Defining the Atlantic Community

Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Marco Mariano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415999045
• eBook ISBN: 9781136966873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In this volume, essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic open new perspectives on the construction of the "Atlantic community" during World War II and the early Cold War years. Based on original approaches bringing together diplomatic history and the history of culture and ideas, the book shows how atlantism came to provide a solid ideological foundation for the security community of North American and European nations which took shape in the 1940s. The idea of a transatlantic community based on shared histories, values, and political and economic institutions was instrumental to the creation of the Atlantic Alliance, and partly accounts for the continuing existence of the Atlantic partnership after the Cold War. At the same time, this study breaks new ground by arguing that the emergence of the idea of "Atlantic community" also reflected deeper trends in transatlantic relations; in fact, it was the outcome of the re-definition of "the West" due to the rise of the US and the decline of Europe in the international arena during the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Part I
American Vistas

1
How Europe Became Atlantic Walter Lippmann and the New Geography of the Atlantic Community

Ronald Steel

A STRUCTURED CONCEPT

The phrase “Atlantic community” has become such a familiar part of our political rhetoric that we rarely question either its meaning or the purpose it serves. The phrase itself suggests shared goals, family values, mutually rewarding benefits and responsibilities. It lies at the foundations of our mental maps of the world and of the role that we play in that world. Within these mental maps, the waters between Europe and North America have come to be seen as a bridge rather than a barrier between the two parts of a common homeland.

Like many constructions, both physical and mental, it periodically requires repair, redefinition, and even reconsideration. It also suffers from the tensions of expansion and contraction as new members join or older ones mutate or even reconsider the terms of their allegiance. The very vagueness of the concept—an artificial “community” divided by thousands of miles; split into a congeries of different tongues, customs, and identities; and stitched together over decades of changing political and military circumstances—raises questions of its inherent artificiality and its durability.

For its advocates, “community” is the description of a common civilization with ancient roots, loyalties, traditions, tongues, and faiths—an entity both natural and inevitable. For its critics, however, the concept is largely rhetoric: a mask for American hegemony over Europe and a cold war cliché that conceals political realities. The concept, however it is approached, is one based not only on ideas and cultures, but also on power and interests.

It is not a natural concept, but rather a structured political one. Sired by war, it has been vitalized by fear, fed by dependency on one side and the will to control on the other, and sustained by a European proclivity to weakness and an American drive to power. The relationship is one of a mutually rewarding codependency. This is the unacknowledged secret of its resilience and longevity.

The Atlantic alliance provides the military foundation of this larger entity optimistically described as the “community.” It endures because it serves a useful function, though one periodically affected by stress and mutation. While the United States—through its economic, military, and political power—dominates the “community,” that entity is as much a European as an American creation.

For the Americans, on the most basic level, it was organized to prevent Europe from being dominated by a single power—whether one actively hostile or only potentially so. The Americans entered the European political equation to establish a viable balance of power that the Europeans themselves could not sustain. Two cataclysmic wars within the thirty-year period from 1914 to 1944 had made it clear that Europeans lacked the will—or the power or the skill—to live peacefully without endangering themselves and others.

The alliance, or the wider but amorphous “community” that was spun around it like a decorative and enveloping web, has been of equal—or even greater—value to Europeans than to Americans. It allowed them, particularly if they acted in concert, not only to benefit from American initiatives they found useful, but also to impede those they considered potentially disadvantageous to Europe. The fact that it was a protective relationship in which one side received the protection while the other—in its own interests, to be sure—delivered it, did not in any way reduce its utility, even though it produced periodic disagreements and tensions.

The American connection also provided a solution of sorts to the two dilemmas that had beset Europe for the better part of a century. One was the German Problem—that is, finding a place for Germany where its energies and ambitions could be harnessed in a manner that did not threaten its neighbors, as well as itself, and might even be used in a mutually beneficial way.

The other dilemma was the Russian Problem. This was not a new development in Europe. It dated back to the time of the tsars. But it emerged in a new form after World War II when, as a result of German aggression under Nazi rule, the Russians not only reversed the humiliations and destruction imposed upon them during the war, but gained control of a buffer zone in the eastern part of the continent. Only the Americans were in a position to challenge what anxious Europeans feared might be an extension of Russian political, if not military, power into Western Europe. The New World, as has been said of an earlier disequilibrium, was brought in to restore the balance of the Old World.

The Atlantic connection—both the community and the alliance to which it was linked—had considerable advantages for the United States. It served first as a useful instrument to focus Europe within an Atlantic framework subject to a high degree of American influence. While some Europeans chafed at this dependency and even, like Charles de Gaulle, publicly denounced it, most Europeans were quite willing to accept it because the advantages seemed to significantly outweigh the disadvantages. This was particularly true in the area of defense: a realm that the Europeans were unwilling to finance and the Americans eager to provide because it offered advance bases for the projection of American power in the global struggle that came to be known as the cold war.

