The Wilson Quarterly

Will Globalization Make Hatred More Lethal?

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

"Link found between hatred and killing" is not a headline that would sell many newspapers. But you might turn a few heads with "Link between hatred and killing changes in ominous way." Or--to put a finer point on it--"Ratio of killing to hatred slated to rise." This is one of the biggest stories of the last 30 years and, probably, the next 30 years: the growing lethality of hatred.

Why has terrorism become public enemy number one? The most common answer--the rise of a brand of radical Islam that uses terror as its weapon -- -is true insofar as it goes. But the reason this weapon is so scary is that something deeper has changed: technology now makes it possible for clusters of intensely hateful people to cause thousands, even millions, of deaths without using the political or military machinery of a state. Yes, the hateful people most likely to exploit this fact today are radical Muslims, but even if this threat subsides, the generic threat will remain: hatred is more lethal than it used to be. And the underlying technological trends will persist over the next three decades, making it more lethal still.

Some of these trends are fairly obvious. Tools for making biological weapons -- -fermenters, centrifuges, gene sequencers- -- infiltrate the industrial and academic landscape as biotechnology evolves. And, though the spread of weapons-grade nuclear material doesn't have a similarly strong intrinsic impetus, regulation that would stop it has been lacking. Meanwhile, the emerging field of nanotechnology may bring the inorganic equivalent of bioweapons: self-replicating, invisibly destructive microscopic machines.

But such obviously lethal technologies are only half the problem. There is also the insidious influence of information technology. Infotech, notably the internet, makes recipes for weapons available to ever-wider circles. It is also a handy administrative aide for the terrorist on-the-go. It lets a terrorist group stay fluidly, elusively intact and then suddenly focus its energies to mount attacks.

What could be worse than a world in which technology is making grass-roots hatred more massively lethal? A world in which technology threatens to raise the amount of hatred as well.

The personal computer lets al Qaeda cheaply generate polished recruiting videos, while the transmission of video gets easier, moving from videotape to DVD to streaming media. Among the emerging niches in the ultra-narrowcasting ecosystem of online video and audio: terro-vangelist. And the blogosphere, though potentially a medium for cross-cultural communication, tends to reinforce tribalism, as people settle into cocoons of the like-minded. (Witness the American left and right.)

Fifty years ago, a reasonable lodestone of foreign policy was to make sure all foreign governments either like us or fear us. Today that won't suffice, because foreign governments no longer mediate all major threats to national security. Essential elements of future security range from the tough international regulation of lethal technologies to a new kind of focus on human well-being around the world. To the extent that people -- -Muslim or non-Muslim- -- feel bitterly resentful, feel alienated or exploited by America or by globalization, we're all in trouble.

And maybe policy, though crucial, won't be enough. Hatred and intolerance are moral, even spiritual, problems. Great moral and spiritual change tends to emanate from somewhere other than legislatures. Unfortunately, that's one of the few things you can confidently say about it. This part of the solution isn't nearly as predictable as the problem.

Will Great Cities Survive?

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

For the first time in human history, a majority of the earth's population lives in cities. But though great cities have been among humanity's supreme achievements down through the ages, they now face an uncertain future, threatened by forces that could undermine the very things that have made them great.

On November 8, 1519, Bernal Dfaz del Castillo saw a sight that would stay with him forever. Serving under Hernando Cortes, the 27-year-old Spanish soldier had already encountered signs of urban civilization that multiplied as he and his comrades marched from the humid lowlands of Mexico up into the volcanic highlands. (In a hint of what was to come, he noted "piles of human skulls" arranged in neat rows atop the provincial temples.) Then, suddenly, a city of almost unimaginable scale appeared, built high in the mountains on a lake crowned by a circle of volcanic peaks. Dfaz beheld broad causeways filled with canoes, avenues where every kind of produce, fowl, and utensil was being sold, elaborate flower-decked homes, large palaces, and temples rising bright in the Mexican sun:

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to do or say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, were great cities; and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico.

The sights Dfaz saw that November day were such as have always inspired human beings encountering great cities. His was the reaction of a Semitic nomad in the presence of the walls and pyramids of Sumer 5,000 years earlier, or a Chinese provincial official entering Loyang in the seventh century B.C., or a Muslim pilgrim arriving by caravan at the gates of ninth-century Baghdad, or an Italian immigrant in the early 20th century spying the awesome towers of New York from the deck of a steamer.

Cities are humanity's greatest creation. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species and testify to our ability to reshape the natural environment in profound and lasting ways. Cities compress and unleash the creative urges of humanity. They are the places that, over the course of five to seven millennia, have generated most of our art, religion, culture, commerce, and technology.

Some cities started as little more than clusters of villages, which over time grew together and developed mass. Others have reflected the vision of a high priest, ruler, or business elite following a general plan to fulfill some great divine, political, or economic purpose. Cities have been built in virtually every part of the world, from the highlands of Peru to the tip of southern Africa and the coasts of Australia. The oldest permanent urban footprints are believed to be in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The founding experiences of the Western urban heritage occurred there and in a plethora of subsequent metropolises -- including Ur, Agade, Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis, Knossos, and Tyre. Many other cities sprang up independently of these early Mesopotamian and Mediterranean settlements, and some of them, such as Mohenjo Daro and Harappa in Pakistan, and Chang'an in China, achieved a scale and complexity equal to that of any of their Western contemporaries. Indeed, for many centuries after the fall of Rome, these "Oriental" capitals were among the most advanced and complex urban systems on the planet. Urbanism must be approached not as a largely Western phenomenon but as one that has worn many different guises reflective of some greater universal human aspiration.

The primary locus of world-shaping cities in each region of the globe has shifted over and over again, and the often rapid rise and fall of great cities was already familiar to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.:

For most of those which were great once are small today. And those that used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.

By Herodotus's time, some of the greatest and most populous cities of the past (Ur, Nineveh) had declined to insignificance, leaving little more than the dried bones of what had once been thriving urban organisms. Babylon, Athens, and Syracuse were then in their glorious prime; within a few centuries, they would be supplanted by Rome and Alexandria.

What makes cities great, and what causes their gradual demise? I believe that three critical factors above all have determined the overall health of cities: the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and the animating role of commerce. When these factors are present, urban culture flourishes; when they weaken, cities decline.

Religious structures -- temples, cathedrals, mosques, pyramids -- have long dominated the landscape of great cities. These buildings once marked the city as a sacred place, connected directly to divine forces controlling the world. In our secularly oriented times, cities seek to recreate the sense of sacred place through towering commercial buildings and evocative cultural structures that inspire a sense of civic patriotism or awe, without the comforting suggestion of divine guidance.

Defensive systems have also played a critical role in the ascendancy of cities, which, first and foremost, must be safe. Many cities, observed the historian Henri Pirenne, first arose as places of refuge from marauding nomads, or from the general lawlessness that has beset large portions of the globe throughout history. When a city's ability to guarantee safety declines, as occurred in the last years of the western half of the Roman Empire, or during the crime-infested last decades of the 20th century, urbanites migrate to a safer urban bastion -- or retreat to the hinterlands.

Yet sanctity and safety alone cannot create great cities. Priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats may provide the prerequisites for urban success, but they themselves cannot produce enough wealth to sustain a large population for a long period of time. That requires an active economy of artisans, merchants, working people, and, sadly, in many places throughout history, slaves. Since the advent of capitalism, these disparate groups, necessarily the vast majority of urbanites, have emerged as the primary creators of the city.

To be successful today, urban areas must resonate with the ancient fundamentals -- they must be sacred, safe, and busy. What was true 5,000 years ago, when cities housed a tiny portion of humanity, is still true in this century, the first in which a majority of the earth's population are urban dwellers. The world's urban population was only 750 million in 1960, grew to three billion by 2002, and is expected to surpass five billion in 2030. These swelling ranks face a vastly changed environment, in which the most powerful urban area must compete not only with other large places, but also with an ever wider array of smaller cities, suburbs, and towns.

In the past, size allowed cities to dominate the economies of their hinterlands. Today, the very girth of the most populous megacities -- Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, Mumbai, Kolkata, Spo Paulo, Jakarta, Manila -- is often more a burden than an advantage. In some places, these urban giants have been losing out to smaller, better-managed, less socially beleaguered settlements. In East Asia, for example, the critical nursery of 21st-century urbanism, Singapore, has integrated itself into the global economy more successfully than the far more populous Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila.

In the Middle East, megacities like Cairo and Tehran have suffered trying to keep pace with their exploding populations, while smaller, more compact centers such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi have flourished. Dubai, a dusty settlement of 25,000 in 1948, saw its population approach one million by the end of the century, yet it has avoided the economic stagnation that afflicts most of the Arab world. Cosmopolitan attitudes, such as those in Dubai, continue to have a major impact in determining the success of cities. In the past, openness to varied cultures and the clever employment of talent helped relatively small cities such as Tyre, Florence, and Amsterdam play outsize roles. Similarly, in the 21st century, a small cosmopolitan city such as Luxembourg, Singapore, or Tel Aviv often wields more economic influence than a sprawling megacity.

As the 20th century drew to a close, megacities in the advanced countries seemed to be enjoying brighter economic prospects. There was a statistically small but notable increase in residential development in some long-abandoned downtowns. Many observers asserted that the most cosmopolitan "world cities" -- London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and San Francisco -- had indeed irrevocably "turned the corner." "Neither Western civilization nor Western cities," remarked the historian Peter Hall, "show any sign of decay." This new optimism rested largely on the impact of global integration and the worldwide shift from a manufacturing-based to an information-based economy.

But the upbeat assessment may be replacing the excessive pessimism of the 1960s with a magnified sense of optimism. Even the most evolved "global cities" now find the advantages of scale diminished by the rise of new technologies that, in the words of the anthropologist Robert McC. Adams, have accomplished "an awesome technological destruction of distance." The ability to process and transmit information globally, and across great expanses, undermines many traditional advantages enjoyed by established urban centers. Throughout the last third of the 20th century, secular trends, particularly in the United States, pointed to a continued shift of corporate headquarters to the suburbs and smaller cities. In 1969, only 11 percent of America's largest companies were headquartered in the suburbs; a quarter-century later, roughly half had migrated to the city periphery.

In fact, high-end services, the supposed linchpin of "global city" economics, have continued to disperse toward the periphery or to smaller cities. This trend is even more marked among firms in the largest generator of new growth, the entrepreneurial sector. Improvements in telecommunications promise to further flatten economic space in the future, with choice jobs able to migrate to exurbs and small cities. One result has been a shift in the very landscape of growth, with suburban office parks widely favored over gleaming high-rise towers. The global securities industry, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, has gradually transferred an ever larger share of its operations to the cities' respective suburban rings, to other smaller cities, and overseas. The company headquarters may remain in a midtown high-rise, but more and more of the jobs are located elsewhere.

These decentralizing trends have taken an unmistakable toll on the overall economic relevance of New York, still the most important of the advanced world's megacities. In the last three decades of the 20th century -- a period of explosive job growth across the United States -- the city's private sector created virtually no new net employment. A powerful service economy remained, but as the historian Fred Siegel pointed out, the long-term trends showed the city slipping further behind the nation "with each new turn of the cycle."

And in a country as highly centralized as Japan, software companies and other technology-centered enterprises have begun to move away from the great centers of Osaka and Tokyo to outlying prefectures. Hong Kong, too, has hemorrhaged both high-tech manufacturing and engineering positions to surrounding parts of mainland China. The rise of "telecities" around the world suggests the emergence of new high-end industrial pockets, such as those in the less urbanized sections of France, Belgium, and South Korea. And the increase in telecommuting threatens to reduce still further the roles once played exclusively by urban regions.

