BETWEEN THE END of the American Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the first great period of human globalization brought the world together as never before. Technologies like the railroad, the telegraph, the airplane, and the internal combustion engine led many optimistic observers to predict the end of large-scale war. We often hear similar arguments today. Are they as wrong now as they were then?
On the eve of that era’s violent destruction, Norman Angell predicted in his best-selling book The Great Illusion that commerce among Europe’s great powers had finally rendered war obsolete. Angell declared that it was economically irrational for any European power to upset the global economy through continental conquest. He argued that the gains of conquest were substantially outweighed by the costs of war. Economically speaking, he was undoubtedly correct. He was also irrelevant. In less than a year, the guns of August shattered his vision and the First World War mired Europe in four years of hell on earth. However economically detrimental it may have been, war was not obsolete.
The first era of globalization shared many common characteristics with our present era of burgeoning trade, rising powers, and a hegemonic security provider. What Britain did then, the United States does to an even greater degree now. That era accordingly provides interesting parallels to our current globalized period. Namely, in that era, intelligent observers viewed war between great powers as economically inefficient and therefore improbable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we hear the same arguments today: In the face of free trade and global interconnectedness, free people will not make war on one another.
It is worth examining this enduring notion that commerce can pacify cultural rivalry. It has not done so historically, and there is no guarantee that it will do so now. In other words: It is worth looking at why Norman Angell was wrong.
IN THE FIRST GLOBAL ERA, Great Britain loosely filled the United States’ current role as guarantor of global stability. To a lesser degree than American aircraft carriers do today, the Royal Navy preponderantly ruled the seas. Also like the contemporary United States, a democratic Britain maintained strategic bases around the globe.
Likewise, in that era, many emerging nations benefited from a unilaterally provided security blanket. All nations engaging in global trade reaped the benefits of such commerce, but Britain alone maintained responsibility for patrolling the world’s seas and keeping the lanes of maritime commerce open. In essence, Britain subsidized a sizeable share of global stability.
In the present era, the United States subsidizes global security for much the same reasons Britain did–the costs of maintaining such military preponderance are substantially outweighed by the benefits of open markets and forward-based power projection. For a percentage of GDP that is less than the percentage of GDP spent on the military during the Cold War, the United States reaps valuable economic and strategic gains.
In the late 19th century, the emerging economic giants were Germany and the United States, each with sizeable and growing populations. Towards the end of that era, an ascendant Japan was also rapidly gunning for great-power status–even militarily defeating Russia in 1905.
Arguably, each of these nations derived significant economic benefits from the British security guarantee. As a democratic nation, Britain possessed little desire for costly wars on the European continent, or for that matter, on the North American continent. Such a large-scale war would undoubtedly spread the costs of war down to the voting British people, and the instigators of such a conflict would suffer electoral consequences. While Britain was constantly engaged in small-scale wars in Africa, the Indian sub-continent, and elsewhere in Asia, defending and expanding its colonial possessions, its naval dominance posed little real threat to German, American, or even Japanese security. Britain alone was dedicated to a policy of free trade, and Britain staunchly defended free navigation on the high seas.
(In this era, Britain fought a large number of engagements against non-Western adversaries to further its imperial interests. Among the more notable are the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the Wars of the Sudan in 1884-5 and 1898, and the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Britain’s single war against a westernized adversary, the South African Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, proved extremely costly and substantially strained British society between 1899 and 1902, when the Boer Republics finally capitulated.)
Yet, Japan, Germany, and the United States all embarked upon policies of dramatic naval expansion. They did so in spite of the economic windfall provided by British naval hegemony. This desire for naval strength accordingly transcended both economics and a generic concept of security. Rather, the driving idea was cultural glory and power projection. The muscular nationalism of the age had little to do with economics, and much to do with gaining a “place in the sun.”
SO WHAT DOES MEAN for the era of the Internet, satellites, and ICBMs? It means that not long ago, cultural ideas presided over economic rationality for ascendant powers. They could do so again, today. While many ascendant nations currently benefit economically from U.S. military preponderance, there is no guarantee that they will be content to remain free-riders. Like Wilhelmine Germany, Rooseveltian America, and Imperial Japan, ascendant nations and regions may, and likely will, still seek their place in the sun.
Without question, the means of augmenting comparative power have changed, and a nascent naval race is not to be expected. Although, the current push among second-rate powers to obtain and develop nuclear weapons may survive loose scrutiny as a modern day comparison. Nevertheless, the overall message of the first era of globalization remains vital–in the case of ascendant nations, economic prosperity does not necessarily preclude a desire to militarily or coercively influence geopolitics.
It is necessary here to distinguish between “ascendant nations” and what could be termed “declining nations.” By ascendant nations, we refer to developing and or growing power centers, such as China or India, whose comparative geopolitical power is on a clear upward trajectory, as opposed to for example, Germany or France, whose comparative power in terms of demographics, economic growth, and power projection is likely looking at a downward or stagnant developmental trend. In the first era of globalization, it was ascendant cultures that proved least accepting of a hegemonic world order–regardless of the economic benefits that accrued from that order.
BUT WHILE OUR CONTEMPORARY ERA may be a time of economic globalization, it is also a time of emerging cultural warfare. The contemporary Middle East provides powerful vignettes to illustrate this trend. Perhaps none is more salient than the fact that while jihadists willingly utilize the fruits of globalization–such as cell phones or the Internet–they utilize such tools to organize cultural warriors in opposition to the very culture which produced those tools.
More importantly, in regard to truly ascendant powers such as China, it is imprudent to assume that economic prosperity will necessarily pacify Chinese national ambitions. Like Wilhelmine Germany or Imperial Japan, and unlike Gilded Age America or contemporary India, China is not a democracy.
Accordingly, the oft-touted argument that economic prosperity and commercial interaction will pacify China must be taken with a grain of salt. With an occasionally saber-rattling, officially Communist authoritarian government still in power, the idea that China is using economic liberalization as a means of dramatically expanding its national power must be taken seriously. From China’s space program to their military modernization, there exist indicia of a non-democratic and culturally-proud nation aimed at regional and perhaps if possible, global power.
IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, both America and Germany entered the naval arms race against Britain. One posed a substantially greater threat to British security and the British world order. (Not surprisingly, it was the nation that started the First World War, not the nation that came to Britain’s aid midway through it.)
An armed United States posed a de minimus threat to Edwardian Britain for the same reason that a nuclear France does not trouble U.S. strategic policy makers today–substantial, democratic cultural ties make such power relatively unthreatening. The same simply cannot be said of economically modernizing non-democracies. To the extent that non-democratic economic modernization and the rule of law that must accompany it serve to promote democratic cultural values, such should be strategically embraced and promoted. However, the concept of a non-democracy using globalization as a means towards comparative power advancement must not be forgotten in the process. Commerce, in other words, can cut both ways.
Michael Brandon McClellan is a writer in Washington, D.C. and runs the blog Port McClellan .
