Deepak Lal: In Defense of Empires

The World Needs a Pax Americana:

Empires provide the most basic of public goods: order. Order means securing life against violence which leads to death or bodily harm; provides assurances that promises once made are kept, and a stability to the degree that challenges are not constant and without limit.

Empires are multiethnic conglomerates held together by transnational organization and cultural ties. In the past, empires extended to "natural limits" imposed by geography. Rather than changing the hearts and minds of the people subjected under them, the homogenizing empires set out to create a national identity out of the multifarious groups inside a territory.

Order has also been associated with the prosperity brought by globalization. Political hegemony lowered transaction costs and led to gains in trade as well as increased specialization.

Were empires beneficial for the metropolis? As foreign trade and investment were mutually advantageous, some nineteenth century liberals argued no empire was needed to obtain gains from trade. All that was needed was laissez-faire. Others, like Cobbden and Angrell, developed Kant's theory of perpetual peace further: the interdependence that emerged between trading states would inevitably lead to peace because no state would wish to impose excessive fiscal burdens on itself for the illusionary benefits of indemnities and territory gained by martial adventurism.

The linking of the whole world through self-interest, however, did require the use of compelling force in some areas. Empire was needed where the condition of a territory was such that social and economic cooperation with other nations was impossible. Where Wilsonianism trumpeted the importance of illegality of aggression enforced by collective security for the maintenance of a world order premised around liberal values, the British system eschewed economic sanctions as a remedy for punishing reclariant actors and instead relied upon the direct and indirect application of its imperial resources.

A global network of law protecting foreign capital allowed the worldwide expansion of trade in the nineteenth century that permitted the first world's first comprehensive development program. The British offered an international order bound together by mutual interest in commmerical progress and underpinned by a respect for property, credit, and responsibile givernment. This allowed many parts of the world to experience intensive growth for a sustained period.

With its vast economic and miltiary resources, the United States was the natural hier to Pax Britannica following World War II, but its anticolonial political ideology marked a departure from the British world order. The United States' moral aversion to imperialism, at least as practiced by European nations, permitted nationalist actors to supersede international legal codes and property rights, raising the risk, and hence the the cost, of foreign investment. Governments trumpeting national social utiltiyencountered little resistance from the hegemon when they destroyed individual property rights. American attempts to foster free trade, sound currency, and free capitial mobility relied on transnational institutions. The U.S. failed to spread free trade because its legislature prefers signing reciprocitiy and bilateral agreements with other nations. The World Bank became an international foreign aid agency rather than a relaible financial mediator and labored during the Cold War to provide incentives for nonaligned nations to ally with the United States: aid would be conditionally tied to a state fulfilling certain developmental requirements.

More wars are sparked by ethnic struggles for self-determination than all other causes. The most fragmented states and the most homogeneuous are the least likely to erupt in civil war because multi-ethnic states traditionally have an excellent framework for dealing with strife. In the world today, ethnic troubles in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are only mediated by the presence of a transnational actor that imposes the conditions of order explained earlier.

Can the U.S. assume this burden? There is, according to Lal, a budding cosmopolitian and global political and economic elite emerging in the United States capable of running a new worldwide empire. If the United States employs its power into a concert dedicated to maintaining peace and order, it will provoke emulation as well as fear and loathing. Preventing the latter from spilling into global disorder has been one of the essential tasks of imperial statesmanship. The United States is reluctant to employ its power because its domestic body politic refuses to embrace these responsibilities.

Absent direct imperialism, we should keep markets for African goods and capital flows to Africa open, and leave Africans to sort out their own problems. According to Lal, the Muslim world must embrace modernization, which means the United States must stop propping up backwards regimes that inhibit its pread. The U.S. must try to find a way to co-opt Islam with a more democratic and mericratic political and economic system. Given the interests for everyone invovled for a new order in the Middle East, the U.S. need not have to act alone.