The End of Pax Americana

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoki Sakai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Young People ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Political Economic

In The End of Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai focuses on U.S. hegemony's long history in East Asia and the effects of its decline on contemporary conceptions of internationality. Engaging with themes of nationality in conjunction with internationality, the civilizational construction of differences between East and West, and empire and decolonization, Sakai focuses on the formation of a nationalism of hikikomori, or “reclusive withdrawal”—Japan’s increasingly inward-looking tendency since the late 1990s, named for the phenomenon of the nation’s young people sequestering themselves from public life. Sakai argues that the exhaustion of Pax Americana and the post--World War II international order—under which Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China experienced rapid modernization through consumer capitalism and a media revolution—signals neither the “decline of the West” nor the rise of the East, but, rather a dislocation and decentering of European and North American political, economic, diplomatic, and intellectual influence. This decentering is symbolized by the sense of the loss of old colonial empires such as those of Japan, Britain, and the United States.

Choice in the West

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Working Out

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.

Realignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Great Depression

The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed arguments from social reformers and artists and economists that the new, spontaneously evolving society was deficient. It worsened poverty, and it impoverished the soul. The tool of political regulation, exercised in the growing political power of the emerging organization known as the nation, was called in to polish the rough edges of the self-regulating society. As time went on, political regulation gradually came to be seen as the default, and self-regulation needed to be justified. The chapter particularly emphasizes the growth in such thinking among socialists and progressives in the United States and Western Europe. The catastrophe of the Great Depression, combined with admiration for a Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany, where political regulators said they were rationally designing a better society, meant that by the onset of World War II, this presumption was firmly in place throughout the West.

scholarly journals Theological Studies Eighty Years Ago

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
David G. Schultenover
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of

At the outbreak of World War II, the synchronicity between the history of the Society of Jesus and the history of the West led to the founding of Theological Studies. This article, based on archival records, narrates the backstory of the journal’s founding. In so doing, it answers the questions faced by the founding figures: Was a professional theological journal in English needed at this moment in history? Should and could the Jesuits rather than some other institution in the United States publish such a journal and maintain it at the scholarly level required?

Geriatric Capitalism

2018 ◽  
pp. 580-606
Author(s):  
Matt Vidal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Instability ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Economic

This entry presents a variegated capitalism analysis of Atlantic capitalism. We trace the development of the national accumulation regimes in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the Great Depression and World War II, policymakers, reformers, and business leaders explicitly crafteda framework for regulating North American and Western European capitalism . The national Fordist accumulation regimes embedded in thisinternational framework offset the stagnationist and crisis tendencies of capitalism for around two decades, seeing high profits and strong, wage-led growth. The crisis of Fordism that lasted through the 1970s—declining profits and stagnation—marked the transition to what we refer to as the geriatric stage of post-Fordist Atlantic capitalism. In response to the crisis, capital and the state engaged in widespread restructuring. The post-Fordist regime of internationalized competition and finance generated a return to destructive, wage-based competition. The core-periphery nature of the enlarged, neoliberalized European Union and the precarious dependence of the United States on China have exacerbated global political economic instability. The post-Fordist stage is characterized by slow growth, economic instability, and increasingly damaging economic crises; wage stagnation, rising inequality, and labor market precarity; and political polarization.

Aversion and Erasure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Dean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This book offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. The text explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. It argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of “Never Again”: as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are. The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. The book also argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis.

Secret Peace Overtures, the Holocaust, and Allied Strategy vis-à-vis Germany: Hungary in the Vortex of World War II

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Borhi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The U.S

This article explores how the U.S. and British governments' wartime strategy against Germany affected their policies toward Hungary, a country that had allied itself with Germany when World War II began. U.S. and British leaders wanted to facilitate an Allied landing on the French coast by diverting German troops to other theaters, thinning them out as much as possible. To this end, the United States and Britain were cool toward Hungary's peace overtures in 1943 and were willing to brook Germany's military incursions into Hungary and Romania in 1944 because German troops operating there could not be quickly redeployed to the west. Germany's occupation of those two countries led to the destruction of what remained of the once-large Jewish communities there, a tragic price that Allied leaders were ultimately willing to risk. The failure of Hungary's secret peace overtures also contributed to the later Soviet occupation of Hungary and the grim fate that befell the country after the war.

World Englishes and the American tongue

English Today ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric A. Anchimbe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Technological Strength

Are the other varieties of English under threat from the United States? This paper reviews the place of the United States of America (her English and culture) in the contemporary world, especially with regard to the spread and use of the English language. World War II and its aftermath raised America to the height of political, economic, commercial, technological strength which saw the transformation of English from being a reserve of the British Isles and their queen, to a code of international linguistic transaction. English today is no longer just spreading world-wide, but is overwhelmingly adopting a predominant American touch, given the pride and prestige of the American lifestyle and pop culture. This paper therefore observes that in a quite foreseeable future the world Englishes will gradually subsume their heterogeneous identities into the sweeping current of the American variety of English.

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