Culture and International History 9781782387978

Citation preview

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page i

Culture and International History

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page ii

Explorations in Culture and International History Series General Editors: Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher

Culture and International History Edited by Jessica C E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page iii

CULTURE AND INTERNATIONAL HISTORY

Edited by Jessica C E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com First paperback edition printed in 2004 ©2003, 2004 Jessica C E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culture and international history / Ed. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht & Frank Schumacher. p. cm. -- (Explorations in culture and international history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57181-382-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-57181-383-1 (paperback) 1. International relations and culture. 2. History--Philosophy. 3. Cross-cultural studies. 4. Cultural relations. 5. Social evolution. I. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E., 1964- II. Schumacher, Frank, 1965- III. Series. JZ1251 .C84 2002 303.48'200dc21

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

2002027709

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page v

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

viii

Editors’ Preface

ix

List of Contributors

x

Part I: Methodology Introduction

On the Diversity of Knowledge and the Community of Thought: Culture and International History Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

3

Chapter 1

The Power of Culture in International Relations Beate Jahn

27

Part II: Culture and the State Chapter 2

The Great Derby Race: Strategies of Cultural Representation at Nineteenth-Century World Exhibitions Wolfram Kaiser

45

Chapter 3

Manliness and “Realism”: The Use of Gendered Tropes in the Debates on the Philippine-American and Vietnam Wars Fabian Hilfrich

60

Chapter 4

A Family Affair? Gender, the U.S. Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945-1960 Laura A. Belmonte

79

00-Prelims

11/5/03

vi

8:01 PM

Page vi

Contents

Part III: Cultural Transmission, Nongovernmental Organizations and Private Individuals Chapter 5

France and Germany after the Great War: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Artists in Non-Governmental European Networks Guido Müller

97

Chapter 6

Small Atlantic World: U.S. Philanthropy and the Expanding International Exchange of Scholars after 1945 Oliver Schmidt

115

Chapter 7

Atlantic Alliances: Cross-Cultural Communication and the 1960s Student Revolution Philipp Gassert

135

Chapter 8

Forecasting the Future: Future Studies as International Networks of Social Analysis in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and the United States Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

157

Part IV: Comments and Criticism or Where Do We Go From Here? Chapter 9

Cultural Approaches to International Relations – A Challenge? Volker Depkat

175

Chapter 10

States, International Systems, and Intercultural Transfer: A Commentary Eckart Conze

198

Chapter 11

“Total Culture” and the State-Private Network: A Commentary Scott Lucas

206

Chapter 12

Gender, Tropes, and Images: A Commentary Marc Frey

215

Chapter 13

Internationalizing Ideologies: A Commentary Seth Fein

221

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page vii

Contents

vii

Part V: Annotated Sources Chapter 14

The Invention of State and Diplomacy: The First Political Testament of Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg (1698) Volker Depkat

233

Chapter 15

The Rat Race for Progress: A Punch Cartoon of the Opening of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition Wolfram Kaiser

243

Chapter 16

Race and Imperialism: An Essay from the Chicago Broad Ax Fabian Hilfrich

250

Chapter 17

A Document from the Harvard International Summer School Scott Lucas

258

Chapter 18

Max Lerner’s “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy” Thomas Reuther

264

Chapter 19

Excerpt from Johan Galtung’s “On the Future of the International System” Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

273

Chapter 20

The “Children and War” Virtual Forum: Voices of Youth and International Relations Marie Thorsten

282

Index

289

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Bill Danch cartoon, Independent Woman, Women’s Packet, June 1954, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 18, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland

89

The Great Derby Race, Punch, 1851

245

UNICEF Voice of Youth Homepage, (16 September 2002)

283

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page ix

EDITORS’ PREFACE

This book collects examples from the research of a new, post-1968 generation of historians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who have begun to redefine the field of international history with a particular eye on culture as a variable and a methodology. The idea for this project grew out of a conference on “Culture and International Relations” at the Center for U.S. Studies (Stiftung Leucorea, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) in December 1999. This volume represents the first of a series dedicated to explorations in culture and international history, which seeks to present individual examples emerging from a new and dynamic field of scholarship. The editors are grateful to all authors for submitting and revising their essays in time; to the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft for a generous conference grant; and to the Stiftung Leucorea for welcoming us in its historical halls dating back to the sixteenth century and for sponsoring the production of this book. Many thanks to Marion and Vivian Berghahn, and Berghahn Books for their candid criticism, unfailing encouragement, continuous interest in transatlantic relations, and for being such good sports. A hearty thank you to our copyeditor, Sue Sakai whose attention to detail impressed all of us, and to Heiko Hecht who helped us to format the original manuscript. Finally, herzlichen Dank to Gudrun Calow for her administrative assistance in the early stages of this project. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher October 2002

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page x

CONTRIBUTORS

L AURA A. BELMONTE is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University. Her research explores the intersections between national security policy and culture. She is currently revising her manuscript entitled Defending the American Way: National Identity, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1960. ECKART CONZE is professor of history at the University of Marburg; he has taught history at the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Tübingen, and Toronto. Conze has published numerous articles on the history of international relations, contemporary German history, and the history of German and European aristocracies, including Die gaullistische Herausforderung: Deutsch-französische Beziehungen in der amerikanischen Europapolitik (1995) and Von deutschem Adel: Die Grafen von Bernstorff im 20. Jahrhundert (2000). VOLKER DEPKAT teaches modern German and American history at the Ernst. Moritz Arndt-Universität in Greifswald, Germany. He is the author of Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen: Deutsche Zeitschriften von 1987 bis 1830 (1998). Depkat’s fields of interest are the social and cultural history of Germany and America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is also interested in the theory of history. SETH FEIN is assistant professor of the history of U.S.-world relations at Yale University. Among his recent works are essays in the books Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940-2000 (2001); Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video (2000); and Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Duke, 1998). Fein is completing a book about transnationalism and film in U.S.-Mexican relations, c.1930-c.1960. MARC FREY is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Cologne, Germany. He has published extensively on the international history of The Netherlands in the twentieth century as well as on the Vietnam War, including Der

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page xi

Contributors

xi

Erste Weltkrieg und die Niederlande (1998) and Geschichte des Vietnamkriegs (6th ed. 2002) PHILIPP G ASSERT received his Ph.D. in 1996. He is currently assistant professor of history at the University of Heidelberg. His publications include Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (1997) as well as edited books and articles on twentieth-century transnational and international relations. JESSICA C.E. GIENOW-HECHT is research fellow at the Center for North American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. She is interested in international relations, the history of psychology, and cultural history, and she has published articles in the Journal of Social History and Diplomatic History, among others. Gienow-Hecht’s study, entitled Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (1999) was co-awarded the Stuart Bernath Prize for the best first book in diplomatic history and the Myrna Bernath Prize for the best book in diplomatic history written by a woman. She is currently completing a study on transatlantic emotions since 1850, with a particular eye on the role of classical music in international relations. FABIAN HILFRICH is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History, “Auswärtiges Amt”-branch office, in Berlin. In 1999-2000, he was Bosch-Lecturer at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga. In 2000 he received his Ph.D. in Modern and American History at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include “Creating and Instrumentalizing Nationalism: The Celebration of National Reunion in the Peace Jubilees of 1898” (in Genevieve Fabre, Jürgen Heideking and Kai Dreisbach, eds., and “Patriotismus zwischen Macht und Moral: Die Beschwörung des Nationalstolzes in der Auseinandersetzung über den Vietnamkrieg 1964-1968 (in Manfred Berg et al., eds., (1999). BEATE JAHN is lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex. Previously she taught at the University of Frankfurt and the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Politik und Moral (1993) and The Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000). WOLFRAM KAISER is professor of European studies, University of Portsmouth, and visiting professor, College of Europe at Bruges, Belgium. He is the author of Using Europe, Abusing the Europeans: Britain and European Integration 1945-63 (1999). Currently, Kaiser is engaged in a history of the political culture of internationalisation (world exhibitions). SCOTT LUCAS is head of American and Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of numerous books and articles on post-1945 U.S.

00-Prelims

xii

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page xii

Contributors

and British foreign policy, covert action, culture, the media, and ideology, including Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956. He is currently working on the project “Pax Americana: U.S. Foreign Policy and Its Consequences since 1945.” GUIDO MÜLLER is lecturer on European history at the University of Stuttgart and is also affiliated with the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. He received his Ph.D. from the Rheinisch Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, in 1991, and concluded his Habilitation in 1998. In 1998/1999, Müller was Visiting Professor (Vertretungsprofessor) for modern and contemporary Western European history at the University of Tübingen. He is a founding member of the German commitee of Historians in International Relations and the author of Weltpolitische Bildung und akademische Reform: Carl Heinrich Beckers Wissenschafts- und Hochschulpolitik, 1908-1930 (1991). Müller is currently working on the biography of the first German Federal president, Theodor Heuss. His special research areas are the history of Franco-German relations, the history of intellectual and cultural transfer, and the history of opera. THOMAS REUTHER is assistant to the Rector of the University of Dortmund. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg. His dissertation was published as Die ambivalente Normalisierung. Deutschlanddiskurs und Deutschlandbilder in den USA, 1941-1955, Transatlantische Historische Studien 11 (2000). He is also coauthor of Americana in German Collections, a reference guide of the German Historical Institute, and author of several articles on U.S. diplomatic history. OLIVER SCHMIDT is Senior Associate in the Office of the Chairman at Bertelsmann where he is responsible for political and social affairs. Before, as director at the Bertelsmann Foundation, he headed a research and project team on new media, civil society and governance. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 2000, submitting a dissertation on U.S. cultural diplomacy, German-American exchange programs and the formation of transatlantic networks during the early Cold War. His current interests include the history of philanthropy, processes of globalisation, and the role of NGOs in transnational relations. ALEXANDER SCHMIDT-GERNIG was until 2002 assistant professor at the Department of History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research interests, publications, and seminars focus on the social history of cultural transfers between modern societies, the development of collective identities, and the role of the public sphere in Western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth century. SchmidtGernig is the author of Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich (1997), and he has recently edited a book with Hartmut Kaelble and Martin Kirsch titled Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert (2002).

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page xiii

Contributors

xiii

FRANK SCHUMACHER is assistant professor of North American history at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is the author of Kalter Krieg und Propaganda. Die USA, der Kampf um die Weltmeinung und die ideelle Westbindung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945-1955. He has published articles on 19th and 20th century North American diplomatic, military, cultural and environmental history and is currently working on his second book entitled The American Way of Empire: the United States and the Quest for Imperial Identity, 1880-1920. MARIE THORSTEN teaches in the International Studies department of Macalester College, and has previously taught at the University of Hawaii and Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Her main research area is in U.S.-Japan relations.

00-Prelims

11/5/03

8:01 PM

Page xiv

To our children

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 1

Part I

METHODOLOGY

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 2

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 3

INTRODUCTION On the Division of Knowledge and the Community of Thought: Culture and International History* Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

T

his collection of essays seeks to broaden the study of international history: its individual contributors retrace the merger between international history and cultural studies (both in terms of theory and methodology) within and outside of the United States. In particular, this volume addresses three premises: first, we wish to facilitate the exchange among international scholars who are interested in cultural approaches. Many of the recent U.S. publications extolling conceptually and empirically interesting and cuttingedge reflections have focused on the post-World War II period (notably the Cold War) and on research along the North-South axis rather than schools and thoughts emerging on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.1 Our collection presents sample topics and sources from the early modern period to the present; it also retraces recent research trends and debates within Europe (notably Germany, France, and Great Britain) and between European and American scholars over the future of international history. What makes these debates and the resulting research so interesting is the breadth of perspective. U.S. historians of American foreign relations, Thomas Paterson tells us, “are curious primarily about the impact at home and abroad of American foreign policies.… They attempt to explain what, if anything, is peculiarly American about U.S. behavior in the international system.”2 As a result, U.S. historians of foreign relations tend to perceive the world in the same fashion as the very actors they study: a world of “us” versus “them,” with the United States as the centerpiece of the international cosmos. Most authors in this book, in contrast, show us how to decenter diplomatic history while at the same time integrating the cultural approach into the study of foreign relations. Second, this book introduces readers to a new generation and its unique conception emerging in the field of culture and international history. When historians of Notes for this section begin on page 15.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

4

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 4

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

foreign relations began to investigate the issue of culture and diplomacy during the Cold War, they originally focused their research on culture as an underlying force of diplomacy, an instrument of state policy (“cultural diplomacy”), as well as perceptions and misperceptions. Notably during the last decade of the Cold War, culture increasingly developed into an all-inclusive category replacing the term and the meaning of ideology. “Culture” seemed to offer historians as well as scholars in neighboring fields such as anthropology and cultural studies a path out of the deadend Marxist analysis of economic domination. For example, in the Yale Review of 1992, philosopher Richard Rorty called upon his fellow “Western leftists” to dismiss “radical criticism of existing institutions” and be “reformist rather than radical.” He urged his colleagues to find an “idea” that would “irradiate the imagination of the intellectual left.”3 Since the 1990s, a new generation of younger scholars on both sides of the Atlantic has assumed a much more pragmatic and less ideologically driven approach to the study of culture and international history. Many of these younger scholars were originally trained in neighboring fields such as social history, cultural studies, and anthropology; more than a few spent part of their formative years outside of the country where they were born. They have expanded the meaning of culture to include social affinities, comparative analysis, cultural conceptions, psychological influences, local traditions, and unspoken assumptions. This volume seeks to introduce some of the leaders of this generation emerging in Europe and the United States. Third, the authors represented in this book wish to strengthen the links between “culture and international history” for classroom teaching on the graduate and undergraduate level. Consequently, this volume is designed for both students and scholars of international history. Serving as a forum for those engaged or interested in this new cross-disciplinary field, this book enables students and scholars/teachers to keep up with methodological innovation and research trends emerging in Europe and the United States. This introduction will survey the preceding methodological debates in the history of foreign relations and explain the theoretical significance of the individual essays. *

*

*

During the World Exhibition in St. Louis in the summer of 1904, hundreds of European, American, and Asian academics from fields as diverse as history, astronomy, and psychology met at the Congress of Arts and Sciences to discuss the relation of the sciences to each other and the unity of human thought. “[E]ach of the 128 sections or addresses was to be on the relation of that particular branch of science to other branches,” one observer noted in his closing report, “but in most cases the speaker, after making a few condescendingly complimentary remarks about other divisions of human knowledge, plunged enthusiastically and deeply into the exposition of his own special contribution to pending problems.”4 The Congress of Arts and Sciences provides an excellent example of the way that even scholars who recognize the conceptual challenge of an increasingly inter-

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 5

Introduction

5

connected world, and who are determined to approach their work in an interdisciplinary and universal fashion, often remain entrenched in national, local, and egocentric patterns of thought. While few of us today remember that one hundred years ago, universalists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel envisioned the twentieth century as an era of unification of the sciences and humanities, we are painfully aware of the failure of their vision: even scholars whose work specifically focuses on the study and history of international relations often limit their exchange of theoretical ideas to precisely those geographical borders that they seek to transcend in their research; and in their discussions of international problems, they communicate predominantly with their national peers. Charles Maier’s much-debated 1980 article “Marking Time,” and the ensuing debates still provoke U.S. diplomatic historians whom Maier accused of self-inflicted marginalization, unimaginative research agendas, and a total lack of communication with other fields and foreign scholars.5 And yet, the environment beyond academia has changed dramatically since the Congress of Arts and Sciences in 1904. Mass tourism, the transportation revolution, satellite television, video-phones, e-mail and the Internet—in short, the revolution of transportation, communication, and information—have given us access to minds and markets far away. We are living today in an increasingly interconnected world, a world in which scholars, politicians and intellectuals fret over the extent and impact of “globalization” (though no one seems to be sure what, exactly, the term implies).6 The current political debates over such issues as world courts, international terrorism, labor migration, pollution, the spread of diseases, and the global impact of popular culture—in short, the relevance of the present has inspired scholars around the globe to look at international history in new ways and to perceive connections in the past that they did not see before. These changes have affected our understanding of international history as well. Originating in the British school after 1918, international history traditionally encompassed the study of the relations between governments. Since then, the field has changed dramatically, both in its breadth and its scope of topics. Today, international history is marked by, first, a profound pluralism; second, a growing awareness that the state is only one out of many principal agencies in the international arena; and, third, the attempt to write supranational history without necessarily taking up the perspective of a particular nation. In the past ten years, scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to private actors and groups who operate within and outside of the governmental bureaucracy. Thus, twenty-first-century international history recognizes that these groups endow and enhance the making of a global political, economic, cultural, and social order, the study of which is at the center of international history. Until the early 1970s, in the United States the field of diplomatic history remained characterized by a division into “realists” such as Hans Morgenthau (who advocated clear-cut studies of the policy-making process at the top level) and “revisionists” such as Walter Lafeber (who stressed domestic influences on the foreign policy-making process).7 But since Maier’s essay, and even before his piece was pub-

00a-Intro-Pt.I

6

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 6

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

lished, scholars interested in foreign relations produced countless essays and presentations proposing or rejecting new methods of analyzing foreign relations. Historians such as Kristin L. Hoganson and Elaine Tyler May have retraced the rhetoric of gender, masculinity and the American family in diplomatic affairs.8 Penny van Eschen, Gerald Horne, and Jon Rosenberg have pointed to the interplay between African American civil rights groups and international relations.9 Michael Hunt and Odd Arne Westad have stressed the crucial role of ideology in the political decision making-process.10 Morrell Heald, Herbert Schiller, and others have investigated the nexus between media corporations, journalists, and U.S. policy,11 while Ralph Levering and Melvin Small have analyzed the influence of domestic public opinion on foreign policy perceptions.12 Bill Walker and Bill McAllister study international cooperation over drug trade and prevention.13 Andrew Rotter has introduced us to the power of religious ideas in Asian and American politics.14 Sound, film and music has been at the heart of a few brand-new investigations.15 And a host of scholars have looked at the role of science, scientific development and academia in the context of the Cold War.16 Likewise, the power of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and private individuals as actors in “international relations” such as tourism17 or environmentalism18 has recently come under investigation.19 Under the influence of cultural studies, scholars of U.S. foreign relations have explored cultural perceptions, global culture systems, and cultural theory.20 The cultural approach, as Akira Iriye explains, “examines international affairs in terms of dreams, aspirations, and other manifestations of human consciousness.” Culture in this context assumes a rather broad definition, encompassing “the sharing and transmitting of consciousness within and across national boundaries … the creation and communication of memory, ideology, emotions, life styles, scholarly and artistic works, and other symbols.” In other words, culture affects nations and global systems as much as, if not more than, power and economic interests.21 A volume of essays titled Close Encounters of Empire, for example, reviews U.S.-Latin American cultural interactions ranging from marriage and food to the visual arts and film.22 The debate over “new directions” in the study of diplomacy is by no means peculiar to the United States. Outside of America, too, scholars are testing innovative methods and theories to renarrate the study of international history. The variety of ways in which scholars are pondering over these issues in different countries and the sheer isolation of each national debate, are noteworthy. The American debate over “new concepts” of foreign relations, reflects the peculiarities of U.S. academia. The “scientification” of political science alienated and segregated diplomatic historians from their colleagues who focused their work on contemporary affairs.23 Moreover, U.S. scholars pick their specialty very early on in their careers and will often stick not only with this field but even more so, with a specific range of topics (e.g., “The Cold War” or “Twentieth-Century Diplomacy”) for the rest of their professional lives. The formal compartmentalization of the field has made it more difficult for U.S. diplomatic historians to venture into neighboring fields and the expansion into cultural studies has taken its toll in the

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 7

Introduction

7

form of countless debates, roundtables, and essays, often inspiring but sometimes also downright hostile.24 The expansion of the field of international history has taken a different direction in Europe than in the United States, partly due to the different structure of the university. Unlike in America, German history departments, for example, offer no specific jobs for diplomatic historians. Universities will narrow a job description at best to something like “modern history,” and occasionally add a desirable specification or region. The lack of compartmentalization allows scholars to switch fields freely.25 While struggling with problems of their own—including interdepartmental hostilities, lack of recognition, and a profound alienation from their peers in other fields— British, French, and German historians all have encountered fewer problems when crisscrossing professional boundaries; provided they wanted to do so. British historians of international history have also felt less compelled to divorce their interests from other fields. Indeed, the study of “international history” originated in the British school after World War I, where it initially denoted exclusively the relations between nations and their governments, notably the question of how to secure international peace. Pioneers like Arnold Toynbee, Charles Webster, A.J.P. Taylor, W.N. Medlicott and James Joll (holders of the chair for international history at the London School of Economics) contributed significantly to the expansion of the field, and the idea to research and teach history without a national perspective. More than anyone else, Joll drew attention to conflict mechanisms outside of the diplomatic spectrum. For example, in The Origins of the First World War, now a standard assignment in upper division history courses, he emphasized those events in the summer of 1914 that originated not only in political but also cultural, social, and economic tensions.26 Already in the 1950s and 1960s, the English school of international relations as exemplified by E.H. Carr developed a number of conceptual approaches for the analysis of the “international society” based on national and cultural factors. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight injected concepts of Christian morality, political theory, and the philosophy of history into the analysis of power and states.27 Although these analyses still centered upon the state, their methodological innovation made it easier for the next generation to turn to altogether new concepts. Thus, Christopher Thorne’s Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941-1945 stressed the cultural differences between sociopolitical systems in those countries that contributed to the decision-making process in the Far East, and the resulting inability of politicians to understand and judge one another.28 Much of the more recent work focuses on European integration, the cultural dimensions of the Cold War, secret services, and the CIA’s impact on cultural programs around the World. For example, Hugh Wilford has assessed the impact of British intellectuals on the Cold War. Toby Thacker has looked at Allied music programs in postwar Germany. Nathan Abrams has singled out Arthur Miller’s role in the postwar era, and Helen Laville has investigated the role of women’s peace organizations between 1945 and 1955.29 A “cultural wave,” which Kathleen Burk recently postulated for the field in Britain, has evidently manifested itself.30

00a-Intro-Pt.I

8

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 8

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

The French school of international history—a field existing in France since the 1870s—has been continually marked by its surrounding academic culture as well as its solid origins in diplomatic history. Most important, diplomatic and international history has never played a major role in French historiography. While the social historians of the Annales school has always viewed international history with suspicion if not antipathy, the so-called Nouvelle Histoire has simply left it by the wayside. Furthermore, the classics have consistently played a prominent role in international history; the French state continues to form its centerpiece; and realism as well as the rejection of any abstract analysis, has marked the history of international relations until the 1970s, if not until today.31 Nonetheless, individual historians repeatedly attempted to expand this “national doctrine”: Pierre Renouvin’s development of a theory of “forces profondes”—that is, long-term dynamics—in diplomatic history after 1945 certainly drew its inspiration from the Annales school. Renouvin is also typically credited with the effort to expand diplomatic history into international history.32 Yet it is likely that no one did more for the development of culture and international relations in French historiography than Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, next to Renouvin the second founder of a French school of international history. Duroselle was the first historian who systematically included in the discipline aspects such as political administration, the centrality of the decision-making process, and the interplay between strategy as well as cultural diplomacy. His journal Relations internationales (founded with Jacques Freymond in 1974) was one of the first publications that explicitly stressed public opinion, immigration and culture and developed a vision of both transand international history.33 Duroselle also had a profound influence on the intensive debate on European integration and cultural transfer that eventually sparked a new interest in the transmission of ideas. Thus, Michel Espagne and Michel Werner looked at French-German relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, while Fernand L’Hullier and Jean-Claude Delbreil analyzed the Franco-German rapport in the interwar period.34 In general, since the 1970s the study of Franco-German official as well as nongovernmental cultural relations has inspired the research agenda of countless European scholars, notably in Germany and France.35 Joachim Scholtyseck’s biographical work on the German industrialist Robert Bosch underscores the informal search for a European economic union in the 1920s, while Dietmar Hüser, looking at collective biographies, cultural assumptions, and domestic pressures, has recently ventured a structural history of French foreign policy in 1945.36 As much as individual French scholars of diplomatic relations have plunged into cultural questions, as much they fear those new trends as a caveat. In a recent article, Georges-Henri Soutou, unquestionably one of the great diplomatic historians in France, warned that area studies as well as the research on European integration threatened to devour or annex international history along with its traditional emphasis on the state, its reluctance to study multilateral relations, and its emphasis on archival research.37 Unless diplomatic historians warmed up to concepts like the

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 9

Introduction

9

European concert or the multilateral order of the Cold War, Soutou seemed to imply, French diplomatic historians ran the risk of being even more marginalized than in other countries. The German case is perhaps the most complex if not confusing one. Based on the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke’s credo of the “primacy of foreign policy,” some German historians, like their colleagues in neighboring countries, traditionally respected the study of foreign relations as the key paradigm to the understanding of political history. They have typically downplayed theory and have insisted on the uniqueness of the diplomatic process as the foremost explanatory variable for the analysis of history. While there is no unchallenged continuity since the nineteenth century, Ranke’s paradigm saw a powerful revival in the 1970s. The proponents of German diplomatic history, such as Klaus Hildebrand, and Andreas Hillgruber, typically focused on the elite decision making level, extracted from sources in the archives of foreign offices throughout the western hemisphere.38 Triggered by the rise of social and structural history in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, the writing of diplomatic history—notably the “primacy of foreign policy”—came under sharp attack, and with it, all of political historiography. Individual diplomatic historians such as Karl-Dietrich Bracher and Hans-Peter Schwarz paid attention to the interplay of foreign and domestic affairs; their central paradigm remained the state’s interest in international relations.39 In contrast, social historians such as Jürgen Kocka and Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that the study of foreign relations needed to be subordinated to the analysis of domestic interest groups and social trends—an argument already raised by Eckart Kehr in the 1930s. The advocates of the new German social history, in the Bielefeld school, consequently focused all research on the analysis of internal, or at best, comparative structures,40 positing their interest explicitly outside of the realm of foreign relations. Thus, the fundamental historiographical and methodological controversy in Germany was one between several fields of history, not one within the field of diplomatic history proper. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of scholars interested in international relations has instigated a paradigm shift by turning to altogether new analytical concepts such as social influences, transnational affairs, and psychological factors.41 In Germany, Gilbert Ziebura, for example, has suggested to integrate sociological methodologies into the study of international relations.42 Volker Rittberger’s Theorie der Internationalen Beziehungen, offers a variety of theoretical approaches for the study of international relations, thus highlighting the frustration over the deadlocked theoretical situation in the field.43 In the same vein, several recent conferences in the Federal Republic have featured panels on new methodologies in diplomatic history.44 While displaying less radicalism than their U.S. peers display, these authors have grappled with similar questions. Most important, they, too, worry about how to integrate new methodological trends into their research without disrupting the field. They stress concepts of ethnicity, transnationalism, peace, environmentalism, and above all, the interplay between domestic affairs and foreign policy. At the same time, their writings for the most part continue to accentuate the state as the central analyt-

00a-Intro-Pt.I

10

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 10

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

ical variable, unquestionably because the state plays a much more ubiquitous and incontrovertible role in European society. To many scholars in Europe, the government and the state remains at the center of international relations, a tradition that may be partly explained by the fact that modern historiography developed in the nineteenth century, not only in conjunction with but also as a science dedicated to the rise of the nation-state. The historiography on colonialism and the European powers coupled with the rise of the “Neue Kulturgeschichte”45 all have contributed to an intensified interest in the significance of culture in foreign relations beyond the state. As early as 1976, Urs Bitterli argued in Die “Wilden” und die “Zivilisierten” that besides encompassing power politics, “colonial history … is also the history of the encounter of people with very different cultures and ways of lives, of the inner tensions that this encounter evoked, and the attempts to intellectually overcome these tensions.”46 Similarly, Jürgen Osterhammel writes about the “disenchantment” of Asia in European eyes during the eighteenth century. Hermann Joseph Hiery’s edited volume on the “German Pacific” highlights the long-term cultural consequences of the Second Empire’s interaction with native populations and other colonial powers in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.47 Johannes Paulmann’s study of “monarchical visits” illuminates the significance of pompous “symbolic action” in European politics between the ancien régime and World War I, and Christiane Eisenberg emphasizes the political significance of British sports among the German bourgeoisie before World War II.48 In 1996, Wilfried Loth, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Jost Dülffer, and Jürgen Osterhammel inaugurated a series titled Studien zur Internationalen Geschichte, which specifically concentrates on the theoretical analysis of formal and informal relations between states and societies.49 Klaus Mühlhahn, for example, examines minutely the bi-national social and cultural contacts and clashes in the German colony of Kiautschou in China. Madeleine Herren wanders through the “backdoors of power” in Switzerland, Belgium, and the United States, where she discovers an intricate network of private transnational contacts beneath the structures of formal diplomacy since 1865.50 The most recent volume, Internationale Geschichte, may be regarded as a German counterpart to Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson’s Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. This book reviews recent topics, results, and perspectives in search of new paradigms for the study of diplomatic and NGO relations. World systems, the interplay of society and the state, perceptions, mentalities, peace research, the environment, the tension between the local, regional, and national, space and historical geography, cultural methodology, and an examination of the tension between plurality of cultures and globalization represent some of the foci of this survey.51 There remains no doubt that the growing interest in an expansion of the field exists in the United States and Europe, as the German example as well as selected samples from France and Great Britain have shown. There are even a number of similarities between the two. On both continents, the debate focuses on whether or not to admit more theory, whether or not the historiography of foreign relations is marked

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 11

Introduction

11

by the “uniqueness” of the foreign policy-making process at the top level, and whether or not foreign relations should be analyzed structurally, that is with a special emphasis on social groups and phenomena located outside of the files of the Foreign Office and Record Group 59. And on both continents, culture has emerged as an attractive new variable in the study of foreign relations. However, to this date the debate around culture in international history suffers from two shortcomings. First, it is a highly nationalized debate within individual countries but not in the international arena where it belongs. Second, historians and publishers have made few efforts to introduce students to the debate at large and encourage them to develop their own positions in the field. Apart from a few introductory essays we now find in some textbooks,52 there is no cohesive effort to make this discussion part of our teaching curriculum. This volume aims to address both issues—by presenting the work of scholars working on both sides of the Atlantic; by reflecting a debate on the pros and cons of the various approaches; and by specifically addressing college students. Part I provides a methodological introduction, explores the cultural underpinnings of foreign policy, and the role of culture in international affairs through an examination of one specific case. In “The Power of Culture,” Beate Jahn points to the dichotomy of culture and nature, both of which have been intrinsic parts in international history but also in international relations theory long before the debate over the admissibility of culture as a methodological concept began. Looking at the Spanish encounter with the Amerindian world, she retraces how early explorers and scientists sought to conciliate this experience with their idea of a universal state of nature by invoking cultural development as a peculiarity, a mechanism that Jahn likens to the contemporary efforts of injecting culture into the history of international relations to allow for diversity in the context of generalization. In Part II, contributors analyze culture as a tool of foreign policy. They demonstrate how culture was instrumentalized for diplomatic goals and purposes in different historical periods and world regions. Wolfram Kaiser studies the cultural images and strategies that European, American, and Asian countries chose to represent themselves and their colonies in the global environment of world exhibitions during the nineteenth century. He stresses the political meaning but also the limitations of such events, which were influenced to no small degree by NGOs and commercial entrepreneurs whose interest did not necessarily comport with those of their governments. Comparing the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War, Fabian Hilfrich shows how gendered rhetorical devices, and in particular the appeal to masculinity, played a vital part in the strategy of the interventionists. To obscure the rational arguments against war, both Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson feminized their respective critics at home, and they were also intent on proving their nation’s masculinity abroad. Laura Belmonte turns our attention to U.S. cultural policy and perceptions. She retraces the United States’ propaganda program with a particular eye on the portrayal of the typical American couple. Employing notions of gender and the family, U.S. propagandists found ways to discredit communism, an

00a-Intro-Pt.I

12

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 12

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

effort that may tell us more about a particular elite’s preferred version of American culture than about the reality of American life.53 Part III of this volume seeks to expand the state-centered view and traces informal cultural relations among nations and peoples. This exploration of transnational cultural interaction focuses on the role of philanthropists and intellectuals. Oliver Schmidt explores the motivations of Cold War U.S. philanthropists who invested in the international traffic of students, as well as the historical significance of U.S. nongovernmentally directed educational exchange programs after 1945. Acting complementarily to the action of policymakers, Schmidt writes, these activities nonetheless developed a dynamic on their own and beyond the control of the very political actors who once helped trigger their implementation in the formation of a transatlantic identity. Private operations geared toward international interaction are also the focus of Guido Müller’s analysis, which scrutinizes the Franco-German friendship movement during the interwar years. Though many of the individuals involved in transnational contacts were right-wing anti-American intellectuals and businessmen with clear nationalist interests, their European vision foreshadowed the integration of the European Community, as it emerged twenty years later.54 The following two essays by Philipp Gassert and Alexander Schmidt-Gernig in Part Three take us up to the most recent history. Studying cross-cultural flows of leftist ideas across the Atlantic since the 1930s, Gassert cautions us to label the 1960s as an era of radical student internationalism. Though the German student revolt in 1968 clearly benefited from a vibrant influx of foreign ideas, it remained unilateral, as few or no ideas boomeranged back across the Atlantic. Alexander Schmidt-Gernig looks at the recent “scientification” of the future, which led to the emergence of a new paradigm called “cybernetics,” designed to bridge the communication gap among nations around the world. Transdisciplinary international conferences, topics, and journals created a network of forecasting and prediction that affected the making of national and international policy and, on a more utopian level, revived the vision of a globally integrated world. As all of these essays demonstrate, the strength of the cultural approach to international history is its ability to place a narrow range of ideas and individuals in a broader context and to point to the significance of the many different varieties of the term “culture” that researchers may employ for their analysis. Accordingly, the authors have chosen to investigate culture either as an analysis of content, thus considering the intellectual and cultural content of transnational ideas, institutions, and individuals (e.g., Schmidt and Jahn). Or they have they have preferred to consider culture as an “architectural design,” that is, an institution or a milieu (e.g., Hilfrich, Schmidt-Gernig, and Müller). We present these choices as different options for research and discussion, and leave it up to the commentators and, ultimately, the readers to decide which model they deem most useful. Part IV collects the findings and arguments of the previous chapters to define a road map for further scholarly inquiry. A group of commentators survey the preceding essays, place them into a larger research context, and address the question, Where

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 13

Introduction

13

do we go from here? Speaking from an outside perspective, social historian Volker Depkat critically assesses the debate over the new diplomatic history and the potential of culture for the study of international history. While Depkat questions historians’ ability to insert culture into the study of grand policy without risking to distortion of the field, he also offers a number of ways in which cultural studies may complement the study of foreign relations. Marc Frey and Eckart Conze then comment on those essays focusing on the state as a central actor in the interplay of cultural transfer in the international system, while Seth Fein and Scott Lucas examine those contributions dedicated to nonstate cultural interaction. Based on their own experiences in the field, they are certainly not united in their plea for the necessity of culture in international history; rather, they offer criticism and cautious advice to readers interested in this field. Like the authors in the preceding parts of this book, the individual commentators, too, choose different analytical strategies and occasionally even differ with each other. Again, we offer this discussion as a point of departure for future readers interested in this field. The last part of this volume offers a variety of sources along with individual comments designed to demonstrate how students can look at primary documents through a cultural gaze and what type of conclusions they may be able to reach. Carrying the debate into the seventeenth century, Volker Depkat examines the ideas on political culture and diplomacy of Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg. The wording of this translated document may sound somewhat unwieldy to the untrained ear; yet its “otherness” and strength is that it shows the potential of the culturalist debate for early modern diplomatic history. The following sources, all stem from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Wolfram Kaiser analyzes a British cartoon from the mid nineteenth century. Fabian Hilfrich introduces us to a newspaper article explicating the multifaceted connections between race(ism) and imperialism. Scott Lucas elaborates on a document pertaining to the history of the International Harvard Summer School designed to disguise the CIA’s attempt to disseminate cultural propaganda during the Cold War. Thomas Reuther analyzes a newspaper article from 1948 reflecting on the cultural future of Germany and looks at the original author’s larger significance. Alexander SchmidtGernig presents an excerpt from Johan Galtung’s 1967 prediction of the cultural dimensions of the future of the international system. Finally, Marie Thorsten’s compilation of webpages designed for the dot-org generation takes us up to the present. Thorsten’s reflections on the future of nongovernmental networks may well inspire us to ponder the future of the history of international relations itself. Thorsten shows how in the twenty-first century an abundance of providers immerse themselves in a cultural race to influence the weltanschauung of children around the world. While sober policymakers are still entrenched in a thought pattern framed by national borders, toddlers and teenagers are creating transnational global communities of cultural exchange and communication. In a similar vein, many historians of international relations have urged their peers to transcend the meaning of political boundaries and take a closer look at emerging supranational communities holding political power.55

00a-Intro-Pt.I

14

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 14

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

While the majority of essays in this reader concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth century, they point to sources, questions, periods, and fields well beyond their own scope. Regardless of their individual concepts, these authors share a common conviction that one cannot get to significant questions without knocking down the walls of the ghetto that has traditionally limited the field of foreign relations. What matters is not the designated field historians of foreign relations are working in, but the questions that they ask. For example, the culturalist state concepts elaborated in Part II may appeal particularly to the political scientist while anthropologists and sociologists might be intrigued by the nongovernmental transmissions described in Part III. As paradigms, theories, and approaches multiply, the writing of a synthesis becomes increasingly difficult, if not unlikely.56 Instead of pondering the question what kind of inquiries and sources diplomatic history should include, scholars of foreign relations need to realize that professional identities are subject to change. Christopher Endy’s recent attempt to “sell” tourism as part of the history of U.S. foreign relations has struck many diplomatic historians as most inappropriate because tourism arguably did not influence turn-of-the century U.S. diplomacy.57 These criticisms are vital and need to be discussed. Nonetheless, the discussion should focus on whether Endy made a convincing argument and not whether his essay constitutes “authentic” diplomatic history. Questions about cultural transmission, transnational NGOs, the gender gaze in international trade, or the clash of value systems in a global environment, just like the debates over the end of the Cold War are facing historians today not because scholars invented these problems but because they are part of the catalogue of questions by which people—and not only scholars—are trying to make sense of the world we live in. Our call for internationalization should thus not be misinterpreted as an appeal for disunity. Instead, with this reader we would like to encourage scholars and students to pay attention to the disputes outside of their fields and embark on a transnational dialogue. While European and American scholars occasionally compare each other’s discoveries in remote archives around the world, they have never communicated their methodological anxieties to one another. European scholars and students would profit a great deal from participating in the imaginative and innovative discussion in the United States. Their U.S. counterparts, in turn, might wish to consider a less compartmentalized attitude when it comes to crossing disciplinary boundaries and methodologies without questioning one’s professional identity. The issue at stake is not merely whether or not to look at gender or how to avoid the Eurocentric standpoint. Rather, inspired by global events, the concern over the definition of foreign relations has already become an international issue in and of itself and it has all the potential to grow into a global debate, in the course of which we can all learn from each other. We are, it seems, finally able to accomplish what the organizers of the 1904 Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis once had in mind—to demonstrate some of the common interests scholars and students from various fields and countries can cherish and share.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 15

Introduction

15

Notes .*

1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

Many thanks to Ernest May, Akira Iriye, David Armitage, David Engermann, Jon Rosenberg, Donna Gabaccia, Jona Hansen, Volker Berghahn, the two anonymous reviewers for Berghahn Books, and all the authors in this volume for their candid criticism and their time. Christian Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). Thomas G. Paterson, “Defining and Doing the History of American Foreign Relations: A Primer,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36-37. Richard Rorty, “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism,” Yale Review 80 (1992): 1-16. Quoted in George Haines and Frederick H. Jackson, “A Neglected Landmark in the History of Ideas,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (1947): 216-217. Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 355-382; “Responses to Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,’” Diplomatic History 5 (fall 1981): 353382; Robert J. McMahon, “The Study of American Foreign Relations: National History or International History?” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson, 11-23. The variety of meanings attached to the term “global” in different fields was at the heart of “History Globalized,” panel with Donna Gabaccia, David Armitage, Leslie Moch, and Jessica Gienow-Hecht, at the annual Social Science History Association, St. Louis, 24 - 27 October 2002. See also Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2000). See the introductory essays in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson. “Culture, Gender, and Foreign Policy: A Symposium,” Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 47124; Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83 (March 1997), 1309-1339; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families and the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). “Symposium: African Americans and U.S.Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 20 (Fall 1996): 531-650; Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Michael L. Krenn, “‘Unfinished Business’: Segregation and U.S. Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair,” Diplomatic History 20 (fall 1996): 591-612; Penny van Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Jonathan S. Rosenberg, “How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997). Michael H. Hunt, “Ideology,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson, 194; Odd Arne Westad, “The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms,” Diplomatic History 24 (fall 2000): 551-565. Morrell Heald, Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900-1940 (Kent, London: Kent State University Press, 1988), ix-xiv, 153-181; Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970); idem, Communication and Cultural Domination (White Plains, NY.: International Arts and Sciences Press, Inc., 1976).

00a-Intro-Pt.I

16

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 16

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

12. Melvin Small, Public Opinion and Historians: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970); idem, “The American Image of Germany, 1906-1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1965); Ralph B. Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976); idem, “Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, and American Politics since the 1960s,” Diplomatic History 13 (summer 1989): 383-93; Frank Schumacher, Kalter Krieg und Propaganda: Die USA, der Kampf um die Weltmeinung und die ideelle Westbindung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945-1955 (Trier: WTV Wiss. Verlag Trier, 2000). 13. William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (London: Routledge, 2000); William O. Walker III, Drug Trafficking in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981); idem, ed., Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996). 14. Andrew J. Rotter, “Christians, Muslims, and Hindu: Religion and U.S.-South Asian Relations, 1947-1954,” Diplomatic History 24 (fall 2000): 593-613. 15. Elizabeth Jannik, “Music in Cold War Berlin: German Tradition and Allied Occupation, 19451951” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 2001); David Monod, “Disguise, Containment and the Porgy and Bess Revival of 1952-56,” Journal of American Studies 35 (August 2001): 275-312; Jessica C E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: Art, Music, and Emotion in German-American Relations, 1870-1920” Journal of Social History 26 (March 2003), forthcoming. 16. Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997); “Science and the Cold War: A Symposium,” Diplomatic History 24 (Winter 2000). 17. William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ix-xiii, 125-160; Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Christopher Endy, “Travel and World Power: Americans in Europe, 1890-1917,” Diplomatic History 22 (Fall 1998): 565-594; Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 18. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972); idem, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Howard Simpson, Invisible Armies: The Impact of Disease on American History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980); Mark Lytle, “An Environmental Approach to American Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 20 (spring 1996): 279-300. 19. Melvyn P. Leffler, “New Approaches, Old Interrogations, and Prospective Reconfigurations,” Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 173-196; Emily S. Rosenberg, “Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness,” Diplomatic History 22 (spring 1998): 155-176; “It May Be Chiefly about ‘Dead White Mailes,’ but Diplomatic History Is Still Important,” letters to the editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 October 1999, B3, B14; Robert Buzzanco, “What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 23 (fall 1999): 575-607. Curiously, this debate had much less of an effect on U.S. scholars working on European diplomatic relations where the primacy of foreign relations has inspired such renowned historians as Felix Gilbert and Gerhard L. Weinberg. 20. Marco Verwej, “Cultural Theory and the Study of International Relations,” Millennium 24 (Spring 1995): 87-111; Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Art Is Democracy and Democracy Is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944-1947,” Diplomatic History 23 (winter 1999): 21-43; idem, “Shame on US? U.S. Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review,” Diplomatic History 24 (summer 2000): 465-494.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 17

Introduction

17

21. Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson, 215; Anders Stephanson, “Considerations on Culture and Theory,” Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 107-119; Frank Ninkovich, “Ideology, the Open Door, and Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 6 (spring 1982): 185-208; Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Cultural and Economic Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); Frank Ninkovich and Liping Bu, eds., The Cultural Turn: Essays in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations (Chicago: Imprint Publishers, 2002). 22. Gilbert Joseph et al., Close Encounters of Empire; Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism. 23. David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 24. This compartmentalization is currently under review. Under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), in 1997, Thomas Bender from New York University initiated a project titled “Internationalizing the Study of American History,” designed to expand if not abandon the U.S.-centric viewpoint of American history. The “La Pietra Report” and the annual reports of the La Pietra conferences on internationalizing the study of American history are available on the OAH web site and at www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/icas. 25. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahhunderts: 1945-2000 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001); Christoph Cornelissen, ed., Geschichtswissenschaften: Eine Einführung (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000). 26. Philip Alan Reynolds, “International Studies: Retrospect and Prospect,” British Journal of International Studies 1 (1975): 1-2; James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London and New York: Longman, 1984). 27. For an analysis of the English school, see Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (London: Macmillan, 1998). 28. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 19411945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 29. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999); Hugh Wilford, “‘Unwitting Assets’?: British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Twentieth Century British History 11 (2000): 42-60; Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, 1945-60: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Associations, 1945-1955 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, forthcoming); Nathan Abrams, “Struggling for Freedom: Arthur Miller, the Commentary Community, and the Cultural Cold War” (Ph.D. diss., Birmingham University, 1998); Toby Thacker, “‘Playing Beethoven like an Indian’: American Music and Reorientation in Germany, 1945-1955” in Restructuring Western Europe after 1945: Social, National, and Cultural Change during the Cold War, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 30. Kathleen Burk, “ Britische Traditionen internationaler Geschichtsschreibung,” in Internationale Geschichte: Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Jost Dülffer, and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000), 58-59. 31. Georges-Henri Soutou, “Die französische Schule der Geschichte internationaler Beziehungen,” in Loth et al., Internationale Geschichte, 31-35. 32. Pierre Renouvin and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Introduction à l’histoire des relations internationales (Paris: Librairie A. Colin, 1964). 33. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Tout Empire périra: Une vision historique des relations internationales (Paris: Université de Paris, I, Pantheon-Sorbonne, 1981). 34. Jean-Duroselle, L’idée d’Europe dans l’histoire (Paris: Denoel, 1965); Michel Espagne and Michel Werner, eds., Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle) (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988); Fernand L’Huillier, Dialogues franco-allemands 1925-1933 (Strasbourg: Gap, Diffusion Ophrys, 1971); Jean-Claude Delbreil,

00a-Intro-Pt.I

18

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 18

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

Les catholiques français et les tentatives de rapprochement franco-allemand 1920-1933 (Metz: S.M.E.I., 1972). Helmut Kaelble, Nachbarn am Rhein: Entfremdung und Annäherung der französischen und deutschen Gesellschaft seit 1880 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991); Guido Müller, “Gesellschaftsgeschichte und internationale Beziehungen: Die deutsch-französische Verständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Deutschland und der Westen: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Guido Müller (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 49-64; Wolfgang Schmale, Historische Komparatistik und Kulturtransfer: Europageschichtliche Perspektiven für die Landesgeschichte: Eine Einführung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der sächsischen Landesgeschichte (Bochum: Winkler, 1998); Matthias Middell, Kulturtransfer und Vergleich / Comparativ 10/1 (2000). Joachim Scholtyseck, “Robert Bosch und die politisch-wirtschaftlichen Europavisionen in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” paper delivered at the 43rd Deutscher Historikertag, Aachen, 29 September 2000; Dietmar Hüser, “Strukturgeschichte französischer Außenpolitik 1945,” paper, also delivered at the 43rd Deutscher Historikertag, Aachen, 29 September 2000. See also Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch und der liberale Widerstand gegen Hitler 1933 bis 1945 (Munich: Beck, 1999). Soutou, “Französische Schule,” 42-44. See, for example, Andreas Hillgruber, “Gedanken zu einer politischen Geschichte moderner Prägung,” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 39 (1970): 33-43; Karl-Dietrich Bracher and Ernst Fränkel, eds., Internationale Beziehungen (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1971); Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Aussenpolitik, 1871 bis 1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989); idem, Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1933-1945: Kalkül oder Dilemma (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971), idem, Integration und Souveränität: Die Aussenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949-1982 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991). Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur und Folgen des Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969); Hans-Peter Schwarz, Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik: Deutschland im Widerstreit der aussenpolitischen Konzeptionen in den Jahren der Besatzungsherrschaft, 1945-1949 (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966). Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus: Studien zur Entwicklung des Imperium Americanum, 1865–1900, 2nd ed. (1974; reprint, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987); idem, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969); idem, ed., Klassen in der europäischen Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979); Jürgen Kocka, Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie, 18501980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977). Wolfgang Krieger, “Der mangelnde Nachwuchs im Berufsfeld ‘Internationale Beziehungen’: Ein Defizit bundesdeutscher Bildungspolitik,” Europa-Archiv 9 (1990): 311-318; Eckart Conze, “Abschied von der Diplomatiegeschichte? Neuere Forschungen zur Rolle der Bundesrepublik in den internationalen Beziehungen, 1949-69,” Historisches Jahrbuch 116 (1996): 137-154; idem, “Moderne Politikgeschichte: Aporien einer Kontroverse,” in Müller, ed., Deutschland und der Westen, 15-30; Wolfram Kaiser, “Globalisierung und Geschichte: Einige methdologischen Überlegungen zur Zeitgeschichtsschreibung der internationalen Beziehungen,” in Müller, Deutschland und der Westen, 31-48; Anja Jetschke and Andrea Liese, “Kultur im Aufwind: Zur Rolle von Bedeutungen, Werten und Handlungsrepertoires in den internationalen Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 1 (1998): 149-179; Jürgen Osterhammel, “Kulturelle Grenzen in der Expansion Europas,” Saeculum 46 (1995): 101-138. For a broader discussion of competing historiographical concepts, see Rainer Maria Kiesow and Dieter Simon, eds., Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Wahrheit: Zum Grundlagenstreit in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 2000). Gilbert Ziebura, “Die Rolle der Sozialwissenschaften in der westdeutschen Historiographie der internationalen Beziehungen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 79-103. Volker Rittberger, ed., Theorie der Internationalen Beziehungen: Bestandaufnahme und Forschungsperspektiven (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990). Wolfram Kaiser, “Internationale Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte 46, no. 6 (1998): 543546; Guido Müller, “Neue Wege in der Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen. Leitung:

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 19

Introduction

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

19

Guido Müller (Aachen/Ludwigsburg); Ulrich Lappenküper (Bonn),” in Eine Welt - Eine Geschichte? 43. Deutscher Historikertag in Aachen 26. bis 29. September 2000, ed. Max Kerner (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001), 256-264. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Hans-Ulrich Wehler eds., Kulturgeschichte Heute (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996); Thomas Mergel and Thomas Welskopp, eds., Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997); Manfred Hettling, Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? Positionen, Themen, Analysen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991); Andrea Recknitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms (Weilerswist: Verlbrueck Wissenschaft, 2000). Urs Bitterli, Die ‘Wilden’ und die ‘Zivilisierten’: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1976), 5. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998); Hermann Joseph Hiery, ed., Die deutsche Südsee, 1884-1914 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000); Christiane Eisenberg, “English sports” und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1800-1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999). See, for example, Gerhard Th. Mollin, Die USA und der Kolonialismus: America als Partner und Nachfolger der belgischen Macht in Afrika, 1939-1965 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Wolfram Kaiser, Großbritannien und die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft, 1955-1961: Von Messina nach Canossa (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Ursula Lehmkuhl, Pax Anglo-Americana: Machstrukturelle Grundlagen anglo-amerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999). Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897-1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000); Madeleine Herren, Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus und modernisierungsorientierte Außenpolitik in Belgien, der Schweiz und den USA, 1865-1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000). Loth et al., Internationale Geschichte; see, in particular, the essays by Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Eckart Conze, Gottfried Niedhart, Robert Frank, Ursula Lehmkul, Jost Dülffer, Jürgen Osterhammel, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier. See also Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “A Global Group of Worriers?” Diplomatic History 26 (summer 2002): 481-491; Barbara Karsky and Maire-Jeanne Rossignol, Transmission des Valeurs Nationales: Théories, Individus, Institutions. Domaine AngloAméricain, (Paris: Publication de l’Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, 2000). Thomas G. Paterson, “Defining and Doing the History of American Foreign Relations: A Primer,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson, 36-54; “Explaining American Foreign Relations,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, ed. Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Lexington, Mass., and Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1995), vol. 1, 1-27. Recent scholarship has increasingly investigated contemporary U.S. propaganda in Eastern Europe; e.g. Maren Roth, “Education for Democracy: American Educational and Cultural Policy in Germany after 1945 and in Bulgaria since 1990,” paper delivered at the Center for U.S. Studies, Leucorea Foundation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 18 December 1999. The term nongovernmental should be understood in its broadest form; it includes not only nonparty groups involved in political action but also groups involved in nonpolitical activities, such as social movements, interest groups, private individuals, and other constitutents. Thomas Adam, “Philanthrophic Foundations in North American and German Cities in the 19th Century and the Transfer of Ideas,” paper delivered at the Center for U.S. Studies, Leucorea Foundation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 18 December 1999. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 502. See Christopher Endy, “Travel and World Power,” and the ensuing discussion on H-Diplo.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

20

7:55 PM

Page 20

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

Bibliography Abrams, Nathan. “Struggling for Freedom: Arthur Miller, the Commentary Community, and the Cultural Cold War.” Ph.D. diss., Birmingham University, 1998. Adam, Thomas. “Philanthrophic Foundations in North American and German Cities in the 19th Century and the Transfer of Ideas.” Paper delivered at the Center for U.S. Studies, Leucorea Foundation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 18 December 1999. Appy, Christian, ed. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. What Is Globalization? Trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, U.K., Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2000. Bitterli, Urs. Die ‘Wilden’ und die ‘Zivilisierten’: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1976. Bracher, Karl-Dietrich. Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur und Folgen des Nationalsozialismus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969. Bracher, Karl-Dietrich, and Ernst Fränkel, eds. Internationale Beziehungen. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1971. Burk, Kathleen. “ Britische Traditionen internationaler Geschichtsschreibung.” In Internationale Geschichte: Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten. Ed. Wilfried Loth, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Jost Dülffer, and Jürgen Osterhammel. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000, 45-59. Buzzanco, Robert. “What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of U.S. Foreign Relations.” Diplomatic History 23 (fall 1999): 575-607. Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York: New Press, 1997. Conze, Eckart. “Abschied von der Diplomatiegeschichte? Neuere Forschungen zur Rolle der Bundesrepublik in den internationalen Beziehungen, 1949-69.” Historisches Jahrbuch 116 (1996): 137-154. _____. “Moderne Politikgeschichte: Aporien einer Kontroverse.” In Deutschland und der Westen: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65, Geburtstag, ed. Guido Müller, 15-30. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998. Cornelissen, Christoph, ed. Geschichtswissenschaften: Eine Einführung. Frankfurt a. M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000. Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. _____. “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War.” Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309-1339. Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972. _____. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. “Culture, Gender, and Foreign Policy: A Symposium,” Diplomatic History 18 (Winter 1994): 47-124.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 21

Introduction

21

Delbreil, Jean-Claude. Les catholiques français et les tentatives de rapprochement francoallemand 1920-1933. Metz: S.M.E.I., 1972. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Dunne, Tim. Inventing International Society: A History of the English School. London: Mcmillan, 1998. Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. L’idée d’Europe dans l’histoire. Paris: Denoel, 1965. _____. Tout Empire périra: Une vision historique des relations internationales. Paris: Université de Paris, I, Pantheon-Sorbonne, 1981. Eisenberg, Christiane. “English sports” und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1800-1939. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999. Endy, Christopher. “Travel and World Power: Americans in Europe, 1890-1917.” Diplomatic History 22 (fall 1998): 365-394. Espagne, Michel, and Michel Werner, eds. Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle). Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988. “Explaining American Foreign Relations.” In Major Problems in American Foreign Relations. 4th ed. 2vols. Ed. Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, vol. 1, 1-27. Lexington, Mass., and Toronto: D. C. Heath, 1995. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C.E. “Art Is Democracy and Democracy Is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944-1947.” Diplomatic History 23 (winter 1999): 21-43. _____. “A Global Group of Worriers?” Diplomatic History 26 (summer 2002): 481-491. _____. “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: Art, Music, and Emotion in GermanAmerican Relations 1870-1920.” Journal of Social History 26 (March 2003), forthcoming. _____. “Shame on US? U.S. Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review.” Diplomatic History 24 (summer 2000): 465-494. _____. Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Haines, George, and Frederick H. Jackson. “A Neglected Landmark in the History of Ideas.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34 (1947): 216-217. Hardtwig, Wolfgang, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, eds. Kulturgeschichte Heute. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996. Heald, Morrell. Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900-1940. Kent, London: Kent State University Press, 1988. Herren, Madeleine. Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus und modernisierungsorientierte Außenpolitik in Belgien, der Schweiz und den USA, 18651914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000. Hettling, Manfred. Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? Positionen, Themen, Analysen. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991. Hiery, Hermann Joseph, ed. Die deutsche Südsee, 1884-1914. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001. Hildebrand, Klaus. Deutsche Aussenpolitik, 1871 bis 1918. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. _____. Deutsche Aussenpolitik, 1933-1945: Kalkül oder Dilemma. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

22

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 22

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

_____. Integration und Souveränität: Die Aussenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949-1982. Bonn: Bouvier, 1991. Hillgruber, Andreas. “Gedanken zu einer politischen Geschichte moderner Prägung.” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 39 (1970): 33-43. Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W.E. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Hunt, Michael H. “Ideology.” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, 193-201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hüser, Dietmar. “Strukturgeschichte französischer Außenpolitik 1945.” Paper delivered at the 43rd Deutscher Historikertag, Aachen, 29 September 2000. Iriye, Akira. “Culture and International History.” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. ed. Hogan and Paterson, 214-225. _____. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. “It May Be Chiefly about ‘Dead White Mailes,’ but Diplomatic History Is Still Important.” Letters to the editor. Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 October 1999, B3, B14. Jannik, Elizabeth. “Music in Cold War Berlin: German Tradition and Allied Occupation, 1945-1951.” Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 2001. Jetschke, Anja, and Andrea Liese. “Kultur im Aufwind: Zur Rolle von Bedeutungen, Werten und Handlungsrepertoires in den internationalen Beziehungen.” Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 1 (1998): 149-179. Joll, James. The Origins of the First World War. London and New York: Longman, 1984. Joseph, Gilbert, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Kaelble, Helmut. Nachbarn am Rhein: Entfremdung und Annäherung der französischen und deutschen Gesellschaft seit 1880. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991. Kaiser, Wolfram. “Globalisierung und Geschichte: Einige methdologischen Überlegungen zur Zeitgeschichtsschreibung der internationalen Beziehungen.” In Deutschland und der Westen, ed. Guido Müller, 31-48. _____. Großbritannien und die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft, 1955-1961: Von Messina nach Canossa. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. _____. “Internationale Geschichte.” Zeitschrift für Geschichte 46, no. 6 (1998): 543-546. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Karsky, Barbara, and Maire-Jeanne Rossignol. Transmission des Valeurs Nationales: Théories, Individus, Institutions. Domaine Anglo-Américain. Paris: Publication de l’Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, 2000. Kiesow, Rainer Maria, and Dieter Simon, eds. Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Wahrheit: Zum Grundlagenstreit in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus Verlag, 2000.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 23

Introduction

23

Kocka, Jürgen. Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie, 1850-1980. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977. Krenn, Michael L. “‘Unfinished Business’: Segregation and U.S. Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair.” Diplomatic History 20 (fall 1996): 591-612. Krieger, Wolfgang. “Der mangelnde Nachwuchs im Berufsfeld ‘Internationale Beziehungen’: Ein Defizit bundesdeutscher Bildungspolitik.” Europa-Archiv 9 (1990): 311-318. Laville, Helen. Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Associations, 1945-1955. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, forthcoming. Leffler, Melvyn P. “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 502. _____. “New Approaches, Old Interrogations, and Prospective Reconfigurations.” Diplomatic History 19 (spring 1995): 173-196. Lehmkuhl, Ursula. Pax Anglo-Americana: Machstrukturelle Grundlagen angloamerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999. Levenstein, Harvey. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Levering, Ralph B. American Opinion and the Russian Alliance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. _____. “Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, and American Politics since the 1960s.” Diplomatic History 13 (summer 1989): 383-393. L’Huillier, Fernand. Dialogues franco-allemands 1925-1933. Strasbourg: Gap, Diffusion Ophrys, 1971. Lytle, Mark. “An Environmental Approach to American Diplomatic History.” Diplomatic History 20 (spring 1996): 279-300. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Maier, Charles S. “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations.” In The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen, 355-382. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families and the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. McAllister, William. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History. London: Routledge, 2000. McMahon, Robert J. “The Study of American Foreign Relations: National History or International History?” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Hogan and Paterson, 11-23. McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. Mergel, Thomas, and Thomas Welskopp, eds. Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997. Middell, Matthias. Kulturtransfer und Vergleich / Comparativ 10/1 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000). Mollin, Gerhard Th. Die USA und der Kolonialismus: America als Partner und Nachfolger der belgischen Macht in Afrika, 1939-1965. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

24

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 24

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

Monod, David. “Disguise, Containment and the Porgy and Bess Revival of 1952-56.” Journal of American Studies 35 (August 2001): 275-312. Mühlhahn, Klaus. Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897-1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000. Müller, Guido. Deutschland und der Westen: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998. _____. “Gesellschaftsgeschichte und internationale Beziehungen: Die deutsch-französische Verständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Deutschland und der Westen: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag. ed. Guido Müller, 49-64. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998, 49-64. _____. “Neue Wege in der Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen. Leitung: Guido Müller (Aachen/Ludwigsburg); Ulrich Lappenküper (Bonn).” In Eine Welt - Eine Geschichte? 43. Deutscher Historikertag in Aachen 26. bis 29. September 2000, ed. Max Kerner, 256-264. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001. Müller, Harald, and Thomas Risse-Kappen. “Internationale Umwelt, gesellschaftliches Umfeld und außenpolitischer Prozeß in liberaldemokratischen Industrienationen.” In Theorie der Internationalen Beziehungen: Bestandaufnahme und Forschungsperspektiven, ed. Volker Rittberger. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990. Ninkovich, Frank. “Ideology, the Open Door, and Foreign Policy.” Diplomatic History 6 (spring 1982), 185-208. Ninkovich, Frank, and Liping Bu, eds. The Cultural Turn: Essays in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations. Chicago: Imprint Publishers, 2001. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998. _____. “Kulturelle Grenzen in der Expansion Europas.” Saeculum 46 (1995): 101-138. Paterson, Thomas G. “Defining and Doing the History of American Foreign Relations: A Primer.” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, 36-54. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Paulmann, Johannes. Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000. Recknitz, Andrea. Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms. Weilerswist: Verlbrueck Wissenschaft, 2000. Renouvin, Pierre, and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. Introduction à l’histoire des relations internationales. Paris: Librairie A. Colin, 1964. “Responses to Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations.’” Diplomatic History 5 (fall 1981): 353-382. Reynolds, Philip Alan. “International Studies: Retrospect and Prospect.” British Journal of International Studies 1 (1975): 1-2. Ricci, David M. The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Rorty, Richard. “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 1-16. Rosenberg, Emily S. “Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness.” Diplomatic History 22 (spring 1998): 155-176. Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Cultural and Economic Expansion, 1890-1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

00a-Intro-Pt.I

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 25

Introduction

25

Rosenberg, Jonathan S. “How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997. Roth, Maren. “Education for Democracy: American Educational and Cultural Policy in Germany after 1945 and in Bulgaria since 1990.” Paper delivered at the Center for U.S. Studies, Leucorea Foundation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 18 December 1999. Rotter, Andrew J. “Christians, Muslims, and Hindu: Religion and U.S.-South Asian Relations, 1947-1954.” Diplomatic History 24 (fall 2000): 593-613. Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cold War. London: Granta Books, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Communication and Cultural Domination. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976. _____. Mass Communications and American Empire. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970. Scholtyseck, Joachim. Robert Bosch und der liberale Widerstand gegen Hitler 1933 bis 1945. Munich: Beck, 1999. _____. “Robert Bosch und die politisch-wirtschaftlichen Europavisionen in der Zwischenkriegszeit.” Paper delivered at the 43rd Deutscher Historikertag, Aachen, 29 September 2000. Schumacher, Frank. Kalter Krieg und Propaganda: Die USA, der Kampf um die Weltmeinung und die ideelle Westbindung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945-1955. Trier: WTV Wiss. Verlag Trier, 2000. Schwartz, Rosalie. Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik: Deutschland im Widerstreit der aussenpolitischen Konzeptionen in den Jahren der Besatzungsherrschaft, 1945-1949. Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966. “Science and the Cold War: A Symposium,” Diplomatic History 24 (winter 2000). Simpson, Howard. Invisible Armies: The Impact of Disease on American History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980. Small, Melvin. “The American Image of Germany, 1906-1914.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1965. _____. Public Opinion and Historians; Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Soutou, Georges-Henri. “Die französische Schule der Geschichte internationaler Beziehungen.” In Internationale Geschichte: Themen—Ergebnisse—Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth et al., 31-44. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000. Stephanson, Anders. “Considerations on Culture and Theory.” Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 107-119. Stowe, William. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. “Symposium: African Americans and U.S.Foreign Relations.” Diplomatic History 20 (fall 1996): 531-650. Toby Thacker, “‘Playing Beethoven like an Indian’: American Music and Reorientation in Germany, 1945-1955” in Restructuring Western Europe after 1945: Social, National,

00a-Intro-Pt.I

26

11/5/03

7:55 PM

Page 26

Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

and Cultural Change during the Cold War, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Thorne, Christopher. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Van Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 19371957. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Verwej, Marco. “Cultural Theory and the Study of International Relations.” Millennium 24 (spring 1995): 87-111. Walker, William O., III. Drug Trafficking in the Americas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. Walker, William O., III, ed. Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Bismarck und der Imperialismus. Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969. _____. Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus: Studien zur Entwicklung des Imperium Americanum, 1865 - 1900. 2nd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987. _____. Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahhunderts: 1945-2000. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, ed. Klassen in der europäischen Sozialgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979. Westad, Odd Arne. “The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms.” Diplomatic History 24 (fall 2000): 551-565. Wilford, Hugh. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, 1945-60: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003). _____. “‘Unwitting Assets?’: British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” Twentieth Century British History 11 (2000): 42-60. Ziebura, Gilbert. “Die Rolle der Sozialwissenschaften in der westdeutschen Historiographie der internationalen Beziehungen.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 79-103.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 27

Chapter 1

THE POWER OF CULTURE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS* Beate Jahn

Theories of international relations have traditionally found culture a difficult concept to deal with. Recently, however, it appears as if there is a “return” of culture in international relations.1 But if “questions of culture and identity have been always part and parcel of our analysis of the social world,” as Friedrich Kratochwil suggests, this raises questions not only about the meaning and potential of their explicit “return(s)” to the discipline of international relations but also about previous periods of “amnesia.”2 In this essay I will first demonstrate that culture does, indeed, lie at the heart of traditional international relations theories albeit in an unreflected way. Culture, I argue, is the great “other” over and against which the discipline of international relations invokes nature. For this reason, the reconstruction of the concrete historical encounter between Europeans and Amerindian peoples, which led to the development of the concept of the state of nature as a solution to the problem of cultural diversity, can play an especially important role: it can provide us not only with an empirical test for the validity of this concept; it also demonstrates that the Western social sciences themselves are a culturally peculiar product. And it is here, in an unreflected epistemology that the most pervasive power of culture lies. For, as I will demonstrate in the second part of this essay, recent attempts to theorize the role of culture in international relations regularly fall prey to the conflation of the ontological, empirical, and ethico-political dimensions of knowledge production, which became foundational in the original conception of a new epistemology based on the concept of the state of nature and natural law. In other words, recent attempts to theorize culture tend to fall back onto conceptions of nature. As a result, history is either naturalized or nature historicized.

Notes for this section begin on page 37.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

28

2:31 PM

Page 28

Beate Jahn

The Invention of the State of Nature Traditional international relations theories seem to be arguing that the distinguishing characteristic between the domestic and the international is the existence of government—of the state, in the former and its lack in the latter.3 At closer inspection, however, it turns out that the precondition for the establishment of government is some sense of shared values. And it is the presence of these shared values—a common culture—which makes the establishment of states possible in the domestic sphere and its absence which prevents a similar development in the international sphere. There can be no “world state” because there is “no community willing and able to support it.”4 Similarly, for liberals, the international is characterized by “competing codes, rival philosophical traditions, clashing conceptions of morality”5, or “the absence of what might be called an international sense of community.”6 Culture, here, is truly “part and parcel” of the discipline of international relations; it is the defining characteristic of the discipline’s subject matter. And yet, culture does not play an explicit role in the theories of international relations developed by these authors. Rather than investigating the conditions of conflict and cooperation between cultures, these theories are based on another level beneath that of culture, namely, human nature. At the level of human nature, we are not any longer confronted with diversity but with homogeneity, for “social forces are the product of human nature in action” and “the struggle for power” as one such drive “is universal in time and space.”7 Meanwhile, for liberals, moral principles for the conduct of international politics can be derived from a hypothetical state of nature; they can be explained by reference to the natural liberty of individuals, or by “nature’s secret design.”8 Cultural diversity, then, is identified by realist and liberal writers alike as the fundamental problem of international politics to which the solution, however, is found in nature. Culture is “part and parcel” of traditional international relations theory and what appears as “amnesia” does not indicate an absence of the concept but rather its invisibility, for it constitutes the “other” to the central concept on which international relations theory is built: the concept of the state of nature. Hence, we need to investigate the origin and meaning of that concept, which Hans Morgenthau and Stanley Hoffman seem to have taken from Hobbes, Kenneth Waltz from Rousseau, Hedley Bull from Locke, Charles Beitz and Michael Doyle from Kant. But from where have the classics taken the concept, and what meaning did it have for them? The classical authors point toward an empirical secular state of nature represented by Amerindian peoples. It was first defined in this sense by Spanish authors in the context of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. Since the existence of the continent of America and of the Amerindian peoples challenged their worldview the Spaniards were forced to grapple with an ontological rather than just a political or legal question: What was the nature of the Amerindians; were they human beings at all?9 The Spaniards tried to apply various concepts to make sense of the nature of the Amerindians, among them Aristotle’s concept of natural slavery, holding that human

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 29

The Power of Culture

29

beings without sufficient reason could not govern themselves and were meant to be slaves. Despite the fact that the Spaniards tried to determine the extent of reason the Amerindians were endowed with empirically, it turned out that the concept of natural slavery fundamentally contradicted the Christian principle of the oikumene which necessarily implied that all human beings had to have enough reason to understand the Christian teachings.10 Hence, it was on the basis of this culturally peculiar religious belief that the Amerindians were eventually considered human beings endowed with reason. However, this solution did not at all solve the problem of cultural difference but rather posed it in new terms. For if God had given reason to all peoples, how could it be explained that its use led to such different kinds of development as in the European and the Amerindian cases? The Spaniards came up with two different answers to this question. Las Casas believed that the Indians were men in the state of nature, with the potential of reason but without cultivation, without history; they were born late. Vitoria, Sepúlveda, and others, on the other hand, saw their “evil” customs as the development of a false culture, a product of education, of history, of thousands of years of socialization.11 The Spaniards thus made an ontological assumption—all human beings had to have reason—on the basis of their religious belief. In the state of nature, all human beings were universally endowed with the potential for reason. But this potential needed to be developed and, thus, cultural differences could be explained either because this development had not yet taken place (the state of nature), or because the process of development had come to a halt (India, for instance, was considered as a stagnant culture), or because a culture was based on an incorrect understanding of the laws of nature (a false culture). The unique significance of this understanding of the state of nature lies in the fact that it led to a revolutionary redefinition of epistemology. With the “discovery” of human societies who were supposedly in the state of nature, Europeans did not have to rely on the interpretation of authoritative scriptures any more but, as Locke pointed out, “the Woods and Forests, where the irrational untaught Inhabitants keep right by following Nature, are fitter to give us Rules, than the Cities and Palaces, where those that call themselves Civil and Rational, go out of their way, by the Authority of Example.”12 Consequently, the science of natural law was liberated from moral theology and based on the empirical analysis of the essence of human beings.13 Thus, the belief that the Amerindians represented a concrete historical state of nature became the basis for the development of social and political thought as a “natural science.” The second unique significance of this redefinition of the concept of the state of nature was the introduction of a linear, secular timescale into the history of humanity. For if the Amerindians truly represented a universal state of nature or, at least, some earlier developmental stage, it had to be explained how and why human societies moved from one developmental stage to another. Both Hobbes and Kant interpreted the state of nature as a state of war. Reason and self-interest commanded that human beings leave this miserable state by setting up government and the rule

01-Jahn

3/27/03

30

2:31 PM

Page 30

Beate Jahn

of law over them—in short, by building states. For both Hobbes and Kant, states therefore embody reason and, thus, represent a higher stage of development than the state of nature.14 An alternative philosophy of history was developed by Raynal, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke and others for whom the defining characteristic of the state of nature was not war but material scarcity. In this reading, a widespread increase in population led to a scarcity of food and land, which in turn led to fights over the scarce resources. State building and the introduction of private property are depicted as the solutions to this dilemma: setting up a superior power ensured peace between the members of the community; and the introduction of private property in land and its guarantee by the laws not only put an end to the fight over common resources but also provided the necessary conditions for intensive agriculture and, thus, an increase in production. Again, state building and private property represent reason for this developmental stage.15 In both accounts, Amerindian communities occupy an earlier stage of development on one linear and universal timescale in the history of humanity; and both accounts justify the peculiar European institutions of the state and private property as in accordance with universal natural law. In other words, the cultural differences between Amerindian and European societies are reinterpreted into developmental, that is, temporal differences despite the fact that European and Amerindian societies coexisted in the same time. Furthermore, essential attributes of European culture— states and private property—were accorded a universal moral justification. Nevertheless, European authors did not overlook the shortcomings of their own societies. Having finally “rediscovered” true natural law, they set out to conceive an ideal and universally valid society based on human nature. In contrast to earlier conceptions, this was a secular society, which could be realized by human effort in time. The “Indians” might have been “ignorant and poor,” but they were also “equal and free.”16 And if equality and freedom were natural qualities of man, then these had to be realized in any society, which claimed to be organized according to natural law. The social inequality and political unfreedom so prevalent in European societies could therefore not be in accordance with natural law. European reformers thus merged the European institution of the state with “natural” freedom and ended up with the demand for consent, democracy; they also merged the European institution of private property with “natural” equality and ended up with the demand for equality before the law.17 Thus, the European classical authors derived ethico-political goals from a supposedly empirically existing state of nature. Insofar as these goals implied the reform of European societies, they were pursued in the American and French Revolutions.18 And insofar as they justified the institutions of the state and private property as in accordance with natural law at that particular stage of historical development and, thus, placed European states morally higher than other forms of political organization, they were used in political theory as well as international law to justify European colonial expansion.19

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 31

The Power of Culture

31

For the purposes of the present argument I would like to concentrate on the methodological implications of this theoretical development. By the time the classical authors bequeathed us with the concept of the state of nature, that concept comprised a conflation between the three levels of scientific inquiry. First of all, it contained an ontological assumption about the existence of human nature devoid of culture. Second, this ontological assumption was presented as an empirical reality found in Amerindian societies. Third, universally valid ethico-political goals were derived from this assumed state of nature. Methodologically, neither of these moves is actually permissible: ontological assumptions cannot be proven or disproved, and ethico-political goals cannot be derived from the laws of nature; they are by definition the product of moral and political decisions by human beings as “free agents”—free in the sense of being able to make choices within given circumstances. It is the substantive content of this concept of the state of nature—the identification of nature, reason, and morality—which constituted the social sciences originally as “natural sciences.” Any social theory, then, as for instance, traditional international relations theory, which uses the concept of the state of nature in an unreflected way, is drawn into this internal logic: a logic in which the particular definition of the contents of the state of nature will be read back into “reality” and presented as “naturally” constituting certain ethico-political goals. And any aspect of reality that does not seem to fit the ontologically given structure will, then, have to be defined as “false culture,” ‘backward development’, or, in Morgenthau’s words, “deviations from rationality.” A theory of international relations, he states, has to “abstract from these irrational elements” and aim at presenting “the rational essence to be found in experience”; this rationality, Morgenthau insists, simultaneously constitutes morality.20 What is rational and irrational, natural and unnatural in the empirical world we study, has been decided a priori in the ontological assumption. It is subsequently read back into empirical study, and constitutes ethico-political goals. It is the abstraction from empirical realities embodied in this ontological assumption of the state of nature, its use as a purely theoretical and logical device, which hides the fact that its validity was based on a concrete empirical reality. Only when we trace the concept back to its historical origins can we uncover its meaning and dismantle its claim. For what we find there is that the assumption of a universal state of nature identified with reason and morality was not derived from empirical evidence; on the contrary, it was a culturally peculiar concept derived from religious belief, and only subsequently read back into Amerindian societies. And since the assumption of a universal state of nature as such could not explain cultural diversity, the latter had to be accounted for by historicizing nature, reason, and morality. The resulting speculative philosophies of history, however, were just as little based on empirical evidence but relied on placing Amerindians and other non-European cultures by an interpretive act into an earlier period of history. The claim that all these concepts were actually based on empirical evidence rather than cultural constructions constitutes the power of culture in international relations. This unreflected claim allows time and again the conflation of the ontological,

01-Jahn

3/27/03

32

2:31 PM

Page 32

Beate Jahn

empirical, and ethico-political levels as I will demonstrate in the cases of more recent attempts to theorize culture in international relations.

Nature and Culture in Contemporary International Relations Theory All the recent attempts to theorize the role of culture in International Relations set out with an ontological assumption that appears to be the opposite of the state of nature: they all proclaim that actors are socially constructed. This assumption is used in different ways, and I will distinguish between four approaches. One attempt to integrate notions of culture and identity into the theory of international relations can be located in the constructivism of Alexander Wendt. A second approach might be seen in the attempts to conduct a metatheoretical discussion of the role of culture in international relations. The third approach propagates the deconstruction of traditional foundationalism. And, finally, the fourth approach insists on historical analysis. First, let us consider the constructivist strategy of Wendt. He wants to prove that there is scope for change in the international system beyond “shifts in polarity that will not end the dreary cycles of conflict and despair over the millennia” as (neo)realists have held.21 And since (neo)realists have argued that the state of nature is by definition conflictual, Wendt sets out to show that this is not necessarily so. He tells two stories of encounters in the state of nature: one between alter and ego, the other between extraterrestrial aliens and New Yorkers.22 The outcome of these encounters, he argues, will depend on the participants’ gestures and their interpretation. For Wendt, the structure of the international system, arising out of these kinds of interactions, is intersubjective rather than material.23 He identifies three different cultures of anarchy—the Hobbesian, the Lockean, and the Kantian—and contends that the international system is much more defined by a Lockean than by a Hobbesian culture and, furthermore, does not logically preclude the development of a Kantian one.24 Wendt, thus, does not question the assumption of the state of nature as such but only the substantive contents (neo)realists have given it. By not engaging in an empirical analysis either substantiating the validity of this concept or refuting it, he ends up reproducing the already familiar conflations. That is, he constructs in purely speculative terms—clearly identifiable in the use of alter, ego, and extraterrestrial aliens— a state of nature in which cooperation is a possibility and then discovers evidence for this kind of transformation of the international system.25 Since his “theory” is in entirety governed by a speculative state of nature uncritically taken from Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, it is not too surprising to find that Wendt’s conclusions do not differ one iota from the conclusions that the former have drawn hundreds of years ago and that have been diligently reproduced over and over again since then—for instance, by Hedley Bull who argued already in 1977 that the international system resembled a Lockean state of nature.26

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 33

The Power of Culture

33

The problems with this approach lead Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil to suggest a metatheoretical debate.27 This would involve reflection on the fact that culture might be less discernible “on the level of discrete events than on the more abstract level of cognition and appraisal.”28 If science hides its own culturally peculiar foundations, then we must investigate “the historical context and the scholarly practices that have rendered them incompatible in the first place.”29 Similarly, Rob Walker suggests that the concept of culture needs to be explored historically in the context of the constitution of modern Western intellectual categories.30 And yet, this promising route is not taken. Kratochwil notes that systems and structures have entered international relations theory ironically “not in the form pioneered by language theory— which would have entailed a more thorough rethinking of positivist methodologies— but … via the microeconomic analogy”; as a result, the problem of meaning almost entirely disappeared from the research agenda. Kratochwil therefore suggests using linguistic categories to retrieve meaning. The analysis of the “total speech act,” reconstructing the history of political ideas, might help to elucidate the problem of culture.31 However, the replacement of the abstract categories of microeconomics with the equally abstract categories of linguistics—both developed within the framework of modern Western science—are not a very promising tool to uncover the historically specific concrete meanings of culture hidden in our conception of knowledge. We cannot derive substantive insights from abstract categories. Walker, too, avoids the task of producing the historical analysis he called for. Instead, he suggests that the use of the concept of culture in contemporary international politics entails a critical awareness of its historical origins on the one hand, and “a conscious amnesia toward those assumptions and contradictions through which the term has been shaped historically” on the other.32 Apart from the fact that the suggestion to practice “amnesia” in the face of difficult concepts is certainly unusual, neither “critical awareness,” nor “consciousness” or “amnesia” are a possibility as long as we have not established what exactly those “historical origins” and “contradictions” of the concept are. Furthermore, Walker suggests, in the contemporary world, in which sovereignty coexists with interdependence and a global civilization, to use the term culture may mean to “engage with questions of political practice” the modern forms of which one might well not find in the practice of states but “on the grounds of tradition or postmodernity, of gender, race, religion and ethnicity, or socialism, or capitalism, of the Other, of the future, of the local community, of the state and of the planet.”33 Without, however, having established the concrete meaning of culture, how are we to be sure that its contradictions and ambivalences are not represented in social movements, too? A similar problem we encounter in the deconstructionist approach, represented here by David Campbell. Deconstructionists, too, argue that we have to examine the underlying foundations, epistemological grounds, and ontological bases that Western science in general and the discipline of international relations in particular take for granted. This we have to do because the “ontological givens”—such as state, nation, society, tribe—of the more traditional approaches only appear to reflect reality whereas what they really do is to construct reality; they are to be seen as “interpretive

01-Jahn

3/27/03

34

2:31 PM

Page 34

Beate Jahn

and performative force, a coup de force.”34 Modern Western science itself, so the argument goes, is built on one of these interpretive and performative acts of violence when it insists on the authority of reason and, thus, denies validity to those objects of cognition that cannot be rendered intelligible on the basis of reason. Within the framework of modern Western science, Campbell points out that with respect to multicultural communities, only two possibilities are envisaged: either “human agency is in suspension while nature violently plays itself out” or this nature would be “miraculously overcome as the result of an idealistic transformation at the hands of reason.”35 Campbell argues that in international relations as well as in wider Western political thought, “assumptions of pregiven subjects with autonomous and settled identities” are taken for granted and, as a result of this belief, ethnic and nationalist conflicts appear natural; consequently, any political practice starting from these assumptions will end up performing those violent acts which only produce the communities with given identities that had supposedly been there before. This kind of violence can only be resisted if we deconstruct the assumptions underlying Western forms of knowledge. Without deconstruction, he holds, there would be no social action; knowledge, ethics, and politics would be no more than technology.36 Deconstruction, here, means to dismantle all foundational claims—to question all ontological givens. And, no doubt, all foundational claims can be dismantled. But it is not enough to demonstrate that any reality is socially constructed. Not to analyze the concrete contents of such concepts “is to fail in the very effort of providing a coherent account of social reality.”37 In fact, without reconstruction, that is, the account of how and why a particular concept has come to be foundational, deconstruction might fail in its most ambitious goal: political and ethical emancipation. After all, it is not the general human tendency to make ontological assumptions and produce foundational claims, which is oppressive, but particular cultural forms in which concrete claims are produced, performed, and reproduced. This leaves a variety of historical approaches to consider, which might provide the concrete analyses missing from the previously discussed attempts to theorize culture. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney criticize Waltz and Wendt for starting out with the concept of the state of nature and, thus, implying presocial and precultural subjects. Historical studies of “initial encounters” reveal that actors have not only a well developed sense of self but also a concept of the “other” long before the actual encounter takes place.38 This can be demonstrated in Tzvetan Todorov’s and Ashis Nandy’s studies of the encounters between Spaniards and Amerindians and English and Indians respectively. These encounters reveal, first, that it is a deeply social predisposition, which drives people to seek contact, namely, the need of the other for the construction of the self, for “self-knowledge.” Second, despite the difficulties and misunderstandings that intercultural encounter necessarily entails, intercultural dialogue is possible through, for instance, the “experience of co-suffering” exemplified by C.F. Andrews in India and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Spanish America.39 Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic, too, insists that a serious cultural approach needs to start with the assumption of already cultured actors. Cultural systems, state systems

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 35

The Power of Culture

35

and civilizations, she suggests, are created over time and can most fruitfully be studied in “recorded social memory or writings of history.”40 Similarly, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach start out with the analysis of a whole array of historical polities and demonstrate that the Westphalian model of the state—characterized by clearly defined boundaries, territory, and government based on the monopoly of the legitimate use of force—does not represent the norm; rather, an alternative model of overlapping, layered, and interacting polities captures the world history of international relations much better.41 Although these authors start with the study of concrete historical cases, their conclusions are, in fact, directed at redefining the state of nature. When Inayatullah and Blaney argue that deeply social motivations drive actors to seek each other out, they attempt to replace Waltz’s “antisocial motivations” with “social motivations” in the state of nature. The same is true of their claim that cooperation across cultures may be possible on the basis of “co-suffering.” Whereas Realists make an ontological assumption about the state of nature and draw substantive conclusions from it, Inayatullah and Blaney take substantive conclusions from two historical case studies and read those back into the state of nature. And, indeed, something very similar is happening in the case of Pasic and Ferguson and Mansbach. Although the authors insist on the specificity of cultural actors and concrete historical analysis, their conclusions are curiously ahistorical and, indeed, acultural. For Pasic, “the contemporary disintegration of states highlights the return of older civilizational claims” and the expression of political argument in “notions of community such as civilization, nation, and ethnic group continues to dominate politics as it always has.”42 And Ferguson and Mansbach, who define the task of international relations as “understand[ing] the sources and consequences of political change,” come to the conclusion that “there are always trends toward larger political groupings along with the fracturing of existing polities.”43 Thus, instead of any insight into cultures, we are confronted with abstract notions such as civilizations and polities, general processes of change characterized as constant “returns,” “enlargements,” and “fracturings.” In all these cases, the authors succumb to the pull of “nature.” To invalidate the substantive claims made by traditional approaches based on a state of nature, they generate historical information that is then abstracted from its cultural and historical specificity and generalized in order to replace the traditional understanding of the “nature” of human beings and/or of the international system with an alternative “nature.”

Conclusion: The Power of Culture in International Relations This is what embraces the power of Western culture: the claim that the state of nature existed empirically allowed the social sciences to emancipate themselves from religion. Henceforth they were to be based on empirical studies; empirical studies of the nature of human beings, thus revealing natural laws, in accordance with which, in turn, society had to be organized. In an attempt to free themselves from ideologi-

01-Jahn

3/27/03

36

2:31 PM

Page 36

Beate Jahn

cal, political, and religious influences, the social sciences replaced the traditional moral and political sciences. Hence, as Max Weber has pointed out in “Science as a Vocation,” and Tzvetan Todorov reminds us today, the goal of the social sciences is “truth, not good.” Truth, of course, only in the limited and preliminary sense of producing hypotheses, which are subsequently questioned, refined, replaced. But even if scientific statements could be shown to be true, they would still not lead to ethics or define political goals. Whether and how human beings use their “knowledge” about the world depends on a political and moral decision, which is in no way dictated by the “facts” themselves. 44 Thus, the drive to “naturalize” scientific findings must be understood as an attempt to fill the moral vacuum of a scientific culture, a nostalgia for the time in which nature, reason, and morality were identified. But this implies the dismissal of moral responsibility. Once naturalized, our findings seem to relieve us of making moral and political decisions by implying a necessary course of action. The power of this original belief in the unity of nature, reason, and morality— embedded in the concept of the state of nature—more than substantive assumptions about its social or antisocial characteristics, inspires contemporary international relations scholars to argue on the basis of nature, even as they deliberately set out to demolish this very concept. This particular level of our cultural identity encourages Wendt to maintain the concept of the state of nature while arguing simultaneously that actors are socially constructed. The same is true, just in reverse order, of the historical approaches which set out with concrete cultures only to end up with an alternative definition of the state of nature. The demand to produce general statements— statements which are true across time and space, statements ultimately based on nature—prevents metatheoretical debates and deconstructionism from engaging in the very activity they rightly identify as the road to understanding the ambivalent role of culture in International Relations. This also explains the endless production of abstractions, for abstractions allow generalizations while at the same time, by definition, precluding the concrete, the particular—culture. But ontological assumptions cannot be proven or disproved—their function is simply to provide a necessary starting point for our analyses; they define the framework, the limits, within which these analyses are valid.45 More importantly, these ontological assumptions have to be empirically tested. Hence, it appears that we have to give up the concept of the state of nature. The empirical evidence produced at the time of its modern reinterpretation—the Amerindian communities—does not stand up to scrutiny. To the best of my knowledge, we have no evidence of human beings in the state of nature. On the contrary, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out years ago, the biological precursors of human beings engaged in cultural activity a million years before biological humans came into being, suggesting that the human being may indeed be a product of culture. But even though all human beings have in common that they are products as well as producers of culture, this potential is realized in specific and not in general ways. Our empirical studies have to be specific rather than general, concrete rather than abstract. And, finally, we cannot derive ethico-political goals

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 37

The Power of Culture

37

from these empirical studies. These limitations should not discourage us, though, for “it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something.”46

Notes *

I would like to thank Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher for the invitation to write this essay and for the organization of the conference on Culture and International Relations at Wittenberg in December 1999. My thanks also go to all the participants for the stimulating papers they gave, for the intensive discussions, for their constructive criticisms, and, not least, their thoroughly enjoyable company. I am also grateful for the lively engagement and good suggestions I received from Georg Sørensen and the audience at the ISA panel in Los Angeles at which this essay was presented.

1. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996). 2. Friedrich Kratochwil, “Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?” in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 203. 3. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: McGraw-Hill,1993), 333; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 8; Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 227f; idem, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 113. 4. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 342f. 5. Stanley Hoffman, Duties beyond Borders (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 19. 6. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 155. 7. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 19, 36f, 67 n; Waltz, Man, the State and War, 4f, 182f; Bull, The Anarchical Society, 7. 8. Beitz, Political Theory, 141; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (1983): 217, and 4 (1983): 324, 351; Hoffman, Duties beyond Borders, 37. 9. Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the Indies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 8, 68; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 32, 37; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 52; Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 250ff.; Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 40, 125; Olive Patricia Dickason, “Old World Law, New World Peoples, and Concepts of Sovereignty,” in Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration, ed. Stanley Palmer and Dennis Reinhartz (Arlington: Texas A+M University Press, 1988), 54ff.; Peter Mason, Deconstructing America—Representation of the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 130ff.; Jean Pierre Sánchez, “Myths and Legends in the Old World and European Expansionism on the American Continent,” in The Classical Tradition and the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Reinhold Meyer (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 216f.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

38

2:31 PM

Page 38

Beate Jahn

10. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, “On the Indians,” in Culture and Belief in Europe 1450-1600, ed. David Englander, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day, and W.R. Owens (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 321; Vitoria, Political Writings, 240ff.; Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Selection of His Writings, ed. George Sanderlin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 144ff.; Beate Jahn, “IR and the State of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling Ideology,” Review of International Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 414; idem, The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 51-71; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 16ff. 11. Las Casas, History of the Indies, 278; Las Casas, Selection, 201f; Vitoria, Political Writings, 250; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 100. 12. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 182f.; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1994), vol. 1, 22; Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: Hafner Press, 1994), 310; JeanJacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 44. 13. Samuel von Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), xf. 14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 85; Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 103f. 15. Pufendorf, De Officio Hominis, 103, 19; Rousseau, The Social Contract, 57, 71ff., 90-99; Locke, Two Treatises, 280f., 296, 299, 302; Abbé Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), vol. 3, 404; Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (Philadelphia: Johnson and Co., 1863), 97f. 16. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 23. 17. Ibid, 290f.; Rousseau, The Social Contract, 240; Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, vol. 6, 113. 18. Jahn, The Cultural Construction, 132-149. 19. Jahn, “IR and the State of Nature,” 428-431. 20. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 7, 10. 21. Alexander Wendt “Identity and Structural Change in International Politics,” in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 62. 22. Alexander Wendt “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (1992): 404f. 23. Wendt, “Identity,” 48. 24. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 259-312. 25. Wendt “Identity,” 56, 58. 26. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 48. 27. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, “Revisiting the ‘National’: Towards an Identity Agenda in Neorealism?” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity,107. 28. Kratochwil, “Ship of Culture,” 203. 29. Yosef Lapid, “Culture’s Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 6, 9. 30. Rob Walker, “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations,” in Culture and International Relations, ed. Jongsuk Chay (New York: Praeger, 1990), 11. 31. Kratochwil, “Ship of Culture,” 211f., 220. 32. Walker, “Concept of Culture,” 12. 33. Ibid, 12f. 34. David Campbell, “Violent Performances: Identity, Sovereignty, Responsibility,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity,178, 165. 35. Campbell, “Violent Performances,” 174. 36. Ibid, 177-178.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 39

The Power of Culture

39

37. Friedrich Kratochwil, “Citizenship: On the Border of Order,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 196f. 38. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney, “Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 67, 73, 81. 39. Inayatullah and Blaney, “Knowing Encounters,” 81, 78f. 40. Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic, “Culturing International Relations Theory: A Call for Extension,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 86, 100-102. 41. Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach, “The Past as Prelude to the Future? Identities and Loyalties in Global Politics,” in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 32-35. 42. Pasic, “Culturing International Relations Theory,” 102 (emphasis mine). 43. Ferguson and Mansbach “The Past as Prelude to the Future?” 43 (emphasis mine). 44. Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), ix, x, xv. 45. Beate Jahn, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest Edition of Liberal Idealism,” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 613-641. 46. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 47, 52, 20.

Bibliography Beitz, Charles R. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Chay, Jongsuk, ed. Culture and International Relations. New York: Praeger, 1990. Campbell, David. “Violent Performances: Identity, Sovereignty, Responsibility.” In The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, 163-180. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996. Canning, Joseph. A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450. London: Routledge, 1996. Dickason, Olive Patricia. “Old World Law, New World Peoples, and Concepts of Sovereignty.” In Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration, ed. Stanley Palmer and Dennis Reinhartz, 52-78. Arlington, Tex.: Texas A+M University Press, 1988. Doyle, Michael W. “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” Philosophy and Public Affairs: 12, nos. 3 and 4 (1983): 205-235, 323-353. Englander, David, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day, and W.R. Owens, eds. Culture and Belief in Europe, 1450-1600: An Anthology of Sources. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Ferguson, Yale H., and Richard W. Mansbach. “The Past as Prelude to the Future? Identities and Loyalties in Global Politics.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 21-44. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press, 1993. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge, 1948.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

40

2:31 PM

Page 40

Beate Jahn

Haase, Wolfgang, and Reinhold Meyer, eds. The Classical Tradition and the Americas. Vol. 1, European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Hanke, Lewis. All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hoffman, Stanley. Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981. Inayatullah, Naeem, and David L. Blaney. “Knowing Encounters: Beyond Parochialism in International Relations Theory.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 65-84. Jahn, Beate. The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. _____. “IR and the State of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling Ideology.” Review of International Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 411-434. _____. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest Edition of Liberal Idealism.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 613-641. Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Keohane, Robert. “Ideas Part-Way Down.” Review of International Studies 26 (2000): 125-130. Kratochwil, Friedrich. “Citizenship: On the Border of Order.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 181-197. _____. “Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 201-222. Lapid, Yosef. “Culture’s Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 3-20. Lapid, Yosef, and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds. The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996. _____. “Revisiting the ‘National’: Towards an Identity Agenda in Neorealism?” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 105-126. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. History of the Indies. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. _____. A Selection of His Writings. Ed. George Sanderlin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Mason, Peter. Deconstructing America - Representation of the Other. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Montesquieu, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws. New York: Hafner Press, 1949. Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Revised by Kenneth W. Thompson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Pagden, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1993. _____. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 41

The Power of Culture

41

Palmer, Stanley H., and Dennis Reinhartz, eds. Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration. Arlington, Tex.: Texas A+M University Press, 1988. Pasic, Sujata Chakrabarti. “Culturing International Relations Theory: A Call for Extension.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 85-104. Pufendorf, Samuel von. De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1927. Raynal, Abbé. Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. New York: Negro University Press, 1969. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourses. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. Sánchez, Jean Pierre. “Myths and Legends in the Old World and European Expansionism on the American Continent.” In Haase and Meyer, The Classical Tradition, 189-240. Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. “On the Indians.” In Englander et al., Culture and Belief in Europe, 321-323. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 2 vols. London: David Campbell Publishers, 1994. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Morals of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Vattel, Emmerich de. The Law of Nations or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. Philadelphia: Johnson and Co., 1863. Vitoria, Francisco de. Political Writings. Ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Walker, Rob. “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations.” In Chay, Culture and International Relations, 3-17. Waltz, Kenneth. Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. _____. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 129-156. Wendt, Alexander. “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.” International Organization 46 (1992): 395-421. _____. “Identity and Structural Change in International Politics.” In Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, 47-64. _____. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

01-Jahn

3/27/03

2:31 PM

Page 42

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 43

Part II

CULTURE AND THE STATE

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 44

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 45

Chapter 2

THE GREAT DERBY RACE Strategies of Cultural Representation at Nineteenth-Century World Exhibitions* Wolfram Kaiser

O f the first world exhibition in London in 1851, the English newspaper The Times wrote: “After ages of mutual alienation and distrust, we this day witness a ceremonial and a work which … may be called the act of all mankind.… Happily that act is an act of peace, of love, and of religion.”1 The satirical magazine Punch was more scathing in its comments on the exhibition. One cartoon presented it as “the great derby race for 1851.” In front of a large crowd of spectators assembled around the Crystal Palace, representatives of all nations scrambled in wild panic toward the finishing line.2 Exaggerated as they may be, these two images of the Times and Punch put in a nutshell two central functions of the world exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first is the representation of the world in a village, creating a global public space for the limited time span of the exhibitions. Not only did the exhibition organizers try to assemble raw materials, processed industrial goods and works of art from most nations and cultures from all continents; increasingly, they also included political ideas and social practices. Thus, the exhibitions focused public attention, particularly, although not exclusively, in the more industrialized countries, and they facilitated the transfer of knowledge and ideas. They were disseminated through the actual visiting of the exhibitions (the number of sold tickets rising from six million in 1851 to fifty million in Paris in 1900). They were also spread through extensive media coverage at a time of rapidly growing literacy and rising circulation figures of newspapers and journals. The second function of the world exhibitions was to provide a unique forum for states to fill this global public space with meaning. They participated in the global “derby race” for economic modernity, social equilibrium, and political stability. States Notes for this section begin on page 55.

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

46

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 46

Wolfram Kaiser

were not always represented by one rider on one horse. Their cultural representations also reflected different interests and concepts competing in the domestic spheres. Those countries whose governments controlled and subsidized the national display at the exhibitions, as was generally true for the French Second Empire and the Third Republic, were more cohesive actors. Where the exhibitions were organized at the local city level and mostly privately financed, as in the case of the American exhibitions, that was much less the case. States represented through official or semiofficial committees were not the only actors. Transnational social and political groups, such as the women’s movement and trade unions, also increasingly tried to occupy sectors of the global public space created by the exhibitions, and they thus contributed to the horizontal structuring of a slowly emerging “world society,” as opposed to vertical national hierarchies. Nonetheless, states were sufficiently cohesive and dominant at the world exhibitions, not least through the national pavilions that became a permanent feature from 1878, to justify the exemplary concentration on their role in the construction and configuration of the global public spaces of the world exhibitions. I will first discuss the main international goals that states pursued with their cultural representations. These were the creation of a favorable national image abroad, the formation or strengthening of national and ideological alliances, and the setting of international or domestic agendas and the facilitating of culture transfer. I will then analyze the various means that states employed to achieve these goals. Those ranged from the way in which the exhibitions were structured, to the exhibition architecture, material exhibits and human representations, state visits and other international exchanges linked with the exhibitions, and their official boycott.

Goals of Cultural Representation The creation of a favorable national image abroad was particularly important to those states that were diplomatically isolated within the Atlantic industrialized world, and to independent non-European states that sought to be co-opted into it. The first category includes France, where the governments used the Paris exhibitions of 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900 to consolidate the political regimes of the Second Empire and then of the Third Republic.3 Closely intertwined with this primary domestic political function was the attempt to project a particular national image in competition with other countries: mainly with Britain in 1855 and 1867, and with Germany at the time of the Third Republic. If Britain was more advanced in industrial production, then France had better quality goods and superior taste. If the Germans after 1870-1871 were a mightier military power, then the French were the more educated, civilized, and politically advanced nation. After the opening of the 1878 exhibition, an anonymous reader recalled in a letter to the editor published in the Republican newspaper La France how he had once “bought a flag to celebrate the putative [French] victory in the battle of Forbach [in the Franco-German war].” He

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 47

The Great Derby Race

47

then added proudly that “after eight years of perseverance and work this very flag will serve to celebrate the great industrial battle France is waging against the rest of the world.”4 In this sense, world exhibitions were the continuation of war by other means, namely, those of cultural representation and competition. Compared to the French, the Americans generally made the least coordinated effort to project a particular national image through their contributions to foreign exhibitions. This was partly due to the absence of a centralized exhibition strategy and massive public subsidies. It also indicates a lack of reflexive intercultural competition through constant comparisons with neighboring countries. Americans were largely preoccupied with domestic issues, such as Western expansion and the Civil War. Their geographical distance to Europe, low export quota, and the United States’ commitment since 1824 to stay out of European affairs contributed to a more introspective attitude compared to European nations. As a result of this more introspective attitude, the initially unimpressive American sections did not adequately reflect the industrial development or the economic potential of the United States. The American contribution to the Crystal Palace exhibition did not at all confirm Alexis de Tocqueville’s earlier assessment of America’s strength and its potential—at least in the longer term—to dominate the world together with Russia.5 Only the Colt revolver left a lasting impression on British visitors. Otherwise, the Times concluded, the American eagle with which the eastern end of the nave was decorated, “is hovering over a set of ‘notions’ spread out very sparsely beneath him.… The American department is the prairie ground of the Exhibition, and our cousins, smart as they are, have failed to fill it. They cannot keep pace with the great strides of European industries, and even the seven-leagued boots, if they had them, would not enable them to do so for some generations to come.”6 The U.S. exposition in London in 1851 was followed by more unimpressive contributions to European world exhibitions, which were hampered in London in 1862, in Paris in 1867, and in Vienna in 1873 by the Civil War and its consequences. Thus, the symbolic entry of the United States as a great economic and political power into the global public space created by the world exhibitions was delayed until the first American exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1876. The American exhibits made an immense impression on European observers. Among many others, Franz Reuleaux, the German general commissioner, analyzed the United States section in his letters from Philadelphia which he first published in the Nationalzeitung, and then as a book.7 Reuleaux particularly praised the inventiveness and flexibility of the American entrepreneurs and the productivity of the work force.8 One American commentator rightly concluded after the close of the exhibition that it had “greatly modified public opinion abroad, and gone towards introducing more just views of us. Those who mingled much in foreign circles … know that the astonishment and wonder of our visitors from abroad at our resources and accomplishments was great and universal.”9 The most striking example for the second category of states, who sought to advance their symbolic inclusion into the Atlantic industrialized world through their

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

48

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 48

Wolfram Kaiser

contributions to subsequent world exhibitions, is Japan. The Japanese sections in 1867 and 1873 raised Europeans’ interest in Japanese history and art. After the restoration of the Meiji dynasty in 1867 and the resulting policy of economic and political modernization, the Japanese impressed European and American observers even more in Philadelphia in 1876, in Chicago in 1893, and in Paris in 1900.10 An exhibition guide commented in 1876 that “no nation has a greater promise of a grand future than this old Japan, which seems to have suddenly awakened from a sleep as dreamless as that of the ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ to a renewed youth and activity.”11 The Japanese representations were to aid the domestic modernization process. Japanese representatives and visitors could make themselves familiar with European and American customs, learn about “Western” production methods and social practices, and establish new trade contacts. But Japan also put much effort and funds into its sections. Its positive cultural perception in Europe and America legitimized and supported its policy of first safeguarding its independence from the colonial powers and then—from its war against China in 1894 and the annexation of Taiwan in 1895—of participating itself in imperial expansion. Gozo Tateno, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, explicitly called the Japanese section in Chicago in 1893 his country’s “formal introduction to the West,” designed to prove “that Japan is a country worthy of full fellowship in the family of nations.”12 Compared to the more traditional geographical term “occident,” Tateno’s reference to “the West” reflects the much clearer spatial division of the world created by colonialism. It also points to the Japanese government’s acceptance of these divisions and its attempt to instrumentalize European concepts of progress and civilization to establish Japan as a great “Western” power. By indicating a general willingness to adopt “Western” systems of production, forms of government, and elements of high culture, the Japanese contributions to the world exhibitions created a highly effective cultural shield against imperial intrusion. This becomes particularly clear when compared to China. The country was not officially represented at world exhibitions until 1904 when imperial intrusion had already taken place on a massive scale. Previously, its unofficial representations organized by Western businessmen or regional Chinese dignitaries had seemed decidedly weak compared to Japan, even in traditional Asian art. Most of all, however, China appeared as “conservative”—unwilling and unable to adopt Western “modernity”. In contrast, Japan presented itself as a highly dynamic country that was open to foreign influences. Discussing this issue in an informal interview in 1900, Tadamasa Hayashi insisted that the emperor had understood the golden rule in the age of internationalization as “immobility is death.”13 The second main goal that states pursued with the organization of world exhibitions and of national contributions to foreign exhibitions was the formation and strengthening of national or ideological alliances. The 1855 exhibition in Paris is a good example of the symbolic use of an international event to strengthen an existing national alliance, in this case between France and Britain, who were at that time fighting Russia in the Crimean war of 1853-1856. In other cases, a national rapproche-

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 49

The Great Derby Race

49

ment was at least attributed ex post to the diplomatic effects of a world exhibition, particularly in the case of the Franco-Russian treaty of 1891-1894.14 At the same time and to some extent conflicting with national alliances that were still dominating European and world politics, the French Third Republic and the United States also attempted to use their exhibitions for the symbolic formation of an ideological alliance of republics. The 1876 exhibition in Philadelphia was to commemorate American independence from monarchical Britain. The New York Herald stressed the international dimension of the American dream: “Here at Philadelphia rise monuments erected to commemorate the emancipation of a continent from bondage and the birth of a new nation, which is destined to lead the world into freedom along the way of progress and prosperity.”15 The 1889 exhibition was then organized to coincide with one hundred years of the French Revolution with its per se universal demands for freedom, equality, and brotherhood. In commenting on the decision of the United States, Switzerland, and several South American republics to participate in the 1889 exhibition, the official French bulletin suggested the need in view of the “reactionary league in Europe” to also develop “a progressive league of all republics of this world,”16 Similar language of republican solidarity was used in Washington when Congress debated the question of a state subsidy for the American sections in 1889 and 1900. Calling for federal funds, President William McKinley reminded senators and congressmen: “As it was the great desire of France at previous expositions that America should take part, so as to depict the virtues of free institutions and self-government, France is now the more anxious that America shall … stand out in emblazoned grandeur at the Exposition of 1900, again to eclipse the exhibits of the monarchical sages and thereby counteract the effect of the seeming importance and greatness of monarchical government.”17 The coordinated representation of a fundamental ideological divide in 1889 did not prevent the French Republic and Czarist Russia from going to war together in 1914. It is also true, however, that these highly politicized representations encouraged more thinking and discussion about the relationship between ideology and state diplomacy. They also created repeated shared experiences of an international community over a long time span, which decisionmakers could later draw upon to legitimate their policies—for example, in the case of the United States’ intervention in the Second World War. The exhibitions could also facilitate culture transfer.18 As two American commissioners and jury members put it in a letter thanking Prince Napoleon for organizing the 1855 Paris exhibition, it had been “a great school where all industrialists could learn lessons and find models.”19 It was a marketplace of ideas. States and governments, too, could learn lessons and find role models. Where industrialists were confronted with new technologies, more efficient production processes and changing tastes, politicians could learn about foreign formal (constitutions, laws, etc.), and informal (traditions, social practices, etc.), institutions and how they operated. Their third main goal was therefore often to set international or domestic agendas by increasing the legitimacy of certain economic, social, and political models and prac-

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

50

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 50

Wolfram Kaiser

tices through their symbolic representation within the global public space of the world exhibitions. When such models and practices were imported, they were not normally transferred in toto, but molded to fit the particular domestic socio-economic conditions and the political interests of the respective client and to guarantee its political legitimacy. The first world exhibition already was not only to prove the superiority of British industry and to open up foreign markets, but also in a more fundamental sense to disseminate the recently established free trade policy.20 The attempted export of this philosophy was recognized as such outside the host country. One French commentator observed that the exhibition was clearly intended to be “the preface to free trade,”21 as, indeed, it proved to be when the Franco-British trade treaty was signed in 1860. Another example of such an attempt to export national institutions is the policy of the German Reich to publicize its social security laws and evolving social policy in Paris in 1900 and in St. Louis in 1904. This helped to make it an important reference point for New Liberalism in Britain and progressivism in the United States.22 From the 1851 exhibition, these international events were also used to import foreign economic, social, and political models and social practices. French opponents of the policy of protectionism used the evidence of British industrial superiority in London in 1851, for example, to argue for a change in French economic policy. They included the Liberal Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, who took up the radical argument that through increasing price levels, tariffs were levied “at the expense of the poor.”23 More influential was the Saint-Simonian interpretation of the lessons taught by the Crystal Palace exhibition, which the French economist Michel Chevalier formulated in his Lettres écrites de Londres.24 Chevalier became a close advisor to Napoleon III on his policy of economic modernization and eventually negotiated the Franco-British trade treaty. By the time of the first Paris exhibition in 1855, the French organizers, including Chevalier, were already using a very similar language without as yet making explicit references to free trade or daring to challenge the well-organized protectionist interests in France. They had clearly internalized the fundamental principles of freeing trade and allowing an international division of labor. In his introduction to the official catalogue published in 1857, Prince Napoleon pointed to the finding of the Paris exhibition that trade needed to be increased. A “real industrial and commercial organization of the world” was necessary in which “each group of the great human family can develop those branches for which it is destined due to its climate, temperament and national genius.”25

Methods of Cultural Representation States and governments had different means at their disposal for pursuing their goals and conveying their messages when organizing exhibitions or national contributions. The first set of cultural agents concerned the setting of the exhibitions, particularly the way in which they were structured, and the use of architecture to underline certain

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 51

The Great Derby Race

51

concepts. In Paris in 1867, for example, the main oval building was organized in such a way that visitors could make their way around it seeing all exhibits from one country or comparing the same products from different countries. While facilitating direct comparisons, this design also suggested a basic universality that did not per se differentiate between an advanced Western industrializing world and supposedly inferior non-European cultures. In contrast, the exhibitions after 1878 still had thematic buildings, but also national pavilions and separate sections for colonial exhibits. They also included special pseudoethnological attractions, such as the famous Rue du Caire in Paris in 1889 and 1900 with belly-dancing performances and the Midway Plaisance in Chicago in 1893. These arrangements reflected a new preoccupation with the comparison between different nations and cultures at the expense of the more inclusive setting of earlier world exhibitions. Potentially at least, they could be used to create spatial divisions of the world, between inside and outside, center and periphery, which only waited to be confirmed by the actual exhibits.26 Many buildings were constructed and statutes put up in conjunction with world exhibitions to convey particular political messages in this uniquely international forum. In 1878, the former American President Ulysses Grant visited Paris, and the immense head of the future statue of liberty was exhibited which was finally erected in New York in 1886.27 In 1889, the most significant celebration of the FrancoAmerican ideological alliance was the inauguration of a smaller statue of liberty, a U.S. present, on the anniversary of the American independence (July 4). At this occasion, Sadi Carnot, the French President, and several U.S. government representatives all made elaborate references to the common revolutionary experience and tradition in their speeches.28 In 1900, the French government construed the inauguration in the presence of the new Russian Tsar, Nicolas II, of the bridge named after his father, Alexander III, the main entry point to the exhibition area, as the culmination of the Franco-Russian alliance. The second set of cultural agents were, of course, the material exhibits and the human representations in the exhibition buildings. The sheer number of exhibits was often already construed as politically meaningful. In 1889, for example, when the United States had some 1,500 exhibits in Paris, Argentina, the leading South American republic, had nearly as many with 1,473.29 Material exhibits were particularly important for proving economic modernity and national strength. The earlier world exhibitions were still dominated by finished consumer goods, such as textiles and porcelain, and certain luxury goods, like jewels, which ordinary visitors would not otherwise be able to see, unless they stole them. From the 1870s onwards, however, the machinery that now produced many of these goods and was the primary force behind economic rationalization and progress, moved to the core of the world exhibitions and became the primary measure for the state of economic development of the exhibiting states. This general trend in the exhibiting and viewing habits only served to increase the immense impression left by the United States in 1876. Without doubt, the single greatest attraction in the exhibition grounds was the Corliss engine, a steam engine designed and constructed in only nine months, which powered all

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

52

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 52

Wolfram Kaiser

other smaller engines in the machinery hall without a single technical problem during the entire six months of the exhibition.30 Yet another shift in the exhibiting and viewing habits toward the end of the century led to an increased public perception at the exhibitions of the key industries of the second industrial revolution, such as the chemical and electrical industries. This contributed to greater international awareness of Germany’s economic advances. Up until this time, the German Reich had consistently overemphasized its heavy industry, especially weapons, which served to underline its military strength.31 Krupp had already displayed the largest known canon in 1867, which was regarded as a symbolic affirmation of Prussia’s ascendancy after its 1866 victory over Austria-Hungary. These displays, which Krupp moved to special company pavilions later—for example, in Chicago in 189332—met with controversy. Not surprisingly, anxious French commentators criticized the “anomaly of exposing in the temple of peace such monsters of mass destruction” in 1867.33 In 1876, Reuleaux, too, attacked the “solely nationalist” motives behind the German representation, which he thought precluded German industry from becoming more internationally competitive.34 The world exhibitions included not only material exhibits, but later also human beings. Initially, products from the colonies were displayed as material trophies of colonial wars. One of the main attractions of the 1851 exhibitions, for example, were objects from India.35 In Paris in 1867, indigenous people from colonized countries worked in the exhibition, for example, as waiters in oriental cafes. The organizers of the later exhibitions went much further and attempted to re-create life in the colonies through the temporary construction of entire native villages filled with human beings who were specifically brought to Paris and St. Louis for this purpose. The “Other” lived in supposedly authentic houses and shops and followed a daily routine of artisan work, cooking, eating, and even religious rituals. These collective human representations have been interpreted as the systematic attempt to categorize entire peoples, so that their conquest seemed more legitimate, and even necessary, for their moral improvement. This is especially true for the American world exhibitions.36 As Paul Greenhalgh has put it, the human exhibits “lived so as to be more comparable […] to animals rather than European man. His animal state made him a fair subject for development, as one might develop crops, livestock or land.”37 But while some organizers did share such an imperialist agenda, others saw the exhibitions primarily as a commercial enterprise. Thus, Sol Bloom, who was in charge of the Midway in 1893, was completely opposed to social Darwinist ideas and became convinced by his own exhibition that an Arab who could swallow a sword represented a higher culture than Swiss farmers producing milk and chocolate.38 It would be misleading to ascribe too much coherence to the motives of the organizers and exhibitors of these human representations. Finally, state visits and other international exchanges, as well as the official boycott of exhibitions, also served states and governments as a political tool to pursue their goals. The best example of an important state visit was that by Queen Victoria to Paris during the 1855 exhibition. Enacted during the Crimean War as a celebra-

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 53

The Great Derby Race

53

tion of peaceful competition among civilized nations, it helped the French upstart emperor to gain international respectability. The state visit included all sorts of symbolic affirmations of the Franco-British alliance, including a stately procession from the railway station and visits by the Queen to the exhibition area. Unofficial visits could be interpreted to be even more significant. In 1878, for example, the Prince of Wales, who came to Paris regularly and not only for seeing the various world exhibitions there, attended the show. His visit was formally incognito, but deliberately visible and interpreted in France as an ostentatious demonstration in favor of the newly established republic. To relieved republicans, the visit showed the reservoir of common interests and goodwill that the liberal republic could share with a liberal monarchy. As the republican newspaper L’Evénement put it, Britain was really “the best of all Republics” and the British heir “perhaps the only European sovereign we can salute, without having to fear to offend him, with our cry of ‘Vive la République.’”39 In 1889, such unofficial visits also included national delegations of republicans, whom the Third Republic used to underline its conviction that the official boycott was in the interest of politically illegitimate monarchs only. In contrast, as one exhibition guide put it, “the people [everywhere in Europe] consider themselves friends of France.”40 It seems that these visits were well planned to stretch over the entire six months of the world exhibition, so that an international republican meeting with Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Swiss and others could be staged every other week. In July, for example, a Hungarian delegation laid down a wreath in the Panthéon in honor of the French writer and Republican Victor Hugo. Hungarians and the French radical minister Lockroy made speeches, then proceeded to the monument in honor of Gambetta on the Place du Carrousel. More speeches followed, and one member of the Hungarian diet elaborated at length on the supposed parallel between Gambetta and the Hungarian national hero Lajos Kossuth who was living in exile in Turin.41 The European monarchies, on the other hand, had almost all boycotted the exhibition. The German boycott decision was, of course, important.42 Bismarck still played a key role in marginalizing France in European diplomacy. But the German decision did not determine the policy of other monarchies. Their reactions were in fact spontaneously negative to the evident linkage between the exhibition and the centenary of the French Revolution, despite the fact that the French government sought to turn down its republican rhetoric in its quest to secure foreign contributions. This became obvious when the British government, already indignant at the omission of any reference to the Crystal Palace exhibition in the official report on the planned Paris exhibition, made enquiries in other European capitals about the likely responses to the French invitation. R.B.D. Morier reported from St. Petersburg that “the official invitation had been a surprise of a not altogether agreeable kind” to the Russian government.43 A. Paget wrote from Vienna that the French ambassador had been reminded in no unclear terms by Count Gustav Kálnocky for the imperial government that “the year 1889 was the centenary of the Revolution which brought an Austrian Arch-duchess to the scaffold; and who [can] tell […] whether the Parisian popula-

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

54

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 54

Wolfram Kaiser

tion, in their enthusiasm for ‘this epoch of glorious memory,’ might not imagine some demonstration which would be extremely repugnant to Austrian feeling.”44

Alternative Representations and Readings As has been shown here, world exhibitions were unique international events that created a global public space. States and governments developed specific strategies of cultural representation to fill this public space with images and messages that were not only directed at domestic audiences, but also designed to have an international reach. They thus facilitated the constitution of international discourses on everything from global national and cultural hierarchies to the best economic and political development strategies in an age of rapid internationalization, as it was still called at the time. But while states and governments were largely responsible for organizing the exhibitions and remained the main exhibitors throughout the nineteenth century, it is imperative to point out the two most important limits to their control over the public spaces thus created. The first concerns the repeated and quite successful attempts by social groups to occupy certain sectors of these public spaces. For example, women organized their own pavilions in 1876 and 1893, thus projecting common transnational emancipatory interests that bridged traditional national divides.45 Workers, too, used the exhibitions to exchange ideas and forge transnational contacts, and it is only logical that the exhibitions of 1862 and 1889 played an important role in the formation of the first and second Socialist internationals.46 The second limit concerns the crucial question, outside the remit of this chapter, whether and to what extent the governmental strategies of representation were actually successful. It must suffice here to raise some doubts concerning their ultimate efficiency. The traditional imperialist interpretation of the human representations, for example, does not take account of the cultural exchange at the world exhibitions, which was not one-sided.47 If one analyzes the actual intercultural communication at the exhibitions, it immediately becomes clear that the visitors could and often did “read” the message of cultural inferiority of colonial peoples very differently. Newspaper articles describing the daily experiences of ordinary visitors in the exhibition grounds regularly professed surprise at the intelligence and friendliness of the indigenous people from colonized countries. And European and American visitors were also confronted with the fact that these people often did not admire “Western” culture and fashion, but actually regarded much of it as bizarre and even inferior.48 It is also doubtful whether the cultural projection of a particular national image always had the desired effect. British liberal commentators regularly sneered at the attempts by Napoleon III to instrumentalize the Paris exhibitions to present himself as “the exponent, and symbol, and representative, and impersonation, not only of harmony, but order itself.… France, with all the inconveniences of liberty, open speech, free thought, and a free press carefully guarded against, … does it not represent a people at the very acme of material, moral, and intellectual well-being?” the Saturday

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 55

The Great Derby Race

55

Review asked ironically.49 At the same time, domestic opponents of the Third Republic questioned whether it could impress the Germans with the organization of exhibitions. One commentator remarked after the opening of the 1878 exhibition, which only included a small German exhibition of paintings: “How naive [the republican politician] Gambetta is! Bismarck has taken Alsace and Lorraine, but Gambetta thinks he is well punished because he sees no toys from Nuremberg in the show-cases in the Champ-de-Mars.”50

Notes *

I would like to thank the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (P14427-HIS / M. Gehler) for supporting my research in the history of the world exhibitions.

1. “Till this day.…,” The Times, 1 May 1851, 4. 2. “The Great Derby Race for Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-One,” Punch 20 (1851): 208. 3. Wolfram Kaiser, “Vive la France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855-1900,” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 227244. 4. “Mercredi, 1er mai, fête de la civilisation, Paris pavoisé et illuminé,” La France, 30 April 1878. 5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988); French orig. ed., 1835-1840. 6. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times, 15 May 1851, 5. 7. Franz Reuleaux, Briefe aus Philadelphia (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1877). 8. See also Wolfram Kaiser, “Die Welt im Dorf. Weltausstellungen von London 1851 bis Hannover 2000,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 22/23 (2000): 3-10. Reuleaux was quickly recalled as general commissioner. 9. James D. McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: The National Publishing Company, 1876), 854. 10. On the Japanese representations at American world exhibitions, see also Neil Harris, “All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876-1904,” in Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1876), 24-54. 11. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876: What We Saw, and How We Saw It (Philadelphia: S.T. Souder and Co., 1876), 30. 12. Quoted in Eric Sandweiss, “Around the World in a Day: International Participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Illinois Historical Journal 84 (1991): 2-14, 9. 13. Quoted in Adolphe Brisson, Scènes et Types de l’Exposition (Paris: Montgredien, 1901), 36. 14. The second son of Tsar Alexander III had visited the 1889 exhibition incognito, despite its official boycott by Russia; see also Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, “Les grandes puissances devant l’Exposition universelle de 1889,” Le Mouvement social 149 (1989), 15-24. 15. “The Exhibition,” New York Herald, 15 May 1876. 16. “Les Etats-Unis à l’Exposition,” Bulletin Officiel de l’Exposition Universelle de 1889, 17 March 1888. 17. Message from the President of the United States Transmitting a Report of the Special Commissioner to the Paris Exposition of 1900 (Washington: n.p., 1897), 74.

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

56

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 56

Wolfram Kaiser

18. For the concept of culture transfer, which has so far only been applied to bilateral (cultural) relations, see the introductions to Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann and Willibald Steinmetz, eds., Aneignung und Abwehr. Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998); Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch. Deutschland/Frankreich 1770-1815 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997). 19. William Valentine and Charles L. Fleischmann to Prince Napoleon, 14 November 1855, Archives Nationales (AN), 400 AP 126. 20. By way of introduction, see also John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (London: Sutton, 1999); Utz Haltern, Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851 (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1971). 21. Alexis de Valon, “Tour du monde à l’Exposition de Londres,” Revue des Deux Mondes 21, no. 11 (1851): 193-228, 201. 22. Cf. David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1913), 331-342; see also Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998). 23. Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, Lettres sur l’Exposition universelle de Londres (Paris: Capelle, 1851), 12. 24. Michel Chevalier, L’Exposition universelle de Londres considerée sous les rapports philosophique, technique, commercial et administratif au point de vue français (Paris: L. Mathias, 1851). 25. Prince Napoleon [Napoléon-Joseph-Charles-Paul Bonaparte], Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1857), 130. 26. See, in relation to European representations of Egypt, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 27. “L’Exposition Pittoresque,” Les Droits de l’homme, 13 May 1878. See also Bertrand Lemoine, La Statue de la Liberté / The Statue of Liberty (Brussels: Mardaga, 1986), 109. 28. X. Paoletti, ed., Discours de M. Emile Chautemps, Président du Conseil Municipal de Paris de février à novembre 1889 (Paris: A. Hennuyer, 1890), no. 6. See also Catherine Hodeir, “En route pour le pavillon américain!” Le Mouvement social 149 (1989): 89-98. 29. Cf. C. de Varigny, “L’Amérique à l’Exposition universelle,” Revue des Deux Mondes 59, no. 95 (1889): 837-866, 838; Pauline Raquillet, “L’Amérique du sud à l’Exposition universelle de 1889,” Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin 3 (1997): 9-35, 14. 30. See, for example, McCabe, Illustrated History, 439. 31. As an introduction to the German representations, see Eckhardt Fuchs, “Das Deutsche Reich auf den Weltausstellungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Comparativ 9, no. 5-6 (1999): 61-88. 32. For a photo of the Krupp pavilion, see James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair photographed (Chicago: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893), no page numbers. 33. Pierre Aymar-Bression, Histoire générale de l’Exposition universelle de 1867: France et Puissances Étrangères (Paris: Impr. de Claye, 1868), 105. 34. Reuleaux, Briefe, 3. 35. Cf. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988), 52-64. 36. See, in particular, Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984). 37. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 84. 38. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 82. 39. “Les hôtes de la République,” L’Evénement, 4 May 1878. 40. Camille Debans, Les Coulisses de l’Exposition: Guide Pratique et anecdotique avec dessins, plans, cartes, etc., etc. (Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1889), 276. 41. Les Hongrois à Paris, Bulletin Officiel de l’Exposition Universelle de 1889, 13 July 1889. 42. On the German boycott policy, see in greater detail Heinz-Alfred Pohl, “Die Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert und die Nichtbeteiligung Deutschlands in den Jahren 1878 und 1889: Zum Problem der Ideologisierung der außenpolitischen Beziehungen in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhun-

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 57

The Great Derby Race

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

57

derts,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 97, no. 3-4 (1989): 381-425. R.B.D. Morier (St. Petersburg) to Marquis of Salisbury, 30 March 1887, PRO FO 425/153. A. Paget (Vienna) to Marquis of Salisbury, 31 March 1887, PRO FO 425/153. See also Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building (Chicago: Academy Press, 1981). See, by way of introduction, Jacques Rancière and Jacques Vauday, “En allant à l’Exposition: l’ouvrier, sa femme et les machines,” Les Révoltes logiques 1 (1975): 5-22; James Joll, The Second International 1889-1914, 2nd and rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). See also Jürgen Osterhammel, “Internationale Geschichte, Globalisierung und die Pluralität der Kulturen,” in Internationale Geschichte. Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 387-408. For a wonderful description of the repeated intercultural encounters of a Singhalese lady and American and European ladies in an Indian teahouse in 1893 and their respective views on corsetts and nose jewels see The City of Palaces: A Magnificent Showing of the Wonders of the World’s Fair (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1894), 47. “The new order of merit,” Saturday Review, 29 September 1866. Le Monde, 4 May 1878.

Bibliography Aymar-Bression, Pierre. Histoire générale de l’Exposition universelle de 1867: France et Puissances Étrangères. Paris: Impr. de Claye, 1868. Blanqui, Adolphe-Jérôme. Lettres sur l’Exposition universelle de Londres. Paris: Capelle, 1851. Brisson, Adolphe. Scènes et Types de l’Exposition. Paris: Montgredien, 1901. Chevalier, Michel. L’Exposition universelle de Londres considerée sous les rapports philosophique, technique, commercial et administratif au point de vue français. Paris: L. Mathias, 1851. Davis, John R. The Great Exhibition. London: Sutton, 1999. Debans, Camille. Les Coulisses de l’Exposition. Guide Pratique et anecdotique avec dessins, plans, cartes, etc., etc. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1889. Francis, David R. The Universal Exposition of 1904. St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1913. Fuchs, Eckhardt. “Das Deutsche Reich auf den Weltausstellungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Comparativ 9, no. 5-6 (1999): 61-88. Gilbert, James. Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988. Haltern, Utz. Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851. Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1971.

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

58

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 58

Wolfram Kaiser

Harris, Neil. “All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876-1904.” In Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations, ed. Akira Iriye, 24-54. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Hodeir, Catherine. “En route pour le pavillon américain!” Le Mouvement social 149 (1989): 89-98. Joll, James. The Second International 1889-1914. 2nd and revised edition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Kaiser, Wolfram. “Die Welt im Dorf: Weltausstellungen von London 1851 bis Hannover 2000.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 22/23 (2000): 3-10. _____. “Vive la France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855-1900.” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 227-244. Lemoine, Bertrand. La Statue de la Liberté / The Statue of Liberty. Brussels: Mardaga, 1986. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, and Rolf Reichardt, eds. Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch. Deutschland/Frankreich 1770-1815. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. McCabe, James D. The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition. Philadelphia: The National Publishing Company, 1876. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Muhs, Rudolf, Johannes Paulmann, and Willibald Steinmetz, eds. Aneignung und Abwehr: Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert. Bodenheim: Philo, 1998. Napoleon, Prince [Napoléon-Joseph-Charles-Paul Bonaparte]. Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1855. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1857. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Internationale Geschichte, Globalisierung und die Pluralität der Kulturen.” In Internationale Geschichte. Themen—Ergebnisse – Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel, 387-408. Munich: Akademie-Verlag, 2000. Paoletti, X. ed. Discours de M. Emile Chautemps, Président du Conseil Municipal de Paris de février à novembre 1889. Paris: A. Hennuyer, 1890. Pohl, Heinz-Alfred. „Die Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert und die Nichtbeteiligung Deutschlands in den Jahren 1878 und 1889: Zum Problem der Ideologisierung der außenpolitischen Beziehungen in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts.“ Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 97, no. 3-4 (1989): 381-425. Rancière, Jacques and Jacques Vauday. “En allant à l’Exposition: l’ouvrier, sa femme et les machines.” Les Révoltes logiques 1 (1975): 5-22. Raquillet, Pauline. “L’Amérique du sud à l’Exposition Universelle de 1889.“ Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin 3 (1997): 9-35, 14. Reuleaux, Franz. Briefe aus Philadelphia. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1877. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984. Sandweiss, Eric. “Around the World in a Day: International Participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Illinois Historical Journal 84 (1991): 2-14.

02-Kaiser-Pt.II

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 59

The Great Derby Race

59

Schroeder-Gudehus, Brigitte. “Les grandes puissances devant l’Exposition universelle de 1889.” Le Mouvement social 149 (1989): 15-24. Shepp, James W., and Daniel B. Shepp. Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed. Chicago: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: HarperPerennial, 1988; French original ed., 1835-1840. Valon, Alexis de. “Tour du monde à l’Exposition de Londres.” Revue des Deux Mondes 21, no. 11 (1851): 193-228. Varigny, C. de. “L’Amérique à l’Exposition universelle.” Revue des Deux Mondes 59, no. 95 (1889): 837-866. Weimann, Jeanne Madeline. The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building. Chicago: Academy Press, 1981.

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 60

Chapter 3

MANLINESS AND “REALISM” The Use of Gendered Tropes in the Debates on the Philippine-American and on the Vietnam War Fabian Hilfrich

Soon LBJ was waving his arms and fulminating about his war. Who the hell was Ho Chi Minh, anyway, that he thought he could push America around? Then the President did an astonishing thing; he unzipped his trousers, dangled a given appendage, and asked his shocked associates: ‘Has Ho Chi Minh got anything like that?’1

Was this outburst by Lyndon Johnson just one of the most drastic examples of the Texan’s brusque and vulgar style? Or did the president’s idiosyncratic use of gender stereotypes indicate a more important pattern of thought that may even have had an impact on the formulation of U.S. policies in Vietnam? In this essay, I will argue that the use of gender stereotypes, particularly of certain ideals of masculinity, did have a measurable influence, if not on policy making, then at least on the acrimonious debate that accompanied America’s war in Vietnam. By enlarging the scope of the inquiry to the imperialism debate at the turn of the century, I will also demonstrate that gender stereotypes have a more enduring place in the history of American foreign relations. At the same time, categories already derived from research into the imperialism debate increase the sensitivity toward similar stereotypes, but also toward changes in the 1960s.2 Skeptical historians still doubt the usefulness of cultural categories—of which gender undoubtedly is a very apt example—for the study of U.S. diplomatic history. With some justification, they point out that the mere detection of cultural stereotypes in rhetoric does not explain their influence. In the first place, however, this complaint could be lodged against any type of analysis that is concerned with discourse or rhetoric because the link between “words” and policies is always difficult to reconstruct. Nevertheless, as Michael Hunt and others have pointed out, the rhetoric of Notes for this section begin on page 73.

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 61

Gendered Tropes

61

policymakers has to reflect the cultural values of the society at large if it is to achieve its purpose. In this sense, the rhetoric of policy-makers provides an insight into the values of the society at large, as well as into policymakers’ motives and intentions. More than simply detecting cultural stereotypes, this “microstudy” illustrates that gendered rhetoric did not merely “seep” into the speeches of the “interventionists”— those who favored the annexation of the Philippines in the 1890s and those who supported the Vietnam War—as a reflection of commonly held cultural attitudes. Instead, it constituted an integral part of their argumentative strategies and possibly even of their worldview. Above all, positive images of manliness served an important political purpose in the domestic debates on both foreign policy ventures. By connecting the latter to various character traits and modes of conduct commonly associated with masculinity, the interventionists basically defined both the annexation of the Philippines and the war in Vietnam as “manly” endeavors, as the choices that a “normal” man would make. By the same token, they disparaged their respective domestic opponents as cowardly and effeminate, thereby raising doubts about the critics’ real motives and the overall integrity of their arguments. These were emotional, rather than rational argumentative strategies, designed to evoke an instinctive instead of a reflective loyalty to the policies that were being pursued and to obscure the substantive issues that were at stake in both debates. Once the nation was engaged in war, the interventionists were saying, all debate should cease, and every “real” man had to devote himself solely to the war effort because only a unified nation, manly and unscared in its disposition, could win the contest. Since imperialists and proponents of the intervention in Vietnam thus basically turned the wars into tests of American manhood, they also effected a pervasive “internalization” of both conflicts, creating the impression that they had to be won at home, rather than abroad. Finally, the subtle or overt association of male nature with war supported a view of both interventions as virtually inescapable and almost “natural.” Since I focus on the uses of “masculine discourse,” I cannot and do not want to provide excessive background information on the understanding of and the cultural changes in the concept of manliness that occurred between both debates. Nevertheless, my study illustrates that by focusing on how “masculinity” was employed in both decades, we can gain an insight into how the concept was defined and what positive traits were associated with it in each decade. Since the days of the Enlightenment, “manliness” or “masculinity” was a composite stereotype of certain, sometimes contradictory, physical and psychological traits. A man was supposed to combine physical with mental strength, he was aggressive and powerful, but restrained at the same time, able to control instinctive impulses such as sexual appetite, fear, and laziness.3 In different cultures and at different times, some aspects of this volatile mixture were emphasized to the detriment of others. This is precisely what we see in the comparison between the imperialism and the Vietnam War debates. At the turn of the century, the interventionists propagated a combative and deeply emotional understanding of masculinity, which emphasized

03-Hilfrich

62

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 62

Fabian Hilfrich

aggressiveness and the existence of racial instincts that were presumably irresistible. The imperialists furthermore interpreted struggle and war as welcome, even indispensable, means to form a man’s character.4 While the purpose of appeals to manly behavior remained very much the same in the 1960s, the precise contents of the concept had changed. Interventionists in the 1960s enriched the discourse by rephrasing manliness as foreign policy “realism,” a supposedly hard-nosed and dispassionately analytical theory. Man was recast as a rational and unsentimental thinker who concentrated on the “facts,” rather than on utopian wishes. As indicated above, this ideal of man as being guided by reason instead of passion was also part of the Romanticera creation of the masculine stereotype. What makes the two debates even more comparable is that both events, the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, as well as the Vietnam War, were preceded by developments that many Americans experienced as “crises of masculinity.” During both periods, some of the basic tenets of the cultural construct seemed to be under attack. This was particularly pronounced in the 1890s when commentators deplored that society had become preoccupied by the supposedly materialist and decadent mood of the Gilded Age, and that, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, a once vibrant and virile society was in danger of becoming “overcivilized,” ossified, and unmanly. Due to women’s increasing involvement in public issues such as prohibition, arbitration, and women’s suffrage, men also felt increasingly beleaguered in their once exclusive domain of politics. They searched for possibilities to reinforce the nexus between military service and politics that had traditionally legitimized the exclusion of women from that realm.5 In the wake of the Sputnik shock in the late 1950s, many Americans once again feared that their nation had grown “soft” in the postwar years of plenty. Anti-communist liberals attacked the Eisenhower administration as being too complacent toward the communist challenge, and American democracy itself seemed threatened if its citizens and leadership lacked the will and determination to stand fast in the global competition with communism. An almost frantic debate about the “national purpose” ensued, which contributed in no small measure to the success of John F. Kennedy in the elections of 1960. Even physically, the young and energetic president personified a new beginning and a renewed vigor for American society, and the public seemed only too willing to oblige the new president when he called for individual and collective sacrifice for the nation.6 Against this background, the advocates of a combative masculinity in the 1890s already hailed the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to revitalize (male) American society and to provide an antidote to the perceived complacency and effeminacy of the Gilded Age. Significantly, those who favored war could not resist polemicizing against the “materialism” of the business community, which had a reputation for opposing war for fear of losing its assets abroad. Finally, so their thinking went, there was a noble cause, for which men could readily sacrifice their petty and selfish day-to-day concerns, and even their lives.7 Hundreds of thousands enthusiastically followed the call to arms. Soon, the view of war as a positive and liberating experi-

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 63

Gendered Tropes

63

ence for men drowned out the calls of those who warned their compatriots not to forget the humanitarian purpose, the relief of the Cubans, with which the United States had originally legitimized its war against Spain.8 In the wake of this conflict, Theodore Roosevelt, arguably one of the most vigorous proponents of this masculine ideology, explained that war had “once again call[ed] forth ‘the best’ in the American people” (read: American men), namely, their fighting capabilities and the spirit of sacrifice for the common good.9 More than simply bringing out the best in men, Roosevelt argued in his theory of “the strenuous life,” struggle and strife, irrespective of why an individual might engage in them, were the inescapable realities of a social Darwinist world environment. This law not only applied to the individual, but also to the nation: [T]he nation, like the individual, which is going to do anything in the world must face the fact, that in order to do it, it must work and may have to fight.… The law of worthy national life, like the law of worthy individual life, is, after all, fundamentally, the law of strife. It may be strife military, it may be strife civic; but certain in it is that only through strife, through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and by resolute courage, we move on to better things.10

Men had to realize that nothing could be achieved without sacrifice and toil. Significantly, this passage does not speak about the precise goals, the substance, for which an individual or a nation should fight; it merely addresses the form of attaining one’s objectives. Struggle and war were defined as “worthy,” as values and as goals in themselves because, presumably, they enhanced a man’s character and masculinity. In this regard, we can observe how a combative manliness came to be understood as a value in itself, and we begin to understand why an appeal to its tenets could argumentatively supersede potentially controversial substantive issues. In fact, Roosevelt’s career illustrates the ascendancy of this particular type of masculinity. Ironically, when he first entered politics in 1882, his dress code and mannerisms earned him the reputation of being an effeminate dandy. As if to compensate for this “humiliation,” the young politician traveled westward to reinvent himself as a rugged frontiersman and undoubtedly to thereby further his political career. In 1898, the war with Spain provided him with the opportunity to turn himself into “a charismatic war hero.” Roosevelt did not hesitate long before quitting his post as assistant secretary of the navy to raise the Rough Riders regiment with whom he participated in the Cuban theater of war. Afterwards, the New Yorker spared no efforts to publicize his exploits, and his military fame helped him in gaining the governorship of New York.11 More important in this context, Roosevelt did not deliver his speeches on a masculine lifestyle in a political void, but in the midst of a heated debate on the annexation of the Philippines and on the war that had unfolded against the population of that distant archipelago. Numerous references throughout the speeches demonstrate that the Rough Rider considered the Philippines the ideal destination for American men who wanted to live the “strenuous life.”

03-Hilfrich

64

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 64

Fabian Hilfrich

While Roosevelt emphasized social Darwinism as a fact of life and the concomitant necessity for men to adapt to its rules, other imperialists claimed in a racial vein that, as Anglo-Saxons, American men were abundantly endowed with positively aggressive instincts. To be more precise, Roosevelt’s narrative demanded that Americans conform to the laws of their outer environment, the social Darwinist world, whereas the racialized reading implied that Americans had to follow their inner natures. In this vein, Republican Senator Wolcott demanded “a realization of our virile strength … [and] that Anglo-Saxon restlessness which beats with the blood of the race into an activity which will not be quenched until we have finally planted our standard in that far-off archipelago.… “ Similarly, the editor Whitelaw Reid praised the Philippines as a “proving-ground” for future generations of America’s “adventurous youth.”12 Both narratives, however, shared the impression of irresistible forces that left American men no choice but to follow the plotted course of colonial annexation. While these scenarios appealed to promise and pride, to the possibilities for masculine endeavor in the new colonies, the racialized reading, as well as Roosevelt’s social Darwinist interpretation of events, also contained distinct threats. Roosevelt warned his compatriots that a failure to boldly seize the new opportunities would leave the United States behind in the competition of nations. By the same token, the racialized reading of masculine endeavor predicted dire consequences should men fail to act in accordance with their positively aggressive instincts. If American men did not have an outlet for their energies, the sociologist Franklin H. Giddings averred, “it may discharge itself in anarchistic, socialistic and other destructive modes that are likely to work incalculable mischief.” In a further elaboration on the subject, Albert Jeremiah Beveridge defined imperialism as the only way to preserve social peace at home: Our energies will have an outlet; prosperous employment will keep busy those hands which, when idle, are always dangerous. Class hatred, sectional strife, internal dissension—these are the rocks on which the Republic will founder … and it is from these rocks of disturbance at home that our active foreign policy draws us safely away. It is better to employ a few American soldiers … in other lands … than to employ many soldiers at home to suppress riot, disorder, and insurrection here, caused by the very fact that we have failed to find … a market abroad for American surplus products.13

Undoubtedly, the memory of violent upheaval during several economic depressions since the 1870s lent credence to such dire predictions. Furthermore, these apocalyptic scenarios were related to the official closing of the frontier in the census of 1890. Traditionally (if not realistically), the frontier—the availability of empty space in the West—had been considered the nation’s “safety valve” for economic and social problems in the East. More than that, the frontier had also been described as the place where men could test and prove their virility; this was precisely the reason why Roosevelt ventured west before he reentered politics. Hence, in the 1890s, new lands were supposedly needed, and the colonies were frequently portrayed as the ideal replacement for the “settled” American West.14

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 65

Gendered Tropes

65

These scenarios produced an argumentative pattern of promise and doomsday predictions that were intricately linked to late nineteenth-century images of aggressive masculinity. Whether American men naturally possessed these qualities, or whether they had to “hone” them to survive, the imperialists argued that a combative masculinity was a conditio sine qua non in global politics. The new colonies were described as welcome challenges and as places where men could realize their full potential. By focusing on masculinity and presumably male instincts, these narratives created an air of inevitability: the acquisition of new colonies was not only a manly choice, it was also the only choice. In these arguments, moreover, the desirable (or indispensable) behavior of the individual man was always closely identified with that of the nation, as has already been indicated in the aforementioned quotation from Roosevelt. The Rough Rider told his audience that the nation had to “play the part of men” in world affairs, and he left no doubt that this entailed “acceptance” of the colonies that had fallen to the United States after the war against Spain.15 In fact, the imperialists conceived of their nation as a quasi-organic entity, subject to human laws of growth and decline. McKinley’s secretary of the navy, John D. Long, forcefully formulated the “natural laws” that governed not only animals and human beings but nations as well: “Expansion is the natural law of animal, vegetable and moral life. The tendency of the age is toward expansion … God governs this earth and expansion is the natural development under the law of God.”16 The imperialists combined historical and biological narratives to describe the United States itself as an adventurous, virile adolescent on the threshold of manhood. Mastering the new colonial tasks, they claimed, constituted the rite of passage for the young nation. By thus tying biological laws into the equation, the imperialists heightened the sense of inevitability, and they implicitly rejected a failure to annex the Philippines as a violation of natural law. Also in this respect, then, the development of the male stereotype and its identification with the country buttressed the case for annexation because there was little room for serious argument in the face of nature.17 At first glance, in the 1960s, interventionists were less obsessed with the combative type of masculinity. Few celebrated the Vietnam War as an exercise in character-building, and virtually no one described the conflict as the outcome of American men’s innate aggressive traits. To be sure, some interventionists still worried, much like their imperialist predecessors, that the United States had become too soft in its battle against a supposedly determined and single-minded foe. In their eyes, the nation was hamstrung by too “civilized” a code of conduct and by a volatile democratic public opinion, a “disadvantage” that totalitarian countries did not have to contend with. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Gale McGee, for example, worried that “one of the great calculations of the East has been the conviction that although the United States is a great power, that because of its highly civilized inhibitions it would not be willing to use its power. They are gambling on our unwillingness to use it.” McGee apparently thought that the communist powers had been tempted to unleash the war in Vietnam because they interpreted the United States “civilized”

03-Hilfrich

66

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 66

Fabian Hilfrich

policies as an expression of cowardice. Echoing the imperialists’ social Darwinist conception of the world, Eugene Rostow added that scruples and utopian dreams of natural harmony could prove costly: “The lessons of history, philosophy, and psychology teach that such peace is not the natural state of human affairs. Civilizations—above all, free civilizations—are built and maintained by struggle—by patience, work, courage and firmness.”18 These were some of the same virtues that the imperialists had prized in men and in their nation, and once again, they were used not only to propagate the need for manliness in international affairs, but also to imply the unavoidable nature of U.S. policies in Vietnam. For the most part, however, masculinity was sublimated in the alliterative pair of “commitment” and “credibility.” According to this line of thought, favored particularly by President Johnson and his administration, Americans were not so much in Vietnam to save their actual ally. Rather, they fought to prove that “[o]nce this Nation makes a pact, a treaty, or a commitment, it lives up to it in word as well as in deed.” In other words, the United States had to stand fast in Vietnam because it wanted to preserve its credibility with its friends and foes worldwide. By the same token, if the United States withdrew from or even failed in Vietnam, its word and steadfastness would be called into question. Such action, in turn, would tempt the communist adversaries into more “wars of national liberation.” Worse, it would prompt the allies to lose faith in American promises and to therefore accommodate themselves with their communist enemies. At the end of this scenario, proponents of the war insisted, stood the specter of another Great War.19 On the one hand, the psychological concept of credibility, which became ever more integral to the Johnson administration’s case as the war dragged on, seemed to make sense in the overall design of “limited warfare.” Since the latter presumably did not envision the total destruction of enemy forces, but rather their retreat, the success depended very much on convincing the enemy that the United States would never back down and that it would match every one of its escalatory steps. On the other hand, “credibility” possessed the same essential ingredients of male honor and heroic perseverance that had already characterized the rhetoric of the imperialists. Yet again, a nation’s behavior was closely identified with that of the individual man: Both had to honor a promise once it was given, and to accomplish this purpose, it was necessary to prevail in Vietnam. To put it simply, in order to preserve their international credibility, Americans had to prove that they were willing to fight and able to win the war. In the increasingly acrimonious debate on the war, stamina and courage were demanded of the homefront, and Americans were invited to support the war not because it was inherently “right,” but because they were “men,” intent on proving their resilience and prowess to the external enemies. Therefore, Justin Gustainis has also spoken of a “dual credibility” problem. One signified the administration’s abovementioned justification for the war in Vietnam, while the other quite simply represented the nation’s and each American’s reputation for being “tough” and combative.20 The war was essentially rephrased as a test of willpower and inner unity. Already in 1965, Anthony Harrigan condensed this assumption into a simple propo-

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 67

Gendered Tropes

67

sition: “If we are defeated in Vietnam … we will be defeated in our own minds. We will have allowed the Communists to break our will to win. If we possess the will to win, victory will follow on the battlefields and on the high seas.”21 The notion of credibility thus also defined male virtues, such as stamina and honor, as the requirements of international politics, and it was increasingly used to rally the homefront behind the war effort. At the same time, the doctrine had an air of inevitability not unlike the imperialist conception of social Darwinism and racial energies. Once the United States had given its word, be it in the form of a treaty or of a loosely defined “commitment,” there was no other option but to honor it at all costs. Yet again, this narrative obscured more substantive questions about the wisdom of persisting in Vietnam. Another argumentative strategy that appealed to masculine values and that heightened the sense of inevitability was the discourse of duty. Traditionally, the fulfillment of one’s responsibilities has also been a staple of the male stereotype, be it in the workplace, toward the family, or toward the country at large. In the 1890s, the narrative of duty was particularly pronounced after President McKinley had coined his influential alliteration: “Duty determines destiny.” In numerous speeches, he described the annexation of the Philippines as a duty, which an unsought destiny had bestowed on the United States during the course of the war with Spain, leaving the impression that Americans simply had to accept their share of the “white man’s burden.” At Chicago, McKinley explained in detail the “inescapable” results of the late war: [W]e must accept all obligations which the war in duty and honor imposed on us. . . . It is not within the power of man to foretell the future and to solve unerringly its mighty problems. Almighty God has his plans and methods for human progress, and not infrequently they are shrouded for the time being in impenetrable mystery. Looking backward, we can see how the hand of destiny builded [sic] for us and assigned us tasks whose full meaning was not apprehended even by the wisest statesmen of their times.22

For the most part, the discourse of duty lent pseudoreligious sanction to the annexation of the Philippines, as it evaded the question of human responsibility and thus functioned as a “tranquilizer” of public opinion. At the same time, the concept alluded to the virtue of fulfilling one’s duties, particularly if the latter had been ordained not by mere mortals, but by “destiny.” Accordingly, President McKinley condensed the complex debate about annexation into a very simple proposition for all men, namely, that there was only a choice between “manly doing and base desertion.”23 While the discourse of duty was less prevalent and less religiously imbued in the 1960s, policymakers also justified the war in Vietnam as the logical consequence of an unsought duty that the United States had had to perform since the Second World War. In his news conference announcing the first large-scale commitment of ground forces, President Johnson sounded almost as determinist as his predecessor McKinley: “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.”24 Johnson dramatically described the United States as the only (reluctant) guarantor of

03-Hilfrich

68

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 68

Fabian Hilfrich

freedom and stability in the modern world, and, in his formulation of “the guardians at the gate,” he also implied the barbarian nature of the communist onslaught. To be sure, the 1960s version of duty and destiny was more rational, as it furnished historical explanation and context for the United States’ postwar role. Nevertheless, the effect of this rhetoric and the implied challenge to men remained very much the same. By insisting that there was no alternative to the chosen course, imperialists and proponents of the Vietnam War avoided the more pertinent question of whether that course was right or whether it even truly served the proclaimed ends of intervention. In both decades, American soldiers emerged as the symbolic representatives of the right attitude toward duty. In the model of the soldier, images of male obedience, responsibility, and discipline converged with the more combative and heroic qualities mentioned above. In a typical celebration of the latter character traits, McKinley’s attorney general, John W. Griggs, demanded that soldierly qualities be instilled in the next generation of Americans: “There should be taught to the boys a spirit of manliness, a spirit that scorns suffering and hardship and loss, and death itself if the honor of the country demands such sacrifice.” Griggs defined the soldier as the epitome of manliness, but it was his willingness to stake his life on a cause higher than himself that distinguished the disciplined soldier from a potential ruffian.25 In his praise for a volunteer regiment after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley enumerated more positive traits embodied by the nation’s soldiers: “Our troops represented the courage and conscience, the purpose and patriotism of their country. Whether in Cuba, Porto [sic] Rico, or the Philippines, or at home awaiting orders, they did their full duty, and all sought the post of greatest peril.” To emphasize the spirit of sacrifice imbuing the soldiers, many imperialists reminded their audiences that volunteer regiments stayed in the Philippines, even though their terms of enlistment had ended, because the regular troops had not yet been shipped to the distant archipelago. More important, McKinley’s supporters believed that in times of war, American soldiers emerged as the representatives of the nation abroad. For if the soldiers represented their compatriots abroad, the latter also had a responsibility toward the former at home, namely, to support them and, by implication, to support the war effort. Accordingly, when American soldiers were attacked in the Philippines, many Americans at home instinctively rallied to the cause of war without considering whether American policies could have been responsible for the outbreak of hostilities.26 It was this instinctive and automatic obedience that Griggs emphasized in one of his speeches on the Philippine-American War when he praised “the gallant boys who for so many days on the firing line, without reasoning or questioning why, kept their faces to the front and the flag floating high.”27 Unlike the antiimperialists at home, one might add, soldiers quite simply, but admirably followed orders, thereby putting their nation’s interests above their own and defending the honor of the country. While Griggs only implied that Americans at home should emulate these soldierly qualities, Marine Corps General Victor Krulak explicitly connected them to the homefront in his remarks on the war in Vietnam: “Selfless devotion to duty is the

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 69

Gendered Tropes

69

quality motivating our soldiers and this is a quality needed both in Vietnam and at home. It is the quality which has made our country great in the past – the realization that being American brings with it obligations as well as benefits.” Echoing the spirit of sacrifice that had characterized John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, Krulak defined “selfless devotion to duty” as the “obligation” not only of Americans in the field, but also of those at home. Needless to say, it was the war effort that the homefront was supposed to “devote” itself to. By the same token, criticism of the war was denigrated as “selfish” and unbecoming of an American. In a similar vein, the president asked the public to display “the same courage, the same stability, and the same good judgment” as the soldiers in Vietnam. Significantly, with the expression of “the same good judgment,” Johnson implied that the soldiers not only performed their duty, but that they also had a better grasp of the situation in Vietnam. The soldier was thus also portrayed as an informed “specialist,” not only as the mere executor of governmental policies.28 The warriors, the most masculine of men, not only represented the United States abroad, they also served as models of general behavior during wartime. The soldierly ideal was thus designed to silence dissent and to evoke unity at home. Soldiers did not criticize and, although not necessarily true in Vietnam in later years, they did not ceaselessly doubt and attack their superiors. Was it not much easier for those at home, such statements seemed to ask, to exhibit some of the courage and obedience that American soldiers so selflessly proved under fire? Essentially, interventionists in both decades demanded a type of loyalty that was to be given automatically and instinctively, rather than one based on reflection and deliberation. These appeals to the masculine model of the soldier were highly emotional, particularly when combined with the charge that domestic dissent, by emboldening the enemy, was endangering the lives of the boys in the field. Against the essentially moral doubts of dissenters, the interventionists pitted a morality of action that reinforced the air of inevitability already created by the rhetoric of unsought national duties: once American soldiers were engaged in battle, all debate had to cease, and every man—including those on the homefront—had to devote himself to the objective of supporting the soldiers and winning the war. Clearly, then, the target of all these masculine stereotypes was the homefront. In the intense debates on the Philippine-American and the Vietnam Wars, appeals to various definitions of male behavior were designed to stabilize that front, which policymakers increasingly viewed as the crucial one. Imperialist observers and officers in the Philippines were convinced that “there is little left in support of the [Philippine] Insurrection except that backing which comes from the element who call themselves the anti-imperialists in the United States.”29 In the explosive climate of the Vietnam War debate, policymakers’ preoccupation with the homefront was even more obsessive. Invariably, they described it as the “X factor” of the war and as “the weakest chink in our armor.” President Johnson formulated this belief very bluntly in a conversation with a journalist: “If we lose the war, it will be lost here—not in Vietnam.”30 Such reasoning essentially internalized the war, creating the impression that the

03-Hilfrich

70

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 70

Fabian Hilfrich

nation’s external enemies were insignificant, if only the homefront would hold out under fire, if only it exhibited some of the male virtues that interventionists in both decades tried to instill in their audiences. Accordingly, the critics were disparaged as cowards and effeminate men. Roosevelt described the anti-imperialists as “timid, lazy, and dull-minded,” motivated by “impulses of sloth and fear.” In behavior unbecoming to men, other imperialists added, the foreign policy critics had no conception of honor when the Filipinos were attacking their nation’s flag and its soldiers. Sixty years later, Senator Thomas Dodd similarly attacked the “querulous, faint-hearted chorus of those who always ask for the price of victory.”31 In both debates, moreover, the interventionists compared their opponents to the “cowards” of other epochs, which had been proved wrong by history. While Roosevelt likened the anti-imperialists to those Northerners who hesitated to fight the South before the Civil War, Senator Beveridge preferred to compare them to men of all ages and countries who vainly tried to stop the march of progress. In the 1960s, a similar strategy was pursued in relation to the “Munich parallel.” Referring to the critics as “quitters” and isolationists, Secretary of State Dean Rusk repeatedly reminded his audiences that already once, in the fight against Hitler, the false policy of appeasing the enemy out of fear of war had only resulted in a much greater calamity. A “little” war like Vietnam, he thought, had to be fought occasionally in order to avoid larger confrontations.32 Hesitation and “cowardice,” it was implied by interventionists in both debates, were not only unseemly for a man, but even dangerous because they could lead to wider war or developmental stagnation. In this context, it did not matter that the comparisons were largely counterfactual because many anti-imperialists had been ardent abolitionists before the Civil War, and because many Vietnam War critics had an impeccable internationalist record in relation to the Second World War. The characterization of the critics was not designed to hold up under rational scrutiny but, like the soldierly ideal, it only appealed to emotions. It glossed over any legitimate criticism of the wars, and instead, discovered cowardice and fear as the sole motives for dissent. The critics, these statements implied, were not real men; therefore, they did not deserve a fair hearing. In the 1960s, this line of attack was also rephrased with the fashionable political theory of realism. According to its practitioners, realism represented the international community “as it really was.” Decisions were supposedly based on the cold calculation of power and of the national interest, rather than on ideology or wishful thinking. A realist appraisal of the situation in Vietnam, the interventionists argued, would expose as utopian and naive the critics’ claims that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil war and that, consequently, the loss of South Vietnam would have no negative impact on the Western world. Hence, in reaction to the first academic teach-ins, Dean Rusk publicly wondered about “the gullibility of educated men and the stubborn disregard of plain facts by men who are supposed to be helping our young to learn.”33 To be sure, such charges did not really resolve the controversy about whether the intervention in Vietnam truly was in the national interest, an assumption disputed by many liberal critics, who themselves took pride in being “realists.” Nevertheless,

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 71

Gendered Tropes

71

the administration sought to create the impression that the critics’ judgment was guided by the “cowardly” desire for peace, rather than by a rational, if painful, realization of the stakes and of the enemy’s “true” objectives. In a conversation with Australian journalists, the president inadvertently revealed how close the discourse of realism was to the more combative variety of manliness. He tried to explain why many Americans showed so much “compassion” for the enemy: The President analyzed this public mood as being rooted in “a maternalistic attitude toward the enemy unlike anything we have had in other wars. You can blame it on liberal (permissiveness). But the best way to turn a peacenik into a realist is to tell him the truth about the chances of his wife being ravaged by the V.C. if she were over there.”34

Ironically, one of the most liberal presidents in modern American memory claimed that liberalism’s reforms had softened and weakened the moral fiber of the American people, turning men into women, or “mothers,” and thereby complicating a resolute and united national response to external threats. These emasculated men, Johnson argued, could only recover their manhood and comprehend the conflict in Vietnam for what it was if their own wives were raped by the presumably ruthless enemy. When the protective instincts of Americans extended to the enemy, they were classified as feminine, while Johnson also implied that, if awakened by a threat to their own wives, the critics’ “correct” male protective instincts would come to the fore. Despite this revealing statement, however, the language of political realism remained a subtler way of rephrasing the need for manliness and virility in foreign affairs. Nevertheless, a political theory supposedly based on dispassionate and rational analysis was employed to achieve the opposite effect, namely, to suspend rational judgment and to emotionalize the debate. As in the more explicit connections between manliness and international affairs, the critics’ arguments were not refuted by facts, but simply dismissed as statements of weak and naive cowards. The interventionists implied that those who desired to be real men or realist observers had to support the wars. In sum, the episode of Lyndon Johnson displaying his sexual organ reflected much more than the vulgar style of a liberal president largely despised by the liberal establishment; it symbolized a discourse of masculinity that was not only widespread in the Vietnam War debate, but even more so in that on American imperialism at the turn of the century. Although positive images of masculinity were certainly not the most important arguments in the interventionists’ rhetorical arsenal, they buttressed some of their major discursive themes. In the 1890s, this was particularly true for the rhetoric of duty and destiny, whereas in the 1960s, masculinity was bound up with the alliteration of commitment and credibility. In both decades, interventionists employed the cultural construct of manliness for two specific and related purposes. First of all, they implicitly or explicitly described the respective wars as the appropriate endeavors for American men in a brutal and social Darwinist world environment to evoke their audiences’ instinctive—even unconditional—support. To be sure, there were important differences between the

03-Hilfrich

72

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 72

Fabian Hilfrich

cases made by imperialists and proponents of the Vietnam War: while the former went as far as praising war itself as a positive and formative experience, the latter more frequently rephrased an aggressive masculinity in the language of rationality and “realism.” Even though the purposes of appeals to manliness remained similar, the observation of these crucial differences also demonstrates how much the concept of manliness itself had changed from the 1890s to the 1960s. Second, the interventionists dismissed their opponents as spineless and fearful cowards, who flinched from the fulfillment of a necessary and almost sacred duty because they did not have the stomach for the rough world of international politics, in which only the strong could survive. In light of their supposed cowardice, the critics’ concerns about the future of American democracy appeared as rationalizations of an unmanly paranoia or hysteria. Both argumentative strategies were designed to obscure the substantive issues at stake in the debates. The discourse of manliness clearly appealed to emotion and instinct rather than to reason. In this context, Americans were invited to support the interventions not because they were inherently just, but because they, like their politicians, would presumably desire to be “real men.” What an American general once said with respect to the South Vietnamese could equally be applied to the American target group, albeit in a different sense: “If you grab ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” In other words, by drawing into question the manliness of the dissenters and of the public at large, the interventionists hoped to garner support for their policies, precisely because the masculine stereotype was a positive image in both decades. At the same time, the loss or neglect of the manly ideal in wartime, the interventionists warned, would surely lead to defeat and catastrophe. The determinism of this rhetoric was seemingly inescapable; Americans held the outcome of both wars in their own hands. If they persevered in a united and determined fashion, they would win; if not, they would have beaten themselves and would only have themselves to blame. Others were obviously not deemed capable of accomplishing that feat. Even more than to others, it seemed, Americans had to prove their manliness to themselves. Critics of analyses of cultural constructs may still object that the analyzed functions of the masculine discourse do not necessarily prove the corresponding intent of those who used them. First, with respect to the imperialists, it is simply reasonable to assume such intent, not only because the rhetoric on the subject was blatant and widespread, but also because a combative masculinity was celebrated as a positive achievement in itself. Hence, it is not too far fetched to infer that the imperialists sought to enlist the positive aspects of the masculine stereotype on behalf of their immediate political goals. More important, the attacks on the critics as cowards suggest that interventionists in both debates deliberately enlisted positive images of male behavior on their behalf. This specific attempt to impugn the character of anti-imperialists and Vietnam War critics neatly fit into a larger argumentative pattern that appealed to emotions rather than to the audiences’ intellect. Furthermore, even if we were to conclude that the subject of masculinity entered the discourse “inadvertently,” this observation does not invalidate the reasonable and

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 73

Gendered Tropes

73

logical conclusions about its impact on the debates. As my “microstudy” has demonstrated, this is true even if we lack documentary evidence to prove the intent of decisionmakers beyond a doubt. Far from reflecting “unimportant” concerns of a “postmodern” constituency in diplomatic history, the research into cultural stereotypes is a valuable contribution to the discipline, precisely because it illuminates crucial irrational factors in history. These are all too frequently overlooked in a discipline that still mainly proceeds from the assumption that historical actors are, first and foremost, rational beings, who make their decisions on the basis of “hard facts,” such as military, economic, or strategic considerations. Looking at two crucial historical actors in the 1890s and the 1960s, we observe that they actually were influenced by irrational factors and by their eras’ cultural background. How else can we explain that, stung by the charges of effeminacy, Theodore Roosevelt ventured into the wilderness of the West and then into that of Cuba to reinvent himself as a seasoned fighter? Obviously, he did not believe that he possessed enough credibility for the world of late nineteenth-century politics otherwise. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, frequently resorted to sexual metaphors and other means to emphasize his prowess and determination, not least to prove himself worthy as heir to John F. Kennedy’s presidency. At the same time, he tried to counteract the prevalent prejudice that liberals were loathe to employ military power to safeguard the American “national interest.” Hence, when Johnson and his advisors harped on the necessity to preserve the United States’ international credibility in Vietnam, was it not also their personal reputation for toughness and perseverance that they perceived to be at stake? Particularly in the rhetoric of credibility, but also in that of duty, personal and political needs as well as views about national requirements were frequently intermingled indistinguishably.35 In this respect, cultural assumptions about the requirements of being a man even had an influence on policy-making, although its extent is admittedly hard to measure with certainty.

