Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [6]
Finally, my thesis is not that more tolerance always leads to more prosperity, nor that tolerance is necessary for prosperity. Plenty of intolerant societies have become rich and powerful; Nazi Germany is a case in point. But throughout history, no society based on racial purity, religious zealotry, or ethnic cleansing has ever become a world-dominant power. To attain and maintain dominance on a global scale, coercion is simply too inefficient, persecution too costly, and ethnic or religious homogeneity, like inbreeding, too unproductive.
The United States is perhaps the quintessential example of a society that rose to global dominance through tolerance. Of course, for much of its history the United States was no more an exemplar of human rights than were the Romans or the Mongols. Americans kept slaves; they brutally displaced and occasionally massacred indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, from the beginning, through a genuinely revolutionary commitment to religious freedom as well as a market system unusually open to individuals of all classes and diverse nationalities, the United States attracted, rewarded, and harnessed the energies and ingenuities of tens of millions of immigrants.
This immigrant manpower and talent propelled the country's growth and success from westward expansion to industrial explosion to victory in World War II. Indeed, America's winning the race for the atomic bomb—an event of unfathomable historical importance—was a direct result of its ability to attract immigrant scientists fleeing persecution in Europe. In the decades after the war, with Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement, the United States at last began, however fitfully and imperfectly, to develop into one of the most ethnically and racially open societies in world history. Not coincidentally, this was also the period in which the United States achieved world dominance.
America's emergence as a hyperpower in the last decade of the twentieth century was in part the consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse. But it also reflected the United States’ staggering technological and economic dominance in the burgeoning Computer Age, and this dominance once again stemmed directly from America's superior ability to pull in talented and enterprising individuals from all over the world. Silicon Valley, which catalyzed the greatest explosion of wealth in the history of man, was to an astonishing extent an immigrant creation.
But while America is like every past hyperpower in the fundamental respect that it owes its world dominance to tolerance, it also differs radically from its predecessors. America is the first mature, universal-suffrage democracy to become a hyperpower. It is the first hyperpower to inhabit a world where human rights and the right of all nations to self-determination are almost universally recognized. Finally, America is the first hyperpower to confront the threat of global terrorist networks potentially wielding weapons of mass destruction.
This unprecedented constellation of factors leaves many Americans today profoundly uncertain about the proper role of the United States in the world. How should America use its military might? How can the threat of terrorism be met? Should America try to remain a hyperpower, or would a return to a multipolar global order be better for the world and even for the United States itself?
No such uncertainty was in the air in the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall—a period of almost euphoric global optimism. Communism had been defeated, authoritarianism discredited. Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history.” There seemed to be a consensus, not just in Washington but to a considerable extent all around the world, that the spread of markets and democracy would “turn all friends and enemies into ‘competitors,’” permitting “more people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements,