The Emotional Turn

When writing in the 1990s, psychologists Kurt W. Fischer and June Price Tangney referred to the study of human emotions as a veritable ‘revolution’, with hundreds of new publications surfacing across disciplines.Footnote ⁷ This upsurge in academic studies started several decades earlier and was especially strong in the sciences, with research on the physicality of individual emotions and theories emerging about universal emotions and unconscious cognitive feelings.Footnote ⁸ Unsurprisingly, this ‘emotional’ or ‘affective’ turn profoundly influenced the humanities and social sciences, including the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, international relations and of course history.Footnote ⁹ Scholars debated the cultural and non-cultural parameters of emotions, although these debates fall beyond the remit of this introduction. In this special issue, we explore the phenomenon of inter- or transnational relations and are primarily concerned with the expression and projection of emotion. The contributors explore emotions principally (although not exclusively) as a cultural practice, and this section outlines some of the main currents that have influenced and inspired our studies of transatlantic gratitude.

In 1941, historian and founder of the Annales school Lucien Febvre published his landmark essay, ‘La sensibilité et l’histoire’, where he inquired into the affective life of those who lived in the past and pressed for their integration into historical methods and approaches.Footnote ¹⁰ Although others before him had been interested in studying past emotions, Febvre’s essay is often considered a launching point for scholars who a few decades later began to fully confront the history of human emotions. In the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Barbara Rosenwein, Peter and Carol Stearns and William Reddy published groundbreaking works in which they set down theoretical and methodological approaches – including Rosenwein’s notion of emotional communities – that opened up a new field of historical enquiry entitled ‘history of emotions’.Footnote ¹¹ Departing from research in the neurosciences, psychology and the social sciences, their works understood emotions as being fundamentally collective, deeply cultural and embedded within specific social structures as well as historical and geographical contexts. Emotions – or emotives, as Reddy referred to them – were understood to result from a dynamic interaction between body and mind, between individual and society.

By the turn of the century, historians were developing important centres for the study of human emotions and experiences, notably in London, Sydney and Berlin.Footnote ¹² As historical understandings of emotions expanded, scholars were better able to challenge the often reductionist assumptions about universal human experiences, and to show how emotions relate to particular cultural contexts, which shape the ways in which they are expressed, regulated, valued, named and perhaps even felt. Invaluable studies and surveys of the history of emotions by Katie Barkley, Rob Boddice, Thomas Dixon, Ute Frevert, Keith Oatley and Jan Plamper thus introduced generations of scholars to the methodological innovations of and intellectual opportunities within the history of emotions.Footnote ¹³ This effervescence of individual and collective historical enquiries since the early 2000s revealed that emotions not only are shaped by their historical, societal, cultural and linguistic environments but also effect and shape those very environments. Recent work on the contemporary history of Europe has produced studies on the impact of emotions on identity formation, democratisation, war, institutionalisation and politics, showing the power of emotions as not only a reactive force but also an active element of society. In German Angst, for example, Frank Biess showed how recurring episodes of fear in the history of West Germany were ‘historical forces of their own’, and should not be ‘[dismissed] as “hysterical,” “irrational,” or “neurotic”’.Footnote ¹⁴ Not only did his focus on fear disrupt assumptions of linear progress, but it also explained how Germans responded to immigration, modernisation or ecological change and, ultimately, built a liberal democratic state. The powerful effect of emotions was recently made clear in Feeling Political, where the editors explained that the link between politics and emotions was rooted in the very structures of modern nations with the advent of participatory politics. Participatory politics, they argued, required emotion work from civilians since the 1800s, whether in liberal or authoritarian regimes. Emotions have been mobilised, shared and negotiated within institutions throughout history and have been ‘pivotal factor[s]’ for ‘political change and social transformation’.Footnote ¹⁵

Unsurprisingly, the intrinsic link between emotions and politics meant that the emotional turn also deeply affected histories of diplomacy and international relations. Far from being a literature dominated by conferences, meeting rooms, official speeches and bureaucracy, research into diplomatic history now repeatedly shows the centrality of emotions in the practice and performance of politics. In her work on cultural exchange and diplomacy, Jessica Gienow-Hecht argued that music was central to US relations with Germany and France in the nineteenth century precisely because it could trigger shared emotions: ‘Whilst music meant different things to different people’, she explained, ‘all agreed that it constituted the language of emotions and could serve as a remedy for social and physical ills as well as a tool for international communication that would transcend language barriers’.Footnote ¹⁶ Many other historical studies confirmed the centrality of emotions to political relations at national and international levels. Ilaria Scaglia has shown how inter-war internationalist projects and groups, with the League of Nations as one of its most ambitious examples, carefully sought to infuse, repress or manage emotions that they deemed essential for their work. They often selected locations in the Alps for meetings, events and activities, actively ‘emotionalising’ the region to induce feelings of friendship, solidarity or brotherhood that were strategically employed to attain political ends. In doing so, 1920s and 1930s internationalists established norms that still shape international exchange and cooperation, imperial endeavours and humanitarian interventions.Footnote ¹⁷ The works of Rachel Applebaum and Christian Goeschel have examined the importance of friendship, in terms of both feeling and performance, in relations between Soviet states and between Axis allies. Similarly, Yuri van Hoef has examined the role of affect between state leaders through an assessment of the political friendship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.Footnote ¹⁸

Historians are not alone in understanding the powerful link between emotions and politics, and it is important to point to the many intersections with international relations (IR) scholars who have contributed new theoretical approaches meant to meaningfully define the role of emotions as a key unit of analysis.Footnote ¹⁹ Andrew Ross analysed the affective dimension of international politics through ‘high-emotion events’, seeking to understand how they shape public sentiment. Simon Koschut, in turn, offered useful theoretical and methodological tools not only to unpack the role of ‘emotion norms’ but also to analyse emotions in relation to discourse and power. In applying Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities to NATO, he introduced the concept of ‘emotional security communities’. Emma Hutchison added fresh insights by demonstrating how traumatic events can contribute to the development of ‘affective communities’ in world politics, while Todd Hall set out new directions in the field through his exploration of ‘emotional diplomacy’, conceptualised as the official projection of particular emotional responses by state actors towards other states.Footnote ²⁰ In their edited collection, Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar brought together the array of qualitative as well as quantitative methods developed by IR scholars to study emotions in international relations, methods that also allow us to see the role of specific emotions such as violence, pity, friendship and ressentiment.Footnote ²¹

Within this effervescence of scholarship across disciplines, the study of specific emotions has been particularly prominent. Joanna Bourke’s study of fear, Thomas Dodman’s study of nostalgia and Ute Frevert’s study of humiliation are a few examples of scholarship that has been central to re-thinking the modern period. Likewise in the past decade, a variety of specific emotions have been carefully conceptualised within the realm of diplomacy and international relations, including trust, empathy, sympathy, pity, anger, fear, guilt and grief.Footnote ²² But if the emphasis is often on ‘negative’ emotions – such as angst or fear – more ‘positive’ emotions have also drawn attention. Studies of love and friendship have opened up new histories of intimacy as well as international relations.Footnote ²³ In their special issue on protest and emotions, for instance, Joachim C. Häberlen and Russell A. Spinney looked beyond rage and anger to explore a broader spectrum of emotional expression within the politics of protest, inviting us to re-consider iconic photographs displaying ‘smiling workers’ occupying factories during the French Popular Front in 1936, or the ‘cheering crowds storming the Berlin Wall in November 1989’.Footnote ²⁴ The contributions in their special issue draw attention to the role of passion and friendship as driving historical and contemporary politics within national (West German radicals, French infantrymen and Spanish anarchists) but also transnational frameworks (hippies, migrants and animal rights activists).

Despite the effervescence of studies of emotions across the social sciences and humanities, the concept of gratitude has been almost completely ignored. In one of the first serious interdisciplinary collections of research on gratitude as an emotion and a virtue, published in 2004, American psychologist Robert E. Emmons underlined that ‘if a prize were given for the emotion most neglected by psychologists, gratitude would surely be among the contenders’.Footnote ²⁵ Over fifteen years later, gratitude has barely received any more academic attention among psychologists or philosophers and can still be characterised as ‘one of the most neglected emotions’.Footnote ²⁶

This is not to say that gratitude has been completely absent from scholarship: the concept of gratitude has captured the interest of psychologists and sporadic explorations have emerged within the realm of the history of ideas, focusing primarily on the role of gratitude in philosophical and theological history with a focus on the classical, pre- and early modern period.Footnote ²⁷ In their 2020 article ‘Don’t Forget to say “Thank You”’, Ruthann Clay and Peter N. Stearns pointed out the lack of historical attention for this particular emotion. Yet by focusing on shifts in the reliance on gratitude within US society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were among the first to set out an approach to analyse gratitude historically in a domestic context.Footnote ²⁸ Even more recently, Charles Schencking showed how anti-Japanese attitudes during the Second World War were fed by the sense that the Japanese were ‘ungrateful’, having betrayed what Americans remembered as generous humanitarian aid to Japan after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.Footnote ²⁹ Building on these works, the contributors in this collection show that the concept of gratitude was so central to the history of twentieth-century relations that it requires more serious consideration. By studying it in a range of national and international contexts, from the perspective of donors and recipients, and through material, performative, linguistic, ceremonial and emotional expressions, they place gratitude firmly within the broader field of the study of emotions and within histories of transatlantic relations, cultural diplomacy, global conflict, humanitarian aid and economic recovery.

Defining Gratitude

Building upon the exploration of the role of emotions in the fields of history and international relations, as well as on the more specific research into gratitude by psychologists and philosophers, this collection presents the very first in-depth academic exploration exclusively dedicated to the role of gratitude as a social emotion in the history of international relations and diplomacy. While the contributors each develop a definition of emotion and of gratitude that is geared towards their specific methodological concerns and historical contexts, we can discuss some of the conceptual parameters.

Within the field of psychology, Emmons and McCullough define gratitude broadly as positive feelings that stem from ‘the perception of a positive personal outcome, not necessarily deserved or earned, that is due to the actions of another person’. Recognising that gratitude was, at the time of their study, mostly absent from psychological inquiry, they define it as a complex compound of valuation, cognitive processes, empathy and positive attitudes or feelings. Within individuals, they note, the experience of gratitude as an emotion is strongest when people ‘perceive themselves to be recipients of an intentionally rendered benefit that is both valuable to the beneficiary and costly to the benefactor’. However, they caution, it has not ‘always been seen as unequivocally positive and desirable’. Positive assessments of the benefactor or the benefit bestowed can mingle with emotions such as jealousy or resentment when it is understood as placing the beneficiary in an inferior position.Footnote ³⁰

Gratitude, however, cannot be reduced to ‘feelings’ alone, and Peter Leithart defines it as ‘a favorable response to a gift or favor’.Footnote ³¹ This is not new, and the ways in which emotion, social bonds and virtue intersect has, perhaps, been most successfully established within anthropology. Readers of this special issue will quickly notice that many contributors turn to Marcel Mauss, particularly his 1925 seminal text The Gift.Footnote ³² By studying material exchange and gift-giving practices in pre-modern societies, Mauss captured a powerful form of social formation. Through the exchange of material (or immaterial) gifts, entire communities found themselves bound together in cycles of reciprocity of giving and gratitude, something that Broch explores very specifically in her own contribution. Showing thanks for gifts was an obligation that ensured social cohesion and ties, while its absence risked severing relations. In 1968, the work of Wilton S. Dillon unpacked the cycle of reciprocity further, identifying the three-step obligation to give, to receive and to repay. His book Gifts and Nations focused in fact on French reactions to Marshall Plan aid after 1945 and crucially showed the much broader application of Mauss’s conceptual cycle.Footnote ³³ Although transatlantic contexts are particularly relevant to our own special issue, Mauss’s work has also been applied to colonial contexts, as shown by Grégoire Mallard, who traces its impact from French conceptions of a benevolent, ‘giving’ empire to the post-colonial critiques of Algerian intellectuals.Footnote ³⁴ Ultimately, the study of gratitude within broader rituals of gift-giving lends itself well to the study of emotions in international relations. Gift-giving rituals are central to histories of power and politics at all hierarchical levels, not least the nation-state level.

Of course, what constitutes gratitude is, in the end, situational: shaped by historical and cultural understandings of the gift, the favourable response and the relationship between giver and receiver that it implies. Furthermore, it can be studied from different academic angles as an internal feeling, a ritual or a moral value. Within the context of European history, gratitude sits at this intersection between emotions, practice and ethics. Classical philosophers from Aristotle to Seneca saw gratitude as virtuous, emphasising its ability to strengthen bonds between humans as well as with the divine. Meanwhile, ingratitude, Seneca declared, was the worst of vices.Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, Katie Barclay has described love, or ‘caritas’ more specifically, as ‘not primarily an emotion’ but rather an ‘emotional ethic’, a ‘framework against which particular feelings and behaviours can be judged’.Footnote ³⁶ Within its particular historical contexts, then, gratitude shapes social relations – whether between individuals or groups, both domestically and internationally – at the intersections of feelings, rituals and ethics.

The Diplomacy of Gratitude

By thinking of gratitude as a feeling, a ritual and a virtue, we introduce the concept ‘diplomacy of gratitude’ to identify the red thread that runs through the different contributions in this volume and one that leads our inquiries in two interrelated directions. The first centres on the function of gratitude itself. The challenge here is not so much in recognising gratitude as an element of international relations – it does not have to be ‘read into’ the sources because historical actors readily expressed, performed and publicised it. The question, rather, is one of taking gratitude seriously as a diplomatic activity: not a form of obligatory or ritualised politeness, but a site where (national) identities were imagined, (re)formed and expressed; power relations were confirmed as well as contested; and affective bonds were shaped. Recognising gratitude as diplomacy requires us to ask deeper questions about its prevalence in international affairs: how was it expressed? Why and to what effect? Who expressed it, or who was expected to express it? What happened when expectations of gratitude were rebuffed? And was it actually felt?

Our second line of inquiry relates to the study of diplomacy. By zooming in on gratitude, the articles investigate and challenge traditional conceptions of diplomacy – as a field populated by state representatives who pursue the ‘national interest’ – to (re)interpret the international histories of Europe in the context of the ‘affective turn’ in international relations. By identifying a diplomacy of gratitude, they centre on the roles of emotional practices and performances and draw new (non-elite) actors, behaviours and processes into our overall understanding of international relations. Ultimately, as an inquiry into the diplomatic history of transatlantic relations, the diplomacy of gratitude helps us to understand the fundamental frictions that shaped and continue to shape the relationship between the United States and Europe. This sustained analysis of gratitude for aid, liberation and protection reveals the (emotional) complexity and even messiness of European responses to the US presence throughout the twentieth century.

By following these two lines of inquiry, this collection traces affective developments in transatlantic relations as the balance of power shifted away from the old world and towards the new. The individual articles explore different national and international case studies across the twentieth century, providing us with new insight into the changing and emotionally complicated relationship between the two regions as US power, aid and modernity spread across the world and notably to this region. Gratitude, previously understood principally as a virtue and a positive feeling, is also an emotional practice; and as an emotional practice, this collection argues, gratitude is never apolitical and is also fundamentally ambiguous. Through the study of ingratitude, the contributions reveal how many Europeans felt frustrated by the new relations of indebtedness and power between the United States and Europe. The contributions make clear that the diplomacy of gratitude is not circumstantial, happening in a moment immediately following conflict and aid; rather, it is long-lasting, part of a cycle of gift-giving and gratitude, playing out in longer chronological frameworks. Expectations of gratitude and memories of aid and (in)gratitude became part of the fabric of international relations between North Atlantic nations. The diplomacy of gratitude was thus not incidental to transatlantic relations, but became one of its established features well into the twenty-first century.

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The contributors met regularly over the course of 2020–1 to consider four interrelated questions to help navigate those different directions of inquiry. Firstly, what is gratitude and how do we study it? This included reflections on the conceptualisation of emotions in general and on gratitude more specifically, as well as the introduction of historical source materials, both those that are well known in their respective fields and those that are new. Secondly, who expressed gratitude and why or to what end? This was, most fundamentally, a question about agency, and readers will notice that the focus on gratitude allows the authors to show how Europeans actively shaped the meaning and impact of US aid. More specifically, it was a question asking who was involved in transatlantic relations, and many articles push beyond the traditional diplomatic actors. Thirdly, does gratitude have a history? The ways in which emotions are expressed or the value that they are assigned change over time but can also develop into repertoires or feeling rules that shape their political and social contexts over longer periods. Through the idea of emotional scripts, emotional templates or the politics of emotions, scholars explored some of these frameworks through which certain emotions are prescribed, encouraged or prohibited.Footnote ³⁷ With regard to gratitude, contributors reflected more specifically on the emotional obligations that arose from the practice and performance of gratitude, and asked whether or how those obligations were ever settled. Finally, how does gratitude shape the history of transatlantic relations?

