International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2011
PIVOTAL DECADE How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies Judith Stein N... more PIVOTAL DECADE How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies Judith Stein New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 367PP, $37.50 cloth ISBN 978-0-300-11818-6STAYIN' ALIVE The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Jefferson Cowie New York and London: The New Press, 2010. 464PP, $36.50 cloth ISBN: 978-1-56584-875-7A striking feature of the American scene is the tendency of economic or geopolitical difficulties to initiate heated arguments over whether the United States is in "decline" as a world power. The 1987 WaU Street crash, for example, helped ensure a bull market for Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. For months thereafter, op-ed pages and letters columns were dominated by the debate over whether America was succumbing to the same cycle of overextension and contraction that, in Kennedy's version of world history, had struck down past hegemons. The timing was less propitious for the two books under consideration here, which were published when the recovery from the 2008 recession, albeit fitful, had begun and the United States had begun to extricate itself from at least one of its two protracted military commitments. The authors of both works differ in emphasis but agree in dating the origins of the long-term weakening of American power to the 1970s, a decade that is now attracting overdue reconsideration from historians. Judith Stein looks in detail at the impact of economic challenges, particularly oil shocks, stagflation, and the downsizing of heavy industry, on the United States' morale and prosperity. Jefferson Cowie pays more attention to cultural changes and the weakening of organized labour as a force in American politics. Each has something to say about the passing of America's postwar economic and geopolitical primacy and the domestic political alignments it reinforced. But each also either ignores or misconstrues important aspects of the topic.Stein differs with many other historians in seeing globalization not as an American triumph but as the gravest of self-inflicted injuries. According to her interpretation, the unprecedented wealth and productivity of the quarter century after 1945 was undone by unreciprocated generosity. In constructing a liberal international trade order, she writes, America not only gave direct aid to future competitors (via the MarshaU plan and the rebuilding of Japan's industrial base through American military production for the Korean War), but it also granted unprecedented access to its own markets. To guarantee its aUies' prosperity and political stability, the United States encouraged a European Community from which high-value American exports would be shut out, adopted legislation enabling successive presidents of both parties to remove old tariffs and obstruct the imposition of new ones, and foUowed tax policies that promoted the export of American capital and technology. Despite a deteriorating balance of trade, the elite consensus behind free trade largely held firm until nemesis arrived in the 1970s. By 1973, domestic supplies could no longer satisfy American demand for oil, and OPEC was able not only to raise world prices but to cut off exports to the US altogether in retaliation for American aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. At the same time, supplies of other raw materials vital to American industry were at the disposal of neutral or hostile regimes.The villains in this account of recent history are the affluent Democratic liberals who sympathized with the antiwar and social liberation movements of the 1960s and disdained organized labour for its materialism, social conservatism, and support for the Vietnam War. Stein attacks these liberals intemperately and distractingly because of their origins in the professional classes and their preference - growing out of their own economic interests - for free trade rather than "buying American." This line of attack smacks of reverse snobbery. She describes Michael Dukakis, for example, as "marinat[ing] in a soup of self-regard fostered by degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard Law School" (274). …
International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2015
Christopher McKnight Nichols Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age Cambridge, MA... more Christopher McKnight Nichols Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;, 201 I ; 464 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-04984-0, $37.00 (cloth).Christopher McKnight Nichols opens his study of American isolationism by quoting George W. Bush's warning, in his 2006 State of the Union address, that "the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting-yet it ends in danger and decline" (1). The bipartisan proclivity for employing "isolationist" solely as an epithet, Nichols writes, along with its binary opposition to internation- alism, "misconstrues the rich complexity of the origins of isolationism'' (1). Nichols seeks to reinterpret and rehabilitate isolationist thinkers of the period from roughly 1898 to 1940, whose ideas he frames as a response to turn-of-the-century imperialism and the Spanish-American War. This modern isolationism was "a constellation of ideas rather than a single principle or policy position" (352) and compatible with widely divergent approaches to foreign relations. Nichols is intent on proving that isolationism "did not entail cultural, economic, or complete political separation from the rest of the world" although "such a separation from the world is the first reaction that comes to mind." Isolationism was also rooted in conceptions of American domestic arrangements and "frequently turned, in fact and in debate, on the inner life of the nation" (352).This is nowhere near as daring and pathbreaking as it sounds. Not for decades has any serious student of American diplomacy believed that isolationism entailed the construction of impermeable barriers between America and the rest of the world. And there is already a rich literature (indeed, Nichols cites it extensively) that demonstrates how deeply rooted isolationist precepts were in conceptions of the good life at home. For example, Wayne S. Cole's many works on interwar isolationists amply illustrate the centrality of their Midwestern and agrarian roots to their suspicion of entanglements abroad. Yet if these elements of Nichols' larger argument are all too familiar, its parts are often greater than the whole. The ana- lyses of individual figures are discerning, well judged, and show a commendable grasp of the varied archival materials and relevant scholarly literature, even if Nichols' prose is often sloppy and the copy-editing is abysmal.Nichols gets off to a shaky start by choosing as one of his exemplary figures the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a vehement imperialist and navalist. Lodge was a prominent supporter of the "Large Policy" against which Nichols sees most of his other illustrative figures reacting, and his one isolationist trait was an absolutist conception of national sovereignty. In his case, this ruled out participation in the League of Nations as an intolerable abridgement of Congress's prerogative to decide if and where American troops were deployed and led him, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to play a crucial role in preventing American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. If Lodge can be shoehorned into the isolationist camp, questions arise of just who could plausibly be excluded and whether what Nichols surveys is in fact a coherent tradition or world view at all.Fortunately, most of the other individuals to whom Nichols devotes chapters fit the isolationist mould more consistently and amount to something better resem- bling a unified school of thought. Their principal shared preoccupation is with the fate of individual liberty in the wake of the giant industrial and military organizations ushered in by the new century. Nichols turns first to the philosopher William James, previously apolitical but a stalwart of the Anti-Imperialist League after American troops were committed to occupying the Philippines. Aptly enough for a founder of Pragmatism, James judged America's dalliance with empire by its consequences, and feared that however elevated the motives and rhetoric of empire, the reality would be brutality abroad and conformity at home. …
International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2015
Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen ... more Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen Lane, 2013. 895 pp. $39.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0713992823The first volume of Charles Moore's official biography of Margaret Thatcher is in some ways surprising. Presumably picked for the task because of his Thatcherite predilections, the long-time Tory journalist wrote with exclusive access to the former prime minister and her papers, as well as many of her associates. The portrait he paints is elegantly crafted if overlong, and, while more richly detailed than the highly critical biographies by Hugo Young and John Campbell, confirms their essential findings. He too finds a leader whose fabled resolve sometimes tips into obstinacy but is as often tempered by a surprising pragmatism. Moore flirts unconvincingly with the idea that Thatcher was an embryonic libertarian from an early age, but more plausibly settles on the view that she identified with, and reflected the views of the small-business, lower-middle-class, Tory grassroots who had never fully reconciled themselves to the party leadership's acceptance of Keynesian economics and the postwar welfare state.Not all of the new material Moore has found rewards his industry. The muchballyhooed discovery of a cache of youthful letters to her sister shows the undergraduate Margaret to have been less preoccupied with politics and more with fashion, food, and previously unknown early boyfriends than other biographers have known. Likewise, it is no more than mildly surprising or illuminating that her eventual husband, Denis, decamped for a time to South Africa during a midlife crisis when "it was... possible that their marriage would end" (175). Moore is on solid ground when he highlights the implausibility of her ascent in light of her humble origins and lack of the standard political gifts of charm and easy eloquence. Instead, she relied on remorseless labour to master her brief; for all her fabled affinity for Ronald Reagan, in her triumph of fortitude over lack of natural talent she is closer to Richard Nixon. Discipline carried her from candidate in unwinnable riding to backbencher to ministerial office in the government of Edward Heath.At crucial moments, she was lucky. In 1975 she won the leadership largely because Heath had not only lost three out of four elections but also alienated even like-minded MPs by his ham-handedness in personal relations. And in much of the run-up to the 1979 election she was significantly less popular than the Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan, who cleaved to the centre ground and himself took steps away from the Keynesian consensus Thatcher was determined to shatter. But Callaghan shied away from calling an election in late 1978, which he might well have won, and by 1979 a resurgence of trade union militancy had destroyed his standing with the electorate and made Thatcher's victory as close to inevitable as politics allows.Moore is sympathetic to the economic program of Thatcher's early years, which stressed the defeat of inflation over that of unemployment, the setting of wages by the free play of market forces rather than government incomes policy, and the control of state spending. There is no discussion here of whether a more measured version of her program (rather than what the Labour politician Denis Healey labeled "sado-monetarism") might have worked better, nor acknowledgement that Thatcher never succeeded in either reducing spending or boosting the prod- uctivity of Britain's economy. Moore provides the most detailed description to date of internal debates over the government's economic direction, and plausibly argues that the public debate between Thatcherites and proponents of a return to the Keynesian consensus was less consequential for the making of policy than debates among those who were in broad agreement about the correctness of the Thatcherite course but differed over the timing and details of implementation. …
International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2011
PIVOTAL DECADE How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies Judith Stein N... more PIVOTAL DECADE How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies Judith Stein New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 367PP, $37.50 cloth ISBN 978-0-300-11818-6STAYIN' ALIVE The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Jefferson Cowie New York and London: The New Press, 2010. 464PP, $36.50 cloth ISBN: 978-1-56584-875-7A striking feature of the American scene is the tendency of economic or geopolitical difficulties to initiate heated arguments over whether the United States is in "decline" as a world power. The 1987 WaU Street crash, for example, helped ensure a bull market for Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. For months thereafter, op-ed pages and letters columns were dominated by the debate over whether America was succumbing to the same cycle of overextension and contraction that, in Kennedy's version of world history, had struck down past hegemons. The timing was less propitious for the two books under consideration here, which were published when the recovery from the 2008 recession, albeit fitful, had begun and the United States had begun to extricate itself from at least one of its two protracted military commitments. The authors of both works differ in emphasis but agree in dating the origins of the long-term weakening of American power to the 1970s, a decade that is now attracting overdue reconsideration from historians. Judith Stein looks in detail at the impact of economic challenges, particularly oil shocks, stagflation, and the downsizing of heavy industry, on the United States' morale and prosperity. Jefferson Cowie pays more attention to cultural changes and the weakening of organized labour as a force in American politics. Each has something to say about the passing of America's postwar economic and geopolitical primacy and the domestic political alignments it reinforced. But each also either ignores or misconstrues important aspects of the topic.Stein differs with many other historians in seeing globalization not as an American triumph but as the gravest of self-inflicted injuries. According to her interpretation, the unprecedented wealth and productivity of the quarter century after 1945 was undone by unreciprocated generosity. In constructing a liberal international trade order, she writes, America not only gave direct aid to future competitors (via the MarshaU plan and the rebuilding of Japan's industrial base through American military production for the Korean War), but it also granted unprecedented access to its own markets. To guarantee its aUies' prosperity and political stability, the United States encouraged a European Community from which high-value American exports would be shut out, adopted legislation enabling successive presidents of both parties to remove old tariffs and obstruct the imposition of new ones, and foUowed tax policies that promoted the export of American capital and technology. Despite a deteriorating balance of trade, the elite consensus behind free trade largely held firm until nemesis arrived in the 1970s. By 1973, domestic supplies could no longer satisfy American demand for oil, and OPEC was able not only to raise world prices but to cut off exports to the US altogether in retaliation for American aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. At the same time, supplies of other raw materials vital to American industry were at the disposal of neutral or hostile regimes.The villains in this account of recent history are the affluent Democratic liberals who sympathized with the antiwar and social liberation movements of the 1960s and disdained organized labour for its materialism, social conservatism, and support for the Vietnam War. Stein attacks these liberals intemperately and distractingly because of their origins in the professional classes and their preference - growing out of their own economic interests - for free trade rather than "buying American." This line of attack smacks of reverse snobbery. She describes Michael Dukakis, for example, as "marinat[ing] in a soup of self-regard fostered by degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard Law School" (274). …
International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2015
Christopher McKnight Nichols Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age Cambridge, MA... more Christopher McKnight Nichols Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;, 201 I ; 464 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-04984-0, $37.00 (cloth).Christopher McKnight Nichols opens his study of American isolationism by quoting George W. Bush's warning, in his 2006 State of the Union address, that "the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting-yet it ends in danger and decline" (1). The bipartisan proclivity for employing "isolationist" solely as an epithet, Nichols writes, along with its binary opposition to internation- alism, "misconstrues the rich complexity of the origins of isolationism'' (1). Nichols seeks to reinterpret and rehabilitate isolationist thinkers of the period from roughly 1898 to 1940, whose ideas he frames as a response to turn-of-the-century imperialism and the Spanish-American War. This modern isolationism was "a constellation of ideas rather than a single principle or policy position" (352) and compatible with widely divergent approaches to foreign relations. Nichols is intent on proving that isolationism "did not entail cultural, economic, or complete political separation from the rest of the world" although "such a separation from the world is the first reaction that comes to mind." Isolationism was also rooted in conceptions of American domestic arrangements and "frequently turned, in fact and in debate, on the inner life of the nation" (352).This is nowhere near as daring and pathbreaking as it sounds. Not for decades has any serious student of American diplomacy believed that isolationism entailed the construction of impermeable barriers between America and the rest of the world. And there is already a rich literature (indeed, Nichols cites it extensively) that demonstrates how deeply rooted isolationist precepts were in conceptions of the good life at home. For example, Wayne S. Cole's many works on interwar isolationists