Nation-building is a fraught and messy business. Michael Ignatieff knows that well. As a journalist he has reported from war zones since 1993 and is the author of several books, Blood and Belonging, The Warrior’s Honor and Virtual War, on the nature of ethnic conflict and intervention. Ignatieff’s latest offering, Empire Lite, is a series of essays exploring the new global empire that is nation-building: the imposition of ‘order’ that follows humanitarian intervention in the ‘failed’ states of Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Ignatieff manages to avoid the didactic and self-righteous style that characterises journalistic writing on this topic—the tirade against land cruisers and expensive hotels. He is more interested in exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in nation-building than in outright condemnation.
Ignatieff does not shy away from naming things. The language of nation-building hides the reality of imperialism in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. To describe nation-building as an exercise in ‘humanitarian intervention’ by the ‘international community’ is a fiction that obscures the fact that none of it would have happened without United States military power. Far from being motivated by humanitarianism, the nation-building exercises in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are exercises in imperialism, interventions crafted to suit American objectives. They are imperial because their foremost purpose is to create order in border zones essential to the great powers. And while nominal power may return to the local capital, the real power remains in Washington, London and Paris. For Ignatieff the ‘Empire Lite’ is ‘hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration’. With its rhetoric of democracy and humanitarian need, nation-building is the kind of empire you get in the human rights era.
Ignatieff exposes the million-dollar enterprise that nation-building has become. Now the cure of choice for ethnic civil war and state failure, the nation-building ‘caravan’ has moved from Cambodia to Angola, to Sarajevo, to Pristina, to Dili, to East Timor and then on to Afghanistan. The caravan’s most recent settling place, Iraq, is too recent to feature in Ignatieff’s study. Wherever the caravan settles it creates an instant boom town, but this boom eventually goes bust.
The bridge across the river Neretva in the town of Mostar, in south-western Bosnia, has come to symbolise the tragic absurdity of the nation-building enterprise. The bridge was built in 1566 to link the mosques and markets from one side of the city to the other and was a structure