Bowman was part of the democratic (albeit capitalist and often neo-colonial) grand strategy of what Luce in 1941 called the ‘American Century ’. Yet, the links between the German and American universities (and, therefore also between German and American thought) before 1914 were robust and significant. This was especially true in geography, which before 1914 was a discipline where German universities excelled. American pre-war geography was heavily influenced by the geography of Ratzel and his German peers. Ratzel’s ideas about political geography were interpreted in the pre-First World War United States, and US geographers (via Semple) put a far more environmentally determinist spin on political geography than Ratzel had intended. Bowman was one of the people responsible for the rejection of this determinism, but this change actually brought American political geography closer to Ratzel’s original intent, and was responsible for the development of a distinctly American version of Lebensraum (Territorial Expansionism: law of nature for all healthy and vigorous peoples of superior races to displace people of inferior races). These ideas fed directly into American post-1945 grand strategy, and are responsible for much of the norms of the global order that we live in today. Thus Bowman’s Americanisation of the international political geography of Ratzel, and his participation in the creation of a distinctly American approach to post-1945 order. For Bowman this meant looking beyond the state and concentrating instead on free trade and the mobility of labour in order to allow expansions of trade and population that would not bring states into conflict. Bowman helped to push this position in his roles at both the Dumbarton Oaks and the San Francisco conferences that would lay down the institutional framework for the new American-dominated global political economy of the second half of the twentieth century. While Haushofer’s concept of Lebensraum was of a German nation struggling to find its place in a hostile world, Bowman’s conception of Lebensraum would see societies expanding through free trade, economic development and migration. That is, each would engage in an economically-driven Lebensraum without leading to wars between states. America’s Lebensraum would work through the new Bretton Woods system, and would constitute what Neil Smith would call the American Empire. In this sense it was not necessarily a radical step, and it ran counter to a more radical tradition in the West that interpreted capitalism and the failure of liberal laissez faire free trade as at the root of the problems of the twentieth century. What was envisioned was a system of free trade that allowed all states to source raw materials, goods and even labour at a global level, and thus made the need for imperial conquest obsolete. The rules of this system were to be guaranteed by a system of international organisations that helped resolve disputes over trade, and provided financial assistance to prevent the short term economic crises that had led to political instability during the early 1930s. Although certainly not either the only or the loudest voice for this global order, Bowman was certainly one of its promoters. Via his participation in the San Francisco and Bretton Woods meetings he was also an active participant on behalf of the Roosevelt Administration. Although during the immediate post-war period this system remained half-formed (it only really covered the western dominated part of the globe, and remained for the first few decades more of a disarmament regime amongst mercantilists, rather than a union of committed free traders), by the end of the century it came to be the dominant global politico-economic reality. What is more, their ideas that linked a geo-strategic literacy to the need to establish a liberal global order built on the power of the ‘Big Three’ Allied powers. The second was the reworking of the idea of Lebensraum in a distinctly liberal and American-centred direction that then formed the basis of the idea of American global hegemony: centred on a global political economy and managed by specific international organisations. He became a key expert on IR in the US, helping to found the Council for Foreign Relations in New York
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 03:13:37 +0000
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