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China policy and assistance to Africa have in later years got into increased focus of international attention. Africa has become a key element in China’s hunt for energy and minerals, while at the same time the continent has increasingly become a brick in an even higher global game, which the rulers in
Beijing are pursuing. In this essay, I will offer an interpretation of some of the circumstances and elements, which characterized China’s approach in its Africa strategy. In this essay, it will use the term “Africa” as shorthand for sub-Sahara Africa.  

In year 2000 China established a new vehicle in its Africa policy, that is, it established the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) that is an institution controlled by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the purpose of coordinating Chinese political objective in Africa. In 2006 China got one step further in this process at the FOCAC Summit in Beijing in November 2006, China announced the creation of a US$ 5 billion China-Africa development funds, however, even if it is called a “development fund,” it is often simply used to finance the entry of Chinese firms into the African economy. A part of China’s proclaimed plan for its Africa policy is to establish five preferential trade and industrial zones for Chinese business entry in Africa. These zones are proposed to be established in Zambia, Mauritius, Egypt, Nigeria and Tanzania. Money diverted toward these projects is often called “foreign aid” in the Chinese vocabulary.  The type of Chinese aid to Africa has so far taken shape of grants, interest-free loan and concessional loans. By mid-2007, China’s EXIM Bank (Export-Import Bank of China), the main vehicle in this process had financed 300 projects in Africa. The EXIM bank was founded in 1994 and is current the world third largest credit agency. About 80 percent of the banks investment in Africa has been in infrastructure projects such as railways, dams, thermal power plants, oil facilities and copper mines.   

An original stimulus for China’s new interest in Africa is certainly its thirst for energy; indeed, the main bulk of Chinese investment in Africa is investment in various gas and oil projects. It is clear that the key countries of China’s interest in Africa so far have been typical resource-rich countries such as Angola, Sudan, Nigeria and Zambia. However, it is important to realize that China’s interest in Africa is going beyond questions of oil and minerals, however, important these factors might appear in the moment. In this way, Africa has increasingly become an important part of China’s long-term, global positioning game in which oil and minerals are only means to an end. As a part of the overall process, China is incorporating a so-called aid strategy for Africa and has especially focused on various infrastructural projects in Africa. China’s focus on infrastructure is understandable because many of Africa’s resources are difficult to “explore” because of lacking or insufficient infrastructure; if the Chinese want Africa’s resources, they must facilitate Africa with infrastructure. The impact of China in the economic structure of Africa is already crystal clear, China is now Africa’s third biggest trading partner with only the US and France ahead. In 2006, China trade with Africa has more than teen-folded since 1999 and reached a staggering 55 billion US dollars amount in 2007. China increased trade and activities in Africa is also reflected in the number of Chinese companies operating in Africa, in 2007, there was more than 800, almost all of them state-owned companies.   

Let us take a look at some of the concrete cases of China’s Africa pursue. In Ethiopia, China has in particular focused on the construction sector and is said to control 50-60 percent of the country’s road construction. China has also shown interest in the country’s manufactory sector. In Ghana, China has provided various loan aimed at Ghana’s construction and infrastructure sectors. China is particular involved in the construction of the Bui Dam (financed by the China EXIM Bank), a project that is China’s single largest financial commitment in Ghana. It is a project, where also the World Bank is involved. In genocide ridden Sudan, China has allied itself with the ruling government. Indeed, using its veto in the Security Council, China has directly prohibited the United Nation to interfere with the “business” of the Sudan government. China was the only nation in the Security Council who refuse to condemn the Sudan government for conducting genocide in Dafur. China is today by far Sudan’s largest foreign investor and roughly two-third of Sudan’s oil production goes to China. One should also take a note of the fact that the state-owned China National Corporation is the largest stakeholder in Sudan’s main oil producing consortium. Since, 1996, the Chinese held a forty percent stake in the Nile project, which produce the majority of Sudan’s oil. There can be little doubt that Sudan is a key factor in China’s Africa game, hence, in 2007 Sudan was China’s third largest trading partner in Africa after Angola and South Africa. In East-Africa, China is involved in the Unity Bridge project, which is a bridge that eventually will connect Tanzania and Mozambique over the Ruvuma River. The Chinese firm involved in this project is the China Geo Engineering Corporation (CGEC). It is CGEC’s second project in Africa; it first project was the construction of a water supply network in Algeria. In Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde, China is engaged in building huge sport stadiums. China has also sealed a $9 billion deal with DR Congo; this deal is supposed to be the largest deal of its kind in Africa. The deal gives China access to natural resources (copper and cobalt) for an intensive build-up of Congo’s infrastructure. Angola is the second large oil-producer in Africa. It is reported that China since 2004 have granted Angola credits worth 4.5 billion dollars. China’s loan in Angola is supposed to have funded projects in the energy and water sectors. In Nigeria, one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, China has recently agreed to lend Nigeria 2.5 billion in loans. These loans shall be seen in the light of China’s current talks with the Nigeria government in its effort to gain energy exploration rights. Also in March 2007 on the quest of the Nigerian government, China put a communication satellite into orbit, while Nigerian technicians were trained in Beijing. In Gabon, China is particularly involved in the timber industry but is also taking a major shape of the country’s oil-export. In Gabon, China is also working on a gigantic project aimed at developing the country’s massive Belinga iron ore deposit. As a part of this project, China’s operators will build a hydro-electric dam to power it and a railway to the coast, and a deepwater port north of the capital, Libreville, to exporting the ore. In Zambia, Chinese companies are involved in at least 35 aid projects within agriculture and infrastructure development. A part of the investment has focus on building the first Chinese Special Economic Zone in Africa located in the Chambishi copper belt. The work in Zambia’s copper-district is carried out by the Chinese company “Sino Metals.” Chinese firms have apparently also been involved in construction new buildings for the Zambian government. The problem with Chinese investment in Zambia is that they threaten to make Zambia one-dimensionally depending on its copper-production, which is a development the World Bank has urged Zambia to avoid. In the old days, Zambia’s copper-mines were the third largest concentration of copper in the world but the country’s one-sided copper strategy proved fatal in 1975 when the world copper-prices collapse, an event that had devastating consequences for Zambia’s economy.  

Let us turn to another interesting dimension of Chinese investment and aid that has important social and industrial implication for Africa. There are surprisingly few societal spill-over effects associated with Chinese projects in Africa from the point of view of Africa’s own communities. China’s projects in Africa tend to facilitate income for the state (that is, the ruling elite) rather than function as bricks for the build-up of Africa’s societal community. Concerns have also been raised that China extreme focus on oil and minerals in its investments in Africa will tend to sidetrack Africa development and lock Africa into a one-sided, raw material-selling dependency with dire implication for the development of Africa’s general social structure. This issue has naturally always been a problem for Africa but it can be argued that the Chinese tend to reinforce the problem rather than facilitating a solution. Another issue of concern is China’s orientation to environmental problems. As a current example, one can mention that OECD’s Export Credit Group in 2003 adopted some explicit stated environmental guidelines for its loan-policy. This has not been the case for China EXIM bank, which is China main vehicle in its investment policy in Africa. The Bank has not made its environmental guidelines available to the public. Also, as the Merowe project signifies, it is questionable whether and how such guidelines are implemented. Despite the large implications for nature in the region, no independent environmental impact assessment was carried out. As in so many other aspects of China activities in Africa, the actual terms and criteria are shrouded in secret.  

But what is of even greater concern is the question of the general learning-curve for African countries in regard to China’s top-down controlled projects. When China conduct a “development project” in Africa, armies of Chinese workers, architects, welders, electricians, technicians, including doctors and cooks arrives, and the numbers of African workers participating in the protects are either limited or not existing at all. It is true that China has trained thousands of Africans in technical courses in China and it also true that it employ many ordinary African workers in some of its project but nonetheless, when one look at the overall picture, the learning opportunities for Africans in regard to China’s African projects is remarkably low. The Chinese activities are created surprisingly few jobs and learning-opportunities for Africans. As one commentator wrote about China’s project in Gabon, “the Chinese tend to prefer to ship in their own workers rather than employing the local labour force, and CMEC’s offer does not include many jobs for Gabonese people.” The same tones sounded at the Seventh World Social Forum (WSF) held in Nairobi in January 2007, Humphrey Pole-Pole of the Tanzanian Social Forum told Chinese delegate that “Now China is driving our small and medium entrepreneurs to bankruptcy. … You don’t contribute to employment because you bring in your own labour.” The indications are also that China uses little time in including the local community in the shape, problems and the meaning of their projects. Indeed, the activities of Chinese companies are notable for its degree of secrecy. The way of the Chinese tend to operate is behind the scene (within close elite-circles) and not in a participatory dialogue with the locals. Indeed, a recent report about China’s lending practices highlights the extraordinary lack of transparency in China’s dealings. As the report from EURODAD assessed, “loan contracts between China and African countries are not open to public scrutiny. This leaves a lot of power in the hands of a few African leaders.” As a general rule, China’s loan contracts is not available to the parliament, civil society or the media in the country, which future they involve. Indeed, China do not use much time on a dialogue with civil society. As one observer expressed it, “they (the Chinese) don’t waste their time on meetings. They just go ahead and build roads.” The Chinese talk about “strategic partnership” but most of the time they don’t really need any partner at all. It is not because that the Chinese projects doesn’t interfere with the life of the local population; in Sudan a huge prestige project, the Merowe Dam, has lead to the forced removal of the Hambdan people living at or near the site. The struggle over this issue has turned into a nasty conflict and local police and private security forces are now providing 24 hours protection for the Chinese engineers working there. The Chinese call this a “win-win situation,” yet Ali Askan, the director of the London-based Piankhi Research Group offers another interpretation; according to him, “the sad truth is, both the Chinese and the elite partners in the Sudan government want to conceal some terrible facts about their partnership. They are joining hands to uproot people, expropriate their land, and appropriate their natural resources.” The international criticism of the Merowe Dam project has been very intensive, among other things, the project has been criticized for not published its impact studies, that the project on 63 accounts violate the World Bank environmental safeguard standards and that the displaced population has been force into barren desert areas. Also, in recent years many of the community leaders who have opposed the government’s resettlement plans are reported to have been jailed without explanation. Also, it has been reported that Chinese dam construction companies have caused protests when they denied local nomads access to their traditional drinking wells. In this way, the Beijing approach to development undermines some key concepts of what real development is all about. Generally, from a sheer developmental point of view, what is much more important than whether Africa is facilitate with this or that piece of infrastructure is whether important segments of African population actually learn something during the process and are accumulating important technical and civic skills as a result of the process. If these learning processes are absent and comparatively weak; then China’s various projects in Africa might be beneficial (by whatever standards) but deepest down they add very little to the path of real development in Africa. In this regard, the real problem in Africa is not the lack of infrastructure, capital or public service but the general lack of deeply structured absorptive capacities, which in part is reflected in the level of skills but more importantly is the function of a general lack of a stable institutionalization of relevant learning processes of the kind there is relevant in the 21th century.  

