THE DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL DOMINANCE: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2000 by Jacob Heilbrunn

THE DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL DOMINANCE: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 by David Abernethy Yale university Press, $35.00

Bread Or Bullets

PHEW! FOR A BRIEF MOMENT there, it looked like the 1970s all over again. The booming American economy was suddenly saddled with rising oil prices, which threatened to lead to stagflation--or high unemployment and inflation rates. The even more vulnerable western European countries experienced long gas lines and protests. To top it off, the old Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared up again. The 1970s retro-look looked as if it was becoming the real thing.

But world leaders have learned the lessons of the past. OPEC oil ministers, wary of spurring the West into serious conservation measures and unwilling to disrupt the world economy, boosted output, while the Clinton administration opened the spigot of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, pumping up not just Al Gore's fortunes, but also the economy's. Meanwhile, the Republicans sputtered helplessly about the Clinton administration's disregard for America's national interests in opening up the reserve.

Pity the poor GOP. The fact is that even an uptick in oil prices, while it resulted in some grumbling, hardly prompted any members of the electorate to divert their attention from "Survivor" or "Big Brother" to foreign policy. Whether it's pounding away at the issue of military readiness or China policy, the GOP's biggest foe hasn't so much been the Clinton administration as the national disinterest of the American public in the national interest. It isn't so much a new age of good feelings as an age of no feelings.

The biggest victims of this quiescent era, however, are the foreign policy pundits. Absent an enemy--and, despite the huffing and puffing in some quarters, North Korea does not cut the mustard--the era of grand strategizing is over. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger belong to an earlier period, not to be duplicated. Journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are searching for the next big idea. But the foreign policy torch, such as it is, flickers only faintly and has been handed off to area studies experts who can explain local conflicts--Armenians versus Azeris, and so on--in mind-numbing detail. Such, globalization is the buzz word that off the tongues of world's financial gurus, but no one has explained what it is much beyond evoking Karl Marx's prediction of an "interdependence of nations."

It is thus something of a pleasant surprise to come across David B. Abernethy's The Dynamics of Global Dominance and Robert D. Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary. These two books could not be more different. The first is a learned discussion of European overseas empires, complete with the requisite methodological apparatus customary in political science these days. The second is a bird's-eye view of the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus as seen by a jaundiced travel writer. While both are flawed, they are packed with provocative insights. They suggest that perhaps there may yet be hope for the foreign affairs field.

Abernethy, a political science professor at Stanford University does not set his sights low. He wishes to provide nothing less than a sweeping account of the rise and fall of colonialism. Following in the path of scholar Charles Tilly, who has founded an entire geopolitical school of thought, Abernethy asks how it was possible for the rulers of eight countries that accounted for 1.4 percent of the land surface of the earth--Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy--could take over large chunks of Africa, Asia, and Central America. Abernethy suggests that, given the current instability around the globe, prosperous Western countries can even learn from the "more experienced weak, poor ones about the destabilizing consequences of globalization."

The notion of imperialism first came into vogue around the turn of the 19th century. Until then, it had been received wisdom that expansion was self-evidently a good thing. There were a few excesses, as demonstrated by the famous trial of Warren Hastings, the former British potentate in India, but a serene confidence in the essential rightness of colonialism was accepted. Sometimes European powers cooperated with each other abroad; in China, for example, German and British troops fought together to suppress the natives. When news of the outbreak of World War I arrived, surely to the surprise and delight of the locals, the British and German troops began firing upon each other.

But with the circulation of 19th-century British malcontent J.A. Hobson's denunciation (which was picked up by Lenin, who termed the imperial impulse the final stage of capitalism), imperalism started to come into bad odor. Things fell apart fairly quickly. The 20th century was about the crackup of the great European empires. World War I polished off the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the Russian monarchy. Hitler's thousand-year Reich crumbled after 13. The Soviet Union was an attempt to resuscitate the old czarist contraption, but even 70 years of ruthlessness weren't enough to extirpate nationalist feeling.