המתת השור

The Onion Problem in Global History Now that the semester is drawing to a close at Princeton, I can turn back to more involvement with the online side of the course. The final lectures are now posted, and everything will remain accessible until the end of January, when I pivot to the next semester at Princeton. This gives us about a month for you all to catch up on lectures (for those who fell behind) and for the discussions in the online Forum section to dig deeper into some of the larger themes.

The Princeton Blogs have been focusing on the Cold War. I urge you to have a look and leave your comments.

I want to comment on one challenge we face as we near the present. Let's call this challenge "the onion problem" of world history. It helps us understand the Cold War and the years since 1989 -- and indeed, the implications of the Onion Problem can shed light on earlier processes.

Several exchanges in particular invite us to consider the possibilities and limitations of a "global" approach to recent history. First, how should we think about militarization in the absence of widespread inter-state warfare? Here is a thread where we explore why we don't have World War 3, and yet we see the persistence of warfare around the world -- with "proxy wars" aplenty, despite the thawing of the old Cold War ideological divides.

https://class.coursera.org/wh1300-002/forum/thread?thread_id=743

The onion metaphor has come up several times to evoke how one process can be nested inside another, and how the two influence each other, even if they are separate. I use it because I want to indicate how world history scales down to varieties of local experiences. The most common use has been to describe how civil wars unfold within international wars and how international wars inflame civil wars. For this week's deliberations, the onion helps us to understand how local civil wars escalate in the era of the Cold War because they became proxy-sites for a contest between the so-called East and so-called West. This was how the Cold War got very HOT in areas around the world where European empires were forced to decolonize and created power vacuums.

But I want to expand the onion problem and suggest that it applies to much more than the history of war, or invites us to think about other variables when we think about war. Like food, our Gods, or family structures. As we reach the end of this course, let me suggest two ways in which our onion problem applies more generally. Consider three hypotheses -- unfurled in the heightened emotions associated with events in Korea and Palestine, to site a few ongoing examples we've been thinking about, and where nuclear weaponry are at stake.

1. One argument of this section of the course is that the Cold War can be seen within a much longer-term process of expansion and ebbing of empire. Not just as a clash between and American and Soviet empire. But a clash inflamed by disparate concepts of sovereignty and citizenship provoked by the challenge to empires since the 18th century, the notion of laws of peoples and self-determination uncorked during WW1 (by Lenin and Wilson), and gathering speed with Atlantic Charter and the notion of freedom of peoples. In this sense, the Cold War was folded within a larger epic of imperial expansion and retraction -- and fueled by it. This asks us to think about the ways in which the Cold War was so much more than a contest between Washington and Moscow, and how it had autonomous propulsion from disparate global regions -- like Korea and Palestine, where people fought to control their own destinies at the expense of far-away puppeteers, for instance. This allows us to see how the global Cold War had so many variations and causes, even as it lead to unintended consequences of making an independent Israel so dependent on the US for survival, or North Korea a puppet state (unhappily at first in the struggle against France) of the USSR. So, you can see how the spread of nationalism and self-determination had the curious effect of promoting the durable relevance of empire.


2. We can see how the onion effect works out in a much longer-term process of integration "the world of villages" into a global marketplace of inter-dependent societies. This has been a big argument for this course and an important reason why we push the narrative of globalization and its multiple tracks back to 1300 (and not 1492, 1750, or 1815 -- the much more conventional departure points). From the middle of the 19th century, with the advent of steam, migration of global capital, and the fanning out of settlers to distant "frontiers" from the Russian steppes to the Argentine Pampas, land had been incorporated into an increasingly integrated world market. But after WW2, and the recovery of the world economy from the Depression, the integration of lands into the world economy shifted from those "open" regions (which often meant displacing often nomadic incumbent populations) to focusing on settled peasant villages, turning the world's comparatively self-sufficient communities with their own sacred cultures and extended kinship structures into commodity-producing households. This was the backdrop to the "war in the villages" (explored in various ways across various lectures). So, we can see how the strategic collision of super-powers took place within an epic contest over how peasants were going to reconcile themselves with the rising pressures and incentives associated with globalization, something we have seen coming from afar for several centuries.

These two examples of the onion problem forces us to think about the intersection of local communities' struggle to survive with global forces. It is informed by what Gyan Prakash referred to in our Global Dialogue as "subaltern studies." It is informed by our effort to try to look at the world from a non-Eurocentric perspective, which we discussed in the Global Dialogue with Robert Tignor. It also gives us a much longer-term perspective beginning with forces unleashed centuries ago and gathering steam in the drama of hamlets and villages caught in the cross-hairs of insurgency and counter-insurgency conflicts.

As the course winds down, I will share some of these more general, perspectival thoughts.

Jeremy Adelman Sun 15 Dec 2013 4:35 PM CET