The recent riots in London and other cities in Britain have raised a discomfiting issue nobody in that country wants to confront: The moral decay that has weakened the fibre of British society. This decay is not limited to the UK; it is also palpable in its trans-Atlantic ally, the United States. Ten years ago, after the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks on mainland America, the US responded with determination, leading the global war on terror from the front. A decade later, the US does not appear as determined. Instead, it is increasingly seen as having abdicated the responsibility that comes with being a superpower by giving up its role of defending the world’s economy and civilisation.
In his masterly work, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, historian Niall Ferguson makes an almost compelling argument for acknowledging the modernising role of the British Empire between the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries. He concludes his controversial work by saying that the role of defending the global economy and civilised culture must now devolve on the US. “There is, in truth, only one power capable of playing an imperial role in the modern world, and that is the United States,” he writes.
The US, which shares civilisational values with Britain, is alone powerful enough to arrest the spread of other, contending value systems and ensure continuity of the concept of ‘Anglobalisation’, he contends. Understandably, Niall Ferguson’s classic work was roundly denounced for not only being politically incorrect as it, in effect, justified British colonialism, but also proposes a blueprint for sustaining Western hegemony. One need not be an apologist for imperialism to appreciate some of Niall Ferguson’s arguments.
I, for one, have never been squeamish about recognising the positive contributions of the British Empire in India, principally the English language and the gigantic railway system. But the underlying frame of the imperialist argument, whether of the Utilitarian school headed by John Stuart Mill or its 21st century protagonist Niall Ferguson, is based on an intangible yet crucial component — the moral authority of the Empire.
This nebulous but pre-eminent moral component is derived primarily from within imperialising power. Because Victorian England was able to deploy a moral force within British society, it succeeded in acquiring legitimacy over its subjects in distant lands. The mythical and (now) revolting notion of the ‘White Man’s burden’ was sustained by a unity of purpose coupled with a make-believe sense of moral, racial and intellectual superiority. Empire’s poets and cheerleaders exhorted young men to rush to the depths of jungles and heathen lands regardless of the predictable ingratitude of those they salvaged. As the Empire’s most articulate poet-propagandist Rudyard Kipling powerfully appealed:
‘Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard’.
Following the defeat of the rebels in 1857, North India’s exhausted landed elite as well as Bengal’s Anglicising middle classes enthusiastically welcomed the new Qaiser-I-Hind Queen Victoria’s promulgation of direct rule. Even those who detested the concept of white supremacy within and outside Britain bowed to the moral authority of the Empire. Within Britain, the Empire engendered economic prosperity, political stability, intellectual stimulation, scientific discovery and a host of other positive changes.
Although colonised societies were ravaged, their natural and human resources mercilessly exploited, but collateral benefits in the form of orderly governance and infrastructure building served to create a forward-looking middle-class in most colonies that helped legitimise the British rule. It is worth recalling in this context that Dadabhai Naoroji, first Indian member of the House of Commons thundered for years against “Un-British” rule in India, vainly appealing to the moral fibre of British society. Even Mahatma Gandhi actively canvassed recruitment to the British-Indian Army during World War I, believing this act of loyalty to the Crown would vest in him the moral power to extract self-rule for India after the War. Imperial moral authority may have been a sham in reality, but it was a powerful belief shared by both the colonisers and the colonised.
After World War II and the end of the Empire, leadership of the Western world effortlessly passed onto the US hands. Once the Soviet challenge was vanquished in the late 1980s, the US emerged as the world’s unchallenged imperial power even without a formal empire, largely approximating the British Empire in its heyday. For decades after the War, the US basked in moral authority especially in contrast to the regimented and restrictive Communist model, which relied almost exclusively on brute military force for sustenance. People from all over the world longed to migrate to the US, which fast emerged as the fabled El Dorado in the inarticulate dreams in Cambodian concentration camps or generated visions of untold prosperity on India’s IIT campuses. The US, always the world’s ethnic melting pot, has now become a truly diverse society with all the attendant problems that wanton diversification brings.
