Culture and Civilization

Cosmopolitanism and the Global Polity

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351524469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume of Culture and Civilization focuses on cosmopolitanism, the global polity, and political ramifications of globalization. The introduction by Gabriel R. Ricci establishes context and provides an overview of the entire work. Topics include the history of globalization, climate change policy, ecological consequences of development, concepts of civilization, human rights, Eastern thought and economics, global citizenship, and travel writing.

Within this collection, Carl J. Strikwerda argues that the first era of globalization in modern times was marked by global migrations patterns. Pablo Iannone's history of the Andean oil rush and its ecological consequences looks at the processes of development. Brett Bowden argues that civilization entails both progress and war. J. Baird Callicott provides a philosophical analysis of a moral theory that accommodates spatial and temporal scales of climate change, Sanjay Paul analyzes the United Nations Global Compact, and Ed Chung discusses the role of economic theory in business schools. Colin Butler reflects on E. F. Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics, " while Taso Lagos relates parallel polis to the idea of global citizenship. Tony Burns examines the ways in which Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant have been interpreted. Finally, Adam Stauffer explores Charles Warren Stoddard's work South-Sea Idyls.

This volume of Culture and Civilization, the first under Ricci's editorship, follows the tradition of the previous four volumes - developing critical ideas intended to produce a positive intellectual climate, one that is prepared to confront challenges and alert us to the opportunities, for people in all fields and of all faiths, of the twenty-first century.

1
Imagining a Global World: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Tragedy of Great Power Politics in the First Era of Globalization, 1870–1914

Carl J. Strikwerda

GLOBALIZATION IS UNDOUBTEDLY one of the most important phenomena of our era. Since the 1980s, international trade and investment have radically changed the life of people in many countries, often most powerfully through the spread of consumerism and instant communications. In the early 1970s, for example, multinational companies invested $10 billion a year outside their home countries. By 2000, this figure rose to $1 trillion annually. Between 1970 and 2000, the price of a five-minute trans-Atlantic telephone call fell over 95 percent.¹ Thanks to personal computers and handheld devices, the effects on everyday life have often been profound. Even in villages in Kenya and India where over half the population is illiterate, people use cell phones to communicate with the rest of the world. Since the Cold War ended in 1989–91, one could be justified in describing our own times as the “age of globalization.”

Yet globalization is not entirely new. Exactly a century ago, the world went through what could be called the first era of globalization. Between 1870 and 1914, there was an enormous increase in worldwide trade and investment. Between 1900 and 1909, the volume of press traffic on telegraph lines trebled.² In many ways, the world was more globalized a century ago than it is today. Migration between countries is higher today than it has been for decades, with an estimated 150 million workers laboring in countries other than that of their birth or citizenship. Before 1914, however, a larger proportion of the world's population lived outside the land of their birth than do so today. Similarly, the proportion of the world's agricultural product that was traded on international markets was greater a century ago than it is now.

Furthermore, the impact of the first era of globalization was felt more deeply than it is today since the break with the preindustrial, local past was more profound. In the late nineteenth century, undersea cables, diplomatic treaties, scientific explorations, imperialist conquests, and international trade and investment brought countries into an interconnected global world for the first time. By 1900, a vast network of telegraph lines, centered on London, spanned the earth and allowed for the communication of news, prices, and political decisions in a matter of minutes from almost any city in any country.³ There were no longer truly “unknown lands” and precious few spots besides the North and South Poles that visitors could not reach.⁴ As the British scholar James Bryce wrote in 1903,

Exploration of this earth is all but finished…. Civilized man knows his home in a sense in which he never knew it before…. The completion of this world-process is a specially great and fateful event because it closes a page forever. The conditions that are now vanishing can never recur.⁵

It is no coincidence that the phrase “the good ship earth” was coined in 1913, by the American writer Herbert Quick, to describe the new global world of his era.⁶

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, as we struggle to understand the impact of globalization, it is instructive to ask, how did people around 1900 try to understand the newness of the first era of globalization and how did they react to it? The impact of the new global world has often been overlooked by historians because the late nineteenth century has been seen as an era in which the world economy was dominated by imperialism and nationalism. Imperialism involved the control of non-European areas by European states. Nationalism fueled rivalries among the European great powers. Together, imperialism abroad and nationalism in Europe, it is argued, created rivalries that led directly to World War I. Sidney Pollard writes, “In the forty years or so before the First World War, the tendencies that were breaking up the economic unity of Europe were getting stronger in relation to those that made for continuing integration.”⁷ Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Howard, James Joll, Arno Mayer, and numerous other scholars have argued that rising nationalism and interstate competition before 1914 made the war almost inevitable.

