American exceptionalism

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According to the German Americanist Sieglinde Lemke , the Statue of Liberty marks the missionary mandate as a natural extension of the self-image of the USA as an extraordinary nation.

The American exceptionalism ( english American Exceptionalism ) is a nationalist ideology that, based on the postulate United States a special position compared to all other nations are taking.

Historical theory

The study De la démocratie en Amérique (two volumes, Paris 1835/1840) by the politician and publicist Alexis de Tocqueville, which is still widely received today, is one of the “guarantee texts” of the idea of American Exceptionalism .

All subsystems of American society - such as the constitution , politics , economics, legal system, social system, religious system and the cross-societal value system ( ideology ) - can only be explained by USA-specific factors that result from the particular history of the country. The late settlement by European immigrants, their political, economic and religious self-liberation from colonialism ( American Revolution ), the status ( shared with France ) as a pioneer nation of modern, secular democracy, the socio-historical developments associated with slavery and its subsequent abolition, as well as the fact The fact that there has been no war on US soil since the civil war had such an impact on American society that a comparison with Western European societies using overarching, i.e. general, criteria and theories would have to remain sterile.

Political doctrine

Noam Chomsky points out that as early as 1630, John Winthrop, in his sermon Model of Christian Charity, used the Gospel phrase “ city ​​on the hill ” when he was designing the future of a new “God determined” nation. Winthrop was governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , which in 1629 shows an Indian in its seal who asked the English Puritans to "come over" to help, that is, to save his soul by converting to Christianity. Through the doctrine of the Manifest Destiny (“obvious determination”) of the 19th century, the sense of mission for Christianity , democracy and human rights according to American characteristics developed, which serve to justify unscrupulous imperialism .

The Americanist Frank Kelleter refers to the debates that took place after independence about how the universalist aspirations of the Americans could be reconciled with their particularist desire to become a nation . In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton formulated a solution that was directed against old Europe. This has long dominated all other continents:

“Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! "

“For too long facts have backed these arrogant claims of Europeans. It is our duty to restore the honor of the human race and to teach the presumptuous brother moderation. Unity will enable us to do so. Disagreement will add another sacrifice to his triumphs. Americans should despise being tools of European size! "

Exceptionalism was derived from the idea of ​​American example, which would teach other nations how the claim to national sovereignty understood under natural law coincides with enlightened universalism in a prime example of free self-government. It is the mission of the US to spread this example on earth. For Hamilton and the Founding Fathers, American exceptionalism was based on America's exemplar.

In 1898 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge senior called on people to support the Cuban struggle for independence ,

“Of the sympathies of the American people, generous, liberty-loving, I have no question. They are with the Cubans in their struggle for freedom. ... Let it once be understood that we mean to stop the horrible state of things in Cuba and it will be stopped. The great power of the United States, if it is once invoked and uplifted, is capable of greater things than that. "

- Henry Cabot Lodge

because the Cubans asked America with the words of the Great Seal: "Come over and help us!"

Even the extreme left of the United States used the term in the 1920s, but in a different sense. The leading American communist Jay Lovestone used it to justify the American communists' separate path because the American proletariat was not interested in revolution. Whereupon Stalin demanded in 1929 that this " heresy " be ended. In April 1930 the Communist Party USA declared at its party congress that the “economic crisis in the USA had blown over the house of cards of American exceptionalism”.

In a 1964 study, Hans Morgenthau developed the thesis that the United States had a “transcendent purpose” to ensure peace and freedom worldwide, since “the arena on which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become global.” He admitted that the historical facts were in contradiction to these ideals, but one should not be fooled by it, but should be careful not to confuse the misuse of reality with reality itself. Rather, reality is the unfinished mission that manifests itself “in the evidence of history as our history reflects it”.

In 1980 Richard J. Tofel conjured Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in the New York Times to defend this particular expression. In the next 20 years, Exceptionalism was used 457 times in the American media. Then usage skyrocketed: in the first decade to 2558 mentions and in the period from 2010 to February 2012 to 4172. In 2014, the neoconservative political advisor Robert Kagan calculated that the US had carried out 26 major interventions with ground forces outside the American hemisphere since 1898: on average every four and a half years, and since 1990 even every three years.

