GLOBAL IMPACTS
—An interstate system once confined to Europe has been enlarged to cover the world.
The combination of European imperialism and anticolonial nationalism globalized the idea and institutions of the territorial, bureaucratic, sovereign state.
The original interstate system, whose existence was so conducive to imperialism, was transformed by the addition of polities whose very formation signaled imperial decline. Yet characteristics of the old system persist in the new, expanded version: the exchange of diplomats, for example, the principle of diplomatic immunity, and treaty-drafting conventions. International negotiations are for the most part conducted in metropolitan languages. The idea that sovereign states are equal in key respects despite glaring inequalities in others is universally accepted. Thus, state A is accorded the legal and moral right not to be invaded by state B even if A is small, poor, and weak while B is a great power. This egalitarian feature of the old system is particularly welcomed by new states, the great majority of which are far poorer and weaker than their former rulers. Application of the one state-one vote principle in international meetings gives each unit a sense that it matters, whatever its resources or the capacity of its rulers to govern.31 Today’s global system, like the old European one, is ultimately anarchic and potentially unstable. Yet widespread acceptance of multiple sovereignties tends to reduce insecurity and routinizes relations among the system’s component parts.Colonialism had contradictory effects on the numbers of units in the interstate system. As just noted, it led eventually to a far larger and more geographically dispersed membership than obtained in a system initially confined to one region. But European rule decimated hundreds of polities by incorporating them, often summarily and brutally, within colonial boundaries.
Among the most obvious instances were New Spain, British India, the Dutch East Indies, Nigeria, and German East Africa. Had the system evolved to include all indigenous polities functioning when Europeans first encountered them, there might be one or two thousand states today. It is difficult to imagine how—or whether—that many units could regulate their relations in any meaningful way. Paradoxically, forcible incorporation of myriad small polities into larger ones during earlier centuries may have made possible relatively stable interactions among sovereign states in modern times.—Empires stimulated an enormous rise in long-distance trade, resulting in a global economy.
The volume and variety of commodities transported from one continent to another rose dramatically during the centuries of European dominance. One should not attribute this phenomenon wholly to colonial rule. Europe’s private profit sectors were more directly involved in overseas commerce than public sectors, and maritime trade did not always require the flag. But metropolitan governments did a great deal to influence the extent, direction, and composition of trade. This was most obvious with mercantilist policies in phase i, but no less important in phases 3 and 4 when decisions based on a Eurocentric interpretation of comparative advantage created and then reinforced the concentration of industrial production in metropoles.
The persistent tendency of Europeans to assert formal control over other parts of the world is itself the clearest indication that, despite the technological and economic advantages they so often enjoyed over others, in the final analysis they lacked confidence in the workings of the free—that is, uncoerced and politically unregulated-market. Public sector institutions were set up to ensure a higher prominence for trade and to guarantee Europeans a higher portion of gains from it than would have occurred had outcomes been driven by the market alone.
Much is made today of globalization as if it were a recent phenomenon.
To say this is to ignore the history of most of the world. For most ex-colonial countries a high degree of openness and vulnerability to economic trends elsewhere—including flows of capital and advanced technology—has been a reality for centuries. Political independence may be a necessary condition for changing an inheritance of economic dependence, but it is by no means a sufficient condition. Trade patterns between an industrialized north and a primary product-producing south are difficult to change in the postcolonial era, in large part because they have deep roots in the formative colonial stage of the globalization process.—Overseas empires spread a transformative stance toward nature. As rapid economic development becomes a universal goal, an urgent question is whether the physical environment can withstand the sustained assaults mounted on it in all countries.
The development ethos pervading today’s world can be traced to the explorecontrol-utilize syndrome impelling five centuries of European expansion. Settler nationalists in phase 2 and non-European nationalists later (with the virtually unique exception of Gandhi) did not critique this syndrome. Instead they enthusiastically adopted it, viewing independence as a way to continue and if possible accelerate the transformation of nature. This point was eloquently made by the Indonesian nationalist Soetan Sjahrir in his intellectual biography Out of Exile:
For me, the West signifies forceful, dynamic, and active life. It is a sort of Faust that I admire, and I am convinced that only by a utilization of this dynamism of the West can the East be released from its slavery and subjugation. The West is now teaching the East to regard life as a struggle and a striving, as an active movement to which the concept of tranquillity must be subordinated.... [Struggle and striving] signify a struggle against nature, and that is the essence of the struggle: man’s attempt to subdue nature and to rule it by his will.32
The larger the number of people holding this view, the more must one question the confident assumption of earlier eras that nature can be manipulated with impunity. The harmful environmental consequences of colonial development were manageable for the most part. The same cannot be said of the postcolonial world, in which ex-metropoles and ex-colonies alike redesign the landscape so their citizens can live longer, more comfortable lives. Might nature, under continuous and accelerating assault, launch a lethal counterattack? The triumph of the syndrome that drove imperialism may at some point become a Pyrrhic victory.