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 Some of those were fascinating questions/answers, iMHO |
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ceo/cfo
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头衔: 海归中将
声望: 院士
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加入时间: 2004/11/05
文章: 12941
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
What makes or breaks a hyperpower?
Historians have debated the rise and fall of empires for centuries. But in her new book, Amy Chua takes this a step further to look at hyperpowers – societies which amassed such vast military and economic might that in effect, they dominated the world.
In Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - And Why They Fail, Ms Chua argues that history’s hyperpowers, including Rome, Tang China and the British, achieved predominance through their unusual pluralism and tolerance: a pluralism which also contained the seeds of their downfall. Read an extract here.
So does the US currently fit the mould of a hyperpower, and how might it avoid collapse? Is it time for the US to retreat from its go-it-alone approach to promote a new multilateralism?
Could China, India or even the EU overtake the US? Has China’s history of integrating different ethnic groups prepared it for global predominance – and is that what it wants to achieve?
Amy Chua, who is the John Duff Jr Professor of Law at Yale Law School, answered your questions online on 14th November 2007.
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There has been a lot of talk about containing China’s rise to become a world power that could surpass the US. Is the world better off having two or more hyperpowers instead of just one?
Antonio L. Zate, USA
Amy Chua: In a way, you’ve asked the largest question of all: Is it good for the world to have a single hyperpower (as opposed to having a multipolar world)? For me, this is a bit like asking whether religion has been good for the world. No single answer seems possible. A great deal depends on point of view and how “good” is being measured.
Spectacular benefits can be attributed to world-dominant powers. They have spurred many of history’s greatest technological advances, from steam power to the digital revolution. They have given birth to some of history’s most extraordinary efflorescences of artistic and intellectual creativity. They have fueled global commerce, economic growth, and, some would say, civilization. Perhaps most important, hyperpowers are capable of maintaining peace; the Pax Romana gave the West an unprecedented two centuries of relative stability, prosperity, and order that would have been impossible but for Rome’s hegemony.
On the other hand, hyperpowers have also wrought terrible destruction. According to one estimate, the Mongols killed over 15 million in order to establish their world dominant empire. At the same time, because of their unmatched military and economic might, hyperpowers are capable of subjugation, exploitation, and coercion on a massive scale.
As for the U.S. and China today, it’s just too early to tell. We just don’t know enough about what kind of superpower China will be, and we also don’t know what turns the U.S. will take in the coming years.
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Is the US still a hyperpower after the world has seen its lack of effectiveness in Iraq? How does the weakening dollar affect the US’s status as hyperpower/superpower?
Brian Junker, Miami, Florida
Amy Chua: The U.S. is unquestionably still a hyperpower. With all of America’s bumbling and all the talk of China rising, it often gets lost that the U.S. still towers over all its rivals, militarily and economically. (Fact: The U.S. has ten Nimitz-class, nuclear-powered supercarriers, each one capable of carrying more than seventy fighter jets; no other country has a single remotely comparable aircraft carrier. Fact: America’s $13 trillion GDP is more than three times the size of the next nearest country, Japan; China comes in fourth, at about $2.65 trillion.) What the future will bring, of course, is another matter.
The truth is that the U.S. could wipe Iraq off the face of the earth in a single day. But because it is a modern, democratic hyperpower, America can’t and won’t use its might this way. This is one of the main points of my book: democracy places limits on America that past hyperpowers never faced.
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How do you compare China’s history of forceful integration of ethnic groups that it has conquered with the US as a destination for multiple ethnic groups whose successive offspring will undergo integration?
Nan Hey Yang Rou Chan
Amy Chua: China and the U.S. just represent completely different models. Perhaps the main difference is that America’s political identity is ethnically and religiously neutral, whereas China remains (despite official rhetoric) a quintessentially ethnically defined nation. As a result, America is the class immigration society: people can become Americans without giving up their ethnicity, religion, and so forth.
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It has been suggested by authors writing on the British in India (e.g. William Dalrymple and Lawrence James) that the British were more tolerant in the 17th and early 18th centuries, than they were in the 19th. The rise of the Evangelical lobby in India in the early 19th century had a major (and unfavourable) impact on British social attitudes and behaviour towards the Indian population. Yet the British Empire in India continued to consolidate and survive another hundred years, despite the decrease in tolerance. How does this reading of Indian history fit with your thesis that powers achieve predominance through tolerance and pluralism?
Colin Greenstreet, London
Amy Chua: I rely on and cite Dalrymple and James in my book. As I try to show in my book, there was an oscillation between relatively tolerant and intolerant regimes in India throughout the 19th century. But consistent with the thesis of my book, I think the British paid dearly for their intolerance in India.
Like every hyperpower before it, Great Britain’s rise to global hegemony was fuelled by – and almost certainly would not have occurred but for – a dramatic shift from destructive internal ethnic and religious infighting to policies of striking openness and tolerance, judged against the standards of the time. It is no coincidence that the period of Britain’s uncontested global supremacy, usually dated to roughly 1858–1918, was also a time when Jews, Huguenots, and Scots were on the whole prospering and participating at virtually every level of British society, including Parliament and the prime ministership. The Jews and Scots in particular not only helped Britain fund, conquer, and administer its colonial empire overseas; they contributed pivotally to Britain’s industrial, financial, and naval supremacy.
But British tolerance had limits it could not cross. At home, the problem was Catholic Ireland. Abroad, the problem was racism. After 1857, the British in India, for example, especially the expatriate business community, lived an essentially apartheid existence, in militarily protected enclaves separated from the “Blacktowns” where the Indians lived. Beatings, floggings, and “accidental” shootings of natives were common. More generally, the British could never quite treat their nonwhite colonies the same way they treated their white dominions. These limits on British tolerance would come back to haunt the empire, helping to tear it apart in the 20th century.
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Did the British hyperpower decline because of a tipping point in its policy of tolerance or because of pressure successfully mounted by German unification and expansion between 1870 and 1940? Was Soviet expansion to superpower status as much a product of repression and exclusion as integration and tolerance? Would it be equally correct to argue that, historically, strong central authority and limits on freedom occasioned the rise of both superpowers and hyperpowers, but such intolerance also planted the seeds of their downfall?
Damon Coletta, United States Air Force Academy
Amy Chua: Just to be clear, my thesis is asymmetrical. I argue that tolerance is necessary (but of course not sufficient) for the achievement of world dominance (ie, for a society to be not just a regional power, but a hyperpower). On the other, I merely say that the decline of hyperpowers is starkly associated with a turn to intolerance and xenophobia. I do not argue that intolerance is the sole cause of decline. Indeed, intolerance and persecution may be by-products of a decline that has already begun. Typically, what we get is a spiral: decline fuels intolerance, and intolerance fuels decline.
As to your overall question, my answer is no. You suggest that intolerance ”occasioned the rise” of hyperpowers, but I think history suggests just the opposite. Plenty of intolerant societies have become rich and powerful. But throughout history, no society based on racial purity, religious zealotry, or ethnic cleansing has ever become a world dominant power. To attain and maintain dominance on a global scale, coercion is simply too inefficient, persecution too costly, and ethnic or religious homogeneity, like inbreeding, too unproductive.
Your example, the Soviet Union, by the way, is a little off point - it never became a hyperpower.
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China, India, and the EU are frequently mentioned as emerging superpowers. But what are the prospects of an Islamic state, or a Caliphate, emerging to become the superpower of this century? With mounting worldwide revulsion toward capitalism and the search for an alternative economic system, Islam as an ideology is rapidly gaining supporters.
Abdulrahman Abdullah
Amy Chua: Again, to be clear, my thesis is only about hyperpowers. An Islamic superpower is certainly a possibility. An Islamic hyperpower, on my view, is extremely unlikely - just as a fundamentalist Christian hyperpower would be unlikely. To pull away from its rivals on a global scale, a society must be able to pull into itself and motivate the world’s best and brightest, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or background. A tolerant Islamic society might be able to do this. I have a chapter on the Ottoman Empire, which perhaps came closest, but never came close to being a hyperpower.
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In which ways does the US compare with ancient Rome?
Steve W. Temecula, CA, USA
Amy Chua: Like the U.S., Rome was the military and economic giant of its time. Like the U.S., Rome was astonishingly pluralistic - educated men of any skin color or ethnicity could rise to the highest levels of authority (in Rome’s case, including the position of emperor itself.) Finally, Rome offered a cultural package that was enormously appealing to far-flung, vastly different peoples. Similarly, the United States today offers a cultural package – supermodels and Starbucks, Disney and double cheeseburgers, Coca Cola and SUVs – that holds infuriating allure for millions, if not billions around the world.
But ancient Rome had an advantage: It could make the people it conquered and dominated part of the Roman Empire. Defeated peoples from Britain to Eastern Europe to West Africa all became subjects – and in the case of male elites, citizens – of the greatest power on earth. The U.S. can do no such thing. The first mature democracy to become a world dominant power, the United States does not try or want to make foreign populations its subjects – and certainly not its citizens. When the U.S. government speaks of bringing democracy to the Middle East, it is not contemplating Iraqis or Syrians voting in the next U.S. presidential election. One ironic result of the United States’ dual role as global hyperpower and self-proclaimed beacon of freedom and democracy – is rampant anti-Americanism. Today, the United States faces billions of people around the world who feel dominated and bullied by the U.S. - but no connection or loyalty to the U.S.
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In the last few years, we have witnessed a huge flow of Chinese who have chosen or selected by their government to venture overseas for academic or professional pursuits. This is undoubtedly with the intention of eventually returning to their homeland equipped with the experience and skills that the rest of the old world has garnered in the last centuries. Does this seem like a very strategic long term plan of the Chinese in building themselves to be this hyperpower depending on their own capital resources? The current financial market dislocation has perhaps also proved to us that power economies are now looking to China as a saviour.
Shuen Chan, London
Amy Chua: You’re right - to upgrade its ‘humanware,’ China has been sending growing numbers of promising young scientists and scholars to study abroad. Known as “turtles,” these students were/are intended to bring back valuable know-how and to serve as the vanguard of China’s technological revolution. Instead of doing so, however, the great majority of these students chose to remain abroad after obtaining their degrees. From 1986 to 1998, for example, some 85% of Chinese students graduating from American universities said they planned to stay in the United States.
There is evidence that this trend may be changing. In the last five years, as China’s standard of living continues to rise, increasing numbers of Chinese Ph.D.s are returning to the PRC. These top-tier, foreign educated Chinese engineers and scientists are often enticed with Western-style perks: luxury cars, state-of-the-art condos, and internationally competitive salaries. Many, moreover, are moved by patriotism. The possibility of China becoming a world superpower fills them with pride and motivation – once again, Chinese ethnonationalism at work.
Nevertheless, although China’s economy has opened considerably, there remains a strong popular perception that hard work and intelligence will not produce commensurate rewards. Shanghai may have a new crop of Prada-wearing real-estate moguls, but because corruption in China remains rife, connections continue to be of critical importance. As long as this continues to be the case, China’s best and brightest may not want to stay in (or return to) the PRC. They will try to go where their talents can translate more directly into success.
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From reading a summary of your book, I am astonished to see that you do not mention the Spanish Empire among the hyperpowers. In the words of the British historian Henry Kamen, the Spanish was the first globalised empire in modern history. The first university opened to indigenous peoples in America was funded by the Spaniards in Santo Domingo in 1535 and the first European style university in Asia was also funded by Spaniards in Manila in the early 17th century. The tolerant Dutch and the liberal English took much longer to allow their colonised people to have even the most basic education, if any (and they never mixed with them, contrary to the Spanish practise of creating mestizo societies). In economic terms, the Spanish Manilla Galleon connected the economies of Asia, the Americas and Europe from the late 14th century until the mid 19th century. Would you classify the Spanish empire as a hyperpower?
Luis Francisco Martinez Montes
Amy Chua: I have a whole chapter on Spain (which relies heavily on Kamen!) - but no, I don’t think it ever achieved hyperpower status. To be a hyperpower under my definition, a society really has to tower above all its rivals economically, militarily, and technologically - even the U.S. was not a hyperpower during the Cold War.
Spain certainly achieved great heights of power. Moreover, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Spain was one of the most religiously diverse societies in Christian Europe. (Unlike any of its northern European neighbors, medieval Spain had large Muslim minorities, the result of centuries of earlier Islamic rule. Spain was also home to the overwhelming majority of Christian Europe’s Jews, who had been expelled at various points from England, France, and Germany). But I argue that Spain’s turn after 1492 to increasingly virulent intolerance – not just against Jews, but converted Jews, Muslims, converted Muslims, Protestants, and eventually even Jesuits – fatally undermined its rise to power, destroying any chance for world domination.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 Some of those were fascinating questions/answers, iMHO -- ceo/cfo - (17049 Byte) 2007-11-15 周四, 02:54 (1071 reads)
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