A closer look, however, reveals that many well-informed European and American observers saw their era as one of increasing integration among nations. Greater unity, not rivalry, among nations was as likely a future as war. In many ways, it was the reaction against globalization among the great powers, not rising nationalism, that led toward war. Nor did imperialism have a straightforward impact on lands outside of Europe. Along with exploiting the resources of the non-European world, Europeans communicated a great deal about Western culture that was attractive to Africans and Asians, including the means, they hoped, to oppose imperialism. Some of the most profound reactions to the impact of Western culture arose in lands not controlled by European imperialism—particularly Japan, China, and Ottoman Turkey. Ironically, the impact of globalization led to increased nationalism. Africans and Asians saw the nation-state as the foundation that gave Euro-pean countries their power. They did see the impact of the new world economy as encouraging greater unity, as can be seen in their combining nationalism with supranational ideologies such as Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism, or Pan-Asianism. Ultimately, however, the new global order encouraged an aggressive militarism on their part, particularly, on the part of Japan and China. Tragically, the militarism of the European powers had a more profound effect than the forces of the world economy which created unity and produced some of the attractive features of the West such as modern education, science, and constitutionalism. Looking at what a range of thinkers and political observers—Brooks Adams, James Bryce, Phan Boi Chau, Nakae Chomin, Mohandas Gandhi, J. E. Casely Hayford, Hermann Hesse, Walter Lippmann, Liang Qichao, George Santayana, Gustav Schmoller, Rabindranath Tagore, Max Weber, H. G. Wells, K'ang Yu-wei, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, among others—thought about the precocious globalization of their time can help us to understand how their thinking shaped the century to follow and to see how our own era of globalization both shares traits and differs from theirs.

A Global Vision

While scholars and popular opinion often view the pre-1914 era as an age of nationalism, it is striking that a large group of European and American thinkers and activists grasped the fundamentally new character of the late nineteenth century and believed that it would lead to greater unity among nations. The British jurist Lord Bryce wrote in 1903, “It is hardly too much to say that for economic purposes all mankind is fast becoming one people.”⁸ J. G. Bartholomew, editor of the Atlas of the World's Commerce, wrote in 1907 that

at no period in the world's history has there been commercial expansion of such stupendous growth as at the beginning of this twentieth century. Every year new lands are being exploited and new regions opened to commerce. Everywhere the old is giving place to the new, the barriers of ancient civilisations are breaking down; the centres of trade are changing and will continue to change as long as this great development advances. Such an expansion means not only penetration into new lands, but the growth of an intellectual conception of the world as a whole, involving the expansion of our economic, political, and social horizon. Commerce leads the way, and in this new age it has come to be realized that commerce is the real basis of modern material civilisation, and the nations which maintain commercial supremacy will also be assured of political supremacy.⁹

Internationalists hoped that Europe's free trade, relative peace, and intrastate cooperation could be spread throughout the entire world. Between 1846, with the ending of the British Corn Laws, and 1868, most western European countries sharply lowered their tariffs. International trade tripled in less than fifteen years. Between 1815 and 1914, Europe knew only one war that involved more than two of the great powers. The Crimean War (1853–56) pitted Britain and France, allied with Turkey and Sardinia-Piedmont, against Russia. The Crimean War occurred on the fringe of Europe, was short, and caused relatively little loss of life. (It did bequeath the famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and gave Florence Nightingale the fame she used to improve nursing and energize social reform in Britain.) Other wars were even shorter: the Austro-Prussian War, or “Seven Weeks’ War,” of 1866 lasted forty-nine days. Between 1840 and 1914, European countries created over thirty international organizations to regulate ocean travel, telegraph lines, migration, and family reunification. In addition, another 450 private organizations connected professionals and activists across borders.¹⁰ The International Congresses on Peace, meeting in The Hague in 1899 and 1907, prompted many internationalists to believe that some kind of cooperative world order might be the capstone to the web of international agreements and organizations, especially if it were combined with free trade among nations. “Free Trade is now by far the strongest guarantee of European peace,” proclaimed the German liberal party leader Theodor Barth in 1908.¹¹ Winston Churchill, not famous in his later career for his starry-eyed idealism, in 1908 declared,

