Is the new imperium an old illusion? -May 7, 2003

Whisper it quietly in the wake of post-Iraq euphoria, but the Republican Right is rattled. Always an uneasy alliance between cultural libertarians and religious authoritarians, President Bush's governing project now faces economic crunch time.

By the end of 2003 the US budget deficit will stand near US$350bn. One in twelve Americans will be unemployed. The health gap will have grown even wider. And a combination of US$550bn tax cuts and up to US$90bn on the war is unlikely to help.

The new Republican Right, which emerged from the GOP in the '80s, and was swelled by 'Reagan Democrats', has three main weapons in its armoury: the reduction of government (not just spending), the reward of enterprise, and boosting the military industrial complex. In 'good times' this programme rolls, and its victims lack the political clout and profile to fight back.

But these are not good times. The world economy is in recession. Debt is spiralling. China will be a heavyweight power in the C21st. Africa is on the brink of dangerous collapse. Military threat is no longer national and linear (that is the real threat of terrorism). Radical Islamism, an ideology binding the wounds of the global poor to the interests of a new non-metropolitan elite, is resurgent. And across the world, dissent is growing in a way that would scarcely have been imaginable ten years ago.

Though cultural commentators laud the recognition that 'grand human projects' do not work any more, the political servants of the global free market know you cannot stand still. But they are sorely troubled.

So the latest idea to grab the imagination of beleaguered technocrats is 'neo-conservatism' and the dream of a 'New American Century'. In fact it emerged from Donald Rumsfeld and his cohorts in the late '90s.

The idea goes something like this. Liberal, capitalist democracy is still the best show in town, but it has four main problems. First, many people have yet to recognise its inevitability, and a lot of them live under regimes that deny and threaten the show’s interests. Second, the market needs directing, but from boardrooms not by states. Third, democracy needs managing, but by consumer choice not political dictat. Fourth, the multilateral institutions (such as the UN) are too equivocal.

What to do? Well, say the ‘neo-cons’ (by no means restricted to the old Republican Right, and embracing some of the socially inclusive ideas of the post-left too) the most pressing problem right now is global instability and the weakness of the UN.

Meanwhile, the US model is clearly the best we have. And since the US is, for the first time in history, in a position to impose its will on the recalcitrant, the obvious solution is more than carrots and sticks – it is guns and candy (in that order). This, rather than any single cause, is what the war in Iraq has been about: an experiment in positive interventionism – anathema to the old New Right, ironically.

Iraq shows us that, with a bit of determination (known tactlessly in some quarters as ‘liberal imperialism’, to distinguish it from the malign kind), ‘the New American Century’ can be ushered in.

“I know you’re going to be outraged,” said a Bush administration official to a leading British commentator recently, “but a violent upsurge may be what is needed to bring about change and awareness of change. The wars in the C20th, after all, created the democracies in Europe.” The answer to our ills is not ‘the kindness that kills’, therefore, but killing for kindness.

In the C20th the ‘master ideologies’ started with misplaced messianic ideals and were corrupted by totalitarianism. Neo-conservatives are not communists and they are not Nazis. But they do suffer from the terrifying illusion (among numerous others) that a better world can grow out of the barrel of a missile.

This is an idea far closer to the logic of crucifixion than it seems able to imagine at the moment. Politics, by contrast, is the difficult task of sharing, absorbing, lessening and removing pain – when it is about real bodies and not just an abstract body politic.

Like all imperialisms neo-conservatism will no doubt devour itself. The trouble is that, unchecked, it will devour many others in the process too. Christian theology is in a good position to see the core problem of any imperium, though it has often failed to do so. Christian worship is based on ascribing ‘lordship’ to Jesus Christ rather than to the powers-that-be. God comes not to shore up empires (however ‘benign’) but to unravel them in the name of One who sides with – indeed becomes – one of the victims, and who triumphs not through domination but by love. That is what marks it out as Good News, and its story as about how properly to relativize power.

The ‘New American Century’ vastly underestimates the ills of its own transatlantic society. It thinks that problems are mostly ‘out there’, and can be kicked away. It is desperation in the guise of assertion.

The Gospel, by contrast, begins with the difficult transformation of the (corporate) self; points to the conditions for a communion of difference; and says ‘be not afraid’ without arming itself to death.

How and on what basis its alternative vision can be nourished into practical political interventions in an open society is what church should be (but mostly isn’t) about. In the meantime, there is more to be done in excavating the damaging securities of the new ‘armed liberalism’.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.

To see the full list of columns by Simon Barrow click here
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