Winner of THE PEOPLES BOOK PRIZE July 2009
 |
|
Prologue: Americans, Russians and Vikings
For America the road to Iraq started on Roanoke
Island when the first Englishman stepped
ashore and claimed a God-given right to take
everything he saw. In the four centuries
since then the world has been transformed
but that first colonial philosophy has changed
hardly at all. The central certainty has
remained: Americans are special; they are
due more of the earth’s riches than
other nations. How those riches are to be
gained, whether through the power of the
musket or the dollar, may have changed but
the continuity of empire is as clear between
George Washington and George Bush as between
Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin. America’s
first President and Russia’s first
Tsar spoke openly of their dreams of Empire;
their twentieth century successors had the
same dreams but convinced themselves that
an Empire by any other name would smell more
sweet.
This book has two simple themes. First that
the United States is and always has been
a fundamentally imperialist power and that
this can be demonstrated by comparing the
histories of avowedly anti-imperialist America
and unarguably imperialist Russia. Second
that this comparison requires the rewriting
of popular history which too often says more
about today’s values than about yesterday’s
realities
That there is any debate about America’s
imperial tradition illustrates how completely
the values of today colour our perceptions
of yesterday. With apparent sincerity
a President of the United States can ship
prisoners of war to Guantanamo in Cuba, seized
from Spain a century ago in a fit of imperial
zeal, and then proclaim that “America
has never been an empire”. That
America’s imperial past so closely
mirrors Russia’s is uncanny but the
resemblance is lost if recollections of the
past are disinfected by the cleansing force
of the present.
Understanding America
Edwin Reischauer when editor of the American
Foreign Policy Library at Harvard University
Press has no doubt that America and Russia
are poles apart.
"No two countries within the bounds
of Western civilisation could have had more
dissimilar histories or developed more divergent
attitudes towards the outside world and the
problems of their own societies".
Most people would agree without hesitation,
but they would be wrong. The histories of
the two countries are remarkably similar,
their attitudes towards the outside world
have close parallels and only in their attitudes
to the problems of their own societies have
they diverged radically as autocracy and
democracy have resolved the same issues in
different ways.
At almost the same time the first English
colonists crossed the Atlantic and the first
Russian colonists crossed the Urals. Unleashing
a barrage of muskets and microbes Americans
and Russians pushed towards the Pacific.
Once the power of native chieftains had been
overcome tsar and president turned their
attention to their weaker neighbours, each
convinced that God had uniquely imbued their
own nation with a manifest destiny to expand.
Realisation of those territorial ambitions
was made possible by economies built on the
backs of serfs and slaves. After emancipation
came to Russian serfs in 1861 and American
slaves just two years later both nations
faced the fresh challenges brought about
by industrialization. New ideologies appeared,
like the anarchist violence that claimed
the lives of Tsar Alexander II and President
William McKinley. Russia plunged into the
horrors of civil war, just as America had
forty years before, but just as the American
Civil War changed far less than popular history
imagines so the Bolshevik revolution merely
replaced one autocracy with another. The
imperialism at the core of both societies
remained; Russian imperialism emerged in
all its old brutality after the Second World
War but American imperialism evolved so comprehensively
that many were fooled into believing it had
disappeared completely, indeed that the American
Empire had never existed.
Any attempt to write an account of the American
Empire immediately runs into a major obstacle:
for many people brought up on the slogans
of the Cold War the very phrase “American
Empire” is an oxymoron. For them the
only twentieth century empire, once the sun
had finally set on Britain’s, was the
“evil empire” of Soviet Russia.
That was clearly and indisputably an empire
and so one way of illuminating American imperial
history is to compare and contrast it with
Russia’s. The parallels between the
two nations demonstrate how imperialism helped
make each of them what they are today.
To find similarities between the two nations
is not to suggest that they are in some way
identical or even equivalent: nobody could
mistake modern Russia for modern America.
Despite the similarities in their histories
the two nations have fundamental differences.
Russia is an inferiority complex trying to
find itself. America is a superiority complex
trying to sell itself. Russia from its earliest
days has been surrounded by enemies, terrorized
by invasions and ruled by unfettered tyrants,
factors for which American history has no
parallels.
The reality is that whether the histories
of America and Russia are perceived to be
similar or dissimilar depends entirely on
who is doing the perceiving. It is possible
to prove either case by being selective in
the choice of evidence.
One of the problems historians face is that
their sources are partial in both senses
of the word - they are not complete and they
are not impartial. Mountains of evidence
have long since disappeared and what remains
often carries less weight than the conventional
wisdoms handed down from one generation to
another. History is not a mirror that reflects
the past but a distorting prism that refracts
the present. It allows us to see ourselves
not as we were but as we wish we were.
Consider the following facts largely missing
from Americans’ own perceptions of
their nation’s history:
For more than half their history Americans
have openly practiced ethnic cleansing starting
when the early Puritans hired an English
mercenary to conduct a terror campaign against
the native population
The Boston Tea Party that sparked off the
American Revolution was instigated by smugglers
when the British reduced the tariff on tea
The United States started acting as global
policeman with its first bombardment of Libya
in 1815, just 31 years after achieving independence
and 131 years before President Reagan bombed
Colonel Gadaffi
The American Civil War was not fought to
abolish slavery; when the conflict started
both sides agreed that slavery should be
allowed to continue
Throughout the nineteenth century America
launched numerous wars of aggression none
of which could remotely be described as defensive
4,743 people are officially reported to have
been lynched between 1882 and 1968, almost
all of them from ethnic minorities
At the beginning of the twentieth century
there were more active socialists in America
than in Russia and following the Russian
Revolution a general strike in Seattle culminated
in a workers’ soviet trying to take
control of the city.
