In the Heart of Europe: Danubian Studies and American Schemes for Economic Reconstruction after World War I

In Cold War America the study of Central and Eastern Europe was the poor relation of Soviet Studies. Yet, American interest in the region and its potential for regulatory re-ordering is long-standing, going back into the mid-nineteenth century when the Hungarian émigré Lajos Kossuth presented his plans for a Danubian Confederation to rapt American audiences. Some decades later, American international lawyers hailed the Commission of the Danube River as a blueprint for a functioning international organisation. In the aftermath of World War I, the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became the focus of American concerns, this time in the context of economic reconstruction and development. Yet again, there was talk of the ‘Danubian’ region, a classification that had less to do with geography – Poland, a non-riparian state, was included – than with American concerns for Central Europe’s successful functioning as an economic entity. U.S. business interests in alliance with American scholars, such as the historian James T. Shotwell (a regional expert for Woodrow Wilson’s Inquiry), spearheaded calls for economic reconstruction, lobbied the League of Nations and became involved in the financial stabilisation of Austria and Hungary. In the 1930s, American interests in economic reconstruction and federation took on a more scientific bent, as American philanthropic foundations sponsored and directed an ambitious undertaking to map society, economy and politics of the Danubian countries. These so-called Danubian Studies compiled a mass of comparable statistical evidence, created to facilitate cross-border economic integration. Thus, regional knowledge served strategic and geopolitical interests, thereby predating one of Area Studies’ characteristics, the desired policy-relevance of academic knowledge.