather, it was the paradox ofpromoting democracy by ½at, whichoften required the adoption of politicallyexpedient methods of rule that undercutthe achievement of the ultimate objec-tive of democratic consolidation.

Attempted democratic transitions arelikely to turn violent and to stall short ofdemocratic consolidation when they areundertaken in a society that lacks theinstitutions needed to make democracywork. Such societies face a gap betweenrising demands for broad participationin politics and inadequate institutions tomanage those popular demands. All ofthis happens at a time when new institu-tions of democratic accountability havenot yet been constructed to replace theold, divested institutions of imperialauthority or traditional rule.

In the absence of routine institutionalauthority, political leaders ½nd they needto rule through ideological or charismat-ic appeals. Rallying popular support byinvoking threats from rival nations orethnic groups is an attractive expedient

4 T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Mak-ing of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1999), 378; for other points, see 58,75, 82–83.

5 Ronald Hyam, “Bureaucracy and ‘Trustee-ship’ in Colonial Empire,” in Judith M. Brownand Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford Historyof the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, vol.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 278,quoting a Foreign Of½ce memorandum by Wil-liam Gorell Barnes.

6 John W. Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in Brown andLouis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Em-pire: The Twentieth Century.

7 Speech by A. Hilton Poynton at the UnitedNations, October 3, 1947, quoted in Hyam,“Bureaucracy and ‘Trusteeship’ in ColonialEmpire,” 277.

8 Colonial Of½ce paper, quoted in Hyam,“Bureaucracy and ‘Trusteeship’ in ColonialEmpire,” 277.

for hard-pressed leaders who desperatelyneed to shore up their legitimacy.9 Theinstitutional weaknesses of early democ-ratization create both the motive to usethis strategy of rule and the opportunityto dodge accountability for its costs.

A common side effect of state weak-ness during early democratization is apoorly de½ned sense of the nation. De-mocracy requires national self-determi-nation, but people in weak states whoare just emerging into political con-sciousness often lack a clear, agreedanswer to the question, who are we?

Notwithstanding the typical viewamong nationalists that the identity ofnations is ½xed by immutable nature orculture, it is normally the common ex-perience of a people sharing a fate in astrong state that solidi½es and demar-cates a sense of nationality. Even inFrance, a country with a long and ven-erable history, it was only the late-nine-teenth-century experience of commonmilitary service, national railways, stan-dardized education, and mass democra-cy that completed the process of forginga culturally diverse peasantry into self-conscious Frenchmen.10 In the absenceof strong state institutions to knit to-gether the nation, leaders must strugglefor legitimacy in an ill-de½ned, contest-ed political arena.

In weakly institutionalized, newlydemocratizing states, this contestationover national self-determination takesplace amid the shifting fortunes of elitesand mass groups. Elites left over fromthe old regime look desperately for strat-

egies that will prevent their fall, whilerising elites try to muscle in. Both sets of elites scramble for allies among thenewly aroused masses.

Nationalism–the doctrine that a dis-tinctive people deserve to rule them-selves in a state that protects and ad-vances their distinctive cultural or politi-cal interests–often emerges as an appar-ently attractive solution to these politicaldilemmas. It helps rally mass support onthe basis of sentiment in lieu of institu-tional accountability, and helps de½nethe people who are exercising self-deter-mination. It thus clari½es the lines be-tween the people and their external foes,who become available as scapegoats in aself-ful½lling strategy that rallies supportin protection against external threats.

Civil or international war may some-times result from this potent politicalbrew as a direct result of nationalist po-litical objectives, such as the aim of re-gaining a lost piece of national territory.However, war may also be an indirectresult of the complex politics of transi-tional states. Political leaders may be-come trapped in reckless policies whenuncompromising nationalism becomesthe indispensable common denominatorthat keeps their heterogeneous politicalcoalitions together.

These problems are likely to face anysociety that tries to democratize beforebuilding the requisite institutions. Thisis no less the case when a democracy-promoting empire is overseeing theprocess. If the empire understands thisproblem, it may try to maintain its posi-tion of domination longer to buy timeto put the needed institutions in place.When considerations of rising cost andwaning legitimacy ½nally compel decol-onization, the empire may attempt anawkward compromise between authori-tarian order keeping and democraticlegitimacy, leaving in place a hybrid

9 Edward D. Mans½eld and Jack Snyder, Elect-ing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War(Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2005); Snyder,From Voting to Violence: Democratization andNationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000).

