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| Moderator: | Michael Mandelbaum, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Director of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins University |
|---|---|
| Speakers: | Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; author, "Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World |
| Niall Ferguson, author, "The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power" |
April 28, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
Michael Mandelbaum [MM]: The housekeeping, first. Let me remind you, please, to turn off your cell phones. And, let me announce that the usual not for attribution rule is waived for this meeting. This is on the record and we do have representatives of the press here. Our speakers remarks will be followed by a Question and Answer session, and we will end promptly at 1:30. Or whenever Bob Orr tells me to bring it to a close, and we ask, as a courtesy to our speakers, that you not leave the meeting early. We have today two authors who have written recent books on how the past bears on the present and the future. And Niall Ferguson, to my right, is the Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business at the New York University. And he is the author of a number of important books on 19th and 20th Century history. They include a two volume history of the Rothschild Banking House, the first volume entitled “Money’s Profits,” the second, “World’s Banker.” Another book on World War I entitled “The Pity of War.” A book about the interaction of finance and security entitled “The Cash Nexus,” and, most recently, and relevant to our meeting today, “Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.” And as many of you know, an essay putting forward one such lesson appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. On my left, Walter Russell Mead, who needs no introduction to a Council audience, but I shall introduce him anyway. He is our Senior Fellow for American Foreign Policy, and author of the book, “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World,” which is the winner of what, with all due respect to our own Arthur Ross prize, is, I think, the most prestigious award for books on international relations, the Lionel Gerber Prize. Now, where the lessons of history are concerned, we have two common pieces of conventional wisdom. One is that history never repeats itself, and so there are no lessons to be learned from history. The other associated with the American philosopher of the early part of the last century, George Santiana(?), is that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. In the next 20 minutes, ten minutes each, our speakers will, I am confident, either tell us which of these is correct, or reconcile the two. Or perhaps ignore them both altogether. (Laughter) So, Professor Ferguson, the floor is yours.
Niall Ferguson [NF]: Well, thank you very much, Michael, and thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming this afternoon. It’s a huge honor to be invited to address the Council on Foreign Relations here in the Capital City of the latest great anglophone empire. And...(Laughter)...you know, it’s interesting that Michael should mention that the lessons from history, Alan Taylor(?), my great hero as a boy, used to say that men only learn from history how to make new mistakes, and it may be that the theme of what I’m going to say to you in the next ten minutes, which is the time I’ve been allotted, will be a rather similar one. Given that time is short, and we’re eager, I think, all of us, to have a discussion rather than two lectures, I simply want to address two questions. The first question is, was the empire, the British Empire, a good thing or a bad thing? Which will give me an opportunity very briefly to summarize the argument of my latest book. And the second, and to you, much more interesting question, I imagine, will be whether or not the American Empire, which dare not speak its name, so I probably ought to call it something else, whether the American hegemon, whether the American office for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance...(Laughter)...call it what you will, department of nation building, can learn anything from the British experience. Now, I think Americans are inherently rather skeptical about the proposition that the British Empire may have been a good thing, for fairly obvious historical reasons. And I think it’s highly unlikely that there’ll ever be an opinion poll like the one that was conducted recently in Jamaica. I think it was last year that the Jamaican government, somewhat ingenuously, asked its people whether they thought Jamaica would be better off if it was still run by Britain. And rather to everybody’s embarrassment, 53 percent of Jamaicans replied, in the affirmative, that they thought...(Laughter)...Now I think, the current sovereign of this country, George the II, will have to do a lot more things wrong before Americans wish back George the III. And the legacy of the 1770s is with us today. I’m constantly struck by the instinctive reaction to the proposition that the British Empire may have had anything good about it. Which seems to me to be largely informed by a kind of high school version of the American creation myth of a struggle against a wicked empire for national liberation. One of the things my book tries to do is to portray the so-called war of independence as a British civil war. The second that had been fought within two centuries, fought across the Atlantic, over issues which were fundamental to British constitutional self understanding. So let me briefly sketch what my book says in defense of the British Empire. Let me first make it clear that it doesn’t defend everything about it. On the contrary, the book is extremely candid, and I hope clear sighted about the evils of British imperialism, which were many. The book tries to draw distinction, however, between the 19th Century empire, a mercantilist slave empire, and the 19th and early 20th Century, but empire that was really very different from that 18th Century forerunner. If the first British empire had been based on a combination of plunder, appropriation, warfare, and even ethnic cleansing, the British empire that developed in the 19th Century was really quite distinct from it. It was based on the idea of free markets, on the idea of free trade, above all, but also free capital movement. It was based on the central insight that without the rule of law, free markets simply cannot function, and that the principle rule of British administrators was to establish a functioning rule of law in that quarter of the world that the British ruled, and it was based on the idea that they should be non-corrupt administration, and that civil servants should rely on their salaries rather than on embezzlement and peculation and baksheesh for their incomes. Now, for these reasons, I try to argue in the book, given what we know about development and economics today, given the work that’s been done by economists like Jeff Sachs on the importance of economic openness, from economic development, given the work that’s been done by economists like Andre Schleiffer on the importance of English legal institutions, from economic development, it