Daniel J. Sargent

The work is a bit of a hodge podge but the 70s are a crucial decade and thus well worth considering for their insights. The introductory essay by Ferguson helpfully wades through the complexity reflected here in this work. "In terms of political violence and economic instability, the 1970s were an unexceptional decade." According to the Harvard-based historian, the chaos of the 1970s was largely imaginary, a delusion produced by an outbreak of moral panic in universities.

“The period's dire reputation may owe more to the bad experiences of Anglo-American academics, caught between inflation and student radicalism," he writes, "than to any measurable increases in global disorder." "The combination of double-digit inflation and public-sector pay freezes seemed to threaten a generation of dons with proletarianisation . . . Professors could not even rely on their investments to compensate them for sharp declines in their real pay." Among these panic-stricken professors, Ferguson singles out A J P Taylor, whose opinions and finances he examines at some length. "For someone of Taylor's age, the trauma of financial crisis was in some measure compounded by the strained relations with students (not to mention teenage sons) that characterised the period after 1968." Taylor believed British capitalism had hit the buffers, but in Ferguson's view this perception was highly subjective. "Taylor was much too gloomy about the west's prospects: it was Deng [Xiaoping] who got it right." Aside from the Anglo-American academy, there was no crisis in the 1970s.

The essays were chosen and grouped into five sections: “Into an Emerging Order”, “Stagflation and the Economic Origins of Globalization”, “International Relations in an Age of Upheaval”, “Global Challenges and International Society”, “Ideological, Religious, and Intellectual Upheaval”. Charles Maier discerns a “crisis of industrial society”; Daniel Sargent simply follows contemporary political scientists in diagnosing an intensified global interdependence and an accordingly diminished influence of the United States; Alan M. Taylor attempts to calculate the intensification of globalization; and Vernie Oliveiro analyzes the importance of multinational corporations and their relation to the nation-state. On the other hand, four essays examine the transformation of the international order through the emergence or rising importance of non-governmental, transnational actors – also a favorite topic of contemporary political observers. Glenda Sluga suggests that within the UN a new conception of globality emerged; Michael Cotey Morgan examines the role of NGOs for the “Rebirth of Human Rights”; Erez Manela looks at the eradication of smallpox as a case for the “rise of global governance”; and J.R. McNeill offers an unsurprising overview over “environmentalism and international society.”

The volume neither offers coherent theses nor does it discuss the different assessments explicitly. Were economic globalization and global interdependency the most important new developments of a period that narrowly circumscribed the sovereignty of the nation-state (Sargent, Alan M. Taylor)? Or was it rather a period of the reassertion of state sovereignty (Adelman, Oliveiro)? Neglecting each other’s work, many authors (over-)emphasize the importance of their research topics tending towards the use of superlatives. Is Kissinger really “the most controversial figure from the 1970s”, as it seems to Jeremi Suri who has spent years working on Kissinger? We are left wondering what was “most important” in the 1970s: Deng’s visit to the United States (Ferguson, p. 20), the oil crisis (Sargent, pp. 49f.,Kotkin, p.80), the economic crisis (Talyor, p.97), the Vietnam War (Nguyen, p.159), nuclear parity with the Soviet Union (Gavin, p.189), or the transformation from an international to a world or global society (Sluga, Manela)?

Cf. http://www.currentintelligence.net/reviews/2011/8/22/the-shock-of-the-global-the...
William I. Hitchcock, H-Diplo-Roundtable Review, vol. XI, No. 49 (19.11.2010), . (06.07.2011)
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/04/1970s-taylor-ferguson
http://ussc.edu.au/s/media/docs/publications/10_Sheehan_Liberation_Redemption.pd...… (mehr)