Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts

Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians

Donald Bloxham. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xiv + 329 pp. $29.56 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927356-0.

Raymond Kevorkian. Le Genocide des Armeniens. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. 1008 pp. EUR 36.10 (paper), ISBN 978-2-7381-1830-1.

Reviewed by Ugur Ümit Üngör (Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Amsterdam)
Published on H-Genocide (August, 2007)

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Keeping a Candle Lit in a Storm: Zooming In and Out on the Armenian

If one had to invoke a metaphor for the study of the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, it would be somewhat like keeping a candle lit amid a rain storm. It is a troublesome endeavor beset by problems related to law, politics, academia, ethics, and especially memory and identity. An international political minefield of high-context cultures and nationalist scholarship seriously raises the threshold for involvement. 

Some of the camps with varying power are the Turkish and Armenian states, and Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Assyrian nationalist organizations in diaspora. Although the historical events are removed in time by more than ninety years and in space by often more than thousands of kilometers, for the aforementioned actors, studying "1915" is much more than a sterile and dispassionate matter of academic ivory towers. The rivalries between these antagonistic discursive communities reach beyond political activism into the academic world and ranging between vitriolic polemics and lawsuits to conference boycotts and even (threats of) violence. 

Given this balance of forces, scholars daring to tread this flammable field should be commended for their courage. But even when one maintains awareness and vigilance against the political activism, that is not all. From the perspective of historical research, one of the fundamental matters of discussion is the diminishing potential for discovering new terrain. Many of the large collections of (Ottoman, German, Austrian, French, and American) primary sources have all been mined, published, and depleted for meaningful and original historical use, perhaps with the exception of the surprisingly rich state archives and missionary collections in Scandinavian countries.

Donald Bloxham and Raymond Kévorkian have managed to make two outstanding contributions to our understanding of the catastrophic fate of Ottoman Armenians. Although their works are two completely different studies--a qualification meaning they can truly complement each other--in their own ways they represent the state-of-the-art in the rapidly developing historiography of the genocidal persecution of Ottoman Armenians during World War I. Whereas Kévorkian's book concentrates on narrative and is encyclopedic, Bloxham focuses on analysis and his book is synthetic. As such, this joint review will contrast their qualities and content.[1]

Donald Bloxham, a historian at the University of Edinburgh, has written a remarkable study of careful erudition, scholarly conjecture, remarkable insight, and unfettered opinion. His prose is straightforward, crisp, precise, and he wastes no words on fancy postmodern jargon, rendering the book accessible for non-specialists and even non-scholars. In the introduction Bloxham immediately lays out the tone for the rest of the book, pointing out that in the West the "historical record of massive human suffering has been used and abused up to the present for economic and political advantage in the Near East" (p. 13). Chapter 1, wonderfully titled "Eastern Questions, Nationalist Answers" provides an overview of three interlocking developments in the nineteenth century: the erosion of Ottoman power in its peripheral dominions; the upsurge of (ethnic) nationalism among the empire's Christian populations; and the attitudes of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia toward both of these developments. Chapter 2 is an analysis of the genocide itself. While the genocide is frequently portrayed as an existing blueprint implemented in favorable circumstances by many writers, Bloxham provides an accurate and authoritative panorama of the evolution of what began as a process of persecution, paying close attention to historical detail and the political influences that came to bear. World War I provides a rich backdrop for this illustrious period, as Bloxham reaches beyond the particularistic discourses of Ottomanists and Turkologists and exposes the interrelations between, and hypocrisies of, the policies of the great powers. The first part is followed by the first of two very important interludes in which the events are placed in the context of an era of nationalist violence.

Much more than a history of the Armenian Genocide, the book is a comprehensive analysis of great power policies towards various political elites and populations in the Middle East, one that is often disregarded in historical accounts of internal affairs. The most important part of the book are those (chapters 4 and 5, and the second interlude) written on the international (read: western) response to mass violence. Bloxham did not write this book to make friends among top European political milieus or Turkish- and Armenian-nationalist pressure groups. Rightly so, since writing a history of the destruction of Eastern Anatolia's entire kaleidoscopic human pallet should not be a popularity contest. 

Although the skeptical reader should be wary of trendy third-world nationalism and Europe-bashing, there is no trace of either tendencies here, and for that the author can be commended for not hiding in the garb of "moderation," "neutrality," or "objectivity." Instead of passing pointless moral judgements, Bloxham backs up his claim that western responses converged to a general culture of Realpolitik towards the mass violence by delving deeply into western diplomatic sources. Furthermore, he demonstrates how nationalist elites accumulated legitimacy in the western-led system of nation-states, resulting in the former's triumph over alternative identity politics--arguably with the exception of Soviet Armenia.

The Great Game of Genocide contributes significantly to at least two lines of theory with which this reviewer is familiar. First, according to one interpretation in nationalism studies, the western European system of nation-states gradually and paroxysmally imposed itself on the world. During the turbulent and long Ottoman century (roughly 1822-1923), this wave hit and overran the Ottoman Empire, leading to the establishment of several nation-states. This book is a timely treatment of this under-researched topic for the Ottoman case, and as such, will (or at least should) be of interest to scholars of nationalism.[2] Second, in his writing and footnotes, Bloxham exhibits that in the burgeoning field of genocide studies he feels like a fish in water. Beyond impressionistic and sporadic cross-references to other cases of mass violence, he quite systematically adopts and applies Hans Mommsen's concept of "cumulative radicalization," a theory that the Nazi genocide arose out of an incremental policy of persecution that radicalized and reassumed its vehemence and violence due to interaction between the center and periphery in the military-bureaucratic power structure.[3] Equipped with this heuristic tool, Bloxham convincingly argues that from autumn 1914 to spring 1915, due to interstate and intrastate pressures, a similar process led to the organization of increasingly drastic measures against Ottoman Armenians (pp.78-90).

In the epilogue Bloxham sums up his main findings and provides food for thought regarding contemporary political issues. In the wake of the recent "Armenian genocide resolution" in the U.S. House of Representatives, which in essence boils down to a horse trade between the humanitarianism of Armenian cries for "recognition" versus the pragmatism of American access to Turkish military air bases, this part too remains of prime importance. Naturally, one can agree or disagree with Bloxham's views and perspectives on current political affairs, but these are for a considerable part contingent on personal convictions and ideological leanings. If this chapter is the one most susceptible to criticism, then that fact itself basically sums up everything about the quality of this book.

Raymond Kévorkian's book is a culmination of his work as director of the Bibliothèque Nubar, an archival gem tucked away in a lovely Parisian neighborhood. His new book, simply titled Le Génocide des Armeniens, is highly accessible and transparent, a detailed table of contents being located (typically French) in the back of the book. If one had to characterize this book with two adjectives, I would use the terms "descriptive" and "detailed." The overwhelming thousand pages should not scare the reader, because after reading the first paragraphs and making acquaintance with Kévorkian's lucid prose this fear quickly evaporates and transforms into curiosity. The book is remarkably systematic, as Kévorkian patiently handles the bricks to construct the building, dividing the text into six parts, each alternately comprising about a dozen chapters. He does not limit himself to any "bottom-up victim perspective" or "top-down perpetrator perspective," but takes the reader by the hand and hovers over the empire's two dozen provinces and districts, expounding considerably on day-to-day events in the field. Kévorkian dedicates a good two-thirds of his book to a description of the facts as he breaks down the genocidal process, as it reads on the back cover: "région par région."

