Exporting Democracy
By GIULIANA CHAMEDES
Review of THE WEIMAR CENTURY: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations
of the Cold War, by Udi Greenberg
Princeton University Press, 2014
This month, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld surprised many in an interview
with The Times of London. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed
to me unrealistic,” Rumsfeld said, turning against his past support for democracy
promotion in the Middle East. “I'm not one who thinks that our particular template of
democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” he
explained. Rumsfeld’s old boss, former President George W. Bush, famously thought
otherwise, and global democracy promotion is considered one of the cornerstones of his
foreign policy platform. In his 2005 inaugural speech, for example, Bush had said, “It is
the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements
and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in
our world.”
As Udi Greenberg shows in his brilliant new book just out from Princeton University
Press, it is Bush 2005– not Rumsfeld 2015– who is the standard-bearer of a longstanding
tradition in American foreign policy. In The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the
Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, Greenberg explores many resonant questions.
One of them is this: How did the export of democracy become central to U.S. foreign
policy between 1945 and 1970, and who did the exporting? To tell this story (and several
others, too), Greenberg traces the lives of five extraordinary individuals. Despite their
many differences, all were committed to the desirability of democracy and to the U.S. as
the agent for its universalization after 1945. All were German-born males; all had
breathed Weimar air and achieved positions of prominence in European society prior to
their exile to the United States. All had a deeply ingrained fear of communism, tucked
alongside their strong abhorrence for National Socialism. And all were able to secure
coveted positions in the United States as high-ranking advisors, project managers, and
foreign-policy theorists following Germany’s defeat and the start of the Cold War.
These five figures are the Calvinist political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, the Socialist-party
activist Ernst Fraenkel, the Catholic anti-liberal publicist Waldemar Gurian, the liberaldemocratic lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and the international relations theorist Hans
Morgenthau. Each one gets a chapter to himself in Greenberg’s colorful collage.
Why these five? Greenberg -- a young but already accomplished scholar at Dartmouth -initially grew interested in these men because all contributed to Germany’s reconstruction
after World War II. Some did so through their work with private American-led
foundations, while others worked in cooperation with the U.S. military and the
Department of State. Thus, when democracy returned to Germany after 1945, it was not
an exclusively foreign import. Rather, the democratization of Germany was also carried
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out by a cadre of German émigrés, born and bred in pro-democracy circles in the Weimar
years. Further, their peculiar conceptions of democracy were shaped by the Weimar
world in which they had matured intellectually. The rise of international communism;
international law and the founding of the League of Nations; political Christianity and the
Vatican’s re-emergence as a force in international politics; the birth of psychoanalysis
and public relations; the greater imbrication between the public and private spheres; and,
of course, National Socialism’s democratic seizure of power -- for Greenberg, we cannot
understand these men without taking account of this rich context. Between the lines of
Greenberg’s narrative emerges a Weimar that’s both familiar and unfamiliar: one in
which there was perhaps more cross-pollination than we had initially thought (socialists
reading Schmitt, international lawyers reading Freud), and more anti-communist paranoia
than expected.
The book does a wonderful job of showing the multifaceted ways in which these figures
participated in their own country’s reconstruction after World War II. However, little ink
is spent on the cast of characters – some of whom never left Germany, others of whom
were US-born officials – who typically feature in histories of Germany’s
democratization. Is The Weimar Century prepared to defend the claim that these
particular five figures were the decisive ones in shaping the intellectual framework
(and/or practical implementation) of Germany’s democratization? Or were these figures
merely representative of broader trends, tendencies, and schools of thought? The
distinction is not always made clear. Thus notwithstanding, the research does point
towards a very important conclusion. We learn little about whether these five figures
actually knew one another, but their vastly divergent conceptions show us that there was
a quiet civil war raging on German soil after World War II. Greenberg’s account thus
suggests -- as scholars such as Marco Duranti, Aline-Florence Manent, Sagi Schaefer,
and Maria Mitchell have also shown -- that Germany’s path towards democracy was a
belabored and deeply contentious one.
Addressing an issue that few scholars have before, Greenberg demonstrates that there
were (at least) five distinct theories of democracy operative in European-American
foreign policy circles after World War II. These were: the oligarchic, the collectivist, the
theocratic, the liberal-democratic, and the realist. Greenberg dedicates a chapter to each.
Through the lens of the Protestant theorist Carl J. Friedrich, we are introduced to a
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religious, elitist conception of democracy. A kind of Zelig of the 20 century, Friedrich
helped globalize the University of Heidelberg by making it the seat of one of the first
modern student exchange programs, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst
(DAAD). He also taught in the Institute für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften (Institute of
Social and Political Science), and following his escape to the United States, helped create
the Harvard School of Overseas Administration (HSOA). This paved the way for
venerable American universities to breed diplomats and military officials, rather than
proudly aloof observers of state- and war-making (Harvard’s previous ethos). On
Greenberg’s read, both before and after World War II, HSOA was in keeping with
Friedrich’s core commitment to elite leadership. In text after text, the German theorist
called upon the “responsible” few to constrain democracy. Drawing on an increasingly
mainstream position in German anti-Nazi circles, Friedrich condemned the hyperemotional masses, and called upon well-educated elites to steer democracy’s noble ship.
