Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.     

War Dead and the Restoration of Military Cemeteries in Eastern Europe

This article examines the rebuilding of World War II cemeteries and mass graves. It compares the cult of the war dead in Germany, Romania and Russia and analyses examples of restorations of war cemeteries by these countries in Moldova. This reveals how the former war allies and adversaries now collaborate, as well as their attempts to overcome the political and ideological divides of recent decades through the reburial and remembrance of the war dead. The search for the war dead occurred at a time when each of these countries was “coming to terms” with its recent totalitarian past and, at the same time, was looking for recognition in a new international context. The convergence of the private and the political in the remembrance of the dead led at times to reconciliatory discourses and at others to a restatement of the “sacredness” of the past or of exclusivist national ideals.     

Reimagined communities: Union veterans and the reconstruction of American nationalism

ABSTRACT. American commemoration of the Union dead and the role this played in the development of post‐war American nationalism is a topic of growing interest. Those who survived, however, are too often left out of the discussion: unsettling reminders of the sectional conflict at the time, the veterans' role in the reconstruction of American nationalism was rather more ambiguous than historians have made it seem. To trace the lineaments of American national identity after the Civil War requires some assessment of the ways in which the veteran was incorporated into or detached from the home front during the war itself and, later, from post‐war society. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to the ambiguity surrounding the veteran, the dead could, in many ways, be more easily accommodated by the new nationalist discourse emerging from the war. Positioning the veteran at the centre of the debate on war and nationalism, indeed, challenges the very concept of an imagined community emerging from or through civil conflict.     

Austro–Hungarian refugee soldiers in China

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the problem of the Austro–Hungarian prisoners of war in World War I who were captured by the Russian Army and who then escaped from Siberian detention camps and ultimately found asylum in China. The Tianjin German Relief Fund (Tientsin Hilfsaktion) was a leading nongovernmental charitable organization that provided aid for these captives and refugees. It operated successfully in China until that country’s decision to join the war on the side of the Allied Powers forced the organization to close. A local network of German and Austro–Hungarian civilian middlemen also helped the refugee soldiers passing through, and the Chinese authorities set up camps in Manchuria for these soldiers, where they were interned until their repatriation after the war. This paper also introduces some individual cases to show how certain Austro–Hungarian POWs attempted to deal with their life in China. The author argues that China had a role and agency in World War I, that the refugee soldier question was the last episode of the nineteenth-century-style Concert of Europe, and that the POWs had a role and agency in shaping their own destinies.     

Military and Maritime Evidence of Pandemic Influenza in Canada during the Summer of 1918

Analysis of archival correspondence, the daily logs of troopships transporting soldiers to Europe and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database for soldier deaths from pneumonia and influenza across Canada indicate that influenza was more common during the summer of 1918 than previously thought. Evidence of pandemic influenza so close to the outbreak of the fall wave calls into question the storyline of a mutated virus causing the emergence of the fall wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic. This highlights the significance of other host, social and environmental circumstances, many related to the First world war, that may have contributed to the severity and timing of pandemic waves in Canada.     

‘Shirkers’, ‘Scrimjacks’ and ‘Scrimshanks’?: British Civilian Masculinity and Reserved Occupations, 1914–45

In both World Wars, the state retained men with essential skills on the home front. Despite needing to mobilise industry and labour in order to supply the military and to maintain key services such as healthcare and food provision, those men who remained in civilian roles were susceptible to accusations of cowardice and being derided as shirkers evading their patriotic duty. While the manliness of the ‘soldier hero’ was secure, the civilian man was susceptible to having his masculinity called into question. This article utilises a range of sources including parliamentary debates, cartoons, Mass Observation records, written testimony and oral histories to examine the policies that were implemented affecting civilian male workers deployed in essential jobs in both wars and the perceptions of men to their reserved status. While there were haphazard attempts to raise an ‘industrial army’ in the First World War, by 1939, a more systematic approach had been implemented with a Schedule of Reserved Occupations drawn up retaining key men in their work. While men on the Second World War home front were potentially diminished by the ‘soldier hero’ and the female war worker, they defined and defended their contributions to the national war effort in written and oral sources in gendered terms, making reference to job security, valued skills, significant earning power, the auxiliary position of female dilutees, positive cultural representations and the added dangers from aerial bombing.     

