German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 by Jens-Uwe Guettel (review)

In this significant new comparative study, Jens-Uwe Guettel explores the international political context of Germany’s ambitions for economic expansion in Europe and the colonial world. As other reviewers have noted, this book might be seen as a response to Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s perplexity that “a phenomenon as secondary … as the short-lived German colonial history can attract so much interest” (“Transnationale Geschichte—der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?” in Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, eds. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz [2006]). Extending his discussion beyond the debate about imperialism to the world of political ideas, Guettel’s stimulating conclusions challenge longestablished tropes about the variants of nineteenth-century liberalism in Germany and the United States. In fact, Guettel builds upon the new transnational scholarship on imperialism to make a compelling case for a broad reinterpretation of transatlantic liberalism. Most important among his revisionist conclusions is his insistence that a benign view of German liberalism, one that stressed its affinity to the constitutionalism and political rights aspirations of the Enlightenment, is both flawed and unhistorical. Guettel suggests that the notion of a normative, benign, “true” liberalism that was “neither racist nor expansionist” in nature was an ideological necessity, a product of the Cold War need to demonstrate that “the Western democracies were (and had to be) the polar sociopolitical opposite to Nazi Germany” (35).

Of particular interest to political historians is Guettel’s insistence that such ideological considerations, expressed in pure form by Hannah Arendt’s seminal work from 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism, underlay and shaped the Sonderweg argument. According to that view, imperialism in the Kaiserreich was a type of “social imperialism,” intended to “tame” liberals by distracting them from their historical mission of achieving constitutional reforms and dismantling Bismarck’s repackaging of the Prussian reaction. According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s s first iteration of the Sonderweg, imperialism was simply one more example of Otto von Bismarck’s cynical arcana imperii.

In place of a “social imperialism” shaped by the Primat der Innenpolitik, Guettel makes a compelling argument for a new paradigm: “imperial liberalism.” He thus joins scholars like Matthew Fitzpatrick, Andrew Zimmermann, Shelley Baranowski, Bradley Naranch, and others in exploring the transatlantic and decidedly liberal origins of the German imperial imaginary. While he acknowledges German admiration for the British Empire, Guettel makes a convincing case that American expansion exerted a more profound attraction for German liberals. The dramatis personae cited for this transatlantic intellectual exchange include Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Jefferson, prominent historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, and liberal imperialists such as Frederick Ratzel, Friedrich Naumann, and Max Weber.

For German liberals, the narrative of American westward expansion offered an almost unbroken record of success. Above all, the example of the United States provided a narrative of “vanishing” indigenous peoples whose displacement (or extinction) could be understood as an inevitable, if regrettable, process of history independent of any government policy. In any case, the American paradigm of colonial conquest and expansion could be seen as a “laissez-faire” form of imperialism built to last precisely because it reflected a broadly accepted view of racial hierarchy within civil society. The American paradigm thus assumed that the removal of indigenous peoples was both a natural product of and a precondition for economic and social progress. Invoking Woodrow Wilson, Guettel insists that the liberal concern for ensuring and defending racial hierarchies proves that the racial discourse on both sides of the Atlantic was not limited to “backward or chauvinist circles” (130).

At its best—and Guettel’s insightful and well-argued book is a prime example—transnational history can offer radical new perspectives and reveal the flaws of grand historical narratives. One of the book’s main revisionist arguments addresses the question of expansionist continuities in German history. Guettel makes a convincing case that the period of a German “imperial liberalism,” influenced...