Also, real learning processes must penetrate the core structure of civil society if a deeper integrated effect of cognitive institutionalization shall occur but it is typical for China policy in Africa that it deliberate taken little interests and concerns about the cripple nature of Africa’s civil society. (It is typical for China when it is approaching the social question in Africa that it is concerned with instrumental questions rather than with rights and skills, which build up the complete citizen). Its deal with the African rulers is in regard to the outer framework of the production-system, the deeper layer of society is of little interest to the Chinese, indeed, the weakness of Africa civic society is a huge active in the policy China is pursuing in Africa. The last thing China needs in Africa is civic and human rights. The truth is of course that both China and Africa’s rulers share the same basic attitude toward human rights, neither of the two actors have any interest in promoting them. In Africa elite survival does not depend on normal concepts of progress and development but on a predatory exploitation of the countries’ resources with the aim of circulated some of the rent within the rulers’ patronage networks. (This problem in Africa has not been solved through democratic elections since the institutions of democracy in Africa is very fragile and immature and has not be able to change many of “the old ways” of policy on the continent). It is this pattern of predatory policy China is playing into and utilizing. (When China is talking about that it is promoting Africa’s “self-development,” one can only wonder whose self-development they are talking about). China is on the other hand very helpful for Africa’s autocratic rulers. When Angola lost billions of dollars in oil revenues as a function of corruption and misgovernment, the IMF tried to press the Angolan government to accept basic transparency measures as a condition of granting it a loan in 2004. However, at some point Angola’s government suddenly stopped negotiation because they had received a loan offer from China on 2 billion dollars. The Angola case illustrate how China’s Africa policy is facilitating persistent corruption, while reinforcing the structure of Africa’s old-fashioned and highly dysfunctional patronage system. The Angola example is by no means unique, in the case of Sudan, international financial institutions ceased to lent the Sudan government money because of its human rights abuses in Dafur and also as a reaction to a long record of corruptive spending practices. However, China’s EXIM bank was not disturbed by such considerations and has worked closely with the Sudan government on a broad range of oil and hydropower projects. In this way in the case of Sudan, China has efficiently undercut an international effort to pressure the Sudan government into political reforms. 

China is following a so-called “no string attached policy.” Since, Africa to an important extent consists of a system of predatory rulers, “elected” or not, many of whom are “presidents” for life or “liberators” as Mugabe, it is clear for anyone — short of the most political naïve – exactly what the policy “no string attached” really means. Indeed, African leaders can be sure that China will not burden them with questions in regard to human rights, civil society or freedom of the press. Indeed, why should China ask questions in Africa, which they do not want their own citizens to ask?  When China speak about “brotherhood” with Africa, it really means China “brotherly” bounds with the predatory interests of African rulers, a kind of relation which authoritarian China does not consider “alien” or “strange” in the first place. Birds of feather flock together as one says. 

China current trouble with sending weapon to Mugabe is only the tip of the iceberg. China has no restrictions when it comes to sell weapons to Africa’s dictators. China sees Africa as a lucrative market for its military hardware. At the same time, the sale of weapon becomes important elements in Beijing’s overall global strategy. By supporting hardcore dictators, such as the regime in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Nigeria with the weapons and by other means, China built up a system of followers in the UN, which is useful when China for various reason derivate from United Nation’s policy on human rights or need a clientele to support its quest for global power. The restrains that France, Britain and the US shows in the sale of weapon especial the nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons are not restrains that
China accept. Traditionally, China has been a supplier of arms to the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand but its increase presence in Africa has added many African countries to the list. In regard to Africa, China has sold the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum weapons and $100 million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including twelve supersonic F-7 Jets. China is today the largest supplier of arms to Sudan. The autocratic government of Mugabe ordered twelve FC-1 fighter jets and 100 military vehicles from China as a part of major weapon-deal in late 2004. In the same year, the Chinese build at major radar system at President Mugabe’s mansion in the Harare suburbs. The US International Broadcast Bureau has also reported that China had provided the Mugabe regime with a radio jamming device that allow the regime to block broadcast of independent news resources like Radio Africa. Perhaps as a special service China has also donated the blue tiles that decorate Mugabe’s house. It is certainly of little surprise that Mugabe calls China his “number one friend.” Indeed, Chinese support for Mugabe has been important for his dictatorships survival.  

Why is China targeting Africa? Naturally, China extreme thrust for energy goes at long way to explain it basic interests. Yet, there are other factors, which might be important for China’s Grand Strategy. If one look on the world from a geopolitical spectrum, Africa is still a highly unexplored territory as far as business interest and investment is concern; no other area in the world is so detached, underdeveloped and politically “virginal” than Africa. (South Africa constitutes a special case in this regard). In any other continent on the globe Chinese political and industrial interests will always face heavily invested interests and strong competition from American, European and Japanese interests. For China to establish themselves in these countries will be an “uphill battle” at least in relative terms. This is not the case in Africa. In other words, if the Chinese leaders looked for a good political “investment object” on the global map, no place is more “obvious” than Africa. In Africa, the resistance to Chinese policy is most benign, the hunger for “aid” is most desperate and the interests of other major powers in the world are only scratchy and weakly established. Indeed, Africa’s weak civil society functions as a guarantee that Beijing will not be harassed by too many “stupid questions” during their operations in Africa. What China can’t get way with in Brazil, Mexico or France, is an easy deal in the extremely corrupt, predatory and fragile African countries. Therefore, no other continent than Africa will give China so much for “so little.” In Africa, China can define its political options almost by will and have a better change to shape the development exact as Beijing would like to see it.

