12:01AM
What Europe did, then what America accomplished
Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 12:01AM From Mike Nelson by way of Talking Points Memo.
What I got from it:
Life was bad in the usual way, and then the Industrial Revolution made it much better in the West. Then rising Europe turned to colonialism and that created a godawful have/have-not world system that was doomed once the greedy Europeans turned on each other in "world wars." Then the US-style of globalization kicked in, eventually creating the better world we know today by creating the opportunities for the "rest" to advance.
Our polite European host skips all the ugly colonial realities, and instead just notes the tremendous inequality that defined the middle period. It's a painfully selective way to capture the past two centuries.
Reader Comments (15)
Mr. Rosling is so interesting and graphic in doing this comparison. But Green Technology isn't going to drive the world economy if done in a green manner. The Chinese are driving forward by doing green industry with all of the pollution and labor practices of the American 19th and early 20th century.
You need to read Karl Popper. It was the idiots who mis-interpreted Marx who screwed things up just as the industrial revolution was proving Marx's "scientific" predictions (increasing wealth for the "haves" and increasing misery for the proletariat would cause social revolution) false. Even Lenin discovered Marx's mistake, but chose the violent, totalitarian response to bring about a more humane world and of course created exactly the opposite effect.
I taught Marxism at Harvard as a grad student, so I'm fairly familiar with the arguments. I just don't feel the need to include Marxists in most of these discussions. Just not that helpful once you get past first couple of chapters in Das Kapital.
Enjoyed this very creative presentation style embracing the positive outcome of globalization.
I also appreciated your pointing out the unmentioned colonialism which not only delayed the positive aspects of globalization but also almost destroyed world civilization with two world wars.
Popper also called Plato a fascist, and his entire attack on "scientism" was well, inconsistent when approaching verisimilitude that would have been better broached by going about using other concepts like a few have done with Godel's Theorum.
"It's a painfully selective way to capture the past two centuries."
Indeed.
You should not forget that the spread of Marxism in underdeveloped- and not the developed countries(as expected by Marx) was mainly and exactly the reaction to this European form of globalization--the colonialism. This is what Lenin´s "Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism"is about:Colonialism.But what Thomas Barnett forgets in his apology for US -style globalization is that the US globalization lead in 2008 to the most severe financial crisis as in 1929 when the Wall Street crashed.The Black Friday was also an incentive for many people to join the Communist movement as they thought this crashed was the end of capitalism.The price for this US globalized Wall Street crash was a World war.Maybe the crisis theory of Marx is not outdated.Even Schumpeter speaks of creative destruction in capitalism.The problem started with the deregulation of the financial markets under Reagan and the abolishment of the Glass-Steagal Act by Clinton in 1998.There has to be a New Rule Set also for Wall Street and the financial markets, not only for the GAP states.That´s what our oldchancellor Helmut Schmidt says and BASEL 3 which will be implemented in 2018 (very late)will be a little leap forward in this direction.Just to restore the Glass-Stegal Act globally would be a big success.Globalization without a New Rule Set for Wall Street will lead to another desaster.
This Europe-bashing is unacceptable.Europe created by its colonialism the basis for the foundation of the world market (even an anticapitalist as Marx said this: The creation of the world market is the positive side of the bourgeoisie and its world misson).The USA might have acted the same way if they were earlier industrialized and had not their new frontiers to manage.The USA benefited from the existing global chains of supply and of the creation of international financial markets.Again: It was the Wall Street crashes which brought the world to the 2 most severe crisis in history, not the Europeans.However:The question will be: If China and India ascend and might become even larger economies as the USA is at the moment, how would a Chinese-style or an Indian style globalization look like. Would they be similiar to the US model or very different?
Yes Ralf, Wall Street created the crisis, and European colonialism created two world wars that killed 100 million souls.
Trying to spin colonialism as a good thing just doesn't sail. It was thievery on a grand scale--nothing more and nothing less.
The US acted differently. That's the whole point.
Wow, this was a hot topic. What bothers me about it is how uninformed the media, politicians and most K-12 teachers are about the full complex scope of the international impact results of early capitalism, colonialism, and then Communist idealism.
The British theory (or spin) of the world benefits for colonialism with its specialized client assignments should be part of K-12 teaching, not because it was evil, but because the advocates did not monitor for unintended consequences, or feel that was a wise obligation. We get some insight from from the 'rum, molasses, and slaves' song & story. However, we don't hear how British companies and academics pushed emerging nations in Africa and other areas to completely revise what their social and economic pattern was to specialize in a resource that had great international user needs. Then, those British companies would dump them when they found a newer and cheaper nation's resources. Often they would then find a way to produce a cheaper artificial material in the UK. Other core countries then followed that example.
So when we try to 'sell' modern nationalism to emerging nations, we should understand that it was not just past military and political pressures in those areas that created a hostile memory culture against US, Europe etc. Only the Dutch relationship with early Japan demonstrated a wise and informative outreach.
