Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Macartney, Alexander F

Titel

War in the Postwar: Japan and West Germany Protest the Vietnam War and the Global Strategy of Imperialism

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This project examines the Japanese and West German protest movements against the war in Vietnam with a particular focus on the connections between anti-imperialist groups and individuals. It contends that movements in the two states had much more engagement than has previously been discovered and that these contacts had an important influence on a particular strain of anti-imperialist ideology that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While historians of the 1960s often speak of anti-imperial politics, few studies trace the contours of what anti-imperialists believed and why. Similarly, although anti-imperialist movements in Japan and West Germany had many similarities and moments of contact, there are no studies of these groups in comparison or in transnational perspective. The key insight this project proposes is that both Japanese and West German anti-imperialist radicals subscribed to a similar theory of global imperial strategy acting in Vietnam, fostered, in part, by an active exchange of people and protest material across borders. The shared West German and Japanese theory of global imperialism that I illuminate held that the past Axis powers had not abandoned fascism or empire, and that the unreformed and reenergized imperialist Japanese and West German states were poised to take over for a United States defeated by the people of Indochina. Indeed, because the United States needed West Germany and Japan for their war in Vietnam – the argument went – these powers were able to achieve their “Economic Miracles” and set them on the path of neo- colonialism around the world. Anti-imperialists shared view of a global hierarchy of imperialism, with a USA in retreat and new imperialist powers waiting in the wings.