Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  For the Romans, military and administrative borders were not always in precise alignment. There were forward bases in areas well beyond the territory Rome actually sought to administer. America has taken this to an extreme. Yes, America has a Coast Guard to watch its shores (and also to patrol the Mississippi and the Great Lakes), but for most of our history the sea itself was the most reliable bulwark. In recent years somewhat more attention has been given to protecting key U.S. ports against terrorism, much as the Romans fortified the “Saxon Shore” of Britain. The American defensive posture is focused on preventing attacks from happening in the first place, and on protecting far-flung economic and strategic interests as well as the territorial heartland. America’s military deployments are not remotely defined by its geographic boundaries. The Distant Early Warning system—the network of tracking stations designed to warn of impending nuclear attack, better known as the DEW line—is strung across the top of Canada. So in this sense America’s northern border runs not through Minnesota’s Lake of the Woods but through the permafrost of the Arctic. At any given moment at least half of the nation’s twelve carrier battle groups are out at sea—in the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf; America’s security borders run across their flight decks. Defensive barriers now surround every American embassy in every world capital, obvious in their camouflage, like a bad toupee. And it’s necessary to ask a question that never occurred to the Romans: How high in the heavens do our borders go? America’s communications and data-collecting satellites, its first line of defense, fly at various altitudes, up to geosynchronous orbit at 26,200 miles. They’re like Rome’s frumentarii, in a way: they can gather information about crops and listen to conversations.

  In terms of security, it’s hard even to say where the border of a place like New York City actually lies. To be sure, there’s the Hudson River and Arthur Kill on the west, forming a moat against New Jersey; and the bay on the south; and various administrative boundaries on the north and east; but the reach of the New York City police force now extends far outside the city’s official boundaries, to offices in Russia and Israel, Britain and France, Canada and Singapore. NYPD officers today can be found almost anywhere, from the docks of Rotterdam to the bazaars of Istanbul to the warehouses of Dubai. More than a thousand officers work the counterterrorism beat, as compared with a few dozen before the attacks of 9/11. New York is deploying its local limitanei, its border auxiliaries, along a limes of its own definition; it’s not depending on the imperial legions. As one account explains:

  There was a strong feeling that federal agencies had let down New York City, and that the city should no longer count on the Feds for its protection. Some of [Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly’s initiatives were incursions into territory normally occupied by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. And yet few objections were raised. It was as if the Feds, reeling from September 11th, silently acknowledged New York’s right to take extraordinary defensive measures.

  Reading those words, you may get some feel for the worldview of a Roman magnate in distant Gaul in the fourth or fifth century, who sees that Rome is increasingly far and threats are increasingly near, and that perhaps the time has come to build some relationships with other groups that wield power, and to fend for himself.

  If you think of America not as a political or demographic entity, whose population shares certain values and viewpoints, but as mainly a collection of economic interests, then your idea of where America’s boundaries lie needs to shift again—and to shift inward as well as outward. Actually, here’s where those old-fashioned textbook maps of the barbarian invasions prove graphically suggestive, though the invaders need to be relabeled: they’re not the Suevi and the Alani and the Franci but, rather, groups like Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Deutsche Bank, Cadbury Schweppes, and Novartis. The past few decades have seen an unprecedented influx of foreign companies seeking to take over American ones. Chrysler was bought by Germany’s Daimler-Benz, Random House by Germany’s Bertelsmann, Mack Trucks by France’s Renault, and Columbia Pictures by Japan’s Sony. Ralston Purina, deep in the Great Plains, was overrun by the Helvetii—it’s now owned by Nestlé, in Switzerland. From time to time a major takeover bid is stopped, as in 2005, when an attempt by the Chinese national oil company to buy the American oil-and-gas company Unocal ran into political opposition from nearly every quarter. The House of Representatives passed a resolution stating bluntly that Chinese ownership of an important American energy company would “threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” In the end the Unocal deal did not go through. This isolated episode, though, is perhaps equivalent to one of those Roman victories that failed to turn back the tide of history—the Battle of Chalons, say, where Aetius deflected Attila. By then the damage had already been done: the Huns had driven other tribes into the empire, and those other tribes would not be leaving.

  If you’re of a mind to entertain a dystopian fantasy parallel, it’s not hard to envision how a modern Asian catalyst could produce an analogous, Hun-like ripple effect. Were the Chinese to begin unloading the enormous amounts of American debt they hold, one consequence would be a significant and rapid decline in the dollar. The inevitable aftershock of that would be more and more American companies falling into outside hands, and small-scale “barbarian kingdoms” sprouting up from Tacoma to Marietta, Long Beach to New London, with American workers by the millions answering to foreign managers, and local governments looking eagerly for ways to establish a modus vivendi. In textbooks a thousand years hence there might be gatefold maps of America “at its greatest extent,” with little crossed swords showing where, say, the Chinese were deterred at the gates of Maytag, or the United Arab Emirates were held off at the mouth of New York Harbor. But mostly there would be sweeping arrows of corporate conquest, with little dates marking each successive line of advance. And the caption might mention how the English spoken in Alabama had been influenced by Korean, or how all the slang terms in Missouri for “efficiency” and “downsizing” were loanwords from Japanese.

