Empires Apart (79 page)

This was illustrated more dramatically in the American invasion of Iraq. Troops from client states like Britain, Spain, Italy and Australia joined America's war in much the same way as troops from Russia's client states joined the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia – because they saw the world through the same ideological prisms. Since its first attacks on the Barbary pirates the United States has been able to persuade other nations that its interests are the same as theirs. America's allies reimbursed $54bn of the $61bn cost of the first Gulf War. Although the US was unable to garner such financial support for the second war, British troops continued in their role as America's ghurkhas.

While most western leaders would deny that the invasion of Iraq was an act of ‘imperialism' some Americans hailed it as what came to be called ‘neo-imperialism'. Neo-imperialists argue that the fundamental objective of American foreign policy must be the security of the homeland and that this can only be achieved by possessing, and being willing to use, overwhelming military superiority. Such a doctrine is of course not at all ‘neo'; it incorporates the conviction of the early Puritans that Americans are a specially chosen people, with the confidence in their own invulnerability that emerged after the Mystic Massacre, the ability to manufacture ‘threats to security' like those used to justify the invasion of Florida and the doctrines of total war personified by Sherman in the Civil War.

Like America's traditional imperialism, its neo-imperialism is fundamentally military, but its proponents do not see it that way. They picture an empire that everyone would want to join, an alliance of democracies aspiring to the American way of life and over whom the United States would exercise a benign tutelage. In the words of William Seward, secretary of state after the Civil War, the American empire would ‘expand not by force of arms but by attraction'.

The belief that US imperialism is qualitatively different from everybody else's goes right back to the Monroe Declaration and beyond, to the yearning for empire that contributed to the revolutionary fervour of America's Founding Fathers. America gained its liberty by force and Americans instinctively understand the yearning of other people for ‘national liberation'. What they so often cannot understand is that for other nations liberty includes the right not to live as Americans live. Time after time the US has helped people struggle against oppression, only to find that those they have helped refuse to live by the rules America wants them to follow. That these guerrillas turn against the very forces that helped create them was astonishing to US strategists in Afghanistan as it had been to their predecessors in the Philippines a century earlier. Prestowitz comments that Americans ‘are simply not good imperialists' because they are too eager to be liked.

From a historical perspective, what is odd is that Prestowitz sees today's American imperialism as new. He himself was a member of the Reagan administration that invaded Grenada. The US has always sought to impose its will on the world by military means if other means are unsuccessful; why this imperialism appears to be ‘neo' is because for most of the twentieth century military force has not been necessary; corporate power has been sufficient. In the period between the end of the Spanish-American War and the end of the cold war it was easy to believe that American imperialism had died. It is with hindsight that the continuities between the classic imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ‘new' imperialism of the twenty-first century can be
seen. But hindsight requires accurate history, and that in turn requires the distortions of ideology to be stripped away.

It is a commonplace that communist ideologists saw only what they wanted to see, distorting reality to fit their preconceptions. What is less commonly accepted is that to some extent everyone does so. Even as informed an observer of Russian history as Robert Daniels could write: ‘There is no American comparison with the way the Soviets enforce conformity to the official ideology, deny any discrepancy between theory and reality, and claim that the current interpretation of theory is the version that has always been valid.' And yet American leaders have repeatedly claimed that their vision of democracy has descended unchanged from the men who fought for independence from Britain, men who in fact were fighting to be allowed to continue to own slaves, to conquer the territory of their neighbours and to protect themselves against corporate power. The ideology of democracy in America has changed almost beyond recognition, and at each step those with alternative interpretations have been sidelined or even persecuted.

History is written from the moment it starts. Participants put an immediate spin on events and motives. Contemporary observers have their own agendas and each generation adds its own gloss. Historical balance tips one way or another as preoccupations change. Democracy is a fundamental part of the American ideology, so its history is taught in every school. On the other hand terrorising natives is no longer part of American life and memories of it have long disappeared. It is unsurprising, therefore, that American history texts devote much more attention to the town hall meetings in New England than to the Mystic Massacre. History may be consciously falsified, but more commonly unacceptable memories simply fade away.

Not only are ideologically unacceptable realities written out of history, but ideologically acceptable myths are written in. Kevin Phillips points out how the Confederate version of the civil war has become
the accepted wisdom in large parts of the United States; for example, Kentucky is now regarded as a southern state and contains seventy-two Confederate monuments and just two Union monuments, but in reality Kentucky was overwhelmingly pro-northern: 90,000 men from the state fought to abolish slavery, against 35,000 fighting to defend it.

The impact of ideology on perceptions of history is illustrated by the impact of religion. Modern religious fundamentalists worry that society is becoming increasingly irreligious. American fundamentalists strive to return their nation to its original beliefs, to a time when all men were God-fearing and the only law was the Bible. While it is true that the original settlers in Massachusetts and Connecticut were often what today would be called fundamentalist, this was not true of most early colonists, whether in the south or in places like Maine, Rhode Island and New York. Religious observance has actually increased: 17 per cent of Americans stated some religious adherence in 1776, rising to 34 per cent in 1850, 45 per cent in 1890, 56 per cent in 1926, 62 per cent in 1980 and 63 per cent in 2000. Each morning American schoolchildren repeat a ‘pledge of allegiance', which includes a commitment to ‘one nation under God'. This sounds like a phrase redolent of history, but in fact the words ‘under God' were only added in 1954. One modern poll found that three out of five Americans believe in the literal truth of the story of Noah's Ark; by contrast, seven of the nine Founding Fathers had doubts about the divinity of Jesus.

Professional historians seek to strip away the accretions of ages but add their own preconceptions and bias. They face an often overwhelming need to demonstrate that their efforts are ‘relevant', that history has lessons to teach. Attempts are made to interpret history to justify contemporary actions or political programmes. Russian history provides numerous examples. In the mid-nineteenth century there were fierce arguments about the origins of peasant communes. Westernisers argued that Russian peasants like everyone else were inherently individualists, and that communes were a tsarist imposition to make tax collection easier. The nationalistic Slavophiles argued that the communes had
always existed and that communal living demonstrated the superiority of Russian culture over the atomised culture of the west. Purportedly the debate was about historical fact, but the arguments were based on political prejudice rather than historical research.

There is an inevitable temptation for historians to use their expertise to smooth the road of progress. The most explicit western proponent of the view that history and historians exist to serve the purpose of the state was John Robert Seeley, the British historian whose religious views provoked the ire of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Russian ideologue of autocracy. Seeley claimed that history should be seen as a science whose function was to solve political problems. In his case the solution that history produced to many of the world's problems was British imperialism. (Nowadays Seeley is remembered, if he is remembered at all, neither for his views on religion nor his views on the role of historians but for a single remark: that Britain had acquired its empire ‘in a fit of absence of mind', a comment sometimes applied, wholly inappropriately, to the United States.)

The historian Richard Pipes did much to change the west's perception of tsarism (and in the process incurred the wrath of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who angrily disputed the parallels Pipes drew between tsarism and Stalinism). In later life Pipes agreed to head a commission for President Reagan that investigated the Soviet Union's supposed ultra-secret and ultra-effective missile programme. The commission found no evidence for such a programme for the simple reason that it did not exist (as the Soviet specialists at the CIA told Pipes at the time, and as was to be proved definitively when the Soviet empire finally collapsed and its research secrets were revealed). Nevertheless Pipes, using his claimed expertise in understanding the Russian mind, developed the novel theory that as the Soviets wanted such a programme to exist it must indeed exist or be close to existing. On this basis Reagan commissioned the enormously expensive Star Wars programme to meet this non-existent threat. (The parallels with the imaginary weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq are obvious.)

The real role of historians is not to explain the present or predict the future but delve below what people imagine happened in the past, to push away the prisms of transient ideologies and identify historical patterns with all their continuities and discontinuities. In doing so it is tempting to focus on the apparent discontinuities – the great, epic transformations like the American and Russian revolutions. But in reality the great paradigm shifts of history are rare, and many that seem to be such at the time prove with hindsight to have had remarkably little impact. In the 1920s and '30s many historians believed that the Bolshevik revolution had been one of the most momentous events in human history; it seems much less important now.

In Russia continuities in history are taken for granted; for centuries dynasties have passed political power from one generation to another, and the values of one era flow seamlessly into the next. In the United States the situation is different: as presidential power peacefully transfers every four or eight years, the reign of each new president looks like a new beginning. Whereas the last tsars fought a losing battle to preserve untouched the whole panoply of values inherited from their ancestors, modern American presidents can pick and choose the ‘traditional values' they wish to claim as their own. The values that underlay the ethnic cleansing and slavery of the early colonies have disappeared, and new corporatist values that would have confounded the Founding Fathers have taken their place.

Despite a few examples like Adams I and II and Bush I and II (one of the Bushes stood as presidential or vice-presidential candidate in six of the seven elections between 1980 and 2004), family dynasties are not a fundamental part of American political life. Some powerful patrician families have provided an element of continuity within the political establishment, and this dynastic element has been particularly noticeable in the evolution of American foreign policy, but dynasties in America are incidental to the system of government, not inherent. The long-established political and business establishments of New England and New York have guided the nation's gradual transition from the crude
imperialism of the early colonies to the corporate imperialism of today, but they do not form an inherited ruling class. Russian autocracy under the tsars was not only a dictatorship but a family dictatorship, and this bound the nation together. There is no real equivalence in America where the continuities are far less evident.

In Russia the continuities persisted even after the Romanov dynasty disappeared. Since before the Mongols Russian society has been controlled by a few powerful men who have put their own interests ahead of everyone else. They may have proclaimed different ideologies but the ‘Great' tsars – Ivan, Peter, Catherine – would have recognised the soul of Stalin's Russia. And above all they would have recognised his imperial ambitions. In terms of both political ambition and personal character Stalin had compelling parallels with the likes of Ivan the Terrible or even Peter the Great. The political pygmies who followed Stalin, and under whom the communist dynasty decayed away, have their own parallels in a stream of forgotten tsars. Perhaps Russia is now undergoing a paradigm shift, but recent military adventures in the Caucasus would suggest that the yearning for empire continues undimmed.

In the case of America the continuities are also clear but largely ignored. The values that led Englishmen, and a few women, to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic in order to impose their dreams on a hostile new world are the values that led their successors on to the Pacific and led corporate America on to conquer much of the globe. Ideological certainty, technological superiority and sheer scale as much as military might have carried the Stars and Stripes to the four corners of the world.

But some things do change. The election of Barack Obama demonstrates that the soul of twenty-first-century America is radically different from the soul of the nation that stumbled into civil war in the nineteenth century. The election of a black man as president of the United States would have been unthinkable even to those struggling against segregation a generation ago. Obama has seen the reality of American imperialism first hand (in his memoirs he describes the crushing impact on his stepfather of the CIA-sponsored coup in Indonesia), but even for Obama overcoming racism
may prove to be easier than abandoning imperialism. Obama is often likened to John F. Kennedy, who raised similar expectations when he hurdled a lower barrier to become the first Catholic president – but went on to authorise the failed invasion of Cuba and plunge into war in Vietnam. When President Medvedev asserted that Russia had the right to intervene in Georgia because in the nations on its borders Russia had a ‘privileged interest', Obama, like most westerners, reacted angrily. And yet the Russian president was just applying to the Russian empire his own equivalent to the Monroe Doctrine, a doctrine Obama himself implicitly endorsed with his campaign attacks on the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. Obama's support for the expansion of Nato and stationing US missiles in Poland suggests that the vision of two competing empires is still as potent in Washington as in Moscow.