Even the best-positioned urban area, then, will have to deal with severe demographic and economic challenges. Many of the young people lured to these cities in their twenties often depart when they start families and businesses; upwardly mobile immigrants, critical contributors to the urban resurgence, increasingly join the exodus. European, Japanese, and other East Asian urban centers confront a yet more extreme demographic crisis: Low birthrates are reducing the ranks of young people, the group most attracted to large cities, and choking off the traditional pool of immigrants from the countryside.

With economic growth shifting elsewhere, many leading cities in the advanced world are resting their hopes for the future on their role as centers of culture and entertainment. These cities may be fulfilling the prediction H.G. Wells made a century ago, when he said that the city would move from a commanding position at the center of economic life toward a more ephemeral role as a "bazaar, a great gallery of shops and [place] of concourse and rendezvous." Cities have played this staging role since their origins. Central squares, the areas around temples, cathedrals, and mosques, long provided ideal places for merchants to sell their wares. Being natural theaters, cities offered the overwhelmingly rural populations around them a host of novel experiences unavailable in the hinterlands. Rome, the first megacity, developed these functions to an unprecedented level. It boasted both the first giant shopping mall, the multistory Mercatus Traiani, and the Colosseum, a place where urban entertainment grew monstrous in its size and nature.

In the industrial era, observed the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, "the techniques of amusement" became "more indispensable to make urban suffering bearable." By the 20th century, industrialized mass entertainment -- publishing, motion pictures, radio, and television -- was exerting an ever stronger hold on the life of urban dwellers. Media-related businesses also accounted for a growing part of the economy in such key image-producing cities as Los Angeles, York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Mumbai. By the early 21st century, the focus on cultural industries began to inform economic policy in many urban areas. Instead of working to retain middle-class families and factory jobs or to engage in economic competition with the periphery, urban regions embraced such fleeting qualities as fashionability, hipness, trendiness, and style as the keys to their survival.

In Rome, Paris, San Francisco, Miami, Montreal, and New York, tourism now ranks among the largest and most promising industries. The economies of some of the fastest-growing centers, such as Las Vegas and Orlando, rely heavily on the staging of "experiences," complete with eye-catching architecture and round-the-clock live entertainment. Indeed, in such unlikely places as Manchester, Montreal, and Detroit, political and business leaders hope that by creating "cool cities" they may lure gays, bohemians, and young "creatives" to their towns. In some places, the accoutrements of this kind of growth -- loft developments, good restaurants, clubs, unique shops, museums, galleries, and sizable gay and single populations -- have succeeded in reviving once-desolate town centers. But they have not succeeded in restoring anything remotely reminiscent of these cities' past economic dynamism.

In the 21st century, some cities or parts of cities may survive, and perhaps thrive, on a transitory foundation, and, with the support of their still-dominant media industries, they may successfully market to the world the notion that they represent the future. The brief but widely acclaimed rise of urban technology districts -- such as New York's Silicon Alley and San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch -- during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s led some to identify hipness and urban edginess as the primary catalysts for information-age growth. Both districts ultimately shriveled as the Internet industry contracted and then matured, yet the market for new housing continued to grow. This demand came partly from younger professionals, but also from a growing population of older affluent individuals, including those hoping to experience a more "pluralistic" way of life. These modern-day nomads often reside part-time in cites, either to participate in their cultural life or to transact critical business. In some cities -- Paris, for example -- they constitute, by one estimate, 10 percent of the population.

The rush in many "global cities" to convert old warehouses, factories, and office buildings into elegant residences suggests the gradual transformation of former urban economic centers into residential resorts. The declining old financial district of lower Manhattan, the architectural historian Robert Bruegmann has noted, seems likely to revive not as a technology hub but as a full- or part-time home for "wealthy cosmopolites wishing to enjoy urban amenities in the elegantly recycled shell of a former business center."

Over time, however, this culturally based growth may not be self-sustaining. In the past, achievement in the arts flourished in the wake of economic or political dynamism. Athens first emerged as a bustling mercantile center and military power before it astonished the world in other fields. The extraordinary cultural production of other great cities, from Alexandria and Kaifeng to Venice, Amsterdam, London, and, in the 20th century, New York, rested upon a similar nexus between the aesthetic and the mundane.

Broad demographic trends do not bode well for cities basing their futures on cultural growth. The decline in the urban middle-class family-a pattern previously seen in both the late Roman Empire and 18th-century Venice -- deprives urban areas of a critical source of economic and social vitality. In Japan and Europe, the number of young workers is already dropping. Super-annuated Japanese cities face increasing difficulties competing with their Chinese counterparts, which are being enriched by the migration of ambitious young families from China's vast agricultural hinterlands. It is hard to imagine the continued preeminence of Japan in Asian popular culture if its population of young people keeps shrinking. Over time, the economically ascendant cities of the world -- Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, and Bangalore -- seem certain to generate their own aesthetically based industries.

Finally, the "ephemeral" city seems likely to encounter profound social conflicts. An economy oriented to entertainment, tourism, and "creative" functions is ill suited to provide upward mobility for more than a small slice of a city's population. Focused largely on boosting culture and constructing spectacular buildings, urban governments may tend to neglect more mundane industries, basic education, and infrastructure. Following such a course, urban areas are likely to evolve into "dual cities," made up of a cosmopolitan elite and a large class of those who, usually for low wages, serve the elite's needs.

To avoid these pitfalls, cities must emphasize those basic elements long critical to the making of vital commercial places. A busy city must be more than a construct of diversions for essentially nomadic populations. It requires an engaged and committed citizenry with a long-term financial and familial stake in the metropolis. A successful city must be home not only to museums, restaurants, and edgy clubs but to specialized industries, small businesses, schools, and neighborhoods capable of renewing themselves for the next generation.

Successful cities flourish under law and order, and maintaining a strong security regime can do much to revive an urban area. One critical element in the late-20th-century revival in some American cities, most notably New York, was a significant drop in crime, accomplished by the adoption of new policing methods and a widespread determination to make public safety the number one priority of government. Indeed, the 1990s represented arguably the greatest epoch of crime reduction in American history, providing a critical precondition for the growth of tourism and a modest demographic rebound in some major cities. Even Los Angeles, after the devastating riots of 1992, managed to curtail crime and stage an economic and demographic recovery.

But as security in American cities improved, new threats to the urban future surfaced in the developing world. By the end of the 20th century, crime in megacities such as Rio de Janeiro and Spo Paulo had devolved into what one law enforcement official called "urban guerrilla war." Drug trafficking, gangs, and general lawlessness also infest many parts of Mexico City, Tijuana, and San Salvador. Inevitably, the erosion of basic security undermines city life. Capricious authority and fear of crime can divert the movement of foreign capital as well, toward safer locations in the suburban periphery.

Insidious, too, are the effects of pollution and growing health-related problems in many cities of the developing world. At least 600 million city residents worldwide lack access to basic sanitation and medical care. These populations become natural breeding grounds for deadly infectious diseases, against which neither affluence nor foreign nationality necessarily provides immunity. Such threats drive both indigenous professionals and foreign investors to more healthful environments abroad, or to secure suburbs.

The Islamic Middle East, where the familiar woes of developing countries have been exacerbated by enormous social and political dislocations, poses the most immediate danger to the security of cities globally. In trying to adopt Western models of city building during the 20th century, many Islamic cities weakened traditional bonds of community and neighborhood but failed to replace them with modern and socially sustainable alternatives. This transformation, according to the historian Stefano Bianca, "sapped the shaping forces of cultural identity," leaving behind a population alienated from its increasingly Westernized environment. The alienation has been deepened by political conflicts, the most important of which is the struggle with an economically and militarily advanced Israel. The aspirations of Islamic, and particularly Arab, cities are continually thwarted not only by economic, social, and environmental failures but also by repeated humiliations on the battlefield.

To a large extent, Islamic societies have also failed to adjust to the cosmopolitan standards necessary to compete in the global economy. Beirut, the Arab city best positioned for cosmopolitan success, foundered because of incessant civil strife, and did not make an serious efforts to rebuild itself until the late 1990s. Other potentially successful Islamic cities, such as Tehran and Cairo, still lack the social stability and transparent legal systems that are critical to attracting overseas investors. Even the best-run of the Islamic countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, still suffer from political and legal systems far more arbitrary than those in the West, or in the Asian states that are home to great cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo.

From the difficult milieu of the Middle East has emerged perhaps the greatest menace to the future of modern cities -- Islamist terrorism. Islamist terrorists regard the West, particularly its great cities, as intrinsically evil, exploitative, and un-Islamic. One Arab scholar has labeled the leaders of the Islamist movement "angry sons of a failed generation," who saw the secularist dream of Arab unity dissolve into corruption, poverty, and social chaos. For the most part, their anger was incubated not in the deserts or small villages but in such major Islamic cities as Cairo, Jeddah, Beirut, and Kuwait. Some were longtime residents of New York, London, or Hamburg, and that experience abroad seems only to have deepened their anger toward the West and its cities. As early as 1990, one terrorist, an Egyptian living in New York, spoke of "destroying the pillars such as their touristic infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings that they are proud of." Eleven years later, that anger shook the urban world to its very foundation. In addition to the economic and social afflictions that beset them, cities now have to contend with the prospect of physical obliteration.

The current threat to the prosperity and survival of cities presented by loosely affiliated marauders instead of states has its historical analogues. Some of the worst damage done to cities in the past was inflicted by nomadic peoples and small bands of brigands. But despite setbacks, the urban ideal has demonstrated a remarkable resilience. Fear rarely is enough to stop the determined builders of cities. For all the cities that have been ruined permanently by war, pestilence, or natural disaster, many others have been rebuilt, often more than once. Indeed, amid mounting terrorist threats, officials and developers in cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Shanghai continue to plan new office towers and other striking edifices.

But far more important than the construction of new buildings to the future of cities will be the value people place on the urban experience. Buildings and physical advantages (proximity to oceans, rivers, trade routes, or freeway interchanges) can help start a great city and aid its growth, but they cannot sustain its success. In the end, a great city relies on those things that engender for its citizens a peculiar and strong attachment that distinguishes one specific place from all others. Urban areas must coalesce around a consciousness that unites their residents in a shared identity. "The city is a state of mind," the great sociologist Robert Ezra Park observed, "a body of customs, and of unorganized attitudes and sentiments."

Whether in the traditional urban core or in the expanding periphery, issues of identity and community still largely determine which places will succeed. In this, contemporary city dwellers throughout the world struggle with many of the same issues that were faced by the originators of urbanity. Progenitors of a new kind of humanity, those earliest city dwellers found themselves confronting vastly different problems from those of prehistoric nomadic communities and agricultural villages. Urbanites had to learn how to coexist and interact with strangers from outside their clan or tribe. This required them to develop new ways to codify behavior and determine what was commonly acceptable in family life, commerce, and social discourse. In earliest times, the priesthood instructed on these matters. Deriving their authority from divinity, priests were able to set the rules for the varied residents of a specific urban center. In addition, rulers gained stature by claiming their cities to be the special residences of particular gods. The sanctity of a city was tied to its role as a center of worship.

