A call for a new imperialism

Welcome the new imperialism The US must make the transition from informal
to formal empire

More from the Guardian / Rusi conference
Niall Ferguson*
Tuesday October 30 2001 The Guardian

In my book, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, published
earlier this year, I wrote: "a terrorist campaign against American cities
is quite easy to imagine". I also argued that for this reason it was
extremely important that the United States and its allies take a more
aggressive attitude towards rogue states. My arguments were greeted with
almost complete incredulity. And now I am happy to say that they are being
taken more seriously. I wish they had been heeded earlier.

What we are witnessing is not in fact the beginning of world war three or a
clash of civilisations, but the extension of post-1968 terrorism tactics of
hijacking and the killing of civilians by urban explosions to the US. I
don't think the ideology of al-Qaida is a great deal more mysterious than
the Russian Narodnik nihilists in the late 19th century. Indeed the best
way to understand this is not as Islam or fascism, but as
Islamo-Bolshevism. What it represents is a challenge to a particular kind
of power, namely the informal imperialism that the US has preferred to rely
on since 1945.

There are therefore some good parallels with the 19th-century period when
the UK was the global power and adopted a mix of formal and informal
imperialism. This was the political globalisation of the 19th century. What
tended to happen was that periodically there would be threats to the
stability of the market system and British security on the periphery beyond
the formal empire, in areas like the Sudan. And in many ways there is an
interesting resemblance between the Mahdi in the 1880s and Osama bin Laden,
both ideologically and in their appeal to poorer Arabs and Muslims. A
failure of political will on the part of the US and its allies could hugely
magnify the economic consequences of these attacks.

 Could it all have economic causes? Lurking inside us all there is a little
Marxist who would like to believe that the complex political world around
us can be explained by simple economic realities. Somehow there must be a
link - I have heard this argument made repeatedly - between global
inequality and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Is globalisation to
blame? Compared with the late 19th and 20th centuries, the world economy is
not very global at all. That is the main explanation for widening
equalities. The real problem has to do with political deglobalisation and
fragmentation.

We have a choice. If we do nothing or falter, the economic cost of failure
could be extremely high. The possibility of losing control of Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia - nuclear weapons in one and the greater part of the future
oil reserves of the world in the other - is a truly terrifying prospect.
Those are some of the stakes in the current war.

We have to understand what the alternative to failure is. We have to call
it by its real name. Political globalisation is a fancy word for
imperialism, imposing your values and institutions on others. However you
may dress it up, whatever rhetoric you may use, it is not very different in
practice to what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries. We
already have precedents: the new imperialism is already in operation in
Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor. Essentially it is the imperialism that evolved
in the 1920s when League of Nations mandates were the polite word for what
were the post-Versailles treaty colonies.

The future of Afghanistan must, if the war is successfully prosecuted, be
very similar indeed to those states currently under this kind of
international colonial rule. Nothing else will do. Contrary to popular
arguments made in the 1980s, imperialism is affordable for the richest
economy in the world. You could argue that the cost of isolationism could
be much higher in the long run than the cost of confident intervention in
rogue states. When the British empire controlled 25% of the world's surface
and population, the British defence budget averaged around 3% of GNP.
Currently the US defence budget accounts for slightly less than that. It
would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that by increasing the
defence budget to 5% of GNP, still below the levels of height of the cold
war, more effective military intervention could be undertaken.

There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial
power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an
affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US - partly
because of its history and partly because of Vietnam - to act as a
self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have
the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?

* Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Oxford University. This is an
edited version of his contribution to yesterday's joint Guardian-RUSI
conference on New Policies for a New World.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


Louis Proyect
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