Anti-Americanism in Twentieth Century Europe

Throughout the twentieth century, journalists, politicians and academics have used the term ‘Americanization’ to assess the global impact of the USA’s rise to the status of a world power, and to make sense of the dramatic and bedazzling social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. European intellectuals have rarely resisted the temptation to use ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’: across the Atlantic, European observers believed, it was possible to learn and see what their own societies would look like in the future. Complaints about the Americanization of Europe – or the world – could easily be turned into outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which made the USA responsible for all the ills of society, be they economic, political, or cultural. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following rift in transatlantic relations gave the history of European perceptions of America a new impetus. Among the large number of studies devoted to the history of ‘Americanization’ and anti-Americanism that have been published in recent years, several monographs, based on original research, promise new insights and deserve close attention

Urban history and modernity in Central Europe

This historiographical review discusses recent literature on cities in modern Central Europe – mainly on Berlin and Vienna – which reflects the great variety of approaches to urban history and underlines the importance of urban history for the study of modernity. The history of urbanisation was a central event in the history of modernity. Especially in the Central European capitals of Berlin and Vienna, where modernisation and urban growth started later and then advanced quicker than in West European cities, all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural modernity and its consequences can be observed in detail

The Mind of the Nation: The Debate about Völkerpsychologie, 1851-1900

Völkerpsychologie or ‘folk psychology’ has a bad reputation amongst historians. It is either viewed as a pseudo-science not worth studying in detail, or considered a ‘failure’ since, in contrast to sociology, psychology, and anthropology, it never established itself as an independent discipline at university level. This article argues that Völkerpsychologie as developed by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal was an important current in nineteenth-century German thought. While it was riddled with conceptual and methodological problems and received harsh criticism from academic reviewers, it contributed to the establishing of the social sciences since key concepts of folk psychology were appropriated by scholars such as Georg Simmel and Franz Boas. The article summarizes the main features of Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie, discusses its reception in Germany and abroad, and shows how arguments originally developed for folk psychology were used by Lazarus to reject antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s. It concludes that Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie epitomized the mentality of nineteenth-century liberals with its belief in science, progress, and the nation, which was reinforced by their experience of Jewish emancipation

Interest Income Tax Evasion, the EU Savings Directive, and Capital Market Effects

The Savings Directive has been celebrated as a major political break-through in coordinating taxation in Europe. Against this background, the present paper evaluates the real-world effects of this directive. The directive has left a loophole by providing grandfathering (exemption from withholding tax) for some securities. In this paper we compare the pre-tax returns of exempt bonds and comparable taxable bonds. If working around the Savings Directive is difficult for tax evaders in Europe, then investors should be willing to pay a premium for bonds that are exempt from the withholding rate. Conversely, if such a premium is absent, then we may conclude that the supply of existing loopholes (exempt bonds included) is large enough to allow tax evaders to continue evasion at no additional cost. The findings of our study are in line with this latter interpretation.Savings Directive, interest taxation, tax capitalization, Austria, Belgium Luxembourg, Liechtenstein

Taxes and the Efficiency Costs of Capital Distortions

Tax neutrality towards alternative financing instruments for corporate investment is a ubiquitous demand in the political debate. At the same time, the literature is surprisingly silent about the magnitude of possible efficiency costs of a departure from tax neutrality. Againstthis background, the present paper discusses the theory of capital structure and provides backof-the-envelope calculations of the possible efficiency cost of a tax distortion of the debtequitydecision.debt-equity choice, capital structure, excess burden of taxation

“The Germans are Beating us at our own Game”: American Eugenics and the German Sterilization Law of 1933

This article re-interprets the connection between American 'mainline' eugenicists and German 'race hygienist' through the prism of the German Sterilization Law of 1933; it shows the 'normality' of this relationship, and its importance for the slow demise of eugenics after 1945

A New World? German and French debates about America and Europe during the First World War

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the USA had developed into a political and economic power that challenged the established Eurocentric world order. Simultaneously, the European nations were increasingly confronted with economic competition from the USA when American companies successfully entered European markets and began undermining the dominance of French, German, and British manufacturers. Despite many condescending comments about American materialism, lack of culture and refinement, and the general deficits of the American ‘character’, genuine anti-Americanism was rare in French and German publications before the First World War. With the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, debates about the possibility of a future ‘Americanization of Europe’ came to a sudden halt, even if only for a short period of time. During the first years of the First World War, academics, journalists, and intellectuals in all European nations engaged in a ‘war of words’ that sought to justify each nation’s position in the conflict

Sex, Coffee, Madness: New Studies on the History of Fin-de-Siècle and Interwar Vienna

Review article of several new studies on or related to the history of Vienna