“Liberalism, at its core, is empty,” said Peter Katzenstein, professor of international studies at Cornell. “There’s nothing there. It’s like the wizard of Oz,” he said, adding that Americans have continually attempted to reinvent liberalism’s core values.
Around 40 faculty members and students came to hear Katzenstein speak on globalization in the second installment of the Watson Institute’s Security Seminar Series yesterday.
Katzenstein lambasted American exceptionalism as “collective idiocy everybody shares,” calling the United States “distinctive” but not “exceptional.”
American exemptionalism — the idea that the United States is exempt from rules that must be applied to foreign nations — is ludicrous and propagated by Congress, he said.
In addition to unpacking American exceptionalism, Katzenstein examined the way scholars classify civilizations.
Proponents of liberal cosmopolitanism are “just like the racists of the 19th century who argued that there is only one right answer,” he said.
Katzenstein defined liberal cosmopolitanism as the belief that ideological pluralism does not exist and that those coming from a certain civilization can be broken down into a single community.
Moving past this belief is vital to understanding globalization, Katzenstein said. He rejected the popular view of globalization as an east versus west enterprise, viewing it rather as the “reconfiguration of identities” that results from several types of civilizational interactions.
It is also important to understand that civilizations themselves do not truly interact, but rather serve as the contexts within which actors — such as nation-states and individuals — deal with each other, he said.
“Civilizations are like a town hall meeting in which we debate our options,” Katzenstein said. “Essentialism argues there’s a single voice,” he said, but “civilizations are built on intellectual, artistic, creative disagreements.”
Katzenstein argued that control power, the concept that one actor directly oppresses another, has become less relevant as individual actors have grown more influential. He highlighted the increasing importance of polycentric innovation — a Foucauldian concept meaning innovation coming from a variety of sources — in an age of globalization. He cited the emergence of the Nigerian film industry, which was based on one investor’s decision and influenced by the power of stock traders to flip the market.
Katzenstein also debunked various myths about cross-cultural interactions and Anglo-American civilization’s role in these exchanges.
While many scholars such as Louis Hartz and Samuel Huntington argued that American ideology can be summarized as a commitment to the liberal tradition, several ideological traditions have been at play within a larger American civilizational context, Katzenstein said. Among these ideologies are race and republicanism, as Rogers Smith asserted.
ADVERTISEMENT