Notes 1. Lyndon Johnson, as quoted in Philip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870-1970 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 158. 2. The relationship between discourses of manliness and American imperialism has already been analyzed by a number of scholars. See, for example, Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Cultures

03-Hilfrich

74

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 74

Fabian Hilfrich

of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 219-236. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-16. On the ascendancy of this new type of “passionate manhood,” compare Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 71. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, 10 April 1899, in State of New York, ed., Public Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Governor—1899-1900, 2 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Brandow Printing Co., 1899), 297; compare also William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 26, 81. On the connection of democratic politics and war, see Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, chapt. 1, particularly 23-29. On the contemporary fears of a weakening of American society, compare also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 185. John C. Higham connects the new “aggressive nationalism” to the fin-de-siècle boom in sports and outdoors culture, and he detects therein a cult of virility, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in idem, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (London and Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970), 79-88. In fact, as Anders Stephanson has written, the fear of “overcivilization” was widespread throughout the entire fin-desiècle Western world, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 86. On the search for a “national purpose” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, compare John W. Jeffries, “The ‘Quest for National Purpose’ of 1960,” American Quarterly 30 (Fall 1978), 451-470; John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 43-44. See, for example, Lodge in Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 2nd sess., 1898: 3783. Henry Lee Higginson, a wealthy Boston banker and friend of Lodge’s, picked up on the swipe when appraising Lodge’s speech: “I wish also, if you find it possible, you would not keep indulging flings at the moneyed men. The moneyed men are no worse than others … and will prove themselves now no doubt as patriotic and self-sacrificing as any other class—perhaps more so” (Higginson to Lodge, 14 April 1898, box 13, series 1, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston). Compare also Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 62-63. Whatever their precise merit, such attacks on the “money power” also reflected a powerful popular aversion to the new economic influences of trusts and capital; see Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 7-8. Scholars have disagreed, however, about the extent to which the business community was truly opposed to the war. Walter LaFeber, for example, furnished proof that the “business community was by no means monolithic in its opposition to war” (The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1963], 385). For one of these voices, compare Jane Addams, as quoted in Chicago Tribune, 20 October 1898. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt—1899, 297. Roosevelt, “Response to the Toast ‘The State of New York’ at the Lincoln Club Dinner, New York,” 13 February 1899, in Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt—1899, 265-266. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 187-190. Commented George Lyman, political friend of Senator Lodge, on the political benefits of Roosevelt’s military service: “Teddy is a jingo, and has always admitted himself as such. He is a fighter. The first he has shown in advocating the war, and he has proved the second as well as his sincerity, and patriotism, by going to the war and taking the part in it which he did. All this will give him a large class of votes” (Lyman to Lodge, 21 October 1898, box 12, General Correspondence, Lodge Papers). Wolcott in Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., 1899: 1451. Reid, “An Address at Princeton University on Commemoration Day, 21 October 1899,” in Later Aspects of Our New Duties (New York: Henry Hall, 1899), 21. The enterprising spirit that Reid discovered in young men has long been one of the hallmarks of the masculine stereotype, see Georg L. Mosse, Image of Man, 113.

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 75

Gendered Tropes

75

13. Giddings, “Imperialism?” Political Science Quarterly 13 (December 1898), 590. It is also noteworthy in this passage, that Beveridge combined the racial energies of his compatriots with the export possibilities for American business; “The Young of America,” speech at Republican Meeting at Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis, 17 October 1899, reprint in The New York Times, 19 October 1899. Compare also Beveridge to John Temple Graves, 26 November 1900, box 266, Letterbooks, Albert J. Beveridge Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 14. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), chapt. 5; on the connection between virility and the frontier, compare Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 187. 15. Roosevelt, “Strenuous Life,” in Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt—1899, 306-307. 16. Long at Banquet of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association in Milwaukee, Wisc., 16 October 1899, reel 83, series 4, William J. McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Compare also Senator Shelby Cullom, “Speech at the Washington Peace Jubilee,” 25 May 1899, Washington Post, May 26, 1899. 17. Pessimistically turned, the biological metaphors also implied that a failure to annex the Philippines would spell the onset of an “aging” process that would ultimately result in the decay of the nation. For the use of such metaphors, compare McKinley, “Speech at the Citizens’ Banquet in the Auditorium, Chicago, October 19, 1898,” in idem, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley, from March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday and McClure Co., 1900), 135; Long at the Banquet of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association in Milwaukee, Wisc., 16 October 1899, reel 83, series 4, McKinley Papers; Senator Shelby Cullom, “Speech at the Washington Peace Jubilee, May, 25, 1899,” Washington Post, 26 May 1899; John Sherman to Lodge, 7 March 1900, box 16, General Correspondence, Lodge Papers. On the analogy between nations and men, see also Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 157. 18. McGee in Congressional Record, 89th Cong., 1st sess., 1965: 8977; Rostow, “Another Round in the Great Debate,” Department of State Bulletin 57 (6 November 1967): 609. 19. Lyndon B. Johnson (hereafter abbreviated as LBJ), “Remarks in Des Moines at a Democratic Party Dinner,” 30 June 1966, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States—Lyndon Baines Johnson—1966 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1967), 693 (hereafter cited as PPP). For the notion that a failure to honor the American commitment in Vietnam would result in greater war, see Dean Rusk, “Secretary Rusk’s News Conference of October 12,” Department of State Bulletin 57 (30 October 1967): 555. A most detailed analysis of the issue of credibility can be found in Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 337-355. 20. J. Justin Gustainis, American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1993), 26. 21. Harrigan, “We Can Win in Southeast Asia,” National Review 17 (9 March 1965): 196. Compare Katzenbach, Memorandum for the President, 16 November 1967, box 25, Memos to the President, National Security File, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Tex. (hereafter cited as LBJPL). 22. McKinley, “Speech at the Citizens’ Banquet in the Auditorium, Chicago, October 19, 1898,” in idem, Speeches and Addresses, 133-134. Still unsurpassed on this subject is Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (1935; reprint Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1963), chapt. 9. 23. McKinley, “Speech at the Banquet of the Ohio Society of New York, March 3, 1900,” in idem, Speeches and Addresses, 364. 24. LBJ, “The President’s News Conference of July 28, 1965,” in PPP—1965, 2: 794. Compare also George W. Ball, “The Issue in Viet-Nam,” address before the Northwestern University Alumni Association, Evanston, Ill., 30 January 1966, Department of State Bulletin 54 (14 February 1966): 239. 25. Speech of Attorney General Griggs at Public Reception in Youngstown, Ohio, 18 October 1899, reel 82, series 4, McKinley Papers. On the ideal of man as soldier, compare also Mosse, Image of Man, chapt. 6.

03-Hilfrich

76

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 76

Fabian Hilfrich

26. McKinley, “Address before the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment, U.S. Volunteers, Schenley Park, Pittsburg, August 28, 1899,” in idem, Speeches and Addresses, 212. Emory Speer, Speech Manuscript, 21 March 1899, enclosed in Speer to Cortelyou, 20 March 1899, reel 9, McKinley Papers. For the instinctive response to the Philippine-American War, compare Harlan to McKinley, 6 February 1899, reel 5; William R. Day to McKinley, 26 September 1899, reel 8; W.D. Hoard to McKinley, 23 October 1899, reel 8, series 1, McKinley Papers. 27. Speech of Attorney General Griggs, Aberdeen, S. Dak., 14 October 1899, reel 83, series 4, McKinley Papers (emphasis mine). 28. Krulak, Speech at Century Plaza Hotel, Beverly Hills, Calif., 1 February 1968, box 32, Office Files of Marvin Watson, Aides Files, LBJPL (emphasis mine). LBJ, “The President’s News Conference of November 1, 1967,” PPP—1967, 2: 971. 29. Joseph Wheeler to McKinley, 20 November 1899, reel 9, series 1, McKinley Papers; compare Howard Taft to Lodge, 30 November 1900, box 16, General Correspondence, Lodge Papers. See also Maria C. Lanzar, “The Anti-Imperialist League,” Philippine Social Science Review 3 (August 1930): 31. 30. Harold Kaplan (aide to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow), Memorandum for Walt W. Rostow, 9 October 1967, box 99, Country File—Vietnam, National Security File, LBJPL; Lyndon Johnson in Jack Valenti, Meeting of 17 December 1965, box 1; idem, Notes of the President’s Meeting with Jim Lucas of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, 24 November 1967, box 1, Meeting Notes File, LBJPL. 31. Roosevelt, “Response to the Toast”; idem, “The Strenuous Life,” in Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt—1899, 265, 297. Compare Senator Lodge: “There will be a loud protest from the timid, but the march of the country will go forward” (Henry Cabot Lodge to John Wright, 9 May 1898, box 38, Letterbooks, Lodge Papers); John R. Procter, “Hawaii and the Changing Front of the World,” Forum 24 (September 1897): 45; Dodd in Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., 1964: 4986. 32. Roosevelt, “Address at the Grant Anniversary at Galena, IL, April 27, 1900,” Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt—1900, 241; Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” speech at Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis, 16 September 1898, in idem, The Meaning of the Times and Other Speeches (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1908), 50. 33. Rusk, “The Control of Force in International Relations,” address before the American Society of International Law at Washington, D.C., 23 April 1965, Department of State Bulletin 52 (10 May 1965): 696. For attacks on the critics as naive and spineless, compare also F.M. Kail, What Washington Said: Administration Rhetoric and the Vietnam War, 1949-1969 (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 214-215. On the ascendancy of realism in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, see David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969; reprint New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 87-88, passim. 34. Charles Maguire, Notes of the President’s Meeting with Australian Broadcast Group, 20 September 1967, box 3, Meeting Notes File, LBJPL. Similarly, a presidential aide, possibly Fred Panzer, analyzed Senator Fulbright’s “Arrogance of Power” speech as containing too much foolish compassion for the enemy (anonymous, no title, n.d., box 361, Office Files of Fred Panzer, Aides Files, LBJPL). 35. On credibility as revelatory of national and personal insecurities, see Philip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism, 157-158. On the different attitudes of conservatives and liberals toward the use of power and on the concomitant prejudice, compare Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (1985; reprint New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 28-29.

03-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 77

Gendered Tropes

77

Bibliography Baritz, Loren. Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. 1985. Reprint New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Beveridge, Albert J. The Meaning of the Times and Other Speeches. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1908. “Culture, Gender, and Foreign Policy: A Symposium.” Diplomatic History 18 (winter 1994): 47-119. Darby, Philip. Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870-1970. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Giddings, Franklin H. “Imperialism?” Political Science Quarterly 13 (December 1898): 584-605. Gustainis, J. Justin. American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War. Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1993. Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. 1969. Reprint New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Higham, John C. “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s.” In idem, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship, 79-88. London, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970. Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Jeffries, John W. “The ‘Quest for National Purpose’ of 1960.” American Quarterly 30 (fall 1978): 451-470. Johnson, Lyndon B. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States—Lyndon Baines Johnson – 1963/64–1968. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1964-1969. Kail, F.M. What Washington Said: Administration Rhetoric and the Vietnam War, 19491969. New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1973. Kaplan, Amy. “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 219-236. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1993. LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1963. Lanzar, Maria C. “The Anti-Imperialist League.” Philippine Social Science Review 3-5 (August-October 1930-1933): 7-41, 118-132, 182-198, 239-254, 222-230, 248279. Linderman, Gerald F. The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974. McKinley, William J. Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley, from March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900. New York: Doubleday and McClure Co., 1900.

03-Hilfrich

78

3/27/03

2:30 PM

Page 78

Fabian Hilfrich

Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ninkovich, Frank. “No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please.” Diplomatic History 22 (summer 1998): 451-466. Procter, John R. “Hawaii and the Changing Front of the World.” Forum 24 (September 1897): 34-45. Schell, Jonathan. The Time of Illusion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. State of New York, ed. Public Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Governor – 1899–1900. 2 vols. Albany: Brandow Printing Co., 1899–1900. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. 1935. Reprint Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1963. Widenor, William C. Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Windt, Theodore Otto, Jr. Presidents and Protesters: Political Rhetoric in the 1960s. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Wrobel, David M. The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993.

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 79

Chapter 4

A FAMILY AFFAIR? Gender, the U.S. Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945-1960 Laura A. Belmonte

On 12 September 1947, the State Department’s Air Bulletin contained an article entitled “Mr. and Mrs. America.” Drawn from eleven years of Gallup polls, the profile depicted the “typical” American man and woman. The average U.S. male, the study noted, “spends fifteen minutes traveling two miles to work, gambles occasionally, and says he loses more than he wins.” Six-tenths preferred brunette women, only three-tenths blondes, the rest redheads. “Mr. America” considered married men happier than bachelors and valued his wife’s companionship, intelligence, and homemaking talent more than her beauty. He thought women nagged too much, and opposed the idea of a woman president. The poll then described an average American female. She “swims and walks for exercise, plays cards for fun, thinks she eats too much for her health, and wants to be her husband’s partner in household finances and prefers marriage to a career.” Although “Mrs. America” would excise the word “obey” from the marriage ceremony, she wanted deferential courtesies from men. She most appreciated her husband’s kindness, good temper, and consideration.1 The archives of the State Department and U.S. Information Agency (USIA) contain scores of documents like “Mr. and Mrs. America.” Although such materials may appear trivial, they are in fact essential to understanding the U.S. response to the Cold War. Dismayed by the devastation, starvation, and chaos engulfing much of the globe in the wake of World War II, U.S. leaders were determined to safeguard American economic, political, and military interests.2 Elites in government, business, and the media embraced new strategies and tactics for defending national security.3 But protecting America meant far more than guarding tangible assets. It also signified a commitment to preserve the ideals and institutions embodying the exceptionalism of the United States.4 Notes for this section begin on page 90.

04-Belmonte

80

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 80

Laura A. Belmonte

Propagandists played a crucial role in advancing these international goals.5 Facing threats of communism, anti-Americanism, and totalitarianism, U.S. information officials embarked on America’s first peacetime propaganda offensive.6 While the information programs were an integral element of early Cold War diplomacy, they also represented a concerted effort to define American national identity. Through radio shows, films, and publications, U.S. policymakers propagated a carefully constructed narrative of progress, freedom, and happiness. They not only “imagined” an American “community” but they also presented their vision to the world in hopes of persuading foreign peoples to reject communism and to adopt democratic capitalism.7 Images of gender and the family proved valuable tools in explaining the American way of life to foreign audiences. In recent years, several scholars have examined the importance of gender in shaping the discourses of power in international relations. They have demonstrated that policymakers often allow their notions of gender to influence their decisions. For example, an official unwilling to be perceived as “weak” will adopt a “tough” line. Accordingly, a narrowly proscribed “masculinity” affects foreign policy. Such assumptions are particularly evident during the early Cold War. In this era, many Americans embraced domesticity as an antidote to anxieties unleashed by atomic weapons and political instability. Sharing similar elite backgrounds, most U.S. political leaders extolled the nuclear family as the embodiment of democratic values. At the same time, U.S. information strategists recognized that ideals of gender and family life could be used to discredit the communist economic and political system. While the Soviets denigrated American morality and culture, U.S. propagandists emphasized the freedom and comfort among citizens of the United States. In contrast to communist atheism, exploitation, and misery, U.S. information experts offered the spiritual, physical, and emotional fulfillment available in the United States. Fighting communism, they implied, involved much more than guarding concrete interests; it meant protecting American families and their way of life. This essay analyzes U.S. propaganda materials in order to assess the state’s efforts to define itself, its people, and its culture. In attempting to stigmatize communists, U.S. information officials revealed their own biases and views of the United States. “America,” to these overwhelmingly male bureaucrats.8 meant that men were able to take care of their wives and children. In “America,” women devoted themselves to their families and their communities. In “America,” the state protected families. Although narrowly defined, this “America” presented an attractive alternative to life behind the Iron Curtain. Through idealizing American political culture and daily life, propagandists justified U.S. dominance in international affairs. Immediately following World War II, some U.S. policymakers noted widespread international distortions of American citizens. In December 1945, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs William B. Benton derided unflattering foreign images of U.S. women. “Too many people think that every American housewife has a 40-foot living room and a maid to wait on her,” he explained. Without an information program to correct such falsehoods, Benton argued, poorer nations would continue to resent American wealth and resist trade with the United States.9

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 81

A Family Affair?

81

Like Benton, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman found stereotypes of the American people and economy distressing. On 20 January 1946, he explained how the Soviets were exploiting labor unrest in the United States. “To the exclusion of material favorable to the USA,” Harriman wrote, the Soviet media was focusing on strikes, racial discrimination, and unemployment. The communists capitalized on the fact that millions of American women were receiving dismissals from their wartime employers and were often barred from unemployment compensation. On 27 December 1945, Komosomol Pravda, the communist youth newspaper, claimed “that educated girls seek any kind of work, they become housemaids and live mannequins in store windows; and that need and unemployment are driving American girls into prostitution.” Harriman then echoed Benton’s call for an information program designed “to correct this grotesque and slightly sinister conception of the USA presented to the Soviet people by their rulers.”10 Determined to correct such images, U.S. information strategists emphasized the benefits that capitalism afforded families. Ridiculing Soviet claims of gender equity, they claimed communism devalued workers and families. On 13 May 1953, John Albert, the chief of USIA’s German service, articulated these sentiments: In the Soviet Zone in Germany, as in all the satellite countries, the women have equality. They have the equality to work in coal mines, work night shifts in heavy work. They can do everything which nobody in a free country would ask a woman to do. There is only one thing they can’t do. They can’t have time to raise their children, to provide for their home and take part in community life, because they are much too tired for it. 11

Albert, like most of his agency colleagues, believed that American consumer goods enabled U.S. women “to have a decent life, to have a job, to bring up children and still take time out for cultural and economic life.” Convincing people behind the Iron Curtain of the possibility of a better family life, Albert concluded, inspired them to continue resisting the Soviets.12 USIA experts also attempted to build support for democratic capitalism among Italian women. In the 1952 pamphlet The Women in Communist Countries, agency writers asked, “Do you remember the food ration cards, the black bread, the long waiting lines in front of the shops, and other wartime inconveniences?” All of these hardships, the treatise declared, had returned to “all the countries ruled by communists.”13 The Soviets responded with broad indictments of the shortcomings of the United States and capitalism. Communist propagandists frequently mentioned U.S. laws barring the employment of married women, disparities between the wages of American men and women, and employment discrimination on the basis of race.14 Rather than deny inequities among American workers, U.S. information officers exposed degrading working conditions in the Soviet Union. “Emancipated” Russian women performed heavy labor in mines, construction sites, and shipyards.15 In the USSR, equality of opportunity “allowed” women to work as stevedores, street cleaners, and forge operators.16 In 1950, State Department analysts listed the exploitation

04-Belmonte

82

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 82

Laura A. Belmonte

of women as one of the principal psychological vulnerabilities of the USSR. They described the low wages and high prices that forced the majority of Soviet women to work. They urged their superiors to publicize the plight of Soviet women—but without suggesting women belonged at home.17 Within two years, American information experts implemented this strategy. They emphasized U.S. labor laws safeguarding women from dangerous occupations. For example, a 1952 edition of Labor Air Bulletin declared: “In contrast with conditions in communist countries, where the much advertised equality and rights of women means the right to work in coal mines, the United States has shown a growing concern for the health and welfare of working women because of their role as home makers and future bearers of children.” Labor laws regulating hours, wages, and working conditions indicated a higher regard for women and children. The United States, the article implied, cared too much about its women and children to permit equality in the workplace.18 The presentation of the American family abroad involved more than a defense of capitalism. U.S. information experts also sought to convey the quality of life in the United States. USIS (U.S. Information Service) libraries distributed material on American health, nutrition, and education.19 They celebrated the political and social freedom fostered by democracy. Frequently, USIA pamphlets quoted communist émigrés impressed by the United States. An August 1954 women’s packet included an article, “What America Means to Me,” written by Tamara Chernashova Gilmore, a former Russian ballerina. The agency directed its public affairs officers to use the piece “to stress the hospitable attitude of Americans to visitors, to indicate their people-to-people friendliness and to emphasize individual freedom in the United States as contrasted, by implication, with communist repression.”20 Interviews with communist refugees revealed deep admiration for the American people and their lifestyles. Not persuaded by Soviet distortions of the United States, many émigrés fled in hopes of attaining U.S. political and social freedoms. In a 1953 survey, Hungarian escapees articulated some of the reasons why they found the U.S. appealing. One woman asserted: “To me, the most attractive aspect of the U.S. is that people there can strike; they can write what they want in newspapers; the churches are free; there isn’t any caste system of society. There is time for recreation, too; the women may dress elegantly without anyone accusing them of being bourgeois.” Another man envied the freedom to meet girls and talk to them without worrying about being reported to the authorities for voicing anti-state sentiments. Armed with this knowledge, USIA experts began emphasizing U.S. leisure and recreation activities. They realized that the freedom to dine and relax could “sell” America as effectively as the freedom to vote and strike.21 It proved more difficult to convey the moral values of Americans. In July 1948, Secretary of State George Marshall urged his staff to “use all our resources to correct, as far as possible, the false or distorted stereotypes concerning the [morality of] the United States.” Many foreigners, especially those in developing nations, believed Americans were “immoral,” had little “family life,” and condoned “loose living.”22

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 83

A Family Affair?

83

Soviet propaganda fueled these perceptions. On 17 March 1950, Radio Prague derided the objectification of American women. The communist announcers told their Greek audience that U.S. advertisements “always depict a woman’s body usually stripped to the waist.”23 In 1956, communist television portrayed American men as “half-criminals, roughnecks, and immoral beings” and characterized American women as “on the verge of prostitution, slovenly, ugly, and silly.”24 In response, the USIA denigrated the ethical standards behind the Iron Curtain. Agency materials implied that communist parents failed their children. An August 1953 USIA women’s packet asserted, “many Soviet women leave their children in state-run nurseries, and many mothers don’t see their children from Monday morning until Saturday night.”25 In February 1955, the USIA published “Russian Children to Throw Hand Grenades”—a description of newly established “physical culture tests” in the USSR.26 Communism, American propagandists contended, destroyed families. In June 1951, a USIS cartoon entitled “Communism and the Family” stated: “Communists take your young, but they cast aside the aged. Communism turns sons against fathers … and takes daughters for slave labor. Under Communism she [a mother] loses her loved ones. And gains a ‘family’ of strangers!”27 The USIS center in Manila distributed 10,000 posters proclaiming, “The Red target is your home.” The placards featured Communist soldiers forcibly separating two women and a young boy. The text read, “Happy family life cannot exist in the communist scheme of things.”28 According to the USIA, families thrived in democratic capitalist societies. The agency presented carefully crafted images of American families emphasizing community involvement, rewarding employment, and material comfort. In 1955, the USIS disseminated 150,000 German and Spanish copies of Building the Community through Family Life. The lavishly illustrated book featured “families and family life” in Buffalo, New York. It addressed the role of religion for local Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. It described activities and classes at neighborhood schools. It depicted blue- and white-collar workers in their factories and offices and highlighted their earning power. All of the workers shown, however, were male. Denying the economic realities of many American families, the booklet claimed, “Our family income very seldom depends on everyone’s working.” But families did share household cleaning and child care tasks. Building the Community through Family Life portrayed citizens working to improve their community as a whole. Such actions, the book concluded, helped abolish “deep prejudices against various groups.… Only by sharing with others some of the responsibility for building our whole community do we overcome these fears and cynical conceptions of the way our society works.” Americans, the USIA implied, were selfless, contented, and honorable.29 To support these claims, the agency often released stories about individual U.S. families. In April 1953, the USIA women’s packet featured Gail Forster, a Philadelphia housewife and mother of three. The Forsters lived well, but not lavishly, on the wages of husband William, a radio engineer. In response to communist criticisms of American wealth and materialism, the USIA emphasized the Forster’s middle-class

04-Belmonte

84

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 84

Laura A. Belmonte

status. “Like most American families, they have no servants.” Mrs. Forster, the text stated, “cooks the meals, cleans the house, washes, irons, and mends the clothes, cares for the children, and works in her flower garden.” Despite her heavy workload, Mrs. Forster remained active in her neighborhood. She taught one day a week in her children’s cooperative nursery school and volunteered for a housing committee in Philadelphia. Every Sunday, the Forsters attended a Christian church. “Mrs. Forster,” the publication concluded, “would never consider herself or her life unusual.”30 According to the USIA, the Forsters exemplified the American family. U.S. information strategists tried to make their selections carefully. Many families failed to meet the criteria for American propaganda materials. In mid 1951, the State Department rejected the Seymours of Falls Church, Virginia. While preparing a picture story entitled “Home Life in the U.S.A.,” the USIS post in London had requested specific photographs of “a typical middle-class family.” To meet the rather exacting requirements, the USIS Photos Branch checked families of agency employees. Finally, a staff member asked a longtime real estate agent for suggestions. The realtor recommended the Seymours. Mr. Seymour had worked for the People’s Drug Stores for twenty-four years. He served in the Masons and the Optimist Club. He and his wife had two children. They were active in the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) and attended Forestville Methodist Church. “The family,” Department aides assured Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Edward Barrett, “appeared to be respectable and suitable as subjects for the picture story.”31 But when the Washington Evening Star reported that Voice of America had selected the Seymours as the “typical American family,” U.S. officials regretted their choice. Within hours, a Mrs. Simmons, identifying herself as a writer, telephoned the State Department to ask if policymakers could defend their choice of the Seymours as the “average American family” when “he is a divorced man, and she is a divorced woman, and moreover the man does not even have a war record, etc.” Stunned at the revelations, information leaders in the United States instructed their London colleagues not to use the picture story until a substitute family was discovered. The State Department took this action, an aide later explained, because “there was a possibility (even though slight) that the communists might get the background facts and use them to good advantage in playing their theme of the USA as a country of moral degenerates.”32 USIA leaders eagerly made similar charges against the Soviets and zealously publicized the grim realities of Soviet life. In The Soviet Woman under Communism, the USIA declared that for the vast majority of the 100 million in the USSR, “life is an endless round of work and worry, of physical hardship and spiritual dejection.” The story depicted some of the difficulties an average Soviet woman experienced in her daily life. The USIA called this woman Nina Saitsev. “She is no one in particular,” the pamphlet stated, “but she is representative of every woman in the USSR.” Nina was a thirty-year-old, married factory worker. She and her husband, Ivan, worked in the same plant. They had two young sons, who were cared for by the day care center in the factory. During the week, Nina rose at 4 a.m. and went to the mar-

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 85

A Family Affair?

85

ket. Compared to Gail Forster’s comfortable life, the housewife in the USSR struggled daily with “the problem of getting enough food to keep herself and her family alive.” The USIA showed Nina, waiting in line for an hour or more, to purchase “milk for her children, a sliver of cheese, a few wilted vegetables (probably cabbage or potatoes), a loaf of black bread, and a little tea.” The Saitsevs could rarely afford meat, and when Nina did purchase it, she could not “be sure of its quality or sanitary handling.” While the Forsters owned a three-bedroom house, the Saitsevs lived in a four-room apartment shared with three other families.33 Nonetheless, the agency presented Nina Saitsev as a strong, if unhappy, woman. She declared it “useless” to complain and focused on keeping her family fed and clean. The USIA subtly blamed communism, not Nina, for her family’s depressing situation. “Frequently, as she waits impatiently in the morning line at market or hurries through the breakfast and housekeeping chores before getting out for the day, Nina wishes that she might stay at home and give her full energy to the job of wife and mother. But for most Soviet women such a wish is impossible.” On her way home at night, Nina picked up the children at the factory nursery where they spent the day. The agency described Nina’s concerns for her sons. She wondered whether they would someday betray her and Ivan or whether they would become “slaves of the state, captives in body and in soul.” She regretted having her children. Nina Saitsev, the profile concluded, “has little faith in promises any more.” The “long, bleak days of toil and hardship” had convinced her that “communism is death in life.”34 Both superpowers employed gender stereotypes in their propaganda. While deriding American women as lazy, promiscuous, and vapid, the Soviets stressed the strength, political commitment, and virtue of communist women.35 USIA writers retaliated by deriding femininity, motherhood, and fashion behind the Iron Curtain. While the Soviets bragged about the achievements of women lumberjacks, one USIA cartoon mocked such exploits by showing two burly Soviet women lamenting, “Even if we are superwomen, I still wish we had fun like Americans.”36 (See Fig. 4.1.) U.S. information experts emphasized the grace and good temperament of American women. In May 1954, the USIA instructed its public affairs officers to use the article “Home is What You Make It” to demonstrate that “American women share the homemaking interests of women everywhere … and put time and effort into beautifying their homes.”37 Two years later, agency leaders encouraged USIS posts to stress that “American women have initiative, enterprise, and good taste in designing their own clothes.”38 In contrast, both superpowers presented men as courageous, intelligent, and hard-working. Neither American nor Soviet propaganda mentioned the clothing or appearance of men. In September 1950, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Grayson Kirk described the “Soviet man” campaign. In juxtaposition to characterizations of American men as boorish and uncultured, the Soviets described communist men as “endowed with graces possessed not even in full measure by the twelve disciples.” “This mythical creature,” Kirk noted, “has been extolled by Soviet writers as an example of the beneficent effects upon the human race of the Marxist system.”39 Two weeks later, U.S. information officers recommended the publication of

04-Belmonte

86

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 86

Laura A. Belmonte

a series of biographic sketches of top American diplomats who had “rugged” backgrounds, including “military award winners, ex-football stars, hard-bitten ex-newsmen, as well as pillar of the community types.”40 The USIA proved more cautious when presenting the achievements of women. Women in the United States, a twenty-six-page description of American women in the workplace, at home, and in political and community activities, assured readers, “There has been little militant feminism on the part of American women.” The agency claimed that “no shrill antagonism between the sexes” existed in the United States because men and women had worked together on the frontier. The USIA stressed women’s role as wives and mothers. After acknowledging that nineteen million women in the United States worked outside the home, the agency reminded readers that most women only worked until they got married. “Homemaking,” the text stated, “is still the goal of most American girls.” Unlike their Soviet counterparts, U.S. mothers rarely worked outside the home; they, not the state, raised their children. When describing unmarried working women, U.S. propagandists compared the “love affair” American women shared with the typewriter to the manual labor performed by Soviet women.41 To deflect criticism of gender wage inequities in the United States, the USIA pointed to the scarcity of Soviet women in managerial and administrative positions. While alleging that no Soviet women held “positions of real power” in the Communist Party, the USIA spotlighted the participation of American women in the United Nations, the U.S. government, parent-teacher associations, pacifist groups, and the League of Women Voters.42 Despite this emphasis on images of middle-class families, U.S. information experts tailored their materials for different national audiences. In September 1949, information officers at the Office of the U.S. Military Government in Germany examined the status of women in postwar Germany. American propagandists placed special emphasis on overcoming the isolation instilled by years of Nazi propaganda and censorship. U.S. radio broadcasts highlighted news on the lifestyles of women and interviews with foreign women to reconnect German listeners to the outside world. Nonetheless, the report acknowledged the disfranchisement of German women stating: The national apathy that has resulted from this swift succession of great effort and great defeat is to be noted particularly in German women, for whom many hardships have persisted until the present day, with no immediate prospect of betterment. Family life has been gravely disrupted; the husband and father has been killed or mutilated, or is still in imprisonment, and the burden of supporting the family has fallen on the wife and mother. Material necessity has forced her to take a job to which she may or may not be suited, and in which she may or may not find satisfaction. In the upbringing and education of the children she stands alone. If her house has been bombed out, or if she is a refugee or expellee, all her strength is absorbed in her efforts to reconstruct her home. 43

American information strategists recognized the futility of upholding the idealized American family before German women facing these hardships. Instead, U.S. propagandists encouraged German women to become politically active and to think

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 87

A Family Affair?

87

independently. For example, the Radio Frankfurt program, “Women and Marriage,” dealt with “problems resulting from the large plurality of women over men, from the widespread material distress, from cramped living conditions, and from the frequent separation of married couples owing to the housing shortage.”44 American information experts were also sensitive to international cultural mores. In January 1953, the USIA Office of Research described the difficulty of creating propaganda films in underdeveloped nations, especially in the Middle East. The subordinate status and cloistered lives of women made casting them in the films especially trying. Agency films crews complained: On the one hand, the particular woman selected may strongly resist what she interprets as an invasion of her personal privacy. Such a thing as dropping her veil, which the crew would almost certainly request, symbolizes such an invasion. On the other hand, the woman is not a free agent even if she herself might be willing. Her behavior is rigidly circumscribed by the constraints of village culture, to say nothing of her husband and family.45

Female casting, therefore, remained “a matter of extreme delicacy.” Avoiding direct recruitment of women, agency officials asked village or town leaders for suggestions. If a woman was married, the agency asked her husband for permission to photograph the woman. Frustrated by these complications, the USIA recommended using native women “only to the extent to which their appearance is indispensable for the purposes of the film.” After all, the agency concluded, “their presence in a film certainly has little ‘cheesecake’ value.”46 Such sexist slurs notwithstanding, USIA leaders hoped to capitalize on the increasingly important role of women in international and domestic affairs. On 31 March 1959, the agency revised its audience guidelines in view of the changing social and economic status of women in certain countries. In cultures where men and women had similar educational background, interests, and social roles, the USIA urged its posts to abandon the women’s packets and to reach women with “the same themes and procedures as those with male audiences.” But in nations lacking extensive interaction between the sexes, the agency recommended the continuation of special programs for women. Significantly, the USIA warned staff members “to avoid using American yardsticks” when analyzing the influence of women in foreign cultures and political systems.47 Although USIA leaders recognized that some women were challenging gender stereotypes and inequalities, agency depictions of American women to overseas audiences changed little. On 13 August, the USIA summarized its policies regarding the portrayal of American women. The guidelines directed USIS officials to depict the American woman “above all as a thoroughly human, hard-working, feminine person.” The agency’s primary emphasis remained on the “average” American woman, particularly as wife and mother, but occasionally profiles of outstanding women appeared. U.S. information leaders deplored the persistence of “highly distorted images of the American woman” in many countries. Several foreign audiences,

04-Belmonte

88

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 88

Laura A. Belmonte

USIA reported, perceived the U.S. female as “an irresponsible glamour girl” or an “unfeminine, materialistic being whose main interest in life is her job.”48 Agency leaders were determined to counter these stereotypes. U.S. propagandists articulated democratic capitalism in a manner that emphasized its benefits for individuals and families. They argued that in almost every culture women represented the family, “the primary stabilizing force that holds society together.” Consequently, USIA leaders concluded that negative perceptions of American women influenced international opinions about the United States as a whole. While acknowledging that some American women were poor role models, they asserted, “The great majority of American women are characterized by devotion to family, womanliness and industriousness - qualities with which foreign audiences can identify with sympathy.” American information materials therefore continued to stress women’s roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers.49 USIA policymakers provided field officers elaborate instructions for crafting images of American women. They suggested the incorporation of information on the American woman and family life into propaganda material “on a wide variety of other subjects, such as education, cultural life, religion, minority affairs, and social welfare.” “The American woman in her role as a homemaker,” agency leaders declared, “should be discussed primarily in terms of her characteristics as a person, rather than shown as a mere user of machines or the passive beneficiary of a high standard of living.” Accordingly, they ordered USIS posts to stress the emotional bonds shared by U.S. couples and the efforts of American parents to maintain a close family relationship. 50 In the late 1950s, despite a decline in U.S. international prestige and rising antiAmericanism abroad, American information strategists saw little reason to modify their ideals of gender and family life in the Untied States. They remained convinced that communism itself attested to the superiority of democratic capitalism. Communist governments enslaved and exterminated millions of people. Communist regimes monitored and controlled virtually every aspect of private life. Those living under communism paid high emotional and psychological costs. These facts served U.S. propagandists well. It proved more difficult to explain the complexities of American democracy. Confined by traditionalist conceptions of domestic life, U.S. information officials defined “America” in terms that omitted many Americans. Segregation, sex discrimination, and poverty were only a few of the issues underplayed or ignored in their vision of the United States. Ironically, communist propagandists foreshadowed many of the criticisms that shattered America’s Cold War consensus during the 1960s. As millions of Americans protested social inequities, U.S. political leaders were forced to address the gaps between democratic ideals and democratic realities.51 Nonetheless, we cannot dismiss the propagandists’ defense of American families as mere rhetoric. In linking individual lives and international relations, U.S. information experts recognized that Man’s longings and aspirations fuel political movements. In espousing their views on family life and gender, they articulated

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 89

A Family Affair?

89

deeply held beliefs and political values. While their visions of America may not have adequately encompassed the socioeconomic diversity of the nation, they provide important insights into why U.S. policymakers took the fight against communism so seriously—and so personally. Figure 4.1

“Even if we are superwomen, I still wish we had fun like Americans.” Source: Bill Danch cartoon from Independent Woman, Women’s Packet, June 1954, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 18, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Courtesy of the National Archives.

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

90

8:00 PM

Page 90

Laura A. Belmonte

Notes 1. Air Bulletin, RG 306, Air Bulletins (General), box 1, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland (hereafter referred to as NAII). 2. For powerful descriptions of the war’s impact and American reactions to the desolation, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 513-517; Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 3-15. 3. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). On the backgrounds of U.S. policymakers and leading journalists, see Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); H.W. Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995); Ronald Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). 4. On exceptionalism as a guiding principle in American foreign policy, see, for example, Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 19-45; Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Exceptionalism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 5. Throughout this text, I refer to “propaganda” and “information.” I use these terms interchangeably and not usually in a pejorative way. Like Clayton D. Laurie, I define propaganda as “any organized attempt by an individual, group, or government verbally, visually, or symbolically to persuade a population to adopt its views and repudiate the view of an opposing group” (see Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996]). For a helpful historical overview, see Richard Alan Nelson, “Propaganda,” in Handbook of Popular Culture, 2nd ed., ed. M. Thomas Inge, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 10111123. 6. On the genesis of the postwar information program, see Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Walter F. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 7. On nations as “imagined communities,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). 8. One could argue that USIA remained male-dominated for decades. In March 2000, 1,100 women won a class-action lawsuit against USIA and Voice of America, the radio broadcasting arm of the agency. The women claimed that they were denied employment opportunities while working at the agency between 1974 and 1984. After a twenty-three-year legal battle, the USIA and Voice of America settled the suit for $508 million – the largest award for job discrimination in U.S. history (see Washington Post, 23 March 2000). 9. Department of State, Bulletin 13, 338 (December 16, 1945): 951. 10. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman) to Byrnes, 20 January 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, 6: 676-678 (hereafter FRUS, year, volume). 11. See Overseas Information Programs of the United States, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1486. 12. Ibid. 13. The Women in Communist Countries, USIA Pamphlet Files, United States Information Agency Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter referred to as USIAA).

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 91

A Family Affair?

91

14. See, for example, 1 March 1960 report, RG 306, USIA Requestor Only reports, 1956-1962, box 2, NAII. 15. 21 March 1951, Labor Air Bulletin, RG 306, Air Bulletin, box 2, NAII. 16. October 1953, Women’s Packet no. 7, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 17, NAII. 17. An Analysis of the Principal Psychological Vulnerabilities in the USSR and of the Principal Assets Available to the U.S. for Their Exploitation, 1950, RG 59, Lot 52D432, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office Files of Edward W. Barrett, 1950-1951, box 5, NAII. 18. “Women Workers in U.S. Protected by Many Safeguards,” 23 January 1952, Labor Air Bulletin, RG 306, Air Bulletin, box 2, NAII. 19. Hulten to Gould, 20 March 1951, RG 59, Lot 52D432, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office Files of Edward W. Barrett, 1950-1951, box 2, NAII. 20. August 1954, Women’s Packet no. 17, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 18, NAII. 21. Media and Communication and the Free World as Seen by Hungarian Refugees, 3 March 1953, RG 306, Office of Research, Reports, and Related Studies, 1948-1953, box 31, NAII. 22. Secretary of State to Certain American Diplomatic and Consular Officers, 20 July 1948, United States Information Policy with Regard to Anti-American Propaganda, Lot 53D47, Records Relating to International Information Activities, 1938-1953, William T. Stone Files, box 3, NAII. 23. Iron Curtain Radio Comment on VOA, Report no. 44, 17 March 1950, RG 306, Reports and Related Studies, 1948-1953, box 8, NAII. 24. 8 November 1956, Present and Potential Communist Use of Television as an International Propaganda Medium, RG 306, Production Division, Research Reports, 1956-1959, box 1, NAII. 25. “Visitor to USSR Reports on Soviet Woman’s Status,” August 1953, Women’s Packet no. 6, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 17, NAII. 26. February 1955, Women’s Packet no. 23, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 19, NAII. 27. “Communism and the Family,” USIA Pamphlet Files, USIAA. 28. Poster for USIS film “This is My Home,” USIA Pamphlet Files, USIAA. 29. Building the Community through Family Life, USIA Pamphlets, USIAA. 30. “A Visit with Mrs. Forster,” April 1953, Women’s Packet no. 1, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 16, NAII. 31. Albert G. Pickerell to Edward Barrett, 17 July 1951, RG 59, Lot 52D365, Records Relating to International Information Activities, 1938-1953, box 60, NAII. 32. Ibid. 33. The Soviet Woman Under Communism, USIA Pamphlet Files, USIAA. 34. Ibid. 35. On the Soviet characterizations of American women, see Unsigned letter to Alice K. Leopold, Assistant to the Secretary of Labor, 2 March 1960, RG 306, Requestor Only Reports, 19561962, box 2, NAII. 36. See Bill Danch cartoon from Independent Woman, Women’s Packet-June 1954, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 18, NAII. 37. Cover Sheet for “Home is What You Make It,” May 1954, Women’s Packet no. 13, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 18, NAII. 38. Cover sheet to Public Affairs Officers, “Young Dress Designers Win Top Prizes for Sewing Efforts,” March 1956, Women’s Packet no. 35, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 5, NAII. 39. Kirk to Acheson, 8 September 1950, FRUS, 1950, 4:1245. 40. Working Group Discussion, 21 September 1950, RG 59, Lot 52-202, Records of Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, 1947-1950, Policy Papers and Meetings, 1949-1950, Public Relations Working Group, 1950, box 5, NAII. 41. Women in the United States, August 1953, Women’s Packet no. 1, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 1, NAII.

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

92

8:00 PM

Page 92

Laura A. Belmonte

42. “Soviet Practices Refute Propaganda on Equality of the Sexes,” October 1953, Women’s Packet no. 7, RG 306, Feature Packets, Recurring Themes, box 17. Virtually every monthly edition of the Women’s Packet included an article on American women’s political activism; see ibid, boxes 1321. 43. Radio Programs for Women, 1 July – 30 September 1949, Information Service Division, RG 59, Lot 53D47, Records Relating to International Information Activities, 1938-1953, William T. Stone Files, box 4, NAII. 44. Ibid. American officials took similar actions in Japan (see Susan J. Pharr, “The Politics of Women’s Rights,” in Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation, ed. Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu [Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987], 221-52). 45. Problems of Film Production in Underdeveloped Countries, January 1953, RG 306, Office of Research, Reports and Related Studies, 1948-1953, box 34, NAII. 46. Ibid. 47. USIA Basic Guidance and Planning Paper No. 6, 31 March 1959, USIA Subject Files, USIAA. 48. USIA Basic Guidance and Planning Paper No. 12, 13 August 1953, USIA Subject Files, USIAA. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. On the tumult of the 1960s, see Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 1991. Brands, H.W. Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Hixson, Walter F. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 19451961. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and Foreign Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Isaacson, Walter, and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. Isserman, Maurice, and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Laurie, Clayton D. The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade against Nazi Germany. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996. Leffler, Melvyn P. “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 513-517. _____. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 93

A Family Affair?

93

Lucas, Scott. Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Nelson, Richard Alan. “Propaganda.” In Handbook of Popular Culture, 2nd ed., ed. M. Thomas Inge, 1011-1123. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Ninkovich, Frank. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Paterson, Thomas G. On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1992. Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Steele, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Exceptionalism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Yoder, Edwin M., Jr. Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995.

04-Belmonte

11/5/03

8:00 PM

Page 94

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 95

Part III

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION, NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS AND PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 96

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 97

Chapter 5

FRANCE AND GERMANY AFTER THE GREAT WAR Businessmen, Intellectuals and Artists in Nongovernmental European Networks Guido Müller

Problem and Methodological Approach

T

he mental attitudes and social structures at work in the networks of European integration today result from a process that began in the aftermath of the Great War of 1914-1918. The cultural and ideological roots of this process are embedded in Franco-German and European nongovernmental relations between 1923 and 1933. Socially and ideologically, the representatives of official institutions and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) acting on the European level in the 1950s had largely the same background as their forerunners between the two world wars in elitist and nondemocratic organizations. Any history of the process of European integration after World War II that wants to explain institutional expansion and the logic of political decisionmaking must discuss this fact and its far-reaching consequences.1 In recent years, historians of international relations have discovered the sphere of social contacts, cultural relations, and transnational nongovernmental networks that link different countries.2 Today, these kinds of cultural and social relationships are established through International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) that are recognized as semiofficial representatives of a global civil society and of global politics.3 Interest in global problems intensified and was shared by a larger public after Word War I, inside and outside the framework of the League of Nations.4 This essay, however, is not concerned with nongovernmental relations in general or on such a global level. It focuses, instead, on certain phenomena, which so far have escaped historians’ general attention, partly because they are difficult to retrace Notes for this section begin on page 106.

05-Muller-Pt.III

98

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 98

Guido Müller

and to explain. The established order of cause and effect in European integration history does not provide an explanation for Franco-German attempts to reach an agreement on the cultural and economic level in the years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. These attempts at harmonizing interests and attitudes were undertaken by groups of individuals on a bilateral nongovernmental level and through both existing and new networks of society elites. Collaboration preceded reconciliation in these efforts to solve political conflicts that were regarded as legitimate results of national developments. The proclamation of common cultural, intellectual, and social interests shared by the nations that had been opposed as enemies in the Great War was by no means meant to discredit nationalism, however obvious the reaction against militarism expressed through these European ideas. Very important in this context is the fact that most adherents and partisans of such European ideals had gained combat experience in the Great War, and knew about the disastrous effects at first hand. It was primarily the former soldiers who were impatient with official diplomatic efforts at reconciliation embodied in the League of Nations. Founded in 1919, the League was of central importance for the development of international and transnational consciousness and solidarity after the First World War.5 But the results of the League’s work seemed minor when compared to the conclusions that were drawn from its failure to function properly, especially in the international crisis of the 1930s. Germany became a member of the League only in 1926, after the treaties of Locarno when, in a climate of general détente, Franco-German cooperation commenced. But as far as Franco-German relations were concerned, the League’s institutions, such as the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris or the International Labour Office at Geneva, were unable to contribute much toward building a network of European cooperation based on the reconciliation and support of both countries.6 Although Franco-German relations from 1870 to 1945 were often depicted as the expression of “hereditary hostility” between the two countries, a great variety of individual and social transnational contacts and cultural transfer between these “unreconciled neighbors” existed.7 Several transnational initiatives date from the period between the two world wars, many of them short-lived and difficult to document today. All bear testimony to the fact that a certain fascination with the “enemy brother” was never absent on either side and acted on individuals as a powerful tonic when they came into closer contact across borders. Interest in the history of cultural and social relations between France and Germany during the interwar years has grown in recent years. This has partly to do with the renewed attention in the vicissitudes of the Vichy government but also with recent attempts to exhume the prehistory of European integration from the networks of collaboration created by Nazi Germany. German social scientists such as HansManfred Bock at the University of Kassel, and French researchers in German culture such as Gilbert Merlio and Michel Grunewald have published important studies on

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 99

France and Germany After the Great War

99

Franco-German cultural relations. Younger German historians such as Eckard Michels, Barbara Unteutsch, Ina Belitz, Hans-Peter Sick, Oliver Burgard and Gaby Sonnabend have in turn been working on individuals, networks, nongovernmental institutions, and cultural subjects in Franco-German relations.8 Two outstanding nongovernmental organizations in particular are representative of Franco-German social and cultural relations after 1918, both due to their comparatively long life span and their social importance: the ”Franco-German Committee for Documentation and Information” and the ”International Federation of Intellectual Unions.” The social composition and aims of both organizations were elitist; both focused their activities on national interests that were perceived as legitimate. The first organization was concerned with economic rather than with cultural cooperation, while the second tried to collect evidence about cultural and intellectual problems and attitudes. The French and German social elites engaged in the building of these transnational organizations after World War I are the immediate focus of this chapter. The background of the individuals and their contacts under consideration here reveals a multitude of international social relations: tourism, migration, immediate business contacts between companies and through traveling salesmen, the problem of collective perceptions, the exchange of points of view in public opinion, as well as cultural relationships through the press, film, radio, literature, music and theatre. After World War I, many groups and individuals in Europe besides diplomats and foreign-policy professionals were increasingly concerned about international economic, cultural, and military relations. Numerous journals, research institutions, clubs, series of publications, and commissions were established to provide information about other nations and analyse ways and means to avoid another war. They were not, however, very successful in promoting peace, anticipating, as they did, the role of international mass organizations, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations in the second postwar period. The Carnegie Foundation for Europe in Paris, for example, already in the 1920s supported Franco-German nongovernmental cultural cooperation. In 1926, the foundation invited Thomas Mann to Paris (his first visit to the city after the war), the German writer who was to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. It was evident in postwar Europe that the continent and its former elites had forfeited their significance. This conviction spread particularly in the territories formerly belonging to the Habsburg monarchy, in such circles in France that accepted the fact the peace had been lost, and in smaller nations such as Luxemburg, Denmark and Austria. A number of intellectuals, artists, and business men felt inspired to create networks for European reconstruction based on closer Franco-German cooperation. Faced with the increasing economic power of the United States and the new ideological great power of the Soviet Union, these groups developed international and bilateral platforms for information, discussion, and the definition of common interests. As individuals and as groups, they all intended to influence governments and political leaders as well as the masses of democratic nations such as the first German

05-Muller-Pt.III

100

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 100

Guido Müller

Republic of Weimar, born after the defeat of the Reich in 1918, and the French Third Republic, also founded under the auspices of defeat, in 1871. A number of shared experiences left their mark on the generations, which played an important role in Franco-German social relationships. First, it was the so-called nonconformist generation, born before or around 1900, that was influenced by wartime experience. Abandoning the rules of the “world of yesterday,” of the world of the nineteenth century and its liberal, conservative, and socialist ideas, these participants of the Great War found themselves (or believed to find themselves) threatened by the prospect of terminally loosing their social status. Aristocrats, intellectuals and artists, all looked for new social, political and international structures to replace the societies and nation-states, which they held responsible for the Great War.9 Other experiences shared by all Europeans included the Bolshevik Revolution, the growing political and industrial status of the United States, new youth movements, and an affinity for Catholic renewal. As a result, new phenomena in European politics captured the attention of elites and intellectuals in all of the European countries: bolshevism, fascism, and neoconservative movements. Even the antidemocratic and reactionary movements within the societies of Germany and France after 1918 quickly discovered new instruments of propaganda and methods of influencing and managing public opinion and mass movements. During, the late 1920s a small group of intellectuals loosely involved with transnational organizations such as the ”Franco-German Committee for Documentation and Information,” discussed the importance of social relations and the role of cultural and mental factors in international and bilateral relations. They believed that international security and peace depended on the common effort of social elites in different countries. These intellectuals distrusted democracy, public opinion, and “the people” as guidelines for national politics and foreign policy. They saw the reason for the outbreak and the disastrous outcome of the Great War in the mass-democratic structures of the nation-states. New research has shown the importance of young right-wing intellectuals in continental Europe.10 Their ideas about society, culture and government politics were predominant in nongovernmental Franco-German relations. This generation of young conservative intellectuals was at the forefront of a Franco-German ”rapprochement” inspired by philosophers and writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In the 1950s, their ideas reemerged in the neoconservative ideology of the ”Occident” (Abendland).11 The overall chronology of initiatives and movements for promoting Franco-German and European cooperation from 1918 to 1939 do not concern us here.12 But the phase from 1923/1924 to 1928 stands apart, for at least eight clubs and public associations were founded in this short period, all of which called for Franco-German collaboration.13 This moment of reconciliation between the western European nations for years prior to World War II, symbolized by the security-treaties of Locarno (1925) was too short to create durable political and economic structures, but it marked a new combination of culture and economy in international relations.14

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 101

France and Germany After the Great War

101

Intellectuals, businessmen, and artists began to search for common interests among European nations. “Europeanism” became a guiding idea in transnational Franco-German relations, even among nationalist and young conservative circles. A new kind of competition between a German and a French Europe emerged, which was later to be combined with National Socialist and fascist concepts of “collaboration” and a “New Order.” All these aspects were apparent in the case of the two organizations discussed below.

Two Case Studies: The ”Comité franco-allemand de Documentation et de l‘Information” and the ”Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles” The “Comité franco-allemand de Documentation et de l‘Information”15 was founded in 1926 by Emile Mayrisch, the owner of the steel empire of the ARBED trust based in Luxemburg; the committee had interests in France, Germany, Belgium, and Brazil.16 The committee officially finished its work and ended its meetings in 1938, having already suspended its political activities in 1933. The idea to form this information club and clearing-committee was developed by a young French political writer, Pierre Viénot, a former member of the staff of Marshal Hubert Lyautey in Morocco. Lyautey had implemented a policy of flexibility to ease the political and social tensions in the French protectorate, where he established a working relationship with native elites.17 Most likely, the Franco-German committee was therefore at least partly inspired by Lyautey’s political ideas, however indirectly. On the other hand, the founder of the committee and the “patron” of the steel industries of Luxemburg, Emile Mayrisch, had already given his support to other public relations initiatives for western European reconciliation. One of the main functions of the new committee’s offices at Paris and Berlin consisted in the correction of errors and misunderstandings appearing in the presses in France and Germany. The office at Berlin functioned almost like an additional French embassy; Pierre Viénot directed it from 1926 to 1930. In 1929, Viénot married Andrée Mayrisch, Emile Mayrisch’s only daughter, but then left the committee in 1930. He was disappointed about the conservative establishment’s lack of support for his innovative efforts on the part of the conservative establishment. Pierre Viénot’s wife, Andrée Viénot, had studied at the London School of Economics and was in contact with the Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man. Under her influence, Viénot started a career as a member of parliament for the French Socialist Party, which at the time had turned to a policy of reform. In 1936/1937, Viénot became undersecretary of state under the ministry of Léon Blum, assigned to decolonize the Near East and the Maghreb. During the war he chose the side of Charles de Gaulle, and he became de Gaulle’s ambassador to London in 1942. In 1944, a few days after the liberation of France, he died.

05-Muller-Pt.III

102

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 102

Guido Müller

Among the eighty French and German members of the committee there was a high percentage of company executives, technocrats and high-ranking civil servants. To avoid party quarrels, the rules of the committee excluded active politicians, ministers, and parliamentary representatives. Many committee members were executives of engineering and electric industries and chemical works; others were executives of the most important banking houses, university professors, or civil servants concerned with research and technology. The committee may therefore be considered a cross-selection of German and French economic, civil service, and diplomatic elites.18 The committee followed a conservative—not a pacifist, internationalist, or supranationalist—concept of reconciliation and cooperation from the point of view of shared national interests. In Viénots view, it was utopian to dream of an international public opinion sensitive to any kind of idealist concepts. During the one or two annual meetings held in Paris, Germany, or Luxemburg, members discussed a variety of topics: the creation of elites, industrial organization and rationalization, European problems of agriculture, the modernization of the Balkans, the organization of the press, relations between Europe and the Soviet Union, and the economic and social crises of the 1930s in general. Economic and social problems assumed a central role during these debates; no trade union officials, politicians, or other lobbyists of social welfare were invited. The discussion of democratic legitimization was excluded from the work of the assemblies. Particularly after Mayrisch’s death in 1928 and Viénot’s departure from the committee in 1930, economic questions took the lead. Following the evacuation of the Rhineland by French troops in 1930 and the beginning of the big economic crisis of 1929, conservative elites in both France and Germany lost their interest in political and economic collaboration.19 The trust issue was especially important to some members of the committee. But after the conclusion of the Commercial Treaty of 1927, other forms of economic cooperation between France and Germany emerged. German export of manufactured articles to France tripled from 1925 to 1929.20 This created good prospects for success for the committee’s efforts. Modern export-oriented industries such as chemical works or electronics manufacture (e.g., IG-Farben, Kuhlmann, AEG) and their associated banking houses (Deutsche Bank, Dresdener Bank and Banque des Pays du Nord) were more interested in and much more important for the activities of the committee than the heavy industries of coal and steel. Unfortunately, we know little about any business deals concluded in the context of committee meetings. In any case, both the creation and development of the committee from 1926 to 1931 were founded upon the rise and decline of Franco-German economic relations and on the question of evacuation of the Rhineland by French military forces. The problems of the committee started with the large economic crisis of 1929 and after the last French soldiers had left the Rhineland. Committee members returned to nationalist egotism and to thinking in categories of military force and autarchy. Time for political reconciliation was too short, and the organization of the committee was too weak to create a functioning and enduring network of industrial and

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 103

France and Germany After the Great War

103

economic interests between France and Germany during the first five years of its existence. Political contrasts between the two nations undermined mutual confidence. Even common economic interests shared by some major industrial corporations remained too weak to conquer political distrust. Felix Deutsch, president of the big electronics manufacture AEG, declared at a committee meeting in June 1931 that political progress must precede economic advance. Like two other committee members, Max Warburg and Franz von Mendelssohn, both of German-Jewish origin and both owners of major banking houses, Deutsch was afraid of the radicalization of the Left and Right in Germany; this made him an advocate of Franco-German solidarity.21 But in the early 1930s, the structure of an association like the committee, although it comprised the economic elites of both nations, was far too weak to build up solidarity on the basis of transnational capital and society interests. In fact, the “war of the minds,” which had opposed French and German intellectuals and the public opinions of both countries since the Great War, continued in a kind of “Cold War” between Germany and France after 1918. Intellectuals and leaders of public opinion may have been understood to fight against misunderstanding, misperception, and hate, but no public figures got any sympathy from their voters for acting on such principles.22 Two Austrian-Bohemian aristocrats and intellectuals spoke out for European unity: Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi and Prince Karl Anton Rohan. The Pan-European Union inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi tended toward Nietzschean ideas. The union enjoyed a positive standing among the public, for statesmen such as French Foreign minister Aristide Briand, French President Edouard Herriot and the Czech Prime Minister Tomas Masaryk spoke out in its favor.23 But it was the European Cultural Union (“Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles” or ”Europäischer Kulturbund”) founded by Rohan, a scion of one of the most famous dynasties of European aristocrats, which attracted upper-class intellectuals from all over central Europe. The Pan-European Union worked for political aims, while both the European Cultural Union and the French-German Committee tried to exclude political debate in favor of a development of mutual economic or cultural interests. The “Kulturbund” was founded in 1922 in Vienna. Individual centers sprung up in Paris in 1924, in Milano in 1925, and in Frankfurt and Heidelberg in 1926; its members formed a European network reaching as far as Portugal and the Baltic States. Actively supporting the idea of a conservative revolution, Karl Anton Rohan and a majority of the “Kulturbund’s” partisans were attracted by Italian fascism. In the mid 1920s, Rohan’s pamphlet ”Europa” clearly showed his fascist leanings; it called for a community of industrials, business-men and technocrats including nonBolshevik young radicals, intellectuals, and artists. The membership list of the “Kulturbund” reads like a Who’s Who of European celebrities: Heidelberg professors Alfred Weber and Arnold Bergsträsser; the IG-Farben executive responsible for exports, Georg von Schnitzler, and his wife, Lilly von Mallinckrodt; Hermann Bücher, president of AEG; the society philosopher Hermann Count Keyserling; the antiliberal enemy of the Weimar republic, writer and lawyer Carl Schmitt; the painter Max Beckmann; Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Aus-

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

104

Page 104

Guido Müller

tria’s chancellor, prelate Ignaz Seipel; Alfred von Nostitz-Wallwitz, president of the German branch of the “Comité franco-allemand,” and his wife, Helene von Hindenburg, a niece of Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and a Maecenas of Rodin and Rilke. The “Kulturbund” was closely connected with Catholic central-European circles around the periodical Abendland (Occident) in Cologne, Munich, and Vienna. City oligarchs such as Konrad Adenauer at Cologne or Carl Petersen at Hamburg were also among the leading members of the “Kulturbund”.24 The “Kulturbund’s” annual meetings involved around 300 participants. Its regular local meetings and more than fifty local branches in Europe, plus its periodical, the Europäische Revue, turned Rohan’s association into the most important intellectual network on the continent. In 1934, however, the “Europäische Kulturbund” ceased functioning, mostly because of serious conflicts concerning questions of national minorities between the Hungarians and the Czechs, and because of the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Nonetheless, the journal of the “Kulturbund”, the Europäische Revue, continued its publication until 1944, with the aid of the German foreign ministry and the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.25 It was a useful means of international propaganda and international contacts for the Third Reich, like Prince Rohan himself. Some intellectuals and politicians banned from public activities were allowed to contribute to its pages, with a view to make it acceptable to readers outside Germany. Among these authors counted the future president of the Federal Republic of Germany, the liberal democrat Theodor Heuss, who published book reviews in the Europäische Revue during the war. After 1945, its editor, Joachim Moras, refounded the journal under the title Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken. At the same time, Rohan’s collaboration with the Third Reich before and after 1938, and his conservative anti-Americanism, overshadowed his earlier contribution to conservative and liberal European intellectual cooperation in the interwar period. Since World War II, both protagonists and historians of European integration have forgotten his name. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rohan worked for the political movements of refugees from Czechoslovakia in Germany. On the other hand, culture played a very subordinate role in the development of European integration since 1948/1950 through to the 1970s. 26 This is an additional reason for the way in which Rohan’s cultural and elitist initiatives fell into oblivion, whereas traces of the economic ideas of Emile Mayrisch may still be found in the annals of European integration history.

Results and Perspectives The two associations discussed here—the Franco-German Committee for Documentation and Information, and the International Federation of Intellectual Unions— were connected with other international initiatives during the interwar period, which also supported plans for economic cooperation, customs union, and economic integra-

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 105

France and Germany After the Great War

105

tion. Many other international and binational organizations were in contact with both associations—for example, the Carnegie Foundation in Paris. Their members regularly appeared at intellectual meeting places such as Emile Mayrisch’s castle at Colpach in Luxemburg, and the European summer schools of Pontigny in France or at Davos in Switzerland. They engaged in the university exchange programs of the University of Heidelberg and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. All these nongovernmental initiatives had contacts in embassies, foreign ministries, governments, political parties, and the institutions of the League of Nations. Germany showed the highest number of nongovernmental relationships with France. Initiatives originating in smaller countries such as Luxemburg and Austria, played an important role of cultural mediation between the bigger nations such as France and Germany. Figures such as Mayrisch or Rohan were equally conversant with Germanic and Latin culture. The periods of Franco-German reconciliation in the 1920s and the period after World War II are linked by the social continuity and the cultural values of European elites active in both associations around 1930. Economic, financial and aristocratic elites and the “intellectual aristocracy” dominated both efforts. All these actors tended to be neoconservative—often antidemocratic and antiliberal. The Eurocentric, Catholic, and antiliberal ideology of the “Occident” thinkers dominated their cultural vision of Europe; they stood as far removed from Anglo-American liberalism as from the radical democratic ideas of the French revolution. After the experience of World War II and of the intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe, “Atlantic ideas,” the mentality of the Cold War, and the ideological framework of “Western civilization,” including America, prevailed amongst these elites. But this set of apparently new concepts responded to experiences and ideas that had marked the biographies of European leaders before 1945. Politicians and intellectuals born between 1880 and 1900 dominated European politics and institutions until about 1960. Their experience of nongovernmental cooperation, the weakness of the nation-state and its inability to preserve security and stability between the wars became decisive for European political and economic development. Democratic and social deficits in the process of European integration can be traced back to the social and mental structures of the biographies of its protagonists. The advent of a new generation and the resulting social and mental transformations in the 1960s seem to have led to new developments and standards of structural and ideological pluralism and democratic frankness; this reflects the crises of European institutions since the 1970s. The defensive European ideology of an exclusive “Occident” is veiled by the concept of a “Western Civilization” including America and its satellites.27 The case of Max Clauss clearly illustrates such continuities in the lives of the makers of Europe of the “Hour Zero.”28 Born in 1902, Clauss studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Paris in the 1920s. He was a student of Ernst Robert Curtius, Adolf Weber, Arnold Bergsträsser, and André Siegfried. These conservative but not nationalist professors were leading members of movements for Franco-

05-Muller-Pt.III

106

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 106

Guido Müller

German and “occidental” reconciliation. In 1926 Clauss became the first secretary of Rohan’s “Kulturbund”, and in 1930 he succeeded Viénot at the head of the committee’s office in Berlin. After 1933, he traveled as a correspondent for the Third Reich in Europe and America. In the early 1940s, he worked as a propagandist of a “New Europe” in occupied France and at Vichy. After a few years at Lisbon, where Clauss was busy with air-freight exchanges between Europe, America, and Africa, in the 1950s, he became a specialist for European-African relations to the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg and later chancellor, Kurt-Georg Kiesinger. In the 1960s he was appointed to represent the Hannover fair at the European Commission in Brussels. Clauss is a typical case for a nongovernmental European career following all the historical turns of the century. Such biographical continuities, which find their expression in European networks and mentalities, remain to be studied more extensively. The mentality and social structures of town partnerships (”jumelages”) offer particularly revealing insights, as do the collective biographies of civil servants working for the European administration and institutions related to the European Commission. By studying institutions such as the College of Europe at Bruges or the European University in Florence, we can get a better understanding of today’s networks and their development.29 Far too little is known about the social elites both involved in and created by the process of European integration. The cultivation and creation of, and the changes in European consciousness effected by elites and intellectuals in nongovernmental networks are a subject quite as important as the systems of political ideas and international relations. Only a closer study of the group biographies linked to European integration will result in a comprehensive cultural history of contemporary Europe containing all the factors, which have shaped its political culture of today.

Notes 1. Historians use four theoretical models of explaining the social structure and political culture of European integration. The first and more traditionally minded approach examines the interdependence of domestic, economic, and foreign policies evident in the process of European integration. The second approach is comparative in the sense of the French historian Marc Bloch, who in 1934 called for a comparative social history of the European nations. Bloch’s approach is followed today, for instance, by the ”Zentrum für vergleichende Geschichte Europas” in Berlin. A third approach is concerned with combining two perspectives on European history: on the one hand, the history of European consciousness and shared European attitudes (Europe “as it is lived in,”—”l‘Europe vécue”) and, on the other hand, the history of integration policies. The French historian René Girault and his Austrian colleague Michael Mitterauer both use this combined approach. Yet another approach is centered on transnational nongovernmental organizations and movements and their systematic ideas about politics in Europe. This approach, to which this chapter aims to contribute, is based on an investigation into the prosopography of international networks concerned

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 107

France and Germany After the Great War

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

107

with European affairs since the 1920s; it by no means excludes the three other approaches described above, or combinations thereof. From this point of view, shared mentalities and shared experiences of whole generations and of individuals are important social and cultural factors (see Rainer Hudemann, Hartmut Kaelble, and Klaus Schwabe, eds., Europa im Blick der Historiker [Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995]). Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State-Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999); Anja Jetschke and Andrea Liese, ”Kultur im Aufwind: Zur Rolle von Bedeutungen, Werten und Handlungsrepertoires in den internationalen Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 1 (1998): 149-179; Wilfried Loth, and Juergen Osterhammel, eds., Internationale Geschichte: Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000). Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994); John Boli, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Michael Walzer, ed., Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1994). Pierre Gerbet, Le rêve d’un ordre mondial de la SDN à l’ONU (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996). Francis P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Werner Scholz, ”Das deutsch-französische Verhältnis in den internationalen Kulturorganisationen der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Les tiers dans les relations franco-allemandes: Dritte in den deutschfranzösischen Beziehungen, ed. Christian Baechler and Klaus-Jürgen Müller (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), 215-223; Michel Dumoulin and Yves Stelandre, L’idée européenne dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions de l’Université Catholique de Louvain-LaNeuve, 1992); International Labour Organization, ed., International Labour Conventions and Recommendations 1919-1982 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1982). Etienne François, M.C. Hoock-Demarle, and Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, eds., Marianne – Germania: Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im europäischen Kontext 1789-1914, 2 vols., (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1998). In the 1970s, two French historians and one German historian published fundamental research on Franco-German society relations: Fernand L’Huillier, Dialogues franco-allemands 1925-1933 (Paris: Ophrys, 1971); Jean-Claude Delbreil, Les catholiques français et les tentatives de rapprochement franco-allemand 1920-1933 (Metz: Editions S.M.E.I., 1972); Clemens A. Wurm, Die französische Sicherheitspolitik in der Phase der Umorientierung 1924-1926 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1979), 434-464, 482-528. Since about 1985, scholars have taken a closer look at a number of groups, networks, parties, youth movements, intellectuals, and engineers (see Hermann Hagspiel, Verständigung zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich: Die deutsch-französische Außenpolitik der zwanziger Jahre im innenpolitischen Kräftefeld beider Länder [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1987]; Dieter Tiemann, Deutsch-französisische Jugendbeziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1989]; Barbara Unteutsch, Vom Sohlbergkreis zur Gruppe “Collaboration”: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen [Ph. D. diss., Universität Münster, 1990]; Yves Cohen and Klaus Manfrass, eds. Frankreich – Deutschland: Forschung, Technik und industrielle Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990]. More than fifty research articles in French and German are contained in Hans Manfred Bock, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus and Michel Trebitsch, eds., Entre Locarno et Vichy: Les relations culturelles franco-allemandes dans les années 1930, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994) (compare introduction by H.M. Bock, vol. 1, 25-61, and bibliography in vol. 2, 837-861); Ina Belitz, Befreundung mit dem Fremden: Die Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft in den deutsch-französischen Kultur- und Gesellschaftsbeziehungen der Locarno-Ära (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag der Europäischen Wissenschaften, 1997); Hans Manfred Bock, “Das DeutschFranzösische Institut in der Geschichte des zivilgesellschaftlichen Austauschs zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich,” and idem, “Bibliographischer Versuch zu den zivilgesellschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Projekt deutsch-französische Verständigung: Die Rolle der Zivilgesellschaft am Beispiel des Deutsch-Französischen Instituts in Lud-

05-Muller-Pt.III

108

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 108

Guido Müller

wigsburg, ed. Hans Manfred Bock (Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag, 1998), 13-120, 379-477; Oliver Burgard, Das gemeinsame Europa – von der politischen Utopie zum außenpolitischen Programm (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Wissenschaft, 2000). Michel Trebitsch and Marie-Christine Granjon, eds., Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1998); Guido Müller, “Jenseits des Nationalismus? Europa als Konzept grenzübergreifender adlig-bürgerlicher Elitendiskurse zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland, vol. 2, Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001), 235-268. Jean-François Sirinelli, ed., Histoire des droites en France, vols. 1-3, (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Aram Mattioli, ed., Intellektuelle von rechts. Ideologie und Politik in der Schweiz 1918-1939 (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 1995), 1-27; Ze’ev Sternhel, ed., L’Éternel retour: Contre la démocratie, l’idéologie de la décadence (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994); Gilbert Merlio, ed., Ni gauche ni droite: les chassés-croisés idéologiques des intellectuels français et allemands dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Talence: Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 1995); Hans-Wilhelm Eckert, Konservative Revolution in Frankreich? Die Nonkonformisten der “Jeune Droite” und des “Ordre nouveau” in der Krise der 1930er Jahre (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000). Guido Müller and Vanessa Plichta, “Zwischen Rhein und Donau: Abendländisches Denken zwischen deutsch-französischen Verständigungsinitiativen und konservativ-katholischen Integrationsmodellen (1923-1957),” Journal of European Integration History 5, no. 2 (1999): 17-47; Axel Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur Ideenlandschaft der fünfziger Jahre (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999). For the structures and chronology, see Guido Müller, “Gesellschaftsgeschichte und internationale Beziehungen: Die deutsch-französische Verständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Deutschland und der Westen: Internationale Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Guido Müller (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1998), 49-64; Ina Belitz, Befreundung, 97-112, 186-207. The most important ones were: “Paneuropa-Union” (1923/1924), “Europäischer Kulturbund” (1922/1924), the Catholic circle around the review “Abendland” (Cologne, Munich, and Vienna, 1925), “Europäischer Zollverein” (1926), “Verband für europäische Verständigung” (1924/8), “Deutsch-Französisches Studienkomitee” (1926), “Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft” (1926) and the “Davoser Sommeruniversität” (1926/1928). Reinhard Frommelt, Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa: Einigungsbestrebungen in Wirtschaft und Politik, 1925-1933 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1977); Burgard, Europa. Guido Müller, “L’Europe de la culture ou une nouvelle aristocratie européenne: les réflexions et les projets au sein de la Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles (1924-1934),” in Organizations internationales et architectures européennes 1929-1939, ed. Sylvain Schirmann (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003); idem, “‘La Fuite sans fin?’ Les milieux franco-allemands des années 20: quel projet pour l’unité européenne ?” in Milieux, réseaux et personnalités: porteurs de projets d’unité européenne, ed. Gérard Bossuat (Paris, 2002). Guido Müller, “Deutsch-französische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund im Rahmen deutschfranzösischer Verständigungsbewegungen 1924-1933,“ Habilitationsschrift, Aachen, 1997, publication planed for 2004 in series “Internationale Geschichte,” ed. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Jost Duelffer, Juergen Osterhammel, and Wilfried Loth (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004). Guido Müller, “Emil Mayrisch und westdeutsche Industrielle in der europäischen Wirtschaftsverständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Galerie: Révue culturelle et pédagogique 10, no. 4 (1992): 545-559; Guido Müller, “Der luxemburgische Stahlkonzern ARBED nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Zum Problem der deutsch-französischen Verständigung durch Wirtschaftsverflechtung,” Revue d’Allemagne 25, 4 (1993): 535-544. Guido Müller, “Pierre Viénot, Schöpfer des Deutsch-Französischen Studienkomitees (19261938) und Europäer der ersten Nachkriegszeit,” (with English and French abstracts), Journal of European Integration History 4, no. 1 (1998): 5-26; Hans Manfred Bock, ed., Pierre Viénot.

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 109

France and Germany After the Great War

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

109

Ungewisses Deutschland: Zur Krise seiner bürgerlichen Kultur (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1999). Gaby Sonnabend is currently working on a doctoral thesis about Pierre Viénot at the University of Bonn. Hans Manfred Bock, “Kulturelle Eliten in den deutsch-französischen Gesellschaftsbeziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Eliten in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Strukturen und Beziehungen, vol. 1, ed. Rainer Hudemann and Georges-Henri Soutou, (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994), 73-91. Guido Müller, “Andrée Mayrisch und Pierre Viénot—ein politisches Paar zwischen Berlin und Paris (1923-1940),” in Les années trente: base de l’évolution économique, politique et sociale du Luxembourg d’après-guerre? “Hemecht”- Beiheft, ed. Michel Polfer and Paul Margue (Luxembourg: Editions Saint Paul, 1996), 131-148. Wilfried Feldenkirchen, “Deutsche Zoll- und Handelspolitik 1914-1933,” in Die Auswirkungen von Zöllen und Handelshemmnissen auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Hans Pohl (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1987), 328-357. Müller, “Gesellschaftsbeziehungen,” 317-360. Another example for the deterioration in public attitudes toward Franco-German reconciliation was the failure of the Franco-German cinema coproduction of the film Kameradschaft/ La tragédie de la mine (1931) by G.W. Pabst. The film unsuccessfully propagated pacifism as well as Franco-German solidarity and friendship in a time of economic and social crisis (see Hermann Barth, ed., Kameradschaft: Mit Aufsätzen und Materialien zum Film [Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1997], 155-190; Wolf Hort, “Paneuropa [!] im Film,” Völkischer Beobachter, Edition, Munich, no. 355, 1 December 1931). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Ein Leben für Europa: Lebenserinnerungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1966); Marco Pons, La pensée et l’action de Coudenhove-Kalergi, vol. 1; L’idée pacifiste source première de l’oeuvre du fondateur de l’union paneuropéenne 1914-1926 (Lausanne: Fondation Européenne, 1979); Claus Schöndube, “Ein Leben für Europa: Richard Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi,“ in Persönlichkeiten der europäischen Integration, ed. Thomas Jansen and Dieter Mahnke (Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 1981), 27-70; Martin Posselt, “Die Paneuropa-Idee des Grafen Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi,” Annals of the Lothian Foundation London 1 (1991): 221-235; Lubor Jilek, “Paneurope dans les années vingt: la réception du projet en Europe centrale et occidentale,” Relations internationales 72 (1992): 409-432; Guido Müller, “Coudenhove-Kalergi – de Gaulle: deux pères de l’Europe et les relations entre l’Europe et les Etats-Unis,” Cahiers de la Fondation Charles de Gaulle 6 (1999): 145-160; Anita Ziegerhofer, “Die Paneuropa-Bewegung der Zwischenkriegszeit,“ Österreichisches Jahrbuch für Politik 1996, ed. Politische Akademie Wien (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997), 573-594. Anita Ziegerhofer is preparing a habilitation thesis at the University of Graz on CoudenhoveKalergi and the Pan-European movement during the interwar period. Müller, “Elitendiskurse.“ Guido Müller, “Von Hugo von Hofmannsthals ‘Traum des Reiches’ zum Europa unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Die ‘Europäische Revue,’ 1925-1936/44,” in Konservative Zeitschriften in Deutschland zwischen 1900 und 1945, ed. Hans-Christof Kraus (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot Verlag, 2003). Michel Dumoulin, “Europe de la culture, culture européenne,” Journal of European Integration History 5, no. 2 (1999): 7-16; Jean-Marie Palayret, “Une Université pour l’Europe: les origines de l’Institut universitaire européen de Florence (1948-1976),“ in Les Intellectuels et l’Europe de 1945 à nos jours, ed. Andrée Bachoud, Josefina Cuesta, and Michel Trebitsch (Paris: Publications universitaires Denis-Diderot 2000), 201-222; Marie-Thérèse Bitsch, Histoire de la construction européenne de 1945 à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001). Müller and Plichta, “Abendländisches Denken,” 17-47; Doris von der Brelie-Lewien, “Abendland und Sozialismus: Zur Kontinuität politisch-kultureller Denkhaltungen im Katholizismus von der Weimarer Republik zur frühen Nachkriegszeit,” in Politische Teilkulturen zwischen Integration und Polarisierung: Zur politischen Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Detlef Lehnert and Klaus Megerle (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 188-219; Carole Fink, ed., 1968: The World Transformed, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Schildt, Abendland und Amerika.

