The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Colonialism contributed to nation-building in a number of ways: by providing an outlet for colonial administrators and emigrants; by promoting trade; by developing the military; and by building up pride in one’s country as truly superior (la mission civilisatrice, the white man’s burden, and other such fantasies). Along with democratization, taxation, and the welfare state, it contributed to the extraordinary development of the state under capitalism and of capitalism under the state, since colonialism is a form of extension of the state into overseas territories.

  Yet between the state and capitalism there can be no harmonious relation but only constant conflict. The state, even when it is federal, devolved, and even when there is a division of power, is necessarily a monolith. There can be only one command centre with rules decided by the state itself. Capitalism, on the other hand, is anarchic, has no centre, no single will. The state is anchored within a territory. Capitalism has global tendencies both in its production and its consumption. It runs where it can, where there are profits, opportunities, openings. Every failure of one capitalist is another capitalist’s success. Every crisis has winners. Every triumph is temporary. As Schumpeter wrote, capitalism is like a hotel where the clients ‘are forever changing’.81

  And while the form of organization of capital is ever more global, the regulatory agency, the state, is constrained by other states. Of course, states get together, make agreements, sign treaties, establish rules, but there is no super-state able to impose its control, whereas capitalism can reach out all over the planet precisely because it is not a monolith, because it has no centre, because it engenders rivalries and thrives on competition.

  PART ONE

  The Condition of the World

  1

  New States, Old States

  Has there ever been a time when the world was made up of small communities living in isolation, under the illusion that they were unique? If there ever was, such beliefs, bred by poverty, ignorance, and almost non-existent technology, were regularly shattered by enterprising men and women who travelled outside their villages, discovered new worlds, exchanged goods and ideas, and subjugated other men and women.

  The ‘shrinking’ of our planet began some 70,000 years ago, perhaps more, when, after several unsuccessful attempts, a technologically aware Homo sapiens began to spread from Africa to the Eurasian landmass, and reached Australia and the Americas, colonizing virtually the entire surface of the earth, except for some permanently frozen spaces and a few small islands. The key to this was the technological advance of travelling by boat and ship, though of course it is possible to cover great distances just by walking. If one walked just 20 kilometres every day, one would be able to cover the distance from Cape Town to Helsinki, Vladivostok, and then to Singapore in just over four years.

  These highly mobile human beings, whose most significant difference with other mammals was their ability to use language, eventually discovered how to grow food and how to cook flesh. They built empires, spread religions and belief systems, and traded with each other.1

  Much later, travellers and invaders from Asia, Europe, and the Arab world systematically explored other lands, in which they occasionally settled. Thus, beginning in the eighth century, the Vikings colonized vast swathes of Europe; in the thirteenth century, the Mongols arrived in what is today Hungary and Poland; at the same time the Maoris settled in New Zealand from eastern Polynesia. The great Chinese explorer Zheng He (1371–1434) travelled on his enormous ‘treasury ships’ (at the time the largest in the world) and traded perhaps as far as the east coast of Africa and north into Kamchatka. Such sea explorations, which could have created a Chinese empire overseas, were stopped in 1433 by the Ming emperors, who regarded such expenditure as wasteful at a time when China was under renewed threat from the Mongols and needed resources for domestic production, internal stability, and colonization.2 The powerful Chinese state could put a stop to exploration, as no European state was able to: though it traded extensively and had settlers elsewhere, it never developed an overseas empire. Over the last five hundred years or so, Europeans have settled in vast numbers in Africa, the Americas, and Australasia. Even in pre-Colombian America, indigenous peoples, such as the Aztec, though cut off from Africa, Asia, and Europe, traded extensively.3 The Silk Road, the ancient trade route that connected China to the Mediterranean, was a major example of trade, as was the slave trade of the eighteenth century.

  Globalization is thus an ancient process and not something that sprang up upon an unsuspecting world in the last few decades. In the ‘olden days’, however, only a few were involved in global processes. A traveller such as Marco Polo, the fabled merchant who went, or so he claimed, all the way to China and came all the way back to Venice in the thirteenth century, was part of a tiny minority. Until the sixteenth– seventeenth century what peasants consumed was largely produced within a few miles of their home, and most marriages were equally local. The vast majority of markets were places that could be reached in twenty-four hours. The wider circle for most people was a region, not a state. The globalized economy then involved only the one per cent of total production that was transported by ship.4

  The globalization that occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century was, however, quite different. While people have long traded from distant places, buying goods in one place and selling them in another at a higher price, the late nineteenth century saw the start of a global market for capital and the globalization of manufacturing, in other words the modern internationalization of capitalism.5 So though globalization was a process with a long history, the intensity with which it developed from the 1860s onwards, helped by conquest, economic development, and the revolution in communication, was new. The most important difference between the First Great Globalization (1860–1910) and the Second (1980–) is the acceleration of time.6

  A new word was invented during the Second Great Globalization to highlight what is new in what is old. Until the late 1980s, the term ‘globalization’ was hardly ever used. Sporadic sightings of this now-so-popular concept occurred before 1990, usually in connection with ‘global firms’ and global marketing. In 1983, Theodore Levitt, in a famous if somewhat over-hyped article in the Harvard Business Review , wrote of ‘The globalization of markets’.7 Before 1990, the catalogue of the Library of Congress listed only a dozen or so books in English with the word ‘globalization’ in the title, none published before 1987. But since then what used to be called international or trans-national was suddenly called ‘global’.

