Germany and US Foreign Relations

Author(s):  
Brian Etheridge

Not many bilateral relationships in modern world history have as many twists and turns as the one shared by the United States and Germany. Their relationship has waxed and waned like few others: from mild indifference to faint and uncomplicated appreciation in the 18th and 19th centuries, to growing awareness, rivalry, and then outright hostility in the early 20th century, to codependent enabling and then horrific existential conflict in the mid-20th century, and finally to occupation, reconstruction, and mutually supportive and global-stabilizing friendship after 1945. With early trajectories that informed and mirrored each other, the paths of the United States and Germany eventually collided in the First World War, a conflict born of issues that were only half-resolved in its immediate aftermath. The outbreak of the Second World War laid bare the incompleteness of the Versailles settlement, leading to the complete and utter destruction of German civil society and ushering in an era of American supremacy in the Western world. The United States’ ambitious effort to reconstruct German society along American lines defined the relationship during the postwar period, but a turn toward nationalism in both countries in the early 21st century resurrected old questions and fears.

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.


World Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (11(51)) ◽  
pp. 37-40
Author(s):  
Tsitsino Bukia ◽  
Nana Parinos

A war correspondent has no border, no gender, no religion or race. The only thing a war reporter has - the skills of delivering truth, reflection of the reality in the way it is.The soviet space was absolutely closed to journalism and combat women journalists’ involvement in wars. The field almost consisted of males. Consequently, it seems impossible to analyze and compare the technique of writing of American and SovietWomen. If America freely accepts women for being actively involved in covering war activities, the Soviets obviously refused to do so.The role of a war correspondent is much bigger than one can suppose. Being a war reporter is more than implementing their responsibilities. It goes deeper into the history. A professional combat reporter is a historian facing the history and keeping it for the next generation.The paper considers advantages and disadvantages of being a female combat correspondent in the Soviet space and the United States of America.The role of American and Soviet women reporters in covering WWII.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Montgomery

AbstractShortly following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an American mobile exploitation team was diverted from its mission in hunting for weapons for mass destruction to search for an ancient Talmud in the basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police (Mukhabarat) headquarters in Baghdad. Instead of finding the ancient holy book, the soldiers rescued from the basement flooded with several feet of fetid water an invaluable archive of disparate individual and communal documents and books relating to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. The seizure of Jewish cultural materials by the Mukhabarat recalled similar looting by the Nazis during World War II. The materials were spirited out of Iraq to the United States with a vague assurance of their return after being restored. Several years after their arrival in the United States for conservation, the Iraqi Jewish archive has become contested cultural property between Jewish groups and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora on the one hand and Iraqi cultural officials on the other. This article argues that the archive comprises the cultural property and heritage of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora.


2021 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
David Bosco

The world wars of the 20th century saw the collapse of pre-war rules designed to protect merchant shipping from interference. In both wars, combatants engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare and imposed vast ocean exclusion zones, leading to unprecedented interference with ocean commerce. After World War I, the United States began to supplant Britain as the leading naval power, and it feuded with Britain over maritime rights. Other developments in the interwar period included significant state-sponsored ocean research, including activity by Germany in the Atlantic and the Soviets in the Arctic. Maritime commerce was buffeted by the shocks of the world wars. Eager to trim costs, US shipping companies experimented with “flags of convenience” to avoid new national safety and labor regulations. The question of the breadth of the territorial sea remained unresolved, as governments bickered about the appropriate outer limit of sovereign control.


2021 ◽  
pp. 260-294
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.


Author(s):  
Graham Cross

Franklin D. Roosevelt was US president in extraordinarily challenging times. The impact of both the Great Depression and World War II make discussion of his approach to foreign relations by historians highly contested and controversial. He was one of the most experienced people to hold office, having served in the Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, completed two terms as Governor of New York, and held a raft of political offices. At heart, he was an internationalist who believed in an engaged and active role for the United States in world. During his first two terms as president, Roosevelt had to temper his international engagement in response to public opinion and politicians wanting to focus on domestic problems and wary of the risks of involvement in conflict. As the world crisis deepened in the 1930s, his engagement revived. He adopted a gradualist approach to educating the American people in the dangers facing their country and led them to eventual participation in war and a greater role in world affairs. There were clearly mistakes in his diplomacy along the way and his leadership often appeared flawed, with an ambiguous legacy founded on political expediency, expanded executive power, vague idealism, and a chronic lack of clarity to prepare Americans for postwar challenges. Nevertheless, his policies to prepare the United States for the coming war saw his country emerge from years of depression to become an economic superpower. Likewise, his mobilization of his country’s enormous resources, support of key allies, and the holding together of a “Grand Alliance” in World War II not only brought victory but saw the United States become a dominant force in the world. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s idealistic vision, tempered with a sound appreciation of national power, would transform the global position of the United States and inaugurate what Henry Luce described as “the American Century.”


Author(s):  
Robert Rakove

For almost a century and a half, successive American governments adopted a general policy of neutrality on the world stage, eschewing involvement in European conflicts and, after the Quasi War with France, alliances with European powers. Neutrality, enshrined as a core principle of American foreign relations by the outgoing President George Washington in 1796, remained such for more than a century. Finally, in the 20th century, the United States emerged as a world power and a belligerent in the two world wars and the Cold War. This article explores the modern conflict between traditional American attitudes toward neutrality and the global agenda embraced by successive U.S. governments, beginning with entry in the First World War. With the United States immersed in these titanic struggles, the traditional U.S. support for neutrality eroded considerably. During the First World War, the United States showed some sympathy for the predicaments of the remaining neutral powers. In the Second World War it applied considerable pressure to those states still trading with Germany. During the Cold War, the United States was sometimes impatient with the choices of states to remain uncommitted in the global struggle, while at times it showed understanding for neutrality and pursued constructive relations with neutral states. The wide varieties of neutrality in each of these conflicts complicated the choices of U.S. policy makers. Americans remained torn between memory of their own long history of neutrality and a capacity to understand its potential value, on one hand, and a predilection to approach conflicts as moral struggles, on the other.


1975 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Zaehner

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand.


1944 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 913-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter H. C. Laves ◽  
Francis O. Wilcox

Looking at the post-war period, it seems obvious that the government of the United States will give more attention to foreign affairs than it has in any comparable period of American history. How can the machinery for conducting foreign relations best be organized to meet these increasing responsibilities?The conduct of foreign relations in the modern world is no simple matter. Technical experts, intelligence systems, ability to negotiate, national political stability, a large and loyal staff of public servants—these are but some of the national requisites for effective participation in world affairs. The mobilization and organization of the best staff resources in the country, the negotiation of national policies, and then of international agreements, constitute a formidable task under any system of government.The conduct of foreign relations is, of course, easiest in a completely authoritarian state. It is made immeasurably more difficult by any division of authority. In most non-authoritarian governments, some division of authority has been found desirable, even at the expense of occasional awkwardness of procedure, because thereby the dangers of usurpation of power are minimized. The United States has gone farther than any democratic country in dividing responsibility in foreign affairs. Not only is there the usual distinction between legislative and executive authority, but the independence of the two branches has been so far underlined that the achievement of over-all government policies (as distinct from legislative and executive policies) is extremely difficult unless the party relationships are just right between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.


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