I found “can democratic society survive” more interesting than “can special people fulfill their destiny.”  Just saying.

At Cliopatria, Claire Potter sadly reports on the passing of Charles Tilly, a giant of French history. “Memorials to Credit and Blame”, excerpted in The American Interest ( May/June 2008 ) from an upcoming book, is worth perusing for its brief reflections on the personal life of an academic history and for his analysis of the Hermann Monument and Sacré Coeur. However, he ends on a cautionary note:

We should therefore be very careful when asking authorities to officially sanction our assignments of credit and blame. One day, for sure, there will be some kind of memorial for the Iraq war, and perhaps the Afghanistan war as well. We had better be careful how we design those monuments and the stories of credit and blame they invariably will tell. We can only hope that, when all is said and done, we will build and tell stories about those monuments in a way that creates consensus instead of separation. It is not always easy or obvious how to do that.

Fareed Zakaria ( “Is America in Decline? Why the United States will survive the Rise of the Rest“, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008 ) spends quite a few pages discussing the relevance of comparisons between the decline of the British Empire and the current situation of the US. Despite the facile similarities–being the premier economy with a global reach–what were Britain’s weaknesses are America’s strengths. The reach of British political power far outdistanced the capacity of its economy by the turn of the century. For the most part, the American economy is not burdened by the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, representing but a small part of GDP. Moreover, American institutions (most notably education) will help the economy maintain its global position. The challenge for the US is not to see the ‘Rise of the Rest’ as a depletion of US power, but to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world in which the US is still dominant.

It’s a hopeful story, and probably Zakaria’s prescription for Americans to learn from the emerging capitalisms is good advice. It’s curious though that Britain would continue to serve as a a valuable example after Zakaria dispensed with its contemporary relevance. If the US can’t fail like Britain, what can we learn from it? Zakaria, of course, did not dictate the terms of the discourse. There’s a tradition of depicting the US as the inheritor of British power and progress, something the Ferguson’s of the world are willing to perpetuate. But even as he undermines the relevance of the British example, he continues to draw inspiration therefrom. Though we might not fail like Britain doesn’t mean we better understand how to avoid failing.

The uniqueness of Britain’s global dominance is largely overstated. Between the Treaty of Paris and the Invasion of Algiers, a seventy-three year period during which chief rival France’s imperial ambitions were continental rather than global, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain maintained extensive global empires (often at tremendous cost). After the Conference of Berlin, other European states were able to assert themselves on the global stage with relative ease. At least in the German case, it was largely to claim the right to be called ein Weltmacht (a global power). in fact, Germany’s territorial empire was incongruent with its commercial ventures, the former burdening the latter, and may be more relevant to comparison. The real question, however, is not whether one country or another is a better comparison for American imperialism. It’s a matter of seeing the entirety of European imperialism since the Early Modern Era–the domination of a collection of European powers over the globe–and where America fits therein. Zakaria may think that reform is all that is needed to maintain global leadership, but it is possible that imperial commitments will inhibit reforms (France, Germany), or that the depletion of manufacturing base will force political power to become dependent on commercial ventures (Netherlands).

A curious analysis from Pierre Rosanvallon about the privitization of women and sentimentality of family constructed by the French Revolution–the biological function of women and the place of the family interfered with the immediacy and individuality sought by the revolutionaries themselves.

… the resistance to granting political rights to women in France derives a specific character from the fact that sexual difference, institutionalized in the family, could not be seen as constituting the equivalent of an ‘intermediate body.’  In other words, the gendered condition of men and women could not be recognized in the public sphere, for to do so would have been to concede that the public sphere did not transcend all differences.  Hence there were only two ways of looking at the gendered condition.  Either it was subsumed by a form of radical individualism, thus in a sense positing that sexual difference was merely one social construct among others; or it was ‘privatized’ or ‘functionalized,’ by which I mean that the family was posited as the only true cell of society, so that the social individual consisted of a man and a woman. … If the gendered condition could not be subsumed in and absolute individualism, then the political exclusion of the revolutionary period can be understood as a reaction to the unprecedented upheaval that such absolute individualism would have implied. (The Demands of Liberty)

Le Monde carries a curious biography of Marek Edelmann, one of the last survivors of the the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (he was also a member of Poland’s Solidarity Movement, and a subject of the documentary Avant la Bataille). Edelmann is considered a hero of the uprising, but largely doesn’t figure into the history of Israel, as do others who resisted:

Docteur de l’opposition, dissident perpétuel, révolté infatigable. Israël, où il s’est rendu quelques fois pour voir ses amis, reste sa bête noire. Le commandant en second de l’insurrection du ghetto de Varsovie n’est pas aimé en Terre sainte. “Edelman n’y a pas bonne presse, convient Elie Barnavi, ancien ambassadeur d’Israël en France. Il est un héros incontestable, mais dans la mémoire collective israélienne, il reste un juif diasporique. Dans le conflit idéologique qui structure le pays, le vrai héros soutient le projet sioniste. Le vrai héros du ghetto, pour Israël, c’est Anielewicz.”