amply illustrate the centrality of their Midwestern and agrarian roots to their suspicion of entanglements abroad. Yet if these elements of Nichols' larger argument are all too familiar, its parts are often greater than the whole. The ana- lyses of individual figures are discerning, well judged, and show a commendable grasp of the varied archival materials and relevant scholarly literature, even if Nichols' prose is often sloppy and the copy-editing is abysmal.Nichols gets off to a shaky start by choosing as one of his exemplary figures the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a vehement imperialist and navalist. Lodge was a prominent supporter of the "Large Policy" against which Nichols sees most of his other illustrative figures reacting, and his one isolationist trait was an absolutist conception of national sovereignty. In his case, this ruled out participation in the League of Nations as an intolerable abridgement of Congress's prerogative to decide if and where American troops were deployed and led him, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to play a crucial role in preventing American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. If Lodge can be shoehorned into the isolationist camp, questions arise of just who could plausibly be excluded and whether what Nichols surveys is in fact a coherent tradition or world view at all.Fortunately, most of the other individuals to whom Nichols devotes chapters fit the isolationist mould more consistently and amount to something better resem- bling a unified school of thought. Their principal shared preoccupation is with the fate of individual liberty in the wake of the giant industrial and military organizations ushered in by the new century. Nichols turns first to the philosopher William James, previously apolitical but a stalwart of the Anti-Imperialist League after American troops were committed to occupying the Philippines. Aptly enough for a founder of Pragmatism, James judged America's dalliance with empire by its consequences, and feared that however elevated the motives and rhetoric of empire, the reality would be brutality abroad and conformity at home. …
International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2015
Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen ... more Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Vol. I, Not for Turning London: Allen Lane, 2013. 895 pp. $39.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0713992823The first volume of Charles Moore's official biography of Margaret Thatcher is in some ways surprising. Presumably picked for the task because of his Thatcherite predilections, the long-time Tory journalist wrote with exclusive access to the former prime minister and her papers, as well as many of her associates. The portrait he paints is elegantly crafted if overlong, and, while more richly detailed than the highly critical biographies by Hugo Young and John Campbell, confirms their essential findings. He too finds a leader whose fabled resolve sometimes tips into obstinacy but is as often tempered by a surprising pragmatism. Moore flirts unconvincingly with the idea that Thatcher was an embryonic libertarian from an early age, but more plausibly settles on the view that she identified with, and reflected the views of the small-business, lower-middle-class, Tory grassroots who had never fully reconciled themselves to the party leadership's acceptance of Keynesian economics and the postwar welfare state.Not all of the new material Moore has found rewards his industry. The muchballyhooed discovery of a cache of youthful letters to her sister shows the undergraduate Margaret to have been less preoccupied with politics and more with fashion, food, and previously unknown early boyfriends than other biographers have known. Likewise, it is no more than mildly surprising or illuminating that her eventual husband, Denis, decamped for a time to South Africa during a midlife crisis when "it was... possible that their marriage would end" (175). Moore is on solid ground when he highlights the implausibility of her ascent in light of her humble origins and lack of the standard political gifts of charm and easy eloquence. Instead, she relied on remorseless labour to master her brief; for all her fabled affinity for Ronald Reagan, in her triumph of fortitude over lack of natural talent she is closer to Richard Nixon. Discipline carried her from candidate in unwinnable riding to backbencher to ministerial office in the government of Edward Heath.At crucial moments, she was lucky. In 1975 she won the leadership largely because Heath had not only lost three out of four elections but also alienated even like-minded MPs by his ham-handedness in personal relations. And in much of the run-up to the 1979 election she was significantly less popular than the Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan, who cleaved to the centre ground and himself took steps away from the Keynesian consensus Thatcher was determined to shatter. But Callaghan shied away from calling an election in late 1978, which he might well have won, and by 1979 a resurgence of trade union militancy had destroyed his standing with the electorate and made Thatcher's victory as close to inevitable as politics allows.Moore is sympathetic to the economic program of Thatcher's early years, which stressed the defeat of inflation over that of unemployment, the setting of wages by the free play of market forces rather than government incomes policy, and the control of state spending. There is no discussion here of whether a more measured version of her program (rather than what the Labour politician Denis Healey labeled "sado-monetarism") might have worked better, nor acknowledgement that Thatcher never succeeded in either reducing spending or boosting the prod- uctivity of Britain's economy. Moore provides the most detailed description to date of internal debates over the government's economic direction, and plausibly argues that the public debate between Thatcherites and proponents of a return to the Keynesian consensus was less consequential for the making of policy than debates among those who were in broad agreement about the correctness of the Thatcherite course but differed over the timing and details of implementation. …
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