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By Root 1061 0

is as old as empire itself. The first hyperpower in history, Achaemenid Persia, never solved it. As the Achaemenid Empire expanded, it came to include increasingly diverse peoples, which remained distinct communities under their Persian rulers. The Achaemenid Empire had no overarching political identity; only military might held it together. Indeed, the tolerance that allowed the Achaemenids to assemble their mighty war machine also encouraged their different subject peoples to preserve their own languages, identities, and political affiliations. Less than a century after its founding, the empire was riven by fragmentation and separatist rebellions. When a stronger, more charismatic military leader, Alexander of Macedon, began sweeping through the region, elites throughout the Achaemenid Empire simply switched their allegiances. They were not traitors, because they had never been patriots.

A similar fate befell the Mongols. Through strategic tolerance, Genghis Khan succeeded in creating a single people out of the warring tribes of the Mongolian steppe. Thus Genghis Khan accomplished what Cyrus the Great never did, establishing a new political identity for his people. But this identity—the Great Mongol Nation or “People of the Felt Walls”—extended no farther than the nomadic steppe. Beyond the steppe, the fearful and disdainful populations the Mongols subdued never acquired any affiliation with the empire that swallowed them up. On the contrary, like Khubilai Khan, who embraced Chinese culture and established a Chinese dynasty, or the Mongols of central Asia who embraced Islam, the Mongol khans and courts in foreign lands increasingly assumed the identities of their more civilized subjects. Its armies were the mightiest in the world, but with no common identity to bind together its culturally dissimilar components, the Mongol world empire quickly splintered into four large kingdoms before breaking up altogether.

China's Tang Empire offers another example. In some ways, the story of the Tang is the mirror image of the Mongols'. The conquering Tang emperors were the “civilized” ones; their genius lay in subduing, winning over, and ultimately harnessing the fierce militarism of the “barbarians” beyond China's walls.

What is most remarkable about the great emperors of the early Tang was their attempt to establish a universal empire in which Chinese and barbarians were at least nominally equal. But the political affiliation the Tang emperors offered their non-Chinese subjects was too weak to hold together the disparate groups—Tibetans, Sogdi-ans, and Turks; Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Nestorians—whom the Tang sought to govern. As with Achaemenid Persia, the tolerance of the Tang rulers eventually worked against them. Because they did not try to impose a “Han” Chinese identity on their non-Chinese subjects, they left intact large subcommunities with distinct cultural, ethnic, and religious bonds. As the Tang Empire reached its zenith, insurrections by non-Chinese peoples spread in all the frontier areas. Tang military commanders of foreign descent increasingly turned on their Chinese overlords.

Of all of history's hyperpowers, Rome came closest to solving the problem of creating a common identity capable of generating loyalty among its far-flung subjects (which goes a long way toward explaining the spectacular longevity of the empire). Through its appealing cultural package and its extension of citizenship to Greeks, Gauls, Britons, and Spaniards alike, Rome managed to “Romanize” vastly different peoples living continents apart. A millennium and a half later, Great Britain was surprisingly successful in this respect too. As late as the 1890s, members of the Indian National Congress cheered whenever Empress Victoria's name was mentioned. Hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers fought for the British in World War II, and even men like Gandhi and Nehru, the eventual leaders of India's independence movement, were deeply loyal to the crown in their early days, seeing themselves as “above all, British citizens of the Great British