| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, editors. The American Century in Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. vii, 286. $35.00.
The fourteen chapters in this volume edited by R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna represent papers presented at a conference sponsored by Cornell University and the University of Turin in the year 2000. Some of the chapters were revised after September 11, 2001. Although the geographic focus of this anthology is America and Europe, in fact some of the chapters feature only America. And if many contributors attempt to provide a century-long survey of their topic, some treat only a few decades.	1
What provides the inspiration and coherence to this volume is the notion of an "American Century" introduced by Henry Luce in his celebrated Life magazine article of 1941. The theme of the American Century works best for the first two groups of chapters devoted to the United States in international affairs and to American culture. It fades in the final chapters that discuss "social responses" to America.	2
Alan Brinkley opens the volume with a rather critical chapter on the emergence of the concept of an American Century in the 1940s. Brinkley presents Luce, the Freedom Train, and the vogue of American Studies programs as representative of a generation that sought to define the American character and promote American values to the world. These efforts, according to Brinkley, ignored many of the nation's unflattering aspects and unwittingly reinforced Americans' "insular self-regard" (p. 20).	3
The fundamentals of the American Century's international vision are analyzed by Frederico Romero. He suggests reading the twentieth century backward to Woodrow Wilson, who launched America on a global crusade toward democracy, free trade, and independent self-government. Romero observes that Wilson's aim of making "the world safe for democracy" assumed promoting global interdependence with its attendant advantages, tensions, and instabilities. Wilson's views were then turned into operational practice by Franklin D. Roosevelt. U.S. national security thereafter depended on creating a world in which free markets and democracies could flourish. But, Romero reminds us, there is a unipolar aspect to this multilateral vision. Its success depends on U.S. power. Even Wilson recognized this logic, as did successors like Lyndon B. Johnson, who made the credibility of American resolve and might essential to the nation's international strategy. Romero also explains that this vision was not simply the creation of zealots like Luce but resulted from an interactive process. Europe's self-destruction, Soviet expansionism, and postcolonial liberation movements, among other developments, invited, even forced, this assertive role on the U.S.	4
Detlef Junker, like Romero, makes Europe central to America's new internationalism. What drew the U.S. across the Atlantic, according to Junker, was the need to contain German ambition and power in two world wars and then to control, defend, and integrate Germany in the Western alliance. He argues that a unified, peaceful, and integrated Germany ranks among the great achievements of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. But Junker has reservations. He, like other contributors to this volume, is uneasy about the crusading character of American policy. This sense of a special national mission converted rivalries into contests between good and evil, and, for example, made the German Empire of Wilhelm II into the "evil empire."	. . .

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