How should we evaluate the Roman Empire? It’s an important question, given the role that the image of Rome has played in modern imperialism, both as a model for imperial powers and as a source of legitimisation for the whole enterprise (echoes of this recently in reports of Mark Zuckerberg’s reputed obsession with Augustus, which bears a striking resemblance to the sorts of claims made by IR theorists like Michael Doyle about the ‘Augustan moment’ when hegemonic power becomes accepted and welcomed by its subjects). It’s difficult to buy into the “and don’t forget the wine” discourse of What The Romans Did For Us without getting entangled in similar claims about the bringing of Civilisation (i.e. European Culture) to the benighted primitives of South America, Africa and Asia.
Fortunately the great scholar-politician of our time has the answer: it’s complicated.
‘In a deep Freudian way, I have no doubt that the EU integrationists want to recreate the Roman Empire. The differences between the EU and the Roman Empire are instructive.’ The EU’s attempts to create ‘a unity’ of laws and symbols has failed to create a ‘sense of allegiance’ of the kind that Roman citizens felt throughout their multi-ethnic empire. ‘The only parallel for that sense of E Pluribus Unum is the US. With the best will in the world, the EU is not like that.’
Even by Boris Johnson’s normal standards, this paragraph – taken from recent remarks in Washington DC on receiving the Irving Kristol Award for Being Right Wing from the American Enterprise Institute, as reported in The Spectator – is thoroughly incoherent. It’s entirely unclear whether the problem with the EU is its wish to recreate the Roman Empire by subsuming different ethnicities and cultures in a single polity, or its failure to do so successfully.
The most obvious explanation is that Johnson had launched into a boilerplate “why would anyone want to recreate Rome unless they were EVIL?” (note that his previous analogy was Brussels as the Death Star), and then suddenly realised that his hosts were perfectly happy with the idea of “doing Rome” as a positive thing and backtracked. After all, no one’s likely to try to make a story out of “Boris expresses regret that EU was unsuccessful in creating multi-ethnic empire”, least of all The Spectator which frames the story in terms of “Boris allowed to show his intellectual heft rather than being plagued by tittle-tattle”.
I’m most intrigued by the incongruous evocation of Freud. On first glance, it looks like a way of asserting something Johnson knows to be true despite not having a shred of evidence – the EU zealots don’t realise themselves that they are driven by an unconscious desire for imperium, while he possesses the analytical knowledge to discern the truth behind their policies. But the strict sense of the sentence is that it is Johnson’s lack of doubt that needs to be understood in Freudian terms – as the expression of its unconscious opposite (actually he doesn’t believe a word of this twaddle), or as the projection of his own desires for dominance, love and excretion onto the Other. America as Mother, Europe as Father, or vice versa..?
Apologies if I’m being dim (and tired), but isn’t the primary issue here a distinction between multi-national Europe and the federated/united States of America? The USA is a nation and the EU is not? (Although at this point the nation / empire question threatens to arise in a way that is far too much for me just now).
Oh, I think there are loads of differences between the EU and the USA, and one could argue that this makes the latter more like Rome than the former (though still not very like Rome, tbh). What’s striking is Johnson’s inconsistency in evaluating this: the EU wants to be more federalist and so more like Rome, and that’s obviously bad, while the USA is already federalist and so like Rome, and that’s good. There’s an aborted attempt at justifying this dramatic switch by claiming that the US was successful in building a new common identity – but that implies it would be a good thing is the EU could do this, which isn’t the view of the Brexity crowd…
Yes, thanks: I was being quite tired (dim).