Almost everywhere, the great classical city was suffused with religion and instructed by it. "Cities did not ask if the institutions which they adopted were useful," noted the classical historian Fustel de Coulanges. "These institutions were adopted because religion had wished it thus." In contemporary discussions of the urban condition, this sacred role has too often been ignored. Indeed, it barely appears in many contemporary books about cities or in public discussions of their plight. That would have seemed odd to residents of the ancient, classical, medieval, or even Victorian city. Today's "new urbanist" architects, planners, and developers often speak of the need for city green space, historical preservation, and environmental stewardship, yet they rarely refer to the need for a powerful moral vision to hold cities together. Their failure to do so is a natural reflection of today's urban environment, with its emphasis on faddishness, stylistic issues, and the celebration of the individual over the family or stable community. The postmodernist perspective on cities, dominant in much of the academic literature, even more adamantly dismisses shared moral values as little more than illusory aspects of what one German professor labeled "the Christian-bourgeois microcosmos."

Nihilistic attitudes of this sort, if widely adopted, could prove as dangerous to the future of cities as the terrorist menace. Without a widely shared belief system, it would be exceedingly difficult to envision a viable urban future. Even in a postindustrial era, notes sociologist Daniel Bell, the fate of cities continues to revolve around "a conception of public virtue: and the "classical questions of the polis." Cities in the modern West, Bell understands, have depended on a broad adherence to classical and Enlightenment ideals -- due process, freedom of belief, the basic rights of property -- to incorporate diverse cultures and meet new economic challenges. Shattering these essential principles, whether in the name of the marketplace, multicultural separatism, or religious dogma, would render the contemporary city in the West helpless before the grave challenges of the future.

This is not to suggest that the West offers the only reasonable model for achieving an urban order. History abounds with models developed under explicit pagan, Muslim, Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu auspices, and the cosmopolitan city well predates the Enlightenment. In our time, perhaps the most notable success in city building has occurred under neo-Confucianist belief systems, mixed with scientific rationalism imported from the West. This convergence, an amalgam of tradition and modernity, eventually overcame Maoism, which was intent on destroying all vestiges of China's cultural past.

We must hope that the Islamic world, having found Western values wanting, may find in its own glorious past -- replete with cosmopolitan values and belief in scientific progress -- the means to salvage its troubled urban civilization. The ancient metropolis of Istanbul, with more than nine million residents, has demonstrated at least the possibility of reconciling a fundamentally Muslim society with what one Turkish planner calls "a culturally globalized face." The continued success of this cosmopolitan model, amid the assault from intolerant brands of Islam, could do a great deal to preserve urban progress around the world in the new century.

In an age of intense globalization, cities must learn to meld their moral orders with the ability to accommodate differing populations. In a successful city, even those who embrace other faiths must expect basic justice from authorities, as dhimmis (non-Muslims) did during the Islamic golden ages. If that expectation cannot be met, commerce inevitably declines, the pace of cultural and technological development slows, and cities devolve from dynamism to stagnation and ultimate ruin.

I believe that the urban experience is universal, despite differences in race, climate, location, and time. As the French historian Fernand Braudel once observed, "A town is always a town, wherever it

Toward a Global Society of States

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 03:00:00 -0400

Here is an instructive and entertaining exercise for students of American foreign policy. Match the quotation to the appropriate American statesman: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson.

The first quotation is this: "Our aim should be from time to time to take such steps as may be possible toward creating something like an organization of the civilized nations, because as the world becomes more highly organized the need for navies and armies will diminish." Woodrow Wilson, you might think, the naïve idealist who dreamed that the League of Nations would put an end to war. But no. The words belong rather to President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1905 State of the Union address.

Perhaps you'll have better luck with the second example: "Unhappily for the other three [parts of the world], Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has in different degrees extended her domination over them all. Africa, Asia and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the world, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men...have in direct terms attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority....Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European." Thomas Jefferson, surely, denouncing European imperialism and racism. No again: Alexander Hamilton, the quintessential realist, in The Federalist 11.

Here, in fact, is Jefferson, sounding like the "realist" Hamilton in a letter of 1814: "Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia, and lay thus at his feet the whole of Europe. This done, England would be but a breakfast....It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy." And here, sounding like his bellicose critic Roosevelt, is Wilson in 1919 describing what it would take for the United States to be an independent great power if the League of nations did not secure world peace: "We must be physically ready for anything to come. We must have a great standing army. We must see to it that every man in America is trained to arms. We must see to it that there are munitions and guns enough for an army that means a mobilized nation."

As the quotation game suggests, it's a mistake to divide the architects of American foreign policy into "realists" and "idealists." Realpolitik of the Continental kind, with its contempt for international law and its elevation of the pursuit of national self-interest by brute force, has had little influence in the United States. (It's not surprising that one of the few American proponents of this school, Henry Kissinger, is a German émigré.) American realists such as Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge had a healthy respect for the role of military power in foreign affairs, but they also believed in international cooperation -- among "civilized" nations, if not among all countries. America's leading "idealists," for their part, have been willing to use force, particularly when the interests of the United States and the international community have converged. Jefferson waged war on the Barbary pirates, who threatened American shipping and Mediterranean commerce in general. Wilson ruined his presidency and his health in his campaign to persuade the Senate to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations, the purpose of which was not to eliminate the role of power in world politics but to replace the "balance of power" with a "community of power."

If the American tradition of foreign policy, then, is neither militaristic realpolitik nor ineffectual pacifism, how should it be described? The mainstream American philosophy of foreign policy, from the 18th century to the 21st, belongs to a broad school of thought that scholars call the "Grotian tradition," after Hugo Grotius, a 17th-century Dutch theorist of international law. From Grotius and like-minded thinkers such as Samuel von Pufendorf and Emmerich de Vattel, the Founding Fathers learned that, after the 17th-century Wars of Religion, the Roman empire and medieval Christendom in the West had been replaced by a "society of states," their number limited initially to the countries of Europe and -- by extension -- their settler colonies in the Americas. "Europe," Montesquieu declared, "is a nation composed of many nations." The British philosopher David Hume similarly viewed Europe and its American and Russian outliers as part of a great commonwealth made up of "a number of neighboring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy." "A society of states (or international society)," the 20th-century British scholar Hedley Bull has written, "exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules of their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions." There is a complex mixture of order and anarchy in the international system, best described perhaps by Alexis de Tocqueville when he wrote of "the society of nations in which each separate people is, as it were, a citizen -- a society always semi-barbarous, even in the most civilized epochs, whatever efforts are made to improve and regulate the relations of those who compose it."

The greatest threat to the European society of states came from conquerors such as Charles V, Louis XIV, and Napoleon, who sought to replace the system of independent states with a new empire resembling that of Rome. In the 17th century, Pufendorf wrote that all European states were "obliged to oppose with all their power" what he called "the monarchy of Europe, or the universal monopoly, this being the fuel with which the whole world may be put to flame." Montesquieu argued that modern states should try to avoid being absorbed into a single "universal monarch" such as the Roman Empire. And Hume, in his essay "Of the Balance of Power," agreed that states should unite in alliance to prevent any single state from reducing them to the status of mere provinces in a universal empire.

In their attitude toward the Western society of states, the American Founders were conservative. They seceded from the British Empire to join the existing international system, not to overthrow it, as the French Jacobins and Soviet Communists would attempt to do. Even as they hoped that, over time, more states would adopt republican government on the basis of the American example, they adopted the diplomatic institutions and norms previously worked out by the European monarchies and empires. Thus, the great American legal scholar James Kent begins his Commentaries on American Law (1826) as follows: "When the United States ceased to be a part of the British empire, and assumed the character of an independent nation, they became subject to that system of rules which reason, morality, and custom had established among the civilized nations of Europe, as their public law."

Where Americans have differed from their European counterparts, without rejecting the basic customs and rules of the society of states, is in their deep antagonism toward imperialism, the coercive rule of one ethnic nation over others. (Early American writers who use "empire" in an archaic sense to mean "national territory" should not be interpreted as endorsing colonial rule.) In the past, American support for self-determination was often limited by racism. Southern slaveowners, for example, feared that the establishment in 1804 of a black Haitian republic, independent of France, would inspire slave revolts in the United States; tragically, at the Versailles Conference in 1919, the United States teamed up with the British Empire to block Japan's proposal that international law ban racial discrimination. (By contrast, antiracism was a basic norm of the international system the United States helped to set up after 1945.)

But there has long been a more generous strain at work in the society. In the early 19th century, for example, the United States welcomed the independence of the Latin American republics from Spain for philosophical as much as for geopolitical reasons. The Monroe Doctrine, which held that the Americas should be an empire-free zone, was violated by France when it took advantage of civil war in the United States to establish a Mexican empire, headed by its puppet, the Hapsburg prince Maximilian. Abraham Lincoln, who had opposed the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-48), supported the republican nationalist Benito Juarez in his battle to free Mexico from France. After Lincoln's assassination, the threat of U.S. intervention in Mexico led the French to withdraw. Lincoln was a principled anti-imperialist who hoped that the Union victory in the Civil War would inspire liberal republicans throughout the world.

Of course, the United States has at times engaged in old-fashioned territorial imperialism -- it annexed northern Mexico; it conquered Spain's Caribbean and Philippine empire in 1898; it repeatedly sent marines to topple or install governments in the Caribbean and Latin America. But America's imperialism, despite episodes of brutality, was constrained by republican principles. With the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii, the geographic expansion of the United States ended with the annexation of the thinly populated northern portion of Mexico. White American statesmen did not was to admit large nonwhite populations in Latin America and the Caribbean to full citizenship, as republican theory required, but they also did not want to rule them without their consent, as republican theory forbade. (Had it not been for 19th-century American racism, much more of Mexico might now be part of the Union.) The few small overseas territories the United States governs today, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, are anomalous exceptions that prove the rule.

Most U.S. interventions in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Philippines occurred to prevent rival great powers -- imperial German and Japan in the early 20th century, the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- from gaining control of crucial strategic assets. The Philippines and Hawaii were valuable chiefly as bases for a U.S. naval presence that kept the European empires and Japan from monopolizing the economic and military resources of China and its surrounding countries. Although some U.S. investors exploited America's military role for their own purposes, sea power and geopolitical prestige, not profit, were on the minds of American presidents when they sent in the marines. When the evolution of naval and air power made the Panama Canal strategically irrelevant, the United States ceded it to Panama. There is no contradiction between this kind of limited and incidental strategic imperialism, which has permitted the United States to take part in global power struggles by using overseas military bases, and the principled hostility of American leaders to attempts by the European powers and Japan to divide most of the earth's inhabitants and resources among a small number of autarkic empires. Precedents for America's oceanic web of ports, canals, coaling stations, and airfields can be found in the maritime empires created by such older commercial republics as Venice and the Netherlands.

The U.S. protectorate and alliance system during the Cold War, if it was an empire at all, was a temporary empire of defense, not an empire of conquest and exploitation. The presence of U.S. forces in West German and Japan allowed those countries to build strong democracies and vibrant economies without being intimidated by the Soviet Union and China. Although the United States supported anticommunist governments in West Germany and Italy in the early years of the Cold War, there was never any possibility that America would invade Western Europe and topple governments, as the Soviet Union did in East Germany (1952), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). And unlike the Soviet Union, which parasitically exploited its more affluent Eastern European satellites, the United States helped restore Western Europe's economy through the Marshall Plan and encouraged the formation of a powerful economic rival, the European Economic Community (now the European Union). American proxy wars in Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan, and other countries of no significant economic value were part of the campaign to thwart the Soviet bid for global military and diplomatic hegemony. It does not just distort language to call America's alliance diplomacy and antihegemonic wars against imperial and Nazi Germany and the Soviet bloc "imperialism" and "colonialism"; it obscures the truly innovative nature of what American leaders have sought to do.

