in April 2013, as part of a special issue of self-criticism of and within the liberal tradition. (Update: here's the
.) I am not sure that I qualify as a liberal - my long-established politics are that leftist critiques of liberalism are convincing, and so are liberal critiques of the left, so do what you can - but it is written from that point of view. It had to be somewhat trimmed back for publication; I'm posting in full here. (Update #2: The essay was picked up, in both English and Spanish, in the "magazine of magazines" Eurozine. Here's the
If the idea of freedom means anything, then surely
imperialism is one way to negate it. And
yet, for the last two hundred years the United Kingdom and the United States, two
nations that draw deeply on the liberal tradition in their conception of
statehood, were also the most powerful and far-flung empires in the world. A recent calculation has it that the United
Kingdom has invaded around ninety percent of the world’s countries; the United
States, even as of 2013, has military personnel deployed in about ¾ of them. Liberalism
is plainly not the only path to empire, but the ideology can lead there, and
has.
One does not need to espouse a kind
of vulgar Marxism to suspect that one reason that this should be the case is
that liberal democracy was, for a time, the modal politics of capitalism. Industrial
capitalism developed first in the United Kingdom, where energy and commerce
began the process of making the world modern.
Capitalism demanded expanding markets for producers and for
consumers. Ensuring that such markets
exist was, even in liberal society, a question of politics and a matter for the
state. And thus, potentially, of empire. Marx himself, never nostalgic for the “rural
idiocy” of precapitalism, saw imperialism as a part of the path of world
development that would make capitalism, and thus socialism, possible.
More
conventional liberal imperialists than Marx saw the empire in those terms as
well: most British saw their empire not as rapacious or predatory, but, on the
contrary, an instrument of prosperity and peace. Multiplying industrial product augured for a
prosperous future, and expanding ties of trade were thought to hold civilizing
potential and, by creating bonds of mutual dependency, to make conflict less
likely. This might have been the case
between relatively equal trading partners, but it was failed to consider the
potential dynamics that would arise when the power of one partner far
outstripped the other; this proved especially true since London became, for
much of the world, the financial capital.
There were places like Argentina that became deeply compromised without
ever requiring full incorporation into the empire. Yet around the world, the threat of violence
to ensure compliance remained very real; British ships bombed China and took
Hong Kong, to give but two examples, and sat threateningly off the shores of
others. As Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, put it in 1860: “It may be
true in one sense that trade ought not to be enforced by cannon balls, but on
the other hand trade cannot flourish without security, and that security may
often be unattainable without the exhibition of physical force.”
The empire that the U.K. acquired
in the 19th century was ad hoc, but not accidental. What began as an empire of trade gradually
became one of territorial possession, as threats from local rebellions,
especially in the 1850s and 1860s, and from other rising European powers,
especially in the 1880s and 1890s, challenged British control. The empire was diverse: it included
monarchies, protectorates, and a variety of weak and strong relations with the
crown. Overlaying it all was the
predictable veneer of racism: the more white-skinned the residents of the
colony, the quicker the path to self-determination. Lucky enough, at least for the white
residents of Australia and Canada; less so for black South Africans, who bore
the brunt of the most vicious union of capitalism and imperialism of British
imperial history. Freedom for Africans on
their own was barbarism, went the imperial reasoning, and so a new kind of
barbarism was imposed in its stead.
At the turn
of the twentieth century, the process of transferring leadership for liberal
empire passed from the United Kingdom to the United States. Each World War made U.S. dominance clearer,
but the process began well before that, especially in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine had long promised that
the United States would object to the incursion of European imperialism in the
Americas. But westward expansion by the
U.S. at midcentury took half of Mexico’s territory. (And with it the responsibility of
suppressing native American groups who wished to be governed by neither state.
)
In the 1890s, the U.S. role as regional hegemonic power was recognized by the
U.K., when it asked the U.S. oversee resolution of a boundary conflict between
British Guyana and Venezuela. Following the brief war with Spain in 1898, the
U.S. took the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and placed Cuba is in a state of
compromised sovereignty.
For the
next decades, intervention in the Caribbean Basin was a regular affair. “I was a racketeer for capitalism,” said
Marine Major General Smedley Butler after his retirement, having overseen many
of the occupations. “I spent
thirty-three years … being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall
Street, and the bankers.”
But acting on behalf of private interests was not dignified work for U.S.
forces, and so the ventures were ennobled with liberal ideologies of freedom
and democracy. In Nicaragua, where U.S. military presence lasted from 1912 to
1933, forces tried to reduce the power of local caudillos over elections,
introduce competitive parties, and create a constabulary force that could
ensure that could oversee a more liberal order after they left. When U.S. forces finally did leave, however,
that head of well-trained and well-equipped force, none other than Anastasio
Somoza, used his training not to enforce democracy but to take power for
himself. His brutal rule, eventually
passed on to his sons, endured for decades.
Imposing Somoza had not been the U.S. plan, but, as with the U.K. before
it, at most times the U.S. could live with friendly dictators that didn’t
challenge its economic and security interests.
U.S.
imperialism was, for the most part, not territorial. It achieved what the U.K. had tried and
failed in the nineteenth century: open markets and compatible regimes without
the costs of formal occupation. It
justified its actions with a similar combination of assertions about
civilizational superiority, self-delusion about being paladin of democracy,
and, in an extension of Monroe-Doctrine thinking, fears about the encroachment
of foreign empires. With the advent of
the Cold War, the U.S. self-conception of itself as a defender of freedom
intensified, set against the enemy of foreign totalitarianism represented by
the Soviet Union. In Europe, this was
not a transparently absurd, and scholars have written much about the United
States as an “empire by invitation” there.
But threats to liberal order in places dominated by the United States
could be brutal. Latin America suffered
more than its share; the CIA bungled its way to a successful coup in Guatemala
in 1954, contributing to the beginnings of a forty-year civil war. Though a certain amount of economic
nationalism could be tolerated when Cold War security interests were at stake, the
U.S. consistently acted to undermine left-wing movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, the bloody war in
Vietnam and U.S. support for dictators in Latin America and the rest of the
world put the lie to the idea of the U.S. as a benign empire. As it had with the U.K. before it, the threat
of violence underlay the liberal order.
In the last
few decades, growth in the world economy, much of it led by states pursuing
strategies that would have to be described as illiberal and mercantilist, has lessened
U.S. dominance, and the economic crisis of recent years made plain the limits
of U.S. power around the globe. But if
the age of liberal imperialism seems on the wane, a liberal order remains, as
do the lessons of the last two centuries: exchange and contract between free nations,
as between individuals, works best when power between them is close to equal.
Extreme inequalities can make freedom of choice an illusion. How the liberal tradition decides to make
sure that power is distributed evenly enough to make its systems work well
remains one of the vital projects of the next century for those who believe in
the promise of a liberal order without imperialism.
