Colossus (33 page)

In short, both opponents and proponents of war to overthrow Saddam Hussein agreed that a swift return to full political sovereignty for Iraq was desirable; the same applied to the other countries under international administration. The question this chapter addresses is whether or not it is correct to regard national independence—what Woodrow Wilson called self-determination—as a universally viable model. Might it not be that for
some
countries some form of imperial governance, meaning a partial or complete suspension of their national sovereignty, might be better than full independence, not just for a few months or years but for decades?
³
Paradoxically, might the only hope for such countries ever to become successful sovereign states (especially if we regard democracy as a key criterion of success) be a period of political dependence and limited power for their representative institutions?
⁴
To answer that question, we need to compare the costs and benefits of both empire and independence in the modern period.

FROM EMPIRES TO NATION-STATES

The age of empires reached its zenith in the century stretching from the 1880s until the 1980s. For most of that period a relatively small number of empires governed nearly all of the world. On the eve of the First World War, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, which among them accounted for less than 1 percent of the world’s land surface and less than 8 percent of its population, ruled in the region of a third of the rest of the world’s area and more than a quarter of its people.
⁵
All of Australasia, 90 percent of Africa and 56 percent of Asia were under some form of European rule, as were nearly all the islands of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. And although only around a quarter of the American continent—mainly Canada—found itself in the same condition of dependence, nearly all the rest had been ruled from Europe at one time or another in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In both the north and the south, the polities of the American republics were fundamentally shaped by the colonial past.

Nor do these calculations about the extent of the West European maritime empires tell the whole story of nineteenth-century empire. Most of Central and Eastern Europe was under Russian, German or Austrian imperial rule. Indeed, the Russian empire stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Warsaw to Vladivostok. And still intact, though in a position of increasing inferiority to the European empires, were the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Chinese empire in the Far East. Independent nation-states, in short, were the exception to a worldwide imperial rule. Even Japan, the best-known example of an Asian state that had resisted colonization (though its economy had been forcibly opened to trade by the United States), had itself already embarked on empire building, having conquered Korea. And as we have seen, the United States, though forged in the crucible of anti-imperial war, had taken its first steps on the road to empire, having annexed Texas in 1845, California in 1848, Alaska in 1867 and the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Guam in 1898. Indeed, its nineteenth-century history can be told as a transition from continental to hemispherical imperialism.

Yet the twentieth century rejected empire, in principle, if not in practice. The rejection may be said to have begun with the publication of one of the most influential of all anti-imperialist tracts, J. A. Hobson’s
Imperialism: An Essay
, the central thrust of which—that the British Empire was a racket, run for the sole benefit of a tiny elite of financiers and their clients—later inspired Lenin’s tract
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
. To Lenin, the First World War was a direct result of imperialist rivalries. Its consequences were, however, to overthrow no fewer than four Central and East European emperors (though Lenin himself ensured that the Romanov empire was reborn in a more malevolent form under Bolshevik rule). The five surviving West European empires limped through the 1920s and 1930s but were shattered in the 1940s by the German, Italian and Japanese bids to build new empires in Europe, Africa and Asia. The two superpowers that emerged victorious from the world wars, though empires in all but name, were both decidedly anti-imperial in their rhetoric. Elaborating on his predecessor Woodrow Wilson’s first draft for a new world order, Franklin Roosevelt conceived of the Second World War as a war to end empire. The Soviet Union, for its part, consistently equated fascism and imperialism and did not take long after 1945 to accuse the United States of sponsoring one and practicing the other. Both these anti-imperial empires believed they would derive strategic advantages from decolonization.

Roosevelt envisaged a system of temporary
⁶
trusteeships for all former colonies, as a prelude to their independence on the basis of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination (which the peacemakers after the previous world war had emphatically ruled out for non-European peoples). Despite the best efforts of Churchill, he got his way.
⁷
Decolonization happened after the Second World War in a succession of great waves, postponed only where (as in the Middle East or Indochina) the Americans were willing to subsidize European colonial governments against Communist “insurgency.”
⁸
The First World War had already dismantled three empires—the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman—but many of their possessions had ended up in the hands of other empires, having enjoyed only the most fleeting tastes of independence. After 1945 it was different. Not only the British but also the French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese empires were wound up, rapidly in some regions of the world, slowly and painfully elsewhere, until by the 1970s little more than vestiges remained. Only three
empires endured: the Russian and Chinese (which Roosevelt conceived of as somehow different from the West European empires because their colonies were not overseas and, perhaps, because their ideologies were overtly egalitarian) and, of course, the unspoken American empire.
⁹
The result was a leap in the number of independent states in the world, which more than doubled. In 1920 there were 69 sovereign states in the world. By 1950 the number had risen to 89, and in 1995, by which time the Russian empire had finally fallen apart, there were 192, with the two biggest increases coming in the 1960s (mainly Africa, where no fewer than 25 new states were formed between 1960 and 1964) and the 1990s (mainly Eastern Europe).
¹⁰

Thus, impelled forward by a combination of European exhaustion, non-European nationalism and American idealism, the world embarked on an epochal experiment, an experiment to test the hypothesis that it was imperialism that caused both poverty and wars and that self-determination would ultimately pave the way to prosperity and peace.

