Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

The high-point of European power was probably just before the First World War, although as late as the 1930s Italy still managed to annex Abys sinia. By then, however, the United States had begun to emerge as the successor power, enjoying not only great economic strength but also growing cultural and intellectual influence. The full impact of its rise, though, continued to be obscured by a combination of its isolationism and its obvious affinity with Europe. This latter perception was reinforced by the huge scale of migration from Europe to the United States between 1850 and 1930, amounting to 12 per cent of Europe’s own population by 1900. [111] [111] Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond , p. 40. The decline of Europe became manifest after 1945 with the rapid and dramatic collapse of its empires, with the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, much of Africa, IndoChina and Malaysia, for example, all gaining independence. The number of nation-states grew by three times. [112] [112] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , p. 431. The global map was once again redrawn, as it had been in the nineteenth century — but this time far more rapidly and in the opposite direction. Independence opened up new possibilities, although these proved to be extremely diverse and uneven. India’s performance was transformed, as the figures cited earlier for its economic growth illustrate, but Africa was left debilitated by the experience of the slave trade and then colonialism. It has been estimated that the slave trade may have reduced Africa’s population by up to a half as a result of the forcible export of people combined with deaths on the continent itself. [113] [113] Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , pp. 182, 397-8, 409. In contrast East Asia, which was far less affected by colonialism and never suffered slavery (though it did experience indentured labour), was much less disadvantaged. In the light of the economic transformation of so many former colonies after 1950, it is clear that the significance of decolonization and national liberation in the first two decades after the Second World War has been greatly underestimated in the West, especially Europe. Arguably it was, bar none, the most important event of the twentieth century, creating the conditions for the majority of the world’s population to become the dominant players of the twenty-first century. As Adam Smith wrote presciently of the European discovery of the Americas and the so-called East Indies:

To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned… At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. [114] [114] Quoted in Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing , p. 3.

Although American and European modernity are often conflated into a single Western modernity, they are in fact rather different. [115] [115] Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond , pp. 5–6. Apart from the European and American passages through modernity, there are two other types. The third is that represented by East Asia, where local ruling elites, threatened by Western colonization, sought to modernize their countries in order to forestall this threat: the classic example of this is Japan. (The East Asian model will be the subject of the next chapter.) The fourth type concerns those countries that were successfully colonized and which were obliged to modernize after finally achieving national independence. History suggests that this last category has faced by far the biggest problems. The point of commonality was that the settlers, who first arrived in 1607, were Europeans. By 1790 the total population of the United States was 3,929,000, of whom 698,000 were slaves and thereby not regarded as part of American society: of the white population, 80 per cent were British (the rest being largely German and Dutch). [116] [116] Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? America ’s Great Debate (London: The Free Press, 2005), pp. 44- 5. Successive waves of European settlers brought with them the values, beliefs, customs, knowledge and culture with which they had grown up. Their intention was to re-create the Old World in the New World. [117] [117] Ibid., p. 40. In contrast to Europe, however, where capitalism was shaped by its feudal antecedents, the settlers were not constrained by pre-existing social structures or customs. In effect, they could start afresh, unencumbered by the past. This, of course, entailed the destruction of the native population of Amerindians in what we would now describe as a most brutal act of ethnic cleansing. [118] [118] Ibid., pp. 53-4. While Europe was mired in time-worn patterns of land tenure, the American settlers faced no such constraints and, with the decimation of the native population, enjoyed constantly expanding territory as the mythical frontier moved ever westwards. Where Europeans possessed a strong sense of place and territory, the Americans, in contrast, formed no such attachment because they had no need of it. The fact that the United States started as a blank piece of paper enabled it to write its own rules and design its own institutions: from the outset, steeped in Protestant doctrine, Americans were attracted to the idea of abstract principles, which was to find expression in the Constitution and, subsequently, in a strong sense of a universalizing and global mission.

The fact that the European settlers brought with them a powerful body of values and religious beliefs but were devoid of the class attitudes of their ancestral homes lent the white American population a feeling of homogeneity. The exclusion of African slaves from American society together with the destruction of the Amerindians imbued their identity with a strongly racial dimension. The boundless opportunities presented by a huge and well-endowed territory and a constantly moving frontier instilled the nation with a powerful sense of optimism and a restless commitment to change. The domestic market was unconstrained by the local and regional preferences and the class and status distinctions that prevailed in Europe and, being relatively homogeneous, was much more receptive to standardized products. [119] [119] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , p. 301. The relative scarcity of labour stimulated a constant desire to introduce labour-saving machinery and improve productivity. Unlike in Europe, there was little resistance to the process of deskilling and the routinization of tasks. The result was an economy which showed a far greater proclivity for technological innovation, mechanization, the standardization of products, constant improvement in the labour process, economies of scale and mass production than was the case in Europe. The American model was distinguished by a new kind of mass market and mass consumer, with all the attendant innovations in areas such as advertising. As a result, from the late nineteenth century American capitalism was to prove far more dynamic and innovative than its European counterparts.

In 1820, the US economy accounted for a mere 1.8 % of world GDP compared with 5.2 % and 3.9 % for the UK and Germany respectively. As indicated in the last chapter, by 1870, the US share of world GDP had risen to 8.8 % while the equivalent figures for the UK and Germany were 9.0 % and 6.5 % respectively. By 1914, the US had pulled well ahead with a share of 18.9 % compared with 8.2 % for the UK and 8.7 % for Germany. In 1950, America’s economic high noon, its share of world GDP was 27.3 %, compared with 6.5 % for the UK, 5.0 % for Germany and 26.2 % for the whole of Western Europe. [120] [120] Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics , p. 261. The damage wrought by two world wars notwithstanding, the American economy hugely outperformed the European economies in the period 1870–1950 and this underpinned the emergence of the United States as the premier global power after 1945. Largely eschewing the formal colonies which had been the characteristic form of European global influence, [121] [121] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600 - 1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), Chapter 11; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004), Chapter 1; Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire , p. 58; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘America’s Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail’, Guardian , 25 June 2005. the United States became the first truly global power: the dollar was enshrined as the world’s currency, a new constellation of global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and GATT, gave expression to the US’s economic hegemony, while its military superiority, based on airpower, far exceeded anything that had previously been seen. The United States succeeded in creating a world system of which it was the undisputed hegemon but which was also open and inclusive, finally reaching fruition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and with the progressive inclusion of China. [122] [122] G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), pp. 6–8. By 1960, if not earlier, the United States had supplanted Europe as the global exemplar to which other societies and peoples aspired. It demonstrated a new kind of cultural power and influence, through Hollywood and its television soaps, and also through such icons of its consumer industry as Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. Its universities increasingly became magnets for the best scholars and students from all over the world. It dominated the list of Nobel Prize winners. And it was the power and appeal of the United States that lay behind the rise of English as the world’s first true lingua franca.