Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Meanwhile, India continues to make world economic headlines. In July 2006, Lakshmi Mittal, the world's fifth-richest man, took over the European steel giant Arcelor. India's leading business newspaper euphorically proclaimed it “The Global Indian Takeover.”40

  Could India become a world-dominant power? I'll begin by making the best case for India within the terms of my thesis. I'll then address some of the major challenges facing the country.

  What is genuinely remarkable about India is not its recent economic upturn, however impressive. Comparatively, India's share of the global economy is still quite small. With 17 percent of the world's population, India accounts for just 2 percent of global GDP and 1 percent of world trade. China's economy is more than twice as large as India's, and in 2005, China received about ten times as much foreign direct investment. In 2006 India's GDP per capita was $3,400 compared to China's $6,300 and Japan's $30,700. More generally, the growth that India has experienced, while significant, fails to place India's standard of living anywhere near that of the major world powers. Some 80 percent of Indians live on about two dollars per day. The United Nations Human Development Index, which assesses countries by factors such as health, income, and literacy, ranks India at 127 out of 177 countries.41

  Rather, what is singular about India is that it is the world's largest democracy, despite an extraordinary degree of ethnic and religious diversity exceeding even that of the United States. Since its birth as a republic, India has juggled a dizzying array of discrete microcultures, religions, languages, castes, sects, and ethnic and tribal groups. India is home to sixteen official languages, more than twenty-two languages that are spoken by at least one million people, and more than a thousand dialects. India's 2004 national elections featured 230 parties. Although the vast majority of Indians are Hindu (over 827 million), the practice of Hinduism varies widely; indeed, there are thousands of different Hindu castes and subcastes throughout the country. India is also home to 150 million Muslims, the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. In addition, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, and Jains all represent significant minorities in India.42

  The fact that India exists at all—especially as a democracy—is a triumph of tolerance. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, two of modern India's founding fathers, were leading voices of tolerance in the twentieth century, passionately opposing fundamentalism of any kind. Under their leadership, India from independence strove to balance its religious diversity through pluralistic laws that provide different regulations for members of different religions. India's “personal law,” for example, permits polygamy among Muslims but requires monogamy among Hindus. In the last fifty years, India has also made great strides in overcoming the extreme intolerance long directed at so-called untouchables and other “backward” classes.

  As the thesis of this book would predict, India's success in holding together and harnessing the talents of an extraordinarily diverse population has paid off handsomely. Indeed, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has argued that the secret to India's greatness over the centuries lies precisely in its remarkable “heterogeneity” and “openness.” For Sen, India's greatest rulers were the emperors Ashoka and Akbar—the former a Buddhist and the latter a Muslim, but both champions of secular tolerance. Almost 2,200 years ago, Ashoka wrote, “For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others…in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest of injury on his own sect.” Thus, tolerance and pluralism had roots in India, Sen argues, long before the European Enlightenment.43

  Nevertheless, the state of tolerance in India today is not as happy as this history might suggest. In 1998, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept into power, calling for the establishment of India as a Hindu state. Frequently referring to Muslims as “invaders” and “outsiders,” BJP politicians promised to destroy mosques across the country and replace them with Hindu temples. In states where the BJP won electoral majorities, it used its new power to restrict Hindu-Muslim marriages, suppress Christian missionaries, and rewrite history textbooks to reflect the view of India as a Hindu state.

  In 2002, India saw its worst outbreak of religious violence in recent decades. More than two thousand Muslims were massacred in cold blood in the northern state of Gujarat. The violence was sparked by an attack by Muslim militants on a train containing Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhah, where, more than a decade earlier, saffron-robed Hindus had destroyed a venerated mosque and looted and burned the surrounding area in a surge of anti-Muslim riots. The Muslim attack on the train killed at least fifty-eight people.

  In retaliation, Hindu civilians and police engaged in a four-day killing spree, looting shops, burning homes, and gang-raping Muslim girls and women. The violence against Muslim women was particularly grotesque, with rioters cutting off breasts and, in some cases, ripping fetuses out of pregnant women's bellies before killing the women. The violence was at least partly state-sponsored; police officers and the National Volunteer Corps led the raids. It was also carefully organized. Rioters identified Muslim homes using computer printouts listing Muslim families and addresses, and they coordinated their attacks through the use of cell phones. Afterward, the BJP government denied that the attacks had occurred, and designated many of the dead as “missing” despite the uncovering of mass graves. The violence had repercussions across the region, resulting in the displacement of more than 100,000 Muslims into refugee camps.44

  Although the BJP was defeated in the 2004 national elections, Hindu nationalism remains a potent force in Indian politics. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims, along with the specter of religious violence, continue to simmer. In 2004, India was the site of 44 percent of the deadlist terrorist attacks around the world. In a 2006 survey, 17 percent of Indian university students cited Hitler as a model for the leader of India.45 Thus, despite the inclusive ideals championed by Gandhi and Nehru, whether India is in fact today—or will remain in the future—one of the world's most tolerant societies is an open question.

