James Meek on The Death of Empires

Were you thinking of America’s present troubles when you chose to talk about the death of empires?

 

Not necessarily. All empires are obsessed with the prospect of their own decline. It may be that by the time they imagine their decline, it’s already begun. From what I understand, almost as soon as an empire is recognised as an empire, its decline has begun. It becomes a thing that people play around with as a concept rather than a thing created as a by-product of specific tasks. Now the Americans are concerned that their situation as the greatest power on earth is under threat. And it is under threat.

 

But is America an empire? It doesn’t like to think so. But the extent to which it falls short of an empire, positive as it may be from the point of view of democracy, may actually be making America’s task more difficult. You can see this in Afghanistan, where it has the military power to maintain order, but no equivalent of the civilian administration that the Romans, the Ottomans or the British were able to bring to bear.

 

America refuses to govern?

 

It refuses to govern, and it may be that future historians conclude this was one of the reasons for its diminishment. But, of course, we are talking about America as if all Americans thought the same way and that would be a mistake. There are Americans who take pride in the power of their military to intervene overseas, and Americans who take pride in being standard-bearers of liberty, and many Americans who take pride in both, though this is a contradictory position. But there are many more sorts of empire than the imperial nation state. You could say the European Union is an empire and, actually, quite an expansionist empire in a way that the Americans are not. And then, of course, there are business empires: Google and Microsoft and so on…

 

Your first book?

 

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. It’s a novel covering three generations of an Austrian family, beginning in the mid 19th century and ending in 1916. But it concentrates on the last generation.

 

The generation that saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

 

Yes. It’s a fascinating story and, of course, one that’s less well-known to us than the British story. One of the things that interests me about the Austro-Hungarian Empire is that it’s an early reflection of the European Union. It had the same problem with language. I remember reading in a book by Norman Stone about this thing called the Kommandosprache, which they used to have in the Austro-Hungarian army. All these different regiments were made up of different nationalities, and most of the men spoke different languages. The Kommandosprache was the dozen words they needed to know: shoot, don’t shoot, present arms, that sort of thing. For everything more subtle there was the regiment’s own native language. There was even one regiment that spoke English. The EU doesn’t have an army, but it has related problems, and no Kommandosprache.

 

When I wrote The People’s Act of Love I had a Jewish character who emerges from the First World War as an officer in a regiment of free Czech and Slovak soldiers, but nevertheless, unlike his Czechoslovakian comrades, mourns the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to which they all once belonged. I hadn’t read The Radetzky March then, but when I did, I was relieved to find out that I had been right. The novel was written by a Jew, and it’s suffused with this elegiac spirit. It’s certainly not a criticism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is, as all great novels are, an elegy for the folly of humanity, but it’s no kind of indictment. It’s a lyrical summoning of a remarkable world, a balance between so many ethnoses, and the thing that brought them together more than anything else, as is usually the case with empires, was the military. The generations in this book are military men. You understand through them that the centre of the empire is not Vienna but the provinces, and that at the eastern edge of the empire, the supposed line dividing us, the Austro-Hungarians, from them, the Russians, is not so much a border as a shading, a merging, a swampy world of doubt, distrust and lassitude. There’s just a crowd of wild Jews straddling the border who have powerfully ambivalent feelings about both the Austrians and the Slavs.

 

It’s about the Vietnam war and it’s a masterpiece, a stone cold masterpiece. An amazing book. There’s this comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan that’s been made so much, but it’s apposite. For a start, I think there’s a lot to be said concerning parallels between modern western perceptions of Islam and past perceptions of Communism.

 

What Neil Sheehan shows is the patriotic dimension of the struggle from the Vietnamese point of view, that this is really what it was about, much more than Communism, just as in Afghanistan it is more about Pashtun identity than about Islam. Communism was a means of rallying and systematising a patriotic movement. It’s often said, but never seems to be taken on board by people at the top level, that in Afghanistan, Pashtun nationalism and the identification of Pashtun customs with Islam is the driver of resistance to the West.

 

Sheehan’s brilliant telling of the Vietnam story through the career of one man – John Vann – makes comparisons to Afghanistan impossible to avoid: the handing of an effectively free mercenary service to a corrupt government, the ability of the north Vietnamese to retreat to and be supplied from places where it was politically difficult to engage them directly, the way that the Americans, if they’d had less money, would have been forced to engage more with the population.