Citizens and soldiers: party competition and the debate in Pennsylvania over permitting soldiers to vote, 1861–64

Political historians of the Civil War era frequently downplay the role of the Democratic Party. Studies of the Democrats in wartime often describe the loyal opposition as able to do little more than react to the policies of the Republicans in power. This has been particularly true regarding the debate over whether or not soldiers should be allowed to vote. Most historians assume that Republicans supported permitting soldiers to vote because it was the patriotic, ‘right’ thing to do, and that Democrats then opposed soldier voting because soldier suffrage bills were Republican war measures and because the Democrats believed the Union army would vote overwhelmingly Republican. In point of fact, the Democrats developed their arguments against soldier voting before the Republicans developed their position in favor of it. Moreover, the Democratic position was rooted in deeply held beliefs, dating back to seventeenth‐century England. Democrats opposed permitting soldiers to vote because they believed soldier voting would destroy the republican liberty of American citizens.     

Gothic memory and forgetfulness in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love and ‘The Demon Lover’

Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1954) and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) share an uncustomary usage of Gothic conventions: the Anglo-Irish writer invests the Gothic genre with new meaning for the war-torn Irish and the post-World Wars generation by skewing Gothic conventions, reflecting a new Gothic for a new age – one that has seen the effects of two catastrophic wars and not only dead soldiers, but dead-in-life survivors. In A World of Love, Bowen uses not a ghost that haunts the attic, but a nearly forgotten dead World War I soldier; not a male power of place and a fleeing female, but a female power of place and a displaced male; and not a lonely, menacing castle, but a dilapidated farm. In both the novel and the short story, the dead-in-life survivors must remember in order to successfully exorcise the war and the dead soldiers of war, thereby revitalizing themselves. Those who cannot remember are doomed to the past. This article examines the twist on the Gothic novel and its statement about the possibly disastrous effects of forgetting and of remembering incorrectly – anxieties shared by other twentieth-century Irish writers in terms of their eroding cultural identity and past.     

论日欧首脑外交

首脑外交是第二次世界大战以来国家间交往的一种频繁使用的外交形式,随着国际格局多极化与世界经济全球化的发展,首脑外交也日益突显出其独特作用,并且为当今大多数国家的政治首脑所接受,冷战约束后,首脑外交更加趋向于公开化,制度化,全球化,在当今国际新秩序的构建过程中,资本主义世界的铁三角同盟（日美欧战略三角）也面临着战略性的结构调整,向着全球性战略伙伴关系发展,日本与欧盟及其成员国的关键日益密切,日欧间首脑的频繁互访无疑发挥了重大的作用。     

国际合作抑或金融监管——以胡佛与斯特朗对欧洲经济重建分歧为中心

作为1920年代美国经济外交的重要制订者和参与者,胡佛和斯特朗都支持美欧经济合作,并鼓励美国民间私人力量参与一战后欧洲的重建,但面对美国对外贷款及其带来的国内投机,二人的分歧也日益突出。胡佛和斯特朗之间分歧反映了他们在欧洲重建方面不同的利益诉求,其背后则是美国不同利益集团的矛盾和冲突。而这种分歧和冲突导致了美国国内的对外经济决策权力分散和碎化,缺乏有力的决策核心,使美国的对欧政策缺乏一致性和连续性,并自相矛盾。     

Narrating Difference and Defining the Nation in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 'Western' Europe

This article examines the influence of Orientalist representations of Eastern Europe on definitions and theories of the nation, and their impact on normative interpretations of the nature of nations and national identity in Western Europe. It focuses on the history of the development of these normative interpretations in the decades leading up to and including the First World War. During this period European progressives--whether intellectuals, social scientists or politicians--residing in Britain and France, definitively 'Western European' states, were keen to discuss the future application of the principle of nationality, its necessity and its obstacles. With the outbreak of war in 1914, such progressive interest in the status of nations and national identities helped shape the anticipated democratic 'new world order' and the mental map of Eastern and Western Europe. I argue that their attempts to explain and represent the nature and significance of nationhood and national identity iterated Orientalist versions of Eastern Europe, and, at the same time, their definitions and theorisations of nations were replete with anomalies that defy any simply categorisation of the nature of Western Europe or the status of its nations.     

Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada

Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans‐, supra‐, or sub‐national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian welfarism and rights‐based citizenship. Scholars have documented the emergence of targeted, risk‐based, and workfarist governmentalities and political economies at various spatial scales, and have even described emergent forms of citizenship as "post‐national". And yet, in many countries we are concurrently confronted with massive symbolic and fiscal reinvestment in national militaries, particularly in the welfare of personnel. Given this, and the longstanding relationships between the nation‐state and military service, it is curious that the soldier has hardly figured in recent discussions about citizenship. This paper provides a genealogy of the soldier‐citizen in Canada, from iconic national worker‐citizen in the post‐World War II period to its recent anxious positioning at the intersection of "domestic", entrepreneurial, workfarist citizenship, and the widespread re‐emergence of militarism and national security. It demonstrates that the military citizen has at key times been a template for innovations in social forms of national government, and argues that the soldier has been a crucial figure in their re‐engineering in recent years. Situated amidst transformations in work and worker‐citizenship, and at the intersections of political struggles in both the domestic and international spheres, the soldier provides a unique lens on questions of the national and the social. Through an engagement with the labour of social citizenship, and the war work that initiated many of its governing techniques, the military citizen emerges as a critical figure in the contemporary neoliberal nation.     

Seeking labour's aristocracy? The ‘Westphalian incident’ and Polish nationality policy in the immediate aftermath of war*

ABSTRACT. In the immediate aftermath of World War II the Polish state placed a high value on national homogeneity. The Polish Committee of National Liberation signed population exchange agreements with its socialist neighbours in September 1944 and expelled the German population who remained within the new Polish borders. Far less frequently discussed are the Polish state's efforts to persuade ‘Poles’ in Western Europe to move to Poland. This paper analyses how Polish policy towards ‘Westphalian Poles’ and the British reaction to Polish claims offer insight into both Polish and British nationality and citizenship policy in the immediate post‐war period. I argue that the quality of potential labour played an important role in both British and Polish thinking. The paper also contends that the ‘Westphalian incident’ gives useful insights into the emergence of the Cold War.     

What is ‘needed’ to keep remembering? War‐specific communication,parental exemplar behaviour and participation in national commemorations

Given the abundance of literature on collective memory practices, there is relatively little empirical research on the socialization processes explaining the transmission of such practices. This article examines to what extent war‐specific communication and parental exemplar behaviour function as a link between the collected memories of individuals and society's collective memory. Utilizing data from an online survey conducted in 2014, we focus on participation in the activities organized on Remembrance Day and Liberation Day in the Netherlands in remembrance of the Second World War. We distinguish between public and private practices. Our findings highlight that different forms of socialization substitute for one another. Whereas communication with non‐relatives is particularly relevant for those communicating less frequently with parents about past war experiences, parental exemplar behaviour, such as participating in the two‐minute silence on Remembrance Day, plays a bigger role amongst those with lower levels of communication with either relatives or non‐relatives.     

South African War (1899–1902) Memorials in Britain: A Case Study of Memorialization in London and Kent

Abstract

Mass public commemoration of war dead is often held to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, with its genesis in the Great War. This article argues for a pre-history occasioned by commemoration of the South African War (1899–1902) that built on shifts in the form and function of war memorials that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century.     

On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland

What role does national identity play after civil war? Is reconstruction possible on the basis of an existing identity, or does a new identity have to be found? Much depends on whether narratives of conflict are unifying. I use the tools of cultural sociology to explain why the Finnish Civil War of 1918 has become a unifying ‘cultural trauma’ for the Finns, whereas the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 never became the dominant referent in Irish national identity. The difference is explained by the greater shock civil war posed to Finnish national identity.     