None of these facts are newly discovered
and if any are controversial it is not because
they are disputed but because they do not
correspond with popular perceptions of America’s
past.
It is expected that sources in Russian history
will be partial, it is not expected that
sources in an open society like America will
be partial. Unsavoury events were less likely
to be hidden in America than in Russia but
being visible to historians and becoming
part of contemporary awareness are two very
different things. Consider the events of
July 1950 near the Korean village of No Gun
Ri. American forces in an orgy of violence
lasting three days massacred four hundred
refugees –women, children and elderly
men. The facts are now out in the open but
it was nearly half a century before the US
authorities admitted the truth of what had
happened. By that time the matter was truly
history, of interest only to academics. No
Gun Ri has had no impact on popular perceptions
of the Korean War.
The pasts of both America and Russia are
replete with events that have been painted
out of history altogether or have been depicted
in a myriad of contrasting shades depending
on what the observer wants to prove. Two
examples from the early twentieth century
illustrate the issue. On Bloody Sunday in
1905 Russian troops fired on demonstrators
outside the imperial palace in St Petersburg.
Nobody knows exactly how many were killed.
There are widely differing estimates and
it is not surprising that both official and
unofficial reports need to be treated with
considerable scepticism. The likelihood is
that around one hundred died, far less than
in an equivalent event in Tulsa, Oklahoma
sixteen years later. One of America's
worst pogroms broke out when a local newspaper
fabricated a story about a black man raping
a white woman in a lift and, in an editorial,
predicted his lynching. Looting whites rampaged
through black areas driving out the inhabitants
before blacks and whites, many First World
War veterans, lined up in a pitched battle.
National Guards sprayed machine gun fire
into the black trenches and some reports
claim that whites rained bullets and Molotov
cocktails from aircraft overhead. But how
many died? The official reports said 36.
Unofficial reports claimed 3,000. Modern
research suggests around 300 but nobody can
be sure.
What is more interesting than speculation
about the number of fatalities is the way
history has treated Bloody Sunday and the
Tulsa Pogrom. The events themselves are broadly
comparable not only in their violence but
in the way they illustrate the currents of
conflict permeating their eras. In themselves
neither changed the course of history: after
Bloody Sunday the Tsar promised reforms but
then reneged and tried to carry on as before;
after Tulsa too reforms were promised but
nothing changed. And yet every history of
Russia features Bloody Sunday while today
even the inhabitants of Tulsa are barely
aware that their city was the site of one
of the most violent racial conflicts in the
history of North America.
In Russia history has repeatedly been deliberately
rewritten, in America the process has been
far subtler. It is true that important official
documents relating to the Tulsa Pogrom disappeared
but the key to understanding why history
has treated Bloody Sunday and the Tulsa Pogrom
so differently is in the prisms through which
that history has been refracted. History
is viewed in the light of ideology and the
colours that shine through are those that
match the prevailing ideological dogmas.
Tsarist Russia was an autocracy; massacring
protesters is the sort of thing autocrats
do; events like Bloody Sunday therefore fit
our expectations. America is a democracy;
massacring the innocent is not the sort of
thing democracies do; the Tulsa Pogrom therefore
does not fit our expectations. The consequence
is that Bloody Sunday reinforces what we
already know and is added to the evidence
bank of history. The Tulsa Pogrom contradicts
what we already know and must therefore have
been an aberration to be cast aside.
There is nothing sinister or deliberate about
the process. To take another example nobody
said to American teachers "When you
tell children about the Pilgrim Fathers tell
them about the natives who helped them find
food but don't tell them about the native
shaman whose head the Pilgrims chopped off
and mounted above Plymouth Fort to terrorise
the locals". History develops informally.
That the Pilgrim Fathers invited a group
of natives to a meeting and then butchered
seven of them contradicts everything we “know”
about the ideals of the men and women who
inspired the American dream; it should not
have happened and therefore as far as popular
history is concerned it did not happen. The
facts are not suppressed; they simply cease
to be expressed.
The ideology of democracy is the most potent
political force America has given the world.
It fundamentally determines our perceptions
of American history and conditions our view
of the present. When America conquered the
Philippine islands at the end of the nineteenth
century it was an act of blatant imperialism
and presaged decades of US colonial occupation;
yet through the prism of ideology it can
be and is seen as an act of liberation bringing
freedom to a land that unfortunately proved
incapable of handling it without prolonged
assistance from the US occupiers. The parallels
with modern Afghanistan and Iraq are obvious.
To a villager in Afghanistan whose family
is accidentally killed by an American bomb
American imperialism must seem as oppressive
as the Russian imperialism his country experienced
not long before, but to the outside world
ideological preconceptions tint the actions
of the two powers quite differently.
Studying Russia as a way of understanding
America is like viewing the world through
the eyes of an Afghan villager. It forces
the observer to recognise the similarities,
identify the differences and question why
both similarities and differences exist.
That there are fundamental differences is
undeniable. Many are due to accidents of
geography or history; others arise from contrasting
ideologies. Understanding how these ideologies
developed is central to understanding each
society today. As Pyotr Chaadayev, the first
great radical Russian philosopher, pointed
out history is not only a succession of events,
but also a chain of ideas.
Competing Ideologies
In his 2004 re-election campaign President
Bush II proclaimed the moral superiority
of nations like the United States "Free
nations are peaceful nations. Free nations
don't attack each other. Free nations
don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
Coming from the leader of a nation that had
just invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and whose
armouries included more than half of the
entire world's stock of weapons of mass
destruction these words match in their sheer
hypocrisy Stalin's protestations of idealistic
solidarity with the workers of the world
when his tanks rolled into Eastern Europe
at the end of the second world war. And yet
there is a fundamental difference: Stalin
was a psychopath who cynically preached brotherly
love while signing death warrants by the
thousand - whatever the ideology of Communism
may have meant to him what motivated his
actions was far more personal; for Bush on
the other hand the ideology of democracy
has so conditioned his thinking that he can
make statements like "free nations don’t
develop weapons of mass destruction"
and really believe them. The distorting prism
of ideology has refracted America's nuclear
arsenal into weapons of mass liberation.
