A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
By examining German reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, author Patrick Jackson shows how the rhetorical invention of a West that included Germany was critical to the emergence of the postwar world order. Civilizing the Enemy convincingly describes how concepts are strategically shaped and given weight in modern international relations, by expertly dissecting the history of "the West" and demonstrating its puzzling persistence in the face of contradictory realities.
"By revisiting the early Cold War by means of some carefully conducted intellectual history, Patrick Jackson expertly dissects the post-1945 meanings of "the West" for Europe's emergent political imaginary. West German reconstruction, the foundation of NATO, and the idealizing of 'Western civilization' all appear in fascinating new light."
--Geoff Eley, University of Michigan
"Western civilization is not given but politically made. In this theoretically sophisticated and politically nuanced book, Patrick Jackson argues that Germany's reintegration into a Western community of nations was greatly facilitated by civilizational discourse. It established a compelling political logic that guided the victorious Allies in their occupation policy. This book is very topical as it engages critically very different, and less successful, contemporary theoretical constructions and political deployments of civilizational discourse."
--Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University
"What sets Patrick Jackson's book apart is his attention, on the one hand, to philosophical issues behind the kinds of theoretical claims he makes and, on the other hand, to the methodological implications that follow from those claims. Few scholars are willing and able to do both, and even fewer are as successful as he is in carrying it off. Patrick Jackson is a systematic thinker in a field where theory is all the rage but systematic thinking is in short supply."
--Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Assistant Professor of International Relations in American University's School of International Service.
Offering much more than a detached historical account of the "German miracle"—a ruined, war-torn nation evolving within a decade into the most flourishing country in Europe—Eugene Davidson delves into this intriguing story as a "participant observer." Drawing on countless interviews with Germans and Americans of various backgrounds and perspectives, from High Commissioner's office personnel to occupation troop GIs, storekeepers to housewives, Davidson insightfully conveys the atmosphere of postwar Germany and the role of the American occupation in achieving the nation's economic miracle.
The Death and Life of Germany examines the transformation of Germany, focusing on such key episodes as the unprecedented war-crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the almost unceasing attempts of the Western Allies to cooperate with the Russians, the startling effects of the currency reform and Marshall Plan aid, the break between East and West Germany that culminated in the Berlin airlift, the heroic East German uprising of June 17, 1953, and the eventual formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.
Davidson traces the progress of thought among Germans and Americans alike as their conceptions of postwar Germany gradually evolved and the leaders of a new, democratic West Germany emerged from the ashes of defeat.
The strength of Davidson's research and analysis and the continuing relevance of this important volume make The Death and Life of Germany an invaluable addition to the collections of scholars and general readers interested in the evolution of postwar Germany.
Should the negotiation of the post–World War II peace treaties in Europe have been pursued separately or should they have been approached within the framework of a general European settlement? The debate on this fundamental foreign policy issue, which has left only faint tracks in the documentary record, is fully explored here for the first time.
W. W. Rostow, in his second book in the Ideas and Action Series, describes a meeting that took place on the eve of the departure of Secretary of State James Byrnes for Paris to participate in treaty negotiations. The meeting was probably the only occasion during 1946 when the peace treaty issue as a whole was explicitly addressed at a high level with lucid alternatives on the table. The plan laid before Secretary of State Byrnes by his senior subordinates, Under Secretary Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton, aimed to halt the movement toward the split of Europe and the emergence of hostile blocs. It outlined an all-European settlement, including economic and security institutions linked to the United Nations. Only one part of the proposal gained Byrnes's support and came to life: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. But the Acheson-Clayton proposal foreshadowed the Marshall Plan.
The book's larger theme is the process by which the Cold War came about. Rostow's interpretation differs from either conventional or revisionist views, emphasizing as it does the process of incremental deterioration that occurred in 1946 and the role of uncertainty and weakness in American policy.
This second volume in the Ideas and Action Series will interest general readers as well as those with a particular interest in World War II. It should be of special value to political scientists, economists, military historians, and policy makers, and may serve as a case study in a variety of courses.
Waged for a just cause and culminating in total victory, World War II was America’s “good war.” Yet for millions of GIs overseas, the war did not end with Germany and Japan’s surrender. The Good Occupation chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to postwar occupier, by exploring the intimate thoughts and feelings of the ordinary servicemen and women who participated—often reluctantly—in the difficult project of rebuilding nations they had so recently worked to destroy.
When the war ended, most of the seven million Americans in uniform longed to return to civilian life. Yet many remained on active duty, becoming the “after-army” tasked with bringing order and justice to societies ravaged by war. Susan Carruthers shows how American soldiers struggled to deal with unprecedented catastrophe among millions of displaced refugees and concentration camp survivors while negotiating the inevitable tensions that arose between victors and the defeated enemy. Drawing on thousands of unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, she reveals the stories service personnel told themselves and their loved ones back home in order to make sense of their disorienting and challenging postwar mission.
The picture Carruthers paints is not the one most Americans recognize today. A venture undertaken by soldiers with little appetite for the task has crystallized, in the retelling, into the “good occupation” of national mythology: emblematic of the United States’ role as a bearer of democracy, progress, and prosperity. In real time, however, “winning the peace” proved a perilous business, fraught with temptation and hazard.
Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal History
A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.
Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.
In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.
Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.
In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.
The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.
Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.
When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.
In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources—diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film—Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.
These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making “After Dachau” a new epoch in Western history.
The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people—sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience—as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.
Moving beyond accounts of high politics and international relations, the essays brought together here focus on the intersections between the politics of daily life and the politics of the nation-state. Building on the approaches of women's history, social history, and cultural studies, they emphasize that the process of defining West Germany in the 1950s took place not only in the geopolitical arena of the Cold War but also in dance halls and at the movies, in worker-training programs, and in patterns of consumption.
West Germany under Construction not only expands our understanding of the early formation of West German society, it also outlines ways to continue the excavation of that past. It will be mandatory reading for students and scholars alike.
Robert G. Moeller is Professor of History, University of California, Irvine.
The authors describe American official and private support for Yugoslavia’s decades-long efforts at economic reform that included the first foreign investment legislation in 1967 and the first introduction of convertible currency in 1990 for any communist country. Also examined are the origins of Yugoslavia’s international debt crisis of the early 1980s and the American role in the highly complex multibillion-dollar international effort that helped Yugoslavia surmount that crisis.
In the past, U.S. support for the Yugoslav economy was proffered in part, the authors claim, to counter perceived threats from the Soviet Union and its allies. This may have enabled Yugoslavia to avoid some of the hard but necessary economic policy choices; hence, future U.S. support, the book concludes, will likely be tied more closely to the economic and political soundness of Yugoslavia’s own actions.
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