10 Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1976).





political system based on both tradition-al and elected authority. This expedientacknowledges the problem but does notnecessarily solve it.

The chaotic democratic processes thatfollowed Britain’s imperial departurefrom Iraq provide a telling example ofsuch dilemmas.

Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s was a coun-try undergoing the strains of socioeco-nomic modernization and decoloniza-tion with no coherent identity, tradition,or political institutions.11 Under a Brit-ish mandate, Iraq’s 1924 constitutiondivided powers between the king and anindirectly elected parliament chosen byuniversal manhood suffrage. After gain-ing independence in 1932, Iraq suffered aseries of tribal rebellions and leadershipstruggles. These culminated in a coup bynationalist military of½cers, which trig-gered British reoccupation of the coun-try from 1941 to 1945.12

Following World War II, the Britishencouraged the regent Abd al-Ilah, whowas ruling on behalf of the young KingFaysal II, to liberalize the regime toenhance its popular legitimacy in theeyes of the alienated urban middle class.Press restrictions were removed, opposi-tion parties were licensed, and electoraldistricts were redrawn to reflect popula-tion shifts to urban areas. However, theplan for political liberalization provokedresistance from established elites.13 The

Iraqi prime minister told a British diplo-mat that his government had “decidedto allow political parties in order that itshould become clear how harmful theyare and their abolition be demanded.”14

Reflecting traditions of patronage poli-tics in a still largely rural society, localnotables dominated the parliament cho-sen in the election of 1946.15

Middle-class nationalists, thoughthinly represented in parliament, re-mained loud voices in public debate.Important in government service, in themilitary, in the economy, and potentiallyin the streets, these educated urbanitescould not be ignored. To appease suchcritics, Iraqi diplomats took the mostradical stance on the Palestine issue atthe June 1946 meeting of the ArabLeague, gratuitously calling for a boy-cott of British and American trade thatthey knew the Saudis and Egyptianswould have to veto.16

Such public relations tactics becameincreasingly entrenched in 1947, as thenew Iraqi prime minister Salih Jabrgroped to ½nd a rhetorical stance thatwould reconcile Iraq’s diverse con-stituencies to his weakly institutional-ized regime. Jabr faced a general eco-nomic crisis, severe food shortages, anda shortfall of money for salaries of civilservants, a prime constituency for Arabnationalist groups.17 The regent and the traditional ruling elites hoped that

11 Reeva Simon, Iraq Between the Two WorldWars: The Creation and Implementation of a Na-tionalist Ideology (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1986), 3–4.

12 Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), 55–93.

13 Ibid., 96–100; Matthew Elliot, “IndependentIraq”: The Monarchy and British Influence, 1941 –1958 (London: Tauris Academic Studies,1996), 25.

14 Elliot, “Independent Iraq,” 26.

15 Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 101; Mi-chael Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the Historyof Modern Iraq (London: Frank Cass, 1994), 139.

16 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Crystallizationof the Arab State System, 1945–1954 (Syracuse,N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 36.

17 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 167; Marr, The Modern History ofIraq, 103.

British economic and military aid wouldhelp them weather the crisis and fend offburgeoning urban radicalism. In pursuitof that strategy, Jabr hoped to renegoti-ate Iraq’s treaty with Britain in order toeliminate the embarrassing presence ofBritish air bases on Iraqi soil and to cre-ate a ½rmer basis for economic and polit-ical cooperation.18

For the nationalists, however, even animproved agreement with the formercolonial overlord was anathema. Thus,to immunize himself from nationalistobjections, Jabr relied on demagogy onthe Palestine issue. In August of 1947, hebroke precedent in calling for the use ofthe regular armies of Arab states, notjust volunteers, to ½ght against the Jewsin Palestine. Nonetheless, amid a wors-ening of the economy and a shortfall ofexpected British aid, the strategy of na-tionalist demagogy on this issue failed toreconcile Iraqi nationalists to the renew-al of the treaty with Britain. The signingof the treaty in January of 1948 provokeda wave of student strikes, demonstra-tions, and denunciations from politicalparties, leading to Jabr’s replacement bya politician who was untainted by asso-ciation with the treaty.19

