Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century: (40 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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.