Sumantra Maitra
‘The world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires’, Guy Verhofstadt once said, a theme the Belgian politician has repeated several times, most recently after US Vice President JD Vance’s infamous Munich Security Conference speech. Claiming that the European Union is unfit to survive in the age of empires, and in competition with a rising China, a reckless United States and a revanchist Russia, in 2016 Verhofstadt remarked: ‘Let’s create a European defence union. Let’s take on our responsibilities… Let’s become an empire.’
He would have found qualitative sympathy from another formidable liberal, Joseph Chamberlain, who – with rather unfortunate timing in 1904 – claimed that the days of small nations were over and the days of empires were here. Verhofstadt, overexcitable though he may be, is correct that the days of small nations are over.
Yet empires rarely arrive planned, nor can they be initiated suddenly with a signature from a pen. Scotland, for example, only joined England after the Scottish attempt at an empire fizzled: it lacked the requisite manpower to have its own empire or defend its colonies against a predatory Spain. Security then, just as now, was the determining rationale to pool forces. European empires, likewise, despite the post-colonial slant, were a long drawn-out affair without any centralised planning or exploitation. Great power competition over resources, territory, technological growth (due to the industrial revolution), and production capacity (requiring colonial manpower), was a collaborative process that more often than not operated with the consent of the governed. In short, per the logic of the realist school of international relations, it was multipolarity and security maximisation that resulted in conquest and imperialism.
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