New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 416.
C. Wright Mills is best known for writing The Power Elite, in which he offered an analysis of the uppermost strata of society and its institutions (business, governmental and military). However, it was not his only sociological bestseller, his first being 1951's White Collar, which dealt with many of the same concerns, but focusing on the much vaster "white collar" salariat beneath those strata.
In approaching this subject Mills begins by attempting to situate it in the larger social context as it has traditionally been understood, and in particular as part of the "middle class"--the fuzziness of which term Mills addresses by drawing a distinction between what he terms the "Old" and "New" Middle Classes. The Old Middle Class is characterized by its economic independence, which is based on its ownership of the means of production with which it works--the small farmer cultivating his own land, the merchant running his own store, and the like. The New Middle Class consists of dependent employees who work with means of production owned by others, at the direction of those others, inside of a context of centralized property and bureaucratized and rationalized business operations--as with the personnel of large businesses.
Mills holds that industrialization has sharply reduced and marginalized the Old Middle Class, which is a far cry from the Jeffersonian mythology surrounding it. What remains of small business, contrary to popular belief, is generally an exercise in futility, afflicted by a high rate of turnover as small businesses fail and are typically replaced by other small businesses which fail in their turn. Even this activity is largely confined to particular economic sectors, namely the retail and service industries (by contrast, "Manufacturing is no longer a small business world" (24)), and when even these survive for any length of time, they tend to do so by "becoming direct satellites" of Big Businesses of various kinds (27) (as with retailers which are "maintenance agencies and distributors for big manufacturers"). He also contends that, for all their free market rhetoric, the "scared" small entrepreneur, especially sensitive to the ups and downs of the business cycle, is in practice preoccupied with seeking protection from marketplace competition (through "fair trade" laws, the prices set by national brands, and the like).1 Indeed, Mills argues, the old image of small business persists principally because it serves the big business interests that, despite some imagined solidarity, have in reality pushed them to the fringes of economic life.
The result is that they have largely given way to the New Middle Class as the predominant "middle" group, and its character is the book's focus: the ways in which it works, what that work means to it, and the political significance of these facts. In examining these he finds a number of parallels between the New Middle Class and the Marxist proletariat, extending beyond their mutual lack of property to the terms of their labor. As Mills notes, the office and the salesroom, "the two great locales of white collar activity" (226-227), have become rather more like the factory, and undergone the same evolution in the direction of rationalization, mechanization and deskilling, so that their staff operate machines under the supervision of a small cadre of specialists--the secretary at their typewriter, the cashier at their cash register not so different from employees of a light manufacturing facility. Medicine has traveled the same path, the old-style general practitioners giving way to narrowly specialized, hospital-based M.D.s, backed up by large numbers of less well-trained support staff (the better to hold down the number of working doctors, and restrict the supply of their skills), while the legal profession has followed a parallel line of development with the emergence of the large firms once termed "law-factories."
Given the circumstances of their work, neither the Protestant work ethic, nor the ideal of the Renaissance craftsman, has much relevance to their actual experience.2 Rather they tend to experience their work as alienated labor, time taken away from living instead of a crucial dimension of life, let alone a development of themselves as human beings. (Indeed, Mills even deepens Marx's analysis of worker alienation by considering a new dimension of it--the alienation of white collar workers not just from their labor, but from their very selves as they "sell themselves" in the "personality market."3) Such satisfaction as they derive from their work is a matter of the income, status and personal power the job affords, with the result that satisfaction is strongly correlated with socioeconomic ranking--professionals, for instance, far more satisfied with their positions than clerical workers that are part of the same white collar category.
Mills notes alongside this change in the manner of work, and the attitude toward it--which make the experience of the white collar worker closer to that of the blue collar employee--a tendency to equalization in their incomes and job security. There is also an equalization of their prospects for upward mobility--closed off not just by the aforementioned deskilling and rationalization (which eliminates the chance to, for instance, "learn the whole operation" at an enterprise), but by the rising level of education among the work force (which has created a credentialing crisis, and even talk of "surplus graduates" and the "management" of ambition). Unsurprisingly, older ideals about the pursuit of "success" through a cultivation of traditionally "middle class" virtues associated with Victorian entrepreneurship, or later, the salesman-like attitude and demeanor supposed to make possible a successful ascent up the corporate ladder, seem decreasingly relevant, even discredited. In their place there is a greater willingness to pursue unionization (especially among those most inclined to feel that "the way up" is blocked or inaccessible).4
Nonetheless, Mills rejects the idea that white collar workers will "go politically
'proletarian'" (353), however much their objective circumstances come to resemble those of blue collar workers. The option is simply not on the table, there being no proletariat for the white collars to join, politically speaking, even the organized "blue collars" failing to count as such (in their unions' emphasis on bettering the conditions of their members' employment rather than broader or more principled social change)--which points to the larger factor determining their political future, namely the apathy with which Americans regard politics in the mid-twentieth century. The combination of their relative material contentment, their intensely private way of looking at their concerns and attitudes (a reflection of the history of immigration and American geographical mobility in Mills' view), and their distance from the centers of decision, leaves them detached, scarcely interested spectators. This tendency is reinforced by a mass media which utterly fails (after hardly trying) to make politics comprehensible and meaningful to them--while being consistently excellent at distraction, especially by way of fantasies of personal status and consumption (with which he identifies the content of most pop culture, and leisure activity more generally).5
Moreover, generalized as this apathy is, white collar workers seem even more susceptible to it than other groups. The significant division between Old and New middle class aside, white collar workers' weaker consciousness of themselves as a class, their more limited and more belated organization, their greater response to the kind of distraction he describes, leaves them more atomized and less likely to emerge as an independent political force. Indeed, they seem bound to follow rather than lead, and to do so opportunistically.
In making this case, Mills' book offers a formidable combination of sweep and detail. Portions of the analysis have admittedly dated, perhaps the most significant of these his discussion of unionization--a trend which has long since been reversed. However, this is more than outweighed by what remains valid in Mills' study for our own time, not least the corrective he offers to the pieties of his day, which all too often remain the pieties of our own, regarding such matters as the character of social class in America, the role of small business in the economy, and the prospects for genuine personal satisfaction through post-secondary education and the "right" career (recently characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich as a case of "bait and switch"). Indeed, some of the problems he described have, in line with his expectations, grown only more pronounced, like the problems raised by a credentialing crisis, and the withdrawal of much of the public from political life. The result is a book well worth reading not just for its insights into mid-twentieth century America, but its grasp of our situation now, with which few works written in the six decades since can compare.
1. By contrast, in the world of the large corporation, the "Unseen Hand" of executive decision has to a great degree displaced the "Invisible Hand" prevailing in a less thoroughly organized economic field.
2. Mills refers here to the Renaissance vision of the life of the craftsman as "a fully idealized model of work gratification" entailing no "split of work and play, or work and culture," a laborer's work "and his entire mode of living" instead comprising a single whole (220). This model has its requirements, however, among them the worker's control of "his own working action"; the absence of "ulterior motive," enabling their concentration on the product and process; and in this process, his opportunity "to learn from his work; and to use and develop his capacities in its prosecution" (220); none of which is operative in today's business environment. Indeed, Mills notes that "as practice, craftsmanship has largely been trivialized into 'hobbies,' part of leisure not of work" (224).
3. As he notes, workers are obliged to "instrumentalize and externalize intimate features" of their "person and disposition" (225) as part of the process of production.
4. Mills also identifies an emerging "new style of aspiration" (282) focusing on "the peace of the inner man" (283) rather than material accomplishment (with which he identifies such works as Arthur Miller's play Death of A Salesman).
5. Mills also notes that those who would be intellectuals are co-opted by the ideological machines of vested interests, which they must represent (or to which they must at least make themselves acceptable), or face marginalization. In either case they are reduced to irrelevance as a political force, with one result their tendency to style themselves "technicians" outside or above politics, or succumb to the cult of alienation. (College professors in particular are constrained by the expectations of academic life, not the least of them the expectation of specialization--or in his view, overspecialization.)
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Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Review: Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012, pp. 240.
Almost from before the economic crisis hit in 2008 (writing this I think of Kevin Phillips' 2007 Bad Money, which described the earliest phase of the housing bubble's bursting), we have seen a veritable library of books explaining the event and its consequences. I have yet to find a single volume that does justice to the whole of this huge, and hugely complex, story, and doubt I ever will (it goes back too far, involves too much), but many do a good job with particular pieces of it.
In Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, Thomas Frank adds his distinctive take on recent events. In his previous books, One Market Under God (2000), What's The Matter With Kansas? (2004) and The Wrecking Crew (2008), Frank traced the country's rightward march, and the tactics conservatives used to bring it about. He extends this line of research with this latest work, which treats the most recent part of that story: the transmutation of the failure of economic prescriptions advocated and implemented by conservatives into yet another rightist "revolution" exemplified by the Tea Party movement, which is extraordinary not just for its timing, but for its character. The culture wars have not died, but according to Frank the movement has not used them as ideological cover for neoliberal economic policies; rather, such policies are themselves the sales pitch, with the disgruntled calling for more of the same economic prescriptions (like deregulation) that produced the crisis in the first place. Moreover, the speculators who have traditionally been cast as villains in the "producerist" narrative historically favored by American right-wing populism have been made into heroes, not just identified with "the people," but made to seem the very best and most victimized of them.1
How did this come about? Frank argues that the right succeeded through a presentation of a simple, comprehensible explanation of a situation (however inaccurate, or even incoherent), and its use of the rhetoric of victimization, dissent and rebellion, in a period of genuine crisis when people have genuine grievances--which "liberals" utterly failed to address, as the Obama administration delivered not a sequel to FDR (for all the right-wing ranting), but "Clinton II."2 Frank holds, moreover, that there is more continuity than rupture in the phenomenon, from the use of traditional right-populist ideas (a selective scapegoating of elites, conspiracism, apocalypticism), to the tactics and rhetoric borrowed from the left--the latter an old theme of Frank's work, which he revisits here.3 (Indeed, one of the more memorable portions of this book is Frank's reading of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as an inversion of proletarian literature, using the genre's techniques to deliver exactly the opposite message.)
It is a strong argument, and well-presented in a book that is witty, informed and lucid throughout. However, I must admit that as a longtime reader I found it something of a letdown. Easily the shortest of Frank's books, it is also the least fresh and original, for the most part applying ideas Frank had developed in earlier books to new events, rather than exploring new intellectual territory--worthwhile as the results are.
1. In Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons' Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort (Guilford Press, New York, 2000), the authors define populist movements as those which exalt the people and are antielitist; a repressive populism as one which combines "antielite scapegoating with . . . efforts to maintain or intensify systems of social privilege and power"--that is to say, the singling out of some vulnerable part of the elite for hostility, while more generally shoring up the status quo; and right-wing populism as a repressive populism "motivated or defined centrally by a backlash against liberation movements, social reform, or revolution."
2. The dire warnings of such takeovers have been a recurrent theme of American history (as Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" makes clear), and routine in the aftermath of electoral victories by Democrats (like the 1992 presidential election). Interestingly, this does not seem to be an exclusively American phenomenon; arguably '70s-era Britain, where exaggerated rhetoric about economic troubles and union militancy were widespread, offers parallels.
3. While eschewing the traditional producerist hostility to finance, the Tea Party otherwise embraces many of the ideology's concepts, like drawing a sharp line between the "productive" and "unproductive" in the country's population. Additionally the scapegoating, conspiracism and apocalypticism common to American right-populism are evident in the movement's combination of celebration of business, markets and capitalism with selective attacks on particular enterprises, its hostility to "government bureaucrats" and intellectuals, convoluted theories of how the crisis came about, and hysterical rhetoric about imminent radical takeover.
Almost from before the economic crisis hit in 2008 (writing this I think of Kevin Phillips' 2007 Bad Money, which described the earliest phase of the housing bubble's bursting), we have seen a veritable library of books explaining the event and its consequences. I have yet to find a single volume that does justice to the whole of this huge, and hugely complex, story, and doubt I ever will (it goes back too far, involves too much), but many do a good job with particular pieces of it.
In Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, Thomas Frank adds his distinctive take on recent events. In his previous books, One Market Under God (2000), What's The Matter With Kansas? (2004) and The Wrecking Crew (2008), Frank traced the country's rightward march, and the tactics conservatives used to bring it about. He extends this line of research with this latest work, which treats the most recent part of that story: the transmutation of the failure of economic prescriptions advocated and implemented by conservatives into yet another rightist "revolution" exemplified by the Tea Party movement, which is extraordinary not just for its timing, but for its character. The culture wars have not died, but according to Frank the movement has not used them as ideological cover for neoliberal economic policies; rather, such policies are themselves the sales pitch, with the disgruntled calling for more of the same economic prescriptions (like deregulation) that produced the crisis in the first place. Moreover, the speculators who have traditionally been cast as villains in the "producerist" narrative historically favored by American right-wing populism have been made into heroes, not just identified with "the people," but made to seem the very best and most victimized of them.1
How did this come about? Frank argues that the right succeeded through a presentation of a simple, comprehensible explanation of a situation (however inaccurate, or even incoherent), and its use of the rhetoric of victimization, dissent and rebellion, in a period of genuine crisis when people have genuine grievances--which "liberals" utterly failed to address, as the Obama administration delivered not a sequel to FDR (for all the right-wing ranting), but "Clinton II."2 Frank holds, moreover, that there is more continuity than rupture in the phenomenon, from the use of traditional right-populist ideas (a selective scapegoating of elites, conspiracism, apocalypticism), to the tactics and rhetoric borrowed from the left--the latter an old theme of Frank's work, which he revisits here.3 (Indeed, one of the more memorable portions of this book is Frank's reading of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as an inversion of proletarian literature, using the genre's techniques to deliver exactly the opposite message.)
It is a strong argument, and well-presented in a book that is witty, informed and lucid throughout. However, I must admit that as a longtime reader I found it something of a letdown. Easily the shortest of Frank's books, it is also the least fresh and original, for the most part applying ideas Frank had developed in earlier books to new events, rather than exploring new intellectual territory--worthwhile as the results are.
1. In Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons' Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort (Guilford Press, New York, 2000), the authors define populist movements as those which exalt the people and are antielitist; a repressive populism as one which combines "antielite scapegoating with . . . efforts to maintain or intensify systems of social privilege and power"--that is to say, the singling out of some vulnerable part of the elite for hostility, while more generally shoring up the status quo; and right-wing populism as a repressive populism "motivated or defined centrally by a backlash against liberation movements, social reform, or revolution."
2. The dire warnings of such takeovers have been a recurrent theme of American history (as Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" makes clear), and routine in the aftermath of electoral victories by Democrats (like the 1992 presidential election). Interestingly, this does not seem to be an exclusively American phenomenon; arguably '70s-era Britain, where exaggerated rhetoric about economic troubles and union militancy were widespread, offers parallels.
3. While eschewing the traditional producerist hostility to finance, the Tea Party otherwise embraces many of the ideology's concepts, like drawing a sharp line between the "productive" and "unproductive" in the country's population. Additionally the scapegoating, conspiracism and apocalypticism common to American right-populism are evident in the movement's combination of celebration of business, markets and capitalism with selective attacks on particular enterprises, its hostility to "government bureaucrats" and intellectuals, convoluted theories of how the crisis came about, and hysterical rhetoric about imminent radical takeover.
Friday, March 23, 2012
After Empire
Studies of the rise and fall of great powers pay great attention to the period in which those powers are first-tier actors – and little to their management of the final dissolution of their empires. Britain's conduct of international affairs, for example, gets a lot of attention during the period from the late sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and very little after 1945.
This is not unreasonable when the central concern is the state of the international system as a whole, but it has resulted in a neglect of some not unimportant factors, and some aspects of recent history. After World War II, Britain and France, and after the Cold War, Russia, all sought to preserve something of their old position. Their particular approaches varied greatly, but there were similarities in their objectives and efforts, five of which seem especially worth discussing:
1. Working to Retain Relationships With Old Colonies and Vassals.
Britain has had the Commonwealth of Nations, France Francophonie, Russia the Commonwealth of Independent States. A significant dimension of this is the retention of a military presence in areas where it seems this can be done at low cost (as with Britain in the Middle East prior to its withdrawal "east of Suez," France's post-colonial role in western and central Africa, and Russia's interventions in "Near Abroad" countries like Tajikistan, Moldova and Georgia since 1991), and special efforts to retain sites of particular strategic value (as with Britain in the cases of Singapore, Suez and Cyprus, and Russia in the energy-rich Caspian Sea basin).
2. Placing a Special Emphasis on Select Military Resources.
The most noteworthy example of these is strategic nuclear weaponry, which all three of these countries possess, and on which have played special roles in their foreign policies. France developed its nuclear deterrent to assure itself an independent foreign position outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the 1990s, with the deterioration of Russia's conventional military capability, it was widely recognized that Russia relied more heavily on its nuclear capability for its international status, and its capacity to defend its interests.
However, less dramatically, all three countries strove to preserve a defense industrial base, even where they have eschewed meaningful industrial policies in other ways (Britain the outstanding example of this). As a result they remained major producers of the kinds of high-end arms which only a few countries are capable of building – armor, aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft systems. Their ability to produce saleable weaponry not only gives them the measure of additional independence that comes with meeting a larger part of their military needs domestically, but through their exports makes them a larger factor in international questions – as seen in the issue of Russian sales of arms to Iran in recent years.
3. Utilizing Old Privileges in International Institutions.
Their leading roles in the British Commonwealth of Nations and its French and Russian counterparts aside, Britain, France and Russia all became permanent members of the United Nations Security Council at a time when they were still plausibly regarded as Great Powers, and retained those seats long after they ceased to be such. The use of those seats, however, has given them disproportionate influence and prestige, and often been their principal means of responding to American initiatives – as with French and Russian efforts to deny the U.S. a UN mandate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
4. The Promotion of Regionalism.
Britain, and especially France, have both participated in the development of a European Union, in part as a way of compensating for their diminished positions. In 2001, Russia was a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brought together several former Soviet republics with China in a common organization.
5. The Cultivation of Close Relationships With Ascendant Powers.
The best known example of this is Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S.. However, France has also relied on close relations with the U.S. (as in its war to retain Indochina as a colony in the late 1940s and early 1950s), and with the Federal Republic of Germany (which was crucial to its activity in the European Union). After 1991, Russia has reconciled with China and cooperated with it on a number of international issues (like the questions raised by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Iranian nuclear program, and most recently, the unrest in Syria).
Such strategies have tended to achieve only limited results, and to be decreasingly tenable over time. A former metropole's magnetism for lost colonies fades quickly after the loss of formal empire, and the material power that supported it (as has been the case with the British Commonwealth), while the costs of preserving a place in seemingly low-cost regions tends to go up over time (as Britain discovered in the Middle East, and France in Africa).1 Their ability to invest in even limited areas of military capability does not match that of other more affluent powers, and reflects the fact. (Britain's nuclear deterrent was already reliant on American-made missiles by the early 1960s, and the country's weapons programs are increasingly dependent on foreign partnerships – as with every British fighter since the Lightning.) Their special status in international institutions increasingly seems dubious (the retention of permanent Security Council seats by Britain and France has long seemed to many a relic and an injustice, especially with countries like Japan, India, Brazil and Germany lacking such places), while yielding few practical returns (given the limited effect of UN votes, as seen in the case of Iraq). Meanwhile their cultivation of regional blocs tends to dilute their voice (as has happened with the expansion of the EU) while frequently falling short of crucial objectives (like a coherent EU foreign and defense policy), while their "junior partner" role in such associations leaves them followers rather than leaders (as has arguably been the case with Britain).
Britain and France's transition away from great power status essentially ran their courses decades ago. By contrast Russia, which suffered in similar ways even after the resurgence in energy prices after 1998 permitted a partial recovery from the Soviet collapse (as former satellite countries entered NATO, Russia turned to foreign partners for support for its fifth-generation fighter program, and so on), remains in the midst of that process, which seems almost certain to continue (quite in contrast with the predictions some have made about a "mini-Cold War" between Russia and the U.S.).
In the end, where the game of great powers is concerned, there is simply no substitute for broad-based military strength, and the broad-based economic strength required to sustain it.
NOTES
1. In the Middle East pillars of British strategy like client relationships with local monarchies, the Suez base and the Baghdad Pact did not last long in the face of local nationalism; the U.S. and Soviet Union soon eclipsed Britain as external presences; and on top of that, many Middle Eastern countries became significant military powers in their own right – all as Britain had to repeatedly cut its defense spending. Likewise, France's confrontation with Libya over Chad in the 1980s showed the limits of "Jaguar diplomacy," while the 1990s brought additional setbacks (particularly the loss of friendly client regimes in Rwanda and the former Zaire).
This is not unreasonable when the central concern is the state of the international system as a whole, but it has resulted in a neglect of some not unimportant factors, and some aspects of recent history. After World War II, Britain and France, and after the Cold War, Russia, all sought to preserve something of their old position. Their particular approaches varied greatly, but there were similarities in their objectives and efforts, five of which seem especially worth discussing:
1. Working to Retain Relationships With Old Colonies and Vassals.
Britain has had the Commonwealth of Nations, France Francophonie, Russia the Commonwealth of Independent States. A significant dimension of this is the retention of a military presence in areas where it seems this can be done at low cost (as with Britain in the Middle East prior to its withdrawal "east of Suez," France's post-colonial role in western and central Africa, and Russia's interventions in "Near Abroad" countries like Tajikistan, Moldova and Georgia since 1991), and special efforts to retain sites of particular strategic value (as with Britain in the cases of Singapore, Suez and Cyprus, and Russia in the energy-rich Caspian Sea basin).
2. Placing a Special Emphasis on Select Military Resources.
The most noteworthy example of these is strategic nuclear weaponry, which all three of these countries possess, and on which have played special roles in their foreign policies. France developed its nuclear deterrent to assure itself an independent foreign position outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the 1990s, with the deterioration of Russia's conventional military capability, it was widely recognized that Russia relied more heavily on its nuclear capability for its international status, and its capacity to defend its interests.
However, less dramatically, all three countries strove to preserve a defense industrial base, even where they have eschewed meaningful industrial policies in other ways (Britain the outstanding example of this). As a result they remained major producers of the kinds of high-end arms which only a few countries are capable of building – armor, aircraft, naval vessels, and anti-aircraft systems. Their ability to produce saleable weaponry not only gives them the measure of additional independence that comes with meeting a larger part of their military needs domestically, but through their exports makes them a larger factor in international questions – as seen in the issue of Russian sales of arms to Iran in recent years.
3. Utilizing Old Privileges in International Institutions.
Their leading roles in the British Commonwealth of Nations and its French and Russian counterparts aside, Britain, France and Russia all became permanent members of the United Nations Security Council at a time when they were still plausibly regarded as Great Powers, and retained those seats long after they ceased to be such. The use of those seats, however, has given them disproportionate influence and prestige, and often been their principal means of responding to American initiatives – as with French and Russian efforts to deny the U.S. a UN mandate for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
4. The Promotion of Regionalism.
Britain, and especially France, have both participated in the development of a European Union, in part as a way of compensating for their diminished positions. In 2001, Russia was a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brought together several former Soviet republics with China in a common organization.
5. The Cultivation of Close Relationships With Ascendant Powers.
The best known example of this is Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S.. However, France has also relied on close relations with the U.S. (as in its war to retain Indochina as a colony in the late 1940s and early 1950s), and with the Federal Republic of Germany (which was crucial to its activity in the European Union). After 1991, Russia has reconciled with China and cooperated with it on a number of international issues (like the questions raised by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Iranian nuclear program, and most recently, the unrest in Syria).
Such strategies have tended to achieve only limited results, and to be decreasingly tenable over time. A former metropole's magnetism for lost colonies fades quickly after the loss of formal empire, and the material power that supported it (as has been the case with the British Commonwealth), while the costs of preserving a place in seemingly low-cost regions tends to go up over time (as Britain discovered in the Middle East, and France in Africa).1 Their ability to invest in even limited areas of military capability does not match that of other more affluent powers, and reflects the fact. (Britain's nuclear deterrent was already reliant on American-made missiles by the early 1960s, and the country's weapons programs are increasingly dependent on foreign partnerships – as with every British fighter since the Lightning.) Their special status in international institutions increasingly seems dubious (the retention of permanent Security Council seats by Britain and France has long seemed to many a relic and an injustice, especially with countries like Japan, India, Brazil and Germany lacking such places), while yielding few practical returns (given the limited effect of UN votes, as seen in the case of Iraq). Meanwhile their cultivation of regional blocs tends to dilute their voice (as has happened with the expansion of the EU) while frequently falling short of crucial objectives (like a coherent EU foreign and defense policy), while their "junior partner" role in such associations leaves them followers rather than leaders (as has arguably been the case with Britain).
Britain and France's transition away from great power status essentially ran their courses decades ago. By contrast Russia, which suffered in similar ways even after the resurgence in energy prices after 1998 permitted a partial recovery from the Soviet collapse (as former satellite countries entered NATO, Russia turned to foreign partners for support for its fifth-generation fighter program, and so on), remains in the midst of that process, which seems almost certain to continue (quite in contrast with the predictions some have made about a "mini-Cold War" between Russia and the U.S.).
In the end, where the game of great powers is concerned, there is simply no substitute for broad-based military strength, and the broad-based economic strength required to sustain it.
