From Plato to NATO : the idea of the West and its opponents by Gress David 1953-

Author:Gress, David, 1953-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civilization, Western, Civilization, Western, Liberalism, Political science, Philosophy, Ancient
Publisher: New York : Free Press
Published: 1998-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE HIGH TIDE OF LIBERALISM ^ 311

greatly to the advantage of both Russia and an imperial France exhausted by wars and in need of peace and consolidation.

Napoleon was defeated not only by his own inability to stay put, which created new enemies where none existed, but also by a third modern principle that, unlike revolutionary meritocracy and nationalism, worked against him rather than for him. This was the capitalist liberalism of England and of the global economy of the high seas and of intercontinental commerce, which not only gave Britain the resources to stand alone against a Europe dominated, in 1807-9, by the Franco-Russian bipolar coalition, but also outcompeted the Continental powers in efficient use of resources and in geopolitical scope. Command of the seas allowed Britain to intervene in Europe where the French could not easily respond, yet where the risks to Britain were minimal. By the back doors of Spain, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Baltic, British power first pricked French power and then, in alliance with Russia, defeated it. Only at the very end, at Waterloo in June 1815, did British forces engage the main French army under Napoleon himself, when France was bled white by twenty-three years of war, whereas Britain, with less than half the population, still had the best of its human resources to draw on.

The economic historians pinpointed incentives to efficient use of resources as the key to economic development in the West. But efficient resource use not only stimulated the economy, but was the fruit of those niches of liberty—collective and individual, religious and political—that, as Montesquieu and Hume suggested, cumulatively defined Western identity from the age of the Germanic invasions on. And as the niches of liberty provided and promoted incentives to efficient use of resources, so the advantages of efficiency fed back to the niches of liberty, justifying, strengthening, and expanding them. No account of Western identity focused on only one side of the equation, on either capitalism or liberty, on material incentives or libertarian idealism, is adequate. It was the inextricable correlation of both motivations that drove the combined engine of democracy and growth. For a thousand years, the scattered communities "where several governed" provided intermittent evidence of the material as well as spiritual advantages that could result from political and social pluralism, until, in the era of Napoleon, the long prehistory of Western liberal democracy met the challenge of a rival modernization.

The British world power that outmaneuvered Napoleonic France, wearing down her energies until she was ripe for defeat in open combat, was preeminently power based on parsimony and efficiency. One reason that Edmund Burke and, with him, other British political thinkers were not overly down-

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