This paper seeks a narrative
framework for global institutional shifts in the 1970s,
the decade that brought us post-modernism and its scorn
for narrative frameworks. Rather than treating this
irony as colorful background to the subject at hand, I would
like to take its challenge rather more seriously and begin
with a discussion of the theoretical problem of representing
global historical shifts. In brief, my position here
is that it is important for us to seek to characterize such
historical shifts and that the decade of the 1970s came
toward the beginning of an extended move away from a world
interstate order and toward a more fractured global institutional
regime. To take this position requires, however, a
revised understanding of earlier global shifts and a defense
of macrohistorical narratives that does more than simply
reject the insights of post-structuralism.
The theoretical problem
is by now perhaps familiar. The post-modernists debunking
of master narratives, most notably in Lyotards The Postmodern
Condition, has in turn been attacked by critics for
containing its own compelling, if implicit, grand narrative,
one that features an oppositional cultural logic in which
hegemony constructs and reconstructs itself against representations
of otherness.1 Versions of post-modernism that
avoid this pitfall, in Terry Eagletons view, turn history
into a matter of constant mutability, exhilaratingly multiple
and open-ended, a set of conujunctures or discontinuities
which only some theoretical violence could hammer into the
unity of a single narrative.2 Thus critics such as Eagleton
wish to turn us back toward historical narratives that are
both structural and, in the narrowest sense of the term
(and, for Eagleton, in its Marxist sense), progressive.
The task proposed is hardly easy. No one is advocating
that we ignore the insights of a generation of historical
research influenced by post-structuralism or retreat even
partially from a vision of historical process as exhilaratingly
multiple and open-ended. Nor should we. The
interplay between representations of dominance and subordination,
the social construction of categories of difference, the
deep cultural logic and imprint of institutional practice,
the mutability and multiplicity of texts these are
not insights that should be left behind, or merely obscured
by the scale of macro history.
I would like to take up
here the problem of representing global historical changes
in a single decade, the 1970s, in addressing this larger
question of reconciling post-structural approaches to history
with the writing of world history. Regardless of ones
perspective, it is clear that the decade of the 1970s marked
a striking set of conjunctures. The deep recession
of 1973-75, by some measures as severe as the Great Depression,
and the second recession of 1979 prompted a round of global
economic restructuring and signaled a reexamination of the
institutions and strategies of the old economy, well before
the outlines of the new one were visible.3 The United States
withdrawal from Vietnam coincided with the Portuguese Revolution
and the formal end to colonialism in Europes oldest overseas
empire. New forms of developing-country association
made a noisy entry; OPEC played a large role in prompting
and magnifying the effects of the economic crises while
both Europeans and third-world leaders, though certainly
prematurely, hailed the 1975 Lom Convention as a turning
point in north-south relations. While global cold
war politics consumed international strategies, it was the
failure of these strategies to offer long-term stability
that was most striking: the ill-fated Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan, the brutal, U.S.-sponsored coups in the
Southern Cone, the multi-sided and ideologically blurry
conflicts in Angola and the Horn of Africa. Historical
accounts of the decade have managed so far neither to show
the relation among such trends nor to agree upon their impact.
Some observers found in the 1970s the seeds of the end
of the state, while others noted the crucial role of the
state in guiding responses to the global economic downturn,
arguing for the analytical move of bringing the state back
in.4
And to complicate
matters still more, we have in the 1970s the rise of post-modernism.
What sort of (global) phenomenon was this? It was
in part a movement that responded to the defeat of a leftist
agenda at the end of the 1960s. Post-modernism has
had both leftist proponents and, on balance, a leftist aura,
given its association with the rejuvenated interest in the
cultural histories of gender, race, and ethnicity, and of
oppositional cultures in general. But critics have
also portrayed post-modernism as itself a refurbished and
even sanitized form of Orientalism a new story that the
West tells itself about its own cultural uniqueness.5
We must take an interest
in sorting out such claims because post-modernists have
also offered one of the few explanations of the relation
between cultural and economic change in the 1970s, and this
proposal is not one that we can ignore in a search for explanatory
frameworks. The post-modern vision of this relation
connects post-industrialism to post-modernism. It
does so crudely, without a doubt. In its basest form,
the connection relies simply on the coincidence of the rise
of the information economy with the post-modern cultural
turn. In Lyotards words, this conjuncture comes about
because knowledge has become the principle force of production.6
Some scholars have sought
a more empirically grounded and theoretically more complex
connection. Such an approach centers on the assertion
that the economic crisis of the mid-1970s was in part a
crisis of over-production in advanced markets, more specifically,
the saturation of markets for mass-produced goods and the
fracturing of those markets into niches characterized by
differences requiring flexibility and decentralization in
production.7 This fragmentation of markets
and the restructuring of production that followed from it
have, at the very least, a striking resonance with the fragmenting
images and disjunctures of post-modern culture. As
David Harvey writes, the more flexible motion of capitalism
emphasizes the new, the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fugitive,
and the contingent in modern life, rather than the more
solid values implanted under Fordism.8 And more succinctly, Jameson
argues that post-modernism marked the rise of a new phase
of advanced capitalism.9
This line of attack appears
promising for our purposes. It has the advantage of
seeking to relate the economic crisis to cultural and political
shifts. Yet, while pointing us in the right direction,
the approach has its own limitations for world historians.
The most notable is that the relation suggested between
post-industrialism and post-modernism is discussed mainly
in the context of the advanced economies. The economic
crisis of the mid-1970s is represented as a crisis of advanced
capitalism and only as a global phenomenon to the degree
that increased competition from newly industrializing economies
exacerbated the fragmentation of markets or that lower wage
opportunities in the developing world made productive restructuring
a global practice. The world economy, in this
view, is the economy of the advanced industrial core, with
a crucial but supporting role being played by the developing
world.
It seems worthwhile to try to preserve the insight that
late-twentieth century cultural shifts were linked to the
emergence of new patterns of production and exchange without
at the same time reproducing a narrative centered on economic
transformations in the West. The models available
for broadening our analysis of this shift offer their own
hazards, however. A range of Marxist and liberal views
of nineteenth and early-twentieth century imperialism have
asserted the central importance in supporting capitalist
growth in the West of economic ties to Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. The common roots of such arguments
are in crisis theory: imperialism has been represented alternatively
in Marxist thought as a way of postponing crises of overproduction
or as insurance against underconsumption in the advanced
economies.10 Dependency theory
offered a less crisis-driven variant, with its emphasis
on the relative stability of flows of surplus from the periphery
to the core. In interpreting global economic change
in the 1970s, though, Marxist and neo-Marxist views became
noticeably troubled. World systems theorists became
mired in the task of explaining and understanding dependent
development, as industrial growth of non-classic patterns
surged in newly industrializing countries.11
Others trumpeted the continuities between colonialism and
post-colonialism, making the valuable observation that trade
patterns and elite interactions continued to tie former
colonies closely to former metropolitan powers. This
view, too, in emphasizing structural continuities, has proven
rather unhelpful in analyzing trends that appeared in fact
to be new, both within developing economies and in their
ties to world markets.
Indeed, if anything is striking
in interpretations of the crises of the 1970s, it is their
fundamental similarity to post-modern perspectives in their
insistence on continuity: the macro-narrative of Western
dominance and non-Western exploitation. But
at the same time that macro-historical understandings of
the 1970s have been disappointing, middle-ground analyses
of economic changes in the 1970s have made impressive headway.
I will return to these in the last section below, for it
is these analyses with their grounded investigation of
global relations of production and cultural change that
hold some of the keys to fashioning a more comprehensive
world historical treatment of the decade.
