Anthony Pagden

Imperialism, liberalism & the quest for perpetual peace Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

For at least two generations, ‘empire’ who had lived under imperial rule would and ‘imperialism’ have been dirty much rather not have and ½nally they words. Already by 1959, when neither had all risen up and driven out their con- the French nor the had querors. yet quite ceased to exist, Raymond Aar- Very recently this picture has begun to on dismissed imperialism as a “name change. Now that empires are no more given by rivals, or spectators, to the di- (the last serious imperial outpost, Hong plomacy of a great power”–something, Kong, vanished in 1997), a more nuanced that is, that only others did or had. By account of their long histories is begin- the 1970s, a consensus had emerged in ning to be written. It has become harder liberal circles in the West that all em- to avoid the conclusion that some em- pires–or at least those of European or pires were much weaker than was com- North American origin–had only ever monly claimed; that at least some of the been systems of power that constituted a colonized collaborated willingly, for at denial by one people of the rights (above least some of the time, with their colo- all, the right to self-determination) of nizers; that minorities often fared better countless others. They had never bene- under empires than under nation-states; ½ted anyone but their rulers; all of those and that empires were often more suc- cessful than nation-states at managing the murderous consequences of religious Anthony Pagden is a professor in the departments differences. of history and political science at the University Ever since 9/11 and the war in Afghan- of California, Los Angeles. His main area of re- istan, a few intrepid voices have even search is the prolonged contact between Europe been heard to declare that some empires and the non-European world. He is the author of might in fact have been forces for good. more than a dozen books, including “Lords of All Books both for and against–with such the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Brit- titles as The Sorrows of Empire, America’s ain, and France c. 1500–c. 1800” (1995) and Inadvertent Empire, Resurrecting Empire, “Peoples and Empires: A Short History of Euro- and The Obligation of Empire–now ap- pean Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from pear almost daily. As these titles suggest, Greece to the Present” (2003). the current revival of interest in empire is not unrelated to the behavior of the © 2005 by the American Academy of Arts current U.S. administration in interna- & Sciences

46 Dædalus Spring 2005 tional affairs, and to the widespread (the so-called Aztec and Inca Empires), Imperialism, assumption that the United States has tribal conquest states (the Mongol and liberalism & the quest become a new imperial power. Even so, Ottoman Empires), European composite for perpetual most Americans continue to feel uncom- monarchies (the Hapsburg and Austro- peace fortable with the designation, which Hungarian Empires), and even networks (forgetting Hawaii, the Philippines, and of economic and political clientage (the Puerto Rico) they have long regarded as current relation of the First to the Third a European evil. Yet ever since the mid- World)–not to mention the British Em- 1990s, the rhetoric of U.S. international pire, which combined features of all of relations has become increasingly impe- these. Faced with such diversity, simple Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 rial. “If we have to use force, it is because de½nitions will clearly be of little use. It we are America,” declared Madeleine is, of course, possible to de½ne the word Albright in 1998, taking care not to pro- so narrowly as to exclude all but the nounce the word ‘empire.’ “We are the most obvious European (and a few indispensable nation, We stand tall, We Asian) megastates. On the other hand, see further into the future.”1 No British de½ning it so widely as to include any proconsul could have put it better. kind of extensive international power runs the risk of rending the concept But for all the talk about a new Ameri- indeterminate. can empire, is the United States today So let me begin by saying that an em- really, in Niall Ferguson’s words, “the pire is an extensive state in which one empire that does not dare to speak its ethnic or tribal group, by one means or name–an empire in denial”?2 another, rules over several others– This would appear to suggest that the roughly what the ½rst-century Roman United States behaves like and pursues historian Tacitus meant when he spoke the recognized objectives of an empire of the Roman world as an “immense while being unprepared to commit itself body of empire” (immensum imperii cor- ideologically to imperialism, or to take pus).3 As such, empires have always been the necessary measures to ensure that more frequent, more extensive political those objectives constitute a long-term and social forms than tribal territories or success. Is that really so? nations have ever been. Ever since antiq- Before these questions can be an- uity, large areas of Asia were ruled by swered, we need to answer a rather more imperial states of one kind or another, fundamental one–namely, what is an and so too were substantial areas of Af- empire? The word has been used to rica. Vishanagar, Assyria, Elam, Urartu, describe societies as diverse as Meso- Benin, Maori New Zealand–all were, in american tribute-distribution systems this sense, empires. All empires inevitably involve the ex- 1 Quoted in Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain ercise of imperium, or sovereign author- (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 22. Ironically–or per- ity, usually acquired by force. Few em- haps not–she was justifying a missile attack on pires have survived for long without sup- Iraq. pressing opposition, and probably all were initially created to supply the 2 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global 3 See P. A. Blunt, “Laus imperii,” in Peter Garn- Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 317; Fer- sey and C. R. Whittaker, eds., Imperialism in the guson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 3–7. sity Press, 1978), 159–191.

