2009 -- Stephen Harper's self-congratulatory history of Canada

CBC quotes the PM at the G20 conference:

“We’re so self-effacing as Canadians that we sometimes forget the assets we do have that other people see,” he said, speaking with a rare passion.
“We are one of the most stable regimes in history. ... We are unique in that regard,” he added, noting Canada had enjoyed more than 150 years of untroubled Parliamentary democracy.
Just in case that was not enough to persuade doubters, Harper threw in some more facts about the geographically second-largest nation in the world.

“We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them,” he said.

So all that land just fell into the laps of British and French colonizers settlers?

Manifest Destiny on a global scale

Manifest Destiny was a popular 19th century idea which attributed to the United States the right to expand and occupy the North American continent from coast to coast. Manifest Destiny was associated with the punchy phrase: "Go West, young man" coined by the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who thought western expansion was the way to go, both for (white) settlers and for the country as a whole. Not that he was unique in this prescription. I was thinking about the Opening of Japan (where the US Navy forced the Japanese empire to allow trade between Japan and the rest of the world) in the 1850s, when I realized that there was a lot of "Opening" in the 19th century. Think Opium Wars! Or the French Conquest of Mexico! Or the slaughter of Australian aboriginals (Being investigated right now by the Guardian)! How did they justify their actions? Somehow I doubt that I will ever have time to explore this topic --Manifest Destiny on a Global Scale -- but maybe someone else will. Or maybe someone already has! Image: Greeley.

Empire -- Lest we forget

Thanks to Nick Russon, this piece from the Telegraph:

Every schoolboy used to know that at the height of the empire, almost a quarter of the atlas was coloured pink, showing the extent of British rule. But that oft recited fact dramatically understates the remarkable global reach achieved by this country.

A new study has found that at various times the British have invaded almost 90 per cent of the countries around the globe.The analysis of the histories of the almost 200 countries in the world found only 22 which have never experienced an invasion by the British.Among this select group of nations are far-off destinations such as Guatemala, Tajikistan and the Marshall Islands, as well some slightly closer to home, such as Luxembourg.

The analysis is contained in a new book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To. Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.

"Half-digested management theory"

...as Magistra et Mater herself says. Nevertheless, I like this:

If modern companies want to expand, they have two main routes to take. One is what is often called organic growth, which is the process of gradually expanding your current business: opening up one extra shop, buying the piece of equipment that will increase your output etc. The alternative is expanding via mergers and acquisitions, where you suddenly take on a whole new area of business. The M&A route can get you big gains quickly, but it’s risky, because you’re moving into unfamiliar territory. Organic growth is slower, but in theory is safer, except that if one of your rivals goes the M&A route and gets a lot bigger, it can then swallow you up.

What does all this have to do with early medieval noblemen? They too want to expand, in the sense of gain more wealth and power. And we can also see two main strategies for how they do this. One focuses on expansion, particularly via war or royal favour. The other is more locally focused, aiming to exploit their current lands and the peasantry on them to the maximum, while gradually buying up or taking over adjacent property. Call these imperial and local strategies.

It’s important, first of all, to notice that it’s hard to combine the two strategies. If you’re spending all your time focused on your local area, you don’t have free time for being at court in the king’s presence, or carrying out the other kinds of networking that you need to gain royal favour. Conversely, if you’re reliant on royal favour, you need to be willing to go where the king wants you. If you’re given charge of the Pannonian frontier, you relocate there, you don’t just stay where your ancestors were. But you then have the fundamental medieval problem of the delegation of power. If someone else is managing your lands for you, and you’re not on the spot, how do you ensure they don’t either rip you off financially or even usurp the land? You can’t easily mix and match the two approaches.

Generally speaking, the local strategy is a conservative one, in the sense of more likely to keep what you already have (whereas king’s favourites can come to very sticky ends). It also fits better with both hereditary office and castles, as I’ll explain in a moment. But first, I want to emphasise one point: that discussions about what (lay) noblemen want too often ignore the anti-Kantian nature of their ideas. Medieval noblemen, like most of us, often really want rules that apply to everyone except themselves, or only to them, not to others. So it’s misleading to say that nobles always wanted offices to be hereditary. They wanted the offices they held to be hereditary, but not necessarily the ones that other men held, because that would make it harder for them to get their hands on those. If offices are becoming hereditary, that suggests an aristocracy worrying more about holding onto their current offices than acquiring new ones, which goes with a local strategy.