To understand both America’s present
and America’s past it is necessary
to first understand its all-pervading ideology
of democracy: what is it, how did it arise,
how does it differ from other ideologies?
Throughout history men and women have been
motivated not only by what is in their own
self-interest but by what they believe to
be right - by their moral codes, religious
beliefs and political ideologies. These in
turn have determined how they have viewed
history.
Most people when considering historical events
identify first with their own nation, religion
or class. When discussing Napoleon, French
people tend to remember his victories, the
British his defeats. This is perfectly natural,
an instinctive response with no moral or
ideological implications. And yet the responses
often go beyond instinctive tribalism. The
French value Napoleon not ostensibly because
he was French but for his contribution to
civilization; the British denigrate him not
for being foreign but for being a despot
threatening their liberty. Tribalism sustained
by a belief that the tribe’s gods were
superior evolved into nationalism sustained
by a belief that the nation’s values
were superior. Those values form the nation’s
ideology. They may not influence a nation’s
actions, history is full of examples of nations
dedicated to freedom usurping the freedom
of others, but they do influence perceptions.
Nations perceive themselves to be acting
in accordance with their ideology and they
perceive themselves to have been acting that
way in the past.
The ideologies of America and Russia are
miles apart which explains why they both
find difficulties in perceiving the similarities
in their histories.
Russia was formed by warlords pulling together
various Slavic and other tribes to produce
the glories of mediaeval Rus, only to see
it smashed by the Mongols. The Russia
that eventually emerged from Mongol rule
had none of the vestigial hints of democracy
that had existed in Rus; it was instead the
Russia of unbridled autocracy summed up in
one man: Ivan the Terrible. The ideology
of autocracy bore the stamp of Mongol terror
and Muscovite ambition. Meanwhile a new type
of government was developing to the west.
In England institutions were starting to
form that were not dissimilar to those which
had existed in Rus in cities like Novgorod,
but they now put down stronger roots so that
even a king like Henry VIII, (a ruler who
had much in common with Ivan the Terrible),
was unable to rule without a degree of genuflection
to the rights of his subjects - rights whose
legitimacy was core to the mindset of those
soon setting off to make a new life across
the Atlantic.
It was a mindset that eventually came to
be expressed in the stirring phrases of the
Declaration of Independence, American Constitution
and Gettysburg Address and can be summed
up in a single word – democracy –
and a single slogan - freedom.
The concept of “freedom” is at
the core of the ideology of democracy. But
what does freedom mean? Is it freedom from,
as Russians have traditionally thought, or
freedom to, as Americans usually imagine?
Terms like “freedom” are floating
banners under which very different battles
are fought. For Russians freedom has
meant freedom from invasion: under the banner
of liberty they have fought to protect their
nation from Mongol khan and Swedish king,
from French Emperor and German Fuhrer.
Freedom in America has meant the opposite:
the freedom to invade both the nations next
door and those further away. For Americans
freedom usually means not collective freedom
but individual freedom, not their nation’s
freedom but their own. But individual freedom
as a concept is no more universal than national
freedom; what is meant changes over time
and from one part of the world to another.
American freedom has included the freedom
to own slaves and includes the freedom for
children to have access to assault rifles;
freedoms many would deny are freedoms at
all.
In twentieth century Russia the official
ideology changed from tsarist autocracy to
communism to the situation today when Russia
is virtually ideology-less. Various versions
of communism predominated for most of the
century, each claiming to be a scientifically
rigorous ideology aligning global revolution
with the innate strivings of the human soul.
Whether the notions of international brotherhood
and universal class struggle that Stalin
and his acolytes claimed to motivate their
imperial adventures were ever fully believed
by the Russian population is open to debate.
Whereas the American concept of democracy
has been a living force since the nation
was born the tenets of socialist solidarity
survived for less than a century from their
birth in the Russian Revolution to their
death at the end of the cold war. Russia
does however have a much more ancient tradition
as deeply ingrained as democracy in America:
autocracy.
Autocracy was the consequence of vicious
struggles between unprincipled warlords but
by the nineteenth century it had evolved
into an intellectual philosophy every bit
as effective as democracy. For democrats
in America the Rights of Man were to be protected
above all else (or at least for most of its
history the rights of white, literate, adult,
heterosexual males). For autocrats the rights
to be protected were not those of individuals
but the collective rights of the nation:
the right to protection from invasion, the
right to order, the right for all to occupy
the position in society ordained by God.
The intellectual champions of autocracy are
completely forgotten in the west but men
like Konstantin Pobedonostsev were no intellectual
pygmies blinded to the light of reason by
religious bigotry and cut off from the enlightened
philosophies of the west. Theorists of autocracy
were well versed not only in the classics
of ancient Greece and Rome but in the intellectual
controversies of eighteenth century France
and nineteenth century England. Despite that
they still argued cogently against the “evils”
of a free press (which would give power to
unaccountable press barons) and universal
education (which would give rise to aspirations
that could never be satisfied). Such arguments
today seem unthinkable but it is worth remembering
that they were put forward equally vehemently
in seventeenth century Virginia before New
England democracy became the American orthodoxy.
