Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  But democratization inside Great Britain and out caught up to the empire by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they struggled with extending the suffrage within the British Isles, the British had no mechanism for, or interest in, making voting citizens out of 250 million Indians, or for that matter any of the empire's other nonwhite colonial subjects. In the end, this limit on British tolerance, together with the increasing costs of imperial rule and the rising demand for self-determination after World War II, tore the empire apart.

  In the twenty-first century, the right of all nations to govern themselves, while not always realized, is almost universally recognized. As an ironic result, America's relationship to the peoples it dominates is more analogous to that of Achaemenid Persia than that of Rome or Great Britain. Under Persian hegemony 2,500 years ago, “a Greek felt that he was a Greek and spoke Greek,” and “an Egyptian felt that he was an Egyptian and spoke Egyptian.”16 And so it is today under the hegemony of the world's first democratic hyperpower.

  The great mistake made by those championing an American empire lies in assuming that the global spread of free markets, democracy, and American products, brands, and consumer culture would somehow “Americanize” other nations, creating common values and even a desire for American leadership. This assumption was as naive as the belief that liberated Iraqis were going to greet American troops with sweets and flowers. Wearing a Yankees baseball cap and drinking Coca-Cola does not turn a Palestinian into an American.

  It's one thing for a rising power to make itself a haven for the persecuted and to hold out its institutions of tolerance as an example to be emulated throughout the world. It's an entirely different thing for a global hegemon to take on the task of spreading those institutions to—or imposing them on—the rest of the world without extending American citizenship to foreign populations or in some other way creating a common political identity with them. To the dismay of many well-intentioned Americans, the United States’ recent attempts to export Western tolerance, including free markets and democracy, has provoked the resentment and in some cases violent wrath of millions who see it as imperialism and a threat to their way of life.

  Anti-Americanism is of course most intense in the Islamic Middle East, where Uncle Sam is often portrayed as blood-spattered and shark-toothed, feasting on the flesh of Muslims. The Saudi princess Reem al-Faisal, granddaughter of the late King Faisal, recently delivered a particularly scathing attack: “How dare America look the rest of the world in the face It is time for the American nation to acknowledge its crimes and apologize and ask forgiveness from the many people it has harmed…The U.S. should leave Iraq after apologizing for over a million dead after an unlawful embargo and a colonial war which at best is a farce and at worst a crime.” In Latin America, even pro-market elites such as Oscar Arias Sanchez, a Nobel Prize winner and former president of Costa Rica, protest that America “wants to tell the world what to do. You are like the Romans of the new millennium.”17 Resentment and distrust of the United States extend beyond the developing world. In 2005, a Pew poll of fifteen major countries outside the United States found that a majority of respondents (both collectively and in each country surveyed) would favor “another country challenging America's global military supremacy.”18 According to a 2007 BBC survey, 51 percent of respondents all over the world believed that the United States had a “negative influence on the world,” giving America a less favorable ranking than North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela.19

  Yet people around the world are not lining up to immigrate to North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela. The truth, particularly in poorer parts of the world, is that attitudes toward the United States are deeply schizophrenic—a perverse blend of admiration and envy on one hand and seething hatred and contempt on the other. For millions of Bolivians, Nigerians, Moroccans, and Indonesians around the world, America is arrogant, greedy, preachy, and hypocritical—but also where they would go if only they could. A student in Beijing summarized this attitude nicely. A few weeks after joining other students in a stone-throwing protest in front of the U.S. embassy, he returned to apply for a U.S. visa. Interviewed by U.S. News & World Report, he explained that he was hoping to attend graduate school in America. “If I could have good opportunities in the U.S.,” he said, “I wouldn't mind U.S. hegemony too much.”20

  Could a democratic hyperpower such as the United States enter into a political union with the people all over the world whom it dominates? Realistically, it is difficult to see how. To do so, the United States would have to give up either its national identity, its sovereignty, or its hyperpower status.

  In theory, for example, America could offer every nation in the world an opportunity to become another state in the United States. Possibly, some nations might accept. But if, say, 234 million Indonesians and 190 million Brazilians were to become American citizens, the United States would be a very different country. In any case, this option is politically inconceivable.

  Theoretically, the United States might also throw itself behind a new democratic world government ruled by international institutions under international law. In this scenario, there would still be a hyperpower, but it would not be the United States; it would be the world government to which the United States had ceded authority. Many idealists support a world order of this kind, but at present—especially given the problems plaguing the United Nations and other global institutions—such a scenario is completely unrealistic.

  Indeed, if anything, after 9/11 the United States moved in the opposite direction. In the last several years, it refused to join the International Criminal Court; walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change; and invaded Iraq without UN authorization or the support of traditional NATO allies such as France, Germany, and Canada. None of these actions has improved America's status in the world. Unilateralism is especially problematic for a democratic hyperpower. No one ever expected Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan to give weaker nations a say in world affairs. But a democratic hyperpower is supposed to recognize the principle that everyone in the world has a right to participate and prosper in global society. Unfortunately for the United States, it is decidedly not the rest of the world's impression that America respects this principle.

