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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (162602)5/19/2005 6:16:28 PM
From: Sun Tzu  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
When you are saying Romans, are you talking about a citizen of the Roman Empire or the specific Roman class?

If you are saying that the city of Rome imported most of its goods, I may live with that. If you are implying that wheat was travelling half way across Europe to make it to every citizen, then I need some proof.

From the little passage I posted (and there is a lot more to this if you read the whole site I linked to), you can see that by late 6th century A.D. the Roman Empire was there only in name and this had nothing to do with Islam. In other words the demise of Roman Empire was more a matter of its own empirical policies than anything else.

As I said, empires collapse under their own weight rather quickly and those who have to rely on too much force fall even faster. That the Roman Empire lasted longer than the Persian one (at least in name only) had to do with (a) its changing nature from an empirical entity to a collection of self-sufficient societies, and (b) that the Arabs were too busy in Persia to be able to concentrate on Europe.

To bring this back to the topic at hand those who fantasize on empire building shall bring about the demise of the country faster than any external force. The future belongs to cooperative confederations.

ST

PS Buffet once said, "it is better to buy a great business at a fair price than a fair business at a great price". It took me a while to fully understand his insight. An empire can at best provide a so-so goods at a "great" price for its citizens (and it can do this only for a limited time). But a cooperative confederation based on fairness and equality makes for a great "business" at a fair price for a very very long time.
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