Author: Sahan S. Karatasli

(Photo: CNN.com)

Timothy M. Gill

With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. remains the world’s sole global empire. Under the Trump administration, though, the direction of U.S. Empire remains uncertain. Indeed, comparative-historical sociologists might provide much help in making sense of U.S. Empire under Trump. Beyond Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” where is U.S. Empire headed under his direction?

Many have recently entered into discussion of the rise, decline, and persistence of the American Empire. In some respects, it is clearly in decline. There is no doubt that China, Russia, and left-leaning countries throughout Latin America challenge U.S. global power. Chinese purchasing power parity, for instance, recently surpassed that of the U.S., and Chinese exports have long surpassed those of the U.S. as well. These dynamics certainly constrain U.S. power. But thinking about this problem counterfactually, it is clear that they do not determine Trump administration priorities. Neither a Clinton nor a Rubio administration would have pursued the same economic and political priorities as Trump has, such as a tariff war and warmth towards right-wing rulers in places like Hungary, the Philippines, and, of course, Russia.

The Trump administration has had a large influence in terms of steering American Empire in a new direction, at least in the short term. In what follows, I attempt to draw a balance sheet.

To do so, I will draw from Michael Mann’s “IEMP” model–which stands for ideological, economic, military, and political power. Focusing on all of these distinct varieties of power precludes one-sided emphasis of any one facet of power, such as economic power, as with many neo-Marxist theorists of globalization, for example.

I take each of these spheres of power in turn, providing some very brief remarks on the trajectory of each sphere under the Trump administration.

Ideological Power

Ideological power has to do with ability to harmonize with, and therefore draw support from, widely-held political beliefs. Insofar as a state wields ideological power effectively, it can persuade people and other states without resorting to the use of coercion. The ideological centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy approach is the promotion of national sovereignty. In his UN General Assembly address in September 2017, for example, Trump mentioned the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” 21 times. This ideological approach, though, seems to resonate very little with the rest of the world.

Since Trump entered office, the Pew Research Center has found that global confidence in the U.S. president has diminished from 64% to 22%. Most countries surveyed have even evidenced double-digit declines: Sweden has evidenced an 83-point reduction (93% to 10%), and both the Netherlands and Germany have each witnessed a reduction of 75 points. Throughout 37 countries surveyed, Pew has reported that citizens across the world have more confidence in Angela Merkel (42%), Xi Jinping (28%), and Vladimir Putin (27%) than Trump (22%).

And perhaps most striking, since Trump took office, a majority of the population in countries found all throughout the world now find the U.S. a threat, including Chile (57%), Japan (62%), Lebanon (50%), Mexico (61%), Spain (59%), and Turkey (72%), among others.

With Trump and U.S. ideological appeal in such disarray, the U.S.’s ability to persuade without resorting to force now remains increasingly restricted.

Economic Power

 Michael Mann characterizes economic power as involving control over “the extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of objects of nature” (The Sources of Social Power Vol. 1, pages 24-5, 1986). With his policies, Trump is threatening the vitality and interconnectedness of the U.S. economy, particularly with the implementation of tariffs, which indeed particularly threaten the global distribution of U.S. goods and the domestic consumption of products coming into the country.

Trump first signaled his intentions to engage in protectionist and isolationist policies when he condemned free trade agreements, like NAFTA, on the campaign trail. Following his inauguration, he quickly removed the U.S. from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions. In subsequent weeks, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and has specifically targeted China with tariffs on $50 billion, and then additional round of $200 billion, worth of goods. The latter $200 billion comes after China retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, which, interestingly and cleverly, were largely placed on goods coming from parts of the U.S. in which Trump received most electoral support, such as soy, pork, and whiskey.

It is hard to understand who Trump wants to satiate with these protectionist maneuvers. Nearly all analyses predict that they will result in job losses. What is more, Trump’s measures bode to reduce U.S. global influence that emerges from intensified trade relations between countries. For instance, Jonathan Moyer and David Bohl (2018) use the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity to measure the influence that countries might wield within other countries as a result of trade reliance.[1] As a result of reduced reliance over the next few years, they estimate that the U.S. is posed to lose global influence to China in some 27 countries, including Indonesia, Nigeria, and Thailand. In doing so, China is intensifying its economic relations with countries all throughout the world with its One Belt, One Road initiative, and establishing trade agreements with countries in the wake of TPP’s demise.

