Showing papers on "Expansionism published in 2011"

The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: A succinct, analytical history of the Monroe Doctrine from its inception in 1823 to its broad extension in the early twentieth century, this book explains in vivid detail this cornerstone of American foreign policy. Covering more than a century of history, Jay Sexton, who teaches American history at the University of Oxford, explores the varying conceptions of the doctrine as its meaning was distorted over the course of decades to further an ever-expanding American empire. When in 1823 President Monroe issued his vaguely worded declaration that the United States would not allow European states to further colonize the western hemisphere, America had little means of enforcing it. The doctrine proclaimed anti-colonial principles, yet it rapidly became the myth and means for subsequent generations of politicians to pursue expansionist foreign policy agendas. Time and again, debates on the key issues of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century foreign relations - expansion in the 1840s, the imperialism of 1898, entrance into World War I and the League of Nations - were framed in relation to the Monroe Doctrine. In Sexton's adroit hands, the doctrine provides a new lens from which to view the still-unresolved question at the centre of American diplomatic history: the nation's contradictory traditions of anti-colonialism and imperialism.

Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Abstract: Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Privacy, Pluralism, and Anti-Catholic Democracy 1. Catholic Canadians and Protestant Pluralism in the Early Republic 2. Pleas for Democracy: Federalism, Expansionism, and Nativism 3. Papal Persuasions: Religious Conversion and Deliberative Democracy 4. This is My Body Politic: Catholic Democracy and the Limits of Representation 5. Haitian Catholicism and the End of Pluralism 6. Losing Faith: Ultramontane Liberalism and Democratic Failure Afterword Index

This Inglorious War: The Second Seminole War, the Ad Hoc Origins of American Imperialism, and the Silence of Slavery

Abstract: Daniel Scallet, "The Second Seminole War, the Ad Hoc Origins of American Imperialism, and the Silence of Slavery," Ph.D. Washington University in St. Louis, December 2011 My dissertation examines the national context of the Second Seminole War and argues that it was begun at the behest of Deep South slaveholders and represented a vital national shift toward violent expansionism. However, due to tacit agreements among public officials to refrain from debating the influence of slavery on federal policy, the fundamental arguments of the war - why it was undertaken, how it was to be fought, why it had to be won - occurred wholly outside of public view, if they occurred at all. As a result, the nation abandoned older Jeffersonian ideals of national expansion predicated upon ideological conversion and instead embraced violent conquest, without a real debate, let alone a fight. This project has two main focuses. In the first, I examine how disparate people in Florida, including generals, volunteers, soldiers, Seminoles, and Black Seminoles, viewed the war and, through the use of diaries, letters, personal narratives, and professional reports, demonstrate the centrality of competing conceptions of slavery and race relations to the everyday struggles of the conflict. Several times, American generals proposed peace treaties that would allow the Seminoles to remain in southern Florida. In each case, vociferous opposition from both southern slaveholders determined to eradicate autonomous nonwhite enclaves on their frontiers and national politicians who characterized agreement with Indians on any grounds as inimical to national honor, left every treaty stillborn. This slaveholder influence on the war effort was largely invisible to the rest of the country. In this work's second focus, I detail the war's national context, utilizing newspaper accounts, Congressional debates, and published manuscripts, to examine how a refusal among politicians of both parties to question the place of slavery in national politics dramatically stunted the breadth of what is commonly called Jacksonian democracy. As Democrats increasingly articulated ambitions over the rest of the continent - John Quincy Adams disgustedly condemned their agenda as promulgating a "culture of conquest" - mainstream Whigs remained largely silent over this radical alteration of American foreign policy, though only a few years before, they had steadfastly opposed Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act. Only isolated groups of antislavery activists led by Joshua Giddings, David Lee Child, and Harriet Martineau, themselves especially attuned to the rhythms of domination and subjugation, had the foresight to perceive the course of their nation: indeed the course of empire) and oppose the Second Seminole War for what it truly was. In 1835, in their failure to grapple with the war's radical underpinnings, elite Americans from every region of the country freely adopted, without contestation, the priorities of the Slave Power: the colonization of native populations and the…

Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies

Abstract: INTRODUCTION In the burgeoning world of 'Arendt scholarship', perhaps the most noteworthy development--and certainly one of the more contentious--is the identification of Hannah Arendt as an intellectual forebear for the emerging field of 'genocide studies'. Discussions of many aspects of Arendt's thought--secularization, cliche and terror, liberalism, republicanism, rights discourse and international relations, and so on--continue apace, as they have long done. But with genocide studies, Arendt is fast being canonised, in a way that would have amazed her, as one of the 'founding fathers' of the field. (1) Yet ironically, in claiming Arendt for their intellectual heritage, genocide scholars may be misreading her. In this essay, I examine the way in which Arendt's ideas have been taken up by genocide scholars, furnishing them with an intellectual lineage. My concern is less with the content of Arendt's ideas than with their adoption and adaptation in the context of genocide studies. In a recent article, Dirk Moses argues that scholars who invoke Arendt's so-called 'boomerang thesis' to justify their argument that the violence of European overseas colonialism formed the basis of fascism in Europe have misunderstood her position: Far from proposing a 'boomerang' thesis about the corrosive effect of colonialism in Africa on the German and European metropole, Arendt was advancing an alternative continuity argument in service of a broader agenda about the discontinuity between what she called 'the Western tradition' and totalitarian crimes. The relevance of her invocation of British colonialism in Africa was not to demonstrate their infection of Germany, let alone Russia. It was to redeem British rule, which she admired. The German colonialism and imperialism relevant to Nazism and the Holocaust was not to be found in Africa, as commonly supposed, but in the Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism of Central Europe. 'Continental imperialism', as she called Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, fed into totalitarianism and its unique crimes, while any abuses of 'Western imperialism' were rationally limited. (2) In Moses's reading, Arendt's aim in limiting the connections between European atrocities overseas and Nazi genocide in Europe was to assert the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Or, we might add, to defend the Western tradition, which Arendt wanted to quarantine from contamination with her comment that Nazism came 'from the gutter'. These are extremely thought-provoking claims. Not only do they suggest that genocide scholars are misreading Arendt, a problem to which I will return, but they also imply that genocide studies, a field that--one hopes--is founded on solidarity with the oppressed, actually panders to western stereotypes about 'exotic' peoples and morbid fantasies about unrestrained violence. Let us not forget that Edward Said lumped Arendt together with Joseph Conrad, Graham Green and VS. Naipaul as a purveyor of just such stereotypes, one 'whose speciality is to deliver the non-European world either for analysis and judgment or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences'. (3) Whatever the truth about Arendt's intentions, it remains the case that her imprimatur is regularly invoked in order to make a connection between imperialism and fascism, colonialism and genocide. Just as Marx turned Hegel on his head to argue that material conditions generated ideas rather than vice versa, so historians have rendered topsy-turvy Arendt's description of the discontinuities between western overseas expansionism and continental imperialism within Europe. What matters is that Arendt placed these two apparently discrete trends of world history together; it is the juxtaposition which fuels the historical imagination, not Arendt's attempt to delimit its relevance. In what follows, I show how Arendt is often the inspiration for many scholars in genocide studies, whether they cite her or not. …

The Novel Approach of the CJEU on the Horizontal Direct Effect of the EU Principle of Non-Discrimination: (Unbridled) Expansionism of EU Law?:

Abstract: The application of the EU principle of non-discrimination in private disputes is a sensitive issue. Recent case-law of the CJEU (cases Mangold and Kucukdeveci) conveys a novel approach that disturb...

Punishment: Two Decades of Penal Expansionism and its Effects on Indigenous Imprisonment

Abstract: This article examines key political, ideological and institutional factors impacting upon the increase in Indigenous imprisonment rates in Australia over the last two decades since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCADIC). Central issues explored include: the multidimensional and racialized nature of punishment and crime control, the use of imprisonment as a form of governance, the impact of neoliberalism on the reforms envisaged by the RCADIC.

Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519-1871

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Sixteenth-Century Background 2. Creating New Frontiers, 1600-74 3. Britain, France and the Natives, 1674-1715 4. Multiple Currents, 1715-53 5. War for Dominance, 1754-64 6. Britain Triumphant to America Independent, 1765-76 7. Britain Defeated, 1775-83 8. Flexing Muscles, 1783-1811 9. Florida, But Not Canada: From the War of 1812 to the Monroe Doctrine, 1812-1823 10. Expansionism and its Problems, 1823-43 11. From the Oregon Question to the Gadsden Purchase, 1844-53 12. A Great Power in the Making? America, 1853-61 13. America Divided, 1861-63 14. Winning the War, 1863-5 15. Settling the North American Question, 1865-71 16. Postscript, 1871-2010 Conclusions Notes Index

Prevail or perish: Anglo-German naval competition at the beginning of the twentieth century

Abstract: British politicians often argued that Britain maintained its navy only in order to secure its own survival by keeping sea communications open, while Germany in no real need of a powerful navy, threatened this legitimate British policy-goal by pursuing expansionist politics German leaders, emboldened and a little dazzled by the tremendous industrial and economic success of the newly unified Reich, held that Britain was maintaining its economic dominance in the Empire by military means and thus blocking the progress Germany hoped to make in its aspiration to parity status and economic prosperity, with all that that entailed This paper will explore the underlying rationale of the arms race between Britain and Germany shining through in those different positions on legitimate (military) policy aims It will go beyond the visible symbols, as it were, of the Dreadnought and the Two-Power standard These very concrete matters will also be dealt with here but, more importantly, this essay is meant to g

Why the Sino-Indian border dispute is still unresolved after 50 years: A recapitulation

Abstract: In its dying days the British Empire in India launched an aggressive annexation of what it recognised to be legally Chinese territory. The government of independent India inherited that border dispute and intensified it, completing the annexation and ignoring China’s protests. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government, acquiescing in the loss of territory, offered diplomatic legalisation of the new boundary India had imposed in its North-East but the Nehru government refused to negotiate. It then developed and advanced a claim to Chinese territory in the north-west, again refusing to submit the claim to negotiation. Persistent Indian attempts to implement its territorial claims by armed force led to the 1962 border war. The Indian defeat did not lead to any change of policy; both the claims and the refusal to negotiate were maintained. The dead-locked Sino–Indian dispute and armed confrontation are thus the consequence of Indian expansionism and intransigence.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Pan-American Symphonic Ideal

Abstract: Receptivity to the cultural and musical values of Western Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, laid the foundation for the growth of classical music in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The ascendancy of German musical culture in the United States began with American musicians’ importation and performance of scores by famous German composers in the 1820s and 1830s. The rise continued throughout the century as waves of German-speaking immigrant musicians played leading roles in the establishment of performing ensembles. Prominent critics such as John Sullivan Dwight, Richard Storrs Willis, and Theodore Hagen bolstered the efforts of these organizations by roundly applauding their performances of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and others. Moreover, as political historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has recently argued, the establishment of foundational components of the United States’ musical infrastructure, including the solidification of a canonical symphonic repertoire, was the result of a “soft diplomacy” rooted in an aggressive agenda of German cultural expansionism. 1 It is easy, then, for us to conceive of the world of classical music in the nineteenth-century United States as a sponge perpetually absorbing musical

Pedro de Perea and the Colonization of Sonora

Abstract: In 1640 or somewhat earlier the first non-clerical Spaniards settled in Sonora and in so doing stirred up a conflict with Sonoran Indians over land rights that lasted for nearly two decades, from roughly 1640 through 1658.1 Jesuit missionaries advised the Indians to take legal action against the settlers. The document that appears in this article portrays the strategy the Indians and their advisors employed to reclaim lands that Spaniards had taken from them. It also reveals the response of Spanish courts to those strategies. Led by a military captain on a civilian mission, Spanish soldiers and settlers (the two often played the same role) ventured into what is now Sonora, not seeking a military conquest but intent on establishing a colony. Their foray had the full backing of the Crown, and they consid ered their mission a license to civilize the region, i.e., establish an enclave of Spanish culture, institute European customs and norms to guide the "barbarian" native peoples, and, even more important, extract wealth from the land. If Indians stood in the way of convenient development of human and natural resources, so much the worse for them. In this case, the nondescript Eudeve settlement of Tuape on the Rio San Miguel, a minor, ephemeral stream in central Sonora, became the location of a struggle that would be repeated numerous times in northwest New Spain in the following 150 years. It would also symbolize the conflicting cur rents in Spanish expansionism: evangelizing and pacifying native peoples versus expanding the royal treasury and establishing Spanish colonies in lands claimed by the king. The conflict would set the stage for Sonora's colonization and outsiders' eventual appropriation of Indian lands and Indian water. The clash of forces would continue through the expul sion of the Jesuits in 1767 and on through Mexican independence. It

This Ecstatic Nation: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism

Abstract: Americans' cultural love affair with their country's landscape started in the nineteenth century, when expansionism was often promoted as divine mission, the West was still the frontier, and scenery became the backdrop of nationalist mythology. With a promise of resources ripe for development, Manifest Destiny--era aesthetics often reinforced a system of environmental degradation while preserving the wide and wild view. Although the aesthetics have evolved, contemporary media are filled with American landscape images inspired by the nineteenth century. Terre Ryan examines this phenomenon by exploring the overlapping trails of national mythology, landscape aesthetics, patriotic discourse, and public policy. Tracing her journeys around bombing grounds in Nevada, logging sites in Oregon, and energy fields in Wyoming, she argues that business and government agencies often frame commercial projects and national myths according to nineteenth-century beliefs about landscape and bounty. Advertisements and political promotional materials following this aesthetic framework perpetuate frontier-era ideas about the environment as commodity, scenery, and cultural trashlands. Transmitted through all types of media, nineteenth-century perspectives on landscape continue to inform mainstream perceptions of the environment, environmental policies, and representations of American patriotism. Combining personal narrative with factual reportage, political and cultural critique, and historical analysis, Ryan reframes the images we see every day and places them into a larger national narrative.

Beyond Mare Nostrum

Abstract: Starting with a brief survey of the historiography on Fascist Italy's policy in the Middle East, the article argues that the approach of Mussolini's regime is best understood through an examination of the interrelationship between ideology, foreign relations and colonial considerations. Hence, it focuses on the impact of three central and at times conflicting forces which shaped Italian policy: the ambitions and goals commonly linked to Fascist ideology (expansionism, vitality, the desire for colonial outlets and a self-sufficient, autarkic empire); traditional foreign policy considerations vis-a-vis the other European Great Powers with special emphasis on Britain and France; and the aspiration to prevent dissent in and to encourage the development of Italy's colonies in Africa which bordered the Middle East.

U.S. Expansionism, Mexican Undocumented Migration, and American Obligations

Abstract: In his compelling piece, “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations,” Rogers Smith argues that the greater the degree to which the U.S. has coercively constituted the identities of non-citizens in ways that have made having certain relationships to America fundamental to their capacities to lead free and meaningful lives, the greater the obligations the U.S. has to facilitate those relationships. Over the last hundred years, many rural communities in Mexico have been constituted more by U.S. immigration policy and the labor demands of U.S. employers than by similar policies and economic factors in Mexico. According to Smith, this means that Mexicans may be owed “special access” to American residency and citizenship, ahead of the residents of countries less affected by U.S. policies, and in ways that should justify leniency toward undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Empire and Allegory in Henry James's The Europeans

Abstract: My article argues for reading the novel as political allegory. America's efforts in the early and mid-nineteenth century are represented by Robert Acton trying to compete with a “European family” for international colonizing privileges. A blend of British and French empire can be seen in the person of Eugenia, the Baroness Munster – originally American by birth, who has, though her years as European nobility, adopted the policy of expansionism. To fully understand James's caustic comment on imperialistic ventures – most notably as he pits the pernicious nature of European exploits against the more humanistic pursuit of art for art's sake – we can read Eugenia's brother, Felix, as a proponent of aestheticism, committed to seeking beauty in all life pursuits. In sum, I suggest that the novel need not be dismissed (as it largely has been for so many decades) as a simplistic, insignificant part of James's oeuvre. I use historical research, literary analyses of other scholars, statements made by James in his letters, and critical statements by James in such commentaries as his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to support my views. Of course, I use the primary text, The Europeans, for much of my support.

The transnational world of Chinese entrepreneurs in Chicago, 1870s to 1940s: New sources and perspectives on southern Chinese emigration

Abstract: This article contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the causes of migration and emigration and the relationship between migrants/emigrants and their homelands by investigating historical materials dealing with the Chinese in Chicago from 1870s to 1940s. It shows that patterns of Chinese migration/emigration overseas have endured for a long period, from pre-Qing times to today’s global capitalist expansionism. The key argument is that from the very beginning of these patterns, it has been trans-local and transnational connections that have acted as primary vehicles facilitating survival in the new land. While adjusting their lives in new environments, migrants and emigrants have made conscious efforts to maintain and renew socioeconomic and emotional ties with their homelands, thus creating transnational ethnic experiences.

Carry the Buddha out into the Street! A Sliver of Buddhist Resistance to Japanese Militarism

Abstract: Despite Buddhism’s reputation as a religion of peace, by the 1920s institutional Japanese Buddhism was, as a whole, a firm if not fervent supporter of Japan’s increasing repression of the left wing at home and colonial expansionism abroad. Nevertheless, there were a small number of Buddhists who refused to accept the supportive stance of their sectarian leaders and banded together to form the ‘Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism’ (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei). This group was the single, notable exception to Buddhism’s subservience to the state, especially as the League members were also deeply involved in social and political action. Inagaki Masami (b. 1926) noted that the League was ‘the only sign that there were still conscientious religionists within Buddhist circles.’1

Atando a Gulliver: los Estados débiles del mundo islámico frente a la expansión hegemónica norteamericana

Abstract: This article intends to describe the behaviour of weak states within a context of hegemonic expansion, assuming that, from the crisis and fall of the Soviet Union to the beginning of the Irak War, this is the situation that best describes American offensive policies toward power vacuum situations in regions such as the Middle East. Therefore, the reaction of a representative sample of states in that region (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Pakistan) will be analyzed in accordance with policies designed in Washington, trying to describe the most important variables of the interaction as well as restraints imposed to sovereignty of these States and the limits to american expansionism in this region. In order to deal with this matter, a discussion on the different responses given by the international relations theories will be intended. After rescuing theoretical thought on weak states from oblivion, we will try to develop an explanation based on a new model of interaction based on realistic premises.

Expansionism: Its Effects on Cuba's Independence

Abstract: Starting in the early part of the nineteenth century, American administrations expressed a desire to own Cuba. A rationale for adding Cuba to the territory of the United States could be built on Cuba's sugar and tobacco industries, as well as Cuba's mineral deposits. But economics was not the primary motivation. American presidents knew that in the event of war, any nation occupying Cuba would have an advantage over the US military strategies; this fear, coupled with the economic benefit, explains a century of policy decisions. As Frank R. VillafaNa shows, Cubans were not sitting idle, waiting for outsiders to liberate them from Spanish oppression. A major part of this research is devoted to studying Cuban efforts to liberate their island from prolonged Spanish domination. Cuba had been struggling for independence from Spain since the 1830s, followed by the Ten Year War. During the 1895-1898 War of Independence, Cuba came close to defeating Spain, but a merciless Spanish military effort converted Cuba into a series of concentration camps. Spain surrendered after its naval defeats by the US at Manila Bay and Santiago de Cuba, following a failed ground campaign in eastern Cuba. After the US occupied Cuba militarily, American political leaders realized only a small minority of Cubans supported annexation, and the Platt Amendment was developed as a substitute. Today, most Cubans agree that independence, even constrained by the United States, was better than enslavement by the Castro brothers. However, as VillafaNa emphasizes, Cubans living in Cuba as well as abroad still seek a land free and independent of foreign threat and domestic tyrants.

