The innumerable assasinations, putsches, and proxy wars by the West are never mentioned with regard to post-War World II colonialism in Africa and Western Asia. Still, there are some useful takeaways in this piece.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world” It’s not especially controversial these days to argue that the political, economic and military strength of the West is in severe decline. Perhaps it’s not to the extent that some wring their hands over, or others lick their lips over, but it is real enough. Yet that’s not the whole of the story. The influence of different western nations always varied, and was anyway much more complex and subtle than theorists of pure power ever acknowledged. But much of what influence remains today is being destroyed by western political elites and their creatures with their soulless and unappealing liberal-technocratic managerial ideology, and their hatred of their country and its people, their history, traditions and culture. Consequently, the West is losing ground to states whose elites have retained and now project, not just competence, but a genuine civilisational ideology, and are not self-mutilated by self-hatred. This is a sufficiently poorly understood issue that I think it’s worth an essay in itself: in fact two, because I’ll return to the less tangible part of the argument in more detail next week.
It’s also a subject where I have a lot of personal experience. Now, I make it a rule in these essays only to write about things where I have at least some relevant background, because I think it would be presumptuous to give my views on subjects where I have nothing special to contribute. After all, Substack, like the Internet in general, is overflowing with bilious pre-formatted commentary on any subject you like, and for any point of view you may support. For some decades (if rather less these days) I have been involved with foreign governments, NGOs, media, academia and others, as a formal or informal representative of various governments, as a teacher or a trainer, or as an informal adviser. I’ve also taught visitors to Europe from most parts of the world, ranging from university students up to senior government officials. I like to think, therefore, that I know a little of what I speak. (I claim no particular virtue for that: everyone has specialities in their lives, and this has been one of mine.) So this is once again an essay about the world as it actually is , and how it works, and if that makes you feel unsafe, then look away now. But to understand where we are, and what we are losing, we need to understand where we used to be, and why. Let’s start with a little history.
Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the aristocracy of the isiXhosa-speaking Thembu nation in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Traditionally, formal education had not existed in such societies, outside the elites. Mandela, however, attended primary and secondary schools founded by missionaries, where his (African) teachers gave him the additional baptismal name of Nelson. Formal western-style education had been brought by missionaries to Africa from the mid-19th century, as the invention of quinine made life possible for them in malarial regions. The principal motive for these initiatives was evangelisation, of course but, as we’ll see, there were wider ethical and philosophical objectives as well. Most of the teachers and administrators at such schools were Africans.
In due course, Mandela wanted to go to university. Now this was the mid-1930s, the period before apartheid, when the more politically-liberal English-speaking elite still ran the country. Even so, access to universities was difficult for non-whites. Except for one particular example: Fort Hare University, founded by missionaries in 1916. Students from all races were admitted, and a number of the lecturers were Africans. Fees were heavily subsidised. Mandela claimed that, for his generation, Fort Hare was “Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard” rolled into one. Like many of his colleagues, he developed a special sympathy for Britain as a result. And Mandela was far from the only Fort Hare student who went on to greater things. It was a nursery for future leaders of independent African states: Kenneth Kaunda, the first President of Zambia studied there, as did Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) and Seretse Khama (Botswana). And many historic leaders of the ANC were also alumni, including Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo. The subversive nature of multi-racial education was fully recognised by the (Afrikaner) National Party in its construction of the apartheid state after 1948: Fort Hare became a blacks-only university.
I’ve focused on Mandela first, because most people know of him. But in fact the generation of leaders that came to power in Africa in the 1960s was very largely educated in the West or at western schools and universities, and absorbed western ideas (of which more later.) Ahmed Ben Bella, the first President of Algeria, was educated at a French school and fought with distinction in the French Army in the Second World War: he was personally decorated by De Gaulle. Like the leadership of the FLN generally, he was fluent in French. Among intellectuals, Franz Fanon fought in the French Army also, and a grateful government gave him a bursary to train as a doctor in France. And finally, the MPLA, the Marxist independence movement that fought the Portuguese and eventually won the ensuing Civil War with Cuban assistance, was led by intellectuals from the mestizo coastal elite, who had been educated in Lisbon. Meanwhile, European missionaries were present almost everywhere in Africa from the 1830s, from every major European country, Protestant and Catholic. And if evangelism was a major factor, the documents of the time show that most missionary movements also incorporated a strong, and by the standards of the day progressive, social conscience.
