Watch on the West
A Newsletter of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West

Challenges of Empire

Volume 3, Number 5
May 2002

by William Anthony Hay

William Anthony Hay is Executive Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. This essay is excerpted from his review of Dominic Lieven’s Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and the final three volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) that appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Orbis.

The ebbing tides of one empire or other have left the international community with many ongoing problems. Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, and Kashmir are only the most prominent cases, and they cannot be understood, let alone resolved, outside of their historical context. So while imperialism might appear at first glance to be a subject for antiquarians, a more careful look shows that the issues it engages are more relevant than ever. The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon brought home in spectacular fashion the ongoing challenge of controlling lawless groups operating beyond the control of recognized states. John Keegan recently suggested that “the great work of disarming tribes, sects, warlords and criminals— a principle achievement of monarchs in the 17th century and empires in the 19th” may need to be done over again today. The challenge of policing unstable borderlands and oceans is only one aspect of imperial history that touches on today’s concerns. Even before the events of September 11 captured attention, the comparative study of empires offered a sophisticated way to approach the current phenomenon of globalization and its impact.

Literature and popular culture often equate empire with formal colonialism, thereby obscuring the word’s other meanings. When England’s Henry VIII declared his own realm an “empire” in 1533, he meant that his kingdom was a sovereignty independent of any external power, not a colonial power. The first edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary published in 1755 defined empire as “supreme dominion; sovereign command … [and] the region over which dominion is extended.” Sir William Temple’s formulation of control over vast tracts of land and its inhabitants cited by Johnson aptly describes the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, along with polities beyond Europe such as China and Ethiopia. Alexander Hamilton drew on the more uplifting aspects of Rome’s legacy when he called the United States “a most interesting empire,” and his rival Thomas Jefferson spoke of the American republic as an empire of liberty. Each of these empires was territorially contiguous for the most part, rather than built on far-flung colonies like the maritime empires of Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands. Common themes emerge from these examples: the perennial dilemmas of governing vast spaces with ethnically diverse and often fractious populations, the need to impose authority on lawless borderlands, and the further strains imposed on empires by competition within the international system.


Challenges of Sustaining a Military System

The Russians and Ottomans ruled military empires that emerged from similar circumstances on Europe’s periphery, and the Byzantine Empire the Ottomans supplanted deeply influenced Russian culture and rulership, not least through the Orthodox Church. Neither Russians nor Ottomans distinguished between periphery and metropolis, ruling both through an army of imperial servitors under closer control by their ruler than elsewhere in Europe or Asia. The decline and collapse of both empires finally left substantial minorities behind in lost territories. Only Russia’s unique success in adopting European ways obscures its similarities with the Ottoman empire it gradually supplanted.

After expanding into the Balkans and Arab Middle East, the Ottoman Turks held their own against Europeans into the early eighteenth century, but hints of decline had already emerged. Absorbing the Arab heartlands of Islam changed the Ottoman Empire’s culture in a way that made it less open to foreign influences. While Russia began modernizing even before Peter the Great’s reforms, entrenched interests within the Ottoman Empire resisted change. The bureaucracy that supported the army and state declined along with the revenues that supported them. Portugal’s development of an alternative route to East Asia devastated the commercial system from which the Ottomans extracted wealth, and the empire failed to develop industry or exports to replace it. Likewise, Russia’s defeat of the Moslem khanates along the Volga freed its empire to expand eastward across the plains and Siberian forests, but the Ottomans found themselves checked and, by the late seventeenth century, pressured by Safavid Persia and Christian Europe. Consequently, the Russians who had lagged behind the Ottomans in 1500 enjoyed a significant advantage by the mid-eighteenth century.

Islam’s role under the Ottomans invites comparison with that of communism during the Soviet period. Both offered universal claims that appealed far more broadly than nationalism and more firmly than dynastic loyalties. The Ottomans welcomed the domestic and international legitimacy conferred on them as champions of a great world civilization against the challenge of the West. (Lieven, p. 137.) Russia and Britain feared the potential for split loyalties among their Moslem subjects just as communism also cast the specter of a fifth column within the West. Despite the messianic appeal of both Islam and communism, however, neither truly cemented the empires that championed them. Islam failed to hold the Arabs’ loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, and force alone kept the communist bloc under Soviet control. Attempts to preserve the Ottoman and Soviet regimes by transforming them from empires into nations only accelerated their dissolution by undermining their very legitimacy.