If Trump wants to crack down on Chinese economic influence and bolster U.S. economic vitality, it is hard to understand why he is pursuing these measures.

Military Power

If there is one area involving U.S. global power that Trump has deliberately sought to enhance, it is U.S. military power. Trump requested an historic $700 billion defense budget to update weapons and employ more military personnel. The U.S. already operates over 800 military bases, and enjoys preponderance in land, sea, and air.

At the outset of the Trump presidency, it was not altogether clear if/when Trump would utilize military force. At times, for example, he criticized the U.S. for behaving like “a bully” on the world stage, and he condemned the second Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. After coming to power, though, Trump has attacked the Syrian government with Tomahawk missiles, removed limitations on military sales to Saudi Arabia and fueled its war in Yemen, and threatened several countries with military force, including Venezuela and North Korea.

If there is any sphere of power in which we can be sure the U.S. will continue to maintain preponderance, it is the military sphere.

Political Power

There is much to say about U.S. political power at the global level. I will focus on with whom Trump has and has not pursued better relations since coming to power, and how Trump has approached global institutions.

Trump has criticized the European Union–even likening it to an enemy–and he has squabbled with traditional U.S. allies, such as Canada and Germany. And while straining these relations, he has exhibited an unusual warmth towards authoritarian leaders, including Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orbán, and Vladmir Putin, with whom Trump recently met in Finland and invited to the White House. There is much speculation concerning why Trump gravitates towards these leaders. A fuller analysis of these dynamics is beyond the scope of this piece. But suffice it to observe that Trump seemingly possesses similar authoritarian inclinations, exhibited when he responds to public criticism harshly, perhaps attributable to his professional life within the corporate sector where the boss is dictator (do not forget Trump’s most famous line: “You’re fired!”).

Trump also exhibits antipathy towards many of the multilateral institutions that were initially developed in the wake World War II in order, some argue, to safeguard the world against another authoritarian superpower like fascist Germany. Trump has criticized the UN and many of its recent initiatives such as the Paris Climate Accords; questioned U.S. involvement in NATO; and threatened the leave the World Trade Organization. As a result, Trump seemingly wants to return to the pre-World War II atmosphere of national sovereignty and all-out unilateralism.

Conclusion

In the short-term, the Trump administration’s behavior points to an overall reduction in U.S. global power. And it’s puzzling. In recent years, we have seen no other presidential candidate quite so vehemently champion nationalism much less champion turning the country from a set of “losers” into “winners.” But, if anything, this was Trump’s promise in his slogan of “Make America Great Again.”

It is well to take issue with the goal. But it is also important to assess the means Trump has for achieving it.

Trump ran for president on his business acumen, but his economic policies seem deliberately designed to damage the U.S. economy. Trump said he wanted to restore the stature of the U.S. abroad, but we have witnessed numerous allies take issue with the administration and openly criticize Trump. And while Trump has cozied up to authoritarian leaders such as Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, these efforts towards rapprochement have, at this point, borne little fruit. If anything, these efforts have delegitimated the government and provided optics in which the U.S. appears unable to successfully leverage global challengers. Indeed, at the global level, the Trump administration has few accomplishments to show for itself for over a year and a half in office.

In the short-term, of the four spheres of power discussed above, the Trump administration is only poised to enhance U.S. military power. Long-term predictions are beyond the scope of this piece, but should the U.S. become a country resting on military might alone, others will replace the U.S. in the ideological, economic, and political spheres of power. What is more, this may allow other powerful actors to eventually challenge U.S. military might, by, for example, leveraging economic power to get host countries to close U.S. military bases or limiting military exercises, or by challenging it even more directly than what we have recently witnessed from Russia in Eastern Europe.

There are surely facets of U.S. Empire that demand interrogation. Trump, however, insists on exploding many of those dimensions that remain least nefarious: ideological sway as a result of liberal democratic pursuits, leadership in multilateral institutions, and economic interconnectedness.

In the end, Trump seems to believe that the U.S. Empire can run on military force and tough posturing alone. Such military overreach may well spawn global resentments that emerge alongside these dynamics.

Timothy M. Gill is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His research focuses on the role of the U.S. empire in Latin America, particularly U.S. democracy promotion efforts in Socialist Venezuela.

