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From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe,
the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic "stagflation," political
scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective
it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the
world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It
was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of
"globalization," as networks of interdependence bound peoples and
societies in new and original ways.
The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and
the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements.
Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the
superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental
protection, population control, and human rights attracted
unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international
politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great
revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first
century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market
revolution.
"The Shock of the Global" examines the large-scale structural
upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of
national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first
time an international system in the throes of enduring
transformations.
A Superpower Transformed explores the predicament of American
foreign policy in the 1970s. This was a phase when the dilemmas of
an emerging post-Cold War era buffeted the United States even as
the makers of American foreign policy struggled for stability in an
enduring Cold War. Clashing imperatives made the 1970s a difficult
phase. Amidst conflicting pressures, leaders struggled to devise
strategic frameworks to guide the exercise of American power in the
world. 1970s-era choices nonetheless proved consequential. The
Nixon administration's efforts to stabilize a faltering Pax
Americana faltered, but Nixon's choices ultimately helped the
champions of human rights to wrest control of American foreign
policy away from the practitioners of amoral realpolitik. So too
did Nixon's efforts to reverse the decline of American economic
power help to open the doors to financial globalization, which
accelerated quickly in the years following the 1971-73 collapse of
the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Choices proved
consequential, but American decision makers remained the captives
of unmasterable circumstances, as the oil crisis of 1973-74 made
clear. Coinciding with Watergate, the oil crisis plunged the world
economy into disarray. It also pushed American decision makers to
begin to devise new strategies to manage-or mitigate-the
consequences of economic globalization. Henry Kissinger, who led
this effort, was less successful in his attempts to terms with a
human rights movement that flourished in the mid-1970s. Not until
the inauguration of the Carter administration would American
decision makers embrace human rights promotion as a central task
for foreign policy. Carter's efforts to devise a post-Cold War
foreign policy nonetheless faltered, confounded in the last years
of 1970s by the resurgence of Soviet-American hostilities. While
the Cold War resurged, the new forces of globalization and human
rights that mobilized in the 1970s left the United States a
superpower transformed.
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