The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective ed. by Niall Ferguson et al. (review)

NOTE: This review reflects only the views of the author and should not be construed as the view of any U.S. government agency.

In The Shock of the Global, Niall Ferguson and his past and current Harvard University colleagues have produced a wide-ranging anthology documenting the trends, contradictions, and curiosities of globalization in the 1970s. The chapters in this volume, which were originally submitted at a conference on "The Global 1970s" at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, cross disciplinary divides as they frame the types of questions that scholars must confront if they want to understand transnational processes and the official and non-state actors that drive them.

Ferguson's introductory essay sketches out the contours of an era characterized by what the political scientist James Rosenau terms "turbulence"—across not only international politics but also economic patterns and production, cultural life, and intellectual trends. The complex forces highlighted by Ferguson transcend the bounds of diplomacy and strategy, setting the wide aperture of the volume and its assorted chapters. Scholars of the Cold War will accordingly find some of the selections more valuable than others.

In examining the situation of the United States, CharlesMaier considers whether the 1970s constituted not a "crisis" per se but a "malaise," a condition that he attributes mainly to economic factors. For Maier, a concrete "rejection of the neo-Keynesian and neocorporatist prescriptions" that had governed the U.S. economy gave rise to market mechanisms as the basis for actions hitherto driven by consensus across the largest producers and self-regulation (p. 36). Although Maier roots the problems in "post-Fordian" production methods and shifts in the industrial base, his analysis extends to the cultural sphere and the difficult evolution of teenage angst in the 1960s as identity formation and maturity caught up with hippies suddenly coming of age.

One of the useful early chapters is Daniel Sargent's discussion of globalization's impact on U.S. foreign policy. Sargent describes how "interdependence" extended the reach and impact of U.S. power as the United States extricated itself from a prolonged and painful military involvement in Vietnam. But interdependence also exposed U.S. policies to a wider range of international circumstances, as the oil shocks precipitated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 made clear. Although Sargent clearly delineates the broader contours of the phenomenon, he does not really show how the growth of interdependence reflected underlying patterns in state-society relations.

Jeremi Suri characterizes U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's managed approach to the dislocations transforming the international system as "a foreign policy of globalization that rested on the reassertion of state power" in the service of U.S. policy ends (p. 175). According to Suri, Kissinger pursued this policy through three principal mechanisms: the reinvigoration of a Euro-Atlantic community through the sharing of nuclear weapons and economic policy coordination; the "polycentrism" of international decision-making diffused to capitals beyond Washington and Moscow; and a shared set of principles for international cooperation that formed the basis of détente and the growth of U.S. relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Odd Arne Westad's contextualization of the PRC's reforms in the late 1970s (after the death of Mao Zedong) in terms of the processes of globalization will prove valuable for scholars breaking with bipolar histories of the Cold War who want to amplify China's role in the history of that conflict. Specific reforms such as pricing mechanisms and even crude systems of credit employed by individual factories in the PRC, Westad notes, were as much a reflection of the liberalization that emerged from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution as they were part of a wider rejection of Soviet central planning schemes and development models that led not only to...