by Kevin Carey

G21 Alumnus

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Kevin Carey

Sussex, United Kingdom - As I write, American forces are steadily taking control of Baghdad, marking the end of the second phase of the evolution of the Pax Americana. The first phase started with Pearl Harbour and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a series of messy compromises, close shaves, stand-offs, reverses and disasters with apparently very little to show, but by 1990 the Soviet Union was neutered, the People's Republic of China was learning to come to grips with the reality of international capitalism, Latin America had gone off the boil and Europe was about to line up for an alliance to repel Saddam's intemperate invasion of Kuwait. Iran, Israel and patches of Africa might be troublesome but these, surely, were minor irritants.

The second phase started well with victory over Iraq, although the inability to resist the temptation of over elaboration led directly to the current conflict, but the route to hegemony was unwittingly opened up by the United Nations in three crucial ways: first, it failed to understand its changed role in a post cold war world, obsessed with messy compromise rather than being the pivot of a democratic axis against American dominance; secondly, its self imposed impotence in Bosnia was a televised scandal; and, thirdly, when it turned its back on the turmoil in Rwanda it showed it was not to be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, worst of all, it continued to pass Resolutions at an ever-accelerated rate that it had no intention of enforcing. Like a desperate parent it threatened its children and then failed to carry out a single threat. This culminated in its miserable failure to stop the 'coalition of the willing'. Instead of mobilising opinion to formulate a resolution forcing a US/UK veto, it tamely allowed the US and Britain to formulate Resolutions to which the rest were forced to react.

Yet, even now, American liberals embrace a dual illusion, the virtue of the Security Council and the survival of an ideal domestic republic. What can you say about an organisation with an in-built majority of dictators? What, in a paraphrase of Monty Python's "Life of Brian" did the League or United Nations ever do for anyone? And at home, like Brutus and Cassius in the face of Caesar, they mourn an autonomy, a perfect republic, that died with Woodrow Wilson.

So what are we to do in the face of the commencement of phase three, the consolidation of the Pax Americana?

There are only two real alternatives; to resist or to accept. It will be no easy matter to resist. China is still navel gazing, Russia turbulent below a fragile patina of calm, Japan rotting, Germany stagnant and sullen, France egregiously venal and Britain equivocal. There is no natural leader to act as the facilitator of resistance.

To accept, on the other hand, is to subject potential economic competitive advantage to the grudging concessions masquerading as treaty agreements under the auspices of the captive World Trade Organization (WTO) . The one hope, a coherent European Union, has been fatally damaged not, as is commonly supposed, by French intransigence and German sullenness over Iraq but by a collective failure to pool sovereignty where it counts, in that very same WTO. From the politics of oil to the construction of aircraft, from agricultural subsidies to intellectual property rights and patents in bio-engineering, mutual suspicion in the EU has clouded European focus and blunted its impact. It brings to mind the story of a young legislator who stared across the parliament house to the party opposite; he rubbed his hands and said: "I can't wait to get at the enemy", to which an old stager next to him replied: "No, those over there are the opposition, the enemy is behind you".

Shall we, then, submit to administrative competence, distant wars, sham sovereignty and taxes always higher than we think just? I fear we shall.

The institution of the common European currency was a brave enterprise but it was quintessentially technocratic; there was no real attempt to hammer home its fundamental political significance; and so it is seen as technocratic, accepted with cool indifference as a matter of convenience but not as the harbinger of greater cohesion. No country within the EU dared sell the Euro as a political phenomenon and the cowardice is now bearing its bitter fruit. Any compliance with the Economic Stability Pact will be sour and grudging rather than being seen as a contribution to a more autonomous political future. The EU will temporarily bask in the illusion that its enlargement will make it more powerful but the game is almost over. We are to the Americans what the Greeks were to the Romans.

I have thought for a long time, given the ineptitude of George Bush (though, to be fair, it is exaggerated by his gaucheness; Tiberias without real cunning) that a world coalition to counter America would be, on balance, a benefit to liberal politics all over the world and to the preservation of liberal sentiment within the United States but I fear that what looked viable only five years ago now looks like an illusion.

