Liberal Imperialism - contradiction in terms?

Tabman — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:47:15 +0000

As a child, having a December birthday was a bugbear as the temptation to amalagamate my birthday with Christmas was usually too great. This year, I had cause to be thankful, as I was given Niall Ferguson's Empire for my birthday and had the chance to read it up to and over Christmas.

The subtitle (and subtext) of the book is "How Britain made the Modern World". For, whilst Ferguson's engaging (if sketchy) narrative takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of British expansion and contraction, it is the questions that this hypothesis raises that are perhaps the lasting impression of the book for me.

Ferguson puts forward a variation on the "seeds of its own destruction" argument for the end of Empire, in that ultimately it was in standing up to the far more brutal nascent German and Japanese Empires that the British Empire bankrupted itself beyond repair.

Yet the real premise of the book is that it is the export of British ideas of governance that sets the British Empire apart, and allowed the development of a liberal/Liberal world. Perhaps the key quote for me in this respect is the following:

The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which the 'ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would

1 secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;
2 secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;
3 enforce rights of contract;
4 provide stable government ... governed by pucblicly known rules;
5 provide responsive government;
6 provide honest government ... [with] no rente to favour and position;
7 provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government ... to hold taxes down [and] reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.

The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are pointe 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democrac was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.

Reading the above list, it strike me that (i) I would agree that it constitutes a blue-print for the sort of liberal society and governement I would like to see and (ii) how few places in the world there are where these conditions pertain. Much like the conditions for human betterment, which require basic physical needs to be satisfied before more esoteric concerns can be addressed, a liberal world requires a certain order.

Ferguson argues that it took the British to impose, and maintain, those conditions, in order for the world to become safe for Liberal Democracy. He uses this case to argue for a Pax Americana, indeed argues that de facto, if not de jure, an American Empire exists already (a theme he has developed in a later book).

Instinctively, as a Liberal I recoil from the imposition of anything; but at the same time, as I value Liberal Democracy should I not fight for, or authorise the fight for, those values to be allowed to others? This conundrum is encapsulated in another quote from Ferguson's book:

[The Americans have always had] a very different conception of Empire. To the Americans, reared on the myth of their own fight for freedom from British opression, formal rule over subject peoples was unpalatable. It also implied those foreign entanglements the Founding Fathers had warned against. Sooner or later, everyone must learn to be, like the Americans, self-governing and democratic - at gunpoint if necessary. In 1913 there had been a military coup in Mexico, to the grave displeasure of Woodrow Wilson, who resolved 'to teach the South American Republics to elect good men'. Walter Page, then Washington's man in London, reported a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edwar Grey, who asked:

'Suppose you have to intervene, what then?'
'Make 'em vote and live by their decisions.'
'But suppose they will not so live?'
'We'll go in and make 'em vote again.'
'And keep this up 200 years?' asked he.
'Yes', said I. 'The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.'

Anything, in other words, but take over[my emphasis] Mexico - which would have been the British solution.

The US has tried the "British Solution" in Iraq - and Ferguson's argument is that it will not stay for the long term, so it tends more towards the Mexican situation. But it does raise this question.

Can it ever be possible to bring about a world system of Liberal Democracy without imposition? And if it can't be guaranteed without the willingness to impose it, should it be pursued in those terms?

empire

Liberal Imperialism - contradiction in terms?