Optimism and Empire
I ended up, quite by chance, in a crowd of about 10,000 people gathered in downtown Raleigh, NC, to rally against the planned US invasion of Iraq. It was 15 February 2003, and around the world protests were taking place, urging the US to give the inspectors more time. I've been thinking of that day often recently, of how it was full of hope and optimism and a surprising sense of global solidarity, of how naive all such sentiments seem now, as I read Thomas Friedman's book Longitudes and Attitudes, which is really just a collection of his N.Y. Times pieces for the last several years. One essay in particular has been sticking in my head, from 2 February 2003, in which Friedman contrasts American optimism, our belief that we can really change the world for the better, with European "cynicism and insecurity." I too think there's something wonderfully optimistic about the American character, a willingness to call the future a blank slate, to declare that the "past is a bucket of ashes," as Sandburg once said. Still, there is something that strikes me as wrong with Friedman's argument.
In Barcelona alone, a city only three times bigger than Raleigh, somewhere close to a million people demonstrated. To dismiss this entire showing as displaced jealousy of America and nostalgia for an old colonial empire, as Friedman does, is to miss the point. Whenever millions of people come out for an event like February 15, there will be a diversity of motivations, and perhaps a few Europeans were motivated by the nationalistic desires that Friedman attributes to them. Many more, however, truly believed they were sending an honest humanitarian message to the world, which when you stop to think about it is an amazingly optimistic thing to do, given the state of international politics. Seen in this light, most Europeans were (and are) profoundly optimistic about the future, in that they can envision a world not ruled by any particular county or empire but governed by an (occasionally bureaucratic) community of nations. In contrast, most Americans, or at least American politicians, seem to envision the future as fundamentally about the extension and maintenance of the American Empire- the only disagreement among the political parties is how bare-knuckled we should be about it. What's so optimistic about that, Mr. Friedman?