There will be compensations.

1. First, Washington will ultimately lose patience with the festering sore of the West Bank and will either establish or destroy the two state solution.
2. Secondly, growing empires always spread the exploitation of resources and the sound administration which that requires; millions of Africans will prefer competent satraps to home grown tyrants and even more home grown 'war lords'; there were more people killed in Africa in the three weeks of the Iraqi war than there were in Iraq.
3. Thirdly, almost without noticing, the great power will learn about the world it rules and will volunteer sound ecological and other measures for the sake of an empire it will come to care for.
4. Finally, and critically, values which European liberals pretend to monopolise - the rule of law, democratic government, a degree of consensus, basic private liberties - will reach places they have never reached before.

And the down side? Paradoxically, as values we prize spread across the globe, the United States will become ever less liberal simply because the Presidency will be such a prize that the struggle for it will bring to mind the 'War of the Emperors' in 69 AD. Like the mythical republic he exemplified, Cincinnatus is dead.

Surprisingly, however, I am less worried by the prospect of the arbitrary dictatorship of the powerful than by the creeping dictatorship of the bland, by the Macdonaldisation, the Colafication, and the Disneyfication of the planet.

We can never know the whole extent of the Roman culture that was lost when the Library of Alexandria was systematically sacked and then burned but there is plenty of evidence that after the rise of Augustus Caesar the Roman Empire produced precious little cultural capital from its own resources. There was, for sure, the surviving silver age culture of the Greek part of the Empire and later, of course, the subversive rise of Christianity but the American economic and cultural profile looks uncannily like that of Rome: thorough, pragmatic, unimaginative, the custodian of a more ancient culture rather than the creator of a new one, the preserver of the republican illusion in spite of the reality of the emperor; straight roads, square rations, plain building and plain speaking; the bath over the theatre; the gladiator over the bard; for bread and circuses read burgers and Fox TV.

There are those who argue that globalisation will bring about a local counter-revolution and others who see the Internet as a source of plurality and protest but the underlying history points to the opposite. Roman roads might well have facilitated the easy passage of anarchists but it was mighty useful for the movement of armies and the Internet will be no different.

This gives me no pleasure. Having been born after the end of the Second World War, I have learned to love the European untidiness which was so fatal in the first half of the 20th Century. I am in love with the variety of language, food, painting, headgear, orchestral sound, cigarettes, land management, signposts, wine, sexual mores, folk tunes, buttons, bottles, uniforms, glazing, salutations, hand writing, children's games, sauces, funerals, carpets, type faces, butchering, constitutions, insults, mushrooms, lucky charms, newspapers, bread, occasional tables, mail boxes, theatrical gestures, cheese, carving, restaurants, versions of history, translations, lace, dentistry, borders, pastries and postage stamps, and I am inclined to think, without anything like convincing evidence, that this is better than placid uniformity. But the untidiness will surely survive me and the next generation cannot be expected to prize, out of sentiment, what we have prized out of a deep sense of history. The economist has finally conquered the polymath, the bottom line is now at the top.

For those who disagree, the task is to show how the future may, on balance, be better.

Although I renounced the simplicity of "The end of history" because there will be ongoing disputes about numerous ethical and social questions raised by the advance of technologies which make our cave man bodies look ever more anachronistic, we have to accept that the best of our heterodox minds. The detritus of the great European intelligentsia, have been reduced to nostalgia and grumbling. If the Greeks could not stem the Roman tide, how are we to resist America?

The only answer is within America itself. Power coarsened Roman institutions, empire destroyed its domestic agriculture and made it dependent on Egyptian grain (Middle East oil) and it alternated between bursts of militaristic wars for the imperial throne and, admittedly much longer, periods of dynastic stultification. In other words, those who have most to lose are Americans themselves. A draconian law on political funding would be a handsome beginning, followed by a strong commitment to the world's technical institutions (WHO, UNESCO, etc.) in spite of a quite proper determination to resist the sentimental hogwash with which liberals endow the United Nations as a political organisation. Only realism, not sentiment, will save us from the imperium.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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