ABSTRACT
The extraordinary economic rise of the United States had something to do with the fact that for a long time it exercised very little military power. The absence of German military power was accompanied by an extraordinary cultural expansion-Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Kant, Leibnitz, Goethe, Hegel, Schiller-and it was the militarily weak Germany that was the cultural core of Europe from about 1700 to 1871. It is interesting that Berlin after the German defeat in 1919 produced the Bauhaus and modern architecture, Bertolt Brecht and a great upsurge in literature and the arts, all of which Hitler stopped abruptly in 1932 because of his belief in military power and the power of threat. The conquests by Islam are a little more ambiguous, especially in the early days when the powers of persuasion such as integrative power may have been more significant in many places than military power.
