Conversations with History

INCOHERENT EMPIRE
By Michael Mann (interview with Harry Kreisler)

Institute of International Studies
February 27, 2004

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Mann/mann-con0.html

--This interview is part of the Institute's "Conversations with History" series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley's distinction as a global forum for ideas.

HARRY KREISLER: Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Michael Mann, who is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His publications include The Sources of Social Power, Volumes I and II; two forthcoming books, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy; and he is the author most recently of Incoherent Empire.

BACKGROUND

HARRY KREISLER: Michael, welcome to Berkeley.

MICHAEL MANN: Thank you.

HARRY KREISLER: Where were you born and raised?

MICHAEL MANN: I was born and raised in Manchester, England. I'm from a lower-middle class background. I passed examinations, went to an elite grammar school, and then went to Oxford University.

HARRY KREISLER: Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

MICHAEL MANN: My father was an upwardly mobile man. He started as a salesman and ended up as the sales director of the corporation -- making asbestos.

HARRY KREISLER: Oh, gee.

MICHAEL MANN: He was a man who had not received a high level of education, but he was a highly intelligent man. He read quite a lot and he was interested in politics, and we used to argue a lot from the age of fourteen. He was a liberal, and I declared myself being a bit further left of that at that age. He influenced me a great deal, but not in specific ways.

HARRY KREISLER: Was it the arguments? Was he the kind of person who made you think about what you were saying?

MICHAEL MANN: Oh, yes. Even after he retired and I was already established, after my mother died, especially, he used to love my coming back home, and he would start an argument with me about whatever it was, the Soviet Union or anything. He used to love it.

HARRY KREISLER: At Oxford, what did you plan to study, and then where did you finally wind up?

MICHAEL MANN: I was admitted to read law, which was my father's desire, and to be in the professions rather than in business. I gave that up after about three weeks, having [studied the law concerning] murder, which was the most interesting part! I read history, which I had always enjoyed, and I still enjoy reading history books. I love the narrative story about other worlds, about other societies, and so I quite enjoyed reading history, though I wasn't a highly committed undergraduate, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I graduated. I thought I wanted to be a social worker, and, indeed, I qualified as a probation officer, and then was asked to do a little bit of social research, and that started me on the path that led me to sociology. I did a Ph.D. at Oxford University in Sociology.

HARRY KREISLER: And what was that Ph.D. on?

MICHAEL MANN: It was a study of a factory. Actually, it was a British subsidiary of an American corporation, General Foods Corporation. They were moving their factory, which made Maxwell House coffee and one or two other products, from central Birmingham to a rural site, and they were offering all their employees a chance at moving, and so I did a survey of 300 employees before and after the move, seeing who moved and who didn't, and why. It was a very practical industrial and community/family kind of sociology. Then I gradually branched out into broader things.

COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

HARRY KREISLER: I guess we would classify you as a comparative sociologist, who works with historical materials. Is that the best characterization of your work?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, for the last twenty years that's what I've been doing -- very broad-scale historical and comparative work.

HARRY KREISLER: What are the skills and prerequisites for doing that kind of work?

MICHAEL MANN: You have to read very widely. You have to go on a "pillaging and looting" raid into the work of archeologists, historians, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists who are studying groups around the world. You have to learn analytical skills of deciding what is the crucial information you need to know in order to test a broader hypothesis, and collect materials on that and advance the argument forward. You're always zigzagging between empirical data, very precise evidence, and more general explanations. You're refining one in relation to the other. You can go first in collecting a body of data, then you get some new ideas and you go back towards theory, and then you realize you need new evidence because you're raising questions that you didn't know existed, and you go back towards that.

It's a continuous solving of intellectual puzzles: How do things work, how do societies work? Human beings have lived in very different ways in different periods and across the world, and trying to figure out how things work is something that is very satisfying when you think you have some answers. It enables you to cast light on your own society, because rather than taking your own society as completely natural and for granted, you say, "Why do we do things like that?" It makes problematic things that most people take for granted.

HARRY KREISLER: Where does your predilection for comparative work come from, seeing where you're from in a wider context?

MICHAEL MANN: Well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think that having been a provincial, lower-middle-class boy at that age with a strong Northern accent, and going to Oxford, which was a different world, and not my world; as a student I was already comparing these ways of life and thinking about them. Politically, I've always been a bit of an independent, though with what in the U.S. you call "liberal tendencies."

I don't take things for granted, so what made an impact on me was the Cold War and the nuclear threat. Whereas my leftist friends tended to see this as just yet another part of the massive capitalist plot around the world, I came to the conclusion that it was a separate issue, a geopolitical struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States and its Western allies. It couldn't be reduced to that analysis; these were different parts of modern social structure. So that tendency to disaggregate problems into different parts of an explanation has been there for a long time.

People say that I am a Weberian, following Max Weber, who was someone who accepted the power of the economy, as Marx did, but also added political-military-religious phenomena as tremendously important. For the last twenty years I have been [asking] what are the relations between these very important aspects of social structure; what is their relationship to each other and why do some become more important at times than others?

EMPIRE

HARRY KREISLER: In your major works, you're trying to understand the social basis of the elements of power. Is that a way to put it?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, that's right. If people want to exercise power there are four essential ways of doing it: one is to control the means of economic production: economic power; one is to control the ideology, the belief system; the third is to control military power; and the fourth is to control the state, political institutions. So I'm looking at the ways in which groups have used these forms of power in different combinations, in different times and places. And that's something that comes to its most congruent fruition in this book, Incoherent Empire.

HARRY KREISLER: Let me show your new book. I know that this book was in a way a distraction from your ongoing project of doing the third volume [of The Sources of Social Power. What drew you to focus on empire? Was it the emerging political context, both in Britain and the United States after 9/11?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, but mediated by the fact that I do hold dual citizenship -- I'm both a U.K. citizen and a U.S. citizen. I've lived in the U.S. for seventeen years now, and I became extremely alarmed and enraged about what my two governments were doing, in the belief that this would be disastrous for the world and for themselves, for our two countries. This is the first book that I have written which comes out of the scholarly world and enters into contemporary politics, and it did come from this [belief]. But also I had the belief that I could contribute to this debate, based on terms of my more general scholarly work, and not only my Sources of Social Power, but also my more recent work on fascism and ethnic cleansing.

I'd come to appreciate for the first time the importance of pragmatism among politicians, and in some ways, the notion of politicians doing dirty backstairs deals and compromises. Instead of seeing this as a betrayal of ideals, we should regard this as quite a healthy and useful thing for politicians to do, because in my experience of fascist and ethnic cleansing, people who were motivated very strongly by values and [who] believed that you could use any means to achieve these values brought disaster to the world. I thought that the Bush administration was overcommitted to certain general values without considering the consequences of action.

HARRY KREISLER: Now, before we talk about your Empire book, help us understand how history can inform policy and public debate, because that's the area you're moving into with this book. Not to say that you have policy recommendations, but your project suggests that history can help inform a discussion of this response to 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

MICHAEL MANN: History doesn't repeat itself, that's perfectly true, so you can't draw absolute lessons from history. But you can see that if we have now an imperial venture -- and we'll talk about that later -- there have been imperial ventures in the past, and we can see what they were based on, what brought success and what brought failure, and at what cost. I do argue very strongly in the book that we draw from the lessons of nineteenth-century empires and that certain of the mistakes that we have made are ones that wouldn't have been made if we had a reasonable knowledge of what previous empires did, and what worked and what didn't work then.

HARRY KREISLER: Your book came out at an opportune time, not just because of events, but at a time when the chattering classes and the public began to embrace the notion that the U.S. is an empire. This discussion was different from what had come before. It was almost as if empire came out of the closet. So before we talk about empire and what history tells us, help us understand what were the factors that led to this situation where the neoconservatives raised the banner of empire and said, "Let's do it." Many of your compatriots from Great Britain who are now writing on the U.S. debate wholeheartedly endorsed that.

