This volume focuses on the uses of collective memory in transatlantic relations between the United States, and Western and Central European nations in the period from the Cold War to the present day. Sitting at the intersection of international relations, history, memory studies and various "area" studies, Memory in Transatlantic Relations examines the role of memory in an international context, including the ways in which policy and decision makers utilize memory; the relationship between trauma, memory and international politics; the multiplicity of actors who shape memory; and the role of memory in the conflicts in post-Cold War Europe. Thematically organized and presenting studies centered on the U.S., Hungary, France, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the authors explore the built environment (memorials) and performances of memory (commemorations), shedding light on the ways in which memories are mobilized to frame relations between the U.S. and nations in Western and Central Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and historians with interests in memory studies, foreign policy and international relations.

This book traces the influence of collective memory in International Relations (IR). It inquires where a country's memory first emerges and how it guides states through time in world politics, and locates the origins of national memory in political strategies within the internationalenvironment.The study then turns to the domestic landscape, where among a country's public, it finds memory to be the carrier of national identity over time. From there, however, the analysis reverts to the international here: in the medium term, collective memory begins to channel international statebehaviour, whereas, in the long run, it circumvents a country's normative horizons. In this book, collective memory is thus assumed to become manifest in world politics in four varying forms: as a country's political strategy, as its public identity, as underwriting its international statebehaviour, and finally, as a source for its national values. All four theorized manifestations of memory are tested in a comparative study of (West) Germany and Austria and the impact their diverse post-war interpretations of the Nazi legacy had on their international policies over time. With theillustrative help of the empirical cases, the book not only explores whether collective memory has an influence on political outcomes but how and why it matters for IR.

The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory. Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists’ increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news. Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln’s election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.

The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force -- not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.

This collection brings together local case studies of Britain’s history and memory of transatlantic slavery and abolition, including the role of individuals and families, regional identity narratives, sites of memory and forgetting, and the financial, architectural and social legacies of slave-ownership.

This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era.

Lessons in failure: institutional memory of strategic errors -- Tête à tête: the informal development of institutional memory -- Dilemmas in design: constraints on sharing knowledge of errors -- See no evil: reflections on errors in Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine -- Hear no evil: the informal processes of sharing knowledge of errors -- Speak no evil: the sources that spur knowledge sharing of errors -- A reactive culture: why the informal development of memory persists -- Conclusion: toward total recall in crisis management