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Globalization, Americanization and Europeanization (Part I) |
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By Volker Berghahn | Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
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Globalization, Americanization and Europeanization are three concepts that have generated much debate among politicians, business people, intellectuals and academics in recent decades. In the first installment of his three-part series, Columbia University’s Volker Berghahn provides a historical foundation for the current debate. The three concepts of globalization, Americanization and Europeanization have been part of major arguments among scholars and practitioners for over 100 years. These debates, concerning the concepts’ usefulness, were rooted in a sense that the concepts encapsulated vital developments and forces in the world in which we live. Economic historians have repeatedly drawn attention to the degree of globalization achieved before 1914 — a degree that was then disrupted by two world wars and profound economic crises, to be reached again only in the 1990s. Looking at trade statistics, human travel and population movements, it is indeed remarkable how interdependent the world had become by 1900.
The 19th century
The 19th century undoubtedly saw a great expansion and intensification of commercial exchange as well as the conquest and occupation of large territories in Africa, Asia and Latin America by the European powers
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| World War I so weakened Europe’s erstwhile hegemony that 1918 was tantamount to the end of Europe’s position at the center of the world. |
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in the “scramble for colonies.”
The invention of the telegraph and the laying of cables across the oceans connected continents at the speed of light and revolutionized communication. The building of very fast ocean liners reduced journey times across the Atlantic to less than a week. It was thus not just information that was constantly traveling around the globe electronically.
There was also the massive and growing exchange of goods along the great sea-lanes of the world, together with the movement of people. For several decades from the 1840s onwards, this movement involved the one-way journey to North America of millions of migrants from Europe across the Atlantic and from Asia across the Pacific. Others emigrated to Australia.
Europeanizing the world
By the end of the 19th century, these streams of people began to dry up while business travel and tourism — especially between Europe and North America — increased dramatically. The Americans went because Europe was then still the acknowledged center of the world in economic, political and cultural terms.
The Europeans had set out long ago to “Europeanize” the world, often by means of commercial penetration, but also through brutal military force. But there was also little doubt that within the ensemble of the imperialist nations, Britain constituted the hegemonic power. For decades after the Napoleonic Wars, little could be done by the other powers that did not have at least the tacit approval of London.
British hegemony
However, by the late 19th century there were many signs that
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| After World War I, the de-Europeanization of the world had begun. Even the once-almighty Britain emerged from the catastrophe as a second-rate power. |
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British hegemony was eroding and being challenged by its neighbors. In Europe, it was the ambition of Imperial Germany to overtake Britain not only as the leading commercial and industrial nation, but also in political and cultural terms.
William II, the German Kaiser, and his closest advisors were convinced that London would thwart their country’s rise to world-power status unless it was able to counter the Royal Navy’s dominance of the seas with the naval instrument large and efficient enough to defeat the British in an all-out battle in the North Sea.
Had William II succeeded in creating such a navy, it would have been followed by a major effort to “Germanize” the world. In the end, Germany proved too weak to challenge Britain militarily.
World War I
London successfully contained the German threat by engaging Berlin in an arms race that the Kaiser had lost by 1912/13. London also initiated countermoves, leading in 1904 to the formation of the Entente Cordiale with France — and, in 1907, to the inclusion of Russia in the Triple Entente.
The German refusal to accept its containment by Britain, France and Russia decisively contributed to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Five years later, not only had the German monarchy been defeated, but the de-Europeanization of the world had also begun. Even the once-almighty Britain emerged from the catastrophe as a second-rate power.
The rise of the United States
In the meantime, the United States had risen to the first rank — a development that could first be observed around the turn of the last century.
It was certainly no coincidence that the British journalist
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| After the turn of the 20th century, North America was no longer regarded primarily as a continent of immigrant settlers, trappers, cowboys and “Red Indians.” |
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William T. Stead published an influential book in 1902 titled “The Americanization of the World or the Trend of the Twentieth Century.” No less significantly, this study appeared two years after the Paris World Exhibition at which the American pavilion became the great attraction for European businessmen, with the latest technologies and machines on display.