Notes

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/12/heres-how-protective-tariffs-trade-away-u-s-global-influence/

(Image: CNN.com)

Zophia Edwards

There is something uniquely comical about seeing politicians dance at diplomatic engagements. From George Bush to Boris Yeltzin to Hilary Clinton, the list of politicians’ painful-to-watch dance steps is longer than it should be. They may be unlucky victims of social pressure to become performers. I, however, happen to believe that very little is left to spontaneity on foreign diplomatic tours; that politicians are desperate to have the public perceive that they are cool, regular, down-to-earth people who can connect with average folks on the ground–that these dance moves are deceitful attempts to demonstrate cross-cultural openness and acceptance of “the other” as a way of securing their economic and political interests. The most recent spectacle of duplicitous dancing diplomacy is Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Several weeks ago, May danced her way across Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa–if you can call what she did “dancing.” As Britain negotiates its withdrawal from the European Union, it is facing tremendous economic uncertainty. Desperate to ensure a stable a post-Brexit British economy, May is scrambling not just to hold on to, but to increase British economic ties to African countries. She promises a “fundamental shift” in the relationship between sub-Saharan African countries and the UK and a “new partnership” that will enable the UK and the African countries with which it engages to secure their “mutual interest.” But what exactly is so “new” about this proposed “partnership”? A comparison of the UK’s old economic strategy toward African countries and its post-Brexit aims reveal that very little has changed in the UK’s approach to African countries. Just as before, the new policies wreak of centuries-old patterns of economic exploitation through trade, aid, foreign direct investment, and debt-creating loans, and racism and racial exclusion. Leaving the dancing aside, the UK’s plan seeks to extend the historical methods of profiteering into the post-Brexit period.

First and foremost, May’s trip is more an act of desperation than a proactive, ambitious attempt to establish a “new” way of engaging with African nations. No British prime minister has visited any African country in five years. The last leader to do so, for the funeral of Nelson Mandela, was David Cameron. Meanwhile, China, France, Germany, Japan, and Turkey, scrambling as they are, have long-term strategies and have increased their efforts to deepen economic ties with the region. For May and the UK government, Africa was treated as an afterthought, only now increasing in relevance and urgency because the UK is in desperate need of guarding against the loss of trade partners when it withdraws from the EU. As such, May’s post-Brexit Africa plans reflect a determination to take the well-traveled road and build on its imperial history of domination. Even though, in her Cape Town speech, she congratulated the continent on being home to five of the world’s fastest growing economies, she visited none of these countries. According to the IMF’s real GDP growth rates in 2018, she should have visited Ethiopia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Rwanda, the three sub-Saharan African countries that have the highest growth rates in the world. But, these countries do not have a colonial connection to England, so that would require additional effort. To be fair, the countries she visited–Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa–are among the largest African economies by GDP, but the choice to have not even one of the fastest growing economies on her itinerary indicates no intention to be bold, creative, or novel. Rather, it indicates that the UK is bent on maintaining the same old approach of relying on former African colonies to be the bedrock of its economic security.

Trade

May spent much of her time in these African nations emphasizing greater opportunities to increase commerce and trade. But what exactly are these supposed “greater opportunities?”  The new Trade Bill promised by the May government will “replicate the effects of the ‘Economic Partnership Arrangements’–development focused trade deals with Africa, Caribbean and Pacific countries which will minimize disruption to current trading arrangements.” This offers nothing new to African economies. May already confirmed in her speeches that the EU’s agreements with the South African Customs Union (SACU) and Mozambique will be carried over to the post-Brexit UK trade agreements. Similarly, the Taxation (Cross-Border Trade) Bill lays out trade preference schemes for developing countries as the UK exits the EU. It is intended to allow the UK to establish standalone trade regimes with trading partners. However, the May government indicates that African economies will receive the same level of access as the current EU trade scheme for developing countries and tariff-free access for the world’s least developed countries. This is no different from what most African countries already receive in EU arrangements. Under the Everything But Arms agreement, a quarter of African countries already trade entirely tariff-free with the EU. On top of this, EU trade agreements with African states have been heavily criticized for their coercive and hegemonic neoliberal approach that restricts rather than fosters the development goals of African countries (Hurt 2003; Lagan and Price 2015). The post-Brexit UK-Africa plan is an old plan.