NOTES
1. In the Middle East pillars of British strategy like client relationships with local monarchies, the Suez base and the Baghdad Pact did not last long in the face of local nationalism; the U.S. and Soviet Union soon eclipsed Britain as external presences; and on top of that, many Middle Eastern countries became significant military powers in their own right – all as Britain had to repeatedly cut its defense spending. Likewise, France's confrontation with Libya over Chad in the 1980s showed the limits of "Jaguar diplomacy," while the 1990s brought additional setbacks (particularly the loss of friendly client regimes in Rwanda and the former Zaire).
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Myth of Decline?
Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan's essay in the New Republic "Not Fade Away: Against The Myth of American Decline," has made something of a stir as of late. Among other things, it has been credited with influencing this year's state of the union speech, as noted on the page at the Brookings Institute where it has been republished, with the result that, once again, Kagan has spun a small book out of it.
In the original piece, at any rate, Kagan makes reasonable arguments about the limits to the influence of countries like Brazil, Turkey, India and even China (given its low per-capita income and constraining geopolitical position); the appearance of seemingly daunting challenges for primacy (like the Soviet Union and Japan), and serious frustrations on the international scene (like the "loss of China" and the Vietnam War), in the past, which proved to be less consequential than was first assumed; and the sheer distance of other actors from anything comparable to the military capabilities the U.S. enjoys.
However, his examination of the U.S.'s economic and fiscal problems is conveniently superficial, all but ignoring such issues as the country's deindustrialization, balance of payments problems, and mounting foreign and central government debt, problematic trends which are interconnected, long-running, well advanced and not easily ameliorated, let alone reversed.1 The result is that, while Kagan puts some of the recent exaggerations in perspective, he remains overoptimistic in his reading of the situation, as is evident when he (all too predictably) trots out the old analogy between the United States and the British Empire, and offers as his final judgment a rough equality between the United States' present position, and Britain's circa 1870--a reading which makes little sense when one crunches those numbers. That this is not more evident owes much more to the weaknesses of other actors (the European Union, China) than the irrelevance of the issues he fails to address.
1. Indeed, Kagan has some of his facts wrong. The U.S.'s share of world GDP has not remained constant during the past few decades as he claims, but slowly eroded, from 31.3 percent of Gross World Product to 23.2 percent between 1970 and 2008, according to United Nations data (cited here). This 26 percent drop in its share is not an insignificant difference in itself, but milder than another, sharper change: that of the U.S.'s share of world manufacturing, which has fallen from 28.4 to 17.6 percent of the global total--a 38 percent drop--in the same time period, one result of which has been China's overtaking the U.S. as the world's biggest manufacturer.
In the original piece, at any rate, Kagan makes reasonable arguments about the limits to the influence of countries like Brazil, Turkey, India and even China (given its low per-capita income and constraining geopolitical position); the appearance of seemingly daunting challenges for primacy (like the Soviet Union and Japan), and serious frustrations on the international scene (like the "loss of China" and the Vietnam War), in the past, which proved to be less consequential than was first assumed; and the sheer distance of other actors from anything comparable to the military capabilities the U.S. enjoys.
However, his examination of the U.S.'s economic and fiscal problems is conveniently superficial, all but ignoring such issues as the country's deindustrialization, balance of payments problems, and mounting foreign and central government debt, problematic trends which are interconnected, long-running, well advanced and not easily ameliorated, let alone reversed.1 The result is that, while Kagan puts some of the recent exaggerations in perspective, he remains overoptimistic in his reading of the situation, as is evident when he (all too predictably) trots out the old analogy between the United States and the British Empire, and offers as his final judgment a rough equality between the United States' present position, and Britain's circa 1870--a reading which makes little sense when one crunches those numbers. That this is not more evident owes much more to the weaknesses of other actors (the European Union, China) than the irrelevance of the issues he fails to address.
1. Indeed, Kagan has some of his facts wrong. The U.S.'s share of world GDP has not remained constant during the past few decades as he claims, but slowly eroded, from 31.3 percent of Gross World Product to 23.2 percent between 1970 and 2008, according to United Nations data (cited here). This 26 percent drop in its share is not an insignificant difference in itself, but milder than another, sharper change: that of the U.S.'s share of world manufacturing, which has fallen from 28.4 to 17.6 percent of the global total--a 38 percent drop--in the same time period, one result of which has been China's overtaking the U.S. as the world's biggest manufacturer.
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