MICHAEL MANN: It came in three stages of escalation, the first is obviously after 1945, when the other empires apart from the Soviet empire collapsed, and the U.S. essentially was the dominant power over two-thirds of the world. But it exercised an indirect or informal empire, if you want to call it that, so that by and large, it was not invading foreign countries, or at least it did so only as a last resort and with important local allies at its side. By and large, it supported client states around the world against the enemies of those client states who were often supported by the Soviet Union and China. So, firstly, there was an enormous growth of American power in that period.

The second escalation is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which leaves the U.S. unchallenged. Throughout the 1990s we have this enormous disproportion, especially in military power, between the U.S. and anyone else, which results now in the U.S. having 40 percent of the entire world's military expenditure.

So the notion that, "We have this power, so maybe we should use it; why not? Can't we do good for the world by using this power?" This began to grow in the 1990s, and so we can't put it all onto the Bush administration. Under President Clinton there was a more active foreign policy, but it was restrained. It was restrained above all by the fact that Americans are not interested in empire. Americans are not terribly interested in the world outside, and certainly not in committing our young men and our tax dollars into massive projects.

HARRY KREISLER: Let's talk about the comparison of the Bush leadership group with the Clinton leadership group. In your terms, the Clintons had two agendas -- the main one being globalization, and the other, later in the administration, being humanitarian intervention. The Kosovo war was consistent with a notion of indirect rule of a hegemonic power, whereas with Bush, with this break that you just described, you get a wholehearted notion of embracing empire, of going in and controlling places.

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, that is a big shift. And you're quite right, the two elements of the 1990s [included] globalization and the notion of free trade (and not necessarily for us, but certainly others ought to adhere to free trade -- we carry on subsidizing our farmers and other people), but opening up the markets: this is an informal imperialism, on the one hand. On the other hand, the growth of humanitarian interventionism. But that was a little bit cautious and notable for its failures, as well as our failures to act. We didn't act in Rwanda in 1994, but we did act in Kosovo.

The great successful humanitarian intervention is one that we never talk about, which was the invasion of Cambodia by the Vietnamese Communist Army in 1979, which ended the Cambodian genocide. That was a spectacular success. But, of course, they did it in a very clever way. They had Cambodian clients, they were asked to come in by Khmer Rouge factions who were distressed by what was going on, and they invaded and stopped the genocide. The notion [in the 1990s] that we could intervene for humanitarian reasons was growing, but that was multilateral, of course. We weren't going to do it on our own.

HARRY KREISLER: Drawing on your work as a historian and comparative sociologist, what forms have empire taken in the past? What are the ways that you do empire when we move from "empire lite" I'll call it, to muscular empire under President Bush?

MICHAEL MANN: What you do is start invading and colonizing other territories. Characteristically empires begin by making trades deals, imposing pressure on the traders and establishing port colonies, and then gradually increasing the pressure on the groups who live in the interior. Then you say, "Okay, we're going to control this, we're going to produce more security here, and more security of access for us. We're going to go in and fight." And you take in an army and you engage the army of the local ruler, and you defeat it.

But at that exact moment, you essentially sit down and wait. What happens then is that the local sub-rulers of this ruler all have a decision to make: Do they carry on supporting their ruler, who has just been humiliated in this way, and who looks as if he might be a loser, or do you come and support the British, or the French, or the Romans, or the Mongols, whoever it is in previous periods? What happens is that enough of them come for you to have very substantial native allies, local allies. You use them to help pacify the colony, and you delegate local powers to them. That's the first stage of indirect. Then you gradually increase the pressure on them and the power, and you gradually absorb them into your administration -- you absorb their solders into your armed forces, their administrators into your administration, and they become part of the empire. These are the characteristic stages.

