"I'm sure you've seen it yourself
Standing on the corner, is an alleged brother
Dressed in blue or green, red and black
And, spouting the news, that the revolution is coming
And you better get ready, sort of like
The end of the world is coming, unfortunately
The world is just going to drag on and on."
-Gil Scott Heron
I say this as a history lover and major: history really isn't as interesting as people think it is. I know that's quite a statement, as many out there probably don't find history all that enrapturing to begin with, but it's the truth. History is more than cataloguing all the major, annal-worthy events of years past, it's the science of how people, societies, and states lived in the recent and not-so-recent past. It is punctuated by great battles and watershed events, but these remarkable occurrences are not history itself, and that means that real history can be dry at times.
Any biologist will tell you that their science involves ascribing names and attributes to things in nature that weren't necessarily meant to be named. Thomas Hobbes, a greater scholar of natural sciences than many are aware, pointed out that you may look at two four-legged, barking, furry animals and call them both 'dogs', but they are in fact, two entirely different phenomena as far as nature is concerned. Only humans label them identically.
History, like nature, does not exist for people to attribute themes and story arcs. It is what it is.
What does this have to do international relations and why is it worthy of the first real article for this esteemed blog? I read an article today that really pissed me off, and now I'm going to talk about it. That's why.
Any of you who visited the bbc.co.uk front page today, or yesterday if I don't finish this post by midnight, saw an image of the sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty, with the headline "Is the Sun Setting on the United States?". The BBC basically said "The sun is setting on the United States," and put a question mark after it. This, of course, is a commonly-held view worldwide.
In the ensuing article, former professor of political philosophy at LSE, John Gray, says that "in a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed. How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees." To begin with, a lot of people question how far-reaching the fall of the Soviet Union was in its implications, but that's beside the point. Like that moment in history, this one, in which certain countries, namely the United States, Britain, Ireland, and Spain face absences of liquidity that threaten key sectors with contraction, is not nearly so interesting as Gray would like you to believe. And the end of the last twenty years' 'unipolarity' draws nigh, they tell us. Again, it's a good line, but a problematic one.
All of that has a basis in fact, but none of it describes the facts. Such a description is based mainly on an impression and a feeling, rather than a comprehensive grasp of the international system, and what the present difficulties actually mean. I want to say now that I do not pretend to know more than the LSE guy, I just think that the whole worldview that the article propagates is overly simplistic. And I'll also say that despite the BBC's long-established track record for passing hacks off as respected academics (Gray's reputation among his peers is not the most enviable), and opinions of respected academics as the minority report, it still awes me everytime.
The widespread perception that the United States has, for the last sixty or so years, been able to do whatever it bloody well pleased, first under Bretton Woods, then during the collapse of Communism, and then during the unipolar post-Communist era, and that finally, those days have met their end, ignores one very important fact. It's not true. It makes for an excellent and compelling story arc to unify the events of the post-World War II era into a grand narrative, but there are key factual problems.
It certainly is true that the United States has been very powerful, both militarily, culturally, and economically. It is also true that that power has made America's influence very potent outside its own borders. It is not true that it enabled the US to topple regimes left, right, and centre, or to dictate policy in other states as though the American President were sovereign there. Not with impunity, anyway. As Robert Kagan, advisor to the McCain campaign, says, "Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion." In fairness to Professor Gray who I called a 'hack' above, I actually think he's really cool, and it's rare I find myself in agreement with Robert Kagan. But in this case, it's Kagan's statement which is uncontroversial, and Gray's which is laughable.
Case in point, many would regard Iran between 1953 and 1979 to be the typical American client state. But America neither blithely loaded the Shah up with weapons, nor did the Shah follow the American will at all times. When the US refused to extend the Shah the credit to purchase modern weapons he regarded as necessary to defend against Nasser, Pahlavi instead bought $110 million-worth of arms from the Soviet Union. A National Intelligence Estimate issued in 1968 addressed this event as a complication of US-Iranian relations, but not particularly troubling. It did not regard Iran as having abandoned its pro-Western orientation. Iran had acted in its national interest, as sovereign states generally do, and the event did not trouble America's national interest, represented in the desire not to have a Soviet-aligned Iran.
The Shah, at the time, aimed to establish himself as an independent figure, so obviously his relationship with Washington was more complicated than other leaders' may have been, but you get the point. America is hardly Zeus.
Presently, whether or not Washington's power is fading depends on how you describe power. If it's the ability to wield military and economic assets to appeal to the national interests of other states in exchange for support of our own interests, or to perform outright conquest, than it seems for the moment that Washington's power has diminished, though more slightly than we are led to believe. On the other hand, if power is the access to instruments that can help one further one's own national interest, than it's possible that the US is more powerful than ever, and that one country's power is not necessarily another's weakness any longer. This is because globalisation allows many countries access to many other countries' raw and secondary materials, meaning greater security of supply. And there is now, in the EU, another organisation bent on representing for Western-style democracy. Spreading its ideology and ensuring security of supply have always been America's top foreign policy objectives, and though Washington's efficacy in pursuing those objectives through certain avenues has decreased, entirely different avenues have opened up in the new international system.
Whether or not the US continues to be a 'leader' will depend largely on to what level it is willing to engage its partners (yeah, I know we hear that a lot, but it's true), turn competitors into partners, and further liberalise its market. In light of the current pressures of public opinion regarding the economy, that last one's going to be a bit of a snag. In any case, the era of leadership isn't over. Not by a long shot. The US still has a lot going for it. The existing and accepted narrative is far too simple, too perfect, and too dramatic. There are elements of truth behind it, but it's not really true, because there are intricacies both in the past described and the changes at hand that that narrative would force us to ignore, as I hope I've just demonstrated.
Beware of historical metanarratives, people. They're there to shape things into what they're not, and encapsulate complex phenomena into simple packages. It may seem now that we're at a cusp, that we've come to the end of an era. But the world is constantly evolving as a product of the days both immediately and long before, and the events of everyday are their own, not those of a grander story. History doesn't have so many turning points, as everything has a cause to precipitate it. There are few true revolutions, and history just drags on. So the next time someone tells you that history has been a long march to liberal democracy, that Irish history has been an enduring struggle for a nation once again, or that there was an 'American Century,' now come to an end, don't go for that. Let the facts speak for themselves.
And check out that song by Bronze Nazareth and Byata from the beginning, because it's excellent.
Any biologist will tell you that their science involves ascribing names and attributes to things in nature that weren't necessarily meant to be named. Thomas Hobbes, a greater scholar of natural sciences than many are aware, pointed out that you may look at two four-legged, barking, furry animals and call them both 'dogs', but they are in fact, two entirely different phenomena as far as nature is concerned. Only humans label them identically.
History, like nature, does not exist for people to attribute themes and story arcs. It is what it is.
What does this have to do international relations and why is it worthy of the first real article for this esteemed blog? I read an article today that really pissed me off, and now I'm going to talk about it. That's why.
Any of you who visited the bbc.co.uk front page today, or yesterday if I don't finish this post by midnight, saw an image of the sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty, with the headline "Is the Sun Setting on the United States?". The BBC basically said "The sun is setting on the United States," and put a question mark after it. This, of course, is a commonly-held view worldwide.
In the ensuing article, former professor of political philosophy at LSE, John Gray, says that "in a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed. How symbolic that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees." To begin with, a lot of people question how far-reaching the fall of the Soviet Union was in its implications, but that's beside the point. Like that moment in history, this one, in which certain countries, namely the United States, Britain, Ireland, and Spain face absences of liquidity that threaten key sectors with contraction, is not nearly so interesting as Gray would like you to believe. And the end of the last twenty years' 'unipolarity' draws nigh, they tell us. Again, it's a good line, but a problematic one.
All of that has a basis in fact, but none of it describes the facts. Such a description is based mainly on an impression and a feeling, rather than a comprehensive grasp of the international system, and what the present difficulties actually mean. I want to say now that I do not pretend to know more than the LSE guy, I just think that the whole worldview that the article propagates is overly simplistic. And I'll also say that despite the BBC's long-established track record for passing hacks off as respected academics (Gray's reputation among his peers is not the most enviable), and opinions of respected academics as the minority report, it still awes me everytime.
The widespread perception that the United States has, for the last sixty or so years, been able to do whatever it bloody well pleased, first under Bretton Woods, then during the collapse of Communism, and then during the unipolar post-Communist era, and that finally, those days have met their end, ignores one very important fact. It's not true. It makes for an excellent and compelling story arc to unify the events of the post-World War II era into a grand narrative, but there are key factual problems.
It certainly is true that the United States has been very powerful, both militarily, culturally, and economically. It is also true that that power has made America's influence very potent outside its own borders. It is not true that it enabled the US to topple regimes left, right, and centre, or to dictate policy in other states as though the American President were sovereign there. Not with impunity, anyway. As Robert Kagan, advisor to the McCain campaign, says, "Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion." In fairness to Professor Gray who I called a 'hack' above, I actually think he's really cool, and it's rare I find myself in agreement with Robert Kagan. But in this case, it's Kagan's statement which is uncontroversial, and Gray's which is laughable.
Case in point, many would regard Iran between 1953 and 1979 to be the typical American client state. But America neither blithely loaded the Shah up with weapons, nor did the Shah follow the American will at all times. When the US refused to extend the Shah the credit to purchase modern weapons he regarded as necessary to defend against Nasser, Pahlavi instead bought $110 million-worth of arms from the Soviet Union. A National Intelligence Estimate issued in 1968 addressed this event as a complication of US-Iranian relations, but not particularly troubling. It did not regard Iran as having abandoned its pro-Western orientation. Iran had acted in its national interest, as sovereign states generally do, and the event did not trouble America's national interest, represented in the desire not to have a Soviet-aligned Iran.
The Shah, at the time, aimed to establish himself as an independent figure, so obviously his relationship with Washington was more complicated than other leaders' may have been, but you get the point. America is hardly Zeus.
Presently, whether or not Washington's power is fading depends on how you describe power. If it's the ability to wield military and economic assets to appeal to the national interests of other states in exchange for support of our own interests, or to perform outright conquest, than it seems for the moment that Washington's power has diminished, though more slightly than we are led to believe. On the other hand, if power is the access to instruments that can help one further one's own national interest, than it's possible that the US is more powerful than ever, and that one country's power is not necessarily another's weakness any longer. This is because globalisation allows many countries access to many other countries' raw and secondary materials, meaning greater security of supply. And there is now, in the EU, another organisation bent on representing for Western-style democracy. Spreading its ideology and ensuring security of supply have always been America's top foreign policy objectives, and though Washington's efficacy in pursuing those objectives through certain avenues has decreased, entirely different avenues have opened up in the new international system.
Whether or not the US continues to be a 'leader' will depend largely on to what level it is willing to engage its partners (yeah, I know we hear that a lot, but it's true), turn competitors into partners, and further liberalise its market. In light of the current pressures of public opinion regarding the economy, that last one's going to be a bit of a snag. In any case, the era of leadership isn't over. Not by a long shot. The US still has a lot going for it. The existing and accepted narrative is far too simple, too perfect, and too dramatic. There are elements of truth behind it, but it's not really true, because there are intricacies both in the past described and the changes at hand that that narrative would force us to ignore, as I hope I've just demonstrated.
Beware of historical metanarratives, people. They're there to shape things into what they're not, and encapsulate complex phenomena into simple packages. It may seem now that we're at a cusp, that we've come to the end of an era. But the world is constantly evolving as a product of the days both immediately and long before, and the events of everyday are their own, not those of a grander story. History doesn't have so many turning points, as everything has a cause to precipitate it. There are few true revolutions, and history just drags on. So the next time someone tells you that history has been a long march to liberal democracy, that Irish history has been an enduring struggle for a nation once again, or that there was an 'American Century,' now come to an end, don't go for that. Let the facts speak for themselves.
And check out that song by Bronze Nazareth and Byata from the beginning, because it's excellent.
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