American empire, going, going ...

Great empires were extraordinarily pluralistic, argues Amy Chua, until they frayed into xenophobia and decline. Can the U.S. steer another course?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: George W. Bush, Andrew O'Hehir, Books, China, Race, History, Immigration, Reviews, Book reviews

Nov. 19, 2007 | Like virtually all works of historical writing, Amy Chua's "Day of Empire" has more to do with the present than the past, and more to do with the writer's own society than with its purported objects of study, which range from the Persian Empire to the Tang Dynasty of imperial China and the 17th century Dutch Republic.

Chua is a professor at Yale Law School whose 2002 bestseller, "World on Fire," offered compelling evidence of the devastation inflicted on the developing world in the name of economic globalization. In particular, Chua effectively demolished the myth that so-called free markets breed democracy and progressive social change. "Day of Empire" derives from a similar impulse to resist widespread and potentially dominant dogmas of the day -- in this case, not the dogmas of neoliberal economists but those of neoconservative foreign-policy wizards and their allies.

You certainly can't complain that Chua's book lacks breadth or ambition. In fewer than 350 pages, she tries to survey the history of imperial "hyperpowers" -- beginning with Cyrus the Great of Persia in 550 B.C. and passing through Rome, China, the Mongol Empire, medieval Spain, Holland, the British Empire and Nazi Germany, with a few other stops on the road to post-9/11 America.

Meanwhile, like some knight errant in a legendary romance, she must fight off not one but two fearsome monsters along the way. On one flank, Chua struggles to spear the clanking pseudo-pragmatist argument put forward by historian Niall Ferguson and neocon think-tanker Max Boot, among others -- and all but explicitly adopted by the Bush administration -- that the United States must embrace its imperial mission and civilize the globe, by force if necessary. On the other, she seeks to banish the hollow-eyed specter of a paranoid, xenophobic society, seeking to protect its "national identity" and core "Anglo-Protestant" values, in the words of Samuel Huntington, with border fences, immigration crackdowns and English-only laws.

One of the central points in "Day of Empire" is that the positions thus represented, while they may sometimes be held by the same people, are not compatible. If Chua's reading of history is correct, imperial powers have universally thrived by accepting and accommodating cultural diversity, at least in relative terms. On the other hand, when imperial societies have turned inward, closed themselves off from the outside world and retreated into ethnic or cultural chauvinism, the end was generally in sight. Indeed, she finds in history near-inevitable progress from monster A to monster B: Nations rise to global hegemony by being extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant, but such imperial expansion eventually reaches a tipping point, triggering internal conflict and xenophobia, which leads to imperial decline.

Chua clearly wants to argue that the United States should put down the white man's burden, abandon any imperial ambitions and back gradually away from its anguished, perched-on-the-precipice position as the world's sole hyperpower (which admittedly hasn't gone so well lately). Being a "mere superpower" in a multipolar century, potentially counterbalanced by the European Union, Russia and China, she suggests, may be a better prescription for longevity. Of course, she also wants to argue against nativism, isolationism and chauvinism, and draws appealingly on her own experiences as the American-born daughter of Filipino-Chinese immigrants.

Like much of Chua's down-with-Bush, out-of-Iraq audience, I'm inclined to agree with both of these positions. That doesn't make them necessarily connected; it's perfectly possible to hold one view without the other. Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, for example, might all share the "liberal" notion that America's global predominance is intimately linked to our ever-shifting national tapestry of ethnicity, race and religion -- and that to embrace the first you must embrace the second. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, on the other hand, would like to retreat from hegemony, bring our troops home from Iraq (and anywhere else they happen to be at the moment) and let the Middle East sort out its own problems -- while expelling illegal immigrants and slamming down an iron curtain along the Mexican border.

As Democratic presidential candidates are reportedly, and uncomfortably, discovering on the campaign trail, anti-immigrant fervor is not restricted to the right wing. It may be an irrational response to economic anxiety, but it is real, persistent and evidently immune to arguments about the price of restaurant meals or supermarket lettuce. (Paul remains the longest of long shots as a Republican candidate, but he's pretty much the only contender in either party who's telling Middle American voters exactly what they want to hear on both immigration and Iraq.)

In this context -- a nation waging a failing and cripplingly expensive overseas war while internally destabilized by acrimonious debate -- Chua's appeal to an alternate vision of the U.S. as "a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism and moral force" seems like a wistful glance into the rear-view mirror rather than a look at the road ahead.

"Day of Empire" is a lively read, full of intriguing factoids and persuasive rhetoric, and the potential applicability of its case histories to America's current quandary, at least, is clear enough. Chua works hard not to oversimplify her encapsulated imperial histories, making clear, for instance, that the "tolerance" and "diversity" of the Achaemenid Persian Empire were instrumental methods of subjugating and absorbing conquered peoples, a long way from any modern conceptions of human rights or international law. Still, under Cyrus and his successor Darius the Great, the Achaemenid court became the most cosmopolitan place the world had yet seen, bringing together "Egyptian doctors, Greek scientists and Babylonian astronomers." (At its peak, Darius' realm extended as far east as India and as far west as the Danube River.) Local laws, customs and religions were widely tolerated -- most famously, Cyrus freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at his own expense -- just as long as taxes and tribute kept flowing.

Apparently the empire's "official" languages included Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Lydian and Lycian (take that, English-only campaigners!), although Darius probably couldn't read any of them. Like most subsequent empires, Chua contends, the Achaemenid dynasty came unstuck for the simplest of reasons: It lacked adequate social and political "glue." "No common religion, language or culture bound the sprawling empire together," she writes; the Persians offered no conception of imperial identity or citizenship to conquered peoples, who were assumed to be innately inferior. Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians went right on being Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians under tolerant Persian rule, and when Darius' son Xerxes and his successors apparently turned cruel and intolerant -- demolishing Egyptian cities and despoiling Athenian shrines, according to some reports -- "the distinct peoples ... eventually turned on the empire itself."

In many ways, the Persian Empire is the cleanest and clearest instance of Chua's repeated historical narrative -- an empire is built on widespread tolerance, then crumbles when imperial glue melts under the heat of internal conflict -- which makes me a little suspicious, since it's also the case furthest away in history and the one about which scholars know the least. She dispenses with the Roman Empire in 29 pages and the British Empire in 38, making essentially the same points about both: New and highly effective ideas about glue were pioneered, whether this meant the Roman notion of widespread male citizenship or the British idea of empowering an English-speaking and English-educated elite; but in the long haul their dominions were torn apart by ethnic or religious bigotry and infighting.

Next page: The U.S. is a new kind of empire facing an old problem