As careful readers of this blog will remember, I have been focusing on American foreign policy and strategy in my non-fiction reading. Next up on my reading list is Niall Ferguson’s Colossus. In this fascinating work Ferguson makes the argument that America should embrace its empire and seek to use it for good rather than pretend it doesn’t exist and allow the resulting chaos. Those who share my interest in this subject will want to check out this interview with Ferguson posted at Atlantic Unbound. I found it interesting and thought provoking. I can’t wait to dig into the book.
Here is a teaser:
This term you use, “liberal empire,” seems sort of oxymoronic. Can you explain the contradiction?
Well, it certainly didn’t seem oxymoronic a hundred years ago when there were self-proclaimed liberal imperialists in Britain, liberals who saw the British Empire as a means of spreading liberal values in terms of free markets, the rule of law, and ultimately representative government. There was an important and influential faction within the Liberal Party who saw empire as an instrument for globalizing the British liberal model.
Globalizing Britain?
To these people, globalizing the British model was synonymous with globalizing liberalism. They looked around and said, Well, not many people have our combination of institutions. What we need to do is plant the seed of this system in as many places as we can and make the world suitably Anglicized. It’s only a contradiction in terms if you define “liberal” in a rather early-twenty-first-century American way, meaning that you like to hug trees, or you have a fit if somebody fires a gun in anger. My sense of liberal is the classical sense. Liberalism stands for creating the institutions of political, economic, and social freedom. And it’s very obvious that in a dozen or more countries in the world, there is absolutely no chance of those institutions developing autonomously. These countries are either so under tyranny, or so completely anarchic, that it’s never going to happen.
