[antiwar-van] Hobsbawm: After the Iraq War (June 2003)

[Tony Tracy]

Le Monde diplomatique
June 2003

AFTER THE WINNING OF THE WAR
United States: wider still and wider
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For those with a long memory and an understanding of the ambitions and
history of previous empires - and their inevitable decline - the present
behaviour of the United States is familiar and yet unprecedented. It may
lead to the militarisation of the US, the destabilisation of the Middle
East and the impoverishment, in every way, of the rest of the world.

By ERIC HOBSBAWM
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THE present world situation is quite unprecedented. The great global
empires that have been seen before, such as the Spanish in the 16th and
17th centuries, and notably the British in the 19th and 20th centuries,
bear little comparison with what we see today in the United States empire.
The present state of globalisation is unprecedented in its integration,
its technology and its politics.

We live in a world so integrated, where ordinary operations are so geared
to each other, that there are immediate global consequences to any
interruption - Sars, for instance, which within days became a global
phenomenon, starting from an unknown source somewhere in China. The
disruption of the world transport system, international meetings and
institutions, global markets, and even whole economies, happened with a
speed unthinkable in any previous period.

There is the enormous power of a constantly revolutionised technology in
economics and above all in military force. Technology is more decisive in
military affairs than ever before. Political power on a global scale today
requires the mastery of this technology, combined with an extremely large
state. Previously the question of size was not relevant: the Britain that
ran the greatest empire of its day was, even by the standards of the 18th
and 19th century, only a medium-sized state. In the 17th century, Holland,
a state of the same order of size as Switzerland, could become a global
player. Today it would be inconceivable that any state, other than a
relative giant - however rich and technologically advanced it was - could
become a global power.

There is the complex nature of today's politics. Our era is still one of
nation-states - the only aspect of globalisation in which globalisation
does not work. But it is a peculiar kind of state wherein almost every one
of the ordinary inhabitants plays an important role. In the past the
decision-makers ran states with little reference to what the bulk of the
population thought. And during the late 19th and early 20th century
governments could rely on a mobilisation of their people which is, in
retrospect, now quite unthinkable. Nevertheless, what the population
think, or are prepared to do, is nowadays more directed for them than
before.

A key novelty of the US imperial project is that all other great powers
and empires knew that they were not the only ones, and none aimed at
global domination. None believed themselves invulnerable, even if they
believed themselves to be central to the world - as China did, or the
Roman empire at its peak. Regional domination was the maximum danger
envisaged by the system of international relations under which the world
lived until the end of the cold war. A global reach, which became possible
after 1492, should not be confused with global domination.

The British empire in the 19th century was the only one that really was
global in a sense that it operated across the entire planet, and to that
extent it is a possible precedent for the American empire. The Russians in
the communist period dreamed of a world transformed, but they knew well,
even at the peak of the power of the Soviet Union, that world domination
was beyond them, and contrary to cold war rhetoric they never seriously
tried such domination.

But the differences between today's US ambitions and those of Britain of a
century and more ago are stark. The US is a physically vast country with
one of the largest populations on the globe, still (unlike the European
Union) growing due to almost unlimited immigration. There are differences
in style. The British empire at its peak occupied and administered one
quarter of the globe's surface (1). The US has never actually practised
colonialism, except briefly during the international fashion for colonial
imperialism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th
century. The US operated instead with dependent and satellite states,
notably in the Western hemisphere in which it almost had no competitors.
Unlike Britain, it developed a policy of armed intervention in these in
the 20th century.

Because the decisive arm of the world empire was formerly the navy, the
British empire took over strategically important maritime bases and
staging-posts worldwide. This is why, from Gibraltar to St Helena to the
Falklands Islands, the Union Jack flew and still flies. Outside the
Pacific the US only began to need this kind of base after 1941, but they
did it by agreement with what could then genuinely be called a coalition
of the willing. Today the situation is different. The US has become aware
of the need directly to control a very large number of military bases, as
well as indirectly to continue to control them.

