Issues 2003 Social Science Research Council
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Vol. 4 No. 4 & Fall/Winter ITEMS issues 2003 Social Science Research Council Lessons of Empire On September 26-27, 2003, the Council sponsored a conference at New York University entitled, “Lessons of Empire.” Participants focused on whether currently prevalent “empire Contents talk” provides a useful set of concepts for analyzing contemporary US economic, cultural, political and military power. Accounts of particular historical cases or issues were presented in a series of panels organized to encourage comparative assessments. The SSRC is collaborat- Lessons of Empire ing with The New Press to publish a volume based on the conference. Edited by SSRC Pres- Modernizing Colonialism and ident Craig Calhoun, Council Board member Fred Cooper and Program Director Kevin the Limits of Empire Moore, Lessons of Empire will be the fifth volume in the SSRC/New Press series “After Frederick Cooper 1 September 11.” Below we present three of the essays written for the conference, selected around the theme of the limits of imperial power. We also include a number of quotations from The History of Lessons: Power conference papers that deal with related lessons of empire. and Rule in Imperial Formations Emmanuelle Saada 10 American Colonial Empire: The Limit of Power's Reach Julian Go 18 I & I Interviews Arjun Appadurai 24 Network Creativity and Digital Culture The Past and the Internet Geoffrey C. Bowker 28 Technologies of the Childhood Imagination Mizuko Ito 31 Online 34 Items 35 Ilkka Uimonen/Magnum Modernizing Colonialism New Staff 48 and the Limits of Empire Publications 49 By Frederick Cooper few years ago, with-it scholars were claiming that the nation-state was dying and that new forms of global connections would shape the world A order. Now the state is back, and in one instance in a form so powerful that public intellectuals call it an empire. Earnest liberals lamented the imperial arrogance of the United States government, but then some feisty conservatives SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL seized the terrain and asserted that indeed the US was an empire and that its unem- 810 SEVENTH AVENUE barrassed exercise of state power would be good for the (continued on page 2) NEW YORK, NY 10019 USA world as a whole.1 The argument that the nation-state is withering away was just as wrong on September 10, 2001, as it is today, and what is particularly striking—and in some ways ominous—about the way the US projects its power is that it is not like an empire. The relationship between territorially bounded institutions and trans-territorial linkages has long been a shifting one, and the current phase of history is no exception to this pattern. But the examination of how it is shifting in this conjuncture is not promoted by arguments that dissolve the problem, either by proclaiming the death of the state or dominance of one state. Empire is being used more as a metaphor than as a category that designates a particular form of polity. But some of the most crucial questions we face are about the structures through which power is exercised in an asymmetrical world order, about the institutions that can conjugate territorial and deterrito- Empires often provided a context rialized processes, about the forms of shared sovereignty that the European for more or less peaceful coexis- Union and other units of international cooperation entail, and about the tence of ethnic or religious groups. governance of multicultural polities. The virtue of thinking about empire historically is that it cuts the nation-state down to size. We need not see But if they were cosmpolitan and history as a succession of coherent epochs: from empire to nation to post- sometimes tolerant, this is partly national globality. Recognizing the continuing importance of empires well because they were not at all demo- into the twentieth century and the importance of political movements that sought to change as well as replace empires points to a more general issue of cratic. continued relevance: the range of possibilities for exercising power. In past as in future, communities may be imagined, but not all imaginings are national Craig Calhoun ones.2 New York University and A useful beginning in examining the specificities of intrusive, sovereignty- Social Science Research Council compromising, transformative political forms is to distinguish among the imperial, the hegemonic, and the colonial.3 Yet those distinctions say both too much and too little, not enough to distinguish the vast differences in process Recent attempts to rethink con- and effect within each, too much to understand the ambiguity and the inter- temporary imperialism on more play among them. If one grants that the US position on Iraq is not about empire in the formal sense—asserting long-term sovereignty over Iraq—and post-modern and post-colonial therefore is either hegemonic or imperial but not colonial, one quickly arrives lines, e.g., in terms of “network at a problem that is indeed quite colonial. Take the following catalogue from a hegemony” and transnational cor- recent op-ed piece in The New York Times: Iraq faces porate collusion, should not at least a decade's worth of reconstruction and improvements. This will include obscure the changing realities of rebuilding ports, farms, roads, telecommunications systems, power plants, hos- pitals and water systems, as well as introducing a medical benefit plan, a nation- US hegemony, especially after the al pension scheme, and new laws for foreign investment and intellectual prop- end of the Cold War. erty rights. The country needs a revised criminal code and judiciary system, a new tax code and collection system, and an electoral voting system with appro- priate technology.... The total bill is likely to be at least $200 billion over a K. S. Jomo decade.4 University of Malaya 1The shift is embodied in the contrasting arguments of two books called Empire, one by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), which dissolves politics into amorphous but all-powerful global networks, and another by Niall Ferguson (London: Alan Lane, 2002), which con- cludes with a plea for the United States to take up the mantle of the British empire, an argument which contradicts his relatively critical, sometimes cynical, view of the empire that actually existed. 2As Craig Calhoun has argued, the sense of community comes from thinking and debating about consti- tutions, institutions, and norms—not just from prior sentiments—which makes all the more important an effort to address issues of shared and compromised sovereignty and non-national institutions. "Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere," Public Culture 14 (2002): 147-71. 3The papers presented to the "Lessons of Empire" seminar by George Steinmetz and Jack Snyder brought out the distinctions among such modes of intervention by a powerful polity in the affairs of weaker ones: imperial (intervening in another polity without actually governing it), hegemonic (setting the rules of the game which others must follow), and colonial (governing internal affairs of a subordinated polity). These do not in fact exhaust the possibilities, and historically the category of "empire" includes a considerable range of ways in which the incorporation of different population groups and the differentiation of those groups was managed and contested. 4Donald Hepburn, "Nice War. Here's the Bill," The New York Times, September 3, 2003, A19. The author is not a liberal academic or development professional, but an oil executive. 2 This definition of the task rings a bell for an historian of the British and French empires in Africa. It does not sound like colonialism in general, but very much like the colonialism of the post-World War II era, when the leading colonial powers, trying to reestablish their legitimacy and make their empires more orderly and productive, acknowledged the mediocrity of their past economic and social contributions to the colonies and proclaimed a new policy of "development." The goals of the British Colo- nial Development and Welfare Act (passed in 1940 and put into operation in 1945) and the French Investment Fund for Economic and Social Devel- You can’t compare empires let alone opment of 1946 sound remarkably like those mentioned above. And the learn their lessons if you don’t know effort lasted about one decade, when British and French governments, what counts as empire, or if all that frustrated by the difficulties of such a transformative project, realized that their taxpayers would not be willing to pay the bill to carry them through, does count is what was done by who- that the interventions would produce more conflict than they would ever did as the Romans did. So with appease, and that giving up empire—once the goals were set so high—was respect to the unit of analysis and his- more prudent than trying to make it work. Looking further back, the now quite large history of empires goes torical depth, as with historical truth against much of the polemic usage of the concept of empire, stressing that and the uses of history for life, I adopt empire is a form of limited rule, limited both in relation to the exercise of a purely pragmatic approach. You do totalizing power and to the will and ability to transform societies. When what you can do and take what you Britain and France rather belatedly got serious about using colonization as a tool of social transformation, they very quickly backed off.5 So let me can get—no guarantees, no absolutes, examine in more detail the notion of limits of empire—even in cases of no boundaries. extreme power asymmetry—and the contradictions of modernizing colo- nialism. Sheldon Pollock In proclaiming a "civilizing mission" certain leaders in the French Third University of Chicago Republic in the 1870s were trying to convince colleagues and voters that colonial conquest was not necessarily too adventurous for a bourgeois society and too militaristic for a republic.