You will notice that I’ve avoided making the lazy equivalence of missionary work with colonialism. Missionaries were on the ground generations before the real beginning of colonialism in Africa in the 1890s, and some of the major missionary nations never had colonies at all: at least a dozen Swedish Protestant denominations had missionary programmes, for example, and German missionaries were present throughout Africa long before the miniature and short-lived German Empire. After colonies were established, the relationships of missionaries to colonial administrations were not always easy. Especially in Protestant countries, missionary societies were politically associated with the pious and industrious middle classes, who distrusted colonies because of the costs involved and the risk of conflict with colonial rivals. They also pushed very hard for social changes such as the abolition of slavery, whereas the colonial administrators, were often nervous about the reactions of local leaders.
The story of the administration of colonial territories is a fascinating one, and one of many that can only be glanced at here. But the two principal colonial powers, Britain and France, took their task very seriously. Ministries were established, and personnel carefully selected. In France a special training school was established, in Britain graduates from good universities were selected by competition. And it was a very important personal commitment. In those days of indifferent communications you signed up for effectively a lifetime in a foreign country, with home leave perhaps four or five times in your career. The result was that such administrators got to know their countries very well. They were not numerous however, (it’s reckoned that the Sudan Political Service had no more than 400 members in the fifty-odd years of its existence) and depended on a large class of locally employed staff for much of their effectiveness.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s natural that we see things differently from the way they were seen a hundred and fifty years ago, and I’m not going to re-litigate colonialism here. What’s much more interesting is the mentality which guided both administrators and missionaries in those days, and how it compares with the careerist, ineffective and frankly often corrupt system we find today, when ironically actual western influence over countries in Africa and the Middle East is if anything greater than it was then.
As I’ve said, the first point is the seriousness with which the individuals and organisations took their tasks. This was an age which thought in terms of duty, and of meaning and purpose in life. For the missionaries, this went without saying. But their duty was not just to evangelise, but also to preach a gospel in which, as St Paul had famously said “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This universality—one of the reasons for the original, rapid, spread of Christianity in its early centuries—made it popular in Africa also, even as its distaste for slavery made it seem subversive to traditional power structures there.
This seriousness took secular forms as well. It was most obvious in Protestant countries, where the traditional idea of vocation (literally “calling”) was still very strong, and where the political influence of the churches, and organisations like the Bible Society and the London Missionary Society was enormous. (Good Works were required of all Christians, after all, so get on with it.) In Britain, the Liberal Party in particular was heavily influenced by the evangelical Protestant Churches, for whom saving souls and spreading the Gospel could not stop at the shoreline. They were prepared to support imperial expansion: not for crude jingoistic reasons, but to bring the benefits of the Gospels and middle-class liberal ideas to the less fortunate overseas. Moreover, this was also the age of Reform in Britain: the extension of the franchise, the introduction of free compulsory education, the expansion of technical education, the creation of the western world’s first professional, apolitical Civil Service. Surely, there was a moral duty to apply these ideas of what we would now call Good Governance elsewhere?
In France, there was of course a strong Catholic missionary movement. But the main motivation came from the young Third Republic, which was just getting settled in at the time of the 1885 Berlin Conference, generally taken to be the real beginning of colonialism in Africa. Whilst the records of the time show there were many other motives for French colonisation (resources and manpower for a future war against Prussia for example), there was also an almost messianic, desire to export the universal principles of the Revolution, now that they were reasonably secure in France. At the same time, the infant Republic was engaged in a vicious struggle with the Church to remove religious influence in schools and politics, something which was not really complete until the 1960s, and is now being undone again. There was no way that the Republic was going to allow the Church to steal a march on it abroad. So from the very beginning Instituteurs , the new, secular teaching arm of the Republic, were sent out to the Colonies to spread not just French civilisation and language, but the universal principles of modernity and secularism also.
The very moral seriousness of this age led it to think and speak in moral absolutes, which often brought its servants into conflict with local traditions. Not just slavery, but social issues such as the status of women were considered as given by missionaries and colonial administrators. Polygamy was not a social-context dependent relativistic ethnically-based social custom, but a bad idea that should be stamped out. And these judgements could be, and were, defended according to the precepts of organised and accepted systems of ethical thought based on mixtures of liberal, republican and Christian principles, whatever we may think of those principles today. (I’ll have more to say about the ethical contrast with the present day next week.)
It was also an age of great optimism about the future, and faith in the idea of Progress. I don’t know exactly when the West effectively abandoned Progress as a popular ideology—perhaps after the end of the Apollo programme—but the generation around the end of century was one of its very high points. Partly it was amazing new inventions—the radio, the telegraph, the motor car, the aeroplane—but partly also massive improvements in the quality of life, through universal education, streets that were safe at night, proper sanitation, better health care and legislation to make work safer. So the watchword was activism, which is why colonial administrators and missionaries were frequently occupied with practical projects: building schools, hospitals, railways etc. (Contrary to what is often supposed, security and justice tended to be left to traditional authorities where possible.) It was the spirit of the time.
Finally, the distribution of spheres of influence at the Berlin Conference (which did not automatically create colonies, of course) meant that there was at least some coherence in the way that countries were administered and social and economic initiatives were put in place, as compared to today’s bedlam when an African government might have projects from a dozen different countries and institutions running on its territory, often at cross-purposes with each other.
The result of all these official and unofficial initiatives was the slow spread of modern political, economic and social ideas. Ironically, even the socially-reactionary Catholic Church had a modernising influence overall. Nor was modernism always imposed from above, since colonial administrators often allied themselves with the more conservative elements of traditional African society. But it slowly permeated nonetheless, through education, visits to Europe and the circulation of books with modern ideas in them. Thus, as Olufemi Taiwo has demonstrated at length, modernism and colonialism are anything but identical: there were many developments before colonialism and there have been many others since the “colonial interlude,” all of which makes much of the tedious “de-colonialisation” discourse rather pointless.
So far I’ve discussed Africa in very summary terms. I’m now going to discuss, even more briefly, parts of the Middle East, since that is another area where the West is very active today with social and political projects, and it’s useful to start by looking at how things were done in the past. Modernism in the Levant, especially, did not begin with the British and French Mandates after 1919. In spite of the conservatism of the Ottoman Empire, foreigners did establish themselves early on in cities like Damascus, Beirut and Alexandria, bringing modern political and social ideas with them. But the language of administration was Turkish, and the language of religion was a dialect of Arabic, and only the wealthy among the indigenous population could afford to learn foreign languages, travel to Europe and read foreign books (where they were not banned) and absorb new ideas. The coming of the Mandate era, when French, in particular, was taught in schools, not only enabled neighbouring communities with different languages to talk to each other, but to share in a flood of fast-developing European political and social ideas, and to organise political and social movements that did not depend on religious or nationalist affiliation. Leftist political ideas arrived almost immediately: the Communist Party of Syria/Lebanon was formed in 1924, the Communist Party of Iraq, then under British Mandate, a decade later. Other left-wing parties also flourished, to the dismay of the Mandate authorities, but they were part of a inescapable tide of modernisation that profoundly affected these societies, and also that of Egypt, which was in practice run by the British at the time. By contrast the role of missionaries was much more limited, given that a large percentage of the populations of these countries was Christian anyway. But they were nonetheless active: the prestigious Université St-Joseph in Beirut was founded by the Jesuits in 1881 ( ironically with the support of the anti-clerical French government of the day) and has since trained successive generations of Lebanese elites.
Again, this ad hoc modernisation and the importation of western ideas in everything from politics to fashion, was opposed by indigenous conservative forces. Controversial issues such as the change in the status of women led to the creation of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in the 1920s, with their long-term and patient strategy of undermining modernism in the family and the school, and promoting a return to “traditional values” based on religion. (By a mordant irony, the Brothers, financed largely by Turkey and Qatar, are now busy radicalising immigrant Muslim populations in Europe.)
The steady flow of western political and social ideas into major Arab capitals created the pre-conditions for the rise of nationalist movements. The outlook of such movements was resolutely secular and modernist, and in many cases inspired by European models of the nation-state. Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution presents a teleological picture of the rise of an Egyptian nation free of colonial powers for the first time in millennia, in which many have seen the influence of Hegel. Indeed Nasser originally planned to introduce multi-party democracy in the new state, and fiercely opposed the influence of the Muslim Brothers, who tried to assassinate him in 1954.
