The processes of globalization have changed, and are confusing many people about how events in the world are unfolding. If you examine a brief history of the multipolar world to 1800, you will see these patterns of change more clearly. But first you might need to unlearn the TED-talk version of world history propagated on YouTube and all-American channels.
World History according to TED talks
The All-American TED talk version of world history goes like this.1
Today, there is an American World Order. It began in 1945, and became unchallengeable in 1990. America will remain the most powerful country in history forever, because Americans are exceptional. Even Jo Biden says so. When Americans talk to non-Americans, there is a polite version of the American World Order, for the international audience. For diplomatic reasons, the American World Order is repackaged as the liberal rules-based order; but at home there is no reason to lie about whose interests are served.
This version of world history assumes there is always one power on top, a hegemon, that defines the world order and the era of world history. Since there is always a hegemon, it might as well be America, that exceptional nation, the acme of Western civilization itself, and in its own self-perception the universal republic. Unlike all previous hegemons in World Orders, the American Republic is not an empire. It is freedom itself. The many countries that house its soldiers and receive its bombs and sanctions might disagree.
But on with the story. The American World Order began in 1945 when the USA freed the world from the thousand-year Reich, despite only entering World War Two a couple of years late. But what came before the inauguration of the post-1945 American World Order?
Before the American World Order, the TED-talk history goes, there was the British World Order. Not the messy exploitative British empire that Americans like to think they over-turned, but a cleaned up British World Order remembered for its liberalism, free trade, reserve currency and gunboat diplomacy.
Some TED-talk and YouTube historians stop there; but some, with a pose of scholarship, refer to the Dutch World Order and the Spanish World Order. France is not acknowledged, despite its contribution to the American Revolution. Nor do these pop historians refer to the cities and territories of the USA that were once Dutch, French and especially Spanish colonies. It might be a bit embarrassing to acknowledge that Texas, Florida and California are not the results of the Idea of America, but the spoils of aggressive Anglo-imperial expansion.
A few even refer to the Portuguese World Order, although that is surely an absurd notion, for a frail filigree of pirate ports, not even validated by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).
But these pop-historians and pretenders at geo-strategy peter out at 1492. Sure they might refer to the great models of Rome or Athens, but the history gets a bit hazy when it does not confirm the myths of the Atlanticist worldview. The TED talk of World History is, after all, an elementary level retelling of the Triumph of the West.
Most even forget about the year in which American triumphalists declared the end of history itself. The most recent phase of world history, the era of the American World Order after 1945, has a dividing point, which marks off the Cold War from the Era of Open Globalisation. Until 1989 the two countries that sacrificed the most to defeat Germany, Italy and Japan during World War Two (or the Great Imperial War 1931-1945, as Richard Overy describes it), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (over 25 million dead) and China (over 10 million dead) refused to acknowledge they were living in a world order defined by American supremacy. But after 1989, American rivals appeared to concede the primacy of the USA. Gorbachev declared idealistically to the United Nations the end of the Cold War. The Chinese communist leadership made a deal with capitalism in the long-term interests of their country. They appeared to be end ideological competition with the American World Order. If the Americans had looked carefully, however, they would have realised that leaders of many states around the world were following that old counsel of Chinese statecraft: bide your time and hide your capabilities from your enemy.
Globalisation as Americanisation
After 1989, the American World Order became the global world order. Americanisation became globalisation. The world was reimagined by American grandees as unipolar, and foreign policy became the sport of international relations models. It lost all sense of the tragic sense of history.
Many popular concepts of globalisation spread around the world in the media, in serious books, and in the new lived experience of virtual reality world affairs in the digital media. The realities of geography, the changeability of cultures and the nuance of real history were scrubbed from our minds. World history was compressed into two-dimensional projections of pixels on an internet screen. Thomas Friedman declared the world flat, and everyday experience at times seemed to confirm the huckster’s con.
But most world historians were never convinced by the Atlanticists’ narrow vision of the history of globalisation. But political leaders, celebrity journalists, business executives and think-tank strategists did not want real history of the whole world. They wanted a coronation myth that vindicated their new power, status and wealth. There were many popularisers willing to give them what they wanted.
The Next Phase of Globalisation in the Multipolar World
But those myths have cracked over the last ten or so years, and since February 2022 and October 2023 are disintegrating at an accelerating pace. It has led many to believe we are now living in a “fragmented world” or a multipolar world is being created. Some say the world is “de-globalising”. Some visionary world leaders, in turn, want to “re-globalise” their people, with the barrel of a gun.
These versions of history, however, are as mythic as the Brave New World of post-1990 globalisation. They do not understand the many vectors of the process of globalisation. They do not appreciate the very long history of that process of globalisation. They do not have any insight into how those processes of globalisation have changed in our time. All they do is maintain the illusions of the Global American World Order.
The Multipolar World Before 1800
It is worth stretching the narrative of world order back before 1800 so we can tell a better story of globalisation in the always multipolar world than the all-American TED talk.
I hope you enjoyed this part of my fortnightly essay on world history. If you want to read more reflections on globalisation and the multipolar world before 1800, then upgrade to become a paid supporter. I would love you to join this growing community of explorers of world history.
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