Past As Prelude

History In The Making Of A New World Order

Meredith Woo-cumings, Michael Loriaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000312591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do we interpret the recent changes in world politics and what is the future likely to hold? The contributors to this volume share an assumption that history repeats itself. The book places the events of the past few years in broad historical context, examining how the political, military and economic arrangements of the past are reflected in current events. By tracing historical patterns in Western Europe, Russia, East Asia, Latin America and the United States, the contributors aim to provide a new perspective on the pressing questions and conflicts that characterize international politics now and in the years to come.

1
Introduction

MEREDITH WOO-CUMINGS
MICHAEL LORIAUX

The world as we knew it for nearly half a century has come to an end. The onrushing changes of the late 1980s and the early 1990s were neither violent nor cataclysmic, but they ushered in changes no less profound and fundamental than those built on the terrible ruins of the world's last two wars. This book assays these recent changes in world politics and suggests directions for the future. It is a study of political economy that is also historically informed. By summoning the past and by asking why certain ways of organizing politics, economics, and the military persisted over time and with what variations and repetitions, we hope both to explain our turbulent present and to suggest what the future may hold.

An initial problem is to decide which history we choose to remember. It will not be just any "past," but a past selected and illuminated by theory- Chapter 2 forces this issue on us by using world system analysis to compare the recentering of the world in 1989-1991 to that in 1919, calling the long interregnum the "seventy-years' crisis." In this choice of how to remember history, Bruce Cumings shows that the current restructuring can be understood as the settlement in Europe of World War II, which itself was part of a European civil war beginning in 1914 and ending only in 1990. What is left at the end of this long crisis? A 1990s world system in which three great capitalist poles function as the "custodians" of the world economy and in which one of them—the United States—deploys hegemonic power in that same system.

In another sense, though, this settlement was also the maturation of the political economy of containment, broadly conceived here as the American doctrine of containing both the enemy (communism) and the ally (mainly Japan and, through NATO, West Germany). The Cold War may have ended in Europe in 1990, but the costly American project of containing postwar Japan and Germany has not. Cumings argues that this outcome of the Cold War will yield only more problems for the United States and puts off the important project of an American perestroika, a domestic revival that will enable the United States to compete with Japan and Germany.

The choice of the past is perhaps nowhere as self-conscious and deliberate as in Chapter 3. Whereas the first chapter presents an internationalist vision, James Kurth offers a regional perspective on Japan and Germany, as countries that are actively transforming and even hollowing out the meaning of the New World Order, The vision that illuminates this drama of interacting and intersecting architectonic logics is one of organized capitalism and the social market in Central Europe and East Asia, reinforced in Central Europe by the supersession of liberalism by Catholic democratic tradition and carried out in East Asia by placing much of the area in the vale of Japan's formidable political economy. This vision might be thought of as a Pax Bismarck and a Pax Ito (Hirobumi), a rehabilitation of the historical model of the 1870s to the 1920s.

In Chapter 4 Peter Katzenstein takes issue with this second coming of German history, however, using instead the recent past to underscore the importance of discontinuities rather than continuities in modern history. For him, Germany's gradual entanglement in the webs of its domestic political system and of interdependence in the international system has led to a lasting accretion of liberal norms and a German unification that seems unlikely to return Europe to the era of power competition and rivalry, that is, to the old Central Europe that Kurth calls Mitteleuropa.

The political structures and processes that evolved in West Germany locked powerful actors in the embrace of their domestic political opponents, obliging these actors and institutions to pursue incremental political goals. Similarly, the policy of Allied containment made West Germany more penetrated and interdependent than other large and middle-sized powers, particularly in comparison to the German Reich, the Weimar Republic, or the Third Reich. Since German reunification has been achieved basically through the introduction into the East of West Germany's political and economic institutions, norms, and processes, Katzenstein argues, there is little reason to suggest that such mechanisms will not continue or that liberalism will be superseded by something else. He thus concludes that the ending of the bipolar conflict and the launching of German unity have deepened, rather than transformed, the situation of Germany's embedded systems at home and abroad.

