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16. Geographical Solicitude, Vital Anomaly
- University of California Press
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The American Century is synonymous with globalization. The first formative moment, from 1898 to 1919, adumbrated the vision of a global political economy that would simultaneously surpass the regional parameters of the European empires and entwine a global political structure (the League of Nations ) with an already accomplished world market.The Russian Revolution, labor and socialist revolts at home, and nationalist U.S. Senate rejection of the league, followed by the rise of fascism in Europe, brought a concerted retreat from this early effort at globalism—a deglobalization of sorts.World War II posited a flintier global design. But the cold war frustrated this second moment of American imperial ambition. At the beginning of the twenty-first century—the third moment of U.S. imperial assertion—a new global amalgam of political and economic ambition, summarized in the rhetoric of globalization , is again promised. The postwar institutions of global management —the United Nations, International Monetary Fund,World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT—superseded by the World Trade Organization)—have newfound power after decades of limited relevance , even dormancy. Twentieth-century globalism was stimulated first and foremost by the increasing geographical scale of economic production and circulation, in short, the increasing scale of capital accumulation. Among the many signs of this expansion, the unprecedented scale of the U.S. Steel works at Gary, Indiana, built in 1905 with a town of two hundred thousand to service it, 16 GEOGRAPHICAL SOLICITUDE, VITAL ANOMALY was perhaps its most powerful landscape expression prior to World War I. But just as important were the proliferation of multinational corporations that began before the war and accelerated in the 1920s, the extraordinary innovations in transportation and communication, and the internationalization of cultural commodities from music to film to advertising. New York was challenging London as a center of global finance; the international power and range of the House of Morgan presaged the global sway of U.S. capital in coming decades, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 provoked an international, not simply a national, economic depression. The new globalism was also political in inspiration.American nationalism was the primary political vehicle for this globalism as well as its major enemy. This was especially evident in the failed first and second moments of American Empire and is vividly expressed by the nationalist internationalism of Isaiah Bowman as much as by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the midcentury State Department, and the Council on Foreign Relations. For the liberal foreign policy establishment of these decades, internationalism was the fruition of American nationalism, a global manifest destiny underpinned by growing economic dominance. This ambition has resurfaced at the end of the American Century with the question of whether globalization is synonymous with Americanization . Fears of Americanization appeared first in turn-of-the-century Europe and continued throughout the century, but with the consummation of postwar U.S. economic and cultural expansion by the 1970s, they impinged globally rather than regionally on people’s identities.1 Americanization and Wilson’s globalism have evolved in consort, but there is also a vital discontinuity between the early and the late decades of the so-called American Century. If we contrast the Americanized world that Bowman and his cohorts struggled to construct with the new American Lebensraum of the early twenty-first century, the relationship between nationalism and internationalism seems to have changed in subtle but fundamental ways.American globalism is no longer a liberal but a neoliberal project, the conservatism of which is manifest. It rejects the idiosyncratic “social” liberalism of mid-twentieth-century U.S. politics in favor of a return to the assumptions of market and individual self-interest emanating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mission of foreign policy liberalism from Wilson onward was the global establishment of capitalism, free trade, and bourgeois democracy within and among the mosaic of nation-states that constituted the world market. The intensity of the cold war and the resort to a binary geopolitics arose precisely from the fact that the abstention of the Soviet and Chinese geographical solicitude, vital anomaly / 455 [3.86.235.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:09 GMT) blocs from international capitalism again frustrated the promise of a liberal globalism. One can therefore see how, to its American authors, there was no contradiction in the nationalism and internationalism that simultaneously drove liberal foreign policy and how also, regardless of the rhetorical scripting that pitted “liberal” doves against “conservative” hawks, the cold war...