The Empire of Europe
The United States is not today’s empire. The European Union is
Europe is taking on its imperial heritage and acting like an imperial power, not only in the Balkans. The European Union’s problem, however, is that neither its citizens nor the majority of its politicians have faced up to this reality. So they frequently discuss the wrong questions.
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The Roman Empire was a cultural melting pot where, even in remote Galilee, a Jewish carpenter’s son could encounter settlers from Greece and legionnaires from Gaul. From the northern border of England to Amman in present-day Jordan, one can find the legacies of Roman civilization: streets, baths, market squares, theaters, and amphitheaters. The Roman citizen was a citizen of the world in a sense that has been replicated only by today’s business traveller who, in every city of the globalized world, moves about in identical planes, airports, rented cars, hotels, bars, etc., for which he pays in the same plastic, global currency.
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Curiously, it was not so much the Empire’s achievements as its decline and fall that captured the imagination of the West. In 1984 the German historian Alexander Demandt counted no less than 500 theories of the fall of Rome. Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to find out how the empire managed to survive for half a millennium despite huge distances, difficult communications, and cultural divergence?
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[T]he British Empire had – as had Rome – accomplished a gigantic civilizing mission. Within just over 200 years, huge areas and millions of people had been rescued from disease, ignorance, and the whims of local despots, and brought into the modern age. The global empire created global trade and a global market, established global legal norms (including the abolition of slavery, torture, the burning of widows, and blood feuds) and internationally binding business practices ranging from banking, credit, and insurance to bookkeeping. It also set up a global lingua franca, and the ideals of personal, transnational mobility and equal rights for all. The globalized world of today is a product of the British Empire.
A half century of decolonization has not led to democracy and peace. On the contrary, tyranny and war are more the rule than the exception in the postcolonial world, and especially in Africa. Neither has decolonization brought prosperity. In fact, the income gap between the former colonies and the former colonial powers has increased practically across the board since decolonization.
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We have grown accustomed to viewing history as an evolutionary process in which the nation state has replaced the empire, yet there is little actual progress to be seen. The nation state that developed in late medieval Europe was certainly preferable to the chaos it replaced, in which local warlords ("noblemen") were constantly engaged in mutual slaughter. Yet with few exceptions, the history of nation states is less edifying than that of the great empires; domestic intolerance and external aggression have been the chief characteristics of political entities founded on homogeneity of race, culture, and above all, religion.
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Yet since the nation defines itself ideologically through race, language, culture, religion, and history, the nation state tends to be intolerant – to the extreme of committing cultural and physical genocide. [...] Not that long ago, the international community sought to come to grips with the nation state’s natural intolerance by legitimizing ethnic cleansing. Think of the “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey organized by the League of Nations or the “westward displacement” of Poland resolved by the United Nations – which presupposed the expulsion of the Germans from their eastern territories.
The “right of national self-determination” proclaimed by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 was probably – with the obvious exception of communism and National Socialism – the most harmful idea of the 20th Century, an age that produced more than its share of harmful ideas. Wilson’s Kantian utopia of a band of democratic republics that would administer eternal peace through the League of Nations was well-meaning, but it was also hypocritical and blind to history. The United States itself had fought a horrendous civil war half a century earlier to make clear that there could be no right of self-determination for individual states or groups of states within the Union.
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The United Nations, founded by Wilson's disciple Franklin D. Roosevelt, is based on the false presumption that the nation is comparable to a natural person, and is thus the sacrosanct smallest unit of the international community. Of course, a process of reconsideration has been going on since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The nation has lost its mystique; the individual citizen with his or her human rights is back in focus. Moreover, with each additional failed state that comes under UN mandate, the world body itself becomes more of a quasi-imperial entity, a kind of empire by proxy on behalf of the great powers.
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Perhaps this metamorphosis of the United Nations has something to do with the new way in which some academics have been looking at the project of empire, most notably Niall Ferguson in Britain and Herfried Münkler in Germany. Ferguson’s view of empire is more generous and eccentric than that of Münkler, who maneuvers carefully within the mainstream. Neither author directly addresses the issue of the United Nations, however. But both assume that today’s world is dominated by an empire and that we should get used to it. That empire is, of course, the USA.
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[ B]oth the imperialist Ferguson and the nationalist Münkler base their arguments on a false premise. If the word has any definition other than “very large and strong state,” then the US is not an empire.
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[H.G. Wells: "]We call the United States a country just as we call France or Holland a country. Yet they are as different as an automobile and a horse-drawn shay." Elsewhere Wells writes of the United States as the "first of the great modern nations."
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The behavior that Ferguson and Münkler criticize from their opposing standpoints is actually determined by the fact that the United States neither is nor wants to be an empire. The nation is big enough for armed isolationism to remain an option, and so individualistically constituted in its politics, economy, and society that the consensual national will required for the sustained maintenance of a global imperial presence simply cannot be produced. The global order that this novel entity seeks is not an “association of divergent peoples” for whose fates in a Hobbesian world the military establishment in Washington and the taxpayers of the midwest would be responsible. What this entity wants is the Wilsonian-Kantian vision of an association of free republics, willing and able to take their own fates into their own hands.
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When Europe finally resolved to take action against one of its own dictators – Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic – yet failed to gain the blessings of the United Nations because Milosevic was a client of Moscow, the Europeans discovered that NATO, an alliance of democratic states, was just as good at legitimizing the use of force to protect human rights as the United Nations. The principle of the “coalition of the willing” was invented not by George W. Bush, but by the Europeans and Bill Clinton.
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The Balkan wars and their aftermath illustrate the role of the European Union in a multipolar world. Europe’s function in the Balkans is that of heir to the mini-empire of Yugoslavia, which itself inherited parts of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Europe is only the most recent imperial power to control the Balkans – where the nation state exists only as an artificial construct; the region’s natural form of existence is that of an imperially administered crazy quilt of nationalities and confessions.
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The European Union’s problem is, however, that neither its citizens nor the majority of its politicians have faced up to this reality. One can see this reflected in the discussions over “widening versus deepening” or in warnings against “overburdening” the union by accepting new members. The demand to “deepen” the European Union is driven by the utopian vision of turning Europe into a “great modern nation” like the United States, the “United States of Europe.” The failure of the constitutional referendum in two states of what is supposed to be "core Europe" has shown what the people have grasped before their politicians, namely that this vision is neither feasible nor desirable. Tony Blair came closest to defining Europe’s destiny when he said it was a matter of “becoming a superpower, not a superstate.” Instead of avoiding the issue with phrases like “Europe is something between a federation of states and a federal state,” the Europeans should admit that they are an empire. Granted, a new type of empire, but an empire nevertheless.
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