Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 | страница 12

The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which ‘the ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would

1. secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;

2. secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;

3. enforce rights of contract;

4. provide stable government ... governed by publicly known rules;

5. provide responsive government;

6. provide honest government . (with) no rents to favour and position;

7. provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government . to hold taxes down (and) reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.

The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are points 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democracy was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed, the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.

It is a point worth emphasising that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign^>12>effect. According to the work of political scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, countries that

were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratisa-tion after independence than those ruled by other countries. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million that has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony. True, there have been many former colonies which have not managed to sustain free institutions: Bangladesh, Burma, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe spring to mind. But in a sample of fifty-three countries that were former British colonies, just under half (twenty six) were still democracies in 1993. This can be attributed to the way that British rule, particularly where it was ‘indirect', encouraged the formation of collaborating entities; it may also be related to the role of Protestant missionaries, who clearly played a part in encouraging Western-style aspirations for political freedom in parts of Africa and the Caribbean.

In short, what the British Empire proved is that empire is a form of international government that can work — and not just for the benefit of the ruling power. It sought to globalise not just an economic but a legal and ultimately a political system too.