Frank Costigliola

Anglo-American Financial Rivalry in the 1920s

Based on British and American primary sources, this article analyzes Anglo-American differences in the reconstruction of the international monetary order. London wanted a worldwide gold exchange standard to bolster its relatively weak financial position. The U.S. pushed instead for the gold standard. Winston Churchill returned to the gold standard largely because he feared economic isolation from the Dominions, especially South Africa, which had accepted private American advice to return regardless of Britain. Anglo-American wrangling continued over the Genoa proposals, loan regulation and war debts. Heavy gold exports were a primary factor in Federal Reserve rate increases in early 1928.

The United States and the Reconstruction of Germany in the 1920s

The foreign economic policy of the United States in the aftermath of World War I was not isolationist, but selectively interventionist. With a group of very able American businessmen-diplomats in the lead, the nation pressured the French to accept the Dawes Plan, which, it was hoped, would solve the reparations problem, encourage healthy economic recovery and growth (which would embrace large sales of American capital goods to Germany), and ensure peaceful contentment in two nations that were more bitter enemies than ever. But, Professor Costigliola shows, a plan to rebuild Germany that was half private business and half foreign policy, and that was manipulated to both ends, could not succeed in the marketplace, where it had to live or die.

The Other Side of Isolationism: The Establishment of the First World Bank, 1929–1930

THE Young conference of 1929 was more than another act in the reparations scenario., Out of the tangle of reparations emerged a plan for a world financial institution, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).2 The leadership for the creation of BIS came from a small group of international bankers in New York City. Despite past rivalries and differences, these international bankers worked together to establish a world financial order that would incorporate the federal principle of the American central banking system. Cooperation among reserve banks in the Federal Reserve System (FRS), New York Citys international financiers believed, not only contributed to the stability of American money and credit but also strengthened the leadership of New York City in American banking. Prominent among these bankers were Owen D. Young, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont, S. Parker Gilbert, Gates W. McGarrah, and Jackson Reynolds,, who, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

Reading for emotion

Dean Acheson appeared angry. The former secretary of state fumed at the “foolishness” unleashed by George F. Kennans radio broadcasts over the BBC in November–December 1957. Kennan, who in 1946–7 had pushed for containing the Soviet Union, was now urging negotiations leading to a US–Soviet military “disengagement” from Central Europe and the establishment of a neutral, reunified Germany. Acheson was proud of having helped create a prosperous West Germany anchored in US-led NATO. Now Kennan was fanning hopes for an easing of East–West tensions and perhaps even an end to the division of Germany. Those changes would undo Achesons handiwork and undermine Americas predominance in Europe. The elder statesman hit back hard, and with a proven strategy. He assailed his opponents credibility as a rational, sound thinker. In a January 1958 statement published widely in the US and European press, Acheson charged that “Mr. Kennan has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships.” Here was Kennan, who had made his reputation as a hard-headed “realist,” being accused of woolly-minded, emotional thinking. In a lead article in Foreign Affairs Acheson went as far as to associate Kennan with the “‘unlovely hordes of apes and monkeys’” from mankinds evolutionary past, those “‘flighty’” creatures with “so much love for absurd and idle chatter.” From his perch as a top Washington journalist, James Reston opined that Achesons newspaper attack ranked as a “public service,” for “next to the Lincoln Memorial in moonlight, the sight of Mr. Dean Acheson blowing his top is without doubt the most impressive sight in the capital.” It is not surprising that such incidents, and foreign relations more generally, entail emotional thinking and reactions. The foreign/transnational/international relations of individuals, groups, and states are often high-stakes, cross-cultural, nail-biting ventures. Despite the “realist” assumption that foreign policy remains the domain of the rational actor appraising objective national interests, emotion has figured prominently in the making of foreign policy. Emotional perceptions have predisposed foreign policymakers to propose or oppose policies, make friends or enemies, pursue peace or war. Without succumbing to emotional determinism, historians can examine how culturally inflected, complex emotional reactions – such as insecure pride, craving for respect, anxiety about change, and fear of appearing fearful – have complicated international relations at all levels. Emotions history enables us to delve deeper into the thoughts, motivations, and behavior of historical actors.

