AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 15-18
Previous Entries: Chapter Two, Chapter One, Introduction
“The United States is the principal global disseminator of the technetronic revolution. It is American society that is currently having the greatest impact on all other societies, prompting a far-reaching cumulative transformation in their outlook and mores.”
Throughout time different nations have been the primary exporter of culture, technology, and justice either by force or by stimulating imitation in other societies. Athens and Rome for the Mediterranean, China for most of Asia, and France for Europe. Brzezinski claims that the French Revolution was “perhaps the single most powerful stimulant to the rise of populist nationalism during the nineteenth century,”.
Today this position of chief exporter is held by the United States. Not unlike the philosophical outflow of the French Revolution, the influence of America is disruptive in much of the world scene. Brzezinski cites communism as an example, a political theory he describes as capitalizing on social frustrations and aspirations, and a major source and target of these sentiments came to be America, its realities and its myths.
The United States is the focus of global attention, emulation, envy, admiration, and animosity. No other society evokes feelings of such intensity; no other society’s internal affairs—including America’s racial and urban violence— are scrutinized with such attention; no other society’s politics are followed with such avid interest—so much so that to many foreign nationals United States domestic politics have become an essential extension of their own; no other society so massively disseminates its own way of life and its values by means of movies, television, multimillioncopy foreign editions of its national magazines, or simply by its products; no other society is the object of such contradictory assessments.
The American Impact
In early years, the influence of America on the greater world was mostly philosophical. America was associated with this dreamy ideal of freedom, and that was true for awhile for many Americans, even if life wasn’t easy. America’s influence, and the concept of the country’s freedom, eventually became more materialistic. It was defined as the land of opportunity, and opportunity that was paid in fat American dollars.
In Brzezinski’s time (this book was published in 1970), as well as now (2024), the American Freedom concept isn’t such a defining element of the nation. For Brzezinski this concept was tarnished in the 1960s; the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the general racial and social tension, the flops in Vietnam. Brzezinski saw America’s global influence shifting to dominance in science, technology, and education.
This scientific and technological progress requires a dynamic environment. These developments depend on the resources committed to them, the available personnel, a high baseline of education, and “last but not least — the freedom of scientific innovation.” America has the resources to throw around and much of them get thrown into various research projects. American people have decently high access to education.1 As a result of a uniquely large population, the U.S. has a mass of educated and skilled workers. Brzezinski acknowledges that many aspects of the American education is deficient when compared to the standards of Western European and Japanese institutions, but he argues that “the broad base of relatively trained people enables rapid adaptation, development, and social application of scientific innovation or discovery”, that gives the U.S. its advantage.
America’s organizational structures and the intellectual environment are suited for experimentation and social adaptation. The material and status rewards that one can potentially receive not only incentivizes the country’s own people to pursue pathways to creative achievements, but also beckons the brightest bulbs of other nations, and its material attractions for the world’s scientific elite are historically unprecedented on the scale America performs.
Competitiveness and the emphasis on quick exploitation have resulted in a quick spinoff of the enormous defense and space research efforts into the economy as a whole, in contrast to the situation in the Soviet Union, where the economic byproducts of almost as largescale a research effort have so far been negligible.
Brzezinski predicted that the glitter of America would wane in attraction for Europeans. Partially due to American domestic issues and partly due to scientific advancements in Europe catching up after the World Wars. With that stated, he urged Europeans to accept America as the “closest to being the only truly modern society in terms of the organization and scale of its economic market, business administration, research and development, and education.” The resistance to this acceptance Brzezinski attributes to European anxiety over the widening technological gap between the sub-continents and a growing presence of large American firms exploiting their advantage of scale and organization to slowly collect controlling interests in key European industries.
Less tangible but no less pervasive is the American impact on mass culture, youth mores, and life styles. The higher the level of percapita income in a country, the more applicable seems the term “Americanization.” This indicates that the external forms of characteristic contemporary American behavior are not so much culturally determined as they are an expression of a certain level of urban, technical, and economic development.
For Brzezinki, such cultural exports became symbolic of American impact abroad and the “innovation-emulation relationship” between America and the rest of the world. And that world learns what is coming to it by watching America because of this relationship; from discoveries in space and medicine to pop art and LSD, air conditioning, air pollution, the issues of the elderly and the delinquency of the youth. Additionally, he notes, foreign students returned home from American universities had already contributed to organizational and intellectual revolutions among the intelligensia of their own countries.
And American society, more than any other, produces more news briefs, TV trash, and research papers than any other country. America had the lock on satellites early on, and in Brzezinski’s time there was already talk of the development of a “worldwide information grid”, which he anticipated would come into being by 1975. And he wasn’t far off. On October 29, 1969, ARPAnet delivered its first node-to-node communication from one computer to another. By the end of the 1970s Vinton Cerf had invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and so began the road to ruin.
For the first time in history the cumulative knowledge of mankind will be made accessible on a global scale—and it will be almost instantaneously available in response to demand.
New Imperialism
It is by these previously listed factors – America’s dominance in the fields of science, tech, and education, the dynamism of the U.S. economic and educational environment, the material and status rewards incentivizing intellectual experimentation and social adaptability, and the global spread of America’s cultural exports – that shaped the unique relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. Brzezinski points out that the outcomes have some overtones of imperialism, but that it differs from historic imperialism. It began taking shape after the conclusion of World War II when a lot of nations were directly dependent on the U.S. in matters of security, policy, and economics.
“The more than a million American troops stationed on some four hundred major and almost three thousand minor United States military bases scattered all over the globe, the forty-two nations tied to the United States by security pacts, the American military missions training the officers and troops of many other national armies, and the approximately two hundred thousand United States civilian government employees in foreign posts all make for striking analogies to the great classical imperial systems.”
The imperial aspects of these relationships were a transitory and spontaneous response to the power vacuum created in the destructions of WWII and encouraged by the subsequent threat felt from communism. It was neither formally structured or explicitly legitimized. By the late 1960s all this political and military dependence declined as Europe found its feet again. In its place rose a more pervasive but less tangible influence, that of American economic presence and innovation, either directly originated in the U.S. or stimulated abroad by American foreign business investment.
“. . . American influence has a porous and almost invisible quality. It works through the interpenetration of economic institutions, the sympathetic harmony of political leaders and parties, the shared concepts of sophisticated intellectuals, the mating of bureaucratic interests. It is, in other words, something new in the world, and not yet well understood.”
Brzezinski clarifies that it is a mistake to see the relationships between America and everyone else as the simple expression of imperial ambition. To assume this ignores the part played by the technological scientific revolution. Incredible achievements like man’s first steps on the moon, the first computers and gaming consoles; these captivated the world and compelled imitation, stimulating the export of new techniques, methods, and organizational arrangements from the more advanced to the less advanced among nations. This undoubtedly created an asymmetrical relationship, but Brzezinski denies that this asymmetry can be accurately described as imperialism. This is because the U.S. in unique in how great an effort, governmentally and privately, through business and a range of foundations, that the nation undertakes to export its expertise, to publicize its space findings, to promote new agricultural techniques, to improve educational facilities, to control population growth, to improve health care, etc. It yields similar notes to imperialism, but it is, according to Brzezinski, not the same.
However, Brzezinski goes on to note that this global impact is contradictory. It both promotes and undermines American interests as defined by policymakers. It advances the cause of cooperation on a larger scale while simultaneously disrupting existing social and economic fabrics. While laying the groundwork for stability and prosperity it also enhances the forces working toward instability and revolution. Unlike traditional imperialistic powers which utilized the principle of divide et impera, America has focused on promoting regionalism in Europe and in Latin America. By doing so, however, it has created larger entities that are more capable of resisting American influence and of competing with it in the global economy.
“Implicitly and often explicitly modeled on the American pattern, modernization makes for potentially greater economic wellbeing, but in the process it disrupts existing institutions, undermines prevailing mores, and stimulates resentment that focuses directly on the source of change—America. The result is an acute tension between the kind of global stability and order that America subjectively seeks and the instability, impatience, and frustration that America unconsciously promotes.”
The United States, Brzezinski argues, is the first global society in history. It is a society that is increasingly difficult to delineate in terms of its external cultural and economic boundaries. Brzezinksi believed such conditions of innovative stimulus would continue on indefinitely. He projected that by the end of the 20th century only thirteen or so countries were likely to reach the 1965 levels of per capita GDP of the United States. Without significant scientific or economic stagnation, or a major political crisis, America would continue to be a force for global change regardless of whether the dominant subjective mood was pro or anti American.
- At the beginning of the 1960s the United States had more than 66 per cent of its 1519 age group enrolled in educational institutions; comparable figures for France and West Germany were about 31 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively. The combined populations of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom are equal to that of the United States—roughly two hundred million. But in the United States 43 per cent of collegeage people are actually enrolled, whereas only 7 to 15 per cent are enrolled in the four countries (Italy having the low figure and France the high). The Soviet percentage was approximately half that of the American. In actual numbers there are close to seven million college students in the United States and only about one and a half million in the four European countries. At the more advanced level of the 2024 age bracket, the American figure was 12 per cent while that for West Germany, the top Western European country, was about 5 per cent. For the 519 age bracket, the American and the Western European levels were roughly even (about 80 per cent), and the Soviet Union trailed with 57 per cent. ↩︎
The Normal Times 