The Unimperial Empire

Well, pardon my English, but why exactly should Americans colonize Iraq in the same way the British did? Last time I checked, London seemed to have botched the job up pretty good there, playing footsie-for-oil with corrupt Sunni minority tyrants only too eager to lord it over majority Shias, plus the Kurds, Christians, and Turkmen. This is not to mention the festering geopolitical sores of Cyprus, Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and much of contemporary Africa, which seem likewise to have British colonial footprints all over them.

Without going too deeply into the tragic fallout of London’s policy of “divide and quit” (a phrase recently given new currency by a more sanguine English expatriate, journalist Christopher Hitchens), let us at least agree that the legacy of the British Foreign Office around the world is mixed. Cricket and common law caught on fairly well in a few Commonwealth countries in Asia and the Americas, but conspicuously less so in the more volatile regions of Africa and the Middle East, where the Brits are not always remembered so fondly.

The postwar American world order, meanwhile, now nearing the end of its sixth decade, seems to be plodding along pretty well, despite Americans’ lackadaisical approach to global governance. And this seems to drive Britcons like Ferguson crazy. Unlike the Oxbridge scions of old, he laments, “America’s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia, but to manage MTV.” Surveying the halls of the Ivy League, he finds no stirrings, even post-9/11, of a “new imperial elite” in the making. Who will govern Iraq? “You simply cannot have an empire,” he concludes, “without imperialists.”

ET TU, Britannicus? Does America really require a colonial service? Need we design sharp khaki uniforms, snappy salutes, punchy titles? Should we ask universities to close down study-abroad centers in friendly, rich countries and give credits only to students who learn the art of the cold shower and the stiff upper lip in difficult Third World climates? Must our values become Victorian, so that we truly civilize the world’s backward regions, instead of merely flooding them with mass-marketed pop culture?

As a fairly highbrow American expat academic myself who speaks a number of foreign languages, I am not so sure this is a good idea. Americans are already quite recognizable enough around the world in their casual approach to fashion, their assertive style of speech, not to mention their accents. The last thing we need is to draw more attention to ourselves. Like most unassuming American expat legionnaires–businessmen, economists, lawyers, English teachers, missionaries, Peace Corps activists, free-weekly editors, NGO staffers, and so on–I do not require an imperial uniform to promote American values abroad. Nor did I pass through a civil service feeder.

The United States does have a foreign service bureaucracy with an entrance exam, of course–but Foggy Bottom is hardly where the action is. Many of the most effective cultural ambassadors for America are not even Americans, but rather foreigners who lived or studied in the United States before returning home to share their knowledge, often creating American-style clubs, organizations, or businesses. Just as London’s Indian civil service employed natives educated at Oxbridge, so now American university graduates create wealth and generate cultural ferment when they return to their countries of origin. The difference today is that no one controls or organizes the process. Although the Pentagon clearly oversees global security, there is no comparable entity that administers the global civilization we might call the Pax Americana. Like the Internet, it largely runs itself.

Take my own humble outpost, Bilkent, a private, English-speaking university in Turkey founded in 1984. American undergraduates who come here on exchange programs feel themselves immediately at home. The semester terms are American, the grading is on the A-to-F scale, and the course catalog shows offerings nearly indistinguishable from those back home (except for the strong department in Turkish literature and classes in Turkish law). There are even class evaluation forms for students to grade their professors, a practice previously unheard of in traditional Turkish culture, where the authority of teachers and parents remains strong.

Bilkent is also a real campus, set off from nearby Ankara, with its own private security detail, dormitories, and special faculty housing. There are no less than two campus gyms, with American nautilus equipment, basketball and squash courts, aerobics classes, the works. There’s even a bowling team, for crying out loud. Most of all, there is green grass everywhere, landscaped walkways between classes, and even a central “green” fronting the main faculty building on which students linger, socialize, and play football–not merely soccer but sometimes even the pigskin variety. All this, in the middle of the Anatolian desert.

So American does Bilkent seem to the casual observer that campus officials are inundated with complaints from a certain type of busybody that they are doing Washington’s bidding in Turkey. But here’s the rub. Bilkent is not American, neither founded nor financed nor run by Americans. There are no more than a token minority of Yanks on the faculty. There aren’t even any Americans on the “American football” team–which seems to have been created by some Turks who learned the game when they lived in the United States. (In fact, when I happened upon a scrimmage one day, they were so flattered by the attention of a real American, they promptly invited me to play.) Plus there’s the bowling team–sponsored by a Turkish beer-brewing company (Efes), although at a recent scrimmage I didn’t see any of the serious young Turkish bowlers, or even their student supporters, drinking any. Imagine that in the Big Ten.

Then there’s the delightful Turkish cuisine in the campus eateries, prepared and served by adults who take pride in their work, instead of by bored, indifferent, overpaid American undergraduates working off their financial aid. Bilkent humor is refreshingly empty of tired jokes about bad cafeteria food, because, well, there isn’t any.

Complaints of certain Turkish Islamist critics notwithstanding, Bilkent is simply not in league with some mythical American imperialist conspiracy. It was founded by Ihsan Dogramaci, an enigmatic Turkish cosmopolitan who speaks some 28 languages, American-accented English not particularly conspicuous among them. If Dogramaci chose an American-style academic system, it may have something to do with the fact that his son Ali, an engineering professor who also serves as rector, received his graduate degrees from Columbia and Stanford (Ali also taught at Columbia). But mostly it’s because the system is a good one, recognized around the world.