Why did Rome fall? Generally, the ultimate reasons for the fall lied in original flaws in the cultural design of the Roman society. The destruction of Rome was the consequences of a cultural fundament that was painfully inadequate for the societal building it should support. The destruction of Rome was cultural in gestalt but political in manifestation. The cognitive-cultural make-up of Rome was from the beginning one-sided and insufficient. On the operative dimension, these flaws resulted in at least four basic problems. First, within the balance of the Empire’s various “subsystems,” it resulted in disproportional emphasis on power as a factor of social action. Second, Rome was characterized by a too one-sided cultural tradition with an inclination toward the unstable or “neurotic.” There was a strange ambivalence in the Romans attitude to the world; its inhabitans were generally, aggressively “openminded” almost innocently so; yet at the same time the Romans lacked some fundamental absorptive capacities in regard to spiritual and intellectual issues, which made it very difficult for the system to progress into a higher type of human civilization. Third, it resulted in a too one-sided approach to technological inventions; the consequence of which was a relative “stalemate” in the promotion of the general means of production. This problem was also reflected in the way in which the technological advances that originally had marked the Roman army slowly diminished relative to the strength of the barbarian tribes at the Roman frontier. Fourth, it produced a shallow intellectual culture hunting the occult and exoteric; this inclination was particularly notable in the way broad groups became emotionally vulnerable in the socio-political crisis characterizing that last centuries of the Empire’s lifetime. One will see that in opposition to Montesquieu who analyzes Rome from the standpoint of cultural decline; I on my part do not see any deterioration of an original golden age. My argument stresses that it is not “decline” but a fatal one-sidedness in the original cultural matrix of Roman society that is the ultimate cause in the puzzle; Rome was an Empire debased by birth and not simply the victim of a process of decadence. For Montesquieu, Rome was a great project that failed, while I see it as a “great project there never was.” As Talcott Parsons has assessed; Rome never succeeded in building a sufficiently substantial system of cultural-constitutive symbolization. Indeed, what Parsons calls the “unstable welter of exotic cults, sects, syncretistic belief systems, and the religious movements” that characterized Rome was never adequately grounded in the general culture. Since, Rome’s value-system was depending on the “legitimacy” of its power cult; it had no coherent answer to the spiritual needs of its population and was unable to effectively counter-act a hostile ideology in the midst of its system. Indeed, rather than counter-acting it, it was eaten alive. In the end of the line, as Parsons has assessed, the Romans “failed to build a viable societal community.”   

In this way, the cultural institutions of the Roman Empire were relatively underdeveloped (or peculiarly one-sided). The focus of power as the all-embracing social gestalt was notable. Naturally, most societies at the time used large resources on building military machines and generally, it was not unnatural for the Romans to concentrate on military things yet the function of power as a factor of social life grew out of all proportions. The comparisons of Sparta with Rome is illustrative, in Sparta the military specialization went far beyond anything Rome ever did but Sparta’s culture was generally more sane and balanced than Rome’s. Although the Spartans could be cruel and cynical in many occasions, their relationship with power was much more “mature” than in Rome. In other words, the army was all-absorptive in Sparta but it never became a fetish in the way it occurred in Rome. Thus, in Rome, the quest for power and prestige tended to prevail over other values. The mechanisms restraining power-allocation in Rome were insufficient from an early point and its institutions were not able to grow with the challenge. Eventually, the quest for power in Rome broke all social and moral bounds. To kill one’s mother or brother in such a relentless pursue became ultimately a part of the obsession. In this way, power became more than a blunt necessity; it became a desire. In Greece, the army was always a means to an end; in Rome, its institutional symbolism became an end in itself, not only as a metaphor but also as bloody reality, perhaps most notable expressed during the reign of Sulla and the terror he released. The issue here is not the amount of power the Romans commanded but the impact power had on their mental fabric. Indeed, “the strongman” is not measured by the power he controls but measured by the extent power consumes him. The tyranny and extravagance that emerged with Nero was more than the idiosyncrasies of one man. The whole environment around Nero was a bizarre ocean of intrigues, murders and frenzy power-struggle; the fever of power was on everyone’s mind, not only the prerogative of Nero; it revealed the strange unrest of the Roman soul, which only would accelerate as time went by. It was as if a constant neurosis was chasing the Roman establishment and that the culture itself was lacking the necessary structure that could counter-balance the trend toward self-destruction. It all revealled a personality structure that was insufficiently culturally rooted and constantly needed to find “surrogates” and restless “confirmation” to fill out the void of cultural institutionalization.

This collective neurosis was link to the Roman he-man celebration. There was too much Sylvester Stallone in the Roman mentality. Indeed, Roman gladiator-games were a sign of the cult of domination and submission, which went to the core of Roman mentality. It was not accidental that the gladiator-theatres dominated the central urban space in the Roman cities. Indeed, few things are more revealing for the Roman character than its gladiator-games, which not only was cruel and inhumane but even trivial in its actual scene-sequences. In most cases, it was a caricature of a fight, where animals and humans had close to no chance in the first place. The Greek would most likely have regarded such “entertainment” for unworthy but this kind of entertainment went to the core of the Roman elite’s sense of superiority and civic identity. One cannot separate the vulgarity of these games from the Roman psyche. Indeed, during the gladiator-games, the killed were dragged away from the arena as if they were meat-loafs, not even the victims death was regarded as other than a triviality. The gladiator-game was popular beyond any measures, every new Roman colony insisted in having a gladiator-theatre because else they could not consider themselves truly Romans. Ordinary households would be decorated with motifs from gladiator-games; it was a national obsession. The gladiator-games would often have “ticket scalpers,” who would buy up seats and sell them to inflated prices, since people was ready to pay any price to see the game. Intellectual criticism of the gladiator-games was quite rare among Romans; the cruelties committed were generally regarded as self-evident, while the Greek had nothing of that kind. 

Thus, Rome never achieved a sufficiently deep culture; its talents were not only one-dimensionally organized but insufficient in its differentiational forms. Generally, Rome started as a war-machine and Roman culture reflected the emphasis of the instrumental-political mentality, which was “needed” in order to fulfil this role-pattern. Yet, what was crucial in this regard what not the functional specialization of the political subsystem per se but the lack of absorptive cognitive capacities that could raise the nation beyond the limits of a sheer instrumental power-approach. The ancient world in which Rome arose was a violent age, and the success of Rome, which was its organizing capacities became fixed on the key criteria for success, which was military might. The early Romans were primitive, much more primitive than the Etruscans but through the military strenght and rudeness mind, the Romans were able to prevail. Perhaps, this is not an unusual story of that age but what was notable was that the Romans never really went beyond their own original primitive state of mind, although its societal sophistication grew to the skies, the mindset of the people remained strangely archaic.

This lack of cognitive-cultural sophistication seem to be reflected in the way in which the Romans (in contrast to the Greek) was unable to find a sufficient mediating solution to its clash between its society’s major groups and “classes.” The kind of integrative mechanism, which we can observe in the Germanic and Greek societies (and which was related to the factor of “democracy”) was never able to penetrate the core of the Roman society despite many efforts to the contrary. Some would perhaps call it the Roman failure to establish a sufficient pattern of social justice. Despite various attempt to increase public participation, Rome remained very much a rather limited plutocracy. The consequences was that the Romans were unable to utilized the social intelligence of the lower strata in the way in which the Germanic order of the Middle Ages was able to do. The origination of Rome seems to have emerged around a comparatively frozen relationship between lord and serf. In this regard, Frank Tenney is arguing that the separation between patricians and plebeian in Rome had an almost caste-like quality. In this way, the social divide in Rome was not just a later “complication,” it appeared at its very birth.  

Indeed, the way Rome differs from the Greek in the manner of social stratification tell us a lot about the special character of the Roman society. Both Greece and Rome were agarian societies and the key to much of their social order lied in the way land was distributed. This was crucial not only for military reasons but also in regard to the institutionalization of civic society. During the period known of the “tyrannic rule” in Greece, the dominance of the aristocracy was “broken” and this gave way to a subsequent democratization of the Greek city. Hence, in Greece this gave way to the emerging of a sizable middle class not only as a social strata of traders and craftmen but also in regard to the size of farms characterizing the Greek agricultural structure. The famous Greek citizen with real influence on public affair was one of the outcomes of this process. The crucial point in this regard is that this was exactly what did not happen in Rome. As Perry Anderson, Rostovtzeff and other have highlighted what was characteristic for the Roman situation was that the “poor” or “proletarian” masses never was able to “grab the moment,” so that the power of the hereditary nobility (who was the big landowners) never was broken but essential remained in persistent control of the socio-political process despite the various twist and turns of Roman history. Generally, members of those pleberian families who got real, persistent influence would be admitted to the Senate. Yet, it happened rarely as Rostovtzeff explained. Also, the new pleberian senator would be regarded as “a new man” and often treated with contempt and suspiction by the old aristocratic families. It all highlighted the key role of the Senate in the politics of Rome. As Rostovtzeff maintains, “the reel control with internal affairs and foreign affairs belong to the Senate.” Without diminising the role of property, I think that the real factor in the strenght of the noblity was their general socio-cognitive capacities; it is most likely indicative that the first writers of the early Republic described the proletarians as rabble hardly caple of coherent thought. (In this way, “nobility” was much more than a presumtious title; in ancient time it took an extraordinary pool of social factors and economic surplus to establish the necessary rich conditions for persistent cognitive accumulation, which “the best families” represented). This power-correlation corresponds to the dominating position of the Senate, which represented the hereditary nobility; a position, which was as much a question of the accumulation of knowledge as it was a matter of financial wealth. This unbroken prevailence of the hereditary nobility has several effects, one was the limits it placed on the process of democratization in Rome even during the Republican period, the other was the drastic difference between rich and poor in Roman society to a degree unknown in Greece. People might be poor in Greece but as citizens they still had a important stake in the civic-political process (Socrates was certainly not a rich man); in Rome the poor tended to become socially excluded rather than included and the trend only increased in time. Rather than citizens, the urban “proletarians” became consumers of welfare, bread and circus, and so on. They tended to become statists in social life rather than proactive agents. Generally, the freezing of the aristocrats power in the special type of Roman “conservatism” functioned as a lowing of the level of societal differentiation, not only socially but intellectually. Generally, it sidetracked the whole development of Roman as a sufficiently integral community. 

