Bryn Jones investigates whether there are Roman lessons in the fall of its empire for Europe and the USA?
Wars, economic disarray, social conflicts: how to make sense of the multiple crises of western capitalist societies? Traditional Marxist, ecological, authoritarian-populist, liberal democratic etc., all offer explanatory frameworks. A more recent, comprehensive and forensic approach is the comparative history of empires. The UK may have relinquished its old colonial empire but it is still part of an empire, the US-dominated “West’. Interestingly, in the USA both Right and Left are more willing to focus on empires and their decline. Many worry that America’s global powers may be ending. This anxiety is fed by the fate of historical predecessors, not just those of Britain or other European states, but the long-gone Roman Empire.
Political traditions – America’s Founding Fathers modelled its institutions on the Roman Republic – Hollywood films, other arts, and the blogosphere have bolstered this fascination. Besides blockbusters such as Gladiator or Ben Hur, film director Francis Ford Coppola’s obsession led him to mortgage his personal properties to finance Megalopolis, an allegoric film on the fall of the Roman republic set in contemporary America. Perhaps inspired by a possible Trump dictatorship?
But Europeans shouldn’t just shrug off all this as a peculiarly American fixation. US world hegemony may be tracking the fate of Rome’s empire but that supremacy is not unilateral. Heather and Rapley’s intriguing book (Why Empires Fall) widens US hegemony to a broader empire of “TheWest” Europe and other G7 states may go down with Uncle Sam. Empires, whether antique or modern, share critical common features and dynamics. Understanding how they handled their crises can help anticipate today’s national and international politics and economics. Despite a few colonial territories from the old European empires the West’s empire today is based on trade privileges and financial power over formally sovereign states.
The empires of Rome and the nineteenth century Europeans were built on expanding ownership and control of land. Europe and the USA, particularly the latter, control the international monetary system, the World Bank, IMF and international banking system. World Trade Organisation policies mostly favour US and EU interests. Most trading and financial transactions are in US dollars, not the Chinese yuan or Russian rouble. However, these imbalances are changing as the global South aligns increasingly with the BRICS trade bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which could become the basis for a rival hegemony led by China. A key BRICS aim is to displace, eventually, automatic use of the US dollar as the world’s trading and payment currency. This change would substantially weaken America’s political leverage over less powerful states and worsen its public sector deficit.
Rome lacked such financial powers, so does it still provide a useful comparison? Its technological level was comparatively primitive: reliant on horse-drawn transport, slaves not machines and human physicality in warfare. It lacked internet, or even telegraphy systems. Consequently, imperial governance took longer but its scale was still relatively wide. Moreover, as Heather and Rapley show, there are three challenges common to Rome and today’s West. How to: 1) meet the costs of an empire but avoid unjust and inflammatory levels of taxation; 2) contain leaders and populations of external territories on the “periphery” of the empire which envy its benefits and whose volatility precipitates mass migration movements; 3) deal with rival would-be empires, which pose military and economic threats.
The fiscal costs and burdens of both empires are strikingly similar. An estimated 30% – 50% of Rome’s imperial budget went to the military. The USA spends much of its GNP on military resources: $801 billion, or 25% of the federal budget. To which should be added the 23% of the (2020) $51 billion foreign aid spent as “military aid”. Western states today do spend more on other sectors, like social security (largely absent in Rome). However, the incidence of taxation seems similar in both empires. Then as now, the elites were adept at avoiding tax payments, shifting the burden disproportionately onto the lower orders: the plebs and peasants in antiquity, the working and lower middle classes today. Tax extraction and its limitations push imperial governments, Roman and later, into massive debts. State debt has gone from a 1980 level of 36.77% of GDP in the UK to 100.75 in 2022/3. In the USA the corresponding figures are from 30.59% to 129%. Inflation, taxation and rents push poorer sections of populations into debt. Household debts in the UK and USA have also ballooned. The average US homeowner now spends a quarter of their income on mortgage repayments. Similar costs apply in the UK where, as of 2024, total individual debt averaged 121% of notional income. Such trends towards unredeemable debt during Rome’s decline forced many into servitude or slavery.