Most people don't know Adam Smith wrote and taught ethics before he became the 'market capitalist' guru. When he pushed domestic and international market networks of specialized players, he only said that the overall wealth growth was good, along with that of the winners. At that time the churches still influenced the public and governments to share that overall wealth growth. Adam Smith also emphasized the need to avoid chasing the hot market for products or services like businesses did in the early colonial efforts to bring things like exotic flowers wealthy families wanted to show, until too many of them saturated their ego groups, and they would chase another hot item. Adam Smith said to be cautious, balanced, and look for emerging market changes. So he would not have backed our recent excessive production and purchasing of 'exotic' real estate and loan derivatives.
However, Adam Smith did say he started his inquiry into market economics when he noticed that in his poor home area, people only got work when other people with money showed up.
P.S. to my comments. A web site below on tulip mania. Google has several good ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
The thesis that European colonialism caused two world wars is just wrong.Germany caused the two world wars, but Germany had no real colonialism. Bismarck already said: My map of Africa is Europe--means: he was not interested in colonies at all.Germany had 2 colonies in Africa, Qingdao in China and some unimportant Pacific islands.That was all. After the 1st world war it had no colonies at all. And Hitler was also not interested in colonialism as you can read in "Mein Kampf"and can see it from the real politics of the 3rd Reich. Hitler and the Nazis wanted a Great German Reich and to fight the other powers directly, but never colonies. The Nazis also supported Chakra Bose, the most important Indian fighter for Indian independence from British colonialism besides Ghandi and Nehru.Anticolonial Germany caused the 2 world wars, but not British and French colonialism.I think it is this unholy tradition of the USA to project everything bad of the past in bad old Europe (Rumsfeld--former chief of Tom Barnett).Second point: The USA also had the mass slaughter of the native US Indians, slavery and gun boat diplomacy and the Iraq war looked also very similar to the conquest of Middle East oil--as the British and the French did before.The antiamericansim all over the world has to do that many countries think that the USA is an imperialistic power with informal rule (IMF, World Bank and WTO)as were the Brits and the Frogs with their formal rule over colonies.
Last point and then I´ll end my lecture about Europe:
Tom Barnett ignores the political consequences of the Wall Street crashes in 1929 and 2008.Without Black Friday 1929 Hitler wouldn´t have been possible. The German debts, the high unemployment and despair in the Weimar Republic caused by the Wall Street crash let Nazism seize power.Without Black Friday there wouldn´t have been a ruling NSDAP and a second world war.
Ralf,
You see all of history at the nation-state level, whereas I tend to favor system-level cause-and-effect.
The reason why Germany had to make its empire in Europe was that it came late to the colonialization party (not that it did not try quite hard to catch up). To try and segment that larger reality off from the world wars is simplistic. Just look at Versailles: it was all about who got what imperial holdings from the losers.
You want to paint colonialization as decent and necessary precursor to globalization. It wasn't. It was just a nightmare for the enslaved.
You should talk to the Chinese sometime about their century of humiliation. They would turn your Euro-centric view around.
Tom,
if I speak about the consequences of the Wall Street crash,I don´t see it at a national level, but as a systemic question. Capitalism and globalization cannot exist without major crisis--it´s its nature and those crisis have severe political and economic implications worldwide--not only today.You brought the systematic question to a bad-old-Europe level ignoring the Wall Street crashes, while I made the argument of anticolonial Germany, because Germany --after Versailles--was the weakest link in the chain of imperialistic countries--that´s what Lenin thought and that´s what Hitler as a pangerman Austrian thought.Both tried to use the weakest link for their revolutionary ideas.Even Sun Yatsen had the idea of a Eurasian club of the lossers of WW1: Germany, Sovjetunion and China which together could fight the rest of the world.I´m not an narrowminded Eurocentric nationalist, but see the the economic development of capitalism and its political consequences.While the USA hadn´t a real colonialism as Germany--as it came to late to the "colonizing party", it had ist internal colonialism: Indians and black people.Was the new frontier a historical necessity or could it have been without the mass slaughter of the native US Indians?Was slavery a historical necessity or an anamoly which the industrialized North corrected?Was gun boat policy a historical necessity or an anamoly of globalization?Or to raise the question this way: Was colonialsim, slavery, gun boat diplomacy,etc. In the primitive starting phase of globalization a hsitorical necessity or an anamoly?I mean: Didn´t the USA join the party AFTER the foundations of the world markets were laid?The question is: Is there some sort of historical materialism which had several phases of globalization--the primitive and the more advanced and the USA came into play at the time of advanced globalization and could take over the world and define it by its informal rule?I have discussed this question with a lot of Chinese academics which are ambigious as on the one side they see colonialsm as national humilation, but see the crony capitalism with its robber barons in China at the moment as a historical necessity-just as the USA at 1840.Till the USA deveoloped to a modern democracy and more middle class society it had also to go through several phases.That´s also what John-Milligan-Whyte and Dai Min say in their book "China´s and America´s Emerging Partnership".