would be extremely surprising if the British Empire had been bad, overall, for the world in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Because British imperial administrators basically applied most of the current nostrums of development economics without knowing the work of Jeff Sachs and Andre Schleiffer, they somehow just knew that a combination of free markets, the rule of law, and non-corrupt administration would be better for the global economy than the available alternatives. In other words, the book is a balance sheet. It’s not a claim that it’s all assets, there are plenty of debits. It’s not all credits. But the bottom line is a positive one. And my argument can be summarized very simply, compared with the available alternatives, between 1815, roughly speaking, and 1945, the British Empire was the best available model for global development. You may question its moral legitimacy, and I would agree that in a utopian world, it’s probably not a good thing for one people to govern other peoples. But in the real world, where the available alternatives were other empires, whether the Mongol empire or laterally, the Nazi and Japanese Nationalist Empires, in the real world, the British Empire was the best available, imaginable world order. Can the United States learn from this, question two. Yes. Yes, because so many of the objectives of British Empire builders tally with the objects of Americans today, at least, Americans who are interested in spreading American style institutions to the rest of the world. Of course, as Walter has shown in his brilliant book, there are four, at least four schools of thought about American foreign policy. And not all of them are interesting in exporting the free market, the rule of law, and represented government to the rest of the world, but at least two of them are, and I think it’s these two, to adapt his terminology, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian schools, that have the most to learn from British experience, although I would argue that all four schools really need to interpret it. The lessons seem to be clear. It can work. Using military force, but also, investment, regime change and nation building, to use contemporary euphemisms for empire, can make the world a safer place, a more prosperous place, and this will be beneficial? Would it be beneficial, not only for Americans, but for everybody else? However, there are reasons why I am skeptical about whether or not Americans will learn the appropriate lessons from the British experience. And let me give you, very briefly, three reasons why I’m fearful, genuinely fearful about the likely outcome of the American Empire building project. I should say right away that we should be in no two minds about the reality of this project. Call it what you will, for at least a hundred years, the United States has been engaged in projecting its power across its borders, not only militarily, but economically. The fact that it chooses not to use the term empire seems to be merely a matter of politeness towards the recipient peoples, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental structural resemblance between the two anglophone hegemons. The three reasons that I’m doubtful about the American version, are these: one, if you read the New York Times Magazine this weekend, you’ll know already, Americans don’t like going there. Compared with the British, 22 million of whom poured over Britain’s mortars into the rest of the world throughout British imperial history, Americans prefer America. And indeed, foreigners prefer to come to America than to have America come to them. This means that nation building’s extremely difficult because there are relatively few Americans out there, on the ground, in hot, poorer countries, by comparison with the numbers of British people who went to hot, poorer countries in the 19th and 20th Century. We can talk more about this in the discussion, but it does seem to me a fundamental problem, that so few graduates of the great American universities are in fact graduating with qualifications that make them capable of building civil society and the rule of law in a country like Iraq, but even if they have those qualifications, it seems questionable whether they actually want to do that, and the alternative is to become the CEO or a partner in a major Wall Street law firm. Or whatever the available alternatives. The American elite does not seem to me to be fitted for an imperial role, outside of the military. The second reason that I have anxieties about the imperial project, I haven’t yet published in any great detail, I believe this country’s fiscal overstretch, to use a term popularized by Paul Kennedy in the 1980s, is in reality much more serious than it ever was in the 1980s. But America’s overstretch has nothing whatsoever to do with its external commitments, and everything to do with its barely funded welfare and medical care services. In the foreseeable future, within ten years, it will become apparent that the existing system of welfare provision in this country cannot be sustained, and I think there is a profound weakness at the very core of the American Empire, an internal overstretch, the full extent of which we do not yet admit to ourselves. A third and final reason for anxiety is also an economic one. The British Empire was an empire built on capital export. It was built on net portfolio and direct investment in the rest of the world, and particularly in those parts of the world that the British most wished to control. The United States is the greatest net importer of capital of all time. With a current account deficit of between five and six percent of gross domestic product, it is heavily reliant for its prosperity and power, on the willingness of foreign investors to lend money, and invest money, in the US economy. 40% of the federal debt in public hands is now held by foreign investors. The returns on these investments in the last two years have been paltry, to put it mildly. And it seems to me highly questionable that foreign investors, particularly European investors who now have the enticing alternative of Euro-denominated assets, will continue to fund the American current account deficit to the present tune, on the present terms. For any of those reasons, ladies and gentlemen, we must guard against hubris. There is great hubris in this town at the moment, notably in the Defense Department. And we should remember the words of Kipling, in his prime recessional, composed at the very zenith of British power, far called, you may know the lines, our navies melt away. Over hill and dune, I’m beginning to forget the words now, the fire sinks, somebody will have to supply them for me, being at one with Ninevey and Tyre(?) was a fate that the British well stood lay ahead of them. There is no sense of Ninevey or Tyre(?) in Washington today. An empire that doesn’t recognize its own mortality is likely to be a short-lived empire. And for that reason, and also, as I’m sure Walter will argue, in a moment, also because I suspect the Jeffersonian or Jacksonian traditions in American policy balk at the idea of an American empire. I am skeptical about the likely durability of this second anglophone empire. Thank you for your attention.
(APPLAUSE)
MM: Thank you. Walter Mead.
Walter Russell Mead [WM]: Well, thanks, Michael, for the introduction, and thanks to everyone for showing up. Niall’s book is really terrific, and if there’s anybody here who hasn’t read it, I urge you to buy it, in fact, in the back, today. And take a look at it, because, one of the things I think Americans are now becoming aware, that we need to do, but as part of recovering and understanding our own past, we have got to understand our connections with Great Britain. And that’s not simply our connections up until 1776, fundamental as those connects are, and as British political struggles like the civil war of the 17th Century, or the glorious revolution of 1689, absolutely fundamental as those are to the development of American political ideology, Britain’s world role in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, does, in fact, remain the sort of only really helpful comparison for Americans trying to get some perspective on what we’re doing, or not doing, in the world. Which is not to say that of course that the systems were identical, or should be identical, but, Britain faced many of the problems that we face. It found solutions that have interesting, and sometimes very telling kinds of information for us. I was thinking about Niall’s question of, is the British Empire, was the British Empire a good thing or a bad thing, and I can’t help but use capital letters in my mind when I think about it, having read 1066 and all that, which is probably the greatest work of 20th Century British historiography, and, argues that history came to an end when Britain ceased to be the top nation in the 1920s. And, as I’ve looked at Britain, my analysis is a little bit less rosy than Niall’s, though, in some ways not much. I mean, he does not take nearly enough points off the British score for encouraging so many people to drive on the wrong side of the road. (Laughter) And anybody who travels to India or Hong Kong today is ready to curse the spoor of these hateful colonialists, I think. But, beyond that, I was in Durban a couple of weeks ago. And Durban is an interesting city, you know, far on the southeast corner of South Africa, in many ways a very British city, but also, in some ways, where the problems that the British Empire could never solve really came to kind of a dramatic juncture. The one hand, you’ve got the courthouse where the young Mahatma Gandhi argued, as a British attorney, and, in his youth, Mahatma Gandhi really thought the future of India was to embrace the British system. And that he completely believed that British common law, British administration, British political traditions, and even British civilizational ideas, could be the foundation for an Indian renaissance. But he really discovered that no matter what he did, in the minds of the British, he would be always this kind of horribly ugly, dark brown interloper, and the more he tried to emulate the British way, the more he aroused a kind of antagonism, particularly, of course, from the Anglo-Indian civil service, but also from others in Britain. And this failure to find a way to integrate non-white, non-British aspirations into the system, I think, was one of the great weaknesses of the empire, that it was never fully able to overcome. But similarly, in South Africa, just a few blocks away from Mahatma Gandhi’s courthouse, are the steps of the post office where Winston Churchill made his dramatic speech after escaping as a POW in the Boer War. I mean, imagine the sensation if one of the embedded American reporters had been captured and then dramatically escapes, someone who’s already very well know, but here, and it’s Winston Churchill who wrote the history of the English speaking peoples and really did try to find a future for the British Empire, was never able to connect with the South African whites, much less the Blacks. Smutz(?) was a good friend of Churchill’s, but, in a sense, the minute the South African whites, Afrikaners got the vote, they started to take South Africa away from the British System, as the Irish did, as the Canadians, as the New Zealanders did, the British never solved the constitution problem that drove us out of the British Empire in 1776, some sort of union of parliaments, or some political form of association that could hold the white dominion, so to speak, together. And it’s interesting, if, forget the non-white parts of the Empire by and large, but if Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, had stayed together, in some effective way, it would be that thing would be the third largest, had the third largest GDP in the world today. Only Japan and the US would be bigger. It would clearly be the world’s second largest military power. It would incomparably be the most important trading partner, source of investment, and so on, of the United States. So that even if we sort of discount all of the failure of European empires, generally, to hold on to their non-white colonies, the failure to find a political project that could unite the dominions with the mother country, effectively, really undid the British. Now, in some ways, as we try to look at the US task today, are we better prepared, less well prepared than the British, and so on, for this task? I think we’re better at the first and no better at the second. That is, in terms of dealing with the non-white world, or the non-Western world, in spite of some recent dramatic difficulties, America, the United States, which has come to conceive itself, toward the turn of the 20th Century, as a non-racial, universal nation, to a greater extent than ever before, and which is ready to, finds it easier than, I think, the British did, to recognize the foreigner drawn to our values, as a true sort of soul mate and ally, to a certain extent, I think we are better prepared to act in a global arena in which, increasingly, the non-Western world is going to play a larger role. Again, if you project forward 50 years, the part of the world that’s going to endure the greatest decline of economic, demographic, and I think, therefore cultural and political, importance, is Europe. In that even with the unification, Europe’s population is shrinking, will be shrinking, its GDP in relative terms will be growing much more slowly, its share of global GDP is falling, so the United States, in the next 50 years, is going to be acting on a world stage where it becomes less and less possible to imagine the United States and Europe standing shoulder to shoulder, as two equal pillars of the world. Rather, the United States is going to have to focus much more on Asia, Latin America, even Africa, as time goes by, and certainly South Asia. But then, on this second problem of relations between sort of allied peoples, within the imperial sphere, as we’ve seen in the latest dust-up over the war in