War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy

Rome best: it was the invasions from without, by people who envied Rome’s prosperity and yet mostly did not share its values and culture who wore away the Roman Empire. Goths, Persians, Arabs and Turks chopped off parts of the empire, province by province, until only Constantinople was left. This city itself was coveted by successive Ottoman sultans who, following the hugely expansionistic Arabs, took Islam to be their excuse for incessant conquests. In this, Morris rightly emphasises that the Crusades were a tiny reaction to centuries of Islamic expansionism. Morris tells us of many other empires that expanded, prospered and then fell, but not always due to invasions. The revolts from within that brought many of them down are at odds with his theory that these empires ultimately brought peace and prosperity to the conquered peoples; if this were true, why did they not appreciate it? The explanation offered is that peoples who are part of a larger entity become both blind to its blessings and willing to rise up over lesser issues of subsidiarity, taxation and consultation in the vain hope that they will be better off on their own. This hope – that one is better off on one’s own – has only become reality in exceptional circumstances, perhaps in locations such as a barely accessible mountain region or on the fault line between two empires that would rather leave the neutral buffer state alone than risk a nuclear war over it. Despite being an obvious contemporary parallel in some ways, lessons for the UK’s forthcoming referendum about EU membership are not spelled out. But it would have been worth extrapolating from Morris’s argument that, since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the trouble with and for Europe was that efforts to restore the empire from the tenth century onwards have been continually opposed. First, the French were the main challengers to the following centuries’ efforts to endow Europe with a new Pax Romana, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806). In Early Modern times, England, and later Britain, copied this anti-imperial stance, equating being anti-empire with being pro-liberty. From the point of view of peace and security, however, the Holy Roman Empire’s track record of internal pacification and the organisation of external defence was pretty impressive. It was marred, admittedly, by periodic quarrels between the Pope and the emperor (that repeatedly brought their factions to war) and then by the Reformation (and the ensuing religious wars). But in terms of providing internal conflict-resolution mechanisms, and characterised by layered sovereignty, the Holy Roman Empire is clearly, to this day, the main model for the EU. When tackling European expansionism from 1415 (a rather arbitrarily chosen date) to 1914, Morris uses another trick: he sidelines the bloody bellicose balance-of-power game among the states of Europe (France versus the Holy Roman Empire; all Habsburgs and England versus all Catholic powers; and so on) and presents the colonisation of the world as a European expansion, rather than a fierce competition among the European states that exported Europe’s internal wars to the rest of the globe. Morris does explain that nationalism was the force leading to the internal break-up of the (internally) peaceable empires, but does not come to grips with the very good question of why their peoples would give up the joys of, say, French civilisation or (perhaps more intelligibly) of Soviet-led communism (with the lure of the EU’s prosperity on the other side) for the sake of doing their own ‘national’ thing. Nor is Morris convincing when he argues that ultimately, the twentiethcentury genocides were a blip in history and that Hitler’s evil empire, had it prevailed, would have nevertheless ‘remained subject to the same iron laws as every other government in history’ (p. 269): commercial and military competition with other orders. Having asserted just a few lines earlier that Hitler might have been ‘more willing than Stalin . to risk nuclear war’, it is difficult to imagine how a much later fall of the Third Reich (had the Allies not won in 1945) would have fitted Morris’s overall argument. Turning to the present, and to the end of the book, Morris suggests that we live in a Pax Americana. This, as with previous imperial peace orders, he argues, is challenged by forces of evil and disintegration. This point seems valid; however, he then claims that unlike past civilisations, the US has the possibility of maintaining and defending its peace order. This is an optimism belying the arguments of the rest of the book and it represents a logically incoherent conclusion. Overall, this book is a great read: highly stimulating, very inspired and has many insights to offer. But the case it tries to make – that imperial expansion is ultimately beneficial to all – is too dependent on the other, crucial variable of a humane, accountable regime for the overarching thesis to be applicable across the broad sweeps of time, geography and ideology. 