Naturally, the above remarks need to be seen in the right context; the point is not to deny the existence of substantial democratic elements of the Roman Republics political institutions or to ignore the strenght that the Roman solution had in regard to political stability. The Roman Republic was not without a certain solidarity in the earlier stages of its existence. Indeed, Rome with its citizen-army could not have fought its wars without this kind of solidarity. This kind of citizen-army is not to be taken for granted, since Carthage during the Punic wars based its army to a high extent on mercenaries. Also, Rome’s upper classes were fully integrated in military activities, while this was not the case in Carthage. What concern us here is not to deny this kind of solidarity as an important factor in Rome’s history but to evaluate the long-term structural implications of Rome’s political institutions. What concern us here is that the Roman institutions might have been quite operative for each moment of short-term application but it failed, importantly, to serve the long-term build-up of more substantial integrative mechanisms in the Roman society and as an effect the Roman lower classes remain remarkably “proletarized” not only economically (as measured by income-gap) but especially in regard to fundamental cultural and cognitive factors. (One sign was that the archic pagan Roman religion (the ”pop-wisdom” of the masses) never really developed beyond its initial shape, which Rostovtzeff has deemed as remarkably primitive in the first case). It all sidetracked the process of societal differentiation, leaving the bulk of the Roman population in a strange limbo vis-a-vis the long-term development. For a while, this flaw in the integral mechanism of the Empire’s social structure was “covered up” by the use of the poll of multiculturalist intelligence that floaded into the center from all spheres of the Empire. In the end of the day, this “subsitute” for an endogenous intelligence established a superstructure of cosmopolitan ”efficiency” but did not address the deep structural problems (of the infantilization of the Roman underclass), which eventually was a crucial key to the overall collapse. Since the Romans never were able to assimilate the cultures under its regime, the substitute intelligence it received had never optimal conditions for deep institutional integration as factors of social-cultural entities and the input the system received remained fragments in a metropolitan universe. In this way, the ever increasing lower masses (and we are not even adressing the question is enormous masses of slaves) would at best become “clients” in a massive  plutocratic system (which tended to determining the real stake in politics); these clients had legal rights but they never became “citizens” in the more substantial sense that characterized Greece in the best of its periods. This “bias” not only proletarized the status of “the poor” but it debased the general development of Rome’s institutions although it took some centuries before its full implications became blantantly clear for the naked eye. The outcome was the emerging of a Eastern type of bureaucratic machinery, which in decisive moments failed utterly to provide an adequate efficiency because it ultimately was hierachy without substance.     

Octavian, who called himself Augustus, was not an accidental happening in Roman history; it was the logical conclusion of a society, which essence was power and which culture was too weak to facilitate the necessary institutional restrains. The degeneration which was symbolized by Caligula and Nero was just the further surrealistic indication that the force of Imperial power in Rome was marching on its own bewildered path; out of “symmetry” with other social functions. In a modern state Caligula and Nero would have been locked-up in asylums but in Rome, they were the leaders of humanity. But again it was nothing out of the ordinary; it was the logical conclusion of the power-fetishism that penetrated the Roman psyche. In this way, Rome as a societal community suffered from a build-in inflationary fixation with power as a generalized symbolic medium. The impact of this inflationary trend was a perversion of the equilibrium of societal differentiation. Thus, power became the standard to which everything else was reduced as an agent. Especially, more diffuse and intangible factors of culture connected to constitutive-cognitive socialization were generally under-nurtured. The overload of the performance capacities of the political institutions was itself indicative of a cultural-constitutive flaw. The signs that the system was reaching its limits became increasingly manifest and in Rome the key to the issue was the state of the army. As David S. Potter has highlighted “the fact that Marcus could not subdue the Danubian tribes was a more telling indication that something was wrong.” Given the Roman learning-pattern and especially the lack of any persistent solution to the issue of “succession,” Rome’s political institutions could do nothing but fail, as soon as social complexity went beyond a certain point. It was a disaster waiting to happen and not just an unfortunate series of events. However, the Roman political-military machinery was still a fórmidable enemy and its statesmanship was often brilliant. The brilliant side of the Roman institutions was exactly the factor that prolonged the process for so long time. Nonetheless, the power-struggle in Rome reached a point of sheer opportunism; an indication of the extraordinary lack of normative restrains and institutionally counter-veiling mechanisms that had been a persistent problem of Rome’s political culture. A part of the problem was that Rome was a quite “open society,” where cosmopolism and individualism was able to advance as social categories; it established a important dynamic but it also opened Rome to serious structural vulnerability, indeed, the hostility of Christianity was only one case in this regard, the self-serving interests of Germanic mercenaries yet another; the problem was that Rome lacked the deeper cognitive-cultural structure that should have “managed” the challenge of Imperial openness. As we know, the Hellenization of Rome had gone very far; yet, it might be argued that Hellenization of Rome actually camouflaged a cultural void; it made the Roman system appear as much more civilized than it was. In this way, Rome became increasingly multiculturalist under conditions, where its own culture was insufficintly shaped to address those isues of spiritual gestalt that the emerging crisis demanded; this fragmentation of values only deepened the crisis. Rome’s civic order built on ideas of virtue that was not shared by many of the new foreign masses, which swamped into Rome. As these virtues began to decay, Rome had no deeper cultural “treasure,” which could replace it beside a shallow cult of “the Emperor.” Rome had never “argued for its existence” beyond a doctrine of sheer glory and domination. Hence, Rome was mentality unprepared for the rabble-rousing rethoric of large-scale, cosmopolitan discourses.   