The composition of the book is arranged to represent a chronological journey from Sultan Abdülhamid II's rule to Mustafa Kemal's ascension to power in 1919. In terms of political leadership, Kévorkian's periodization charts the mutual collaboration between the Armenian revolutionary parties and the Young Turks under the absolutism of Abdülhamid II, explains how and why that support eroded and vanished, summarizes the brutalizing war in the Iranian Azerbaijan region, and finishes the last sentence of part 3 on the empire-wide attack on Armenian elites on page 326. The next five hundred pages are dedicated to historical accounts of the genocidal process. Starting in the northeastern province of Erzurum, the author maps out province by province, district by district, how the deportations were ordered and organized at the national level, to be translated and implemented at the local level. The narrative includes local idiosyncracies, such as resistance in the Shatakh region, the "murderous creativity" of Dr. Mehmed Reshid (governor of Diyarbekir), and the underground rescue line of Dersim. For every province, Kévorkian identifies dozens of names of men involved in the killing, pillaging, and kidnapping. In his chapter on the Urfa district, for example, he lists no fewer than fifty perpetrators (p. 770).

At least two important aspects of this book stand out. First, in the historiography of the Armenian Genocide; Kévorkian is the originator of the "Second Phase" thesis. According to him, the persecution of Ottoman Armenians reached a climax twice: first, with the elimination of the Armenian elite and the indiscriminate massacres in the summer of 1915, and second with the large-scale concentration of Armenians along the Syrian Euphrates and subsequent mass killings in the summer of 1916. The calculated timing of these phases of destruction explains the policies of Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, who, at times, decreed Armenian deportation convoys to be protected. Bad faith authors have abused these orders as supposedly constituting evidence for the government's benevolent intentions, but in the fifth part Kévorkian dismisses this claim. He enunciates that "sloppy" massacres on the road caused panic and compromised the secrecy of the whole undertaking; instead, the convoys were to be kept alive until the Syrian Desert, where recurring sequences of massacres in compartmentalized spaces ensured continuous decimation. The second issue is that of sources. Even though there is a sufficient level of Quellenkritik in the book, Kévorkian does not a priori discriminate in his sources. Unlike other scholars who dismiss survivor testimony as containing "victim bias," Kévorkian favors their use, he argues, "qui ont longtemps été rejetées par la recherche" (p.351). His handling of survivor memoirs is especially enlightening and provides a revealing window for readers unfamiliar with these crucial Armenian texts.

Many students of the genocide would perhaps agree that this book is in fact the first purely historical narrative text dealing solely with the persecution and destruction of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. In its strengths lay also its weaknesses: no matter how compelling and well documented the narrative, broader analyses "à la Bloxham" are, with minor exceptions, generally thin or lacking. Nevertheless, the pros clearly outweigh the cons. One can only hope that translations into English and Turkish are underway as this review is being written.

All in all, although these books are two different studies on the same topic, both of them promise to remain definitive studies for some time.

Notes

[1]. For a multiple review on the Armenian Genocide see, Hans-Lukas Kieser, "Sammelbesprechungen--Urkatastrophe am Bosporus: Der Armeniermord im Ersten Weltkrieg als Dauerthema internationaler (Zeit-)Geschichte," in Neue politische Literatur, 50, no. 2 (2005), 217-234.

[2]. See for example, James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and John W. Meyer et al., "World Society and the Nation-State," in American Journal of Sociology, 103, no. 1 (1997), 144-181.

[3]. Hans Mommsen, "Der Nationalsozialismus: Kumulative Radikalisierung und Selbstzerstörung des Regimes," in Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon (Mannheim, Germany: Bibliographisches Institut, 1976), vol. 16, 785-790.

Source: H-Net Online (https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13532)
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A brief comment on the content of the post:

A brief introduction to the reason for this post about Genocide and Imperialism (book review). 

There are Reactionary groups in Brazil, not exactly aligned with Trump's allies like former president Jair Bolsonaro, where both in their "Crusade against the Left-wing parties and Left-wing thought" deny concepts such as Imperialism, claiming that's only reproduced by "Old-fashioned leftists from the 20th century" etc. The truth is, this concept of Imperialism is still widely used in Academia as the books reviewed above

The most widely used media for the dissemination of this type of nonsense (Fake news or lies) in Brazil has been YouTube. The Brazilian People were already poor readers before the mass adoption of the Internet, with the advent of YouTube's alienation as "mass media", they stopped reading anything, especially political and history blogs. Few people still read these "sites" (blogs) in the country, usually journalistic media (which do not usually mention the blog as a 'source of information', because they don't like to give credit for the effort to the website, something that can be classified as plagiarism), university audiences, few schools, etc.

Please, note that all 'sources' used in the Posts are duly mentioned and credited to their authors.

Today it's difficult to fight against this type of misinformation (lies, distortions) with YouTube channels versus "blogs", but it's worth registering. For foreigners who want to understand the Brazilian political situation (and issues of World War II etc.), this blog and the original in Portuguese (Holocausto-doc https://holocausto-doc.blogspot.com) are recommended spaces.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014
by Laurence H. Shoup

The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.

Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world scene: globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a “War on Terror,” among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers. Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.
Wall Street’s Think Tank is a very important book, and its information is essential for an understanding of how our politics, and the world’s, has come to its sorry state.

—Joan Roelofs, Counterpunch

Forty years ago, Laurence Shoup and William Minter published their book Imperial Brain Trust, a careful and highly informative analysis of World War II planning for the postwar world by the Council of Foreign Relations and the State Department, plans that were then implemented, establishing much of the framework of postwar history. In this new study, Shoup carries their inquiry forward with a very revealing account of how a small group of planners drawn from sectors of concentrated private and state power, closely linked, along with ‘experts’ whose commitments are congenial to their ends, have set the contours for much of recent history, not least the neoliberal assault that has had a generally destructive impact on populations while serving as an effective instrument of class war. A welcome and very valuable contribution.

—Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Laurence Shoup reveals, as nobody has before, the actual workings of the Council on Foreign Relations. He names the names, explores the connections, and details the penetration of this beast as it shapes and expresses the will of the United States ruling class in the period of its global hegemony. As this approaches its end, we may expect the Council to continue to play a decisive role. In any event, no one can claim to understand U.S. imperialism without reference to Shoup’s masterful work.

—Joel Kovel, author, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?

Lucidly written and deeply informed, this book reveals how the super-rich class organizes itself into a consciously directed, ruling plutocracy. Shoup offers a treasure of insights into a subject that seldom gets the attention it very much needs.

—Michael Parenti, author, The Face of Imperialism and Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies

This book will be a formidable resource for those looking for the ‘American’ fraction of the transnational capitalist class in an era when the hegemony of the U.S. state is being seriously challenged.

—Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

Wall Street’s Think Tank is an invaluable supplement to Laurence Shoup’s earlier book, Imperial Brain Trust, as it chronicles the subsequent history and composition of the Council on Foreign Relations over the last five decades. It thus records how the CFR’s early advocacy of the Vietnam War led to a reversal in 1968 of both Council and U.S. policy, followed by a restructuring of the CFR itself. Did this mean that the CFR avoided the widespread campaign before 2003 to press America into another disastrous war in Iraq? Not at all: The CFR, as Shoup documents, played a leading role in this largely dishonest effort. Underlying both campaigns Shoup shows the on-going presence in the CFR of the international oil majors, as well as of related financial interests, such as the Rockefellers and their spokesmen. Shoup persuasively demonstrates how U.S. foreign policies are still (as in the 1950s) formulated at the CFR before they are adopted in Washington. While it may be more challenged than before by other think tanks, none can begin to match its international outreach. This is a must read for those wishing to understand the dynamics of U.S. hegemony.

—Peter Dale Scott, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Berkeley; author, The American Deep State

Praise for Imperial Brain Trust:
The first in-depth analysis of the activities and influence of the most important private institution in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Shoup and Minter’s work is based on detailed research, including examination of material hitherto unavailable to the public. This work will stand as a milestone.

—Library Journal

[A] masterpiece of documented analysis of one of the most successful influences on American national policy…. As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential and strongly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections.

—Paul T. Vogel, The Midwest Book Review

Laurence H. Shoup received his Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University in 1974. He is the author of several books, including Imperial Brain Trust (with William Minter) and Rulers and Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769-1901, as well as many articles in scholarly and popular publications. He has taught U.S. history at the University of Illinois, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and has been active in the anti-war and social justice movements since the 1960s.

Source: Monthly Review
http://monthlyreview.org/product/wall_streets_think_tank/

Friday, December 18, 2015

German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945

Germany and the "Laissez-Faire" Imperialism of the United States

Linked to the rise in domestic industrial capacity and the ascent of an educated, commercially minded liberal political class desirous of expanded economic opportunities, Germany’s global penetration during the long nineteenth century was predicated on the conviction that overseas expansion would deliver both mercantile benefits and domestic political change. Over the past decade, this period of domestic change and international activity has been a fruitful field for researchers studying the historical development of Germany. Historians have variously framed this penetration through the superordinate concept of “globalization”; or alternatively, imperialism, which is one of globalization’s primary historical forms.

Whether viewed as imperial or globalizing endeavors, German attempts at overseas penetration during the nineteenth century did not take place in a historical vacuum, with numerous, preexisting European empires all but crowding Germany out of the ranks of the global empires. While the antiquated Iberian empires offered a counterexample to German liberals, the blue water empires of the British, the French, and the Dutch were perceived by German liberals as exemplars of successful European liberal imperialist ventures. With great verve and clarity, Jens-Uwe Guettel makes the case that missing from this picture is the key role of the United States, which he argues was central to German understandings of liberal empire and in some respects offered a template for German approaches to expansionism. Guettel traces Germany’s liberal imperialism, or as he terms it, “imperial liberalism,” from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, showing the numerous points of transatlantic overlap. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, and Christoph Meiners’ respective meditations on slavery, which derived their content from Anglo-American models, he illustrates how the tension between the negative experience of the condition of slavery for the slave and the utility of slavery as an institution enabling further European economic development was resolved in favor of the latter. From here, Guettel’s account moves on to a refutation of the notion of any special German affinity or empathy for the plight of Native Americans. He does this by demonstrating the favorable reception in Germany of American narratives of the “vanishing” Amerindians, which presented the extraordinary excess death rates associated with imperial expansion as either inexplicable “natural” occurrences or, quite often, a process in line with world-historical developments which dictated that “higher” forms of life must displace “lower” ones. Astutely, Guettel points out that this racializing discourse was multidirectional, with Friedrich Ratzel not merely transmitting current U.S. thought on indigenous policy, but also contributing to the renewal of liberal imperialist thought in the United States, influencing figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner. At this point it might have been interesting to see Guettel go even further and try to assess the impact and agency of ordinary German settlers in the United States on this transcontinental exchange. An admittedly difficult task, it might nonetheless have been possible by utilizing the material uncovered by Stefan von Senger und Etterlin in his 1991 work Neu-Deutschland in Nordamerika: Massenauswanderung, nationale Gruppenansiedlungen und liberale Kolonialbewegung, 1815 – 1860.

One of the main elements of U.S. imperialism that Guettel sees as translating well to the German context was the emphasis on what he terms the American-style laissez-faire approach to empire, which he argues particularly informed the views of not only Ratzel but also the left-liberal colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg. Central to this American model were political liberty, economic self-reliance, a decentralized approach to settlement patterns, and a localized, “rational” approach to issues of colonial racial hierarchy. While the first three were certainly laissez-faire, the decentralized aspects of U.S. racial policy that Germany adopted were, at least in the late imperial period, not always apparent, as Guettel admits. A tension between localizing and centralizing impulses was apparent, pronouncedly so under the left-liberal colonial secretary Wilhelm Solf, who in 1912 moved from a reliance on colony-specific ordinances forbidding miscegenation and mixed marriages towards a demand that such measures be enacted from Berlin and enshrined in national legislation. With Solf’s call for a law against mixed marriages defeated by the combined forces of the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Guettel explains how Solf once again turned to the example of the United States; this time to study how the segregationist Jim Crow laws of some states coexisted with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which seemed to contradict them at the federal level.

