One of my favourite hobby horses has been the impending end of the American Empire and how we would recognize it. It is an utterly unscientific and totally anecdotal theory, rather like one of those strange houses designed and built by eccentrics in their spare time, over decades, so everyone and their brother are free to debate and disagree - let's see how it all pans out?
And yesterday, I read this piece in the NYT that just reinforced some of those notions. Read on...
Without going into all the nooks and crannies of my reasoning, I usually hang facts on a framework of two or three basic points:
* All dominant civilizations and empires - Greek, Roman, Mughal, the Caliphate, British, Soviet etc - inevitably decline and fall. The inflexion point is usually not detected at the time and in retrospect, is usually found to have occurred around the time when common wisdom suggested its utter and total infallibility. 'The End of History', while looking like a particularly foolish statement of hubris for our time and which will damn Fukuyama to the laughing stocks of history, is not a new idea; even as late as the 1930s, a variant of it could be heard as 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'.
* The rate of change is only increasing - while the Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 600+ to a thousand years, based on your point of view, the Mughal Empire lasted around 400 years, as did the British Empire and the Soviets found themselves slung out after a relatively brisk 70 odd years. Therefore, to suppose that the American Century is well past us is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis.
* The seeds of decline are varied and not necessarily external - while external events can precipitate dramatic changes, the rot is usually from within. The madness of the Romans had as much to do with their collapse as the Goth invasions; the Mughals alternated between fanatical religious fervour and world-class dissoluteness while the British empire crept up on it while the British empire was becoming an infeasible enterprise given the aspirations of its subjects and the march of the technology and resource driven American nation. The straws in the wind in America are beginning to accumulate - healthcare and the proportion of Americans without access to it at an affordable cost, the raging battles over whether or not Darwinism should be taught in school, the frantic battles in some sections to deny the impact of man's activities on the environment and the unsustainability of our current way of life, the use of Katrina by Republicans to carry out some convenient bleaching of the city's racial makeup, the seemingly ever-constricting grip of frankly loony evangelicals over the public discourse and the levers of power and the unshakeable belief that every war can be fought and refought till they are won.
Even if they are lost.
But with nukes next time.
Having said all of this, then, I spotted something in the New York Times today that really made me sit up. Given the carnage in the financial sector and the bloodbath going on, none of which contradicts my hypothesis in any way (especially given that I give it exactly 48 hours before some talking suits will pop up on TV to say that we should guard against the knee-jerk impulse to make regulation stronger as that would only harm the working man...), what caught my eye was rather surprising. It was this.
Let me extract some bits:
WASHINGTON — Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.
But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.
"One of our great exports used to be constitutional law," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. "We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had."
Remember 'soft power' ? Defined as 'its ability to attract others by the legitimacy of U.S. policies and the values that underlie them'? Well, this is exactly what the NYT article is talking about - take a good look, 'cause the tide seems to be running out.
The causes cited in the article should not be unfamiliar to anyone who goes past the daily Britney-Paris Hilton-Sarah Palin crap in the news. The extreme right-wing conservatism of the Supreme Court, America's foreign policy being increasingly unpalatable abroad, the insularity of American courts and their unwillingness to accept foreign law, none of these should be stunning front page news.
What is certainly surprising, is to read a statement along the lines of this one:
'America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater'.
And who's the filthy communist, terrorist loving radical who said this?
Justice Michael Kirby, of the High Court of Australia!
Oh.