There are important differences in the structure of the domestic state and
its ideology. The British empire had a British, but not a universal,
purpose, although naturally its propagandists also found more altruistic
motives. So the abolition of the slave trade was used to justify British
naval power, as human rights today are often used to justify US military
power. On the other hand the US, like revolutionary France and
revolutionary Russia, is a great power based on a universalist revolution
- and therefore based on the belief that the rest of the world should
follow its example, or even that it should help liberate the rest of the
world. Few things are more dangerous than empires pursuing their own
interest in the belief that they are doing humanity a favour.

THE basic difference is that the British empire, although global (in some
senses even more global than the US now, as it single-handedly controlled
the oceans to an extent to which no country now controls the skies), was
not aiming at global power or even military and political land power in
regions like Europe and America. The empire pursued the basic interests of
Britain, which were its economic interests, with as little interference as
possible. It was always aware of the limitations of Britain's size and
resources. After 1918 it was acutely aware of its imperial decline.

But the global empire of Britain, the first industrial nation, worked with
the grain of the globalisation that the development of the British economy
did so much to advance. The British empire was a system of international
trade in which, as industry developed in Britain, it essentially rested on
the export of manufactures to less developed countries. In return, Britain
became the major market for the world's primary products (2). After it
ceased to be the workshop of the world, it became the centre of the
globe's financial system.

Not so the US economy. That rested on the protection of native industries,
in a potentially gigantic market, against outside competition, and this
remains a powerful element in US politics. When US industry became
globally dominant, free trade suited it as it had suited the British. But
one of the weaknesses of the 21st century US empire is that in the
industrialised world of today the US economy is no longer as dominant as
it was (3). What the US imports in vast quantities are manufactures from
the rest of the world, and against this the reaction of both business
interests and voters remains protectionist. There is a contradiction
between the ideology of a world dominated by US-controlled free trade, and
the political interests of important elements inside the US who find
themselves weakened by it.

One of the few ways in which this weakness can be overcome is by the
expansion of the arms trade. This is another diffe rence between the
British and US empires. Especially since the second world war, there has
been an extraordinary degree of constant armament in the US in a time of
peace, with no precedent in modern history: it may be the reason for the
dominance of what President Dwight Eisenhower called the "military
industrial complex". For 40 years during the cold war both sides spoke and
acted as though there was a war on, or about to break out. The British
empire reached its zenith in the course of a century without major
international wars, 1815-1914. Moreover, in spite of the evident
disproportion between US and Soviet power, this impetus to the growth of
the US arms industry has become much stronger, even before the cold war
ended, and it has continued ever since.

The cold war turned the US into the hegemon of the Western world. However,
this was as the head of an alliance. There was no illusion about relative
power. The power was in Washington and not anywhere else. In a way, Europe
then recognised the logic of a US world empire, whereas today the US
government is reacting to the fact that the US empire and its goals are no
longer genuinely accepted. There is no coalition of the willing: in fact
the present US policy is more unpopular than the policy of any other US
government has ever been, and probably than that of any other great power
has ever been.

The Americans led the Western alliance with a degree of courtesy
traditional in international affairs, if only because the Europeans should
be in the front line in the fight against the Soviet armies: but the
alliance was permanently welded to the US by dependence on its military
technology. The Americans remained consistently opposed to an independent
military potential in Europe. The roots of the long-standing friction
between the Americans and the French since the days of De Gaulle lie in
the French refusal to accept any alliance between states as eternal, and
the insistence on maintaining an independent potential for producing
hi-tech military equipment. However, the alliance was, for all its
strains, a real coalition of the willing.

Effectively, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the only
superpower, which no other power could or wanted to challenge. The sudden
emergence of an extraordinary, ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US
power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with
long-tested imperial policies developed during the cold war, nor the
interests of the US economy. The policies that have recently prevailed in
Washington seem to all outsiders so mad that it is difficult to understand
what is really intended. But patently a public assertion of global
supremacy by military force is what is in the minds of the people who are
at present dominating, or at least half-dominating, the policy-making in
Washington. Its purpose remains unclear.