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

110

7:48 PM

Page 110

Guido Müller

28. Guido Müller, “Der Publizist Max Clauss: Die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften und der ‘Europäische Kulturbund’ (1924/5-1933),” in Heidelberger Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften: Das Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften zwischen 1918 und 1958, ed. Reinhard Blomert, Hans-Ulrich Eßlinger, and Norbert Giovannini (Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, 1997), 369409; idem, “‘Mitarbeit in der Kulisse … :‘ Der Publizist Max Clauss in den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen von der Weimarer Republik zum ‘neuen Europa’ (1924-1943),” Lendemains: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Frankreichforschung 22, no. 86/87 (1997): 20-48. 29. Guido Müller, “Les jumelages et les relations franco-allemandes depuis la première guerre mondiale,” in Les relations entre les institutions européennes et les collectivités locales, ed. Hervé Groud (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1999), 97-107; Palayret, “Université pour l’Europe ;” Karel J. Verleye, De Stichting van het Europa-College te Brugge (Brugge: Collège d’Europe, 1989).

Bibliography Barth, Hermann, ed. Kameradschaft: Mit Aufsätzen und Materialien zum Film. Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1997. Belitz, Ina. Befreundung mit dem Fremden: Die Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft in den deutsch-französischen Kultur- und Gesellschaftsbeziehungen der Locarno-Äera. Frankfurt / Main: Peter Lang Verlag der Europäischen Wissenschaften, 1997. Bitsch, Marie-Thérèse. Histoire de la construction européenne de 1945 à nos jours. 2nd ed. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001. Bock, Hans Manfred. “Kulturelle Eliten in den deutsch-französischen Gesellschaftsbeziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit.” In Eliten in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Strukturen und Beziehungen. Ed. Rainer Hudemann and Georges-Henri Soutou, vol. 1, 73-91. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994. Bock, Hans Manfred, ed. Pierre Viénot. Ungewisses Deutschland: Zur Krise seiner bürgerlichen Kultur. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1999. _____, ed. Projekt deutsch-französische Verständigung: Die Rolle der Zivilgesellschaft am Beispiel des Deutsch-Französischen Instituts in Ludwigsburg. Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag, 1998. Bock, Hans Manfred, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, and Michel Trebitsch, eds. Entre Locarno et Vichy. Les relations culturelles franco-allemandes dans les années 1930. 2 vols. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994. Boli, John. Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Brelie-Lewien, Doris von der. “Abendland und Sozialismus. Zur Kontinuitaet politischkultureller Denkhaltungen im Katholizismus von der Weimarer Republik zur frühen Nachkriegszeit.“ In Politische Teilkulturen zwischen Integration und Polarisierung: Zur politischen Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Detlef Lehnert and Klaus Megerle, 188-219. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990.

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 111

France and Germany After the Great War

111

Burgard, Oliver. Das gemeinsame Europa – von der politischen Utopie zum außenpolitischen Programm. Frankfurt / Main: Verlag Neue Wissenschaft, 2000. Cohen, Yves, and Klaus Manfrass, ed. Frankreich – Deutschland: Forschung, Technik und industrielle Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard. Ein Leben für Europa: Lebenserinnerungen. Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1966. Delbreil, Jean-Claude. Les catholiques français et les tentatives de rapprochement francoallemand 1920-1933. Metz: Editions S.M.E.I., 1972. Dumoulin, Michel. “Europe de la culture, culture européenne.” Journal of European Integration History 5, no. 2 (1999): 7-16. Dumoulin, Michel, and Yves Stelandre. L’idée européenne dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions de l’Université Catholique de Louvain-La-Neuve, 1992. Eckert, Hans-Wilhelm. Konservative Revolution in Frankreich? Die Nonkonformisten der ”Jeune Droite” und des ”Ordre nouveau” in der Krise der 1930er Jahre. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag 2000. Feldenkirchen, Wilfried. “Deutsche Zoll- und Handelspolitik 1914-1933.” In Die Auswirkungen von Zöllen und Handelshemmnissen auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Hans Pohl, 328-357. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1987. Fink, Carole, ed. 1968: The World Transformed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. François, Etienne, M.C. Hoock-Demarle, and Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus. Marianne – Germania: Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im europäischen Kontext 1789-1914. 2 vols. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1998. Frommelt, Reinhard. Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa: Einigungsbestrebungen in Wirtschaft und Politik 1925-1933. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1977. Gerbert, Pierre. Le rêve d’un ordre mondial de la SDN à l’ONU. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996. Hagspiel, Hermann. Verständigung zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich: Die deutschfranzösische Außenpolitik der zwanziger Jahre im innenpolitischen Kräftefeld beider Länder. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1987. Hudemann, Rainer, Hartmut Kaelble, and Klaus Schwabe, eds. Europa im Blick der Historiker. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995. International Labour Organization, ed. International Labour Conventions and Recommendations, 1919-1982. Geneva: International Labour Office, 1982. Jetschke, Anja, and Andrea Liese. “Kultur im Aufwind: Zur Rolle von Bedeutungen, Werten und Handlungsrepertoires in den internationalen Beziehungen.“ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 1 (1998): 149-179. Jilek, Lubor. “Paneurope dans les années vingt: la réception du projet en Europe centrale et occidentale.“ Relations internationales 72 (1992): 409-432. L’Huillier, Fernand. Dialogues franco-allemands 1925-1933. Paris: Ophrys, 1971. Loth, Wilfried, and Juergen Osterhammel, eds. Internationale Geschichte: Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000. Mattioli, Aram, ed. Intellektuelle von rechts. Ideologie und Politik in der Schweiz 19181939. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 1995.

05-Muller-Pt.III

112

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 112

Guido Müller

Merlio, Gilbert, ed. Ni gauche ni droite: les chassés-croisés idéologiques des intellectuels français et allemands dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Talence: Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 1995. Müller, Guido. “Andrée Mayrisch und Pierre Viénot—ein politisches Paar zwischen Berlin und Paris (1923-1940).” In Les années trente: base de l’évolution économique, politique et sociale du Luxembourg d’aprs-guerre? “Hemecht” – Beiheft, ed. Michel Polfer and Paul Margue, 131-148. Luxembourg: Editions Saint Paul,1996. _____. “Coudenhove-Kalergi – de Gaulle: deux pères de l’Europe et les relations entre l’Europe et les Etats-Unis.“ Cahiers de la Fondation Charles de Gaulle 6 (1999): 145-160. _____. “Der luxemburgische Stahlkonzern ARBED nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Zum Problem der deutsch-französischen Verständigung durch Wirtschaftsverflechtung.” Revue d’Allemagne 25, no. 4 (1993): 535-544. _____. “Der Publizist Max Clauss. Die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften und der ‘Europäische Kulturbund’ (1924/5-1933).“ In Heidelberger Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften: Das Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften zwischen 1918 und 1958, ed. Reinhard Blomert, Hans-Ulrich Eßlinger and Norbert Giovannini, 369-409. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, 1997. _____. “Deutsch-französische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund im Rahmen deutsch-französischer Verständigungsbewegungen 1924-1933.“ Habilitationsschrift, Aachen, 1997. Publication planned for series “Internationale Geschichte,” ed. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Jost Duelffer, Juergen Osterhammel, and Wilfried Loth. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004. _____. “Emil Mayrisch und westdeutsche Industrielle in der europäischen Wirtschaftsverständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.“ Galerie. Révue culturelle et pédagogique 10, no. 4 (1992): 545- 559. _____. “Gesellschaftsgeschichte und internationale Beziehungen: Die deutsch-französische Verständigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.“ In Deutschland und der Westen: Internationale Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Guido Müller, 49-64. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1998. _____. “Jenseits des Nationalismus? Europa als Konzept grenzübergreifender adligbürgerlicher Elitendiskurse zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen.“ In Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Vol. 2. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif, 235-268. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2001. _____. “‘La Fuite sans fin?’ Les milieux franco-allemands des années 20: quel projet pour l’unité européenne?” In Milieux, réseaux et personnalités: porteurs de projets d’unité européenne. Paris : Gérard Bossuat, 2003. _____. “Les jumelages et les relations franco-allemandes depuis la première guerre mondiale.“ In Les relations entre les institutions européennes et les collectivités locales, ed. Hervé Groud, 97-107. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 1999. _____. “L’Europe de la culture ou une nouvelle aristocratie européenne: les réflexions et les projets au sein de la Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles (19241934).” In Organizations internationales et architectures européennes 1929-1939, ed. Sylvain Schirmann. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003.

05-Muller-Pt.III

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 113

France and Germany After the Great War

113

_____. “Mitarbeit in der Kulisse …”: Der Publizist Max Clauss in den deutschfranzösischen Beziehungen von der Weimarer Republik zum ‘neuen Europa’ (19241943).“ Lendemains. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Frankreichforschung 22, nos. 86/7 (1997): 20-48. _____. “Pierre Viénot, Schöpfer des Deutsch-Französischen Studienkomitees (19261938) und Europäer der ersten Nachkriegszeit“ (with English and French abstracts). Journal of European Integration History 4, no. 1 (1998): 5-26. _____. “Von Hugo von Hofmannsthals ‘Traum des Reiches’ zum Europa unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: die ‚Europäische Revue,‘ 1925-1936/44.“ In Konservative Zeitschriften in Deutschland zwischen 1900 und 1945, ed. HansChristof Kraus. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot Verlag, 2003. Müller, Guido, and Vanessa Plichta. “Zwischen Rhein und Donau. Abendländisches Denken zwischen deutsch-französischen Verständigungsinitiativen und konservativkatholischen Integrationsmodellen (1923-1957).“ Journal of European Integration History 5, no. 2 (1999): 17-47. Palayret, Jean-Marie. “Une Université pour l’Europe: les origines de l`Institut universitaire européen de Florence (1948-1976).“ In Les Intellectuels et l’Europe de 1945 à nos jours, ed. Andrée Bachoud, Josefina Cuesta, and Michel Trebitsch, 201-222. Paris: Publications universitaires Denis-Diderot, 2000. Pons, Marco. La pensée et l’action de Coudenhove-Kalergi. Vol. 1, L’idée pacifiste source première de l’oeuvre du fondateur de l’union paneuropéenne 1914-1926. Lausanne: Fondation Européenne, 1979. Posselt, Martin. “Die Paneuropa-Idee des Grafen Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.“ Annals of the Lothian Foundation London 1 (1991): 221-235. Risse-Kappen, Thomas, ed. Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State-Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Rosenberg, Justin. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations. London: Verso, 1994. Schildt, Axel. Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur Ideenlandschaft der fünfziger Jahre. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999. Scholz, Werner. “Das deutsch-französische Verhältnis in den internationalen Kulturorganizationen der Zwischenkriegszeit.“ In Les tiers dans les relations francoallemandes: Dritte in den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen, ed. Christian Baechler and Klaus-Juergen Müller, 215-223. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996. Schöndube, Claus. “Ein Leben für Europa: Richard Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi.“ In Persönlichkeiten der europäischen Integration, ed. Thomas Jansen, and Dieter Mahnk, 27-70. Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 1981. Sirinelli, Jean-François, ed. Histoire des droites en France. Vols. 1-3. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Sternhel, Ze’ev. L’Éternel retour: Contre la démocratie, l’idéologie de la décadence. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994. Tiemann, Dieter. Deutsch-französische Jugendbeziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1989. Trebitsch, Michel, and Marie-Christine Granjon. Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels. Paris: Editions Complexe, 1998.

05-Muller-Pt.III

114

11/5/03

7:48 PM

Page 114

Guido Müller

Unteutsch, Barbara. Vom Sohlbergkreis zur Gruppe “Collaboration”: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen. Ph.D. diss., Universität Münster, 1990. Verleye, Karel J. De Stichting van het Europa-College te Brugge. Brugge, Collège d’Europe, 1989. Walters, Francis P. A History of the League of Nations. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Walzer, Michael, ed. Toward a Global Civil Society. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1994. Wurm, Clemens A. Die französische Sicherheitspolitik in der Phase der Umorientierung, 1924-1926. Frankfurt / Main: Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1979. Ziegerhofer, Anita. “Die Paneuropa-Bewegung der Zwischenkriegszeit.“ In Österreichisches Jahrbuch für Politik 1996, ed. Politische Akademie Wien, 573-594. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 115

Chapter 6

SMALL ATLANTIC WORLD U.S. Philanthropy and the Expanding International Exchange of Scholars after 1945 Oliver Schmidt

It would not be surprising, in other words, if two men changing places for six months should exert a reciprocal influence on each other’s destinies, and actually mirror each other’s experience in certain respects, notwithstanding all the differences that exist between the two. (David Lodge, Changing Places)

Since the dawn of civilization until the modern era, travel for the sake of erudition was the privilege of a select group. Fewer still were those scholars receiving stipends to study abroad. This old exclusive world of learning has all but vanished. Today, thanks to a burgeoning educational exchange industry, thousands upon thousands of students crisscross the globe. Study-abroad programs and modern conference circuits, as the British novelist David Lodge writes in Small World, “resemble the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on selfimprovement.” To be sure, not all traveling students have taken their exchanges as literally, or seriously, as the protagonists in Lodge’s academic parodies, who swap positions, offices, and wives without ever having applied for the year abroad. Entanglements abound with the comedic comfort of fiction as Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow probe their alter egos in unfamiliar environments.1 Such institutionalized academic migration is a relatively recent phenomenon, made possible by a historical field of forces that created opportunities for transatlantic exchanges at an unprecedented scale.2 I would like to examine the emergence of “scientific philanthropy” and its eminent role in developing, after 1945 as never before, a previously benign branch of American cultural relations. In particular, I would like Notes for this section begin on page 126.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

116

2:27 PM

Page 116

Oliver Schmidt

to account for the active part philanthropies—quintessential nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—have played in increasing the volume of interchange between European and American worlds of learning, in decreasing the sense of distance, and in perpetuating cycles of reciprocity among individual scholars and their societies. This focus on NGOs challenges the literature on U.S. cultural Cold War diplomacy, which treats the relationship between federal government and foundations as one under near-complete state control. A state-centered perspective overlooks the continuities undergirding the philanthropy-government nexus at least since the 1920s. It also diminishes the freedom of action foundations retained after World War II, and downplays the political cleavages within and among foundation bureaucracies. The Third Sector continued to play a vital role—both as collaborator and autonomous agency—in developing American cultural relations after 1945.3 The expansion of transatlantic scholarly exchanges illustrates the power of philanthropic patronage. Writing on the domestic role of foundations during the New Deal, Barry Karl contends that foundations aimed at bridging the gap between the world of politics and the world of ideas through the production of democratic elites in a mass society.4 Applying this hypothesis to the international realm, I submit that major American foundations5 served as important links in the managing of transatlantic elites. From 1945 to 1965, these foundations contributed significantly, albeit with varying intensity, to the integration of Western European intellectuals and scholars into the transatlantic world.

Writing Foundations into America Foreign Relations Despite continuous calls for a cultural turn,6 inquiries concerning the allegiance, prestige, and transfer of culture have remained marginal to the study of American diplomacy.7 As a result, “cultural diplomacy”8 has long received short shrift in the historiography of the early Cold War. Early monographs and official histories present the genesis of American cultural diplomacy largely as a response to foreign policies in Britain, France, and Germany, and to expanding Nazi propaganda in Latin America in particular.9 Our understanding of U.S. cultural diplomacy, I believe, would be enriched if it did not treat cultural relations as mere “instruments” of state action.10 Scholars of American foreign relations have recently devoted more, but by no means sufficient, attention to the role of philanthropies in international affairs.11 Frank Costigliola’s Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe 1919-1933 records the intertwining of U.S. cultural penetration of Europe and the Old World’s indigenous modernization during the interwar years. The study traces the subtlety by which “cultural influence and prestige enhanced the ability of the United States to conduct its political and economic policies in Europe with minimal cost and entanglement.”12 Although Iriye has recently argued that nongovernmental organizations have since contributed to an emerging “international civil society,” his programmatic essays have yet to be backed by detailed empirical studies.13

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 117

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

117

In this historiographical field, transnational exchanges are often mentioned, though rarely explored at great length. We may find historians of education concerned with the history of youth policy and international exchanges; social historians dealing with migration and integration; and a most productive group comprising practitioners in the field.14 Histories of international relations, however, still tend to relegate foundations to the sphere of footnotes. As for bureaucratic history written by a State Department insider, Henry J. Kellermann’s 25-year-old account remains a starting point for any analysis of American exchange programs during the immediate postwar decade.15 Recent rounds of the Americanization/Westernization debate have revived empirical research into transnational networks.16 A number of essays have begun to probe connections and exchanges among scholars and students in various academic disciplines.17 This essay attempts to fill some of the gaps sketched out above. I would like to discuss two related questions. First, what was the rationale behind the expansion of scholarly exchange programs during the first two postwar decades—in other words, what motivated U.S. philanthropies to invest in the international traffic of students? Second, what was the historical significance of American foundations in setting up educational exchange programs after 1945? Although my analysis may lend itself to heuristic generalizations about the role of foundations in transnational relations, the empirical data undergirding my argument is largely drawn from foundations’ engagement in Western Europe, with an emphasis on investments in West Germany between 1945 and 1965.

Foundations and U.S. Cultural Relations It is a commonplace for contemporary historians to emphasize the central role of the state in their analysis of American foreign relations since the 1930s. The New Deal, World War II and the Cold War accelerated the growth of federal government at the expense of private institutions. U.S. philanthropy, in turn, was conceived in the domestic context and born as a progeny of private wealth—not of public administration.18 The first American foundations date back to 1828;19 their numbers proliferated after the Civil War, band-aiding social ills or raising education and medical standards in local communities. By the turn of the century the accumulated riches of immense business empires emerging during the Gilded Age and the apparent social and demographic revolutions of an increasingly industrial and urban society called for a more systematic redistribution of wealth. The creation of the first large-scale foundations was the product of the Progressive era, and American business elites’ response to calls for higher taxation. The Carnegie Foundation, founded in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation, created in 1913, were controversial political compromises consistent with the reflexes of a liberal society toward its own contradictions.20 In the American political tradition, foundations had become legitimate sources of “private wealth used for public purposes.” The new “scientific” philan-

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

118

2:27 PM

Page 118

Oliver Schmidt

thropies signaled an unbroken belief on the part of free marketeers that the United States did not need a strong central government, let alone a welfare state.21 The Great Depression did much to discredit the utopia of a self-regulatory liberal society. The strengthening of federal administration in the American political system drew foundations into ever-close collaboration with branches of government. This was particularly true for domestic politics, but it also extended to the realm of foreign policy. By 1947, when the Truman administration decided to define the conflict of interests with the Soviet Union in terms of a clash of civilizations, foundations played a signal part in the cultural cold wars at home and abroad. Containment of communism and co-optation of American allies were declared ends of U.S. Cold War strategy, and the Marshall Plan and NATO its most prominent means. But a total Cold War called for the deployment of all means available. Since the geopolitical conflict was not merely defined in political, economic, and military terms, “cultural diplomacy” was to gain prominence in American foreign policy. This collaboration, or “symbiosis,”22 must be understood as a division-of-labor rather than an instrumental relationship between contractor and subcontractor. In the first half of the twentieth Century, big foundations superseded missionaries as the principal private agencies abroad. Foundation leaders such as Abraham Flexner or Wickliff Rose insisted on their autonomy vis-à-vis government; it was common for them to demand that the government stay out of their business. They stressed their independence, flexibility and trendsetting ability to initiate social reforms. It comes as no surprise, then, that trendsetters such as the Rockefeller Foundation represented and conducted U.S. cultural relations in China, Latin America, and Europe long before the founding of a separate cultural affairs division within the State Department (1936).23 Vis-à-vis ever-expanding government activities, foundations retained considerable leverage as independent auditors, networkers, and resources of know-how.

Exchanges in the Republic of Letters In postwar Europe, the exchange of ideas was likewise driven by a mix of political and economic motives as well as by the propulsions of scholarship. And it had a long history to build on. Back under the Roman Empire, students traveled to educate themselves at the schools of Athens and Alexandria. The first heyday of large-scale student mobility across frontiers coincided with the formation of medieval European universities. From the twelfth Century onward, students from all over the continent migrated to attend nascent universities in Northern Italy and Paris. Long before the first German university came into being, in 1158, Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa granted foreign students special rights and imperial protection hoping that their “light” might “illuminate the world” (quorum lumine mundus illuminatur). The itineraries of early humanist scholars and scientists accompanying the first explorers can be seen as ensuing historical precursors to the twentieth-century exchange movements in higher education.24

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 119

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

119

By tradition transnational, the communities of letters multiplied and intensified their exchanges during the nineteenth century. Revolutions in both communication and transportation, along with middle-class affluence, prepared the grounds for this acceleration. The requirements of European imperialism and the emergence of social movements of labor, women, and pacifists, accelaterated the pace of inter- and transnational traffic.25 While the grand tours (Bildungsreisen) of the ascending bourgeoisie may have inspired countless exchanges, institutions helped to routinize them. Since the nineteenth century, more and more scientific and epistemic communities created international associations. National governments and international organizations as well as the merging worlds of philanthropy provided additional incentives for scholars to move across national borders or natural barriers. The Atlantic Ocean could not halt this trend. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing stream of European scholars visited the United States, while generations of American students were flocking to Germany, France, and England in pursuit of higher education. Leading European scholars participated at the World Fair in St. Louis (1904). In the wake of Cecil Rhodes’ decision to extend his scholarship fund to include five students from Germany,26 the leading Prussian cultural diplomatist of his time, Friedrich Althoff, instigated an official exchange of high school students (1903). Agreements for an exchange of professors (1904), and for student and teacher exchanges (1905) followed.27 The first U.S.-German agreements may have paled in comparison with other, more overtly political, American programs such as a one-time project involving 1,300 Cuban doctors, or the ChineseAmerican exchange covered by Boxer Indemnity fund.28 But modest as they were, the diplomatic initiatives laid a foundation for a steady increase in scholarly contacts across the Atlantic. Transatlantic exchanges during the interwar years were affected by a series of crises that continued to haunt central Europe after the self-inflicted catastrophe of 1914. While Europe’s funds for education and science were severely curtailed, American foundations expanded their activities. Soon after assuming the leadership of Rockefeller’s General and the International Education Boards, Wickcliff Rose left for Europe to present his “Scheme for the Promotion of Education on an International Scale” (1923).29 Rose traveled to fifty European universities in eighteen countries to interview “inspiring productive men” and “select students” worth funding. A new office in Paris was to supervise the first of a series of “emergency programs” in Europe, where inflation and war debts delayed desperately needed investments in the sciences. In Germany, the Rockefeller Foundation provided aid to the newly established Notgemeinschaft der Wissenschaft (emergency association of science) as well as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. Although the emergency program was officially terminated in 1926, the grants continued to flow for another ten years.30 Exchanges were broadened to include not only scholars, but students, trainees, and professional cadres.31 After 1933, the forced emigration of German scholars eclipsed regular exchange activities. During this period, philanthropies such as the Rockefeller and

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

120

2:27 PM

Page 120

Oliver Schmidt

Carnegie Foundations helped sustain scholarly networks across the Atlantic through individual stipends, study programs, and funding for new institutions such as the New School for Social Research and the Center for Advanced Studies in Princeton.32 The end of World War II, which had halted civilian exchanges altogether, marked another caesura—not a beginning—in the mobility of scholars between the Old and the New World. It was a new departure conditioned by a confluence of political and scholarly propulsions that shaped the resumption and dramatic expansion of exchange programs.

The Politics of Exchange: Specific Conditions and a New Departure after 1945 For nearly two decades, U.S.-based international philanthropy and its educational exchanges aligned closely, albeit often uneasily, with American foreign policy. The Cold War provided a justification for political elites in both government and the philanthropic sector to seek close cooperation. The absence of democratic accountability encouraged ideological homogeneity within the foundation world; political differences within the foundations’ New York headquarters were less conspicuous than those encountered on Capitol Hill. Many foundation staffers had a common belief that their organization held certain advantages over government institutions—that they were in a strategic position owed to the prestige and perception as private and quasi-autonomous brokers. This explains in part why after their arrival at the Ford Foundation in 1952, the just-retired High Commissioner of Germany, John McCloy, and his loyal lieutenant for public affairs, Shepard Stone, tried to turn the young institution into a kind of private State Department, or public CIA. They understood that unlike the State Department, foundations had the freedom to act quickly and with less scrutiny from hostile legislators in Congress. Unlike the CIA, the big foundations could move overtly and without fear of compromising the recipients of aid. And unlike government agencies or private corporations, the Ford Foundation and other major philanthropies benefited from a high regard and presumption of (relative) innocence even among potential critics of American foreign policy, including leftist intellectuals.33 This collaboration between U.S. foundations and federal agencies, however, rarely reached the level of conspiracy their critics suspected. Since foundations had to work in a domestic climate polarized by radical forces on the political Left and Right, interests and identities were constantly negotiated in a highly contentious field: there were rivalries between foundations. Some of the older philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, sought to avoid overt politicization by emphasizing the “cultural” dimension of their engagement: first among them, significantly, the enhancement of scholarship, knowledge, and “international understanding.” Then again, there were factions within the ranks and boards of philanthropic bodies. Foundations were, after all, no monoliths; different individuals and factions displayed an interest

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 121

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

121

in different degrees of cooperation. Some groups lobbied for more traditional philanthropy such as education, science, and health policies. Other lobbies pushed for more active stances in the political and economic debates of the day. Some sought publicity; others preferred to avoid it. When Paul Hofman mixed his work as head of the Ford Foundation with his political ambitions (he was rumored to be vying for a cabinet post in the second Eisenhower administration), he had to resign. It was in part due to the cultural capital34 other foundations had been accumulating during decades of American philanthropy abroad that new, potent players such as the Ford Foundation ran into passionate criticism for their alliance with official diplomacy. Public charges against foundations as proxies of government were particularly virulent during the early 1950s.35 At least as far as the Ford Foundation was concerned, the criticism was accurate. Archival evidence leaves little doubt that the International Affairs Division under Stone was preoccupied with such highly politicized goals as combating the appeal of communist ideology among intellectuals, creating networks of institutions working toward the democratization of Germany, West European integration, or “Atlantic solidarity,” and supporting individuals contributing to a “transatlantic society.” Revelations in the mid 1960s eventually confirmed the extent of clandestine collaboration between cold warriors in government and those sitting in foundations.36 In the postwar politics of exchange, foundations served various distinct functions. Domestically, they contributed to the circulation and recruitment of the political class. John McCloy’s move to the Board of the Ford Foundation in 1953, Dean Rusk’s transfer from president of the Rockefeller Foundation to secretary of state in the Kennedy administration, and McGeorge Bundy’s ascendancy as head of the Ford Foundation after his service as national security advisor—these were merely the most prominent illustrations of a horizontal mobility between foundation and administration posts.37 In the process of policy formulation, philanthropies served as mediator, critic, and catalyst by means of writing independent reports, organizing conferences, and commissioning hearings.38 As sponsors and administrative bodies, they also contributed to the implementation of policy. In a few instances, foundations also served as covers for intelligence agencies or other government branches, as illustrated in the by now well-documented connection between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.39 Their most valuable asset was arguably their service as channels of communication: philanthropies helped build networks across generations and borders; helped gather information and disseminate it; linked the spheres of politics and the sphere of higher education; and built bridges between institutions of civil society. Finally, they would connect the negotiations about domestic reforms with the debates on foreign policy. The Ford Foundation was the philanthropy most preoccupied with foreign policy. While running the High Commssion of Germany, John McCloy and Shepard Stone had overseen American propaganda efforts ranging from news management (including radio stations such as Radio Free Europe or RIAS Berlin) to cultural centers (so-called America Houses), to visitor programs for thousands of Germans.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

122

2:27 PM

Page 122

Oliver Schmidt

Back in New York, McCloy and Stone lobbied hard for an ambitious international affairs program at Ford to back up Washington’s cultural offensive. In spite of the continued freeze of cultural relations between “East” and “West,” Stone sought to expand his activities by exploiting any opportunity to initiate exchanges with countries from the Warsaw Pact. He went to Vienna to recruit Hungarian exiles in the wake of the Budapest uprising; in 1957, he supported a modest exchange program with Poland; and two years later, he funded some 150 Yugoslavs and 20 Americans, as well as the American Council for Learned Societies to allow for informal meetings with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Again and again, Stone had to modify or postpone his grand schemes due to bureaucratic opposition or public pressure. In the early 1960s Stone eventually buried his pet idea of creating an “Atlantic Foundation,” with which he presumably wanted to maintain intellectual networks such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.40 By then, Stone had decided to focus his attention primarily on Western Europe casting a wide but not indiscrimate net to catch scholars for his Atlantic cause. Equipped with a growing, yet by all contemporary standards, minimalist bureaucracy, his office dispensed grants to carrier organizations, which in turn administered the exchange. Stone was concerned with “leaders of thought”—scholars, journalists, public intellectuals, and “potential leaders,”—the euphemism for promising students. In that respect, he kept up with tradition: whereas federal government was responsible for ordinary exchanges, foundations would take care of emergencies, exceptional cases, or short-term needs. Some grants sponsored individual independent research. Others again went to academic institutions pursuing specific projects, such as $800,000 allocated to the European Community Institute for University Studies in Brussels. Lobby groups employing scholars benefited from Ford’s largesse—for instance, $600,000 went to Monnet’s Action Committee for the United States. Stone did not hesitate to sponsor transnational collaboration for the sake of pure research. CERN in Geneva received more than $1 million for nuclear research, as did Churchill College in Cambridge for “science and technology” and Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics. A key science of the atomic age, nuclear physics, acquired a particularly symbolic value in the cold war race for technological supremacy. Stone’s list of activities suggests the difficulty in distinguishing “political” and “scientific” exchanges during the first two decades of the Cold War. The subsidies for studies of international relations are a good illustration. Pet projects such as the regular Bilderberg conferences in The Netherlands, which were largely sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment, gathered American and European leaders in nonpublic meetings. In this instance, political eminence and “Atlanticist” orientation were more important entry tickets than scholarly credentials. Ford’s cultural politics included important meeting places for political and academic elites, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) or the Royal Institute for International Affairs (London); but it also fortified academic institutions supportive of Atlanticist or liberal causes, such as Raymond Aron’s European Center of Sociology (Paris) and SVIMEZ

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 123

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

123

(Associazione per lo sviluppo dell´ industria nel Mezzogiorno), an Italian training ground for economists. But Stone’s division also made contributions to a range of institutions solely concerned with the graduate study of international affairs, be it St. Anthony’s (Oxford), the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University (Italy), or the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.41 In spite of its many constructive functions, foundations also helped to hide, or mystify, political interests behind the visitor programs for students and scholars—for instance, the hegemony’s need to renew its legitimacy through seemingly benign acts of generosity. “Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources,” writes Mary Douglas in her foreword to Marcel Mass’s classic study on exchange. “What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient.”42 The symbolic value of free invitations increases as long as they are gratuitous, but of course the donors did attach expectations and invisible strings to their gifts. Yet, while many exchanges were proposed with a Cold War ring, exchange policies were more complex than that. Even Ford’s agenda included domestic issues such as the modernization of U.S. institutions of higher learning and the strengthening of foreign-area studies in American universities, or the promotion of American high and popular culture. These objectives would most probably have been pursued even in the absence of superpower conflict. The American century had reached its first peak during the postwar decade; America’s projection as a world power was there to stay and unfold. International educational exchanges between 1948 and 1960 must therefore be seen against the backdrop of three interrelated contexts. The first and most obvious structural condition was the geopolitical and geo-economic conflict between the superpowers. The Fluorite Act (1946) and the Smith-Mind-Act (1948) provided a legal framework for stronger involvement of U.S. government. In Europe, the Marshall Plan and army reorientation programs stimulated a surge in exchanges. Between 1948 and 1955, more than 12,000 visas were granted to German visitors alone. These official exchange programs were part of an emerging grand strategy aimed at double containment, and the integration of Western Germany into Europe. Their main purpose was to contribute to the formation of liberal-democratic elites after the defeat of Nazi Germany and imbue them with an Atlantics orientation. An oftenoverlooked side effect, exchanges were also conceived as a vaccine against lingering legacies of ethnic (violist) group behavior. Educational exchanges were planned primarily as individual experiences, and not as exercises in group dynamics. German agendas and dispositions shaped the exchange experience no less than the intentions of the American hosts. The inner propulsions of scholarship and popular demand for international communication thus constitute a second context shaping the course and content of the programs. The local population tried to use American hosts and guests to their advantage. Far from pawns, students vied for a chance to travel abroad. Professors lobbied for money to support their individual research interests. University administrators sought additional funding in an era of scarce resources. American institutions picked up most of the tabs until the late

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

124

2:27 PM

Page 124

Oliver Schmidt

1950s, whereas recipients successfully exploited the twin objective of democratic mission and Pox Americana—that is, the tension between laissez-faire and control— which framed American gifts. Since neither State Department intentions alone nor the recipients’ needs suffice to explain the sizable increase in exchanges, I suggest that the “politics of exchange” also reflected identity battles within the United States. Here, we have to take into account transformations American society underwent after World War II—to wit, the peacetime expansion of governmental power gained since the New Deal; the postwar explosion of higher education (GI Bill);43 a new generation of corporate wealth and big foundations. The same political lobbies backing America’s postwar construction of Atlantics networks considered necessary to maintain an Atlantic alliance were also engaged in contested domestic struggles over traditional isolationism, segregation, WASP oligarchies, and the promises of democracy. In this third context, cultural exchange policies contribute to processes of domestic “Americanization”—the domestication of radical voices—a contested agenda that continued to define the culture wars of the 1960s.

Integrating Atlantic Networks Since their coming of age during the nineteenth Century, American foundations grappled with their hybrid nature as private trusts for public welfare. Neither entirely private nor public, they had to carve out a niche in the social and political system. In the politics of exchange after 1945, foundations served a variety of purposes. As critics, they contributed to a division of labor between public and private agencies. As catalysts, they sought to appeal to European elites through demonstration, persuasion, and invitation. As cooperators, they served as a bridge between guests and hosts at home, foreign publics and foreign leaders, between the political class and its society at large. As conduits, they sometimes took on projects that would have been compromised by “official” government support. But did the exchanges make a difference? Since acculturation is slow and discreet, and since every exchange and every grant was part of a complex process of socialization, I dare not give a general answer to that question. While some historians like Ron Robin have challenged the interpretation of American reeducation as a “success story,”44 others, such as Thomas Schwartz or Herrmann-Josef Rupieper, suggest that exchange programs were of “a particular significance for the change of the postwar political culture.”45 If recent empirical studies are any indication, one is tempted to suggest that firsthand encounters with America and Americans left “civilizing” marks on the Europeans. Oral histories and personal memoirs further suggest that exchanges enabled students and scholars to reunite personal and professional networks cut loose by the war. Exiled scholars, given an opportunity to return with some degree of material security, came as occupation officers, foundations envoys, guest lecturers or remerges. Nascent academic disciplines such as political sciences, American

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 125

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

125

studies or psychotherapy benefited from foundation money. Numerous institutions ranging from high-profile public universities such as the Free University in Berlin to private meeting places such as the Salzburg Seminar benefited in myriad ways. Through European institutions or by means of direct exchanges, hundreds and thousands of Europeans could catch up with the latest trends in the United States, which emerged from the war as the dominant political and cultural hub in the “West.”46 According to official surveys, visitors who had been abroad were considered “the most reliable source of information about the U.S.”47 The promotion of transnational relations was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the extension of U.S. hegemony in Western Europe. Participants of scholarly exchanges contributed to America’s porous ness toward European ideas and influences, as well as to the “Atlanticization” of Western Europe. Positing that exchanges enhanced a reciprocal rapprochement, is not to say that mobility among scholars and students replaced “the state” or “political economy” as prime mover in the process of cultural convergence within the Atlantic society. 48 However, it would be equally misleading to deny their integrative purpose and quality. Such a tentative conclusion needs to be analyzed in more detail, which has to be done elsewhere. The findings resonate with recent liberal theories of international relations, which reclaim that “transnational relations do matter.”49 For if we wish to explain the integration toward an “Atlantic society” over the past decades, state action and economic forces alone do not suffice. Since “ideas do not float freely,” the construction of an “Atlantic society” needed international institutions that provided for exchange of information; it required political entrepreneurs that translated and interpreted norms as much as middlemen that brought the intelligentsia into regular contact. According to theories of transnationalism, American hegemony was no unilateral imposition; its political and military structure could not be sustained by coercion alone. The Atlantic alliance required institutional structures and processes that allowed for communication and persuasion between governments and between their societies.50 On one level, then, we may interpret U.S. foundations’ exchange programs as part of the American effort to stabilize its postwar regime in Europe: a cog in the establishment of a Pax Americana.51 The drastic expansion of international exchanges was part of America’s “neo-Wilsonian” strategy to make the world safe for American hegemony—one more means in the American arsenal shaping European public opinion in favor of its foreign policy and integrating its elite into Atlanticist networks. No longer limited to scientists and students, these exchangees’ included intellectual and political leaders, businessmen and unionists, scholars and students who were considered “potential leaders” of tomorrow. On another level, these exchanges reflect the interests and aspirations of scientists and scholars to learn from each other and jointly pursue the quest for knowledge. These scholarly exchange programs, paradoxically, while often deployed as a means for conducting the Cold War, also served as a means to subvert it. Exchanges probably stabilized the Cold War by strengthening the block identities in the “West” (as opposed to “East”), while providing channels for détente and the dissolution of the Soviet empire.52

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

126

2:27 PM

Page 126

Oliver Schmidt

Transatlantic exchanges of scholars after 1945, in other words, cannot be understood in Manichean categories that characterized so much of the Cold War epoch. They demonstrate neither a preponderance of power over culture, nor the reverse, but the degree to which these realms are endlessly intertwined. Cultural diplomats understood that they could instigate channels, yet no final controls for the movements of scholars and their ideas. The State Department may have commissioned countless studies to prove to a suspicious Congress that exchange programs were, indeed, effective means to win the minds of men. U.S. philanthropies trusted their common sense and charitable instincts that gifts, carefully selected, would eventually be returned. The young academic and literary critic David Lodge for one, touring the United States on a Harkness Commonwealth fellowship in 1964, found himself inspired to write hilarious parodies about his academic exchange experiences. Specific historical circumstances had allowed thousands upon thousands of his peers to pilgrimage across the Atlantic. Advances in transportation, communication, and welfare set the general conditions; the democratization of higher learning raised the demand for transnational exchanges pent-up by years of warfare; and the vision of “Atlantic society” provided the political impetus for governments and philanthropies to secure the means for academic elites. Lodge’s novels suggest transformations scholarly exchanges may have undergone in the second half of the twentieth century. In Changing Places (1969), the main protagonist considers the flight to San Francisco a “rare treat” as if he were heading for “Outer Mongolia.” Ten years later, in the best-selling sequel Small World, this very sense of a semipermeable membrane surrounding university life is already history, swept away by a remarkable cultural revolution and replaced, even before the advent of the internet, by the integrated global campus. For students of the postwar generation, the transatlantic world was becoming ever smaller indeed. In the meantime, for the scholarly jet set of the late 1970s, the transatlantic trip had already and perhaps inevitably lost some of its thrill.

Notes 1. David Lodge, A David Lodge Trilogy: Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work (London: Penguin, 1989), 6. 2. Throughout the twentieth Century, the number of foreign students attending American colleges rose from 2,673 in 1904 (women colleges not included) to 10,000 (1930), to 30,000 (1951), to more than 375,000 (1998). For the nineteenth century, we lack reliable data. See Liping Bu, “Foreign Students and the Emergence of Modern International Education in the United States, 19191970” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1995), 5-8. 3. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Baltimore University Press, 1997). 4. Barry Karl, “Philanthropy and the Maintenance of Democratic Elites,” Minerva 35 (1997): 207-220.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 127

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

127

5. In a classic definition, Andrews defined a foundation as “a nongovernmental, non-profit organization having a principal fund of its own, managed by its own trustees or directors, and established to maintain or aid social, educational, charitable, religious, or other activities serving the common welfare” (F. Emerson Andrews, Philanthropic Foundations [New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 1956]). 6. Akira Iriye has argued since the 1970s for an enlargement of the study of American foreign relations to include intercultural relations (see Akira Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History 3 [spring 1979]: 115-128). Other scholars have since prepared a “cultural turn” in the study of American diplomacy: see, for example, Frank Ninkovich, “Interest and Discourse in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 13 (spring 1989): 135-161; R.B.J. Walker, “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations,” in Culture and International Relations, ed. Jongsuk Chay (New York: Praeger, 1990); Anders Stephanson, “Commentary: Considerations on Culture and Theory,” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (winter 1994): 107-119. 7. Although the analysis of “culture” is en vogue, the object of analysis remains often vague. For practical purposes, I define culture as a matrix for behavior, habits, and values—in other words, as a range of dispositions that structure and delimit the way we act in the world. For a classic introduction to the ongoing debates in anthropology, see Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). 8. I define cultural diplomacy as the spectrum of activities undertaken by a government or by nongovernmental organizations acting as contractual cosponsors of public agencies, to portray a nation to the citizenry of another nation. This self-portrayal aims to heighten awareness and sympathy of other peoples toward that nation, enhance its prestige, back up political and economic foreign relations, or reinforce loyalty of citizens living abroad. Cultural diplomacy includes the promotion and transmission of cultural media such as film, literature, music or art, as well as exchanges of experts and visitors from all walks of life. 9. Cp. J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936-48 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977); and Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany 1945-1954 (Department of State Publication 8931, Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1978) with Charles A. Thomson and Walter Laves, Cultural Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), or Philip H. Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). Lacking analytical depth, these works seem to be more commonly cited than perused. 10. Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Dimensionen von Amerikanisierung in der deutschen Gesellschaft,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 11. 11. Merle Curti, Philanthropies Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Robert A. Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988); Waldemar A. Nielsen, Inside American Philanthropy: The Dramas of Donorship (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Edward H. Berman, The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 12. Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe 1919-1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 22; cp. with Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), and Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Baltimore University Press, 1991). 13. Akira Iriye, “A Century of NGOs,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999) 421-435. 14. See Liping Bu, “Foreign Students and the Emergence of Modern International Education in the United States“; Karl-Heinz Füssl, Die Umerziehung der Deutschen (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1994); Hartmut Kaelble, “Towards a Social History of European Integration,” December 1993, unpublished manuscript; Ulrich Littmann, Gute Partner—Schwierige Partner: Anmerkungen zur

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

128

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

2:27 PM

Page 128

Oliver Schmidt

akademischen Mobilität zwischen Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 19231993 (Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst, 1996). Kellermann relies on a solid collection of government sources, including a dozen of government studies commissioned by the administration between 1949 and 1955, and a thorough survey by HICOG historian Henry P. Pilgert, The Exchange of Persons Program in Western Germany, Historical Division, Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, 1951. The account´s analytical and interpretative shortcomings, notably the author’s neglect of U.S. domestic developments such as McCarthyism, the expansion of higher education, and the continuing growth of nongovernmental organizations provide the layout for future research. For overviews on the subject, See Karl-Heinz Füssl, Umerziehung der Deutschen (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1994), 168-185, and Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Wurzeln der deutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Velag, 1993), 390-420. In an essay on transnational connections that drew on research from the 1970s, Werner Link suggested lines of enquiry for the trade unions in his essay, “Building Coalitions: Nongovernmental German-American linkages,” in Charles S. Maier and Günter Bischof, eds., The Marshall Plan and Germany: West German Development within the Framework of the European Recovery Program (Oxford: Berg, 1991). Volker Berghahn’s study on the influence of American ideas and practices on German industrialists has been widely debated (idem., Americanization of West German Industry [1986]). The “Westernization” project at the University of Tübingen has been critical of Berghahn’s “Americanization” paradigm; for a summary of its work, see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999). See Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marssolek, and Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996); Konrad Jarausch and Hannes Siegrist, eds., Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in Deutschland. 1945-1970 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1997). See also Heinz Bude and Bernd Greiner, “Die Entdeckung Amerikas. Über die ‘Amerikanisierung’ der alten und neuen Bundesrepublik,“ in Westbindungen: Amerika in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Heinz Bude and Bernd Greiner (Hamburg: Verlag Hamburger Edition, 1999); in the same volume, Michael Schroeter examines the rebirth of German psychoanalysis, while Alfons Soellner traces the influence of rémigré scholars on the political culture of the early Federal Republic. Not the last one to call for more case studies of scholarly communities, Hartmut Lehmann relates the Western orientation of (West) German historiography to transatlantic contacts. (Westbindungen, 119-137). For a survey on U.S.-European cultural relations since 1945 see Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Born in medieval Europe, notions of charity and welfare found their way across the Atlantic as settlers began to colonize the New World. The English Reformation helped secularize legitimating functions previously attributed to the Catholic Church by shifting some of the moral leadership to the rising classes of nobility and merchants, and thus promoting to a prominent position the concepts of stewardship and self-help. In New England, Puritanism made very little distinction between religious principles and worldly laws. Here, charity for the needy was not a responsibility of the state, but private business; “alms of conscience” (Gewissensgelder) raised the possibility, albeit no guarantee, for a soul’s salvation (Max Weber, Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1 [Tübingen: Mohr, 1920], 59). Although some philanthropists such as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Stephen Girard (1750-1831), can be rightfully considered to have anticipated more comprehensive notions of welfare, historians mark the genesis of an autochthonous American tradition with the founding of the American Peace Society (1828), the bequest of James Smithson to the U.S. government (1828), and the foundation of Oberlin College (1833), the first college to educate women; See Report of the Princeton Conference on the History of Philanthropy in the United States (New York: n.p. [Russell Sage Foundation?], 1956). Other major foundations, such as the Rosenwald Fund (1917) and the Commonwealth Fund (1918), followed suit; the most powerful U.S. philanthropy after 1950, the Ford Foundation, was

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 129

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

129

originally conceived as a rather local charity in 1936. 21. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper, 1952). 22. Volker R. Berghahn, “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the “American Century” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999): 393-419. 23. From its inception, the Rockefeller Foundation kept its mandate deliberately broad: “To promote the well-being and to advance the civilization of the peoples of the United States and its territories and possessions and of foreign lands in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, in the prevention and relief of suffering, and in the promotion of any and all of the elements of human progress” (quoted in Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations [New York: Columbia University Press, 1972], 50). 24. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 25. S.F.L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe 1815-1914 (Leyden: A.W. Sythoff, 1963). 26. After meeting the emperor in the spring of 1899, Rhodes (1853-1902) changed his will to include five stipends for German students. From 1902 on, 70 students from British colonies, 102 students from the United States, and from 1903 on, five German students received fellowships (officially bestowed by the emperor) for three years of study in Oxford. According to Rhodes’ last will, the stipend was meant to preserve peace by contributing to the unity of the three big Germanic races— that is Anglo-Saxons, Americans, and Germans. See Thomas J. Schaeper and Kathleen Schaeper, Cowboys into Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998); John G. Lockhardt and Christopher M. Woodhouse, Rhodes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963) 400, 413-421. 27. Bernhard vom Brocke, “Der deutsch-amerikanische Professorenaustausch,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, no. 2 (1981), 128-182; Ragnhild Fiebig-v. Hase and Jürgen Heideking, eds., Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1900-1918 (Trier:WVT Wissenschafts Verlag, 1997). 28. Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, 1900-1901, 9: 37-43; Isaac L. Kandel, United States Activities in International Cultural Relations (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1945), 80-82. In one exceptional political initiative in 1900, the U.S. Army shipped some 1,300 Cuban citizens to Boston, where they spent six weeks in a Harvard summer school. A few years later, President Theodore Roosevelt initiated a precursor to the later Fulbright programs when he suggested that part of the Boxer indemnity fund, which had exceeded the actual damage, be returned to China for educational purposes (1908). The Chinese government eventually created a fund of $12 million for the establishment of libraries and museums and, above all, the training of young Chinese in China and the United States. Over the next two decades, more than 2,000 students came to American colleges and universities. Chinese students soon became the biggest national group among foreign students in the United States. 29. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 148. 30. To my knowledge, there is no systematic study of scientific collaboration in the interwar period. For first incursions into this direction, see Kurt Düwell, “Die deutsch-amerikanischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen im Spiegel der Kaiser-Wilhelm- und der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft,” in Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft, Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm/MaxPlanck-Gesellschaft, ed. in Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard vom Brocke (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990), 751-757. See also Philip Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologic Propaganda und Volksmeinung 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 136. 31. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 32. My emphasis here is on transatlantic exchanges. This is not to deny that the foundations did much to improve the exchange of scholars within the United States by sponsoring the modernization of higher education. 33. On this point, see contributions by Francis X. Sutton and Volker R. Berghahn, in The Ford Foundation and Europe: Cross Fertilization of Learnig in Social Science and Management, ed. Giuliana Gemelli (Brussels: European Interuniversity Press, 1998).

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

130

2:27 PM

Page 130

Oliver Schmidt

34. Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,”in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 155-199. Cultural capital is, of course, not the product or privilege of philanthropic endeavor alone. Costigliola credits the appeal of American capital, technology, democracy, and popular culture for much of the “cultural influence and prestige” in interwar Europe, idem, Awkward Dominion, 22. 35. Richard Pells, Not Like Us, 82. Congressional hearings in 1952 and 1954—the so-called Cox and Reece Commissions, are a good illustration of the political field in which the foundations were operating. For a summary of the latter’s proceedings, see “Excerpts from Reports” and “Foundations Call Charges Untrue,” New York Times, 20 December 1954, 20. 36. The Ford Foundation, for one, has been subject to heightened scholarly attention. See, for example, Pierre Grémion, “The Ford Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in The Ford Foundation and Europe; Francis X. Sutton, “Ford Foundation’s European Policies: Ambitions and Ambivalences,” in The Ford Foundation and Europe; Kathleen D. McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development: The International Culture Activities of the Ford Foundation, 1950-1980,” Daedalus (winter 1987): 93-118. The most comprehensive synthesis thus far is provided by Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 37. Not limited to the upper echelons of the institutions, this mobility is also characteristic for the members of the bureaucracies. 38. The Havighurst Report is one example of how foundations tried to shape exchange politics immediately after 1945 (Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, Record Group 1.1; “Projects,” Box 3, folders 16-19, Havighurst report, 1947, 113). 39. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1989); Pierre Grémion, L’Intélligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, 1950 – 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive: Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (München: Oldenbourg, 1998). As far as I know, military programs such as Operation Paperclip or Operation Overcast required no foundation support. These large-scale covert operations during the occupation of Germany are perhaps better understood as recruitment (often forced) of scientists rather than an exchange of scholars. 40. Volker R. Berghahn, “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History, vol. 23, no. 3 (summer 1999): 393-419. 41. This line of enquiry is elaborated in Oliver Schmidt, “A Civil Empire by Co-optation: GermanAmerican Exchange Programs as Cultural Diplomacy, 1945-61” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999). 42. Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, foreword by M. Douglas (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), vii. 43. Warren F. Ilchman and Alice Stone Ilchman, “Academic Exchange and the Founding of New Universities,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 491 (1987). 44. Ron Robin, Behind the Barbed-Wire: The Reeducation of German POWs (Princeton: Princeton University, 1995). 45. Rupieper, Wurzeln der deutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie, 427. Schwartz posits that “the exposure of a generation of German leaders to the United States, warts and all, had important consequences” (idem., “Reeducation and Democracy,” in America and the Shaping of German Society, 19451955, ed. Michael Ermarth [Oxford: Berg, 1993], 43. 46. Heinz Bude, “Unser Amerika,” Mittelweg 36, no. 5 (1997): 41-48. 47. “German Awareness of U.S. Exchange of Persons Program,” HICOG population survey, 1952, as presented in Kellermann, Cultural Relations. 48. Thomas Molnar, The Emerging Atlantic Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994). 49. The current debate on “transnationalism” in international relations theory revives on older discussion associated with “interdependence” dating back to the 1970s. See Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 131

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

131

Press, 1973); James B. Rosenau, The Study of Global Interdependence: Essays on the Transnationalisation of World Affairs (London: Pinter, 1980). 50. Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., “Introduction,” Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3-36. 51. Charles Maier, “The Making of the Pax Americana: Formative Moments of U.S. Ascendancy,” in The Quest for Stability, ed. R. Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 379. 52. See contributions by Matthew Evangelista and Patricia Chilton in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In.

Bibliography Andrews, F. Emerson. Philanthropic Foundations. New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 1956. Berghahn, Volker R. The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945–1973. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986. _____. “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the ‘American Century.’” Diplomatic History 23, 3 (summer 1999): 393-419. Berman, Edward H. The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power.” In Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, 155-199. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Bremner, Robert A. American Philanthropy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988. Brocke, Bernhard vom. “Der deutsch-amerikanische Professorenaustausch.” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 2 (1981): 128-182. Bu, Liping. “Foreign Students and the Emergence of Modern International Education in the United States, 1919-1970.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1995. Bude, Heinz, “Unser Amerika.” Mittelweg 36, no. 5 (1997): 41-48. Bude, Heinz and Greiner Bernd, eds. Westbindungen: Amerika in der Bundesrepubli. Hamburg: Verlag Hamburger Edition, 1999. Coleman, Peter. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1989. Coombs, Philip H. The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe 1919-1933. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Curti, Merle. Philanthropies Abroad: A History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

132

2:27 PM

Page 132

Oliver Schmidt

Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm. Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999. Düwell, Kurt. “Die deutsch-amerikanischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen im Spiegel der Kaiser-Wilhelm- und der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.” In Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft, Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm/Max-PlanckGesellschaft, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard vom Brocke, 751-757. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990. Ermarth, Michael, ed. America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945–1955. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Espinosa, J. Manuel. Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936-48. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977. Füssl, Karl-Heinz. Die Umerziehung der Deutschen. Paderborn: Schönigh, 1994. Gassert, Philip. Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propoganda und Volksmeinung, 19331945. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997. Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters. 1680-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Grémion, Pierre. “The Ford Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” In The Ford Foundation and Europe: Cross-fertilization of Learning in Social Science and Management, Giuliana Gemelli. Brussels: European Interuniversity Press, 1998. Hochgeschwender, Michael. Freiheit in der Offensive: Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen. München: Oldenbourg, 1998. Hogan, Michael J., and Thomas G. Paterson, eds. Explaining American Foreign Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ilchman, Warren F., and Alice Stone Ilchman. “Academic Exchange and the Founding of New Universities.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 491 (1987): 48-62. Iriye, Akira. “A Century of NGOs.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999): 421-435. _____. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Baltimore University Press, 1997. _____. “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations.” Diplomatic History 3 (spring 1979): 115-128. Jarausch, Konrad and Hannes Siegrist, eds. Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in Deutschland. 1945-1970. Frankfurt: Campus, 1997. Johnston, Howard Wright. “United States Public Affairs Activities in Germany, 19451955.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1956. Kaelble, Hartmut. “Towards a Social History of European Integration.” December 1993, unpublished manuscript. Kandel, Isaac L. United States Activities in International Cultural Relations. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1945. Kellermann, Henry J. Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany 1945-1954. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1978. Keohane, Robert O. and Joseph S. Nye, eds. Transnational Relations and World Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

2:27 PM

Page 133

U.S. Philanthropy and Exchange of Scholars

133

Kroeber, Alfred L. and Clyde Kluckhohn. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. Link, Werner. “Building Coalitions: Nongovernmental German-American Linkages.” In The Marshall Plan and Germany: West German Development within the Framework of the European Recovery Program, ed. Charles S. Maier and Günter Bischof. Oxford: Berg, 1991. Littmann, Ulrich. Gute Partner—Schwierige Partner: Anmerkungen zur akademischen Mobilität zwischen Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 19231993. Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst, 1996. Lockhardt, John G., and Christopher M. Woodhouse. Rhodes. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963. Lodge, David. A David Lodge Trilogy: Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work. London: Penguin, 1989. Lüdtke, Alf, Inge Marssolek, and Adelheid von Saldern, eds. Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996. Lyons, S.F.L. Internationalism in Europe, 1815-1914. Leyden: A.W. Sythoff, 1963. Macdonald, Dwight. The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions- an Unauthorized Biography. New York: Reynal, 1956. Maier, Charles. “The Making of the Pax Americana: Formative Moments of U.S. Ascendancy.” In R. Ahmann, A.M. Birke, and Michael Howard, eds. The Quest for Stability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls, foreword by M. Douglas. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. McCarthy, Kathleen D. “From Cold War to Cultural Development: The International Culture Activities of the Ford Foundation, 1950-1980.” Daedalus (winter 1987): 93-118. Molnar, Thomas. The Emerging Atlantic Culture. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994. Nielsen, Waldemar A. The Big Foundation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. _____. Inside American Philanthropy: The Dramas of Donorship. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Ninkovich, Frank. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. _____. “Interest and Discourse in Diplomatic History.” Diplomatic History 13 (spring 1989): 135-161. Nolan, Mary. Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pells, Richard. Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Pilgert, Henry P. The Exchange of Persons Program in Western Germany. Historical Division, Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, 1951. Report of the Princeton Conference on the History of Philanthropy in the United States. New York: n.p. [Russell Sage Foundation?], 1956. Risse-Kappen, Thomas, ed. Bringing Transnational Relations Back in: Non-State Actors: Domestic Structures and International Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

06-Schmidt

3/27/03

134

2:27 PM

Page 134

Oliver Schmidt

Robin, Ron. Behind the Barbed-Wire: The Reeducation of German POWs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Rosenau, James B. The Study of Global Interdependence: Essays on the Transnationalisation of World Affairs. London: Pinter, 1980. Rosenberg, Emily. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Rupieper, Hermann-Josef. Wurzeln der deutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993. Schaeper, Thomas J. and Kathleen Schaeper. Cowboys into Gentlemen: Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. Stephanson, Anders. “Commentary: Considerations on Culture and Theory.” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (winter 1994): 107-119. Thomson, Charles A., and Walter Laves. Cultural Relations and United States Foreign Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Walker, R.B.J. “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations.” In Culture and International Relation, ed. Jongsuk Chay. New York: Praeger, 1990. Weber, Max. Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1920. Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Baltimore University Press, 1991.

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 135

Chapter 7

ATLANTIC ALLIANCES Cross-Cultural Communication and the 1960s Student Revolution* Philipp Gassert

F

or students of international relations, revolutionary crises provide excellent opportunities for analyzing the effects of cross-cultural communication. The 1780s and 1790s, the late 1840s, the post-World War I years, as well as the 1960s, witnessed a mobilization across cultures, national borders, and political systems. In particular, the events of 1968, the climactic year of the 1960s protest cycle, have often been described as an example of “global revolution.”1 During that year, protest movements became a critical factor in the social and political fabric of the advanced capitalist societies of the West. They also disrupted the Socialist nations of Eastern Europe as well as the developing countries of the Third World. Berkeley, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Washington, but also Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Cairo, Istanbul, Madrid, Mexico City, as well as Prague and Warsaw became the sites of major protest demonstrations.2 Beginning with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January and ending with bloodshed in Sicily in December, a remarkable chain of events lead contemporaries to conceive of what happened in 1968 as similar to 1848. As Hannah Arendt wrote to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers and his wife Gertrud in June 1968: “It seems as if the children of the next century will learn about 1968 in the same way we did about 1848.”3 Contemporaries in 1848 and 1969 shared a peculiar international outlook. Both events were characterized by their transnational nature. Protests were not only ubiquitous in 1848 as well as in 1968, they were also closely related to each other. Therefore, “1968” has come to symbolize a watershed in the postwar history of many countries. Although many scholars have long acknowledged that the local and national protests of the late 1960s took place within an international context, it is surprising that so little empirical research has been devoted to the study of the concrete interacNotes for this section begin on page 149.

07-Gassert

3/27/03

136

2:26 PM

Page 136

Phillipp Gassert

tion and the exchange of ideas among activists. Most studies taking more than one country into account have confined themselves to a comparative approach, rather than analyzing grassroots interaction.4 With the exception of an article by the German political scientist Kurt L. Shell, published in 1973, and few recent publications,5 students of social movements have barely investigated the nature and the impact of the international networks of the 1960s. Instead, they have concentrated on the peace and ecological movements of the 1980s and 1990s.6 Despite their growing interest in culture and society, diplomatic historians, too, have long ignored the literature on transnational social movements and international nongovernmental organizations.7 To better understand how “culture” works in international relations, diplomatic historians could benefit from the empirical results of the burgeoning research on transnational social movements. They also should consider some of the theoretical insights of diffusion theorists, who have provided the most influential methodological and theoretical frameworks to date. Donatella della Porta, for example, has recently summarized some of the preconditions for a successful cross-cultural diffusion of ideas. One is a cultural or geographical proximity of two countries including a history of mutual interaction. A variety of factors can facilitate the interaction among social movements: bi- or transnational institutions, cultural exchange programs, the knowledge of a common language, and the status of the influencing country. With regard to the last factor, the United States’ overwhelming position in the postwar era certainly constituted an important reason for why the American student movement became so influential in Europe. The second factor summarized by della Porta consists of similar conditions in the two interacting societies. Real or perceived similarities of the social life and of the institutional framework heighten the chance of cross-cultural interaction. To belong to an imagined community of shared grievances enhances the development of a collective transnational “identity” and further facilitates the circulation of ideas across borders. Furthermore, a minimum of (real or perceived) commonalities as well as a structural equivalence of the transmitting and receiving entities needs to exist. Third, the responses of the authorities are often shaped by their view of protest movements, notably when those movements reveal an international character and transcend cultural barriers. Similar reactions of state institutions in various countries strengthen the vision of activists to be part of a common struggle. As is well known, street battles between students and the police were one of the most enduring images of the 1960s protest cycle; they reinforced the notion that students all over the world were facing a united front.8 Diffusion studies have shown that social movements rarely develop in a political vacuum. They tend to incorporate the experiences of earlier movements. Charles Tilly has demonstrated that a successful challenge to existing authority in one country increases revolutionary activities in other countries by making available “transferable revolutionary expertise and doctrine” and reducing “the likelihood that the states undergoing revolution will intervene to shore up neighboring old regimes.”9 Looking at the 1960s, Doug McAdam and Dieter Rucht have argued that “protest makers do not have to reinvent the wheel at each place and in each conflict.… They often find

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 137

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

137

inspiration elsewhere in the ideas and tactics espoused and practiced by other activists”—in their own countries as well as across international borders. According to McAdam and Rucht, direct personal links between the transmitters and adopters of social values, “organizational innovations,” or protest tactics are not necessarily a precondition for the cross-cultural diffusion of movement ideas. Such processes are as likely to occur in the absence of high levels of direct contact if adequate “nonrelational channels“ of communication exist, such as the modern mass media.10 In their overview of the transnational student movements of the 1960s, McAdam and Rucht have tried to distinguish between three different phases of transatlantic communication. In the beginning, the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or Social German Student Association) and its American namesake, Students for a Democratic Society, consisted of small bands of activists confining themselves to the discussion of core ideas such as “participatory democracy” without seeking a wider audience. During this first phase, personal networks overshadowed other means of communication. As those networks contributed to the perception that activists were operating within an international framework, a higher degree of ideological and tactical learning by German students from the American example resulted. In this second phase, the media started to report more frequently on student protest. The final phase, which began around 1965 in the United States and approximately two years later in Germany, saw widespread media attention; it was also characterized by a keen awareness among the activists to the effect that they had become part of mass movement that could be sustained and furthered through a skillful exploitation of the media. Whereas Rucht and McAdam have productively used the insights of diffusion theorists to sketch out an influential research agenda, their approach remains problematic. Diffusion theory—originally adopted from physics—is built on the premise of a one-directional “sender—receiver” model of communication that underestimates the autonomy of the receiving subject as well as the bilateral character of transatlantic communication. As scholars of international relations have been arguing for a long time, the flow of communication across the Atlantic can not be portrayed as a one-way street. Therefore, scholars interested in the transnational history of social movements can gain important insights from social analyses of America’s global cultural influence before and after 1945.11 Like other research dealing with intercultural transfer processes, the literature on problems of “Americanism” and “Americanization” has underscored that “foreign” concepts and ideas, icons, and cultural artifacts, are translated into new cultural contexts because they speak to the concerns of the receiving society.12 Others, which seem less relevant for the host culture, tend to be overlooked. Whereas Michael Jordan has become a hero among European youngsters and prompted a strong interest in basketball, baseball, arguably the most “American” sport, has had a much slower start catching on in the Old World.13 In this essay I hope to shed some light on the extent and meaning of cross-cultural communication by looking at the relationship between the German and the American student movement. Based on the available secondary literature as well as some pri-

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 138

138

Phillipp Gassert

mary source material, I argue that transatlantic communication was crucial for the development of the New Left in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, due to a variety of factors: the Cold War framework, structural similarities, ideological affinities, and a common perception that the struggle of 1968 took place in an international environment. After providing an overview of the rise and fall of the New Left in Germany and the United States, I will, first, analyze the transmission of ideology as part of the development of a transatlantic New Left and, second, study personal contacts among activists. The juxtaposition of personal contacts and ideological learning will show that although there was more individual interaction than often presumed, the transmission of ideas mattered. At the same time, however, individuals who had a bicultural capacity often transmitted these ideas. Some were members of the German SDS who had studied in the United States; others belonged to the academic establishment, such as Herbert Marcuse, who epitomized the transatlantic nature of core New Left ideas. In fact, the New Left was an amalgamation of German, European, and American thought, going back to the international labor movement of previous decades and the continuing century-old traditions of intellectual and cultural exchange between the two continents. Therefore, the history of the New Left is a particularly telling example for the study of intercultural transfer processes across the Atlantic.14

Structural Similarities A quick glance at the histories of the German and the American student movements of the 1960s reveals many similarities that invited a high degree of communication. Both movements show a parallel development throughout the 1960s: they were grounded in similar social circumstances, were reacting to similar problems, were close ideologically, and shared a common perception of the international character of their struggle. In the United States, the two major organizations, the SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were both founded in 1960 in the context of the civil rights struggle in the South. After a slow start, the student movement picked up speed around the year 1964. From a few hundred members in October 1963, who were organized in 19 chapters (of which only 6 did serious political work), the American SDS grew to more than 1,000 members in 29 chapters by mid 1964, and to 134 chapters and 4,300 members by the end of 1965. At its peak in 1968, the American SDS probably had 100,000 members in 350 chapters across the nation.15 Three developments were central for the takeoff of the American student movement during the course of 1964: (1) the rise of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley; (2) the Freedom Summer Project, which brought more than 1,000 primarily white college students from the North to the state of Mississippi in support of the civil rights movement in the South; and (3) the escalation of the Vietnam War in late 1964. The Freedom Summer Project provided ideological lessons and tactical skills that would fuel the rise of the

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 139

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

139

American New Left in many important ways. The opposition against the Vietnam War, in turn, transformed the American student movement into a mass phenomenon that went far beyond the campus and attracted considerable media attention. Furthermore, the Vietnam War highlighted the international dimension of the domestic struggle because it created an imaginary link between anticolonial and liberation movements of the Third World, the fight of African Americans and their supporters for civil rights, and the alienation that students experienced at their universities.16 In Germany, too, the beginnings of the student movement can be traced to the year 1960, when the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) decided to cut its ties to the German SDS. The German New Left rose to mass movement status about two years later than in the United States, after police killed a student protester in 1967. As in the United States, the German student movement peaked in 1968 and disintegrated shortly thereafter. The German SDS disbanded in 1970; the American SDS had collapsed the preceding year.17 In both countries, the decline of the New Left accelerated with the street confrontations of 1968, the siege of the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August, and the “Battle of the Tegeler Weg” in November 1968 in Berlin.18 In both cases, increasing ideological infighting, sectarian splits, and the rise of terrorism marked the movements. Both movements reveal a similar social background as well. The main protagonists were by and large members of the academic elite and came from stable middle-class families. As in the United States, the concern about decolonization was amplified by the growing tension over Vietnam. Frustration over educational conditions linked German students with their American counterparts, even though the American universities were in much better shape than their German counterparts. The Cold War framework not only provided channels that facilitated communication but also a common enemy image that seemed to be at the roots of domestic as well as international problems.19 Ideologically, the American and the German SDS were both rooted in the labor movement and the old Left. Soon, however, they developed an antiauthoritarian leftist ideology that was influenced by nonorthodox Marxist thinkers, such as C. Wright Mills or Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse in particular symbolized the common ideological ground on which both the American and German student movement were built. Whereas in the United States the split between traditional Marxist perspectives and the new antiauthoritarian groups would soon disappear, in Germany it remained a major factor of dissent. There were other issues indigenous to Germany, such as the opposition against the introduction of emergency laws, which would allow the limitation of basic civil rights in case of war or natural catastrophes. In addition, the formation of a Grand Coalition government between the two major parties, the SPD and the Christian Democratic Party (Christlich-Demokratische Union, or CDU) in 1966 left the Federal Parliament without a viable political alternative. Finally, the generational conflict over the Nazi past was a unique feature of West German culture despite certain parallels with the United States, where Holocaust imagery was employed to criticize the Cold War policies of the Johnson administration.20 On the

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 140

140

Phillipp Gassert

other hand, the demand for civil rights was a feature unique to the United States, although it did influence the German movement. Common to 1960s protests in both countries were the campus origins and their critique of the conditions of education, opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as support for and ideological affinity to the liberation movements of the Third World. Furthermore, in Germany as well as the United States, the media played a central role in the “making and unmaking of the New Left” (to use Todd Gitlin’s words). Gitlin has demonstrated that the mass media was a critical factor in the transformation of the New Left into a mass movement. In the United States, the SDS became “big news” with its march on Washington in April 1965. In Germany that moment came approximately two years later, in September 1967, when the 22nd Delegate’s Conference of the German SDS received coverage by several German and foreign television stations. The media began to seek out specific events and specific persons to emphasize the spectacular and “negative” aspects of the movement, such as internal dissent or deviant behavior. Frequently, protesters were annoyed by the ways in which the media reported on their activities, particularly if the focus was on certain “stars” such as Rudi Dutschke in Germany. At the same time, the New Left learned how to use the media for their own purposes. Protesters took the media into account when planning their activities, choosing their leaders, and articulating their views. Having become aware of the power of the media, activists sought the offensive, first through press communiqués and news conferences, and later through carefully staged events that captured the eye and provoked the general public.21

Ideological Affinities The many similarities, that existed between the German and American student movements facilitated the transfer of ideology and movement tactics. In both countries the protest movements of the 1960s, which perceived themselves as part of the New Left, were preceded by the formation of an intellectual New Left. In part, the rise of the New Left was a reaction to contemporary developments, such as Stalinism and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. It was precipitated by the debates within the Left about the development of socialism since the 1920s. Returning to the early writings of Marx and combining Marxism with more recent theoretical approaches, such as psychoanalysis or existentialism, the New Left stressed alienation rather than exploitation. Changes in the cultural sphere would have to precede a political and social revolution. A movement, not a party, would heighten the awareness of the general public by “direct action” and provocation tactics. Also, the New Left redefined the subject of social change, which would no longer come from the blue-collar working class but from the intelligentsia and skilled, white-collar groups—the socalled new working-class.22 Of course, this discussion took place in many countries and there seems to have been nothing particularly unusual about American influences on the New Left in

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 141

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

141

Germany.23 There was a peculiar transatlantic impact, however, that had enormous bearing on the development of a New Left in Germany. In Germany, National Socialism had delayed the development of an intellectual New Left, when Leftist intellectuals had been forced to leave the country. Many emigrated to the United States. It was only during the 1960s that West German intellectuals and students would rediscover the German emigration of the 1930s.24 Before 1965, only a few groups such as the Situationist International had become interested in the writings of the socialist émigrés, whereas most German student activists remained committed to a traditional Marxist agenda.25 Today, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse have become classics of social thought, but until the early 1960s they remained relatively unknown in Germany. A distinct transatlantic channel of communication that originated in the United States magnified both the spread of the unorthodox socialist heritage of the 1920s as well as specific movement tactics. For those ideas to have an impact, timing was important. Just two examples: the former German SDS president Michael Vester, when he returned from an exchange studentship to Germany in 1962, contributed two articles on the American New Left to the journal of the German SDS, Neue Kritik.26 His publications did not provoke any reaction among his colleagues. In 1965, however, he wrote an article on the “The Strategy of Direct Action“ based on his knowledge of the American civil rights struggle.27 This essay instantly became a major piece of discussion within the German SDS and greatly influenced the protest tactics of the antiauthoritarian wing. Similarly, C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left,” in which the author proposed that the intelligentsia was the central agent of social change and which became one of the most influential texts for the American student movement, was published in Germany for the first time in 1961.28 At first the “Letter to the New Left” failed to leave an impression in West Germany. But two years later an article in Neue Kritik about the German émigré Karl Korsch, who had been a socialist critic of orthodox Marxism since the 1920s, provoked an intensive discussion and further aggravated the split between the “traditionalist” and “antiauthoritarian” wings of the German SDS.29 Rudi Dutschke, arguably the most charismatic of the West German student leaders, read Marcuse and other émigré scholars. When confronting the traditionalist wing of the SDS, Dutschke always quoted from the writings of Korsch and Marcuse; he often urged his fellow activist to study these works.30 The Jewish émigré philosophers of the Frankfurt School not only heightened the interest of the antiauthoritarian wing of the SDS in nonorthodox, Marxist theories—Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer’s narrow escape from Germany and their radical critique of capitalism “after Auschwitz” highlighted the inextricable link of Germany’s present to its past.31 Marcuse became the single most important source of intellectual inspiration for the West German student movement. As one of the mentors of the American as well as of the German SDS he personalized the blending of the New Left in both countries.32 The One-Dimensional Man (1964) and his essay “Repressive Tolerance“ (translated in 1965), although primarily referring to the situation in the United

07-Gassert

3/27/03

142

2:26 PM

Page 142

Phillipp Gassert

States, became major texts of the student movement in West Germany.33 Most German activists agreed that Marcuse’s analysis applied to the situation in both countries, where the working class had become integrated into the mainstream of society through the means of Cold War anticommunism, growing productivity, and the lure of a consumer society. In May 1966, Marcuse provided the keynote speech at the Germany SDS Congress entitled “Vietnam: Analysis of an Example,” in which he called for the solidarity with the liberation movements in the Third World. 34 According to Marcuse, it was the failure of the Western industrialized nations to accept their responsibility for oppression and exploitation in the Third World that had motivated the student radicals in Germany and the United States. It was therefore no accident that the final communiqué of this Vietnam Congress referred to Marcuse’s theses when declaring the solidarity of the West German SDS with the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) and the American protest movements.35 Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse not only represented the unorthodox émigré socialist tradition, he also served as a reminder to the West German student movement that their grievances were part of a global opposition to the Cold War status quo. In a June 1967 lecture, for example, Marcuse urged his German listeners to take global cooperation among opposition forces seriously. Because Marcuse saw the students as an important revolutionary force, he described the establishment of closer relations between the movements in both countries as one of the most important necessities of strategy in our time. There are almost no relations between the student opposition in the United States and in this country. Indeed, there is not even an effective central organization of the student opposition in the United States itself. We have to work on the establishment of such relations—and I am using the example of the U.S. for my lecture to help prepare the establishment of such relations.36

Other members of the Frankfurt school also acknowledged the simultaneity of developments in the United States and the significance of the American movement for the German cause. During a demonstration honoring the murdered Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg, the German social scientist Ludwig von Friedeburg defended the political engagement of students by pointing to the example of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in California; its fight not just for university reform but also for societal change had provided an important precedent. Like their German counterparts in 1967/1968, von Friedeburg argued, the students of Berkeley had actively sought to address the crucial political questions of their society.37 The civil rights struggle of American blacks and their allies brought German protestors in touch with American concepts of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. During a court trial against leading German SDS members, Karl Dietrich Wolff justified disobedient behavior and the calculated transgression of legal rules with historical experiences of National Socialism and what he had learned from his contacts with American civil rights activists.38 Many contemporary observers stressed that sit-ins and silent marches constituted an import from the United States, notwithstanding the fact that these new forms of protest were grounded in older traditions of

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 143

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

143

the European labor movement as well. Jürgen Habermas, in a sympathetic critique of the strategies of the student movement, referred to his observations as a visitor to the United States when describing the technique of the “limited transgression of the rule of the law” (“begrenzte Regelverletzung”). Having first been developed in the United States, Habermas saw this as the most promising strategy against the bureaucratized apparatus of a potentially unassailable system.39 For Habermas, similar techniques could be applied to the situation in Germany because of similar circumstances. A common perception that West German and the American society shared many similarities also paved the way for the reception of Henry David Thoreau’s theory of nonviolent resistance. As Wolfgang Kraushaar has argued, it was no accident that Thoreau’s pamphlet “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” which had come out during the antebellum protest against slavery, was first translated into German in 1966.40 During the 1980s, Habermas defined a Thoreauvian tradition of nonviolent protest as the yardstick against which the democratic culture of West Germany had to be measured.41 The civil rights movement and the writings of Marcuse linked the West German student movement to the international arena. The young black woman Angela Davis seemed to personify the international linkage between the situation of students in Western countries like Germany and the struggle of racial and ethnic minorities abroad. Davis had participated in the fight for civil rights in the South, and she came to Frankfurt in 1967 to study with Marcuse; she also stood for the influences extending across the Atlantic in a westbound direction. As an assistant professor at the University of California in San Diego, Davis represented the influence of the émigré philosophers on American radicalism. Not unlike the German government, American authorities who had tried to remove Davis from the university interpreted her “hatred against white people” as an outgrowth of studies in Frankfurt, particularly with Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas.42 After Davis had been incarcerated for illegal possession of weapons in the early 1970s, she served as a powerful symbol of the resistance against the “system” and the fate of “political prisoners” in Germany as well as in the United States. Her picture became a familiar icon that was often displayed on placards and banners that were brandished by West European demonstrators.43 In retrospect, the relationship between the German and American New Left has been almost unanimously described as an asymmetrical one. Moreover, historians have barely addressed the question to what degree the American New Left was shaped by international trends. While American scholars tend to study social movements within their domestic contexts, Europeans have more frequently searched for transatlantic influences. Norbert Finzsch even speaks of an “Americanization” of the German student movement.44 And even though Kurt L. Shell refers to the émigré influence on the American New Left as a “Germanization” of American intellectual thought, he has focused on the American impact on Germany.45 I would argue, however, that the international character of the student movement of the 1960s, cannot be understood without the surrounding interactive process of intercultural relations.46 The Frankfurt school has often been cited to highlight the

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

144

Page 144

Phillipp Gassert

ideological linkage between the New Left in both countries, but its story is only the tip of the iceberg. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the ideas of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse—but also of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and others found a fertile breeding ground at the University of Wisconsin. Here, émigré scholars like Hans Gerth and George L. Mosse contributed to the synthesis of “homespun American radicalism” and the left-liberal thought of the Weimar Republic.47 The New Left historians who came out of Madison became one of the dominant voices in American historiography. Richard Pells has underscored the national peculiarities of the various New Lefts; yet its hallmark was the amalgamation of European and American radical thought. Examining the aftermath of the 1960s, even Pells has identified Frenchinfluenced postmodernism and post-structuralism as avenues through which European ideas gained ground in American academic circles. Finally, Rudi Dutschke’s famed concept of the “march through the institutions” caught on in the United States as well, where it proved just as successful as it did in its original context.48

Personal Contacts It is one of the great ironies of the close Cold War cooperation between the West German and American governments that the exchange programs, which had been set up to “democratize” the Germans, might have worked too well, at least from the viewpoint of the ruling elite in both countries.49 Because of the experiences of 1968, U.S. President Richard Nixon remained reluctant to respond to West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger’s idea to establish a German-American youth foundation modeled on the Franco-German example. As Nixon told Kiesinger during a conversation in August 1969, there “might be an explosion if the participants are not selected very carefully.” Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, exhibited even more concern. He accused German students of being more radical than their American comrades. For Kissinger, West German student protestors were the true heirs of fascism.50 Kiesinger, however, at least partly blamed the Americans; a close supporter of cultural exchange with the United States, he noted the impact of the Vietnam War and highlighted the fact that the student movement had started in Berkeley. According to Kiesinger, it were American philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse who been instrumental for the rise of a New Left in West Germany.51 The Federal Chancellor had a point. In their reminiscences, two German Americanists, Peter Freese and Ekkehart Krippendorff, have described how their studies in the United States in the early 1960s changed their outlook on the German university. Krippendorff, in particular, has traced his personal involvement in protest activities to his experiences as a student in the United States.52 According to his personal account, the open and egalitarian atmosphere at American institutions of higher learning compared very favorably to what he experienced at the Free University in Berlin.53 Leading members of the German SDS had been politicized as exchange students in the United States as well. Karl-Dietrich Wolff, who became president of

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 145

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

145

the German SDS in 1967, had been an exchange student in the United States in 1959/1960. He maintained relations with the American New Left, whose representatives he invited to participate in the famous International Vietnam Congress, in February 1968. Michael Vester, president of the German SDS in 1961, became a Fulbright exchange student in 1961/1962, but also served as an “official” representative of the German SDS in the United States. As he recalled in an oral history interview, the differences between the German and American organizations were striking: “You had the feeling that [in the United States] something was fermenting, about to move. It was exciting and I thought, if only we in the German SDS could get out of our theoretical objectivism and get into gear too!”54 Vester would also attend the famous Port Huron conference—the only participant who was not an American citizen. He was able to inject references on the issues of German unification, NATO, and the Berlin Wall into the Port Huron Statement. Vester called for a neutralization of central Europe and described the “inhumanity of the Berlin Wall” as “an ironic symbol of the irrationality of the Cold War, which keeps Adenauer and Ulbricht in power.”55 As the example of Michael Vester shows, the flow of information might have been asymmetric, with the American movement being the “early riser” and the more influential partner and the German organization more frequently on the receiving end. It was not as one-directional, however, as diffusion theory has asserted in a more general way and as the recollections of many contemporaries suggest.56 Michael Vester’s correspondence as foreign secretary of the German SDS reveals a more differentiated picture. Not only did Tom Hayden acknowledge that Vester’s participation at Port Huron was “instrumental in our present stand on the German question;” he also stressed that the American movement had become more aware of the fact that movements in both countries were “attempting to end the Cold War which has been the definitive social experience for us all.”57 Although the American SDS saw “international relationships as necessarily limited” because it lacked the resources to maintain more than occasional contacts abroad, American students frequently discussed common projects with their German counterparts. Topics included the boycott against companies trading with South Africa or the German SDS’s efforts to bring former Nazis to court.58 Both organizations exchanged leaflets and brochures as a way to keep each other informed at a time when the cost of transatlantic travel was still very high. Members of the American SDS became very interested in the 1961 memo of the German SDS, “Hochschule in der Demokratie” (University and Democracy) and commissioned one of their members to translate the text into English.59 When the student government of Cornell University staged a teach-in on Vietnam in 1967, the international opposition against “America’s war” was an obvious topic. New York University Professor Norman Birnbaum, who had spent some time in Germany, was invited to speak about the positions taken by the German SDS as well as other European opposition movements.60 In 1968, two Columbia University students, Barbara and John Ehrenreich, traveled to Europe to underscore that 1968 was the “year of the

07-Gassert

3/27/03

146

2:26 PM

Page 146

Phillipp Gassert

student” at home and abroad. Their journey was part of a larger effort of the American SDS to study student movements abroad and explore possibilities for cooperation.61 Furthermore, like its German counterpart, Neue Kritik, the journal of the American SDS, New Left Notes, occasionally reported on the developments in Germany, especially after the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke in April 1968.62 Being part of a global movement shaped American activists as much as their Germans comrades. By the mid 1960s it had become more common for students to participate in demonstrations abroad. Less expensive fares for transatlantic travel facilitated contacts, even though trips remained too expensive to allow for frequent flights to New York or Paris. Already during the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, the campaign against nuclear armament had mobilized global support across the Cold War divide.63 The antinuclear campaign dissipated in the late 1960s when activists flocked to the anti-Vietnam war movement and when the urgency of its crusade was diminished by the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), and the impending détente between the superpowers. Nevertheless, there was a considerable measure of continuity—of personnel and organization, rhetoric and symbols, strategy and tactics—between the anti-nuclear movement and international protest movements of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War.64 The Vietnam War internationalized the student movement of the 1960s even more profoundly than the antinuclear protests. Vietnam created an imagined worldwide community of protestors united in a “front against U.S. capitalism and imperialism.” The idea of international solidarity gained even more appeal through the reception of a common body of literature, such as the writings of Chairman Mao and the Argentine guerilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara.65 At any of the large antiwar demonstrations organized in the second half of the decade, one would find participants from abroad. Although other forms of communication such as widespread reporting in the mass media soon took prevalence over personal contacts, in terms of sheer numbers, the participation of foreign activists peeked in the late 1960s. The famous Vietnam Congress convened by the German SDS in Berlin, in March 1968, attracted more than six thousand participants from all over Europe as well as from Turkey and the United States.66 As Ronald Fraser has demonstrated, in 1968 “revolutionary tourism” was rather the norm than the exception.67 Whereas personal involvement across borders grew, other forces were taking shape, which had a profound impact on the student movement. Thus, although in absolute numbers personal interaction probably grew, it became less important for the movement. In particular, the growing attention of the media changed the nature and impact of personal contacts. Manifestos now highlighted the “international character” of the movement. In Munich, for example, a “Vietnam Committee for Peace and Liberation” was founded in November 1966.68 Its explicit goal was to increase public awareness of the exemplary character of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was seen as the logical outcome of the East-West confrontation of the Cold War. Resolutions thus urged activists to use “all possible means to protest against the US aggression.” The authors of the resolution declared their solidarity with those movements in the United

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 147

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

147

States that were opposed to the U.S. foreign policy. They particularly advocated the efforts of African Americans and the organizers of the various anti-Vietnam War campaigns: “By combating this system here and now and by joining ranks for further struggles, we are acting in a spirit of solidarity with the democratic movements in the USA as well as with the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” This message from Munich was dutifully acknowledged by American comrades. The American SDS congratulated the group for its heroic protest against the imperialist and antidemocratic foreign policy of the United States government. Like their American brothers and sisters, the Bavarian SDS would “bear the banner of freedom in the face of the destructive power of the American giant.“ In the conclusion, the American SDS national secretary called for further cooperation between the movements in both countries.69 Antiwar rallies routinely produced solidarity declarations with American protestors. In February 1966, for example, groups from West Germany, Austria, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and The Netherlands convened anti-Vietnam War rallies in response to similar meetings in the United States.70 The ritualized language and the self-celebratory mood that became the hallmark of public exchange between protestors on both sides of the Atlantic highlights the transformations taking place during the second half of the 1960s. Protesters no longer relied on individual contacts or articles in obscure movement journals in order to communicate with each other. Press releases and open letters were not just targeted at followers at home and abroad but at the domestic and international public as well. To a degree, the “international character” of the movement depended now on the coverage it was given in the established media. In addition, media reports attracted attention in other countries and led to a cross-fertilization among movements. In October 1967 the “march on the Pentagon” by American antiwar protestors was echoed by closely coordinated solidarity demonstrations against the U.S. establishment in West Berlin as well as in Amsterdam, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo. In Paris, in 1968, an attack on the American Express building by left-wing terrorists actually precipitated the May uprising in France.71 In Great Britain, groups that had originally organized over issues of college discipline transformed into a mass movement against the Vietnam War. In London, protests peaked in 1968 with two massive demonstrations, in March and October, in which more than 100,000 people participated.72 There is further evidence from Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands, the Philippines, Thailand, and Sweden that opposition to the American engagement in Vietnam stimulated the growth of radical student movements. Whereas the American opposition against Vietnam mobilized Europeans, sometimes European events caused protest demonstrations in the United States. The student occupation of Columbia University in April 1968 was precipitated by protest demonstrations against the Rockefeller Center office of the German Axel Springer publishing group. Because of its negative reporting on student unrest in Germany, Springer was accused of having caused the assassination attempt on the German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke.73 The May 1968 protests proved even more contagious

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

148

Page 148

Phillipp Gassert

than events in Berlin. In Italy, for example, battles between the students and police reached their climax in June 1968. In Belgium, on the other hand, officials decided not to call the police after students occupied the administrative offices of the Free University of Brussels.74 In Istanbul, students occupied their campus after they heard about the takeover of the Sorbonne.75 In Berkeley and Belgrade, Berlin and Buenos Aires, protest demonstrations supported the workers and students of France.76 In some ways, the media drove this international cross-fertilization. Therefore, personal contacts and the exchange of ideas in movement journals no longer characterized cross-cultural communication between student movements of different countries. Instead, now the sensation created by media coverage played a much larger role in influencing events in other countries. Whereas media reporting may not necessarily be a sign of intensive cross-cultural communication, I would argue that the media were successful in transmitting information about protest in other countries because students shared a common reservoir of ideas and had become acquainted with each other during an earlier period. Because they felt that they had similar experiences and belonged to a worldwide community of protestors, the belief was further enhanced that the confrontations of 1968 were part of a global event wherever they happened.

Conclusion As I have argued in this paper, the German and American student movements of the 1960s showed remarkable structural similarities. The Cold War framework, exemplified by Vietnam, unified not only the main political protagonists in Washington and Bonn, but it also created opportunities for the antiwar movement in both countries. Furthermore, the rise of the New Left predated the student movement, which became heavily involved with nonorthodox Marxist thinkers. The very nature of New Left ideology, twice crossing the Atlantic—first in the 1930s and then in the years following World War II—with its blending of European and American radical thought, further strengthened transatlantic ties among leftist students. The influence of the Frankfurt school and its Wisconsin successor created a common framework of ideas. A transatlantic discursive sphere emerged, which allowed activists in both countries to employ the same ideological language. The parallel rise and fall of the student movements on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the shared pool of basic ideas and problems, undoubtedly reinforced the notion of the “international character” of the movement. It remains difficult to assess the role of personal contacts. Sometimes they seem to have paved the way, but were they sufficient? The transfer of ideas and tactics was often achieved through individuals; more often, however, these processes seem to have been less personal and more mediated. If individuals could not travel, books and articles certainly did. Therefore, as we study a discourse involving intellectuals and activists on both sides of the Atlantic, it is difficult to pin down the exact role of persons and institutions. Furthermore, as the decade progressed, mainstream media as a

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 149

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

149

principal source of cross-cultural communication increasingly replaced personal contacts. The strategy of direct action, the “translation” into German concepts such as civil disobedience, the enthusiasm for Third World liberation theory owed much to individuals like Michael Vester who had first encountered those issues on the other side of the Atlantic. Finally, the basic problem of the asymmetric flow of communication needs to be recognized. It was a result of the overwhelming position of the United States in international relations after 1945. All this said, one should not be deceived by the powerful image of an Americacentric world system during the Cold War. Current scholarship regards international influences on Germany as a given, whereas there is little mention of foreign influences on the American scene. Therefore, the question of the extent to which the American New Left became internationalized during the 1960s seems a worthwhile topic to pursue in future research.

Notes *

I would like to thank Thomas W. Maulucci and the two editors of this volume for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

1. Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968 – Revolution im Weltsystem,” in 1968 – Ein europäisches Jahr, ed. Etienne François et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997), 19-33; Carol Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2. David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Robert V. Daniels, Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 3. Hannah Arendt to Karl and Gertrud Jaspers, 26 June 1968, in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (Munich: Piper, 1985), 715f. 4. Gianni Statera, Death of Utopia: The Development and Decline of Student Movements in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Cyrill Levitt, Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties: A Study of Student Movements in Canada, the United States, and West Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Peppino Ortoleva, Saggio sui moviementi del 1968 in Europa e in America (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988); Philip G. Altbach, ed., Student Political Activism: An International Reference Handbook (New York: Greenwood, 1989); Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University, with a new introduction by the author (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993); Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996); Gerard J. DeGroot, ed., Student Protest: The Sixties and After (London/New York: Longman, 1998); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michael A. Schmidtke, “Reform, Revolte oder Revolution? Der Sozialistische Deutsche

07-Gassert

3/27/03

150

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

2:26 PM

Page 150

Phillipp Gassert

Studentenbund (SDS) und die Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1960-1970,“ in 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998), 188-206. Kurt L. Shell, “The American Impact on the German New Left,“ Contagious Conflict: The Impact of American Dissent on European Life, ed. A.N.J den Hollander (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), 30-49; Doug McAdam and Dieter Rucht, “The Cross-National Diffusion of Movement Ideas,” Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science 528 (July 1993): 56-74; Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Die transatlantische Protestkultur: Der zivile Ungehorsam als amerikanisches Exempel und bundesdeutsche Adaption,” in Westbindungen: Amerika in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Heinz Bude and Bernd Greiner (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 257284; Claus Leggewie, “1968: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences,“ in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990, vol. 2, ed. Detlef Junker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [2003]). Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153-169; Charles Chatfield et al., eds., Solidarity Beyond the State: The Dynamics of Transnational Social Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997). For a preliminary assessment, see Akira Iriye, “A Century of NGOs,” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 421-435. Donatella della Porta, “‘1968’ – Zwischennationale Diffusion und Transnationale Strukturen: Eine Forschungsagenda,“ in Gilcher-Holtey, 1968, 131-150. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14. McAdam and Rucht, “Cross-National Diffusion,” 58. For a survey of that literature, see Philipp Gassert, “Amerikanismus, Anti-Amerikanismus und Amerikanisierung: Neue Forschungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa,“ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531-561; see also Uta G. Poiger, “Beyond ‘Modernization’ and ‘Colonization,’“ Diplomatic History 23 (1999), 45-56. Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,“ Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649-685, here 678ff. Barbara Keys, “Review of Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism,” HDiplo, H-Net Reviews, January 2000. . Most recently, however, baseball seems to have made it to Europe. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 15, 122-123; McAdam and Rucht, “Cross-National Diffusion,” 66. For an overview of developments in the United States, see James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam, 1993). A good scholarly synthesis of developments in Germany is still missing; see Pavel A. Richter, “Die Auflerparlamentarische Opposition in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1966 bis 1968,“ in Gilcher-Holtey, 1968, 35-55; from an insider perspective, see the early study by Tilman Fichter and Siegward Lönnendonker, Kleine Geschichte des SDS: Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund von 1946 bis zur Selbstauflösung (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1977). Kraushaar in Bude and Greiner, Westbindungen, 268. On the importance of being anti-anti-Communist see Gitlin, Sixties, 105ff. Harold Marcuse, “The Revival of Holocaust Awareness in West Germany, Israel, and the United States,” in Fink, Gassert, and Junker, 1968: The World Transformed, 421-438; Wilfried Mausbach, “Auschwitz and Vietnam: West German Protest against America’s War During the 1960s,“ America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, ed. Andreas

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 151

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

151

Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [2003]). Fichter and Lönnendonker, Kleine Geschichte, 116; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Maurice Issermann, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Kritische Theorie und Neue Linke,“ in Gilcher-Holtey, 1968, 168-187; Gerd-Rainer Horn, “The Changing Nature of the European Working Class: The Rise and Fall of the ‘New Working Class’ (France, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia),” in Fink, Gassert, and Junker, 1968: The World Transformed, 351-372. British and French influences should be acknowledged as well; see Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Die Phantasie an die Macht”: Mai ’68 in Frankreich (Frankfurt, Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 82-95. Claus-Dieter Krohn, “Die Entdeckung des ‘anderen Deutschland’ in der intellektuellen Protestbewegung der 1960er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den Vereinigten Staaten,“ Exilforschung 13 (1995): 16-52. See Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “May 1968 in France,“ in Fink, Gassert, and Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed, 256f. Michael Vester, “Schöne Neue Welt,“ Neue Kritik 4, no. 15 (1963): 3-8; idem, “Die Linke in den USA,“ Neue Kritik 4, no. 17 (1963): 6-14. Michael Vester, “Die Strategie der direkten Aktion,“ Neue Kritik 6, no. 30 (1965): 12-20; see also the Vester interview in Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, 66. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,“ reprinted in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, ed. Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert (New York: Praeger, 1984), 86-92; German translation in Konkret 23/34 (1961): 17. Erich Gerlach, “Karl Korsch und der Marxismus,“ Neue Kritik 18 (November 1963): 16-18. Rudi Dutschke, Zur Literatur des revolutionären Sozialismus von Karl Marx bis in die Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Berlin: SDS-Korresponden, 1966); see also Ulrich Chaussy, Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1993). See Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Autoritärer Staat und Antiautoritäre Bewegung: Zum Organisationsreferat von Rudi Dutschke und Hans-Jürgen Krahl auf der 22. Delegiertenkonferenz des SDS in Frankfurt (4.-8. Sept. 1967),“ in Frankfurter Schule: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, 3 vols., ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Frankfurt, Main: Rogner and Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998), vol. 3, 15-33, quote 26. Ingo Juchler, Rebellische Subjektivität und Internationalismus. Der Einfluß Herbert Marcuses und der nationalen Befreiungsbewegungen in der sog. Dritten Welt auf die Studentenbewegung in der BRD (Marburg: Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 1989); Krohn, “Entdeckung des anderen Deutschland,“ passim. Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; idem, “Repressive Toleranz,“in Kritik der reinen Toleranz, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 91-128. Herbert Marcuse, “Vietnam: Analyse eines Exempels,“ Neue Kritik 36/37 (June/August 1966): 30-38. Bundesvorstand des SDS, “Schlußerklärung zum SDS-Kongreß ‘Vietnam – Analyse eines Exempels,’“ Neue Kritik 36/37 (June/August 1966), 38-40. Herbert Marcuse, “Das Problem der Gewalt in der Opposition,“ reprinted in Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule, vol. 2, no. 143, 272-275. Robert von Friedeburg, “Der gewaltsame Tod unseres Berliner Kommilitonen Benno Ohnesorg: Kundgebungsrede auf dem Frankfurter Römerberg,“ reprinted in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, vol. 2, no. 125, 244-246. Karl Dietrich Wolff ’s statements are quoted reprinted in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, vol. 1, 468. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder: Sechs Thesen über Taktik, Ziele und Situationsanalysen der oppositionellen Jugend,“ Frankfurter Rundschau (1 June 1968), reprinted in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, vol. 2, 408-413, here 409.

07-Gassert

3/27/03

152

2:26 PM

Page 152

Phillipp Gassert

40. Kraushaar in Bude and Greiner, Westbindungen, 276. 41. Jürgen Habermas, “Ziviler Ungehorsam: Testfall für den demokratischen Rechtsstaat,“ in Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit, ed. Habermas (Frankfurt, Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 83f. 42. Report from the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt, quoted in Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule, vol. 1, 463. 43. See the illustrations in Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, vol. 1, 513, 520. 44. Norbert Finzsch, “Wie übersetzt man ‘Civil Disobedience’: 1968 in den USA und in der Bundesrepublik,“ unpublished paper, in possession of the author. 45. See Shell in Hollander, ed., Contagious Conflict, 40; Kraushaar’s title “Transatlantische Protestkultur“ in Bude and Greiner, Westbindungen, suggests he is exclusively interested in the effects on Germany; so is Leggewie in Junker et al., The United States and Germany. 46. See Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich;“ Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), 11f. 47. Jost Hermand, “Madison, Wisconsin 1959-1973: Der Einfluß der deutschen Exilanten auf die Entstehung der Neuen Linken,“ Exilforschung 13 (1995): 52-67. 48. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 283-291. 49. Ulrich Littmann, Partners, Distant and Close: Notes and Footnotes on Academic Mobility between Germany and the United States of America, 1923-1993 (Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 1997). 50. Memo of conversation, 8 August 1969, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Hans-Peter Schwarz et al., vol. 2 (1969) (Munich: Oldenbourg 2000), 906f. 51. Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik, St. Augustin, Kiesinger Papers, I-226-A-008: “Hintergrundgespräch von Bundeskanzler Kiesinger mit Journalisten der Landespressekonferenz Baden-Württemberg,“ 21 March 1968; “Hintergrundgespräch mit den deutschen Chefredakteuren im Bundeskanzleramt,“ 18 April 1968. 52. See also Oliver Schmidt’s contribution in this volume (chapter 6). 53. Peter Freese, “America”: Dream or Nightmare? Reflections on a Composite Image, 3d ed. (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1994), 26-27; Ekkehart Krippendorff, “Die westdeutsche Linke und ihr Bild von den USA,“ in Deutschland und Amerika: Perzeption und historische Realität ed. Willi Paul Adams and Knud Krakau (Berlin: Colloquium, 1985), 39-46. 54. Quoted in Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, 66. 55. “The Port Huron Statement,“ reprinted in Miller, Democracy is in the Streets, 329-374; here 357. 56. Shell in Hollander, Contagious Conflict; Krippendorff in Adams and Krakau, eds. Deutschland und Amerika. 57. Thomas Hayden to Michael Vester, n.d. [1964?], folder SDS-Bundesvorstand, Referat Ausland, October 1964-October 1965, Archiv APO und soziale Bewegung, former Zentralinstitut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, Berlin (hereafter cited as Archiv APO). 58. Don McKelvey (SDS national bureau, New York) to Michael Vester, 8 December 1962, ibid., Archiv APO, folder SDS, Bundesvorstand, Ausland, 1962. 59. Michael Vester to Betty Garman (Berkeley), 19 December 1962, “Hochschule in der Demokratie,” originally published in Neue Kritik, was reprinted as SDS-Hochschuldenkschrift (Frankfurt, Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1972). 60. Reimut Reiche to Norman Birnbaum, 13 February 1967, Archiv APO, SDS, Bundesvorstand, Referat Ausland, Verschiedenes. 61. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). 62. I would like to thank Martin Klimke of the University of Heidelberg for bringing the articles in the New Left Notes to my attention. Klimke is currently working on a dissertation on the relations between the American and European New Left. 63. Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 153

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

153

64. See Richard Taylor, Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement, 1958-1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Lothar Rolke, Protestbewegungen in der Bundesrepublik: Eine analytische Sozialgeschichte des politischen Widerspruchs (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 226238; see the references to nuclear disarmament in the Port Huron Statement, Miller, Democracy, 346ff., 355ff. 65. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988); Guevara’s writings were translated into several European languages (see Gitlin, Sixties, 246; Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 145). 66. See the interview with Karl-Dietrich Wolff, quoted in Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 260n, 10. 67. Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt; numerous examples of visits of leading members of the various student movements to other countries can also be found in the meticulous chronicle of Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, vol. 1, 345. 68. On the history of the student movement in Munich, see Stefan Hemler, “München ‘68 – war da was? Überlegungen zur Erforschung der Studentenbewegung anhand bedeutsamer Marginalien,“ 1999: Zeitschrift für die Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 13 (1998): 117-136. 69. Quoted in Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 125-26. 70. Ibid., 120. 71. Keith A. Reader, with Khursheed Wadia, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 8. 72. Katsiaficas, Imagination, 56. 73. Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, “Student Movements of the 1960s, The Reminiscences of Jeff Jones. Interview with Ronald Grele, New York, 24 October 1984,” 49, quoted in Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 289; Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, 195. 74. Caute, Year of the Barricades,108. 75. Ahmet Samim, “The Left,“ in Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives, ed. Irvin C. Schick and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 157. 76. Katsiaficas, Imagination, 3; Fraser, 1968 : A Student Generation in Revolt, 273.

Bibliography Adams, Willi Paul, and Knud Krakau, eds. Deutschland und Amerika: Perzeption und historische Realität. Berlin: Colloquium, 1985. Altbach, Philip G., ed. Student Political Activism: An International Reference Handbook. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Bude, Heinz and Bernd Greiner, eds. Westbindungen: Amerika in der Bundesrepublik. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999. Caute, David. The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Chatfield, Charles, et al., eds. Solidarity Beyond the State: The Dynamics of Transnational Social Movements. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Chaussy, Ulrich. Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Ch. Links, 1993. Daniels, Robert V. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

07-Gassert

3/27/03

154

2:26 PM

Page 154

Phillipp Gassert

Daum, Andreas W. Lloyd C. Garnder, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds. America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming [2003]). Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm. Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999. DeGroot, Gerard J., ed. Student Protest: The Sixties and After. London and : Longman, 1998. Fichter, Tilman, and Siegward Lönnendonker. Kleine Geschichte des SDS: Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund von 1946 bis zur Selbstauflösung. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1977. Fields, A. Belden. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States. New York: Praeger, 1988 Fink, Carol, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds. 1968: The World Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. François, Etienne, Matthias Middell, Emmanuael Terray, and Dorothea Wierling, eds. 1968 – Ein europäisches Jahr. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1997. Fraser, Ronald. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Freese, Peter. “America:” Dream or Nightmare? Reflections on a Composite Image. 3d ed. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1994. Gassert, Philipp. “Amerikanismus, Anti-Amerikanismus und Amerikanisierung: Neue Forschungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa.“ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531-561. Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid. “Die Phantasie an die Macht”: Mai ’68 in Frankreich. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. _____, ed. 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1993. _____. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Habermas, Jürgen. Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt, Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Hemler, Stefan. “München ‘68 – war da was? Überlegungen zur Erforschung der Studentenbewegung anhand bedeutsamer Marginalien.“ 1999: Zeitschrift für die Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 13 (1998): 117-136. Hermand, Jost. “Madison, Wisconsin 1959-1973: Der Einfluß der deutschen Exilanten auf die Entstehung der Neuen Linken.“ Exilforschung 13 (1995): 52-67. Hollander, A.N.J. den, ed. Contagious Conflict: The Impact of American Dissent on European Life. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973. Iriye, Akira. “A Century of NGOs.” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 421-435. Issermann, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Juchler, Ingo. Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996. _____. Rebellische Subjektivität und Internationalismus. Der Einfluß Herbert Marcuses und der nationalen Befreiungsbewegungen in der sog. Dritten Welt auf die

07-Gassert

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 155

Atlantic Alliances: The 1960s Student Revolution

155

Studentenbewegung in der BRD (Marburg: Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, 1989). Junker, Detlef, with Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris, eds. The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (2003). Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston: South End Press, 1987. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat. Munich: Piper, 1998. _____, ed. Frankfurter Schule: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995. 3 vols. Frankfurt, Main: Rogner and Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998. Krohn, Claus-Dieter. “Die Entdeckung des ‘anderen Deutschland’ in der intellektuellen Protestbewegung der 1960er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den Vereinigten Staaten.“ Exilforschung 13 (1995): 16-52. Levitt, Cyrill. Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties: A Study of Student Movements in Canada, the United States, and West Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Lipset, Seymour Martin. Rebellion in the University. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993. Littmann, Ulrich. Partners, Distant and Close: Notes and Footnotes on Academic Mobility between Germany and the United States of America, 1923-1993. Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 1997. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. _____. “Repressive Toleranz.“ In Kritik der reinen Toleranz, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse, 91-128. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. McAdam, Doug, and Dieter Rucht. “The Cross-National Diffusion of Movement Ideas.” Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science 528 (July 1993): 56-74. Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Ortoleva, Peppino. Saggio sui moviementi del 1968 in Europa e in America. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988. Paulmann, Johannes. “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts.“ Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649-685. Pells, Richard. Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Poiger, Uta G. “Beyond ‘Modernization’ and ‘Colonization.’“ Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 45-56. Reader, Keith A., with Khursheed Wadia. The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

07-Gassert

3/27/03

156

2:26 PM

Page 156

Phillipp Gassert

Rolke, Lothar. Protestbewegungen in der Bundesrepublik: Eine analytische Sozialgeschichte des politischen Widerspruchs. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987. Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973. Schick, Irvin C., and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak, eds. Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Hans-Peter Schwarz et al., vol. 2 (1969). Munich: Oldenbourg 2000. Statera, Gianni. Death of Utopia: The Development and Decline of Student Movements in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Taylor, Richard. Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement, 1958-1965. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 Tilly, Charles. European Revolutions, 1492-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wittner, Lawrence S. Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 157

Chapter 8

FORECASTING THE FUTURE Future Studies as International Networks of Social Analysis in the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and the United States Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

Due to their peculiar developmental dynamic, modern societies are in general future- and progress-oriented.1 However, this does not mean that during the last two centuries public discourses were above all determined by a steady orientation toward the future. On the contrary, recent research has discovered a fascinating story of changing trends between euphoria and depression, between an intense belief in ”utopian” projects on the one hand and a deep skepticism toward the future in general on the other. According to the historian Lucian Hölscher, four different periods of an intense future orientation can be distinguished: the 1770/1780s, the 1830/1840s, the time around the turn of the century, and the 1960s.2 Roughly speaking, the first period was characterized by the secularization of the future. Philosophers such as Kant, Lessing, and Condorcet played a leading role. They ”replaced” the rather religious understanding of the future in terms of salvation or damnation with a more secular notion of the future as a result of historical and man-made developments. The French revolutions of 1789 and 1830 caused a significant change of the public discourse on the future: pamphlets focused either on utopian beliefs in a better and more democratic society or proclaimed the idea of history as an evolution or revolution toward social equality and justice. The leading representatives of this new perspective were social philosophers and theorists such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, and political visionaries such as Cabet and Fourier. This period of an intense debate about the future in the 1830s and 1840s, which can be labeled as a politicization of the future, was followed by a ”depression” after the failure of the European revolutions in 1848/1849. Notes for this section begin on page 168.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

158

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 158

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

After that, the third trend of a general future orientation that arose in Europe (as well as in the United States) may be described as a profound mechanziation of the future. Underlying this was the enormous impact of intense industrialization, especially since the 1890s. New technologies and technological inventions such as electricity, automobiles, planes, and new chemical substances promised a new ”age of energy” (and mobility) where all basic social problems seemed solvable by technical and scientific means. During the same period, the new literary genre of the science-fiction novel with authors such as Jules Verne, Herbert G. Wells, Bernhard Kellermann, and many others started to celebrate this new age, expressed by the ideal of the engineer. In sharp contrast to these expectations, the European experience of two world wars and deep economic and social crises after 1914 brought a profound disillusionment, turning former utopian visions into dark dystopias of eternal wars and visions of totalitarian political power. Consequently, the last period of ”euphoric” beliefs in future perspectives in the 1960s was overshadowed by the menace of a total atomic disaster. At the same time, the enormous scientific and technological progress since the 1930s3 now seemed to provide new means and possibilities of a scientific ”engineering” of modern societies. In contrast to the secularization, politicization, and mechanization of the future in previous periods, the core of this new future orientation consisted in the idea of a scientification. A new scientific field of future(s) studies, or futurology, emerged as a field of genuine academic research in order to provide scientific bases for a new kind of ”rational” policy making. This contrasted profoundly with the utopian visions of the nineteenth century as well as with the single measures of military and economic planning in the highly developed countries before 1945.4 In addition, the new specialty of future studies consisted in its international or transnational character, which marked another departure from the forms of national economic planning in the interwar period. “The future” did not belong to writers and artists anymore. Instead it became increasingly a public discourse of experts. These experts not only tried to bridge the gap between scientific disciplines but they also started to establish networks of scientific exchange across national boundaries in order to analyze the new global problems and their possible solutions. With regard to the historical analysis of the relationship between culture and international relations, these attempts to establish a scientific mode of forecasting and prediction offer an excellent example of one of its most important aspects: the emergence of international scientific networks of experts during the Cold War era. This essay focuses primarily on the common scientific paradigms (or modes of thinking) as one of the most important aspects of this new international culture of experts.

Future Studies as International Networks of Social Analysis: A Transnational Public of Experts The new aspect of the emerging “futurology” consisted in the fact that it combined prognoses and projections, the theory of programming and planning, and finally ethi-

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 159

Forecasting the Future

159

cally based designs of alternatives. The main thesis of this essay is that the specifically international character of ”future studies” as a transnational network of scientists consisted of three variables: (1) a common ”agenda”; (2) a new form of common media and channels of information; and (3), most importantly, a common scientific paradigm which determined three different variations of an emerging post-industrial society. The first element, the common agenda, consisted of the perception and experience of an unprecedented, sometimes even exponential growth in the most important social and economic sectors, such as GNP (gross national product), mass consumerism and technological innovations but also in terms of global population and potential for destruction from the 1950s on. This previously unknown dynamic development seemed to change not only modern, but all societies on the planet with a breathtaking speed. One of the crucial elements of this dynamic was the dramatic growth of scientific knowledge and its technological applications, especially in the field of information technology.5 Although the scientific basis for this revolution in information technology had been developed for the most part in the 1930s and 1940s, World War II accelerated its technological application in areas such as radar technology, new telecommunicatively guided artillery systems, and the development of nuclear weapons. Especially in the United States, this heritage of the war continued with regard to the new rivalry of the superpowers after 1945. Thus, the first future studies were a result of military operations research and systems analysis. New institutions of the emerging military-industrial complex such as the RAND Corporation started to develop strategic forecasts by using modern system analysis and operations research. These methods were then soon applied to more comprehensive economic and social forecasts during the 1960s.6 While the national as well as international cooperation in the field of strategic planning lead to the specific trans- or interdisciplinary approach of futurology, the new ”futurists” also began to create specific media such as future-oriented research institutes and transdisciplinary international conferences. The most important media in this new field of research consisted of national institutions and ”think tanks” such as the RAND corporation (1948), the Hudson Institute (1961), the World Future Society (1966), and the Institute for the Future (1967) in the United States, the French Association Futuribles Internationale (in 1960), and the German Zentrum Berlin für Zukunftsforschung (1968-1981). These institutions edited their own periodicals, including the French Futuribles, the German Analysen und Prognosen über die Welt von morgen (1968-1981), the British-American journal Futures: The Journal of Forecasting and Planning (published since 1968), and the more popular journal, The Futurist, edited since 1967 by the World Future Society in Washington, D.C. These periodicals give particularly informative insights into the international and interdisciplinary character of futurology. No issue of the German, American, or French periodicals confined itself exclusively to national authors or topics. Quite the contrary: almost every aspect in the new field of future studies was seen as essentially ”international”; thus, specialists from different (Western) countries covered most of the topics. The same is true for the many international conferences that focused on the

08-Schmidt-Gernig

160

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 160

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

”future of mankind” such as Mankind 2000 (in Oslo 1967), Challenge from the Future (in Kyoto in 1972), the Third World Conference (in Bucharest in 1972) and many others. These conferences created significant inter- or transnational networks of forecasting and prediction. At the same time, they intended to provide general knowledge for (inter-) national policy making.7 One of the prominent ”futurists,” the German publicist Robert Jungk, described the way of creating these international networks by using the example of the conference Mankind 2000 in Oslo: Half a year after the Oslo conference we see … a growing concern with peaceful aims. In the Federal Republic of Germany, where future research had not yet existed, participants of the “First International Future Research Conference” founded the “Gesellschaft für Zukunftsfragen” and the “Zentrum Berlin für Zukunftsfragen.” In Italy, Japan and England, the write-ups of the meeting had a marked positive effect, and the study and the possibility of shaping the future is finally beginning to be taken seriously. The Council of Europe, prodded by some “Osloites,” has formed a “Committee 2000” of experts from its member countries and a ‘prognostic cell’ within its secretariat, in order to guide it towards more future oriented policies … In the U.S.A. the preparations for “The Institute of the Future” … got strong financial support at last. New journals dedicated to “future research” are being prepared in England, the United States, Holland, and the Federal Republic of Germany. They will group around the oldest and most important publication of this kind (“Analyse et Prévision”) founded and headed by Bertrand de Jouvenel, the president of the “Association Internationale des Futuribles” and dean of the futurist movement in Europe.8

But future studies were not only a purely academic undertaking. To underline their public importance, they frequently tried to combine academic credibility with universal comprehensibility. Many such studies acquired a sort of bestseller-status. They were consequently debated in the mass media and translated into other languages (this is especially true for many American studies, which were translated into many European languages). Among the many examples for this intense public debate about future problems on a global level are the reports to the Club of Rome, founded in 1968.9 The first reports to the club on global economic and demographic dynamics, such as The Limits to Growth by Dennis Meadows and others in 1972, gained enormous international public resonance. For the first time, they pointed to the increasing costs and dangers of an unbalanced economic growth and a reckless exploitation of natural resources worldwide.10 By focusing public attention on dramatic scenarios of the planet’s possible ecological collapse by the first half of the twenty-first century, these studies had a considerable impact on political activities such as the emergence of environmental movements and parties in Western countries since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, these studies helped to create many new critical institutions such as Greenpeace and other international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which then formed an enlarged transnational and globally oriented platform of international policy making.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 161

Forecasting the Future

161

The Common Paradigm: Systems Theory and the Model of Cybernetics The most important common feature consisted in the fact that, despite all the diversity of knowledge and training, all these ”futurists” sought for a common scientific paradigm. The paradigm could be labeled as ”general systems theory,” or more precisely as the new scientific theories of cybernetics. This represented a new kind of integrating science emerging in the 1940s which could, in the words of one of its founders, Norbert Wiener, be defined generally as the science of communication and control in animate and inanimate systems. After 1945, cybernetics became a new central model of scientific thought; it influenced strongly the application of natural-scientific explanatory models to the social sciences. This application found significant expression, particularly in the form of the newly emerging future studies. As Karl W. Deutsch observed in 1963: Cybernetics, the systemic study of communication and control in organisations of all kinds, is a conceptual scheme on the “grand scale.” … Essentially, it represents a shift in the centre of interest from drives to steering, and from instincts to systems of decisions, regulation and control.… In other words, the viewpoint of cybernetics suggests that all organisations are alike in certain fundamental characteristics and that every organisation is held together by communication.… It is communication, that is, the ability to transmit messages and to react to them, that makes organisations; and it seems that this is true of organisations of living cells in the human body as well as of organisations of pieces of machinery in an electronic calculator, as well as of organisations of thinking human beings in social groups.11

As Deutsch pointed out, cybernetics primarily dealt with the systematic recording of communication and control processes in systems or organizations of all kinds, of which decision, regulation, and control mechanisms are the main foci of interest. The main epistemological presupposition consisted particularly in the notion that biological, technological, and social systems are similar in certain basic characteristics and that they were held together first and foremost by communication, in the sense of a transfer of information. Deutsch himself gave an informative technical example, typically enough taken from the military range: A modern radar tracking and computing device can “sense” an object in the air, interacting with its beam; it can “interpret” it as an airplane (and may be subject to error in this “perception”); it can apply records of past experience, which are stored within its network, and with the aid of these data from “memory” it can predict the probable location of the plane several seconds ahead in the future.… [I]t can turn a battery of antiaircraft guns on the calculated spot and shoot down the airplane; and it can then “perceive,” predict, and shoot down the next.… Man made machines actually operating or designable today have devices which function as “sense organs,” furnish “interpretations” of stimuli, perform acts of recognition, have “memory,” “learn” from experience, carry out motor actions, are subject to conflicts and jamming, make decisions between conflicting alternatives.12

08-Schmidt-Gernig

162

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 162

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

Hence, the primary focus of cybernetics is on the dynamic interactions between certain structural parts of a biological, technical, or social system as well as between the system as a whole toward its environment, based on channels of information. The crucial mechanism is the idea of feedback of information, which means ”a communications network produces action in response to an input of information, and includes the results of its own action in the new information by which it modifies its subsequent behaviour.”13 These feedback loops of information provide the theoretical basis for the observation that an open system can ”learn” to organize and steer itself by reacting to new environmental challenges. Therefore, a system can intensify its ”intelligence” or its problem-solving capacity because information about its own (past) performance is always reintroduced into the system to control its future conduct. A cybernetic approach is not deterministic (although it focuses on the rules of communication within a system). Systems developments are contingent, depending on the system’s information about the environment, about its own ”consciousness” (or memory), and about the relations between its own inner structural elements. The more information a system can receive and use, the better it will be able to adapt to changing environmental challenges. The ”futurists” saw the fascinating and convincing aspect of cybernetics in the promise of an unprecedented possibility to bridge the gap between the different scientific (and national) cultures on the one hand, and to introduce scientific methods into the field of the social sciences and humanities on the other.14 Cybernetics therefore seemed to guarantee the emergence of a specific international or transnational culture of experts in the name of a universal scientific paradigm.15 The increase of information channels in modern societies would reinforce their learning capacities and lead to the emergence of a ”learning society.” Correspondingly, the various approaches were all in agreement about analyzing a change of enormous proportions toward a ”global society,” which seemed, at best, comparable with the transition to the neolithic revolution. According to this model, due to the observed scientific and technological “revolution,” the highly developed societies in Western countries appeared to have entered a phase of intensified evolutionary dynamic on the basis of cybernetic systems logic. As the physicist John R. Platt claimed emphatically in 1966: We have been isolated human beings, selfish, combative, ignorant, helpless. But now for several hundred years the great evolutionary hormones of knowledge and technology have been pressing us, almost without understanding it, into power and prosperity and communication and interaction, and into increasing tolerance and vision and choice and planning —pressing us, whether we like it or not, into a single coordinated human kind. The scattered and competing parts are being bound together.… We have been men. We are emerging into man.16

Furthermore, cybernetics seemed to offer a key to explaining historical developments in the long run. Almost every study traced back its predictions and analyses more or less explicitly to a stage theory of general evolutionary development.17 In this respect, one cannot state that these studies argued completely ahistorically (as they were often accused of). The technoscientific bias in this thought is striking, however;

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 163

Forecasting the Future

163

the cybernetic perspective tended to see the “motor” of history primarily in scientific knowledge and technological innovations, and asserted that it was possible to deduce most of further social and cultural elements from them. Against this background one can distinguish three sometimes overlapping but nevertheless distinct visions of the generally predicted development toward a postindustrial society.18

Variations of the “Postindustrial” Society A first group of studies directed its attention primarily to the influence of the new technologies on the change and continuity of social and economic structures in highly industrialized countries (especially the United States). They predicted the postindustrial society as a kind of information or knowledge society primarily based on the innovative potential of pure scientific knowledge as well as on the new information technologies. Prominent physicists, economists, sociologists, or systems analysts such as Herman Kahn, Daniel Bell, Peter F. Drucker, Jean Fourastié, Karl Steinbuch, and others focused on the consequences of the observed exponential growth of knowledge and technological innovations and on the growing applications of cybernetics on society itself. According to these analyses, these technological innovations were about to create a ”cybernetization” of society. Cybernetic technologies and cybernetic logic would change the character of the traditional industrial society profoundly and speedily. Future societies therefore would be based essentially on ”knowledge” and permanent learning due to the dominance of new intelligent information technologies. Despite the basic idea of an accelerated change, the continuity of the process seemed to be assured by the enormous impact of scientific and technological innovations on other trends of modernization, driving them into the same continuous and irreversible direction. This trend would reinforce itself, and, therefore, would guarantee the developmental logic of the system. Herman Kahn, one of the most influential futurists of this paradigm, together with Anthony Wiener expressed this idea of a self-reinforcing modernization in one of the most prominent future studies of the late 1960s. He described a ”long-term multifold trend,” which seemed to have developed in Western societies since the Middle Ages. This trend of profound modernization consisted of a number of principal elements: the centralization and concentration of economic and political power; an accumulation of scientific and technical knowledge due to increasing institutionalization of research and development; and a growing importance of the service sector as well as of literacy, education, and the “knowledge industry.” These deep structural changes had brought about the dominance of bourgeois, bureaucratic, and meritocratic elites as well as an increasingly secular, individualistic, pragmatic, utilitarian, and hedonistic culture in general. Moreover, this trend, according to Kahn, Wiener, and others, gained its tremendous developmental power by reinforcing itself. It started to spread all over the world faster and faster, particularly during the twentieth century.19 These basic characteristics set the tone for many

08-Schmidt-Gernig

164

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 164

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

future studies, which extrapolated this multifold trend into the future according to its assumed inner logic. They conceptualized modernity or modernization as a universal, irreversible, systemic, global, and goal-oriented (and therefore relatively predictable) change according to its inner system logic of increasing information. From today’s perspective, many of these predictions were amazingly realistic. They included, for example, the general use of automation and cybernation in management and production; the pervasive business and other widespread use of computers for intellectual and professional assistance, including home computers for communication with the outside world; and home education via video and computerized learning. On the other hand, many of their technological forecasts, especially in the field of space exploration and biological manipulation, still today look like mere science fiction. They speculated, for instance, on the construction of artificial moons, (some) control of weather and climate, permanent underwater habitat or colonies, human hibernation for extensive periods, interplanetary travel, and so on. The cybernetic character of this approach consists primarily in the idea of progress as based on a selfsteering, dynamic system that received its dynamic from new technologies of communication and information as positive feedback loops. A second group of studies focused on the level of global politics and global political interactions, predicting the emergence of (or the hope for) a kind of planetary society. The cybernetic perspective of political and social scientists such as Karl W. Deutsch, Ossip K. Flechtheim, Lester Brown, Johan Galtung, Robert Jungk, Victor Ferkiss, John McHale and Pierre Bertaux concentrated on the increasing significance of communication networks within states and, above all, between states and societies. Facing the global menace of a nuclear disaster only increased flows of communication, and information seemed able to increase the necessary learning capacity of political systems in the long run. Karl W. Deutsch expressed this new perspective in his pioneering study, The Nerves of Government, and he pointed to the following crucial questions: What is the tolerance of a given political system for contradictions and ambiguities within it? And what is the capacity of this political system for self-transformation with significant preservation of its own identity and continuity? Since the coming of the nuclear weapons, societies depend for their survival on their political subsystems. The question of the life and death of nations, perhaps of mankind, has become politicized. Nations depend more than ever on the capacities of their political subsystems for tolerance, learning, and viable selftransformation.20

These questions of higher learning capacities by means of global communication and knowledge networks became the main focus of globally designed future studies, which looked for existing or possible trends but also for obstacles to the development of a sort of planetary society. The idea of a fundamental overcoming of the industrial era therefore consisted not so much in technological and economic growth per se but in the assumption of a significant decline in the role of the nation-state as an immediate consequence of the ”cybernetization” of world society.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 165

Forecasting the Future

165

A telling example of this focus on the future of the international system inspired by cybernetics was the first big international future studies conference on ”Mankind 2000” held in Oslo in 1967. The Norwegian political scientist, Johan Galtung, one of the most important founders of peace research, referred explicitly to a cybernetic system analysis in his intensely debated contribution on the ”future of the international system.” Galtung believed that the scientific revolution and the emergence of new planetary means of communication and information would connect all parts of the world. This would create a system of relatively high ”entropy,” a high level of instability and disorder due to the relative decline of the power of the single nationstates. He predicted an increasing replacement of national identities by sub-, cross-, trans- and supranational identities in the highly and increasingly integrated part of the world (especially the Western societies). And he observed that this tendency, combined with intense economic and political interdependence, would make a major war quite unlikely in this part of the world, adding that international nongovernmental as well as governmental institutions would also play a significant role in this scenario.21 Not surprisingly, within this general ”paradigm” one finds many variations, ranging from rather sober analyses of the inner dynamics of the international political system to more enthusiastic and ”utopian” ideas of a general evolutionary development of mankind. The famous architect Buckminster R. Fuller,22 for instance, anticipated a profound transformation of the ”human race” toward an integrated global society symbolized by the ”spaceship earth.” In his rather utopian vision, this new humankind would be globally integrated and physically as well as spiritually liberated by the synergetic interaction of highly advanced technologies of communication and automation. But both the more sober as well as the emphatic designs of a coming world order and global integration clearly argued in terms of cybernetic system logic. Both interpreted the new cybernetic and communicative technologies as the principal driving forces of the development in the future. According to these theories, only these new cybernetic technologies would be able to guarantee the necessary ”learning capacity” and evolutionary adaptability of the political system on the national as well as on the global level. Not surprisingly, top-down institutions such as the UN as well as (perhaps even more important) bottom-up models of increased democratic participation were key in this vision.23 Based on this idea of an increasing democratic participation, a third group of authors tended to concentrate primarily on the role of values and social norms as crucial factors of change. They predicted the emergence of a trans-industrial society, which was supposed to inaugurate the domination of new forms of collective consciousness along with new forms of social integrity based on a (spiritual) unity between man and nature. This group gained a strong influence in the course of the 1970s in the context of the end of the long postwar economic boom and the increasing political crises in many parts of the Third World. These studies concentrated on the hitherto ignored ecological and social costs of the rapid scientific-technological change. They also believed that people would become increasingly conscious of these costs. Hence, they predicted a resulting change in norms and values that seemed

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

166

2:26 PM

Page 166

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

apparent in view of the new social movements such as the student movement, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the counterculture. 24 Most of these studies were concerned with a critique of political power relations, especially of the military-industrial complex.25 Many represented an explicit critique of the futurology à la Kahn or RAND. Not surprisingly, they often attempted to develop an ”antifuturology,” which concentrated on the critique of existing power relations and the social costs of “progress.” At the same time, they were oriented toward a framework of “utopian” alternatives. Futurists such as Willis W. Harman, W. Warren Wagar, William Irwin Thompson, Gordon R. Taylor, Theodore Roszak, Ivan Illich, and Robert Theobald regarded the extensive ”decentralization” of power structures on a national as well as global level as the decisive task and chance for development in the next decades. Willis W. Harman, director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy at the Stanford Research Institute, spoke for many when, at the international conference of the World Futures Society in 1975, he circumscribed this crisis situation with several “dilemmas”: a ”growth dilemma” (growing social and ecological costs); a ”control dilemma” (increasing uncontrollability of technological developments); a ”distribution dilemma” (an ever-growing gap between rich and poor on a global level); and a ”work-roles dilemma” (growing unemployment or “meaninglessness” of work due to automation and mechanization).26 In view of the perceived crisis of industrial society, the transition to a ”transindustrial” society in the form of a fundamental renunciation of the traditional ways of thought and behavior of the industrial society was of central importance for the near and distant futures. Harman, who had been trained as a systems engineer, was well acquainted with the technical applications of cybernetics. He imported the idea of positive feedback processes into the sociological analysis of alternative lifestyles as well as new value orientations in society (e.g., the ecological agenda, esoterics, meditation, Asian religions, etc.). Although most of the authors of this paradigm did not define themselves as ”cyberneticians” in a technical sense, Harman’s example shows the close affinities between the different designs of a ”transindustrial” society and a general cybernetic mode of thinking. Other authors remained more skeptical about the ability of systems for a sort of cybernetic self-transformation. They were more likely to anticipate the collapse of the industrial world-system as a necessary requirement for a new transindustrial or planetary era. Hence, the system’s inherent problems (exponential population growth, increasing poverty, devastation of the environment) as well as the exponential depletion of natural resources in the Third World would sooner or later lead to the doom of ”the golden age of capitalism.”27

Conclusion Futurology, or future studies, can be seen as a revealing case study for the crucial impact of shared assumptions and common intellectual paradigms of transnational

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 167

Forecasting the Future

167

interactions and intercultural transfers. Above all, a common intellectual paradigm bridged the gap between national orientations and identities, and created a sort of transdisciplinary elite. This elite tried to establish institutions of mutual exchange to provide new means and orientations for national as well as international policy making. Therefore, we need to be aware of the importance of shared paradigms and intellectual modes of thinking to understand the logic of transcultural mechanics. But these paradigms and modes of thinking gained social importance only by using the means of the public. The focus on the interplay between intellectual paradigms and public discourses provides a viable tool for the analysis of intercultural relations and crossnational identities. For this reason, the analysis of international organizations and transnational expert groups appears to be more promising than the more regional forms of “face-to-face publics” or the rather national mode of the mass media. A short assessment of these findings might illustrate this perspective a bit: the strengths of the variations of the postindustrial society inspired by cybernetics lay above all in the area of technological predictions and their effect on economic and political development. Many predictions were often right, sometimes amazingly so, in areas where systems logic were effective and could be observed, especially in the area of science, economics, and (international) politics. The basic prediction that scientific knowledge expanded enormously and would also become the major force of economic productivity, proved to be accurate. The studies focusing on the information society correctly predicted the trail, if not all details, of the synergy effects of innovation technologies. For instance, they pointed to the emergence of transdisciplinary networks between biological and computer technologies as well as to the resulting economic growth. Likewise, in the area of political predictions (weakening of the East-West conflict, continuation of the North-South problem, growing importance of supranational and transnational organizations, economic and financial integration, emergence of a world public sphere) proved to be correct, though they did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. Therefore, an essential strength of the future studies lay in the fact that they had already overcome the traditional fixation on the role of the nation-state alone. They began to think in global dimensions because they focused on the new technologies and their global economic effects but also on international political developments as well as on global ecological crises. Despite their pioneering insights into the process of globalization, most of the authors hardly took notice of those transnational processes that could not be directly traced back to scientific or technological bases. The futurologists did not predict central topics of the 1990s such as economically motivated migrations, mass tourism, the development of various multinational corporations as well as the internationalization of organized crime. The most important reason for this misjudgment was that the majority of future studies paid little attention to sociopolitical actors or institutions and the “power of inertia” vis-à-vis massive changes in the social environment. Most of the future studies tended to overestimate the rule and system character of societies. They were also

08-Schmidt-Gernig

168

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 168

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

inclined to underestimate the relative autonomy of individual and collective actions, notably the resistance to technological developments and the reorientation of societal needs and priorities. Paradoxically, such determinism also holds for the studies of the “transindustrial” society, which did concentrate on the social participants in the form of the new social movements and on the change in values in the highly developed societies. Suffering from a high level of abstraction, these studies focused too strongly on supposed determinants and system logic while failing to adequately consider concrete, nondetermined patterns of social and political action. Despite the development of many innovative methods, the decline of systemically and cybernetically oriented futurology in the 1980s originated in the fundamental tendency to underestimate the impact of social actors.28 The system-breaking revolutions in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states since 1989 underline the extent to which the political autonomy of social and political actors needs to be taken seriously.

Notes 1. See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1999). 3. Just to give a purely quantitative idea of this growth: over 90 percent of the total worldwide scientific and technical information was produced in the twentieth century, more than two thirds after World War II; see Rolf Kreibich, Die Wissenschaftsgesellschaft: Von Galilei zur High-Tech-Revolution (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 26-28. 4. For the historical development of the futures studies after 1945 see, among others, Wendell Bell, Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 1-68. For the generally predictive aspects of the social sciences and the humanities, see Bruce Mazlish, The Uncertain Sciences (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 17-20. 5. See the concise overview of the ”information technology revolution” in Manuell Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol.1, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 29-65. 6. See, among others, John A. Hannigan, “Fragmentation in Science: The Case of Futurology,” Sociological Review 28, 2 (1980): 321-322. For the spread of the systems approach from the military to economic, urban, and social development analysis, see Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 141-196. 7. See the listings in Peter Moll, From Scarcity to Sustainability: Futures Studies and the Environment: The Role of the Club of Rome (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1991), 195-197. Even many academic as well as private institutions that were not primarily dealing with future-related topics felt the need to focus on this new subject. For example, the European Cultural Foundation which, between 1967 and 1975, funded the broad interdisciplinary attempt on the part of more than sixty scholars to predict the social, economic, political, and cultural future of Europe in the year 2000: Plan Europe 2000, ed., The Future is Tomorrow: 17 Prospective Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). See also the final report: Peter Hall, ed., Europe 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 169

Forecasting the Future

169

8. Robert Jungk, preface in Mankind 2000 , ed. Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung (Oslo and London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 10. 9. Moll, From Scarcity to Sustainability, 26-27; see also ibid., 21-29 and 279-300. 10. Donella Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). For the public campaign of the club in order to promote the ”Limits to Growth,” see ibid., 93-105. The first report was immediately translated into nine languages, four million copies were sold in Europe alone. For an overview of the most prominent studies and different point of views, see Barry B. Hughes, World Futures: A Critical Analysis of Alternatives (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 12-25, and Sam Cole, “The Global Futures Debate 1965-1976,” in World Futures: The Great Debate, ed. Christopher Freeman and Marie Jahoda (London: Martin Robertson, 1978), 9-49, as well as Larry D. Wilcox, “Futurology and the Social Sciences: Bloom and Boom or Gloom and Doom?” International Social Science Review 58, no. 4 (1983): 202-210. 11. Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York and London: The Free Press, 1963), 76-77. 12. Ibid., 81. 13. Ibid., 88. 14. Already in 1950, the famous mathematician Norbert Wiener had pleaded explicitly that societies, analogous to open biological systems, are best comprehended through the analysis of their communication channels. Wiener thus believed that the social sciences should therefore concentrate more strongly on these channels. Applied to contemporary societies this meant, first and foremost, to examine more closely the networks between humans and cybernetic machines (primarily computers) and the networks among themselves since these would determine the future decisively; see Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 15-17. 15. See Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, “Cybernetics and Social Science: Theories and Research in Sociocybernetics,” in Kybernetes 20, no. 6 (1991): 81-82 and Geof Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970,” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 1 (1993): 108-115. 16. John R. Platt, The Step to Man (New York: Wiley, 1966), 202-203; see also Deutsch, Nerves of Government, xvi. 17. See the comprehensive overview in Michael Marien, Societal Directions and Alternatives: A Critical Guide to the Literature (New York: LaFayette, 1976), 391-393. 18. The very influential world models and reports to the Club of Rome mentioned above are left out in this context because these studies primarily focused on more traditional patterns of the industrial society. Nevertheless, it is important to note that these studies were strongly and even more explicitly committed to a cybernetic approach on the methodological level. They used quantitative methods of computer simulation based on cybernetic mathematical models; see Moll, From Scarcity to Sustainability, 151-160. 19. See Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York and London: Macmillan, 1967), 7; see also the comprehensive interpretation of this book in Thomas E. Jones, Options for the Future: A Comparative Analysis of Policy-Oriented Forecasts (New York: Praeger, 1980), 85-110. 20. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government, xiii. For a detailed analysis of the cybernetic impact on political science, see ibid., especially 75-244. 21. Johan Galtung, “On the Future of the International System,” in Mankind 2000, 14. 22. See Richard Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (New York: Overlook Press, 1969). For the development toward a planetary society, see also John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: G. Braziller, 1969), particularly 267-300. 23. See, among others, Robert Jungk, The Everyman Project: A World Report on the Resources for a Humane Society (New York: Liveright, 1977).

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

170

2:26 PM

Page 170

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

24. One of the first descriptions of this new counterculture was Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969). 25. As advocates of the radical paradigm in its different variations, see, among others, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Rethink: A Paraprimitive Solution (New York: Dutton, 1973); William E. Thompson, At the Edge of History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972); Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Robert Theobald, An Alternative Future for America (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968). 26. See W.W. Harman, An Incomplete Guide to the Future (San Francisco: San Francisco Book Co., 1976), especially 39-88, and, with regard to the emergence of a ”transindustrial era,” 113-145. 27. See W. Warren Wagar, Building the City of Man: Outlines of a World Civilization. A World Order Book (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), and recently, idem, A Short History of the Future, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3d ed. 1999), as well as, among others, Gordon R. Taylor, How to Avoid the Future (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), and Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973). For a collection of these doom prophecies, see also the overview in E. Cornish et al., The Study of the Future: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow’s World (Washington, D.C.: The Society, 1977), 21-34. 28. Other factors also played an important role, including new scientific paradigms (chaos theory, postmodernism and the like). See, for example, Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 65; Theodore J. Gordon, “Chaos in Social Systems,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 42, no. 1 (1992): 1-15. For postmodernism, see the excellent overview in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), especially 3-118.

Bibliography Bell, Wendell. Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era. Vol. 1, New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Bowker, Geof. “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970.” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 1 (1993): 108-115. Castells, Manuell. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Cornish, Edward, et al. The Study of the Future: An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow’s World. Washington, D.C.: The Society, 1977. Deutsch, Karl W. The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York and London: The Free Press, 1963. Freeman, Christopher, and Marie Jahoda, eds. World Futures: The Great Debate. London: Martin Robertson, 1978. Fuller, Richard Buckminster. Utopia or Oblivion. The Prospects for Humanity. New York: Overlook Press, 1969. Galtung. Johan. “On the Future of the International System.” Mankind 2000. Ed. Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung, 12-41. Oslo, London: Allen and Unwin, 1969.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 171

Forecasting the Future

171

Geyer, Felix, and Johannes van der Zouwen. “Cybernetics and Social Science: Theories and Research in Sociocybernetics.” Kybernetes 20, no. 6 (1991): 81-92. Gordon, Theodore J. “Chaos in Social Systems.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 42, no. 1 (1992): 1-15. Hall, Peter, ed. Europe 2000. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Hannigan, John A. “Fragmentation in Science: The Case of Futurology.” Sociological Review 28, no. 2 (1980): 317-332. Harman, W.W. An Incomplete Guide to the Future. San Francisco: San Francisco Book Co., 1976. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Hölscher, Lucian. Die Entdeckung der Zukunft. Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1999. Hughes, Barry B. World Futures: A Critical Analysis of Alternatives. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Kreibich, Rolf. Die Wissenschaftsgesellschaft: Von Galilei zur High-Tech-Revolution. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. Jungk, Robert. The Everyman Project: A World Report on the Resources for a Humane Society. New York: Liveright, 1977. Jungk, Robert, and Johan Galtung, eds. Mankind 2000. Oslo and London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Luhmann, Niklas. Observations on Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Marien, Michael. Societal Directions and Alternatives: A Critical Guide to the Literature. New York: LaFayette, 1976. Mazlish, Bruce. The Uncertain Sciences. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. McHale, John. The Future of the Future. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Meadows, Donnella, Dennis L. Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books, 1972. Moll, Peter. From Scarcity to Sustainability: Futures Studies and the Environment. The Role of the Club of Rome. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1991. Plan Europe 2000, ed. The Future is Tomorrow: 17 Prospective Studies. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972. Platt, John R. The Step to Man. New York: Wiley, 1966. Roszak. Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. _____. Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972. Taylor, Gordon Rattray. Rethink: A Paraprimitive Solution, New York: Dutton, 1973. Theobald, Robert. An Alternative Future for America. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968. Thompson, William E. At the Edge of History. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Vacca, Roberto. The Coming Dark Age. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Wagar, W. Warren. Building the City of Man: Outlines of a World Civilization. A World Order Book. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971. _____. A Short History of the Future. 3d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

08-Schmidt-Gernig

172

3/27/03

2:26 PM

Page 172

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Wilcox, L.D. “Futurology and the Social Sciences: Bloom and Boom or Gloom and Doom?” International Social Science Review 58, no. 4 (1983): 202-210.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 173

Part IV

COMMENTS AND CRITICISM OR WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 174

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 175

Chapter 9

CULTURAL APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS A Challenge?* Volker Depkat

S

hortly after NATO started bombing Kosovo in the spring of 1999, left-wing as well as conservative politicians, journalists, and other representatives of the politically interested public accused Germany’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer (born in 1948), a member of the Green Party, of having betrayed his own party’s pacifist viewpoints by helping to bring about the decision for war. Asked in this context whether there was a specifically Green foreign policy, Fischer responded: “Of course there is a Green foreign policy.… However, the German foreign minister does not pursue a Green foreign policy.”1 Fischer’s political biography is inseparably connected with Germany’s Greens, a multifaceted political party whose activists come from a wide variety of social protest platforms, including ecological, peace, antinuclear power, and civil rights movements.2 Founded as a party proper in 1980, the Greens, with their core values of ecology, grassroots democracy, social welfare, and non-violence, understand themselves to represent a counterculture that originally provided a firm alternative to the established political parties in what was formerly West Germany.3 Although they have since risen to positions of political power and their initial radicalism has waned considerably, the idea that Germany’s social and economic order should be put on a new footing is still a core element of Green self-conceptions. Fischer himself was part of the extraparliamentary opposition in the 1960s. Between 1968 and 1975 he was a member of the group Revolutionärer Kampf which participated in activities such as squatting actions and other forms of social protest. In the late 1970s, he turned toward the ecological movement, becoming the first Green minister ever when he served as Hessian minister of the environment and energy from 1985 to 1987. In October Notes for this section begin on page 189.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

176

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 176

Volker Depkat

1999, Fischer assured the world that there was no specific Green foreign policy but only a German one. Fischer’s political transformation nicely illustrates that the world of international relations constitutes a separate sphere, a power-structured system in its own right in which sovereign nation-states pursue their national interests defined in terms of security, trade and prestige. It functions rather independently from the values, norms, and perceptions of the diplomats and politicians acting in it. Policymakers establish state policy and define state interests, to be sure, but they cannot act according to their personal preference. The organizational frame of operation for their thinking and behavior is defined by the idea that the state is a factual, objective reality. The state’s supposed interests set an agenda that supersedes the interests of individuals, political parties or all living generations as Fischer’s performance reveals; his statement on the Kosovo War reflects a mode of thinking that views the nation-state as a seemingly solid entity with a life of its own, which exists apart from the will of its participants. This episode suggests that the counterculture habitus of the Greens does not play a role in the foreignpolicy process at all. It highlights the conceptional and analytical problems confronting a cultural approach to diplomatic history and international relations. This essay attempts to explore some of these problems in greater depth to assess the challenge that cultural approaches might provide for the study of diplomatic history and international relations. My argument proceeds in three steps: first, I would like to sketch out broadly the different kinds of intellectual challenges in the field of historiography. Second, I aim to assess the cultural approach’s potential for innovation in diplomatic history. I argue that this approach does not really constitute a challenge unless diplomatic historians can find meaningful ways to fit the term “culture” into the specific research interests of their field, that is the historical reconstruction and explanation of foreign policies. The study of international relations is not just about policy anymore, and diplomatic history itself has shifted away from state-centered forms of analyses toward retracing the informal social and cultural interaction among nations and peoples. I argue that this diffusion of research interests constitutes part of the problem when it comes to assessing the cultural challenge. Just as social historians remain interested in analyzing the history of a society when they make use of cultural studies paradigms,4 so should students of foreign relations continue to be primarily interested in reconstructing the evolution of policy processes in international constellations of power. The question that will have to be answered, then, is whether a cultural approach can provide new—and maybe even more adequate—explanations for the behavior of people in the past. Since this means exploring the cultural foundations of foreign policy and analyzing culture as a factor in international relations, the third part of my argument will make some suggestions as to how cultural studies paradigms might be utilized to structure new forms of inquiry into the nature of international relations.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 177

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

177

Revision, Expansion, Transformation of the Field: Three Different Kinds of Intellectual Challenges The quality of any intellectual challenge to a supposedly traditional field of research is determined by at least two factors: first, the respective approach’s ability to alter substantially our understanding of the past; second, its impact on the profession’s understanding of the significance of historical research, its subjects and its historical relevance in the chaos of facts, events, and developments handed down to us. The simplest way of throwing new light on a historical period is to revise a supposedly verified scholarly thesis by reading hitherto unread material, or by rereading well-known sources with the aim of adding new bits and pieces to the mosaic of historical knowledge, or by stressing previously neglected aspects. This is basically a revision brought about by broadening or reassessing the database for the period under scrutiny. Revisions usually produce more differentiated or sophisticated answers to old questions; they add new colors and new depths to the mosaic, but the frame of the mosaic remains intact. The general concepts, interpretative contexts, objects of study and conceptual paradigms of the field are not changed.5 A second and much more substantial form of challenge consists in expanding the field of research by including formerly excluded areas. This kind of challenge not only rearranges the colors of one mosaic, it combines it with a second mosaic and thus lets the colors of both appear in a new light. Such an expansion alters the terrain of the field by bringing in new subjects of study, new categories of analysis, and new kinds of sources. It enriches a field by adding new dimensions to it, by highlighting connections not seen before, and by relating the hitherto unrelated. Much about the cultural turn in diplomatic history seems to run precisely along these lines; it represents the discovery that there is a cultural dimension to foreign policy. For example, the recognition that culture is a tool of diplomacy, which can be instrumentalized to achieve a state’s goals in the foreign policy process, is at the heart of many recent studies advocating a cultural approach to international relations.6 The third and strongest kind of intellectual challenge grows out of the second one. The discovery of a field’s new dimensions implies that these hitherto neglected aspects of past realities are not only there but are also relevant to one’s research interests and the historical processes one wishes to explain. In our case, this would mean to assume that there is some causal link between culture and international relations that has explanatory significance. In these terms, culture would not only be analyzed as a mere dimension of foreign policy, but also as a factor in it. The question, then, is whether culture constitutes a “cause” of foreign policies, and if so, in how far this challenges the conceptual paradigms, analytical categories, and unwritten assumptions of research in international relations. Challenging the very concepts and paradigms of analysis can be very productive. It opens new windows on the past and deepens our understanding of the way people acted, while at the same time transforming the intellectual and methodological frameworks that are the very condition of possibility for all historical research. A remark-

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

178

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 178

Volker Depkat

able case in point is the famous Fischer controversy that shook Germany’s academic landscape in the 1960s.7 Can a cultural approach to the study of diplomatic history and international relations provide a similar challenge?

Assessing the Challenge: Cultural Studies between Constructionism and Postmodernism When it comes to the assessment of the challenge of a cultural approach for the study of international relations we are confronted with two substantial problems: the term “culture” itself and the many competing theoretical frameworks that can structure the analysis. These theories are quite disparate, form anything but a coherent whole, and in some cases are even mutually incompatible. The spectrum reaches from moderately constructionist approaches in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge to the epistemological radicalism of postmodern theories as developed by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Jean Baudrillard. Their common denominator, when applied to the field of international relations, is the rejection of the rationalism and positivism of neorealistic approaches. Yet the reach and quality of their respective methodological implications are fundamentally different. When speaking of “constructionism,” I refer to those cognitive, reflexive, or interpretative approaches in the field of international relations that integrate anonymous cultural practices, systems of belief, images and mental maps, values and norms into their analysis of the decisionmaking process.8 By “postmodernism,” I refer to those conceptions of cultural studies that are largely inspired by recent French philosophers as mentioned above.9 The definition of “culture“ remains a controversial issue. The term itself is not only highly disputed and means different things to different people; it also has different connotations in different national frameworks. Curiously, cultural studies experts have not been particularly interested in defining its objects.10 I want to sketch out two layers of the term and their analytical implications: first, culture as products of art; second, culture as systems of meaning that make sense out of the world in which people live. The narrowest definition equates culture to products of art in the broadest sense comprising “high culture” as well as “popular culture,” that is literature, theater, films, music, paintings and sculpture, architecture, dance, folk tales, magazines and so forth. At its best, a cultural approach to diplomatic history proceeding from such a definition analyzes cultural diplomacy as a distinct form of political strategy. Culture is understood as a tool of foreign policy, as an instrument to achieve diplomatic goals. It is important to note, however, that the overall policy strategy behind cultural diplomacy cannot be interpreted in terms of culture. The cultural ambassadors themselves do not determine the overarching policy goals. In terms of causal explanation, cultural diplomacy appears as a mere side effect of diplomacy, as an integral part of a grand strategy that rests on other factors than culture itself.11 Defining culture as products of art in the broadest sense can lead to debates about cultural imperialism and the attempts of one nation to impose its cultural goods

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 179

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

179

as well as its ideology and way of life on another country. This becomes particularly obvious in the numerous studies on the role of U.S. cultural diplomacy after 1945 and its effect on the minds of people abroad. Scholars writing in the early postwar period deplored the absence of an aggressive U.S. cultural foreign policy. But more recent studies have retraced a deliberate effort on the part of American policymakers to spread American culture in Europe to secure the American influence, manipulate consumers abroad, and expand the national market.12 The studies have relaxed the state-centered view and have contributed to a shift of interest toward informal cultural relations among nations and peoples as manifested in science, art, religion, tourism, and images about the other. But they have generally left the conceptual paradigms and underlying assumptions of foreign policy untouched. The question of power in international relations is simply taken to a different level; hegemony is no longer defined in terms of economic or military might but as export of cultural goods. Such an approach only pushes the analysis of the foreign policy process from the political realm to the cultural and leaves the interpretative frameworks that constitute the field of diplomatic history untouched. Research remains guided by the idea of sovereign nation-states imposing their policy on others, and what allows them to do so is the historical constellation of power in the international system. Things look quite different if we pursue a moderately constructionist approach to culture, as Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and other scholars in the phenomenological tradition do. Here, culture is defined as systems of meaning that make sense out of the world in which people live, that impose order on the factual chaos of empirical data, that provide for orientation, guide behavior, and thus enable people to act meaningfully in the first place.13 Culture, understood with Clifford Geertz as “a web of significance” really is the underlying structure for all human behavior.14 It has social role models and notions of identity written into it, defines core values as well as schemas of action, and thus provides for cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientations to political phenomena.15 Most important, this notion of culture is essentially sociological because it understands the belief systems to be the result of social action; at the same time, the belief systems are understood to structure patterns of social action. Constructionist approaches emphasize the dynamic relationship between actors and structures. They analyze processes of learning and communicative interaction within epistemic communities. A cultural approach to diplomatic history based on such a notion of culture would provide a substantial challenge to the field because it suggests that the diplomatic realm is anything but an enclosed sphere in which the Political reigns autonomously. Culturally constructed mental maps are pervasive and run through every fibre of the social, economic, and political fabric. Addressed this way, culture could no longer be treated as a mere dimension of foreign policy but as the very condition of possibility for it. Mental maps actually produce entities like nation-states and notions of the other; they constitute the morphology of international relations, and outline the system of aspirations, expectations, and fears that motivate and guide foreign policies. As such a system of meaning, culture refers to a complex circle: a

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

180

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 180

Volker Depkat

community produces certain perceptions and imaginations about the self and the other, and in turn, these perceptions and imaginations produce and sustain these “imagined communities.“16 For the sphere of international relations, this means that cultural systems of meaning, too, nurture notions like state, national interest, and ideas about what constitutes the International written into them. Indeed, they constitute the manufacturers of these seemingly objective entities in the first place. Territorialized entities such as Europe or the New World are far from being neutral geographical expressions; rather, they represent cultural constructs with embedded value judgments. They divide the world into zones of good and bad, and draw lines between in and out, the self and the other. President Ronald Reagan’s map of the world, for example, featured an “Evil Empire“ that comprised the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The opposite “good” zone circumscribed the members of NATO. Reagan hence understood NATOs job to be that of defending the “Free World” against a powerful, ubiquitous, and malevolent Soviet Union that instigated instability all over the world.17 Reagan was by no means an exception. Intellectual history is full of attempts to divide the world into moral territorial entities.18 The patriots of the American Revolution saw their country as the “Land of the Free,” and they looked at eighteenthcentury Europe as the zone of despotism and corruption. Until 1789, liberal Europeans were willing to share this conception of the world, but after the French Revolution developed into the Jacobin reign of terror, they were no longer certain whether freedom and democracy as such were universally applicable, positive goods. Between 1789 and 1830, when a series of revolutions shook Europe, America as the “Land of Democracy” suddenly appeared to conservatives, and even to liberal German contemporaries, as profoundly “foreign.” Observers now considered America and its customs as “Un-European,” altogether something that should be kept out of the Old World. These early forms of German anti-Americanism were rooted in the perception that the Atlantic was not merely a geographical but also an ideological divide that separated America and Europe.19 Scholars who wish to take this notion of culture as a point of departure for the study of international relations thus need to delimit the sphere of the Political. They need to relate foreign policy to the domestic situation in its broadest sense and understand that diplomatic actions are deeply influenced by culturally constructed core values, notions of identity and role models. Such a conceptualisation, indeed, opens up many fascinating new possibilities, as many recent studies-including the ones in this book-have shown.20 These studies have infused the traditional understanding of diplomatic developments with cultural meaning and have overcome easy dichotomies of the foreign and the domestic. In relating the hitherto unrelated, they have increased our understanding of the complexities of power and have opened up new vistas on the foundations of national interest that may not only be defined in terms of security, trade, and honor but also in terms of identity struggles.21 This is all intellectually stimulating, indeed, but is it really about the history of diplomacy and international relations?

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 181

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

181

The problem with all these studies is twofold. First, the underlying concept of culture is so broad and all-encompassing that it is no longer analytically meaningful. Second, inquiries tend to deconstruct the sphere of the International to such an extent that there is not much foreign policy left, at least not as a clearly identifiable aspect of past realities, identifiable to contemporaries such as Joschka Fischer and to us as historians. Consider, for example, two recent articles, one by Steven Conn and one by Robert D. Dean. Conn analyzes the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, founded in 1893 to collect commercial products from all over the world and to celebrate the advancement of civilization brought about by commerce, as an attempt to purposefully create an “epistemology for empire.“22 He claims that the study of the history of this museum offers new and more adequate insights into the nature of American imperialism that for him “was not exclusively, or even most importantly, an episode in American foreign relations, presidential policy, or military history.“ Instead, Conn argues, that the “‘process of empire’ took place on a multiplicity of terrains—domestic and foreign, public and private.“23 Imperialism thus appears as an omnipresent category in the United States and the world around 1900, a factor that can be used to explain developments at home as well as abroad—a factor that links the founding of a museum to the war in the Philippines. Yet, Conn fails to show that the Commercial Museum had any measurable impact on U.S. colonialism and foreign trade policy. Quite to the contrary, Conn has to admit that an instance of cooperation between the U.S. Department of Commerce established in 1903 and the museum “apparently never happened.“24 I am not opposed to the expansion of our perspective, nor the situating of America’s international relations at the crossroads of all kinds of discursive traditions. But we should remain aware that some discourses are more significant for the processes of decision making than others.25 Things do not become analytically more meaningful if we look at studies that focus on links between gender and international relations. For Robert Dean, masculinity is not only the specific ideology that helps us explain John F. Kennedy’s counterinsurgency doctrine and foreign assistance policy but also his domestic gender politics. Dean argues that “gender must be understood not as an independent cause of policy decisions, but as part of the very fabric of reasoning employed by officeholders.“ Such a conception of gender as a “fundamental element in the makeup of an individual’s world view“ eventually explains everything and nothing.26 To understand cultural constructions in such a broad fashion actually means that there is no aspect of past realities that is not gendered. This omnipresence of cultural constructs only reveals the basic anthropological fact that men have to make sense out of the world in which they live because they cannot live without doing so. But gender then hardly has any analytical meaning when it comes to explaining foreign relations. To claim that all aspects of past realities are culturally constructed is just as mundane as the somewhat traditional article of faith that men live in groups and that their behavior is therefore socially determined. This last remark leads me to my second critique. Cultural approaches to international relations tend to do away with foreign policy questions altogether. Much

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

182

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 182

Volker Depkat

about the domestication of foreign policy is really about delimiting the domestic. Internal problems and conflicts, which most cultural historians define in terms of identity, are thus projected into the sphere of international relations. Based on this, Rosenberg, Dean, McEnamy, and many others then suggest that this is the underlying pattern of U.S. foreign policy positions. In Writing Security, David Campbell goes so far as to interpret the Cold War not in terms of the Soviet-American antagonism but as the result of an American identity crisis that had its roots in the Depression, World War II, and the United States’s postwar involvement around the globe.27 The need for constructing a U.S. identity thus appears to be at the heart of American Cold War policy. Joschka Fischer seems to be well aware that there is a sharp line separating the sphere of international relations from domestic politics. Historians, on the other hand, maintain that contested identities and gender roles at home structure international relations and foreign policies. This universalization of the domestic is bound to lose touch with interpretations of concrete policy positions. According to Elaine Tyler May (who is, after all, in favor of analyzing the interrelatedness of gender discourses and foreign policy), domestic culture and ideology “do not in themselves explain how or why U.S. foreign policy evolved.“28 A culturally turned history of foreign relations metamorphoses into a special branch of cultural history. A paradigmatic shift like this defines cultural history as the guiding discipline for all historical research. Culture is no longer an analytical tool in the service of diplomatic history and the study of international relations. Instead, it becomes the mother of all historical research, setting the agenda for every discipline. Identity construction, the confrontation with “the other,” the production and reproduction of identities through foreign policy, and the “establishment of boundaries that constitute, at one and the same time, the ‘state’ and the ‘international system’“29 all move to the center of the history of international relations. While there is nothing wrong with contextualization, I remain unconvinced that domestic gender relations and identity struggles are as important for the interaction between states, nations, and peoples as economic interests or objective military threats. For one thing, to what extent can domestic culture and ideologies, gender and sexuality, race and identity explain how or why the foreign policy of a given state evolved? Moreover, does a specific foreign policy evolve because of these cultural narratives? Cultural historians are concerned with public narratives since all processes of identity construction are the effects of social, that is, public communication. If one wishes to argue that public narratives constitute a significant part of the decision-making processes, we need to know more about exactly which narratives influence decision making and how they function.30 Unless scholars can retrace the central role of cultural narrative in concrete situations of policy making, cultural approaches to foreign policy remain what they are: interesting but irrelevant. The task of historians (including cultural historians) is to think about change over time in terms of cause and effect. Systems of meaning are constructed, preserved, transformed, and passed on in confrontation with material reality and historical

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 183

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

183

change. Mental maps are the result of human action in concrete historical contexts, and at the same time, they are the condition of possibility for all human behavior, for these socially constructed realities provide for the motivations and the aims that make a person’s behavior in society meaningful. Cultural studies, conceptualized as a sociology of knowledge in the sense of Berger and Luckmann, have to analyze human behavior as it affects systems of meaning as well, and as systems of meaning in their effects on human behavior. Apart from that, is such a cultural approach all that new when taken to the field of international relations? I am not so sure, because students in the field have never ceased to deal with these questions. They have investigated ideologies and intellectual assumptions of policymakers to explain the evolution of foreign policies. They have hardly ever lost touch with the subjective dimension of perceptions, meanings, worldviews, grand strategies, fears, and motivations of the actors involved. Because of their seeming dedication to the Rankean tradition, diplomatic historians today seem somewhat archaic in the eyes of theoretically and methodologically innovative social historians. But it is exactly this epistemological atavism of diplomatic history that now takes a lot of the wind out of the cultural approach’s sails. Finally, a word on postmodernism, the most radical idea in recent cultural studies. Despite their still relatively vague stand on the “cultural question,” all of the constructionist approaches hitherto discussed continue to adhere to a sociological conception of men and women as social actors who are confronted with anonymous structures, and at the same time, act intentionally within these structures. To be sure, scholars such as Peter J. Katzenstein and Ursula Lehmkuhl no longer portray decision makers as individualistic performers with well-rounded, essentially rational conceptions of the world. Instead, they stress the importance of socially constructed belief systems and cognitive maps, collective cultural practices, and processes of social communication. Yet the social actor, his or her place in structural frameworks, and processes of decision making continue to be at the center of these investigations.31 Postmodernism rejects the notion of the individual as homo sociologicus acting consciously within his or her subjective horizon of meaning. Both poststructuralists and deconstructionists radically challenge notions of “subjectivity”, “reality” and the organization of “knowledge” about reality altogether. Foucault, Derrida, and many others have questioned the tradition of Western thinking about the relationship between “signs” and “reality” 32 since Aristotle and the ancient Greeks.33 These French philosophers have radically questioned the rationalism, logocentrism and the correspondence theories of Western thinking. Postmodernist aim at deconstructing an essentially Cartesian concept of Man that was formulated by René Descartes in the seventeenth century and that sees men and women as solid and solitary entities with identical selves, as sovereign carriers of reason, as rational actors. Postmodernism displaces exactly this one-to-one relationship of “subject,” “reason,” and “knowledge.” The idea that there is a correspondence between empirical reality on the one hand and systems of signs on the other is largely thrown overboard. Postmodern theoreticians postulate that signs do not refer to a material world but to other

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

184

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 184

Volker Depkat

signs. These signs achieve their meaning only through their relation to other signs and not through their reference to an outer reality. In setting language as absolute, postmodern theoreticians claim that language actually produces reality. Thus, postmodern philosophy questions the forms and the disciplinary organization of modern knowledge altogether, including the field of international studies. “One cannot say that this is just a crisis of the discipline of international studies,“ argue Richard K. Ashley and Robert B.J. Walker, “because the crisis, so understood, puts in doubt any imaginable boundaries that would separate the discipline of international studies from other disciplines and, indeed, from all other contested sites of modern life.“34 Postmodernism provides several philosophical arguments for our general conception of the world and the place of humankind in it. As such, it forces us to rethink not only the field of international relations but scholarship, the scholarly production and disciplinary organization of knowledge altogether. Yet these philosophical theories were not meant to structure historical or sociological research. Neither Foucault nor Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, or other postmodern philosophers really offer a “method” for historical research. Indeed, postmodern cultural studies is “not a methodology but an approach, based upon interrelationships and context, that is concerned with rethinking categories of knowledge and examining forms of power.“35 This, however, is exactly the problem when it comes to assessing the postmodernist challenge to the study of international relations. To be sure, this approach opens up new perspectives. It questions traditional categories and methods of the social sciences. It helps to expose cognitive schemas such as the “international system” or the “balance of power” as discursive formations that discipline the discourse of international relations as well as the discourse about them. This brings with it the chance of radically breaking down traditional interpretations. New, relatively free, playful, and potentially productive readings of supposedly wellknown sources may be the result.36 Additionally, this questioning of traditional paradigms of research can lead to a redefinition of our conceptions of “power” and “interest”. Drawing on Derrida’s philosophy, categories such as the state, state policy, and the system of international relations can be understood as texts, as a free-floating and never-ending exchange of signs, or as an ambiguous and infinite play of framing difference. Nation-states and other geopolitical entities can then be understood as functions within this system of signs. This way of conceptualizing the “world” as “text” subverts notions of “power” and “national interest” inscribed into the “classical” approaches to diplomatic history and international relations. It dismisses notions like the state as the source of sovereign power or the idea that the international community is an essentially anarchic phenomenon as legitimizing grand narratives. Furthermore, it questions realistic concepts of decision makers as pragmatic actors that, driven by some motives, behavioral patterns and values, consciously pursue aims since these are seen as functional ciphers in the text of international relations. This is all very subtle, highly complex and fascinating—but does it help us to understand international relations?

