Introduction

“The United States,” political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in the early 1960s, “may properly claim the title of the first new nation. It was the first major colony to successfully break away from colonial rule through revolution.” Lipset's claim, made in the halcyon days of American post-war prosperity, echoes the exceptionalism that permeated American historiography and social science at that time. Nevertheless, the statement rightly positions the United States at the forefront of modern national experience and, by extension, to the process of globalization. The majority of countries in the world today are newly independent since World War II and, like their eighteenth-century American predecessor, are post-colonial nations. Most are “state-nations” constructed on the basis of social nationalism, rather than nation-states of single ethnic origin. Like the United States, they too are products of an accelerated process of globalization that characterizes modern times.

Considerable differences of opinion exist about what constitutes globalization, when it began, and where it is leading us. World-systems analysts, for instance, put forth a metahistorical perspective that globalization is contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism and is an outcome of European expansion. In this view, globalization becomes the inevitable result of the free market at work.