Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. xvii + 286 pp. $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-472-06929-3; $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-472-09929-0.
Reviewed by Timothy Schroer (Department of History, University of West Georgia)
Published on H-German (June, 2007)
Discursively Constructing the West
In this work Thaddeus Jackson takes on a familiar question: how did Germany and the United States go from enemies in a Manichaean war to allies within the space of ten years? Jackson takes a novel approach to this question by focusing on public rhetoric's role in producing this dramatic transformation. He argues that the idea of "'Western Civilization' played a causally important" (p. 242) role in integrating the Federal Republic of Germany into the "West" and rehabilitating it as a reliable ally of the United States. Both West German and American political elites, Jackson persuasively shows, argued publicly after 1945 that West Germany and the United States belonged to a single, coherent, meaningful entity known as western civilization. Policy makers in both countries insisted that this shared heritage faced a common threat from the Soviet Union. Those leaders accordingly legitimated cooperative policy initiatives, especially the Marshall Plan and the grant of sovereignty to the West German state as a member of NATO, as necessary measures to protect a shared civilization.
This book is a study of international relations meant primarily for scholars of that field. Jackson devotes considerable effort to elaborating the theoretical bases of the work. He describes his approach as "transactional social constructionism" (p. x, emphasis original). Jackson examines the changing place of West Germany in the world as a rhetorical contest in which West German and American participants jockeyed for primacy in legitimating their policy prescriptions to a broader public. Jackson focuses on the language of the public debate, because he theorizes that the rhetorical jujitsu of legitimating one's own position and delegitimating that of one's opponent was a decisive, causative, under-studied element in producing West Germany's integration within the "West."
Jackson's theory shapes the contours of his study. He insists that his approach avoids the fool's errand of trying to discern the real policy motives of post-World War II actors in Germany or the United States (p. 22). Public rhetoric, Jackson writes, played the decisive role "not ... by modifying the subjective content of anyone's head" but rather by shaping "the public discursive space in favor of one or another course of action" (p. 31). What historical actors really believed "is not relevant to the causal process" examined in the book (p. 31). Jackson's theory leads him to focus almost exclusively on evidence from formal, high-level debates, especially in the Bundestag and the U.S. Congress (pp. 49-50). Since he professes a deep skepticism about the possibility of finding out whether figures such as George Marshall or Konrad Adenauer really meant what they said publicly and he believes that the real action was in formal debate, Jackson eschews "private sources" that might seem to cast light on motivations for policies of integrating West Germany in the West (p. 32).
Jackson observes that the West itself was a social construction (p. 244). After laying out his theory and explaining his interest in how the idea of the West was mobilized in debates rather than attempting to uncover what Western Civilization really was, Jackson sketches what he calls "the topography of postwar debates" in chapter 3. His description of such a topography exemplifies his writing style: "the topography of a series of debates specifies the various rhetorical commonplaces that are variously deployed and opposed by the advocates of the concrete positions appearing in the course of that debate" (p. 46). Jackson argues that over time an "occidentalist" commonplace became more prominent in that topography.
The book's fourth chapter offers a Foucaultian genealogy of the "rhetorical commonplace" Western Civilization. Jackson shows that by 1945 a vague notion of the "West" existed in German and American public rhetoric. The Occident was commonly understood to be a real, transnational thing, distinct from "the East." Jackson is on somewhat less sure ground in asserting that the West was further "linked to a series of other commonplaces, such as the defense of liberty and an opposition to Russia" (p. 111). Chapters 5, 6, and 7 then trace debates in which the term "Western Civilization" cropped up during three periods, 1944-46, 1947-48, and 1949-55. The last chapter turns its attention to theoretical conclusions or generalizable propositions to be gleaned from the study.
Jackson acknowledges that the rhetoric of western civilization did not monocausally produce the realignment and rehabilitation of West Germany (p. 242). Nevertheless, he does assign critical importance to it, asserting that "West German reconstruction can be satisfactorily explained by a focus on public rhetoric" (p. 3). Historical events, such as the outbreak of the Korean War, appear in the book, but they are relegated to a position subordinate to shifting public discourse. Jackson explains: "As a result of particular deployments [of rhetorical commonplaces], the Soviet Union became a 'threat,' and Germany ceased to be quite as 'threatening'" (p. 132). By the same token, the Federal Republic's rearmament and inclusion in NATO became feasible because of the argument that West Germany was a part of the western civilization that NATO was bound to defend (p. 226).
The compactness of the approach notwithstanding, Jackson's claims about the significance of public rhetoric are too ambitious to be fully persuasive. He demonstrates that an interesting range of participants in postwar debate, from poet T. S. Eliot to white supremacist U.S. Senator from Mississippi James Eastland, as well as more usual suspects like Adenauer and Marshall, invoked "western civilization." The question remains, however, of the importance of that rhetorical device in producing a rearmed, sovereign West German state within the American-led NATO alliance. Absent an examination of the motives of historical actors framed in the context of political, economic, military, and cultural developments, we cannot know the relative importance of that rhetorical commonplace in their calculations. Were references to western civilization merely unimportant rhetorical flourishes? Jackson insists that they mattered, but he does not offer persuasive evidence to show it. To my mind, Jackson's analysis thus does not answer the most interesting questions it raises.
This book's strong dose of rather specialized theory points out the difficulty of the laudable enterprise of fostering interdisciplinary communication. Readers unversed in the theory of international relations will be challenged by this book. Few historians will be persuaded by Jackson's urging to lay aside questions of what motives led historical actors to take particular actions (p. 252). Historians will be unsurprised to hear Jackson note that historical actors often lie (p. 22). That rather obvious point does not mean that it is impossible to reach conclusions based on weighing the sources, some of which are more revealing and reliable than others. Similarly, I suspect that Jackson's call to "take up the task of ideal-typically delineating generalizable social processes, patterns of social resources, and mechanisms of deployment that combine in historically unique ways to generate historically unique outcomes at particular moments" will fail to stir the hearts of many outside the world of international relations scholarship (p. 253). On balance, the book adds an interesting dimension to the story of the postwar integration of West Germany within the West, without fundamentally revising our understanding of that process.
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Citation:
Timothy Schroer. Review of Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13303
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