Meredith Woo-Cumings - Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order

Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...79

PAST AS PRELUDE

Past as Prelude

History in the Making of a New World Order

Edited by
Meredith Woo-Cumings
and
Michael Loriaux
Northwestern University

First published 1993 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1993 by Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Past as prelude history in the making of a new world order / edited
by Meredith Woo-Cumings and Michael Loriaux.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1622-7 (cloth).ISBN 0-8133-1623-5 (pbk.)
1. World politics1989- 2. Cycles. I. Woo-Cumings, Meredith.
II. Loriaux, Michael Maurice.
D16.9.P27 1993
909.82dc20 92-25866
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28235-6 (hbk)

For Ian, Sunyoung, Alain, Paul, and Dominique

Contents

Guide

No one writing in 1988 could have foreseen the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nor could one have predicted the peaceful reunification of West Germany and East Germany in 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. No one writing at the time of the European monetary crises of 1981-1983 could have suspected that European leaders would subscribe to the momentous commitments of Maastricht in 1992.

How does one explain these events? The editors of this volume are political scientists. Political science as a discipline, however, was overwhelmed by the events. There is simply no nomothetic theory in the discipline that provides a satisfactory ante hoc explanation of them. For this reason the editors solicited the reactions of scholars who, because of their area expertise and familiarity with history, could place the events of 1989-1992 within the context of a larger narrative and identify forces, constraints, evolutions, and opportunities that increase our understanding of what has happened.

A collective effort such as this is impossible without generous financial support. We express our gratitude to the International Studies Program, the Gordon Scott Fulcher Chair of Decisionmaking, the Edna Files Weber Fund, and the Alumnae of Northwestern University and specifically to Madeleine Bennett, Jonathan Casper, David William Cohen, John Godfrey, Marie Jones, John McLane, and Benjamin I. Page.

A special thanks goes to our colleagues Evelyne Huber, Benjamin I. Page, and John Stephens, whose pertinent and insightful comments are hidden in the folds of the revisions that these essays have undergone. We also thank Christine Margerum, who helped put editorial order into chaos, and Jennifer Knerr of Westview Press, who herded the manuscript through the editorial process with remarkable efficiency. Finally, we wish to thank our colleagues of the Departments of Political Science and History who provided much appreciated advice and support: Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Lee F. Anderson, Peter Hayes, Herbert Jacob, Juergen Kohl, Jane Mansbridge, Harold Perkin, and Donald Strickland.

Any error in the book is entirely the responsibility of the other coeditor.

Meredith Woo-Cumings
Michael Loriaux

Introduction

MEREDITH WOO-CUMINGS
MICHAEL LORIAUX

The world as we knew it for nearly half a century has come to an end. The onrushing changes of the late 1980s and the early 1990s were neither violent nor cataclysmic, but they ushered in changes no less profound and fundamental than those built on the terrible ruins of the world's last two wars. This book assays these recent changes in world politics and suggests directions for the future. It is a study of political economy that is also historically informed. By summoning the past and by asking why certain ways of organizing politics, economics, and the military persisted over time and with what variations and repetitions, we hope both to explain our turbulent present and to suggest what the future may hold.

An initial problem is to decide which history we choose to remember. It will not be just any "past," but a past selected and illuminated by theory- forces this issue on us by using world system analysis to compare the recentering of the world in 1989-1991 to that in 1919, calling the long interregnum the "seventy-years' crisis." In this choice of how to remember history, Bruce Cumings shows that the current restructuring can be understood as the settlement in Europe of World War II, which itself was part of a European civil war beginning in 1914 and ending only in 1990. What is left at the end of this long crisis? A 1990s world system in which three great capitalist poles function as the "custodians" of the world economy and in which one of themthe United Statesdeploys hegemonic power in that same system.

In another sense, though, this settlement was also the maturation of the political economy of containment, broadly conceived here as the American doctrine of containing both the enemy (communism) and the ally (mainly Japan and, through NATO, West Germany). The Cold War may have ended in Europe in 1990, but the costly American project of containing postwar Japan and Germany has not. Cumings argues that this outcome of the Cold War will yield only more problems for the United States and puts off the important project of an American perestroika, a domestic revival that will enable the United States to compete with Japan and Germany.

The choice of the past is perhaps nowhere as self-conscious and deliberate as in . Whereas the first chapter presents an internationalist vision, James Kurth offers a regional perspective on Japan and Germany, as countries that are actively transforming and even hollowing out the meaning of the New World Order, The vision that illuminates this drama of interacting and intersecting architectonic logics is one of organized capitalism and the social market in Central Europe and East Asia, reinforced in Central Europe by the supersession of liberalism by Catholic democratic tradition and carried out in East Asia by placing much of the area in the vale of Japan's formidable political economy. This vision might be thought of as a Pax Bismarck and a Pax Ito (Hirobumi), a rehabilitation of the historical model of the 1870s to the 1920s.

In Peter Katzenstein takes issue with this second coming of German history, however, using instead the recent past to underscore the importance of discontinuities rather than continuities in modern history. For him, Germany's gradual entanglement in the webs of its domestic political system and of interdependence in the international system has led to a lasting accretion of liberal norms and a German unification that seems unlikely to return Europe to the era of power competition and rivalry, that is, to the old Central Europe that Kurth calls Mitteleuropa.

The political structures and processes that evolved in West Germany locked powerful actors in the embrace of their domestic political opponents, obliging these actors and institutions to pursue incremental political goals. Similarly, the policy of Allied containment made West Germany more penetrated and interdependent than other large and middle-sized powers, particularly in comparison to the German Reich, the Weimar Republic, or the Third Reich. Since German reunification has been achieved basically through the introduction into the East of West Germany's political and economic institutions, norms, and processes, Katzenstein argues, there is little reason to suggest that such mechanisms will not continue or that liberalism will be superseded by something else. He thus concludes that the ending of the bipolar conflict and the launching of German unity have deepened, rather than transformed, the situation of Germany's embedded systems at home and abroad.

Next page

1234567...79

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order»

Look at similar books to Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Perry Stone

Deciphering End-Time Prophetic Codes: Cyclical and Historical Biblical Patterns Reveal Americas Past, Present and Future Events, including Warnings and Patterns to Leaders

Olivier Zunz

Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History

Sugata Bose

Modern South Asia: History, Culture and Political Economy

Susanne Bauer

Tracing the Atom: Nuclear Legacies in Russia and Central Asia

Anton Weiss-Wendt

The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putins Russia

David Jacobson

Old Nations, New World: Conceptions of World Order

Meng-Hsuan Chou

The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global / Transforming the Local

Koyama

On the persistence of the Japanese history problem: historicism and the international politics of history

Christopher Lascelles

A Short History of the World

Tanner Ross.

Forgotten History: Captivating History Events that Have Been Forgotten

Robert L. Scheina

Latin America’s Wars Volume I: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791-1899

John K. Cox

The History of Serbia

Discussion, reviews of the book Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.