Furthermore even though Pobedonostsev’s
vision of how society should be ordered differed
fundamentally from that of America’s
founding fathers they would have recognised
much of his analysis. Nowadays democracy
is defined as being non-elitest. All men
are created equal is deemed to imply that
all are equally fit to rule. But that was
not the original American meaning. All men
were deemed to have equal value in the eyes
of God but God had also ordained that there
were to be leaders and followers. The difference
between autocracy and democracy was that
in the former the leaders were chosen for
life from among the elite by the rules of
inheritance, (at least in theory –
in practice brute force often played its
part), whereas in a democracy the leaders
were chosen for fixed terms from among the
elite by popular vote. In both cases the
concept of an elite was central.
One of the great theoreticians of the American
Revolution, Alexander Hamilton, pointed out
at the Federal Convention that “All
communities divide themselves into the few
and the many. The first are the rich and
well-born; the other the mass of the people”
The masses he went on to say simply could
not be trusted to “judge or determine
right”. Pobedonostsev would have agreed.
Where the two men would have disagreed radically
is on the conclusions that should be drawn
from the analysis. For Hamilton the rich
and the well-born were the natural rulers
and it was essential to bind them into the
new society, as he put it they must have
“a distinct, permanent share in the
Government”. Pobedonostsev believed
that the elite would inevitably promote its
own interests above the common good and so
needed to be subject to a higher and more
altruistic authority: a monarch not dissimilar
to the one against whom the colonists in
America had rebelled.
For men like Hamilton God’s will was
that a small group of well-intentioned “well-born”
should lead the masses to the Promised Land
along the paths of democracy. For Russians
right up until the 20th century God’s
will was represented on earth not by a particular
class but by a single autocrat, a single
Emperor, destined to forever expand his empire.
That autocrat was the Tsar but it is not
difficult to see how the ideology of autocracy
mutated easily from Romanov Tsar to Bolshevik
dictator.
Ideologies are especially important in nations
that have never suffered setbacks or defeat.
France under Napoleon and, more clearly,
Germany under Hitler gained an empire, however
briefly, and then lost it in circumstances
that caused much soul-searching. The same
has happened to Britain over a much longer
period and is happening to Russia today.
In such circumstances ideologies are inevitably
questioned and modified. Few in Britain would
echo the imperialist ideologies of their
grandparents. Even when the ideologies themselves
remain untouched there is some recognition
that the nation has not lived up to its ideals.
America is almost unique in never being forced
by defeat to seriously question its ideology
or whether its actions and its ideology are
congruent. Even after defeat in the Vietnam
War there was no retreat from the underlying
ideological commitment to the apparently
tautological objective of imposing freedom.
For the United States the ideology of democracy
was not a fig-leaf paraded in a cynical attempt
to divert attention from the atrocities committed
by American troops in Korea or Vietnam or
the “coca-colanisation” of centuries-old
cultures around the world or the rapaciousness
of American multinationals. Terms like
democracy, liberty and freedom have real
meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans
who are genuinely horrified to be labelled
“imperialists” and genuinely
shocked when, for example, millions of Europeans
believe that the successive invasions of
Iraq are more about grabbing oil than granting
liberty.
The difference between Russia and America
is that for most of their histories one has
proclaimed its imperialism while the other
has denied its. Americans act like imperialists
but don’t talk like imperialists, their
political culture is not explicitly an imperial
culture. Even when America and Russia have
acted identically, as with the treatment
of their native populations or their invasions
of Afghanistan, they have perceived themselves
to be acting differently.
For most Americans it is axiomatic that democracy
and imperialism are incompatible; the very
birth of their nation symbolised the victory
of the forces of light and liberty over the
dark forces of empire. Their mission ever
since has been to spread that light.
“Freedom is not America's gift
to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's
gift to each man and woman in this world”
was how President Bush II justified the American
invasion of Iraq. Bush II has repeatedly
made plain his belief that America has a
God-given mission to spread freedom and democracy
across the globe. When US marines storm ashore
from Grenada to Vietnam, from Somalia to
Iraq, they are not enforcing American colonial
control but imposing freedom. Canada was
invaded in 1812 not to extend an American
empire but to diminish Britain’s just
as the Philippines were seized to hasten
the end of Spanish imperialism and the mujahaddin
of Afghanistan were trained in the skills
of modern war to help bring down the Russian
empire. As Bush II said in another speech
five years earlier “America has never
been an empire. We may be the only great
power in history that had the chance, and
refused – preferring greatness to power
and justice to glory.”
There is no doubt that for most modern Americans
the belief that their country is not an imperial
nation is sincere. In the days of President
Roosevelt I imperialism was a real issue
in American politics with candidates taking
explicitly pro and anti imperialist stances
but within forty years a transformation of
attitudes was complete and Roosevelt II could
proclaim the non-existence of American imperialism
with the same sincerity as Bush II.
When, during the Second World War, the three
allied leaders - Churchill, Roosevelt and
Stalin - gathered at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta
in 1945 members of the British delegations
were horrified to find that Roosevelt regarded
Churchill as a bigger threat to the post-war
world than Stalin. As far as the President
was concerned he and Stalin were not weighed
down by the incubus of empire and were both
therefore, unlike Churchill, able to contemplate
a future world of independent sovereign nations.
The consequence was that in the great Tehran
Conference debate about opening a new front
against Hitler (in which Stalin wanted the
British and Americans to invade France and
Churchill wanted to strike at the Balkans
to forestall Russian intervention in the
region) America sided with Russia effectively
consigning the peoples of central and south
eastern Europe to half a century of servitude
as part of the Soviet empire.
If the beliefs of men like Roosevelt II and
Bush II are so strong is it wrong therefore
to talk of American imperialism? The answer
to that question can be found by examining
one of Bush II’s specific assertions
- that “America has never been an empire”.
Empires Apart
It is not clear when the first Russia colonists
crossed the Urals. Rudimentary Russian mining
operations seemed to have started in the
early sixteenth century but the first settlements
are usually dated to the period following
the seizure of the city of Sibir by Yermak
Timofoyevich, making them almost simultaneous
with the first English settlements in Virginia.