In Chapter 5 Michael Loriaux likewise views Germany and France as deeply attached to the European Community (EC) through anchors of economic interdependence and the evolution of new norms of European international behavior. But for him this liberal internationalism and the recent strong drive for European integration are unplanned and adaptive solutions to old problems of geography and, hence, geopolitics. He shows how the Rhine River's longitudinal gash across a continent contributed to the development of a thriving urban commercial and industrial civilization and how Europe's nation-states converged upon each other along this same axis. He examines French policy after 1919 amid the clash of national claims to the Rhineland and shows how those conflicting claims could find their solutions only within the framework of increasing liberalization of the international market and binding supranational institutions. Loriaux then provides a persuasive and parsimonious account of France's recent role as the vanguard of internationalism and even free trade, quite in contrast to what presumed lessons of history might tell us about French national pride and insularity.

Michael Loriaux is more tentative than Peter Katzenstein, however, in stating how much this recent past is likely to predict the future. Economic liberalism has a weaker pulse in France than it does in Germany and the smaller democratic-corporatist nations of Europe, and an economic downturn throughout the European Community that adversely affects France could well revive habits of protectionism and sovereign prerogative over the market. But a fundamental rupture would occur, he thinks, only if the French confronted again their geopolitical nightmare: the return of the wealth of the Ruhr to unconstrained German sovereignty.

Geopolitical forces provide a compelling explanation for yet another return of history in Russia, according to Valerie Bunce. Russia's absence of natural borders and its location on the fringes of the West, she argues in Chapter 6, has bred a distinct elite culture that compensated for insecurity with despotism at home and expansionism abroad. A system-threatening crisis (generated by rapid international changes, sudden military reversals, or the onset of an economic crisis) has often in the past spawned exceptional leaders capable of enacting fundamental reforms. Thus Alexander II (1855-1881) emerged from the torpid reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), and Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from the stagnation of the regime of Leonid Brezhnev—the latter having proved that the Soviet Union was unable to catch up with the West and had exhausted itself in trying.

Reforming Russia à la Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev had two predictable consequences: redistribution of power at home and restructuring vis-à-vis the international system, yielding a better alignment of domestic capabilities with international realities (if only through contraction of Russia's world sphere). Thus Gorbachev's "diplomacy of decline" created the basis for more cooperative interaction among states and established the necessary conditions for liberalization at home, albeit at the cost of giving Germany new room for expanding its influence. Gorbachev's reforms, like those of Alexander II, fell short of the mark in terms of invigorating the system and could not overcome the constraints of Russian geopolitics so much as accommodate them.

In Chapter 7 Meredith Woo-Cumings shifts the focus to East Asia. Although agreeing with James Kurth and Bruce Cumings that U.S.-Japan cooperation is likely to last, she argues that the relationship is increasingly afflicted not just by trade tensions but also by a cultural and rhetorical divide that increases friction at the same time that it obscures the continuing realities of the relationship. This divide, in turn, is due to asymmetries of power that derive from the past, especially from the political logic of single-market dependence—which has been a constant factor in U.S.-East Asian relations for decades.

Woo-Cumings argues that East Asian moves toward diversified markets—primarily with regard to Europe—signal a growing departure from the previous structure going back to the World War II settlement whereby the United States interacted bilaterally with Western Europe and Japan while Japan and Europe had little mutual interaction. Additionally, the deepening of economic relations between Northeast and Southeast Asia heralds the beginning of an interregional reorganization that may cushion the impact of bilateral trade frictions across the Pacific. In the near term, though, the Pacific will likely remain an American lake in the military, political, and cultural sense, even if the economic Gordian knot that ties East Asia to the United States undergoes continuing attenuation.

