Anyone questioning the raison d’être of previous empires had received an answer much like the justification for climbing Mount Everest: ‘because it was there’. But now history, too, had become scientific. Ideas took the place of facts. Such was the nature of capitalism that it was historically predetermined to destroy itself, whereupon an entirely new socio-economic age would emerge, where all were equal under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. All property would be collectively owned by a classless society. The means of production would be in the hands of public ownership . . . and so on, for three eight-hundred-page volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. (He had planned to write six volumes, but managed to convey his message nonetheless.)
For many years people had dreamt of a just society. ‘To the Kaiser and Lenin’, and so forth. In the Russian Empire, prior to the Revolution, it had been possible to ask: ‘What have the Romanovs ever done for us?’ But the advent of communism rendered such naive enquiries redundant. Marx had discovered the science that lay behind ‘inevitable’ history, and science was not open to question.
The class-ridden societies of the West – from country-house Britain to robber-baron America – looked on in horror, fearful that the contagion of communism would spread. In America, the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) attracted thousands, leading strikes. In 1918, amidst the chaos of defeated Germany, the journalist Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria an independent communist state. Hungary also declared itself communist. In Britain, 60,000 striking Glasgow workers had to be dispersed by tanks, and the Scots revolutionary leader, John Maclean, was appointed from Moscow as ‘Bolshevik consul to Scotland’.44
In 1921–22, Russia (which became the USSR during this period) would suffer from the Volga Famine. This was caused by the chaos of the civil war, drought and inadequate transportation. Yet it was further exacerbated by Lenin’s introduction of War Communism. This entailed grain stocks being seized from the peasantry, whom the Bolsheviks saw as resistant to communism, in order to provide for the urban proletariat, whose loyalty was essential.
Insurrection, especially by the sailors at Kronstadt, the naval base outside St Petersburg where the Revolution had begun, led Lenin to soften his rigid policy. Instead, he introduced the New Economic Policy, which permitted, especially in the countryside, ‘a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control.’ Despite this, five million died in what became known as the Volga Famine, which raged through a large region south-east of Moscow, as far east as the Urals, as far south as the Caspian.
In 1931, seven years after Stalin had succeeded to power, he admitted, with admirable frankness:
We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do so then or we’ll be crushed.
The last remark was not entirely paranoia. Stalin’s response to this situation was to abolish the New Economic Policy and instigate the first Five Year Plan. This decreed that all land should be collectivised, and peasants marshalled onto large collective farms. Peasants who resisted giving up their plots of land, or any who had made a profit during the days of the New Economic Policy, were labelled ‘kulaks’ and decreed ‘enemies of the working class’. This insistence on idealism over realism would result in the 1922–23 Ukraine Famine, which saw ten million deaths over a region extending as far as Kazakhstan and beyond.
By now Stalin’s suspicions had hardened into genuine paranoia. Between 1936–1938, this resulted in the Great Purge. The difference between this and the previous mass deaths was that the purge affected the upper echelons of Soviet society – army officers (especially generals), the professions, the intelligentsia, even the secret police who carried out the purge, as well as the usual suspects amongst the lower orders.This resulted in around one million deaths, with many more sent to the gulags – a new network of forced-labour camps in Siberia.
Others were set to work on Stalin’s pet projects, such as the White Sea Canal. This was intended to link Petrograd (by now renamed Leningrad) on the Baltic to Archangel on the White Sea. The result was possibly as many as 750,000 deaths (around twice as many as those who died during the entire construction of St Petersburg). The final achievement was a canal that was not deep enough to permit the passage of ocean-going ships, only barges and the smallest coastal freighters.
The period of the Russian Empire’s self-inflicted death and catastrophe would come to an end with the advent of the Great Patriotic War (known as the Second World War in the West) against Nazi Germany. Here too the Russian people suffered catastrophic losses, but this time in a cause to which all the democratic Western nations subscribed. An estimated twenty-six million Soviet citizens would die in the conflict, of which eleven million were military personnel. Nazi Germany lost over four million armed forces and some half a million civilians. Japan lost a total of three million, China twenty million, and so it went on.
The twentieth century would see advances such as in no other era of human history, as well as slaughter on a scale that still defies comprehension. There is no doubt that such conflict spurred human inventiveness. On the other hand, there is no denying that at the same time civilisation transformed itself of its own accord. Widespread electrification, the spread of rail transport throughout the world, refrigeration, telecommunications, and countless other benefits were all for the most part spurred on by humanitarian aims (as well as profit).
The end of the Second World War saw the division of Europe into a communist half and a ‘free western’ half. The Russian Empire was now larger than it had ever been, and its Czar far more powerful than any of his predecessors. In the new communist countries of the Russian Empire, intellectuals sought to combat the repressive regime. Meanwhile in the free West, a large proportion of intellectuals remained more or less overtly in favour of communism. This was particularly the case in France, where the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, would influence a generation of Marxists. At the same time in Italy and Greece, only covert CIA manipulation ensured that these countries remained ‘free’.
