Originally posted by oboe
Grits,
What about Perry opening up Japan to trade with the world? Opening Japan up to global connectivity did not prevent war in that case. In fact it may have encouraged and accelerated it.
Different time and place, I know. I was just pondering whether he theory could explain events in the past.
Sorry oboe, I missed this post.
Yes, Historians use a different term, they use Modernization and it can encompass many other things than connectivity, but it is essentially the same thing. You can see societies that have had violent corrections because of differential modernization all though history.
In your example, I would submit that Japan did not truely modernize until after it was forced to, and it took a world war. Pre-war they were modernizing but not at a fast enough rate, and more importantly their culture and government were vestiges of much less modern times. It was not until losing a war did they truely modernize as an entire culture.
The US and English civil wars were both the same war, fought by the same world views. In the English civil war, the Stuarts and the Royalists would not accept the modernizing culture around them and stress between them and Parliament bult up to the point that there was no other solution than war. The Monarchy was restored after the removal of Cromwell, but the society and government England were forever changed in a more modern way.
The US civil war was the same war, only removed 200 years. The north was populated and governed by the Protestants, who had the same world view as Parliamentarians, only in a more subtle way. The South, or more accurately those that held power in the South, had much the same world view as the Royalists. The stress and tensions from differential modernization built up to the point where neither side could see a way other than war, and they actually welcomed it. You have to ask yourself, "What would I beleive in so much that I would enter into a war with my own country?". The French Revolution can be seen in much the same way.
Corrections can also come about because someone or group try to take a part of the world and disconnect it, or remove it from the modernization process. Marxist revolutions usually spring from removing a government that refuses to modernize, yet they in the end refuse to connect to the rest of the world and become left behind in the modernization process and eventually collapse for the same reasons.
Osama Bin Laden, the Talaban, and the Wahabist in general want to take large chunks of the muslim world and disconnect it as quickly and permanently as possible. Our goal in the world, and this is all Barnett's idea, is to connect them faster than the Islamists can disconnect them. It is a race and it is a race we can not afford to lose.
