10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9073
application/pdf
2611-2752
9073
en
Alberto Benvenuti
USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
American Politics
Revisiting Global America: Nationalism in History and Politics
Text.Serial.Journal
https://usabroad.unibo.it/
2
Editorial
2019-03-01
2019-02-13
2019-03-01
2019-11-05
USAbroad
Alberto Benvenuti
2019/03/01
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9073
INDIRE
2611-2752
American Politics
en
Revisiting Global America: Nationalism in History and Politics
https://usabroad.unibo.it/article/download/9073/8970
2
Editorial                                              USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 2 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9073                                                             ISSN 2611-2752




   Revisiting Global America: Nationalism in History and Politics


                                               Published: March 1, 2019




     Nationalism has been a defining feature of American history, politics, and international relations.
Since its foundation, the United States has created an exceptional, expansive, and open image of itself
as the “global nation” founded on a set of seemingly universal principles. The ways Americans have
thought about their country have been a tremendous force for overseas expansion and an irresistible
attraction for many outsiders. However, despite the success of this model of global, multiracial and
multi-ethnic America, or possibly because of it, recent but not unprecedented nationalistic trends
have contributed to dispute, contest or even reject its very tenets. The topic has also taken on ur-
gency at the historiographical level. Scholars have inevitably looked with renewed interest into US
nationalism and its practical, policy manifestations since 9/11. In the last few years, however, the de-
bate has become even more intense, with a shift from explaining outcomes to questioning the nature
of American identity and patriotism. The seismic waves produced by the last presidential election
eventually reached nationalism studies, reinforcing a tendency that had started after the election of
Obama: ethnicity, religion, and above all race were brought back as crucial elements in the analysis
of the American national community and provided a tool to deconstruct the alternative visions of
belonging that find space in the current political and public debate. At the same time, nationalism per
se is being refashioned. The negative coating deposited on it by 20th-century wars is being scrubbed
off by those who, even at the academic level, see strong nationalist policies as a way to navigate the
current era of geopolitical uncertainty and fragmentation.
     The second monographic issue—Revisiting Global America: Nationalism in American History and Poli-
tics—embraces this discussion, offering an ample range of perspectives on American nationalism and
the many issues connected to it. The four articles composing the issue cover different historical peri-
ods, following the construction and the evolution of the American nationalist sentiment from the early
Republic to the Reagan Era. What distinguishes these contributions is not only their chronological
framework but also their approach to the notion of American nationalism—a concept that goes from
being intended primarily as individual consciousness (as an element of personal self-determination
of Americans abroad, like in Nikoletta Papadopoulou’s work) to being represented as a political battle-
ground (i.e. an expression of partisan politics) as in Giovanni Militello’s study, who takes US nation-
alism not as a unitary and unifying ideology but the manifestation of distinct and, in fact, opposing
practical visions of governance. In Matteo Rossi’s and Stefano Livi’s articles, instead, we see more
traditional interpretations of American nationalism at work. Their views of nationalism appear as



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Revisiting Global America                                                             USAbroad. Vol. 2 (2019)




broader conceptualizations of what America is and should be—what are the economic and ideologi-
cal principles on which the national community is based, and what the government has to do in order
to preserve them and fulfill, accordingly, a self-assigned (global) mission. Both Rossi’s and Livi’s anal-
yses, which focus respectively on the 19th and 20th century, point to themes that returned multiple
times in later US policy. Rossi’s study is particularly relevant in this respect; his article rediscovers
the original work of an almost forgotten 19th-century thinker, Henry Charles Carey, and it is difficult
not to notice the importance that the pillars of Carey’s economic theory—protectionism and a state
as the guarantor of social order—would have had in subsequent stages of American history, up to the
current days of economic nationalism.
    The primary focus of the historical analysis therefore varies, as does the scope of the work of his-
torical reconstruction, for a second issue of USAbroad that taken together shows how complex and
multifaceted the nature of US national sentiment and sensibility is. The organization of the articles is
chronological, constructing an imaginary trajectory of the notion of American nationalism through
crucial twists and turns of US history and different geographical spaces. The issue opens with Pa-
padopoulou’s National Anxieties and Negotiating Difference in American Barbary Captivity Narrative. The
article examines the personal experiences of those Americans who came into contact with the Berbers
along the North African coast in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, in the decades immediately after the
proclamation of American independence. By reviewing the written accounts left by those Americans
abroad, who most often became and remained captives for years in the Barbary states, she explores
the national anxieties and personal reflections arising from the encounter with a religiously and cul-
turally complex, distant society as the one developed on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
Papadopoulou focuses on the stories of three main characters: the first is James Leander Cathcart, an
Irishman by birth who had traveled to North America and joined the Revolution before being cap-
tured by Barbary pirates in 1785 aboard American schooner. Cathcart spent eleven years in captivity
in Algiers, a period during which he managed to progress from the position of palace gardener to
that of Christian secretary of the Dey. He would return to the Barbary Coast, years after achieving
his freedom, as no less than the American consul general. Cathcart’s writings, Papadopoulou suggests,
“articulate an individual’s experience that represents the entire nation’s struggle for liberation and self-
definition.” The article then follows the stories of two members of the crew of frigate Philadelphia,
captured in 1803: Jonathan Cowdery, the Navy appointed ship’s surgeon, and William Ray, one of the
sailors aboard. Their published accounts offer different, and in fact contrasting, versions of the time
in captivity, showing a disparity of treatment between officers and ordinary seamen that cut through
their supposedly shared, common status (and identity) as Americans. Papadopoulou therefore shows
how, in the formative years of American nation and nationalism, “the Orient” became a space where
themes related to selfhood, nationhood, and belonging were constantly negotiated, re-interpreted,
and reconstructed. Indeed, she explains, although most American captivity narratives of the period
attempt to maintain binary divisions between Christian-Muslim or Self-Other, what those works actu-
ally expose is the Americans’ own ambivalence on how to preserve as well as mediate these differences,
in a tortuous process of construction of American identity.
    Rossi’s Protecting America: Order, Nation and Exception in Henry Carey’s Social Science looks into an-
other crucial period in American history, that of 19th-century continental and economic expansion.
The article shows the importance of Carey’s economic thought in the reinterpretation of American na-
tionalism in an era of critical growth for the country “as a nation, as a capitalist market and as a State.”
Born in Philadelphia in 1793, Carey became one of the major intellectual figures and interpreters of
the antebellum period. He also took an active role in politics, first by entering the Whig Party and later
by actively participating in the construction of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, helping to shape
the national economic platform for the 1860 presidential election. Rossi explains that Carey worked
to legitimize, through economic science, a political theory of the American nation that celebrated
the country’s distinctiveness and, at the same time, aimed at protecting it from social conflict and
crisis that marked the historical transition to capitalism. On the one hand, the author argues, Carey
built his political economy on a vision of America as a historical exception (a vision that was based
on what appeared as an almost limitless availability of resources in the continent); on the other, the
protectionist economic policies he prescribed were aimed at preserving the country’s status, marking



