THE DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL DOMINANCE: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980.

THE DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL DOMINANCE: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 by David Abernethy Yale university Press, $35.00

Bread Or Bullets

PHEW! FOR A BRIEF MOMENT there, it looked like the 1970s all over again. The booming American economy was suddenly saddled with rising oil prices, which threatened to lead to stagflation--or high unemployment and inflation rates. The even more vulnerable western European countries experienced long gas lines and protests. To top it off, the old Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared up again. The 1970s retro-look looked as if it was becoming the real thing.

But world leaders have learned the lessons of the past. OPEC oil ministers, wary of spurring the West into serious conservation measures and unwilling to disrupt the world economy, boosted output, while the Clinton administration opened the spigot of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, pumping up not just Al Gore's fortunes, but also the economy's. Meanwhile, the Republicans sputtered helplessly about the Clinton administration's disregard for America's national interests in opening up the reserve.

Pity the poor GOP. The fact is that even an uptick in oil prices, while it resulted in some grumbling, hardly prompted any members of the electorate to divert their attention from "Survivor" or "Big Brother" to foreign policy. Whether it's pounding away at the issue of military readiness or China policy, the GOP's biggest foe hasn't so much been the Clinton administration as the national disinterest of the American public in the national interest. It isn't so much a new age of good feelings as an age of no feelings.

The biggest victims of this quiescent era, however, are the foreign policy pundits. Absent an enemy--and, despite the huffing and puffing in some quarters, North Korea does not cut the mustard--the era of grand strategizing is over. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger belong to an earlier period, not to be duplicated. Journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are searching for the next big idea. But the foreign policy torch, such as it is, flickers only faintly and has been handed off to area studies experts who can explain local conflicts--Armenians versus Azeris, and so on--in mind-numbing detail. Such, globalization is the buzz word that off the tongues of world's financial gurus, but no one has explained what it is much beyond evoking Karl Marx's prediction of an "interdependence of nations."

It is thus something of a pleasant surprise to come across David B. Abernethy's The Dynamics of Global Dominance and Robert D. Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary. These two books could not be more different. The first is a learned discussion of European overseas empires, complete with the requisite methodological apparatus customary in political science these days. The second is a bird's-eye view of the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus as seen by a jaundiced travel writer. While both are flawed, they are packed with provocative insights. They suggest that perhaps there may yet be hope for the foreign affairs field.

Abernethy, a political science professor at Stanford University does not set his sights low. He wishes to provide nothing less than a sweeping account of the rise and fall of colonialism. Following in the path of scholar Charles Tilly, who has founded an entire geopolitical school of thought, Abernethy asks how it was possible for the rulers of eight countries that accounted for 1.4 percent of the land surface of the earth--Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy--could take over large chunks of Africa, Asia, and Central America. Abernethy suggests that, given the current instability around the globe, prosperous Western countries can even learn from the "more experienced weak, poor ones about the destabilizing consequences of globalization."

The notion of imperialism first came into vogue around the turn of the 19th century. Until then, it had been received wisdom that expansion was self-evidently a good thing. There were a few excesses, as demonstrated by the famous trial of Warren Hastings, the former British potentate in India, but a serene confidence in the essential rightness of colonialism was accepted. Sometimes European powers cooperated with each other abroad; in China, for example, German and British troops fought together to suppress the natives. When news of the outbreak of World War I arrived, surely to the surprise and delight of the locals, the British and German troops began firing upon each other.

But with the circulation of 19th-century British malcontent J.A. Hobson's denunciation (which was picked up by Lenin, who termed the imperial impulse the final stage of capitalism), imperalism started to come into bad odor. Things fell apart fairly quickly. The 20th century was about the crackup of the great European empires. World War I polished off the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the Russian monarchy. Hitler's thousand-year Reich crumbled after 13. The Soviet Union was an attempt to resuscitate the old czarist contraption, but even 70 years of ruthlessness weren't enough to extirpate nationalist feeling.

How did it all get started? Abernethy quite rightly notes that various enterprises pushed colonialism along. He writes, "People living in the metropoles were generally uninformed about and uninterested in overseas expansion" in its early stages in the 15th century. Sound familiar? Instead, "important decisions were made by leaders of sectoral institutions: monarchs, officials in the royal court, directors of government-chartered companies, heads of Roman Catholic missionary orders." Though Abernethy does not say so, this state of affairs is the dream of most national security types. Though they have to pay pious homage to democracy they would really like to get things done, which means that, for all the Council on Foreign Relations' talk about the need to get the broader public interested in foreign affairs, it's the last thing anyone really wants. What they want is deference and attention, not opinions.

