Liberal empire?

Motyl offers several responses to Ferguson’s advocacy of liberal empire as a way of spreading democratic institutions, capitalist economies, freedom, and Western culture.

First, he notes that liberal empires that promote free trade and democracy might be tied to a particular historical moment: “it is an unwarranted leap in logic to conclude from the British example that all liberal empires can promote free trade and democratic institutions. For all we know, the initial conditions underpinning British success may no longer be present.” Second, Ferguson recognizes that the British empire became formally imperial “unwittingly and unintentionally,” and so exhorting Americans to follow the British model is self-contradictory.

It is also far from clear whether the US could establish the kind of formal empire that the British did. Again, the historical preconditions for that may have been peculiar to the past. In fact, the very success of the British empire diminishes the possibility of another “liberal” empire: “The British Empire’s successful dissemination of democratic and liberal norms means that the United States could never employ force, coercion, and violence to the same degree that Britain was able to in the past. These norms would constrain Americans’ own behavior, and they would also limit the degree to which potential colonies, their neighbors, other states, and the international community would be willing to tolerate American interventions.”

Plus, it’s not at all clear that empire is the best means for the spread of liberal institutions and ideas: “it is hardly self-evident that, today, empire is the most efficient means of disseminating the benefits of free trade and liberal institutions. Just because the British Empire may have been a vehicle of globalization and liberalism, it does not follow that, today, only empire can promote globalization and liberalism. Nor does it follow that, today, only liberal empire can promote globalization and empire. Indeed, globalization may have its own dynamic—not the least of which is the power of the Internet and financial flows—and democracies have surely multiplied without American or any other kind of imperial intervention.”

Finally, Americans, as Ferguson explains in details, have been fairly incompetent in the few escapades that approach real colonization: “Even if empires are best suited to fix broken states—a dubious claim that Ferguson wisely refrains from making—America’s alarmingly incompetent performance in post-war Iraq suggests that, even now, the United States continues to be ill-suited to abandon the ‘American approach’ Ferguson derides. And even if that performance miraculously improves, the vast expenditure of military and financial resources that pacifying Iraq involves should lead one to doubt that the United States could fix another broken state anytime soon.”