Russian and American pioneers then set off
towards the Pacific. Despite the early Americans
facing far fewer obstacles the Russians got
there first, gobbling up territory at a phenomenal
rate and easily exceeding the speed with
which the United States spread west. Some
of the conquered lands were absorbed into
the bosom of Mother Russia and others were
ruled as colonies with a degree of tyranny
never experienced by the fledgling British
colonies on the North American continent.
But it was the British colonies that burst
into revolt.
The American Revolution was both a war against
empire and a war for empire. The early Americans,
like the early Russians, wanted to conquer
a continent and create an empire. George
III did not share their imperial pretensions
and issued a proclamation stopping settlers
encroaching on native territories across
the Appalachians (just as Ivan the Terrible
had originally outlawed encroachments across
the Urals). When American colonists helped
seize Louisburg in French Canada and Havana
in Spanish Cuba the authorities in London
handed them back. Britain wanted a commercial
empire not extra territory to administer.
The Americans wanted a much more traditional
form of empire; one like the tsars had already
created. Robert Kagan quotes example after
example of American colonists envisioning
a new empire arising on the North American
continent: a speech to Yale students in 1770
calling for America to rise “the Queen
of Empires” and replace the “setting”
British Empire; a South Carolina planter
in 1776 proclaiming that God had erected
“a new Empire, stiled the United States
of America” that “bids fair …
to be the most glorious of any upon record”
and so on. The founding fathers saw themselves
not as the destroyers of the British Empire
but as its inheritors. Like Lenin and Stalin
a century and a half later the revolution’s
leaders believed that they were creating
a new form of government that would conquer
the world.
At the very same time that Americans on the
eastern rim of the continent were celebrating
their independence from the British Russians
were settling in Alaska. The Russians had
gained Siberia, a territory far larger than
the United States, but a land that was largely
barren. Russia turned its eyes west and south,
taking by force much richer territory held
by Swedes, Poles and Turks. Americans by
contrast found a land of abundance waiting
to be exploited - once it had been cleansed
of the native population – but it too
soon looked covetously at the territory of
its neighbours. Florida was taken from Spain
and Texas from Mexico.
In the middle of the nineteenth century both
countries launched attacks on their neighbours,
Russia on Turkey and America on Mexico, but
America soon had a better weapon than military
force alone: money. The two empires traded
what each had in abundance when Russia swapped
the enormous empty wastes of Alaska for 7.2
million dollars. Earlier the whole American
west had been opened up when millions of
acres of wilderness had been purchased from
Napoleon. As the century drew to a close
the two empires seemed set on the same path:
Russia seizing territory on the borders with
China and America launching a war against
Spain that left her in possession of the
Philippines and Cuba.
Throughout the nineteenth century Russia
and America were acting in the same way and
yet history treats only one of them as having
had an “empire”.
In earlier times when nations set out to
conquer they did so unashamedly under the
banner of Empire – from the Romans
to the British they gloried in their imperialism.
Russia under the tsars did likewise. For
centuries after Ivan the Terrible proclaimed
himself the first tsar in 1547 Russia was
proud to describe itself as an Empire. Only
under the Communists did imperialism have
to be disguised as something more noble like
“international solidarity”. America
too has sought a more noble banner: democracy.
And yet just like Ivan America’s Founding
Fathers saw themselves as instruments of
God’s will destined to extend their
rule far beyond their current boundaries.
In their speeches and writings George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander
Hamilton all used the term "empire"
to describe their vision of America's
future.
When Russia occupied Siberia it perceived
itself – and history perceives it -
as having enlarged its “Empire”.
When the original thirteen colonies did the
same in North America it is perceived only
as extending the borders of the “Nation”.
The different terminologies have come to
imply that one power was inherently imperialist
while the other was not but the reason the
term Empire is not used for American territorial
aggrandizement is far more prosaic. It is
a linguistic accident that in English “empire”
and “emperor” are cognate and
consequently there is a natural assumption
that one will be accompanied by the other.
As a republic America had no monarch and
thus could not have an emperor. Kings like
Ivan the Terrible (or queens like Victoria)
could proclaim themselves Emperor but Presidents
could not. Thus America almost by definition
could not have an empire.
Niall Ferguson has examined the various academic
meanings given to the term empire: whether
any of the meanings can sensibly be applied
to the United States, whether the terms “hegemon”
and hegemony would be more or less useful.
He concludes that there is today an American
empire. In reality whether the words “empire”
and “imperialism” are appropriate
when talking about the way American history
developed is largely a matter of fashion.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the terms were widely used. Men pushing to
extend the nation's borders by annexing
territory in Central America, the Caribbean
and Pacific were proud to do so in the cause
of the American Empire. But that view was
never unanimous; at the end of the 19th century
there were heated debates between self styled
imperialists and anti-imperialists and a
convention of the Anti-Imperialist League
in Chicago in 1899 was attended by delegates
from all over the country. In the 1900
Presidential elections the Democrats ran
an anti-imperialist campaign but lost out
to the Republican’s imperialist ticket
of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
In the 20th century the debate died as American
business and political leaders realised that
their economic objectives could usually be
achieved without using military force or
annexing territory, the traditional characteristics
of imperialists. Even in the 19th century
America had acquired far more territory by
purchase than by conquest.
America was changing. With industrialisation
new social forces came into play and in particular
Hamilton’s elite of the “rich
and well-bred” became much richer and
much less well-bred. It was the age of the
“Robber Barons” at home and of
mercenary adventures abroad. Imperial expansion
was privatised. In Hawaii American businessmen,
with the help of the US Navy, staged a coup
against the local government and the territory
was eventually incorporated into the United
States. The next stage was the realisation
that American business could own or control
other nation’s property without taking
on the burden of colonial rule that had helped
bankrupt Britain. When US business balked
at paying the tariffs demanded by the Colombian
government for using the Panama Canal they
organized a Hawaiian-style coup, again with
the support of the US Navy, but this time
created the “independent” state
of Panama to manage the local population
on their behalf.