Iraq, we’re no closer than the British were to finding a kind of supranational, political form. We can’t imagine a system in which we would give Germany and France some kind of real input into what we do and what we don’t do, when the chips are down, and they find it very hard to imagine really cooperating with us, when we’re not prepared to give real influence in exchange. I think, even in Britain, you’ll hear from time to time, sort of plaintive cries, well, why don’t we get a vote for President of the United States? Because he, you know, who that person is has so much influence, so that, even our close allies can feel some what, instance, alienated or appalled by the growth of American power. This is nothing new to us or to British. The Brits, Rome’s probably greatest challenge in some way, came from the Italian city-states, who at one point, Rome had established hegemony over, but wasn’t willing to grant equal citizenship, and so on, to. How do we solve that problem in a world system that in many ways becomes increasingly universal? Or certainly, broad. How do we give non-Americans what seems to them to be adequate representation in the councils of the office for reconstruction and development...(Laughter) ...or whatever we’re going to call it. This will increasingly be a problem as we go forward, and I don’t think we’re any closer to solving it than the British were. Very quickly, I’ll close, we do, however, have one advantage that they didn’t, which is that we don’t have to deal with the United States of America. (Laughter) That Niall alludes to this in his book, Skidelsky’s wonderful third volume of his Life of Keynes takes this a good deal further. There has been a little bit of talk of this, but the United States did, in Keynes’s glorious words, ’pick out the eyes of the British empire.’ During the Second World War, the British empire didn’t just fall, it was pushed. And, in a sense, while Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo might have been pulling from the front, it was Roosevelt’s pushing from the back that send the statue toppling over. There was another power that thought it could do the job better than Britain, was tired of propping Britain up, was ambitious to take Britain’s place, had at least some of the connections, and so on, that Britain did, and was ready to go. At least as yet, our successor is not on the scene in that way. Rivals we have, hostile powers we have, a potential successor, I don’t yet see. And so I think we may not be all that close to the end of the unipolar moment, at least right now. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
MM: Thank you, both. I am going to take the chair’s prerogative, and ask the first question, and it’s for both of you. In both your books, you emphasize the importance, especially in the 19th Century, of missionaries. And the missionary impulse, and the missionary impulse, of course, can take a secular as well as a religious form, and did, and has in the case of both countries, especially in the British Empire, after the mutiny, after 1857, so my question for both of you is, if we assume that some sort of missionary impulse is really necessary to keep this kind of enterprise afloat, is there the equivalent in the United States today? And, do we have, in this country, whatever combination of religious fervor, and cultural self-confidence, is necessary to sustain this grand role, especially when, as Niall Ferguson suggests, a time may come when it starts to pinch, when people may come to feel that it’s expensive, and prefer to spend their money on other things. Are we up to it?
NF: Well, it’s a great question, Michael. I think, back to the fact that Deacons could satirize the missionary impulse, if you remember, in Bleak House(?), the wonderful character of Mrs. Jellybee, who’s so entirely taken up with the fate of Africans that she pays no attention whatsoever to her own children, who run amok in the house. In a way, Dickens was making fun of a very important part of Victorian British life. The supreme Victorian hero, I think there’s no question, was David Livingston, who came to personify, not only the missionary spirit, but the lust for exploration, the desire to penetrate the dark heart of Africa that was at the central core of the missionary projects. And although Livingston himself converted virtually no Africans, he was much better at exploring than he was at being a missionary, he blazed a trail that was subsequently followed by many thousands of what I would call non-governmental organizations. And the Victorians had their NGOs, it’s just that the greater part of them were engaged in a specifically Christian, an evangelical Christian mission. But they also brought with them some tremendously useful secular things, not least, education. The missionaries were really the organizations, the NGOs of the Victorian Empire, that built the schools all over Africa, and turned sub-Saharan Africa into a substantially Christian continent. Though those who see that Africa today is a more Christian continent than Europe, and if you look at the statistics on church observance in Western Europe, and compare them with those in a country like Zambia, then you’d have to be inclined to agree. Does that exist in the US today? Well, literally, it does, because we know that evangelical missionaries are extremely important, particularly in Latin America, but I also came across some, when I was in Zambia, in continuing this 19th Century tradition of exporting evangelical Christianity. But they’re not clearly the key to the success or failure of an essentially secular American vision, which I take to be at the heart of the unstated imperial project, one that has much more to do with law, and economics, than it has to do with salvation in the next world. And my sense is that there’s a big problem here. Because although there are many young Americans who spend some time abroad, in secular non-governmental organizations, in one form or another, they don’t stay very long, it’s usually something they do before graduate school, and by and large, the Americans abroad are, in relative terms, compared with the foreigners in the United States, are a relatively astonishingly small number of people. When I looked at the statistics on this, I was really impressed by the number of Americans who live abroad, until I looked at where they live. And they nearly all live in Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe. The number of Americans who permanently are resident in sub-Saharan Africa is just a few tens of thousands. In that sense, though there may be a willingness to go abroad in the United States, generally speaking, it’s for ten days, business class, expenses paid, and then home again, hoping you haven’t got SARS in the interim. (Laughter)
MM: Walter.
