The Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power by Frank Ninkovich (review)

Eminent foreign relations scholar Frank Ninkovich’s latest book, entitled Global Republic, is a sweeping and, as he says, “conceptual” history of the “relationship between globalization and American foreign policy” (1). It is a spirited cultural and intellectual historical work that presents World War II as a radical break in US foreign relations in an attempt to chart a new path between (or perhaps parallel to) arguments that emphasize empire and those that engage exceptionalism.

Global Republic is in keeping with much of Ninkovich’s work: it is erudite, accessible, and likely to make an impact. One of its more controversial claims is captured in the book’s subtitle, for the book asserts that the US’s ascent to commercial and military power is best understood as “inadvertent” by dint of being embedded in — and dependent on — a long emerging international society. The book takes aim at facile exceptionalist arguments in the effort to “make a case for global developments as the course of motivation for policies that led to America’s ascendency” (2).

Beginning with the “provincial prelude” of the Revolutionary Era, the book contends that republican ideology was not aimed at implementing the export of American ideals and traces the advent of globalization there-after up through the very near-past. The narrative is heavily weighted toward the twentieth century and pivots on the year 1941 — and World War II more broadly — which stands as a moment of “singularity” at which “policies whose formulation, implementation, and consequences were prompted by an unprecedented commitment to maintaining an international society that had developed independently of American initiative” (169, 5–6). Perhaps the central contribution of the book is this conceptualization of World War II as a “war of choice” for the US that situates American participation as a “globalization” of what amounted to two large-scale regional conflicts which thereby “made” the war a world struggle that centred on international society and remade the US as a hegemon into a full-fledged advocate of globalization (165, 169).

What the book is not is a “fact-laden narrative history of US foreign relations” (6). As an interpretive, “conceptual” big-picture project, moreover, the aim is to be provocative. Ninkovich concedes as much, saying that at times his narrative oversimplifies in the interest of developing what he terms “a more complex way of framing a story that is impossibly intricate” (7) over the course of the full sweep of US history in ten fascinating, if at times uneven, chapters of analysis heavily weighted toward the twentieth century.

Global Republic is the product of an exceptional scholar and thinker yet in its attempt to distill a multifaceted, complex history down to a central argument it often overreaches or seems over-determined. The ambition, scale, and scope of analysis are breathtaking and worthy of the highest plaudits and yet the velocity of chronological movement coupled with brevity and bluntness of argument somehow make the whole feel less than the parts. These problems seem most blatant on issues of empire-building and expansion. By largely limiting imperialism to formal holding of colonies and territories, Global Republic misses crucial elements of commercial and cultural imperialism maturing in the nineteenth century even as the book does a great job exploring the global consciousness of “opinion elites” (chaps. 2–3). Ninkovich casts globalization (at least before WWI) as driven by “commanding social forces” (43) underwritten at times by Great Britain such that international society “just happened, swallowing everything in its path, without forethought or planning” (46). Glib assessments also grate; these include ascribing the Spanish American War as deriving from “contingent developments abroad” (72), suggesting that “desire for colonies was a temporary enthusiasm” (66), and the odd claim that “positive expectations about the future of international relations, not by credible apprehensions of danger from abroad” (66–67) prompted a great deal of the annexationist, interventionist, “big stick” diplomacy characterized...