The afterlife of empire

NEVER BEFORE has imperialism been so condemned as now. European colonialism continues to constitute a raw and living memory in the collective minds of its hundreds of millions of victims and their descendants, even while each and any aspect of racism is noisily condemned in the United States. Empire, in other words, has come to represent the world-historical face of racism writ large. It might seem that empire has no future in today’s globalized world, where one culture cannot simply appropriate other cultures as its exotic and “privileged terrain,” to quote the late Columbia University professor Edward W. Said, whose brilliant 1978 book, Orientalism, has for decades served as something of a call-to-arms for leftist intellectuals across the globe who remain livid about Western domination of the developing world. But has empire truly been consigned to a dark age? In a formal sense, certainly. No government official anywhere dares refer to his country’s foreign policy as imperial. Yet in a functional and operational sense, especially as we enter an age of great power conflict, imperialism lurks behind the scenes as an organizing principle of geopolitics, difficult as it may be to admit. Retired Oxford historian John Darwin explains that because natural resources and geographical fortune have never been evenly distributed, making the building of ethnically-based states problematic, empire—in which a number of different peoples fall under the sway of a common ruler—“has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history.” Empires may leave chaos in their wake, yet it is also true that they have arisen as a solution to chaos, allowing us to set our lands in order, observed Luo Guanzhong, the fourteenth-century Chinese writer and historian. If this all seems a bit antiquarian, just look with clear eyes at today’s world.

THE MUSCULAR actions beyond their borders of the three principal contenders for global dominance— China, Russia, and the United States—are imperial in spirit if not in name. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the British East India Company in reverse, going from east to west rather than from west to east. BRI’s network of roads, railways, pipelines, and ports across Eurasia is grounded in geopolitical, mercantile, and military— that is, in imperial—logic, and follows the pathways of the medieval Tang and Ming dynastic empires. Russia’s attempts at undermining the countries of its near-abroad—from the Baltic states and Belarus, through the Balkans and Ukraine, to the Levant—is a naked attempt to recreate the contours of the Soviet empire and its shadow zones. Meanwhile, the United States maintains decades-old alliance structures, however frail, throughout Europe and the Far East; not to mention military bases in the Middle East and elsewhere. In terms of its challenges and frustrations overseas, America is in an imperial-like situation, and can only be compared to other world empires in modern history, like the British and the French…

Then there is the European Union, in which a bureaucratic elite only partially answerable to its subjects and headquartered in northwestern Europe governs the daily lives of far-flung peoples ranging from Iberia to the Balkans. Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and one of the most prominent members of the European Union’s parliament, told an audience last year in the United Kingdom that, “The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It is a world order based on empires.” Thus, he argued, there was no European future outside the imperial-like dimensions of the European Union. The recent $857 billion aid package in which northern Europe, principally Germany, essentially subsidizes southern Europe, allows Italy and other countries to stay in the Eurozone and keep buying German consumer goods: this is a variation of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in which China lends money to countries for ports and other infrastructure, so that they can then hire Chinese workers and companies to do the construction. It is in this way that imperial powers internationalize their domestic economies.