Archibald Clark Kerr, Averell Harriman, and the fate of the wartime alliance

This essay examines how the divergent personalities, emotional thinking, and cultural assumptions of British ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark Kerr and US ambassador W. Averell Harriman coloured their respective perceptions of political problems and recommendations for dealing with the growing tensions in the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

Explaining political economy

The study of political economy is a seriously neglected area of research and writing in the history of US foreign relations, and international history more generally. Political economy is the study of the relationships among business, state, and society as well as those between economics and international politics. Certain historians, broadly associated with the so-called Wisconsin School, have long focused on the economic dimensions of foreign policy, especially the quest for overseas markets. But most ignore political economy except in the most general of terms – lumping the interests of firms or corporations, banks and the health of the world economy and the global financial system among the “considerations” entertained by policymakers alongside personal, bureaucratic, or geopolitical concerns. Those who have devoted attention to economic concerns largely confine their attention to the views of policymakers, rather than broader social and economic constituencies, or to more abstract conceptions of influence rather than to the economic power of particular actors. In recent years, scholars have turned increasing attention to the role of race, gender, culture, and ideology in shaping the worldviews and policies of US officials, as well as the myriad ordinary Americans engaged with the wider world as non state actors. Yet an understanding of political economy remains essential to any narrative of US power, and to the wider world in which that power is constituted and exercised. Given space constraints, this chapter will not offer a comprehensive theory of political economy, or suggest that there is a single road map for thinking and writing about it. Rather, we will survey some classic and some more recent works that can suggest how to more productively think, research, and write about the political economy of US foreign relations. Four interrelated dynamics are particularly important to consider: the structure of the world economy and the place of the United States in it; the role of manufacturing and extractive firms; banking and finance; and the relationship between business, state, and society. THE WORLD ECONOMY To understand the relationship between economics and US foreign policy, it is important to name the system – the wider field of forces in which US officials, corporations, and other actors operate. This system is a capitalist world system. The essential starting point for understanding its core features and functioning is Karl Polanyis The Great Transformation .

Shades of sovereignty: racialized power, the United States and the world

The segregated diners along Marylands Route 40 were always somebodys problem – mothers packing sandwiches for a daytrip to the nations capital, Jim Crow on their minds – but they were not always John F. Kennedys problem. That changed in the early 1960s, when African diplomats began arriving to the United States to present their credentials to the United Nations and the White House. Between the high-modernist universalism of the former and the neo-classical, republican universalism of the latter, at just about the place where ambassadors got hungry, lay a scattering of gaudy, ramshackle restaurants straddling an otherwise bleak stretch of highway. As the motoring diplomats discovered to their shock, the diners excluded black people in ways that turned out to be global: whatever their importance to US foreign policy, African economic ministers and cultural attaches received no diplomatic immunity. The incoming Kennedy administration soon confronted an international scandal, as the officials filed formal complaints and US and overseas editors ran with the story. “Human faces, black-skinned and white, angry words and a humdrum reach of U. S. highway,” read an article in Life , “these are the raw stuff of a conflict that reached far out from America in to the world.” Kennedy, reluctant to engage the black freedom struggle except where it intersected with Cold War concerns, established an Office of the Special Protocol Service to mediate: its staff caught flak, spoke to newspapers, and sat down with Route 40s restaurateurs, diner by diner, making the case that serving black people was in the United States’ global interests. High-level officials argued for the desegregating of Marylands public accommodations for both visiting dignitaries and African Americans. “Let me say with a Georgia accent,” stated Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.” In the context of Cold War rivalry and African decolonization, Route 40s petty apartheid was no longer just its own. Racialized power had a geopolitics; one that had suddenly brought the President to within two degrees of separation from the owners of the Double-T Diner. This chapter explores intersections between the politics of racialized difference and the United States’ geopolitical histories, and the rich varieties of ways that historians have mapped them.

