Deepening historical understanding in a transnational world: A review essay

Internationalizing American history

Although the distinguished historian Eric Foner did not contribute an essay to Rethinking American History, he did take part in the 1999 La Pietra conference. His participation produced a seedbed of ideas for his Presidential Address to the 2001 American Historical Association entitled, "American Freedom in a Global Age." The address also appeared in the American Historical Review and is collected along with eight other essays by Foner in Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. Foner's address traces Americans' understanding of freedom and liberty from the Founding period through to the present, all the time keeping a sharp eye on how America's interplay with the world helped shape this understanding. Foner's treatment of the history of a basic American idea-freedom-is another example of what Hollinger sees as an effective way of relating American history to global questions. The benefit it provides, besides enriching our understanding of freedom, is that it constructs a picture of the relation of freedom and globalization as they actually relate today in a world of nation-states, and not in some future unformed world order.15

According to Foner, a certain strain of thinking about American freedom resonates in many quarters of the world; it is one with deep roots in the American past but which nevertheless derives in large part from the Reagan years. Its core is a series of negations, a conception that can be characterized as freedom from restraints and limits-from government interference, from social constraints on behavior and self-definition, from interference in market choices. These notions of freedom have spread widely around the globe because they are congenial to a certain popular idea of globalization, one that borrows in part from a resuscitated and redefined idea of American exceptionalism. America's "historic purpose," according to this view, is to promote the foregoing conception of American freedom as "freedom from" toward "the creation of a single global market in which capital, natural resources, and human labor are nothing more than factors of production in an endless quest for greater productivity and profit." Pushing globalization to its extremes, some known as "hyperglobalizers," says Foner, envision traditional cultures giving way to a homogeneous world culture and nation-states either withering away entirely or surrendering their economic functions. Foner dismisses this vision of a new world order and insists that the nation-state is here for "many years to come," even though some of its traditional functions such as regulation have been degraded. Even with the comparatively modest erosion we see currently in the prestige and power of the nation-state, the result, at least thus far, is not a new global homogeneity, but new cultural and politic divisions in the world and the aggravation of others of long standing. The weakening of the nation-state, as Foner himself acknowledges, has caused a "proliferation of social movements and often violent conflicts based on ethnicity, religion and local and regional cultures."16