For the best part of half a century, the world saw a Cold War, with the two superpowers being the Soviet Union and the United States. These menaced each other with a series of proxy wars (in Korea, Vietnam and other ‘third world’ countries), as well as a series of more dangerous ‘crises’ (Cuba, Berlin and so forth).These latter threatened the planet with nuclear war, and the end of civilisation as we know it. Fortunately, a mix of sanity, accident and sheer luck prevailed. (As we have seen, historical research has revealed that these incidents were hair-raisingly close to the edge – closer even than anyone at the time imagined.)
Ironically it was Lenin who had coined the phrase Voting with their feet’. Yet it was the communists who erected an Iron Curtain across Europe to prevent the inhabitants of their empire from doing just what Lenin described.
After the Second World Wan, the overseas European empires soon broke up. The Russian Empire, on the other hand, remained in its greatest incarnation until 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Soviet era of the Russian Empire. When the Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had introduced perestroika (reform and démocratisation of the Communist Party) along with glasnost (openness and freedom of expression), he had no idea of the pent-up forces he was unleashing. On a trip to Lithuania he naively appealed to the locals, and by extension all other Soviet puppet states (or colonies), not to leave the USSR.
In the scramble for the exit, all that was left was the Russian Federation, with the heroic drunkard Boris Yeltsin resisting a coup by hardliners and becoming the next Czar. Yeltsin took the unprecedented step of introducing free elections and privatising state industries, which then fell into the hands of an unscrupulous gang of oligarchs. In 2000, Yeltsin was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, a former low-ranking KGB officer in East Germany. Putin quickly and brutally asserted his control over the oligarchs and indeed any opposition to his rule.
After years in power, his motives
of personal gain gradually transformed into dreams of a return to the glory days of the Soviet Union, with authoritarian rule and the Russian Empire as a world superpower. In this, he appears to have made a similar mistake to Gorbachev – imagining that Russia can hold on to a past that is already history. Even so, Russia remains the world’s largest country, and continues its incremental expansion and influence. All this, despite its internal disregard for civil rights embodied in any form of Magna Carta, to say nothing of its complementary external unwillingness to recognise the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia.
Sequence
But are such principles so obvious as to be necessary? Is progress towards them inevitable? Is the entire world bound to evolve towards some kind of liberal democracy? And when such a vision is on the brink of realisation, does this herald ‘The End of History’, as the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed – after the collapse of the Russian Empire left the United States as the world’s only superpower. Such questions will be the constant backdrop to the evolution of our final great empire.
42 The word Kremlin literally means ‘fortress inside a city’. Each ancient city of Russia had a Kremlin at its centre, much as ancient Greek cities, and indeed cities throughout the Middle East, have their ancient acropolis, or citadel.
43 This signalled a fundamental shift in the nature of the Christian faith. From now on, individual Protestant worshippers could pray directly to God, without the intermediary of a priest (or Czar).
44 After his death, Angliyskiy Prospekt (English Avenue) in St Petersburg (then Russianised to Petrograd), would be renamed Maklin Prospekt after the former Scots consul. It has since been returned to its original name.
10
The American Empire
When the ever-perceptive Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was only obliquely correct in his forecast for America. He did not foresee its inde-pendence, let alone that this would take place in the same year as the publication of his masterpiece. On the other hand, he did forecast America’s greatness. One day, he predicted, the centre of the British Empire would shift to the New World.
In that same year, 1776, Thomas Jefferson would write the United States Declaration of Independence. In this, he took account of some of the finest philosophical thinking of the Age of Enlightenment. Thomas Paine, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume . . . one could not have asked for a finer pedigree. Or indeed a more heartening and resounding document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . .
Unfortunately, this stirring vision did not apply to the indigenous Native Americans or the transported Africans who were already enslaved in all thirteen states. Indeed, by this time the State of Virginia held over 187,000 slaves, while more than 60 per cent of the population of Georgia were slaves (1770 figures).That said, the British who belatedly tried to win back the American colonies, even going so far as to burn down the White House in 1814, were not fighting for the release of slaves. Neither were the French, who helped drive out the British in the first place: their age of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ still lay thirteen years in the future at the time of American Independence.
But to return to the Declaration in all its glory. It is no accident that these ‘self-evident’ words resemble mathematical axioms (as in the philosophy of the Jewish-Dutch pantheist – or atheist – Spinoza, in this aspect an unacknowledged influence). Upon such axioms can be built abstract truths extending far beyond their basic origins. Indeed, the growth of America can be seen in this mathematical metaphor. The huge structure that today is encompassed in the idea of Western liberal democracy assumes the truth of Jefferson’s initial vision.
