| And the award goes to... an impostor!
Well, maybe impostor is a bit harsh. But this year’s Academy Awards ceremony may have been the first time that portrayals of real historical figures scooped the Oscar for both best male and female actor. Helen Mirren won hers for an acclaimed impersonation of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, while Forest Whitaker picked up his statuette for playing former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
Underlying this coincidence was another – both films implicitly dealt with the role of empire in the modern world. Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1952, at a time when Britain was trying to extricate itself from the bonds and bounty of the empire that it had amassed over three centuries. Her reign over the next 55 years has been marked by the efforts of successive governments to manage the resulting decline in British global influence.
Idi Amin, on the other hand, came to power in the process of Uganda’s independence from the British Empire in the early 1960s. Promoted to commander of the Ugandan army by Prime Minister Milton Obote in 1966, Amin subsequently led a military coup against Obote in 1971 and declared himself head of the African nation, a role he occupied for the next eight years.
Yet armed might was not enough for Amin, who ruled over a bloody dictatorship that saw thousands expelled and perhaps half a million slaughtered. Rather, he sought to legitimize his reign by awarding himself a series of manufactured honorifics. In addition to proclaiming himself "King of Scotland," Amin’s full title extended to "His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshall Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC [‘Victorious Cross’], DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."
So which was the more appropriate representative of empire in the late 20th century? Elizabeth – the benign, matronly figure, content to deliver annual yuletide messages and to reign over the orderly dismantling of the largest imperial power the world had ever seen? Or Amin — a crude, self-aggrandizing thug, who understood neither the notion of obligation nor that of accommodation that imperial rule had come to entail in the post-colonial world?
Or, perhaps more to the point, why is the question of empire even of concern in the 21st century?
After all, in the dying days of the Second World War, a new organization had been formed, the United Nations, on the basis of which the triumphant democratic powers marked their victory over fascism by recasting the world on a fairer, more equitable basis than ever before. The underlying premise of this global reconstitution was that nation-states would be democratic. That is, they would reflect and represent the prevailing majority consensus of their populations.
Such an idea might strike us now as self-evident, uncontroversial and even boring, but it bears recalling that, at the time, virtually the entire world had just gone through a conflict that, in Tolkien style, had pitted the forces of evil against the forces of... well, if not good, than at least a far lesser evil. And in case we thought that evil had been defeated once and for all, George Orwell penned a little book called Nineteen Eighty-Four to remind us that this wasn’t so.
But the bigger point is that the new organization was christened the United Nations. Not the United Empires. What the Second World War had also determined was that the old European empires were no longer tenable, that only by linking political structures to democratic accountability could humankind avoid a repeat of such carnage.
After 1945, the process of decolonization swept across Africa, Asia and Latin America, bringing to an end a global hegemony that European powers had enjoyed since the 1500s. This process was not always peaceful, nor is it complete even now, but the fact remains that the very idea of empire had lost almost complete ideological and political support.
This was the belated triumph of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement of the 1700s that championed reason over tradition. It was the triumph of such philosphers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notion of "social contract" reformulated the relationship between those who governed and those who were governed. It was the triumph of the American and French revolutions, which reconceptualized the ideal of "the people" and "the nation" and which ensured that autocratic power would no longer prevail. And it was even the triumph of Canada, whose act of Confederation in 1867 was, and remains, a historic landmark in the determination of a people to overcome their differences – ethnic, religious, regional, historical – and unite in a common (even if elusive) good. That was then.
As an experiment, the modern nation-state is less than 250 years old. Empires have, historically, fared much better. The Babylonian Empire from 1900 to 1600 BC; the Roman Empire from 27 BC to 476 AD. In more modern times, the Russian Empire stretched from 1721 to 1917, the Chinese Empire from 221 BC to 1912 AD, and the Dutch Empire from 1620 to… well, it’s not over yet.
In other words, despite their lack of democratic accountability or popular support, empires have proven to be resilient. From a historical perspective, the recent triumph of nation may turn out to be a mere transitory episode in the evolution of human affairs.
With western powers presently engaged in occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and with America poised to intervene in Iran, we may be at a historic turning point. Those interventions may be justified in the name of democracy and freedom, but the terms on which they have been, and continue to be, executed smells increasingly of a new imperialism.
To be continued… |
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