From the time the United States emerged as a great power around 1900, most American leaders have shared the vision of a global society of states that would be an alternative to a world divided among closed imperial economic and military blocs. In the world that Americans wanted, applying the principle of self-determination would result in the replacement of large multinational, dynastic empires with dozens or hundreds of new nation-states -- preferably, but not necessarily, democratic republics similar to the United States. In the postimperial world order envisioned by leading Americans before 1945, a global market based on free (or perhaps managed) trade would replace the exclusive economic blocs of the British, French, and other empires. This "Open Door" principle was first applied to prevent the carving up of China into imperial economic zones, and it was then generalized to the entire world economy after World War II through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the Word Trade Organization (WTO). International organizations -- the League of Nations after World War I, the United Nations and other bodies after World War II -- were to offer permanent forums for diplomacy; international law and the decrees of international institutions were to be enforced by a global steering committee led by great powers, such as the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

In the early 20th century, variants of this vision were shared by "realists" and "idealists" alike. To enforce international decisions and norms, for example, idealist Woodrow Wilson emphasized collective security actions taken by every nation in concert, while his realist critics Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge favored international policing by a few "civilized" great powers, such as the United States, Britain, and France. But Roosevelt and Lodge shared with Wilson the goals of promoting international organization and arbitration and reciprocally reducing trade barriers.

The broadly shared American vision of a postimperial, global society of states was finally realized by Franklin D. Roosevelt -- Theodore's cousin, who had served Wilson as an assistant secretary of the navy. During World War II, Article 3 of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which declared the "right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live," was an accurate statement of American policy. When the British argued that Article 3 did not apply to their empire, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles replied in 1942: "If this war is in fact a war for the liberation of peoples, it must assure the sovereign equality of peoples throughout the world, as well as in the world of the Americas. Our victory must bring in its train the liberation of all peoples. Discrimination between peoples because of their race, creed, or color must be abolished. The age of imperialism is ended."

Throughout World War II, FDR sought the peaceful liquidation of the old empires of his British and French allies, even as he joined them in opposing the new empires of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy. Although he was willing to make some concessions to them, the American president wanted the British out of India and the French out of Indochina, and he conditioned U.S. help for Britain on the abolition of "imperial preference" in trade and investment and the creation of a truly global economy. An aide's report of comments made to him at Yalta by FDR reflects how much the president's anti-imperial idealism was buttressed by realism:

The President said he was concerned about brown people in the East. He said that there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence -- 1,100,000,000 enemies are dangerous. He said he included the 450,000,000 Chinese in that. He then added, Churchill doesn't understand this.

Adolf Hitler, who had long dreamed of an alliance between Germany and Britain against the United States, ranted that Roosevelt "says he wants to save England but he means he wants to be ruler and heir of the British Empire." In fact, FDR wanted to do something far more radical than merely create an American empire of a traditional kind. He wanted to crate a nonimperial world -- a global society of states to replace the old Europe-centered society of states. In return for giving up their exclusive empires, great powers would have a place in the new global system as joint guarantors of peaceful change. FDR's list of global "policemen" varied; at different times he saw Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as partners of the United States. Whatever their identity, the great powers, rather than exploit their exclusive spheres of influence as predatory empires of the past had done, would act in concert to benefit the overall system, as the great powers of Europe had sometimes done in the 18th and 19th century.

FDR mistakenly assumed that the postwar Soviet Union would act as a traditional great power. Instead, after the defeat of Hitler, Joseph Stalin and his successors created an empire in Eastern Europe, helped bring Mao Zedong to power in China, and promoted the expansion of a Moscow-centered communist bloc that included outposts in Korea, Indochina, Cuba, and Africa. The veto power the Soviet Union enjoyed as a permanent member of the UN Security Council kept that body deadlocked from the late 1940s to the 1990s. At the same time, the need to enlist British and French support in the Cold War caused successive U.S. administrations to tolerate a slower pace of decolonization in Asia and Africa than FDR had envisioned.

Although the Grotian ideal of a civilized society of states has been the basis for mainstreaming American foreign policy, there has always been a concomitant dissenting tradition of American exceptionalism. In this view, the United States is not to be a new Roman Republic or a larger Britain but a new Israel. In 1952 Ronald Reagan, whose Midwestern mother belonged to the Disciples of Christ, echoed this venerable analogy between the United States and Old Testament Israel: "I believe that God is shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land."

The source of this messianic view of America's role in the world is the Protestant Reformation. New England Protestants feared that the Roman Catholic Church, working through the British monarchy, might strangle the Protestant "saints" in their American refuge. The granting of toleration to Catholics in British Canada by the Quebec Act of 1774 alarmed many Protestants in the American colonies. In the imagination of today's Protestant evangelicals, the United Nations and "secular humanism" have replaced the British Empire and the Catholic Church as the hubs of international evil, but apocalyptic paranoia remains part of American culture.

American exceptionalism oscillates between isolationism and evangelicalism. Virtue must be protected in America from a corrupt world -- or imposed by America on a corrupt world. At times (such as the two decades between the First and Second World Wars), American exceptionalists have wanted to create a Fortress America and leave the rest of the world to succumb to decadence, anarchy, and tyranny. In other circumstances, American exceptionalists have been energized by a millennial fervor for reforming the world. The two impulses have sometimes coexisted. In the 1890s, for example, one fervent Protestant evangelical politician, William Jennings Bryan, denounced American imperialism, and an equally fervent Protestant evangelical preacher, Josiah Strong, argued that it was America's destiny to Christianize the world by means of an expansive foreign policy.

The isolationist wing and the evangelical wing of American exceptionalism share a dread of alliances: It might be necessary to make immoral concessions to allies to enlarge or maintain a coalition, and the purity of America's purpose in foreign policy would then be diluted. Even worse, alliances might infect the godly American republic with Old World viruses -- autocracy, perhaps, or collectivism. This fear explains why the United States participated in World War I as an associated power, not an ally. It explains, too, why the United States for many years refused to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China; merely to engage in ordinary diplomatic relations with an evil regime is to condone its crimes. American exceptionalism is responsible as well for the frequent use of economic and military sanctions to punish all kinds of transgressions by foreign countries. And its influence can be sense both in the American Left's enthusiasm for private disinvestment campaigns against countries with objectionable governments and in much of the American Right's reflexive unilateralism and suspicion of international organizations and treaties.

During the Cold War, the realist and exceptionalist traditions were both represented among supporters of the successful U.S. strategy of containment of Soviet expansion. Realists sought to check and reduce Soviet imperial power, while exceptionalists viewed the struggle as one for universal human liberty -- or against "godless" communism. But long before the end of the Cold War, during the Vietnam era, consensus in U.S. foreign policy had already broken down.

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration pursued what it called "assertive multilateralism" -- signing a number of treaties, including the Kyoto Protocol and the treaty to create an international war crimes court, that even some Clinton Democrats had qualms about, and that the succeeding Bush administration unceremoniously dropped. The unilateralist philosophy that initially guided the presidency of George W. Bush in turn proved to be inadequate to dealing with the crisis in the Middle East. Multilateralism and unilateralism are tactics, and the attempts by pundits and policymakers to promote them to the level of strategic "doctrines" is a mistake.

The alternative to both a reflexive multilateralism that subordinates U.S. national interests to a veto by small and weak countries with their own agendas and an arrogant unilateralism that offends important allies is the strategy preferred by both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, who envisioned a concert of the "civilized" great powers. This approach places responsibility for the management of global peace and progress less on the UN General Assembly than on the permanent members of the UN Security Council -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China (all now democracies except for the last). The replacement of the obstructionist Soviet Union by a postimperial Russian nation-state has enabled the Security Council to function at times as its designers had intended -- by authorizing joint great-power interventions in Kuwait and the Balkans, for example. The Security Council remains handicapped, however, by the fact that its permanent members do not include great powers such as India, Japan, and Germany.

A great-power concert can also work through institutions outside the UN system. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, was not part of the original UN framework, but since the end of the Cold War it has shown signs of evolving into a regional European/Middle Eastern police force. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Group of Seven (G-7, and later G-8) nations became an informal steering committee for the world economy. It remains to be seen whether the "quartet" of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations that has coalesced to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be effective. It is worth noting, however, that the "trio" consisting of the United States, the European Union, and Russia controls a majority of both the world's wealth and its military power.

In the long run, new kinds of world order that we cannot now imagine may become possible and desirable. But until that happens, the goal of American strategy ought to remain what it has been for generations: a world in which a handful of great powers sharing basic liberal values cooperate to manage conflict and competition in a global society of sovereign states.

Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Late this year, a sad little anniversary will likely pass without much notice. On December 14, 1972, Eugene Cernan took one last look around the dark lava plains of the Taurus Mountains, near the Littrow Crater. The golf-cart-like lunar rover stood 500 feet away, ready to send Earth live television images of his departure. He gazed down at the plaque on the spider-legged lunar excursion module, which, like the rover, would be left behind: "Here Man completed his first exploration of the Moon/December 1972 A.D./May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." Cernan boarded the Command Service Module and, with fellow astronaut Harrison Schmitt, lifted off to begin the journey home. No one has been back since.

If you get a little teary eyed over that vignette, with its simultaneous evocation of enormous achievement (the U.S. space program of 30 years ago) and enormous disappointment (the U.S. space program of today), then you will take a bittersweet pleasure in Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon. Reynolds describes the Apollo program, which put 12 men on the moon from 1969 to 1972, as "an unprecedented new kind of project for our culture. We must look to the pyramids of Egypt or the cathedrals of Europe to find parallels." Despite the current stagnation -- circling the Earth in a shuttle or space station hardly counts as progress -- he believes the best is yet to come: "One day, the achievements of Apollo will inspire us to find our astonishing strengths again."

Alongside hundreds of photographs, Reynolds recounts the history of the Apollo project, from the tragic Apollo 1, which caught fire during permission testing in 1967, killing the three astronauts inside, through the successful Apollo-Soyuz Earth-orbiting collaboration of 1975. He provides fascinating back story, too, including a reputation-burnishing account of Wernher von Braun, the rocket boy turned Nazi munitions maker turned American NASA-meister. The book lovingly reproduces von Braun's sketches for rockets from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as the see-the-future-now paintings that, in his postwar incarnation as public-relations whiz, he inspired in Collier's and other popular magazines.

The author of five books on the Star Wars movies, Reynolds naturally emphasizes the fantastical origins of the space program. In From Earth to the Moon (1865), Jules Verne posited Florida as a launch site; the pioneering French science-fiction writer knew that Earth's faster rotation near the equator would help a rocket achieve escape velocity. Reynolds rescues from obscurity Fritz Lang's 1929 silent movie Frau im Mond (Woman in the moon), which benefited from the technical advice of rocketeering visionary Hermann Oberth. "In some major ways," Reynolds observes, "the look and feel of Apollo began with Fritz Lang and Frau im Mond."

The Star Wars movies are perhaps the best portal for kids who might grow up to take humanity beyond Apollo, but when the young and curious are ready to move from fiction to fact, they should pick up this book. For everyone else, Apollo will make a handsome, informative addition to the coffee table.

Do the People Rule?