After Paris, more and more Europeans traveled to the United States to visit Washington, New York or Chicago, but also to inspect the centers of steel-making and steel-cutting in Pennsylvania, of the machine-tool and electrical engineering industries in Ohio and of car-making in Michigan.
Taylorism and Fordism
Next to technology, they were particularly interested in American-style work organization as recommended by Frederick Taylor and in Henry Ford’s assembly lines in Detroit, the new automobile capital of the world.
From then on, North America was no longer regarded primarily as a continent of immigrant settlers, trappers, cowboys and “Red Indians.” What was still missing was the translation of this metamorphosis into a projection of American military power abroad.
Colonial powers
The focus was still on the promotion of trade across the Atlantic, but also with the colonial world and exchange within Europe. In the years before 1914, Germany and Britain were each other’s best customers.
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| A militaristic nationalism overwhelmed economic internationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism that had inspired the pre-1914 globalization process. |
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There were hence many businessmen and also some intellectuals and politicians who hoped that peaceful trade and free access to the markets of the world would relieve the tensions resulting from the great powers’ naval and military rivalries in an age of rising nationalism and economic protectionism.
In the end, the opposite happened. A militaristic nationalism overwhelmed economic internationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism that had inspired the pre-1914 globalization process. World War I, in which Europe’s colonial competition came back to haunt the region, so weakened its erstwhile hegemony that 1918 was tantamount to the end of Europe’s position at the center of the world. Britain’s pre-war position of preeminence was also gone.
| Globalization, Americanization and Europeanization (Part II) |
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By Volker Berghahn | Wednesday, November 14, 2007 |
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Globalization, Americanization and Europeanization have long been debated by politicians, business people and academics. In the second installment of his three-part series, Columbia University’s Volker Berghahn traces the history of these trends through World Wars I and II. Just as the late entry into World War I by the United States had tipped the scales in favor of the allies and against the continental European monarchies, America was also the only power to emerge strengthened from this highly destructive conflict. With its very productive industrial economy, the United States could have filled the economic and power-political vacuum that the fading of British hegemony had left.
There were some prominent Americans who wanted their nation to do this, with the aim of restoring the pre-1914 liberal-capitalist trading system — and thus to resume the globalization process.
Post-war Europe
They were prevented from realizing this goal by the strong political isolationism that motivated the ordinary voters in the early 1920s,
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| The steep decline of the U.S. stock market in 1929 and the subsequent worldwide depression obliterated efforts to re-establish a global economy. |
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especially in the Midwest. These voters pressured the politicians in Washington to retreat from the world scene.
Instead of helping the Europeans to reconstruct their shattered socio-economic and political systems, they let them “stew in their own juice” and insisted on the repayment of war loans.
However, abandoning Europe posed a threat not just to the stability of the world economy, but also of these countries’ political systems, as European voters were becoming radicalized due to their dire economic and social straits under those circumstances.
Reconstruction
Some far-sighted U.S. politicians and businessmen advocated Washington’s re-engagement with Europe, especially after the postwar crisis there had culminated, in 1923, in the virtual collapse of Germany’s economy and parliamentary-democratic system.
The majority of the U.S. population was still unwilling to make a public commitment to the European reconstruction effort. Consequently, the United States could reappear on the scene only through the backdoor. Accordingly, from 1924 onwards, Wall Street bankers helped the Europeans to settle the contentious reparations problem that in turn encouraged U.S. industrialists and investors to appear on the scene.
Booming economy
With the U.S. economy booming in the mid-1920s, financial institutions and individuals, some of them speculators, took up the loans and bonds issued by European companies and municipalities
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| In 1945, the economic, political and intellectual elites of the United States made two fundamental decisions about the postwar order. |
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desperate to modernize their production facilities and local infrastructures. A few U.S. corporations, such as Ford and General Motors, either built their own production facilities or bought up European enterprises.
The U.S. industrial dynamism was rooted in its embrace of Taylorism and Fordism. While the ideas of Frederick Taylor and the Scientific Management movement were primarily concerned with the rationalization of production, Fordism, by contrast, was not merely about assembly-lines and work organization — but also about passing some of the gains of mass production on to the ordinary consumer.
In other words, Henry Ford’s views on mass production and mass consumption were two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the United States experienced in the 1920s a lowering of prices for automobiles and other consumer durables that until the Great Depression of the 1930s produced a period of considerable — if socially uneven — prosperity.
The beginnings of Americanization
Meanwhile Europe, suffering from continuing structural problems in its economies stemming from the ravages of World War I, saw at best the modest beginnings of an age of mass consumption, especially in the field of affordable entertainment and leisure
Nor did European business take over U.S. mass production methods and management systems wholesale. As before 1914, there was a good deal of skepticism and resistance. But the practices introduced in some branches of industry allow us to speak of a partial Americanization.
Music, dance and film
This also applies to the importation of U.S. mass culture. Hollywood arrived in Europe as an economic power-house that quickly outpaced the European film industries. The images and happy-end stories that California’s dream factories
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| After World War II, Americans decidedly did not act like a steamroller that pushed into Western Europe and flattered all existing patterns around it. |
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told on the silver screen influenced the attitudes of millions who went to the movies at least once a week and came away envisioning for themselves the better life that they had just seen and associated with the United States.
With the film stars also came U.S. jazz musicians and dancers and dances, such as the Charleston. Sections of Europe’s youth became mesmerized by these cultural imports from across the Atlantic.
On the other hand, the older generation of educated middle-class Europeans tended to reject the products of American popular culture. Upholding notions of an allegedly more refined European high culture, Hollywood and jazz were often derided as primitive and vulgar — and fed a fairly widespread cultural anti-Americanism.
Stock market crash
The steep decline of the U.S. stock market in 1929 and the subsequent worldwide depression obliterated these efforts to re-establish a global economy, this time under American aegis. The United States and Europe sank back into economic protectionism and an integral political nationalism. Worse, large numbers of German voters rebelled against the postwar order.
In January 1933, they brought the Nazis to power — a movement that was wedded to the creation of an autarkic economic bloc and racist Germanic “new order” in which the “non-Aryans” were either allotted the position of slave laborer or were denied the right to life altogether and murdered.
World War II
Had Hitler succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union in 1941 — as he confidently expected — we would have witnessed an attempt to Germanize Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Even faced with this threat, Germany’s European opponents again
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| In rebuilding post-World War II Europe, Washington realized that cultural change takes a long time. |
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proved too weak to stop the aggressor.
It was only the entry of the United States into World War II, covertly in 1940, and officially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that — not unlike the situation in 1917 — the Allied victory was secured over the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
When this world conflict finally ended in 1945, the economic, political and intellectual elites of the United States made two fundamental decisions about the postwar order. They wanted to rebuild, for a second time, a liberal-capitalist multilateral world trading system, buttressed by parliamentary-democratic political systems.
The American Century
But the most important lesson learned from the interwar experience was that Washington would not retreat, but this time use its superior economic and power-political weight to shape the postwar world.
This quest is probably best summarized in Henry Luce’s famous article in Life Magazine of January 1942, entitled “The American Century.” In it, the newspaper tycoon argued implicitly that, if the United States had failed to mold the world along the lines of its own political and economic ideals in the first half of the 20th century, it would and should certainly do so in the second half.
Cold War
A major problem in building this new order was the role that Stalin’s Russia might play in it. Some Americans believed in 1945 that a global framework could be devised that would not only complete the process of de-colonization and the integration
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| After the experience of the 1920s, Western Europe underwent a second and more intensive wave of Americanization. |
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of the “Third World,” but also somehow incorporate the Soviet Union.
By 1946, it had become clear that integrating Stalin proved impossible. Instead, the Cold War divided the world along the Iron Curtain until 1989. Accordingly, the West now concentrated its postwar reconstruction effort on Western Europe.
Washington used its hegemonic weight — now both economic and military — to nudge and often pressure the West Europeans not only into closer cooperation, but also into the adoption of its ideas and practices relating to the organization of a modern industrial economy devoted to mass production and mass consumption.