There's more. I'd just add that M et M could have spent a little time on dynastic marriage. Maybe later. Oh, her reflections on 1000 years of economic irrationality are worth a look, too.

Image: Warkworth Castle.

Imperial rule, then and now

Juan Cole, the Middle East scholar and political commentator, wrote in his blog today an article entitled "McChrystal Drama is Sideshow; Can Obama define a realistic Goal?" If you have been paying attention to Afghanistan policy, you can write a summary of the post from the title.

More interesting, in a way, and more appropriate for this blog, is a long comment by someone called hquain, which I will reproduce here:

Here’s a follow-up question: what would a “realistic set of goals” consist of? We can enumerate the possibilities easily enough ourselves… should any at all come to any mind.

I’d suggest that Afghanistan represents the typical situation in which global ‘goals’ are generated post hoc to cover for a complex dynamical process that is dominated by a multitude of contending forces and incentives, themselves often quite local in scope if not in impact.

The military — one of the actors now and no mere tool — has set up shop in Pentagonistan, a wealthy country all of its own that overlies the Afghan wretchedness, where new hardware and software is beta-tested in an endless live-fire exercise, where the officer corps gets its promotion-worthy combat cred, where McChrystal Pasha and his like inflate their theories of dominion and control, cushioned by inexhaustible billions. They don’t need goals; they have plentiful incentives to stay the course from week to week, month to month, year to year.

Other networks of advantage, real and imagined, can surely be discerned in the worlds inhabited by each of the parties to the situation, starting with simple inertia (change itself being costly) and branching out in many directions, at many scales.

The question, then, is what the use would be of declaring a set of goals, even ‘realistic’ ones, should they exist. Perhaps they could serve temporarily as a force in the local calculus, pushing us to get out sooner rather than later; but we shouldn’t think of the situation as one controlled by long-term goals, so that all we have to do is pick the right ones to control it.

Hquain here talks about American foreign policy, and American occupation of Afghanistan, in the politics of this particular war in the way I might talk about a distant empire of the past. Say, perhaps, the ancient Persian empire that Alexander conquered and swallowed. The writer reminds us of a number of things here, that wars and imperialism are complicated phenomena,
and that anything really important is not accomplished by large groups motivated by monomaniacal collective goals, but by individuals and relatively small groups motivated by their own particular interests, whether mystical and apocalyptic or more down-to-earth, like worries about where the next meal is coming from. The reference to Pentagonistan not only reminds us that there is not a single American policy or set of interests in the Middle East, but many. It specifically reminds me of something I read years ago and incorporated into many lectures. Namely, that the Spanish army of Flanders, which in the 16th century was put together to crush the Dutch revolt and was also aimed at one point at the conquest of England (think Armada 1588), had more troops and a larger "national debt" than just about any polity in Europe at the time.

This makes me wonder how CENTCOM, the American Middle Eastern command based in Tampa Florida, compares in size to the other national capitals of the world. Where would it be rated by number of personnel employed? CENTCOM surely is more important, better armed and better financed than any central American country (not including Mexico, which should be counted as North American).

When world events of the present are happening to people like you and your neighbors, it is difficult to take a detached view. If people talk consistently like America or Canada or other countries are individuals with single, rationally calculated wills, we start thinking that there is a single Canada or America or Honduras.

Once we break free from that illusion, however, we may realize that there is a Pentagonistan, one hardly restricted to the boundaries of Afghanistan, whose relationship to the United States of America and its government cannot be understood simply by looking at the Constitution of the United States or the organization table showing the formal relationship of the various generals, admirals, joint chiefs, presidents, cabinets, and members of Congress.

That was quite a thought-provoking comment, hquain and not a single egregious insult in it. Go forth, reader, and do likewise.

Image: what is the name of this country? Where are its boundaries?