Us and Them

What should we make of these facts?

American economists supervise the policies of poor nations in debt to the International Monetary Fund, and the American economy every year presses its ethic of entrepreneurship and creative destruction deeper into Europe, East Asia, and India. American legal scholars and political scientists write constitutions for new governments in Africa and Central Asia, and Americans from financier George Soros's Open Society Institute fund the creation of local civil society.

English is the world's second language: 350 million people are native speakers, but more than a billion have learned enough to strike a bargain or argue about a basketball game. American culture is the other global second language, a shared patois whose vocabulary includes Michael Jordan's face, the ragged beats of hip-hop music, and Baywatch, the world's most popular television program. Immigrants arrive in American airports having already lived much of their imaginary lives between New York and Los Angeles.

Much of the world does not hesitate in its diagnosis: empire. Frontline , a major Indian weekly magazine, titled a 1999 cover article on American foreign policy "Ways of Imperialism." A South African journalist writes of living in "the outer provinces of the empire," and an Arab scholar refers matter-of-factly and without venom to Egypt's incorporation into "the American imperium." The French, with special insistence, lament that "we are being globalized by the Americans." These are not the voices of the far left, and they are not the mouthpieces of governments nursing grudges. They are expressions of a nearly universal perception that the American writ reaches everywhere -- not to govern the world, but to set the terms on which the governance of the next century will take place.

Present an American with this analysis, though, and he will blink in puzzlement. To his eye, the American empire is invisible. It is almost unintelligible to Americans that they could be an imperial power. As a nation, Americans believe deeply in their own innocence: we are a benevolent people, and we make trouble only for those who first make trouble themselves. Empire is the apogee of old-world wickedness. It is to Americans what Oriental despotism was to the European imagination in the nineteenth century -- the cruelty of a degenerate civilization.

In this American image, "empire" means conquest. We have pretty much conceded that the Spanish conquered the Americas, although we insist that we, a bit later, simply settled our portion. The Spanish conquest, with its slaughters and wholesale enslavement, was empire. So was the European powers' carving up of Africa, or the British Raj in India. Those bloody, domineering episodes have nothing to do with us.

Here American skeptics would seem to have a point. Those who think about America's special position in today's world have pressed into service the unsatisfactory term "soft power," meaning roughly that American influence does not follow American armies. Can soft power really be imperial power, protests the American?

The answer is that it can, and it is. The American idea that empire lives by the sword is historically ignorant, and has even less relevance now than ever in the past.

From Rome to Washington

Take the great empire of the West. If an erudite ancient Roman could examine today's evidence, he would lose no time in diagnosing empire. The Roman empire conducted itself in much the same way: it ruled not by terror, but by extending the system of Roman law and, by degrees, the privilege and discipline of Roman citizenship across its vast tracts. What law did not accomplish, culture did: Roman fashions, and especially the Latin language spread throughout the western empire. Roman citizens might have a local language and local loyalties, but they were also members, by law and culture, of a universal imperium. They shared in a commerce that covered the extent of Rome's rule. The empire's authority began in the sword, but it settled in the mind, the tongue, and even the soul. These made it an ideal of order and power long after its government had disintegrated.

Moreover, Rome led with the sword only when necessary, where a primitive people such as the Britons or the Iberians could not be mollified by more subtle means. Rome's governors often preferred indirect rule through pliant local monarchies, alliances with formally independent cities, and even Germanic tribes that retained much of their traditional internal governance. Allowing others' energy to flow to one's own purposes is always more fruitful than directing it there against sullen resistance. "It was," Montesquieu wrote in his history of Rome, "a slow way of conquering." Through new loyalties and gradual shifts in power, an ally "became a subject people without anyone being able to say when its subjection began." Anyone who has watched the IMF huddle with his country's leaders or seen the arrival of a new Cineplex must have an inkling of Montesquieu's meaning. Soft power is not a new reality, but a new word for power's most efficient form.