If we think about this continent, when Cortez arrived in Mexico, he didn't even have to engage the Aztecs, because the Tlaxcalans were in revolt against the Aztecs. They came to him and said, "Support us and we'll support you," and they jointly defeated the Aztecs. Then the Spanish increased their control over them.

PROBLEMS OF EMPIRE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

HARRY KREISLER: Your previous analyses in your earlier works had led you to look at the dimensions of power. In your analysis in Incoherent Empire, you're applying those dimensions and your understanding of them to look now at whether the U.S. can do empire. Talk a little about that, and the dimensions of power that one has to look at to say, "Is this going to work?"

MICHAEL MANN: In order to exercise general power, you need some combination of these four types: economic, ideological, military, and political. You can go light, perhaps, on one of them, but it's difficult to go light more generally. In talking about how the British or the Romans did empire, I've talked about both military power and political power -- the political power getting allies and ruling through them, and then gradually increasing political control over them. But there's also the ideology.

In former times, imperialists were not confronted by nationalism, which is a modern ideology, and so there was no "if you deal with the British you're a traitor to the nation." You were actually benefiting the group whose leader you were by giving them the patronage of the Romans or the British. There wasn't an ideology strongly opposed to it, and, indeed, what they could all see, in the case of the nineteenth-century empires, was that the British and the French and the Dutch and others were more modern than they were, and they had science and technology -- guns, of course -- a superior economy. They wanted this knowledge, and they often converted to Christianity assuming that this was the key to it. If you acquired this powerful god, then you could become powerful, too. So the ideological power was there, and, of course, [imperialist powers] financed it.

HARRY KREISLER: Shall we move to the U.S. now?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, yes.

We find we have the military power to conquer in the first place, though there is a weakness. The weakness is that after you defeat the enemy's army and take the capital, you then have to disperse your forces to pacify the country. If you do this yourself, you need -- the British used to calculate -- you need two and a half times the number of troops. When you're dispersing your troops, they become more vulnerable to attack by small groups -- guerillas, we call them nowadays. And in the present day, a special problem has arisen, which is that there is a revolution in warfare of weapons of the weak. The Kalashnikov (there are supposed to be 100 million Kalashnikovs in the world), the shoulder-[mounted] grenade launcher, the Semtek, the bombs that suicide bombers can strap to their chests. These are weapons of the weak: you don't need much resources for them. These are no good for defeating American armies in the field, but they're good at taking pot-shots at highly armored Russians in Chechnya or Americans in Iraq. So that's a specific problem. If you do it yourself, which previous empires didn't do in military terms, and disperse your troops, they become vulnerable.

But politically, we went into Iraq without any allies and without any prospects of allies. Well, there's one exception to that, which is the Kurds in the north. Things are lot smoother in the Kurdish areas; we can rule through the Kurds, and we can decide whether we want to increase pressures on them or not, whether we want to stop them having a Kurdistan state or not. That's our choice now. But elsewhere in Iraq, we went in with a bunch of Iraqi exiles who hadn't been there for twenty years or more, and who didn't have these networks of patient-client relations on the ground which they could activate to support the Americans and the British if the Americans and the British support them.

HARRY KREISLER: I want to take apart what you've been saying. First, you're pointing out that we're trying to do empire in an entirely different international situation. But let's look at this presumption that we can do it, and that comes from what we've gotten very good at, which is the revolution in military affairs, namely that technology has empowered us to both believe and to act in such a way that we can control the battlefield. That is pivotal to understanding what the Bush administration thinks it can do.

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, absolutely.

HARRY KREISLER: What does that mean? What is the military revolution, first, the empowering side? But then we want to talk about what you just suggested, which is that there is a change on the other side.

MICHAEL MANN: Yes. The revolution in military affairs combines two things. Firstly, smart bombs, precision firepower. We think of it in terms of bombs, but it's also artillery shells; laser-guided is the key technology here. So that brings in the second element, which is the revolution in military communications, so that we have special-forces soldiers on the ground with a handheld GPS receiver, and they're in communication with satellite planes flying at high altitude, able to photograph what's going on in real time, and with the battlefield headquarters, which are rooms with banks and banks of computers.

HARRY KREISLER: Even in the United States.

MICHAEL MANN: Yes.

HARRY KREISLER: I mean, it even extends to the Central Command in Tampa.

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, yes, quite. This means that we can rain offensive devastation on the enemy before they even get into range. Indeed, in Afghanistan this was at its most spectacular, because there were only about four hundred Americans on the ground when the Northern Alliance troops marched into Kabul and overthrew the Taliban. Two hundred of these were the special forces with the GPS receivers, telling the bombers where to bomb the Taliban, and the other two hundred were CIA agents with suitcases stuffed full of dollars to bribe warlords. That's not high-tech, but . . .

HARRY KREISLER: So that combination is empowering with regard to the notion that you can do empire: you can concentrate forces, you can take Iraq militarily with only 100,000 troops. But once you move to implementing empire, which is to control politically the situation on the ground, or to control the aftermath of the military victory, then you raise all the problems that you just discussed, which is that the weak also have been [militarily] empowered.

MICHAEL MANN: Right. The offense: when you go into battle, into the capital, Baghdad, you concentrate your forces. And given our offensive firepower superiority, we didn't need all that many. We needed considerably less than 100,000 troops to do this. But once you've done that and you try to pacify the country, you have to disperse them, and that needs many more.

Now, it's also important for the revolution in military affairs that we can conquer the enemy without taking much losses ourselves. That's very important, because the American military is not happy with losses. But we now have a way of avoiding them, so it was thought.

Now, the motivations for going into Iraq are extremely complicated, and there are a number of them, some of them are quite good motives and others not so good. But underlying them all is this great confidence: "We don't have to bother too much about our motives, because we can do it. We can do it without suffering much losses." But it's once you disperse the troops that they become vulnerable to this second revolution in military affairs, the weapons of the weak. We can't control a global arms trail, which disperses Kalashnikovs and the like across the world. And the collapse of the Soviet Union produced a lot of surplus weaponry, and for sale. So there's a real military problem at the end of the process.

HARRY KREISLER: This military problem at the end of the process when you move to empire links up with what you were referring to earlier, which is the changed international environment in terms of what people think about what they want, and whether they want an outsider coming in to rule. You get an explosive situation when the weapons [of the weak] come together with a belief that "We should be running our own country and not the Americans."

MICHAEL MANN: That's right. Yes, this is the shift in political and ideological [ideals], which comes down to the very general assertion I made that this is not the age of empire, this is the age of nation state. The notion that Iraq is for Iraqis as Somalia is for Somalis, as France is for the French, this is dominant across the world. This is the main ideology of our times, national self-determination. That makes it really difficult. The British and the Romans were never confronted by this belief. Sorry, I correct myself. In the twentieth century [the British] were, partly as a result of the spread of liberalism or socialism to India and places like that. Indians for the first time began to think of themselves as "Indians"; previously, it had been our term for them. And so the British were confronted by Indian nationalism. Once that happened, the writing was on the wall for the European empires . . . the self-destruction of World War II to add to it. But the Indian nationalist movement was too strong even before World War II for the British to last very much longer. And this rolled around the world disposing of the other empire. In the case of Vietnam, of course, it was Vietnamese nationalism which defeated us.

So though Iraqis, if we can return to Iraq, are grateful to us for liberating them from Saddam -- they really hate Saddam and his memory, or almost all of them do -- they don't want to be occupied by America. So they have a deeply ambivalent view of us. Though they're disputing among themselves -- Kurds, Shiite, Sunni -- they dislike Americans even more if Americans are occupying and seeming to rule over them.

So it's this political and ideological shift in the world which makes it . . . it wasn't just a mistake that we invaded Iraq without political allies; we'd have had very great difficulty in getting them. We could have made overtures to the Shia, but of course in doing that we'd be setting in motion political forces that we don't quite like, the possibility of a pro-Iranian theocratic movement. But this is what the more pragmatic empires in the nineteenth century would have done. They would have assumed that at a later stage they could suppress that, but used them as their allies. We, of course, used Islamists in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. That's how we used bin Laden at first, until the situation changed and he turned against us.

