Opinion

About empires

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It is bad for all empires to lose. It hurts all empires. What happens is that not all of them react in the same way and some of them take defeat better than others, especially if they have no other option. And there are some who do not realise that they are no longer empires and there are even some who want to continue to be treated as such.

The Roman Empire broke up in the face of the barbarian invasions, first divided between Arcadius and Honorius, between East and West, and when the latter divided itself among the Gothic tribes, what was left took refuge in Byzantium, "the new Rome", which claimed to be its universal heir until the Turks put an end to the dream. This tension continues to manifest itself today in the religious sphere in the struggle between Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

The Ottoman Empire also overextended itself and ended up bleeding to death in continuous wars with Russia over an outlet to the Black Sea (Crimea), and also with Austria over the Balkans, resulting in the atomised world described so well by Ivo Andric in "A Bridge over the Drina", while Joseph Roth recounts the death throes of the Austrian Empire in "The Radetzky March". The Ottoman epitaph was set by the Great War and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's revolution. Today Turkey is rearing its head again to compete with Saudi Arabia for the leadership of the Sunnis in the Middle East, without ruling out more distant horizons as shown by its intervention in the civil and tribal war in Libya. It is curious that three countries, the three old empires, are today competing in the region to fill the vacuum left by the Americans: Turkey (Ottoman Empire), Russia (Tsarist Empire) and Iran (Persian Empire).

The Spanish Empire slowly and quietly unravelled until the Yankees under the Monroe Doctrine buried it with bombs in Cuba and the Philippines. The shock was so traumatic that it led a few years later to the fall of the Monarchy and a Republic without republicans, which some today praise, but which was such a failure that it led to a bloody uncivil war and a forty-year dictatorship from which we managed to emerge with a Transition that astonished (and relieved) the world and which today is despised by some out of ignorance and others out of malice.

France was luckier because when Waterloo ended Napoleon's wars the victors treated it generously at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the one about which Prince de Ligne wrote that it danced rather than worked, and as a result it was a reliable partner throughout the 19th century channelling its adventurism into Africa and Southeast Asia. Trouble for Europe came from Prussia, which, emboldened in 1870, went back to its old ways in 1914 only to be humiliated at Versailles in 1919. The result of that humiliation was the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, which we know how it ended. And with the Japanese Empire it was three quarters of the same after the atrocities it committed in Korea, China and Southeast Asia. When both fascisms lost their empires, their citizens were able to devote their energies to building powerful economies that have given them an enviable standard of living.

The British Empire ended after World War II when the Americans, who had no colonies, decided to wipe out the remaining colonies. London then had to divest itself of India, among other things. The cherry on top was the Suez War in 1956, when Washington punched its fist on the table and put an end once and for all to the remaining imperialist pretensions of the British and French. A few years later, Paris abandoned the pretence of disguising Algeria as a French department, while the British do not yet seem to have realised that they are no longer an imperial power, as their decision to leave the European Union shows.

China never wanted to be a colonial empire, it was enough to be the Empire of the Centre that despised the outside world, but it was an empire that was humiliated in the 19th century for not having joined the industrial revolution, something that Mao and Xi are very clear about, and that is why they want to make China the leader of the current Bit (Artificial Intelligence) revolution because they know that this is where the dominion of the future lies. It is not for nothing that the Brookings Institution has written that the country that dominates artificial intelligence in 2050 will dominate the world in 2100. In other words, another form of imperialism.

The United States says it is not an empire and it is true that it is not an empire in the traditional way of occupying foreign lands today (and when it tries to do so, it does not succeed very well, as the cases of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other minor ones, show), but it does not need to do so because it is the great power of our time and achieves its objectives with economic or military pressure, as it is well known from Cuba to Iran. Or with the soft power of their fashion, film and music. Their imperialism is of a different kind, but also very effective and no less implacable. Some, like Paul Kennedy, predict its decline because it is trying to cover too much (and because of its serious internal divisions) but it seems to me that there is still time for that to happen.

And so we come to Russia, which is not resigned to ceasing to be an empire either. It was for centuries under the Romanov tsars and then under the communist tsars. And when the failure of communism dragged down the USSR, Russia did not want to hear about it, has not decolonised Siberia, drowned the Chechen rebellion in blood and fire, failed in Afghanistan and now, after securing Belarus and Kazakhstan, wants to take over half of Ukraine in a war of an imperialist and expansionist nature more typical of the 19th century than of the 20th. But as Stephen Hawking warned us about time, history does not go backwards, and I fear it will come out of this adventure badly: politically isolated, militarily weakened and psychologically dangerous because of its unpredictability. Because to play in the Champions League you need a bench and Russia, with a GDP of less than two trillion dollars, finds it very difficult to compete with the US (18 trillion) and China (14 trillion). Sic transit gloria mundi.

Jorge Dezcallar