In the 21st century, American exceptionalism denotes the core political ideology of the United States. As Stephen Kinzer writes, it is also expressed in the fact that the USA “ are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God's work ” in the history of modern times who are convinced that they are doing God's work by bringing their political and economic system to others. ”) Because of its uniqueness, the USA are basically only bound by international agreements to the extent that this is useful to them.

Roger Cohen wrote in 2009 that "America was born from an idea and therefore has the task of spreading this idea". The inspiring idea of ​​the birth of the country as a city ​​on the hill is deeply rooted in the American soul and expresses itself in "the unmistakable spirit of American individualism and enterprise".

Dick Cheney , who in his time as Vice President of the United States to war in Iraq with brought about and torture justified as an interrogation method, published in 2015 together with his daughter Liz , a book in which she made the unique role played by the US in World War II , played an Duty to defend freedom all over the world and that America is “ the most powerful, good, and honorable nation in the history of mankind, the exceptional nation ” (German: “the most powerful, best and most honorable nation in the history of mankind, the Exceptional nation ").

criticism

Francis Fukuyama denies the claim of the USA to show everyone else the right path by means of power, on the one hand the legitimacy as belief in a vocation, but affirms the effectiveness of this practice. According to Noam Chomsky, the American sense of mission was nothing but an ideology from the very beginning, that is, when the North American continent was conquered, to cover up and justify unscrupulous and brutal imperialism.

The British journalist Godfrey Hodgson subjects American national mythology to a critical analysis in his book '' The Myth of American Exceptionalism ''. Starting with Reagan's widely acclaimed speech from 1974, in which he quoted in a historical falsifying manner from Winthrop's sermon, who at that time could not speak to Americans about the USA, but only about an English colony, which he praised English colonists as a model for others. Much of what Americans think about their history has been re-instrumentalized in a similar way. The USA is a big country, but much less extraordinary and more rooted in Europe than the Americans think. They are by no means exemplary in everything, but have striking deficits in many respects: health and education, crime and the penal system, social inequality and mobility, racial relations, international cooperation and human rights, one could perhaps say capitalism in general. And this national myth is dangerous: Americans' tendency to think of themselves as unique and superior "affects the way they behave toward the rest of the world over which they now have so much influence and power." After all, the idea of ​​American exceptionalism is particularly difficult to endure if it is shrilly linked with conservative convictions and, above all, neoconservative foreign policy.

The Australian historian Ian Tyrell sees the assumption of American exceptionalism as the inevitable paradox that it implies a comparison with supposedly non-exceptional nations, i.e. a scheme of normal development. This comparison is just as decidedly rejected by the representatives of American exceptionalism as any assumption of a scheme or a regularity of historical developments.

The German cognitive scientist Rainer Mausfeld declares every exceptionalist ideology to be a moral and intellectual pathology , since it offers a justification for disregarding international legal norms.

