David Reynolds - One World Divisible : A Global History Since 1945

One World, published in New York in April 1943, was one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers to date. It sold its first million copies in only seven weeksquicker than either The Outline of History (1920) by H. G. Wells or Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). By October 1944, when its author, Wendell Willkie, died of a heart attack, One World, had been translated into dozens of foreign languages and had notched up 4.5 million sales.

Willkie had been the Republican partys presidential candidate in 1940. On August 26, 1942, with the blessing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he set off in a converted U.S. bomber to view the war fronts. Around the world he went in forty-nine days (thirty of them spent on the ground)a total of 31,000 milesacross the Atlantic to Cairo and Teheran, on to Moscow and Chongqing, then back via Siberia and Alaska. One World was Willkies hastily composed travelogue. The world has become small and completely interdependent, he wrote. The myriad millions of human beings of the Far East are as close to us as Los Angeles is to New York by the fastest trains. Our thinking in the future must be world-wide.

In the 1940s, air travel was abolishing distanceat least for a few. Over the next half-century it became available to millions. The whole period is, on one trajectory, the story of a growing web of interconnectedness in travel and trade, ideas and information, that takes us on to the Internet of the late 1990s. It has also seen unprecedented migration of peoples, from country to country and even more important, from countryside to city. What mattered was not merely the fact of interconnection, but the growing awareness of it. This was fostered by mass education and by the spread of radio and television. A quarter-century after Willkie, space flight transformed one world into one planet, and TV allowed millions of human beings to share the astronauts vision of earth (Plates 17 and 18). That image became an icon of our agethe fragile biosphere floating in the darkness of infinite space.

Unitiesreal and perceived, yet also divisions. Willkies own book was full of themthe rifts caused by totalitarianism and imperialism, by religion and nationalism, by hierarchy, class, and landed wealth. Less than a year after his death, the atomic bomb gave humanity a truly novel weapon of destruction, around which the postwar era polarized in a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Crisscrossing the East-West divide has been a North-South gulf between colonies and empires, between dominant industrial powers and dependent new nations. The South, in turn, fractured into Jew, Muslim, and Hindu, into the well oiled and oil-less, into Asian tigers, Indian elephants, and, at times, African jackals. Nor was the North a unitySerbs battled with Croats, Ulstermen fought Irish Nationalists, and the politics of the European Community often seemed to be a continuation of war by other means. This was not just a divided world, therefore, but one that could apparently be almost endlessly divided. The tools of unification (from statehood to software) also served as weapons of disintegrationcreating new states and sects, reinforcing old cultures and nations.

Greater unity and keener consciousness of interconnection; but also multiple divisions and the creation of many more: to adapt the U.S. pledge of allegiance, this is a story of one world, divisible.

But can one tell it as a story? After all, stories have beginnings and endings. By definition, a history of our own time has no ending. Contemporary historians are like interpreters, trying to comprehend a very long sentence in German, whose verb has yet to be uttered. Any contemporary historian must accept the risk that he will soon be reading his book with a wry, toothless grin.

The idea of narrative history is itself problematic. To postmodernists, stories are explanatory fictions created by the author to make sense of the world: they have no basis in reality, which is experienced as a mere sequence of events. I incline, however, to the view that storytelling is rooted in human consciousness. Remembrance and anticipation structure every conscious experiencethe intermingling of time past, time present, and time future that informs the first of T. S. Eliots Four Quartets.

Yet postmodernists are right to remind us that there is an element of construction in every narrative, be it avowed fiction or putative fact. They reserve particular contempt for grand narratives with an overarching theme, many of which are fabricated from present-day political agenda. Contemporary history is often victors history. Whoever shapes the future determines interpretations of the past: Yesterday will be what tomorrow was, to quote the German novelist Gnter Grass.