These more grounded analyses
operate at a level of sophistication that is a world away
from the assertions of post-modernists about the economic
transformations of the 1970s. Though perhaps prescient
in signaling ties between economic and cultural change in
the 1970s, the post-modernists have gotten the economy wrong
in several ways. The first mistake, most notably,
is that they attribute an implausible causality to the rise
of the information economy. The economy they describe
as primordial in the transition to post-industrial sensibilities
was a later phenomenon than they propose and was, by many
measures, only in its infancy in the 1970s.12 Second, and more seriously, the post-modernists
miscast productive decentralization as, on the one hand,
market shift and, on the other, a simple move to outsource
in order to cheapen the costs of labor. The restructuring
of production and the search for flexibility were more complex
processes that involved not just a fragmentation and decentering
of Fordism but also the formation of new cultural and institutional
contexts for production. In fact, a very modern-seeming
search for shared meanings and trust animated many regional
economic adjustments.13
At least part of the problem
of fashioning a theoretically compelling understanding of
the converging global trends of the 1970s, then, calls for
adjusting macro-historical perspectives to reflect better
the studies of micro political, economic, and cultural processes.
But this is no mere exercise in application or scanning
from micro to macro levels. The various more-or-less
standard theoretical approaches to world historical shifts
fare poorly and require not just amendment but replacement.
At a deep level they fail to account for structural change
at all.
In looking for new theoretical
moves and, simultaneously, new empirical questions that
will push theory forward, we can profit from arguments over
past world historical shifts. I do not have space
here to discuss the alternatives in detail but will instead
outline one theoretical approach and an example of its application
to past institutional shifts in world history. Working
from these examples by way of analogy, I will then return
to the problem of reconceptualizing the 1970s as a decade
of important institutional restructuring on a global scale.
Institutional
world history
World history as a field has revolved around a single paradigm
until recently: the study of world history as the history
of the global economy. What is meant by the world
economy has varied, both over time and from scholar to scholar.
The mapping of global trading patterns, shifts in the global
organization of production, and changes in (and exchanges
of) technology and its impact on trade and production
these themes recur and form the center of debates about
broader narratives. More recently, attention to ecological
and biological dimensions of world history has suggested
a paradigm shift, though just as often, it seems, such factors
are studied within the framework of patterns of economic
exchange facilitating the movement of disease, plants, and
animals.
The dominance of the economic
and, now, biological themes in world history has had the
ironic effect of turning a field that is at its heart necessarily
about cultural difference and change into one with a tentative
relation to cultural studies. Timing has not been
kind, either. When swept from the stage of world historical
studies, culture exited in the form of civilization studies,
draped unmistakably in cloth cut from Orientalism and its
variants. It now makes its entrance in the form of
post-colonial and post-modernist cultural studies.
More multi-cultured and multi-colored, more attuned to difference
and transgression, this figure of culture is also badly
matched with the stolid and systems-centered economic history.
The central theoretical problem of world history becomes
a variant of the old structure-and-agency problem of social
theory more generally: how to relate culture to economy,
fluidity to continuity, local improvisation to global structure.
I have argued elsewhere
that institutional world history holds promise as a path
towards a perspective that can hold both culture and economy
on a single stage. Post-structuralism offered not
just a vision of culture as fluid and discursive but also
elevated cultural practice and strategic cultural moves
to a more visible analytic plane. At the same time,
political economists were embracing a broader view of economic
change that emphasized the determining possibilities of
social conflict. Institutional world history invites
the study of cultural practice and conflicts as they shape
and interact with the structures of global political order.14
Rather than attempting to bridge local and global levels
of analysis, the approach relocates the study of global
change at the local level in doing so, it insists on the
importance in world history of comparative analysis.
Rather than giving more detail to this profile, I will turn
to an example from my own work. I do not propose this
example as a new master narrative nor even a new paradigm
for world history, but I do think it provides an illustration
of the promise of institutional world history as a research
field.
