Power in the Age of Globalizations

Globalizations

It has been widely observed that human activities have been increasingly expanded and stretched over the globe since the end of the Second World War. Many have also noticed an intensification of worldwide social relations that link and scale up happenings in different localities. However, “globalization” has now become such a catch-all term in social sciences and the humanities that it risks losing its descriptive and explanatory power. Furthermore, “hyperglobalist” theorists often paint a picture of the triumph of global capitalism, and in particular the flow of global capital, in which the nation-state does not play a significant role and in which the “place” is “flattened” (Harvey 2007: 213). For them, the triumph of the global means the retreat of the nation-state.

Mann cautions against the celebrations of the hyperglobalizers, and insists that so-called “globalization” is not an abstract force, but rather a concrete and polymorphous process that is embedded in territorial boundaries, local economic activities, national politics, historical contingencies, and hybrid cultures. Mann dissects the concept into three components: the globalization of capitalism, the globalization of the nation-state system, and the emergence of and reactions against the United States, the first and only remaining global empire. These constitute the three pillars of the contemporary global order. In viewing globalization as a set of interconnected but distinct global processes, Mann is able to not only give the term “globalizations” more analytical power, but also to reveal different dynamics that often pull in divergent or even opposing directions. For example, while capitalism as an economic system has quickly spread throughout the world without much lasting opposition, at the same time the nation-state as a political system has been strengthened, not weakened. Mann (2011: 146) even claims that “globalization involves the globalization of the nation-state.” Many global problems initially arise as domestic ones, and a number of global issues are negotiated between nation-states. More importantly, this conceptualization enables Mann to look closely at his four principal sources of social power—ideological, economic, military, and political—in their own right, as their globalizations in the second half of the 20th century and up to today have been relatively autonomous. To be more specific, since the end of the Second World War, the process of globalizations has involved “the diffusion of ideologies like liberalism and socialism, the spread of the capitalist mode of production, the extension of military striking ranges, and the extension of nation-states across the world, at first with two empires and then with just one surviving” (Mann 2013: 3).

Mann is certainly neither the only nor the first sociologist who sees globalization as an array of distinct forces and processes at work, but what sets his work apart from the others is his profound knowledge of history and his ability to link contemporary phenomena to their historical origins. With the exception of Immanuel Wallerstein, Mann knows history and global affairs better than any other living sociologist. He is adept at showing us, for example, how different capitalist economic systems have evolved from the early 20th century until today, how the United States became a global empire, how the American empire initially benefited the world but has become increasingly coercive, how liberalism as an ideology became a dominant global ideology, and how the dominant military power of the United States may contribute to its eventual fall.

Capitalism

While rejecting Marxist economic determinism, Mann (2011: 171) acknowledges that “economic power provides the most stably integrated and most steadily developing intensive and extensive set of power relations.” On the global scale, since the early 20th century capitalism has quickly diffused across the world, and has become the most widely adopted and taken-for-granted economic system, despite the intermittent challenges of socialism and fascism. Mann (2011: 22) goes even further and asserts that “capitalism is almost the only game in town,” with the only notable exception being China, a mixture of market economy, state regulation, and bureaucratic capital. A social democrat and a pragmatist, Mann does not want to radically replace capitalism. Insisting on context-specific explanations and historically informed analysis, he notes that there are varieties of capitalism, and that capitalism has evolved through a series of stages in the 20th century and continues to do so today. For example, the rights of workers have greatly improved in comparison with the first half of the 20th century, while governments have played a much larger role in bringing about economic growth, social justice, and political stability.

This does not mean that Mann has lost his critical edge, however. Instead, he acutely notes that the West has never really solved its myriad of problems, despite (and likely in part because of) the lack of any lasting opposition. In particular, Mann is highly critical of the increasing financialization of the economy, or the shift in gravity of economic activities from production to finance. In the West, and in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, financial capital has taken a much greater role in the economic system. Financial markets have dominated the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, and the counterbalancing power of society over the financial sector has been dwindling. In the fourth volume of The Sources of Social Power, Mann provides a detailed historical narrative of how uncontrolled financial capitalism gave rise to the recent and still-ongoing financial crisis. Mann has never denied the advantage of the market economy in providing incentives and increasing productivity, but he warns that in this era of globalizations, financial capital is virtually out of control, and that it is necessary and imperative to exert more regulations from the social sphere.

Furthermore, Mann rejects the capitalism–socialism dichotomy. Socialism (and its big brother communism) as a political utopia has brought disastrous consequences to human beings; however, Mann insists that the political failure of socialism is not the same as its economic failure. As Mann sees it, the government can and should play a positive role in economic development and in domesticating financial capital, in both developed and developing countries. More specifically, a mixed mode of economic development that combines a market economy and state coordination would fare much better than a laissez-faire economic system in which market forces are unfettered.

Mann’s reflections are certainly profound. Indeed, Mann’s empirical analysis is much richer than his conceptualization, and my summary can in no way do justice to his rich historical narrative. Nevertheless, I suggest that that Mann is still trapped by the ontology of capitalism and socialism. Market economy and state regulation are both social constructs and can be seen as elements in a social field, and labeling the former as capitalism and the latter as socialism can only be misleading. What is more, Mann’s analysis of capitalism as economic power is limited in that it ignores the threats that capitalism poses to codependent relations around which human beings and collectivities define themselves (Blau, 2001). In addition, Mann appears to conflate state and society: when he talks about “social forces,” what he has in mind seems to be the state, or the government. A large number of sociological studies have emerged that emphasize the complexity of the spectrum between the state and society (Ben-Eliezer, 1998; Ray, 2012), something which Mann seems to ignore.

Military Power

Mann’s ambitious and anti-deterministic analysis has often been compared with that of Max Weber. Hall (2006: 33) even claims that “Mann is our Weber.” What differentiates Mann from Weber, among many other aspects, is his insistence on the relative autonomy of military power. While the separation of military power from political power has been a matter of some controversy, I believe that it is one of Mann’s major insights. Mann’s analysis of the United States provides the best example of the relative independence of military power—its development has often been different from that of the other sources of power, despite its shifting, history-specific relationship with ideological, economic, and political power.

Among the four sources of power, military power is most destructive and has the most significant short-term effect. At the turn of the 20th century, destructive military power reached a point that transcended the human reconstructive capacity. In particular, the creation of nuclear weapons, which have the potential of destroying the whole world, has profoundly changed the power structure and political dynamics of the world. This is not necessarily bad news. Indeed, at least in the West, partly as a result of the creation of nuclear weapons, what shapes the power map is no longer the intensified military competition between small states that Charles Tilly (1990) observes for earlier periods. Because of the fatally destructive power of nuclear weapons, world leaders have so far shown a fair degree of restraint.

However, the avoidance of the irrational use of nuclear weapons does not mean that the Great Powers, and in particular the United States, have lost their military power in the global system. The American military dominance is obvious, and that status has remained unchallenged for more than half a century (Mann, 2003: 18–48). Indeed, as the United States is declining in terms of its ideological, economic, and political power, it has been using its military power to sustain its dominance. Nevertheless, although the United States has the military power to intimidate and devastate, it has lost its ideological, political, and economic power to rebuild, as shown by the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In terms of ideology, empire has lost much of its legitimacy since the end of the Second World War, and a milder version of nationalism represented by the principle of national self-determination has been widely accepted as the dominant ideology in today’s world (Mann, 2003: 100–122). While the United States has vehemently denied the label of “empire,” its military intervention has not been popular to say the least. Furthermore, due to the emergence of nationalism, the United States finds it increasingly difficult to find local allies for its military actions, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown (Mann, 2013b: 293–310). In September 2013, President Barack Obama tried to convince Congress and the American people to support his proposed military action in Syria, with much resistance. One of the many reasons for the resistance was the lack of credible allies in Syria. Nevertheless, emotion has often overtaken pragmatic considerations, which explains the entrenchment of the so-called “War on Terror.” As Mann (2011: 38) puts it, war has been normalized in American culture. The faith in American power and American exceptionalism has often overwhelmed realistic and pragmatic cost–benefit analysis. While capitalists in general tend to avoid wars, the intrusion of military power into political power has led to costly military interventions. Although war in most cases no longer leads to any positive change, either for the United States or for the country targeted—it neither secures the natural resources needed to sustain its global hegemony, nor wins any legitimacy to support its ideological and political power, let alone the military and political enemies created by the unnecessary wars—the imperialist impulse of the military wing often regards war as a necessary and important component of America’s foreign policy agenda, and often gets the upper hand when facing domestic and political oppositions. A notable case is the 2003 Iraq War, when “hawks” such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld successfully sidelined the moderate “doves” and waged war without sufficient evidence of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. As analyzed by Mann (2013b: 278–301), the military wing and the political wing within an administration often have different preferences and strategies. For example, the “hawks” in the administration of George W. Bush (and the administration of Bill Clinton) showed very little interest in economic imperialism, but were mainly interested in military power. The separation of military power from political power enables us to make sense of the military adventure of the United States in the new century.

The Rise of the American Empire

Empires are one of the most fundamental and important creations in human history, yet the analysis of empires has been for the most part mysteriously missing from mainstream sociological work, especially that in the United States. Mann’s analysis of the United States is among the most nuanced sociological analyses of empires. He defines an empire as “a centralized, hierarchical system of rule acquired and maintained by coercion through which a core dominates peripheral territories, serves as the intermediary for their main interactions, and channels resources from and between the peripheries” (Mann, 2012: 17, see also Mann, 2013a: 213). Mann distinguishes five types of domination by cores over peripheries: direct empire, in which the core conquers the peripheries through military means and incorporates them into its political realm; indirect empire, in which the core claims political sovereignty while the peripheries retain autonomy; informal empire, in which the sovereign peripheries are constantly under pressure and even intimidation, through either military interventions or military proxies, from the core; economic imperialism, in which the peripheries retain sovereignty but are intimidated by the core through economic coercion; and hegemony, in which the leadership by the core over the peripheral sovereign states is accepted and routinized by the latter. The first four types of domination are forms of imperialism, with the level of coercion in decreasing order. Hegemony, the mildest form of domination, needs little coercion.

With this typology, Mann is able to trace American domination in the post-war world across space and time. Despite the denial of most Americans and their political leaders, the United States is the only surviving empire and the only truly global empire in human history. The United States has never existed as a direct or indirect empire—it has never resorted to colonization (its military domination is based on its extensive military bases worldwide without formal occupation)—but has instead existed as an informal empire and hegemony. For the most part, American domination over Europe has been hegemonic, and is evolving into mutual dependence. The domination of the United States over East Asia has transmuted from indirect empire and informal empire through military intervention into hegemony. Over Latin America and the Middle East, the domination has intermittently been informal empire through military intervention or proxies, and in recent years the rule of informal empire has declined in Latin America but increased in the Middle East.

Mann approaches “empire” in a neutral way. Indeed, he explicitly acknowledges that the “world benefited from American hegemony over the postwar economy” (Mann, 2013a: 217). With the leadership of the United States, the majority of the countries in the globe shared in economic growth, albeit to different degrees. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, as the US dollar remained the reserve currency, the surplus US dollars worldwide went to the United States. Ironically, this enabled the United States to increase its level of global domination, including intensifying its military interventions, as exemplified by the Vietnam War. With the leadership of the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shifted their focus from the North to the South, and initiated their structural adjustment programs. The World Bank and the IMF would lend money to the indebted countries, and the latter would in turn accept a series of neoliberal policies designed by the banks. As Mann points out, this form of economic imperialism worked well for the United States, as its practitioners, and even its targets, believed that the relevant policies would bring prosperity to the peripheral territories. In addition, led by the United States, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has put pressure on the developing countries and forced them to open up their markets while the developed countries continue to protect their own agriculture.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States became the only existing superpower in the world, with its superior military, economic, and political domination unparalleled in world history. Against this background, the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush (the latter more dramatically than the two predecessors) expanded the American military presence worldwide, particularly its military interventions against the so-called “rogue states.” Thus, since the late 1960s, the domination of the United States over the peripheral regions has gradually escalated from hegemony and economic imperialism to informal imperialism through proxies, and eventually to informal empire through large-scale military interventions. On the one hand, intriguingly, and out of different concerns (economics versus geopolitics), neoliberals and imperialists formed a strategic coalition that lifted the military presence of the United States to a new level (Mann, 2013: 148–154). On the other hand, in the case of the American empire it is important to distinguish between economic imperialism and military imperialism. While originally linked and often forming an alliance, each has its own logic of development that is not necessarily linked to the other.

