The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [81]
There are many contemporary echoes of Britain’s dilemmas. America’s recent military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq all have parallels with Britain’s military interventions there decades ago. The basic strategic dilemma of being the only truly global player on the world stage is strikingly similar. But there are also fundamental differences between Britain then and America now. In Britain, as it tried to maintain its superpower status, the largest challenge was economic rather than political. In America, it is the other way around.
Britain’s Reach
In today’s world, it is difficult even to imagine the magnitude of the British Empire. At its height, it covered about a quarter of the earth’s land surface and included a quarter of its population. London’s network of colonies, territories, bases, and ports spanned the entire globe, and the empire was protected by the Royal Navy, the greatest seafaring force in history. During the Diamond Jubilee, 165 ships carrying forty thousand seamen and three thousand guns were on display in Portsmouth—the largest fleet ever assembled*. Over the preceding quarter century, the empire had been linked by 170,000 nautical miles of ocean cables and 662,000 miles of aerial and buried cables, and British ships had facilitated the development of the first global communications network via the telegraph. Railways and canals (the Suez Canal, most importantly) deepened the connectivity of the system. Through all of this, the British Empire created the first truly global market.
Americans talk about the appeal of our own culture and ideas, but “soft power” really began with Britain in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the empire, English spread as a global language, spoken from the Caribbean to Cairo and from Cape Town to Calcutta. English literature became familiar everywhere—Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, Tom Brown’s School Days. Britain’s stories and characters became more securely a part of international culture than any other nation’s.
So, too, did many English values. The historian Claudio Véliz points out that in the seventeenth century, the two imperial powers of the day, Britain and Spain, both tried to export their ideas and practices to their Western colonies. Spain wanted the Counter-Reformation to take hold in the New World; Britain wanted religious pluralism and capitalism to flourish. As it turned out, Britain’s ideas proved more universal than Spain’s. In fact, modern society’s modes of work and play are suffused with the values of the world’s first industrial nation. Britain has arguably been the most successful exporter of its culture in human history. We speak today of the American dream, but before it there was an “English way of life”—one that was watched, admired, and copied throughout the world. For example, the ideas of fair play, athleticism, and amateurism propounded by the famous English educator Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby (where Tom Brown’s School Days was set), heavily influenced the Frenchman Baron de Coubertin—who, in 1896, launched the modern Olympic games. The writer Ian Buruma has aptly described the Olympics as “an English Bucolic fantasy.”
Not all of this was recognized in June 1897, but much of it was. The British were hardly alone in making comparisons between their empire and Rome. Paris’ Le Figaro declared that Rome itself had been “equaled, if not surpassed, by the Power which in Canada, Australia, India, in the China Seas, in Egypt, Central and Southern Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean rules the peoples and governs their interests.” The Kreuz-Zeitung in Berlin, which usually reflected the views of the anti-English Junker elite, described the empire as “practically unassailable.” Across the Atlantic, the New York Times