Bought as a bookshop remainder in 2010, I recently picked this book up as my next read. However, a glance through the covernotes and blurb changed my mind.
I got the impression that the book trumpets the great deeds of the west (= USA, with some others) in establishing a fine world order.
Well, much has chaged in the 15 years since the book was written. The "new world order" is looking a little frayed and tatty, and any projections based on a 2007 world view now lookk highly dubious.
Pass.

It's been 14 years since Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold was published. That's one global financial crisis, one global pandemic, one Brexit, two Presidents (and starting the first term of a third), and a US insurrection ago. Does this book still have anything to tell us about "Britain, America, and the making of the Modern World"? Well, perhaps.

Despite that subtitle, this book is not a history of how Britain and America made the modern world order. It's not a history book at all, which the author acknowledges in his introduction. It's more of a philosophical dissertation. Mead takes as a given the "Anglo-Saxon" primacy in creating the modern world order, and proceeds to lay out what he sees as the underlying conditions that led to the leadership role of these two nations.

There's a lot to quibble with about this book.

First off, it's well documented, with appropriate footnotes, but there is much too much taken as given. Mead never really defines the "modern world order" that the whole book is about. Is it economic, legal, moral, technological, industrial, military, diplomatic? Mead, I think, might argue that it's all or at least pieces of all of the above, but by not defining it, he gives himself free rein to marshal his argument unfettered by definitional constraints.

Secondly, this book is way too long for the case it's trying to make. Mead wanders. And wanders. While wandering with him was fun in parts, you do get to the end of the book asking yourself whether all that wandering really bolstered the argument he's trying to make.

Mead does have a likable writing style - he keeps things moving and provides a "light touch" even when the topics of discussion are heavy subjects. He covers a lot of ground, he raises a number of points, he posits a number of arguments. Then, in the final chapter he tells you what it all means (the name of the chapter is literally "The Meaning of It All"). Like the rest of the book this is a pretty generalized discussion, but basically it says that global capitalism will eventually lead the whole world to, not Utopia, but to a "perpetual revolution" of higher and more transcendental human meaning. Really.

So does this book have anything to tell us 14 years later? About as much as it did when published. Which is to say - there is a lot of interesting stuff here, and it might lead you to pick up some of the works he references in his arguments, but ultimately, for me, it doesn't build to a wholistic, convincing argument. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, and particularly the discussion about how religious themes and demonizing "enemies" who are little more than economic competitors was a staple in the Anglo-American discourse since Cromwell, Louis XIV, etc. and then later Hitler, McCarthy, Reagan, and then Bush. Telling people straight up that we want their sons to die so the King can get richer, just wouldn't sell enough to make a war really work.

It won't work any better to say "so Exxon Mobil can get richer, and you stay dependent on foreign oil in your car" either! The talk about how religious myths have been used on people to go fight, or even the suitability of texts of Judeo-Christianity-Islam to perpetuate this system for use by ruling elites. It is fantastic! What is left out though is that this system continues in our "open society", but it has always been the MO of the British Empire even though Mead claims we've always been about "democratic capitalism". History shows that really only a very few people back in England lived under the "democratic" part of this capitalism, and only then begrudgingly by a well preserved ruling elite, he describes them as a strong "parliament". I agree, they mostly ran Parliament until the post-war era, seats being musical chairs for the cousins put forward by the Conservative Party. This book is full of references, and I intend to use them. The system has been "demonstrably more effective", but he fails to be honest about the many backs on which that effectiveness arose. Anyone reading this literally, and without other sources, would believe exactly what he has to say, and go off merrily believing things are just fine the way they are.

The book is full of misleading language like "religious strife between....the resentful Catholic peasants of Ireland and the British State". Notice no adjective to describe the British State, but I can think if a few. There's no mention of denuding Ireland of timber for Bess's ships, nor the potato monoculture that might have arisen anyway by these Anglo- invisible hand ideas, just like our corn monoculture (oh that's subsidized, I forgot), but other sources suggest conflicting information about just how "invisible" was this hand in all of this exploitation of Ireland.

The best part for me, was "Wars of religion are largely an Abrahamic trait, found among the Abrahamic peoples, and in self-defense, their neighbors." Mead mentions how Sioux, Shawnee, Boxers, Carlists, or Xhosa chiefs used religious myth to get fighters to go down against unbeatable odds, but nothing about the same tactics used today on Americans of simple faith to fight a desperate war for the world's remaining oil, masked as existential and religious for the voters and soldiers who are "created equal" under the Constitution and this Anglo-American tradition, but not treated as so by the FCC licensed media, nor elected Congressmen. Evidence suggest military commanders are using this language on young people, and recruitment is focused on social classes for which this would be central. We also can connect the dots between funding sources of 501c3s or religious organizations that produce Islamophobic dogma, and concentrated owners of FCC licensed media. These funding sources are also the same ones who give campaign contributions to Congressmen, most notably "the family" on C Street. Mead must have known about these people. Since only 1% of the population control most wealth and income both in the US and the UK, it is pretty easy to see who is behind funding all these ventures. None of this comes out in this Paean to Anglo-American "dynamic open society" supporting maritime control and achievement.

While he goes on and on about the failure of the centralized French state versus the decentralized British and American states, and emphasizes the importance of a dynamic open-society at home to support US provided security of the global "maritime system", he covers up the truth that US wealth and political power is now more concentrated than it was during the 1920s in both the US and UK (and Australia and Canada hmmm pattern here?). The current collapse, brewing just under the surface in 2007 when his book was published, exemplifies what happens when too much economic and political power is held by too few minds, just like the French state under Louis XIV which missed so many innovations, later including the telephone evidently, but also the white elephants like the Yangtzee River Dam of another centrally concentrated power system like the Chinese Communists. We may have a few white elephants of our own now, like TARP banks for example?

For me, the biggest thing about this book is the meta-story that while conservatives in the Council on Foreign Relations can espouse in print these Anglo-American values of "democratic capitalism" and "open society" as predestined to dominate the world, these values are collapsing in this country under the weight of conservatives' very own campaign finance laws, Supreme Court case law about political speech and money from the 1970s, and non-prosecution of anti-trust laws during the Bush Administation.

Other conservative writers espouse the Atlas Shrugged model, the brilliance of JP Morgan raising capital in this Dutch finance system for John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford, or Andrew Carnegie to create the "Age of Oil" and Big Capital we live in to serve them. They write to justify bailing out too big to fail Wall Street firms that enable Big Oil and Big Everyone Else's run around this planet in search of low-cost, low-rule-of-law, high-profit countries and people to exploit (increasingly "resentful" people would that be the adjective to use?). Now we are dependent on their "Age of Oil", and the system isn't open enough, nor the Dutch finance system capable of successfully forming capital around useful new technologies (plenty of un-useful technology bubbles though).

Mead's plea to protect the "maritime system" seems like a masked one to protect access to Central Asian oil, which is the big CIA play now, since supertankers and cargo ships don't run on wind power or fuel cells. This masked plea precludes moving democratically as American families need toward "slow food" or "slow money" or "locally produced goods". With conservatives producing and reading between the lines in manifestos like this one, it doesn't look like a sustainable future for American families is in their powerful hidden cards!

This book reinforces a growing question about anything written by these people explaining our Anglo-American "ideals". In fact, those "ideals" shrouded in old fashioned religion just whitewash for us taxpayers and voters a commercial empire based on exploitation like slavery, CIA "interventions" against trade unionism, taxes, democracy, indigenous rights, or social reform, or today's recent coup in Honduras against Zelaya for the Chiquita Banana company, their Cincinnatti Board Members, and their wealthy Honduran buddies from the country club in Miami (or Naples more likely)!

All of those details are well hidden from us taxpayers by this book and a disciplined media elite who write for Foreign Affairs, and talk to us on Meet the Press, etc! ( )

“Le modèle anglo-saxon n’est pas le nôtre”, aldus Jacques Chirac tijdens een toespraak tot het Franse volk. Dit boek is dan ook niet voor hem en zijn geestesgenoten geschreven. Het probeert niet alleen een antwoord te geven op de vraag wat dat dekselse model eigenlijk is, maar vooral waarom het zo succesvol is gebleken. Want, verontschuldigt zich de schrijver, het is bijna vulgair om het te zeggen, maar de Engelstalige landen hebben de laatste 400 jaar in alle grote conflicten aan het langste eind getrokken. Deze gêne belet Mead overigens niet dezelfde stelling nog een paar maal te herhalen en soms is daarbij de nauwelijks onderdrukte juichstemming wat ergerlijk, vooral als ook de laatste schijn van objectiviteit overboord wordt gegooid wanneer hij, refererend aan de Angelsaksische wereld, het heeft over “wij” en “ons”. Desondanks, het feit blijft, de vraag is gewettigd en de antwoorden die Mead aanreikt, zijn het overdenken waard.

Overigens is hij niet blind voor de fouten van de Engelstalige landen. Ook hun tegenstanders –een kleurrijk gezelschap van Franse koningen, Duitse tirannen, progressieve intellectuelen en Moslim fundamentalisten- komen aan het woord. Zo citeert hij met voelbaar genoegen het lijstje waaruit gezagsdragers uit de voormalige DDR ter inspiratie konden putten om de gehate Britten te beschrijven: “paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators.” Vooral die kadaver etende, kruiperige na-apers spreken me wel aan en ik houd ze achter de hand om ooit, op een gepast ogenblik, in een conversatie te gebruiken.

Mead voert de onstuitbare economische opkomst van Engeland vanaf de zeventiende eeuw terug op een gelukkige samenloop van omstandigheden: een goede geografische ligging beschermd voor invasies, het juiste staatsbestel –los genoeg om ruimte te bieden aan individuele ontplooiing, maar sterk genoeg om het land bijeen te houden- en de juiste grootte. Deze economische opgang vertaalde zich ook in militaire macht. Een combinatie van overwicht op zee en een strategie van “balance of power”, waarbij potentiële tegenstrevers werden geneutraliseerd door het aangaan van bondgenootschappen, leidde tot een steeds groter wordende invloed, eerst voor Groot-Brittannië en later voor de Verenigde Staten.

Maar de schrijver ziet ook een belangrijke rol weggelegd voor religie: een stabiliserende factor tijdens de dramatische transformatie naar een kapitalistische samenleving, maar zelf ook een drijvende kracht achter deze veranderingen. Het religieus compromis dat in de Engelstalige wereld werd gevonden tussen traditie, rede en geloof zou het best geschikt zijn om deze dubbele rol voor zijn rekening te nemen. Dit in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld Frankrijk waar eerst een verstikkend katholicisme en later een doorgeslagen rationalisme (denk aan de Franse Revolutie) een rem zette op de ontwikkeling van een duurzame liberaal-kapitalistische samenleving (zeg maar, “le modèle anglo-saxon”).

In het laatste deel van "God and Gold" waagt Mead zich aan bespiegelingen over de essentie van het kapitalisme, de overeenkomsten tussen de monotheïstische godsdiensten, het belang van utopieën en de toekomst van de Engelstalige wereld. Niet oninteressant, maar soms rammelt de argumentatie en geregeld neemt hij teveel hooi op de vork. Misschien had hij zich, naar goed Angelsaksisch gebruik, beter bij de feiten gehouden en alle hoogdravende theorie overgelaten aan zijn continentale collega’s. “Just the facts ma’am.” Meer moet dat niet zijn. ( )

This book looked to be promising, and there are indeed some quite interesting bits. But Mead has produced what is in effect a triumphalist, cheerleading text that repeats the propaganda line of US nationalism: the US system is the best in the world, others have to get used to it, and criticism of it is due to hatred. (To be fair, he includes the Brits as authors of this awesome "maritime system" as well. )

What's especially strange about this book is that Mead knows a lot, and he should know better. He has a wide knowledge of history, including the histories of other places besides the US and UK. And he shows that he understands the different perspectives on the US/UK system, and the experiences of others in the face of this system. But he nevertheless returns to the propaganda line. This actually makes this worse than if he'd shown himself to be totally ignorant.

While parts of Mead's theses are interesting, if you want a serious and objective look at these issues you'll have to look elsewhere. If on the other hand you're looking for a feel-good US nationalistic view of the world, this is the text for you. ( )