  Moreover, even if India avoids further sectarian strife and remains a stable, multiethnic democracy, it is still hardly a magnet for the world's most enterprising success-seekers. On the contrary, for many Indians who compare their situation with those of their more prosperous counterparts overseas, the old adage continues to ring true: Indians can succeed everywhere in the world except India itself. Despite India's recent economic strength, Indians continue to emigrate at high rates. In 2004, nearly 70,000 Indians emigrated to the United States, composing the second-largest group of new legal immigrants to the United States. Many of these Indians never return permanently to their home country, and they invest in India at a far lower rate than, for instance, their Chinese diaspora counterparts. For the Indians who “cast their vote with their feet” by expatriating, India has far to go before it can match the opportunities that countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom offer for the ambitious and talented.

  There is certainly reason to be optimistic in India. India has a large base of educated graduates ready to take on the next wave of economic growth. Whereas the EU's population is aging, half of India's population is under twenty-five years old. In contrast to China, the growth of which has been powered largely by manufacturing, India's most booming sectors are software, information technology, media, advertising, and Bollywood—areas that all rely heavily on creativity and individual talent.46 As a result, there are possibilities of upward mobility in contemporary India that were unimaginable a couple of decades ago: Today, members of the so-called untouchable caste are managers in prominent technology firms. And for the first time in history, small numbers of noncolonizing middle-class Westerners are moving to India for better jobs than their own countries can offer. Even so, India would have to overcome many intractable problems—pervasive rural poverty, disease-filled urban slums, entrenched corruption, and egregious maternal mortality rates, just to name a few—before significant streams of the wo
rld's best and brightest would even think of moving to India.

  In sum, India has made tremendous strides. Some of its achievements since independence, such as its progress in dismantling a centuries-old caste system and its success in maintaining a diverse democracy that is the world's largest, are historically unprecedented. These achievements probably explain why India has become a kind of darling to so many commentators on globalization. Perhaps, as some experts have suggested, India's “bottom up” model of development will prove superior in the long run to China's “top down” strategy.47

  Nevertheless, talk of India's becoming a superpower, let alone a hyperpower, is probably premature. Indeed, India itself does not seem interested in displacing or disrupting U.S. global dominance. On the contrary, as one of the countries in the world most favorably inclined toward the United States—a 2005 poll showed that 71 percent of Indians had a positive view of America48—India seems far more interested in becoming partners with the United States in the global economic system.

  No hyperpower lasts forever. U.S. world dominance too will come to an end; the only question is how long it will last—if it hasn't passed its zenith already. Even if none of them ever replaces America as a hyperpower, sooner or later China, the European Union, India, or perhaps Russia, Japan, or some other unforeseen rival will, individually or through an alliance, become strong enough to re-create a bipolar or multipolar world order.

  Yet asking how long America can remain a hyperpower assumes that world dominance is something the United States ought to try to maintain. The next and final chapter will address this question. Should America seek to preserve its hegemony? Would an American empire be in the best interest of the world—or of the United States itself?

  * The relevant statute, the Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China (1980), provides that foreign nationals may acquire Chinese nationality “upon approval of their application” but provides no right or entitlement to that status (Article 8).

  * For the single English word “Chinese” there are many Chinese terms (Zbongguo ren, Zhonghua minzu, banren, buayi, tangren, buaren, huaqiao, etc.), each with a slightly different, often fluid connotation, such as “the Chinese people,” “Chinese nationals,” “the Chinese race,” “the Han people,” “descendants of Chinese,” “the Tang people,” etc.

  * By “overseas Chinese” I am loosely referring to citizens of the People's Republic living abroad; the Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan; and foreign citizens of Chinese descent.

  TWELVE

  Lessons of History

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  — T. S. ELIOT, Little Gidding

  In the suddenly unipolar world that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, the only remaining superpower seemed without serious rival or foe. For many, the hard geopolitical choices had melted away. Free markets and democracy, working hand in hand, would transform the world into a community of modernized, productive, peace-loving nations. In the process, ethnic hatred, religious zealotry, and other noxious aspects of underdevelopment would be swept away. It was the “end of history,” Golden Arches instead of war.1 When it came to U.S. military might, the most controversial issues were whether the United States should intervene abroad for purely humanitarian reasons (as in Kosovo or Rwanda) and what America should do with its “peace dividend,” the billions of dollars the United States would no longer be spending on its military.

