It doesn't matter what you call the project the U.S. is involved in Iraq; colonization or advancing the cause of freedom and democracy, the idea is pretty much the same. We're trying to substantially change the political culture and institutions of some other place.
I'm pretty much with Niall Ferguson on this one; the British empire did a pretty good job of leaving democratic and market institutions in the places it went:
the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labor than the British empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order, and governance around the world.
Not every ex-colony has done well with the British institutions and ideals left behind; Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Nigeria show that things can go sour for even the most promising places. But by and large, most of the ex-British colonies in Asia, Africa and the Carribean have done pretty well. The British were of course most successful at exporting their ideas and institutions to North America and Australasia, and the reason they were successful is that a substantial number of people moved there, and took their families and fortunes with them.
I'm not claiming that without the immigrants British imperialism would have failed, but they were important to its success in many ways.
First of all emigrants demonstrated to the natives (lets not shy away from the historical terminology) that the colonizing people were prepared to take some personal risks with their finances and happiness. To be sure, you could make a lot of money in the colonies, but that was not known in advance. You could also do poorly, and success was not guaranteed. Given the transport and communications and general lack of information about ones future prospects, you had to take a bit of a punt on your future to go to Canada or New Zealand or Kenya or Fiji. Moreover, given those same vagaries of transport and communications emigration, especially to Africa or Australasia meant that many people never saw their families again, and many others had only sporadic contact by very slow postal service.
Second, the emigrants were private individuals whose interactions with the natives were potentially mutually beneficial ones: trade and social contact. Government by its very nature is a somewhat hierarchical beast (though the aim in a liberal democracy is that the people ultimately have control of the state, and that power flows both ways), especially in places where the rule of law and parliament had not been established.
Some emigrants also married into the local population (the metis in Canada and the early Pakeha-Maori in New Zealand are good examples, and indeed inter-marriage in New Zealand became common enough as to be worthy of little comment by the twentieth century).
Even in colonies where the emigrants did not rapidly outnumber the natives (Africa and Asia) there were enough, a critical mass, of emigrants who interacted with the natives. And in a perverse sense, the more the better, since the colonies that most adopted British values were the ones where the native population got swamped by the emigrants.
Are there several hundred thousand Americans who are going to up and move their families to Iraq, and become the vanguard of changing Iraqi society? Probably not.
The British empire, of course, was also assisted by other privately interested parties; namely companies that hoped to profit from what exotic combinations of land and labor there were to be combined in foreign parts.
It's less clear that these trading and migration companies were a critical part in transmitting values from metropole to colony, but they played a part by organizing large-scale economic interaction between colonists and colonized. They also employed local labor, which again contributed to making the natives feel there was something in colonization for them.
It's for this reason that we should be concerned about the way in which Iraq's reconstruction is being handled by American companies with contract labor, and it seems not employing a lot of Iraqi's. Hardly the way to make Iraqis feel there is something in the American occupation/liberation for them.
Western imperial projects have foundered in the Middle East for precisely this lack of migration and investment in the past. Going in again, and trusting that people on short-term contracts and 19 year old soldiers fresh out of boot camp, will be the agents of democratization is just too hopeful.
In fact, I'm not sure that any country has successfully remade another in its own image without sending lots of people over there, exporting private capital to the 'colony,' and employing local labor in businesses. That after all was also the success of the Roman Empire -- they moved to the countries they conquered and lived there. Maybe you could point to U.S. intervention in central America in the 1980s, but democracy has been established there more by internal political forces than outside intervention.
Of course, large scale American migration to the Middle East is an idea few will be attracted by at either end of the journey, which is why we'll be engaged in Iraq in other ways for a long, long time.
Posted by robe0419 at August 30, 2004 1:45 PM