Blessed Among Nations
Eric Rauchway
240 pages including index
published in 2006

The main reason I picked up this book from the Amsterdam library was because I recognised Eric Rauchway's name; a quick google confirmed that this was the same Eric Rauchway who writes on The Edge of the American West, an excellent history orientated groupblog. It's always nice to see somebody who can write clever blogposts is able to sustain that cleverness over the length of a book, as Rauchway did here. It's even better if it's done in a book I actually would want to read anyway, of course.

Blessed Among Nations is an examination of "American exceptionalism", the idea that America as a country is different from other countries in more than the trivial way in which every country differs from every other country. In several ways the United States differ from its peers in Western Europe. It is the largest economy in the world, but depends on investment of foreign labor and capital to keep its economy running. It spent much less on social welfare than other rich countries, its government is somewhat less centralised as well and finally there has never been the kind of broad mass socialist or social democrat movement in the US as there has been in Europe. What Rauchway wants to do in his book is to explain these differences without either explaining them away or falling in the trap that America is special, unbound by rules that govern lesser nations.

The explenation Rauchway reaches is contained in the subtitle of the book: How the World Made America. He argues that the foundation for modern post-world war America was laid in the period between the Civil War and World War I, during the first era of globalisation. During this era America was a favourite destination of both labour and capital, the first in the shape of mass immigration from Europe, the second through investments made by British investers. America was far away enough from Europe not to be sucked into the great power conflicts there but near enough through new technology like the telegraph and the steamship to be integrated in the worldwide capitalist system. What's more, America could make do with a relatively small army and navy as it could shelter behind the might of the Royal Navy as Britain kept the oceans free for their own purposes, while its expension westwards brought the country into conflict with mainly military inferior opponents.

That this westward expension could be done on the cheap, needing few soldiers to defend the settlers nor many administrators to govern the territories, as the settlers could govern themselves while the indigenous population was largely absent, ethnically cleansed from their lands. As the western territories became states the voters their brought their anti-big government prejudices with them, retarding the expansion of the state. These voters didn't look to government to help them, but to stay out of their way as well as protect their priviledges. The westward expension also offered a safety valve for the overpopulated east, as immigration continued to rise and people went looking for jobs elsewhere.

Mass immigration shaped American politics in ways unlike what happened in other countries. Where in Europe you got an organised working class pressuring the state to provide for and help them, in America you get a working class divided by ethnicity as well as the difference between the native and immigrant workers. Westward migration only offered a partial escape for workers priced out of their jobs as in the second half of the nineteenth century there no longer was empty land to settle on. Meanwhile the difference between the working classes and middle classes was larger than in other countries because of this and since voters were overwhelmingly middle class they elected governments that were less than keen to help the working classes but were increasingly keen to protect "real" Americans from the foreign influences of immigrant workers.

The biggest foreign influence on America was capital, not labour however, as the country was the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. Moreover this investment was not directed towards governmental initiative as in other countries like Argentine, but in private ventures. Despite occasional mass defaults British investors kept putting money in all kinds of business ventures. This of course created winners and losers and the latter became powerful voter blocks against foreign influence. Conflicts between old world investors and new world debtors led to the creation of an awkward, haphazard financial system unlike any other, with lots of small, regional banks that could be trusted to respond to local needs as well as large national or semi-national monopoly businesses (railways!) that could be trusted to give investors value for money.

Rauchway's final conclusion pulls these separate developments together. He argues that globalisation on the whole "reinforced Americans' sense of priviledged exemption" as the free flow of capital and labor into the country combined with the ability to use new land in the west did raise wages for large groups of (middle class) workers. These people saw no need to expand state power to protect them from the negative effects of globalision, hence government remained smaller than elsewhere. Meanwhile those who were affected adversly by globalisation pressured the state to regulate capital and limit immigration rather than to provide welfare, with socialism and social democracy largely being seen as something foreign.

While I'm not sure I believe Rauchway's thesis, he puts together a convincing case as he manages to explain what made America different without sounding thriumphalist. Blessed Among Nations is quite breezy and at times a bit too schematic and the one thing I do miss is a more in-depth comparison to similar countries like Britain, Australia, Canada or New Zealand. How much of an outlier is the US compared to those countries rather than more continental ones like Germany or France? Btitain especially would make a good testcase for Rauchway's hypotheses, as it is the one European country that resembles the US the most in its governance and approach towards finance, welfare and capitalism. Like the US it has always been more inclined to trust free movement of capital and labour (as evidenced by the ease with which it opened its borders to new EU member states a few years back) and lagging in its welfare provisions. Like the US it has a labour movement that has historically been much less revolutionary and strong than elsewhere in Europe. It would've strengthened Rauchway's case had he made a more explicit comparison between these two countries, to prove the US was really "Blessed among Nations" or just an outlier amongst a larger group.