Charles S. Maier

Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I

The author of fourteen books, Charles Maier is one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history.Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his first book, presented an unparalleled analysis of the crucial decade in Europe after 1918. Based on extensive archival research in each of the three countries, the book examined how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization.Recasting Bourgeois Europe accomplished two major historiographical goals simultaneously. First, Maier provided a comparative history of three different European societies for a period when common developments demanded an approach other than that of the usual national histories. Second, he rethought the political structure of the European interwar period. Although most accounts presented the 1920s as a time characterized by illusory attempts to return to a prewar political equilibrium, and doomed to succumb to the Depression and the dictatorships, Maier suggested instead that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II.The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse but uni.ed histories in detail, and its effort to make stabilization, and not just breakdown, a historical problem have made it a classic of European historiography.

The politics of inflation and economic stagnation : theoretical approaches and international case studies

The inflation of the 1970s represented the greatest peacetime disruption of the Western economies since the Depression. Even as inflation receded, the recession in its wake brought more joblessness than at any time since the 1930s. The governments of industrialized nations found that the economic policies they had developed since World War II no longer assured price stability or high employment. What are the lessons of over a decade of economic difficulty? In this conference volume, which focuses on aspects of the crisis that economists often presuppose to be beyond control, the authors analyze the political and social underpinning of inflation and recession. Part 1 places the economic problems of the 1970s in the historical context of postwar development and then compares economic and political science analyses of inflation. Part 2 examines how rivalries between social groups affect inflationary processes. One chapter draws on the history of Latin American inflation to suggest the conflicts in play. Two others weigh the role of labor and industry in the formation of economic policy. And another shows how rivalry between countries, like rivalry between classes at home, permitted inflation to rise. The chapters in part 3 contest the claim that big government or big labor causes inflation. Two studies emphasize that a high degree of public expenditure does not itself lead to inflation. Further contributions explore the role of central banks and subject such concepts as the political business cycle to critical analysis. Part 4 comprises case studies about macroeconomic policymaking in four nations: Italy, Germany, Japan, and Sweden. The studies reveal what institutional attributes rendered those countries resistant to inflation or vulnerable to economic setback. In the last part, the editors pull together the findings and lay out the contemporary political feasibility of alternative approaches to macroeconomic management.

The Vulnerabilities of Interwar Germany

In a recent review essay in this journal Konrad Jarausch discussed the paradigm of illiberalism in the historiography of modern Germany. He found it suggestive but wanting in precision.1 A related theme, which served as the implicit conceptual base of much fruitful research in the past decades, involves what might be termed the German limits of civic rationality. By the limits of civic rationality I mean the fact that groups committed to a fervent nationalism in the abstract can demonstrate very partial or flawed insights into public needs. This is hardly a new theme, having served from the nineteenth century as the basis for critiques of Interessenpolitik down to Ralf Dahrendorf s contemporary indictments of both conservative and socialist traditions. As a historical guideline the limits of civic rationality sensitizes the researcher to the constant tension between the pursuit of group objectives and the skewed conceptions of the public interest: the difficulties in the way of establishing a German res publica. Both of these important studies are based upon this continually challenging theme, although they focus on different centers of group interest and activity. While David Abraham examines the consequences of economic rivalries for the Weimar regime, Michael Geyer counterposes the militarys concepts of power politics with the more genuine imperatives of German national security after 1918. His juxtaposition of armaments or security cuts across the two interwar German regimes; his book offers perhaps the more striking reworking of the inherited theme, but remains vulnerable to issues of definition and precision.