Guettel quite correctly reveals just how much changed for Germany after World War One. Germany lost a significant portion of its territory, including all of its overseas colonies, while also enduring a period of partial occupation, including occupation by African troops brought in under French auspices. This inversion of the hitherto-prevailing colonial socio-racial order was decried in the German press. In addition, as a result of the American entry into the war, Germany’s relationship with the United States suffered greatly, to the extent that favorable allusions to U.S. racial conditions in post-1918 German debates fell off markedly. Even more obvious, Guettel reveals, was the Nazi Party’s disdain for the state of racial law in the United States. Rejecting the prewar enthusiasm for a decentralized approach to racial law, the Nazis instead argued that the United States was in fact a racially degenerating counterexample which should follow the new, highly centralized German approach. “Unlike in 1912,” Guettel argues, “in 1935 America was not allowed to be exemplary” (p. 200). The previously admired liberal mode of U.S. imperialism was necessarily criticized on the same grounds--it lacked centralization and was too heavily bound up in notions such as individualism and political liberty which, the Nazis claimed, they had superseded. In this way, Guettel convincingly disrupts accounts of Nazi imperialism that stress its continuity with prewar forms of liberal imperialism, suggesting instead that “the pre-1914 imperialism and post-1918 visions of living space in the East existed as perceived opposites within a framework of dialectical tension” (p. 223).

A natural field of further inquiry for both the author and other future researchers is the liberal depictions of Central Europe in nineteenth-century Germany. Raised briefly in the first chapter, it is one area that might profit from further analysis. Perhaps in deference to Woodruff Smith’s seminal Lebensraum/Weltpolitik distinction, Guettel seems to stress the distinction between overseas empire and contiguous European empire in liberal circles.[1] While he correctly points out the marked differences between liberal imperialism and Nazi imperialism in terms of political modality, racial policy, and manner of execution, it is worth remembering that German liberals such as Friedrich List, Friedrich Naumann, and Max Weber also had their own sense of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) that complemented liberal demands for an overseas empire, as Guettel acknowledges (p. 63). The partial overlap in the imperial topography of liberal Germans and Nazi Germans does not mean that there were uniquely German structural or political continuities that determined the shift from liberal to Nazi imperialism. Given too that U.S. liberal imperialism largely (but not exclusively) took the shape of contiguous territorial expansion, Guettel might profitably assess how Central Europe looked to not just the Nazis but also nineteenth-century liberal Germans familiar with U.S. expansionism. This could potentially strengthen his already detailed and convincing refutation of overarching and idiosyncratic lines of political and imperial continuity in German history.

Guettel’s book is admirable for a number of reasons. It expertly dissects the twin myths that U.S. expansionism was uniquely devoid of violent, imperialist characteristics, and that the history of German imperialism is somehow reducible to proto-Nazi violence. Citing the myriad statements of violent intent against indigenous people made by U.S. liberals and noting the transferal of these statements to German public discourse, Guettel lays out precisely how strategies for imperial consolidation were not contained to individual nation-states but were translocated. The book also successfully contextualizes prewar German imperialism within a liberal milieu which shared a set of assumptions with its American counterpart regarding the correct forms of imperial penetration and the requisite means for dealing with recalcitrant indigenous populations unwilling or unable to submit to the rigors of European politico-military dominance and work discipline. As Guettel shows, imperialism and the forms of socio-racial knowledge it engendered were an integral part of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Note

[1]. Woodruff D. Smith The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Jens-Uwe Guettel. German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 S. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02469-4.

Reviewed by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Source: H-Net
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38209

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