H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XI, No. 34 (2010)
Jerald A. Combs, SFSU:
"Cumings argues that American history and foreign policy have been dominated by a Western outlook since Washington’s Farewell Address. He dismisses the Atlanticist outlook as one held by a tiny elite and which predominated only in the period between 1941 and the end of the Cold War. Instead of looking across the Atlantic for allies and models, even most Easterners in the period prior to 1941 hated England, despised European mores, and concentrated on continental expansion and internal markets."
Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine:
"Although other scholars have described America’s Janus-faced foreign policy, in which a estern-looking tradition of nationalism, expansion, and unilateralism faces off against the tradition of Atlanticism and internationalism, never before has such an interpretation been so solidly anchored in a deep investigation of the West’s evolving political economy, culture, and involvement with the Pacific. Cuming’s states that the “central problem of the book is how to understand and explain the difference between an Atlantic-facing internationalism and a Pacific-facing expansionism.” One, of course, dealt with Europeans; the other largely with people of color.
...
California’s story is one of gold, Indian extermination, and railroad barons. Texas history is organized around cotton, cattle, oil, and the cowboy mythology. In offering the figure of the loner and the satisfactions of retributive violence, the oil and cowboy cultures of Texas fused together into an ethos that spread through the nation and even the world. For the Pacific and the Caribbean, Cumings lays out the story of colonial acquisition, the “dirty war” in the Philippines that transplanted the fierce traditions of frontier Indian-fighting to overseas imperial possessions, and the triumphalism of the Great White Fleet."
Ander Stepahson, Columbia:
"Pacificism Writ Large, or, Schumpeter in California"
"There are really two related arguments, or two arguments unfolding on different levels that intersect in a single event. There is, first, an argument about expansion and periodization. For a century and a half, the U.S. develops westwards, fairly easily, quite powerfully, facing away from Europe, secure and isolationist (in a manner of speaking). World War II changes all that, turning the U.S. into a predominantly Atlanticist power and for the duration of the cold war as conventionally understood (that is, until 1989-91), so it remains. Another name for Atlanticism would be ‘internationalism.’ The collapse of the Soviet Union then brings into view a kind of generalized (or ‘globalized’) version of that Atlanticist form of hegemonic rule in the 1990s, which is at once the dialectical end of Atlanticism and the preservation of it at some higher level (I am simplifying and rewriting a bit).
Unexpectedly, very unexpectedly for Cumings himself (and me too), this was cut short by a particularly atavistic return in 2001 to some pre-1941 form of unilateralism in the figure of George W. Bush and his cohort...
The second line of argument has to do with that great transformation and its axial event. Government (or the state) had always been involved in development. Witness the gigantic subsidies to the railroads, in turn the constitutive factor in the process. Witness also the intimate connection between state and often individual business on the crucial problem of providing water to essentially arid southern California, a feature amplified by the New Deal and creating a spectacular kind of hydraulic state at the opposite political end of what such a state notoriously was supposed to be. World War II, however, marks a decisive, qualitative shift. Massive infusions of funds serve to industrialize across the board, to connect the west organically to the rest of the nation, while actually also catapulting to the cutting edge of capitalism at home and abroad. Unrepeatable historical and geographic circumstances in combination with federal intervention opened up for a monumental expansion of innovation and entrepreneurship, two already existing features in the region that, in combination with extraordinary natural resources and agricultural prowess, made the west (i.e. California) peerless in capitalist development. California (and the rest, though less so) benefitted enormously from having been created ex nihilo as it were, from being a late developer in world capitalist terms and from having no existing structures to contend with, only abundant resources and incomparable weather, the totality now fueled by cheap water and cheap electricity, not to mention local oil. Paradoxically, this moment also provides the ground for the emergence of rightwing Republicanism, the kind of politics that lives on denigration of taxes, Washington and the government whilst benefiting tremendously from these very institutions, above all in the form of defense expenditure. The combination of forces and the conjuncture following first 7 December 1941, then the advent of the cold war in 1947, and then, finally and irrevocably, the outbreak of the Korean War (in a way) in June 1950, all produced an exceptional space for capitalist development. This, then, is the outside project deployed to rev up what is already there, creating the full-fledged Pacific city on the hill.
...
Schumpeter’s own limits have to do with class and there is indeed nothing much about class in Cumings. This is partly because we are in some Hartzian universe where the bourgeoisie is everywhere and therefore nowhere: California exceptionalism if you will, ‘the clean slate,’ but the main reason is precisely that Cumings is following Schumpeter. The Austrian was preoccupied with the productive disequilibria of creative destruction, innovation and entrepreneurship, with talent and its conditions of possibility. Here he always recognized his deep debt to Marx (and Cumings carefully notes their affinities), above all on the subject of creative destruction, the constant revolutionizing of the means of production. Schumpeter, however, was not concerned with labour and exploitation. Class entered into the account early on as the bourgeois failure to displace the outmoded aristocracy in Central Europe and later, conversely, in the bourgeois failure to find some counterpoint to aristocratic purpose.2 California, as Cumings celebrates it, is presumably a Schumpeterian success in that regard: it never has to face the bourgeois impasse because the rivers of talent never dry up. I merely note this feature in Cumings. All I want to do is render it explicit so we can think systemically about his way of thinking systemically.
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Cumings’s sizeable intervention had to do with Schurmann’s shortcoming on, inter alia, the issue of state, class and ideology, not to mention his reliance on Schumpeter (“Schurmann hurts his own analysis most when he is consciously being Schumpeterian and anti-Marxian.” 60).
Cumings thinks, by contrast, that consensus rather than conflict is the mark of the U.S. in the cold war, though he also retains Schurmann’s distinction. Evidently, then, there is an interesting essay to be written on Cumings, Schumpeter and Schurmann. Here I will only cite one of Cumings’s remarks which is relevant for his present Conclusion: “Accommodation is a sophisticated strategy that usually draws the fire of narrowminded conservatives who mistake its intent. Yet it is a truly conservative policy for defusing conflict, predicated on maintaining the existing arrangements” (62)."
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