Doctor of the opposition, perpetual dissedent, tireless revolutionary. In Israel, where he goes sometimes to see his friends, he is but a bête noire. The commander of the second insurrection of the Warsaw Ghetto is not loved in the Holy Land. “Edelmann had bad press … He is indisputably a hero, but in the collective memory of Israel, he remains a diasporic Jew. In the ideological conflict that structures the nation, the true heroes support the Zionist project. The real hero of the Ghetto, for Israelis, is Anielewicz.”

Putting aside the ideological differences between Edelmann (who was much more of a Bundist) and Zionism, his exclusion from Israeli history seems rather arbitrary. Had he died before he could opine about Israel, he would have been granted recognition in a forefather of the nation. Had he found return to his place of origin (say Thessalonika) impossible, he would have accepting Israeli nationality out of necessity.

Recognition as a hero arbitrarily requires the ability to nationalize him. Edelmann is exceptional, perhaps, only in that he cannot be retroactively nationalized, like the Joans of Arc, who could hardly be defenders of the French Republic. These more distant figures are more capably transnational and transhistorical simply because they are mute on the spatial and temporal boundaries between nations.

Matt Yglesias points out a passage from Buchanan’s new book (no link to Amazon because I won’t promote it) that reveals some obtuse historical thinking:

Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.

The basic argument seems to be that Britain and France could have (and should have) employed a kind of policy of “dual containment” vis-a-vis Hitler and Stalin. I don’t think I share Buchanan’s rosy assessment of Hitler’s intentions. I probably won’t finish the book, but anyone interested in the conservative anti-imperialist tradition may be interested to know that people do really believe this stuff.

While Ygelsias is focused on what the Allied approach would be, I think it’s more interesting what made the global conflict in Buchanan’s opinion. Did Britain’s and France’s empire condemn us to a “world war” that need not have been? I remember making a similarly stupid assertion about the global nature of WWII, but as an intellectual exercise. However, if we were to assume that Britain and France could keep Germany out of Western Europe (which makes little sense, given French military and diplomatic policy to fight in the East), would the war between Germany and USSR have remained isolated? Probably not. I would tend to think that Japan would still provide a common link between wars in Asia and the Pacific, requiring American and British cooperation. Buchanan, of course, seems intent on proving that the war against Fascism was a sideshow to the clash between capitalism and communism. The notion that the world would be spared 56 million deaths is patently laughable.  Give it up, already.

Christian Kreutzer (”Germans to the Front”, Atlantic Times, March 200 produced a piece on the German effort in Afghanistan, describing the army’s hesitation to take an active role the war. Alas, the Bundeswehr, more involved than the German public realizes, is still quite tepid about engaging in combat missions. But is this is question of post-war mentality?

The politicians have all run for cover because they are afraid that in the next election, an opponent might fashion a political noose out of any commitment to the mission, Perthes says. “In game theory, that is called a game of ‘chicken’ for cowards.” But politicians have demonstrated strong leadership in some cases, he adds, pointing out that they regularly make decisions that run in the face of majority opinion.

A deeper reason for German reluctance to fight lies in its collective subconscious, according to Perthes. “The American re-education campaign after the war was successful,” he said. As part of re-education after World War II, the U.S., in particular, required that school curricula, newspaper articles and popular culture promoted an anti-militaristic, democratic awareness among the German public.

Karsten Voigt, the federal government’s coordinator for German-American relations, can’t suppress a grin either. “After the last World War, the Americans wanted an especially peaceful German nation,” he said. “Now they have it and are astonished and unhappy that their re-education campaign was so successful.”

Perhaps, but I’m not quite convinced by the notion of Prussian militarism castrated by De-Nazification. Germans listen to American propaganda, but only to a point. Eventually, they resented hearing those messages, holding their ears when shorts came up in theaters. It just wasn’t that effective. Giving up a strong defense was controversial, being a matter of national sovereignty, and it was resolved politically rather than psychologically. If anything psychological prompted this new mentality, it was probably the extent of the German defeat for that first generation, as well as the guilt heaped on it by succeeding generations.
[Crossposted to Cliopatria]