In your previous accounting of US imperial outlays, you mentioned the US military spending amounting to the average of 18.4% of GDP during the 1940s (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004643.html>). What proportions of GDP do you think that Britain's military expenditures amounted to during WW1 and WW2?
World War 1
"Figure 2, based on Table 5, shows that in France, government outlays had taken up nearly half of national income at current prices by 1917, and in Britain and Germany nearly 60 per cent. . . . The USA, richer, distant, entering the war late, also gave 17 per cent of its GDP to its own war effort at the peak of mobilisation and lent another 5 per cent to its Allies" (Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, "The Economics of World War 1: A Comparative Quantitative Analysis," <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/broadberry/wp/wwitoronto.pdf>, January 20, 2005).
World War 2
"[T]he share of GNP devoted to military outlays at their peak, usually in 1942-4, reached 60-70% in the case of Germany, Russia, and Japan . . . with Britain (52-55%) and the USA (31-42%) in between" (Sidney Pollard, "_The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison_, ed. Mark Harrison, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998" [Review], _The Economic Journal_, 109.456, <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0133%28199906%29109%3A456%3CF467%3ATEOWWI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M>, June 1999, p. F467).
Lessons for the American Empire?
"In the end, Britain's enormous borrowing to pay for two world wars was simply too much for its economy. At the close of World War II, British foreign debt stood at $40 billion, roughly the same size as its entire economy in 1948. 'The British lost their empire because they went bust,' Professor [Niall] Ferguson said. 'With a potential fiscal crisis looming in the United States, it should be a lesson to us all'" (Anna Bernasek, "Lessons for the American Empire," New York Times, <http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2005/0130lessons.htm>, January 30, 2005).
The Iraq War isn't in the same league as World Wars 1 and 2 in terms of relative burdens on the US economy, but, unlike the British Empire, the American Empire may be going bust anyway even without a World War: "With no improvement in the current account deficit, the external debt of the United States will rise from 24% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2003 to 64% by 2014" (L. Josh Bivens, "Debt and the Dollar," EPI Issue Brief #203, <http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/Issuebrief203>, December 14, 2004).
Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com, Mon Mar 7 02:46:44 PST 2005:
>The US was _against_ the breakup of the Soviet Union. Lots of the US
>policy establishment was against the USSR moving its troops out of
>Eastern Europe, in fact.
Washington was initially against the breakup of Yugoslavia, I recall. What does that say? :->
>On a related note, according to the last census, 4.8% of the Russian
>population speaks English, and believe me that 4.8% is far from
>fluent.
<blockquote>A Russian visitor to rural Moldova or Uzbekistan might have a fine conversation with a person over 35--but a 20-year-old will greet him with blank stares. "If before more than 90 percent of the people in the Soviet territories spoke Russian, now less than half do," says Vladimir Neroznyak, a Moscow linguist who helps advise the Russian government on language policy. Within the decade, he predicts, that figure will have fallen to one in 10. . . .
. . . The number of schools that conduct classes solely in Russian has dropped by 71 percent in Turkmenistan, 65 percent in Moldova, 59 per-cent in Kazakhstan and 47 percent in Uzbekistan. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . Over the past two years President Vladimir Putin has more than doubled the amount of money appropriated for the protection of the language. Russian "must be preserved as a language of international discourse," he said soon after being elected, if only so that the former Soviet states will be "able to compete" in the world at large. Putin's wife, Ludmilla--a linguist by education--has become the Kremlin's spokeswoman for the campaign. Across the former Soviet territory, she can be found opening Russian-language centers and attending Russian-language "Olympiads" where students compete in grammar drills.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Russia has won some improbable allies in the fight to save its language. Both NATO and the European Union have pushed Baltic countries to drop what critics say are discriminatory laws. Among those countries is Latvia. To run for political office there, candidates have been required to speak fluent Latvian--despite the fact that Russian speakers make up 30 percent of the population. Last April one Russian-speaking woman from Latvia who was barred from a parliamentary race won her case before the European Court for Human Rights. In February, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson told the Latvian Parliament that its language laws might affect NATO's decision to invite Latvia into its ranks. Reason: the issue is a contentious point with Moscow. "It's not in our interest to admit countries that don't have good relations within their borders or with their neighbors," one NATO official explains.
Will the combined forces of Putin, NATO and the EU be enough to rescue Russian from the mausoleum? (Eve Conant, "Saying Nyet To Russian," _Newsweek_, Atlantic Edition, <http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/LPRU/newsarchive/Art756.txt>, July 1, 2002, p. 30)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
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