Remapping A Pre-World War Two Japanese Diaspora: Transpacific Migration As An Articulation Of Japan’s Colonial Expansionism

Abstract: This chapter explores ways that migrations to and from Hawaiʻi shaped and were shaped by the Atlantic and Pacific contexts and questions of who was to keep sovereignty, who was to rule, and who was to be ruled in Hawaiʻi. It focuses on the history of migration and politics of sovereignty, settlement, and belonging in between the 1780s, when Hawaiʻi became a key crossroads to and through which peoples from around the Atlantic and Pacific circulated, and the 1930s, when most migration to and from Hawaiʻi came to a virtual standstill. The chapter presents preliminary findings on how ideas about the potential of Portuguese and Japanese immigrants to become settlers and citizens of Hawaiʻiand Brazil circulated in the Atlantic and Pacific between the 1870s and 1910s. Keywords:Atlantic; Hawaiʻi; Japanese immigrants; migration; Pacific; Portuguese immigrants; settlement; sovereignty

The king's most eloquent campaigner... Emile de Laveleye, Leopold II and the creation of the Congo Free State.

Abstract: The “Belle Epoque” saw the revival of the colonial idea in new forms. A second European colonization wave washed over Africa. King Leopold II unfolded his activities in Congo from 1876 onwards. There, his efforts to develop a so-called “philanthropic” enterprise soon evolved in a process of state formation, overshadowed by intrigues and tensions that were a consequence of colonial competition between the Western powers. Only a decade later, at the Berlin Conference of 1885, a definite arrangement was adopted. Everywhere in Europe, a disputed transition was made from liberal to more conservative ways of government. Of course this tension field also dominated intellectual life. There was an intense debate between partisans of colonialism and supporters of worldwide free trade. For the development of his colonial doctrine Leopold II had been inspired by intellectuals that supported economic expansionism. Most of them were active in the field of economic geography. But the King also searched for support in other academic circles and mobilized Emile de Laveleye (1822-1892), one of Europe’s brightest minds, to join him in his quest for the most adequate economic, social and political model of a future state in the heart of Africa. In his books, articles and pamphlets, the liberal minded political economist de Laveleye showed himself an unshakable opponent of colonization and imperialism. However, in the period 1875-1885 – a decade so crucial for Congo – a surprising intellectual rapprochement between de Laveleye and Leopold II was established. For a certain time, this competent man of science advised the King, putting into royal service an intellectual network of European range. This paper investigates how, in the complex and constantly evolving public discussion about Congo, two apparently opposing minds attracted each other. We focus on de Laveleye’s important pleas for a “neutral and international formula” that would place Leopold II in a conflicting situation with Portugal and France. This study shows that, in the years preceding the Berlin Conference, de Laveleye got actively involved in a carefully orchestrated European media campaign in support of Leopold’s initiative. It was there that his intellectual circle became extremely useful and was fully implicated. His contacts among experts of international law contributed to the important discussions about Congo’s juridical status. De Laveleye’s colleague Sir Travers Twiss, as well as the influential Institut de droit international, of which de Laveleye had been one of the founders, entered the debate zone and took positions which were favorable for Leopold’s project. With this new approach, our paper also aims to give insight in the way Leopold II transformed his own reasoning into a more authoritative set of practical standards which were shared by an intellectual elite.

The Tartar King’s Masque and Performances of Imperial Desire in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

Abstract: As Wroth scholars have increasingly recognized,1 the overarching narrative of her prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, in both its published first part of 1621 and the equally substantial unpublished second part, is driven by the desire of the dynasty at its core to establish a “universal Christian empire” covering Eurasia.2 This end is accomplished through the premodern mode of European expansionism: marital alliances combined with military interventions. The marriage of the Tartar king Rodomandro and the Greek princess Pamphilia, who becomes queen of her eponymous realm in Asia Minor, unites “East” and “West” under Western Christian hegemony without demanding the exclusion of racialized “others,” as would subsequent anglocentric models of empire. The Tartar king’s leadership is crucial to the military campaigns in Central Asia and Persia that propel the narrative. They are meant to secure both regions, only implicitly Islamized in the romance, for Western Christian and Christian(ized) Eastern rulers. This imaginary resolution of the real conditions of imperialist expansion within Eurasia during the early decades of the seventeenth century, with the Safavid Persians dominating Central Asia and the Ottomans a significant force in central Europe and the Mediterranean, draws attention to discourses of difference related to English colonial efforts in the Americas that targeted Native Americans and Africans.3

The Coming of War: 1939

Abstract: I Germany’s seizure of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 inaugurated the final crisis in the disintegration of the Versailles peace structure and the march toward war. Again, Britain, France, and the United States – the makers of the Versailles Treaty – had failed to relieve Europe’s burgeoning tensions by modifying their treaty or defending it through an effective display of force. Even after the Munich settlement of the previous September, British leaders assumed that some form of accommodation would produce a general European settlement and forestall a German continental hegemony. But in the fall of Prague they detected a new and inescapable threat to Europe’s future. What troubled European observers was not merely the ruthlessness of the German occupation but, even more alarming, the revelation of a German expansionism without visible limit. On no grounds, and certainly not self-determination, could anyone justify such aggression. “The utter cynicism and immorality of the whole performance,” wrote British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson from Berlin, “defies description. Nazism has definitely crossed the rubicon of purity of race and German unity….”

Lessons of the Eastern Front

Abstract: We don’t want war and we will do everything to prevent it. But precisely in order to seize the imperialists’ lust for war adventures in the heart of Europe, we have to create our own strong national armed forces…. If the imperialists were to instigate the Third World War, then this war must and will become the tomb not only of several Western European capitalist countries but also world imperialism. Walter Ulbricht (1952) After Germans’ experiences with the totalitarian regime of the Nazi period, after the world’s experiences with totalitarian Soviet Russia since 1944 … one thing should be the common conviction of all Germans: totalitarian states, particularly Soviet Russia, do not acknowledge law and liberty as the principal factors in the coexistence of peoples and nations; they acknowledge only one decisive factor: power. Konrad Adenauer (1950) No other political topic dominated the inner-German debates of the 1950s like the controversial issue of Germany’s remilitarization(s). Hardly half a decade after the end of World War II, the re-creation of German armed forces was back on the agenda on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The legacy of the Wehrmacht cast contrasting shadows on these debates. Hitler’s army had suffered its greatest and most costly defeat in the war against the Soviet Union while simultaneously facilitating and participating in the Nazi mass murder on the Eastern Front. Yet the way the two Germanys faced this past in the course of the remilitarization debates could not have been more different. While in the GDR the war against the Soviet Union became a constant theme, in fact, an obsession in political propaganda and military indoctrination, it was almost entirely absent from official discourses over rearmament in the Federal Republic. One crucial factor shaped the political cultures in each country and infused the debates on remilitarization: the fear of a new war. In the East, the SED fostered and sustained fear of another “Barbarossa” in a third world war, with a relentless campaign aimed at proving that the West was following in Hitler’s footsteps. This campaign culminated in the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a “measure” that allegedly had saved Europe from the brink of war. On the other side, West German political culture was permeated by a constant fear of “Bolshevism,” and Soviet expansionism, it was believed, sought to spread the communist revolution around the world. Mutual angst derived from each set of rational security concerns in light of each side’s historical experiences – German aggression against the Soviet Union, Soviet domination of East Germany and East-Central Europe – and from irrationally exaggerated hostilities generated in the Cold War spiral of verbal and actual violence.