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this articles. International Relations theory Sovereignty: evolution of an idea. By Robert Jackson. International legitimacy and world society. By Ian Clark. Human rights and ethics American torture: from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and beyond. By Michael Otterman. International law and organization Law, war and crime: war crimes trials and the reinvention of international law. By Gerry Simpson. Foreign policy The Israel lobby and US foreign policy. By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Koizumi diplomacy: Japan's Kantei approach to foreign and defense affairs. By Tomohito Shinoda. Conflict, security and armed forces Nuclear logics: contrasting paths in East Asia and the Middle East. By Etel Solingen. Who should keep the peace? Providing security for twenty‐first‐century peace operations. By William J. Durch and Tobias C. Berkman. Terrorism and global disorder: political violence in the contemporary world. By Adrian Guelke. Endless war? Hidden functions of the ‘war on terror’. By David Keen. After mass crime: rebuilding states and communities. Edited by Béatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman and Albrecht Schnabel. The looming tower: Al‐Qaeda's road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright. Chechnya: from nationalism to jihad. By James Hughes. Politics, democracy and social affairs The myth of the rational voter: why democracies choose bad policies. By Bryan Caplan. All politics is global: explaining international regulatory regimes. By Daniel Drezner. The international politics of space. By Michael Sheehan. After Hitler: recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995. By Konrad H. Jarausch. Political economy, economics and development Making aid work. By Abhijit V. Banerjee. Business power in global governance. By Doris Fuchs. Rational extremism: the political economy of radicalism. By Ronald Wintrobe. Ethnicity and cultural politics Changing white attitudes toward black political leadership. By Zoltan L. Hajnal. Uncouth nation: why Europe dislikes America. By Andrei S. Markovits. History The Cold War and after: capitalism, revolution, and superpower politics. By Richard Saull. Tales from Spandau: Nazi criminals and the Cold War. By Norman J. W. Goda. Iraq and the lessons of Vietnam: or how not to learn from the past. Edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young. Spy satellites and other intelligence technologies that changed history. By Thomas Graham Jr and Keith A. Hansen. Europe Democracy in Europe: The EU and national polities. By Vivien A. Schmidt. Russia and Eurasia Getting Russia right. By Dmitri V. Trenin. Middle East and North Africa The Islamic Republic and the world: global dimensions of the Iranian revolution. By Maryam Panah. Inside Lebanon: a journey to a shattered land with Noam and Carol Chomsky. Edited by Assaf Khoury. Sub‐Saharan Africa US foreign policy and the Horn of Africa. By Peter Woodward. Asia and Pacifc Military inc: inside Pakistan's military economy. By Ayesha Siddiqa. The deadly embrace: religion, politics and violence in India and Pakistan 1947‐2002. Edited by Ian Talbot. Islam, oil and geopolitics: Central Asia after September 11. Edited by Elizabeth Van Wie Davis and Rouben Azizian. North America The crisis of American foreign policy: the effects of a divided America. By Howard J. Wiarda, with the assistance of Esther M. Skelley. The J curve: a new way to understand why nations rise and fall. By Ian Bremmer. Latin America and Caribbean The Pinochet regime. By Carlos Huneeus.     

The ‘return to Europe’: intellectual debates on the global place of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period

In the East Central European context, the phrase ‘return to Europe’ has been used mainly in the period after 1989, referring to political, economic and social changes as well as mental relocations towards a ‘Western’ system. However, debates about the national whereabouts on a mental map – whether one was part of Eastern, Central or Western Europe – also abounded in the years following the founding of the nation-states after the First World War. Concentrating on Czech discourses on the national whereabouts both in a European and a global perspective in the years preceding and following the great upheaval of 1918, this article traces the changing Czech national identity, ranging from a self-perception as a ‘small nation’ in the Habsburg Empire to a European power with colonial ambitions after the foundation of the Czechoslovak republic, and finally to the acknowledgement in the 1930s that these ambitions could not be met. The study is based on sources ranging from Czech travelogues mainly to Africa and Asia, but also South America, to economic writings and colonial brochures, which offer a broad range of debates on the role and location of both the Czech nation and the Czechoslovak state both in Europe and the world.     

Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

The collapse of British foreign policy

British foreign policy has tried to balance between the United States and continental Europe for the past half-century, with an unambiguous commitment to a special relationship with Washington and an ambiguous commitment to European integration. New Labour has followed its predecessors in this, claiming that Britain can act as a bridge between America and Europe, or as a pivot around which transatlantic relations turn. In the wake of the Iraq war, deepened scepticism in Washington about whether close European cooperation is in America's interest, and scepticism across continental Europe that Britain can or should act as a privileged interlocuteur, have undermined both ends of the bridge on which British foreign policy claims to rest. The end of US commitment to Atlanticism, together with post-Cold War divergence between US and European interests and values, should have led to a shift in British priorities towards closer cooperation with other major European states and-from that shared perspective-an attempt to reconstruct a more balanced transatlantic relationship. The EU presents a sadly weak framework for such a strategy; but Britain's domestic debate, in which this government-like its predecessors-has allowed a Eurosceptic press to shape the language of foreign policy, has made it more difficult for any government to change direction. Recent government speeches on foreign policy, however, suggest that ministers still cling to the illusion that Britain has a 'unique' position between Europe and the United States.