Aid

The UK’s Africa policy has always emphasized aid for trade, and the post-Brexit strategy still stresses this position. In her trip to these three African countries, May pledged to continue spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid (official development assistance) in order to support Britain’s private sector. To be clear, this is not an increase in aid spending; the UK has been spending this proportion of GNI on ODA since 2013. Furthermore, she did not specify whether and by how much the proportion of this ODA going to African economies will be increased. Despite her grand proclamations, most analysts expect that a weakened British currency in the post-Brexit economy will in fact reduce the amount of British aid that can even be made available to African countries.

On top of this, the post-Brexit aid plan is intended to benefit British interests more so than the interests of the citizens of African countries. The UK had a long history of “tied aid” or aid that obligates recipient countries to buy from donor countries. While the tied aid policy was formally banned in 2002 (although in practice it was a different story), May’s unabashed proclamation that British aid must benefit British interests seems to suggest a formal revival of the tied aid policy. May said, “I want to put our development budget and expertise at the center of our partnership as part of an ambitious new approach–and use this to support the private sector to take root and grow.” In her Cape Town speech, she explicitly said, “I am also unashamed about the need to ensure that our aid program works for the UK. So today I am committing that our development spending will not only combat extreme poverty, but at the same time tackle global challenges and support our own national interest. This will ensure that our investment in aid benefits us all, and is fully aligned with our wider national security priorities.” For May, this includes cracking down on illicit finance, opening new embassies in Niger and Chad to help battle terrorism and political instability, and of course, reducing the inflow of migrants to the UK. Decades of scholarship has shown that foreign aid retards economic development in recipient nations (Bornschier et al. 1978). British aid has never been about ameliorating the most pressing of issues within the African recipient nations, such as land concentration in South Africa. It has always been about securing British interests.

Foreign direct investment

Just as the post-Brexit trade and aid proposals signal no shift in the UK approach to relations with African countries, the foreign direct investment (FDI) plans echo more of the same. May declared that Britain is aiming to be the largest G7 investor (stock) in Africa by 2022. But in which countries will it invest? And in which industries? According to ONS statistics, South Africa is currently the largest recipient of UK FDI and more than half (54.4%) of UK FDI in South Africa goes to the mining and quarrying industry. Dependence on FDI results in a range of negative impacts: it results in profit expatriation rather than local re-investment (Bornschier 1980) and limits state autonomy to pursue development interests that may not align with foreign corporations’ interests (Amin 2001; Perelman 2003). For mining and quarrying specifically, these are extractive sectors that do not generate significant levels of employment, and resource-exporting countries in the periphery benefit comparatively less from their resources but bear greater costs of environmental degradation (Bunker 1984; Jorgenson et al. 2009). This is a long-standing colonial pattern that shows no indication of undergoing significant change in the post-Brexit period.

Furthermore, UK foreign investors have been involved in a range of scandals, which Theresa May has not attempted to address in her post-Brexit agenda. The CDC Group, a UK government-owned emerging markets private equity investor, sees Africa as the next private equity financial frontier. In fact, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are already among the top five countries with the largest proportions of CDC investments. But the CDC has been entangled in several nefarious acts across the continent, particularly in the countries visited by Theresa May. For instance, the CDC was implicated in the money laundering activities of Nigerian politician James Ibori. It has also invested heavily in luxury hotels in Nigeria, the Garden City shopping complex in Nairobi, Kenya, and elite boarding schools in Mauritius, which benefits local business elites and wealthy shoppers, but does little for the poor. The CDC justifies these projects claiming the construction jobs are open to the poor and semi-skilled; nevermind that they are short-term jobs with no benefits. This is a far cry from the aims of African governments. For example, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya aims to improve food security, introduce universal healthcare and affordable housing, and increase manufacturing, not build more shopping malls. In May’s post-Brexit vision, FDI in Africa will follow old patterns of extracting natural resources and bolstering the local elites rather than enabling African countries to shift their position in the world system.

Loans and debt

In May’s speeches, there was little talk about new commercial and bilateral loans and even more silence on debt repayments in the post-Brexit plans. According to the IMF, Sub-Saharan African countries are slipping into a new debt crisis. Many African countries received debt cancellation of IMF/World Bank/Paris Club loans through the 1996 HIPC initiative and the 2005 G8 multilateral debt relief initiative. However, over the last 18 years, external debt stocks in African countries have crept back up to the pre-cancellation levels; this time involving accumulation of debt in the private sector of these countries as opposed to the public sector characteristic of the period of debt crises. The rising debt is being driven by a combination of factors: commercial lenders have sought high-yielding assets; a slump in commodity prices and exports, in large part dependent on China’s growth; governments and lenders have not adequately monitored the legitimacy and productivity of borrowers; U.S. interest rates have been rising; and so on. Mozambique, Ghana, and Zambia are among the countries suffering under the high interest loans to private lenders. While African countries are now taking on more and more loans from China, all the UK talk of “mutually beneficial relationships” has not touched on the opportunity to rid affected African countries of decades-long burdens of UK debt. Jubilee, a coalition of organizations lobbying for the debts of developing countries to be cancelled, for example, has called on the UK to pass legislation to promote transparency in lending and borrowing and to restructure, where necessary, debts contracted under English law. This never came up in May’s proposals about a “new partnership” with African nations.

Racial exclusion

In addition to the post-Brexit Africa agenda being an extension of colonial patterns of trade, aid, FDI, and debt, there is the enduring racism undergirding the entire Brexit agenda. Gurminder Bhambra has written extensively about the fact that the UK referendum for continued membership in the UK was a proxy for debating race, citizenship, and migration. According to Bhambra (2017), since its conception, “There has been no independent Britain, no ‘island nation’; . . . [but rather,] a racially stratified political formation that Britain led to its own advantage.” As such, the UK does not perceive or treat African people, or people of darker hues in general, as people deserving of the same rights and privileges as white British citizens. The UK has a long history of enacting anti-black racist immigration policies. As Bhambra notes, the Commonwealth Immigration Acts of 1962, 1968, and 1971 were designed to restrict the freedom of movement of darker peoples. From musicians to IT workers to laborers, it is very difficult for citizens of African countries to get visas to visit and/or do business in the UK.

Theresa May herself, during her tenure as Home Secretary, presided over a number of immigration policies designed, in her own words, “to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants” (“illegal” murkily defined). This invariably meant the exclusion of black and brown immigrants. When Britain was an EU member, May refused to participate in refugee relocation and resettlement programs as well as naval rescue missions for those making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. Her UK-Africa partnership speeches emphasize the UK’s aim to prevent African migrants from entering the UK, not to facilitate it. President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, as much as a year ago, was already pressing for the establishment of a visa processing center in Nairobi, but there was no mention of this in May’s 2018 “new partnership” plans. Of course, to ease the visa application process for black Africans seeking to visit/relocate to the UK would be the antithesis of the Brexit agenda. After all, the entire Brexit narrative was that “these people should not be here!”

Conclusion

Theresa May’s dancing should not only be viewed as comic relief; it is emblematic of the UK’s deceptive approach to its dealings with African nations: pretend to appreciate African people and culture in order to ensure that the UK maintains its position in the world system. This attempt to maintain unequal ties to African countries in the post-Brexit period may not necessarily spell doom for the latter. Brexit might provide new fortuitous opportunities for African countries that were not open to them in the past. Desperate to project a strong and united EU, EU negotiators have adopted a largely unwavering stance toward the UK’s efforts to retain the benefits of EU market access and agreements without actually maintaining membership. The UK might hope to simply roll over EU free trade agreements with African countries, but without leverage and with fewer economic allies, African nations may be able renegotiate agreements that are more tilted toward their favor. If they are unable to, the words of Walter Rodney, dependency theorist and author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1981: 22) will continue to resonate with those of us who are not fooled by Theresa May’s disturbing and delusive dancing:

Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.

 

Zophia Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Providence College. Her research examines the impacts of colonialism and local labor movements on state formation and long-term development in the Global South, with a particular focus on resource-rich countries.

References

Bhambra, G. K. 2017. ‘Locating Brexit in the Pragmatics of Race, Citizenship and Empire.’ Pp. 91-100 in Brexit: Sociological Responses, edited by W. Outhwaite London: Anthem Press.

Bornschier, Volker , Christopher Chase-Dunn, and Richard Rubinson, R. 1978. “Cross-national Evidence of the Effects of Foreign Investment and Aid on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Survey of Findings and a Reanalysis.” American Journal of Sociology 84(3): 651-683.

Bunker, Stephen G. 1984. “Modes of Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Progressive Underdevelopment of an Extreme Periphery: The Brazilian Amazon, 1600–1980.” American Journal of Sociology 89(5): 1017–1064.

Hurt, Stephen R. 2003. “Co-operation and Coercion? The Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and ACP states and the End of the Lomé Convention.” Third World Quarterly 24(1): 161-176.

Jorgenson, Andrew K. 2007. “The Effects of Primary Sector Foreign Investment on Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Agriculture Production in Less-developed Countries, 1980–99.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 48(1): 29–42.

Langan, Mark and Sophia Price. 2015. “Extraversion and the West African EPA Development Programme: realising the development dimension of ACP–EU trade?” Journal of Modern African Studies 53(3): 263-287.

Rodney, Walter. 1981. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press

The third wave disposes of the first wave – (Image: “Twin Peaks: the Return, Part Three” )

George Steinmetz

The very idea of an ASA section dedicated to “Comparative and Historical Sociology” may be puzzling to some sociologists. How do these two ideas, comparison and history, fit together, and how do they relate to sociology? It may seem to some like an unnecessary luxury to add this section to a discipline that already lacks a center and constantly generates new sub-specialties.

As American sociology retreats ever more resolutely into the present (to paraphrase Norbert Elias [1987]) and focuses ever more exclusively on the United States as its geospatial frame of reference, I want to pose some basic questions that I hope we can talk about at the mini-conference and the main conference in Philadelphia this August. Why should sociology be historical and comparative? What do comparison and history have to do with one another? Why is it important to have a separate section on comparative and historical sociology?

All sociology is historical and comparative

First, consider the problem of history in relation to sociology. On the one hand, sociology is always historical. Every analysis of the present becomes historical as soon as it is committed to thought, language, computer, paper. Every social object is historically constituted. To understand any social practice, phenomenon, object, or event we need to reconstruct its genesis and genealogy and its evolution and change over time. Even the most resolutely static and presentist approaches are unable to hide the historicity and mutability of their analytic objects. On the other hand, insisting on the historicity of sociology is a way of making sociology more critical, more self-reflexive, and more fruitful. Historical sociology is a way of “dispelling the illusions of false necessity” (Calhoun 2003: 384), and is in this respect an essential part of any critical social science. The history of sociology demonstrates how easily sociologists forget that (1) all social objects are shaped by their genesis and historical constitution and are in this respect arbitrary or contingent rather than universal and immutable; (2) historical processes do not take the form of uniform laws but are shaped by unique, contingent conjunctures of causes; (3) social objects are typically grasped using inherited and spontaneous categories that need to be reconstituted, criticized, and consciously reformulated; and (4) engaging in undistorted, dialogic, open-ended discussions with historians can actually make sociology more interesting and generate new concepts and theories (Steinmetz 2017).

Second, consider the problem of comparison. This is in some respects an even broader category than historicity. Thinking itself is impossible without comparison. Language itself is constituted through differences (among phonemes, letters, words, etc.). Such differences can only be perceived through comparative judgements. Categories, including scientific concepts, are constructed in language and are therefore grounded in comparisons. Mental comparisons are essential to all forms of scientific method, including retroduction, which is an essential part of all social science (Pawson and Tilley 1997). Comparative methods in social science cannot be replaced by transnational approaches, even if the latter serve as an essential complement to comparison (Steinmetz 2014).

The raisons d’être of the comparative and historical sociology section

If the arguments in the preceding section are correct, “historical and comparative” approaches would seem to encompass the entirety of sociology. One might therefore ask again: what need is there for a distinct ASA section on historical and comparative sociology?

There are still good reasons for maintaining a specific section. One is that the section’s work serves to continuously and emphatically remind the rest of the discipline that sociology is inherently historical and comparative. We need to maintain the CHS section alongside transnational and global sociology, since there were (and still are) societies without states (or “nation states”) and social processes that are neither transnational nor global. Sociology should not content itself with the small sliver of history since the rise of the modern state or since the rise of “globalization.”

Making these sorts of arguments as a “collective intellectual” (Bourdieu), that is, as an entire section of the discipline, within the disciplinary field, is more effective than arguing individually or as “specific intellectuals” (Foucault).

For evidence of the pervasive presentism of U.S. sociology, one only needs to look at recent issues of American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and American Sociological Review(ASR). Titles of articles about the present – the vast majority of them — usually do not indicate any era, period, or time frame, and are written in the sociological present tense.[1] This convention conveys an image of the social world as being governed by unchanging universal laws and logics of necessity, undercutting policymakers’ good intentions about “changing the world.” The message is that the present is the same as the past, or that the past is simply not interesting, and that social objects are eternal and do not need to be historically reconstructed or contextualized in order to be explained and transformed.

Turning to comparison we should consider the pervasiveness of the syndrome of Methodological Homelandism. This is not unrelated to a different syndrome in Anthropology that Trouillot (1991) called its “Savage Slot”—the idea that Anthropology involves the study of the “primitive” Other. Sociology, it follows, involves the study of the “Self.” This ontologically meaningless (but politically odious) scientific division of labor was rejected by social scientists from the colonized and colonizing countries during the middle decades of the 20^th century (e.g., Mercier 1951; Elias 1963). In the newly-created African and North African universities, “anthropology was demoted to a subdiscipline of sociology” or banned outright (Colonna 1972). But this disciplinary division of labor was never attacked with much vigor in the U.S. and it has returned with a vengeance almost everywhere since the 1970s.

The equation of sociology with the study of one’s own society undercuts efforts to dissolve the idea that the nation state is the default frame or unit of sociological analysis (Martins 1974; Bogusz 2018). For evidence of the robustness of methodological nationalism we can again peruse the titles of AJS and ASR articles.[2]Articles about the US usually do not contain any indication of location or place in their titles, while the titles of articles about other parts of the world usually name those places. This practice communicates two possible messages. The first is sometimes made explicit, as in modernization theory (Knöbl 2001): the United States serves as a model for rest of the world. The second reading is that the rest of world simply doesn’t matter much.[3] We should not assume that the U.S. is unique in this regard. Even in India, Morocco, and other countries that passed through a phase of European colonialism, sociology tends to be defined as the study of the modern, national Self, Anthropology as the study of the more “primitive” Other.[4] A section like ours can serve a bulwark against such rigorous presentism and self-centered parochialism.

Historical sociology and the History of sociology

The history of sociology is closely tied to historical sociology, as early American sociologists seemed to recognize.[5] How does the history of sociology serve historical sociology?

First, as part of the self-objectifying approach to scientific reflexivity (Bourdieu). We may wish to understand where our own scientific categories and concepts come from and the origins of the extant division of social scientific labor in order to do better research. This requires a historical sociology of our own science.

Second, the history of sociology is important even if our main focus is something other than social science. Modern social science shapes social, political, and economic events and processes. If we are interested in government policy, we can analyze the intentional production and deployment of expert social-scientific knowledge. Examples include cameralistics, counter-insurgency research, modernization theory, behavioral economics, much immigration research, much social policy research, and most of the field of law. Many other policies and practices are influenced unintentionally by social science. In other instances, policies and practices are shaped indirectly. The world’s first welfare state in Imperial Germany was profoundly shaped by proto-sociological discourses on society and the social question (Steinmetz 1993). The basic parameters of modern colonial policies (especially “native policy”) cannot be understood without reconstructing precolonial amateur and professional ethnography, Orientalism, and racial theory (Said 1978; Steinmetz 2002, 2004; Goh 2007).

Third, the history of sociology bolsters arguments for the value of historicist epistemologies in sociology more generally. Many sociologists regret the splintering of their discipline into myriad specializations. From this perspective, it is worth examining in detail one period in which sociology was flourishing, self-confident, and taken seriously by the rest of the intellectual field, namely, Weimar Germany. I discussed this first “wave” of genuinely historical sociology in my first memo as Chair of the CHS section (in Trajectories Vol. 29, no. 1, Fall 2017). Nowadays in Germany, where historical sociology was invented, there is not even a permanent committee on historical sociology in the national sociological society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. I am not suggesting that American historical sociologists will suffer the same fate as their Weimar counterparts, but simply that they should remain wary of the various forces that pounced on historical sociology once the opportunity arose in 1933.

Conclusion

What better venue could there be to discuss these and other urgent topics than the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section’s mini-conference on “The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis,” to be held August 10^th in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania?[6] I urge all section members and anyone else who believes that historical and comparative approaches need to remain alive and well in American sociology to attend the mini-conference and the special sessions sponsored by the section during the regular conference in the days that follow.

George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Germanic Language and Literatures at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Paris. He is a social theorist and a historical sociologist of states, empires, and social science.

Notes

[1] The sociological present tense focuses ontologically on the moment of research and writing. Works written in sociological present tense either ignore everything anterior to the moment of analysis or relegate the past to “background” conditions. This epistemological stance became part of the positivist methodological unconscious in postwar US positivist sociology. It was so well codified that even a sociological study that drew on historical data could be divided into a present—the moment of the “dependent variable”—and historical “background.”

