Book Review

In introducing the thirteen essays that make up this volume, professor Knud Krakau of the Freie Universität Berlin ventures that the United States might offer "some kind of alternative model" to the "resurgent demon nationalism" that he identifies as Europe's primary threat to a post-Cold War order. The assorted pieces that follow do not provide an American model that might set the rest of the world on the right path. Nevertheless, they do show how historians, both within and beyond the borders of the United States, are analyzing the nationalist ideologies, practices, and policies of the most powerful country in the late twentieth century and placing them in historical perspective.	1
Two writers from the United States, Liah Greenfeld and Tony Smith, come closest to suggesting what might be hopeful about an American nation that both consider, in sweeping essays that recapitulate book-length efforts, to be liberal to its very core. Greenfeld begins by abridging her account of the "ideal" American nation that she contrasted with four European countries in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992). Americans' fierce commitment to surpassing the English as advocates of freedom, she argues, predates the founding of the United States as an independent country. The provocative essays by Ralph Bauer and Robert von Friedeburg that follow hers show more specifically how this might be so by turning to Indian-white relations and political theory, respectively, prior to the American Revolution. Tracing issues of American identity to the colonial (and, specifically, to the New England) experience is perhaps more traditional than Greenfeld's contention that there was no "concrete geopolitical referent of the American national loyalty" until the Union attained victory over both secession and slavery in 1865. Those who want more detail on such an intriguing suggestion will probably want to turn to its full explication in her book.	2
In the closing essay, Tony Smith displays similar enthusiasm for what he takes to be a normative American ideology in foreign affairs. There, he builds from the generalizations of his America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1994), sketching a "Wilsonian" framework within which, by his account, the United States has used its diplomatic might idealistically from World War I through the Reagan administration. The exercise of power in the international realm has shaped American identity, he convincingly affirms, though he might have said more about the contradictory domestic repercussions of global involvement. Herbert Dittgen not only proposes one model of how this interplay works, his discussion of immigration reform of the 1990s offers one of the most negative assessments of American cultural nationalism included in the volume.	3
The remaining eight essays showcase more recent scholarship, most produced by German students who have concentrated their energies, often in doctoral projects, on narrower aspects of American life. The essays are helpfully grouped by either topic or chronology, even though all survey the period between 1890 and the 1960s, a striking pattern given the emphasis that Greenfeld and, more recently, David Waldstreicher and Cecilia O'Leary, have placed on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the formative years of American patriotic practices and norms.	. . .