  In a way, this optimism was a testament to the great goodwill the United States had built up in the world over the twentieth century, notwithstanding Vietnam or its chronic Latin American misadventures. Here was a society with unthinkable destructive capacity, facing no countervailing power. Yet it seemed to go without saying that the United States would not use its unrivaled force for territorial expansion or other aggressive imperialist ends.

  Today, not even twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this bubble of optimism has burst. Although America remains the world's hyperpower, its goodwill abroad has been all but squandered. Inside the United States, confidence is down and a sense of precariousness pervades, whether the fear is of terrorists, immigrants, or economic downturn. The attacks of 9/11 and the rise of an intensely interventionist U.S. policy changed the whole landscape.

  AN AMERICAN EMPIRE?

  A year after the 9/11 attacks, in September 2002, the White House issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS), which began as follows: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence…[T]he United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” So far, the NSS sounded like something the Clinton administration could have issued. As President Clinton declared in 1996: “Because we remain the world's indispensable nation, we must act and we must lead.”2

  But the NSS went further. It also declared that to forestall further terrorist attacks, “the United States, will, if necessary, act preemptively.” “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies.” Finally, the NSS formally announced the United States’ determination to maintain a unipolar world order: “It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our forces beyond challenge…Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”3

  These sentiments were echoed in various quarters throughout the United States and elsewhere in the period following September 11. Well-known neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams—all of whom were influential figures in the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq—argued for an aggressive use of American military might to overturn authoritarian rogue governments, replacing them with democratic regimes, which, it was claimed, would be pro-market, pro-American, pro-peace, and pro-liberty.

  Influential liberals also favored the invasion of Iraq. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued that the Iraq war, if “mounted in the right way for the right reasons,” could stabilize the Middle East, producing “a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.” Christopher Hitchens, a longtime contributor to The Nation, supported the use of U.S. military force to uproot “fascism with an Islamic face.”4 The question was no longer whether America would use military force abroad but how it would do so—how unilaterally, how preemptively, how unimpeded by other nations’ sovereignty or international law.

  Talk of an American empire was suddenly on the table, with a swell of voices—both in and outside the United States—increasingly in favor. A month after 9/11, in his much-quoted essay entitled “The Case for American Empire,” the former Wall Street Journal editor and security expert Max Boot argued that “[t]he most realistic response to terrorism is for the United States unambiguously to embrace its imperial role.” Deepak Lai's 2004 book In Praise of Empires warned of dire global consequences “[i]f the U.S. public does not recognize the imperial burden that history has thrust upon it, or is unwilling to bear it.” Around the same time, in Colossus, the British historian Niall Ferguson called on the United States to get over its “imperial denial” and take on the civilizing and modernizing burden that Great Britain had carried in past centuries.5

  The argument for an American empire—including the vigorous use of U.S. military force to replace dictatorships with free-market and democratic institutions—was perfectly understandable. After World War II, America had deployed its unrivaled military to occupy and democratize Germany and Japan while taking measures to prevent those countries from ever posing a military threat to the United State
s again. Those postwar exercises in nation building proved enormously successful. Given the horrendous threats of terrorism, why shouldn't post-9/11 America take advantage of its military preeminence to disarm and democratize rogue states in the Middle East? Indeed, why wouldn't the United States follow Rome and use its world-dominant power to modernize, civilize, and pacify its enemies?

  The almost instantaneous 2003 collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq seemed to give further strength to those advocating the aggressive use of American military might for regime change and nation building. But three years later, with American military power looking less and less effective in Iraq, the previously widespread support for the war in the United States had eroded severely. Many who had originally supported the war, both liberals and conservatives, asserted that they had done so solely because of an exaggerated threat of weapons of mass destruction.6 Perle, long described as one of the architects of the Iraq war, publicly recanted his support for it. President George W. Bush's approval ratings among Americans fell to 31 percent, and in November 2006 the Republican Party lost both houses of Congress. A CBS News poll a month later found that 62 percent of Americans thought it had been “a mistake” to send U.S. troops to Iraq.7

  What calls for an American empire missed was something crucial: history. There are lessons in the rise and fall of hyperpowers past—lessons reflecting both the similarities and differences between the United States and the world-dominant powers that preceded it. Over the centuries, there has been a slow but relentless transformation in what it means—and what it takes—to be a hy-perpower. Reduced to its simplest terms, this transformation has been a shift from conquest to commerce, from invasion to immigration, from autocracy to democracy. At the same time, notwithstanding this transformation, there is one fundamental challenge that all hyperpowers necessarily confront—the problem that I have called “glue.” Because of the changed nature of world dominance today, the United States confronts this ancient problem in a modern form. It is this combination of old and new that holds the key to understanding the prospects of American power in the twenty-first century.