The most influential political movement of the Arab world at the time was the Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party. It was present throughout the region, though it only came to power in Iraq and Syria. Its ideology, whilst heavily influenced by western Socialist ideas, was not a carbon copy of them, but included pan-Arabism, anti-imperialism and a strong sense of Arab cultural identity. Nor was it sectarian: one of its two main founders was a Christian, the other a Sunni Muslim. So by about 1970, the direction of the Arab world seemed clear, with secular, modernising regimes in place throughout the region (most recently in Libya). The reasons why this changed are beyond he scope of this essay, but I’ll touch on them very briefly later.
Thus, in both Africa and the Middle East there arose a generation of leaders with concepts inspired by, but not limited to, those absorbed from Europe over previous generations. They were not for the most part “anti-western” in an ideological sense (though they could obtain benefits from the Soviet Union by adopting the right vocabulary.) They wanted control over their territory for themselves, to evict foreign powers, and then create western-style nation states. Thus, athough the ANC sought military help from the Soviet Union (since the West was too stupid to offer it) its ideology was inclusive: the Freedom Charter of 1958 defined South Africa as the country of “all who live in it,” and they therefore looked to the West for inspiration and help also. And whilst since the 1970s the de-colonialisation era has been romanticised in the vocabulary of “liberation,” in Africa the transition was generally without violence except in countries where there were significant white populations. Indeed, hard as it may be to believe now, the early independence years were a time of great optimism about Africa. Modernisation Theory suggested that politically Africa would soon resemble Europe, and western governments set up Development Ministries to help with what was seen as the natural process of modernisation and industrialisation of the continent. (When I was young, science-fiction stories reflected the prevailing orthodoxy of a future Africa resembling Europe or the United States.)
Yet it’s worth pointing out that, in both Africa and the Middle East, the main consumers of modernisation were the urban middle-classes, many of whom had social and economic links with the colonial authorities, and benefited personally from modernism and its opportunities. The situation was very different for ordinary people. (As the pioneering African historian JF Ade Ajayi noted wryly, in some colonies the common people had only just become aware of the colonial power when the colonists started to leave.) This, and its analogue in the Arab world, turned out to be substantial problems later.
Newly-created independent states looked to the West for help and advice for purely practical reasons: they saw things there worth learning from and imitating. In this, of course, they followed a long tradition, pioneered by the Japanese during the Meiji Restoration, when Japanese students were sent to Europe to learn technical subjects and to study the operation of government. And it has to be said that there were things to imitate. Europe had rebuilt itself physically and politically, and to some extent morally, after the horrors of 1939-45, and the previous centuries of blood and turmoil. Anyone arriving in western Europe in, say, 1970, would find functional states and bureaucracies, political systems that largely worked, a broad consensus on many important public issues, health services that functioned, and significant degrees of social welfare and protection of rights. In an imperfect world, such a level of relative success seemed worth imitating. In turn, this allowed European states to act with a certain amount of self-confidence and pride in what had been accomplished in the years since 1945.
Partly as a result, western states (and by no means only former colonial powers) began to develop ambitious programmes of aid and technical assistance. To some extent, this came out of post World War 2 idealism, but also out of the pragmatic judgement that growth and stability ultimately benefited everyone, and also the never-ending search for influence in which states have engaged since there were states. I’m aware of course that for some people, the idea of nations pursuing their interests and seeking influence abroad is positively scandalous. There are also people who believe, or affect to, that their own nation is so evil and hateful that it does not deserve to have interests or influence. As I say, I don’t know how much of this is just posturing, but in any event it hardly matters. The game of influence is as old as history, and also for the most part zero-sum: politics doesn’t tolerate vacuums, and in most parts of the world, as one state’s influence declines the influence of other states will increase.
In turn, this is because, although it may be difficult for nationals of large states to understand, most countries look for advantage in relations with larger and richer countries, in everything from technical assistance to trade arrangements to military protection. In many cases, the success of a small country’s foreign policy depends on how deftly it manoeuvres to get what it wants and needs from others, while maintaining as much independence as it can. Most leaders in the Global South are well aware of how to balance public affirmations of sovereignty with private appeals for assistance, and to play large states against each other. And since much of what follows will be extremely critical of what western states and international organisations do today, I should start on a positive note.
For simplicity, I’m going to talk essentially about types of activity, which obviously vary enormously in detail with the donor and the recipient. Much of it revolves around training and education in the widest sense of those terms. Sometimes it’s simply about resources. Most countries can provide basic and intermediate training for their police, military, customs and similar forces (I’ve taught at such establishments) But the kind of person marked out as a potential National Commissioner of Police, Chief of Defence etc. will require better than that, and relatively few nations in the world train such people in substantial numbers. So your prospective candidate is likely to go abroad, which is often mind-expanding anyway, and will meet many colleagues from other nations. (Indeed, and at a slight tangent, even advanced nations send large numbers of military officers abroad for training for wider career and relational purposes: go to a western Staff College and you’ll probably find that half the student body is from overseas.)
Sometimes the training will be technical, in new scientific or medical and health techniques, or in their application to government. Sometimes it will be networking: building links between academic researchers in Africa and researchers on Africa in Europe, for example. Sometimes it will be organisational. A country under pressure to improve its customs and border security will look round for help and advice from countries that already have functioning systems. These will not necessarily be western countries either: so-called “South-South” initiatives involve financing visits from countries or experts, perhaps in the same region, who are further advanced. But there are also initiatives aimed at the non-governmental community. For example, I’ve been involved in training journalists about how to understand and report on sensitive aspects of government in countries where there is no tradition of public discussion of them, or parliamentary researchers in new democracies to enable the new Parliament to do its job. I’ve taught courses for academics on how to understand different sectors of government and how to research them, and how to interview senior decision-makers. And many other things.
But there are also more fundamental initiatives. More and more, senior policemen and soldiers around the world have advanced degrees, including an introduction to international politics and security. Many states don’t have the academic capacity to provide the staff, and so they often come from abroad. I’ve done that too. And finally, countries may find themselves in a completely new political situation, either because of domestic developments or because the international system has changed arid them, and they seek advice and help from others on how to cope.
There’s much more, but this gives a quick indication. Now there have always been a number of structural problems associated with this kind of activity, although they can be intelligently managed to some extent. (There are also some much more serious, non-structural problems which we’ll get to next week) The first, obviously, is dependency. A small state will probably never have the resources to do everything, and will always seek assistance. But larger states, also, may become habituated, simply because it’s easier, and someone else is paying. This leads to absurdities such as engaging foreign consultants to do your Foreign or Security Policy review. The result is a lack of confidence and a kind of pre-emptive cringe in favour of donors. The cure, insofar as there is one, is to develop indigenous intellectual resources, which is something I have personally always tried to encourage. There are various reasons for this learned helplessness which I’ll come to in a second, but it can be frustrating and even irritating. I remember at one conference in francophone Africa many years ago pounding the table (literally or more probably metaphorically, I can’t remember) and saying Vous n’avez pas besoin de moi! : you don’t need me. I can give you information, tell you how things work in other countries, discuss things that seem to generally work well, but you have the brainpower available to decide, you just need the confidence.
Another is that these things cost money, and so the projects that happen are ones that donors are prepared to fund. This happened most famously and catastrophically in the DRC, but it’s pervasive. Unlike the serious, long-term commitment in-country of a hundred years ago, today’s Development official in a national capital or an Embassy is there for three years, and wants something to show at the end of it, and above all to avoid doing anything controversial or difficult. Thus, a “reform” programme in an Interior Ministry may in practice just be a random collection of projects that foreign donors feel comfortable funding. And whereas Missionaries tried to save souls, NGOs deliver moral lectures. Whereas colonial administrators built railways, donors pay for consultants to advise on how to privatise them. And almost all the activities are symbolic and performative: corruption in an unpaid customs service requires a new law, brutality by unpaid and untrained policemen requires a code of conduct. Here’s a translation of the one we use in my country.
A third is that the system becomes self-sustaining, as people make their careers in it, as intermediaries extract rents from it, and as recipient governments get used to it. The amount of genuine international expertise available is, in fact quite limited in many areas, but you wouldn’t know this from the size of the industry, and the number of people and organisations who fight for contracts. Moreover, since foreign voters are paying, projects are subjected to mind-numbing levels of bureaucracy and audit, which means that they are increasingly managed by large specialist consultancies who have cultivated links with foreign governments that some find questionable. As a result, much of the project budget never actually makes it into the country concerned, but is spent at home. And because donors are alive to the need to avoid having teams of exclusively white people, an entire neo-colonial class has emerged, beholden to a variety of different donors rather than working for their own government, as they more productively could.
