Book review: Amy Chua, Day of Empire - How hyperpowers rise to global dominance and why they fall
Following an interview with Chua in a Dutch newspaper (NRC, Science section, June 13-14) I found this review:
How to Rule the World
By LANCE MORROW
Published: November 18, 2007
The emperor Claudius thought about the dynamics of imperial ingestion. He reminded the Roman Senate that the founder Romulus would both fight against and naturalize a people on the same day. Claudius argued that the Gauls, by logical extension, could be accepted into the Senate because they no longer wear trousers that is, they could be counted on to come to work wearing the Roman toga and thus to have effectively become Romans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/morrow.html#secondParagraph
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
DAY OF EMPIRE
How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall.
By Amy Chua.
396 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.
The great Mughal emperor Akbar flourished by practicing a similar strategic tolerance which included what Amy Chua in Day of Empire calls multicultural copulation. A Muslim himself, the emperor intermarried widely: By the time of Akbars death, he had more than 300 wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from South Indian kingdoms, Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.
E pluribus unum.
Chua argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history among them, Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and hegemonic America prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion, the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.
Its not always an easy case to make. Genghis Khan used his victims corpses as moat-fill; he is credited with the memorably barbaric definition of happiness to crush your enemies ... and hear the lamentation of their women. But as Chua says, relative tolerance is what counts. Having savored the lamentations of the women, Genghis Khan embraced ethnic diversity, decreed religious freedom and drew into his service the most talented and useful individuals of all his conquered populations.
The death of empire, in Chuas thesis the Kryptonite that vitiates a superpower is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial purity or religious orthodoxy. Chua wonders how different 20th-century history might have been if Hitler had been a tolerant and accommodating conqueror. By murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of thousands of German citizens, she observes, the Nazis deprived themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. ... Germany lost an array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Lise Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction of the worlds first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the war. It was historys most spectacular example of shooting oneself in the foot.
Further unintended consequences of doctrinaire malice: In 1478, the Inquisition, decreed by papal bull, ended an era of relative tolerance in Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews the choice of either converting to Catholism or leaving. Ten years later, the Muslims of Castile were ordered to convert or emigrate. The Spanish monarchy had officially embraced intolerance, Chua writes, and for an empire hoping to rise in global pre-eminence, this was a staggeringly bad move.
Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School, unfolds an agreeably plausible case with clarity and insistent simplification, like a lawyer pacing before the jury box, hitting the same points (tolerance, diversity, inclusion) for emphasis as she clicks off centuries and civilizations. Always in the back of her mind is the drama of America.
Chuas larger historical preoccupations, as she suggests, arise from her own biography. Her Chinese parents came to the United States from the Philippines, where they had grown up and lived under Japanese occupation. When Douglas MacArthur returned in 1945, my father remembers running after American jeeps, cheering wildly, as U.S. troops tossed out free cans of Spam. The Chua family became a handsome enactment of the American dream and a dramatization of Chuas greatness-through-inclusion thesis. Leon O. Chua attended M.I.T. on a scholarship and as an electrical engineer helped to develop chaos theory; he became known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. Among the Chuas, the pronoun we was a bicultural portmanteau it meant both we Han Chinese and we Americans. Her father told Amy when she was 4! You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body. She married a Jewish American. Today, my father and my husband are the best of friends. Her children speak English and Mandarin.
This book is a tribute to Americas tolerance, Chua writes. It is also intended as a warning against empire building the use of Americas world-dominant military abroad to achieve regime change and remake other nations by imposing American-style institutions.
Still, the obverse of Santayanas famous line that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it is an equally powerful cliché: generals always fight the last war. In other words, those who learn too much from the past may be condemned to be surprised if the world stumbles onto an entirely new way of doing things. After Hiroshima, for example, the calculus of war among the powers was changed forever: the past might, in fact, become useless in making decisions about nuclear weapons.
Few would quarrel with Chuas absorbing PowerPoint presentation, her shrewd and happy argument that a generous policy of tolerance and inclusion leads on to success and prosperity. Or with her somewhat more intricate (or circular?) case that even the most embracingly inclusive empires eventually disintegrate because they lack glue an overarching political identity to give coherence to the whole.
