Reviewed in this article:Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff(Vintage, 2003; 127 pages plus index; the Penguin edition, also published in 2003, is reviewed here)
He’s got that thing. Michael Ignatieff has been charming the Canadian journalistic classes for months now. The Globe and Mail published a fawning seven-page interview with him. Over and over we’re told how intellectual he is, how powerful his mind is, how he’s internationally respected as a scholar.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I decided to read some of this great thinking. The first thing I discovered while I was looking him up at the Toronto Public Library is that the Canadian people, or at least the Toronto branch, have not been inspired by reports of Mr. Ignatieff’s intellectual power (since Mr. Ignatieff is not teaching at the moment, I will use Mr. as his title rather than Dr.). No one’s been reserving any of his books, many of which are still on the shelves. In Toronto, at least, Iggymania seems to be confined to the employees of giant media corporations.
Anyway, I took out Empire Lite, which had the advantage of being fairly recent (2003) and topical (it deals in part with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; Mr. Ignatieff, in a departure from the policy of the party he aspires to lead, supports the latter invasion). It’s also short (127 pages of text in the Penguin edition), which I hoped would mean it hadn’t been artificially fattened the way so many books have been these days.
Mr. Ignatieff plunges into his topic immediately. His argument is that the old form of imperialism, which justified itself as necessary to spread civilization, has been replaced by a new stripped-down version which justifies itself as necessary to promote national self-determination – “hegemony without colonies,” as he puts it, “a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing” (p. 2). He calls this empire lite, and says “the key question is whether empire lite is heavy enough to get the job done” (p. 3).
What job is that? Well, Mr. Ignatieff is confusing about that question. He asserts in his summary that the “essential purpose" of empire lite is “to restore order to border zones essential to the security of great powers” (p. 109), which at least is plausible. However, from the end of the introduction on he assumes that the most important goal of empire lite is actually to promote self-determination.
He writes in his introduction, for example, that “critics of imperial power need to understand that self-government in these places [Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo] is unattainable without some exercise of imperial power….Imperialism has become a precondition for democracy” (pp. 23-24). However, 85 pages later we find him writing that one of the imperial characteristics of empire lite is that “real power [in the countries which have supposedly become self-determining] will continue to be exercised from London, Washington, and Paris” (p. 109).
Besides that, Mr. Ignatieff repeatedly writes, persuasively, that the failure of empire lite to provide true self-determination is one of its serious flaws. One could as well argue that although con men never deliver the Brooklyn Bridge to any of the suckers who’ve given them money, nevertheless if you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge you’re going to have to give money to a con man.
Mr. Ignatieff has been characterized by some as a groupie of the powerful, and his attribution of democracy-creating magical powers to imperialism – against his better judgment – seems to be an example of this. Nowhere does he make an argument to support his claim that imperialism is a precondition for democracy. He does not attempt to show how this assertion could be deduced from the defining characteristics of empire lite. In the three chapters between his introduction and his summary he marshals no objective empirical evidence which would support his claim or disprove a counterclaim that democracy can be established in a country without its becoming an object of imperialism. As we have seen, he characterizes imperialism (including empire lite) as inherently restricting national self-determination. His conclusion is that if empire lite doesn’t start living up to its supposed principles soon we’re going to be in serious trouble. But since imperialists say that their goal is to promote democracy, then ipso facto, Mr. Ignatieff seems to be arguing, that’s what their goal is.
I realize that what I’m claiming may not seem credible. However, if you’re a Canadian your public library probably has at least one copy of this book. All you have to do is read it. You will probably be as shocked by what you find as I was.
You’re probably wondering what goes on in those middle three chapters if Mr. Ignatieff is not marshalling evidence. What’s going on is some pedestrian journalism. In particular, the second of these three chapters is devoted to obvious character assassination of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières and of Médecins du Monde. Well, Mr. Kouchner may be as evil as Mr. Ignatieff depicts him, but his argument is unsupported by evidence. “What Bernard Kouchner represents is the whole tortuous history of modern humanitarianism and its marriage of convenience with state power and military force,” Mr. Ignatieff writes (p. 59). Represents to whom? Who exactly considers him to be a symbol of these things, other than Mr. Ignatieff? And saaay – isn’t hitching the self-determination wagon to the locomotive of state power and military force what Mr. Ignatieff is arguing for?
Clearly the imperialism of today does not promote national self-determination. Bosnia is effectively run by the European Union. In Iraq the coalition of the all too willing is ostensibly promoting the self-determination of a democratic nation called Iraq, when many of this ostensible nation’s citizens think their true nation is something else – Kurdistan, or an Islamic Caliphate based in the Sunni regions, or an islamic Republic of Iraq. But Mr. Ignatieff is still pitching the supposed virtues of the invasion of Iraq.
Much has been made of Mr. Ignatieff’s supposedly suspect Canadianness. Well, this book will allay your fears on that score. He actually mentions Canada as if it were important, so he must be Canadian. However, his book is obviously intended not for Canadians but for citizens of a country (the United States, say) which is having grave doubts about the justifiability of its imperial adventures and looking for someone who can give it soothing reassurances that blowing up thousands of Iraqis and Afghans is just what the remaining unexploded Iraqis and Afghans needed. As an analysis of what's happening in the world, though, it is unsubstantiated, self-contradictory, and quite possibly disingenuous.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment