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

[Count Zero]

(emphasis by me... Is this Eric Hobsbawn also a "dolt" undertoad?)

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.
(continued on the next post)