With every year that passes over the globe, with every improvement in communication, with every decision of a Hague Tribunal, with every meeting of a Peace Conference or an International Congress of any sort or any kind, the unity of the civilized world, and the interrelation and interdependence of all civilized modern communities, is being steadily and irresistibly advanced… the European arrangement to which the Free Trader looks forward is a co-operative commonwealth, a great banding together of all peoples of Europe, of Christendom, and ultimately the world.¹²

Internationalists recognized the deep roots of hostility among the great powers. They argued that this hostility might be transcended as nations realized the foolishness of war. As Norman Angell, later Nobel Peace Prize winner, claimed in his bestselling The Great Illusion, peace guaranteed prosperity and promised benefits beyond what any war could garner.¹³ Internationalists did not give ground to the social Darwinists who employed the theory of natural selection to argue that war aided the human race in winnowing out the weak and infirm. Instead, they argued that militarism was a leftover trait from an earlier stage of human evolution. More developed societies grasped that war was inefficient and destructive and found ways to deploy human competitive urges in peaceful economic rivalries.¹⁴ For the fertile imagination of science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, it could be an invasion from Mars that would bring home the essential unity of the human global community. After the earth had survived the invasion because germs from earth had proved fatal to the Martians, his fictional narrator in The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, noted that the experience of fighting the invasion “has done much to promote the commonweal of mankind.”¹⁵ Propelled by economic globalization, society as a whole ran ahead of political leaders who clung to old divisions. According to the American jurist Raymond Bridgman in 1911,

[u]nity created in men as men, not developed by men as creators, has been stimulating them for many centuries, and today it is the dynamic which runs international railroad and steamship lines and carries men and women in to all nooks and corners of foreign countries, to see new peoples, to learn new languages, to read new literature, to study new histories, and to develop that world spirit and race enthusiasm which is thrilling all nations as they look forward to the mutual friendship, peace, and prosperity which is their natural right and destiny, and which they are about to achieve. Unconsciously, the masses of the nations are illustrating the unity of the human race. Their statesmen are just beginning to realize the truth and act upon it.¹⁶

Great Power Politics and Racism in the New Global Order

The congruence between economic globalization and the argument for international collaboration was clear to the opponents of the internationalists. Indeed, the vehemence of the opposition to the internationalists and fear of being dependent on the world economy provide strong evidence that internationalists read the major trends of their day insightfully. It is striking that major commentators on world politics of the period who opposed the internationalists nonetheless predicted that only very large empires or “world powers” could survive in the emerging global economy. British geographer Halford Mackinder foresaw a looming conflict among large empires or continental powers, based on his reading of world history. Great land-based continental empires—created by the Mongols, Turks, and Mughals—had dominated most of Eurasia's history. The seaborne trade that created the global economy of the nineteenth century was a remarkable divergence from the past. Europe's era of explo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Imagining a Global World: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Tragedy of Great Power Politics in the First Era of Globalization, 1870–1914
• 2. The Temporal and Spatial Scales of Global Climate Change and the Limits of Individualistic and Rationalistic Ethics
• 3. Saving Civilization from Itself
• 4. Globalization and the Andean Oil Rush
• 5. Corporate Citizenship and Globalization: An Analysis of the United Nations Global Compact
• 6. With Apologies to Daffodils: Business Enterprise and the Human Condition
• 7. Toward Buddhist Economics, Building on E. F. Schumacher
• 8. “Parallel Polis” and the Arab Spring: The Internet as Layer, Difference, and Engine of Democratic Renewal
• 9. “The Right to Have Rights”: Slavery, Freedom, and Citizenship in the Thought of Aristotle, Hegel, and Arendt
• 10. Consuming the South Pacific: Charles Warren Stoddard, Foreign Travel, and the Limits of American Cosmopolitanism