The Global Narrative Problem
How we can situate and work out a beneficial primary narrative for our times
With Miroslaw Manicki
Having inherited the long, but restless empire from the British, Americans continue to rule the roost. According to the principal American perspective, this is as things should be. As an American, I was raised with this. I remain positive and grateful as to this history. This does not mean that it necessarily represents the first and only high point since the dawn of civilization. As it stands, there have been tens of thousands of years of living experience by ancestors of ours with essentially the same capacities as we enjoy. We owe much to them, to the risks that they took, their exhaustive efforts, and the progress they made.
As it stands, Americans represent under five percent of the population of the world. Many from the other ninety-five percent agree that life under American leadership has been good. There have been decades of relative peace. There has been some progress in the two great economic challenges — introduction of middle-class conditions around and world and minimizing poverty, want, and suffering.
There are many around the world who would like some kind of a change. This does not necessarily mean that they hate the United States and what it has brought to the world stage, although many clearly do. There are also many Americans who wish to return to full-on civic and cultural hegemony over the world.
It is interesting to look at the global relations conundrum from the perspective of the beginnings of the establishment of the United States. As rebels, Americans wanted home rule and all that that represented. They also wanted to change how things are done, they wanted to introduce a new order, which they ultimately did.
That new order set up a thousand stories. No — millions. The British are surely tired of them by now and perhaps others, but these are embedded in the psyche of Americans and many others. Extending principally from a hundred years or so after the country’s founding, American global leadership that ultimately came was not a mirror image of that which emerged from Revolutionary War times, but it was a pretty good extension of that.
The debates and struggles over the primary American narrative was largely represented by competition between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson won out at first, but Hamilton’s priorities clearly prevailed eventually. The America at the end of the nineteenth century was much more plutocratic and capitalistic than that of the century before, which set the United States up to inherit the British mantle of authority and power by mid-twentieth century.
America in its founding and development introduced a concept of freedom that has evolved into different things for different people, even within the United States. There are questions of democracy and political order that have spread throughout the world in different ways with different implications in each case. They are grounded in the American narrative, but their meanings have been aligned and maligned. This goes on even as we speak.
We now face levels of maturity around the world in public and economic affairs in countries that have worked their way through them and have developed ideas and commitments of their own. Many have inherited traditions of their own that have had little to do with the British-American experience. Such other experience and other narratives will have much to do with desired directions for individual states and with affect how they elect to work together and with international organizations, including the United Nations, the G7, and the G20.
The broader makeup of the G20 organization of twenty large countries makes it more malleable than is the traditional G7 collection of highly industrial states. As to associated support groups, there has been a heightened vibrancy among G20 participants, such as the T20 group of think tanks, the Y20 collection of young people, and the rest. In response, the G7 started a think tank side group in Berlin last year — followed up by similar activity under Japanese leadership in 2023. Recognition of the importance of ideas at this level reflects movement to multipolarity — not only in geography but in historically murky conceptual spaces, not of interest to hegemonic traditionalists.
Susan Thornton, a former US assistant secretary of state, just gave a speech at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD in La Jolla, California, in which she identified this narrative problem as the most challenging bridge to be crossed in our changing times (Thornton, 2023). She rightly dismissed militarists who see war as an inevitability. Such militarists fall for the so-called Thucydides trap that they set for themselves: “Sparta and Athens fought as rival states. It must follow that all such rivals will similarly fight each other.”
Truly, there is no existential reason why current conditions should lead to wars — most particularly between the old hegemon, the United States, and the new ‘kid on the block’, China. We have noted little in terms of proof on this matter. Not for nothing, it is useful to ask proponents of this hardline position for any substantive scientific grounding for such their presumption.
This is not to say the vigilance is not in order with regard to possible military actions. It does not take scientific rigor to deduce that attacks do happen, for whatever reason. It just doesn’t of necessity result from a need for zero-sum ascendancy, for big power bragging rights.
This comes to a need to identify a useful global narrative for our time, as encouraged by Ms. Thornton. Where should we begin our story? When does the narrative begin? This is of more than a little importance. We note a contemporary political review of Syria, for example, that encourages a historical review of that country and its domestic and international conditions way back to the year…1947!
We cannot even begin to conceive of such a thing. Consider below some of the ancient sites in Palmyra, Syria, which date back to pre-Roman and very ancient civilizations.
What of the old civilizations? Are they relevant? Should our contemporary narrative involve them?
Many people think so. They look with some amusement at the American Revolution from a historical perspective. There is increasing evidence of very old regimes characterized by far more organizational sophistication and social stability. Breadcrumbs outlining some of these have always been there — in old sources such as the Hebrew Bible and other ancient documents.
Many more voices have emerged from a constant effort at discovery by archaeologists and ethnologists to translate and interpret newly available records, many of them written on clay and stone. We say “newly available” wryly, as many have been available for over a hundred years.
This comes to our central thesis. If it is important to create a narrative of our times, when should it begin?
Therein lies the rub. Americans would really like to bring 1776 into the conversation. They would like to start there. This is not too far off from Europeans generally, who would likely want to mark time from the Enlightenment era of the last few centuries.
There are reasons for these to be understood and appreciated. The American experiment is and has been an important source of social ballast for the entire world. The Enlightenment has brought advancement of many kinds. Both of those phenomena reached back to the Greek demos of the last centuries BCE and subsequent Greek philosophy for the most part.
Enlightenment was needed to overcome the effects of Europe’s dark age. Having suffered from raiding parties principally from the north for a thousand years after the fall of Rome, Europeans had developed little respect for governmental or aristocratic protections for the people generally during this long period. For that matter, colonial conquests, which some Americans had participated in, involved raiding of this kind, as well.
There was an inherently individualistic foundation to British hegemony and that of the other European countries as they circled the world in conquest from the 15th century onward. Individualism characterized the founding of the American west except for when it didn’t.
There is much misunderstanding on this point from within the United States and elsewhere. We have documented almost sixty collective social and economic efforts in North America, many of which persist and are important in the contemporary American experience (Tingey and Manicki, 2018).
In the United States, every time a consumer eats a nut or a raisin or drinks orange juice or partakes of any of a number of agricultural products, they are benefitting from the efforts of cooperative enterprises, which produce about one-fifth of all of the food in the country. Logos for some of these can be seen below.
As seen below, cooperative organizations in the United States are broadly represented.
Cooperatives are common in almost all sectors of the [United States] economy, including the energy, grocery, housing, finance, and telecommunications industries. Some brands that you may be familiar with include Farmers Electric Co-op (energy), Iowa Food Co-op (grocery), Vintage Cooperatives (housing), Community Choice Credit Union (finance), and Farmers Mutual Co-op Telephone (telecommunications). Iowa Agricultural Literacy Foundation
Such kinds of business organizations are not generally recognized as being a part of the American narrative, but they most certainly are. Participants are not capitalists in that their principal objective is upwardly-spiraling profits, but they are purveyors of their primary products and proud of it. This isn’t to say that they do not engage in marketing, product development, and competition. The point of such cooperatives is often to do engage in those very activities. They provide strong evidence that the ‘magic sauce’ of American success is not uniquely capitalistic, but much of it emphasizes commercial as opposed to financial activities.
In looking for a reference point for our narrative, we need to be looking for stability — very long-term stability if we can find it — as opposed to just innovation and changing dynamics. We need to see a combination of both. As the Germans have pointed out, Gemeinschaft, which is the essence of stable communities, along with Gesellschaft, which is a kind of association dedicated to a cause, including innovation, change and betterment. Our narrative, to be effective, should take these into account.
In history, we need to be looking for both of these. Where can these be found? Our point here is not to make such a choice, but to lay out prospects for these. We leave you to contemplate where these may be found. There are evidences of useful civilizational foundations in ancient Sumer (Kramer, 1986). That would be one of the places we would want to start looking.
Anthony Wallace was a proponent of social revitalization. He criticized those who would try to be creative in this regard. Before you design your utopia, he would say, you need to learn of effective examples of civilization — in your own people and traditions or in those of other peoples. Efforts at recreation of those — of revitalization — are much more likely to succeed than ‘what if’ frameworks that you might dream up on your own. Civilization-making is a very complex and fraught profession. You wouldn’t want to carry it out on a whim — or based on a prejudice which may well signal a blind spot.
We should be highly motivated in this. Are things going so well that we are not at least curious to understand our long history more fully? What could we learn from it? Let’s look for abiding success. Let’s hang the prospects for our histories and the narratives of our lives on those more firm foundations.
References
Kramer, S. N. 1988. History begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine firsts in recorded history, 3rd ed. Philadelphi, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Thornton, S. 2023, March 16. How the West should meet the China challenge. Robert F. Ellsworth Memorial Lecture Series. La Jolla, CA: School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego. Available: https://china.ucsd.edu/events/named-lectures/ellsworth-memorial/index.html
Tingey, K. B., and Manicki, M. 2018. Conceptual heartland: The ultimate frontier: ‘Peasant power,’ submission, and American remembrance. in K. B. Tingey, Manicki, M., and N. Asllani, 2018, Humanity 2.0 vs golem 2.0: The dawn of a new era of civilization (Basileus reinvented). Logan, UT: Fluidity Finance, 26–116.
Wallace, A. F. C., Robert S. Grumet, R. S. (Ed.). 2003. Revitalizations and mazeways: Essays on culture change, Vol. i. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.