Is it likely to be successful? The world is too complicated for any single
state to dominate it. And with the exception of its military superiority
in hi-tech weaponry, the US is relying on diminishing, or potentially
diminishing, assets. Its economy, though large, forms a diminishing share
of the global economy. It is vulnerable in the short term as well as in
the long term. Imagine that tomorrow the Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries decided to put all its bills in euros instead of in
dollars.

Although the US retains some political advantages, it has thrown most of
them out of the window in the past 18 months. There are the minor assets
of American culture's domination of world culture, and of the English
language. But the major asset for imperial projects at the moment is
military. The US empire is beyond competition on the military side and it
is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. That does not mean that
it will be absolutely decisive, just because it is decisive in localised
wars. But for practical purposes there is nobody, not even the Chinese,
within reach of the technology of the Americans. But here there will need
to be some careful consideration on the limits of technological
superiority.

Of course the Americans theoretically do not aim to occupy the whole
world. What they aim to do is to go to war, to leave friendly governments
behind them and go home again. This will not work. In military terms, the
Iraq war was very successful. But, because it was purely military, it
neglected the necessities of what to do if you occupy a country - running
it, maintaining it, as the British did in the classic colonial model of
India. The model "democracy" that the Americans want to offer to the world
in Iraq is a non-model and irrelevant for this purpose. The belief that
the US does not need genuine allies among other states, or genuine popular
support in the countries its military can now conquer (but not effectively
administer) is fantasy.

THE war in Iraq was an example of the frivolity of US decision-making.
Iraq was a country that had been defeated by the Americans and refused to
lie down: a country so weak it could be easily defeated again. It happened
to have assets - oil - but the war was really an exercise in showing
international power. The policy that the crazies in Washington are talking
about, a complete re-formulation of the entire Middle East, makes no
sense. If their aim is to overthrow the Saudi kingdom, what are they
planning in its place? If they were serious about changing the Middle East
we know the one thing they have to do is to lean on the Israelis. Bush's
father was prepared to do this, but the present incumbent in the White
House is not. Instead his administration has destroyed one of the two
guaranteed secular governments in the Middle East, and dreams of moving
against the other, Syria.

The emptiness of the policy is clear from the way the aims have been put
forward in public relations terms. Phrases like "axis of evil", or "the
road map" are not policy statements, but merely sound bites that
accumulate their own policy potential. The overwhelming newspeak that has
swamped the world in the past 18 months is an indication of the absence of
real policy. Bush does not do policy, but a stage act. Officials such as
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz talk like Rambo in public, as in private.
All that counts is the overwhelming power of the US. In real terms they
mean that the US can invade anybody small enough and where they can win
quickly enough. This is not a policy. Nor will it work. The consequences
of this for the US are going to be very dangerous. Domestically, the real
danger for a country that aims at world control, essentially by military
means, is the danger of militarisation. The danger of this has been
seriously underestimated.

Internationally, the danger is the destabilising of the world. The Middle
East is just one example of this destabilisation - far more unstable now
than it was 10 years ago, or five years ago. US policy weakens all the
alternative arrangements, formal and informal, for keeping order. In
Europe it has wrecked the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - not much of
a loss; but trying to turn Nato into a world military police force for the
US is a travesty. It has deliberately sabotaged the EU, and also
systematically aims at ruining another of the great world achievements
since 1945, prosperous democratic social welfare states. The widely
perceived crisis over the credibility of the United Nations is less of a
drama than it appears since the UN has never been able to do more than
operate marginally because of its total dependence on the Security
Council, and the use of the US veto.

