Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:12:15.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

American Political Culture and the End of the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Christopher Thorne
Christopher Thorne
Affiliation:
Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The ending of the Cold War, represented by the extraordinary changes that have been taking place within the international system since 1989, has finally, it seems, put an end to a situation wherein two armed and tightly organised blocs confronted one another and perceived each other as being, in essence, a threat that was immediate and potentially mortal. Given, too, that it was the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself that fell apart, it is understandable that this should be widely perceived as a victory for the West; and it is perhaps inevitable that attention should now fall on how the United States will relate to the international environment in which the country may well find itself in the early decades of the coming century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , December 1992 , pp. 303 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Other dimensions and perspectives relating to the external behaviour of this or any other state are not, of course, of inherently lesser significance. I shall in fact be referring on occasions to such matters as international and domestic structures, for example; but I cannot hope to do them justice, or to explore the crucial and demanding question of the causal interrelationships and hierarchies that link, inter alia, structures with political culture itself; that link socio-economic and political-economic dimensions to what Clifford Geertz calls “world views”, or Jürgen Habermas “lifeworlds”, or Berger and Luckmann “symbolic universes”. In other words, I have much sympathy with Carole Pateman when she argues that much of the early work on political culture tended to ignore the potential significance of structures and of political socialization. See here “The Civic Culture: A Philosophical Critique”, Almond, G. A. and Verba, S. (eds.), The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar. I do not follow those like Pierre Bourdieu who would give theoretical primacy to what he terms the “objective structures”, but am in accord, rather, with those such as W. G. Runciman and Michael Mann who emphasize the reciprocal relationships involved, and who tend to accord primacy empirically, on a case-to-case basis. I am also in agreement with Robert Packenham when he observes: “It is certainly true that ideas are conditioned by historical, economic, and socio-cultural forces…. At the same time, however, especially under the press of historical crises, ideas can also acquire autonomy.” See Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice trans. Nice, R. (Cambridge, 1977), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Runciman, W. G., A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge, 1989), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mann, M., States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford, 1988), viiGoogle Scholar, and The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1986), 1–2Google Scholar; Packenham, R. A., Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, 1973), 319–20Google Scholar. See also e.g. Cox, R. W., Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York, 1987), 29.Google Scholar

2 For an earlier discussion by Christopher Thorne of the concept of an American political culture see his American Political Culture and the Asian Frontier, 1943–1973 (London, 1986).Google Scholar

3 Bull, H. and Watson, A. (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, 1984), 1, 117ff.Google Scholar

4 Hoffmann, S., Gulliver's Troubles, Or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1968), ch. 2.Google Scholar

5 Nye, J. Jr, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990)Google Scholar, passim. See also Calleo, D. P., Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

6 Brown, S., New Forces in World Politics (Washington D.C., 1974).Google Scholar

7 R. Dore, “Unity and Diversity in Contemporary World Culture” and A. Bozeman, “The International Order in a Multicultural World,” in Bull, and Watson, , op. cit.Google Scholar And see e.g. Dore, , “Technology in a World of National Frontiers,” World Development, 17, no. 11 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bozeman, , The Future of Law in a Multicultural World (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar. Bozeman's use of the terms “system” and “society” in her essay do not accord entirely with the sense in which they have been taken here, but I have rendered them in accord with the sense of her argument.

8 Fukuyama, F., “The End of History?,” The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3Google Scholar. See too his The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992).Google Scholar

9 Giddens, A., A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. 1 (London, 1981), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London, 1973), 264.Google Scholar

10 On this issue in general, see e.g. Bloom, W., Personal Identity, National Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (London, 1991).Google Scholar

11 Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation (New York, 1944), chs. 18 and 21.Google Scholar

12 Hoffmann, S., “A New World and its Troubles” in Rizopoulos, N. X. (ed.), Sea Changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed (New York, 1990), 284.Google Scholar

13 See e.g. King, A. (ed.), The New American Political System (Washington D.C., 1978).Google Scholar

14 Destler, I. M., Gelb, L. H., and Lake, A., Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1984), 91 ff.; 121.Google Scholar

15 Brinkley, A., “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Daedalus, Summer 1984.Google Scholar

16 Green, D., Shaping Political Consciousness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan (Ithaca, 1987)Google Scholar. For a fine case-study, see Gerstle, G., Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar

17 See Holsti, O. R. and Rosenau, J. N., American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (Boston, 1984)Google Scholar; Destler, , Gelb, and Lake, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Smith, M. J. and Thompson, K. W. (eds.), Consensus: Issues and Problems (Lanham, Md., 1985).Google Scholar

18 Halle, D., America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago, 1984).Google Scholar

19 McNeill, W. H., “Winds of Change”, in Rizopoulos, N. X. (ed.), Sea Changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

20 See e.g. Smith, and Thompson, , op. cit., 11Google Scholar

21 Mann, M., “The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 35 No. 3, 06 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Wiebe, R. H., The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York, 1975), 48, 90.Google Scholar

23 Rogin, M. P., The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 33.Google Scholar

24 Halle, , op. cit., 302 and passim.Google Scholar

25 Mailer, N., “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” quoted in Wills, G., The Kennedys: A Shattered Illusion (London, 1983), 163.Google Scholar

26 Destler, , Gelb, and Lake, , op. cit., 11, 38, 83–85.Google Scholar

27 Foucault, M., Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, C. (Brighton, 1980), 131.Google Scholar

28 Trachtenberg, A., The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982), 3, 43.Google Scholar

29 Lerner, M., America as a Civilisation: Life and Thought in the United States Today (New York, 1957), 407, 629Google Scholar. And see e.g. Richard Hofstadter on the “extraordinary ability, in the face of the record,” of Americans “to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples”: Hofstadter, R. and Wallace, M. (eds.), American Violence: A Documentary History (New York, 1970), 6.Google Scholar

30 Kattenburg, P. M., The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75 (New Brunswick, 1980), 69 ffGoogle Scholar. This is not to suggest that ideas and principles do not enter into the defining and functioning of societies in other lands. But the degree to which this has been so in the U.S.A., together with the sheer size and diversity of the peoples involved, appear to justify the notion that the American case is exceptional in this respect.

31 These ideas were to have been pursued at greater length in a book that Christopher Thorne was working on when he died, and which would have been entitled, The Demanding Dream: American Society, the American Polity, and the World Beyond, 1941–1964.

32 Quoted in Burns, E. M., The American Idea of Mission: Concepts of National Purpose and Destiny (New Brunswick, 1957), 219Google Scholar. On Croly, see Ross, D., The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 5.Google Scholar

33 Bellah, R. N., Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970)Google Scholar and The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Wuthnow, R., The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988), 61.Google Scholar

34 See e.g. Dean Acheson's comment in 1945, that U.S. foreign policy was “merely the expression of the people's purpose with reference to matters outside the nation”; quoted in Leigh, M., Mobilizing Consent: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 1937–1947 (Westport, Conn., 1976), 127–8Google Scholar. Cf. e.g. Cohen, B. C., The Public's Impact on foreign Policy (Boston, 1973).Google Scholar

35 See e.g. Morgan, E. S., Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

36 Niebuhr, R., The Irony of American History (London, 1952), 5 and passim. This is not to suggest that the matter of power, not least in international relations, is other than frequently ambiguous.Google Scholar

37 Lowi, T. J., The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. And see e.g. McConnell, G., Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Karl, B. D., The Uneasy State: The United States, From 1915 to 1945 (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar; Mead, W. R., Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston, 1987), 119–20 and 336.Google Scholar

38 Wills, G., Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (New York, 1979), 466 ff. and 490 ffGoogle Scholar. Also Katz, M. B., “The New Educational Panic”, in Berlowitz, L., Donaghue, D. and Menand, L. (eds.), America In Theory (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. See too those studies which underline the strength of support for “the values and institutions of capitalism” among the American working class, as well as the wealthier sections of society. E.g. McClosky, H. and Zaller, J., The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (New York, 1984), 133 and passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 , R. S. and Lynd, H. M., Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York, 1937), 235, 469, 489.Google Scholar

40 McDougall, W. A., …The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985), 447.Google Scholar

41 Maier, C. S., “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of International Economic Policy After World War II,” International Organization, 31, no. 4, (Autumn 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Tocqueville, A. de, Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, H. (London, 1946), 517–8.Google Scholar

43 Hartz, L., The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955), 211.Google Scholar

44 Becker, C. L., Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York, 1935), 21.Google Scholar

45 Kammen, M. (ed.), “What is the Good of History?” Selected Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, 1973), 261.Google Scholar

46 Oilman, S. L., Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, 1985), 20 ff.Google Scholar

47 On attitudes towards domestic “Others”, see for example, Norton's, Alternative AmericasGoogle Scholar, and Drinnon, R., Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. On one set of connections between attitudes towards internal and external “Others” respectively, see Williams, W. L., “U.S. Indian Policy and the Debate Over Philippine Annexation,” Journal of American History, 66 (03 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On one, current aspect of the interconnections between the politics of domestic pluralities and international affairs, see Sleeper, J., The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York, 1990)Google Scholar. Sleeper observes that, just as New York City's problems cannot be overcome within the context of the prevailing national political-economic system, so in turn “the wealthiest nation on earth has become an increasingly interdependent part of a larger world capitalism that has no stake in America's resolution of its own inequities…. Expanding the economy might still be; balanced and controlled by Americans it is not. Unskilled, semi-skilled and blue-collar workers and the unemployed - categories comprising a majority of the nation's blacks – are the losers” (103, 161).

48 See e.g. Burns, , op. cit., 257.Google Scholar

49 See e.g. Tuveson, E. L., Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968), 212Google Scholar and passim. For a recent, interesting discussion of America's ambivalent attitude to its overwhelming power and the way that its predominance has weakened the main justification for the projection of U.S. power abroad – namely, that America itself is vulnerable to attack – see Thompson, John A., “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History, 16, no. 1 (Winter 1992).Google Scholar

50 See Thome, C., Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York, 1978), 515.Google Scholar

51 Minutes of U.S. Delegation meeting of 17 April 1945, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, Vol. I (Washington D.C., 1967), 311 ff.Google Scholar

52 Thome, , Allies of a Kind, 138.Google Scholar

53 Quoted in Gleason, P., “American Identity and Americanization” in Thernstrom, S. (ed.), The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 43.Google Scholar

54 Quoted in Dallek, R., The American Style of Foreign Policy (New York, 1983), 141–2.Google Scholar

55 Mead, M., New Lives For Old, Cultural Transformation: Manus, 1928–1953 (New York, 1961) 19Google Scholar; And Keep Your Powder Dry (London, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 13. As Phyllis Grosskurth has observed, “Margaret Mead was as American as apple pie. She believed in efficient know-how. She believed that the world could be made a better place. She believed that there were answers to everything – and that she knew a lot of them…. She had a normative view of American behaviour against which others were implicitly judged…. In a sense there was a real meeting of Mead's narcissistic needs and the narcissistic values of her society.” Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy (London, 1988), 15, 56, 94Google Scholar. None the less, Mead was by 1968 strongly criticising her country's failure to eradicate poverty within its own borders. See Windmiller, W., The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Washington, D.C., 1970), 149.Google Scholar

56 Boorstin, D., The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (London, 1961), 244Google Scholar. Or, as Daniel Bell has put it in a recent essay – “All nations are to some extent unique. But the idea of exceptionalism … assumes not only that the United States has been unlike other nations, but that it is exceptional in the sense of being exemplary (‘a city upon a hill’) or a beacon among nations”: in Shafer, B. (ed.) Is America Different? (Oxford 1991), 50–51.Google Scholar

57 The attraction of Billy Graham provides one obvious example of this phenomenon. Graham was proclaiming in the 1950s that Americans “were created for a spiritual mission among the nations” – while at the same time warning those same Americans that many of them were deep in moral turpitude (Americans, he proclaimed in 1952, were “a desperately wicked people” because of their “sins of materialism”). He was alleging, moreover, that Communists, their doctrine “master-minded by Satan”, were in control of “the minds of a great segment of our people”, to the extent that the country's “educational [and] religious culture [was] almost beyond repair.” See Whitfield, S. J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 80 ffGoogle Scholar. On the relevant tradition in American history, see Bercovitch, S., The American Jeremiad (Madison, 1978).Google Scholar

58 Baritz, L., Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York, 1985), 30Google Scholar; Nye, , op. cit., 111, 193 ff., 227Google Scholar. In the 1980s, for example, the USA was exporting seven times more television shows than its nearest rival, 50 per cent of the world's cinema-screen time was occupied by American films, and the USA was responsible for something like 80 per cent of the world-wide transmission and processing of data.

59 Gleason, P., “American Identity and Americanization,” in S. Thernstrom (ed.), The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic GroupsGoogle Scholar; Ninkovich, F. A., The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge, 1981), 181–3 and passim.Google Scholar

60 Packenham, R. A., Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, 1973).Google Scholar

61 Immerman, R. H. (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, 1990), 280.Google Scholar

62 Shafer, D. M., Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Leicester, 1988)Google Scholar. Note that when examining the proceedings of a 1986 conference on “Low-Intensity War”, sponsored by the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, Shafer finds no significant change in basic thought-patterns from the Vietnam and pre-Vietnam periods. Ibid., 283 ff. See also, on the “Kissinger Report” of 1984 on Central America, Shapiro, M. J., The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices on Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison, Wisconsin, 1988), 112 ffGoogle Scholar. Also e.g. Etheridge, L. S., Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Central American Revolutions (New York, 1985), 172, 195Google Scholar, and passim, and I. F. Stone's observations quoted in Ellsberg, D., Papers on the War (New York, 1972), 159–60.Google Scholar

63 Paterson, T. G. (ed.), Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York, 1989), 314–5Google Scholar and passim. Also e.g. Windmiller, M., The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Washington D.C., 1970).Google Scholar

64 See e.g. Kattenburg, , op. cit., 84 ff., 119–20, 169 ff., 288–9Google Scholar; Thomson, J. C. Jr, Stanley, P. W., Perry, J. C., Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York, 1981), 280 ff.Google Scholar

65 Stillman, E. and Pfaff, W., Power and Impotence: The Failure of America's Foreign Policy (New York, 1966), 45Google Scholar. Is there, again, an interweaving here between approaches to external and to domestic relationships? Is there relevance in this context in certain observations on the part of Niebuhr, Crozier and Sontag among others ? Consider: (i) “[Americans] can understand the neat logic of either economic reciprocity or the show of pure power, but…are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears which enter into the policies of nations and which lie at the foundation of political cohesion”: Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 35–6Google Scholar; (ii) “[Americans] lack a code, a culture, in the domain that will always be closed to the computer, that of complex human relationships”: Crozier, M., The Trouble With America, trans. Heinegg, P. (Berkeley, 1984), 133Google Scholar; (iii) “Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of experience. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”: Sontag, S., Against Interpretation (London, 1987), 13–14Google Scholar; (iv) “Most Americans are possessed of a profound chauvinism that is existential… They really do not believe that other countries, other ways of life, exist – in the way that they and theirs do”: Sontag, quoted in Vogelgesang, S., The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War (New York, 1974), 111.Google Scholar

66 Sheehan, N., A bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (London, 1989), 217, 315Google Scholar. Note also the particular dimension lacking in the modern American experience: the visiting of total war upon its own territory and upon the great mass of its population. See Kennedy, D., “War and the American Character,” Stanford Magazine, Spring/Summer 1975Google Scholar, and Wiebe, , op. cit., 34–35Google Scholar. During the Second World War, American deaths as a percentage of total (1939) population amounted to 0.3 per cent; those of The Netherlands, for example, 2.4 per cent, of Yugoslavia 11 per cent, and of the Soviet Union (if the recent suggested figure of 27 million deaths are valid), approaching 17 per cent: Chirot, D., Social Change in the Modern Era (New York, 1986), 167Google Scholar – though the figure given there for the USSR is erroneously low by a large margin.

67 Chace, J., “A Quest for Invulnerability,” in Ungar, S. J. (ed.), Estrangement: America and the World (New York, 1985). For a rather different perspective see Thompson, “Exaggeration of American Vulnerability.”Google Scholar

68 LaFeber, W., Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

69 Kwitny, J., Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

70 Bureau of the Budget, comments on drafts of NSC 68, 8 May 1950: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. I (Washington D.C., 1977), 298 ffGoogle Scholar. For simply two illustrations outside the Americas themselves see e.g. Bonner, R., Waltzing With A Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, and Wittner, L. S., American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

71 Packenham, , op. cit., 144.Google Scholar

72 Williams, W. A. et al. , America in Vietnam: A Documentary History (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 258.Google Scholar

73 NSC 68 (14 04 1950)Google Scholar and succeeding drafts, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. I, 298 ff.Google Scholar

74 Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1966), 125.Google Scholar

75 Schlesinger, A. M. Jr, A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), ch. 27.Google Scholar

76 Bell, D., The End of Ideology (New York, 1962)Google Scholar. Cf. e.g. Thompson, J. B., Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, and for Gramsci on “common sense”, Forgacs, D. (ed.), An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York, 1988), 325 ffGoogle Scholar. On the employment of the term “common sense” by the Committee on the Present Danger in 1976, see Dalby, S., Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics (London, 1990).Google Scholar

77 See e.g. Packenham, , op. cit.Google Scholar, and Shafer, D., op. cit., 65Google Scholar: “Political development theory offered a vision of the United States's place in history based not on might but on right. America was definitive of modernity, and modern meant scientific, industrialized, and powerful. Modern also meant humane, participant, democratic; and democracy, the theory proved, is the ‘crowning institution’ of history.” See also e.g. Augelli, E. and Murphy, C., America's Quest for Supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis (London, 1988)Google Scholar, and Girling, J. L. S., America and the Third World: Revolution and Intervention (London, 1980).Google Scholar

78 Fukuyama, F., “The End of History?” and his The End of History and the Last ManGoogle Scholar. Cf. Stanley Hoffmann's forebearing comment: “a silly notion based on a set of mistaken assumptions…”: “A New World and its Troubles,” loc. cit. See also the reference to “common sense” in note 76 above, and Roland Barthes on the task of myths as being to “give an historical intention a natural justification, and make contingency appear eternal.” Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London, 1972), 142Google Scholar ff. Emphasis added. Fukuyama does acknowledge – in an aside which itself speaks volumes – that much of the Third World “remains very much mired in history.” Nonetheless, he speaks also of “the universalization of Western democracy,” and opines that “while the meaning of life lies in the causes we fight for, in the future there won't be any”: Guardian, 4 11 1989Google Scholar. For a thoughtful Third World commentary, see Carlos Fuentes, “Too Soon to Hail Capitalism's Triumph,” Guardian, 27 12 1990Google Scholar. Quite apart from representing a “tone-deafness” towards the Third World, the notion of “the end of history” also rests on, inter alia, what Ali Mazrui has termed a “dichotomous framework of world-order perceptions amount[ing] to an iron law of dualism” (“The Moving Frontier of World Culture,” in Cultural Forces in World Politics, London, 1990)Google Scholar – in this case the assumption that if Communist regimes have been thoroughly discredited, and perhaps even the Marxist paradigm also, then nothing can remain except American-style liberal-capitalism. It is worth recalling that the West European allies of the USA, while accepting Marshall Aid from the Republic after the Second World War, successfully resisted Washington's attempts to “sell” them American corporatism at the same time: see Hogan, M. J., The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1951 (Cambridge, 1987), xii, 136 ff., 427 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 10, 1986Google Scholar; Milward, A. S., The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51 (London, 1984), 469, 476.Google Scholar

79 See Huntington, S. P., “The United States: Decline or Renewal?,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1988–89Google Scholar: “If the next century is not the American century it is most likely to be the European century.”

80 Cf. Turner, F. J., The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, R. and Lipset, S. M. (eds.), Turner and the Sociology of the FrontierGoogle Scholar; Williams, W. A., “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review, 11 1955Google Scholar; Thorne, , American Political Culture and the Asian Frontier.Google Scholar

81 Millikan, M. F. and Rostow, W. W., A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York, 1957), 149–51.Google Scholar

82 McDougall, , op. cit., 387–8Google Scholar. And see e.g. Exoo, C. F. (ed.), Democracy Upside Down: Public Opinion and Cultural Hegemony in the United States (New York, 1987), 3Google Scholar, and Smith, M. L., “Selling the Moon,” in Fox, R. W. and Lears, T. J. J., eds., The Culture of Consumption (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

83 McDougall, , 217.Google Scholar

84 Quoted in Wills, , The Kennedys, 261–2.Google Scholar

85 Speech of 7 April 1964, “The Cold War in American Life,” reprinted in Johnson, H. and Gwertzman, B. M., Fulbright: The Dissenter (London, 1969), 284 ffGoogle Scholar. And see e.g. Stillman, and Pfaff, , op. cit., 189Google Scholar: “It may be that we have used a fifth of a century of Cold War as a means of avoiding self-confrontation.”

86 Green, , ch. 8Google Scholar. “What remained for many Americans,” he concludes, “was not so much faith in government as a fear of change and of the consequences of admitting a loss of faith: hence their continued susceptibility to a familiar vocabulary and perspective” (252). And see e.g. Bellah, , Habits of the Heart, 277.Google Scholar

87 “Final Report, MDAP Survey Mission to South East Asia,” 6 12 1950Google Scholar, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. VI (Washington D.C., 1976), 164 ff.Google Scholar

88 Thomson, J. C. Jr, Stanley, P. W., Perry, J. C., Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York, 1981), 18Google Scholar. And see e.g. Drinnon, R., Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

89 Barnet, R. J., Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy (London, 1973), 252, 264Google Scholar. And see e.g. Stillman, and Pfaff, , op. cit., 183Google Scholar, on “an American need for world identity that will confirm our national identity. It is a disguise for our insecurity and violence, a mask.” David Campbell helpfully suggests in this regard a distinction between “foreign policy”, as referring to “all relationships of otherness, practices of differentiation, or modes of exclusion that constitute their objects as foreign in the process of dealing with them,” and “Foreign Policy”, which “serves to reproduce the constitution of identity made possible by foreign policy and to contain challenges to that identity”: “Global Inscription: How Foreign Policy Constitutes the United States,” Alternatives, 15, (1990).Google Scholar

90 Lerner, , op. cit., 626, 695, 921Google Scholar. And see e.g. Gorer, G., The Americans: A Study in National Character (London, 1948), 178 ff.Google Scholar, and Dorfman, A., The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Barbar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do To Our Minds (New York, 1983), 201Google Scholar: “[Americans] desired the power which can only come from being large, aggressive, and overbearing, but simultaneously only felt comfortable if other people assented to the image they had of themselves as naïve, frolicsome, unable to harm a mouse. Unlimited frontiers, abundance and plenty, the feeling of being reborn at every crossroads, led to the belief that growth and power need not relinquish, let alone destroy, innocence.”

91 Perin, C., Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines (Madison, 1988), 62, 102, 105.Google Scholar

92 Lewis, M., The Culture of Inequality (New York, 1979), xiGoogle Scholar. Also relevant is the dimension explored by Pierson, G. W. in The Moving American (New York, 1973)Google Scholar: “More citizens of the United States may own their own dwellings than in any other civilized society,” he observes. “But what they own has been drained of much of its human feeling and associations” (115). Similarly, Richard Hofstadter was writing in 1954: “This has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them”: quoted in ibid., 153.

93 Halle, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Chinoy, E., Automobile Workers and the American Dream (Garden City, N.Y., 1955)Google Scholar. Of the men he studied, Chinoy, echoing Lynd's comments on “Middletown” in the 1930s, recorded: “Both self-blame and the defensive rationalizations against self-blame…contribute to the maintenance of both existing economic institutions and the tradition of opportunity itself…. [Thus] American society escapes the consequences of its own contradictions” (129). See also Burawoy, M., Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar, and, on the widespread adoption of hard-line Cold War nationalism among American workers, Gerstle, , op. cit., 304–5Google Scholar, and Davis, M., Prisoners of the American Dream (London, 1986), 88 ff.Google Scholar

94 See e.g. Terkel, S., American Dreams: Lost and Found (London, 1982), 25Google Scholar: “During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie…was offering six-o'clock commentary. ‘We gotta do it. We have no choice.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We can't be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show 'em we're number one.’ ‘Are you number one?’ A pause. ‘I'm number nothin’. – He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters.” Also ibid, 102 ff. Also Barnet, op. cit., 338: “The number one nation is dedicated to winning,” and the exemplification of the approach in question in Nixon, R. M., No More Vietnams (London, 1986), 212Google Scholar: “Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America's first international losing streak has been halted.” “If our way of life derives from America's ‘givenness’,” observes Wills, Garry, “Nixon is what will be given us”: Nixon Agonistes, 327.Google Scholar

95 Gerstle, , op. cit., 304–5.Google Scholar

96 Bercovitch, S., The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1975), 103, 135, 178. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

97 I am broadly in agreement on this with the relevant arguments in Nye, , Bound to Lead, 21, 40, 86 ff, and chGoogle Scholar. 2 passim, and in Hall, J. A., “Will the United States Decline as did Britain?,” in Mann, M. (ed.), The Rise and Decline of the Nation State (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar

98 Nye, , op. cit., 111, 193 ff., 227Google Scholar; cf. e.g. the works by Bozeman cited above. One could refer, for example, to Americans having to discover, in recent decades, the extent to which Japanese have remained Japanese, despite the apparent “remaking” of their society and political culture under MacArthur following the Second World War.

99 See the post-Gulf War comment of Robert J. Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York: “We run the risk of seeing ourselves not only as a blessed country but also as the agent of an all-powerful technological deity. Militarised high technology becomes equated with absolute virtue, and as possessors of that virtue we have the duty to be the most powerful of world policemen”: “Last refuge of a high-tech nation,” Guardian, 12 12 1991Google Scholar. Cf. Gibson, J. W., The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston 1986)Google Scholar, and Franklin, H. B., War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

100 Ball, G., The Past Has Another Pattern (New York, 1982), 422.Google Scholar

101 Fitzgerald, F., “The American Millennium,” in Ungar, op. cit.Google Scholar

102 Such anxieties antedated the furore caused by Kennedy's, Paul book, The Rise and Fall of the Great PowersGoogle Scholar. Robert Bellah and his colleagues, for example, found in their survey in the early 1980s “a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us”: Habits of the Heart, (Berkeley, 1985), 277.Google Scholar

103 American Historical Review, 82 (06 1977).Google Scholar

104 That is, to repeat, as it involves notions of the autonomous individual, the equal-advantaging of groups, the “automatic society”, the beneficence of the market, the informed, caring and participating citizen, and so on. On the make-believe and evasion surrounding issues of race and class, see for example the works of Sleeper and Ehrenreich cited above. There is also, obviously, a related but lower-scale element of make-believe in what David Calleo summarises as a “political system that votes the spending [but] is unwilling to vote the taxes”: Beyond American Hegemony, 110Google Scholar. On international affairs, I go beyond Calleo (ibid. 220) when he observes that “the American consensus has grown into a conspiracy to avoid reality.”

105 Wills, G., Reagan's America: Innocents At Home (New York, 1987), 1 ff., 376, 386–7Google Scholar, and passim. And see e.g. Susman, W., “Did Success Spoil the United States?,” in May, L. (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar, and Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A., How To Read Donald Duck, trans. Kinzle, D. (New York, 1975), 29–30.Google Scholar

106 Quoted in Williams, W. A., Empire As A Way Of Life (New York, 1980), 99.Google Scholar

107 Hartz, , op. cit., 286.Google Scholar

108 Diggins, J. P., The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941–1960 (New York, 1988), 256Google Scholar; Hartz, , op. cit., 14–16, 287, 308–9Google Scholar; Mazrui, , “America and the Third World,” in Cultural Forces in World Politics.Google Scholar

109 Crozier, , op. cit., 144Google Scholar; Hoffmann, S., Dead Ends: American Foreign Policy in the New Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 83.Google Scholar

110 Again, I find Wiebe's argument persuasive in this regard (The Segmented Society, 203)Google Scholar: “The principles of a segmented society applied with stark clarity across…distant [foreign] areas. The striking limits of empathy spread a dehumanizing haze over the multitudes of the world where the devastation of a strange society…might elicit feelines similar to those for the extermination of whales. Peace as a void demanded their exclusion from American life, for interaction and accommodation would inevitably entail abrasions, eruptions, trouble. The values of power justified almost any manipulation involving almost any number of humans that would minimize the disturbance from an alien source, and by the logic of those values, outsiders who did not respond to the subtler manipulations exposed themselves to a chilling sequence of more direct techniques for control…. The appalling price of an American system was paid abroad.” In other words, the rest of the world has been obliged to bear some of the consequences – harsh at times – of the perpetual American need to create identity, purpose, and the illusion of a coherent, communicating society. Note, for example, the notion, fostered by President Bush himself, that “America rediscovered itself during Desert Storm.” (New York Times, 5 05 1991.)Google Scholar Where had it been in the meantime, one wonders?