History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0493/04937.txt

Text File | 1992-10-12 | 16KB | 267 lines

$Unique_ID{how04937}
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$Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
Analysis And Conclusion}
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$Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
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$Subject{states
united
american
western
europe
history
world
power
war
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$Date{1992}
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Title:       World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
Book:        Chapter 29: Industrialization of the West, 1760-1914
Author:      Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.
Date:        1992

Analysis And Conclusion

Analysis: The United States In World History

     World history surveys often have some problems in integrating the United
States, after some coverage of colonial origins as part of Western
explorations and trade. World history already offers a full menu. American
students always take some separate United States history courses. So why not
simplify life and leave the United States out of world surveys?

     This approach gains added support from the fact that until the late 19th
century the United States, relatively isolated save for the arrival of
immigrants, was not particularly important in the larger stream of world
history. American preoccupation lay in internal development, including
westward expansion. This brought clashes with Mexico, an important foretaste
of the rebalancing in power between the United States and Latin America.
Westward expansion also brought some posturing against European nations
tempted to interfere in the Western hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine (1820)
warned against meddling in Latin America. In fact it was British policy and
naval power that kept the hemisphere largely free from new colonialism.

     The United States counted for little in world diplomacy. The nation's
population, though growing, was small. Its economy, though developing,
exported little until the great surge of agricultural exports followed by an
industrial outflow in the 1870s and 1880s. The United States was a debtor
nation, depending on loans from European banks for much of its development
until 1914. The nation did play an important role in receiving European
immigrants, just as it earlier had affected African history through its role
in the slave trade. And the nation symbolized, especially to some Europeans, a
land of freedom and prosperity; revolutionaries in 1848, for example, invoked
American institutions, just as Latin American independence fighters had done
around 1820. But while the United States depended on world currents of
immigration, loans, and culture, it had yet to contribute much in detail.

     By the end of the 19th century the tentativeness and isolation of the
United States in world affairs, though they still affected American
perceptions in promoting a belief that the nation could be shielded from
international involvements, had really passed. American agriculture poured
goods into the markets of Europe. American industry was rising, along with
that of Germany, to the top of world output rankings. The United States had
clearly become, along with western Europe, part of the dominant economic core
in world trade. American naval power led to the acquisition of important
colonies in Asia and the West Indies. As it gained in international impact,
the United States, while retaining some of its earlier image as a
revolutionary new nation, became increasingly similar to major west European
powers in defending existing world power alignments.

     Since the international importance of the United States did grow, leaving
the nation out of world history until the late 19th century risks missing
significant early patterns. But building United States history in, even after
1870, raises some conceptual as well as practical problems.

     There is a legitimate historical question about whether to treat the
United States as a separate civilization (along perhaps with Canada and other
places that mixed dominant Western settlement with frontier conditions). Latin
America, because of the peculiarities of its colonial experience, its ongoing
position in the world economy, and above all its blending of European, Indian,
and African influences, cannot be subsumed as part of an expanding Western
civilization. Does the same hold true for the United States?

     Because the United States is so often treated separately in history
courses there is a ready assumption of American uniqueness. The United States
had purer diplomatic motives than did western Europe - look at the idealism of
Woodrow Wilson. It had its own cultural movements, such as the religious
"great awakening" of the 18th century or transcendentalism in the 19th. The
United States had the unique experience of wave after wave of immigrants
reaching its shores, contributing great cultural diversity but also promoting
considerable cultural and social integration under the banners of
"Americanization." Many of these assumptions of uniqueness are mere reflexes,
not supported by serious comparative study. There is, however, a more careful
school of historians who argue for American exceptionalism - that is, the
United States as its own civilization, not part of larger Western patterns.
American exceptionalism need not contend that the United States was immune
from contact with western Europe, which would be ridiculous, but it argues
that this contact was incidental to the larger development of the United
States on its own terms.

     American exceptionalists can point to a number of factors that caused the
development of a separate United States civilization. The Atlantic colonies
gained political and cultural characteristics in relative isolation - they
were, among other things, unusually democratic (among white males) compared to
Europe at the time. Though colonial immigrants often intended to duplicate
European styles of life, the vastness and wealth of the new land quickly
forced changes. As a result American families gave greater voice to women and
children, abundant land created a class of independent farmers rather than a
traditionalist peasantry with its tight-knit villages. Even after the colonial
era, distinctive institutions, created by the successful revolution and its
federal Constitution, would continue to shape a political life different from
that of western Europe. The frontier, which lasted until the 1890s and had
cultural impact even beyond that date, would continue to make Americans
unusually mobile and restless, while draining off some of the social
grievances that arose in western Europe.

     Distinctive causes, furthermore, produced distinctive results. There is
no question that the United States, into the 20th century, had a different
agricultural setup from that of western Europe. American politics - with the
huge exception of the Civil War - emphasized relatively small disagreements
between two major political parties, with third party movements typically
pulled into the mainstream rather quickly. There was less political
fragmentation and extremism than in western Europe, and more stability (some
would add boredom). No strong socialist movement took shape. Religion was more
important in American than in European life by the later 19th century.
Religion served immigrants as a badge of identity and helped all Americans,
building a new society, retain some sense of moorings. The absence of
established churches in the United States kept religion out of politics, in
contrast to Europe where churches got caught up in more general attacks on the
political establishment.

     The American exceptionalist argument often appeals particularly to things
Americans like to believe about themselves - more religious, less socialistic,
full of the competence that came from taming a frontier - but it must embrace
some less savory distinctiveness as well. The existence of slavery, and then
the racist attitudes and institutions that arose following its abolition,
created ongoing issues in American life that had no direct counterpart in
western Europe. Europe, correspondingly, had less direct contact with African
culture; jazz was one of the key products of this aspect of American life.

     The exceptionalist argument is powerful, particularly because Americans
(and Europeans) are normally schooled to think of the United States history as
a largely separate line of development. Yet from a world history standpoint,
the United States must be seen also, and perhaps primarily, as an offshoot of
Western civilization. The colonial experience showed the powerful impact of
Western political ideas, culture, and even family styles. American history in
the 19th century followed patterns common in western Europe. The development
of parliamentary life and the spread of democracy, though unusually early in
the United States, fits a larger Western trajectory. American
industrialization was a direct offshoot of Europe and followed a basically
common dynamic. American intellectuals kept in close contact with European
developments, and there were few purely American styles. Conditions for women
and wider patterns of family life, in areas such as birth control or
disciplining children, were similar on both sides of the North Atlantic, which
shows that the United States not only imitated western Europe but paralleled
it.

     In some important cases, because the United States was freer from peasant
and aristocratic traditions, it pioneered developments that would soon surface
in western Europe. This was true to an extent in politics; it was true in the
development of mass consumer culture and mass media (for example, the popular
press and popular films). In these areas the United States can be seen, not as
distinctive to the point of forming a separate civilization, but as
anticipating some developments that would become common in Western
civilization in part because of American example.

     American exceptions remain - the Civil War and racial issues, the absence
of serious socialism (but not of trade unionism and bitter labor strife, quite
similar to West European patterns), and the importance of religion. American
distinctiveness remains in another respect: The United States was rising to
world power just as key European nations, notably Britain, began to decline.
The trajectory of American history is somewhat different from that of western
Europe, and the 20th century revealed growing American ability to play power
politics in western Europe itself. Just as American exceptionalists must admit
special Western influences, so those who argue the United States as part of
the West must work in special features and dynamics.

     While the shared Western experience provides the most accurate framework,
given not only mutual influence but so many common impulses, the main point is
to analyze American history in careful comparative terms as part of removing
the nation's history from the isolation in which it is so often taught and
viewed.

     There is, finally, one other vantage point, not definitive but
suggestive, that uses the world history framework in the form of analogy. The
United States here is Rome compared to West Europe's Greece. Like classical
Greece, western Europe produced the basic cultural creativity of the
civilization and its first expansion (the Atlantic of course replaced the
Mediterranean). Like Greece, western Europe could never really unite, and its
empires were fragile as a result. Like Rome, the United States went through a
republican period in considerable isolation, full of stern virtue and the
strengths of a solid farming community. It initially feared Western culture as
corrupting. But as the United States gained power, like Rome, its initial
political and social institutions gave way to a more powerful state, larger
armies, and huge corporations (the equivalent of Rome's great estates).
American power, like Roman, soon eclipsed the power of the civilization's
source. Yet the United States never matched Europe's cultural creativity; its
strength lay in highways, stadia, organizational ability, and brash
self-confidence. Here, then, in analogy, is a restatement of American
participation in Western history, but also of a distinctive American role. Is
the analogy useful? Does it suggest the same last chapter: an American
collapse that will affect the whole of Western civilization save perhaps for a
"third Rome" somewhere else?

Conclusion: Diplomacy And Society

     The tensions that spiraled into major war are not easy to explain.
Diplomatic maneuverings can seem quite remote from the central concerns of
most people, if only because key decisions - for example, with whom to ally -
are made by a specialist elite. Even as the West became more democratic, few
ordinary people placed foreign affairs high on their election agendas.

     The West had long been characterized by political divisions and
rivalries. This was, by comparison with some other civilizations, an endemic
weakness of the Western political system. In a sense, what happened by the
late 19th century was that the nation-state system got out of hand, encouraged
by the absence of serious challenge from any other civilizations. The details
of this development, involving the rise of Germany and the new tensions in the
Balkans, are obviously important, but the link with a longer-term Western
problem area should not be forgotten.

     At the same time, the diplomatic escalation also had some links with the
strains of Western society under the impact of industrialization. Obviously
the fact that modern war proved so horrible, as had already been suggested in
the American Civil War, stemmed directly from the destructive power of modern
factory-produced weaponry, from massive new guns and ships to steady
improvements in the explosive power of chemical combinations. The causes of
war, also, related to industrial patterns.

     Most obviously, established leadership in the West continued to worry
about social protest and the growing visibility of the masses. Leaders tended
as a result to seek diplomatic successes in order to distract. This procedure
worked nicely for a few decades when imperialist gains came easily. But then
it proved a straitjacket: German officials around 1914, fearful of the power
of the socialists, wondered if war would not aid national unity, while British
leaders, beset by feminist as well as labor unrest, failed to think through
their own diplomatic options. Leaders also depended on military buildups for
economic purposes. Modern industry, pressed to sell the soaring output of its
factories, found naval purchases and army equipment a vital supplement.

     The masses themselves had some role to play. Though some groups,
particularly in the socialist camp, were hostile to the alliance system and to
imperialism, many workers and clerks found the diplomatic successes of their
nations exciting. In an increasingly disciplined and organized society, with
work frequently routine if not downright boring, the idea of violence and
energy, even of war, could find appeal. Mass newspapers that fanned
nationalist pride with stories of conquest and tales of the evils of rival
nations, helped shape this belligerent popular culture.

     The consolidation of industrial society in the West, in other words, had
continued to generate strain at various levels. Consolidation meant more
powerful armies and governments, a more potent industrial machine. It also
meant continued social frictions and an ongoing tug of war between rational
restraint and a desire to break out, to dare something wild.

     Thus it was that, just a few years after celebrating a century of
material progress and relative peace, ordinary Europeans went to war almost
gaily in 1914. Troops departed for the front convinced that war would be
exciting with quick victories, their departure hailed by enthusiastic
civilians who draped their trains with flowers. Four years later almost
everyone would have agreed that war had been unmitigated hell. The
complexities of industrial society were such, however, that war's advent
seemed almost a welcome breath of the unexpected, a chance to get away from
the disciplined stability of everyday life.