PETRA GOEDDE This broadening has created greacer diversicy and increased the common l rural radius. But it has also created friction and cultural fragmentation as tjiti'- ■ ent cultural groups vie for dominance in local, national, and global settinjr,, | |j. emergence and evolution of global cultures since 1945 thus followed ceniripct t] as well as centrifugal trajectories. Global cultures were marked by homoi^.m7il. tion as well as heterogenization in the major urban centers of the world. (;„]. rural interaction produced universal standards of conduct, rights, „i:id v;.|,les while at the same time they revealed the particular local interpretations oftlm^ values. And finally those engaged in cultural exchange negotiated and continue to negotiate between the demand for conformity and desire for difrert-nce. D„'siii[t; an ever tighter network of global exchange of people, goods, and ideas, the culm ral landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century might be more mulfi".ia-u:J than it has ever been. •[ FIVE ]• The Making of a Transnational World Akira Iriye •[ 678 ]■ ■ Introduction IM EARLY June 1940, as war had come to Western Europe, and the people of Paris—those who had not left for other parts of the country—braced themselves for the impending German invasion, the Paris Opera gave its scheduled performance of Jules Massenet's opera Thais (1894), a story of a religious zealot who tries (i- convert a profligate courtesan, only to be enticed and ensnared by her. Merely .1 landful of people—no more than fifty—came to see the opera, among them a young diplomat who worked for the Japanese embassy.1 He had come from Japan to Paris to study the philosophy of Blaise Pascal at the Sorbonne, but when war broke out in 1939, he was recruited by the embassy to reinforce its staff. He served : in the post for four years before leaving for Berlin when the allied powers success-sfully launched their counterattack in Normandy in 1944 and pushed German forces out of France. Before he left Paris, he visited various parts of France and ran into prison inmates who had been released and forced to march on the Nazis' orders—the phenomenon of what a later historian would call "death marches."2 The marchers included men and women of many religions and nationalities. The diplomat never forgot his encounter with these people who had hitherto been hidden from public view. In May 1945, when Germany surrendered, the Japanese diplomat, his colleagues, their families, and several other civilians (including a female violinist who had been studying and giving concerts in wartime Europe and was to become world famous after the war) were all detained in Bad Gastein, Austria. But the State Department in Washington decided to move such personnel to the United States, and as a result they were brought over to Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, in August, where they were confined in a hotel for several months before being sent back to Japan toward the end of the year.3 A story like this diplomat's may be understood in a number of contexts. At one level, of course, it is a story of war in which nations try to destroy and defeat one another. International relations inevitably impact on personal lives, and the diplomat's experiences were undoubtedly shaped by the vicissitudes of the Second •[ 68. ]• AKIRA IRIYE World War. But to end here would be unfair, both to the individual and i ( h, lt!1 It would amount to defining history on the basis of national and intern.i:iiin 1 ^ affairs and to consign such personal experiences, along with those of hn.n|lL.Li ' of millions of others, to a mere footnote. But what the diplomat saw, di.l, n.i thought about gains significance if it is put in other contexts, such as the history of music, the movement of people across borders, or encounters amorg iiidivJu-als of different backgrounds. These themes do not always fit into the lai ^ ■.n,, „f war or diplomacy, but they may have a legitimacy and an integrity of their :i. To trace some of these experiences would be to add another layer to t he h i. ,<, , „[ the world. This chapter seeks to add such a layer, what may be termed a tram atu n.il perspective, in our understanding of global developments since the eiid ol Jit Second World War. Transnational histoty may be understood to :nea . 11n, J, into the past in terms of phenomena and themes that cut across national boundaries and in which non-national actors (such as nongovernmental orgarrizaiuiu., and business enterprises) and entities (civilizations, races, for instance) play cru- -cial roles. In such an approach, individuals and groups of people bccur.k- involved in history not primarily as members of a national community but throng.* other identities (such as migrants, tourists, artists, students, missionaries) 1' lii interactions with one another differ from the usual "international relations' in which states engage with one another in pursuit of some national objectives, .'.nil they create their own networks and bridges that are not identical with terriioi ul boundaries defined by nations. Transnational relations, then, are conceptual!* distinguishable from international relations, and transnational affairs from national affairs. Transnational history so understood has existed for along time. A spectacuUi example is the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road, connecting the Levari: with East Asia, in which people of diverse races and religions met and traded.' 1 i the modem world, however, particularly since the eighteenth century, the nana, became the key unit of human activities, first in Europe and then in other paiti of the globe. Individuals and even non-state actors were now enmeshed within territorial states. Nevertheless, global transnational connections were stead ih being built throughout the nineteenth century, primarily thanks to techiiolocc.il innovations such as the telephone, the telegraph, the railroad, and other mc.mi THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD 0f faster communication and transportation. Economically, a global market was (.-merging- Even so, nation-states retained their predominant roles as definers of history, in that how nations behaved, both internally and toward one another, defined the ways in which people lived. A transnational world was in the making by the beginning of the twentieth century, but its momentum was frequently lost because of the emergence of centralized states and of the rivalries among nations, in particular among those that were called "great powers." One way to comprehend world history after the Second World War, then, would be to see how nations and international affairs fared and how, parallel to these phenomena, transnational forces developed. Did a transnational world that was making its appearance around 1900 survive the turmoil of national and international crises that dotted world history during the first half of the twentieth century? How would the world of 1000 compare with that a hundred years earlier in that regard? Here we will trace the transnationalization of the world, as it were, by focusing on a few themes—transnational encounters, activities, and thoughts—to see whether and how a more transnational world had developed by the first decade of the twenty-first century. Transnational encounters—people meeting people across national ^boundaries—can, of course, take place in war as well as in peace. The young Japanese student who first went to Paris to study French philosophy in 1934 had (encountered a wide range of people from other countries, in Japan as well as else-■ where. Once in Paris, he, his new wife (who also came from Japan), his children, iand other members of the family daily met and interacted with students and scholars from many countries as well as with neighbors, local store keepers, and even maids. When war came, some foreign acquaintances (from the United States, for instance) steadily disappeared from France, while new ones, especially from Germany, arrived. Through the family albums and letters, it is possible to trace the changing patterns and contents of transnational encounters. After the end of the European war in May 1945, these encounters became much more restricted and, unlike earlier, most of the people the Japanese diplomat and others like him had contact with were Americans, both in Europe and in the United States. Such a story will, of course, have been duplicated millions of times through global transnational encounters before and during the war. It will be impossible to be numerically precise about the phenomenon and to say with certainty how much -f 68z 1- •[ 683 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE larger such circles of cross-border meeting grew after the war, but we1 111 "1J va-ci some trends and characteristics in the post-1945 period. Transnational encounters would be of only statistical interest, ho^m.- , j did not produce, or were not part of, transnational activities. InoKvu,,^ fr ^ \ different countries could run into each other without producing any last 1 g t[J'c. * It is when they decide to participate in some common undertai.in.Jv_rilll4r- \ from engaging in a conversation to eating the same food, from eii|o,ni> cadi'l others artwork to organizing themselves to promote a cause—that u. ns.i.itifinal' encounters begin to take on significance. Historically, the best-tan i\\ n . ]M,,ri:e I of transnational activities would include efforts to share and spread .cli.^i n-i. ATS\ ideas. To go back to the Japanese diplomat's example, his parcni, ,-, ;;„ck; Friends (or Quakers) as a result of their encounter with American Qiu] u , ,N |10; had come to Japan in the early part of the twentieth century. Iherc ,;f uuir«: 1 a long history of religious accommodation as well as persecution, sto, ie<-1 ■ \ \A-individuals and communities of different religions sometimes come tcgataJ and develop an ecumenical environment, while in other instances they confwind one another, even through violence. We may also add quasi-religiou.- or iu v -the awareness of linkages across borders and, ultimately, a sense of sh manity, a faith that people can indeed communicate with one another re i ull. of their diverse identities. To focus on transnational phenomena and ttar.ics hi reviewing the past is, then, to consider whether the world became more, or k-v, transnational during a certain period of time. The development of transnational consciousness may be examined through-some personal experiences. For instance, in studying Pascal in Paris during rhc 1930s, the above-mentioned Japanese diplomat and his advisors cv.cmpliliul the idea that philosophy, of whatever origin or character, has a meaning that transcends its national origin and that, more broadly put, scholarship kr.ows m> national boundary. Actually, some professors at the Sorbonne initially tried to discourage the future diplomat, saying that a quintessentially European thinLr like Pascal could never be understood by an outsider. But others were mute open-minded. A shared mental universe was created between them and the su -dent, and indeed between the seventeenth-century French philosopher aw.' ,s twentieth-century Japanese youth. By then, of course, scholarly transnationalism had been well developed in the West. Even though cultural nationalism sometimes stood in the way, the idea that in scholarly and academic undertakings national identity mattered much less than personal qualities (intellectual aptitude, willingness to learn, receptivity to unfamiliar ideas) had provided the basis for scholarly and academic exchange programs across national boundaries. Soim. of the philanthropic foundations established in the United States—such as tin 1 Riickefefler Foundation (founded in 1909), the Carnegie Corporation (1911), „• J the Ford Foundation (1936)—explicitly promoted educational and cultural tu-hanges to foster what may be called transnational awareness. Where politics stood in the way of such transnationalism—as happened when foreigners and s |L.iVS were expelled from German universities and research centers after the Nazis t uric to power—many were able to go elsewhere to find a more receptive environment, as exemplified by universities and colleges in the United States that opened their doors to exiled scholars. Intellectual transnationalism was challenged by, but did not completely succumb to, political anti-transnationalism. Likewise, the Japanese diplomat who went to see an opera in Paris in 1940 J;spite the impending crisis that was about to envelop the city may be said to have exemplified transnational consciousness in the field of music. There was a shared universe of music that defied national and international "realities." The Japanese violinist who traveled with him across the Atlantic in 1945 was one of -many foreign musicians studying in Europe before and during the war, and in mcIi instances, too, it may be said that both they and their teachers believed in onusical transnationalism, as did German musicians, many of them Jewish, who ^continued to conduct and teach far away from Europe during the 1930s and beyond.6 They shared the idea that art (in this instance music) was timeless whereas politics was temporary and transient. The view that art is eternally and universally valid would contrast with the narrower idea that each country and each culture had its own musical heritage that could never be transmitted to, let alone understood or shared by, others. Many states, most notoriously Nazi Germany and its ideologues, sought to promote their own music (as well as other art forms such as paintings and cinemas) to enhance national prestige. But such attempts did not stifle a transnational appreciation of culture independently of national policies or nationalistic propaganda. Yan Nis study of Japanese film in China during the 1930s shows that, despite the obvious foreign policy implications of the making of movies by Japanese directors on the continent, their cooperative Chinese counterparts and the enthusiastic Chinese audiences knew how to separate propaganda from art, how to find room for artistic pursuits even while they were vehemently opposed to Japanese rule. In such instances, too, artistic transnationalism existed side by side with, and ultimately survived, political vicissitudes.7 T 686 1- ■[ 687 ]■ AKIRA ik.iye In the case of classical European music, an extremely important 'eiVi transnationalism, it was only around the turn of the twentieth crnfii i .. , i 1 11 .'"'-Ji'sMca Gienow-Hecht has shown, that it came to be appreciated very scriou\h \\- th United States.8 There was, as she notes, a shared sensibility, a comir.on vmotio that bound Europe and North America together. What aboutthe re-,- 0|"tj * world? Classical music arrived in China in the 1920s when an orchcsiir. -c )s t. tablished by European residents of Shanghai, but at first only Westerrc.* \-< • to hear its performances.3 (The Chinese were not even allowed inro the conccr hall.) Western melodies were introduced to Japan in the late nineteenth airur ■ as part of the school curricula and military training, and Japanese traveler* sonc- times went to concerts and operas in Western cities. Nagai Kafu; the I.sp.iiH'su novelist, is said to have been one of the first Japanese to attend the Merii.politar. Opera's performances in New York in the early years of the century ami ;n writ- about them. He found it a deeply moving experience and lamented that in hj4 own country there was nothing comparable, appealing to universal audiences."1* Outside of classical music, it is well known that jazz, whose origins v, e v u an-uin- tinental (African and African American), gained its popularity abroad ilnrirn the 1920s, including in the Soviet Union, which often invited African Ar.iaii.111 musicians to perform.11 Although the war put obstacles in its path, music,]' u. n\- nationalism never disappeared. For a vivid example, when Moscow was under siege by German forces, musical scores for Dmitri Shostakovich's Sy/tipl.wr 1 Xc - were smuggled out of Russia and played ail over Europe and North Ajiietioi. Operas like Richard Strauss's Capriccio and Benjamin Britten's Peter (jrin. t - \. 1 it composed and performed toward the end of the war and had little or r.otl nnj; t., do with nationalistic emotions but appealed to audiences all over the wo-11 vu their universal themes—in Capriccio the delicate balance between mus.c * nc literature, and in Peter Grimes the problem of alienation and social os: . ■". When in Capriccio the heroine sings that the arts are for the whole, woild . rJ that the opera has no ending, it was as if Strauss, despite the fact that ?o : . ■■■ he never distanced himself from Nazism, was transmitting the messaged trLin^- nationalism to a world devastated by war, that the military conflict v,oi M ii'cu come to an end, as did all temporal affairs, but that art would live on forever. Transnational consciousness may be fostered by literature even in ti:'.ie* or war. While patriotic writing was encouraged, Paul Fussell's study shows elicit:n THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD United States many writers spoke the language of universal humanity.12 In I nun. in contrast, novelists and poets adopted a nationalistic stance and spoke •\citedly of the nation's new mission to expel the West from Asia. As Donald Kei ne has documented, their language was narrowly nationalistic and parochial, id marry of them consciously rejected cosmopolitanism, considering it an out-,! ,rd Western import.13 It is interesting to note, on the other hand, that many .\inericans, including Keene himself, gained an appreciation of traditional Japa-iics: literature during the war. Roger Dingman has pointed out that some US naval personnel who interviewed Japanese prisoners of war discovered facets of I mese culture that intrigued them and decided, then and there, to study the ,L1liject further once the war was over.14 That, too, shows a transnational awareness, die view that certain cultural legacies are of value to the whole world. Somewhat ..iitferent in setting but no less transnational were literary works published in the • : ited States by Chinese American writers. As Xiao-huang Yin has shown, by the J930S several generations of Chinese in the United States had been writing stories, both in Chinese and in English, and the writers, while uniformly conscious of their Chinese background, had begun to strive to transcend their alleged Chineseness. They were influenced by the literary styles and experiments of other American writers and were coming to think of their work as both Chinese and American, a worthy addition to world literature, what in our context could be called transnational literature.15 Lastly, we may consider transnational memory. When the Japanese diplomat reminisced about the war, his personal memory was as much transnational as national, and he shared it with friends and acquaintances in many parts of the world. The same would be true of virtually everyone throughout the world who was old enough in the early 1940s to retain some memory of the global conflagration. Each individual involved in the conflict, whether directly or indirectly, would retain personal memories of the war, and the bulk of those memories might be framed within national dramas, the stories of being drafted and sent to the battlefield, killing enemies so as not to be killed by them, staying at home and being engaged in arms production, in teaching, and other pursuits to enhance national power, being invaded by enemy forces, seeing their homes destroyed. Such memories, while differing from individual to individual, also constitute national memories.16 There are memories shared by all Americans, all Chinese, and so •[ 6S8 ]- ■[ 689 ]• AKIRA IRIYE forth, and these national memories are transmitted from generation m .., cion through history education, books, historical exhibitions, and so f\ i1 Can there be such a thing as transnational memory? May Ant^nuiiis w Germans, or Chinese and Japanese, be said to have certain wartime mem ints, common? Or, if not wartime memories, do they have a sense <-r ,\ ,1 ui. t| lst whether going back for centuries or with regard to more recent cxpe, iu iL) s slll.j as September n—the terrorist bombings against the United Staus in ^, study of transnational history would have to raise such questions, "i, J . ,ii memory constitutes an essential part of history. To ask whether rhue i SLlL |, thing as shared transnational memory, then, requires dealing with -f un-l.ii il -tal methodological issues in studying transnational history. Here Mar ■ and Kiran Patel have made important suggestions in their edited vd.irm, l.nio-peanization in the Twentieth Century}1 They, and the contributors to :1k hook argue that there is such a thing as a "community of shared memory": hu is u,,ns. national, at least in the European context. Europe for them may be clelmul ,is such a community. This memory includes what Europeans remember ofili,. pjsr. ranging from calamitous wars to cultural achievements. Both negative and positive records are part of the shared memory, and all Europeans "remcmbei' \ hem as the key to their identity. Can there be other communities of shared .:ki ioiv How about East Asia, South Asia, the Islamic Middle East, Africa, ui Sm.th America? Does each of such geographically specific regions also constitute .1 /one of common legacies? For that matter, can North America and Europe be ah< ■> saiil to share historical memory? Is there a Pacific legacy common to all countriLs an j regions that border on the ocean? Or, to get away from geography, can races, religions, or civilizations share memory? If Western civilization, for ins:.:;ic", m:\ Lfc. defined as a community of shared memory, how about other civilizations. Ultimately such questions lead to shared global memory, or com iron hui l in heritage. Do all people, regardless of where they live or their national, rcli^ii-us. or racial identities, understand themselves as belonging to a community w tli -i shared past? Is there such a thing as global history—or, to be more precise, global world history, the history of the world in which globally shared devcopm- nrs are the focus of inquiry? It may be suggested that for those old enough to have experienced i ii- bi. "iid World War, there is a shared memory across national or other borJiT*. K> h<- A Macedonian soidier carries an urn with the ashes of Macedonian Jews during the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Skopje in zon. This and other Holocaust memorial museums in various countries show how a human tragedy is shared worldwide. (AFP/Getty Images) sure, even today, nearly seventy years after the end of the global conflict, the war tends to be remembered in nation-specific contexts. Personal memories are given meaning as part of national memories. Still, the very fact that the act of remem-berine the Second World War cuts across national boundaries makes it a trans- o national experience. More specifically, certain generations in different countries may remember the war in their own specific ways. Those born before 192.5 or thereabout were old enough to be directly involved in the war, the male half of them having been combatants, while women experienced the conflict at home. This generation is now in their eighties and nineties, but regardless of where they live, they seem to retain the memory of the wartime experiences as the defining moment of their lives. In contrast, the majority of those who came into the world after 1915 but before 1940 seem to have their own memories of the war years that are somewhat different from their elders'. It may well be that there is such a thing as a globally shared generational memory. Whether or not the postwar generations have also developed transnational memories is a question that will be addressed in 690 ]• 691 AKIRA IRIYE various places in the subsequent sections. Regardless of which gene-. tin i 0|1 belongs to, however, there may be such a thing as transnational mem , individuals, whatever their nationality, age, or other identities, join in tive effort to understand the past. "When a teacher in an Illinois midd .■ v|11)f|i asks his students to discuss how President Harry S. Truman made .he J ,,, to drop atomic bombs on Japan, and whether he might have chosen not io Ji. s, both teacher and students are engaged in memory sharing, an activity ih.ir Li-(W no national or other bounds. When the composer John Adams and the librei'-w Peter Sellars produce an opera—Dr. Atomic—in which the singer p],t\.rg role of J. Robert Oppenheimer remarks, seconds before the dcnin::rnn t.f i.iv first nuclear device over New Mexico, "There are no more minutes, n i i.it, ,. seconds! Time has disappeared; it is Eternity that reigns now," they ai ■ iimliii" people of all countries to ponder the coming of the atomic age.18 Histor_c.il uiun-ory is being shared transnationally. A key framework for this discussion will be how, through such e\pc.-icnu^, transnationalism as an idea and an attitude developed after the Sciomi World War. The term transnationalism is used here rather than the more ri riilicion.il cosmopolitanism and internationalism, concepts that are no less valid but perhaps more appropriate for other, less transnational ages. Internationalism may be seen as an idea of fostering cooperation among nations through inter-state cooperation, and cosmopolitanism usually refers to a state of mind among educated elites that seeks to appreciate different national traditions. Transnationalism i, an ideology, in contrast, underlies the efforts by private individuals and noii-s-atj actors in various countries to establish bridges toward one another and to engatji-in common activities. It reflects, and strengthens, attempts at understanding historical as well as current developments as being made up of cross-bonl-i pi l nomena, shared concerns, and global human perspectives. t i, ". Postwar Transnationalism l MAY begin our inquiry into postwar transnational history by going back zo '-he question of whether there are memories of the Second World War shared iss national boundaries. Books and essays continue to be written on the war; i hi- overwhelming majority of these focus on one belligerent or another. At the e time, however, attempts have been made to consider the experiences of the as a global, human event in which moral dilemmas and tragic outcomes tran-ided national boundaries.15 The development of a transnational perspective he war constitutes an important aspect of post-1945 history. It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, in particular during the war crimes trials, separate national memories were pitted against one another. As German and Japanese military and political leaders were brought to trial, sharply contrasting histories of the prewar and war years were presented, prosecutors representing the victorious nations seeking to construct a past in which Germany, Japan, and their allies had engaged in a conspiracy to rule the world, while the defendants argued on the basis of a different historical memory, in Germany's case going back to the injustices of the Versailles peace settlement, and in Japan's even farther back, to the nineteenth century, which was recalled as the time when Western powers began their subjugation of Asia. And there were differing readings of international law. The United States and its wartime allies, for instance, cited the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 as well as later agreements such as the Geneva Protocol of 1915 and the Pact of Paris of 19x8 to accuse Germany and Japan of having committed crimes of war (such as the mistreatment of prisoners of war) and against peace; the defendants' lawyers cited the same laws to argue that the prosecuting countries had themselves violated international law in attacking and killing unarmed civilians through their strategic bombing raids. Quite apart from such differences, the two sides represented conflicting memories of the past. Although in the end memories held by one side were rejected and war criminals were punished, these contrasting memories would remain. Even among the allies, •[ 693 ]• AKIRA IRIYE sharply divergent national memories of the war soon came to be constructed with Americans and Russians, for instance, producing separate accounts of |, victory had been achieved. Nation-specific memories have not disapjn.ait.il u-'l will continue to be preserved through history education, national museum* i, other means. At the same time, however, there were innumerable instances of tiarsji,ltl(1| ally shared experiences in the immediate aftermath of the war, expem i Ll_, .-n would eventually come to be remembered by people of victorious and di IL,, (i countries alike. Take, for instance, the story of Anne Frank, who had been '\u\. den in a house in Amsterdam to protect her, as she faced deportation and .11 t„,n death because she was Jewish. Her memory became widely shared when her Ji.,r. was translated shortly after the war and read by hundreds of thousands, k ,i si u-ply by those belonging to the wartime generation but by the younger jyiMa. -,n as well. Likewise, Viktor FrankFs account of his internment at a twi < ,m i-which he published as a book in the early 1950s, served to arouse a global aw aie-ness of what had gone on in the camps. (It is reported that when it was public wit in Japanese translation in 1956, it immediately became a best seller and went through twelve printings in two months.20) Even before the 1960s, when a large number of books on Nazi Germany, in particular its persecution of Jew;, be.;. 11n be published, it may be said that, quite apart from political phenomena like the war crimes trials, something like a transnational memory of the Second Wdd War was already in the making. Concerning the Pacific theater of the;\var, it would take much longer to develop a transnationally shared memory of the a. 1, which went back to 1931 and lasted for fourteen years. There was no con ntajvi 1 to Frank's or Frankls writings to be shared across national boundaries, and cm.ii to this day, the failure to generate a shared community of memory militates against the establishment of an Asian counterpart to the European Union, .is we will see. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that began the Pacific phase of the Second World War almost instantaneously generated a shared memory frs;- :he American people that would continue for generations without evoking its coun: terpart in Japan, although in time veterans from the two countries would begin meeting together to commemorate the event.21 About one of the momentous events in the Pacific War, the dropping of atomic bombs, there was at first little information, shared or not, about the secret weapon. Americans and Japanese, as •[ 694 ]■ THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD well as people all over the world, of course wanted to know the impact of the ,lt<>mic bombs on cities and individuals, but US occupation authorities did not it first allow civilians even to interview the victims. But the situation began to chai1^ after John Hersey's Hiroshima was published in the United States in 1947. (It had first appeared as an article in New Yorker in August 1946. ) Hersey was 0ne of the first to visit Hiroshima, and his report almost overnight made nuclear war part of global consciousness, to such an extent that within ten years after the war a powerful transnational movement began to emerge against further uses of such weapons. Such consciousness grew in both sides of the wartime conflict and became a powerful instrument for reestablishing a sense of restored humanity. " *-"•- ."' '"Tie 1 liliiillllilllllllS ! SiIIIIp II. Ir .'"1 111 m /iluStö* tum! KB IP' t ■ft'- : 11111 1 WMwm- ^SKgEStm WmlBiB 'Hit; atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6,1945. It not only led to Japan's surrender but also signaled the beginning of a nuclear age. (IWM via Getty Images) ■[ 695 > AKIRA IRIYE Similar observations may be made about the occupation of Genii Japan, and other countries by US, USSR, British, French, Chinese, \ni\ forces. At least as far as Western Europe and Japan are concerned, tl exist a shared memory of the occupation in which the occupied popiil.u l.u tan) ^ into contact with Americans, British, French, and other occupiers, and in \\ l^ich ' both sides gained a knowledge of each other more closely than in ilu tl ^, -i^"" same would not be true of Germans and Russians. As Norman I i shown in Russians in Germany, the Russian zone of occupation wa- ,11 i tl)nj cive to creating a shared memory, certainly not a sense of transnational In i,ur. ! ity.13 Even here, however, the fact remains that, like the war that-the* h id |,ist; • fought, the Russian occupation of East Germany, Poland, Huulmii, ane ■ k lier j nations was an experience shared by the same generation in all ihe.*c l<.umiu<, I How an occupation experience may have given rise to transnational ton- i sciousness may be illustrated by taking a closer look at the American oceun.i .ion i of Japan. Transnational and transcultural encounters through militaryoLc'iiiy. ; tion were particularly revealing in Japan, where most of the occupy ins; 1 ne^s ' were US soldiers. Aside from American missionaries in Japan anc Jap;\iiL-L iimmigrants in the United States, there had been little direct enco.:n~cr beaten j individual Japanese and Americans before the war. This changed literal \ o\lp- ■ night, however, upon the arrival of US occupation personnel in Japan in Auguw ! 1945. After the surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri in Tok'.c B.iv on i 1 September z, American GIs became a common sight all across the countn. Thvir primary task, of course, was to ensure peace and order, but in many othci .ispcctt as well the occupiers came into closer contact with the occupied. A^ in Gei 1 i.inj, , women often were the conduit between the two groups of people. .-V N oko | Shibusawa has shown, from the very beginning GIs were involved with j "p.ini'se J women, initially mostly in prostitution but in time involving other types o- association.24 Of such associations, postwar reforms were of primary sign i i~. iv.i ill '1 he j occupation authorities under the command of General Douglas M.icAril'.ui vine ; determined to remake Japan, putting away its militaristic and aurhonran.'n p i"t! to turn Japan into a modern democracy. MacArthur's staffincluded a nui ibii nl officers who had been active in the New Deal era or otherwise invoh ed 11 milmI and cultural changes in the United States. They were eager to help transfoi iv pan, and in this process they came into contact with a large number ol J. panesti THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD h men and women, who would join them in the endeavor. It may well be that ■h occupiers and occupied shared a "memory" of the 1910s, which both saw as -lug been a promising period for democracy and peace for Japan, before it nched an aggressive war in the following decade.15 Women's rights were a rticularly significant issue inasmuch as Japanese women had not enjoyed the ■x to vote and had been reared in the traditional ethos of submitting them-„ Ives to their husbands and parents-in-law. The new constitution guaranteed ier equality, and soon women became active in Japanese politics as well as ular culture and education. Americans came to know a number of these nen, and collectively they transformed their image of Japan, paralleling the ;lopments in Germany. &I1 these may still be considered aspects of a geopolitical phenomenon, the ipation of Japan by the United States and its allies. The transnational connec-s in postwar Japan were not exactly between equals. Nevertheless, occupiers and the occupied gained knowledge of each other to an extent never seen before the war, and some of them developed transnational linkages that would in time form a basis for their shared memory of those years. A significant number in the US occupation personnel were attracted to the traditional Japanese theater, ithe kabuki and the no, and became their enthusiastic introducers to Western audiences. Others translated modern Japanese literary works, thus incorporating them into the corpus of world literature. Many army and navy officers would :in time go back to the United States and contribute to the inauguration and strengthening of Japanese studies in the West. This was not something that had heen anticipated in the official guidelines for the occupation of Japan and may ithus be seen as an important feature of transnational connections emerging out of the Second World "War. The same thing can be said of the Japanese reception of American culture. Apart from baseball, a limited number of Hollywood movies, and architectural gems (such as the Imperial Hotel) designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and other Americans, the average Japanese person's knowledge of the United States had been extremely limited before the war. Now, however, schools began to teach something about democracy, English textbooks introduced scenes from American life, scholars belatedly began to study US history and politics, and ordinary citizens came into contact with American food, such as canned corned beef, which was 696 ]■ 697 AKIRA IRIYE introduced to the Japanese diet for the first time thanks to MacAi rj^ i mination to prevent a famine that threatened the country after rhv wai | )3 in fondness for American food, just like a similar phenomenon in (iujii.h-j Austria, may initially have been a product of occupation policy, but u .iiiriiv&i the occupation and was to grow stronger in the subsequent years l'jJi.Lpi LV(;, more instrumental in familiarizing the Japanese with American Si,. , SM,, aii ture were the Hollywood movies. As Hiroshi Kitamura shows ir \)rL..»