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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.
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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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?