(Or, On the Dangers of Wearing Two Hats at Once)
As an adjunct faculty member at CSU San Marcos, I wear many hats in the classroom. The two I wear most often, however, are teaching U.S. foreign relations in the history department and teaching globalization in the global studies program. This semester, as it happens, I’ll be wearing both hats. So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about globalization and its impact on diplomatic history.
We diplomatic historians presume that globalization should have a positive impact on the field. Way back in 2001, Thomas W. Zeiler spoke of the benefits of globalization for diplomatic historians. “Globalization should not be alien to us,” he argued. The framework of globalization “might help diplomatic historians to reintegrate themselves into the mainstream of the historic profession (in which we were once the leaders), end our incessant insecurity, and address topics of concern to the public and academics alike.” It poses an opportunity, he asserted, “to latch on to the phenomena of our times and place history in a new context.” Zeiler concluded by urging us to “heed the words of a foremost corporate globalizer and ‘Just Do It!’”[1]
And I did. I was a convert to the idea of globalization. I heeded the call three years later by Michael Hogan and others to embrace globalization and its benefits for diplomatic history, to recognize that we’re in the midst of a new and very different paradigm shift in our field as a consequence of globalization.[2] I thought long and hard about the need to redefine, redescribe, and, as Akira Iriye insists, “reinvent” ourselves accordingly.[3] And, yet, when it comes to bringing this paradigmatic shift into the classroom, I have to confess that I must be doing it wrong. Or more discouraging still (but please don’t tell my fellow converts) I’m not convinced that everyone else is doing it right.
In preparing two courses that I was to teach simultaneously—the United States in the Cold War Era and Global Studies—a lack of congruity became apparent. I sought to make a more explicit, deliberate connection between the content of each course. How enlightening it was going to be, I thought, to be able to explain the history of the Cold War using globalization as a framework of analysis. How illuminating to reposition the Cold War in a more dynamic, international context. I assigned new readings that I was confident would provoke new kinds of discussion about the impact of the Cold War, for example, on the Global South. But the truth is that in the process of teaching about the United States in the Cold War, it quickly became apparent that finding ways to “globalize” that story is much trickier than one might expect. To decenter the role of the United States in the Cold War—as so many of my esteemed colleagues encourage me to do—is highly enticing.[4] But to actually teach Cold War history with globalization as the driving force posed challenges for my students that I had not anticipated.
Put simply, I have found it to be extremely difficult to give students a clear, correct and accurate sense of what happened in the East-West standoff without treating Uncle Sam as one of the leading characters. It makes for a much more complex and compelling drama to bring onto the Cold War scene the numerous other actors—from Iran to Cuba to Vietnam—but as teachers, we risk the students’ losing the plot entirely if those minor (“minor” in a global sense) actors upstage the central protagonists of the global conflict.
The reason, it seems to me, is that the internationalization of diplomatic history and the globalization of diplomatic history are not the same thing.[5] There’s a good justification for the creation of global studies as a separate field of study. Just as diplomatic history and international relations share much in common but remain fundamentally different disciplines, so too should it be with the study of globalization and the history of U.S. foreign relations.
In our haste—and I have found it to be an almost desperate sense of “now or never!”—to inject globalization into the field of diplomatic history (as though doing so will postpone an inevitable death), we have tended to assume compatibility between the two disciplines. For example, it seems to me that the benefits of globalization as a framework for scholarship—often described as “tying the world together,” or, as Marilyn Young puts it, “bringing together accounts most historians tend to keep separate”—are real, but that framework is often unwieldy in the classroom, and students fail to appreciate it. [6] In fact, my students are often confounded and distracted by the tangential accounts, and further confused by the “interconnectedness of it all.” It is nearly impossible for them to see the forest from the trees when everything is taught in this organic framework of “globalization.”
A paradigm shift in the field of diplomatic history as a consequence of globalization may indeed be on the horizon (or, as so many are claiming, at our doorstep). And we are right to extend an “open door policy” to its influence, as Hogan so eloquently urges us to do.[7] But sharing ideas between disciplines does not (and should not) obliterate the lines of distinction between them. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that globalization is knocking on our diplomatic history door, but there’s no reason to behave as though it is a force that will pound that door down.
In fact, as the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, if we know nothing else about globalization, what we do know is that very few can agree upon what it is. According to Manfred B. Steger, a leading scholar on globalization, “there exists no scholarly agreement on a single conceptual framework for the study of globalization. Academics remain divided on the validity of available empirical evidence for the existence and extent of globalization, not to mention its normative and ideological implications.”[8] If the thinkers on globalization cannot decide upon an agreed conceptual framework, perhaps we diplomatic historians ought to be a bit skeptical about employing such a framework, or at least about employing it hastily. Some caution is all the more sensible in light of claims from some quarters that globalization has already passed its sell-by-date, and may even be intellectually rotten. [9]
And so, I’ll continue to wear two hats: one for diplomatic history, and the other for global studies. And, at times, the two might look a heck of a lot alike. But I intend to wear the hats at different times. To wear them at the same time is not merely awkward and cumbersome, it’s downright confusing to my students. It’s also unfair—even misleading—to my history students of U.S. foreign relations to force accommodation to the phenomenon of globalization, merely because (or precisely because) the phenomenon has become an ideology.[10] We ought to contemplate far more carefully how and why globalization impacts our understanding and teaching of diplomatic history. In order to do that, we have to first identify spaces where the two meet, and acknowledge where they do not.
“Just Do It!” urged Zeiler at the start of this century. Absolutely. I’m doing it. You do it. Just don’t do it for the sake of doing it.
[1] Thomas W. Zeiler, “Bernath Lecture: Just Do It! Globalization for Diplomatic Historians.” Diplomatic History Vol. 25, No. 4 (Fall 2001), 551.
[2] Michael Hogan, “’The Next Big Thing’: The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age” Diplomatic History Vol. 28, No.1 (January 2004): 1-22.
[3] Akira Iriye, “The Transnational Turn,” Diplomatic History Vol. 31, No. 3 (June 2007): 373-76.
[4] I think immediately of Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, ed. Decentering America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
[5] Zeiler acknowledges the distinctions between “internationalism,” “interdependence,” and “globalization” in his treatise on globalization for diplomatic historians. Zeiler, op. cit., 530. Among the leading scholars who are helping us to more carefully unravel the relationship between globalization and internationalization is Peter Katzenstein at Cornell University. Katzenstein defines globalization as “a process that transcends space and compresses time”; and he defines internationalization as “a process that refers to territorially based exchanges across borders.” Whereas globalization is “novel and transformative,” internationalization describes “basic continuities in the evolution of the state system.” Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 13.
[6] Marilyn B. Young, “Globalization and America’s Wars.” Diplomatic History Vol., 29, No. 2 (April 2005): 353-55.
[7] Hogan, 20.
[8] Manfred B. Steger, Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism (NY: Roman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 43.
[9] See, for example, Rawi Abdelal and Adam Segal, “Has Globalization Passed Its Peak?” Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb 2007; Steven Weber, et al. “How Globalization Went Bad,” Foreign Policy Jan/Feb 2007 and Pankaj Ghemawat, “Why the World Isn’t Flat,” Foreign Policy March/April 2007.
[10] In an effort to understand the promises (and perils) of globalization, a number of outstanding scholars have pointed to this aspect of the phenomenon as a major downfall. Nobel Prize-winning author, Joseph Stiglitz, for example, criticizes the ways in which “an agenda of globalization” has been promoted by international institutions without sensitivity to the conditions on the ground. William Easterly makes a very strong argument along the same lines in “The Ideology of Development,” Foreign Policy July/August 2007.
Tags: globalization
Kimber Quinney
Kimber Quinney is a full-time Lecturer in the History Department at the California State University, San Marcos. She holds an MA in international relations from the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., and a PhD in history from UC Santa Barbara. Her reseach is focused on U.S. policy toward postwar Italy and the transition from fascism to democracy. Her current research explores the impact of ethnic indentity on American foreign relations, including especially the role played by Italian Americans in the making of U.S. foreign policy toward Italy in the early Cold War.