DOCSLIB.ORG

American Primacy and Its Discontents: Reflections on an Empire in Denial’

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
American Primacy and Its Discontents: Reflections on an Empire in Denial’ FIRST DRAFT – NOT TO BE REPRODUCED OR QUOTED WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION ‘American Primacy and Its Discontents: Reflections on an Empire in Denial’ (Harvard University, September 23, 2003) Niall Ferguson Herzog Professor of Financial History Stern School of Business New York University Senior Research Fellow Jesus College Oxford University Ferguson, Empire American Primacy and Its Discontents Al Jazeera: Would it worry you if you go by force into Iraq that this might create the impression that the United States is becoming an imperial, colonial power? Rumsfeld: Well I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democracies behave. That's how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the United States behaves. Interview with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Al Jazeera.1 They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young ... was so good at it that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first. Black Hawk Down2 I It used to be that only critics of American foreign policy referred to the ‘American Empire’. During the Cold War, of course, both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China harped incessantly on the old Leninist theme of Yankee imperialism, as did many Western European, Middle Eastern and Asian writers, not all of them Marxists.3 But their claim that overseas expansion was inspired by sinister corporate interests was not so very different from the indigenous American critiques of late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century overseas expansion, whether populist, progressive or socialist.4 In the 1960s these critiques fused to produce a new and influential historiography of American foreign policy usually referred to as ‘revisionism’.5 Historians like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko argued that the Cold War was the result not of Russian but of American aggression after 1945, an argument made all the more attractive to a generation of students by the contemporaneous war in Vietnam – proof, as it seemed, of the neo-colonial thrust of American foreign policy.6 The reassertion of American military power under Ronald Reagan prompted fresh warnings against the ‘imperial temptation’.7 This tradition of radical criticism of American foreign policy shows no sign of fading away. Its distinctive, anguished tone continues to emanate from writers like Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Michael Hudson,8 echoing the strictures of an earlier generation of anti-imperialists (some of whom are themselves still faintly 1 Ferguson, Empire audible).9 Yet criticism of American empire was never the exclusive preserve of the political Left. In the eyes of Gore Vidal, the tragedy of the Roman Republic is repeating itself as farce, with the ‘national-security state’ relentlessly encroaching on the prerogatives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.10 Meanwhile, far to the Right, Pat Buchanan continues to fulminate in the archaic isolationist idiom against East Coast internationalists intent on entangling the United States – against the express wishes of the founding fathers – in the quarrels and conflicts of the Old World. In Buchanan’s eyes, America is following not the example of Rome but that of Britain, whose empire she once repudiated but now imitates.11 Other, more mainstream conservatives – notably Clyde Prestowitz – have also heaped scorn on ‘the imperial project of the so-called neo- conservatives’.12 Recently, however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term ‘American empire’ less pejoratively, if still ambivalently,13 and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm. Speaking at a conference in Atlanta in November 2000, Richard Haass – who went on to serve in the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department – argued that Americans needed to ‘re-conceive their global role from one of traditional nation-state to an imperial power’, calling openly for an ‘informal’ American empire.14 This was, at the time, bold language: it is easy to forget that during the 2000 presidential election campaign it was George W. Bush who accused the Clinton-Gore administration of undertaking too many ‘open-ended deployments and unclear military missions’.15 As Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, told the Washington Post in August 2001: ‘There’s not all that many people who will talk about it [empire] openly. It’s discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like “America is the sole superpower.”’ 16 Such inhibitions seemed to fall away in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a seminal article for the Weekly Standard – published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center – Max Boot explicitly made ‘The Case for an American Empire’. ‘Afghanistan and other troubled lands today’, Boot declared, ‘cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.’17 When his history of 2 Ferguson, Empire America’s ‘small wars’ appeared the following year, its title was taken from Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ – written in 1899 as an exhortation to the United States to turn the Philippines into an American colony.18 The journalist Robert Kaplan also took up the imperial theme in his book Warrior Politics, arguing that ‘future historians will look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a republic’.19 ‘There’s a positive side to empire,’ Kaplan argued in an interview: ‘It’s in some ways the most benign form of order.’20 Charles Krauthammer, another conservative columnist, detected the change of mood. ‘People’, he told the New York Times, were ‘now coming out of the closet on the word “empire”.’21 ‘America has become an empire,’ agreed Dinesh D’Souza, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, in the Christian Science Monitor; but happily it is ‘the most magnanimous imperial power ever’. His conclusion: ‘Let us have more of it.’22 Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2002, the journalist Sebastian Mallaby proposed