They looked around and said, Well, not many people have our combination of institutions. What we need to do is plant the seed of this system in as many places as we can and make the world suitably Anglicized. It's only a contradiction in terms if you define "liberal" in a rather early-twenty-first-century American way, meaning that you like to hug trees, or you have a fit if somebody fires a gun in anger.
My sense of liberal is the classical sense. Liberalism stands for creating the institutions of political, economic, and social freedom. And it's very obvious that in a dozen or more countries in the world, there is absolutely no chance of those institutions developing autonomously. These countries are either so under tyranny, or so completely anarchic, that it's never going to happen.
Zimbabwe would be on the list, too. The list isn't endless, but it would have to include North Korea. There are countries that are not going to reform themselves, and the function of a liberal empire is to deal with that. So liberal empire has a discrete and distinct function to perform.
It has to impose—and I stress impose—the rule of law. That has to happen before you hold elections. So where did the British do that successfully? What countries? Well, the list is quite a long one, actually, because by a hundred years ago the British Empire's transition to representative government was really quite far advanced.
South Africa was supposed to become one, but ultimately it didn't. And India by the s was in fact on the path to regional representative government. The objective was always to dissolve British rule when the time was ripe.
In terms of their economic model the British achieved relative success in countries like Egypt—and indeed Iraq. But not many of the political institutions they set up endured in those countries. In general, though, I think liberal empire has quite an impressive track record when you come to look at it.
Have you always been in favor of empire, or did your thinking change at some point? Essentially, as an undergraduate I absorbed the conventional wisdom that empire was always and everywhere exploitative. It was only as I worked on books like The Pity of War and The World's Banker that I started to discern the more positive features of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
You are in favor of empire, but you don't like the loss of life that comes with it—you lament the horrific human costs of the American interventions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and other places. How can you have it both ways? The question is one of degree. First, remember that people may kill one another even more in the absence of empire—see sub-Saharan Africa. Second, if we don't extend our civilization, an even worse empire may emerge—see the Cold War.
It is the habitual fantasy of many Americans that if the U. One of your arguments is that for an empire to be successful, it has to pay dividends to both ruler and ruled. What dividends were paid to countries like Nicaragua under Somoza, or Guatemala under the generals, or Iran under the Shah, or other countries that could be considered colonies of the American Empire?
I think the truth of the matter is, not much. One of the problems with America's Central American adventures, along with its Caribbean adventures, was precisely that they failed to establish very obvious collaborative frameworks, other than with military elites.
Those frameworks that they did establish quickly morphed into dictatorships when the Americans held a traditional election and went home.
And I think that does help explain the very, very dismal showing of America's Central American policy. The irony that the country that has performed best in the region is the one where the Americans never went—Costa Rica—speaks for itself. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary turned out to be a recipe for chronic instability in Central America. You have to feel that the British would have done it better. But the United states from a very early stage staked out a monopoly position south of the Rio Grande—with wholeheartedly dismal results, I'm afraid.
I think that reflects the fact that the model of empire that the United States has followed has been defective. It was almost as defective in the days of Theodore Roosevelt as it is today. So what if the goal, then, is first and foremost to just get rid of the governments that are unfriendly, and there's not much thought given to what happens after that?
Well, I think that became the model when the Cold War set in. And when you look at what happened in countries from Chile to Iran, I think it's obvious that the cost of that approach probably outweighed the benefits. The legitimacy of American foreign policy suffered serious long-term damage because support was given rather uncritically to some pretty lousy regimes.
Indirect rule through petty dictators has the defect that you really have a problem controlling the bastards that you are notionally sponsoring. You will find a similar condemnation in Civilization: The West and the Rest. Incidentally, one of the heroes of that book is Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was almost certainly gay. There is still, regrettably, a great deal of prejudice in the world, racial as well as sexual. There are two strategies we may adopt.
One is repression—the old Victorian practice of simply not talking about such things. The other is education. In my writing and teaching, I have labored long and hard to expose precisely what was wrong about the theories that condemned homosexuals, Jews and others to discrimination and death. I have also tried to explain what made those theories so lethally appealing. I doubt very much that any of my vituperative online critics have made a comparable effort to understand the nature and dire consequences of prejudice.
For the self-appointed inquisitors of internet, it is always easier to accuse than seriously to inquire. In the long run we are all indeed dead, at least as individuals.
Perhaps Keynes was lucky to pre-decease the bloggers because, for all his brilliance, was also prone to moments of what we would now call political incorrectness. But does anyone today seriously argue that we should not read Keynes because he was a Polonophobe?
He told the world to wise up and start being grateful for everything that the British Empire had done for it. He also risked the wrath of war veterans by arguing that the First World War had not been worth Britain fighting - Germany should have been allowed a mainland European empire. His views on the US and Iraq are gung-ho: the problem with American "empire", he says, is that Washington doesn't throw its weight about enough. It should occupy Iraq for 40 years.
Ferguson's bad-boy persona, prolific writing and ability to bridge the gap between journalism and academia have brought fame, wealth and influence. Those who dismiss him as a "telly don" are envious, the Glaswegian believes: "I don't see a distinction between my academic work and my journalism. They are just different mediums for ideas. If you want to reach three million people you go on television.
His new book clobbers an established historical truth - that the 20th century was America's, and a triumph for the West over Communism and fascism. The real story of the 20th century is not the triumph of America and Europe but "the climb of Asia and descent of the West's wealth and values".
Ferguson says we are in the middle of a "huge rebalancing of the world China and India's eventual dominance is not certain, but the prognosis for the West is clear: the Asian tigers are at large, so watch your back. Lehrer is a smart young upstart — his third book, Imagine: The Art and Science of Creativity , had been tearing up the bestseller lists before scandal hit — who seems to have made good storytelling a higher priority than the truth.
That progression may tell a lot. The path to lucrative thought-leaderdom blazed over the past couple of decades was to establish yourself with dense, serious work or a big, important job and then move on to catch-phrase manufacturing I spent a few weeks following Tom Friedman around in , and learned that he had made this transition very deliberately.
Nowadays ambitious young people looking to break into the circuit often just aim straight for the catch-phrases. Speakers bureaus need pithy sales pitches, not complex erudition — and while speaking fees might be spare change for Mitt Romney , for journalists and academics they often represent their only real shot at a top-tax-bracket income. Or at least: a part of the intellectual environment is like that.
I should credit futurist Eric Garland, who has been making this argument a lot lately. What got you there may not keep you there.
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