Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today by Smith Tony

Author:Smith, Tony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CONTAINMENT AND LIBERALISM IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD, 1950–1980

It should come as no surprise that debates in the academic world over the relative merits of supporting authoritarian regimes or promoting a liberal agenda followed much the same terms as in the policy world in Washington. Some doubted that the high cost of defeating communism in Indochina or parts of Latin America could possibly be justified by the small stakes developments in these parts of the world represented. Others countered that the effect of any communist victory would possess a contagion effect like a “falling domino” or a “rotten apple” such that the United States must stand prepared to block communism wherever it appeared.

But the problem for those who would act to stop communist advances was how to conceptualize the nation- and state-building requirements that any such effort would need. It was painfully clear that few of the countries of Africa and Asia (Latin America was often looked at differently) had the kinds of preconditions for such government that Germany and Japan had possessed in 1945. Could a successful strategy be formulated that would block what was widely seen as the relative advantages enjoyed by Leninism—especially when complemented by Mao Zedong’s model of peasant and working-class insurgency or Fidel Castro’s “foco” concept of guerrilla warfare, all augmented by a neo-Marxist argument called “dependency theory” that had appeared in full flower by the late 1960s, uniting nationalism to world-class conflict with anti-Americanism as the focus of its wrath?28

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the most influential writing came from theorists of development who posited a linear set of “stages” from tradition to modernity, complete with personality types, social profiles, economic changes, and forms of political order whose understanding might be used to blunt the appeal of communism. Among the most influential writers of this period in economics were W. W. Rostow and Max Millikan; in social psychology Sidney Verba, Talcott Parsons, Daniel Lerner, and Lucian Pye; in politics Gabriel Almond, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Apter, and James. S. Coleman.29

The mix of those involved in these questions was extraordinarily varied. Area studies and distinct social science disciplines mixed with those who favored “macro,” “micro,” or “mid-level” forms of theory. If some writers came down on the side of supporting authoritarian governments against communist insurgencies in hopes that the former would eventually foster liberalization through economic development or political reforms, others settled for supporting authoritarians pure and simple. What was most striking was how few held out for democratic nation- and state-building aside from areas such as Latin America where it was obvious some indications of fertile ground existed.

Over time, emphasis changed; economic stages in modernization might be called dominant from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, after which political science moved firmly into control. The fields were so divided by area studies, academic disciplines, and theoretical grandstanding that we cannot do better than to agree with economist Albert Hirschman’s contention in 1970 that “the compulsion to theorize … is often so strong as to induce mindlessness.

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