Are we the external proletariat of the American Empire?
The expression was coined by Arnold Toynbee to describe those 'primitive people' on the periphery of civilisation -- principally, the Germanic barbarians on the outer edges of the Roman Empire . That I am not alone in thinking of ourselves as the external proletariat of the USA was borne out recently by a line in a South Asian magazine: "The H1B visa quota has been increased to 300,000 per year, to encourage more of us to apply to work as cyber-coolies".
We are more or less aware of the limes -- the geographical separation of barbarian and civilised -- and those who are not have only to stand in line for a visa to discover how substantial, like any river or desert, it is. The Roman limites are most clearly seen in Great Britain and Germany; the Rhine and the Danube in the latter, and Hadrian's Wall between the Rivers Tyne and Solway, and further north, the turf wall of Antoninus Pius between the Rivers Forth and Clyde, in the former.
So much for the physical limes . There is a psychological limes separating the civilised from the barbarian just as substantial as any river or desert. The barbarians across the Roman limites looked upon Rome as the height of cultural achievement and earthly glory. Correspondingly, they regarded themselves as the nadir of cultural achievement and earthly glory. And this is the true limites.
That a major portion of the world regards itself as
culturally, materially, and spiritually inferior to the United States should not make headlines. That most of the super-elite of the rest of
the world regard themselves as the lackeys and cyber-coolies and minions of the
United
States should be
occasion for a raising of the eyebrow. For the same South Asian magazine
observes: "...the people who bemoan the time and effort it takes to get visas
to South Asian countries are more than willing to undertake even humiliating
procedures to join interactions in New York...." How many times have we not seen
so-and-so return from a "seminar' in New York , aglow
from head to toe like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai? So what
if the host country regarded her a barbarian from beyond the limites admitted within for a lesson in civilisation? Of
course, the authorities had all along been in terrible apprehension that the
barbarian may stay for good....
For another function of the limes, from the Romans to the present day, has been to keep out those in search of less spiritual edification. In short, the illegal immigrant. The Rio Grande today serves roughly the same purpose as Hadrian's Wall or the Danube -- and with equal success. For just as the Alemanni broke through the limes, so great hordes of Mexicans and Latinos swim their way to economic emancipation. And while these desperados evoke our deepest sympathy, the seminar-attending intellectual provokes our deepest contempt.
However, the Great Empire has planned the ultimate limes, the limes of limes, which nothing in antiquity -- and possibly nothing in the future, since there may not be any -- can or will match. I refer to the nuclear-defence shield. And just because it is a high-tech device doesn't mean it cannot compare favourably with Hadrian's Wall or the Danube frontier. In point of fact, however, it cannot compare favourably with either.
For the reason is that -- as a recent edition of Foreign Affairs alarmingly pointed out -- the American Empire has 100,000 miles of shoreline and 6,000 miles of borders with its neighbours. Last year, 475 million people, 125 million vehicles, and 21.4 million import shipments entered the Empire. Any one of these could have conveyed into Empire the modern counterpart of the bubonic plague (as evidenced by 9/11)!
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