Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis

Author:Mike Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Origins of the NATO State System

It was only within a framework of bourgeois stability and inter-imperialist pacifism, guaranteed by American nuclear supremacy, that the old Wilsonian project of the ‘liberalization’ of European (and now, also, Japanese) capitalism was actually accomplished in the early Cold War years.2 Political liberalization was the precondition for economic liberalization, and it is important to recall that, excepting the brief and unstable interlude between Versailles and the march of the Blackshirts, the post-1945 period was the first full cycle of normative parliamentary democracy upon a universal franchise in West European history (the Iberian fascist states, of course, remaining significant exceptions to this otherwise general rule). The achievement of controlled democratization was essential to the dynamic of American hegemony, and, in particular, to the ability of Washington to counterpose its own ideological universal to the challenge of socialism.

First, however, we should identify the two major obstacles that had previously made a full-scale parliamentary politics so atypical or unstable in the greater part of Mitteleuropa and the Mediterranean Basin. One was the relative weight and militancy of the local labor movements, predominantly Marxist or anarchist in orientation. The other was the persistence of much of the sociological and political debris of late absolutism.3 Time and again, a sub-hegemonic bourgeoisie, incapable of creating its own mass parties or reconciling its own internal schisms, allied with a tenacious aristocracy (often supported as well by an ultramontane peasantry or ruined mittelstand) to overthrow democratic institutions seemingly too conducive to radical or reformist labor movements. This particular fragility of European political capitalism was, of course, directly related to the meagreness of the ‘welfare surplus’ available as a resource for class conciliation. The latter, in turn, was an expression of the general underdevelopment of coherent capitalist relations of production and consumption: i.e., the prevalence of pre-capitalist agriculture, strength of rentier strata, inefficient and cartelized heavy industries, mass underconsumption, and so on.

An American project to intervene in the reshaping of European capitalism was first elaborated during World War One as part of the Wilson administration’s attempt to merchandise ‘democratic’ war aims to the skeptical American and weary Allied publics. Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1917—a specific riposte to the peace appeal of the Russian Revolution—universalized the ideology of American Progressivism (previously distinguished by the self-veneration of national exceptionalism and a strong aversion to European involvements) via a messianic call for the reconstruction of the international economy and state system upon the principles of the Open Door and democratic elections. Although Wilson ultimately failed to sell his League of Nations to German or Irish-American voters within his own party, and although the majority of his cabinet was adamantly opposed to various proposals, like Keynes’s, for a multilateral state-led recycling of reparations and war-loan repayments, his encouragement of a private American capitalist offensive in Europe was considerably more successful.

This first crusade to mobilize Americanism as a countervailing world ideology to Bolshevism was sustained, after the signing of the Dawes Plan, through the brief but extraordinary Weimar boom of 1925–29, which prefigured many of the ideological and political relationships of the 1950s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.