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 185

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

185

Within a concrete context, signs can only carry a certain number of meanings. Every historical constellation sets narrow limits to the potentially endless play of signs and meanings. Even adamant supporters of the “linguistic turn” are meanwhile willing to concede this.37 Deconstructionists abandon the idea that there is at least some degree of correspondence between language and the outside world, and they deny that we can measure the degree of a proposition’s truth through rational conclusion. In doing so, deconstructionists treat the cultural production of meaning as one that has neither origins nor agency, and that remains unaccountable to patterns of causality and the constellations of concrete historical situations. And with this, any pragmatic understanding of “power” is lost. In refuting the idea that individuals or groups act intentionally within their respective system of meaning, in questioning that men and women as social beings pursue goals and find means to realize them, postmodern theories have dismantled a conception of power as it was largely shaped by Max Weber.38 According to his instrumental understanding of the term, power is the specific chance that one actor imposes his or her will on others. Power results from social, political and economic structures; it grows out of a constellation that cannot be identified with its linguistic representation. In contrast, postmodern theoreticians tend to have a rather monistic, all-encompassing and therefore diffuse, conception of power. This is particularly true of the early Foucault, whose ideas of “power” in political, social, and economic constellations remained perpetually vague.39 In the understanding of the early Foucault, the discourses themselves become the protagonists of the historical process. The most important question that advocates of postmodernist approaches to foreign policy will have to answer is whether there is some degree of correspondence between the interconnection of discourses that they see as important and the factual reality of decision making. This is again a question of cause and effect, and true believers of postmodernist paradigms have rightly been charged with having “impossibly vague views of causality.”40 Indeed, there is a strong tendency among cultural historians to refuse to think in terms of causality altogether, to dissolve everything into relations, and this with only a rudimentary sense of hierarchies of significance. If we follow Emily S. Rosenberg, the refusal to think in terms of cause and effect is actually constitutive of cultural studies approaches to international history. For her, cultural studies and its prime tool, discourse analysis, is “not concerned with labelling ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ but with highlighting symbolic interrelationships among seemingly unrelated institutions and assumptions in order to understand the boundaries of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and what seems taken for granted as ‘natural’.” 41 This is quite a challenge but does it go beyond deconstructing the traditional conceptions of “subjectivity” and “agency,” “knowledge” and “meaning,” “cause” and “effect”? Does it provide us with more adequate paradigms and methods of sociological and historical research? In short, does postmodernism lead to the development of a new and constructive treatment of “subjectivity”, “agency” and “structures” in the field of international relations? I don’t think so! There is a tendency among cultural studies scholars inspired by postmodernist theories to stop their work with

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

186

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 186

Volker Depkat

deconstructing dominant discourses, with defining the limits of discursive formations and exposing their legitimatory function. As a result, they question the very possibility of intentional behavior; however, they do not really provide an answer for the question of why is it that people act the way they act.

Where Can We Go from Here? The extent to which a cultural approach can be considered a challenge depends on the respective national historiographical traditions. An approach that provides a fundamental challenge in Germany may not necessarily be applicable in the United States, and vice versa. The discovery, for example, that there is a domestic dimension to foreign policy is not really that stunning when you take it to the post-Fischer controversy German theatre. To complicate matters further, the interest in cultural studies in the United States grows out of a completely different historiographical tradition than in Germany or other European countries. Whereas the American discussion seems to be largely fuelled by postmodern philosophical theories, the German interest in Kulturgeschichte is very much the result of a critique of social history in the tradition of the Bielefeld School and its doyen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Social historians like Wehler interpret anonymous social and economic structures as the dominant factors in human behavior and historical developments. They focus on the determinedness of every individual existence by those abstract socioeconomical and political constellations that constitute an historical epoch. This structuralist concept of history hardly attributes an explanatory relevance to the perceptions of individuals and their capability to act meaningfully in their socioeconomic environment.42 A cultural turn means a dramatic shift of interest away from the analysis of “objective” social structures and abstract historical processes, to the reconstruction of concrete environments; it means to stress the inherently dynamic relation between individual or collective imaginations and objective structures. As Rudolf Vierhaus puts it, individuals and structures do not stand opposite each other; rather, people live in groups and in realities that they themselves have constructed.43 One result of the cultural turn in Germany is a new interest in processes of socialization through which values and social norms are internalized and identities are constructed. Scholars such as Andreas Gestrich, Werner Buchholz, Christa Diemel, and others retrace the validity of norms and values as well as the stability of worldviews among individuals and groups.44 The cultural turn in Germany largely revolves around the rediscovery of subjectivity, of concrete men and women in their times, their perceptions and values, their fears and hopes, and their rationales and emotions.45 Such a cultural turn remains indebted to the phenomenological tradition and is based on a largely anthropological definition of culture; it rejects postmodern deconstructionism and the tendency of the “linguistic turn” to set language absolute.46

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 187

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

187

Although these different national historiographical traditions have to be taken into consideration when assessing the value of cultural approaches, there are some general aspects that might be worth pursuing. Students of international relations can profit in three respects: first, they may arrive at a different understanding of subjectivity. Second, it might produce a more differentiated and methodologically reflected notion of worldviews and how they affect decision making. Third, diplomatic history may become thoroughly comparative, going beyond the comparison of different policies. Instead, scholars compare different national policies in relation to their respective cultural contexts. In regard to the first two points, the historical study of international relations is characterized by a rather personal understanding of the actors in the decision–making process. One result of such a conceptualization is to interpret policy positions and grand strategies as the mere translation of a weltanschauung into politics. This is highly problematic, and the long debate about the character of National Socialist ideology, Adolf Hitler’s worldview, and its relevance for Third Reich policy may serve as an example. Contemporaries and scholars alike agreed that Hitler and National Socialism had no political aims other than to establish and uphold a totalitarian rule.47 Hitler, so the argument went in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to rule for the sake of ruling.48 But in the 1960s, Eberhard Jäckel argued that one could hardly find a better historical case study than Adolf Hitler to demonstrate how a politician actually did what he said he would do. Jäckel identified the extermination of Jews and the conquest of territory as Hitler’s two major aims, and he interpreted National Socialist rule as the gradual, purposeful realization of the ideological program laid down in Mein Kampf. The Holocaust and World War II thus appeared as the logical result of Hitler’s weltanschauung.49 A recent study by Frank-Lothar Kroll has differentiated the notion of a solid, coherent, and unambiguous National Socialist ideology that correlates with Hitler’s weltanschauung.50 Kroll compared Hitler’s worldview with that of other leading National Socialists such as Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Walter Darré, and Heinrich Himmler, and he showed that central categories of National Socialist ideology such as “Race”, “Jewry,” “Germanic Culture,” and “Reich” were highly unstable and disputed complexes of discourse that meant different things to different National Socialists. Kroll’s findings provide an excellent example of cultural historians’ basic argument that individual subjectivity is by no means an autonomous quantity and that worldviews are a solid system unified by central core values. Cultural historians stress that notions of self as well as worldviews can best be analyzed as formations of discourse that do not make up a logically consistent and stable entity. In integrating some of the deconstructionists’ arguments into their analytical framework, diplomatic historians may overcome their somewhat naive way of relating political behavior on a one-on-one basis to a particular worldview. A cultural approach might also push comparative approaches to diplomatic history. Mental maps and epistemological frameworks are constitutive of larger cultural

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

188

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 188

Volker Depkat

systems that are not necessarily coincident with national boundaries. One could thus attempt to analyze transnational cultural systems and their relations with each other. This would require identifying these systems in the first place, grouping them along commonly shared values, setting them in relation to each other, and describing their potential for harmony or conflict. Take, for example, the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy itself is the product of a particularly Western tradition of thinking—a tradition with ancient Greek and Roman, Judeo-Christian and Germanic roots. Although enlightened Europeans claimed their own core values such as reason, individualism, progress, civil liberties, economic freedom, and civilization to be universal and applicable to all of humankind, in fact they are the product of a particular cultural system that is geographically restricted to Europe. Simultaneously, these values defined and sustained a cultural system that bound the nations of Europe together and set them apart from other cultural units such as the Islamic world or the world of American Indians.51 Worldviews during the Enlightenment centered on the contrast between “civilization“ and “barbarism,“ and the category that distinguished both was the degree to which “reason” represented the guiding principle for political, social, and economic organization and interaction in various parts of the world.52 This led to a division of the globe into zones of “civilization” and “barbarism.” In this scenario, Europeans perceived their own continent as the most civilized, because reason had begun to penetrate all aspects of human existence. This mental concept of the world pushed toward expansion for the sake of promoting progress in those parts of the world that were considered to be “backward” in the sense of Enlightenment reasoning. Such a system of meaning produces the logic as well as the practice of controlling, displacing, or even exterminating social, political, economic, and cultural orders that did not fit the Enlightenment definition of “civilization.“ Apart from studying the relations between larger cultural systems, one could also analyze the differences within one particular system to obtain a deeper understanding of a particular state’s foreign policy. James R. Sofka’s analysis of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy, for example, argues that Jeffersonian power politics were not very different from European politics in the eighteenth century.53 Although this might appear true at first sight, one should be aware of the fact that at the roots of Jefferson’s policy there is a fundamentally different understanding of the state and power and what defines the public good. The founding father’s policy was shaped by a fundamentally “un-European” understanding of these terms. For Europe’s absolute monarchs, the abstract good of the state was the end of all political action, whereas for Jefferson, the state and its power never was an end in itself but rather the means to secure individual freedom.54 A comparative cultural approach to foreign policy reveals these differences resulting from differences in the deep structure of the cultural matrix in Europe and America. Comparative studies like these demonstrate that the problem of culture and international history is more complicated than enthusiasts of the cultural approach tend to believe. As the existing cultural approaches elaborate on the subtext of gender, race,

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 189

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

189

and class informing formal and informal relations, they certainly do enlarge our understanding of the domestic situation in the respective state. But they do not explain why the decision makers of a state choose to pursue one policy option and reject another. Or to put it differently, any cultural approach to diplomatic history will have to provide an explanation for why it is that even a member of Germany’s Green Party turns into a practical politician in the tradition of realpolitik as soon as he becomes foreign minister.

Notes *

I would like to thank Kenton J. Clymer, UTEP, for his great help with this essay. Also many thanks to Ralph and LaVern Barnhard and their friends in Oregon for the collective effort in proofreading.

1. “In zehn Jahren bin ich nicht mehr in der Politik,” Tagesspiegel, 24 October 1999. 2. Joschka Fischer, Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch 1999). 3. Joachim Raschke, Die Grünen: Wie sie wurden, was sie sind (Cologne: Bund, 1993); Hubert Kleinert, Vom Protest zur Regierungspartei: Die Geschichte der Grünen (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1992). 4. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Beck 1998); Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Wolfgang Hardtwig, eds., Kulturgeschichte heute (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996). 5. A good case in point is the long controversy about the nature of the early Republic’s foreign policy. Having read George Washington’s Farewell Address, Felix Gilbert proclaimed that early American diplomacy could best be described as an “idealistic internationalism.“ Then James Hutson, who had studied the Letters of Delegates to Congress for the year 1776, found no mention of these idealistic visions; he thus fiercely disputed Gilbert’s thesis (Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961]), and James H. Hutson, “Intellectual Foundations of Early American Diplomacy,“ Diplomatic History 1, no. 1 (1977): 1-19. The controversy continues: David M. Fitzsimons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations,“ Diplomatic History 19, no. 4 (1995): 569-582; James R. Sofka, “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786-1805,“ Diplomatic History 21, no. 4 (1997): 519-544. 6. The most recent study addressing these issues in connection with the question of the supposed Americanization of the world after 1945 is Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 7. See the introduction to this volume.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

190

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 190

Volker Depkat

8. For a good overview of the recent constructionist approaches, see Thomas Schaber and Cornelia Ulbert, “Reflexivität in den Internationalen Beziehungen: Literaturbericht zum Beitrag kognitiver, reflexiver und interpretativer Ansätze zur dritten Theoriedebatte,“ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 1, no. 1 (1994): 139-169; Ursula Lehmkuhl, Pax Anglo-Americana. Machtstrukturelle Grundlagen angloamerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg 1999), 23-54. 9. Cf. Matthias Albert, “‘Postmoderne‘ und Theorie der internationalen Beziehungen,“ Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 1, no. 1 (1994): 45-63. 10. Anders Stephanson, “Commentary: Considerations on Culture and Theory,“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 108. 11. Rebecca Boehling, “Commentary: The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe: The Case of the United States’s Occupation of Germany,“ Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (1999): 59. 12. For an overview of the discussion, see Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible, 2-4. 13. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966). 14. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 15. Cf. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 16. Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 866-1149; Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2000). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 17. Kenneth Oye, Robert J. Lieby, and Donald Rothchild, eds., Eagle Resurgent: The Reagan Era in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown 1987). 18. Heinz Gollwitzer, Geschichte des weltpolitischen Denkens, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972-1982). 19. Volker Depkat, Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen, 1789-1830. Deutsche Zeitschriften von 1789 bis 1830 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998), 319-342. 20. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Presidential Address: Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness,“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 2 (1998): 155-176; Laura McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism,“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 47-57; Robert D. Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 1 (1998): 29-62; John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Mary Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,“ Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988): 61-120; Detlef Junker, “Ein Dämon wird gesucht,“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 March 1995; Ragnhild Fiebig – von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds., Enemy Images in American History (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1997). 21. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Erosion of American National Interests,“ The Journal of International Relations 76, no. 5 (1997): 28-50.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 191

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

191

22. Steven Conn, “An Epistemology for Empire: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1893-1926,“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 4 (1998): 533-563. 23. Ibid., 534. 24. Ibid., 561. 25. Bruce Kuklick, “Commentary: Confessions of an Intransigent Revisionist about Cultural Studies,“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 124; Regina U. Gramer, “Feature Review: On Poststructuralisms, Revisionisms, and Cold Wars,“ Diplomatic History 19, no. 3 (1995): 521-523; Frank Ninkovich, “Review Essay: No PostMortems for Postmodernism, Please,“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 3 (1998): 459. 26. All quotes in Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology,“ 30. 27. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1992). 28. Elaine Tyler May, “Commentary: Ideology and Foreign Policy: Culture and Gender in Diplomatic History,“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 77. 29. Campbell, Writing Security, 69. 30. See also Susan Jeffords, “Commentary: Culture and National Identity in U.S. Foreign Policy,“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 93. 31. The most recent overviews include Lehmkuhl, Pax Anglo-Americana; Schaber and Ulbert, “Reflexivität in den Internationalen Beziehungen.“ 32. According to this Western tradition, factual experience is somehow translated into signs, which also means that you can retrace the reality that the signs refer to. The second major element of this tradition of Western thinking is that “reason” offers the intellectual instrument to do this. Through universally acceptable rational conclusions, so the argument runs, one can reconstruct the relation between signs and reality as well as the concrete meaning of signs in historical contexts. Here, language is understood to be but a mediator between an external reality and human consciousness. Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte originates in this conception of language; therefore, it should not be mistaken for a German variation of discourse analysis (Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte,“ in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1989], 107-129). Reinhart Koselleck and Christoph Dipper, “Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Christoph Dipper,“ Neue politische Literatur 43 (1998): 187-205. 33. For a good introduction into deconstructionist theories and their epistemological challenge to the field of historiography in general, see Philipp Sarasin, “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper: Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte,“ in Wehler and Hardtwig, Kulturgeschichte heute, 131-164; Jakob Tanner, “Wie machen Menschen Erfahrungen? Zur Historizität und Semiotik des Körpers,“ in Körper – Macht – Geschichte: Geschichte – Macht – Körper, ed. Bielefelder Graduiertenkolleg Sozialgeschichte (Bielefeld and Gütersloh: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1999), 16-34. 34. Richard K. Ashley and Robert B.J. Walker, “Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies,“ International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 377. 35. Rosenberg, “’Foreign Affairs’ after World War II,” 60.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

192

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 192

Volker Depkat

36. Apart from Campbell’s Writing Security, other students in the field of international relations have used postmodern theories. See Bradley S. Klein, “After Strategy: The Search for a Post-Modern Politics of Peace,“ Alternatives 12 (1988): 293-312; idem, “The Textual Strategies of the Military: Or Have You Read Any Good Defense Manuals Lately,“ in International/Intertextual Relations, ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1989), 97-112; idem, “How the West Was One. Representational Politics of NATO,“ International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 311-325; Charles E. Nathanson, “The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation,“ Alternatives 13 (1988): 443-483; Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War (London: Pinter 1990); Michael C. Williams, “Neo-Realism and the Future of Strategy,“ Review of International Studies 19 (1993): 103-121. 37. Even adamant supporters of the “linguistic turn” have begun to return to the “insight” that language is primarily a medium between an external reality and human consciousness. Lyndal Roper, “Jenseits des ‘linguistic turn,’” Historische Anthropologie 7 (1999): 452-467. 38. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1980), 28. For attempts to go beyond Weber’s conception and arrive at a communicative understanding of power, see Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). Ursula Lehmkuhl has integrated this approach into the field of international relations (idem, Pax Anglo-Americana, 41-48). 39. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Michel Foucault: Die ‚Disziplinargesellschaft‘ als Geschöpf der Diskurse, der Machttechniken und der ‚Bio-Politik,‘“ in Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte, 45-95; Ulrich Brieler, “Foucaults Geschichte,“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24 (1998): 244-279. 40. Ninkovich, “No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please,“ 459. 41. Rosenberg, “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II,“ 65-66. 42. Wehler, Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte, 8-9. 43. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Die Rekonstruktion historischer Lebenswelten. Probleme moderner Kulturgeschichtsschreibung,“ in Wege zu einer neuen Kulturgeschichte, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995), 14. 44. Andreas Gestrich, Vergesellschaftung des Menschen: Einführung in die historische Sozialisationsforschung (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999); Werner Buchholz, ed., Kindheit und Jugend in der Neuzeit, 1500-1900: Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an die Instanzen sozialer und mentaler Prägung in der Agrargesellschaft und während der Industrialisierung (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000); Christa Diemel, Adelige Frauen im bürgerlichen Jahrhundert. Hofdamen, Stiftsdamen, Salondamen 1800-1870 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998). 45. Vierhaus, “Die Rekonstruktion historischer Lebenswelten“; Winfried Schulze, ed., Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996). 46. See Lehmkuhl, Pax Anglo-Americana, 12-13, 33-37; Michael Wala and Ursula Lehmkuhl, “Einführung,“ in Technologie und Kultur: Europas Blick auf Amerika vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Wala and Lehmkuhl (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), xix-xx.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 193

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

193

47. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung: Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Stuttgart: DVA, 1981). 48. Although Alan Bullock, author of the first scholarly biography of Hitler, acknowledged that there was a National Socialist ideology, he did not understand it as the motivational force behind Hitler’s policies. Bullock saw Hitler as an unprincipled opportunist who put ideology in the service of his will to power (idem, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. [New York: Harper, 1962]). 49. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung: Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Stuttgart: DVA 1981). 50. Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997). 51. Good places to start: Horst Möller, Vernunft und Kritik: Deutsche Aufklärung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathologie der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973). 52. Urs Bitterli, Die “Wilden“ und die “Zivilisierten“: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: Beck, 1991); Astrid Blome and Volker Depkat, Von der “Civilisirung” Rußlands und dem “Aufblühen” Nordamerikas im 18. Jahrhundert: Leitmotive der Aufklärung am Beispiel deutscher Rußland- und Amerikabilder (Bremen: Edition Lumiere 2002). 53. Sofka, “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security.” 54. The idea that only a secure state would be able to uphold individual rights is typical of Jefferson’s understanding of republican politics (see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic. Political Economy in Jeffersonian America [New York: Norton 1980]; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990]). On the other side of the Atlantic, even Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, the model of an enlightened monarch, never overcame the notion that the abstract good of the state was completely detached from society and individual rights (see Theodor Schieder, Friedrich der Große: Ein Königtum der Widersprüche [Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1986], 284-340).

Bibliography Albert, Matthias. “‘Postmoderne’ und Theorie der internationalen Beziehungen.” Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 1, no. 1 (1994): 45-63. Almond, Gabriel, and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Ashley, Richard K., and Robert B.J. Walker. “Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies.“ International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 367-416.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

194

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 194

Volker Depkat

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Bitterli, Urs. Die “Wilden“ und die “Zivilisierten“: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung. 2nd rev. ed. Munich: Beck, 1991. Blome, Astrid, and Volker Depkat. Von der ‚‘Civilisirung’ Rußlands und dem ‘Aufblühen’ Nordamerikas im 18. Jahrhundert: Leitmotive der Aufklärung am Beispiel deutscher Rußland- und Amerikabilder. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2002. Boehling, Rebecca. “Commentary: The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe: The Case of the United States’s Occupation of Germany.“ Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (1999): 57-69. Brieler, Ulrich. “Foucaults Geschichte.“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24 (1998): 244-279. Buchholz, Werner, ed. Kindheit und Jugend in der Neuzeit, 1500-1900: Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an die Instanzen sozialer und mentaler Prägung in der Agrargesellschaft und während der Industrialisierung. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000. Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. rev. ed. New York: Harper, 1962. Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Conn, Steven. “An Epistemology for Empire: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1893-1926.“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 4 (1998): 533-563. Dalby, Simon. Creating the Second Cold War. London: Pinter, 1990. Dean, Robert D. “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy.“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 1 (1998): 29-62. Depkat, Volker. Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen: Deutsche Zeitschriften von 1789 bis 1830. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998. Diemel, Christa. Adelige Frauen im bürgerlichen Jahrhundert: Hofdamen, Stiftsdamen, Salondamen 1800-1870. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Dudziak, Mary. “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative.“ Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988): 61-120. Fiebig – von Hase, Ragnhild and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds. Enemy Images in American History. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1997. Filene, Peter. Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Fischer, Joschka. Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst. Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch 1999. Fitzsimons, David M. “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations.“ Diplomatic History 19, no. 4 (1995): 569-582. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books 1973. Gestrich, Andreas. Vergesellschaftung des Menschen: Einführung in die historische Sozialisationsforschung. Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica. Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 195

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

195

Gilbert, Felix. To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Gollwitzer, Heinz. Geschichte des weltpolitischen Denkens. 2 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972-1982. Gramer, Regina U. “Feature Review: On Poststructuralisms, Revisionisms, and Cold Wars.“ Diplomatic History 19, no. 3 (1995): 515-524. Habermas, Jürgen. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Erosion of American National Interests.“ The Journal of International Relations 76, no. 5 (1997): 28-50. Hutson, James H. “Intellectual Foundations of Early American Diplomacy.“ Diplomatic History 1, no. 1 (1977): 1-19. Jäckel, Eberhard. Hitler’s Weltanschauung: Entwurf einer Herrschaft. Stuttgart: DVA, 1981. Jeffords, Susan. “Commentary: Culture and National Identity in U.S. Foreign Policy.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 91-96. Junker, Detlef. “Ein Dämon wird gesucht.“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 March 1995. Klein, Bradley S. “After Strategy: The Search for a Post-Modern Politics of Peace.“ Alternatives 12 (1988): 293-312. _____. “How the West Was One: Representational Politics of NATO.“ International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 311-325. _____. “The Textual Strategies of the Military: Or Have You Read Any Good Defense Manuals Lately.“ International/Intertextual Relations. Ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, 97-112. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1989. Kleinert, Hubert. Vom Protest zur Regierungspartei: Die Geschichte der Grünen. Frankfurt: Eichborn 1992. Reinhart Koselleck. “Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte.“ In Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 107-129. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. _____. Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathologie der bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Koselleck, Reinhart, and Christoph Dipper. “Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gespräch mit Christoph Dipper.“ Neue politische Literatur 43 (1998): 187-205. Kroll, Frank-Lothar. Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997. Kuklick, Bruce. “Commentary. Confessions of an Intransigent Revisionist about Cultural Studies.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 121-124. Lehmkuhl, Ursula. Pax Anglo-Americana: Machtstrukturelle Grundlagen angloamerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. May, Elaine Tyler. “Commentary: Ideology and Foreign Policy. Culture and Gender in Diplomatic History.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 71-78. McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic. Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. New York: Norton, 1980.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

196

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 196

Volker Depkat

McEnaney, Laura. “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 47-57. Möller, Horst. Vernunft und Kritik: Deutsche Aufklärung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Nathanson, Charles E. “The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation.“ Alternatives 13 (1988): 443-483. Ninkovich, Frank. “Review Essay. No Post-Mortems for Postmodernism, Please.“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 3 (1998): 451-466. Nolte, Paul. Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft: Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Beck, 2000. Oye, Kenneth, Robert J. Lieby, and Donald Rothchild, eds. Eagle Resurgent: The Reagan Era in U.S. Foreign Policy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987. Raschke, Joachim. Die Grünen: Wie sie wurden, was sie sind. Cologne: Bund, 1993. Roper, Lyndal. “Jenseits des ‘linguistic turn’.” Historische Anthropologie 7 (1999): 452-467. Rosenberg, Emily S. “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II. Connecting Sexual and International Politics.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 59-70. ____. “Presidential Address: Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness.“ Diplomatic History 22, no. 2 (1998): 155-176. Sarasin, Philipp. “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper: Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte.“ In Kulturgeschichte heute, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Wolfgan Hardtwig, 131-164. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996. Schaber, Thomas and Cornelia Ulbert. “Reflexivität in den Internationalen Beziehungen: Literaturbericht zum Beitrag kognitiver, reflexiver und interpretativer Ansätze zur dritten Theoriedebatte.“ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 1, no. 1 (1994): 139-169. Schieder, Theodor. Friedrich der Große: Ein Königtum der Widersprüche. Frankfurt and Berlin: Ullstein, 1986. Schulze, Winfried, ed. Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996. Smith, Geoffrey S. “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and Disease in the Cold War United States.“ International History Review 14, no. 2 (1992): 221240. Sofka, James R. “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786-1805.“ Diplomatic History 21, no. 4 (1997): 519-544. Stephanson, Anders. “Commentary: Considerations on Culture and Theory.“ Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (1994): 107-119. Tanner, Jakob. “Wie machen Menschen Erfahrungen? Zur Historizität und Semiotik des Körpers.“ In Körper – Macht – Geschichte: Geschichte – Macht – Körper. Ed. Bielefelder Graduiertenkolleg Sozialgeschichte, 16-34. Bielefeld and Gütersloh: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1999. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

09-Depkat-Pt.IV

3/27/03

2:25 PM

Page 197

Cultural Approaches to International Relations

197

Vierhaus, Rudolf. “Die Rekonstruktion historischer Lebenswelten. Probleme moderner Kulturgeschichtsschreibung.“ In Wege zu einer neuen Kulturgeschichte, ed. Hartmut Lehmann, 7-25. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995. Wala, Michael, and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds. Technologie und Kultur: Europas Blick auf Amerika vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2000. Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 5th ed. Tübingen: Mohr, 1980. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte. Munich: Beck, 1998. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, and Wolfgang Hardtwig, eds. Kulturgeschichte heute. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996. Williams, Michael C. “Neo-Realism and the Future of Strategy.“ Review of International Studies 19 (1993): 103-121.

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Page 198

Chapter 10

STATES, INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS, AND INTERCULTURAL TRANSFER* A Commentary Eckart Conze

T

he exploration of the role of “culture” in international relations is a relatively recent approach to diplomatic history, international history and the history of international relations.1 In their analyses, historians of international relations have preferred—and still prefer—to examine political power relations and international economic structures instead of the significance of culture for the evolution of international and transnational relations and the structures of the international system. If we take a closer look at the international, and even global, trends of the last decades, we can hardly ignore the increasing relevance and importance of cultural issues in international affairs. And this is not only true for the more recent past, when culture moved to the forefront of historical scholarship. Indeed, the cultural approach affects the interpretation of the entire history of international relations. Cultural issues do not simply add a third pillar to traditional security and/or economic aspects of international relations; they influence and broaden our understanding and definition of power or security relations and the international economy.2 Whatever definition researchers prefer, “culture” should not be reduced in the narrow and traditional sense to the products of human efforts, that is scholarly and artistic works. Nor should it be regarded as the so-called high culture or the arts. The concept of culture embraces political, social, and economic patterns of thinking and behavior. “Culture” stands for “both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they ‘handle’ and respond to the conditions of existence; and … the lived traditions and practices through which these ’understandings’ are expressed and in which they are embodied.”3 Notes for this section begin on page 203.

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Page 199

Commentary: Intercultural Transfer

199

In international relations, culture represents a network, a multitude of interconnected symbols as well the individual and social construction of meaning and reality surrounding the individual. A concept of culture, which includes more or less every human phenomenon, runs the risk of loosing its value as an analytical tool. The cultural approach can, however, help us to identify the mental and cultural underpinnings of international policies and international relations in a wider sense. It can also pay tribute to the mediating function of culture in a transnational context.4 This latter dimension clearly transcends the realm of intergovernmental and interstate relations; it does not even necessarily consider states and governments as actors. Nevertheless, the cultural approach to international history should not be limited to nonstate relations. Culture can bridge the gap between ideas, images, and identities on the one hand, and politics and political behavior on the other. States as actors in international relations can act politically to spread culture or they can use culture as an instrument of state policy, as a means to achieve or support political objectives. The decreasing significance of national boundaries and the nation-state in an era of globalization suggests a growing importance of cultural factors in international affairs. But the active integration of culture in the evolution and implementation of a state’s foreign policy is nothing new. There is no doubt that “images of American gender roles and families proved valuable tools in distinguishing democratic capitalism from communism” after 1945.5 Yet already in nineteenth-century Europe, during a formative phase of the European state system, states and governments pursued international and foreign policy goals with their cultural representations and employed cultural means to achieve these goals. Nineteenth-century World Exhibitions represent the most obvious proof of this functional role of culture in international relations.6 In the fields of international education and cultural policy, the connection between state, power, foreign policy, and culture becomes even more evident. States and governments can instrumentalize culture. They can spread culturally shaped images. They can use the transfer of culture as a means to enhance stability, security or even hegemony. The two case studies by Laura Belmonte and Wolfram Kaiser in this volume being at the center of this commentary’s observations present examples of processes of cultural or intercultural transfer, with the specific characteristic of the state being involved as this transfer’s main agent. Processes of intercultural transfer also involve nonstate actors. But as long as the existence of national states and governments remains a structural feature of the global order, we have to address the role of states for these transfer processes. Recent studies have argued that a world of states is gradually transforming into a world of societies. Some authors would even use the expression “world society” or “global society.”7 They show how nonstate relations, processes and forces undermine state structures, state systems, and state relations transcend and, at the same time, undermine the state as a political entity. Still, the state has a pivotal function in international relations. Perhaps the state does, indeed, not represent the only, or even the decisive actor but rather remains one

10-Conze

3/27/03

200

2:24 PM

Page 200

Eckart Conze

decisive force in world affairs. States still represent important agencies of political, social, and economic coordination. They also are spaces of communication, which remains a decisive precondition for liberal democracy and pluralism. Relations between states (in other words international relations in the political and diplomatic sense) often influence the structures, directions, and results of intercultural transfer. Intercultural transfer should be considered broadly and not only as the transfer of culture, but as a transfer between cultures.8 This difference may sound simple, but it is crucial to our grasp of how culture travels. Transfer is not, or not necessarily a one-direction phenomenon; it can also embrace ways and patterns of mutual influence. We need to pay attention to the conditions of unilateral sender and receiver structures of intercultural transfer. Political hegemony, for example, constitutes a precondition for unilateral processes of cultural transfer. The Americanization of Europe after 1945 provides a good example for such a one-way transfer.9 Intercultural transfer includes both material and nonmaterial cultural goods, as well as individuals and social or political institutions. A “social history of ideas” can take into consideration both the social foundations of ideas (value systems, concepts of order) and their social relevance and effects.10 Analyzing mechanisms and patterns of intercultural transfer helps to integrate cultural factors in studies of international relations without embarking on a trendy “culturalism.” The cultural approach does not seek to establish a new general paradigm for international history. Nor does it attempt to subjugate international history to the “linguistic turn’s” theoretical and methodological claim for dominance. Rather, it can open our eyes to a dimension of international relations that traditional studies of diplomatic history have very often neglected and overlooked. Power hierarchies establish the basic framework for the possibility and the extent of intercultural transfer. Wolfram Kaiser’s study of the World Exhibitions during the second half of the nineteenth century confirms the basic political structure of the international system.11 The European nation-states, and especially the powers of the European pentarchy (Britain, France, Prussia/Germany, Austria, and Russia), regarded themselves as basically equal; they respected each other as players in the European-centered international system. Japan, in contrast, played the part of a second-rank nation. Especially after the Meiji restoration, Japan looked toward the West—toward Europe and North America. Japan, that is, became culturally expired by outside influence without exporting its own cultural traditions. A century later, the propaganda battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, an essential part of the Cold War, also grew into a war of rivaling cultural concepts and images. The political and ideological division between East and West brought about a cultural competition that only admitted limited possibilities of intercultural transfer between both blocs. The analysis of gender images by American and Soviet propaganda institutions during the Cold War, according to Laura Belmonte, shows how both sides extended a political constellation, that is, the Cold War and its superpower conflict, into the realm of culture.12 They did so to present the Cold War as a military and political power confrontation but also, and more

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Page 201

Commentary: Intercultural Transfer

201

importantly, as a profound conflict affecting all dimensions and levels of politics, society, economy, and culture. Exploring the relations between the political structures of international relations and the forms, mechanisms, and contents of intercultural transfer opens a wide field for future research. While we can, for example, identify a clear relation between U.S. hegemony over Western Europe after 1945 and the cultural penetration of West European societies, the processes and contents of Americanization in the 1920s and their political conditions have received much less attention. How and where do processes of intercultural transfer originate? What exactly is the relation between these transfer processes and political and economic relations? How important are specific political circumstances or constellations for the direction of intercultural transfer? How do political relations enhance or weaken its reception and its effects? Integrating culture in studies of international history can also be valuable for an analysis of the interdependence of foreign and domestic politics; it can thus help us to transcend categories relating to a primacy of foreign policy or a primacy of domestic policy. These mutually exclusive approaches to political history, which go back to Leopold von Ranke and Eckart Kehr,13 ignore the social and cultural foundations of politics in modern societies. Yet in modern societies, the distinction between foreign and domestic policy is not a question of hierarchy or primacy; instead, it denotes only one of many different issues in a broad political arena. Foreign politics is above all politics.14 A history of international affairs needs to address the relations between states, nations, and societies. Yet it also must deal with their interdependence, mutual influences, interconnections, integration, and the role of structures and actors beyond the level of state and government. A history of international affairs cannot anymore limit itself to political or diplomatic history; it has to consider social and cultural factors as well. Social and cultural history, on the other hand, may not be reduced to national structures and the framework of the nation state.15 The processes of globalization, which in modern history contribute to the shaping of the international system, typically originate not in diplomacy and politics but in economic, social, and cultural developments. Globalization is a process of de-nationalization and de-politicization. To limit international studies to states and governments, to regard the nation-state as the central or the only unit in international relations means to disregard the fact that our world today is a world of cultures and societies and no longer a politically ordered system of states.16 This last point should not be misunderstood as an appeal to concentrate future research on processes of globalization or internationalization, twentieth-century international relations, and the Cold War; the opposite is the case. For one thing, tendencies of internationalization are not new. Throughout the nineteenth century, the century of nation-building that saw the evolution of an international order shaped by the existence of autonomous nation-states (at least in Europe), we can identify processes of internationalization. World Exhibitions are part of the establishment and constitution of global structures of communication and intercultural transfer. The

10-Conze

3/27/03

202

2:24 PM

Page 202

Eckart Conze

issues that these exhibitions presented and performed would today count as issues of global domestic politics (Weltinnenpolitik). Second, we can only understand current or recent developments if we place them into a broader historical context. International history has to start its analyses with the formation of modern territorial states in early modern Europe. International history has to embark more consequently on diachronical studies. The diachronical approach focuses on a specific issue or question over a longer time period; it reaches beyond conventional epochs of political history. Thus, it can give us profound insights into specific research questions, but also into the changing nature and structures of the international system and international relations. Diachronical studies are comparative studies running along a “time rail.” For example, the year 1945 was a decisive break in the history of international affairs. But to understand how patterns of international relations changed under completely different political circumstances (including in regard to processes of intercultural transfer) we have to analytically surpass the political turning point of 1945; for cultures and societies do not change from one year to the next. It is therefore imperative for historians of international relations to create longer time frames for their analyses if they want to correlate the study of culture and international politics. Longer time frames become even more important if we wish to find out how cultural processes or concepts such as Americanization, Westernization or globalization changed and still change societies, and how core values such as liberal democracy or consensus capitalism took root in different societies. Only such an approach can pave the way for innovative studies in the field of a social history of culture and a social history of ideas in an international and transnational context. For studies of processes such as Westernization or Americanization a concentration on the twentieth century, and, especially the years after 1945, on the one hand, and the role of the United States in international relations, on the other, is legitimate and appropriate. Still, it is necessary to substantially enlarge the scope of research to include earlier time periods and other states. In many cases, the analysis of more distant time periods, the investigation of processes and developments that are less related to the present may lead to a more profound understanding of the underlying structures or mechanisms of political, cultural, and social behavior. Distance in terms of time and in terms of culture can thus turn out to provide us with a valuable heuristic means. Historical analysis and empirical research are never self-explanatory. Historical research has to be based on theoretical reflection and has to be informed by theory. This is just as true for international history as it is for social and cultural history (which is commonly assumed in the latter case). An international history that seeks to open up towards aspects of culture, or asks for the role of culture in international relations, must deal with theories of culture, cultural change and cultural transfer. Diplomatic history in Germany has a particular tradition of bypassing theoretical reflections. The main reason for this deficit is a deep misunderstanding of Leopold von Ranke’s objective to show, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist in connection with his “primacy of foreign policy” paradigm.17 Though historians do not aim at general the-

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Page 203

Commentary: Intercultural Transfer

203

ories, their task is not to provide empirical evidence to support or falsify a general social, political, or international relations theory; international history is not an ancillary science for international relations. It is the historian’s task to analyze the origins and conditions of historical realities and to explain their time-specific peculiarities. Historians deal with the causality of the historical process; they try to identify patterns of causality without constructing determinisms and without neglecting the contingent nature of history. This general objective represents the strongest argument and the most convincing legitimacy for a more systematic and thoughtful integration of “culture” in the analysis of the history of international relations.

Notes *

1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

This commentary refers primarily to the contributions of Laura Belmonte and Wolfram Kaiser in this volume; it does not present a detailed critique of these two articles but takes them as a starting point for a brief reflection on some of the issues raised by their authors. Although the expressions “diplomatic history,” “history of international relations” and “international history” carry different connotations, my comment refrains from overstressing these differences. A broad understanding of the research field is probably best expressed by the term “international history.” See A. DeConde, “On the Nature of International History,” The International History Review 10 (1988): 282-301; Internationale Geschichte. Themen - Ergebnisse Aussichten, ed. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), especially W. Loth, “Einleitung,” vii-xiv. See Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 214-225; here 215. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies. Two Paradigms,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 527. See Robert Frank, “Mentalitäten, Vorstellungen und internationale Beziehungen,” in Loth and Osterhammel, Internationale Geschichte, 159-185; here, 184f. See Laura Belmonte’s contribution to this volume (chap. 4). See Wolfram Kaiser’s contribution to this volume (chap. 7). See, for example, Ernst-Otto Czempiel, “Von der Staatenwelt zur Gesellschaftswelt,” in Kluge Macht: Außenpolitik für das 21. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1999), 17-101. See Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649-685; here, 678. For an informative overview of recent studies on Americanization, see Philipp Gassert, “Amerikanismus, Antiamerikanismus, Amerikanisierung: Neue Literatur zur Sozial-, Wirtschaftsund Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531-561. This goes back to Max Weber’s statement: “Interessen (materielle und ideelle), nicht: Ideen, beherrschen unmittelbar das Handeln der Menschen. Aber: die ‘Weltbilder,’ welche durch ‘Ideen’ geschaffen wurden, haben sehr oft als Weichensteller die Bahnen bestimmt, in denen die Dynamik der Interessen das Handeln fortbewegte” (idem, “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Vergleichende religionssoziologische Versuche. Einleitung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssozi-

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Eckart Conze

204

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

Page 204

ologie, 9th ed., 2 vols. [Tübingen: Mohr, 1988], vol. 1, 237-275; here, 252). See also M. Rainer Lepsius, “Interessen und Ideen. Die Zurechnungsproblematik bei Max Weber,” in Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 31-43. See chap. 2 in this volume. See chap. 4 in this volume. For Ranke’s concept of the primacy of foreign policy/politics (Primat der Außenpolitik) see Leopold von Ranke, “Zur Geschichte Deutschlands und Frankreichs im 19. Jahrhundert: Politisches Gespräch [1836],” in Sämtliche Werke, 54 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1867-1890), vols. 49/50, 327f. For Kehr’s positions, see Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik, ed. HansUlrich Wehler (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965). See also Gerhard T. Mollin, “Internationale Beziehungen als Gegenstand der deutschen Neuzeit-Historiographie seit dem 18. Jahrhundert: Eine Traditionskritik in Grundzügen und Beispielen,” in Loth and Osterhammel, Internationale Geschichte, 3-30, especially 13-22. See Ekkehart Krippendorff, “Ist Außenpolitik Außenpolitik?” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 4 (1963): 243-266. Loth, “Einleitung,” in Internationale Geschichte, ed. Loth and Osterhammel, xi; see also Eckart Conze, “Nationale Vergangenheit und globale Zukunft: Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und die Herausforderung der Globalisierung,” in Geschichte ist immer Gegenwart. Vier Thesen zur Zeitgeschichte, ed. Jörg Baberowski et al. (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 43-65. Eckart Conze, “Zwischen Staatenwelt und Gesellschaftswelt: Die gesellschaftliche Dimension in der Internationalen Geschichte,” in Loth and Osterhammel, Internationale Geschichte,117-140; see also Czempiel, “Von der Staatenwelt zur Gesellschaftswelt.” For an overview, see Loth and Osterhammel, Internationale Geschichte.

Bibliography Conze, Eckart. “Nationale Vergangenheit und globale Zukunft: Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und die Herausforderung der Globalisierung.” In Geschichte ist immer Gegenwart. Vier Thesen zur Zeitgeschichte. Ed. Jörg Baberowski et al, 43-65. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001. Czempiel, Ernst-Otto. “Von der Staatenwelt zur Gesellschaftswelt.” In Kluge Macht: Außenpolitik für das 21. Jahrhundert, 17-101. Munich: Beck, 1999. DeConde, Alexander. “On the Nature of International History.” The International History Review 10 (1988): 282-301. Gassert, Philipp. “Amerikanismus, Antiamerikanismus, Amerikanisierung: Neue Literatur zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531-561. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” In Culture/Power/History, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Internationale Geschichte: Themen - Ergebnisse – Aussichten. Ed. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000. Iriye, Akira. “Culture and International History.” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. Ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 214-225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

10-Conze

3/27/03

2:24 PM

Page 205

Commentary: Intercultural Transfer

205

Kehr, Eckart. Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965. Krippendorff, Ekkehart. “Ist Außenpolitik Außenpolitik?” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 4 (1963): 243-266. Lepsius, M. Rainer. “Interessen und Ideen: Die Zurechnungsproblematik bei Max Weber.” In Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen, ed. M. Rainer Lepsius, 31-43. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990. Paulmann, Johannes. “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649-685. Ranke, Leopold von. “Zur Geschichte Deutschlands und Frankreichs im 19. Jahrhundert. Politisches Gespräch [1836].” In Sämtliche Werke. 54 vols (vols 49 and 50). Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1867-1890. Vol. 49/50. Weber, Max. “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Vergleichende religionssoziologische Versuche. Einleitung.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. 9th ed., 2 vols. (vol 1, 237-275) Tübingen: Mohr, 1988.

11-Lucas

3/27/03

2:22 PM

Page 206

Chapter 11

“TOTAL CULTURE” AND THE STATE-PRIVATE NETWORK A Commentary Scott Lucas

“

C

ulture” has not been a term that figures prominently in the history of international relations. It is far easier to deal with the tangibles of policy making, diplomacy, and economics than it is to consider a construction that, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, is no less than “the organization of all experience.”1 In my own field of interest, the Cold War, this has led to historians endlessly restaging the battle between defending US foreign policy as the quest for national security and criticizing it as the quest for economic hegemony. “Culture” has been absent or restricted to a cameo appearance such as the recent assurance by one historian, in a celebration of the “American Century.” As Geir Lundestad puts it, “In the 1990s Europe remained culturally as attached to the U.S. as it had ever been; as measured in everything from the popularity of American movies and television programs to the increase in sales of Coke in Central and Eastern Europe.”2 There are signs that culture, which was integral to the quest for supremacy in the Cold War, will finally receive due recognition. Some historians have embarked on an examination of “cultural diplomacy,” evaluating “official” programs of the U.S. government such as the Fulbright educational exchanges, the work of the U.S. Information Agency, and the U.S. presence at trade and cultural exhibitions, and the analysis of specific cases from U.S. cultural intervention in Austria and France to the development of journalism in the U.S. zone of occupation in West Germany.3 There have been significant studies of the projection of race and gender in U.S. foreign policy, be it implicit, as in the discourse of George Kennan or U.S. films with “foreign” women, or explicit, as in the Government’s role, with an eye toward overseas opinion, in Brown v. Board of Education and in the Little Rock crisis.4 Notes for this section begin on page 211.

11-Lucas

3/27/03

2:22 PM

Page 207

Commentary: The State—Private Network

207

Apart from the obvious point that culture did not begin in 1945, there are limitations to this step forward. Given its “imperial” nature, U.S. Cold War culture has resulted in U.S.-centered scholarship, not only reducing “foreign” audiences to spectators or passive recipients but never considering the cultural Cold War waged by governments based outside Washington and Moscow. Much as policy making is defined through political and administrative elites, cultural diplomacy is portrayed through cultural elites—in the “mass culture” of the twentieth century, the role and influence of the “mass” has yet to be examined. There is always the risk that having promoted the triumphalism of “national security,” and now the triumphalism of “liberal democracy,” to link Cold War “history” to the present and future image of the United States, historians may now bask in the triumphalism of culture. Yet the case of culture and the Cold War is significant for wider study because of two seminal aspects. The first is the development for the first time during “peace” of a comprehensive state strategy, which incorporated culture into the campaign to defeat its adversary. While 1930s Europe had witnessed government collaboration with and even sponsorship of “private” groups to spread a positive national image, this was more an adjunct to diplomacy than an integral part of a campaign for continental supremacy.5 Perhaps the Comintern, with the potential direction of an international cultural effort from Moscow, could be seen as an exception, but the shift in Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s toward the popular front, as well as more pressing domestic matters, casts doubts upon a concerted and orchestrated campaign. No, it would be “democracies,” building upon the experience of “political warfare” in World War II that would incorporate culture in a total effort. In January 1948, the British government, using the model of the political warfare executive, would create the top secret Information Research Department for anti-communist propaganda and political action.6 Four months later, George Kennan, the head of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, would recommend “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” to the newly formed National Security Council: What is proposed here is an operation in the traditional American form: organized public support of resistance to tyranny in foreign countries. Throughout our history, private American citizens have banded together to champion the cause of freedom for people suffering under oppression.… Our proposal is that this tradition be revived specifically to further American national interests in the present crisis.7

When political warfare was established as a method and the breakup of the Soviet block enshrined as an objective, U.S. strategy became far more than a quest for national security or the pursuit of economic advantage. The United States was now engaged not only in the attainment of military superiority or the securing of diplomatic alliances but also in the promotion of its ideology, centered upon the concept of “freedom.” The project “Militant Liberty,” launched by the military in the 1950s, stated concisely: Communist ideology can only be defeated by a stronger dynamic ideology. Therefore, the concept consists of motivating peoples everywhere to be militant in their belief in liberty.

11-Lucas

3/27/03

208

2:22 PM

Page 208

Scott Lucas

For this purpose, training must be available in the meaning of freedom, the responsibilities to freedom, and the methodology of communication and persuasion.8

Freedom had economic and political dimensions, such as the promotion of free trade and free elections but it also had to be embodied in a U.S. “culture.” The U.S. ideology of “freedom,” which exalted individual choice as it condemned state control of all aspects of life in communist systems, had to be projected through the apparent autonomy of organizations in the private sector. Foreign audiences, wary of statedirected “propaganda,” were to be won over by the common man or woman, projecting values that were not national but universal. Every sector of U.S. society— business, labor, journalists, youth, women, African Americans, athletes—was to play a part in a total Cold War. It is striking that of the hundreds of studies on NSC 68, the U.S. blueprint of 1950 for victory over the Soviet bloc, few, if any, have noticed that there were specific annexes for both overt and covert ideological and cultural activity. Even before NSC 68 was adopted, President Truman had issued the call for the state-private network to implement it: We must pool our efforts with those of the other free peoples in a sustained, intensified program to promote the cause of freedom against the propaganda of slavery. We must make ourselves heard round the world in a great campaign of truth. This task is not separate and distinct from other elements of our foreign policy. It is a necessary part of all we are doing … as important as armed strength or economic aid.9

Where possible, the government promoted U.S. values through overt programs with private assistance, as Laura Belmonte’s essay in this volume demonstrates. To implement NSC 68 and the Campaign of Truth, the State Department annual budget for such activity increased from less than $25 million in 1948 to almost $150 million in the early 1950s. Programs concentrated on “urban and rural workers, youth, the professional and governing classes and intellectuals, with emphasis among the latter on journalists and teachers.” Documentaries and millions of booklets, leaflets, magazines, and posters complemented a ring of transmitters for the Voice of America. Educational and cultural exchanges were expanded, and there was a mysterious $10 million “for discretionary use of unconventional devices for affecting popular attitudes.” 10 “Private” individuals were placed onto the United Nations delegation to make specific points, as with the appointment of African American lawyer Edith Sampson in 1950 to deflect attention from U.S. race relations by condemning Soviet use of “slave labor.”11 These operations were only the visible facade of the U.S. effort, however. Limited by the aversion, at home and abroad, to state-directed propaganda but also by lack of congressional willingness to allocate funds, the government could only pursue an aggressive strategy of political warfare through covert sponsorship of the state-private network. The Jackson Committee, convened by President Eisenhower to review U.S. political warfare, concluded: Propaganda or information should be attributable to the U.S. only when such attribution is an asset. A much greater percentage of the information program should be unattribut-

11-Lucas

3/27/03

2:22 PM

Page 209

Commentary: The State—Private Network

209

able.… Far greater effort should be made to utilize private American organizations for the advancement of U.S. objectives.12

The CIA had embarked on this strategy two years earlier. Director Walter Bedell Smith, his deputy Allen Dulles, and the U.S. High Commissioner in West Germany, agreed, “The Russian and Communist propaganda machine has secured some notable triumphs in the pursuit of its Partisans for Peace campaign.… It is, therefore, necessary to enlist the assistance of our friends to organize a systematic campaign speaking up for us and the things on our behalf which must be said.”13 The agency established an International Organizations Division (IOD), led by Thomas Braden, to coordinate the rapidly evolving links with private groups. From 1951 to 1967, when it was exposed in magazine and newspaper revelations, the IOD would funnel millions of dollars both to existing groups, such as the American Federation of Labor, universities such as Harvard and Columbia, the National Student Association, and organizations created to wage the cultural Cold War, including the National Committee for Free Europe, the Committee for Free Asia, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.14 This is why Oliver Schmidt’s essay on philanthropy and the exchange of scholars is so important (see chapter 6 in this volume). Where necessary, the CIA would use “dummy” foundations as conduits for its finance of the state-private network, but its preference was for “legitimate” philanthropists to perform the service. In the early 1960s, a host of bodies such as the Hobby Foundation of Texas (run by Oveta Culp Hobby, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Eisenhower adminstration) took over from their “dummy” counterparts. The optimal arrangement was for a legitimate foundation to decide of its own accord, perhaps after encouragement from government officials inside and outside the CIA, to finance a key project. Given the scale of the resources, the most desired outlets were the Big Three of the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations. By 1949, even before the consolidation of government arrangements for the state-private network, the Big Three were making vital contributions to the administration’s program of political warfare. Carnegie would be instrumental in establishing the Russian Research Center at Harvard. By 1949, the Ford Foundation, the most prominent group in Schmidt’s essay, had decided that it would fund Cold War initiatives to “advance human welfare … synonymous with democratic ideals on challenge in the world today.” It helped advanced “liberation” efforts from 1951 when it provided more than $500,000 for the East European Fund, headed by George Kennan, who had just left the State Department. The following year, as Schmidt notes, Paul Hoffman, John McCloy, and Shepard Stone, all with extensive service in government, would take over the leadership of Ford and “turn [it] into a kind of private State Department or public CIA.”15 Certainly, as Schmidt argues, studies of culture and foreign policy should “not treat cultural relations as mere ‘instruments’ of state action.” The Ford Foundation pursued many projects without any urging from the government; conversely, it balked

11-Lucas

3/27/03

210

2:22 PM

Page 210

Scott Lucas

in a number of instances at funding initiatives pressed upon it by Washington. Schmidt is far too cautious, however. One can avoid a static conception of government hegemony over foundations while not falling into the naïve and misleading conclusion, which only replicates the marginalization of culture carried out by many diplomatic historians, that “nongovernmental connections between the U.S. and other countries” were mere auxiliaries to Cold War strategy. Government officials in 1952 were far more perceptive about the state-private networks than the academics studying them fifty years later seem to be, as a Psychological Strategy Board report illustrates: Our democratic system forbids any great regimentation of private activity. In our attempt to counter the Soviet challenge, we should certainly develop better techniques and channels for the use of private capabilities, but the goal in mind cannot be absolute direction and control. From both the pragmatic and idealistic points of view, there may be distinct advantages in permitting certain types of unfettered private action, even when it does not accord exactly with official objectives.16

The second significant aspect of the state-private network in the Cold War, one that demands far more examination, is the relationship between economics and ideology. Edward Said has written, “Granted that American expansionism is principally economic, it is still highly dependent upon and moves together with cultural ideas and ideologies about America itself, ceaselessly reiterated in public.”17 Inevitably, the ideological and cultural campaign of political warfare was based upon a “free” economic system. Almost all the state-private activists in the network were from “middle,” or “upper-class” backgrounds. Yet it can be argued that many of the “private” operations were not driven by a specific economic interest but by a general ideological conception that U.S. freedom should be universal freedom and by noneconomic interests such as, in the case of the CIA-funded Committee of Correspondence, the conception of an international gendered identity for women. 18 Here the unprecedented intervention of the state in peacetime is crucial, for contrary to the general “revisionist” portrayal of U.S. foreign policy, the lead was ideological rather than economic. When President Truman issued his doctrine that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,”19 he did far more than lay a rhetorical smokescreen. “Freedom” had been established as the marker for government and private action; the United States would soon embark on quests, which cannot be explained primarily by geopolitical or economic motives, such as the liberation of Eastern Europe. Without this state intervention, would “private” groups have been so strident in their prosecution of the Cold War? It is in this context that Wolfram Kaiser’s work in this volume offers an important comparative perspective by considering philanthropy and culture before the era of extensive state involvement. Kaiser’s concept, studied through the construction of presentations at international exhibitions, of private groups seeking “transnational” rather than “vertical” hierarchies challenges a simple notion of state direction. Moreover, his distinction between “internationalized” or “globalized” firms, which were generally suspicious of vertical hierarchies, and

11-Lucas

3/27/03

2:22 PM

Page 211

Commentary: The State—Private Network

211

“heavy” industries who gladly worked with the state, establishes that even “economic” interests cannot be treated as a homogeneous entity. Kaiser is still working, however, within a framework of “economic” or “industrial” culture. Considering the interaction between economics, culture, and the state, a possible way forward is to rework the “revisionist” thesis, placing foreign policy on an economic base. The linkage of “culture” and “economics” in international activity was not the product of the state’s presence but of its absence. As long as a country like the United States remained detached, at least politically, from international affairs, then “cultural” issues could be guided by economic motives; it was after World War II, with the comprehensive nature of political warfare, that philanthropy or cultural presentation was directed by noneconomic objectives.20 Donald Pease has argued, “Although the U.S. imperial nationalism was predicated on the superiority of military and political organization as well as economic wealth, it depended for its efficacy on a range of cultural technologies.” This is not a static conception of state hegemony or, alternatively, of private “autonomy,” but an evaluation of a dynamic relationship transcending economics and geopolitics. For it is through the consideration of culture and the evolution of the state-private network that one can establish William Appleman Williams’s assertion that “some ideas which originate as instruments of specific interests or ultimately break their narrow bounds and emerge as broad, inclusive conceptions of the world.”21

Notes 1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). 2. Geir Lundestad, “’Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (spring 1999): 217. 3. On the general conception of cultural diplomacy, see Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Specific cases includes Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 4. Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997): 1309-1339; Emily S. Rosenberg, “’Foreign Affairs’ after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (winter 1994): 59-70; Cary Fraser, “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (spring 2000): 233-264. For a few years now, Diplomatic History, the leading journal for US diplomatic historians, has begun to focus

11-Lucas

3/27/03

212

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

2:22 PM

Page 212

Scott Lucas

on culture and foreign policy. A roundtable on Henry Luce and the “American Century” included contributions by Volker Berghahn, Emily Rosenberg, Gerald Horne, Reinhold Wagnleitner, and Rob Kroes. In summer 2000, Jessica Gienow-Hecht published a critical review of “Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War,” with commentaries by Richard Pells, Bruce Kuklick, Richard Kuisel, and John Dower. See, for example, Philip Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See W. Scott Lucas and C.J. Morris, “A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War,” in Espionage, Security, and Intelligence in Britain, 1945-1970, ed. Richard Aldrich (London: Routledge, 1992), 85-110. Policy Planning Staff report, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” 4 May 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Document 269, (20 September 2002). “Militant Liberty Outline Plan,” 5 November 1954, U.S. DDRS, 1997: 0667 (emphasis in original). As the National Security Council argued in its policy for Eastern Europe in 1949: “The U.S. should do what it can practicably, particularly through covert operations and propaganda, to keep alive the anti-communist sentiment and hope of those making up the non-communist majorities in the satellite countries. To do less would be to sacrifice the moral basis of US leadership of free peoples” (NSC 58/2, 8 December 1949, Minutes of Meetings of the National Security Council with Special Advisory Reports [Frederick Md.: University Publications of America], reel 2). “Truth as a Weapon in Cold War,” The Times (London), 21 April 1950. Draft Senior NSC Staff Report NSC 114 and Annex 5, 27 July 1951, U.S. DDRS, 1980: 284B-285A. On Sampson, see Helen Laville and Scott Lucas, “The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African-American Identity in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (fall 1996): 565-590. Lay memorandum, “Progress Report on Implementation of the Recommendations of the Jackson Committee,” 1 October 1953, U.S. DDRS, 1990: 2796. Wisner memorandum, 23 June 1951, U.S. DDRS, 1991: 2279. See Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 93-127. See Lucas, Freedom’s War, 108-109; Kathleen D. McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development: The International Cultural Activities of the Ford Foundation, 1950-1980,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (winter 1987): 96-98; Volker Berghahn, “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999): 406-407. Korns to Sherman, 4 June 1952, U.S. DDRS, 1990: 1545. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 3. Helen Laville, Cold War Women (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2002). Harry Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), 105. A useful comparison here is between Wolfram Kaiser’s examination of international exhibitions and Michael Krenn’s work on modern art and U.S. participation in the 1958 World’s Fair (Michael Krenn, “The Art of American Diplomacy: Modern Art and Propaganda at the 1958 World’s Fair,” paper at annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Toronto, Canada, 23 June 2000). T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567-593; William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966), 21.

11-Lucas

3/27/03

2:22 PM

Page 213

Commentary: The State—Private Network

213

Bibliography Berghahn, Volker. “Philanthropy and Diplomacy in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999), 393-419. Costigliola, Frank. “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War.” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997): 1309-1339. Fraser, Cary. “Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for U.S. Foreign Policy.” Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (spring 2000): 233-264. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica. “Shame on US? Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review.” Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (summer 2000): 465-494. _____. Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Hixson, Walter. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Krenn, Michael. “The Art of American Diplomacy: Modern Art and Propaganda at the 1958 World’s Fair.” Annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Toronto, Canada, 23 June 2000. Kuisel, Richard. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Laville, Helen. Cold War Women. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2002. Laville, Helen and Scott Lucas. “The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African-American Identity in the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 565-590. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities.” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567-593. Lucas, Scott. Freedom’s War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Lucas, W. Scott and C.J. Morris. “A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War.” In Espionage, Security, and Intelligence in Britain, 1945-1970. Ed Aldrich, Richard. London: Routledge, 1992. Lundestad, Geir. “’Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (spring 1999): 189-217. McCarthy, Kathleen D. “From Cold War to Cultural Development: The International Cultural Activities of the Ford Foundation, 1950-1980.” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (winter 1987): 93-117. Ninkovich, Frank. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Rosenberg, Emily. “‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics.” Diplomatic History 18, no. 1 (winter 1994): 59-70. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Taylor, Philip. The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 19191939. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Truman, Harry. Memoirs: Year of Decisions. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956.

11-Lucas

3/27/03

214

2:22 PM

Page 214

Scott Lucas

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. Williams, William A. The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966.

12-Frey

3/27/03

2:14 PM

Page 215

Chapter 12

GENDER, TROPES, AND IMAGES A Commentary Marc Frey

O

ver the last two decades, a large number of studies broadly situated in the field of international history have employed approaches that stress the importance and value of perceptions and images for the study of foreign relations. Likewise, an increasing number of studies employ the category of gender, either to highlight the contributions of women to the history of foreign relations or to gain a more nuanced understanding of how and why male-dominated decision-making processes define interests, ideas, and policy strategies. The reasons for these developments are complex and can only be briefly mentioned here: in the wake of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, students on both sides of the Atlantic questioned traditional notions of family, gender relations, and the siege mentality of the “us versus them” politics of the Cold War. Long-established national interests were questioned or repudiated altogether, and in contrast to “realist” perspectives, new historical subdisciplines such as peace studies acknowledged the inherent nature of ideology and belief systems in any given political or societal action and development. In the late 1970s, the trend toward globalization, the democratization of knowledge, technology, and capital were conveniently associated with the end of the Bretton Woods system and the European and Japanese rise in relative economic importance. Together these developments gave a strong boost to the introduction of concepts of culture into the field of international history.1 Tired of traditional methods of diplomatic history and bored by accounts that dwell at length upon what one bureaucrat said to another, a new generation of historians began to explore ideas rather than interests (that is, “facts”), and discourse rather than events. “Objectivity” became an impossibility. In an age of structuralism, deconstructivism and constructivism, objectivity came to be regarded as a naive and slightly deplorable conception of a bygone past. Mass south-north migration highNotes for this section begin on page 219.

12-Frey

3/27/03

216

2:14 PM

Page 216

Marc Frey

lighted and spurred the multicultural character of Western societies, and helped to put the notion of “culture” squarely at the center of debate in the humanities and social sciences. Institutions and universities responded by changing curricula, departmental structures, and hiring policies so that by the 1980s and 1990s, political history and diplomatic history had almost become an embarrassment. The occupation with perceptions, images, and belief systems is neither new nor original, and the construction of an “other” is not confined to the history of foreign relations since the Enlightenment. The need for an “other” seems to be one of the most basic characteristics of human behavior—it allows one to perceive oneself through a mirror. The ancient Greeks were not the first to discover this simple but important necessity; but they introduced a concept for the distinction between you and me: they termed every non-Greek bárbaros, that is foreigner, alien. The equation of war and masculinity along with the use of gendered rhetoric for discriminatory purposes is also not a recent phenomenon. As Gerda Lerner argues, at least as early as the Bronze age, men assumed power over women by exploiting conflicts with other groups of people and by employing gendered rhetoric to ensure dominance: “The first step toward turning ‘difference into dominance’ is the institution of patriarchal privileges of men over women,” usually achieved by military leaders who usurp power and discourse and who provide an example for all other men.2 Thus, the concepts of masculinity and perceptions of the “other” seem to be ageold forms of human behavior, and men and women have undertaken their contextualization over the centuries. A good example of the equation of war with manliness provides the classic theoretical study on war, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. In her introduction to the posthumously published work, Marie v. Clausewitz, Carl’s wife, wrote: “It rightfully estranges that a female hand dares to accompany a work of such content with an introduction.”3 Marie, an enlightened and fairly emancipated woman, captured in this sentence the mood of the time (and not only her time): war is manly, and war is the field in which men can display their highest masculine traits. The difference between Marie von Clausewitz’s commentary and recent scholarship on gendered tropes is that we no longer take the equation of war with masculinity for granted. Unspoken assumptions are made explicit, they are questioned, analyzed, and interpreted—this is (much needed) masculine emancipation in the making. While an appreciation for the function of gendered tropes represents a rather recent phenomenon, scholars have long recognized the importance of perceptions. Thus wrote the German sociologist Max Weber: “Interests (material and ideal), not ideas, dominate the action of human beings. But: the ‘world views’ [Weltbilder] that are created by ideas, have very often served as moving forces for the avenues, in which the dynamic of interests have influenced action.”4 Interests and ideas belong together. To consider only ideas means to disregard interests; to look at interests is to exclude the human factor in international relations, to subjectivize abstract notions of “the state,” “the nation,” and “foreign policy.” The ongoing debate about the character of American foreign policy during the Cold War serves as a good example of the fallacy of one-dimensional interpretations:

12-Frey

3/27/03

2:14 PM

Page 217

Commentary: Gender, Tropes and Images

217

was Washington’s “official mind” motivated by “realist notions,” “geopolitics,” or “capitalist ideology”? Doesn’t “geopolitics” contain heavy doses of propaganda (e.g., the “need” for a globalized conception of “national security”)? Do not “realists” base their argument on some objective and knowable reality? Do they not assume that “power” is objectively measurable, thereby inviting criticism for being positivist, reductionist, and determinist?5 In We Now Know, John Lewis Gaddis points to one pertinent problem of many traditional diplomatic histories: “The ‘old’ Cold War history,” he writes, “emphasized interests, which it mostly defined in material terms— what people possessed, or wanted to possess. It tended to overlook ideas—what people believed, or wanted to believe.”6 Ideas in a broad sense is what the chapter by Fabian Hilfrich in this volume is about (see chapter 3). His essay on “Manliness and Realism” convincingly demonstrates the link between men’s self-perception, or rather self-conception as “masculine” men, and the debate about war. Hilfrich also persuasively argues that gendered rhetoric serves specific purposes: it legitimizes one’s own position, and it serves to discredit opponents. Gender-based positive self-definitions and negative accusations work because the sender and receiver share the same cultural assumptions. Robert Dean has recently observed that this kind of rhetoric works effectively not only in times of war, but also in times of perceived or constructed crises.7 The question is whether there is a time-related connection between the use of “masculine” rhetoric and a crisis in masculinity. Fabian Hilfrich’s characterization of the 1890s and the 1960s as decades where traditional gender roles were questioned and well-established conceptions about the role of men and women at home and in society came under attack is confirmed by a large number of studies. But in his interpretation of the 1950s, Robert Dean also finds a “crisis of masculinity” (although there was no war at the time). The same could be argued in connection with the 1930s, where male-designed economic policies clearly worked to the disadvantage of working women and tended to reinforce traditional conceptions about the relationship between the sexes.8 Thus, one might easily find good reasons for depicting each decade and epoch since the Enlightenment (and perhaps further down in history?) as a time of “crisis of masculinity.” That the present generation diagnoses a “crisis of masculinity” so ubiquitously says as much about us as it does about the objects we study. This observation points to a considerable challenge historians face: the plausible connection of long-term trends, of a history interested in the longue durée, with more readily definable event-related interpretations. It is perfectly legitimate to single out specific periods of time as “crises of masculinity” and relate them to discourses centering upon events like wars or depressions. But it is equally important to recognize the persistence of gender-related rhetoric and gender-informed belief systems over time. This observation is not meant as a criticism of Fabian Hilfrich’s argument. Hilfrich’s aim is to point to the “influence” gendered rhetoric has on foreign policy debates. But rhetoric is always gendered. As Robert Dean proposes, “gender must be understood not as an independent cause of policy decisions, but as part of the very

12-Frey

3/27/03

218

2:14 PM

Page 218

Marc Frey

fabric of reasoning employed by officeholders.”9 Since gender is a fundamental factor of self-percection and perception, of positioning oneself within society, Fabian Hilfrich’s article makes us aware of the importance of gender as a necessary category for understanding discourses on foreign policy and for assessing the connection between domestic issues and international relations. Research on images and perceptions is crucial to the study of international relations. Notions about “the other” have always been identified as one factor of decisionmaking processes, of public opinion, and of the repercussions of public sentiment on the “official mind” and vice versa. What distinguishes traditional approaches from more recent ones is a heightened awareness of the methodological and theoretical problems involved. Historians of international relations have utilized poststructuralism and approaches and theories from other disciplines (such as anthropology, literature, psychology, sociology, and political science).10 This clearly has had a most positive effect on the discipline as a whole, particularly in terms of the diversity of topics. Issues once largely neglected have become now important topics of research. This includes cultural imperialisms; efforts and processes of cultural transformation; the content, function, and role of information, education, and propaganda policies; communications; the role of nongovernmental actors such as missionaries, women’s clubs, trade unions, foundations, or exchange programs; tourism; exhibitions; processes of transnationalization, and so forth. Curiously, the problem of theory in history and international relations has largely been avoided. Reaching out to new topics and employing categories from adjacent fields, including cultural studies, does not mean that scholars adopt a theoretical orientation. There is certainly a heightened awareness of the need to explain terms and reflect on the methods used. But does this amount to theory? If one follows Karl Popper, one would not search for an (ideally) infinite number of confirming cases to establish a theory. Instead of confirmation, one might search for alternatives—for exceptions to the rule (“falsifiability criterion”). Only the absence of contradictory evidence becomes corroboration of a theory. And here the multitude and ambiguity of human experience gets us in trouble. Too often, we read books that consist of introductory remarks outlining various theories and then proceed in a rather straightforward—traditional—fashion when exploring the specific topic.11 Too often institutional demands and constraints, hiring policies, and perceived needs for legitimacy force authors to engage in sophisticated methodological discussions that are largely unrelated and largely not successfully connected to the actual research topic. In a globalized world where exchange, rupture, and interconnection have become bare necessities, and in an academic environment where disciplines strive for interdisciplinarity, theories are highly important for establishing denominators, for generalizing the specific, and for creating thought systems that are plausibly falsifiable. Nonetheless, the meaningful writing on culture and international relations neither starts nor ends with theory. What is probably more important is our ability to widen our own intellectual horizons. We need to acknowledge the inherent nature of gendered rhetoric by continuous efforts to emancipate ourselves, by studying other cul-

12-Frey

3/27/03

2:14 PM

Page 219

Commentary: Gender, Tropes and Images

219

tures through language training and personal exchanges with “others,” and by experiencing the fabulous and wonderful experience of intercultural learning and cross-cultural discourse. The ancient Greeks attached a threefold meaning to the word história: to ask, to know, to tell. Theory is necessary for formulating questions and for reproducing knowledge. But since history is not just out there, but reconstructed— some would prefer the term constructed—in one’s mind, the narrative is imperative. And since writing is an act of creativity, we should not neglect the fundamentally artistic quality of our discipline. Isn’t this in itself a contribution to the enrichment of culture?

Notes 1. This definition of globalization follows Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999). 2. Gerda Lerner, “Reconceptualizing Differences among Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1 (1990): 106-118, reprinted in Gerald N. Grob and George A. Billias, Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, 6th ed., vol. 2, Since 1877 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 105-115, quote from 106. 3. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmlers Verlag, 1980), 1 (my translation). 4. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1947), 252, quoted in Deutschlandbilder in Dänemark und England, in Frankreich und den Niederlanden, ed. Hans Süssmuth (Baden-Baden: Nomos 1996), 79-86. 5. For a fuller exploration of this debate, see Michael J. Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3-155. 6. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 282. 7. Robert D. Dean, “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 22 (1998): 29-62. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. A good introduction to the field is Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase’s introduction in Enemy Images in American History, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1997), 1-42. See also Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Methods,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1387-1403; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream. The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For a succinct and highly critical overview, see Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (New York: Free Press, 2000). 11. See, for example, Michael Jochum, Eisenhower und Chruschtschow. Gipfeldiplomatie im Kalten Krieg 1955-1960 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996).

12-Frey

3/27/03

2:14 PM

220

Page 220

Marc Frey

Bibliography Clausewitz, Carl von. Vom Kriege. Bonn: Dümmlers Verlag, 1980. Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Methods,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1387-1403. Dean, Robert D. “Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy.” Diplomatic History 22 (1998): 29-62. Fiebig-von Hase, Ragnhild, and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds. Enemy Images in American History. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997. Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999. Gaddis, John Lewis.We Now Know. Rethinking Cold War History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Grob, Gerald N., and George A. Billias. Interpretations of American History. Patterns and Perspectives. 6th ed. Vol. 2, Since 1877. New York: Free Press, 1992. Hogan, Michael J., ed. America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Jochum, Michael. Eisenhower und Chruschtschow: Gipfeldiplomatie im Kalten Krieg 19551960. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996. Lerner, Gerda. “Reconceptualizing Differences among Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1 (1990): 106-118. Novick, Peter Novick. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Süssmuth, Hans, ed. Deutschlandbilder in Dänemark und England, in Frankreich und den Niederlanden. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996. Weber, Max. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. 4th ed. Tübingen: Mohr, 1947. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. New York: Free Press, 2000.

13-Fein

11/5/03

8:05 PM

Page 221

Chapter 13

INTERNATIONALIZING IDEOLOGIES A Commentary Seth Fein

A

s the conference that produced this book convened in December 1999, elite and popular forces converged in Seattle to rock the discourse of globalization. Although the outdoor protests that challenged neoliberalism’s “inevitable” progress gained the most television time, they had little to do with the collapse of the intergovernmental talks indoors. There, the problems were long-standing ones that revealed both the lack of international elite consensus about the form “free trade” should take and competing desires to use the World Trade Organization more to preserve or gain comparative advantages than to enact “universal” principles. This volume’s contributions by Guido Müller, Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, and Philipp Gassert examine transnational discourse and its consequences for international relations. In different ways, these essays interpret international ideological interactions formed in response to issues of state power but which, like the Seattle confrontations, transcend state-to-state engagements. Recently Akira Iriye has written that the development of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) marks the American century more than conventionally formulated extensions of military, economic, and diplomatic power.1 Iriye’s assertion points to the accumulated effect of studies about transnational bodies on recent historiography of international relations. And the works by SchmidtGernig, Gassert, and Müller contribute to this movement while forcing us to reconsider the implicit U.S.-centrism of Iriye’s perspective. These essays examine critical discourses—futurism, New Leftism, and Europeanism—at distinct moments in twentieth-century international history: the sociopolitical and economic “crisis” of the late 1960s and the aftermath of the Great War. All three contributions skillfully construct the contours of international rhetoric and demonstrate how nongovernmental entities disseminated ideas across national borders. Notes for this section begin on page 227.

13-Fein

11/5/03

222

8:05 PM

Page 222

Seth Fein

Let us begin with the future. Schmidt-Gernig offers us a typology of futurist theorizing as well as a peek at the “transnational network” that reproduced these midCold War discourses (see chapter 8). His essay usefully points out the particularities of its temporal framework, the burst of professionalized prediction around 1970. As Schmidt-Gernig notes, this type of intellectual production was not a new phenomenon, even if the practice’s sites—think tanks—were. And his analysis of the oftenon-the-mark prognoses produced three decades ago recalls those of late nineteenthcentury futurist novels, particularly Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); it, too, was written during a period of perceived social turmoil and with its author’s eyes fixed on the approaching twentieth century (just as Lester Brown’s were focused on the twenty-first). As with the writings analyzed by Schmidt-Gernig, many of Bellamy’s forecasted technological and organizational innovations came to pass, while the utopian social and political transformations he advocated to distribute those benefits did not. Schmidt-Gernig sensibly locates the anxieties represented in these futurologies in the environment in which they emerged, the insecurities of Western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Schmidt-Gernig has in the past grappled with a concluding comparison of U.S. and European futurologies, distinguishing shrewdly between the global focus of U.S.-based experts and the more parochial (regional and national) fields engaged by social scientists working in Western Europe. The echo of Louis Hartz2 is audible when Schmidt-Gernig suggests that the United States’ weaker domestic state sector combined with its stronger and more extensive economic and strategic (corporate and governmental) international power, compared to its West European “allies,” accounted for these conceptual differences. To me, though, the essay’s conclusion that the era’s various futurologies’ “basic prediction that scientific knowledge was not only expanding massively but would also become the major force of economic productivity,” sounds much like the rhetoric of U.S. elites after the two world wars who, as historians (such as Frank Costigliola and Richard Kuisel) have shown, vigorously exported U.S. socioeconomic and cultural models. These were not always graciously received, demonstrating cultural resistance and divergence among mature capitalist societies, differences that persisted into the 1970s and beyond, which are unfortunately muted in this version of SchmidtGernig’s work.3 I am not so sure that this new epoch is really all that new, that is, that the post1945 period has really been fundamentally different than the post-1919 era in terms of the impact of international systems of communication on the nature of international power. Changes seem to come more rapidly, but they seem to reinvent an older system more than replace it. As the geographer David Harvey and the historian Perry Anderson have (separately) demonstrated, the linked discourses of postmodernism and globalization (each of which emerged contemporaneously with Schmidt-Gernig’s futurologies ) were not generated by a paradigmatic shift in political economy. Rather, they were discursive renovations to a preexisting capitalist edifice.4 Relatedly, the discourse of futurology could do with a bit more critical interpretation than it receives in

13-Fein

11/5/03

8:05 PM

Page 223

Commentary: Internationalizing Ideologies

223

Schmidt-Gernig’s work, particularly regarding its representation of and connection to material power. Moving from the empirical to the methodological, it is not entirely clear whether Schmidt-Gernig is studying representations of transnationalization (i.e., discourse) or a case of transnationalization itself (i.e., process). I think this work can and should be both (i.e., discourse is process), but to do so these modes of analysis must be more discretely rendered and vigorously interrelated. These quibbles aside, Schmidt-Gernig’s methodological focus on the interplay between intellectual paradigms and public discourses in the study of intercultural and crossnational identities offers a valuable combination of the study of ideas and international relations in a crucial sphere of late twentieth-century thought and communication. Philipp Gassert’s essay pursues a similar agenda (see chapter 7). He relocates, however, our attention from inside (the think tank) to outside (the street), from a liberal ideology extorting, in most cases, centralized planning and social engineering, to another advocating antiauthoritarianism, direct democracy, spiritual renewal, and, in some cases, violence. He reminds us of the transnational context of the student mobilizations of the late 1960s. Transcending the all-too-common assertions of similarities among episodic uprisings—Paris, Chicago, Tokyo, Prague, Mexico City, for example—Gassert explores interpersonal links, not unlike the ones studied by Müller, between two national (West German and U.S.) New Left movements. Gassert’s analysis reminded me of a personal encounter. In 1993, I participated in a roundtable at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México that addressed the legacy of 1968, twenty-five years after the Mexican government violently suppressed student-led protests. Following my presentation, a member of the audience who had participated in that year’s events approached me to share his memory of the significant contact between Mexican and U.S. student radicals during that tumultuous epoch. One of the strengths of Gassert’s work is the attention it pays to one case of this under-studied dimension of the period’s sociointellectual international history. At times, though, Gassert seems overly concerned about redressing what he deems a U.S.-centric scholarly bias in international scholarship that occludes the influence of West German (not to mention other) intellectuals and organizers on their U.S. comrades. But instead of decentering our approach to intellectual history—to produce a less linear, more multinational, or, even better, non-national framework— Gassert merely reroutes the flow of ideas along a conventional U.S.-European axis (reversing the West-East flow to produce an East-West current). Such conceptual limitations regarding national identity overly obscure the important contribution he makes toward a multifaceted ideological analysis that combines comparative and interactional methods. The essay’s final move to address how the rise of a transnational mass-media regime problematizes our specific understanding of informational flows and our more general notions about cultural power in the age of audiovisual mass communication is also important. However, it requires more rigorous research and theorizing than offered here before it can be usefully deployed to evaluate television’s impact on the era’s transnational politics.

