The Nation Magazine, May 8, 2000
FREE-MARKET LIBERALISM IS NOW PROCLAIMED A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR SUCCESS, BUT
THIS BELIEF IS BASED ON A PARTIAL AND LIMITED WORLDVIEW.
The American Ascendancy: Imposing a New World Order
by BRUCE CUMINGS
The turn of the millennium provided yet another occasion to celebrate a
triumphant American Century. And given the unipolar pre-eminence and
comprehensive economic advantage that the United States enjoys today, only
a spoilsport can complain. Unemployment and inflation are both at
thirty-year lows. The stock market remains strong, though volatile, and the
monster federal budget deficit of a decade ago miraculously metamorphoses
into a surplus that may soon reach more than $1 trillion. Meanwhile,
President William Jefferson Clinton, not long after a humiliating
impeachment, was rated in 1999 as the best of all postwar Presidents in
conducting foreign policy (a dizzying ascent from eighth place in 1994),
according to a nationwide poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
This surprising result might also, of course, bespeak inattention: When
asked to name the two or three most important foreign policy issues facing
the United States, fully 21 percent of the public couldn't think of one
(they answered "don't know"), and a mere 7 percent thought foreign policy
issues were important to the nation. But who cares, when all is for the
best in the best of all possible worlds?
If this intoxicating optimism is commonplace today, it would have seemed
demented just a few short years ago: Back then, the scholars and popular
pundits who are supposed to know the occult science of international
affairs were full of dread about American decline and Japanese and German
advance. The American Century looked like an unaccountably short one. Today
it is disconcerting to recall the towering influence of work by
"declinists" like Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) and
Clyde Prestowitz (Trading Places); it is positively embarrassing to read
recent accounts like Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization and the
Remaking of the World Order and Donald White's The American Century, which
still seem to assume an America on the road to ruin. Prestowitz thought
Japan was ahead of the United States in nearly every important industry and
argued that Japan was verging on hegemonic predominance in the world
economy. Now it is difficult to find any American who takes Japan
seriously--in 1990, 63 percent of foreign policy elites fretted about
competition from Japan; that fell to 21 percent in 1994 and a mere 14
percent in 1998.
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man had a different
point to make: The end of the cold war marked the real millennial
transition, leaving just one system standing--ours. Few could have imagined
Fukuyama doing this through a reprise of the thought of Hegel--and perhaps
least of all the great philosopher himself, who would roll over in his
grave to see his dialectic grinding to a halt in the Valhalla of George
Bush and Bill Clinton's philistine United States. But Fukuyama's argument
had an unquestionable ingenuity, taking the thinker perhaps most alien to
the pragmatic and unphilosophical American soul, Hegel, and using his
thought to proclaim something quintessentially American: that the pot of
gold at the end of History's rainbow is free-market liberalism. History
just happened to culminate in the reigning orthodoxy of our era, the
neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan.
The United States has such a comprehensive advantage in the world that it
could occupy itself for a full year with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a
year punctuated by the disastrous collapse of several of the world's
important economies (South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia) and followed
by a new war, and nothing happened except that the American economic lead
lengthened. The stock market continued to go up in spite of the global
financial crisis, which included a very expensive implosion of the Russian
economy in August 1998; the market expanded all through the war in Kosovo.
(More recently it appeared that the bull market might be coming to an end.)
Economic growth in the last quarters of both 1998 and 1999 was so robust
(6.1 and 6.9 percent, respectively) that in GNP terms it created a Spain
overnight. This isn't to say that US diplomacy is winning friends and
influencing people the world over, but so what? Former UN chief Boutros
Boutros-Ghali put his finger on the deepest truth: "Like in Roman times,"
he said, the Americans "have no diplomacy; you don't need diplomacy if you
are so powerful."
Let me try to isolate four elements that I think account for the American
ascendancy today, each of which has little to do with preponderant military
strength (even though the United States has that, too): mass consumption
and mass culture, the advantages of a continent, an unappreciated aspect of
American technological prowess and the longevity of the global system that
American planners established after World War II, a system that was long
obscured by cold war obsessions.
Full article at: http://www.thenation.com
Louis Proyect
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