Occidentalism: Rhetoric, process, and postwar German reconstruction

This thesis analyzes the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War, seeking to understand the role played by public rhetoric in legitimating the various policies contributing to this end. Emphasis is placed on the rhetorical commonplaces which figure prominently in the debates (both in the United States and in the occupied zones of Germany) about German reconstruction, particularly the notion of 'Western Civilization' which served to frame and organize many other appeals (such as anticommunism or the desire for military security). It was as a member of a cultural community called 'the West' that the western zones of occupation were permitted to join such programs as the Marshall Plan and NATO; absent this rhetorical possibility, events may well have turned out differently. The thesis adopts a 'relational' perspective, emphasizing processes of social transaction rather than the putatively essential qualities of pre-given entities, on the suspicion that only such an approach can adequately grasp a situation in which the boundaries of social entities were in great flux. 'Legitimation' is reconceptualized as a process of boundary-demarcation, in which certain policy proposals are ruled 'out of bounds,' and others are ruled acceptable, through the strategic---although not necessarily rational---use of rhetorical commonplaces. A general framework for understanding the impact of rhetorical commonplaces, involving the tracing of such commonplaces from their imagination by intellectuals through their dissemination among the relevant population (speakers and audiences alike) and their subsequent deployment in specific policy debates, is introduced and elaborated. The use of this framework highlights the contingent elements which came together in the postwar period and made possible the reconstruction of Germany under the auspices of the 'Western Alliance.' It also avoids the conceptual error of reading the later history and stability of the Cold War backwards into the early postwar period, restoring agency---if not essential agents---to a central analytical position.