WM: That sounds like an absolute description of my last vacation. (Laughter) Well, I do definitely think the United States has the cultural self-confidence, and fervor, to want to continue to export ideology of various kinds. And I think, in fact, the balance between the Christian and the secular sides of the American missionary spirit is an interesting one today, because I actually think one of the most under reported stories in the world now, and some of you may have read Philip Jenkins’s book on the next Christianity, which I, again, strongly recommend, Jenkins looks the statistics on the extraordinary rise of Christian Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism around the world. According to the Oxford encyclopedia of religion, or Christianity, it’s, there are one million conversions to Christianity a year in China. I know the State Department is now estimating there are somewhere between six and nine percent, I think, of the Chinese population is Christian. This is phenomenal increase, almost all of it since the cultural revolution. In Africa, in 1900, there were roughly 10 million Christians. There are something like 400 million today. Don’t shoot me if I’m off a little bit on these numbers, but, it’s approximate. In Latin America, I mean, I was in Rio not long ago, and it was almost like being in Montgomery, Alabama, in terms of seeing bumper stickers, you know, Jesus is the Way. And this kind of thing. It’s remarkable. You’re starting to get groups of evangelicals in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, and so on. Rapid changes are really going on. Obviously, two places in the world seem immune to this. The Islamic world, and Western Europe. Or Europe. And so, interestingly, I think you might see a different relationship, in China, we should not underestimate the degree of searching that may go forward, now, with Marxism lost as a guide, to the future of the world, I think it’s not unlikely that Christianity, forms of synchritistic religion that blend elements of Chinese and Christian thought, as well as things like Falun Gong you know, the sort of, we’re going to see a lot of this, and I wouldn’t really be surprised to see, you know, in South Korea, I think South Korea went from about three percent Christian to something like close to 50% Christian, in the second half of the 20th Century. I believe that Billy Graham’s parents were born in North, one of his parents was born in North Korea, in Pyong Yang. So, I would not underestimate the Christian dimension of this. With, just as Britain was predominantly exporting evangelical Christianity, but sort of willing to put that aside when state interests came into play, for example, after the mutiny. I think you may well see that going on in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised to see faith based policy for Africa as a kind of a winner in the Washington context, particularly where secular agencies and states have broken down to such a great degree, in so much of Africa, and religious networks may be the most effective way of dealing with some of the problems there. The question, just, I’d like to quickly respond to the question of whether enough Americans are going to be living abroad, I think one of the differences between the British and the American Empire is that we don’t actually have to go there. We don’t send the gunboats to Chile and take over the economics ministry. We offer fellowships to Chileans to come study at the University of Chicago. And, then they go back, and run Chile. And it’s actually fascinating, in the last generation and places like Singapore, and some other ex-British localities, there’s been a shift. The older generation was Oxford, Cambridge educated. The younger generation tends to be Cambridge, Massachusetts educated, to a greater degree. And I think the United States has gone a long way, as part of the shift from direct rule as a primary modality of empire, to voluntary association as a form of agency for international reconstruction and develop, again, or whatever we’re calling the American system, I think the idea is that partly as a result of the legacy of the British Empire, across much of the world there’s a good deal more domestic support to, and ability, technical and intellectual and social, to align policies with the norms that in the past might have been imposed by force. So that we may be able to have the luxury of staying at home more, and still have people increasingly adopting some of these things, and so it may work out okay.
MM: The floor is open for questions. When you ask your question, please state your name and affiliation. Please speak up. And please be brief. Yes, right here.
Audience: Bill Jones from Executive Intelligence Review. I address my question to Mr. Ferguson, although I agree with your conclusions that the United States, indeed, probably is not prepared to be involved in long term, in any kind of empire project. I think that your basic argument is based on a fallacy of compassion, and I think it’s also accepted by Mr. Mead, and that is, there is a distinct difference between the British Empire and what we call the American system. That readily, I agree with you, that since about 1860, through 1876, when the United States embarked on its first industrialization, and more specifically, during the period of Franklin Roosevelt, the US became a world power. But its power was not that of empire. Its power was the power of its existence as a unique form of republic, which many, many other nations in the world, some of whom belong to empires, wanted to repeat. The policy of Roosevelt was not to replace the British empire, but to abolish the British empire. And the Japanese empire. And the Dutch empire. And to replace them with independent nation states, and the independence movement in India, which looked towards the United States as that temple of liberty, and the beacon of hope was based on this unique position of the United States in the world. And I think that that will always remain the case, granted there are people here who are pushing the idea of empire, but I think it will be a long time, as long as the Americans have freedom of speech, freedom of discussion, that the American public would ever accept this idea, because we do represent something different. And to the extent that we are, if you want to call it, a premium enterprise, in a world of nation states, that is our strength, and the world will respect us. But if we go along the idea of trying to imitate the British empire, I think we’re going to have a growth in anti-American feeling, and this republic will become something that its founding fathers never wanted it to become.
MM: Thank you. I think the issue has to do with direct rule. If you both, or either of you comment on this.
NF: Well, I think the great thing about the American empire, and one of the reasons that it’s so successful is that so many Americans disbelieve in its existence. And you just had a fine example of this just now. (Laughter) I mean, the idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over the creation of a world of independent nation states would have come as a bit of surprise to the chiefs of state in 1945, who were systematically deciding where the braces would be in the future, that the United States Navy, and that the Air Force would require to maintain their control of at least their half of the world. But the Soviet empire, which Roosevelt omitted to include in his list of empires to be dismantled, was going to leave. Now, this is the key point. Ever since the, what, and you go back to the annexation of Texas, you don’t even need to go to the annexation of the Philippines, the United States has systematically pursued and empirial policy. It’s a next territory to itself, the only thing stopping it from annexing Canada was the power of British Military presence there. In the 19th Century. It repeatedly has intervened in the affairs of neighboring, and not so very neighboring countries. Think of Woodrow Wilson, Mexico, 1913. The United States has never ceased to intervene militarily, in the affairs of even quite far flung countries. Now, whether you call this empire, or whatever euphemism takes your fancy, the rhetoric bears an uncanny resemblance to the rhetoric the British themselves use then they were doing exactly the same thing. I mean, the network of Naval based ain’t so different. If you look at the geography of British and Naval bases 100 years ago, it’s pretty similar to the geography of American bases in the world today. And that colossal deployment of troops that you may be aware of, that the United States keeps, from one of the earth to the other, it’s actually numerically almost exactly the same as the number of troops that the British had stationed overseas in 1903. So the idea that this isn’t an empire is the result of the suspension of disbelief by American people, who would think that they are so different, that when they have bases on foreign territory, it’s not an empire. When they invade sovereign states like Iraq, it’s not an empire. I mean, it’s a wonderful state of mind to be in...(Laughter)...but let me give you one final example, with just (Overlapping Voices)...
