Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff

In March of 2006 the Bush Administration released is updated version of the “National Security Strategy for the United States”. Perhaps even more notable than the Administration’s continued defense of “preemptive” military action was the markedly imperialist implications of the moral, global vision articulated in the report. “In the world today,” argued the drafters in terms that would cause Realists to shudder, “the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power among them.”¹ Such thinking was, and remains, central to the logic of “regime change” and the continued occupation of Iraq.

This article looks at the writings of two public intellectuals whose work contributed significantly a policy climate centered toward the importance of the “fundamental character of regimes”; Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, Niall Ferguson, and former Carr Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard and current Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, Michael Ignatieff. The article focuses on the story each man tells of the relationship between liberalism and empire both historically and in the wake of September 11th. In particular, it examines how each constructs his narrative so that this relationship can only be understood in terms of a tragic choice between acting illiberally or allowing the world to slip into execrable chaos. At the heart of this construction lies a naturalized image of the liberal imperial state forging bravely through time, whose “fundamental character” both justifies its actions and whose actions reinforce its “fundamental character.”

The political project both Ferguson and Ignatieff confront in their pro-imperial writings is not uncommon in the history of liberal imperialism. Both must make sense out of the niggling disconnect between liberals’ historically expressed commitment to human equality, the self determination of states, and the rule of law and actual practices of imperialism which suspend these assumed natural rights for large segments of the world’s populations for unspecified amounts of time.² The internal contours of each man’s argument, however, while similar in slope, also express the differences inherent in the particular kinds of liberalism to which they adhere. Because Ferguson is an iconoclastic neo-Thatcherite for whom liberalism “stands for creating the institutions of political, economic, and social freedom,” his arguments tend to be more triumphalist in tone, particularly with regard to the benefits of what he refers to as “Anglobalization,” past and present.³ For Ignatieff, by contrast, liberalism (as a political theory and set of institutional practices) is saturated with a much heavier ethical commitment to the “self justifying” and participatory processes of democratic debate.⁴ His pro-imperial work thus contains a good deal more of what looks like self-examination and moral critique. Regardless of style, however, both men come to the same ideological and policy conclusion; that the only way to guarantee the safety of liberal democracies and the continued thriving of the global free market is to accept that U.S. political and military hegemony is no longer enough. What the world requires, rather, is an explicit return to the vocabulary and political practices of empire, a full-fledged resurrection of imperial order headed by a self confessedly imperial American state. Both make this point through rhetorical processes that essentialize liberal democracies, past and present, and pose empire as the tragic but inevitable result of circumstances beyond our control.

The word “tragic” in this argument works on three different levels of analysis. First, it refers to the way Ferguson and Ignatieff set up their arguments so that empire seems a kind of “lesser evil” which, although inevitable, implies deep ethical and political losses. Second, Ferguson and Ignatieff both acknowledge that their political auguries fall within a narrative tradition of imperial rise and decline where the well meaning but flawed imperial heroes of Britain and Rome inevitably fell prey to the delusions of absolute power. Finally, I argue that Ignatieff and Ferguson’s works are tragic insofar as, in their desire to create a new kind of liberal imperial vision free from the Polybian shackles of empires past, they unwittingly echo the stylistic narratives...