Dædalus Spring 2005 47 Anthony metropolis with goods it could not oth- concept that, in its recognizably modern Pagden on erwise acquire. In 1918, the great Austri- form, the Romans invented and that, imperialism an economist Joseph Schumpeter de- ever since the early days of the Republic, scribed territorial expansion as “the had been the main ideological prop of purely instinctual inclination towards the Roman world. Of course, not all war and conquest” and relegated it to Rome’s subject peoples wished for such an earlier atavistic period of human his- things; but if a substantial number had tory that he believed was now past.4 He not, its empire could not have survived would have to wait another half centu- as long as it did. ry for the ½nal dismemberment of the All the later European empires did the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 world’s last signi½cant colonial outposts. best they could to follow at least part of But he could see that in the new global the example Rome had set them. The economies that he projected for the Spanish and the French both attempted world in the wake of the Great War, con- to create something resembling a single quest would no longer be possible and society governed by a single body of law. that without conquest there could be no Similarly, the British in could nev- empire er have succeeded in seizing control of But Schumpeter’s view is only part of the former Mughal Empire without the the picture. War and conquest would active and sometimes enthusiastic assis- have achieved very little if that is all tance of the emperors’ former subjects. there had been. To survive for long, Without Indian bureaucrats, Indian all empires have had to win over their judges, and, above all, Indian soldiers, conquered populations. The Romans the British Raj would have remained a learned this very early in their history.5 private trading company. At the Battle of “An empire,” declared the historian Plassey in 1757, which marked the begin- at the end of the ½rst century b.c., “re- ning of the ’s politi- mains powerful so long as its subjects cal ascendancy over the Mughal Empire, rejoice in it.” twice as many Indians as Europeans Rome had a lot to offer its conquered fought on the British side.6 populations–architecture, baths, the It was this process of absorption–and ability to bring fresh water from distant with it the ambition to create a single hills or to heat marble-lined rooms in community that would embrace, as the villas in the wilds of Northumberland. Roman Empire had, both the mother (The historian Tacitus acidly comment- country and the indigenous inhabitants ed that in adopting baths, porticos, and of its colonies–that allowed Edmund banquets, all the unwitting Britons had Burke to speak of the victims of the bru- done was to describe as “humanity” tal regime of , governor what was in reality “an aspect of their of Bengal, as “our distressed fellow-citi- slavery.”) Ultimately, however, Rome’s zens in India.”7 Empire was a sacred greatest attraction was citizenship–a trust, “given,” as Burke insisted, “by an 4 Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social 6 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the Classes, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: A. M. World, 1600–1850 (: Jonathan Cape, Kelley, 1951), 7. 2002), 259.

5 This has been described most recently and 7 “Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts,” with great brilliance by Clifford Ando, Imperial quoted in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Em- Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Lib- pire (Berkeley: University of California Press, eral Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago 2000). Press, 1999), 157. 48 Dædalus Spring 2005 incomprehensible dispensation of Di- seemed to provide a means to create a Imperialism, vine providence into our hands.” To new, more ecumenical form of empire liberalism & the quest abuse it, as Hastings had, was not just that now would bene½t all its members. for perpetual morally offensive; more signi½cantly for For, in theory at least, commerce created peace Burke, it threatened the very existence a relationship between peoples that did not only of the “British constitution,” not involve dependency of any kind and but of “the civilization of Europe.”8 that, most importantly, avoided any use Yet the idea of empire based upon uni- of force. In these new commercialized versal citizenship created a paradox. If societies, the various peoples of the all the inhabitants of the empire were world would swap new technologies Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 indeed fellow citizens, then a new kind and basic scienti½c and cultural skills as of society, universal and cosmopolitan, readily as they would swap foodstuffs. would have had to come into being to These would not be empires of con- accommodate them. With hindsight it quest, but “empires of liberty.”10 was possible to argue, as Edward Gibbon But this vision never materialized be- did, that in the second century, when cause, as Smith fully recognized, the Eu- “the Roman Empire comprehended the ropean empires were not, nor had ever fairest part of the earth and the most civ- been, merely means to economic ends; ilized portion of mankind,” a new kind they were also matters of international of society had indeed arisen.9 But in the prestige.11 Smith knew that without eighteenth century, things did not look colonies Britain would be nothing more quite so harmonious. Instead of one than a small European state. The dispari- world community, the European over- ty in size between the mother country seas powers had created what the French and the rest of the empire remained a philosopher and economist the Marquis constant worry. Furthermore, as David de Mirabeau described in 1758 as “a new Hume pointed out, the “sweet com- and monstrous system” that vainly at- merce” in which Montesquieu and oth- tempted to combine three distinct types ers had placed such trust was, at best, an of political association (or, as he called uncertain panacea for the ills of man- them, esprits): domination, commerce, kind: in reality, even the most highly and settlement. The inevitable con- commercialized states tended to “look flict that had arisen between these had upon their neighbours with a suspicious thrown all the European powers into cri- eye, to consider all trading states as their sis. In Mirabeau’s view, the only way for- rivals, and to suppose that it is impossi- ward was to abandon both settlement ble for any of them to flourish, but at and conquest–especially conquest–in their expence.”12 favor of commerce. He was not alone. For those like Mira- 10 See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France beau and his near-contemporary Adam c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni- Smith, what in the eighteenth century versity Press, 1995), 178–187. was called ‘the commercial society’ 11 Adam Smith, “Thoughts on the State of the 8 , On Empire, Liberty, and Re- Contest with America,” in Ernest Campbell form: Speeches and Letters, ed. David Bromwich Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, eds., Correspon- (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, dence of Adam Smith, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon 2000), 15–16. Press, 1977), 383.

9 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Ro- 12 , “On the Jealousy of Trade,” in man Empire, chap. 3. Eugene F. Miller, ed., Essays, Moral, Political, and

Dædalus Spring 2005 49 Anthony ume’s skepticism proved all too er or later those hatreds, those opinions, Pagden H on accurate. It was in the long run more and those desires would explode and en- imperialism pro½table, as both the British and the gulf it.13 Dutch discovered in Asia, to exercise di- Like Smith, Constant also believed rect control over the sources of supply that commerce, or “civilized calcula- through conquest than it was to trade tion,” as he called it, would come to con- with them. But the Enlightenment vi- trol all future relationships between peo- sion of the future transvaluation of em- ples. Nearly a century later, Schumpeter pire was ½nally swept aside not so much expressed, in characteristically unques- by the actual practice of the “empires of tioning terms, the same conviction. “It Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 liberty” as by ’s attempt to may be stated as beyond controversy,” build quite a different kind of empire he declared, “that where free trade pre- within Europe itself. vails no class has an interest in forcible Initially the very brevity and bloodi- expansion as such.”14 ness of the Napoleonic ambition to Ironically, in view of the similarity transform Europe into a series of satel- of these claims, what separated Schum- lite kingdoms seemed to the liberals who peter from Constant in time was a phase had suffered from it–Alexis de Tocque- of imperial expansion that was more ata- ville and Benjamin Constant in particu- vistic, more “enthusiastic” even than the lar–to have rendered all such projects one Constant hoped he had seen the last unrepeatable. In 1813, with Napoleon of. For what in fact followed Napoleon’s apparently out of the way, Constant felt ½nal defeat was not a return to the En- able to declare that, at last, “pleasure lightenment status quo ante, but the and utility” had “opposed irony to every emergence of modern nationalism. After real or feigned enthusiasm” of the kind the Congress of Vienna, the newly self- that had always been the driving force conscious European states and, subse- behind all modes of imperialism. Napo- quently, the new nations of Europe– leon, and, above all, Napoleon’s fall, had Belgium (founded in 1831), Italy (1861), shown that postrevolutionary politics and Germany (1876)–all began to com- were to be conducted not in the name pete with one another for the status and of “conquest and usurpation,” but in ac- economic gains that empire was thought cordance with public opinion. And pub- to bestow. Public opinion, far from turn- lic opinion, Constant con½dently pre- ing an ironical eye on the imperialistic dicted, would have nothing to do with pretensions of the new European na- empire. “The force that a people needs tions, embraced them with enthusiasm. to keep all others in subjection,” he National prestige was, for instance, the wrote, main grounds on which Tocqueville sup- is today, more than ever, a privilege that ported the French invasion of Algeria in cannot last. The nation that aimed at such 1830. an empire would place itself in a more dangerous position than the weakest of 13 Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European tribes. It would become the object of uni- Civilization in Political Writings, ed. and trans. versal horror. Every opinion, every desire, Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge every hatred, would threaten it, and soon- University Press, 1988), 79.

Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 14 Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, 328. 99.

50 Dædalus Spring 2005 The turned out to be peoples, half devil and half child,” had Imperialism, very different from the kind of empire of not merely to be ruled, they had to be liberalism & the quest liberty for which Burke and Smith and ruled for their own good–however for perpetual Mirabeau had argued. No “sacred trust” much they might resent it at ½rst–and peace was involved here–only, in Joseph Con- had to be made to recognize that one rad’s famous phrase, “the taking away way of life was the inevitable goal of all [of the earth] from those who have a dif- mankind. This was empire as tutelage. ferent complexion or slightly flatter Ironically, and fatally for the imperial noses than ourselves.” In the new na- powers as it turned out, it also implied tionalist calculus, the more of this earth that one day all the subjects of all the you could take away, the greater you be- European empires would become self- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 came. By 1899, imperialism had indeed governing. become, as Curzon remarked, “the faith “By good government,” Lord Macau- of a nation.”15 lay had declared as early as 1833, “we There was something else that was may educate our subjects into a capacity new about the new imperialism. With for better government; that having be- the exception of the Spanish, the earlier come instructed in European knowledge European powers had been only margin- they may, in some future age, demand ally concerned with changing the lives, European institutions.” He did not know beliefs, and customs of the peoples when this would come about, but he was whose lands they had occupied. Mis- certain that when it did, “it will be the sionaries–Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, proudest day in English history.”16 In Calvinist–were present in British and practice, self-determination would be French America, and even in British, postponed into the remote future. But French, and Dutch Asia, but their activi- Macaulay was forced to acknowledge ties were always of secondary political that, theoretically at least, it could not importance and generally looked upon be postponed inde½nitely. by the civilian authorities as something Nationalist imperialism, however, of a nuisance. brought to the fore a question that had In the nineteenth century, however, remained unanswered for a long time: in Africa and even India became the testing the modern world what, precisely, was grounds for a new missionary zeal. Dri- the nature of empire? Ever since 1648, ven partly by Christian ideals, partly by the modern nation-state has been one in a belief in the overwhelming superiority which imperium has been regarded as of European culture, the new imperial- indivisible. The monarchs of Europe had ists sought to make of the world one spent centuries wresting authority from world–Christian, liberal, and, ultimate- nobles, bishops, towns, guilds, military ly (since none of the virtues peddled by orders, and any number of quasi-inde- the missionaries could be sustained in pendent, quasi-sovereign bodies. Indi- any other kind of society), commercial visibility had been one of the shibbo- and industrial. leths of prerevolutionary Europe, and In this vision of empire, the ‘natives,’ one which the French Revolution had Rudyard Kipling’s “new-caught sullen gone on to place at the center of the con-

15 Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919–1925: A Study in Post-War Diploma- 16 Quoted in Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of cy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1934), 13. Press, 1994), 34.

