Abstract
The cultural effects of waging war, the absence or presence of perceived providential favor for the nation, and the influence of religiosity, were pivotal in explaining US and EU European security cultures and how they developed during the Cold War. Emerging from the Second World War, the contrast between the US and West European experiences could not have been greater. Woodrow Wilson believed that battling evil was best achieved “from the abodes of righteousness,” and US victory in WWII appeared to many to confirm it.1 Western Europe lay in ruins, having lost more civilians than military personnel to war and its effects, a fact that distinguished the Second World War experience from that of the First, and clearly set apart the European from the American case. In the First World War, a war fought overwhelmingly on the battlefield, millions perished in Europe, but most of them were military personnel. In the Second World War, waged from the air as well as on land, civilian deaths and infrastructure damage reached catastrophic proportions, especially as a result of strategic bombing and the targeting of civilian centers alongside military targets. For example, by the end of the war, the Allies had dropped about 1.3 million tons of bombs on Germany. Over 40 percent of the urban areas of Germany’s 70 largest cities were destroyed as a consequence of bombing, and an estimated 305,000 civilians were killed.2 In Hamburg alone, Allied firebombing destroyed about 75 percent of the city, and some 45 thousand city dwellers perished. The numbers of people left homeless by the war reached into the millions, with over two million displaced persons in Germany alone.3
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Notes
Woodrow Wilson, “Christ’s Army,” in Ronald J. Pestritto, ed., Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 71–72.
Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 254–255.
For a brief description of the destruction rained on Hamburg not only by mostly RAF, but also American bombers, see David Lippman, “Allied Aerial Destruction of Hamburg during World War II,” HistoryNet.Com, February 7, 2009.
For other discussions of the destructiveness of World War II in Europe, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008)
Sir Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989)
John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)
James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (New York: Mariner Books, 2008).
The consensus was forged at the elite and popular level. McLeod observes that throughout the 1950s, “The great majority of people living in Western countries were nominally Christian; the majority of the younger generation were still being socialized into membership of a Christian society; links between religious and secular elites were often close.” Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29.
Joschka Fischer, to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, September, 2004.
Garry Wills, Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America (New York: Penguin, 2007).
Craig Calhoun, “Cosmopolitan Europe and European Studies,” in Chris Rumsford, ed., SAGE Handbook of European Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009), chap. 35.
Dianne Kirby, Religion and the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 1.
Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 3.
William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), quotation on p. 1.
See discussion in Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), esp. chap. 23.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2007).
Dr. Uta Balbier, “God and Coca-Cola: Billy Graham in Germany,” Billy Graham Center Archives, speech delivered October 22, 2009.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 103.
Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted in Joseph Loconte, “Obama Contra Niebuhr,” The American, The journal of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI, January 14, 2010).
Richard H. Immerman, “Introduction,” in Richard H. Immerman, ed., John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 18.
Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1973), p. 49.
For an in-depth look at the anticommunist consensus among British Christian elites, and the intimate institutional connections J. F. Dulles maintained with them, see Philip M. Coupland, Britannia, Europa, and Christendom (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).
Scott M. Thomas, “Faith, History and Martin Wright: The Role of Religion in the Historical Sociology of the English School of International Relations,” International Affairs 77, no. 4 (October 2001): 905–929; quotation on p. 908.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); quotation on p. 30.
See Phillip W. Hildmann, ed., Vom christlichen Abendland zum christlichen Europa: Perspektiven eines religioes gepraegten Europabegriffs fuer das 21. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, 2009).
See also Maria Mitchell, “Materialism and Secularism,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 278–308
Robert G. Moeller, ed., West Germany Under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Mary Anne Perkins, Christendom and European Identity: The Legacy of a Grand Narrative since 1789 (Berlin: alter de Gruyter, 2004), p. 67.
Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); quotation on p. 122.
Klaus von Beyme, ed., Die Grossen Regirungserklaerungen der deutschen Bundeskanzler von Adenauer bis Schmidt (Munich: Hanser, 1979), p. 73. My translation.
Theodor Heuss, Reden an die Jugend (Tuebingen: Wunderlich, 1956), p. 32.
Ronald J. Granieri, The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 2003).
Hans-Peter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer Volume One: From the German Empire to the Federal Republic, 1876–1932, trans. Louise Willmot (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995); quotation on p. 200.
For an in-depth discussion of Adenauer’s relationship with and influence on the Abendlanders, see Vanessa Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland Zwischen Reichstradition und Westorietierung (1920–1970) (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschats Verlag, 2005), esp. pp. 153–155.
See discussion in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. 312.
Thomas Risse and Daniela Engelmann-Martin, “Identity Politics and European Integration: The Case of Germany,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Risse and Engelmann-Martin also argue that Adenauer was influenced by the union ideas of Coudenhove-Kalergi from his European Union.
See discussion by Eckart Conza, “Staatsraeson und nationale Interessen: Die ‘Atlantiker-Gaullisten’ Debatte in der westdeutsch Politik-und Gesellschaftsgeschichte der 1960 Jahre,” in Ursula Lehmkuhl, et al., Deutschland,Grossbritannien, Amerika (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003); quotation on p. 218.
Konrad Adenauer, quoted in Hans-Juergen Grabbe, “Konrad Adenauer, John Foster Dulles and West German-American Relations,” in Immerman, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, p. 111. The memoirs, Erinnerungen, were written in German and Grabbe translated pertinent passages into English. His translation of Abendland is the Occident; it is also Christendom as discussed throughout this study.
Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review 113 (June–July 2002): 3–28.
For an in-depth look at the movements of 1968 throughout Europe, see Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave, 2008).
Callum Brown, in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 29.
Leon Sloss, background interview, 1995, quoted in Mary N. Hampton, The Wilsonian Impulse: U.S. Foreign Policy, the Alliance, and German Unification (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), p. 112.
Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).
Edward Tabor Linenthal, “War and Sacrifice in the Nuclear Age,” in Ira Chernus and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 24–25.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (New York: Regan Books, 2004), p. 89.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in Michael Beschloss, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 321.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 14.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 135.
Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 1991), p. 247.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 30.
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).
See depictions of Thatcher’s attitudes in John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
John O’Sullivan, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006)
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: Perennial, 1995).
Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections (New York: Rizzoli Publishing House, 2005).
Peggy Noonan, “We Want God,” The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2006.
Natan Sharansky, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), p. 106.
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© 2013 Mary N. Hampton
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Hampton, M.N. (2013). Combating Communism “from the Abodes of Righteousness”. In: A Thorn in Transatlantic Relations. Palgrave Studies in Governance, Security, and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343277_4
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