The concept of a diplomacy of gratitude allowed them to explore the complexity of transatlantic emotional ties but also to confirm their significance within North Atlantic relations. To depart from the realm of what could be defined as ‘traditional’ foreign relations, the articles that follow show how, for European governments, expressing gratitude for US military and economic aid in the twentieth century was a matter of policy and diplomatic performance. As Bertrams explains, gratitude was ‘common currency’ between Belgium and the United States during and after the First World War, and Piller describes it as an obvious ‘diplomatic tool’ during this same period. This was in part imposed by Americans: the Committee on Public Information was especially heavy-handed, or ‘tone-deaf’ as Fazzi shows, in asserting American kindness, generosity and humanity in Italy, and the flag incident that Piller analyses and that caused an uproar in the US press occurred against the backdrop of high expectations of German gratitude and close monitoring of its behaviour.

But the diplomacy of gratitude was never limited to the elite domain of foreign policy and formal diplomacy: it involved ordinary European citizens, sometimes by their thousands. Broch in particular shows that gratitude emerged at the grassroots level, and in doing so highlights the importance of solidarity, affective community, desire for closeness and intimacy. It involved not only ordinary people but also ordinary objects, such as thank you gifts of dolls, lace doilies, books and other trinkets. Gerund also shows how the arrival of US gifts after 1945 was a formative experience for many German children who in turn had been drawn into transatlantic relations mostly by teachers. Looking back to the First World War, Piller refers to the children who participated in these performances of gratitude: they painted pictures, wrote letters and crafted objects in authentic – if supervised – gestures of gratitude. The articles are peppered with references to ordinary civilians driving performances of thanks, and they played an important part in bringing back a degree of sincerity to these often diplomatic performances. Schwartz confronts us with this question: while expressions of gratitude may be instrumentalised to serve other purposes, does that make the sentiment any less sincere? Accusations of insincerity were rife within this diplomacy of gratitude, as Fazzi, Bertrams and Piller show, but the inclusion of civilians reminds us that a sincere and grassroots impulse nonetheless existed.

Interestingly, the contributions also make clear that there was an inherent initiative and desire from Europeans themselves to show gratitude for US aid throughout the twentieth century. This was for a number of reasons, not least because there was a mutual understanding that recipients were morally required to show gratitude. Broch, Bloemendal and Van den Berk explore the post-war initiatives amongst French and Dutch statesmen and civilians alike to give thanks for American aid. As Gerund notes with regard to the US occupation of Germany, the ‘re-education’ of the former enemy required ‘emotion work’ from both sides and the fact that ‘gratitude [became] the preferred emotion in hegemonic discourse on German responses to US occupation and liberation’ was a result of the efforts of German elites more than of Americans.

But if European governments recognised the emotional demands that the reception of aid placed on them, it also created a situation that many considered undesirable. As many of the contributions make clear, dependence on US hand-outs made it painfully evident to European elites that the balance of power had shifted to the other side of the Atlantic. The ways in which European governments expressed their gratitude, then, were shaped by a desire to reciprocate in a way that was consistent with a sense of national dignity or, in other words, to renegotiate the balance between giver and receiver. Transatlantic power shifts were felt very strongly in Germany after the First World War (Piller), but this was not limited to questions of military defeat: perceptions of ‘poor little Belgium’ (Bertrams) were damaging to the population, while Italians felt misunderstood, and unheard, by Americans (Fazzi). Likewise, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the new transatlantic power dynamics after 1945 were painfully felt in the Netherlands (Bloemendal and Van den Berk) and France (Broch) and West European expressions of gratitude tried to re-balance to some extent this new political order, not least by reminding Americans of European cultural greatness. In their articles, Gerund, Schwartz, Bloemendal and Van den Berk notably show how these power dynamics also carried important gendered connotations, notably about the ‘masculine’ power of the United States and the ‘emasculation’ and/or ‘feminisation’ of Western Europe. In fact, as Bloemendal and Van den Berk show, the Dutch tried to redress the power dynamics by using so-called masculine forms of gratitude to acknowledge thanks.