How is the world to confront - contain - the US? Some people, believing
that they have not the power to confront the US, prefer to join it. More
dangerous are those people who hate the ideology behind the Pentagon, but
support the US project on the grounds that, in the course of its advance,
it will eliminate some local and regional injustices. This may be called
an imperialism of human rights. It has been encouraged by the failure of
Europe in the Balkans in the 1990s. The division of opinion over the Iraq
war showed there to be a minority of influential intellectuals, including
Michael Ignatieff in the US and Bernard Kouchner in France, who were
prepared to back US intervention because they believe it is necessary to
have a force for ordering the world's ills. There is a genuine case to be
made that there are governments that are so bad that their disappearance
will be a net gain for the world. But this can never justify the danger of
creating a world power that is not interested in a world that it does not
understand, but is capable of intervening decisively with armed force
whenever anybody does anything that Washington does not like.

Against this background we can see the increasing pressure on the media -
because in a world where public opinion is so important, it is also hugely
manipulated (4). Attempts were made in the Gulf war, 1990-91, to avoid the
Vietnam situation by not letting the media near the action. But these did
not work because there were media, for example CNN, actually in Baghdad,
reporting things that did not fit the story Washington wanted told. This
time, in the Iraq war, control again did not work, so the tendency will be
to find yet more effective ways. These may take the form of direct
control, maybe even the last resort of technological control, but the
combination of governments and monopoly proprietors will be used to even
greater effect than with Fox News (5), or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.

How long the present superiority of the Americans lasts is impossible to
say. The only thing of which we are absolutely certain is that historic
ally it will be a temporary phenomenon, as all these other empires have
been. In the course of a lifetime we have seen the end of all the colonial
empires, the end of the so-called Thousand Year Empire of the Germans,
which lasted a mere 12 years, the end of the Soviet Union's dream of world
revolution.

There are internal reasons why the US empire may not last, the most
immediate being that most Americans are not interested in imperialism or
in world domination in the sense of running the world. What they are
interested in is what happens to them in the US. The weakness of the US
economy is such that at some stage both the US government and electors
will decide that it is much more important to concentrate on the economy
than to carry on with foreign military adventures (6). All the more so as
these foreign military interventions will have to be largely paid for by
the Americans themselves, which was not the case in the Gulf war, nor to a
very great extent in the cold war.

Since 1997-98 we have been living in a crisis of the capitalist world
economy. It is not going to collapse, but nevertheless it is unlikely that
the US will carry on with ambitious foreign affairs when it has serious
problems at home. Even by local business standards Bush does not have an
adequate economic policy for the US. And Bush's existing international
policy is not a particularly rational one for US imperial interests - and
certainly not for the interests of US capitalism. Hence the divisions of
opinion within the US government.

The key issue now is what will the Americans do next, and how will other
countries react? Will some countries, like Britain - the only genuine
member of the ruling coalition - go ahead and back anything the US plans?
Their governments must indicate that there are limits to what the
Americans can do with their power. The most positive contribution so far
has been made by the Turks, simply by saying there are things they are not
prepared to do, even though they know it would pay. But at the moment the
major preoccupation is that of - if not containing - at any rate educating
or re-educating the US. There was a time when the US empire recognised
limitations, or at least the desirability of behaving as though it had
limitations. This was largely because the US was afraid of somebody else -
the Soviet Union. In the absence of this kind of fear, enlightened
self-interest and education have to take over.

Edited by Victoria Brittain

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* Eric Hobsbawm is a historian; among his works is Age of Extremes: The
Shorter 20th: 1914-1991 (Michael Joseph, London, 1994, paperback by
Abacus, London, 1995)

(1) The Age of Empire 1875-1914, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
London, 1987.

(2) Op cit.

(3) Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire, Owl Books, 2001.

(4) "France protests US media plot", International Herald
Tribune, 16 May 2003.

(5) Eric Alterman, "United States: making up the news", Le
Monde diplomatique, English language edition, March 2003.

(6) "US unemployment hits an 8-year high", International
Herald Tribune, 3 May 2003.

Original text in English
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