The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power - Hardcover

Ninkovich, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022616473X ISBN 13: 9780226164731

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

For decades the United States has been the most dominant player on the world’s stage. The country’s economic authority, its globally forceful foreign policy, and its leading position in international institutions tend to be seen as the result of a long-standing, deliberate drive to become a major global force. Furthermore, it has become widely accepted that American exceptionalism—the belief that America is a country like no other in history—has been at the root of many of the country’s political, military, and global moves. Frank Ninkovich disagrees.

One of the preeminent intellectual historians of our time, Ninkovich delivers here his most ambitious and sweeping book to date. He argues that historically the United States has been driven not by a belief in its destiny or its special character but rather by a need to survive the forces of globalization. He builds the powerful case that American foreign policy has long been based on and entangled in questions of global engagement, while also showing that globalization itself has always been distinct from—and sometimes in direct conflict with—what we call international society.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States unexpectedly stumbled into the role of global policeman and was forced to find ways to resolve international conflicts that did not entail nuclear warfare. The United States's decisions were based less in notions of exceptionalism and more in a need to preserve and expand a flourishing global society that had become essential to the American way of life.

Sure to be controversial, The Global Republic compellingly and provocatively counters some of the deepest and most common misconceptions about America’s history and its place in the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Ninkovich is professor emeritus of history at St. John’s University, New York. He is the author of many books, including Modernity and Power and The Wilsonian Century, both also published by University of Chicago Press. His most recent book is Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism. 

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The Global Republic

America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power

By Frank Ninkovich

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2014 Frank Ninkovich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-16473-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Provincial Prelude, 
2. Global Society and the Challenge to Exceptionalism, 
3. Gaining Entrée: The United States Joins the Club, 
4. The Wilsonian Anomaly; or, The Three Faces of Wilsonianism, 
5. Restarting Global Society in the 1920s, 
6. The War for International Society: The Coming of World War II, 
7. Economics versus Politics in the Reinvention of International Society, 
8. Ideology and Culture as Ingredients of the Cold War, 
9. Americanization, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War, 
10. Global Aftermath, 
Concluding Thoughts, 
Appendix: Historians and Exceptionalism, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Provincial Prelude

Limiting Legacies

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again," boasted Thomas Paine in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense. By announcing that "the birthday of a new world is at hand," Paine was articulating a common assumption about the origins of American exceptionalism: that by breaking free from England the American colonists were also escaping from the grip of the past and ushering in a new era of world history. Unfortunately, his revolutionary swagger was riddled with wishful thinking, for while separation from Britain was merely difficult, securing independence from the past was impossible. For one thing, the faith in American exceptionalism did not originate in an act of self-creation, but was descended from a sense of British exceptionalism that permeated America's political consciousness long before the countdown to revolution began. In classic Burkean fashion, the political way of life of the new state grew out of a well-established tradition of colonial self-rule. Common ethnicity, British common law, the English language, religious links, literary and intellectual culture, and bonds of trade—none of these connections and affinities disappeared in 1776. Following independence and through most of the nineteenth century, these and other important features of American life would remain outliers of developments in Britain and in Europe. So deep was this legacy that more than two centuries of growing cultural distance and ethnic diversification would not eradicate it. Expectations of leading others to a radically new future would prove even more unrealistic.

The past, especially the political ideology inherited from Britain, provided the cultural wherewithal that enabled Americans to conceptualize their grievances and their liberation. In this case, Britain was only the custodian for a bundle of ideas whose lineage ran from classical Greece and Rome, to Renaissance Italy, and then through the opposition English "country" Whigs, whose arguments against the crown were appropriated as the ideological vocabulary of the revolution. As is obvious from the wealth of classical references in the political discourse of the period, this deep historical legacy allowed Americans to frame their revolution and constitution making in a well-established context of principles and practices. Indeed, the kinetic energy stored in the call of the past was so strong that echoes of the republican civic creed would reverberate through the centuries following the founding.

But this inherited Atlantic republicanism would also circumscribe what the new republic could hope to achieve, particularly in its foreign relations. While some of its features overlapped with elements that later were incorporated into liberal thought, others were alien to what would become the liberal sensibility, particularly the obsession with civic virtue as the core value of a republic. A virtuous citizen, in the classical sense, was expected to place the good of the community above personal desires, quite unlike the liberal commitment to individual self-fulfillment. This emphasis on the centrality of altruism, though quite useful in making the argument against a corrupt British monarch and indispensable in time of war, was a serious liability in creating the kind of humdrum world of peace and prosperity that many Americans hoped would come into being in the wake of their revolution. In its classical form, virtue had been indispensable to survival in a Greco-Roman world inhabited by carnivorous polities in which war belonged to the natural order of things. In that kind of environment, only militarily virtuous republics could hope to remain standing in the midst of violent neighbors. At best, in the classical scheme of things, republican universalism envisaged a world of militant republics competing with one another to demonstrate the superiority of their brand of virtue.

Any hopes of creating a peaceful new world thus depended on the degree to which the United States was able to break with the classical past and its history of violence. In theory, this was not impossible, for the new United States was, by some key measures, the antithesis of a classical republic. The constituent ideas of republicanism, even the core belief in a virtuous altruism, were already in process of being dramatically altered under the influence of the Enlightenment and a nascent liberalism. The historian J. G. A. Pocock, widely credited with calling attention to the role of republicanism as the ideology of the American Revolution, pointed out that it was "notorious that classical republicanism was ... transformed in the making of the Federal Constitution and the Federalist and Republican minds." The most celebrated reversal of hoary republican truths involved James Madison's abandonment of the hitherto axiomatic view of republics as territorially diminutive face-to-face civic communities. In his classic Federalist number 10, Madison argued ingeniously that a large republic could be stable because it could neutralize the problem of faction in national politics by confining it to the local level.

In making his case, Madison jettisoned another republican axiom. Whereas the classical view held that successful republics required public spirited citizens, Madison postulated a society of self-interested individuals who possessed "different and unequal faculties of acquiring property." The influence of local men on the make, whose natural tendency was to coalesce into self-serving factions and parties, could be diluted to harmless proportions within the new republic's vast territory, thereby making room for a high-minded elite—"representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice"—to guide the nation. True, Madison did not do away with virtue altogether, whose most noble features would continue to reside in a quasi-aristocratic class. But whether self-interest was something that needed to be reined in or, as later liberal thought would have it, to be unleashed, the definition of virtue, which was the central concept of republicanism, was radically different in the American republic and was already en route to being hustled off the stage. Madison's innovations marked a sharp change from the Founders' view in the 1770s of a virtuous public to the more jaundiced outlook of the 1780s in which an uninhibited and unprincipled populace was thought to be dangerously prone to "licentiousness."

Despite many continuing affinities with the republican past, there is little reason to doubt, therefore, as one historian has...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022616473X
• ISBN 13: 9780226164731
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 342
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland