Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The real role of historians is not to explain the present or predict the future but delve below what people imagine happened in the past, to push away the prisms of transient ideologies and identify historical patterns with all their continuities and discontinuities. In doing so it is tempting to focus on the apparent discontinuities – the great, epic transformations like the American and Russian revolutions. But in reality the great paradigm shifts of history are rare, and many that seem to be such at the time prove with hindsight to have had remarkably little impact. In the 1920s and ’30s many historians believed that the Bolshevik revolution had been one of the most momentous events in human history; it seems much less important now.

  In Russia continuities in history are taken for granted; for centuries dynasties have passed political power from one generation to another, and the values of one era flow seamlessly into the next. In the United States the situation is different: as presidential power peacefully transfers every four or eight years, the reign of each new president looks like a new beginning. Whereas the last tsars fought a losing battle to preserve untouched the whole panoply of values inherited from their ancestors, modern American presidents can pick and choose the ‘traditional values’ they wish to claim as their own. The values that underlay the ethnic cleansing and slavery of the early colonies have disappeared, and new corporatist values that would have confounded the Founding Fathers have taken their place.

  Despite a few examples like Adams I and II and Bush I and II (one of the Bushes stood as presidential or vice-presidential candidate in six of the seven elections between 1980 and 2004), family dynasties are not a fundamental part of American political life. Some powerful patrician families have provided an element of continuity within the political establishment, and this dynastic element has been particularly noticeable in the evolution of American foreign policy, but dynasties in America are incidental to the system of government, not inherent. The long-established political and business establishments of New England and New York have guided the nation’s gradual transition from the crude imperialism of the early colonies to the corporate imperialism of today, but they do not form an inherited ruling class. Russian autocracy under the tsars was not only a dictatorship but a family dictatorship, and this bound the nation together. There is no real equivalence in America where the continuities are far less evident.

  In Russia the continuities persisted even after the Romanov dynasty disappeared. Since before the Mongols Russian society has been controlled by a few powerful men who have put their own interests ahead of everyone else. They may have proclaimed different ideologies but the ‘Great’ tsars – Ivan, Peter, Catherine – would have recognised the soul of Stalin’s Russia. And above all they would have recognised his imperial ambitions. In terms of both political ambition and personal character Stalin had compelling parallels with the likes of Ivan the Terrible or even Peter the Great. The political pygmies who followed Stalin, and under whom the communist dynasty decayed away, have their own parallels in a stream of forgotten tsars. Perhaps Russia is now undergoing a paradigm shift, but recent military adventures in the Caucasus would suggest that the yearning for empire continues undimmed.

  In the case of America the continuities are also clear but largely ignored. The values that led Englishmen, and a few women, to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic in order to impose their dreams on a hostile new world are the values that led their successors on to the Pacific and led corporate America on to conquer much of the globe. Ideological certainty, technological superiority and sheer scale as much as military might have carried the Stars and Stripes to the four corners of the world.

  But some things do change. The election of Barack Obama demonstrates that the soul of twenty-first-century America is radically different from the soul of the nation that stumbled into civil war in the nineteenth century. The election of a black man as president of the United States would have been unthinkable even to those struggling against segregation a generation ago. Obama has seen the reality of American imperialism first hand (in his memoirs he describes the crushing impact on his stepfather of the CIA-sponsored coup in Indonesia), but even for Obama overcoming racism may prove to be easier than abandoning imperialism. Obama is often likened to John F. Kennedy, who raised similar expectations when he hurdled a lower barrier to become the first Catholic president – but went on to authorise the failed invasion of Cuba and plunge into war in Vietnam. When President Medvedev asserted that Russia had the right to intervene in Georgia because in the nations on its borders Russia had a ‘privileged interest’, Obama, like most westerners, reacted angrily. And yet the Russian president was just applying to the Russian empire his own equivalent to the Monroe Doctrine, a doctrine Obama himself implicitly endorsed with his campaign attacks on the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. Obama’s support for the expansion of Nato and stationing US missiles in Poland suggests that the vision of two competing empires is still as potent in Washington as in Moscow.

  So what of the future? Unsurprisingly historians are divided. Former neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama has discovered that history has not ended, and in 2008 supported Barack Obama as the candidate most able to manage America’s decline, only to be attacked by Robert Kagan, adviser to John McCain, who seems to have moved his analysis of American history from determined opportunism to determined optimism. The US, Kagan insists, is not in decline, not even relative decline; but as Paul Kennedy demonstrated in his magisterial 1987 study of European imperialism, all empires eventually suffer from ‘imperial overstretch’. Kennedy claimed this was starting to happen to the United States. Kevin Phillips also looked at the Spanish, Dutch and British empires and noted one common characteristic: as they approached their end their richest and brightest citizens stopped exploring and conquering, trading and manufacturing, inventing and creating; instead they devoted themselves to something new: finance. They provided the investment and credit needed to ensure that the rest of the world would grow their food and produce their manufactured goods; they lived on interest, dividends and capital appreciation. In all three cases the financiers and bankers came up with ever more elaborate forms of financial wizardry – some that today would be recognised as options and derivatives – until eventually the whole imperial edifice imploded. The imperial centre could not live beyond its means for ever. When wealth could no longer be sucked in from abroad the empires collapsed. Phillips was writing in 2006; the financial crisis starting in 2008 may yet presage that a similar fate awaits the American empire.

  America is a land of principles and privilege but, as President Eisenhower said, ‘A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.’When the nascent economic superpowers of Asia assert themselves will the world remain as deeply embedded in American culture, values and fads as it is now? What will happen when the rest of the world stops paying for America’s consumption? Will China, flexing once again its imperial muscles, usurp America’s pre-eminent position? Will America pollute itself and the world into oblivion? When will the road from Roanoke reach its final destination? As with Rurik’s road, in the timescales of history it is far too soon to say.

  1 Even this is not straightforward. A series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases determined that territories such as Puerto Rico belonged to, but were not part of, the United States and therefore, under Article IV, Section 3, paragraph 2 of the Constitution, Congress had the power to determine which parts of the Constitution applied there.

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  Suggestions for further reading and comments on some of the sources used are available on the website www.empiresapart.com.

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