While Jabr’s rhetoric on Palestinefailed to achieve its intended conse-quences, its unintended consequenceswere profound. A British diplomat re-ported that “the Iraqi Government isnow to some extent the victim of theirown brave words, which the opposition

is not slow to challenge them to makegood.”20 In a vicious cycle of outbid-ding, the regent, the parliamentary no-tables, and the socialist parties now allcompeted with the nationalist opposi-tion to adopt the most militant positionon Palestine. Since Iraq was not a front-line state, the costs of undermining thechances of compromise in Palestinewere low compared to the domestic po-litical costs of being outbid on the Arabnationalism issue. This rhetoric rever-berated not just within Iraq, but alsothroughout the Arab world. Jabr’s mili-tant stance on Palestine at the Octoberand November 1947 meetings of the Ar-ab League helped to set off a spiral ofincreasingly vehement anti-Israeli rhet-oric in other Arab states. In the echochamber of popular Arab politics, Iraq’sincompletely democratized regime ledthe way in adopting a demagogic strate-gy that increasingly tied the hands of lessdemocratic Arab states that otherwisemight have been able to resist such pop-ular pressures.21

It would be an exaggeration to say that Britain’s inadequate effort to installpartially democratic institutions in Iraqwas the sole cause of these outcomes;politics in modernizing Iraq might havebeen fraught with turmoil under any sce-nario. Nonetheless, this serves as a cau-tionary tale, demonstrating how a de-mocracy-promoting empire can unleashilliberal forces in societies with weak po-litical institutions.

18 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 159, 162–163; Marr, The ModernHistory of Iraq, 101–102.

19 Maddy-Weitzman, The Crystallization of theArab State System, 49; Eppel, The Palestine Con-flict in the History of Modern Iraq, 143, 164–166,174–175; Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 101–105.

20 Eppel, The Palestine Conflict in the History ofModern Iraq, 169.

21 Ibid., 141–142, 158, 181, 193; Marr, The Mod-ern History of Iraq, 102; Maddy-Weitzman, TheCrystallization of the Arab State System, 49. For a related argument, see Michael Barnett, Dia-logues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in RegionalOrder (New York: Columbia University Press,1998), 87–91.





One of the most common charges laidagainst the British Empire is that it un-scrupulously played the game of divideand rule. In order to maintain its author-ity over millions of colonial subjectswith a minimum of expense and Britishmanpower, the British built up elites oflocal ethnic groups or tribes who servedas Britain’s agents of indirect rule. TheBritish also armed local ethnic minori-ties who kept order effectively at rock-bottom prices. Scholars have argued thatthese tactics contributed to the politici-zation of ethnicity, which loaded thedice in favor of bloody ethnic conflictsonce the empire retreated. Even whenthe British were trying to prepare a col-ony for peaceful, democratic self-gov-ernment, such tactics as institutional-ized power sharing or minority repre-sentation among ethnic groups tendedto politicize earlier ethnic divisions.These latent ½ssures tended to crackopen with the move to independenceand true universal-suffrage democracy.

India is often invoked as an example of the divisive legacy of British tactics of divide and rule, but it is by no meansunique. In Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), forexample, the British relied dispropor-tionately on English-speaking civil ser-vants from Tamil and other minoritygroups. In Malaya, the British encour-aged immigration of Chinese and Indianworkers to man the rubber plantationsand other enterprises needed to sustainthe broader imperial economy and mili-tary machine. These measures laid thegroundwork in both of these colonies for the envy of the rural ethnic majoritygroups, the Sinhalese and Malays, thatsought af½rmative action and language-use privileges to correct perceived injus-tices.

The British dealt with these problemsby oscillating between power-sharingschemes that protected minorities and

universal-suffrage democracy that em-powered the majority. The generation of British-trained politicians that tookpower immediately after independencekept up this balancing game for a time,but in the long run the system’s opposedprinciples turned out to be incompati-ble. In Malaysia, the problem was solvedwhen the state curtailed the democraticprocess and civil rights in 1969; in SriLanka, democracy spiraled into ever-worsening ethnic warfare. These exam-ples illustrate a widespread pattern inimperial attempts to democratize multi-ethnic societies.

