0.6 The end of the west  (Page 6/19)

A countervailing trend was triggered by Napoleon's conquests. The Great Powers united to defeat the revolutionary upstart. Napoleon tried to establish dynastic legitimacy through intermarriage with the progeny of older sovereigns, but confronted the collective interest of the monarchies in maintaining limits. A balance of European power, based on state legitimacy and limits, was established at Vienna in 1815 through the diplomacy of Metternich and Castlereagh.

Britain, less principled, more pragmatic and privileged by its insular location, read the lessons of the industrial revolution better than the European continental states. The 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act created a middle-class electorate and the Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1867 and 1884-85 extended the vote to most working men in rural and urban areas. Effective management of the 'modern age' enabled the British monarchy, the division of Parliament into Lords and Commons, the courts, the principles of parliamentary convention and legal precedent and the role of the established church to survive until the present.

The USA, born in and from the concepts of the modern era – though Jefferson fondly imagined the Republic could be founded on educated, taxpaying, rural landowners – had a less fundamental transition to make. It succeeded by continuously redefining the accidents of its character, reinterpreting and where necessary amending the Constitution, while remaining generally true to its founding principles. The traumatic and destructive Civil War defined its modern character as an industrial state; its insular character afforded it in the 20th century the same luxuries as Britain in the 19th, of remaining aloof from continental wars until it could intervene decisively.

Whereas Britain and France, though victorious in the great wars of the 20th century, were devastated in fighting them, the USA emerged stronger from both. Woodrow Wilson sought to create a utopian system after WW I. The League of Nations failed because of the punitive nature of the reparations imposed on Germany and the Nazis’ exploitation of German resentment in the aftermath of economic collapse, to fuel xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Fear of communism also promoted the rise of Fascism and Falangism in southern Europe and the League’s impotence in the face of Mussolini’s aggression against Abyssinia sealed its fate, paving the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the second Great War of the 20th century.

Roosevelt’s entry into the war after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour swung the tide against Germany and Japan. The fact that the war was fought on the territory of others preserved US economic strength. The USA’s dominance in the past sixty years is due chiefly to its having been the architect and constructor of the post-WW II era. The pillars – the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank and the GATT (now succeeded by the WTO) – reflect the values and interests of the country whose economy constituted 50 percent of the global GDP in 1946. Dean Acheson’s choice of the title of his autobiography, Present at the Creation, underlines the point. But Washington was not unchallenged: Stalin’s expansion into Central Europe had produced a peer competitor. Mao tse Tung’s victory over the Nationalists in China, moreover, paved the way for China’s consolidation, even if it required Deng Xiaoping’s reversal of Mao’s economic policies in 1978 to enable its resurgence.