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Presidents as diverse as William McKinley, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter have spoken the simple words: "Here the people rule." But the meaning of the words is by no means as straightforward as it may seem. Who exactly are the people? The inhabitants of 50 different states, or the inhabitants of a single nation? One people, or 50 peoples joined by compact? The questions are as old as the nation, and perhaps best answered today by recognizing validity in each position.

If American government were a cake, what kind of cake would it be? Political science and law examinations at American universities frequently ask some version of that question. Is the best metaphor for the relationship between the federal and state governments in the U.S. Constitution a layer cake, in which each level retains its own identity? Or does the United States have a "marble cake federalism," in which, according to the political scientist Morton Grodzin, "ingredients of different colors are combined in an inseparable mixture, whose colors intermingle in vertical and horizontal veins and random swirls"? Layer cakes and marble cakes do not exhaust the metaphorical possibilities. The political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and David Walker have suggested, respectively, that a birthday cake and a fruitcake can symbolize American federalism. All the culinary constitutionalism seems appropriate for a nation that some claim was once a melting pot but is now a salad bowl.

This battle of metaphors reflects a deep and enduring disagreement among Americans about the nature of popular sovereignty in the United States. Is the United States a creation of the individual states -- or are the states a creation of the Union? Is there a single American people -- or are there as many "peoples" as there are states?

The debate began when the ink was hardly dry on the new federal constitution drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. That fall, delegates from across Pennsylvania convened in Philadelphia to ratify or reject the document. On October 6, 1787, the delegates heard from James Wilson, as Scots-born lawyer who had been one of the leading thinkers at the past summer's constitutional convention (President George Washington would appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1789). "There necessarily exists in every government," Wilson told the delegates, "a power from which there is no appeal; and which, for that reason, may be termed supreme, absolute and uncontrollable. Where does this power reside?"

Wilson rejected the British idea that the government -- in the case of Britain, the crown-in-parliament -- was sovereign: "The idea of a constitution limiting and superintending the operations of legislative authority seems not to have been accurately understood in Britain. To control the power and conduct of the legislature by an overruling constitution was an improvement in the science and practice of government reserved to the American states." However, Wilson continued, it would be a mistake to assume that the constitution is sovereign: "This opinion approaches a step nearer to the truth, but does not reach it. The truth is that, in our governments, the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power remains in the people. As our constitutions are superior to our legislatures, so the people are superior to our constitutions."

Although the idea of popular sovereignty reached its fullest development in the United States during the War of Independence and the early years of the American republic, it was an ancient concept. The Roman republic and, at least in theory, the subsequent Roman Empire were based on the imperium populi, the delegated sovereignty of the people. The idea of popular sovereignty was revived in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Christian and humanist opponents of the divine right of kings.

In 17th-century England, during decades of civil war and other political turmoil, English thinkers worked out the basics of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty. Drawing on earlier writers, philosopher John Locke argued that every people has a right to change its government whenever the government becomes tyrannical. Although the theory of popular sovereignty remains controversial in Great Britain, all mainstream American constitutional thinkers have accepted the Lockean premise that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

The paramount debate in American history has not been about the ultimate sovereignty of the people, but rather about the identity of the people (meaning a single entity, in the sense of populus). Is there a single American people? Or is the United States a federation of as many peoples as there are states?

The two rival interpretations of popular sovereignty in America have been the nationalist theory and the compact theory.The nationalist theory holds that from the beginning there has been a single American people, which has existed in the form of successive "unions." Lincoln summarized this view in his first inaugural address: "[W]e find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen states expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was

Contemporary Affairs

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Aug 2001 00:00:00 -0400

In the 1990s, the Washington consensus held that free trade and deregulated markets would best promote prosperity in countries at all stages of development. This "neoliberal" consensus was shared not only by conservatives and libertarians but by center-left advocates of the Third Way, such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who sought to reconcile progressive redistribution programs with free-market economics. Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, provides a well-informed and often witty assault on the conventional wisdom.

He argues that economic globalization, by enlarging the pool of low-wage labor, tends to reduce wages in advanced countries

The Genetic Surprise

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 -0400

So strong is the American aversion to "socialized medicine" that neither major candidate in this year's presidential election has dared question the fundamental role of the private sector in underwriting the U.S. health care system. Indeed, most health care reform proposals on the table involve attempts to make private health care insurance more widely available through the use of various subsidies and other incentives. Yet the collision of two well-established trends in medicine and law may soon make the private sector's role in spreading the risk of health care costs unworkable, and government provision of universal health care coverage increasingly difficult to avoid.

The first of these trends is the rapid advancement of genetic testing and other means of determining proclivity to disease. Ten years ago there were fewer than a dozen genetic tests available, mostly for relatively rare inherited disorders such as retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye, and cystic fibrosis. Today, tests have come on line for approximately 400 genetic disorders, including common diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer, and many more are in the offing. For example, one supplier of genetic tests, Myriad Genetics, a biotech company in Utah, markets a test for a gene that governs which drug is most likely to help a patient with high blood pressure. Within a year, the company hopes to launch tests for genes that contribute to melanoma, an inherited form of colon cancer, and perhaps 20 percent of heart attacks. Within three years, the company hopes to offer tests that predict the risk of asthma, insulin-dependent diabetes, obesity, and osteoporosis.

Other companies are racing to develop tests for the genes that contribute to a rogues' gallery of diseases such as Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, lung cancer, and depression. With the completion of the map of the human genome last July, geneticists expect that hundreds more genetic tests will soon be available. Moreover, the tests are likely to be cheap and easy to administer. Your doctor will scrape a few cells from the inside of your cheek, place them in a device on a tabletop, and look into your medical future. New gene-chip technology, which marries DNA sequencing with the silicon chip inside computers, promises not only to speed the search for additional genes but to bring down the average cost of genetic tests from several hundred dollars to just a few. Eventually, discovering your genetic destiny, or at least your genetically probable fate, may become as simple and easy as checking your cholesterol.

The second trend that will have an impact on private health insurance is the plethora of "right to privacy" laws passed in response to widespread fears that genetic tests will be used as a basis for discrimination. So far, 37 states have passed legislation that tries, in one way or another, to limit an insurer's access to genetic information, and there are approximately 200 similar bills pending in various state legislatures. In February, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order that forbids federal agencies from using genetic testing in any decision to hire, promote, or dismiss workers. Clinton also endorsed congressional legislation sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Representative Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) that would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of genetic testing. A similar bill introduced by Representative Slaughter had more than 200 bipartisan supporters in the House and was endorsed by 100 public-interest groups representing a broad swath of the American public.

The political appeal of such bans can hardly be overstated. Many studies have shown that fear of discrimination discourages individuals from undergoing genetic tests that could be useful in prolonging their lives. Genetic counselors report, for instance, that many women at risk for an inherited form of breast cancer are reluctant to get tested for fear they will lose their insurance. At the same time, discrimination on the basis of genetic endowment violates most people's fundamental sense of fairness. As Carroll Campbell, president and CEO of the American Council of Life Insurance (ACLI), told an industry meeting two years ago: "Our Achilles' heel is that we haven't been able to successfully explain why it's fair to penalize applicants for risk factors they can't control." In fact, Campbell confided that, according to internal polling by the ACLI, fully 80 percent of life insurance industry employees (not including actuaries and underwriters) oppose the use of genetic testing by insurers.

The fact that many genetic markers for disease are strongly associated with specific ethnic groups adds to the potential controversy. Jews of eastern European origin, for example, are far more prone to several harmful genetic mutations than the general population. They face a three- to four-fold increased risk for three mutations associated with breast cancer and approximately a six-fold increase in risk for colon cancer. African Americans are more likely to suffer from hypertension, coronary artery disease, and sickle cell anemia, a disease that almost never strikes northern Europeans or Asians. Caucasian children, meanwhile, face at least a 10-fold increased risk of cystic fibrosis compared with nonwhites.

Yet the ever-tightening legal prohibitions against genetic discrimination create perverse side effects when combined with the trend toward cheap and effective genetic testing. Specifically, the ability of people to keep the results of genetic tests secret causes an asymmetry of information between insurers and insurees that threatens to unravel the very logic of private health insurance markets and, by extension, the viability of the U.S. health care system as a whole.

This mighty threat arises chiefly from a phenomenon known to actuaries as "adverse selection." People who know, for whatever reason, that they face an increased risk of disease or premature death tend to load up on insurance. This presents no threat to the sustainability of insurance markets so long as insurers have access to the same information and can use it to adjust the premiums offered such people to a level commensurate with the risks they present. But when insurers are denied meaningful information about the risks they are underwriting, or are forbidden from practicing price discrimination based on different probabilities of risk, then adverse selection sets in motion a process that at best makes insurance markets highly inefficient, and at worst dysfunctional.

To see why, consider the following thought experiment, inspired by an example from David Holland, president and CEO of Munich American Reassurance Company of Atlanta. For simplicity's sake, imagine not a health insurance company, but a life insurance company, called PetLife, which has three types of customers: 1,000 dogs, 1,000 cats, and 1,000 mice. Each customer holds a policy that will pay $1 in the event of death, but life expectancies vary widely. The cats, blessed with nine lives, enjoy the lowest mortality rates. Only 10 percent of all cat customers die each year. Dogs, prone to chasing cats into the street, suffer a higher mortality rate, with 20 percent dying annually. Finally, there are the poor mice, who, largely because of the cats, have the shortest life expectancy. In any given year, fully 36 percent of mice customers expire.

Obviously, the mice pose the highest risks and the highest costs for PetLife. Indeed, since they are more than three and a half times more likely to die in any given year than cats, many mice find that they can only obtain life insurance at rates that are very high, at least compared with the rates quoted to cats. Sensing an injustice (after all, they had no choice about being born mice), the mice band together as a special-interest group and push a law through Congress that prohibits discrimination on the basis of genetic endowment. From now on, all life insurers will have to offer policies to cats, dogs, and mice at the same price.

How will insurance markets respond to this mandate? Given the different mortality rates for its 3,000 customers, PetLife can expect 100 cats, 200 dogs, and 360 mice to die by the end of the first year, for a total of 660 claims. Ignoring the cost of overhead and any need for profits, PetLife will need to collect premiums of $660 to cover each of the $1 death benefits it can expect to owe each year. Since it is prohibited from practicing genetic discrimination, it must select a single premium price that covers its expenses. After dividing the total amount of expected claims ($660) by the total number of customers (3,000), the company will discover that the premium it must charge for each policy is 22 cents.

But there is a problem with these single-price policies, especially if you are a cat. With their comparatively long life expectancy, the cats collectively will pay some 45 percent more in premiums than they will collect in benefits. By contrast, the short-lived mice will collect some 61 percent more benefits than they pay in premiums. What would you do if you were a cat? Obviously, you'd be inclined either to look for a new plan with more cats and fewer mice, or perhaps go without life insurance altogether.

And what would you do if you were a mouse? With the company paying the average mouse $1 in benefits for every 22 cents it contributes in premiums, PetLife policies are highly popular among mice. It is such a good deal that, unlike cats, few mice ever let their policies lapse. Consequently, over time PetLife's risk pool comprises an ever larger share of high-cost mice, and an eversmaller share of low-cost cats.

As this happens, PetLife will have no choice but to keep raising its premiums to cover the increasing average death rate of its remaining (mostly mice) customers. And each time it does so, its remaining cat customers will face a worse deal, causing still more to flee and requiring a new round of premium increases. Eventually, either PetLife will go broke or the mice will again find themselves paying very high premiums, with many of them perhaps priced out of the market.