„, uK ligbtenment, there were clearly political objectives behind the choice, oi lii.m-to be screened in postwar Japan, whose leaders also sought to tak- advjnu rt Hollywood productions to make their task of reforming the counm L,i,-S1*'i But one should also note that the viewers who went to see these iiio\ks ^ an excellent view of American home life, food, clothes, and all o'hei .i-pei tsof middle-class living that would in time become a transnationally sli iuc' \i-,nii, ,>| the good life to aspire to. For the generation from whose ranks the bulk of the US occm a.ion p. sun-nel came and who, in Japan, experienced the occupation, there seems to.hiv btcn generated a memory that is still fresh today, the awareness that their underbuilding of US-Japanese relations goes back to the immediate postwar years. Ilu foi-mation of such memory is one of the most significant aspects or transnational consciousness. To the extent that those involved in the occupation bequ \.dicd their memories to those who came after them, much of how the postwar genera-." tion came to understand contemporary history would hinge on the trans.r sAcm of these memories. How do the post-1945 generations in both the United m-.r« and Japan, and by extension elsewhere, view and react to their elders' transnational experiences? Do they share the memories of the older generation? Oi k.iw they developed their own understandings of the recent past? These are e\tu- v J { important questions that remain to be explored. Migration as a Shared Experience Also important to transnational consciousness during the immediate postwar-years were the experience and memory of cross-border migrations. The immediate postwar years are recalled by millions of people as having been the time when they crossed borders, often several times, before finally settling down n ..n ■[ 698 ]• THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD - W honies' or SomS backto their original lands. Such movements by definition "wV'ite transnational individuals, but whether they share positive memories of Xd experience varies from people to people, from circumstance to circumstance. •Cfill, the story of postwar migrations seems to constitute an important part of shared global memory. At the end of the Second World War there were roughly two billion people on the planet, of whom about eleven million, or a little over 0.5 percent, were outside jKcir own countries."' Strikingly, the number of such people—migrants, broadly put—did not diminish but increased drastically after 1945. Because the Second World War had involved far more military and civilian casualties than ever before, it left a staggering number of families who had lost someone in the war, and joine of these families joined other migrants in search of a new home. Moreover, in many parts of the world the war's end signaled the beginning of conflict within empires where anticolonial forces sought to stop the colonizers from returning to the prewar systems of imperialism. In such areas violence continued unabated, in the process creating large waves of migrants. All in all, several years after 1945 were a period of unusual global migrations. Migrations, of course, did not end then but have continued to this day, but the immediate postwar years were unprecedented in that the bulk of migrants consisted of involuntary refugees, whereas after the 1960s a growing number of them would be associated with global economic opportunities. The key question in this context would be to what extent migrations were .viewed as shared experiences that constituted an important aspect of the postwar world. It would seem that the experiences of Jewish people came to be widely viewed as one such example. Arguably, Jews had been among the most transnational of ethnic communities, and so it was a brutal irony of fate that under the Nazis their transnationality had been confirmed in the concentration camps where they awaited their death. In the process they encountered many nationality groups—German, French, Polish, and others—almost always in an environment of mutual incomprehension and horror. This became even more pronounced in the last months of the war when Jews and other prison inmates were released and forced to march to uncertain destinations. They were not to be liberated by invading enemy forces, so ordered Adolf Hitler, but were to be taken to other (in many instances undetermined) destinations. In the process of their "death •[ 699 ]• AKIRA IRIYE marches," they were taunted, abused, and even attacked by civilian (j;. t, others who came into contact with them. The fact that a significant inii.<„ r, the death marchers were non-Jewish made these marches an even i no en,K, n transnational phenomenon.28 (It should be remembered that the v.c.iht, ,■' ' Holocaust and targets of other exterminations included Roma or V,,, , . well as communists, homosexuals, and the mentally ill—all of whom o m|t ,| be considered transnational humans.) From such tragic circumstances, a sense of common humanity cuicr.r.-c, * some of the survivors recounted their experiences, making the whole w ... |JA. of them. The tcim genocide came to be used to describe what had hcui d.,i.,_ tl, them, the underlying assumption being that what the Jews and otbu s Y j i,,jn„ through constituted a denial of their humanity, that the crimes conn ) ct,,i against them amounted to the refusal to concede human existence i. ■ a < it lm , of the world's population. As Bruce Mazlish has noted, the term humanity was first used during the First World War to refer to the killing or hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey.29 The term was adopts, .u die Nuremberg Trials to indict the Nazi atrocities committed against Je 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the Tin tions was the final step in establishing the transnational concept of hum ii'u Quite clearly, then, the suffering of Jews and others had generated a nc\ ness, a transnational memory that went beyond separate national i.u etlunc memories. It may also be added that many Jews who had left Germany and oilu- p.u t\ of Europe after the Nazis came to power had had their own transnationa ences that, put together, came to constitute an integral part of postwa-1 Some left for Palestine and other destinations as early as 1933, while othc. until the Rekhsprogromnacht (which Nazi propaganda called Reichskristt of 1938 forced them to leave. Their destinations ranged from Britain to the I '.unJ States, from Argentina to Manchuria, but the sum total of their migrate \n.-came part of the saga, the experiences of migrants who included many 01 lui n>,. But the situation there was even more serious because of the ambiguous fro-miers. Furthermore, even among the Muslim majority in Pakistan, those in the Bengal region remained restive, seeking to build their own country, separate from Pakistan. In Ceylon, in the meantime, where the majority were Buddhists, the ~uiik comprising nearly 20 percent of the population and embracing the Hi ndu \.irl 1. likewise sought to follow the principle of national self-determination. of those who were unwilling to be ruled by the majority crossed the sea to enr;-i- and live in southern India. In such circumstances, it would be difficult to -tchi. ;i community of shared memory in the region. And yet, to the extent that these" issues were all aspects of post-1945 history, there was something transnatifii.-l about their experiences; they were not unique to South Asia but became pare of similar developments elsewhere. Nationalistic antagonisms, as it were, were trans-; nationalized. Ir remained to be seen whether, in such circumstances, some overarching transnational perspective would in time develop. Even more serious in this regard was the question of memory in Jn If seine. The birth of Israel and the consequent struggle between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are, of course, key events in post-1945 international history and in Middk- •[ 702 ]• istcrn history. But we can also put them in the framework of the search for a ■s|1fli-ed past- Both Jews and Arabs had a long sense of history going back for centu-:■■ but unfortunately there was little that was transnational about their under-, nding of the recent past. Before the war there were fewer than 400,000 Jews i, 1'alestine; by the time the new nation was proclaimed in 1948, the number ■ ,j. increased to 650,000, one of the most remarkable transnational migrations ■ ii modern times. In contrast, there were more than one million Arabs in Pales-i-nr in 1945, of whom 600,000 to 700,000 were expelled from their homes dur-jnii ]nv tory. The Palestinian Arabs, too, had their own transnational links to Muslim* elsewhere. The majority of them were citizens of their own states, soirx Hd 111,1 Turkey), some new (Pak istan, Malaya, Indonesia). The new Arab sta ;s sri.li a^ Libya, Syria, and Egypt refused to recognize the state of Israel. The ser >'s of mill-tary conflicts between these two was an important chapter in postwa. inu 1,1 tional affairs, but in the history of transnationalism, at this time the worldwide community of Arabs and Muslims was less successful than the Israelis and |L wi 1 n imparting a sense of transnational solidarity. Why this should have been the case is one of the most critical questions in the history of the world in the immediate aftermath of the war that awaits investigation. Despite all such contrasts, however, refugees, forced migrants, and sta.eks'-people were not just statistics but individual humans—living at the very lr.oniei it when the notion of "human rights" was being enshrined as a basic value in the postwar world. No matter where they lived, they had to be cared for, at lei»i in principle. Their livelihoods, their health, and their education were matters of public concern, not merely private affairs. Although these problems were pi im ir-ily within the jurisdiction of separate states, and thus belong more in nar i-iul than in transnational history, the whole conception of "welfare state" was bjco 11-ing transnational. As Rana Mitter has shown, hundreds of thousands of wai time refugees in China, expelled from their homes during the war with Japan, confronted the Nationalist government with a major task, which it undertook within the framework of the incipient notion of the state s responsibility for societ;, \ well-being.34 From Europe to North America, from the Middle East to East Asia, the immediate postwar years were notable because public welfare, just like human rights, was globally seen as a matter of public policy for all countries. And w.i-'n governments failed to fulfill their obligations in this regard, international oigan- THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD IBIStlSiil Unauiiiui :.'i-d immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border during the night, April 1951. Migrations, both legal and illegal, have been a major transnational theme in world history since the end of .the Second World War. {Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) zations such as the UN as well as a host of private nongovernmental bodies, could step in and undertake the task. Because migrations were by definition a transnational phenomenon, it is not surprising that migrants' well-being became the concern of international entities, most notably the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Here, too, was another instance where a transnational world was being constructed. Intellectual and Cultural Exchanges It is possible to raise the same kinds of questions about the transnational understanding and memory of the Cold War as those discussed in connection with the •[ 704 ]• ■[ 705 ]■ AKIRÄ IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD Second World War and with postwar migrations. In the aftermath of(-uj ■ War, it became possible for researchers from both sides of the geopolitics div:J. to explore together the evidence and to seek to construct a comprehensible, si i fKI\ understanding of the confrontation between the United States and the Suviu Union, with their respective allies and satellites, that defines one lacer - p< iSr 1945 history. With the opening of the archives in the former SovietUniim -UiA its Eastern allies as well as in the Peoples Republic of China, the Cold \\>.r, i|„, may now constitute a chapter in the shared memory of all people.15 At the s,|.11( time, the Cold War fundamentally entailed international alliances and nation,: i security concerns, not global memory sharing. The essence of the Cold \\\ir Vl.)s to divide the globe, and if possible to freeze the status quo on that ba-K n..ji t() encourage the growth of transnational consciousness. A universal concvptii.-n (>f humanity would have been difficult to sustain when the "Soviet" and the "Westerner" seemed to dominate and divide Earth's human population. Frank Ninkovich, Volker R. Berghahn, Richard Pells, and others have shown that Cold War strategic thinking propelled the United States to eng,:gc in ,i t j.. tural diplomacy in order to produce and preserve pro-American views i n Ilium*1, Asia, and elsewhere.36 The Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, was lm_>u to promote cultural activities abroad that gave people favorable images iV1 United States and spread negative ones of the Soviet Union. Voice of Ainenca (VOA), a foreign broadcaster established and funded by the US government during the war to counter Axis propaganda, became an arm of diplomacy in ig-jG when it was transferred to the State Department. The languages that VOA ti.mv mitted in included Russian and Arabic. The Soviet Union tried to prevent its citizens from listening to VOA broadcasts by jamming the transmissions. Mr.;cu''. was engaged in its own transnational cultural strategy, bringing studeníš fm.n Asia and Africa to inculcate in them Marxist orthodoxy and to turn them against Western colonialism and imperialism. Still, these activities should no:' .ill Ik subsumed under the rubric of Cold War history. Often, as will be seen, the \ cr, projects that were seeking to produce cultural warriors in the global geopoliti cal struggle betrayed the sponsors and developed their own agendas. In the West, moreover, governmentally initiated projects were just a part of the large-scale postwar undertaking in cultural and educational exchange aimed at fostering international understanding and transnational thought. The Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations in the United States were particularly active promoters of international educational and cultural ex-t'i >nges in the aftermath of the war. The Rockefeller Foundation inaugurated rhe Salzburg Seminar in American Studies as early as 1947 in order to reestablish ..J expand contacts between Americans and Europeans, in particular Germans n-J Austrians, so as to promote postwar reconciliation. It is not surprising that die task of reconciliation was considered to be a fit arena for private foundations' activities. While official policy might be dictated by geopolitical interests, private, nonprofit organizations were in a position to fund and direct their own agendas. From modest beginnings the Salzburg Seminar grew into one of the longest-lasting and most successful exchange programs across the Atlantic. Cold Vi'ar perceptions and policies did creep into such activities, but the geopolitical struggle did not define all aspects of exchange programs, which tended to move wiih their own momentum. Some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were aware of the danger that their work might be co-opted, even subverted, by calculations of state policy and strategy and were determined to maintain their autonomy as much as possible. There was ample space for private initiatives in their endeavor to promote postwar reconciliation and mutual understanding. As Rowan Gaither, president of the Ford Foundation, noted in 1951, "The ultimate conditions of peace include minimum levels of economic well-being and health, enhanced world understanding, and a world order of law and justice."37 Of these various objectives, "enhanced world understanding" was particularly important as something that private foundations could undertake. Large and small foundations in the United States brought an increasing number of students, scholars, journalists, artists, and many others from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, and at the same time provided funding for "international area studies" during the 1950s. (These private initiatives were matched by the federal government under the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which funded foreign language study at US universities, with an initial emphasis on Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi-Urdu.) These programs were by definition productive of transnational encounters. Statistically, the postwar years saw a spectacular increase in the number of exchange students and other personnel, at first centered in the United States but by the early 1960s in many other countries as well. The Fulbright exchange program, initiated •[ 706 ]■ ■[ 707 ]• AKIRA IRIYE in the United States in 1947, was the best known of such projects .si th ,t t- not least because thousands of German and Japanese students we:w ,im,„ Hie, first beneficiaries. Their presence in campuses across the nation did a Tr,-11 ! ^1 * bring about postwar reconciliation—and the effort at understandinii tlu-ir iv ■.. past better, at sharing historical memory, is a key aspect of such recoccili uioi "■ Although a government-funded program, the Fulbright program w administered by nongovernmental bodies, both in Washington and at vjrU> ' universities and research centers. There were smaller-scale foundation, tn ,c ^ promoted international student exchanges. One, led by the American 11 kla Service Committee, a Quaker organization, established seminars and \v»r! in Japan and other parts of Asia to bring Americans, Japanese, and others together" to share common experiences and to explore the possibilities for an intcrdepuiulert world. Their experiences were by no means uniform, but they invariably c.11 n\b-uted to creating a sense of cross-border encounter and engagement. To meet indents and educated people from other lands was to engage in a ti\-nsn.i::iir1|] experience, out of which developed a sense of common humanity. In this connection, it is pertinent to note certain scholarly developments ami cultural trends, broadly considered, that provided underpinnings for :hc civ.cii!-ing transnationalism. During the war and in the immediate postwar years, rhir United States began to emerge as the world center of scholarship, in part'.'sc.-uise of its principal role in mobilizing global resources for war, and also because :tn is the haven for many refugee scholars from Europe and (to a lesser extent) ek'w Ik i e Noted scientists and humanities scholars, some but by no means all of win.11 were of Jewish background, had left their countries, especially Germany, to find refuge elsewhere to continue with their scholarly activities. A significant number of them, such as Erich Auerbach, a distinguished scholar of comparative literature, spent the war years in Turkey and then moved to the United States after the war. Others, such as Enrico Fermi and a large number of other scientists, cairn, u the United States to work on nuclear arms and related projects and stayed artLT tin, war to teach and do research at various universities. Several scholars associated with the noted Frankfurt School, which had flourished as a center of learning in the social sciences, also ended up in the United States. Theodor W. Adorno, arguably the most influential of them, was at Princeton in 193S-1941 and at the University of California, Berkeley, for seven years afterward before returning to Germany THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD -|s [l)49. His writings on "the authoritarian personality," among other subjects, '-Y'cinie very influential as they offered away to understand the development of fascism. Nazism, and other forms of totalitarianism in prewar Europe. A large jiiinber of other refugee scholars from Germany were invited by the New School 'for Social Research in New York, whose graduate program in the social sciences i-'hcciUiie a new home for their research and teaching. These exile scholars were exemplars of intellectual transnationalization in that they brought their scholarship to a large number of American colleges, uni-:.; ¥Crsities, and research institutes and shared their ideas with students and schol-,-j of the host nation. The latter, in turn, incorporated the fresh perspectives coming from Europe and expanded their intellectual horizons. Most of the voluminous writings by the German sociologist and political theorist Max Weber, for instance, became available in English translation for the first time after the . ^-aL-—the only significant exception was his Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism, whose English version had been published in 1930—and made an enormous impact on the study of history, in particular the rise of the modern capitalist West and the contrast between it and the rest of the world. What came to be known as modernization was frequently derived from Weber's thought, which stressed religious and intellectual preconditions for socioeconomic transformation. Such perspectives were welcomed in the West, as they seemed to challenge Marxism's emphasis on material factors and class relations as engines of change. Weberism and Marxism were both transnational perspectives, though, in that they offered theories for understanding social phenomena that cut across national boundaries. At a time when the Cold War was making Marxism, because of its anticapitalist implications, an alien ideology to shun, exiled scholars contributed to keeping it alive. In the meantime, Freudian theory spread to North and South America as well as Australia and other countries after the war and began to influence scholarly writings in history and the social sciences. Both Marxism and Freudianism had obvious ideological and political implications, but those implications transcended specific national limits, the former stressing the possibility of understanding modern world history in a global framework, and the latter the identities of subnational groups such as racial minorities.35 In other fields, too, transnational emigre scholars made a significant impact upon the postwar scholarship. The study of comparative literature, for instance, ■[ 708 ]• *[ 709 ]• AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD was given an enormous boose through the infusion of Ei ropean * \„,\u | brought to the United States by Auerbach, René Jasinzki, Herbert I j., ''U and others. Although their field was called "comparative" literature, the ,L < \v\ were promoting the study of literature, not nationally separate literát ■ In time their ranks would be expanded by those who brought Asian j e si^ i „ . either by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese intellectuals who came to the I j.,lL j States after the war or by American and European scholars who .ijiph, e t|)ř , recently acquired knowledge of East Asian culture to their study ol h u ltUr Likewise, European emigre scholars dominated the field of mus study of musical theory and history. As vividly recalled by one of tin n HiUI Nettl, at first the bulk of them were Jewish scholars who had been exptlli il i'lJla their positions in Europe during the 1950s and the war years. As whereas before the war the study and teaching of musicology hard! the United States, after 1945 American universities came to rival "th j.jnd mi stitutes of Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, and Munich, which considered themselves the cradle of musicology."'*0 Although initially the focus of rescindi v.-.-,s on Western music, soon the field expanded to include the study of other-miisicitl traditions, which came to be known as ethnomusicology, a truly transri.iriiuial approach to the history of music. Curt Sachs, another emigre musicologi-:, m-|k» left Germany in 1933 and taught in Paris before moving to New York University in 1937, remained the leading scholar in this field until his death in Tlier; is little doubt that thanks to the activities of these and other scholars'; the postwar intellectual scene in the United States and elsewhere grew more and more;; transnational. The transnational scholarship in such fields as literature and music, ol\-o:ir»e, was amply supplemented and reinforced by postwar literary and artistic activities throughout the world. Although it would be difficult to be statistically precis;;, anecdotal evidence suggests that almost as soon as the war ended, transnational; cultural activities, ranging from translations of novels and poems to art exhibi-: tions, from musical performances to international film festivals, resumed. Some of these activities, to be sure, were initiated or sponsored by states for foreign, policy purposes and were more in the realm of cultural propaganda than trans-nationalism. The Cold War deeply involved the governments in Washington, Moscow, and elsewhere in international artistic and musical events. During the ■[ 710 ]• j cj,T[at of McCarthyism in the United States, for instance, steps were taken to ff ipove a large number of books from overseas libraries that had been established gutter the auspices of the State Department. The banned books included Ernest -j_jernjngway's Across the River and into the Trees and D. H. Lawrence's Lady 0kitterley's Lover, The Soviet Union, for its part, established Stalin International J'ri/.cs and in 1954 awarded one of the prizes to Paul Robeson, an African American singer who was virtually shunned in his own country because of his opposition to Cold War policies. Examples can be multiplied, but it would be too easy to comprehend them merely in the geopolitical framework. Even when the state was involved in financing, directing, or dismantling such activities, it could not have controlled or anticipated the impact they would have on individuals across national boundaries, 'flic International Tchaikovsky Competition, in piano, in Moscow, just to take one example, was held under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Music, a state organ, but its awarding of first prize to an American, Van Cliburn, in 1958 had many transnational consequences, not the least of which was to confirm the view that music knew no national or political boundaries. The Japanese violinist who was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter remained in Japan, to which she returned from Europe via the United States in 1945, and became the principal violinist to reintroduce European music to her country. In the meantime, the revival of the Wagnerian festival in Bayreuth, a quintessentially German cultural event, in 194S—when Herbert von Karajan conducted Wagner's Ring cycle as well as Meistersinger—had political implications, but that did not prevent opera lovers from all over Europe and North America (and eventually from other parts of the world as well) to make annual pilgrimages to the city. The renowned orchestra conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, who had remained in Germany during the Nazi era and was suspected abroad of being a sympathizer, soon resumed his activities, some of which were held overseas. (For instance, he took the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on a tour of Britain for the first time in 1951.) European soloists were once again a familiar sight in Japan after its occupation by US and other forces ended in 1951. A young musician from Tokyo, Seiji Ozawa—he was born in China in 1935—joined many others from other countries in Tangiewood, Massachusetts, and elsewhere for ttaining. Japan's Kabuki theater troupe toured American cities in the mid-1950s, a first. ■r 711 Van Cliburn congratulated by the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, upon winning the 194« Inter* national Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow—a moment of cukurai transnationalinn at the height of the Cold War. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) The resumption and growth of transnational cultural activities was undoubtedly facilitated by postwar improvements and innovations in comimmii..u,u:ns technology. For instance, international telephone calls had become .ess sive, so that ordinary citizens could discuss and make arrangements ror 111l.u1-1 events by telephone. (The cost of a three-minute conversation between NVw York and London, for instance, decreased from $189 in 1940 to $46 nv;:in later, in 1990 dollars.41) Even more relevant was the prevalence of the tape recorder, a device for recording sounds by using magnetic tape. Developed iniiulh for military use, it soon became a popular device for recording voices and music, with vast possibilities for circulating them transnationally. And then there was the television, which came to be found in an increasing number of homes in the United States after the war and, by the end of the 1950s, in other parts or the world. These devices made the transmission of cultural products across borders THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD nuoi easier than before the war and contributed to creating a sense of shared ^xperiences. Ihese developments, in particular the spread of television sets, had particu-lai'H' notable implications for the cinema. It was widely believed that the television would soon replace movies as a form of entertainment on the screen. But it ^Jid not happen, in part because Hollywood responded with wide screens ("cinerama") and "technicolors," to show what they were capable of doing to keep customers coming back to the theater. Moreover, the industry produced a number of movies that appealed to audiences in many parts of the world. In 1953, to rake a single year, Hollywood productions such as High Noon with Gary Cooper, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, and Gene Kelly's Singin in the Rain were immediate sensations not just in the United States but also in Europe and parts of Asia. While these products exported Hollywood overseas, others, while also made in Hollywood, may have served to connect the American people to the rest of the world. Around the World in Eighty Days, a 1956 movie version of a French novel written in the 1870s, was one of the hits of the season and may have given theatergoers in the United States a taste of transnational experience. Equally important in the context of transnational history was the large number of films made outside the United States that helped connect people across national boundaries in a common visual experience—and a shared consciousness about life. Masterpieces such as the Italian The Bicycle Thief and the Japanese Rashomon appealed to audiences around the globe because they seemed to speak to universal themes, in these instances having to do with layers of morality and of memory. These and other movies won prizes at international film festivals, which were revived shortly after the war and whose number increased over the years, further contributing to transnationalizing cultural productions. Lastly, we may consider the study of history as a transnational experience. To what extent may it be said that historical scholarship contributed to fostering an understanding of the past shared across borders? Like other fields of scholarship, the study of history in the United States was affected by immigrants, including emigre historians such as Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert, each of whom contributed a great deal to broadening the scope of American history by viewing it in the context of Western history or in some cases of Atlantic history. They all emphasized the critical importance of considering parallel developments in -f 712. 