Until a few years ago, it was hard to miss the conspicuous
absence in world historical writings of attention to law
and to legal institutions. The reluctance to study
law in world history seemed to follow from an assumption
encouraged by legal scholars, viz., that law is best understood
within national political settings. Surprisingly,
even many comparative treatments of legal history stressed
the imperviousness of law to cultural or social trends,
thus reinforcing the view of legal institutions as developing
logically out of relatively immutable legal sources.15
Alternatively, more vibrant regional traditions of legal
historical studies tended to insist on the civilizational
boundaries of particular ways of viewing law; Islamic legal
historians kept to themselves, and historians of canon law
in the West, while recognizing its role as an early form
of transnational law, emphasized its culturally unique qualities.16
Several elements of law
in early modern societies, though, appear strikingly similar
across a broad range of cultures and regions. One
is that legal institutions contained routines for the recognition
of cultural and religious difference. Examining the
history of the Islamic empires, on the one hand, and the
Iberian overseas empires, on the other, one finds more similarities
than differences in the legal status of religious and cultural
others. These essentially structural similarities,
in turn, promoted an important degree of institutional continuity
across diverse regions what I have called an international
legal regime in an era before the formal recognition of
international law or the vision of an interstate order.17 Further, rather than growing
organically out of legal sources, routines for organizing
and recognizing difference developed out of conflict and
practice. Debates about cultural difference at the
local level, in other words, generated the institutional
structures that comprised order at the global level.18
What of the transition to
a world order invoking the model of a multiplicity of autonomous
states claiming territorial sovereignty? Prominent
narratives of political science and historical sociology
situate state formation in the dynamics of competing European
polities.19 World historians attention to the decisive forces
of expanding global capitalism has meanwhile had the effect
of relegating the formation of the interstate order to the
status of a sideshow within world history. Capitalism
either prompted institutional shifts or required them.20
Again, a look at law and at particular legal conflicts suggests
a different process of change. Legal politics repeatedly
centered around defining and redefining the relation of
multiple legal authorities and cultural entities in
plural legal orders. This was an undisguised cultural
politics. People fought about legal boundaries precisely
because they understood them to signify cultural boundaries,
and they often framed legal conflicts in cultural terms
rather than with reference to the material benefits of positioning
within the changing political economy. In case after
case, we find that the colonial state emerged not as the
simple imposition of colonial powers or at the behest of
foreign investors, but out of a complex politics in which
local litigants and non-elite actors conjured up the colonial
state as a legal authority even before it had juridical
substance.21
Rather than taking space
here to provide detailed examples of this interaction, I
wish to instead explore its theoretical implications.
Culture in this narrative matters, not as an alternative
framework for a story about civilizations, nor even as a
purely discursive complement to structural forces, but as
an element in the creation of institutional patterns congruent
with those forces. I suppose this move could be viewed
as one that is intended to bring global forces to bear on
cultural representation. But it can also be understood
as a move in the other direction, a way of observing the
structural consequences of cultural tensions repeated at
many locations. The shift from a more fluid legal
pluralism and of law in diaspora to a hierarchical model
of state law dominating non-state legal authorities took
place within the logic of a replicating cultural politics,
and on a global scale.
Back to
the future: the 1970s
How does this example of
institutional world history help us with the puzzle of finding
the most fruitful approach to understanding the decade of
the 1970s? In many ways, the challenge of characterizing
the global changes underway in that decade is similar.
Attempts to portray the decade as one of economic restructuring
have, like the narratives of global economic change for
earlier periods, told a Western-centered narrative about
a crisis of advanced capitalism. This analysis has
featured either the marginalization of cultural and political
conflicts or a crude pairing of post-industrialism with
post-modernism. How can the study of institutional
shifts help to move us beyond these disjointed and superficial
approaches?
Surely one important lesson
of institutional approaches to world history is to adjust
certain expectations about the timing of global shifts.
The realignment of legal institutions outlined in the last
section the shift toward state-centered law took place
largely over the course of the long nineteenth century.
Important adjustments, however, clustered in particular
decades; thus, for example, colonial and national legal
policy staked new claims to sovereignty (rather than more
limited suzerainty) over indigenous populations in a wide
variety of settings in the 1820s and 1830s. By the
loosest analogy, it is helpful to adjust our expectations
about the global import of the 1970s in the changes we observe
in the last decades. They formed only part, albeit
a particularly important part, of a longer process of institutional
change that continues to this day.
