While the world depicted in Forging Global Fordism seems at first blush far removed from our own, the book makes a convincing case that in all its various guises, it was Fordism—perhaps more than any other system of social organization—that shaped our present, and now deeply uncertain, world order. Reflecting on the postwar recovery in Western Europe, Link addresses a deeply unsettling legacy of National Socialist industrial policy: Volkswagen and other German automakers had been primed for mass production through the various forms of support and compulsion Hitler’s regime administered. Their energies no longer siphoned into a war economy, Fordist consumption in the American sense could finally take off in a democratic West Germany allied with the United States. Rather than consider the industrial strategies of the Nazi state in isolation—and therefore as merely reflecting the choices of a mercurial and fanatical chain of command—Link perceptively suggests that “historians might look to the many other authoritarian, activist, and development-oriented states of the twentieth century” for substantive comparison.
It is worth recalling that the rise of different activist states in the 1930s all had a common focus on public works and infrastructure. This structural feature fed back into the international race to grow economies of scale that centered on the innovations, supply chains, and value-added inputs of national auto industries. Once we step back from Link’s close reading of the factors that established Fordism in the central antagonists of World War II, we can more fully observe the developmental state in all its various incarnations, from liberal democratic to totalitarian. Its successes have depended not just on the implementation of Fordism, but on the particular ways the state oversees the Fordist relationship between industry and labor.
That contingency helps put the ascent and subsequent post-industrial underdevelopment of the United States in historical, comparative perspective. Among the activist states of the twentieth century the most successful was Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it benefited significantly from the fact that Fordism had already matured in the United States. Because America maintained its edge in technology and industrial capacity, the shift to a war economy enabled it to outgun Nazi Germany while sparing Americans the levels of sacrifice that the Nazi, Soviet, and other war economies inflicted on their populations. Fordist manufacturing, in turn, became inextricable from conceits about the American Century; for decades it defined U.S. growth and the postwar idea that growth would ensure shared prosperity. Although Ford himself was virulently anti-union, a more assertive regulatory state that supported union rights molded, rather than blotted out, his producer populism.