  THE LAST HEGEMON

  Where does this leave the United States? All the factors so far discussed—the lessons of the old and the face of the new—point in one direction: against an American empire.

  As the first nation of immigrants and the first mature democracy to become a hyperpower, the United States confronts a far more limited set of choices than the Romans or even the British. To begin with, it is by no means clear that an American empire would pass democratic muster at home. The effort to sustain the Iraq war, particularly after the exposure of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the continuing violence in Iraq, quickly exhausted U.S. popular support. Unless there is a stunning turnaround in Iraq, it is unlikely that the American electorate would support continuing aggressively interventionist military policies designed to effectuate regime change and democratization. In this way, Americans are very different from the Victorian British, who took great pride in their imperial role. Perhaps because of their country's own anti-colonial history, most Americans do not wish to see themselves as imperialists—even “enlightened” ones.

  At the same time, as a democratic hyperpower, the United States is fundamentally limited in what it can offer to, and take from, foreign populations. Although America has the power to invade foreign countries and topple their governments, as a practical matter it cannot simply seize local resources—Iraqi oil, for example—or annex their territory. The United States can (and does) offer ballot boxes, model constitutions, troop training, weapons, and billions of dollars in loans and aid. But it cannot (and does not want to) turn these foreign populations into Americans. Yet without some kind of “glue,” America has no means of overcoming the hostile, disintegrative forces that quickly tore apart Achaemenid Persia, the Great Mongol Empire, Tang Chin
a, and every other hyperpower in history that was unable to forge a common political identity that bound the central power with the peoples it dominated.

  Moreover, democracy rests ultimately on legitimacy and consent. An “enlightened” or “liberal” empire may be an impossible feat, precisely because it requires an element of coercion inconsistent with democratic ideals. In June 2003, for example, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, unilaterally canceled local elections, even though the Iraqis were eager and ready to vote. Mr. Bremer based his decision on the grounds that conditions in Najaf were not yet appropriate for elections. A senior official in his office elaborated: “The most organized political groups in many areas are rejectionists, extremists, and remnants of the Ba'athists…They have an advantage over the other groups.” Not surprisingly, the barring of elections in Na-jaf, as well as later postponements of elections elsewhere in the country, produced tremendous anger at America throughout Iraq. This anti-Americanism—not to mention the continuing bombings and beheadings—in turn fueled a wave of hostility within the United States against the “ungrateful” Iraqis and “hopeless” Middle Easterners generally.

  It is hard to imagine how an American empire could possibly flourish or even serve United States interests. In today's world, an aggressively militaristic hyperpower incurs massive costs—whether measured in terms of money spent, lives lost, legitimacy squandered, or hatred provoked—without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past. The face of an American empire is present-day Iraq: hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops caught far from home in the middle of a sectarian war, disliked and targeted on all sides, with no obvious upside or even concrete objective in sight.

  To be clear, this is not an argument for America to embrace pacifism or isolationism. The battle against terrorism may require strong military measures, and the United States could, if it chooses, deploy its armed forces on limited humanitarian missions to prevent ethnic cleansing or other crimes against humanity. The argument rather is against empire building—the use of America's world-dominant military abroad to achieve regime change and remake other nations by imposing American-style institutions. At the same time, trumpeting the United States’ intention to maintain its global hegemony at any cost, including through military means, has only hurt our standing among other nations.

  Instead, the United States would be better off following the formula that served it so well for more than two hundred years. America pulled away from all its rivals by turning itself into a magnet for the world's most energetic and enterprising; by creating a society in which individuals of all ethnicities and backgrounds have an opportunity to rise; by rewarding talent and ingenuity no matter what its source; and finally, with a few notorious exceptions, by shrewdly avoiding unnecessary, self-destructive military entanglements and expansionist adventures overseas. The United States would be far truer to its own history and principles striving to be an exemplar for the world—a “city on a hill”—rather than arrogating to itself the Sisyphean task of remaking societies around the world in its own image.

  But America in the twenty-first century cannot think of itself only as a city on the hill. Having achieved world dominance, America—like every hyperpower that preceded it—is acutely dependent on the cooperation, the contributions, and the goodwill or at least the acquiescence of the foreign populations it dominates. If anything, America is more dependent on the goodwill of foreign populations than the hyperpowers of the past because the global economy is now so extensively interconnected (billions around the world today are America's consumers, suppliers, investors, and laborers), the right of other countries to govern themselves is so well established (so that even a hyperpower cannot impose its will by direct rule), and weapons of mass destruction can now be transported in a backpack.

  Thus the crucial question for the years and decades to come will be whether America can address what I've called the problem of “glue.” Given that America cannot generally extend citizenship to foreign populations, are there other mechanisms through which the United States can, without losing its sovereignty, create a sense of shared purpose or even a kind of common identity with the billions of people around the world it dominates, giving others more of a stake in America's success and leadership?

