The end of Europe? III

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes - to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolutely safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal in perfect harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to the intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

"So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection - absolute permanency."

- H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

For most of his adult life, Wells was a socialist by conviction, believing that progress could continue only if controlled and directed by a central authority, the kind that traditionally has not ruled free societies except in times of war. Only in his last years, during and after the Second World War, did Wells finally come to accept the obvious: socialism could be achieved - but only by reorganizing society on a permanent war footing. War had already led to socialism in the Europe and the rest of the world; continued socialism would just mean a permanent prospect of war. And even then, society could not be made to stand still in the way the vision-bewitched, power-hungry socialist planners wanted. Socialism could not be a permanent stasis, only a stopping point on the way to decline or self-destruction. In other words, Wells late in life grasped what his and the preceding generation of European intellectuals had led their civilization to: disaster. This same despairing realization lies at the bottom of Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, three years after Wells' death. Thus far Wells the prose stylist and popular social thinker.

But in his science fiction, Wells knew better: his artistic intuition was stronger and better than his political beliefs. In his bones, regardless of whatever socialist opium he deluded himself with, he understood the real situation, probably because in his youth, he had absorbed the new, dazzling, and penetrating ideas of Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers: your biography doesn't stop until your dead, and history doesn't stop until and unless humanity becomes extinct.* There's no PAUSE button. The evolutionary idea had a fatal implication for the socialist utopia: the world of stasis - the heaven-on-earth of the socialists - is a religious fantasy.

Europe might come to that sad end, within our lifetimes. But it's also imperative, before arriving at such a conclusion, to take the longest view possible of European and Western history and see its unusual features in the light of centuries and millennia. Compared with other societies and civilizations, Europe's demography has always been unusual: delayed marriage, exceptional accumulation of capital and knowledge, escape from the Malthusian trap of food supplies saturated by population growth. With these came other unusual traits: starting with feudalism, contractual government in place of autocracy; individualism, romantic love, feminism. These distinctive features originated in the much-misunderstood Middle Ages and Renaissance (which, contrary to a common confusion, should be considered a unit). This era marked the formative age of the modern West. The Western habit of extending adolescence allowed for rapid and sustained social change, so much so that the West now takes innovation and progress for granted. The American branch of the modern West goes a step further in "lightweight," low-overhead civilization. Not so for typical pre-industrial civilizations, where a static ideal always reigned in theory, if not in practice. In place of closed systems of thought (religious and philosophical dogmas), we have learned to live with partial and incomplete truths and take for granted the never-ending possibilities thus opened up.

This is all radically different from any human society that existed before about 300 years ago. Europe's overseas descendants and the societies of east and south Asia have absorbed this dynamic and made it their own, germinating new civilizations along the way. And all of this because Europe failed in a crucial way: it failed to be a successful pre-industrial society - unlike, say, China, by any measure, the world's most successful. (That's before the shock of its encounter with the modern West). Fruitful failure is often much more interesting and charged with possibility than simple success. Simple success tends to halt progress. Progress - real progress, not the fake "progress" of the left - requires repeated failure. One failure, once, won't do much; but repeated trying and failing changes everything. Repeated failure at one thing can lead to other and new things that no one had thought of before. That is one of the main lessons of the 1200 or so years of the history of the modern West.**

We should keep such facts in mind as we survey Europe's recent past and possible futures. These are especially important to keep in mind when we consider the triple roots of modern Western culture: the barbarian peoples (Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.), the classical Greeks and Romans, and the Hellenistic-Hebraic hybrid of Christianity. It keeps a reasonable perspective on the views of such Catholic or conservative writers as George Weigel, a view that, for all its value, tends to overemphasize the ancient classical and biblical sources of the modern West, to the detriment of the distinctive contribution of the Dark Age barbarians. Their individualistic restlessness kept Europe from becoming too civilized, too successful and complacent at any one thing. That is why the legend of Faust is so dead-on about the modern West. It is perhaps the supreme story that modern Western literati have played with about their own civilization.†
---
* And what is history, but biography writ large?

** This is a larger point to grasp about human evolution. Humans are not better chimps or apes - they're good at something else entirely. Presumably, the ancestors of humanity were at some point primate failures and in danger of extinction. But they evaded an otherwise inevitable doom as failed primates by becoming a successful something-else. It is the unusually long adolescence of humans makes this possible. It also makes culture - as opposed to pure instinct - a human necessity. Culture is (part of) human nature.

† Worth reading in Goethe's version, at least Part One and bits of Part Two - see such modern translations as Kaufmann's.

Why America is not an empire

America as empire is nonsense, of course, but there you are. You hear it incessantly from the Left, with its monumental narcissism and historical ignorance. Even people who should know better use the terminology of empire, but only at the price of serious distortion.

What is an empire? An imperial relationship is when people A rules people B without any consent or input from people B. It's a political, not an economic, concept. Empires have been important in the development of civilization because, until the last few centuries, they were the only successful large-scale civilizational units. Only in recent times and certain places, has a new and more advanced type of civilization appeared, one based on common consent and self-interest, undergirded by the "social contract." (See here, here, and here for this all-important feature that makes modern societies modern.) Its characteristic political unit is not the empire, but the nation-state, because its characteristic political principles are individual citizenship and self-rule by representation, not rule by outsiders.

