Andrew Roberts: Europe’s Hubristic Imperial Overstretch

The key text for the coming dismemberment of the European Union can be found in that compendium of homespun wisdom and haunting melodies, The English Hymnal. In The Day Thou Gavest, Lord is Ended, John Ellerton reminds us that “earth’s proud empires pass away”. The adjective is crucial: for it is when empires become proud, and thence hubristic, that their days become numbered. It is now time for us to debate the precise moment when that fate befell the Brussels economic empire.

 

For the first French empire and the Nazi empire the moment historians call “imperial overstretch” is simple to spot: they both invaded Russia. The second French empire suicidally sent the Ems Telegram to Otto von Bismarck, ensuring its speedy downfall in the Franco-Prussian War. The Soviet empire invaded Afghanistan on Christmas day 1979, just as the Habsburgs had invaded Serbia in 1914. Imperial overstretch was obvious, at least in retrospect, in Britain’s invasion of the Boer republics, a war it eventually won, but only after it had become Britain’s Vietnam. For the Ottomans, the decision to join the Central powers in 1914 condemned a six-century-old empire to the scrapheap in less than a decade.

 

Historians will long debate the hubris moment for the Roman empire. For my money, it was when Diocletian established the Tetrarchy in 293AD, splitting the empire into four, a classic sign of hubris. Here in the US, the electorate is about to enter its own moment of hubristic over-reach, when it re-elects an administration committed effectively to nationalising healthcare, which represents 15.2 per cent of its economy, at the same time that it has a $15.56 trillion national debt, with no plans to rein it in.

 

So when was it that the Brussels empire over-reached, and became more concerned about its own expansion and glory, its own ambitions for hegemony, than about the daily economic wellbeing of its citizens?..