Decades after many scholars and intellectuals tried to completely disavow “American exceptionalism”, I can’t help but think that there remain a few things about American society and politics which are (relatively) exceptional. One of them is the citation and use of a written constitution and its sometimes-falsely-represented history of long standing as an arbiter of contemporary political decisions. Another is a basic idea of national identity that is intrinsically pluralistic, one that can’t really be squared with indigeneity, even if the different circumstances of arrival have been encoded into racial and ethnic hierarchies. American nativism whenever it has erupted more virulently has been a more naked grab for domination within the citizenry of the United States rather than a comprehensive mythology of national belonging. It demands a level of historical and ideological delusion that goes well beyond what is needed to sustain a heart-felt belief in a deep-rooted “Germanness”, “Frenchness” and so on.
However, in many—most—respects the United States is a modern nation-state in a world full of them. As a sovereignty, it’s older than most, though its antiquity requires a bit of Ship-of-Theseus backdating, e.g., much of its present territory was acquired through imperial conquest and settler expansion. The ways that Americans have historically regarded the founding and growth of their republic as exceptional are the #1 example of the exceptionalism that really does need to be left behind.
The remnant force of that kind of exceptionalism is what allows so many public discussions of policy-making in the United States to be convened in peculiarly short-sighted ways that make perfectly ordinary and plausible options available to any nation-state with substantial resources seem exotic or impossible. Public health care is the most prominent example, but there are many others. For example, Americans throw away food scraps (in large volumes), largely into landfills. South Koreans don’t: for twenty years, South Korea’s food waste has been recycled into biofuel, fertilizer and animal feed. That is not necessarily a result of some unusual wisdom on the part of South Koreans: it was a result of the relatively small square mileage of the country and the terrain, which meant that landfill waste had to be nearby human residences. (In the U.S. and some other industrialized nations, the issue of residential proximity to waste and pollution is simply handled by choosing poor and relatively powerless communities to suffer from proximity.) Reading about South Korean policy makes it clear enough that there’s nothing especially daunting about designing a system like theirs, but anyone advocating in the U.S. would doubtless be told that this was an expensive, technically daunting and politically divisive idea and that we should settle for something more incremental, like individual tax credits for suburbanites who buy 65-gallon composting bins.
I think more importantly, outside the frame of conventional policy debates, Americans are the most prone to think that the deep fundamentals of the contemporary global system are natural, inexorable and immutable. But most contemporary national populations are exceptionally well-aware that borders, mobility, rights, political systems, and civic norms can be profoundly altered, and not always violently or chaotically. The most successful examples of territorial change—the basically peaceful splitting of post-Cold War Czechslovakia or the basically peaceful integration of West and East Germany—quickly drop out of headlines and out of reference. More potently, though, many Americans not only forget that their current territorial borders are only sixty-five years old, but also that only 150 years ago, most of the global map was in flux in profound ways. Civil wars, revolutions, border wars, wars between sovereignties, made nations in the 19th Century. So did cultural movements, migration and civil institutions. Empires and global wars made many of the rest.
One reason that both elites and mass populations will fight—or sometimes hope to avoid a fight—over national belonging and territorial possession—is because in modernity, citizenship and security have always been profoundly associated with fighting. American policy-makers and American citizens alike still tend to treat wars of territorial conquest and the mobilization of violence to assert sovereign authority as abnormal, and questions of citizenship or residential rights as generally settled. (Listening to some American commentators on the right and the left, you’d think that immigration as such is only a major policy problem for the United States—or that harsh limitations on who may live, work and join a nation are only at stake in American life.)
I think a comparative frame helps with policy design, or it should. That was always the technocratic dream of modernity, really: nations, states, counties and municipalities serving as experimental laboratories, with the best policies being evenly disseminated across borders for the good of all. There are good reasons why that was never as good a proposition as it sounded—not the least of which is that local histories and local cultures are just different in important ways—but any American writer who takes policy seriously should always have to reckon with what is demonstrably possible—or even demonstrably easy—beyond American borders.
I do not observe that the more fundamental structures of the contemporary world-system are mutable with the same advice in mind, as advocacy. I do observe it to say that there is almost nothing we can or should take for granted about the sociopolitical disposition of the global future. The people who argue that progress marches on and that we are in a never-ending wave of material and sociopolitical change for the better not only find ways to overlook global-scale dangers, they tend to make projections (as futurists often do) either from the last sliver of time available to them or to perform a savage reduction of wide variability and contingency in modernity to a single best-fit line that they take to be the inevitable totality of our tomorrows.
There is as much reason to think instead that many millions of people who live in one place today might be in motion tomorrow, and not all of them for reasons we can now readily envision. That borders that seem fixed today might come undone tomorrow. with surprising ease. That political dispensations and cultures that seem deeply established might convulse, wither or mutate, whether under pressure from movements or for far less clear reasons. And all of this less about a movement from one state to another in some clear transition, but in a muddled and contradictory way.
It’s easier to stay with advocacy—with the clear way such conversations presume that change is a choice and that we in the conversation are the choosers. But one of the dividing lines between pundits and observers is that those who have the patience to watch and the humility to understand sometimes end up with a far keener understanding of what might happen, of what is happening, and at that point and only at that point are able to essay a plausible opinion about what ought to happen.
Even though the US added new territory only 37 years ago (pop quiz!), in a very real sense the borders of the country have only changed in minor ways in 170 years, the formal structure of the government has changed little in that same time, and the wars and revolutions of the 20th century were visited on the inhabitants of the US hardly at all. So the American belief in the immutability of the world-system etc, which is definitely real, also has a fairly strong basis for Americans.