Bureaucratic Empire and the Nationalist Challenge

Understanding the Russian Empire as a military and bureaucratic state underlines its similarities with the Habsburg monarchy. Great-power status defined the identity of both regimes, as did the challenges of ruling a multinational, continental empire. These empires proved more resilient than they appeared for most of their respective histories — histories that are shorter than is generally appreciated today. The Russian state extending between the Black Sea and the Baltic emerged in the eighteenth century, and the Habsburg monarchy only became a modern state in the eighteenth century with the establishment of institutions to govern its territories effectively from Vienna. Despite the Ausgleich of 1867 that granted Hungary considerable autonomy within Austria-Hungary, the values of an army and bureaucracy loyal to the Habsburg dynasty characterized the regime until its final agony of defeat in 1918. But differences between the Russian and Habsburg empires are also illustrative. Russia grew through conquest and migration and, beginning with Ivan III’s destruction of Novgorod in the 1470s, imposed its institutions and culture. Effective integration of new territories ensured that no independent regions or groups existed to support resistance. The Habsburg empire, in Dominic Lieven’s apt phrase, was a conglomeration of crownlands built through marriages and diplomacy. Separate kingdoms and crownlands retained their laws and social structure, and the crown negotiated the terms of its relations with local notables despite consistent efforts at centralization. Hence, the social structures that gave Habsburg domains a more developed civil society than Russia’s also presented a formidable barrier to the exercise of authority from Vienna. Regional and ethnic particularism threatened the Habsburgs even more than the social upheavals that shook Russia in 1905 and 1917.

The problem of national minorities with populations outside the empire’s borders troubled both the Habsburgs and Russia. Neighbors with irridentist ambitions stirred unrest along Austria-Hungary’s borders with Serbia, Romania, and Italy. Habsburg Poland became a cultural center toward which Poles in Russia and Wilhelmine Germany gravitated, and the Polish question in various guises preoccupied Russia’s rulers from the eighteenth century through the 1980s. Annexing territory to unite minorities within Russia never solved the problem, but merely changed its effects. Peter Durnovo warned Nicholas II in 1914 against annexing Austrian Galicia lest it strengthen Ukrainian nationalism and its potential as a subversive force. (Lieven, p. 334.) Soviet annexations after 1945 made Galicia the catalyst for the Ukraine’s cultural revival and eventual secession from the Soviet Union.

Like the Habsburg monarchy, the Russian empire in both its incarnations sought to rule through collaborators among subject peoples. The Soviets even went beyond tsarist practice by recruiting among non-European peoples as well as Ukrainians and Balts. Indeed, Communist Party leaders in the Central Asian republics regretted the Soviet collapse more than many of their counterparts. Whereas the Habsburg empire could never save itself by becoming a nation, Russian nationalism remained an option. Late tsarist Russia appealed increasingly to a patriotism that excluded national minorities as well as many aristocratic servitors drawn from Baltic German families. National Bolshevism bolstered Stalin’s regime while appealing to the emigre diaspora in the West, and even anti-revolutionary leaders such as Peter Struve displayed a grudging respect for the Soviet achievement. However, majority nationalists — whether Germans in Habsburg Austria or slavophiles like Alexander Solzhenitsyn under the Soviets — offered as devastating a critique of empire as the secession-minded minorities. Russian patriotism might rally support for the state, but by implicitly excluding non-Russians it created new problems.


The Political Economy of Empire

Even as a superpower, Russia never established an informal empire comparable to that of Britain or the United States. Although it requires wealth to establish, informal control relieves an imperial power from the burdens of governance while preserving access to markets and resources along with political influence. Military garrisons and cadres of political advisors held Soviet satellites in check, and Russia paid heavily for its control over Central and Eastern Europe for fear of the cost in security and prestige that withdrawal would impose. The history of Soviet rule aside, Western Europe and the United States exerted too much attraction for any hope of merely informal economic or political leverage over former satellites. As a nineteenth- century tsarist viceroy in the Caucasus noted: “England displays its power with gold. Russia which is poor in gold has to compete with force of arms.” (Lieven, p. 267.) Tsarist Russia thus depended upon the banks of Paris, Berlin, and London for capital to finance modernization, and today’s Russian Federation likewise relies upon foreign investment to remain afloat.