American imperialism had adapted to the advent
of the “corporation”.
In 1773 The British East India Company, the
largest multinational corporation of its
day, threatened to move into the North American
market and use its massive scale to drive
local merchants out of business. The colonists
responded by tipping the Company's tea
into Boston Harbour and thereby tipping themselves
into a war of national liberation. After
achieving their freedom the colonists were
determined that they would never again be
threatened by such corporate power. Thomas
Jefferson spoke eloquently about the dangers
that the very notion of “corporations”
posed to the American way of life and legal
safeguards were erected to defend the citizens
of the new nation from any threat of corporate
power. After the Civil War these safeguards
started to crumble so that eventually the
Bill of Rights, so carefully crafted by the
Founding Fathers to protect citizens against
unreasoning authority, was being used to
protect corporations against elected authority.
The casual assumption of the nation's
founders that only human beings could have
rights had been overturned and the concept
of corporate “rights” was invented.
By the end of the twentieth century these
rights had mushroomed. Health and safety
inspectors were stopped from raiding factories
on the grounds that it infringed corporations'
property "rights" (Marshall v Barlow's
Inc 1978). Legislation stopping corporations
funding campaigns in public referenda was
declared unconstitutional as it contravened
the corporations' "right" to
free speech (First National Bank of Boston
v Bellotti 1978). For the same reason state
legislatures were forbidden to order utility
companies to distribute leaflets urging energy
conservation (Pacific Gas & Electric
v Public Utilities Commission 1986). Such
cases greatly extended doctrines developed
in the period of the Robber Barons between
the American Civil War and the First World
War.
A new ideology of corporate capitalism emerged
virtually un-noticed at the same time as
Karl Marx and his followers were promulgating
their pseudo-scientific doctrines predicting
that the end of capitalism was nigh. "Corporatism"
was secreted silently in the interstices
of American commerce as "Communism"
developed in the bitter internecine warfare
of socialist and anarchist factions across
Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth
century neither seemed to be particularly
relevant to the imperial ambitions of the
two great empires of Russia and America but
both new ideologies would come to dominate
imperial development for much of the century.
For America the First World War was a massive
opportunity and in particular it allowed
American corporations to seize markets previously
controlled by its main economic competitor
Britain. American exports to Britain and
its allies increased sevenfold between the
start of the war in 1914 and America’s
entry in 1917 and even more thereafter. The
European powers not only became beholden
to US industry for their survival but those
imports were financed with American loans
that had to be repaid, often in the case
of Britain by selling assets the British
Empire had built up around the world. American
industry was massively assisted by the state
and whole industries, such as ship building,
were transformed by state intervention. This
state intervention continued after the war
to combat economic recession: a government
agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which
became the nation’s largest electricity
producer, has been called the world’s
most successful large-scale experiment in
socialism. In the Second World War the transfer
of wealth from Britain to America through
the “Lend Lease” programme was
even more marked and for the rest of the
twentieth century America’s economic
imperialism had no rival.
For the Russian Empire the picture was very
different. The First World War was a disaster
and Russia lost nearly all of its empire
in Eastern Europe. Attempts to export its
socialist ideology failed. Abortive revolutions
in Germany and Hungary and conspiratorial
Communist Parties in many parts of the world
(including two in the United States) produced
nothing; the only new territory the Bolsheviks
managed to conquer was in Mongolia and that
was taken by force of arms. The Second World
War saw Russian imperialism back with all
its old vigour and with the same methodology:
brute force. Like America Russia tried to
export its ideology with Communist parties
gaining votes where elections were allowed
but at the end of the day the Soviet Empire
was created as all previous Russian Empires
had been by bullets not ballots.
That is not to say that ideology was unimportant
in extending the Russian Empire; the short-lived
Seattle Soviet of 1919 showed that communist
ideology, like the ideology of democracy
today, has had its adherents in the most
surprising places. Nevertheless the fundamentals
of Russian imperialism remained unchanged
from the Empire’s inception to the
collapse of communism.
By contrast America found that to become
really wealthy it no longer needed imperialism
of the traditional type. Although it
invested massive amounts in military hardware,
the US Navy becoming the world’s second
most powerful by the end of the nineteenth
century, it used this power to promote its
commercial interests without, in general,
grabbing territory. There were exceptions,
small corners of the world colonised largely
for military reasons, but these were not
central to American imperial strategy. Indeed
one of the unintended consequences of the
Iraq war was the sudden realisation of many
inside and outside the United States that
America possessed a colony at Guantanamo
Bay on the island of Cuba and had done so
for more than a century. America had found
a way of exercising imperial control without
the formalities of empire - it became a small
step to proclaim that this new model imperialism
was not really imperialism at all.
The United States had always seen itself
as the enemy of other people's imperialism.
As its own imperial advances became softer,
and the tactics more subtle than those of
previous empires, the absurdity of American
imperialists decrying as immoral the imperialism
of other nations was resolved by simply denying
the existence of their own imperial ambitions.
At the same time as this was happening almost
unconsciously in America exactly the same
process was going on in Russia. There the
conversion from imperialist to anti-imperialist
was more extreme and the hypocrisy more blatant.
Russian leaders exercising a degree of control
over the countries of Eastern Europe undreamt
of by earlier Tsars proclaimed that by definition
proletarian revolution had freed them from
any hint of empire or imperialist intent.
The term imperialist began to have negative
connotations for almost everyone. The new
Bolshevik government in Russia claimed to
have rescued the country from an imperialist
war and to be beset by imperialist foes.