The Decline of the American Empire

With its enormous military expansion that extends beyond the support available from other sources of power, the United States has been trapped in its military imperialism, and, as predicted by Mann, the decline of the American empire is inevitable. While there are no real geopolitical challengers, the economic, political, and ideological power of the United States has been in decline and will not be able to sustain its global military presence.

Economically, the United States reached its peak of economic imperialism at the turn of the 21st century. With the structural adjustment program, the dominance of the US dollar in global reserves, and the unparalleled technological innovation system, the economic power of the United States steadily increased from 1970 to 2000. However, largely due to its own dysfunctional political system, America has found it difficult to address its economic problems. The soaring government debt, underinvestment in infrastructure, rising inequality, consistently high jobless rate, lagging secondary education, and decaying manufacturing all have afflicted America and show no prospect of solution in the near future. The financial crisis of 2007–2009 further brought to light the economic danger of neoliberalism and its inability to solve the crisis. Despite this predicament, the unequal distribution of power between the rich and the poor makes it difficult to reverse the trend. The weak collective power of the poor and weak class consciousness further clouds the prospects of a long-term rebound of American capitalism. In the short run, the United States is still the power-house in the world economy and will retain its formidable power in the near future. But in the long run, with the inevitable end of the US dollar as the single reserve currency and with China taking the spot of the largest economy in the world, American economic imperialism will end.

Politically, as a pluralist, Mann firmly holds the view that power should be balanced among its four sources and shared among the groups wielding power. However, economic power has increasingly encroached upon and corrupted political power, and is undermining the latter. Because of the failure of American military imperialism, the United States has become rather unpopular in the world and has been losing allies and local supporters. In addition, the polarizing two-party political system is weakening America’s political power. As I am writing this essay in October 2013, much of the US federal government is shut down as a result of the impasse in Congress between the Democrats and Republicans. This senseless ideological and political “crusade” sent 800,000 federal employees home without pay. Indeed, the US Federal Government has shut down on 18 occasions since 1976. Moreover, as a macro background, with the geopolitical rise of East Asia, eventually the United States will have to share its political power with Europe and the emerging countries represented by China.

Militarily, while the might of the United States has been unchallenged since 1945 and will remain dominant for the foreseeable future, it has been misused since the Vietnam War, and in particular since the 2000s, with its unfortunate adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Americans and their political leaders tend to be overconfident about their military power, which has often led to the loss of a realistic sense of the purpose of war. Military missions often grow out of a strong sense of responsibility from those in Washington, and Americans feel responsible for not only “policing the world,” but also for bringing capitalism and the free market to the developing world. Military actions often have unintended consequences, such as making more enemies, which has been a consequence of the War on Terror. Furthermore, the War on Terror is bringing down the economy of the United States. To a large degree, Al-Qaeda’s mission to “bleed” America financially is succeeding.

Ideologically, the United States is trapped in the ideology of American exceptionalism, anti-statism, neoliberalism, and anti-intellectualism, which only keep it from solving its economic and environmental problems. While rhetorically the Obama administration has addressed all these issues, little substantial progress has been made. In addition, multilateralism is rising, and groups such as the G20 and BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—are playing increasingly significant roles. While there is unlikely to be another superpower in the 21st century, the visible decline of the American empire is only a matter of time.

Global Warming

Mann identifies nuclear weapons and global warming as two truly global crises that could change the trajectory of human civilization, but whereas world leaders have behaved quite rationally with respect to nuclear weapons, he is much more concerned with the looming crisis of global warming. When Mann was working on the first two volumes of The Sources of Social Power, the matter of climate change understandably did not come to his mind. But when he began to turn his attention to the 20th century, and in particular to the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, global warming became one of Mann’s greatest concerns. Currently, the overwhelming majority of scientists in relevant fields endorse the position that global warming exists, and is mainly caused by human activities (Cook et al., 2013).

However, there are a series of obstacles to an effective solution to the environmental crisis. First, the impact of global warming is distributed unevenly across the globe, both geographically and economically—countries that are rich and are not immediately affected by global warming do not share the same level of incentive as other countries. Second, human beings tend to be near-sighted, which makes it difficult for us to sacrifice short-term interests and find long-term solutions. Third, those from the developed countries, and even many from developing countries, have been used to a material life and culture based on high carbon dioxide emissions. Fourth, many human activities that contribute to global warming have their roots in capitalism. A fundamental solution would require curbing the autonomous economic power of capitalism, and especially the vested interests of different economic groups. This appears to be an almost insurmountable hurdle. Fifth, global warming is also a political issue in need of compromise both domestically and globally. Domestically, the United States and China are the largest polluters in the world, but the polemical nature of Washington politics impedes the progress of any bill that attempts to substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions, while China’s obsession with and reliance on economic growth makes environmental protection low on its list of priorities. In particular, today the United States produces more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than any other country, but environmental matters are often “hijacked” by political considerations. Globally, dealing with global warming requires cooperation among nation-states on a truly global scale, but politics has been largely “caged” by the nation-state, which adds extra difficulty in reaching a global consensus.

Mann is quite pessimistic about the prospect of solving the environmental crisis, as this would require a very high level of international agreement and cooperation, which has never existed before, and the differences between developed and developing countries appear to be mounting rather than fading. As he notes, unless “the United States, Europe, and the BRIC countries at a minimum took very similar actions of effective mitigation, it is unlikely disaster could be averted” (Mann, 2011: 152). Mann predicts that it may take a global environmental disaster, as a tipping point, to awaken humans to the need to reduce the power of both capitalism and the nation-state and to take serious actions. Our success in creating material wealth may eventually bring a man-made disaster upon us. This is certainly a gloomy picture.

Conclusion

Mann’s work in the last decade greatly advances critical sociology, not merely because of the range and significance of contemporary topics he covers, but more importantly because of his ability to analyze today’s capitalist word from a historical perspective. He impressively uses his relatively simple and parsimonious model of the four distinct sources of power—ideological, economic, military, and political—to make sense of the complex world, trace its historical evolution, and investigate connections among macro-level institutions. His work is driven by a deep concern with human suffering and emancipation, and exemplifies the core values of critical sociology: freedom, equality, justice, solidity, and plurality.

Aside from the aforementioned minor quibbles, my major complaint concerns what is relatively lacking in Mann’s analysis—while Mann is highly critical of the missteps in the democratic states, especially the United States, his criticism of totalitarianism and authoritarianism is surprisingly thin. For example, while Mann does not completely neglect the problems that China has encountered, his account of China is simply too rosy. While the “China model” has been praised by many Western observers, a number of observers and scholars have changed their opinion and started doubting the sustainability of China’s economic growth (Krugman, 2013). Indeed, in the last two or three years, the BRIC countries have all faced some form of serious economic challenge, and their rise may not be as smooth as predicted by Mann. More importantly, the social and political suffering of the Chinese people during the Mao era and today, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Three Years of Great Famine, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the environmental disaster, does not receive much attention from Mann. In brief, I am not as convinced as Mann that China’s rise will be smooth and peaceful.

Notwithstanding, we should judge a work by what it sets out to achieve alone, and what Mann has achieved is stunning. As Perry Anderson (1992: 86) remarks on Mann’s first volume of The Sources of Social Power, “All criticisms of The Sources of Social Power are bound to have something of the cat looking at the king.” This assessment applies to the works reviewed in this essay as well. Critical sociologists should welcome such an accomplished scholar, and celebrate such an encyclopedic body of work.