미국 예외주의의 뿌리 (The Economist 2003.11)

[안재오]

SURVEY: AMERICA

From sea to shining sea

Nov 6th 2003
From The Economist print edition



American exceptionalism is nothing new. But it is getting sharper

“EVERYTHING about the Americans,” said Alexis de Tocqueville, “is extraordinary, but what is more extraordinary still is the soil that supports them.” America has natural harbours on two great oceans, access to one of the world's richest fishing areas, an abundance of every possible raw material and a huge range of farmed crops, from cold-weather to tropical. Not only is it the fourth-largest country in the world, but two-thirds of it is habitable, unlike Russia or Canada. Any country occupying America's space on the map would be likely to be unusual. But as de Tocqueville also said, “Physical causes contribute less [to America's distinctiveness] than laws and mores.”

In his 1995 book “American Exceptionalism,” Seymour Martin Lipset enumerates some of these laws and social features. In terms of income per head, America is the wealthiest large industrial country. It is also the only western democracy to have practised slavery in the industrial era. It has the highest crime rate and highest rate of imprisonment (though crime, at least, is falling towards European levels). Its society is among the most religious in the world. Perhaps less obviously, Americans are more likely than almost anyone else to join voluntary associations.



A nation apart
From sea to shining sea
Us versus us
Therapy of the masses
Home of the brave
Politics as warfare
Doctor Jekyll and Mr Bush
The last, best hope of earth?
Audio interview
Acknowledgements
Offer to readers



United States



Click to buy from Amazon.com: "American Exceptionalism", by Seymour Martin Lipset (Amazon.co.uk); "Democracy in America", by Alexis de Tocqueville (Amazon.co.uk); "The End of History", by Francis Fukuyama (Amazon.co.uk); "The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective", by Angus Maddison (Amazon.co.uk).

Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution writes on America's population. See also the White House.





America has a highly decentralised political system, with federal, state and local governments all collecting their own taxes, writing their own laws and administering their own affairs. Its federal government spends a relatively low share of national income. The country has more elective offices than any other, including, in some states, those of judges, which means that in each four-year cycle America holds about 1m elections. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it also has one of the lowest voter turn-outs, making it at once the most and the least democratic democracy.

It has no large socialist party, and never has had. Nor has it ever had a significant fascist movement. Unlike conservative parties in Europe, its home-grown version has no aristocratic roots. America has one of the lowest tax rates among rich countries, the least generous public services, the highest military spending, the most lawyers per head, the highest proportion of young people at universities and the most persistent work ethic.

But the term “exceptionalism” is more than a description of how America differs from the rest of the world. It also encompasses the significance of those differences and the policies based upon them. People have been searching for some wider meaning to the place since its earliest days. In 1630, the year the Massachusetts Bay Company was founded, John Winthrop, the colony's governor, described his new land as “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

And as they have looked, people have found two quite different reasons for thinking that America is special. One is that it is uniquely founded on principles to which any country can aspire. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper that “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

That is America-as-model. George Bush has embraced the idea. Commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks of September 11th 2001, he said that “the ideal of America is the hope of all mankind.” He was echoing Lincoln, who called America “the last, best hope of earth”.






But exceptionalism has another meaning: that America is intrinsically different from other countries in its values and institutions, and is therefore not necessarily a model. Thomas Jefferson said that “Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours are perhaps more peculiar than those of any other in the universe.”

In 1929, Jay Lovestone, the head of the American communist party, was summoned to Moscow. Stalin demanded to know why the worldwide communist revolution had advanced not one step in the largest capitalist country. Lovestone replied that America lacked the preconditions for communism, such as feudalism and aristocracy. No less an authority than Friedrich Engels had said the same thing, talking of “the special American conditions...which make bourgeois conditions look like a beau idéal to them.” So had an Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and a British socialist, H.G. Wells, who had both argued that America's unique origins had produced a distinctive value system and unusual politics.

Lovestone was purged, but his argument still has force: America is exceptional partly because it is peculiar. As usual, de Tocqueville had thought about both meanings of exceptionalism before anyone else. In his book “Democracy in America”, he described not only what is particular to democracy, especially the way in which it changes how people think and act (what he calls “the quiet action of society upon itself”). He also described what was, and is, particular to America: its size, the institutions it had inherited from England, its decentralised administration.

These two versions of American exceptionalism have more in common than might appear at first sight. Both suggest that the experience of America is open to others. The idea of America-as-model implies that other countries can come to be more like America, though American differences may still persist over time. The idea that America is intrinsically different is also consistent with the notion that outsiders can become American, but they must go there to do it and become citizens—hence America's extraordinary capacity to assimilate immigrants.

There are three points to grasp from this gallop through the history of American exceptionalism. First, it is, as Mr Lipset put it, a double-edged sword. It helps explain the best and the worst about the country: its business innovation and its economic inequality; its populist democracy and its low voter turn-out; its high spending on education and its deplorable rates of infant mortality and teenage pregnancy. Exceptionalism is often used either as a boast or as a condemnation—though in reality it is neither.

Second, the two strands help explain why exceptionalism is divisive within America itself. Most Americans are doubtless proud of the “exemplary” qualities of their country. But the non-exemplary, more peculiar features do not always command universal approval.

Third, there should be nothing surprising, or necessarily disturbing, in a revival of exceptionalism. America has almost always been seen as different. The question is: has anything changed recently?



Unparallel tracks
It is always risky to proclaim a break in a trend. Yet evidence is growing that, over the past decade or so, America has been changing in ways that do make it more different from its allies in Europe, and September 11th has increased this divergence.

Most of the previous half-century was a period of convergence. Between 1945 and about 1990, America and Europe seemed to be growing more like one another in almost every way that matters. Economically, Europe began the post-war period in ruins. According to Angus Maddison, an economic historian, in 1950 average incomes in western Europe were 54% of American ones. By the early 1990s, the ratio had passed 80%. Richer EU countries now boast a standard of living comparable to America's. Until the mid-1980s, America and Europe also both had stable populations, declining fertility rates and growing numbers of old people.

In the 1960s, America moved closer towards European levels of government spending through the Great Society programmes. This was the start of Medicaid for the poor and, later, increased regulation of industry through bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

With Watergate and the Vietnam war, America started to approach European levels of cynicism about government and military intervention abroad. In 1976, a sociologist, Daniel Bell, wrote a book whose title encapsulated the conventional wisdom of the time: “The End of American Exceptionalism”. Later changes seemed to prove him right. In the 1980s, European countries started to organise their economies on more American lines. Governments privatised and deregulated. Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, set up NASDAQ clones and started using share prices to measure a company's or manager's performance.

In politics, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both engaged in similar projects to shrink the size of the state. Bill Clinton (who was wildly popular in Europe) proclaimed himself a paid-up member of the largely European “third way”.

When communism collapsed, Mr Fukuyama hailed “The End of History”. Countries, he argued, would henceforth tend to become more alike, more democratic, more liberal, more globalised. There would be less exceptionalism, of the American or any other kind.

But things did not work out that way in foreign affairs, and other sorts of convergence may be coming to an end, too. The demographic differences are now startling. Around 1985, America's fertility rate bottomed out and began to rise again. It is now at almost two children per woman, just below the replacement level of 2.1, and looks set to rise further. Europe's fertility rate is below 1.4 and falling. Even China's is 1.8, and its birth rate is dropping fast.

At the moment, the EU's population is considerably larger than America's—380m against 280m—and will grow further with enlargement next year. China's is nearly four times as large as America's. But on current trends, by the middle of this century America's population could be 440m-550m, larger than the EU's even after enlargement, and nearly half China's, rather than a quarter.

America will also be noticeably younger then and ethnically more varied. At the moment, its median age is roughly the same as Europe's (36 against 38). By 2050, according to Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, America's median age will still be around 36, but Europe's will have risen to 53 (and China's will be 44). In the 1990s, America took in the largest number of immigrants it had ever seen in one decade: 33m people now living in the country were born outside it, and Latinos have become the largest ethnic group. “America,” says Hania Zlotnik of the United Nations Population Division, “is the world's great demographic outlier.”

Then there is the technology gap. Each year, more patents are applied for in America than in the European Union. America has almost three times as many Nobel prize-winners than the next country (Britain), and spends more on research and development than any other country. On one measure of academic performance, over 90 of the world's top 100 universities are in America.

Europe and America have also been diverging economically, though one should be cautious about that. In the seven years from 1995 to 2001, real GDP rose by 3.3% a year in America but by only 2.5% a year in the European Union. The bursting of the stockmarket bubble and the subsequent recession reversed this pattern—in 2001, GDP growth was higher in Europe than America—but the gap opened up again as the economies recovered. On current estimates and forecasts, growth in America in the three years to 2004 will average 1.3 percentage points a year more than in the 12-country euro area. Some 60% of the world's economic growth since 1995 has come from America.

These relative economic gains may be reversed. It is hard to see how the country can sustain both its huge trade and budget deficits. On the other hand, its growth in the 1990s reflected a big improvement in productivity, which rose by over 2% a year in the 1990s. The number of hours worked also rose. In 1982, Europeans and Americans put in roughly the same number of hours each year. Now, Americans work a daunting 300 hours a year more.

These divergences began at different times and for different reasons. The demographic gap began to open up as long ago as the mid-1980s. Economies started to diverge in the mid-1990s. Even in the area most relevant to the terrorist attacks—foreign policy—the roots of transatlantic differences arguably go back to the fall of communism in 1989-91. September 11th did not create these tensions, but it dramatised some of them. The attacks took place at a time when America was governed by an administration already less engaged in Europe than any in recent history, and when almost all the other measures were, for the first time in 50 years, pointing in the same direction—away from Europe, as well as from much of the rest of the world.

If this pattern continues, America may be entering a period of even greater dominance in world affairs. That alone makes American exceptionalism of more than domestic importance. American power will be divisive abroad—but it will also bring conflict at home, because a significant portion of Americans does not believe that the era of convergence is over. When Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate, said that “We won't always have the strongest military,” he was slapped down by his own party as well as by Republicans. But he touched a nerve. The next section will explain how exceptionalism divides America as well as defining it.