On Ferguson's Defense of Liberal Empire
I dislike a certain kind of arguments/topics in political philosophy. To simplify these are proposals where the downside risks fall almost wholly onto others—who may never realize who participated in the abstract discussion that led to results that (ahh) threw them under the bus. One benefit of engaging with these arguments in terms of their history is that they usually do not invite re-igniting inductive risk. In addition, our political moment is so occupied by very different dangers that today’s post is hopefully wholly irrelevant.
Be that as it may, a fair accounting of the history of liberal political thought will find fierce critics and, alas, friends of imperialism. For example, in Imperialism: A Study (1902) — a canonical text for social liberalism and the study of modern imperialism —, Hobson treated empire as a sordid, rent-seeking financial racket of well-connected insiders at the expense of domestic workers and foreign subjects. Hobson’s position is quite notable because while advocating for a turning away from empire, he simultaneously clearly believed in racial superiority of whites (who he hoped to unite in a global federation). Hobson’s argument goes back to Adam Smith and Cugoano, both of whom don’t just note that empire tends to confer monopoly profits for well-connected insiders that distort the economy at the expense of other industries, but that it also allows these to corrupt politics at home and to turn it into militarist and mercantile adventures.
By contrast, J.S. Mill, a colonial administrator by day, treats empire as a kind of duty to engage in a civilizational mission and thereby elevate the locals (whose purported backwardness is treated as a transitory cultural phase). While much imperialism was just plunder, in chapter 5, “The Case of Liberal Empire, of Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire (2004), Niall Ferguson provides a cost benefit of Liberal empire that on its own merits (warts and all) may be taken as a partial vindication of Mill’s position (who goes unmentioned). [I thank Chandran Kukathas for calling my attention to it in an unpublished paper of his.] I quote Ferguson’s conclusion:
Two conclusions follow from all this. The first is simply that in many cases of economic "backwardness," a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state. The second, however, is that even a very capable liberal empire may not succeed in conferring prosperity evenly on all the territories it administers. With that caveat, we may therefore make what might be called an altruistic argument for the United States to engage in something resembling liberal imperialism in our time. (p. 198)
In particular, Ferguson suggests that “Liberia would benefit immeasurably from something like an American colonial administration.” Ferguson notes that America as a “historical responsibility” to Liberia. And it is place with few downside risks because the status quo is so bad: “Liberia is one of those countries…where nearly everything has gone wrong.” (p. 199)
To be sure, Ferguson acknowledges that in the case of India (which is really Mill’s main focus) the economic argument for empire is by no means conclusive. But he also offers considerations to suggest that the counter-factual without empire ‘India’ is not especially promising. But it is by no means obvious we have good empirical access to the historical counterfactual.
Ferguson (Stanford & Harvard) is familiar with Hobson’s argument (p. 172), which he summarizes in ways not dissimilar from my own. What is odd about Ferguson’s cost-benefit analysis is that he wholly ignores both sides of Hobson’s underlying argument. Ferguson does not spend much time on Hobson’s claims about the cost of imperial rule to the purported ruling nations.
But he does not wholly ignore it either. For, Ferguson does address a version of Hobson’s argument by Keynes (in 1924). I quote Ferguson’s response to Keynes.
Keynes's point was that this state of affairs was not in the economic interests of Britain itself. With unemployment stubbornly stuck above prewar levels and mounting evidence of industrial stagnation, capital export seemed like a misallocation of resources. But Keynes did not consider the benefits reaped by colonial economies from this kind of cheap access to British savings. From an imperial rather than a narrowly national point of view, it was highly desirable that savings from the wealthy metropolis be encouraged to flow to the developing periphery. Besides ensuring that British investors got their interest paid regularly and their principal paid back, the imperial system was conducive to global economic growth-more so, certainly, than an alternative policy of the sort Keynes had in mind, which would have prioritized the industriaJ production and employment of the United Kingdom. (p. 193)
Let’s stipulate that Ferguson’s underlying economic argument is sound. Ferguson’s switch from the national to the imperial perspective is notably not couched as a moral argument. But rather as a widening of economic perspective—a broader aggregate we may say. Ferguson avoids asking questions about distributions in the imperial core or periphery and conveniently talks in terms of development and allocation of resources. Ferguson’s own data is mostly aggregate in character (per capita GNP), and may well disguise very unequal distributions. The exceptions he provides that show reduction of distributional inequality are all cases of white settler colonialism to dominions in the British empire (p. 198); they don’t show that the local natives benefitted. I don’t deny that a certain kind of aggregate utilitarianism may well justify the imperial perspective, but Ferguson himself does not go there.