To Americans – and to a varying extent their allies, and the entire free world – the deductions from these self-evident foundations are the way society ought to be. They are viewed as a moral imperative. And societies that deviate from such foundations are viewed as evil. As in Reagan’s description of Russia as an ‘evil empire’. As in Roosevelt’s characterisation of the Nazis as ‘an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion’. As in General Miller in the film, In the Loop, describing war: ‘Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go again, unless you absolutely fucking have to . . . It’s like France.’
Thus, the ‘American Way’ – in a country where all its citizens (bar the Native Americans) are ultimately descended from immigrants, the majority less than three generations away from the ‘home’ country. This accounts for why Americans, on the whole a friendly outgoing people, will frequently reveal to a foreigner within the first few minutes of conversation:
1. How American they are (and you are not!).
2. How Irishy/Jewish/Turkish, etc. they are.
There is no conflict in this apparent illogic. Patriotism is unabashed and far stronger than it is in most Old World countries, and it has to be, coexisting as it does with deep ‘ethnic’ loyalties, largely from the Old World. This must constantly be borne in mind when discussing the American Empire. Even before America was a nation, the participants in the Boston Tea Party dressed as Native Americans (even if they did refer to them as Red Indians).
As with the British in the nineteenth century, many say that if anyone had to be top dog in the twentieth century, it was probably best that it was the Americans. Naturally, as in the British case, there have been grotesque blunders. Yet the Americans nonetheless prevailed – most notably tipping the balance in two world wars, assuming the role of world superpower in facing up to the Soviets, and in spreading their popular culture across the globe. Many resented, and looked down upon this ‘Coca-Cola’ culture, yet there can be no denying that it was popular, in both senses of the word. It was in no sense highbrow or elitist, and a lot of people liked it.
This is the nation that gave the world not only Coca-Cola, but Hollywood films, hamburgers, chewing gum, and the general razzmatazz that accompanies American presidential elections and other great sporting events. No other nation would presume to stage an annual ‘World Series’ between two of its own teams.45
Coca-Cola culture spread throughout the world.
American presidential elections, and their product, are the modern incarnation of Jeffersonian democracy. Enough said, where the present is concerned.46 Yet it is worth bearing in mind that even the noble Jefferson himself found it necessary to pen Notes on the State of Virginia. According to US expert on human behaviour, Lee Alan Dugatkin, this work was ‘written in reaction to the views of some influential Europeans that America’s national flora, fauna, including humans, was degenerate.’
Closer to the truth than mere prejudice on this topic is the insight of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, Thomas Dewey. It was he who understood that despite all its inequalities, American life is infused through and through with the ethos of democracy. Dewey recognised that ‘democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a way of associated living . . . of communicated experience.’
America is a nation where ‘the individualistic ideal’ co-exists with an exaggerated acclaim for success. The French revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ (which remains its national motto to this day) is a contradiction. Liberty eventually outruns equality. The American way of life acknowledges that fact. Even if we all begin at the same starting line, someone is going to win the race. And America won in the twentieth century. Winners are seldom popular. I remember as a student travelling through Europe, where I was asked by an American student, ‘Why do they all hate us Americans so much?’ I could only reply, ‘Last century it was us British who ruled the roost, and were heartily despised all over the world for this achievement. Now it’s your turn.’
Which brings us to the question: What exactly is the American Empire? In 1776, the thirteen states that had declared independen
ce stretched in a continuous line down a thousand miles of the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia. These extended into the hinterland for an average of 200 miles or so, sometimes much more, sometimes much less. To the north lay eastern Canada, recently taken by the British from the French, which had expanded to include the entire region of the Great Lakes, as well as the hinterland territory now occupied by Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and more.
West of those founding states further down the Atlantic seaboard lay the vast expanse of French Louisiana, stretching north-west from New Orleans up into what is now Canada, in a vast belt of land that was up to 800 miles wide. To the south lay Spanish Florida. The rest of the territory now occupied by mainland USA belonged to Spain, including the region occupied by modern California, New Mexico and Texas. Meanwhile Alaska and the coastline stretching south for over 500 miles belonged to the Russian Empire.
The original thirteen states had an aggregate population of some 2.5 million, including slaves and Native Americans living within their boundaries. This occupied a territory far less than a tenth of the present USA. The Russians regarded Siberia and Alaska as part of their empire. The westward expansion of the US is regarded as adding to its territory. What is the difference here? Purely one of attitude, it would seem. Both expansions involved the disruption or displacement of indigenous peoples, replaced by settlers (or colonists). But there was one essential difference. The United States actually bought two large chunks of its territory.
In 1803, Jefferson bought the entire Territory of Louisiana from Napoleon for $15 million. In present terms, this is worth anywhere between $300 million and $1.2 trillion, dependent upon which federal agency does the calculation. This may have been a bargain, but it still represented a considerable sum, and Napoleon needed the money at once to fund his wars in Europe. Only one snag: America simply didn’t have that sort of money. But Jefferson recognised this purchase for what it was: the making of a future great nation.
Empire Page 18