An empire in denial

Published : Apr 23, 2004 00:00 IST

Why the U.S. does not see itself as imperialist.

IN January 2004, United States President George W. Bush told a joint session of the houses of Congress: "America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire."

An Englishman and a Canadian, both academics who live and work in the U.S., dispute this claim. Niall Ferguson, who teaches at New York University and authored a popular history of the British Empire, wrote in Newsweek: "The United States is now an empire in all but name - the first case in history of an empire in denial." Michael Ignatieff, Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights at Harvard University, wrote in The New York Times: "If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a state of deep denial."

It should be borne in mind that both Ignatieff and Ferguson are eager for the U.S. to adopt the mantle of imperial power, so that it might not be constrained to manufacture an "Empire Lite" (Ignatieff) or "Empire on a shoestring" (Ferguson).

In 1899, Rudyard Kipling moved to Vermont, U.S., lived in his newly built house Naulakha (Priceless Jewel), wrote Jungle Book, and when the U.S. government invaded the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba, penned his famous poem "A White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands". "Take up the White Man's burden - Send forth the best ye breed," sang this Englishman, go civilise "your new caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." Such conquests are not for gain, Kipling wrote, but they are "the savage wars of peace. Fill full the mouth of Famine, and bid the sickness cease".

Kipling, veteran of the British Raj, knew that Empire never sees itself as malevolent. It is always on hand to bring civilisation, to dispense liberty, and to offer the benefits of modernity. A visit to the Museum of the British Empire in Bristol, United Kingdom, shows us that this self-image of benevolence is alive and well. Ferguson quotes Kipling in his book on the British Empire and then concludes: "No one would dare use such politically incorrect language today. The reality is nevertheless that the United States has - whether it admits it or not - taken up some kind of global burden, just as Kipling urged. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost."

America, for Ignatieff and Ferguson, is the bona fide centre of an empire, an imperialist power that is unwilling to proclaim itself. Why are Americans in such a state of denial? Ignatieff offers an answer: "[American imperialism] is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears `the ark of the liberties of the world'."

Ignatieff correctly points out that the American Revolution provides the U.S. government and citizenry with its myth of purity - the U.S. being a power that emerged from an anti-colonial struggle, its own interventions overseas can only be on behalf of liberty and against tyranny. Furthermore, since the bulk of the citizens do not directly benefit from imperialism (and many of them lose their loved ones in its defence), they do not see the benefits of imperialism. Empire's rewards accrue to the corporations and not to the families of the middle class and the poor. The bulk of the U.S. population pays the financial cost of imperialism, and the corporate elites reap its benefits.

The myth of purity actually predates the 1776 Revolution. When Americans began to write about their Puritan ancestors who arrived on the coasts of New England and Virginia in the 1620s, they depicted them as persecuted Europeans who had fled the religious orthodoxy of "Old Europe" to make a place that did not replicate Europe's deviousness and intrigue. The Puritans, the historians wrote, opposed the artificiality of feudal manners and favoured plain-speak and independence. The Americans who followed the first generation of settlers saw themselves in this light, as hardy, courageous, tough and guileless.

In a brilliant article published in 1970, the English historian Gareth Steadman Jones points out that the "expansion" of the Puritans from the Atlantic coast westwards follows a colonial logic. The 1776 Revolution, he notes, did free the colonials from their home country, but it did not liberate those who had become the new servants of the Puritans - the enslaved Africans, the Amerindians who had not been exterminated, and the poor whites (many of whom had recently been indentured servants). "The essential fact," Steadman Jones writes, "is that white settlers in North America were partners in English mercantile imperialism, and not its victims."

In 1786, in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, a "mob" of farmers and artisans captured the courthouse to prevent the conviction of those who had fallen into debt. The act incited a major rebellion led by Daniel Shay that lasted until 1787. Shay's Rebellion, as it is called, sought to liberate workers and farmers from the excessive taxes on land and on the poll tax that allowed only the rich to vote. The rebels failed and the U.S. state remained in the hands of urban merchants and the rural gentry (including the plantation owners whose lands were worked by enslaved Africans). Liberty, in those days, meant liberty from the tyranny of England - not from the tyranny of the American elites.

One of the advantages of the American Revolution came in the rejection of the controls placed by the English Crown on the expansion to the West - out toward the Pacific Ocean. Now the "Pioneers" could go forth and expand, exterminate the Amerindians, conquer large tracts of Mexico and set up a colonial regime that, as far as the Amerindians and Mexicans go, extends to the present. This expansion produced the largest domestic market on the planet, and enabled the U.S. economy to grow at a pace that is only rivalled by the rate of growth of the Chinese economy over the last three decades. For the U.S. ruling class, Steadman Jones concludes, "The absence of territorialism `abroad' was founded on an unprecedented territorialism at home."

When the West had been absorbed, and when the U.S. economy grew strong enough for its military to exert itself, the government began to act on the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which preserved the Americas from Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to the Canadian border as the dominion of the U.S. In 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward purchased the province of Alaska, then known as Seward's Folly. The expansion to Alaska was part of Seward's design to extend U.S. interests toward Asia. In 1853, Seward already preached a forward strategy to move into the Asian market. He said: "Multiply your ships and send them forth to the East. The nation that draws most materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the greatest power on the earth."

In 1898, when the opportunity provided itself, the U.S. superseded Spain as the paramount power in the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba - the event that provoked Kipling's poem. When radical public opinion, joined by such luminaries as Mark Twain and his League Against Imperialism, spoke out against the U.S. move into Spain's former colonies, the distinguished Senator from Indiana, Albert Beveridge, rose to defend the policy. He offered the usual bluster about "the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilisation of the world", and how "God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world". The U.S. must act because the Filipinos, says Beveridge, "are a barbarous race. It is barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the Anglo-Saxon sense". Racism provides a firm foundation to justify colonialism - they are inferior, so we must take care of them. One can sense much the same sort of attitude in the U.S. administration's comments on the Iraqi population's capacity for self-government. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director James Woolsey and Princeton University Professor Bernard Lewis suggested, in late 2003, that Iraq revert to its 1925 Constitution and accept monarchical rule because the Iraqi people, in their view, are not capable of democracy.

Soon, Beveridge got down to business - the real reason to hold the Philippines was markets and resources. He described the many products of the archipelago, then stopped, lifted a rock in his palm, and announced: "I have a nugget of gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. And this wealth is but a small fraction." Finally, he noted that the Philippines offered a doorway to "China's illimitable markets. The Pacific is the ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic."

In our own time, in Iraq, the U.S.' denial over its empire is helped by the privatisation of imperialism. The U.S. government is present in Iraq as the army of occupation, but the work of colonial reconstruction is not conducted primarily by the state. This work, empire building, is left to private entities such as Bechtel, Halliburton and Development Alternatives, Incorporated. The U.S. head in Iraq Paul Bremer's Order No. 39 privatised all state industries and allowed foreign ownership in most sectors of the economy: Americans will now see their work overseas as the creation of "markets" and "opportunities" not the squelching of the will of the Iraqis for the benefit of the U.S. economy. Privatisation of empire has only allowed the American denial over its imperialism a longer lease.

America's denial about its empire is not new - indeed it is as old as America itself. In 1899, an African American poet, John Edward Bruce, replied to Kipling in "The Coloured American":

What talk of the white man's burden? What burdens hath he borne? That has not been shared by the black man From the day creation dawned? Why taunt us with our weakness, Why boast of your brutal strength; Know ye not that the children of meekness Shall inherit the earth - at length?

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