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

Abstract

The main argument of Jan-Uwe Guettel’s book is that Germany’s imperial liberalism, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, was racist and expansionist, drawing as it did both on examples of westward expansion in the USA and on the discriminating racial politics prevalent in the American South to further the cause of German colonies. The perception of America as a liberal colonial empire was incorporated into German liberal theories from the late eighteenth century, and put into practice in the late nineteenth century when colonial debates in the Reichstag allowed for a framing of issues that transcended political lines. In defining liberalism, Guettel notes that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it is often seen as a relatively benign concept when compared with Nazism. He disputes this, positing that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial liberalism was infused with violence, racism and oppression. In his lengthy introduction Guettel argues that German colonialism was supported and championed by German liberals, a stance contrary to traditional historical narratives, yet one aired by various newer studies. He draws upon a wide range of secondary literature (watch out for footnote 7, which is almost two manuscript pages long) to contextualize and describe the intellectual development of this historiography in reference to German history. His broader argumentation throughout the book questions the three prevailing methodologies describing German liberalism: cultural pessimists (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer); those who see European colonialism as the origin of European totalitarian ideologies (Hannah Arendt and others); and those advocating the theory of a German Sonderweg. In describing the historiography of the positive exceptionalism of America’s imperial and colonial past, Guettel draws upon a much smaller and predominantly older set of sources than he does for the German historiography. This sets the tone for the focus upon German domestic and international politics as opposed to domestic US politics.