Most Americans are not aware that the debtor status of our nation is not particularly novel; we have been a debtor nation for most of our history. This fact serves as one of the major linchipins in Eric Rauchway’s Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, a economic historical look at how globalization made America then, and is making it now. One of the major points that Rauchway attempts to hammer home is that American exceptionalism is posterior to the conditions which framed the republic, it is not the cause of the peculiarities of the American condition.
One of the major ways in which America is exceptional is its relatively small public sector. In other words, our state doesn’t do nearly as much as is the norm among wealthy countries. Rauchway shows that in 1910 there is a close linear relationship between per capita production and the amount spent by the state per capital. The United States stood outside of this trendline, a wealthy nation which spent relatively little in public monies. And so it still is, more or less.
Why? One of the major parameters for Rauchway is the fact that the United States had a diverse stream of immigrants. In contrast, Canada, Australia and Argentina tended to have large immigrant populations, but from only a few nations. The British Dominions naturally drew primarily from the British Isles; while the sources of Argentina and Brazil’s immigration streams were mostly from Iberia and Italy. In contrast, the American immigrant stream was polyglot, and no one group dominated the others around the turn of the century. The consequence was that labor was not able to coherently argue for its interests against capital because it was riven with ethnic faction, and the linguistic diversity made even basic organizing different.
Today approximately the same proportion of the American population is foreign born as it was in 1900. We are also again a debtor nation. Finally, we are clearly in the second age of globalization, as flows of capital and labor are on the same order of magnitude as what was the norm before 1914. Rauchway offers one major difference: we are military power, the global policeman. But there is another way in which America differs somewhat: there is one nation which looms particularly large in origins of the foreign born, Mexico. Additionally, adding other Latin American nations into the mix means that a substantial proportion of American immigrants are united by a common language.
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