Rome had undoubtedly developed very strong capacities to play the instrumental game of war and conquest. At the same time; its cultural identity was very narrowly organized around sensory gain of status and material well-being, while the nurturing of the soul was facilitated through spectacular entertainment. The slogan of “bread and circus” was much more than an accidental saying; it was a very precise description of the basic reward-systems of Roman life or at least an illustrative signification of the key to their mentality. The immanent value of knowledge in the Greek sense was a strange concept for the Roman mind. The Romans knew of reasons but no Reason. Higher intellectual issues were beyond the Romans, unless it was broken down in concrete components or signified as concrete techniques or “real projects.” All this become remarkably clear, when we compare Greek civilization with the Romans; the intellectual sophistication of the Greek was lost on the Romans; their talent was materialist-instrumental, understood within a narrow behaviourist mode; any higher intellectual consideration was, with remarkable few exceptions, generally lost on them. Roman philosophy was never more than a pale reflection of the Greek. Indeed, the Greek was like the Romans excellent and successful soldiers but their culture and social life was never fixated on power in the way it characterized Rome. The Greek had raised a a compelling vision of reflextive, cognitive Man as a totality of infinite values; the Romans were fixed on the ”legitimative” quest of the might of superior domination (with “civilization” and “Pax Romana” as the concrete bonus goods). In Greece, the real challenged of Man lied in the opening of his mind; while in Rome, conquest and superiority was always perceived as physically and concrete. In this way, the concept of science as a cognitive gestalt was millions of light-years from the Roman mind; the Romans built in stone, blood and in factors of domination, the rest was a flash of nothingness in their minds. The Romans’ power was (to a high extent) built on a kind of material consumption of its environment (slaves, tribune, land, etc. etc.); when this process came to a close at the end of their expansion, they ran out of the crude magic of their own superiority and while the Germanic barbarians actually (in their own confused ways) was on a path of learning; the Romans could only wait until the moment, where the cognitive talent of the barbarians turn into some kind of social and military reality (by whatever “bewildred” way or process). The real way, the barbarian won over the Romans was through their cognitive superiority (that is, their capacity for cultural-embedded learning) and not as such through their military virility but it was through their militiary virility that the cognitive factor revealled its ”latent” process in the social matrix of the historical context.  

The Romans borrowed almost all their socio-cultural components from the Etruscans and the Greek without ever being able to really understand or internalize the true sophistication of the two other cultures. The warm, human element of the Etruscan culture was never really replicated in Rome: who was too intoxiated of their own military machinery, as they were intoxiated during the killing-orgies in the Gladiator-games. In almost everything the Romans borrowed from the Greek, there was lacking something essential. One often speaks about “the ancient world” with the implicit connotation that the Roman simply was an extension of Greek culture; nothing can be more deceiving. In the Roman copy of the Greek, there always seemed to lack the higher points of cultural refinement. (Especially, in intellectual issues, the Roman position represented a vulgarization of what had been a Greek point). Not surprisingly, the Romans education was fixed on form rather than substance. What was important for the Roman “intellectual” was rhetoric not thinking. Intellectualism for the Romans was not a calling but placed its focus on poetic entertainment or the mastery of rhetoric as a way to promote one’s power and prestige. (Not surprisingly, Augustine was known as a teacher of rhetoric long before he became a “religious icon”). If one is looking for (the equivalent of) a Plato, Leibniz or a Kant among the Romans, one is looking in vain; the Romans had absolute nothing of that kind. The closest they came to an intellectual deed was to turn Platonism into a vulgar, quasi-religious cult. Indeed, it is very unlikely that the thing which we call “Christianity” would have looked the way it did without the invention of “neo-Platonism.” The intellectual origins of neo-platonism appeared to lie in an attempt to Egypt-orize Plato. The original idea can be traced to an Alexanderian Greek by the name of Ammonius Saccas, who beside his philosophic credentials apparently worked as a dock-worker. It might also be of some interest to notice that some of the other famous neo-Platonists at the time, Porphyry and Iamblichus, both were Syrians; it is clear that neo-Platonism was a result of the increasing Asian impact on the social structure of Rome in the last centuries of the Empire’s history. (In neo-Platonism there is a shift from Plato’s emphasis on Reason and Being into an emphasis on the purification and salvation of the soul; it is not accidental that Plotinus was influence by the doctrines of Persian and Indian philosophers; in reality it turned Plato’s epistemic thinking into a salvationist doctrine about quasi-mystical soul-redemption). It was a part of the process, which Rostovtzeff has described as the increased Eastern influence on Rome. For Montesquieu, Rome was exposed to a wave of immigrants, who lacked any deeper compassion for Roman traditions and values. Indeed, the early Christians regarded Rome as the incarnation of evil. It is naturally indicative that both Paul and Peter according to legend were executed in Rome. In this way, it is true that Christianity was a component of the destruction of Rome but only as a symptom of a much broader trend. The progress of Christianity among citizens of Roman was the sign of an alarming development in regard to the legitimation of the regime, since Christianity openly defied the highest authority. Yet, Christianity was just a component in an increased “dissolving” of the social structure. Its increase popularity correlated with the deterioration of the economy in the third century, which brought society to the brick of chaos. In 235, the year Maximus Thrax became an emperor, bands of brigands and desperate people swept through Italy, pillaging as they went. Christianity was part of this turbulent frenzy of the times. However, the intellectual attraction to Christianity was not necessary so clear-cut as it often have been presented. Indeed, Augustine was very close in ending up as a Manichaean; it was not Christianity but an esoteric desire for mystery religions that was the driven motif of his character. Under other circumstance, he would have written his famous “confessions” as a zealous defence of Manichaeanism. (Indeed, Augustine had zealously defended Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism in earlier stages of his life; what credibility had he as a “unique defender” of Christianity?) The fragile nature of the Roman intellectual ballast made them mentally defenceless in regard to the Eastern supermarket of salvationist “solutions.” In Rome, reason was the first casualty when crisis stroke. Indeed, at the time of Augustine, Rome was a boiling pot of spiritual despair; a kind of stock-market of salvationist merchants buying and selling ideological “security” to a nation in a stage of spiritual panic. Rome became increasingly the catalyst for despotism from the East, not only politically but mentally. In the West it resulted in total collapse, in the East it resulted in another kind of collapse, that is, the fossilization of the social structure.    