With the coming of the Russian Revolution
the trappings of empire disappeared, but
the reality remained. Stalin’s vicious
rule over his colonies in Eastern Europe
was virtually indistinguishable from his
Tsarist predecessors. The only significant
difference between the tsarist and soviet
empires was that the latter denied it was
an empire at all. Nevertheless its conquest
of most of Eastern Europe continued a tradition
going back to Ivan the Terrible and beyond.
“US imperialism” was much less
tangible. The phrase was applied to developments
as diverse as military intervention in Vietnam
and Iraq, the economic power of American
multinationals and the cultural domination
of Hollywood.
Despite examples like Afghanistan American
and Russian imperialism became less similar
as the twentieth century wore on. Russian
imperialism remained much as imperialism
had always been but the American empire evolved
as it grew; it became something altogether
new and as the century drew to a close it
was this new type of empire that proved itself
far superior. The collapse of Communism also
marked the collapse, permanently or temporarily,
of the Russian Empire leaving its adversary
free to conquer the world in a welter of
fast food outlets, dumbed down news and US
Marines.
The Empires Today
Throughout the Cold War two great empires,
America and Russia, hurled the invective
of anti-imperialism at each other. On one
level for either to describe itself as anti-imperialist
was rank hypocrisy but on another level both
societies espoused comprehensive, intellectually
coherent ideologies which appeared to be
the antithesis of imperialist: communist
autocracy and democracy. This apparent contradiction
is more apparent than real for inherent in
both American democracy and Russian autocracy
were the seeds of imperialism.
In Russia imperialism had for centuries been
driven forward by autocrats claiming to be
carrying out God’s will. The mirror
image of this faith appeared on the other
side of the world where God’s will
was equally firmly believed to be represented
on earth not by a single autocrat but by
a single people: Americans. By virtue of
its democracy God had willed that America's
manifest destiny was to rule over lesser
breeds; by virtue of its autocracy God had
willed Russia to do the same. Americans and
Russians may have started in different places
but they arrived at the same destination:
empire.
Niall Ferguson concludes that there exists
today an American empire and, more controversially,
that it is a good thing. It is an empire
in which the vassals are “dependent
on” rather than “dominated by”
the imperial power, (a distinction more semantic
than practical). For him it is the only way
to bring the benefits of liberal democracy
to the bulk of the world now mired in poverty
and strife. Many American neo-conservatives
reached the same conclusion for different
reasons, for them an explicit policy of imperial
expansion is the only way to ensure America’s
security.
The Russian empire on the other hand is almost
universally regarded as having been a bad
thing. Only a few on the fringes of
Russian politics argue for the reestablishment
of Russian control over the nations of Eastern
Europe. And yet just a few decades
ago there were some in the west who argued
passionately that Soviet rule had brought
enormous benefits to their colonies - economic
stability, full employment, equality of opportunity
in education, comprehensive health and welfare
services and, perhaps above all, peace.
In any event it may be too early to say that
the Russian empire is over. Even after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and all that went
with it Russia continues to fight colonial
wars in places like Chechnya, thousands of
people in the eastern Ukraine yearn for re-annexation
into their Russian homeland and supposedly
free republics around Russia's periphery
find the colossus next door still dominating
their economies.
Far, far more economies however are dominated
by the United States. American imperialism
today is more economic than military and
the changing forces working in the American
economy are what have changed the nature
of American imperialism.
One of the main drivers behind the numerous
territorial acquisitions made by the United
States in the first half of the nineteenth
century had been the desire to find more
land on which slaves could be set to work
producing goods cheaply for their masters.
Once slavery was abolished the pressure for
outright annexation diminished. Why make
Nicaragua part of America, (a repeated endeavour
of American imperialists before the civil
war), if the natives then had to be paid
at American rates?
By the twentieth century American companies
were shipping home products and profits made
around the world to further fuel the onward
march of the American consumer. The economics
are simple: if a US company employs someone
abroad at lower rates than it would have
to pay in America the US consumer benefits,
through lower prices, and the US company
benefits from higher profits. The only
downside for America is if unemployment at
home is driven up, but as both US consumers
and US investors are better off they can
afford to buy more of the products and services
that can only be provided within the US,
thus creating more jobs. The whole
cycle works as long as those overseas do
not have to be paid the same as Americans
and such is the competition for jobs around
the world that so far this has simply never
happened.
Crude European-style imperialism was replaced
not by an overt American imperialism but
by “globalisation” under which
raw materials from Africa might be processed
in Asia and sold in Europe – with the
profits spent in America.
All this was due not to imperial diktats
of the kind used in the Russian empire but
– or so it is claimed – resulted
from the unimpeded workings of the free market.
The irony is that American industry was able
to create this happy situation precisely
because it systematically prevented the operation
of the free market. Early American
industry was largely created through state
intervention and it only thrived by being
shielded from the global marketplace by protective
tariffs. America in fact owes its economic
pre-eminence to exactly those economic policies
it now fights so vigorously to stop others
adopting.
Most, but not all, empires have sucked the
wealth of their colonies, protectorates and
dominions back to the centre. In the case
of the Soviet empire this process was crude
in the extreme: factories in Eastern Europe
were dismantled and shipped back to Russia,
followed by raw materials and manufactured
goods transferred across the empire in accordance
with the whims of central planners. In the
case of the US transfers of wealth have been
far more subtle. Originally the earliest
American colonists survived on “tribute”
coerced from the native tribes as a form
of protection money, in exactly the same
way that the Mongols had extorted tribute
from their Russian vassals or the Russians
themselves had coerced tribute from the natives
of Siberia. But over time such crude
extortion gave way to less violent methods
until today wealth is transferred in the
form of loans, repatriated profits and cheap
imports.