What’s notable about Ferguson’s response to Keynes, is that he wholly ignores the political dimension. While the age of empire is an age of growing franchise in Britain, the property requirement was only abolished in 1918, and simultaneously women above 30 were given the vote. This expanded the franchise from 7,694,741 (in 1910) to 21,392,322 voters. Keynes’ argument is situated in a context where a government has to take into account the perceptions and considerations of its population/voters. Hobson’s opportunity cost argument was given political bite by this expansion. (Of course, many voters who might not have benefitted economically may have been attracted to empire on non-economic grounds.) Notably, as Ferguson grants, the self-governing settler-colonist Dominions all opted for mercantile policies if they could.
I return to Hobson political argument below. But one may argue that there is another way in which Ferguson indirectly acknowledges Hobson’s argument by treating his proposed liberal empire (in Liberia) as a species of “altruism.” Ferguson basically proposes a kind of imperial trusteeship. So, it is no surprise, then, that it may come at the economic expense of the home/imperial society.
I don’t want to deny that states can act from altruist motives. Arguably some of the USAID programs that have been eliminated these past weeks would fit in this category. While much European foreign aid is really a subsidy to local industry or to local well-connected citizens/NGO’s, at least some of it (let’s stipulate) really benefits foreign development. But as the events of the last few weeks suggest such altruism is not a very solid political basis for a program because without powerful domestic constituencies, they lack permanence. A long-term foreign engagement of the sort that Ferguson advocates is very hard to undertake if the purported foreign beneficiaries lack domestic votes or financial resources (in which cases such an engagement is unnecessary).
Hobson’s political arguments alerts us to the fact that imperialism is more than an economic phenomenon. What Ferguson (who is no Marxist or materialist) ignores is that even in cases where liberal imperialism might be economically beneficial for protectorate and home country in the economic aggregate, it may have other adverse structural consequences.
By this I don’t just mean (and this, of course, crucial to the moral evaluation of empire) that Ferguson’s cost-benefit analysis wholly ignores the role of political violence and cultural domination in empire. (He does not ignore this in his earlier Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.) Rather, also, the running of empire changes the decision structure of the imperial center and the imperial periphery, and, thereby, deforms both.
The only kind of liberal empire that does not deform is one rooted in relative political and economic equality of all the parts; that is the sort that Adam Smith and Kant envisioned, that is, a federalism of commercial/liberal republics (familiar of the EU kind) or a liberal project of functional integration (through WTO, NAFTA, UN, etc.). Unsurprisingly, contemporary liberal internationalism tends to slide into this kind of embrace of what one may call ‘voluntary empire.’
The deformation in imperial trusteeship is an effect of a political structure in which one side is superior and the other side rests nothing but servile gratitude. Even where such paternalism is not corrupt, imperial rule generates the wrong sort of characteristics in the ruling administrators (who are backed by immense power) and the wrong sort of servile characteristics in the beneficiaries if they understand themselves as beneficiaries at all. There exist no cases where locals clamor(ed) for enduring trusteeship. And the reason for this is not just that one has no means to secure impartiality and restraint among the actual rules, it also creates resentment among the would-be-local political elites who may be denied opportunities for self-rule.*
One may well object on behalf of Ferguson that the implied argument so far as it goes in the previous paragraph is republican and not liberal in character. I admit the charge. But following Adam Smith (and Bright) I think it is characteristic of the point of liberalism to trust and allow individuals (and associated individuals) to create meaningful choices. And how they rule and organise themselves are among the most consequential of meaningful choices. Even where a trusteeship secures benefits — say rule of law — that make some such choices possible, it simultaneously infringes on them. So, trusteeship becomes self-defeating. This is why cases of transitional trusteeship — and one can imagine arguments for them — are never emancipatory or characterized by freedom.
That’s all I wanted to say here. But part of the problematic of liberalism today, is that we can’t really imagine anymore a liberal position that isn’t all in on internationalism and so, as critics suggest, forms of (soft) empire. I myself very strongly feel the pull of such internationalism. And this temptation is only strengthened by the rise of America First and Brexit; opposition to these is increasingly existential for liberals. But we also need a more prudential, less millenarian and Manichean liberalism one that is at ease with the narrower and narrowing limits of self-government.
*In fact, arguably Brexit, Euro-skepticism in the EU, and American First are projects that feed on a sense of powerlessness among the many and the interests of would-be-elites who saw an opportunity for self-advancement against existing imperial elites. (I don’t mean to suggest that other racial/ethnic/cultural dynamics don’t play any role.)