The Underappreciated Art of Empire

Americans don’t like the word “empire” very much, but Deepak Lal does. In fact, Mr. Lal thinks the world needs a good dose of empire these days and is calling on America to provide it.An economist by training, Lal comes late to imperial controversy. As a diplomat in the Indian foreign service in the 1960s, he presumably refrained from lecturing veterans of the Quit India movement and other anti-imperialists on the virtues of allegiance to the Crown. But he spent much of his later career as an academic and World Bank adviser urging ex-colonial countries to abandon socialist economic policies in favor of classical liberal ones.By 2002, he had arrived at the idea of empire outright, arguing that in order to sustain globalization’s new prosperity, a deeper political structure would be necessary. In a word, empire.His newest book, “In Praise of Empires” (Palgrave Macmillan, 270 pages, $26.95), develops the ideas more fully with economic reasoning and historical illustration. The book argues that empire is the key prerequisite for civilization and prosperity just about anywhere. If it’s more than simply the economic cartel the old Spanish Empire was, Mr. Lal argues, it benefits the strong and the weak alike. “Empires control both foreign and domestic policy,” he writes, and “the two major effects of empires have been that they have preserved the peace and promoted prosperity in the territories they encompassed.”Mr. Lal’s model, not surprisingly, is British rule in India. The secret to British rule, he notes, was to number few, govern through local proxies, and tread lightly (for the most part) in exercising authority. In the meantime, the empire worked its magic: It kept the peace and opened trade with its far corners.Leaving aside the oddity of a former Indian public servant extolling the British Empire, there seems to be something to the argument. For one, the historical record is mostly positive. The modern experience with empire is almost all bad: Militaristic Nazis, tyrannical Soviets, fascist Japanese, in ept Ottomans, and decrepit Habsburgs and Austro-Hungarians are the main 19th- and 20th-century examples to ponder. But most prosperity has come under empires, from the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese through the Roman Empire – whose standards of living weren’t reproduced until the early modern era – and after.We all know in at least some limited sense that security brings prosperity, and if successful and benevolent empires bring the most security, then perhaps they bring the most prosperity too.“Security is like oxygen,” Harvard’s Joseph Nye once wrote. “You tend not to notice it until you begin to lose it, but once that occurs there is nothing else that you will think about.”If one understands security to mean a military guarantee, then Nye’s soft power arguments don’t seem so far from Mr. Lal’s imperial thesis. Though in parts of Europe much is made of the dangers of the American hyper puissance and in other places like Saudia Arabia or South Korea the talk is even worse, Jacques Chirac or Prince Abdullah would be among the first to protest American troop withdrawals from central Europe or the Arabian Peninsula.Mr. Lal reserves his deepest scorn for activists and self-styled idealists who deny these truths, particularly for international organizations like the United Nations and World Bank and for nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace. The United Nations should be abolished outright, he argues, because it is a “broken reed” that “merely provides a forum for the weak to unite to tie the U.S. Gulliver down.” NGOs, meanwhile, are undemocratic elitists guilty of “global salvationism.” They project whatever happens to occupy Western imaginations at a given moment on Third World countries, whom they use to act out international morality plays of good and evil.Mr. Lal’s is, in short, a harsh assessment of international bodies and global do-gooders. But he scorns America almost as deeply, for an inability to talk turkey about the imperial role Americans assumed after September 11, 2001, and U.S. insistence on using bilateral mechanisms to promote free trade in lieu of throwing open the international economic doors unilaterally to undergird the system, as the British did in the 19th century. The Americans scare other countries with their universalistic and idealist rhetoric, he says, and they impede international economic growth by retaining barriers to trade.The worst thing about the Americans, says Mr. Lal, is their insistence on trying to change “habits of the heart” in other lands. That includes democracy and human rights, which are simply the “cosmological beliefs” of the West. “The jihad to convert the world to American habits of the heart” – yes, Mr. Lal calls it an American jihad – “will be resisted as much as Osama bin Laden’s jihad to convert the world to Islam.” (Someone should tell the Germans and Japanese.)All this is consistent with a neoclassical economist’s discovery of power politics, and it’s fine as far as it goes. It’s even more interesting coming from an Indian diplomat-cum economist like Mr. Lal, whose firsthand experience advising ex-colonial governments and helping for a time to run his own country’s would seem to give him extra credibility in the eyes of likely skeptics. Still, it would seem odd to advocate “empire” but to leave out “habits of the heart.” What were Roman-era elites in the provinces a few generations after the Romans put the sword to them, if not Romans at heart?Mr. Lal is right to want America to be an empire by invitation, as it were, but he skirts the possibility that when adversaries set their hearts against the United States, its interests, and its way of life, a little forcible change of heart may be in order. For an advocate of empire so fierce on every other account, that seems unbecomingly dovish.Mr. Conway last wrote for these pages on the American experience in the Philippines at the turn of the century.

The Underappreciated Art of Empire

The Underappreciated Art of Empire

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