Empires and tolerance

Today’s New York Times Book Review includes a review of Amy Chau’s Day of Empire, which makes some very interesting observations about the role of toleration and inclusion to the success of several empires, including Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and the United States. Lance Morrow, a longtime essayist for TIME magazine wrote the review:

The emperor Claudius thought about the dynamics of imperial ingestion. He reminded the Roman Senate that the founder Romulus would “both fight against and naturalize a people on the same day.” Claudius argued that the Gauls, by logical extension, could be accepted into the Senate because “they no longer wear trousers” — that is, they could be counted on to come to work wearing the Roman toga and thus to have effectively become Romans.

The great Mughal emperor Akbar flourished by practicing a similar “strategic tolerance” — which included what Amy Chua in “Day of Empire” calls “multicultural copulation.” A Muslim himself, the emperor intermarried widely: “By the time of Akbar’s death, he had more than 300 wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from South Indian kingdoms, Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.”

E pluribus unum.

Chua argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history — among them, Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and hegemonic America — prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion, the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.

. . .

The death of empire, in Chua’s thesis — the Kryptonite that vitiates a superpower — is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial “purity” or religious orthodoxy. Chua wonders how different 20th-century history might have been if Hitler had been a tolerant and accommodating conqueror. “By murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of thousands of German citizens,” she observes, “the Nazis deprived themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. … Germany lost an array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Lise Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction of the world’s first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the war.” It was history’s most spectacular example of shooting oneself in the foot.

Further unintended consequences of doctrinaire malice: In 1478, the Inquisition, decreed by papal bull, ended an era of relative tolerance in Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews the choice of either converting to Catholism or leaving. Ten years later, the Muslims of Castile were ordered to convert or emigrate. “The Spanish monarchy had officially embraced intolerance,” Chua writes, “and for an empire hoping to rise in global pre-eminence, this was a staggeringly bad move.”

Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School, unfolds an agreeably plausible case with clarity and insistent simplification, like a lawyer pacing before the jury box, hitting the same points (tolerance, diversity, inclusion) for emphasis as she clicks off centuries and civilizations. Always in the back of her mind is the drama of America.

. . .

Few would quarrel with Chua’s absorbing PowerPoint presentation, her shrewd and happy argument that a generous policy of tolerance and inclusion leads on to success and prosperity. Or with her somewhat more intricate (or circular?) case that even the most embracingly inclusive empires eventually disintegrate because they lack “glue” — an overarching political identity to give coherence to the whole.

But in the 21st century, “empire” and “superpower” and “hyperpower” are terms that may require rethinking. They suggest boundaries, borders — even as they connote the expansion of territory and influence. But most of the powerful forces, good and evil, of our new century are borderless, globalized — the almost unimpeded global flow of information (images, ideas, news, music, movies, emotions, hatreds), products, commodities, capital, environmental pollution, climate change and terrorism. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear terrorism. In such a world, an idea (a rage, a grievance, a difference of cultural perspective) may create a superpower without borders, using a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan as its Pentagon.

Read it all here.

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