Britain has already metamorphosed; multi-culturalism rules the roast, the country’s moral backbone having weakened beyond recognition. Analysts attribute Britain’s degeneration to the hostility that migrants faced, given the past sway of imperial arrogance and exclusivist ideas on the country’s mindset. The British middle-class may have accepted the necessity to import bus drivers from the Caribbean or motor mechanics and airport sweepers from the Indian sub-continent, but it understandably recoiled from social interaction with people they basically regarded as ‘coolies’. This generated indignation and hatred, which has now flowed onto the streets. In an attempt to arrest social fracturing, Britain has bent backwards to accommodate the most irresponsible demands of militant sections of the migrant community. The classic example of this is the laughable attempt to employ Muslim policewomen who refuse to shake hands with their superiors on the specious ground that they are not supposed to touch the skin of any male except their fathers, brothers or husbands!
On the face of it, America has a much better record of racial/ethnic assimilation ever since the riots over common busing in some southern States in 1964. But the limits of such assimilation have been powerfully etched in the shootout at Virginia Tech last week in which a lonely, frustrated South Korean youth gunned down 32 people. This outrage, coming in the aftermath of a mounting number of violent incidents involving either dispossessed or alienated white Americans and members of various migrant communities, sharply underlines the inadequacies of societies attempting to globalise or dictate a transition to multiculturalism.
It is not easy for migrant people to get absorbed within a self-possessed society even after three or four generations. The case of Cho Seung-Hai at Virginia Tech, whose parents migrated to the US decades ago, reinforces this. Non-white migrants to Europe or North America continue to feel ignored, under-rated, discriminated against, mocked at and humiliated by dominant communities. Even after 400 years, descendants of African labourers (barring an increasing number of exceptions) are yet to feel fully integrated into mainstream American society. This is even more apparent in the case of Indian migrants who retain deep roots in their native country and thus are incapable of Americanising.
I believe America’s economic and military rise in itself contained the seeds of its decline. It has progressively become a violent society and every war it fights overseas, brutalises the country furthe r. For example, racist American youngsters went about manhandling and even killing Sikhs in the aftermath of 9/11 assuming all turbaned, bearded people to be linked to Osama bin Laden. The spate of violent incidents in the US over the last decade actually point to the decline in America’s moral authority to create and sustain a global empire.
The wielding of brute military power outside (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc,) and multiculturalism as a balancing sop domestically, can never produce the desired results. The decline and fall of America may first come at home before it becomes palpable abroad.
In his masterly work, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, historian Niall Ferguson makes an almost compelling argument for acknowledging the modernising role of the British Empire between the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries. He concludes his controversial work by saying that the role of defending the global economy and civilised culture must now devolve on the US. “There is, in truth, only one power capable of playing an imperial role in the modern world, and that is the United States,” he writes.
The US, which shares civilisational values with Britain, is alone powerful enough to arrest the spread of other, contending value systems and ensure continuity of the concept of ‘Anglobalisation’, he contends. Understandably, Niall Ferguson’s classic work was roundly denounced for not only being politically incorrect as it, in effect, justified British colonialism, but also proposes a blueprint for sustaining Western hegemony. One need not be an apologist for imperialism to appreciate some of Niall Ferguson’s arguments.
I, for one, have never been squeamish about recognising the positive contributions of the British Empire in India, principally the English language and the gigantic railway system. But the underlying frame of the imperialist argument, whether of the Utilitarian school headed by John Stuart Mill or its 21st century protagonist Niall Ferguson, is based on an intangible yet crucial component — the moral authority of the Empire.
This nebulous but pre-eminent moral component is derived primarily from within imperialising power. Because Victorian England was able to deploy a moral force within British society, it succeeded in acquiring legitimacy over its subjects in distant lands. The mythical and (now) revolting notion of the ‘White Man’s burden’ was sustained by a unity of purpose coupled with a make-believe sense of moral, racial and intellectual superiority. Empire’s poets and cheerleaders exhorted young men to rush to the depths of jungles and heathen lands regardless of the predictable ingratitude of those they salvaged. As the Empire’s most articulate poet-propagandist Rudyard Kipling powerfully appealed:
‘Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard’.