HARRY KREISLER: You are very convincing, and events are confirming your thoughts about the limits of the "muscular empire" notions within the [Bush] administration and the reliance on military power. But also in this book you're raising questions also about "empire lite," mainly the notion of humanitarian intervention. You're not saying not to intervene against genocide, but rather that our normative structure, our Wilsonian ideals, may not be applicable in the way we think broadly, because of ethic nationalism. Talk a little about that basic failure not only to understand the nationalism that drives the whole country, but also the ethnic nationalisms within one country.

MICHAEL MANN: These don't make it impossible for us to intervene, but they should make us very cautious. Humanitarian intervention could work if certain conditions were met. One, that our motives have to seem good. In Iraq, that's not easy, because of oil, of course. But this also tends to mean that we have to do it with local allies. If we're going to intervene in a country, we've got to have some credible local allies. That feeds into the fact that if we're just intervening and then leaving, we have to have a credible alternative government on the ground. Of course, this was so for the Vietnamese in Cambodia; it was so in Kosovo -- we might have had reservations about the KLO, the Kosovo Liberation Army, but they could control the territory. We had reservations about whether they were going to "ethnic-cleanse" Serbs, and they did to some extent, but nonetheless, if you decided this was the lesser of two evils, they could do it. We could have done it in Rwanda, because there was an alternative Tutsi government there invading the country at the time.

So provided there are local forces, you need a little bit of protection, but [if] they can operate the country, that's possible. Of course, you have to decide whether their rule is going to be any better.

HARRY KREISLER: Right. And the question is, is it realistic to think that you could in the short term impose Wilsonian formulas of elections and self-determination, and so on? This has to be structured over time for it to work, and then it might not, because of the ethnic nationalism that you're talking about.

MICHAEL MANN: Well, we have to be realistic about this. We can't go around imposing our notions of democracy. Democracy has a whole set of institutional preconditions, and indeed, our notion of democracy is not the only form of relatively tolerant liberal government. In Iraq, Saddam was a ruthless dictator, but the characteristic forms of rule lower down are [often] negotiations between clans and tribes and religious groupings and patron-client relations. They're not democratic, but they're decentralized, and they are relatively stable, and there can be a basis for a better government through these institutions. But it has to be through their own institutions, their nationally defined political system. It's very na•ve of us to think that you can impose democracy, wipe away previous institutions, and from this tabula rasa create a democracy. That's not how our own democracies emerged; they emerged over a long period of time through different kinds of institutions.

Our past, both Britain and the U.S., had a property franchise, where only males with a certain degree of property got the vote. That was the first form of representative government, and you went through that, and you also had civil rights, and you had habeas corpus -- denied in Guantanamo Bay at present! You had the gradual buildup of the institutions of representative government, which culminate a hundred years later in full-scale democracy for women and former slaves in this country. That took a long period of time.

HARRY KREISLER: In addition to the failures of our military intervention and primary emphasis on military power, which we've discussed, you also point to a very important intellectual flaw in American foreign policy, which relates to the failure to distinguish international from national terrorists. Talk a little about that, and explain what that difference is and why that matters, and why it will lead to a failure of policy.

MICHAEL MANN: Terrorists are groups who attack civilian targets, and they generally start by trying to attack military and political targets, but they're usually very protected, so they then retreat to attacking civilians. But 95 percent or more of the world's terrorists are what I call national terrorists who are implicated in some state somewhere and who are attacking their local oppressor, and so in their point of view they are freedom fighters. The state responds with its own form of state terrorism. And so there is a symmetry in Israel/Palestine between the two sides attacking each other and killing civilians on each side.

Now, -- this comes from my ethnic cleansing book -- this is a general pattern across the world, it's going through the world. It's occurring in many places. We shouldn't get involved on one side or the other, because these are very deep-rooted struggles. If we start to take sides rather than use our best offices to try and conciliate them, and to bring what pressure we have on both sides to come to some agreement, then we're going to be in trouble, because these movements of national terrorists are too deeply rooted to be able to suppress. The Chechens have been fighting against Russians intermittently for several centuries now. These are very deeply-rooted movements.

International terrorists are those who go beyond that. They have generally been defeated in their attempts at the local enemy, and they move as émigrés to Western countries and then they attack the U.S. and other Western targets. Now, obviously, they are attacking us; we have to attack them, we have to eliminate them, preferably by legal methods. But that's not too difficult, because as soon as they start letting off their bombs, characteristically they kill more of the local nationality, whatever that is, than they kill Americans. So the Indonesian government was reluctant to aid a war against international terrorism, but then came the Bali bombing, and they were compelled to enter into it. Most of the governments in the world are cooperating in this attempt to drive international terrorists out.

But when the Bush administration talks about terrorism, it characteristically produces a list -- it goes from al Qaeda, to Hamas, to Hezbollah -- the names vary according to the list. But they are putting together the national and the international terrorists. The State Department points out that Hamas and Hezbollah, who are respectively Palestinian and Lebanese movements, [have] killed Americans; but they did so in the early 1980s, when American troops were in Lebanon. They haven't killed any Americans since then.

Now, it's elementary not to attack people who are not attacking you, especially if in attacking them, you are attacking something that's much more deeply rooted than al Qaeda is. If you go and attack Muslim countries, and intern Muslims in Guantanamo Bay, and arrest Muslim immigrant men to this country, and check that their visas are in order, and deport some and incarcerate others if you've got only suspicions about them, then all of this fuels a more general Muslim discontent with us, and fuses together Muslim national terrorists with international terrorists. And I await -- every now and then over the last few months, you see a Hamas or Hezbollah leader who makes a statement saying, "America is our enemy. We should attack America." And there's a dispute immediately within the movement; so far they've been shouted down and they haven't done it. But I await the first Hamas or Hezbollah attacks on us, and that will be a sign of our failure. Already in Iraq there are international terrorists, and there were not under Saddam, because he was their enemy. There was Ansar al-Islam, but that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern part of the country. So we're creating more terrorists by this [war on Iraq].

HARRY KREISLER: It seems that the American government, whoever is in power, will have learned a lesson that you can't do empire in the traditional way unless you build a coalition. One can imagine a learning process through books like yours and through the repercussions of what's happening on the ground, but what is not clear is whether the American government (whichever administration is in power) will come to understand the distinction that you've just made between international and national terrorists. I want to ask you about that, because our military power is global; it has the mobility, flexibility, and the ability to be all over the world with rapid deployment forces. But is this distinction [understood by] our policymakers? I fear that the combination of this global reach with alliances with governments that have [internal] terrorists isn't digestible.

MICHAEL MANN: One particular case is very difficult to digest, and that is Israel-Palestine, because the U.S. has for a long time been very closely allied to IsraelÑthey absorb a third of our foreign aid. They're not a poor country, and the connections between the Right and this administration, and in a mysterious way, evangelical Protestantism, are strong. It's difficult for American politicians to actually go to the right policy, which is to bang both their heads together and not to show preferential treatment to Sharon; to accept that both Sharon and Arafat are the legitimate leaders of their people, and bash both their heads together to compromise. President Clinton did quite a reasonable job; he got quite close at Camp David and at Taba, and that's obviously the way forward.

The U.S. [has played a] very constructive role in Ireland, which I know quite a lot about, being a frequent visitor there. Senator Mitchell, the Chair of the Conciliation Committee in the Clinton administration and now the Bush administration, continues this policy of helping to bring both sides together, to give certain leads in certain ways, alongside the Irish and British governments, which have had enough of this. That's the way forward.

Now, I don't think it's impossible; and, in fact, the U.S. is not confusing [internal versus international conflicts] all over the world. The administration is well aware that in Kashmir it shouldn't side with either India or Kashmir, though it's tempted to side with India because of its identification of Muslin terrorists as the enemy. It does hold back a bit. But it should be possible in such a case -- Israel is a difficult one -- but elsewhere it should be possible for the U.S. to have a more aggressive conciliation policy.

HARRY KREISLER: It's in that role as a conciliator that we can make progress on these problems in a way that would further our other interests, economic or whatever.

MICHAEL MANN: That's right, because it makes places into stable territories, and we can trade with them, do business with them, and they can be our allies if we wanted allies. Of course, we also have considerable economic resources, and we not only prop up Israel, we prop up the Palestine Authority too, with much smaller sums, but nonetheless they would be in trouble without these sums. So we have bargaining leverage over groups like these.

HARRY KREISLER: Your book is called Incoherent Empire. Why "incoherent," and what does incoherence lead to?

MICHAEL MANN: It's incoherent because the different forms of power are at odds with each other. We have enormous military power over most of realm of military, although not in pacification; but we are schizophrenic about political power, about whether we have allies or not. We shift between these two. In terms of ideological power, our militarism is contradicting the values that we say we stand for.

Also, we do stand for these values. The world stands for more humane values than it did in the nineteenth century, so that we cannot do what the British did, and what the French did. I don't want to glorify previous empires. Faced with the Sunni triangle they would go rampaging in it. British forces would go in -- they'd loot and burn. They burned villages, they burned crops, they killed young men in villages that were supposed to have dealt with the enemy, and exercised an enormous amount of repression. We can't do that; the world has changed, and we don't want to do that. So we are held back, ideologically. There are contradictions between the different forms of power.

And also, there is not only weapons of the weak in the military terms, but in ideology, too, weapons of mass communication. Al Jazeera, Al-Arabia, Arab newspapers and websites communicate across the Middle East. Nineteenth century empires were not faced with local people who could communicate in this way. So they learn all about our atrocities, obviously seen through their own perspective.

HARRY KREISLER: So it's incoherent because these things are very uneven and they contradict each other.

MICHAEL MANN: Where does it lead? Well, it's leads to failure. In fact, in real terms, the administration is recognizing this. Our troops are being pulled back into a smaller number of securer bases, and leaving the Iraqi police force to take the brunt. We immediately see a reduction in our loss rate, our casualty rate, and a massive increase in theirs. We've abandoned the notions of privatizing Iraqi industry. We're accepting in various ways that we cannot do what we intended originally to do. Though we're not admitting it publicly, and the administration obviously can't admit anything publicly before the election, the administration is recognizing that this was a mistake, and it can't do it again. At least, I hope so. But, of course, if there's another 9/11, well, who knows what emotions this will stir up amongst us?

So this may be just a blip and we may return to what we used to have in the 1990s.

CONCLUSION

HARRY KREISLER: One final question. What would you tell students about how comparative historical sociology can contribute to policy debates like the ones we're having now about what to do after 9/11?

MICHAEL MANN: Firstly, all American students should know that a world exists beyond America. British students should know that a world exists beyond Britain. To know how other parts of the world live and think is extraordinarily desirable for whatever branch of work students are likely to go into later, whether it's public administration, business, or whatever, and to develop real knowledge of what Arabs are like, or Indians, or Chinese, or whatever. This is the basic justification for comparative [studies], that is, looking at other countries and not taking our own country as the limits of our vision.

And history? Well, I find history entertaining; not everybody does. But as well as that, it is instructive, it shows you the follies of human beings, and we can think a little bit about how we might not repeat them.

HARRY KREISLER: And the sociology?

MICHAEL MANN: Sociology is the queen of the social sciences, which brings all these things together.

HARRY KREISLER: On that very positive note after this lengthy discussion of our incoherent empire, Michael, I want to thank you very much for taking the time for being on our program today.

MICHAEL MANN: Thank you for inviting me.

HARRY KREISLER: And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.