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Geopolitical Seduction
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Philip E. Steinberg
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Department of Geography, Florida State University. USA

To cite this Article: Philip E. Steinberg , 'Geopolitical Seduction', Geopolitics, 11:3,

529 - 534
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 Geopolitics, 11:529–534, 2006
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
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DOI: 10.1080/14650040600767974

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Geopolitics, Vol. 11, No. 3, June 2006: pp. 1–11
1557-3028
1465-0045
FGEO
Geopolitics

Geopolitical Seduction

PHILIP E. STEINBERG
Geopolitical
Philip E. Steinberg
Seduction

Department of Geography, Florida State University, USA

John Agnew (2005), Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 284 pp. Pbk: ISBN 1592131530, $21.95; Cloth: ISBN
1592131522, $64.50.
Victoria de Grazia (2005), Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through
20th-Century Europe, Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 608 pp.
Pbk: ISBN 0674022343, $19.95; Cloth: ISBN 0674016726, $29.95.

“In the beginning,” John Locke famously declared in his Second Treatise on
Government, “all the world was America.” “And so shall it be in the end,”
might add John Agnew and Victoria de Grazia.
The “America” of Agnew and de Grazia, however, bears little resemblance
to that depicted by Locke. Locke’s America was a land without commodities,
possessions, or security. Agnew and de Grazia’s America, by contrast, is one
where individuals live in a cycle of perpetual accumulation and consumption of
consumer goods, where individuals are adept at calculating value and adding it
to their material environment, and where a stable society of mass production
and mass consumption is viewed as attainable by all.
For both Agnew and de Grazia, as for Locke, America is much bigger
than the United States; it is a concept. Nonetheless, the United States has a
special role, both as the nation that thrust this model of the democratic con-
sumer society on the world and as the nation that continues to serve as the
paradigmatic example for those who aspire to turn their own land into a
consumer society. As Agnew puts it, “A consumption-based economic
model [that] first developed on a large scale in the United States [has been]
the dynamo at the heart of American [global] hegemony” (p. 220).

Address correspondence to Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State

University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. E-mail: psteinbe@coss.fsu.edu

529
 530 Philip E. Steinberg
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Agreeing on the basic contours of what America is (as an image of con-

sumer abundance, as a set of social institutions and relations that support
the consumer society, and as a metaphor for the individualist ethics and
democratic ideals that underlie these social institutions and relations), the
two authors diverge somewhat, following their respective disciplinary paths
to analyse the “America” that has become the world. De Grazia, a historian,
examines the processes by which the world (or, to be more precise,
Europe) became Americanised, while Agnew, a political geographer, uses
his understanding of American hegemony to interpret contemporary politi-
cal-economic trends as well as to explore implications for political geo-
graphic theory and for future global geopolitical configurations.
In Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia combines the best of business
history, economic history, and cultural history to demonstrate how America
reshaped Europe in its image (and accrued substantial profits in the pro-
cess). Prior to the First World War, Europe’s business culture had centred on
tight networks of manufacturers who produced high quality goods for rela-
tively small markets, while the masses purchased precious little in the cash
economy and mass retail merchants were scorned by the business elite.
Between 1920 and 1970, however, European consumers, manufacturers,
and distributors were presented with an alternate economic and business
model. In this American economic and business model, merchants took the
lead in the business community, selling to relatively well paid members of
the working class who, led by “Mrs. Consumer,” purchased mass-produced,
mass-marketed goods to sustain high-consumption households.
De Grazia’s history is filled with prominent (or sometimes just rich and
arrogant) Americans who consciously undertook the reshaping of European
consumption cultures so that Europe could serve as a profitable site for US
investments and as a profitable market for US products. She develops her
argument through nine case studies, ranging from a history of the Rotary
Club (the quintessential American local businesspersons’ organisation,
which quickly diffused throughout Europe as a harbinger and catalyst of a
changing business culture); to the spread across Europe of American-style
advertising agencies, marketing campaigns, chain stores, and supermarkets;
to the construction of the European (and especially female) consumer-
citizen. The narrative is also filled with tales of European resistance, by the
Soviets (who receive relatively little attention), by the Nazi party (whose
economic system, according to de Grazia, posed the greatest threat to the
economic and business model promoted by the Americans), by small shop-
keepers (who were particularly virulent in their opposition to supermar-
kets), and by labour unions and communist parties (most of whom failed to
perceive that any alternative to an American-style economy would still have
to revolve around workers’ desire for high-consumption lifestyles). In the
end, though, resistance for the most part was futile, and Europe is now sat-
urated with American business culture and American personal consumption
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patterns, as well as the investments of American firms. Although she uses a

brief discussion of the Slow Food movement in the concluding chapter to
discuss a very different business/consumption model that could be rising
from the embers of the Europe that had existed prior to its Americanisation,
for the most part this is a book about the past, not the present or the future.
Along the way, the reader learns all sorts of wonderful facts: Thomas
Mann was an active Rotarian; the Bishop of San Miguel, El Salvador con-
demned the Rotary Club as “‘a suspicious, seditious, and secret association’
akin to freemasonry, Communism, and the egregiously heretical sect Theos-
ophism, known for combing oriental mysticism, Protestant fundamentalism,
and an eccentric feminism” (p. 63); the first successful supermarket chain in
Italy was established with the support of Nelson Rockefeller and others who
were committed to endowing Europe with a consumer society constructed
in the US’s image; in 1920 every town in the United States with over 8,000
people had a Woolworth store. That last figure raises interesting questions
about the relationship between early twentieth-century American consumer-
oriented capitalism and consumer capitalism in early twenty-first-century
America, as de Grazia’s description of Woolworth’s market penetration, for
instance, resonates with how one would describe today’s Wal-Mart. De
Grazia, however, does not make this connection. Indeed, de Grazia misses a
number of opportunities to make connections with the literature on contem-
porary economies and business practices. Not only does she not engage work
on today’s consumer-oriented American business culture (e.g., Wal-Mart), she
also fails to consider much of the work on contemporary business models
that persist outside this mainstream (e.g., the manufacturers of the “Third
Italy” who engage in scaled-up craft production). Although De Grazia could
legitimately respond that these extensions of her work would make her
book unwieldy, they would add greater depth to her arguments as well as
increase their relevance to debates in the social sciences about today’s
global consumer economy, its connections with previous consumer econo-
mies, and the possibility for alternative economic formations.
Given that this is a work of history, de Grazia’s decision not to make these
links with various literatures on contemporary economies is understandable. A
much more striking gap, though, is the lack of attention that she gives to the
role of military, political, and economic “hard” power in constructing this “irre-
sistible empire.” Consider, for instance, the book’s cover photo, which repro-
duces a 1959 advertisement in which a smartly dressed young woman waves
her hat and smiles as she straddles the engine of a Pan Am jetliner that’s parked
on the ground. Dressed like a middle-class woman who is about to head off on
a shopping spree (right down to her bright red toe-nails), the photo combines
the idea of “Mrs. Consumer” with that of global reach, and thus is the perfect
cover illustration for this book. However, although de Grazia does not discuss
the cover photo, the image is also reminiscent of the final scene in Doctor
Strangelove, in which Sterling Hayden waves his cowboy hat as he straddles the
 532 Philip E. Steinberg
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missile that will trigger the end of the world. This is the other story of how the
US “conquered” Europe, which is largely absent from Irresistible Empire. Did
the US offer up to Europe an “irresistible empire,” or did it make Europe an
“offer it couldn’t refuse?” While the US military makes an occasional appearance
in de Grazia’s book, she focuses almost exclusively on the seductive side of
empire building (exemplified perhaps by the muted erotics of the Pan Am
model) so that the more virulent, masculine side of empire building (exempli-
fied by Hayden’s missile straddling in Doctor Strangelove) risks being forgotten.
This diversion of attention from the exercise of “hard” power is exacerbated
(and, perhaps, facilitated) by the lack of attention that she pays to American
“conquests” outside of Europe. In countries that are even further from achieving
the US-modeled consumer culture, the seductive side of the “irresistible empire”
would be less likely to function effectively, and one would expect that in these
instances the US would be more likely to forsake seduction in favour of brute
force. Indeed, the record of US military adventures and economic strong-arming
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America suggests that this has been the case. It is ques-
tionable whether the US would have been able to develop the high standard of
living and large stashes of capital that made its seduction of Europe possible
had it not simultaneously been exercising a more coercive form of power else-
where in the world, but this story is obscured by de Grazia as the reader, like
the European consumer, is seduced by images of a benign and bountiful Amer-
ican consumer culture.
In John Agnew’s Hegemony, there are no photographs of women (or
men) straddling flying objects. In fact, there are no photographs at all
(although there are a few graphs, tables, and maps). Unlike Irresistible
Empire, this is a social science book with a definite argument. Reacting to a
spate of recent books that have labeled the US an imperialist power, Agnew
contends that while the US is clearly the global hegemonic power it is not
an imperial power. The term “empire,” for Agnew, implies the formal con-
trol of extranational territories, and this has never been a major component
in US hegemony. Agnew is no happier with the term “informal empire,”
because this still implies that power is maintained, and projected, through
the ordering of space and through the ordering of relations among sover-
eign, territorial states. Nor does Agnew endorse the term “empire” as used
by Hardt and Negri in their book of the same title. Although Hardt and
Negri’s “empire” is deterritorialised, it also lacks a hegemonic center, and for
Agnew no understanding of power in the world today can ignore the fact
that the US is hegemonic. According to Agnew, the US is the latest in a suc-
cession of hegemons but, like each preceding hegemon, it has organised its
power in a unique way. Specifically, the US has used its various forms of
power (from military might to the seductive powers described by de Grazia)
not to construct an empire based on enclosing and dominating spaces but
rather to construct a “global market-access regime.” Thus, for Agnew, the
end project of US hegemony is not empire; it is globalisation.
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Having defined core terms such as “hegemony,” “empire,” and “global-

