Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — And Why They Fall
By Amy Chua
Doubleday, 396 pages, $27.95
Empires and imperialism are hot topics these days, not only in faculty seminars or secret conclaves in Foggy Bottom but with countless book groups, at your local Starbucks, at the nearest cineplex and on the evening news. Although the proximate cause of such interest is the Bush family’s intergenerational fixation on Iraq, the ultimate cause is deeper and relates in large part to globalization. Indeed, in my view it is a truth — albeit hardly universally acknowledged — that whenever the world goes thorough one of its periodic bouts of globalization, people get interested in empires and imperialism.
Generally speaking, globalization, the economic dimensions of which lead to increased integration of the world economy, has been associated with the rise of empires, formal or informal, the leaders of which try to order and control the integration process through imperialism, whether old style or neo. Such phenomena have not gone unnoticed or unremarked upon over time. Think William Shakespeare during the globalization wave of the 16th Century; Voltaire, Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon during the 18th Century wave; and writers such as Theodor Mommsen, Hobson, Rudyard Kipling and V.I. Lenin during the globalization wave that began in the mid-19th Century and ended about the time of World War I.
Similarly, we find a broad array of voices weighing in on empires and imperialism today, with high-profile writers such as Niall Ferguson, Max Boot and Deepak Lal making positive, if iconoclastic, cases for imperial schemes of one sort or another, and with others such as Noam Chomsky, Mike Davis and John Gray relentlessly, if predictably and tediously, decrying the same.
In “Day of Empire,” Amy Chua, a professor at Yale University Law School, takes a somewhat different tack, seeking neither to defend nor to denounce empires and imperialism, but rather to explain the historical trajectories of an imperial subset, which she refers to as hyperpowers. In so doing, Chua, author of the 2003 best seller “World on Fire,” has at once shifted and in some ways elevated the interpretive terrain. Whereas in 2003 she skillfully identified and analyzed some of the unforeseen and unintended consequences attending globalization, free markets and democratization — majority hatred of, and, all too often, violence against, successful minorities, most notably — in “Day of Empire” she zeroes in one particular variable related to hyperpowers, one necessary, if not sufficient, to explain why some empires (and not others) became hyperpowers, and how and why various hyperpowers have risen and fallen over time.
Because Chua employs the term “hyperpower” carefully, let us spend a moment on matters of definition. Lest readers take cheap shots, Chua states early on that her argument does not apply to all empires, but only to those that rose at some point to the status of “world-dominant power.” The power of such an entity “clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporaneous rivals; it is not clearly inferior in economic or military strength to any other power on the planet; and it projects its power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the bounds of mere local or even regional preeminence.”
Such stringent conditions rule out most of the empires that ever existed, including the Aztec Empire and the Habsburg Empire, as well as the U.S. during the Cold War, each of which failed to meet at least one of the above conditions.
Which empires make the cut? How many hyperpowers have there been over the ages? Seven, according to Chua, beginning with the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire (559-330 B.C.), followed at intermittent intervals by the Roman Empire, especially at its apogee from 70 to 192; the Tang Dynasty in China (618-907); the Mongol Empire in the 13th Century; the Dutch Empire in the mid-17th Century; the British Empire from the late 18th Century until the early 20th Century; and the U.S. “empire” since about 1990, when its Cold War rival, the USSR, faded into oblivion.
Although the magnificent seven differ in countless ways, Chua argues that all hyperpowers share one hugely important characteristic: relative tolerance of diversity. Chua emphasizes the word “relative,” for she is not claiming that the ancient Persians, much less the ferocious Mongols, were warm and fuzzy egalitarian multiculturalists. After all, Darius the Great “was fond of impaling anyone who defied him,” and Genghis Khan was, well, Genghis Khan. Rather, to Chua, tolerance “simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society — even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons.”
Despite the huge differences between and among the seven hyperpowers, each, relatively speaking, was “open” vis a vis its competitors, incorporating talented “outsiders” into the mainstream and, in so doing, turning “cultural diversity into a source of synergy and strength.” Take the Dutch, for example, who, in their 17th Century golden age, employed toleration strategically to foster growth and development, rendering the Netherlands “a haven for enterprising outcasts from the rest of Europe” and beyond. And the Mongols, bad press notwithstanding, may have taken tolerance even further, incorporating talented (and more civilized) peoples from all over Eurasia into the fold, and borrowing science, culture, administrative systems and technology from them without prejudice or even a second thought. In the same spirit, Chua ponders whether the British Empire ever would have achieved hyperpower status without the early contributions of “outsider” groups — Jews, Huguenots and Scots in particular.
Such tolerance of diversity contrasts sharply with the ideologies and policies regarding tolerance associated with other potential hyperpowers through the ages — 16th Century Spain; the Ottoman, Ming and Mongol Empires; imperial Japan; and Nazi Germany — each of which failed to attain that status. In Chua’s view such failures owed much to the opportunities foregone because of intolerance — intolerance made manifest in rampant ethnocentricity, ethnic chauvinism, racism and, alas, in the extreme case of Nazi Germany an effort at genocide.
Chua focuses much of her attention on the present day and the current hyperpower, the U.S. She believes relative tolerance has been important to this country since its inception in the late 18th Century, and instrumental in our will to (hyper)power over time. It is not encoded in American DNA, however, and Chua fears we may be nearing a tipping point whereby (neo)imperial expansion and greater and greater diversity evoke a backlash against others of one type or another. Such tipping points were reached by each of the preceding six hyperpowers and helped occasion their declines.
If Chua is cautious about the future, she is not pessimistic about the resiliency of the U.S., arguing that the country remains pretty tolerant even today, certainly compared to the leading rivals for hyperpower status in the 21st Century, namely, China, India and the European Union. According to Chua, it is more important in any case that we remain tolerant than that we remain a hyperpower, for hyperpower status “brings costs as well as benefits,” and a world with a handful of superpowers rather than one hyperpower might not necessarily be such a bad place.
“Day of Empire” is an ambitious and challenging book to say the least. Unfortunately, although the author came honestly to her interest in tolerance and diversity — as she points out more than once, she is a child of the Chinese diaspora and is married to a Jew — her interpretation is a bit too transhistorical and one-dimensional to be altogether persuasive. Time and context change things over millenniums, and explanatory parsimony such as hers makes historians (if not law professors) blanch. Moreover, tolerance may at times be a correlate rather than a cause of hyperpower status, and intolerance an effect rather than a cause of a given hyperpower’s decline.
Chua concedes these points in her introduction but more or less forgets this concession as she proceeds. One can also take issue with her concluding point that the U.S. is still “a paragon of strategic tolerance.” Maybe, but it could also be argued that any country wherein one leading university (Columbia) allows a public platform to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while another (California at Davis) denies one to former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers could tolerate a new tolerance strategy.
———-
Peter A. Coclanis is associate provost for international affairs and Albert R. Newsome professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