Empires” foreign affairs are complicated by the need to accommodate the peripheral zones that are difficult to incorporate or which resist outright absorption, but need to be neutralised. Rome’s peripheries were north and west Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube and the area east of the Euphrates. It never fully conquered these, but on the European frontiers, military conflicts and trade with the Empire concentrated and “modernised” the barbarians” military and political structures. Together with population and climatic factors the resultant conflicts pushed semi-Romanised peoples to seek land within the empire itself, either as mercenary armies, or as peasant settlers, or as both. Today there is an analogous geographical arc of instability: economically distressed and war-torn states stretch from sub-Saharan Africa, through the Middle East and into the Caucasus. Civil conflicts in Central and South America have engendered disruptive turmoil and mass migration. Waves of desperate refugees seek security, employment and income in the USA or Europe.
Beyond these peripheries are rival would-be empires. In Roman times it was Persia and, later, Islamic Arabia; today Russia and China. These wannabe empires bid to control the wealth of agricultural products, minerals and other resources in the peripheries, especially in Africa. Largely failed by the West’s monetary and financial systems – sub-Saharan Africa spends more on debt payments than all its health and welfare services – these and other states in the global South look to China, Russia and other BRICS for support. Potential loss of foodstuffs and raw materials from these countries threatens the West’s economies. The associated mass migration presents the West’s rulers with both foreign and domestic problems: co-ordination of controls on migration internationally and responses to extremist political “solutions” at home.
It was once thought that the Roman Empire handled intra-empire migration well – with African soldiers on Hadrians Wall and middle-eastern merchants in London – but couldn’t cope with barbaric immigrants from outside. Germanic hordes crossing the Rhine allegedly triggered the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire. Newer interpretations credit these migrations with a much more positive role. Some Germanics were relocated to agricultural areas within the empire replacing populations decimated by war and plagues. Others transitioned from being volunteer mercenaries to forming entire regiments under their own leaders. Rome then used these forces against other barbarian incursions and to fight in civil wars over the imperial throne. This also solved the problems of recalcitrant and more costly recruits from within the Empire. Eventually, in the western half of the empire, barbarian kings became nominal regents of the official emperor in Italy and, later, of Constantinople. For over a century the Franks, having adopted a regional version of Latin language and law, became guardians of Rome’s culture and, eventually, Catholic Christian religion – whose church became virtually a surrogate of the state.
Heather and Rapley advocate analogous solutions to resolve the West’s economic and social problems. They recommend economic conciliation with China, while “agreeing to disagree” on human rights, reforms of the currently exploitative relations with periphery states – cancelling or abating debt and promoting less predatory financial investments. Additionally, absorption of immigrants in more rational ways into their flagging economies to boost the West’s productivity and innovation levels and remedy its population decline. Debt cancellations would, they argue, lessen the attractiveness of China and Russia to “periphery” countries, while also reducing poverty-driven migration. The West’s vampyric financial debt machine would also need radical reform and the penchant for military “solutions” to perceived threats, especially in the Middle East would have to change. The military suppression of Palestinians has antagonised most BRICS nations. Powerful social and political forces in the West would be needed to overcome its elites” inevitable resistance to such changes.
Contrary to the image of a catastrophic “Fall”, the eastern, Byzantine empire and its culture survived in reduced form for centuries. While the western Roman empire somehow managed a relatively successful transition from empire to a culturally unified set of nation states. A pathway that analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck advocate for the EU part of the West.* However, the preservation of cultural values, stressed by Heather and Rapley, depended on the proactive and transformative power of a major social movement: Christianity. This not only ended the worst forms of Roman civic violence, against women and infants, its representatives pacified barbarian forces and established church and monastic institutions which conserved and developed literary knowledge and humanistic values. Values movements with similarly transformative potential are effectively subdued in today’s West. Authoritarian xenophobia and rapacious neoliberalism seem to have the political upper hand over such alternatives as environmentalism, feminism and an enfeebled socialism. Yet without some hegemonic ideology to mobilise change the eventual fall of the West’s empire could be more severe than that of Rome. Wars on three continents, a disintegrating global economic system and failing democracies suggest that future parallels with Roman decline may become even closer.
* Streeck’s book Take Back Control will be reviewed in a future issue of Chartist.
Thinking of our future as being about sustaining an empire we already don’t have seems peculiarly hidebound to me. The puzzle I would like to hear eplained is why do relatively wealthy, healthy, hopeflly largely sane people choose authoritarins to rule them?