  This challenge underlies and has implications for some of the most contentious issues in American politics today. I will briefly discuss three of these issues below.

  Immigration. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is U.S. immigration policy. Despite its legacy as a nation of immigrants, America today harbors deep anxieties about the porousness of its borders. These anxieties are driven by both the threat of terrorism and a wider backlash against the influx of immigrants from Latin America. In his provocative book Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington argues that continued immigration, particularly from Mexico, endangers America's unity as well as its core identity as “a deeply religious and primarily Christian country” rooted in “Anglo-Protestant” values. Many, including recent presidential candidates and television hosts, have followed Huntington's lead. CNN's highly popular Lou Dobbs, for example, has warned against the “army of invaders” from Mexico, stealing America's jobs, infecting the country with leprosy, and plotting to reannex the American Southwest.21

  It goes without saying that the United States has a right and a need to restrict immigration. No sensible immigration policy would open the floodgates to unlimited foreigners or sacrifice national security. Nevertheless, the recent fear-mongering ground-swell to shut down America's borders is triply wrongheaded.

  First, if the history of hyperpowers has shown anything, it is the danger of xenophobic backlash. Time and again, past world-dominant powers have fallen precisely when their core groups turned intolerant, reasserting their “true” or “pure” identity and adopting exclusionary policies toward “unassimilable” groups. From this point of view, attempts to demonize immigrants or to attribute America's success to “Anglo-Protestant” virtues is not only misleading (neither the atomic bomb nor Silicon Valley was particularly “Anglo-Protestant” in origin) but dangerous.

  Second, a relatively open immigration policy is one of the most effective mechanisms available for creating goodwill and close ties between the United States and non-Americans. It signals America's receptivity to individuals of all backgrounds. It grants almost a million foreigners annually a right to participate directly in American society, with full citizenship the potential reward for their contributions. It allows many millions more to think of America as a home to their relatives and as a place where they themselves might someday live. Even those “left behind” can benefit tangibly from open American immigration policies. In 2005, foreign-born workers in America sent nearly $40 billion back home; the most popular day of the year for these remittances was Mother's Day.22

  Programs that bring younger foreigners to the United States only temporarily, like the F-visa program for students, can also foster important connections. They offer a glimpse of American society up close and, in many cases, a lifelong identification with an American institution. Above all, they immerse foreign students in American norms and values, which some will carry home with them. Contrary to much thinking after 9/11, such programs can be an effective way to keep Middle Eastern and South Asian students from the radicalism of campuses often dominated by Islamist organizations. To the extent that America seeks to win over the next generation of foreign elites, these opportunities cannot be overlooked.

  Third, and most important, like every world-dominant power before it, the United States is a hyperpower today because it has surpassed all its rivals in pulling in and motivating the world's most valuable human capital. Turning its back on immigration would destroy the very underpinnings of its prosperity and preeminence at a time when, in the words of Google vice president Laszlo Bock, “we are in a fierce worldwide competion for top talent unlike ever before.” The destructive effects of anti-immigration policies might be felt far sooner
than Americans realize. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently testified before a U.S. Senate committee that the United States’ post-9/11 immigration measures are “driving away the world's best and brightest precisely when we need them most.”

  Bock similarly testified before a House subcommittee that tight visa caps are seriously damaging “the ability of U.S. companies to innovate and create the next generation of must-have products and services…Each and every day we find ourselves unable to pursue highly qualified candidates because there are not enough H-1B visas.” Bock added, “Simply put, if U.S. employers are unable to hire those who are graduating from our universities, foreign competitors will. The U.S. scientific, engineering, and tech communities cannot hope to maintain their present position of international leadership if they are unable to hire and retain highly educated foreign talent.”23

  What should America's immigration policy look like in the twenty-first century? Borrowing a page from its own early history and from all the pre-modern hyperpowers, the United States today should pursue a much more aggressive, incentive-based strategy for identifying and attracting immigrants with high-value skills, training, and know-how. At the same time, America should not follow the lead of Germany and other European states in making the recruitment of high-tech workers the sole platform of its immigration policy. Rather, the United States should leave an avenue available to immigrants of all classes and education levels, holding open a significant number of immigration slots in a first-come-first-served or lottery-like system.

  Countless immigrants in the past—including some of the most successful, such as Andrew Carnegie and Eugene Kleiner—have demonstrated the potential contributions of those who came to this country “in rags,” possessing only the drive and ingenuity that allowed them to reach these shores in the first place. Many today believe that they can tell which immigrant groups are the most desirable, the most likely to contribute to American prosperity, the most intelligent and hardworking. But it should be remembered that some of the most successful minorities in the United States today—for example, Chinese and Jewish Americans—were described as unintelligent and unassimilable a hundred years ago.