It's useful to be reminded of where actual empires come from and what they look like to clear the air of this pseudo-question. Historically, empires have arisen when a people develops a large advantage over neighboring peoples in organization, technology, surplus wealth, and military prowess. They are typically exporters of surplus people and (with modern empires) of surplus capital. In their mature forms, they are also exporters of political order, as they encounter neighboring peoples who lack the same skill at organization and are often either primitive or decadent. The exported political order might also include culture and religion. This feature requires an aristocracy or at least a class that can function as one.

The most important example in Western history was the Roman empire, an entity that still influences our lives to this day. (Pick out all the Latinate words in this posting.) The Roman empire had two halves, the Greek-speaking East and the (over time) Latin-speaking West. In ancient times, the former was old, wealthy, highly populated and urbanized, but by the time the Romans took over, militarily weak and politically decadent. The latter was new, poor, poorly populated, and agrarian. To the East, the Romans exported political order to a place that could no longer could generate its own. From the East, the Romans imported capital, people, and culture. To the West, the Romans exported order, capital, and high culture to places that never had it. From the West, they imported little except slaves (in the early empire). The Roman empire was, in part, a result of the breakdown of the Roman republic. Imperial institutions replaced republican ones, although the latter lingered on as vestiges. The modern West was hatched in the ruins of the western Roman empire.

The most important modern empire was the British. Unlike the Roman empire, the British was a sea empire, largely based on commerce, with a "light" military presence. Unlike the Romans, the British also (except for the American Revolution) voluntarily phased out their empire, by modifying their imperial rule over non-Britons into partial, then complete, independence. It was the world's first self-liquidating empire, a tribute to the Britons' own system of representative government at home. During the era of the British empire, this representative system grew stronger, deeper, and broader, and many British imperial possessions inherited some form of it. The self-demolition of the British empire was not totally voluntary: some Britons wanted to hold on to it. But Britain's bankruptcy after World War II forced the issue.

America's sole experience with empire came in the wake of the Spanish-American war (1898-1900),when it came to control three former Spanish colonies, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Each one was treated differently and had different fates. Because the United States is a republic, it could not claim indefinite rule over these possessions, and it didn't. Each one was put on the road to political independence after World War I. American involvement was longest, deepest, and most successful in the Philippines, where the Filipinos were promised independence during World War II for their loyalty in fighting the Japanese (and they did fight, fiercely). They became independent in 1946. The Puerto Ricans eventually rejected independence in favor of a semi-imperial relationship, where Puerto Rico has internal self-government, and external foreign policy and military matters are taken care of by the American federal government, with significant amounts of federal money flowing in on net. The least successful was Cuba, which was prematurely cut loose from the US in 1934 and immediately turned into a dictatorship (Batista), overthrown in 1959 by the Soviet-oriented revolutionary Castro. Cuba today is a half-finished imperial project abandoned by two superpowers and ruled by a dictator who's turned the island into a tropical prison.

America is the world's dominant power and its remaining superpower. It's fair to call it a "hegemon" (a legitimate word sometimes used pejoratively). It is the linchpin of the civilized world's security and economic system. That does not make it all-powerful in some absolute sense. American foreign policy has largely focused on exporting international order, while leaving internal order within countries up to those countries, with a few exceptions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia). Exporting international order is much easier and well within American capabilities. Imposing internal order within countries is much harder and probably beyond anyone's power.

It follows that, while America is powerful yet not omnipotent, America needs friends and allies to help. The help is in our interests and theirs, often much more in theirs. This is the type of "hegemony" to be expected of a superpower nation-state in a world of other nation-states. It is based on the reality and legitimacy of the nation-state system, yet recognizing that some nations are much more powerful and critical to the system than others.

But American dominance has evolved in a curious and unhealthy way in Europe, the Middle East, and east Asia, where many countries have abandoned the ability to defend themselves and developed significant problems with political legitimacy. They have come to rely on the US and yet resent that dependence. The current agony we're in now is the result of other countries' backing away from military defense and foreign policy, figuring, let the US do it - and, let the US take the heat. Here is the crux of why people feel America is an "empire," even though it isn't: it's become a republic with a quasi-imperial role, an uncomfortable and unsustainable situation. Americans, both ordinary voters and foreign policy experts, were unprepared for this post-Cold War development. The US military is too small to serve as an imperial force and depends on allies able and willing to pull their own weight. But apart from a handful of exceptions, many American "allies" are actually "military welfare" cases. The US can fill this void only imperfectly and suffers, in some sense, from imperial understretch. (Yes, you read that right.)

But the solution is not to try to turn America into an empire, an impossible goal in any case. America is a middle-class, commercial republic, as well as a net importer of capital and people, three facts enough to kill the "empire" conceit. And it has no aristocratic imperial class or ethos - such things are foreign to American culture and society, fueled as they are by immigrants who all must get along within a framework of political and legal equality.

So let's hear no more of it: we're not an empire, never were, and aren't becoming one. We certainly shouldn't try. The real question is: can our relationship with our so-called allies be changed? And can they police their own corners of the globe and take control of their fates?