Corporatism: from the new era to the age of development

Scholars have used the term corporatism or associationalism to describe an economic and political system that is characterized by certain organizational forms, by a certain ideology, and by a certain trend in the development of public policy. Organizationally, corporatism refers to a system that is founded on officially recognized functional groups, such as labor, business, agriculture, and the professions. In such a system, institutional regulating and coordinating mechanisms seek to integrate the groups into an organic whole; elites in the private and public sectors collaborate to guarantee order, stability, and progress; and this collaboration creates a pattern of interpenetration and power sharing that makes it difficult to determine where one sector leaves off and the other begins. Ellis W. Hawley defined corporatism in these terms, his work building on the insights of historians, such as Alfred D. Chandler and Robert H. Wiebe, who identified the organizational revolution and the search for order as major themes in the history of modern industrial society. Still other scholars delineated the ideology and political culture of the associative state and its champions among progressive political leaders and their counterparts in the private sector. They uncovered a body of liberal thought that celebrated such virtues as voluntarism, managerial expertise, and enlightened self-regulation and cooperation, all in the service of liberal capitalism. They explored the many programs to promote social welfare, tame the business cycle, nurture growth at home, and promote economic development and modernization abroad. They demonstrated how these programs often sought to contain the state by entrusting much of the responsibility for public policy to semi-autonomous agencies, to supposedly nonpartisan experts, and to collaborative systems of economic planning and voluntary regulation. According to most of these studies, those who championed the associative system saw it as a “middle way” between the laissez faire capitalism of a bygone day and the paternalistic statism of an Orwellian nightmare. In this system, partisan politics would supposedly give way to scientific management, public legislatures would yield some of their functions to private forums, and redistributive battles would dissolve in a material abundance in which all could share. The portrait drawn in this scholarship is fluid rather than static; the relative weight assigned to various components of the associational system, particularly to public versus private power, varies according to historical circumstances, the political power of the groups involved, and the national system under discussion.

Development and technopolitics

In 1900 an official commission landed in Manila to establish a colonial government for the Philippines. It included Ohio judge William Howard Taft and a young attorney, Daniel R. Williams, who kept his thoughts in a diary. “It is an interesting phenomenon, this thing of building a modern commonwealth on a foundation of medievalism – giving to this country at one fell swoop all the innovations and discoveries which have marked centuries of Anglo-Saxon push and energy,” he penciled on a damp page in October 1901. “I doubt if in the worlds history anything similar has been attempted, that is, the transplanting so rapidly of the ideas and improvements of one civilization upon another.” It is a familiar enthusiasm, one that might have been expressed at different times by American missionaries in Hawaii, Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana, or economists in Chile. It is not altogether different from President Barack Obamas pledge to poor countries that “we can deliver historic leaps in development.” The United States conducts foreign relations through diplomacy, trade, and war, but also through humanitarianism and science. Such interventions are called development, but development is also a way of seeing other peoples’ ways of life as an incomplete project, and the United States as an agent in fulfilling their ultimate destiny. Williams did not specify the “improvements” in store for Filipinos, nor did Obama say what “historic leaps” he had in mind (they probably defined development in vastly different ways) but their shared assumption that the United States was ahead of other nations and could lead them toward a better future is a persistent and powerful theme. Foreign aid and technical assistance have been part of the diplomatic toolkit since 1948, but even earlier US foreign relations aimed not just to influence other countries but to modernize them: to push them to break with the past and begin a restless search for change and renewal. For over a century, development has been at the core of the American mission. It has justified the expenditure of billions of aid dollars, the upending of whole societies, and the bulldozing of landscapes, while inspiring visions of the final eradication of poverty, disease, and war.

The religious turn in diplomatic history

Few aspects of the human condition are as complicated as religion. Universal and yet impossible to define because no single definition can capture its diversity and complexity, religion is a source of war and peace, conservatism and liberalism, traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and internationalism, localism and globalism. It is the producer and product of culture, and all that culture entails. Worldwide, in virtually every society, it has provided a basis for the human condition from long before the axial age right through to the present. Yet in the twenty-first century, a digital era of big data, medical miracles, and artificial intelligence, we are more conscious than ever of living in what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “a secular age.” For diplomatic historians, the problem of religion has been especially acute. Mostly neglected until the last decade or so, religion poses a unique set of methodological and epistemological challenges. This chapter aims to provide a historiographical overview of religions burgeoning presence in the field; an introduction to the challenges it poses; and a set of guidelines on how it can be used effectively to explain the history of American foreign relations. Despite its salience to virtually every time period and most topics in American history, until recently the study of religion had been relegated to the margins of historical scholarship. Instead of being considered an integral component of US history writ large, religious history had developed into a specialist subfield, thriving amongst its practitioners but with little appeal and acceptance in the wider historical community. In an influential essay in 2004, Jon Butler observed that modern American historians had a “religion problem”: they rarely utilized religious actors or subjects; when they did, it was suddenly and temporarily, with usually superficial results. Butler compared religion to a jack-in-the-box, popping up briefly and unexpectedly before disappearing with little trace. Since then, however, political, social, and cultural historians have worked hard to integrate religion into their broader narratives, so that it now has a central role in topics as diverse as civil rights, ethnicity, citizenship, deindustrialization and the emergence of a services-based economy, mass internal migration, and the rise of the conservative political movement. No longer is the historiographical presence of religion ephemeral, sudden, or brief.