Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Integrating the globe during the post-war boom
The rapid economic growth of Europe, Japan, and North America from 1946
to the 1970s marked an enormous integration of the various spaces of the
world economy. The post-WWII boom was one of two great waves of creative
destruction to sweep the world in the twentieth century (the other being the
rise of postmodern capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s). Politically, this era
marks the apex of the
Pax Americana
, when the U.S. remained unquestion-
ably the leading economic and political superpower of the planet, making it
virtually synonymous with neocolonialism. Economically, the post-war boom
witnessed the climax of Fordist production systems and the culmination of
late modern capitalism. The post-war global division of labor was character-
ized by the steady dispersal of routine production facilities such as assembly
and processing operations to parts of the developing world (Hymer 1979;
Cohen 1981). Several factors fueled this round of time-space compression,
including the economic dynamism of the U.S. (which produced up to half of
the world's industrial output), the stable exchange rates o
ered by the Bretton-
Woods Agreement, and the steady, worldwide reduction in tari
ff
ff
s made pos-
sible by multiple rounds of the General Agreement on Tari
s and Trade
(GATT). The result was that throughout the late twentieth century, world
trade grew more quickly than did world output, indicating a steady deepening
of the economic interrelations among nation-states (Figure 4.9).
The cold war, which de
ff
ned the geopolitics of the post-war boom, pre-
vented the complete integration of the globe under the umbrella of commod-
ity production and consumption; the existence of the Soviet bloc sealed of
fi
ff
large chunks of the Earth's surface from Western capital, indicating that
American hegemony was always contested. Ostensibly socialist states in the
Figure 4.9
Relative global trade and output levels, 1950-2005.
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