American ‘neo-imperialism’ as the best remedy for the ‘chaos’ engendered by ‘failed states’ around the world.23 One reading of Michael Ignatieff’s recent critique of American ‘nation-building’ in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan is that it has not been not sufficiently imperialistic to be effective.24 While Mallaby and Ignatieff are perhaps best described as liberal interventionists – proponents of what Eric Hobsbawm has sneeringly dismissed as ‘the imperialism of human rights’ – the majority of the new imperialists are neo-conservatives, and it was their views that came to the fore during and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. ‘Today there is only one empire,’ wrote James Kurth of Swarthmore College in a special ‘Empire’ issue of the National Interest, ‘the global empire of the United States. The U.S. military ... are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire.’25 Speaking on Fox News in April 2003, the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol declared: ‘We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.’26 That same month, the Wall Street Journal suggested that the British naval campaign against the slave trade in the mid nineteenth century might provide a model for American policy against nuclear proliferation.27 Max Boot even called for the United States to establish a Colonial Office, the better to administer its new possessions in the Middle East and Asia.28 3 Ferguson, Empire Within the Pentagon, the figure most frequently associated with the ‘new imperialism’ is Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who first won notoriety – as Under- Secretary of Defense under the current president’s father – by arguing that the aim of U.S. policy should be to ‘convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests’.29 That line, so controversial when it was written back in 1992, now seems remarkably tame. Nine years later, the Office of the Secretary of Defense organized a Summer Study at the Naval War College, Newport, to ‘explore strategic approaches to sustain [U.S. predominance] for the long term (~50 years)’, which explicitly drew comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman and British empires.30 Such parallels clearly do not seem outlandish to senior American military personnel. In 2000 General Anthony Zinni, then Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command, told the journalist Diana Priest that he ‘had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior- statesman who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome’.31 It is hard to be certain that this was irony. Officially, to be sure, the United States remains an empire in denial.32 Most politicians would agree with the distinction drawn by the historian Charles Beard back in 1939: ‘America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.’33 Richard Nixon insisted in his memoirs that the U.S. is ‘the only great power without a history of imperialistic claims on neighboring countries’,34 a view echoed by policy-makers throughout the past decade.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Review Essays
    Review Essays The Mechanics of Empire by John Hillen John Hillen ([email protected]) is a trustee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and director of its Program on National Security. He is a contributing editor at National Review. Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Knopf, 2004) $19.95 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004) $25.95 Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the 21st Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003) $18.95 Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004) $21 James Dobbins, et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2003) $35 Just as it took a few years after World War II for the nature of the Cold War and the strategy of containment to become evident,1 so too the reality of the Bush doctrine and the practicalities of waging a war on terrorism and promoting democratization and globalization are only now becoming clearer. As active as the United States has been over the past three years, the operating tenets and mechanics of a durable grand strategy have yet to come. The books under consideration here address that dilemma. They all explicitly accept what has come to be the general principle of American grand strategy: that the surest way to attain lasting security is for the United States to enlarge the community of nations and other groups that generally ascribe to liberal political and economic values.
    [Show full text]
  • 14664 Time to Woo India
    October 2004 A Strategy for Nuclear Iran By Thomas Donnelly Regardless of who is elected to the presidency in November, the growing threat posed by a nuclear Iran is certain to be at the top of the next administration’s national security agenda. Unfortunately, neither a “grand bargain” with Tehran nor a conventional military strike against its nuclear facilities offers much hope of preventing one of the world’s most dangerous regimes from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons. In the short term, at least, the United States must instead work to isolate Iran not only militarily but ideolog- ically, by succeeding in the democratic transformation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic Republic in Iran continues to speed The anxiety raised by the prospect of nuclear- toward acquiring nuclear weapons, with every armed Iran is creating a “Do Something!” week, it seems, bringing further evidence of its moment in Washington. Boot, a strong supporter progress. In late September, the head of Iran’s of the Bush administration’s strategy for the Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza greater Middle East, allows that, “on Iran, as in Aghazadeh, announced his country had begun so many other areas, the administration seems to enriching a “test amount” of uranium—enough, be paralyzed by disagreements between Defense that is, for several nuclear weapons. Soon, there Department hawks and State Department will be no insurmountable hurdles left; it is sim- doves.”3 The Democrats, by contrast, have made ply a matter of engineering, time, and Tehran’s a point of advocating a “grand bargain” with the choice.
    [Show full text]
  • In the Supreme Court of the United States
    No. 17-965 In the S upreme Court of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP , PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES , ET AL ., petitioners v. STATE OF HAWAII , ET AL ., respondents On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE EVAN MCMULLIN, ANNE APPLEBAUM, MAX BOOT, LINDA CHAVEZ, ELIOT COHEN, MINDY FINN, JULEANNA GLOVER, NORMAN ORNSTEIN, MICHAEL STEELE, CHARLIE SYKES, AND JERRY TAYLOR IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS R. REEVES ANDERSON JOHN B. BELLINGER , III ARNOLD & PORTER Counsel of Record KAYE SCHOLER LLP ELLIOTT C. MOGUL 370 Seventeenth St. KAITLIN KONKEL Suite 4400 ARNOLD & PORTER Denver, CO 80202 KAYE SCHOLER LLP (303) 863-1000 601 Mass. Ave., NW Washington, DC 20001 (202) 942-5000 [email protected] Counsel for Amici Curiae TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Interest of Amici Curiae .............................................. 1 Introduction and Summary of Argument ................... 2 Argument ..................................................................... 4 I. EO-3 contravenes the prohibition on nationality-based discrimination that Congress, with support from almost all Republicans, adopted in 1965 ................................ 5 A. Congress intended to eliminate “all vestiges of discrimination against any national group” from our immigration system ............................................................... 6 1. Members of both parties, and Republicans in particular, strenuously repudiated the discriminatory policies that predated the 1965 Act ......................... 7 2. The 1965 Act rectified missteps in U.S. immigration policy ............................ 12 3. The principles underlying the 1965 Act are now fundamental to our national identity ........................................ 16 B. EO-3 runs afoul of Congress’s nondiscrimination guarantee ......................... 18 II. The President may not substitute his alternative policy judgments for Congress’s comprehensive statutory immigration scheme ..
    [Show full text]
  • Niall Ferguson Is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus
    Niall Ferguson Professor, Harvard University Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has published fourteen books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the Longman- History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild to international critical acclaim. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. His other books include Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power; Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire; The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West; and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, which won the Handelszeitung Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West and the Rest. An accomplished biographer, Ferguson is also the author of High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (2010) and is currently writing a life of Henry Kissinger.
    [Show full text]
  • Political Science 279/479 War and the Nation-State
    Political Science 279/479 War and the Nation-State Hein Goemans Course Information: Harkness 320 Fall 2010 Office Hours: Monday 4{5 Thursday 16:50{19:30 [email protected] Harkness 329 This course examines the development of warfare and growth of the state. In particular, we examine the phenomenon of war in its broader socio-economic context between the emergence of the modern nation-state and the end of World War II. Students are required to do all the reading. Student are required to make a group presentation in class on the readings for one class (25% of the grade), and there will be one big final (75%). Course Requirements Participation and a presentation in the seminar comprises 25% of your grade. A final exam counts for 75%. The final exam is given during the period scheduled by the University. In particular instances, students may substitute a serious research paper for the final. Students interested in the research paper option should approach me no later than one week after the mid-term. Academic Integrity Be familiar with the University's policies on academic integrity and disciplinary action (http://www.rochester.edu/living/urhere/handbook/discipline2.html#XII). Vi- olators of University regulations on academic integrity will be dealt with severely, which means that your grade will suffer, and I will forward your case to the Chair of the College Board on Academic Honesty. The World Wide Web A number of websites will prove useful: 1. General History of the 20th Century • http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/ • http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm • http://www.fsmitha.com/ 2.
    [Show full text]
  • RUSSIA and CHINA and Central Asia Programme at ISPI
    RUSSIA AND CHINA. ANATOMY OF A A PARTNERSHIP OF AND RUSSIA CHINA. ANATOMY Aldo Ferrari While the “decline of the West” is now almost taken is Head of the Russia, Caucasus for granted, China’s impressive economic performance RUSSIA AND CHINA and Central Asia Programme at ISPI. and the political influence of an assertive Russia in the international arena are combining to make Eurasia a key Founded in 1934, ISPI is Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti Anatomy of a Partnership hub of political and economic power. That, certainly, an independent think tank is a Research Fellow committed to the study of is the story which Beijing and Moscow have been telling at the Russia, Caucasus and international political and Central Asia Centre at ISPI. for years. edited by Aldo Ferrari and Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti economic dynamics. Are the times ripe for a “Eurasian world order”? What It is the only Italian Institute exactly does the supposed Sino-Russian challenge to introduction by Paolo Magri – and one of the very few in the liberal world entail? Are the two countries’ worsening Europe – to combine research clashes with the West drawing them closer together? activities with a significant This ISPI Report tackles every aspect of the apparently commitment to training, events, solidifying alliance between Moscow and Beijing, but also and global risk analysis for points out its growing asymmetries. It also recommends companies and institutions. some policies that could help the EU to deal with this ISPI favours an interdisciplinary “Eurasian shift”, a long-term and multi-faceted power and policy-oriented approach made possible by a research readjustment that may lead to the end of the world team of over 50 analysts and as we have known it.
    [Show full text]
  • Implementing Stability in Iraq and Syria 3
    Hoover Institution Working Group on Military History A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY ON THE DEFEAT OF ISIS Implementing Stability in Iraq and Syria MAX BOOT Military History The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) first captured American attention in January 2014 when its militants burst out of Syria to seize the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which US soldiers and marines had fought so hard to free in 2004. Just a few days later ISIS captured the Syrian city of Raqqa, which became its capital. At this point President Obama was still deriding it as the “JV team,” hardly comparable to the varsity squad, al-Qaeda. It became harder to dismiss ISIS when in June 2014 it conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and proclaimed an Islamic State under its “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. With ISIS executing American hostages, threatening to massacre Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, and even threatening to invade the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, President Obama finally authorized air strikes against ISIS beginning in early August 2014. This was soon followed by the dispatch of American troops to Iraq and then to Syria to serve as advisers and support personnel to anti-ISIS forces. By the end of September 2016, there were more than five thousand US troops in Iraq and three hundred in Syria.1 At least those are the official figures; the Pentagon also sends an unknown number of personnel, numbering as many as a few thousand, to Iraq on temporary deployments that don’t count against the official troop number. The administration has also been cagey about what mission the troops are performing; although they are receiving combat pay and even firing artillery rounds at the enemy, there are said to be no “boots on the ground.” The administration is more eager to tout all of the bombs dropped on ISIS; the Defense Department informs us, with impressive exactitude, that “as of 4:59 p.m.
    [Show full text]
  • America's Empire of Bases
    Volume 1 | Issue 5 | Article ID 2029 | May 23, 2003 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus America's Empire of Bases Chalmers Johnson America's Empire of Bases weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root by Chalmers Johnson company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract As distinct from other peoples, most Americans services to build and maintain our far-flung do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize outposts. One task of such contractors is to -- that the United States dominates the world keep uniformed members of the imperium through its military power. Due to government housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the amused, and supplied with enjoyable, fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of vast network of American bases on every the American economy have come to rely on continent except Antarctica actually constitutes the military for sales. On the eve of our second a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense its own geography not likely to be taught in any Department was ordering up an extra ration of high school geography class. Without grasping cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor- the dimensions of this globe-girdlingpiercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its size and nature of our imperial aspirations or 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the the degree to which a new kind of militarism is supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, undermining our constitutional order.
    [Show full text]
  • CBC IDEAS Sales Catalog (AZ Listing by Episode Title. Prices Include
    CBC IDEAS Sales Catalog (A-Z listing by episode title. Prices include taxes and shipping within Canada) Catalog is updated at the end of each month. For current month’s listings, please visit: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/schedule/ Transcript = readable, printed transcript CD = titles are available on CD, with some exceptions due to copyright = book 104 Pall Mall (2011) CD $18 foremost public intellectuals, Jean The Academic-Industrial Ever since it was founded in 1836, Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Complex London's exclusive Reform Club Spelman Rockefeller Professor of (1982) Transcript $14.00, 2 has been a place where Social and Political Ethics, Divinity hours progressive people meet to School, The University of Chicago. Industries fund academic research discuss radical politics. There's In addition to her many award- and professors develop sideline also a considerable Canadian winning books, Professor Elshtain businesses. This blurring of the connection. IDEAS host Paul writes and lectures widely on dividing line between universities Kennedy takes a guided tour. themes of democracy, ethical and the real world has important dilemmas, religion and politics and implications. Jill Eisen, producer. 1893 and the Idea of Frontier international relations. The 2013 (1993) $14.00, 2 hours Milton K. Wong Lecture is Acadian Women One hundred years ago, the presented by the Laurier (1988) Transcript $14.00, 2 historian Frederick Jackson Turner Institution, UBC Continuing hours declared that the closing of the Studies and the Iona Pacific Inter- Acadians are among the least- frontier meant the end of an era for religious Centre in partnership with known of Canadians.
