How to be a good sole superpower

A few days ago, at one of those interminable year-end parties, I was introduced to a couple of young Brits of Indian origin studying at Oxford University.

To make an already desultory conversation even more boring, I asked them if they had been taught the history of the Empire at school in Britain. "No," they said, "but we were told Hitler was a bad man."

Thus, two entire generations of Brits have grown up without any idea about the origins of their current prosperity. No wonder that unlike the Germans who have deliberately not allowed themselves to forget Nazi rule, the Brits have such a nice self-image.

But while national amnesia amongst the bad guys is understandable, what about the good guys, namely, us? Amartya Sen, in a commemorative essay* for 1857, points out that ". . . the British empire is invoked persistently these days to discuss the demands of successful global governance. . . "

The reference is to those who have suggested that the US, as the sole superpower, has certain responsibilities and that it can learn how to discharge these properly from the British Empire which delivered so much by way of good governance and civilising institutions to the natives. Some of these people, remarks Sen, say that "the United States now runs a de facto empire 'that dare not speak its name.' They call the US 'an empire in denial.'"

Western historians are not alone in their praise for the British Empire though. In June 2005, our own Prime Minister, at a speech in Oxford, also said it was not such a bad thing. He may not have the time to read his friend's essay right now but next year, after he goes into retirement, he will need things to read and I would recommend this one highly.

Sen's basic point is this: don't instigate or inspire the US to start an empire of its own by suggesting that the last Anglo-Saxon thing was a gift to those who were colonised. He asks us to imagine that Commodore Matthew Perry hadn't turned up in Japan to show American force but as an advance party aiming to conquer Japan.

"If we were to assess the achievements of this supposed American rule of Japan by comparing Japan before that imagined American domination in 1853 with Japan after that domination were to end, we would omit all the effects of the Meiji restoration in 1868, as well as all the other globalising changes. . . " on Japan.

Sen concedes that when the British arrived, India had already become what the Communists would like it to be now and forever: stagnant and dysfunctional. But he takes issue with Karl Marx who wrote that the only way out for India out was the window that the Brits opened for it.

He argues that "what was needed at the time was more global involvement -- but that is not the same thing as imperialism." Upon which I would remind all Indians that the Communists, or at least Prakash Karat, appear to echo this but, in fact, want to prevent global involvement as well, witness the nuclear deal, to name just one example.

Sen's response to pro-Empire Western historians -- and at least one important newspaper owner in India who believes that British rule was an unmixed blessing -- is that "it is important to distinguish between the obvious blessings of greater global interaction and integration, and the penalties of inequity and imperial asymmetry."

In the end, it is this asymmetry is what it all about and those who fail to recognise it for what it is, deserve to be taken to task, as Sen has done in this essay.

But in the context of asymmetry there is one important bit missing in the essay: the China experience, even though it was never formally colonised. At first, it was China that imposed ridiculously unfair rules on the "foreign devils."

Then, when their turn came in the 1840s, the foreign devils retaliated with knobs on. Today the wheel has come full circle and it is the turn of the foreign devils to be at the receiving end.

Moral: asymmetric relationships always fail and that is why Empire is a bad thing.

*Imperial Illusions: India , Britain, and the wrong lessons; The New Republic , December 31, 2007.