WHY DECOLONIZATION FAILED

That hypothesis has been largely proved false. The coming of political independence has brought prosperity only to a small minority of former colonies. And although the former imperial powers no longer fight one another, decolonization has in many cases been followed by recurrent conflict between newly independent states and, even more often, within them. This has been the great double disappointment of the sixty years since the end of World War II. Nor has the disappointment ended there. Self-determination was supposed to go hand in hand with democracy. But decolonization has often led not to democracy but, after the briefest of interludes, to indigenous dictatorship. Many of these dictatorships have been worse for the people living under them than the old colonial structures of government: more corrupt, more lawless, more violent. Indeed, it is precisely these characteristics that explain why standards of living have actually worsened in many sub-Saharan African countries since they gained their independence.
¹¹

Most of the former colonies of the Middle East are wealthier only because nature endowed some of them with underground deposits of oil, full
exploitation of which came only after they had gained their independence. But with few exceptions their polities are little better than despotisms. Colonialism was not all good, of course, and independence has not been all bad. But it is not convincing (though it is certainly convenient for the likes of the Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe) to blame all the problems of the developing world today on the malign after-effects of colonial rule. In the words of the African Development Bank’s 2003 report, “More than four decades of independence … should have been enough time to sort out the colonial legacies and move forward.”
¹²
The experience of much of Africa and the Middle East since 1945, as well as large parts of Asia, makes it clear that Roosevelt’s faith in decolonization was misplaced.

Take poverty. Although historical statistics for
per capita
incomes are very far from complete or exact, it is possible to measure approximately how former empires and former colonies have fared in the period from high imperialism to post-imperialism. Long-run
per capita
gross domestic product figures are available for forty-eight countries, eight of which can be considered empires before the world wars and fourteen of which were colonies. Two things are immediately apparent from table 6, which compares both sets of countries in 1913 and in 1998. The first is that only one former colony has significantly improved its relative economic position: Singapore, which in 1913 had a
per capita
GDP of a quarter of that of the United States, but which by 1998 had overtaken all the former European imperial powers. The other ex-colony to improve its position, Malaysia, has done so only modestly, raising its
per capita
GDP from 17 percent to 26 percent of the American level. All the others have fallen farther behind the United States than they were in 1913, in some cases very far behind. The second point, which follows from the first, is that the gap between the world’s former empires and most of their former colonies has widened sharply. In 1913 the Philippines, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Ghana and Burma all had
per capita
GDP of between 13 and 20 percent of the American level. In 1998 the average income in all six was less than a tenth of the average U.S. income. By comparison, all the former empires have remained within sight of the world’s economic leader, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which is distinctly worse off in relative terms than it was in 1913.

Yet these figures understate the extent of the global divergence between rich and poor, because they omit many of the poorest countries in
the world for which historical data simply do not exist. When one concentrates on the period between 1960 and 1989, a critical era for the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, it is possible to discern more striking evidence of the economic failure of independence. Among forty-one former British colonies, only fourteen succeeded in narrowing the gap between their own
per capita
GDP and that of their erstwhile British rulers during those thirty years.
¹³
Indeed, in all but two former African colonies (Botswana and Lesotho), the ratio of British to former colonial income significantly increased.
¹⁴

TABLE 6. PER CAPITA GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT OF EMPIRES AND COLONIES DURING AND AFTER THE AGE OF EMPIRE (IN 1990 INTERNATIONAL DOLLARS)

Source: Angus Maddison,
The World Economy
. Rankings are based on the forty-eight countries for which Maddison provides data. The calculations are for real GDP
per capita
, measured in constant U.S. dollars of 1990, adjusted for purchasing power parity.

In one respect, this great postcolonial divergence may be slackening as
India, the most populous of all the former European colonies, enters a long-overdue era of economic growth. However, most ex-colonies continue to lag ever farther behind the elite of wealthy countries. According to the World Bank, there are only fourteen countries in the world with
per capita
GDP of three-quarters or more of the American level. Of these, all but two are European; the others (Japan and Hong Kong) represent the extremes of Asian experience, the former having never been a colony, the latter having remained under British rule for more than a century and a half. At the other end of the scale, however, there are twenty countries where
per capita
GDP is 3 percent or less of the American level. In more than thirty of the world’s countries the average income is less than $1 a day.
¹⁵
All but six
¹⁶
of these are African countries that have gained independence since the Second World War. In the poorest of the former British colonies, Sierra Leone,
per capita
income is now $140 per year; the average Briton is more than two hundred times better off. In 1965 the difference in income was a factor of just eight. Gambia, the condition of which so appalled Roosevelt in 1943, has fared only slightly better. Incomes there are 0.8 percent of the British level, a far wider differential than at the time of independence in 1965. According to the World Bank, its GDP
per capita
has grown in real terms by just 14 percent since 1970, despite the fact that it has received aid totaling $1.6 billion since independence—equivalent, on average, to nearly 20 percent of its national income.