literature

  • Seymour Martin Lipset: American exceptionalism. A double-edged sword. Norton, New York 1997.
  • Deborah L. Madsen: American Exceptionalism. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 1998, ISBN 1-57806-108-3 .
  • Elisabeth Glaser, Hermann Wellenreuther (Eds.): Bridging the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism in Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 978-0-5210-2639-0 .
  • Daniel Deudney, Jeffrey Meiser: American exceptionalism. In: Michael Cox, Doug Stokes (Eds.): US Foreign Policy. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008. pp. 21-39.
  • Godfrey Hodgson: The Myth of American Exceptionalism. Yale University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-12570-2 .
  • American Political Thought 2012/1. American Exceptionalism: Is It Real, Is It Good. In: James W. Ceaser: The Origins and Character of American Exceptionalism. Pp. 1-25.
  • Terrence McCoy: How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism'. In: The Atlantic. March 2012 ( theatlantic.com ).
  • Natsu Taylor Saito: Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law. NYU Press, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-8147-9836-2 .
  • Hilde Eliassen Restad: American Exceptionalism. An idea that made a nation and remade the world. London, New York: Routledge. 2015.
  • Lukas D. Herr: A Myth that Matters: American Exceptionalism and the Attempt to Conceptualize the Ideational Liberal Foreign Policy Theory. In: Kaiserslautern occasional papers in political science. (KOPS) No. 6, Political Science of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, June 2016 ISSN  1861-7018 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Winfried Fluck , Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe: Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies . University Press of New England, 2011, ISBN 978-1-61168-190-1 , pp. 207 ( books.google.com - excerpt).
  2. ^ Winfried Fluck, American Exceptionalism. A key to American self-image . In: Christian Lammert , Markus B. Siewert, Boris Vormann (eds.), Handbuch Politik USA . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-02641-7 , pp. 15–28, here p. 21.
  3. ↑ Noam Chomsky: Who rules the world? Ullstein, Berlin 2016, p. 49.
  4. ↑ Alexander Hamilton: The Utility of the Union in Respect to Commercial Relations and a Navy. In: avalon.law.yale.edu , accessed November 10, 2018.
  5. ↑ Frank Kelleter: American Enlightenment. Languages ​​of Rationality in the Age of Revolution. Schöningh, Paderborn 2002, pp. 616–620.
  6. ↑ JP Freire: Henry Cabot Lodge: Isolationist? Not exactly. In: The American Spectator . June 29, 2011, Retrieved July 26, 2020 (American English).
  7. ^ Lars Schoultz: That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. Chapel Hill 2009, p. 4.
  8. ^ Ted Morgan: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster ( books.google.de ).
  9. ↑ a b Terrence McCoy: How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism'. In: The Atlantic , March 15, 2012 (English).
  10. ^ Hans Morgenthau: The Purpose of American Politics. New York 1964. cit. according to Noam Chomsky: Who rules the world? Ullstein, Berlin 2016, p. 48.
  11. ^ Robert Kagan : US needs a discussion on when, not whether, to use force. In: The Washington Post , July 15, 2014 (English, quoted from: Lukas D. Herr: A Myth that Matters: American Exceptionalism and the Attempt to Conceptualize the Ideational Liberal Foreign Policy Theory. In: KOPS. No. 6, Political Science of Technical University of Kaiserslautern, June 2016, p. 2. ISSN  1861-7018 ).
  12. ↑ Trevor B. McCrisken: Exceptionalism. In: A. Deconde, RD Burns, F. Logevall (Eds.): Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. Volume 2, 2nd edition. Scribner, New York 2002, pp. 63-80.
  13. ↑ Trevor B. McCrisken: American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam: US Foreign Policy since 1974. Palgrave Macmillan, New York of 2003.
  14. ↑ Stephen Kinzer: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. Times Books, New York 2006.
  15. ↑ “ A new international order is emerging, but it is being crafted to suit American imperial objectives. The empire signs on to those pieces of the transnational legal order that suit its purposes (the WTO, for example), while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts (the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty) that do not. ”Michael Ignatieff: Barbarians at the Gate? In: New York Review of Books. February 28, 2002.
  16. ^ Roger Cohen : America Unmasked. In: The New York Times , April 24, 2009 (English, quoted from: Noam Chomsky: Who ruled the world? Ullstein, Berlin 2016, p. 49).
  17. ↑ Noam Chomsky: Who rules the world? Ullstein, Berlin 2016, p. 46.
  18. ↑ Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney: Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. Threshold Editions, 2015, ISBN 978-1-5011-1541-7 .
  19. ↑ Noam Chomsky: Who rules the world? Ullstein, Berlin 2016, pp. 46–62, torture memos and historical amnesia.
  20. ^ Godfrey Hodgson: The Myth of American Exceptionalism. Yale University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-12570-2 .
  21. ↑ Clive Crook: Book review: The Myth of American Exceptionalism. In: The Atlantic , March 18, 2009 (English)
  22. ^ Ian Tyrell: American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History. In: The American Historical Review . 96, No. 4, 1991, pp. 1031-1055, here pp. 1033 f.
  23. ^ Rainer Mausfeld: Why are the lambs silent? How elite democracy and neoliberalism are destroying our society and our livelihoods. Westend, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-86489-225-7 , p. 76 f.