Nederland als 'Empire'

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

In de bijlage Wetenschap NRC van een week geleden een boekbeschrijving
t.g.v. de vertaling van Day of Empire.
De essentie uit de eerste alinea's: grootmachten (o.a. Nederland in Gouden
Eeuw) zijn tolerant.

Nederland gaat dus een grootse toekomst tegemoet!

Groet / Cees

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/morrow.html?
DAY OF EMPIRE
How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall.
By Amy Chua.
396 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.

How to Rule the World
By LANCE MORROW

The emperor Claudius thought about the dynamics of imperial ingestion. He
reminded the Roman Senate that the founder Romulus would “both fight
against and naturalize a people on the same day.” Claudius argued that the
Gauls, by logical extension, could be accepted into the Senate because
“they no longer wear trousers” — that is, they could be counted on to come
to work wearing the Roman toga and thus to have effectively become Romans.

The great Mughal emperor Akbar flourished by practicing a similar
“strategic tolerance” — which included what Amy Chua in “Day of Empire”
calls “multicultural copulation.” A Muslim himself, the emperor
intermarried widely: “By the time of Akbar’s death, he had more than 300
wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from South Indian kingdoms,
Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.”

E pluribus unum.

Chua argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history — among them,
Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire,
the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and
hegemonic America — prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion,
the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.

It’s not always an easy case to make. Genghis Khan used his victims’
corpses as moat-fill; he is credited with the memorably barbaric
definition of happiness — “to crush your enemies ... and hear the
lamentation of their women.” But as Chua says, “relative tolerance” is
what counts. Having savored the lamentations of the women, Genghis Khan
“embraced ethnic diversity,” decreed religious freedom and drew into his
service “the most talented and useful individuals of all his conquered
populations.”

The death of empire, in Chua’s thesis — the Kryptonite that vitiates a
superpower — is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial
“purity” or religious orthodoxy. Chua wonders how different 20th-century
history might have been if Hitler had been a tolerant and accommodating
conqueror. “By murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of
thousands of German citizens,” she observes, “the Nazis deprived
themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. ... Germany lost an
array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von
Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Lise
Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction
of the world’s first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the
war.” It was history’s most spectacular example of shooting oneself in the
foot.

Further unintended consequences of doctrinaire malice: In 1478, the
Inquisition, decreed by papal bull, ended an era of relative tolerance in
Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews the choice of either
converting to Catholism or leaving. Ten years later, the Muslims of
Castile were ordered to convert or emigrate. “The Spanish monarchy had
officially embraced intolerance,” Chua writes, “and for an empire hoping
to rise in global pre-eminence, this was a staggeringly bad move.”
[rest weggelaten]

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