1- ■r 7131- AKIRA IRIYE Europe and North America as heirs to a shared historical heritat u ■ i c • , . r 1 'nf-u- ence became apparent in the emergence or comparative history, number of countries in terms of such themes as feudalism, soci.il 111 ] t politics. (A book published in 1956 with the title of Feudalism in Ii tlll paring European and Japanese feudalism, was a harbinger of what 1 To be sure, some historians in the United States continued in sti rK tional character of the American experience. David Potters Pe Economic Advance and the American Character (1954), for instance, p uu w, ^ cl history of the American people against the background of the nai ion s \u\mi ^ rich natural resources, while Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, plored the meaning of the "liberal tradition" in the United States is 1 p fcn,„llc. non distinct from European political developments.43 Such worl s pi.ii .tu.it«.J the mono-national orientation of historians; even when they comj.ued dc 1 lui'-ments in the United States to those in Europe, there was little ser erf ln,iv t|U. two had interacted—even worse, no consideration at all of other parts of the globe. Other scholars, however, offered less parochial and more Lran'njtu.r. it perspectives. For instance, David Riesman's pathbreaking work 11k I wii 1 ( situated the well-known phenomenon of social conformity among iviiddk-d.is., American families in the context of the worldwide development of industmlua-" tion and urbanization, while W. W. Rostow's Stages ofEcono?nic Cu,-i>ih cilfujj a way to read world history comprehensively in the framework of tlu lt;j,.i <>[ economic development that the author applied to all countries and sonet m" The popularity and the wide impact these works had indicates the gnnvini: influence of the social sciences in postwar scholarship in the United Stue-i .i.id elsewhere. (Riesman was a sociologist, and Rostow an economist.) Anthropology and sociology had developed in Europe at the end of the nineteenth <_e innhut until the Second World War most work tended to be parochial—both in the tendency to develop generalizations and hypotheses on the basis of European and American models, and in the tendency to "essentialize" the ni'iiA\\.st, viewing Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as qualitatively different from the West. During the 1950s, however, various attempts were made to develop i l.hh prehensive framework for understanding all societies. The theory of m.idu 111/1-tion, made popular by the sociologist Talcott Parsons and others, was a notable example of this new trend. If all societies were comprehensible as moving tow aril THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD ^oJernity, usually defined as industrialization, urbanization, and demo-ft itization, then it would become possible to establish meaningful comparisons iCt0$s national boundaries. This sort of methodological transnational ism was characteristic of the postwar work of social scientists, many of whom had experi-tnccd military service abroad and postwar occupation duty, both of which contributed to deparochializing their outlook. Physical border-crossing, in other -nords, had resulted in intellectual and mental border-crossing. Not the least significant implication of such a phenomenon was that it contributed to fostering transnational thinking. Although some of the social sciences, such as political science, tended to dwell on the uniqueness of each country's system of governance and decision-making process, with an inevitable emphasis on national interest ,ind a "realistic" assessment of available choices (this was the heyday of "realism" in international relations theory, popularized in the United States by an emigre scholar from Germany, Hans J. Morgenthau), others, notably economics but also sociology—in particular "historical sociology," which began to make its appearance during the 1950s, promoted by the sociologist Robert Merton, the historian John K. Fairbank, and others—encouraged efforts to establish more common, universalizable generalizations. In such a situation, it is not surprising that the postwar years gave rise to a renewed interest in world history and world civilizations. Earlier in the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, and several other (mostly European) writers had published books on world history, in the process seeking to present a perspective on history in which themes and chronologies were not all derived from European history.45 Such pioneering work had not made much impact on the historical scholarship before the Great Depression, and the war brought back a more Western-centric perspective; the efforts to overcome the economic crisis and the fight against totalitarian enemies were conceived as a struggle for the survival of Western civilization. The same ideology would inform much of the Cold War as it was understood in Western Europe and North America. At the same time, in the aftermath of the war there was increased awareness that the fate of humankind knew no national or civilizational boundaries. Civilization as such was on trial, as Arnold J. Toynbee noted in the book he published in 1948 with that title.'16 Toynbee had long been involved in editing the Survey of International Affairs series for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, chronicling •f 7H 1- •[ 7i5 ]' AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD international relations on an almost annual basis. But he was akn In, - f&äß the world's historical development, an interest that went back to Iii.... ,„ ■ on the European continent, especially in Greece and the Balkans, in - lt n)| diate aftermath of the First World War. In 1934 he began p;i jhshin.jr./ \nt^ History, a twelve-volume work that was not to be completed r.nLil :i)<,£ '" nllt"t(, bulk of the work was completed shortly after the Second World War Its proach to history, the units of analysis were civilizations, rather-than 1 lt|,J, regions, or religions, although religion was seen to have played a key r:i i m l|1, development of civilizations. In this sense he was a transnational histori,, 1 ,s 10(l. work was enriched by his extensive global travels, especially in the po'sľ-i^ Jiirs In seeing civilizations as the key to the development of world history— L oi jyj on the "challenges" presented to specific civilizations by changing naui.,il \\- \ human conditions and on their "responses"—he emphasized spiritual and intellectual, rather than material, foundations of history. One of To\ nbcc's 11 1 or collaborators in editing Survey of International Affairs, William IT. McNeill <\ ... to carry on the enterprise by developing what proved to be an academic respected history of the world. Their work undoubtedly reflected the; w Ln,.\<, that the West needed to be historicized, that is, it should not be taken as 11 definer of the history of humankind, which must be understood as ah the interplay of a rich variety of civilizations. In some such fashion, th; stuiK or history, too, was beginning to be transnationalized. Transnationaiizing the Third World The story of decolonization and nation building in the postwar world belong', more in international, imperial, and national history. Even so, it is pertinent tri'j note that efforts were constantly being made, both by leaders and citizens in die new nations and by those in the established countries as well as in interr.atu'ii.il organizations, to link what was emerging as the Third World to the rest or .lie globe. The idea of the Third World itself reflected this, a transnational awareness.; that the decolonized and still colonized areas of the world were very rcvjcli p.u't of a conceptually identifiable world community. The globe would have to be seen, now more than ever, as consisting of all countries, regions, and peoples, and;: to divide them into those belonging to the "first world" (the principal Cold Vi .i r ': nt.igonists)' to the "second world" (advanced industrial countries, mostly in the A"i it), 10 tne Thi^ World appeared to reflect the reality better than a bipolar livision of the world, whether in the earlier framework of the Axis versus the " |t'tnocracies or in terms of Winston Churchill's 1946 division between the two sides of the Iron Curtain. The Third World would comprise the bulk of humanity jjjj would have its own identity. During the 1950s much effort was made to conceptualize the Third World, t0 identify its position in the world community. One way was through what was jjy men a familiar dichotomy of colonialism and anticolonialism. Both could be -transnational ideas, but in the wake of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the decolonization of most countries in Asia and the Middle East, the history of anticolonial struggles would come to constitute a more widely shared memory. Many in the West, such as Albert Camus and George Orwell, continued to publish scathing attacks on colonialism, and their writings were widely read throughout the still remaining colonies as well as formerly colonized areas and suggested a unifying scheme for comprehending the Third World. Anticolonialism came to constitute both a shared memory and a common vocabulary for understanding what had happened, and was happening, in the Third World. For instance, Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist, was inspired by such thinking and in 1958 published Things Fall Apart, in which he described the effect that British colonizers and Christian missionaries had had upon the Igbo people.48 The Third World, in this framework, was comprehensible as an arena of victimization by colonial rule that had fundamentally altered the indigenous ways of life. Somewhat different was the idea of development through which public leaders and private individuals both in the West and elsewhere sought to integrate the Third World conceptually into the whole globe. "Development," as David Enger-: man, David Ekbladh, and other historians have pointed out, was a leading ideology of the 1950s that was found on both sides of the Cold War divide.'19 Until after the Second World War, as James William Park has shown, the adjective underdeveloped had been rarely used. Instead, those countries and people who had failed to undertake economic transformation had been referred to as "backward" or "retarded," implying that they had stopped growing.50 To be sure, toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, much was said and written about the "awakening" of Asia and other parts of the world, ■[ 716 ]■ ■[ 717 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD suggesting that even the "backward" areas that had remained dorman: \vhi|t ' West had forged ahead might sooner or later awaken from their long slun,llvl. j bring themselves into the modern age. Before the Second World W. . ;. only a handful of countries, notably Japan and Turkey, could be tecc.uii7U| having modernized themselves. In the postwar years, in contrast, develi,|ini(,n talism became a widely shared vision, a transnational way of undersumdniir t].„ world in turmoil. This was in part because both sides in the Cold W,-.r _uu.i|u rtJ promote Third World economic development to expand their respective sphere-, of influence. We should note, however, that the superpowers might r.ot I i,lvi: \-.xa to turn their attention to Third World countries unless these latter h.nl themselves been determined to undertake development in the process of nation building. In a sense developmentalism affected the Cold War, not thv cither v\av around. In any event, Washington and Moscow shared a commitmen. ta the idea of helping other countries modernize their economies, and the newly independent states as well as older but less developed nations such as those in L.stin America were anxious to look in all directions for developmental assistance. Here was an interesting case of two transnational doctrines of modernization competing for influence. On one side was what historians have called "libi r:\\ developmentalism," which argued that economic development could best be pro?, moted under conditions of free-market competition.51 Although economic planning by the state would be a requirement, the private sector would remain vibrant, as it did in the United States, Western Europe, and other areas. As W. W. Rostov argued in Stages of Economic Growth, most societies pursued a standard pattern of economic development, from the hunting to the agrarian stage, and fromthetu to the industrial phase, followed by a postindustrial consumer culture. Such the-?.; ory itself was not new. In the nineteenth century, the British sociologist Herbs ri Spencer had already written about human society's steady development through stages. For that matter, Karl Marx had theorized the march of history from the primitive to the feudal to the capitalist phase as an inevitable and universal development. But the Marxists postulated the postcapitalist phase as socialist, in which industrial workers would seize control of the state and carry out a planned development of the economy to benefit all people. "Liberal developmentalism" and the socialist variety, then, shared much in common and differed only wirh respect to future prospects. In reality, neither -"- .jsion was realistic. Few, if any, postcolonial countries undertook modernization ?a[ong either the US- or the USSR-prescribed path; indeed, some of them would "pot be "modernized" for many more decades to come, or not at all. Among the jltler countries of Latin America, some, such as Argentina, rebelled against modernization theory, which usually implied industrialization through capital accumulation, technological development, and urbanization, and chose a policy of import substitution, through which they would purchase manufactured goods from abroad and pay for them by shipping agricultural products, rather than adopting their own indigenous programs of industrialization. One Caribbean country, Cuba, opted for socialism when Fidel Castro's revolutionary forces seized control of the state in the late 1950s, but the new regime in Havana did not exactly lit the Soviet model of a proletarian dictatorship. Without having entered the |tage of industrialization, to speak of the industrial workers seizing control of the Irate was unrealistic. The same was true of China when it came under the Communist Party's reign in 1949. It called itself a "people's republic," very much like the Eastern European "people's democracies," and it eagerly sought to industrialize through state planning and control. But one major experiment, called "the great leap forward," undertaken in the late 1950s, was a self-consciously Chinese— that is, Maoist—way of industrializing the country. The plan called for establishing people's communes where workers would try to manufacture goods, in explicit rejection of the Soviet model of urban industrialization. But the experiment resulted in the starvation of millions of people as "collectivization" denuded huge i areas of the countryside, thereby diminishing food production. And yet the Chi-I nese Communist leadership refused to shift to the liberal developmental model I until much later. Despite such differences and gaps, however, by then the idea of : development had become well established, providing a framework in which the I relationship between the Third World and other, more industrialized countries I could be comprehended. ; Another way in which the Third World could be conceptually transnational-\ ized was through the dichotomy of "the West and the non-West," "the West and ; the rest," or, more popularly at that time, "East and West." ("East and West" also : referred to the Cold War geopolitical divide, against which the Third World would, in the 1970s, propose a "North and South" dichotomy.) Such a conception would bring the Third World into a transnational scheme of things so that this ■[ 719 ]• A KIR A IRIYE latter would represent "the other." The bifurcated view of humanity,dimlcd b • tween East and West, had long existed, going back to the ancient Gixc . ill, i,,, of the world between "Europe" and "Asia." Around the turn of the in.uuicl] century, too, as Cemil Aydin has shown, the idea of Eastern civilizatui.«, j, ,,,m, erful enough to bring together thinkers from Turkey and the rest of A .j a|| ^, way to Japan.5" During the 1930s and the early 1940s, however, rlie fcasi-\\' dichotomy had been appropriated by Japan to justify its war in Asia ;i a nii\,i,)i to expel the West from the East and to return the latter to its pristine > lLii w bt. fore it had become invaded by Europeans and Americans. Amazing, dw*nlt(; such misuse of the dichotomy, it survived the war and reemerged as a |>.jiisiblc framework in which to comprehend the emergence of the Third World In the new scheme, the Third World represented the East. Whethci J.ip,*} fitted into the West better than the East was a question that was not sctil. il rhLl (or since, for that matter.) Countries like China, India, and Egypt ic^n „ij to represent the East better. Their leaders believed there was an Eastern civili /a-Km as the counterpart to Western civilization, and that these were the two hal.^s uf humanity. Just as Europeans and Americans were now, in the aftermarh c .1 ihur fratricide, dedicating themselves anew to their Western heritage, Asians wciv to reawaken themselves to their common identity. Africans were often irickulal :n such a conception of the East; ifEast andWestwere two halves of hi: ma mj, uui if Africans were not part of the West, they must be viewed as belonging to tk East, or at least they and Asians must work together to confirm what thcj \id u-common. In 1955, for instance, when delegates from twenty-nine countrie-. hum Asia and Africa—most of them having newly achieved independence—met in Bandung, Indonesia, one of their subcommittees focused on cultural cooperation, emphasizing the need to promote exchange programs witli::i iV A Mi-African region as part of various global projects being promoted by I.1 NLSC.U. The delegates were proud that Asia and Africa were where human nvlii/ac. Hi, strong organizational base. Many of these institutions are more appropriately called intcrgoveri n .. teal organizations, in that they were established through agreement nr.-ring a 1n.1n.l-cr of nations to promote certain shared objectives, such as disarmament or hum 111 tarian relief. The United Nations and its affiliate bodies, such as the World H. alth Organization and the International Labour Organization, are examples, as ale the International Monetary Fund and other constituents of the Btetton \\ooc\ system. They belong more properly in the discussion of international ailai 1. ! than of transnational history, but those bodies provided spaces for tiie ciiiuny together of people from all over the world, and not just government officia Is 11 u" 1-viduals and private associations frequently met at these institutions and esiab-lished their own networks, sometimes independently of more formal da\ ■ 1 affairs conducted by government officials and international civil servants. Transnational organizations, properly called, refer to non-state actors. Fa j.l inition, they do not represent any government, although the distinction L-.....:= public authority and private activity is not always clear-cut in countrieswitl: ;m- THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD |., unitarian systems of governance. To the extent that one may distinguish non-,-t,- actors from the state apparatus, they include private, voluntary organiza-.()11S formed to promote specific objectives, whether humanitarian, religious, or :^anoniic. There had always been private associations of people; most had been -local or national in scope and membership, some were intentionally transna-, otl3\ from the very beginning, but after 1945 the number of such transnational i networks increased. By 1951 the United Nations had officially recognized 188 i transnational nongovernmental organizations, of which 64 had been established .during and after the war. Among humanitarian transnational bodies, particularly n/oininent were religious organizations, such as the Catholic International Union for Social Service, the Council of Jewish Organizations, and the Friends' World Committee for Consultation. Among medical societies, the International Com- . mittee of the Red Cross, the International Council of Nurses, the World Federa-:io:i for Mental Health, and the World Medical Association, among others, worked closely with the World Health Organization to rid the Earth of communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox." These organizations provided the opportunity and the space for individuals and associations of various countries to come together, enabling them to confirm their transnational orientation. For instance, telecommunications experts from sixty-six countries met in Moscow in 1946 to establish a transnational body, the International Frequency Registration Board, that served as the clearinghouse of information regarding the radio frequencies used in different countries. Despite the rising tensions in the geopolitical arena, this body continued to function, providing one area in which Americans and Russians met to discuss more mundane but arguably equally critical questions. The pace of establishing nongovernmental organizations did not slow even during the 1950s, the decade of the "high" Cold War. Some transnational bodies were created precisely to lessen Cold War tensions and help reunite the world. Various organizations formed to promote nuclear arms control provide a good example. On both sides of the geopolitical divide there were informal networks of scientists who were committed to cooperation to diminish the danger of nuclear war, and some of them established the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957 to promote nuclear arms control. They were joined by pacifists and humanitarian organizations of various countries, many of whom had come together in Hiroshima in ■[ 7"- ]• '[ 713 I" AICIRA IRIYE the summer of 1955 and pledged themselves to mobilize the world a^am-t .iiim,, and hydrogen bombs. As Lawrence Wittner, Matthew EvangelKu, a u[ " have shown, these initiatives ultimately led to international agreemc -t- u, |, -nuclear testing and to reduce strategic arms.56 Transnational awmviic^ juJ t|}, anti-bomb movement reinforced one another and created a worli munity consisting of global networks in the interest of peace. When Pu s.d?iu Dwight D. Eisenhower announced programs for peaceful uses of nurl \u tllll| „v the way was opened for transnational cooperation in ensuring the saft i, ,,; v clear power plants, which were to be built in many areas of the wuilc, .mj tor preventing their conversion into weapons factories. A conference ■ .1 ,ui nu\i\ organized by the UN in 1955 was attended by Soviet and Czech scicir us .is well as those from the Western allies and paved the ground for the establislnimr. 0f the International Atomic Energy Commission in 19 56. Here was l- :i \ 1 La. ;i .ir.s-national moment that proved far more crucial for the future of hn::i: iLmd ih.u Cold War geopolitics. In a similar vein, several thousand Americans went to the Soviet Unio.i Jui utg 1958-1961 to organize various exhibits, and an equal number of Soviet cm/wit came to the United States for similar purposes. Admittedly, these exchange* 0 en-made possible through an official agreement between Washington and ]\lo >luw, but it may be argued that such an agreement itself was a product of pressures from private associations to open up national borders for transnational exchanges.57 In the meantime, some transnational associations became parti active in helping newly independent countries with economic deve.opment and modernization of schools and medical facilities. For instance, in 1954 the McJilJ Assistance Programs International was established to bring doctors L=.nd .1111 its from Europe and North America for service in newly developing nations. In the following year Japan began sending specialists to countries in the Middle F.:st and Africa to help them overcome tuberculosis. Toward the end of ::ie decade, My Brother's Keeper was founded in the United States as "a volunteer, r.imv.ct.u-ian group dedicated to the purpose of linking Americas vast medical res uivxi to global health care needs."54 In education, too, private groups, notably foundations in the United States, were involved in efforts in the developing countries to make primary schooling available to all children and thereby to increase !n-> ; These were formidable tasks, as critical as health care for newly independent THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD irjiintries, many of which lacked the resources and infrastructure to promote -pui blic education. Catholic and Protestant missionaries from abroad sought to fjli some of the gaps, as did the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and other foundations. They worked closely with UNESCO, whose constitution declared, "The Vfl/iJc diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man." Education would remain one of the thorniest issues in the construction of nations, but it would be a vital component of transnationalism, just as transnational encounters would contribute to developing an awareness of shared humanity, certainly a cardinal objective of education. Besides the issue-oriented transnational organizations, we may also consider those that were essential to the reglobalizing of the world economy. The international economy was not fully global in the 1950s. Although trade and shipping around the globe expanded rapidly—during this decade, the total combined volume of trade by all countries nearly doubled—the rates of growth were much faster for the United States, Western Europe, and Japan than for other countries. The dollar was the only international currency, the medium of exchange among different countries. Its strength was backed up by the huge gold holdings in the US Treasury. (In 1950 the United States possessed more than two-thirds of the total gold reserves in the world.) Moreover, a large portion of the countries' resources was being devoted to military expenditures. Out of the total world GNP of $71 billion in 1950, more than $13 billion, or nearly 10 percent, was spent on arms, including atomic weapons. In such a situation, the global economy was both US-dominated and driven significantly by geopolitical considerations. Nevertheless, the world economy was buttressed by international and transnational organizations that had not existed earlier. Most obviously, the Bretton Woods system, designed to dismantle protectionist trade and investment policies and to establish a more stable system fot promoting worldwide exchanges of goods and capital, was institutionalized by the International Monetary Fund, the key instrument for the smooth functioning of trade and monetary exchanges, as well as the World Bank, which was designed to help developing countries with their economic projects. These were intergovernmental organizations, but like the UN they provided spaces for the establishment of networks among bankers, industrialists, and economists from all parts of the world. More genuinely transnational ■\ 715 AKIRA IRIYE were organizations that were created to provide standards of qua for goods produced. One of the earliest such organizations was tin. n,,. . Organization for Standardization (ISO), established in 1947 l. ) ti«-fi n, standards for products. Each country had its own set of sta ndard s, ln1L tn. was the first to bring different national systems together lo rl ul tJlL national exchanges." From this time on, ISO and similar bodies coiituim.,.' i„ ,j ■ more such transnational rules, which were an important aspect of ci ■ .11 ninL ,,] balization. Togetherwith intergovernmental organizations, such bodit., n . considered to have reflected the development of transnational consciousness „ the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. 2. The Transnationalization of Humanity ■ ^ SIGNIFICANTLY transnational moment in humankinds view of itself may be said to have arrived when Neil Armstrong, an American astronaut, first set foot on the moon on July 10,1969. The episode, in which he and his two colleagues had been launched to the moon in a rocket, was, at one level, clearly a product of US strategy during the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy had made it a cardinal objective of his administration to send a man to the moon before the Soviet Union did, a feat that would enhance national prestige and would also have military implications in terms of the emerging competition in outer space. (The mathematics and technical skills for sending a rocket to the moon were considered equivalent to launching an ICBM to Moscow.) But that was not the only way the moon landing was viewed in various parts of the world. Those with access to television watched Armstrong as he set foot on the moon and declared, "That's one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind." He ■ planted an American flag, but there was no presumption that the United States now claimed its ownership of the moon. Indeed, beside the flag, Armstrong left a plaque with a message in English signed by President Richard Nixon as well as the three astronauts: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon— July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." The moon landing did indeed belong to all humankind, as hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere watched the feat and not only hailed the successful adventure but also came to share a perspective on the Earth as viewed from outer space. "Planet Earth," as it came to be called, was seen as consisting of mountains, rivers, and oceans, not of separate national entities and boundaries. All inhabitants of the globe, now numbering over 3.6 billion, shared the same "spaceship Earth," another term gaining popularity. It was by no means the first time that people realized the silliness of populations subdividing the Earth into arbitrary and mutually hostile units when Earth's inhabitants shared so much in common. Transnational awareness had steadily l/«M»-T i ARU The plaque that would soon be pi accu u*i Lin. 3U1111LL ui tut; iLiuuii wo <*>uujiituY.s, jury:iy. ihe; message combines pride in a national achievement with an eagerness to view it also as humankind'1) shared experience. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) grown after the Second World War, but the moon landing further strengthened it, giving legitimacy, as it were, to the questioning of the primacy of tcnitoiul states as the key definer of human affairs. Such questioning had started immediately after the war—indeed, muih earlier—but during the 1960s it gained in intensity across the globe. The inspiration for the renewed questioning came from many sources, but at bottom then.' seems to have been the idea, as Albert Camus had put it eloquently in hi' ov publication, The Rebel, that to exist as a human being was to rebel, to ciu-srion one's circumstances and to consider alternatives. Camus had in mind not only historical movements against slavery, colonialism, and other injustices, but also existing political and social institutions. Such a perspective fit with the pioie^t movement against the Vietnam War in the United States, Europe, and else1 %'hei e which ultimately led to the questioning of the Cold War itself and the political system that had sustained it. THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD In the late 1950s the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, founded in the ited States to oppose nuclear war, had asserted, "The sovereignty of the human imunity comes before all others—before the sovereignty of groups, tribes, or ions."60 This was the language of transnationalism pitting itself against a ■Idview that divided the globe into allies and enemies, each armed with de-ictive weapons. At bottom was an impatience with the ongoing Cold War, its nition of world affairs, and its zero-sum game of gains and losses. The Viet-1 War seemed to confirm such a mentality. This is not the place to chronicle antiwar movement of the 1960s, except to note that it was truly global. It began he mid-1960s across college campuses in the United States where students (in-ling male students, who were liable to the draft) and faculty held "teach-ins" liscuss, and frequently to denounce, the war; it soon spread to many other ntries and merged with various other activities to develop as a transnational 1 i-establishment movement. It was anti-establishment in the sense that those who protested against the cnam War began questioning the wisdom of their respective countries' leaders ^egedly "the best and the brightest"), who had guided their national destinies for a generation, from the 1930s to the 1960s.61 These leaders were of the wartime generation who had overcome the Great Depression, fought the Second World War, and were now waging the Cold War, in the process establishing around the globe "national security states," where large portions of national budgets were devoted to strengthening military power and where the civilian economy tended to be dominated by manufacturers ofweapons, including warships and airplanes. Above all, there reigned a mentality that viewed both world and domestic affairs through the prism of national security. National interest was the unquestioned guide to policy, and nationalism the ideological framework for preparing citizens for waging war, hot or cold. Such ideological orientation and intellectual premises came to be sharply questioned by those who opposed the ongoing war in Southeast Asia as well as by others who were not directly affected by the conflict but who shared the same skepticism about what the "establishment" had to offer. Thus, from the United States to France, from Britain to Germany, voices of protest grew louder, to culminate in 1968, the year that saw massive demonstrations and strikes in these and other countries.62 The leaders of such movements, many belonging to the 718 •[ 72-9 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD postwar "baby boomer" generation who reached adolescence dúiii,< often called themselves "radicals," "revisionists," "the New left," sons of "counterculture," indicating their self-consciousness about . ■" the prevailing culture of the day that had been defined by the older .ru, Tr. r\ '",,3 As the movement's leaders asserted, and as later generations iec.-.lk-J 1 |K. 1 ideology was to stress that "the cultural is the political." In oilier woi J., su.l(, ,1 for one's identity apart from that defined by the nation's political clin.1,.A llL , v . political act and was destined to reshape national and international n.T.iiis '1] ■' was transnational self-consciousness both in being directed against sum- aith ity and also in beginning to be widely shared across state bounda-ic. It is true that the "counterculture" held conflicting views abou: modcrni1-On the one hand, its advocates criticized industrialization as a polhr.-T of'ski \ and waters, a shared experience in the 1960s from London to Tokyo. At the s.iin -time, many young radicals embraced some products of technology hl.c .1111. .nm. biles, transistor radios, and electric guitars. But the fundamental key to the i<;6os "radicals" was that they typically stressed humanity as against nation, people ;>s against the state, and individuals doing their own thing" as against tollowing "lie prescribed paths of education, military service, and career development.. Simit applied such radicalism to domestic reconstruction, paying particular attemion to racial injustice and gender inequality, while others went even further and began questioning the age-old foundations of social order such as marriage andjaimly. Many lived together without marrying, some had abortions, and some gavs nm! lesbians began to partner openly. As they did so, they were aware that theirs v .is a "cultural revolution" in which old premises were discarded and people's consciousness was being remolded. "Consciousness-raising" indeed became an o'.ijfc-tive of their movement, to call on people to revolutionize their behavior by inns-forming their views of themselves and of the world. In such an equation, ilu-n-was little room for the state—or the state would become an object of assault,.'-1 political and sometimes even physical. The "cultural revolution" was thus a mental transformation, a new way of defining oneself and ones relationship with the world and the state. It is no: surprising that the transformation was fundamentally transnational, both becai-.s;: it stressed the authenticity of the individual's existence, regardless of his oi her national identity, and because leaders of the movement in one country were aware in ;\r what they understood to be its essential messages—and, echoing the < hiiiwa students in the throes of their revolution, declared that intellectuals ever* \\ hci; must identify with "the people," with their struggle to free themselves from ,jur-moded and decadent lifestyles.66 The transnational character of these political and mental upheavals: w;s evident in other parts of the world as well. In Japan the 1960s began with a 11 u<>n wide protest movement against the government, which was dominated bj the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, whose leadership included some v. In ■ li,ui been closely connected with the war—and who now were proposing to n',. il ie 1951 treaty of alliance with the United States to bringjapan's security more e \pk itly under the US "nuclear umbrella." Although the protest was an issue-spiTilii movement, its leaders often spoke of China as an alternative to the United Stato and espoused the cause of "democracy," which to them meant people sn.'ii.g power in their own hands against "conservative and reactionary" politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalists. In the end, the new security pact was ratified b\ ilu Japanese Diet (Parliament) and went into effect, but many of the originr.l uppc- THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD I as well as those who came of age during the 1960s became aware that theirs "e>.s part °^a growmg worldwide protest movement. Thus, even while they op-,j tnc US alliance, they came to admire the American people who, like their ^Hiricerparts in Europe, appeared to be trying to bring about a profound transformation of their political and social systems. A minority of Japanese radicals, v- [.j,e other hand, identified with China's Cultural Revolution and saw it as the lV. 0f the future, while still others, some extremist fringe groups, went their fown ways and engaged in violent behavior that proved to be their undoing. (The Japanese diplomat who was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter was by .Mien teaching French philosophy at the University of Tokyo. Along with his col-"!ci,7ues, he witnessed student radicals taking over the campus and forcing classes to be canceled. Such a story was duplicated nationwide through the early 1970s.) What were the implications of all such events for transnational thought, in utricular transnational intellectual collaboration? Empirical evidence suggests that the effects were both affirmative and negative. On one hand, international scholarly exchanges continued unabated, and as the awareness of global interdependence grew through the spread of radical movements, they may have been provided an additional impetus as a venue for bridging generational divides. Representatives both of the older generation and of those too young to have experienced the war could come together from various countries to study the past and to deepen a comparative perspective. One of the most successful instances of this was the "modernization of Japan" project in which historians and social scientists from the United States, Britain, and Japan participated throughout the 1960s, producing a number of books in the process.67 Another project, located at Columbia University, held monthly meetings amongjapan specialists to reexamine the course of Japan's foreign affairs since the nineteenth century.63 Perhaps the most notable achievement in this connection was a conference held in Japan in 1969 in which historians from the United States and Japan discussed "the road to Pearl Harbor." It was a remarkable scholarly phenomenon that, less than a quarter century after the end of the war, researchers from the erstwhile antagonists came together for a scholarly discussion of US-Japanese relations prior to 1941. The participants were not intent upon defending the decisions made by their respective countries; instead, they jointly explored in a comparative framework how policy makers and the public had steadily paved their ways toward •[ 73^ ]" ■[ 753 ]• AKIRA IRIYE war. 9 The gathering was marred only by the absence of a small num n. ] ," | ars who had to cancel their participation because they had to deal w th ■ , spective campus crises. At this time there was nothing comparable to h gether Chinese and Japanese, or Chinese and American, scholar, | lL , exploration of these bilateral relationships would have to wait un •illl. that matter, despite the transnational waves of anti-establishment thuugli! -[lĽ . s was as yet little intellectual engagement across the Cold War divide. | ]lilt n„u]j | come only as Russian and Eastern European intellectuals mignuid tn iIk '\X'vist ' and contributed to enriching the vocabulary of historical and othei smdks a \ development that would begin to take place after the early 1980s. ,: , The picture was even more complicated in the rest of Asia. Tor must (,| tj,. *' 1960s and the 1970s, the pivotal event was the war in Vietnam. Hi ■ í sufficient to note that both the North Vietnamese (and their allies i : ílu iohcL \ ■ the Viet Cong) and the South Vietnamese sought to present their a se, 111 i.uis- national language, not just in the framework of the Cold War roiupeiitiDii tar power between the two camps. Ho Chi Minh and other leaders in Hanoi sucuht I to appeal to world opinion by speaking of freedom, justice; ami I-determination, while the Saigon regime, led by Ngo Dinh Diem untifhi-. 