At the risk of being simply Guardian west today, here are two pieces worth considering from that paper: columnist Madeline Bunting, facing “one of those interminable [imperial] feasts” with Iraq as the “antipasto,” asks two important questions of us, “Will the empire corrupt and/or bankrupt the republic?” and “Can a consumer culture support empire?”
Little has been said here about what may be happening to what’s left of our American republic. But can there be any question that empires abroad that involve massive military garrisoning, as ours does, tend to end up by garrisoning the “homeland” as well. Months ago, with a flurry of discussion of whether we were the New Rome (that was before the cover of the New York Times magazine section informed us that American Empire was us and we should simply “get used to it”), a few writers did manage to invoke the “crossing of the Rubicon” that essentially brought the Roman Army back to Rome as a conquering force. But somehow all that’s died away. I suppose we’re getting used to it, which actually means watching one tiny Rubicon after another be forded by the forces of the imperium. (Of course, the Supreme Court offered us all a hand in crossing the first of those Rubicons on this round of empire.)
You can’t dump staggering, globally unprecedented sums of money into your military, mobilize armies so large they make the clashes in the recent Tolkien films look underdone, and only dream of more of the same, without militarizing your own society. And so, as one of our well-known writers likes to say, it goes. But with it goes republicanism (not Republicanism). It’s a subject that should, of course, be front and center in our consciousness.
I’ve included a nice companion piece to Bunting’s (which initially looks like a parochial Brit piece, but read on), also from the Guardian, by Todd Gitlin on this administration’s imperial and imperious disdain for Europe at the moment and what to make of it. Tom
Beginning of the end
The US is ignoring an important lesson from history – that an empire cannot survive on brute force alone
By Madeleine Bunting
Monday February 3, 2003
The GuardianThere are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these days, as his grey, haggard features after last week’s diplo-marathon indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun to niggle – those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly nice to him. He’s a “great statesman” now, one of the “greatest prime ministers”; it’s when things are getting really bad – you’re dying, for instance – that people start being this nice.
People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair – they don’t buy his arguments on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly appreciate the enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment in post-second world war British foreign policy has fallen to his watch.
There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these days, as his grey, haggard features after last week’s diplo-marathon indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun to niggle – those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly nice to him. He’s a “great statesman” now, one of the “greatest prime ministers”; it’s when things are getting really bad – you’re dying, for instance – that people start being this nice.
People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair – they don’t buy his arguments on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly appreciate the enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment in post-second world war British foreign policy has fallen to his watch.
To read more Bunting click here
Europe? Frankly, America doesn’t give a damn…
The ‘cowboys’ in the White House were raised in an anti-European culture
By Todd Gitlin
February 3, 2003
The GuardianAcross the vast and tangled expanse of the United States of America, these days it isn’t hard to spot disdain and contempt for that reputedly miasmic entity known in Washington as “Europe”. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brought these sentiments to a boil recently when he dismissed the anti-war climate of “Old Europe”, meaning the French and German governments. “Old” in his lexicon means loser: not virile, not vigorous, incapable of defending itself against marauders. Old Europe is a museum of that wretched and bloody “history” which Francis Fukuyama famously declared to have “ended”.
Rumsfeld’s disdain is as old as America, an extension of Europe, which in a certain sense founded itself as the anti-Europe – democratic and neither royal nor aristocratic, vigorous and not effete, pragmatic and not committed to hidebound tradition.
Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, is the author of Media Unlimited and the forthcoming Letters to a Young Activist