Maps illustrating this post

Q1: The problem with these posts is that the TEP is not falsifiable. What's the difference between a TEP-less history and a TEP-id one?

A1: There are two differences. The first is, if the nations of my TEP hypothesis were entirely adversarial, rather than cooperative-competitive, then we would see either a colonial history like the rival dukedoms of interregnum China, or the gunpowder empires of South Asia, or (at the very least) the sort of violent clashes between Protestant and Catholic powers for control over littoral empires in, say, the East & West Indies. After the Napoleonic Wars, European powers did not normally fight for possession of non-European territories.

The other difference is that, had the empires merely reached a modus vivendi, instead of a de facto merger, there would never have been such a smooth and instanteous flow of capital in support of each other's colonial enterprises. What would have seen, presumably, was mutual passive resistance. Instead, the TEP developed highly cooperative capital, industrial, and transport systems that facillitated specialization.

Q2: What about the First World War? Wasn't that over empire?

A2: No, absolutely not. In fact, German imperialism was always driven by two forces: one was the military and the other was industrial managers. The industrial managers, as in all developmental states, were closely tied to the state and its patron saints. The German monarchy had a very simple answer to every issue, and it was a compelling one: if the state is strong, then it can focus on development. Then you (the people of Germany) will be both safe and rich. This was, indeed, the motto of practically every contemporaneous conservative party everywhere, and it's revealing that virtually all the opposition parties in Germany embraced this as a common goal (including the predominantly Roman Catholic Center Party).

The German military was mainly the Prussian Army plus a massive industrial project known as the Prussian/German Navy. It was built with astonishing speed and naturally became the premier consumer of the very heavy industry that was so crucial to Germany's military ascent. Yet, its role was almost entirely alienated from imperial ambitions. The most valuable German colony abroad was Tanganyika; this colony was never seriously exploited despite its massive mineral wealth and attractive climate. It was acquired and maintained with full British cooperation at all times until WW1. The German plans for victory at sea were exceptionally pessimistic; they assumed the principle object would be to deter a conflict with the UK, which would be impossible if the country seriously tried to capture any British colonies.

Likewise, after defeat in 1870, the French government sought to buy the alienated territories of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany with offers of Vietnam, Algeria, Djibouti... anywhere. Examples abound, but there was clearly a weird division between the grand strategies of men like Tirpitz (who created the German Navy to deter war with Britain) and Imperial Chancellor Bethman-Hollweg (whose fundamental strategy was to avoid conflict with the UK), and the public loathing of Britain as a politically-tolerated expressent of dissent with the Kaiser's regime. Like all of the autocratic regimes of the epoch, those of Germany were heavily dependent on movements of the lumpenproletariat, paramilitary bands of thugs that beat up socialists and chanted nationalist songs. They were addicted to conspiracy theories and yearned to lead one. Their paradise was the hero worship paid to the soldier and the sailor, who presumably was beyond crass pecuniary concerns. Such movements are, however, very difficult to utilize in the service of a pecuniary foreign policy because their members develop their own taste in foreign policy.

Q2.1: You focus on Germany. Why?

A2.1: Because if WW1 was really fought because of a rivalry over colonies, Germany is the one country that could conceivably have been accused of trying to break Britain's and France's oligopoly on overseas colonies. Britain and France didn't go to war with each other, despite having a long colonial rivalry. At the margins (with bit players like the USA, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Italy) there were a few interesting possible opportunities, but WW1 was not fought because of them. When we think about the role of popular sentiment in the War, we see still less evidence of the "rival imperialisms" hypothesis. What we see instead is a rash of hypernationalistic movements bent on revenge for every single slight. The demonization of "England" might have served some geopolitical significance in Germany, but in Austria-Hungary the country was merely a convenient scapegoat for every Slavonic nationalist movement that plagued the multinational empire. For Austria, the big enemy was Russia and Pan-Slavism, not some alien power ruling India.

Q3: Is Russia a member of the TEP? How about Israel? Japan?

A3: My view is that Russia remains detached from the TEP. It has tried, with no success, to either cultivate or seize respect from the Western Powers. Indeed, Russian military might has often been exploited by the elites of Europe; then, the Russians have been punished for claiming their reward. It's difficult not to sympathize with them. However, the effectiveness and consistancy with which Russia has been excluded, reflects something deeper. For most of its history to the present, Russia has been the scene of very different modes of economic production. In the reign of Czar Nicholas II, and again in the time of Yeltsin, there have been impressive exchanges of capital and expertise (or "expertise"), but oddly, Russia remains profoundly distinct from Europe in a way that the USA is not.

I believe part of this is that Russia is distinguished in the amazing and unparallelled strength of its bureaucracy over the whole of the national life. The Russian bureaucracy has been amorphous between rival sectors and national institutions for centuries; whether public or private, it seems every institution is shaped by its membership in the colossal Russian pyramid, and by little else. While Russians themselves usually take a fatalistic attitude towards their nation's history and future, class stratification in the country has not really enabled prolonged mixing of Russian and European influences in each other's national lives; in contrast, in the TEP we have the fairly obvious case of cosmopolitan top management of multinational corporations (e.g., Germans managing American subsidiaries of Japanese companies). The Romanovs often wound up with foreign queens, such as the German-born Catherine II, or the blood relationships of the ruling houses of Europe; and several 18th century monarchs tried to introduce European technology through the importation of whole communities of Germans. However, the Russian bureaucratic class never successfully adapted to these communities.

Japan obviously emerged as a major industrial power long after the Napoleonic Wars, and indeed, right up until the 1970's was seldom regarded as a serious challenge to US industry. For many years there was indisputably a US commitment to the successful reform of the Japanese economy, which faded only when the reform was complete. However, I would argue that Japan remains, like Russia, detached because of its peculiar cultural formation. Far from being imitative, the Japanese have done more than any other society on earth to invent a culture from "scratch." They have, moreover, tended to accumulate capital independently rather than importing it in for long periods. In effect, Japan is in every sense an autonomous society that happens to have a lot of business with the TEP.