The moral of the story is that for all insurance markets, not just life insurance, a failure to practice price discrimination against different classes of risks can lead quickly to market failure. This isn't just a matter of theory. In the 19th century, adverse selection created by an antiquated system of one-price-for-all underwriting made life insurance extremely attractive to the old and sick, and too expensive for the young and healthy. As insurers' costs rose, so did prices, until the product was so expensive only the affluent could afford it.

Something similar is happening today in New York State, where health insurers have been forced by law to charge everyone the same price, based on the average cost of insuring people in each of nine regions across the state. The 1992 community rating law applied not only to insurance for individuals but to rates offered to small businesses. Health insurers had to stop offering better rates to small businesses with young (and therefore generally healthier) workers and charging higher premiums to those with older, sicker workers. The legislation was aimed at bringing prices down so more businesses and individuals could afford health insurance. "What happened was just the opposite," says Mark Litow, an actuary with Milliman & Robertson, an employee benefits consulting firm. Instead, says Litow, "It raised average prices and wiped out the individual market in New York State." Within the first 18 months after passage of the bill, an estimated 365,000 New Yorkers lost or dropped their health insurance. Most of them were young, a pattern that caused prices to rise even more.

Though most Americans receive their health care through group policies in which adverse selection is less of a concern, even group plans are affected by the phenomenon, say industry experts. Individuals who know they are at elevated risk for genetic disease will seek out employers offering gold-plated health insurance plans (the government, for instance), or will choose to stay with an employer whose health plan is more likely to cover them. Employees with genetic conditions who can pick and choose among different health insurance options will select the plan that best covers the treatment they need.

It isn't just fear of adverse selection that creates a strong incentive for insurers to use genetic information in setting prices. Potentially, price discrimination based on the results of genetic testing could make insurance markets much more efficient, and the price of health and life coverage much lower for most people, albeit much higher for more than a few. It is a well-established principle of economics that when consumers have vastly different demand curves for a product, charging higher prices to those who need the product intensely, and lower prices to those who want it only weakly, often leads to lower average prices.

An example is the airline industry, which fills seats that would otherwise go empty by offering steep discounts to people who have no urgent need to travel and can purchase tickets far in advance. The presence of such people makes the average cost of tickets lower than it otherwise would be, because the cost of the flight is spread among more passengers. The public benefits that can accrue from price discrimination against different classes of customers were widely recognized as far back as the late 9th century, when government regulation of railroad freight and passenger fares embraced the principle.

The same tenet applies to the use of genetic tests in pricing insurance, and more broadly than one might suppose. Those who know they are blessed with few deleterious genes will have lower demand for health care insurance than those who know they are not, all else being equal. If the genetically fit are charged the same premiums as the genetically unfit, the former will consider health insurance overpriced, and many will simply choose to go bare. The only way to tempt them into a risk pool is to offer them discounts commensurate with the lower risks they present, or, to put it another way, to charge the genetically unfit more.

The use of genetic tests potentially increases the efficiency of insurance markets for another important reason: In effect, it reduces the amount of unknown risk, or uncertainty, insurers must absorb, and thereby allows them to charge lower average prices. Just having additional genetic information about the pool as a whole reduces uncertainty about future claims, notes James Hickman, dean emeritus of the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and to that extent reduces the risk premium that must be built into insurance prices. Even if a pool of employees turns out to have a higher-than-average number of workers with potentially expensive gene defects, the reduction of uncertainty achieved by sharing that information with insurers may well be enough to reduce the cost of insuring the pool to below what it would be were insurers simply left in the dark about the risks involved.

To see this principle at work in another context, consider which would be the more attractive bet for you: (a) You encounter a person on the Internet of unknown sex, age, and health habits who offers you $100 in return for your promise to pay his or her estate $1,000 in the event he or she dies next year, or (b) your 55-year-old neighbor, who you know is at least fit enough to mow his own lawn, but whom you also see smoking on his porch from time to time, offers you the same bargain, with the only difference being that the most he will pay you upfront to take the deal is $7S. Perhaps both proposals are bad bargains, but the second should seem more tempting than the first. That is because the attractiveness of a bet increases as its uncertainty decreases, even when comparatively high real risks are involved. This example shows why laws protecting privacy incur such great costs, and why it should be an open question whether the price is always worth paying.

Allowing genetic discrimination in insurance underwriting would be far less revolutionary than it might seem. Starting in the 1980s, blood testing of life insurance applicants became widespread, as did price discrimination based on the results. Today, some insurers have as many as nine classes of preferred rates based on factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, age, sex, and smoking habits. Far from generating political opposition, such price discrimination has become a marketing tool. As John Krinik, editor and publisher of Underwriter ALERT, has noted, "Cultural attitudes dealing with financial status (i.e., preferred, gold, and platinum credit cards, club memberships, etc.) made life insurance marketers believe that competitive advantage would accrue to the insurer who played to these social stratifications."

No insurance company yet offers discounts to the "genetically fit," but many industry observers believe it's only a matter of time before some renegade firm makes the pitch. A sample ad has already appeared in an article on future trends in insurance published in Contingencies, a trade magazine for actuaries: "Your genetic profile may qualify for the lowest insurance rate ever offered! You don't have to subsidize anyone else's inferior genes again! DNA Life Insurance Company introduces Immortal Life, the policy for the superior man or woman with unsurpassed gene fitness."

In pondering how health and life insurance markets might evolve if left to their own devices, it is worth noting that many consumers may well want to offer the results of genetic tests to insurance companies. Privacy laws increasingly allow individuals who get unhappy test results to keep that information to themselves. But those who discover they are genetically well-off may want to share that information with insurers in order to obtain lower rates. Similarly, in the future, employers may be tempted to reduce their health care costs by offering the prospect of lower premiums to employees who voluntarily submit to a genetic test.

Lawmakers may try to prohibit such transactions, but arguably this would in itself be a form of genetic discrimination. Why should people who happened to be born without many gene defects (but who may be poor or suffering from nongenetic disease) be forced to pay more for health insurance than is warranted by the actuarial risk their genes are known to present? Alternatively, if those who are prone to genetic disease require a subsidy for their health care needs, why should the burden of paying that subsidy fall exclusively on the genetically fit as a class without regard to their individual health or economic status?

Breast cancer provides a concrete example of how bans on genetic discrimination can cause inequities. About 80 percent of the women who carry BRCAI, a gene associated with breast cancer, will develop the disease. But women with this inherited form of cancer constitute only a fraction of all breast cancer patients. Why should women who carry the BRCAI gene be a protected class, effectively entitled to insurance priced below the actuarial cost of their benefits, while those who develop breast cancer from other causes are not?

Many people believe that genetic discrimination should be banned because individuals have no control over the gene defects they inherit. But while the content of our DNA may be a matter of fate, genetic disease usually isn't. Some genetic defects, to be sure, do lead inexorably to disease. For example, people who test positive for the rare gene mutation that causes retinitis pigmentosa know for certain that they will go blind by about age 60. But the results of most genetic tests are expressed in terms of probability. Part of this variability stems from the vagaries of genetics. The same genetic mutation may express itself differently in different people; one identical twin, for example, may develop juvenile diabetes while the other escapes it. The expression of genes is also affected by lifestyle and environment. If you have a genetic predisposition toward high blood pressure, you may not develop the condition if you exercise and hold down your calories. Many persons carrying the gene associated with familial adenomatous polyposis colon cancer can achieve a nearly normal lifespan if they receive regular colonoscopies and have their polyps removed. An inherited predisposition to lung cancer or emphysema can be diminished by giving up cigarettes.

The fact that most genetic tests establish only a predisposition to disease causes some observers to object that such tests should never be used as a basis for discrimination. Doing so, they say, is equivalent to charging blacks higher life insurance premiums just because blacks, on average, have lower life expectancies-actuarially sound, but morally unacceptable. Yet insurance has always been based on probabilities determined through group membership, variously defined. People who have only recently obtained their first driver's license, for example, are often very careful drivers, yet as a class such drivers present enough of an elevated risk of accidents that they are charged dramatically higher premiums than the general population, and without stirring much political objection to the implicit age discrimination either.

Similarly, many, if not most, occasional smokers don't develop lung cancer or other smoking-related illnesses, but enough do so that price discrimination by life insurance companies against all smokers, whether they smoke one cigarette a day or 60, is well established and widely accepted. More significantly, insurers now routinely charge higher prices to people who, while not actually ill, carry mere markers or precursors of disease, such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure. The fact that such conditions often have a genetic component further undermines any attempt to draw moral or legal distinctions between genetic testing and routine medical screening. "The arguments I don't like are the ones that say genetic information is so special that it deserves particular protection," says Hank Greenly, codirector of the Stanford Program in Genomics, Ethics, and Society. "It's just another form of predictive information, like sex, age, weight, and past medical history."

Adding to the pressure on insurers to use genetic information in underwriting is the reality that once one company does it, they all have to, or they run the risk of huge increases in cost. In the early 1980s, for example, when some life insurance companies first charged higher premiums to smokers, insurers that delayed implementing the policy found that the percentage of smokers in their risk pools increased to as much as 60 percent, because smokers sought out the companies that did not practice price discrimination against them.

Yet the insurance industry also faces huge risks of further political backlash if it adopts wholesale genetic testing. This is particularly true when it comes to health insurance, because of the widespread conviction that access to health care is a right of citizenship. "Health insurance carriers are more likely to react in a political fashion than in an actuarial fashion," says Alex Capron, professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California. "They are likely not to want to use genetic information even if they could, because they recognize extensive use of it would create a situation of larger numbers of uninsured people, and all that does is feed the demand for health care reform."

Some observers believe the tradeoffs between equity and efficiency can be reconciled if the government allows for genetic discrimination in underwriting but also creates special benefits or subsidies for people who are thereby left unable to afford insurance. Patrick Brockett, director of the Risk Management and Insurance Program at the University of Texas, advocates a voucher system, similar in method to food stamps, which he believes would be far preferable to an outright ban on genetic discrimination. "We don't ask supermarkets to sell food at a lower price to disadvantaged people; we give disadvantaged people food stamps," notes Brockett. "Similarly, we may want to give vouchers to people who, because of genetic test, can't afford insurance." Brockett thinks such a system will start with health care, "because so many people now think it is a right," and soon spread to types of insurance against human frailty, such as workers' compensation and life and disability insurance.

Other observers believe tha

The Second Fall of Rome

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500

The reputation of Roman civilization in the Western world has never been lower than it is today. To a remarkable degree, the cultural and political legacies of both the Roman republic and the Roman Empire have been edited out of the collective memory of the United States and other Western nations not only by multiculturalists attacking the Western canon but by would-be traditionalists purporting to defend it.

The loss of the ancient Romans has been the gain of the ancient Greeks. Today, Western democracy is usually traced back to Athens rather than the Roman republic, something that would have astonished the American Founding Fathers and the French Jacobins. The Roman philosopher-statesman Cicero--perhaps the most important historical model in the minds of early modern European and American republicans--has been replaced by the Athenian leader Pericles as the beau ideal of a Western statesman. The art of rhetoric, once thought to be central to republican culture, has come to be associated with pompous politicians and dishonest media consultants. As for the Roman Empire, it is often thought of as an early version of 20th-century Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, or, if the emphasis is on decadence, as a rehearsal for the Weimar Republic.

The reputation of Roman literature has fared no better than that of Roman government. Roman authors such as Virgil and Horace and Seneca and Plautus are often dismissed as second-rate imitators of the Greeks. By common consent, the three greatest epic poets of the West are identified as Homer, Dante, and Milton. Even though the epic was a Roman specialty, Virgil, Statius, and Lucan are demoted to a second tier or ignored altogether. In two and a half centuries, Virgil has gone from being the greatest poet of all time to a feeble imitator of Homer and, finally, a paid propagandist comparable to a hack writer in a 20th-century totalitarian state. The Roman playwright Seneca, once revered as a tragedian and a philosopher, is no longer taken seriously by students of literature or philosophy.

The denigration of the Romans and the promotion of the Greeks has not been the product of increased knowledge or refinement in taste. Rather, it is the result of an anti-Roman and anti-Latin bias that has warped Western European and American culture since the late 18th century--a bias that 20th-century modernism inherited from 19th-century romanticism and 18th-century neoclassicism. An unbiased re-examination of the Roman legacy reveals that the ancient Latin traditions in art and philosophy, if not in foreign policy or government, contain much of value to the contemporary world.

Rome's low reputation today seems astonishing when one considers how central the legacy of Roman civilization was to Western identity only a few centuries ago. From the Middle Ages to the late 18th century, the Roman classics dominated the Western literary curriculum. Before the Renaissance, many Greek classics, preserved by the Byzantines and Arabs, were unknown in the West. Dante, for example, knew Homer only by reputation. Even when more Greek classics became available, few members of the Latin-educated Western elite studied Greek. An English translation of Aeschylus did not appear until 1777.

Renaissance humanists, despite their eclectic interest in Greek as well as Egyptian and Jewish traditions, were chiefly concerned with reviving the culture of Roman antiquity. The architect Palladio combined Roman motifs with vernacular Italian architecture to create a style that replaced Gothic throughout Italy and western and northern Europe. Literary scholars devised "Ciceronian Latin," an artificial dialect using only words Cicero used. Seneca inspired Renaissance tragedy, and his fellow Romans Plautus and Terence provided the models for Renaissance comedy.

A succession of European rulers from Charlemagne to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556, shared the dream of reviving the Roman Empire in the West. Both Dante and Machiavelli imagined a new Roman Empire. Absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV portrayed themselves as new Caesars. Eighteenth-century republicans in the United States and France identified their new states with the Roman republic and identified themselves with republican statesmen such as Cincinatus, Cato, and Cicero, or tyrannicides such as Brutus.

Unlike some of the radicals of the French Revolution, most of the American Founders had reservations about treating either the Roman republic or the Greek city-states as precedents for a modern national and liberal republic. In 1791, James Wilson denied that "the Grecian and Roman nations" understood "the true principles of original, equal, and sentimental liberty." He declared, "But no longer shall we look to ancient histories for principles and systems of pure freedom. The close of the 18th century, in which we live, shall teach mankind to be purely free." George Washington expressed a similar sentiment in his call for a stronger federal government: "The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition; but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any other period."

Nevertheless, the American state constitutions and the federal constitution of 1787 incorporated what elite Federalists such as John Adams and the authors of the Federalist Papers considered to be the features that gave the Roman constitution a stability missing from the faction-ridden city-states of ancient Greece and medieval Italy: a strong chief magistrate and a bicameral legislature with a powerful senate.

Rejecting this prescription, American populists and radical democrats found a different precedent not in Greek democracy but in the "Ancient Saxon Constitution" of England, whose assembly was invoked as a model for a unicameral legislature with members serving short terms. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in the populist myth of the democratic Anglo-Saxons, informed his fellow former president John Adams in December 1819 that he had been reading the letters of Cicero: "When the enthusiasm . . . kindled by Cicero's pen and principles, subsides into cool reflection, I ask myself What was that government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, and the ambition of Caesar to subvert?" Adams had once written that "the Roman constitution formed the noblest people, and the greatest power, that has ever existed." But now he agreed with Jefferson about the Romans: "I never could discover that they possessed much real Virtue, or real Liberty there." (This concession, however, was less damaging than it might appear, because Adams and other Federalists believed that institutions such as the Roman Senate were more important than civic virtue in ensuring the success of republican government.)

Despite their doubts about the relevance of classical precedents in politics, the American Founders did not hesitate to borrow the imagery of the Roman republic. Among other things, this practice disguised the extent to which the United States was an organic outgrowth of English society. The very name "republic" was a version of the Latin res publica. The building that housed the legislature was called the Capitol, not the Parliament; the upper house was the Senate; a creek on Capitol Hill was waggishly named the Tiber, after the river that ran through Rome. The Great Seal of the United States includes two mottoes from Virgil: Annuit coeptis (He approves of the beginnings), and novus ordo seclorum (a new order of the ages). In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay argued for the ratification of the federal constitution using the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul of the Roman republic. The enemies of republicanism that they described--faction, avarice, corruption, ambition--were those identified by Cicero, Tacitus, and other Roman writers.

The triumph of Roman imagery in the American and French Revolutions, however, marked an Indian summer of Roman prestige in the West. By the late 18th century, new trends in Western culture were undermining the classical values symbolized by both republican and imperial Rome.

The first challenge came from Scotland. In 1762, the Scottish writer James Macpherson published a "translation" of a supposed third-century epic by the fabled Gaelic bard Ossian. The poems purported to be a loose collection of primitive ballads rather than a polished work of a civilized writer. Before it was exposed as a forgery, the work inspired a Europe-wide vogue; Goethe praised it, and Napoleon took a copy with him to Egypt. The influential German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) argued that the Homeric epics, too, grew out of the spontaneous songs of the ancient Greek Volk.

Virgil, once preferred to Homer because he was more civilized, was now considered inferior to Homer--for the same reason. The neoclassicism of the late 18th century was not so much the final stage of Renaissance and Baroque humanism as it was the beginning of a new romantic primitivism that would manifest itself in 19th-century romanticism and 20th-century modernism. The primitive was now associated with virtue and imagination, the sophisticated with immorality and triviality. Among Greek writers, the more primitive and sublime, such as Aeschylus, came to be preferred to those such as Euripides who seemed too sophisticated and self-conscious to Europeans seeking an intellectual vacation from civilized life.

Germany was the center of romantic Hellenism. Among other things, German romanticism was a declaration of independence from the cultural and political hegemony of France. If France identified itself with Rome (both republican and imperial), then Germany would champion the Greeks. "A break was made with the Latin tradition of humanism, and an entirely new humanism, a true new Hellenism, grew up," writes the historian Rudolph Pfeiffer.

Goethe called the 18th century "the age of Winckelmann," after the German aesthete Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), who transformed art criticism by attributing the perfection of Greek art to the social and even physical perfection of the ancient Greeks themselves. "The most beautiful body of ours would perhaps be as much inferior to the most beautiful Greek, as Iphicles was to his brother Hercules," Winckelmann speculated. The humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) inspired the 19th-century elite German educational system that put the study of the Greeks at the center of the university and high school curricula. (The German Gymnasium, or high school, was inspired by the Greek institution combining the sports arena and the school.)

Influenced by German philhellenism, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1842, reformed the public schools that educated the ruling class of Victorian Britain. The Greek cult of the athletic youth (quite alien to Roman culture, which was symbolized by the middle-aged consul or general with furrowed brow) influenced the British culture that produced the poets A. E. Housman and Rupert Brooke. As George Steiner has observed, "The Homeric saga of warfare and masculine intimacies, with its formidable emphasis on competitive sports, seems immediate, as is no other text, to the boys' school, to the all-male college, the regiment, and the club (configurations cardinal to British, not to Continental societies)"

Hellenomania was a characteristic that English romanticism shared with the German version. Lord Byron's career took him from Scotland, the home of the noble Ossian, to Greece, where he died fighting the Turks on behalf of Greek independence. Shelley declared: "If not for Rome and Christianity, we should all have been Greeks--without their prejudices." An entire minor genre of romantic literature was devoted to nostalgia inspired by Greek ruins or artifacts. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), Byron, regarding a broken column, wrote: "Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on Thee, / Nor feels as Lovers o'er the dust they loved." It is no accident that Keats wrote an ode inspired by a Grecian urn rather than a Roman vase.

Ancient Greece, a sunny paradise populated by athletes and poets, was contrasted with repressive medieval Christendom or the hideous modern industrial West. For homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde and libertines such as Algernon Swinburne, it symbolized freedom from bourgeois and Christian sexual mores. Roman civilization--imperial, metropolitan, urban, bureaucratic--was too reminiscent of contemporary Europe and North America to be used as a contrast with 19th-century society.

Once Rome became a symbol of stultifying civilization, anti-Latin romantics were quick to find virtuous primitivism and purity in tribal societies--the ancient Celts, Teutons, or Slavs. Indeed, from a romantic nationalist point of view, the fall of Rome before the onslaught of the various trans-Alpine tribes was the necessary precondition for the formation of modern European nationalities.

Romantic nationalism and populism led 19th-century intellectuals to seek ethnic heroes in peasant folklore and long-neglected medieval manuscripts. Ossian was joined by Germany's Siegfried, Ireland's Cuchulainn, England's Beowulf, and Spain's Cid, among others. These new heroes inspired Richard Wagner and William Butler Yeats to create dramas set in the misty prehistory of Germany and Ireland. And the saga of Beowulf, rediscovered in neglected manuscripts in the 19th century, became the foundation of the nationalistic new scholarly discipline of "English literature."

The rise in the reputation of Greek bards and northern European barbarians was accompanied by a rapid decline in the reputation of Roman writers. The shade of Virgil, eclipsed by Homer, may not have had to compete with Ossian once Macpherson's forgery was exposed, but he found a new rival in his admirer Dante.

Most of the leading literary intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries preferred Dante to Virgil, whose ghost served as the Florentine poet's guide through hell. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated the Divine Comedy into English (1865-67), introduced the cult of Dante to the United States. T. S. Eliot, whose poetry contains many echoes of the Divine Comedy and who saw Dante as the ideal poet, declared in a 1944 lecture that Virgil "is at the center of European civilization, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp," and that "we are all, insofar as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire." But Eliot's classicism was really a kind of Anglo-Catholic romantic medievalism that led the poet to view Virgil through Dante's eyes. Eliot was more interested in Latin Christendom than in pagan Latindom, in Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire than in the Roman Empire of Augustus.

The reputation of Cicero, as well as that of Virgil, underwent a drastic revaluation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The union in Cicero of republican statesman, lawyer, philosopher, and master rhetorician made him the hero of the educated elite in the early American republic. John Adams declared in his Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America (1787) that "all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character." His son John Quincy Adams described Cicero's De officiis (On Duty) as the manual of every republican.

Thanks to Cicero's influence, the major American literary form before the Civil War was the oration, not the novel or the lyric poem. The celebrity attained by great orators such as Daniel Webster and Edward Everett was only possible in a culture saturated with memories of republican Rome. The replacement of the orator by the Ossianic bard or shaman as the model of the poet was another victory for the primitivist aesthetic shared by neoclassicism, romanticism, and modernism--and another defeat for Rome. Rhetoric, a Greek and Hellenistic art brought to perfection by Cicero and other Romans, was incompatible with romanticism. The romantics equated the rhetorical with the insincere and the spontaneous with the authentic. Although most of the great romantic poets continued to write metrical verse in recognizable versions of traditional genres, the aesthetics of German romanticism, disseminated in Britain by Coleridge and others, held that each art work should be an "organic" outgrowth of the personality of the artist or, in the case of the nationalistic romantics, of the genius of the tribe or race. According to romantic-modernist orthodoxy, "rhetorical" was the greatest insult that could be used in connection with a poet's work, which was supposed to be a spontaneous and sincere effusion, not a work of verbal artifice crafted with an audience in mind.