Dædalus Spring 2005 51 Anthony ception of the modern state. The mod- Sir Robert Seeley in 1883 to make his fa- Pagden on ern person is a rights-bearing individual, mous remark that it seemed as if Eng- imperialism but–as the 1791 Déclaration des droits de land had “conquered and peopled half l’homme et du citoyen had made clear–he the world in a ½t of absence of mind.”19 or she is so only by virtue of being a citi- zen of a single indivisible state.17 Nothing, it seems, could be further re- Such a strong notion of sovereignty moved from the present position of the could apply, however, only within Eu- United States. Is then the United States rope. In the world beyond, things were really an empire? very different. It had been impossible I think if we look at the history of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 for any empire to thrive without sharing European empires, the answer must be power with either local settler elites or no. It is often assumed that because with local inhabitants. As Henry Maine, America possesses the military capabili- a renowned jurist, historian, and legal ty to become an empire, any overseas member of the viceroy’s council in In- interest it does have must necessarily be dia, had declared in 1887, “Sovereignty imperial.20 But if military muscle had has always been regarded as divisible in been all that was required to make an international law.”18 Failure to cede this empire, neither Rome nor Britain–to point had, after all, been the prime cause name only two–would have been one. of the American Revolution, and, after Contrary to the popular image, most 1810, of the revolt of the Spanish colo- empires were, in fact, for most of their nies in South America–and had almost histories, fragile structures, always de- driven the French settlers of Saint-Dom- pendent on their subject peoples for sur- ingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique into vival. Universal citizenship was not cre- the waiting arms of the British. ated out of generosity. It was created out Nowhere was the question of divided of need. “What else proved fatal to Spar- sovereignty so acute as in the British ta and Athens in spite of their power in Empire, which by the early nineteenth arms,” the emperor Claudius asked the century had become larger and more Roman Senate when it attempted to de- widespread, and consequently more var- ny citizenship to the Gauls in Italy, “but ied, than any of its rivals or predeces- their policy of holding the conquered sors. “I know of no example of it either aloof as alien-born?”21 in ancient or modern history,” wrote This is not to say that the United Disraeli in 1878. “No Caesar or Charle- States has not resorted to some of the magne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar.” If such a conglomerate was to 19 Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of Eng- survive at all, it could insist on no single land (London: Macmillan, 1883), 12. constitutional identity. It was this fea- ture of the empire that led the historian 20 This, for instance, is the argument behind Robert D. Kaplan’s Warrior Politics: Why Leader- ship Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random 17 See Anthony Pagden, “Human Rights, Nat- House, 2002), and in a very different and more ural Rights and Europe’s Imperial Legacy,” Po- measured tone, Chalmers A. Johnson’s, The Sor- litical Theory 31 (2003): 171–199. rows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 18 Quoted in Edward Keene, Beyond the Anar- 2004)–although Kaplan approves and Johnson chical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in disapproves. World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2002), 63. 21 Tacitus, Annals II, 23–24.

52 Dædalus Spring 2005 strategies of past empires. Today, for in- sire to impose its political values on the Imperialism, stance, Iraq and Afghanistan look re- rest of the world. Like the ‘liberal’ em- liberalism & the quest markably like British protectorates. pires of nineteenth-century Britain and for perpetual Whatever the administration may claim France, the United States is broadly peace publicly about the autonomy of the cur- committed to the liberal-democratic rent Iraqi and Afghan leadership, the view that democracy is the highest pos- United States in fact shares sovereignty sible form of government and should with the civilian governments of both therefore be exported. This is the Amer- places, since it retains control over the ican mission to which Madeleine Al- countries’ armed forces. What, however, bright alluded, and it has existed in one the United States is not committed to is form or another ever since the creation Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 the view that empire–the exercise of of the republic. imperium–is the best, or even a possi- In addressing the need to “contain” ble, way to achieve this. Communist China, Harry Truman– In a number of crucial respects, the comparing America to Achaemenid United States is, indeed, very unimperi- Persia, Macedonian Greece, Antonine al. Despite allusions to the Pax America- Rome, and Victorian Britain–claimed na, twenty-½rst-century America bears that the only way to save the world from not the slightest resemblance to ancient totalitarianism was for the “whole world Rome. Unlike all previous European em- [to] adopt the American system.” By this pires, it has no signi½cant overseas set- he meant, roughly, what George W. Bush tler populations in any of its formal de- means by freedom–democratic institu- pendencies and no obvious desire to ac- tions and free trade. Truman, knowingly quire any. It does not conceive its hege- or unknowingly, took the phrase “Amer- mony beyond its borders as constituting ican system” from Alexander Hamilton, a form of citizenship. It exercises no di- who ½rmly believed that the new repub- rect rule anywhere outside these areas; lic should one day be able to “concur in and it has always attempted to extricate erecting one great American system su- itself as swiftly as possible from any- perior to the control of all transatlantic thing that looks as if it were about to de- force or influence and able to dictate the velop into even indirect rule. terms of the connections between the Cecil Rhodes once said that he would old world and the new.”23 “For the colonize the stars if he could. It is hard American system,” Truman continued, to image any prominent American poli- could only survive “by becoming a world cymaker, even Paul Wolfowitz, even se- system.”24 What for Hamilton was to be cretly, harboring such desires. As Vis- a feature of international relations, for count James Bryce, one of the most as- Truman was to be nothing less than a tute observers of the Americas both world culture. North and South, said of the (North) But even making the rest of the world Americans, “they have none of the adopt the American system did not earth-hunger which burns in the great mean, as it had for all the other empires nations of Europe.”22 Truman cited, ruling the rest of the

The one feature the United States does share with many past empires is the de- 23 Federalist 11 in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 22 Quoted by Arthur Schelsinger, Jr. in “The 1987), 133–134. Making of a Mess,” The New York Review of Books 51 (14) (September 2004): 41. 24 Quoted in Ferguson, Colossus, 80. Dædalus Spring 2005 53 Anthony world. For Truman assumed, as has far side of the Mediterranean.”26 The Pagden on every American administration since, French government chose to ignore him imperialism that the world’s ‘others’ no longer need- and made it into a colony nonetheless. ed to be led and cajoled until one day But such an arrangement has never they ½nally demanded their own demo- been an option for the United States. If cratic institutions. American values, as only because the United States is the one Bush put it in 2002, are not only “right modern nation in which no division of and true for every person in every socie- sovereignty is, at least conceptually, pos- ty”–they are self-evidently so.25 All sible. The federal government shares humanity is capable of recognizing that sovereignty with the individual states Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 democracy, or ‘freedom,’ will always be of which the union is composed, but it in its own best interest. All that has ever could not contemplate, as former em- prevented some peoples from grasping pires all had to, sharing sovereignty with this simple truth is fanaticism, the mis- the members of other nations. Only very guided claims of (certain) religions, and briefly has the mainland United States the actions of malevolent, self-interested ever been considered an empire rather leaders. Rather than empire, the United than a nation. As each new U.S. territo- States’ objective, then, is to eliminate ry was settled or conquered it became, these internal obstacles, to establish the within a very short space of time, a new conditions necessary for democracy, and state within the Union. This implied that then to retreat. any territories the United States might There can be little doubt that this as- acquire overseas had, like Hawaii, to be sumption has been the cause, in Iraq as incorporated fully into the nation–or much as in El Salvador, of the failure to returned to its native inhabitants. No establish regimes that are democratic in American administration has been will- more than name. Humanity is not, as ing to tolerate any kind of colonialism Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrat- for very long. Even so resolute an impe- ed, destined to ½nd democracy more rialist as Teddy Roosevelt could not enticing than any other alternative. You imagine turning Cuba or the Philippines may not need to be an American to em- into colonies.27 The United States does brace ‘American values’–but you cer- possess a number of dependent territo- tainly need to be much closer to Ameri- ries–Guam, the Virgin Islands, Samoa, can beliefs and cultural expectations etc.–but these are too few and too small than most of the populations of the Mid- to constitute an overseas colonial em- dle East currently are. Tocqueville made pire. The major exception to this rule is a similar point about Algeria. It would Puerto Rico. The existence of a vigorous have been impossible to make Algeria debate over the status of this ‘common- into a modern nation without “civiliz- wealth’–a term which itself suggests ing” the Arabs, he argued, a task that would be impossible to achieve unless 26 “Rapport fait par M. Tocqueville sur le pro- Algeria was made into not a “colony,” jet de la loi relative aux credits extraordinaires but “an extension of France itself on the demandés pour l’Algérie,” in Seloua Luste Boul- bina, ed., Tocqueville sur l’Algérie, 1847 (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 228. 25 Quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Em- pire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous 27 Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Impe- Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, rialism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 3. 2001), 75.