Democratic transitions are most suc-cessful and peaceful when undertaken ina context of bureaucratic ef½ciency, ruleof law, mature political parties, and es-tablished free press. One of the reasonsthat India has remained a fairly stabledemocracy is that all these elementswere put in place, largely as a result ofBritish efforts, before its independencein 1947. However, to buy the time to ac-complish this (both for Britain’s ownstrategic reasons and arguably to prepareIndia better for the transition), the em-pire needed to shore up local allies whosupported the continuation of the colo-nial regime. In India in the 1920s and1930s, these included traditional Muslimelites who welcomed British rule as aprotection against the feared tyranny ofthe Hindu majority. (A consequence ofthis policy, many have argued, was thebloody partition of the British Raj intoIndia and Pakistan in 1947, in which ithas been estimated that nearly a millionpeople died.22) To strengthen these al-lies while gradually introducing demo-cratic reforms in preparation for eventu-

22 Radha Kumar, “The Troubled History ofPartition,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1) (January/Feb-ruary 1997): 26.

al independence, the British establisheda system of separate electorates andguaranteed numbers of seats in provin-cial parliaments for Muslims and Hin-dus. As the political system began to de-mocratize, this system of ethnic repre-sentation helped to channel mass loyal-ties along ethnic lines.23

British policy promoted the politiciza-tion of Muslim identity still further dur-ing World War II. When Britain commit-ted India to the war effort against Ger-many without consultation, CongressParty members in the Indian govern-ment resigned en masse. Congress lead-ers were jailed. The Muslim League,however, continued to see Britain astheir protector against the Hindu major-ity, and so supported the British war ef-fort. Enjoying a clear ½eld for politicalorganizing with no opposition from theCongress, the League emerged from thewar with a strengthened hold over theMuslim electorate.

In the postwar 1946 elections, theLeague gained 76 percent of the Mus-lim vote through its irresistible call forthe creation of the state of Pakistan.24

When in 1947 the League euphemistical-ly called for “direct action” in the streetsto press the Congress for concessions onMuslim autonomy, the new electorate,its loyalties channeled by the system ofrepresentation separated by ethnicity,responded by rioting in Calcutta and inother major cities. Looking to extricatethemselves through a policy that criticshave labeled ‘divide and quit,’ the Britishabandoned India to a chaotic, bloody

partition of the extensively intermingledreligious communities.

On the one hand, the British legacy of liberal institutions facilitated India’stransition to a fairly stable democracy.On the other hand, the legacy of insti-tutionalized ethnicity, an expedient tosustain British rule while awaiting thetransfer of power to the local majority,increased the likelihood that culturalcleavages would become the basis fordivisive politics in the transitional state.

In Sri Lanka, the British fostered thedevelopment of a small, English-educat-ed, cosmopolitan political and bureau-cratic elite who tended to favor theinclusive civic identity of ‘Ceylonese,’based on loyalty to the governmentalsystem that Britain had established inthe colony of Ceylon, rather than theexclusive ethnic identities of Sinhaleseor Tamil.25 Because of the success ofChristian missionary activities in theTamil-populated Jaffna region, Tamilsconstituted a disproportionate share of that elite. Fewer Sinhalese learnedEnglish because the powerful Buddhistpriesthood blocked British inroads in-to the traditional monopoly of templeschools over the education of lay chil-dren.26

High-level British-trained native of½-cials never sunk deep roots into localcommunities and thus failed to attract a popular following. During the 1920s,Ceylon’s main representative body, theState Council, was elected under a pow-er-sharing system that restricted suf-

23 Anita Inder Singh, The Origins of the Partitionof India, 1936–1947 (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987), 237; Peter Hardy, The Muslims ofBritish India (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1972), chap. 8; H. V. Hodson, The GreatDivide (London: Hutchison, 1969), 14–15, 48.

24 Singh, The Origins of the Partition of India,243.

25 K. N. O. Dharmadasa, Language, Religion, and Ethnic Assertiveness: The Growth of SinhaleseNationalism in Sri Lanka (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 1992), 225–226, 254.