But in the 21st century, empire and superpower and hyperpower are terms that may require rethinking. They suggest boundaries, borders even as they connote the expansion of territory and influence. But most of the powerful forces, good and evil, of our new century are borderless, globalized the almost unimpeded global flow of information (images, ideas, news, music, movies, emotions, hatreds), products, commodities, capital, environmental pollution, climate change and terrorism. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear terrorism. In such a world, an idea (a rage, a grievance, a difference of cultural perspective) may create a superpower without borders, using a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan as its Pentagon.
And in the new politics and metaphysics of the globalized globe, the problem of the toleration of intolerance the toleration of evil intentions or atavistic tribal or sectarian angers that now may come armed with advanced technology, including nukes becomes the sharpest dilemma of responsible power. It may no longer be enough to refer the toleration of intolerance to the First Amendment.
The worlds uneasily dominant hyperpower, the United States, finds itself now (partly through its own incompetence and lack of foresight) in the lobster trap of Iraq: no exit. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. But suppose that he had had them. Would it then have been right necessary for the hyperpower, or someone else, to invade Iraq? An old argument, now congealed into partisan rhetoric. But what will be the responsibilities of the United Nations, or the United States, or China, or the European Union, or any other emerging hyperpower, when as will undoubtedly happen some monster-autocrat or some gang of theological throwbacks come along who really do have nuclear or chemical or biological weapons? Empire is a very big word a Newtonian word, so to speak in a world that has grown abruptly small and susceptible now to a physics that is new and strange.
Lance Morrow, a longtime essayist for Time magazine, is the author of eight books. He is currently writing a biography of Henry R. Luce.
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/morrow.html)
Interestingly, Chua ascribes the late 17th century shift in global dominance from the Dutch Republic to the British empire mainly to William III's move to Britain (Glorious Revolution, 1688), in the wake of which parliament accepted the Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration and Jewish merchants and Amsterdam bankers moved to London.
Following an interview with Chua in a Dutch newspaper (NRC, Science section, June 13-14) I found this review:
How to Rule the World
By LANCE MORROW
Published: November 18, 2007
The emperor Claudius thought about the dynamics of imperial ingestion. He reminded the Roman Senate that the founder Romulus would both fight against and naturalize a people on the same day. Claudius argued that the Gauls, by logical extension, could be accepted into the Senate because they no longer wear trousers that is, they could be counted on to come to work wearing the Roman toga and thus to have effectively become Romans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/morrow.html#secondParagraph
DAY OF EMPIRE
How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall.
By Amy Chua.
396 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.
The great Mughal emperor Akbar flourished by practicing a similar strategic tolerance which included what Amy Chua in Day of Empire calls multicultural copulation. A Muslim himself, the emperor intermarried widely: By the time of Akbars death, he had more than 300 wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from South Indian kingdoms, Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.
E pluribus unum.
Chua argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history among them, Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and hegemonic America prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion, the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.
Its not always an easy case to make. Genghis Khan used his victims corpses as moat-fill; he is credited with the memorably barbaric definition of happiness to crush your enemies ... and hear the lamentation of their women. But as Chua says, relative tolerance is what counts. Having savored the lamentations of the women, Genghis Khan embraced ethnic diversity, decreed religious freedom and drew into his service the most talented and useful individuals of all his conquered populations.
The death of empire, in Chuas thesis the Kryptonite that vitiates a superpower is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial purity or religious orthodoxy. Chua wonders how different 20th-century history might have been if Hitler had been a tolerant and accommodating conqueror. By murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of thousands of German citizens, she observes, the Nazis deprived themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. ... Germany lost an array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Lise Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction of the worlds first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the war. It was historys most spectacular example of shooting oneself in the foot.
