4 - Globalization and Nationalism in the United States: A Historical Perspective

Summary

American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognize in common ... America is already the intellectual, scientific, and artistic capital of the world.

— Henry Luce, “The American Century”, 1941

At the annual Lower East Side Jewish Festival yesterday, a Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of Ty Thuan Duc's Vietnamese grocery store. Beside her a Spanish-speaking family patronized a cart with two signs: “Italian Ices” and “Kosher by Rabbi Alper”. And after the pastrami ran out, everybody ate knishes.

— New York Times, June 1983

Introduction

“The United States,” political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in the early 1960s, “may properly claim the title of the first new nation. It was the first major colony to successfully break away from colonial rule through revolution.” Lipset's claim, made in the halcyon days of American post-war prosperity, echoes the exceptionalism that permeated American historiography and social science at that time. Nevertheless, the statement rightly positions the United States at the forefront of modern national experience and, by extension, to the process of globalization. The majority of countries in the world today are newly independent since World War II and, like their eighteenth-century American predecessor, are post-colonial nations. Most are “state-nations” constructed on the basis of social nationalism, rather than nation-states of single ethnic origin. Like the United States, they too are products of an accelerated process of globalization that characterizes modern times.

Considerable differences of opinion exist about what constitutes globalization, when it began, and where it is leading us. World-systems analysts, for instance, put forth a metahistorical perspective that globalization is contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism and is an outcome of European expansion. In this view, globalization becomes the inevitable result of the free market at work.