In Latin America, where the history of dependence on the United States runs even deeper, John Coatsworth argues in Chapter 8 that the post-Cold War era heralds less a watershed change than a renewal of longstanding historical patterns of subordination. The Cold War in Latin America, he argues, dates back as far as the mid-1920s when the United States intervened in Nicaragua to suppress a Liberal revolt and began to identify opposition to U.S. strategic, political, and economic aims as Communist-inspired—thus generating a transnational political economy of overprotection and persistent inequality, supported by U.S.-dominated multinational corporations, local governments, and industries. As with East Asia, diversification away from dependence on the United States is much needed. But with the incorporation of the former Eastern-bloc countries into the world market, the Latin American hope of attracting sufficient European and Japanese investments to offset the overwhelming American presence is, for now, dashed.

The prospect for Latin America is thus a familiar one, but its hue is a good deal grayer in comparison to either Eastern Europe or East Asia. Eastern Europe is in the orbit of two of the world's most dynamic economies as is East Asia, drawing resources from both Japan and the United States. But the opportunities that such competition generates are mostly lacking in Latin America—leaving it perhaps to repeat history, rather than escape it, in the New World Order.

The final chapter in the book returns us to the examination of the "unwobbling pivot," which was how Ezra Pound translated the Chinese term for the imperial institution. Pound's usage comes close to Franz Schurmann's understanding of the role of the American state in the world system. If the American state and its foreign policy often seem opaque and impenetrable, it is because empires have both interests and ideologies, both of which are frequently incomprehensible in terms of national logic and the discourse of ordinary American politics. The logic that unites imperial interest and ideology resides in the vision of the chief executive, Schurmann argues, making the presidency more than just the sum of the parts that constitute the various bureaucracies responsible for foreign policy. Beneath the level of executive gestalt lie factions that contend for influence and conflict with each other, requiring the analyst to do a kind of sinology to figure out which faction or interest has the president's ear. The case that Schurmann chooses to illustrate his method in this volume, the Gulf War, is just one microcosm of how the United States involves itself with the rest of the world.

Schurmann moves fluidly between factional splits on Middle East policy, from the historical "Israel versus oil" configuration to the shifting coalition inside the "Arabist faction," illustrating how factional politics reflect deeper currents of interests. These conflicts are contrasted with the executive role, or the president's imperial vision, in the Gulf War. The actions taken by George Bush as the imperial commander in chief are related, Schurmarm argues, to the emergence of a new configuration in world history: the league of the North, now at peace, and the league of the South, now the prime arena of conflict and rivalry.

The historical background to Frariz Schurmann's chapter is unthinkable apart from the state; in fact, it is the story of the state. But it is not history as a conservative force that reflects the consciousness of the powerful, an official narration that binds people to the state. Rather, it is the story of the state as a public realm, whose structures and institutions may be repressive but can also become sources of power, freedom, and heightened consciousness. Such a conception traces to the experience and personal proclivities of the author, who describes himself as a "dissident who was once involved in ideological struggle against certain interest groups active within the 'state site'." This point of view provides an opening for us to reverse the process of examination that we have been engaged in.

We introduced the eight chapters that follow on the premise that the authors were explicit in the way they employed history to understand world politics, and on that basis we have sought to understand the rationale behind each author's choice of the history. But if we can think about history as a consciousness, a "river we all swim in," as Franz Schurmann says, then a different exercise also is possible. All social science is historical whether its practitioners know it or not, because the lens through which we observe the world is based on assumptions that are historically derived. Several of the chapters in this volume demonstrate that one's lens is often ground by the region that one studies—by "the river[s] we all swim in."

Bruce Cumings and John Coatsworth are historians of places—East Asia and Latin America—where U.S. policies have profoundly transformed the destinies of the people. The pattern of international history in these places seems a good deal more structured and permanent, with less autonomy imaginable for states in those regions historically dominated by the United States, often unilaterally so, from the Monroe Doctrine onward in Latin America and from the victorious Pacific campaigns of World War II onward in the case of East Asia.