It is hardly surprising that empire should change its forms in two thousand years. In a time when wealth comes from control of markets and ideas, sovereignty over territory is neither necessary nor sufficient for greatness. Indeed, in a world of demanding citizens and discontented national populations, it can be more an impediment than a boon: witness Russia's ethnic conflicts and China's terrified dance with its poor regions and huge minority populations. Any sensible emperor would want what Rome achieved, without the landmass: an empire where all markets lead to Rome, but the roads can be closed on command.

Pax Romana and the Baywatch Centurions

Still, Americans find resentment of their imperial status comical and unintelligible. They protest, with perfect sincerity, that the rest of the world seems to want American prosperity, American entertainment, American styles and the American language. Of course that is right, as far as it goes; but the Romans understood that power over desire and loyalty can be the most important kind. America exercises two special kinds of power that have nothing to do with blood and conquest.

The first might be called Microsoft power. The real reason Microsoft is ubiquitous is not that it forces its operating system on computer users, but that its very ubiquity creates enormous advantages for a new buyer who choose it over a different system. If everyone else has one sort of stove and you choose another, you lose nothing. But if you choose a different operating system, you cannot trade files, transfer documents, or sit down at nearly any terminal confident that you can manipulate its programs. Microsoft is the vocabulary that gives people access to global flows of communication, information, and commerce. Choosing it is impeccably rational, but it also creates resentment: the chooser knows there are other ways of doing the same tasks, but that they are marginal. And precisely because they are marginal, they will remain marginal. Economists call the advantages of a big information system "network effects," so Microsoft power is the power of big networks to stay big because they create the language in which people get access to each other.

The so-called "language" of Microsoft is one thing. English is another. It is the world's second language because it is to the tongue what Microsoft is to the screen: the way people reach each other across distances of geography and civilization. So also are the trade rules of the WTO -- a set of common terms that open up the world's places to each other. The world of full of networks that people have every reason to join -- but to which, in a real sense, they also have no alternative. And the networks are American, in origin and in idiom. Such a regime can remain invisible to Americans while its power is always and everywhere inescapable to the rest of the world.

If Microsoft power directs free choices in a way that still feels coercive, Baywatch power works more directly on the desires the well up beneath choice. American entertainment is everywhere, and its images are the currency of the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation. Moreover, its culture industry has a century's history of understanding the lowest common denominator of entertainment for a mass audience. For whatever combination of reasons, a child in Delhi knows the arc of a certain basketball player's swoosh and the curves of a Baywatch model -- and in some sense, wants them both.

Baywatch power invites a special kind of resentment. On the one hand, what you desire becomes a part of you, and you move toward it of your own eager will. On the other hand, this Americanized desire is still manifestly foreign to much of the world. It is them and yet it is not. Such power shapes its subjects' appetites and guides their tongues. It directs their gazes to its image of beauty and their convictions to its idea of justice. They cannot easily drive out what they have invited into themselves. They cannot escape what has become a part of them. And so their resistance becomes more insistent as it grows less effective.

The City on a Hill

The great reason Americans are blind to all this is that they have always suspected that they are the world's universal nation. Unlike the French and certain nineteenth-century Germans, they do not possess a theory of why this should be so; rather more like the Victorian English, they simply cannot imagine that it could be otherwise. Americans believe, somewhere below the level of articulation, that every human being is born an American, and that their upbringing in different cultures is an unfortunate but reversible accident.

This idea has a history, now mainly forgotten, that is as old as European settlement in North America. The first English settlers, members of radical protestant sects, famously envisioned the new continent as "a city on a hill," shining the light of its inspiration on the world. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence and a great muse of American democracy, wrote that in the new country men might at last feel universal law in their hearts, so that the code of lawbooks would become superfluous. For Jefferson, the movement of the law from outward codes to inward conviction repeated the transformation from the Old Testament's elaborate strictures to the New Testament's emphasis on conscience. Wherever one looked, Americans were anointing themselves the homeland of universal law.