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Did Friedrich identify at all with the famous progenitors of this position (Plato, Weber,
Durkheim, Le Bon), one wonders? Did he see eye-to-eye with U.S.-born contemporaries
like Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, and Joseph Schumpeter? What of his relations
with democratic elitists in the wider German émigré community – figures like Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, William Kornhauser, or William Röpke? The
Weimar Century does not explore these questions in detail. But it does show us that
Friedrich’s conception of democracy was not just elitist: it was also shot through with
Calvinist motifs. For Friedrich, democracy drew from the people’s consent for religious
reasons: deploying the Calvinist concept of the covenant, Friedrich argued that
democracy derived from the peaceful cooperation of Christian communities in pursuit of
this-worldly and over-worldly aims. Friedrich’s conception –having much in common
with elite theory and with what Andrew Preston has called a U.S.-bred Christian
republicanism – was thus an idiosyncratic fusion of several existing models for
democracy.
But Friedrich’s conception of democracy would have been anathema to another figure
Greenberg explores: the German Socialist Ernst Fraenkel. By contrast, Fraenkel believed
that democracy must be robustly committed to improving the social and economic wellbeing of all its constituents, so as to bring about a collectively run, and more horizontal,
political order. Fraenkel sought to translate these ideas into practice in postwar Germany,
though it actually took the German socialists until the 1960s to welcome his views as
their own. Fraenkel had more luck as senior agent in the American mission to
“modernize” South Korea. The irony of a European socialist working with a capitalist
power to counter communist influence was not lost to anyone. But Fraenkel was proud of
his achievements in East Asia. In 1948, he won the fight to get the new South Korean
Constitution to delineate collective and social rights, rather than just individual ones,
arguing that doing so would lay the foundations for a lasting democratic order.
Greenberg’s findings here are quite important. They not only help corroborate the recent
contention that the postwar human rights boom cannot be viewed as the reversal and delegitimation of the category of group rights, as previous historians had claimed. They also
explain how some European socialists -- despite their long-seated opposition to liberal
democracy – could find common ground with the United States after World War II.
Finally, they provide an unlikely source for the United States’ democratization efforts in
East Asia: German socialist thought. Though it would have been nice to know more
about whether and how Fraenkel’s views were received by South Koreans and by U.S.
forces onsite, the story of Fraenkel’s strange triumph is a fascinating and important one.
Power to the elite or the collective: the menu of options for postwar democrats did not
end here. Greenberg’s third chapter explores a very important (though little-studied)
group that enjoyed a surge in support after World War II. For this group, the protection
and promotion of Christianity – and particularly, Roman Catholicism -- was the integral
component of any functional political system. The group aimed to eliminate the
possibility of any future liberal separation of Church and state by preserving Church-state
cooperation (and its interwar legal guarantees) in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere.
Greenberg’s attention here focuses on the Catholic publicist Waldemar Gurian, the father
of postwar totalitarian theory, and a leading figure in the Rockefeller Foundation’s
outreach program in Germany. But Greenberg could have easily looked at many other
figures defending this view, including several European Christian Democrats, American
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Catholic clerics and laymen, and leading figures within the Vatican itself (including Pope
Pius XII). Readers of this chapter might wonder about the extent to which democracy
was a central element in Gurian’s thought at all. Was Gurian – like Pope Pius XII –
willing to embrace democracy only on the condition that it defend “Christian rights” and
combat communist internationalism? Greenberg suggests an answer in the affirmative,
but this reader, at least, would be eager to hear more.
The book’s two final figures (and the intellectual frameworks they represent) will likely
be the most familiar to readers. The legal scholar Karl Loewenstein introduces us to a
legalistic conception of democracy, according to which democracies function as they
should only if laws are put in place to protect individual liberties, while simultaneously
limiting certain rights (i.e., the freedom to undo democracy, or speak out strongly against
it). This restrictive legal internationalism was a dime a dozen in the interwar years. But
Greenberg sees Loewenstein as particularly significant, insofar as his theories influenced
the United States’ postwar dealings with Latin America, through his work with the
Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense (CDP). Founded in 1942, the
CDP’s official task was to coordinate domestic measures against potential Axis enemies
across the Americas. But the organization lived on well beyond World War II, turning its
animus now against communism. Nowhere other than in the Loewenstein chapter does
Greenberg appear more skeptical of the potentially damaging implications of democracy
promotion, as he outlines the CPD’s suppression of political groups, its “pre-emptive”
actions against potential internal enemies, and its mass internment and deportation
campaigns across Latin America.
Greenberg closes his excursus with the best-known figure of all: political theorist Hans J.
Morgenthau. In many senses, Morgenthau has little in common with Greenberg’s other
historical actors. But the king of postwar international relations theory figures as a kind
of accidental hero: the unlikely redeemer of the German émigré community and its
commitment to forms of democracy ultimately cast as deeply flawed -- “short-sighted,”
rigid,” and “tragically paranoid,” in Greenberg’s words. As is well known, Morgenthau
asserted the primacy of the political, and saw the pursuit of national interest as the
determining factor in international relations. But this “realist democracy,” Greenberg is
careful to note, was not devoid of moral commitments: for Morgenthau, ethical and moral
considerations constrained and determined the pursuit of national interest. This, for
Greenberg, explains why the expat gone native developed his growing discontent over
the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, and his surprising agreement with the ’68
generation, in their call for a more principled, and horizontal, democratic practice. In this
final chapter, Greenberg’s narrative leaves the calcified democratic theory of the
Weimar-into-early-Cold-War era, and points towards the emergence of new theories and
expectations regarding U.S. foreign policy. Greenberg also avoids freezing the
intellectual titan in “the Weimar moment” – for just as Weimar was formative for
Morgenthau, Greenberg demonstrates that so too were new experiences (migration,
World War II, and the Vietnam War). It’s a refreshing conclusion.
Greenberg’s book points in many directions, and summarizes huge bodies of literature. It
sheds light on the story of Germany’s democratization; on the practices and ideologies of
US postwar foreign policy; and on the sources of the strength of the Western Cold War
alliance system.
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Overall, The Weimar Century suffers only two minor flaws. At times, the book appears to
presume an overly tidy and linear connection between thought and action. But as
Greenberg himself admits, it is dicey to claim that what we do is the direct actuation of
what we think –that is, that actions necessarily emerge from theoretical and ideological
commitments. And the temptation to see action as “ideology with teeth” becomes even
more implausible when we turn our attention to foreign policy-making and state-building
– paradigm examples of messy, complex, and collective, processes that eschew singleauthorship models.
The other minor flaw of The Weimar Century is this: the book, perhaps predictably,
overstates the influence of its five protagonists, and implies that all were equally
important. The one man, one chapter, approach is conducive to this reading, but
Greenberg also appears at least partially wedded to a mode of historical explanation that
privileges individual agency and the quest for real-world, easy-to-spot, influence and
power (in place, for instance, of a framework that emphasizes collective action, structural
forces, and the intrinsic significance of ideas). Greenberg is far too sophisticated a
historian to make the case that understanding these five figures will enable us to (fully)
understand who rebuilt Germany, undergirded democracy promotion, and “provided the
intellectual framework [for the] new alignment with the Western bloc.” Sure, these were
important players. But did they act alone? Hardly. And can we chart their actual influence
on postwar Germany or U.S. foreign policy in a convincing, quantifiable, manner?
Probably not – and if we listen to the recommendations of certain prominent intellectual
historians, the question of “cultural influence” is probably not the most answerable (or
productive) question anyway.
Happily, and to its vast credit, The Weimar Century does not ultimately hinge on the
intractable question of individual influence. Its contributions are considerably more farreaching. In brief, The Weimar Century represents a fantastic and far-reaching
provocation, as most great books do. It challenges us to rethink American foreign policy
in the early postwar years as multi-directional and well-nigh incoherent; the outcome and
unlikely synthesis of a variety of antitheses. On Greenberg’s read, American foreign
policy emerged from the union of native and foreign-born expertise. But even the phrase
“foreign-born expertise” underrepresents the muddle of postwar planning teams: after
World War II, democracy promotion was the product of a range of vastly divergent
conceptions of the good society. Thus, The Weimar Century makes the powerful case that
democracy is a vast ocean – and that one person’s democracy might look like another’s
dictatorship. This finding has broad implications not only for the study of democratic
theory, but also as we continue to debate the validity of the end of history paradigm, and
listen to the U.S. administration continuing to make cautious overtures to the project of
democracy promotion abroad. Is it really so easy to sing the praises of democracy as an
unquestioned, and unquestionable, good? Following Udi Greenberg’s lead, we might
reserve the right to ask a few follow-up questions rather than rush into a quick yes or no
answer. For as The Weimar Century demonstrates so well, democracy in the abstract is a
severely under-determined concept, while democracy promotion in-the-flesh has been a
many-headed hydra. And some of the monster’s heads – we might add – have done and
said rather distasteful things in our not-so-distant past.
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GIULIANA CHAMEDES is an Assistant Professor of European International History at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She spends her time thinking about the history of
trans-Atlantic conservatism, the Vatican, and the fate of democracy in twentieth-century
Europe.
https://history.wisc.edu/faculty_gc.htm
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