The ascent of globalisation

Harry Blutstein

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719099717
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ascent of globalisation tells the sweeping historical drama of the development of globalisation, from the Second World War to the present day. The story is told through the richly detailed accounts of eighteen remarkable men and women, describing how these architects reshaped the modern world, for better or worse. Profiling their lives, ideas and struggles reveals fresh insights into the nature of globalisation. The book also examines their legacies, shedding new light on many of the problems the world faces today: the global financial crisis, the political and economic malaise afflicting Europe, the numerous failures of the United Nations, the unchecked power of corporations and the inability of governments to cooperate on critical issues such as climate change.

Part I

The liberal foundations of globalisation

After Pearl Harbor, many of Hollywood’s finest joined the army. One was Darryl F. Zanuck, the cigar-chomping president of Twentieth Century Fox. As a colonel in the Army Signal Corps, he served in the Aleutians in the Northern Pacific as well as North Africa.

On his return to civilian life in 1943, he became fixated on the failure of the League of Nations, which he saw as a lost opportunity for permanent peace. If only, he speculated, the US had listened to President Woodrow Wilson and joined the League in 1919, then the Second World War might have been avoided. And so, Zanuck decided that he would use his position to convince the movie-viewing audience to embrace Wilson’s dream of a ‘better, saner world’.¹

In a project dear to his heart, on 1 August 1944, Twentieth Century Fox released a motion picture celebrating the life and dreams of the twenty-eighth president, simply titled Wilson.

Zanuck’s timing was perfect – the war was nearing its end, and political leaders had just finished meeting in Bretton Woods and would soon be gathering in San Francisco to finalise the charter for the United Nations. Together, these international summits would lay the foundations for the postwar liberal order.

While Zanuck sold Wilson as a piece of popular entertainment, he also hoped that the movie would rally public support behind these endeavours, completing the project that Woodrow Wilson had started twenty-five years earlier.

The film’s budget of $5.2 million made the movie Hollywood’s most expensive production up until that date. Having bet heavily on the success of Wilson, Zanuck wryly quipped that unless it was ‘successful from every standpoint, I’ll never make another film without Betty Grable’.²

The project was always going to be risky, and to scotch rumours that he was making a ‘message’ movie – Hollywood code for a movie that would have no chance at the box office – Zanuck told a reporter that Wilson would appeal to ‘the regular mugs and bobby-sockers, and we don’t want them getting the idea that it’s highbrow’.³

To this end, Zanuck lavished money on sets to make the film a Technicolor spectacular. But to succeed, the picture also needed a likeable hero. Unfortunately, the president had the reputation as an aloof, dour and somewhat scholarly man. To humanise Wilson, the flick treated audiences to glimpses into his private life: coaching the football team at Princeton; sing-alongs with his three adorable daughters, as their father tickled the ivories; and later, his courtship of Edith Galt, who became First Lady in December 1915. The celluloid president even displayed a playful sense of humour, a quality Wilson lacked in real life.

The movie drew drama from Wilson’s clashes with the political foxes of Old Europe: Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy and Georges Clemenceau of France. They were mainly interested in fighting over the spoils of war, keen to extract territory and treasure from the defeated nations. Wilson valiantly struggled to convince them to support the League of Nations, which he argued passionately would create a lasting peace. After winning that fight, he faced off against Henry Cabot Lodge, who proved to be his nemesis by persuading the US Senate to reject the treaty.

As one would expect from Hollywood, Woodrow Wilson’s journey is portrayed as heroic, his shortcomings papered over and his opponents became onedimensional villains. Nevertheless, the critics loved Wilson, with the Washington Post gushing that it was ‘one of the most distinguished films in the whole history of the cinema’.⁴ Hollywood also took to Wilson, and it won five Oscars.

It was not, however, a commercial success, losing the studio $2.2 million. With no marquee stars and running an epic two-and-a-half hours long, it struggled at the box office, particularly in the Midwest, where Wilson’s presidency had never been popular.

For most of the movie, Zanuck restrained himself. But in its last scene, he indulged in some heavy-handed proselytising. As the president’s term winds down, his Secretary for the Treasury (played by the debonair Vincent Price) asks Wilson whether the cause is now lost.

I’m not one of those who have the slightest anxiety about the eventual triumph of the things I’ve stood for. The fight’s just begun. You and I may never live to see it finished. But it doesn’t matter. The ideals of the League aren’t dead just because a few obstructive men now in the saddle say they are. The dream of a world united against the awful waste of war is too deeply imbedded in the hearts of men everywhere.⁵

The message was clear. By putting words into the president’s mouth, Zanuck was urging the current generation to embrace Woodrow Wilson’s dream and complete the project he had started.

As it turns out, a number of the men who would take up Wilson’s baton in the 1940s happened to have attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. While they all admired Wilson’s idealism, they criticised his strategy and performance during negotiations, determined not to repeat the same mistakes.

One of those men was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Wilson had appointed assistant secretary of the navy in 1912. In February 1919, FDR happened to be on the same ship as Wilson, who was also bound for Washington, DC. Roosevelt was delighted when the president invited him and Eleanor to lunch in his cabin. Assuming the role of mentor to the younger politician, Wilson explained the importance of the League, ‘The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.’⁶ This conversation transformed Roosevelt from a lukewarm supporter to an enthusiastic Wilsonian internationalist.

When Roosevelt became the Democrat’s candidate for vice president in 1920, he used his acceptance speech to offer public support for the League of Nations.

Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.⁷

During the subsequent campaign, when FDR saw isolationism reassert itself in the American psyche, he decided to soft-pedal his rhetoric. Nevertheless, over the next twenty years, he quietly worked behind the scenes to sow the seeds for internationalism, which he hoped would take root when the circumstances were more auspicious.

That time came during the Second World War, and as president, Roosevelt employed his considerable political wiles to bring the United Nations to life. He applied those same skills to ensure that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were supported at Bretton Woods. Together, these institutions formed the foundation of the liberal international order.

The only gap was the International Trade Organization (ITO), which was left to President Truman, after FDR’s death, to shepherd through the Senate. Lacking the same commitment and political savvy of his predecessor, he failed that challenge. It would nearly take another fifty years before an international trading system was in place, but it would be quite different from the liberal model pursued in the 1940s.

John Maynard Keynes, who would work closely with the Roosevelt Administration a quarter of a century later on the international economic order, was, in 1919, a relatively unknown, although quite senior treasury official. His brilliance as an economics expert, however, had secured him a ticket to Paris, where he advised the British delegation.

A keen observer, Keynes believed that Wilson was out of his depth among the skulk of political leaders from Old Europe. Keynes put Wilson’s failure down to his naivety, gormless idealism, a ‘slow and unadaptable’ mind. ‘He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House’, wrote Keynes.⁸ As much as Keynes deplored Wilson’s ineptitude, he conceded that there was ‘substantial truth in the President’s standpoint’.⁹ If nothing more, Keynes admired Wilson’s ambition to forge the League of Nations, even though Wilson was unable to vest the organisation with the authority it needed to enforce the peace.

Never one to sit on the side-lines, soon after the Paris Conference, Keynes travelled to Amsterdam to meet key European and American financiers. At its first meeting, held on 13–14 October 1919, Keynes proposed an international currency to facilitate international trade, which the League of Nations would manage.¹⁰ But, unable to attract political support, this proposal went nowhere.¹¹

The Anglo-American model of liberal internationalism had more success during the latter half of the 1940s, when the international community embraced rules and institutions designed to promote productive and responsible behaviour among nations. Its success or failure, however, depended on the ability of countries to voluntarily cooperate. What makes this new order remarkable is that it established the principle that all countries, whether powerful or not, would be governed by the rule of law.

Europe showed that another model existed. Its prime architect, Jean Monnet, also happened to have attended the Paris Peace Conference, where he advised the French prime minister.

Monnet’s ideas were shaped by his experiences working for the League of Nations, where he was its deputy secretary general between 1919 and 1923. While Monnet enjoyed some successes, he found the reasons for his failures more instructive.

In Geneva I was impressed with the power of a nation that can say no to an inter-national body that has no supranational power. Goodwill between men, between nations, is not enough. One must also have international laws and institutions.¹²

During the 1950s, Monnet helped develop economic and political institutions that would bring Europe closer together. This experiment took the liberal order into new territory by subjecting nation-states to the authority of supranational rules.

These two variants of the international liberal order represent the first phase of globalisation.¹³

This principle became a guiding light for liberal internationalists who emerged from the Second World War determined to complete Wilson’s dream, but this time around, they worked hard to construct a robust institutional framework around this principle that would willingly sacrifice the purity of the vision against the realpolitik of the times.

Notes

1 D. Zanuck, ‘Preface to ‘Wilson’, in John Gassner and Dudley Nichols (eds), Best Film Plays of 1943–1944 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1945), p. 2.

2 Darryl F. Zanuck quoted by Thomas J. Knock in ‘“History with Lighting”: The Forgotten Film Wilson’, American Quarterly, 28:5 (1976), 523–43, quote on p. 531.

3 C.R. Koppes and G.D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 320.

4 Review that appeared in the Washington Post on 8 September 1944. It is quoted by Thomas J. Knock in ‘“History with Lighting”: The Forgotten Film Wilson’, p. 533.

5 L. Trotti, Wilson. This screenplay was published in J. Gassner and D. Nichols (eds), Best Film Plays of 1943–1944, p. 86.

6 A.E. Roosevelt, This Is My Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 289.

7 F.D. Roosevelt, acceptance speech for vice president of the United States, delivered on 9 August 1920 on front steps of his Hyde Park residence in New York State.

8 J.M. Keynes, The Econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part I: The liberal foundations of globalisation
• Part II: Sovereignty of global markets
• Part III: The human face of globalisation
• Epilogue
• Index