But all of this, in theory, could be pushed back against. After all, Asian countries, from 19th century Japan onwards, have controlled the process themselves and taken and used only what they thought useful. (They still do so today.) And some African countries in my experience (Algeria, for example, or South Africa) have enough self-confidence to keep intellectual charge of what’s going on. But what about the rest? This is a a huge subject and I can only tiptoe around a corner of it. In the case of Africa, it’s accepted that importing the western state model wholesale and trying to compress centuries of often tumultuous change into decades was always too ambitious. The failure is not a failure of Africans, but of the model, which has far more preconditions for success than were realised by the first generation of African independentists. (The fact that most African and Arab states have artificial borders, some following roughly those of Ottoman provinces, may be unhelpful, but just makes them like nearly every other state in the world.) What Basil Davidson famously referred to as the “curse” of the nation-state in Africa doesn’t have any obvious remedy, but many donor projects actually make the situation worse, by continuing to pretend these problems don’t exist.
Few subjects are more lamented by African intellectuals after a couple of beers than the decline in the African leadership class since Independence, but the reality is they are simply following imperatives for survival. It took centuries for the extractive classes in Europe to be replaced by the productive classes, and now they seem to be on their way back. Why should things be any different in Africa? And the perception of failure, and the disappointment after the high hopes of the 60s and 70s, the chaos wrought by uncontrolled raw material prices and neoliberalism and endemic conflict and corruption feed into a self-sustaining narrative of failure that undermines confidence and encourages dependency.
In the Arab world, by contrast, we are dealing, as the great Egyptian-Lebanese writer Amin Malouf has argued, with the legacy of centuries of highly centralised, immensely distant and completely unaccountable Ottoman rule, which encouraged an enduring feeling of helplessness in the face of mysterious omnipotent powers. After the departure of the Ottomans, and the Mandate interlude, it became attached to foreign states generally. And the defeat and humiliation of 1967 by Israel, more than any other single event, shattered the fragile self-confidence of the secular era.
Western policies today take no account of such problems, and continue to assume conditions and possibilities that simply don’t exist. The result is at once intrusive and ineffective. All over Africa and the Arab world, and in parts of Asia and elsewhere, there are consultants and NGOs beavering away, running “training courses” on irrelevant subjects, producing reports no-one reads, making recommendations that will never be carried out and reorganising things that will never work. Perhaps ten per cent of this work is of any value—I’ve given some examples—and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never had to depend on it for my income and could always say no. Indeed, I’ve done quite a lot of it for free or as part of my job. But there are plenty of struggling NGOs and consultants, half of whose time is spent competing for contracts on the latest fashionable theme of the day. And because the ethos of donors, whether governments, foundations or institutions, is towards a technocratic, liberal, normative concept of government, such projects, with their deadening vocabulary and stultifyingly amorphous concepts, often seem to serve little purpose other than virtue-signalling. I was going to provide links to some of the more banal and pointless projects for which bids are currently being solicited, but I haven’t the heart. Let’s just say that if you think you have the expertise, you can certainly bid for an independent project to audit the effectiveness of a country’s diversity training initiatives in the Middle East over the last five years, which will put food on your table for some time.
As I’ve suggested, in the never-ending game of influence is as old as history, the West, and especially Europe, had certain advantages. Its systems generally worked, it had visibly overcome some of the same problems now found elsewhere, it had a historical, cultural and philosophical richness that many countries admired, and it was the source of modern, and for many liberating, ideas. This had little to do with hard power, or even soft power, really. A diplomat would have fond memories of a year spent at the Sorbonne, a General would recall a British training team that came to his country and brought real expertise to solve a problem. Over the decades, these things add up, even if you mostly can’t see them. (By contrast, the United States with its history of brute-force assertiveness was seldom very effective in this way of working.)
We’ve lost that now. We continue to preach governance although our political systems are collapsing. We continue to try to influence foreign militaries when our own have practically ceased to exist. We offer assistance on combating drug smuggling when parts of Europe have themselves become narco-states. We presume to sort out the political crises of others while in Britain we are about to see the seventh government in ten years, and in France the political system is disintegrating before our eyes. And let’s not even get into the normative side now. You know the rest. We are not listened to out of respect any more, just out of nostalgia and habit, and because, for the time being at least, we still have the money to fund the projects. How long will that last, though?
Next week I’ll look at some of the deeper reasons behind all this.
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