Because the question of gratitude is so linked to that of power and politics, the role of ingratitude was never far; in fact, as contributions often show, it was as – if not more – important as gratitude itself, potentially carrying serious consequences. Ingratitude often became a diplomatic issue as a result of the disparity between American emotional entitlement and the price that Europeans were willing to pay in relation to their sense of national dignity. This is evident in Fazzi’s work on Italy during the First World War, where Italian gratitude quickly ceases due to the United States’ ‘inflated expectations’ of gratitude. In the case of the flag incident in Germany in 1923, Piller also emphasises how European ingratitude exploded into highly sensitive, and highly dramatic, international incidents. Meanwhile, Schwartz highlights the deep wound inflicted on Americans when French President Charles de Gaulle demanded the withdrawal of US troops from his country in 1966: US diplomats rhetorically questioned whether that included troops buried in France after the world wars, and the stereotype of French and Gaullist ingratitude was further consolidated. In her article, Broch asks not only who showed gratitude or ingratitude but also who abstained from showing gratitude, reminding us of the methodological complexities we need to consider when studying the diplomacy of gratitude. The collection thus makes clear that studying accusations of ingratitude offers historians an entry point into the webs of implicit emotional expectations that underlie international relations.

There is a strong interdisciplinary current within the collection, and many of the articles draw on international relations scholars and scholarship. Fazzi, Gerund, Bloemendal and Van den Berk draw heavily on the work of Todd Hall, Simon Koschut and others who have offered useful frameworks through which we can study emotions in political and historical contexts. Gerund links this firmly to the literature on the history of emotions and shows the emotional dissonance expressed through performances of gratitude (or ingratitude), whether relief and anxiety, or hope and despair. Mauss’s theory of the gift is also highly useful when exploring US humanitarian aid during and after the world wars. As Bertrams reminds us, Hoover’s insistence on defining American ‘gifts’ to Belgians reflects the social and political contexts in which gifts are given, received and returned. Schwartz identifies the ‘gift’ of liberation as a deeply ‘contested site of meaning’ that carried with it unspoken expectations, tensions around memories of liberation and questions over the larger moral and emotional economy.

A response to US post-war aid by Europeans themselves was to reframe the history of transatlantic relations as a cycle of gift-giving and reciprocity, debts incurred and repaid over time, in such a way that the relationship seemed more balanced than it certainly was throughout the twentieth century. And so, as Bloemendal and Van den Berk highlight, the Dutch liked to remind Americans that a sizeable loan from the Netherlands in 1778 kept the young republic afloat during the revolutionary war. In a similar vein, as Broch highlights, the French came to consider Lafeyette’s role in the fight for US independence as the original gift, one that had settled French debts of the twentieth century ahead of time. These interventions reveal clear historical patterns over extended periods of time, showing that practices of gratitude are woven into the fabric of diplomatic and international relations in the longue durée. Far from being momentary, they are an important framework through which states understand their histories and relationships to other nations. But as Schwartz, Bloemendal and Van den Berk rightly ask: when do these cycles end? at what point do expectations of gratitude become irrelevant, if ever?

Ultimately, this collection offers a new contribution to transatlantic history in the twentieth century. The shifting balance of power and the emergence of the United States as a global hegemon, source of new ideas and ideals, and main provider of aid to Europe forms the major backdrop to most of the articles. This new reality provoked a variety of emotional responses among Europeans, shaped in part by historically specific understandings of giver, gift and recipient, including the obligations it entailed. Bertrams suggests broadening the time-span of humanitarian aid precisely to look at its afterlife, thereby allowing for a more complicated beneficiary–donor relationship fraught with tension: it was often understood to put European beneficiaries in a subordinate position – one that was commonly coded as feminine, being weak, passive and dependent. As such, American largesse and Europeans’ sometimes reluctant reception of it could be seen as a threat to national dignity and could provoke painful emotions such as shame, humiliation or envy.

At the other end of the spectrum, but also simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically, the experiences of war and social disruption, combined with what was arguably a genuine sense of wonder at US affluence as well as idealism and generosity, were met by positive emotions, a sense of solidarity and longing for closeness, though sometimes muddled by a desire to keep the aid coming. Gerund even refers to a ‘transatlantic love story’, which is a useful way of thinking about the very mixed and at times conflicting emotions that can play out within such a dynamic. Beyond this, the articles reveal how actors on both sides of the Atlantic actively sought to establish new emotional performances and feeling rules that ultimately became part of the fabric of transatlantic relations.

Indeed, histories of US aid and European reception are too often understood in terms of discrete strategic or diplomatic interests on either or both sides. But those interests or the specific ways in which gratitude was at times instrumentalised can only be understood in the context of the social or emotional obligations that it entailed, as well as the cultural repertoires by which recipients sought to meet or avoid those. Thus, while some of the articles may emphasise the strategic or instrumental and others the social and cultural, it is only at their intersections that we can understand the diplomacy of gratitude as a site where transatlantic relations were (re)negotiated.