Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West

Reviewed by Jeff Conant
06.21.05

Jonathan Swift is famously known as the father of modern literary satire, and his essay, “A Modest Proposal,” is one of the greatest critiques of empire that the age of empire produced. That essay—whose full title is “A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public”—takes as its premise that Protestant Britain is plagued by the “helpless infants” of the Irish Catholic poor, who grow up only to become beggars, thieves, and Papists. Swift’s proposal to solve the problem, of course, is that upon weaning, the children should be sold for slaughter and “introduced as a new dish to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste.” The proposal is both economical and humane, and builds a case worthy of the best Republican think tanks of our age. The argument’s only flaw is that it advocates infanticide and cannibalism.

In Empire 2.0, Regis Debray offers his own modest proposal for the continued survival of the West in our age of clashing civilizations. He suggests that it is time for the nations of Europe to give up their pretenses to sovereignty and join the great US of A to form an imperial power the likes of which the world has not seen since ancient Rome. By hitching its wagon to the star of American Empire, he argues, Europe will not only survive, but thrive, based on the formula “Big Mac + Chateaubriand, Disneyland + the Louvre.” The joke is framed by the appearance that it is not Regis Debray who lays out the argument, but an old nemesis of his from his university days. The tract is written in the form of a letter from a right-wing French diplomat who, in a post-9/11 fervor, has recently exchanged his French citizenship for a US passport, and is writing his old friend Debray to explain his actions.
The engine of satire is irony; in good satire, irony is carried to excess, revealing to us our prejudices and the weakness of human reason. It takes the joke over the top. Like other great political satire—think of the Dead Kennedys’ classic agitprop songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” and “California Uber Alles,” or the writing of William S. Burroughs—Debray’s essay reveals something of the barbaric impulse at the core of “civilized” values. Debray’s masterful touch is to lay out an argument for empire which is almost convincing—imagine the human potential! the flowering of arts and culture! the inclusivity!—and then to take the argument too far, to creep just across the line where federalism becomes fascism or cultural unity turns to eugenics.

Regis Debray gained fame in the ’80s for traveling with Che Guevara during Che’s campaign in Bolivia, and for his subsequent three-year jail term that ended only due to the plea of France’s most eminent intellectuals. In the intervening years he has continued to condemn the means and ends of imperial capitalism, though most recently from within the French government, having served in the cabinet of President Mitterand in the ’80s. A leftist’s leftist and a staunch anti-American, Debray finds ripe material for satire here at the beginning of “the Next American Century.” By taking aim at both America’s dumb imperialism and Europe’s cowardly acquiescence, Debray manages to make a grand joke of geopolitics, while drawing a portrait of empire that highlights its ugliest truths and the helplessness of those who stand by unable to stop it.

The running joke throughout is that the supposed author, Xavier de C***, longs for an empire as great as that of ancient Rome. A Latin scholar, he peppers his epistle with Latin quotations that give his argument the weight of history: “Dulce et decorum est, pro patri mori”— it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. “We must work mutatis mutandi”— to change what needs changing. The accumulated Latin quotes have the chilling effect of revealing the extent to which America’s empire mimics Roman values and ideologies. The classic quote that highlights the resonance of ancient Rome with the present-day American empire is “Timor externus maximum concordiae vinculum”—fear of the foreigner is the best means of creating harmony.

By framing the book as a letter from a right-wing zealot, Debray reminds us of the value of knowing our enemies. At a time when the progressive movements in the US are confronting the crisis of how to create a viable opposition to what looks increasingly like a 1000-year reich, this book offers relief in the form of a joke. Like most satire, it is only useful to the extent that it makes us laugh at our predicament, and a certain knowledge of European history and current affairs is necessary to get the full effect. But, coming straight out of Old Europe, the book has the charming if unintended side effect of reminding us that we are not alone on this side of the puddle. And a lesson in history is never a bad thing, to wit:

I would hope you remember your Roman history lessons—if not, dust off your old volumes of Piganiol and Carcopino! Around 212 CE, when the Goths grew too bold in the north, and the Sassanid Persians in the east, not to mention the Moors on the southern flanks, a perspicacious ruffian named Caracalla had the vision to grant full Roman citizenship to all free men in all the provinces. This edict rejuvenated an exhausted Roman polis by bringing in millions of new recruits, with all their talents and taxability. This sudden generosity must have seemed scandalous at first, and I anticipate your observation that the edict did nothing to prevent the spread of Christianity (that troublesome, mushrooming religion, not unlike Islam today in Asia, Africa, and Europe). Granted, but this bracing emergency tonic at least staved off the barbarian depredations and the resulting Dark Ages for three more centuries. In any case, all our battles amount to no more than delaying tactics in the end, right?

In other words: Take hope, dear reader, for all empires eventually fall.