1-sination in 1963, presented the southern half of the peninsula in the Iangii..i>e of l\ nation building and economic development.'0 After the north toppled the soiitii !-" and US forces left in 1975, the newly unified Vietnam combined both these ,ip = proaches and, perhaps for that reason, gave the impression that it was less u'.di»..i; %, than China under Maoism. In contrast, its neighbor Cambodia embraml the ! Chinese-style cultural revolution in its extreme form while the Khmei Rouge i ruled (1975-1978), arresting, expelling, and killing intellectuals and i 1 Ii-.m-huI * people in the name of returning the country "back to the land." The excesses J continued until Vietnam invaded Cambodia and put an end to the /egum, 1 development that in turn triggered a war between China and Vietnam. 'Hie iu n belongs in the history of Asian international relations, but it is pertinent .0 1 ■> serve that in the end radical excesses in China and Cambodia led to the 'election of virtually all transnational connections and contact, until the situation way to something more acceptable to the rest of the world. Thus, the global cultural revolution of the 1960s had both positive and ^ negative aspects in terms of transnationalism. While the negative aspects— |S THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD ufi-intellectualism, for instance, in many lands—deserve to be deplored, we hoidd note that at its most promising moments, the cultural revolution helped deepen an appreciation for common humanity, for a universal vocabulary that brought people of different countries together. It is no accident that around this time Viktor Frankl's influence grew in Japan and other countries. (He visited Japan in 1969.7') Frankl's stress on universal humanity even in the face of unspeakable adversity perhaps appealed to those going through the turmoil of the t96os and the 1970s. On the surface, it would be difficult to find anything parallel, let alone universal, in the Middle East, where the predominant issue remained the Palestinian question, which resulted in the Arab-Israeli military confrontations in 1967 and rg73. Still, it is possible to detect transnational ideas and movements in the region. One of these is sometimes called "Arabism," the idea of Arab unity that was influential in many countries in the Middle East as they achieved independence. Powerfully promoted by Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, it combined Third Worldism, Arab nationalism, and socialism and was a major ideological and political force in the region in the 1960s. But Arabism as a transnational force declined after the 1967 war and was eclipsed by more militant movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and sectarian Islam. These, too, were transnational phenomena but were notable because of their willingness to espouse the use of violence in the name of a "holy war," in particular against Israel and its supporters. More successful in promoting transnationalism may have been the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Edward W. Said, and others who challenged the intellectual frameworks in which the Middle East, and Asia on the whole, had been understood in the West, and in which the non-West had also seen itself. Frantz Fanon, an Algerian writer, in 1961 published Les damnes de la terre {The Wretched of the Earth), calling on all people in the former colonies to liberate themselves—even through violence—from the language, ideas, and ways of life that had been imposed on them by the imperialists.72 A mental revolution was needed to think for oneself in a way that was not a mere regurgitation of Western imports. These ideas strikingly resembled those being presented by the cultural revolutionaries in the West. Together, they were paving the way for the decentering of the West as the hegemonic ideology that defined and explained human activities, the past, present, and future. We shall return to this theme in Section 4. •[ 734 ]• •[ 735 ]• AKTRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD Edward W. Said's influential book Orientalism was released in k,^>j _ teen years after Fanon's.73 Said, an American scholar born in Palcaiin .ri|] that the West ("the Occident") had imposed on the non-West ("t!v < in.,,,', conceptual frameworks through which to view the world, cyl-ii lnv.i i,, t]rnl about itself. Tlie very idea of the "Orient" was a Western import, Said Ln rUl ;. did not exist in the allegedly "Oriental" countries, and it connoted tin; r,t|,, • namely, the opposite of everything for which the West presumably «,:rJ(, J „,)v ment, progress, science, even beauty. The time had come, he implu-1, (.(.lining Fanon, for "the other" to think for itself, liberating itself from die West', .nrct-lectual and ideological domination. Although Fanon's and Said's ideas ac one*" level seemed to discourage the kind of dialogue between East ;md Vmsl tha-UNESCO, among others, had been carrying on, they also fit into the vucabu-" lary of the global transnationalism of the 1960s and the 1970s that \ „s lu u-v a reexamination of familiar ideas and assumptions throughout the world, Edward Albee's 1966 play A Delicate Balance may be taken as an rpt desirn-tion of this state of affairs.74 In this drama, a delicate balance has been i:iai r 1 j rial by a family whose core members are an aging couple living in a rniddk i.1j,<. suburban home. Both the husband, a retired businessman, and his wife t v 10 preserve some sense of order in their life, a task that has become complicated as the wife's sister, an alcoholic, has moved in. The couple have lost their 01 .\ son, and their daughter, age thirty-two, has been divorced three times and is sepaut-ing from her fourth husband. Not a very enviable circumstance, and evc~tua![y the "delicate balance," maintained by familial norms, certain words, even facial expressions and gestures that they all understand, breaks down when th(.v arc visited by another couple, close friends of the husband and wife, who have become frightened for no particular reason and decide to move in with thi r lamik These circumstances are evocative of the breakdown of the familiar political order and mental universe that was experienced during the 1960s. Evei, esc.il-lished norm and system appeared to be being questioned, if not breakii g d' 1 completely, with no end in sight. Eventually, to be sure, the cultural ferment of the decade would 1 un on: ot steam. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China slowed down and petered out even before Mao's death in 1976, and in the West, too, "the csrahlish- Sir •at" returned to positions of power.75 The legacy of "the sixties," however, was ■ ot i0 eas'ty erase(i—fundamentally because the transnationaiization of mental-which was integral to the global cultural revolution, confirmed the trend jiai had become evident even before the decade and was strengthened by other, a current developments during the 1960s and the 1970s. A Global Civil Society? js'owhere were these developments better summed up than by the phrase global , nil'society, which began to be used in the 1970s, first primarily by political scientists and international relations specialists but in time by others as well. There was I u xandard definition of the term, and even today scholars disagree as to pre-„i,e y what it designates. From a hisrorical point of view, ir is clear thar rhe adjectives global and civil were neatly combined to indicate what was happening to "society," which in this instance was analogous to "world community," even "humanity," rather than local groupings. Up to this time the phrase civil society tad designated an existence within a country that was separate from the state. A lodern nation was said to consist of the state apparatus and the citizens, existing II a "delicate balance," to go back to Albee's play, each performing its roles so as to nsure the country's survival and well-being. The dichotomy of state and society v«s not a new idea, but during the 19 60s it gained currency because "people" in so many countries appeared to pit themselves against "the establishment," Influential writers such as Jürgen Habermas of Germany and Michel Foucault of France i popularized the idea of "civil society" standing autonomously against the state. During the 1970s the concept of civil society was transposed onto the inter- j national arena and came to be viewed as a global existence. The whole world, in other words, came to be seen as consisting of two layers; the layer made up of states and that constituting a "global civil society." In the absence of the world government or its equivalent, of course, the domestic analogy of state and society would not be literally transferrable to the international arena. Nevertheless, the ]; experiences of the 1960s and beyond seemed to suggest that one could never understand the contemporary world if one ignored the emerging and growing movements and phenomena by non-state actors that cut across national boundaries. •f 736 1- j 737 1- AKIRA IRIYE Such thinking coalesced into the idea of global civil society, which m.t nv r'I political scientists but eventually other scholars as well—dated 1'roi di making that decade an even more transnational time than earlier.'1. Who were the global non-state actors? They ranged from c:-o?s i, Kj t m grants and refugees to tourists, from multinational business enteipn^s 'u iln governmental organizations (NGOs). They had long existed, but ii ((l|r the 1970s that their significance came to be recognized. They were scon u> < in * tute the world community just as did nations and intergovernnn mil oiin ily tions. This was both because their numbers grew steadily (and in sorm. ,. ^ s tVc| exponentially) during the decade, and also because many of thi.ii piuiii<,-Lil transnational interests that were not identical with separate national iim Here a bare outline of such phenomena as migrations and multLii li )i i| ||u,.. ness corporations will suffice to indicate their relationship to the evolving j'li>h->I civil society. International migration statistics that are periodically published bv tiic United Nations are quite revealing in this regard. These data cover re!\nr(.LS j, well as those who cross borders to find jobs and residence abroad. In 1960, lm instance, there were 73 million such people, and by 1980 the number had incrca^;* to nearly 100 million. These were still a tiny portion of the total world por*uIatit'n, which expanded from 3.013 billion to 5.179 billion during the same [ ■ . ■ i (Such a phenomenal demographic increase had many causes, in particular rlic growing life expectancy resulting from improvements in health care in die advanced countries—itself a transnational phenomenon of major signiiji..ijkl— which offset the still persistently high rates of infant death in less developed areas, as well as the spreading use of the birth control pill that had the effect of"! 1 miring the number of children in richer nations.) But the picture begins to change if we add tourists as well as students, businesspeople, and others who are nor ircluded in migration statistics but who were nevertheless border-crossing iriciijcuais. They would stay for brief periods of time abroad and have their own transnational experiences. For instance, in i960 there were only 69 million international touiiTs ur slightly over z percent of the world's population. Twenty years later, the number was 2.78 million, or more than 5 percent of the total population. That each year, one out of every nineteen individuals was visiting another country tells .1 gieai THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD I j about the changing conditions of the world. These statistics are provided by nt'h country from its immigration data, so it is possible that some individuals i counted more than once if they visited more than one country. The real ruber 0f people who traveled abroad, therefore, was lower. The important thing, jjtheless, is to note the impressive growth of tourism during those decades. ,Hy the early 1980s, it is reported, international tourism was the second largest component of the total world trade.73) Moreover, whereas in i960 Europe and \r, 11 th America were the destinations of the overwhelming majority of international tourists, twenty years later the ratio was down to 86 percent, as Africa, the Middle East, and especially Asia began to attract an increasing number of tourists. Comparable figures for other categories of temporary border-crossing people, notably businesspeople and students, all suggest not only that their numbers 1111. eased during this period but that they were now found in all parts of the world, rht: growing importance of the Middle East as a magnet for foreign investors, merchants, and workers because of its petroleum resources is a good example, but these decades also saw a significant number of Japanese bankers and businessmen arriving in North America and Europe as well as in other lands. They were soon followed by their counterpart from South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, and elsewhere in Asia. The upshot of all such activities was the rise of multinational enterprises in which the capital, labor, and markets of many countries, and not just sthose in the West, came together to produce and sell products—as well as ideas. ;ln the process, world trade expanded phenomenally and the Middle East and East : Asia steadily increased their shares of the global market. AH such phenomena were instances of transnational encounters and contributed to the development of global civil society. How they may have furthered transnational thinking may be difficult to generalize, but it would be fair to say that their rapid growth served to alter drastically the traditional perception of the world as consisting of nations, especially the so-called great powers that had defined an international "order" at a given moment in time. Sovereign states and superpowers continued to exist, but their "international" relations operated at one level, whereas non-state actors were adding many layers of "transnational" connections. One could even say that international refugees were now becoming more transnational, in that more were coming from all corners of the globe. In i960 •[ 738 1- •[ 739 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD there had been just over i million refugees, or 1.9 percent of the total migrjl1 population, whereas the number shot up to 9 million by 1980, or 9,1 percent of \U. nearly 100 million people crossing borders. Some had been refugees fo- a | ,n« time, such as the Palestinians who had been unable to return home because of the continuous tension between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Abnut 700,000 Palestinians lived in Israel in 1980, but more than a million Palestinian refugees remained in the surrounding Arab-speaking countries, such as Lebanon Jordan, and Syria. There were more recent refugees in Southeast Asia, who r ui 1 bered 390,000 by 1980, five years after the Vietnam War ended. Many oftheiti had left South Vietnam when the country was unified by the Hanoi govern v.nt and found new homes in the United States, Canada, and other countries who would accept them. Cambodia, too, produced its share of refugees when Vietnam invaded the country during 1978-1979 to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. Close to half a million Cambodians crossed the border into refugee canun in Thailand. A large number of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees came 1. j In-known as "boat people," as they resorted to navigating the oceans in small vessels, trying to reach Australia, Malaysia, and elsewhere. These countries were ,i|sc magnets for East Timor's refugees, who fled their homeland when Indonesia challenged its independence and invaded the country, engaging in a brutal war. The picture was just as appalling in Africa, where the Angolan civil war resulr.d in hundreds of thousands of its people fleeing to neighboring countries such as Zambia and Zaire. The long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, lasting from :1k early 1960s to the early 1990s, caused half a million people to seek refuge in Sudan and Yemen. The impact of such large-scale migrations on national and international nf-fairs is not hard to see. The United Nations, which had from its inception defined one of its objectives as the promotion of human welfare, sought to deal with :k-problems faced by migrants and refugees—housing, health, education—through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but separate countries needed to help in the process. The UN was instrumental in having them agree to accept certain numbers of international refugees each year, and some, mostly in North America and Western Europe, voluntarily aclniitr-'d them. The emerging global society was in part a product of such mer.smes: nations and international organizations were now more than ever concerned s it:h dealing with border-crossing, and sometimes even stateless, people. In the process the ethnic composition of sovereign nations began to change as nations idmitted into their midst people of vastly different backgrounds. In the United S ates, the country that accepted the largest number of refugees, some began 1 Iking of diversity rather than unity or conformity as a national characteristic, and the same trend could be seen in other countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia. 'These phenomena clearly had transnational implications. For one thing, ethnic tllClaves and communities could now be found all over the world. The Vietnamese population, for instance, was scattered in North America, Australia, and Europe to such an extent that their food became no more "exotic" than Chinese or Japa- use cuisine. Vietnam, in other words, was not just a state with territorial borders !■> it also a transnational existence tepresented by its people around the globe. The same would be true of other countries, notably China and the Chinese, after the fcountry was opened to the outside world in the early 1970s. What added to the momentum was the growing number of transnational Kvorkers, who might not move permanently from their home countries but who nevertheless came to constitute a significant portion of the labor force in the host countries. WangGungwu has called such people "sojourners," to distinguish them from immigrants who usually stay in a country of their destination and become permanent residents or citizens.75 One striking fact about such temporary migrants was that, starting in the 1960s, the bulk of the world's sojourners— including those who eventually settled down in their host countries and thus became immigrants—began to consist of non-Europeans. This was particularly true of laborers in search of job opportunities. Hundreds of thousands of Turks moved to Germany, for instance, to fill job openings as Germany's economy expanded. Similarly, France was home to millions of North Africans, mostly originating in its former colonies, and the Netherlands began to attract former colonials from Indonesia and Surinam and others from Morocco. In these countries, the percentage of the foreign-born in the total population increased steadily, reaching nearly 10 percent by the 1990s. From East Asia, a growing number of Koreans left their homes for the United States as the latter revised its immigration laws in 1965 and eliminated the quota system that had, since the 1910s, favored Europeans over the rest. (People from Latin America had not ■[ 741 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE been regulated under the quota system, whereas Asians, Africans, Ar ] ers deemed nonwhite had been totally excluded.) Now immigra us (i i irn \S| t. j gan to outnumber those from Europe. Although during the 1960s a i the largest numbers originated from South Korea and Taiwan, soon tho „ t| 1 \ be eclipsed by those coming from China as well as South Asia (India uic [>i|. ? stan). The result was to confirm further ethnic diversity in the United Si iu,,, -n 1 \ in some European countries. Such phenomena quite clearly added another transnational layer -o du woi-rf i community, but how they might have reinforced transnational thou;-|.i s more * difficult to determine. Did the addition of unprecedented numbers n| etliiii^ijy ■" diverse populations, producing "hybrid" persons and communities, ctmlli m ,t|lc| >' strengthen a sense of shared humanity, or did it give rise to narr::we, 1 ion, mrri. \ chial attitudes? Was "hybridity," a term that scholars began to use to c! mi .u teri/e '• the phenomenon, seen as a healthy development for a country, or diil 1.10,. fumlc ' prefer to retain their societies' "purity," however that was defined? It is cl uuirsc \ impossible to generalize about millions of individuals, but we might \i lent -make note of two developments during these decades that wot. Id help , qilore ' the question—the "brain drain" and "multiculturalism." The two reinforced each other. The brain drain consisted of the moven^nr of! 1 doctors, scientists, and other scholars and educators from Third World couni 1 ic, to the United States and Europe. It created a very serious problem for th; ituin- j tries of origin, which were just then seeking to modernize their ceo u mies, ' education, and health care, but such waves were also an inevitable aspect ot die growing transnational networks that enveloped all types of human pursrits flu same may be said of foreign students. A steadily increasing number of students' from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America sought education.il opportunities in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. The Ur.ircr States, j which attracted about one-third of all international students to its ^uIIcas . m! i - 1 universities every year, had just under 50,000 of them in i960, accounting for* roughly 1.3 percent of the total student population in the nation. The nun Kr increased sixfold, to over 300,000, by 1980, or 2.6 percent of all stuue:-.t' in the ■ United States. No other country's universities had such a high proportion of foreign j students, although those in Britain, France, and the Netherlands had sizable ■ THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD lent populations coming from their still-existing or former colonies. Many of foreign students would stay in the host countries, and eventually became a ■ni'lcant portion of the host country's academic personnel. Most dramatic was low but steady growth of students from mainland China who began to appear ,,■ I .iropean and US campuses during the 1970s, almost as soon as official (or even .ill! .rrnal) relationships were opened up between Beijing and Western capitals, purred in part by the brain drain, but also because of the social and cultural ges in the West and elsewhere during the 1960s and the 1970s, there was a ing influence of multiculturalism, or the idea that the nations and the en-vorld consisted of diverse populations living in close proximity to one an-r, each with its own traditions and ways of life, but sometimes blending with ; of other groups. If formerly the prevalent view had been that the globe was led into separate ethnic categories and civilizations, the new perspective ght these entities together so that there would be one human grouping, the human species, and one civilization encompassing all people. But humanity and human civilization were not seen as homogeneous or monolithic. Rather, they contained infinite variety. There was unity consisting of, or coexisting with, diversity. (Although precise statistics about "mixed marriages" are hard to come by, it seems possible that interracial households and children of different races became increasingly noticeable during these decades. Barrack Obama, born in 1962, would perhaps prove to be the most famous example. But in the early 1970s, when John Lennon, a former Beatle, said the United States was "the best place to bring up a Eurasian child"—his wife was Japanese—he may have been speaking on behalf of an increasing number of such children not just in the United States but elsewhere as well.30) Hie emerging global civil society, then, embraced the ideas of the unity of humankind and of respect for infinite varieties of ways of life and thought. Tire coexistence of the two—what Arthur Mann referred to as "the one and the many" in the context of American history—could foster the acceptance of hybridity, the living, working, and blending together of people and institutions of diverse backgrounds. One could see this in global cultural developments and in the phenomenal growth in the number of multinational business enterprises. Here a bare outline will suffice to put these developments in the context of transnationalism. •[ 743 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE Global culture meant the sharing of cultural products, both ": ijh ^, and "peripheral," across national boundaries. The idea of a globally di. (i_ j t, jt ( . product usually conjures up the phenomenal growth in popularity • > ltK n . roll that easily surmounted the Cold War divide and became "hegen mi,.' ti, sense of offering a novel and also universal way of combining words ,unl tUl,. Although there were national variations, this musical genre was inten L-d ^ tl ,lt ,v wave, to go beyond jazz, blues, and country music. It would be wrona n to focus on rock and roll as the single notable development in the gl il>aUu|-unj arena in this period. In the realm of "high culture," too, these deca, lis wer. notable for transnational exchanges. In classical music, the Cold W: di- n\ tt , frequently breached. Pianists from the United States and elsewheie co uin icj to participate in and win competitions in Moscow, Prague, and odv. ,tsu..n European cities, and there was movement in the opposite direction. For instance in 1961 the Kirov Ballet performed in Paris, and a year later the Leni-i.ii id Cilia toured North American cities. (Rudolf Nureyev, a twenty-three-vear-o.i1 so.o «.c of the Kirov company, defected at the Paris airport and became a major :"niiw ]n ballet in Europe and the United States.) The Philadelphia Orchestra lost ni rim,, in visiting the People's Republic of China as soon as formal contact was lished between Washington and Beijing. The 1960s and the 1970s were v„ Ikv-day of recorded classical music, made accessible to all people thanks 10 tl:.- spiL.-.e of tape recorders and, in particular, Sony's Walkman, a device with, which i-W could easily listen to one's favorite music while walking, bicycling, or rid 1 -g 1.11 a train. In the meantime, hitherto peripheral cultural pursuits began to b.1 i h u-duced to wider spaces and intermingle. The Japan Foundation, establ died :n 1972, the British Council, the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Francaise, and orhcr semiofficial cultural agencies were designed to promote cultural exchanges across borders, and similar foundations were created in South Korea, Tan\ an m, 11-land China, and elsewhere in Asia. Although provided with funding from official sources, these foundations functioned like such private organization % 11 dv United States as the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations, to promote cross-cultural exchanges. Even those who did not participate in foundation activities h'ra. 11c p.ut of global cultural networks in such other areas as food, fashion, and mov u1■ ^ ''-h expanding waves of migration, it is not surprising that non-Wesrerr. ci suit THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD Subway riders in New York City listen to Sony Walkmans, March 19S1. The convenient portable jurJio player, invented and produced in Japan, became a symbol of a mass culture that easily connected people in all parts of the world. (NY Daily News via Getty Images) spread to Europe, North America, and Oceania. There had always been Chinese restaurants in Western countries, but most of them had been limited to Cantonese food. Now many other varieties were introduced, including Peking and S langhai cuisines. Anecdotal evidence suggests that more and more Americans jnd Europeans became adept at using chopsticks, something that was helped by the growing popularity of Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian dishes. Businessmen from Japan and South Korea popularized their native cuisine, often cooked by chefs brought over from their countries. Raw fish, the main staple of I.panese food, was no longer looked upon as exotic, tasteless, or unsanitary. Not [list Japanese residents but an increasing number of Americans and Europeans began appreciating the taste as well as the health value of raw fish and other items s'ich as tofu. Similarly, the influx of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians in the wake of the Vietnam War familiarized Westerners with Vietnamese and Thai •[ 744 ]■ ■[ 745 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE food. Ac the same time, in Asian countries restaurants offeri"i:> \V-.,■ , t> »»>.M«.ii, hjoil,in particular American, French, and Italian cooking, rapidly increased in lur • Hamburgers and hot dogs appealed to Asians as an aspect of A neric.iii cnlti the first McDonald's fast-food restaurants opened their doo"s in Tip „ • i early 1970s. In fashions, blue jeans, popularized in the West after the Leyi\ b w marketed aggressively in the United States, came to unify the world's unuli 'iul even older people as their favored daily wear. An increasing numhci -: if" tioi Westerners came to attend fashion shows in Paris, New York, and elsewhere u:' some outsiders even opened their own boutiques in Europe and Ninth Aisici i« One might also note the international popularity of "Barbie dolls,' clad in E|v. latest fashions. With the spread of television sets in all parts of the world, people everywhere were able to see what styles were in fashion and to emulate ti-.n-i, Moviegoing added to the trend. The 1960s were remarkable for s.iih ii'incon-formist and even countercultural movies as The Graduate and A €!<■*• !;u u,lt Orange, the former a Hollywood production and the latter made iiv-Brir.iiii. 'Jbr Graduate starred Dustin Hoffman, who plays a college student who disri pis his ex-girlfriend's wedding and runs away with her. Earlier in the movie he hid an affair with the girl's mother. These and other episodes illustrated the cri:.vlilitiK of traditional family values and moral standards, which were con:,ideud out of date and hypocritical. Instead, the principal driving force now would be the determination to be true to one's desires and beliefs. The film was widely accLxicd in the United States and shown in many other countries where ?hc audiences shared vicariously in what the counterculture generation was producing ir the United States. Likewise, Clockwork Orange (directed by American author Sr s:i!;:y Kubrick) showed British hooligans who disregarded all social norms and rcn.rieil to violence against the established order, in the process even indulging .11 mass rapes. They spoke an argot of cockney English mixed with Slavic to;s, she movie was an extreme depiction of the countercultural impulses of the younger generation, and resonated with some young men and women elsewhere, .t inspired other antiheroes and anti-establishment actors such as Jack Niciolson, Warren Beatty, and Dennis Hopper. Of course, such extreme expressions provoked resistance and oppnsiiii:i:. sometimes just as extreme, among those who saw a threat to traditional order .Hid THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD ■ jnal values. Multiculturalism, which its European and American opponents ated with the erosion of traditional values, appeared to doom Western civilian. Ihe breakdown of sexual morals as exemplified by these movies alarmed ...-iservatives and even liberals who felt the countercultural movement had gone "too for. Many of them came together around the issues of abortion and homo-'sexuality- The US Supreme Court legalized abortion under certain circumstances : fa Roe vs. Wade (1975), a decision that was denounced by the Catholic Church and others who viewed fetuses as living beings and considered an abortion the equivalent to murder. Certain countries, in particular the Protestant nations of Europe as well as China, Japan, and others, had legalized abortion, but Roe vs. lV,ide became a battle cry for the Vatican and the Catholics in Latin America and elsewhere to renew their commitment to the sanctity of life, which they insisted began at conception. Likewise with homosexuality. Same-sex marriage was still illegal in most countries, but some homosexual couples were more willing now to "come out of the closet." Movies and dramas with explicitly homosexual themes began to attract large audiences. For instance, Michel Tremblay's play Hosanna, a story of two gay men in search of sexual identity, was first performed in Quebec in 1973 and was soon staged in Toronto, New York, and other cities. Transnational networks of homosexual organizations grew, which in turn produced hostile reaction in many parts of the world. As AIDS began to appear in the 1970s, first in Africa and then in Southeast Asia, notably among homosexuals, the fear of contagion brought about a global reaction against homosexuality, even as NGOs sand the UN began to grapple with the spread of the disease. In some such fashion, there were now global cultural developments that produced numerous transnational encounters and movements. Vicarious transnational moments were being created everywhere, contributing to the sense that while nation building continued in various parts of the world and the Cold War developed with its own momentum, even more significant phenomena were appearing, impacting upon the consciousness and behavior of people everywhere. Tick mentality had been thoroughly affected, even transformed, in the process. If these were instances of transnational cultural phenomena that provided underpinnings, as it were, for the global civil society, they were reinforced by multinational business activities. In the background was the steady erosion of the hegemonic position enjoyed by the US economy in the immediate postwar ■[ 746 ]- •[ 747 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE years. This could be most graphically seen in the fact that steadily tin {, 1960s and into the 1970s, the dollar, the mainstay of the Bretton Wo >J, nSrL. lost its primacy. The pound sterling, the franc, the mark, and the yen,c j m 1 ,t| |(_.' had been increasing their value as the countries in which they wcie 1 .m i ■ ,n 1 currencies had grown economically and expanded their foreign tra lc, ib K ni tainingmore dollar reserves. Put another way, world trade and financial uansac'"; tions were becoming more and more multilateral, and the dollar was |lKl 0|J among the major currencies. The value of these currencies would flWtii itc [\lt one day to the next, opening the way to currency speculation that would 0 (u.n widespread in the 1980s. Thus, economic transactions would become as ii(,Ln transnational (among individuals and private establishments across bo'duO as international (among business firms acting within legal and policy liainewnr!