But change in what?
Once we adopt a perspective that views the state as historically
contingent and produced by a series of broadly cast conflicts,
it appears a flawed choice as a unit of analysis.
Some world historians have responded insistently, in the
case of Frank that the only meaningful unit of analysis
is the world system itself. This move is resolutely
anti- or atheoretical, and it leads us from narrative to
posturing to the simple assertion that patterns of global
economic exchange prove a favored understanding of world
order. An institutional perspective invites us to
shift attention both from global economic exchange and from
states to a broader institutional map to shifting locations
of authority, redefinitions of cultural boundaries, the
refashioning of political identities, and changing patterns
of coercion. Such processes are constitutive of the
political economy and percolate in ways that are productive
of global ordering. They can also and this is no
small virtue be compared, yielding greater analytical
rigor, revealing synchronous shifts, and offering a way
of translating the study of local conflicts into the study
of global change. In the framework of the 1970s, then, the
goal must be not to reproduce the usual narrative of economic
crisis and supplement it with stories about political conflict
and cultural discourse, but to fuse these analyses into
one.
And here the institutional
history that I have sketched in the last section is of more
specific help. The degree to which the state ever
fully consolidated control over its subjects, established
legitimacy, or exercised territorial sovereignty has varied
greatly. Consistently, however, states have asserted
such claims since the emergence of a global interstate order
over the long nineteenth century, and they have been assisted
by the attentions of other states operating on the shared
assumption of this role of political dominance and control
over bounded territories, designated peoples, and finite
political processes. Without asserting a progressive
imperative in history, we can begin to see a change with
the decade of the 1970s serving as one of its important
axes toward a different and more complex institutional
patterning.
A good deal of attention
mainly by political scientists has indeed been given
to the internal transformations of the state since the 1970s
and the external realignment of states that has been coupled
with these internal changes. If this line of study
has failed to cross disciplinary boundaries or even to
build a convincing consensus within one field it is partly
because, I think, many of its practitioners are looking
in the wrong place. We should not narrowly examine
the state itself for signs of the demise, or transformation,
of the state, but instead (again following the lessons of
an institutional history for earlier periods) explore the
conflicts shaping state and non-state political authorities
and their relation. The search focuses on replicating
sets of conflicts that pull at the boundaries of the state
and in doing so reconstitute political authority and legitimacy.
Let us be more specific,
and return to the actual historical changes of the 1970s.
I would like to offer three examples, all of which have
been amply studied and documented, though without the connection
to world historical change I wish to make.22
The first phenomenon of note is the reemergence of diasporas
as important economic and political forces. World
historians are perhaps most familiar with two approaches
to the study of diasporas. One centers of the work
of Philip Curtin about the importance of diasporas in long-distance
trade in the long period before the rise of the interstate
order.23 The second is
the study of the cross-regional cultural continuity provided
by diasporas the African diaspora in the Atlantic, for
example, or the Chinese diaspora of the Asian-American world.24
An institutional approach to the study of diasporas adds
several dimensions to these approaches. As Adam McKeowns
work on Chinese migrants has shown, it is important to begin
to understand the ways in which diasporas intersected with,
and helped to create, structurally similar political conflicts
in diverse settings where members of ethnic diasporas settled.25
Making the same point in a different way, I have argued
that diasporic communities in the early modern Atlantic
fit into and helped to reproduce a fluid legal pluralism
that gave semi-autonomy to foreign communities within host
polities. This process generated institutional continuity
across diverse regions and protected and promoted opportunities
for cross-cultural exchanges.26
Extending this attention to the political framework for,
and consequences of, diasporas, we must recognize a shift
in the character of diasporas in the post-1970s world.
After a long period of relative political weakness, they
reemerged with greater political and economic force.
