Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-43695-4
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 40, 236 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 487 g

Reihe: Studies in Global Social History

The civilizing mission associated with nineteenth-century colonialism became harder to justify after the First World War. In an increasingly anti-imperialist culture, elites reformulated schemes for the “improvement” of “inferior” societies. Nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy were used to justify outside interventions and the top-down transformation of non-western, international or even domestic societies.

The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how these justifications influenced Polish nation building, Scandinavian disarmament proposals and technocratic social policies in the interwar years. Treatment of the second half of the century covers the changing cultural context of European humanitarianism, as well as the influence of American social science on US foreign policy, more particularly democracy promotion.

Contributors are: Boris Barth, Rolf Hobson, Jürgen Osterhammel, Frank Ninkovich, Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Esther Moeller, and Jost Dülffer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Barth, Boris

Hobson, Rolf

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Notes on Contributors

Civilizing Missions from the 19th to the 21st Centuries, or from Uplifting to Democratization

Boris Barth and Rolf Hobson

The Cultural Transformation of America’s Civilizing Mission in the Twentieth Century

Frank Ninkovich

Nation-Building, Concepts of Space and Civilizing Mission in the Early Second Republic of Poland

Bianka Pietrow-Ennker

Ambiguities of the Domestic Civilizing Mission: Technocratic Elites and Social Engineering in Interwar Europe

Boris Barth

Lilliputians for Peace: Scandinavian Internationalism and International Disarmament c. 1880–1940

Karen Gram-Skjoldager

Questioning the Civilizing Mission: Humanitarianism and the Arab World in the 20th Century

Esther Moeller

The Democratic Peace Controversy in Retrospect as a “Civilizing Mission”? a Theory Revisited

Jost Dülffer

American Nationalism and Regime Change: How the Neocons Tried to Speed Up the Inevitable

Rolf Hobson

Epilogue: from Civilizing Missions to the Defence of Civility

Jürgen Osterhammel

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Prof. Dr. Boris Barth is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Charles University, Prague. He has published monographs and many articles on financial imperialism, the stab-in-the-back legend, genocide, and on the crisis of the European democracies in the inter-war years.

Rolf Hobson is Professor of History at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and the University of Bergen. He has published studies of modern European political history, war and society and German military history.