BILKENT IS NOT ALONE. There are already 24 private universities in Turkey, including Koc and Sabanci in Istanbul, which, like Bilkent, were founded by rich philanthropists whose vision would have impressed Leland Stanford. Not all of these schools are English-instruction only, but most require at least a year of intensive English, especially the technical universities.

And this is just the tip of the global iceberg. As David Cohen reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education two years ago, “in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and throughout much of the developing world, private colleges now represent the fastest-growing area of postsecondary education.” Some of these new schools have received loans from the World Bank–implying at least a tenuous political connection to Washington–but most have simply sprung up to meet seemingly insatiable demand.

Unlike the famous old American universities of Beirut and Cairo, founded and staffed by Protestant missionaries, the new generation of American-style, tuition-heavy private colleges is more or less self-replicating. The reason they grow so fast is that students like them, and usually get jobs when they graduate–which means tuition-paying parents like them, too. In other words, they work.

The same can be said for American-style businesses, which have become so ubiquitous around the world as scarcely any longer to merit attention. Globe-trotting Americans think nothing these days of encountering everything from private express-mail companies and all-night copy shops to big-screen sports bars, Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood knock-offs, and edgy Internet cafes complete with interactive message boards. So taken for granted are such customer-service oriented companies that expats have already begun complaining about this “Americanization,” even as they eagerly use them.

But then, world-weary consumerist ennui is itself profoundly American. Natives frequenting these haunts of global culture, by contrast, tend to enjoy their marvels without irony. Just go to a disco playing mainstream American pop music virtually anywhere in the world. Unlike at the “cooler” clubs in Manhattan where such things are passé, people will be singing happily along to the lyrics and dancing up a storm.

I noticed this immense irony gap soon after I began spending time in the former Soviet Union. Nearly all observers of post-Communist cities note the stark contrast between the surly service in dreary, Soviet-style offices, hotels, and restaurants and the cheerful alternative in the flashy new “Western” outfits, staffed by attractive young men and women who usually speak English with an American accent. Some Americans I know take a kind of masochistic pleasure at being abused in the Soviet-style facilities–an “exotic” experience you can only get in ex-Communist countries. There’s even a word for this kind of dreary service: sovok.

But just try inviting a savvy, young local to one of these places. If you’ve grown up in a country deprived of the simplest consumer pleasures, you don’t take things like working telephones, edible food, and clean tablecloths for granted.

It is true that this kind of customer-is-right Americanization has yet to trickle down beyond the oases of prosperity in the world’s poorer regions. And of course, many countries (Turkey is a good example) have strong service traditions of their own, which have been not so much replaced by the arrival of American-style businesses as harmoniously augmented. But where American-style service is absent, that fact reflects not a cultural aversion to Americanization–merely the geographic limits of prosperity. Once consumers can afford American-style service and education, they demand it as a right.

This does not mean everyone on planet Earth will one day play baseball (although basketball does seem to be catching on just about everywhere it is tried). It does mean that a global elite whose size grows year by year, whether Latin American, European, Turk, Arab, or Asian, will insist that businesses and schools serve their needs, rather than the other way around. They will insist on various political and civic rights, including those of women. They will form volunteer organizations and sports leagues, organize (often pointless) academic conferences, and come to demand all of these institutions as a necessary part of the social landscape.

Many, though by no means all of them, will have learned these habits in American universities. Some will learn them from others who visited the States, or will pick up the vibe from the Internet. Given one or two degrees of separation, a trend can blanket an entire region in a matter of weeks, before the local culture czars have even noticed, by which time it is already too late for them to object.

QUITE PROBABLY, many of the most energetic exponents of Americanization in the new global elite will deny there is anything American about their activities. Some will even form organizations or political parties explicitly hostile to America–of a kind already cropping up in an Iraq newly liberated by Americans from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

And yet this sort of cut-and-thrust politics, too, will demonstrate the spread of the Pax Americana. The beauty of this non-system lies in its total flexibility, its lack of a centralized imperial administration that rewards its own and punishes the disloyal. The success or failure of American-style businesses, schools, organizations, or political regimes around the world will not be judged in some distant colonial office in Washington, but rather in the rough and tumble of the economic and political marketplace.

That’s as it should be. Like most of my fellow Americans, I am proud of my country, and serve it happily, in my own way, without expecting so much as a pat on the back for my efforts. Let our brave soldiers, who risk their lives every day defending Western civilization, receive the medals. They deserve every accolade they get. And yet even our men and women in uniform seem to spurn undue rewards and recognition, preferring to serve their country quietly and efficiently only as long as needed, before going home.

Yes, American troops must stay the course in the Middle East, overawing the local strongmen until the Arab world returns to its senses and rejects terrorism. But it is not their job to establish a permanent ruling bureaucracy, or to teach the natives how to become Americans. If Arabs prefer soccer to our football, eat kebabs instead of hamburgers, drink Mecca Cola rather than Coke or Pepsi, join obnoxious anti-American political parties–even if democratic parliaments choose to impose sharia-like bans on alcohol or enforce Islamic dress codes–so be it. All that matters is that Arabs breathe enough freedom to concentrate their minds on such humble matters, once we have removed the tyrants who suffocate them.

If this be empire, then I’m all for it. Where can I sign up for my toga?

Sean McMeekin teaches international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. His first book, “The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willy Munzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West,” is forthcoming from Yale University Press.