In Defense of Empires

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Deepak Lal writes In Defense of Empires, which “have undeservedly got a bad name, particularly in America since President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the end of the Age of Empires and ushered in the Age of Nations”:

The major argument in favor of empires is that, through their pax, they provide the most basic of public goods — order — in an anarchical international society of states. This is akin to maintaining order in social life. The three basic values of all social life, without which it cannot exist, and which any international order should seek to protect, were cogently summarized by the late Hedley Bull in his magisterial book The Anarchical Society as: first, to secure life against violence which leads to death or bodily harm; second, that promises once made are kept; third that, “the possession of things will remain stable to some degree and will not be subject to challenges that are constant and without limit.”

Empires — which for our purposes can be simply defined as “multiethnic conglomerates held together by transnational organizational and cultural ties”[3] — have historically both maintained peace and promoted prosperity for a simple reason. The centers of the ancient civilizations in Eurasia — where sedentary agriculture could be practiced and yielded a surplus to feed the towns (‘civitas’ — the emblem of civilization) — were bordered in the North and South by areas of nomadic pastoralism: the steppes of the North and the semi-desert of the Arabian peninsula to the South. In these regions the inhabitants had kept up many of the warlike traditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and were prone to prey upon the inhabitants of the sedentary ‘plains’ and at times attempted to convert them into their chattel like cattle.[4] This meant that the provision of one of the classical public goods — protection of its citizens from invaders — required the extension of territory to some natural barriers which could keep the barbarians at bay. The Roman, Chinese, and various Indian empires were partly created to provide this pax, which was essential to keep their labor intensive and sedentary forms of making a living intact. The pax of various imperium has thus been essential in providing one of the basic public goods required for prosperity.

These empires can further be distinguished as being either multi-cultural or homogenizing. The former included the Abbasids, the various Indian empires, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and the British, where little attempt was made to change ‘the habits of the heart’ of the constituent groups — or if it was, as in the early British Raj, an ensuing backlash led to a reversal of this policy.

The homogenizing empires, by contrast, sought to create a ‘national’ identity out of the multifarious groups in their territory. The best example of these is China, where the ethnic mix was unified as Hans through the bureaucratic device of writing their names in Chinese characters in a Chinese form, and suppressing any subsequent discontent through the subtle repression of a bureaucratic authoritarian state.[5] In our own time the American ‘melting pot’ creating Americans out of a multitude of ethnicities by adherence to a shared civic culture and a common language, has created a similar homogenized imperial state. Similarly, the supposedly ancient “nations” of Britain and France were created through a state-led homogenizing process.[6] India, by contrast is another imperial state whose political unity is a legacy of the British Raj, but whose multiethnic character is underwritten by an ancient hierarchical structure which accommodates these different groups as different castes.

The article is not a short one, and it eventually works its way around to the Middle East, where Lal brings in a bit of personal history:

The amazing thing for me is that, the “right to return” after fifty years is still an issue and is being kept alive by the large number of Palestinians still in refugee camps. Why are they still there after fifty years? On a personal note, my family and I, along with millions of others lost their land and property as a result of the partition of India in 1947. We were refugees. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments provided some help, but most importantly the refugees themselves, after a little while, made new lives for themselves. There are no refugee camps on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border with millions demanding “the right of return.”

History is never just, and economists have been right to maintain that “bygones are bygones.” This is particularly important in that highly contested territory of Palestine. This came home to me in the late 1970s when a friend was carrying out a dig near the Wailing Wall. He took me down, and showed me layer upon layer of corpses. The ones in each layer had been killed by those above, and then they themselves in a later layer had killed those below them. To decide who has the original rights to the land in this fiercely contested territory, where “might has been right” for millennia, to right historical wrongs on the basis of some principle of restitution would defeat even the wisdom of Solomon. Sensibly, losers in these continual shifts in fortune through history have come to terms with their losses and continued with their lives.

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