Dependency and relative weakness may be the great continuity in Russia’s history, and its difficult transition from empire does not bear easy comparison with its rivals'. Under Vladimir Putin Russia faces the same challenge as Kemalist Turkey in building a working state from the debris of empire, but Russia cannot so easily abandon its past. Economic and security concerns force Russian leaders to preserve ties with former Soviet republics that control energy resources or pipeline routes. The state depends upon oil and gas revenues to sustain the Russian economy in the absence of a competitive industrial base, and political instability makes those regions an attractive playground for external nuisances such as the Taliban or criminal gangs. Veterans from Afghanistan have joined other Islamic militants fighting in Chechnya and Daghestan, while the Taliban has worked to undermine regimes in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The Soviet collapse strengthened neighboring states like Iran and Turkey, and the unfavorable demographic balance between Russians and their former Muslim subjects adds another facet to the problem.

It remains uncertain what policy Putin will adopt toward Russia’s near abroad. Renewed fighting in Chechnya along with an ongoing security relationship with several Central Asian states indicate that Russia will defend its perceived interests and attempt to impose stability along its borders. But the problems that have undermined Russia remain largely internal. Putin’s top priority appears to be reconstructing the state and enforcing its authority following a decade- long experiment in the devolution of power. Russian minority populations in former Soviet republics matter less on this score than imposing control on provincial governments within Russia and the private fiefdoms of oligarchs that supplanted the bureaucratic state in the post-Gorbachev era.


A Model of Informal Empire?

The history of the British Empire raises very different questions from that of Russia, though both faced the problem of imposing authority on unstable border regions. The late eighteenth century marked an important shift from the first British empire, focused on the Atlantic world, to its larger successor defined by territorial acquisitions made during the Napoleonic Wars and struggle for mastery in India. The government acted reluctantly before the 1880s because, with the significant exception of India, few colonies generated sufficient revenue to make them profitable. Security concerns or the ambition of officials beyond metropolitan control made the flag follow trade or humanitarian efforts. Imperial authorities considered themselves obliged to take cognizance of British subjects abroad, as much to restrain their misbehavior as to protect them from local rulers. (Oxford History, III:191.) Securing enclaves and suppressing piracy and disorder along existing borders drew Britain into new areas, while local officials took actions that their metropolitan superiors would never have countenanced beforehand. South Africa offers a case in point, when Governors Benjamin D’Urban and Sir Harry Smith annexed land occupied by the Xhosa in 1835 and 1847 in the course of border wars. Their successor, Sir George Grey, specifically was denied authority to take further territory as a result. Sir Charles James Napier’s famous Latin pun peccavi (I have sinned) announcing his occupation of Sindh in 1843 provides another example of such unauthorized initiatives. Access, not possession, was the preferred object of imperial ambition until almost all the other European powers, plus Japan and the United States, leapt into the scramble for colonies in the late nineteenth century.

Indirect control protected British interests better in many cases than direct annexation and foreign investment made this approach possible. No other major country before or since placed so high a proportion of its assets overseas as did Britain, and British investment patterns shaped imperial development. (Oxford History, III:704l) Historians a generation ago described British influence in Latin America and China as “the imperialism of free trade,” particularly during the mid-nineteenth century, when statesmen like Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston saw trade as means of extending British influence throughout the world. (See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, Second Series 5 (1953): pp. 1-15.) The broader concept of informal empire also provides a way to understand other regimes, including the post-1945 American imperium and contemporary relationships captured by the word globalization. Jurgen Osterhamel defines informal empire as an “historical situation of some stability and permanence in which overt foreign rule is avoided while economic advantages are secured by 'unequal' legal and institutional arrangements, and also by the constant threat of political meddling and military coercion that would be intolerable in relations between fully sovereign states.” In the case of China, informal empire rested on extraterritorial legal privileges for foreigners, an externally imposed free trade regime, and the use of gunboats and consular officials to interfere domestically. (Oxford History, III:148-9.) Western states imposed similar demands on the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, and Britain ruled Egypt through informal advisors and diplomats.

Latin America demonstrated a different pattern more akin to twenty-first-century globalization. Merchants and investors established Britain’s sphere of influence after Spain recognized its former colonies' independence, and they could not expect help from London when local politics threatened their interests. Latin American governments and business enterprises defaulted on loans and British consular officials grudgingly cooperated with tyrannical caudillos whose only merit lay in guaranteeing stability for investors. Political sovereignty, however, did not challenge dependency rooted in the economic imbalance between Britain and its Latin American clients. Investors became partners with local collaborators and Britain’s role as a monopsonistic purchaser in leading economic sectors made for good relations for its suppliers.