America also became the homeland of the distinctly modern form of liberty: free self-expression, whether of conscience or of whim. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were full of pessimism about what the fall of aristocracy and the rise of mass culture would mean for human character. The heralds of the new society, such as Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, accepted that greater equality would come at the price of mediocrity and intellectual and spiritual sluggishness. In response, the American prophets of the nineteenth century announced that the end of aristocracy and other hierarchies freed men to look into their own souls and find there as much grace, dignity, and harmony as the courts and refinements of the old order had ever achieved. In the vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, America would become the world's "first nation of men," the first people whose national life would be the unfolding of individuality.

The Americans took this idea from the European ideal of the romantic artist, the unconventional young man of passionate, sincere, and incorrigible feeling. In the new world, however, the idea of self-expression found its home in the free market. The hero of American individuality was not the artist but the inventor, the pioneer, and above all the entrepreneur. Americans look to the market for the finest uses of modern freedom. It is there that we find our heroes, our nobility, and even our saints.

So, when Americans see their version of the market economy spreading through the world, they do not see others forms of life giving way, other civilizations being transformed. The advance of what Europeans are sometimes polite enough to call "the Anglo-Saxon model" of capitalism is to them just the progress of modern life. And when they learn that Baywatch is the most popular program in Iran, it does not cross their minds that this might give a new inflection to Islamic civilization's idea of feminine beauty, erotic satisfaction, or the good life. Of course the world is adopting our market. Of course the world loves Baywatch. These are the natural human desires, that have been inhibited for so long by awkward European politics and the heavy weight of the black chador. At last the rest of the world is becoming fully human.

This American attitude -- one might call it parochial universalism -- has found further comfort in the discipline of economics. In its recently ascendant neo-classical form, economics takes the basic social features of the American market -- individualism, nearly unlimited power of contract, a state that serves mainly to enforce private bargains -- and makes them axioms of the first universally valid science of human behavior. In the United States, economics has expanded its reign to become the most respectable vocabulary for discussions of public policy, legal reasoning, and sometimes even intimate relations. (One eminent American legal scholar has noted without irony that marriage and prostitution are substitute goods -- in the language of economics, they deliver the same satisfaction by different means.) Whatever their other merits, the IMF and the World Trade Organization both reflect the global ascendance of the same version of economic logic. The Americans and American-trained economists who shape these institutions believe in the foreground of their minds that they are applying science, and in the background that they are bringing a retrograde world into full humanity. The suspicion that they are also helping to remake humanity in the image of one nation is buried very deeply indeed.

Owning up to Empire

It is an article of contemporary faith that empire is an altogether bad thing. However that may be, it is certain that there is no virtue in ignoring empire when it in fact exists. The ruler does not become a saint by insisting on his innocence and powerlessness.

Already, Americans' belief that they are humanity's natural future has divided the world, as viewed from Washington and New York, into two camps. On the side of angels are all the peoples who are rapidly and inevitable becoming us: the Europeans, the Koreans and Japanese, the Chinese if we can manage a decade of free trade with them, and the Indians if they don't descend into subcontinental civil war. We blink over the battles that America's soft-power empire is already stirring in those places, and the stern nationalism that is rising in some of them.

On the other side are the barbarians: those whose violence and seeming indifference to our charms puts them outside the scope of ordinary moral concern. The slaughters of sub-Saharan Africa and the jihad of militant Islam seem so far from the American idyll that we make sense of them by believing them entirely different from us. We cannot reason with them, because we speak a language of pragmatism guided by principle, while they operate on primitive or violent appetites. They only understand violence. If we approach them too closely, they will destroy us. We have joined our imperial predecessors in believing that humanity is divided between those whose destiny is to join us and those who reason only by the sword. One half of the world has nearly become what we are; the other has no hope of joining us, and so we can make no moral sense of it.

So, paradoxically, for Americans to admit our imperial status would be a humbling act. It would wrench us from our complacent idea that we were born the universal people, and open our eyes to all the ways that we are instead making ourselves into an imperial nation. We might then see some of the complexity and danger that our time brings. We might admit the ambiguous and traumatic character of the cultural change that is taking place everywhere. The longer we remain invisible to ourselves, the greater the chance that our empire will be judged one of history's crimes. For false innocence is a crime, and invisibility is no excuse.