The Art of Coercion

Abstract

During latter stages of World War II, policymakers on both sides of Atlantic faced an unenviable task: deciding what to do with a war-ravaged Germany-a country that had seen its economy decimated, its infrastructure destroyed, and its state capacity crippled. US Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, with initial support of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, favored reducing Germany to a state of quasi-feudalism. Other US advisors, most notably Senator Robert Taft, preferred withdrawing US troops from European soil and thereby from duplicities of European power politics. In Germany, many influential policymakers, including Jakob Kaiser, a highly placed Christian Socialist and former resistance leader, made case for a demilitarized Germany, pinned back behind its prewar borders. Given this range of options, it seems remarkable that it was perhaps most unlikely of policy prescriptions-the institutionalization of Germany at heart of alliance-that emerged from political tumult. Indeed, some 50 years after Germany declared its full sovereignty, it is difficult to recall considerable material resources ($3 billion provided by United States to Germany alone between 1945 and 1955) and enormous symbolic shifts that this policy required. Perhaps most important feature of Civilizing Enemy: German Reconstruction and Invention of West, by Patrick Jackson, is that it reminds us of uncertainties and contingencies that lay behind Germany's reconstruction from enemy of West to cornerstone of civilization. By doing so, Jackson rescues an important and much contested historical process from what E.P. Thompson (1968:13), British historian, famously derided as the enormous condescension of posterity. Jackson focuses on public rhetoric that underpinned Germany's reconstruction, in other words, on how Germany's real world geopolitical position was reinterpreted through a discursive move that placed Germany at center of Western itself. Jackson argues that integration of German reconstruction with notions of civilization provided a discursive resource, which, in turn, provided a space that made certain policy decisions likely (in particular end of Occupation) and others taboo. This notion that rhetoric can be, at least in part, coercive-providing tools that close down possibilities for action-is an important addition to both constructivist theory in international relations and post-positivist turn more generally. In addition, by highlighting emergence of idea of civilization in first half of twentieth-century, Jackson demonstrates how notions of a clash between East and West, or between and rest, were a fundamental part of Cold War itself, investing this struggle with a Manichean fervor. Much of Civilizing Enemy provides a detailed investigation into how Germany was reimagined as an indispensable part of the West by intellectuals