Marcel Van Herpen - Putin's Wars

The last, and fifth, point is that the vastness of an empire strengthens despotic rule. This was an argument that was already being used by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Their argument was that huge countries with large populations could be neither prosperous nor democratic. This argument was used especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the ideal state was a city-state, the size of Geneva. “Size of states!” he wrote, “first and most important source of human misery, and especially of the many disasters that undermine and ruin the civilized peoples. Almost all small states, whether republics or monarchies, prosper only by the fact of being small.” [38] Rousseau, “Considérations,” 1039. And he added: “All large states, crushed by their own mass, are suffering.” [39] Rousseau, “Considérations,” 970. Rousseau’s aversion to big states was shared by Voltaire, who wrote: “Men seldom deserve to govern themselves. This happiness seems to be the lot only of small nations hidden in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who hide from the carnivorous animals; but in the end they are found and devoured.” [40] Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 193. Adam Ferguson, their contemporary, and one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote, in a similar vein, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767):

Small communities, however corrupted, are not prepared for despotical government: their members, crowded together, and contiguous to the feats of power, never forget their relation to the public; they pry, with habits of familiarity and freedom, into the pretensions of those who would rule…. In proportion as the territory is extended, its parts lose their relative importance to the whole. Its inhabitants cease to perceive their connection with the state, and are seldom united in the execution of any national… designs. Distance from the feats of administration, and indifference to the persons who contend for preferment, teach the majority to consider themselves as the subjects of a sovereignty, not as the members of a political body. It is even remarkable that enlargement of territory, by rendering the individual of less consequence to the public, and less able to intrude with his counsel, actually tends to reduce national affairs within a narrower compass, as well as to diminish the numbers who are consulted in legislation, or in other matters of government. [41] Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society , reprint of the original, Edinburgh, 1767 (Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2001), 417.

And Ferguson concluded:

Among the circumstances, therefore, which… lead to the establishment of despotism, there is none, perhaps, that arrives at this termination, with so sure an aim, as the perpetual enlargement of territory…. In the progress of conquest, those who are subdued are said to have lost their liberties; but from the history of mankind, to conquer, or to be conquered, has appeared, in effect, the same. [42] Ferguson, An Essay , 418.

These early laudatory speeches in praise of small is beautiful were written before the American Revolution, at a time when it was almost axiomatic that democratic rule was only possible in small territories, such as the ancient Greek polis or the Italian and Swiss city-states. However, even in the twentieth century authors continued to express their doubts about the viability and utility of large states. In 1914 the British historian Sir John Seeley made the following remark about the size of the British empire: “At the outset we are not much impressed with its vast extent, because we know no reason, in the nature of things, why a state should be any the better for being large, and because throughout the greater part of history very large states have usually been states of a low type.” [43] Sir John Rober Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co, 1914), 294. He added: “For a long time no high organisation was possible except in very small states.” [44] Seeley, Expansion of England , 347. This assessment led him to make the following remark about Russia: “We cannot, it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a high type of organisation.” [45] Seeley, Expansion of England , 348.

The United States was the first counterexample, showing—contrary to all historical evidence—that it was possible to organize a democratic society over a large territory. But the young United States was not an empire; it was a former colony with a homogeneous population that had liberated itself from British rule. [46] The young and democratic United States had an important flaw, which was the status of black slaves who were not considered citizens. However, in its territorial expansion the United States did not act as an empire (at least not until 1898, when it took the Philippines from Spain). Neither did it incorporate the native American tribes. Their land was “bought,” and they were driven from their lands, finally ending up in extraterritorial reservations. Alexis de Tocqueville, a profound admirer of American democracy, who, in December 1831, witnessed the deportation of the Chactas Indians, denounced the silent extermination that went on behind a juridical façade, writing that “the Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of the law and legality [than the Spaniards in South America], never bloodthirsty, are more profoundly destructive of their race [Chactas tribe] and it is beyond doubt that in one hundred years there will remain in North America not one single tribe, nor even one single man, belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Contre le génocide des Indiens d’Amérique,” in Textes essentiels , Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoît, (Paris: Havas, 2000), 305.) Russia was different. It was from its foundation an imperialist, as well as an absolutist state: continuously expanding its territory and subjugating and incorporating foreign peoples within its frontiers. Its mere size and its heterogeneous populations seem, indeed, to have been determining factors that have hampered its development into a modern, democratic polity.

Imperial rule needs legitimation. But it would be an exaggeration to state that imperialist rule always needs legitimation. In the first phases of modern imperialism territorial expansion just happened. Often it could not even be called imperialism, especially when expansion took place in empty territories where no native populations lived that could be subdued. However, it was a different matter when imperialist expansion implied wars of conquest, as in South America where the Spanish conquistadores conducted bloody wars against the indigenous Indian populations. It is, therefore, no coincidence that “Spain was the only conquering country… that asked itself questions about its capacity and the legality to exercise its rights and dominate other peoples.” [1] Carlos Malamud, Historia de América (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005), 66.

In its search for a legitimation theory Spain fell back on the old medieval theory of the “just war” waged by Christians against the infidels. The “infidels,” in this case, were not Muslims, but pagans. An additional argument was found in the fact that the population of the Caribbean included cannibals, which was considered a reason for them to be enslaved. Thus, in this early period the Christian faith and the superiority of Europe’s civilization were used as arguments to support imperialist rule. In Western Europe the inherent hypocrisy of these theories began to be attacked in the eighteenth century when Enlightenment philosophers, such as Voltaire and Diderot, formulated the first fundamental criticism of slavery and colonial rule. [2] Voltaire, in his satirical novel Candide ou l’optimisme (1759), criticized Leibniz’s theorem that we live “in the best of possible worlds” and gave as one of his counterexamples the case of a slave in Surinam whose leg had been cut off because he had tried to escape. Diderot, in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772), criticized French Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville who, in 1767, visited Tahiti and had laid claim to the island for France. Diderot let an old and wise Tahitian man describe the French visitors as follows: “ambitious and evil men: one day you will know them better. One day they will return… to put you in chains, slit your throats, or subjugate you to their extravagancies and to their vices, one day you will serve under them.” The (French) text is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8spvb10.txt . These critical voices found resonance in the nineteenth century, when a widely supported anti-slavery movement emerged. This led to a new legitimation theory, the theory of the white man’s burden, which was the result of the bad conscience caused by the new moral criticism. It became more difficult to legitimate imperialist expansion by referring to the Christian faith (in both its catholic, as well as its protestant variants). In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith,