>I suspect the mythological bane or baleful spell of unquestioned US
hegemony
> is something like a reaction-formation to our lack of multinational
> narratives capable of describing multinational capitalism for what it is
> -- a transnational reality.
Sorry, Dennis, can't buy it. What we are doing is questioning the right to assert such hegemony. The 20th century WAS the century of nationalism, and it was ALSO the American century.
I don't think anyone is arguing for US monolithic omnipotence (look how they screwed up so many things, including shopping, urban development, food as culture, transport with internal combustion engines, and airport and in-flight security).
But Americans run the business schools, the think tanks, the IMF and World Bank, a huge chunk of the media and much of the English language to go with it. They also run NATO and they treat Japan as a client state in which they still exercise extra-territoriality. And they've got a huge national security state that can suspend a constitution and ask for an extra couple hundred billion whenever there is a crisis.
The statist, consensus society of Japan, Inc. never existed and its somewhat different form of capitalism has been gutted by an overvalued yen (which started under Reagan, took off under Bush, and was driven home with vigor by Clinton). Taiwan and S. Korea are also rans. Thailand and Indonesia were never weres. The Asian century is just another American globalist myth in the pages of Business Week--like the new economy and the recessionless business cycle. (Can't wait to start chanting in the election year, It's the NEW economy, stupid!).
Where is that form of capitalism that is more 'efficient' than the US? In what, capital formation? Where?
There are other multi-national narratives and world views. Innuit. Native American. Polynesian. Aborigines. Nordic Europe. Transnational Islam (I saw wonderful examples of that when I visited a university in Malaysia last spring).
But these are all marginal, and unimportant from the American point of view. They only notice when a really, really fringe group does something big like fly planes into symbols.
Yours, Charles Jannuzi