Further unintended consequences of doctrinaire malice: In 1478, the Inquisition, decreed by papal bull, ended an era of relative tolerance in Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews the choice of either converting to Catholism or leaving. Ten years later, the Muslims of Castile were ordered to convert or emigrate. The Spanish monarchy had officially embraced intolerance, Chua writes, and for an empire hoping to rise in global pre-eminence, this was a staggeringly bad move.
Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School, unfolds an agreeably plausible case with clarity and insistent simplification, like a lawyer pacing before the jury box, hitting the same points (tolerance, diversity, inclusion) for emphasis as she clicks off centuries and civilizations. Always in the back of her mind is the drama of America.
Chuas larger historical preoccupations, as she suggests, arise from her own biography. Her Chinese parents came to the United States from the Philippines, where they had grown up and lived under Japanese occupation. When Douglas MacArthur returned in 1945, my father remembers running after American jeeps, cheering wildly, as U.S. troops tossed out free cans of Spam. The Chua family became a handsome enactment of the American dream and a dramatization of Chuas greatness-through-inclusion thesis. Leon O. Chua attended M.I.T. on a scholarship and as an electrical engineer helped to develop chaos theory; he became known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. Among the Chuas, the pronoun we was a bicultural portmanteau it meant both we Han Chinese and we Americans. Her father told Amy when she was 4! You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body. She married a Jewish American. Today, my father and my husband are the best of friends. Her children speak English and Mandarin.
This book is a tribute to Americas tolerance, Chua writes. It is also intended as a warning against empire building the use of Americas world-dominant military abroad to achieve regime change and remake other nations by imposing American-style institutions.
Still, the obverse of Santayanas famous line that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it is an equally powerful cliché: generals always fight the last war. In other words, those who learn too much from the past may be condemned to be surprised if the world stumbles onto an entirely new way of doing things. After Hiroshima, for example, the calculus of war among the powers was changed forever: the past might, in fact, become useless in making decisions about nuclear weapons.
Few would quarrel with Chuas absorbing PowerPoint presentation, her shrewd and happy argument that a generous policy of tolerance and inclusion leads on to success and prosperity. Or with her somewhat more intricate (or circular?) case that even the most embracingly inclusive empires eventually disintegrate because they lack glue an overarching political identity to give coherence to the whole.
But in the 21st century, empire and superpower and hyperpower are terms that may require rethinking. They suggest boundaries, borders even as they connote the expansion of territory and influence. But most of the powerful forces, good and evil, of our new century are borderless, globalized the almost unimpeded global flow of information (images, ideas, news, music, movies, emotions, hatreds), products, commodities, capital, environmental pollution, climate change and terrorism. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear terrorism. In such a world, an idea (a rage, a grievance, a difference of cultural perspective) may create a superpower without borders, using a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan as its Pentagon.
And in the new politics and metaphysics of the globalized globe, the problem of the toleration of intolerance the toleration of evil intentions or atavistic tribal or sectarian angers that now may come armed with advanced technology, including nukes becomes the sharpest dilemma of responsible power. It may no longer be enough to refer the toleration of intolerance to the First Amendment.
The worlds uneasily dominant hyperpower, the United States, finds itself now (partly through its own incompetence and lack of foresight) in the lobster trap of Iraq: no exit. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. But suppose that he had had them. Would it then have been right necessary for the hyperpower, or someone else, to invade Iraq? An old argument, now congealed into partisan rhetoric. But what will be the responsibilities of the United Nations, or the United States, or China, or the European Union, or any other emerging hyperpower, when as will undoubtedly happen some monster-autocrat or some gang of theological throwbacks come along who really do have nuclear or chemical or biological weapons? Empire is a very big word a Newtonian word, so to speak in a world that has grown abruptly small and susceptible now to a physics that is new and strange.
Lance Morrow, a longtime essayist for Time magazine, is the author of eight books. He is currently writing a biography of Henry R. Luce.
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/morrow.html)
Interestingly, Chua ascribes the late 17th century shift in global dominance from the Dutch Republic to the British empire mainly to William III's move to Britain (Glorious Revolution, 1688), in the wake of which parliament accepted the Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration and Jewish merchants and Amsterdam bankers moved to London.