26 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Sri Lanka: EthnicFratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),65–66, 79, 155.





frage and reserved a proportion of theseats for Tamils. This system bufferedindigenous of½cials from full accounta-bility to mass constituencies. In 1931,however, the British DonoughmoreCommission, in an attempt to prepareCeylon for independence and full de-mocracy, stripped away this buffer byeliminating separate minority represen-tation and introducing universal suf-frage.27

Despite growing populist ferment, theold cosmopolitan elite managed to pre-vail in elections to form the ½rst twopostindependence governments in 1947and 1952. Soon, however, the Sinhaleserebellion against pro½ciency in the Eng-lish language as a requirement for gov-ernment employment began to gatherforce. Sinhalese teachers and Buddhistmonks also wanted to exclude Tamil asan of½cial language, arguing that lan-guage parity would somehow allow thelarge Tamil population of South India toswamp Sinhalese culture. Radical monksin the less wealthy temples resented theinfluence of Western culture and admin-istrative practices, which deprived themof their traditional role as the link be-tween the state and the villages.28 Thesemonks experimented with socialist rhet-oric in the late 1940s, but by the mid-1950s they found that nationalist pop-ulist themes were a more effective vehi-cle for expressing their demands.

Given the competitive incentives ofuniversal-suffrage elections, even a secu-

lar, cosmopolitan, Oxford-educated pol-itician such as Solomon Bandaranaikefound it expedient to tap into this popu-lar movement. Perceiving an opportuni-ty to gain power in the 1956 elections,the Buddhist political organization of-fered to support Bandaranaike’s chal-lenge to the ruling United National Par-ty, on the condition that he campaign on the platform of making Sinhala theof½cial state language. This marriage of convenience consolidated the ideo-logical shift of Ceylon’s Buddhist move-ment from socialism to ethnonational-ism. Through word of mouth, by playinga central role at local political meetings,and by distributing election leaflets, lo-cal monks delivered ‘vote banks’ on be-half of Bandaranaike and the ethnicallydivisive language policy.29

Although Bandaranaike owed his elec-toral victory to the support of militantBuddhists, once in power he negotiateda pact with Tamil leaders to establishTamil as the language of administra-tion in Tamil-majority provinces in thenortheast of the country and to allowlocal authorities to block Sinhalese im-migration into their regions. These con-cessions triggered anti-Tamil rioting inthe capital city of Colombo. Bandara-naike gave up his plan to gain legislativeapproval of the pact, declared an emer-gency, and implemented the main fea-tures of the agreement by decree. Bud-dhists, claiming the pact would “lead tothe total annihilation of the Sinhaleserace,” only intensi½ed their resistance.30

27 Urmila Phadnis, Religion and Politics in SriLanka (New Delhi: Manohar, 1976), 159; Chel-vadurai Manogaran, Ethnic Conflict and Reconcil-iation in Sri Lanka (Honolulu: University of Ha-waii Press, 1987), 8; James Manor, “The Failureof Political Integration in Sri Lanka (Ceylon),”Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Poli-tics 17 (1) (March 1979): 23.

28 Tambiah, Sri Lanka, 8, 20; Phadnis, Religionand Politics in Sri Lanka, 74.

29 Phadnis, Religion and Politics in Sri Lanka,73–74, 160, 164–165, 183–187; Manor, “TheFailure of Political Integration in Sri Lanka(Ceylon),” 21–22; Dharmadasa, Language, Reli-gion, and Ethnic Assertiveness, 296–297, 300, 314.

30 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Be-trayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in SriLanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992), 50.

A monk assassinated Bandaranaike in1959.

From this point on, the pattern of elec-toral outbidding among Sinhalese par-ties was ½rmly established. Even JuniusJayawardene’s hitherto moderate Sin-halese United National Party attackedBandaranaike’s power-sharing agree-ment with the Tamils. On several subse-quent occasions, the Sinhalese party inpower sought an agreement with theTamil minority to achieve a majoritycoalition in parliament, and the Sin-halese opposition party responded withdemagogic attacks to wreck the agree-ment. Revamping the electoral system in1977 to reward candidates who appealedacross ethnic lines also failed to breakthe spiral of conflict.31 By that time,groups had developed the habit of riot-ing in the streets against policies theydisliked, so conflict was fueled regard-less of electoral incentives.

The legacy of British imperialismexacerbated the problems of the demo-cratic transition in Sri Lanka’s multieth-nic society. In Sri Lanka as elsewhere,this legacy included the contradictoryelements of a divide-and-rule preferencefor ethnic minorities and the subsequentmove to universal-suffrage democracy.In this setting, even the DonoughmoreCommission’s well-intentioned planturned out to be fraught with unintend-ed consequences.

Malaysia achieved independencefrom Britain in 1957, a decade after Sri

Lanka. In many respects, the two startedout on similar trajectories. In a processthat closely resembled Sri Lanka’s tran-sition to independence, the British inMalaysia brokered an agreement for ademocratic constitution, which was un-derpinned by a power-sharing accordbetween cosmopolitan, English-speak-ing elites from the Malayan and Chinesecommunities. Having brought Chineseand Indian immigrants to Malaya to sus-tain the imperial economy, the Britishhoped that democratic power sharingcould overcome the political divisionsthis had brought about. But that expec-tation was too optimistic. As in Sri Lan-ka over the course of the ½rst decadeafter independence, the logic of masselectoral competition began to under-mine the power-sharing accord, as na-tionalist parties in both major ethnicgroups began to draw votes away fromthe centrist, cross-ethnic alliance. Inter-ethnic harmony was restored only afterdemocracy was truncated through a sus-pension of the liberal constitution fol-lowing the 1969 postelectoral riots.32

During the early years of the ColdWar, an armed rebellion mounted by theChinese-dominated Malaysian Commu-nist Party had left all Chinese politicallysuspect. As a result, the Chinese businesselite faced dif½culties in organizing po-litically on its own. Moreover, wealthyChinese found that their interests oftencoincided more closely with those ofMalayan bureaucratic elites than withthose of working-class Chinese. As aresult, the main Chinese party, the Ma-laysian Chinese Association, combinedwith the Malayan elite party, the United

31 Donald Horowitz, “Making ModerationPay,” in Joseph Montville, ed., Conflict andPeacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (New York:Lexington Books, 1991), 463. On the more re-cent period, see Amita Shatri, “GovernmentPolicy and the Ethnic Crisis in Sri Lanka,” inMichael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, eds.,Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asiaand the Paci½c (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press,1997), 129–164.

32 Gordon P. Means, Malaysian Politics: The Sec-ond Generation (Singapore: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991), chap. 1; Muthiah Alagappa, “Con-testation and Crisis,” in Alagappa, ed., PoliticalLegitimacy in Southeast Asia (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1995), 63–64.





Malays National Organization, to form acoalition, known as the Alliance, for thepurpose of contesting the Kuala Lumpurcity elections in 1952. The British rein-forced this arrangement and made eth-nic cooperation a precondition of even-tual independence.33

The cross-ethnic coalition agreementheld ½rm for the ½rst two postindepen-dence elections: In 1959, the Alliancewon 52 percent of the vote in free andfair elections and, because of the magni-fying effects of single-member districts,74 out of 104 seats in parliament. In 1964,the Alliance bene½ted from the rallyingeffect induced by military threats fromIndonesia and increased its margin ofvictory.34

By 1969, however, the Alliance’s pow-er-sharing formula was coming underintense challenge by a second generationof political elites that was more ethnical-ly oriented and less cosmopolitan thanthe founders of the independent Malay-sian state. The Alliance continued tocampaign on what in retrospect soundslike an extraordinarily reasonable plat-form: Alliance politicians offered pro-grams to rectify the economic disadvan-tages of impoverished, poorly educatedMalayans, and they justi½ed these pro-grams in terms of the need to developagriculture, not of ethnic favoritism.Malay was to become the sole of½ciallanguage, but other languages could beused for of½cial business as needed. TheChinese would continue to bene½t froma liberal policy on citizenship. The Al-liance’s ideology was one of Malaysian

civic-territorial nationalism, not Ma-layan ethnic nationalism.35

This reasonable-seeming formula be-gan to wear thin, however, in the trou-bled economic context of 1969. Both theMalays and the Chinese had grounds forcomplaint against the elitist Alliance,whose supporters came disproportion-ately from the upper-income groups ofboth ethnicities. By 1969, Malays’ percapita income remained less than halfthat of non-Malays. Opposition partiescatering to Malay constituencies be-lieved the solution should be a massiveprogram of employing Malays in new,state-sector industries. Yet they saw thatthe Malay political power needed to ac-complish this was receding, because theAlliance’s liberal citizenship policieswere swelling the ranks of Chinese na-tionalist voters. “Racial harmony is onlyskin deep,” the manifesto of the Malayopposition party concluded. “Ninetypercent of the nation’s wealth is still inthe hands of non-Malays.”36

At the same time, Chinese economicgrievances were rising. A devaluation ofthe British pound sterling harmed Chi-nese business interests. Because the Alli-ance was hard-pressed by the Malay op-position in the hard-fought 1969 parlia-mentary election campaign, it refused tocompensate those who suffered ½nanciallosses as a result of the devaluation. Thisgave added ammunition to the Chineseopposition parties. In a perverse form of interethnic elite collusion, the Malaynationalist and Chinese nationalist par-ties had agreed not to divide the opposi-tion vote and so refrained from runningopposing candidates in districts whereone of the two parties held the majority.The Alliance had gained only 49 percent

33 Stanley S. Bedlington, Malaysia and Singa-pore: The Building of New States (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1978), 85–87.

34 Karl von Vorys, Democracy Without Consen-sus: Communalism and Political Stability in Ma-laysia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975), 249, 297.

35 Ibid., 268.

36 Ibid., 271.

of the popular vote, though it retained amajority of the seats in parliament. De-spite this ‘victory,’ the Alliance govern-ment eventually succumbed to tactics ofethnic polarization and suffered ultimateelectoral defeat at the hands of the eth-nic opposition parties. When riots brokeout in Kuala Lumpur between Chineseand Malays in the ethnically polarizedatmosphere after this tense election, thegovernment declared an emergency andsuspended the constitution.

The government then began to pursuea two-pronged strategy of truncatingdemocracy while implementing a tech-nocratic policy designed to maximizeeconomic growth and increase educa-tional and employment opportunitiesfor ethnic Malays. Heavy governmentinvestments would modernize rural ar-eas where Malays were the majority. Ac-cording to this formula, which was codi-½ed in the Second Malaysia Plan of 1971,Chinese businesses could continue toenrich themselves, but national symbol-ism and government-backed af½rmativeaction would strongly favor Malays. In-flammatory ethnic appeals were madeillegal. Political coalitions were arrangedthrough backroom bargaining and pa-tronage deals rather than through opencontestation.37 In the jargon of socialscience, the Alliance instituted an “eth-nic control regime” based on a combina-tion of repression and side payments tosome of the losers.38

This strategy was so successful that by1973 even the nationalist opposition par-

ties had been co-opted into the rulingAlliance, which now controlled 80 per-cent of the seats in parliament. Underthis system of sharp limitations on freespeech and truncated democratic rights,Malaysia enjoyed three decades of extra-ordinary economic growth without seri-ous ethnic violence, with the Allianceunassailably in power.39

A key factor in this success was thepower of Malaysian state administra-tors over society. British Malaya had be-queathed an effective central bureaucra-cy, a powerful tool that Alliance politi-cians could use to coerce or buy off op-ponents under the Second MalaysiaPlan.40 The powers held by the state un-der the revised 1971 constitution includ-ed the ability to distribute patronage tocooperative opposition politicians, todistribute central tax revenues to coop-erative localities, and to parcel out eco-nomic development projects. The loyaltyand ef½ciency of the Malay-dominatedmilitary and police immediately made itpossible to repress rioting. Sarawak ran-ger units, composed of Iban tribesmenbrought in from the Malaysian part ofBorneo, proved equally ruthless in re-pressing unruly gangs.41

Finally, the state had strong powers tobar ethnonationalist messages from the

37 Ibid., 394–412; Means, Malaysian Politics,439; Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 116.

38 D. Rumley, “Political Geography of Controlof Minorities,” Tijdschrift voor Economische inSociale Geographie 84 (1) (1993); Ian Lustick,“Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consoci-ationalism Versus Control,” World Politics 31 (3)(April 1979): 325–344.

39 Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 152; Wil-liam Case, “Malaysia: Aspects and Audiences ofLegitimacy,” in Alagappa, ed., Political Legitima-cy in Southeast Asia, 75–76, 79–80, 106; SumitGanguly, “Ethnic Politics and Political Quies-cence in Malaysia and Singapore,” in Brownand Ganguly, eds., Government Policies and EthnicRelations in Asia and the Paci½c, 233–272.

