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The limits of self-interest

24 November 2003

The idea that American self-interest is everybody else's interest may make for an attractive moral certainty but it won't solve the world's problems or even make U.S. interests more secure.

George Bush's foreign policy speech at the Banqueting house last Wednesday was generally considered to have been a good one. Elegantly written and, by all accounts, well delivered, it also said many sensible things about multi-lateralism and democratic values. These are the motherhood and apple pie of international diplomacy, so it would have been surprising if he had not said them. But the problem comes when you look at the detail and see how it measures up to the U.S. world view.

The speech opened with a curious attempt to draw the American character in terms of the English moral and political tradition. The inspiration of "Wilberforce and the firm determination of the Royal Navy over the decades to fight and end the trade in slaves" was cited, forgetting for a moment that the interests against which those naval vessels were pitted were those of the United States. "To this fine heritage," Bush continued, "Americans have added a few traits of our own: the good influence of our immigrants, the spirit of the frontier. Yet, there remains a bit of England in every American. So much of our national character comes from you, and we're glad for it."

Well, maybe. One thing that the U.S. undeniably acquired from these islands is a language, and because of this it is easy to forget that only about thirteen per cent of the U.S. population is of English ancestry. The Welsh and Scots add another three per cent, with the "Scotch-Irish" on 2 per cent and the indigenous Irish on fifteen per cent. The largest group by ancestry is German, at 23 per cent, with the rest of continental Europe accounting for a similar figure in total. In speaking of "the good influence of our immigrants" and "the spirit of the frontier" Mr Bush presumably sought to distinguish between these later migrations and the original English settlers.

That, of course, is the whole point. The people who have given the Unites States its national character are not the English as such but wave upon wave of economic and political migrants who had the energy and the independence of spirit to leave their old countries behind. The only bit of England that lives in most of them is their seventeenth century vocabulary. English was the language of the American colonies because their founders were predominantly British, but its survival as the lingua franca of this diverse nation says more about the cohesive social and political institutions of the U.S. than it does about any trans-Atlantic relationship.

To recall, as Mr Bush did in his speech, the America interventions in the twentieth century European wars, can make for misty eyes. But the U.S. did not enter either of these wars to "save" Britain. They did so to defend their own (largely economic) interests, bringing to the aftermaths of each conflict an agenda designed to curtail European (including British) global power. If Wilson's idealism of 1918 was, as Bush implied in his speech, a challenge to the politics of self-interest, it failed because the U.S. was itself not un-self-interested. It was therefore as implicated in the collapse of the League on Nations (which it never joined) as anyone else. By 1945 the U.S. was more confident in its own global projection and the challenge to a bankrupt and exhausted Europe was explicit and unconditional. The old world order was swept away and a new one, shaped to American policies and interests, emerged to take its place.

Britain was the biggest loser in that transaction because Britain had the most to lose. But by hanging on to the American coat tails she maintained vicariously for herself some illusion of her former status. The price for this was the assumption that U.S. global interests were necessarily coincident with her own. The ceding of British global power to America could be made to seem, in the era of the cold war, a natural development, a mere rearrangement of the "old and tested alliance of values" to which Mr Bush referred in his speech last week.

In the Cold War era these values were "against" something that was clearly unattractive to the western democracies. Freedom could be defined as "not Communism" and could be made to embrace a swathe of sordid right-wing dictatorships for that reason. Now, however, the situation has changed, even if the language has not. "We value our own civil rights," says Bush, " so we stand for the human rights of others... We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings." The question is, "freedom from what?", and Bush answers this in his characteristic way. "By working for justice in Burma, in the Sudan and in Zimbabwe, we give hope to suffering people and improve the chances for stability and progress. By extending the reach of trade we foster prosperity and the habits of liberty. And by advancing freedom in the greater Middle East, we help end a cycle of dictatorship and radicalism that brings millions of people to misery and brings danger to our own people."

References to Burma, the Sudan and Zimbabwe were clearly intended to appeal to British ears, but the key words here are "progress...prosperity and the habits of liberty." In a world of U.S. hegemony these are the values that define freedom, and it is notable that they reside in what is essentially the economic sphere. In this throwback to what, for Europe, is a nineteenth century view of liberty, freedom is the freedom to prosper if you can. Of this, the principal beneficiaries are those best placed to exploit it, which in turn means U.S. commercial forces that are encouraged by their government to seek advantage in every corner of he globe.

George Bush's declaration in an earlier speech that "if you're not with us your against us" illustrates precisely the singleness of this vision. There is only one way. Philosophically, however, it must be doubtful whether it is possible to achieve freedom by subscribing to a set of values that are not your own. The reference to the Middle East in the extract quoted above hints at this dilemma. In the cycle of dictatorship and radicalism, it is not so much the dictatorships that are the problem as the radicalism that they spawn.

Radicalism means change at the root, which in some contexts is spoken of as a good thing. But in Bush-speak it is a bad thing because it challenges the pre-eminence of the hegemonic definition of liberty. As such, it embraces not just Islamic fundamentalism but anybody who opposes the U.S. on account of environmental degradation, exploitative trade practices, support for oppressive regimes, the denial of human rights to its own prisoners of war and a swathe of other issues.

There is something charming in Mr Bush really wanting everyone to love American values, but he does nothing to address the problem of what happens when they don't. It points to a real problem for a hegemonic power in trying to "improve" the world through the pursuit of its own self-interest. The British Empire crumbled as its peoples chose (often chaotic) self-determination over well organised subservience. In Palestine, in Kenya, in Malaya and elsewhere the British fought their own "war on terror", which turned out to be rearguard actions in defence of a set of values that had had its day. That problem has not gone away just because it is America that now faces it. It may be an unpalatable truth, but if everybody is really to prosper the person with the most has to give, not take.