No, they were not sustaining their empires through "plunder". They took much in trade and taxes, but they also gave much: law and order, courts, roads, aquaducts, trains, general infrastructure. The locals wanted to sign on, generally.
This is revisionism on a fairly grand scale. I don’t recall too many locals being eager to sign on to the British Empire, and I remember quite a few being eager to sign off. The economic mechanisms of colonialism are not much studied these days, but I don’t think plunder is too strong a word by any means.
The progressive aspects of empire were not, almost across the board, installed for the benefit of the local populace. Law and order were necessary to protect the colonial overlords and maintain productivity. Roads, trains, and bridges were necessary to bring goods out. Schools were oriented toward producing civil servants, in both senses of that expression.
How do you fit the British opium trade, for example, into your fantasy of the benevolent hegemon?
One of the more amusing moments of colonial rule came in the early 20th century, when several colonial powers, under the influence of liberal regimes at home, decided to allow the colonized peoples a greater say in their government. Quite uniformly, the first thing the colonized peoples said, when given a say, was along the lines of “get the $%&( out of our country”. The liberals were, of course baffled by this “ingratitude”; conservatives were horrified. Amazing how blind people can be.
A multi-party system does not create changing conditions, or have to respond to them?
That’s not what I said, but perhaps I was not sufficiently clear.
A single hegemon is fundamentally unacceptable to most of the peoples of the world. This is true even if the hegemon is benevolent, and there are good reasons for this. We have all observed the corrupting tendency of power, and the tendency of hememons to manipulate their hegemony for their own benefit. Even if a hegemon is benevolent to day, it may be tomorrow. This is why a single-hegemon system will never create order. No matter what it does, it will inspire resistance and disorder; ultimately there will be more resistance in more places than the hegemon can afford to control. Hegemony may result in temporary order, but only at the expense of stability. The order exists only because disorder is forcibly quelled.
If we are going to discuss a war of order against disorder, we have to acknowledge that disorder is the inevitable handmaiden of change. To the extent that change is necessary – and in many parts of the world it is very necessary indeed – disorder is also necessary. The challenge is not to eliminate disorder, but to control its more grossly negative manifestations.
I find it odd that people so eager to support democracy on a national scale are also eager to insist that order on a global scale can only be maintained by the unchecked exercise of unaccountable power. That hardly seems consistent with American principles. Most of us believe, I assume, that the legitimacy of leadership is based on the consent of those led. At what level of political organization do we set this principle aside, or do we simply set it aside when convenient?
Much of the free world opposes our hegemony. They don’t oppose it because they oppose our principles. They oppose it, on the contrary, because they believe in our principles. The question is the extent to which we believe in our principles. Do we believe that leadership derives from the consent of the led, or that power grows from the barrel of a gun? |
