Just Because Niall Ferguson Says it’s Okay Doesn’t Make it Okay
By What is it about “hawkish” pundits that they can’t understand nationalism?
In Iraq, the leviathan has somehow managed to give the impression that what previous mid-rank powers would have regarded as a little light colonial policing has left it stretched dangerously thin and bogged down in an almighty quagmire. Even if it were only lamebrain leftist media spin, the fact that it’s accepted by large numbers of Americans and huge majorities of Europeans is a reminder that in free societies a military of unprecedented dominance is not the only source of power. More importantly, significant proportions of this nation’s enemies also believe the spin. In April 2003 was Baby Assad nervous that he’d be next? You bet. Is he nervous now?
It’s not as if nationalism is new; in its modern form, it has been around since at least 1789. Admittedly, the introduction of nationalism as an ideology didn’t happen until the twentieth century in many parts of the world, and in many places identification with the nation-state still isn’t the paramount form of political identity, but you would still expect that advocates of empire would take note of a phenomenon which has been around for a couple of centuries and which has fundamentally challenged the imperial model of governance.
To be as brief as possible, occupying and controlling a country like Iraq is much more difficult today than it would have been in 1890. While the French were able to control all of Indochina in the late 19th century with a relatively small number of troops, the United States couldn’t pacify half of Vietnam with a huge investment of military force in the 1960s. For a variety of reasons, most notably the spread of mass media and the consequent creation of national languages and historical narratives, new types of identification have been created. Entire books have been written about this process; it’s not a secret.
Nevertheless, guys like Steyn and especially Ferguson continue to talk as if they’ve never heard of nationalism. Need to pacify Iraq? Good show; the Ottomans managed with a few battalions in 1884, so shouldn’t be a problem for us. The problem extends into the administration, where policymakers seem to believe that people in Iraq/Lebanon/Iran/Syria will be delighted when the bombs start raining down, as long as the bombs (mostly) hit their domestic opponents.
Modern advocates of empire MUST grapple with the difficulties that nationalism creates if they want to be taken seriously. As I’ll discuss later this week, the pre-eminent imperial advocate, Niall Ferguson, utterly fails to do this. His failure doesn’t absolve the rest, though.