    [Show full text]
  • European Journal of American Studies, 2-2 | 2007 Taking up the White Man’S Burden? American Empire and the Question of History 2
    European journal of American studies 2-2 | 2007 Autumn 2007 Taking up the White Man’s Burden? American Empire and the Question of History Johan Höglund Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/1542 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.1542 ISSN: 1991-9336 Publisher European Association for American Studies Electronic reference Johan Höglund, “Taking up the White Man’s Burden? American Empire and the Question of History”, European journal of American studies [Online], 2-2 | 2007, document 5, Online since 14 December 2007, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/1542 ; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.1542 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. Creative Commons License Taking up the White Man’s Burden? American Empire and the Question of History 1 Taking up the White Man’s Burden? American Empire and the Question of History Johan Höglund 1. Introduction 1 If Britain obtained its empire in ''a fit of absence of mind,'' as Sir John Seeley once remarked,1 the United States has acquired its empire in a state of deep denial, or so Michael Ignatieff argued in an article from 2003.2 It would seem that this denial characterizes large portions of the American public and most members of the current Presidential administration. However, an increasing number of political and historical writers and journalists have begun to discuss the notion that the United States may, after all, resemble a traditional empire.3 2 The two Bush administrations have been forced to react to this notion on a number of occasions.
    [Show full text]
  • Models of the Developmental State
    Models of the developmental state Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira Abstract This paper seeks to understand the developmental state and its historical role in industrial revolutions and afterwards. First, the developmental state is defined as an alternative to the liberal state. Second, it is argued that industrial revolutions have always taken place within the framework of a developmental state. Third, four models of developmental states are defined according to the point in time at which the industrial revolution took place and the central or peripheral character of the country. Fourth, the paper describes how the state withdraws partially from the economy after the industrial revolution, but the developmental state continues to have a major role in directing industrial policy and in conducting an active macroeconomic policy. Keywords Public administration, economic planning, macroeconomics, liberalism, nationalism, economic policy, economic development JEL classification O10, O11, O19 Author Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira is an Emeritus Professor with the Department of Economics of the Sao Paulo School of Economics, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil. Email: [email protected]. 36 CEPAL Review N° 128 • August 2019 I. Introduction In the 1950s, Brazilian political scientists and economists identified “developmentalism” as a set of political ideas and economic strategies that drove Brazil’s rapid industrialization and underpinned the coalition of social classes identified with national development. Hélio Jaguaribe (1962, p. 208) stated in the early 1960s that “the core thesis of developmentalism is that the promotion of economic development and the consolidation of nationality stand as two correlated aspects of a single emancipatory process”. Through “national developmentalism”, which would become the established term for the country’s development strategy, Brazilian society was successfully overcoming the patrimonial state that characterized its politics until 1930.
    [Show full text]
  • Models of Developmental State
    1 Working 426 Setembro de 2016 Paper Models of developmental state Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira Os artigos dos Textos para Discussão da Escola de Economia de São Paulo da Fundação Getulio Vargas são de inteira responsabilidade dos autores e não refletem necessariamente a opinião da FGV-EESP. É permitida a reprodução total ou parcial dos artigos, desde que creditada a fonte. Escola de Economia de São Paulo da Fundação Getulio Vargas FGV-EESP www.eesp.fgv.br TEXTO PARA DISCUSSÃO 426 • SETEMBRO DE 2016 • 1 Models of developmental state Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira July 2016. Abstract. This paper searches to understand the developmental state and its historical role in the industrial revolution and after it. First, the developmental state is defined as an alternative to the liberal state. Second, it was in the framework of a developmental state that industrial revolutions took place, and four models of developmental state are defined. Third, after the industrial revolution, the state withdraws partially from the economy, but the developmental state continues to have a major role in assuring the general conditions that make competitive the competent business enterprises in each country – in conducing an active macroeconomic policy, particularly an exchange rate policy, in coordinating the non-competitive industries, and in conducing strategic industrial and technological policy. The paper concludes by comparing developmentalism with nationalism. Key words: Developmental state, developmentalism, economic liberalism, nationalism Resumo. Este artigo busca compreender o Estado desenvolvimentista e seu papel histórico na revolução industrial e depois dela. Em primeiro lugar, o Estado desenvolvimentista é definido como uma alternativa para o Estado liberal.
    [Show full text]