The cultural ascendancy of Victorian liberalism likewise attracted local Latin elites, though many looked as well to France and the United States for models. Argentina had especially close ties with Britain, and remained part of the sterling bloc well into the twentieth century. The relative decline of British economic power, particularly in relation to that of the United States, exposed Britain’s informal empire to challenges from populists like Juan Peron. But, the very policies of import substitution advocated by dependency theorists such as Raoul Prebisch and implemented by populist regimes eager to escape British or American “hegemony” ironically locked the region into economic backwardness from which it is only recently emerging. [See Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).] Governments that worked within the constraints laid down by the City of London and other financial centers, particularly settlement colonies such as Australia, remained on the trajectory to sustained growth despite rough periods in the 1920s and 1930s. The “golden straitjacket” of free markets, rule of law, liberty of the press, and individual rights that define today’s globalization has interesting antecedents.

British migration laid the foundation for the development of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as settler capitalist societies. Imperialism involved Britain as a whole and not merely the English, and Sir J.R. Seeley insisted that technology and communications had created a “Greater Britain” overseas that became the empire’s most significant legacy. But the debate over imperial preference hinted that free trade no longer united the empire sufficiently and that new political ties must strengthen frayed economic ones. After 1939, the balance between strategic assets and liabilities drew Canada and Australia toward the United States as Britain could no longer guarantee their security. Self-governing dominions became independent nations, and from 1950 onward the British Empire transformed itself into a commonwealth of nations that has recently entertained overtures for membership from countries Britain never even ruled. Spared the lingering traumas of a Vietnam or Algerian war, let alone the upheavals that ended the Ottoman, Habsburg and Soviet empires, Britain made a relatively easy retreat from empire. To be sure, domestic problems, particularly in the economy, accelerated Britain’s post-1945 decline and fueled a pessimism that peaked in the winter of 1979. But its network of overseas influence has become an asset rather than a liability with the revival of British competitiveness. No longer an empire, Britain remains a nation of traders and investors. This factor probably explains more about the relative ease of decolonization than cases of other empires driven by motives other than commerce.


Empire Today

Imperial history involves questions about power that are surprisingly topical. Popular disenchantment with the project of European integration appears to confirm Montesquieu’s doubts that the peoples of Europe would ever accept unification within a single empire after a millennium of independent development following the collapse of Rome. Current debates about the EU’s “democratic deficit” point to deeper conflicts in the future. In other situations, the challenges facing past empires have emerged in modern form. The dissolution of Yugoslavia turned attention to the nineteenth century Eastern Question caused by the decay of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. It also called into question how well multinational states can withstand pressures that threaten to pull them apart. Economics may play as great a role here as ethnic conflict or particularism, since regions may see overseas business interests as more relevant than a distant central administration. The experience of global empires provides a framework for discussing such relationships today, particularly when trade and investment drive them both. One might well ask whether globalization is nothing more than an updated version of the nineteenth-century imperialism of free trade.

Americans resist thinking of the United States as an empire, both because of the word’s negative connotations and the fact that their country was founded in a colonial war of independence. Nevertheless, much of the world thinks of the last remaining superpower in just those terms. Street protests against globalization might be best understood as rebellions against the United States' post-Cold War ascendancy by people otherwise attracted to many aspects of American life. If empire is a system of influence sustained by wealth, military power, and cultural attraction, the United States cannot be described today as anything but an empire. Global interests bring global responsibilities that raise the question of how best to meet them.

One key lesson from empires of the past is that the quality of statesmanship matters more than wealth or military power. Pragmatic realists adept at using their country’s influence generally have succeeded in securing vital overseas interests as a reasonable cost. The crusading spirit in American history that Walter McDougall and Irving Babbit identified as “global meliorism” and the “will to service” are hubristic temptations best avoided, along with the fallacy that distance and wealth minimize overseas threats to the United States. Instead, American leaders should focus on securing concrete national interests through indirect influence where possible or by direct control where necessary. The protracted conflict against terrorism demands careful use of diplomacy as a force multiplier. The debate over whether American should favor multilateral approaches or act unilaterally misses the vital point that the real debate should be over which policies secure which American interests at the least cost. Doctrinaire positions on this preclude the flexibility changing circumstances demand. Military forces must be flexible in projecting power overseas to meet contingencies not envisioned during the Cold War or its immediate aftermath. If threats to stability are to be contained, American public opinion and official policy alike must take a focused, realistic approach to the anarchic realm of international politics that will be at odds with the unfettered idealism and sporadic humanitarian interventions erratic of the 1990s.

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