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• The Birth of Imperial Race Medicine

  Eszter Ureczky

  Views:

  94

  Book review:

  Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. 324 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-41830-0. Pbk. £29.99.

• The Crisis of the American Sense of Mission at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  Éva Eszter Szabó

  Views:

  117

  The sense of mission is an integral part of the national spirit. Therefore, questioning its validity can lead to the destabilization of a nation’s fundamental values and a major crisis in its self-image. This type of crisis accompanied the transformation of the American sense of mission at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arose from the clash between the principles of traditional continental expansionism and new imperialist aspirations. In the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War, the United States found itself definitively enmeshed in the global arena of great power politics. The control of overseas possessions not meant for statehood in the Union turned the federal republic into an empire in all but in its name. The crisis of the sense of mission fed on the inherent tension between liberal democratic traditions and the attempt made at imperial governance. As research into the Congressional Records will indicate, in the congressional debate developing between traditional and new ideas of expansionism, a consensus emerged that the questions relating to the status of the new overseas territories were the most significant the American people had faced during the nineteenth century, for these questions touched upon the roots of the nation’s consciousness. With view to the significance of this historical moment, this essay examines the forces at work both for and against the transformation of the American sense of mission at a time when Congress still constituted a powerful check on the executive in the field of foreign policy. (ÉESZ)

• “Literature on the Edge”: Austro-Modernism of the Long War

  Enikő Bollobás

  Views:

  58

  Book review:

  Perloff, Marjorie. Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 204 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05442-1. Hb. $23.98.

• The 1990s and the Remaking of the Neoconservative Foreign Policy Paradigm

  Rasha Awale

  Views:

  199

  This essay explains how neoconservative foreign policy doctrine evolved from strenuously seeking to defeat the communist enemy during the Cold War to thoroughly seeking to preserve America’s newfound “unipolar moment” by constructing new enemies to defeat. It analyzes the generational transition within the neoconservative movement from the 1970s to the 1990s and its empire-building project in the post-Cold War era. Based on neoconservative publications and contributions to magazines such as Commentary, The National Interest, and Weekly Standard as well as the publications, reports, and statements of neoconservative think tanks (The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, The Committee on the Present Danger, American Enterprise Institute, The Project for New American Century, among others), the essay argues that the themes associated with the neoconservatives after 9/11—such as militarism, preemptive war, regime change, democratization, and unilateralism—had been rooted in the neoconservative discourse since the 1970s. It also shows that the post-9/11 neoconservative foreign policy approach was the product of neoconservative narratives during the Cold War era and after the fall of communism. (RA)