The Marshall Plan
The recovery program that U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced in June 1947 involved not merely the sending of material aid to enhance Western Europe’s postwar reconstruction in competition with Stalin’s efforts on the other side of the Iron Curtain to Sovietize the economies and societies of eastern Europe.
The Marshall Plan was also significant psychologically in that it gave the European “masses” hope of a better future and encouraged U.S. private industry to invest — and thus to help Europe’s industries to modernize.
Institutional change
This time, the United States, as the economic and military hegemon of the West — would not withdraw from international affairs as in 1918/19, but would
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| In post-war Europe, structural change was complemented by a process of steady cultural erosion that was accelerated by generational change among Europe’s economic and political elites. |
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try to shape the postwar world, nudging the nations of Western Europe to seek closer economic integration.
One of the most important players on the European side was Jean Monnet, the actual father of the Schuman Plan and of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950/51. The ECSC represented a major step on the way to the Rome Treaty of 1957 that ushered in the next phase of European integration.
All the while, American pressure for change was directed at the traditional structures of European capitalism, and its cartels in particular that were generally averse to competition in the market place. It was also aimed at transforming entrepreneurial mentalities and attitudes underlying European resistance to structural and institutional change.
Transformations
These transformations did not occur overnight. The United States did not act like a steamroller that pushed into Western Europe and flattened all existing patterns in its path. Washington realized that cultural change of this kind — and this is what it ultimately was — takes a long time.
One of the key people on the U.S. side was Paul Hoffman, a former president of Studebaker, who, as Marshall Plan administrator, first promoted visits by European managers, trade unionists, politicians and civil servants to study the U.S. system of production, labor relations and consumption.
Cultural change
In 1950, when he became president of the Ford Foundation, then the biggest philanthropic organization in the world, he continued his policy of exchange and dialogue by funding European and international programs as part of a projection of American “soft power” (in the words of Joseph Nye) around the world.
Thus, structural change was complemented by a process of steady erosion of cultural anti-Americanism.
In this picture of generational change, it is not surprising that many of the old executives, especially in the heavy industries of Europe, were more resistant to American ideas than the younger managers. An increasing number of them knew the United States from personal visits — or even from their studies at one of the country’s universities or business schools.
| Globalization, Americanization and Europeanization (Part III) |
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By Volker Berghahn | Thursday, November 15, 2007 |
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In the eyes of quite a few observers, globalization, Americanization and Europeanization were the three dominant trends of the 20th century. In the final installment in his three-part series, Columbia University’s Volker Berghahn analyzes the extent to which these forces will shape the 21st century. We now have ample evidence to support the assertion that, after the experience of the 1920s, Western Europe underwent a second and more intensive wave of Americanization. This applied not only to economic structures and habits or, through NATO, to military institutions — but also to popular culture. Hollywood, jazz and pop music returned and captivated the young.
Turn to mass production
The key point, though, is that Americanization always involved a blending of U.S. practices with
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| On closer inspection, recent trends look more like a veiled Americanization that began in Western Europe after 1945 and has been sweeping the globe since 1989. |
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homemade ones. This blending was not uniform. There were areas where the American “flavor” was stronger than in others.
Still, foreign visitors would have no difficulty in knowing that they were in Munich, Manchester, Lyon or Bologna rather than in Austin, Texas or San Francisco.
Admittedly, there has been a fair amount of criticism of the Americanization paradigm. Western Europe’s turn to a mass production and mass consumption society is seen by these critics as part of a long-term modernization process that all industrial societies are supposed to undergo. Yet after several decades of debate, Americanization has not lost its plausibility.
Americanization and Sovietization
Given the hegemonic weight of the United States in the transatlantic relationship, empirical research has found plenty of footprints of all sorts that the United States has left behind.
This applies also to Eastern Europe after 1989, the region that due to the Cold War was excluded from the American reconstruction and recasting effort after 1945 — and instead underwent a process of Sovietization.
The Cold War and Eastern Europe
To be sure, over the years the Soviet model of economy and society became increasingly discredited, and economic change
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| It seems clear that most important advances in globalization, especially in communication and finance, continue to come from North America. |
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toward a liberal-capitalist model had been established in countries such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia well before the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Cold War acted as a brake on East European development.
Even if the Sovietization of the Soviet Bloc economies had gone into reverse gear — as it was failing to fulfill the promises of a better life that the communist regimes, too, were holding out to their populations in competition with the West — it took longer to loosen the autocratic grip that the governments and communist parties had gained over these societies.
East-West competition
East-West competition also delayed change in the third world. It enabled the old colonial powers to hold on to their empires, and when independence finally came, the liberations’ struggles were often followed by civil wars.
The extreme violence of these wars radicalized small, determined minorities and traumatized the rest of the population — resulting in further physical destruction and widespread fatalism.
Developing new ways
Some third world countries
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| After the experience of the 1920s, Western Europe underwent a second and more intensive wave of Americanization. |
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used their hard-won independence to enlist economic and military aid from either Moscow or Washington.
Others kept their distance from both and adopted a neutralist position.
In either case, they found it difficult to develop their potential and were also hampered by corruption, unequal terms of trade and often-covert outside interference.
Momentous changes
No less important, the implosion of the Soviet Bloc coincided with the renewed dynamism that the American economy developed in the 1990s against the backdrop of the IT revolution, making adaptation to Western practices even more attractive to Eastern Europeans.
The same lure may be found behind the momentous changes that are now going on in East Asia, South Asia and parts of Latin America, where the retreat or the transformation of communist movements paved the way towards civilian mass production and mass consumption societies. These changes also gave way to an orientation toward the world market, as a multilateral trading system unfolded, still unbalanced but nevertheless offering advantages and the prospect of prosperity for all.
Globalization and Americanization
The most common term now being used to define economic and cultural developments of the past two decades would appear to be “globalization,” often interpreted as a resumption of the first wave of global interaction before 1914.
But just as this earlier wave cannot be
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| The fading of the United States and the return of a “concert” of the great powers may also once more disrupt the process of globalization. |
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understood without constant reference to Britain as the hegemonic power of the 19th century, on closer inspection recent trends look more like a veiled Americanization that began in Western Europe after 1945 and has been sweeping the globe since 1989.
Without denying that some of the technological and economic innovations that drive globalization originate outside the United States, it seems nevertheless clear that the most important advances, especially in communication and finance, continue to come from North America. The question now is whether the United States will be able to hold its central place within the world economy that it forged, step by step, after 1945.
Europeanization
Whatever we may think of the viability of the concept of globalization, what we certainly seem to be witnessing is a Europeanization, not of the world as in the 19th century, but of the European Union.
In a sense, the American attempt to divide Europe into an “Old” and a “New” part has produced the opposite effect, just as Washington’s unilateralism had led to a rallying of other power centers in other parts of the world.
We are also seeing a weakening of the process of cultural Americanization, owing to the power-political miscalculations of the Bush Administration and the resultant “imperial overstretch” (in the words of Paul M. Kennedy).
Multi-polar international system
There was a moment after the end of the Cold War when the
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| The most common term now being used to define economic and cultural developments of the past two decades would appear to be “globalization.” |
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United States was indeed the sole “hyper power” that believed that others were irrelevant — and that it could throw its weight about unilaterally.
The war in Iraq has shown this notion to have been an illusion, so that we are once again moving into a multi-polar international system in which China, Russia, India and Europe can no longer be ignored.
Considering the havoc that Washington’s power-political unilateralism has wrought around the globe, this may not be a bad thing.
Emerging Asia
And yet the fading of the hegemon and the return of a 19th-century type “concert” of the great powers may also result in greater instability and conflict that could once more disrupt the process of globalization — as it did for the 70 years following the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Some people speculate that this “concert” will again be replaced by a new hegemon, emerging this time from Asia. But this is a development that, if it ever happens, will take decades to play itself out.