Hobsbawm, "After the Winning of the War"

AFTER THE WINNING OF THE WAR - United States: wider
still and wider
By Eric Hobsbawm

Le Monde diplomatique - Le Monde diplomatique June
2003

<http://MondeDiplo.com/2003/06/02hobsbawm>

===

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.

===

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
difference 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

________________________________________________

* 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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