^ set up by their home countries). The growth of multinational enterprises was a good indication ■ 1. :>.e 1 kiui These were transnational business arrangements in which ca.pii.il, techmln^, and labor of more than one country would be combined to produce goods and' services that would be marketed throughout the world. Financiers, j:ls u.rrs, workers, and consumers of several countries became transnational actors, timlinr the best and most profitable means of production, marketing, and consumpi cn. The number of multinational corporations was less than one hundred in 9-0 but grew to over nine hundred by i98o.Si They were transnational not onh 1 1 rlic sense of building bridges across boundaries but also because they wire dm.11 more by business than by national considerations. Multinational enterprise v.vrc inherently non-national in that sense; they were subject to the rules and guidelines of the countries in which they operated, but they did not necessa. iU i ol I j\v or identify with the policies or objectives of particular nations. This c»:n Listed with the situation before World War I, when business enterprises wit;- (.'i more rooted in specific countries and engaged in their own nationalistic coirpcnr i.-i1 with one another. Nations, above all the United States, had sought to safeguard their domestic producers by erecting tariff walls. In the fast decades o: rhv twciu. eth century, in contrast, these businesses operated within a framework set u.i b* various governments supportive of global economic transactions and e 1 npiii-J among themselves without regard to where their components came from. I a. Iii'r, THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD •( inay De sa^> there existed international economic activities but no global civil adety, whereas now the two reinforced each other. Globalization was a term that had not yet gained currency during the 1960s or 15170s. Yet it was clearly the direction of world economic affairs during those tlccades. What was suggested by the "Nixon shock" economic measures of July n)"i, which resulted in the devaluation of the dollar, was that economic globaliza--ion was now more than ever becoming transnational. That is to say, quite apart from the story of the growth of international trade and investment, the agents of uiobalization were becoming more and more widely scattered. The Bretton \\ nods system had operated on the basis of the major countries' intergovernmental cooperation, and this would continue in a limited way even after the devaluation of the dollar starting in 1971. However, increasingly, outside the framework of such state-level transactions, transnational linkages were developing. That may be one reason why world trade did not diminish despite the global economic downturn during the 1970s. This downturn was caused primarily by the "oil shocks," the tripling and quadrupling of the price of crude oil, the bulk of which was produced in the Middle East. This was a result of a conscious decision adopted by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 in retaliation against Israel's attacks on the neighboring countries. Not just Israel but the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and other countries that had seemed to be behind Israel were to be punished by the Arab countries that accounted for a majority of the OPEC membership. They were aware of these other countries' dependence on imported oil, and they aggravated this vulnerability by reducing the output of crude oil and at the same time raising its price. These decisions were repeated again in 1979. As a result, the cost of energy increased tremendously, causing trade deficits in oil-importing countries for the first time in many years. The global energy crisis during the 1970s led various countries to seek alternative sources of power. The United States, the Soviet Union, and other European nations as well as Japan had been building nuclear power plants since the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, but during the 1970s they impressed observers as perhaps the best alternative to imported oil. Still, at that time nuclear energy provided only a fraction of power needed for industrial and individual needs, and so the countries' oil •f 748 1- •[ 749 ]• AKIRA IRIYE dependence was not mitigated. The result was a steep inflation l-i iy\v j ^ j | economic stagnation, as goods made in the industrialized nations hi r * expensive while the consumers' disposable income (after food and inn,,, i -it t had been paid) declined. Unemployment ensued, and the rates 1(|. growth of most advanced countries plummeted, some even recording /a (, or fn" | nus growth. Perhaps the most telling symbol of how the oil shod., a.kucd c(s | world's richer economies was the sight of the British government .lpphnij. and obtaining a $4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fm t [r h «1 Despite such disasters, however, the volume of international tia k- ,t ,(u.j,( increased, in sharp contrast to the 1930s when the Great Depressions e *i ]u.,, j (| hand with diminished trade. One key reason for this was that duri manufacturing firms and businesses began to resort to "offshore" prou Lni nt_ that is, they sought to reduce costs by looking for cheaper labor ab iud. Imvst-ment capital, saturated in the domestic economy, also went abroad, to md isi ..j !/c hitherto underdeveloped economies. A related development was a reorii ntaioii of the US, British, and several other advanced economies from industrial piu.luc-tion toward the service sector such as finance, insurance, and real estate A new global division of labor was developing, facilitated by the floating exchai ia 1 ,nt.s that came into existence by the end of the 1970s. Currencies kept movi'in; iranv-nationally; while, for instance, US, British, and Japanese capital would be poured into China and India to hire local labor for manufacturing, the emerging rich in these latter countries would invest their profits in purchasing bonds and scan -ties in New York, London, or Tokyo. Add to such developments the phenon »..1,! growth of "oil dollars," the petroleum-exporting countries' cash receipts tl" a: ihiy could invest abroad as well as use to purchase luxury items, it is not su piling that there were many transnational transactions in capital, goods, and la v_i Transnational Justice No aspect of the emerging global civil society was more dramatic than "re lo , sive growth of international NGOs. Together with individuals (migrants, tourists,! and others) and multinational enterprises, these organizations constituted non*| state actors and shared the world with separate states and intergovcrnnKi til institutions. em THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD fsjongovernmental organizations typically were private associations of people %ho voluntarily came together to pursue certain shared objectives, and as such t|lCy were not incorporated into public systems of governance. It would be difficult to apply such a definition rigidly to an organization from an authoritarian iiitc that controls even private activities. Not all private organizations, therefore, could be seen as authentic members of civil society. We may, however, take the listing in the Union of International Associations, itself a non-state actor, as a rcliable statistical guide. According to its publications, the number of international NGOs grew from 1,795 in 1971 to n,68S (79,786 if local branches were a[so counted) in 1984. This was a spectacular increase, unparalleled in the his-rory of NGOs before or since.83 Why this phenomenon? It can best be understood as another aspect of the overall characteristic of the world of the 1960s and the 1970s, namely, that the overwhelming authority and prerogatives of the state that had informed postwar history began to be challenged by the emerging social and cultural forces as seen above. Particularly pertinent was the growing awareness that the existing states were not capable of dealing effectively with issues that were of transnational nature. Many of those issues involve considerations of justice. The concept of justice had long existed in international law and in separate national legal systems, but during the 1960s and the 1970s it was given wider significance as people in various parts of the world sought to protest against violations of human rights and against ecological deterioration. Although the movement for the protection of human rights and for the preservation of the natural environment had different origins, by the 1970s they had become merged as a global agenda for justice. It is no accident that among the rapidly increasing number of NGOs were those concerned with these two issues. Human rights is a quintessentially transnational concept. When people in different countries lived at great distances from one another, the definition of who constituted the human community was rather limited. Even when one spoke of the rights of men, as the French did during the Revolution, "men" were not necessarily envisaged as people all over the world. Actually, the Revolution combined the rights of men with those of the nation so that they would reinforce each other. The same was true in most other countries. Human rights were to be safeguarded within the framework of a nation-state that would provide law •[ 750 ]■ •[ 75i ]• AKIRA IRIYE and order for its citizens. Their rights, in other words, were usualh L ,n hended as civil rights rather than human rights. But the years after ici | s |,| ,V1 j , greater opportunities than ever before for the encountering and iriiumt v<\ of people of different nations. It is not surprising, then, that the idn nl'li^n,'^ rights should emerge as a major principle of people's interactions \\ id other, and of the behavior of states toward their citizens. The significance of the 1960s and the 1970s in the history of .'1 man lights lies in the fact that in those decades human rights came to refer to poii L (j- ,] backgrounds and circumsrances. During the 1960s the UN adopu d 1 su it, ot resolutions declaring that "the subjection of peoples to alien subjug nation and exploitation," "all forms of racial discrimination," and' tion against women" were violations of human rights. To ensure that tl,. n 1111,111 adhered to such principles, a number of NGOs were created, such a> A niu._srs International and Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, ci ■[■hOi^,,, 1961, became a major transnational force on behalf of "prisoners of consui iilc," to promote global public awareness of, and protest against, abuses of po]mLllj prisoners that transcended "national, cultural, religious, and ideological bm:nd-aries."84 Such language shows that to be human was now considered a si pu icr condition of existence, over and above national and other identities. Hi is n 41m-zation received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, reflecting the emerging vi.'w :h.-.t a peaceful world order and the respect for human rights were interdependent, Human Rights Watch, founded at that juncture, particularly played a ciuual role in ensuring that the emerging detente between the United Stv.ics and Soviet Union would include considerations for human rights on both ,ides of" the Cold War divide. (The Helsinki Accords of 1975, signed by all the states be?-longing to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact, r.i.uii1 an explicit reference to human rights.) In the 1970s human rights had particular relevance to the protecrior. ol wmii-en's rights. Not just in individual states but across national boundaries, women • voices were heard more clearly and strongly than ever, especially through the'; large number of transnational organizations created for the purpose. During the 1960s, women's rights movements were mostly confined to the West, but Jiirint; the subsequent decade women in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere also became active. The UN declared 1975 "International Women's Year" and designated the years THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD chrough 1985 the "Decade for Women." In 1975 the first World Conference oll women was held in Mexico City, and the participants resolved to establish networks of women's organizations throughout the world. In 1976 in Brussells, tJie International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women brought together two thousand women from forty countries who cited and denounced all forms of violence against women. Clearly, no definition of humankind would ever again exclude females, and transnational women's organizarions and gatherings continued to remind men of this simple truth. Did "being human" include those born with physical and mental disabilities, those unable to take care of themselves, or even to express themselves due to brain damage? The most famous of "handicapped" persons in the world may well have been Helen Keller (1880-1968), a woman who overcame her blindness and deafness through special training and perseverance and led a movement to help the deaf and the blind. Her life's story captured transnational attention through The Miracle Worker, a play (1959) and a movie (1961) based on her life, people with physical disabilities had constituted a significant minority in all societies, some of which had developed programs to look after their needs. But the transnational care of such people had been very slow to develop. Apart from several organizations that assisted veterans of war who had been seriously injured, humanitarian relief activities had not involved efforts to have the handicapped be treated as "normal" human beings. The i960 Rome Olympics was a landmark in this regard in that the regular games were followed by the Para-lympics, where men and women with physical disabilities, from various countries, could for perhaps the first time in history challenge one another in sports in significant numbers. The experiment brought such joy to the participants and their supporters rhat the practice was followed by the Olympics held in Tokyo in 1964, Mexico City in 1968, and in all subsequent events. Among transnational efforts less connected to states was the holding in 1970 of an international competition for physically disabled athletes in Aylesbury, England. Such sporting events soon came to include the blind and those with cerebral palsy.85 Notable as these events were, they covered only those with physical disabilities, ignoring the large number of persons with mental, emotional, psychological, or linguistic disabilities. The United Nations belatedly included the rights of the ■[ 753 ]' \ n. 1 k \ I í I i I Hie Italian team at the Olympic Village before the start of the first International ParalymnM. held in Rome immediately following the i960 Olympic Games. The Paraiympics have since h. e,, .W|J every four years, demonstrating the world's belated awareness and acceptance :i-:hi d 1 ikd (Getty Images) mentally disabled in its list of human rights in 1971, and four years later the v .irld organization denounced discrimination against all types of disability. Iv.cn su, it was only in 1980 that "Special Olympics" were organized to bring togethei n-jn-tally disabled persons. This was surely one area where even expanded de:inn ic>n\ of human rights left a large segment of humanity inadequately covered. Nc^e rlii-less, soon it was globally recognized that one could not except even rK-1 lost severely disabled from the definition of humanity. If anything, such people tuvkJ a greater measure of "human security"—a term that gained currency at tins 111 il-ture, indicating the view that as well as, or even more than, the traditional rutn «n of national security, the well-being of humans as humans regardless of v 1 rlie\ were must lie at the basis of any conception of justice.86 ■H| i 4: THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD An important component of "human security" was environmental. The de-j£S after i960 were notable for the worldwide concern with the physical environment, in terms both of the quality of air, water, and food that humans consumed and of the preservation of the ecological system that sustained animals, birds, trees, and all living things. Both were transnational issues whose relevance cut across national borders. At bottom was a growing transnational concern with two phenomena that had characterized the postwar decades: population growth and economic change. With the world's population more than doubling between 1945 and 1980, with larger and larger percentages of people Jiving in urban centers, and with industrialization spreading even to small cities and villages, the skies began to darken, the waters became impure, and the air was sometimes unbreathable. Of course, wars and armaments contributed to some of these phenomena. The atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons sprayed "ashes of death" on all living beings indiscriminately until they were halted in I963—at least by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, which signed a test-ban treaty in 1963. In the war in Vietnam, US forces were spraying the Vietnam countrysides with Agent Orange, an agent containing dioxin that not only desttoyed forests and farmlands but also acted as a powerful carcinogen in the human body.87 Up to three million children and grandchildren of Vietnamese exposed to the chemical were said to bear its effects. Outside of such battlefields, air and water pollution remained and even grew worse because of pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide emitted from factories and automobiles, while rivers, lakes, and oceans were increasingly contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. One notable moment in demonstrating environmental damage may have come in Minamata, a seaside village in western Japan, where starting in the second half of the 1950s babies began to be born deformed, mentally handicapped, and even unaware of themselves. "Minamata disease" was caused by mercury poisoning; a manufacturer of a substance known as acetaldehyde used mercury in the production process, and dumped it into the ocean. The appearance of these babies was so shocking that civic groups were formed in the 1960s to protest against the company and to call upon the government to do something about the situation, which by then was causing scores of deaths.88 The news of Minamata disease ■[ 754 ]• •[ 7« ]• AKIE.A IRIYE spread to other countries, where similar incidents were reported, ,->nd ■ worldwide concern with mercury poisoning became one of the ni? jo*- ■ '1C transnational environmentalism. The Minamata syndrome seemed tu (| strate the danger of uncontrolled industrial development and thus fed tlv ing movement across national boundaries to stem the tide. As exempli n"a| |r, (l , Club of Rome, a gathering of economists and others in the late i960; in icn,j|}i.. to the growing seriousness of the consequences of industrialization, thi-rc uv transnational movement to resist unlimited economic growth. Theirs was not necessarily a universal voice. From the beginning, tin. uU ,r limited growth was opposed by Third World countries, which asserted rhjr th ■ world's environmental problems had been produced by the countries t:-;it I'a J already undertaken industrialization, in the process making use of the rkh resources of the poorer lands. The poorer lands, they insisted, should not be iuiu ircd to restrain their economic development, which would keep them forevtr i.i tin-state of underdevelopment, increasing the already large gaps between im t«u groups of nations. The collision between environmentalism and devclopmcntalistn was serious, and has remained so to this day. However, all countries, regan. Ins K.f their degree of industrialization or urbanization, agreed on the necessity _«> iidn.tr endangered species and to improve the quality of air and water. To that ivuc there was a transnational consensus. The disagreement had to do with -.im tic means of achieving these goals, the poorer countries insisting that the rich n ati'ii is should do more to improve the natural environment and should help the pnorir nations attain "sustainable growth," that is, economic development th:.t \\ s u>m-patible with environmental conservation. A landmark moment in the development of transnational envimnnieiu.il '■in was the Stockholm meeting convened by the United Nations in 1971. "ns \us a major international (rather than transnational) conference, but the -73 to follow up on the conference, was an international institution, it ,r L>vided the setting for the coming together of representatives of many private 'organizations with their shared agendas. The number of transnational organiza-[iniis dedicated to environmentalism grew so rapidly that in 1975 a conference - was held in Austria to review their interrelationships as well as their relation-Jiins to the United Nations and to independent states.89 Nowhere was environ-nvrtal activism inside and outside national and international frameworks more sensationally demonstrated than through the activism of Greenpeace, an organization established in 1970. Greenpeace not only advocated the conservation of the biosphere and the protection of endangered species, notably whales, but it often resorted to direct action. The organization's founders, Canadians and Americans in Canada, from the beginning were assertive in protesting against underwater nuclear testing and against the killing of whales, and they sent ships to disrupt such activities. But Greenpeace was not alone. In its campaign to save whales it was joined by other organizations, such as Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund, the latter having been established in 1971. As a result of their activities, international agreements came to be negotiated to ban the killing of at least certain kinds of whales. Norway, Japan, and some other countries that still practiced whaling—and ate whale meat—protested against such bans, but they could not silence the transnational voices that grew even louder with each success. Very broadly put, then, both human rights and environmental concerns were broadening the conception of justice. Going beyond the traditional legal notion, there was a transnational awareness that people and the natural environment needed to be treated justly. Technically, transnational justice was a concept that was formally adopted by the United Nations much later and referred primarily to reconciliation and restitution after violent clashes or dictatorial rule in a ■[ 757 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE country.90 But the idea that justice must prevail globally and that t. efforts must be made to pursue such an objective was quite evident lieio-. It is not surprising, then, that the unprecedented increase in the ninnhe-activities of international nongovernmental advocacy groups coincided w:th -I growing awareness that all persons must be protected against abusc/reiM id ^" c their differences, and that the planet Earth, with all its living beings nicst U treated justly. These were transnational concerns, and NGOs mushroom^] b. cause the authority of the state was weakening or because existing Government were incapable of dealing with those problems. Transnational'orgarizatirn, worked with individual governments and with international bodies it- seekir r to cope with them, but when these others were found to be inadcqtia:e, in iy ,tc associations would gladly take their place to exercise the initiative in -die n;,nK. ltc the whole of humanity. It was just a step here to the idea that in order to ensure transnat on. ] jumm-there should be established new legal frameworks, transnational courts of nisti.s. Unlike the international courts of justice that dealt with war crimes cdfi inu:ecl by one nation or group of nations against another, the transnational courts >\ mild represent people everywhere and bring to justice even those who acted in ^ motion of the human rights of their own citizens. Ironically, precisely at the moment when notions of transnational justice were making headway, a new challenge to the vision appeared in the firm ol tei or-ism, which often was couched in the language of justice and was now more uan>-national than earlier. Acts of terrorism had always existed, but most of them bail been national phenomena. During the 1970s, West Germany's Red Army 1 .u. tn>n protested against the governing class, which it believed contained too mam holdovers from the Nazi era, while the Irish Republican Army led a gucnill, -wu against British occupation forces in Northern Ireland.91 The Kurdistan Woikers Party worked for a Kurdish homeland in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey a.id in northern Spain the separatist group ETA was formed in 1968 to gaiiva '-.r.ne-land for the Basque people of the Iberian Peninsula. Both these organic tumi were willing to resort to terrorism, but arguably the most spectacular remnisc incident occurred in 1972 when the Palestine Liberation Organization [VLl >i attacked and killed a number of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic-. At iln. end of the decade, when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, Islamic iiliadi'.ts 1: THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD known as mujahedin staged guerrilla-style attacks against them. These were politically motivated terrorist acts that were part of national {or nation-making) dramas- jn late ^os and the early 1970s, however, a more transnationally 'oriented and organized terrorism made its appearance. Particularly notable were groups of Muslims who came together across national boundaries to target their enemies, who included both Arabs (most notably Egypt's Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1981) and non-Arabs who were considered enemies of Islam. Because Muslims were particularly numerous in South A.sia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, networks of clandestine organizations began to be created in these regions, out of which the most famous transnational terrorist group, al-Qaeda, would be created in the early 1990s. Terrorism, whether local, national, or transnational, clearly violated universal human rights in its assault upon people whom its petpetrators considered their enemy, whether because of the victims' nationality, religion, or way of life. Equally ' seriously, terrorists disregarded the sanctity of their own lives when they turned themselves into suicide bombers. Like the Japanese kamikaze ("divine wind") pilots who crashed their small aircraft into US ships in what they considered a sacred mission to honor the emperor, Islamic extremists blew themselves up in a "holy war" in the name of the prophet—and in the name ofjustice. (It was unjust, in their view, for the West to support Israel at the expense of Palestinian Arabs.) But the terrorist acts were criminal deeds in violation of all declarations on universal human rights that the United Nations and other organizations, including religious bodies, had promulgated. They were as serious an offense against humanity as genocides and even more transnational in scope. Transnational, nongovernmental terrorist incidents were, unfortunately, to grow more serious in the ■following decades. These headline-catching crimes, however, provoked global condemnation that was just as transnational in scope. Whether transnational terrorism could be suppressed only by national or international efforts through the use of military force, and whether, in responding with military power, the states might also be violating human rights, were questions that were to be bequeathed to the subsequent decades. ■[ 758 ]■ ■[ 759 ]• AKIRA IRÍYE Religious Revival and the Limits of TransnationalisTi There is another way to contextualize the appearance of Islamic -xr:\>\ iSm Ml ti 1970s. It was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that religion was ncujo- ■!,[,. gaining influence among individuals and nations, and in various iL-gmii, ,,| tlt world. While it is wrong to equate terrorism with a religious movei ncni, rl K (, cidental phenomenon of transnational violence and religious revival in the ,j. cades that saw notable developments in such areas as human rights and en, ,,„. mentalism is deserving of attention. Certain religious developments u-kK,. t., stress national and parochial concerns. Even if religious faiths had rraditunM||v stressed the unity of humans before God, that did not prevent sectarian, p.rt ú J. laristic forces from developing agendas that were clearly against universalis^. In particular, during these decades there grew what Scott Thomas lu, j,^;, termed "religious nationalism," or religion in the service of a nation, ..id ,Vc versa." Iran after the revolution of 1979 is a good example: a nation ruled by a rhe-ocracy of ayatollahs, or religious leaders. Of course, one could poinr to the c\L-nr..|ť of Israel as a Jewish state as an even earlier manifestation of a religion establishing .1 nation, but Israel was not quite a theocracy, and secular Jews shared power with the more religious. Others, such as Hamas in Palestine's occupied territory, rh< 1ky-bollah in southern Lebanon, and the Taliban in Afghanistan (until after end. >| Soviet occupation in the 1980s) and Pakistan did not control a national government but were seeking to seize political power. In all these instances, religious revival manifested itself through politicization, "Political Islam" was a good example. But Islam was not alone. The 1970s also witnessed the revival of fundamentalist tendencies among other religions. As Thomas Borstelmann has shown,; in the United States the decade was characterized by both social diversity and rcliL.mus resurgence." The same phenomenon could be detected elsewhere as well. Christianity, which had mostly remained a personal faith and, within a nation-:;t.n.', !>\- .11 ni large passive and subordinate to secular authority, came to assert itself. Most 1- 11 >■ influence, it is true, was in civil society, where church attendance began to grow and evangelical preachers and movements gained influence. But within the Cliiisii.in church, there were significant new developments among both Catholics and Protestants. Throughout the 1960s and the subsequent decades, the Catholic Chuuh h -came a major force for nuclear arms control and interracial harmony, while at the THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD ianie time adhering to traditional perspectives on such issues as marriage and birth control. Moreover, Catholics, especially in Europe, became deeply involved in developmental and humanitarian activities abroad. In Latin America, where such efforts were particularly notable, there emerged what was called "Liberation Theology"— t|iis came close to fundamentalism, as its followers strictly adhered to the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Bible, but it also had political implications in that it drove its adherents to involve themselves in opposition to secular state authorities. The Protestant counterpart to Liberation Theology was revivalism, or evangelicalism as it was sometimes referred to, stressing the impending "second coming" of Christ and the need for ardent prayers for personal salvation. Mainline Protestant churches in Europe and the United States declined in attendance during the 1960s, but nondenominational and charismatic sects surged. They stressed that the Bible was to be understood literally as laws passed down from God through Jesus. In the United States, for instance, a group calling itself "The Moral Majority" increased its influence during the 1970s, joining forces with additional evangelicals whose roots went back to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. Billy Graham exemplified the mid-twentieth-century variety, exhorting all devout believers to bring Christian doctrine into their daily lives. These movements were the Christian counterpart to Islamic fundamentalism, not only doctrinally but also in their attempt to make an impact on political and social affairs. Some fundamentalists became actively engaged in protesting against birth control and abortions, while others resurrected the anti-Darwinian movement that had seen its heyday during the 192.0s (especially in the United States) and argued that science, especially as taught at schools, should conform to the Bible. In opposition to Darwinian perspectives on the origins of human species, the adherents of what came to be called "creationism" insisted that the origins of humanity as well as of the world should all be attributed to God's work. While Islam and Christianity were particularly notable in the renewed emphasis on fundamental doctrines, other religions, too, were affected by the trend and produced groups within them that were oriented toward fundamentalism, even extremism. For instance, in South Asia, where Buddhists and Hindus had existed side by side for centuries—a coexistence complicated by the fact that Buddhists tended to be a major influence among poorer classes—some individuals and groups resorted to violence against one another, or sometimes against other 760 ]• 761 Transnational religion; temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1013. AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD religions. Such religious activism became serious when it was intertwined with ethnic conflict within national boundaries, as happened in Sri Lanka where the Tamil minority, espousing Hinduism, sought to achieve autonomy, if not complete independence, by struggling against the Buddhist majority. In Tibet, followers of the Dalai Lama accepted his doctrine of passive resistance to the Chinese government, which claimed that Tibet belonged to China, but a minority of radicals did not hesitate to use more direct means of protest. We may also add the example of Afrikaners, the white population in South Africa, the majcii^ of whom professed faith in the Dutch Reformed Church while safeguarding their nation's policy of racial segregation, or apartheid, even as it came to be denounced by the transnational community as a gross violation of human rights. Religion in the service of the state, and vice versa, were in many ways air anomalous development in a period that saw so much evidence that transna--: tional ideas and aspirations were being strengthened.54 The Dalai Lama and actor Richard Gere at chc New York Lawyers Alliance for World Secutirys Annual Peace Award, April 1994. Exiled from Tiber when it was incorporated into China in the Dalai Lama has followers all over the world, symbolizing the spiritual leadership of a transnational individual. (Wirelmage/Getty Images) Why such a development? It was clearly a reaction against the tendency of the age that exalted the transnational individual at the expense of the national community and that saw a steady erosion of state authority and the strengthening of non-state actors. Religious nationalism, in a sense, came to the state's rescue. One may see this most clearly in the United States, where religious revival was closely connected to nationalism and political antiradicalism, even antiliberalism. Those who were shocked by the challenges to state authority by the radical movement of the 1960s off en sought refuge in religion, in most instances the Christian church. Many religious conservatives, on their part, saw eye to eye with political nationalists. The relentless assault on the government during the Vietnam War, as well as rhe growth of transnational movements, produced an inevitable backlash, coalescing those who sought to restore respect for the nation as well as the church. In this sense, religion and nation reinforced each other. Religious revival in this period, however, may also be connected to another notable phenomenon: the self-assertiveness of non-Western countries and people. From the moment they came to power, Iran's ayatollahs did not conceal their disdain for modern Western civilization, in particular its secular lifesryles and democratic governance. Likewise with other Islamic fundamentalists, who castigated the West for its alleged domination of the world. Even less-politicized Muslims began to distance themselves from Western values or to assert that these values were not universally valid, that non-Western parts of the globe adhered to their own belief systems. We have noted the influence of such writers as Fanon and Said, who challenged the political and cultural terms that had been defined in the West and accepted unquestioningly by the non-West. Such thinkers as well as religious leaders were insisting on an equation between the West and the non-West, neither of which was of universal validity. Just at the moment when transnational forces appeared to grow with unprecedented speed, these views were calling for recognition of diversity, even of division of humankind into separate religious and other identities. Politicization of religion may be considered an aspect of such a phenomenon. In 1963 the historian William H. McNeill published a widely acclaimed book, The Rise of the West. The title was misleading, because the book's aim was not to celebrate the triumph of modern Western civilization but rather to put it in the context of the long history of humankind. In McNeill's view, "the rise of the ■[ 7é5 ]- AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD West" was not foreordained. It was a relatively recent phenomenon, datingfr ]ated that agrarian societies would undertake industrialization and urbanization no earlier than the mid-eighteenth century. The West "rose" and came to do;ui ) through some system of state planning, whether socialist or nonsocialist. The nate the world because of its scientific and intellectual achievements during 11„ advanced industrialized countries were to provide capital and technology for Enlightenment, but, he argued, this dominance might not last any longer tii..n ' this purpose. These ideas retained their influence after i960. Indeed, they gained that of other civilizations had. McNeill was only vaguely aware of the fore,.,, official recognition in the United States when President John F. Kennedy estab-what would come to be called globalization, let alone of transnationalizatior, lished an office devoted to foreign assistance (the Agency for International De-his emphasis, like that of his senior colleague Toynbee, was on connections amr.nj. ] velopment) and avidly promoted nation building and economic development in civilizations as a major engine of human history. Although McNeill was aj >;,.„• Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In addition, he also initiated the Peace Corps, ently unaware that these phenomena were even then challenging long-held ideas # aprogram for young American men and women to go abroad to serve as engineers, about the modern West, his insistence on viewing history as a world-embraci teachers, hospital workers, and in many other capacities to help modernize de-development, not just in terms of national or regional units, would, in two u\ : 1" veloping countries. The key theme was again development, which was now more three decades, come to seem commonplace. - j firmly incorporated into official US policy, as exemplified by the appointment In any event, to borrow from the title of McNeills book, the 1960s and the ; _ j of W. W. Rostow, the preeminent theorist of development, as a member of the 1970s did indeed mark the time when the non-West began to rise. We have <, e 1 i National Security Council. Even the Vietnam War, which grew in seriousness some examples of this already during the 1950s, such as the Bandung Conference ■ »under Kennedy and was drastically expanded under his successor, Lyndon B. and UNESCO's ten-year project on mutual appreciation between East and \\"cs-.. Johnson, was waged in the name of helping South Vietnam's self-determination Both challenged the traditional acceptance of the West as the norm and soug!-.i ;:i and economic modernization. place the West and the non-West on equal terms. We may likewise note the w.rt, j This was the heyday of academic developmentalism. Theories of moderniza-in which the idea of "development" became politicized and uncoupled from the -.; [ Jp. cion were promulgated by political scientists and sociologists as well as by econo-West. No idea was more "Western," at least in modern history, than that of l'X%- miscs' and historians, too, avidly absorbed the social science literature on the "development." And it had immense following among non-Western people.Eco- ;: f £ subject. As noted earlier, modern Japanese history came to be understood in the nomic development was a primary objective of the newly independent states ^framework of modernization, and the same conceptualization was applied to during the 1950s and beyond. As more countries joined their ranks—by the | Turkey, China, and other countries, and not simply national histories but also 1970s more than two-thirds of the membership of the United Nations consisted international relations were frequently understood in the same framework. Often of postcolonial states—development became an even more urgent imperative. the Cold War came to be seen as a contest between the superpowers as to which Already in i960 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution designating the ffC p 0f t]lem was better equipped and more successful in helping Third World coun-new decade as the Decade of Development. : tries modernize themselves. But far more than global geopolitics was involved, as The situation began to change in the early 1970s, however, when the develop- / ■ § j can be seen in the struggle between Moscow and Beijing to influence developing nations called for a "new international economic order" that would promote |: mental strategies in such countries as North Korea and Vietnam. Recent research their development by giving them preferential treatment vis-a-vis the advanced reveals that for Pyongyang or Hanoi, the Cold War struggle between the two countries of the West in trade, investment, and other areas. At the same time, re- superpowers was of much less interest to the political leaders than the question fleeting the thinking of Fanon, Said, and others, some in the Third World came to 0f choosing the ideology and methods that were best calculated to ensure their challenge the prevailing thinking on economic development, which had postu- own, as well as their country's, survival.95 •[ 766 ]• •r 7671- AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD At this level, then, development was a widely shared, transnational id t.li> ,s as well as the basis for understanding national and international■Tirlaii-, ■ \<ľ' ever, Third World doctrines against Western-style development also <^i ■ v, Jm the 1960s and became even more widespread in the subsequent decad ■ IfWL ( to name a significant moment to mark the rise of counterdevelopmentalisni, rhcrj would be no better landmark than the emergence of "dependence thooi \ ' h,sr promulgated by Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist and statcsm; n t hi, \w the 1960s he chaired the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and u,n. tinued to take the advanced economic powers to task for pursuing theirself i iv.oii-sr even when they undertook developmental assistance. Such assistance, 11 .i..-^ tl t] all had strings attached; the capitalist nations used it for solidifying tlu 1 iu|^ ()[, less advanced countries, tying them to global trade and investment netwoi |lť upshot was to keep these countries perpetually under the control of th<- iiidn» j 1,^ nations by making them dependent on the latter rather than freeing theimelves from the chain. Like Fanon's treatises on the Third World's mental deper.deiia' on the West, Prebisch's formulation theorized about the same pheno 11^-11011 in the economic area. Both questioned the prerogative of the West to present its own history as a model for others and sought to liberate the non-West from the aifc vanced countries' seemingly perpetual control of the world's resources and m,iŕľ kets. Soon dependency theory became widely shared among developing na:i enun or at least to aspire to enjoying, Western-style middle-class patterns of living ;u the very least, the Chinese were less poor than they had been tradiriu.sr h. | ,r instance, the rural poverty rate was 41.8 percent in 1990, but it shrank iu 3 4.1 percent by 1997. The percentage of Chinas population earning less than one US dollar a day fell from around 9 percent to less than 4 percent during the 1990s.'7 It is true that state planning, rather than market forces, dictated tlv o\cr,.l! direction, size, and specific contents of the Chinese economy. The Beijing regime, controlled by the Communist Party, annually set goals for economic growth, made plans for industrial and agricultural production, and provided subsidies rn export-oriented businesses. Even its population policy, which came to be known as the "one child per family" rule, was part of the state's attempt to increase the nation's productivity. By limiting the overall population, the leaders hoped to educate and train those who were born so that they would become productive iv.en> bers of the country and succeed in the international arena. This was an inrcgr.:! part of China's strategy of modernization, launched in the early 1980s so as tu catch up with the more advanced countries and to claim a larger share of the world economy. Even so, the state alone could not have carried on the task of transforming the country without the cooperation of the people, the mote so because modernization entailed incorporating the nation into the global setting, which in turn meant providing a profit motive to ambitious and hardworking individuals so that they would compete in both the domestic and external markets. Ar. increasing number of Chinese willingly entered the global market and pursued their opportunities as well as interests, to such an extent that by the end or rhe century a small minority at the top of the economic ladder were emerging as millionaires, to the envy of the rest of the population. The gap between the successful few and the rest created social unrest and political tension, which would never disappear despite the efforts by the governing elite to maintain domestic order. THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD The story could be duplicated in many other countries, so that there emerged Va globally interconnected community of individuals and non-state actors with agendas that were not identifiable with formal state policies. Countries like In-idia and Brazil were not far behind China, although their rates of economic growth in this period were lower. And in the wake of the ending of the Cold AVar and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Eastern European countries now entered the global arena and took advantage of the opportunities being opened up for economic liberalization and growth. Some of the formally socialist states did better than others, however. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic made fairly successful transitions to the market economy, whereas Russia's economy shrank by 3.5 percent between 1990 and 2.000 and Ukraine's rate of growth fell by nearly 7 percent per year. The fact remains that there were now far more numerous players in the drama of globalization. As a result, the United States, Japan, and the Western European countries that had dominated the world economy could no longer take their hegemonic position for granted and were forced to pay increasing attention to the newly globalizing states. Such a nation-by-narion description of accelerating globalization, however, is somewhat misleading. The principal units playing their roles in the world economy were no longer just nations. One significance of globalization at the end of the twentieth century is that states were becoming less the determinants of economic activities and their traditionally central roles were being supplemented, if not supplanted, by non-state actors and individuals. This phenomenon had already become noticeable in the 1970s, but it was accelerated during the 1980s. Instead of focusing on the rise of China or of the entrance of Eastern European states into the global economic arena, therefore, we should pay equal attention to the flow of goods, capital, and labor, which was now much less restrained than earlier. Instead of seeing China as a monolithic economic entity, for instance, we should speak of individual Chinese as well as the country's profit-oriented firms. These were people and organizations that happened to be Chinese, but their roles were not bound by the territorial borders. They went all over the wotld in search of business opportunities. Capital, too, was becoming increasingly more stateless, released from various restrictions that had regulated its movement. Perhaps the decisive moment in ■f 771 1- ■[ 773 ]' AKIRA IRIYE the transnationalization of capital came at the end of 1985, when represcnuiV.'i. of central banks and finance ministers from the United States, Britain, GeniMiy -France, and Japan met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to liberaliz;' cu-i-civ transactions across national borders. The authorities in these countries h.-J sj|IC 1971 sought to coordinate their monetary policies in order to sustain the valu- .-,|" the dollar at a certain level, but now they would minimize, if not elimiiutj altu-gether, such intervention. The Plaza Accord in effect withheld support for t!-.^-dollar as the officially sanctioned currency of choice in international tran^ei and eliminated state-controlled rates of exchange, at least in theory In real itv, 11 iL-central banks in various countries retained a measure of control over t\-.tes ol'ev change through buying or selling their respective currencies, China being a par-ticularly notable example. Still, currency traders, speculators, and even o:\linarv citizens all over the world were now much less restrained than in the past to pur-chase, accumulate, or sell chunks of whatever national monetary units they cliche. For the first time in the modern centuries, currencies began to float gloh.-.li\, which complicated business planning but was an inevitable aspect of the transn:.-tionalizing of the global economy. The establishment of the European Union in 1991 and the decision in 1990 ,v, most members of the regional community—Britain was a notable exception—u> adopt a common monetary unit, the euro, was further evidence of the UMUTia-tionalization of the global economy. One could now travel in most countries in Western and Central Europe without changing currencies at each border, while at the same time imports to, and exports from, the regional community u a xcc. and waned as the rates of exchange between the euro and the dollar, as we I. a% between the euro and the pound sterling and other currencies, kept changi ~ig. Despite such developments, observers and academic specialists weic slow to recognize them as a significant historical phenomenon. Although the term globalization began to be used by economists and social scientists during the ; 1980s—and its usage steadily spread to journalists, the business community, politicians, bureaucrats, and even foundations (such as the Center for Global Partnership, established within the Japan Foundation in 1991)—historians did not initially catch on. A cursory look at their writings indicates that few of them mentioned, let alone discussed, globalization until toward the end of the cer.tun. Even words like global and globalizing were rarely used by historians before tin ■■jj THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD [L;90S. But then, as if driven by some obsessive consensus, historians began writ-■ ng books in which such words appeared in their titles.58 Global history almost uvernight became an acceptable way, a plausible framework in which to study history, especially of the modern period. World history, too, made a comeback. jVs noted earlier, McNeill's The Rise of the West, published in 1963, had been a jjath-blazer, but the author's passion for the history of the whole world and its various civilizations had not quite caught on, and historians continued to focus on national histories. This had been how they had studied the past ever since the discipline of history was established in nineteenth-century Europe. History meant the study of a nation's past (and present). Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, world history gained in popularity, making separate national i histories less and less palatable, looking parochial. According to periodic surveys undertaken by the American Historical Association, whereas in 1980 only a tiny fraction of history departments in the United States had faculty teaching world history, twenty years later almost 2.0 percent of them did so/" The proportion of faculty and graduate students teaching and studying non-Western history continued to increase, challenging the once overwhelming presence of "Americanists" and "Europeanists." In this context, the term global history made its appearance. In most instances it meant the same thing as world history, but an increasing number of scholars came to prefer the term global rather than world { to describe their work and their intentions, especially if they were teaching or ; writing about the modern period. Whichever term was used, it is remarkable that in the 1990s more and more colleges began offering courses in world history, the assumption being that it was no longer sufficient just to study a particular country's past but rather that one should recognize the interrelatedness of all national histories. This was because, scholars and teachers now insisted, no country's history was self-contained but was a product as much of interactions with other countries as of internal dynamics. In a sense, then, there was no such thing as national history pure and simple, but only global history. However, because global history was a very awesome concept, assuming that one had to know something about all nations and civilizations, and because the term could give the impression that national borders no longer mattered, some preferred to refer to what they were advocating as "transnational history." Transnational history did not deny the existence and relevance of sepa- AKIR.A IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD rate nations but emphasized interconnections and mutual influences ,imon, them. Nations still mattered, but there were many other players on ;l,K ^ , ^ \ history, creating constant flows of goods, people, and ideas across borders, k.lu;. religions, and civilizations interacted with one another on a different p.,uu Morn nations. Whereas most scholars continued to comprehend these phciuj.i^,,,, tl themes in international history, the term international tended to -imply interstate, rather than inter-civil-society and interhuman connections, and mi ,(,rl1l argued, it was important to categorize these connections less as intem.-irion.-l ,iiu) more as transnational. Thus emerged the field of transnational history as a way to reconcer u|1/t history, especially modern history. Because the modern period saw the . v.m dancy of the nation as the key unit of political governance, economic sen. !Ml>> and social order, and because the study and teaching of history were often l-mnj up with the task of nation building, it was important to liberate oneself from sm 'i nation-centrism and pay equal attention to what was transnational in a naiiui:', past and present. Thinking along some such lines, scholars increasingly began in refer to transnational themes and developments in the modern and conten world. It was no accident that the historians who led the way in this dinre'i'm included scholars of US history, a subject that for decades had been dom i r writers focusing on domestic political, social, and cultural history, stre; unique character. Scholars such as Thomas Bender and Ian Tyrrell began i-> emphasize the need to put US history in the context of world history and of g( a lih-versal symbol for the search for freedom. That the protest was brutally suppressed was a Chinese national affair, but its memory was transnational and :ic\: winr away, so that the "Tiananmen moment" came to mean a betrayal of peopic s aspirations anywhere in the world. I Transnational Contributions to the i Ending of the Cold War [he dramatic ending of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s is usually attributed to geopolitical factors, in particular to the superiority of US military, economic, £hd technological power. The prevailing narrative postulates a teleology in which the bipolar struggle for power ended in one side's victory because it had greater military and economic power as well as intellectual and cultural resources— what Joseph Nye called "soft power"—which it used effectively against an opponent who may have had huge stockpiles of arms but not much else to counter that superiority.102 If such a one-sided power equation was all there was to the Cold War, however, it would not have lasted as long as it did. We must remember that :he Soviet Union as well as other socialist countries, including the People's Republic of China, had wielded as much influence as they did in the world because they appealed to anticapitalist and anti-Western opinion in various parts of ;he world, giving the impression that they, the socialist societies, were the wave jf the future. It was the challenge posed to the ideological as well as the military underpinnings of the Cold War that contributed to undermining and altering :he geopolitical map of the globe. The challenge was fundamentally transna-ional, ranging from global movements for human rights and for world peace to islamic fundamentalism opposed both to the Soviet Union and to the West. The + Cold Wars end contained all such elements, and to single out the geopolitical realities" would be fundamentally tautological. That is to say, if the Cold War is ieen to have been defined by such "realities," to assert that it ended when the "realities" changed is merely stating the obvious. It would be more helpful to note that the arena in which the geopolitical game was played had been signifi-:antly transformed so that the game had steadily altered its character. While the jf nuclear-armed states remained, and while international relations and national rivalries continued to move with their own momentum on one level, transna-ional forces were steadily intruding upon their spaces. Transnational contributions to ending the Cold War took many forms, but at bottom was the growth of non-state, non-national actors. NGOs and multina- W - tional business enterprises had spectacularly increased in number during the 1970s, J -7-7R 1- •[ 779 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE and in the subsequent decade they continued to help promote a senv ni'n| >[, i community. Some NGOs specifically aimed at resisting nuclear arman-jnt |, t strategy on the part of the superpowers, especially the introduction of mtdm range missiles on European soil. The Catholic Church actively particip,r.u: ; the global call for reduction of tensions, and it joined other international Nl.,0 in organizing protest marches and rallies in Europe, South America, and \\. There was an atmosphere of transnational solidarity that even began to attract participation by some from the Soviet Bloc. In the meantime, multination.il u>-terprises did their part in the process as well by expanding their business activities in Soviet-Bloc countries and in China. Although of modest scale, such activities created opportunities for contact between Western (and Japanese) busings people and their counterparts in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Clun t Soviet and Chinese leaders, exemplified by Gorbachev and Deng, uiideiit'Mil that some personal engagement with capitalists from abroad was a necessa i, a i ltl inevirable aspect of their countries' economic modernization programs. The aw.-.ie-ness of the growing business ties must have contributed to generating sense or community driven by shared interests across what was left of the Cold War divide. Another transnational factor in the drama of the 1980s was environment, i-ism. To recapitulate briefly, although the movement for protecting the planet" from pollution and waste had begun to gather momentum in the 1970s, duriiv the 1980s there was as yet little to show for it. The most graphic manifestat ion of this was in the Earth's temperature. It had arisen from the average of %6.<,"V (i3.6°C) during the first decade of the twentieth century to 57.o°F (i3.9°G)■ seven decades later, but in the 1980s it rose at a more rapid tempo, to 57.4°F (i;| i°L'i, indicating an alarming impact of the "greenhouse effect" caused by carbon diux-ide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. In 1980 the world emitted i total of 18,333 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the burn'ng of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, and by 1990 the amount had risen to million.103 The United States and the Soviet Union were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, together accounting for 41 percent of the world's total in 1980 and 41 percent in 1990. China added another 8 percent in 1980 and 11 percent i.i 1990, so that these three large countries were significantly contributing to what came to be known as "global warming." THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD It would be far-fetched, of course, to argue that the increasingly serious ,n-eenhouse effect undermined and ultimately ended the Cold War. It is clear, nevertheless, that within the Soviet bloc no less than in the West, concern with •he environment was growing, as was the realization that such concern was ihared transnationally. Nowhere was this more dramatically demonstrated than in the horrendous nuclear seepage that took place in a nuclear power plant located in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986. On April 2.6, reactor number 4 of the facility exploded, and the resulting fire spread contamination into the atmosphere, which winds distributed far and wide. It was a transnational tragedy as the nuclear jases spread beyond the Soviet borders. The elevated and potentially harmful fallout reached Western Europe and as far away as Greenland. (Even as late as ion, it was reported that sheep-grazing pastures in Wales still recorded low lev-is of radioactivity.104) This was a civilian, not a military, disaster, but its impact was all the greater because the radiation released has been estimated to have been of far greater intensity than that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities in August 1945, and because it caused the deaths of scores of people and the evacuation of the city's residents, many of whom have not returned there even today. In the United States, many had been traumatized by the depiction of nuclear fallout in the movie The China Syndrome, which together with the Chernobyl crisis and the less severe seepage in 1979 at a nuclear factory in Three ;Mile Island, Pennsylvania, served to confirm the transnational belief that environmental disasters knew no national boundaries. Gorbachev clearly understood this, and he turned to other countries for assistance in clearing up the debris from the Ukrainian nuclear plant. In such circumstances, maintaining a posture of confrontation with the United States and its allies must have seemed to make no sense. The Cold War, whatever meaning it had ever had, lost significance when the nuclear adversaries both contributed to, and suffered from, environmental disasters and global warming. Human rights were another transnational issue that connected countries on borh sides of the Iron Curtain. As Sarah Snyder details in her book Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, since the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which included a provision about human rights, Western activists had been stepping up their efforts to contact similar groups, many of them clandestine, in the •[ 781 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE Barbed wire surrounds the deserted town of Prypyat, Ukraine, adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, May 1003. An accident at the plant caused radioactive material to spread all over Ukraine and many parrs of Europe, triggering a worldwide questioning of the wisdom of producing more nuclear energy. (AFP/Getty Images) socialist countries in order to protect victims of political persecution."-' Due in part to such efforts, Eastern Europeans increasingly became bolder in challenging their leaders. At first quite modest, steps toward democratization were nevertheless real. In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and other countries—even in Romania, which still had a particularly brutal regime--citizens organized themselves in opposition to those in power, and unlike e;:tliei this time the Soviet leadership, under Gorbachev, did not send in tanks and troops to suppress them. After all, the Soviet Union itself was promoting the spirit of "openness." The result was that toward the end of the decade, one communist regime after another fell, and the borders between Eastern and Western Europe were opened up. Particularly dramatic was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989—a fitting climax to the drama of democratization in Eastern Europe. While this event is often seen in the context of the ending of the Cold War, it would be more fitting to consider it a chapter in the history of human THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD I rights. It was democratization that, added to environmental and other transnational factors, led to the end of the Cold War, and not the other way around. Moreover, it would be too simplistic to assert that Eastern European demo-^ cratization was a victory for rhe United Stares in the geopolitical contest. Human rights had been promoted by many people all over the world who had constructed non-state networks of activism, and the significance of this phenomenon went far beyond the ups and downs of international affairs. Rather, the story belongs in transnational history, and in that sense what happened in the 1980s demonstrated that conventional international relations were making way for transnational relations. What a study like Snyder's shows is that there exist several parallel histories: history of geopolitical affairs, history of human rights, history of environmental disasters and efforts to cope with them, and many others. What the 1970s and the 1980s showed was that human rights, perhaps for the first time in history, asserted its primacy and eclipsed other narratives. That, too, is an important theme in the making of a transnational world. 111 ] Transnational Nationalism? Ironically, just as transnational waves were sweeping through the world, tradi-: tional forces of nationalism also appeared to be reviving. Nowhere was this phenomenon more striking than in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, where renewed assertions of national identity frequently led to calls for independent '5 nationhood. During the 1980s, it took the form of Eastern European countries' assertion of greater independence from Soviet control, but in the aftermath of ■ the Cold War, it became an even more extensive phenomenon, with various 1 components of the USSR breaking away from Moscow and, with or without the latter's connivance, establishing (or, in most cases, reestablishing) autonomous nations, such as Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Their separation heralded what would be the final demise of the USSR in 1991. jHenceforth, Russia, too, would become a nation among nations, although even within the now smaller country there would be components seeking to achieve their own independence. The Islamic republic of Chechnya was the most notable i." example, where separatist rebels sought independence from the rest of Russia in 1994 an£f fought against Russian troops for a number of years, the Russian military •[ 782 1- ■[ 783 ]• AKIRA IRIYE in the process laying to waste the capital city of Grozny. The Chechcn-Riiw an confrontation would continue into the new century. In the rest of Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia broke into two, the Czerh Republic and Slovakia, but the most extreme case was in the Balkans, v,hiii Yugoslavia, which had been created in the aftermath of the First World WVu anJ consisted of regions with separate identities and religions, divided into a number of states after the 1980 death ofJosip Broz Tito, who had presided over Yugoslavia after the Second World War. Like the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Y_m• j.,e,,,) separatism. Most of these challenges to dominant national regimes v.cie peaceful, but in Northern Ireland the Irish Republican Army periodically enslaved m terrorist attacks on Protestants citizens, and the latter responded in kind unul., peace accord was concluded in 1998. In Spain the separatist Basque 1 ulit.'ni-, continued to agitate for independence, resorting to bombing raids throi »\\ -Jli: first years of the new century.106 How do we interpret such occurrences? Clearly they indicated the depth .,1" ethnic nationalism that went back to the nineteenth century and even <■ xr.'.ci. Long suppressed while the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and rht United States had privileged the status quo over the aspirations of ethn ic grou ps, such groups now felt released from any such constraint and sought to establish new nations to reflect their separate identities. It should be noted, however, that ethnic self-consciousness did not translate into an assertion of separate nationhood in most countries of the world, which after all were mostly multiethnic entities. Russia, even after the Soviet Union was broken up, continued to contain nearly two hundred nationality groups, while the People's Republic of China consisted of some fifty-five ethnicities, of whom nearly 10 percent were non-Chinese. In the United States, virtually all the races and religions of the world were represented. In the last decades of the century, non-African racial groups i" the United States, particularly Latinos and Asians, grew rapidly in number, but there was no indication that any of the racial, religious, and other ethnically identifiable groups were seeking to create a separate nation. The United Stales was perhaps the best example where overall national consciousness had developed to such an extent that the nation's breaking up into fragments along ethnic lines would be unimaginable. Such was also the case with most other "established" countries, where, with the exception of a few like Spain, ethnic self-consciousness •[ 786 ]• 111 1 ■HI I -•if -i THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD did not threaten the integrity of nationhood, at least in the last decades of the twentieth century. Even in some of these countries, however, ethnic minorities were never free from a sense of national (or, perhaps more correctly, subnational) identity and did not integrate entirely into the larger community. The Turks in Germany, the Algerians in France, and the Pakistanis in Britain often chose to emphasize their ethnicity over assimilation into the larger national community.107 Tibetans, Ui-ghurs, Koreans, and other minorities in China remained cohesive and did not identify with the Han (Chinese) majority. These phenomena in turn provoked nationalistic responses from the majority populations, who sometimes organized rhemselves into ultranationalistic movements. If the second half of the twentieth century was the age of transnationalism, it also seemed to enhance nationalism, of both minority and majority groups. Perhaps the best way to understand these dual phenomena, transnationalism and nationalism, would be to view them as existing simultaneously at different levels or layers, inhabiting separate but not exclusive spaces. It was not so much that transnationalism and nationalism were competing for influence, but rather that they were simultaneous forces. For one thing, nationalism was becoming a transnational phenomenon. Along with everything else, nationalism was one kind of global development. Moreover, unlike the earlier "age of nationalism" that begot world wars and local wars, this time many of the nationalistic forces were oriented domestically, seeking their own separate identities and sometimes their own communities and even daring to break away from an established state. Nationalistic rivalries of the traditional sort remained, involving territorial, trade, and other disputes, but these international dramas were played out even while global forces were shaping another layer of transnational connections. Nationalism, in other words, was just like other "local" identities that grew hand in hand with forces of globalization. In that sense, there was no inherent contradiction or irreconcilable opposition between nationalism and transnationalism. Not so much nationalism as mono-nationalism may be taken as having been a more serious challenge to transnationalism. Mono-nationalism in the sense of exclusionary loyalty to one's nation and of resistance to considering items beyond borders—be they goods, ideas, or individuals—was incompatible with transnationalism, and it was becoming rarher rare. Even so, mono-nationalism -[ tSt 1- AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD sometimes made its appearance as if to revalidate the nation's sense of In. This can best be seen in historical memory. As suggested in the introduccoi \ tion, how a nation remembers its past had always been central to its idcntiu ') | in a transnational age collective memories across borders could in ::-kui\ |1h , emerged so that ultimately they would become a shared memory of the \\ h i|t humankind. That was a development that was becoming discernible i i Liui n as the next section will discuss, but more notable at the end of the centui \ v,u . competing memories that reinforced the mono-nationalism of many counn u-s China and Japan, for example, clashed over official memories of rheii mc,rL wars, in particular Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s. Japanese history textbooks, written by nongovernmental writers but subject to official appu>\, 1 |lL. fore course adoption, began to attract the attention of Chinese as we! I ,(s I^in.'