After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century

2. THE WORRIES OF NATIONS

13 2❖ THE WORRIES OF NATIONS Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. —Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation More than half a century has passed since Karl Polanyi penned those words. He wrote The Great Transformation in the midst of the greatest conflagration human civilization has yet known, and, ever since, his book been regarded as one of the classics of modern political economy. Polanyi sought to explain why the twentieth century, then not yet half over, had already been rent by two great wars. Where most blamed “accidents” for World War I, and Germany, Japan and the Great Depression for World War II, Polanyi found an explanation in the dreams and failures of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalists and the market processes originally set in train during the early years of the first Industrial Revolution, between 1800 and 1850. The nineteenth century was a time of social and technological innovation and reorganization at a scale theretofore unexperienced by anyone. It left an indelible 14 Chapter 2 mark on the world and its impacts are still being felt today. The “Great Transformation” led to the emergence of the modern nation-state as an active political and economic player in people’s everyday lives and turned it into an aggressive agent in international relations. It also resulted, in the twentieth century, in the two world wars. It would seem unlikely that a fifty-year-old book about events taking place almost two hundred years ago would have anything to say to us about either today or the future. Nonetheless, many of the same phenomena examined by Polanyi are, once again, at work today. In this chapter, I argue that we have entered a period of social change for which the history of the Industrial Revolution, and the events that followed, merit close scrutiny for contemporary parallels. To be sure, things are not the same, but there are a number of important similarities between then and now. In particular, as the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves living through a period of social and technological innovation and reorganization, taking place not only within countries but also globally—a phenomenon that is often called “globalization .” We might expect that, as happened in the past, unanticipated social and political consequences will follow (on globalization, see, e.g., Gill and Mittleman, 1997; Sakamoto, 1994; Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998). In the later chapters of this book, we shall see that these consequences may be violent or peaceful, integrative or fragmenting, bringing prosperity to some and poverty to others. For now, these are mostly only possibilities. At some point during the coming century, however, it is likely that new patterns of global politics will become clear. We may then be able to look back, as Polanyi did, and describe how events, processes of change, and human actions during the second half of the twentieth century led to the new patterns of the twenty-first. At this point, the future remains cloudy and we can only speculate. I begin this chapter with a general discussion of industrial revolutions and their impacts within nation-states and on relations between them. The key element here is social innovation and reorganization at scales running from the household to the global. I then turn to an analysis of the “Cold War Compromise,” the concerted attempt following World War II to avoid the reemergence of those conditions that were thought to have led to the two world wars, and especially World War II. The “compromise” represented the United States’ attempt to steer the global political and economic system toward stability and The Worries of Nations 15 prosperity by reproducing, as much as possible, domestic American conditions abroad. As we shall see, the Compromise was largely a success, but it has had quite unforeseen results. I then describe the origins of the Third Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. the “information revolution ”) in the great applied science projects of World War II (the Manhattan Project, in particular), which became the model for technological research and innovation during the decades that followed. More specifically, it was the mobilization of knowledge in the pursuit of a better world that, paradoxically, has...