European leaders were easily able to get away with thuggish behavior and drape it in the vestments of honor and nobility, not just profit. Abernethy suggests that things really got cracking once western Europe got the technological edge on its rivals. Coupled with the introduction of European diseases, subjugating the natives was a fairly easy enterprise. According to Abernethy, "The estimated three to four million Amerindians who inhabited Hispaniola as of 1492 numbered about fifteen thousand by 1518 and essentially disappeared by 1570." Sometimes, though, it was the whites who were vulnerable. The west African coast became known as "the white man's grave" because of malaria and other tropical illnesses.

For all his legwork recounting in some detail the history of imperialism, Abernethy shies from reaching much of a conclusion about its effects. He correctly observes that it did spread Western institutions--such as the rule of law in India. But he retreats into saying: "Among the most reprehensible aspects of colonialism, in my judgment, were its deliberate, systematic, and sustained assaults on human dignity." Well, yes. But that's not exactly news. Today, the great powers are on better behavior. A guilt complex is evident, a la Clinton apologizing in Africa for the excesses of the Cold War.

But that doesn't necessarily mean, as Robert Kaplan observes, that matters have improved all that much. Kaplan, you might say, takes a rather saturnine view of the world. Kaplan does not come by his views easily, and his book is the product of incredibly hard work. A tough traveler, he seems to have been everywhere and talked to everyone, from peasants to presidents.

His new book is a sequel, he says, to his earlier Balkan Ghosts, a work cited by President Clinton as a reason for not intervening in the Balkans. It depicted the hostilities in the Balkans as the product of ancient enmities that outside powers were incapable of extinguishing. Kaplan maintains that he is not offering a prescription in any of his books for whether to intervene, but simply describing harsh realities. Eastward to Tartary is no less bleak.

Kaplan writes that in the Near East democracy will be beside the point: "The fundamental issue will be the survival of the states themselves--by whatever means. The battle over Caspian pipelines, the coming conflict between Iran and Azerbaijan, the resurgence of Russia ruder a quasi-autocracy, instability in post-Assad Syria, chaos in Georgia, and stagnation in rural Romania and Bulgaria--if those two countries are left out of NATO--such might be tomorrow's headlines." Might.

Still, even if these conflicts do not materialize, Kaplan provides astute assessments of the new territory he has explored. His encounters are revealing. Bulgaria's head of state, President Petar Stoyanov, thanked him for taking the time to visit the country. "I was struck," says Kaplan, "by the president's certainty that almost any kind of publicity would be good for Bulgaria. The fear here was of being forgotten."

But Kaplan's perceptions of the countries he visits are rooted in something of an atavistic belief that they are prisoners of their past. Kaplan, you might say, believes that race and geography are destiny.

Here is Kaplan on the Near East: "Fundamentally, little had changed in regional politics since Herodotus and Thucydides. For Herodotus, the fault zones had been ethnic and cultural ... Thucydides later reduced Herodotus' chronicle of cultural dash to the steely confines of power politics."

More colorfully, here is Kaplan on crossing the border from Romania to Bulgaria by train: "The compartment was now jammed with people standing in the aisles: men with outlandish clothes, shaven heads and unshaven faces, and the most violent of expressions.... The middle-aged couple across from me cowered in fear as the train slowly crossed the wide Danube into Bulgaria."

No doubt Kaplan could respond that he is describing harsh realities that other writers are afraid to express in a politically correct age. But one wonders whether it isn't a little like ascribing primordial waits to Germany after World War II. The truth is that national characteristics are often invented after the fact, either as a state-building myth, as in the case of Serbia, or as a way to bludgeon the defeated enemy. Reducing subtle thinkers like Herodotus and Thucydides to ethnic or power politics may be rather unfair to them. The Greeks, after all, were not big on racial distinctions. Quite the contrary; the reason they resented the Jews was because they remained stubbornly independent, resisting the Greek ideal of the oekoumene, or universal civilization.

Today, it is the United States that carries the aspiration of a universal culture, and it seems to be working. McDonald's and the English language are making inroads everywhere. Neither Abernethy nor Kaplan speculates about the consequences for the U.S. But at the apex of American power, its population is largely indifferent to the country's power and prestige. For all the problems this presents for the foreign policy set, maybe it's a good sign. If the biggest difficulty Americans face is filling up an SUV, there may be no need for concern. Unless, of course, Kaplan turns out to be right about where the world is headed.

JACOB HEILBRUNN has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement.