Benefits of Size versus Benefits of Local Rule

Anthony questioned my idea, expressed in a recent post, that the changing balance between imperialism and nationalism was one of the trends that led to the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. I think he is right that my argument was flawed. Clearly the great political empires were broken up in the 20th century. Think of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and of the English, French, Portuguese and Japanese empires after World War II (not to mention the end of Dutch imperial rule of Indonesia by the Japanese invasion of Indonesia in World War II); think also of the end of the Russian Empire at the dismemberment of the USSR and Warsaw Pact. Surely the people in the newly formed nations wanted home rule, but the imperial powers tended to see empire as an expression of their own nationalism. The key trend was perhaps a reduction in the power of the imperial centers to impose power relative to the power of the imperial peripheries to demand self rule.

Incidentally, the United States might be seen as an economic imperial power, especially after World War II when U.S. GDP was estimated to be half of the global total. If that is true, now that the U.S. GDP is about one-fifth of the global total, comparable to that of China and less than that of Europe, one might conclude that economic imperialism also diminished in the second half of the 20th century.

Larger political entities are likely to be more powerful militarily; they can provide economic advantages by providing larger markets. On the other hand, smaller political entities can be more responsive to local preferences. Voluntary federations such as the European Union and the British Commonwealth as well as various common markets represent efforts to strike appropriate balances between aggregation and local rule during the 20th century. Perhaps another way to look at the trend is as a trend away from forced union toward voluntary partial union.

From the point of view of the United States, the complexity is obvious in working out a political system that allows

• for local school boards and for federal efforts to assure a national, globally competitive workforce, 
• for local control of family law and for federal efforts to assure that citizens can move freely from state to state, or 
• for local areas to secure the economic benefits of government installations and for federal efforts to aggregate facilities to achieve economic efficiencies.

While once the means of doing so was for a country with better weapons, better transportation and better communications to conquer less well equipped people and impose unification by force. Perhaps the key transformation has been in the invention and dissemination of better institutional mechanisms to achieve benefits of size without losing many benefits of self determination on the local level. Certainly the evolution of these institutions is still going on, as the current efforts to provide a common economic policy to secure the Euro in Europe shows.

In terms of Gaddis' book, The Cold War: A New History, the end of the Cold War was marked by dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia, and of the Communist block; those are perhaps the most available memories relevant to the topic of this post for many of us. These were examples in which the ability of confederation was incapable of holding together nations which sought self rule.

However, the end of the Cold War was also marked by the reunification of Germany, and led to the affiliation of many central and eastern European countries with the European Union. In these cases the (mostly economic) benefits of larger political entities led to aggregation of states into larger entities.

Earlier in the Cold War we saw the Korean War and the Viet Nam War fought between those who would reunify countries divided at the end of World War II and those who would keep the nations divided. Of course, these conflicts were also between Communist and anti-Communist governments, but also between governing elites in the north who wanted to extend their domains and those in the south who wanted to keep their domains. The Chinese invasion of Tibet might be seen as still another Cold War example in which a Communist government sought to extend its rule over another people who wished for an independent state and who were anti-Communist.