[2] The most recent volume of AJS, at the time of writing (Volume 123) demonstrates this pattern. In issue no. 6 (May 2018) there are six articles, only one of which lists a time and place in the title (“Gilded Age America”). None of the articles in issue 4 list place names, and all of them are set in the United States (although one lists the Postbellum South in the title—places and spaces that are not the present day US both break the spell of positivist universalism). In issues 2 and 5 the only article titles that include a place name are set in countries other than the US (the sole exception is an article on Arizona). Krippner’s article in issue 1 of volume 123 is the great exception to the rule, as it names both a time (the late twentieth century) and place—“America” (Krippner 2017). A non-systematic scan of the ASR, or of the AJS in earlier years reveals the same pattern: titles only situate their subject in time and space when it is not located the US or does not take place in the immediate present.

[3] See interviews with department chairs of sociology (and political science and economics) departments in major US research universities in Stevens, Miller-Idriss, and Shami (2018).

[4] Interview by the author with anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi about sociology and anthropology in post-Independence Morocco, on May 10, 2018, in Princeton, NJ. For India see Bandeh-Ahmadi 2018; Uberoi, Sundar, and Deshpane (2007).

[5] In 1926 a “Division on Historical Sociology” appeared on the annual program of the American Sociological Society, with presentations on sociology in England, Germany, Russia, and Argentina (American Sociological Society 1927: 26-71).

[6] See http://chs.asa-comparative-historical.org/the-crisis-of-history-and-the-history-of-crisis.

References

American Sociological Society. 1927.  Papers and Proceedings. Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society Held at St. Louis December 28-31, 1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bandeh-Ahmadi, Nurolhoda. 2018. “Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Bogusz, Tanja. 2018. “Ende des methodologischen Nationalismus?” Soziologie. Forum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, 47(2): 143-156.

Calhoun, Craig. 2003. “Why Historical Sociology?” Pp. 383-393 in Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin, eds., Handbook of Historical Sociology. London: SAGE.

Colonna, Fanny. 1972. “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnographie dans l’Algérie de l’entre deux-guerres: la programmation des élites moyennes.” Libyca 20: 259-267.

Elias, Norbert. 1963. “Sociology and Anthropology. A Paper Read at the Second Annual Conference of the Ghana Sociological Association, April 1963.” Elias papers, Marbach, File MISC – E XI = SOC-Anthrop.

Elias, Norbert. 1987. “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present.” Theory, Culture and Society 4(2-3): 223–249.

Goh, Daniel P.S. 2007. “States of Ethnography: Colonialism, Resistance and Cultural Transcription in Malaya and the Philippines, 1890s-1930s.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49(1): 109-142.

Knöbl, Wolfgang. 2001. Spielräume der Modernisierung: das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

Krippner, Greta R. 2017. “Democracy of Credit: Ownership and the Politics of Credit Access in Late Twentieth-Century America.” American Journal of Sociology 123:1 (July): 1-47.

Martins, Herminio. 1974. “Time and Theory in Sociology.” Pp. 246-294 in John Rex (ed.), Approaches to Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mercier, Paul. 1951. Les tâches de la sociologie. Dakar: IFAN.

Pawson, Ray and Nick Tilley. 1997. Realistic Evaluation.  London: Sage.

Stevens, Mitchell L., Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and Seteney Khalid Shami. 2018. Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Steinmetz, George. 1993. Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Steinmetz, George. 2002. “Precoloniality and Colonial Subjectivity: Ethnographic Discourse and Native Policy in German Overseas Imperialism, 1780s-1914.” Political Power and Social Theory, volume 15, pp. 135-228.

Steinmetz, George. 2004. “The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography: Lessons from German ‘Salvage Colonialism’ for a New Age of Empire.” Ethnography, Vol. 5, number 3, pp. 251-288

Steinmetz, George. 2014. “Comparative History and its Critics: A Genealogy and a Possible Solution.” Pp. 412-436 in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, eds., A Companion to Global Historical Thought. Blackwell.

Steinmetz, George. 2017. “Field Theory and Interdisciplinary: Relations between History and Sociology in Germany and France during the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 59, no. 2 (April 2017), pp. 477-514

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot. The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Pp. 18-44 in Richard Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Uberoi, Patricia, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpane, eds. 2007. Anthropology in the east. Founders of Indian sociology and anthropology. New Delhi: Permanent Black.