Lateinamerika Als Konfliktherd Der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Beziehungen 1890-1903 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 153 Lateinamerika Als Konfliktherd Der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Beziehungen 1890-1903. By Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985. l,196pp. 298DM/Cloth. Reviewed by Nancy Mitchell, Ph.D. Candidate, SAIS. It was the beginning of the twentieth century. The German Navy had drawn up plans to wage war against the United States. Although it had toyed with the idea of a direct assault on New York or Cape Cod, it favored the establishment first of a base in the Caribbean from which it would lure the U.S. fleet to its Waterloo. Predicting this strategy, the U.S. Navy's General Board was alarmed by any German activity in the Caribbean. Reports surfaced that the Germans were conspiring to buy the Danish West Indies (soon to become the U.S. Virgin Islands), that they were on the verge of prying the island of Margarita from the Venezuelans, and that they had sinister designs on Haiti. Therefore, the U.S. Navy devised detailed plans to counter a German attack in the Caribbean, plans that dovetailed with the German plans with eerie precision. How serious was the threat of war between the United States and Germany? The question has been muted by hindsight, muffled by the Great War. All is overshadowed by the trenches. And yet, it is important to resist the magnet of 1914—not simply for historical accuracy, but also to understand the decisions American and German policy makers faced and the choices they made. Echoes of the distrust that was generated at the turn of the century between Washington and Berlin over conflicts of interest in Latin America reverberate through, for example, the naval building programs of both nations, the American interventions in Haiti (1915) and the Dominican Republic (1916) and U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies (1916); the echoes color the war itself. Few historians have looked at German policy in Latin America at the turn of the century; those who have, have been unable to escape the deep shadow of Alfred Vagts.1 Vagts' research, completed in the 1930s, was not only dauntingly thorough, but it was also based on many documents that were subsequently lost. Vagts believed that Berlin had no grand design in the Western hemisphere and that the poor Germans were wrongfooted at every turn in their dealings with the United States, whether in Samoa, Venezuela, Haiti or elsewhere. A handful of historians since Vagts have focused on specific case studies in German-Latin American relations before the war. In general, however, historians ofGermany ofthe period give very short shrift to German policy in the region, while historians of U.S. policy in Latin America give considerable 1. Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten ¡? der Weltpolitik. 1890-1906 (New York, 1935). 154 SAISREVIEW significance to the German threat to the hemisphere.2 The disjunction is startling. Along comes Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase. Her Lateinamerika als Konfliktherd der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Beziehungen 1890-1903 confronts Vagts head on: she dramatically outresearches him, and she turns his thesis on its head. Fiebig-von Hase asserts that the Kaiser, the chancellor and important sectors of the German Navy pursued a strategy of expansion in Latin America. They were supported and urged on by German industrialists, exporters, PanGerman nationalists, the middle class and influential sectors of the press—virtually everyone, that is, except the Social Democrats. The key examples of this policy are the blockade of Venezuela in 1902-3, colonization projects in south Brazil, the pursuit of economic imperialism throughout Latin America, and the search for a naval base in the Caribbean. Germany alone among the European nations refused to recognize the Monroe Doctrine, that—as the Kölnische Zeitung decreed—"special manifestation ofAmerican arrogance."(p.375) Fiebig-von Hase shows clearly that the Germans resented U.S. pretensions in Latin America. And anger toward U.S. trade and tariff policy fueled the drive to teach the Americans a lesson in their backyard. This was no idle threat: the German Navy had the requisite muscle. From 1900 to 1905, it was stronger than the U.S. Navy by all standards of measurement: quantity, tonnage, and quality of ships; training, professionalism and...