Alejandro Portes has made this argument specifically for
Miami Cubans, and he has made it more generally for what
he terms immigrant enclaves in the advanced economies.27
Communities housed in these enclaves emerged in the 1970s
with new political clout and a rejuvenated transnational
economic function based on the vitality of small, immigrant-owned
firms and the enhanced technological supports for multi-national
residence.28
I will return to the significance
of this trend and its particular meanings in the 1970s in
a moment. Let me turn briefly first to another phenomenon,
that of economic re-regionalization, the enhanced vitality
of subnational economic districts. Again, this trend
has been studied mainly in connection with its role in productive
restructuring and in the search for blueprints for economic
development. The premise of this work is that those
regimes that weathered the downturns of the 1970s best did
so because they benefited from geographical concentration
(or re-concentration) of production, often accompanied by
local deconcentration and the proliferation of small, niche
producers.29 The
phenomenon has been studied in sectors as diverse as the
Brazilian shoe industry and the Los Angeles film industry.30 Studied as a product of global
economic crisis, the phenomenon has been the subject of
an interesting debate about whether it generated new forms
of labor or reproduced older patterns of worker exploitation.31 In a broader (and global) institutional perspective,
re-regionalization also generated an array of transnational
connections taking place without, or at the margins of,
national states. Before the 1970s, for example, it
would have been rare for a subnational region to possess
a foreign policy; after the 1970s, this was not rare but
in many places expected. Not surprisingly, re-regionalization
is also closely linked with movements of ethnic and/or regional
autonomy, so that patterns of political-economic restructuring
merge neatly with the politics of cultural representation.
A third phenomenon that
also had roots in the period before the 1970s but underwent
important change is that of transnational sectoral restructuring.
Whereas earlier analyses focused on the importance of transnational
firms in shaping global markets and curtailing state
authority, a broader institutional analysis examines not
firms but sectors. Its students have traced commodity
and production chains both connecting differently situated
world regions and spanning the formal, legal spheres and
the informal (underground) spheres of advanced and developing
economies.32
While most attention has focused on the ways in which such
structures assisted capital accumulation and enhanced flexibility,
and therefore intensified as strategic responses to the
global downturn of the 1970s, an equally important implication
is institutional. Informal sector production decentered
state authority and reinvigorated non-state regulatory arrangements.
Further, both political authorities and producers learned
quickly that they had a stake in the regulatory frameworks
of distant places and not just at the level of the state,
since national bodies could not reliably provide information
about, or ensure the stability of, decentralized regional
producers.33
Are we right to see the
1970s as a strategic point in the development of these processes,
and in what sense do they (and other transnational processes
connected with them) constitute an institutional shift of
world historical proportions? It is, of course, impossible
to make the connection to the 1970s without reference to
the global economic downturn and its study. It is
possible, though, to characterize economic transformations
as also fundamentally social and cultural. That is,
rather than portraying the economic shift as one that simply
set these changes into motion, we can see the locally based
sets of conflicts shaping them as important structural ingredients
of global institutional change.
For example, re-regionalization provided ethnic nationalism
with a new, if quiet, source of legitimacy, and was in turn
strengthened by strategies of regional elites seeking to
reinforce their autonomy.34 Sectoral restructuring,
including the growth of the informal sector, shifted in
subtle but important ways economic actors perceptions of
the state as the locus of regulation. Undercutting
the authority of other national political actors such as
unions and cross-sectoral business associations, productive
decentralization in many cases also reinvigorated local
and regional neo-corporate alliances and drew renewed attention
to non-state mechanisms for the regulation of the labor
process: kinship relations, local producer associations,
and community social networks.35
Global political events, too, intersected with these processes.
Challenges to the state, and even prolonged violent conflicts
over the control of the state, were associated with changes
that also reconstituted state power. Thus the uncertainty
over political stability enhanced the importance of transnational
communities as conduits for trade and as elements of order.
At a later period, Graham Smith notes the strengthening
of the Russian diaspora in Baltic states in the upheaval
surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union.36
In the context of the 1970s, the Portuguese Revolution both
marked an end to formal colonialism and strengthened the
economic and political role of a Portuguese diaspora stretching
across four continents.37 Reconstituting political authority and redefining
cultural identity in such cases were homologous processes.
The approach to post-1970s transnationalism outlined here
is not the story of a coming global culture, nor even of
a global cultural hegemony. It is a narrative about cultural
conflicts and their consequences. Diasporic communities
do not obtain or hold their influence easily, nor (and we
might remind ourselves of the Miami Cubans) should their
enhanced influence prompt us to unreserved celebration of
multi-culturalism. Further, we must guard against
the view that cultural outcomes have been somehow vaguely
programmed by the nature of the new economy. They
have not. As a work of institutional world history,
our narrative focuses on the pervasiveness and repetition
in diverse settings of structurally similar sets of conflicts
and their influence, in turn, on cross-regional and world
ordering. In relation to the seventies, this is (at
the moment) as much a research agenda as it is an opportunity
for reassembling data already in our hands.
What we seem to be observing are institutional shifts in
two directions. On one side, sub-national governance
structures emerged with an enhanced importance in the restructuring
global economy. This statement may also be turned
around to suggest that restructured regional governance
guided some places to new forms of integration with transnational
economic structures. Such governance emerged out of
a complex matrix of local alliances, the overlap of social
networks and production, and the outcome of cultural conflicts
over ethnic, gender, and class boundaries. On the
other side, new forms of association among states began
to emerge in the 1970s: OPEC, the Lom Convention, the first
economic summit among advanced industrialized nations, early
international trade accords. Post-colonialism seeks
to explain the lack of effectiveness and long-term stability
of such arrangements and points instead to the continuities
of interstate interactions. But the intensification
in the 1970s of the search for such associations is itself
significant, and subsequent decades reveal more, not less,
pressure for them to proliferate and succeed. The
interesting tension they create between association as a
strategy to preserve state authority and the threat of subordination
to extra-state power is also a cultural tension, as we see
clearly in the politics of the British response to the EEC.
For in this trend, too, economic reordering is not an isolated
cause producing structural adjustment and cultural response.
While struggles over cultural boundaries and the complex
process of forming new economic regulatory structures
in short, the shift toward a new late-twentieth century
international regime pulled forcefully in two directions
on the state, the resulting trends also generated anxiety
about, and interest in, preserving and strengthening state
authority. We see this, for example, in the national
response to the threat of emerging infectious diseases,
where despite their relative inability to stop the cross-border
transmission of viruses and pathogens, national-level public
health institutions have been called on to play their border-patrolling
function more vigorously.38
We see it, too, in the unassailable and indeed growing confidence
in the U.S. Federal Reserve to guide the U.S. national economy,
even in the face of an increasingly international financial
climate. Also, the scurrying in response to international
scenarios of collapsed states or states in crisis Indonesia,
Rwanda, Colombia suggests a firm commitment to the search
for state authority of any variety so that intervention
carries a modicum of legitimacy and some promise of stability.
The emerging international regime that was so decisively
initiated in the 1970s will likely be a modified interstate
order that is nevertheless significantly novel in the depth
and variety of non-state and extra-state transnational interconnections.
These connections have their roots in cultural practice
and in routines for ordering cultural difference.
The 1970s did not give us this new order, but we will do
well to look to the decade and the peculiar confluence of
economic crisis and restructuring, cultural pluralism, and
political conflict and transition as a pivotal time in the
emergence of a historically new international regime.
As these narratives of 1970s institutional change unfold,
we need not choose between the insights of post-structuralism
and the certainties of narrative history. If to some
degree post-modernism forms part of an ideology of cultural
hegemony disguised as a recognition of diversity, it also
illuminates elements of cultural discourse that correspond
to new forms of conflicts with global dimensions.
At the same time, positing and exploring major shifts in
world history should not be left to economic historians
or world systems theorists. Understood broadly, institutional
shifts are linked in specific ways to cultural discourse
and political economy. The study of these connections
offers a theoretical opening for merging analysis of culture
and economy, as well as a lens for viewing simultaneously
the reorganization of local and global political authority
in world history.