WM: Well, I am aware that India ever had a plebecite on holding British bases...
NF: Let me just come back to the matter of India in a moment, I was going to remind you that Mahatma Gandhi was one of those people who studied at Oxford, and we used to recruit elites to our universities to study, too, and it didn’t work out terribly well as a strategy, (Laughter) because, the great majority of nationalist leaders in the 20th Century turn out to have studied either at Oxford, Cambridge, or the London School of Economics at one time or another, so be warned about the ’educate them here and they’ll do our bidding’ strategy. That’s doesn’t work too well.
WM: We’re a lot more careful with the curriculae. (Laughter)
NF: I think if you look at the term, sir, of President Bush’s address to the Iraqi people some two weeks ago, and compare them with the terms of the address that General F. S. Maude(?) proclaimed in 1917 following the conquest of Iraq, they are almost verbatim the same. ’We come here to liberate you.’ Quote, unquote. (Speaks French),I know you’re not allowed to speak French in Washington...(Laughter)...(Applause)...
MM: Walter, do you want to comment?
WM: Well, it’s one of the great privileges of being one of the new Romans is, you keep getting all these witty Greeks coming over to tell you...(Laughter)...how to do it better. And I think one of Britain’s chief exports as the empire declined was the experts coming over to the United States, telling us how to run our empire. (Laughter) Well, we’ve lost ours, but here’s how you can keep yours. (Laughter) I think it is true, I would agree, though, with Niall, that the distinction that we love to make, that ours does not involve as much direct rule as the British did, begs a few questions. I mean, in much of British India, in fact, there were local rulers who were nominally independent, who just took the advice of the British resident. And, in a lot of Africa, particularly increasingly as the Empire went on, the preference was for indirect rule. And conserving the traditional authorities and so on. So, it is certainly true that the United States, like Britain, is trying to create a world wide system of political and economic relations. And that this rests not simply on the enthusiastic consent of everyone who hears about it, but...on the point, oh, the US system does represent a kind of an upgrade. And that, its’ not quite as, the American flag is not quite as much in the faces of other peoples as the union jack was in parts of it, and I think we’re probably not likely, I think that is an advantage. We should not think the American Empire began today. It’s already 60 years old, if we take Roosevelt as our starting point. Older, if we go back farther. So we’re not talking about a mushroom versus a sturdy oak. We’re talking about a system, the American system, which has already gone through a fairly tumultuous existence, and that’s one of the reasons why I have some confidence that it’s not getting ready to fall apart, all suddenly.
MM: Ambassador..?
Audience: Both of you have said very little about the changes in the world, and, perhaps increase resistance to being colonized, or dominated. No longer do we have a map of Africa that’s just kind of open in the middle, and most areas of the world have been independent countries for some period of time, and it seems to me that the opposition and the nationalism, that anyone is going to encounter, make some of these comparisons perhaps a bit iffier, and I’d like to have your comments on the changes in the world’s reaction to dominance by one power.
NF: Well, I think it’s extremely interesting that you mention Africa in this context, because of course, the experiment with independence in the majority of sub-Saharan African states has been a fairly unmitigated disaster for the peoples living in those countries. One of the examples I cite in my book, and I think it’s a good example, is the history of Zambia. At the end of the period of British rule, the average British per capita income was 7 times the average Zambian per capita income. Today it’s 28 times greater, because Zambian incomes have declined not just relatively, but in absolute terms. And it’s very clear why this is. I mean, if one reads, for example, an excellent recent book by my colleague at NYU, Bill Easterly, the principle reason for the failure of these countries has been bad government. Corrupt government, government in which the rule of law no longer exists, but has actually been dismantled. Governments that pursue autocic policies that positively repel foreign investors. In that sense, Africa’s tragedy is the tragedy, of course, Robert McGarvey(?) would have you believe that these are all terrible consequences of colonialism. The bad news is, that Africa’s poverty is a consequence of independence. When I was in Sierra Leone last year, a country I don’t recommend you visit, I was impressed by the fact that everybody I met agreed that the return of British Military presence, not in the UN, but of the British Military presence, was the thing that had restored order to the country, and ended the perpetual civil war there. And a man came up to me, quite unprompted, when he heard what we were doing, he shouted, “Thank God for Britain!” I never thought I would hear the day when a Black African, least of all in a country like Sierra Leone, would shout, ’thank God for Britain,’ in the presence of a British citizen. There is a strong sense, when you travel in Africa, that much has gone wrong under the dictators like Mugabe, much has gone wrong in the failed states that have been allowed to degenerate into a Conrad-like hearts of darkness. That of course doesn’t mean, and here I completely agree with you, that we should really restore Cecil Rhodes’s project of a map of Africa colored pink, from the Cape to Cairo, and I don’t suggest for a minute, and I want to make this absolutely clear, that we can somehow resuscitate the British Empire and have a kind of Kipling-esque vision of Empire 1.2. I hope it’s not like one of those Microsoft upgrades, incidentally, which is ... (Laughter) ... actually much worse than the version you had already installed. (Laughter) Our question has to be, how can the United States, with its colossal wealth, you’re in military and economic terms, far, far stronger, than the British Empire ever was, you know, 20 to 25 percent of world GDP, Britain never had more than 10 percent. A military leader of its opponents, unlike anything the British have ever enjoyed, how can the US make a difference? To central Africa? War in Central Africa’s claimed about 3 million lives in the last ten years. Nothing, nothing has been done. By this country, to end that war, nothing significant in the way of aid reaches those countries. And now, it doesn’t need, seems to me, the formal restoration of empires. Or recolonization. A new scramble for Africa. But it does need something to install workable structures of good government, to root out corruption, and to make sure that when money’s invested in these countries, it doesn’t end up in Switzerland. That’s the question we need to address. And when I speak about this, I speak with real passion, because I see parts of the world, not only out of the globalization loop, but headed for unimaginable depths of misery, and we do nothing about it.