ization,” Agnew deepens the theoretical basis of his argument by discussing
the differences between territorial and non-territorial organisations of
power. To understand American hegemony, he argues, one must reject
models wherein static territorial states dominate and trade with each other.
Instead, one should envision a more geographically networked world in
which, while power initially flows out from the American centre that ini-
tiates the system, it is reproduced through the interactions of the network,
not through the (formal or informal) control of territories.
Following this theoretical discussion, Agnew searches for the aspects of
the US that led it to pursue a uniquely non-territorial hegemonic project. He
finds his answer not in the structural mechanics of the American political sys-
tem (as do Hardt and Negri) but in the domestic consumer-oriented business
culture that emerged out of the US’s political-economic circumstances. Agnew
backs up this finding by asserting, like de Grazia, that the US’s globalisation
project has centered on the projection of this consumer culture on the world.
From this point, having established the roots and goals of the American
globalisation project, Agnew spends the second half of the book detailing
how this globalised international political economy functions. He uses his
perspective to explain recent phenomena including the decline of industry
in the US, the anomaly of continued unilateral uses of US military power,
and the rise of competitor nations challenge US hegemony even as they
reproduce many of its contours.
While I generally concur with Agnew’s analysis (as, I imagine, de Grazia
would as well), he may be overstating his case at points. For instance,
Agnew argues that in order to understand how American hegemony oper-
ates we need to think outside a state-territorial framework and, more gener-
ally, we need to appreciate how the universalism of US hegemony erodes
distinctions between “insides” and “outsides.” And yet de Grazia, in her dis-
cussion of American marketing strategies, demonstrates that the construc-
tion of “insides” and “outsides” was key to the expansion of American
commercial hegemony. In a brilliant discussion contrasting American sales-
manship brochures with the Leipzig Fair, she shows that, in this instance at
least, it was the new order brought to Europe by the Americans that was
territorial. The Leipzig Fair, as described by de Grazia, resembled Agnew’s
hegemonic America: although there was a definite centre, actors from
around the world came to the centre, engaged in commerce, and then left,
reproducing a bit of that centre in their homeland when they returned home
(and hence reproducing the ideological power of the ideas and institutions
that were generated in the center). No boundary lines were drawn and no
territories were demarcated. American global marketing strategy, by
contrast, has emphasised the designation of “sales territories” and the satu-
ration (or, one could even say, colonisation) of those territories with adver-
tisements for a particular brand. In this instance, at least, the American
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innovation was to territorialise a previously non-territorial field of global

interaction, and not the reverse.
Agnew may also overstate his case when he points to the unique qual-
ities of the American hegemonic enterprise. Although the book does not
contain a sustained comparison with the practices of prior, more classically
imperial, hegemons, Agnew does briefly contrast the US with nineteenth-
century Britain, which, he writes, depended to a much greater extent than
the US does on coercion and formal territorial control. While this no doubt
is correct, much recent work in postcolonial and subaltern studies argues
that, under the British as well, hegemony did not just involve the territorial-
isation and domination of imperial “others” but that seduction played an
important role as well. Colonial subjects were simultaneously attracted to
and repelled from the metropole (both geographically and emotionally) and
this led them to reproduce British domination even as they resisted it. Thus,
while I do not disagree with Agnew that there are elements of US hege-
mony that are qualitatively different from previous hegemonies, a sustained
comparison with other hegemonies would be needed to adequately make
this point. If one were to make this comparison, it is possible that as many
similarities as differences would emerge, but Agnew never allows for this
comparison to be made. Just as an expansion into the contemporary realm
could flesh out some of de Grazia’s most fascinating historical insights, a bit
more history in Agnew’s book could go a long way toward supporting (or,
perhaps, complicating) his argument about the current state of affairs.
In the end, the two authors make similar assessments of the future,
both noting that the consumer-oriented, seductive, deterritorialised hege-
mony engineered by the United States contains its own contradictions. As
the US is increasingly successful in remaking the world in its own image, it
loses its distinctive place at the centre of the world political-economic order.
As de Grazia notes, Europe now has its own multinational, mass consumer-
oriented retailing chains, some of which, such as Aldi, have a substantial
presence in the US. And, as Agnew notes, military efforts by the US to main-
tain its place at the “center” of the world are likely to interfere with the
larger hegemonic project of maintaining “universal market access.” As the
US attempts to cope with this contradictory situation, fissures have emerged
which are allowing other states to assume increasingly central roles in the
US-generated (and, for now, still US-dominated) global economic system.
The irony recognised by both authors is that if indeed all the world
becomes America, then America will cease to be the centre of the world.