What was pactomania

Someone had painted it Columbia blue so it was easy on the eyes, and the bottom area of the shelf was deep enough for a young kid like me to actually sit on a stack of magazines and lean against the side of the rack perusing issues of Archie comics, Disney Digest, and later on a few issues of Tiger Beat, Seventeen, Glamour and the more racy Cosmopolitan. Prior to wading into the sea of magazines and comics at the front of the store, I always performed a quick walk thru the produce department.

My goal was a Chiquita banana sticker. Once I located a sticker I promptly removed it and placed it on my forehead or cheek where it would stay for an undetermined length of time. Students are at lunch and I have a few scant minutes to look over my afternoon lesson plans, slurp down a cup of soup and visit the restroom for the first time since six a.

As I rushed out to pick up my class I grabbed a simple envelope I had crammed with homemade stickers the night before. Yes, you guessed it…. Chiquita banana stickers. I had found the design online and using a Xyron sticker machine I had created a Chiquita label for each and every student, and of course, one for me. As the kids put their tray up and got in line I stopped and visited with each one as was my normal custom…..

Once we were all back in the classroom I took my place at the front of the room and began to relate my childhood affection for Chiquita banana stickers and told students ElementaryHistoryTeacher never does anything without a purpose and there was a purpose behind the stickers. Chiquita Brands, the company that brings us Chiquita bananas began in as United Fruit Company, an American company, that not only traded in bananas but pineapples, too. Through the s, United Fruit became very powerful in third world countries…..

In most areas United Fruit contained such a tight hold on the banana market it had the ear of local and national governments. From this the term Banana Republic was born…. Henry William Sydney Porter , first referred to Latin American countries as Banana Republics in his collection of stories titled Cabbages and Kings, …… Yes, in case you are wondering that is the same O.

Henry we remember as the master of the ironic twist from literature class. Henry had fled to Honduras for one year in regarding a pesky charge of embezzlement by United States Federal authorities. You could not be signed in. Sign In Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering for this journal. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. View Metrics. Email alerts Article activity alert.

Advance article alerts. New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Unlike those archenemies France and Germany, Britain could thus maximize alliance options in the next round. And so, Britain could always mastermind those superior coalitions that brought down the hegemonist du jour.

This new player was now the mightiest actor on the European stage-akin to the present-day United States globally. Grenville in his book Europe Reshaped, , and he quotes Disraeli to make the point: "You have a new world. The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.

Isolation a la Britain was impossible, encircled as Germany was by four great powers, one of which, France, harbored a permanent desire for revanche. Bismarck's enduring problem was Frederick's cauchemar des coalitions on a grander scale. Germany could hold off any challenger, but it could not dominate all of them at once. The solution was limned in the famous Kissinger Diktat, formulated by Bismarck at his summer retreat, Bad Kissingen, in June the creation of a "universal political situation in which all the powers except France need us and, by dint of their mutual relations, are kept as much as is possible from forming coalitions against us.

Germany had to manage Europe's fragile equilibrium from the center. Berlin had to neutralize the forces that drove Russia and Austria toward collision in the Balkans, that threatened to embroil Britain and Russia in the arc of crisis running from Turkey to Afghanistan, and that might tempt each of the three to look for French help.

How to play the "dead weight"? For a few years, Bismarck tried going it alone a l'anglaise. But when he realized that Germany lacked both gravity and invulnerability, Bismarck contracted a lasting case of pactomania. The centerpiece was the Dual Alliance with Austria against Russia. Two years later, that axis was embedded in a revived Three Emperors' League with Russia, where each ruler pledged benevolent neutrality to the others in a war with a fourth power, that is, France. That is the true protection against coalitions.

Finally, after the Three Emperors' League had collapsed under the weight of Austro-Russian rivalries, Bismarck struck a secret deal with the czar: the legendary Reinsurance Treaty of Each pledged benevolent neutrality in case the other was attacked by its principal foe-Germany by France, Russia by Austria.

What was the purpose of these contradictory commitments? Bismarck did not construct his system to aggregate power, but to devalue it-balancing and stalemating like the British, but in totally un-British ways. He dreaded the marriage of Germany's flanking powers.

And so this intricate web would preserve Germany's position by making hostile coalitions-indeed, war itself-impossible. If all but France were bound to Berlin, if none could move without being tripped by that net, each would stay in place-and with it the European status quo profoundly destabilized by the enormous but not supreme power of the Second Reich. America is a bit like Britain and a lot like Bismarck's Germany, but with far more clout than either, and on a global scale.

To Britain's insularity and superior navy, the United States has added an unmatched air force and the greatest deterrent of all: nuclear weapons. Though virtually neutralized as an offensive weapon, this revolutionary technology has unhinged one mechanism of the balance of power.

Nuclear weapons cannot be aggregated like the armies of yore. Even if Russia, China, et al. In the conventional arena, numbers mattered. On the nuclear chessboard, it is the speed, reach, and invulnerability of weapons and C-3 command, control, and communications systems. In the nuclear age, ganging up does not threaten America's core security. Indeed, because they can deter all comers, nuclear weapons are an isolationist's dream. Britain was not really part of the European greatpower system; by regularly shifting to overseas expansion, Britain rarely offered a target for countervailing alliances.

But contemporary America is more like Bismarck's Germany writ large. Its interests and its presence span the globe; the United States is always in harm's way. Nor can the United States rely on the other great powers to stalemate each other. How would the EU balance China? Like Britain, the United States minimizes itself as a target by staying offshore as an over-the-horizon presence in the western Pacific and Mediterranean.

Where the United States does commit ground forces, as in Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe, their presence is accepted as legitimate. But the global game is essentially a Bismarckian one, and that explains why the rest of the world is not moving in on the United States.

Recall the Kissinger Diktat. The task was to work out a "universal political situation in which all the powers except France need us and. For all their antagonism toward the United States, their association with the hub is more important to them than are their ties to one another. Yet today the United States has better relations with Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea and of course Taiwan than these states have with one another.

Lesser states like Thailand or even Vietnam would rather huddle under the American umbrella than be exposed to the larger Pacific powers. Despite their newly minted "strategic partnership," China and Russia look to the United States as an implicit ally against each other. All Asia counts on the U.

And though each has played its own game with North Korea, China and Russia have been quite content to let the United States carry the burden of constraining Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.

In the Middle East, the world's most labile region, the United States inserted its spoke 4o years ago by ending the imperial careers of Britain and France during the Suez War. Now everybody but Iraq and Iran looks to Washington to help sort out their ancient quarrels, with the United States dispensing side payments in the form of economic and military aid to its various clients and tacit guarantees of everybody's security against everybody else.

When local culprits like Iraq needed chastening, the United States organized the international posse. Bismarck could not even have dreamed of such a successful hub-and-spoke operation in nineteenth-century Europe. Western Europe has been linked to the Washington hub since if also for reasons that have lost some persuasiveness since the end of the Cold War.

At least since de Gaulle, France has pursued a halfhearted balancing strategy against the United States, trying to organize a competitive orbit. Nonetheless, the game does not work. Britain, Germany, Italy, even France need the United States as a security lender of last resort-as balancer against a resurgent Russia as well as against each other. It is nice to have an extracontinental player in the game that is bigger than each and all but also more of an elephant than a Tyrannosaurus.

Also, Europe is a long way from e pluribus unum and thus not very good at producing public goods like security. After three years of European humiliation at the hands of the Serbs, it was American cruise missiles that sobered up Messrs.

Karadzic and Milosevic. In the meantime, Washington has also managed to recruit Yeltsin's Russia into its orbit. It was George Bush who eased Moscow's fall from empire while running interference for Helmut Kohl as he fumbled his way to reunification. Just before the Madrid summit, France executed a classic anti-American gambit, trying to mobilize European pressure for the admission of Slovenia and Romania.

It did not work because no European nation was really willing to confront the United States. For all of Europe's widening web of economic and monetary integration, the spokes of grand strategy continue to converge in Washington.

But there is more-a new game Bismarck would not have understood that favors the United States as the last remaining superpower. The classical balance-of-power game will never disappear as long as there are sovereign entities living in a state of nature.

But the classical game is receding; Saddam Hussein and Radovan Karadzic no longer define the essence, or the bulk, of world politics. And that has to do with the devaluation of military power and the changing stakes of international relations. Setting aside war for strategic resources like oil and water in the Middle East, or population wars, as in Africa, what is the point of conquering land and people?

Land in the developed world no longer spells riches, but more agricultural surpluses and hence higher support payments. Machiavelli thought it easier to acquire riches with good armies than vice versa, "for gold alone will not produce good soldiers, but good soldiers will always produce gold. Population as such has also been devalued in the post-agrarian, post-infantry age.

What counts is highly trained and highly motivated people. But machine guns do not motivate. Worse, knowledge workers are almost as mobile as money. In short, conquest isn't what it used to be. An important incentive for war and alliances has disappeared. Let's make no mistake about it. Hard power-men and missiles, guns and ships-still counts.