By issuing bonds and providing other investment
opportunities America has ensured that a
constant stream of wealth flows in to provide
the sustenance of economic life. The
United States has long imported far more
manufactured goods and raw materials than
it has exported and it has achieved the remarkable
feat of living beyond its means by persuading
the rest of the world to lend it money so
that American society can consume more than
it earns.
America has created virtuous circles that
use the wealth it has accumulated to suck
yet more from its commercial empire. For
example pension funds in Britain invest money
in American firms who use the cash to develop
global scale and muscle that in turn allows
them to obtain dominant positions in national
markets like Britain, reducing the relative
value of British firms and thus persuading
UK pension funds to invest yet more in the
US.
The United States has used its ideologies
of freedom and free markets to bind its commercial
empire together with only the occasional
use or threat of military force. The Russian
empire in the twentieth century was the precise
opposite. It used its ideology as a cloak
to mask the Red Army shackles that bound
the empire together. The machine guns, prison
camps and barbed wire of Russian imperial
dictatorship were hidden behind the simplistic
slogans of Marxist-Leninism, Communist Brotherhood
and International Solidarity.
As the Cold War progressed the two empires
massed beneath their ideological banners
and prepared to go to war. It was a war that
never happened. The defining characteristic
of the cold war was not war between the two
empires but conflict within. At the end of
the day the Russian Empire (like the British
Empire) succumbed not to the military might
of enemies beyond the empire’s frontiers
but the nationalist aspirations of its colonies.
The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and of the
USSR itself demonstrated that brute force
without the economic might to sustain it
could not hold an empire together. The American
route of peaceful, commercial imperialism
appeared to have proven itself superior.
And yet America was finding that economic
might not translated into brute force could
also be insufficient. Overt and covert force
became increasingly necessary to maintain
US control over the foreign resources, particularly
oil, needed to maintain its economic wellbeing.
Imperialism has played an important part
in both American and Russian history but
it has played a different part in each. The
differences between the two nations remain
far more significant than the similarities.
When critics attack the erosion of civil
liberties in the United States their starting
point is a degree of liberty which has never
existed in Russia. Fundamentally Americans
have enjoyed more “freedom” for
much longer than Russians. The McCarthy
persecution of supposed communists in America
in the 1950s was an affront to all the values
which Americans claim to hold dear but in
relative terms this affront was totally insignificant
in comparison with the crimes of Stalin whose
victims numbered in the tens of millions
most of whom lost far more than their careers.
A common feature of comparisons between Russian
and American history is that American history
is often Russian history writ small. The
exploration of the American west was Siberia
on a smaller scale. The deportation of the
American native tribes was repeated by Stalin
on an altogether more horrific scale. The
pogroms against African Americans that were
a feature of American life in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were replicas
in miniature of the Russian pogroms against
the Jews in the same period (although not
as miniature as many would like to believe).
The American invasion of Afghanistan led
to hundreds if not thousands of civilian
deaths but undoubtedly fewer than the preceding
Russian invasion.
There remain differences between the two
societies that are so fundamental that they
go right to their very souls.
For centuries there has been much anguished
debate about the Soul of Russia. In the nineteenth
century the Russian intelligentsia devoted
enormous energy to contesting the rival claims
of Slavophiles and Modernists and delving
into such arcane matters as the origin of
the peasant commune and its implication for
the Russian way of life. The Communists eradicated
such debate by imposing a brand new vision
of the human soul but as their power vanished
the debate has reignited. America has had
no such continuing debate. Since men like
Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and James
Madison laid down the ground rules Americans
have known that their society is destined
to be what it already is: a democracy. There
may be disagreements about details, in some
cases important details such as the compatibility
or incompatibility of democracy and slavery,
but fundamentally most Americans believe
that the democratic soul of their nation
is closer to God than anyone else's.
That democratic soul is what gives American
imperialism its constancy of purpose, confidence
of execution and certainty of victory. Bush
II may be wrong when he says that America
is not practicing imperialism but spreading
democracy but only the totally cynical would
doubt his sincerity.
It is in the words of America’s leaders
and thinkers that the stark contrast between
democratic ambition and imperial reality
are most apparent and that contrast goes
right back through American history. To modern
eyes and ears the words of contemporary political
leaders often appear as self-serving and
insubstantial sound bites while the words
of earlier generations may be dismissed as
quaint or archaic. These are not the adjectives
which spring to mind when reading the words
of many early Americans; much stronger descriptions
are needed: inspiring, noble, uplifting,
appalling, barbaric. The fine sentiments
of men like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin are rallying calls for everyone
who believes in decency, dignity and justice.
The proclamation that all men are endowed
with certain “inalienable Rights”
among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness” has stirred the imagination
of the oppressed across the globe. But the
words of other early Americans are offensive
in the extreme: the leader of the Pilgrim
Fathers glorying in the “sweet sacrifice”
of natives “frying in the fire”
after a particularly gruesome massacre of
native men, women and children; the first
president born in a log cabin, Andrew Jackson,
symbol of egalitarian democracy, assailing
the “wicked” opponents of slavery
for daring to suggest that slaves were any
different to other forms of private property;
one of the most powerful nineteenth century
newspaper editors proclaiming America’s
“Manifest Destiny” to make the
“imbecile” Mexicans succumb to
the natural superiority of Anglo-Saxons.
Offensive as such opinions may be they are
the values that drove the ethnic cleansing
which opened up the continent, the slave
trade on which the nation’s early prosperity
was built and the imperial conquests that
established its boundaries.
Americans and Russians perceive their histories
to be more different than they are. Even
where Russia and America have followed the
same paths neither Russians nor Americans
recognise that fact. Historians cannot even
agree where the paths started. One possible
starting point is with the Vikings.
|