Even more than Cicero, Seneca was a victim of the German romantic revaluation of the classical past. The Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio, who supplied the plots of Measure for Measure and Othello, wrote of Seneca in 1543: "In almost all his tragedies he surpassed (in as far as I can judge) all the Greeks who ever wrote--in wisdom, in gravity, in decorum, in majesty, and in memorable aphorism." Elizabethan tragedy, down to its five-act structure, its lurid violence, and its use of ghosts, was inspired by the tragedies of Seneca; Shakespeare's Hamlet is a Senecan play.

Like Cicero, Seneca was admired as a philosopher as well as a literary stylist and praised by Dante, Chaucer, and Montaigne. Saint Jerome nominated him for sainthood, and his Stoicism influenced thinkers on both sides of the Reformation divide. For a millennium and a half, his place was secure alongside Virgil at the peak of Parnassus. In the 20th century, however, Seneca has been dismissed by literary critics and historians, with a few exceptions such as the poet Dana Gioia. Herbert J. Muller writes in The Spirit of Tragedy (1956): "Almost all readers today are struck by how crude his drama is, and how invincibly abominable his taste. It is hard to understand why for centuries western critics and poets had so high an admiration for Seneca, installing his plays among the classics." (Among other things, this implies that Shakespeare, who learned so much from Seneca, was a poor judge of drama.) The Norton Book of Classical Literature (1993) does not include one word of Seneca.

The only art in which the Roman tradition held its own in the 19th and 20th centuries was architecture. Beginning with late 18th-century neoclassicism, fads of abstract, primitive simplicity in architecture have repeatedly been followed by shifts in taste back in favor of ornate Roman or neo-Roman Renaissance styles. Neoclassicism gave way to gaudy Second Empire; the Greek Revival in the early 19th century was followed in the second half of the century by the Beaux-Arts revival. In the 1980s and '90s, one reaction against the geometric abstraction of International Style modernism took the form of neo-Palladian revivalism.

The reason in each case was the same--neo-Greek simplicity in poetry or drama may be sublime, but in architecture it is merely boring. Generations of connoisseurs have shared the sentiment expressed in the 18th century by Lord de la Warr on viewing the Greek Revival building commissioned by Lord Nuneham: "God damn my blood, my lord, is this your Grecian architecture? What villainy! What absurdity! If this be Grecian, give me Chinese, give me Gothick! Anything is better than this!"

Although the Latin-based high culture survived longer in the provincial United States than in Britain or Germany, with Emerson and Whitman most American intellectuals joined the transatlantic romantic movement. By the middle of the 19th century, Ciceronian orators such as Daniel Webster, Augustan poets such as the Connecticut Wits, and classical painters such as Thomas Cole and Benjamin West seemed to belong to another civilization.

The older culture of Latinity did linger on in the American South. The poet Allen Tate described the South's "composite agrarian hero, Cicero Cincinatus": "I can think of no better image for what the South was before 1860, and for what it largely still was until about 1914, than that of the old gentleman in Kentucky who sat every afternoon in his front yard under an old sugar tree, reading Cicero's Letters To Atticus."

By the 20th century, the ancient Greeks had almost completely replaced the ancient Romans as the preferred cultural ancestors of Americans. What David Gress, in his recent study of changing conceptions of the West, From Plato to NATO, calls the American "Grand Narrative" of Western history was shaped by the Contemporary Civilization course devised at Columbia University after World War I and the Great Books curriculum promoted by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago during the 1930s. These curricular reforms inspired American college courses in "Western Civ," a version of world history disseminated to a wider audience by popularizers such as Will and Ariel Durant and Edith Hamilton, author of The Greek Way (1930)

Western Civ (WC) held that Euro-American history between Pericles and Thomas Jefferson was a long and regrettable detour. According to Gress:

Literature, founded by Homer, came to fruition in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Representational art, which lay at the core of modern Western identity from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, reached heights never since rivaled in the sculptures of the Parthenon at Athens or the temple of Apollo at Olympia. Philosophy matured in Socrates and culminated, in the fourth century, in Plato and Aristotle. As if all that were not enough, the Greeks also invented democracy and the study of history, and the two were related, just as philosophy and the scientific outlook on nature were related.

This conventional wisdom represented the hardening into orthodoxy of the once-revolutionary claims of the early-19th-century romantic philhellenes. According to the WC orthodoxy, Rome's historical mission was merely to pass on the heritage of Periclean Athens to the modern Atlantic democracies. "Given its liberal slant," Gress writes, "it downplayed the Romans, both of whose aspects caused discomfort: the aristocratic and patriarchal libertas [freedom] of the early fathers and the slave-holding, exploitative imperialism of the later conquerors and their henchmen."

The task of the popularizers of Western Civ was made easier by the fact that American Protestantism had always disseminated a negative image of the Roman Empire (and its successor, the Roman Church). American Protestants thought of the ancient Romans as an evil and dissolute people whose favorite pastime was watching Christians being fed to lions in the Coliseum. In the popular mind, hard-bodied Greeks exercised; fat Romans lay on couches nibbling grapes between orgies. The lesson of Roman history seemed clear: if you have too much fun, you will be wiped out by invading barbarians and exploding volcanoes. In Protestant America, Rome symbolized not only pagan immorality but tyrannical big government. The comparison of government entitlements and popular entertainment to Rome's "bread and circuses" for the depraved and riotous masses became a staple of American conservative rhetoric.

If the reputation of Roman culture declined in the 18th and 19th centuries, the reputation of the Roman polity suffered in the 20th. Already a symbol of unimaginative, derivative art and literature, Rome came to be thought of as the forerunner of the most monstrous tyrannies of modern times.

Although early-19th-century Germans, divided among petty states and more adept at art than at arms, imagined themselves as the heirs of the city-state Greeks, 20th-century Germany seemed suspiciously like Rome. The Second Reich (Empire), founded in 1870, was led by a Kaiser (derived from Caesar). Hitler's Third Reich looked even more Roman. German National Socialism was influenced by Benito Mussolini's neo-Roman Fascism, the very name of which referred to the Roman symbol of authority (the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound tog

The New American Frontier

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

What if a distinguished American foreign correspondent resumed home to explore and explain the United States, using interpretive skills developed by studying other societies? That is the premise of Robert Kaplan's study of the United States at the turn of the millennium, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future. A contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan has written influential and widely admired books about countries torn by ethnic strife and poverty, including Balkan Ghosts (1994) and The Ends of the Earth (1997). In An Empire Wilderness (parts of which appeared in the Atlantic), Kaplan employs his trademark combination of firsthand observation, social analysis, and historical interpretation to try to make sense of a country as puzzling as any he has visited as a foreign correspondent: his own.

Kaplan's exploration of the United States concentrates on the country west of the Mississippi, from the border of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest. He finds signs of the American future in an ethnic mix changed by Latino and Asian immigration, and in a reorientation of American regional consciousness along a North-South axis in which the Canadian and Mexican borders are becoming less important. Two West Coast metropolitan areas strike him as models of alternative American urban futures: Portland, Oregon, symbol of a tidy and humane urbanism, and Orange County, a dystopia outside Los Angeles spawned by the car. Kaplan prefers the pedestrian-friendly urbanism of Portland to the sprawl of Los Angeles, while admitting that the latter model of urban life in North America is likely to prevail.

At his best, Kaplan convincingly illustrates the influence of geography on society and politics. For example, he observes that "the different responses of California and Texas to the Mexican challenge are geographically determined: while major urban attractors such as Los Angeles are close to the Mexican border, which makes California vulnerable to illegal immigrants, Texas is not quite in the same situation (El Paso's population is only 515,000, compared to 3.5 million for only the city of Los Angeles)." Where a less thoughtful journalist or scholar might have been content to observe that Omaha, St. Louis, and Kansas City "all are river cities in the flat middle of the continent," Kaplan describes the important distinctions: "Unlike St. Louis, Omaha has been able to annex its emerging suburbs in order to prevent their separate incorporation. So while St. Louis is a feudal assemblage of 92 separately incorporated cities, Omaha is overwhelmingly Omaha. Only four southern suburbs are beyond its grasp, and everyone, not simply poor blacks and Mexicans, attends Omaha's public schools."

Yet Kaplan's attempts to draw analogies between cultures and historical eras are sometimes strained. The friendliness of a Texas waitress inspires a theory of geographic determinism: "Indeed, Texas constitutes just another friendly desert culture, similar in its fundamentals to what I encountered in Arabia and other places, where great distances and an unforgiving, water-scarce environment weld people closely to one another at oases, while demanding a certain swaggering individualism out in the open—as well as religious conservatism."

The dangers of analogy become apparent when Kaplan, who has written incisively on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, scans the United States for signs of incipient Balkanization. An Arizona map showing Indian military bases, and other areas reminds the author of maps of Bosnia, prompting him to speculate: "Should the social disintegration I saw in Tucson's south side ever become pervasive while our governing institutions become infirm and border crossings from Mexico increase substantially, the broken lines on a map that today appear abstract could have deadly consequences." Like both proponents and many critics of multiculturalism, Kaplan contemplates the end of a common American national identity: "Perhaps, as America becomes increasingly a transnational melange—becoming more like the rest of the world as the rest of the world becomes more like us—we will come to resemble some Old World societies in this respect instead of a nation, we will become a 'community of communities' on the same continent."

A skeptical reader will wonder whether the United States is really more of "a transnational melange" in the 1990s than it was in the 1890s, when enormous European diasporas in America had their own newspapers, neighborhoods, religious institutions, and political machines. Apart from a pool of Spanish-speakers that would quickly shrink without continual Latin American immigration, there is no single foreign-language bloc comparable to the once-enormous German-speaking population of the United States. To judge from today's high rates of intermarriage across ethnic and racial lines, not only assimilation but amalgamation is occurring more rapidly than it did in the past. As Kaplan himself notes, "A third of all U.S.-born Latinos and more than a quarter of all U.S.-born Asians in the five-county greater Los Angeles region intermarry with other races. Almost one out of ten blacks in greater Los Angeles intermarries, a percentage high enough to create significant changes in black racial identity in years to come."

Kaplan is much more persuasive when he writes about the secession of elite neighborhoods within regions, "as wealthier Americans increasingly live their lives within protected communities, heavily zoned suburbs, defended corporate enclaves, private malls, and health clubs." Indeed, a case can be made that class divisions are growing in the United States, even as the historic disparities between regions and races continue to narrow. "But what if such wide, rigid class distinctions reemerge—with a deepening chasm between an enlarged underclass and a globally oriented upper class—while the dialogue between ruler and ruled becomes increasingly ritualistic and superficial? Will the form of democracy remain while its substance decays?" The real danger facing the United States may be not that it will be split along regional lines into five or six countries, but that it will fissure along class lines into two nations.

Although weakened somewhat by misleading analogies and apocalyptic pessimism, Kaplan's tour of his own country is an impressive synthesis of observation and analysis that confirms the author's standing as one of this country's leading intellectual journalists. Whether or not An Empire Wilderness is, as advertised in the subtitle, "travels into America's future," Robert Kaplan has provided a rich and rewarding account of his travels into America's present.