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BOOK REVIEW
The ghosts of empire: Past, present and future
Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past by Kimberly Zisk Marten

Reviewed by David Isenberg

Since this book is just hitting bookstore shelves now, one might accurately, in deference to the Christian holiday season, subtitle it "the Ghosts of Empire Past". As the administration of US

President George W Bush is not known for its attentiveness to historical lessons, as least those that don't fit in the confines of its ideological blinkers, it is doubtful that policymakers in the West Wing of the White House will be putting this on their must-read list. That is a pity, because as the ongoing insurgency in Iraq clearly shows, the words of philosopher George Santayana have never been more true: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Author Kimberly Marten is an associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. The thesis of her unavoidably academic but nonetheless relatively brief and compelling book is simple: Western attempts to remake foreign societies in their own image, even with the best of intentions - as in "road to hell" or the "noble cause" characterizations of Ronald Reagan - invariably fail. She compares peace-building operations in the 1990s in places such as Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor to the colonial activities of Britain, France and the United States at the turn of the last century.

Those "peacekeeping" operations were not your parent's peacekeepings. Unlike the operations when the United Nations first started doing such activities, which were envisaged as taking place with the consent of both parties to a conflict and consisting mainly of enforcing truces, monitoring borders, and disposing of weapons turned in by combatants, the recent operations have been far more ambitious. Even though they might be motivated by, or at least cloaked in the language of, liberal democratic principles, they are nothing less than grand attempts to control political developments in foreign societies. And as Marten notes, "To control a society from without, using force, brings up the specter of imperialism." This fits squarely within the classic definition of "empire", as in "empires are relationships of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies".

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Marten's view, represent an oxymoron, or as she more politely phrases it, an "intertwined set of problems". It is the desire by the international community to avoid being tarred with the imperial label while attempting to exert what amounts to political control over foreign societies, and the need to encourage multilateral participation to achieve legitimacy while avoiding inconsistency.

Among Marten's findings are the following: Powerful states in both eras have lacked the political will that would be necessary to gain control over political development in foreign societies; military organizations are one of the factors contributing to the lack of clear direction we find on the ground; and when properly directed to do so, disciplined soldiers can do a good job of providing public order. The meaning of all this is that peacekeepers should try to limit their goals but expand their expectations of what military forces can reasonably do. Specifically, rather than trying to transform foreign societies, peacekeepers should be directed toward providing security and preventing anarchy in unstable regions of the world.

As Afghanistan and Iraq were not a main focus of Marten's book, it is unclear how her prescription will pan out. Especially in Iraq, US military forces are occupiers, not peacekeepers.

The heart of Marten's book is in chapters 3 and 4. The former compares the motive underlying colonialism practiced by the liberal great powers a century ago and juxtaposes them against those of the peacekeeping operations of the 1990s. She finds that despite all their differences, both types of operations were pursued for a similar combination of reasons that straddle security interests and humanitarianism. While the balance between the motives in the two eras differed, the prospect of controlling foreign developments in both eras served the security interests of the intervening states.

Chapter 4 finds a similarity between the imperial and modern peacekeeping eras: the absence of sufficient political will on the part of intervening states, both empires and peacekeepers, to ensure that what their capitals intended was actually possible given the resource constraints they faced. In both eras attempts to control other countries for the sake of external security became mired in inadequate political will to maintain consistent policies and excessive concerns about cost. For a modern example of the latter, just recall the debate over the US$87 billion supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan in the recent US presidential campaign.

One of the rewarding things about historical analysis, when done properly, is the ability to separate rhetoric from reality. In an example of Gertrude Stein's saying, a rose is a rose is a rose, consider this passage:

It may grate on liberal Western sensitivities to think that international peacekeeping operations have something in common with colonialism, but they do, despite all of their differences. The United States, Great Britain, and France were all relatively liberal (if flawed) democracies a century ago. Each nonetheless took colonies and attempted to reshape them to a greater or lesser extent to look more like themselves, using military force to back up their attempt at persuasion. Leaders in each imperial country believed they were doing good for humanity even as they were doing well for themselves, contributing not only to their country's own wealth and security but also to the betterment of those living in unfortunate circumstances. It is probably not a coincidence that each of these three countries have been dominant actors in recent complex peacekeeping operations, nor is it a coincidence that each of these three countries have been dominant actors in recent complex peacekeeping operations, nor is it a coincidence that it is their leadership as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council that has shaped the evolution of peacekeeping since the end of the Cold War. Peacekeeping has a colonial heritage.

Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past by Kimberly Zisk Marten. Columbia University Press, New York, 2004. ISBN: 0-231-12913-0. US$27.95, 208 pages.

David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.

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Dec 23, 2004

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