The alliance also secondly served as a means to pacify a Europe prone to violence and political extremism. The United States had to intervene no fewer than three times in the first half of the twentieth century to restore a political balance that Europeans lacked the will or the ability to maintain for themselves. This pacification was, to be sure, accomplished within a structure under American direction and control. Such control was essential not only to achieve American foreign policy goals, but also to secure the domestic support that the commitment entailed. Americans had to be assured that this entangling relationship was not only desirable but necessary. The refusal of the US Senate in 1919 to endorse Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic, but vaporous and ineptly handled, plans for world peace weighed heavily on the decisions made by American policy makers in 1945.

In addition to its other functions, the ostensible community was designed to prevent the European states or any postwar European political construction from pursuing policies or assuming an identity hostile to American interests. For obvious reasons this was never explicitly stated in alliance documents and pronouncements, but it was inherent in the very structure of the organization. It is for this reason that American officials throughout the long cold war period proclaimed, and continue to proclaim even to this day, that “America is a European power.” The intended audience for this problematic avowal is more European than it is American. Despite its fraternal connotations, it means that the United States is intent on playing a major role in European affairs.

Third, the Atlantic connection has ensured that Europe would serve as an advance base for the projection of American military power and influence. This function became strikingly apparent during the 1940s and 1950s when the American military presence in Europe was revealed to be not a holdover from World War II, but rather an open-ended and seemingly permanent arrangement. European leaders, with a few notable exceptions, accepted this willingly because it did not seem to impinge meaningfully on their autonomy, and it spared them the considerable costs of maintaining a significant military force of their own. There were, however, other problems that European governments had to overcome— including serious domestic dissent from groups on both the left and the right. These critics opposed what they viewed as a dangerous dependency on the United States.

AMERICA’S EUROPE

Although some form of transatlantic entity was inevitable for both political and economic reasons, the form it took was not. The mutation of a military alliance into a “community” was a construction project that required a major reinterpretation of the military, political, economic, and cultural links between the United States and Europe.

The United States came into being as a non-European, or even an anti-European, power. Indeed, for many eighteenth-century Americans in search of religious and political freedom or an escape from poverty and servitude, it represented a rejection of Europe. America offered, in the words of the late eighteenth-century patriot Tom Paine, a chance to “begin the world anew.”

While Americans are mostly of European descent (though increasingly less so in recent decades), they are in fact a mixture of cultures and races. This is much truer today than at any time since the nation’s founding. The values and structures of American society—individualism, democracy, religious and cultural diversity, the absence of an established national church—are in sharp contrast to European traditions. Immigrants have come to America in order to leave behind them the nations of their origins. It has represented a chance to start life over again—not to replicate it in a different longitude.

From its inception, and well into the twentieth century, most Americans have been wary of being drawn into European quarrels. When they have done so, it has been because they were persuaded by their leaders that their well-being was at stake. But as commercial interests increasingly drew Americans abroad in search of profit and influence, so did they contribute to the belief that these interests required military protection. By the 1890s, barely a century after its founding, the United States was the world’s leading industrial power. This fed the quasi-religious concept of Manifest Destiny, with its implication that it was not only possible but necessary for the United States to play a global role of leadership and inspiration.

The long-standing belief that America must stand apart from Europe’s incessant wars and orgies of self-destruction was gradually undermined in the early twentieth century by elites—mostly based in the banks and industries of the Northeastern states—motivated by a different conception of American interests and the benefits of an entangling role for American power. For example, Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant steel baron and one of the richest men in America, went so far as to propose a merger between the United States and Great Britain.

Political ambition also played an important role. Impelled by the logic of the new concept of geopolitics, the strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan drew on this logic to propose the unity of English-speaking peoples to guard the world’s sea lanes. At issue, he argued, was “whether the Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate throughout the earth to control its future.” Similarly, the nineteenth-century American historian Henry Adams urged “building up a great community of Atlantic powers.”¹

This vague ambition became a reality following the outbreak of the war that engulfed Europe in 1914 and spread across the Atlantic by 1917. Anglophile groups, largely centered in the northeastern seaboard states and fortified by historical ties and cultural affinities, urged alliance with Britain. Even more important was the pressure from Wall Street bankers who had made enormous loans to their British partners—loans that they would lose were Britain to be defeated.

Such pressure was fortified by the concerns of strategists that a German victory would create a continental power bloc capable of challenging American and British interests in the South Atlantic. These interests had been explicitly congruent since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when the British fleet had become the effective guardian of an American economic and political presence in the Western Hemisphere.

Although Woodrow Wilson had declared that America must remain neutral in the European war, this avowal was a hope rather than a pledge. It was belied by his willingness to respect Britain’s blockade of German ports, its seizure of cargoes bound for the ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I American Vistas
• Part II Transatlantic Crossings
• Part III At the Receiving End
• Contributors
• Index