  That’s the nativist nightmare, at any rate—or one of them. The reality is that “borderlessness,” de jure or de facto, is a fact of life, and Americans are perpetrators of it as much as victims. We ourselves play the role of barbarians in other places. Borderlessness cuts across all categories—culture, economics, demographics. The biography of a counterfeit Prada handbag serves as a parable of a borderless world:

  The bag’s original design—probably acquired or stolen in Europe—was transported electronically or physically to China. There, the leather, zippers, belts, and buckles were procured and assembled into tens of thousands of counterfeit handbags. The finished products were then smuggled onto containers officially carrying, say, industrial valves, to ports such as Naples or New York. Once the handbags reached these final markets, street merchants took over—often African immigrants who themselves were smuggled across borders by human-trafficking networks.

  In the final act, the profits from the enterprise are laundered electronically and deposited “offshore” in untraceable numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands.

  The Assimilation Machine

  THAT PRADA HANDBAG has no ready analogue in the Roman experience: the modern world is on its own. America’s physical borders are another story; here the resonance with Rome is substantial. The U.S.-Mexico border is our Rhine and Danube frontier. It is about the same length as that segment of the Roman perimeter, running nearly 2,000 miles along the bottoms of four states and through the territory of three dozen native tribal groups. Where the border is not river, it is mainly desert or mountain. Once again the speakers of a Latinate language bump up against the speakers of a Germanic one, although linguistically the roles of imperium and barbaricum are reversed. Some 10,000 Border Patrol officers—two Roman legions—are charged with the task of keeping people from crossing la linea. But by any practical measure this border is as indefensible as the Roman one came to be—it is too long
, and the terrain too inhospitable, and the guards too few. As was the case with Rome and its neighbors, the wealth on one side is also just too great; according to the historian David Kennedy, the wage differential between America and Mexico “is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world.” By now the broad zones on either side of the border, fifty or a hundred miles wide, resemble each other far more than they do the distant cores of their own countries. There are 300 to 400 million legal crossings of the border a year, many by people whose work takes them back and forth every day And then there are those crossings, legal and illegal, made by people who plan on longer stays—that is, entire lives—in the north.

  At El Paso the white SUVs of the Border Patrol stand sentinel at half-mile intervals along the banks of the Rio Grande, as if unaware that history has long since passed them by, heading in both directions. El Paso itself is already 90 percent Mexican. The Wells Fargo Bank and other tall downtown buildings stand like Anglo boulders above a Hispanic tide. Of course, it’s not just from Mexico—the oikumene, the known world as it registers on the American consciousness, keeps getting bigger. The old dynamic of Rome is familiar to Americans. Political and economic dislocations far from our shores—at first in Europe and Latin America, more recently in Asia and Africa—have set people by the millions into motion, and in our direction. America’s population would be in decline were it not for this replenishment from the outside. California, home to 40 percent of America’s immigrants, where César Chávez’s birthday has joined the Fourth of July as a legal holiday, now has the demographic character of a Roman frontier province. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson, in his book Mexifornia, sees a “potentially explosive mix” in this mingling of races, cultures, and classes—“a demographic and cultural revolution like no other in our times” (but one not unknown in the Rome of the Caesars). Is this blending getting a little out of hand? Immigrants are choosing new destinations, settling down in out-of-the-way places. A restaurant in my small New England town—a place still governed by town meeting, and where the barbers function as newspapers—offers something called “Thai fajitas” on its menu. In the past five years the number of immigrants in South Dakota has grown by 44 percent, in Delaware by 32 percent, in New Hampshire by 26 percent. Whittaker, the historian of the Roman frontiers, takes the long view and makes this analogy:

  The Roman empire of the fourth century was in some ways undergoing the same kind of transformation as the modern nation-state in the face of globalization. Both can be viewed as what Karl Barth called “disordered societies”; that is, as societies where traditional values were in conflict with new interests, when relations between national and foreign cultures were being renegotiated, and when the concept of ethnicity was being redefined under pressure from external frontiers.