In extreme contrast, Israel's very existence as a modern republic is the result of permanent, vociferous anti-Jewish hatred. Europeans briefly sided with Israel as an ally in colonial reconquest; having left the survivors of the Final Solution in a death stand, compelled to fight or die, Israel had no choice but to become a garrison state. Having done so, it could only sustain its oversized military-industrial complex by embracing the neo-colonial causes of the TEP. It was a classic Russian-style military settlement, a colony of the excluded, armed against any nationalist insurgency the TEP faced. This is the most extreme illustration of the trans-national character of imperialism, because the Jewish Israeli population cannot be reasonably blamed for the grievances the Palestinians have against them, and the Palestinians have undeniably legitimate grievances.

Q4: If your recondite historical and political notions were accepted, what would change?

A4: First, journalists might be inclined to look with greater suspicion on the convention of referring to countries as actors (as I undoubted am guilty of now and then). In fact, countries don't act. Their governments, in turn, constitute clusters of institutions that may or may not be accountable. The US CIA, for example, has scarcely any grounds at all for being characterized as an American entity since its doings are shrouded in both untrue denials and untrue allegations; it serves the interests of a particular class of people who are not all Usonian, nor does it serve a majority of Usonians (or even a very large share of us). There's a tendency to use the same word to refer to an entire nation, as to a necessarily obscure committee whose doings have controversial implications; not only that, but for even very highly educated people, allegedly steeped in their subject, to insist they are not bigots, then launch into the most lurid demonologies, in which the USA is solely and uniquely responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened, and this somehow all to the benefit of the population. Likewise, the unshakable conviction of so many that countries are like flavors of pudding: isotropic within, utterly unlike each other without.

There is a concept called the "fallacy of division," that each part is a replica of the whole. In the Manchester Guardian, in any given week, one is likely to find an essay such as this one claiming to explain every single event as evidence of the ineffably repulsive Usonian national character. At least Porter makes the effort of finding an error made by the INS before declaring, "While we assume that they are innately more efficient than us, in fact there is nothing as literal-minded and as unresponsive as bureaucracy in the United States." Usually, the writer describes an exchange with someone unnamed, perhaps on the street corner, as the sole foundation for the most sweeping generalizations imaginable. Good Lord, imagine what he must have said about women the first time he had his heart broken!

If the reader requires that I explain why the essay is too silly to serve as satire (which, frankly, I don't think it was meant as at all), then I'm wasting my time: common sense cannot be taught. If you really believe any nation consists of millions of identical people, then I can't help you. But clearly there is a point that is nearly universally overlooked: the degree of interconnectedness and shared experiences, the uniqueness of individual lives and the commonality of life experiences, the division of nations into regions and cohorts, sexes, races, ethnicities, the identification of these peculiar cohorts or regions across national boundaries, the ambiguities of any classification—these have always been true, but they are now too urgent to be brushed aside.

Q4.1: Is the nation obsolete?

A4.1: No, because for one thing, here it is. "Obsolescence" is a problematic concept, anyhow. Does it mean something better has arrived? If we're talking about politics, there's no way to test the meaning of "better," if no one actually adopts the putatively "better" thing. Also, the problem seems to be the way people think about nations. I'm not talking about ordinary people here, so much as "activists" who seem to have no intellectual curiosity about the matter. It's like the activists, who are supposedly the vanguard of progressive social change, are merely trying to update antisemitism. When people supposedly devoted to ameliorating problem P trace it back to the door stop of some alien group, and proceed no further, one may reasonably assume that they are either dishonest about their motives, intellectually timid, or thwarted by a mental block.

People, in other words, aren't stupid by accident.

Q4.2: So much for journalists. What else would change?

A4.2: As I mentioned, I'd like to hope activists would change. But my idea of the TEP is actually pretty recondite. Outside of conspiracy theories, which invariably imagine the weakness of the nation is a Bad Thing, even economic historians seem to avoid the concept. And a lot of popular books about history cleave to an absurdly polemical version. Activists, in turn, have a difficult notion with the idea because they're very much stuck in the punitive notion of pedagogy: if the country does something you disapprove of, wreck something. Disrupt. Embarrass. Hire a sound truck with loudspeakers and harangue the neighborhood as they do in Japan. If the society resists, broaden the attack on society, even if the target is as unrelated to the problem as Iraq was to the 9/11 attacks, or elephants are to tomatoes.

Q4.3: It's like the left is...really the right!

A4.3: I know, I'm off on my vacuous platitudes again. But I believe this also reflects the infantile notion of the state-as-actor, somehow capable of reflection, moral decency, and kindness. Only humans can do that, and they can only do so when they feel it's empowering to do so.

The real crime of terrorism is that the terrorist, who presumably thinks the cause is just, requires society to render up what he wants purely under duress. War is the same way: the defeated country yields something under coercion; it acts in a way that it can never justify morally. Even doing the right thing is shameful. I recall once returning an oversized income tax refund. It wasn't my money and I contacted the IRS to arrange to replace my windfall with the correct amount. At my job, my immigrant coworkers were dazed by my honesty. One said that was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen living here.

What I did not say was that the IRS agent had been astonishingly, stunningly rude. After volunteering to do this, she snarled that I'd better, because if I didn't I'd get in serious trouble. Unable to cope with someone being honest, she had to restore the relationship to one she understood: bureaucrat versus delinquent. I do not like terrorists, even if they are with the "excess refund liberation front." To the terrorist, the society is a criminal. Who else thinks like that?