13-Fein

11/5/03

224

8:05 PM

Page 224

Seth Fein

One movement understandably (if notably) unconsidered in these two works is the New Right’s emergence in the 1960s (which, like the New Left, did not spring to action spontaneously but had important intellectual and organizational antecedents in the early postwar period). Much like the New Left, the New Right’s rhetoric was radically antistatist, objecting, too, to what it labeled elitist liberalism (reproduced within, among other institutions, Schmidt-Gernig’s establishment think tanks). But instead of the direct democracy, anti-imperialism, radical redistribution, and social experimentation advocated by Students for a Democratic Society (and its international analogues), the New Right asserted an anti-intellectual, antistatist populist critique of the decline of social order, economic opportunity, and unilateral international power, symbolized in the United States by Students for Goldwater.5 The final essay we turn to does consider (what it terms) rightist ideology, but during the pre-World War II years (not complicating the Cold War liberal consensus implicitly accepted by the two other works in this section). Guido Müller’s examination of European interwar internationalism seeks to revise conventional coupling of rightism and nationalism (see chapter 5). The placement of this essay in this section reminds us of the importance of the interaction between regional, temporal, and international factors (just as Gassert’s and Schmidt-Gernig’s works call attention to the need to mix sociological and intellectual analysis) in studying transnational ideas. In the afterglow of World War I—prior not only to Cold War establishment of U.S. power in Western Europe but also to the Depression and the rise of National Socialism’s ultra-rightist drive for autarky—internationalist-minded French and German elites together sought to construct a shared European identity in support of cooperative political and economic relations. In recovering this movement, Müller usefully articulates an important point also implied in Schmidt-Gernig’s essay, that as we explore nongovernmental international interactions we can neither divorce these experiences from their relationship to state power nor neglect their specific national contexts. Müller’s work contests conventional conceptions of contemporary European history by both positing a pre-Cold War prototype for post-1945 continentalism and proposing a conservative context for what is conventionally presumed today to be an inherently liberal movement (opposed in the recent past by Thatcherites in Britain and by various right-wing “extremists” on the continent as well as in the United States). In so doing, this work suggests that the prointegrationism that has marked center-right West European politics from Adenauer to Kohl and from de Gaulle to Chirac has been an extension of a moderate rightist continentalism that sought security arrangements and cultural independence that elided U.S. (and Soviet) domination and British obstructionism. (This interpretation perhaps allows us to understand better, too, the swift and independent Bonn diplomacy that guided reunification ahead of Washington interference.) We are all inmates of our own historiographical prisons. So it is self-indulgent but understandable (I hope) for me to offer some comparative analysis based on my own area specialization. In reading Müller’s work I was struck by conspicuous parallels between the Franco-German and Mexican-U.S. situations during the mid

13-Fein

11/5/03

8:05 PM

Page 225

Commentary: Internationalizing Ideologies

225

1920s. While differences between the cases—too numerous (and obvious) to delineate here—abound, there are striking similarities: extensive transnational border regions, long-standing animosities resulting in recent military conflicts, symbiotic relationships between national identity and stereotyping of the cross-border “other,” potential and realized economic interdependence. Moreover, Müller’s observation that the economic interests behind Franco-German cultural initiatives sponsored by the Comité franco-allemand de Documentation et de l’information and the Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuels in the mid 1920s were solidly based in finance capital mirrors U.S. patterns of international experimentation during the same period. For example, the International Bankers Committee in Mexico, led by the House of Morgan’s Thomas Lamont, urged diplomatic cooperation and unconditional recognition of the postrevolutionary state’s sovereignty, including its right to regulate foreign economic interests (which clashed with the reactionary interventionist position of U.S. petroleum companies, the most prominent direct investment south of the border). Seeking to influence Mexican policy through financial support for the regime, foregoing the instability of economic and political intervention urged by the political allies of foreign enclaves like oil, U.S. finance capital produced a comprehensive vision of international relations in the 1920s based in transnational interactions between local nongovernmental foreign representatives (promoting U.S. socioeconomic and political models).6 Mexico was but a fragment, although a significant one, of a global pattern of U.S. financial capitalists’ “informal” arrangement of economic and diplomatic relations.7 This was not a mere product of the diffuse and complex character of finance capital as it matured as the leading business sector of post-World War I U.S. international political economy; it was also derivative of the social types who comprised the period’s internationally minded U.S. banking establishment. The activities of these individuals often blurred distinctions between governmental and nongovernmental international relations, just as their careers passed through Washington, New York, and points abroad. But despite their solid footing in the capitalist establishment, it is difficult to label these individuals “conservative.” It is even more problematic— whether dealing with Müller’s Franco-German case or the U.S.-Mexican one—to categorize the international initiatives of these quintessential cosmopolitans as rightist. Müller implicitly recognizes the inadequacy of this ideological designation at several points (e.g., when he refers to Prince Karl Anton Rohan’s contribution to liberal and conservative European cooperation between World War I and II, prior to his later collaboration with National Socialists). Similarly, he earlier describes how Emile Mayrisch’s son-in-law, Pierre Viénot, resigned from his work with the Comité because it was increasingly suppressed by the conservative establishment, went on to a career in mainstream left politics under Blum in the 1930s, and then served antifascist/conservative nationalism under de Gaulle’s leadership during the war. (The last position, I suspect, based on Müller’s evidence, is where Viénot was probably most at home). Such apparent ideological fluctuations speak more to the limits of the social scientist’s schema than to the subject’s worldview. Recently Ronald Radosh

13-Fein

11/5/03

226

8:05 PM

Page 226

Seth Fein

somewhat disturbingly intervened in a scholarly internet discussion about resonances of William Appleman Williams’s idiosyncratic leftism in Patrick Buchanan’s populist rightism. Leaving aside Radosh’s own neoconservative trajectory since his New Left youth, his affirmation that Williams would find much to commend in Buchanan’s economic nationalism had the sting of plausibility.8 It seems to me that Müller’s figures are equally difficult to label, and his projected prosopography will likely make their ideological complexities more evident, for their internationalist initiatives seem to be decidedly liberal, even if their own backgrounds are based in a conservative establishment (which included notable reactionaries). In the U.S.-Mexican case, Dwight Morrow, another Morgan bank executive, is a perfect analogue to Müller’s figures. Morrow exemplifies how the U.S. financial sector influenced diplomacy and how U.S. foreign policy relied upon extragovernmental cultural contacts. Following his arrival as ambassador in Mexico City in 1927 to replace the racist, supercilious oil-enclave advocate James Sheffield, Morrow brokered a key settlement between foreign petroleum interests and the nationalist government of President Plutarco Elías Calles. This deal helped to establish more stable relations between Mexico and the United States, strengthening the postrevolutionary regime as it faced serious domestic challenges (including military uprising and religious civil war). It would be misleading to brand Morrow, and the banking culture from which he emerged, as clearly conservative; the same is likely true for Müller’s internationalistminded capitalists. Their economic interests and cultural undertakings promoted progressive (albeit nonradical) endeavors, aimed at international change. In Mexico, the ambassador and his wife, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, advertised their admiration for Mexican art (most famously by commissioning Diego Rivera’s Cuernavaca mural lauding the Mexican revolution’s iconographic agrarian rebel, Emiliano Zapata). Morrow also undertook pop-culture diplomacy in arranging for the international goodwill flight to Mexico City by his future son-in-law, Charles Lindbergh. These efforts were not limited to Morrow. Never more so than between the early 1920s and the end of World War II did U.S. businesspeople, intellectuals, artists, and cultural patrons converge in their attention to Mexico, nor did Mexican artists again receive such concentrated attention in the United States. This movement, reminiscent again of Müller’s Franco-German case, led not only to a readjustment of elite discourse but also influenced the production of popular images in leading culture industries, including Hollywood and Mexican cinema.9 Historians Helen Delpar, John Britton, Mauricio Tenorio, and others have appropriately represented this period as a golden age of U.S.-Mexican transnational cultural interaction.10 Its empirical contribution notwithstanding, there is room in Müller’s work for more methodological engagement with new cross-disciplinary historical approaches to international culture. The U.S.-Latin American field has recently been particularly fertile, producing, in addition to the Mexican examples cited above, works such as Frederick Pike’s study of intellectual image formation, Mark Berger’s dissection of the international power inscribed in academic discourses, Arturo Escobar’s deconstruction of “development,” and the sociocultural cases presented in the anthology of

13-Fein

11/5/03

8:05 PM

Page 227

Commentary: Internationalizing Ideologies

227

transnational histories Close Encounters of Empire.11 Such works are potentially as useful to Schmidt-Gernig and Gassert as to Müller for their provocative linkages of ideology, discourse, and everyday forms of international relations. These international histories might also help us to better understand contemporary events. Seattle and subsequent public battles over neoliberal economics have underlined that the battle over “globalization” is as much as anything part of a discursive war. Interstate fissures and popular challenges demonstrate neoliberalism’s frailty, particularly in this post-Cold War age, when it is impossible to contain and suppress outdoor and indoor dissent in the name of anti-communism. (Although in the post-11 September era, new rhetorical forms of international consensus are being deployed in the name of anti-terrorism, the results of these efforts cannot, of course, be assessed yet.) Today’s predictions of capitalist utopias (and dystopias) are not all that different from earlier projections of international orders (and counterorders) described by Müller, Schmidt-Gernig, and Gassert. For instance, as we watch various European-U.S. conflicts over trade and culture, we might recall Müller’s examination of earlier elite efforts to defend European interests against U.S. power, or Schmidt-Gernig’s observation that “global” forecasts inevitably express specific geopolitical contexts and interests. And as we try to unravel the meaning of the internet for international control and resistance, we may usefully ponder Gassert’s suggestive observations about how television affected cross-cultural politics in the 1960s. Together, these essays teach a single cautionary lesson about obstacles to the implementation of international/ist ideals.

Notes 1. Akira Iriye, “A Century of NGOs,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 421-435. 2. Louis Hartz, The American Liberal Tradition: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955). 3. Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 4. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). 5. On the connections between the New Left and its radical antecedents, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987). On the rise of the New Right, see Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988). For a recent analysis that encompasses both movements, see Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, The New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

13-Fein

11/5/03

228

8:05 PM

Page 228

Seth Fein

6. See Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 19161932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Alan Knight, U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910-1940: An Interpretation (La Jolla: University of California at San Diego Center for U.S.Mexican Studies, 1987); Emilio Zebadúa, Banqueros y revolucionarios: la soberanía financiera de México, 1914-1929 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994). 7. For one of the foundational accounts of this “corporatist” alliance, see Michael Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977); a recent work that innovatively approaches the culture at the nexus of state and finance capital international interactions is Emily Rosenberg’s Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 8. Ronald Radosh, “William Appleman Williams and Pat Buchanan,” [email protected] (27 November 1999), 14:32:47. 9. See Seth Fein, “Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,” Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940-2000, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 159198; idem, “La imagen de México: la segunda guerra mundial y la propaganda fílmica de Estados Unidos,” in México-Estados Unidos: Encuentros y desencuentros en el cine, ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan Trujillo, and Mónica Verea (Mexico City: IMCINE/UNAM, 1996), 41-59; idem, “El cine y las relaciones culturales entre México y Estados Unidos durante la década 1930,” Secuencia 34 (spring 1996): 155-195. 10. Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992); John A. Britton, Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995); Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, “Gringos viejos: radicales norteamericanos en los años treinta y su visión de México (una interpretación),” Secuencia 21 (fall 1991): 95-116; see also, idem, “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1940s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1156-1187 (the entire issue is devoted to “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History”); and John Oles, South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993). 11. Frederick Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Mark Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898-1990 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).

13-Fein

11/5/03

8:05 PM

Page 229

Commentary: Internationalizing Ideologies

229

Bibliography Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Berger, Mark. Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898-1990. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995. Blumenthal, Sidney. The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Britton, John A. Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Delpar, Helen. The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935 . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Fein, Seth. “El cine y las relaciones culturales entre México y Estados Unidos durante la década 1930.” Secuencia 34 (spring 1996): 155-195. _____. “Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 19402000, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, 159-198. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 159-198. _____. “La imagen de México: la segunda guerra mundial y la propaganda fílmica de Estados Unidos.” In México-Estados Unidos: Encuentros y desencuentros en el cine, ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan Trujillo, and Mónica Verea, 41-59. Mexico City: IMCINE/UNAM, 1996. Hartz, Louis. The American Liberal Tradition: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Hogan, Michael. Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in AngloAmerican Economic Diplomacy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977. Iriye, Akira. “A Century of NGOs.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (summer 1999): 421-435. Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Joseph, Gilbert, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Klatch, Rebecca E. A Generation Divided: The New Left, The New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Knight, Alan. U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1910-1940: An Interpretation. La Jolla: University of California at San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1987. Kuisel, Richard. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

13-Fein

11/5/03

230

8:05 PM

Page 230

Seth Fein

Oles, John. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Pike, Frederick. The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Rosenberg, Emily. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Smith, Robert Freeman. The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916-1932. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Tenorio Trillo, Mauricio.”Gringos viejos: radicales norteamericanos en los años treinta y su visión de México (una interpretación).” Secuencia 21 (fall 1991): 95-116. _____. “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1940s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1156-1187. Zebadúa, Emilio. Banqueros y revolucionarios: la soberanía financiera de México, 1914-1929. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 231

Part V

ANNOTATED SOURCES

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 232

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 233

Chapter 14

THE INVENTION OF STATE AND DIPLOMACY The First Political Testament of Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg (1698)* Annotation by Volker Depkat

The state is the condition of possibility of all diplomacy and international relations. Yet the state as we know it is itself the product of a particular political culture— Europe‘s political culture, to be precise. Statehood is neither an anthropological constant nor a cultural necessity, let alone the fulfilment of history, as Georg Friedrich Wilhlem Hegel (1770-1831) thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather, it was the Europeans who invented the modern state roughly between 1500 and 1750. The notion of the state is in itself a system of meaning that is both the result of power-structured human and the precondition for subsequent political behavior. The state is the product as well as the producer of political behavior. As such, the concept of the state is embedded in and grows out of larger, inherently European systems of meaning with their Greek and Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic roots.1 The invention of the state produced new kinds of boundaries, which in turn produced international relations in the first place. The modern state and diplomacy, that is, the institutional framework that regulates the interaction among these political entities, emerged in the same historical process. Diplomacy began to evolve in the fifteenth century in those areas of Europe with relatively developed statehood, that is, Italy and Spain. Diplomacy then turned into a fully regulated and self-sufficient system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reached the climax of its influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period of ”classical” diplomacy under the conditions of a balance of power.2 Along with these institutional changes in the early modern period came a transformation of mental maps that guided the understanding of what defined a superior Notes for this section begin on page 241.

14-Depkat

3/27/03

234

2:09 PM

Page 234

Volker Depkat

prince and what formed the essence of politics. In this context, the “Erste Ermahnung Kurfürst Friedrichs III an seinen Nachfolger,” the first political testament of Frederick III (1657-1713), Elector of Brandenburg, is important in at least three respects.3 First, the testament manifested those mental patterns that, in establishing the norms, values, and concepts of good government, guided the conduct of politics. Second, it also constituted an act of creating different kinds of boundaries that defined the inside and outside in their relevance to foreign policy. These boundaries were made up by a complex combination of premodern and modern elements. Third, this political testament became a factor within the developing state-building process; it propelled the process through which the idea of state as a clearly identifiable territorial entity was carved out from traditional, that is, basically medieval, understandings of political organization. Frederick III was the second in a row of four princes that headed the house of Hohenzollern between 1640 and 1786.4 His father, Frederick William, the Great Elector (1620-1688), had established a standing army, weakened the estates in his territories, wrestled the right to collect some permanent taxes from them, and had greatly expanded the Hohenzollerns‘ territory.5 During the Thirty Years War, he incorporated the prince-dioceses of Cammin (Pomerania), Halberstadt, Minden, and Magdeburg into his domain. In the following war between Sweden and Poland, Frederick William sided with both Sweden and Poland, both of whom then granted him sovereignty in Prussia in 1660. In 1675 he even defeated Sweden, which had invaded the Mark of Brandenburg. Frederick William’s son, Frederick III, continued his father‘s extremely agile and cunning diplomacy of changing alliances and applied all his energies to becoming king in Prussia.6 The duchy of Prussia, situated on the Baltic coast east of Danzig and north of Warsaw, was not part of the Holy Roman Empire and thus allowed for this advancement without drawing into question the political organization of the empire. In return for the Hohenzollern’s support in the Spanish War of Succession (1701-1714), Emperor Leopold I consented to Frederick III’s monarchic aspirations. On 18 January 1701, Frederick III crowned himself in the city of Königsberg, becoming Frederick I, King in Prussia. He also continued to be the Elector of Brandenburg, since this was the position on which his power in the Holy Roman Empire rested. Frederick III/I carried on his father’s state-building policies. He patronized the arts and sciences by founding the University of Halle (1694), the Academy of Arts (1696), as well as the Society of Science (1701). By bringing the sculptor and architect Andreas Schlüter (1660-1714) to Berlin in 1694, Frederick III sought to translate absolutist self-conceptions into an architectural program of royal capital building. Frederick III’s first political testament clearly revealed his ideas on the characteristics of a “good” prince around 1700.7 In Frederck III’s view, an ideal prince should be pious, just, and hardworking. He should take care of the business of governing himself, but he should also ask experts for advice to ensure well-informed and carefully considered decisions. A good ruler administered justice to every one of his

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 235

Annotation: Political Testament of Frederick III

235

subjects and saw to keeping the peace as long as possible, for every war meant a sacrifice for his subjects. All of these ideas complied with traditional concepts of an ideal monarch, which grew out of an ethic that was essentially Christian. In this understanding, a monarch was never free to do whatever he wanted; rather, he was bound in his actions by God’s law. Even the absolute monarchs of the early modern period were never considered to be above all law and therefore were never entitled to use their power arbitrarily. Rather, God punished unjust uses of power and illegitimate policies by thwarting the monarch’s efforts. A monarch’s special relationship to God thus originated in the divine right of kings; however, it was a monarch’s duty to secure further divine support through constant prayer and a political conduct agreeable to God. That is why Frederick III interprets the success of his political actions as a manifestation of God’s blessing, which in turn legitimized his policies. Beyond this rather traditional orientation toward God as the authority that distinguishes “just” and “good” from “unjust” and “bad” policies, Frederick III’s testament revealed an inherently modern dynamism. The second criterion that defined the legitimate use of power was its efficacy in promoting the state’s sovereignty. Frederick III did not yet speak of the state but only of the House of Hohenzollern. However, the underlying concept connected to it remained the geographical area bound together by the monarch’s sovereign rule. The inhabitants of this dynastically integrated territory were considered to be permanent members of this political organization, in which the monarch as the head of the executive and as the supreme commander of the army claimed the monopoly of domestic power. This political unit is to some extent still regarded as the personal property of the dynasty. Note that Frederick always spoke of “my house,“ a word choice that identified the interests of the state with the interests of the ruling family. Yet, according to Frederick III, the members of the family were no longer free to do with this property whatever they liked. Rather, the preservation of territorial cohesion appeared as the central aim of all politics, to which everything else was subordinated. The prime instrument for safeguarding the existence of the dynasty, and therefore the state, was, so Frederick III explicitly said, the principle of primogeniture. We know that Frederick did not accept his father‘s testamentary decree, according to which his stepbrothers were to inherit the principalities of Minden and Halberstadt as well as the county of Ravensberg. This would have fragmented the Hohenzollern territory through testamentary contract solely for the purpose of supporting family members. To defend his case, Frederick III cited the family treaty of Gera (1598). This agreement had established the principle of primogeniture and constituted the final division of Hohenzollern territory, which once and for all established three ruling lines: the electorate of Brandenburg, to which the duchy of Prussia was bound by personal union in 1618, and the two Franconian principalities of Bayreuth and Ansbach. However, the treaty of Gera had only divided the ancestral homelands of the Hohenzollern dynasty; it left the problem of future acquisitions untouched. Frederick‘s stepmother, Princess Dorothea Sophie, had thus some reason

14-Depkat

3/27/03

236

2:09 PM

Page 236

Volker Depkat

to claim her share of the inheritance. The Great Elector, in turn, believed he was acting in accordance with the family treaties, since (except for the county of Ravensberg) he was only distributing territories acquired by the Hohenzollerns after 1598. In adapting the treaty of Gera to present needs, Frederick III extended the principle of territorial unity to all areas presently under the Brandenburg line’s rule. He counted this among the maxims of future statesmanship—a nice example of how the interests of the state were becoming increasingly detached from the person of the monarch. Moreover, Frederick III’s testament revealed a notion of the state that defined it as an isolated polity solely committed to its own rational interests. Frederick invited his successor to ensure that all resources would remain within the country, as they were seen as the basis of power. In pointing out that money spent on actors and singers was money sent to Italy, he drew a line defining the inside and outside and sustaining a territorially integrated political unit that could be separated from other, similarly bordered entities. This demonstrates how the economic doctrines of mercantilism played a role in the invention of the state. Apart from this domestic dimension, there was also an “international” aspect in the idea of “good” politics, which fulfilled itself in the continuity of the political unit bound together by the rule of the Hohenzollern family. The head of the house not only defended his sovereign rule against family members or the estates‘ claims to participation; he also had to defend the sovereignty and integrity of his territory against outward competition. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, had established a new form of political organization in Germany that had granted territorial sovereignty (ius territoriale) to the estates of the empire. From then on, the German princes were free to enter into alliances among themselves or with other European powers as long as they were not directed against the emperor or the Holy Roman Empire. The treaty had thus created a fragile balance of some hundred or so sovereign territories that used their right of alliance to prevent a single dynasty from becoming too powerful. The dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire were granted sovereignty to ally themselves with European powers as long as these alliances were not directed against the Holy Roman Empire; this arrangement was the prerequisite for modern statehood and diplomacy in a very modern sense. The classical age of oldregime European diplomacy began with the Treaty of Westphalia. In this context, alliances with other powers became most important, since they were a means to secure both the state’s existence and its potential for aggrandizement. The political testament of Frederick III revealed all of this in a nutshell. First, he invited his successor never to side against the emperor, since this would mean a breach of the political order created in 1648. The house of Hohenzollern thus accepted the emperor as the supreme head of the Holy Roman Empire, and this deference in turn defined the limits of their own aspirations to glory and greater influence. It is no surprise, then, that Frederick III based his monarchy on Prussia, a territory that lay outside of the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, Frederick III advised his successor to stand in good alliance with either Sweden or Denmark, since this would prevent the two from forming an alliance against Brandenburg. Next, the

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 237

Annotation: Political Testament of Frederick III

237

Prussian monarch was urged to keep a watchful eye on all of the neighboring powers. In a world full of princes like Frederick III who were attempting to secure the existence of their states and enhance their influence at the same time, there was always the potential risk of other powers allying against the Hohenzollern dynasty. On the other hand, too aggressive a policy from the Hohenzollern side also appeared as a reckless endeavor. Frederick III thus warned his successor not to start wars carelessly, since this aggression might destroy the Hohenzollern sphere of influence altogether, and he pointed to Sweden‘s fate after the Thirty Years’ War as an example. Alliances secured the balance of power but also brought the danger that one single state could use them to achieve hegemony. The very condition of possibility for such a modern understanding of diplomacy was a concept of “international relations” that interpreted the interaction of states solely in terms of secular usefulness. This ideologically rather neutral rationale actually defined policy options: to enlarge one’s own sphere of influence without engaging in hazardous foreign policies that might ruin the state altogether, to strive for favorable borders, and to make use of a competing dynasty‘s momentary weakness. War was an integral part of these policies. Standing armies were established in those days, and Frederick III spent a fortune on the training of his soldiers. However, the impetus for military aggression was balanced by a rationale of deterrence, calculated risks, and limited warfare. Frederick III thus directed that his successors should maintain an army strong enough to keep others from attacking Hohenzollern territory, but not so strong that it would ruin their finances. Frederick III’s ideas on foreign matters and foreign policy were strongly influenced by his religious considerations. He asked his successor to support the Protestant powers against the Catholics. This is a remnant of the confessional epoch in Europe, which had culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, when Catholic and Protestant territories had fought for confessional hegemony. In 1700, the confessional age was a bygone era, while the national epoch with its own form of warfare had not yet begun. Frederick’s political testament clearly reveals that the modern elements of his thinking about the state and diplomacy combined with premodern ones. The lines between inside and outside on this mental map originated in the Reformation, and they produced different political units than the ones discussed above; it was no longer the ruling dynasty that defined a political entity and distinguished it from others. Rather, confessional affiliations carved out camps that went beyond a single territory, and this in turn defined the self, the other, and foreign relations in quite different terms. This complex juxtaposition of premodern and modern elements places the testament of Frederick III squarely in the middle of a transitional period in which religious and confessional motives for foreign policy were increasingly superseded by secular ones which defined foreign policies in rational terms of state interest. Frederick’s first political testament was not his last. In addition to several private testaments, he also wrote a second political testament in 1705, after he had become king in Prussia, which struck the same themes. His testaments thus are indicative of the ongoing state-building processes around 1700: they make a strong case for a cul-

14-Depkat

3/27/03

238

2:09 PM

Page 238

Volker Depkat

tural approach to diplomatic history; thus, we should not simply think about them as passive reflectors of extratextual realities. Cultural approaches always take into consideration the power of texts to actually produce a reality. From this point of view, Frederick III’s testament served not only as an indicator of but also as a factor in these state-building processes; it actually pushed this process further by trying to establish maxims of the state that his successors, not only his own son, Frederick William I, but all future princes of Brandenburg, were then supposed to comply with. Frederick III saw his testament as an act of establishing a policy tradition for the House of Hohenzollern, which would thereby guarantee a continuity that went well beyond the person of a single monarch. This actually created—and not only reflected—the notion of an abstract state whose interests superseded those of individuals and all living generations. We should hence not only read the testament as a somehow passive reflector of a mental process already completed, but as political action that tried to push a new idea and establish it for future generations. The well-being of this abstract state as an organism of its own was considered to be the only criterion that determined whether a concrete policy was good or bad. In so doing Frederick III saw himself as further developing a policy tradition that had begun with his father. The seventh and final point of his testament, then, ordered his son to read not only his father’s but also his grandfather’s political testaments, not once, but several times. The source under review is thematically and methodologically significant for our understanding of the interplay of culture and international relations. First, it reveals some of the images and mental concepts that were not in themselves inherently political but nevertheless did structure thought and practice in policy around 1700. The cultural matrix here rested in the idea of the family. The ruler not only appeared as the head of the Hohenzollern family but also as the head of the family, a family that consisted of his subjects; he ruled over his territory like a father ruled over his family. This constellation reflected the divine order of the entire world. Frederick III was (supposedly) to his subjects what God was to the family of all Christians, the father who loved, supported, admonished, and protected his children. Each workday, Frederick III began with a prayer, thereby putting himself in a special relationship to God, the father in heaven. The notion of political sovereignty reflected the unshaken authority of a father over his family. This view had serious repercussions for the metaphorical and practical conceptualization of international relations. All other princes were likewise understood to be the sovereign heads of families. The interaction of states thus presented itself as an interaction among families, and this made marriages an instrument of diplomacy. Marriage could be used to protect or to enlarge one’s territory, but it could also pose a danger (the above-mentioned dispute with Frederick III’s stepmother exemplifies this quite well). New “in-laws” meant new actors, new claims, and new constellations in the field of international relations. This last remark takes us to the methodological implications of the source under consideration. For cultural historians, the “state” or the “international system” are not ahistorical and therefore unchangeable constants; they do not represent solid objective

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 239

Annotation: Political Testament of Frederick III

239

realities per se but cultural constructions, and as such, inventions by all participants. These “inventions” have a history that rests in the change of perception patterns, value systems, images, and ideas over time. Worldviews contain a certain form of political logic. We need to analyze the history of the international system in the context of existing worldviews and rationales. The case of Frederick III presents us with a logic of foreign relations, state, and politics that, although familiar on first sight, is actually very different from own. Why? Because Frederick III (and monarchs like him) were just about to create the modern state, the modern international system, and modern diplomacy; indeed, they often found themselves precisely on the borderline between the traditional and the new. Cultural approaches to international relations heighten our awareness of the “otherness” of the past, an otherness that originates in different contexts, values, norms, ideals, images, and their relation to each other. Frederick’s political testament reveals some of the core values that defined the weltanschauung of his time, a system that was essentially premodern but on the brink of becoming modern. Although it was primarily designed to influence the political sphere, the testament not only comprises major elements of Frederick III‘ s grand strategy (securing the integrity of the Hohenzollern territory and heightening the house’s “international” power); it also provides us with a window on the cultural past, notably the values that informed and structured the thought and behavior of people at the time. We are left to wonder when, exactly, heads of state actually stopped considering statehood and international relations as “family affairs” and how this influenced later eras of diplomacy. But this is a different question for a different source.

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 240

SOURCE Elector Frederick III’s First Admonition for His Successor

Maxims of state that my descendants may wish to comply with.8 First, a ruler must put his trust in Almighty God, in whom everything originates, and, in laying his case before Him, must pray devoutly to Him every morning and every evening. Afterwards, he should joyfully begin his work, administering the law and justice to everyone without favoring any persons, call meetings of the privy council frequently, and, in case something important comes up, ask his privy councillors for their opinion.… Secondly, a prince has to devote himself to the interest of the house and should never allow for further divisions other than the one of Franconia to be introduced into the house.… My house has achieved its greatness through nothing but the introduction of the primogeniture that my father has left to me in writing of his own hand, and he would never have issued a decree contrary to this principle, had he eventually not been misled by my stepmother’s constant lamentation. However, I never confirmed his provision because it ran counter to the treaty of Gera in which the whole house had unanimously and under oath agreed that only three ruling lines would be tolerated.… Additionally, a ruling Elector of Brandenburg has to keep an eye on all his neighbors and has to see, above all, that he lives in agreement with them, and that he does not engage in any useless conflict without a cause, so that things may not go for him as they went for Sweden. In particular, my successor should always maintain friendly and neighborly relations with Holland and the Electors of Saxony—especially with Holland, because it shares religion and faith with us. He must not allow for the [Dutch] republic to be destroyed, for, if this were the case, the same could happen to us in the end. However, he must also not help Holland to gain even more power so that it may become uncontrollable. My successor will also have to pay attention to the Emperor as the head of the Holy Roman Empire, and, wherever possible, seek good relations with the Archdukes of Austria at all times, because it is certain

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

Page 241

Annotation: Political Testament of Frederick III

241

that my house has profited in many respects from the Emperor. Elector Frederick I was the first to receive the Electorate from Emperor Sigismund and on this occasion he committed himself to siding with the Emperor for all times to come. Thirdly, he [Frederick III’s successor] should ensure that he stands in good alliance with the crowns of Denmark or Sweden so that, in case any one of the two starts a conflict with us, we will have good chances in this war and will no doubt have the same assistance of Almighty God that my Father had in the recent war against Sweden. However, I admonish my successor to abstain from beginning any ill-considered war and to strive for keeping the peace as long as war can be prevented so that his subjects may not be ruined but protected.… And I admonish and remind my successor in the Electorate to look after the Protestants, because otherwise it can easily happen that the Catholics will wipe out the Protestants entirely.… Fourth, my successor must take care that the strength of the army is such that our neighbors will have to fear it. However, in times of peace he should not hold more soldiers than the country can support.… Sixth, a ruler has to ensure at all times that no new entertainments such as operas, comedies, and all other carnivals are introduced, … that is why I advise my son against it and suggest that he use his money for pious foundations, churches, and schools through which either God or the country gain benefit; and all the money remains in the country; whereas everything is sent abroad to Italy by the comedians.… I have always fared well by using my money for the maintenance of my soldiers and representative buildings rather than for building opera houses, and that is why Almighty God has given his blessing on all of my undertakings so that everything I ventured turned out successful.

Notes *

I would like to thank W. Daniel Wilson in Berkeley, California, for his great help with this chapter.

1. For a comparative history of the state, see Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1999). 2. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London: Routledge, 1995). 3. I extracted those parts from the testament that are most relevant to our subject; due to limited space I could not select all of the important ones. 4. For the most recent work on the Hohenzollern dynasty, see Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, Die Hohenzollern (Berlin: Siedler, 1995). 5. Ernst Opgenoorth, Friedrich Wilhelm, der Große Kurfürst von Brandenburg: Eine politische Biographie, 2 vols. (Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Musterschmidt, 1971-1978); Gerhard Oestreich, Friedrich Wilhelm, der Große Kurfürst (Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Musterschmidt, 1971).

14-Depkat

3/27/03

2:09 PM

242

Page 242

Volker Depkat

6. Research on Frederick III/I is scarce, although we do learn something about him from biographies written on his son, Frederick William I, King in Prussia; see Carl Hinrichs, Friedrich Wilhelm I. König in Preußen: Eine Biographie, vol. 1., Jugend und Aufstieg (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941). The Hohenzollern Yearbook (1900) celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Prussian monarchy, is exclusively about Frederick III/I; see Paul Seidel, ed., Hohenzollern Jahrbuch: Forschungen und Abbildungen zur Geschichte der Hohenzollern in Brandenburg-Preußen 4 (1900). See also Frank-Lothar Kroll, ed., Die preußischen Könige (Munich: Beck, 2000). On an explanatory note, Frederick started out as Frederick III, elector of Brandenburg, and formally he continued to be that even after he had become “King in Prussia.“ Due to the legal situation in the German Reich he could only become “King“ outside of the German territory, and this was Prussia. “King in Prussia“ is therefore the constitutionally correct form. 7. Fritz Hartung, “Die politischen Testamente der Hohenzollern,” Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preußischen Geschichte 25 (1913): 333-363; Hans Hallmann, “Die letztwilligen Verfügungen im Hause Brandenburg, 1415-1740,” Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preußischen Geschichte 37 (1925): 1-30. 8. The following is my translation from Richard Dietrich, ed., Die politischen Testamente der Hohenzollern (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1986), 211-216.

Bibliography Dietrich, Richard, ed. Die politischen Testamente der Hohenzollern. Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1986. Hallmann, Hans. “Die letztwilligen Verfügungen im Hause Brandenburg, 1415-1740.“ Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preußischen Geschichte 37 (1925): 1-30. Hamilton, Keith, and Richard Langhorne. The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration. London: Routledge, 1995. Hartung, Fritz. “Die politischen Testamente der Hohenzollern.“ Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preußischen Geschichte 25 (1913): 333-363. Hinrichs, Carl. Friedrich Wilhelm I. König in Preußen: Eine Biographie. Vol. 1. Jugend und Aufstieg. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941. Kroll, Frank-Lothar, ed. Die preußischen Könige. Munich: Beck, 2000. Küntzel, Georg, and Martin Hass, eds. Die politischen Testamente der Hohenzollern nebst ergänzenden Aktenstücken. 3 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1919. Oestreich, Gerhard. Friedrich Wilhelm, der Große Kurfürst. Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Musterschmidt, 1971. Opgenoorth, Ernst. Friedrich Wilhelm, der Große Kurfürst von Brandenburg: Eine politische Biographie. 2 vols. Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Zurich: Musterschmidt, 1971-1978. Reinhard, Wolfgang. Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Beck, 1999. Stamm-Kuhlmann, Thomas. Die Hohenzollern. Berlin: Siedler, 1995.

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

7:34 PM

Page 243

Chapter 15

THE RAT RACE FOR PROGRESS A Punch Cartoon of the Opening of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition Annotation by Wolfram Kaiser

The Crystal Palace Exhibition

World exhibitions were imminently important in the nineteenth century because they created global public spaces through the mass visits of people from all sorts of social backgrounds and from many different countries. They were also extensively reported on in newspapers and journals worldwide. Initially, world exhibitions were mainly industrial exhibitions, with international participation. However, the second exhibition in Paris in 1855 already had a special pavilion for works of art, and the scope of subsequent exhibitions was progressively extended to include sections on common development issues in an age of internationalization, such as education, the future role of women, and the “social question.”1 The first world exhibition took place in London in 1851.2 Industrial exhibitions had been organized in several countries before this, but they had always been limited to exhibits from one country only. This is true, for example, of the French industrial exhibitions started by the Republic in 1798 to make French industry more competitive with that of the leading industrial power at the time, Britain.3 The same applies to industrial exhibitions organized by several German states in the first half of the nineteenth century. The idea of internationalizing these exhibitions was proposed at the time of the Second Republic in 1849, but the protectionist forces in France were still strictly opposed to foreign competition at their exhibitions. It was thus left to Britain to organize the first world exhibition only five years after the abolition of the Corn Laws and the introduction of the policy of free trade. One key motivation behind the organization of the exhibition was to facilitate the cultural representation of international industrial competition to demonstrate the general superiority of the Notes for this section begin on page 248.

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

7:34 PM

Page 244

244

Wolfram Kaiser

British social system of production and industrial products and to promote British exports and international trade. Reflecting the free trade ideology, the organizers also expected the international exhibition to contribute to universal peace by facilitating intercultural encounters and the global exchange of goods and ideas.

The Rat Race for Progress This cartoon was published in the English satirical magazine Punch. It presents the world exhibition as a “derby race,” the most popular British horse race at the time, although it looks more like a rat race of all nations for progress and modernity.4 The Crystal Palace is in the background and shown as a kind of grand stand at the race course; it was a captivating and universally acclaimed building made solely of iron and glass and constructed by the architect Joseph Paxton. In the cartoon, Paxton is shown running in front of the national competitors behind him. Just in front of him, on a dog, is the standard figure representing the magazine Punch. Large crowds on and in front of the Crystal Palace building and in the foreground follow the race. Most of the spectators look like members of the British “respectable classes” who would have been able to afford the high entrance fee on the opening day, and some foreigners. The cartoon interpreted the world exhibition in a way that is revealing for the dominant view of international competition and relations in Britain at the time. The presentation of the different riders and their respective place in the race was also to some extent indicative of the progress of different countries and continents as seen by the Punch cartoonist and journalists, based on their impressions of the different national sections in the exhibition grounds. The satirical magazine, like most influential British newspapers by 1851, was not opposed to the liberalization of world trade through the policy of free trade. Quite the contrary—Punch made a mockery of warnings by British protectionists and outright xenophobes before the start of the exhibition. The latter had warned that at best, the event would lead to the import of bad morals and republican ideas; at worst, it would destroy British industry through foreign competition or provoke the revolution that Britain had avoided in 1848-49. But despite its general support for free trade, Punch also applied irony to the more ambitious (and elusive) hopes of many radical free traders, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, that the intercultural encounters at the world exhibitions would necessarily enhance international understanding and promote world peace. Punch was also clearly skeptical that the international competition in the global public space created by the world exhibitions would always take place in an orderly fashion. Rather, the cartoon presented the national riders as scrambling in wild panic for the finishing line. At the same time, the cartoon reflected the idea of a basic universality, which was still characteristic of the first world exhibition. Note that the European nations and the Americans are not all pictured as running ahead of the rest of the world, or, in other words, as economically and politically more advanced. See the American on a Colt

7:34 PM

Annotation: Punch Cartoon

Figure 15.1

3/27/03

Source: “The Great Derby Race for Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-One,” Punch 20 (1851): 208.

15-Kaiser Page 245

245

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

246

7:34 PM

Page 246

Wolfram Kaiser

revolver on the right, far behind the front-runners. There is also a European rider with a spiked helmet just behind the African elephant and next to an American Indian. The cartoon did not yet differentiate between an “occidental” or “Western,” more advanced culture on the one hand and supposedly inferior non-European cultures on the other. The same idea of a basic universality and (at least in principle) of comparable abilities of and equal opportunities for all nations and cultures would be less likely to be found in similar visual representations of later world exhibitions at the height of imperialism. The undisputed race leader was England, personified by John Bull, followed by a Scotsman. The Crystal Palace exhibition, indeed, underlined British industrial superiority, particularly in mass consumer goods and the machinery to produce them; it increased the general curiosity in Europe for the reasons for Britain’s rapid economic advance, especially for British production methods, its industrial relations, and its new external trade policy. The Crystal Palace exhibition contributed significantly to the dissemination of free trade ideology, especially in France. Here, the Second Empire used its first world exhibition in 1855 to prepare the ground in very general cultural terms for the liberalization of trade, which followed in the bilateral socalled Cobden-Chevalier treaty of 1860.5 At the same time, John Bull in the picture, despite what looks like a smile of satisfaction, still keeps an eye on the other riders. After all, the exhibition had also shown that countries like France and some North German member states of the customs union “Zollverein” were already catching up quickly, at least in some areas. The systematic comparison facilitated by the international exhibition also revealed that the industrial race leader was lagging behind in other respects. In particular, visitors recognized France as being undisputedly more advanced not only in its works of art; the French also seemed ahead in the application of art to industrial products and generally in questions of design and taste. The cartoon represents France in the foreground on the left by its president, who later abolished the already weak republic in December 1851 and then declared himself emperor in 1852. Napoleon III, as he then became known, appears in this carton dressed in his preferred bourgeois clothes, similar to those he might have worn when he was still in exile in London before 1848. He is riding a galloping horse with a stylish harness, moving elegantly. This contrasts sharply with the English bull, an energetic and difficult to stop animal, which is also wild and uncultivated. These two animal images were clearly meant to symbolize certain basic (assumed) characteristics of the two national cultures. Despite the general satisfaction with British industrial performance, the exhibition also increased a longing in Britain for the supposedly superior continental European style and taste, and it led to repeated demands by Cobden and others to adopt it. Britain and France occupied approximately one half and one third, respectively, of the entire exhibition space. This served to strengthen the impression of their superiority as the two most advanced industrial countries. Symbolically, Punch placed a “Yankee,” the common name for Americans at the time, almost at the end of the field;

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

7:34 PM

Page 247

Annotation: Punch Cartoon

247

his hopeless position reflects the general idea conveyed by the small American section that the United States remained a basically agricultural economy and was unlikely to become more competitive in industrial products “For some generations to come,” as The Times (wrongly) predicted in one of its reports.6 The high transport costs across the Atlantic, the still comparatively low industrial export interest in the United States, and the lack of public subsidies to support a strong national showing, all contributed to the meager American performance. In the eyes of European commentators, the U.S. presentation was not at all up to the earlier prediction of Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America that the United States had the potential in the longer term to dominate the world in tandem with Russia.7 Three impressions served to correct the initially negative assessment of the United States. The first was the repeated victory of American harvesting machines over British competitors in several field contests during the summer. True, these machines were invented and used for agriculture, but they clearly demonstrated the potential of American machinery production. The second and third impressions were combined pictorially in the Yankee’s means of locomotion; he sits on a Colt revolver, a decidedly superior “method of vaccination” (as The Times called it 8) shown in the American section, which at least alludes to the potential military power of this rapidly growing country. The knives figuring as the Colt’s legs in the cartoon represent a bet that an American won in London during the exhibition summer when he unlocked a supposedly unbreakable British-made lock. This was no mean feat in the eyes of the British, who had bet on his success or failure, and it strengthened the image of Americans as a people prepared to overcome all obstacles and succeed against all odds. The last rider deserving special mention is the Chinese man in the foreground. We now know that pigs are among the most intelligent animals, but in 1851 they were popularly considered to be stupid, and they were certainly much slower than the English bull or the French horse. And while the Chinese rider at least manages to identify the general thrust of human progress, the pig is fast asleep and also facing in the wrong direction, evidently causing the officer in front to laugh wholeheartedly. China was never officially represented at world exhibitions until 1904, except for exhibits brought to Europe and North America by Western tradesmen and provincial Chinese dignitaries. At the same time, the intra-Asian comparison with Japan began only with the exhibition in Paris in 1867 when the Japanese Empire presented the first in a whole series of national contributions. Their contributions left a marked impression in the Atlantic world due to Japan’s rapid modernization and the country’s general willingness to adopt “Western” systems of production, forms of government, and elements of high culture. China, still a positive point of reference in European discourses in the age of the enlightenment, appeared in this cartoon as immobile and incapable of movement—in other words, as easy prey in the coming era of more rapid colonial expansion.

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

248

7:34 PM

Page 248

Wolfram Kaiser

Cartoons as Sources of International Cultural History The world exhibitions produced a massive amount of valuable sources for the study of the cultural history of international relations. The means of representation in the exhibition grounds included the setting of the exhibits and national sections. The architecture used was extremely important. The Crystal Palace, for example, conveyed the idea of transparency and openness, not only of the building itself, but also of a liberal parliamentary state. The actual material exhibits were all important forms of representation; they ranged from mass consumer products to luxury goods, machinery, and exhibitions on education, the role of women in the modern world, policies to tackle the “social question” and “human exhibits” of indigenous people from European and American colonies who were “on display” at the world exhibitions later in the nineteenth century. All of these and other cultural sources related to the world exhibitions can be very valuable for the study of international history in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, they are often only informative about one particular aspect or issue, not about world history as a whole. To reconstruct the vertical and horizontal relations within the emerging “world society” in this age of rapid internationalization, it is usually necessary to interpret many different sources in conjunction. This facilitates the analysis of international relations between states, the transnational networks of social groups and political parties, and the global transfer of ideas, ideologies, and social practices. On the other hand, cartoonists aim to put a particular idea in a nutshell. This cartoon of the opening of the Crystal Palace exhibition manages to illustrate and discuss in a single image a key issue of the world exhibitions, namely, the competition between nations, continents, and cultures for economic progress and social and political modernity in an ever more interdependent world. This is what makes this example so especially interesting. It is also true that cartoons are generally more relevant sources of the cultural history of international relations in liberal parliamentary states, such as Britain, or democracies with a free press. In contrast to Britain, France, most German states, and Austria-Hungary, among others, had regimes in the 1850s that were quite repressive politically, with elaborate systems of press censorship. Here, feuilleton reporting and literary descriptions often tried to convey messages that could be expressed more directly elsewhere. Even when we do have cartoons like this one, however, we often need a substantial amount of knowledge of historical facts and of contemporary images before we can interpret and use them for our historical research. Moreover, it is also evident that we need to see them in the particular cultural setting in which they were produced. In the case of many British cartoons, this requires some practical intercultural training, especially in drastic black humor, before we can gain intellectual access to them.

15-Kaiser

3/27/03

7:34 PM

Page 249

Annotation: Punch Cartoon

249

Notes 1. For brief introductions to the world exhibitions in the nineteenth century see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vista: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988); Linda Aimone and Carlo Olmo, Les Expositions universelles 1851-1900 (Paris: Belin, 1993). 2. By way of introduction, see John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (London: Sutton, 1999); Utz Haltern, Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der bürgerlich-industriellen Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1971). 3. On the French industrial exhibitions see Philippe Bouin and Christian-Philippe Chanut, Histoire française des foires et des expositions universelles (Paris: Baudouin, 1980). 4. “The Great Derby Race for Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-One,” Punch 20 (1851): 208. 5. See also Wolfram Kaiser, “Vive la France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855-1900,” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 227-244. 6. “All Visitors to the Great Exhibition,” The Times, 27 May 1851, 5. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988; French original edition, 1835-1840). 8. “All visitors to the Great Exhibition,” The Times, 27 May 1851, 5.

Bibliography Aimone, Linda, and Carlo Olmo. Les Expositions universelles, 1851-1900. Paris: Belin, 1993. Bouin, Philippe, and Christian-Philippe Chanut. Histoire française des foires et des expositions universelles. Paris: Baudouin, 1980. Davis, John R. The Great Exhibition. London: Sutton, 1999. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vista : The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988. Haltern, Utz. Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der bürgerlich-industriellen Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1971. Kaiser, Wolfram. “Vive la France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855-1900.” National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 227-244. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: HarperPerennial, 1988. French original edition, 1835-1840.

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 250

Chapter 16

RACE AND IMPERIALISM An Essay from the Chicago Broad Ax Annotation by Fabian Hilfrich

T

he following published appeal to “colored voters” represents a source on both domestic politics and foreign policy. Issued before the presidential elections of 1900, the letter sought to convince African Americans to withdraw their political allegiance from the Republican Party. The reason the three writers mentioned for their advice was located in the foreign policy realm—in their opposition to American “imperialism” or, to be more precise, opposition to the annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The cultural paradigm of race furnishes the link between foreign policy and domestic politics. Placed within its historical context, this source helps us understand how the discourse on race influenced the justification of certain foreign policy recommendations. At the same time, the source also illuminates the repercussions of foreign policy on domestic culture. In this particular instance, we can perceive how pervasive racism was in fin-de-siècle American culture—contrary to its authors’ intentions— and how little political clout African Americans displayed when trying to change their own fate in American society. The link between the foreign and domestic realm and the predominance of the cultural category of race make this document ideally suited as an example of the cultural dimensions of international relations. Although a “culturally inclined” analyst of this source would not proceed in a markedly different way than a political or social historian, he or she needs to be aware of the practice that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has referred to as “thick description”: “What the [scholar] is in fact faced with … is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render.”1 Analysis of this source reveals that it yields multiple layers of complementary as well as conflicting meanings. Notes for this section can be found on page 256.

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 251

Annotation: Chicago Broad Ax Essay

251

Who were the authors of this appeal? Who constituted their prospective audience? And where did they choose to publish their message? The Chicago Broad Ax constituted an anomaly in the political and media landscape of the late nineteenth century: it was a Democratic African American weekly. Most African Americans at the time supported the Republican Party, not only because of a certain “nostalgia” for the Civil War but also because southern Democrats still discriminated against African Americans (e.g., by various “legal” codes that excluded them from voting). Hence, the prospective audience for the appeal was a minority of African Americans who had switched their political allegiance to the Democratic Party. With a few exceptions, most of them resided in the North, where laws allowed African Americans to exercise their political rights. The background of those who wrote the appeal emerges from the newspaper article itself. Their identification in the subheading as “three eminent friends” of “the colored race” makes it safe to conclude that the writers themselves were white. Their names and further “credentials” are mentioned at the end of the article. Thomas Wentworth Higginson and George S. Boutwell had personally participated in the struggle against slavery, whereas William Lloyd Garrison was the son of one of the most famous abolitionists. In turn, these credentials were supposed to establish the writers as “eminent friends” of African American readers, friends who only had the best interest of their audience at heart. The text related two matters: the contemporary American war in the Philippines and the presidential elections of 1900. Two years prior, the United States had gone to war against Spain, ostensibly to liberate the Cubans from Spanish oppression and to pacify the Western hemisphere. During the course of this war, the U.S. Pacific fleet also attacked the Spanish colony in the Philippines. On the heels of victory, the Republican administration of William J. McKinley decided to annex the Philippines, a decision that led not only to a long and hard-fought guerrilla war with Philippine forces, but also to an acrimonious debate between so-called imperialists and anti-imperialists at home. Higginson, Boutwell, and Garrison all counted among the anti-imperialists. After the American Senate had ratified the peace treaty with Spain, formally acquiring the Philippines, these anti-imperialists saw their only hope in obstructing President McKinley’s reelection in 1900 because his Democratic opponent, William J. Bryan from Nebraska, promised independence for the archipelago. In this historical context, the three authors composed a scathing indictment of the Republican Party’s contemporary foreign policy in an effort to convince African Americans to relinquish their traditional allegiance to that party. At first glance, their arguments seemed logical and straightforward. They described the “new” Republican Party’s foreign policy and the war in the Philippines as inherently racist, asserting that supporters of annexation believed that no “colored race” was equipped to govern itself. The authors rediscovered the old slaveholder doctrines that they had fought so hard to destroy. If this ideology were to prevail in the upcoming elections, so the anti-imperialists warned, the consequences would be dire for both Filipinos abroad and African Americans at home. As proof of their proposition, they cited

16-Hilfrich

252

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 252

Fabian Hilfrich

examples from the correspondence of (white) U.S. servicemen in the Philippines, who “reintroduced” the epithet “nigger” into American political discourse. Viewed against the background of an upsurge in racially motivated violence at the time, the authors’ warnings must have resonated strongly in the African American community. The white majority’s convictions about racial hierarchies did facilitate imperialist policies toward “the colored races” abroad, and the experiences with these races arguably exacerbated the plight of African Americans in the United States. Higginson, Boutwell, and Garrison had a point when they advised their readers to vote against “imperialism.” Similarly justified was the charge that the Republican Party showed little interest in enforcing those Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution that had secured political rights for African Americans. Since the end of Reconstruction, Republican (and Democratic) administrations in Washington had relinquished such efforts to improve relations with the southern states and to heal the wounds wrought by the Civil War. This tendency culminated in the McKinley administration’s celebration of the war against Spain as proof of the “reunion” of the nation because volunteers from all regions had participated in the effort. For the purpose of “reunion,” however, it was also necessary to de-emphasize the question of contemporary racist oppression in the South. While the indictment of the Republicans’ foreign (and domestic) policies was therefore convincing, the authors’ suggested alternative—voting for the Democrats— was not. The fact that Higginson, Boutwell, and Garrison only devoted five sentences of their entire appeal to the Democratic Party indicated that they were well aware of their logical lapses. After all, why should northern blacks vote for a party whose southern wing discriminated, disfranchised, and dismembered African Americans in the South? The authors justified their recommendation on the grounds that “southern Democrats … oppose the national policy of imperialism.” Given their assumption that imperialism itself was racist and that it would exacerbate racial tensions at home, the anti-imperialists’ advice does not seem entirely wrong. The story becomes more complicated, however, when we examine the reasons for the southern Democrats’ opposition to imperialism that the three writers more or less freely discuss. While the authors oppose imperialism as a (racist) denial of liberty to others, they simultaneously explain southern anti-imperialism as a racist response, born from the same source as the southerners’ denial of equal rights to African Americans (and arguably from the same source as the imperialists’ denial of freedom to Filipinos). Confusingly, then, these northern anti-imperialists invited their readers to vote for a party with a large racist faction in order to fight the racism inherent in imperialism. In light of contemporary racism among Democrats, moreover, the sentence “[t]his much, at least, experience has taught them,” took on an ominous significance. Undoubtedly, the writers were referring to the second part of the previous sentence, essentially claiming that the Civil War had taught southerners that it was impossible to rule other races. Nevertheless, given southerners’ racist motives to oppose imperialism and to curtail the political rights of African Americans at home, we are tempted

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:00 PM

Page 253

Annotation: Chicago Broad Ax Essay

253

to link the southern “experience” to the first part of the foregoing sentence. Then, the “lesson” they had “learned” would only be strict segregation of the “races.” While the three “eminent friends of the colored race” certainly did not intend this interpretation, it remains indisputable that southern Democrats opposed imperialism primarily out of fear of “racial contamination.” In their reading, the American Constitution did not allow for indefinite colonial rule, and they were afraid that the Philippines would eventually have to be admitted as American states. Even if that were not the case, however, southerners (and many Americans living in the West) still feared that no American law could bar Filipinos from immigrating to the United States individually. Hence, what they advocated was not so much independence for the Philippines, but rather strict separation from the United States, essentially the same strategy that they were pursuing with regard to African Americans in the South. Viewed in this context, the last sentence of this paragraph, “[t]hus far, at any rate, they [southern Democrats] are on your side” displayed the authors’ cynicism. Although these anti-imperialists invited “the American Negro” to “think for himself ” in the last paragraph, this sentence and their arguments in favor of the Democrats do not show much respect for the thought process of African Americans. Apparently, the writers did not care as much about the fate of their “friends” as they claimed; rather they cared about the question of imperialism, and in an effort to convince their readers of the anti-imperialist viewpoint, they dramatized it as a racial question. While we can conclude this much from the source itself, the conclusion is borne out by contemporary evidence. When (white) anti-imperialists criticized the subject rule of another people, they did so primarily because they feared the blemish such a colonial practice would leave on American democratic ideals. Furthermore, and more to the point in this context, northern anti-imperialists were not above employing racist scare tactics in their struggle against imperialism. Particularly when the future fate of the Philippines had not yet been decided, many northerners—including George Boutwell—warned, much like southerners did, that Filipinos would eventually take part in governing the United States. Apparently, at the turn of the century, racism was so prevalent that even supposedly nonracist anti-imperialists with staunch antislavery credentials could not resist enlisting racist fears to fight imperialism. The contents of such an article, moreover, tells us something about the political choices and power of the African American community at the turn of the century; it perfectly demonstrates how African Americans were caught between a rock and a hard place—between an anti-imperialist Democratic Party, whose northern wing professed sympathy for “the colored races” abroad, while its southern wing discriminated against African Americans at home, and a Republican Party that favored imperialist and inherently racist policies abroad, policies which might (and probably did) exacerbate racist attitudes at home. In other words, African Americans could only choose between “foreign policy” and “domestic” racism—both unpalatable choices. By implication, the article also reveals how little political weight the African American community had at the time. How else would it have been politically wise and feasible to even suggest to an African American audience to vote for the Demo-

16-Hilfrich

254

3/27/03

2:00 PM

Page 254

Fabian Hilfrich

cratic Party? Or how else can we explain that the Republican Party could so callously disregard the qualms African Americans did, indeed, have about the “war of races” in the Philippines? Despite grave misgivings about imperialism and a genuine sympathy for the plight of the Filipinos, most African Americans continued to support the Republicans, probably because the (southern) Democrats’ domestic racism was of more immediate concern to them. Viewed through this source, a greater attention to cultural issues, such as the question of racial stereotyping, enriches our understanding of diplomatic history. The question of imperialism was not only one of power politics or economic interest; it was also a question of cultural habits and conditioning. Racial stereotypes that were already prevalent in late nineteenth-century America supported the discursive rationale of imperialism that “inferior races” were not able to govern themselves. At the same time, white attitudes toward these “races” abroad reinforced racism at home and buttressed the southern states’ case for disfranchising their own resident African American minorities. In this regard, it would be callous for the historian of today to strictly separate the foreign from the domestic sphere, the question of power politics from the question of culture.2

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:00 PM

Page 255

SOURCE “To Colored Voters: An Address by Three Eminent Friends of Their Race,” (Chicago) Broad Ax, 27 October 27 1900

Boston, Mass., Oct. 4 – To the Colored People of the United States: We, the undersigned, address you at one of the most important points in your history. If ever there was a war of races in this world the war now going on in the Philippine Islands is precisely that. Yet if there is anything which the colored race in this country has to dread, and the white race also, it is just such a war. Every day in the Philippines is already training our young American soldiers to the habit of thinking that the white man, as such, is the rightful ruler of all other men. This is seen, for instance, in the fact that these very soldiers in writing home letters from the seat of war describe the inhabitants of the Philippines more and more constantly as “niggers,” thus giving a new lease of life to a word which was previously dying out among us. Every defender of the war in congress sustains the contest which [sic] on the assumed ground that the Filipinos are unfit for freedom, although Admiral Dewey, at first described them as more fit for it than the Cubans; and Senator Hoar describes them to be probably better fitted than any race on the two American continents south of ourselves. In other words, freedom is to become for the new Republican Party, a matter of complexion. If this doctrine is to prevail, what hope is there for the colored race in the United States? The answer is easy; there is in that case no hope at all. In the name of the old anti-slavery sentiment, we call on you to resist this great danger, even if you have, for that purpose, to turn your backs on the party you once had reason to love. This danger can evidently not be resisted by any further voting for the Republican Party. In other days that party freed the slaves and passed amendments to the United States constitution for the protection of those who have been slaves. These amendments are now steadily set aside and the Republican party shows no sign of

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:00 PM

Page 256

Fabian Hilfrich

256

raising a finger in their defense. There have been far more outrages on the American Negro during one term of McKinley than two terms of Cleveland. On the other hand, the southern Democrats are at least doing the colored race this service; that they as a rule oppose the national policy of imperialism. This may seem an inconsistency, but it is really very simple. The very fact of their unwillingness to give equal rights to the American Negro makes them unwilling to undertake the government of ten millions more belonging to the colored race. This much, at least, experience has taught them. Thus far, at any rate, they are on your side. The undersigned, trained from youth in the strictest school of anti-slavery convictions, are following up the same early training when they now write to you. We wish to warn you that the imperialistic Republican Party of today is not the liberty-loving party of that name which set the American Negro free forty years ago. The time is past when you can safely give to it your implicit support. We warn you that the American Negro must henceforth think for himself and must cut adrift from every organization which wars on darker races, as such, and begins to talk again of “the natural supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.” We fought through a four-years’ war to get rid of that doctrine, and enli[s]ted nearly 200,000 black soldiers for the purpose. It is too soon to see such a theory brought up again. It rests with you to make it impossible. Thomas Wentworth Higginson William Lloyd Garrison George S. Boutwell (Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson commanded the first regiment of colored troops enlisted in the war for the Union. William Lloyd Garrison is the son of the man who more than any one [sic] else pressed the cause of the emancipation of the American Negroes. George S. Boutwell was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1851 and 1852, and was Secretary of the Treasury during the first Grant administration.)

Notes 1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10. 2. For more background on this topic, see Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Fabian Hilfrich, “‘Nation’ and ‘Democracy’: Representations of the American Self in the American Imperialism (1898-1900) and Vietnam War Debates (1964-1968)” (Ph.D. diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2000 [microfiche]).

16-Hilfrich

3/27/03

2:00 PM

Page 257

Annotation: Chicago Broad Ax Essay

257

Bibliography Gatewood, Willard B., Jr. Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903. Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hilfrich, Fabian. “‘Nation’ and ‘Democracy’: Representations of the American Self in the American Imperialism (1898-1900) and Vietnam War Debates (1964-1968).” Ph.D. diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2000 (microfiche).

17-Lucas

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 258

Chapter 17

A DOCUMENT FROM THE HARVARD INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL Annotation by Scott Lucas

The following document on the origins and development of the Harvard University International Summer Seminar of the 1950s illustrates that “culture,” academia, and foreign policy cannot be separated in the Cold War. Indeed, the U.S. Government recognized from 1948 that the battle with Soviet Communism was not just for military superiority or economic advantage but also for the supremacy of U.S. values and “way of life.”1 To win this battle, the state had to rely on the promotion of its campaign through private outlets such as universities, but to maintain the illusion that freedom of the individual was behind this U.S. crusade, the government had to support its private partners through covert means. The document also points to a pretty good story: the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the rise of Henry Kissinger. Agency support was instrumental in enhancing Kissinger’s profile as a graduate student at Harvard University and, more important, introducing Kissinger to private patrons such as Nelson Rockefeller and key official in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, including Richard Nixon. The seminar was the idea of Kissinger’s Ph.D. supervisor, Professor William Y. Elliott. Elliott had worked from the Office of Defense Mobilization in World War II and, after the war, served as a consultant to the CIA. In 1950, while commuting to Washington two to three days a week to advise the agency, Elliott thought of the seminar to advance the U.S. cause in the conflict with Moscow and, possibly, to promote his position against rivals in the Department of Political Science. What Elliott needed was the time and money to bring his project to fruition. The first of these challenges he solved by passing the idea to his graduate students. Kissinger took charge of the seminar’s development through the “Subcommittee on Academic Programs.” His initial report (see source) set out not only the academic Notes for this section can be found on page 263.

17-Lucas

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 259

Annotation: Harvard International Summer School

259

content but also the ideological rationale for the initiative. The initial “student class” would be fifty men—ten from France, ten from Italy, ten from Germany and Austria, five from the Benelux countries, five from Finland, five from Yugoslavia, and five displaced persons. Intriguingly, there would be no representatives from Britain, presumably because it was securely allied to the West, and none from Scandinavia, apart from Finland, and Switzerland because those countries were firmly neutral and not immediately threatened by the Soviet bloc. Kissinger also made the financial arrangements for the first seminar. Elliott had looked into the summer program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was funded by the Economic Cooperation Administration, the Sloan Foundation, and private sources, but there is no record in Elliott’s papers of an approach to public sources. Instead, by April 1951, Elliott and Kissinger were preparing for covert support. Kissinger wrote Gates Lloyd of the CIA to arrange for $15,000 to pay for speakers and the travel and living costs of the first group of forty students. The pilot seminar was run in August 1951, and Kissinger wrote a fawning note to Elliott, “I realize how much time our problems often took up in your already overcrowded schedule. Your unfailing readiness to counsel provided the impetus for their solution.” But the long-term future of the seminar still had to be secured. Funding was arranged for the 1952 seminar; however, the first breakthrough came in January 1953 when Elliott and Kissinger secured a grant from the “philanthropist” Julius Fleischmann. It is unclear whether they were aware that Fleischmann’s Farfield Foundation was a conduit for CIA subsidies. Thirty-nine students from Europe and Asia attended the 1953 seminar; more importantly for Kissinger, he used the seminar as a foundation for the journal Confluence, funded by the Ford Foundation. It appears that the covert support was contingent on continued efforts to get private backing. With the help of the CIA’s Mallory Browne and C.D. Jackson, President Eisenhower’s special assistant for psychological operations, Elliott approached the Sloan, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations. Elliott finally secured Ford’s support in 1954; meanwhile, the CIA ensured the seminar’s survival. At one level, the story of the seminar is important in illustrating how the state-private network could propel the careers of key individuals. In 1955, Kissinger would be asked to serve as one of the consultants for the Quantico Conference, organized by President Eisenhower’s special assistant, Nelson Rockefeller, on the eve of the Geneva Summit to plan U.S. psychological strategy. The young scholar would then be funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations to carry out his research into nuclear strategy. The resulting books, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy and The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy, established Kissinger as one of the foremost analysts of U.S. foreign policy. Most important, Elliott and the seminar gave Kissinger a valuable entree into government circles. The professor arranged Kissinger’s initial appointment as a consultant for the CIA. Meanwhile, Kissinger built up a network of contacts with officials whom he invited to address the seminar. The most significant introduction came on 12 May 1955 when Kissinger asked Vice-President Richard Nixon to participate

17-Lucas

3/27/03

260

1:59 PM

Page 260

Scott Lucas

in the forum as “someone who could set the tone for the subsequent effort and to whom international relations was of more than academic interest.”2 The significance of the seminar, however, goes beyond even Henry Kissinger. This was just one small if important project in a web of “private” initiatives supported, and even directed, by the state. To ensure the illusion of a U.S. campaign led by “free” individuals, most of the campaign was covert; by 1951, the CIA was coordinating this politico-cultural effort through the International Organizations Division. Millions of dollars would be provided to ensure proper representation of the United States by labor unions, journalists and publications, filmmakers, youth groups, women’s organizations, lawyers, religious bodies, artists, and musicians. Kissinger, Walt Rostow, Gloria Steinem, and Allard Lowenstein would all benefit from the CIA’s largesse; others, such as Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollock, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Greta Garbo, wittingly or unwittingly, would all be supported by the agency. Even George Orwell, posthumously, would receive a boost when the CIA ensured the conversion of Animal Farm and 1984 onto film. The Cold War was not just a political or military conflict; it was a contest of cultures and ideologies. In that contest, no sector of society was insulated from government intervention. The state-private network of the 1950s, forged through the cooperation of individuals and groups with their own motives, would define the American “consensus.”

17-Lucas

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 261

SOURCE “Report of the Sub-committee on Academic Programs” (Undated, October/November 1950), William Elliott Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, Box 2, International Seminar 1951-1959

Members: Henry A. Kissinger and outside Advisors Basic Assumptions: The sub-committee considered the problems of formulating a meaningful, cohesive program. Since any program reflects the basic assumptions of the Harvard Summer School Foreign Students Project, a definition of these principles has been attempted. The Harvard Summer School Foreign Students Project represents an attempt to create a spiritual link between the younger generation of Europe and American values. For individuals who have lived in an atmosphere of crisis for over a decade and who during that period have witnessed the collapse of all traditional values, the U.S. offers a bewildering spectacle of economic prosperity and seeming misunderstanding of European problems. The nihilism of European youth, reflects the disillussionment [sic] of an idealism, that sees its hopes submerged by an avalanche of technology and its aspirations answered by economic promises. Only in these terms does the bitterness of the frequent attacks on U.S. motives and policies become understandable. It testifies to a frustation [sic] with an approach that never appears to understand the groping for values in a rapidly changing world and to the disappointment with a country from which so much was expected. Communism often becomes the residuary legatee. The intensity of its proponents too frequently offers an assurance beyond the drabness of a technological surrounding and a possibility for inward committal not defined by merely material conditions. (This argument regarding the essentially poetic nature of the Communist appeal to many young Europeans was well stated in a recent article by Barbara Ward in the N.Y. Times magazine. A perhaps more significant example is the tremendous critical and popular success of the book “The

17-Lucas

3/27/03

262

1:59 PM

Page 262

Scott Lucas

Twenty Fifth House,” which states Europe’s dilemma as a choice between the barbarians of the East and those of the West.) It is hoped that the Harvard Summer School Foreign Students project can assist in counteracting these tendencies, by giving inwardly alive, intelligent young Europeans an opportunity to study the deeper meaning of U.S. democracy. This does not imply a program of dogmatic indoctrination. It does mean, that contact with intense young Americans may demonstrate to foreign students that a concern for abstract problems is no European monopoly and that the U.S. does not exhaust its aspirations in material prosperity. To be sure, the answers to these problems may prove different and the attainment of a consensus quite difficult. Yet the very fact of discussing common concerns in terms of normative ideas capable of being understood and felt as part of a democratic value system may serve to convince young Europeans, that their choice is not merely one between nihilism or Communism (i.e. Inward abdication in the face of the materiality of the environment). It may be maintained that such an approach smacks of condescension and that foreign students would resent an apparent attempt at indoctrination. This argument seems fallacious, however. From a practical point of view it appears unlikely that 50 Europeans, carefully selected and brought to this country at considerable expense, would believe any protestation that the purposes of the program were primarily technical (or if they did would consider this another example of naivete). Moreover, their very application for the program indicates a desire to learn about the U.S. No apologies need be made for teaching the meaning of American democracy, if the purpose of the program has been frankly stated to prospective applicants. From a moral point of view it does not appear that a series of seminars about subjects of the gravest concern in the present world situation involves condescension. Since the program recommended below enforces no “line,” since an opportunity exists for both disagreement and criticism within its formal framework, the mere introduction of the problem of values is hardly inappropriate. It may be much more condescending to assume that American values prove self-validating and that mere acquaintance with American life will lead to its ultimate understanding. A vast difference exists between the enforcement of a doctrine, and a formal framework of discussions which encourages an interchange of ideas on fundamental issues. The Harvard Summer School Foreign Students Project aims at demonstrating that self-reliance is a possibility despite the complexity of the present age and that the assumption of personal responsibility is more meaningful than unquestioning submission to an apparatus. It need not always be the Communists who have the strength of their convictions…. … [Formal] seminars should be conceived as setting the tone of the project. If properly conducted in an atmosphere of cooperation and tolerance they can provide the antidote to the spirit of nihilism rampant among the European youth and achieve an understanding of the meaning of personal responsibility. They should be built around a central theme: “The Meaning of Values in a Technological Age.” The U.S. experience should serve as the starting point for an examination of, [sic] such as the concept of freedom in the 20th century, the striving for self-realization in art

17-Lucas

3/27/03

1:59 PM

Page 263

Annotation: Harvard International Summer School

263

against the felt pressure of convention, the quest for a reconciliation of rationalism, personal responsibility and dogmatism in religion. The success of the seminars will depend to a large extent on the quality of the instructors to whom these problems should be something more than technical questions and who should impress by their example not only by their learning. The presentation of the issues should be dialectical, developing the alternative trends in American life. Their trend should be positive, however, not in the sense of claiming absolute solutions but by indicating the assumptions of the perfectability of man and the ultimacy of his moral personality as the meaning of U.S. democracy. In these terms, social problems become challenges for normative concepts not static definitions of an institutional frame-work. Though the intellectual level of the seminars should be high, they should be less concerned with producing rounded research efforts than affording an opportunity for an elucidation of fundamental issues. (If the appeal is pitched high enough, it seems very probably [sic]that many outstanding individuals would content to conduct these seminars.) [Signed] Henry A. Kissinger.

Notes 1 . See, for example, the first pages of NSC 68, the blueprint of 1950 for the global crusade against communism, with its mantra of “a basic conflict between the idea of freedom under a government of laws and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” (State Department, Department of Defense report, 7 April 1950, U.S. Declassified Document Reference System, Retrospective Collection, Document 71D). 2. Kissinger to Nixon, 12 May 1955, William Y. Elliott Papers, Harvard University Archive, box 2, International Seminar 1951-1959.

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 264

Chapter 18

MAX LERNER’S GERMANY HAS A FOREIGN POLICY Annotation by Thomas Reuther

Introduction

M

ax Lerner belongs to the outstanding personalities in American intellectual life of the twentieth century. Born in Minsk in 1902, the son of Russian Jews, Lerner went to the United States to become an important journalist, columnist, and author. As a liberal, he backed Roosevelt’s New Deal policy in the 1930s when he wrote for the Nation. In 1943-1948, his influential columns appeared in P.M. Later on, he worked as syndicated columnist for the New York Post. Lerner, who backed Henry Wallace in his unsuccessful campaign for the American presidency in 1948, still held on to his political convictions in the era of McCarthyism. As author of numerous books and articles, he dealt with various subjects on American political and social life but always also occupied himself with American foreign policy. In the 1950s, Lerner concentrated more on educational matters, and also published his voluminous book on American symbols, The Unfinished Country (1959). Lerner went on to be an influential writer after having finished his journalistic career. In 1990, he experienced a sensational comeback with the best-selling memoir of his personal fight against cancer, Wrestling with Angels. Lerner died in New York in 1992. The document at issue here is a part of an article Lerner wrote on the development of a new foreign policy in Western Germany in 1949. In the early Cold War period, Lerner dealt with the “German problem“ in numerous articles. This one was published in the New York Post on 18 July 1949. It gives the reader an insightful view into Lerner’s personal opinion on Germany at the cornerstone between the occupation period and the new Federal Republic of Germany . Moreover, it serves as an insightful demonstration of the way American liberals tried to come to terms with the German past and present. Notes for this section begin on page 271.

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 265

Annotation: “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy”

265

As an expression of American culture, the text may be perceived as an attempt to critically examine American policy at home and abroad “through the backdoor.“ Following Akira Iriye’s concept of culture as “the creation and communication of memory, ideology, emotions, life styles, scholarly and artistic works, and other symbols,”1 newspaper and magazine articles like the one presented here can be understood as an expression of American culture in the early Cold War period. Recent studies have made us increasingly aware of the existence and the importance of different subcultures in American history. Still, it makes sense to hold on to the idea of a general “American” culture and the existence of an overall public discourse on Germany and the German problem within that culture during this period. Referring to the often-stated dictum that the good Russians, good Chinese, bad Germans, and bad Chinese of World War II turned into the bad Russians, bad Chinese, good Germans and good Japanese of the Cold War,2 we otherwise run the risk of failing to grasp important aspects of images held by the American people toward the outside world. Moreover, concepts like these are based on the unspoken assumption that the “soft factors” of culture merely follow the “hard factors” of the economy and the political sphere, an assumption that neglects the realities of mutual influence between culture and (economic or political) “power.” When authors such as Lerner wrote about Germany, they always had in mind the actual state and future development of the American political system. At the same time, Lerner, as countless American journalists before and after him, looked at the German experience through the lense of an anthropologist studying a foreign tribe. The article reminds the reader of a period not so far ago when Germany in American eyes was far from belonging to the “family of western nations.”3

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 266

SOURCE Max Lerner (Frankfurt), “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy,”New York Post, 18 July 1949 (manuscript, Max Lerner papers, Sterling Memorial Library, original essay courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library).

After several weeks in Germany, one begins to glimpse the broader outlines of the new German foreign policy. I call it that because, even though it is not yet wholly on its own, Germany has a foreign policy. This is one of the great power-peoples of the world. Even more than the Americans and British—as much, perhaps, as the Russians—these men have power in their blood and tradition. The economic rulers especially, who are the real rulers in Germany, know what they want. Let me set down summarily the main points of their strategy. First, they want continued American aid in rebuilding their industry, and handling the Ruhr coal and steel back to private ownership, even though under the facade of a loose international supervision.4 The American aid has already done wonders for them, making them today the most powerful state in Europe except for Russia. Second, although they still talk very guardedly about it, the Germans would like to attract American investments again as they did in the 1920s. American capital, once bitten, is twice shy. But the Germans have not given up hope. * * * Third, the German rulers are downcast at the relative success of the Paris conference.5 Some of them, even so admirable a Social-Democrat as Major Reuter of Berlin, have told me that the conference should not have been held, that we should have waited and squeezed the Russians harder. They blame Secretary Acheson for what they call his naiveté, and his inexperience with Russian tactics. Even as I write

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 267

Annotation: “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy”

267

the Berlin papers are calling on the West to re-impose its punitive counter-blockade on the Eastern zone. Fourth, despite the wooing of High Commissioner McCloy by the powerful Germans, they suspect and fear him. They preferred Clay.6 As the Frankfurter Abendpost puts it in an editorial, Clay could be counted on to be unrelenting to the Russians. * * * Fifth, there is a split among the Germans on the question of the new East-West trade. Some of the business minds find in it a chance to get better markets for their products than the crowded competition will offer them in the West alone. But others fear that it may lead to an allaying of the cold war, and therefore of the stimulus to the continued American economic aid. From this standpoint, the Germans, and the more conservative group in France also, are disturbed by the John Foster Dulles interview in the U.S. News in which he points out that the expense of the cold war is a greater danger to our economic health than the Russian danger. Sixth, one can therefore now expect an intensifying of the “spirit of Rapallo“ propaganda campaign. The German leaders have for several years thrown out vague hints that some conservative businessmen and Generals might revive the movement for a new treaty with Russia, as in 1922 at Rapallo. Every time this has been mentioned it has thrown the Americans here into a panic. I think that this has been exactly its intent, and that with some exceptions most of the Rapallo talk has been phony. But it has worked, and the Germans may try it again in order to frighten us back into the cold war. * * * Which means, finally, that the main target of the German foreign policy is to keep the American-Russian cold war alive. Why should it not be, since thus far Germany has been the principal if not the only beneficiary of the cold war? The nine million refugees want their lands in the East back, and are willing to risk a war for it. The parties of every kind, including the Social Democrats, want the Russians pushed out, so that they can have a powerful unified Germany again. If it means risking a third World War, the Germans have most to gain from it. For in such a war all three of their big power-rivals—Russia, Britain AND AMERICA—will be weakened, and several destroyed. It is a dream worth dreaming.

Commentary In an article on “Hitler as political thinker” published in the late thirties, Max Lerner worked out the idea of the “two Germanies“ by contrasting a “humanist“ to an “antihumanist“ branch in German political tradition. The first Germany stretched from

18-Reuther

3/27/03

268

1:54 PM

Page 268

Thomas Reuther

Goethe and Lessing to Max Weber and Thomas Mann, and „stresses freedom, the life of reason, and the possibilities of Human existence.“ The second Germany, developed by Fichte and other romantic thinkers, and taken up by Hitler, “stresses authority, the brutal and tempestuous in man, and the transcending of the human by the heroic and daemonic.”7 This differentiation became typical for the American image of Germany in the war years; far from demonizing the whole nation as in World War I, it gave a logical explanation of Hitlerism as “victory“ of the bad side of the German soul, but at the same time gave way to the hope of a more positive development in the future if power were given to the “humanist“ segments of German society. In his estimation of these “better” forces, Lerner met with the common appraisal of the left-wing New Deal ideology of his times. The socialist movement, labor unions and, at least partly, intellectuals seemed to be bearers of a promising “new“ Germany. With American entry into the war, and perhaps even more with the exposure of the concentration camps in April and May 1945, the American image of Germany underwent a serious change. Many contemporary observers noticed a hardening of sentiment in the United States toward the conquered nation. As a descendant of Russian Jews, Lerner felt exceptionally affected by the horrifying news from central and eastern Europe. As one of just a handful of American journalists, he had broader knowledge of and interest in the fate of European Jews during the war. But even Lerner had long underestimated the dimension of cruelty. The hardening of his views on the German state and society in the last years of the war is obvious. In 1944, Lerner stated that “two decades of fascist thinking and a decade of fascist iron rule and conditioning do not give us a Germany that holds out much hope for a natural restoration of decency.“8 Consequently, he became a forceful supporter of the Morgenthau Plan and a “policy of revenge“ toward Germany. As was the case with most American thinkers of the American Left at the end of the war, the negative attitude toward Germany corresponded with a positive image of Soviet Russia. The maintenance of the war coalition with the Soviet Union was the conditio sine qua non for any postwar U.S. foreign policy.. Only this coalition seemed to give any real chance for fulfilling the great foreign policy objectives of the American democratic Left: the creation of the United Nations and a “New Deal for the world.“ The latter objective became crucially important for the New Dealers in the mid 1940s. After the New Deal had begun to stagnate at home, not the least as a consequence of Roosevelt’s policy of integrating leading Republicans such as Henry Stimson into his cabinet, the only chance to fill the New Deal with new life seemed to many liberals to lie in exporting its credo abroad. A democratic foreign policy abroad would, in Lerner’s opinion, as much strengthen a democratic policy at home as an imperialistic expansion would strengthen the forces of conservatism and big business. Germany became the decisive test for the future course of American foreign policy. But the development of the American occupation since Secretary of State James Byrnes‘ crucial speech at Stuttgart in 1946 seemed to give little reason to expect the policy outcome that the liberals hoped for. The upcoming Cold War darkened the

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 269

Annotation: “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy”

269

horizon—and not just for Max Lerner; in Germany, the same fatal coalition of conservative army officers and conservative businessmen, which so far had done so much harm to American foreign policy, seemed to be gaining the upper hand again. The threatening division of Germany, the integration of the western zones of Germany in the Marshall Plan, the forceful support of Western Berlin during the Berlin blockade, the planned creation of the Federal Republic of Germany—nothing in America’s central European policy of the late 1940s developed as the left-wing liberals had expected. And the rising feelings of anti-communism gave their arguments little chance to be heard at home. But there was one possibility of raising American fears beyond the dominating Cold War paradigm: developments inside Germany. By criticizing German policy and raising doubts on the democratic reliability of the Germans, American liberals played what was perhaps their last trump card for a policy of better understanding with the Russians. The foreign policy of President Harry S. Truman and his foreign ministers, George Marshall and Dean Acheson, rested on the assumption that West Germany would become a reliable and important European ally in their policy of “containment“. It was precisely this point that Lerner doubted. By examining the “broader outlines of the new German foreign policy,“ Lerner came to the conclusion that its main target in the foreseeable future would be “to keep the American-Russian cold war alive“ for Germany was its single benefiter. Lerner’s argumentation in many ways reflects the liberal thinking of his times. The courageous opposition of West Berliners against Soviet Russia in the just-finished Berlin blockade had seriously put into question the popular references to the “spirit of Rapallo“ arguing that the major aim of the West German elites would be to reestablish their traditional good contacts with Soviet Russia. In this interpretation, Operation Barbarossa and the high sacrifices on the eastern front during World War II seemed to represent merely a short intermezzo in the history of a “special relationship“ between conservative German businessmen and revolutionary Russian leaders. Such a scheme of interpretation, with its mixture of anti-Nazism and anti-bolshevism, never really became compelling to Lerner; he therefore had no hesitancy in deconstructing it as a myth. Instead, Lerner built up what in hindsight can be seen as another myth, although for contemporaries it seemed to be a serious conclusion. The great danger of the Germans did not lie in their pro-Russian attitudes but in their decisive anti-Communism. Reconquering the lost eastern territories by pushing the United States into a hot war with Russia seemed to be the logic underlying Germany’s foreign policy according to Lerner. In late 1949, Lerner’s interpretation represented a minority view within American public opinion at least insofar as he still saw the Germans as the greatest threat to world peace. But even if his interpretation never had any real chance of dominating foreign policy or public discourse in the United States, many of its elements remained popular. All of the images and stereotypes that Lerner used could be found in countless expressions of American culture until the early 1950s: mistrust in the Germans; lack of faith in their determination to become democratic; the conviction

18-Reuther

3/27/03

270

1:54 PM

Page 270

Thomas Reuther

that hidden among the ruins of the “Reich“ there still existed elements of Nazi ideology waiting for better times to resurface. The “struggle for the soul of Faust“ (John McCloy)9 still seemed to be in question; even the establishment of a democratic West German state did not result in an overnight change in this skepticism. History seemed to have proven Lerner’s thesis wrong. Whereas the question of who started and who was responsible for the Cold War continues to provoke heated controversy among diplomatic historians, the democratic development of West Germany is today being seen as one of the great achievements of the last decade. Germans were neither willing to risk a war with Russia in former eastern territories nor did they return to what was seen as their “traditional“ policy of “blood and iron”. Nevertheless, one should not treat authors such as Max Lerner merely as naive dreamers unable to adapt their thoughts on the “realities” of the Cold War. There is good reason to expect that German political development might have taken another course if it had not been critically examined by western, and especially by American, public opinion. The conservative Adenauer government established later that year continually tried to bring its policy into line with American attitudes and expectations. The path of the Germans in their quest to transform their image from an archenemy to stable ally and important political and economic partner was paved with trap wire. In the end, what was gaining the upper hand was a pragmatic view expressed by Henry Luce’s Time magazine article of 5 December 1949, which saw the policy of economic and political integration as the lesser of two evils: “Giving German industry increasingly free reign involved risk; giving the West Germans more sovereignty involved risk; backing Konrad Adenauer was a gamble; arming the Germans would be a gamble. But the only real alternative to what the U.S. was doing in Germany would be to let the country stagnate and, eventually, fall to Communism. That would not be a gamble: it would be a disaster.” Finally, the Korean War and the following decision to re-arm Germany marked the final breakthrough of the now broadly established “Cold War consensus” on the German problem. Until then, the discussion on the “German mind” and the peculiarities of German culture were deeply linked with political discussions on the future of Germany. Afterwards, cultural discourse on the Germans gradually became detached from this foreign policy link. Instead, discourse on Germany and the lessons of the war and the Holocaust became more and more part of cultural conflicts in the United States.10 This gives the scholar of American history a striking example of how culturally produced images and stereotypes tend to survive the political context in which they were originally produced; they represent double-edged phenomena that are always actualized on the background of a special, singular moment in history. At the same time, they often develop a life on their own. They do not merely constitute a basic tool serving people to make sense of their lives. They also help historians in trying to convey the events of the past.

18-Reuther

3/27/03

1:54 PM

Page 271

Annotation: “Germany HAS a Foreign Policy”

271

Notes 1. Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 214-225. 2. Detlef Junker The Manichean Trap: American Perceptions of the German Empire, 1871-1945 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1995), 36. 3. All markings in the text are from the original document, New York Post, 18 July 1949. 4. The international control of the Ruhr area as the German and European center of coal and steel production had been coordinated in the Ruhr statute since April 1949. 5. The 6th Meeting of Foreign Ministers in Paris from 23 May to 20 June 1949 ended in failure. The Western powers unsuccessfully tried to suggest to the Kremlin the integration of the Soviet Zone into the already determined West German state. The Soviets promised to reestablish the Allied Control Council and to reunite Germany economically along the axioms of the Potsdam Conference. 6. John M. McCloy followed Lucius D. Clay who served as American military governor for Germany since 1945, to become High Commissioner for Germany in July, 1949. 7. Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 359f. 8. Max Lerner, Public Journal: Marginal Notes on Wartime America (New York: Viking Press, 1945), 330. 9. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers (FRUS), 1949, vol.IV: Western Europe, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974, 485-86. 10. Beverly Crawford and James Martel, „Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film Images and Public perceptions in the Postwar Era,“ in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth GlaserSchmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 285-308..

Bibliography Crawford, Beverly, and James Martel. “Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film Images and Public Perceptions in the Postwar Era.” In Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay/Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, 285-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hamby, Alonzo L. Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism. New York: Colombia University Press, 1973. Iriye, Akira. “Culture and International History.” In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 214-225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Junker, Detlef. The Manichean Trap: American Perceptions of the German Empire, 18711945. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1995. Lakoff, Sanford A. Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

18-Reuther

3/27/03

272

1:54 PM

Page 272

Thomas Reuther

Lerner, Max. Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas. New York: The Viking Press, 1939. _____. Public Journal. Marginal Notes on Wartime America. New York: The Viking Press, 1945. _____. “Thomas Mann: Hero of Our Times.” Nation 146 (25 June 1938): 726-728. Lipstadt, Deborah E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: Free Press, 1986. Muresianu, John M. War of Ideas: American Intellectuals and the World Crisis, 1938-1945. New York: Garland, 1988. Pells, Richard H. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

19-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 273

Chapter 19

EXCERPT FROM JOHAN G ALTUNG’S “ON THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM” Annotated by Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

Introduction

In early autumn 1967, over seventy participants from more than twelve countries and three continents gathered, at the initiative of newly formed European think tanks such as Mankind 2000 (London), the International Peace Research Institute (Oslo), and the Institut für Zukunftsfragen (Vienna). The meeting consisted of what was, at that time, a unique experiment of a “World Future Studies Conference“ to discuss the future of humankind in the shadow of the Cold War on an interdisciplinary basis. At this conference, the Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung held the talk partially reprinted here, on the future of the international state system. The future of world political structures began to emerge in the age of the atomic threat and increasing conflict potential as one of the most important tasks of the new interdisciplinary “future studies“ forming in the 1960s. Despite early signs of rapprochement in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, from the mid 1960s on, the international confrontation of the Cold War reintensified. Simultaneously, in 1967, the Vietnam conflict escalated and seemed to manifest the extent of the deployed military potential in so-called substitute wars in the Third World. Other international trouble spots, such as the Middle East, experienced a new hot phase of conflict, for instance in the form of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War. It were not only “western“ societies such as the United States or Israel that emerged in increasingly escalating conflicts; however, the invasion of Soviet troops into Prague in August 1968 signaled clearly how rigidly and unforgivingly the ideologically and economically structured blocs of power opposed one another in the Notes for this section can be found on page 281.

19-Schmidt-Gernig

274

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 274

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

Cold War, and how fragile world peace really was. In the face of arms expenditures amounting to 165 billion dollars in the year 1967 (NATO, 95 billion dollars, Warsaw Pact, 43 billion), four times the expenditures for health services worldwide, the nascent peace and conflict studies spoke of a “negative peace,“ or of a condition of permanent “structural violence“. Nothing seemed more imperative than attaining alternative courses of action in the interest of securing a long-term peace on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of the international political and economic system—a goal that peace studies had taken up as a cause. The sociologist Johan Galtung can be seen as one of the most prominent founders and representatives of this new interdisciplinary field of research.1 The International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, founded by him in 1959, along with institutes such as the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution of the University of Michigan (publisher of the Journal of Conflict Resolution), and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, formed the institutional framework of this initiative. The latter included Kenneth Boulding, Ossip K. Flechtheim, Jan Tinbergen, Richard F. Behrendt, Robert Jungk, Arthur I. Waskow, and others. These social scientists criticized the existing political and social structures, sometimes from a Marxist perspective. They attempted to show alternative possibilities for development with new methods of future studies research such as scenario writing, Delphi methods, brainstorming, trend extrapolation, and others. The exceptional feature of this type of newly developing future studies research lay in the fact that it combined predictions with planning models and the design of alternative possibilities for development. The new scientific community of researchers dedicated to future studies shared a basic idea about the possibility of creating of a more humane future. Especially in Oslo, the attempt was made to shake up the more militarily-strategically oriented beginnings of future studies in the United States and to concentrate on the new tasks of an explicit examination of potential conflict resolutions. The German publicist Robert Jungk, who had essentially co-organized the Future Studies conference in Oslo, summed up this matter of concern as follows: What was the experiment about? Future research was in the early autumn of 1967 no longer brand new. It had grown, especially in the United States, from its first haphazard beginnings in 1944 to a large “think industry” with its own “factories” or “tanks” staffed in some cases with well over a thousand “brains.” But almost all this work had so far been financed mainly directly or indirectly by the armament effort. Therefore it had essentially served military and related industrial goals. In calling a conference dedicated to Peace and Development in the next decades, the organizers of the conference pointed to a new and urgent direction of future research. Could the new intellectual tools of information technology, systems analysis, operational research, forecasting, anticipating, scenario writing and “futures creation” be used on civilian problems?... The Oslo conference was hoped, and indeed proved, to be a catalyst of this trend: the new techniques of interdisciplinary analysis and prognosis were henceforth to be used against such enemies as urban sprawl, hunger, lack of education and growing alienation.2

The exact analysis of the economic and, above all, international political situation was decisive for the development of positive future scenarios. Galtung’s essay

19-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 275

Annotation: “Future of the International System”

275

serves as an outstanding example of the interplay between comprehensive world-system analysis and prospects for the following decades—an analysis that appears amazingly shrewd from today’s vantage point.

Analysis We can only reprint a brief excerpt from Galtung’s insightful essay, and excerpt encapsulated in a nutshell his central prediction with respect to the development of the international system.3 But how did he come to this explicit model of the future? Galtung presented the idea of a world system of nation-states that was characterized by strong differences in values. In view of an exceedingly heterogeneous norm structure of the increasingly globally connected individual societies, the question of the feasibility of peace arose with greater urgency. It was just this increased global communication and transfer intensification that, in Galtung’s eyes, clearly accelerated conflict potential. The classical model of completely sovereign and utterly “egoistic“ nationstates appeared less and less suitable for resolving confrontations; it had to be supplemented by transnational and supranational institutions or international governmental organizations to facilitate various communications processes of resolution and to resolve conflicts. Galtung’s second important thesis is that the transnational networking devices (computers, satellites, etc.) inaugurated by modern traffic and communication technologies, as well as the increasingly global dimensions of the risks caused by modern technologies, contributed to a change of collective identities and to a more strongly global and transnational way of thinking. According to Galtung, new globally connected elites in highly developed countries would develop new forms of subnational, crossnational, transnational and supranational identifications during the following decades. Galtung considered the emergence of subnational identities above all in light of the development of the critical counterculture of leftist student and artist milieus in the United States during the 1960s. The critique of the U.S. military-industrial complex could trigger a far-reaching alienation of this elite from national identifications. These identifications expressed themselves in the rejection of the Vietnam War, the refusal to do military service in the name of “civil disobedience,“ or in the sacrifice for those ethnic minorities (such as African Americans) excluded from full participatory rights. Crossnational identifications, on the other hand, would arise through the “general process of interpenetration“ between nations or societies in the sense of the taking root of ever-more long-lasting and functional or “symmetrical“ relationships between members of different nation. They could also come about by “symmetrical“ relationships between members of different nations; for example, within the framework of cooperation in multinational businesses of international governmental organizations (IGOs). According to Galtung, this does not necessarily imply the loss of loyalty to the nation as a consequence, but generally leads to a relativization of purely national

19-Schmidt-Gernig

276

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 276

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

identifications and, above all, to an increasing appreciation of members of other nations. Transnational identifications arise, in contrast, in the context of the constantly growing number of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace. They document the trend toward the necessity of solutions to supra-national problems in diverse political fields such as environmental topics or human rights. Their advantage consists in a concrete orientation on political problems and in the principled openness of the approach. The resulting trend toward an internationalization of political ideologies on the one hand, as well as a kind of “world domestic politics“ (to cite Carl F. von Weizsäcker) on the other, would reinforce itself through the steadily growing influence of the INGOs and the functional elites employed in the framework of developmental aid and peacekeeping measures. These influences would thereby more and more determine foreign policies, particularly as it came to an “internationalization of agesets“ in the sense of generational conflicts. The solidarity of specific age groups, Galtung believed, was strengthened by the rapid social change. Soon it would extend beyond national borders and disassociate itself from the members of older generations, whose knowledge would thereby be “devalued“. The political pressure brought to bear by these new, young transnational elites (often through INGOs) also strengthened the development of supranational identifications. For Galtung, all of these processes contributed to the growing disproportion between worldwide problem situations and the organizational form of the nationstate. “Denationalization“ applied especially to smaller highly developed countries, whereas collective identities in larger nations such as the United States might develop into “neonationalisms.“ What was different about Galtung’s sketch of the future was the idea of a general process of integration of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries with the socialist countries. As a result, the East-West conflict would lessen in favor of a peaceful coexistence and a breaking down of oppositions. For Galtung, these development prognoses were driven by the de-ideologization accompanying the computer-based communications revolution and a general scientification or technification of the socio economic system. This technification would bring about the development of the international system to a gigantic network of diverse national, supranational, and supraregional institutions for the resolution or prevention of conflict. Galtung observed this trend, despite the Vietnam War and many other conflicts present in the late 1960s, from the diverse disarmament attempts which, for instance, led to the first SALT (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks) treaty in 1972. This diagnosis peaked with Galtung’s most important prognosis, which was at least in the West, no more large-scale wars could be expected. He argued that the increasingly worldwide nature of conflict potential was intensified by the collision of highly and less highly developed countries brought about by communications technology. As a result, the entire system became increasingly unstable.

19-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 277

Annotation: “Future of the International System”

277

Commentary Perhaps the most important point in Galtung’s lecture from today’s perspective lies in his precise description of the situation of the Cold War and its long-term potential for development. Particularly in reflecting of the year 2003, the prognosis of a significantly lessened East-West conflict due to, or in connection with, a strongly intensified worldwide communications network appears to point the way ahead. Naturally, such a view did not appear completely unfounded against the backdrop of the first easing of tensions after 1962, especially since this prognosis appeared to be directly confirmed by the détente developing in the early 1970s. This period of eased tensions, however, initiated above all under Nixon, was followed by a renewed arms spiral and heating up of the Cold War in the late Seventies and during the Reagan era of the 1980s, which Galtung had by no means ruled out. The plausibility of his diagnosis and prognosis was, and is, most visible in the connection of the establishment of the worldwide communications integration and the rising institutional integration through IGOs and INGOs. In sheer numbers, the number of active INGOs worldwide rose from approximately 200 in 1900 to over 800 in 1930, and approximately 2,000 in 1960 to almost 4,000 active institutions in the year 1980.4 Even though many of these organizations represented or represent very special interests and narrowly limited agendas, their rising influence on the formation of a worldwide general public, as well as on the politics of IGOs, must be estimated highly. This trend was supported by three basic “grassroots“ democratic principles, which were typical of INGOs: the principle of universal accessibility; the conception of membership oriented to individuals and their concerns; and a fundamentally rationalist orientation toward progress in the solution of transnational problems. These three principles produce an essentially egalitarian structure of “world citizenry”. The major problems of the international community that were, and are, appropriately identified out as central themes by the INGOs, are above all primarily technical standardization, population policy, the environment question, the status of women worldwide and, especially, international rules of conduct in cases of conflict and war:5 INGOs are built on world-cultural principles of universalism, individualism, rational voluntaristic authority, progress, and world citizenship.… Some INGOs, including sports, human rights, and environmental bodies, dramatically reify the world polity; human rights and environmental INGOs are especially prominent because of their conflicts with states over world-cultural principles.... Contrary to the claims global of neorealist theories, states are not always leaders of social change; they can also be followers. In mobilizing around and elaborating world-cultural principles, INGOs lobby, criticize, and convince states to act on those principles, at least in some sectors and with respect to some issues.6

The exceptional feature of the source presented here consists in the shrewd analysis of the rising significance of international (non-) governmental organizations for world politics and in the view of the changes in collective identifications linked to it. Galtung’s analysis was, and remains, highly meaningful because early on, he took

19-Schmidt-Gernig

278

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 278

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

political or techno-scientific developmental tendencies into consideration. Moreover, he asked questions about the consequences of such developments for the mentalities, identities, and cultural interpretive patterns of the affected societies; he pointed to a change in the values of Western societies that had already set in.7 On the other hand, his analysis is a very typical example of the kind of prognosis and future orientation of the period, which tended to see the most important catalysts of political and social change of the future above all in the new communications and computer technologies. This narrowness decisively limited Galtung’s approach in a manner typical of the future studies at the time—typical, indeed, for the 1960s in general: the internal logic of systems was generally given too much weight while the role of individual social participants tended to be underestimated.

19-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 279

SOURCE Johan Galtung: “On the Future of the International System,” in Mankind 2000, ed. Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung (Oslo and London: Universitetsforlaget /Allen & Unwin 1969), 25-26.

We predict a steady growth in the mutual interpenetration and intermeshing of all developed, industrialized nations with neomodern segments with each other; using INGOs and IGOs as building structures and individuals with cross-, trans- and supraloyalties as building blocks. Small nations will be particularly important in this process. They have most to gain from the process, since their level of incompatibility is highest, so they will often deliver the best IGO/INGO personnel. They may serve as go-between for bigger nations that willl still have a more purely national concpet of „national interest“ and hence tend to perceive each other in competitive terms. But also for them, i.e. particularly the United States and the Soviet Union, we predict that they will be caught in this generally integrative movement. This will eventually (i.e. at the very latest by the year 2000, probably already around 1980) comprise an area from the Bering Strait to the Bering Strait, from Alaska via Canada, the United States, over the NorthAtlantic Ocean into Western Europe and Eastern Europe (possibly with the exception of some Mediterranean countries), Soviet Union, Japan, and down to Australia and New Zealand: in other words, the OECD nations plus the socialist nations. The Kennedy Grand Design vision of an Atlantic Community, the de Gaulle vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the visions expressed in the 1957 Treaty of Rome—all are partial visions, with clearly political constraints, of this total image based more on the logic of the socioeconomic forces currently in operation. In this area there will still be nations, maybe about the same as today, but most borders will play no more role than the border between Norway and Sweden or even between two countries.... As in marriage, nations will be tied; they will have less latitude; but, also

19-Schmidt-Gernig

280

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 280

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig

as in marriage, most of them will decide that they gain more than they lose by the arrangement. There will also be regions with particularly strong supra-national links: we will proably discern the EEC, the Comecon countries, etc. Some parts will call themseves capitalist—but that will be more like the difference between countries with socialist or with non-socialist majorities inside a nation: the logic of industrialized, highly educated societies will prevail over such ideological distinctions. The flow of persons (also as labor force: one works where one wants or is most needed). Goods, and information across borders will be considerable, and this permeability of borders will contribute tremendously to the erosion of the nation-state—as indicated above. Nations will look more like Armenians and Jews before Israel. This may also sometime in the 1970’s facilitate the solution of the German problem in Central Europe. Peaceful coexistence will be the general rule. Thus, the prediction is that East and West will rapidly disappear as meaningful contradictions, not because of any complete convergence in socio-economic system, but because of deideologization and technification of the economies and a relatively complete mutual inter-dependence—with the big two as the last to join.... This gigantic neomodern complex will not have a unified regional government, but rather be coordinated through a network of supra-national and supra-regions organizations that will have to work closely together with INGOs and super-INGOs. Thus, all three conditions of peaceful relations envisaged in section 2 above will be satisfied and increasingly so, and that will serve to absorb and solve conflicts bound to arise in a process of interpenetration. As a crowning achievement there will even be integration of military forces in this area, starting with non-agression treaties … continuing with exchanges of observation teams and mutual inspection schemes, and ending up with some kind of unified command. Thus, we do not predict disarmament so much as arms control and a pooling of military resources, that will be less and less targeted on intra-region goals. Of course, for all this to take place a common enemy would be almost, but not quite, indispensable—and this will be discussed later. In other words, the prediction would be that in this region there will be no major war, except, possibly, by technical failure or escalation in the first ten years. After that, even such factors will be under control. There may be some local conflagrations, but they will be absorbed quickly because of the high number of conflict-absorbing and conflict-solving organizations, the high entropy due to the high level of mobility, and the generally symbiotic pattern of cooperation. There is the uncertainty connnected with the two big powers, not so much because of their power potential as because of their size. We may risk some kind of atavistic return to nationalistic rather than regional militarism, but this can be coped with by means of domestic opposition and the extent to which allies are able to control the superpowers and inform them that they cannot count on unconditional support.…

19-Schmidt-Gernig

3/27/03

1:53 PM

Page 281

Annotation: “Future of the International System”

281

Notes 1. Born in 1930 in Norway, Johan Galtung became one of the most prominent founders of international peace and conflict studies. Between 1959 and 1969 he was director of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. In addition, as the winner of the alternative Nobel Prize, Galtung held a chair in Peace Studies at the universities of Oslo, Princeton, Hawaii, Stockholm, WittenHerdecke, and others. Galtung’s most essential publications are, among others, Essays in Peace Research, vols. 1-6 (Copenhagen: Ejlers, 1975-1988), Theory and Methods of Social Research (New York: Columbia Press, 1969), There are Alternatives (Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman, 1984), Human Rights in Another Key (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), and The Road to Conflict Transcendence in the 21st Century (London et al.: Pluto Press, 2000). 2. Robert Jungk, Preface, in: Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung, eds., Mankind 2000 (Oslo and London, Allen and Unwin, 1969), 10. 3. Johan Galtung, “On the Future of the International System,” in Jungk and Galtung, Mankind 2000, 25 (italics in original); see also, ibid., pp. 19-41. 4. See the general overview by John Boli and George M. Thomas, “World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 171-190, especially 172. 5. For more detailed analysis of these principles and topics, see ibid., 180-187. 6. Ibid., 187. 7. See, for example, Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

Bibliography Galtung, Johan. Essays in Peace Research, vols. 1-6. Copenhagen: Ejlers, 1975-1988. _____. Theory and Methods of Social Research. New York: Columbia Press, 1969, _____. There are Alternatives. Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman, 1984. _____. Human Rights in Another Key. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. _____. The Road to Conflict Transcendence in the 21st Century. London et al.: Pluto Press, 2000. Jungk, Robert, and Johan Galtung, eds. Mankind 2000. Oslo and London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Boli, John, and George M. Thomas. “World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization.” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 171-190. Inglehart, Ronald. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

20-Thorsten

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 282

Chapter 20

THE “CHILDREN AND WAR” VIRTUAL FORUM Voices of Youth and International Relations Annotations by Marie Thorsten

The electronic gathering of youth from all over the world who are demanding peace should strike fear in the hearts of bullies everywhere.… You are proving that there is a weapon more powerful than the world’s most deadly arms – the e-mail. — Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in a message to participants in the UNICEF Voices of Youth “Children and War” forum, 1999

T

he 1999 conflict in Kosovo, coinciding with the Internet’s adolescent growth spurt, generated a gamut of virtual communities discussing the war from diverse religious, political, and cultural perspectives. The “Children and War” interactive discussion facilitated by UNICEF’s Voices of Youth (VOY)1 created a generational perspective, allowing young people, from elementary school through university, to submit over 1700 messages about war. Their entries came from ninety-seven countries, in French, English, and Spanish languages, but the youth represented one common interest: bringing peace to Kosovo. The “Children and War” site exemplifies the capacity of United Nations agencies (such as UNICEF), as well as nongovernmental organizations, to promote knowledge of the world via new media. Through the VOY website, young people communicate by forging new communities of interest that overlap national identities. They bond with their counterparts from many areas of the world who are similar in age, interest in global affairs, and access to the Internet. Yet the representation of children in international relations has never been politically antiseptic, in spite of its kinder, gentler appearance. To use the VOY in classrooms, I suggest the following reflections on the site concerning its relevance to culture and international relations (IR): (1) Does the site promote genuine universalism or unilateral hegemony? (2) Notes for this section can be found on page 288.

20-Thorsten

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 283

Annotation: Voices of Youth

283

Does the site promote elitism or egalitarianism? 3) Does the site eliminate or exacerbate the excesses of statecraft? And (4), does the site promote apathy or empathy?

Background UNICEF established the Voices of Youth interactive homepage as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1995, launching the VOY pilot at the World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen. Over the course of six weeks, about 3,000 messages from 80 countries were sent via the Internet to the summit leaders, and the summit leaders also returned brief messages to online participants. UNICEF called it “an Internet record,” and encouraged further development: “You are caring, responsible citizens of the emerging global village of which you will be the leaders tomorrow,” explained the homepage to the youth participants.2 Figure 20.1: UNICEF Voice of Youth Homepage, (30 September 2002)

Source: The “Children and War” Virtual Forum: Voices of Youth homepage(30 September 2002) (30 September 2002) See also http:/www.unicef.org/voy/meeting/meethome.html

The permanent VOY website now consists of three parts. “The Meeting Place” is the main virtual discussion area where youth (usually under twenty-one) submit views on current global topics. “The Learning Place” offers interactive projects directed toward VOY’s main themes: “Children and War,” “Children and Cities,” “The Girl Child,” “Children and Work,” and “Children’s Rights.” Finally, “The Teachers’ Place” offers a forum where educators and education planners, whether in formal schools or nonformal educational agencies (such as UNICEF country offices) can exchange ideas and also read suggestions for teachers from UNICEF staff. (A related site, “Teachers Talking,” facilitates discussion of VOY-related teaching methodologies in greater detail.) The relevance of civilians—hence, children—to modern warfare appears bluntly in VOY’s caption, which accompanies one of its child drawings. A twelve-year old from Slavonski Brod in the former Yugoslavia submitted a picture, titled simply,

20-Thorsten

284

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 284

Marie Thorsten

“War,” of a child praying in front of a church that has been destroyed by bombs. Alongside the drawing, VOY informs us that, “At the beginning of the century, around 90% of the people killed or injured in war were soldiers. Today, 90% or more are civilians, mostly women and children.”3 VOY also offers considerable space to educate older youth and adults on the stark realities of children and war in greater detail. The “Anti-War Agenda” explains that the VOY site closely follows the Convention on the Rights of the Child in its support of the following issues: the need to create efforts for the prevention of war and resolution of conflict; the need to offer special protection for girls and women in war; the proposal to raise the minimum age of recruitment into the military to age eighteen (currently it is fifteen); the need to ban “the production, use, stockpiling, sale, and export of anti-personnel mines” through efforts of international law; the need to establish international war crimes tribunals; the need to establish children as zones of peace; the need to conduct “child impact assessment” on any type of sanctions; the need to provide emergency relief effectively; the need to rehabilitate adult and child soldiers, and the commitment to education to promote peace and tolerance.4 When hostilities broke out in Kosovo in 1999, VOY invited youth from around the world to contribute comments addressed to that conflict in particular. The invitation was well-received: from 25 March to July 20, youth from nearly one hundred countries contributed comments in VOY’s three languages. The entries varied considerably in content and delivery, but VOY staff recognized all of the comments as long as they were not overly profane or otherwise inappropriate. Examples, entered below in original wording, include: From an eighteen-year-old in Singapore: Many of the young people [in my country] don’t really know what is going on in Kosovo, between India and Pakistan or North and South Korea. Many don’t even really bother about it…. They do not realise that they are a citizen of the world, not just a citizen of a country. All they concern about is about themselves, this kind of selfish and egocentric youths will be the ones to cause the downfall of a nation.

From a trio of sixteen-year-olds in Armenia: Clinton and NATO are monsters. I am realy sorry for serbians and for albanian refugees who are running not from the serbs but from aggressive americans.

From a sixteen-year-old in The Netherlands: Milosevic has started the war. The NATO tries to stop him. The NATO tries to make the Yougoslavian army weak. And if the Yougoslavian army is weak, the Serbs will stop with killing the Albanians. If we stop the attacks, the Serbian soldiers will continue with the ethnic cleansings. In this case, violence is the only way to get PEACE.

The originality, pertinence and innocent smartness of the entries prompted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to address the forum with his own message, as cited at the beginning of this chapter. The secretary general clearly recognized the power

20-Thorsten

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 285

Annotation: Voices of Youth

285

of the pen rendered through electronic mail, calling it “the most powerful weapon in the world.”

Reflecting on Youth and International Relations Perhaps there is no more compelling universal image than the child, the photogenic innocent whom public officials claim to serve and politicians hope to kiss. Do the images in the “Children and War” site inspire a common bond among all on the need to be more concerned with the plight of children in conflict? Conversely, do the images merely reinforce hegemony—a unilateral cultural imperialism? Even if we might assume that UNICEF consciously intends no Western-inspired hegemony, sometimes unilateral actions do occur. The organization responded resourcefully to the charges that it was biased in support of sympathy for Kosovo while ignoring other conflicts around the world (namely, those in non-European areas such as Iraq, Sudan and East Timor etc.). On 22 April, the Executive Director of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy, issued a statement that has since then replaced Annan’s opening message to the discussion site: While the Kosovo crisis merits an immediate and generous response worldwide from both the public and the media, relatively little attention has been paid to similar conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Ethiopia and many other places where thousands of persons are displaced from their homes, tortured and killed every day.

The Kosovo pages were replaced by a forum to “Discuss less-reported conflicts,” which successfully focused on other areas until the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Although the participants presently discuss areas such as Kashmir, Zimbabwe and Columbia, the war on terrorism clearly dominates.5 Moreover, the anthology of entries to the archive on “Children and War” features ten pages of general comments on conditions of war, with barely any mention of specific conflicts.6 Some feel that the Internet is creating more equal democratic opportunities for all by facilitating “anytime, anywhere” access to knowledge, temporal meeting places, and opportunities for both cyber-activism and face-to-face public gatherings. However, all this depends on whether or not people have access to quality computers and high-speed Internet connections to begin with. UNICEF is surely not insulated from fielding questions on elitism, including skeptical queries on whether information dissemination can do anything to facilitate its more traditional mandate of securing bread, blankets, and basic needs for women and children in impoverished circumstances. Still, if donations are what enables UNICEF action, those donations might be more abundant if the organization provides greater transparency to donors as well as greater knowledge to recipients of prevailing global conditions. Both donors and recipients would be better served by improved technology, Internet access, and informative communication. Certainly, developed countries claim a much higher privilege of accessibility to the Internet, which was especially true when VOY was originally launched.7 This

20-Thorsten

286

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 286

Marie Thorsten

continues to be reflected in the VOY discussion pages, where Americans, Canadians and other digitally-provided citizens offer more contributions than residents of areas on the other side of the digital divide. However, the fact that in 1999, contributors to the Kosovo thread of the “Children and War” site already represented nearly one hundred countries showcased a future scenario of a digitally connected developing world. To promote Voices of Youth, UNICEF has been running several demonstration projects throughout the developing world to teach representatives in country offices and affiliated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) how to coordinate the Internet with youth advocacy. Many public-private partnerships to provide greater connectivity have also been established. “Each year there is greater interest in and understanding of where the Internet can fit in to support and enhance programme priorities,” notes VOY Project Coordinator Anne Sheeran, adding, “But we are still in quite the early stages…. It’s [the] orientation towards democratizing the medium that characterizes much of UNICEF’s interest in the Internet and the Voices project.”8 Thus, while youth from wealthier countries may have entered VOY on their own initiative via personal computers (or at school), youth in poorer countries were more likely to have had their comments gathered from someone else (such as an NGO, UNICEF, or youth advocacy representative); or, the contributors may have accessed the VOY directly while on the premises of UNICEF country offices or related NGOs. While representations of youth from around the world seem to evoke mental imagery of a borderless, hand-in-hand “small world after all,” they also reinforce the borders of states, sometimes in unexpected ways. In Nevzat Soguk’s example, the very process of naming and bureaucratizing the “refugee” is a process of statecraft, in that a refugee is someone who exists outside the state system, is granted legal status only by proof of state-related political conflict, and is denied a voice in his or her own affairs by the very condition of being state-less.9 A telling technological feature of the VOY website enables both the enforcement and the erasure of state-constructed identities. Upon entering any of the discussion sites, including “Children and War,” users are invited to change the sorting mechanism of the messages (“change selection”). Merely by clicking on dots, the messages can be sorted according to country, topic, or date (as well as by cohort and language). By selecting “country,” participants represent the interests of their alphabetized home states: Andorra, Angola, Argentina, and so on. In another click, however, the comments from those sites can be instantly grouped into new communities of interest, topically arranged (according to recent log-on) as: “Ethical Foreign Policies,” “Iraq and the Suffering of Its Population,” and “I Don’t Know” (to name only those that appear first). Ideally, the groups of young people meeting in cyberspace are empathetic toward one another as well as for the children whose needs are serviced by UNICEF initiatives. Although such values of empathy and tolerance should theoretically lead toward more peaceful relations in adulthood, the opposite also might occur. The saturation

20-Thorsten

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 287

Annotation: Voices of Youth

287

of suffering children images might also provoke a counterintuitive “compassion fatigue,” whereby the continuous image-streams of pathetic individuals lead to feelings of separation rather than sameness. As communications scholar Susan D. Moeller explains compassion fatigue in her searing criticism of American world news coverage: “Too much harping on the same set of images, too much strident coverage with insufficient background and context, exhaust the public…. Undifferentiated mayhem leads to emotional overload.”10 Thus, journalists often compete among themselves to cover the most sensational news stories, especially if they are related to the United States and haven’t been covered for a long time. Soguk has critiqued a similar phenomenon concerning refugee images in wealthier countries. The circumstances faced by displaced peoples only register ephemerally in Western media and soon become “distant and aberrant realities.” Through image overkill, “refugee suffering is familiarized, first becoming ordinary, and then simply invisible even as they appear on TV screens and front pages of newspapers.”11 Can an organization such as UNICEF promote any sustaining public interest in world affairs, especially problems that concern its mandate, the protection of women and children? International organizations, until very recently, have had to either fit their representations into the mass media mold, or go unnoticed. Their self-promotions, often used to solicit funds, easily follow the mass media’s precedent in creating compassion fatigue. It is true that the drawings, photographs, and stories in the “Children and War” forum are inevitably sad. They might inspire feelings of empathy among participant users who are similar in age, or they might create feelings of radical separation between those who live in peace and those who know all about war. There are important distinctions, however. The VOY forum allows considerable room for the self-representations of youth, whereas mainstream media rarely cover actual voices of people in poor countries. Offering a limited space where children themselves can speak, and a larger space where adult advocates of children can also be heard, constitutes at least one small step toward democratizing the conditions that victimize children, namely, war. As Soguk argues in the case of refugees, however, the voices of children (like refugees) can be considered as democratically enabled when child advocates gain power to truly shape children’s political situations.12 “Children and War” demonstrated the forcefulness of youth perspectives on war. Voices of Youth also dealt resourcefully with criticisms, such as its alleged overemphasis on Kosovo. The site represents the capacity of international and nongovernmental organizations to educate the public more freely than they could through the constraints of mass media, or through traditional academic discourse on international relations. Indeed, this website offers hope for previously marginalized voices to make themselves more noticed and influential in the relations among nations.

20-Thorsten

11/5/03

7:57 PM

Page 288

Marie Thorsten

288

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Voices of Youth, (30 September 2002). “Voices of Youth: World Summit for Social Development,” (30 September 2002). “Explore Children and War,” http://www. unicef.org.voy/meeting/war/War3.html. “Anti-War Agenda,” http://www. unicef.org.voy/meeting/war/war-exp3.html>. “Discuss less-reported conflicts,” http:www.unicef.org/voy/meeting/war/less-reported.html (7 October 2002). “Archives: Children and War,” http://www.unicef.org/voy/cgi-bin/z.cgi?search2.zgi&field= start&issue=war. As of 1998, over ninety percent of Internet users were in developed countries, as cited in Lester R. Brown, Michael Renner and Christopher Flavin, Vital Signs: Environmental Trends that are Shaping our Future (London: Earthscan, 1998). Present indicators suggest that the developing world is gradually gaining access to information technology, but still at a slower rate than developed countries, and with the further negative consequences of dividing “information-haves” and “have-nots” within domestic borders. See “Spanning the Digital Divide: Understanding and Tackling the Issues,” , (30 September 2002). E-interview, Anne Sheeran, [email protected], with Marie Thorsten, 20 July 1999. Nevzat Soguk, “Other than Ourselves: Our Other Selves,” conference paper, International Studies Association Vienna Convention, 17 – 19 September 1998, 2000, 1-26; here, 3. See also Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999), 25. Nevzat Soguk, “Other than Ourselves,” 7. Ibid., 16.

Bibliography Brown, Lester R., Michael Renner and Christopher Flavin. Vital Signs: Environmental Trends That are Shaping Our Future. London: Earthscan, 1998. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Soguk, Nevzat. “Other than Ourselves: Our Other Selves.” Conference paper, International Studies Association Vienna Convention, 17 – 19 September 1998. _____. States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 289

INDEX

A absolute monarchy, 235 academia and Cold War, 258–263 new concepts in foreign relations, 6–7 Acheson, Dean, 266, 268 Action Committee for the United States, 122 Adenauer, Konrad, 104, 145, 224, 270 Adorno, Theodore, 141, 144 African Americans and Democratic Party, 251 meager political choices, 253–254 and Republican Party, 250 Air Bulletin, 79 Albert, John, 81 Althoff, Friedrich, 119 America Houses, 121 American Council for Learned Societies, 122 American imperialism, 181; see also cultural imperialism; imperialism Americanization of Europe, 200, 201, 206 studies of process, 202 American Left, 268 American Revolution, 180 Amerindian peoples, 28–32 Amnesty International, 276 Anderson, Perry, 222 Andrews, C. F., 34 Animal Farm (Orwell), 260 Annales school, France, 8 Annan, Kofi, 282, 284, 285 Antifuturology, 166 antiglobalization protests, 221 anti-imperialists, 70 antinuclear campaign, 146 appeasement policy, 70 architecture, 50–51

Arendt, Hannah, 135 Aristotle, 28–29, 183 Aron, Raymond, 122 Ashley, Richard K., 184 Association Futuribles Internationales, 159 Atlantic Community, 279 Atlantic society, 125 Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, 146

B barbarism, 188 Battle of the Tegeler Weg, Berlin, 139 Beckmann, Max, 103 Behrendt, Richard F., 274 Belitz, Ina, 99 Bell, Daniel, 163, 260 Bellamy, Carol, 285 Bellamy, Edward, 222 Benjamin, Walter, 141, 144 Benton, William B., 80–81 Berger, Mark, 226 Berger, Peter L., 179, 183 Bergsträsser, Arnold, 103, 105 Bertaux, Pierre, 164 Beveridge, Albert J., 64 Bielefeld school, 9, 186 Bilderberg conferences, 122 Birnbaum, Norman, 145 Bismarck, Otto von, 53, 55 Bitterli, Urs, 10 Blaney, David, 34, 35 Blanqui, Adolphe-Jérome, 50 Bloom, Sol, 52 Blum, Léon, 101 Bock, Hans-Manfred, 98 Bohr, Niels, 122 Bolshevik Revolution, 99–100

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 290

290 Bosch, Robert, 8 Boulding, Kenneth, 274 Boutwell, George S., 251–252, 253, 256 Bracher, Karl-Dietrich, 9 Braden, Thomas, 209 Braudrillard, Jean, 178, 184 Brecht, Bertolt, 144 Briand, Aristide, 103 Bright, John, 244 Britain, New Liberalism, 50 British school, 5, 7 Britton, John, 226 Brown, Lester, 164, 222 Browne, Mallory, 259 Brown v. Board of Education, 206 Bryan, William Jennings, 251 Buchanan, Patrick, 226 Bücher, Hermann, 103 Buchholz, Werner, 186 Bull, Hedley, 28, 32 Bundy, McGeorge, 121 Burgard, Oliver, 99 Burk, Kathleen, 7 Butterfield, Herbert, 7 Byrnes, James, 268

C Cabet, Etienne, 157 Calles, Plutarco Elias, 226 Campbell, David, 33–34, 182 capitalism, in Cold War propaganda, 81–82 Carnegie Foundation, 120, 259 and Central Intelligence Agency, 209 founding of, 117 Carnegie Foundation for Europe, 99, 105 Carnot, Sadi, 51 Carr, E. H., 7 cartoons, and cultural history, 248 Center for Advanced Studies, Princeton, 120 Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, 274 Center for the Study of Social Policy, Stanford, 166 Central Intelligence Agency, 120, 121, 258, 259 dummy foundations, 209 International Organizations Division, 209, 260 politico-cultural effort, 260 CERN, 122 Challenge from the Future, 160 Chevalier, Michel, 50

Index

Chicago Broadax, 251, 255–256 Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968, 139 “Children of War” interactive discussion, 282–287 China, 48 Chirac, Jacques, 224 Christian Democrats, Germany, 139 Churchill College, 122 “Civil Disobedience” (Thoreau), 143 civilized world, 188 civil rights movement Germany sympathies for, 142–143 in international arena, 143 Claus, Max, 105–106 Clausewitz, Carl von, 216 Clausewitz, Marie von, 216 Club of Rome, 160 Cobden, Richard, 244 Cobden-Chevalier treaty, 246 Cold War cultural dimensions, 7 culture and academia, 258–263 effect on U. S.-German relations, 269 escalating conflicts, 273–274 German-American relations, 144 ideas in history of, 217 political of educational exchanges, 120–124 private initiatives, 260 and U. S. identity, 182 United States policies, 207–211 Cold War culture, 207 Cold War propaganda, between U. S. and USSR, 200–201 Cold War propaganda (Soviet) on labor unrest in U. S., 81 portrayal of men, 85–86 on shortcomings of capitalism, 81–82 use of gender stereotypes, 85 Cold War propaganda (US) on benefits of capitalism for families, 81–82 on complexities of democracy, 88 gender stereotypes, 78–89 images of gender and family, 80–81 on labor laws, 82 on moral values in U. S., 82–83 portrayal of men, 85–86 on Soviet women, 84–85 stories of family life, 83–85 using Communist refugees, 82 College of Europe, 106

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 291

Index

colonialism and cultural inferiority, 54 on display at world exhibitions, 52 European justification for, 30 historiography, 10 by Japan, 48 as welcome challenge for U. S., 65 Columbia University, student occupation, 147 Commercial Treaty of 1927, 102 Committee for Documentation and Information, 225 compassion fatigue, 287 Comte, Auguste, 157 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 157 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 121, 122 Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904), 4–5, 14 Conn, Steven, 181 constructivism, 32 approach to culture, 179 definition, 178 Convention on the Civil Rights of the Child, 284 Costigliola, Frank, 116, 222 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard, 103 Council on Foreign Relations, 122, 259 credibility concept, 66–67 Crimean War, 48 crisis of masculinity, 62, 217 cross-cultural relations Amerindians and Spaniards, 28–32 culture transfer, 49–50 favorable national image, 46–48 German-American student movements, 138–140 New Left personal contacts, 144–148 student protester ideological affinities, 140–141 student revolution of 1960s, 145–149 in world exhibitions, 45–55 Crystal Palace exhibition, 45, 47, 50, 243–248 in Punch cartoon, 244–247 cultural diplomacy, 3 and cultural imperialism, 178–179 goal of world exhibitions, 52–54 new studies in., 206–207 role of U. S. foundations, 116–117 cultural diversity, 28 cultural exchange transatlantic exchanges 1900-1939, 119–120 at world exhibitions, 54

291 cultural history, 182–183 cartoons as sources of, 248 cultural imperialism, 178–179, 211 Americanization of Europe, 200, 201, 206 of United States, 181 at world exhibitions, 54 cultural inferiority, 54 cultural relations in American Cold War propaganda, 79–89 during Cold War, 7 educational exchanges, 115–16, 120–124 between France and Germany, 98–99 London exhibition of 1851, 243–248 national or ideological alliances, 48–49 philanthropic foundations, 209–210 political agendas, 49–50 private initiatives, 260 role of non-governmental organizations, 115–16 in 19th-century exhibitions, 45–55 of U. S. foundations, 117–118 of U. S. with underdeveloped nations, 87 work of foundations, 116–126, 259 at world exhibitions, 45–55 cultural representation alternatives, 54–55 in architecture, 50–51 for cultural transfer, 49–50 goals of, 46–50 methods, 50–54 of national image, 46–48 national or ideological alliances, 48–49 to set political agendas, 49–50 at world exhibitions, 46 cultural revolution of 1960s, 215 cultural stereotypes, 61 on gender, 60–61 cultural studies, in U. S. and Germany, 186–187 cultural transfer, 8, 49–50 culture and Cold War, 258–263 of Cold War, 207 constructivism vs. postmodernism, 178–186 created over time, 34–35 debate about, 11 deconstructionist view, 33–34 definition, 6, 127, 178–179

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 292

292 expanded role in international relations, 198–201 freedom and economic dimensions, 208 and historiography of colonialism, 10 and human nature, 28 instrumentalization of, 199 in international relations, 136 and international relations in Frederick III’s testament, 238 in international relations theory, 32–35 language theory, 33 meanings of, 198–199 modernization trends, 163–164 role in international relations, 27, 32–36 shared values, 28 and state of nature, 35–36 study of, in U. S. diplomacy, 6 tool of diplomacy, 177, 178 underlying force in diplomacy, 3 world exhibitions, 198–201 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 105 cybernetic logic, 163 cybernetics, 161–163 cybernetic technologies, 163 cybernetization of society, 164–165

D Darré, Richard Walter, 187 Davis, Angela, 143 Dean, Robert, 217 Dean, Robert D., 181, 182 deconstructionists, 33–34, 183, 185 De Gaulle, Charles, 101, 224, 225 Delbriel, Jean-Claude, 8 Della Porta, Donatella, 136 Delpar, Helen, 226 democracy, in Cold War propaganda, 88 Democratic Party, 251 denationalization, 276 Derrida, Jacques, 178, 183, 184 Descartes, René, 183 Deutsch, Felix, 103 Deutsch, Karl W., 161, 164 diachronical studies, 202 Diderot, Denis, 30 Diemel, Christa, 186 diffusion theory, 137 diplomacy; see also international relations invention of, 233–239 new directions in study of, 5–11

Index

diplomatic history cultural approach, 179–180 gender rhetoric, 216 in Britain, 7 in France, 8-9 in Germany, 9-10, 202–203 new generation of historians, 3-4, 6-11, 14, 215–216 in United States, 5–6 discourse on duty, 67–68 future orientation, 157–158 linking words to policies, 60–61 masculine, 61 realism, 70–71 at world exhibitions, 54 Dodd, Thomas, 70 Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, 10 domestic political issues, 181–182 Douglas, Mary, 123 Doyle, Michael, 28 Drucker, Peter F., 163 Dülffer, Jost, 10 Dulles, Allen, 209 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, 8 Dutschke, Rudi, 140, 141, 144, 146, 147 duty and American imperialism, 67–68 American soldiers as symbols of, 68–69

E East European Fund, 209 Economic Cooperation Administration, 259 economic development displayed at world exhibitions, 51–52 in Germany, 52 educational exchanges, 115 benefits of, 124–125 during Cold War, 120–124 context in 1948-1960, 123 early 20th century, 119 history of, 118–119 integrated networks, 124–126 interwar years, 119–120 in 19th century, 119 political vs. scientific, 122–123 United States - Germany, 119–120 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 145 Ehrenreich, John, 145 Eisenberg, Christiane, 10

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 293

Index

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 208, 259 Eisenhower administration, 62 Elliott, William Y., 258, 259 Endy, Christopher, 14 Enlightenment world views, 188 environmentalism Green Party, 175–176 Greenpeace, 160, 276 escalating conflicts, arms expenditures, 274 Escobar, Arturo, 226 Espagne, Michel, 8 Europäische Revue, 103 Europe Americanization of, 200, 201, 206 de Gaulle’s vision for, 279 disillusionment about the future, 158 future studies, 222 influence of U. S. student protests, 136 justification of colonialism, 30 mindset after World War I, 99–100 post-1945 elites, 105 right-wing intellectuals, 100 society and natural law, 30 transatlantic exchanges 1900-1939, 119–120 U. S. cultural penetration 1919-1939, 116 U. S. hegemony, 125–126 European Center of Sociology, 122 European Community Institute for University Studies, 122 European Cultural Union, 103 European integration, 8 European University, 106

F families capitalist vs. Communist societies, 83 portrayal in Cold War propaganda, 83–85 in U. S. Cold War propaganda, 80–81 Farfield Foundation, 259 feedback of information, 162 Ferguson, Yale, 35 Ferkiss, Victor, 164 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 268 Finzsch, Norbert, 143 First Political Testament of Frederick III, 234–239 Fischer, Joschka, 175–176, 178, 182 Flechtheim, Ossip K., 164, 274

293 Fleischmann, Julius, 259 Flexner, Abraham, 118 Fluorite Act of 1946, 123 Ford Foundation, 209, 259 criticisms of, 121 leadership of, 121 political connections, 120 preoccupation with foreign policy, 121–122 foreign relations of Germany, 264–271 and U. S. historians, 3 Forster, Gail, 83–84 Forster, William, 83–84 Foucault, Michel, 178, 183, 184, 185 foundations association with CIA, 209 collaboration with federal agencies, 120–121 cultural capital, 121 effort to stabilize Europe, 125 history of, 117–118 ideological homogeneity, 120 during New Deal, 118 post-1945 functions, 121–123 role in U. S. foreign relations, 116–117, 120–124 Fourastié, Jean, 163 Fourier, Joseph, 157 France evacuation of Rhineland, 102 school of diplomatic history, 8–9 Franco-German Committee for Documentation and Information, 99, 100 history of, 101–104 results of, 104–106 Franco-German rapport, 8 Franco-German relations economic cooperation after 1927, 102–103 from 1870-1945, 98 ideology in, 225–226 makeup of organizations, 99–100 non-governmental, 97, 99 phases 1918-1939, 100 results of interwar efforts, 104–106 right-wing intellectuals, 100 social and cultural, 98–99 war of minds after 1918, 103 Franco-Russian Treaty of 1891-94, 49 Frankfurt School, 141–142, 143–144 Fraser, Ronald, 146

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 294

294 Frederick III of Brandenburg, 13, 233–239, 234–238, 241–242 admonition to successor, 240–241 Frederick I of Prussia, 234 Frederick William, the Great, 234 Frederick William I of Prussia, 238 Freedom Summer Project, 138–139 Freese, Peter, 144 Free Speech Movement, 138, 142 free trade debate, 50 Free University, Berlin, 125, 144 Free University, Brussels, 147 French Revolution, 49, 157, 180 Freymond, Jacques, 8 Friedeburg, Ludwig von, 142 Friedrich Barbarossa, 118 frontier safety valve, 64 Fulbright educational exchanges, 206 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 165 future orientation, 157–158 Futures: The Journal of Forecasting and Planning, 159 future studies accuracy of, 167 common agenda, 159 common scientific paradigm, 161–163 criticisms of, 166 Europe vs. America, 222 international networks of social analysis, 158–160 media channels, 159–160 misjudgments, 167–168 postindustrial society, 163–166 shared assumptions and paradigm, 166–167 technological forecasts, 164 in think tanks, 159 values and norms, 165–166 work of Galtung, 273–280 Futuribles: Analysen und Prognosen über die Welt von morgen, 159 Futurist, 159

G Gaddis, John Lewis, 217 Galtung, Johan, 13, 164, 165, 273–278, 273–280, 279–280 Gambetta, Léon, 53, 55 Garbo, Greta, 260 Garrison, William Lloyd, 251–252, 256 Geertz, Clifford, 36, 179, 250

Index

gender, and policy decisions, 218 gender politics, 181 gender roles, questioning of, 217 gender stereotypes aimed at homefront, 69–70 in cold War propaganda, 79–89 commonly held attitudes, 61 by LBJ, 60 and liberalism, 71 masculine dominance, 216 by U. S. Department of State, 79 generation post-1980, 9–10 post-1968, 282 post-1968 historians, 215–216 post-1968 scholars, 4 post-World War I, 99–100 of student revolution, 135–149 German historiography, 9 German student movement ideological affinities with American students, 140–144 personal contact with Americans, 144–148 similarities to U. S. counterpart, 138–140 and U. S. civil rights movement, 142–143 Germany; see also Franco-German relations after Thirty Years’ War, 236 cultural studies, 186–187 demonized after World War II, 267–268 diplomatic history, 202–203 economic development, 52 exchange programs with U. S., 119–120 generational conflict, 139 Green Party, 175 industry and banking, 102 leftist émigrés to U. S., 141–142 Max Lerner on, 264–271 National Socialist ideology, 187 New Left, 138, 139 at onset of Cold War, 269 post-1945 educational exchanges, 123–124 status of women, 86–87 Gerth, Hans, 144 Gestrich, Andreas, 186 Giddings, Franklin H., 64 Gilded Age, 62 Gilmore, Tamara Chernashova, 82

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 295

Index

Gitlin, Terry, 140 global communities, Voices of Youth, 282–287 globalization, 5, 201 cybernetization of society, 164–165 on display at world exhibitions, 46–54 emergence of, 222–223 instability and disorder, 165 protests against, 221 utopian visions, 165 global politics, 164 Goebbels, Joseph, 104, 187 Goethe, W., 268 government, preconditions for, 28 Grant, Ulysses S., 51 Great Depression, 118 Greenhalgh, Paul, 52 Green Party, Germany, 175 Greenpeace, 160, 276 Griggs, John W., 68 Grunewald, Michel, 98 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 146 Gustanis, Justin, 66

H Habermas, Jürgen, 143 Harey, David, 222 Harman, Willis W., 166 Harrigan, Anthony, 66–67 Harriman, Averell, 81 Hayashi, Tadamasa, 48 Hayden, Tom, 145 Heald, Morrell, 6 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 233 hegemony in international relations, 179 Herren, Madeleine, 8 Herriott, Edouard, 103 Heuss, Theodore, 104 Hiery, Hermann Joseph, 10 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 251–252, 256 Hillgruber, Andreas, 9 Himmler, Heinrich, 187 Hindenburg, Helene von, 104 Hindenburg, Paul von, 104 historiography of international relations in Britain, 7 Cold War studies, 206–210 colonialism and Europe, 10 constructivism vs. postmodernism, 178–186 debate about, 10–11

295 expanded role of culture, 3-4, 6, 14, 198–201 in France, 8–9 future of, 186–189 in Germany, 7, 9, 10, 202–203 in Germany and U. S., 186–187 intellectual challenges, 177–178 in postmodernism, 183–185 problems with studies, 181 U. S. and Europe compared, 188 in United States, 3–7 Hitler, Adolf, 70, 187, 268 Hobbes, Thomas, 28, 29–30 Hobby, Oveta Culp, 209 Hobby Foundation of Texas, 209 Ho Chi Minh, 60 Hoffman, Paul, 121, 209 Hoffman, Stanley, 28 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 100, 103 Hogan, Michael, 8 Hoganson, Kristin L., 6 Hohenzollern, 234, 235, 236–238 Holocaust, 187 Hölscher, Lucian, 157 Horkheimer, Max, 141, 144 Horne, Gerald, 6 Hudson Institute, 159 Hugo, Victor, 53 human nature and culture, 28 in state of nature, 29–32 Hunt, Michael, 6, 60 Hüser, Dietmar, 8

I ideological alliances, 48–49 ideology of American Left, 268 in Franco-German relations, 225–226 of freedom, 208 internationalization of, 276 liberalism, 223 of masculine ideal, 63–66 masculinity ideal, 60–63 of National Socialism, 187 of New Left, 140–144 New Left in-fighting, 139 New Right, 224 policy options and neutrality of, 237 of Students for a Democratic Society, 139 in U. S. foundations, 120

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 296

296 Illich, Ivan, 166 imperialism and American homefront, 69–70 criticism of opponents, 70–71 as duty, 67–68 natural laws of, 65 Philippine annexation, 251–252 to preserve domestic peace, 64 and race, 250–254 role of masculinity ideal, 61 in Spanish-American War, 61–62 uses of masculinity ideal, 71–72 in Vietnam era, 62 imperial nationalism, 211 “Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” (Kennan), 207 Inayatullah, Naeem, 34–35 industrialization, race for, 246–249 industrial society, crises of, 166 information feedback, 162 Information Research Department, Britain, 207 information technology, 159 initial encounters, 34 Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, 98 Institute for the Future, 159 Institute for Theoretical Physics, 122 Institut für Zukunfstfragen, 273 intercultural transfer Americanization of Europe, 200, 201, 206 by cartoons, 247–248 London exhibition of 1851, 243–248 power hierarchies, 200 role of state, 199–200 International Bankers’ Committee, 225–226 international cultural history, cartoons a sources of, 248 international exchange London exhibition of 1851, 243–248 Voices of Youth, 22–287 International Federation of Intellectual Unions, 99, 225 effect of, 104–106 history of, 103–104 international government organizations, 275–276 international history broadened focus of, 3–4, 10 changed understanding of, 5 debate about culture, 11 decentering, 3 diachronical approach, 202

Index

European vs. American approaches, 7 French school, 8 old vs. new views of, 4-10, 14, 444–6 pragmatism vs. ideology, 4 internationalization, 14, 201 of civil rights movement, 143 functions of League of Nations, 98 of political ideologies, 276 of student movement, 146–147 in student revolution, 135–138 International Labor Office, 98 international nongovernmental organizations, 97, 276; see also nongovernmental organizations International Peace Research Institute, 273, 274 international relations; see also historiography of international relations as branch of cultural history, 182–183 British school, 7 characteristics, 176 cultural approaches, 175–189 culture in, 136 and culture in Frederick III, 238 and domestic issues, 180, 181–182 French school, 8–9 gender politics, 181 German school, 9 invention of, 233–239 and moral territories, 180 national interpretations, 3–11 new directions in study of, 5–11 new methods of studying, 5–6 pe-1970 U. S. diplomatic history, 5–6 post-1980 generation, 9–10 poststructuralist approach, 218 power and hegemony in, 179 problem of theory in, 218–219 realism theory, 70–71 role of culture in, 32–36 transformation of field, 177–178 U. S. credibility on Vietnam, 66–67 value of images and perceptions, 215 at world exhibitions, 46–55 and youth, 285–287 international relations theory constructivist approach, 32 and language theory, 33 nature and culture in, 32–35 and state of nature, 31 International Summer School, Harvard, 258–263 International Vietnam Congress, 145

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 297

Index

international war crimes tribunals, 284 Internet Children and War interactive discussion, 282–285 improved access to, 285–286 virtual communities, 282 Iriye, Akira, 6, 116, 221, 265 Italian fascism, 103

J Jäckel, Eberhard, 187 Jackson, C. D., 259 Japan modernization of, 48 at world exhibitions, 47–48 Japers, Karl, 135 Jaspers, Gertrud, 135 Jefferson, Thomas, 188 Johnson, Lyndon B., 11, 66, 69, 73 and American credibility, 66–67 attack on liberalism, 71 gender stereotyping, 60 on Ho Chi Minh, 60 on U. S. role in the world, 67–68 Joll, James, 7 Jordan, Michael, 137 Jungk, Robert, 160, 164, 274, 279–280

K Kahn, Herman, 163, 166 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 119 Kalnocky, Gustav, 53 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 29–30, 157 Karl, Barry, 116 Katzenstein, Peter J., 183 Kehr, Eckart, 9, 201 Kellermann, Bernhard, 158 Kellermann, Henry J., 117 Kennan, George, 206, 207, 209 Kennedy, John F., 62, 69, 73, 181 Keyserling, Hermann, 103 Kiesinger, Kurt-Georg, 106, 144 Kirk, Grayson, 85 Kissinger, Henry, 258–263 Kocka, Jürgen, 9 Koestler, Arthur, 260 Kohl, Helmut, 224 Komosomol Pravda, 81 Korean War, 270

297 Korsch, Karl, 141 Kosovo War, 175, 282, 284–287 Kossuth, Lajos, 53 Kratochwil, Friedrich, 27, 33 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, 143 Krippendorff, Ekkehart, 144 Kristol, Irving, 260 Kroll, Frank-Lothar, 187 Krulak, Victor, 68–69 Krupp industries, 52 Kuisel, Richard, 222 Kulturbund, 103–104 Kulturgeschichte, 186 Neue, 10

L Labor Air Bulletin, 82 Labor laws, U. S., 82 Lacan, 184 Lafeber, Walter, 5 Lamont, Thomas, 225 Language theory, 33 Lapild, Yosef, 33 Las Casas, Bartolome de, 29, 34 Laville, Helen, 7 League of Nations, 98 learning society, 162 Lehmkuhl, Ursula, 183 Leopold I, 234 Lerner, Gerda, 216 Lerner, Max career, 264 on German foreign policy, 266–271 Lessing, Gotthold, 157, 268 “Letter to the New Left” (Mills), 141 Levering, Ralph, 6 L’Hullier, Fernand, 8 liberalism, 223 attacked by LBJ, 71 Lindbergh, Charles, 226 Lloyd, Gates, 259 Locarno Pact, 100 Locke, John, 28, 29, 30 Lodge, David, 115, 126 London exhibition of 1851, 45, 50, 243–248 American presence at, 47 Long, John D., 65 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 222 Loth, Wilfried, 10 Lowenstein, Allard, 260 Luce, Henry, 270

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 298

298 Luckmann, Thomas, 179, 183 Lundestad, Geir, 206 Lyautey, Hubert, 101

M Maier, Charles, 5 Mallinkrodt, Lilly von, 103 Man, Hendrick de, 101 Mankind 2000 future studies conference, 160, 165, 273 Mann, Thomas, 99, 268 Mansbach, Richard, 35 Mao Zedong, 146 Marcuse, Herbert, 138, 139, 141, 142–143, 144 influence on New Left, 141–142 “Marking Time” (Maier), 5 Marshall, George C., 82, 268 Marshall Plan, 118, 123 Marx, Karl, 140, 157 Marxism and New Left, 140–141 and student revolution, 139 Marxist analysis, 4 Masaryk, Tomas, 103 masculine discourse, 61 masculinity, crisis of, 62 masculinity ideal aggressive instincts, 64 and American credibility, 66–67 and American military, 68–69 in Cold War propaganda, 85–86 and crisis of masculinity, 217 for disparaging of critics, 61 and duty, 67–69 equating war with, 216 versus feminine liberalism, 71 and gender stereotypes, 60 interventionists’ purposes, 71–72 meaning of, 61 obscuring substantive issues, 72 and realism discourse, 71 and social Darwinism, 64 Mass, Marcel, 123 May, Elaine Tyler, 6, 182 Mayrisch, Emile, 101, 102, 104, 105, 225 McAdam, Doug, 136–137 McAllister, Bill, 6 McCarthy, Mary, 260 McCloy, John, 120, 121, 122, 209, 267, 270 McEnamy, Laura, 182

Index

McGee, Gale, 65 McHale, John, 164 McKinley, William, 49, 65, 67, 68, 251, 252 Meadows, Dennis, 160 mechanization of the future, 158 Medlicott, W. N., 7 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 187 Mendelssohn, Franz von, 103 mental maps, 179–180, 183, 187–188 Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken, 104 Merlio, Gilbert, 98 Mexican-U. S. relations, 224–227 Michels, Eckard, 99 Militant Liberty project, 207–208 Miller, Arthur, 7 Miller, Guido, 227 Mills, C. Wright, 139, 141 modernization, 163–164 Moeller, Susan D., 287 monarchy, 235 moral territories, 180 moral values, in Cold War propaganda, 82–83 Moras, Joachim, 104 Morgenthau, Hans, 5, 28, 31 Morier, R. B. D., 53 Morrow, Dwight, 226 Morrow, Elizabeth Cutter, 226 Mosse, George L., 144 Mühlhahn, Klaus, 8

N Nandy, Ashis, 34 Napoleon III, 49, 50, 54, 246 national alliances, 48–49 national image, 46–48, 54 National Socialist ideology, 187 Nationalzeitung (Reuleaux), 47 natural law, 30 of imperialism, 65 nature, in international relations theory, 32–35 Neue Kritik, 141, 146 New Deal, 118 New Europe concept, 106 New Left, 224 German-American ideological affinities, 140–144 Germany, 138, 139 Marxist influence, 140–141 media role in, 140 United States, 138

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 299

Index

New Left Notes, 146 New Liberalism, Britain, 50 New Right, 224 New School for Social Research, 120 New York Herald, 49 New York Post, 264 Nicholas II, Tsar, 51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 100 1984 (Orwell), 260 Nixon, Richard M., 258, 259–260 nonconformist generation, 99–100 nongovernmental organizations, 6, 10, 221, 277, 279–280 educational exchange programs, 115–126 European Cultural Union, 103 Franco-German Committee for Documentation and Information, 103–104 Franco-German social/cultural relations, 99–104 in Franco-German relations, 99 future studies, 159 International Federation of Intellectual Unions, 103–106 Internet use, 286 makeup of, in Europe after 1918, 99–100 Pan-European Union, 103 results of Franco-German relations, 104–106 role in U. S. cold War propaganda, 209–211 of student revolution, 137–149 think tanks, 159 U. S. foundations, 115–126 UNICEF, 282–287 Nonproliferation Treaty, 146 nonviolent resistance, 143 norms, 165–166 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 118, 175, 180 Nostitz-Wallwitz, Alfred von, 104 Notgemeinschaft der Wissenschaft, 119 Nouvelle Histoire, 8

O Office of the U. S. Military Government in Germany, 86 Ohnesorg, Benno, 142

299 “On the Future of the International System” (Galtung) analysis of, 275–278 text, 279–280 ontological assumptions function of, 36 on state of nature, 31 On War (Clausewitz), 216 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 276 Orwell, George, 260 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 10

P Paget, A., 53 Pan-European Union, 103 Paris exhibition of 1855, 50, 52–53, 243 Paris exhibition of 1867, 51 Paris exhibition of 1889, 49, 51 Pasic, Sujata Chakrabarti, 34, 35 Paterson, Thomas, 3, 8 Paulmann, Johannes, 10 Paxton, Joseph, 244 peace imperialism to preserve, 64 research, 165 studies, 215, 274 peaceful coexistence, 280 Pease, Donald, 211 Pells, Richard, 144 Petersen, Carl, 104 Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 181 Philadelphia exposition of 1876, 47, 49 philanthropy history of U. S. foundations, 117–118 scientific, 115–116 Philippine annexation as American duty, 67 and American homefront, 69–70 as manly endeavor, 61 necessity of, 65 and U. S. race relations, 251–252 Pike, Frederick, 226 Platt, John R., 162 political science, scientification of, 6 Pollock, Jackson, 260 Popper, Karl, 218 Port Huron Statement, 145 postindustrial society, 163–166 postmodernism, 144, 183–185 definition, 178 emergence of, 222–223

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 300

300 poststructuralism, 144, 218 poststructuralists, 183 power in international relations, 179 socially constructed, 185 power hierarchies, 200 progressivism, U. S., 50 protectionist debate, 50 Psychological Strategy Board, 210 Punch magazine, 45, 244–247

R race cultural program, 250 and imperialism, 250–254 and Philippine annexation, 251–252 racial stereotypes, 254 Radio Free Europe, 121 Radio Prague, 83 Radosh, Ronald, 225–226 RAND Corporation, 159 Raynal, Abbé, 30 Reagan, Ronald W., 180, 277 realism theory, 70–71 refugees, 286, 287 Reich, Wilhelm, 141 Reid, Whitelaw, 64 Renouvin, Pierre, 8 Repaper, Herrmann-Josef, 124 Report of the Subcommittee on Academic Programs analysis of, 258–260 text of, 261–263 “Repressive Tolerance” (Marcuse), 141–142 Republican Party and African Americans, 250 indictment of, in 1900, 251–254 Reuleaux, Franz, 47, 52 Revolutionären Kampf, 175 Revolution of 1830, 157 Revolution of 1848, 135, 157 Rhodes, Cecil, 119 RIAS Berlin, 121 Rittberger, Volker, 9 Rivera, Diego, 226 Robin, Ron, 124 Rockefeller, Nelson, 258, 259 Rockefeller Foundation, 209 avoidance of politicization, 120 founding of, 117

Index

General and International Education Boards, 119 in Germany after World War I, 119 leadership of, 121 worldwide efforts, 118 Rohan, Karl Anton, 103, 104, 105, 225 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 264, 268 Roosevelt, Theodore, 11, 73 on anti-imperialists, 70 on colonies, 65 on competition of nations, 64 on crisis of masculinity, 62 and Rough Riders, 64 and social Darwinism, 64 on the strenuous life, 63 Rorty, Richard, 4 Rose, Wickliff, 118, 119 Rosenberg, Alfred, 187 Rosenberg, Emily S., 182, 185 Rosenberg, Jon, 6 Rostow, Eugene, 66 Rostow, Walt, 260 Roszak, Theodore, 166 Rotter, Andrew, 6 Rough Riders, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28, 30 Royal Institute for International Affairs, 122 Rucht, Dieter, 136–137 Rusk, Dean, 70, 121 Russian Research Center, Harvard, 209

S Said, Edward, 210 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri, 157 Saitsev, Nina, 84–85 Salzburg Seminar, 125 Sampson, Edith, 208 Saturday Review, 54–55 “Scheme for the Promotion of Education on an International Scale” (Rose), 119 Schiller, Herbert, 6 Schlüter, Andreas, 234 Schmitt, Carl, 103 Schnitzler, Georg von, 103 Scholtyseck, Joachim, 8 Schwartz, Thomas, 124 Schwarz, Hans-Peter, 9 science, deconstructionist view, 34 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 36 scientification, 158 scientific paradigm, 161–163

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 301

Index

scientific philanthropy, 115–116 Seattle antiglobalization protests, 221 Second Empire, France, 46 second industrial revolution, 52 secularization of the future, 157 Seipel, Ignaz, 104 self-knowledge, 34 Sepulveda, Juan Ginés de, 29 Sheeran, Anne, 286 Sheffield, James, 226 Shell, Kurt L., 136, 143 Sick, Hans-Peter, 99 Siegfried, André, 105 Simmel, Georg, 5 Situationist International, 141 Sloan Foundation, 259 Small, Melvin, 6 Smith, Walter Bedell, 209 Smith-Mind Act of 1948, 123 social analysis, international networks, 158–160 social Darwinism, 63, 64 Social Democratic Party, Germany, 139 Social German Student Association, 137 contacts with American students, 144–148 social movements context of, 136–137 transnational, 136 social sciences, goal of, 36 Sofka, James R., 188 Soguk, Nevzat, 286–287 Soldierly ideal, 68–69 Sonnabend, Gaby, 99 South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, 142 Soutou, Georges-Henri, 8 Soviet Academy of Sciences, 122 Spanish-American War, 251 revitalization of U. S. society, 62–63 Spanish conquest, 28–32 Spanish War of Succession, 234 Sputnik, 62 St. Louis exposition of 1904, 4-5, 119 state dominance at world exhibitions, 46 goals of cultural representation, 46–50 and intercultural transfers, 199–200 invention of, 233–239 methods of cultural representation, 50–54 peacetime interventionism, 210–211 view of Frederick III, 240–241

301 state of nature, 28–32 constructivist approach, 32 and culture, 35–36 in English thought, 29–30 in French thought, 30 initial encounters, 34 lack of evidence on, 31–32, 36–37 ontological assumptions, 31 redefining, 34–35 with reason and morality, 31 Statue of Liberty, 51 Steinbuch, Karl, 163 Steinem, Gloria, 260 Stimson, Henry, 268 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 274 Stone, Shepard, 120–122, 123, 209 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, 276 “Strategy of Direct Action” (Vester), 141 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 138 student revolution of 1960s, 135–149, 223 antiwar rallies, 147 context of, 136–137 developmental phases, 137 German-American contacts, 144–148 German/American ideological affinities, 140–144 German/American structural similarities, 138–140 influence of Marcuse, 141–142 intellectual underpinnings, 141–144 internationalism in, 135–138 Marxist influence, 139, 140–141 media role in, 140 summary on, 135 Students for a Democratic Society, 137, 224 compared to German counterpart, 139–140 history of, 138–139 Port Huron Statement, 145 Students for Goldwater, 224 subcultures, United States, 265 SV/MEZ, 122–123 systems theory, 161–163

T Tateno, Gozo, 48 Taylor, A. J. P., 7 Taylor, Gordon R., 166 technological forecasts, 164

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 302

302 technological innovation cybernetics, 163 information technology, 159 Tenorio, Mauricio, 226 Thacker, Toby, 7 Thatcherites, 224 Theobald, Robert, 166 theory, importance for international relations, 218–219 Think tanks, 159 Third Reich, 104 Third Republic, France, 46 Third World Conference, 160 Thirty Years’ War, 237 Thompson, William Irwin, 166 Thoreau, Henry David, 143 Thorne, Christopher, 7 Tilly, Charles, 136 Times of London, 45 Tinbergen, Jan, 274 “To Colored Voters: An Address by Three Eminent Friends of Their Race” analysis of, 251–254 text, 255–256 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 47, 247 Todorov, Tzvetan, 34, 36 Toynbee, Arnold, 7 transatlantic contacts educational exchanges, 119–126 German/American student protesters, 144–148 transatlanticism Cold War educational exchanges, 120–124 early 20th century, 119 foundations and cultural relations, 117–118 integrated networks, 124–126 interwar years, 119–120 New Left personal contacts, 144–148 of student revolution, 137 U. S. hegemony in Europe, 125–126 work of U. S. foundations, 124–126 transindustrial society, 165–166, 168 transnational identity, 136 transnationalism Cold War educational exchanges, 120–124 in cultural systems, 188–189 educational exchanges, 117 educational exchanges of 19th century, 119 Franco-German relations, 224–227

Index

functions of League of Nations, 98 future studies, 158–169 student revolution of 1960s, 135–149 U. S. hegemony in Europe, 125–126 U. S. - Mexican relations, 224–227 of world exhibitions, 45–46 transnational social movements, 136 transnational social/political groups, 46 Treaty of Gera, 235 Treaty of Westphalia, 236 Truman, Harry, 208, 210, 268 Truman administration, 118

U Ulbricht, Walter, 145 UNICEF, Voices of Youth, 283–285 United States blueprint for victory over Soviets, 208 Cold War culture, 207 Cold War policies, 207–211 Cold War strategy, 118 crisis of masculinity, 62 cultural diplomacy and imperialism, 179 cultural imperialism, 181 cultural relations and foundation work, 117–118 cultural studies, 186–187 cultural studies on foreign relations, 6 diplomatic history in, 5–6 future studies, 222 image of postwar Germany, 268 imperial nationalism, 211 influence of student protests on Europe, 1346 loss of frontier safety valve, 64 Militant Liberty project, 207 national image at London exhibition, 47 national purpose debate, 62 New Left, 138 postwar transformation, 124 progressivism, 50 subcultures, 265 transatlantic exchanges 1900-1939, 119–120 United States Department of Commerce, 181 United States Department of State Air Bulletin, 79 Campaign of Truth, 208 Cold War cultural exchanges, 208–209

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 303

Index

cultural affairs division, 118 Policy Planning Staff, 207 on Soviet exploitation of women, 81–82 on typical American men and women, 79 United States financial capitalists, 225–226 United States foreign relations Cold War mindset, 216–217 and cultural stereotypes, 60–61 and cultural studies, 6 hegemony in Europe, 125–126 post-1945 involvement in Europe, 123–124 role of foundations, 116–117 ties for Ford Foundation, 121–122 work of foundations with, 120–124 United States Information Agency, 79, 206 on family in capitalist society, 83 guidelines for portraying American women, 86–87 on Soviet ethical standards, 83 on Soviet women, 84 stories of American family life, 83–85 support for democratic capitalism, 81–82 and underdeveloped nations, 87 Women in the United States, 86 United States Information Service Building the Community Through Family Life, 83 on Communism and family, 83 United States Information Service libraries, 82 United States military, symbols of duty, 68–69 United States student movement ideological affinities with German students, 140–144 personal contacts with Germans, 144–148 similarities to German counterpart, 138–140 Universal state of nature, 31 Unteutsch, Barbara, 99 utopian visions, 165

V Values, 14, 61, 63, 67, 80, 82, 89, 122, 123, 165–166, 261, 262, 286 Van Eschen, Penny, 6 Verne, Jules, 158 Vester, Michael, 141, 145, 149

303 Victoria, Queen, 52 Viénot, Andrée, 101 Viénot, Pierre, 102, 103, 106, 225 Vierhaus, Rudolf, 186 “Vietnam Committee for Peace, Liberation,” Munich, 146 Vietnam War and American credibility, 66–67 as American duty, 67–69 and American homefront, 69–70 antiwar rallies, 147 as assertion of American power, 65–66 internationalization of student movement, 146–147 as manly endeavor, 61 and masculinity ideal, 60 realism approach, 70–71 student opposition, 138–139 virtual communities, 282 Vitoria, Francisco de, 29 Voice of America, 208 Voices of Youth founding and functions, 283–285 and Kosovo War, 284–287 Von Ranke, Leopold, 9, 201

W Wagar, W. Warren, 166 Walker, Bill, 6 Walker, Robert B. J., 33, 184 Wallace, Henry, 264 Waltz, Kenneth, 28, 34, 35 War and masculinity ideal, 216 prevention of, 284 view of Frederick III, 237 Warburg, Max, 103 Waskow, Arthur I., 274 Weber, Adolf, 105 Weber, Alfred, 103 Weber, Max, 5, 36, 185, 216, 268 Webster, Charles, 7 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 9, 186 Weiner, Anthony, 163 Weizsäcker, Carl F. von, 276 Wells, Herbert G., 158 Wendt, Alexander, 32, 34, 36 Werner, Michel, 8 Westad, Odd Arne, 6 Western civilization concept, 105 Westernization, 202

21-Index

3/27/03

8:27 PM

Page 304

304 “What America Means to Me” (Gilmore), 82 Wiener, Norbert, 161 Wight, Martin, 7 Wilford, Hugh, 7 Williams, Raymond, 206 Williams, William Appleman, 211, 226 Wolff, Karl-Dietrich, 142, 144–145 Women in postwar Germany, 86–87 in underdeveloped nations, 86 and USIA, 81-82, 86 USIA guidelines on portrayal of, 86–87 world exhibitions, 45–55, 200, 201 architecture of, 50–51 Chicago 1893, 48 cultural and political goals, 46–50 displays of economic development, 51–52 displays of indigenous peoples, 52 and European monarchies, 53–54 French purpose in, 46–47 functions of, 45–46 goals of cultural representation, 46–50 intercultural transfer, 243–248 Japanese presence, 47–48 London 1851, 45, 50 number of exhibits, 51–52 Paris 1955, 50 Philadelphia 1876, 47, 48 as political tool, 52–54 projections of national image, 54–55 social groups at, 54 St. Louis, 1904, 4–5

Index

World Future Society, 159, 166 World Future Studies Conference, 273 World’s Fair of 1904, 119 World Summit for Social Development 1995, 283 World Trade Organization, 221 Worldviews, 239 World War I effect on European elites, 99–100 impact of postwar non-governmental organizations, 97–98

Y youth, and international relations, 285–287

Z Zapata, Emiliano, 226 Zentrum Berlin für Zukunftsforschung, 159 Ziebura, Gilbert, 9