  As a national issue, immigration is politically pyrophoric—it has a way of igniting for no apparent reason. One day all eyes might be on a coming election or an endless war, and then suddenly the focus shifts to Minuteman vigilantes patrolling the Arizona and New Mexico border. Frustrated that the borders are so hard to control, and that the world is not a tidier place, American politicians have proposed tough measures to seal the frontier and to make it a felony to be illegally on the wrong side of it. One California congressman has suggested that America’s incarcerated population be pressed into service to replace undocumented workers: “I say, Let the prisoners pick the fruits.” (Maybe he had Louisiana’s “rent a convict” practice in mind; it provides certain prisoners to local businesses as day laborers, for low pay or for none.) The release of a Spanish-language recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 2006 made talk-radio tempers flare—“The Illegal Anthem,” one commentator called it. A letter to a columnist in the El Paso Times expressed concern for, among other things, the fate of what he regarded as traditional American food: “The images that sprang into my mind with the idea of the National Anthem in Spanish was a man coming into my home, sitting in my chair, changing my TV to Telemundo, my radio to KBNA, and announcing to my wife that the lasagna we were having will now be changed to menudo and burritos.” Many in Congress are violently opposed to enabling the 10 million or so illegal aliens in the country to take steps toward citizenship—leaving them in permanent second-class status, a deliberate limbo, needed but not wanted: economic foederati. President Bush has announced his intention to erect real fencing and also a high-tech “virtual wall”—with infrared and motion sensors, and unmanned blimps and drones—along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. There is certainly money to be made in border defense. The Department of Homeland Security has recently solicited bids from vendors capable of supplying an “indefinite quantity” of bean-and-beef burritos for illegal aliens awaiting repatriation. (A hundred years ago, of course, the order might have been for lasagna.) The real money is in the virtual wall itself, to be built and operated by private corporate security forces that are supplementing the federal Border Patrol as America’s limitanei. The irony is irresistible: using overpaid hired corporations to keep out underpaid hired workers.

  In the long history of efforts at immigration reform, the biggest consequences are usually the unintended ones. What never changes, because in the short term it can’t, is the underlying dynamic: a rich country’s demand for unskilled workers, and the rest of the world’s limitless supply of them. Like the Romans, Americans seem to know in their hearts, for all the hot rhetoric and partisan posturing, that there’s little to be done: the forces of population and economics are too powerful. In the late fourth century the Romans carved public images of barbarians being slaughtered—and at the same time produced the medallion of Lyon, showing barbarians being welcomed as settlers. The President Bush who wants to fortify the border against the immigrant hordes also produced what might be called the medallion of San Antonio: a campaign film in which he puts one arm around a brown-skinned immigrant child and waves a small Mexican flag with the other. Maybe the problem isn’t as much of a problem as would be any “solution” that restricted the supply of cheap labor. This is the modern version of “concessions . . . were safer than the domestic risks of efficient defense.” Or, as the former senator Alan K. Simpson once put it, “We’ve done open arms and closed arms. Now it’s ‘throw up your arms.’”

  But there is positive news for America in the Roman experience. It’s impossible to do a precise accounting, but the outside pressures on Rome were at least as great as those on America, and in all likelihood far greater; and Rome coped with them successfully for a very long time—for centuries on end. There was hardly a moment in Rome’s history when barbarians weren’t worrisome neighbors. Rome’s ability to assimilate newcomers is so large a fact that it’s easy to lose sight of. Attention is drawn away, understandably, by specific episodes of invasion and mayhem in the final centuries of the Western empire’s coherent life. “They gave vent to their rage by every kind of atrocity and cruelty,” runs one account of the Vandals in Africa. And so they did. But the peaceful influx and evolution over great swaths of time was a bigger phenomenon still: “In the many centuries since it had entered upon the conquest of distant lands,” Walter Goffart observes of Rome, “millions of barbarians had been pacified and absorbed into a common civilization, a Romanita whose component peoples, however imperfectly homogeneous, looked to the emperor for defense against outsiders, and had no desire for liberation from his rule.” These many millions of barbarians were incorporated into Roman society as a matter of routine, and without the help of powerful tools Americans take for granted, such as public education and mass communications (and Madison Avenue). There was no conscious effort to encourage assimilation as such, no set of policy initiatives, no Department of Romanization. But it happened, on a broad scale, because in the eyes of the newcomers Roman civilization looked like a good deal and they wanted to buy into it. Think of those many hundreds of scribblings pulled from the muck of Vindolanda. This is the detritus of everyday life, produced mainly by soldiers who by birth were not
Romans but barbarians, and rather unsophisticated, and still more comfortable speaking in their native tongues. They were willing to invest twenty-five years in the military in order to obtain Roman citizenship for themselves and their families; half of them would die before achieving that goal. The Latin they wrote is clumsy, filled with misspellings and odd locutions and unusual turns of mind. But it is Latin, real Latin.

  America, too, is an assimilation machine, though one whose success we tend to acknowledge mainly in hindsight. Looking back, we now know that America managed to accommodate the waves of immigration in the 1850s, the 1880s, the first decade of the 1900s, and the 1980s, despite skepticism at each of those moments—when those moments were “the present”—that it ever could. In the earliest days of Ellis Island, before the stricter immigration laws of the 1920s, America’s door was open wider than it is today; some 98 percent of those getting off the boat were allowed in, virtually without paperwork; and most were processed within eight hours of arrival. Every age doubts that it retains the absorptive capacity of ages past, just as every age fails to remember the human heartache and wrenching adjustments that immigration entails. Or the utter determination. My father-in-law came to America from Mexico in 1920, in his mother’s arms, and on his yellowing immigration papers, next to “Mode of arrival,” is the typed-in word “Rowboat.” My children, now that I think about it, have the kind of mixed heritage that would have been commonplace on Rome’s frontiers: one Mexican ancestor was coming north to become American just as one Irish-American ancestor was heading south to fight Mexicans.