40 Milton Esman, Administration and Develop-ment in Malaysia: Institution Building and Reformin a Plural Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1972).

41 Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapore, 166–167; von Vorys, Democracy Without Consensus,348.





media. A 1971 constitutional amendmentmade it a crime even for legislators todiscuss ethnically sensitive questionsabout Malay language dominance, citi-zenship, or the constitutionally mandat-ed special rights of Malays as the coun-try’s indigenous group. Ownership andstaff of the mass media were ‘Malaysian-ized’ in the 1970s. This assertion of stateauthority over the press was legitimizedin part by a policy begun under the Brit-ish, who had required newspapers to ap-ply for annual licenses and had threat-ened seditious newspapers with closure.Even as recently as 1987, the main Chi-nese newspaper was closed down for ayear after it protested the policy of hav-ing Malay principals administer Chineseschools.42

The paired cases of Sri Lanka and Ma-laysia show that democratization risksthe exacerbation of ethnic tensions, es-pecially when imperial policies have fos-tered envy and promoted politicizationalong ethnic lines. Ironically, some ofthe measures that became ethnicallydivisive were originally adopted as expe-dients to sustain imperial rule while try-ing to prepare the ground for democracy.Whereas British-style institutions of rep-resentative democracy were a dubiousblessing in both cases, the most valuablelegacy of empire in Malaysia turned outto be an effective administrative appa-ratus capable of managing ethnic divi-sions while overseeing coherent eco-nomic policies that bene½ted all groups.

In countries with weak political institu-tions the transition to democracy carries

a higher risk of civil or international war.Nonetheless, when a democratic powermilitarily occupies a country, it is likelyto promote democracy there as part ofits strategy of withdrawal. This prefer-ence reflects the democratic power’sself-image and values, its expectationthat democratization will create a coop-erative partner after the withdrawal, andits desire to legitimate the military inter-vention as consistent with the targetstate’s presumed right to national self-determination.

Normally, the imperial state seeks toorganize the basic institutional precon-ditions for democracy before handingpower back to the occupied nation.However, while this effort is being un-dertaken, the empire usually must gov-ern through local elites whose legitima-cy or political support is typically basedon traditional authority or ethnic sectar-ianism.

Unfortunately, such short-run expedi-ents may hinder the long-run transitionto democracy by increasing ethnic polar-ization. Even if the empire does not takeactive steps to politicize ethnicity, themere act of unleashing premature de-mands for mass political participationbefore democratic institutions are readywill increase the risk of a polarized, vio-lent, unsuccessful transition. Britishimperialists fell prey to these dilemmasbetween the 1920s and 1960s, notwith-standing their frequently benign inten-tions. The United States risks falling intothe same trap as it tries to promote de-mocracy in the wake of military inter-ventions.

Elections under the U.S. occupation ofIraq in January of 2005 reflected the typ-ical pattern of ethnic and religious polar-ization in culturally divided societiesthat attempt democracy before coherentstate institutions have been constructed.The United States was not consciously

42 Means, Malaysian Politics, 137–140; Bedling-ton, Malaysia and Singapore, 150; Jon VandenHeuvel, The Unfolding Lotus: East Asia’s ChangingMedia (New York: Columbia University, Free-dom Forum Media Studies Center, 1993), 146–162; von Vorys, Democracy Without Consensus,429.

playing the game of divide and rule, butthe elections it sponsored inadvertentlycomplicated efforts to overcome divi-sions among Kurds, Shia Arabs, andSunni Arabs. With the Sunni refrainingfrom voting out of fear or protest, andthe Kurds and Shia voting strictly alonggroup lines, the assembly elected towrite the country’s constitution turnedout to be less comprehensive in its repre-sentation and more culturally polarizedthan a nondemocratic process wouldhave devised. After the elections, Sunniinsurgents increasingly directed theirattacks against Shia civilian targets rath-er than only against U.S. and Iraqi gov-ernment targets. If the United Statescontinues to try to impose democracy on ill-prepared societies, it can expectmore uphill struggles such as this one.



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book Spring 2005 - American Academy of Arts and Sciences · 2019-12-14 · coming up in Dædalus: Jonathan R. Cole Academic freedom under ½re 5 Niall Ferguson America, unconscious