Following the defeat of the rebels in 1857, North India’s exhausted landed elite as well as Bengal’s Anglicising middle classes enthusiastically welcomed the new Qaiser-I-Hind Queen Victoria’s promulgation of direct rule. Even those who detested the concept of white supremacy within and outside Britain bowed to the moral authority of the Empire. Within Britain, the Empire engendered economic prosperity, political stability, intellectual stimulation, scientific discovery and a host of other positive changes.
Although colonised societies were ravaged, their natural and human resources mercilessly exploited, but collateral benefits in the form of orderly governance and infrastructure building served to create a forward-looking middle-class in most colonies that helped legitimise the British rule. It is worth recalling in this context that Dadabhai Naoroji, first Indian member of the House of Commons thundered for years against “Un-British” rule in India, vainly appealing to the moral fibre of British society. Even Mahatma Gandhi actively canvassed recruitment to the British-Indian Army during World War I, believing this act of loyalty to the Crown would vest in him the moral power to extract self-rule for India after the War. Imperial moral authority may have been a sham in reality, but it was a powerful belief shared by both the colonisers and the colonised.
After World War II and the end of the Empire, leadership of the Western world effortlessly passed onto the US hands. Once the Soviet challenge was vanquished in the late 1980s, the US emerged as the world’s unchallenged imperial power even without a formal empire, largely approximating the British Empire in its heyday. For decades after the War, the US basked in moral authority especially in contrast to the regimented and restrictive Communist model, which relied almost exclusively on brute military force for sustenance. People from all over the world longed to migrate to the US, which fast emerged as the fabled El Dorado in the inarticulate dreams in Cambodian concentration camps or generated visions of untold prosperity on India’s IIT campuses. The US, always the world’s ethnic melting pot, has now become a truly diverse society with all the attendant problems that wanton diversification brings.
Britain has already metamorphosed; multi-culturalism rules the roast, the country’s moral backbone having weakened beyond recognition. Analysts attribute Britain’s degeneration to the hostility that migrants faced, given the past sway of imperial arrogance and exclusivist ideas on the country’s mindset. The British middle-class may have accepted the necessity to import bus drivers from the Caribbean or motor mechanics and airport sweepers from the Indian sub-continent, but it understandably recoiled from social interaction with people they basically regarded as ‘coolies’. This generated indignation and hatred, which has now flowed onto the streets. In an attempt to arrest social fracturing, Britain has bent backwards to accommodate the most irresponsible demands of militant sections of the migrant community. The classic example of this is the laughable attempt to employ Muslim policewomen who refuse to shake hands with their superiors on the specious ground that they are not supposed to touch the skin of any male except their fathers, brothers or husbands!
On the face of it, America has a much better record of racial/ethnic assimilation ever since the riots over common busing in some southern States in 1964. But the limits of such assimilation have been powerfully etched in the shootout at Virginia Tech last week in which a lonely, frustrated South Korean youth gunned down 32 people. This outrage, coming in the aftermath of a mounting number of violent incidents involving either dispossessed or alienated white Americans and members of various migrant communities, sharply underlines the inadequacies of societies attempting to globalise or dictate a transition to multiculturalism.
It is not easy for migrant people to get absorbed within a self-possessed society even after three or four generations. The case of Cho Seung-Hai at Virginia Tech, whose parents migrated to the US decades ago, reinforces this. Non-white migrants to Europe or North America continue to feel ignored, under-rated, discriminated against, mocked at and humiliated by dominant communities. Even after 400 years, descendants of African labourers (barring an increasing number of exceptions) are yet to feel fully integrated into mainstream American society. This is even more apparent in the case of Indian migrants who retain deep roots in their native country and thus are incapable of Americanising.
I believe America’s economic and military rise in itself contained the seeds of its decline. It has progressively become a violent society and every war it fights overseas, brutalises the country furthe r. For example, racist American youngsters went about manhandling and even killing Sikhs in the aftermath of 9/11 assuming all turbaned, bearded people to be linked to Osama bin Laden. The spate of violent incidents in the US over the last decade actually point to the decline in America’s moral authority to create and sustain a global empire.
The wielding of brute military power outside (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc,) and multiculturalism as a balancing sop domestically, can never produce the desired results. The decline and fall of America may first come at home before it becomes palpable abroad.
Source: The Pioneer
