Wykład gościnny w języku angielskim: 100 Years of America’s Relations with Central and Eastern Europe 3620-MGR1-WG-YARCEE
1. First Draft of the American Century: Wilson’s 14 Points, a New Europe, and Failure at Versailles
• Context and content of the 14 Points: America’s first attempt at Grand Strategy.
• 14 Points and the outline of European security.
o General framework of rules-based order.
o Specific settlements: Russia, Central Europe, Poland.
• Conceptual underpinnings of the 14 Points.
o Break with European balance of power politics.
o Rules based, democratic world order.
o No conceptual split between Western and Eastern/Central Europe.
o Walter Lippmann as drafter and exponent. (Lippmann has perhaps most important American foreign policy thinker of the 20th century, from WWI through Cold War.)
• The 14 Points encounter reality at Versailles. Clemenceau’s alternative. Three failures.
o Central Europe and the complexities of “self-determination” on the ground.
o Germany and reparations
o American withdrawal from Europe: failure of ratification of the League of Nations Treaty in the US Senate.
2. The Road to Yalta
• Roosevelt’s failure and the contrast with the 14 points.
o We cannot defeat Hitler without Stalin’s help, and we accept the consequences.
• Isolationism
o Sources: populist, leftist, disillusion after Versailles.
o Walter Lippmann accepts isolationism.
o Neutrality Acts cripple America.
o Kellogg-Briand Pact and policy of gestures.
• Strategic vacuum
o Roosevelt’s failed attempts to take on isolationism.
o Alternatives to American leadership: France and the Little Entente.
• War.
o The Fall of France (not the Fall of Poland) shakes the establishment. Lippmann turns from isolationism (too late).
o Wells Declaration re the Baltics.
o The American First Committee and right-wing isolationism.
o Roosevelt finally moves: the Atlantic Charter, based on strategic underpinnings of the 14 Points.
o Pearl Harbor and America enters the war.
• Consequences.
o Military dilemma of liberating Europe from the West alone.
o Lippmann turns to “Realism” and spheres-of-influence.
o Tehran and loss of potential American leverage.
o The policy of empty hope: FDR and Churchill send Mikolajczyk to Moscow, and Stalin dismisses him. George Kennan’s forebodings.
o Yalta’s Declaration of Liberated Europe: applies Atlantic Charter but in soft language.
3. Establishing the Cold War Consensus
• The decision to draw a line.
o After Yalta, FDR and Churchill keep pressing Stalin on Poland, and learn of Stalin’s intentions.
• Drawing conclusions.
o Kennan’s Long Telegram and Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech
o Alternatives: Henry Wallace’s sentimentality, Acheson’s hard line, Lippmann’s realism.
o The Czech coup and Truman tries the hard line.
• Eastern Europe and the emergence of Cold War “Realism”
o Limits of “Liberation” (of Central and Eastern Europe).
o Lippmann defines limited goals (implicitly surrendering Europe east of the Iron Curtain).
o 1956/Hungary, 1961/Berlin: liberation in theory, “Realism” in practice.
o Lyndon Johnson and “Bridge Building”: operationalizing “Realism” or a realistic tactic?
o 1968 and Czechoslovakia: implications of “Realism”
o Détente: the Nixon-Kissinger model and the 1972 visits to Moscow and Warsaw.
4. America recalls its Grand Strategy: Brzezinski, Solidarity, and Reagan
• The logic of Détente. Nixon/Kissinger embrace Lippmann’s “Realism”
o What’s in it for the US, what’s in it for the USSR.
• Ironies: the consequences of détente from below: new openings on the ground for Central Europeans, and a new generation of Americans.
• The consequences of détente from above: CSCE process and the Helsinki Final Act.
o Human rights/”Basket III” as an unintended consequences.
• Brzezinski and the policy of “differentiation”
o Brzezinski modifies détente and introduces Central Europe as subject.
o Jan Paul II and Jan Nowak: Poles now shape events.
• Solidarity and Martial Law.
o Poland challenges the “Realists’” axioms.
• Reagan recalls America’s Grand Strategy.
o Response to Martial Law (v Johnson’s response to Czechoslovakia 1968).
o Deeper Reagan challenge to US Cold War consensus. Westminster Speech.
5. The Power of Freedom: 1989 and its Consequences
• The shock of 1989. Despite Reagan, the “Realist” axioms of the Cold War run deep.
o Lippmann’s axioms still hold sway. Even Kennan has adopted them.
• 1988-89: Poland breaks the mold.
• George H. W. Bush’s turn to Poland:
o Ahead of the consensus, ahead of his Administration.
o Condi Rice’s open mind.
o Bush’s Hamtramck speech and embrace of the Roundtable Accords.
o Bush’s July visit to Poland.
• The “J-Curve” of post-Communist transformation.
o Washington’s perspective on Poland’s early years post-89.
o Poland’s turns the corner.
• “Proof of Concept”: the viability of post-communist transformation. What strategic consequences?
6. Clinton’s Choice: the Strategic Turn to Grow the Free World
• America’s strategic assumptions in 1993.
o The “Realist” model still ascendant. Still behind the 14 Points.
• Poland pushes at the door.
o Poles crystalize around NATO membership to break Yalta Europe.
o America is not yet ready.
• Weakness of the “Realist” model: 1994 Clinton trip to Europe and the Prague meetings.
• Out of the “Gray Zone.” How the “Realistic” model faltered in American thinking.
• The return of the Atlantic Charter (and assumptions of the 14 Points).
o On the American side.
o On the Polish side.
• Building the political foundation
o Democrats and Republicans, Polish-American, Jewish-American.
• NATO Summit at Madrid: invitation to the first three.
• GW Bush and the choice to push the envelope.
o The options: no go, go slow, Big Bang.
o Bush from realistic to the Freedom Agenda: Warsaw Speech.
o Prague NATO summit.
• The vision achieved.
7. Triumph and Aftermath
• Tolstoy’s Principle: life moves on.
• What Went Wrong (with the West)?
o Economic stresses, political dysfunction, national identity.
o America’s stresses, in particular.
o The reactionary return: rejecting the Free World?
• Central Europe’s commonality, and specificity: its variant of the general challenge
o Beyond superficial analysis.
o Trauma of two generations: War and Communism.
Resistance, collaboration, and memory.
Dissent: mass and marginal.
o Successful transformation, and its limits.
o Gaps in development.
• The political consequences.
• What should America do?
o Stay out of politics.
o Show up. Reengage.
o Remember the historical context and challenges.
o Defend against Russian aggression.
o Maintain our common values.
o Recall America’s Grand Strategy: the 14 Points and the assumptions they rest on.
Rodzaj przedmiotu
Kryteria oceniania
Obecność na zajęciach
Zaliczenie pisemne w formie eseju i/lub zaliczenie ustne
Literatura
Asmus, Ronald, “Opening NATO’s Door,” 2002
Dobbs, Michael, “Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War,” 2012
Garthoff, Raymond, “Détente and Confrontation,” 1985
LaFeber, Walter, “America, Russia and the Cold War,” 1967
Kennan, George F., “Memoirs,” 1967
MacMillan, Margaret, “Peacemakers” The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War”
Simons, Thomas, “Eastern Europe in the Postwar World,” 1991
Steel, Ronald, “Walter Lippmann and the American Century,” 1980, 1999.
Plus the documents contained in the book “The U.S. and Central Europe in the American Century”
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