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The View From Here: The Waning of Empires

May 23, 2017 | Featured, The View From Here - Walter Kish

Volodymyr Kish.

This past weekend, Canada celebrated Victoria Day, giving Canadians a much-welcomed long weekend with which to celebrate spring. This public holiday is one of the many legacies of our past history as a former colony of the British Empire. Ironically, we are the last member of the British Commonwealth to still honour the formidable Empress who ruled the Empire where it was said that the sun never set. In most of the rest of the former British dominions, Queen Victoria’s birthday gave way to Empire Day, and when the Empire disappeared, so did the holiday.

With the disappearance of its Empire, Great Britain, which was once acknowledged as the world’s strongest power both military and economically, has retreated into dowager status, living more on nostalgia for the good old days, rather than being the mover and shaker that it once was. But Britain was not the only imperial power to suffer this fate. The twentieth century became the graveyard for most of the world’s anachronistic colonial empires built up during the Middle Ages. One after another they crumbled as the idea of democracy and self-rule spread throughout the disenfranchised third world. The British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the German and the Ottomans, all lost their vast conquered domains, as they reluctantly were forced to confront the inherent immorality and unmaintainability of colonialism.

Sadly, there still remain a few countries that are bucking the trend, and who still cling to the might is right concept, refusing to relinquish control of inevitably restless and rebellious acquired domains. The Russians and the Chinese in particular, still view imperialism, imposed through force and military might as their inherent right. They are countries whose political mindset is stuck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and where authoritarianism or some form of fascism prevails. One can only hope that they will eventually evolve into more enlightened and cooperative political entities, yet history tells us that such absolute autocracies seldom fade away peacefully. More often, they are either violently overthrown or collapse spectacularly from internal rot and structural weakness.

There is also the special case of what many people call the American Empire. There is no doubt that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, regardless of which metric one wishes to choose. Technically speaking, aside from some minor territories, islands and protectorates, it does not have any colonies as such. However, it would be naïve not to recognize that the U.S. wields tremendous influence on the rest of the world. It does so primarily through its overwhelming economic and cultural clout, though the fact that its military might is unchallengeable is an important part of the equation.

By default, the U.S. has become the global policeman. It is debatable whether it willingly sought that role to protect its own interests, or whether it assumed it for the more altruistic purpose of world peace and harmony. Whatever the case, in today’s reality, no conflict anywhere on this planet escapes the attention of and subsequent intervention by the Americans. Whether this constitutes imperialistic ambitions, or is morally benign in nature, depends on one one’s political perspective. For China, Russia and the other autocratic states of the world, they can only conceive a zero-sum game motivation, and hence see the U.S. as a threat to their own existence.

The truly sad thing is that in virtually all those countries, I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of their populations would, if given the choice, happily decamp for the lifestyle and freedoms to be found on American soil. Every year, millions of folks risk life and limb to escape their current circumstances and try and make it to Europe or North America, to the countries that were once their colonial masters.

Imperialism in the modern age has become a bit confusing. In the old days, it used to mean the rich and powerful countries of the first world imposing their will on and exploiting third world countries. While some of this is still a factor in the economic sphere, more and more, imperialism means autocratic third world states trying to impose their authoritarianism on others. The more Russia declines as an economic and world power, the more it seeks to intimidate, destabilize and take over its immediate neighbours. Similarly, radical Islamist states and movements, having lost both their once progressive and dynamic former empires, seek to drag the rest of the world into a primitive medieval form of religious feudalism. As for China – well, it remains as enigmatic as ever, yet its appetite for expansion and domination continues as it has for millennia.

For many centuries imperialism flourished under the superficial guise of bringing “civilization” to the heathen masses. Of course, today we accept that most of that was sheer hypocrisy. What remains of imperialism today is now more concerned with unrepentantly turning back the course of civilization to a darker age of brute force and neo-feudalism. We are indeed living in interesting times.

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