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9073                                                       Art. #9073
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Revisiting Global America                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 2 (2019)




its uniqueness vis-à-vis Europe. The US had indeed a different and universal mission, whose objec-
tives were prosperity, opportunity for all, freedom and peace. Economic nationalism was therefore
needed to manage growth and competition while maintaining social order—a condition of prosperity
to be enjoyed first by American citizens and then the entire humankind through the expansion of an
American empire “voluntarily joined.” According to this interpretation, then, American exception-
alism became both a foundational element and a political goal of Carey’s economic theory; equally
important, this US “exception” came to represent an essential component of American nationalism.
     A similar expansive vision of US nationalism and (global) mission emerges from Livi’s Exporting
Americanism: Arthur Bullard and American Propaganda in Russia. The article seeks to provide a broader
understanding of American propaganda abroad during World War I and its aftermath by analyzing
the history of the Committee on Public Information and its role in revolutionary Russia. Livi focuses
on the figure of one of its directors, Arthur Bullard, whose role many scholars of Soviet-American
relations have considered over the years secondary and subordinate to that of more notable figures,
like ambassador David R. Francis or the head of the CPI, George Creel. Drawing on documents from
the Arthur Bullard Papers and the Records of the Committee on Public Information, the article offers
new insights into Bullard’s efforts in the fields of diplomacy, information, and education. Livi argues
that Bullard actively tried to make US diplomacy more accessible and “democratic,” but also more per-
vasive and penetrating, promoting public knowledge and the spreading of American values through
a strengthened communication strategy both at home and abroad. He tried to implement these prin-
ciples while in Russia (1917–1919), working to reach two different, but complementary, objectives: the
promotion of Americanism in the country and the containment of Bolshevism among the population.
Bullard’s overarching idea, Livi writes, was to avert the decline of Americanism through the creation
of a “national mind” able to counter the growing “influence of foreign cultures brought by immigrants
to the United States.” This is exactly what motivated Bullard’s decision to export “American ideals and
values” abroad, especially in revolutionary Russia. “While CPI’s main goal was to seek to keep Russia
in the conflict,” the articles states, “Bullard’s view went beyond the horizon of the war,” trying to fight
off Bolshevism, spread knowledge about American history and principles in schools, and therefore
bridge a new and stronger relationship between the American people and those abroad.
     The last article, Giovanni Militello’s The Battle of Montreal: Neo-Conservative vs. Regulatory National-
ism, discusses the rounds of negotiations for the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which led to the banning
of a series of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons. The US administration supported the agree-
ment, which still remains an international landmark in environmental legislation. In order to reach
this path-breaking environmental deal and put pressure on the international community, the US used
its diplomatic leverage, the opinions of members of the scientific and business communities, and also
the work of some environmental organizations. The author, however, argues that the protocol actu-
ally served as a tool to export to the world (and impose upon it) a level of environmental protection
that was already used in the US and risked damaging the competitiveness of American companies
and economy. The analysis of the domestic debates surrounding the treaty shows how nationalis-
tic rhetoric and discourse was used for partisan goals. Indeed, the negotiations became a contest of
strength between a dying, “New-Dealist,” regulatory nationalism and a thriving neo-conservative na-
tionalism. The former won the battle in Montreal, but lost the war; the agreement represented its last
flicker of life before the final rise of the latter.
     Militello’s work closes this monographic issue—an issue that seeks to bring new considerations to
bear on the meaning of US nationalism by highlighting continuities, idiosyncrasies, and changes in
nationalistic discourses, practices, and policies. To offer a comprehensive review of the topic is, of
course, impossible. The goal, in this case, is to add historical pieces to the composite picture of the
American nation and give useful historiographical tools to interpret our present of revived nation-
alism. From this perspective, in the new column Bringing the History Back In, the article of Federico
Romero—Globalization’s Nemesis: from Liberal Internationalism to White Nationalism—reconstructs the
complicated historical road from liberal internationalism to the white (and economic) nationalism of
today.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9073                                                        Art. #9073
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