-ans and other Asians in the 1980s and beyond, who blamed the authorities m Tokyo for encouraging a revisionist teaching of the recent past, whitewashing the aggression and atrocities committed by Japan's military forces. Some in Tap.--:i, for their part, blamed their critics for distorting the record by publishing thai own official histories, which, they said, exaggerated casualty figures and other! aspects of the conflict. Japanese nationalists viewed the Asian-Pacific war as hav-,: ing been waged to "liberate" Asia, whereas Chinese nationalists, joined by those from Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere, asserted that Japan's imperialism had been even worse than that of the European powers.108 The history of the Second World War also engulfed the United States and Japan in controversy over tin Smithsonian Institution's plans in the mid-1990s for an exhibition oi the EuoLt Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. That was the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and the initial design of the exhibit had been to pay as much attention to the destruction caused by the atomic bombing as to the development of the new weapon. But the plans had to be drastically modified so as to present the nuclear attack as having been a roirplccclv justifiable means for bringing the war in the Pacific to an end without further casualties.109 Japanese remembered Hiroshima in a sharply contrasting way. as ;.r. unjustifiably inhuman way to destroy a populace, and there could be no easy reso ■ lution of the two conflicting memories, indicating that even between allies, trans-nationalization of historical memory was no easy task. When it came to a nation's history, mono-nationalism seemed to trump transnationalism. It was as if the more transnational connections across borders grew, the stronger also became a sense of history and memory as constituting individual and group identities. Transnational Regions If there was to be a way to reconcile transnational and national layers of consciousness, the European example suggested that the construction of a regional community might be a possible solution. Nationalism and transnationalism— Jocal and global forces—could perhaps be mediated through regional coramuni-: ties. As best exemplified by the European Community, which became the European Union in 1994, various nationalisms could be placed together in a regional framework in which all members would share certain policies, even a common currency. The story of the Union belongs in national and international history, but its transnational implications are obvious. Regarding such cross-border issues as migration, water resources, and environmental protection, the regional community would develop common approaches. By abolishing borders within the Union, citizens of all member states would be free to move across national boundaries, and foreigners would also be able to visit all countries within the regional community once they had been admitted into one of them. The Europeans were particularly concerned with their water resources. There are no arid areas within the European Union, but it is imperative to preserve its rivers and lakes in order to provide sufficient water for industrial, agricultural, and consumer needs. Since the 1960s the member states have cooperated in developing a strategy for controllingwater usage.110 The European states also worked together to protect the natural environment, defining a common approach to reduce carbon emissions and prevent deforestation. Nowhere was transnational pan-European consciousness more graphically demonstrated than in the founding of the European University Institute in Fie-sole, outside Florence, in 1976. There was clear awareness among the institution's founders—who came from all parts of Europe—that no regional community would be enduring without some shared intellectual and cultural experiences, and this would particularly be the case in education. Traditionally education -[ 789 ]• AKIRA IRIYE had been a very national undertaking, as each country sought to create a furtu -citizenship that would be cohesive, literate, and ready to serve its needs. As a i,i sequence, not only primary schools but also institutions of higher learnin>h 11 tended to be organized nationally. The new European leaders understood the imperative necessity to go beyond such a narrow focus, and, although they v o i, j still support national centers of pedagogical and academic excellence, they w oh j(| also be willing to share their resources for bringing university-level students from all over Europe, and some even from the United States and other countries, to expose them to a more transnational environment of scholarship .md research. Initially consisting primarily of programs in economics, law, liisioi ■, and civilization, and in the political and social sciences, the European University Institute demonstrated Europeans' commitment to shared knowledge and tn intra-European cultural exchange. Such a commitment was confirmed by d ic establishment in 1987 of the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobiln > litical arrangements such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Iht ,]e ( a Pacific community was much slower to develop, but as Walter Mcl Jon ,A\ ^ already pointing out in a 1993 book, Let the Sea Make a Noise, counirus ,unl people of the north Pacific—ranging from Chinese and Russians 1 Hov, IM , Canadians, and Americans—had been interacting with one anothe, f-,i a |l)r„ time.112 As if to take a cue from such a perspective, historians in A.is ulia, (, ,,. ada, the United States, and elsewhere were beginning to conceptua!i/i , V iulu community whose scale would be even grander than its Atlantic ci.imtui'iit However, no blueprint yet existed for a comprehensive Pacific communis cr in-parable to the European Union. For that to develop, Asian countries would first have to establish theii rei'i-in .1 identities. But the situation in Asia continued to be complex. Several ccanirif, of Southeast Asia had already, in the late 1960s, created their own regional community, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had be^un to promote not only economic but also political interdependence anion.; u members. Economically, they suffered a serious financial crisis in the late 1990s a> Thailand and some other nations experienced a sudden shortage of foreign exchange, a crisis that had grown out of their increasing consumption of foreign goods. With a sharp increase in these countries' trade deficits, the value oi then-currencies fell. The worst possible development, like the global exchange crisis of the early 1930s, was averred by a timely intervention by the IMF, which pro-.: vided temporary relief measures in return for these countries' pledges to lrrormu late their economic policies. But the experience showed that a regional com in n nii\ that focused almost exclusively on economic cooperation was insufficient. F"o:n around that time, ASEAN began to negotiate trade agreements with r.immembers such as China, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union, looking toward a more global engagement. Such undertakings were still within ".he traditional framework of international relations, but there also grew environmenta. and cultural tegional consciousness transcending national boundaries, an identity - jj| THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD that reflecred a self-consciousness of the region's position vis-a-vis China in rhe north and Australia and New Zealand in the south. Leaders and the public in * the region were making an attempt to develop a transnational identity that would |»nable them to define a common perspective on such issues as human rights and jnvironmentalism. For instance, the seas surrounding the Southeast Asian countries were particularly rich in reefs, containing about one-third of the world's total. But it was reported in 1990 that virtually all these reefs were in danger of jxtinction because of pollution, and ASEAN provided a framework for transnational cooperation to cope with the critical situation. However modest, the Southeast Asian countries' regional initiatives were far jhead of any development in East Asia. Consisting primarily of China (including Taiwan), South and North Korea, and Japan, the region remained divided not only because of the uncertain relationship between mainland China and the island of Taiwan, and between the two Koreas, but also because no shared memory comparable to that in Europe had emerged there. Koreans srill resented the ' Japanese invasion of the peninsular kingdom toward the end of the fifteenth I century and the rule by Imperial Japan during the first decades of the twentieth, jf while the Chinese retained bitter memories of their war against Japan. Unlike ' Europe, which had somehow managed to accommodate wartime German atroc-1. ■ ities into a collective memory, in East Asia the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Japanese held on to their separate memories, nationalizing rather than transna-tionalizing history. North and South Koreans, for their part, dealt with their recent past, notably the Korean War, in sharply contrasting ways. Those in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea attributed the war's origins to South Korea's invasion in collusion with US imperialists, whereas in the Republic of Korea the conflict was remembered as a national tragedy perpetrated by the communist regime to the north that not only initiated the attack in 1950 but also retained a large number of people who were denied a chance to return to their homes in the south. Under these circumstances, it was very difficult to promote a sense of regional (or even of Korean national) identity. Nevertheless, at least among China, South Korea, and Japan, there slowly developed a consciousness of shared regional concerns and destiny. This was most evident in their economic relations. Japan, the world's third largest trading nation during the 1980s and the 1990s (after the United States and Germany), ■[ 792. ]• ■\ 793 1- AKIRA IRIYE vi ;'imgSjM increased its exports to China from $5 billion in 1980 to $30 billion tweniv vc;ir. 1 later, and its imports from China from $4 billion to $55 billion in the same >... il$$igm riod. The United States still remained Japan's principal trading partn.":-, bi,t ' j China was fast catching up. The "newly industrialized countries" of Asia, i\m1k ,, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, accounted for 8,9 percent Qf--'-'7$j$m Japan's total export trade and 18.4 percent of its imports in 1000.Las-. Asia nr. the whole was emerging as a major and rapidly expanding regional market; i rn ra- = ■ regional trade among East Asian countries as a percentage of their total v.r.,^ * trade grew from 35.6 percent in 1980 to 46.8 percent twenty years l.uer. Tin.-^. : figures were still lower than those for the European Union or for NA1-TA, i which reached 73.1 percent and 55.7 percent, respectively, in 2,000, but far hi»|1 than for ASEAN, whose members traded among themselves for only a quarter ^^^^T of their total trade. There was also much intraregional investment. A steads j increasing number of Japanese firms began to be established in China, where tlu ! number of business personnel and factory representatives from Japan jumped % from 63,000 in 1990 to 567,000 ten years later. (The comparable figures lor j- ■ "I nese working temporarily in the United States were 479,000 and 661,000, spectively.) Conversely, more and more Chinese visited Japan; some stayed<• added to the non-Japanese Asian population in the country, which numbered : roughly one million at the end of the century. 1 1 There was also a deepening level of popular and elite exchanges among CI- - i nese, South Koreans, and Japanese. Movies made in South Korea gained pope- ; larity in Japan, and Japanese television dramas were shown on Chinese iciVvi- sion. Historians from the three countries began their initially modest attempts I at studying the past together, in the process stressing the importance of transna- |; tional regional history. In other words, rather than studying the past ir. die framework of respective national histories, they explored the region's past .is .1 j whole, tracing the three countries' economic, social, and cultural interdependci '1 It remained to be seen if there would in time emerge an intellectually cohcr :| idea of East Asian regional history, comparable to European history. Therj little doubt, though, that the efforts by scholars, journalists, and others to under- \; /intake the task jointly were creating transnational moments and spaces that went beyond official relations. THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD The American Century as a Transnational Century ■ Toward the end of the twentieth century, especially after the end of the Cold War, many spoke of the United States as the sole superpower, as the new hege-: mon, or as an empire. All such expressions revealed a habit of mind that continued to see the world as fundamentally defined by sovereign states that maintained some order through their military and economic power. In the age of globalization and transnationalization, however, such traditional measurements of influence were no longer adequate. A nation would be a "winner" only to the extent that it reflected and reinforced global trends and furthered the networking of people and communities. It was perhaps because this key fact was recognized that many recalled Henry Luce s 1941 editorial in Life magazine on the "American Century," or that Francis Fukuyama's xooz book, The End of History, gained so much popularity. A group of conservatives in the United States even began a movement called "For a New American Century." That, however, was a mono-nationalistic take on a fundamentally transnational phenomenon, for the writings by Luce, Fukuyama, and others emphasized not so much US geopolitical power as its "soft power," another term that gained currency after Joseph Nye used it in a 1990 book, Bound to Lead, pointing to the nation's technology, ideas, and sheer example as the keys to its global influence. And there was little doubt that at the end of the century the United States stood as the embodiment of the ideas and ideals that had transformed the world. That was what Fukuyama meant by the "end of history"—namely, that Enlightenment ideas such as democracy and freedom exemplified by the American example seemed to have been universally embraced so that history had in a sense been fulfilled. Such optimism was, and has since been, severely criticized, but Nye, Fukuyama, and others were undoubtedly correct to link the destiny of the United States with the modern global transformation. What they could also have stressed is that this transformation had fundamentally entailed transnationalization, so that in contributing to it, the United States, too, had been changed. It had become increasingly more interconnected with the rest of the world, with the result chat it was now less unique and shared many traits and phenomena with other countries. In that sense the American century had made the United States less "American" and more interchangeable with others. One could see such a •f 79s" 1- AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD process, Americanization of the globe and the globalization of Amu v | ring simultaneously, in population movements, technological de\t Iciiimtp ? and many other areas. For instance, international tourism was now becoming more and in,,,, t, -national. Whereas earlier Americans, and then Europeans after thf\ nYt>\Lt | from the war, had dominated the tourist scene, their numbers were b< in^ augmented by travelers from other parts of the world. The overall number 11" 11' " St ternational tourists increased from 278 million in 1980 to 687 million in -.00 „ Jjf These figures correspond to roughly one out of fifteen people in the w< »i Id 1111 y ir and one out of nine in 2000. (The same individual may be counted moie dm once in such statistics, because, as we saw earlier, the statistics are compiled .v. tl- • - "3? host countries independently of one another. Still, the trend is unmistakably -What is equally interesting is the growing diversity both of the natioivl niinn^ of the tourists and of their destinations. In the last two decades of the cencui v, : *|j middle-class Japanese and wealthy Arab rourists, and eventually Koreans .uiti " *1 Chinese, joined American and European travelers, so that foreign traveling bv ; ^'m-came a truly transnational phenomenon. Stores in New York, London, Paris, and other Western cities began to post signs in Japanese and other non-Western;^'"::' ':3L languages and hired native speakers of non-Western languages to cater to the new f§! visitors. Equally significant, international tourists increasingly began visi:i ng areas = outside of Western Europe or the American continent. In 1980, for instance, about : i ;|j:: 23 million travelers visited Asia and the Pacific, accounting for less than o pciv. in ; of the total number of tourists, the remainder visiting mostly Europe and NorJi ; America. Twenty years later, however, no million people visited the Asia I\.c Jk region, another 28 million went to Africa, and 23 million went to the Middle E: Together, these areas hosted about a quarter of die world's tourists.11 The expansion of international tourism was reflected in the phenomenal growth of the money spent by the travelers all over the world. Tourism receipts grew from $104 billion in 1980, to $264 billion ten years later, to $475 billion ■■■ 2000.114 These figures average out to nearly $700 per traveler in 2000—::ct 1 eluding the cost of airfare and other transportation. Most long-distance crave, was by plane, and the rising price of gasoline made air travel more expensive. Nevertheless, the tourist figures suggest that increasing numbers of people ielr they could afford to undertake such trips, perhaps by joining tour groups and ijilso by staying at less expensive lodgings. Although few people in the developing countries were earning sufficient income to enable them to undertake even the cheapest of foreign travels, international tourism was nevertheless becoming affordable for the majority in the advanced and advancing economies. And although Europe and America took the lion's share of tourism receipts, for counties of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the billions of dollars spent by visiting tourists were a growing portion of their national revenues. That roughly one out of nine people in the world in the year 2000 was crossing borders every year as a tourist and spending so much money abroad was an important aspect of the transnationalization, and of the Americanization, of the world. But international tourism was also a major contributor to the growing global environmental crisis. Many travelers crowded big cities and provincial towns, putting pressure on water resources, polluting skies and lakes, damaging trees, even killing endangered species. African safaris, for instance, became so popular that already in the 1980s voices began to be heard, warning of the danger to the survival of elephants, lions, and other animals. The concern with protecting the natural habitat and preserving endangered species developed in tandem with the growth of international tourism. That, too, was something that Americans and people from other countries came to share. When hundreds of millions go abroad and meet people in other countries, however fleetingly, innumerable transnational moments are created, often resulting in the development of transnationally shared ideas and attitudes. Literary writers were quick to incorporate this emerging phenomenon into their work. David Lodge's Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984) perhaps best exemplified the trend. In these and other novels, college students and university faculty were described as basically stateless, engaging in their research, teaching, and social activities in which their national identities were of much less significance than the transnational spaces they created. Readers of these best sellers immediately recognized the settings, what some sociologists were beginning to define as "non-places"—airports, tour buses, shopping centers, and the like that were interchangeable anywhere in the world—where the principal characters intermingled and spoke common languages. Although many such novels were set in academic institutions where students and faculty from many countries mingled and created their transnational communities, the description of how differ- •1 796 1- ■[ 797 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE enc national intellectual landscapes and institutional traditions becani. transformed, or reaffirmed could have been applied to all internatión 1 M ^ and those staying home but interacting with them. It is, of course, im « „ j [ generalize about the combined impact of such encounters, some of undoubtedly less friendly than others and confirmed existingp.-e|iiditts st reotypes about "foreigners." Nevertheless, it would be fair to say th a ih ,| tourism the world's people were becoming more than ever conscioii-, ul iilln) „ diversity as well as shared humanity. The question was whether such au.ircji; would have a constructive consequence, such as the promotion of tlv -,1m, „i tolerance, or whether it would do little to overcome traditional pi uJKt, ward the unfamiliar. Most likely, both processes went on at the Same i me,. >, | M, Desmond's 1999 study of Waikiki tourism suggests.115 All the sane, t mmm may be comprehended as yet another manifestation of one of the ke\ plvi uměna in the contemporary world, the unceasing intermingling of people oi d \ u nl backgrounds and orientations. Here, too, the United States as a nation remained more truly tran?:intit.iui than most others because of its tolerance for diversity. Global migrations continued unabated in the last two decades of the century, but migrating inrn dk-United States, whether as legal or illegal immigrants, on business, or I or education, was a particularly striking development The percentage of the ] oLcign-borr. population in the United States, which was as high as 14 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century, had been steadily declining, hitting tin- Wcm point, or 4.7 percent, in 1970, but the trend began to reverse itself rapidly there-: after, and by the year 2000 more than one-tenth of the population consisted :>f those born elsewhere. By far the largest body of immigrants in the last decades of the century came from Central and South America. At the end of the ccnr.iry, they numbered over fourteen million, more than one-half of the entire foreign-born population in the country, followed by those from Asia, who now e.\iealed seven million. Europeans, who as recently as i960 accounted for more than 50. percent of residents in the United States who had been born abroad, now fell to about 15 percent. Mexico, in particular, sent by far the largest number of people to settle north of the border. Already in 19S0 there were over two million d them, or about 15.6 percent of the foreign-born population of the United States, but by 2000 the number had increased to over nine million, or close to 50 piTCcii: •[ 798 ]■ THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD Jf this population. There was also a sizable Cuban population, as many people from that island nation, still under Fidel Castro's socialist regime, tried all means t0 cross the Gulf of Mexico northward. At one point, in 1980, the Havana government allowed 120,000 Cubans to move to the United States. But their status remained unclear for several years, and many of them were detained in federal prisons.11'' In any event, the number of Mexicans and other "Latinos" was increasing so fast that there were even predictions that within another half century they would be the majority population in the nation, surpassing even European Americans. Among the latter category of newcomers, too, there were significant developments in the aftermath of the opening of the borders dividing Eastern and 'Western Europe. An increasing number of Eastern Europeans, especially Poles, found their new home and employment in American cities. In the meantime, immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam, and India joined those from East Asia who had arrived earlier, swelling the ranks of Asians in the United States. While these remarkable demographic developments inevitably provoked domestic, anti-transnationalist opposition, with many traditionalists calling for more stringent control of immigration and some even arguing for denying schooling and medical services to illegal aliens, it must be noted that these issues were also being raised in other countries, especially in Europe. The fact remains that in the United States, Western Europe, japan, and some other countries, immigrants, whether legal or clandestine, filled the needs of aging societies. These countries all recognized the problem and sought to cope with serious labor shortages in areas such as hospitals, nursing homes, and domestic services. In any event, the sheer number of recent arrivals, as well as their employment in certain categories of jobs—nurses, janitors, gardeners, apple pickers, house cleaners, babysitters, and so on—served to make the United States an especially transnational nation in the late twentieth century. Naturalization laws automatically conferred US citizenship on babies born in the country, with the result that the younger generations of citizens were more racially heterogeneous than their elders. (According to the US Census Bureau of 1990, the last year when individuals could report only one race, 80.3 percent of the American people considered themselves "white," 12.1 percent "black," and 2.8 percent "Asian." The bulk of people of Hispanic origin reported their race as "white," but considered separately they constituted 9 percent of the total population.) Intermarriages across racial lines were probably more ■[ 799 ]' AKIRA IRIYE common among Americans than other people—one reason why the f »,,su Bureau allowed people to report more than one racial identity in : contributing to the transnationalization of the population.117 Equally significant was the increasing number of foreign students in the t United States. During the academic year 1977-1978 the proportion of students at American colleges and universities for the first time exccdcc. ?. iitr. cent. By the end of the century, the ratio had reached 3.6 percent, or nearh li.ib'a million coming from abroad to study in the United States, where total university"! enrollment had reached fifteen million. What these figures indicate is that vh.k more and more Americans were going to college, they were being joined hv ;m increasing number of foreign students. Just to recall that as late as in it^3-Iyf,3 there were fewer than fifty thousand students from abroad is to becoive awar^ of the continuing attractiveness of the United States to college-age men and wom. c from all over the world. So many of them would not have come to ihi- United States to study if the quality of US higher education had not been I'cc.n-ni.-.ed as being superior to that in other nations—and if job opportunities for foreign students, should they decide to stay and work in the country, had not been bctiei. When we speak of the twentieth century as having possibly been an Amcncjn century, then, we must not forget that it may have been in the area of higher education that the nation achieved undoubted supremacy. No other country could boast such a high ratio of foreign students or such a large number of foreign-bcrr scholars, researchers, and educators. This situation is well represented by the number of Nobel Prizes that were received by scholars in the United States, whether native or foreign-born. They had internationalized their scholarly work, turning the laboratories and classrooms into arenas for transnationally collaborative activities. Of roughly izo Nobel Prizes in the sciences (including medicine) awarded during 1980-2000, over -o went to the United States. Most of the rest of the laureates had spent at least part of their time in the country. Of course, many American winners of the prizes had conducted research and teaching abroad. To break down these scholars into nationality groups makes lirtle sense, itself another indication that in the world of scholarship, border crossing had become routine. Nonetheless, the opportunities that US research insritutions provided for transnational collaboration canncr be disputed. The Nobel Prize in Economics, which was established in 1909, was i llllli HHP 3».- THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD : also dominated by American scholars; 46 were awarded through the year xooo, ; of which ij went to economists in the United States. It would be safe to assume ; that practically all of these laureates had trained a large number of foreign economists. Milton Friedman and other University of Chicago economists, for instance, who were among the early recipients of the prize, were known to be exponents of "monetarism," stressing the critical importance of the free circulation of money as a mechanism for providing for the well-being of society, rather than governmental regulations. Such thinking, which rejected not just socialism but also New Deal-type national planning, made an enormous impact on foreign economists and government officials, who collectively turned the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s into an era of reduced state roles in regulating social and economic affairs. The "Chicago school" was particularly influential in South America, where economists trained at the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the United States set about dismantling edifices of governmental control. It is also noteworthy, however, that the Nobel Prize in Economics toward the end of the century (in 1998) was awarded to Amartya Sen, a scholar from India who had conducted research in Britain and the United States. In sharp contrast to Friedman, Sen emphasized political and social aspects of all economic phenomena and stressed the need for education to bring impoverished people in all countries out of their predicament. He became a powerful voice for a new cosmopolitanism that would emphasize the interconnectedness of nations and espouse universal values adapted to local conditions. It is not hard to detect the influence both of Indian tradition and of American education on his thought. In that sense he typified the interrelationship between American educational achievements and transnational scholarly developments. One might even say that economists and other scholars worldwide were trying to grapple with the phenomenon of globalization and that, while Friedman and others were arguing for removing what they viewed as political and bureaucratic obstacles standing in the way of the smooth functioning of economic forces, those who thought like Sen were becoming aware of the social and cultural dimensions of the global transformation and sought to change the course of history through active human engagement. Both cases illustrated that the still visible American century was being particularly well demonstrated by transnationalism in education and learning. •f 800 ]• ■ f Sni 1. AKIRA IRIYE In short, the key achievement of the American century was that it r ad r,,,.^ nationalized the world to an extent never seen earlier. The 1980s and : -0 Iy v^ were above all an era of a rapidly interconnecting world. People everywhuc m globe were becoming connected to one another to an extent never set 1 Not just through migration, tourism, or education, but even more fund; through technological developments and material culture, notably-foi.J, ili.v were beginning to share a vast amount of mental and physical products. It nlU l><. said that transnational networks were being built on many layers, some rluoiigh people, others through goods and ideas, and still others through "vin nections, those made possible by rapid advances in information and comm. 1 ! cations technology. People across the globe were becoming connected, or, as many started sauny "wired." With the Internet system of communication, initially den-op .J J{-, military purposes in the United States, being increasingly made available Iu civilian use, companies and individuals took to it in droves starting in . .. 1980s. Electronic mail was another remarkable instance of American technology facilitating the establishment of transnational links. It was found to be so e.is\ in use and so quick in making connections that it steadily became a favored r.ie.ir.s of communication among those who could afford to own a computer. And thivr number kept expanding. In 1995, for instance, the total population online was 16 million, or 0.4 percent of the globe. By December 2.000 the number had ;dica<.;; climbed to 561 million, or 5.8 percent of the world s population. Graphical!;, indicative of the new technology's transnational and global character is the fact that as early as in zooo, the largest percentage of Internet users was in Asia (114 million, or 31 percent), compared to 108 million in Europe and about the .