The new empires that arose in the wake of the First World War were not content with the successful but haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old empires, including the messy mixtures of imperial and local law and the delegation of powers and status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; these were more like "empire states" than traditional empires.
The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions.
Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler accused the British of excessive softness in their treatment of Indian nationalists.
The empire states of the midth century were to a considerable extent the architects of their own downfalls. In particular, the Germans and Japanese imposed their authority on other peoples with such ferocity that they undermined local collaboration and laid the foundations for indigenous resistance. That was foolish, as many people who were "liberated" from their old rulers Stalin in Eastern Europe, the European empires in Asia by the Axis powers initially welcomed their new masters.
At the same time, the territorial ambitions of these empire states were so limitless — and their combined grand strategy so unrealistic — that they swiftly called into being an unbeatable coalition of imperial rivals in the form of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Empires do not survive for long if they cannot establish and sustain local consent and if they allow more powerful coalitions of rival empires to unite against them. Publicly, the leaders of the American and Chinese republics deny that they harbor imperial designs. Both states are the product of revolutions and have long traditions of anti-imperialism.
Yet there are moments when the mask slips. Even if they do not, it is still perfectly possible for a republic to behave like an empire in practice, while remaining in denial about its loss of republican virtue.
The American empire is young by historical standards. Its continental expansion in the 19th century was unabashedly imperialistic. Yet the comparative ease with which sparsely settled territory was absorbed into the original federal structure militated against the development of an authentically imperial mentality and put minimal strain on the political institutions of the republic.
Virgin Islands, which remain American dependencies, U. During the course of the 20th century, the United States occupied Panama for 74 years, the Philippines for 48, Palau for 47, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands for 39, Haiti for 19, and the Dominican Republic for 8. The formal postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan continued for, respectively, 10 and 7 years, though U. Troops were also deployed in large numbers in South Vietnam from , though by they were gone.
This pattern supports the widespread assumption that the U. Empire — especially unstated empire — is ephemeral in a way that makes our own age quite distinct from previous ages. In the American case, however, the principal cause of its ephemeral empire is not the alienation of conquered peoples or the threat posed by rival empires the principal solvents of other 20th-century empires but domestic constraints.
These take three distinct forms. The first can be characterized as a troop deficit. In , when it successfully quelled a major Iraqi insurgency, Britain had one soldier in Iraq for every 23 locals.
Today, the United States has just one soldier for every Iraqis. The problem is not strictly demographic, as is sometimes assumed. For the United States is not short of young people.
It has many times more males aged 15 to 24 than Iraq or Afghanistan. It is just that the United States prefers to maintain a relatively small proportion of its population in the armed forces, at 0.
Moreover, only a small and highly trained part of this military is available for combat duties overseas. Members of this elite group are not easy to sacrifice. Nor are they easy to replace. Each time the newspaper reports the tragedy of another death in action, I am reminded of the lines of Rudyard Kipling, the greatest of the British imperial poets:.
That figure is not much in relation to the size of the U. Other spending priorities, such as the ballooning unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system, have precluded the Marshall Plan for the Middle East that some Iraqis had hoped for.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the American attention deficit. Past empires had little difficulty in sustaining public support for protracted conflicts. The United States, by contrast, has become markedly worse at this.
It took less than 18 months for a majority of American voters to start telling pollsters at Gallup that they regarded the invasion of Iraq as a mistake. Comparable levels of disillusionment with the Vietnam War did not set in until August , three years after U. All kinds of pat theories exist to explain the diminished durability of empires in our time. Some say that the reach of the hour news media makes it too hard for would-be imperialists to conceal abuses of power.
Christianity, too, changed as a result of the Romans. Martyrdom became commonplace and the suffering of Christians came to be considered holy; the more one suffered, it seemed, the closer they came to God. This idea held true well into the modern era. Likewise, Islam arose in the Middle East several hundred years later, in the seventh century C. Islam itself was the basis for the Arab Empire and changed after the death of Mohammed into several sects that survive to this day.
The pressures of an Empire and the thirst for power over nations caused the creation of the divisions in Islam, divisions that survive today all over the world. Architecture is another aspect of cultures inspired by both empire and subject nation. In Spain, there are excellent examples of the influence that the Berbers and Moors, both tribes associated with the Arab Empire, had on the architecture, with the fantastic mosques and castles in various regions of the nation.
Structures built by Arabs found themselves influenced by local peoples in places like Africa, where both conquerors and conquered peoples built structures in slightly modified traditional ways. Rome had similar experiences. The Roman Empire left its mark all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East with their baths, which were centers for public health and for socialization. Some of these baths are still in use today.
The concept may have led to our modern-day spa. However, one of the most famous Roman edifications, the Roman road, did not start out Roman at all.
The art of road building came to the Romans from the Etruscans, another people in Italy, which Rome conquered and fell to over the period of the Roman kingdom and republic.
People in antiquity were certainly aware that civilisations could rise and fall. It is, in a sense, the great geopolitical theme of the Bible. In the Book of Daniel, the prophet dreams that he sees four beasts emerge in succession from a raging sea; and an angel explains to him that each beast represents a kingdom. Gold and purple, in the Bible, are cast as merely the winding-sheets of worldly greatness.
The Greeks, too, with the example of the sack of Troy before them, were morbidly aware how impermanent greatness might be. Herodotus, the first man to attempt a narrative of how and why empires succeed one another that did not look primarily to a god for its explanations, bookends his great history with telling passages on the precariousness of civilisations. I will pay equal attention to both, for human beings and prosperity never endure side by side for long. Then, in the very last paragraph of his history, he provides what is, in essence, the first materialist theory as to why civilisations should succeed and fail.
The Persians, having conquered a great empire, want to move from their harsh mountains to a richer land — but Cyrus, their king, forbids it. Implicit in his narrative, written at a time when Athens was at her peak of glory, is a warning: where other great powers have gone, the Athenians will surely follow. The Romans signalled their arrival on the international stage by fighting three terrible wars with a rival west Mediterranean people: the Carthaginians.
At the end of the third war, in BC, they succeeded in capturing Carthage, and levelling it to the ground. Nevertheless, it is said of the Roman general who torched Carthage that he wept as he watched her burn and quoted lines from Homer on the fall of Troy.
Then he turned to a Greek companion. There were many, as the Romans continued to expand their rule across the Mediterranean, who found themselves hoping that the presentiment was an accurate one.
Rome was a brutal and domineering mistress, and the increasing number of much older civilisations under her sway unsurprisingly felt much resentment of her autocratic ways.
Rome and her empire were engulfed by civil war. In one particular bloody campaign, it has been estimated, a quarter of all citizens of military age were fighting on one side or the other. No wonder that, amid such slaughter, even the Romans dared to contemplate the end of their empire.
But the Roman state did not die. In the event, the decades of civil war were brought to an end, and a new and universal era of peace was proclaimed. Virgil, perhaps because he had gazed into the abyss of civil war and understood what anarchy meant, proved a worthy laureate of the new age.
All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden. In the event, the garden would turn to brambles and weeds. Intruders would smash down the fences. New tenants would carve up much of it between themselves. Yet the dream of Rome did not fade.
Its potency was too strong for that. He was not the first barbarian to find in the memory of Rome — the splendour of its monuments, the vastness of its sway, the sheer conceit of its pretensions — the only conceivable model for an upwardly mobile king to ape.
Indeed, one could say that the whole history of the early-medieval west is understood best as a series of attempts by various warlords to square the grandeur of their Roman ambitions with the paucity of their resources. There was Charlemagne, who not only had himself crowned as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day AD, but plundered the city of pillars for his own capital back in Aachen.
Then there was Otto I, the great warrior king of the Saxons, a hairy-chested lion of a man, who in was also crowned in Rome. The line of emperors that he founded did not expire until , when the Holy Roman empire, as it had first become known in the 13th century, was terminated by Napoleon. Yet the joke was not quite fair.
There had been a time when it was all three. He had himself betrothed to a princess from the Second Rome, Constantinople.
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