MM: Walter, you want to comment?
WM: Yes. I think one of the things that has characteristics of the last 50 years in world history that has grown more marked is that this sort of experiment, and believe me, the Americans forced it on the British, the Dutch, the French, of sovereignty in the former colonial empires, has had very different results in very different parts of the world. In East Asia, by and large, it has been quite a success. And, we are seeing, you know, just a new stage there in cultural, political and economic history that is tremendous. In Latin America, basically under the US system, more or less did, as it was in the British system, a sort of informal colonialism combined with formal independence. Argentina is not as rich as it was 100 years ago, but its sort of position in the world is not all that different. Africa is clearly, by and large, a place where decolonization has been a tragic failure, not again, and I agree with Niall completely, the colonization, recolonization, is the answer. But I think, to be somewhat optimistic about at least a growing American determination to deal with this, I think we have been, Americans have really gotten a wake-up call from the degree to which Africa served as a training ground, as an activity basis for terrorists, we had those attacks on the US embassies in East Africa, we are aware, I think, in a way that we were not, as a people, before September 11th, that failed states over seas are a problem. I believe, as we go forward into the 21st Century and technology develops, it’s going to be, in the old days, really, to pose a threat to a country like the United States, you had to have a large, well-developed country with an economy and a sophisticated industrial plant and so on. Increasingly, I think you’re going to be able to have sort of islands of Dr. Moreau(?), in parts of the, in a failed state, where all kinds of terrible things can be cooked up, with relatively low resources. We’re going to need to live in a world which is much more thoroughly and consistently ordered and policed than the one we’ve got now. And that emphatically includes Africa. It’s very interesting, if you look at the national securities strategy statement of the Bush Administration, most of the attention on that has gone to a couple of paragraphs about preventive war. But there are pages in there about Africa. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of another general statement of American strategic purpose in the world, which puts so much weight on Africa. And we’ve already seen with the millennium development accounts, we’ve seen with the commitment on HIV AIDS in Africa, we’ve seen an administration now known for its fondness for either nation building or writing large checks to the developing world, a real new priority for Africa, so I would say that, to Niall, that this is probably an area where you’re going to see a deepening US commitment, out of fear and self-interest, admittedly, but nevertheless, I think, a positive development.
MM: Doyle McManus.
Audience: Doyle McManus, from the Los Angeles Times. With all due respect, I think you took Ambassador Oakley’s(?) very good question and tiptoed around the center of it. Africa is the worst case. East Asia is the best case. Neither one is the case that confronts us. We are attempting to extend some form of something that, dare not speak its name, to a Muslim world, that, to take the example of Iraq, it does not have a government. But appears to have a very well organized and legitimate opposition to our hegemony. Are we prepared, in any sense, in a domestic mobilization sense, in a cultural sense, in a trading sense, to deal with that? To succeed at that?
NF: I’ve never been accused of tiptoeing around a question in my entire life. I’m now putting on my hobnail boots, and I’m going to jump right on top of yours ...(Laughter)...The key thing is to understand that if you attempt to hold elections in a battlefield, people are unlikely to vote for the victors. And the thing that seems to be most conspicuously absent, and I must keep my hobnail boots under control since time is finite here, the thing that’s most conspicuously absent at the moment from the American strategy is any sense of how you get from military victory, through the rule of law, to civil society, and ultimately, to a transfer of power to legitimate, elected government. It’s not as if you have to learn from the British experience. The United States did this with huge success in the decade after 1945. In both West Germany and Japan. Examples that I’ve often heard people dismiss, I’ve heard the president cite them, I agree with them, but they are good examples, because they illustrate what the United States can do. But of course the success of these transitions, in what had once been the world’s worst regimes, was predicated on a military presence, which actually still continues to this day, but formal occupation of Japan lasted 7 years, and Germany 10 years. And it was predicated on reconstructing the economy, with substantial aid. The Marshall Program seems to me to be a very important model here. You have to kickstart these economies. People will only feel any affinity with the United States, when they are increasing their own incomes. Until that point is reached, why should they feel any gratitude to the people who have bombed their houses? To the people whose tanks have driven down their streets? The Germans did not immediately embrace and welcome the Western model. If you take opinion polls in the immediate aftermath of World War II, there was enduring loyalty to Hitler and Germany. Until the economic miracle had begun to pay its dividends, so the answer is, get the economy right, wait until a rule of law is firmly established, make sure that civil society has taken root, transfer power only at the local level to begin with, expect to be there ten years, don’t hold elections at the national level until everything else has been dealt with.
MM: Walter, if you can be concise, we will have time for one more question.
WM: All right. Just quickly, to join Niall with the hobnail boots, I think, you’ve got to look not just at Germany and Japan, look at places like Italy. The interesting thing about Germany and Japan after the war, essentially all domestic activity had been crushed, and that the catastrophe was so immense, the collapse of all organized life was so enormous. You look at France, you see, you have thousands of collaborators, in many cases lynched, over a period of months. You look at Italy, it was a horrendous mess. Some would say a mess that goes on to this day. But, you have partisans in the north, Communists and non-Communists, you had quasi-fascists who changed very opportunistically in the south, you had a king trying to hold his throne. It was a mess. What you’re seeing, I think, in Iraq, now, is that the Shia, the organized Shia, see this as their opportunity to bid for power, because, they are not a majority, I think, the Shia in Iraq who want a theocracy are not a majority. The people of Iraq, but in something of a political vacuum, they are the first organized force. You don’t see the Kurds agitating at the moment, to get the US out. Ultimately, we’ve certainly got to stay there long enough so that the Sunnis who never worked well with others, played well with others, realized that with demography, now, they need to make alliances with the Kurds. They need to make alliances with the secular Shia and the moderate Shia. This is going to take some time, and we’re going to have to give it some time, but I think the interests of people overwhelmingly in Iraq are in a federalist, democratic state, or at least something that looks a little bit in the dark like Turkey’s ugly sister, and, right now, we need to stand firm to prevent, in the power vacuum, somebody grabbing power. But the basis for pluralism does exist in Iraq, and before we give up and hand the keys over to another Sunni generally, I think we should at least give this strategy a serious try.
MM: One more question. Avis.
Audience: (Inaudible - Off Mic) I have a question for Professor Ferguson. You cited internal overstretch as one of the weaknesses of the American approach. And, I wanted to ask you to clarify that a bit. Do you mean that countries who aspire to have empires cannot have social policies? Or merely that the United States has not given much priority to that, and it’s going to come home to roost? And also, would you say a word, maybe, about the, I mean the British Imperial Army was not a high tech army, and not probably very expensive compared to the US forces today. And how that would play in as well. The guns versus—
NF: Thank you for your question. I’ll answer it as briefly as I can. I was warned that people who come to these meetings expect to be out of here at 1:30 punctually. And I said, of course, because they have the world to run. (Laughter) Back in England, we can talk all afternoon, knowing it really was of little consequence. (Laughter) But two important points I’d like to make before we go our separate ways. The first is, that the internal overstretch problem, that the United States faces, is unrelated to its overseas commitments. It’s entirely to do with the nature of the system of welfare and of particularly of Medicare. In a paper that will be published shortly in the Atlantic Monthly, Larry Coppakoff(?) and I argue that, if you actually calculate the unfunded, unstated, off balance sheet liabilities of the federal government, their present volume for the future, and you relate them to the present volume of all expected tax receipts, the gap is of the order of magnitude of $44 trillion. Now, $44 trillion is pretty serious money. It’s a lot more money than the US has spent in its external adventures in the last 50 years. And one of the key points to notice about America power overseas is how cheap it is today, that the war in Iraq has yet to cost more than .7 percent of US GDP. That’s nothing. Americas overseas commitments are the least of her fiscal worries. I mean, in a strange kind of way, to just pursue your point about the high tech, low tech armies, in its day, the British Army was the high tech army. It had the high tech Navy as well. It had the most expensive hardware that was available. And as a percentage of GDP, Britain’s defense costs a hundred years ago were below 3% of gross domestic product, roughly the same proportion that US defense spending currently is. Empires, if you make them work, if you get it right, can be very inexpensive, can ever show a profit. Welfare states, not so. I hope that answers your question. With our without hobnail boots.
WM: I’m not as pessimistic about our overstretch. Part of it is that, you look at everyone else’s and it’s so much worse. In the sense, you look at Europe’s demographic problems, you look at Japan’s, you even look at China’s. And China is going to be making the transition from a high demographic growth to demographic stability and decline, without having achieved that intermediate step of becoming rich. To some degree, the thing is currencies are like antelopes in a herd, that is, you don’t have to run faster than the lion. You just have to run faster than the other antelopes. And, the fact that the Euro zones deficits are so much larger, projecting forward, than the dollar deficits. Also the fact that the US consumer market remains so important to other countries means that, for example, every time you started to have a dollar crisis, Japanese exporters go to the Ministry of Finance and say, ’do something, for god’s sake, if the yen appreciates too much against the dollar, we’re all ruined.’ And to some degree, by the magical powers of debt, first discovered by the Bank of England, in the 17th Century, and then I think brought to new perfection by Alexander Hamilton, the more people that you owe a lot of money to, the more people you have with a vested interest in your success. And I think the United States has at least, for the near future, and mid term, mastered the politics of mastery through debt. And, they are going to keep on sending us very attractive consumer products in exchange for these beautifully printed certificates of indebtedness, and we don’t need to worry right away that that system is going to come to an end, I think.
MM: Well, in closing, after that—praise to credit cards, let me say that if there are any questions that have not been answered to your satisfaction, you will surely find the answers in the books that these gentlemen have read, so let me urge you to pick them up, and let me thank both Niall Ferguson and Water Mead, on behalf of the Council for a very stimulating sessions.
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