For more than two decades a rising number of historians of American foreign relations have investigated the ideological and cultural foundations of U.S. foreign policy. No longer taking for granted that foreign-policy makers simply (should) pursue seemingly objective national interests, realistically assess the international distribution of power, and seek to maximize their state’s allegedly measurable political, economic, and military might against other states, they have explored the symbols, images, stereotypes, conventions, and values upon which U.S. foreign policies were based. They have thus reconstructed the prism through which Americans viewed themselves and the world and defined their necessarily subjective national interests in the first place.1 A particularly fruitful part of this research in the wake of the cultural turn has concerned itself with the historical analysis of enemy images and processes of Othering, i.e. the construction of imaginary antipoles in opposition to which nations have defined themselves.2

Michael Patrick Cullinane, Senior Lecturer of U.S. History at Northumbria University in Newcastle, and David Ryan, Professor of Modern History at University College Cork, now brought together nine scholars with research backgrounds in American identity discourses and American diplomatic history to provide an overview of how constructions of the Other have shaped U.S. foreign policy in different periods. Their articles range from an investigation of Indian warfare and the production of images of Native American enemies in the colonial period through analyses of the negotiations of Self and Other inherent in American consumerism at the turn of the twentieth century, of the debate about the acquisition of overseas colonies in the wake of the Spanish-American War, and of ethnic and racial hierarchies informing Woodrow’s Wilson vision for a new world order at the end of the First World War to an examination of the construction of the Muslim Other in the recent (and still ongoing) “War on Terror,” to name but a few of the topics addressed in this collection. The authors explore the following questions from various angles: how American identity has been defined by demarcating the American nation from its external Others; how foreign-policy makers’ perception has been shaped by national discourses of alterity; whether the heterogeneity of American society has made the U.S. particularly dependent on external enemies for the generation of internal cohesion; how the discourses on America’s Others have changed over the course of time; whether American elites deliberately constructed foreign threats and hostile Others in order to generate support for their foreign policies or whether their foreign policies themselves were shaped by a perception of foreign enmity; and in how far enemy images distorted reality and led to sometimes disastrous foreign policies, as in the Vietnam War.

The fact that the editors mostly approached distinguished experts such as Walter L. Hixson, Jack P. Greene, Kristin Hoganson, and Lloyd Ambrosius to write articles for this edited book ensured that their quality is continuously high. However, the decision to opt for established rather than younger and not yet widely known authors comes at a price: those familiar with the writings of these authorities will find little surprising or revelatory in their contributions to “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other.” Nonetheless, its compact form, its consistent focus on a clearly defined set of research questions, and its excellent scholarship will make it a valuable resource for those teaching U.S. diplomatic history and an authoritative introduction to how discourses of national Self and Others have influenced U.S. foreign policy over the course of American history.

Two qualifications to this positive assessment, however, need to be made. First, as the question of how processes of Othering and foreign policy have been interrelated in U.S. history is at the center of the book, it comes as a surprise that there is no article on the early republic – the formative period of American national identity formation and thus presumably the era in which the connection between identity discourses and U.S. foreign policy was most immediate and relevant. As previous colonies of the British Empire, the American union needed to demarcate itself from its former mother country in order to “invent” itself as a new nation after the successful War of Independence, and it had to forge a post-colonial national identity at a time when Great Britain and France were at war with each other for (with only small interruptions) more than twenty years. The European war not only posed tremendous foreign policy challenges to the U.S., which had significant trading interests with both of the major contestants, but it also triggered armed U.S. conflicts with the two nations in the Quasi War and the War of 1812, which were essential for the emergence of an American nationalism. An analysis of how Americans’ need to set themselves apart from their former British mother country and from their French ally of the Revolutionary War influenced the international conduct of the U.S. in the early republic would have given the book a more comprehensive character.

Second, by focusing on America’s external Others, the book somewhat neglects its internal Others, even though the latter were as significant for the construction of an American national identity as the former – particularly in the 19th century, during which the solidarity among different white ethnic groups was predicated on their sense of differentness from the black Other. The issue of slavery, moreover, was not simply a domestic issue but had profound foreign-policy dimensions, too, as can be seen, for example, in America’s response to the revolution in Haiti or to Great Britain’s attempts to stop the international slave trade. An investigation of the construction of internal Others with regard to the rising alienation between the North and the South in the antebellum era and the Civil War – an event which diplomatic historians increasingly view as a foreign-policy rather than a domestic affair – would also have given an important additional layer to the otherwise superb, nuanced, and sophisticated discussion of how U.S. foreign policy and processes of Othering have been intertwined in American history that Cullinane’s and Ryan’s edited book provides.3

Notes:
1 For the conceptual reorientation of American diplomatic history in response to the cultural turn see Frank Ninkovich, Interests and Discourse in Diplomatic History, in: Diplomatic History 13, 2 (1989), pp. 135–161. Akira Iriye, Culture, in: Journal of American History 77, 1 (1990), pp. 99–107.
2 For the significance of enemy images in American history see Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase / Ursula Lehmkuhl (eds.), Enemy Images in American History, Providence 1997. For an overview of U.S. diplomatic history tracing how Americans have frequently fallen into “the Manichean trap” of sharply dividing the world into friends and enemies see Detlef Juncker, Power and Mission. Was Amerika antreibt, Freiburg 2003.
3 Cf. the first volume of The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations series: William Earl Weeks, Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865, New York 2013.