Still the American Century in Europe?

About the Event

Study Group on America and the West

Chair: Ron Granieri, Executive Director, FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West

4:30 p.m. Seminar; 6:00 p.m. Dinner

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, disagreements about interventions in Libya and Syria, controversy about how to respond to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, and negotiations about a possible Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, European-American relations are tense if not conflictual. American power, influence, and prestige look substantially different than in the first post-World War II decades. Far from being a recent or even post-Cold War development, however, the erosion of the American Century in Europe began in the long 1970s. Economic crises, diplomatic disagreements and transformations in the domestic politics of countries on both sides led to a widening of the Atlantic. A transatlantic market gap, a God gap and a war gap emerged especially strongly after 1989. Europe became more Europeanized, economically, culturally and politically, while US interests turned to other areas. New forms of European anti-Americanism and American Anti-Europeanism have erupted periodically, leaving the Atlantic Community a little weaker every time. This presentation will discuss the historical background to such divisions, and their significance for the present and future of transatlantic relations.

Mary Nolan is Professor of History at New York University. She is a specialist in twentieth-century European-American relations and in German History.  Her most recent book is The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010. She is also the author of Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany and coedited Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century.  Recent articles deal with Americanization in Europe, with European anti-Americanism and American Anti-Europeanism, and with the politics of memory in Germany.  In 2013 she received the Helmut Schmidt Prize for German-American Economic History, given by the German Historical Institute and the Zeit Foundation Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. 

The Study Group Idea: Greater Philadelphia is home to 80-plus institutions of higher learning, and FPRI is the place where the great minds of these institutions meet through our Inter-University Study Groups.  Each month a guest speaker presents a paper for in-depth discussion in seminar format and in the dinner following. 

Registration

Participation is limited to university faculty, graduate students, and to FPRI Members at the $1000 level.

Reservations are required. RSVP: events@fpri.org

For more information contact 215 732 3774, ext 200 or events@fpri.org.

Speakers