The making of an empire

Published : Feb 23, 2007 00:00 IST

Robert Kagan captures well the fundamental relationship between the nature of a country and the character of its foreign policy.

BRITAIN and the United States have found themselves in conflict many times and at war with each other twice. Nonetheless, ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, the two countries have shared much, and their different historical paths have had many points of intersection. Most importantly, they share ethnic and racial characteristics. Perhaps the latter, more than anything else, helps explain why, during a convulsive century in which the U.S. was busy usurping Britain's imperial power and reach, the two never came to blows. The perception of these shared characteristics has helped obscure in the British mind the highly specific and unique conditions of America's birth and evolution, which set it apart in very profound ways from both Britain and Europe.

The U.S. was born a settler colony, that unique product of largely British (but also European) migration during the era of empire, which was to leave a permanent Anglo-Saxon footprint in such disparate lands as North America and Australia.

The settler colony produced a quite different dynamic and mentality from that of Europe and Asia, both of which were characterised by the relative continuity of their native populations. The establishment of settler colonies meant the conquest and brutal destruction of native populations. It is impossible to understand the psychology of the Americans, or indeed the Australians, without understanding what they did to the native Indians and Aborigines respectively. This was not ethnic cleansing but something closer to ethnic extermination.

One of the myths that surrounds American history is that it has been relatively non-aggressive and, of course, anti-colonial. Robert Kagan, in what will eventually be a two-volume history of American foreign policy, has no time for these arguments. He shows that, quite to the contrary, from the Pilgrim Fathers onwards, the new colonial settler society was by its very nature expansionist and aggressive, with an insatiable appetite for territory.

He writes: "This colonial America was characterised not by isolationism and utopianism, not by cities upon hills and covenants with God, but by aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism, and an overarching ideology of civilisation that encouraged and justified both.'' It bred both a particularly abhorrent form of racism and a new kind of capitalism.

With a seemingly limitless supply of land, every white male settler could ultimately fulfil his dream of becoming a landowner: colonial America, in Kagan's words, was like an "expansionist pressure cooker''. This restless territorial acquisitiveness, on which the British colonial masters eventually sought to place a constraint, together with the growing power and prosperity of the colony (on the eve of the revolution, Americans already enjoyed a higher standard of living than any European country and the population had increased from 75,000 to 1.6 million in a century) brought it into growing conflict with Britain.

What began as a struggle for autonomy (based on the proposition that the empire should be conceived of in terms of countries that enjoyed something like equal power and status) soon became a struggle for independence, which then turned into a revolution rooted in Enlightenment principles and espousing a liberal republican ideology.

The embryonic nation, of course, was in no position to use the traditional argument for nationhood, resting on roots, identity and history, given that it was seeking to separate itself from those roots, so the act of formation of the newly independent country inevitably involved a quite new principle for a nation.

In the light of the fact that we tend to think of the U.S. as "non-ideological'' (mainly because of the lack of a strong Left/Right tradition) - another myth - it is ironic that the two great wars that were fought on its territory, namely the war of independence and the subsequent civil war, were, as Kagan points out, both highly ideological.

Kagan captures well the fundamental relationship between the nature of a country and the character of its foreign policy: that the latter reflects the national idea, whatever that might be and however it might change over time. The book is at its best in showing how the country's restless and constant desire for expansion is rooted in its settler origins. (He vividly describes the way in which the settlers constantly set the agenda of government when it came to the theft of Indian land, irrespective of the treaties that the government had solemnly agreed with the Indians.)

Already, in the early decades of the 19th century, not long after independence, "American leaders from every region of the country and representing every political stripe'', writes Kagan, "shared a common belief that most if not all of North America, including Canada, Mexico, and the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, formed the `natural' dominion of the United States.''

The fact that the U.S. rested on universalist abstract principles imbued American society from the outset with a wider and more ambitious concept of its role: that its values were relevant and applicable to the rest of the world. Of course, at the root of its restless expansion and growing self-confidence - and ultimately its enormous influence - was the hugely dynamic nature of its capitalism, which was eventually to transform the entire world. In fact, although Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism was based on Britain, its true lodestar - and insight - was surely the American model-to-be, at once both revolutionary and untrammelled by a past that it had destroyed.

Having read the first volume, I look forward to the second, which will deal with the 20th century. There are too many illusions about the U.S., and in its own way, this book helps dispel some of them.

Although at times it suffers from an excessively narrative style, particularly towards the end, it is an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of American history.

Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics.

Guardian News & Media 2006
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