  After 1990 the term ‘globalization’ was deployed with a crescendo of enthusiasm. Twenty-four titles containing the word appeared between 1990 and 1995, a further 86 by 2000, another 913 between 2001 and 2005, and a further 1,330 in the years between 2006 and 2010. In 1964, Le Monde used the word mondialisation in only one article. By 1992 the paper had published almost 200 articles containing the term, and in 2000 there were over 800.8

  ‘Globalization’ sells. In 1996, Susan Strange was already complaining, with some justification, that this was yet another of those ‘vague and woolly’ words freely bandied about, whose precise meaning is seldom clearly defined, and that ‘all too often, it is a polite euphemism for the continuing Americanization of consumer tastes and cultural practices’.9 Globalization became an ill-defined state of affairs loathed and feared by some, celebrated by others as a new stage in the evolution of humanity from a primitive world of separate communities to a single ‘global village’ (the expression was used by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962 – well before the age of the internet).

  Globalization, of course, has been going on for many centuries through the channels of trade, religion, crime, food, even disease. Ancient trade routes covered much of the globe. Religions travelled widely, often on the back of conquest and colonialism: Christianity from the Mediterranean to Asia, Africa, and the Americas; Islam from the Arabian Peninsula as far as Spain in the west and Indonesia in the east; Buddhism from Ind
ia to China and Japan. Crime too travelled as criminals (pirates) became increasingly mobile, keeping up with technology, as do modern mafia organizations. After 1500, food became global as the New World alerted everyone to the existence of potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, peppers (including chilli), peanuts, and maize. It is rather remarkable that only four years after Peru was conquered by Francisco Pizarro’s armed men (1532) the first potato (the tuber is indigenous to the Andes) was eaten in Spain. By 1597 it was cultivated in London, and soon became popular in Ireland. Rice cultivation in the United States was introduced by the slaves who planted rice when and where they could, as they had done in west Africa for generations.10 Along with food and people, diseases travelled too, causing more deaths in the New World than the atrocities directly perpetrated by European colonists. But the globalization of diseases was hardly new. Bacteria on fleas, fleas on rats, rats in ships travelled along trading routes, arriving in Europe from Asia and causing, in the fourteenth century, the traumatic death of perhaps one-third of the population.

  The globalization of food is a topic of study in itself since it includes products that became part of the staple diet across the world, food such as potatoes, maize, rice, and cassava. Coffee made its way in the fifteenth century from the port of Mocha in Yemen, via Turkey, towards the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, and Java. It was eventually drunk at the court of Louis XIV, served on Chinese porcelain, sweetened with sugar grown on slave plantations in São Tomé and Brazil.11 Luxury food was soon ‘global’. At dinner parties at the house of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII in the 1530s, the cook would use such exotic delicacies as ginger, nutmeg, figs, oranges, and marzipan.12 Then it was the turn of the bourgeoisie to eat ‘international’ food. In 1833 the celebrated Paris restaurant Aux Frères Provençaux offered a menu that today we would call ‘world cuisine’: oysters from Ostend (Belgium), ducks ‘farcis à l’anglaise’, prawns in ‘soya de Chine’, and various meals from different parts of France, from Dieppe in the north (mussels) to Provence, where the owners came from.13 Fruit salad was already called a ‘Macédoine’ – an allusion to the multi-ethnic nature of Alexander’s Macedonian Empire. At the restaurant Lapérouse, established in 1766 (and still on the Quai des Grands Augustins), one could eat, in 1891, Barbue sauce hollandaise (a fish called brill in English and rombo liscio in Italian) and Puddings d’abricots à la Vénitienne (bread pudding with apricots).14 The bourgeois classes of the nineteenth century could drink coffee from the Americas or Africa, fill their pipe with tobacco from Virginia or Kentucky, wear shirts made from Egyptian or American cotton, and eat chocolate made with cocoa imported from Africa or the Americas.15 Upper-class ladies were wearing hats made of beaver and vicuña, or of raw materials from Canada, Peru, west Africa, the Sudan, and the Levant, made fashionable in the eighteenth century by French hat-makers.16

  In 1876 the first refrigerated ship sailed from Argentina to France with frozen beef. The further drop in transport costs between 1870 and 1914 led to a remarkable convergence in prices – Liverpool wheat prices still exceeded those in Chicago by 58 per cent in 1870, but by only 18 per cent in 1895.17 Advances in transport made the world smaller: the fastest liner in 1842 had a speed of 10 nautical miles per hour; by 1912 it could do 18 nautical miles per hour. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) almost halved the distance between London and Bombay: in the 1840s it took between five and eight months to get to India, but in 1912 the trip could be done in two weeks.18

  Ideas too travelled. Contemporary cosmopolitans can look back to ancient celebrations of international interconnectedness, from John Donne’s famous line from his Meditation XVII (1623), ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’; to Jeremy Bentham’s first use of the word ‘international’ (1780) to denote ‘the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations’; to Immanuel Kant’s Project for a Perpetual Peace (1795), which envisaged a world of sovereign states (ius gentium), at peace with each other but also one in which men would be regarded as citizens of a universal state (ius cosmopoliticum); to the Marquis de Condorcet’s Esquisse (1795), which looked forward to a time when the ‘sun will shine only on free peoples who will know no master but reason and when tyrants, slaves and priests will exist only in history’.19

  These dreams are still to be fulfilled, but in 1864 the first international agreement was signed that limited the absolute sovereignty of the state; that was the Geneva Convention, which allowed for the protection of soldiers wounded in battle. It had been immediately preceded by the first supra-national humanitarian organization, the Red Cross (1863). Since then there has been a proliferation of trans-national organizations and agreements, such as the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), and an international agreement adopting the metric system signed by seventeen states in 1875 (the Convention du Mètre) and now adopted by all countries in the world except Burma, Liberia, and the United States.20 By 1914 there were 112 international organizations.21 The number has steadily increased ever since.

  Time-keeping also has become global in the sense that a single clock is used to measure time in different parts of the world. Dates are the same everywhere, even though the date universally adopted is that of the Christian calendar, which non-Christian cultures also use, often alongside their own.

  In the twentieth century, international organizations such as the United Nations, the OECD, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International War Crimes Tribunal arose out of increasing cooperation among almost all countries in the world. There are also regional associations – prevalently dealing with trade – such as the European Union, SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Area), MERCOSUR (Common Market of South America), NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and the African Union. But such organizations do not substitute themselves for states. On the contrary they are agreements between sovereign states and they come in two forms: economic alliances, in which case almost always about free trade within the regions (as the Zollverein, the German customs union, in the nineteenth century from 1833); or military alliances such as NATO, dominated by the United States. In fact, while the equality of states, just like the equality of people, was often declared, the reality is that power in the international arena has remained in the hands of a few states: whether the Great Powers of the so-called Concert of Nations in the nineteenth century or what today we call the ‘international community’, meaning, most of the time, a US-led West.

  Market capitalism and representative democracy are regarded by their supporters as suitable for all people, without exceptions (the parallel with religious belief is striking). But capitalism is wider than liberal democracy. Although almost all the hardware and software associated with the computer and internet revolutions – IBM, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Dell, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, Google, e-Bay, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Wikipedia – originated in America, an increasing proportion of the physical goods (such as computers and electronic tablets) are manufactured outside ‘the West’, above all in China, which exports half the computers of the world.22 The ever-increasing speed of travel, the waves of migration, and, above all, the formidable speed of cultural exchange and communication (radio, television, and the internet), have been among the more salient aspects of the shrinking of our planet. The international division of labour studied and theorized by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo has developed to levels then unimaginable.

  The general acceptance, at least formally, of the concept of universal human rights, an aspiration seldom mentioned a few decades ago, suggests the establishment of common moral standards. This is a recent achievement. When, in 1853, the Comte de Gobineau published his racist Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, his views were not regarded as particularly provocative. Global warming and the perils associated with a signific
ant increase in the world’s temperature have strengthened the view that we are all in the same boat, burning slowly and surely, but together.

  Today internationalism and cosmopolitanism are seen by many as worthy of praise. Yet this was not so in the first half of the twentieth century, when internationalists and cosmopolitans were often denounced – and, in some places, shot. Indeed, in the nineteenth century even progressive literary critics such as Vissarion Belinsky, a Russian Westernizer, attacked some writers for their ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ – an early, perhaps the first, use of this expression.23 And he did not mean Jews. The term ‘cosmopolitan’, however, is ancient. Diogenes, asked where he came from, is reported to have said (by a Greek biographer writing in the first half of the third century ad): ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (kosmopolitês).24 Less grandly, the term was adopted as the title of an international magazine first published in 1886 in the United States: The Cosmopolitan, originally a ‘family’ magazine, but aimed mainly at women with articles on fashions, cooking, and household management – sex advice came later. Fashion, one of the regular features of the magazine, already straddled countries and continents.

  Today the forces of nationalism are stronger than those of cosmopolitanism. Politics is still overwhelmingly national politics. Citizens may not trust politicians but they trust their own more than those of other countries. They expect their governments to protect their own interests above those of foreigners. In the era of globalization it is felt that to belong to a strong state is an advantage – which may not always be true, since strong states also give rise to strong feelings of antagonism: it is probably safer to be an Austrian anywhere in the Middle East than an American.