What Have We Learned Since 1989

This paper is a frankly subjective effort to return to questions posed about the nature of communist rule and the sudden collapse of communism in the light of the intervening two decades. It asks, first, why feelings of elation about the transformations of 1989 faded relatively quickly, second, why the communist system collapsed so clamorously, and, third, how might we best describe its earlier operation. The paper suggests that there will always be a sense of let-down after intensely hopeful political activity. It endeavours to provide a model of social complexity that communist rule with its Marxist archetypes of social development could not really master. But it also rejects the idea that ‘society’ under communism can be judged autonomously apart from the regime that sustained and structured it. Efforts to do so will trivialise the degrees of repression and surveillance. Finally the paper proposes that the nature of communist rule in the decades after Stalin must be described in terms of a ‘life cycle’ metaphor, such as the idea of ‘late style’ provides for artistic creation. It is fruitless to describe an ideal type of transformative political regime that makes no allowance for change over time. Hence, returning to the first enquiry, the paper argues that efforts to reclaim communal fulfilment will always exist or revive alongside efforts at individual emancipation.

Targeting the city: Debates and silences about the aerial bombing of World War II

The article goes back to the early discussions of the morality of city bombing which took place before and during World War II and attempts to analyze both the moral argumentation and its historical context from the 1940s until today. The development of the doctrine of “collateral damage” which recognized that attacking enemy factories was permissible even if it cost the lives and homes of civilians was soon widened beyond its original notion. After the war, the dropping of the atomic bombs became an issue in its own right, to be considered separately from the earlier recourse to conventional bombing — even when conventional bombing achieved equally destructive results. Twin inhibitions have reigned in the issue of what force against civilians was justified: the reluctance of German commentators to seem apologetic for the Third Reich, and the difficulty in the U.S. of seeming to cast any aspersions on those who fought “the good war.”

Empires or Nations? 1918, 1945, 1989…

Nella vita degli imperatori c’ e un momento, che segue all’orgoglio per l’ampiezza sterminata dei territori che abbiamo conquistato, alla malinconia e al sollievo di sapere che presto riunceremo a conoscerli e a comprenderli; . . . e il momento disperato in cui si scopre che quest’ impero che ci era sembra la somma di tutte le meraviglie e uno sfacelo senza fine ne forma, che la sua corruzione e troppo incancrenita perche il nostro scretto possa metterevi riparo, che il trionfo sui sovrani avversari ci ha fatto eredi della loro lunga rovina.

Die Sozialwissenschaften und die Wende: Grenzen der Prognosefähigkeit

Als Amerikaner, und als Historiker von Haus aus, stehe ich vor Ihnen gewissermasen als ein doppelter Ausenseiter. Mein Interesse fur die politischen und kulturellen Entwicklungen in Deutschland reicht bereits Jahrzehnte zuruck. Und was meine Fachzugehorigkeit betrifft, stehe ich oft unter Verdacht, wegen meiner Neigung zu methodologischen Fragen und zur Zeitgeschichte ein getarnter Politologe zu sein. Auf die Frage, wann denn fur mich die Zeitgeschichte als Geschichte ende, habe ich stets eine leichte Antwort parat: beim der Fruhstuckslekture der New York Times. Spatere Ereignisse darf der Historiker nicht in Betracht ziehen; da fehlt ihm die notwendige Perspektive. Jedenfalls erscheine ich hier in diesem Forum als eine Art Grenzverletzter oder, mit dem Begriff einer vergangen Epoche vielleicht besser ausgedruckt, als ein Mauerspringer.

Introduction: New Perspectives on the Use of Parity Mandates and Quotas to Guarantee Equality between Men and Women

This book presents to English-speaking readers a concept for assuring group representation—one based on gender, however, not race or ethnicity—advocated by many in Europe, but generally rejected out of hand in the United States. Contributors discuss the theory and experience of mandating quotas for the presence of women candidates for national office, whether by compelling electoral procedures that will return a fixed number to elective office or by requiring parties to nominate a minimal percentage. The rough analogue in the United States has been “affirmative action,” which has been applied prevailingly to educational admissions, employment opportunity, job contracts, and only indirectly to voting. Quotas for guaranteed representation provide one among several possible measures available to boost the presence of underrepresented groups in public office. Even before the courts began to dismantle affirmative action as constitutionally suspect, advocates of affirmative action in the United States often separated the procedures they supported from the imposition of fixed quotas.