54 Dædalus Spring 2005 that Puerto Rico is an independent re- In the end, perhaps, what Smith, Con- Imperialism, public–and the fact that the status quo stant, and Schumpeter prophesied has liberalism & the quest strikes everyone, even those who sup- come to pass: commerce has ½nally re- for perpetual port its continuation, as an anomaly, placed conquest. True, it is commerce peace largely proves the rule.28 stripped of all its eighteenth-century Those advocating a more forceful U.S. attributes of benevolence, but it is com- imperial policy overlook that if America merce nonetheless. The long-term polit- is in denial, it is in it for a very good rea- ical objectives of the United States, son. To become a true empire, as even which have varied little from adminis- the British were at the end of the nine- tration to administration, have been to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 teenth century, the United States would sustain and, where necessary, to create a have to change radically the nature of its world of democracies bound inexorably political culture. It is a liberal democracy together by international trade. And the (as most of the Western world now con- political forms best suited to interna- ceives it)–and liberal democracy and tional commerce are federations (such liberal empire (as Mill conceived it) are as the European Union) and trading incompatible.29 The form of empire partnerships (the oecd or nafta), not championed by Mill existed to enforce empires. the virtues and advantages that accom- In Paradise and Power: America and Eu- panied free or liberal government in rope in the New World Order, Robert Kagan places that otherwise would be, in Mill’s boasts that whereas the “old” Europeans language, “barbarous.” The time might had moved beyond “power into a self- indeed come when the inhabitants of contained world of laws and rules and such places would demand European transnational negotiation and coopera- institutions–but as Mill and even Ma- tion . . . a post-historical paradise of peace caulay knew, when that happened, the and relative prosperity, the realization of empire would be at an end. Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace,’” the By contrast the United States makes United States no claim to be holding Iraq and Afghan- remains mired in history, exercising pow- istan in trust until such time as their er in an anarchic Hobbesian world where peoples are able to govern themselves international rules are unreliable, and in a suitable–i.e., Western–manner. It where true security and the defense and seeks, however imperfectly, to confer promotion of a liberal order still depend free democratic institutions directly on on the possession and use of military those places, and then to depart, leaving might.30 the hapless natives to fabricate as best they can the social and political infra- It is dif½cult to know just what Kagan structure without which no democratic takes the words ‘Kant’ and ‘Hobbes’ to process can survive for long. stand for. But on any reasoned under- standing of the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, he would 28 See Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Mar- seem to have inverted the objectives of shall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto the Europeans and the Americans. For it Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 30 Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America 29 On this term, see Michael Mann, Incoherent and Europe in the New World Order (London: At- Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 11. lantic Books, 2003), 3.

Dædalus Spring 2005 55 Anthony is the Europeans (or at least the majority would ever go to war to satisfy the greed Pagden on of them) who–by attempting to isolate or ambition of their rulers. imperialism the European Union as far as possible With due allowance for the huge dif- from all forms of external conflict that ferences between the late eighteenth are considered to pose no immediate do- century and the early twenty-½rst, and mestic threat–are the true Hobbesians. between what Kant understood by rep- And in most respects the objectives of resentative republics and what is meant Kant’s conception of a “universal cosmo- today by liberal democracies, the United politan existence”–which would consti- States’ vision for the world is roughly tute the “matrix within which all the similar: a union of democracies, cer- original capacities of the human race tainly not equal in size or power, but all Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 may develop”31–is, mutatis mutandis, committed to the common goal of great- what the current U.S. government er prosperity and peace through free claims to be attempting to achieve. trade. The members of this union have Kant argued that the peoples of the the right to defend themselves against world would never be at peace so long aggressors and, in the pursuit of defense, as the existing world powers–what he they are also entitled to do their best to called “universal monarchies”–were cajole so-called rogue states into mend- locked into internecine competition ing their ways suf½ciently to be admitted with one another. They had, he said, to into the union. This is what Kant called be persuaded to join a league for their the “cosmopolitan right.”32 We may own mutual protection. To make this assume that Truman had such an ar- possible, however, it was not enough to rangement in mind when he said that rely on international trade agreements the American system could only survive or peace treaties, because in the long run by becoming a world system. the parties to such agreements would For like the “American system,” honor them only if they perceived them Kant’s “cosmopolitan right” was intend- to be in their interests. A true world fed- ed to provide precisely the kind of har- eration could only come about once all monious environment in which it was the states of the world shared a common possible to pursue what Kant valued political order, what Kant called “repre- most highly, namely, the interdepend- sentative republicanism.” Only then ence of all human societies. This indis- would they all have the same interests, putably “liberal order” still depended and only then would those interests be “on the possession and use of military to promote mutual prosperity and to might,” but there would be no perma- avoid warfare. The reason he believed nent, clearly identi½able, perpetual en- this to be so was that such societies were emy–only dissidents, ‘rogue’ states, the only ones in which human beings and the perverse malice of the excluded. were treated as ends not means; the only Kant was also not, as Kagan seems to im- ones, therefore, in which human beings ply, some kind of high-minded idealist, could be fully autonomous; and the only in contrast to Hobbes, the indefatigably ones, consequently, in which no people realist. 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 Hans 32 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Reiss, ed., Political Writings (Cambridge: Cam- trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge bridge University Press, 1991), 51. University Press, 1991), 156.

56 Dædalus Spring 2005 rational idea of a peaceful, even if not Revolution, at least in its early phases, Imperialism, friendly, thoroughgoing community of offered one kind of model). liberalism & the quest all the nations on the earth,” he wrote, Kant’s project for perpetual peace has for perpetual “is not a philanthropic (ethical), prin- often been taken to be some kind of peace ciple, but a principle having to do with moral blueprint for the United Nations. rights.”33 It was based quite as ½rmly But in my view, it is far closer to the ½nal upon a calculation of reasonable self- objective of the modern global state sys- interest as was Hobbes’s suggestion for tem in which the United States is un- exiting from the “war of all against doubtedly, for the moment at least, the all.”34 key player. It is also, precisely because it Kant, however, was also aware that is a project for some future time, a far Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/2/46/1828909/0011526053887301.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 bringing human beings to understand better guide to the overall ideological just what is in their own self-interest objectives of the United States than any- would always be a long and arduous thing that now goes under the name of task. In order to recognize that autono- ‘empire.’ my is the highest human good, humans have 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 off the ball and chain of his perpetual im- maturity” would be properly “enlight- ened,” and only the enlightened could create the kind of state in which true au- tonomy would be possible.35 Because of this, the cosmopolitan right still lay for most at some considerable distance in the future. It still does–few states today ful½ll Kant’s criteria. And of course Kant never addressed the problem of how the tran- sition from one or another kind of des- potism to “representative republican- ism” was to be achieved (although he seems to have thought that the French

33 Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 158; Antho- ny Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism and the 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.

Dædalus Spring 2005 57