James Kurth and Michael Loriaux excavate quite different patterns for Europe, patterns rooted in the permanence of geopolitics and close-quarter conflict. Much of twentieth century politics in Europe is a struggle to square the circle, to deal with the problem of security and industrial development in a particularly competitive world. For Loriaux, the solution for the old geopolitical problem in the Rhenish corridor rests with European integration, whereas for Kurth it is with the peoples of Central Europe following their cultural and religious telos.

The assumption of permanence sits uncomfortably with Peter Katzenstein. The vision of history that animates his writing emphasizes lessons and the learning of them, a process of complex change and adaptation to new realities: History does not always repeat itself and certainly not as tragedy followed by farce. Postwar Europe has been successfully liberalized after the tragedy of fascism, and German history is thus one of salutary discontinuity, a delinking from a bad past that promises a bright future.

Valerie Bunce's chapter reveals yet another way of thinking about a history rooted in region: the cyclical tendencies in Russia's past. Thus the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev are anticipated in the reforms of Alexander II, many of them owing to the peculiar geopolitical circumstance of Russia. Meredith Woo-Cumings, too, examines periodic recurrences of images and cultural stereotypes, imbedded in and reinforced by power relations in international politics.

Just as people break free of the past to give direction to the future, to fashion freely and spontaneously the New World Order promised by Gorbachev in the mid-1980s and George Bush in the 1990s, they still move forward historically. Just as the political economy of the Cold War lies in wreckage in the former Soviet Union and in the American rust belt, a political economy of allied competition and contention comes to the fore. Disguised in the new clothes of U.S.-Japan rivalry or an integrated Europe, it runs on well-trodden geopolitical tracks and revives old conflicts just as it creates new unities. It is too early to speak of the history of the making of this New World Order. But it is not too early to ask history to inform us about where we have been so that we might know where we are going.

2
The End of the Seventy-Years' Crisis

Trilateralism and the New World Order

BRUCE CUMINGS

For the first time since 1945 it is possible for an American president to speak of constructing a New World Order. For the first time since 1919 it is possible that he might succeed. The onrushing changes of the 1980s curiously recentered the world system circa 1919, minus the three great mistaken outcomes of World War I and the Versailles peace: the failure of the League of Nations, the hard peace that threw a defeated Germany into economic depression, and (from the Western viewpoint) the mistake of the Bolshevik Revolution. As of 1992 the United Nations is reinvigorated, Germany has the "soft" peace of reunification and the most vibrant economy in Europe, and the Bolsheviks have declared themselves to be a mistake.¹

Seven decades ago, after the terrible bloodletting of "the war to end all wars," Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin offered competing models for a new world system, which nonetheless had much in common: Both held to an internationalist vision, to opposition to Old World imperialism, and to self-determination for colonial peoples. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev did not compete so much as unite on principles of collective security, open systems, and a world under law—the last being the personification of the unfulfilled vision of Wilsonian idealism.

The hopes that attended the end of the 1980s, however, have turned to fears. The year 1991 threatened a return to crisis rather than promising the dawning of a new era. Whereas Wilson and Lenin constructed their visions amid the catastrophe of war, George Bush implicitly acted on the principle that the impetus for the New World Order he has spoken o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The End of the Seventy-Years' Crisis: Trilateralism and the New World Order
• 3 Mitteleuropa and East Asia: The Return of History and the Redefinition of Security
• 4 Taming of Power: German Unification, 1989-1990
• 5 The Riddle of the Rhine: France, Germany, and the Geopolitics of European Integration, 1919-1992
• 6 Transforming Russia: A Comparison of Reforms Under Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev
• 7 East Asia's America Problem
• 8 Pax (Norte) Americana: Latin America After the Cold War
• 9 After Desert Storm: Interest, Ideology, and History in American Foreign Policy
• Notes
• About the Book and Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index