^nu number in North America."8 More than a novel means of communication, the Internet in time developed as a major transmitter of information. Organizations began to create their own websites, accessible to anyone who would type in the proper address. And ltvwas just a matter of time before a device would be developed that collected all such information and made it available to Internet users. The Google system best exemplified the new phenomenon. Established in the late 1990s by a handful oi young engineers in California, it amassed an immense amount of inioi m.ition THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD , Mongolians playing computer games ac an Interne: cafe in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, July 2003, an ' example of a globally shared personal pastime. (Getty Images) i 1 ; worldwide—on stores, train and air travel schedules, cultural events, weather, ', and just about every subject—that would be offered free of charge to anyone I connected to the Internet. All one had to do was to type in a subject or a question, ' and Google would provide the answer. At first only a small number of Internet 'x users took advantage of what Google had to offer; barely 100,000 uses were made of Google per day at the end of the 1990s. But already seeds were being f sown for a vast expansion of the information network in the coming century. . Such a network confirmed the supremacy of the English language, at least for I the time being. Because information technology was most rapidly developed and 1 spread in the United States, what it had to offer necessarily came in English. Computer keys, terminology, and user manuals were written in English, and non-English I clients had to get accustomed to them. Email addresses and links were likewise in a English. The situation did not change immediately, even after japan, China, and other non-English-speaking countries began manufacturing compurers, alrhough •[ 803 ]• Percentage of a nation's inhabitants who use the Internet, ion. AKIRA IRIYE in the twenty-first century the number of websites written in Chinese, Spanish Japanese, and other languages would increase. In any event, the spread i .frhc |n. ternet implied that the world was becoming interconnected through shared tecli-nology and information to an unprecedented degree. The Internet was not the only way that people in different parts of the world established connections with each other. Another important technical L-ic.il;-through at the end of the century was the mobile phone, or the cell ph.r-e l(s 1L was known in the United States. Worldwide mobile phone subscriber:; jun.pLd from just n million in 1990 to 740 million in 1000. That would mean, in tin-abstract, that one person out of nine used the new device, perhaps one -jci.vhi 11 seven if we exclude infants and small children. (Those between the ;u;e-: nf/e.n and fourteen accounted for about 30 percent of the world's total population in 2000.) The portable phone that one could carry in one s pocket anywhere \,\t simply a triumph of technology; it also implied greater mobility of people, a s tl ie\ no longer needed to be at home or in their workplaces to receive telephone calls. Added to email, the cell phone connected people in different parts of the globe more easily than ever before. Although some mobile phones would not work across borders, altogether international telephone calls made from traditional as well as cell phones increased from 33 billion minutes in 1990 to 118 billion minutes in 2000.119 (It may well be that the widespread use of email and mobile phones around the globe resulted in a shatp decline in more traditional forms of correspondence. As fewer people wrote letters to foreign addresses, international postage rates skyrocketed, which may further have discouraged the practice.) Individuals all around the world, in any event, came to know each other, vicariously if not directly. Their mutual knowledge may not have developed beyonda-t elementary level, but compared to their forebears, a far greater number of men and women—and even children—in virtually all parts of the globe became aware of each other's existence and shared information and their experiences. This could be seen in the spread of various kinds of cuisine all over the world. During the last decades of the twentieth century, there grew networks of "exotic" restaurants all over the world, to such an extent that in most large cities one had an enormous range of food to choose from: French, Italian, Greek, Ethiopian, Turkish, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and many others. This was in part a result of migrations; as people moved across borders, they THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD brought their own cuisine, which was now seen by the local population as less quaint than interesting, something they would try themselves. Ethnic diversity and culinary variety reinforced each other. At the same time, it became more common for city dwellers to dine out. Restaurants and catering businesses seem to have multiplied everywhere in the world, no doubt reflecting the fact that more and more women were now working so that they would have less time than traditionally to devote to cooking at home. The point is that besides the familiar fast food, people were willing to try nontraditional dishes at a restaurant if not at home. One consequence of such a development was that the major cities of the world began to look more alike. Shanghai and New York imparted similar impressions to visitors, and all cities faced the problem of accommodating their growing populations. Among the advanced countries, already in 1950 about half of their people lived in cities, but by 2000 the ratio had reached 70 percent. In the rest of the world, too, the urban population increased from 25 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 2000. The kinds of issues that urban centers in Western Europe and North America had faced a century earlier—such as crime, social order, public education, garbage collection, street cleaning—now were all global problems. What is equally significant is that, in coping with such issues, national governments were proving to be inadequate instruments, and the initiative for urban governance was reverting to the cities themselves. Mayors and officials of the world's cities periodically met with one another to share ideas and to develop common strategies. Whether living in what Saskia Sassen has called "global cities" or not, urban residents all over the world were becoming transnational beings.120 Nowhere was the phenomenon of transnational interconnectedness more dramatically demonstrated than in worldwide sporting competitions, such as the Olympics and the World Cup for football (soccer). The teams in both events competed in the name of their respective nations, and nationalistic emotions were unabashedly enhanced during the games. But such nationalism was also a transnational phenomenon—it was manifest all over the globe, and nevertheless it was not an exclusionary, antiforeign sentiment that traditionally had exacerbated relations among countries. In World Cup games, while the spectators tended to be segregated by nation in the stands, the franchises were becoming steadily less "national" in their composition. During the 1990s, football leagues in Europe almost completely shed their associations with regional or national entities (except -[ 806 ]- •[ So? ]■ AKIRA IRIYE I Wh- in name), and much like a prototypical transnational corporation (which i|lL.v actually were), teams recruited coachingstaff and players from around the *\. .'li,.. \ glance at the winners of the FIFA (Federation Internationale de Footbr.l] A^.itIll. tion) World Player Award in football since 1991 showed a very weak correiat'oii between the player's nationality and the "nationality" of his team. Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney—to list the cities where the summ j 1 M\ n pics were held between 1988 and zooo is to name some of the fastest-; cj^ 11»« urban centers in the world. The 1980 and the 1984 games, planned for two large urban areas, Moscow and Los Angeles, were boycotted by some countries for geopolitical reasons, a striking example of how states overrode the :i>piratuurt of the world's athletes to come together for "a festival of peace." Even during ilu height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the games had not been boycotted so these were rather unusual developments, and in any event they did not prevetv. the resumption of the games after 1988. (The winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, New York, in 1980 and in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1984, were attended by athletes of all countries.) Young men and women congregated in urban centers, shared living quarters, and competed with one another, in the process further ei iric!ir.ij> their transnational experiences. Arguably the most dramatic illustration ol'cht transnational reach of spectator sport came during the opening ceremony of the Nagano (Japan) Winter Olympics, held in early 1998. There Seiji Ozawa, v.c conductor, led a global chorus in singing from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, thc-OtL to Joy. Groups of singers from Australia, South Africa, Europe, China, the United States, and other countries sang in real time, being coordinated via satellite television by Ozawa's baton in central Japan. It was a fitting illustration of die ;.gc or transnationalism. Transnational Criminals Unfortunately, not all layers of transnational activities contributed to the making of a more peaceful world. A significant number of individuals and groups, win ■ were transnational in that they did not represent specific states but availed themselves of opportunities provided by cross-border connections, began to engage .n criminal acts. International terrorists, drug smugglers, and traffickers in women and minors had always presented a serious threat to world order as well as to do- ■\ 808 1- 1 THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD niestic well-being, but it was especially in the last two decades of the twentieth century that such criminals came to wreak havoc upon the global community. It is customary to view the acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic fundamentalists in those decades as having been directed against the United States and against the West in general. Thus, a suicide bomber attacked the US marine headquarters in the Beirut, Lebanon, airport in 1983, and in 1998 the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing more than two hundred people. These were episodes in international affairs, but they did not pit one nation against another. The terrorists did not represent, or seek to promote the interest of, any particular country but were coming together to target the United States because of its support for Israel or its overall presence in the Middle East, or else because in their view the United States exemplified modern capitalism, bourgeois decadence, secularism, materialism, and many related sins. Thus the attack upon : the World Trade Center in New York in 19 93, carried out by a group of Arab extremists, was viewed as an exemplification of the fundamental conflict between two ways of life, one modern Western and the other traditionalist and anti-Western. Samuel Huntington, one of the most influential writers of the 1990s, presented such a dichotomous scheme in his widely read book The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1996. The modern West he viewed as defined by Christian civilization, which he argued was being threatened by other civilizations, especially Islamic and Chinese. That, he argued, would be a more serious problem for the United States and its Western allies than any old-fashioned geopolitical threat. He cited the terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists as evidence that civilizations, not nations, were becoming the crucial determinants of world affairs. But he was also concerned with the rise of Asia, which he saw as a potentially anti-Western development. (Ironically, in the coming struggle chat he predicted for the twenty-first century between the West and "the Rest," he was hopeful that India would take the West's side, as would Russia and any other country or civilization that had a modicum of "Western" ingredient.) Huntington and many others who understood international terrorism in such a framework were correct to note the emergence of transnational challenges to world order, but their tendency to dichotomize between "the West and the Rest" did not go much beyond traditional thoughc—many of their ideas had been expressed by American and European thinkers at the turn of the twentieth -[ 809 ]• AKIRA IRIYE century—and ignored the fact that East and West, Europeans and Asians rid different races of the world were now, at the end of the twentieth conr-.m, coming together, in some instances literally intermixing with one nuoriei m • creating a new, hybrid, global civilization. Transnational connections and exchanges characterized that civilization, so that even the acts by the Leirm sis-were one part of the new global drama, representing one layer of the CLiiepmiir cross-border consciousness. They were not pitting one civilization again.sc another, one nation against another, or even one religion against another. Rather the terrorists were like alienated individuals who exist everywhere and chouse in marginalize themselves from what they take to be the way things arc moving Instead of finding meaning in social and community affairs, they would »a-k iu retain their sense of purity and to eradicate everything else that stood in the wav, They were transnational beings in the sense that they did not identify with, or act on behalf of, a country, but at the same time they were trying to damage ciihe. transnational beings lest their efforts to establish bridges across the world's regions and civilizations should succeed. The Islamic terrorists were also transnational in that few of them remained in their countries of origin. Several key terrorists came from Yemen, others from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East as well as South Asia. Tiev weni back and forth among these countries and regions, and some studied in Tin ope and North America. It was while spending time in the West that some ol i\:zir. fell under the influence of radical Islam. The reasons are not hard to guess:A sense of alienation living as guests in a country that espoused a different religion and a contrasting way of life, combined with frustrations at not being recognized as respectable members of the host community, frequently drove these foreign residents to despair and in extreme cases to hostility that seemed to justify any act of violence to express their anger. Such anger was provided with the teachingsof radical Islamic theologians to generate a sense of mission ostensibly derived from a moral superiority. Such self-righteousness was fueled when would-be terrorists came together in congregations and seminaries where they were taught by thost-with a rigid faith in their doctrinal purity, correctness, and superiority. Why some transnational persons embraced antisocial behavior that iniglir (and did) provoke an opposition that could undermine the transnational resources i I THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD at their disposal—for instance, through stringent immigration restrictions or a strict surveillance of foreign banking accounts—while the majority embraced or at least chose to live on a more peaceful level of transnationalism, is one of the key questions of contemporary society. Although the idea of jihad, or "holy war," was a fundamental tenet of the Islamic faith, for most of its sects and believers it did not mean a call for collective (and violent) action against all that stood in the way. But it did imply disregarding secular authority, especially any state not t based on Islam (or one of its sects), so that Islamic terrorism at one level was an assault upon a world composed of independent nations. But whereas othet transnational people challenged the authority of the state by setting up non-state organizations and building bridges among them, the terrorists envisaged a world in which not only secular states but also NGOs not telated to Islam would be eliminated. Such, of course, was an impossibility, and the terrorists knew they had to make use of existing institutions. Thus, the distinction between them and the vast majority of people throughout the world consisted in the terrorists' un- |.:- willingness to envisage a transnational future other than that of their own apocalyptic vision. They were criminals in the sense that they refused to share the I - planet with other human beings. It should be noted, at the same time, that many of the terrorists were purists in a world that was increasingly becoming hybrid, I and in that sense they shared a psychological oneness with other purists, whether religious, racial, or nationalistic. They preferred doctrinaire (and unrealizable) I- purity in a world that was becoming more and more ambivalent, as Kenneth Weisbrode has noted.121 The terrorists were far from alone, however, in posing a serious threat to the |-- integrity of the global community. Arguably even more sinister challenges to |:: transnationalism were posed by drug smugglers, traffickers in women and chil- 1: dren, and other criminals. Drug smuggling took advantage of the global net- * works of producers and consumers and thus became more successful than ever before. Although opium smoking abated significantly in the twentieth century, the consumption of other narcotic drugs increased. It would be difficult to de- I" termine whether there was now more demand for drugs because of their increasing availability, or whether the supply was a response to growing demand, which may have been related to criminal activities in many countries where the selling •[ 810 ]• •[ 811 ]• AKIRA IRIYE of illegal drugs was a lucrative business and a source of income for crime'syndicates. Globalization had something to do with the phenomenon, in that demand and supply data could be instantaneously communicated across bordas and illicit transactions could take place via the Internet. There was in a seiiK- j transnational brotherhood of drug traffickers against whom law enforcement bodies were often helpless—some in law enforcement even profited by takimr ! bribes. The distinction between illegal and legal action was sometimes hard tn make in such regions as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the areas adja- ■ cent to Myanmar. Like international terrorism, drug trafficking across borders was difficult cu control because it went beyond the jurisdiction of a single state and there was no nonmilitary mechanism sufficiently global in scope to control such abuses. In :; :-s^ the international community established Interpol as a cooperative agency to coor- vfj dinate policing activities across borders. Initially only a few countries were rtpre- J sented, but Interpol membership grew rapidly after the Second World War, with over one hundred countries participating by the end of the century.122 But Interpol'", effectiveness in controlling drug traffic varied from region to region. (In Europe. Europol was established in 1992 as the policing arm of the European Union, but there was nothing comparable in other areas of the world.) It may well be that be cause, unlike terrorists, drug smugglers did not espouse any violent ideology to re make the world, perhaps their presence was not considered an equally grave threa, although the problem would grow even more serious in the coming century. Transnational humanitarian organizations that earlier in the century had been quite active in the movement to control opium traffic now were more concerned with human trafficking, especially of women and children, which gicu in scale at the end of the century. (Statistics vary, but according to a UN estimate: there were about one million trafficked people in 1000.123) Here was anorher aspect of the fast-globalizing world. With national borders becoming more mid more porous, women were taken from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere and sent to other parts of the world to serve as "sex slaves." Even teenagers would be lured away from their homes by promises of jobs abroad, only to find themselves confined to tight spaces, with their passports taken away and forced to serve strangers as servants. There was a growing demand for services of such entrapped people, whose movement and activities were controlled by transnational THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD A.i Afghan farmer scores opium poppy buds in a fieid near Habibullah, Afghanistan, April zou. Diug cultivation, consumption, and trafficking became serious transnational issues of the contemporary era. (AFP/Gett)'Images) criminal syndicates that clearly violated all principles promulgated by the international community to protect human rights. It remained to be seen whether i.iterpol, Europol, and other police agencies as well as the regional communities and transnational organizations would in time succeed in coping with these violations of human rights. The world at the end of the twentieth century, then, was a kaleidoscope of transnational beings, constituting layers of cross-border activities and emotions. Most of them took advantage of the new opportunities being provided by the lowering of territorial boundaries and the availability of cross-border information and communication to build a better future for themselves and for others, while a minority were a negative presence whose activities would move the world closer to violence and chaos. What about those who never became transnational? There were, of course, ir any of them all over the world, some physically cut off from other countries •r 8iz 1- 813 ]• AKIRA IRIYE and societies, others choosing to isolate themselves as a matter of pririnpl..'. t lxl. ? ^" TwCntj-FlTSt CBYltUYJ or personality, or for other reasons. Many objected to some aspects of Lrj~sn -. ~~~- tionalism but not to others. For instance, the massive demonstrations r.;\i::1M tj,., ' Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999 showed thai \vIV:;t. \ the demonstrators expressed their opposition to economic globalization, iln-y i were united transnationally in pursuit of what they believed would be a less m- ,. i ricious world order. Such people were part of an evolving global civil sr.;.iei\. (>„ THE YEARS since 2001 are part of contemporary history that began some the other hand, there were those who remained outside the networks of transnn- - time curing tne ^ast decades of the twentieth century. That may explain why tional connections not because they were necessarily anti-transna:io-\d bu; ' there was reJacively uttle attempt at predicting the possible course of the twenty- because they were fundamenrally mono-national beings in the sense that their pr> ! nrsC centurv' Compared to the last years of the nineteenth century and the early mary and overwhelming identity was with their respective countries and they s.:.w ■ vears °^ twentieth, this time there were few confident depictions of human no need to change. Even though they might run into foreigners in their midst, en-. civilization that would usher in a world without conflict, war, or antipathy among an occasional tasting of exotic food, or even set foot abroad, they would alw; . ■ groups of people. There was, to be sure, much concern over the transition from think in mono-national terms. Their well-being, their education, and their lirl December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000. Known as the YzK problem, it involved objectives all were bound up with the power, prestige, and interests of their o< the fact that all sorts of activities in the world, ranging from nuclear arms devel- country. Probably the bulk of humanity combined transnational experiences with opment to navigation, were programmed by computer but that computers might national perspectives. Only a minority may have considered themselves trahsi . not recognize the transition to 1000 (because the number 2000 might be ren- tional individuals leading "transnational lives," to use a term some historians hlivt dere£I as 10°> r9°o, and so forth), which might result in catastrophes. It was said begun to use.114 Put another way, national sentiments and nationalistic attitudes that billions of dollars were spent worldwide to fight the "millennium bug." This, did not disappear even as the world was coming to consist of transnational connec- %:H iSf however, was less a prediction of the coming century than a pragmatic concern tions. Layers of transnational consciousness had been added to the traditional with specific technological questions—more or less in the same category were national consciousness. How these various layers would be transformed, amalgam- predictions about the rise of China as the new century's greatest power or of India ated, augmented, or instead violently collide against one another was a question 'as the most populous country. These were not particularly profound observations that the end of the twentieth century was bequeathing to the twenty-first. 'f£if anc* may nave revealed a lack of imagination on the eve of the new millennium. Many observers assumed that globalization would continue, with all that it implied in people's lives as well as the fortunes of nations. Whether the United i States would remain the sole superpower was a favorite subject that intrigued §jp. numerous observers, but such geopolitically framed questions were not particu- tjljj. larly interesting in the age of globalization. What was more relevant was the view that the continued economic development of China, India, Brazil, and other I countries could have dire environmental consequences, or that the unceasing I increases in the world's population might create a new scramble for food and raw materials. Unlike a hundred years earlier, there was much less confidence that science would solve all these and many other problems. On the other hand, there AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD was no widely shared belief that a military collision among some great p-i-i-ii was inevitable, as there had been in the early years of the previous centur, .In,-,. (j there was some faith that cooperation among nations would continiii ,m J n through international organizations the pressing problems of the tniijilit become susceptible of solution. In other words, many of the ideas that had cfi i-. acterized the decades since the 1960s continued to provide the key framework for the new century. the situation did not change even after the terrorist attacks on key US :.initis on September ii, 2.001, which most people recall even today as havint, lv<.n key event of the first year of the twenty-first century. On that day, sevei al Tsl.. 1-1 terrorists seized two airplanes departing Logan Airport in Boston for the Wlsi Coast, took over the planes' cockpits, flew to New York City, and crash'.! t:.v planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroying the buildings and causing death to nearly three thousand people, mostly Americans but also1 including a number of foreigners. Simultaneously, a third hijacked plane, departing from Washington Dulles International Airport, flew into and partially damaged the Pentagon building outside Washington, DC, and yet a fourth flew across the state of Pennsylvania to target another city, possibly Chicago, before the passengers, having become aware of what was happening in New York, assau ltcd the terrorists and diverted the aircraft to the western part of the state, causing it to crash in a field in Somerset County, destroying the plane and killing all onboard. All these attacks had been planned by al-Qaeda, the terrorist group headquartered in Afghanistan under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. This heinous, extremely tragic incident traumatized not only the American people but the rest of the world. It was a transnational crime of the kir.d rh.i: some may have imagined possible before it happened, but few would have been able to foresee the sense of horror that it gave rise to across the globe. All over the world, leaders and ordinary citizens—save the minority who sided with the terrorists ideologically and gloated over the humiliation suffered by the migluy United States—expressed their utter disgust with the crime and their heartfelt sympathy with the American people. The victims as well as the culprits wire transnational, and so the attacks were viewed by many as a harbinger of what was to come in an increasingly interconnected world. Some of the terrorists had studied in Europe, and others had learned how to fly in the United State-. The perpetrators had exchanged messages with bin Laden, who remained in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. They had received funds from various sources channeled through legitimate bank accounts in the United States and elsewhere. The terrorists' ideology, on the other hand, was anything but transnational in the sense of bringing people of the world closer together. Islamic fundamentalism divided all people into true believers and the rest, and the latter were considered enemies of the faith that needed to be destroyed. The ideology likewise had little tolerance for the diversity of religious interpretations within Islam itself. The West, in particular the United States, exemplified the enemy because it was materialistic, secular, and committed to the idea of global community consisting of people of all faiths. More specifically, the Islamic terrorists castigated the United States for its unflinching support of Israel and its alleged antagonism toward Islamic countries such as Iraq and Iran. It would be wrong, however, to view the September 11 attacks as an act of war between the terrorists and the United States. That was President George W. Bush's perception, and he believed the world now consisted of supporters and opponents of terrorists against whom the nation would wage a relentless war. But how would a nation fight a "war" against a non-nation, an entity that existed apart from sovereign states? President Ronald Reagan, it is true, had already in the 1980s spoken of "war on terror," much as his predecessors had popularized notions of "war on poverty," "war on illiteracy," and the like. But traditional inter-narional law had made little provision for a nation waging war against an individual or an organization not connected to another state. (That was why the zoi 1 killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces, which was justified by the White House as an act of war, was not universally considered legitimate.) On the other hand, the world was witnessing increasingly ominous activities not just by terrorists but by drug smugglers, pirates, traffickers of women, and the like, so that some internationally coordinated action to deal with them was becoming a matter of urgency. The problem was how to arrange for such coordination and how to carry out such a "war." Moreover, the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were not waging war against a single nation. It would be more correct to say that the criminal acts were targeting the entire human community as it existed in reality and in perception. The whole idea of a transnationally connected global community would ■[ 816 ]■ •[ 817 ]■ AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD have been repugnant to the radical Islamists, who must not have anticipácii ú,, way that community responded in shared horror and outrage, thus in 0„.. firming the existence of a transnational world. If the terrorists really thou-ht that through their acts they would intimidate or undermine the emei gi ng gloh.il community, they were totally mistaken. Ironically, the nation-centric response to the September n attacks b\ -|ie United States government also tended to undermine the unity of huuiaiiLirJ The global outpouring of sympathy and support for the American people did not prove enduring for various reasons, but one key factor was surely the wa\ tl ,e Bush administration handled the crisis. By framing it in a traditional manner, as a surprise attack upon an unsuspecting nation—the Pearl Harbor analogy came easily to the minds of many Americans—the president led the fight to ■punish the offenders, much as the nation had risen in unison against the insngato s <,f Pearl Harbor. To say, as he did, "You are for us, or you are against us," wastu -li vide the globe into two, but "us" in this case was the United States, and the image of the whole world either engaged in war against the nation or coming to i ts support was extremely nation-centric and unrealistic as well as insensitive to changing world conditions. Indeed, it may not have been so much the terrorists as the unilateralist response of the United States that threatened to undermine the emerging transna-tionalization in the days andmonths following the September n attacks. Whs-cn the event only confirmed the existence of a global community, the Bush administration's countermeasures tended to revert back to a time when one power could, or believed it could, change the world. Actually, even before 9/11, in the spring of 2.001, Washington had withdrawn from the 1998 Kyoto protocol on combating climate change and refused to ratify the convention for the establishment or an international criminal court, insisting that US military personnel be e>e::ipi-'d from any such jurisdiction. Neither did the Bush administration ratify the :w Ottawa treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. It had been adamant from the start that national interest considerations alone should be the basis of its foreign policy and that any restrictions on the nation's freedom of action would be resisted. These decisions were clearly out of step with worldwide trends and showed that unilateralism was already becoming a mark of the new US government when the September 11 attacks took place. The gap between the United States and the international community had become so clear that the latter's overwhelmingly empathetic support of the American people in the aftermath of the terrorist assault could have provided an opportunity for the United States and the rest of the world to come together again. That this did not happen was a serious setback for the further growth of an interdependent, transnational world. Some historians date the end of "the American century" to those attacks, but if they do so because the incident showed that even the mighty United States was vulnerable to transnational terrorism, they would be wrong.125 It would be more correct to say, as noted in the preceding section, that "the American century" had been losing its meaning in an increasingly transnational world and that if the leaders in Washington now tried to bring it back, they were engaged in an anachronistic task. (A group of neoconservative leaders had organized a shortlived "project for the new American century" in 1997, calling for increases in defense spending, challenging "hostile regimes," promoting the cause of "freedom" abroad, and accepting the nation's "unique" role in keeping and extending the international order.126 But the construction of such a "new American century" : was an unrealizable dream, not because the nation was incapable of using all its military and economic resources to combat terrorism, but because the global community would not have accepted such a mono-national orientation and nation-centric definition of the world for the twenty-first century.) There was a good deal of cooperation between Washington and other capitals, iat- especially of the liberal democracies with sizable Muslim populations, to seek out .:§,- and punish the culprits of the terrorist attacks and to prevent their recurrence. Some of these measures were readily concurred in by most other countries as well, including autocratic states and former Cold War adversaries. For instance, S*; they cooperated with the United States in the policy of "rendition," in which terrorist suspects would be "rendered" to the CIA's secret prisons or to locations j abroad where criminal suspects faced inhumane conditions and even torture. ! Most nations tightened border control, seeking to make it less easy for would-be .;| terrorists to cross national boundaries. Many countries began instituting more stringent screening systems at airports, inspecting checked and carry-on lug-: gage with greater care. At first even such items as fingernail clippers and sewing needles were confiscated; later, liquids over 3.4 ounces in quantity were banned ] unless they were put in checked luggage. When a small explosive was found •[ 818 1- •[ 819 ]• AKIRA IRIYE THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL WORLD inside the shoe of a would-be terrorist, several countries, including the 'Jini„j States, made it mandatory for passengers to take off their shoes when they v,uit through the security check. The United States, Japan, and several other c