context for Pynchon: new book excerpt

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=11950>

Imperial history
 
June 2003
 
Americans are stuck with the burden of empire without
having chosen it. No wonder they're feeling truculent.

Dominic Lieven

[...] For the US, empire presents many dilemmas. True
empire demands a price in money and blood which
democratic metropolitan electorates are very unwilling
to pay. This was a key factor in the collapse of
European empires after 1945. It explains too why the
European empires which lasted for longest (the USSR
and Portugal) were run by authoritarian regimes which
did not need to ask electorates whether they wished to
pay the price. The American electorate will need very
good cause to pay even a historically small price to
sustain indirect empire through a global network of
clients and allies. If, as often happened in former
empires, imperial policy undermines these clients and
forces a choice between direct imperial rule or
allowing territories to become bases for anti-imperial
"bandits," then the price of empire will escalate. 

American ideology inhibits paying this price. The
American foundation myth is rooted in anti-imperial
struggle. Americans never equated their own conquest
of a continent and destruction of its native
population with European colonialism. Isolationism
runs deeper than imperialism in US culture. Moreover,
at the very core of empire's definition is rule
without consent over many alien peoples. This flatly
contradicts the hegemonic contemporary ideologies of
popular sovereignty, democracy and nationalism. 

The contemporary American dilemma of empire is not
new. Even by the 1850s it was clear that true great
powers of the future would require continental-scale
resources. But continental scale usually implies
multinational populations. In a world where popular
sovereignty and ethnic nationalism were becoming the
dominant ideologies, how were such polities to be
legitimised? 

A number of possible strategies existed. The Soviet
Union attempted to base itself on a new, universal,
supra-ethnic ideology. Sultan Abdul Hamid II tried to
save the Ottoman empire by reasserting an Islamic
identity which would unite Turks, Arabs and Kurds
behind his regime. Many imperial rulers hoped to
consolidate as much as possible of the empire into a
central ethno-national core—through Russification,
Magyarisation and so on. Britain hoped to achieve a
consolidation of the white colonies into a Greater
British imperial nation by consent. Meanwhile in
Austria, the Habsburgs found themselves pioneering
principles of multiethnic federation which, in more
democratic form, would become crucial elements in
later efforts to secure harmony in multiethnic
societies. It was towards such a goal that Gorbachev
hoped to steer the Soviet Union.

[...] Whether or not it is worthwhile to call the US
an empire, it certainly is interesting to ask which
particular empires and imperial traditions America
resembles. In one sense, the US is closest to the
British and the Dutch empires of modern capitalism
which created the global capitalist economy. In other
respects it is much closer to some of the great land
empires of antiquity. This is not just because of the
obvious (although crucial) point that the US is an
empire of continental scale and resources. It is also
because of the nature of US collective identity. This
is above all defined by ideology, culture and
political loyalty. In this sense, it is much closer to
Roman and Ottoman imperial identities than to
ethnically defined English or Dutch ones. This has an
impact on attitudes towards assimilating outsiders
into its own community and allowing them access to
elite status and power. Even in the 2nd century AD,
many emperors and most senators were not Roman, often
not even Italian. The parallels with the US, and the
stark contrast to the British and Dutch empires, are
clear. 

[...] Democracy is also a source of confusion. The
American political class believes that democracy is
inherently peaceable and un-imperialist. There is some
truth in this. Democracy does not go to war for fun or
for status in the style of old-fashioned
warrior-aristocracies. But even modern US history
yields the example of the war between the Union and
the Confederacy. No doubt neither were perfect
democratic nation states since both denied votes to
women, indigenous Americans and (often even in the
Union) to blacks. By those standards, democracy barely
existed anywhere before 1945. Nevertheless, both the
Union and the Confederacy were sustained by massive
popular and electoral commitment, and were far closer
to democratic nation states than almost any other
polities of their era. Far from inhibiting conflict,
this made it more total and terrible. 

Behind the claims for democracy often lies a very
Enlightenment (and very American) optimism about human
nature, if unrestrained by wicked elites and
superstitions. But the Anglophone white settler
democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries were the
most democratic yet also among the most racist
polities of their time. The economic and cultural
interests of indigenous peoples were usually safer
under bureaucratic or aristocratic imperial rule than
under settler democracy. This would have surprised
neither Fran-cesco Guicciardini nor David Hume, both
of whom argued that the worst of all fates was to be
the subject of a republic of citizens. Nor were
Anglophone settlers particularly wicked in this
respect. Algerian natives fared better under the
military rule of Napoleon III than under the
democratic Third Republic, for all the latter's
incantations about liberty, fraternity and equality.
In an increasingly integrated global economy which
rests on huge imbalances of power between first and
third worlds, it remains anything but self-evident
that democracy in the first world guarantees
third-world interests. [...] 

Dominic Lieven's book, "Empire: The Russian Empire and
its Rivals," has just been published by Pimlico in
paperback


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