Naturally, there are many other factors in the fall of Rome; some scholars have highlighted the economic trouble that the Empire ran into in the end of its reign. Also, Arnold J. Toynbee and Joseph Tainter have both highlighted the Empire’s predatory nature, its irrational waste of economic resources and diminishing marginal return of its general design. In its later stages, Rome became increasingly bureaucatized and began to show the kind of signs associated with the fallacies of state socialism. It is in this regard, we shall understand Bruce Barlett’s statement that “excessive government killed Rome.” I think that a major part of these problems was caused by a fatal inadequacy in Rome’s political administration and its pattern of decision-making. Generally, many of the Empire’s decisions on economic questions in the later stages reinforced problems rather than reducing them. The Government debasement of money was a case in point; it started a chain-reaction of events with disastrous consequences. Hence, when the monetary system collapsed the taxation system collapsed with it. In the case of Rome, one shall recall how intimate taxation was correlated with military expenditures. The result was clearcut; troops went unpaid, supplies could not be purchased and bribes could not be paid to Germanic chiefs. But even worse the industrial structure disintegrated and people began to leave the cities. The harsh counter-measures by Theodosian and others had little effect. However, the exact structure of the economic crisis is still scholarly disputed yet generally, the bulk of economic problems was restricted to the West while the situation in the East was different. Also many of the Roman problems, especially those of the industrial kind, were the outcome of the fact that the Roman never changed the basic premises of their mode of production. The problem was not that various new inventions didn’t exist (at least to some extent), it was rather than they never really appeared on the decision-makers radar-screen. This was also the problem in regard to the barbarian Germanic tribes; in contrast to the Roman society, the German tribes went through very extensive learning-processes. The socio-technological gap between the Roman and the Germanic tribes became importantly reduced as time went by, especially within the question of military technological capacities, which was the decisive “high-tech” capacities of the time. In the end the Germanic weapons was a least as good as the Romans. Also many Germanic people had served in the Roman army and knew its military techniques by heart; when they turned against the Roman army, they were experts knowing everything about the training and techniques of their enemies. Indeed, the invasion of the Germanic barbarians came, there was no clear-cut the socio-technological lead, which the embattled Romans could rely on. The Roman historian Taticus called the Germanic warriors “a nightmare of which their is no awaking.” And in the fourth and fifth centuries this Roman nightmare turned into a full-scale catastrophy.

In sum, the problem of Rome was present at its genesis. Rome succeed by specializing its military-political capacities at the time it was a tiny city-state but this specialization became also a fixation of its cultural-mental development; so the pursue of power as a generalized symbolic media, tended to overrule other aspects of the system’s socio-cultural process of differentiation. The consequences of this perversion of the system’s process of societal differentiation became more and more critical as the Empire grew in scope and became “actualized” at those points in time, when various systemic processes ran into exhaustion or “trouble.” The degeneration Gibbon talk about is in a sense nothing but the manifestations of the increase structurally disjointed gab between the overloaded political system (and its symbolization in the media of power) and the “black holes” left in the social matrix, where a balanced process of societal differentiation was not able to proceed. The effect was not only socio-cultural but also socio-technological and gave the Germanic tribes located beyond the border of the Empire an option to bridge the socio-technological gab at least in regard to operative military battle capacities. In the end, when the barbarian Germanic warriors entered the Empire in horde after horde, they only knocked down the door of a building, which already was weaken by its own immanent pathology and structural limitations.

Even so it took a while for the Empire to collapse; in part it was the consequence of the fact that the Germanic tribes were not a combined, organized invasion army under unified command but a system of independent tribes and groups floating around in a vast area by the function of their own inclinations. In this way, the collapse of the Empire did not occur through “one stroke” but rather through an overlapping series of events of which the fall of Rome to the Visigoth in 410 AD was a particular signficant moment. Also, the Roman army was still (when it functioned) a very tough fighting-machine and was only undermined bit by bit. Also, the Romans were often able to turn one Germanic tribe on the throat of the other; which gave the Empire a breathing-space for a while. However, one of the devastating elements in the process was that the Empire fought a major civil war at a time, when it should have concentrated on pressing back the invaders. The civil war was, of course, nothing than the opportunist behavior inherent in the Roman power-fixation in the moment of its full bloom. (As in the case of Clausewith’s ”total war” thus an outbust of ”sheer opportunism” can only last so long, in the same way that a burning house consume the source of its own burning). The phenomenon was naturally linked to the Roman lack of any real solution of the issue of succession, which meant that this process persistently broke down in sheer chaos. It was however, only the ultimate consequence of a system, where power triumph over any other normative institutions. In the end of the road; the Romans’ love-affair with power was nothing but self-destructive. It all created a process, where the Empire point by point lost the upper hand in dealing with the overall situation.