A decade of imperial decline

There are valuable lessons to be learnt from the first decade of the 21st century.

To order history in decades is hard because large changes in the world don’t usually pay much attention to round numbers. But the Noughties, the first years of this century, neatly contain within themselves the end of American empire. If the 20th century was America’s, the 21st has begun with a decade of disclaimers about its dominance.

Y2K as metaphor
Who remembers Y2K? It’s a footnote now, but at the time the 20th century looked like ending in apocalypse because lazy programming had abbreviated the four-digit year number into two digits. The Y2K problem, apart from being a crisis, was also a metaphor for the American century: so complete was America’s ownership of the world that a trivial coding error by American programmers threatened to shut down the world. And this ownership was both geopolitical and technological. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War in 1989, we were told that we lived in a unipolar world. Once the Japanese economic miracle slowed and fizzled, and the early optimism about the European Union as a cohesive power bloc dissipated, we tended to believe it.

All hail America
The Neocon Nineties had American military power, under the auspices of Nato, setting the world to rights. There was the first Iraq War that liberated Kuwait and then the aerial bombardment in Bosnia and Herzogovina that produced the Dayton Accords. Four years later President Clinton sanctioned the massive Nato bombing of Serbia/Yugoslavia in a bid to throw the Serbs out of Kosovo, a war that was then described as the ‘first humanitarian war’. These military adventures were the first fruit of the doctrine of liberal interventionism which took American hegemony for granted. Regardless of whether policymakers believed in Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of history coming to an end in some Anglo-American heaven of market democracy, or favoured, instead, Samuel Huntington’s opposed thesis where he foresaw a clash of civilisations, they were all persuaded that America was destined to rule the world.

When Muslim terrorists flew two airliners into the WTO towers on the 11th of September, 2001, the first decade of the new millennium seemed set to sustain the status quo of the previous century. The wickedness of the act consolidated America’s grip on the world’s moral imagination. Afghanistan was invaded and occupied and less than two years later a coalition of the willing, led by the US, attacked Iraq and overran it. Neither invasion was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. The Noughties, even more than the Nineties, seemed to presage a time of unbridled American power.

The end of multilateralism?
In the first five years of this decade, multilateralism led by the United Nations seemed headed for extinction, replaced partly by Nato as global policeman and partly by the Anglosphere, an informal but extremely close-knit alliance of the US, Britain and Britain’s white settler colonies. The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were primarily supported by soldiers from English-speaking countries: Canada, Australia and Britain. The reluctant French were lampooned as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and liberal interventionism began to seem like a muscular Anglo-American project. American and English editorialists began to differentiate between the Anglosphere’s attitudes towards issues as diverse as freedom and capitalism from those of its European allies. The ‘West’ began to seem like an Anglophone invention.

Thus Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard began to distinguish their zeal for freedom from the realpolitik practiced by France and Germany. Anglo commentators and economists criticised France’s dirigiste capitalism from the vantage point of the more market-oriented (and therefore more virtuous) capitalism favoured by Britain, Australia and America. When American marines helped Iraqis topple Saddam Hussein’s statue in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003, America and its English-speaking auxiliaries seemed to carry all before them.

Dance on the dark side
Then things went pear-shaped. The military occupations went horribly wrong: no weapons of mass destruction were found and bin Laden was never captured. What the Americans did manage was the destruction of civil society in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the total wrecking of their economies. The Anglosphere’s much-trumpeted commitment to human rights and political freedom was discredited both by its willingness to employ torture, kidnapping and illegal imprisonment as instruments of policy and by its acquiescence in Israel’s violence in Gaza and its continuing encroachment on the West Bank and Jerusalem. Abu Ghraib, orange suits and Guantanamo became bywords for America’s readiness to dance on the dark side.

The foundation crumbles
But even this could have been withstood, if America had seen the decade out with its economy intact. George Bush’s ‘surge’ had bought America time with which to plan a non-shambolic retreat from Iraq and the election of Barack Obama seemed to signal a reburnishing of America’s moral credentials. But when in 2008 the American economy tanked and its principal institutions — its banks and its biggest companies — had to be bailed out with public money, the very foundations of the market capitalism that the Anglosphere had bet its house on were called into question. Two years after the meltdown, European economies like Iceland and Ireland and Greece and Spain are still struggling with the prospect of bankruptcy while the American economy struggles to grow despite the stimulus. The idea of a market-oriented democracy survives: not as the end of history but as one historical arrangement among many.

Acid test
And it doesn’t always survive in seemly or dignified ways. Nothing, perhaps, has tested America’s reputation as an open society as much as the recent uproar over the WikiLeaks disclosures. To have the US Attorney General threatening to extradite and prosecute a foreign national for publishing classified information given to him by others, to watch American companies like Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and Paypal supinely cave in to government pressure and withhold financial and network services from WikiLeaks, to see Senator Joseph Lieberman threatening the New York Times with legal action for having behaved like a bad ‘citizen’ in publishing WikiLeaks’s revelations, to read about the original leaker, Pvt Bradley Manning, spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement for months on end without having been convicted, is to watch a liberal democracy consume itself in public view. To look on as the country that made the Internet possible, that made digital information the connective tissue of the contemporary world, wages war against a website is to witness a great nation lose its sense of itself.

Made in China
And all the while, in the midst of this economic and political wreckage, one behemoth continued to grow. A formally communist and politically authoritarian state began to be seen as the second pole in a world that was, till recently, uni-polar. Revisionist histories of the turn-of-the-century might well conclude that America’s misadventures in West Asia, its war on ‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ were elaborate diversions from the central challenge before it: the rise and rise of the People’s Republic of China. For global bystanders, the spectacle of a country as removed from ‘Western values’ as China owning the lion’s share of American debt, is both piquant and instructive.

History lessons
What this tableau and the last decade ought to teach us is not schadenfreude or some glib notion that the West is dead and America vanquished. No, what we should have learnt from living out the last 10 years is a series of lessons. First, Western liberal democracies have the most violent foreign policies in the world. Second, when we speak of ‘Western liberal democracy’, the emphasis should always be on the first word. The Anglosphere and the violent alliances it has led should have taught us that what these countries primarily share aren’t democratic values but a white, English-speaking sense of oneness. This lesson ought to shape the foreign policies of countries like ours. It should lead us to treat any talk of India being part of some global concert of democracies with extreme suspicion because what this amounts to is being co-opted into America’s wars and geo-political manoeuverings in return for which America will agree to treat us as honorary whites. This is not a condition to which Indians ought to aspire.

The close of this decade should fill us with relief that we survived these 10 years with our economy intact and our foreign policy unentangled in American adventures. Prudent politicians stayed out of the Iraq war when many influential voices in our power elite urged us to put boots on the ground. Sensible civil servants like the governor of the Reserve Bank avoided the excesses of Western financial ‘innovations’ when private bankers urged India to go with the flow. We’ve done well for ourselves at the start of this century by keeping the rhetoric of Western ‘values’ and ‘common sense’ at arm’s length: as we enter its second decade, there’s no pressing reason to change.

Mukul Kesavan’s most recent book was The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions; he teaches History at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi