The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations 019887345X, 9780198873457

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The Oxford Handbook of

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THE OXFOR D H A NDBOOK S OF

INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS General Editors

Christian Reus-​Smit of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford

The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-​volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-​ fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-​Smit and Duncan Snidal, with each volume edited by a distinguished team of specialists in their respective fields. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-​field in challenging new directions. Following the example of the original Reus-​Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by editors scholars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-​field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.

The Oxford Handbook of

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Edited by

M L A DA BU KOVA N SK Y E DWA R D K E E N E C H R I ST IA N R E U S -​SM I T M AJA SPA N U

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950148 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​887345–​7 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198873457.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

This project has taken us on a long and winding road, and along the way we have incurred many debts. The most fundamental is to the wonderful community of historians and International Relations (IR) scholars who have grappled with the history of the international. Rather than see this as a community riven by an unbreachable disciplinary divide, we have experienced it as a field of rich and challenging engagement. This engagement has shaped our individual scholarship in profound ways, and it ultimately led us to this project. Indeed, the project itself has become a site of such engagement, which we very much hoped it would be. Our thanks go, therefore, to everyone who populates this wonderful field of scholarship, and more specifically, to the historians and IR scholars who contributed so much to this finished volume. We also thank Dominic Byatt, Christian Reus-​Smit, and Duncan Snidal for commissioning a volume that seeks to disrupt the well-​worn, highly ritualized debates that have long divided historians and IR scholars. The final product would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of Melinda Rankin and Jack Shield who did the proofreading and copyediting needed to prepare the manuscript for submission. Many, many thanks! Our last word goes to the generation of young scholars whose pioneering work is now reshaping so fundamentally how we think about the relation between history and international relations. This book is dedicated to you. Mlada Bukovansky Edward Keene Christian Reus-​Smit Maja Spanu

Contents xi

List of Contributors 



PA RT I   I N T RODU C T ION

1. Modernity and Granularity in History and International Relations Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene



3

PA RT I I   R E A DI N G S

2. Origins, Histories, and the Modern International R. B. J. Walker

21

3. Historical Realism Michael C. Williams

35

4. Liberal Progressivism and International History Lucian M. Ashworth

49

5. Historical Sociology in International Relations Maïa Pal

63

6. Global History and International Relations George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich

79

7. International Relations and Intellectual History Duncan Bell

94

8. Gender, History, and International Relations Laura Sjoberg

111

9. Postcolonial Histories of International Relations Zeynep Gulsah Capan

125

10. International Relations Theory and the Practice of International History Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay

137

viii   Contents

11. Global Sources of International Thought Chen Yudan



155

PA RT I I I   P R AC T IC E S

12. State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger

173

13. Diplomacy Linda Frey and Marsha Frey

188

14. Empire Martin J. Bayly

202

15. Barbarism and Civilization Yongjin Zhang

218

16. Race and Racism Nivi manchanda

233

17. Religion, History, and International Relations Cecelia Lynch

249

18. Human Rights Andrea Paras

262

19. The Diplomacy of Genocide A. Dirk Moses

277

20. War and History in World Politics Tarak Barkawi

292

21. Nationalism James Mayall

306

22. Interpolity Law Lauren Benton

320

23. Regulating Commerce Eric Helleiner

334

2 4. Development Corinna R. Unger

348

Contents   ix

25. Governing Finance Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young

363

2 6. Revolution Eric Selbin

379



PA RT I V   L O C A L E S ( SPAC IA L , T E M P OR A L , C U LT U R A L )

27. The ‘Premodern’ World Julia Costa Lopez

395

28. Modernity and Modernities in International Relations Ayşe Zarakol

410

29. The ‘West’ in International Relations Jacinta O’hagan

424

3 0. The Eighteenth Century Daniel Gordon

439

31. The Long Nineteenth Century Quentin Bruneau

454

32. The Pre-​Colonial African State System John Anthony Pella, Jr

469

33. The ‘Americas’ in the History of International Relations Michel Gobat

483

34. ‘Asia’ in the History of International Relations David C. Kang

499

35. The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in International History Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka



513

PA RT V   M OM E N T S

36. The Fall of Constantinople Jonathan Harris

531

37. The Peace of Westphalia Andrew Phillips

544

x   Contents

38. The Seven Years’ War Karl Schweizer

560

39. The Haitian Revolution Musab Younis

573

40. The Congress of Vienna Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg

587

41. The Revolutions of 1848 Daniel M. Green

602

42. The Indian Uprising of 1857 Alexander E. Davis

617

43. The Berlin and Hague Conferences Claire Vergerio

631

44. The First World War and Versailles Duncan Kelly

646

45. Sykes–​Picot Megan Donaldson

660

46. World War Two and San Francisco Daniel Gorman

675

47. The Bandung Conference Christopher J. Lee

690

48. Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

705



PA RT V I   C ON C LU SION

49. History and the International: Time, Space, Agency, and Language Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-​Smit

723

Index

741

List of Contributors

Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Tarak Barkawi is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Martin J. Bayly is Assistant Professor in International Relations Theory in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. Jordan Branch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. Quentin Bruneau is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. Mlada Bukovansky is Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts. Zeynep Gulsah Capan is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Erfurt. Chen Yudan is Associate Professor in International Politics in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. Julia Costa Lopez is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. Alexander E. Davis is Lecturer in Political Science (International Relations) at the University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences. Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of Public International Law at University College London. Linda Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Montana. Marsha Frey is Emeritus Professor of History at Kansas State University. Michel Gobat is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Daniel Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

xii   List of Contributors Daniel Gorman is Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Daniel M. Green is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delaware. Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of London. Eric Helleiner is Professor and University Research Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. Talbot Imlay is Professor of History at the Université Laval in Quebec. Peter Jackson holds the Chair in Global Security (History) in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Edward Keene is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and Official Student of Politics at Christ Church. Duncan Kelly is Professor of Political Thought and Intellectual History in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. George Lawson is Professor of International Relations in the Coral Bell School at the Australian National University. Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and Bye-​Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Christopher J. Lee is Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California. Nivi Manchanda is Senior Lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University of London. James Mayall is Emeritus Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Jennifer Mitzen is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University. A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair of International Relations at the City College of New York. Jeppe Mulich is Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. Jacinta O’Hagan is Associate Professor in International Relations in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University.

List of Contributors    xiii Andrea Paras is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph. John Anthony Pella, Jr is a Research Fellow in the School of International Affairs at Fudan University. Benoît Pelopidas is Associate Professor of International Relations at Sciences Po (CERI). Andrew Phillips is Associate Professor of International Relations and Strategy in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Signe Predmore is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Christian Reus-​Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Jeff Rogg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel. Or Rosenboim is Director of the Centre for Modern History and Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. Karl Schweizer is Professor in the Federated Department of History at NJIT/​Rutgers University. Eric Selbin is Professor and Chair of Political Science & Holder of the Lucy King Brown Chair at Southwestern University. Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations and Director of the Gender Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. Maja Spanu is Affiliated Lecturer at University of Cambridge and Head of Research and International Affairs, Fondation de France. Jan Stockbruegger is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Copenhagen University. Chika Tonooka is a Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Corinna R. Unger is Professor of Global and Colonial History (19th and 20th centuries) at the Department of History, European University Institute. Claire Vergerio is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science. R. B. J. Walker is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Victoria and Professor Colaborador do IRI, PUC-​Rio de Janeiro. Michael C. Williams is University Research Professor of International Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Kevin L. Young is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

xiv   List of Contributors Musab Younis is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

PA RT I

I N T RODU C T ION

Chapter 1

Modernit y a nd Gr anul arit y i n H i story and Internat i ona l Rel ati ons Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene The idea for this Handbook on History and International Relations originated from two propositions. One is that we cannot make sense of how international relations work without understanding the history of how different forms of global political orders have developed; the other is that the history of the world as a whole cannot be written without taking account of the existence of an international system (or systems) on a global scale. To capture the various dimensions of this interdependence between the academic disciplines of International Relations (IR) and History, the Handbook is organized around ‘Readings’, ‘Practices’, ‘Locales’, and ‘Moments’. The first section, ‘Readings’, examines the contexts within which the encounter between historians and IR scholars takes place, with writers from both fields reflecting on different ways in which their inquiries intersect. Thereafter we look outward to see how current research is re-​shaping our understanding of how the world we live in today developed. Rather than work towards a single grand overarching narrative here—​the story of historical IR—​our goal is to show how different perspectives inform our sense of the international and global dimensions of historical becoming in a rich variety of ways. To establish coherence and points of comparison across this diversity, we have asked all our authors to focus on two key themes that give them a number of ‘hooks’ on which they can pin their analyses. We will explain these in more detail next, but it may be helpful to give a brief summary of these fundamental elements of our project here at the very beginning of this introductory chapter, to explain how they inform the arrangement of the Handbook across its various sections, so that readers can approach the many chapters presented here with a clearer understanding of how the volume is organized, and why we have chosen to arrange it that way. The first set of questions we posed for our authors is about the chronological development of different ways of ordering the international, and how to navigate between structural

4    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene change and continuity. To do this, we chose to adopt a focus on modernity as an organizing concept, or possibly critical foil. We recognize that there are potential dangers in putting this idea at the centre of our reflections on history and IR, and that some would see a fixation with modernity as a significant source of problems within mainstream IR scholarship. For example, the chapter by Ayse Zarakol on ‘Modernity and Modernities in IR’ (Chapter 28) offers the most direct engagement with this theme, and illustrates the reflective and critical manner in which we hope to handle the concept throughout the Handbook. Zarakol mounts a forceful argument that the academic discipline of IR has been powerfully influenced by a specific version of modernization theory that generates a number of dubious propositions, provocatively labelled as three distinct ‘Wrong Answers’ to the questions of what modernity is, who made it, and how it interacted with other ways of organizing social, economic and political life as it spread around the world. Zarakol contends that all of these ‘Wrong Answers’ spring from an over-​commitment to ‘the idea that “modernity” is a unique set of developments that was experienced first or only by the West’ and radically underestimates the agency of non-​Western actors. One important consequence of this is a tendency for IR theory to coalesce around a particular conception of state sovereignty, and it is clear that this risks importing a specific Western perspective into any treatment of historical IR and international history. We have therefore actively encouraged authors to imagine multiple modernities, alternative meta-​narratives, and different pathways of change that, in Zarakol’s words, will reveal ‘a more open-​minded survey of global history’. To take another example of the kind of work that this involves, consider the account of global legal history offered by Lauren Benton (Chapter 22), which rejects the narrow focus on Western sovereignty contained in Zarakol’s ‘Wrong Answers’, and highlights instead the importance of ‘interpolity zones, or regions marked by interpenetrating power and weak or uneven claims to territorial sovereignty’. We believe that thinking about the relationship between IR and History requires us to understand both traditional state-​centric answers to the question of how the distinctively modern international system came into being and developed, and the critical responses from scholars such as Benton (2010) that contest these formulations today and embrace a much wider range of forms of global political ordering. By establishing ‘modernity’ as one of the organizing themes for the Handbook, we hope both to acknowledge its central significance in the development of historical IR, and to expose it to radical scrutiny as a limiting factor on our ability to comprehend the complexity of how the international has developed within a global context. The second theme tries to unlock the potential for generating fresh insights by adopting different framings in geographical space, historical time, and levels of both agency and structure, which we articulate through the idea of granularity. The sections on ‘Practices’, ‘Locales’, and ‘Moments’ are all intended to offer opportunities either to step back to contemplate the very broadest kind of analysis, or to zoom in on the personal and micro-​political aspects of the day-​to-​day. An example of the former is Linda and Marsha Frey’s chapter on the practice of diplomacy (Chapter 13), which gives a sweeping survey that runs from the earliest periods of recorded history up to the twentieth century in what one might call the ‘grand manner’ of diplomatic history; whereas for the latter, one could look at Christopher Lee’s analysis of the Bandung Conference (Chapter 47) which homes in on the specific details of a particular moment, and uses them as a way to think about the wider significance of this precise event, and the persistent myths that flowed from it. These two chapters offer almost polar opposites

Modernity and Granularity in History    5 of the different scale on which the encounter between IR and History might be envisaged. In between, our authors adopt a host of different perspectives. Several chapters—​Eric Selbin’s on ‘Revolution’ (Chapter 26), for example—​aim to show how understandings of specific phenomena can shuttle back and forth between micro-​and macro-​perspectives. It is fair to say that ‘Practices’ invites the longue durée, whereas the examination of ‘Moments’ inevitably brings one up close to the personal and the immediate. However, several of our authors break up this expectation. To take just one example, Musab Younis’s fascinating study of the Haitian Revolution (Chapter 39) not only dives into the details of what this moment represents as a specific event within the historical development of the international politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also uses it as a stimulus to expose ‘the limitations of the very categories we use to measure significance and meaning when we study the international’, and concludes by suggesting how an intellectual history of the Haitian revolutionaries’ own self-​understandings could be the basis for an alternative perspective on the international grounded in ‘anticolonial and postcolonial cultural nationalism.’ At the same time, somewhat more cautiously, Megan Donaldson’s analysis of the Sykes–​Picot agreement of 1916 (Chapter 45) warns about how the question of scale opened up by this granularity theme raises the possibility that something may be lost as we move from one perspective to another, how we can see very different things from different vantage points, and how indeed some of these may be illusory. The section on ‘Locales’ stands, as it were, in between the opposite ends of the spectrum of granularity, and each chapter here gives its author an opportunity to examine the categories that we frequently, and often unthinkingly, use to organize discrete subject areas for thinking about historical IR. We think two of these are particularly significant: periodization and regionalization. Historians and IR scholars tend to break their subject matter up either into delimited chunks of time (e.g. the ‘early modern’ period, the ‘long nineteenth century’), or into distinct geographical spaces (e.g. the idea of regional international systems in Asia or Africa). There is a sense in which these categorizations would not exist, or be so popular, if they did not capture something important and valuable, and so our purpose is not simply to criticize or dismiss these as organizing devices for scholarship. Many of the chapters here, such as Quentin Bruneau’s study of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (Chapter 31), broadly work within this periodization, presenting current scholarship on how it is conceived in History and IR, and sometimes (as in Bruneau’s case) offering novel interpretive insights into how we should understand it and its place within the wider set of stories of historical IR. Nevertheless, several chapters, such as Zarakol’s chapter on modernity discussed above, or Julia Costa Lopez’s account of the ‘pre-​modern’ world (Chapter 27), seek to unsettle these conventional ways of carving up the huge expanse of historical time and geographic space that we are operating within. As Costa Lopez warns, for example, ‘approaching the premodern with periodization-​derived preconceptions about its significance prevents us from doing anything but confirming our own prejudices—​whatever those may be’. Our choice of specific ‘Locales’, ‘Practices’, and ‘Moments’ to include in the volume has been guided by our desire both to inform the reader of conventional wisdoms about historical IR, and to challenge these or open up new vistas. For example, among our ‘Locales’ we have a chapter not on the geographical space of Europe as such but on the imaginary of the ‘West’, which (as Jacinta O’Hagan shows in Chapter 29) is the subject of multiple narratives that depict it as variously ‘civilizational’, ‘liberal’, and ‘fragmenting’. This highlights the way that we do not simply take regional classifications as starting points for analysis,

6    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene but as socially constructed entities whose meaning needs to be interrogated. As O’Hagan remarks, the ‘West’ is not so much a geographically designated part of the world, but rather it constitutes ‘an imagined community that has acted as a strategic and normative reference point for the constitution of agency and identities in international relations’. This clearly connects with and amplifies Zarakol’s point discussed previously, where the understanding of ‘modernity’ in much IR and historical scholarship has traditionally been a vehicle for privileging one view of the ‘Western’ experience of global political ordering at the expense of alternative perspectives. In a similarly critical vein, while our list of ‘Moments’ acknowledges some that would feature prominently in any textbook, such as the Peace of Westphalia (even if, as Andrew Phillips explains in Chapter 37, much of the significance of this moment may be misconceived), we have deliberately tried not to make this just a collection of canonically recognized turning points. Instead, within the obvious limitations in terms of the number of ‘Moments’ we can possibly cover, we have tried to include some where we think that there is a disappointing absence of scholarly connections between historians and IR scholars, such as Dan Green’s examination of the European revolutions of 1848 (Chapter 41). Moreover, mindful of the importance of non-​Western agency, we especially want to take the reader to places around the world that might have been missed by the Eurocentric gaze of traditional narratives: we start this section with Jonathan Harris’s study of arguably one of the most globally momentous moments in the shaping of the modern world, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (Chapter 36), and carry this forward in chapters such as Younis’s examination of the Haitian Revolution mentioned previously. Of course, we cannot expect these editorial choices alone to redress the balance of what has, or has not, traditionally been included in the scope of historical IR, but we hope that they will offer a provocation that opens possibilities for new research on times, places, and phenomena that have not received the attention or interpretive weight that they deserve.

The Encounter between History and International Relations Before we examine some further, deeper aspects of these two themes of modernity and granularity that run throughout the Handbook, we should acknowledge that, in pursuing them, we are building on well-​established traditions of scholarship in both the academic disciplines of IR and History. The two have long been intertwined. From its own side, IR has always been, and continues to be, profoundly influenced by History. One could argue that many, perhaps even most, of the earliest people who are now recalled as ‘IR theorists’ were historians by training or inclination: for instance, several of the key figures in the formative period of the IR discipline—​such as Raymond Aron, E. H. Carr, and Arnold Toynbee—​had close links to History in terms of their academic activities. This interest in the history of the international system has been carried forward through the development of the field in the later-​twentieth century by groups such as the ‘English School of International Relations Theory’ (Navari and Green 2014; and see Wight 1977; Bull and Watson 1984; Watson 1992), and a great deal of more recent work across a wide range of IR theory draws inspiration

Modernity and Granularity in History    7 from historiographical innovations: for example, Duncan Bell shows in Chapter 7 how the field of international intellectual history has evolved under the influence of methodological developments such as contextualist approaches to the history of thought; while Chen Yudan applies a similar perspective to the way in which global history impacts on our understanding of the historical sources of international political thought (Chapter 11). Admittedly, within the last four or five decades many scholars working within what is often described as the mainstream of IR have come to conceive of the field as an ‘American Social Science’ (Hoffmann 1977; see also Crawford and Jarvis 2001), understanding it as an inquiry that is primarily concerned with identifying and explaining timeless recurring patterns of interaction between sovereign states (Waltz 1979). This view of how scholarship should proceed is often expressed rather combatively, not only as an alternative to, but as a rejection of more historical or normative approaches (for the origins of such controversies, see Singer 1969 and Bull 1969). Nevertheless, even scholars working within this positivist and scientific self-​understanding cannot avoid intrinsically historical questions about when and how modern states came into being, the extent to which their interactions really do display strong continuities over time, and the timing and character of major changes in the institutions and structure of the international system: history is, at the very least, a source of data, and often plays a much larger role than that (Elman and Elman 2001 is a good survey). An historical consciousness informs many fundamental works in IR theory (for example, Waltz 1959; Levy 1983; Gilpin 1984; Ruggie 1998; Wagner 2007), and is evident even in some supposedly ‘ahistorical’ theories of neorealism (e.g., Fischer 1992, although criticised for its interpretation of history by Hall and Kratochwil 1993). As Maïa Pal shows in Chapter 5, for those focusing more on economic structures and processes, the history of modern capitalism and its relationship to socialism inevitably looms large from both a historical materialist standpoint and in historical sociology more generally; while Martin Bayly’s chapter on ‘Empire’ (Chapter 14) shows how this remains a relevant unit of analysis despite the Eurocentric insistence on the primacy of sovereignty, and even after the waves of decolonization of the 1950s and 60s. Scholars today very often combine original historical research with new theoretical trends in the study of IR (for example, Teschke 2003; Bell 2007; Fazal 2007; Nexon 2009; Zarakol 2011; MacDonald 2014; Phillips and Sharman 2015; Shilliam 2015; Acharya and Buzan 2019; Owens and Rietzler 2021). The ‘International History’ section is a growing element of the field’s major professional body, the International Studies Association. The relationship between History and IR is not a one-​way street where the latter feeds off the former. Although less frequently or explicitly acknowledged, the discipline of History has been influenced by trends in the social sciences, including theoretical innovations by IR scholars. Compare, for example, two seminal works in the prestigious Oxford History of Modern Europe series by A. J. P. Taylor (1954) and Paul Schroeder (1994). The two books may cover contiguous historical periods, but they are a distance apart in terms of the theoretical perspectives and assumptions that underpin them. Taylor’s work is very much a creature of the 1950s, anchored in a straightforward, even trite, version of realism, whereas the intervening 40 years have given Schroeder a wealth of alternative insights into the dynamics of relations between states, many of which are derived from more recent, and arguably more sophisticated variants of realist thought, but extending to entirely different theoretical perspectives such as more social constructionist readings of IR as well. Beyond these intramural developments characteristic of the ongoing dialogue between History and IR, significant critical challengers are pushing for major reorientation of both

8    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene disciplines. As George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich show in their analysis of ‘Global History and IR’ (Chapter 6), over the last few decades there have been repeated surges of interest in the writing of ‘world’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global histories’ that deliberately attempt to break free from the strait-​jackets imposed by nationalist historiography, and offer intriguing suggestions of links to the study of IR, but often also problematizing the state-​centrism that colors much work in this area (for example, Bayly 2004; Clavin 2005; Mazlish 2006; Burbank and Cooper 2011; Osterhammel 2014; Conrad 2016). Nivi Manchanda’s study of ‘Race and Racism’ (Chapter 16), or Laura Sjoberg on ‘Gender, History and IR’ (Chapter 8), show how such historical studies are often part of efforts to reorient not just units of analysis but entire conceptual vocabularies to account for previously excluded, subaltern voices (e.g. Fischer 2004; Getachew 2019; Pham and Shilliam 2016). Theoretical orientations such as historical materialism, historical institutionalism, post-​structuralism, and postcolonialism have shaped and reshaped how history is studied, and whose history ought to be studied: as well as Pal’s chapter on historical sociology here, one could also point to Zeynep Gulsah Capan’s study of postcolonial histories and their place in IR (Chapter 9). Critical assessments regarding what constitutes a ‘source’ and an ‘archive’, such as the powerful challenge posed by the scholar (in an anthropology department no less) Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (1995) and taken up by those seeking to uncover and challenge the persistence of white supremacy in academia, have begun to transform the way in which History is practiced. This in turn destabilizes how scholars view the workings of the ‘international system’, and indeed how they understand the very meaning and signification of that term and associated ideas within the IR field (see, for instance, Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015; Spruyt 2020). Such critiques reveal that interdisciplinary entanglements may just as easily reify and replicate persistent patterns of exclusion and omission as move either or both disciplines forward. For example, while the members of the ‘English school’ are often cast as defenders of an historical approach to IR, the growing challenges to their historiography regarding the so-​called ‘expansion of international society’ (Bull and Watson 1984) as a narrative of progressive evolution of the international system suggest that any narrative framing of historical evidence for theoretical purposes, or generation of theoretical insights from historical narrations, may become fodder for deep critiques of the omissions and silences thus facilitated (Keene 2014; Howland 2016; Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017). Moreover, during a time of political upheaval in what had long been considered the relatively stable ‘West’, the study of History itself has become intensely politicized and subject to backlash, with historical monuments sometimes being literally pushed off their pedestals even as people band together to offer new defenses of old myths, all in a climate of intense pressure on existing democratic and semi-​democratic institutions. The space that brings IR and History together is thus not simply a place for collaborative mutual learning, but can be a battlefield where bitterly opposed intellectual commitments confront one another. What remains clear in all this turmoil is that it is inadequate to reify History and IR as independent fields of enquiry, each of which has its own proprietary terrain, with a set of questions, issues, and methods that belong to it exclusively. These are not closed guilds, much as they may at times seem that way to scholars struggling to articulate new ideas in a climate where secure academic positions are few and the weight of expectations often induces conformity with established practice, and where professional opportunities can be jealously guarded for students with a degree in the ‘right’ subject. It is thus with a certain humility and awareness of the contentiousness of our analytical categories, as well as of

Modernity and Granularity in History    9 the power dynamics involved in articulating both historical and theoretical agendas, that this volume has sought to bring together writers from both History and IR. This awareness also informs our editorial decision to ask them to orient their contributions according to the two very broad organizing themes or concepts that we outlined at the beginning of this Introduction: modernity and granularity. We want to conclude these introductory remarks by explaining in more detail why we think these offer fertile sources of questions shared across the disciplines, and give the chance to integrate them in productive ways without, we hope, either ignoring what long traditions of scholarship can provide, or closing off the potential for radical critique.

Modernity ‘Modernity’ is an almost inescapable category for imagining historical time, especially with its rich variety of adjectival modifiers, ‘pre’, ‘early’, ‘high’, ‘late’, ‘post’, and so on. One might think of the similar role that ‘democracy with adjectives’ plays in organizing contemporary political science (Collier and Levitsky 1997), and it is not coincidental that the concept of ‘capitalism’ can be adapted in much the same ways. Yet, perhaps in part because of its ubiquity, modernity will always be a moving target, and a contested one. The use of the term in ordinary language often serves to distinguish what is distinctively new in the ‘present’ in relation to what was the ‘past’. But precisely because of this—​because human beings draw such distinctions with respect to everything from fashion to architecture to ideology to modes of political and economic organization—​the question of modernity constitutes a productive forum for historians and IR scholars, among others (and there is much to be said for broader cross-​fertilization than just History and IR; many contributions in this volume are more interdisciplinary than that if one begins to look closely at sources). As we noted at the beginning of the Introduction, and in our brief discussion of Ayse Zarakol’s contribution to this volume on this specific topic (Chapter 28), we do not intend modernity to imply a single linear narrative that is to be imposed on a given topic. We do not insist that modernity is the fiscal-​military or bureaucratic state, the market, property, or some such form of social or political organization, and that the question of modernity requires us simply to track the emergence of one or a few of these at different times in different parts of the world. On the contrary, while acknowledging that these are significant themes, we see modernity as presenting a series of puzzles and provocations that can be taken as an invitation to open-​ended intellectual inquiry, and even playfulness. How have different people conceptualized what it means to be ‘modern’? Against what do we distinguish it, what lies outside of the modern: the ancient? The medieval? The primitive? The traditional? The contemporary? The non-​Western? How do we time the modern; and where and in what configuration of forces do we locate the builders of modernity? Whose modernity are we analysing, and are those who resist or are different merely peripheral, or left out of modernity altogether? What does it take to opt out of modernity, if that is even possible? To the extent that intellectual historians have identified modernity with something like the ‘Enlightenment’, what is the relationship between the development of ideas and culture on the one hand, and the development and maturation of social, political, and economic structures and practices on the other? What is at stake in the question of whether we should

10    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene consider modernity as a single overall phenomenon or set of structures, or whether in the postcolonial moment we need to consider ‘multiple modernities’? The question of what modernity is and what it does to our understanding of the international thus strikes us as an interesting way to integrate intellectual and political histories, and to highlight common preoccupations as well as salient differences between the disciplines of IR and History. Although some IR scholars may set History aside in their preoccupation with what they take to be the timeless condition of anarchy, and in some cases those who model the subject in terms of rational actors with given sets of interests opt to bracket questions about the historical development of such interests, we are hardly alone in arguing that a productive way to comprehend IR is in terms of the historical development of the forms of actors, institutions, modes of production, and both strategic and normative principles and practices with which we live today (for example, Rosenberg 1994). Such a focus does not neglect but indeed raises interesting questions about the continuity of social forms through time, considering whether a history should look like an evolutionary narrative or something more akin to genealogies of contemporary phenomena, such as nation-​states or security dilemmas. But clearly a focus on the historical development of, say, modern statehood, also raises questions about change, in the sense of the identification of moments of profound discontinuity or transformation. How did the international order that we live in come to be, and what is distinctive about it in comparison with ways of conducting ‘international relations’ outside the scope of what is identified as modernity? Timing modernity involves not only looking at continuities and distinctions between ‘past’ and ‘present’, and hence the identification of the ‘pre-​modern’, as in Costa Lopez’s chapter mentioned previously; articulations of ‘the modern’ entail visions of a future as well. Visions of a fully modernized or even post-​modern future extrapolate from readings of how certain pasts generated a given present, and how such trends bode for future configurations of world politics. For example, a prominent theme in Lucien Ashworth’s chapter on ‘Liberal Progressivism and International History’ (Chapter 4), and in Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka’s study of how the specific terms of the ‘international’ and ‘the global’ were re-​ imagined in the twentieth century (Chapter 35), is how a liberal reading of international history envisions a future populated by liberal democratic states linked together by shared legal constraints on the use of force as well as by more or less freely circulating commercial and financial flows. And, as demonstrated in key works focusing on imperialism and postcolonial world politics, historical inquiry serves to shape not only how we narrate the past; a particular narration of the past may constitute a critical intervention in present-​day politics, as well as articulating a specific vision of the future (for example, Scott 2004; Wilder 2015; Getachew 2019; Spruyt 2020). Such interventions remind students of international politics that visions of the future constitute fodder for critical reinterpretation as the kinds of questions we ask about contemporary world politics change. Far from being only about ‘the past’, therefore, readings of history speak to the present and also shape visions of the future. As they are played out in the contemporary discipline, questions about timing modernity in IR often focus on how to pin-​point the most significant discontinuities that shaped the ‘modern’ international system in the form of what Barry Buzan and George Lawson have called ‘benchmark dates’ (Buzan and Lawson 2014). In the past these debates were often quite open, with scholars looking back to events such as the Council of Constance or the French intervention in the Italian wars in 1494 (which supposedly spread ideas about raison d’etat and balance of power around Europe). However, R. B. J. Walker’s analysis of ‘origin

Modernity and Granularity in History    11 myths’ in the IR discipline (Chapter 2) shows how in more recent years the IR field has coalesced around a (still-​controversial) origin story pivoted on the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. While we think it is worthwhile to look in detail at this specific moment, as Andrew Phillips does in Chapter 37, neither we nor Phillips want to subscribe to an over-​simplified, and frankly somewhat dubious, story about the ‘Westphalian moment’ as the key turning-​ point when a principle of territorial sovereignty was first established as the basis of the modern form of world order (see Keene 2002; Teschke 2003; Beaulac 2004). Our selection of ‘Moments’ in Part 4 of the Handbook is not an attempt to present a list of possible candidate benchmark dates, but is intended in part to allow opportunities to reflect on different key instances of discontinuity that might feature in such a story, and so to explore alternatives to the Westphalian starting point. Putting the historical discontinuities of modernity, rather than the supposedly timeless logic of anarchy, at the heart of our enquiry also raises the question of where the international system originated. Interwoven with chronological questions about periodization are geographical questions about social networks and connections that have traditionally been—​ but are no longer—​pushed aside by an often silent assumption of Eurocentrism (the locus classicus for these discussions is Wight 1977, c­ hapters 4 and 5; see also Bentley 1996). Where there once may have been a general consensus about modernity originating in Europe with the European states-​system, research in recent decades has shaken this consensus and brought some of its assumptions and omissions under scrutiny. At the very least, the idea of a European system as somehow self-​contained demonstrates an inexcusable neglect of the central role of imperial expansion and colonization projects as contributors to Europe’s development. There may be no consensus on when the ‘modern’ international system began, nor how far it has spread, nor indeed whether some regions have already passed through to the ‘post-​modern,’ or followed some different path altogether. Modernity therefore has the advantage of offering a common frame of reference without closing off debates about its geographic or temporal boundaries, nor indeed about what forms of political order ought to be associated with it. We can thus engage questions about the shift from the medieval to the modern international system; or, as David Kang does in the chapter on ‘ “Asia” in the History of IR’ (Chapter 34), about the question of ‘modernization’ in Asia, for example, without presupposing that we already know the answers. We can inquire as to the origin, transmission, and circulation of modernity’s core concepts and practices without assuming that modernity belongs to a particular place (Europe) or even time (for example Hobson 2004). While modernity must have some boundaries to render it a coherent organizational concept, we do not presume a priori agreement on where those boundaries are located, either in space or time. The contributions to this volume offer a diversity of ways by which modernity may be timed and placed, and especially in Part 3 on ‘Locales’ we have encouraged our authors to think about the concept from the perspective of different regions or parts of the world, and historical periods (themselves, we acknowledge, often socially constructed artifacts of modernity). Authority to determine and claim modernity can itself be contested, as can the contours of what may be termed modern and what ‘backward’. As Yongjin Zhang shows, one of the main ways in which modern forms of empire rationalized their exception to the principle of the recognition of territorial sovereignty was precisely in terms of a heavily loaded distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ (Chapter 15). Another key example of such

12    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene contestation is found in the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and its allies on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other (in Chapters 46–​48 by Daniel Gorman, Christopher Lee, and Benoit Pelopidas and Ned Lebow, respectively). Both superpowers competed in modernizing their postwar industrial societies, and to attract allies via the power of their example as well as the more direct promise of arms and aid. This is an example of overtly contested modernity, describable within a familiar narrative of competing ideologies of communism and capitalism. More recently, the growth of China and India into great powers with hegemonic aspirations and extensive commercial and patronage networks destabilizes older categories used to classify economic and political systems, so that ideas of democracy and socialism once associated with the ‘West’ or with the Soviet bloc are no longer the only models available for leaders seeking to revolutionize or ‘develop’ their societies. Indeed as Corinna Unger makes clear in Chapter 24, the very meaning of development is one site of significant contestation within existing international institutions, and it has in fact been so contested for far longer than normally acknowledged. To focus on modernity is to import these contestations and political struggles into the heart of our analytical framework. These struggles have different agents and indeed scales of agency, as well as different scopes, which brings us to our second organizing theme for the volume.

Granularity If asking the question of modernity evokes both spatial and temporal explanatory questions and debates, the second theme orienting this volume zeroes in on questions of scope, scale, and closeness of association when classifying or bundling phenomena together in posited relationships. We have already implicitly made a number of assumptions along these lines by repeatedly referring to the concept of an ‘international system’, as if that was an easy thing to pluck out from the messy complexity of global interactions between people and institutions (see, for instance, Butcher and Griffiths 2015, and 2017). What we might call the granularity problematique arises from the tension between the richness, specificity, and individuality of a social phenomenon within its immediate chronological and geographical context on the one hand, and the desire to tease out general patterns and shifts across the longue durée and the global on the other. Nor does this issue arise only at the very generalized level of the system as a whole. How are ‘units of analysis’ determined in IR theorizing? What are the consequences of choosing to focus on sovereign states rather than, say, economic classes or individuals? Do cycles of the rise and fall of hegemonic powers constitute a pattern such that when bundled together and compared, knowledge of such cycles advances our understanding of the past and expectations about similar patterns being repeated in the future? The very delimitation of what constitutes a ‘case’ is a granular choice. With fewer discursive associations than modernity (at least within the social sciences and humanities), granularity as we envision the term evokes a bundle of issues clustered around problems of scope and scale, and closeness of association when classifying phenomena. From an amateur’s point of view the way the concept of granularity works in quantum mechanics has to do with how energy ‘clumps’ rather than smoothly traveling or dissipating, and we find it useful to stretch for something like this analogy when asking our authors to

Modernity and Granularity in History    13 reflect on how they are arranging their facts or data; how they are ‘casing’ their subjects and objects of study (Rovelli 2021; Wendt 2015). How we articulate the objects and subjects, the boundaries we draw around them, the classifications delimiting what they are not—​these analytical choices generate the granularity of a given study. The question of granularity is clearly about issues of scope and method, but is not simply about a clash between the interests or methods of the historian and those of the social scientist: some of the latter concern themselves with fairly localized, ‘puzzle-​driven’ or at best ‘mid-​range’ theorizing, while some historians operate at the grandest levels of ‘global histories’ that stretch across centuries. Whatever their disciplinary labels, scholars always have to choose where to operate on a spectrum that runs from the millennium to the moment, and from the global to the local. Asking historians and IR scholars to consider how they approach the question of granularity opens up fault-​lines within both fields, and sometimes unites certain IR theorists and historians against alternative cross-​disciplinary coalitions. For example, Dirk Moses’s chapter on the ‘Diplomacy of Genocide’ in the ‘Practices’ section (Chapter 19) offers a fascinating insight into the political aspects of this in terms of its implications for how specific genocides and specific interventions have been handled, and informs controversies around these questions to the present. Considered in terms of methodological debates within IR narrowly conceived, granularity may recall the so-​called ‘levels of analysis’ problem in terms of whether explanatory theories base themselves on the systemic, state or individual level in terms of locating key causal phenomena (Singer 1961). However, we prefer the term granularity because it offers the possibility of a broader array of perspectives than just three or four ‘levels.’ Whereas the term ‘level’ implies a plane, and levels of analysis categorizes explanatory schemas based on which ‘plane’ they locate an independent variable, the notion of granularity is more topographically diverse, and implies that observing a phenomenon may entail an array of focal points revealing either finer or coarser aspects of multi-​dimensional systems and constituent parts. For example, as noted previously, Eric Selbin’s chapter plays with the granularity issue to interrogate multiple possible focal points for studying revolutions, while Megan Donaldson’s also examines the trade-​offs involved. As such, granularity has the potential to encompass the standard methodological questions about choice of independent and dependent variables, but goes beyond this to embrace approaches which eschew causal analysis altogether in favour of other methods such as thick description, analytical narratives, or constructivist studies of constitution of social phenomena. It can also encompass the type of distinctions made in economics between micro-​and macro-​level phenomena, without limiting the choice to a binary. We think of granularity as encompassing questions of texture, of focus, and of scale. As with many methodological choices, choice of focus and of scale is seldom a matter of right or wrong, but rather fitness to the question at hand. The focus one adopts, whether coarser or finer-​grained, allows one to see different aspects of a phenomenon, and thus offers quite different kinds of knowledge and insight. A work may draw our attention to the significance of a particular century for shaping international order, as Buzan and Lawson have recently done, or it may argue for a closer look at the geographical location of the origins of practices of humanitarian intervention, as embodied in Davide Rodongo’s study of the Ottoman Empire (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Rodongo 2012). Within the choice of time and place are nested further choices about which institutions, actors and practices are worthy of analysis; as we noted above in Megan Donaldson’s chapter on the Sykes–​Picot Agreement, it is

14    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene also a question of perspective, and especially whose perspective we are taking up at any one moment. States or foreign policy bureaucracies or particular foreign ministers; trade unions or their individual organizers or the ideas which animate them; transport routes or supply chains or the microbes transmitted along these: the range of possible scales and foci is vast. The theme of granularity thus raises a broad set of questions regarding methodologies and degrees of detail required to generate productive explanations and/​or narratives. For example, structural realism offers an entirely different granularity in terms of how it conceives of structure than does classical realism (the latter tending to include actual human personalities), the English School, historical materialism, or historical institutionalism. And granularity is not just a question of size and scope, it is also a question of specification of the appropriate unit of analysis, be it state, nation, class, network, individual, or genome. Just as realists are found deploying a range of granularities from systemic to individual, so too can rational choice scholars and game theorists vary in their specification of the units of analysis and the relevant field of ‘play’. A game in which the players are individual policy makers will have a different granularity than one in which the players are bureaucratic agencies within states, states themselves, corporations, or financial networks. The granularity problem also intersects with the modernity problem in interesting ways. For example, for scholars engaging the debate on change in the international system, and which sorts of developments count as changes ‘of ’ system rather than changes ‘within’ the system, the issue of granularity will loom quite large, as it involves asking scholars to specify their ontological focus and commitment: are they studying states, systems of states, production and communication networks, epistemic communities, supply chains, inter-​personal connections among elites or activists, or cultural networks? Broadly framing these issues in terms of granularity (rather than levels of analysis) may allow for a more ecumenical approach as to what constitutes an object of study. For example, networks and flows may be included along with systems, states, classes, individuals or empires, and these at different ‘granularities’—​from circulation of ideas among individuals to historical changes in broad institutional structures. As with modernity, the granularity problematique is something that should engage both IR scholars and historians, and so has the potential for fruitful collaboration. Another aspect of the intersection between modernity and granularity, then, is that different conceptions of change rest on different perceptions of the locus and scale of the phenomena which trigger significant global change: working beyond the classic butterfly wings rendition of this problem, one can think of arguments identifying climactic or other types of ecosystem sources of change, familiar international systemic or geopolitical phenomena such as balance of power dynamics and hegemonic cycles, domestic political sources of international change such as revolutions, ideological sources of change such as the Enlightenment or postcolonialism, individual human, even genetic, neurological, microbiological, and quantum phenomena have been evoked as sources of either continuity or transformation in the study of IR (Wendt 2015). So the granularity question serves as a productive way to cut into the question of the scale and scope of continuities and transformations in international politics, just as modernity serves as a way to delimit the character of those continuities and transformations. These choices recur throughout the book, but there are some places where they come particularly clearly into focus. In Part 2 on ‘Practices’, for example, we have deliberately invoked the notion of a ‘practice turn’ in social theory and IR (Schatzki 1996; Adler and Pouliot 2011).

Modernity and Granularity in History    15 On the one hand, reflection on concepts and practices shows how the discursive frames we bring to bear on international relations are themselves historically constructed and variable. On the other, studying the history of key concepts and practices illustrates how ways of conducting international relations—​such as making war and peace, regulating commerce, or participating in international organizations—​have changed over time as practitioners adopt new understandings of what it means to perform their roles competently. Both kinds of reflections invite further exploration of appropriate granularities as applied to a specific concept or practice. What level of structural detail is required to characterize whether an entity counts as sovereign? Are the practices of diplomacy best understood by zeroing in on the activities of a Talleyrand, or should one rather study diplomacy as an institution? We do not expect definitive answers to such questions, but rather use them to invite the chapter authors to communicate the rationales behind their methodological criteria and their chosen focal points.

Bringing History and International Relations Together As we have already noted, the academic fields of History and IR have long been intertwined with one another. Despite tendencies (on both sides) to try to separate them by stressing their different epistemological and methodological orientations as belonging to the Humanities and Social Sciences respectively, they continue to enjoy a close relationship. We believe that the scholars whose work is collected in this volume—​some of whom would probably self-​identify as historians, some as IR scholars—​offer strong evidence that this engagement remains fruitful. One of the principal purposes of this volume is to introduce readers to this rich, and still unfolding, field of enquiry, especially students who are perhaps encountering historical IR for the first time. We have also endeavoured, however, to set out some of the key questions and challenges that thinking about both history and IR together poses for the student or the researcher. In part, we want to inform the reader by providing examples of cutting-​edge work across a wide range of different subject areas, but at the same time we aim to stimulate fresh enquiry by pointing to the issues that remain open to new investigations in what is essentially an unending intellectual task. The questions of periodization, discontinuity, and pathways of change opened up by the theme of modernity, and of scope, scale, and perspective posed by the granularity theme, not only provide a device with which to establish some coherence across the volume, but are also, we hope, bridges across which people studying History and IR can connect these two fields and strengthen their mutual entanglement. There remains much to be discovered here, and we hope that the Handbook will demonstrate how scholars currently engaged in this kind of enquiry are staking out new terrain for both academic fields. Much of this effort in contemporary historical IR is devoted to looking beyond the traditional narrative centred on the specific Western experience of global political ordering in terms of a system of territorially defined sovereign states, gradually working out and universalizing a modus vivendi among themselves based on norms and institutions such as sovereign equality, balance of power, non-​intervention, consent-​based positive international law, or permanent residential diplomacy. In the first place, this Handbook shows very clearly

16    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene that this is only part of a much larger set of stories that we can tell about change and continuity in global political order; that many of these do not refer back to a core norm of territorial state sovereignty; and that this is not even an adequate version of what international relations looked like in the ‘West’, let alone the varieties that exist beyond that ‘imagined community’. The new research presented here shows how scholars are taking on the exciting opportunities offered by these new fields of enquiry. Furthermore, although our focus on historical IR inevitably draws us back towards the past, the Handbook urges the reader to use this perspective to re-​interpret the present. In many commentaries on current affairs, there is a persistent tendency to suppose that phenomena such as globalization, or the decentring of Western states such as the US as the dominant actors in global politics, are unprecedented novelties. Very often, this assumption is merely the result of a too-​narrow historical understanding of modern international order in terms of territorial state sovereignty. As many of the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, to reflect on the history of specific aspects of international relations, and the different ways in which international relations have shaped global history, is not to trap oneself in the past; it liberates us to ask new questions and achieve new understandings of the world we live in today, and so envision new possibilities for action within it.

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18    Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene Phillips, A. and Sharman, J. C. 2015. International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodongo, D. 2012. Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire 1815–​ 1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenberg, J. 1994. ‘The International Imagination: IR Theory and “Classic Social Analysis”’, Millennium 23(1): 85–​108. Rovelli, C. 2021. Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, translated by E. Serge and S. Carnell. New York, NY: Riverhead. Ruggie, J. G. 1998. Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization. London: Routledge. Schatzki, T. 1996. Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, B. 1998. The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schroeder, P. 1994. The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–​1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, D. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. Shilliam, R. 2015. The Black Pacific: Anti-​ London: Bloomsbury. Singer, J. D. 1961. ‘The Level-​of-​Analysis Problem in International Relations’. World Politics 14(1): 77–​92. Singer, J. D. 1969. ‘The Incomplete Theorist: Insight Without Evidence’. In Contending Approaches to International Politics, eds. K. Knorr and J. Rosenau, 62–​86, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spruyt, H. 2020. The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A. J. P. 1954. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–​1918. Oxford: Oxford Press. Teschke, B. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso. Trouillot, M.-​R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Vitalis, R. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wagner, R. H. 2007. War and the State: The Theory of International Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Waltz, K. 1959. Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: Random House. Watson, A. 1992. The Evolution of International Society. London: Routledge. Wendt, A. 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wight, M. 1977. Systems of States. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Wilder, G. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zarakol, A. 2011. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PA RT I I

R E A DI N G S

chapter 2

Origins, Hi stori e s , and the Mode rn Internati ona l R. B. J. Walker Immanuel Kant once defined history as the description of everything in time, the complement to geography as the description of everything in space. Theorists of international relations often like to think of themselves as specialists in the politics of the entire world, in both space and time. Both have ambitions beyond description, though scholarship on international relations has been especially attracted to the explanatory claims of the modern social sciences. Moreover, prevailing understandings of both history and international relations are now subject to challenge and revision in ways that necessarily implicate each other. So there are many reasons why conversations between these two heterogeneous modes of scholarship can be awkward. I explore this awkwardness in two closely related contexts: first, how the study of international relations tends to differentiate itself from historical analysis while still grounding itself in specific accounts of history; second, different claims about the origins of the modern international system, a problem shared by both historians and theorists of international relations. I focus on the work of a single historian who also played a role in shaping the study of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline, especially in the UK: Martin Wight. Wight, I suggest, opens out much that has been at stake in contested claims about the origins of the modern international system as well as in the politics of claims about origins more generally.

International/​History Historians often encounter literatures on international relations as a field controlling its understanding of history through two familiar strategies. In one, historical specificities are minimized, and sins of anachronism indulged in order to distil knowledge about structural forms, especially systemic relations and balances of power among states. In this way, some

22    R. B. J. Walker things—​sovereignty, states, power, human nature, politics, reality—​achieve an almost miraculous state of continuity across space and time, whether by reification or essentialization. Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes then seem to know what we think we know now and do so through similar practices of knowing. This sustains hopes for replicable knowledge, comparisons across a common ground, and status as a properly modern social science among other social sciences. In the other, temporal contingencies are controlled through some form of linear or developmental history. Instead of analysis on an atemporal ground of the present, we find accounts of the development of Europe and then the rest of the world in which the modern international system, like modernity more generally, appears as the destination of all prior histories. These strategies for controlling claims about history have their own long and complicated history and politics. They enable selective historical references to obscure both many histories and the contested character of all historical analysis. Despite apparent differences they have much in common, including philosophical and theological distinctions between being and becoming, transcendental eternity and immanent contingency, form and substance, and spatiality and temporality. They share two broad tendencies. One is the narrative logic in which unity is both distinguished from and privileged over diversity: a logic sometimes traced to Aristotle and often expressed as the metaphorical and historical fate of masters and slaves. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history often appears in discussions of this point, often by contrast with both Kantian antinomies and Nietzschean genealogies. The other is a distinction between those included within the presumed struggle between masters and slaves, or singularities and pluralities, and those left somewhere and sometime beyond. Anthropologists, postcolonial critics, and advocates for a world history have all commented on this. Historians rightly complain about overgeneralization across the social sciences and have also engaged in philosophical disputes about universalizing and historicizing claims to knowledge. On the other hand, even to refer to a system of states or an international ordering of some kind is to express desires to understand systematic patterns and structural determinations. Indeed, the need for broad generalizations and systemic causalities is precisely the point of scholarship that seeks to engage more than phenomena, specificities, contingencies, actions, intentions, and agencies: to examine structural forms and systemic forces on perhaps the largest scale available to the modern sciences of humanity. Furthermore, the modern international system is not just a possible object for yet another academic discipline. To the contrary, many difficulties have been generated by the degree to which knowledge claims about it have been shaped within specific academic institutions of political or social science within specific national cultures within specific statist jurisdictions, even though disciplines, nationalisms, and states already work within and on terms enabled by the international system. Indeed, methodological internationalism may be an even more pervasive though widely ignored problem for contemporary political analysis of all kinds than its better-​known nationalist twin. The modern international system works as a systematic and sometimes highly deterministic ordering of inclusions and exclusions with its own externality or limits, both spatially and temporally, geographically and historically. Most accounts of international relations tend towards spatial and geopolitical modes of analysis and limits then appear as boundaries of various kinds. These are usually expressed in territorial terms, as physical borders and

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    23 legal jurisdictions, but also include the less tangible boundary between what is included within the international system and whatever world, or worlds are necessarily excluded to enable such a system of inclusions and exclusions. By contrast, accounts of international relations in temporal and historical terms gravitate towards questions about limits as a point of origin; often literally a point, 1648 in Westphalia most notoriously, but nevertheless a boundary at which to distinguish something like the international system we know in the present from whatever came before. In this sense, international relations already express specific understandings of spatiality and temporality, beginnings and endings, origins and limits, shaping claims about histories, geographies, and whatever comes in between or is left outside (Walker 1993, 2009, 2016). Temporalities are intimately related to spatialities. Beginnings are also intimately connected to endings, both spatially and temporally, and beginnings and endings shape what comes in between. The practices and formalizations of such intimacies, including what it means to speak of spatialities and temporalities, have been highly variable, and these variations have consequences. Most significantly for now, many origin stories have been told, encouraging affirmations and denials of other origin stories. Some—​expulsion from Eden or its possible reversal, Abrahamic sacrifice, a collapsing Tower of Babel, virginal birth, teleological fulfilment—​are palpable in contemporary understandings of something international. It is important that in Christian doctrine the world was created together with time, not in time, and that Greek geometries enabled the condensation of all horizons into very sharp points and vanishingly thin lines. Other stories, especially those linked with cyclical rather than linear conceptions of cosmology and temporality, are harder though not impossible to identify in this context. Trickster gods might add interesting complications. Nevertheless, while drawing on creation myths from many sources, the modern international system expresses a distinctive account of what one ought to find at its outer edges: intimations of a world beyond a universalizing international, outside the world of humanity, in spatial terms; and something sharply different from or just a bit less than an international system in temporal terms—​some less elaborated system of states, some marker of a coming into a system of internalities, externalities, and sovereign jurisdictions. Moreover, the spatial and temporal modalities of the modern international system work together less as intimacies than as co-​constitutive antagonisms, internally and externally. More is at stake here than the practices of specific academic disciplines. Many scholars are aware of the constrained and politically consequential historiographies expressed in structuralist and developmentalist readings of systems of states in general and of the modern international system in particular. Some have noticed the relation between such readings and other contexts in which dangerous temporalities have been captured within spatialized territories, properties, representations, concepts of time, and practices of sovereignty. Other histories have been explored, some akin to genealogies, some attuned to micro-​contingencies, some shaped by sustained meditations on the Owl of Minerva, the Angel of History, the longue durée, conflicting interpretations of Darwinian evolution, or anger about histories enabled by privilege. The contestable character of historical analysis and historiographies has been acknowledged, though often forgotten. Reifications and essentializations remain pervasive, but it is a commonplace that sovereignties, powers, and canonical texts exceed their codified appearances as structural universals or teleological, providential, eschatological, Whiggish, or just naively progressivist versions of a philosophy of history.

24    R. B. J. Walker How, then, are we to understand the specificity of the modern internationalized system of states as one case among many? How are we to think about structural or temporal differentiations between that case and other cases, or other forms? At what point, in space and time, can we be sure that we are dealing with what we think we are dealing with? Where and when, we may eventually agree to ask, despite all misgivings about any search for origins, did it all start? Or better, which creation myths and founding practices still work for us and with what effects? And how can one even presume to offer anything more than clichéd answers to any of these questions given that we ask them on the basis of understandings of origins, spatialities, temporalities, discriminations, and ways of being and therefore knowing generated within those forms of social and political organization we want to examine?

Where? When? What? Wight wrote a sequence of influential essays in the 1960s and early 1970s responding to three key questions: Where might we find systems of states? When might we find them? How might we identify them? Whatever one’s judgement about Wight’s standing as an historian, or as a key figure in an English School of IR theory associated with heightened sensitivities to (conflicting kinds of) historical analysis, these questions remain consequential (Wight 1977; Hall 2006, 2019). The answers to each depend on, and have consequences for, answers to the others and provoke further questions about spatialities, temporalities, political ontologies, and how we have come to know what we think we know and with what kind of authority. Assume that politics has a strong connection to the spatiality of a polis or city-​state and one has a good idea of what politics ought to be. Presume such an account of what politics ought to be and one has a good sense of where politics will be found and when it started. Assume that politics occurs in time, in the City of Man, rather than in a spatialized eternity, in the City of God, and one has a good sense of what politics cannot be, no matter how desirable that ideal may seem and how powerfully it has shaped accounts of what politics must be. Instructively, Wight addresses the spatial or geographical question first, through commentaries on relations among Greek city states, the Hellenistic and Roman era, and fifteenth-​century Europe. Turning to the European case, and with greater interest in questions about temporality, he offers a doubled answer wrapped in a biopolitical metaphor. Arguing against more influential claims on behalf of the Westphalia treaties of 1648 and in favour of fifteenth-​century Italy, he argues that ‘At Westphalia the states-​system does not come into existence: it comes of age’ (1977, 152). Wight was aware that his search for ‘the origins of our states-​system’, geographically and chronologically, was grounded in an idea of what a system of states looked like when it had come of age, by 1648. By then, one could identify the presence of many sovereign states, mutual recognition among them, the presence of major or hegemonic powers, means of regular communication, a body of international law, and mechanisms for defending common interests (1977, 129). This explains why 1648 is so often treated as a definitive point of origin, one all too conveniently close to the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Wight sensed the dangers of anachronism this identification implied for his engagement with states-​systems he identified in the Hellenistic and Persian world, after the Macedonian

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    25 invasion and Alexander the Great, in a context more frequently portrayed through concepts of imperium, cities, and dynasties than of systems of states. In this case, Wight admitted that he could not quite find what he was looking for, even that the experience of looking had led him to doubt the very idea of a states-​system (Wight 1977, 105–​106). Because Wight was so clear about what he was looking for, he saw origins of the modern European system better located in the fifteenth century, centred on other conventionalized dates: 1494 with the French invasion of Italy; and especially 1414–​18 with the Council of Constance. He even suggested one might consider 1492 as a marker for a reading of the already world-​wide rather than merely European character of the modern states-​system right ‘from the beginning’ (1977, 114–​115). One might read this remark against subsequent stories from English School history about a later ‘expansion of international society’ from Europe to the rest of the world (Bull and Watson 1984), or to raise questions about how we understand the relation between the Italian city-​states and what we have come to mean by both Europe and the rest of the world. Some of these questions have been taken up by admirers of the English School in ways that respond productively to at least some worries about Eurocentric concepts of expansion while invoking concepts of a civilizing process (Linklater 2016) or globalization (Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017) that arguably run into related difficulties. Wight already had categories of analysis to help fix far-​off phenomena into recognizable patterns. Finding those patterns, he could affirm and clarify claims about what we think we are talking about: it looks a bit like Westphalia, so it must be a system of states. Moreover, in the European case, the relation between a site of creation and what is created is scripted through the metaphor of a coming of age, a script affirming problematic but constitutive periodizations of a Renaissance, an early modernity, an Enlightenment, and their various others (Butterfield 1955, 128ff; Davis 2008; Fabian 1983; Fasolt 2004; Fried 2015; Le Goff 2015; Rubiés 2019). Wight thus gives an appealingly modest account of what it means to engage in historical analysis, evidence of the tenacity of a specific philosophy of history allowing him to find what he was looking for, and some naivety about the conditions under which the former is easily appropriated by the latter despite his own scepticism about developmental histories. Wight is aware of other options. He contests F. H. Hinsley’s claims (1963) about the eighteenth century, an era where it becomes increasingly possible to think of a system of states in the language of an international order. Wight sees this as just a further moment in a coming of age. Other versions of ‘maturity’ might be thrown into the mix: processes of secularization; translations of Protestant theologies into reworkings of older political concepts; codifications by figures like Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, and many others of the rules of what was increasingly systematized as an ordering of authorities and jurisdictions; processes of industrialization, urbanization, rationalization, capitalization, enclosure, slave trading, colonial exploitation, piracy, and so on that are conspicuously absent from the histories that Wight and the English School tended to favour. Indeed, if one wants to stay with dubious metaphors of a coming of age, Hinsley’s preference for the eighteenth century is probably more to the mark. Here one might look at Kant as someone who understood the contradictory and not simply systematic character of interstate order, and at his account of human history as it must work out within the confines of an inter-​republican system of some kind, thereby helping to shape our understanding of what it means to come of age: to come to maturity, to think for oneself, to become self-​ determining, both individually and collectively. One might also look to Kant for an account

26    R. B. J. Walker of the processes through which people who have the capacity to become free but also to live by a universal moral law may enter into the struggle for freedom in a history in which many simply fall by the wayside. History, after all, is not simply what historians do or what they find. From the eighteenth century especially it came to be treated as a vehicle for emancipation and self-​determination, as a temporal ground on which politics happens both in harmony and conflict with the spatial grounding of sovereign territorialities and authorities. History is now both an historical achievement and a theory of politics. The modern international system itself can be understood as an expression of this promise of history, a spatial expression of and condition of possibility for a telos/​eschatology of human possibilities in time and then in space: a practice of development quite as much as of geopolitics. It is certainly in relation to this understanding of the eighteenth century, and of Kant’s critical project, that one can understand crucial aspects of the transition from a mere system of states to an international order: a new beginning for an order of self-​determining authorities and subjectivities, both micro and macro, realizing themselves in time but within limits that reach to the edge of the knowable world rather than just Hobbesian subjects within a singular sovereign authority. Even the eighteenth century might be premature. After all, Kant’s understanding of republics is still at some remove from our understanding of modern nations, let alone democracies, peaceful or otherwise. But how many more origins, or degrees of maturity, do we need? The French Revolution? Or the revolution in Haiti as a reminder of what is missing in narratives about France alone? The Congress of Vienna as a symptom of Europe’s increasingly coherent institutionalization? Or the Franco-​Prussian War as a rift foretelling Europe’s future fragmentation? Transformations in patterns of colonization? Various episodes in the articulation of industrialization, capitalism, struggles between free-​traders and mercantilists, and so on, in relation to the particularist claims of nation states? Clausewitz, Weber, Schmitt, and Kelsen as paradigmatic responses to all these dynamics and more, in ways that helped shape subsequent catechisms of political realism and political idealism and the gradual institutionalization of an academic discipline defining international relations as a sharply delineated object of analysis? Or the instructive origin of the influential American journal Foreign Affairs as the Journal of Race Development (Vitalis 2015)? Moving in this direction while ignoring questions about how one knows in which direction one is moving, one creeps ever closer to some present moment, a concept that is just as troubling as the intimately related concept of origin (North 2018). Perhaps the United Nations Charter was, literally, a constitutive event, the formal beginning of an order torn between the claims of the system itself (‘collective security’) and its constituent states (‘domestic jurisdiction’), not to mention the Peoples, and tacitly presumed people, in whose name it was constituted. Perhaps one might also consider the Charter’s affirmations along with the experiences of Partition: the imposition of modernity’s most exemplary form of discrimination, the straight lines constituting new states and nations out of people and peoples who had never before lived so sharply between such radically unnatural boundaries. Perhaps one should reflect on various moments in the 1960s, the era in which processes of formal colonization were wound down and it became possible to claim that everyone on the planet lives within the modern international; within conditions—​such an elegant solution—​that allow us to appeal to various kinds of cultural/​substantive plurality within a formally universal order. Still, we may want to ask, where did those divisions come from? When did those discriminations originate? What exactly were those ‘colonizations’ that were supposedly

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    27 ending? Whose cartography and chronology are we charting here? Or are we again merely noting continuities that many people experience as novelties, disruptions, erasures and exclusions from a universalizing order of inclusions and exclusions? One can imagine Wight affirming a version of his original response to Bull and Hinsley: these are all later moments of the story largely marked by origins in fifteenth-​ century Italy. As long as we convince ourselves that we know what it means to refer to an Italy or to clear distinctions between eras—​and historians regularly counter cozy categories with dirty details in this respect, though not necessarily to great political effect—​Wight’s case is not easily dismissed even if it is open to many objections. Even so, a moment of ‘re-​birth’ offers swampy ground for any claim to origins. Apart from Westphalia and Renaissance Italy, the most persistent claim to an origin story for IR involves selective references to Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Historians and analysts of international relations alike have extracted bits of supposedly timeless wisdom from bits of this salutary text. Still, it is not obvious that its profundity lies just in the bits that have been extracted from or read into it by people thinking about contemporary politics and in need of higher authority to convert practical maxims about strength and weakness or challenges posed by rising powers into a doctrine of political realism. In any case, Herodotus, another founding father of what we recognize as the study of history in some form, might be an equally interesting source. At least we might wonder about the diversity of human experiences, to examine how the strangeness of others came to be converted into more systematic forms of Othering, especially to a systematic ordering of friends and enemies among nationalized states (Hartog 1988). Thucydides and Herodotus may be celebrated as historians of some kind, but they are engaged largely as texts. Yet there are many other texts from classical Greece on which historians might draw quite as readily as these two, most obviously Plato and Aristotle: two names conspicuous by their absence in most contemporary discussions of international relations. Plato is nonetheless famous as a conjurer of founding practices one might think relevant for how we have come to understand a world of both states and systemic relations between them, including the distinction between being and becoming and the privileging of being over becoming that has shaped our fondness for structuralist comparisons and developmentalist histories. Two such moves, two productions of a constitutive externality, are arguably much more consequential in principle than anything to be found in either Thucydides or Herodotus, depending on what one is looking for. One is Plato’s staging at the beginning of his Republic of the theatrical joust between Socrates and various young Sophists over the meaning of justice. Few figures are scripted into this conversation. They do not include representatives of the prevailing even if fragile traditional cultures raised on Homeric stories about old gods and heroes. Cephalus, the one featured representative present in the opening symbolic walk from the port of Piraeus towards Athens, is simply sent away to attend to his sacrifices after admitting to the debilities of old age and, by implication, of a passing age. In what has become a familiar pattern, a specific form of founding practice, a constitutive exclusion, shapes one of our key sources for thinking about inclusions and exclusions. Properly philosophical discussion can then begin, even if the first round ends in stalemate, another beginning must be made, and a new city is imagined into being. Then after much ground breaking, Book 5 of this text articulates another familiar sequence. First, establish a unity: hence, for example, women and children in common so as to eradicate all private interests based on blood ties. Then contemplate

28    R. B. J. Walker the limits of this unity: treat fellow Greeks reasonably well even when they are fractious, while declaring that non-​Greeks deserve no such accommodation. Finally, with the status of unity/​diversity and internality/​externality sorted, we can start to talk about what counts as proper philosophy. The sequence matters: presume unity; translate difference into alterity; then discuss knowledge, power, and authority.

Now, There, Then Why would Wight seize upon the Council of Constance and the French invasion of Italy in particular? Is this really why what we call Renaissance Italy matters for us? Which us? Is this why specific accounts of that elusive phenomenon have been constructed in retrospect, in a view from an also elusive eighteenth-​century Enlightenment? Why would he choose to read whatever happened there and then on terms set up by a reading of institutionalized structures identifiable in 1648? Was he looking for a birth, an inception, or a desire, to stay with his biopolitical metaphor? What, after all, were the problems driving whatever was going on in that specific time and place? How does his analysis square with other readings of the Renaissance as considerably more than a matter of cracks in the authority of a universalizing Christiandom and some military and diplomatic manoeuvres? What do we think was at stake politically that still matters for the dynamics of the modern international system? That he knew what he was looking for was both the strength and fragility of Wight’s analysis. Moreover, he showed considerable sensitivity to the demands of historiography, even if his religious commitments tended to keep him on the straight and narrow. Others also know what they are looking for in a Renaissance, but find other things, other figures, even too many phenomena to fit into a singular concept, or singular continent. Wight is open to some of these and even begins to explore some of their consequences, but ultimately returns to his initial path. Machiavelli is often the first to answer the door to those looking for other things, especially to historians of political thought; or perhaps Hobbes pops up as a later and more northerly expression of much the same, or more mature, perhaps even counter-​vailing version of the same epoch. At least, these figures have been forced to play commanding roles in claims about international relations, including by Wight himself. Canonical figures bring many interpretive difficulties, but there are elementary reasons why one might learn something about the politics of origin stories from the beginning of Machiavellian and Hobbesian texts, as of many others (Jullien 2015; Steiner 2001). Both speak to the problems to which the modern international system might be understood as a plausible response, as well as to the elaboration of principles guiding that response. Wight was primarily interested in similarities among systems. His work appeals to scholars bringing structuralist/​ comparativist inclinations to their historical claims. Machiavelli had a more forceful sense of what he was up against: a universalizing imperium understood both as a practical matter and as the ground of assumptions that no longer helped him respond to practical matters. Empirically speaking, distinctions between the hierarchical forms of medieval empire and a recognizably modern system of states can seem cloudy at best. Wight himself understood that it might be possible to interpret ‘Western

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    29 Christiandom’ as sufficiently fragmented to be identified as a ‘double-​headed suzereign state-​system’. He was more inclined to see it as an expression of ‘a single undivided societas christiana . . . with a persistent theoretical emphasis on hierarchy rather than equality’, and a ‘distribution and parcelling of power among an innumerable multitude of governmental units’ organized through ‘pyramidal not horizontal lines’ but which ‘in due course gave birth to the conceptions of “sovereignty” and “the state” ’. This Empire laid initially ineffective claim to universal jurisdiction, a claim that ‘persisted, and characteristically grew clearer and more defined after the Empire as a political institution had fallen to pieces’. It also made a more effective claim to universal jurisdiction in spiritual matters. While there was an ongoing struggle between Empire and papacy within the societas christiana, it ‘was always essentially a conflict between officers of the same undivided society’, though it eventually ‘degenerated into a struggle between two great powers’. Even so, ‘first the Emperor and then the pope’ claimed to be ‘lords of all mankind’ (Wight 1977, 26–​29). This reading might endorse a continuity thesis or a radical rupture thesis. Looking at events, historians might see more continuities than ruptures. Yet even though Wight knows what he is looking for when looking back from 1648, he is also working from a sense of emerging problems and sharply competing principles to read the significance of events. He had clearly absorbed important things from R. G. Collingwood (1946) in this respect. He understands, crucially, that imperium was organized vertically, pyramidally, whereas states-​ systems are organized horizontally. Something new is afoot. Principles falter, as the Council of Constance already revealed. At this point Wight reads the origins of the modern international system less in relation to the events he identifies on the basis of what he knows about 1648 than as a repudiation of principles of imperium, of hierarchical subordination. What is a states-​system? Not a universal empire, even if it is an ordering of ‘dominant’, ‘great’, ‘world’, and ‘minor’ powers (Wight 1978). When and where did this begin? In many places and many times, we might say, as principles of hierarchical subordination were challenged by inchoate principles of self-​determination, especially as medieval Europe gradually gave way to something more modern, but also as, say, the Ottoman Empire could no longer manage all its extraordinary diversities (Barkey 2008). Why should we remember Machiavelli and Hobbes? Certainly not because they were the political realists of popular notoriety but because they were figures caught up in wider struggles to articulate responses to multiple disorders, not least through ideals of ‘liberty’ in the former case and another concept of liberty along with assumptions about ‘equality’ in the case of Hobbes. They also did so on the basis of distinctive figurations of a politics of origins that are still in play. Consequences followed. Machiavelli remains subject to intensely conflicted interpretations, partly because he is such a liminal figure, an expression of continuities and ruptures as well as of options eluding narratives of both continuity and rupture. Nevertheless, one clue to his significance lies hidden in plain sight in the very first chapter of The Prince. This chapter begins with a universalizing claim about political orders as being either republics or principalities. Principalities are then divided and sub-​divided into more and less interesting categories, the interesting ones being, in increasing order of interest, those that are new rather than hereditary, those that are completely new rather than added to something older, those that are used to being free rather than under a prince, those that are gained by one’s own arms rather than those of others, and those that are gained by one’s own virtu or virtuosity rather than through Fortuna. So this founding text is itself set up from the beginning not as an analysis of politics

30    R. B. J. Walker in general but of situations involving something new, a founding, and with princes acting on their own and with their own (collective) capacities. Even from this short opening, one can identify subversive intent on two major fronts: the concern with novelty when prevailing norms stressed the perfection and thus permanence of what had already been formed by the divine creator; and the possibility that humanity rather than God is doing the creating. Call it a particular form of Renaissance humanism, the celebration not only of humanity but also of the City of Man, subject to the whims of Fortuna, of temporality, and thus as far more interesting than the eternally tedious City of God. It is a subversion revealing both a crisis of authority and the possibilities of human liberty, with liberty understood partly in relation to presumptions of an unchanging necessity, as an almost god-​like capacity to create, and partly as the possibility, even necessity, of human self-​creation. Liberty, in time. Time to say a slow farewell to principles of justice as knowing one’s place in the hierarchical Chain of Being, to modulate status into states, and to read politics without the (direct) benefit of laws given by an essentialized Nature or a transcendentalized deity. It is a long, contested, and constantly revised array of stories. Fortunately, Hobbes offers the conveniently short version. Erase the old ways of knowing and being. Start again with a recognition of the sensory origin of imperfect knowledge, then cultivate the right form of reasoning through the right form of language authorized through the proper definitions; dismiss those besotted by the old ways; redefine human beings as in a very specific sense both free and equal; draw the depressing consequences; then call this invention a state of nature. Thus start yet again: define where and when you are, here and now, sort of free but, crucially, equal and thus not subject to natural subordination; project a negatively ‘natural’ version of humanity as it has been defined out to some other space and time; then turn around so as to return as a subject of human/​civil rather than natural/​transcendental law, within limits, all in a twinkling of a miraculous moment of fear and rationality. The point of origin here is precisely the present moment, the here and now from which other origins in space and time are constructed in order to confirm the sovereign authority of that present moment and a specific version of sovereign humanity. The sequence really matters here. As an origin story, in the old sacrificial mode but now articulated through the formalizing sensibilities of a Galileo or Mercator, this ranks with the very best, even if diluted into mundane and secularized accounts of a mere social contract, and if complex practices of sovereignty have been turned into nationalistic clichés about monopolies of power in isolated territories. Hobbes says little about any system of states, explicitly repudiating any equation of a state of nature between individuals with a state of war among states. What he does say about relations between states makes him more a theorist of peace than of war (Thivet 2008; Springborg 2018). Nevertheless, although primarily exercised by civil war, he helps to imagine the spatiotemporal contours within which a system of states might and perhaps must take form (Walker 2011). The possibility precedes the actuality, one might say. Even so, like Machiavelli, Hobbes is less interesting as a marker of origins in any clear historical sense –​ both rework old ideas to articulate novel possibilities –​than as an authorizer of an historically constituted account of origins: an authorizer of origins that authorize a specific form of authority, the form of abstract law we call state sovereignty. Why would one fuss with Westphalia when confronted with practices of creation and authorization like these? It is one thing to identify a point at which something new takes recognizable form but quite another

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    31 to understand how the very idea of creating something new, or new conceptions of what it means to create, came to have such a strong purchase on what it means to engage in politics. Both Machiavelli and Hobbes can be read as responses to a profound reshaping of what it means to speak about humanity, to the humanisms dominating our conventional understanding of what the Renaissance was all about: to the ‘great outbreak of dualisms’ that increasingly contrasted humanity with natural order, nominalisms with essentialisms, knowing subjects with knowable objects, and so on. In this sense, humanity was reimagined as a double problem: as a creature liberated/​alienated from the world, and from higher/​natural authority; and thus as a creature who might be understood both in the singular, as humanity, or in the plural, as particular human beings, as politically qualified citizens. Again the sequence matters. Hobbes could afford to take a radical (Protestant, Galilean, nominalist) dualism of humanity and world for granted in ways that Machiavelli could not. On this basis he offers a brilliant but only partial answer to the second problem. He specifies a universalist account of modern humanity as free and equal, deduces the consequences, and constructs a geometry of departure and return that transforms humanity in general into citizens in particular within and under a common but specific sovereign authority. This is nevertheless a move that works only for particular states, leaving one to presume that the rest of humanity might do something similar until the world is filled with people willing to sacrifice their common ‘natural’ humanity for their politically qualified citizenships. He conceptualizes the spaces within which other states might be placed but not the ‘anarchy’ he attributes to proto-​liberal individuals. While saying little about relations among states he is still in need of a plurality of states of some kind to complete a reconciliation of humanity in general with citizens in particular in more than one jurisdiction: a spatialized complement to his constitutive moment of spatialized temporality. This is precisely the move that becomes much more sharply defined in Kant’s meditations on a cosmopolitan history and the ironically titled Perpetual Peace. A mere moment of contract is drawn out into a difficult line of emancipatory but conflictual history within mutually constitutive complementarities/​antagonisms between subjects, states, and a system of states (Kant 1991). Yet another idealization generates an account of both the likelihood and the legitimacy of violence. The elegant horizontal solution to the dissolution of vertical imperium reveals its founding flaws: humanity is split from world; and that humanity is split in two.

Which International? Whose History? Hobbes mobilizes an early version of conjectural history. Given what we think we are, in the present, what must we once have been? Parts of Wight’s analysis work in a related spirit. Yet Wight affirms two related but analytically distinct narratives. One takes us from Westphalia to the Renaissance to find what he is looking for in immature form. He was especially impressed with the institutionalization of resident diplomats. The other takes us to what the modern system of states is not, the universal imperium that was already in trouble at the time of the Council of Constance. This takes us in turn to the problems generated by its dissolution, to which not only the claim to sovereign statehood but also claims to popular sovereignty and the organizing principles (and in some sense even sovereignty) of the system of states can be understood as the primary outcome. The consequence is a flattened world in

32    R. B. J. Walker which authority must be reconstituted from the ground up and the top down, not on terms guaranteed by Nature or by God but partly by reworking old principles of theology, partly by absorbing authorities from above and below, partly by legitimizing new forms of hierarchy, partly by switching from natural law to civil law and from qualitative essences to quantitative distributions, and all the rest of those long, complicated, and contested stories driven by many competing forces. New problems arise, and responses to them generate further difficulties. Wight ultimately privileges the first narrative, cuts his journey short, and returns to Westphalia. States and their subjects are put aside, in ways consistent with both the radical distinction between statist and international theorizations he had defended a decade earlier (Wight 1966) and with the methodological decisionism enabling the ‘levels of analysis’ and disciplinary jurisdictions guiding American traditions the English School thought it was resisting through greater historical sophistication. Instead of following through on his sense that the modern system of states was a response to a problem, as principles of higher and lower had given way to principles of internality and externality, of subjectivities both macro and micro, he simply cut externalities from internalities. Perhaps disciplinary interests trumped historical insights. This is especially unfortunate because Wight had already identified significant complementarities between internal and external forms of politics in their differential privileging of temporalities and spatialities respectively. Yet neither difference nor complementarity imply separation: they suggest intense political activity, sovereign practices, connections enabling divisions transforming what had been connected, mutual productions of self and other as domestic and foreign, and mobilizations of claims about beginnings, endings, and thus what counts as an in between. Again consequences follow. Abstracted from almost everything else generated by the dissolution of imperium, the structure, functions, and institutions of external relations among states can be packed up into a specialized discipline. Given this spatialized focus, claims about the superiority of historical analysis can be overwritten by anachronistic accounts of society, community, order, and anarchy. Canonical thinkers must then be appropriated in painfully contorted forms, typologies, and debates. Sovereignties, boundaries, laws, and struggles over principles in general can be drained of political life. Relations between the claims of states and the claims of a systemic order enabling and to varying degrees limiting both the liberties and equalities of states can be rendered almost invisible. A few upsides are compromised by many downsides. By contrast, his second narrative points vaguely towards a dramatic structural shift of orders, in principle and eventually in practice; not as a biopolitically conceived dynamic of development but as a rearticulation of structural form enabling the instantiation of those biopolitical accounts of development within new political bodies, in Hobbesian, Kantian, and many other variations. Relations between universality and diversity must then be worked out in another way: one system/​many states, one state/​many subjects, one humanity/​ many citizens; a flattened singularity containing many containers but also inequalities, even empires, but no universal imperium; and uplifting forms of national self-​determination, distinctive patterns and practices of relationship, and wars when necessary. This narrative might also be taken as just another affirmation of European exceptionalism, one dependent on many exceptionalist practices. This might in turn encourage greater stress on continuities than on ruptures, or on yet another oscillation from tight integration to loose

Origins, Histories, and the Modern International    33 pluralization. The structuralist/​comparative impulse might then be directed towards systemic forms of empires rather than systems of states. Perhaps this would make aspirations for a world history easier, though questions about which and whose world would still need to be negotiated. Nevertheless, the modern international is not an empire in the singular, at least in its internal structures and practices. For better and for worse it expresses a distinctive understanding of what it means to be human: caught neither midway between gods and beasts nor ranked in layers under heavenly and imperial authority, but somehow a self-​creating creature strung out in geopolitical space, within subjectivities, within states, within a system of states, but not quite part of ‘the world’. The scalarization of human orders remains, but now in quantitative terms of bigger and smaller, not on qualitative terms of higher and lower (Walker 2018). Origin stories are endlessly contestable; the stakes can be so high. Even if we repudiate all scholarly claims to origins, founding practices are hard to avoid in any kind of politics. Whose histories are one supposed to tell when referring to an internationalized political order? How is one supposed to tell them? To whom? With what ambition? And with what kind of authority? Wight gives us two familiar options, but ultimately prefers one: choose, with both Wight himself and the prevailing disciplinary conventions, the option that leads us to privilege war, peace, and security—​‘anarchy’ for short—​as the founding problem for the discipline of IR; or choose liberty, equality, self-​determination, and much else as the primary values, interests, and practices that must be secured. I tend to assume that problems and principles precede consequences, and that the problem of the modern international necessarily exceeds the structural, functional, and institutional arrangement of external relations among states, as well as a discipline that focuses very tightly upon them. While Westphalia may be understood as part of a bigger picture, the name of that picture is not Westphalia. Would ‘modern’, ‘European’, or ‘Western’ be more appropriate? These terms might be compatible with the stories affirmed by Wight’s explorations, but are also among the over-​generalized concepts that should cause scholarly trouble. Can we say that it is also universal, or world-​wide, or an expression of accounts of humanity and politically qualified people and peoples we must hold on to when the relation between Humanity and World has come to seem so fragile? All this is considerably more contentious, for political analysts and historians alike.

References Barkey, K. 2008. Empires of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bull, H. and A. Watson, eds. 1984. The Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butterfield, H. 1955. Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, K. 2008. Periodization and Sovereignty. How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern The Politics of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dunne, T. and Reus-​Smit, C. 2017. The Globalization of International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

34    R. B. J. Walker Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fasolt, C. 2004. The Limits of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fried, J. 2015. The Middle Ages, translated by Peter Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, I. 2006. The International Thought of Martin Wight. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hall, I. 2019. ‘The English School’s Histories and International Relations’. In Historiographical Investigations in International Relations, eds. B. C. Schmitt and N. Guilhot, 171–​201. Basingstoke: Palgrave-​Macmillan. Hartog, F. 1988. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, translated by J. Lloyd. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hinsley, F. H. 1963. Power and the Pursuit of Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jullien, F. 2015. The Book of Beginnings, translated by Jody Gladding. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kant, I. 1991. ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’. In Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, 41–​53 and 93–​130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Goff, J. 2015. Must We Divide History into Periods? New York: Columbia University Press. Linklater, A. 2016. Violence and Civilization in the Western States-​System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, M. 2018. What is the Present? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rubiés, J-​P. 2019. ‘Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World: Hierarchies, Genealogies and the Idea of European Modernity’. In Regimes of Comparativism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, eds. R. Gagne, S. Goldhill, and G. E. R. Lloyd, 116–​176. Leiden: Brill. Springborg, P. 2018. ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Political Economy of Peace’. Croatian Political Science Review, 55(4): 9–​35. Steiner, G. 2001. Grammars of Creation. London: Faber and Faber. Thivet, D. 2008. ‘Thomas Hobbes: A Philosopher of War or Peace?’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16(4): 701–​721. Vitalis, R. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/​Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, R. B. J. 2009. After the Globe, Before the World. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Walker, R. B. J. 2011. ‘Hobbes, Origins, Limits’. In International Political Theory After Hobbes, eds. R. Prokhovnik and G. Stomp, 168–​188. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Walker, R. B. J. 2016. Out of Line: Essays on the Politics Of Boundaries and the Limits of Modern Politics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Walker, R. B. J. 2018. ‘The Modern International: A Scalar Politics of Divided Subjectivities’. In Theorizing Global Order: The International, Culture and Governance, ed. G. Hellmann, 13–​36. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Wight, M. 1966. ‘Why is there No International Theory?’ In Diplomatic Investigations, eds. H. Butterfield and M. Wight, 17–​34. London: George, Allen and Unwin. Wight, M. 1977. Systems of States. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Wight, M. 1978. Power Politics, eds. H. Bull and C. Holbraad. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

chapter 3

Hi storical Re a l i sm Michael C. Williams While life needs the services of history, it must be just as clearly comprehended that an excess of history will do harm to the living.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History

Realism and history have a difficult relationship. The problem is not that realists lack a sense of history: realist texts abound with historical analyses, illustrations, and analogies. Nor is it that history is resistant to realist concepts: the importance of power and questions surrounding its balancing; the centrality of war and peace; the complex and often tragic nature of political ethics and choices, find ample expression throughout the chequered course of human endeavour. History, one might sadly say, is all too amenable to realist analysis and its stress on the darker sides of political life. The difficulty, then, lies not in realism’s possible links to history, but in the meaning that political realism finds in history—​in its precise uses of history. What, exactly, does history show us? For many realists, the answer is powerfully and disarmingly simple: history is the validation of their theoretical claims about the enduring nature of international politics as power politics. Yet this picture obscures the fact that there are diverse visions of history in realism, even amongst those who agree in general that international political history is a history of power politics. There are in fact very different views amongst realists about what power is, as well as the structures, mechanisms, and limits through which it operates historically. In fact, realist visions differ widely in their understandings of what history shows and what it means to take a realistic stance toward it. I here examine three of these. The first and most common today, particularly in the United States, is neo-​or structural realism. Here, history is the story of structural determination. Underneath the flux of events lie certain core principles of realpolitik that, once exposed, become the bedrock of knowledge. This idea has been the source of the lion’s share of controversy over the use and abuse of history in International Relations (IR) theory, upheld by supporters and savaged by critics (see Lawson 2012; Puchala 2008). But structural realism is far from the only realist vision of history. A second version identifies realism not with continuity, but with change—​not just change within an essentially timeless structure (as, for instance, when a series

36   Michael C. Williams of great powers succeed one another within the otherwise unchanging logic of international ‘anarchy’), but with change at more fundamental levels. This is a kind of ‘historicist’ realism. Finally, a third way of looking at realism’s relationship to history is one that foregrounds the realist vision of modernity and of the striking—​even unique—​dangers posed by this epoch. Here, history is neither repetition nor contingency, neither eternal structure nor continual change. It is the emergence of an epoch defined precisely by its obliteration of historical continuities, rendering previous orders unworkable and yielding new ones fraught with unprecedented dangers. This realist vision of history is not tragic in the sense of eternal repetition: it is potentially apocalyptic and requires a realist vision that seeks and embraces historical wisdom while seeking alternative visions and strategies to meet the challenges of the present.

Realism as Eternal Return Over recent decades, structural or ‘neo-​’ realism as become probably the most prominent approach to realism. It is also in many ways the most straightforward—​to its critics, simplistic—​in its approach to history. In the eyes of its advocates, this simplicity (or what they might prefer to call ‘parsimony’) is in fact one of its greatest strengths. Here, despite all its variations, the history of world politics is underlain by a dominant explanatory logic: the causal impact of international anarchy. Despite their adoption of the language of tragedy, their vision of tragedy is one of fate, of recognizing historical inevitability. The key proponent of this position, of course, is Kenneth Waltz. Waltz argues that anarchy—​the lack of an overarching authority in world politics—​breeds insecurity and thus competition. Even though states seek only their own survival and are not driven by an animimus dominandi that he identifies with ‘classical’ realism, their actions in pursuit of security (such as arms build ups) inevitably generate insecurity for other states, which are driven to act likewise. As he puts it in a typically succinct formulation: Structural realism presents a systemic portrait of international politics depicting component units according to the manner of their arrangement. For the purpose of developing a theory, states are cast as unitary actors wanting at least to survive, and are taken to be the system’s constituent units. The essential structural quality of the system is anarchy—​the absence of a central monopoly of legitimate force. Changes of structure and hence of system occur with variations in the number of great powers. The range of expected outcomes is inferred from the assumed motivation of the units and the structure of the system in which they act. A systems theory of international politics deals with forces at the international, and not at the national, level. (Waltz 1998, 618, also Waltz 1979)

Waltz does not deny that ‘unit level’ factors—​the historically variable institutions, ideas, and ambitions of states—​matter. But he holds that they do so only within the overall structuring effects of the system that endures despite these changes (Walker 1989). As he puts it, ‘A systems theory of international politics deals with forces at the international, and not at the national, level. With both systems-​level and unit-​level forces in play, how can one construct a theory of international politics without simultaneously constructing a theory of foreign policy? An international-​political theory does not imply or require a theory of foreign policy anymore than a market theory implies or requires a theory of the firm’ (Waltz

Historical Realism   37 1998, 618). While particular outcomes are historically variable, depending on the specifics of the situation, the overall logic of international history is structural. What the editors of this volume call ‘granular’, finely focused analysis is for Waltz important in explaining specific outcomes, but it cannot alone account for the most important causal factors, which are structural, not agential; historically repetitive, not variable. This is most clearly illustrated in the case of international politics most important and destructive dimension: war. As Waltz puts it, The origins of hot wars lie in cold wars, and the origins of cold wars are found in the anarchic ordering of the international system. The recurrence of war is explained by the structure of the international system. Theorists explain what historians know: War is normal. (Waltz 1998, 620; also see Schroeder 1994)

Waltz’s emphasis on the importance of absence of an overarching authority in the international system is one that virtually all realists (and indeed many others) would accept. But his formulation of it has also met with telling criticisms and revisions, even from within the neo-​realist camp. For example, as Randall Schweller argues, it is by no means clear why Waltz’s system should generate this security dilemma (Schweller 1996). If all states are security seekers prioritizing survival, why would they not find ways of mitigating the consequences of anarchy? For Schweller and other ‘neo-​classical’ realists, this means that to understand conditions of insecurity and conflict under anarchy it is necessary to reopen the question of state intentions that Waltz brackets, looking historically at those states and interstate systems that do generate security dilemmas as a result of their domestic politics and foreign policy choices. History here returns in a more substantial and fine-​grained way (see Ripsman et al. 2016).1 However there remain tensions between the ahistorical structural dimension and historical variation in neoclassical realism. In particular, if changes in the identities and intentions of the units matter, does this open the possibility of fundamental shifts in the structure and implications of international anarchy far beyond the historical limits proscribed by Waltzian structuralism? If so, is neoclassical realism actually quite close to constructivists who argue that, in Alexander Wendt’s well-​known phrase, ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992)? A different attempt to hang onto the core Waltzian claim that anarchy breeds insecurity and conflictual security dilemmas has been influentially developed by John Mearsheimer. For him, the structure of anarchy is causal because it generates uncertainty. Since no state can be sure about the intentions of others, it must assume the worst and act accordingly. This amendment, he argues, solidifies the claim that IR is inescapably tragic, a history of eternal return. In an influential formulation, he thus argues that: The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—​that is, the only great power in the system. (Mearsheimer 2001, 2)

In Mearsheimer’s rendering, it is the uncertainly that all states have about the intentions of others that is the crucial driver of international anarchy. The uncertainty of the actors

38   Michael C. Williams becomes, somewhat paradoxically, the basis of certainty for the theorist that history is, tragically, an inescapable tale of competition and conflict. One of the questions raised by Mearsheimer’s realism is whether (and how) states could (or have) mediated the effects of uncertainty through institutions or relations of trust. Different answers to these questions mark fundamental points of disagreement between structural realists and many of their critics. Indeed, Waltz’s hypostatizing of states overlooks what other types of realists (not to mention non-​realist theorists) see as fundamental: social and economic shifts within and across states and systems at levels more fundamental than the relatively thin concept of a system of states deployed by Waltz. Nowhere is this clearer than in political economy, and in the argument that focusing on an abstracted state system elides transformations at work within and across states and systems. Consider, for instance, Waltz’s claims about the political economy of bi-​polar Great Power competition. For him, such systems are characterized by a lack of entanglement. As he puts it, ‘the economies of the great power in a bipolar world are less interdependent of than those of the great powers in a multipolar one’ (Waltz 1998, 624). Similarly, Mearsheimer’s approach relies on his view of the inescapable consequences of uncertainty. The question is, do states always react in the way he predicts? Or have they adopted different responses, such as building institutions and trust, as some analysts claim is the case in post-​Second World War Europe? Much of the controversy surrounding Mearsheimer’s assessment of history since the end of the Cold War, particularly his bold prediction that we would soon miss the Cold War and that Europe would return to the imperatives of anarchy, or his more recent predictions of a coming conflict between the United States and China (see Kirshner 2012). These controversies show the vital links between claims about the nature of history and debates over more contemporary political judgements and policy recommendations (Mearsheimer 1990).2 For a number of years after the end of the Cold War, structural realism seemed on the defensive. Globalization theorists of all stripes declared its views deeply misleading in an interconnected world economy. Liberals stressed the benefits of cooperation and challenged its scepticism about the potential of institutions to help tame conflict. Constructivists and other ‘critical’ theorists assailed its theoretical foundations. Historians contested its claims to historical validity. Yet structural realists have by no means ceded the field. The response of Waltz to claims that the world had changed, one might suspect, would have been that history will return: that structural determination may experience some lag and allow some relatively temporary variation, but it will eventually reassert itself. For his part, Mearsheimer has recently claimed that the apparent abeyance of realism since the end of the Cold War can be explained through realist principles (Mearsheimer 2018). It was, he argues, the existence of unipolarity and American domination that allowed ‘liberal’ principles and institutions to ameliorate realist imperatives. But this relatively brief (and rare) situation only led to the growth of major powers such as China, who used the liberal order to rise as challengers within it. As a result, a bi-​or multi-​polar world is again on the horizon, and the imperatives of anarchy are almost sure to reassert themselves. In some eyes, then, recent evidence of the partial ‘decoupling’ of major economies, along with political and security challenges in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, have given this realist vision of history more credence than it has likely had for some decades. Whether its interpretation of current events is correct, of course, depends on its foundational claims about history and its lessons—​a position that remains highly contested.

Historical Realism   39

Historicist Realism: Power and Contingency E. H. Carr is rightly identified and remembered as a realist for his scathing indictment of liberal idealism in his famous study of the Twenty Years Crisis of the interwar period (Carr 2010). Yet Carr’s realism is equally or even more interesting for the links he draws between the fallacies of liberalism and the issues of historical change discussed at the end of the previous section. Although he is often lumped in with a relatively undifferentiated and ahistorical realist tradition, Carr adopted a quite different and in many ways more philosophically subtle and sophisticated vision of history than realists are often given credit for. This is perhaps unsurprising, since he saw himself more as an historian than a denizen of the still-​ nascent field of IR. But it also reflects a quite different sensibility toward realism, and of the uses of history. Carr’s attack on liberalism was historical. Influenced by Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history (see Cox 2010; Jones 1988; Haslam 1998) as well as by Marx, Carr argued that far from being a mistaken, naïve, or ‘utopian’ set of ideas, liberalism emerged in the nineteenth as the dominant ideology of a particular (capitalist) social class and dominant (British) state. In its heyday, liberalism’s notion of the ‘harmony of interests’, in which peaceful cooperation was the optimal realization of self-​interest, functioned as a form of domination, rationalizing and supporting the interests of dominant liberal-​capitalist states and classes domestically and internationally. However, liberalism’s intellectual errors were twofold. First, liberals failed to see that (and how) their ideas were linked to dominant interests and actors, seeing them instead (as ideologies are wont to do) as natural, rational, universal, or (with echoes of some forms of liberal-​rationalism in IR today) scientific. Second, they failed to see that this ideology was becoming increasingly and dangerously dysfunctional as those who did not in reality benefit from it (pre-​eminently Germany) rejected both the ideas and the order. Liberalism, for Carr, was thus not the polar opposite of realism. Liberalism was in fact once a part of power politics—​the successful ideology of dominant actors. It became misleading, foolish, and dangerous when that historical order changed and liberalism failed to recognize its ideological function and its inadequacy in the face of the new social and historical forces. It is for these reasons that that putatively ‘critical’ thinkers, such as Robert Cox, turned to Carr in search of what they saw as a more sociologically and historically rich and realistic vision of global politics than that provided by structural realism (Cox 1981).3 For Cox, Carr’s realism highlights the importance of focusing on social forces such as capitalism, nationalism, and mass politics as well as states in understanding transformations in and between international orders. Here, political realism embraces both granular approaches that study states and social forces in specific places and analyses of macro-​historical transformations in modernity, including the changing structures of capitalism and technology, and shifting forms of political mobilization and representation. (For his synthetic analysis, see Cox 1987.) Carr also adopts a vision of historical knowledge quite different from that of structural realism. This view focuses on the two-​fold relationship between subjectivity and the past. Carr cleaves to the ‘facts’ of history as objective data, but for him these are what we might now call ‘social facts’ which incorporate the subjectivity of actors, including the impact that their interpretations of reality have on their actions, and thus on the preservation or

40   Michael C. Williams transformation of historical orders (see Carr 1961). Moreover, for Carr, historical enquiry properly understood also requires accounting for the subjectivity of the historian who chooses what facts are truly of historical significance and those which are superfluous or irrelevant, as well as the interpretations, affects, and values that condition the actions of the historical agents being studied. Accordingly, historical accounts can take numerous forms depending on the purposes, dynamics, and concerns of the present, or at least the historian’s view of them. It is not so much that new facts about the past are always being discovered (although that can certainly be the case), as it is that the past is constantly being repurposed in light of the present. As Randall Germain has argued in a stimulating recent exploration, for Carr: This is one reason why the past as a meaningful narrative is continually being recast: as the specificities of current problems evolve, existing historical knowledge needs to be reevaluated in light of these new problems so that it can speak directly to contemporary generations .... It is not so much that new facts about the past are discovered or better ones refashioned; rather, it is that the purposes to which we put our knowledge about the past changes. What we demand for knowledge changes over time, and these changing demands modify the parameters that we impose on knowledge itself. (Germain 2019, 955)

The implication of this position, clearly, is that historical narratives are conditioned by the analyst’s assessments of current challenges, trajectories, and needs. At one level this seems unobjectionable: who can doubt that historical disputes reflect the divergent perspectives of their participants? Yet the challenges go further than this, for if historical realism is based not on a form of objectivity such as that later adopted by neorealists (which Carr clearly rejects), but is based on the analyst’s convictions about present and future social needs, interests, or values, then the practice of history itself risks becoming simply a part of (or even a weapon in) these struggles (Germain 2019, 960).4 History, in short, becomes not only a story of power politics: the practices of historians themselves become a form of power and a part of power politics. For Carr, this may well have been a suitably realistic conclusion about knowledge, history, and politics—​as he showed to quite devastating effect in his excoriating assessment of classical liberalism’s belief in the harmony of interests.5 However, it is also a discomfiting one—​ or at least so it appeared to some of his realist contemporaries who felt it risked reducing historical knowledge (and realism) to nothing more than power. In his assessment of Carr’s views on the nature of politics, for instance, Hans Morgenthau reached conclusions that he would likely have extended to Carr’s vision of history as well. Carr, he charged: has no transcendent point of view from which to survey the political scene and to appraise the phenomenon of power. Thus the political moralist transforms himself into a utopian of power. Whoever holds seeming superiority of power becomes of necessity the repository of superior morality as well. Power thus corrupts not only the actor on the political scene, but even the observer, unfortified by a transcendent standard of ethics. Mr. Carr might have learned that lesson from the fate of the political romantics of whom the outstanding representatives are Adam Muller and Carl Schmitt. It is a dangerous thing to be a Machiavelli. It is a disastrous thing to be a Machiavelli without virtu. (Morgenthau 1948, 130)

It may seem strange to see one famous realist criticizing another for focusing on too much on power, but this shows more than anything how narrow understandings of realism have

Historical Realism   41 often become due to the tendency of both supporters and critics to flatten realism to a structurally determined form of ahistorical and amoral power politics. By contrast, using disputes about history to open up the richness of the history of realism itself provides an opportunity to see the breadth of realist thought and the cleavages within it.

Classical Realism: Modernity, Tragic, and Apocalyptic History Morgenthau’s invocation of the spectre of Carl Schmitt brings us to a third, and perhaps most complex and oft-​misunderstood, rendition of realism, history, and modernity. Found most clearly in the prominent postwar ‘classical’ realism of figures like Morgenthau and John Herz, as well as a host of other émigré thinkers, this stance begins from Carl Schmitt’s argument that the essence of politics lies not in any particular set of issues or institutions, but in a specific stance toward them (Schmitt 2007; Schmitt 2006).6 A ‘political’ issue is one defined by the divide between friend and enemy—​an existential, potentially life and death, confrontation. For Schmitt, this ‘concept of the political’ provides an orienting device amidst flux and change. History shows that virtually any issue can be treated as ‘political’ or not: religion, or economics, for example, have at different times been treated as vitally political questions—​as questions of life and death decisions and conflicts—​while at other times they are treated in distinctly non-​‘political’ terms, as matters of ‘private’ concern. The distinction, Schmitt argues, lies not in the nature of the issue itself, but in the way it is perceived and experienced: whether it is seen within an intense, existential logic of friend and enemy, an issue ultimately requiring a life and death decision. Any issue is thus capable of becoming ‘political’. The core divisions in life are structured as relations between groups that share a vision of the political and those who do not share that vision or, ultimately, are existentially opposed to it and thus become ‘enemies’. This principle holds true for all properly ‘political’ groups, whatever historic form they take: tribes, sects, empires, nations, or any other conceivable configuration. It is the principle that allows one to see specifically ‘political’ logics in operation despite the vast variation in social forms, practices, and historic periods, however different they may appear. In this view, structure and change are not opposed—​they are reconciled via a unifying concept, that of politics itself. Schmitt’s vision provides an essential backdrop against which the most sophisticated and important dimensions of realism developed in the postwar era. These developed in two main, often related, forms. The first, deeply influenced by Max Weber, took an explicitly sociological cast, focusing on the historical emergence of modernity as an epoch in which manifestations of ‘political’ logics took on new and ever more destructive forms. The second was marked by a rejection of Schmitt’s identification of politics solely within a logic of friends and enemies. It sought an alternative in an uneasy mixture of appeals to principles beyond history—​to principles of natural right—​or in the historical resuscitation of republican democracy, or both. And it sought to ally these to new possibilities for international order based on the claim that nuclear weapons had, for perhaps the first time, fundamentally changed history rendering Schmittian realpolitik in important ways obsolete and demanding alternative ways of ordering international political life.

42   Michael C. Williams

Modernity as an Historical Epoch For realists such as Morgenthau, Herz, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the consequences of the emergence of industrial society went far beyond simply bringing new and powerful technologies of destruction to the traditional logic of realpolitik. On the contrary, modernity was in important ways defined by its shattering of that logic. Although the historical story these realists told about these transformations was complex and differed in emphasis, nuance, and implications, a number of shared themes stand out. The first is that the advent of modernity involved shifts in human subjectivity that had profound implications for political life. Focusing like Weber and many others on early modern Europe, these realists argued that the visions of political obligation, hierarchy, and commonality that structured medieval Christendom and extended into early modern states had underpinned important parts of the balance of power between absolutist states. Sovereignty based in mutually recognized claims to the legitimacy of divine right amongst monarchs provided a basis for domestic and international order. The calculus of absolutist statecraft was based on a structure of limits far beyond foreign policy alone, and constant competition was constrained by commonly accepted principles, as well as by limited military capacities. However, as the principles of the Enlightenment continued to gather pace, the foundations of this system were gradually undermined. The rise of secularism eroded claims of divine right and natural law; individual subjectivity achieved pre-​eminence over universal Reason, and previous visions of an overarching, natural order had been irrevocably destroyed by industrial capitalism and social transformations such as the Reformation. And even in the one area where universality increased its claims—​modern science—​the consequence was the dominance of instrumental reason that divided technical knowledge from values, leaving morality adrift and society subject to its technological and rationalizing forces. Disconnected from the sense of a larger order, modern humanity paradoxically finds itself adrift in an anomic social and existential void and yet at the same time embraces an almost unlimited will to power and self-​realization (Morgenthau 1942; Morgenthau 1972; Niebuhr 1941/​43; also see Bell 2009; Guilhot 2017). The most important result of this paradox is the development of the nation-​state, which is not simply yet another form of domestic political structure or a linear successor to absolutism (in short, just another ‘unit’ in an unchanging structure of anarchy, as some later realists would have it), but a novel and powerfully destructive new historical force. Lacking a divine or other ‘objective’ standard or order, the nation emerges as both the fulfilment of the individual and an agent with a ‘national’ historical destiny. Individuals living under the increasingly anomic, individualized, and rationalized conditions of capitalism and modernity find meaning and an outlet for their will to power in the nation. The nation, in turn, is prone to see its destiny in grand historical terms, as the destiny of its chosen people or even as the deified agent of history as a whole: the agent that will bring the (pre)history of humanity to an end by bringing to an end all wars, ensuring universal peace, and creating a truly global order—​once it has eliminated those who stand in the way. In this way, these realists argue, the conditions of modernity radicalized the dynamics of the political, breaking down previous structures of limitation and mediation in inter-​state relations, radicalizing power politics, and threatening to cast aside all limits except those of a

Historical Realism   43 fragile balance of pure power. In this historical vision, the capacity for the individual exercise of power through a faith in the ultimate power (and judgment) of God that was a key plank in the moral economy of Christendom, providing even the most oppressed with a feeling of power. The breakdown of this moral economy of interest, along with the corresponding decline of cross-​cutting and competing aristocratic hierarchies, destroyed the internal balance of power (and source of limitation) characteristic of feudal and early modern states. Loss of belief in the power of the divine, and of an interest in religion, has left individuals in the anomic condition of modernity, and societal rationalization has increased this feeling of powerlessness. The progressive disempowerment created by bureaucratic political parties, conformist pressures of modern citizenship, and the alienating impact of large-​scale industrial societies and capitalist production has led to a paradoxical rise in the mobilizing power of the state and an increase in the collective interest in, and power of, political logic. As Morgenthau puts it: The growing insecurity of the individual in Western societies, especially in the lower strata, and the atomization of Western society in general have magnified enormously the frustration of individual power drives. This, in turn, has given rise to an increased desire for compensatory identification with the collective national aspiration for power. (Morgenthau 1967, 100)7

For Morgenthau, this process was at the core of the rise of fascism. As a philosophy that rejected a politics of limits, which identified the essence of the political with violence, conflict, and the casting of Others as enemies, and which sought to inject this logic as broadly as possible in a process of social mobilization, fascism represents the ultimate social expression of an unbounded politics. In a passage worth quoting at length, he argues: Thus National Socialism was able to identify in a truly totalitarian fashion the aspirations of the individual German with the power objectives of the German nation. Nowhere in modern history has that identification been more complete. Nowhere has that sphere in which the individual pursues his aspirations for power their own sake been smaller. Nor has the force of the emotional impetus with which that identification transformed itself into aggressiveness on the international scene been equalled in modern civilization. (Morgenthau 1967, 104)8

In short, much of the Enlightenment vision of the gradual historical triumph of reason was not only false or misleading: it was positively dangerous. In it lay the roots of modern totalitarianism, as well as total war. Science, for all its obvious achievements, was not solely a progressive force, and neither were those social scientific theories that took it as a model for emulation. Both misunderstood the sources of human conduct, the complexities of political life, and the often-​tragic nature of the choices it demanded. The consequences of these transformations were not, of course, completely negative. Although many of these realists exhibited some nostalgia for earlier forms of order, they were far from reactionaries. The political liberties and intellectual and scientific progress promised by the Enlightenment were not spurious. But they came with high costs, costs that helped explain how instead of yielding the path to peace that so many of its proponents envisaged, the historical legacy of the Enlightenment was a modern era of increasing violence and domination that now threatened the planet as a whole. Colonial expansion showed both its power and its violence. Now, although the spread of modern principles of sovereignty and self-​determination in the post-​colonial period brought welcome and

44   Michael C. Williams legitimate independence to many peoples across the globe, it did so at the risk of exporting the pathologies of modern sovereignty as well—​something that led these realists often to be suspicious of modernization theory and silent about or sceptical toward decolonization (see Guilhot 2014). War and the perils of modern politics now threaten to be total, not just in terms of technological reach but in terms of its place at the existential heart of modernity itself. With the advent of nuclear weapons, this threatened to make the end of history a reality.

Realist Responses In the face of this disenchanted vision of history, realists sought a series of ways forward. Two are particularly striking. The first lay in democracy. There is little doubt that realists were, in the early years, highly dubious about the virtues of democracy. Liberalism had little understanding of the nature and demands of the political: in its rationalist or relativist forms it lead only to entropy, passivity, or naivete in the face of the challenges of foreign policy. Their vision of the radical nature of modern nationalism meant that democratic rule only added to the dangers. Moralistic and jingoistic publics were distinctly unsuited to dealing with the complexities and hard dilemmas of foreign policy, while liberalism’s other face—​its crusading universalism—​sought to put an end to those dilemmas through endless and futile wars carried out in the name of democracy. And there was no shortage of cynical or demagogic leaders willing to exploit these weaknesses. Yet realists did not give up on democracy. Instead, the classical realism of the postwar era is actually marked an increasing recognition of the virtues of democracy—​if it could be chastened and informed by realist insights. Nowhere is the clearer than in realism’s engagement with American republicanism and institutions, which they saw as capable of blunting the worst aspects of liberalism and democracy and even having the potential to turn them toward positive alternatives (see Tjalve 2008; Tjalve and Williams 2015). Here, the goal was to foster a democratic, republican culture of self and social limitation. Individuals were capable of building mores, cultures, and institutions capable of constraining the dangers of modernity whilst retaining its positive potential. The history of the American republic in particular could be mobilized (realist caveats included, of course) as inspiration, if it could meet the challenges it, too, confronted. For even this republic was not immune to modernity’s acids. History was a contest between the rationalizing irrationality of modern, mass society and its potential for reasoned self-​ direction. Realists were by no means sure that this battle could be won, but they saw it as vital that it be fought and fought with full awareness of the historical dynamics at work and the stakes involved. This included awareness that in the realist view it could not be won within the terms of modernity alone. As Nicolas Guilhot has argued, there are clear counter-​ Enlightenment strands, sensibilities, and commitments in many of these postwar realists. For them, if the history of the previous three centuries is the domination of Enlightenment Reason, then it is a history that must in crucial respects be resisted. Taking seriously this view of the realist interpretation of history has important implications for our understanding of the history of realism itself, and its place in intellectual history. Nowhere is this clearer than in the divide between realism and liberalism. In many conventional tellings, the history of International Relations theory is the

Historical Realism   45 triumph of realism over liberalism (or sometimes idealism). This history is tragic: it is a lesson learnt only at great cost, as well-​meaning liberals lead the world into wars until (hopefully) realist lessons finally triumph, but it is the founding historical narrative of the field. It is also greatly distortive. It is much better, as Guilhot has argued, to see realism as an attempt to provide an historical fusion between realist and liberal perspectives. Indeed, one of the difficulties in the specifically intellectual history of postwar realism is that it represents ‘an unprecedented ideological hybrid for which we still lack a descriptive term’ (Guilhot 2017, 12). Finally, postwar realism’s vision of history was deeply marked by the question of nuclear war. Returning to Morgenthau’s engagement with Schmitt in light of these concerns helps clarify his oft-​misunderstood conception of history. Morgenthau, for instance, is not guilty of the facile charge that he presents a view of history that does not ‘change’.9 As we have seen, he was well aware of the historical variation of social and political orders—​ and relations between them—​over time. For him, it is the question of the political as decision, and its connection to violence in the last resort, that is historically consistent. But for Morgenthau, nuclear weapons fundamentally alter this vision of history. They do not simply modify an eternal structure of anarchy: they challenge the political at its most fundamental level because the classic Schmittian vision of the political as residing ultimately in a life and death struggle is rendered absurd in an age of mutual annihilation (see Morgenthau 1964; Craig 2003). In reaction to this situation, postwar realists mobilized yet another specific historical narrative in their quest to reorient political life in the face of nuclear danger: that of historical apotheosis or apocalypse. As we have seen, although realists did not disavow the positive dimensions of modernity, they stressed its dangers—​chief amongst them the advent of nuclear weapons. To avoid the catastrophic historical potential of these weapons, realists evoked the narrative device of the end of history itself—​an end not in the sense of Hegel (or later Fukuyama), but of apocalypse: the end of times. Indeed, as Alison McQueen insightfully demonstrates, whereas Morgenthau’s early writings betrayed a ‘tragic’ view of history as conflict as a counterweight to what he saw as naïve liberal progressivism and the disastrous consequences of good intentions, his later confrontation with the implications of nuclear weapons led him to invoke the spectre of apocalypse and to use it as a rhetorical device to stave off annihilation. All-​out nuclear war would not be tragic. It would not be the eternal repetition of history. It would be the end of history. We have no precursors for it, and if it were to happen there would no longer be any historical legacy to learn from nor anyone to learn its lessons. History would be neither heroic nor tragic. It would be literally meaningless: an end to the very common historical world that constitutes humanity (McQueen 2018). As Morgenthau put it in an article entitled ‘Death in the Nuclear Age’: Nuclear destruction is mass destruction, both of persons and of things. It signifies the simultaneous destruction of tens of millions of people, of whole families, generations, and societies, of all things they have inherited and created. It signifies total destruction of whole societies by killing their members, destroying their visible achievements, and therefore reducing the survivors to barbarism. Thus nuclear destruction destroys the meaning of death by depriving it of its individuality. It destroys the meaning of immortality by making both society and history impossible. It destroys the meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself. (Morgenthau 1961, 22; also see McQueen 2018, 186)

46   Michael C. Williams

Conclusion Realism is often, and not unfairly, criticized as a form of historical fatalism. Its very claims of lineage seem to confirm the charge. Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and a host of others continue (despite the best efforts of historians of ideas who think otherwise) to be cited not only as illustrious predecessors of today’s realists, but as confirming its convictions about the essentially timeless principles underpinning global politics. Yet realist visions of history are also richer and more diverse than many of its critics and supporters often recognize, and the issues they engage range far beyond the rather narrow categorizations that see realism and history as essentially opposed. In some of its most sophisticated forms, realism takes history as a resource for understanding the trajectories that give rise to contemporary politics. It is also a means of ethical, practical, political reflection—​a means of rising to meet the challenges of the present with wisdom but without illusions. The ‘lessons’ it teaches are not those of objective or structural determination. We live in a world that is not completely malleable to our wills but nonetheless capable of being moved in better rather than worse directions, toward less rather than more destructive futures.

Notes 1. Some of the most historically rich and nuanced studies in this vein are those of William Wohlforth (see for instance Wohlforth and Brooks (2016)). 2. Tellingly, in yet further evidence of the diversity of views on realism, critics like Stanley Hoffmann almost immediately responded that this view (and its Waltzian roots) were based on ‘a mis-​or non-​reading of history’, and citing in support another canonical realist, Raymond Aron (Hoffmann et al. 1990). 3. On the relationship between realism and critical theories in IR, see Behr and Williams (2017). 4. Carr himself, as Germain notes, was ‘spectacularly unsuccessful’ in identifying which direction history was heading (Germain 2019, 960). 5. Carr’s debt to Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is another important source of many of these ambivalences. 6. For Herz’s connections to Schmitt, see Herz (1992); for Morgenthau’s see Morgenthau (2012). Secondary treatments include Brown (2007); Scheuerman (2000); and most broadly, Guilhot (2017). 7. For an insightful recovery of Morgenthau’s views on human nature, see Koskenniemi (2001). 8. For a fuller analysis, see Williams (2005). 9. Robert Cox’s contrast between a historically static realism and a fluid ‘critical’ theory has in this respect unfortunately been less than helpful in understanding the place of history in either.

References Behr, H. and Williams, M. C. 2017. ‘Interlocuting Classical Realism and Critical Theory: Negotiating “Divides” in International Relations Theory’. Journal of International Political Theory 13(1): 1–​17.

Historical Realism   47 Bell, D. 2009. ‘Introduction—​Under and Empty Sky—​Realism and Political Theory’. In Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. Duncan Bell, 1–​22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, C. 2007. ‘ “The Twilight of International Morality”? Hans J. Morgenthau and Carl Schmitt on the End of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum” ’. In Realism Reconsidered: the Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, ed. Michael C. Williams, 42–​61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carr, E. H. 1961. What Is History? London: Penguin. Carr, E. H. 2010. The Twenty Years Crisis. London: Macmillan. Cox, M. 2010. ‘“Editors Introduction” to Carr E. H. 2010’. In The Twenty Years Crisis, ed. M. Cox. London: Macmillan. Cox, R. W. 1981. ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’. Millennium 10(2): 126–​155. Cox, R. W. 1987. Power, Production, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Craig, C. 2003. Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz. New York: Columbia University Press. Germain, R. 2019. ‘E. H. Carr and IPE: An Essay in Retrieval’. International Studies Quarterly 63(4): 952–​962. Guilhot, N. 2014. ‘Imperial Realism: Post-​War IR Theory and Decolonisation’. The International History Review 36(4): 698–​720. Guilhot, N. 2017. After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-​Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haslam, J. 1998. The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr, 1892–​1982. London: Verso. Herz, J. 1992. ‘Looking at Carl Schmitt from the Perspective of the 1990s’. Interpretation 19(3): 307–​314. Hoffmann, S., Keohane, R. O. and Mearsheimer, J. J. 1990. ‘Back to the Future Part II: International Relations Theory and Post-​Cold War Europe’. International Security 15(2): 191–​199. Jones, C. 1988. E.H. Carr and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirshner, J. 2012. ‘The Tragedy of Offensive Realism: Classical Realism and the Rise of China’. European Journal of International Relations 18(1): 53–​75. Koskenniemi, M. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001: 445–​455. Lawson, G. 2012. ‘The Eternal Divide? History and International Relations’. European Journal of International Relations 18(2): 203–​226. McQueen, A. 2018. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mearsheimer, J. 1990. ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’. International Security 15(1): 5–​66. Mearsheimer, J. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: WW Norton. Mearsheimer, J. 2018. The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Morgenthau, H. J. 1942. Scientific Man and Power Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgenthau, H. J. 1961. ‘Public Affairs: Death in the Nuclear Age’. Commentary 32(3): 231–​234. Morgenthau, H. J. 1964. ‘Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy’. American Political Science Review 58(1): 28–​35. Morgenthau, H. J. 1967. Politics among Nations (fourth edn) New York: Knopf.

48   Michael C. Williams Morgenthau, H. J. 1972. Science: Servant or Master? New York: Norton. Morgenthau, H. J. 2012. The Concept of the Political, eds. Behr, H. and F. Rosch. London: Palgrave. Niebuhr, R. 1941/​1943. The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Puchala, D. 2008. Theory and History in International Relations. London: Routledge Ripsman, N. M., J. W. Taliaferro, and S. E. Lobell, eds. 2016. Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheuerman, W. 2000. Morgenthau. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schmitt, C. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schroeder, P. 1994. ‘Historical Reality vs. Neo-​Realist Theory’. International Security 19(1): 104–​154. Schweller, R. 1996. ‘Neorealism’s Status-​Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?’ Security Studies 5(3): 90–​121. Tjalve, V. S. and Williams, M. C. 2015. ‘Reviving the Rhetoric of Realism: Politics and Responsibility in Grand Strategy’. Security Studies 25(1): 37–​60. Vibeke Schou Tjalve, V. S. 2008. Realist Strategies of Republican Peace. London: Macmillan. Walker, R. J. B. 1989. ‘History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations’. Millennium 18(2): 163–​183. Waltz, K. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Boston: Addison-​Wesley. Waltz, K. 1998. ‘The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18(4): 615–​628. Wendt, A. 1992. ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of State Politics’. International Organization 46(2): 391–​425. Williams, M. C. 2005. The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohlforth, W. and Brooks, S. G. 2016. America Abroad. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 4

Lib eral Pro g re s si v i sm and Internat i ona l History Lucian M. Ashworth Attempts to summarize the contribution of liberalism in the history of international thought run into the problem that there are many varieties of liberalism (Rosenblatt 2018), and these manifest in International Relations (IR) in different ways (Ikenberry 2020). One common solution, which saves time and aids coherence, is to concentrate on one of the major strands of liberal internationalism. This usually ends up falling into one of two possible directions. The first is to concentrate on the progressive form of liberal internationalism that evolved from the new liberalism of the late nineteenth century. In this story the liberal internationalism that emerges is progressive, democratic, and fades into social democracy. It was this form of liberal internationalism that influenced the development of democratic socialist foreign policies, criticisms of neocolonialism, and through Hobson influenced Lenin’s approach to imperialism. The second is to concentrate on the construction of a liberal global order based around United States’ hegemony. Here the emphasis shifts to the often-​non-​ democratic property-​based view of classical liberalism, and the eventual development of neoliberalism. The continuity between classical liberalism and the post-​1945 liberal world order is emphasized, as is the rise of neo-​liberalism, with its attempts to circumvent the state and democracy through market-​friendly rules and institutions. While both stories share an emphasis on international organizations and on individual freedom, they remain distinct visions of what a liberal global governance should be. In this chapter, I explore the origins, nature, and conflict between different liberal narratives, arguing that the clash of these liberalisms defines much of the Western approach to the problem of global governance. At the same time I want to stress the importance of an historical frame to the understanding of liberal internationalism, and also how past liberal internationalists have interpreted their own place in history. In placing the emphasis on historical narratives and contingency I follow a granular approach to the nature and evolution of liberalism in international thought. The two main strands of liberal internationalism—​one emerging from new liberalism, and the other from a classical liberal influenced neoliberalism—​develop as interconnected and porous traditions, evolving over

50   Lucian M. Ashworth time as scholarly generations are replaced, and the major questions and problems of the day shift. Here the changing nature of liberalism over time is emphasized. Granularity is stressed through the fine-​grained analysis of two separate exchanges between liberals that, in turn, help make sense of the courser-​grained broader history of liberal internationalism. Treating liberal internationalism as a porous tradition in the stream of time has one major disadvantage: it is messy. The line of least resistance in trying to understand an ideology is to set up a clear definition of its core values, and then trace this interpretation across major protagonists. The problem with this approach is it creates an ahistorical and ‘great man’ approach to understanding. Defining canonical values leads to a reified canon of assumed connections. Focusing on traditions made up of communities of scholars and practitioners allows the intellectual historian to appreciate how ideas interact and change, and reinterprets ideologies as a set of inter-​related family trees, where both intra-​and inter-​generational relationships matter. In the stream of time even the apparent ageless rocks of a generation’s core values can be weathered and redeposited in a new form. It is this process of intellectual weathering and re-​sedimentation that leads to redefinitions of liberalism. In order to understand liberal internationalism we need to explore the changes that it went through, and how scholarly communities and inter-​generational change both broke it down and rejuvenated it. It is impossible to do justice to the whole history of liberal internationalism in such a short space, so I concentrate on two major exchanges that affected its development in the English-​ speaking world. While each of these are partial stories, they do draw out major themes in the development of liberalism as it came to terms with a particular form of modernity associated with industrialization. Whether these exchanges are consciously remembered by liberals today, the issues discussed still resonate in the study of the current international order. The first exchange, that took place during the First World War, is the clash between Bernard Bosanquet and his new liberal critics over the possibilities of international government. This was one interaction among many that helped to coalesce a more progressive liberal internationalism in reaction to more classical liberal objections. The second, taking place during the Second World War as part of postwar reconstruction debates, focuses on two opposed (yet linked) liberal texts. The first is David Mitrany’s attempt to reform progressive liberal internationalism through the functional approach. The second was a restatement of classical liberal values by Friedrich von Hayek that helped spread neoliberal ideas of global order. Neither of these fine-​grained vignettes tell the whole story of liberal internationalism, but they do reveal key aspects of its journey, as well as how liberal internationalists situated themselves within the history of internationalism.

Classical Liberalism at Bay. The Savaging of Bernard Bosanquet, 1915–​18 The story of the origins of liberal internationalism is part of the story of the revolt of new liberalism against classical liberalism. In this respect it represents a sharp break with the past. It is not that an international theory of sorts cannot be gleaned from the writings of earlier liberals such as Locke, Rosseau, Smith, Bentham, Kant, and Hegel—​and many including myself have managed to do just that (Ashworth 2014, 51–​66). Rather, it is that the international

Liberal Progressivism and IH    51 thought of these classical liberals lacks the assumptions and ideas that we associate with the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century, and with the possible exception of Kant these classical liberal sojourns into the international are extensions of their more developed analysis of politics within a society. Liberal internationalism, with its concerns about global governance in a modern economically interdependent world and its focus on the problem of international organizations in a war-​prone self-​help system, emerges as a response to the changes brought about by industrialization (see Buzan and Lawson 2015). While in its original form it emerges as a global manifestation of the new liberalism of the late nineteenth century, it would later incorporate a reaction to new liberalism in the form of the neoliberalism of Hayek and others, who brought back key classical liberal ideas. Yet, despite its harking back to classical liberalism, neoliberalism retained the new liberal concerns for global governance and international organizations. Neoliberalism, in this sense, represents a hybrid of classical liberal concerns about rights and liberty fused to a new liberal framework of international organizations and interdependence. Thus, twentieth-​century liberal internationalism is a response to the problems of a particular kind of modernity that emerges out of the new realities of industrialization. The IR implications of this new industrialized modernity has been well explored by Craig Murphy (1994). The British idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet wrote very little on the international, but this was by design. His liberal position, informed by Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, led him to regard the happenings beyond the boundaries of the state as lesser matters. Like many of his liberal forebears, his international thought was derived from his thoughts on politics within the state, and in Bosanquet’s case it served the role of protecting his more developed intra-​state political theory from criticisms by new liberal thinkers. His political theory found its clearest statement in his 1899 The Philosophical Theory of the State (1923). Bosanquet’s goal was to understand the essence of the state, which he saw as a product of the human mind interacting with its environment (Collini 1976, 72, 93). His understanding of what the human mind meant in this context was taken from Rousseau’s concept of the general will, which remained central to his view of the nature of the state. According to Bosanquet a society has a general will, which in turn is responsible for creating a communal mind. Ideally a state’s borders are coterminous with this general will, and this allows the communal mind to be brought to life through the organs of the state (Bosanquet 1923, chapters VI–​VII; 1917, 307). Without a general will, or where a state’s boundaries exceed the limits of the general will, the organs of the state no longer act for a communal mind, and instead the government becomes ‘external and tyrannical’ (Bosanquet 1916–​17). Philosophically a cosmopolitan, Bosanquet nonetheless rejected the idea of cosmopolitan global governance structures, arguing that cosmopolitan ideals could only be expressed through the communal mind within the state. As a result, the state remained the ultimate moral agent, and a sense of community had to precede the development of organs of government (Bosanquet 1916–​17, 306–​307; Nicholson 1976, 78–​79). At the same time, Bosanquet feared that any attempt to create a greater sense of unity across the world would be carried out at the expense of the diversity of the ‘valuable individual qualities of national minds’ (Bosanquet 1916–​17, 53). Because of the centrality of his idea of the state as a moral community to his world view—​something he took from German idealist notions of the Rechtstaat—​ Bosanquet accepted that war was a natural and reasonable part of life. That said, he also argued that, since the establishment of organs of government in the absence of a general will would lead to violence, those who advocated for the establishment of international

52   Lucian M. Ashworth government were encouraging the outbreak of war (Bosanquet 1917, 313). The only way out of the threat of war, he argued, was either if a truly global general will developed that made a world state possible, or a Kantian peace where properly constituted constitutional states were able to develop side-​by-​side. Here Bosanquet suggests that the cause of war is imperfect states (1916–​17, 35, 50–​51; 1917, 307, 309; 1923, lix). Bosanquet’s concept of the development of societies rests on moral development, and the role of industrialization plays little part in his central argument. Similarly, his analysis of the state is based on an abstract philosophical argument that assumes the existence of an uncomplicated general will that is not disrupted by class divisions or specific interests. It also offered little to those, especially during and after the First World War, who looked for a way to prevent the outbreak of another devastating global conflict between modern industrial powers. For all these reasons Bosanquet came under attack from new liberals. In two places in particular—​a symposium published by the Aristotelian Society, and a book by L. T. Hobhouse—​Bosanquet was singled out for attack by name (Burns et al 1915–​16; Hobhouse 1918). Both the ‘Symposium’ and Hobhouse’s book focus on how Bosanquet ignored the importance of the state’s external relations under industrialized modernity, underscoring both how dismissive Bosanquet was of international relations, and how he was blind to the effects of growing economic interdependence brought on by industrialization. In the ‘Symposium’ Delisle Burns stressed the extent to which the modern state was forged by its external relations through its embeddedness in a society of states. G. D. H. Cole and Hobhouse, on the other hand, emphasized the extent to which human relations also occurred across borders (Burns et al. 1915–​16, 298–​299; Hobhouse 1918, 108–​109). By stressing the centrality of moral unity to the state, Bosanquet had rendered invisible the development of economic links across borders, which led Hobhouse to argue that governance needs to encase not the moral community but the new interdependent economy. As that interdependence became increasingly global in nature the need for structures of global governance became imperative. In short, Bosanquet’s view of the state assumed a unity within a national community that just was not there (especially with growing class divisions in the modern industrial economy), and underplayed the importance of the interactions across borders (Hobhouse 1918, 108). Instead, Hobhouse proposed that a sense of belonging to the same society would be the effect, not the cause, of the development of common institutions (Hobhouse 1918, 107). This distinction between Bosanquet’s state as encompassing a (pre-​industrial) moral community, and the new liberal idea of governance needing to enclose an interdependent political economy underscores the difference between the old and the new liberalisms. It also shows how this new liberal criticism also leads directly to the liberal international concern for a new global governance in the face of the new reality of industrialized modernity. Yet, the criticisms of Bosanquet also teased out another hallmark of liberal internationalism amongst the new liberals: the problem of war, and the need to find institutional answers to prevent war between states. Hobhouse cast doubt on Bosanquet’s claim that properly constituted states were more pacific, and thus also rejected the basic premise of Kant’s concept of perpetual peace. Instead Hobhouse argued that interdependence (under industrialized modernity), without the institutional mechanisms to prevent conflict between states, would lead to war (Hobhouse 1918, 106). Russell took a related turn by arguing that in a world of states the irony remained that the attempt to guarantee your own security through arms would also lead to the insecurity of others (Burns et al. 1915–​16, 303–​308). Thus, at the heart of a

Liberal Progressivism and IH    53 society of industrial interdependent states without some form of global governance there lay an inherent problem of insecurity, and thus the threat of war. Here we see an early manifestation of the security dilemma. The attacks on Bosanquet represented a sharp break with the classical liberalism of the past, and the development of a new liberal internationalism that concentrated on solving the problems thrown up by interdependence and war through mechanisms of global governance. It also demonstrates the extent to which an earlier liberal tradition of international thought found in the work of Kant and others had little influence on the newly emerging liberal internationalism. Like Bosanquet, Kant’s liberal peace—​based upon the naturally peaceful intent between constitutionally secure states within a specific ethical frame—​is firmly rejected. Kant and Bosanquet’s shared view of a perfected state living peacefully with others seemed quaint and out of touch in the aftermath of the First World War. Perhaps we also see the effect of the machine age here. The organic analogy of the moral community found in Bosanquet’s liberalism is, with the new liberals, replaced by an impersonal mechanical machine designed to harness interdependence and prevent war. Shifting from an organic to a mechanical analogy is one manifestation of new liberalism’s embeddedness in industrial modernity, and its rejection of an earlier classical liberalism that used organic analogies. Interestingly, this machine analogy would continue in the neoliberalism of Hayek, despite his debt to classical liberalism. The new liberal inspired liberal internationalism would remain a powerful element in English-​speaking international thought throughout the interwar period, and increasingly it would not feel the need to judge itself by its differences with classical liberalism. One of its clearest statements comes from Mary Parker Follett in 1918. The New State sees Follett range freely across national and international politics, making new liberal arguments for fresh forms of governance to manage an interdependent world where the welfare of the individual became paramount (Follett 1918). Interestingly, Follett is also, along with Hobhouse, one of the first liberal internationalists to use the idea of functional organizations as a way of reconciling new liberal ideas on democracy, interdependence, and global governance (see Murphy 1999). This functional approach, which would also appear in the work of R. H. Tawney, H. G. Wells, and Harold Laski, would be taken up again by David Mitrany. Much of this new liberal internationalism in the interwar period would focus on perfecting the machinery of the League of Nations, in an exercise of rule-​tightening that was frequently referred to as ‘closing the gaps in the Covenant’ (see Ashworth 2014, 159–​ 164). Here they would often receive support from political geographers inspired by Ellen Churchill Semple. Backing for a League with teeth came from both Halford Mackinder and Isaiah Bowman (the latter a major influence on the American-​led post-​1945 global order). They also ran into conflict with an emerging feminist international thought represented by the work and political activism of Helena Swanwick and Emily Greene Balch. Although also supportive of the League and its good offices, this new feminist IR opposed the sanctions provisions of the League that could require the League to fight wars against aggressors (see Swanwick 1937). This resistance rested on both an opposition to the institution of war and to the view that the liberal internationalist assumption that states would obey a law when agreed to was dangerously naïve. While Hayek would inherit this view that an agreed set of rules could be adhered to at a global level, Mitrany’s functional approach took on board this criticism of the weakness of the rule of law, preferring to rely on the more elemental idea of human needs as the basis of global order.

54   Lucian M. Ashworth

Liberalism Divided. Mitrany versus Hayek. 1943–​4 4 Bowdlerized histories of IR, based around the myth of the realist-​idealist ‘Great Debate’, often assume that the Second World War and its aftermath represents the victory of realism. The story of wartime preparations for postwar reconstruction tells a different story. Within this story liberals emerge as major protagonists (see Ikenberry 2020, ­chapter 6). The bulk of this section will concentrate on the very different liberal visions for global order proposed by David Mitrany and Friedrich von Hayek, and how their ideas faired in the decades after 1945. The world that emerged after 1945 was not realist. With the split between the Allies still years in the future, and the global governance architecture already the subject of signed treaties among the Allies during the war, the emerging world often had a distinctly liberal flavour. The lessons of the war involved issues of trade (especially the availability of raw materials), fiscal policy, development, and the curbing of aggressors through an international machinery compatible with the pre-​war ideas found in liberal internationalism. The architects of the new political economy were economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White (Steil 2013), but the leading academic international specialist was the political geographer Isaiah Bowman (see Ashworth 2017, 73–​90). As a veteran of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Bowman was brought into the State Department during the Second World War as a presidential advisor. In this role he attended the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences. Although one of many academics involved in United States and allied postwar planning, Bowman’s own view of the world matched closely the emerging allied consensus that would result in the United States-​led postwar global order that dominated global politics outside of the Soviet sphere. Central to Bowman’s world view was the idea that industrialization had altered humanity’s relationship with the Earth. The increased need for specific raw materials had undermined the independence of the state, and prosperity now relied on transnational trade. This was the reality of the new industrialized modernity. For Bowman, the violence of the war had been a product of policies of expansion by the fascist powers as they looked for new sources of raw materials and new outlets for the settlement of growing populations. Yet, crucially for Bowman, this was not a predetermined path. The changes brought by industrialization did make imperialism and conflict one possible outcome, but these same conditions could result in a different global order. For Bowman the alternative to this imperialist and fascist logic was a liberal order based on global free trade and free mobility of labour. If raw materials were available on global markets, and people were free to relocate as individuals, then the necessity for state conflict and formal political empires was removed. For Bowman, a liberal trading order was both a reaction to the material realities of industrialization, and a viable alternative to the imperialism that had led to the war (Bowman 1928; and 1942). Thus both fascist expansion and liberal free trade were reactions to the realities of industrialized modernity. Bowman’s attempt to envision an interdependent and capitalist world shorn of its overt imperial political structures has a strong family resemblance to the attempt by neoliberals such as Hayek to envision a rules-​based market order outside of the old pre-​1914 imperial economy.

Liberal Progressivism and IH    55 Profound changes in the economy, and its effects on the political institution of the state, is also central to the international thought of David Mitrany. Mitrany’s approach to global order had been maturing through the 1930s (Mitrany 1933), but his popularity rose with the publication of his 1943 pamphlet ‘A Working Peace System’. Although not mentioned specifically in the pamphlet, the underlying assumption in Mitrany’s work on global order was that the process of change involved the relationship between the ‘social life’ of a society (defined as a mix of its economy and social interactions of individuals) and its security arrangements (in modern terms the state). The tendency was for the social life to expand until it broke the bounds of its security arrangements. When this happened security institutions went from protecting the social life to being a threat to it. For Mitrany, the reality of the twentieth century was that the social life had not only burst the bounds of the state, it had now gone global. Thus, the act of simply expanding the boundaries of the state to encompass the enlarged social life was no longer a possibility (Mitrany 1933–​34; see also Mitrany 1943, 7). A Working Peace System argues that the idea of government that had served the liberal nineteenth century so well had also failed. For Mitrany the revolution in government of the nineteenth century had been a rebellion against arbitrary government, which had instead developed a state-​wide rule of law under a constitution: the nightwatchman state. While the nightwatchman state was a necessary development for Mitrany, it was singularly ill equipped to deal with the problems of the twentieth century, which had moved on from the struggle for rights, to that of poverty and the fulfillment of need (Mitrany 1943, 7–​10). The satisfaction of need was a pragmatic issue poorly suited to questions of legal rights. Rather it suits organizations that spot and satisfy needs. Thus, the very nature of modernity had changed, and government had to change in response. Bringing these two points together—​the failure of the security arrangements of the nation-​state and the growth of pragmatic needs-​based government—​Mitrany turned to transnational organizations that could plan the satisfaction of needs. Yet, national planning would just exacerbate the problem: empowering states, setting them into conflict over global resources, and giving them the ability to wage total war. The answer for Mitrany lay in the development of international planning. Two possibilities for international planning lay immediately to hand, but both were flawed. One was an overarching powerful global organization (a league with teeth), and the other was a voluntary federation of states leading to larger organizations. Mitrany rejected them both on practical grounds. Mitrany’s doubt about an overarching global organization was rooted in his analysis of the failures of the League. The League for Mitrany had been an attempt to create a new constitutional level of government, so it did not directly deal with need, but it was also unlikely that states would give it wide-​ranging powers (Mitrany 1943, 8). Federalism was also a naïve hope. The problem with federalism was that it required agreement between federalizing units on all aspects of government. This might have been possible in the eighteenth century, when government was limited, but in the new welfare states of the twentieth century the role of government was so complex that any treaty of federation would be almost impossible to put together without upsetting many interested parties. Mitrany had pointed out that the successful examples of federation held up by federalists had occurred at a time when states were self-​sufficient, and governments limited to only a few easily coordinated roles. Even if a federation succeeded, all it would do is create a much larger state that would not solve the problem of states competing globally for resources. In fact, it could make those conflicts

56   Lucian M. Ashworth worse by marshalling larger resources under the control of the protagonists (Mitrany 1943, Part II; see also Mitrany 1966, 172). Federalism was not suited to industrialized modernity. Instead of these formal structures Mitrany opted for an approach that emphasized a pragmatic process over utopian goals. Where federalism had a clear goal, but was weak on the process of getting there, Mitrany left the final goals open and concentrated on adumbrating the process of change needed. Instead of directly confronting the state, as federalism did, he advocated creating functional organizations built around single needs. These would not directly challenge the state, and their justification would rest on their ability to adequately plan a single issue. A proliferation of functional organizations would then lead to a transition away from the state one function at a time (Mitrany 1943, Part III). International planning would be accomplished in areas where agreement could be reached, and in piecemeal fashion. A Working Peace System enjoyed some immediate success. Read by those on the left planning for a postwar welfare state and revived League of Nations, the idea of functional integration was often absorbed into these plans even as Mitrany’s warnings about national planning and League-​like organizations were ignored (Ashworth 2007, 186–​196). Mitrany’s functional approach was also adopted by E. H. Carr (without proper citation) in his Conditions of Peace (1942) and Nationalism and After (1945), where his vision for a postwar Europe was a planned functional order. Peter Wilson has argued that the force of Mitrany’s and Carr’s arguments for a functional approach played a major role in the decline of federalist ideas in postwar Britain (Wilson 1996, 39–​62). Despite his strong links to the United States, Mitrany’s functional approach was slow in crossing the Atlantic. The major exception was Ernst Haas’ use of Mitrany’s ideas in his development of his neofunctionalism (Haas 1958, and 1964). Despite this A Working Peace System was much admired by Hans J. Morgenthau, and it was through Morgenthau that Mitrany’s pamphlet (republished with other works and with an introduction by Morgenthau) reached a wider American audience in 1966 (see Ashworth 2013, 59–​68), making it a feature of American IR, and a must-​address issue in the study of international organizations (Claude 1964; Sewell 1966), or in European integration (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970, 6–​7). In the 1970s Mitrany’s ideas had another renaissance via the work of John Groom and Paul Taylor, although after that interest in Mitrany faded in IR (Groom and Taylor 1975). While Mitrany’s functional approach is considered a part of IR, Hayek’s role as a theorist of the international is not well known, despite some notable exceptions (see Spieker 2014). Greater attention on the role of Hayek’s wider circle of acquaintances in the development of neoliberalism has been spurred by Quinn Slobodian’s recent book Globalists, that has put this branch of liberalism under detailed intellectual scrutiny (Slobodian 2018). While much of the work on the development of neoliberalism’s international thought came from a broad range of thinkers, and Hayek does not play the lead role in Slobodian’s book, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom summarized and popularized what would become the consistent neoliberal position for the next seven decades. Published in 1944, a year after Mitrany’s A Working Peace System, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom does not directly engage with Mitrany’s ideas. Despite that, it does curtly dismiss a central pillar of Mitrany’s thesis, while at the same time advocating a way forward that Mitrany had directly criticized. In both cases, it is clear that Hayek had not read Mitrany’s work, and at this stage at least the relationship between these two strands of liberal internationalism is a dialogue of the deaf. This is made clear in two parts of Hayek’s pamphlet: his dismissal of international planning, and his support for federalism.

Liberal Progressivism and IH    57 Hayek sees the idea of international planning as merely the extension of national planning to the global level. As a result, he sees it as policy imposed by a central authority through the use of force. For Hayek international planning is something that would be ‘unitary’, and therefore imposing a single plan on diverse societies (Hayek 1994, 242–​243). Later, in reference to a contemporary idea for the development of a Danuban River Authority using the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Hayek criticizes schemes for international planning as ‘determining beforehand . . . the relative rates of progress of the different races’ (Hayek 1994, 247–​248). Thus, Hayek assumes a single master plan. This is very different from Mitrany’s concept of international planning, where single functions are planned by those involved in the function, and where the concept of bottom-​up functional democracy privileges process over goals. Ironically, the problem of sharing knowledge that was spread over multiple individuals for which Hayek saw the market as the only solution, is also addressed by Mitrany through his functional organizations. For Mitrany, functional democracy within functional planning organizations would also release the knowledge held by individuals (Mitrany 1971, 540–​541). Thus we see a similar logic at play in both Hayek’s markets and Mitrany’s functional planning. In a short section towards the end of Road to Serfdom, Hayek supports the very idea of international federation that Mitrany had rejected. For Hayek, these federations would in turn federate with other federations, creating a federal system that could maintain the rule of law and prevent individual state governments from developing national planning. The nature of federation for Hayek was limited to the transfer of what he called ‘the powers of the ultra-​liberal “laissez-​faire” state’, so that the new federal authorities would be administering basic rules that would prevent states damaging one another (Hayek 1994, 255–​256). While Hayek’s idea is limited compared to the powers some of his contemporaries in federalist movements wanted to transfer to a federal authority, his plan still runs into the accusation of naivety that Mitrany leveled at federal plans. Sadly there was no Mitrany-​Hayek debate over the issues of international planning, functional integration, and federalism. Despite their common interests in international organizations, and their common worries about rising state power, there was no public venue in which their different visions of the postwar order were subject to comparison and debate. Hayek does, though, attack E. H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace. The basis of the attack was Hayek’s defence of the abstract nineteenth century liberal thought that had been Carr’s main target. Carr had seen nineteenth-​century liberalism as an ideological justification for the actions of class elites and British governments acting in their own interests. Hayek, on the other hand, saw in liberal ideas of individual liberty and opposition to government control the ideological basis of a free society. These abstract principles, interpreted through the rule of law, were a protection from the arbitrary authority of the state, and were the guarantee of a society of free individuals. Carr, for Hayek, was the manifestation in the English-​speaking world of a longer counter-​tradition of socialist collectivist thought—​manifest on the right as well as the left—​that opposed freedom by justifying the use of arbitrary power by the state (Hayek 1994, 204–​207). Carr, in this sense, was not just an apologist for appeasement, he was laying down the ideological preconditions of the development of a British form of totalitarianism. Here it is clear that Hayek understood the nature of the classical realist argument about the nature and role of theory. In a 1952 article Hans J. Morgenthau had argued that the difference

58   Lucian M. Ashworth between realist and utopian thought in foreign policy did not revolve around specific policy issues. Indeed, it was more than possible for realists and utopians to agree on a foreign policy approach. The difference was the thought processes used to come to a specific position. Utopians, Morgenthau claimed, applied abstract principles to a situation, and from this application came up with policy. Realists, on the other hand, evaluated situations through a historical analysis of the situation. Both positions, Morgenthau argued, were ethical, but that the utopians applied ethics rooted in abstract principles, while realists saw ethics as historically grounded (Morgenthau 1952). Hayek grasped this difference in his reading of Carr, and quoted Carr’s explicit identification with the ‘historical school’ of realism that could be traced back to Germany (Hayek 1994, 204). While Carr and Morgenthau saw in their historical treatment of foreign policy an empiricist treatment of issues on their own merits, Hayek interpreted it as a surrender to arbitrary power. The abstract individualist thought that the realists attacked, was necessary for Hayek as the intellectual underpinnings of respect for the individual under a sacrosanct rule of law. Carr was making totalitarianism possible by rejecting the only guarantee of the rights of the individual under the rule of law, while at the same time providing moral justification for arbitrary state power through an appeal to historical conditions. On this issue at least, it is useful to see classical realism and Hayekian neoliberalism as theoretical opposites. In part The Road to Serfdom is a defence of the abstract thinking of nineteenth-​century liberals, and therefore an answer to classical realism. For Hayek the major implication of the rise of collectivism was the growing polarization of the world into quarrelling states. Here he was much closer to Mitrany’s discussion of the implications of the rise of state planning. As states collectivized their economies under government planning regimes, Hayek thought this would strengthen nationalist sentiment, and set nationally planned states against each other. Individuals would be squeezed out, as states traded directly with states (Hayek 1994, 241). To prevent this from happening Hayek proposed that a generalized rule of law governing international interactions should be extended globally, and then regulated by an international authority. The purpose here would be to protect the rights of individuals to engage in a global free market, while preventing states from collectivizing their economic activities (Hayek 1994, 254). Hayek’s support for some form of international authority through the development of international organizations was something that he shared with both Mitrany and classical realists like Carr. Yet, while Mitrany’s organizations would solve pragmatic problems of need and infrastructure, Hayek’s would primarily deal with the enforcing of general rules outside of the state. As Slobodian has shown, this conception of global order was central to the neoliberal approach to IR, and would become the ideological basis behind the development of a new strata of global governance from the 1970s. The neoliberal approach endeavoured to protect the free market from government interference by increasingly investing international organizations outside of the control of any one state with the power to enforce a rule of law based on generalized agreements. This approach was designed to protect the freedom of the individual from collectivist and majoritarian whims (Slobodian 2018). Hayek’s later popularity seems to be the inverse of Mitrany’s. While the soft ‘collectivism’ that worried Hayek was a first step to totalitarianism remained influential during the ‘Trente Glorieuse’ (1945–​75), Hayek’s ideas remained outside mainstream thinking and little known in IR. Until the 1970s, the major economies of the capitalist West constructed an economic

Liberal Progressivism and IH    59 system that was a blend of private competitive practices and state-​run planning. According to Hayek this was an impossible mix that would just lead to totalitarianism (Hayek 1994, 47–​48), but Hayek was a voice in the wilderness. This was to change with the rise of neoliberalism in the late seventies. Although by the 1980s he was popular in many political circles, Hayek has been little explored by IR scholars. Yet, while it is easy to contrast Mitrany and Hayek as opposite approaches, there is much that they share. Both were coming to terms with the major changes that had rocked politics since industrialization, and both were concerned with the role the state might play in unravelling a future liberal order. Both also shared an unfortunate tendency after the Second World War to compromise their commitments to freedom and democracy. Mitrany, despite commitments to functional democracy, welcomed the more top-​down functionalism of multinational firms and the United Nations (UN) special agencies. Similarly, Hayek’s commitment to the idea of individual freedom led him to champion an order that seemed to abandon democratic government in favour of a soft authoritarianism (Gray 1993). This privileging of freedom over democracy by neoliberals does contest Ikenberry’s claim that democracy is central to Liberal internationalism (Ikenberry 2020, 13). Both Mitrany and Hayek also saw the development of constitutional ideas against arbitrary government in the nineteenth century as important, although while Hayek saw this as a tradition in need of revival, Mitrany saw it as a stage that was no longer fit for solving twentieth-​century problems. The major difference here was that while Hayek feared for the future, Mitrany embraced the changes he saw around him. Where Hayek saw the erosion of classical liberal freedoms, Mitrany predicted that the functional ‘trend of the times’ would usher in a better world with a ‘working peace system’. Despite Hayek’s claim to be returning to a threatened classical liberalism, his thought shows very little affinity with Bosanquet. Many of these differences lie with Bosanquet’s German-​inspire idealism, which is at odds with the more British Enlightenment tradition that inspired Hayek. Yet, another aspect of this difference with Bosanquet is the extent to which Hayek is far more influenced by the new liberalism of the liberal internationalists than he admits. Hayek’s mechanical view of government, his support for international organizations, and his rejection of the metaphysical theory of the state shows that he had more in common with Hobhouse and his generation’s response to industrialized modernity than first meets the eye. Neoliberalism, in this sense, is not a return, but a new synthesis of classical and new liberalism.

Conclusion This study has concentrated on scholars who were part of a British-​American cultural nexus. I have also further limited my study by focusing on two key intellectual moments, adopting a fine-​grained analysis of two specific intellectual moments. In this sense my study has much in common with a preliminary archaeological dig, where two test trenches have been excavated in the hope that these narrow and deeper explorations will give a sense of the site in its entirety. A full and costly excavation awaits the investment of more time and energy. Yet, this concentration on a coherent liberal tradition during two key moments, like the test trenches, is revealing.

60   Lucian M. Ashworth One issue that does jump out is how irrelevant the Kantian legacy is to the liberal internationalisms discussed in this chapter. In IR it was common to adopt Kant as an exemplar of liberal international political thought—​not least by both Martin Wight and Hedley Bull, who see him as a benchmark for the revolutionary tradition in IR (Wight 1996; Bull 1977). Yet, the Anglophone liberal internationalism of the twentieth century, through its reaction to the Kant-​inspired liberalism of Bosanquet, is a rejection of Kantianism. Rather, the realities of industrialized modernity lead to a different form of liberalism. Here we see liberal internationalists (including Hayek) constructing a view of history that sees industrialization as a game changer, and their role as organizers of a new global order in tune with new historical realities. With their machine age analogy of a mechanical government intended to enclose a functioning political economy, the idea of a world of peaceful organic moral communities living in a pacific union has no place. That philosophical construction of the global dies with the savaging of Bernard Bosanquet. Equally at odds with the conventional wisdom is the idea of the Second World War as marking a transfer from a liberal/​idealist to a predominantly realist tradition in Anglophone IR. Rather the discussion of Mitrany and Hayek, within the context of the construction of a liberal postwar settlement, reveals the early 1940s as a period of liberal internationalist renewal (see also Ikenberry, 2020: c­ hapter 6). To return to my earlier analogy, what we witness in the pamphlets of Mitrany and Hayek is a weathering of the sedimentary rock of liberal internationalism, and its re-​sedimentation into two approaches that would influence not just IR, but also European Union (EU) studies, the study of international organizations, and the new neoliberal consensus on global governance after the 1970s. As IR enters the Anthropocene, liberal internationalism is likely to face new forms of weathering and re-​sedimentation. The neoliberalism associated with Hayek is under attack, while the ideas associated with Bosanquet’s national moral communities have re-​emerged in a new classical liberalism that shows a disturbing tendency to ally with far right groups in a way that would have appalled the politically liberal Bosanquet (Slobodian 2019). Similarly, the process-​centred functional approach first articulated by Follett and Hobhouse, and developed by Mitrany, has found favour with those rethinking politics in a less stable global environment. Although apparently unaware of Mitrany’s work, Dryzek and Pickering have nonetheless put forward a very Mitrany-​esque politics, where process is privileged, and institutions take on a more functional air (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). While particular schools of liberalism are likely to be eclipsed, the ideas that make them up will be reassembled in new ways.

References Ashworth, L. 2007. International Relations and the Labour Party. London: I. B. Tauris. Ashworth, L. 2013. ‘A New Politics for a Global Age: David Mitrany’s A Working Peace System’. In Classics of International Relations, eds. H. Bliddal, C. Sylvest, and P. Wilson, 59–​68. Abingdon: Routledge. Ashworth, L. 2014. A History of International Thought. London: Routledge. Ashworth, L. 2017. ‘Progessivism Triumphant? Isaiah Bowman’s New Diplomacy in a New World’. In Progressivism and US Foreign Policy Between the World Wars, eds. M. Cochran and C. Navari, 73–​90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Liberal Progressivism and IH    61 Bosanquet, B. 1916–​17. ‘The Function of the State in Promoting the Unity of Mankind’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 17: 28–​57. Bosanquet, B. 1917. Social and International Ideals. Being a Study in Patriotism. London: Macmillan. Bosanquet, B. 1923. The Philosophical Theory of the State, fourth edition. London: Macmillan. Bowman, I. 1928. The New World, fourth edition. Yonkers-​on-​Hudson: World Book Company. Bowman, I. 1942. ‘Geography vs. Geopolitics’. Geographical Review 32: 646–​658. Bull, H. 1977. The Anarchical Society. London: Macmillan. Burns, D., Russell, B., and Cole, G. D. H. 1915–​16. ‘The Nature of the State in View of its External Relations’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 16: 290–​325. Buzan, B. and Lawson, G. 2015. The Global Transformation. History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carr, E. H. 1942. Conditions of Peace. London: Macmillan. Carr, E. H. 1945. Nationalism and After. London: Macmillan. Claude, I. 1964. Swords Into Plowshares. New York: Random House. Collini, S. 1976. ‘Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State: Philosophical Idealism and Political Argument in England 1880–​1918’. Past and Present, 72: 86–​111. Dryzek, J. and Pickering, J. 2019. The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Follett, M. P. 1918. The New State. London: Longmans. Gray, J. 1993. Beyond the New Right. New York: Routledge. Groom, A. J. R. and Taylor, P. 1975. Functionalism. Theory and Practice in International Relations. New York: Crane Russak. Haas, E. 1958. The Uniting of Europe. London, Stevens. Haas, E. 1964. Beyond the Nation-​State. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Hayek, F. A. 1994. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hobhouse, L. T. 1918. The Metaphysical Theory of the State. A Criticism. London: George Allen & Unwin. Ikenberry, J. 2020. A World Safe for Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lindberg, L. and Scheingold, S. 1970. Europe’s Would-​Be Polity. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-​Hall. Mitrany, D. 1933. The Progress of International Government. London: Allen and Unwin. Mitrany, D. 1933–​34. ‘Memorandum on Studies in International Relations’. Unpublished paper. From the Mitrany papers collection at the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences. Mitrany, D. 1943. A Working Peace System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitrany, D. 1966. A Working Peace System. Chicago: Quadrangle. Mitrany, D. 1971. ‘The Functional Approach in Historical Perspective’. International Affairs. 47(3): 532–​543. Morgenthau, H. 1952. ‘Another “Great Debate”: The National Interest of the United States’. The American Political Science Review 46(4): 961–​88. Murphy, C. 1994. International Organization and Industrial Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, C. 1999. ‘The Functional Approach, Organization Theory and Conflict Resolution’. In New Perspectives in International Functionalism, eds. L. Ashworth and D. Long, 84–​104. Houndsmill: Macmillan. Nicholson, P. 1976. ‘Philosophical Idealism and International Politics: A Reply to Dr Savigear’. British Journal of International Studies 2(1): 76–​83.

62   Lucian M. Ashworth Rosenblatt, H. 2018. The Lost History of Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sewell, J. P. 1966. Functionalism and World Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Slobodian, Q. 2018. Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Slobodian, Q. 2019. ‘Anti-​’68ers and the Racist-​Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right’. Culture Politics 15(3): 372–​86. Spieker J. 2014. ‘F. A. Hayek and the Reinvention of Liberal internationalism’. The International History Review 36(5): 919–​942. Steil, B. 2013. The Battle of Bretton Woods. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swanwick, H. M. 1937. Collective Insecurity. London: Jonathan Cape. Wight, M. 1996. International Theory. The Three Traditions. Leicester: University of Leicester Press. Wilson, P. 1996. ‘The New Europe Debate in Wartime Britain’. In Visions of European Unity, eds. P. Murray and P. Rich, 39–​62. Boulder CO: Westview.

chapter 5

Historical So c i ol o g y i n International Re l at i ons Maïa Pal When I introduce Historical Sociology in International Relations (IR) (HSIR) to undergraduate students, I tell them that historical sociologists are concerned with ‘the big questions’, before realizing that their idea of ‘the big questions’ might be significantly different to mine, making me—​and at least a few of them—​chuckle. I persevere by illustrating what I mean by ‘the big questions’. Which major actors and patterns of behaviour shape and disrupt international relations? What makes an order, system, society ‘international’? How appropriate is the word ‘international’, and should it be used as a noun? What do historical patterns of interaction tell us about contemporary issues? And how do they allow us to theorize in IR? My hope is that students get the idea that HSIR is to IR and social sciences what in some ways astrophysics are to natural sciences. Sadly, in some respects, it can also appear just as dense and obscure to them and to the general public. In the following, I argue why HSIR needs to take seriously its work with students and how it can be more simply broken down to them as a key pedagogical tool that has a broader purchase to social sciences—​and even to the general public—​that goes beyond its more esoteric concern with the origins and dark holes of the political world. HSIR’s theoretical objective has mainly consisted in finding ways to overcome the historical pitfalls and structural limits of the international/​domestic and external/​internal dichotomies. These are conventionally defined by IR according to the emergence of the modern state and crystallized in a few mostly mythical benchmark dates that continue to inform leading research and pedagogical resources (Carvalho et al. 2011; Buzan and Lawson 2014). By shaking and redefining these dichotomies and benchmark dates, HSIR aims to provide a ‘core trans-​disciplinary intellectual agenda for IR’ (Hobson et al. 2010, 20), not only acknowledging and actively working towards improving the ways in which ‘we are all historians’ (Hobson and Lawson 2008, 420), but also becoming better i.e. more radical, materialist, and practice-​based sociologists (Hamati-​Ataya 2018). HSIR proposes an ambitious agenda that is built on classic epistemological debates in the social sciences, such as how

64   Maïa Pal ‘scientist’ or ‘historicist’ social sciences should be (Teschke 2014). Its protagonists see it as a way of bringing the discipline back to a more appropriate set of methods and aims, somewhere in between 1) the scientific as positivist and law-​like, and 2) the historicist as empirical and reflexive. However, these debates remain unresolved. Simultaneously, in the face of vibrant current debates on the origins of IR (Vitalis 2015), HSIR is an opportunity to connect the necessary questions of origins, structure, and change by focusing on state-​formation, the origins and modes of expansion of capitalism and modernity, the role and characteristics of revolutions, and more recently, the role of empires, non-​ Western agency, and non-​territorial spaces and ideas. HSIR is not only concerned with key historical moments of international history—​such as the construction of the international system—​and what these tell us theoretically about its main actors or units of analysis. HSIR also poses a significant epistemological challenge to the mainstream by questioning the origins, methods, and essential purpose of IR. However, to connect these aims, HSIR also needs to return to basic methodological questions and engage with the potential of large-​scale comparative and theoretical analysis from a pedagogical angle. Part of HSIR scholarship today stands at a crossroads, having to choose between on the one hand a periodization of ‘waves’—​the latest of which implies ‘theorising the international’ (Hobson et al. 2010)—​and, on the other, the idea of ‘competing centres of gravity’ (Teschke 2014)—​which emphasize a more radical historicism. This chapter argues against theorizations of the international as the solution or primary research agenda for HSIR, which for many takes the form of the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). However, it also pushes historicist critiques of UCD by political Marxism away from the analytical ground on which they have mostly been conducted. Instead, this chapter answers calls for a ‘methodological turn’ (Knafo 2017) to enrich key debates inside HSIR such as UCD, Eurocentrism, and how to theorize non-​Western agency. This approach requires a focus on methodological and pedagogical questions to better understand and communicate the challenges and opportunities of HSIR. This means thinking of the different uses and vantage points from which scholars can disturb existing paradigms, develop new research angles, and retrieve lost, silenced, and erased conceptions of structure and agency. To do so necessarily involves the question of the production of knowledge and an acknowledgement and better understanding of how that knowledge is not only produced, but also shared and received. In sum, the chapter argues for HSIR to focus on the production of knowledge through methodological questions regarding research and pedagogy. First, the chapter situates this argument in the context of the handbook’s two essential angles; modernity and granularity. Second, it briefly presents relevant specificities of HSIR. Third, the chapter explores the methodological contribution of HSIR in terms of analytical research. In particular, this section shows that internalism is not necessarily a problem for anti-​Eurocentric projects and that more care should be taken in enforcing methodological conceptions of Eurocentrism, thereby illustrating the importance of methodology. In the final section, the chapter explores another set of methodological questions in terms of pedagogy, i.e. how we teach students to compare in IR. Experimenting with how undergraduate students choose to embark on small scale comparative exercises constitutes a useful platform to explore how IR actually ‘does’ historical sociology (HS).

Historical Sociology in IR    65

From Modernity to Granularity The question of modernity has been one of the central objects of study for historical sociologists and defined primarily through the construction of both the inter-​state system and capitalism in early modern Europe. Since the Marxist and Weberian legacies of HSIR have been widely acknowledged and discussed at length (Shaw 1998; Lapointe and Dufour 2012), this chapter will not dwell on them in significant detail. However, the question of granularity—​linked to questions of method in terms of texture, focus, and scale—​is a less common and more fruitful one to unpack. Granularity is becoming increasingly important for HSIR since its primary analytical objectives are not only to identify structures and patterns, ruptures, and transitions of international history. HSIR also aims to emphasize IR as a set of imaginary yet highly political constructs for understanding and explaining ontological and epistemological social change, constructs which always need de-​and re-​constructing (Bhambra 2011; Sabaratnam 2011). Granularity is not more important than modernity for HS; their intersection is undoubtedly at the heart of this approach. However, granularity evokes more original angles to understand the dilemmas raised by the complicated relationship between IR and HSIR. The specific approach taken here is to interpret granularity as an admission of the dialectic i.e. of functioning and necessary contradictions enabling a (re)connection between the often-​separate worlds of research and pedagogy. In other words, to critically explore the granularity of HSIR—​i.e. beyond the levels of analysis problem—​is to think of the different ways of methodologically doing HSIR, of its different protagonists beyond the usual analytical or theoretical divisions often (self-​)ascribed by scholars. This implies identifying how students of IR construct analytical steps when doing historical sociology exercises. It is also about identifying the analytical steps and identities taken when scholars are conceiving, writing, doing field-​work, or teaching, i.e. when they are in spaces where theoretical identities can quickly dissolve, shift according to the situations and dialogues, or do not always have time to take hold. Crucially, this means questioning and interchanging the identities of ‘student’ and ‘researcher’, because through this granularity angle, what distinguishes these positions becomes less clear and pertinent. These guiding questions mean that this chapter will not consist in a survey or chronological story of the emergence and breadth of HSIR. Nevertheless, the following section discusses key moments and works that distinguish this approach to history and IR in relation to other approaches discussed in this handbook.

The Specificities of HSIR Since the traditional or first wave of historical sociologists, and the body of Marxist scholarship which contested their Weberian perspective in the second half of the twentieth century, a rich body of scholars mostly in the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia, Turkey, the United States (US), and across European universities have led the renewal of HSIR. The most prominent analyses of societies, states, and revolutions are concerned with Europe,

66   Maïa Pal the Middle East, and North Africa, but also increasingly China and South-​East Asia, Latin America, and North America. Calls for a ‘second wave’ of Weberian and Marxist historical sociology (Halliday 1994; Hobson 1998) generated rich debates, and these discussions culminated in the production of landmark texts defining and debating the approach of HSIR.1 The complexities of HS’s original mix of history and sociology, as well as the complexities of current perspectives and trends produces more granular conceptual challenges, such as the ‘cage’ of Eurocentrism (Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015); the intersectionalities of race, class, and gender; the problem of multiple origins and beginnings (Powel 2020); the consequences of IR’s reflexive turn (Hamati-​Ataya 2013); as well as ongoing debates on Weberian long-​term Western perspectives of international social change (e.g. Linklater 2019, 2017; Ling 2017; Gulsah Capan 2017b; Chong 2017). In spite of important and several differences between them, HSIR scholars might agree on certain fundamental characteristics of their approach. Firstly, HSIR is not about studying contemporary events, nor is it concerned with short-​term intervals or history as exceptional cases disconnected from longer-​term social directions. HSIR can take a diachronic or a synchronic angle as long as this is pursued in a comparative set of cases. If very general, these conditions do distinguish HSIR from other approaches in this Handbook, although there are inevitable overlaps between them, especially with case-​and model-​based, global, intellectual, and postcolonial histories. In contrast to other historical approaches at each end of the ‘general/​particular’ or ‘macro/​ micro’ spectrum, ‘historicist historical sociology’ (in other words, HSIR) provides a sort of middle ground shaped by historical materialism, institutionalism, constructivism, and the English School. This particular approach to comparative analysis looks for general patterns of causation and development while integrating particular moments of change, transition, and disruption. For Hobson and Lawson (2008, 429), this method implies ‘differentiating between significant and accidental causes’, looking for ‘intelligible meaning in a world of incessant change and contestation’, and being ‘open to new facts, interpretations and explanations’. The approach is influenced by contextualist historians E. H. Carr and Quentin Skinner and shares these axioms according to which, firstly, History ‘is knowable but traditional historians cannot claim objective truth’ and secondly, History is ‘produced within a certain time and place and subject to interpretations of its practitioners’ (Hobson and Lawson 2008, 429). Some of these scholars are now concentrating on a ‘third wave’ of HSIR, otherwise called ‘international historical sociology’ (IHS). This should focus on uniting the internal and external angles of analysis by theorizing and de-​externalizing the international so as to produce an autonomous and self-​sustaining social theory of international relations (Hobson et al. 2010; Rosenberg 2006). While some have adopted this goal and shaped it according to the theory of UCD (Matin 2007; Rosenberg 2013; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015) or ‘societal multiplicity’ (Powel 2020b), this ‘wave’ is being disputed by other scholars, notably those associated with political Marxism in IR (Teschke 2014; Rioux 2015; Duzgun 2018; Pal 2018; Knafo and Teschke 2020). The latter argue that UCD risks returning HSIR to a positivist and scientist starting point by developing a universal and law-​like theory generalizing inter-​ societal behaviour. To its proponents, UCD decentres the state and analytically shifts the gaze of historical reconstruction away from the Western European core. However, it pays for

Historical Sociology in IR    67 this dearly by compromising on the contingency of social and (geo)political history, leading to downplaying the indeterminacy and unpredictability of agency and social struggles over contested claims to authority. Of course, not all HSIR is concerned with this debate. A significant part of HSIR is more focused on developing new paths in the study of non-​Western societies and non-​territorial spaces through the influence of postcolonial, decolonial, and other critical approaches as efforts to provincialize Europe as much as Weberian/​Marxist HSIR (Bhambra 2010; Seth 2011; Sabaratnam 2011; Shilliam 2013, 2015; Go 2013; Gulsah Capan 2017a; Campling and Colás 2018). By opening a discussion on the importance of method and the specific device of internalism, the following section attempts to reconnect what may become a problematic cleavage between the UCD-​versus-​historicist debate on the one hand, and a more eclectic body of critical scholarship on the other.

Methodology in Research: The Non-​Eurocentric Potential of Internalism for HSIR The three specific goals of HSIR in the 1990s were to contest the ahistoricism, presentism, and Eurocentrism of realism and neorealism. The goal of contesting Eurocentrism has broadened beyond realism and neorealism, becoming a rich and vibrant body of scholarship. Eurocentrism is a problem that also concerns most critical and Marxist approaches. If not Eurocentric in the standard mainstream sense, many critical approaches remain ‘Eurofetishist’ because they exaggerate Western agency and fail to theorize non-​Western agency (Hobson and Sajed 2017).2 If HSIR needs to take this argument seriously, this section also calls aspects of this critique into question by suggesting a more methodological angle to the problem of how to do anti-​Eurocentric research in HSIR. Some scholars of the ‘third wave’ choose to theorize non-​Western agency through theories of the international such as UCD understood as a unitary theory of multiple inter-​ societal co-​existence. However, there is a multiplicity of ways of being anti-​Eurocentric, and theories of the international are not the exclusive anti-​Eurocentric research path for HSIR. The Eurocentric problem is also methodological, rather than predominantly empirical (or ontological). In significant cases, such as with the device of internalism, it is not the method in itself which is Eurocentric but the way it is used and justified. In other words, the problem has more to do with the conditions and context in which a scholar chooses and uses a method. Most critical approaches in HSIR have tackled Eurocentrism as an ontological problem explained by the focus on the temporality and spatiality of modernity. Modernity remains, understandably, the standard methodological starting point for questioning the construction of systems of international relations and has therefore been somewhat naturalized by HSIR as its locus classicus. For Hobson, early attempts at HSIR distinguished themselves by emphasizing the need to ‘provide new ways of theorizing and explaining the emergence and

68   Maïa Pal development of the modern international system/​society in its multiple dimensions’ (2002, 20). In response, HSIR should be understood as a critical approach which refuses to treat the present as an autonomous entity outside of history but insists on embedding it within a specific socio-​temporal bloc, thereby offering sociological remedies to the ahistorical illusions that chronofetishism and tempocentrism produce. (Hobson 2002, 13)

Chronofetishism and tempocentrism are modes of ahistoricism produced by mainstream social theories—​and notably in IR, by structural theories such as Structural Realism and Neoliberal Institutionalism. They refer to ‘illusions’ such as reification, naturalization, and immutability in the case of chronofetishism; and isomorphism in the case of tempocentrism. These illusions can also be understood as methodological devices and mechanisms, which continue to shape the way we produce knowledge, more or less consciously, in both conventional and critical IR. Accordingly, Eurocentrism is produced by these devices and is primarily seen as a modernity and temporality problem, by showing how the past and present of modernity and capitalism have been constructed by, for, and about Europe and Europeans, according to chronofetishist and tempocentric theories and concepts. These modes of ahistoricism are then used as critical starting points to develop new anti-​Eurocentric methodologies, by looking for a past and present of modernity and capitalism that have been constructed outside Europe by, for, and about non-​Europeans. In other words, retrieving non-​Western agency implies an empirical and ontological angle to the problem of Eurocentrism and assumes that Eurocentrism is primarily shaped by the modernity qua Europe narrative. However, some scholars have also been emphasizing the problem of methodological Eurocentrism (Bhambra 2007; Bilgin 2016; Kuru 2016). Methodological Eurocentrism emphasizes how Eurocentric methods can be used without focusing empirically on Europe. In other words, it occurs when scholars discuss non-​European cases of societal interaction, but they do so by using concepts and methods that remain Eurocentric by assuming European superiority and teleological development. To develop this focus, what does an emphasis on multiplicity at the methodological level of knowledge production—​rather than at the ontological and theoretical levels of multiple societies—​reveal? Does HSIR provide a multiplicity of methods not solely determined by (Western) Eurocentric concepts? Are research methods in HSIR Eurocentric in essence, and can they be dismissed in and of themselves, regardless of how and why they are used or applied, or regardless of the research problem driving them? Or, as suggested here, is Eurocentrism produced by the specific ways in which we use methods? These questions open up the discussion on HSIR research methods and the following suggests that devices such as internalism are not in essence Eurocentric, despite being widely assumed to be. It is useful to recap some of the broad general methods used in HSIR: a) historical comparison (diachronic or synchronic) of secondary literature; b) concept-​formation; c) empirical narratives based on primary and/​or secondary material addressing gaps caused by key illusions and devices (such as reification, naturalization, and so on); d) theories of inter-​ societal co-​existence and agency such as UCD; e) long-​term models, waves, historic blocs, and other types of periodization and structural patterns.

Historical Sociology in IR    69 Internalism is a specific methodological device used for causal sequencing in many of these broader research methods. It denotes the beginning of a causal sequence from an ‘internal’ standpoint or empirical case. Conventional definitions refer to it as a set of ‘analytical narratives and causal explanations that are confined to dynamics within a particular territory’ (Go and Lawson 2017a, 4). It is often associated with methodological nationalism and blamed for much of the Eurocentrism dominating historical sociology and considered as Eurocentric by definition (e.g. in Anievas and Matin 2016). Nevertheless, in my own research, I adopt an outward form of internalism, using as main research methods dialectical concept-​formation, large-​scale comparison of secondary material, and primary archival material. I questioned conventional definitions of the term ‘internalism’ outside their territorial and static—​and state-​centric—​confines. An outward internalism denotes the need to think more about the multiplicity of this device for research. Specifically, it refers to analytical narratives and causal explanations that begin (instead of ‘are confined’) from dynamics within particular spaces (instead of ‘territory’). In other words, outward internalism can methodologically refer to very different causal sequences to those generally associated with internalism and it can empirically open the ‘territory’ box to concepts of authority, space, multiple forms of sovereignty—​and crucially, to jurisdiction—​ as ways of bordering power and class struggle (Pal 2020). Its benefit is to maintain a useful standpoint or beginning that emphasizes the particularity, contingency, or modality of a case or starting point. These terminological nuances distinguish outward internalism from the methodological nationalism often hastily associated with internalist methods. It also renders the charge of methodological Eurocentrism raised against internalism less convincing because the method merely describes the mobility of, in the case of my research for example, authority from one imperial locale to another with the aim of engaging in activity that will profit to that authority. This internalist method is therefore more open to agentic possibilities and to geopolitical conditions particular to the context; instead of being associated to an activity or a set of dynamics necessarily restricted or confined to one possible place of origin—​Europe—​ or to an anachronistic system of fixed and abstract territorial sovereignty. In other words, it is crucial to be more open to the ‘granular’ opportunities of various research methods and devices, and to be more specific about how we apply them and what they mean. More concretely, distinguishing different forms of internalism—​and thus a multiplicity of causal sequences for social change and mobility of power—​involving a large spectrum of agents and structures is absolutely crucial to any period, but especially to the early modern period. This is the period before the modern territorial state becomes the standard international legal form, when jurisdictional international relations and imperial practices—​ whether similar or different—​lead to different outcomes; in effect, to different forms of political and legal subjectivity. In other words, there is very little direct and recurrent causality or correlation between agents and structures in this period, and at the very least, there is less causality and correlation than one finds in the modern period when the territorial state form dominates the international legal system. Therefore, more emphasis needs to be placed for the early modern period on the differences between internal causal sequences and logics of accumulation (i.e. the dynamics of how societies form politically, legally, and economically). This can be explained by the fact that they involve a wider variety of actors and institutions that negotiate, for themselves and for their sovereigns or representatives, practices of accepted social interaction. The forms

70   Maïa Pal and practices of authority vary from each empire, dynastic sovereign, composite monarch, republic, city, or chartered company. If I chose the concept of ‘jurisdictional accumulation’ (Pal 2020) to account for specific types of these transports of authority, other scholars have emphasized multiplicity according to different types of agentic internalisms based on studies of e.g. agents of private violence (Colás and Mabee 2010), dynastic geopolitical accumulation (Teschke 2003), bourgeois revolutions (Davidson 2012), logistics of shipping (Khalili 2019), war and money (McNally 2020), and so on.3 This application of an outward internalism as a methodological device to enrich and contest histories of early modern European empires is merely one example of a concrete manifestation of knowledge production as another avenue of research and debate in HSIR. If many projects remain largely empirically Eurocentric because focused on the expansion of early modern European empires, they can nevertheless claim to contribute to anti-​ Eurocentric methods if they develop a method that does not assume European superiority or uniqueness in the construction of modernity. To conclude on this section, the choice of HSIR research methods should be considered fundamental to conceptual and theoretical argumentation even though these methods are predominantly analytical and based on secondary material. Methodological choice as knowledge production should be discussed and justified more thoroughly, as a necessary and inevitable pathway towards theoretical and epistemological debates. This helps to reveal the diversity in how methods are used according to Eurocentric research agendas and questions, as well as the diversity in methods to overcome or avoid it. In effect, if it is important to maintain ‘the coexistence and interaction’ claimed by UCD, crucial to grasp what is unique about HSIR, it is also necessary to shift it from the ontological level—​concerned with ‘multiple societies’—​to a more contingent and problem-​ driven methodological level—​concerned with the social production of knowledge. Doing so entails situating and maintaining ‘the coexistence and interaction’ between concrete manifestations of the production of knowledge (i.e. methods), by not assuming a priori that a specific theoretical pattern or difference constitutes the sine qua non to undertaking HSIR. Instead, adopting a multiple approach to methodology assumes that scholars will need to be more precise and explicit about their choices and what drives them to conceptualizing certain practices and actors as societies, states, empires, and so on (i.e. as agents and structures shaping local and global patterns and disruptions). Otherwise, developing theories that determine empirical and methodological problems such as Eurocentrism and claim to provide solutions to them (instead of starting from empirical and methodological problems and using theories accordingly) narrows the horizon and possibilities of HSIR and leads to ambitious but unattainable goals, such as the idea of a unitary theory of multiple inter-​societal co-​existence. Internalism, too often used as a marker for Eurocentricity, is in fact merely a methodological device that has become narrowly amalgamated with Europe through the focus on modernity. What we could call a ‘modern-​centrism’ has implicitly shaped ambitions for universal theories of Western—​non-​Western agency and multiple inter-​societal co-​existence. In other words, internalism has been associated with empirical Eurocentrism, instead of being considered as an analytical practice of knowledge production, a methodological device, and a particular causal sequence. Considering internalism through these types forces a dissociation between internalism and Eurocentrism, and forces scholars to be more vocal about their methodological choices.

Historical Sociology in IR    71

Methodology in Pedagogy: The Technique and Analytical Purchase of Student Comparative Exercises The second example of a concrete manifestation of knowledge production presented here is pedagogical and relates to teaching historical sociology to undergraduate IR and Politics students in the UK. The contemporary context of twenty-​first-​century academia in Western/​ Northern-​ dominated universities is a complex and contradictory one where critical thinking is rich and vibrant. Yet it remains simultaneously hooked into deeply and increasingly unequal and hierarchical systems of funding and education that inevitably condition what and how we research and teach.4 In other words, we need to acknowledge and continue questioning our assumptions in what and how we teach and be more open to how topics are taught in non-​Western universities and other places of learning. This chapter cannot claim to provide this experience nor is it an illustration of non-​Western knowledge and ways of doing IR, but it acknowledges the urgency to do so, and the methodological standpoint required to incorporate those experiences into our set of practices, tools, and resources.5 The module I conducted this pedagogical experiment with is entitled ‘Law, Empires, and Revolutions’ and consists in a broad historical sociology of international law from the early modern period to the twenty-​first century. It showcases the role of legal institutions and mechanisms in the history of the construction of the modern international system and of capitalism, in and around Europe. It weekly enacts comparative exercises using contemporary and historical cases to reveal aspects of this history. The module goes beyond comparative history and the similarities and differences between events. In particular, it builds on those differences and similarities to reflect on the various patterns and ruptures that shape the relationship between international law and international relations by asking which key agents and structures are revealed by the emphasis on that relationship. For example, do international lawyers and judges have a leading political role? How does this role differ from that of domestic lawyers and judges? Which international legal institutions influence key economic and political events? How can revolutions across the early modern to modern period be compared? How do the legal dimensions of revolutions change, depending on their spatial and temporal contexts? How does constitutionalism differ from critical approaches to international legal order? Crucially, what different methods are used in the disciplines of IR and International Law to assess historical events, and what historical assumptions have shaped each discipline? The module has run for three academic years and the following thoughts are therefore the fruit of these three different instances of students engaging with the same assignment detailed next. The most important implication of this experiment has been to show that historical sociology is a practical pedagogical tool which goes far beyond a mere ‘dialogue between Marx and Weber’ or ‘between the twin dangers of a ‘futile cult of facts’ and a ‘pretentious cult of abstraction’ (Colás and Lawson 2010, 248). Simple comparative exercises with students that lie at the core of any HSIR project reveal much deeper aspects of the role and potential of HSIR and for what IR means beyond its smaller academic circles and institutional fora. It also helps them understand the difference between an exercise in comparative history and

72   Maïa Pal one in HSIR, as the latter seeks additional answers to the question of the construction of the international system or (dis)order. The following exercise is given to the students twice but with different word limits and conditions of originality: What are the main similarities or differences between the contemporary topic and the historical counter-​point you have chosen? Which of these similarities or differences do you find most significant for the history of international relations and why?

Teaching students how they should choose topics of comparison emphasizes the importance of understanding the conditions and implications of international events or large-​scale social phenomena, and the importance of reflecting on why we compare; or in this case, on what the comparison is meant to achieve beyond the mere act of comparison. Teaching students that there is a significant set of conditions and context to the act of comparison is in itself an important achievement. Although, as undergraduates, they are not fluent in nuances between types of historical comparative analysis, this exercise aims to show them that there are various layers and potentialities to why and how one compares. The aim is to force students to question how the comparison they choose is going to reveal what they find most important about international relations, hence accentuating the element of historical sociology, and crucially how the choice of topics is unconsciously shaped by their understanding of international relations, that is how international relations has been produced for, shared to, and received by, them. Moreover, it also forces them to confront how some research projects tamper with or adapt the object of study to shape the expected result, argument or hypothesis. In other words, it forces students to make more explicit their too-​often unconscious methodologies, and to learn that basic comparative exercises are only a part of HSIR and not the whole story. The most important gain of this exercise is to alert students to the ways in which comparisons in social sciences are never neutral, objective, and predictable exercises; and that hiding behind comparisons, one always finds theoretical and analytical assumptions. Moreover, students tend to be astonished when I tell them they can compare whatever they want within the parameters set by the exercise, i.e. a ‘contemporary’ topic being post-​1945 and a ‘historical’ topic pre-​1945. The important lesson here is that although they can in theory compare anything, and also compare very different or very similar things, what makes their comparison the basis to a good essay is that it reveals something that studying the case on its own does not. In other words, a good comparison should produce some surplus of knowledge that cannot be achieved without the comparison. In other words, the comparison is dialectical. This also means that the process of comparison is not about exhaustive or exegetic analysis, or about summarizing each topic in turn, which is their most common mistake. They easily fall back in the apparently comfortable position of comparison as a summing up of similarities and differences, in spite of the essay question explicitly asking them ‘what is most significant’ about those similarities and differences. The ‘trick’ to achieve a dialectical comparison, and how to turn a good summary of two topics into a HSIR project, is to work out the key or legend to the comparison: i.e. on what grounds or according to what filters, lenses, criteria are the topics compared? In other words, HSIR emphasizes a balance and a certain opportunism in how and why scholars in this field compare. On the one hand, they cannot consider history to be simply an objective

Historical Sociology in IR    73 and knowable set of facts, and on the other side, they cannot freely interpret history for the sake of theory and prediction. I explain in tutorials that this methodological element—​ encapsulated in the identification of ‘similarities and differences’—​is going to shape their argument, hypothesis, or specific research question.6 Students work out, through doing the exercise, that they have to constantly make choices about what is important, relevant, surprising about what they are learning from their topics. That they make these assumptions all the time but tend not to reflect on them, and that their task at university is often more to deconstruct their own thinking process than to work out a complex new argument. The exercise shows how students often make significant comparative and analytical conclusions in their mind about topics without realizing it. They learn that it is impossible to think about two events or phenomena in IR without making historical and analytical assumptions about what those things are ontologically or what we want them to do and mean epistemologically and methodologically. They learn that all social events and phenomena are subjective and material experiences, whether through the historical agents and problem of sources, or through the researchers that communicate the event or phenomenon and their theoretical or disciplinary identities and positions. Through these learning outcomes, they are better able to grasp what distinguishes HSIR as a ‘core trans-​ disciplinary intellectual agenda for IR’, to repeat Hobson, Lawson, and Rosenberg’s phrase (2010, 20), and, perhaps more crucially, how doing HSIR through simple methodological exercises about how and what to compare reveals the trans-​disciplinarity inherent in the discipline of IR. In sum, the experiment shows 1) how useful historical sociology can be as a general pedagogical tool in social sciences and IR; and 2) how the basic principles of historical sociology (creating and shaping concepts, making structural comparisons, or deducing patterns, continuities, ruptures, and transitions) are an inevitable part of not only the social sciences but also students’ life as thinking human beings that strive to understand the world they live in. Finally, this exercise illustrates how events in various parts of the world are connected and influence each other, and how comparing is also a fun and creative part of understanding IR. Reflecting on the students’ most common mistake (i.e. simply summarizing each case separately and not identifying the methodological criteria that generated or justified the comparison, e.g. the most significant similarity or difference), there is a sense that students assume that part of the task of researching should be left to readers who will themselves look at the similarities and differences and judge for themselves. However, this thick descriptive approach to historiography ignores the choices made in selecting differences and similarities, and perhaps more importantly, the choices made in the selection of topics. In other words, to translate this into debates for researchers and the methodology of HSIR, there is a tendency to take for granted the choice of research question and to not sufficiently take a positionality or reflect on why and how a specific research project has been chosen.

Conclusion This chapter explores some of the experiences of doing HSIR as a researcher and teacher, and how such an approach to the topic is necessary today because it reveals new paths that

74   Maïa Pal can overcome some of the epistemological and methodological obstacles confronted by scholars and students. HSIR researchers have been able to mostly avoid discussing the more granular methodological steps in their work, and focus much more heavily on the epistemological assumptions and theoretical principles of their adopted approach. However, it might be time to be much more honest about researchers’ methods (or lack thereof) for choosing or deciding on research projects. How often are these guided by pragmatic or personal reasons involving relationships with supervisors, colleagues, funding bodies, institutional or governmental agendas? How is this changing in the current hyper-​marketized research environment? Many researchers do not have the privilege or time to take seriously all the potential options and considerations, and they embark on doctoral projects as students, i.e. as learning researchers who need a project to learn their craft. PhD projects are pedagogical projects as much (if not more) as original contributions to knowledge. The lines between students and researchers are in this case very blurred; but this chapter has hinted at how this line may be continuously blurred through our work as teachers having to simplify and break down what we do, and thereby reconnect with methodologies that we had sidelined for the ‘big debates’ in social sciences. Instead, by exploring diverse methodological devices and mechanisms, this chapter shows the importance of returning to basic methodological questions for rethinking how we approach enduring problems such as Eurocentrism.

Notes 1. In addition to examples of key scholarship already cited in this chapter, see e.g. Cutler (2003); Barkawi (2005); Lacher (2006); Bhambra (2007); Colás and Mabee (2010); Branch (2014); Buzan and Lawson (2015); Anievas and Matin (2016); Zarakol (2017); Go and Lawson (2017). 2. Eurofetishism ‘occurs when the analyst reifies or fetishizes the West as having absolute power and agency such that it obscures or elides the co-​constitutive social relations between Western and non-​Western agents’, thus eternalizing and naturalizing ‘the “all-​ powerful West” ’ (Hobson and Sajed (2017, 7)). 3. I do not have the space here to explain how these authors use internalist methodological devices, but generally, unless they explicitly declare themselves to be radically structuralist and/​or anti-​internalist e.g. Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015) or Anievas and Matin (2016), most HSIR studies use internalist causal sequences in some very basic or more determinate form. 4. Leading universities are geographically situated in the West and North but also in the South and East where Western universities are being cloned, transplanted, or outsourced through International Branch Campuses or (IBC)s (Lane (2016); Dear (2017)). 5. A significant literature is growing around this objective e.g. Acharya and Buzan (2009); Shilliam (2010); Anievas et al. (2014); Niang (2016); Routley (2016); Sheikh (2016); Carpenter and Mojab (2017); Odysseos and Pal (2018); Bhambra et al. (2018); Messari et al. (2020). 6. Tips given to students: 1) state your key (most significant) difference(s) and/​or similarity(-​ies) in the intro; 2) state your argument; 3) your argument is linked to your key

Historical Sociology in IR    75 difference(s) and/​or similarity(-​ies). Be more careful when choosing combinations—​ think what ‘type’ of things am I comparing? Is this an analytical concept, a legal concept, a legal institution, an event, and so on. If the two cases are very different, or very similar, is the comparison justified?

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76   Maïa Pal Davidson, N. 2012. How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Chicago: Haymarket. de Carvalho B., Leira, H., and Hobson J. M. 2011. ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You About 1948 and 1919’. Millennium 39(3): 735–​758. Dear, L. 2017. Colonialism, Knowledge and the University. PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow. Duzgun, E. 2018. ‘The International Relations of “Bourgeois Revolutions”: Disputing the Turkish Revolution’. European Journal of International Relations 24(2): 414–​439. Go, J. 2013. ‘For a Postcolonial Sociology’. Theory and Society 42(1): 25–​55. Go, J. and G. Lawson, eds. 2017. Global Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gulsah Capan, Z. 2017a. ‘Decolonising International Relations?’ Third World Quarterly 38(1): 1–​15. Gulsah Capan, Z. 2017b. ‘Writing International Relations from the Invisible Side of the Abyssal Line’. Review of International Studies 43(4): 602–​611. Halliday, F. 1994. Rethinking International Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hamati-​ Ataya, I. 2013. ‘Reflectivity Reflevivity, Reflexivism: IR’s “Reflexive Turn”—​ and Beyond’. European Journal of International Relations 19(4): 669–​694. Hamati-​Ataya, I. 2018. ‘The Sociology of Knowledge as Postphilosophical Epistemology: Out of IR’s “Socially Constructed” Idealism’. International Studies Review 20(1): 3–​29. Hobson, J. M. 1998. ‘The Historical Sociology of the State and the State of Historical Sociology in International Relations’. Review of International Political Economy 5(2): 284–​320. Hobson, J. M. 2002. ‘What’s at Stake in ‘Bringing Historical Sociology Back into International Relations’? Transcending “Chronofetisism” and “Tempocentrism” in International Relations’. In Historical Sociology of International Relations, eds. J. M. Hobson and S. Hobden, 3–​41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, J. M. and Lawson, G. 2008. ‘What is History in International Relations?’ Millennium 36(3): 415–​435. Hobson, J. M. and Sajed, A. 2017. ‘Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-​Western Agency’. International Studies Review 19(4): 547–​572. Hobson, J. M., Lawson, G., and Rosenberg, J. 2010. ‘Historical Sociology’. In The International Blackwell in association with the Studies Encyclopaedia, ed. R. A. Denemark. Wiley-​ International Studies Association. https://​www.oxfo​rdre​fere​nce.com/​disp​lay/​10.1093/​acref/​ 978019​1842​665.001.0001/​acref-​978019​1842​665-​e-​0181?rskey=​tPm​CDg&res​ult=​202 Khalili, L. 2019. Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London: Verso. Knafo, S. 2017. ‘A Methodological Turn Long Overdue: Or, Why it is Time for Critical Scholars To Cut Their Losses’. In What’s the point of international relations? eds. J. Selby, S. L. Dyvik, and R. Wilkinson, 242–​252. London, Routledge. Knafo, S. and Teschke, B. 2020. ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’. Historical Materialism 28(2): 1–​30. Kuru, D. 2016. ‘Historicising Eurocentrism and Anti-​Eurocentrism in IR: A Revisionist Account of Disciplinary Self-​reflexivity’. Review of International Studies 42(2): 351–​376. Lacher, H. 2006. Beyond Globalisation: Capitalism, Territoriality and the International Relations of Modernity, London: Routledge. Lane, J. E. 2016. ‘Creating Embassies of Knowledge: Do International Branch Campuses Mitigate or Facilitate the Evolution of International Relations?’ International Studies Review 00: 21–​26.

Historical Sociology in IR    77 Lapointe T. and Dufour, G. 2012. ‘Assessing the Historical Turn in IR: An Anatomy Of Second Wave Historical Sociology’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 25(1): 97–​121. Ling, L. 2017. ‘The missing Other: A review of Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-​System’. Review of International Studies 43(4): 621–​636.Linklater, A. 2017. Violence and Civilization in the Western States-​Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linklater, A. 2019. ‘Symbols and World Politics: Towards a Long-​term Perspective on Historical Trends and Contemporary Challenges’. European Journal of International Relations 25(3): 931–​954. Matin, K. 2007. ‘Uneven and Combined Development in World History: The International Relations of State-​formation in Premodern Iran’. European Journal of International Relations 13(3): 419–​447. McNally D. 2020. Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire. Chicago: Haymarket. Messari, N., A. B. Tickner, and L. H. M. Ling,.eds. 2020. International Relations Theory: Views Beyond the West. London: Routledge. Niang, A. 2016. ‘The Imperative of African Perspectives on International Relations (IR)’. Politics 36(4): 453–​466. Odysseos, L. and Pal, M. 2018. ‘Towards Critical Pedagogies of the International? Student Resistance, Self-​ formation and Other-​ regardedness in the Neoliberal University’. International Studies Perspectives 19(1): 1–​26. Pal, M. 2018. ‘My Capitalism Is Bigger than Yours! Against Combining “How the West Came to Rule” with “the Origins of Capitalism”’. Historical Materialism 26(3): 99–​124. Pal, M. 2020. Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires and Capital. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powel, B. 2020a. ‘Blinkered Learning, Blinkered Theory: How histories in textbooks parochialize IR’. International Studies Review. 22(4): 957–​982. Powel, B. 2020b. ‘Whither IR? Multiplicity, Relations, and the Paradox of International Relations’. Globalizations 17(3): 546–​559. Rioux, S. 2015. ‘Mind the (Theoretical) Gap: On the Poverty of International Relations Theorising of Uneven and Combined Development’. Global Society 29(4): 481–​509. Rosenberg, J. 2006. ‘Why is There no International Historical Sociology?’ European Journal of International Relations, 12(3): 307–​340. Rosenberg, J. 2013. ‘The “Philosophical Premises” of Uneven and Combined Development’. Review of International Studies 39(3): 569–​597. Routley, L. 2016. ‘Teaching Africa, Presenting, Representing and the Importance of Who Is in the Classroom’. Politics 36(4): 482–​494. Sabaratnam, M. 2011. ‘IR in Dialogue . . . but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3): 781–​803. Seth, S. 2011. ‘Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1): 167–​183. Shaw, M. 1998. ‘The Historical Sociology of the Future’. Review of International Political Economy 5(2): 321–​326. Sheikh, F. 2016. Islam and International Relations: Exploring Community and the Limits of Universalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Shilliam, R. ed. 2010. International Relations and Non-​Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity. London: Routledge. Shilliam, R. 2013. ‘Race and Research Agendas’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26(1): 152–​158.

78   Maïa Pal Shilliam, R. 2015. The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Teschke, B. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso. Teschke, B. 2014 ‘IR Theory, Historical Materialism, and the False Promise of International Historical Sociology’. Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies 6(1): 1–​66. Vitalis, R. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zarakol, A. ed. 2017. Hierarchies in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 6

Gl obal History a nd I nternational Re l at i ons George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich From Fish and Chips to Global History What could be more British than fish and chips? It is the cornerstone of ‘British cuisine’,1 a gift from Britain to the rest of the world. Yet, on closer inspection, things are less clear-​ cut. Potatoes are not indigenous to the British Isles. In fact, they’re not even indigenous to Europe. Potatoes were part of the wave of imports that arrived in Europe as a result of the colonization of the Americas during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The French and Belgians responded by cutting potatoes into slices and frying them. At some point, this technique found its way to Britain. The fish part of the ensemble was also an import. Battering fish was a Jewish custom that crossed from Portugal and Spain to Britain. It was only in 1860 that these two imports were combined by a British Jew, Joseph Malin, who opened the country’s first fish and chip shop in the east end of London. Some half a century later, fish and chips had become Britain’s national dish—​an exemplary case of a national tradition being derived from a global process. Today, the majority of fish and chips shops in Britain are owned and run by immigrants. And fish and chips can be found around the world, including, as one of us discovered in the summer of 2019, at a German pub in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province in northeast China. The story of fish and chips is, therefore, a global process, enabled by flows of imperialism, capital, and migration, which became nationalized before becoming re-​globalized. It is not a one-​off. Similar dynamics lie behind not just cuisines and cultural artifacts, but also institutions and forms of governance. The promise of global history lies in unravelling the entanglements between these artifacts and institutions, denaturalizing national histories and demonstrating the ways in which the modern world has emerged through connections, entanglements, and flows of multiple kinds and various intensities. The first task of this chapter is to outline the ways in which global history can contribute to International Relations (IR). Its second task is to show that this contribution is, as yet, unfulfilled. In part, this is because IR has been slow at exploring the richness of global history, including what it adds to the two themes that animate this volume: modernity and

80    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich granularity. In part, the contribution is unfulfilled because global history has been slow to fully explore what it can bring to IR. While IR remains in large measure a state-​centric, Eurocentric discipline dominated by national histories, global history has not done enough to theorize its narratives of entanglements. We first outline the multiple forms that global history—​or histories—​takes. We then examine the ways in which IR has engaged with these histories. The third section outlines two possibilities for how engagement between IR and global history can be further developed: a minimalist vision premised on the generation of synthetic historical-​theoretical work, and a maximalist vision based on the construction of new, non-​Eurocentric histories of transboundary encounters and entanglements.

Global Histories In 2004, the British historian Christopher Bayly (2004, 469) noted that ‘all historians are world historians now, though many have not yet realized it’. A decade and a half later, Bayly’s statement holds up remarkably well. The global turn has fundamentally challenged the way history is written and has reshaped much of the discipline, well beyond those who would self-​identify as global or world historians. And yet there are still vigorous debates about the promise and potential of the global history project (see Drayton and Motadel 2018 and the replies by Bell and Adelman). One of the reasons why these debates carry on, and why criticisms are still being levelled at global history, is that the field is at once hard to pin down and, at the same time, often painted as a unified and clearly demarcated entity. Global history does not, in fact, represent a single historical or methodological approach. Rather, it is a term that covers a range of approaches and perspectives, which are united by an interest in transboundary movements of different kinds, allied to a critique of scholarship that is confined by nation or geography. The confusion of terms alone should alert readers to the fact that global history is not a single thing. Asking a non-​historian to successfully navigate the terrain of world, global, and transnational history is hard enough, and that is before introducing closely related concepts like Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s (1997, 2007) ‘connected histories’ or the French notion of histoire croisée (Werner and Zimmermann 2006). There are certainly distinctions to be made between these approaches, but there are arguably more things binding them together than pulling them apart. Perhaps the most important unifying factor is a shared critique of the nineteenth century approach to thinking about history through national containers, which still characterizes the way history is organized as an academic field. Each of these approaches thus emphasizes the fact that a different frame of reference is needed to understand not only what took place within these geographically bounded containers, but also what took place between and across them. Crucially, by decentering the nation-​state as the primary unit of analysis, all of these approaches seek to move beyond the Eurocentrism that has been an ingrained part of the modern discipline of history (O’Brien 2006; Zemon-​ Davis 2011). The methodological approach to achieving this aim might be comparative, as has often been the case within world history, but global history has in part been seen as distinct due to its focus on connections and entanglements rather than discrete comparisons.2 Global history is also

Global History and IR    81 typically differentiated from transnational history, in this case because transnational history presupposes the presence of some type of national unit, which global historians have argued was absent from much of the world before the late nineteenth century, at the earliest. Finally, global history has been singled out as different from related fields due to its emergence in the 1990s as a historiographical response to the concerns of the time, namely globalization (Geyer and Bright 1995; Hopkins 2000). While global history is much more than simply the history of globalization, and indeed many global historians today are skeptical of globalization as a concept, global history is concerned with the role and effect of a variety of global forces. In this sense global history is only rarely the history of the globe in its entirety. Rather, it is the history of the impact or development of particular global processes, including those that led to the creation of national units. There are thus a wide variety of approaches to global history. That said, four clusters of issues can be said to have shaped the field: globalization and modernity, space and scale, flows and connectivity, and the spread of ideas. We look at each in turn. The first and most enduring topic of research in global history has, unsurprisingly, concerned the origins and course of globalization. Pioneering work in the field set out the stakes of this debate, most famously with Kenneth Pomeranz’s (2000) notion of a ‘great divergence’ taking place between Western Europe, or Britain more specifically, and the rest of the world, particularly China (see also Wong 1997). This great divergence caused European imperial powers to pull ahead of other world regions at some point in the late 18th or early 19th centuries, the argument goes, but not before then. What exactly caused the divergence has been the topic of much debate, one that has sustained almost two decades of research, as different factors have been highlighted, new regions have been brought into the discussion, and the timeline has been pushed back and forth (Parthasarathi 2011; Rosenthal and Wong 2011). The central claim of the great divergence literature—​that Europe and Asia were essentially equal in terms of prosperity prior to the era of high imperialism—​is important for a range of debates, most notably the origins of modernity. As global historians have traced globalizing processes back in time and looked at regional globalizations in the early modern period, discussions of how to think about modernity have followed (Hopkins 2002; Brook 2007). Some historians have taken up the sociological notion of ‘multiple modernities’ to explain how different regions developed parallel but distinct notions of modernity, including variations on the standard elements of state bureaucratization and market (or merchant) capitalism (e.g. Washbrook 1997, 1998). Others have pushed back against this agenda, either because it is seen as diluting the analytical value of the concept of modernity, or because it inadvertently reproduces the Eurocentrism of modernity as a historical concept (van der Veer 1998; Cooper 2005). Second are issues of scale and space. As noted previously, global histories rarely treat the global as a single unit of analysis, and issues of scale and space have continued to drive debate in the field. Indeed, histories that attempt to tackle the entirety of the globe over the long term have more often fallen under the remit of neighbouring subfields like ‘Big History’ or ‘Deep History’, characterized as much by the natural sciences as by traditional historical methods (e.g. Christian 2004; Smail 2007). But below the planetary level of analysis is a host of other possibilities. Given the grand ambition of illuminating global processes, one might ask how small is too small to still be global? One of the major approaches within the field has been global microhistory, an adaptation of traditional Italian microhistory that seeks to illuminate wider issues through granular studies of the ‘exceptional normal’ (Grendi 1977,

82    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich 512; Trivellato 2011). A range of works in this genre have traced the journeys of boundary-​ crossing individuals in order to demonstrate the types of connectivity and mobility that operated in the early modern period (Zemon-​Davis 2006; Colley 2007; Andrade 2010). A related approach has been more concerned with spaces and communities than extraordinary individuals. Perhaps the best example is Donald Wright’s (2010) global history of the territory of Niumi in West Africa, which traces a geographically anchored community across several centuries of global economic, social, and political transformation by applying a particular version of world systems analysis. Between the level of the global and the local is a burgeoning literature on the relationship between global and regional histories. While regional histories and area studies have long offered an alternative to traditional national histories, these approaches run the risk of providing new and equally arbitrary constraints, preventing historians from placing their areas of study in conversation with events and processes taking place beyond their borders. The global turn has in this way called for a history of regions in the world, rather than as worlds unto themselves (Middel and Naumann 2010; Vaughan 2013). The study of Atlantic history is a good example of this move, as Atlantic historians have increasingly been receptive to the criticism of exceptionalism and insularity coming from global history (Coclanis 2002, 2006), and have instead sought to place work on their region within broader themes and trajectories, including the formation of trans-​oceanic networks, migration flows between regions, and the rise of global empires (Games 2006; Vidal 2012; Prior 2014). A different type of spatiality has more recently entered the conversation with the emergence of global urban history, first championed in pioneering works by Michael Goebel (2015) and Joseph Ben Prestel (2017) and then, in 2019, with a series of monographs expressly dedicated to the field: Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History. The third issue-​area within global history, and perhaps its most prominent, is concerned with connectivity and movement. Works on the flows and circulations of people, goods, and information have flourished and shaped much of the field, adding depth and granularity to more abstract analysis of globalization. Here, migration has been a key concern, with global historians paying particular attention to the enduring networks fostered by migratory movements and the effects of regional and global diasporas (Ward 2009; Huber 2013; Amrith 2013; Arsan 2014). Commodity histories, a pioneering genre in world history (i.e. Mintz 1985; Schmitz 1986), have returned to the fore in recent years with scholars analysing the trans-​ regional histories of goods from cotton to guano, often using particular commodities as windows into the emergence of global capitalism (Berg 2004; Cushman 2013; Beckert 2014). This preoccupation with flows and circulations has been criticized for ignoring those places that are either sparsely connected or not connected at all, as well as those people whose mobility is limited. In the words of Frederick Cooper (2001, 190), ‘the world . . . is filled with lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, where social relations become dense amidst others that are diffuse’. Such criticisms have prompted attention to separations as well as connections, and to blockages and gaps as well as flows and movements, the most prominent example of which is Adam McKeown’s (2008) pioneering work on borders and passports (see also Singaravélou 2017). At the same time, there has been renewed attention to the rise and role of the state, both as a consequence of global forces and as a driver of these forces (Bayly 1998; Thompson 2010; Yun-​Casalilla and O’Brien 2012; Adelman 2015).

Global History and IR    83 Finally, in recent years, the global turn has increasingly affected subfields that have otherwise been largely absent from debates over globalization, movement, and migration. New approaches have emerged, including global legal history, global intellectual history, and global histories of science and technology—​all of which are fundamentally concerned with the spread and entanglement of ideas. Legal historians have studied the spread of legal concepts and the gradual emergence of a global legal order in the context of early modern imperial expansion (Benton 2010) as well as the more recent rise of international law as a global process (Becker Lorca 2014; Donaldson, 2020). Intellectual historians have studied shifting notions of the global and the international across time and place (Armitage 2012; Rosenboim 2017; Slobodian 2018) and have engaged in sustained discussions of global intellectual history as a historiographical and methodological project (Moyn and Sartori 2013). They have also done much to decenter Eurocentric narratives of the emergence and spread of political ideologies, including nationalism and radicalism (Karl 2002; Khuri-​Makdisi 2010; Hofmeyr 2013). Most recently, historians of science and technology have begun their own global turn, with important works challenging the Eurocentric foundations of the subfield and illustrating the global development of scientific ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ogle 2015; Poskett 2019). Global history is, therefore, alive and well, having done much to destabilize the enduring Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism of history as a field of inquiry. But the global turn is far from a fait accompli and there are still several things missing from its compass. First is a more rigorous theorizing of entanglements. Identifying the fact that historical processes are boundary-​crossing and that events in one region have major ramifications for other regions is the first step towards understanding these entanglements. But with some notable exceptions (e.g. Benton, 2002; Benton and Mulich, 2015), global historians have been reluctant to theorize these entanglements as structured patterns of transboundary interactions. A related issue is the lack of attention given to the links between different levels of analysis. As mentioned above, global historians have been comfortable working at macro, micro, and regional levels, but relatively little work has explored how these levels interact and intersect. Global history provides the ideal opportunity for this type of work, focusing on the relationship between local, regional, and global processes. But, to date, too much scholarship treats global forces as something that acts unilaterally upon the local or as a backdrop to locally anchored events. The second major gap relates to the preponderance of power asymmetries in history. In many ways, the Cooper critique that global historians are obsessed with flows and connections at the cost of blockages and separations no longer stands. If there remains a certain penchant for flows and networks, most scholars are now well aware of the historical moments when links broke or when global integration either stopped or reversed (Osterhammel 2014). But it is not enough to look at such moments as examples of the changing tide of globalization without grappling seriously with the power asymmetries present at both moments of integration and disintegration. In other words, global historians need to consider more seriously the hierarchical nature of connections and the implications of these asymmetries for historical development. Historians are too often content with simply pointing out power imbalances, without exploring what such hierarchical relations might mean for the nature and dynamic of global processes.

84    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich

International Relations and Global Histories International Relations has a long association with global history, or at least with work that would now be called global history. The origins of IR in imperial world order projects meant that studying parts of the world outside the white West was central to its mission (Bell 2007). In Britain, for example, figures like Arnold Toynbee and E. H. Carr worked in both disciplines. Despite similar origins in inter-​imperial rivalry, race theory, and colonial administration (Vitalis 2015), the relationship between IR and History worked differently in the United States. Here, the positioning of IR as a branch of political science led it towards a thin sense of history as a technique or resource rather than as a fully integrated part of the discipline. Although American IR tested, and continues to test, its arguments in history, History is rarely seen as a site of conceptual development. To be sure, a wide range of US-​based scholarship works on the frontiers of IR and History, including prominent Realists (e.g. Jervis 1976; Gilpin 1981; Snyder 1991; Walt 1996; Eckstein 2005; Gunitsky 2017), Liberals (e.g. Ikenberry 2001; 2020), and Constructivists (e.g. Ruggie 1986; Bukovanksy 2002; Finnemore 2003; Nexon 2009; Reus-​Smit 2013). And much of this work extends its historical compass well beyond the experience of the modern West (e.g. Hui 2005; Kang 2010; Spruyt 2020). But the close association between positivism and US Political Science means that there is only occasional understanding of History as a doubly interpretative enterprise: first, in its choice and assessment of primary sources; and second as historiographies that are continually being assessed, refined and re-​evaluated. Although history as a point of data collection is present in these accounts, historicism—​a commitment to historically locating practices and dynamics, a concern for the contingent, disruptive, constitutive impact of historical events, and the study of contextualized rationalities and inter-​subjectivities—​is rarer. Most mainstream approaches use history as a means of coding findings, mining data, or as a source of post factum explanations (Lawson 2012). Given this, it is no surprise that the closest relationships between IR and global history have been constructed outside the United States. In parts of Asia, particularly Japan and China, the links between IR and History are strong. In Japan, this is largely oriented around the relationship between IR and Diplomatic History; in China, Liu Debin and his colleagues at Jilin University have developed centers, programs, and journals premised on the rich connections between world history and IR. Similar traditions can be found in Latin America, Africa and Europe. In Germany, for example, a range of projects have explored the space between global history and IR (see, most recently, Albert and Werron eds. 2020). Norway has been a particularly prominent site in the generation of a distinctly Historical IR (e.g. Carvalho and Leira eds. 2015). The English School of International Relations stands, perhaps, as the vanguard of historical studies of the world beyond the modern West. The institutional fount of the English School, the British Committee on the Theory of International Affairs, explored a wide range of historical international orders (e.g. Butterfield and Wight eds. 1966; Bull and Watson eds. 1984). More recently, figures such as Barry Buzan (e.g. Buzan and Little 2000; Buzan and Lawson 2015, 2016; Buzan and Goh 2020) have produced work that significantly extends IR’s historical compass. For their part, Edward Keene (2002 2008), Shogo Suzuki (2005), and Iver Neumann (e.g. Neumann and Wigen 2019) have forged a

Global History and IR    85 space in-​between the English School and global history to theorize the forms of hierarchy, such as the ‘standard of civilization’ and practices of ‘stigmatization’, that structure international order. Early work on historical international orders tended to follow a ‘vanguardist-​diffusionist’ model of historical development in which modern history emanates in and spreads from the West (e.g. Wight 1977). This model, so the story goes, diffused around the world through a mixture of coercion and consent, forming a global order that is to all intents and purposes made in, and for, the West (for a recent statement along these lines, see Linklater 2017). Recent scholarship has fostered two critiques of this work: first, its Eurocentrism; and second, its view of international orders as unitary, bounded units constituted by distinct cultures (e.g. Lawson 2017). Because, as the previous section outlined, global history emerged as a critique of similar tendencies within History, it provides a number of insights that can be mobilized against both assumptions. Global historians have done much to make clear the ways in which containers of various kinds, most obviously nation-​states, but also civilizations and societies, are not bounded, but forged through transboundary encounters. The example of fish and chips that opened this chapter is one amongst many such examples. Traits seen as a quintessential part of a national, regional, or civilizational DNA are, once subjected to global historical enquiry, shown to be the result of encounters between peoples, places, ideas and institutions. The building blocks of cultures—​languages, rituals, cuisines, flags, public places—​are transboundary fusions. Take the capital of the United Kingdom (itself an amalgam), London, and its central public space: Trafalgar Square. This square, home to the National Gallery (supported by transnational capital, curated by art historians from all over the world, and showcasing art from many countries) is named after a conflict that took place off the coast of Spain and Portugal in 1805: The Battle of Trafalgar. The battle takes its name from Cape Trafalgar, which in turn derives its name from the Arabic term, Taraf al-​Gharb, meaning ‘edge of the West’. In this way, the most national of symbols has its origins in a transboundary encounter. Global historical inquiry shows how taken-​for-​granted cultural formations are forged from entangled histories. Global histories, therefore, deploy dynamics of ‘incorporation’ and ‘adaptation’ rather than diffusion. Proponents argue that it has not been European historical experience that has diffused around the world, but interactions between peoples and places that have driven the emergence of modern international order. In this way, modernity was not self-​generated through the unfolding of specifically European economic practices (such as double-​entry bookkeeping), institutions (such as representative governance), or symbolic schemas (such as the Enlightenment). Rather, modernity was forged through the co-​constitution of local and transnational, and its core vectors were transboundary in character, from capitalist expansion to imperialism (Buzan and Lawson 2015). From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a relatively thin international system sustained forms of interaction that were crucial to the development of modernity. In their interactions with European polities, the Ottomans and Chinese thought of themselves as the culturally and politically superior party. In Africa and the Americas, Europeans engaged in diplomacy and made treaties with local peoples and polities. When they moved into the Indian Ocean, the Europeans found a well-​developed international order in place. Grotius’ seventeenth century argument that Europeans should accept the principle that the high seas constituted international territory was based on the precedent provided by the Indian Ocean states-​system (Alexandrowicz

86    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich 1967), just as trade between Britain and India helped to form Adam Smith’s ideas about free trade (Erikson 2014), and utilitarian thought was forged in the imperial encounters between Britain and India (Chatterjee 2012). From the nineteenth century onwards, global interactions became more unbalanced as a major power gap opened up between the European (and later American and Japanese) ‘leading-​edge’ and most other polities (Buzan and Lawson 2015). These dynamics eventually allowed a small number of mostly Western states to project their power around the world. But this power projection did not produce a world of homogeneous social orders. Rather, it led to diverse amalgams of old and new, and of ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’ (Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015). Peoples and places were intensely locked together, even as their entwining fuelled a stark unevenness in terms of power distribution and in terms of how social orders were constituted. Modernity was a global process in origins as well as outcomes. Any narrative of Western civilizational resources diffusing outwards misses the to-​and-​fro of these interactions, the power asymmetries that fuelled them, and the ways in which this combination of entanglements and power spurred historical development. History is not unidirectional, but an interactive series of events and experiences that generate multilinear developmental pathways. This is one of the key insights of global history. And it has yet to be mainstreamed by IR scholars, including many of those who work in historical international relations. The Eurocentrism of much historical IR, and the use of insights from global history to critique it, is matched by a second link between IR and global history: the former’s tendency towards internalism and boundedness, and once again, the latter’s critique of these tendencies. Against the view that international orders are endogenously produced units that can be differentiated from other societies by cultural traits, from belief to language (e.g. Wight 1966; 1977), recent work has illustrated how culture is not a coherent whole that is unified and bounded, but a diverse web of symbols and rituals that are negotiated, contested and subject to diverse interpretations (Reus-​Smit 2017; also see Swidler 1986). International orders regulate cultural diversity by authorizing forms of cultural difference and tying these to political units: states and religions, empires and civilizations, and so on. In other words, cultural heterogeneity is a requirement of enduring order. Many of the most durable historical international societies have been culturally plural and geographically dispersed. The British imperial web, for example, encompassed China, Argentina, Fiji, Australia, Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Nigeria, Cyprus, and Ireland. This scattered geography was not maintained through the enforcement of cultural similitude, but through symbolic amalgams that regulated unequal recognition. The legal structure of the British Empire was a layered, ‘lumpy’ fusion of imperial and indigenous (Benton 2010). The penal code of the Raj blended British and Indian jurisprudence, and it was this blend that was exported to many of Britain’s imperial territories in South East Asia and East Africa (Metcalf 2008). Where British imperialism was successful, it relied on establishing close, if asymmetrical, partnerships with local power brokers: the Straits Chinese, the Krio of West Africa, the ‘teak-​wallahs’ of Burma, the Chettiar of South India, and others. International orders, therefore, are better seen as constituted by transboundary encounters than as bounded units that subsequently interact with other blocs. These orders are the products rather than the producers of cultural flows—​they are ‘hybrid amalgams’ rather than ‘self-​constituting entities’ (Hobson 2017). These hybrid amalgams encompass an array of ideas, inventions and institutions, from cosmologies to productive techniques.

Global History and IR    87 Major religions do not just cross borders, but are constituted in novel blends of indigenous and transnational; technologies and strategies of warfare are emulated and fused with existing capacities; cartographic techniques used to map colonial spaces serve as the basis for territorial claims within metropoles (Branch 2012). In other words, history is not Western first and ‘other’ second; it is global all the way down. Any narrative that focuses on a dualistic logic between inside and outside cannot tell the story of the West any more than it can tell the history of any other part of the world. To take one prominent example: the contemporary human rights regime is not a Western invention that has been subsequently exported around the world, but the product of negotiations between northern and southern states in which histories of race and decolonization played leading roles (Jensen 2016). In this way, global history musters a powerful critique of tendencies within historically-​ informed IR towards Eurocentrism and its related assumption of boundedness. It also provides the outlines of an approach that overcomes these tendencies through attention to entanglements, connections and flows on the one hand, and power asymmetries on the other. Over the past two decades or so, work associated with global history has challenged the vanguardist-​diffusionist model of international expansion, demonstrating the ways in which international orders are produced by interactive, if asymmetrical, relations between peoples and polities (e.g. Keene 2002; Hobson 2004; Buzan and Lawson, 2015; Phillips and Sharman 2015, 2020; Rosenberg 2016; Barkawi 2017; Dunne and Reus-​Smit eds. 2018). Much of this work builds on insights from historical sociology. Historical sociology is a long-​established interdisciplinary field concerned with incorporating temporality in the analysis of social processes. In its most recent iteration, global historical sociology (Go and Lawson eds. 2017), the approach concentrates on the multifaceted, multi-​linear character of historical development, and the necessarily co-​constitutive relationship between north-​south, colony-​metropole, and core-​periphery. Global historical sociology rejects narratives of unidirectional metropolitan diffusion, seeing the global as emerging from decentred interactions rather than as the result of the reified logic of the metropole. In this way, global history allies with explicitly theoretical work to shed light on debates ranging from the rise of the West to how imperialism has shaped the contours of contemporary world order.

A Shared Agenda Global history and IR therefore share a potentially rich agenda. This agenda has three components: first, writing new, non-​Eurocentric histories of transboundary encounters and entanglements; second, demonstrating how these encounters are structured through power asymmetries; and third, theorizing these structured entanglements. No convincing account of global historical development can be constructed as ‘West first, then global’, just as no such enterprise can proceed from the standpoint of bounded units defined by the cultural attributes they share, or lack. Rather, global history points IR towards the relational, incorporative character of historical development (Phillips 2016; 2017). In this sense, the ‘foreign’ and the ‘domestic’, the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’, are neither analytically separable, nor empirically discrete (Go and Lawson eds. 2017; also see Anievas and Matin 2016 eds). Places, regions, institutions, peoples and ideas are entangled all the way down.

88    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich And the patterns generated by these entanglements forge international orders, orders that are sustained and challenged by power asymmetries. There are two variants of this shared agenda. The first, more minimalist, variant is largely synthetic in character. It draws on global histories in order to foster novel accounts of the emergence, spread and contestation of international orders (e.g. Reus-​Smit 2013; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015; Buzan and Lawson 2015, 2016; Phillips and Sharman 2015; 2020; Sharman 2019). If disciplinary History is doubly embedded in primary and secondary sources, this approach tends to use the latter more than the former in making arguments that are oriented primarily at International Relations. The second variant offers a more maximalist vision, one that engages not just existing historiography, but also provides a first cut at writing history in its own right. Based more on primary source research than the synthetic approach outlined above, scholars operating in this register produce work that is more likely to be recognized as ‘proper’ history by disciplinary historians, while retaining an anchor in IR concerns and debates (e.g. Bayly 2016; Barkawi 2017; Getachew 2019; Mulich 2020). On a methodological level, this approach seeks to avoid some of the issues of relying on existing historiography, including the fact that authors of this historiography have often not been interested in the same questions or topics as the IR scholars drawing on their work. This approach also makes it possible to generate research questions from the archives, in a hermeneutic sense, rather than relying on a priori questions applied to an existing body of work (Mulich, 2021). Both approaches have much to offer. And, like all forms of scholarship, both have shortcomings. If the minimalist approach can rely too much on existing historiography, the maximalist approach can struggle to tackle big picture, global, longue durée topics, not least because of the logistical and linguistic challenges associated with multi-​archival work. Not only do both approaches offer trade-​offs between breadth and depth, both provide different takes on the relationship between global history and IR. Where minimalists are more concerned with what historical IR can learn from global history, maximalists are more interested in what global history can learn from historical IR. Whatever approach is taken, both point the way to a series of rich, ongoing encounters between IR and global history in years to come.

Notes 1. Readers are invited to insert their own jokes here. 2. There are other factors differentiating world and global history, many of which are more institutional than substantial. World history emerged as a subfield primarily at universities in the United States, especially the University of Hawai’i, while global history primarily gained ground in the United Kingdom, specifically at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE)—​and later at the University of Warwick. The two major publications of the field—​the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History—​are housed at the University of Hawai’i and at the LSE respectively. World history has long been taught at the undergraduate level in the US as a substitute for, or supplement to, older Western Civilization courses, while global history has more typically been taught at the postgraduate level. In very broad terms, world history might be said to emphasize encounters and comparisons, while global history tends to

Global History and IR    89 emphasize networks and flows. In chronological terms, world history often deals with the longue durée, including ancient and medieval history, while global history has tended to focus on the past three or four centuries. But the distinction between the two is not a hard and fast one, and it is telling that pioneering work in the 1990s tended to use the terms interchangeably (e.g. Bentley (1990)).

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chapter 7

Internationa l Re l at i ons and Intellect ua l H i story Duncan Bell Intellectual historians have long debated methodological questions: Straussians, Marxists, linguistic contextualists, Foucauldians, Frankfurt Schoolers, and post-​ structuralists, have battled over how best to interpret past manifestations of reflective thought.1 In this chapter, I adopt a different vantage point, focusing on some of the contrasting purposes that have been claimed for historical scholarship, as well as surveying assorted themes that have shaped the field in recent years. The first section, ‘Practices and Purposes’ outlines the roles that have been claimed for intellectual history, from illuminating the tangled development of human thought to informing contemporary political theory or social science. While methodological differences are important, alternative cleavages also differentiate historical practice and scholars working with different methodologies can share similar goals and self-​understandings. The second section, ‘Trends and Trajectories’, discusses topics that have recently drawn attention, notably empire and disciplinary history. The final section, ‘Exclusions and Expansions’ examines long marginalized themes, above all gender and race, and highlights how work addressing them is pushing the field in exciting new directions.

Practices and Purposes Intellectual history has been assigned a variety of purposes. The most common emphasizes the historical value of inquiry: the principal (maybe sole) aim is to illuminate aspects of past cultural production. Although proponents of this approach acknowledge that such work may have contemporary implications, this does not form part of the justification for pursuing it. This position is not reducible to any particular methodology—​it is better seen as a matter of intellectual sensibility and disciplinary norms. It is rarely embraced by historically oriented International Relations (IR) scholars, not least because it is difficult to publish such work in IR journals and even harder to defend it to hiring committees. The other two approaches accept that intellectual historians should contribute to historical knowledge,

IR and Intellectual History    95 but they add a more ambitious claim: historical scholarship should inform contemporary understanding of politics. This claim comes in strong and weak variants, the former positing that contemporary analysis is thoroughly impoverished, even fatally flawed, absent serious engagement with history. The latter claims that analysis is enriched or improved by it. The relationship between the history of political thought and contemporary political theory is vexed (Floyd and Stears 2011; Blau 2020). My own view is that history can inform and sometimes strengthen philosophical engagement with politics, but it is not essential for all variants of it. Intellectual history can enable and constrain. It enables insofar as it identifies new questions, perspectives, and arguments, or felicitously reframes existing ones. Call this an elucidatory function. Historical research can reveal ‘buried treasure’, uncovering ‘the often neglected riches of our intellectual heritage and display them once more to view’ (Skinner 1998, 112, 118–​119). Thus Skinner elaborates a ‘republican’ conception of liberty derived from pre-​Hobbesian political thinking (Skinner 1998). Sean Fleming (2020) employs an insightful interpretation of Hobbes’s views on personhood to ground a theory of state responsibility. Michael Doyle’s (1983) reconstruction of Kant’s argument about perpetual peace spawned the massive ‘democratic peace’ research programme. There is a broader, more amorphous, sense in which history can inform present understanding. William Bain and Terry Nardin observe that ‘international intellectual history is not just an engagement with history; it also plays an indispensable role in the theoretical enterprise by questioning, shaping, and repositioning what it means to reflect on international relations’ (Bain and Nardin 2017, 215). It can disclose how the categories, concepts, norms, and values that shape our world(s) came into being, and consequently it can provoke reflection on them. It has both a genealogical function (identifying the source and trajectory of phenomena) and a critical one (confronting those phenomena). Although the former does not entail the latter, many intellectual historians pursue both. By emphasizing the ‘contingency of prevailing conventions’ Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran argue, intellectual history demonstrates how ‘relatively recent structures and orientations’ are elevated to the ‘status of enduring historical essences’ (2010, 109), which opens them to critical engagement. This ambition animates David Armitage’s (2012) account of how European thinkers came to imagine the world as divided into competing sovereign states. In a similar vein Jennifer Pitts suggests that her analysis of the entanglement of empire and international law ‘may help to illuminate continuing uses of ideas of international law and human rights to obscure dynamics of domination by the Global North over the Global South’ (2018, 27). Mira Siegelberg (2020) maintains that unravelling the intellectual history of statelessness is essential for understanding the ideological legitimation of contemporary sovereign statehood. Intellectual history can inculcate a clearer understanding of the objects of theoretical inquiry and critique. Most bluntly, it can defuse unwarranted claims to originality, identifying moments when scholars are reinventing the wheel. History can also caution against the dangers of generalization and abstraction.2 It is, as Istvan Hont once remarked, the ‘tool of skeptics’ (Hont 2005, 156). Take the example of liberalism. One implication of recent work on the history of the liberal tradition is that sweeping generalizations about it typically mislead more than they inform. While both defences and critiques of liberalism often rely on caricatures, historical scholarship emphasizes that it is a shape-​shifting amalgam of arguments, claims, narratives, and practices, varying across time and space (Bell 2016; Rosenblatt 2018). The same could be said of other ideologies. Moreover, intellectual history can illuminate the form, promise, and limitations of theoretical arguments. Global justice

96   Duncan Bell is a pertinent example. Dominant theoretical approaches tend to ignore or misconstrue the historical conditions—​above all imperial and racial domination—​that produced features of the world they seek to change (Bell 2019). Samuel Moyn and Katrina Forrester historicize the philosophical debate with illuminating effect. Moyn (2017, 2019) shows how discourses of global justice and individual human rights emerged in the 1970s as alternatives to more radical global reform projects. Forrester (2019) traces how analytical political philosophy effaced questions of historical reparations for slavery and racial violence by rejecting historically oriented conceptions of justice to focus instead, following Rawls, on current distributive patterns: ‘egalitarianism in theory was bought at the cost of ignoring historical and structural injustice in practice’ (2019, 50). Intellectual history can illuminate contemporary political theory by disclosing how certain conceptual features arose and how others were ignored or discarded, as well as rooting its development in time and place. It can induce a degree of theoretical and political reflexivity. Intellectual history has also been claimed as an integral element of social science. While most neopositivists place little emphasis on the causal role of ideas, some historians and philosophers argue that it is impossible to comprehend (international) society without accounting for their fundamental role. For Mark Bevir, intellectual history is central to interpretivism because of the ineliminable role of intentionality in social action. ‘Properly to understand social life just is to refer to the intentionality of the relevant actors. Properly to explain intentionality just is to place it in the relevant historical context. Thus, all the human sciences necessarily depend on intellectual history’ (Bevir 2011b, 105). This is contextualist intellectual history conceived of not (or not primarily) as the painstaking examination of individual thinkers but as the study of broad ‘traditions’ of thought (Bevir 2011a).3 Building on this perspective Ian Hall contends that the history of international thought remains marginal in IR because the dominance of (Skinnerian) contextualism precludes fruitful engagement with contemporary theory. Rather than falling into ‘ever narrower, syncretic histories of texts, into antiquarianism, and into the indefensible position that contextualist historians ought to be the sole gatekeepers for past international thought’ (2017, 254), lessons about the purpose of intellectual history can be learnt from ‘English School’ scholars such as Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, who developed an early form of interpretivism (Bevir and Hall 2020). The fruits of this interpretivist research agenda include insightful analyses of British foreign policy traditions (Bevir et al. 2013). It is worth noting that Skinner saw intellectual history as integral to social science. During the 1960s and 70s, along with Charles Taylor, Alistair Macintyre, and Clifford Geertz, among others, he sought to flesh out an interpretive alternative to behaviouralism (Tully 1983). Only later did contextualism come to be seen as a method for interpreting texts rather than studying social action. It need not be so. Criticizing the view that philosophy has a privileged claim to ‘superintend, determine, and evaluate IR theory’, Richard Devetak restages the venerable clash between history and philosophy to argue for the importance of contextualism in theorizing the international (2017, 262; 2018). He traces its provenance to Renaissance humanist thought, when historiography was wielded as a weapon against philosophical argumentation, and argues that contextualism is both a hermeneutic technique and a form of social theory. Taking history seriously induces ‘an understanding of politics as a historically situated, contingent activity that took place in historical time’ prompting recognition that ‘[e]‌arthly actors and institutions’ interact in specific and changeable circumstances (2017, 269). An empirically superior

IR and Intellectual History    97 approach to comprehending the past, it also offers important lessons for contemporary analysis, disclosing the ‘historicity of prevailing assumptions and concepts’ (2017, 273). Christian Reus-​Smit argues that the ‘essence’ of IR constructivist approaches to history is Skinnerian (2008, 400). Constructivist social ontology implies that ideas are ‘constitutive forces in history, forces that give meaning to historical processes, forces that warrant, justify, and license certain forms of action’ (2008, 410). This follows Skinner’s injunction that socially situated actors seek to legitimate their actions through reference to prevailing conventions (Reus-​Smit 2008, 410; Skinner 2002). The normative implication is clear: demonstrating the historical mutability of norms, values, and institutions demonstrates that humans can remake their worlds (Reus-​Smit 2008, 398). Like Bevir and Hall, Reus-​Smit contrasts this approach with a ‘history of ideas’ alternative that focuses on the exegesis of canonical thinkers. ‘Instead of studying the history of ideas, constructivists explore ideas in history’ (2008, 408). This project departs from the Skinnerian ‘ethos’ because constructivists write ‘big history’, tracing shifts in norms—​sovereignty, humanitarian intervention, individual rights—​through macro-​case-​study comparisons. Hermeneutic depth is sacrificed for explanatory breadth. This points to the question of granularity addressed throughout the volume. Many intellectual historians are committed to granular analysis, seeking to illuminate the arguments of particular (groups of) writers through detailed reconstruction of their thought-​worlds. This is often yoked to other methodological injunctions, perhaps most significantly an insistence that scholars work in the languages in which arguments were formulated. Scepticism about macro-​comparisons, seen as abstracting too much from the contexts in which meaning is generated, is common. But contextualist work is not necessarily confined to fine-​grained studies of individuals or narrow slivers of time. Some of the most influential works in the genre—​including Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought and Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment—​ range across centuries and continental expanses. Armitage’s (2017) ‘serial contextualist’ account of civil war opens in ancient Rome and culminates with George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.4 Brett’s (2011) analysis of the relationship between nature and polity moves across early modern Europe, Andrew Fitzmaurice’s (2013) account of sovereignty, occupation, and empire spans half a millennia, while Pitts’s (2018) investigation of the boundaries of international law moves from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, a similar period to that covered in Helena Rosenblatt’s (2018) study of liberalism. Longue durée intellectual history is not unusual. Such works combine attention to the rich texture of intellectual production with chronological ambition. Moreover, as Claire Vergerio argues (2019), contextualist methodology can accommodate expansive reception histories (her own work traces the fortunes of Gentili’s arguments about war from the seventeenth to the twentieth century). The methodological divergences between contextual intellectual history and constructivism are not best captured by contrasting micro-​and macro-​scales of analysis. Rather, there are four principal issues at stake. The first concerns the degree to which scholars are willing to abstract or generalize arguments from particular times and places onto a wider historical canvas. The second concerns the extent of detailed engagement with primary source material considered sufficient to warrant interpretive claims. The third concerns the viability of doing comparative contextual work where this involves attempting to compare or evaluate ideas across linguistic communities or ethico-​political traditions. Finally, there is a notable difference in the types of claims made, in particular the emphasis places on the purported

98   Duncan Bell explanatory or causal properties of ideas. Intellectual historians disagree, often sharply, in how they think about these issues. Modernity—​the other organizing theme of this volume—​is not a central interpretive category in contemporary intellectualistory. The same is true of ‘the Enlightenment’. Intellectual historians are more likely to pluralize or historicize these concepts—​exploring their emergence, development, and ideological uses—​than invoke them as basic analytical frames. Nevertheless, historians of political thought have sketched assorted narratives about the origins of ‘modern’ politics. One privileges the ‘early modern’ era, and especially the seventeenth century, when the concept of the modern sovereign state first emerged in Europe (Skinner 2009).5 An alternative chronology emphasizes the rise of ‘commercial society’ during the long eighteenth century, with modern politics figured as a product of the multiform entanglement of international capitalism and the sovereign state (Hont 2005). An argument can be made for the nineteenth century, focusing on the development of nationalist ideologies and the looping consequences of the French and American revolutions. But these contrasting periodizations, each of which picks out transformative intellectual and socio-​political developments, remain focused on the constitution and interaction of European states. At best, they enrich understanding of the character and trajectory of modern European (or transatlantic) politics. If we open the aperture further, a different range of episodes or periods might be invoked, from the conquest of the Americas in 1492 through to the Haitian revolution of 1791. This shift of focus points to some of the main trends that have emerged in recent scholarship.

Trends and Trajectories The history of international thought has flourished since the end of the Cold War, finding a home in various fields, notably History, Political Theory, IR, and International Law. Some topics have drawn attention across (sub)disciplinary divides, others have been confined largely to one or two disciplines. Empire is an example of the former, the disciplinary history of IR the latter. The assorted purposes catalogued in the last section cross-​cut these lines of inquiry. The subject is no longer principally dedicated to the study of inter-​state relations, but ranges across different configurations of political space, encompassing empires, federations, composite states, supranational entities, empires, world polities, even projects of space exploration. But it is empire above all that has drawn attention in recent years. During the 1990s scholars, including David Armitage, Barbara Arneil, Anthony Pagden, and James Tully examined the imperial thought of early modern Europe. In the late 1990s, animated in particular by Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire (1999), attention turned increasingly to liberal conceptions of empire.6 Other significant trends overlapped and intersected with interest in imperial expansion and rule. This includes the history of liberal internationalisms (Baji 2016; Gorman 2012; Jahn 2013; Sylvest 2009; Tonooka 2021), which has been complemented by analysis of radical and reactionary international visions, from Communist through to Nazi (Hall 2015; McKay and LaRoche 2018; Steffek 2015). Others have analysed projects for regional or racial orders, and the idea of a world state (Aydin 2007; Bartelson 2009; Rosenboim 2018; Holthaus 2018; Younis 2017). The history of human rights

IR and Intellectual History    99 is now thriving (Hoffmann 2010; Moyn 2010, 2015; Mackinnon 2019). The history of international law has prospered. At its core has been the question of how law was formulated and wielded to regulate relations between European states and legitimate imperial hierarchies—​ as well (less frequently) as furnishing imperial critique (Anghie 2004; Cavanagh 2020; Pitts 2017, 2018; Koskenniemi 2001, 2021; Fitzmaurice 2013).7 Much work on empire has been motivated by interest in the possibilities and pathologies of contemporary international order.8 Mehta turned to Edmund Burke as an alternative to the imperial ‘urge’ he argued was integral to liberal thought. Pitts (2005) and Sankar Muthu (2003) responded by pluralizing liberalism, reclaiming a generative late eighteenth-​century anti-​imperial variant in (among others) Bentham, Kant, and Smith. Inder Marwah (2019) disagrees, contending that Millian liberalism can accommodate human difference better than Kantian alternatives. Readings and re-​readings of the canonical figures seek to shed historical and theoretical light on the character, value, and fate of liberalism. In a different vein, Jeanne Morefield traces recurrent patterns of argumentation. Pairing early twentieth-​ century figures with recent political commentators—​Alfred Zimmern and Donald Kagan, the Round Table and Niall Ferguson, Jan Smuts and Michael Ignatieff—​she highlights patterns of discursive continuity and change. She maintains that all adopt liberal narratives of ‘deflection’ that allow them to divert attention from the fundamental illiberalism of liberal empire, ‘back towards the liberal nature of the imperial society’ (Morefield 2014, 1, 3). Morefield concludes by identifying resources for critiquing liberal international theory in the work of G. D. H Cole, Gandhi, and Edward Said. Some of the most innovative scholarship in the field traces how prominent anti-​colonial thinkers challenged imperial domination. In Worldmaking after Empire, Adom Getachew (2019) charts how a network of thinkers and activists—​Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams, among others—​fused arguments for political self-​determination with ambitious plans to recast the international system. They sought to institutionalize a right to self-​determination at the United Nations, supported the establishment of regional federations, and pushed ideas for a new international economic order (NIEO). Getachew is clear that this historical analysis can inform contemporary visions of global justice. Inés Valdez (2019) draws on Du Bois’ writing and political activism to critique Kantian political theory and develop a compelling account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Other scholars make strong explanatory claims. Karuna Mantena contends that late nineteenth century shifts in imperial ideology shaped British imperial policy. During the second half of the century there was a transition from ‘ethical’ claims centred on ‘the language of a civilizing rule and the goal of self-​government’, exemplified by John Stuart Mill, to ‘alibis’, a form of ‘culturalist’ argument that invoked the protection of ‘native communities’ (2010, 48), represented chiefly by Henry Maine. She adduces two further arguments. The first is that Maine’s work directly influenced the policy of ‘indirect rule’ that was utilized in twentieth century British imperial governance. To understand the development of British policy, she suggests, it is essential to recognize shifts in justificatory argumentation. Moreover, she pinpoints the recurrent instability of imperial ideology by showing continuities between historical arguments and strategies employed to legitimate war in Iraq (2010). Disciplinary historians have greatly enriched understanding of IR (Bell 2018; Schmidt 1998, 2012). The textbook staple that it was structured by ‘great debates’ has been debunked (Schmidt 2012). The institutional ecology formed by universities, thinktanks, and

100   Duncan Bell foundations has been mapped (Guilhot 2011; McCourt 2020; Parmar 2012). Prominent thinkers—​above all Hans Morgenthau—​have been prized from the grip of deadening stereotypes. Realism has been reinterpreted as a sophisticated body of political thought.9 The long-​standing barriers between intellectual historical work in IR and political theory have begun to dissolve. William Scheuerman (2009), for example, shows how mid-​twentieth-​ century IR realists articulated sophisticated cosmopolitan arguments that prefigure those developed by recent political theorists. This is intellectual history both as cautionary tale, highlighting the lineage of positions often claimed as novel, and as a resource for theoretical argument. Drawing together IR and political thought, Alison McQueen (2017) shows, through a subtle reading of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau, how the idea of apocalypse has inflected realism, concluding with an exploration of how such arguments figure in debates over climate change. Interrogating IR’s entanglement with imperialism has drawn disciplinary historians into wider debates about empire. Robert Vitalis’s, White World Order, Black Power Politics traces how American IR, from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, was implicated in the justification of colonialism and white supremacism (see also Blatt 2018; Schmidt 1998, 2008; Guilhot, 2014). Questions of ‘colonial administration’ and ‘race development’ stood at its heart. ‘[I]‌nternational relations’, Vitalis writes, ‘meant race relations’ (2016, 1). Other scholars have explored how race and empire figured in disciplinary formation and development outside the Atlantic world. Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale (2020) relocate the origins of IR to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Alexander Davis argues that Australian IR emerged not with the creation of the first chair in the subject in 1949 but with the earlier establishment of the Australian branch of the imperialist Round Table movement, and that it was shaped by a commitment to settler colonization and imperial expansion in East Asia (Davis 2021; Cotton 2013). Presenting a counterpoint to Vitalis’s American narrative, Davis Thakur and Vale (2021) et al. sketch a genealogy of the ‘imperial discipline’ centred on the British imperial world. Once again we see a divergence in purposes that cross-​cuts method. This can be captured by thinking about the difference between endogenous and exogenous disciplinary histories. The principal reason that historians attend to the production of social scientific knowledge is exogenous: they aim to trace the imbrication of knowledge, power, and institutions. The social sciences were (and remain) an important site for tracing intersections of public policy and power (Isaac 2007). But IR scholars typically prioritize an endogenous ambition: they seek to contribute to contemporary IR. Brian Schmidt adduces four reasons for the value of disciplinary history: 1) past thought can generate important theoretical insight; 2) misleading disciplinary narratives distort current debate; 3) historical knowledge helps render present assumptions and preoccupations intelligible; 4) it facilitates critical reflection on the present (Schmidt 2012, 4). In realizing these goals IR disciplinary history adopts a range of the strategies I outlined in the first section: mining historical texts for ideas, demythologizing dominant discourses, and critiquing the theoretical and political entailments of approaches by historicizing them. IR has not attracted much attention from historians of Cold War social science, chiefly because it is not seen as a source of influential transdisciplinary intellectual developments. It is a net importer of ideas. Yet there is much to be gained by studying it. Following the frequent traffic between academic departments and foreign policy-​making elites furnishes insight into the dynamics of knowledge production and usage. Moreover, the history of IR

IR and Intellectual History    101 offers fertile ground for exploring how powerful theoretical frameworks—​from structural-​ functionalism through cybernetics to rational choice—​were adapted and reshaped for particular political and intellectual purposes. Nicolas Guilhot’s (2018) work on IR’s cybernetic moment is a valuable example. The history of IR, meanwhile, has much to gain by engaging with wider currents in the history of social science. IR should be embedded in the wider ecology of the Cold War knowledge-​complex. This requires interdisciplinary inquiry. Examples range from Pamela Lee’s (2020) work on the aesthetics of Cold War think tanks, through Hunter Heyck’s (2015) account of the ‘age of system’ to Fred Turner’s (2006) analysis of how computing was reimagined from a Cold War technology to a source of digital utopianism. Though such work might not contribute directly to the advancement of contemporary IR, it provides a richer account of visions of postwar world-​making.

Exclusions and Expansions Traditionally intellectual history focused on a select group of ‘great’ thinkers, almost all of them white European men. The problems with this are manifest. Most obviously, it ignores the voices and experiences of women and members of minority communities. Addressing such a limited range of individuals distorts comprehension of past intellectual production. The canon itself is an historical artefact, constructed and reproduced over time—​rather than being treated as a given—​it is better regarded as an object of historical inquiry. While scholarship in the last couple of decades has broadened the scope of intellectual history, much remains to be done. Women are largely absent from scholarly monographs and textbooks in the field (Owens 2018). Although there are notable exceptions (e.g. Ashworth 2011; Sluga 2009; Sluga 2015), it is only recently that this absence has been addressed systematically. Doing so is not only a matter of expanding the established canon, important as that remains, for women were often denied educational opportunities and career options that facilitated the production of the kind of work that qualified an author for recruitment into it. It is necessary to expand the compass of intellectual history, studying (for example) the work of journalists, teachers, artists, social reformers, and administrators in international organizations (Huber et al. 2021 Keene 2017; Hartnett and Rosenboim 2021). A landmark summa of progress is Women’s International Thought: A New History (2020), edited by Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler. It encompasses ‘canonical’ thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper, Rosa Luxembourg, and Simone Weil, those working in or adjacent to academic institutions, including Vera Micheles Dean, Krystyna Marek, F. Melian Stawell, Merze Tate, and Barbara Wootton, and those who made their mark as campaigners, journalists, or administrators, such as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, and Elizabeth Wiskemann. In recognition of the importance of putting women on syllabi, the volume is complemented by an anthology, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon? (Owens 2021). This project highlights the importance of both collaborative scholarship and pedagogical reform in addressing historical marginalization. The men comprising the canon have almost invariably been white. Addressing this exclusion has taken various forms. Much effort has focused on expanding the scope of international/​imperial political thought to include the contributions of notable thinkers and

102   Duncan Bell politicians. Getachew’s analysis of anti-​colonial world makers is exemplary, as is Robbie Shilliam’s work on Marcus Garvey (2006). The clearest example is the burgeoning interest in Du Bois’ international thought (Getachew and Pitts 2021; Valdez 2019). As Brandon Byrd observes, questions of inter-​and trans-​nationalism have been central to the ‘renaissance’ of African-​American intellectual history (2021). Vitalis identifies a distinct ‘Howard School’, a group of remarkable scholars—​including Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, Alain Locke, and Merze Tate—​who had been erased from the disciplinary history of IR. Affiliated with Howard University, they provided the only sustained source of intellectual resistance to the racial and imperial pretensions of the white-​dominated field in the early twentieth century and into the Cold War. Other scholars have expanded the remit of intellectual historical work. An excellent example is Keisha Blain’s (2018) recovery of a mid-​twentieth century form of anticolonial internationalism shaped by African-​America and Afro-​Caribbean women, including Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell. Imaobong Umoren (2018) explores the lives of Una Marson, Paulette Nardal, and Eslanda Robeson—​a Jamaican, Martiniquan, and an African-​American—​to trace the transnational circulation of ideas about decolonization, anti-​fascism, and feminism in the mid-​twentieth century. This body of work has produced a detailed map of ‘Black internationalisms’ and the global vectors of anti-​colonial thought (Byrd 2019; Blain and Gill 2019; Goswami 2012; Slate 2012). Even topics that might at first appear unrelated to international thought can shed light on the subject, opening up new imaginative possibilities. One generative example is work on the idea that the ancient Egyptians were Black, a line of argument that was popular from the late eighteenth century and into the twentieth among Afro-​modern thinkers building counter-​discourses of world history (Moses 1998; Nurhussein 2019).10 One of its principal implications was that variations on the theme of universal history articulated by European thinkers to naturalize and legitimate racial hierarchies were misconceived. This project of historical recoding could also be deployed for utopian purposes. As Wilson Moses argues, the proponents of ‘Egyptomorphic Afrocentrism’ worked out ‘a historiography of progress’ that furnished a ‘utopian teleology in African American thought, which advanced the idea of an unstoppable progress toward a racially enlightened and egalitarian society in the future’ (Moses 1998, 15). Scholarship addressing exclusion and marginalization within the intellectual history of the Euro-​American world intersects with a prominent scholarly trend—​the analysis of ‘non-​Western’ political thought. (The term is problematic and contested.) This is the remit of two distinct but overlapping endeavours: ‘comparative political thought’ and ‘global intellectual history’ (Moyn and Sartori 2013; Jenco et al. 2020), the former associated with Political Theory programmes, the latter with History ones. Both have the same objective: to challenge, complicate, and extend the traditional geographical and cultural focus of scholarship by taking seriously, on its own terms, the production, circulation, and reception of ideas outside the Euro-​American world. Parallel moves have been made to explore ‘non-​ Western’ IR, including Arlene Tickner’s (2003) pioneering work on Latin American IR (see also Shilliam 2010). Comparative political thought and global intellectual history are not synonyms for international political thought, in so far as they do not necessarily focus on inter-​polity relations or visions of world-​making.11 But much work in these transversal fields does fit the description and should be seen as both a valuable complement and a productive challenge to existing approaches. It is complementary because it expands the range

IR and Intellectual History    103 of thinkers, discourses, sources, and debates. It is a challenge because it at once critiques, and offers an alternative to, the parochialism and false universalism that have often shaped intellectual historical discourse. Some scholars aim to enrich the intellectual history of particular regions. India has attracted much attention from both historians and political theorists (e.g. Kapila 2011, 2021; Mantena, 2012; Sultan 2020). Others focus on the global or regional development of politico-​religious traditions, such as Cemil Aydin’s intellectual history of the Muslim world (2017). The circulation and mutation of ideas across time and space has been a popular subject of inquiry (e.g. Bayly 2011; Bose and Manjapra 2010). Others are more directly comparative, aiming to juxtapose or connect ‘Western’ and ‘non-​Western’ thinkers. Illuminating examples include Murad Idris’s War for Peace (2018) which reads (for example) Plato, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb to make an argument about the violence embedded in moralized ideals of peace, Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas (2017), which reads Frederick Douglass and Du Bois with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and José Vasconelos to explore fin de siècle transnational theorizations of race, and Juan Pablo Scarfi’s The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas (2018), which focuses on James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez. Comparative political thought encompasses assorted methods and its proponents elicit varied purposes (Ackerley and Bajpai 2017. Some are principally normative theorists and have little to say about intellectual history. Others focus on the historical record and only gesture towards the present. Many try and do both. Some make claims about the importance of intellectual history for social science, comparative politics in particular. Joshua Simon (2014) argues that studying past thinkers can inform empirical scholarship, especially historical institutionalism, by providing evidence of the choices available to actors at key moments and demonstrating the contingency of institutional outcomes. Brooke Ackerly and Rochana Bajpai, meanwhile, highlight how comparative political thought can inform interpretive social science (2018). In this sense, work in comparative political thought mirrors the variety of purposes that have been long been claimed for intellectual history.

Conclusion The history of international thought is thriving. As I have suggested, its practitioners employ assorted methods and pursue various goals, from the relatively modest (seeking credible historical accounts of individual thinkers) to the hugely ambitious (placing intellectual history at the heart of social science and political theory). They do not speak with one voice. In recent years, intellectual history has seen a welcome expansion, thematic, methodological, and geographical. This trend is likely to continue, reshaping the compass and concerns of the field. One constant remains: historians of (international) political thought tend to concentrate on written sources. But visions of global order were and are produced in various media. Painting, cinema, architecture, music, computer games: all are fertile sites for intellectual historical investigation. Future developments in the field will hopefully include an extension in the type of source materials explored. The history of political thinking should embrace the full range of cultural production.

104   Duncan Bell

Notes 1. Thanks to the editors, and Ian Hall, Emma Mackinnon, Or Rosenboim, and Jeanne Morefield, for comments on earlier drafts. On the development of intellectual history, including trends in political thought, see Brett (2002); Charette and Skjönsberg (2020); Grafton (2006); Guilhot and Schmidt (2018); McMahon and Moyn (2014). 2. Blau (2020) makes a plausible case for the potential theoretical (not historical) value of creative misreading’s of past thinkers. 3. This points to possible uses of digital humanities methods (Hill (2016); Blaydes, Grimmer, and McQueen (2018)). 4. For a multi-​century conceptual history of war, see Bartelson (2017). 5. For an account of medieval understandings of political authority, and their implications for IR theorizing, see Costa López 2020; Bain (2020). 6. For overviews, see Bell (2016), ­chapter 2; Pitts (2010); Muthu (2012). 7. There have been fierce methodological exchanges about how to study international legal history (Brett et al. (2021); Hunter (2016); Wallenius (2019). 8. I discuss the various positions in the debate in Bell (2016), ­chapter 2. 9. Examples include: Bell (2008); Craig (2003); Kelly (2018); Molloy (2006); Munster and Sylvest (2016); Specter (2022); Tjalve (2008). 10. The controversy over this long-​standing intellectual tradition was reignited in the 1980s in arguments over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. 11. For an argument that global intellectual history can be seen as the study of practices of world-​making, see Bell (2013).

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108   Duncan Bell McKay, J. and LaRoche, C. D. 2018. ‘Why Is There No Reactionary International Theory?’ International Studies Quarterly 62(2): 234–​244. McMahon, D. and S. Moyn, eds. 2014. Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McQueen, A. 2017. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mehta, U. S. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-​Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Molloy, S. 2006. The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Morefield, J. 2014. Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-​American Decline and the Politics of Deflection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moses, W. 1998. Afrotopia: The Roots of African-​American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moyn, S. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moyn, S. 2015. Christian Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Moyn, S. 2017. ‘The Political Origins of Global Justice’. In The Worlds of American Intellectual Rosenhagen, 133–​ 154. History, eds. I. J. Kloppenberg, M. J. O’Brien, and J. Ratner-​ Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moyn, S. 2019. ‘The Doctor’s Plot: The Origins of the Philosophy of Human Rights’. In Empire, Race, and Global Justice, eds. Bell, 52–​73. Moyn, S. and A. Sartori, eds. 2013. Global Intellectual History. New York: Columbia University Press. Munster, R. V. and Sylvest, C. 2016. Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution. London: Routledge. Muthu, S. 2003. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Muthu, S., ed. 2012. Empire and Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nurhussein, N. 2019. Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Owens, P. 2018. ‘Women and the History of International Thought’. International Studies Quarterly 62(3): 467–​481. Owens, P. ed. 2021. Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owens, P. and K. Rietzler, eds. 2020. Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parmar, I. 2012. Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia University Press. Pitts, J. 2005. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pitts, J. 2010. ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’. Annual Review of Political Science 13: 211–​235. Pitts, J. 2017. ‘International Relations and the Critical History of International Law’. International Relations 31(3): 282–​298. Pitts, J. 2018. Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reus-​Smit, C. 2008. ‘Reading History through Constructivist Eyes’. Millennium 37(2): 395–​414. Rosenblatt, H. 2018. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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chapter 8

Gender, History, a nd International Re l at i ons Laura Sjoberg Feminist and queer histories of global politics make the argument that, in V. Spike Peterson’s (2014b, 605, emphasis in original) words, ‘the making of states is the making of “sex” ’. In this view, histories of global politics are and necessarily always have been histories of gender relations, and histories of gender relations are and necessarily always have been histories of global politics. The international system is in important ways a place where what Laura J. Shepherd (2008) called ‘the violent reproduction of gender’ takes place—​where political and social order relies on gender hierarchy, and where gender hierarchy is simultaneously shaped by shaping of the political and social order. The two have always been interrelated. Though it occurs in most tellings of international history, separating them does not make sense. Whatever future histories should/​might discuss, whether they are of ‘the international’, ‘international history’, or ‘international thought’, it is clear that looking seriously at gender and sexuality disrupts not only International Relations (IR)’s inherited histories, but also IR’s inherited ways of defining, seeing, and doing History as a project. Whether it is in including women and/​or sexual minorities, rethinking inclusion of the thought of women and/​or sexual minorities, rewriting the boundaries for inclusion of the lived experiences of women and/​or sexual minorities, or transforming histories in one of many ways suggested by feminist and/​or queer thought, one message is common to these perspectives: histories by and for elites are not histories either of international thought or of ‘the international’ itself, and must stop being recognized as such. While lengthy definitions of many of those ideas may not be productive here, some notes situating the discussions of gender herein may be appropriate. First, I use terms like sex, gender, and sexuality as descriptors of constitution and perception—​where people present as, are read as, or some combination of those things, particular sexes and genders. Words like male and female are often treated as dichotomous—​as if there are only two sexes, when both biological science and social interaction show that there are many more complexities. Here, I use ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ to refer to co-​constituted categories of maleness, femaleness, and both/​and neither/​nor, and of masculinities and femininities. I use ‘sexuality’ to refer to all stripes of sexual interactions and sexual relationships. Given contemporary social norms, the terms around heterosexuality refer to someone who ‘is’ cis-​sexual of one sex [noun],

112   Laura Sjoberg having ‘sex’ [verb], or identifying sexual desire [exclusively] with/​for a person or persons of the opposite sex [noun]. Heteronormativity is the presumption that such relationships are appropriately the norm, and heterosexism is giving preference to the heterosexual norm and discriminating against or excluding its constitutive others, including but not limited to the homosexual and the queer. These terms will be used across this chapter, and expanded upon where necessary. If sex, gender, and the state are interdependent and co-​constituted concepts and social realities, the only scholars that IR recognizes who take account of that are feminist and queer ones. That ‘recognition’ is both quite recent and quite incomplete. This chapter briefly looks at the disciplinary, sociological, and epistemological blind spots that make IR’s incomplete, skewed, and problematic approach to (disciplinary and) global history possible. The next section then shows that it is not women and feminism who come recently to IR, but IR which comes recently and reluctantly to a long tradition of women’s and feminists’ contributions to the study of global politics. It demonstrates that the pathology lies in the exclusion of these women from histories, rather than their lack of relevance to them. The third section makes the argument that IR’s problematic histories cannot be corrected by recovering women’s thought and women’s stories and adding them to existing histories. It argues that the project of de-​masculinizing histories is a transformative, rather than piecemeal, process, and provides a brief account of how such a transformation might take place. The fourth section engages the idea that the histories of the state and the histories of gender have always been intertwined and inseparable, even as many IR scholars separate out the concepts completely. The fifth section of this chapter argues that transforming (disciplinary) histories might not be enough, as some feminist and queer accounts suggest that the very processes and methods by which historicizing takes place are sexist and heterosexist in concept and organization. A sixth section looks at the gendered politicization of the ‘sides’ of History in both disciplinary and political discourses. The conclusion of this chapter looks that the various interruptions and revisions that gender analysis might make in thinking about and doing international histories.

Women Have a Long Legacy of Contributing to IR and Being Ignored In a piece on the history of women and feminism in the study of IR, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True (2018, 28) made the argument that the explicit entry of feminist theorizing into disciplinary inquiry ‘emerged from a deep skepticism about knowledge that claims to be universal and objective but which, in reality, is knowledge based on men’s lives’ (Tickner and True 2018, 228). Feminisms’ deep skepticism must be itself a historical claim. IR’s knowledge that ‘claims to be universal and objective’ must be dehistoricized and decontextualized, and the feminist ‘skepticism’ looks to recontextualize and historicize knowledge based on ‘men’s lives’ to something less narrow. Tickner and True (2018, 228) characterize feminisms as interested in ‘disputing claims that the International Relations discipline is gender-​free’ by showing that ‘its subject matter has, for the most part, been written by elite, white men, for these men, about these men’.

Gender, History, and IR    113 One of the ways that feminist scholars have argued that IR is by, for, and about men is by showing that women have been left out of, or written out of, disciplinary sociologies and histories. Patricia Owens (2018, 467) laments that ‘existing surveys and anthologies wrongly convey the impression that women in the past did not think seriously about international politics’. This problem is difficult to correct in a straightforward way, given the paucity of the archive. Owens (2018, 467) notes that, for the most part, ‘we lack histories of women in the early years of the discipline’. As Tickner and True (2018, 221) argue, it is not only female scholars or female thinkers who are left out but also women’s lives and their needs, as ‘disciplinary history rarely concerns women, or issues of concern to women’. Note that Tickner and True (2018, 222) use present tense throughout their discussion, where they note that, despite some attention to feminist IR, ‘many scholars still see feminist concerns as ‘women’s issues’ that lack significance for the wider discipline’. Surveying 60 histories of international thought written over the course of the last 100 years, Owens (2018, 474) finds that their historical citations collectively totalled 2.94% women, with many histories including no women at all. Implied in many of these histories is a narrative that suggests that recent scholarship in feminist IR (starting in the late 1980s) was the first significant female/​feminist thought in the field. Tickner and True (2018, 222) explicitly reject ‘conventional disciplinary histories’ that ‘suggest that feminism came late to IR, arguing instead that ‘the discipline has come late to feminism’. They point to a ‘longer tradition of feminist theorizing about international peace and security’ which has been ‘completely neglected’ in the disciplinary histories and sociologies of IR (Tickner and True 2018, 222). Tickner and True (2018, 221) are interested in tracing the development of feminist international thought from women’s peace activities around the First World War. They argue that the discipline over-​tells an inherited story about being inspired by the trauma of the brutality of the First World War, all the while ‘in either these retrospectives or the discipline’s broader analyses of WWI’ ‘discussion of women’s peace activities’ during and after the conflict are neglected. Tickner and True (2018, 211) highlight the frequency, importance, and high profile nature of women’s contributions at the time, discussing, for example, a meeting of ‘more than fifteen hundred women from twelve nations’ to ‘draw up plans for the peace’ (citing Addams et al. 2003, 89). These women were involved in both the substantive analysis of global politics and advocacy about interstate relations. As Tickner and True explain, rather than coming late to the scene: Throughout the twentieth century women activists worked hard to get issues, such as gender-​based violence and women’s participation in peace processes, on the agenda of states. But women have had a hard time having their voices seen as authentic in matters of international politics, particularly those related to war and national security. (Tickner and True 2018, 221)

Tickner and True (2018), then, argue that women were a part of the study of global politics all along—​the ‘discipline’ and its ‘canon’ ignored, left out, and erased their contributions. As the two authors (2018, 231) argue, the ‘airbrushing’ of women’s thought about global politics ‘from the history of international relations’ is deeply problematic. They see it as ‘a loss to the entire discipline—​not only to the feminist subfield—​and to the world, as we seek all the inspiration and resources we can marshal to create the conditions for positive and enduring peace’ (Tickner and True 2008, 231).

114   Laura Sjoberg With Tickner and True, many feminist historians suggest that there is significant utility in researching what Owens (2018) calls ‘historical women’ to see what and how they thought about global politics. Bock (1991, 1) contends that making women more generally historically visible makes visible their subjection and their subjectivity—​both of which are important to telling a fuller history. Tickner (1992) argues that only by including women’s lives, women’s histories, and women’s thought in IR can a full accounting of global politics be had. Such inclusion requires recovering and rewriting histories. Several feminist scholars have looked to do some of that recovery and rewriting. Tickner and True (2018) research early twentieth-​century feminist pragmatism’s work on peace and security. Others have written about feminist scholars and activists in IR in the early twentieth century. Lucian Ashworth (2011) looked for the contributions of the people he identified as ‘lost feminists’ between the two world wars, especially to the study of peace. Catia Cecilia Confortini (2012) traced the theoretical, empirical, methodological, and activist contributions of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) from its founding during the Second World War. Owens credits others with excavating some of the work of other early ‘IR’ female thinkers, including but not limited to Helena Swanwick, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Merze Tate, and Coral Bell.1Owens (2018, 468) herself writes in detail about Lucy Philip Mair’s research and teaching in international studies at the London School of Economics in the interwar period. Finding women in the disciplinary history of IR matters. It reveals not only important scholars but also key insights that are often cast aside by dominant perspectives on international histories and the (often white, male) historians who write them. But ‘restoring’ the contributions that women have made, as the next section argues, is only a part of a project of re-​visioning disciplinary Histories and the international histories that they engage. Owens (2018, 469) acknowledges that ‘recovering and identifying the work of neglected academic women is obviously central to writing disciplinary history’ but argues that this is not enough.

This Cannot Be Fixed by Just Finding ‘The Women’ and Adding Their Insights As scholars of gender have consistently noted, an IR discipline written by elite, white men, for those men, and about those men inherits artificial boundaries about what counts as the international, what counts as relations, and what counts as knowledge about international relations. As V. Spike Peterson (2014a, 398) argues, ‘because the historical record is focused on elite male experience it fails to illuminate the sensual/​emotional/​sexual experience of nonelite men and virtually all women’. This is not only a problem of who counts as being part of history, but of what counts as history. Revealing the violence of those boundaries and expanding them matters, since ‘feminist historiography suggests that to fully capture women’s intellectual work, we also need to extend the locations and empirical sources of international thought’ (Owens 2018, 469). It is important, then, to see that it is not enough to identify women as contributors to international thought. Instead, ‘looking for women in the history of international thought

Gender, History, and IR    115 does more than producing a “recovery history.” It forces scholars to rethink what counts as international thought itself, where it is located, and how it might be studied’ (Huber et al. 2019, 2). If the discipline’s canon was established in a ‘gendered, raced, and classed manner’ (Owens 2018, 468), fixing women’s exclusion is a project of transformation rather than recovery. As Owens (2018, 469) explains, this sort of project ‘potentially involves the rewriting of the thought itself, transforming its accepted practices, genres, and locations’ (Owens 2018, 469). Methodologically, Bock (1991, 17) adds that transforming gendered histories ‘requires continuous work on the dismantling, historicization, and deconstruction of the apparently given meanings of the various categories’. In other words, IR as we currently know it is itself a product of ‘structural hierarchies—​of sex, sexuality, class, ethnicity/​race and nation’ which ‘have histories’, the neglect of which has the effect of ‘disabling more adequate critiques of hierarchy’ both among IR thinkers and in global politics (Peterson 2014a, 395–​396). It is these structural hierarchies that make the history of the co-​constitution of gender and the state impossible for IR to tell. Feminist history, rather than just adding women and their work, can: Provide new perspectives on old questions (about how, for example, political rule is imposed, or what the impact of war on society is), redefine the old questions in new terms (introducing considerations of family and sexuality, for example, it the study of economics or war), make women visible as active participants, and create analytic distance between the seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology. (Scott 1987, 50)

In other words, feminist histories not only add women and their perspectives, but look at the ways that the lives and modes of thought which are left out of traditional, masculinist histories. This work might reveal previously invisible events, reshape previously uncontested concepts, and make fathomable previously unseen relationships. It is not by adding women’s insights to the IR histories featured elsewhere in this book that we get the history of the co-​ constitution of gender and global politics. Instead, it is essential to pair recovery and transformation projects. Using gender analysis, it is possible to see things that are obscured by masculinized histories that claim gender blindness. Looking for gender can reveal not only the women and non-​binary people who have been excluded from these histories, but also the ways that those histories are raced, classed, and heterosexist. Even the history that starts this chapter remains visibly and problematically incomplete—​certainly, similar stories can be told about the co-​constitution of the state/​state system and race, and the co-​constitution of the state/​ state system and class. With Peterson (2014b, 604), I use queer analytics to see the ways ‘that codes and practices of “normalcy” simultaneously constitute “deviancy”, exclusions, and “otherings” as cites of social violence’ (Peterson 2014b, 604). Every partial history, including recovered histories, has within it some exclusion and violence. Looking to redress some of that violence, Spike Peterson argues that transforming the ways that international histories are produced might also provide avenues for changing the dynamics of global politics. Particularly, Peterson argues that states and sex, made together, are unstable and can be unmade together. As such, Peterson (2013, 58) contends that it is both possible and desirable to ‘denaturalize identities, ideologies, and institutional practices that were stabilized through early state formation’. She sees this as a time with the potential to change inherited social and political organizations, where ‘contradictory

116   Laura Sjoberg developments reveal the instability of heterosexual and state-​ centric arrangements’ (Peterson 2013, 64). As such, ‘if making states is making sex, it is clear today that both states and sex are unstable and, indeed, are being unmade’ (Peterson 2014a, 401). Peterson argues that doing transformative work on international histories might provide fodder for transforming global politics.

Feminist Histories in/​of Global Politics V. Spike Peterson (2014a) traces histories of human social and economic collectives to examine the co-​evolution of gender norms and political structures. Peterson (2013, 57) reads ‘early state formation . . . as constituting and normalizing binary sex/​gender differences and kinship relations’ which in turn shaped ‘the context of European state-​making, the “international” system of states/​nations it generated, and the (nationalist) colonizing practices it proliferated’. According to Peterson, the historical consolidation of gender roles accompanied and was a necessary condition for the constitution of the state as it is known by theorists of IR today. In so doing, she looks to examine the world ‘before’ that state, asking readers to ‘consider what the state’s centralizing dynamics apparently displaced’ (Peterson 2014a, 393). While Peterson (2014a, 393) is not arguing that patriarchal customs started historically at the same time as the modern state, she does contend that, with the evolution of statehood, gender roles ‘assume specific and entrenched forms’. Peterson (2014a, 393–​394, emphasis in original) marks as key a ‘shift from kinship (fictive and otherwise) as a principle of societal organization to kinship as co-​residence; in effect constituting a smaller and more independent household—​the “family”—​centered on husband-​wife-​offspring relations’. As such, ‘historically, state-​making established heteropatriarchal family/​households as foundational socioeconomic units” with “intense emotional investments’ built in (Peterson 2014b, 605, emphasis in original). This shift was a part of the state coming to codify and consolidate a masculine-​feminine difference (Peterson 2014a, 400). Peterson (2014b, 605, emphasis in the original) suggests that modern political centralization—​the making of states—​is a process distinguished by ‘formal (legal) codification of marriage (entailing the heterosexual matrix and ‘nuclear’ family/​household form) and patriarchal inheritance of property/​citizenship (instituting ‘private’ property and insider-​outsider status differentiation)’. In this context, the state began to exert increasing active and passive control over what women are and what happens to women’s bodies. Accordingly, ‘the regulation of marriage and women’s sexuality became a priority and prerogative of the state’ and ‘nationalist policies involve regulating under what conditions, when, how many, and whose children women will bear’ (Peterson 2014a, 398; Peterson 2013, 61). In this way, ‘states abstracted and centralized authority in a ‘political (public) sphere’ that was thus distinguished from, while being dependent upon, a ‘household (private) sphere’ focused on subsistence and social reproduction’ (Peterson 2013, 60). These consolidations of gender roles had not only sexist but heterosexist impacts. By normalizing and defining as necessarily heterosexual and heteropatriarchal family organizations, states make non-​ heterosexuality appear to be ‘against’ their needs

Gender, History, and IR    117 or interests. In this system of self-​reinforcing values, heterosexist group reproduction becomes a fundamental part of nationalist practice (Peterson 1999, 39). In this way, ‘heterosexist ideology and practice is inextricable from the centralization of political authority/​coercive power that we refer to as state-​making’ (Peterson 1999, 39). Feminists have explored relationships between sex, gender, sexuality, and nationalism, where equating the nation with women (e.g. ‘Mother Russia’) both constitutes a ‘spatial, embodied femaleness’ (Peterson 2013, 62) and stakes a political claim to women’s bodies. In turn, equating women with the nation (e.g. ‘protecting our women and children back home’) ‘marks the boundaries of (insider) group identity’, makes women ‘symbols of cultural authenticity’, and creates ‘pressures to conform’ to gender expectations (Peterson 2013, 62). These tight gender-​based dynamics mark a violent boundary between the state and ‘not the state’—​‘self ’ and ‘other’. In this context, ‘sameness within the state is purchased at the price of institutionalizing difference—​and too often, conflict—​among states’ (Peterson 1999, 35). It is not just the founding of the modern state that relies on heterosexism and heteropatriarchy but its stability and continuation. Peterson argues that the ‘normalization of heteropatriarchal principles’ has been key ‘to securing ‘appropriate social reproduction and reliable transmission of property’ to make possible the ‘intergenerational continuity of state formations’ (Peterson, 2014b, 605, emphasis in original). The preservation of these cycles corresponds to ‘ideological justifications of emerging inequality’ propped up by ‘the elevation of masculinist principles: male procreativity, male right to rule and patriarchal transmission of property and membership status’ (Peterson 2014a, 399). In this context, it is possible to see ‘the historical—​and continuing—​fusion of nationalism, militarism, and (heterosexist) masculinism’ (Peterson 2013, 62, citing Puar 2007). The history and function of the state, then, necessitates, makes, and constitutes gender relations, and is in turn constituted by gender relations. It is the case then that states and the state system are ‘marked by hierarchical dichotomies’ of sex, gender, and sexuality (Peterson 2013, 57). This replicates and is replicated in capitalist economics, where ‘global capitalism cannot be understood without reference to the sexual sphere’ because ‘capitalist relations are made possible by the sexual division of labor’ (Smith 2019, 33). This means that, because ‘systems of regulated production and exchange are sustained by unpaid and informal labor—​such as domestic, caring, and intimate labor’, it is the case ‘that economic production itself forms part of broader and deeper processes of social reproduction’ including gender subordination and heterosexism (Smith 2019, 34). As such, like the development of the modern state, the development of ‘capitalism relied on the naturalization of marriage, the family, and sexuality’ (Smith 2019, 46). This means, as Smith (2019, 258) argues, that ‘capitalism is structured by sexual injustice’ (Smith 2019, 258). Rather than continuing to endorse the current histories in which ‘sexuality has come to be regarded not only as distinct from political economy but as antithetical to it’, Smith (2019, 2) contends that it is important to sexualize history and to historicize sexuality. Histories of capitalism must be understood as histories of sexual injustice, and histories of ‘sexuality must be expanded to include analysis of capitalist power relations’ (Smith 2019, 33). In this way, feminists and queer theorists have been making an argument that gender and sexuality are and constitute global political and economic history, despite IR’s general tendency to ignore gender and sexuality both conceptually and empirically.

118   Laura Sjoberg

Problematizing history (with a little ‘h’) That said, not everyone who looks at the ways that gender and/​or sexuality have been treated and neglected in (international) histories sees transforming and rewriting histories as a corrective to the critiques of partialness, exclusion, and bias. Instead, some critics—​especially queer theorists—​have made the argument that capitalism, the state, and global politics are not the only thing constituted by and constituting gender and sexuality. Linear views of time and progress built on looking back to the past and forward to the future are bound up in these systems of oppression. As queer historian Heather Love (2007, 1) argues, ‘a central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence’. As such, it is by definition in opposition to ‘not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning’ (Love 2007, 1). Love (2007, 5) sees this as fundamental, where ‘the association of progress and regress is a function not only of the failure of so many of modernity’s key projects but also of the reliance of the concept of modernity on excluded, denigrated, or superseded others’. In other words, the idea that there is regress behind us and progress in front of us in a linear history of the world is by definition enmeshed in existing (sexist, racist, classist, and heterosexist) power structures. Confronting those power structures means necessarily confronting the histories they have produced (and will continue to be produced) and confronting their structure (rather than just their content). Partial and biased histories do not only ‘leave out’ the people who are marginalized in existing power structures and their life experience, but they ‘leave out’ loss, pain, and subjugation. As such, the ‘profound obscurity’ in which histories’ marginalized others find themselves is structural to histories themselves, rather than only to particular constructions of history. This means that ‘the effort to recapture the past is doomed from the start’, an equivalent of chasing ‘after the fugitive dead’ (Love 2007, 121). In this context, histories, both ‘original’ and rewritten, can become a ‘desired past’—​ ‘not a neutral chronicle of events but rather an object of speculation, fantasy, and longing’ (Love 2007, 130). In this sense, ‘history—​like the future—​is a medium for dreaming about the transformation of social life’ (Love 2007, 133). If this is the case, projects of recalling those who were left out of histories or revising histories based on the addition of neglected concepts and dimensions entrench the oppression in those original, exclusive histories rather than serving as a tool of redemption or liberation. The only redemption or liberation that takes place in the rewriting of histories is the identification of the writer and reader with a particular and hopeful version of possible futures. This creates a conundrum for thinking about what to do with histories, and with the relationships between histories and futures. As Love explains: Queers face a strange choice: is it better to move on toward a brighter future or to hang back and cling to the past? Such divided allegiances result in contradictory feelings: pride and shame, anticipation and regret, hope and despair. Contemporary queers find ourselves in the odd situation of ‘looking forward’ while we are ‘feeling backwards’. (Love 2007, 27)

Love (2007) suggests that it is possible to do both—​that histories do not need to be discarded altogether. She looks at a path forward which not only includes those left out of dominant histories and the concepts that their voices would add, but also includes the negativity that

Gender, History, and IR    119 might be ‘in’ histories which featured the losers, the abused, the oppressed, and the hard. She explains that ‘given the ruination to which history’s others are subject’, histories could and should feature that ruination (Love 2007, 71). It would be important ‘to recognize and even affirm forms of ruined political subjectivity . . . we need a politics forged in the image of exile, of refusal, or even of failure’ (Love 2007, 71). Histories of exile, of negativity, of failure, and of pain, in Love’s view, might work against histories that are structured in a way that make invisible not only these things but the people who live them. Other queer theorists who think about history are less sure that history and historiography are salvageable in the face of the ways that they are implicated in domination and subjection. This is particularly the case among those who problematize the relationship between the past and the future; history and futurism; regress and progress in terms of gender and sexuality. While Love (2007, 28) suggests that it is important to ‘attend more closely to what remains unthought in the turn to the future’, others throw out both history and futurism with their problematic implications and relationships. Lee Edelman (2004), for example, in a book called No Future, argues that the human attachment to what he calls ‘reproductive futurism’ (seeing the future through the eyes of the child and of the next generation) is itself an unnatural product of heterosexist historicism which works against the death drive. Edelman’s understanding of history is intrinsically linked to this invented attachment to reproductive ambition, where history is ‘the continuous staging of our dream of eventual self-​realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire, what we take to be reality itself ’ (Edelman 2004, 10). History then becomes ‘the ongoing dialectic of meaning’s eventual realization through time’ (Edelman 2004, 135). In other words, one can have no history that is not a replication of the violence of the production of narrow and exclusive meanings. There are certainly critics of Edelman’s radical rejection of writing or rewriting histories. Some suggest that Edelman can only critique the futurism in history from the privileged position of being a person whose future is certain (see, e.g. discussion in Smith 2019). Others suggest that it is dangerously decontextualized, such that ‘queer anti-​social theory has similarly been called out for its ahistoricism’ (Smith 2019, 40). There are (perhaps relatedly) those who take Edelman’s point seriously but stop short of wholesale rejecting the project of writing histories. Love (2007, 44), for example, also questions the idea that it is possible to write histories ‘moving forward from a determinate origin and proceeding according to a smooth logic of progression’. This sort of neatness, queer historians contend, can only be found in histories that look to produce meanings for the future by writing the meanings of the past. This is because ‘history, thought in terms only of progress or development, becomes antithetical to [queer] life’ (McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011, 4). Instead, queer theorists have problematized ‘history as a linear narrative’ as constrained by, and in, a heterosexist reading of futurism (Edelman 2004, 4; see also McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011). Instead, as Love (2007, 44) explains, it is better to see history as something which ‘begins accidentally and proceeds by fits and starts’ (Love 2007, 44). This is why McCallum and Tuhkanen (2011, 10) argue for ‘contesting anew the relationship between history and life’, including rethinking the project of history against linearity, against progressivism, and against the project of the imperial constitution of the future subject. What implications do these ways of rethinking history have for IR? They go beyond adding people who IR’s histories have neglected, adding their ways of thinking, or rewriting histories putting making central concepts which have previously been

120   Laura Sjoberg neglected. In this sense, the histories told by Tickner and True (2018), Owens (2018), and even Peterson (2013, 2014a, 2014b) would remain subject to these critiques. These critiques suggest that recovering histories and rethinking histories are inadequate to the task of deconstructing histories’ oppressive pasts and potentially oppressive futures. Instead, they argue that it is not just IR’s histories that need to be rethought but what IR treats as history itself. Perhaps in an even neater presentation than most disciplines, IR tends to tell linear, evolving, progressive accounts both of itself (through ‘debates’ histories and the like) and of global politics (often using the Peace of Westphalia as a starting point for telling an evolution of the state system). The least radical version of these queer critiques of history suggests that the linearity with which these stories are told is both problematically inaccurate and violent, and that non-​linear accounts of the histories of both the discipline and global politics might be both more accurate and less subject to weaponization for social and sociological oppression. A bolder approach demands critically rethinking the use of history to tell futures, and thus the linking of historicism and futurism, both in disciplinary histories and in international histories. In disciplinary histories, this might suggest that, rather than looking ‘back’ at IR’s paradigms, or great debates, or turns to understand what is ‘next’ for IR thinking, the ‘next’ be freed from telling of the discipline’s pasts. In international histories, this outlook would suggest that progressivist narratives about what era built on what era and what comes next be replaced by examination of disjuncture, fits and starts, failures, and non-​ linearity, or at least supplemented by it, asking questions like what was lost or harmed by the things that international histories usually frame as progress or triumph. The most radical version of this critique suggests that history as a project cannot be separated from futurism—​ that history is and always will be reduced and reducible to the weaponization of narratives about the past for production of meaning and disciplining of behaviour for the future. If this is the case, the telling of disciplinary histories—​even rewritten or reconceptualized—​ constitutes a cage for the present aiming their work at an idealized future that is never to be. Telling international histories—​even more inclusive ones—​disciplines those previously understood as outside of progressivist narratives to make a ‘better future’ for ‘our children’ into reproductive futurism. Whatever is taken away from these critiques, they provide a reason to think of the potential problems with, and violences of, (especially linear, progressivist) histories themselves.

Politicization of Histories with a Big ‘H’ and their Implications for History Histories are one thing, ‘History’ might be another. A motley crew, from IR scholars (recall Francis Fukuyama’s [1992] ‘End of History’) to politicians have used history with a capital ‘H’ to describe global politics. This ‘History’ is different than a history or histories about what has happened before now (perhaps and probably with an interest in influencing what happens after now). Instead, to Fukuyama (1992), ‘History’ was one single grand narrative composed of many smaller narratives—​it was the progress of humankind (as a monolith) towards a particular end, which he claimed it was reaching.

Gender, History, and IR    121 In this and similar framings, as Weber (2016, 126) explains, ‘the right side of history’ is always on the side of progressive implementation of universal moral imperatives; ‘the wrong side of history’ is on the side of obstructing such progress. Recently, supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) rights has been characterized as on the ‘right side of history’ (Weber 2016, 127). While this initially appears to be a progressive move of recognizing the ‘homosexual’ as human and a holder of rights, Weber (2016, 127) argues that such moves ‘enable Western states to include “the homosexual” as a normal human in their tolerant, multicultural liberal political communities while simultaneously preserving figurations of the “perverse homosexual” that are compatible with or underwrite (neo)imperial sexualized organizations of international relations’. Putting the ‘LGBT’ rights on the ‘right side of history’ equates homosexuality with ‘normal love’, places it in the frame of neoliberal values, and moves it into the jurisdiction of the neoliberal state, leaving a dark, ‘other’ space outside the neoliberal subject to continued othering and violence, while those who are ‘in’ are violently disciplined to normalcy (Weber 2016, 128–​132; see also Haritaworn et al., 2014). This leads Weber (2016), with Rahul Rao (2012), to suggest that being on the ‘right side of history’ in this case may be normatively problematic. It is not only putting LGBTQ rights (and women’s rights) on the ‘right side’ of ‘History’ that is problematic. While that certainly is a problem—​not least because it preserves a ‘wrong’ side of history for deviant women and queers—​this very construction of ‘History’ is itself violent, both because it is monolithic (history is singular) and because it is dichotomized into two camps, one of which is right/​righteous and the other of which is wrong/​evil. These usages need to be subject to critique. First, ‘History’ as a monolith is problematic. Using the word ‘history’ in the singular to refer to one history among many is one thing; using ‘History’ to describe the history of the world is another. That implies that the world has a singular history, with similar beginnings, middles, and ends. As Tickner and True (2018) and other feminists cited previously discussed, the history tends to be written by, for, and about the elite, the privileged—​often but not exclusively white men. History as a monolith writes out of ‘History’ those who do not fit it, those who lost in its making, those on whose backs it was made but whose efforts were not acknowledged—​most people, most places are not in the monolith ‘History’. Including more people in the monolith does not move away from its problematic and violent conceptual origins—​it simply sweeps them up in a violent ‘history’, doing violence towards the included as it forces them to fit and doing violence towards the excluded as it further others them (see, e.g. Haritaworn et al.; 2013). Second, either ‘History’ or ‘histories’ having a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side (or, for that matter, an identifiable ‘beginning’ and an aspired ‘end) is deeply problematic. In addition to implicating Edelman’s critique of historicism as necessarily linked to a particular version of progressivist futurism, these framings of ‘History’ explicitly use a universalized version of morality to brand an ‘us’ as ‘right’ or ‘the future’ and a ‘them’ as ‘wrong’ or the ‘past’, weaponizing ‘our’ right/​righteousness not only against ‘their’ wrong/​evil but against ‘them’ as a ‘group’ of persons who are wrong. The ‘right’ side of ‘History’ can therefore weaponize ‘History’ against those who are in the wrong, using their righteousness to do violence against the wrong/​evil. This brings about several undesirable implications. One problem is the explicit acceptance of a universal morality, brought about by the powerful who get to decide what ‘History’ is and who/​what falls on its ‘right’ side. Another undesirable implication is the weaponization of right/​Righteousness, which even war ethicists (e.g. Walzer 1977) have

122   Laura Sjoberg suggested can permit the use of otherwise-​immoral tactics against the wrong/​Evil. Still another problem is the conceptual meshing of the ideas that are ‘right’ with the people that have them being on the ‘right side’ of history (and therefore the ideas that are ‘wrong’ with the people that have them being on the ‘wrong side’ of history). People who have right, or even morally good ideas are not always themselves righteous or morally good. One can hold a morally good idea and many morally evil ones, or one can hold morally good ideas which one does not practice. A leader who practices ethnic cleansing may champion women’s rights. If women’s rights are on the ‘right’ side of history, is that leader also on the ‘right side of history’? Common sense would say no, but crusades have been built on much less. These implications are not just risks of creating a monolith ‘History’ with ‘sides’ and a beginning and an end—​they are instead necessary byproducts.

Conclusion Seeing ‘History’ as a weaponized, violent iteration of international histories is an extreme example, but an example of the ways that history/​histories are themselves political and politicized, and never separable from the politics of projects of historicizing. Rather than seeing international histories as objective, it is important to see who they were written by, who they were written for, and who they include, as well as whose experiences dictated their content, whose experiences were left out, and what invisible people, experiences, and ideas must be left out in order to write histories the way that they are written. The subject, object, focus, and ‘outcome’ of histories are all contingent on their context, their authorship, and the normative principles on which they intentionally or unintentionally draw. Seeing that neither ‘History’ nor ‘histories’ have either set focus or set content creates space for a politics of recognition and rethought. This critique directly implicates both the modernity and granularity problems around which this volume is shaped. For the modernity problematique, this critique at once questions the accuracy of inherited origin stories about the international system, the feasibility of finding a ‘correct’ origin story, and the normative value of origin stories themselves. At the same time, it suggests dimensions of the granularity problematique which may not be visible from other perspectives. In addition to asking who is left out of traditional histories both of disciplinary IR and of the international arena, this critique asks how those omissions and silencing’s shape the content of histories and the possibility of telling them. This suggests an interaction between macro-​historical problems of origin and micro-​historical problems of texture, focus, and scale. Histories of global politics (and disciplinary IR) can be rethought with the (partial) ‘recovery’ of the women, queers, minorities, and underclass (not to mention the ‘losers’) who are often left out of them—​this matters, though there is debate on how much it matters. Many feminist and queer theorists who confront these issues suggest that recovery is not enough—​that histories written taking into account the lives of elite men sanitized for the stories that they desire to tell are always going to have problematic boundaries. This means that what is included in histories, what perspective they are written from, and what concepts and ideas they are centred around must be transformed rather than simply supplemented.

Gender, History, and IR    123 Diverse offerings exist for what such a transformation should look like. Peterson (2013, 2014a, 2014b) has a project of looking at the co-​constitutions of genders, sexualities, the state, and the international system to which Smith (2019) explicitly adds capitalisms. In this view, rewriting histories to take account, both conceptually and representationally, of who and what was left out of their telling is a transformative and important political and intellectual project. Love (2007) suggests that even this is not enough—​that the complicated relationship that people who were harmed by progressivist histories have with pasts and futures need to be included in historical projects. Identifying pain, ambivalence, loss, and destruction within as well as from histories is essential to any rehabilitative project. Edelman (2004) argues that the rehabilitation of histories buys into and reifies their disciplinary, heterosexist, and futurist implications—​violently doing away with history, and with it having no future (and relatedly no past) is the only possible ‘path’ away from the violence’s of histories themselves. These perspectives, separately and together, provide insight into the matrixes of available histories and some of the implications that choosing among them might have.

Note 1. For Swanwick, she cited Ashworth (2011). For Bell, she cites Ball and Lee (2014). For West, she cites Hansen (2011). For Weil, she cites Kinsella (2014). For Tate, she cites Vitalis (2015). For Woolf, she cites Wilson (2013).

References Addams, J., Balch, E. G., and Hamilton, A. 2003. Women at the Hague. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books. Ashworth, L. M. 2011. ‘Feminism, War, and the Prospects for Peace: Helena Swanwick (1864–​ 1939) and the Lost Feminists of Inter-​War International Relations’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(1): 25–​43. Ball, D. and Lee, S. 2014. Power and International Relations: Essays in Honour of Coral Bell. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Bock, G. 1991. ‘Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History’. In Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, eds. K. M. Offen, R. R. Pierson, and J. Rendall, 1–​23. New York: Springer. Confortini, C. C. 2012. Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Edelman, L. 2004. No Future. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Hansen, L. 2011. ‘A Research Agenda on Feminist Texts and the Gendered Constitution of International Politics in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’. Millennium 40(1): 109–​128.Haritaworn, J., Kuntsman, A.., and Posocco, S., eds. 2014. Queer Necropolitic. London: Routledge. Haritaworn, J., Kuntsman, Adi., and Posocco, S., eds. 2013. ‘Murderous Inclusions.’ Special Issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics 15(4): 445–​578. Huber, V., Pietsch, T., and Ritzler, K. 2019. ‘Women’s International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–​1940’. Modern Intellectual History. 18(1): 121–​145.

124   Laura Sjoberg Kinsella, H. M. 2014. ‘Simone Weil: An Introduction’. In Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of American International Relations: A European Discipline in America? ed. F. Roesch, 176–​197. London: Palgrave. Love, H. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McCallum, E. L. and Tuhkanen, M. 2011. ‘Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Mediations’. In Queer Times, Queer Becoming, eds. E. L. McCallum and M. Tuhkanen, 1–​19. Albany: State University of New York Press. Owens, P. 2018. ‘Women and the History of International Thought’. International Studies Quarterly 62(3): 467–​481. Peterson, V. S. 1999. ‘Political Identities/​Nationalism as Heterosexism’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(1): 34–​65. Peterson, V. S. 2013. ‘The Intended and Unintended Queering of States/​Nations’. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 13(1): 57–​68. Peterson, V. S. 2014a. ‘Sex Matters’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 16(3): 389409. Peterson, V. S. 2014b. ‘Family Matters: How Queering the Intimate Queers the International’. International Studies Review 16(4): 604–​608. Puar, J. K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rao, R. 2012. ‘On “Gay Conditionality”: Imperial Power and Queer Liberation’. Kafila, 1 January 2012. Available at https://​kaf​i la.onl​ine/​2012/​01/​01/​on-​gay-​con​diti​onal​ity-​imper​ial-​power-​ and-​queer-​lib​erat​ion-​rahul-​rao/​. Accessed 14 July 2019. Scott, J. W. 1987. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Shepherd, L. J. 2008. Gender, Violence, and Security. London: Zed Books. Smith, N. J. 2020. Capitalism’s Sexual History. New York: Oxford University Press. Tickner, J. A. 1992. Gender in International Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Tickner, J. A. and True, J. 2018. ‘A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women’s Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda’. International Studies Quarterly 62(2): 221–​233. Vitalis, R. 2015. White World Orders, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres. Walzer, M. 1977. Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books. Weber, C. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sex, Sovereignty, and the Will to Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, P. 2013. ‘Attacking Hitler in England: Patriarchy, Class, and War in Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas’. In Classics of International Relations, ed. H. Blidall, 36–​47. London: Routledge.

Chapter 9

P ostc ol onial H i stori e s of Internat i ona l Rel ati ons Zeynep Gulsah Capan Introduction Postcolonial Studies encapsulates a wide range of positions and arguments. Even what it means and refers to is contested as a consequence of how wide-​ranging its influence has been across disciplines, from literature to History (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2003; McLeod 2007). Postcolonial theory has been contested since its ‘beginning’ especially with respect to its naming and its development as a field of study (McClintock 1992; Shohat 1992).1 The first aspect that has been questioned by postcolonial scholars has been its name. For example, Ella Shohat (1992, 103) observes that there is a spatial and temporal issue with ‘naming’ the postcolonial as such. Spatially, the question is ‘where is the postcolonial?’; ‘does the ‘post’ indicate the perspective and location of the ex-​colonized (Algerian), the ex-​ colonizer (French), the ex-​colonial-​settler (Pied Noir), or the displaced hybrid in First World metropoles (Algerians in France)?’ and temporally the question is ‘when does the post-​ colonial begin? Which region is privileged in such a beginning? What are the relationships between these diverse beginnings?’ (1992, 103). The second key aspect being questioned is the very ‘story’ of its development. Edward Said (Said 1983, 1994) is usually identified as one of the founders of the approach whereby ‘postcolonial studies have actually defined itself as an academic discipline through the range of objections, reworkings and counter-​arguments that have been marshalled in such a great variety against Said’s work’ (Young 2016, 383). Two other representatives of colonial discourse analysis follow Said: Homi Bhabha (2012) and Gayatri Spivak (1985, 1999). Young (2016) characterizes these three authors as the ‘Holy Trinity’ of postcolonial studies. Julian Go (2016) speaks instead of two different waves and argues that the ‘first wave’ of postcolonial thought included varied influences such as W. E. B. Du Bois (1935) (sociologist and historian), Aimé Césaire (1972) (poet, playwright and politician), Frantz Fanon (1963) (psychiatrist and political philosopher), and Amilcar Cabral (1974) (politician and theoretician)2 who provided the inspiration for the ‘second wave’

126   Zeynep Gulsah Capan that included postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said (1979), Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992, 2009), and Gayatri Spivak (1988). Go (2016, 8) argues that the second wave was an extension of the first and that it ‘picked up the mantle of epistemic decolonization, adopting the unfinished task of decolonizing knowledge and culture’. Discussions about ‘beginnings’ and ‘development’ aim to underline that any attempt to bring in a clear-​cut definition of what postcolonial theory entails will end up overlooking a myriad of other debates. In the broadest sense, postcolonial approaches interrogate the colonial and imperial past and assess ‘its legacies for the present’ (Huggan 2013, 10). The present chapter will not present a chronological discussion of debates that encapsulate postcolonial history but underline some of the central issues that have been raised and how these issues have been discussed within International Relations (IR). The first section will focus on the way postcolonial history has addressed the questions of (i) how bodies of knowledge are constructed in the study of History and of (ii) who the subject of history is. The second section will look at these same two questions yet in IR.

Interrogating the Colonial Past Fanon states that ‘the settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country’ (Fanon 1963, 40). As this quote reveals, the transformation of the past into history centers on the experiences of the colonizer. In that sense, interrogating history is an important part of postcolonial approaches. The section will therefore focus on two main questions that have been raised within postcolonial approaches with respect to interrogating history: first, how the body of knowledge was constructed and second, who the subject of history is. Edward Said’s monograph Orientalism directly tackled the relationship between power and knowledge. Said underlined how the ‘Orient’ was a ‘European invention’ and defined Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1979, 3). He approached Orientalism as a discourse and body of knowledge that ‘was able to manage—​and even produce—​the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-​Enlightenment period’ (Said 1979, 4). The knowledge of the Orient was constructed and reproduced through a variety of texts-​travelogues in particular-​through the distinction between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘Us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘Them’) (Said 1979, 45). The study of the Orient and these distinctions were not only subjective but also depended on a narrative of the superiority of the West. In the early 1980s, in parallel to the discussions about Orientalism, a collective called Subaltern Studies was started by historian Ranajit Guha and eight other scholars based in various institutions across India, the UK, and Australia. The collective questioned the various historiographical traditions of writing about Indian independence.3 Guha argued that: In all writings of this kind [i.e., elitist historiography] the parameters of Indian politics are assumed to be or enunciated as those of the institutions introduced by the British for the government of the country . . . . [Elitist historians] can do no more than equate politics with

Postcolonial Histories of IR    127 the aggression of activities and ideas of those who were directly involved in operating these institutions, that is, the colonial rulers and their eleves—​the dominant groups in native society. (Guha 1984, 3–​4)

The Cambridge school of historiography of the British empire largely presented a positive account of the British empire (Seal 1968, Gallagher, Gordon and Seal 1973). The Cambridge school narrated British colonialism in a positive manner and credited colonialism ‘for bringing to the subcontinent political unity, modern educational institutions, modern industries, modern nationalism, a rule of law’ (Chakrabarty 2000:11). The narrative of the Cambridge school crediting colonialism for modernity was however challenged by the so-​called ‘nationalist narrative’ (Chandra 1979) which argued that modernity and political unity ‘were not so much British gifts to India as fruits of struggles undertaken by the Indians themselves’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 11–​12). The colonialist narratives told the story of the independence through the perspective of ‘British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture’, whereas the nationalist narratives credited the ‘Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas’ (Guha 1982a, 1). Guha criticized both these bodies of literatures for not acknowledging ‘the contributions made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism’ (1982a, 3). He emphasized the ‘people’, and the subaltern classes in particular, as an ‘autonomous domain’ which could ‘be traced back to pre-​colonial times, but it was by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded’ (Guha 1982a, 4). Subaltern politics was differentiated through two features. Firstly, Guha claimed that mobilizations happened vertically in elite politics and horizontally in subaltern politics. As such, subaltern politics relied on ‘the traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class associations depending on the level of the consciousness of the people involved’ (Guha 1982a, 4). The second feature was the ‘exploitation to which the subaltern classes were subjected in varying degrees’ (Guha 1982a, 5). The Subaltern series focused predominantly on peasant consciousness throughout the different volumes and different authors of the collective (Guha 1982b, 1983a, 1983b, 1984). Guha’s work focused on addressing the relationship between knowledge and power and how bodies of knowledge had been constructed to erase given subjects from the dominant narrative. This was done through the introduction of the category of the subaltern as the subject of history which extended the definition of the political. As Chakrabarty (2000, 16) points out, peasant revolts that ‘were organized along the axes of kinship, religion, cast’ were narrated as ‘backwards consciousness’. Guha explains this through contrasting how peasant revolts were explained by Eric Hobsbawm (1978, 2) who characterized them as ‘pre-​ political’ and Anil Seal (1968, 1) who argued that peasant revolts had no ‘specific content’. In contrast, Guha extended this definition of the political by approaching the peasant as ‘real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of that modernity that colonial rule gave rise to in India’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 17). As important as these contributions were with respect to how to include the subaltern in the writing of history there was very little exploration into the constitution of the subject which was criticized specifically through discussions underlining the absence of women from the analysis (Arnold 1984; Mani 1987; O’Hanlon 1988). Feminist historian Lata Mani (1987, 153) analyses the abolition of sati (a historical practice during which the widow sacrifices herself) in 18294 in India. She underlines that the debate about the abolition of

128   Zeynep Gulsah Capan sati was for the British about the civilizing mission, and for the Indian elite actually about the protection of their status. This meant that somehow, women as a subject of history disappeared since their motivations, reasons and desires were ignored and/​or silenced in the narrative of the abolition of the sati. As such, the abolition of sati was told not as a story about women but rather became ‘the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated’ (Mani 1987, 153). Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 102) discussion in her article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ further problematizes the subject position and underlines how ‘between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-​constitution and object-​formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the “third-​world woman” caught between tradition and modernization’. In that sense, it is not access to further ‘archives’ that will necessarily ‘solve’ the issue of retrieving the subject since within the colonial discourse the subaltern has no enunciatory position. This should not be taken to mean that the subaltern cannot speak but more specifically that the subaltern cannot speak within the available discursive constructs. The issue, then, is not the availability of archives but rather how the notion of archives of knowledge has been constructed by a Eurocentric system of knowledge. This approach to problematizing colonial power started off what is generally termed as ‘colonial discourse analysis’. Colonial discourse analysis has focused on two streams. The first stream looks at the ‘agency’ of the colonized and the retrieval of the subject. The second stream consists of the critique of the discipline of History itself. These two streams have been interrelated in the sense that it was the construction of the body of knowledge (in this case the discipline of History) that defined the very limits of the discourse through which the ‘subject’ could not enunciate its own agency. As a consequence, several works have focused on exploring ways to actually retrieve the subject (Bhabha 2012). Because the ‘objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origins, in order to justify conquest and establish systems of administration and instruction’, the colonized is constructed as a radical other (Bhabha 2012, 70). Despite such a radical otherness, Homi K. Bhabha argues that the colonized subject is always ambivalent, navigating between similarity and difference, and constructed not only as the radical other but also as someone ought to be brought into Western understanding. As such, Bhabha sees the ambivalence of being ‘almost the same but not quite’ as a threat to colonial power and as part of anti-​colonial resistance precisely because it destabilized the binary between similarity and difference (Bhabha 2012, 89). Bhabha’s exploration into ambivalence has opened a path to the exploration of the agency of the subject. In parallel, other works have focused on History as a discipline, attempting to work through how to write histories that are not part of a singular unique History (Nandy 1995; Chakrabarty 2009). According to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 6–​7), historicism is defined as ‘the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development’ which ‘enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century’ as it was ‘one important form that the ideology of progress or “development” took from the nineteenth century on’. It was historicism that made ‘modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it’ and established historical time ‘as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-​West’ (Chakrabarty 2009, 7). This understanding of historical appeared clearly in those accounts that revealed ‘completely internalist histories of Europe in which Europe was described as the site of first

Postcolonial Histories of IR    129 occurrence of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment’ (Chakrabarty 2009, 7). Focuses on history, Chakrabarty writes: insofar as the academic discourse of history—​that is, “history” as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—​is concerned, “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian”, “Chinese”, “Kenyan”, and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe”. In this sense, “Indian” history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of history. (Chakrabarty 2009, 27)

Chakrabarty argues that only Europe is theoretically knowable (that is, at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking); all other histories are then matters of ‘empirical research’ (Chakrabarty 2009, 29). As this section has demonstrated, postcolonial approaches have interrogated two main issues with respect to history and the colonial past. The first issue relates to the constitution of a body of knowledge-​History-​and how such a construction has worked to silence and omit specific events, developments and subjects from dominant narratives. The second aspect concerns who the subject of history is and how should history include colonial subjects into its historical narratives. Following from this, the next section looks at how these questions have been treated within IR.

Interrogating IR This section will discuss the two main issues postcolonial approaches focus on and elaborate upon how these have been discussed within the field of IR. The first issue relates the body of knowledge constructed as the field of IR. The second relates to who the subject is within the history of the international and what is the agency given to postcolonial subjects. The first issue raised by postcolonial thought and history that will be discussed in this section is the questioning of the body of knowledge constructed as IR. IR as an academic field has for a long time been dominated by a Eurocentric system of knowledge which postcolonial approaches have regularly called into question (Amin 1989; Wallerstein 1997; Hobson 2012; Araújo and Maeso 2015; Çapan 2016). Eurocentrism is a system of knowledge that works through the establishment and reproduction of spatio-​temporal hierarchies. These hierarchies are premised upon a spatial division between ‘Europe’/​’West’ and ‘non-​ Europe’/​’non-​West’. This spatial division is reinforced through a temporal hierarchy that puts Europe ahead of other spaces. As a consequence, any event and/​or development that happens within the space separated as ‘Europe’ is considered to have happened firstly there and then as being exported outwards. A series of binaries become further assigned through these spatio-​temporal hierarchies such as modern/​non-​modern, developed/​underdeveloped, civilized/​uncivilized. These spatio-​temporal hierarchies work in narrating the making of the international in a specific manner whereby one part of the binary is assigned to the West (modern, civilized) and the other part of the binary is assigned to the non-​West (traditional, uncivilized). Within this system of knowledge becoming modern means moving from one side of the binary into the other (Çapan 2017a, 2017b).

130   Zeynep Gulsah Capan The questions raised by postcolonial historians and their critique of the Eurocentric system of knowledge have been discussed within the field of IR in two main ways. Firstly, this has happened through the focus on the sociological makeup of the discipline and how the history of the discipline has been narrated. The second set of discussions has revolved around questioning who the subject of history is and how to ‘provincialize Europe’ in narratives of the making of the international. The first discussion has focused on ‘who’ has been included in the discipline and whose voices have been heard, underlining that the ‘non-​West’ has been absent from the constitution of IR (Waever 1998; Tickner and Wæver 2009; Tickner and Blaney 2013). This means that the knowledge produced by the discipline and its sociological makeup was and has been ethnocentric and Eurocentric (Bilgin 2016). These bodies of research have taken multiple forms including discussions of the ‘non-​Western’and the ‘post-​ Western’ decentering and decolonizing of IR (Chen 2010; Shilliam 2010; Sabaratnam 2011; Shimizu 2015; Çapan 2017a). They have also relevant research has also problematized who is included and who is excluded in the field, who is published and cited and how syllabuses are organized (Kristensen 2012, 2018; Hagmann and Biersteker 2014; Wemheuer-​Vogelaar, Bell, Navarrete Morales, and Tierney 2016). These discussions have further focused on different ways in which the body of knowledge constructed as IR can be challenged and become more inclusive. The second aspect of the discussion with respect to the sociological makeup of the discipline has focused on the history of the discipline furthering the works that had challenged the validity of the so-​called ‘three debates’5 structure through which IR had been narrated (Wilson 1998; Ashworth 2002; Thies 2002; Quirk and Vigneswaran 2005). The focus has been on excavating ideas, concepts, and theories that had been silenced as the discipline developed (Vitalis 2000, 2010; Henderson 2013, 2017). For instance, Vitalis’ (2015) work underlines how disciplinary histories silence discussions around race and empire that have nonetheless been central to the making of the international . For instance, the Howard school of IR (1920s-​1950s) included scholars such as Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazer and aimed at developing a critique of ‘the role racism played in sustaining imperialism’ (Vitalis 2015, 12). An example of how race and empire were central to international relations can be seen from how the journal Foreign Affairs used to be called Journal of Race/​ Development/​International Relations in the 1910s. However, ensuing disciplinary histories have largely left out these discussions. Vitalis’ (2015) book then demonstrates how scholarship has ignored, left out and made invisible a variety of archives of knowledge. The second issue discussed by postcolonial authors in IR relates to who the subject is within the History of the international. Efforts in interrogating the nature of history have not only been influenced by postcolonial history but also by global history, connected histories, and historical sociology (Subrahmanyam 1997, 2005; Bhambra 2007; Buzan and Lawson 2015; Osterhammel 2015; Conrad 2016; Go and Lawson 2017). As with postcolonial history, the focus of the discussion has been on the notion of who the subject is within the history of the international and the main way in which IR scholars have discussed the issue of agency of the ‘non-​West’ is through works that focus on entangled histories and connectivities (Buzan and Lawson 2015). Discussions about entangled histories interrogate the construction of ‘Europe’ as a separate space where events happened in isolation from and before other spaces. As a consequence, the literature on entanglements and connectivities attempts to expand accounts spatially by underlining that events did not happen in isolation in Europe but in connection with the other spaces (Bhambra 2007; Buzan and Lawson 2015). Who the actors with agency are then becomes an important part of the discussion as with postcolonial

Postcolonial Histories of IR    131 history, underlining different negotiations, resistances and connections. An example of these discussions is present in Siba Grovogui’s (1996, 2001, 2002, 2006b, 2006a) and Robbie Shilliam’s (2006, 2008, 2013, 2014, 2017) respective works. Both interrogate categories that have been naturalized in IR such as sovereignty and the international system, demonstrating the spatio-​temporal hierarchies inherent to these concepts. Siba Grovogui interrogates who the subject is, by questioning narratives of international order that focus exclusively on the West as the agent through which sovereignty and subjecthood were imagined. Grovogui underlines how IR is ‘founded upon incomplete archives and/​or dubious recollections of international events’ (2006a, 6). As such, the West, remains the main subject of the story. It is Western actors’ interests, worries, fears that become narrated as universal issues. Grovogui interrogates how the West remains the main subject of history through a critique of historicism drawn from historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thought. He argues that ‘the ideological device of time that Europe and then the West elaborated a typology of a civilizational time according to which humanity and human development were cast into a single continuum of time’ which assumed a ‘common human beginning’ (Grovogui 2006a, 54). Grovogui underlines how ‘the colonized developed plausible doctrines and visions of state sovereignty and global interactions, of moral agency and subjectivity, and of the collective good that differed greatly from Western ones’ (Grovogui 2006a, 63). The author does this by bringing forward the stories of évolués6 such as Félix Eboué, Gabriel d’Arboussier, and Ouezzin Coulibaly. The stories of the évolués demonstrate that their ‘doctrines and visions were constitutive of a distinct ‘language’ of international relations’ (Grovogui 2006a, 58). This account underlines the complicated nature of the French empire which by the end of World War Two ‘included the métropole or French state, its overseas departments and territories, protectorates, associated states, colonies and communes’ that meant ‘concurrent hierarchies of subjectivity (identity), institutions (values), and economies (interests)’ (Grovogui 2006a, 88). These discussions open the possibility to refocus the story of international order and underline that there were different imaginings and ‘languages’ at play. A second remarkable example comes from Robbie Shilliam’s book The Black Pacific which directly engages with Spivak’s (1988) question ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. In it, Shilliam outlines the questions Spivak presents with respect to whether it was ‘possible to recover the political consciousness of the subaltern as knowledge untainted by the exercise of power?’ (Shilliam 2015, 5). He underlines that one of the issues with the Subaltern Studies project is its continued recentering of the colonial gaze whereby the narratives continue to refer back to Europe and end up focusing not on decolonizing knowledge but become instead ‘another faculty through which to deconstruct knowledge of the Western self ’ (Shilliam 2015, 6). Shilliam’s aim is to break through the colonial gaze and to ‘redeem the possibilities of anti-​colonial solidarity between colonized and (post)colonized peoples on terms other than those laid out by colonial science’ (Shilliam 2015, 11). He does this by building the notion of ‘deep relation’—​a ‘relationality that exists underneath the wounds of coloniality’ (Shilliam 2015, 13). What the colonial gaze does is to subordinate everyone to form a relation with the colonial space. In this formulation the ‘colonized’ ‘could never relate to each other’ because ‘as non-​moderns, they do not possess the competency to interrelate; they are merely ‘unreflexive agents, practicing the old mystic arts of magic and trickery’. In order to be accepted as being able to relate ‘they would have to look to a third force—​a modernizing force of self-​reflexivity—​that could render the meaning of their actions on their behalf ’

132   Zeynep Gulsah Capan (Shilliam 2015, 20). Thus, Shilliam argues that the answer to the question as to whether or not the subaltern can speak is not to refer back to the colonial gaze but, instead, to underline other knowledges that have not been categorized as such because of the way in which dominant understandings have been constructed.

Conclusion The concerns of postcolonial history are wide-​ranging, and it is hard to present a summary that can claim to be comprehensive. This chapter has therefore aimed to underline the main issues raised by postcolonial history and has discussed how IR has addressed them. The first section presented the way in which postcolonial history addressed two key issues. The first one concerns how the construction of a body of knowledge (namely, History) has worked to delineate, hierarchize and organize knowledge in ways that have silenced the colonial past. The second relates to who the subject of history is and who is presented by scholarship as having relevant agency. The second section of the chapter then focused on how the two issues brought up within postcolonial history have been treated in IR. In IR, extant postcolonial scholarship has demonstrated that the archives of knowledge which initially constituted the discipline did not draw from all the sources available equally, as discussed through the examples of Grovogui’s and Shilliam’s works. As this overview has demonstrated, there is a continuing discussion within the field of IR that concentrates on how bodies of knowledge are constructed and who the subject of history is. These discussions have also been important in interrogating the teleological narratives of modernity that have been central to the social sciences in general and IR specifically. One aspect of the postcolonial critique that does not receive sufficient attention is the problematization of ‘history’ itself (Bell 2001; Vaughan-​Williams 2005; Çapan 2016, 2020). As IR has engaged with the themes and issues raised by postcolonial history, it has in that process predominantly taken ‘History’ as an unproblematic discipline even though problematization of history was one of the central aspects of the critique put forward by postcolonial approaches. This, then, remains one of the avenues that within IR requires further engagement.

Notes 1. Postcolonial Studies encompasses a wide array of work, and the following discussion can in no way claim to be an exhaustive consideration. For further details on postcolonial studies see : Gandhi (1998); Go (2016); Young (2016). 2. For further details on the thoughts of these and other anti-​colonial theorists see Rabaka (2009, 2015). 3. Even though the ‘origins’ of Subaltern Studies is traced back to discussions about Indian historiography, Subaltern Studies did travel into different contexts such as Latin America and Africa with varying degrees of success (Beverley (1994); Cooper (1994); Mallon (1994); Saldívar-​Hull and Guha (2001); Lee (2005)). 4. For further discussions on the context of the events that led to the abolishing of Sati see Mani (1987).

Postcolonial Histories of IR    133 5. The debates are usually narrated as being: the realist-​utopian debate, the traditionalist-​ behaviouralist debate and the inter-​paradigm debate. In some narratives the third debate is called the rationalist-​reflectivist debate. For more on these three debates see: Waever (1996). 6. Évolués refers to individuals who were seen within specific territories by the French colonial empire as supposedly assimilated. They were usually involved in the colonial administration in some capacity.

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chapter 10

International Re l at i ons Theory and th e Prac t i c e of In ternationa l H i story Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay Introduction In recent years the field of International Relations (IR) has been enriched by an ‘historical turn’ as scholars have directed their attention to the origins of the discipline. During the same period a number of scholars of International History (IH) have borrowed concepts from IR theory in order to provide new perspectives on subjects such as great power relations in the era of the French Revolution or the origins of the First World War. These trends, when combined with the fact that historians have contributed to the scholarship on origins and evolution of IR, prompted Nicolas Guilhot, a prominent participant in IR’s historical turn, to suggest that we are witnessing a new and exciting convergence of research in these two fields (Guilhot 2019, 23). The essay that follows will consider aspects of the relationship between IH and IR from the late nineteenth century to the present. It will argue that this relationship was characterized by remarkable convergence in its early stages but growing divergence after 1945 as IR evolved into a distinct and self-​confident discipline. Many of the reasons for this divergence can be understood in terms of this Handbook’s two framing themes: modernity and granularity. If granularity is a question of scope and scale, scholars of IH tend to focus on the particular. They tend to offer what IR scholars would consider to be case studies. Similarly, if modernity concerns the origins and nature of the international system, IR scholars appear more comfortable using a broad lens than do historians—​although the recent surge in global history might change things. At the same time, the divergence is not evenly sided. Whereas IR scholars continue to use the work of IH scholars, principally as sources, historians of international relations, with rare but revealing exceptions, tend not to incorporate the work of IR scholars. In reality, the dominant practices in History and IR pose formidable obstacles to future convergence. Nicolas Guilhot’s optimism regarding the prospects for engagement and

138    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay synergy between two disciplines is appealing. But enduring challenges remain to systematic inter-​disciplinary collaboration.

Diplomatic History and IR Theory before 1914 The tradition of blending historical analysis with theoretical insights on the nature of relations between states can be traced back as least as far as Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. On the eve of the First World War, one of the defining characteristics of field of international studies remained the lack of disciplinary boundaries between ‘historical’ and other approaches. ‘Political Science’ was in its infancy and the ‘academic’ study of international relations was dominated by historians and international lawyers. Although ‘international history’ was not yet a defined field of research, this was because the vast majority of historical writing before 1914 focused on war, high politics, and diplomacy. In other words, the practice of history was dominated by the study of international relations (Watt 1985). This situation reflected, in large part, the towering influence of historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Albert Sorel on the theory and practice of foreign policy and international politics (Badel 2020, 7–​25). Ranke is most often associated with his aspiration to present that past ‘as it actually was’ [wie es eigentlich gewesen]. But his claim concerning the ‘primacy of foreign policy’ [Primat der Außenpolitik] was just as influential. Ranke asserted that the nature of international relations ‘requires the State to mobilize all its inner resources for the goal of self-​preservation’. This, he asserted, was the ‘supreme law’ of politics (Ranke 1950, 171–​172). German ruling elites embraced Ranke’s insight as a ‘biological statement of fact’ while leading historians took it upon themselves to ‘hammer the notion of the “primacy of foreign policy” into every German brain’ (Simms 2003, 275–​276). Sorel, meanwhile, was in many ways a forerunner of twentieth-​century classical realists. He argued that the foreign policies of nations are determined by ‘national traditions’ (Sorel 1886, 6–​7). But he tempered this cultural determinism with an appeal to realism. Sorel asserted that national traditions were more often than not political myths and, as such, should not be allowed to distort a clear-​eyed calculation of interests. ‘States’ he asserted, had ‘no other judge than themselves and no other laws than their interests’ (Sorel and Funck-​Brentano 1877, 16–​19). Sorel also identified a ‘balance of interests’ that conditioned the behaviour of states in the international system. ‘The source of the excesses of this system also constitutes its moderating force . . . [t]‌o the dangerous excesses of national ambitions there is an ineluctable impediment: the interests of other states’ (Sorel 1886, 31, 33–​4; Sorel and Funck-​Brentano 1877, 18–​19). British historian John Robert Seeley described history as a ‘school of statesmanship’. This approach, Seeley argued, must provide the basis for a ‘new political science’ to instruct political leaders in their management of Britain’s imperial and international interests (Seeley 1870, 299, 309; Seeley 1896). Other nineteenth-​century historians focused on strategy and geo-​politics. John Knox Laughton, Julian Corbett, and Alfred Thayer Mahan explored the role of naval power in geo-​politics (Lambert 1998; Corbett 1911). Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History was enormously influential in shaping strategic thought during the

IR Theory   139 decades before 1914 (Mahan 1890). The importance these thinkers attributed to command of the sea was challenged, in turn, by Halford Mackinder’s concepts of ‘heartlands’ and ‘pivot areas’ in the course of world history. All of these works were characterized by their shared assumption that world politics are governed by a logic of competition for various sources of power (Mackinder 1904; Hughes and Heley 2015; Kennedy 1984; Ashworth 2013). In sum, in the nineteenth century there was little meaningful distinction between historical analysis and theorizing about international politics. Nor were historians alone in generating theoretical insights into international politics. Liberal theories of peace were at the heart of the transnational movement to eradicate war from the 1840s onward. Early ‘peace theorists’ advocated free trade to promote economic and therefore political interdependence (Bariéty and Fleury 1987; Ceadal 1996; Cooper 1991). From the mid-​1860s onward international law displaced political economy as the most popular area of peace research and activism. Transnational campaigns for compulsory arbitration as a means of ‘pacifying’ and thus ‘civilizing’ nation-​states culminated in two international peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 (Koskenniemi 2001; Reid 2004; Clark 2007; Sluga 2013). Historians were notably absent from this liberal theorizing on peace. Nor were they at the forefront of trans-​Atlantic advocacy of an international system dominated by an Anglo-​ American imperial condominium. Advocates of this essentially racist approach to future international order included the pundit H. G. Wells, colonial official Lionel Curtis, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, colonialists Cecil Rhodes, philosopher Joseph Chamberlain, and pundit William James and, for a time at least, economist and social theorist J. A. Hobson. In this trans-​Atlantic vision, a white-​dominated international order would be imposed by the military, naval and economic power of the ‘English-​speaking peoples’ (Bell 2016, 182–​209). Historians would play a greater role in refashioning ideas of an ‘Anglo-​Saxon’ global order during and after the First World War. Several would eventually become leading figures in the new discipline of International Relations.

The Impact of the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference The unprecedented slaughter and devastation caused by the First World War discredited pre-​war diplomatic practices among a large cross-​section of both elite and popular opinion. It also created political space for alternative approaches to international order to flourish. Discourses of international governance and institution-​building that had been on the margins before 1914 gained a much wider and more receptive audience. As the prominent French internationalist Antoine Pillet observed, the experience of total war had ‘transported into the political arena pacifist ideas that had long been confined to the domain of pure speculation’ (Pillet 1919, 18–​19). Not coincidentally, the war years witnessed a tremendous upsurge in writing about world politics. For the first time the international system was widely treated as a discrete object of study. This new literature appeared at the same time as a host of new organizations devoted to reforming the practice of international politics and lobbying for the creation of a ‘League’ or ‘Society’ of nations in Britain, France, and the United States. In France, historians Ernest

140    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay Lavisse and Charles Seignobos were prominent supporters of an international organization (Mouton 1976). Among the founders of the British ‘Council for the Study of International Relations’ (created in 1915) were historians R. W. Seton-​Watson and Arthur James Grant. Grant edited what is widely regarded as the first ‘IR’ textbook: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Grant et al. 1916; Acharya and Buzan 2019, 33–​66; Stöckmann 2022, 27–​7 1). A core focus of this work, along with hundreds of other wartime books, pamphlets, and articles that appeared during the war, was the urgent need to reform the practice of international politics to achieve ‘the basis of a durable peace’ (Butler 1918). If the First World War inspired a wave of scholarly reflection on the nature of IR, the Paris Peace Conference provided an opportunity for this new thinking to contribute materially to the creation of a new world order. Paris in the first six months of 1919 was the site of an unprecedented concentration of expertise on international politics. Many of the historians, political scientists and geographers who would go on to establish the discipline of IR were members of national delegations at the Peace Conference. Others attended to lobby on behalf of a kaleidoscope of civil society organizations from advocates of women’s rights and democratic control of foreign relations to anti-​colonial movements and supporters of various national movements (Manela 2007; Siegel 2020; Clark 2007, 83–​129). A lesser-​known outcome of the Peace Conference was the creation of transnational networks of British and American academics and activists whose members would go on to constitute the discipline of IR. The key moment in this process was a meeting of British, Dominion, and American ‘international experts’ at the Hôtel Majestic on 30 May 1919, the chief result of which was the creation of what would eventually become the US Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) (Dockrill 1980). The meeting was attended by a roll call of the era’s most influential American and British writers and practitioners. Internationalist principles provided the foundations for discussion: It was recognised by all thoughtful men that in future the foreign policy of each state ought not to be guided by a calculation of its own individual interest. National policy ought to be shaped by a conception of the interest of society at large; for it was in the advancement of that universal interest that the particular interest of the several nations would also be found. (FO 608/​152, 30 May 1919)

Those present agreed on the necessity, as the British delegate Harold Temperley put it, of ‘creating an opinion on international affairs at once charitable, sane and well-​informed’ (Temperley 1920, v). Lionel Curtis, on whose initiative the meeting had been called, outlined the future of international studies as an Anglo-​American enterprise: [t]‌he future moulding of those settlements would depend upon how far public opinion in these countries would be right or wrong. Right public opinion was mainly produced by a small number of people in real contact with the facts who had thought out the issues involved . . . A beginning might be made if an institute of international affairs created by the two great commonwealths which had the advantage of a common tongue. (FO 608/​152, 30 May 1919)

The meeting at the Hôtel Majestic was an important moment in the emergence of IR as distinct area of study. Three aspects of this meeting are particularly important. Firstly, the postwar study of IR was conceived as an Anglo-​American undertaking. Second, there were important continuities (including Curtis himself) between the agenda of the new institute

IR Theory   141 and earlier projects for Anglo-​American imperium. The assumption was that research and writing about international politics on both sides of the Atlantic would be dominated by white male enthusiasts for empire. This fact helps explain the early entanglement of IR with British colonial administration (Vitalis 2015). The aim was not to speak ‘truth unto power’, but instead to disseminate official conceptions to the wider public. The legitimacy of Empire was not to be called into question. Third, and most importantly for this essay, there were few if any distinctions between historical and other methods of enquiry during this early stage of ‘IR’. But this state of affairs did not last.

Confluence and Divergence between the World Wars After 1919 the agendas and priorities academics and activists for international reform began to diverge. The postwar emergence of ‘International Politics’ and ‘International History’ as distinct fields of research and teaching was both a product and an accelerator of this process. While historical and ‘IR’ approaches retained much in common, differences in aims and focus emerged that would in the long-​term prove decisive in creating and cementing the frontier between the two disciplines. Over the past three decades important work on liberal ‘thinkers of the interwar crisis’ has done much to demolish the foundation myth that this period was characterized by a seminal debate between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’. It has done so not least by illuminating the extent to which considerations of power remained central to the majority of leading figures in the early years of liberal IR. This reflected the continued prominence of imperial and racial understandings within this liberal elite (Pemberton 2020, 1–​70; Schmidt 2012; Bell 2005; Jerónimo 2018). Efforts to develop and illustrate generalizable theories were rare (Wilson 2012). Several of the leading liberal voices in the establishment of IR were ancient historians whose interests had shifted to more contemporary issues. Most prominent among these were Gilbert Murray, F. Melian Stawell, Alfred Zimmern, and Arnold Toynbee (Wilson 1995). The creation of the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth marked the beginning of a slow but steady bureaucratic and disciplinary divergence between History and IR. The Wilson chair, first occupied by Zimmern in 1919, was endowed by passionate internationalist David Davies to promote ‘the systematic study of international political relations with particular emphasis on the promotion of peace’ (Porter 1989). Other major chairs in IR were created at the London School of Economics (LSE) (1923) and Oxford (1930) (Long 1995). Several years later another committed internationalist, Sir Daniel Stevenson, agreed to finance a hybrid appointment between Chatham House and the LSE. Arnold Toynbee became the first Stevenson Professor of International History in 1927. Once again, normative aspirations were attached to the chair from the outset (Stevenson 2014, 9–​10). The aim was to ensure that IH was ‘taught impartially, so far as that is possible’ to counteract the prevailing tendency to ‘teach history only from the point of view of one country’ (Stevenson 2014, 9). The themes of Toynbee’s courses in fact anticipated the twenty-​first century fields of global history and security studies and included ‘The Pacific as a focus of international relations’ and ‘Emigration and immigration since the war of 1914–​1918’ (Stevenson 2014, 9, 10–​11). Toynbee’s interests, along with the work of Lillian Knowles and Merze Tate, were emblematic of the permeable frontier between history and IR in the era of the two world wars.

142    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay But there were other forces at work. Academic departments emerged around the new chairs in IR. Perhaps inevitably, members of the new discipline of IR deployed strategies of distinction to bolster its legitimacy within universities (Bourdieu 1990, 36–​7 1). This meant establishing clear boundaries with the cognate discipline of History. In his inaugural lecture as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford, for example, Zimmern stressed IR’s unique focus on contemporary world politics and the operation of the international system. Historical approaches, he argued, could not bring to bear the necessary focus and precision on current affairs (Zimmern 1931, 10). Study of world politics, in other words, should be left to practitioners of the new discipline of IR. More prosaic forms of demarcation took place at the LSE. Director William Beveridge intervened to decree that international politics should be taught ‘analytically’ while the international history should be more ‘historical’ (Stevenson 2014, 6; Hall 2005, 488 n. 13). This confused and misleading understanding the relationship between the two subjects has proved frustratingly durable. Two influential historians returned their focus to the past but retained a commitment to internationalist principles acquired during the First World War. Harold Temperley and Charles Webster, both veterans of the war and the peace conference, played important roles in establishing international history as a distinct field of study. Both were liberals and committed internationalists. Temperley aimed to ‘turn the serious attention of our young men in the direction of International Politics and the League of Nations’. His lectures were highly critical of the balance of power. What was needed, he argued, was a system where states were obliged to act in the common interest (Temperley 2014, 28–​29). In his research, however, Temperley showed little interest in treating the international system itself as an object of study. He insisted that the core practice of the international historian was to reconstruct policy-​making processes by interrogating documentary evidence from more than one national archive (Stevenson 2014, 10). And he was highly sceptical of any attempt to use the past as a guide to contemporary politics (a scepticism that influenced his student Herbert Butterfield). (Fair 1992, 96–​97). Charles Webster was of a different cast of mind and much more inclined to derive theoretical insights from historical research. Webster returned from the war a ‘proselytizing internationalist’ (Stevenson 2014, 10). He was convinced of the transformative character of the Great War because it had made ‘thinkers in all countries turn their minds . . . [towards efforts] . . . to create new machinery for international co-​operation’ (Webster 1933, 99–​100). Webster remained consistently reluctant to recognize the emerging disciplinary boundary between IH and IR: For a long period, law was the only subject to which the adjective international was applied in our universities. More recently it has been prefixed to the words politics and relations to indicate the new developments in political science. It is surely not inappropriate that similar emphasis should be given to the study of history, in which both law and politics are deeply rooted. (Webster 1933, 99–​100)

An interest in theorizing is evident in Webster’s study of the Congress of Vienna, which advanced a conception of a stable international system maintained by institutionalized power politics. This insight, interestingly, shaped Webster’s important contributions to the design of both the Atlantic Charter and the future United Nations made during the Second World War (Webster 1961; Reynolds and Hughes, E. J. 1976; Hall 2005). Webster’s rejection of disciplinary boundaries, along with his commitment to internationalism, were hallmarks of this early period in the history of international studies. Both attitudes would become

IR Theory   143 increasingly rare, however, as the practice of international history became politicized as it turned increasingly toward ‘disaster studies’.

The ‘War Guilt Question’ and the Practice of International History Joe Maiolo has observed recently that ‘International History was born of the search for the causes of the [Great] war’ (Maiolo 2018, 577). While the work of Temperley and Webster (among others) suggests this is overstated, Maiolo is right to underline the role of preoccupation with the origins of 1914 in shaping research practices. This study of war origins, with its emphasis on the responsibility of various national leaders, dominated the field from the 1960s. Its effect was to shift the focus of analysis away from the nature and functioning of the international system towards the role and responsibilities of national decision-​makers. The result was the emergence of a national paradigm for understanding the origins of war that ran counter to a focus on the international system as a whole that characterized the emerging discipline of IR. The ‘war guilt’ question polarized scholarly opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Refuting the charge of responsibility for the war became a major aim of German foreign policy, understood as the necessary first step towards revising the territorial and financial terms of the Versailles Diktat. The result was a state-​led campaign of ‘pre-​emptive historiography’ aimed at shaping the historical literature on the origins of Great War both inside and outside Germany (Hahn 1985, 47). A well-​funded ‘War Guilt Section’ [Kriegsschuldreferat] was created within the German foreign ministry to lead this effort. Strategies employed included the early publication of official documents, massive dissemination of propaganda, suppression of all scholarship that contravened the official line, the provision of generous financial support to sympathetic accounts of the coming of the war, and strict control over the publication of memoirs by former decision-​makers (Herwig 1996). One important result of German campaign of ‘pre-​emptive historiography’ was to stimulate international responses. Britain, France, Austria-​Hungary, Russia and the US all commissioned their own documentary collections, largely in response to the German series (Wilson 1996). Historians such as Pierre Renouvin in France, G. P. Gooch in Britain, and Sidney Fay, William Langer, and Bernadotte Schmitt in the US, all rose to national and international prominence by intervening in the debate over the origins of the Great War (Wilson 1996; Barros and Guelton 2006). Another consequence of the politicized character of this debate was a growing focus on unit-​level policy processes and document-​rich analysis of little interest to most practitioners of IR. A significant gulf had opened up between IH and IR that would only continue to widen as IR became a more self-​confident discipline in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Growing Divergence after 1945 The divergence between IH and IR widened very considerably after 1945 as IR developed into a more self-​confident discipline with distinct methodological approaches. The search

144    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay for a unifying theory of international relations was probably the most important source of divergence. This search was at the heart of efforts to define IR as a distinct discipline by a group of scholars working in the 1950s under the aegis of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Foundation. Although an overarching theory proved elusive at the time (as it does now), the attachment to theorizing persisted (Schmidt 2020; McCourt 2020). Theoretical reflection in IR, moreover, has focused on the international system. Writing in 1977, Stanley Hoffmann identified the international system as the central concept for IR, functioning as ‘a way of ordering data, a construct for describing both the way in which the parts relate, and the way in which patterns of interaction emerge’ (Hoffmann 1977, 51; Jervis 1997). Many of the core debates structuring mainstream IR theory continue to revolve around the origins, nature and effects of the international system. Along with system and theory came an emphasis on methodology. Early on, IR defined itself by its methodological rigour, often designated as the ‘behavioural turn’ and the quest to make political science more scientific. For Hoffmann, the question was not whether IR was a social science but whether it was a US one (Hoffmann 1977). Over the years, the methods have multiplied to include quantitative analysis, formal modelling and process-​tracing. These approaches all share an insistence on research design, on viewing scholarship as an experiment in which phenomena must be sharply demarcated, dependent and independent variables clearly distinguished and the ‘logic of inference’ placed in the service of discovering regularities and even laws of state behaviour. Another fundamental divergence is the use of history in IR scholarship. With few exceptions, IR scholars consider history or, more accurately, historical scholarship as a source—​as ‘raw material’ in Ken Booth’s words (Booth 2019, 362). In practice, this means choosing studies on the basis of immediate usefulness in order, as George Lawson writes, ‘to code findings, mine data or as a source of post factum explanations’ (Lawson 2012, 205). This practice differs notably from how historians understand historiography: as an evolving debate between scholars on particular questions in which new evidence, perspectives and interpretations are offered and in which the initial question itself often changes. For historians, a work of scholarship needs to be evaluated in light of its place in an ongoing debate. Even IR scholars sensitive to the importance of historiography in historical practice tend to understand it in ontological terms—​the ‘what is history’ question (Lawson 2012). This persistent difference between practice in IR and IH is neither trivial nor easily bridged. Ian Lustick has cogently criticized the reluctance of political scientists among others to acknowledge that ‘monographic studies of historical episodes contain theoretical claims and thus cannot be used unselfconsciously without selection bias’. Significantly, Lustick admitted that he had no ready solution to the ‘problem of theoretically weighted and contradictory historiography’, concluding instead with an appeal for greater sensitivity on the part of political scientists (Lustick 1996, 609–​610). One measure of the problem is the tendency of IR scholars to refer to ‘history’ and not historical scholarship, as if the first could be understood independently of the latter. Viewed in this light, optimism for future convergence between IR and IH seems overstated. While IR after 1945 pursued its scientific turn, IH (or diplomatic history as it was still frequently called) continued to develop along interwar lines. Scholars studied great power politics, the ebb and flow of inter-​state relations, rivalry and conflict, devoting particular attention to the causes of major wars—​that of 1914 but also the Second World War and, increasingly, the Cold War. In terms of granularity, the focus was on unit-​level analyses of

IR Theory   145 decision-​making and decision-​makers, often at the highest levels but also the role of diplomatic and military advisors. As with interwar scholarship on the July Crisis, painstaking work with primary sources characterized much of this work, with a premium placed on multinational archival research. The overall result was a steady stream of high-​quality, archive-​based studies on recent questions of international politics. At the same time, some IH scholars expressed concern about the value of this approach. As early as 1955, W. N. Medlicott called for an expansion of IH beyond inter-​state diplomacy. He remarked that recent scholarship tended ‘towards massive and inconclusive debate about a too-​limited range of topics’ and warned that ‘a simple issue can be unnecessarily confused by a scholarly deployment of too much evidence’ (Medlicott 1955, 418). Over the next two decades the field came under growing criticism, accused of being hide-​bound, interested solely in elites and out of touch with larger developments within the historical discipline. In a much-​discussed essay published in 1980, Charles Maier charged IH in the United States with ‘marking time’. The field, he judged, was far from ‘the cutting edge of scholarship’. Significantly, Maier suggested international historians should shift their attention away from reconstructing decisions and toward an exploration of systemic issues as well as transnational linkages (Maier 1980, 355, 386–​387). Maier revealed a sense of unease within American IH, an unease that fuelled a process of renewal. Over the next four decades scholarship on US foreign relations, in particular, embraced an ever-​widening array of topics, perspectives and approaches. A useful indicator is the edited collection, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. The most recent edition contains chapters on corporatist frameworks, political economy, development, non-​state actors, domestic politics, gender, memory, and religion. Previous editions included chapters on psychology, dependency, modernization theory, ideology, and race (Costigliola and Hogan 2016; Hogan and Paterson 1991). IH is now characterized by its diversity, its methodological sophistication, and a collective desire to push the boundaries of the field ever further. Indeed, the field’s dynamism has led to questions about its coherence and even calls for a return to a more circumscribed definition of its subject matter (Maiolo 2018). Worth noting also is that this dynamism does not include a self-​conscious post-​modern turn as has occurred in IR. Critical IH is concerned not so much with epistemological questions as with exploring the international dynamics of inequality, violence, domination, and resistance. And yet, for all its dynamism, IH has not heeded Maier’s suggestion regarding systemic approaches. To be sure, American IH scholars have borrowed concepts and methodologies from a range of disciplines (sociology, anthropology, ethnology, psychology, for example). Yet this trend reflects developments within the wider historical discipline, where questions of gender, race, and memory have become mainstream. In this way, IH has integrated itself more firmly into its home discipline. But it has at the same time moved further away from core debates in IR. Nor has IR had much impact on the practice of history in Europe. In Britain, the potential for cooperation between the two initially appeared promising. EH Carr, author of one of the foundational texts in the discipline of IR (Carr 2001), self-​identified as an historian. Up until the late 1980s, the most influential British contributions to IR came from the English School, whose founders included historians such as Herbert Butterfield and Michael Howard. The English School advocated an historical approach and positioned itself as a reaction to what its members characterized as the scientific pretensions of American IR. Although

146    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay undeniably ‘realist’ in orientation, the English School preferred the concept of international society whose rules, norms and general functioning developed over time (Hall and Dunne 2019). An appreciation of history and historical analysis was thus one of the more notable features of the English School. Hedley Bull, one of its leading lights, ‘conceived the relation of history and theory conjointly, whereby good historical enquiry is informed by theoretical considerations and good theoretical work is informed by history’ (Bain 2007, 515). Yet the English School did not live up to its promise of fostering cooperation between IR and IH. Its leading members were more interested in building theory than tackling specific historical questions. For all his sensitivity to historical evidence, Bull approached history as ‘a repository of (past) events that furnished cases against which (present) generalizations are tested’ (Bain 2007, 517). The English School thus quickly became a discussion between IR scholars, with scant participation from historians. If anything, this exclusiveness has been reinforced by the more recent efforts of Barry Buzan, among others, to steer the English School away from an emphasis on historical development and towards a functionalist perspective drawing on abstract and even ahistorical models evolving ‘naturally from the logic of anarchy’ (Buzan 1993, 340). Nor did British scholars of IH manifest much interest in the English School, or in IR more generally. Instead, the dominant approach consisted of analyses of decision-​making and decision-​makers in a national and multinational framework—​an approach fuelled by the rich published and archival material available on European policy-​makers. An early example is A. J. P. Taylor’s, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–​1918 (1954). Having identified in the introduction the ‘perpetual quadrille of the Balance of Power’ as the decisive factor in European diplomacy, Taylor went on to offer an idiosyncratic analysis of European diplomacy, peppered with caustic comments and colourful aphorisms (Taylor 1954, ix). But it was Donald Cameron Watt who best embodied the focus on decision-​making. From his perch at the LSE over four decades, Watt promoted what he called the ‘personalities and policies’ framework to international history. Watt initially presented his approach as an effort to ‘bridge the gap’ between IH and political science by ‘borrowing concepts’ from IR. But Watt was first and foremost an historian, which for him dictated an almost exclusive focus on the ‘foreign-​policy making elite’. The historian’s task was to reconstruct policy-​making though fine-​grained archival research into the preferences and aims of members of that elite (Watt 1965). Not surprisingly, Watt evinced little practical interest in IR, whose predilection for abstractions and generalizations were alien to his resolutely empirical enterprise. In France, meanwhile, early developments also seemed promising for a fruitful cooperation between IH and IR. The institutionalization of IR as an academic field, embodied in the founding in the 1950s of the Centre d’études des relations internationales (CERI), owed a great deal to Jean-​Baptiste Duroselle, one of France’s leading scholars of IH after 1945. Having forged close ties with prominent American IR scholars, and having benefited from financing from the Rockefeller Foundation, Duroselle looked to IR as a means to valorize IH in France in the face of the dominance of the Annales school. The Annales emphasis on structural elements and the longue durée translated into ill-​disguised contempt for political history. The CERI’s task was to develop a multi-​disciplinary approach to the study of IR in which IH would enjoy a prominent place (Guilhot 2017; Jansen and Scot 2019). Yet Duroselle’s commitment to integrating history and IR did not last. During the 1950s he collaborated with his mentor, Pierre Renouvin, who had developed the concept of the ‘forces profondes’ shaping policy-​making as an answer to the structural challenge of the Annales.

IR Theory   147 Combing structure and agency, however, proved difficult and ultimately unsuccessful. When Duroselle replaced Renouvin at the Sorbonne in 1964, he dropped the interest in structure, vigorously promoting the study of decision-​making and decision-​makers [les décideurs]. Although Duroselle retained some interest in IR and even published a theoretical analysis of decision-​making drawing on IR scholarship, his scholarship increasingly reflected his preferences (Duroselle 1981). Much like D. C. Watt in Britain, his magnum opus would be an archival-​based study of French decision-​making in the 1930s (Duroselle 1985; Watt 1989). Duroselle’s focus on decision-​makers and decision-​making, moreover, decisively shaped what is now known as the ‘French School’ of IH (Frank 2012). Finally, in Germany during the 1990s a research group centred in Marburg and led by Peter Krüger, a prominent scholar of Weimar Germany’s foreign policy, set out to examine the ‘history of foreign policy and international relations from a systemic perspective’. Interested particularly in the dynamics of change and stability, the group explored the international system both as a conceptual tool for historians to understand great power politics and as a structure constructed by the great powers to manage their relations (Krüger 1996, vii; Krüger 1999). If a Rankean perspective is evident, so too is the influence of Ludwig Delhio, one of Ranke’s more prominent successors, who understood the balance of power in geo-​political terms, highlighting Germany’s ill-​fated position as a continental power that was too strong for the balance of power to operate but not strong enough to impose hegemony (Delhio 1948). But Krüger’s group made little impact on scholarship either in IH or IR. It remained marginal inside Germany and had little visibility abroad.

Efforts to Bridge the Divide Divergence between IH and IR is not the whole story of their postwar relations. Scholars from both fields have sought to narrow the divide, spurred by a shared interest in International Politics. One example is a project in the 1990s led by Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, which brought together leading scholars in IR and IH to discuss the ‘feasibility of cross-​fertilization’. For the Elmans, the seeming marginalization of qualitative case-​study methodologies within IR, along with the perceived marginal status of IH within the larger discipline of History, furnished additional incentives for cooperation. The initiative, which produced a workshop, special journal issue and an edited collection, was facilitated by good-​ will on both sides (Fendius Elman and Elman 2001, 1997). At the same time, the participants identified several obstacles to cooperation, including a ‘lack of institutional embeddedness’ in the form of collaborative research projects, joint graduate training and shared publishing venues. More recently, a group of IH and IR scholars came together to consider neo-​realist theory, though their generally negative assessment of its usefulness likely did little to build bridges between the two disciplines (May et al. 2010). Such collective projects have been rare. Instead, the task of championing the value of IR among IH scholars has fallen largely to individuals. The most visible is almost certainly Paul Schroeder. Though Schroeder counts among the rare number of scholars to have published in both leading IR and IH journals, his chief aim has been to persuade historians to think in systemic terms. By this he means incorporating the international system into analyses as a structure of rules, norms and expectations shaping and, more often than not, constraining

148    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay the behaviour of states and especially of great powers. A corollary to this aim is a plea for IH scholars not to limit their analyses to the intentions and motivations of decision-​ makers, which, Schroeder insists, are notoriously difficult to identify. But this is not the only problem: a focus on intentions/​motivations risks overlooking the unintentional and even unwanted consequences of policy decisions—​consequences rooted in systemic effects. The international system, for Schroeder, has an agency that historians all too often ignore. In his magnum opus, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–​1848, Schroeder mobilized a systemic analysis to critique the balance of power, whose dynamics international historians and IR scholars often see as working in quasi-​automatic fashion to regulate the behaviour of states (Schroeder 1994). For Schroeder, the effects of balance of power thinking were disastrous and perpetuated wars of unprecedented scale and destructiveness during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. It would take the prolonged devastation of the period 1792–​1815 to convince the great powers of the balance of power’s destructive dynamics, resulting in a collective effort to replace it with a concert system consisting of a ‘set of rules, understandings, and practices designed to enable the great powers to cooperate and control European politics, settle major problems, and, above all, avoid great-​power conflicts’. (Schroeder 1975, 22). Schroeder’s analysis of the Vienna Congress offered something to both IH and IR scholars. To the former, he demonstrated the need to factor system effects into analyses of great power politics; and to the latter, a sustained critique of structural realism and the insight that international systems are not immutable, but can be revised through the conscious and collective endeavours of states. Marc Trachtenberg is another prominent scholar championing the use of IR in IH. Too much of the latter, he contends, amounts to research in need of an interpretive framework. This being so, Trachtenberg urges IH scholars to consider IR theory not only because it offers ideas about how international politics work, but also because it generates questions that can help to structure research. Indeed, he envisages a cooperative endeavour in which IR theory provides questions and historians, through primary research, provide answers. In terms of IR theory, Trachtenberg, like Schroeder, considers a systemic perspective to be useful. Unlike Schroeder, though, Trachtenberg views balance-​of-​power dynamics as a stabilizing rather than destructive force. For Trachtenberg, stability, understood as the absence of major disruptive challenges, is inherent due to the premium that a balance of power system places on its members maximizing their power and security. This leads states to the search for the greatest number of allies, prompting great powers to seek friendly relations with as many of their peers as possible. The result is greater stability (Trachenberg 2012). For Trachtenberg, power politics provides the fundamental logic governing the international system. Problems arise when states ignore this fact. Trachtenberg applied this framework to the Cold War, asking why the United States and the Soviet Union did not negotiate a spheres-​of-​influence agreement as an alternative to the all-​encompassing Cold War rivalry that developed. The answer lies in the problem of Germany, which remained potentially too powerful for one superpower to accept its inclusion in the other superpower’s sphere. Unable to work out a mutually acceptable solution to Germany before the 1960s, rivalry, suspicion, and even paranoia festered on both sides. The Cold War, in Trachtenberg’s telling was the tragic price paid for ignoring the logic of power politics (Trachtenberg 1999). Schroeder and Trachtenberg demonstrate that it is possible for scholars to straddle IR and IH. Both have published articles in top-​ranked IH and IR journals, and both are cited by scholars in the two fields. That said, Schroeder and Trachtenberg appear to be exceptions. It is difficult

IR Theory   149 to name other scholars who enjoy a similar stature. It is easy to list prominent IR scholars who use history—​Elizabeth Keir, Jack Levy, Barry Posen, and Jack Snyder to name a few. But these scholars have little presence within IH. Equally pertinent, Schroeder and Trachtenberg’s influence is far greater in IR than IH, a reality arguably explained by their respective approaches. Trachtenberg’s promotion of power politics downplays non-​systemic factors, for example the role of domestic politics, that have been central to historical interpretations since the 1960s and were only reinforced by the enormous impact of the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1990s. Similarly, IH scholars are unlikely to embrace Schroeder’s premise that international politics constitute an autonomous realm, separate from ‘other systems or structures in society’ (Schroeder 1994, ix). To do so risks separating IH from the larger discipline of history, undoing the prolonged efforts of IH scholars to build bridges to other historians. There is arguably another practical reason why Schroeder and Trachtenberg remain exceptions: the scope of their ambitions. In some ways, what they propose is a merger of IR and IH or, perhaps more accurately, a hybrid enterprise appealing equally to scholars in both fields. But this is a tall order. It requires that one master two fields, each with its own disciplinary logic and practices, before combining them to create something new. It demands a combination of effort and imagination that is probably beyond the scope of most scholars. That Schroeder and Trachtenberg have partially succeeded is a tribute to their abilities; but so too perhaps is the apparent hesitation of other scholars before the enormity of the task. It is also true, as the Feldmans pointed out, that the structures for such a hybrid enterprise do not exist. And each field has its own logic, with different currencies of social, cultural and symbolic capital. Historians seeking rapid career advancement, for example, have little incentive to try to place an article in prestigious IR journals such as International Organization or International Security. All told, multiple obstacles, both intellectual and practical, impede the close cooperation of IH and IR. If Schroeder and Trachtenberg’s example is unlikely to be widely adopted by IH scholars (or IR scholars), this does not mean that divergence alone must characterize relations between the two fields. There are ways to encourage convergence that do not require the creation of a hybrid field, or even studies that are read widely by scholars in both IH and IR. From an IH perspective, one possibility is for IH scholars to use IR in an opportunistic fashion—​one that is episodic and question-​oriented. International historians would deploy concepts and questions drawn from IR without aiming to intervene in the theoretical debates structuring that field. They would use such tools for their practical benefit. To be sure, such a practice amounts to ‘cherry picking’, which, ironically, is precisely the criticism IH scholars level at IR scholars. Yet IR tools are not the equivalent of works of scholarship. They can be taken from one field of inquiry and deployed in another. Choosing among available tools for a particular task does not involve the same risks of ‘selection bias’ as when IR scholars pick one historical study/​interpretation and ignore others. Incidentally, this practical approach is obviously not limited to IR: IH scholars also benefit from pillaging concepts and methodologies from disciplines such as sociology, law and economics. That said, given their shared interest in the nature of international politics, IR scholarship seems to be a good place to start for IH scholars looking for useful tools. One advantage of this practice is that it already exists to some extent. A number of IH scholars use IR in an opportunistic manner, applying its various tools to their research projects. Examples include David Stevenson and Joseph Maiolo’s studies of arms races that operationalize the concept of security dilemma (Stevenson 1996; Maiolo 2010; Stevenson

150    Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay et al. 2016). William Mulligan and Jack Levy, meanwhile, combine realist theory and the idea of time horizons to reconsider great power diplomacy before 1914 (Levy and Mulligan 2017; Mulligan and Levy 2019). From an institutionalist perspective, George-​Henri Soutou, Mark Jarret, and Matthias Schulz have all stressed the great power concert as an ordering principle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Soutou 2000; Schulz 2009; Jarret 2014). Francine McKenzie has similarly examined the history of GATT through the prism of liberal institutional theory (McKenzie 2020). Peter Jackson uses balance of power theory as a foil to better understand the evolution of French national security policy in the era of the Great War (Jackson 2014). Most recently, a group of scholars have drawn on concepts from security studies to argue for the emergence of a ‘new European security culture’ in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (de Graaf et al. 2019). All of these IH scholars have handpicked concepts from IR to advance influential reinterpretations of major issues in the history of international relations.

Conclusion Looking back, the relationship between IR and IH can be characterized as a tug-​of-​war between the forces of convergence and divergence. In the late nineteenth century, IH and IR were basically one and the same, with scholars such as Ranke and Sorel inferring general features and dynamics of international politics from case studies. As in so many realms, however, the First World War proved disruptive. Historians separated increasingly into two groups: those who focused on contemporary issues and moved into the new field of International Relations and those who continued to examine past periods, war origins, and especially the July Crisis. This growing divergence deepened after 1945 as IR developed into an independent field with an emphasis on theory, methodological rigour, and systemic perspectives on world politics. International history scholars, meanwhile, concentrated on the national level, on decision-​making and decision-​makers, while also working to integrate their field into the larger discipline of History. Regret at this divergence has motivated historians and IR theorists to search for common ground in order to set the two disciplines on a more convergent path. But success has been limited, and there are good reasons to conclude that genuine convergence between the two fields is unlikely. Yet pessimism is also misplaced. A particularly promising development are strategies pursued by scholars in both disciplines to approach similar problems in an opportunistic, question-​centred fashion. If this practice is unlikely to produce convergence, it does point to a growing familiarity with IR among international historians. Greater familiarity, in time, might lead to more meaningful cooperation across the two disciplines.

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chapter 11

Gl obal Sourc e s of Internationa l T h ou g h t Chen Yudan Although International Relations theory, along with the discipline of International Relations (IR), has a history of merely one hundred years, it is also the case that international thought, as a tradition of contemplating relations between states , can be traced back to at least four centuries, when its foundations were built. Armitage has defined international thought as ‘theoretical reflection on that peculiar political arena populated variously by individuals, peoples, nations and states and, in the early modern period, by other corporate bodies such as churches and trading companies’, echoing Skinner’s claim quoted in the same work that ‘[b]‌y the beginning of the seventeenth century, the concept of the State . . . had come to be regarded as the most important object of analysis in European political thought’(Skinner 1978, 349; Armitage 2012, 7). Considering the fact that the term ‘international’ was invented by Jeremy Bentham as late as eighteenth century, international thought has been unavoidably centred with the emergence, development, and crisis of the nation-​state system, or with the ‘modernity’ of international politics. The storyline of the history of Western international thought is thus clear, though not unquestioned. Among the ‘fathers of international thought’ (Thompson 1994), classical thinkers before the sixteenth century might be called the ‘grandfathers’, with philosophers, historians, and tragedians in ancient Greek city-​states attracting overwhelming attention, not only because they belong to the ‘axial age’, but also that the city-​states are said to resemble the international system today. With the rise and expansion of European nation-​ states, the sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century thinkers, always counting from Machiavelli, contributed to the ‘modern foundations’ and started a rich tradition of international thought, until the discipline of IR was born in the early twentieth century, due to the Great War which threatened not merely any single unit in, but the whole body of, the modern nation-​state system. However, the narrative would be much more ambiguous and complicated if we turned our sights to the non-​Western world, to which the modern international system based on nation states is not endogenous. The nation-​state system ‘leads the willing and drags along the reluctant’, to borrow the saying of Seneca, at different times. Therefore, when searching for global sources of international thought, one will find that it is exactly the tension

156   Chen Yudan between ‘global’ and ‘international’ that has dominated the study in this field. Why and how can the teachings of sages hundreds and thousands years ago from various civilizations around the world benefit our understanding of the modern international society? If ‘most surveys of the history of international political thought . . . project contemporary ideas back into the past’ (Keene 2005, vi), it is especially true to the surveys of non-​Western ancient international thought. But this is not something to blame, it is rather a lens through which we may see that embedded in the explorations of different forms of various international thought are often the efforts to construct external histories of their own states or civilizations, and to interpret their relations with others as well as their positions in the world. Thus the reader needs to bear in mind the following two phrases: ‘all history is contemporary history’, as Croce argued, and ‘whose history matters’, as the editors of this volume asked. This chapter is organized into four parts. I first discuss why the history of international thought, and more generally International History, can benefit from a global vision; then what texts of global sources have been collected, and neglected, by the international theorists today whose interpretations are basically either thinker-​centred or concept-​centred; and how non-​Western scholars have dealt with the tension between the ‘pre-​modern global’ and ‘modern international’. The possibility of a true ‘global’ study of international thought beyond the West and non-​West dichotomy is further considered in the conclusion.

Why: Global Sources in Global History ‘Histories make men wise’, as Francis Bacon wrote, but reading only the Eurocentric history since the seventeenth century would instead limit the sights of any student of international relations with what Buzan and Little call as the ‘Westphalian straitjacket’ (Buzan and Little 2000, 7). Despite the rich thought before the twentieth century, the foundation of the academic discipline of IR was inspired by the calamity of the First World War, which was mainly fought in Europe, as an event in, and a legacy of, the modern international system. It was then natural for the Western founders of IR, having experienced one or both of the world wars, to conceptualize and theorize anarchical Westphalian international relations as the basic lens through which to view the past history. The early stage of studying the international thought, against such a disciplinary background, was therefore mostly Eurocentric and ahistorical. Keene argued correctly two decades ago that surveys then were ‘powerfully influenced by late twentieth-​century ways of thinking about the world’ (Keene 2005, vi), and may add that the initial explorers of this area were as much powerfully influenced by early and mid-​twentieth-​century ways of thinking. There is little similar between Florence Melian Stawell’s irenic and progressivist history and Martin Wight’s profound but sometimes obscure works, for example, except that they are both of a ‘Whig’ tradition of Western thinking about international relations, interpreting past thinkers with concerns about the sovereign state system’s crises in their times (Stawell 1929; Hall 2014; Hall 2017, 243). While the major works by the end of the twentieth-​century focused on ‘great’ traditions with ‘great’ thinkers on a few ‘great’ questions, that is, taking a largely ‘textualist’ and ‘continuist’ approach, the first two decades of the twenty-​first century has witnessed the transformation towards a more ‘contextualist’ and ‘discontinuist’ way

Global Sources of International Thought    157 in studying the Western international thought (for more discussion, see Keene 2005 and Hall 2017). The turn to ‘context’ is an essential way to recover the history of international thought. But if we want the study to be more ‘historical’, we need to be further equipped with a ‘global’ vision, instead of concentrating on Western contexts only. Here ‘global’ has two meanings. On the one hand, past ideas in various places and times should be included in the history of international thought, not separately by themselves, but to form an integrated global history along with the Western thought. On the other hand, we should attach more importance to how past people have speculated on the inter-​state relations according to the world as a whole, but not from the perspective of modern Western IR with anarchy and independent units as a dominant theoretical assumption. The introduction of global sources into the history of international thought has contributed, and will still contribute, to a stronger connection between History and IR. First, histories of international thought have not developed in isolation. The Western ideas themselves, and the language and social contexts in which they are embedded, have been in continuous contact and communication with ideas and contexts from other civilizations. The influence of the Near East over European history is not new to us, and the role of Chinese culture in the development of modern European thought has already been researched in detail (see for example, Étiemble 1988). However, while IR theorists have observed how non-​Western thinkers dealt with modern international thought from the West (for the latest research, see Acharya and Buzan 2019), there has been little study on the influence from the other way around. Searching for global sources of international thought is to provide a broader sight on the contexts in which the Western thoughts developed, and thus improve ‘historical contextualism’ in IR. Second, with a ‘global’ vision, we can enrich our understandings of international relations and international history. ‘All history is the history of thought’ (Collingwood 1994, 215). Though the statement is controversial, it is true that without considering specific ideas and motives one cannot understand events historically. The past two decades have witnessed a growing interest in global international history, seen from Buzan and Little’s comprehensive review of international systems to Sharman’s re-​interpretation of the rise of the West in the modern world order (Buzan, Little 2000; Sharman 2019). However, if one observes histories of different places and times through the Westphalian lens only, global international history will still be dominated by the Western IR theories. If the belief of an anarchical world divided into independent states, which is represented by modern raison d’état, is at one end of the spectrum, and the cosmopolitan view that the world is a union at the other end, most pre-​ modern global sources of international thought fall in between. To distinguish these types of historical thought can both benefit us in the study of history, and help us to grasp the current complex world derived from the various traditions.

What: Texts and Their Interpretations The interest in writing histories of international thought is not a new to students of international relations. Throughout the twentieth century, general histories from Stawell’s pioneering The Growth of International Thought (Stawell 1929) to Boucher’s remarkable

158   Chen Yudan Political Theories of International Relations (Boucher 1998), though almost never include ‘Western’ in book titles, usually refer to Western ‘sources only, always dating back to the classical Greek world, with little reference to other traditions. Since the beginning of the twenty-​ first century, however, concerns about diverse sources have been seen in some major works. For example, International Relations in Political Thought, an impressive textbook edited by three outstanding scholars, introduces the classics of Al-​Farabi and Avicenna, two Islamic thinkers whose names are alongside nearly 50 Western counterparts from Thucydides to Schumpeter in this volume (Brown et al. 2002). In The Return of the Theorists, an innovative work of dialogues, the chapter contributors ‘interview’ about 40 past thinkers from Homer to Elshtain, with two ancient Chinese philosophers, Confucius and Lao Zi, in the list (Lebow et al. 2016). We should notice that the editors of both books admit honestly that, whereas they acknowledge ‘the usefulness of ’ and ‘the need for’ a non-​Western focus, their collections are ‘heavily weighted towards’ Western culture and ‘the European past’ (Brown et al. 2002; ‘Introduction’; Lebow et al. 2016, 2). This, I argue, is a regular way among researchers of international thought in the English world who are open-​minded to, but with little knowledge of, non-​Western traditions. Meanwhile, specific studies on the concepts and ideas of certain cultures began to proliferate since the late twentieth century within IR. We have seen monographs written in English exploring Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Islamic, Russian, and other sources (just to list a few books here: Yan 2013; Ling 2013; Shahi 2019a; Tsygankov 2012; Nakano 2013; Sheikh 2016), not to mention numerous journal articles and book chapters, or works in other languages. There have also been a number of edited volumes of miscellaneous sources, among which a few outstanding examples are The Zen of International Relations, a pioneering work which attempts to create a dialogue between Western and non-​Western (mainly East Asian and Islamic) international thought (Chan et al. 2001); Non-​Western International Relations Theory which focuses on Northeast, Southeast, Indian, and Islamic traditions to answer the question ‘why is there no non-​Western international theory?’ (Acharya and Buzan 2010); International Relations and Non-​Western Thought which contains not only Chinese and Islamic sources but also the less-​studied thought from African and Latin American histories (Shilliam 2010). It is not surprising that many authors in this category have non-​Western cultural or national origins. Therefore, their efforts in interpreting the sources are always, intentionally or not, inseparable with their reflections on the relationship between the Western and the non-​Western world today. For instance, International Relations and Non-​Western Thought, the collection mentioned previously edited by Robbie Shilliam, uses a very clear subtitle ‘Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity’. The studies on the concept of ‘Tianxia’ (All under heaven) in China is another example. During 1960s and 1970s, Tianxia and other Confucian concepts were submerged in mainland China as notorious ‘old’ ideology. The reform and opening-​up policy has brought a rapidly growing China on to the international stage since 1980s, and the changing position of China made Confucianism able to be rediscovered as a significant source of its cultural identity. It should be mentioned that while the revival of Tianxia in Chinese discourse in 1990s was majorly opposed to a ‘narrow nationalism’ (Li 1994; see also Sheng 1996), the booming literature of Tianxia in the twenty-​first century, marked by the publication of Zhao Tingyang’s The Tianxia System in 2005, has been motivated by China’s rise and the consequent popular tendency to re-​consider China’s position, showing more confidence in the

Global Sources of International Thought    159 culture and sometimes even as far as a Chinese exceptionalism (see, for example, the comprehensive criticism of Tianxia enthusiasm by Ge 2015). Thus, the explorers of non-​Western sources of international thought have themselves participated in the debates of current international politics, via constructing the narratives of Histories of international thought, at both global and local levels. Compared with the studies on Western international thought, the efforts on non-​Western sources, though flourishing in the last decade, suffer even more the ‘paucity’ and ‘poverty’ as complained about by Martin Wight 60 years ago (Wight 1960, 38), since not only the subject of IR, but also the whole system of academic divisions/​disciplines is from the Western world. Thus, the very first mission for explorers of non-​Western sources is to make clear what materials constitute such sources, before any genealogy can be made. The answer is obvious. Most of the relevant texts collected, unsurprisingly, in general histories edited by Western scholars and in specific studies by researchers with non-​Western origins alike, are extracts from great political philosophers’ works. Nakano’s Beyond the Western Liberal Order, probably the only book beyond the Western tradition in the Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought series, for example, introduces the political thought of Yanaihara Tadao, the most prominent Japanese social scientist in the early twentieth century (Nakano 2013). Similarly, Louise Fawcett’s survey of Latin American contributions to international thought focuses on Andrés Bello, a great statesman and scholar in the nineteenth century who is widely regarded as the intellectual father of the region (Fawcett 2012). The ‘big name’ strategy is certainly most evident in exploring traditions with long histories. One of the most influential studies on Chinese sources is the work of ‘Tsinghua approach’ (for a comprehensive review, see Zhang 2011). The Tsinghua University-​based team led by Professor Yan Xuetong focuses on the eighth to the third century bce (pre-​Qin period) philosophers and intends to apply their thoughts to modern world politics. One pioneering contribution is Pre-​Qin Chinese Thought on Foreign Relations (Yan and Xu 2008) which is the first and probably by far the only collection of classical Chinese international thought. Another influential work of the team is Yan’s book published in English titled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, which attempts to improve the study of IR theory with interpretations of pre-​Qin thinkers (Yan 2011). There has been little difference in the exploration of Indian sources of international thought. From Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s paper ‘Hindu Theory of International Relations’ published in the American Political Science Review a century ago (Sarkar 1919) to a recent conference, organized by Amitav Acharya and Yan Xuetong, on the comparative study between classical Indian and Chinese world views, the dominating subject has always been the ancient Indian statesman and philosopher Kautilya and his treatise composed between the third and second century bce, as can been seen from the impressive ‘frequency of invocation of International Relations scholars from India of Kautilya in their work’ (Mallavarapu 2019, 2). The classics of Confucius, Kautilya, and other great thinkers are undoubtedly primary sources of international thought. However, just as with their Western counterparts, very few of them have been drawn to make international politics their principal interest, which might remind us of what Martin Wight called ‘parerga’ (Wight 1960, 37). Furthermore, while the ‘axial age’ thinkers in China and India have dominated the study of classical international thought, fewer figures from the second century bce to the twentieth century ce have had the attention of researchers in this field. An exception is Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan’s work recently published at the centenary of IR, which introduces thinkers from Japan, Latin

160   Chen Yudan America, China, India, and other colonial regions in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, instead of from ancient times, as ‘IR before IR in the Periphery’ (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 55–​64). While this chapter is a brilliant reconstruction of the history of international thought in a global sight, many names mentioned in the section, say, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao from China, would nevertheless surprise IR students today as the ancestors in the subject since international relations had never been their primary concern. Another approach that has been taken to study non-​Western sources of international thought is what we may call ‘concept-​centred’ rather than ‘thinker-​centred’. Instead of focusing on a series (or lineage) of great thinkers, this approach attempts to find from certain traditions unique concepts which may contribute to describe and interpret international relations. These concepts are either directly found in classical sources and transformed into modern theoretical terms, as illustrated by Sheikh’s study on the Islamic term ‘umma’ and ‘a notion of IR’ developed from ‘an Islamic heritage’ (Sheikh 2016, 3), and Pan Zhongqi team’s recent project on Chinese concepts (Chen and Pan 2019), or created on the basis of the authors’ understanding and conclusion of traditional wisdom, as the ‘Shanghai School’s’ trademark ‘symbiosis (gongsheng)’ (Zhang, Yu et al. 2014; Ren 2020). These efforts, of course, often consist of canons derived from general principles of the Universe, society, and life, rather than specific reflections on international relations. While the primary question of the thinker-​centred approach is ‘who are selected as our founding fathers?’ for non-​Western students, the concept-​centred approach’s focus is ‘what are selected as our distinctive characters?’. They are different ways of studying the history of ideas, but often lead to the same goal to construct intellectual identities by narrating the specific traditions of international thought. At the turn of the century, Nicholas J. Rengger, as a leading Western international thinker, noted that ‘[m]‌ost cultures and civilizations have, after all, long and important traditions of reflection about the subject matter of International Relations, however understood: relations between political communities, war, trade, cultural diversity and its implications’. In the endnote to this statement, he referred to David Cooper’s World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction, which is considered to have touched on ‘political thinking generally and international relations specifically’ (Rengger 2000, 12, 31). Today, while the research on these traditions is booming, little change has been seen in reflecting on what the texts of international theory consist of. What is missing, other than scattered pieces, concepts, and ideas found in the histories of non-​Western philosophies, in the construction of international thought among which one may find potential sources? One the one hand, the ‘speeches, despatches, memoirs and essays of statesmen and diplomatists’, as counted by Martin Wight sorts of international theory (Wight 1960, 37), has not yet been valued sufficiently in the studies on non-​Western thought. What were the views and ideas, aside from the widely researched abstract philosophical—​and always moral—​principles, that have helped practitioners of external affairs in various traditions reach decisions under various historical circumstances? These specific understandings of international relations during thousands of years are, after all, no less important than the encompassing sayings of great thinkers, and may potentially contribute to reflection on the complex world today. On the other hand, the changes and discontinuities has been largely ignored by the students of non-​Western international thought. The call for a ‘discontinuist’ view of history

Global Sources of International Thought    161 against the ‘widely shared bias in favour of an approach organized around traditions and schools’ is not a new one in the field of international political thought (see for example, Keene 2005, 5), yet rarely seen when non-​Western thought is surveyed. This is, as mentioned previously, at least partly due to the authors’ inclination to construct unbroken and unitary national, regional, or cultural traditions as a way to think about the relationship between the West and non-​West in face of the questionable but still overwhelming Western values in international studies. The great thinkers and concepts constituting these traditions are obviously winners in their respective historical debates. A Foucauldian archaeological lens would be helpful to re-​discover the values of the forgotten, marginal, or oppressed discourses. The fact that they lost in their times does not necessarily mean that they cannot contribute to our time. One recent example is a pioneering (and rare) work which intends to ‘provide a non-​ holistic component of the Chinese classics’ by studying Gongsun Long, who is by no means a first-​ranking philosopher in the orthodox Chinese history of ideas, but a ‘pre-​modern thinker of international relations’ with a post-​modern thinking (Shih and Yu 2015, 3). But there is still something even more interesting to consider about the texts which can or cannot be collected as the sources of international thought. If, as we have already seen, the classical Greco-​Roman, Chinese, and Indian political philosophers, as well as the Christian and Islamic ideas, have found their undisputed places in IR, why is there almost no survey on the ancient Egyptian and Persian thoughts, or ideas from the Mesopotamian empires? With their rich inter-​state histories, it is hard to say these civilizations had not developed international thought as valuable as the Chinese and Indian 2,000 years ago. The substantial difference here is not that there were no great thinkers or classics in these civilizations, but that they were broken or ended in history, and thus considered by few non-​Western students today as the origins of their own traditions. The discovering and interpretation of various sources of international thought, therefore, has never been irrelevant to the reflections and debates on the contemporary global politics.

How: Strategies to Connect Pre-​modern ‘Global’ with Modern ‘International’ Since the efforts on non-​Western international thoughts have been, to a large extent, a way to speculate on the relationship between the West and non-​West, while the study of international history is still dominated by the Western narrative centring upon the emergence, expansion, and development of modern international society, it is essential for any explorers into this field, with most of the texts they have collected written before or outside the modern nation-​state system, to consider how the ideas from the past thinkers around the globe can be linked to the modern ‘inter-​national’ relations, and thus be sources of international thought. This may not be as inconvenient for their Western colleagues since the lineage of great political thinkers from Plato onward has already been well established and the IR theorists during the past century have continuously referred to, though sometimes misinterpreted, the classics of the West. However, for students of non-​Western thought, an aqueduct must be built to make the past ideas from various traditions potential sources that can be brought into the study of international relations.

162   Chen Yudan There are basically two strategies, though most studies are somewhere between the two extremes: to compare the non-​Western ideas to the sovereign-​state-​system based Western thought, and interpret the former with a modern theoretical framework; or seek to transcend—​at least substantially revise—​Western international theory with non-​Western wisdom. The strategy chosen depends on not only on a scholar’s personal academic preference, but also their motive to study the tradition, and sometimes, the Zeitgeist. When an ‘outsider’ or a marginal state demands to be recognized as a member, or a respected power, of modern international society, the interpretation of its tradition is often that of an equivalent of modern Western political understanding, and sovereign states have not been treated as unseen or unimportant in its history, and thus it should be accepted by, and can contribute to, the contemporary international community. This is especially true when the research work is mainly written for the international reader. Two early explorations before the Second World War of non-​Western classical international thought, from India and China separately, are typical examples here. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, one of the most distinguished Indian social scientists and philosophers in the early twentieth century, wrote widely on classical Indian political philosophy in English, including an article discussing the ‘Hindu Theory of International Relations’ in The American Political Science Review. This work, published in the same year of the mythical founding of IR, begins with the statement that the ‘conception of “external” sovereignty was well established in the Hindu philosophy of the state’. Sarkar, as knowledgeable as he was, offered numerous comparisons to Western international relations and political thought throughout the article, from the first section on ‘the doctrine of Mandala (sphere of influence)’ to the second on ‘the doctrine of sārvabhauma (world sovereign)’ (Sarkar 1919), which would quickly familiarize any educated Western reader with the Indian classical thought quickly. A few years later, Siu Tchoan Pao, a prominent Chinese jurist, in the first volume of the monograph on International Law in ancient China, based on his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne, surveyed the ideas of pre-​Qin Chinese thinkers on international relations. Though this book, written in French and published in Paris in 1926, is not well-​known and easily accessible today, it was reviewed in The American Journal of International Law, which said that the author compared the ancient Chinese diplomatic agency created more than 2,000 years ago to a modern bureau of foreign affairs, and the ancient Chinese sages to the modern European philosophers. The monograph’s ‘main interest’, the review held, ‘lies in the manner in which Mencius and his ideals are compared with those of Rousseau; and those of Confucius with Kant, as also the ideals of Mo Ti with Kant’ (Siu 1926; Carpenter 1927, 405–​407). Both Sarkar and Siu, it should be added, followed the interwar fashion in the West with a particular interest in managing the problems of a sovereign-​state system. The former ends his article with the argument that ‘[t]‌he doctrine of unity and concord is the final contribution of neeti-​shastras to the philosophy of the state’, and the latter’s survey on Chinese classics was largely under the influence of the ‘Religious Pacifist School of Thought’ (Sarkar 1919, 414; Carpenter 1927, 405). With the development of Western IR studies and its prevalence from the mid-​twentieth century, non-​Western theorists, especially those who learned IR in the US and UK, began to bring traditional wisdom into conversation with the Western IR theories. A remarkable case is Professor Zhang Yongjin’s Martin Wight Memorial Lecture in 2013, which introduced the idea of order in ancient Chinese political thought with a Wightian exploration (Zhang

Global Sources of International Thought    163 2014). Qin Yaqing, a leading Chinese IR theorist who pioneered the study of constructivism in China, advanced relationality theory based on his previous ‘processual constructivism’ by drawing on Chinese traditional philosophy. Though Qin makes a distinction between Eastern ‘relationality’ and Western individual ‘rationality’, he never argues for the superiority of the former over the latter (Qin 2018; see also Acharya 2019, 473). The second strategy usually emerges when the basic assumptions and values of the Western IR theories and the Westphalian international system dominated by the West are questioned. Unsurprisingly, studies in this category have proliferated since the turn of the century, as modern international relations seemed to meet fundamental challenges unseen in the past centuries and the development of Western theories seemed to be in a predicament. Remedies found in and adapted from non-​Western classics have been provided ontologically, epistemologically, normatively, and methodologically. The ontology of Western international relations theory is often criticized by its non-​ Western competitors as a state-​centred worldview in which international anarchy and struggles for power and interests are naturalized. Overarching frameworks of world politics embedded in non-​Western classics are thus particularly valued. This is most evident in Zhao Tingyang’s influential Tianxia philosophy, in which the modern Western political system is regarded as philosophically incomplete and its ‘internationality’ ‘a specious and misleading concept’. He thus calls for a ‘nothing and nobody excluded’ view that ‘[t]‌he world as a whole, and not the state, is the key philosophical issue’, as a philosophical re-​elaboration of an ancient form of Chinese universalism (Zhao 2009, 10–​12; see also Zhao 2005, 2019). It is echoed in L. H. M. Ling’s ‘worldist’ concept which draws on (classical Chinese) Daoist yin/​yang dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis’ (Ling 2013). Harsh criticism of the biases of Western IR theory is found in Pasha’s claim that: Western IR is a particular realization of the liberal modernist imaginary. Durable attributes give Western IR its distinctive character: the Westphalian legacy (including a preference for secularism); a modernist confidence in progress (initially secured within the framework of the modern state but also obtainable within secure spaces of a pacific international community); the ontological primacy of the individual above society; and the innate superiority of capitalist exchange (as the principle of allocating resources and preferences and structuring social interaction and cohesion). (Pasha 2017, 23)

Pasha then refers to the world order idea of Ibn Khaldun, which ‘reclaim the humanistic tradition in International Studies, a tradition salvaged from a Europeanized discourse of the Enlightenment’ (Pasha 2017, 142). Similarly, Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh argues that ‘Islam as a worldview, as a cultural, religious and ideational variant, has sought a different foundation of truth and the “good life”, which could present alternatives to Western IRT’, against the latter’s insistence ‘on states, power and sovereignty’, though the challenge is to put Islamic international thought into practice, since the ‘ultimate tension is between the raison d’état and the raison of Islam’ (Tadjbakhsh 2010, 174–​5, 191). Her endeavour is followed by the editors and contributors of Islam and International Relations: Contributions to Theory and Practice who, inspired by the ‘revival and reinterpretation of classical sources in the Muslim world’ and believing that Western international thought ‘in its current form is not good for the health of our understanding of the social world in which we live’, insisted that ‘Islamic civilization is well able, in source and political culture, to contribute to the development of both IR and IRT and to provide alternative optics for theorization’ (Abdelkader et al. 2016, 3).

164   Chen Yudan On the foundation of non-​Western ontology often falls non-​Western epistemology. On the Islamic side, Tadjbakhsh observed that a new epistemological project is in flux, with tools such as history of thought rather than political events, with a focus on principles such as justice, collectivity, solidarity and emancipation, rather than power and materialism, and using Islam as a religion and worldview rather than merely as a social-​historical space. (Tadjbakhsh 2010, 176)

Classical East Asian philosophy, with its rich tradition, has nourished various epistemological inquiries beyond the ‘Westphalian straitjacket’. Acharya employed Buddhist philosophy to broaden the epistemology of IR (Acharya 2011). Ling noted that ‘[m]‌ost insidiously, Westphalia World denies Multiple Worlds epistemically’, and turned to ‘the ancient epistemology of Daoist dialectics for contemporary world politics’ which ‘enables interaction across and within bordered ontologies like Self vs Other, West vs Rest, Westphalia World vs Multiple Worlds’ (Ling 2013, 2, 38). One recent and innovative etymological exploration is Deepshikha Shahi’s introduction into IR of the classical Indian concept of ‘Advaita (non-​dual or non-​secondness)’ as ‘an untapped epistemological resource’. By challenging the ‘Western scientism’ and the ‘epistemological imperialism in International Relations’, she also compare ‘Advaita’ with the emerging Chinese concept of ‘Tianxia’ as two types of monism, which constitutes a rare theoretical dialogue between non-​Western International thoughts (Shahi and Ascione 2016; see also Shahi 2018). If the modern international system and the Western international thought is regarded as ontologically nation-​state-​centred and power-​centric, and epistemologically set in dualisms of self/​other, subject/​object, and so on, the conclusion always follows that non-​Western international thought could authentically contribute to global peace, justice, and solidarity. The normative preference, if not superiority, is witnessed in the assertive argument of the symbiosis (gongsheng) school’ of Shanghai, one of several distinctive theories of Chinese origins, that it is the time to boost the Chinese traditional culture and Chinese wisdom of harmonious philosophy . . . which is particularly necessary for creating the IR theory of peace and development, sticking to the road of peace and development and contributing to the construction of a lasting peace, co-​prosperity and harmonious world, and ‘the proposition of symbiosis of international society would inevitably replace the proposition of international anarchism. (Jin 2011, 1). And, in an Islamic scholar’s interpretation of the Qur’an, it is held that ‘from the viewpoint of Islam all human beings are originally equal’, and that ‘[t]‌hese verses confer an exceptional right on human beings and provide an unparalleled opportunity for interactions between among people and countries in international relations’, and ‘pave the way for a peaceful socio-​political path for all human beings’ (Alikhani 2016, 910). Compared with the abundant surveys of non-​Western ontology, epistemology, and values, explorations of non-​Western sources of methodology are rare. While methodology and methods have prevailed in IR, what we mean by ‘methodology’ always follows a clear line of research dominated by scientific positivism, in which non-​Western thought is hard to integrate (see Eun 2018). An early attempt among the few non-​Western IR methodological studies is AbuSulayman’s reference to Uṣūl, the classical methodology of Islamic jurisprudence, against Western positive law (AbuSulayman 1993). A recent but less radical case can be found in Deepshikha Shahi’s effort to bring the ‘methodological eclecticism’ of

Global Sources of International Thought    165 thirteenth-​century Sufism, along with its epistemological monism and ontological immaterialism, into formulating ‘a non-​Eurocentric Global International Relations theory’ (Shahi 2019b, 251). By refuting the ‘Western scientism’ in which the modern methodology is embedded, studies on classical non-​ Western methodologies have naturally allied with the post-​ modernism/​post-​positivism in IR. Roland Bleiker, in his inquiry of neorealist claims in light of various schools of ancient Chinese philosophy, compared particularly Chuang Tzu’s butterfly story that employs an anti-​rational and intuitive approach . . . which one could call post-​positivist in contemporary theory-​speak, with the core principles of Western social science: . . . a reality that can be understood as well as assessed, as long as our theoretical and analytical approaches are rational and systematic enough’(Bleiker 2001, 189, 193). Bleiker listed three ways in which the methodologies of neorealism and Chinese philosophy differ. Similarly, ancient Chinese philosopher Gongsun Long is linked to postmodernity partly by his ‘methodological skepticism’ (Shih and Yu 2015, 101–​105). As mentioned previously, most studies on the non-​Western sources of international thought fall somewhere between the two extremes that, on the one hand, attempt to comply with the modern international system and theoretical framework, and on the other, endeavour to reveal the dissimilarities and go beyond the West. The approaches to a certain sources may even shift with time, as illustrated by the formation of Kyoto school and its interpretation, application and revisit in IR and international studies (Shimizu 2018).

Where: Path toward a True ‘Global’ Study? As seen before, there are rich traditions of speculation around the world on inter-​state relations, and the studies in this field are not impoverished. However, compared with non-​ Western histories of political thought, the history of non-​Western nternational thought are still an area yet to be fully established. While classics of political philosophies of various civilizations have been revisited to shed light upon contemporary IR theories, the texts collected and interpreted are scattered and unsystematic, and at most history of ideas on inter-​state relations. It should be noted that historians, despite their efforts in international history, have not been often involved, or interested, in the explorations of non-​Western international thought. If it is needed to switch from the current ‘history of ideas’ approach to a more ‘intellectual history’, that is, to review and interpret the texts against their historical backgrounds and search non-​philosophical contexts, instead of focusing on the abstract principles and teaching, we should invite more historians to meet with IR scholars and philosophers in this field. Since studies on sources of international thought are always inseparable from the constructions of national/​civilizational histories and identities, a global study or study with global sight is necessary to promote ‘fusion of horizons’ in international theory. The term ‘global’ is in fashion in academia, as seen in the research of global history, global Intellectual history or global history of political thought, and, in the discipline of IR, Acharya’s renowned global IR project. At the turn of the century, several distinguished scholars, in their history of international political thought textbook, expected that ‘[a]‌s the present global order

166   Chen Yudan develops . . . international political theory will be increasingly an amalgam of Western and non-​Western thought, just as, for example, contemporary international relations theory is increasingly influenced by feminist writing’(Brown et al. 2002, ‘Introduction’). The following two decades have witnessed fruitful dialogues between the West and non-​West, and it is undoubted that there should be more such dialogues to survey the global sources of international thought. But a true ‘global’ vision is beyond this dualism between West and non-​West. First, most studies on non-​Western international thought, whether as friendly dialogue with or harsh criticism of the West, see the latter only in its modernity, that is, as modern international system and scientific approach. While the history of Western international thought covers the tradition from Thucydides onward, there have been few dialogues between pre-​modern Western and non-​Western thought, which would nevertheless inspire researchers of non-​Western sources to better understand the emergence and crisis of the modern world and contribute to global politics today. Second, it seems that there have not been sufficient dialogue within the non-​West. For instance, considering the numerous works on Chinese and Islamic sources of international thought, it is regrettable to see that almost no comparative studies or dialogues between the two fields. Such mutual neglect is not uncommon. We may find exceptions that bring together authors writing for different traditions (see especially the inspiring works: Shilliam 2010; Acharya and Buzan 2010), but there should be more to being ‘global’ than just inviting contributors with various backgrounds speaking separately. Third, the ‘West’ itself, as a label, is not unquestionable. Is there one history of the Western international thought, or are there different traditions within the West, not those of realism or liberalism, as we already know, but the traditions as hidden and often forgotten sources excluded by the mainstream narrative? If the ‘Australian school’ can be traced back to some centuries ago (Cotton 2013), can we find, say, Viking sources of international thought? If histories make men wise, then a global history of international thought would broaden our horizons by reflecting on a global politics that originated from, but has developed beyond, the modern European context. About seventy years ago, drawing on philosophies of different civilizations, especially by combining Western ‘reason’ and Chinese ‘conscience’ (ren), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed and recognized globally (see United Nations (UN) website for the history of the document). In the light of this, to survey the global sources of international thought is potentially a way to build a global future.

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168   Chen Yudan Mallavarapu, S. ‘International Relations in India and the Kautilyan Legacy. Conference paper for “Classical Indian and Chinese World Views on Global Order: A Comparison” ’. 9 July 2019. Nakano, R. 2013. Beyond the Western Liberal Order: Yanaihara Tadao and Empire as Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pasha, M. K. 2017. Islam and International Relations: Fractured Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Qin, Y. 2018. A Relational Theory of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ren, X. 2020. ‘Grown from Within: Building a Chinese School of International Relations’. The Pacific Review 33(3–​4): 386–​412. Rengger, N. J. 2000. International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order: Beyond International Relations Theory? London and New York: Routledge. Sarkar, B. K. 1919. ‘Hindu Theory of International Relations’. American Political Science Review 13(3): 400–​414. Shahi, D. 2018. Advaita as a Global International Relations Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Western IR Theory. Cham: Springer International Shahi, D. 2019a. Kautilya and Non-​ Publishing. Shahi, D. 2019b. ‘Introducing Sufism to International Relations Theory: A Preliminary Inquiry into Epistemological, Ontological, And Methodological Pathways’. European Journal of International Relations 25(1): 250–​275. Shahi, D. and Ascione, G. 2016. ‘Rethinking the Absence Of Post-​Western International Relations Theory in India: “Advaitic monism” as An Alternative Epistemological Resource’. European Journal of International Relations 22(2): 313–​334. Sharman, J. 2019. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Sheikh, F. 2016. Islam and International Relations: Exploring Community and the Limits of Universalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Sheng, H. 1996. ‘From Nationalism to Universalism’. (Cong minzu zhuyi dao tianxia zhuyi.) Zhanlue Yu Guanli 1: 14–​19. Shih, C. and Yu, P. 2015. Post-​Western International Relations Reconsidered: The Pre-​Modern Politics of Gongsun Long. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Western Thought: Imperialism, Shilliam, R., ed. 2010. International Relations and Non-​ Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Shimizu, K. 2018. ‘Do Time and Language Matter in IR?: Nishida Kitaro’s Non-​Western Discourse of Philosophy and Politics’. The Korean Journal of International Studies 16(1): 99–​119. Siu, T. 1926. Le Droit des Gens et la Chine Antique. Vol. I, Part I. Les Ideés. Paris: Librairie de Jurisprudence Ancienne et Moderne. Skinner, Q. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stawell, F. M. 1929. The Growth of International thought. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd. Tadjbakhsh, S. 2010. ‘International Relations Theory and the Islamic Worldview’. In Non-​ Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia, eds. A. Acharya, and B. Buzan, 184–​206. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Thompson, K. W. 1994. Fathers of International thought: The Legacy of Political Theory. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Tsygankov, A. P. 2012. Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin: Honor in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pa rt I I I

P R AC T IC E S

chapter 12

State, Territoria l i t y, and Sovere i g nt y Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger This chapter considers three concepts—​state, territory, sovereignty—​by examining how each has been formulated in scholarship at or near the intersection between International Relations (IR) and History, and how those formulations have yielded particular approaches to the study of historical international politics. Exhaustively reviewing scholarship on these three concepts is impossible, thanks to the expansiveness of the terms and the numerous academic disciplines that have addressed them. Instead, this chapter focuses on three loosely defined bodies of work: literature that explicitly addresses the intersection of History and IR, literature not framed in these terms that has nonetheless been foundational to discussions in IR and History, and literature that is further afield but could be productively brought to bear.1 These concepts are fundamental to the intersection of History and IR, and their study has given rise to many of the overlaps between the two fields. Moreover, historical interrogations of these concepts have played an essential role in IR theoretical debates and the evolution of IR as a whole. For example, Ruggie’s critique of neorealism was focused on the latter’s inability to explain ‘the shift from the medieval to the modern international system’ (1983, 273), and many subsequent foundational works of constructivist IR have examined historical transformations in state, territory, and sovereignty (e.g. Kratochwil 1986; Ruggie 1993). All three concepts are also deeply interwoven with the concerns of this volume. Modernity itself is in part defined by the emergence of the ‘modern’ forms of state, territory, and sovereignty—​including a problematic Eurocentric focus across how all three have been defined and studied. The granularity of research has shifted over time, from initial studies largely focused on broad questions of the ‘international system’ to more fine-​grained analysis of particular practices or contextually specific ideas. Yet these three concepts remain challenging to study. Each can be difficult to pin down, let alone operationalize for empirical research (often acknowledged with regards to sovereignty, but equally challenging with the other two). Furthermore, it can be difficult to distinguish state, territory, and sovereignty analytically—​after all, even the Weberian definition of the state includes territory. Identifying exactly which of the three concepts a particular study is (most) focused on, however, is important and is one of the core tasks of this chapter. The significant differences in explanatory targets have often been obscured by an explicit focus

174    Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger on debates about causal drivers or conditions. This chapter thus asks how each concept has been examined, especially as an outcome, addressing each in turn—​state, sovereignty, and finally territory—​in order to track how the literature has changed over time. We then conclude by discussing broad critiques and possible future directions for research.

State On ‘the state’, literature at the intersection of History and IR has tended to assume a particular type of state and then ask about its origins: state formation, in short. In IR, this question was initially posed in reaction to the assumption that the units of international politics were unchanging, at least in their important characteristics. The studies that have emerged vary in what they consider to be the defining features of ‘the state’ or ‘the modern state’, with implications for the commensurability of findings. Spruyt’s (2002) review distinguishes among several explanatory traditions, each of which emphasizes different causal factors and processes: war-​making, economic change, institutional development, and ideas. (See Vu (2010) for a review of the related literature from comparative politics.) One line of research has focused on war as a driver of increasing state capacity and reach, most prominently in several books by Charles Tilly (esp. 1992). He argues that states represent a particular type of ‘coercion-​wielding organizations’ whose characteristics are at least in part explained by the ‘organization of coercion and preparation for war’. The simplified version of this is that ‘war made states, and vice versa’ (1992, c­ hapter 3), but the argument builds on a careful reading of how political rulers and organizations in different circumstances went about extracting resources and organizing for war.2 From the beginning, this line of argument has been closely connected with work by historians, such as studies of changing military technology, tactics, and organization (e.g. McNeill 1982). Another research tradition has examined economic drivers of the emergence of modern states, focusing more on the capacity to enforce property rights and promote trade. Influential early research was by Douglass North (e.g. North and Thomas 1973) and other economic historians. This has been foundational to IR studies examining the economics of state emergence, including comparisons of economic versus war-​making factors (e.g. Abramson 2017). Economic processes are also emphasized by work that applies a Marxist perspective to property and class relations (e.g. Anderson 1974). As existing overviews have pointed out (Spruyt 2002), many of these war-​making or economic explanations have focused on large-​scale changes in the international environment in terms of military competition, trade, economic systems, and so on. Other studies have shifted the focus to more fine-​grained analysis. For example, Spruyt (1994) explains how institutional competition, driven by both war-​making and economic interests, led to the emergence of competing forms of organization and the eventual triumph of states. Bringing war-​making and economic processes together has proved fruitful for studies of the institutional trajectory of specific states (e.g. Collins 1995), abstract analyses of the state as an institution (e.g. Wagner 2007), and a number of recent studies building on these traditions (e.g. Karaman and Pamuk 2013; Saylor and Wheeler 2017). What has largely been left out of existing reviews and comparative analyses is the role of ideas and ideational change in the emergence of states, in spite of several traditions of

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    175 research along these lines.3 An early example (Elias 1994 [1939]) argues that changes in state structure related to a broader social and ideational ‘civilizing process’. Other studies have posited state creation as a construction of culture as much as of institutions (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), or have focused on the political logics of particular religious ideas (Gorski 2003). In the history of political thought, research by Quentin Skinner (1978) and others traces the emergence of the concept of the state out of ideas in circulation during the European Renaissance and Reformation. This literature highlights when and how specific ideas appeared, ideas that form a part of the concept and practice of statehood today. It also reveals the difficulty of identifying the origins of the ‘modern’ state precisely, suggesting that we need to contextualize its evolution through more fine-​grained studies of discourses and political practices. Several challenges have emerged in these research programmes. First, the vast majority of research has focused on the European ‘medieval to modern transformation’. In addition to being problematically Eurocentric (see below), this elides the possibility that, even within Europe, the history of institutional change may not support the notion of a single transition from medieval complexity to modern state uniformity. Osiander (2007) notes that this model does not reflect the historical record of nearly constant institutional change and persistent complexity. Others have also identified specific institutional forms that were not simple ‘way stations’ on the road to modernity: the early-​modern ‘conglomerate’ or ‘composite’ state, for example (Gustafsson 1998; Nexon 2009). This demonstrates that a more granular approach, one that sheds light on specific micropractices of political rule is crucial to trace the evolution of the ‘modern’ state. Second, some studies have talked past each other because they actually explain different aspects of ‘the state’. Consider, for example, the enormously wide range of dates given for the emergence of the state. Studies from the history of political thought have found elements of the state in the Middle Ages (e.g. Strayer 1970), and similar arguments have emerged from other approaches (e.g. Blaydes and Paik 2016). Yet others have argued that ‘modern’ statehood only appears in the eighteenth century, or later (Osiander 2007). This disagreement is driven by the different outcomes actually being explained: the shift to more centralized authority (in medieval Europe) or the creation of society-​penetrating institutions and bureaucracies (far later). Adjudicating between different explanations for ‘the state’ is impossible when those explanations are focused on fundamentally different outcomes. Addressing this challenge requires greater specificity in what aspects of the state are being explained, or maybe avoiding the term altogether. Ferguson and Mansbach (1996), for instance, survey political organization and transformation over broad historical periods through the concept of a polity: any institution with a distinct identity, the capacity to mobilize people and resources, and some level of hierarchy. Or we could shift our focus to governance as a way to categorize different types of rule, including both states and other forms. The goal is not to discard state-​based terminology altogether, but instead to recognize the obstacles it may pose to bridging different research traditions. Changing the level of granularity of research may also help, by studying the specific governance techniques of different forms of political organization across diverse settings. Finally, a predominantly Eurocentric focus in state-​formation literature persists, in spite of being repeatedly acknowledged. The empirical scope of influential early studies such as Tilly’s or Spruyt’s was not implicitly Eurocentric—​those studies explicitly focused on the European case, without claiming that this single case was generalizable. This has given

176    Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger a particular cast to nearly all subsequent research, including a large body of work that has sought to apply those theories or concepts to non-​European regions, asking if Tilly’s basic premise (that war made states) applies elsewhere, or drawing on other arguments built on European models (e.g. Herbst 2000; Centeno 2002; Kiser and Cai 2003; Matin 2007). Much less common are efforts to turn the tables and ask what non-​European models or influences shaped European state formation. This has become more prevalent in reference to sovereignty and territory (see next sections), but some scholars have pointed to the role of colonialism and imperialism in shaping a purportedly European development of statehood (e.g. Holsti 2004). Finally, more examples are also gradually emerging that look entirely outside of Europe—​both for a causal model to apply and for an empirical target—​particularly in terms of the trajectories of postcolonial states (e.g. Chong 2010). In the end, because the very concept of the state has been defined in reference to this one contextually specific form of political organization, the framing of questions regarding the state seem to have been almost inevitably Eurocentric.

Sovereignty The concept of sovereignty is challenging: acknowledged as central to international politics and its study but, at the same time, contested among practitioners as well as scholars. Since an exhaustive review is impossible, this section considers how sovereignty has conventionally been operationalized in IR; how History, IR, and related fields have approached ‘systemic change’ through the lens of sovereignty; and how the Eurocentrism of early work has been critiqued and amended. For the rationalist tradition of IR, sovereignty has simply been assumed, if it is discussed at all—​much like statehood. Sovereignty is the baseline concept for what distinguishes international from domestic politics: the presence of political units that do not recognize any higher authority over them. In other words, the sovereignty of states is the corollary to the anarchy of the ‘modern’ international system. Yet there is a tradition of interrogating sovereignty, asking what defines sovereignty and if the concept varies across units, regions, or time. This includes a few key distinctions: internal versus external sovereignty, de jure versus de facto sovereignty, and juridical versus empirical sovereignty (Jackson 1999). This ‘sovereignty with adjectives’ approach has allowed for better descriptions of how political units are defined and related to one another. Some concepts overlap with the study of state formation (de facto or empirical sovereignty relates to state capacity), while other aspects are more system-​facing (sovereignty as mutual recognition or as international legal equality). Key interventions in IR include Barkin and Cronin’s (1994) emphasis on sovereignty as a variable rather than a constant, Thomson’s (1994) conceptualization of sovereignty as an institution defined by both constitutive and functional aspects, and Krasner’s (1999) differentiation between four dimensions of sovereignty. Krasner highlights the long history of strong states violating the sovereignty of weaker states, demonstrating that the notion of a ‘breakdown’ of sovereignty today imagines an era of untrammelled sovereignty that never existed. Yet this framework has been critiqued for being conceptually static, examining the violation of a set of fixed dimensions of sovereignty rather than interrogating their possible

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    177 transformation (e.g. Biersteker 2002). Other IR scholarship has focused directly on transformation, especially in ideas, including examinations of sovereignty through genealogy and social construction (Bartelson 1995; Biersteker and Weber 1996), and by interrogating ideas about recognition and legitimacy (Holsti 2004; Bukovansky 2002). These studies shed light on sovereignty as a contested yet distinctively ‘modern’ concept that is deeply embedded in contemporary political practices and debates. The challenge of examining sovereignty historically—​especially when moving out of Europe’s recent past—​is that the actors themselves did not use the term, and attempting to find cognate words can mask fundamental differences (Costa Lopez et al. 2018). This means that the search for ‘violations’ of sovereignty in eras when the concept did not exist can be problematic. Moreover, the concept of sovereignty as absolute non-​intervention did not consolidate until recently, and sovereignty has always involved responsibilities as much as negative rights (Glanville 2014). The emergence and transformation of sovereignty has been studied at different levels of granularity, including sovereignty as a systemic property, its manifestation in specific ideas and practices, and tracing sovereignty as a means of debunking the ‘myth’ of Westphalia. One line of scholarship has investigated the evolution of sovereignty in terms of the international (or state) system and systemic change. Particularly for the juridical and external aspects of sovereignty like mutual recognition and legal equality, these are practices of the system as a whole, rather than of any individual state or unit. For example, foundational English School studies like Bull (1977) and Wight (1977) recognize the historical transformation of the international system, highlighting how system-​wide features, including shared norms or identities, have emerged and changed over time. This explicitly avoids the assumption of a single, eternal form of international organization, but it has sometimes implied a teleological ‘evolution’ of the international system toward modern sovereignty. Constructivist studies have focused on the ideas and practices that define the international system and thereby have challenged the assumption that politics has always been constituted by sovereign states interacting in anarchy. For example, Reus-​Smit (1999) argues that that the state system is defined by a ‘constitutional structure’ of ideas; when those have changed the system has changed. Philpott (2001) traces the emergence of the modern concept of sovereignty, and thus the state system defined by that concept, to changes in ideas during the Reformation.4 Others have highlighted the role played by ideas about nationalism (Hall 1999), self-​determination (Spruyt 2005), or individual rights (Reus-​Smit 2013). An important result has been a debunking of the ‘myth’ of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia as a seminal moment in the emergence of sovereignty and the modern state system. The texts of these treaties, the negotiations leading up to their signing, and the ideas and practices in which they were embedded all fail to evince any sign of ‘modern’ sovereignty, statehood, or the practices of the international system (Rosenberg 1994; Croxton 1999; Osiander 2001; Teschke 2003; Nexon 2009, ­chapter 8). While demonstrably false, this myth has continued to be deployed for disciplinary purposes, allowing scholars of post-​1648 international politics to argue that they can ignore systemic change (De Carvalho et al. 2011). Challenging Eurocentric interpretations of sovereignty and systemic change has taken various forms. Some studies have applied hypotheses or concepts from European narratives to other regions, but others have attempted to define their arguments or questions without reference to European models. Yet decentering Europe in the study of sovereignty or

178    Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger systemic change can be challenging when, again, the very concepts that define the inquiry emerged out of a specific European context. One route has been to examine various forms of interaction among diverse political entities, without framing those interactions in terms of sovereignty. This could involve simply looking for ‘international systems’ or their analogues in different regions and eras, such as precolonial Africa (Warner 2001) or classical China (Zhang 2001). Hui’s (2005) comparison of early modern Europe with Warring States-​era China demonstrates the contingency of principles seen as universal when only examined in the European context, such as balance of power. The push against Eurocentric approaches has also involved looking not for analogues to the modern state system but instead for alternatives that functioned in fundamentally different ways, with diverse organizing ideas and practices. For example, Kang (2010) shows that the tribute system in East Asia involved stable hierarchical ordering, based on symbolic practices as much as on material power. Other studies have revealed similar variety in systemic organization in non-​European contexts (e.g. Ringmar 2012; Mackay 2016; Pardesi 2017; Neumann and Wigen 2018). Phillips and Sharman (2015) demonstrate that the early modern Indian Ocean region exhibited a durable system of diverse, rather than uniform, interacting units. Another move away from a Eurocentric approach has been to interrogate the conventional narrative that the modern system emerged entirely internal to Europe and then was imposed or imitated elsewhere. Colonialism and imperialism, in other words, have conventionally been either ignored or treated as processes whereby European powers decolonized and ‘admitted’ new states into the system upon independence (e.g. Bull and Watson 1984). Instead, critical IR scholarship has pointed out that the interaction of colonial and European spaces was essential to the emergence not only of global interconnectedness but also of sovereignty and the European state system itself (e.g. Keene 2002; Adelman 2006). Other studies have shifted the focus outside of Europe entirely, including finding patterns of colonial expansion and domination in other early modern regions, such as China or India (e.g. Hostetler 2001; Phillips 2014). Critical historians of international law have also emphasized the interaction between colonialism and the development of the modern international legal system, particularly in the expansion to the Americas (e.g. Anghie 2005; Benton 2009; Aalberts 2014; Becker Lorca 2014; Pitts 2018). By examining specific legal and political practices in non-​European spaces, these studies also demonstrate the value of a more granular analytical approach.

Territory Although the concept of territory is constantly deployed in IR discussions (territorial state, territorial sovereignty, territorial conflict, and so on), it is rarely defined and interrogated directly. What, then, is territory? It is not simply land, nor is it a feature of geography. Creating a territory is a political strategy of control, involving the delimitation of authority by spatial boundaries (Sack 1986). As Elden argues in his historical survey of the emergence of the concept, ‘the term territory became the way used to describe a particular and historically limited set of practices and ideas about the relation between place and power’ (2013, 6–​7). In other

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    179 words, territory is a specific form of spatial political control. This narrower conceptualization of territory ties the concept to modernity, but that is exactly Elden’s point: territory is a modern idea and practice, not something that has always existed in its current form. Highlighting the uniquely modern nature of territory is useful, because it is one of the key elements that separates contemporary states and sovereignty from earlier forms of political organization. ‘Early states’ in ancient Mesopotamia, for example, exhibited centralized political authority (Scott 2017), but those ‘states’ did not take on the spatial form we are familiar with today. The territorial state is something distinct, and separating out and explaining that territorial element—​as History and IR scholarship has increasingly done, particularly with studies of specific practices of territorialization—​can yield a more fine-​grained analysis of state formation and the emergence of political modernity. During the post-​1945 growth of IR as a discipline, territory was rarely examined directly. Agnew (1994) suggests that IR theory fell into a ‘territorial trap’, assuming that political rule has always been defined by the territorial exclusivity of modern state borders and thereby ignoring processes of globalization and fragmentation that have long existed (see also Taylor 1994). Constructivist studies later brought this concept back into focus, including Kratochwil’s (1986) discussion of boundaries and territoriality, and Ruggie’s (1993) push to explicitly interrogate the territorial nature of modern politics. Ruggie notes the contrasts among territorial rule defined by clear boundaries, non-​spatial forms of rule over persons, and spatial claims that are not exclusive or fixed (i.e. nomadic movements). Other research has demonstrated that sovereignty in international politics is defined not only by recognition or legal equality but also by the territorial organization that power has taken (Murphy 1996; Caporaso 2000; Holsti 2004; Kahler and Walter 2006; Kadercan 2015). For many of these arguments, the essential point has been to show that today’s territorial structure of politics can potentially change, because territory and authority have not been fixed historically. Building on these various traditions, studies have examined particular aspects of the history of territory. One line of inquiry has been into the territorialization of rule in early modern Europe, focusing on practices and institutions as well as on ideas. This has taken place in History (Sahlins 1989; Maier 2016), as well in historically focused IR, at diverse levels of granularity. Larkins (2010), for example, delineates the change in territoriality from medieval to early modern European political organization. Other studies have focused on the role of particular representational or governance tools, such as cartography, in both depicting and instantiating the territorial form of statehood (Biggs 1999; Strandsbjerg 2008; Branch 2014). Historical IR research has also sought to specify exactly how borders were made linear in practice, rather than simply in representations or in ideas (Goettlich 2019). These types of studies demonstrate that following the particular thread of territory can reveal different processes and chronologies of state formation and systemic change than those that are emphasized in studies focusing on centralization, bureaucratization, or extraction—​ examining the form that rule takes, in addition to its capacity or depth. As with the study of the state and sovereignty, most of the early work on territory has focused, implicitly or explicitly, on European history. Territory is a more recent focus for IR, and the moves to expand beyond the European context are in some ways less extensive than with regard to the other two concepts. There is, again, the challenge of taking a concept that has been defined in terms of its particular trajectory in European history and applying it elsewhere. Nonetheless, studies have asked about the territorialization of political rule or identity in non-​European settings (e.g. Thongchai 1994). Others have taken an approach

180    Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger similar to studies of colonialism and European sovereignty, noting how events and processes outside of Europe were integral to the emergence of territorial ideas and practices (e.g. Kayaoglu 2007; Branch 2012; Herzog 2015). Yet the exploration of non-​European spatial-​ power relations and institutions is an area ripe for continuing study, one that scholarship in Global History—​which investigates spatial alternatives and the production of space through transnational practices and connections—​is well placed to address (Conrad 2016).

Critiques and Future Directions The rest of this chapter outlines four overarching critiques and avenues for future research: studying state, territory, and sovereignty as distinct yet interrelated outcomes and processes; overcoming the Eurocentric bias inherent in these concepts; addressing the twin problems of anachronism and generalizability; and focusing on the material manifestation of practices. First, scholars need to identify more explicitly which of the three overlapping concepts—​ state, sovereignty, or territoriality—​they are investigating, and how these concepts are connected in their research. There is significant but often unremarked variation in the historical evolution of each, but scholars are often unclear which they are explaining. As a result, studies speak past each other, for instance when an explanation of state centralization presents as its foil a study of the emergence of linear territorial boundaries. Such mistaken opposition overlooks the fact that changes in state, sovereignty, and territory may be subject to diverse causal dynamics. Of course, the three concepts are never completely discrete. Instead of conflating them, however, scholars should trace how they evolve and interact, including by rethinking the granularity of their research. For example, while earlier work in historical IR investigated broad changes leading to the evolution of the sovereign territorial state (e.g. Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994), more recent work has investigated territorialization, state formation, and sovereignty as distinct yet interrelated practices (e.g. Keene 2002). One potentially useful framework for delineating diverse processes and outcomes while still noting their connections is the concept of an assemblage, constituted by diverse interwoven elements (e.g. Sassen 2006; Carroll 2006). Another useful route would be to focus on practices, especially in more fine-​grained analysis. In addition to the growing literature on the ‘logic of practices’ in international politics (Adler and Pouliot 2011), there are long traditions of studying particular practices like diplomacy (e.g. Mattingly 1955; Der Derian 1987). This could suggest new interactions, such as those between the sovereign-​equality-​constituting practices of diplomacy and the territorializing practices of boundary making. Second, more studies are needed that try to overcome the Eurocentric bias and framing of the most widely cited scholarship in historical IR. For many studies, Eurocentrism is not an implicit oversight but instead reflects a conscious choice about what to explain: a particular form of something (state, sovereignty, or territory) that is purported to have emerged in Europe. Other studies have focused on regions outside of Europe and, more recently, have asked questions that are not framed by the European example. Yet the field as a whole has been slow to move away from Europe as a case, as a foil, or as a source of hypotheses.

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    181 Even when findings reveal the importance of non-​European dynamics, they are sometimes ignored or not incorporated into the broader discussion. Moreover, as Bilgin (2008) points out, recognizing and addressing Eurocentrism is not just about looking ‘outside the West’ for cases but also about asking questions and applying concepts that are not framed by Western history (and contemporary readings of it). This does not mean, however, that scholarship should drop European concepts and framings entirely. Concepts like the state, sovereignty, and territory not only constitute the ‘modern’ international system; they also speak to broader theoretical debates. Thus, historical scholarship should develop alternative vocabularies, but in conversation with these core concepts. One promising approach is to draw on a growing body of research in History and related fields on the ‘global early modern’ (see the chapters on ‘Global sources of international thought’ and ‘early modernity’ in this volume). For example, Hostetler (2001) looks at early modern Qing China and sees processes of expansion, territorialization, and colonialism that parallel what some contemporary European polities were doing. The importance of connections between world regions during this period could also be highlighted (e.g. Neumann and Wigen 2018). Thus, instead of asking if specific theories of European state formation or systemic change ‘apply’ to other regions, we can consider how the increasing interactions between regions during this period shaped global politics, including the development of states, sovereignty, and territory—​both within Europe and outside of it. This includes investigations of imperial and colonial settings, which highlight the fragmented and often de-​territorialized nature of sovereign political authority outside of Europe (Armitage 2004; Benton 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Stern 2011; Phillips and Sharman 2015). Another route to address Eurocentrism is to build on a tradition of looking outside of Europe for the origins of modern (and supposedly European) political ideas, institutions, and practices. Focusing on the expansion to the Americas as constitutive of modernity is one example (Mignolo 1995), as is Hobson’s (2004) research on the explicitly non-​European roots of political modernity. The recent emphasis on the nineteenth century as an important period of systemic transformation can also be framed in global, rather than European, terms (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Osterhammel 2014). Indeed, historians often study local events and processes in the context of global flows and transformations (Conrad 2017). Drawing on this approach, however, requires a shift in granularity. Instead of only producing macro-​level studies of global transformations, IR scholarship also needs to study their local effects and implications. IR scholars should also draw directly on work by non-​Western scholars and investigate how their views and perspective pertain to modern conceptions of the state, sovereignty, and territory (e.g. Shilliam 2010; see also this volume’s chapter on ‘Global Sources of International Thought’). For example, Sakar (1919, 400) argued that ‘The conception of “external” sovereignty was well established in the Hindu philosophy of the state’. This might reveal similarities between European and non-​European political practices, and that Europe’s historical experience was less exceptional than IR scholarship suggests. Including thinkers from outside of Europe into historical IR scholarship would also contribute to globalizing IR and would, in the words of Acharya and Buzan (2019, 6), ‘open a debate . . . about how and why it needs to make the transition from being mainly West—​and indeed Anglosphere—​ centric, to being truly global’. Third, historical scholarship needs to address the twin problems of anachronism and generalizability: the possible inapplicability of contemporary concepts to earlier historical

182    Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger periods and the challenge of drawing lessons from history for contemporary politics. In contrast to the first wave of historical IR scholarship, recent studies have begun to focus less on generating implications for today. Although forcing all historical scholarship to speak to contemporary politics can be unhelpful, it is useful to continue to seek appropriate generalizable findings while avoiding anachronism. And addressing this problem, in turn, has important implications for the granularity of historical research. One potential route to avoid anachronism is to hew as closely as possible to the language and concepts of the time in question. This approach makes comparison between cases difficult, but it still allows scholars to explain important historical processes and events. Another route, one that prioritizes generalizability, is to focus on mechanisms that are general enough that they avoid being anachronistic. Nexon’s (2009) study of early modern Europe, for example, explicitly proposes and tests mechanisms that rely on broad analytical concepts and categories, rather than more historically contingent ideas such as sovereignty, statehood, or anarchy. Finally, a promising new area of inquiry is the materiality of states, sovereignty, and territory. The causal factors and mechanisms explored in the literature reviewed previously vary widely, ranging from material-​focused studies of war-​making and trade to ideas-​focused explanations emphasizing conceptual changes. In most cases, however, the outcome being explained is largely about ideas, practices, and institutions: the state as an institution, sovereignty as a set of concepts and practices, and territoriality as a collection of spatial ideas and strategies. Yet these conceptual outcomes also have important though largely unexplored material corollaries: for example, material instantiations of state capacity, physical means of diplomatic exchange and recognition, and the tangible effects of territorialization in border construction and maintenance. Modernity itself rests on the material foundation of technologies and infrastructures as much as on ideas. Materiality has never really been absent from these discussions, but more cross-​ disciplinary conversations between IR and fields like Science and Technology Studies (STS) would be productive. Carroll’s (2006) study of state formation, for example, considers the importance of material culture and sociotechnical systems for the state, not just as a driver of centralization but as a part of what defines a state as centralized and bureaucratic. Other studies, particularly from History and STS, have engaged with different sociotechnical and material elements (Guldi 2012; Mukerji 2010). Territory also lends itself to this type of analysis, given that modern territoriality involves not only ideas and practices but also material representations (maps) and infrastructures (demarcated borders). Focusing on materiality also generates new insights into how state, sovereignty, and territory intersect in day-​to-​day practices. Assessing the current discussion of the state, sovereignty, and territory, a lot has been accomplished since the last direct review of these concepts by Biersteker in 2002. Studies have proposed new categories of explanation for state formation and systemic change, increased the focus on the territorial aspect of modernity, and begun drawing more—​and more deeply—​on non-​European histories. Yet there is still much to be done. The Eurocentric conception of modernity and the emphasis on European cases, concepts, and causal processes demands further correction. Exploring diverse levels of granularity also remains a challenge, especially bridging broad theories and historical narratives to specific processes, mechanisms, and cases. One does not have to privilege microfoundations to see that many of these debates could use an injection of more fine-​grained analysis.

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    183

Notes 1. Nearly two decades ago, Biersteker (2002) provided an overview of the IR literature on ‘State, Sovereignty, and Territory’. This chapter: 1) adds coverage of the IR literature that has been published on these concepts since then, 2) brings in more work from outside the confines of IR and 3), shifts the historical focus from the twentieth century to earlier periods. 2. For recent commentary see Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg (2017). 3. Abramson (2017), for example, only compares economic factors with war-​ making pressures. 4. The discussion of Philpott (2001) in existing literature demonstrates the challenge of specifying the outcome being explained by particular studies. While this book is often positioned as an ideational foil to economic or war-​making state-​formation theories (Tilly, Spruyt, and so on), Philpott actually seeks to explain a systemic principle of interaction, not state capacity or the state as an organizational form.

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chapter 13

Dipl omac y Linda Frey and Marsha Frey Although scholars disagree about the origins of diplomacy, they do concur (a rarity) on the necessity of diplomacy for relations among peoples. Diplomacy was universal in that it was a prerequisite for relations, but also granular in that the particulars differed over space and time. Many of the customs and practices of diplomacy such as the reception accorded envoys, the individuals selected, and the privileges remained intensely granular; they differed greatly not only in time but also from society to society. Nonetheless, certain constants remained. Diplomats were accorded basic protections that later evolved into diplomatic privileges and immunity. Over time, envoys changed from being ad hoc in the Ancient and Middles Ages to becoming permanent in the Renaissance. The ancient and medieval practice of relying on multiple envoys as well as proxenoi was abandoned. Rulers’ dependence on priests in the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance periods shifted as well to a dependence on lawyers and professional envoys, and became what many view as modern. Still, differences persisted in the privileges accorded to diplomats. The quarrels over precedence which bedeviled ancient and early modern states were not resolved until 1815 and 1818. Governments were able to eliminate abuses such as droit du quartier and asylum, and practices such as employing foreigners as envoys. By the early modern period, states increasingly granted envoys immunity for acts committed during but not before their embassies as they had in the past, but even then, questions arose over the extent of the envoys’ inviolability. States’ increasing reliance on law and reciprocity rather than religion or custom was also seen as the mark of a modern society, as was the increasing stress on a functional justification for diplomatic immunities. Differences among states, nonetheless, persisted. Ultimately, such granularity impeded negotiations and increased the strains on the system.

Preliterate Societies Before the written record, different peoples valued envoys and accorded them basic protections. Each area developed culturally specific principles. In preliterate peoples the representatives wore some sign of their status. Preliterate societies had a rudimentary system of communication made possible by the mandate of hospitality towards strangers. (Numelin

Diplomacy   189 1950, 139). These early systems of diplomatic relations had certain features such as reciprocity, the giving of gifts, competition for status, hospitality, ritual, feasting, and the exchange of women (Cohen 2001, 25). Diplomats were valued and protected by reciprocity, sheltered by hospitality, sanctified by religion. They played a vital role in bringing peace. The tradition of employing priests as envoys buttressed their sacrality as did hospitality, public opinion, and customary law. From the beginning, diplomacy was plagued by disputes about ceremonial because the diplomat represented the power and the prestige of the sender (Sinor 1997, 350).

Ancient Near East Still, there was a significant gap between these preliterate societies and the literate societies of the ancient Near East which witnessed the beginnings of a system of law and protocol and some argue the first ‘international system known to us’ (Cohen and Westbrook 2000, 4). Cohen sees a ‘continuous ‘Great Tradition’ of diplomacy in the ancient world stretching from the cuneiform civilizations of Mesopotamia down to classical Greece and Rome’ (Cohen 2001, 23). Some have argued that ‘many of the rules and principles . . . [that governed] the relations of civilised states were already established some four centuries earlier’ (Munn-​ Rankin 1956, 68–​110) when a number of confederations dominated the area of Syria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and the lands east of the Tigris. The relationships among them invoked kinship, fraternity (equality), or vassalage in terms of ‘father’ and ‘sons’ (Munn-​ Rankin 1956, 78). These peoples negotiated and ratified treaties with elaborate rituals. They also engaged in arbitration and mediation and exchanged letters and gifts. Experienced men were sent on ambassadorial missions, although they were ad hoc. Interstate relations were governed by certain conventions which were believed to be created by divine sanction. This intense diplomatic activity ended with the advent of hegemonic empires such as Assyria, Babylonia, Achaemenid Persia, and Alexander the Great.

Greece In this framework, Greece inherited a system that had already evolved, whose basic assumptions undergirding diplomacy were passed down albeit in embryonic form. Entrance into the international system and recognition necessitated the acceptance of certain norms and rituals. The Greeks were united by blood, language, and religion; those outside those boundaries were by definition ‘barbarians’ (Wolpert 2001, 71–​88). The Greeks formed alliances and leagues to implement their strategic interests and fought wars, but internal considerations, including the importance of autonomy and autarky limited their options. The Greeks never developed a professional diplomatic system. Three groups of individuals served interstate relations: heralds, envoys, and proxenoi. The proxenos of Greece, a local citizen, would help and represent the citizens of another state when they came to the area. The foreign state would grant him the status of guest-​friendship and certain privileges. The heralds who carried a staff were thought to be under divine protection; divine sanctions reinforced inadequate human deterrents. Heralds carried messages and requests

190    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey and issued pronouncements. When war ensued, heralds were exchanged. That very exchange was often thought to mean a state of war. Once war began, heralds obtained permission to recover the dead and the wounded from the battlefield and secured a safe-​conduct for envoys who negotiated or advocated. The sacred status of the herald who delivered his messages orally was an innovation of the Greeks. Immunity for heralds was pivotal to maintain communication; it was reinforced by reciprocity, buttressed by sanctions, and ultimately enshrined in law. Diplomats as such had to rely on safe conducts and the tradition of hospitality. Truces and treaties often stipulated that such protection be accorded. The Greeks did not even have a technical term to denote envoy. The envoys, often two, three, five, or even ten men, remained amateurs selected from prominent members of the polis and dispatched on missions of short duration.

Rome The Romans introduced much of the legal scaffolding, both vocabulary and practices, that created the international system. Through her diplomacy and her military might, Rome forged an empire. In the early days, Rome existed in a ‘multi-​polar anarchy . . . international law was minimal and in any case unenforceable’ (Eckstein 2006, 1). Engaged in a grim struggle for survival in an exceptionally violent and cruel world, the republic of Rome became a hegemonic power. This harsh environment could not but influence the culture of Rome and in turn its diplomacy. The very survival of Rome, a small village on the Tiber, was dependent on creating a diplomatic system, on forging alliances with neighbouring states and exchanging envoys. Their inherent distrust of strangers is reflected in the language; in ancient Latin the word for stranger peregrinus was synonymous with that for foe, hostis (Egger 1866, 171). Only later did hostis come to mean a belligerent or one at war with Rome (Campbell 2001, 4). The Romans developed a language that mirrored their concern with various types of negotiated agreements (Campbell 2001, 2). To underscore their importance, many were inscribed on bronze or stone tablets and displayed in prominent political or religious places. Rome reached out to its allies and integrated them into the Roman world. Rome shared a common religion and a common language with her neighbors which expedited the forging of a community. After the conquest of Italy, Rome reached beyond the Mediterranean and became involved in protracted negotiations with other states. Rome was forging an international community and an international law. Although the term ius gentium did not refer to international law as it did later, Rome recognized certain legal principles, such as bellum iustum and pax deorum. Diplomacy was also inextricably linked with good faith (fides Romana). Early Romans negotiated by means of the institution of fetials, a semi-​priestly body of 20 men drawn from noble families who served both the gods and the state. That ius fetiale is often thought of as the beginning of international law and the beginning of just war theory. Rome’s stress on the inviolability of fetials (and later legates) underlay the European law on diplomatic immunity, dictated by necessity, reinforced by religious sanction, and ultimately incorporated into law. Age-​old traditions and rituals reaffirmed the sacred nature of the fetials. The fetials declared war and concluded peace by intricate rituals, shared by other Italic peoples. Just as the Greek herald carried a stave, the fetial wore the sacred herbs,

Diplomacy   191 verbenae, as a symbol of his sanctity. Dubbed praesides fidei, guardians of the faith, they wore white, the color of faith (Frey and Frey 1999, 39). These men were to ensure that the rituals surrounding war and peace were enacted correctly and that the war was just. They were also to invoke the favour of the gods. In the first stage, the denuntiatio, Rome sent the pater patratus (one who is made a father) with three other fetials to demand redress for some grievance, such as theft. If the offending state did not offer reparation within 30 days, Rome would act. The Senate then convened and decided on whether to declare war. The citizens ratified the decision. In the last stage, a messenger hurled a spear dipped in blood or pointed with iron into the land of the enemy. As the Romans extended their power beyond the Latium plain, some parts of the ceremony became difficult to enact. Nor did the new enemies share the fetial procedures. The Romans responded by adopting certain fictions such as declaring war on the nearest garrison of the enemy. In the shift from republic to empire some of these traditions disappeared. Still, what strikes the reader is the adherence to ancestral customs that had no practical function. For Ennius, the father of Roman poetry, ‘The Roman state stands firm on ancient customs and laws’ (Frey and Frey 1999, 44). Despite the extensive debate on Roman expansion, (Rich 1993; Hoyos 1998, 42), her success cannot be doubted. Rome mastered the Mediterranean and would go on to conquer much of the known world. That mastery was attributable not only to her military machine but also to a diplomatic strategy that made enemies allies and to an undoubted diplomatic brinkmanship based on that military might and the sheer power of their authority (Rich 1993, 38–​68). Not only the vocabulary but the traditions of Rome influenced subsequent diplomatic behaviour. Foreign delegations were entitled to safe conduct and hospitality and were conducted to the Senate to be heard. Only sovereign states could send representatives and those only on ad hoc missions. A professional diplomatic corps did not exist, and contacts were often initiated by provincial governors or envoys. The representatives the Romans sent were not plenipotentiaries in the modern sense; they had instructions but were to report to the Senate who could repudiate their decisions. The problems posed by distance meant that in practice they were accorded a great deal of initiative. The early fetials were increasingly replaced by legates, and these by Roman commanders (witness Caesar in Gaul). Diplomacy came to reflect the changing political fortunes of the state. Consistent procedures, meticulous rituals, and elaborate protocols reflected the importance of ritual, and of good faith, and of treaties. The Romans still relied on oaths to reinforce the idea of the fides Romana. They even handed over officials to the enemy whose agreements had been repudiated. Lurking behind the overtures was always the threat and strength of the Roman army. Rome primarily relied on verbal communication but written communication remained important; safe conducts were issued, protocols established, terms provided (Millar 1988, 358). Rome passed down a highly legalistic framework to subsequent generations. Within that framework, Roman legates enjoyed legal immunity for acts committed before a mission but not for acts committed during—​a tradition respected in the Middle Ages. Theorists subsequently cited Roman law to support ambassadorial immunity, although Roman law referred mainly to legates sent within the empire. The very extent of the borders of the Roman empire meant that Rome had to interact with a significant number of peoples. Negotiations had to be conducted and trade secured. Diplomacy was an important tool in that empire; one historian has noted that diplomacy ‘represented an attempt to achieve generally imperialistic goals without consuming the

192    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey strength of their expensive army’ (Campbell 2001, 19). Rome could achieve subordination by treaty.

Middle Ages During the Middle Ages, the Roman legacy, in practice and theory, lived on buttressed by the Christian ethic. The droit d’ambassade was essentially meaningless since anyone who had the resources could send and receive representatives. Both the organization and practices of the diplomatic corps were influenced by the extensive diplomatic network of the papacy. At this time, the rules governing diplomatic practice became more complex and more defined. Sovereigns, who seldom met each other because of security concerns, sent instead nuncii or legati. The nuncius or legatus was only a messenger, a ‘living letter’, likened to a magpie by the contemporary Italian jurist Azo (Queller 1984, 202–​203). He had no power to negotiate or conclude. Nor was he necessarily a citizen of the state which had sent him. Foreigners were often employed and even dispatched on reverse missions, sent to one and returned by that individual to the other principal. Given the inherent limitations of a nuncius, senders turned to procuration. That institution had more flexibility and had come down from Roman private law through canon law. A procurator could bind his principal if he acted within the terms of his mandate, another concept taken from Roman law. The procurator acted in his own name unlike the nuncius who acted in the name of his sovereign. Ratification was not required in private law nor juridically mandated in public practice. The wide latitude accorded procurators also posed a danger and when residents appeared, was restricted (Queller 1984, 204). Only later in the Middle Ages did an ambassador (literally ‘one who was sent’) appear; he could be either a nuncius or a procurator. The envoy, his entourage, and his goods enjoyed immunity. As in Rome, the representative was answerable for crimes committed during an embassy, but not crimes committed before. That rule was supported by canon law which emphasized both the inviolability and accountability of the envoy. Both laity and the clergy were part of a larger Christian community, an ecclesia that was indivisible like the garment of Christ. In a brutal and violent society, ‘elaborate ceremony helped to protect the fragile thread of civilized intercourse’ (Queller 1984, 211). Custom, law, and reciprocity, reinforced by religion, generally ensured the safety of those sent. A Christian ethos permeated diplomatic practice; religious feasts were chosen to signify the beginning or end of a truce, sanctified places to negotiate or conclude. Not surprisingly, clerics were often sent because they were men of learning and because their religious status gave them added protection. The benefit of clergy which exempted persons and places from the king’s jurisdiction provided the rationale for the right of sanctuary. Custom also reinforced the inviolability of envoys. As in the past, envoys wore special garb or carried a distinctive symbol such as a wand. Papal legates wore red to identify them. Roman law also protected the representatives, for the legal tradition lingered on and influenced the development of legal codes. Jurists borrowed legal phrases from that law and maintained its systematization. Roman law that stressed the power of the state reinforced the idea that diplomats were both protected by and answerable to the civil law. That law as interpreted by medieval theorists noted that the ambassador carried his own law with him (Frey and Frey 1999, 93). That belief ultimately influenced the idea of extraterritoriality. Safe-​conducts were

Diplomacy   193 extensively used. To secure such, the medieval world turned to heralds, who were inviolable. Pragmatism and reciprocity helped ensure the safety of the representatives. As the society became more literate, they relied more on safeguards of the law, which acted as the glue of the social fabric. A contemporary allegory described society as the body and law as the soul (Frey and Frey 1999, 108).

The Renaissance The Renaissance saw not only an increase in the tempo of diplomacy but also the establishment and increasing spread of a new and uniquely Western innovation, the resident ambassador. The revival of commerce and the arts and the development of the territorial state spurred diplomatic exchange, as did fears of war. In fifteenth-​century Italy, economic, commercial, personal, and even familial matters often assumed an international aspect. Elsewhere, as territorial states like Spain, France, and England consolidated their power, they adopted a more energetic foreign policy. Even Machiavelli, who had concluded that rulers must above all value military strength concluded that continuous diplomacy was necessary, especially for a prince who strove ‘to do great things’ (Berridge 2001, 543). A strong element of mutual distrust pervaded the diplomacy of the time when, for many, peace was a myth. As Petrarch wearily noted: ‘No peace lasts in our world, no wars ever end’ (Petrarch 1966, 197). Such convictions encouraged the establishment of permanent ambassadors who were more adept at gathering information. More and more ad hoc embassies were appointed for longer periods until the envoy resided continuously. In Venice in the thirteenth century, envoys rarely remained more than three or four months; by the fifteenth century this had stretched to two years, and by the end of the sixteenth was extended to three years. Allied or friendly powers, intent on facilitating joint action or cementing their friendship, had first exchanged residents. The resident ambassador visibly symbolized goodwill—​the principal in sending and the accredited party in receiving. This practice moved in every larger waves from the Mediterranean, northward and eastward across Europe (Mattingly 1937, 425). Before the end of the fifteenth century resident embassies were common in Italy and by the middle of the sixteenth century common throughout Europe. Their numbers continued to grow because the advantages of sending them outweighed the disadvantages of receiving them. Ultimately the establishment of resident embassies entailed a considerable expansion of embassy personnel and an explosive growth in the attendant immunities. The traditional and still more accepted view traces the beginning of resident embassies to fifteenth-​century Italy. These permanent residents differed functionally from their predecessors. In contrast to the ad hoc envoy the permanent envoy was sent ‘not to discharge a specific business and then return but to remain at his post until recalled’ (Mattingly 1971 [1955], 64). The emphasis shifted from negotiating to gathering and relaying information: ‘They ought to see everything, report everything, and look into everything’ (Weckmann 1952, 187). A resident ambassador came ‘pour rester’, to stay. As such he was often termed ordinarius in contrast to ad hoc envoys who came to be viewed as ‘extraordinarius’. The issuance of general credentials, the principal’s insistence on immediately replacing one envoy with another, and the conviction that the failure to replace an envoy would require an

194    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey explanation characterized the new diplomacy. Principals came increasingly to think that if a vacancy existed, a successor must be appointed. Such thinking heralded a new era. Though permanent embassies could give a ruler incontestable advantages, including most obviously a greater understanding and knowledge of the host’s country and policies, some were equivocal about their value. Bernard du Rosier, provost and later archbishop of Toulouse and Conradus Brunus, a lawyer and later assessor of the Reichskammergericht, both of whom had served as envoys, considered resident envoys little better than spies. Both concluded, in the words of Rosier, that it was better not to ‘suffer strangers to remain long with you’ (quoted in Frey and Frey 1999, 123). The astute Philippe de Commines, Louis XI’s adviser, warned the king of the dangers of resident envoys; staying at all in his view was staying too long. Louis XI wanted to avoid receiving Sforza’s envoy and diplomatically assured the duke that ‘the custom of France is not same as that of Italy’ (Kendall and Ilardi 1981, 3: xv). This ploy failed, however, and Sforza not only persuaded the king to accept a permanent envoy but also dissuaded him from reciprocating and sending French residents to Milan. At least in this case it was better to give than to receive. Nor was this an isolated sentiment. Because states only slowly and often reluctantly accepted the idea of resident envoys, they continued to rely on ad hoc envoys (Mallett 2001). The Renaissance also marked a departure in restricting the droit d’ambassade, using it as a litmus test of sovereignty, though as late as the sixteenth century subject cities routinely sent envoys to Venice. In spite of such concerns and the dominance of Roman law, which underscored the sovereignty of the state, the onrushing tide of new agents continued, and governments had to deal with a question that would bedevil them thereafter: the question of precedence. Courts elaborated rules regulating the receiving of ambassadors. How the host received an envoy reflected not only on the honor of the individual diplomat but also on that of his principal, causing what one papal master of ceremonies aptly referred to as ‘accursed difficulties over precedence’ (Behrens 1934, 647). Diplomats went to great lengths, or one might say more accurately depths, to establish their position and their precedence. Just as the number of diplomats expanded so too did the theorists. For Machiavelli and others, the ordinary rules of morality did not apply. Filippo Maria Visconti observed, a generation before Machiavelli, that though he valued his soul more than his body, he valued his state more than either. Political virtue was not to be confused with moral virtue. Louis XI advised his envoys: ‘They will lie to you, you lie as well to them’ (Quoted in Degert 1927, 15). The renowned humanist Ermelao Barbaro as well stressed that an ambassador should appear to be merciful, humane, faithful, religious, and upright but he should be prepared to be the opposite, echoing Machiavelli who thought that a diplomat must be thought to be a man of integrity. For Barbaro the first duty of the ambassador was to ‘do say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state’ (Quoted in Queller 1972, 655–​656). Such sentiments gave Renaissance diplomacy a reputation for deceit and trickery. At this time, rulers often employed envoys from other states as they did throughout the Early Modern period because it was more convenient, less expensive, and less hazardous. Predictably, problems ensued and some states such as Venice forbade their citizens from representing foreign powers. Rulers increasingly relied on envoys to negotiate for they enjoyed an inviolability that rulers did not. Moreover, questions of protocol and etiquette, and the attendant ceremonial and lavish spectacle, often encumbered rather than facilitated negotiations between sovereigns. On the few occasions that rulers did negotiate

Diplomacy   195 with one another they took elaborate precautions such as meeting on neutral ground and procuring safe conducts, not always respected. Rulers also sometimes relied on unofficial representatives in order to save money, to expedite agreements, or to negotiate in secrecy. This ploy, however, was fraught with danger for these individuals had little protection. Official representatives enjoyed inviolability in the Renaissance—​but only with the receiving state. Envoys faced dangers from unfriendly powers or brigands who could waylay, ransom, or kill them. The prudent envoy did not depart until he had received safe conducts from the states through which he passed, for without such he was considered a spy. Still, remarkably few envoys were intercepted or assaulted during the Renaissance because of the ever-​present threat of reprisal. Generally, the receiving state respected the envoy’s immunity for only then were relations possible. Because of the desire for, or the dread of, reciprocal action, the privileges extended to envoys were many and the offenses committed against them few. The most common violation of international law was the seizure of diplomatic documents. Envoys took elaborate precautions in sending and receiving mail; they hired couriers, and used special ciphers or codes. Yet another issue that arose with the spread of resident embassies was the inviolability of embassy grounds and the granting of asylum. When diplomats were accused of wrongdoing, not proceeding with the charges was often only a matter of courtesy which over time hardened into custom. Although resident embassies became more common during the Renaissance no immediate change occurred in the practice of granting diplomatic immunity. Problems such as the inviolability of embassy grounds, the immunity of staff, and the granting of asylum would later arise, but only as resident envoys became more widespread. Jurists would have to confront such challenges in the Early Modern period.

Early Modern In the Early Modern era, Europe evolved from a ‘a society of princes’ to ‘a system of states’ (Bély 1999) and the diplomatic network expanded. In the midst of this expansion the Reformation and the French Revolution challenged the international system. Although Mattingly was analyzing the effects of the religious wars, his statement on the corrosive effects of ideology could be equally made about the Revolution—​that ‘the clash of ideological absolutes drives diplomacy from the field’ (Mattingly 1971 [1955], 195–​196). Both the Reformation and French Revolution fractured the international order. During the Reformation bitter differences over religion deepened mutual hostility and shattered the bonds of the res publica christiana. Formerly territorial frontiers defined one’s enemies, now religion did as well. Catholics and Protestants divided Europe into two bitter irreconcilable camps (Mattingly, in Jensen 1974, 24). In a religiously divided Europe, both sides increasingly relied on non-​clerical diplomats. Religious fanaticism colored the era, and the diplomatic network in general contracted; many Protestants states refused to send envoys to Catholic ones and Catholic ones reciprocated. Some states, however, still felt the obligation to negotiate ceaselessly. Political considerations transcended religious ones (Jensen 1974, 24–​46). What made the fight so virulent was that it was fought from within. In this highly polarized Europe questions about ambassadorial immunities and privileges assumed a new importance, especially the contentious right of embassy chapels, which in

196    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey turn raised the larger issue of the inviolability of the embassy and the privileges of the entourage, especially the chaplain. Confessional bonds stretched the bonds of immunity. As religious hostility abated, the diplomatic network expanded. After 1648 the diplomatic corps grew exponentially, both geographically and numerically; new posts were created and others upgraded. (Horn 1961, 12–​41). International congresses increased in number and predictably ceremonial squabbles over issues such as precedence, the opening and closing of doors, the placement of stoves, the roundness of the table, and so forth proliferated (Horn 1961, 204–​216; Onnekink 2013, 62–​63). During the Westphalia negotiations, 167 plenipotentiaries convened, and the talks predictably dragged on for years. States also modernized and professionalized their diplomatic service, dividing envoys by rank. Elaborate and byzantine bureaucracies ensued. In 1713 the French minister of foreign affairs needed 20 coaches to transport himself and his entourage. Many of the theorists of the time underscored the professional nature of the diplomat such as Rousseau de Chamoy, L’Idée du parfait ambassadeur (1697) and Callières, On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes (1716) and ministers such as Cardinal Richelieu could plausibly contend that merit should be the chief criterion for a diplomatic post. In France, Jean-​Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Torcy created permanent repositories for diplomatic documents in 1710 and established an academy to train diplomats in 1712. Throughout Europe offices were established for corresponding with ministers. Traditional practices, however, persisted. In the United Provinces, key provinces routinely selected ambassadors for certain posts. Important missions were often entrusted to several individuals; predictably, difficulties ensued as these individuals often quarreled among themselves and differed on policy (Rowen 1986, 238–​256). As diplomats proliferated so too did theorists and lawyers. A virtual tsunami of publications flooded Europe on international law and diplomats: from 1648 to 1700 at least 94 new authors joined the ongoing debate over ambassadorial privilege and four others published new editions or new works. Seventeen anonymous tracts were published plus 136 editions of various tracts. By the eighteenth century the adherents of natural law (such as Emerich de Vattel) predominated but they were over time undermined by positivists (such as Georg Friedrich von Martens) who based law on the implicit or explicit consent of the states. Because of the growth of the diplomatic corps and their attendant entourages the question of diplomatic privilege, especially that of inviolability, assumed a new urgency. As territorial law grew, states proved reluctant to receive their own subjects as envoys and to grant them immunity from jurisdiction. Theorists and governments often successfully challenged and limited territorial privileges, in particular the droit du quartier and asylum. By the late eighteenth century most governments recognized an envoy’s exemption from criminal jurisdiction but not all recognized his exemption from civil jurisdiction especially in matters of debt. One of the most troublesome and persistent problems involved precedence and etiquette. The privileges of the envoys, buttressed by an aristocratic European code, were closely intertwined with the court society in which states manipulated ritual to increase their power. Louis XIV ordered his representative not to avoid conflict but to seek it in order to increase his gloire: ‘a reputation cannot be preserved without adding to it every day’ (Louis XIV 1970, 37). By defending and extending their privileges, ambassadors enhanced their sovereign’s reputation. Ambassadors played a key role in this theatre of power. Ambassadors had to fight, sometimes literally, for their privileges. ‘Like boxers in a clinch none of the various

Diplomacy   197 privileged groups dares alter its previous position in the slightest because each fears that it might thereby lose advantages’ (Elias 1982, 274).

French Revolution Diplomatic inviolability assumed a new importance in times of turmoil, especially the Reformation and the French Revolution. The revolution in particular challenged traditional assumptions and values. Revolutionaries criticized not only the old order but diplomacy itself. They attacked not only ceremonial and custom but also positive law. In part they echoed the philosophes who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century attacked not only the international system but also diplomacy which they derided as ‘the art of intrigue’ (Gilbert 1951, 255). The French revolutionaries saw the diplomatic system as an artifact of a regime that followed false ideals, and were unwilling to entrust their diplomacy to professional diplomats (Armstrong 1996, 384). The French revolutionaries saw themselves as soldiers fighting for a cause; in their struggle to subvert the old order they defied diplomatic conventions, traditional mores, and customary etiquette. French representatives distributed seditious propaganda and meddled in local affairs. Their opponents understandably feared that revolutionary diplomats might be spreading their subversive message (Armstrong 1996, 385)—​as they often were. The revolutionaries challenged Europeans’ assumption of a common diplomatic culture, of a universal diplomatic language, and most basically, an international diplomatic community (Frey and Frey 2018). Diplomats proved reluctant to engage in an international system they repudiated; they proved even more reluctant to negotiate with those who represented a system they derided and governments they deplored. Twenty-​three years of warfare ensued. Just as the revolutionaries had struggled against the international order, they found themselves enmeshed in it. France could not afford diplomatic isolation (Frey and Frey 1993, 706–​744). The ‘new diplomacy’ which had questioned the role and even the necessity for diplomacy, ‘the pest of the world’ (Frey and Frey 1999, 326) in Jefferson’s phrase, had been drowned out by expediency. When Bentham coined the phrase ‘international law’ in 1789 the transition from an international order based on universalist assumptions to one based on what has been termed the ‘anarchical society’, with its unique characteristics, was just beginning (Bull 1977, 35). Theorists no longer spoke of a law common to all nations but of a law between nations. The prevailing characteristics of international legitimacy had become national or popular. Technological and military superiority ensured that the Western legal tradition would dominate the expanded world. Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-​first centuries, the ‘European’ law of nations collided with other mutually exclusive, imperial, and fundamentally irreconcilable systems. The European system was based in theory on the equality of nations, however spurious, whereas others like the Chinese, were based on hegemony (Bull and Watson 1984; Gong 1984). As Europeans expanded across the globe, they brought with them the unique institution of permanent diplomacy and international law. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had increased international turmoil and exacerbated the problem of rank and the prickly issue of precedence. Before this era diplomats had to rely on usage, custom, or force to establish stature. Two congresses resolved the issue. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 agreed to recognize three classes of diplomats,

198    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey modified to four by the Congress of Aix La Chapelle in 1818 and to three by the 1961 Vienna Convention: 1) ambassadors, or nuncios, or heads of missions; 2) envoys, ministers, and internuncios; and 3) chargés d’affaires. Precedence was established by rank and within rank by date of official arrival.

Modern Era In the nineteenth century both jurists and statesmen agreed on the necessity of restricting diplomatic privileges but on little else, making reform impossible. Envoys were exempt from criminal jurisdiction, but not always from civil. The envoy’s immunity also extended to his family and official entourage, but not always to his unofficial one. Practice, however, varied widely. Both statesmen and jurists attacked the doctrine of extraterritoriality and some of the most flagrant abuses such as asylum. Those who attempted to defend extraterritoriality found themselves in an increasingly untenable and ultimately indefensible position, while theorists who stressed that diplomatic privileges could only be justified functionally became increasingly combative and ultimately successful. Most of these jurists, who belonged to either the Belgian or Italian school, eloquently argued that international law had not changed with the times: it was debris from the past which should be swept away. They repudiated the views of the positivists, who based present practice on past precedent. Influenced by the burgeoning nationalism of the nineteenth century and the French Revolution, they stressed the sanctity of the individual, and the importance of justice, and rejected the calculus of political interest. For jurists such as François Laurent, ‘the droit des gens should reflect the ineluctability of progress, the primacy of justice, and the inherent rights of the individual’ (Laurent 1880, 3: 10). Increasingly functionalism and reciprocity served as the basic parameters for diplomatic privilege, especially as the numbers employed mushroomed. In the modern era, the explosive growth of the diplomatic corps and their attendant entourages, as well as the elephantine growth of the bureaucracy, caused new problems, as did the expansion of international bodies and their staff such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. To give but one example, in Germany the diplomatic service employed from 1871–​80 a total of 692 diplomats but by 1901–​14, 3,041 (Cecil 1976, 113). In Great Britain in 1913, 543 individuals enjoyed diplomatic status, but by 1964 approximately 5,000 did (Frey and Frey 1999, 453–​454). The number of diplomats and staff multiplied in part because of the inherent nature of bureaucracies to expand rather than contract. Moreover, the rapid development of science and technology and the growing interdependence of the world meant that more and more matters fell within the diplomatic purview. Governments increasingly relied on specialists and hired military, financial, labor, scientific, and cultural attachés, to name but a few. At the very time that governments increasingly tried to restrict diplomatic privilege, the international order disintegrated, and international law eroded. The First and Second World Wars and various revolutions, notably Russian and Iranian, stand as milestones in the deterioration of the international order. The widespread variations in the privileges accorded diplomats created a confusing quagmire and to many underscored the necessity of codifying the international law on diplomatic immunity. Necessity more than anything else ultimately helped to ensure the passage and acceptance of a new code on diplomatic privileges and immunities; many states had become convinced of the necessity of forging a new consensus

Diplomacy   199 as they ultimately did in Vienna in 1961. There the functionalist, restrictive approach prevailed. For example, the convention conferred varying degrees of privileges on embassy personnel and their families and thus drastically reduced the army of privileged individuals. The diplomat and his family enjoyed immunity from criminal and in most cases civil and administrative jurisdiction. The attempt to codify the privileges accorded the personnel and representatives to international organizations did not fare as well. The first of these international organizations was established in 1804 but they grew in size and number and ballooned in the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War. In 1900, 30 existed and in 1978–​85, 378 (Frey and Frey 1999, 577–​579). Although a convention was held in Vienna in 1975 to codify the immunities of international officials, many states did not attend and even fewer ratified the final product. The convention failed because most regarded themselves as sending states, not hosts and thus were more disposed to expand rather than contract privileges and limit the power of the host. Predictably, few host states ratified it. By 1961, governments who both received and sent envoys could agree on the limitation of diplomatic privileges and immunities making the system more universal and more modern. The practices and conventions associated with diplomacy remained durable and universal perhaps because of their significance in international society. The introduction of permanent embassies and the modern expansion beyond a traditional corps did not fundamentally alter the code. Differing assumptions about the international system posed by the Reformation, the Revolution, and recent twentieth-​century developments did not alter the fundamental trajectory despite temporary challenges. Although in the modern era the diplomat’s position has improved because his privileges and exemptions have been codified since 1961, it has also become an increasingly dangerous world for diplomats who were often targeted by terrorists and revolutionaries. These attacks have mushroomed (Wilkinson 1986). Statistics paint a grim picture. In 1970, terrorists launched 213 attacks against diplomats, by 1980, 409. From 1971 to 1980, 48 embassies were taken over, including the seizure of the US embassy in Iran in 1979 (Frey and Frey 1999, 504–​526). For diplomats their job has become increasingly hazardous in a world not united but divided. The introduction of permanent envoys and the modern expansion beyond the traditional corps did not fundamentally alter the modern trajectory, nor did the differing assumptions about the international system posed by the Reformation, various revolutions, and the expansion of basically a European world order. The expansion of the international community has meant the inclusion of nations with different traditions and few common values. Law no longer serves a metaphor for the international community as it did in the past.

References Armstrong, D. 1996. Revolutionary Diplomacy. Discussion Papers no.23. Leicester: Leicester Diplomatic Studies Programme. Behrens, B. 1934. ‘Origins of the Office of English Ambassador in Rome’. English Historical Review 49(196): 640–​656. Bély, L. 1999. La Société des princes: XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Berridge, G. R. 2001. ‘Machiavelli: Human Nature, Good Faith and Diplomacy’. Review of International Studies 27(4): 539–​556.

200    Linda Frey and Marsha Frey Bull, H. 1977. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan. Bull, H. and A. Watson, eds. 1984. The Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Campbell, B. 2001. ‘Diplomacy in the Roman World (c. 500 BC–​AD 235)’. Diplomacy and Statecraft 12(1): 1–​22. Cecil, L. 1976. The German Diplomatic Service, 1871–​1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, R. 2001. ‘The Great Tradition: The Spread of Diplomacy in the Ancient World’. Diplomacy and Statecraft 12(1): 23–​38. Cohen, R. and R. Westbrook, eds. 2000. Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Degert, A. 1927. ‘Louis XI et ses ambassadeurs’. Revue historique 154(1): 1–​19. Eckstein, A. M. 2006. Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press. Egger, E. 1866. Etudes historiques sur les traités publics chez les grecs et chez les romains. Paris: A. Durand. Elias, N. 1982. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon. Frey, L. and Frey, M. 1993. ‘‘The Reign of the Charlatans is over’: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice’. Journal of Modern History 65: 706–​744. Frey, L. and Frey, M. 1999. The History of Diplomatic Immunity. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press. Frey, L. and Frey, M. 2018. The Culture of French Revolutionary Diplomacy: In the Face of Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, F. 1951. ‘The ‘New Diplomacy’ of the Eighteenth Century’. World Politics 4(1): 1–​38. Gong, G. 1984. The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horn, D. B. 1961. The British Diplomatic Service 1689–​1789. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoyos, B. D. 1998. Unplanned Wars: The Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Jensen, D. L. 1974. ‘French Diplomacy and the Wars of Religion’. The Sixteenth Century Journal 5(2): 23–​46. Kendall, P. M. and V. Ilardi, eds. 1970–​1981. Dispatches and Related Documents of Milanese Ambassadors in France and Burgundy, 1450–​1483, 3 vols. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Laurent, F. 1880. Droit Civil International, 5 Vols. Paris: Marescq. Louis, XIV. 1970. Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin. Translated and edited by P. Sonnino. New York: Free Press. Mallett, M. 2001. ‘Italian Renaissance Diplomacy’. Diplomacy and Statecraft 12(1): 61–​70. Mattingly, G. 1937. ‘The First Resident Embassies: Mediaeval Italian Origins of Modern Diplomacy’. Speculum 12(3): 423–​439. Mattingly, G. 1971 [1955]. Renaissance Diplomacy. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Millar, F. 1988. ‘Government and Diplomacy in the Roman Empire during the First Three Centuries’. International History Review 10(3): 345–​377. Munn-​Rankin, J. M. 1956. ‘Diplomacy in Western Asia in the Early Second Millennium B.C.’. Iraq 18(1): 68–​110. Numelin, R. 1950. The Beginnings of Diplomacy. Oxford: University Press. Onnekink, D. 2013. ‘The Treaty of Utrecht’. In Peace was Made Here: The Treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden, 1713–​1714, eds. R. de Bruin and M. Brinkman, 60–​69. Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag. Petrarch. 1966. Letters from Petrarch, ed. M. Bishop Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Diplomacy   201 Queller, D. 1972. ‘How to Succeed as an Ambassador: A Sixteenth-​ Century Venetian Document’. Studia Gratiana 15: 653–​666. Queller, D. 1984. ‘Diplomacy, Western European’. In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Strayer, 201–​214. New York: Scribner. Rich, J. 1993. ‘Fear, Greed and Glory: The Causes of Roman War-​Making in the Middle Republic’. In War and Society in the Roman World, eds. G. Shipley and J. Rich, 38–​68. London: Routledge. Rowen, H. 1986. John de Witt, Statesman of ‘True Freedom’. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sinor, D. 1997. Studies in Medieval Inner Asia. Farnham, England: Ashgate. Weckmann, L. 1952. ‘Les Origines des missions diplomatiques permanentes’. Revue générale de droit international public 56: 161–​188. Wilkinson, P. 1986. Terrorism and the Liberal State. Basingstroke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Wolpert, A. 2001. ‘The Genealogy of Diplomacy in Classical Greece’. Diplomacy and Statecraft 12(1): 71–​88.

chapter 14

Empi re Martin J. Bayly For decades empire occupied a ghost-​like presence in International Relations (IR). On one hand it was almost undetectable in many of the discipline’s canonical theoretical works. Though it may be a crude metric, there are no index references to ‘empire’ in Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979); John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001); Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999); or Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence (1977). On the other hand, empire haunts the disciplinary origins of IR and stalks the shadows of its deeper theoretical traditions. In recent years the ghost in the machine of IR has been brought to light. Historical IR has been at the forefront of a ‘re-​turn’ to empire in in the discipline. A more sympathetic engagement with history, notably the alliance of global historical sociologists with global history, has allowed the recovery of the long nineteenth century in the forging of the modern twentieth-​century international system with imperialism featuring prominently in this story (Buzan and Lawson 2015). As a result, a greater appreciation for the imperial origins of the modern international system now prevails, nuancing the idea of a twentieth-​ century transition from a world of empires to a world of states. Elsewhere, historians of international political thought, some influenced by the Cambridge School of contextualist intellectual historians, have more faithfully read the intellectual histories that gave rise to the modern IR discipline in the contexts of imperialism and colonialism, with attendant questions of race, gender, class, and civilizational hierarchies (Bell 2001, 2016; Buck-​Morss 2000; Keene 2002; Long and Schmidt 2005; Lowe 2015; Moloney 2011; Pitts 2009; Schmidt 2016; Steadman-​Jones 2007; Vitalis 2015). These moves have been aided by evolving trends in IR theory. Constructivism, with its apparently necessarily historical epistemological and ontological stance (Reus-​Smit 2008) offers one source, but so too post-​positivist ideas of subjectivity and representation which have excavated enduring (neo)imperial tropes of ‘development’ and the co-​constitution of north/​south identities allowing space for more granular studies of imperial subjectivities revolving around racist, gendered, or civilizational distinctions (Doty 1996; Sabaratnam 2017; Vucetic 2011). Finally, perhaps the most obvious source for a re-​turn to empire in IR have been events in world politics. Echoes of empire were heard in the Global War on Terror that followed the 9/​11 attacks (Ferguson 2009; Gregory 2004; Ignatieff 2003), but so too in the imperial nostalgia that accompanied ‘Brexit’ (D. Bell and Vucetic 2019); in Donald Trump’s apparently serious suggestion to buy Greenland

Empire   203 (Bender et al. 2019); in Vladimir Putin’s attempted territorial acquisitions in Ukraine, or the Chinese revival of Confucian concepts of Tianxia (all-​under-​heaven) (Callahan 2008); in the resettlement camps of Xinjiang, on the streets of Hong Kong, and in the valleys of Kashmir. The historical fact that empire has been the dominant form of political organization in world history is beginning to be reflected in the substantive focus of IR. This chapter surveys the contributions of this ‘re-​turn’ to empire in IR, before offering some reflections on the work yet to be done. Much existing work on empire and IR has demonstrated how global modernity, and by extension the modern international system, was built on the connections that empire forged. But empire rarely travelled alone. It was not a hermetically sealed political entity, but interlaced with multiple competing fields and forms of political action. An overemphasis on what empire is, what it does to the world, and how it should be distinguished from other polities, obscures the global entanglements that constituted imperial power. Treating empire in substantialist terms as a thing in itself potentially re-​embeds a unitary ontology, misreading empire as merely the state writ large or as a precursor to the nation-​state, perpetuating the notion that imperial and colonial forms of power are a thing of the past. Above all, it drowns out the voices and agency of those who were on the receiving end of empire and colonialism. Accordingly this chapter turns attention to more relational conceptions of empire; in particular those that illuminate the patterns of resistance that empire fostered. In so doing it calls for greater attention to the ways that international order was constituted through an historical struggle both against and within empire and imperial forms, whether forms of rule, knowledge, cultural forms, or institutional manifestations. Bringing the relational whole of empire to the fore is now an important next step in overcoming the analytical bifurcations between empire/​state, West/​ non-​West, and core/​periphery that continue to pervade IR’s analytical field of vision and buttress its enduring Eurocentrism.

Modernity in the ‘Re-​Turn’ to Empire One of the insights of historical IR is that our core disciplinary concepts—​state, sovereignty, territoriality, or governance, for instance—​do not move through time or across space in uniform fashion. Care must be taken therefore when establishing definitional terms. Empire is no different. A basic resemblance can be seen in the notion that empires are defined by some sort of effective control—​whether formal or informal—​by an imperial metropole over a subordinate periphery (Doyle 1986; Go 2011). This relationship of authority is hierarchical, and may be of a political, economic, or societal nature. Polities pursuing these authority relations may be described as engaged in practices of imperialism, encompassing a range of tactics, strategies, techniques or repertoires (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Go 2011, 7), including the establishing of colonies, or colonialism. Yet a cursory look at the historical trajectories of empire reveals that the nature of the relationship between centre and periphery shifted over time. European empires may have modelled themselves on the great empires of antiquity, but they rarely reflected this vision in practice. British imperialism in South Asia, for instance, began through the decentred ad-​hoc exploits of privateers—​notably the East India Company—​before being gradually consolidated under the British Crown. In other spaces within and beyond the British empire alternative arrangements of power were apparent.

204   Martin J. Bayly Whereas British India fell under the authority of a semi-​autonomous Government of India, French colonies, for instance, were generally centrally administered as départements of the French state. Complicating this time/​space variation in the practices of imperialism and colonialism is the fact that the definition of empire, colonialism, and imperialism is in itself historical. Imperialism emerged in the nineteenth century as a polemical and pejorative neologism to decry the military despotism of Napoleonic France (Steinmetz 2013a, 9–​10). Contemporary attempts by political scientists, sociologists, and some historians may privilege political authority, but earlier scholarship in 60s and 70s focused more on the political economy of empire. This was in part a legacy of earlier anti-​colonial, socialist, and Marxist critiques of imperialism as an economic system that began to emerge at the turn of the century (J. A. Hobson 1902). Such renderings remain a feature of development studies, dependency theory, and its critics. More recently, historical anthropology and sociology have interrogated the social form of empire and colonialism, building on the postcolonial turn in each of those disciplines (Asad 1973; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Go 2011). Accordingly colonialism does not necessarily imply a territorial or legal operation of power, but a form of social and ‘epistemic’ dominance and exclusion—​a definition that aligns more closely with early twentieth-​century anti-​colonial critiques of empire. Here hierarchies of imperial consciousness and knowledge come to the fore, particularly the racializing effects of colonialism on world politics (Anievas et al. 2015). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s recent global history of empire adds to the political structure of imperial polities their maintenance of distinction and hierarchy amongst those peoples they incorporate (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Cooper 2005). Once again, there is a move on from nineteenth century meanings of the term stressing colonization as the process of settling in, and establishing of, a (territorial) colony through conquest or purchase, leading to the seizure of sovereignty (Steinmetz 2013a, 10–​1). Modern understandings of colonialism and imperialism require neither territorial occupation, nor sovereign authority. A more historically and geographically variegated appreciation for empire and imperialism has challenged that most pernicious and misleading treatment of empire within IR: the tendency to view empire as the state writ large. But problematizing the unitary conception of empire begs a further question on therefore how to understand empire as an arrangement of power. Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright (2007) start from the question of order, distinguishing imperial systems from other varieties of order, including hegemonic or multipolar systems. Imperial systems are accordingly made up of a core-​periphery network structure in which indirect rule occurs through ‘heterogenous contracting’ within periphery segments. The core cuts different deals with multiple peripheral actors—​whether in the form of protection, resources, or symbolic authority—​and may ensure compliance by threatening to withdraw support in favour of others: a policy of ‘divide and rule’. This more historically mobile and relational understanding of empire as a form of political order reveal imperial configurations of power as an ongoing feature of contemporary world politics. IR theorists might also note the structural pluralism of this understanding of imperial order as nested in anarchic, hierarchic, and interdependent orders, again refuting a simple transition logic from a world of empires to a world of states. Imperial systems also challenge IR’s sometimes narrow conception of unit interactions highlighting empire’s engagement with multiple forms of political authority. Here, global

Empire   205 history assists. The rise of the modern world system occurred amidst multiple forms of ‘state’, some of which were navigated, or even established by empires. This includes those states where power was diffused amongst ruling groups (here Britain and the US would be examples); contested states of certain Buddhist of Muslim societies for instance; corporate states, such as the Hudson Bay Company; states in the hands of lineage heads or members of age-​sets; and family-​based mobile peoples with memories of, and ambitions for, state power (C. A. Bayly 2004, 254). Accordingly, one of the findings of the return to empire in historical IR has been the manner in which empires navigated a multiform political landscape, by flirting with peripheries of established powers, or stitching polities together often in a haphazard manner (Phillips and Sharman 2015). Rarely did empires resemble a coherent whole, more often an assemblage of political forms parasitic upon pre-​existing polities including the faded remnants of past empires. But unit heterogeneity should not imply equality of status. As hybrid entities, empires rested upon systems that differentiated and ranked human collectives with world-​ordering effects. Empire studies within IR have therefore given further analytical purchase to the ‘hierarchy turn’ in IR theory (J. M. Hobson and Sharman 2005; Lake 2009; Zarakol 2017). As Janice Bially Mattern and Ayse Zarakol highlight, belonging ‘at no particular level of human social life . . . [hierarchies] can, in principle, cut analytically across and through the levels of analysis that have locked IR into an inter-​state approach to world politics’ (2016, 630). Accordingly, hierarchical orders may be felt ‘all the way down’, with imperial polities provide a resource for the study of this. In particular they offer examples of the ‘productive’ logic of hierarchies—​the production through bodily activity and discursive regimes of particular kinds of agents, with particular capacities for action, within a particular space of world politics (Mattern and Zarakol 2016, 640–​643). The discourse of ‘standards of civilization’; the categorization and ranking of races; the delineation of caste, tribe, clan, and religion; all offer practices of empire that stratified societies, providing a blanket justification for the continuation of imperial rule, with implications for international order (Dirks 2011; Gong 1984; Manchanda 2020; Strang 1996). The location of civilizational hierarchies in international law offers one demonstration of how such distinctions have structured diplomatic, legal, and military practices (Simpson 2009; Spanu 2019).

Granularity in the ‘Re-​Turn’ to Empire At a more granular level, attention has been paid to the governing practices through which status hierarchies were enacted, and constructed ‘on the ground’. Edward Keene’s study of ‘divided sovereignty’ has echoes in Lauren Benton’s ground breaking work on the geography of law (Benton 2010; Keene 2002). Her observation on empire’s spaces being ‘politically fragmented; legally differentiated; and encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders’ (Benton 2010, 2) exposes the lie of blanket imperial territorial control. Such work offers rich insights for IR, in its more complex rendering of sovereignty as not simply divided, but also ‘layered’, hybridized, negotiated, and subject to practices of ‘legal posturing’, by so-​called ‘men on the spot’ and their interlocutors. The geographic imagery of empire becomes less one of shaded pink areas on maps and more ‘configurations of corridors and enclaves, objects of a disaggregated and uneven sovereignty’ (Benton 2010, 30) with

206   Martin J. Bayly implications for how empires perceive territory, threat, and their governing responsibilities. In Ann Stoler’s terms, these ‘imperial formations’ thrived on territorial ambiguity and proliferated a series of legal exceptions that helped justify and advance the projects and violence of imperial agents (Stoler 2006). Imperial studies in IR remind us that linear borders did not exhaust the space-​making consequences of empire. Imperial formations proliferated under the legal, cartographic, and imaginative spheres of empire. Frontiers (Condos 2017; Hopkins 2020; Gardner 2021), archipelagos (Mulich 2020), and maritime networks (Alexanderson 2019; Mawani 2018) were all features of imperial polities, frequently stoking their most vivid paranoias as spaces beyond the realm of the metropolitan gaze. Indeed, viewing empire from these spaces, and from the perspectives of Europeans who ventured there, highlights some of the mythology, fear, and weaknesses of imperial power (M. J. Bayly 2016). Amanda Cheney’s work on the Tibetan frontier, for instance, points to the linguistic practices that ensnared colonial officials in a legalistic language they failed to fully grasp, with enduring legacies for the territorial ambiguity of that space (Cheney 2017). These findings leave IR’s traditional comfortableness with the territorial Weberian state seemingly inadequate (Agnew 1994; Barkawi and Laffey 2002). Indeed they confound presumptions at the basic level of interstate intercourse. The pooling of sovereignty amongst imperial powers at treaty ports such as Shanghai offers one instance of the imperial foundations of interdependence. Territorial ambiguity disturbs comfortable narratives we have over inter-​imperial competition too. The classic great power rivalry of the British and Russian empires over Central Asia is conventionally narrated somewhat wistfully as the ‘Great Game’. But a more granular perspective reveals the uncertainty that both empires had over what was regarded as terra nulius, or a patchwork of ‘barbarous’ and ‘uncivilized’ states whose rulers were best managed rather than occupied outright; a policy that frequently generated cooperation rather than competition (M. J. Bayly 2015). These practices of remote governance were not simply experiments that happened ‘over there’. Alex Barder’s work on the ‘imperial laboratory’ resurrects Hannah Arendt’s and Aimé Césaire’s observations on the boomerang effects of imperialism—​that practices on the periphery would be visited on the metropole (Arendt 2017; Barder 2015; Césaire 2001). The bureaucratic state was perfected in the colonies, but so too were surveillance systems, techniques of population management, policing, and perhaps most horrifying of all, concentration camps; showcasing the dark sides of imperial modernity that tied together governance practices on a global scale. The Boer War (1880–​81), the extermination of the Herero people in German South West Africa, and the advent of American imperialism in the Philippines all presaged systems for the surveillance, policing, mass detainment, and destruction of peoples that would be visited upon the European continent in the First and Second World Wars and beyond (Go 2020; Hull 2013). The global reverberations of these governing practices had profound implications for the structure of what we now know as international politics. Jordan Branch shows how the ‘colonial reflection’ of boundary making established norms of territoriality that recrafted the space of the international, making ‘certain goals imaginable and appealing’ (Branch 2011, 8). These were not techniques crafted in the European ‘core’ then diffused to the ‘periphery’. Straight lines on the map were emblematic of colonial territorial violence, but the bordering practices themselves were reflected back into Europe. Fixed territorial order was a colonial invention.

Empire   207 What emerges from recent work on empire in historical IR then is a more nuanced understanding of the imperial polity and its often-​disaggregated forms. In addition, the ordering effects of empire and imperialism are now theorized in more historically sympathetic ways. The modern international order was in some sense a product of imperial encounter, but the advent of the ‘international’ as opposed to the inter-​imperial was not a story of simple transition but rather a fading into a set of practices that retained their imperial legacies which endure to this day. By paying closer attention to these practices the complicity of empire in forging modernity is revealed. Global modernity in this sense was tied up in imperial power: The categorization of peoples, territories and states; their organization into various hierarchies; the formalization of these into myriad diplomatic and legal practices; the governing of peoples, spaces, and technologies; the bureaucratization (and colonial reflection) of these techniques; the crafting of imperial subjects (in part through their differentiation); and the connecting and standardization of territories and economies. In short, the treatment of empire in IR has moved closer to the potential expressed by Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, as a means of conceiving the international as a ‘thick’ set of social relations, consisting of social and cultural flows as well as political-​military and economic interactions in a context of hierarchy’(Barkawi and Laffey 2002, 110). Despite these developments however, and as with imperial borders, academic frontiers rarely remain static. One deficiency in the current literature is that substantively the study of empire within IR remains overwhelmingly Eurocentric. The tendency to privilege European imperialism (a tendency that includes the present author) has obscured the pre-​colonial and ‘para-​colonial’ networks, actors, and practices that provided the context, collaboration, and contestation for proto-​imperial entities (Bose 2009). Recognizing this is important if we are to address the Eurocentric tendencies of IR as a whole. But it also reveals how empires operated through both hierarchical modes as well as transversal arrangements. European empires were often opportunistic in their exploitation of faded dynasties and failed expansions, as a means of accruing symbolic power, as a cost-​saving measure, and out of sheer necessity—​adding to the layering of forms of rule. Frequently empire grafted itself upon the remnants of previous imperial systems. One need only observe the investiture ceremony of the British Crown with its Tudor Beefeaters, Ottoman dais, Nepali Gurkhas, and the scion of a Saxony dynasty, to see this in practice. But empires also evolved in parallel with pre-​existing political orders, some of which they never successfully dominated. So whilst empire may have provided a vehicle for the forging of modernity, in many of the areas that constituted the ‘modern’ this was not simply the story of one polity enacting its practices on another, but also about processes of enmeshment, hybridity, contestation, and adaptation. To take the areas of global transformation staked out by Buzan and Lawson as an exemplar, industrialization, the emergence of rational states, and ideologies of progress provide a set of abstractions that narrate the rise of the modern international. But this ‘package thinking’ approach to modernity, as Cooper suggests, potentially glosses over a messier set of processes (Cooper 2005). As the examples explored previously suggest, imperial orders were nested in regional orders established by (for instance) Chinggisid systems in East Asia (Zarakol, 2022); Mughal power in South Asia; declining Ottoman authority in North Africa and the Middle East; and tributary empires in East and South East Asia. Colonial extraction often involved a deliberately non-​interventionist approach to navigating indigenous sovereignties (Sharman 2019), many of which were preserved under imperial authority as with the Princely States system of the Raj.

208   Martin J. Bayly Similarly, whilst the ‘rational’ colonial state may have colonized the archival record, colonial governmentality in practice was far from uniform in its disciplinary power and often expressed a more distant and ambivalent form where countervailing practices provided less costly alternatives (M. J. Bayly 2019; Legg 2006; D. Scott 1995). This included bordering practices where imperial interests were not at stake. More granular analysis reveals for instance how frontiers often provided sites for experiments in government that claimed to be more hybrid and permissive, if not entirely absent (Hopkins 2020; J. C. Scott 2009). At the same time, ‘contact zones’ on the peripheries of imperial powers were also productive of novel forms of resistance that both borrowed from and challenged hegemonic entities, knowingly operating within imperial hierarchies in order to achieve political change (Leake 2017; Pratt 1992). The technologies of mass transportation and mass media were exploited by those who were ultimately successful in upending imperial systems (Alexanderson 2019; Mawani 2018; Harper 2020), a form of insurgent internationalism that both operated within and sought to disentangle imperial genres of the ‘international’. The ‘ideologies of progress’ tied up in Liberal European discourses of civilization may have been hegemonic, but this should not overpower the transcultural heuristics through which hierarchies were translated into multiple languages and embodied practices, enabling elites to reassert their position even within European dominated fields (M. J. Bayly 2022). The colonial knowledge that generated descriptions of the ‘other’ may have systematized those hierarchies that justified colonial rule and found their way into to nascent social science disciplines, but the epistemicide that they visited upon indigenous knowledge complexes was rarely complete (Santos 2015). This includes instances of ‘epistemic insurgency’ in which colonized intellectuals sought to enact political agendas through subverting the knowledge orders of colonial authorities (Walsh 2010). Indeed a blind spot in the current literature on the imperial and colonial roots of the IR discipline concerns the vocal response of colonized intellectuals to a social ‘science’ that they recognized as imperial in form and function. So yes, colonial knowledge and administration was productive of the social sciences, but the colonized answered back. The development of British orientalism amidst the learned societies of Calcutta, for example, was entangled with the ‘Bengal Renaissance’—​the intellectual movement that produced some of the most vocal critics of colonial rule. The language of ‘imperial modernity’ therefore unlocks a key resource for reimagining the origins of the modern international system, but it is far from the only story. Some relief from the more pernicious universalizing tendencies of the modern is offered through multiplying modernities: cosmopolitan (Mohanty 2018), multiple (Eisenstadt 2000), alternative (Gaonkar 2001), lost, and even connected modernities, but these constructs arguably still privilege a liberal pluralism that speaks the languages of cultural essences and naturally leads towards purist notions of the modern (Cooper 2005).1 This is apparent for example in moves towards understanding different imperial and international orders defined in terms of ‘cultural values’ or divergence from ‘Western’ practices. Global IR, which has sought to bring in histories of other internationals, including imperial, colonial, and postcolonial histories, is sometimes prone to this form of abyssal thinking (Capan 2020). On the one hand this leaves a sense in which the story of empire in historical IR is stacked in favour of the imperialists—​one actor doing things to another part of the world, with little response. On the other hand, when this response is engaged with, it is done so through an analytical bifurcation: West/​non-​West; core/​periphery; imperial/​anti-​imperial; and colonial/​anti-​colonial. Frequently this allows a type of ‘epistemic mapping’(Murray 2019) that

Empire   209 corrals anti-​colonial movements and their associated geographies into certain parts of the discipline—​normally postcolonial studies. One of the most energizing and productive theoretical movements to shape the consideration of empire in IR in recent decades has been the rapidly growing literature on decolonial approaches that have helped to bring to the fore that which has been silenced, erased, or destroyed in colonial histories and imperial violence (Bhambra 2014; Blaney and Tickner 2017; Sabaratnam 2011). This work offers vital corrections to the violence and erasure of Eurocentric IR, but arguably this too performs a vivisection on history when it seeks to strip out those vestiges of modernity (read as coloniality) from disciplinary knowledge. This in itself sets up an analytical bifurcation obscuring one aspect of empire and imperialism that remains undertheorized and underexplored in historical IR—​the relationality of imperial connections and the co-​production of international orders through these. In what remains of this essay we will consider the value of a move away from thinking about empire and modernity in attributional terms, towards more relational conceptions of entanglements, connections, and the coming together in various ways of what were previously differently arranged orders, societies, ‘cultures’, and politics. In short, the seeing together of what had previously seen separately (Emirbayer 1997; Go and Lawson 2017); away from essences and substances, towards assemblages.

Empire, Resistance, and Historical IR: A Relational Conception A ‘relational’ conception of empire in Historical IR is not a revolutionary idea but draws from a range of disciplines including work in IR (Jackson and Nexon 1999; Nexon and Wright 2007; Steinmetz 2013b; Qin 2016; Go and Lawson 2017). The term originates in attempts by sociologists to move away from ‘substantialist’ theoretical enquiry: the idea that things, beings, and essences constitute the fundamental units of enquiry (Emirbayer 1997, 282). Relational approaches foreground the analytical prior of understanding actors and social forms in terms of their embeddedness in transactional processes across time and space, thus precluding categorical stability. Accordingly, one motivation for relational sociology was a desire to impart a more historicist sensibility on theoretical enquiry; to help overcome ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ (Somers 1989). The ontic wager (Jackson 2010) that relationalism presents, away from essences, towards transactions, offers to pull apart the imperial entity as a thing in itself acting in the world, towards a conception of empire as an assemblage of circulations, movements, or productive entanglements across scales of analysis. One example is Matthew Norton’s understanding of states and empires as ‘pattern-​effects in circulatory systems’. As he reminds us: ‘The circulation of goods, people, services, and ideas does not feed the empire—​it is the empire’ (Norton 2017). This conception is also reflected in the integrative work of global historians seeking to overcome the spatializing effects of ‘imperial modernity’ that privileges Europe, towards more ‘multi-​axial’ frameworks that explore patterns of ‘connection and contention, interdependence and independence, accommodation and resistance, together within the same frame’ (Ballantyne and Burton 2012, 304). Such an approach would offer more space for the consideration of copresence and ‘coevalness’ (Chakrabarty 2008), allowing for the

210   Martin J. Bayly decentering of agency claims and exploration of the productivity of connections. We move away from thinking about causal effects, towards considering the emergent qualities within configurational entanglements of imperial modernity. We could take the example of transport and communications that forged global connections and advanced the disparity between the West and the ‘rest’. Beyond establishing advantages for imperial agents, transport connections also fostered a growth in transregional religious practices, as with the huge growth in the Haj through connections forged between the Middle East, South Asia, and South East Asia. Shipping companies ferrying pilgrims became vessels not only for the projection of imperial surveillance states (especially Dutch and British agencies), but for the fostering of pan-​regional anti-​colonial groups (Alexanderson 2019). Similar processes were evident in the development of Gandhi’s swarajist thinking in part through his experience of racial segregation and labour exploitation in South Africa. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire faced a revolt in 1909 partly in reaction to the redirection of travellers away from Bedouin-​controlled desert routes. These groups would come to fame through their instrumentalization against the Ottoman empire by T. E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ in the First World War (Ballantyne and Burton 2012). In East Africa, the privatization of railway transport led to the discontinuation of branch lines run by indigenous and colonial labour forces in favour of routes serving the highlands areas populated by white settlers. The discontent this fostered fed into wider racial tensions and would add to the political and economic grievances fuelling the eruption of the so-​called ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion of 1956. These patterns provided sites for inter-​and intra-​imperial dialogue and collaboration, as with the networks of imperial bureaucracy, capital, labour, and law that spanned the Indian Ocean connecting East Africa, the Gulf, India, and South East Asia. But they also presented networks within which imperial opposition could thrive (Bose 2009; Metcalf 2008; Harper 2020). Such opposition operated within and between multiple ‘worlds’: imperial, colonial, para-​colonial, and anti-​colonial. A relational approach recognizes this capacity as well as the second-​and third-​order effects of the dynamics of imperial rule. For instance, the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905—​in many ways an inter-​imperial struggle—​coincided with the partition of Bengal in South Asia which not only galvanized opposition to empire in South Asia but fostered new intellectual ties between India and Japan (Manjapra 2012). These networks intersected with circulations enabled by the Trans-​Siberian railway line that brought Persia and the wider Middle East into closer connection with East Asia (Green 2013). This cemented a deeper connection between the sometimes shared ‘anti-​Western’ political visions of Pan-​ Asianism and Pan-​Islamism; ideas that resonated amongst anti-​colonial groups across the region (Aydin 2007). One example was the Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, who used the safe spaces of interwar Japan to develop networks that would culminate in the alliance between the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Japanese Army in their campaign to unseat British rule in South and South East Asia during the Second World War. Indeed, one of the surprising features of the early twentieth century is how regularly imperial metropoles played host to projects and individual actors who openly sought to unseat imperial power. London hosted a variety of anti-​colonial activists who sometimes used political connections within the British establishment, including the Labour party, to promote their objectives. Interwar Paris hosted a variety of pan-​African intellectuals including Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, who used pamphleteering to promote the cause of négritude (Goebel 2015; Wilder 2014). Brussels played host to the League Against Imperialism in 1927—​an attempt by an alliance of socialist internationalists, anti-​colonial activists, and

Empire   211 Marxists of the newly formed Russian republic to organize in opposition to the League of Nations (Louro 2018). Indeed, as Susan Pedersen has shown, although the League of Nations showcased an imperial international order, it also offered a venue for claim-​making on part of national movements petitioning the League for consideration of their grievances (Pedersen 2010). Geneva became another hub for the forging of new patterns of transnational agitation against imperial order. The same might be said, albeit with greater success, for the United Nations (Mazower 2013). In New York, branches of the Irish republican movement teamed up with Indian diaspora organizations such as the Indian Home Rule League of America to pool resources and share meeting spaces. In San Francisco, immigrant communities from across the Pacific—​ including decommissioned Punjabi solders from the Indian army, as well as Chinese immigrant workers—​formed solidarities born out of their shared persecution in an increasingly racist anti-​immigrant environment in the 1920s. The militant Ghadar movement, born on West Coast America, drew its strength from a global network of sympathizers, including (later on) the German Kaiser, Egyptian revolutionaries, and the Afghan Amir, leading to attempts at raising rebellion in India’s northwest, and through Singapore (Ramnath 2011). These transversal networks and circulations that operated within and between worlds of empire, nation, and colony garnered their power in part from a capacity to be captured by none of these categories, accordingly it is to their relational structure that we must turn our attention. A relational approach to the study of empire in historical IR offers to transcend debates over what constitutes an empire in viewing circulations, movements, and power asymmetries as themselves productive of new ideas and political constellations. Again, this is not a revolutionary suggestion. Recent works within IR, political science, and global history have moved towards an appreciation of empire and resistance as a multi-​axial, relational whole (Ballantyne and Burton 2012; Steinmetz 2013b), unseating rupture narratives associated with post-​Second World War decolonization or the Bandung ‘moment’ (Getachew 2019; Lee 2010), as well as co-​locating ‘anti-​Western’ ideals in imperial and non-​imperial global contexts (Aydin 2007). Frequently, those voices and movements that ‘answered back’ in response to imperial and colonial forms of power, have been parcelled out into certain areas of the discipline, for instance postcolonial or decolonial approaches. As such the internal intellectual boundaries of IR arguably do damage to the histories we can envisage. A related tendency has been to present such resistance as ‘heroic but vain’ (Cooper 2005, 25), or else to categorize it within the genre of third-​world internationalism, as with the treatment of the Bandung moment as a curious, but ultimately unsuccessful, alternative (Lee 2010). One of the striking tendencies here has been the re-​population of the story of imperial resistance with the teleology of the nation state. Conversely, a relational conception of empire that traverses the territorializing tendencies of ‘empire’, ‘state’, and ‘nation’, and that is attentive to imperial resistance would begin to address the principal development of twentieth century world politics: decolonization. A story by which IR has conventionally remained strangely unmoved.

Conclusion Although empire is now far less of a peripheral concern in IR, a relational approach to empire in historical IR would take existing arguments further. A comprehension of

212   Martin J. Bayly the constitution of global modernity through imperialism, imperial encounters, and anti-​imperial movements can be pushed further by asking ‘whose global’ and ‘whose modernity’? Instead of refining the concept of empire as a political unit, or stressing substances, essences, and abstractions, we might move towards connections, relations, and interactions, in order to help overcome the ‘violence of abstraction’ (Linebaugh and Rediker 2002, 6). This is not a revolutionary proposal –​many are already pursuing these lines of enquiry. Nor is it exclusivist. This is not about delegitimating the analytical category of empire as a unit, but rather stressing that there are other ways of doing this kind of work. Nor does such an approach seek to gentrify postcolonial and decolonial approaches that have sought to elevate the lifeworlds of those histories, knowledges, and practices obliterated by empire and colonialism. A relational approach to empire would however aim to overcome the analytical bifurcations that permeate existing approaches. This would be an engagement with empire within IR that resists the locus of ‘centre’ (and therefore does not require ‘decentering’); one that escapes the language of the metropole (and therefore the language of colony or periphery); one that is alive to the constitution through imperialism of the ‘West’ (and therefore the ‘non-​West’). In short, stressing the codependence of imperial, colonial, and international realms. On an empirical level, relational approaches to empire also offer to reach those substantive concerns of contemporary world politics that mainstream IR currently struggles with. The world ordering effects of circulations: labour movements, knowledge, technology, disease, forms of resistance, and governing practices are alive today in patterns of migration, ‘fake news’, the Covid-​19 pandemic, the global reverberations of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, terrorism, and the rise of the ‘new right’. Perhaps most important for the project of historical IR, however, is that a deeper theorization of empire as relationalities offers to develop a space somewhat vacated by imperial and global history. The IR discipline would recognize the increasing fragmentation and renationalization of imperial history, and the growing chorus of critique that global history has received for its latent Eurocentrism and unfocussed empirical gaze. It is perhaps naïve to suggest that history has anything to learn from IR, but the growing theoretical eclecticism evident in the ways that historical IR treats empire does offer some strength in diversity to a field of History often under fire.

Note 1. I’m grateful to Chris Murray for framing it for me in these terms.

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chapter 15

Barbarism a nd Civiliz at i on Yongjin Zhang If ‘Cultural diversity is inherent to human condition’ (Reus-​Smit 2018, 1), then cultural conflicts can be said to be omnipresent in shaping human experience in world history. From this perspective, the discursive construction of the opposition of barbarism versus civilization as a particular kind of cultural conflict has haunted a diverse range of historical international orders, not in the least because ‘the struggle to conceptualize the nature of civilization is as old as civilization itself ’ (E. Hall 1989, 51). The persistence of the dichotomy and the antinomy of barbarism vis-​à-​vis civilization in these powerful discursive constructions has produced complex and fluid webs of contested intersubjective meanings of both barbarism and civilization in different intellectual traditions, thanks to historically and culturally contingent discursive mechanisms. The foundational narrative of Western civilization would always trace its origin to classical Greece—​the progenitor of European Civilization—​as much as the inception of the concept of barbarism. A master narrative of the Chinese civilization would be expected to start with a differentiation of Chinese culture and society with bounded yet shifting geographies from the non-​Chinese ones beyond those boundaries as imaged and represented in ancient China. If the perpetuating binary logic of civilization versus barbarism as defined in the nineteenth century produces a European standard of ‘civilization’ for the entry of non-​European states into the expanding European international society, the revolt against the West in the mid-​twentieth century and the subsequent globalization of the sovereign international order represents an outright refutation of such a logic. Each of the two terms carries, therefore, long and complex historical memories of shifting antithesis, symbiotic existence, and dialectic relationship, which have been enriched, but perhaps also convoluted, by its intricate evolution of unstable meanings throughout world history in intercultural encounters, exchanges, contestations, and conflicts. It is perhaps not surprising that the very concept of civilization depends heavily on the characterization of barbarism for its self-​definition and that the persistence of the opposition of civilization versus barbarism has been open to enduring critique and constant contestation in the discursive construction of historical international orders. In practice, these two ideas and the discourses surrounding them have often had decisive influence in defining diplomacy, law,

Barbarism and Civilization    219 and International Relations (IR) in world history and in constructing and maintaining order, and as often its destruction. This chapter sketches the intricate co-​evolution of barbarism and civilization as a discursive frame of historical international orders through the explorations of moments of their articulation and invention in a kaleidoscope of slices of Western and Chinese history. The selective focus on Western and Chinese history enables this short chapter to provide an analysis of the conceptual co-​evolution of barbarism and civilization with a certain level of historical granularity in contrasting cultures and intellectual traditions, to unpack their fluid and contested meanings in historical complexity, and to tease out not only the historicity of these two concepts, but also, more importantly perhaps, their contentious nature in shaping contemporary international practices. The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section traces the genesis of the idea of barbarism/​civilization in Western and Chinese history to highlight their early conceptual co-​evolution in different world historical contexts. This is followed by a consideration, in the second section, of civilization as a modern European construction in historical intercultural encounters and its practice in expanding the European order in the long nineteenth century, which arguably continues to define how conceptually we think of the civilization versus barbarism antinomy in IR today. The third section looks at the collapse of the nineteenth century European civilizational edifice during the twentieth century and discusses the resurrection of the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism in the discourses of world politics at the turn of the twenty-​first century.

Barbarism, Civilization, and Culture in Western and Chinese History It is generally acknowledged that the word ‘barbarian’ has the Greek etymology, although there had been similar word in the Babylonian-​Sumerian language, barbaru denoting foreigner. When it was first used in ancient Greece, the term ‘barbarian’ referred often to what is foreign or strange, more specifically to foreigners whose language was incomprehensible to the Greek. Language, in other words, is the first criterion for distinguishing the barbarians from the Greeks throughout Greek antiquity. In the plays of ancient Greek tragedians, the word ‘barbarian’ is used to mean ‘non-​Greek’, ‘incomprehensible’, and also ‘eccentric’ or ‘inferior’. Typical barbarian qualities were projected, with certain assumption of ethical import, as foolishness, cowardice, and injustice vis-​à-​vis wisdom, courage, and justice as opposite, and typically Greek, virtues (J. Hall 2002, 177–​178). It was during and after the Persian Wars that foreign speech became ‘a sign of primitivism, intellectual or cultural inferiority, and irrationality’ and that ‘the Greek/​barbarian opposition acquires clear political, ethnic, and cultural connotations’ (Boletsi 2013, 70). The Persian Wars played otherwise a decisive role in shaping the discourse of how the Greeks demarcated their world from barbarism in three important ways. First, as members of the Athenian polis shared a common language and culture, culture1 became a standard against which ‘barbarians’ (the Persians) were defined. There was also an element of ethnocentricity in identifying the Persians as the threatening but also inferior barbarians located in a specific territory, i.e., Asia. Second, a stark polarity between Greek democracy and Persian

220   Yongjin Zhang despotism was framed into the ideological/​political polarization of Hellene and barbarian. Since democracy was generally considered an Athenian invention, the defeat of the Persians in 480–​479 bce was celebrated in Athens ‘not only as a triumphant affirmation of Greek culture and collectivity over alien invaders, but over the demon of tyranny’ (E. Hall 1989, 59). Third, the barbarization of the Persians helped construct the cardinal antagonism between Greek and barbarian as civilization against primitivism, order against chaos, observance of law against transgression (E. Hall 1989, 51; J. Hall 2002, 186–​187). In the Hellenistic and Roman eras, language gradually retreated as a standard for defining the barbarian. Hellenicity was recast as a cultural attribute defined by education. Such culturally defined Hellenic identity ‘endured well into the period of Roman rule’ (J. Hall 2002, 224; Boletsi 2013). Already in the early Roman period, however, the Greek/​barbarian opposition was replaced, at least in part, by the distinction between Romanitas and barbarism. Romanitas became a culturally achieved status—​homo humanus in opposition to homo barbarus—​as embodiment of a specific education leading to virtue. Being barbarian was not, therefore, an irreversible state, as barbarians could be educated into Romanitas by adopting the Latin language, the toga, Roman law, and religion, and submitting to the Pax Romana. This acculturation—​the promotion from barbarism to Romanitas—​was, however, more an option for the barbarian than a systematic mission for the Roman and did not diminish the presumed opposition of civilization versus barbarism (Boletsi 2013, 86; Jones 1971, 379). Of Axial Age civilizations, Ancient China is another one that had experienced a long historical process of cultural differentiation leading to its own invention of the antithesis of barbarism vis-​à-​vis civilization. According to the Shang Shu (‘Venerated documents’), as early as the beginning of the Xia dynasty (2224–​1766 bce), Chinese people living in the Central Plain were aware that they were surrounded by a multitude of alien peoples, living in marshes or on mountains. Shang oracle bones and written documents of the Zhou dynasty (1046–​771 bce) contain a considerable amount of data concerning the names of non-​ Chinese peoples against whom the Shang (1600–​1046 bce) fought in wars or with whom the Shang entered into a wide range of relations (Di Cosmo 1999, 907; Huang 2013). During the Shang-​Zhou transition, four generic terms emerged to denote rather neatly the ‘barbarians of the four corners’ (si yi) beyond the Central Plain, the Rong in the West, the Di in the North, the Yi in the East, and the Man in the South in the incipient ethnocentric imagination of the world by the Chinese. There is, however, no single all-​encompassing term in the Chinese language that equals precisely the English term ‘barbarian’ (Di Cosmo 2002, 95). The consolidation and expansion of Chinese states in the Warring States period (476–​221 bce) militarily conquered and/​or culturally absorbed numerous Rong, Di, Yi, and Man (barbarian) statelets. By the time of the imperial unification of China in 221 bce, there were no more ‘barbarian’ pockets on the Central Plain (Pines 2004, 85). The construction of the Great Walls delineated symbolically Chinese cultural frontiers, ‘the frontier between the people “with bows and arrows” and those “with hats and girdles” ’ (Di Cosmo 1999, 893). It also subsequently defined Imperial China’s geopolitical frontiers in the North, as the establishment of the nomadic state of Xiongnu on the Steppes in 209 bc presented security threat to the Chinese Empire. Like the Greeks, the Chinese used ethically pejorative terms, and even beast simile, in describing non-​Chinese peoples. The Rong and the Di ‘had the heart of a tiger or a wolf ’ and they were ‘greedy and cruel, untrustworthy’ (Di Cosmo 1999, 949). Like the Romans, pre-​imperial Chinese thinkers allowed the possibility of human transformability under the

Barbarism and Civilization    221 blessed influence of proper education. Bestiality was very much seen as a socio-​political condition, as it is ritual norms and social rites that defined the major delineating line between Self (the Chinese) and the Other (the non-​Chinese) in pre-​imperial China (Pines 2004, 66–​73). There was, however, greater fluidity of cultural boundaries in pre-​imperial Chinese thought. ‘Not only through the blessed influence of the Chinese could savages be transformed, but they could become in turn moral teachers of the Chinese’ (Pines 2004, 73). Further, the crossing of cultural boundaries was bi-​directional, i.e., ‘barbarization’ of the Chinese occurred with no less frequency than ‘Sinification’ of the barbarians in the Warring States period. The transformability of one’s cultural affiliation was undergirded by a firm belief in cultural/​inclusive rather than ethnic/​exclusive identity in pre-​imperial China (Pines 2004, 87–​91). The culturally exclusive view of the ‘immutable barbarians’ gradually emerged only in the Han period (206 bce–​220 ad), when bestiality was accepted as an inalienable feature of the barbarians such as the Xiongnu and other northern nomads, which became eventually part and parcel of Chinese imperial thought. While this culturally exclusive view of the Chinese vis-​à-​vis the barbarian was hardened in the Chinese world, in Europe of late antiquity, religion became gradually a key defining factor in the construction of the barbarian, as Christianity was introduced as the state religion into the Roman Empire. By the end of the seventh century, the transition from a cultural to a religious definition of barbarism was completed. ‘The principal distinction within the European consciousness became a religious one; and the Catholic Christian was distinguished from the barbarian, who was the heathen or the Arian heretic’ (Jones 1971, 387). The closing of the Christian oecumene against heathen barbarians and the emergence of the idea of a spiritually homogeneous Christendom, ‘drew vividly the distinction between the lands of the Christians and the barbarous region’ (Jones 1971, 390). The reappearance of the furor barbaricus along the frontiers of Europe, which dramatically represented and was dreadfully manifested by the Mongol threat of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, highlighted the cultural and moral antagonism of civilization versus barbarism over their purely religious difference, reminiscent more of the Greek/​barbarian antinomy in classical Greece. Two other evolving conceptions of barbarism are worth considering here. The disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West as a result of the so-​called barbarian invasion also led to a different view of the ‘barbarian’. Byzantine writers, taking the Orthodox Christian perspective from Constantinople, generally viewed the West as lost to ‘barbarian rulers’. Eighteenth century thinker and politician Edward Gibbon, as historian Jurgen Osterhammel (2018, 83) observes, ‘delights in recounting how crusaders and their Muslim opponents denounced each other as barbarians’ and ‘likes to refer to “Western barbarians” and depicts early Islam in an unusually positive light, partly in order to oppose it polemically to early medieval Christianity’. Byzantium’s ‘Bureau of Barbarians’ could probably be counted as the first foreign intelligence agency dedicated to gathering information on the empire’s rivals from every imaginable source. The longevity of the Byzantine Empire is sometimes attributed to its aggressive use of diplomacy in negotiating treaties and forming alliances and making friends with the enemies of their enemies (Ringmar 2019, 91–​92). During the Middle Ages, ‘barbarians’ were increasingly equated with the ‘Other’ of Christendom, taking on unmistakably strong religious connotations. ‘This dichotomy was reified during the Renaissance, most often using the stereotype of the “Turk” in exhortatio ad bellum contra barbaros’ (Salter 2002, 19).

222   Yongjin Zhang It is the ‘Age of Discovery’ and early European colonialism that brought Europe and non-​ European world into direct civilizational encounter and cultural conflict for the first time in world history. In the colonization of the Americas, the material exploitation was often couched in religious terms. Whereas converting natives in the New World to Christianity led to their salvation, ‘the natives’ rejection of Christian message was proof of their ‘bestial irrationality’ and barbarism, justifying imperial intervention and violence (Boletsi 2013, 89). This ‘New World’—​‘a universe of newly encountered or discovered humans’—​was conceived as an absolute, and definitely inferior, ‘other’ in the European imagination (Pocock 2005, 271–​272). Europe’s early cultural and intellectual encounter with Imperial China is, however, altogether a different story. Jean Bodin noted already in 1579 that ‘The Spanish have remarked that the Chinese, the most Oriental of peoples, are the most ingenious and the most courteous, and that those of Brasil, the most Occidental, are the most barbarous and cruel’ (Cited in Blue 1999, 59). The pioneering Jesuits also recognized that ‘the Chinese, unlike those in other technologically or materially less advanced parts of the world, could not be converted by overawing them by the European might’. They needed to be ‘approached as intellectual equals and shown through sophisticated arguments that Christianity was in harmony with some of the more fundamental beliefs’, as observed by historian David Mungello (2005, 81–​82). These civilizational encounters have had lasting influence in reformulating the distinction between civilized and barbarians in European thought. In the Americas, the European encounter with the native inhabitants of the ‘New World’ led to both philosophical and popular debates about the humanity of non-​White race and ‘brought racial standards for defining the barbarian more to the foreground’ (Boletsi 2013, 89). In the words of Charles Wills (1997, 27), ‘it needs to be realized that in keeping with the Roman precedent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human’ (italics in the original). European encounters with Imperial China as the civilizational Other clearly presented a serious philosophical problem here. As Leibniz noted in 1697, ‘Now the Chinese Empire, which challenges Europe in cultivated area and certainly surpasses her in population, vies with us in many other ways in almost equal combat, so that now they win, now we’ (cited in Launay 2018, 62). The incorporation of the non-​European world into European systems of knowledge through these civilizational encounters clearly posed a cognitive challenge to the European worldview and demanded reorganizing Europe’s world knowledge. The cultural transformations embodied in the Enlightenment as ‘a state of intellectual tension’ (Shklar cited in Conrad 2012, 1004) marked an important beginning of European reconceptualization and reinvention of civilization versus barbarism. Major eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers—​Voltaire, Hume, Smith, and Ferguson, among others—​ ‘constructed histories of the millennium of barbarism and religion and the exit from it into enlightened Europe’ (Pocock 2005, 5). In the works of the Enlightenment thinkers, ‘European history was presented as the outcome of periodic ‘barbarian’ invasions by ‘shepherd’ peoples and their subsequent civilisation’ (Pocock 2005, 2). More broadly, Enlightenment stadial theory articulated systematically the idea of humanity and society progressing from savagery and barbarism to civilization, placing barbarians in-​between civilization and savages (Wolloch 2011). In the words of Adam Smith, ‘There are four distinct states which mankind pass thro:—​1st, the Age of Hunters; 2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce’ (Smith cited in Schorr 2018, 512). Civilization was thus reinvented and reconceptualized as a historical process,

Barbarism and Civilization    223 chronologically and causally connected, ‘with its emphasis on secular and progressive human self-​development’ (Williams 1985, 58). Thinking of civilization as social evolutionary stages enabled Enlightenment thinkers to translate cultural difference into a language of historical progress and to invent a progressive regime of time. This conjectural history would become an enduring tradition in modern historiographical interpretations of the rise of civilization. Barbarism became the flipside of progress and European civilization. This European reinvention thus serves to trap different peoples and societies beyond and upon the frontiers of Europe in a perpetual barbarian category. In the comparable historical period, there was a perennial discourse of civilization versus barbarism in Imperial Chinese history. Imperial Chinese assumption of cultural superiority is closely associated with a specific Chinese cosmology that China is not a higher civilization, but the civilization—​the centre of the world—​around which the world was organized hierarchically, in civilizational terms. This assumption informs the Confucian notion of universal kingship and is informed by a perennial discourse on the distinction and relationship between the Chinese and the non-​Chinese (barbarians). The Chineseness is, however, a culturally more than racially and ethnically defined concept, i.e. the Chineseness can be acquired through self-​cultivation leading to internalizing the Chinese system of rituals, shared beliefs, and practices, regardless of race and ethnicity. Non-​Chinese ‘barbarians’ can be transformed, in theory, by exposure to Confucianism and to Chinese civilization as a means of self-​cultivation. Distinctions can therefore be maintained between ‘inner’ barbarians (more sinicized) and ‘outer’ barbarians (less sinicized). The Confucian conception of a civilizational world sees China sitting at the centre, pretending to assign to others a proper place according to how ‘civilized’ they are in the Chinese world. An elaborate set of rituals (li) are designed as a traditional standard of ‘civilization’ for others who wish to enter, or to be accepted, into the Chinese world to observe and fulfil. Such civilizing agenda was part of Chinese imperial statecraft for more than two thousand years. This discourse of Chinese versus non-​Chinese—​civilization versus barbarism—​informs the construction of the constitutional structure of the tributary system as an international order presided over by Imperial China, a historical order that only collapsed in the imperial clash between the Chinese Empire and the British Empire in the late nineteenth century (Zhang and Buzan 2012).

Barbarism and the Standard of ‘Civilization’ in the Long Nineteenth Century It is perhaps not purely a historical coincidence that the use of ‘civilization’ is first documented in French in 1767 and in English in 1772 and it appeared in an English dictionary only in 1775 (Williams 1985, 57; Gong 1984, 47). Regardless of its complex genealogy, Boswell’s first usage ‘emphasized not so much a process as a state of social order and refinement, especially in conscious historical or cultural contrast with barbarism’ (Williams 1985, 57–​58). More commonly, the new sense of civilization expressed both the ideas of historical process and an achieved condition of refinement and order underpinned by ‘the general spirit of the Enlightenment’ (Williams 1985, 58). The Enlightenment conceptions of

224   Yongjin Zhang civilization importantly facilitated a gradual shift from an identification of civilization with Christendom to an identification with Europe as a political idea. Before the Enlightenment, the identity of ‘Europe’ as a society of states had already been symbolically enshrined at Westphalia. In the words of Voltaire, the eighteenth-​century Europe was ‘a kind of great republic divided into several states, . . . . They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions. They all have the same principles of public law and politics, unknown in the other parts of the world’ (Cited in Gong 1984, 45–​46). To the extent that civilization as we understand it today is a modern European construction, three critical moves in self-​conscious European assessment of civilization are worth noting in its sustained intercultural, colonial, and imperial encounters in the long nineteenth century. First, civilization was increasingly understood and identified as European civilization specifically based on the idea of a secular unity of Europe. For the first time the superiority of the European subject was established through a single term that contains a series of unspoken assumptions and a multiplicity of subjective standards that delineate the realm of the civilized self vis-​à-​vis the barbaric in a particular social and historical context. This conceptual elasticity in defining ‘civilization’ secured the stability of the opposition between civilization and barbarism in modernity. Barbarism became the opposite of civilization par excellence, which threatens the frontiers of the civilized world, while simultaneously sustains its self-​definition. ‘Civilization’ became a powerful conceptual wall with specific normative quality for keeping the ‘barbarian’ at bay and in justifying the basic violent structure of the hierarchical opposition between the two (Boletsi 2013, 61–​67). ‘The trope of the barbarian often represents an exclusion and dehumanization of the target group’ (Salter 2002, 26). Second, as ‘an achieved condition’, civilization ‘celebrated an associated sense of modernity’ (Williams 1985, 58) as well as the notions of European exceptionalism and superiority. In claiming the equivalence of civilization and the Enlightenment, these conceptions of civilization simultaneously framed and was framed by the achievement of European modernity. Consistent with the stadial theory, non-​European societies were increasingly seen as embodying the distant past of modern Europe. European and non-​European worlds were not only culturally different but also occupied different stages of historical progress of civilization. European civilization became both the point of reference and a goal to achieve for the rest of the world. As barbarians could acquire ‘civilization’, this conception justified a civilizing project of exporting European modernity to the ‘uncivilized’ non-​European worlds from the mid-​nineteenth century onwards, ‘conjuring the gifts of social order, legality, reason, and religion, as well as regulating manners and mores’ (Brown 2009, 179–​180). It was also used to legitimize the use of violence in the name of the Enlightenment values in the European colonial expansion. ‘Civilization’, in this sense, ‘is nothing more than a European self-​description of its role in history’ (Mignolo 2005, xvii). Third, positivism and social evolutionism, as two influential intellectual trends in the nineteenth century, left indelible marks on the Enlightenment conceptions of civilization. Positivism, characterized as the progress of science, reinforces the progressivist view of civilization in offering an essentially unilinear model of human development and progress in a definite and desirable direction from barbarism towards civilization. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, proposes that the advancement of civilization depends on the struggle between peoples of different races and colours. Gobineau (2016) asserted that the human species can be divided on physiological grounds alone ‘into three great and clearly marked types, the black, the yellow, and the white’ arranged in a permanent racial hierarchy

Barbarism and Civilization    225 characterized by ‘the immense superiority of the white peoples’, and further that the decline and fall of civilizations were attributable to superior races mixing with inferior races. James Lorimer, a nineteenth-​century international lawyer, celebrated the contribution that ethnology—​the science of races—​made to influencing international politics and jurisprudence in the nineteenth century (Gong 1984). Race rose as a new civilizational standard in the divide between Europeans and barbarians (Mills 1997). An ideology of racial and cultural hierarchy defined, or rather disguised, in civilizational terms is integral to the nineteenth century colonialism and imperialism. With these three critical moves, civilization as a modern European construction in the nineteenth century became a key term of great potency in remapping the world in the European imagination, in reconstructing the geopolitical order of the world, and in seeking the capitalist integration of the globe in an age of European imperialism characterized by the asymmetrical power relationship between Europe and the extra-​ European worlds. Equating civilization per se with the particular civilization of Europe stripped the non-​European worlds of any semblance of civilization. The ensuing sustained colonial and imperial encounters between Europe and the non-​European worlds and their respective cultural systems can only be interpreted meaningfully in terms of confrontations between civilization and barbarism/​semi-​barbarism/​savages. As Aimé Césaire noted poignantly, the colonizers’ sense of superiority and their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers ‘depends on turning the Other into a barbarian’ (Kelly 2000, 9). Even for Imperial Japan, ‘the cosmology of different stages of civilization and the differing chronologies of progress were crucial elements in justifying colonial forays into East Asia’ (Conrad 2012, 1020). A clear-​cut distinction between civilized and barbarians became instrumentally and philosophically essential for an empire to sustain its political, cultural, and military superiority and hegemony. The constructed nature of the colonized subjects as barbaric justified deviations from the European standard of civilization in the colonies. ‘The construction of the barbarian as evil and dangerous becomes a ruse for imperial violence’ (Boletsi 2013, 82). For the nineteenth-​century international lawyers, ‘civilization’ became a scale by which all countries in the world were categorized according to their different levels of civilization as measured against the European standard and determined by the Europeans. Although the concept of ‘civilization’ was ‘not defined beyond ‘impressionistic characterization’ (Koskenniemi 2001, 103), the distinction between the civilized and the uncivilized nevertheless structured colonial international law as ‘the legal conscience of the civilized world’ towards the end of the nineteenth century (Koskenniemi 2001). For W. E. Hall, international law ‘is a product of the special civilization of modern Europe and forms a highly artificial system of which the principles cannot be supposed to be understood or recognized by countries differently civilized’ (cited in Bartelson 2017, 17). Accordingly, uncivilized states had only a partial standing in positive international law. Politically and philosophically, the standard of ‘civilization’ functioned therefore to define the internal unity and the external boundaries of the nineteenth-​century European society of states. International law became ‘a gentle civilizer of nations’ (Koskenniemi 2001) in what historian Eric Hobsbawm (1987) calls ‘the age of empire’. Integral to the claim and the practice of the standard of ‘civilization’ as a legal principle is the deliberate denial of non-​European states and political entities of the same foundational institutions such as sovereignty and territoriality on the one hand and the sanctioning on

226   Yongjin Zhang the other of such regimes as extraterritorial jurisdiction for the European states. In the name of constructing order, sovereignty became ‘a gift of civilisation’ (Koskenniemi 2001, 98) in the practice of colonialism and imperialism. The standard of ‘civilization’ as an integral part of the colonial discourse was invoked to legitimize brutal colonial wars and some of the worst injustices in the history of modernity in the construction of the nineteenth-​ century colonial and imperial international order. The colonial project was pursued in the name of modernity ‘disguised as the natural course of universal history’ (Mignolo 2005, 8). The notion of ‘the sacred trust of civilization’, originated at the 1885 Berlin Conference to justify the partition of Africa, best exemplifies the self-​assigned and self-​righteous ‘civilizing mission’ of modern European empires. The concept even survived as a juridical expression in the internationalization of colonialism under the mandate system authorized by the League of Nations and of the trusteeship system in the United Nations (UN) Charter (Gong 1984, 76–​81). On the scale of the standard of ‘civilization’ as a colonial discourse in international law, Imperial China was relegated to a semi-​civilized status. In the European remapping of geography of power in the nineteenth century, Imperial China fell progressively under the same ‘civilizing’ and rapacious gaze of European imperial powers as many other non-​European parts of the world, which were increasingly ‘stigmatized as being inferior, backward, barbaric, effeminate, childish, despotic, and in need of enlightenment’ (Zakarol 2011, 54). It was decidedly Orientalized as a static, retarded, and despotic empire standing in the way of ‘civilization’—​in particular, progressive commercial exchange of the emerging capitalist global economy. The military conflict between Imperial China and Imperial Britain in the mid-​nineteenth century was, as historian James Hevia (1995, 25) asserted, but a violent encounter ‘between two imperial formations each with universalistic pretensions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress their claims’. For IR scholar Gerrit Gong (1984, 8), the two ‘Opium Wars’ were simply ‘the extension of the conflicting standard of “civilization” by other means’. Yet, there is an obvious contradiction of ‘a barbarian on a civilizing mission’ (Ringmar 2013, 6). This was best illustrated by the destruction of Yuanmingyuan in Beijing in October 1860, when the Imperial Palace and surrounding gardens as places of beauty, learning, and culture were first ransacked and looted and then deliberately burned down by the combined British and French expedition forces. For Palmerston, who congratulated Lord Elgin for burning down the Summer Palace, ‘It was absolutely necessary to stamp by some such permanent record our indignation at the treachery and brutality of these Tartars’ and, these incidents will teach them [the ‘idiotic’ Chinese] that in dealing with the Powers of Europe they must obey those laws of international right which prevail among the civilized nations of the world. (Cited in Ringmar 2013, 81, 149)

‘Liberal barbarism’, as Ringmar (2013) terms it, was fully justified in the name of progress and civilization because the uncivilized need to be ‘punished or saved by the civilized by any means necessary’ (Boletsi 2013, 51). By the same token, the eight-​power Boxer intervention in 1900 was purported to redress ‘an outrage against the comity of nations’ and to teach uncivilized China with imperialist violence an unforgettable lesson and instructive trauma about respecting ‘civilized’ norms. The ‘civilizing mission’ rhetoric was an indispensable part of imperial ideology to license violence and war against the ‘uncivilized’ and barbaric act they committed (Hevia 2003).

Barbarism and Civilization    227

New Barbarians and the Resurrection of a Discourse of Civilization versus Barbarism The moral and physical self-​destruction of the European society of states in the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century brutally demonstrates that the European civilizational and normative edifice in the nineteenth century was a far more precarious construct than it was believed to be. Not only did the standard of ‘civilization’ codified in international law vanish in the fog of the First World War; but many of the presumptuous cultural assumptions that had underpinned the European society of states also crumbled in the ashes of the Second World War. ‘Who can read of the killing fields Flanders, the Somme, Caporetto, Stalingrad, and Leningrad, . . . without acknowledging the barbarism deeply implanted in the heart of our civilization?’ historian Bernard Wasserstein (2007, 793) asks rhetorically. Who could deny civilization and barbarism were walking hand in hand in the twentieth-​century European history of Holocaust and genocide? Anti-​colonialism and decolonization further marked the retreat of the civilized versus barbarian antonym in the discourses of world politics. The acceptance of human and racial equality in the postwar period banished the concept of a single civilization and closed off the so-​called barbarian option of conceptualizing humanity as divided into the civilized, the barbarian, and the savages. It served well the practical purposes of bringing states with diverse civilizational roots into a functional and pluralistic international society. The proliferation of postcolonial states led to the globalization of a system of juridically equal sovereign states in international relations. At the UN, civilization versus barbarism as part of the imperial vocabulary was quickly abandoned. Members of the International Law Commission agreed specifically to ‘refrain from using the expression “civilized countries” . . . because it dated back to the colonial era with its concept of the white man’s burden’ (Gong 1984, 90). The UN General Assembly passed resolutions and declarations to uphold that no country would be discriminated against on the basis of ‘civilization’. The paradox that the European notion of ‘civilization’ is historically grounded in a perpetual violence against its inferior others, the colonized, is exposed cogently and unforgivingly by Aimé Césaire in the postcolonial discourse. Not only has Césaire revealed, again and again, that the sense of superiority of the colonizers and their ‘civilizing mission’ undertaken as the world’s pretentious civilizers both depend on the reinvention of the colonized as barbarians and the deliberate destruction of their past. But Césaire also demonstrated crucially how colonialism works to ‘decivilize’ the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-​called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of Europe itself. (Kelly 2000, 9)

Barbarism, in this understanding, is at the very heart of the historical civilizing process of European colonialism. The rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism in the public discourses of world politics after the Second World War and decolonization is unsurprisingly rather muted. As IR scholar

228   Yongjin Zhang John Hobson (2012, 322) sharply observes, however, ‘the old explicit Eurocentric trope of “civilization versus barbarism” effectively became replaced by the subliminal Eurocentric tropes of “tradition versus modernity” and “core versus periphery” ’. Given the persistence of cultural differences and the durable nature of civilizational encounters in world history, however, the resurrection of the antonym of civilization versus barbarism in the post-​Cold War discourses of IR should not be a surprise. The claim of the clash of civilizations, first articulated by Samuel Huntington (1993), epitomizes such a resurgence in stark oppositional thinking in terms of the West versus the rest. For Huntington, the great political and ideological divides of the Cold War, i.e., capitalism versus communism and democracy versus totalitarianism, were replaced by the clash of civilizations in a format of the West vis-​à-​vis the rest. We live, Huntington (1996, 309) declared, ‘in an era in which global politics is shaped by cultural and civilizational tides’. The prospect of a universal civilization, in his view, is in a constant struggle with forces of barbarism in the world, as he warns that ‘On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, . . .’ (Huntington 1996, 321). Even as he calls all civilizations to fight barbarism together, however, Huntington is unequivocal that only the values of the West can lead this fight as he celebrates ‘Western civilization as the highest normative referent in world politics’ (Hobson 2012, 344). For Huntington, political theorist Wendy Brown (2008, 411) notes, ‘What will hold barbarism at bay is precisely what re-​centres the West as the defining essence of civilization and what legitimates its efforts at controlling the globe’. This new civilizational rhetoric and the culturalization of global conflicts associated with it gained new currency after 9/​11. As if to fulfil Huntington’s self-​fulfilling prophecy, the civilized world (the West) appeared to be at war now with the world of evil. ‘A group of barbarians have declared war on the American people’, George W. Bush claimed. The global war on terror, in his words, was not ‘just America’s fight’ but ‘civilization’s fight’. Consequently, the rhetoric of this civilizational discourse after 9/​11 divided the world through a number of hierarchical oppositional pairs: ‘America, civilization, freedom, liberty, justice, humanity, compassion’, on one side, and ‘evil, barbarism, terrorists, hatred, cruelty, and cowardice’ on the other side. Such civilization versus barbarism rhetoric has thus been used to legitimize the use of military force and violence both for ‘pre-​emptive strike’ in defending Western citizens and for promoting democracy in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This rhetoric of stark opposition of civilization versus barbarism in the twenty-​first-​ century world politics has its fierce critics. Tzvetan Todorov (2010), for one, redefines the notions of barbarism and civilization as universal moral categories in challenging Huntington’s peremptory contention that the fault lines of global conflicts in the twenty-​first century would form around cultural and religious differences. ‘What one group calls “civilization” conseals, for another group, an incarnation of barbarity’ (Todorov 2010, 43). What is manifested in the claim of the clash of civilizations, he asserts, is but the West’s fear and suspicion of the rest challenging the dominance of the West. It is the fear of the arrival of the new barbarians that makes the West fight barbarism with barbarism in adopting such barbaric practices as torture in the war on terror and in promoting democracy by force of arms. The real barbarians, in his words, ‘are those who deny the full humanity of others’ (Todorov 2010, 16). Barbarity ‘exists in itself ’ and ‘forms a category of the first importance’ (Todorov 2010, 21). In a purposeful retort of Huntington, Gilbert Achcar (2006) argues the world disorder after the end of the Cold War culminating in the 9/​11 attacks resulted not from the clash of civilizations but from the clash of a twin barbarisms, the dark sides of both Western

Barbarism and Civilization    229 and Islamic civilizations, which had spawned a cycle of escalating violence and of mutual annihilation. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek (2009, 177) contends that ‘every clash of civilizations really is a clash of underlying barbarisms’. Contemporary debates about the clash between civilization and barbarism have also witnessed ‘an ominous turn’, as cultural critic Terry Eagleton (2008) noted, when in liberal Western discourse such a clash is often redefined as a conflict between civilization and culture of a particular incarnation. In his words: We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-​doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between West and East is being mapped on a new axis. (Eagleton 2008)

Wendy Brown (2009, 150–​151) also notes an ‘odd but familiar move within liberalism’ in the discursive turn to culturalization of conflict and difference. ‘Culture’ is, in her words, ‘what non-​liberal peoples are imagined to be ruled and ordered by’, whereas ‘liberal peoples are considered to have culture or cultures’ (italics in the original). Liberalism’s unique capacity to be ‘culturally neutral and culturally tolerant’ contrasts sharply with nonliberal cultures’ disposition toward barbarism. In other words, barbarism is associated with the condition of being governed by culture. Paradoxically, ‘the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself ’ in this liberal vision of civilization versus barbarism, Slavoj Žižek (2009, 120) asserts, which ‘relies on the opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the life-​world into which they are born, and those who merely “enjoy” their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose it’. It would seem that cultural differences have been reframed in this new fashion as opposition of civilization versus barbarism, identifying the former with universalizable Western liberal values.

Conclusion As the previous analysis with certain historical granularity shows, barbarism and civilization are both relational concepts with shifting, plural, and unstable meanings in diverse cultures and intellectual traditions. Both carry long historical memories of a rich vocabulary imbued with their respective moral and cultural values in mutually defining each other often in oppositional terms. Only through an understanding of the global history of references to barbarism and civilization and of their constant conceptual co-​evolution, re-​articulation, and reinvention under conditions of inequalities of power in culturally specific and historically contingent contexts, can we appreciate fully how cultural and geopolitical hierarchies produced in a civilizational discourse find their way not only in our conceptual vocabulary in thinking the world, but in active practices of world politics. As such, the opposition of civilization versus barbarism can be considered one of the most potent discursive frames of IR in world history. As a modern European construction, civilization is a normatively charged evaluative concept. Few other terms are more heavily invested with notions of European exceptionalism and superiority, establishing Europe as the equivalent of ‘civilization’. Few

230   Yongjin Zhang continue to have such potency in framing discursively contemporary debates in international relations. Invoking the ‘civilizing mission’ is part and parcel of imperial strategies of European powers and is used as a tool of empire in the nineteenth century. Yet, ‘The more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates’ (Engels cited in Wasserstein 2007, 793). The destructive drive of European civilization, moral and physical, in the two world wars has further ruthlessly demonstrated that barbarism nestles at the heart of civilization. The most eloquent—​and provocative—​critique of the clash of civilizations as part of the West’s aggressive project of prolonging its global domination is perhaps articulated by Walter Mignolo (2005, xix), when he states: The future can no longer be thought of as the ‘defense of Western civilization’, constantly waiting for the barbarians. As barbarians are ubiquitous (they could be in the plains or in the mountains as well as in global cities), so are the civilized. There is no safe place to defend and, even worse, believing that there is a safe place that must be defended is (and has been) the direct road to killing.

Note 1. Culture is used here to mean analytically a system of shared beliefs, values, and practices by means of which Greeks (like all groups of human beings) structured, regulated, and comprehended their collective lives. As is made clear in the following discussions, it is existential cultural diversity in world history and historical intercultural encounters and conflicts that make the notion of culture meaningful as an analytical term in understanding the fluid and contested conceptions of barbarism and civilization.

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Barbarism and Civilization    231 Donnelly, J. 2006. ‘Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Society’. European Journal of International Relations 12(2): 139–​170. Eagleton, T. 2008. ‘Culture Conundrum’. The Guardian 21 May. Accessed: 20 August 2021. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ree/​2008/​may/​21/​1. Gobineau, A. D. 2016 [1915]. The Inequality of Human Races. London: Forgotten Books. Gong, G.1984. The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Relations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-​Definition through Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, J. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hevia, J. L. 1995. Cherishing Men from Afar Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hevia, J. L. 2003. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-​Century China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1987. The Age of Empire, 1875-​1914. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hobson, J. 2012. The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics Western International Theory, 1760–​2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang, Y. 2013. ‘Perceptions of the Barbarian in Early Greece and China’. CHS Research Bulletin 2(1). Accessed: 20 August 2021. Available at: http://​www.chs-​fell​ows.org/​2014/​03/​14/​perc​ epti​ons-​of-​the-​barbar​ian-​in-​early-​gre​ece-​and-​china/​. Huntington, S. 1993. ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. Foreign Affairs 72(3): 23–​49. Huntington, S. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jones, W. R. 1971. ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 13(4): 376–​407. Kelly, R. D. G. 2000. ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism’. In Discourse on Colonialism, ed A. Césaire, 7–​28. New York: Monthly Review Press. Koskenniemi, M. 2001. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–​1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Launay, R. 2018. Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, W. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Mills, C. W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mungello, D. E. 2005. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–​1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Osterhammel, J. 2018. Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, translated by R. Savage. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pines, Y. 2004. ‘Beasts or Humans: Pre-​Imperial Origins of the Sino-​Barbarian Dichotomy’. In Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, eds. R. Amitai and M. Biran, 59–​102. Leiden: Brills. Pocock, J. G. A. 2005. Barbarism and Religion: Volume 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reus-​Smit, C. 2018. On Cultural Diversity—​International Theory in a World of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ringmar, E. 2013. Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ringmar, E. 2019. History of International Relations: Non-​European Perspectives. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

232   Yongjin Zhang Salter, M. B. 2002. Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations. London: Pluto Press. Schorr, D. B. 2018. ‘Savagery, Civilization, and Property: Theories of Societal Evolution and Commons Theory’. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 19(2): 507–​531. Todorov, T. 2010. The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wasserstein, B. 2007. Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Wills, C. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wooloch, N. 2011. ‘The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory’. Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 44(2): 245–​259. Zakarol, A. 2011. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhang, Y. and Buzan B. 2012. ‘The Tributary System as International Society in Theory and Practice’. Chinese Journal of International Politics 5(1): 3–​36. Žižek, S. 2009. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

chapter 16

Race and Rac i sm Nivi Manchanda The operations that pronounce colonial divisions of humanity—​settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriations of many kinds—​are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporarily distinct nor as yet concluded. To investigate modern race is to consider how racial differences articulate complex intersections of social difference within specific conditions.

Lisa Lowe (2015, 7)

At the contemporary conjuncture, questions of nationalism and ‘ethnic’ loyalties, and their corollaries racism and xenophobia, animate much political discourse. The rise of the far right in contexts as diverse as Brazil, Germany, the Israeli state, the UK, and India, to take only a handful of instances, is the source of heated discussion and political commentary around the globe (Traverso 2019; Fekete 2017; Richardson and Wodak 2009). These movements herald a worrying trend, but are steeped in longer histories of fascism, racism, and myths of national purity. Even more recently, protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s cold-​blooded murder at the hands of a policeman on 25 May 2020 have witnessed a global reverberation of protests, demonstrations, and demands to dismantle structural racism. Again, this is not a novel phenomenon, and the history of anti-​racist and anti-​colonial resistance has prefigured some of the opposition to the enduring structures of racism, anti-​Blackness, Islamophobia, and anti-​Semitism. To unpack these developments, this chapter looks at the genealogy of practices of racism and anti-​racism.1 It also critically interrogates the history of the discipline of International Relations (IR) to explore what narratives (of racism) persist and what stories (of anti-​racism) are marginalized or written out of its remit. The chapter is organized as follows: first, it attempts to define ‘race’ and ‘racism’. The word ‘attempt’ is vital here, because as we shall see this is a thorny and contested issue. To give some texture to this conceptual tapestry, the chapter then analyses the narrative history of IR to show how pivotal the question of race was to some of the discipline’s founding figures—​ including contemporaries Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Du Bois—​and how different visions of race gave way to certain practices of racialization. It then looks at why the ineluctable facticity of racialization and racism have been systemically filtered out of the discipline.

234   Nivi Manchanda Finally, the chapter attends to the implications of the whitewashing of the discipline, and what an IR that is sensitive to questions of race and racism might look like, charting some potential avenues for future research.

What are ‘Race’ and ‘Racism’? The definitions of ‘race’ and its attendant concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘racialization’ are elusive and inescapably political. To retain the focus on the processes set in motion by conceptions of ‘race’, I take my lead from scholars working on race and do not introduce one definition of ‘race’. Rather, ‘race’ here is apprehended as a problematic effect of racism (Brooks 2006, 313). It is not a historical or biological ‘fact’; it is mutable, mobile, and evasive. In the words of Cedric Robinson: ‘Race presents all the appearance of stability. History, however, compromises this fixity. Race is mercurial—​deadly and slick’ (2007, 4). To explore how history may compromise or complicate the supposed stability of race, we turn to concepts of ‘racialization’ and ‘racism’. Racialization may be understood as a set of practices, norms, and conceptions that hierarchize and discriminate on the basis of skin colour—​an epidermal schema that institutionalizes oppressive political and social structures. Racialization is a process that involves ‘the extension of racial meaning to a previously unclassified relationship, social practice or group’ (Omi and Winant 1986, 64). Racism is the more immediate antagonism and prejudice against groups and individuals owing to a belief that one’s ‘race’ (usually that racialized as white) is superior to other ‘races’. Racialization and racism structure society, interpersonal relations, and the global order. They are dynamic, evolving, and fluid. Note that this definition is slightly different to other equally valid and sometimes more pertinent definitions like the one articulated by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her pioneering study on prisons and incarceration in California. For Gilmore racism is ‘the state-​sanctioned and/​or extralegal production and exploitation of group-​differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore 2007, 28). Whilst Gilmore’s definition captures the ways in which some groups of people are rendered disposable in conditions of racial capitalism and is especially concerned with the geographical and spatial repercussions and complexities of racism, the present chapter is focused on the historical practices of racism that have shaped IR and global politics. The polysemy, or more accurately the multivalence, of ‘race’ is testament to its tentacular and adaptive character. Race and racism often function as synecdoche; as shorthand for a wide assortment of heinous practices from which they are inextricable, including colonialism, capitalist expropriation, genocide, and foreign invasion. This mutual implication and inseparability of race from divisions of humanity across times and spaces makes it all the more important for scholars of racism to tease out the specificities and contexts which give rise to particular forms of racialization and raced assemblages. Perhaps this monumental task—​race is everywhere but not always the same—​is one reason that students of IR in particular, and the human sciences in general, have been reluctant to fully engage with, or have shied away from, concerns and questions of racism and racialization. But this very pervasiveness of racism—​both mundane and spectacular—​in immigration systems, in prisons, and incarceration policies, in property regimes, in development aid, in ‘humanitarian’ interventions, also means that it is a touchstone in the topography of international politics.

Race and Racism    235 It is therefore incumbent upon us as scholars to examine the ways in which this bedrock has been ignored, glossed over, and concealed by IR.

Wilsonianism and the League of Nations: Trusteeship, Mandates, and the Birth of IR According to the dominant narrative, IR as a discipline was born in the interwar period with its core aim to analyse war in order to transcend it. For many prominent IR theorists (Wolfers 1956; Donnelly 1995), the discipline is a product of Woodrow Wilson’s idealism and of the founding of the League of Nations, of which Wilson is considered chief architect. This commitment to Wilsonianism in IR was formally enshrined in the founding of the world’s first chair for the study of international politics in 1919 at the Department of International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. The professorship was called the ‘Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics’ and the inaugural holder of the post was Alfred Zimmern. To this day, Professor Andrew Linklater was the last to hold this prestigious position.2 IR, on this account then, is conceived as a fully-​fledged discipline in the aftermath of the First World War, a bloody conflict of a scale hitherto unseen, with its explicit mission to avoid any future outbreak of war and concomitant loss of life. Appealing though this story is, it is at best a patchy one, and at worst a deliberate misrecognition of the geopolitical terrain on which global politics was contested and experienced. Although race was of fundamental concern to IR or international politics—​as it also sometimes known—​in the early years of the founding of the discipline (Shilliam 2017, 286), the story IR tells of its own ‘coming into being’ deliberately eludes this history. In the first instance, as Brian Schmidt has shown, a historiographical approach to interwar IR scholarship suggests that IR was not merely responding to the exogenous shocks of the First World War, but rather was composed of a range of scholars working on issues of war, peace, development, and security from a host of perspectives. These perspectives themselves were constitutive of the very field of study they claimed to be examining, and influenced state and military action in matters of war and peace in a multiplicity of ways. Thus, IR theory was richer, more diverse, and perhaps more problematic than a thin association with Wilsonian idealism or pluralism suggests (Schmidt 2002) and yet this view has come to dominate to the detriment of all others. This hegemonic story of the birth of a discipline is itself therefore a product of racialized practices that silences and overlooks other equally or more valid narratives as we will discover. The key takeaway at this juncture is that this founding myth glorified postwar Wilsonianism as an ideal(istic) framework that was also a normative ‘good’. Through an uncritical adoption of this schema, it was argued that the Wilsonian framework ought to be adopted and strived for, if we—​as scholars, practitioners, and students—​want humanity to flourish. What this cult of personality occludes are the ontological assumptions on which Wilson’s practices and policies were predicated; Woodrow Wilson was by any measure a man who held deeply racist beliefs in both his private life and public policy. More pertinently,

236   Nivi Manchanda Wilson’s racism shaped his politics on both the domestic and the global level, which had resounding ramifications in the United States and beyond. Wilson is often remembered for his Fourteen Points, a statement of principles outlined in a speech he made to the US Congress in January 1918, which espoused, amongst other things, the merits of free trade, democracy, and self-​determination in the search for world peace and prosperity. This commemoration of Wilson is selective at best, and misleading at worst. Whilst much is made of Wilson’s commitment to self-​determination in the context of European, especially British and French, empire, what goes unmentioned is how caveated and tempered this commitment in practice actually was. Instead of formal colonization, he advocated a ‘tutelage system’ through which so-​called advanced nations would help less ‘civilized’ nations prepare for eventual self-​governance. This would take place in phases, either through a mandate system in which erstwhile colonies (construed as pre-​modern) became the common property of the League of Nations, or be administered by a Scandinavian country, until such time as the ‘Negro races’ and other ‘Asiatic peoples’ would become fit for self-​rule (Pedersen 2015). Wilsonian conceptions of tutelage can be situated in a much longer lineage of systems and practices designed to withhold power and autonomy from those people and places designated as unfit for governance. Indeed, international lawyers of both liberal and conservative persuasions in the nineteenth century argued that European culture was innately superior to other ways of life, whilst disagreeing about whether non-​European peoples could be schooled in the ways of civilization and modernity (Koskenniemi 2016). The idea of ‘trusteeship’, with which Woodrow Wilson is most closely associated, became ‘the lynchpin of the League of Nations system of colonial rule’, whilst expressing some caution about the ‘exportability of (European) civilization’ and modernity (Mazower 2006, 558). Although Wilson and the League of Nations self-​consciously departed from the old language and register of ‘colonialism’, assumptions about European superiority and civilizational prowess remained largely intact. Even as the de-​barbed language of modernity aimed to conceal the project of ongoing racial hierarchy, the reception of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ in the non-​European world attests to its imperial underpinnings. Protests and demonstrations ripped through countries from North Africa to China against a qualified and gradated vision of sovereignty that was in essence colonialism in disguise (Mazower 2006; Manela 2007). Even today, the racialized notion of trusteeship continues to speckle international politics. A contemporary example helps illustrate the continuing import of this Wilsonian idea and the racism that inheres within it. On the 4 August 2020, two colossal explosions occurred in the port of Beirut in Lebanon, a key port in the Mediterranean and responsible for 60% of Lebanon’s imports. The explosions led to the death of over 150 people and injured more than 5,000. Much of the port and its infrastructure were destroyed, leading to grain shortages and rendering 300,000 people homeless in the midst of a global pandemic (Khalili 2020). In the immediate aftermath of this explosion, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beirut and expressed his sympathy with the people of Lebanon as well as his rancour at the Lebanese political class and influential elites. His visit elicited mixed emotions, with one segment of the population issuing a petition demanding that Lebanon be placed ‘under French mandate for the next ten years’ (Meddi 2020). This is in effect a demand for a return to the status quo—​Syria and Lebanon were part of a French mandate under the League of Nations Mandate system until the creation of the United Nations in 1945. Mandates, dependencies, and trusteeships were all integral to Wilson’s worldview—​a

Race and Racism    237 semi-​colonial system that has some resonance with today’s notion of ‘responsibility to protect’. The Responsibility to Protect, or (R2P) as it is sometimes referred to, is an ‘international principle’ (Bellamy 2009) adopted by the United Nations which comes into effect when a country has failed to look after its citizens and committed atrocities (manufactured a famine, engineered a civil war, perpetrated genocide) against its own population, at which point it becomes the responsibility of the international community to step in. Although this seems innocuous, even commendable, R2P is riddled with racialized assumptions—​which states are considered ‘failures?’ When is a place considered important enough for (implicitly) the West to intervene in? What sort of government is installed in the aftermath of the intervention? And so on. Although the mandate and trusteeship system are set up differently, in that they are stadial and iterative arrangements of governance, the underlying precepts for both R2P and mandates are remarkably similar. These conform to a vision of government and development where states and peoples usually racialized as non-​white are interpellated as being less capable of governance than their Western (white) counterparts. In any case, not only did the mandate system not work in Lebanon, as its eventual dissolution attests to, it was also racialized in a particular way. The borders of Lebanon were delineated by the French, and France retained control of many of Lebanon’s national institutions. Nevertheless, Lebanon was no longer ‘properly colonized’ and informal empire led to internalization of what Labelle (2018) calls a ‘superiority complex’ in Lebanon vis-​à-​ vis darker-​skinned Africans. Gradations of racism and hierarchy led to the belief that the Lebanese, whilst not cultural equals to the French, were somehow superior to West Africans. The Lebanese were ‘slightly elevated’ in the system of scientific racism. As Labelle (2018, 41) argues: Global ideas of race and racial differences between Arabs and sub-​Saharan Africans, together with perceived different political standings between colonies and mandates within empires, informed the racialization of Lebanese nationalisms. Much like France, Lebanese society saw darker-​skinned colonized peoples from sub-​Saharan Africa through an imperial lens. Lebanese imperial ways of seeing commonly represented both ‘Senegalese’ persons and the so-​called Dark Continent as being barbarous, backward, savage, and uncivilized. Despite the formal political parameters established by the modern imperial politics of difference, Arabs saw themselves as being culturally better situated to climb the ladders of international race and state hierarchies, as well as overcome the global color line. As far as a group of Lebanese nationalists were concerned, this perceived superiority in relation to West Africans was supported by France’s independence promises throughout World War II.

By invoking the return to a French mandate, both the legacy of race and its simultaneous erasure continue to live on. Mandates were racialized, but not always straightforwardly so. This history of racialization is spotty and uneven—​with many in the Arab world subject to racism, also implicated in the perpetuation of myths of civilizational hierarchy, of ideas of modernity and progress that are exclusionary, and of anti-​Black racisms. These complex constellations of race and their manifestations shape the global arena, and yet are largely overlooked by scholars of IR. Indeed, racial taxonomies have been key technologies of colonial power at least since the seventeenth century, and are not an invention of the twentieth century. As Lisa Lowe has eloquently argued, the grammar of a ‘racial governmentality’ is an enduring feature of the modern world. In her Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe explores the relationships between Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe in the late eighteenth and

238   Nivi Manchanda early nineteenth centuries. She details the processes of taxonomizing and hierarchizing that undergird liberal notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘humanity’. The invention of race and the institutionalization of social difference were not always obvious weapons in the armoury of slavery, colonization, and extermination. In 1807, the abolition of slavery in Britain and the move away from ‘mercantilist plantation production’ (Lowe 2015) for instance, did not mark the end of racial violence or what has been otherwise called ‘racial capitalism’. Instead, Chinese indentured labour became a supplement to Black labour rather than either a strict replacement or a continuation of those practices—​the British imaged the Chinese ‘as a racial barrier between [them] and the Negroes’ (Lowe 2015, 24). The British referred to the Chinese workers as ‘free’, but they would be ‘shipped on vessels much like those that brought the slaves they were designed to replace; some would fall to disease, die, suffer abuse and mutiny’ (Lowe 2015, 24). Chinese people were considered one step closer to self-​governance and differently racialized than Africans, but this differential racialization speaks to the amorphous character of global racism(s) rather than to the benign nature of liberal humanism or to the ‘progressiveness’ of white abolitionists. Thus, the slippery and slick character of race, and the different modalities through which it has been experienced historically by different populations has meant that the international order we have inherited today is unevenly racialized. This fundamental unevenness—​not all practices of race are the same everywhere—​is why norms of self-​determination, conceptions of modernity, and notions of development appear benign and apolitical. Moreover, untethered from the violent histories and political ecologies of colonialism and slavery they become tacitly accepted as scientific fact. Tracking back to Wilson’s thought, we can see how even his problematic notions of attenuated or piecemeal self-​ governance and self-​ determination—​ of those considered higher up in the rungs of racial hierarchy such as the Lebanese—​was in no way guaranteed. Consider, for example, Wilson’s policy towards the Philippines. Whilst initially, Wilson had reportedly opposed American annexation of the Islands, ‘in 1906 he veered towards an endorsement of colonial imperialism’ before finally advocating a policy of American tutelage to ‘prepare the Filipino people for self-​determination’ (Curry 1954, 435). But even after native Filipinos were permitted to have majorities in both houses of their legislature following two decades of American colonization, Wilson justified this policy by arguing that it would allow Filipinos to prove their ‘sense of responsibility in the exercise of political power’ and only if they were successful would he grant the Philippines full independence (Manela 2007). For Wilson, this ‘dabbling’ with legislative authority was a test for a people he deemed unfit for self-​governance, and it was only in 1946 after the signing of the Treaty of Manila that the Philippines was granted full independence. Not only does this ride roughshod over indigenous revolutionary and independence movements, it also stands in stark contrast to Wilson’s own contemporaries around the world including for instance Vladimir Lenin who published his Right of Nations to Self-​Determination in 1914, which advanced the immutable principle of sovereignty and self-​determination without conditionality for all states. Unlike Wilson’s, Lenin’s was a radical egalitarian argument not a provisional and racially inflected one. And without absolving the Soviet Union, which was an imperial enterprise in its own right, Lenin’s anti-​capitalism and the open contempt which communists were subject to, precluded any reckoning with Lenin’s treatise on self-​determination. Anti-​communism and anti-​Blackness went hand in hand, and the twin enemies of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK); the KKK targeted communists frequently and most infamously massacred five members of the

Race and Racism    239 Communist Workers’ Party in 1979. Yet, Lenin was far from the only voice that advocated for decolonization in the ‘West’: those fighting for decolonization at the time included Rosa Luxemburg, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Nikolai Bukharin. Many Black writers and activists, not least George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, and Amy Ashwood were also espousing self-​ determination and the end of colonization in far more unequivocal terms than Woodrow Wilson. Even so, it is Wilson who is celebrated as having been the one who enshrined the principle of self-​determination and sovereignty—​the theoretical edifices on which the discipline of IR is built. Given the cacophony of voices advancing self-​determination at the time, one can deduce that Wilson’s was amplified for two main reasons, both of which speak to practices of racialization. First, as the president of the United States, and almost needless to say, a white male, he had a platform that most of his contemporaries were unable to access. The US was accepted into the fold of European modernity, with its economic and technological capabilities unmatched after the First World War. Second, Wilson distanced himself from some of the more barefaced racism of many European leaders and politicians. His liberal racism was more palatable but crucially it did not demand a clean break from centuries of colonial rule. The patina of equality that Wilson advocated was the extent to which European colonial modernity could accommodate its others. Twentieth-​century theories like W. W. Rostow’s famous ‘modernization theory’ further institutionalized stagist theories of development, sedimenting the veneer of racial equality while retaining the Wilsonian logics of tutelage and notions of ‘maturity’. Modernization theory divided the world into two: modern and traditional. Modern society and states were progressive, rational, cosmopolitan, and complex. Traditional society and states were backward looking, superstitious, passive, and economically simple. All countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were deemed traditional, whereas the West was rendered modern. This bifurcation of the world was not incidental, but the West was innately modern and the rest innately unmodern; as Nils Gilman (2003, 5) avers: modernity was conceived of as containing a ‘distinctive quality’ which some people had and others didn’t. He goes further: ‘There was little sense that modernity might be riven by internal tensions, that modernity might contain unsavoury aspects, or that modernity’s various features might play themselves out very differently in different places’ (Gilman 2003, 5). In much of these racialized and neo-​colonial imaginaries, modernity became a euphemism for ‘good’ (and white), sacrificing any nuance or granularity for simplistic accounts of civilized people and their backward counterparts. Wilson’s racial paternalism abroad—​which saw colonies rated on a sliding scale of developmental potential much like the modernization theory analysed previously—​saw its ugly counterpart at home where any pretence of benevolence was cast aside in favour of plain, simple, and unreconstructed racism. To contextualize, and as will be shown next, Wilson was racist judged even by the, admittedly lax, standards of his time in the US (Moody 2011, 126). He was an ardent supporter of the KKK, whose throwing of ‘the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic’ was a ‘delightful discovery’ (Wilson 1918, 60) in his own words. Wilson also defended the KKK3 as white men of the South [who] were aroused by the mere instinct of self-​preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers’ (1918, 58). Finally, and most egregiously, Wilson oversaw the racial re-​segregation of the federal government agency staff. Agencies including the Treasury and the Post Office that had been

240   Nivi Manchanda integrated in the reconstruction era multiple years earlier were segregated once again, and many Black workers were fired. A letter written to him by W. E. B Du Bois in 1913 homes in on the racism of Wilson’s presidency and is worth quoting at some length: Sir, you have now been President of the United States for six months and what is the result? It is no exaggeration to say that every enemy of the Negro race is greatly encouraged; that every man who dreams of making the Negro race a group of menials and pariahs is alert and hopeful. Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, Cole Blease, and Burleson [administrators in the South at the time] are evidently assuming that their theory of the place and destiny of the Negro race is the theory of your administration, They and others are assuming this because not a single act and not a single word of yours since election has given anyone reason to infer that that you have the slightest interest in the colored people or desire to alleviate their intolerable position, A dozen worthy Negro officials have been removed from office, and you have nominated but on [sic] black man for office, and he such a contemptible cur, that his very nomination was an insult to every Negro in the land. To this negative appearance of indifference has been added positive action on the part of your advisers . . . which constitutes the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation, Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government. In the Treasury and Post Office Departments colored clerks have been herded to themselves as though they were not human beings. We are told that one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work has consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years. (Du Bois 1918, 48)

Later, Du Bois wrote in a journal revealingly titled the Journal of Negro History about how he and other Black Americans protested about the re-​segregation that Wilson oversaw in his government staff, and how their appeals fell on deaf ears. In his own words: ‘The attempt on the part of Negroes to plead with the President and secure his sympathy in this matter was on the whole unsuccessful’ (Du Bois 1973, 455). He also argued that Wilson was for the most part disinterested in emancipation of European colonies other than for reasons of ‘commercial enterprise and profit making’. Du Bois’ final lines in his short piece on Wilson titled ‘My impressions of Woodrow Wilson’ with reference to the latter’s outlook on European colonialism in Asia and Africa, sums up many of the concerns of this chapter thus far: ‘Here as elsewhere my conception of Wilson as a scholar was disappointed. At Versailles he did not seem to understand Europe nor European politics, nor the world-​wide problems of race’ (Du Bois 1973, 459). Du Bois was alive to the fact that Wilsonian ideology inscribed a benevolent racism that masqueraded as an apolitical project of modernity and enlightenment.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and the Global Colour Line This leads us to one of the greatest ironies—​and tragedies—​of the disciplinary history of IR. Whilst Woodrow Wilson is celebrated as early adherent, even champion and progenitor, of IR theory, W. E. B Du Bois has instead been sentenced to a systematic aphasia—​a deliberate forgetting—​in spite of his foundational contributions to the study of IR and the intellectual

Race and Racism    241 project of anti-​racism more broadly. Moreover, even though race and racism were crucial to a Wilsonian ideology—​as they were to Du Bois’—​those issues seem to have been bracketed out in conventional analyses of IR. Robbie Shilliam reminds us that ‘in the early years of the field’s formation, race was discussed as a mainstream and not marginal issue’ (2017, 286). For Wilson this discussion of race stemmed from an inescapably racist worldview, but there are others who understood racism as toxic and wanted to build a political movement to alleviate its pernicious effects. Practices of racism adhered, whilst anti-​racist worldviews and solidarities were gradually and wilfully eroded. In the aftermath of the First World War, Du Bois wrote an article in the journal Foreign Affairs entitled ‘World of Color’ (1925) in which he revisited a pronouncement he had first made in 1903: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-​line—​the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’ (Du Bois 1961 [1903], 23). Ten years later, Du Bois wrote again in Foreign Affairs, this time cautioning against the Italian-​Ethiopian war and its potential for the further escalation of racism and the inflammation of the global colour line (1935). Not only were his warnings prescient for Europe, because Italy’s colonial army was defeated spectacularly by the Ethiopians and resulted in imperial retreat, but also because he spoke to the dilemmas that might confront newly decolonized states and peoples. Even before Ethiopia’s victory against Italy he pondered whether ‘she’ viz. Ethiopia would realize that the path of Europe is the path of destruction, that she is witnessing the culmination of white civilization and the beginning of the inevitable decline, and the only salvation of Ethiopia and the Black races is to find new ideals different from the ideals which have dominated white Europe and America since the seventeenth century. (quoted in Quirin 2010, 12)

These pronouncements are part of an impressive oeuvre that Du Bois produced on the practices of race, racism, and global inequality. Given that Du Bois’ thought featured in Foreign Affairs, the foremost journal of IR at the time, signals how central his thinking was to the field at its birth. Incidentally, to this date Foreign Affairs remains one of the most influential journals of foreign policy analysis. Not only has Du Bois’ work been marginalized in IR, albeit with a few notable and relatively recent exceptions (Anievas et al. 2015; Grovogui 2016; Vitalis 2015), the history of the journal itself has been effaced. As Robert Vitalis (2018) notes, Foreign Affairs at its official launch in 1910 was called The Journal of Race Development and only later in 1922 changed to Foreign Affairs. This reflects the pre-​occupation of early IR scholars with questions of racism and colonialism. Even towards the end of the First World War, race was still discussed occasionally but in subsequent years, especially in the post-​ Cold War era, race seems to have been deposited in the virtual dustbin of IR history (Anievas et al. 2015, 4–​7). Nonetheless and as a welcome corrective, both Du Bois and the centrality of race are now being excavated in critical IR (see Anievas et al. 2015; Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018; Vucetic 2011; Bell 2012; Persaud and Sajed 2018). Many of the abiding concerns of Du Bois’ work were those that animated much of the birth of the discipline and both the micro-​and macro-​histories of racism. These had to do with European empire: the question of what to do with the ‘colonies’ including how to manage imperial administration; questions of hierarchies between groups of people and ways of social organization; and finally, the ‘problems’ posed by Third World nationalists and liberation movements that had taken root around Asia and Africa. These fixations centring

242   Nivi Manchanda around the question of race were the capstone of interwar IR. Notwithstanding, the defining features and practices that IR was imbricated in at its conception seem to have been all but forsaken by contemporary IR, where an entirely different set of problematiques has come to structure the discipline as we know it today. It is telling, but not surprising then, that a leading school of IR housed at Princeton is called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but no such equivalent institute has been named after Du Bois.4 Alternate imaginaries of decolonization, of indigenous self-​determination, of anti-​racism have remained firmly outside the mainstream of IR. IR as a discipline has chosen to narrate the world, and therefore bring into being this world, or at least make it intelligible to its audience, in a manner that decentres questions of race, and spotlights rarefied and arcane debates in its stead. IR is implicated in the racialized practice of forgetting rather than divorced from race and racism. However, its foregrounding of insular and insulated theory, rather than on the material processes of what Adom Getachew (2019) calls ‘worldmaking’ is a symptom of a larger trend in social science and political theory. It is to this that the chapter now turns.

The Elision of Race in IR Sankaran Krishna (2001) delineates a key discursive strategy that IR deploys in order to produce a wilful amnesia around questions of race. He labels this strategy ‘abstraction’ and outlines how abstraction severs IR’s object of study (the state, anarchy, sovereignty) from its constitutive colonial histories and social relations of violence, extraction, and dispossession. Denise Ferreira Da Silva locates this tendency towards abstraction in a ‘double distinction’ which places racism and racialization ‘outside the ‘proper’ domain of political theory’ (Da Silva 2017, 61). This double distinction means that political theory relies at once on racialized thought, and denies the importance of race in, and for, political theory. While the object of critique for Da Silva is political theory, her observations are apposite to IR. Da Silva argues that on the one hand race is considered too ‘everyday’, too ‘banal’ to be the stuff of proper theorizing. On the other hand, however, ‘raciality functions among the conditions of possibility for articulating the proper subject of the Political as a self-​ determined (self-​regulated or self-​transparent) existent, while affectability is attributed to everything (bodies, minds, places, and more-​than-​humans) that is not white/​European’ (2017, 62). The former is explicit—​race and racialism are processes relegated to the realm of the ‘moral’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’ rather than the properly ‘political’, and the second is implicit—​a distinction made between ‘self-​determined’ or ‘rational subjects’ versus ‘affectable’ or ‘emotional’ ones. Da Silva’s commentary is directed specifically at Wendy Brown’s failure to accord the beating of Rodney King, and the protests it set in motion after the acquittal of the police officers in charge, the status of an event worthy of saying something useful for political theory (Manchanda, 2021). On Brown’s account, Rodney King’s beating—​and all that it set in motion—​has no political purchase, no ‘analytical import’, because racial subjects and subjectivity are not in and of themselves political. Indeed, for Brown, they become political ‘only when presented in the recognizable forms such as the Civil Rights Movement rather than in ‘banal’ events’ (Da Silva 2017, 64). Through this conceit of abstraction, it also becomes much easier to maintain a distance from and deny any involvement in these ‘racial events’.

Race and Racism    243 This resonates with IR’s reluctance to grapple with, obscure, or diminish the importance of anti-​racist solidarity movements today, and equally to analyse and contend with the rise of the far-​right as transnational or global events. That is, IR chooses to augment practices of racism over those of anti-​racism and reflects broader political trends at play. Today’s political landscape is contoured by on the one hand, the violent practices of colonization and suppression of land and peoples across the globe including in Kashmir, in Palestine, in the Amazon, and on the other hand forces of resistance that impel us to see the connections between the killing of George Floyd in the United States, of a pandemic that disproportionately affects people of colour in the West, of the death of 16-​year old Sudanese refugee whose body was found swept ashore a beach near Calais, and of the abovementioned explosions in Beirut. These interlinkages and entanglements should be the lifeblood of IR but owing to the practices of abstraction and distancing that sustain racism, IR instead diverts its energies into studying theories and paradigms that are largely disconnected from global political events and contestations.

Race as Practice: The Pitfalls of Colonial Amnesia As we can see from the previous discussion, mainstream IR (as well as other cognate disciplines) is blinkered when it comes to questions of race and empire or more accurately perhaps, certain practices of racism are normalized whilst others are shunned. Postcolonial approaches to IR spotlight the ways in which conventional IR privileges the West over the Rest. This is owed in part to IR’s positionality—​most academics working in IR are from or based in the Global North, thus resulting in a field that is built largely around the experiences of a small proportion of the world’s states and peoples. Those that centre race and coloniality in their analyses share a commitment to knowledge production and cultivation that goes beyond the familiar rationalist Enlightenment paradigms privileged in IR and other Western social sciences. Equally damning, for a discipline seemingly developed to prevent or at least contain the excesses of war, much IR scholarship fails to pay much heed to global inequalities in power and wealth. These asymmetrical relations, which retain a fundamentally racialized character, are implicated in sustaining a world order that is rife with conflict, discord, and disharmony. One only need look at the recent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the time of writing the war in Yemen, to see how centuries of colonial dispossession suture with Islamophobia and racism today to perpetuate a deeply strife-​riven and unequal global system. This is a counter-​narrative, in stark contrast to the dominant narratives peddled in IR in which the world is constituted by sovereign states interacting in the relative absence of war. With or without conscious volition, IR’s neglectful treatment, even amnesia, of the ubiquitous question of race ultimately implicates the discipline and those of us who are associated with it in a system of racism in general and white supremacy in particular. Charles Mills (1997: 3) defines global white supremacy as a ‘particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties’.

244   Nivi Manchanda

What if we Take Race Seriously: Atoning for our Sins and Future Avenues for Exploration The history we are told of IR then is unambiguously racist. Its future, however, need not be. For IR to be a truly global discipline it first has to recognize (rather than assiduously negate) that race and racism are phenomena with unescapable international and transnational dimensions. An acknowledgement of the globally exploitative—​both materially and discursively—​nature of racial power would considerably enhance our ability to study complex international developments and devise better theoretical tools. First, this means squarely facing up to the reality that IR has been complicit in the racial science of imperial administration not least through the setting up of institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London precisely to produce a generation of administrators (mostly white men) to govern British colonies in Asia and Africa more effectively. And second, and rather more troublingly, it requires that we disavow the thinly-​veiled recourse to ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ through which IR continues to propagate a Eurocentric, racialized, and indeed gendered world order. By extolling the law-​ like status of the Democratic Peace Thesis which states that liberal democracies are less likely to be embroiled in war, we shy away from examining and critiquing the multiple wars fought by democracies such as the US and the UK against countries like Syria and Iraq. Likewise, by reifying ‘sovereignty’ into an intrinsic quality possessed by states, we close our eyes to the struggle for land and liberation in Palestine, Kashmir, and Kurdistan. Finally, the purview of IR must be expanded greatly if it wants to be germane to global politics. Not only does the history of the slave trade, settler colonialism and genocide need to be taken seriously, the deep-​seated ways in which the legacy of colonialism continues to structure world politics has to be contended with. As early as 1965, Kwame Nkrumah the president of the then newly independent Ghana, stated: ‘The essence of neo-​colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed by outside’ (1965, ix). These words still ring true for much of the world’s population. Indeed, the world cannot be ‘accounted for’ or made sense of, through a systematic excision of 90% of its population which resides in the ‘non-​West’ and battles with destitution, lack of resources, and the practices of ongoing neocolonialism. The very notion of sovereign states begins to crumble when we begin to apprehend the politics of knowledge that produce IR. Even this picture can be further complicated when we unpack the provision of healthcare, employment, housing and become cognizant of the raced distribution of wealth within the West. IR and the academic study of international politics more generally has to become more capacious in order to deal with the human condition beyond the black boxes of nominally sovereign states. As Manu Karuka argues, it is much more accurate to refer to colonial claims of sovereignty, the sort put forward by the United States and Canada for instance, as ‘countersovereignty’. On this account, colonial sovereignty is ‘always necessarily a reactive claim’ (Karuka 2019, 2). This is because European sovereignty has existed only through the

Race and Racism    245 denial of other peoples’ sovereignty—​the elimination of indigenous people in the Americas, the enslavement of Black peoples, the violent importation of Chinese labour, and the colonization of vast swathes of the global population. IR must shed some of its colonial baggage and become more attuned to the history and present of racial violence—​oppose rather than reinscribe the status quo—​if it is to realize its eponymous goal of a global discipline. There already exists a rich body of work, especially in the Black radical tradition, that contemporary IR can draw on. Scholars writing in the 1970s including Amilcar Cabral, Roy Preiswerk, George Shepherd, and Tilden Lemelle have presented sophisticated treatises on racial politics, carceral capitalism, and the indelible imprint of colonialism on people in both the West and the non-​West. IR merely needs to engage these meditations and build on them rather than re-​discover the wheel in order to become a more attentive and inclusive discipline. To wrap up, this chapter has shown how race—​as structure and practice—​has been subject to a systematic disremembering, or indeed misremembering in contemporary IR to the detriment of practices of anti-​racism. The privileging of a Wilsonian (racialized) view of self-​determination that fed into ever more ‘abstract’ conceptions of statehood and sovereignty has resulted in a discipline thoroughly disengaged with the problems of the world. And yet, IR is the discipline best placed to deal with the current moment which is defined by a demand for racial justice that is constitutively global. As the Black Lives Matter Movement spreads like wildfire around the globe, those who are committed to thinking with and through the ‘global’ must return to fundamental questions of (anti-​)racism and international solidarity. Narratives of progress, modernity, and redemption will continue to ring hollow without a concomitant wrestling with questions of reparations, abolition of prison and detention facilities, and open borders.

Notes 1. This is not to suggest an easy conflation of anti-​racism with anti-​colonialism. Indeed, the advent of ‘fascist modernities’ belies an easy origin story: anti-​imperialism was a strategic choice of some fascist groups whilst for others the undertones of the civilising mission that saw the possibility of modernity extended to peoples in the Global South necessarily entailed the morally abhorrent dilution of the white races. Likewise, present-​day populists are often in favour of self-​determination for Black and brown peoples, because in this, an imaginary hermetically sealed white nation needs to be protected with its boundaries preserved from racialized hordes. These fissures are further complicated in reference to debates on climate change today—​there is often an uneasy (and largely superficial) alliance between (racialised) indigenous groups and white nationalist anti-​migration groups in the US, Canada, and other settler colonial countries, for instance. Race is a many-​headed hydra-​contingent, context-​dependent, and inseparable from practices and structures of capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, and transphobia. 2. This lionisation of Wilson can be seen most recently in the recent celebration of the centenary of the establishment of the Woodrow Wilson chair of International Relations in the journal International Relations special issue: ‘Continuity and Change in International Relations 1919–​2019’. The contributors frequently evoke Wilson’s legacy in glowing terms. The relative absence of female contributors and the even more marked absence of people of colour from this issue provides another mirror into the reality of IR.

246   Nivi Manchanda 3. There may be some merit in pointing out Marcus Garvey’s complicated endorsement of the KKK in this context. Garvey, a prominent Jamaican activist, was the founder and first President-​General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey’s notion of Pan-​Africanism effectively saw ‘Africa’ as the home for all Black people and the US as the white person’s preserve. Much has been made of his exclusionary ‘Black nationalism’ but to read him as a straightforwardly ‘racial separatist’ does a disservice to his complex and sometimes contradictory outlook on race and racism. 4. Princeton has since promised to rename the school given Wilson’s racist legacy. Nonetheless, it may be worth considering whether naming chairs and institutions after famous people is such a wise move after all. Du Bois himself was far from perfect, and harboured quite problematic views about Africans from the continent (I owe this insight to Philip Conway) and also held fairly paternalistic, if not downright sexist attitudes towards women. More pertinently, perhaps the very desire to ‘honour’ persons who are invariably ‘great men’ needs to be rethought, ‘decolonized’, and ultimately relinquished.

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Race and Racism    247 Gilman, N. 2003. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Gilmore, R. W. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grovogui, S. 2016. Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions, reprint of 2006 edn. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Karuka, M. 2019. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. Oakland: University of California Press. Khalili, L. 2020. Behind the Beirut explosion lies the lawless world of international shipping. The Guardian. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ree/​2020/​aug/​08/​bei​rut-​explos​ ion-​lawl​ess-​world-​intern​atio​nal-​shipp​ing-​ Koskenniemi, M. 2016. ‘Race, Hierarchy and International Law: Lorimer’s Legal Science’. European Journal of International Law 27(2): 415–​429. Krishna, S. 2001. ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’. Alternatives 26(4): 401–​424. Labelle Jr, M. M. 2018. ‘Tensions of Decolonization: Lebanon, West Africans, and a Color Line within the Global Color Line, May 1945’. Radical History Review 131: 36–​57. Lenin, V. I. 1977. The Right of Nations to Self Determination: Selected Writings. Reprint, Greenwood Press. Lowe, L. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. London: Duke University Press. Manchanda, N. 2018. ‘Postcolonialism’. In Security Studies: An Introduction, eds. P. Williams and M. McDonald, 114–​128. New York: Routledge. Manchanda, N. 2021. ‘The Banalization of Race in International Security Studies: From Absolution to Abolition’. Security Dialogue 52(1 suppl): 49–​59. Manela, E. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, T. 1986. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. New York: The Majority Press. Mazower, M. 2006. ‘An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-​Twentieth Century’. International Affairs 82(3): 553–​566. Meddi, A. 2020. ‘Lebanon’s State Failure is Macron’s Opportunity to be Saviour’. Middle East Eye. Available at: https://​www.middle​east​eye.net/​opin​ion/​leba​non-​mac​ron-​savi​our-​sea​ rch-​lost-​mand​ate. Accessed 30 May 2022 Mills, C. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press Moody, W. 2011. Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Nkrumah, K. 1965. Neo-​Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International. Omi, M. and Winant, H. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pedersen, S. 2015. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persaud, R. and Sajed, A. 2018. Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives. London: Routledge. Quirin, J. 2010. ‘WEB Du Bois, Ethiopianism and Ethiopia, 1890–​1955’. International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 5(2): 1–​26. Richardson, J. E. and Wodak, R. 2009. ‘The Impact of Visual Racism: Visual Arguments in Political Leaflets of Austrian and British Far-​right Parties’. Controversia 6(2): 45–​77.

248   Nivi Manchanda Rutazibwa, O. U. and R. Shilliam, eds. 2018. Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics. London: Routledge. Schmidt, B. 2002. ‘Anarchy, World Politics and the Birth of a Discipline: American International Relations, Pluralist Theory and the Myth of Interwar Idealism’. International Relations 16(1): 9–​31. Shepherd, G. W. and Lemelle, T. J. 1970. ‘Race in the Future of International Relations’. Presentation at the Sixty-​Sixth Annual meeting of American Political Science Association, Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, California, September 8–​12. Shilliam, R. 2017. ‘Race in World Politics’. In The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, eds. J. Baylis, S. Smith, and P. Owens, 284–​300. Seventh Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traverso, E. 2019. The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. London: Verso Books. Vitalis, R. 2015. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vitalis, R. 2018. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vucetic, S. 2011. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wilson, W. 1918. A History of the American People, Vol. 10. New York: Harper and Brothers. Wolfers, A. 1956. The Anglo-​American Tradition in Foreign Affairs: Readings from Thomas More to Woodrow Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press.

chapter 17

Rel igion, History, a nd In ternational Re l at i ons Cecelia Lynch Religion and IRs’ Foundational European Mythology From the founding of International Relations (IR) as a discipline in the early twentieth century to the end of the Cold War, scholars have tended to ignore religion. The exception is the founding mythology of modernity. To the extent that modern IR relies on the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia as the point of origin for the study of the state system, the discipline has considered religion to be important historically. This is because Westphalia purportedly ended the Wars of Religion, although these treaties have become an increasingly contested marker both for the end of religious wars and for the founding of the international state system. But the import for the study of religion in IR remains; in much of the IR literature, religion is important only as a negative example; that is, of commitments and identities that cause conflict and war when they are allowed to become part of governance in the public realm. The ‘lesson learned’ about religion from Westphalia and the wars that preceded it, in this narrative, is that religion must maintain its proper place in the private realm, or, in a trend that appeared to accompany ongoing ‘modernization’, be eradicated altogether as an anachronism of the Middle Ages. This lesson solidified from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, and became operationalized into a theoretical proposition in the mid-​twentieth century, known as the ‘secularization thesis’. According to this thesis, sometimes called a theory, secularization inevitably accompanied modernization and hence, progress. Peter Berger, one of its primary exponents, states that the theory’s ‘key idea’ is ‘simple: Modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals’ (Berger 1999, 2). The theory has since been disproved or heavily revised by Berger as well as others. As Berger puts it, ‘it is precisely this key idea [regarding religion’s decline] that has turned out to be wrong’ (Berger 1999, 2–​3; see also Martin, 1969 for an earlier challenge). José Casanova,

250   Cecelia Lynch however, draws a distinction among the related terms, ‘the secular’, ‘secularization’, and ‘secularism’, arguing that distinguishing among them clarifies their respective relevance. In this schematic, the first is ‘a central modern epistemic category’, the second ‘an analytical conceptualization of modern world-​historical processes’, and the third ‘a worldview and ideology’ (Casanova 2011, 54–​55). While secularization has occurred in many, although not all, parts of the world, and while the secular is an epistemic category with considerable influence in modernity, ‘secularism’ as a worldview and ideology is not accepted worldwide. More specifically, the attendant bifurcation of public/​private, with religion in the latter box, is part of a specifically European story for Casanova, that is more mythology than fact even in Europe (Casanova 1994). This mythological story of the widespread ascendancy of secularism never had the same resonance in the US, let alone Latin America, Africa, or Asia. Yet it remains significant and discursively powerful in IR for at least two reasons. First, this is the story that has shaped the development of the discipline of IR. The mythology of the state in general relies on the assumption that military or economic power, and not ‘culture’ or ‘religion’, provide the relevant categories of analysis for understanding the world. Second, the European story’s power has resulted in constricting the definition of what constitutes ‘religion’, and also in downgrading, silencing, or even erasing the importance of many kinds of religious commitments, practices, and experiences around the globe with significant historical and contemporary significance. Interrogating the meaning and scope of modernity (one of the themes and purposes of this Handbook), however, allows for provincializing this European narrative (Chakrabarty 2000; Grovogui 2006), opening up space for understanding a wide range of religious traditions, practices, and commitments in international politics. Along with this provincialization, incorporating ‘granularity’ (another Handbook theme) regarding experiences both within and outside of Europe, can compel not only a richer view of the ongoing presence and power of these traditions, practices, and commitments, but also a re-​evaluation of several contemporary debates that stem from the mythology of absence. One major example concerns ‘practice theory’ as developed in the field of IR, which has, oddly, largely ignored religion, even as the concept of ‘practice’ has traditionally accompanied discussions of religious observance in the modern West (i.e. one ‘practices’ one’s religion). Accessing aspects of granularity, along with interrogating modernity, provides openings for much-​needed correctives in IR’s treatment of religion. However, granularity alone cannot do the trick; i.e. compensate for IR’s traditional inattention to religion. This is because grasping the meaning of religious expression, practice, and tradition in the world requires more than in-​depth study of practices that appear to be different from each other. Such constructions of meaning, following Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, and numerous others, too often include comprehending ‘other’ traditions through or in contrast to ‘familiar’ (read ‘modern) ontological and epistemological, as well as spatial and temporal, categories. Instead, understanding the range of religious expression, practice, and meaning in the world requires openness to cosmologies that these writers often consider to be (whether or not they are) non-​ modern in some way. This, in turn, potentially requires reconfigurations of ontologies and epistemologies, and conceptions of time and place, in ways that moderns might find unsettling, but that open up modernity as well as IR to comprehending a fuller range of religious expression.

Religion, History, and IR    251

The European story and the demise of religion in IR The European story of the founding of modern international relations is intimately connected to the alleged demise of religion, which presumably resulted in greater peace and progress in the developing international system. The simplified story is that the Wars of Religion, pitting Catholicism against reformist Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries especially, represented a succession of especially bloody and violent encounters throughout western and central Europe, ended only by a series of agreements that slowly began to diminish the power of religious difference. The Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, between the German states and the Holy Roman Emperor, laid the groundwork by putting forth the principle of ‘cuius regio eius religio’. According to this principle, the ruler determined the religion of the inhabitants of the land. Of course, this treaty did not prevent further bloodshed, and almost one hundred years later in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia comprised a series of treaties between the Catholic Hapsburgs of Austria and Spain, the Germanic states, France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands (Nexon 2009). In addition to putting an end to the Thirty Years’ War, these treaties reinforced the principle of Augsburg, drawing political boundaries that were also confessional. As José Casanova points out, however, even these treaties did not stem ‘religious’ violence in Europe, which continued throughout the eighteenth century (Casanova 2008, 65). Moreover, conquest and colonization accompanied conversion efforts by Europeans to non-​European parts of the world, including the Americas, Asia, and Africa (Van der Veer 2011). The story, therefore, tends to ignore the intertwined violence of conquest and conversion that connects the medieval and modern eras and complicates the idea that Europe had become ‘secular’ (if it had, for example, how and why were so many of the colonial enterprises so closely tied to conversion and evangelization?). Instead, the European narrative emphasizes the growth of Enlightenment ideas such as the use of human reason and the potential for human progress in both science and governance, and the alignment of these ideas in the formation of the ‘citizen’ during the French and American revolutions. Religious considerations were pushed further and further out of the mechanisms and processes of governance, which became ‘secularized’, and put where they allegedly belonged, outside of the institutions of governance and into the private realm. No longer was ‘God’ necessary to guide human action; reason and progress would do so instead, allegedly ensuring the capacity for what Charles Taylor has called ‘human flourishing’ (Taylor 2007).

Religion, Secularism and Decolonization Looking at religious and secular commitments in decolonizing regions from the 1940s into the 1970s and beyond illustrates the power of the secularization thesis to shape expectations about ‘modern’ statehood. These commitments, however, also demonstrate some of the ways in which the secularization thesis was already inadequate to capture the forms of governance being advocated and instantiated in parts of newly decolonized states in Asia and Africa.

252   Cecelia Lynch Decolonization processes included vociferous debates about whether newly independent states could be sufficiently ‘modern’ to join the ‘international community’. In these terms, modernity required secular systems of government (Juergensmeyer 2008). As a result, the role of religion in postcolonial forms of governance suffused decolonization struggles. In India, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru opposed Mohandas Gandhi’s use of Hindu and interfaith traditions that inspired his articulation of nonviolence through satyagraha or ‘truth force’ to insist on explicitly secular institutions of governance. Similarly, in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser suppressed any attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to promote Islamic legal norms. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah famously paraphrased and ‘secularized’ a well-​ known biblical expression in calling for pan-​African unity, stating, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you’. In many ways, therefore, it seemed that those leading independence movements and newly independent countries during the mid-​ twentieth century had fully bought into the secularization narrative. In order to demonstrate their status as modern states, they controlled or even suppressed public religious activity in the service of secularism as an ideology. But this was never the complete story. Egypt instantiated a kind of state-​defined Islam, as did Pakistan after its 1947 partition with India. Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania, was not only a Christian, but also an African socialist and pan-​Africanist. Demonstrating his awareness and critique of colonial and missionary histories, he insisted that ‘the Church must work with the people in the positive task of building social justice . . . it is important that we should stress the working with, not the working for’ (Isichei 1995, 326, Lynch 2017). Leopold Senghor, first president of independent Senegal who was also a Catholic and former seminarian in a Muslim-​majority country, drew inspiration from French thinker Jacques Maritain and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but also critiqued ‘the divorce existing between the doctrine and the life of European Christians, between Christ’s work and Christian acts’ (Isichei 1995, 339). Senghor also instituted a form of secularism that was respectful of the power of the largest Sufi Brotherhoods, the Mourides, Tijaniyyah, and Layenne. Perhaps more importantly, however, Indigenous religious traditions never disappeared in any of these regions, and a deeper look at religion in Europe and the Americas shows that their staying power has in fact been a global phenomenon. I return to this staying power later in this chapter.

Religion’s ‘Resurgence’ in IR: Post-​C old War Pushback During the past three decades, scholars of religion inside as well as outside of IR have strongly challenged the European story of progressive secularization along multiple dimensions (Chan 2000; Haynes 1998; Hatzopoulos and Petito 2003; Lynch 2000/​2003; Thomas 2005; Mahmood 2006, 2009; Wilson 2012; Hurd 2008; Martin 1969; Berger 1999; Casanova, 1994; Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Asad 1993). First, the European story of secularization has shaped but not suffused the rest of the world, as the previous discussion of decolonization begins to indicate. Ideological commitment to secularism in the European

Religion, History, and IR    253 sense has transferred uneasily, at best, to other areas of the world. Pushback against state repression of religious expression has grown across the Middle East, and a wide range of practices, beliefs, and traditions not generally considered to be ‘secular’ (at least in the post-​ Enlightenment, European sense) remain evident throughout the world. In this sense, the progressive Enlightenment narrative of IR, that posits a temporal and spatial rendering that situates ‘religion’ squarely in the midst of an ever-​‘rationalizing’ (read ‘secularizing’) modernity, following part of Max Weber’s thesis, has not come to pass (Weber 1993). Weber’s theorizing about religion is complex, but one of his primary conclusions concerned the inexorable (although not inevitable) ‘rationalizing’ force that resulted in the development of ‘world religions’ organized according to bureaucratic criteria that would enable them to operate transnationally, but, in some interpretations, would also eventually end in the progressive diminution of religion itself. Once again, then, modernity (at least this definition of it) would actively subdue and erase religion from IR. But this part of Weber’s thesis has not come to pass. Instead, scholars continue to employ Weberian methods that connect developments in religion to interrelated economic, social, and political processes, often in order to demonstrate the staying power of religious commitments and their support in socio-​political processes, rather than to identify the features that diminish such commitments. Second, even the European story of secularization has numerous gradations, holes, and counter-​ narratives, from the fact that many European countries still have state religions or state churches (the UK is perhaps the most prominent, but these also include Denmark, Iceland, Greece, Finland, and Armenia, among others), to the fact that the mutual influencing of religion and state has not disappeared in other European contexts (e.g. Poland, Spain, Romania, Italy, and Ireland, to name but a few). Relatedly, a number of scholars have examined different, non-​European forms of secularism, broadening the story of origins as well as of the conventional forms of secularism to encompass a much broader range of government-​religion relationships (Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun 2010; Bilgrami 2016; Cady and Hurd 2010). These studies of multiple forms of secularism show how ‘secular ideology’ frequently represses religion, sometimes violently, rather than acting as a neutral backdrop for government institutions. They therefore call into question both European superiority in achieving ‘tolerance’ among communities with different religious commitments, and rigid notions of religious/​secular separation. Third, scholars of what has been called ‘secularism studies’ (Mahmood 2006, 2009, 2016; Asad 1993, 2003) make a different argument in emphasizing the genealogical inseparability and constitutive power of European forms of secularism and European forms of Christianity (especially Protestantism). It is no accident, in other words, that the Wars of Religion were about different forms of Christianity. In these wars, both Protestants (Calvinist and Lutheran) and Catholics viewed Jews and Muslims as inferior, dangerous, or both. Fast-​forwarding to the present, these scholars point out that Europeans still consider Christianity, in whatever form, to be superior to other ‘world religions’ of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This is evident in debates over the wearing of headscarves, the location of mosques, and the subsidization of Christian schools, among numerous other issues (e.g. Göle 1997). Thus, for scholars of ‘secularism studies’, secularism has always been merely an extension of Christianity, promoting Christian-​derived forms of power vis-​à-​vis other world regions and religious traditions (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2016; Yelle 2011). This instantiation of Christian/​secular power is deployed most clearly against Islam, which is constantly framed as the ‘other’ (Mahmood 2016). Muslims, as a result, all too often must

254   Cecelia Lynch decide whether to conform to ‘good Muslim’ constructions which assume assimilation into Western/​Christian/​secular modes of modernity, as opposed to ‘bad Muslim’ constructions which project fears of extremism onto non-​conforming Muslim subjects (Mamdani 2004). Finally, still other scholars agree with the argument of secularism studies that Western forms of both Christianity and secularism have constructed Muslims (and Islam) as a deficient ‘other’, with very real material ramifications in the Middle East, especially Palestine, as well as many parts of Africa and Asia. Still, these scholars point out that secularism studies becomes too reductive along a range of dimensions (Omer 2015), including human rights (Springs 2016), and understanding tensions in Christian ethics (Lynch 2020). Secularism studies also, in this rendering, needs to do more to acknowledge the place of a wide range of other religious traditions within as well as outside of the problematic of the West/​orientalist framing. The argument that Christian/​secular modernity has historically pitted itself against Islam, in other words, needs to be further challenged to examine the ongoing as well as historical role of ‘traditional’ or ‘Indigenous’ religions across the world, including their syncretism with Christianity, Islam, and other ‘world religions’ (Lynch 2020). Despite their lively debates with each other, all of these contestations strongly challenge secularist assumptions about modernity. The more complex and granular European story also confuses assumed categories of ‘modern’ and ‘anti-​modern’, given that societies with state-​sponsored religions include places like the UK and the Netherlands. The challenge of secularism studies to conventional notions of modernity shows how a religiously inflected exclusion of Islam underlay ‘modern’ if unstated assumptions about the values of Protestant Christianity, in particular, for ‘progress’. And those who challenge secularism studies as incomplete go further in demonstrating the necessity to examine a wider range of religious ethical debates, both within Christianity and among it, secularisms (in the plural), and other religious traditions. The very fact that these ‘Indigenous’ religions have not disappeared, but in many ways have continued to transform, sometimes developing more radicalized or essentialist political offshoots, but almost always maintaining a hold on people’s conceptions of natural, social, and/​or political order, should, in this view, provide rich sources of material for investigation in the discipline. In the next sections, I therefore move from a discussion of the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ to additional challenges that assessments of granularity can and should, in my analysis, entail.

‘Multiple Modernities’, Weberianism, and Granularity in Studies of Religion in IR The term ‘multiple modernities’, made salient by S. N. Eisenstadt in 2000, gave voice to the growing anxiety about the European narrative’s lack of fit as a model for the rest of the world. This anxiety was taking hold across the social sciences, and beginning to do so in IR. In Eisenstadt’s rendering, Europe and its related ‘Western’ forms of modernity were ‘not the only modernities, although they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a reference point for others’ (Eisenstadt 2000, 3). European institutions, traditions, and politics did not, in fact, become the model for non-​European regions. Other institutions and traditions could be distinctly ‘modern’ but also quite different in their social, political, and

Religion, History, and IR    255 cultural forms, including the very backlash against secular ideologies occurring in Muslim-​ majority countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan (Juergensmeyer 2008). The crystallization of the term ‘multiple modernities’ also occurred in tandem with a post-​Cold War wave of Weberian-​inspired studies that moved towards more granularity in studying religion. For example, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori edited an influential volume in 1997 that brought together scholars who examined manifestations of Islam, Evangelical and Catholic Christianity, Hinduism, and other traditions to interrogate their interrelationships with socio-​economic and political trends (Rudolph and Piscatori 1997). Others also published studies of religious political expression in different parts of the world; for example, the voluminous ‘Fundamentalism Project’ at the University of Chicago was explicitly based on Weberian methods that integrated religious practice with socio-​economic patterns and changes (Marty and Appleby 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997). Following Weber’s method in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/​2001), these studies generally situated particular religious traditions within socio-​economic and political contexts, adopting a constitutive understanding of ‘religious doctrine, economic development, political change and social forms of behavior’ (Lynch 2009, 391). In IR, a special issue of Millenium (later published as a book, see Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003) announced in 2000 religion’s ‘return from exile’. The contributors to that issue (of whom I was one), challenged the ‘Westphalian presumption’ (Thomas 2003, 23) and Enlightenment presuppositions that contributed to hiding religion from the discipline, and assessed religious trends vis-​à-​vis theoretical and popular approaches (Kubálkova et al. 2003). IR scholars followed this collection with ongoing interrogations of the origins of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’, the development of binaries, including binaries such as religious/​secular, public/​private, atavistic/​modern that contributed to gross oversimplifications of religious traditions in international politics, and a range of studies overturning facile assumptions about the opposition between religion and secularism and the connection between religion and conflict (Thomas 2005; Sandal and Fox 2013; Haynes 2013; Hurd 2008).

Granularity and Ethics in Religion, History, and IR: The Neo-​Weberian Approach The discussion of religion in IR thus far has demonstrated the historical, contemporary, and theoretical difficulties of the European narrative, in its Enlightenment aspects as well as its ‘secularization theory’ turn. In the past 20 years, variants of the multiple modernities thesis have taken hold, as have conceptualizations that complicate the theoretical and substantive practice of secularism, which is now viewed in the plural as encompassing a range of state-​ society forms (Bilgrami 2016; Cady and Hurd 2010). But looking more closely at modernity, multiple modernities, and multiple secularisms should also take the field towards a more granular understanding of the wide range of religious traditions. I take the idea of granularity to refer to in-​depth spatial and temporal examinations of phenomena at issue in this volume (i.e. religion). Granular studies of religious traditions, practices and commitments often follow Weberian guidelines, which, as indicated earlier, require historical and geographic contextualization, along with assessing

256   Cecelia Lynch interrelationships between socio-​economic and political processes, on the one hand, and religious practices, on the other. Moreover, such guidelines also keep open the possibility of change in religious traditions, as religious teachings confront the problem of ‘theodicy’, or how to explain and adjust to evil and suffering in the world. Such investigations lead to questions for IR approaches that have long ignored religious traditions and expressions. The idea of granularity should also lead to examinations of religious traditions in different parts of the world, historically and today. Once begun, such examinations can multiply exponentially in number, greatly complicating the European narrative of secularization and the progressive growth of secular ideological commitments. But does granularity merely cause problems for Eurocentric mythologies, or do granular studies require interrogating theoretical assumptions and their conceptual constructs? I assert that granular studies cannot be the sole answer to IR’s traditionally limited understanding of religion. Instead, moving to a ‘neo-​Weberian’ approach (Lynch 2009) focuses on the dynamism of the religion/​socio-​economic and political relationship, highlighting the ethical tensions that characterize interpretations of religious practices in a wide range of specific contexts. Others focus less on the constitutive nature of such tensions, and more on the concept of ‘entanglements’ that result from religiously inspired ventures into the public sphere (see Agensky 2017). Moreover, broadening the scope of knowledge regarding religion in history also requires openness to epistemologies and ontologies that may stretch conventional understandings of modernity. Erin Wilson’s articulation of the need to overcome the ‘ontological violence’ of secularist presumptions against religious expressions opens the issue of what counts as religion and how people conceptualize their commitments (Wilson, 2018). Increasingly, moreover, the concept of ‘cosmologies’ is being used to point to religious commitments that challenge Western/​modern spatial and temporal constructs. Scholars who research the epistemological presuppositions of various kinds of ‘Indigeneity’, for example, move beyond merely including in-​depth, granular, Weberian-​style studies of religious traditions in various world contexts (Scauso 2018; Ling 2014; Pasha 2017). While in-​depth inclusions are important, they are insufficient unless they pose deeper and broader questions that return us to the conceptualization of religion and understandings of its ethics and epistemologies as well as its historical and geographic context.

Religion, Practices, and IR IR’s current preoccupation with ‘practices’ could make a difference in the exploration of religious ethics, epistemologies, and alternate cosmologies, but thus far it has not done so. The focus on understanding ‘practices’, to be sure, has clearly helped IR cope with the stakes of everyday patterns, interactions, and ‘traditions’ (even though feminist IR had long before been preoccupied with similar concerns!). Foregrounding the concept of practices, and the attendant necessity of examining their social and hence relational character, has important benefits in ensuring that the discipline of IR moves beyond various forms of determinism. People engage in practices, which can tell us about how social structures are replicated or challenged. However, practice approaches also need to take a wide range of meanings into account to comprehend the richness of practices in international politics.

Religion, History, and IR    257 Such an account cannot ignore the practice of religion. In other words, what people see and engage in as religious practices, the reasons/​ethics that support them, and how they connect ontologically and epistemologically to their interpretations of the world and their place in it, are crucial questions for IR’s comprehension of religion in history. But ironically, much of the ‘practice literature’ in IR has virtually ignored religion. Scholars of the practice turn, who draw primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, have thought little about the practice of religion, even though it was a topic of great interest to Bourdieu himself. As Craig Calhoun asserts, Bourdieu’s own ‘ “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field” has not been widely enough recognized as Bourdieu’s key, seminal text on fields’ (Calhoun 1995, 157, fn. 14). As a result, I focus primarily on debates about Bourdieu’s framework in this section, although others in IR (e.g. Adler and Pouliot 2011) draw on the work of Theodore Schatzki (Schatzki 1996) to focus on issues that do not necessarily concern religion, such as the relationship among social order, cognition, and learning. Bourdieu used the concept of ‘field’ as a central analytic tool to convey and also delimit the notion of context in which religious (and other) practice occurs. Still, according to numerous commentators, his resulting framework is too mechanistic to account for intentionality or ethical struggles, which are central to religious practice historically (Lynch 2020). Understanding both intentionality and ethical struggle, in turn, is critical for not erasing religion by collapsing it back under various forms of determinism in IR. As social theorists and religious studies scholars have argued, Bourdieu’s work too easily ignores critical aspects of agency and meaning, concerning issues of performativity (Butler 1999) and the ability to think ethically. Michele Dillon, for example, argues that Bourdieu’s framework is too ‘mechanistic’, dividing religious agents into categories of ‘producers and consumers’ that have differing interests. Change in religious doctrine thus becomes a product of socio-​economic processes that alter the interests of religious producers (elites). Dillon, in contrast, argues that her empirical work on US Catholics demonstrates instead the necessity of understanding their ‘interpretive autonomy’ in explicating their religious practices (Dillon 2001). In this view, ethical interpretation requires a different understanding of agency. Judith Butler, in a related move, criticizes ‘Bourdieu’s account of performative speech acts because he tends to assume that the subject who utters the performative is positioned on a map of social power in a fairly fixed way’ (Butler 1999, 122). James Bohman insists that agency is connected to reflexivity and ethics, asserting that Bourdieu robs agents of ‘reflexivity in the critical sense’ by confining it to sociological analysis rather than understanding it as ‘a constitutive property of agency and thus of practical reason’ (Bohman 1999, 136). These scholars are pointing to something very significant in terms of how IR understands intentionality and ethics in religion and history. People ‘practice’ their religions, and likely always have, despite the modernist assumption that pre-​moderns acted unreflectively. They do so, however, with varying degrees of commitment and adherence to the rules and forms of power set up by (in Bourdieu’s terminology) religious ‘fields’. Bourdieu himself acknowledges as much, but then re-​collapses agency into reductionist categories of leader versus follower, and elite versus popular adherence (Bourdieu 1991,1993). I assert that a more productive line of inquiry for understanding the dynamics of religious (and secular) practices in the history of IR is to bring out concrete insights and meanings that merge substantive and theoretical inquiry. This merger is also a fundamental concern of Bourdieu’s, but comprehending the historical as well as contemporary import of religion

258   Cecelia Lynch in IR requires understanding practices as an integral part of ethical struggles that cannot be reduced to mere interests. Interrogating religion as practice, therefore, can help with this understanding if religion is taken seriously by both IR and practice theory. This is because tensions in religious ethics (and in the religious/​secular divide) influence practices, and represent a significant component of the lifeblood of struggles about what people think matters in the world. If we skip over or merely mention these struggles without more thorough interrogation, then we have reverted to yet another form—​even if a more processual one—​of determinism, draining the soul from historical examinations of international politics itself. In this reading, the ongoing resilience of Indigenous religions and religious syncretisms with ‘world religions’ all over the globe demonstrates the risks associated with collapsing ‘religion’ into ‘practice’ as it is often deployed in IR. Indigenous religious practices continue to connect mind and body in rituals of healing and worship, for example, countering Western/​ ‘modernist’ assumptions about the superiority of the mind and its capacities for reason. Indigenous religious practices also suggest circular ideas of temporality, instead of linear ones that also characterize Western/​modernist assumptions about the engineering of historical progress. These notions of temporality are also infused with understandings of ‘material’ aspects of existence, particularly plants, animals, climate, sources of water, and the Earth itself, that rely on ontologies and epistemologies of interconnection with human beings. We need more expansive understandings of the resulting practices to make sense of the range of meanings constitutive of religious expressions in the world. Not only have such Indigenous practices, beliefs, commitments and rituals never gone away, they also frequently combine with Weber’s ‘rationalized’ world religious traditions, sometimes uneasily, sometimes more seamlessly (Lynch 2014). Recognizing the wide range of religious practices and their ontological and epistemological commitments opens up our analysis of historical and contemporary IR in significant ways.

Conclusions I began this chapter with a discussion of religion’s traditional absence in the discipline of IR, due in large part to the mythology of the European story of how the ‘secular’ state was founded and how it progressed over time. The actual practice of international politics could never push religion completely out of the public realm, despite the power of the European narrative. During the twentieth century, as more states gained their independence, struggles about the place of religion in the proper form of governance continued to be exposed. With the end of the Cold War, religion reappeared as a factor in the ‘high politics’ of war and peace, although it had never really left either high or low politics. Scholars, drawing from interdisciplinary insights, increasingly pointed out the deficiencies of the European story in both its Westphalian and Enlightenment phases, also demonstrating that religion’s assumed antithesis, ‘secularism’, was far from a neutral category, particularly in European contexts. At the same time, attention to religion’s multiple meanings and forms of expression came back from their place of ‘exile’, with scholars examining such themes as political theologies, religious traditions, and religious ethics in different eras and parts of the world. Intersecting with the ‘practice turn’ in the discipline of IR, this discussion noted the importance of practices to the study of religion, but in ways that allow for the latter’s

Religion, History, and IR    259 multiple ontological and epistemological expressions. Increasingly, therefore, moving beyond Weber’s ‘world religions’ is required to understand the historical as well as contemporary importance of religion in international relations. Such investigations not only challenge the conventional European IR story of the spread of secular ideology, but they can provide new insights into historical turning points, perhaps especially those of conquest, colonization, and decolonization. It is critical, in other words, to reject reductionist approaches that view religious traditions, including Indigenous ones, as either rigid or unimportant. Appreciating the richness of religious ontologies and epistemologies is a necessary complement to IR’s relatively new openness to understanding history more deeply within as well as beyond the West.

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chapter 18

Hum an Ri g h ts Andrea Paras The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how historical analysis can help us to better understand the role of contemporary human rights practices in global affairs. On the surface, this may appear like a relatively straightforward task: one need simply to identify the origins of rights in various philosophical or legal discourses, then trace their eventual institutionalization and legalization in the human rights system of our present. This is in fact how many historians and International Relations (IR) scholars have attempted to explain the trajectory of human rights, but they have reached a range of different and often incompatible conclusions. Some scholars argue that human rights practices are more robust now than ever, while others predict the imminent demise of the international human rights system. As the historian Devin Pendas has observed, there is a lack of consensus amongst leading human rights scholars around even the most basic contours of the subject (2012, 95). Thus, we are left in no better place to evaluate the wide range of interpretations of human rights amongst historians and IR scholars, or to understand the basis upon which we can evaluate their smorgasbord of claims. This chapter, therefore, will take an alternative approach. In order to understand human rights practices in the current international system, I argue for the necessity of a historiographical perspective that accounts for how the different historical narratives we tell about rights have consequences for the way that we understand them in the present. In other words, I ask: why do different historical interpretations matter for our contemporary understanding of human rights? This volume’s organizing concepts of modernity and granularity provide a way of bringing such a historiographical perspective to our understanding of human rights. The modernity problematique asks us to reflect on the nature of change in the history of rights in order to understand how the current international order came to exist. In other words, what are the different stories we can tell about the origins of human rights and their historical trajectory, and on what basis can we evaluate the strengths or limitations of these different narratives? The concept of granularity helps us to more precisely identify scholars’ analytical choices related to definitions, actors, geography, and timescales. In different human rights narratives, the wide-​ranging variations in all of these dimensions lead to different conclusions about the past, present, and possible future of human rights. As the editors of this volume point out, the concepts of granularity and modernity intersect at various points, and the discussion that follows will demonstrate how analytical choices related to the former have a direct

human Rights   263 bearing on conclusions related to the latter. Nevertheless, despite their overlaps, the concepts of modernity and granularity are useful heuristic devices that aid in the task of artificially untangling that which is inherently interconnected. They do so by helping us to identify different historiographical assumptions that lead to the wide range of differing conclusions about current human rights practices in international affairs. Given the large number of published books and articles on rights in general, and human rights in particular, it will not be possible to provide an exhaustive overview of the field in this limited space; rather, I draw on a selection of illustrative texts in order to represent the broad contours of historiographical debates amongst human rights scholars. I have also delimited the discussion by focusing specifically on historiographical debates about human rights in particular and not the much broader history of rights, although some of the scholars I will discuss explicitly identify how the former relate to the latter.1 Indeed, as Christian Reus-​Smit (2013, 6) has suggested, the process by which ‘individual rights’ came to be synonymous with ‘human rights’ is at the crux of the debates that I now discuss. Noting these limitations, the chapter proceeds as follows: the first section discusses the relevance of historiography, and then identifies three narratives that are prevalent in historical and IR scholarship regarding the trajectory of human rights practices. Each narrative has a different view of the relationship between historical change and human rights, and each projects a different future. The following section uses the concept of granularity to identify the consequences of different analytical choices related to definitions, actors, geography, and timescales. The concluding section argues that a historiographical perspective illuminates how the intersection between historical narrative and analytical choice produces diverging accounts of the role of human rights practices in contemporary global politics.

Historiography and Three Narratives About Rights Historiography is commonly defined as ‘the history of historical writing’ (Salevouris and Furay 2015, 255). While the objective of history is to interpret historical facts and processes, the aim of historiography is to understand how and why variations exist in these historical interpretations, and why some historical accounts become widely accepted while others are dismissed. In a widely cited essay, the early twentieth century American historian Carl Becker wrote that historiography ‘records what men at different times have known and believed about the past, the use they have made, in the service of their interests and aspirations, of their knowledge and beliefs, and the underlying presuppositions which have made their knowledge seem to them relevant and their beliefs seem to them true’ (1938, 22). Setting aside Becker’s dated language, his point is that historical analysis should be understood as a narrative constructed by historians for a particular purpose rather than a dispassionate recitation of supposedly immutable facts about the past. In short, for historiographers, the assumptions, beliefs and analytical choices of the narrator are the main point of interest. With regard to understanding the history of human rights practices in , a historiographical perspective provides a way to identify how different historical interpretations about rights have led scholars to different conclusions about what, echoing Becker, is ‘relevant’ and ‘true’.

264   Andrea Paras Over the past decade, there has been a flurry of new publications that focus on the history of human rights. Overall, there are two main axes to the debates in these accounts. The first has to do with whether the history of rights is one of punctuated continuity and progress over the centuries, or whether human rights have more recent origins in the latter half of the twentieth century. The second source of debate is about the degree to which human rights are a Western invention or whether they have more global origins. For the most part, historiographical debates have tended to focus on which of these origin stories is most accurate (Burke and Kirby 2016, 30). The problem, however, is that the near-​obsessive focus on origin stories has precluded discussion of other more significant historiographical differences. To that end, the following discussion identifies three narratives that scholars tell about the historical trajectory of rights. While origin stories play a role in these narratives, they are not the main focus. Rather, these narratives provide divergent perspectives about the emergence and evolution of human rights practices, their relationship to modernity, and their future trajectory. While some scholars may explicitly acknowledge the historical narrative that informs their analysis, it is also possible for an account of human rights to only implicitly endorse one or other of them. This is the case particularly for scholars of IR, who do not see themselves as engaging in historical analysis per se, but nevertheless may tacitly align themselves with a particular historical narrative. In reality, there are variations within each narrative type, and sometimes even overlaps between them. Nevertheless, it is still useful to identify these narrative structures in broad strokes with a view of making more visible different historiographical assumptions.

Narrative 1: A Long (or Short) History of Progress Narratives in this genre share an underlying agreement that the history of human rights is ultimately one of progress, although there are disagreements about the correct temporal or geographic starting place. It would be overly simplistic to say that this view of human rights is entirely linear, as there is certainly acknowledgement of contestation, moving backwards, and even failure. In this regard, Steven Jensen argues for the necessity of a pluralist narrative that observes a cabinet of human rights glasses with some half empty and some half full (2016, 281). But despite setbacks or failures, scholars who subscribe to this narrative point to evidence of higher levels of specification, institutionalization, and legalization of human rights norms (e.g. Hafner-​Burton 2013). Overall, they would conclude, the world is a better place now than it was at earlier points in history because of the existence of a more-​or-​less functioning human rights system. The largest source of disagreement within this narrative has to do with when and where the history of human rights begins, and there is wide variation on these questions. On one end of the spectrum, there are accounts that endeavor to identify a transhistorical kernel within the concept of human rights that has existed in various epochs and spaces, which has been passed down from one century to the next in different forms, and which ultimately evolved into the international human rights with which we are familiar today (see Ishay 2007, 2008; Lauren 2003). Micheline Ishay (2008), for example, begins her exhaustive history of human rights with a detailed discussion about notions of universalism, liberty, equality, and justice in various pre-​modern ethical and religious traditions. Even though these traditions

human Rights   265 do not speak of these concepts specifically in terms of human rights, Ishay argues that these shared conceptions of a common good laid the foundations for later thinkers during the Enlightenment to elaborate a theory of natural rights, which eventually evolved into contemporary human rights theory and law. ‘Human rights are’, Ishay asserts, ‘. . . the result of a cumulative historical process that takes on a life of its own, sui generis, beyond the speeches and writings of progressive thinkers, beyond the documents and main events that compose a particular epoch’ (2008, 2). Ishay’s analytical gaze is sweeping insofar as it includes philosophical ideas, grassroots activist movements, institutions and law, although her geographic focus remains mostly in the West. The problem, however, of seeing human rights everywhere and in all times, is that the concept easily becomes an empty signifier. Pendas identifies the nub of the problem: ‘If human rights have always existed everywhere, it can be tempting simply to deny outright that they can have any history’ (2012, 97). In other words, by putting such a strong emphasis on historical continuity, it becomes difficult to weigh the relative importance of different historical events or developments, or to understand how the contemporary notion of human rights has taken on specific meanings or applications that did not exist in previous eras. The corrective to such an all-​encompassing approach has been for scholars to focus on specific historical moments as origin points for modern human rights. But, again, we see an array of temporal and geographic choices. Some accounts identify an early modern starting point for human rights in the Western Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, locating their intellectual foundations in philosophy, literature, and art (Hunt 2007), or their legal foundations in the documents of the American and French Revolutions (Israel 2011; Tunstall 2012). Others cite the nineteenth-​century abolitionist movement as the first examples of international human rights activism (Crawford 2002; Keck and Sikkink 1998) or law (Martinez 2014), or European interventions in the Ottoman Empire as the precursor to contemporary humanitarian intervention (Bass 2008). Reus-​Smit (2001, 2013) argues that different sets of individual rights have contributed to the constitution of sovereignty and the international state system ever since the 1648 Westphalian settlement. He specifies that the human rights that emerged after the Second World War with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two Convenants are just the most recent phase within a much longer history of the expansion of individual rights in world politics (see Reus-​Smit 2013, 201). Indeed, there is most consensus around the post-​Second World War era as marking the beginning of the modern international human rights system. For instance, in a widely cited book now in its third edition, Jack Donnelly describes the founding of the United Nations in 1945 as a ‘decisive’ moment, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as ‘unquestionably the foundational document of international human rights law’ (2013, 26; see also Afshari 2007; Burke and Kirby 2016; Henkin 1990). Other scholarship views the UDHR as an important albeit largely symbolic starting point, as well as criticizes scholars’ focus on actors from the Global North. Instead, scholars such as Susan Waltz (2001), Christian Reus-​ Smit (2001, 2013), Roland Burke (2010), Steven Jensen (2016), and Kathryn Sikkink (2017) emphasize that states from the Global South were the most influential agents for the breakthrough and consolidation of international human rights, particularly through decolonization processes. Despite the disagreements over historical or geographic starting points, these accounts basically agree that the history of human rights is ultimately a narrative of moral and/​or legal progress (see, for instance, Lauren, 2003; Morsink, 2009). This history may be longer

266   Andrea Paras or shorter based on temporal and geographic starting places, and this progress may have proceeded in fits and starts, but it is nonetheless progress. Moreover, narratives of progress also tend to project similar visions for the future of human rights. Hunt, for instance, exhorts us to ‘continually improve on the eighteenth-​century version of human rights’ (2007, 212), while Ishay encourages us to ‘carry the lantern of hope’ gained from the past progress of fights towards justice (2008, 355). In comparison, Sikkink provides a more pragmatic assessment of human rights’ trajectory (as measured by empirical evidence rather than what she dismisses as an elusive ‘comparison to the ideal’), but she nevertheless finds ‘evidence for hope’ that human rights will continue to mobilize people to fight for positive global change (2017). Reus-​Smit provides perhaps the most muted version of a history of progress, but his work fits within this narrative genre because he ultimately understands individual rights—​ including human rights—​as progressively delegitimizing imperial hierarchies and providing moral foundations for legitimate statehood (2013, 34, 210).

Narrative 2: The Shadow Side of Rights Narratives that focus on the shadow side of rights are often offered in direct contrast to narratives of progress, either with the aim of tempering expectations about the emancipatory potential of rights or pointing out the ‘dark side’ of human rights (Kennedy 2004). These historical narratives focus on the negative and oftentimes unintended consequences of human rights practices such as the perpetuation of paternalism (Hopgood 2016), or neo-​ colonial governance (Anderson 2011; Barreto 2013), or how powerful political actors have used human rights as tools or ‘weapons’ for their own political ends (Bob 2019). The latter critique became particularly salient in the wake of debates about humanitarian intervention during the 1990s, and especially after the Bush administration heavily cited human rights as a justification for its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001 (Chandler 2006). These narratives do not necessarily entail a wholesale rejection of the international human rights project, as there is still an underlying belief in their moral or legal potential to improve human welfare. For instance, Balakrishnan Rajagopal critiques international human rights law for reinforcing Western imperial tendencies in global politics, even while concluding that human rights contains the potential for a counter-​hegemonic and radical democratic politics (Rajagopal 2006). Even Clifford Bob’s realist account of ‘rights as weapons’ concludes that activists should use his critiques in order to develop more effective ways of using rights arguments to achieve their goals (2019, 216). However, this narrative genre also includes arguments that human rights are inherently limited in their potential for radical human emancipation. Samuel Moyn, one of the most prolific and controversial of the sceptics, doubts that human rights would ever be able to address systemic problems of distributional inequality, even if they have had some limited successes in countering political repression (2018, 218). While narratives about the shadow side of rights do not necessarily deny some of their achievements, they caution that focusing on historical progress without properly acknowledging the ‘dark side’ of rights can result in distorted or hubristic assumptions about what can be achieved—​which in itself can lead to other negative consequences that would further undermine or contradict the goals of human rights (Kennedy, 2004). Moyn, for instance, argues that the emergence of human rights as the dominant international language

human Rights   267 of morality has precluded discussion of other modes of pursuing global justice (Moyn 2014, 2015, 2018). Similar to Reus-​Smit, Andrea Paras (2019) argues that contemporary human rights have helped to legitimize and entrench the principle of state sovereignty. Unlike Reus-​ Smit, however, she focuses on how transnational moral obligations, including those that are framed by human rights, reflect and reproduce structural hierarchies between different actors in international politics rather than offering a more transformative form of global solidarity (2019, 172). Thus, there are two sides to the critique contained in narratives about the shadow side of rights: first is the critique related to the shortcomings of human rights themselves. Second is an underlying historiographical critique of those who interpret rights primarily in terms of progress, whereby putting too much faith in the human rights project results in blinders about their capacity to harm as well as help. In other words, even if narratives about the shadow side of rights do not explicitly focus on the history of rights, they are fuelled by an underlying historiographical argument that the trajectory of rights—​past and future—​is defined by how their good intentions have gone wrong.

Narrative 3: The Demise of Human Rights A small but vocal number of scholars have taken the narrative about the shadow side of human rights a step further to argue that we are now witnessing their final demise. According to this narrative, human rights have not been able to live up to their noble intentions, but unlike the previous scholars who engage in a critique of rights in order to improve them, they argue that the human rights project is beyond rescue. Samuel Moyn,2 Stephen Hopgood, and Eric Posner are the best-​known proponents of such a position, and while there are divergences in their historical accounts about the origins of human rights, they share a commitment to a historiographical claim about their impending demise. Of the three authors, Moyn’s book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) most explicitly engages in a historiographical critique of many of the orthodoxies of human rights history: that human rights have their deep sources in the cosmopolitan philosophies of ancient or Enlightenment philosophy, that the Universal Declaration signaled the true beginnings of the modern human rights era, and that anticolonial movements helped to further entrench international human rights. Instead, Moyn identifies the year 1977 as the moment when human rights finally gained their prominence through the work of international activists as well as the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter (Moyn, 2010, 121–​122). He argues that a minimalist vision of human rights was successful at that particular moment because of the failure of other ‘utopian’ universalisms, and because they purported to offer a minimalist, non-​ideological path to global justice (Moyn 2010, 223). But the conditions of their success became the recipe for their eventual downfall: Moyn argues the global expansion of human rights has irretrievably transformed it into a maximalist, political agenda that can no longer claim to be insulated from the ‘power of the powerful’ (Moyn 2010, 227). Human rights just happen to be the most recent vision about how to make the world a better place, but they—​like all utopias—​ are bound to collapse under their own weight (Moyn 2010, 225). Stephen Hopgood claims that his book The Endtimes of Human Rights (2013) is an argument, not a history about the subject. Whether Hopgood acknowledges it or not, however, his argument rests on historiographical claims about the rise and imminent demise

268   Andrea Paras of human rights. He introduces a distinction between lowercase ‘human rights’ (described as local and transnational networks of activists who combat violence and depredation) and uppercase ‘Human Rights’ (described as the global structure of laws, courts, norms, and institutions dedicated to human rights promotion). Unlike Moyn, Hopgood locates the origins of ‘human rights’ in secular humanist movements of the nineteenth century, particularly the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Similar to Moyn, however, Hopgood argues that American power was responsible for transforming ‘human rights’ into ‘Human Rights’, as human rights discourse was increasingly embedded in global institutions (Hopgood 2013, 172). According to Hopgood, we are at the verge of witnessing the endtimes of Human Rights, because their increasing embeddedness in global institutions has led to a hollowing out of the moral authority that gave human rights their legitimacy in the first place (Hopgood 2013, xiii). As global ‘human rights’ lose their moral force, Hopgood argues, it may be possible for local activists to reclaim ‘human rights’ as a nonhegemonic language of resistance and mobilization (Hopgood 2013, 178), but their success is uncertain as sovereign states and religious movements push back. Like Moyn and Hopgood, Posner’s book The Twilight of Human Rights Law argues that we are witnessing a gradual but certain demise of human rights, but Posner differs from his co-​ critics with his more historically expansive interpretation of human rights. Similar to Ishay and Lauren, he locates their deep origins in ancient ethical or religious beliefs about a moral obligation to aid strangers and not to harm them (Posner 2014, 9–​10). Modern human rights thinking developed during the eighteenth-​century Enlightenment (Posner 2014, 10), and this was followed by the emergence of human rights law with the signing of the UDHR in 1948 (Posner 2014, 19). The crux of Posner’s criticism of rights is that human rights discourse, defined as the invocation of human rights in public discussion and policy, has had tremendous success (Posner 2014, 6). However, human rights law has achieved very little in actually improving the well-​being of people (Posner 2014, 78). Posner concludes that even if human rights discourse persists, human rights law will have a slow death as it ‘gradually [dissolves] into a soup of competing and unresolvable claims’ about human rights protections; thus we are living in the twilight era of human rights (Posner 2014, 140). Even though Moyn, Hopgood, and Posner diverge significantly in their arguments about the origins of human rights, they share a commitment to a historiographical interpretation of human rights that points to their failures and predicts their demise. This is in sharp contrast to narratives that view the history of human rights in terms of progress, or narratives that critique the shadow side of rights. While recent historiographical debates tend to focus on different interpretations of the historical origins of human rights, the preceding discussion of these three narratives suggests that these divergent accounts of historical trajectory represent the more salient and significant historiographical difference between scholars.

Granularity and the Consequences of Analytical Choice How can we account for these three conflicting historiographical narratives, and on what basis can we weigh the differences between them? This section will demonstrate how the

human Rights   269 concept of granularity helps us to identify the historiographical consequences of deliberate analytical choices. While IR scholars commonly refer to different levels of analysis (Singer 1961), granularity allows us to choose from an array of focal points revealing either finer or coarser aspects of a multi-​dimensional system and its constituent parts (see c­ hapter 1 of this volume). In regard to understanding different interpretations of the historical trajectory of human rights, the following discussion identifies four relevant focal points related to definitions, actors, geography, and timescales. Within each of these focal points, there are finer or coarser degrees of analysis, which lend themselves to different conclusions. Furthermore, these focal points may intersect with each other, insofar as analytical choices related to one focal point may have a bearing on the choices made in relation to another. Finally, it is also possible to combine fine and coarse degrees of analysis within a single argument.

Definitions of Human Rights One might assume that, at the very least, scholars might share a common definition about human rights, even if they agree on little else. Given the preceding discussion, however, it should not come as a surprise that this is not the case. Definitions range in scale from the coarse to the fine: ‘coarser’ definitions treat the concept of human rights like a huge basket that can contain a wide range of phenomena, whereas ‘finer’ definitions are more like a sieve that strains out everything except a clearly defined and smaller set of phenomena. For example, Donnelly offers a definition that is echoed by other scholars: ‘Human rights are literally the rights that one has simply because one is a human being’ (2013, 10; see also Ishay 2008, 3; Lauren 2003, 1). This definition is probably the coarsest along the granularity spectrum, because almost anything could go inside this basket. The definition does not specify what specific rights could be included (or excluded), or the exact nature of the right. Such a coarse definition means that the potential scope of analysis could be extremely wide-​ranging, and this is in fact what we see in accounts that employ this kind of definition. Ishay suggests that human rights, which she similarly understands as inherently existing in humans, are an idea that has been carried across the centuries (2008, 2–​3). It is exactly this expansive definition that permits her to write a history of human rights that begins with ancient philosophical and religious traditions and ends with globalization in the twenty-​first century. Hunt, who traces the origins of human rights in eighteenth-​century literature and art, likewise defines human rights as natural, that is, inherently existing in humans (Hunt 2007, 20). While ‘natural rights’ concepts lend themselves to a coarser definition of human rights, not all coarse definitions rely on a ‘natural’ conception of rights. Bob, for instance, offers another variety of a coarse definition when he defines rights as the ‘power of one entity, the rights-​holder, to enforce a duty on another, the duty-​bearer’(Clifford 2019, 8). Unlike Ishay and Hunt, however, his definition relies on a legal realist tradition that views rights as existing only to the degree that they are enforceable through law (Clifford 2019, 110), and he defines the more specific term ‘human rights’ as a rhetorical tool that activists use to rally support around their cause (Clifford 2019, 13). Revisionist historians such as Moyn have criticized such wide-​ranging definitions for lacking historical sensitivity about how the concept of human rights has taken on a quite specific meaning in the present day. To that end, Moyn’s definition is on the ‘fine’ end of

270   Andrea Paras the granularity spectrum. He argues that ‘there is a clear and fundamental difference between earlier rights . . . and eventual ‘human rights’ and that the rights that fueled eighteenth century revolutions need to be rigorously distinguished from the ‘human rights’ that gained prominence in recent decades (2010, 12). For Moyn, the notion that human rights are the descendant of older cosmopolitan universalist traditions is mistaken, because there have been many varieties of universalism over the ages, so to focus on this as the defining essence of rights imposes a historical continuity that simply does not exist. For this reason, Moyn asserts a narrower definition of human rights as legal rights that were first specified in the UDHR, but that did not acquire any real influence until their political mobilization during the 1970s. Posner, in fact, interprets Moyn as understanding human rights strictly as a sociological, rather than legal phenomenon, which is also a relatively fine understanding of the concept (Posner 2014, 19). Likewise, Hopgood is closer to the fine end of the granularity spectrum in his distinction between (lowercase) ‘human rights’ and (uppercase) ‘Human Rights’, a definition that enables him to focus his critique on institutions rather than grassroots social movements. Finally, Reus-​Smit (2001, 2013) identifies human rights as a specific subset of the broader category of individual rights, so in this sense his definition is also on the fine end of the spectrum. As the previous discussion demonstrates, scholars can choose to define human rights more coarsely or finely as a practice, an idea, a discourse, a rhetorical tool, a variety of ‘natural right’, a sociological phenomenon, or a legal phenomenon. Regardless, the granularity of the definition is fundamental to how scholars determine the scope of their analysis and has downstream implications for the analytical choices that are made in relation to actors, geography, and timescales. Legal scholar Philip Alston, who himself has identified six alternative ways of defining human rights, has pointed out how different definitions of human rights contain ‘analytical assumptions—​sometimes made explicit and sometimes almost buried—​ that inform the choice of criteria against which each author determines when human rights began’ (2013, 2071). In other words, definition really is everything.

Human Rights Actors Different levels of granularity also influence who scholars consider to be relevant human rights actors. A coarse approach would include a broad range of human rights actors, whereas a fine approach narrows the focus to a more limited number of actors. Unsurprisingly, the degree of granularity associated with actors is directly associated with definitional choices: a coarser definition of human rights could imply the relevance of a broader range of actors, whereas a finer definition could limit the range of relevant actors. Sikkink’s book provides an example of a coarse analytical focus on actors, insofar as her book examines the effectiveness of human rights law, institutions, and movements. Her inclusion of legal, institutional, and civil society actors is consistent with her coarse definition of human rights: she alternately defines human rights as moral and political discourse, ideas, values, beliefs, norms, laws, institutions, and movements (Sikkink 2017, 8). One of her main conclusions is that we should view the trajectory of human rights with optimism, as she argues we are in a ‘period of vibrant dynamism in human rights movements, laws, and institutions’ (Sikkink 2017, 247). She devotes a significant portion of the book to discussing the overall effectiveness and legitimacy of human rights, and although she

human Rights   271 identifies both areas of improvement and decline, her conclusion is that the overall record is positive (Sikkink 2017, 141). Her coarse approach to definition and actors facilitates these conclusions, because according to her measures, the success of human rights does not only depend on legal or institutional enforcement (of laws or rules); it also depends on the ability of human rights (as beliefs, ideas, or values) to mobilize people to fight for positive change. For Sikkink, the trajectory of human rights is one of progress because so many diverse actors have been able to deliberate over what human rights are and struggle for their realization (Sikkink 2017, 248). On the other end of the granularity spectrum, Posner’s analytical focus on actors is considerably finer. His definition of human rights explicitly rejects the relevance of human rights discourse and focuses instead on human rights as a legal phenomenon (Sikkink 2017, 7). Since his definition of human rights is more narrowly focused on legal institutions, the relevant actors in Posner’s analysis are primarily states and institutions. He concludes that ‘a small number of treaty provisions may have improved a small number of human rights outcomes in a small number of countries by a small, possibly trivial amount’ (Sikkink 2017, 78). His explanation is that states have few incentives to comply with human rights treaties, and that even democratic states are wary about allowing international law to constrain their domestic politics, which leads him to his conclusion that we are witnessing the twilight of human rights law. However, Posner’s conclusions have been criticized as faulty precisely because of their narrow focus on state actors. For instance, Beth Simmons, another noted scholar of international human rights law, argues that Posner’s fixation on state-​to-​ state relations precludes any recognition of how non-​state domestic stakeholder groups have contributed to the successful implementation of international human rights standards (Simmons 2015; see also Simmons 2009). Indeed, numerous scholars focus on how non-​ state actors, including non-​governmental organizations (NGO)s and transnational advocacy networks, ‘set the agenda’ for human rights (Carpenter 2010; see also Keck and Sikkink 1998; Wong 2012). Beyond the analytical choices described previously, granularity also has bearing on which actors should be considered the relevant rights-​holders. Along the fine end of the granularity spectrum, human rights would apply solely to individuals, whereas a coarse approach would also include groups or even non-​human species as the bearers of rights. For instance, Donnelly defends the restriction of internationally recognized human rights to individual rights and argues that individual approaches are capable of accommodating the interests of oppressed groups (2013, 46). In contrast, Will Kymlicka has famously argued for the recognition of group rights, particularly in relation to ethic minority or indigenous rights (Kymlicka 1995), and has more recently advocated with Sue Donaldson for the recognition of animal rights (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2013). These examples demonstrate how granularity influences analytical choices about which are the relevant actors, and that these choices lend themselves to different conclusions about the effectiveness or trajectory of human rights more broadly.

Human Rights Geography The concept of granularity helps us to identify a third analytical focal point, which is related to geographic space. Accounts of human rights that employ a coarse analytical focus

272   Andrea Paras understand the evolution of rights in a global context, whereas a fine focus limits the analysis to a particular locale. One variety of a coarse approach is to draw on examples from different cultural contexts to support an argument about the universality of human rights principles. Ishay (2008) provides an example of such a tactic: although she takes the position that modern human rights are European in origin, she begins her analysis with a detailed chapter of how they are compatible with a variety of religious traditions, as well as intersperses the discussion in the remainder of her book with selected quotes from human rights thinkers or activists from around the world (see also Ishay 2007). Similarly, Donnelly argues that human rights were first developed in the West, but that most, if not all, cultures find ‘human rights to be a profound expression of their deepest cultural values’ (2013, 107). To illustrate, he includes detailed discussions of how universalist elements in Confucianism and Hinduism are compatible with human rights, and the broader implication is that we can find human rights values everywhere. A similar approach, but with different aims, is to provide examples from around the world to illustrate culturally specific interpretations and critiques of human rights, such as Barreto’s edited volume on Third World perspectives (2013). The purpose of the latter approach is to use a coarse granular focus in order to critique human rights for its colonial and neo-​colonial impacts, or to highlight local interpretations of rights. Scholars may also employ a fine granular approach to pinpoint more precisely the contributions of non-​Western actors to the emergence and evolution of human rights principles and law. To this end, for example, Sikkink focuses on the contributions of Latin American activists and jurists, and argues that ‘the contributions of individuals and countries outside the Global North were pivotal in the development of human rights discourse, and yet continue to be ignored or downplayed’ (2017, 58; see also Sikkink 2014). Similarly, Jensen (2016) focuses on the contributions of Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines to the consolidation of human rights during the decolonization movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, another variety of a fine approach, but with obverse goals, is to focus on the mobilization of human rights by powerful Western actors in order to illustrate their failures (Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2010) or political cooptation (Hopgood 2017). In short, analytical decisions related to human rights geography fall along the entire granularity spectrum, and are influenced by other analytical focal points and historiographical commitments. Often, geography acts as a flashpoint for underlying disagreements over whether human rights are based on the imposition of Western values or whether they have more global relevance.

Human Rights Timescales In the chapter’s first section, we already noted how historiographical debates about human rights have tended to focus on disagreements about origin stories. Essentially, these are disagreements over the correct degree of granularity related to timescales. The concept of granularity helps us to understand how scholars identify different historical starting places in their origin stories about human rights. A coarse approach to timescales traces the evolution of concepts across the centuries, whereas a fine approach limits the analysis to a specific moment or a limited period of time.

human Rights   273 For example, we have seen how Hunt (2007), Lauren (2003), and Ishay (2008) provide examples of coarser human rights timescales, insofar as they trace the evolution of human rights from religious traditions through the Enlightenment and up to the present day. This coarse analytical approach allows them to make an argument about a trajectory of continuity and progress in the history of human rights. In contrast, Sikkink (2017), Jensen (2016), and Moyn (2010) operate within a finer timescale, since they restrict their temporal gaze to a specific time period—​in their cases, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. This fine analytical focus enables them to identify events or processes that they claim have been previously overlooked or underexamined by other scholars. As an example of how it is sometimes difficult to neatly classify scholarship according to these categories, some other works integrate ‘nested’ timescales. Reus-​Smit (2013), for example, embeds a fine-​grained focus on the emergence of twentieth-​century human rights during the postwar period within a coarser timescale of investigating the role of individual rights in constituting the international system over the past several centuries. Regardless of the limitations of these classifications, the important thing to remember is that historical timescales are not pre-​given or pre-​determined. Instead, just like the other focal points already discussed, scholars make deliberate analytical decisions about where to operate along the granularity spectrum, which includes choices about when a history ‘begins’. These choices related to starting points have consequences for the conclusions they reach about the current and future trajectory of human rights practices. Furthermore, the concept of granularity helps us to disaggregate how analytical decisions around timescales intersect with other choices around definition, actors, and geography. As the editors of this volume note in ­chapter 1, within the choice of time and place are nested further choices about which institutions, actors, and practices are worthy of analysis. In other words, timescale is but one focal point of analysis that is influenced by other prior analytical commitments. As I have argued previously, human rights debates that focus on origin stories and timescales—​ to the exclusion of other focal points—​sidestep discussions of other important historiographical issues. Furthermore, I would argue that debates about timescales can act as a red herring, insofar as they may actually be driven by underlying disagreements over other analytical focal points, such as the definition of human rights or which actors are most relevant.

Conclusion In a 2006 newsletter to members of the American Historical Association, President Linda Kerber reflected on the duty of historians to respond to morally uncertain times and proclaimed that ‘we are all historians of human rights’ (Kerber 2006). Her rationale was that human rights could no longer be considered a sub-​field in isolation from other areas of specialization; rather, that concerns about human rights permeated all subjects of historical inquiry, from histories of sexuality and labour to histories of trade and migration. Her statement foreshadowed a surge of scholarly interest in the history of human rights that unfolded over the subsequent decade, some of which proclaimed a triumphalist narrative about human rights’ contribution to moral progress over the longue durée while others announced their imminent demise.

274   Andrea Paras One might argue similarly regarding the discipline of IR, whose scholars have identified human rights dimensions to many (if not most) urgent contemporary concerns, such as poverty, migration, health, climate change, conflict, or the rise of authoritarian regimes. Yet similar to historians, IR scholars have differing views on the role of human rights practices in global affairs. There are those who find in human rights a means of restraining the worst impulses of state behaviour and ensuring a measure of freedom for those most marginalized, while others have argued that human rights provide a moral cover for the pursuit or abuse of power. While IR scholars appear to share a thin consensus around the basic relevance of human rights practices in contemp international relations, this is overshadowed by broader disagreements about their legitimacy, effectiveness and future viability. This chapter has used the modernity problematique to identify three divergent narratives about the trajectory of human rights practices, and has applied the concept of granularity to understand the spectrum of possible analytical choices available to scholars. Using these concepts, I have demonstrated how methodological and analytical choices have historiographical consequences that directly impact one’s perspective about the role and effectiveness of human rights in the contemporary world. The point of this chapter has not been to advocate for one or other of these interpretations of the history of human rights, but rather to simply illuminate how historiographical arguments—​whether implicitly or explicitly made—​are the consequence of deliberate analytical choices. If this is the case, it is incumbent on both historians and IR scholars to reflect on their analytical choices, to be aware of the historiographical implications of their arguments, and to be more explicit about them. Why do these divergent historical narratives matter for our contemporary understanding of human rights? What are the implications of choosing one historiographical interpretation of human rights over another? It should be clear from the preceding discussion that the stakes over historical interpretation are high, because they directly involve claims about what human rights are, where they came from, who they apply to, and where they are going. Furthermore, these disagreements arise not merely from differences in historical interpretation, but also, as the concept of granularity helps to reveal, more foundational analytical and methodological differences that reflect conflicting worldviews and normative perspectives. It could be the case that ‘we are all historians of human rights’, but not for the reasons that Kerber had in mind. If, paraphrasing Alston, the struggle for the soul of human rights is being waged through the proxy of historiography (2013, 2077), it may be more accurate to say that we are all historiographers of human rights.

Notes 1. It is important to note a conceptual distinction between ‘rights’ and ‘human rights’, and that the latter does not always or necessarily coincide with the former. ‘Rights’ is a broader umbrella concept that could refer to ‘natural rights’, ‘individual rights’, or other legal entitlements that are not necessarily ‘human rights’. 2. Considering all of his major publications, Moyn’s arguments overlap between narratives two and three. I consider his most recent work on human rights and distributional inequality (2018) to fall under narrative two, but his most famous and influential work, The Last Utopia, fits under narrative three.

human Rights   275

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chapter 19

The Dipl omac y of Geno c i de A. Dirk Moses Introduction This chapter delineates a particular domain of international relations: the ‘diplomacy of genocide’. This domain comprises the intranational and international interactions between state and nonstate actors about genocide, in particular how to categorize and memorialize mass violence, and how to assess the merits of intervention to prevent or stop it. Before the concept of genocide was invented in 1944, such questions pertained to atrocities, ranging in type from the Belgian King Leopold II’s labour exploitation of Africans in the Congo to the massacre and deportation of Armenians by Ottoman authorities during the First World War. The scale of human destruction in the Second World War revealed the limitations of the diplomacy of atrocity and led to the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of Genocide (UNGC) in 1948. But, despite the lofty rhetoric accompanying the convention and Universal Declaration on Human Rights that many heralded as manifesting the progressive potential of modernity after its darkest moment, civilians were not comprehensively protected from mass violence. For the United Nations (UN) Charter (1945), the UNGC, and the subsequent evolution of Holocaust memory built two paradoxical features into the new diplomacy of genocide: 1) the expansion of humanitarian sensitivity in the stigmatization of genocide was accompanied by a contraction of the humanitarian imagination due to the immense symbolic aura of its archetype, the Holocaust, which set an impossibly high analogical bar; and 2) the stimulation of intervention constituencies invoking the Holocaust analogy, and eventually the Responsibility to Protect norm, ran up against the UN Charter’s hardening of state sovereignty in the general prohibition on intervention in other states. If contemporaries differed about the vehicle to realize modernity’s promises of material development in the later 1940s—​liberal empires or nation states?—​the decolonizing trend was already unmistakable: an international order of nation-​states meeting in the UN was truly modern, with humanitarian agreements guaranteeing peace and security. Multinational empires represented pre-​or early modern vestiges. This conceit of temporal

278   A. Dirk Moses novelty, I argue, concealed the enduring security priorities of all states since early modern state development. As much continuity as rupture can be detected in the transition from the diplomacy of atrocity to genocide. A historical-​granular approach to the relationship between atrocity, genocide, and international relations brings into view both the enduring patterns and changing modalities of diplomacy. Such an approach is uninterested in cataloguing and accounting for cases of genocide, still less in assessing the compliance of states with the UNGC. Instead of taking the law and concept of genocide for granted as a stable category reflecting intended ethno-​ national group destruction, it examines the generative effect of its ideal-​typical definition. The concept enables the identification of supposed instances of a stable phenomenon in history, thereby giving the illusion of objectivity and continuity to arbitrary choices made in the present. Accordingly, the construction of this ideal type and the contestation about its application constitute the key dramas in the diplomacy of genocide. These dramas are diplomatic and granular in two senses: they pertain to international relations and they entail intense negotiation by many actors. The latter are, first, victim groups (or those, often in diasporic locations, claiming to represent them) making bids for recognition and external (‘humanitarian’) intervention, even sometimes engaging in the ‘moral hazard’ of provoking violence to this end; second, the alleged perpetrator states that disavow accusations of genocide, the states that level and endorse such accusations, and bystander states that seek a ‘political solution’ to conflict; and, third, civil society and media actors that try to shape public opinion to pressure states and the UN to ‘do something’ about the violence against civilians. Analysis proceeds from the ground up: by reconstructing the patterns of interactions between these actors. Such reconstructions reveal that the bone of contention in naming genocide and advocating intervention is whether the contested violence falls into one of two artificial but widely deployed categories: the non-​political category of ethno-​national-​racial conflict in which civilians are attacked solely because of their identity, implying their lack of agency and thus innocence; or the political category in which some of their number engaged in political violence, implying their agency and the ascription of collective guilt. The innocent victim is intrinsic to the imagination of criminality that ‘shocks the conscience of humanity’ (or ‘mankind’), the jurisprudential term of art that qualifies events as the ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’ demanding intervention (deGuzman 2020; Walzer 1977, 251–​252). This is the threshold that genocide came to represent in the UNGC when, as we see below, state representatives at the UN made the Holocaust the archetype of genocide and thereby ‘the crime of crimes’ (Jinks 2016). This dichotomy between unpolitical and political violence is empirically misleading because political logics govern any extensive civilian destruction, but the diplomacy of genocide structures discourse about it in these stark terms (Moses 2021). By those terms, victim groups tend to promote the non-​political understanding of state conduct to gain attention and possible intervention, while accused states respond that legitimate security (that is, political) imperatives drive policy. A consequence of this categorization contest, then, is the diplomacy of genocide’s de facto authorization of civilian destruction: because genocidal intention is so difficult to prove and because state violence is so easy to depict as legitimately defensive. The Holocaust optic of racially motivated, asymmetrical destruction of non-​ combatants also screens out civilian destruction caused by aerial bombing and domestic famines like the Chinese Great Leap Forward (1958–​1961) that cost tens of millions of lives (van Dijk 2022; Lal 2005).

The Diplomacy of Genocide    279 This chapter proceeds as follows: first, it sketches the pre-​Second World War diplomacy of atrocity so we can discern the continuities and ruptures with the postwar diplomacy of genocide. Then it examines the negotiations for the UNGC in 1947 and 1948 to restrict the definition of genocide to accord with state security priorities: the conceptual sundering of genocide from international and non-​international armed conflict by depoliticizing genocide as a massive hate crime was no accident. The next section sets out how the diplomacy of genocide consists of campaigns for and against intervention during conflict, and the struggle for post-​genocide recognition to assert or ward off the stigma of genocide in the name of geopolitics. The chapter concludes by noting the recurrence of atrocity language. By privileging racialized civilian destruction (‘identity crimes’) over securitized and collateral civilian destruction, genocide has become virtually impossible to prove in courts, leading to the return of the language of ‘atrocity prevention’. However, the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiag province and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in which the victim groups have quick recourse to ‘genocide’ to name their experience and generate international support, indicates that genocide remains the most popular currency for claim-​making. Whether it can cash in depends on the balance of forces in the international system. Powerful states and states with powerful patrons will be immune to such moral pressure.

Before Genocide: The Diplomacy of Atrocity The formative moment for the diplomacy of atrocity is Bartolomé de las Casas’s (1484–​1566) indictment of Spanish rule in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542. His polemic against the Spanish enslavement and massacres of Amerindians, and those who excused or trivialized them, instigated an enduring scandal within Spain and beyond. A Short Account was quickly translated into many European languages, because it provided a rich source for Protestant empires to criticize their rival, inaugurating a centuries-​long debate about the ‘black legend’ of Spanish conquest. This new diplomacy of atrocity centred on the rhetorical device of condemning rival empires to legitimate one’s own model of empire, and to justify intervention to end atrocities in the name of ‘mankind’ (later ‘humanity’). We can identify four elements of this nascent diplomacy in Las Casas’s famous jeremiad. First, he described the emotional response to atrocity in now familiar terms. Thanks to his writings, Europeans would routinely use words like ‘shock’ to describe their own outraged affects in reaction to atrocities. Second, to signal these crimes’ excessive character, Las Casas claimed they are unprecedented. Third, still another trope to communicate excess was the inversion of civilizational hierarchies: not the Indians but the Spaniards were barbarians. Fourth: of equal significance was Las Casas’ identification of economic and political dynamics in the Spaniards’ conquest. Economic exploitation and putting down rebellions, not solely racial or religious contempt, motivated the Spanish. Atrocity was not depoliticized as it was after 1945 (Las Casas 1992). Consistent interpretations of mass violence characterized the diplomacy of atrocity: rival empires provoked uprisings by their despotism and misrule, while unpolitical criminal motives of bandits and fanatics drove unrest in one’s own realm. Spain’s Protestant rivals, the

280   A. Dirk Moses English and Dutch in particular, developed their imperial ideologies around commerce and land cultivation to contrast with Iberian plunder and exploitation. All European empires, however, deployed ‘civilization’, ‘humanity’, and ‘public conscience’ as the keywords of the diplomacy of atrocity. These keywords were taken up in the late eighteenth century by an incipient humanitarian lobby in Great Britain and the US, and then in other parts of Europe in opposing the slave trade and mismanaged colonial enterprises that undermined the ability of the imperial system to ethically justify itself. States would heed humanitarian advocacy when it aligned with their interests. They could agree that the answer to atrocious practices was not to end European empire; it was, rather, to end slavery and regulate the lawless colonialism of private corporations like the East India Company. Reforming empire and promoting its chief vehicles, commerce and Christianity, was the answer to atrocity. In the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which concluded the Napoleonic wars, signatories committed themselves to end the slave trade, condemning it ‘as repugnant to the principle of humanity and universal morality’ (Clark 2007, 55). Having abjured slavery, it was in Britain’s economic interests that other states do so as well. With the Treaty of Vienna setting the norm, Britain concluded bilateral treaties about visitation (inspection) rights with Latin American states, leading one historian to observe that they marked ‘an initial step towards an international police authority of the British fleet upon all of the world’s oceans’ (Grewe 2000, 561). The diplomacy of atrocity was the handmaiden of liberal empire. As the abolition campaigns peaked in the 1830s, two other questions preoccupied the British liberal press, humanitarians, and statesmen that bore on the diplomacy of atrocity: 1) the protection of ‘native’ peoples by physical relocation to reservations under state or church authority (‘humanitarian governance’) to remove them from settler predation (Lester and Dussart 2015); and 2) the protection of ‘captive’ European peoples in despotic continental empires, especially Poles in the Russian Empire and Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The nationality principle was also enshrined in the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, deriving from an English self-​understanding as a small, free state that shared more attributes with minor European republics than with large, absolutist empires (Whatmore 2009). Accordingly, the British, with French help, insisted that the powers which had partitioned Poland in the late eighteenth century—​Russia, Prussia, and Austria—​agree to recognize Polish national rights, the first time such rights, as opposed to religious ones, were accorded this status. Because there were no enforcement mechanisms, the partitioning powers grudgingly agreed. Then as now, states would sign on to normative commitments so long as they did not entail legal obligations. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin settled the Russian-​Ottoman conflict, signalled in part by granting independence to Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania, while creating Bulgaria from Ottoman territory, thereby granting sovereign political rights to aspiring nationalists. Far from seeking to liberate ‘captive nations’, however, the European powers were politicizing ethnicity in order to justify intervention in the Ottoman Empire, often to pre-​empt rivals (Reynolds 2011, 14–​16). Concern about Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire was the immediate context of the ensuing debate about ‘humanitarian intervention’, a term coined in 1880 by the English lawyer, William Edward Hall (1835–​94): ‘intervention for the purpose of checking gross tyranny or of helping the efforts of a people to free itself ’ (Hall 1880, 303). Interventions against tyranny had been discussed in Europe at least since the early modern period. Oppressing a nationality was evidence of tyranny (Swatek-​Evenstein 2020). The right

The Diplomacy of Genocide    281 to intervene was invoked by powers that claimed to represent ‘civilization’, meaning Europe, its settler colonies, and the USA. It implied an asymmetrical view of sovereignty: Fyodor Martens (1845–​1909), the Russian diplomat and professor at the University of St. Petersburg, assured Europeans that the principle of intervention was ‘not applicable to relations between civilized powers’ (Heraclides 2014, 42–​43). These conceits about protection, good governance, and trusteeship combined in striking harmony at the Berlin Conference of late 1884 and early 1885 when the great powers reconciled their growing trade rivalries in Africa by effectively chartering Belgian King Leopold II’s own company to administer the Congo as a free trade and navigation protectorate: the Congo Free State (Press 2017). Although money-​making was the priority, the Italians and British, prompted by their domestic anti-​slavery lobbies, sought the moral high ground by criminalizing slavery by Africans (Pétré-​ Grenouilleau 2004). The other powers demurred because of the impracticality of ending a trade that extended deep into the African interior, so ultimately a non-​binding article to end its maritime aspect was written into the General Act of the Berlin Conference. Article 6 crystallized the civilizing mission commenced in the Treaty of Vienna’s anti-​ slavery rhetoric in 1815. But if the diplomacy of atrocity could authorize liberal empire in the Congo, its norms also enabled missionaries and humanitarians to criticize Leopold’s rule after 1890. For rather than allowing free trade, the country’s rubber industry was controlled by concessions that exacted forced labour from Africans under the iron fist of local gendarmes. Violating the Berlin Act in every respect, Leopold’s Congo led to the deaths of millions of Congolese. The international protest movement utilized eyewitnesses to these atrocities who were quoted in the voluminous pamphlet literature that highlighted the systematic nature of the criminality. The sustained scandal forced the monarchy to hand over administration of the Congo to the Belgian state in 1908. In the end, Belgium was not a great power and could not resist the campaign. And, yet, the solution was not for Europeans to leave Congo, but to better administer it. Liberal internationalism utilized the diplomacy of atrocity to institute protectorates, trusteeships, and tutelage (Ewans 2002). At the same time, government delegations met at The First Hague Conference in 1899 to regulate warfare. It effectively codified the diplomacy of atrocity at the high point of imperial rule by setting the norms of civilized warfare, including the treatment of occupied enemy civilians—​but not of ‘uncivilized’ non-​European entities. Because, smaller European states, led by Belgium, could not agree with the larger imperial powers about the rights of occupying powers and of occupied European peoples, a compromise was reached in the preamble formulated by Martens. It set a general standard of conduct until positive agreement could be reached. Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience. (Meron 2000)

The diplomacy of atrocity was thus split between the Convention’s specific prohibitions and the imprecise requirements of the preamble. As a consequence, the ‘laws and customs of war’ enjoyed the status of settled law (and later would be called ‘war crimes’), while the preamble

282   A. Dirk Moses became the subject of debate in the 1940s when Allied lawyers discussed which laws would be used to prosecute Axis personnel after the war. The diplomacy of atrocity met its limitation in the Second World War when Nazi Germany treated Europeans like non-​Europeans on a far greater scale than in the First World War. The hollowness of this diplomacy was compounded when the Allies condemned Axis powers for mass atrocities but declined to bomb Nazi death camps despite urgent pleas by Jewish groups. Winning the war in a conventional manner remained the imperative. As always, intervention only occurred when it aligned with Realpolitik. These limitations were the impetus to transcend the diplomacy of atrocity by the Polish-​Jewish émigré lawyer, Raphael Lemkin (1900–​59).

Inventing Genocide: The Foundations of the New Diplomacy Lemkin coined the genocide concept in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in 1944. It simultaneously invoked the Hague Conventions to establish the basis for postwar prosecutions of Germans and their Axis allies while arguing that international law needed augmenting. That is why the book is generally about Axis violations of the laws of occupation. Because the Hague regime covered individuals rather than nations, Axis rule contains a single chapter introducing his proposed legal innovation: genocide as a ‘new technique of occupation’, meaning the destruction of nations (Lemkin 1944, 23). By joining the ancient Greek word of genos (i.e. tribe, nation, or race) and the Latin caedere (to kill), Lemkin proposed a new crime, genocide, to codify the Martens Clause. This ‘generic notion’ would represent the ‘laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience’ (Lemkin 1944, 79–​80). Lemkin had a restricted category in mind when he invented ‘genocide’: civilians targeted solely by virtue of their national identity. In doing so, he stood in the tradition of defending the ‘rights of nationality’ and ‘small nations’ well established since the nineteenth century. What is noteworthy, but overlooked by historians of the genocide concept, is that the context of this choice had changed. For he ignored the interwar debate among military thinkers and international lawyers about civilian immunity and aerial bombing. During the next world war, 600,000 civilians would die from aerial bombing, and another million would be maimed, while European and Japanese cities lay in ruins (Tanaka and Young 2009). Death by starvation due to sieges, like the German siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1942), also resulted in hundreds of thousands more civilian deaths, yet were not regarded as war crimes by the American judges after the war because they did not violate the Hague Convention of 1907 (Marcus 2003). Lemkin’s blind spots in these respects are not surprising given that he regarded the British and French as upholders of international law and bulwarks against chauvinist revisionism. Blockades were legitimate instruments of enforcing international law and agreements rather than representing a perfidious means of civilian destruction that should be criminalized (Mulder and van Dijk 2021). The Western powers were happy to elide the distinction between combatants and civilians in enforcing international rules that suited them.

The Diplomacy of Genocide    283 These imperatives flowed into the diplomatic wrangling about the definition of genocide. After the UN General Assembly called for a convention in December 1946, representatives of UN member states spent the next two years thrashing out a definition by debating the merits of two draft conventions. This process involved religious groups, intellectuals, writers, and journalists who lobbied state officials and the UN about the coming genocide negotiations. The point of departure was the Secretariat Draft convention (1947), co-​authored by Lemkin. It set out a tripartite categorization of genocidal policies as ‘physical’, ‘biological’, and ‘cultural genocide’ (Schabas 2009). Broad as its terms were, the draft prefigured the debate by excluding two state practices. First, civilian destruction in warfare was permitted. The experts’ commentary on the draft readily admitted that civilian populations were affected by modern warfare in ‘more or less severe losses’ but distinguished between them and genocide by arguing that in the latter ‘one of the belligerents aims at exterminating the population of enemy territory and systematically destroys what are not genuine military objectives’. Military objectives, by contrast, aimed at imposing the victor’s will on the loser, whose existence was not imperilled. In this argument, collateral damage caused in war was legitimate, even if as extensive as genocidal violence (Hirad and Webb 2009, 231). Second, the Secretariat Draft also took ‘mass displacements of populations’ off the table. The experts were thinking less of the partitions of India and Palestine, whose massive population expulsions began in the second half of 1947, than of the expulsion of millions of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe that the Allies had countenanced towards the end of war (Shaw 2014). The partition of India made its way into the debate in connection to cultural genocide, which had been included on Lemkin’s insistence. It immediately raised hackles. The British, opposed the Secretariat Draft because cultural genocide was extraneous to genocide as they understood it, and could threaten British interests by giving colonized people an international legal remedy to contest imperial security measures. Seeking to retain the moral high ground, the Americans did not attempt to block the convention negotiations, but also sought to restrict genocide’s definition as much as possible. Cultural genocide should not be confused with the protection of minorities, they maintained. Other countries saw the matter differently. Pakistan, for instance, worried about the remaining Muslim population in India that far-​right Hindus denounced as a ‘fifth column’. In the end, the extensive debate on cultural genocide was decided by the same standard as the decision to exclude population expulsion from the draft: it was not genocide if not intended physical destruction akin to the Holocaust. Consequently, cultural genocide was dropped as a legal concept, although protections of heritage and other aspects of culture made their way into other international legal instruments (Novic 2016). Genocide was also depoliticized explicitly. The question of political groups as a protected category revealed the incipient cleavages of the Cold War and security imperatives that concerned all states. The Soviets were stung by accusations of genocide levelled by emigre Baltic organizations that complained about the takeover of their countries after the war (Weiss-​Wendt 2017, 58). But not for love of the Soviet Union did the Latin American representatives support them. The exclusion of political groups would make it easier for states to repress domestic dissert, whether communist or anti-​communist, as some of Latin American representatives plainly admitted (Hirad and Webb 2009, 1356). Lemkin agreed as well in order to save the convention. Political expediency demanded this constriction.

284   A. Dirk Moses The dispute was as heated regarding the listing of specific motives in the intention to destroy groups ‘on grounds of national or racial origin, religious belief or political opinion of its members’, as the Ad Hoc Committee Draft put it in 1948. The Soviet Union and its supporters insisted on omitting political opinions as grounds for destruction. Though happy to include them, the British also noted that listing motives would allow perpetrators to claim they had other motivations. In reply, the New Zealand’s representative emphasized the importance of a restricted list of motives to avoid the possibility that ‘bombing may be called a crime of genocide’, because ‘Modern war was total, and there might be bombing which might destroy whole groups’ (Hirad and Webb 2009, 1415, 1418). The British were quickly convinced, and the deadlock was broken by Venezuela’s compromise suggestion to replace a list with the simple phrase ‘as such’. Since political groups had been excluded from the definition, destroying groups ‘as such’ meant destroying its members solely by virtue of membership of them, in other words, on the non-​political grounds of their identity (Hirad and Webb 2009, 1416–​1427). In the end, the majority of UN states thought that genocide needed to resemble what would later be known as the Holocaust, although only a particular version of it: as a synonym for mass mortality shorn of ethnic cleansing and attacks on culture. The text agreed upon by the UN General Assembly in November 1948 defined genocide in Article II thus: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: ( a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Diplomacy of Genocide This definition was not the humanitarian breakthrough as commonly supposed. Rather than comprehensively protecting civilians, the majority of UN states designed the UNGC to protect national security (in non-​international armed conflict) and military necessity (in international armed conflict). When combined with the UN Charter’s prohibition on interference in the internal affairs of member states (in Articles 2.4 and 2.7), the repression of political opposition was made all the easier. So was killing masses of civilians in warfare. The diplomatic victory of the US and Britain in ensuring the Geneva Conventions of 1949 did not regulate aerial bombing left the way open for the US to kill millions of civilians in Korean and Vietnam conflicts, for Russia to flatten Grozny in secessionist Chechnya in the 1990s, and for Syria to bomb cities in its civil war from 2012 (van Dijk 2022). In effect, states criminalized conduct they thought pertained to their rivals and not to them. Although economic exploitation leading to mass death was covered by Article 2(c) of the UNGC, it applied only if the fatal outcome was intended, thereby excluding circumstances like King Leopold’s Congo where it was a by-​product of excessive rubber harvesting. Taken together, these limitations were the price paid to extend legal protection of some groups in peacetime.

The Diplomacy of Genocide    285 Codifying their Martens Clause in the UNGC, then, only partially fulfilled its humanitarian promise to ensure that civilian populations ‘remain under the protection and empire’ of ‘the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience’. The diplomacy of genocide now made it all the easier for states to sidestep accusations of excesses that ‘shock the conscience of mankind’. Because the ethic of protection had to contend with the newly minted stigma in international relations, victims were compelled to depict themselves as exemplary in terms of the attenuated but common understanding of the Holocaust. The difficulty of proving genocide was no disincentive to trying, however. On the contrary, the new stigma raised the stakes of state legitimacy to new levels, meaning the postwar period is littered with allegations of genocide. These allegations were either rhetorical or legal depending on context. Both modes were diplomatic instruments in state campaigns for geopolitical security. Until the end of the Cold War, there was no prospect of establishing an international criminal court, let alone one-​off tribunals to prosecute alleged perpetrators like the Nuremberg Trials. Consequently, the coinage of legitimacy remained largely rhetorical, namely ensuring a state’s counterinsurgency or military campaign could not be judged as genocide in the virtual court of international public opinion. To be sure, this judgement had serious diplomatic implications. The UNGC’s obligation to prevent and punish genocide was a powerful norm even if a legal dead letter. Because great power sponsorship of violent states was subject to critical scrutiny by humanitarian lobbies, it was imperative that their clients not be seen to violate that norm. And, naturally, great powers sought to present their conduct in the best light. The rhetorical accusations began during the negotiations of the UNGC with India and Pakistan’s mutual allegations during partition massacres, in Arab and Jewish complaints about the violent aftermath of the British Mandate in Palestine, and by the claims of Eastern European exilés that the USSR was destroying their nations. Thereafter, leaders of national liberation and secessionist movements, activists, intellectuals, and journalists routinely invoked genocide to draw attention to their cause, to denounce their opponents, or simply to express horror at massacres they had witnessed. The Algerian National Front claimed the French committed genocide in suppressing its independence struggle in the 1950s, contemporaries decried Hutu massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1964 as genocide, the philosopher Jean-​Paul Sartre excoriated the US war in Vietnam in the same terms, while the unsuccessful Biafran secession struggle from Nigeria in the late 1960s was marketed as forging a safe haven from genocide. Bengalis seeking to carve out Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 said the government’s repression was genocidal, while scholars thought they saw ‘selective genocide’ in Burundi a year later, and in attacks on Paraguayan Indians soon thereafter. All these allegations failed rhetorically because they could easily be distinguished from genocide’s archetype, the Holocaust. Prominent among them was the the secessionist Nigeria-​Biafra between 1967 and 1970, in which Biafran propaganda posited the Igbo—​the majority people in the self-​proclaimed republic—​as the ‘Jews of Africa’. Public opinion in Britain was firmly on the Biafran side, for instance; government rhetoric about Nigerian unity and its long-​standing military relationship was no match for images circulated by the Biafran public relations campaign and sympathetic Western journalists. The Nigerian government and British ultimately won the propaganda war, however, by sponsoring an international observer team to visit Nigeria and report on the genocide issue. The team determined that genocide was not taking place, and international public opinion eventually

286   A. Dirk Moses concurred. The latter concluded that the Nigerians were not like Nazis and the Igbos not akin to Jews. Indeed, critics of Biafran strategy and its international supporters pointed out that prolonging Biafran resistance and the war exacerbated civilian casualties: the conflict was a civil war rather than a genocide (Moses and Heerten 2018). When Western client states killed millions of civilians, like Indonesia in 1965, they too would be shielded from genocide accusations. This situation changed briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The military conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and in the Balkans occurred when fleeting moments of consensus could be reached about an international legal response, resulting in two ad hoc criminal tribunals (for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia) and the successful negotiation of the Rome Statute in 1998 to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC). The tribunals were also responses to the perceived failure to intervene based, as before, on the proposition that these were roughly symmetrical conflicts driven by tribalism or ‘ancient hatreds’, and thus not analogizable with the Holocaust (Hansen 2006). Analysis of UNSC debates indicates that it was inclined to vote for intervention when conflicts could be depicted as ‘intentional’; meaning that clear victims and perpetrators could be identified. It was less likely to support intervention when conflicts were ‘inadvertent’ and ‘complex’, meaning ‘multifaceted, complicated, and tragic situations in which multiple and often fragmenting groups are responsible’. In such cases, intervention was unlikely to be seen as efficacious (Walling 2013, 26). For this reason, some have observed a ‘moral hazard’ in the genocide optic, because it encourages secessionist movements to provoke attacks on civilians to inflame international public opinion and lead to foreign intervention (Kuperman 2008). Certainly, claiming they are victims of genocide is a favoured rhetorical move by secessionist movements (Grodsk 2012). Underling the legalization trend, UN member states signed off on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm in 2005 that had been developed in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an ad hoc committee chaired by the Canadian government. The norm declared that states have ‘the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ and, further, that it ‘entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means’ (UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect). While R2P had to be consistent with the UN Charter’s limitations on intervention, the norm did point to a renewed commitment to fulfill the spirit of the Martens Clause and to take seriously the mandate of the ICC. Since then, the question of legitimacy is mediated by legal considerations as parties try to attract ICC attention. However, just as the ICC sparked into life, subsequent Russian and Chinese assertiveness in the Security Council inhibited its referrals. Russia, China, and other states became alarmed by the seeming exploitation of the R2P norm in the campaign against Libya in 2011, which they said exceeded the UNSC mandate by extending to regime change. Also thwarting the ICC is the traditional practice of protecting client states. Just as Western powers ensure Israeli officials and politicians avoid prosecution for war crimes, so Russia and China block action on Syrian crimes and the Myanmar expulsion of Rohingyas, defying the recommendations UN fact finding missions and the International Court of Justice. As a result of this Cold War-​like split on the UNSC, legal considerations are now largely symbolic as well, except for some African states.

The Diplomacy of Genocide    287 What is more, the UN itself can get in the way. A UN investigative committee of inquiry in 2005 held attacks on civilians in Darfur in Sudan not to be genocidal, although they closely resemble the Armenian genocide. Instead, it concluded that the Sudanese government was guilty of crimes against humanity for racial persecution, a determination greeted with sighs of relief in Khartoum and by African leaders (Mamdani 2007). Unlike the Rwandan and Bosnian cases, which many, including the ad hoc tribunals, saw as analogous to the Holocaust—​asymmetrical killing of civilians on racial/​ethnic grounds—​Darfur was too readily portrayable as a security emergency (Mayroz 2019). Despite the virtual impossibility of ICC or UNSC action, genocide recognition campaigns have intensified since the end of the Cold War. The emergence of a new post-​Soviet states led to border disputes and eventually frozen conflicts in which ethnic killings and cleansings were depicted as genocide in order to gain international attention and sympathy (Finkel 2010). The Armenian campaign to have the Ottoman attempted destruction of Armenians in 1915 recognized as genocide was driven by diasporic Armenians during the Cold War, but increasingly became official policy when Armenia won independence in 1991. The same applies to Baltic states’ efforts to class the Soviet ‘occupation’ of their countries as genocidal. Critics observe that their ‘double genocide’ thesis, in which both the Holocaust and Soviet genocide occurred on their soil, is designed to obscure local collaboration with the Nazis in murdering Baltic Jews. As might be expected, Russia rejects this equation, but also instrumentalizes Holocaust memory to whitewash Soviet crimes, including the famine of 1932–​33 that struck Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian nationalists, abroad and in Ukraine, are intent on depicting it as genocide (‘Holodomor’), making memory politics an adjunct of diplomatic efforts to distance the country from Russia (Subotic 2019). For its own diplomatic reasons, Israel participates in these struggles as the perceived owner of Holocaust symbolic capital by backing the Russian arrogation of Holocaust memory, as well as the Turkish government’s exculpatory equation of genocide with the Holocaust. Exemplifying the impotence of genocide diplomacy, Israel sold arms to Azerbaijan in its struggle to regain its Armenian-​held province of Nagorno-​Karabakh in 2020, despite calls by Israelis and Armenians to prevent a repetition of 1915 (Ben Aharon 2019). Closer to home, Israelis consistently portray Palestinian strategies, like marching on the Gazan border fence, as genocidal, thereby justifying the deployment of snipers to shoot far-​off marchers. Likewise the proprietor of Holocaust symbolic capital, Germany makes strategic distinctions in genocide recognition for its diplomatic benefit, especially in its tense negotiations with Namibia in which it declines to deal directly with the descendants of the victims of the colonial repression in German Southwest Africa in 1904–​1905. While the German government is now prepared to use the term ‘genocide’, it does so in metaphorical, non-​legal terms to avoid paying reparations as it does to the State of Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference. ‘We don’t want to relativize it [the Holocaust]. It stands on its own’ (Beck 2020). A ‘crime of crimes’ modelled on the Holocaust makes it virtually impossible to characterize past and present civilian destruction as genocidal, enabling states to better manage their international relations rather than protect civilians and fully acknowledge past crimes. The only country to have gained general genocide recognition apart from Bosnia-​ Herzegovina, Rwanda, predictably engages in diplomatic ruses to hold onto this diplomatic prize. To combat a ‘double genocide’ thesis about the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutus were also victims in the invasion of the Rwanda People’s Front in 1994, the Rwandan government pushed through a UN resolution in 2018 to change the title of the UN commemoration

288   A. Dirk Moses day: from ‘International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’ to ‘International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda’. However understandable this motivation to combat denialism, noteworthy is how this presentation of the conflict tries to copy the common understanding of the Holocaust as a non-​political crime driven only by race hatred: Tutsis murdered solely for being Tutsis. By fixating on the genocidal features of the conflict in Rwanda and surrounding countries in 1994, the approach occludes the mass violence against Hutu civilians along with the broader civil war context in which all civilian destruction took place (Straus 2019). As always, this sort of civilian destruction is relegated to the margin.

Conclusion: The Return of Atrocity? Because the diplomacy of genocide stymies rather than promotes civilian protection, prominent advocates of humanitarian intervention have abandoned or supplemented it by reviving the pre-​Second World War diplomacy of atrocity. Insiders now propose ‘crimes against humanity’, which debuted in the Entente note to the Ottoman government in 1915, as an alternative to genocide, because it covers the same acts as genocide but without the strenuous intent requirement (Evans 2006). Moreover, commentators have advocated ‘atrocity crimes’ to cover the infractions covered by genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes (Scheffer 2006). The Rome Statute of the ICC signalled the way by bundling genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace under the rubric of ‘most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole’ (Rome Statute, Article 5[1]‌2000). The new United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide has effectively institutionalized this approach by stating its ‘duty to prevent and halt genocide and mass atrocities’ (Office of The Special Adviser on The Prevention of Genocide). The office’s ‘Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes’, released in 2014, elaborated this point by transcending the genocide concept’s narrow national-​ethnic-​racial definition of a targeted group to include the more general ‘protected groups, populations or individuals’ included in crimes against humanity and war crimes (UN 2014). This innovation by scholars and diplomats working at the coalface of international politics represents a major critique of the modernist legal architecture to protect civilians and combatants that culminated in human rights revolution after the Second World War. It implies that the hierarchy of these various crimes is inimical to their prevention, and that large-​scale atrocity is their common denominator. Taken together, the framework runs counter to the monumentalization of genocide. And yet, the allure of ‘genocide’ continues as before for victim groups and invaded states. Advocates from and for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiag province of China allege that the government’s incarceration and sterilization policies are tantamount to genocide (Finley Smith 2021). Likewise, the Ukrainian government insists that the Russian invasion of early 2022 is genocidal because of attacks on its civilian population and the stated Russian aim to destroy Ukrainian statehood and nationality. As always, external support is sought. Uyghurs want diplomatic pressure exerted on China while the Ukrainians require weapons. It may be no accident that US President Biden declared that Russia was committing genocide on

The Diplomacy of Genocide    289 the day (13 April 2022) that his administration announced its delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine (Borger 2022). While alleging atrocities continues, genocide remains the gold standard for claim-​making. It is, after all, the ‘crime of crimes’ for victims. However, the likelihood of China or Russia appearing before the ICC or any international tribunal are as remote as Israeli or US officials doing so. None of these states are parties to the Rome Statute, and permanent members of the UNSC can veto any referral to the ICC. They are effectively exempt from prosecution. The diplomacy of genocide will not surmount the pre-​Second World War limitations of the diplomacy of atrocity, and thus fulfill the Martens Clause, until the swathes of sanctioned state civilian destruction on security grounds are covered. So far, the purpose of state diplomacy has been to ensure these exceptions, indicating that the diplomacy of atrocity, now under the sign of genocide, will endure (Moses 2021).

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290   A. Dirk Moses Lemkin, R. 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lester, A. and Dussart, F. 2015. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-​Century British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, D. 2003. ‘Famine Crimes in International Law’. American Journal of International Law 97(2): 245–​281. Mamdani, M. 2007. ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’. London Review of Books 2(5): 8 March. Mayroz, E. 2019. Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide From Bosnia to Darfur. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Meron, T. 2000. ‘The Martens Clause, Principles of Humanity, and Dictates of Public Conscience’. American Journal of International Law 94(1): 78–​89. Moses, A. D. 2021. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moses, A. D. and L. Heerten, eds. 2018. Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-​Biafra War, 1967–​1970. London and New York: Routledge. Mulder, N. and Dijk, B. van. 2021. ‘Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?’ In Contingency and the Course of International Law, eds. K. J. Heller and I. Venzke, 370–​388. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novic, E. 2016. The Concept of Cultural Genocide: An International Law Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, M. 2011. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–​1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 5(1). Available at: https://​www.icc-​ cpi.int/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​RS-​Eng.pdf Pétré-​Grenouilleau, O. ed. 2004. From Slave Trade to Empire: European Colonisation of Black Africa 1780s–​1880s. London and New York: Routledge. Press, S. 2017. Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schabas, W. A. 2009. Genocide and International Law: The Crime Of Crimes, second edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheffer, David. 2006. ‘Genocide and Atrocity Crimes’. Genocide Studies and Prevention 1(3): 229–​250. Shaw, M. 2014. Genocide and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Straus, S. 2019. ‘The Limits of a Genocide Lens: Violence Against Rwandans in the 1990s’. Journal of Genocide Research 21(4): 504–​524. Subotic, J. 2019. Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Swatek-​Evenstein, M. 2020. A History of Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations. 1964. The crime of genocide [1946] UNGA 66; A/​RES/​96 (I) (11 December 1946). Accessed: 1 September 2022. Available at: http://​www.world​lii.org/​int/​other/​UNGA/​1946/​. United Nations. 2014. Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes. Available at: https://​www. un.org/​en/​gen​ocid​epre​vent​ion/​docume​nts/​about-​us/​Doc.3_​Fr​amew​ork%20of%20A​naly​ sis%20for%20A​troc​ity%20Cr​imes​_​EN.pdf United Nations, Office of Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect. Accessed: 1 September 2022. Available at: https://​www.un.org/​en/​gen​ocid​epre​vent​ion/​genoc​ide.shtml.

The Diplomacy of Genocide    291 Tanaka, Y. and M. Young, eds. 2009. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-​ Century History. New York: New Press. van Dijk, B. 2022. Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walling, C. B. 2013. All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Walzer, M. 1977. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books. Weiss-​Wendt, A. 2017. The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Whatmore, R. 2009. ‘“Neither Masters Nor Slaves”: Small States And Empire In The Long Eighteenth Century’. In Lineages Of Empire: The Historical Roots Of British Imperial Thought, ed. D. Kelly, 54–​81. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 20

War and H i story i n World P ol i t i c s Tarak Barkawi The professors and the public just don’t like the same kind of history.

Doyne Dawson (2008, 603)

War may seem a familiar category to International Relations (IR) scholars who understand their discipline to be about questions of war and peace. And historians have written many histories of wars. The aim of this essay is the uncomfortable one of making the encounter with war strange for both disciplines, in order to identify new directions for inquiry. I do so by focusing on the relations between war and knowledge about war, a war/​knowledge problematic (Barkawi and Brighton 2011). In respect of IR, I situate the discipline as shaped by war, in co-​constitutive relations with it, rather than intellectually in command of war. One need only reflect on the significance for the development of IR of Anglo-​American victory in the Second World War, or of the imbrication of the discipline in the Cold War US, to appreciate the force of this point (Hoffmann 1977; Oren 2003). In respect of History, I turn to History done outside of university settings, among soldiers, veterans, and publics. I seek to highlight some of the ways in which war is reproduced through the writing and consumption of military histories. At the same time, I draw attention to potential critical resources and perspectives in these practitioner and amateur accounts. Critical traditions of inquiry have a way of beginning outside the academy, as they have in areas as diverse as Marxism or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) history (Kunzel 2018). This may prove true of histories of war. Armed encounters between and among peoples in world politics have shaped societies and polities, economies, and cultures, and the relations between them. The histories and sociologies of these encounters make up the domain of an international and historical war studies. As a primary form of transboundary encounter, war should be a phenomenon to be explored, not a fact to be explained or counted by IR theory. Although we have brilliant classical statements, and extraordinary contemporary scholarship, the main challenge in the study of war remains bringing together ‘war’ and ‘society’ in the same analytic frame in

War and History in World Politics    293 compelling ways (Geyer and Tooze 2015). In this essay, I develop some approaches to this question which turn history writing about war into an object of inquiry. The wars and other violence of the early twenty-​first century gave new energy and direction to the study of war and war-​related topics across a range of fields of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities (Carruthers 2016; Wool 2015). War and armed forces no longer are, if they ever were, topics mainly in the provenance of narrow bands of realists, positivists, and traditional diplomatic and military historians. In international studies, feminist and gender scholars, theorists of the body and culture, new materialists, and scholars of civil war and genocide have taken up new approaches to war (Baaz and Stern 2013; Grove 2019; Kalyvas 2006; Lisle 2016; McSorely 2013; Wilcox 2015). Collectively, their work is as rich in theory as in empirics. Social and cultural historians have produced archivally rich and conceptually sophisticated histories on war and armed forces (Dower 2010; Kaplan 2005; Roberts 2013). Interdisciplinary formations around war and society and science and technology studies have blossomed (Eden 2004; Engberg-​Pedersen 2015; Erikson 2013). Histories and analyses of combatants’ mentalities have developed over several generations now, while anthropologists, historical sociologists, and economic and political historians have woven war into their accounts in new ways (Edgerton 2006; Harari 2008; Macleish 2013). Taken together, these literatures constitute a virtual critical and interdisciplinary war studies from which we might re-​imagine the encounter between international studies and histories of war. While archivally and ethnographically rich studies may be granular in detail, they have the capacity to introduce new ideas and perspectives about events, processes, and concepts (Maza 2017, 157–​198). In recent decades, historians of Atlantic slavery and of the indigenous peoples of North America fundamentally transformed received wisdom about these subjects, invalidating synthetic accounts widely read in the recent past (Chaplin 1999; Hämäläinen 2008). They did so, in no small measure, through the accumulation of monograph studies based on primary research that contradicted received interpretations. From the 1980s onwards, anthropology and humanities disciplines, like English literature, began an archival turn, still on-​going, using historians’ methods for their own questions (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Greenblatt 2004). While both ethnographical approaches and archival research are found in IR, they do not have the same prominence or play field-​defining roles in major debates.1 Notably, in debates over the meaning of history in IR, the question of the archive is not central, as it is for university historians. For most scholars in IR and political science, history tends to mean one of two things. First, it is a source of facts and data points to test theories or establish patterns. These facts may come from either secondary sources or primary research. Second, history means historicizing, situating social phenomena in time and place and conceiving them as conditioned by historical context in some significant way. Historicism is a rich site of theorizing in IR. But the source of information on historical context, however, is likely to be secondary (e.g. reading the work of a historian who did primary research) or synthetic (scholarship which synthesizes a series of monographs or other primary-​ based works). It is often from older synthetic accounts, based on secondary sources, that IR scholars get their history, of wars, and warfare, and of other subjects. This strategy can mean that, at best, IR’s historical resources are always at least a generation behind university historians (Carvalho et al. 2011). As a consequence, history is deprived of its capacity to surprise. It is a place where theories are confirmed, rather than one where new concepts and interpretations might be developed.

294   Tarak Barkawi By contrast, contemporary university-​trained historians think historiographically. They make a distinction between history as what happened in the past and History as a researched account about the past. The reading public might be forgiven for thinking that the former is more or less directly accessed through the latter. But researched accounts are interpretations of particular sources, and they ask questions, construct significances, and foster silences in ways that change over time (Trouillot 1995). Genre, itself historical, informs their structure and prose (White 1973). The ‘history’ of any given historical object consists of collections of such accounts. Trouillot’s distinction between history1, history as the past, and history2, history as researched accounts of the past, is particularly significant for understanding how history2s come to play roles in history1 (1995, 1–​4, 29). What I will suggest in what follows is that one of most important ways in which war affects society is through providing it with military histories. These histories shape the subjectivities of citizens, soldiers, and leaders. Often written by veterans and others outside the academy, and entwined with militarized popular culture, these histories connect war fronts and home fronts, part of the media through which wars inform the identities of peoples and polities in world politics. Understanding what kind of accounts these are, and how war shapes the histories that are written of it, requires a reflexive approach to war and knowledge about war, the topic with which I begin. I then continue the discussion of history and historiography, with particular attention to the critical potential of non-​university history writing. I close by drawing the threads of the essay together in the example of battle history. I hope to offer a glimpse of how we might approach war as a transboundary encounter whose effects radiate widely in time and space, shaping the local and global in interconnected ways. After all, war stories are part of the shared fabric of humankind over time and place, and many of these stories are histories.

War and Knowledge about War Much systemic analysis related to war and military affairs, in and beyond the academy, begins from the standpoint of instrumental rationality. For those at any level, from the private solider to the statesperson, contemplating participation in war, the question of how to prevail often dominates. It serves as a life and death incitement to research and inquiry of all kinds. Most inquiry related to war and armed forces more or less baldly concerns how to do some aspect of war better. In political science and strategic studies, this takes the form of policy science and advice, often underwritten by objectivist and materialist epistemologies. As Peter Paret comments, much traditional and official military history concerns ‘lessons learned’ and other ‘purely utilitarian’ purposes (1971, 381). The industrialization and the totalization of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries broke down barriers between distinctly military and civilian knowledge domains. Everything from physics to area studies would eventually become relevant to ‘national security’ (Cumings 1999, 173–​ 204; Leslie 1993). The preparation for and conduct of war became ever more complex and rationalized, drawing in technical and natural sciences as well as more humanistic areas of learning (Bousquet 2009). Developments in warfare helped drive developments in the production of knowledge, across a range of fields (Light 2003; Lowen 1997; Rawls 2018). These processes were historical, shaped by, and shaping, the epistemologies of the day as

War and History in World Politics    295 well as the institutional sites, like universities, where inquiry took place. The discipline of IR, as it developed in North America after 1945, can be placed in such a historical context (Guilhot 2011). The ‘American social science’, as Stanley Hoffmann termed IR, was part and parcel of the Cold War (1977). It took sides in this global conflict, and extensively analysed United States’ strategy and decision-​making. In this sense, for many critics, IR was intentionally militarized, overly concerned with war and national security, and with prosecuting the conflict with the Soviet bloc, particularly its nuclear dimensions. But Hoffmann’s insightful analysis suggested, too, that US IR was of war and power. That is, beyond the instrumental imperatives for policy science, war shaped expert knowledge in structural ways as well, setting the terms of inquiry and determining the fate of ideas. The discipline unreflexively assumed the perspective of the powerful (Hoffmann 1977, 58–​59). Rationalist, cybernetic, and game theoretic tools that developed out of wartime operations research were applied to nuclear strategy and other aspects of ‘defence’ like procurement (Abella 2008; Mirowski 2002, 153–​231). Over time, they came to inform the discipline’s core approaches (Amadae 2015). Funding streams, access to official resources and secrets, and the prestige that came with proximity to foreign and security policy supercharged the careers of particular scholars and their theories and methods (Oren 2003, 126–​171). More generally, ‘this war’, that is, the war that is going on presently, dominates inquiry (Balibar 2008). In addition to the Cold War, the US war in Vietnam and peacekeeping created vast literatures, as did the War on Terror and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The discipline of IR may have sought to command war, but it was also commanded by it. The upshot of this discussion is that war studies should begin with a critical or reflexive attitude towards knowledge about and related to war, even university and scientific knowledge. War happens in and through expert knowledges, including social scientific and humanistic ones. This does not make war unique; the professions and technical sectors of modern society supply ready analogies. But when it is recalled that war also periodizes national histories, underwrites public reason and memory, and informs political and gender identities, the density of the war-​generated fog that surrounds us, and the scale of the war-​ knowledge research agenda, becomes apparent. In this context the significance of histories of war comes into view. Under these conditions, how might histories of war and the armed forces that fight them be written reflexively? Let us return to the distinction between history and historiography, and contrast it with social scientific approaches to history.

History and Historiography For many social scientists, history amounts to a meta-​container of facts. The most prominent database of wars in IR, the Correlates of War (CoW), defines war as a year-​long period involving at least one thousand battle deaths among the armed forces of combatant polities (Sarkees and Wayman 2010). Historical research means rigorously finding this data in order to determine if a ‘war’ occurred. CoW defines interstate war as war between two or more sovereign states, while civil war occurs within the territory of a sovereign state. An evolving category of extra-​systemic/​extra-​state war is used for those conflicts that do not fit. By fixing the definitions of sovereign states and of wars across time and place, claims can be made about

296   Tarak Barkawi the incidence and rates of types of war. These claims can be mobilized as ‘facts’ requiring theoretical explanation. Examples include the putative decline of interstate war and the rise in civil war since 1945, or that no states coded as ‘democratic’ have waged interstate war on one another since the data began (Braumoeller 2019; Russett 1993). CoW data is rigorously collected and revised, but within its own terms. For CoW, states and wars are defined by the same criteria across time and place. Competing databases which tweak definitions or more rigorously collect data from, say, non-​Western cases, do not differ in principle in this respect (Lyall 2020; Reiter et al. 2016). War is not something that changes and has histories of its own. Each war is essentially the same as another, subject to variation in the number of combatants and casualties. The Second World War becomes a data point, interstate war number 139 in the CoW data. The dominant positivist traditions in political science and IR require fixed definitions of social kinds and categories, such as states, regime types, or types of war. Only in this way can patterns and generalizations be established that hold over time and place. The approach is ahistorical on principle. In contrast, for historicist approaches to social inquiry, wars and armed forces evolve, changing over time and place. An excellent example is the industrialization and totalization of modern warfare over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in the advent of nuclear weapons which transformed world politics and the conduct of war (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Malesevic 2010; McNeill 1982). In these studies, war not only changes historically, it is dynamically interrelated with society, economics, science, politics, culture, and so on. But even historicist social inquiry seeks to generalize, however attentive to historical detail. By contrast, as Sarah Maza remarks of historians, their ‘purpose is not to extract from one historical situation a generalization that can be applied to another’, but rather to ‘order, and make sense of, a complicated set of events at a particular point in the past’ (2017, 164). Historians’ questions, interpretive frames, and sources have their own histories; they are themselves historical. To train as a contemporary university historian is to learn to think historiographically, to situate research in the context of the existing historiography of an historical object or set of objects. The assumptions, questions, silences, politics, and much else that have shaped history writing over time become evident. This does not mean that these histories do not contain facts, only that they have certain facts, not others, and that they assign certain significances to those facts, and not to others. Historians are not alone in arguing the facts of the past are constituted through the concerns of the present (Benjamin 1968, 253–​264; Nietzsche 1997; Weber 1949). But their training and practice are perhaps unique in driving this point home, even if they are as susceptible in their own way as positivists to notions of the accumulation of knowledge (Wilder 2012). Historians see shifts in prevailing interpretations, and in the facts they uncover and assign significance to, as salutary evidence of intellectual vitality. These shifts are also evidence of how social and political change impacts the academy and its research. Only certain questions and answers are thinkable in any given context. Some remarks on the Haitian revolution as an historical and interdisciplinary object of inquiry illustrate these points. They also introduce the significance of taking account of non-​university inquiry. This will give us some tools to approach military historiography. Broadly, in recent decades, scholars have reconsidered the meaning and significance of the Haitian revolution as an object of inquiry. Notably, it had not figured in the

War and History in World Politics    297 historical and sociological study of revolutions, even Atlantic ones. Rather, in historical and political discourse, Haiti had served as a salutary warning about Black misrule and the tragic consequences of slave revolt, the original failed state (Gaffield 2015; Shilliam 2008). But, assisted by local historians, and taking their lead from C. L. R. James’ classic statement, scholars began asking new questions, finding new facts, and assigning new significances to the events and politics of the revolution (James 1980; Trouillot 1995, 95–​ 107). They studied the extraordinary character of the Haitian constitution, the entwinement of the Haitian and French revolutions, and the wider effects elsewhere of events in Haiti. New scholarly discoveries followed. These included the role of Haiti in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its master-​slave dialectic; and how news and stories of the political and military successes of Haiti’s rebel slaves, and their extraordinary general Toussaint Louverture, circulated among enslaved and oppressed populations in and beyond the Americas, shaping and inspiring resistance in other times and places (Buck-​ Morss 2009; Clavin 2011; Shilliam 2015). The new scholarship on Haiti was fuelled by, and helped to fuel, the general critique of racial and colonial knowledge that was hastened in the Western academy by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979). The historians and their histories had kept Louverture’s victories and tragedies alive long enough for Haiti to become a general critical object for contemporary Western scholars and their students (Scott 2004). Here is a glimpse of the wider effects of war and war stories in history and in scholarship, where Toussaint’s armies continue to help win theoretical victories for the oppressed. Wars are eruptions that ramify over time, place, and social sphere. The Haiti story is an example of how social change affects the academy and the truths it produces. Widely used in training contemporary university historians, Trouillot’s text makes (in somewhat different language) the useful and multifaceted distinction between history1 (historical events and processes) and history2 (researched accounts about them). Trouillot’s point in making this distinction is that history1 and 2 overlap (1995, 29). This overlap produces both silences and forgetting, as when traces of the past are obliterated by powerful actors. And it produces new facts and histories, as when historical change leads scholars to ask new questions of the past and search for new answers. Public and amateur historians are caught up in this overlap, just as are university scholars and national academies. There is a tendency to privilege university scholarship as freer from power, disinterested, while public history is seen as reflecting the official story or the demands of groups for laudatory histories about themselves (Novick 1988, ­chapter 14). Yet, in the Haiti story, amateur and local scholars have had particular importance, and critical import, however incomplete or compromised their scholarship. James’ brilliant history was amateur scholarship, funded in part by a friend who owned a tea shop, and inspired by histories of Haiti that circulated in Afro-​Caribbean anti-​colonial circles, not British universities of the time (James 1980, v–​vii). The Black Jacobins went largely unread by white scholars for decades after its initial publication in 1938, yet it prefigured and helped inspire the critical university scholarship on Haiti we now have. We need not make the opposite mistake of assuming that public, amateur, or indigenous scholarship is necessarily more true or critical than that produced in Western universities. Rather, we should be on the lookout for different kinds of critical potential in research done outside the university, especially when we situate it against the vicissitudes of history1 and history2. What happens if we take this parable to military history?

298   Tarak Barkawi

Military historiography To address this question, I look at an important set of review essays of military history, mostly written by prominent North American university historians (Citino 2007; Dawson 2008; Howard 1983; Lynn 1997; Paret 1971; Sherry 1990; Showalter 1975; Shy 1993). These essays speak to, and cite one another, and are frequently cited as representing the state of the field. I call attention to two entangled themes found in them. The first of these concerns the characteristic antinomy in the study of war between war front-​and home front-​centered approaches, between a focus on the fighting (‘war’) and a focus on its wider context and effects (‘society’). In these review essays, and in scholarship they discuss, this antinomy often takes the form of an opposition between traditional, operational, or ‘drums and trumpets’ military history, and work that focuses on the ‘society’ part of war and society (Showalter 1975). The second theme is the putatively embattled status of military history in history departments in North American universities (Lynn 1997). The connection between the two themes is the perception that social histories, broadly conceived, are more academically reputable and have more legitimacy, or at least affinity, with the sensibilities of contemporary historians who do not study military topics. War and society, it is said, made military history safe for civilian universities by leaving the war part out (Morillo 2006, 40–​41). One of the first things to note about these two themes is how they assign a ‘hard’, military reality to operational history and a ‘soft’ signifier to the study of society. War front-​centered scholarship tends towards materialist and objectivist formulations and this kind of hard/​ soft distinction is common (Citino 2007, 1089). Citino unwittingly provides an example in approvingly quoting John Lynn: ‘[E]‌xtreme proponents of cultural history might dispute the very existence of reality, since all is perception to them. In the realm of military history, such airy discussions tend to become foolish. Thousands of dead and wounded as a result of battle is the kind of hard fact that defies intellectual games’ (Lynn 2003, xx; quoted in Citino 2007, 1086). Reality inheres in war; mere cultural construction resides at home. But few things have been as constructed and reconstructed as the meaning of the military dead, meanings which have had plenty of real effects on battlefields and on homefronts (Mosse 1990; Winter 1995). However, it is also Citino who points out that ‘society’ was not added to the study of war by university historians in the 1960s but was very much part of the putatively ‘old’ military history (2007). Already in 1797, Lieutenant-​General Gerhard Scharnhorst, Karl von Clausewitz’s teacher and patron, had written a study situating the new French armies in their revolutionary social and political context (Paret 1971, 376–​377). Clausewitz generalized this insight in his philosophy of war and in his many studies of Napoleonic and other military operations. Here, again, we find analysis done outside of the academy, in this case by practitioners, well ahead of the scholarly perspectives of the day. They were in part arguing against a strategic tradition that conceived war within geometric and mathematical terms, and they had little trouble in seeing military realities in political and social events. My discussion is schematic but sufficient to draw some concluding points. Efforts to offer a progressive or a declinist narrative of the rise of war and society scholarship, or the fall of operational history, based on work done exclusively in university settings falls apart if we look outside the academy, especially the North American one. Practitioner analysis properly

War and History in World Politics    299 appreciated, even by Prussian officers, holds critical potential. More significant perhaps is the way war manages to disrupt, refract, and divide efforts to make sense of it in and beyond the academy, in part through the confusion spawned by hard/​soft distinctions. Consider how strategic studies, with its Cold War penchant for game theory and higher math, replicates similar problems as Clausewitz identified in the geometric models of strategy prevalent in his day. Signalling, bargaining, and deployments based on game and marginal utility theory helped lead US strategists to defeat in Vietnam, in part because they failed to attend to culture, politics, and history in their analyses of their opponent and themselves. Also evident are overlaps between history1 and 2. On Lynn’s account, opposition to the Vietnam War on US university campuses, especially when protesters eventually became professors, fuelled the hostile reception military historians received in university departments. For Lynn, they had to turn to studying gender, culture, and society to survive, as if these topics were not in fact central to their subject matter in the first place (Lynn 1997). The history1 of wars intersects with the history2 of researching and writing about them. Being cognizant and reflexive about this situation is the path to more satisfactory analyses. In some respects, and although it still focuses on university history, Citino offers the most satisfactory coda and formulation: ‘the line of demarcation between the “old” and the “new” military histories is becoming increasingly indistinct, even antiquated. Perhaps it is time to drop the distinctions altogether, and to describe military history today as a discipline with a strong interest in social and cultural analysis, but with an equally immovable commitment to its battlefield and campaign traditions’ (2007, 1089). But just how might we bring together battlefields and society?

Battle History I begin by recalling that war and its core activity, fighting, are primary forms of transboundary encounter in world politics. Notably, while war is a foundational concept in IR, battle is not. As historical events and military outcomes, battles figure in the discipline, in case studies, data bases, and historical narratives and periodizations. But battle is not a theoretic concept in the study of world politics, whether in its classical meaning of significant fighting limited in time and space, or in its more generalized sense of combats or exchanges of violence. Battles are out of favour even among historians (Harari 2007). By contrast, in popular terms, battle and fighting constitute the central cultural artefact of war (Jeffords 1989). Official memorialization and popular culture dwell on fighting and its immediate effects, such as the military dead, the combat veteran, weapons, and tactics (Homer 1987; Gibson 1994; Winter 1995). Hollywood rarely makes movies about the complex logistical or organizational dimensions of war, but focuses instead on combat, as do war novelists, memorialists, and popular historians. In imagination, battle is a kind of concentrated war, a cipher for war as a whole composed of its most distinctive and essential activity, and through which publics access and make sense of war. Westerners who know little else of history might still know that important battles were fought at Waterloo (1815), Stalingrad (1942–​43), or Dien Bien Phu (1954). Battles populate the memories of formerly colonized peoples, marking their moments of independence in public memory, such as

300   Tarak Barkawi those fought at Yorktown (1781), Boyacá (1819), Surabaya (1945), Algiers (1956–​57), or Cuito Cuanavale (1987–​88). Of course, the first order ‘theories’ of social agents should not necessarily become scholarly concepts. But I have outlined a situation where a primary form of international interaction is more in the popular mind than the scholarly mind. The ‘old’ military historians may have something to teach us in their insistence on battle’s importance if not their means of studying it. At this juncture, it becomes significant that battle has a tendency to produce its own historians. Veterans’ history writing comprises a major public and amateur historiographical tradition in the West extending back to the ancient world (Fehrenbach 1991; Xenophon 1949). Soldiers return from war to write or participate in the production of battle histories, an overlap and interaction between history1 and 2. Widely read in modern times, especially in the Anglo-​American West, battle histories are a principal site where citizens make sense of war, especially when their wider role in informing official and public commemoration is taken into account. They also shape wars to come through their usage in training and in informing the mindsets of new generations of officers and soldiers. Battle histories constitute an important form of mediation between war front and home front, in ways that flow over time and space. I noted the military history review essays were concerned with the legitimation of military history as a university subject, and therefore paid relatively little attention to non-​ academic historiography. Michael Howard’s category of ‘nursery history’ is an exception (Howard 1983, 189). By this he meant the kind of popular military history, often written by veterans, that recounts the exploits of military units and their heroes and great captains. An eminent developer and advocate of the university war and society tradition, Howard’s term for this kind of history indicates his view of its intellectual qualities. But Howard was also a decorated infantry officer. For him, ‘nursery history’ had its place, a legitimate ‘use’ of military history to prepare potential recruits and soldiers for military service and combat, and to build morale in fighting formations. When you add in staff college history, designed to train commanders’ judgement, the more or less direct implication of history writing in the reproduction of war becomes clear. History2 participates in the making of history1. Military histories serve Nietzsche’s ‘monumental’ and ‘preservative’ functions, uses of history for life, enabling military formations and commanders to replicate and build on past battlefield feats (1997, 67–​75). Just what such uses of military history look like historically, and in practice, is a topic on which there is surprisingly little work (Reardon 1990). Anders Engberg-​Pedersen’s groundbreaking study (2015) of the epistemic shift occasioned by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars is exemplary. He situates military history alongside other genres that try to make sense of war, like novels and maps. Engberg-​Pedersen’s analysis ranges across representations of battle and war consumed by military officers as well as wider publics. If we situate popular military history alongside other ways stories of wars, battles, and combatants circulate in myth and memory, we can see that war stories and histories have wide ranging social, cultural, and political effects (Nguyen 2016). In New Zealand and the Yucatan, passing down stories even of defeat shaped postcolonial identities and social relations decades or centuries later (Belich 1986, 298–​310; Clendinnen, 2003, Part II). Accounts of the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 circulated among African-​Americans as well as later generations of Ethiopians, while those of the Japanese victory at Tsushima Strait in 1905 inspired imperialized peoples across Asia (Aydin 2007, 71–​92; Jonas 2011, 267–​284). For post-​1945 Anglophone readers,

War and History in World Politics    301 popular military histories whitewashed the armed forces of Nazi Germany, helping make possible the Cold War rapprochement with West Germany (Smelser and Davies 2008). Later, historians uncovered the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust, leading to cultural and political contestation and conflict in contemporary German society (Hamburg Institute 1999). Meanwhile, East and West Europeans, not to mention Asians, divide over the meaning and significance of the history of the Second World War, organizing identities and politics around competing visions of it (Mälksoo 2010, ­chapter 5; Yoneyama 2016). The scholarship I have been describing investigates the field of relations between battle as a military event and battle as a social and political construct. In this space, force and culture meet and become entangled in war, interconnecting peoples and shaping their identities. Such approaches point the way to overcoming the bifurcation between war front-​and home front-​centered studies identified previously. Although underappreciated in IR, popular culture is one of the primary means by which publics make sense of local and world politics (Neumann and Nexon 2006; Weldes 2003). War stories and battle histories, along with the material culture of militaria, infuse popular culture (Paris 2000). These connections between war and identity, mediated by history telling, mark out a field of study for contemporary and historical research in world politics.

Conclusion: White Supremacy at War in World Politics What might such studies tell us about war in world politics? I summarize the themes of this essay with a sketch of battle as a transboundary encounter shaping the ways people imagine relations with others over time and space. I focus here on how war histories help sustain or challenge racial identities, particularly those of the West and its others. History writing is not the only medium through which war exercises generative effects on identity and politics, but it is an important one. Why? The experience of war, as many have commented, has a strong tendency to shatter expectations and undermine prevailing ideas (Fussell 1975). It is a feature of war that things do not go as planned. Polities that suffer defeats at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior risk cultural blowback, as in France and the US after their wars in Vietnam. In various genres of war writing authors seek to re-​order what has been disordered (Hynes 1998). They re-​establish meaning and significance, drawing upon war’s energies to underline some truths and undermine others. A history, as an authoritative account of what happened, has considerable utility for these purposes. Of course what counts as authoritative and for whom, and how this changes over time, needs itself to be accounted for, as the discussion of historiography outlined. For example, the US defeat in Vietnam has given rise to waves of revisionist historiography debating the reasons and even reality of defeat (Moyar 2006). War histories shape identities in part through what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is granted significance. The ways in which these processes work may not be obvious; they may have subterranean dimensions that require the archival recovery of battlefield and campaign events to understand. Such events are the purview of much amateur and veterans’ history writing. Attending to the questions they ask and how they answer them offers

302   Tarak Barkawi insights not only into war, but into how histories of it are conceived and written. Surviving soldiers and commanders come home with certain tales to tell and grievances to nurse, having absorbed some combination of shocks, triumphs, and losses. Later, some of them will write histories about these matters, often duelling and conflicting ones. A battle or war can function narratively as a trial by force which establishes or contests political truths and identities, including racial ones. For Yuval Noah Harari, battle histories provide ‘representative tests for the strength of competing cultures or polities’, supplying supposedly ‘decisive proofs’ of superiority and inferiority (2007, 259, 262). Much popular representation concerning military conflicts between the West and the non-​European world focus on the military qualities of Western soldiers and their way of war over Asian and African opponents. This military orientalism typically divides the world by race and extols the virtues of white soldiers. Both battle histories and Hollywood war films often reproduce narratives of how a few Western soldiers successfully fight much larger numbers of brown or Black soldiers. One consequence of such military orientalism in history writing and other genres is a tendency towards underestimation of non-​ European opponents by Western soldiers, statespersons and publics. Here, we can begin to see how the historiographical and popular cultural construction of past wars might set the stage for future ones, and shape their conduct and course. Invading Iraq in 2003 with small but highly capable forces might have seemed rational to officials, and acceptable to publics, because of a military-​orientalist sensibility, one historically reproduced through war stories and battle narratives across a range of media and genres. This is the kind of research question that arises from a combined focus on war and society. In popular Western military histories of wars in the non-​European world, certain iconic battles and engagements garner a great deal of attention, sometimes out of proportion to their strictly military importance. What are the wider effects of such a focus? What kind of identity politics might they reveal? Rorke’s Drift in 1879 is one such example, oft-​ memorialized in history and popular culture. A company of British infantry successfully held off a much larger force of Zulus. For Harari, such focus on a ‘tiny skirmish’ is a perfect example of the use of battle history to sustain a sense of civilizational (and racial, I would add) superiority (2007, 260). But Rorke’s Drift does more than this. The fight there came in the wake of a major Zulu victory inflicted on a poorly led and divided British force that had just invaded Zululand. While the victory at Isandlwana is memorialized by Zulus and other Africans, it has much less purchase in Anglophone memory (Beckett 2019). Retelling histories and stories of Rorke’s Drift recoups the challenge to white supremacy that Zulu arms inflicted on the actual field of battle. Here, we can see the utility of knowing campaign and battle history for critically assessing the popular cultural artefacts generated by war. In the actual war, the British invaded; they were the aggressors. But in the specific tactical circumstances of Rorke’s Drift, it was the Zulus who attacked. In filmic and other representations, Zulus are seen assaulting the tiny cantonment in great masses, held off by the heroic efforts of a small band of white men. Rorke’s Drift exhibits magical properties in historical memory, turning invasion and attack into defence. There are other examples of the ability of battle stories to reverse signs like this. That the US invaded North Korea during the Korean War is a fact which hardly registers in popular memory of that war in America, a forgetting sustained by accounts of combat actions involving communist Chinese and North Korean human wave attacks. In popular

War and History in World Politics    303 American accounts of the fighting in Vietnam, it is usually the Vietnamese communists who are attacking or ambushing. Accounts of Western soldiers fighting in the Global War on Terror work similarly. Battle histories help sustain racial identities that thrive on a sense of beleaguerment and fears of being outnumbered (Belew 2018). They do so as much through what tales are told and retold, what events studied and studied again, as through their silences. War histories shape culture and identity in world politics in cortical ways.

Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors, Sarah Bertrand, Shane Brighton, George Lawson, Jennifer Luff, Hew Strachan, Ines Valdez, and Rachel Zhou for comments and assistance.

Note 1. An important exception to this generalization is disciplinary history. See Vitalis (2015) and Guilhot (2017). Histories of international thought also make extensive use of primary sources.

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chapter 21

Nationa l i sm James Mayall International Relations (IR) cannot be studied sensibly without an understanding of how history has shaped the evolution of the international system. The same goes for the study of nationalism. Both are largely defined by their origins and so far as practitioners are concerned—​that is diplomats and politicians—​by their future destiny. It follows that their mutual impact can also only be understood historically. This is a complex task for reasons that this chapter will attempt to unravel. Most of them arise from the tension between the exclusive demands of popular sovereignty, itself a product of the rise of nationalism, and the economic, technological, and sometimes ideological necessity for international cooperation. For the moment it is sufficient to note one aspect of this complexity, which echoes the two organizing themes of this volume—​modernity and granularity. The contemporary international system is a product of the long period of Western hegemony, which is now arguably fading. Its principle characteristics and institutions—​positive international law, diplomacy, the enormous expansion of international organization, were all responses to Western ambitions, needs, and interests. Those who established these institutions were doing what people always do when confronted with intractable problems: they were trying to resolve them, to find a way of moving forward, somehow or other to ‘keep the show on the road’. Very few can have had any idea that their efforts were helping to define an epoch, a new condition of humanity, which we have come to think of as modernity. Nonetheless, we can now see that is what they were doing. The modern international system was crafted by dynastic and often absolutist statesmen but during the long nineteenth century, nationalist ideas and values first infiltrated international thought concerning the society of states and after 1918 came to dominate it (Mayall 1990, 18–​25). Defining the nation is notoriously contentious; reaching a consensus on the political doctrine of nationalism—​roughly one culture one state—​less so. There is little argument that the nation is a political community, at least potentially. But is that community based merely on common citizenship, or must it also reflect a common ancestry, faith, language, or other cultural attribute? On this there is no agreement. The discussion falls into four sections. The first deals with the legacy of Western hegemony; the second with the way history is used by those who see nationalism as a modern phenomenon and by those who insist that the nation has primordial roots, while the third section examines the intertwining of the spread of nationalism with the development of

Nationalism   307 international society. The chapter concludes by shifting the focus onto the nature and content of nationalist thought.

The Legacy of Western Hegemony The fact that the architecture of modern international society was an overwhelmingly Western invention had two paradoxical consequences. The first was that the international order had to be state-​centered. Although empire arguably remained the dominant political form until the middle of the twentieth century, Western Europe was home to a number of highly competitive, ambitious, and broadly equal states. They were not yet nationalist states—​although many nationalists believe that their nations were already fully formed, and, like the sleeping beauty, merely awaited the prince of historical destiny to bring them back to life. Most of these rival polities were also legatees of the Roman Empire, and were hence marked as much by a common civilizational inheritance as by the fierce determination to maintain their separate identities and sovereignty. In the world which witnessed the rise of nationalism, modernity and granularity were thus joined at the hip from the start. The second paradoxical outcome of the Western origins of contemporary international society and political nationalism was the way in which anti-​colonial nationalism was framed. In the West, nationalism started as an emancipatory movement against the Ancien Régime of monarchical absolutism, hereditary aristocratic privilege, and ecclesiastical wealth. La grande nation was the triumphant third estate, whose power rested on the allegedly universal values, discovered in the eighteenth century by the French philosophes (Gasset 1932, 224–​225). Since they were universal it followed that all nations should similarly belong to their people. The fact that this seductive argument was carried across Europe by Napoleon’s armies complicated the way in which the new ideology spread first within Europe itself and then globally. Within Europe, the values of the French Revolution were seized upon with enthusiasm by the intelligentsia, which found itself stifled and frequently oppressed by the dynastic regimes which were determined to resist the infection of liberal ideas. But when they were accompanied by an army of occupation whose commander seemed determined to replace the crowned heads of Europe with his own relatives, it predictably led to a popular reaction. How was an acceptance of the European Enlightenment to be reconciled with a rejection of Napoleonic hegemony? The answer to this question was not obvious because Enlightenment values claimed to be universal and hence intrinsically international, whereas national emancipation was explicitly granular: it had to appeal to the legitimacy of distinctive cultural characteristics and experiences as the basis of the new political order. German romanticism, with its emphasis on the value of the volk had already suggested one kind of answer. In the view of Johann Herder, liberalism and cultural autonomy and authenticity were synonymous. It was as though the diverse nations of the world naturally coexisted in harmony, like flowers in an herbaceous border. Later in Italy, Mazzini appeared to believe that once all Italian speaking peoples were united, they would naturally forge a liberal and progressive state (Kelly 2015). Unfortunately, historical experience failed to live up to these benign visions and in the twentieth century, Germany and Italy led the way in the

308   James Mayall reactionary and chauvinistic take-​over of the national idea. Nonetheless, the defeat of exclusive nationalism in the Second World War seemed to have established, at least at the time, that a world of nation-​states only made sense within an international society. Much the same conclusion emerges when the spread of nationalism is viewed from a global perspective. In the twentieth century, nationalism divided into two streams. The dominant stream was made up of the major European powers—​predominantly by Britain and France—​which happened to be liberal democracies. But while the roots of their liberalism were different—​in the British case commercial and in the French political—​their nationalism developed in an expansionist and imperial direction. Since both countries claimed that their right to rule beyond their own borders was based not just on power but on the superiority of their modern scientific civilization, which they propagated through their colonial education systems, it is hardly surprising that Western values were eventually tuned against them by those they ruled. In the majority of cases this second and subordinate stream of nationalist development was framed in the language of modernity. Nationalism was about transforming traditional agricultural and hierarchical societies into modern states with diversified economies, allegedly based on the universal values that had formed part of the ideological baggage of the European imperial powers, and in terms of which colonial elites had been educated. The need to express the uniquely distinctive history and nature of national cultures was of course acknowledged, either by inventing a nationalist past that was lacking, as in Estonia, or by appropriating for symbolic purposes the past of other groups whose history, identity and even geographical location had little to do with the modern ‘nation-​state’. Thus, Kwame Nkrumah, who led The Gold Coast to independence in 1957 appropriated the name of an African empire, Ghana, which no longer existed and in any case lay several hundred miles to the north of the territory over whose fortunes he presided. But overwhelmingly, in the era of decolonization, the point of anti-​colonial nationalism was not to invoke a long-​dead golden age but to transform and modernize society. Anti-​colonial nationalism was about a future Utopia not an ancient Arcadia. There were three additional reasons that channelled anti-​ colonial nationalism along a modernizing course. The first was that the two non-​Western countries that could act as models for states seeking to break with their colonial past, Japan and Turkey, had viewed nationalism from this perspective. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese had deliberately deconstructed their feudal society and built in its place not only a highly effective centralized industrial state, but one that was capable of first defeating Russia, one of the great powers of the day, but then going on to develop an empire of its own. The Japanese adopted nationalist ideology to preserve their independence; they interpreted it as requiring them not only to emulate the Western great powers but if necessary to beat them at their own game (Gluck 1985). Fifty years later—​after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk created modern Turkey as a Westernized secular state, complete with a Romanized alphabet and the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. By this time formal empire was in retreat, but the achievements of Western societies, based on science and liberal education, were not (Kinross 2001). Second, unlike Japan and Turkey, which might plausibly be described as proto-​nations before the nationalist era, many former colonies lacked a ‘useable’ past. The mass parties that were formed to campaign for independence from European rule, were generally loose alliances between groups, whose relations with one another in other respects were often

Nationalism   309 fragile and sometimes openly hostile. There had been no time to develop the amnesia that Renan famously viewed as an essential attribute of the nation (Renan 1882).1 To take one granular example, Tanganyika, which became independent in 1962, united with Zanzibar in 1965. This provided the country’s President, Julius Nyerere, with an opportunity to remake an existing institution—​the National Museum—​to buttress a previously non-​existent sense of forward-​looking national identity.2 The original collection, assembled by colonial officials, consisted of artefacts illustrating the material culture and way of life, of the country’s peoples. It was about diversity and tradition not unity and progress. Nyerere did not attempt to remove the original collection, but he allowed it to fester. The focus of the museum was on two new rooms. The Atrium was devoted to a series of plaster casts of Leakey’s discoveries supporting the theory of the origin of mankind in the Rift Valley. As an internationalist symbol of an identity that established local citizens as flag-​bearers for humanity rather than their xenophobia, it could hardly be bettered. Upstairs there was a room devoted to an invented fusion of African cultures that were not specified. Photographs of the ceremony showed Nyerere mixing Tanganyikan and Zanzibari soil in a single calabash, of a kind widely used across the continent. Finally, the global diffusion of nationalism beyond Europe coincided with the institutionalization of international society and the growing influence of the United States on the world order. In the two-​and-​a-​half centuries between the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and the Versailles Peace conference in 1919 a growing number of philosophers and political and legal theorists such as Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, and Kant reflected on how to improve international order, but usually only at the end of their careers and in the margins of their major work (Donelan 1978, 75–​91). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the increasing scope of commercial and scientific interactions across international borders provided the European powers with an incentive to regulate these activities and to establish multilateral organizations to preside over the emerging regimes in areas such as postal traffic, river and canal transport, telecommunications, and so on. The liberal enthusiasts who saw in such functional cooperation evidence that might finally resolve the age-​old problem of war, seriously underestimated the impact of nationalism on state sovereignty. One leading advocate of functionalism, Rumanian scholar David Mitrany, noticed that in the Balkan wars more people died of typhoid than on the battlefield and concluded that sooner or later such insane irrationality would break down in the face of scientific progress (Mitrany 1943). It did not happen. Nonetheless the relentless pressure for institutionalization continued throughout the twentieth century, and under the initial patronage of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, the first world-​wide political organization, the League of Nations, was established in Geneva. The United States never joined the League, which by the time the Second World War broke out in 1939, was largely viewed in the West as a dysfunctional organization, the ill-​designed brainchild of idealist internationalists and impractical utopians (Carr 1946). The organization, in any case, remained mired in European power politics and Western racial and political assumptions: Japan failed to secure a racial equality clause in the covenant (Macmillan 2003; Shimazu 1998) and it quickly became clear that even Wilson himself was not thinking beyond Europe and the break-​up of the Western dynastic empires when he advocated a new world order based on the principle of national self-​determination. In the first two decades of the twenty-​first century it became fashionable to see global multilateral organizations, of

310   James Mayall which the League was the precursor, as instruments of continuing Western hegemony, a way of extending, under American leadership, the epoch of capitalist imperialism. There is no doubt that there were many in the West who saw the multilateral framework of world order in ways that can be reconciled with this analysis. Realists, such as the French sociologist Raymond Aron, regarded the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank together with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (the rump survivor of the Havana Conference), as the infrastructure of a new global imperial order that would take over from the defeated dynastic empires of old Europe and the anachronistic liberal empires that were in headlong retreat (Aron 1973). Opposing them were the liberal internationalists, who had played a major part in framing the new international order envisaged by the League, and who understood intuitively that a way had to be found of reconciling a world of nation-​states and nationalism with cooperative values of mutual respect, tolerance, a commitment to trade and development, human rights, and constitutional government (Mazower 2009). Theirs was a vision of an ‘empire of the mind’, a phrase that seemed to echo Immanuel Kant’s 1795 proposal for perpetual peace, but which was coined, rather implausibly, by Winston Churchill (1943) when he accepted an honorary from Harvard in 1943. Those who regard the post-​1945 order as little more than ‘the continuation of imperialism by other means’ fail to acknowledge the extent to which nationalists who campaigned for the disintegration of the European empires bought into it. Maybe their enthusiasm reflected the hegemony of Western ideas and values in the way suggested by Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1999). For example, no Third World leader was prepared to follow the advice of the Latin American dependencia economists, who argued that the only way to achieve true independence, which would combine economic autonomy with the purely theoretical sovereignty they had achieved with decolonization, was to decouple from the capitalist world economy. Instead, they borrowed the political symbolism of dependency theory, while rejecting its economic analysis, and formed a new international organization, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whose objective was ‘to level the playing field’ of the liberal economy. The Group of 77—​the Third World caucus within the UNCTAD—​quickly expanded to include well over 100 states as the original ‘new nations’ both accepted the United Nations (UN) as the guarantor of their independence and used it as a platform from which to press their collective and separate interests. The Group of 77 became a widely accepted short-​hand for describing the collective anti-​ colonial nationalism of the previously colonized world. There was never much attention devoted to the importance of cultural diversity and the particular historical experiences of individual countries beyond a strong emphasis on the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity. The need to take account of ‘national circumstances’, the phrase used in the Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration (Srinivasan 2010) is the closest to an endorsement of granularity as is possible to find in any major international document. The idiom of Third World nationalism was overwhelmingly technological and developmental. From the start, it was both a modernist and an internationalist project. Much more could be written about the complex and intertwined history of the rise and spread of nationalism and the two-​way impact of international society on nationalism and its impact in turn on international relations. Even from such a brief overview, it is possible to draw one relatively uncontentious conclusion. On the one hand, history is a necessary—​ indeed an indispensable—​part of any analysis because national stories nearly always look

Nationalism   311 backwards and very often project from the past into the future, on the basis of memory, myth, and sometimes invention. On the other, it is insufficient because like all stories it has to have a beginning and an end. We do not yet know the end, despite speculation that the age of nationalism is over (Hobsbawm 1990, 182–​183). But wherever we begin the story there is an implicit assumption that there was a time before nationalism. If this assumption is correct two questions are unavoidable: why and when did nationalism arise and why, when, and how did it spread?

Explaining the Evolution of Nationalism and International Society: Modernists and Primordialists The question of the origins of nationalism as a general phenomenon—​as distinct from the national question in particular countries—​was hardly studied at all before the mid-​ twentieth century. The latter topic was dominated by historians, who were mostly unwitting primordialists, or preoccupied with single issues such as the responsibility of nationalist movements for the first world—​war (Hinsley 1973), or the underground opposition to communism in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, or the nature of the alliances that formed the Indian or South African National Congresses. They were seldom concerned with wider problems of explanation or causation. The study of nationalism itself was effectively abandoned after the Second World War as a serious field of study, as a result of its association with fascism and Nazism, so that as late as 1979 John Dunn could describe it as ‘the shame of the twentieth century’ (Dunn 1979, 55). There was little attention paid to the subject at the height of the Cold War either, and even afterwards in the United States most particularly, nationalism and democracy were seen as alternative systems of thought and political organization, rather than as mutually, if inconveniently, dependent (Nodia 1992, 3–​22). The study of IR fared better if only because the rise of the United States to world dominance and its strategic stalemate with the Soviet Union, created a congenial environment for realist thought even as it consigned the rival tradition of liberal international thought to a similar neglect to that meted out to nationalism. It was largely the result of a chance encounter at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) that the question of the rise and spread of nationalism forced its way back into academic contention and then became the subject of a vigorous and multidisciplinary debate. Elie Kedourie was a historian of ideas and expert on the Middle East, who had been brought to the LSE by the political theorist, Michael Oakeshott, whose conservative political philosophy he shared. Ernest Gellner was a Czech émigré who migrated to the LSE from Oxford and from philosophy to sociology and anthropology, and whose intellectual orientation was that of a tough-​minded liberal. Before the two men faced off against one another, most historians who addressed the question of nationalism believed that there had always been nations but that many of them had disappeared over time, swallowed up by, or assimilated into, stronger neighbouring polities and empires. An excellent introduction to this enormously wide and varied literature can be found in the bibliography to Hugh

312   James Mayall Seton-​Watson’s magisterial Nations and States, an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics Of Nationalism (1977, 507–​544). It was Elie Kedourie who first challenged this conventional wisdom (Kedourie 1960, 9). His book opens with a celebrated and much-​quoted salvo. Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to provide a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the legitimate type of government is national self-​government. (p. 9)

Ernest Gellner had no difficulty in accepting the modernity of the nation—​indeed he shared Kedourie’s view on this if nothing else—​but he found it impossible to believe that the claims contained in the doctrine could have had such a massive impact on the modern world if they did not reflect some fundamental shift in the evolution and organization of human society. His position was set out first in Thought and Change (1964) and refined in two further volumes, Nations and Nationalism (1983) and the posthumously published. Nationalism (1997). Gellner’s essential thesis was that the form of life dictated by the circumstances of modernity had put a premium on political and cultural boundaries running congruently together for the first time in history. It was not that this had never happened in the past, but that where such ‘nation-​states’ had existed it was largely a contingent matter, which may have sometimes given rulers an advantage in the world of realpolitik, but was in no way a trump card. Traditional societies were mostly politically and socially hierarchical and economically agricultural. The political landscape combined city states like Venice and multicultural, multifaith dynastic states. Where culturally homogenous states existed, the majority of their inhabitants would not have had any political rights and would not have thought of themselves in terms of their national identity. Nationalism, Gellner argued, arose because even a nascent modern economy required a minimally literate and numerate work-​force, and, therefore, a common education system. In traditional societies not only were most people objects rather than subjects of politics, but from the point of view of the rulers there might even be advantages in having a mixed population since peasant revolts—​a recurrent event in most parts of the world—​could be fairly easily contained and the status quo ante restored. In the nationalist era, when peasants left the countryside for the city and more and more people shifted from agricultural pursuits to factory work, this was no longer so. Gellner’s modernist account of the origins of nations and nationalism was certainly grounded in history but his was the grandest and least granular of narratives. He was a believer in ‘the great ditch’ theory of history, according to which there are only a few key events marking human evolution (Gellner 1988). Another modernist thinker, Benedict Anderson, shared many of Gellner’s assumptions, but placed the origins of nationalism in a more historically specific setting, which arguably made the argument more appealing to those who favour a more contextual approach to social science. Whereas Gellner believed that where nations did not exist in the modern world, they could be invented, Anderson insisted that all nations were imagined (Anderson 1983).

Nationalism   313 He traced the possibility of nationalism to the development of print capitalism, which had generated a need for vernacular publication in order to enlarge the market of readers. Anderson’s account contained three claims, which threw light on the rapid dissemination of the idea of the nation. The first was that nationalism only becomes imaginable when a population was united in ‘a community of fate’ so that people who did not know one another were able to share a common view of themselves as fellow nationals through newspapers, popular novels and the electronic media. His second contribution was to show how this logic applied not merely in Europe, where the doctrine had originated, but anywhere. He was an expert on South East Asia, whose interest in nationalism had been fostered by his desire to find an explanation for why two communist societies—​China and Vietnam—​could so quickly come to blows after the Vietnam War. Finally, he interrogated the problem of nationalism in immigrant societies through a comparison of the United States and Latin America, why had Bolivar failed to unite the southern part of the Americas as the federalist founders had been able to do in the north? His answer to this question linked the idea of the nation as an imagined community with Spanish imperial policy. Nationalists invoke the name of ‘the people’ and proclaim their interests, but nationalist ideology is created by the elite, not the mass. In Latin America, Anderson suggested, it was the creole bureaucracy and intelligentsia who did the imagining. Within the Spanish Empire only native-​born Spaniards could travel and work anywhere in the Empire. For creoles, Spaniards born in colonial America, their ‘career pilgrimages’ were limited to the territory of their birth. The result was to reinforce sentiments of local loyalty and interest and weaken the appeal of any wider, continental solidarity.

Nationalism and International Society The contrast between the relative success of the North Americans in forging a civic nation and the failure of the South Americans to follow suit, can usefully be employed to explore the way in which the evolution of international society mirrored the schizophrenic origins and development of nationalism itself, and was intertwined with it. Although from the French revolution onwards nationalism was always framed as an emancipatory doctrine—​and hence as a central part of the modernist project—​there has always been a deep division over the nature and characteristics of the nation. The shorthand for describing this division is between those who hold to a civic definition of the nation as a political community of citizens and those who maintain that the definition should be based on ethnic identity, or even a common racial ancestry. Strenuous attempts have been made, most notably by Anthony Smith, to find a middle way between these rival definitions. Smith conceded that nationalism was a modernist ideology but argued that nations required an ethnic pre-​history much as bricks could not be made without straw (Smith 1986). The analogy was more apt than he probably imagined. These days’ bricks can be made without straw and while Gellner accepted that an ethnic past could be a resource for nationalists, it was not a pre-​requisite for the nation to come into existence. The debate is not capable of resolution. What can be said is that both definitions of the nation have caused serious problems for the international order. International society, like the UN, is made up of nation-​states. Nonetheless insistence on the ethnic definition,

314   James Mayall which ties citizenship to an exclusive group into which one has to be born, has led to numerous minority, secessionist and irredentist conflicts. On the other side, attempts to impose the civic definition by force in the name of liberal internationalism have often come unstuck in the face of a recalcitrant human nature, and may sometimes have done more harm than good. One of the most vivid examples from recent history was the extraordinary lengths to which the American government went in negotiating the Dayton, Ohio, Accords in 1995, to maintain the fiction of a unitary Bosnian state while partitioning it along ethnic lines (Holbrooke 1998). How should we explain this ambiguous legacy of modernist nationalism to international relations? So long as sovereignty could be attached to a monarch or even to the state itself rather than its people the character of the nation and the basis of national citizenship did not seriously compromise such inter-​state cooperation as was necessary in the system of alliances and counter-​alliances that dominated the European political landscape after the defeat of Napoleon. International society continued to be a mixed regime in which absolutist dynastic states co-​existed with partial democracies, or at least, constitutional monarchies, as well as empires. The so called ‘liberal’ empires incorporated most of the world into a single system during the nineteenth century. But since they located sovereignty in the metropolitan state, they also disenfranchised huge swathes of humanity. The world beyond Europe was incorporated in the Western society of states, economically and through the establishment of far-​flung territories of Western settlement, but in a subordinate way that left colonial territories without rights under international law. With historical hindsight it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that having claimed the state for the people, the Western powers had set in motion a chain of events which would eventually bring all the complications and contradictions of nationalist ideology into day-​to-​day IR and shatter the comforting assumptions of a permanent Western hegemony. This conclusion was not obvious to liberal internationalists at the time. Many would have agreed with Mazzini in seeing no contradiction in his belief in universal human emancipation and his support for the self-​determination of all Italian speaking people within a single sovereign state. Those progressive thinkers and diplomats such as Benjamin Constant3 and Charles Maurice Talleyrand, who had escaped but nonetheless experienced the brutal excesses of popular sovereignty during the French terror looked to constitutional monarchy of the British kind as the way to build a rational liberal future. Talleyrand’s last diplomatic mission—​his appointment as French Ambassador to the Court of St. James—​was engineered to head off a French land grab for Belgium and to install a King of the Belgians rather than a King of Belgium (Kelly 2015). The attempt to build an international order based on constitutional monarchy was a holding operation designed to slow down the advance of popular sovereignty while recognizing the demands for national self-​determination. As we saw in the previous section, the final contribution of nationalism to the building of modern international society had to wait for the destruction of the First World War and the arrival of President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference in January 1919. Wilson’s fourteen point program combined three powerful liberal ideas: that the state belonged to the people and that the international order should therefore be organized as a league of democracies; that these democracies should be based on the principle of national self-​determination to ensure that their national aspirations would be satisfied; and that world peace should be guaranteed by a system of collective security (Mayall 1990).

Nationalism   315 This famous formula did not survive its encounter with reality. Most of the democracies that succeeded the disintegration of the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov, and Ottoman empires proved to have shallow roots and in the period between the two world wars gave way to fascist, national socialist, or authoritarian nationalist regimes. The idea that the world was divided into discrete unambiguous national territories was quickly shown to be false: European history had peopled the continent with a mosaic of different communities, while outside the north Atlantic seaboard, virtually none of the successor states had developed a civic identity that successfully bonded different religious or ethnic communities. Which then were the national communities that could legitimately claim a right to self-​determination? The League of Nations eventually came up with a pragmatic solution under which the map of Europe was redrawn essentially along majoritarian ethnic lines with a system of guarantees for the minorities that were left stranded without a state of their own or the right to join their state-​endowed compatriots elsewhere (Cobban 1945). This system was always deeply unpopular with the successor governments, as well as with the minorities themselves, particularly as neither the British nor the French were prepared to admit that their states contained any minorities at all. Perhaps, not surprisingly its alleged unfairness was subsequently used by the Nazis to justify their liberation of German-​speaking minorities in the east. The failure of democracy to establish itself as the dominant political form and of the powers to agree on an uncontentious definition of the principle of national self-​ determination were crippling blows to the new order. The League was in any case stillborn since the US Congress refused to let America join, and after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union also boycotted it. Its domination by the old-​world Great Powers, none of whose governments really believed wholeheartedly in the liberal principles of its covenant, also ensured that the Wilsonian principle of collective security, was never seriously put to the test. Both the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia were loudly denounced in the councils of the League but led to no decisive collective action. Even so, Wilson’s initiative at Versailles had a profound influence on the development of both nationalism and international society from the end of the First World War to the end of the Cold War in 1989. This impact was largely an unintended consequence of Wilson’s vision. He could not prevent the magnetic appeal of the doctrine of self-​determination spreading like wild-​fire. He also overlooked the extent to which bureaucratic rationality had unavoidable consequences that set a time limit on the legitimacy of imperialism as a political form. The establishment of the League of Nations’ Mandate system ensured that, when all the caveats had been entered, the old pluralist international order had been buried beyond hope of resurrection and that the future would belong to the nation-​state, however ambiguous and contested the meaning of that entity might be. The society of ‘nation-​states’ (i.e. existing states plus former European colonies), that eventually took shape was not without its anomalies, as the following examples illustrate. The Kurdish people, the largest stateless group, which had been promised self-​ determination in 1918 remained divided between Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Armenia, after the British and French reneged on the commitment contained in the Sykes-​Picot Agreement. Bulgaria, which received extensive swathes of territory when it was partially liberated from the Ottomans by the Russians in 1878 had lost most of these territorial gains at the insistence of the other great powers by the time it declared full independence in 1908. If the failure of the League’s system of minority guarantees in eastern and southern Europe was

316   James Mayall not as disruptive as might have been expected, given the fierce attachment of the region’s peoples to their cultural and ethnic identities, this was largely the result of Soviet policies during the Cold War and Tito’s success in containing ethnic rivalries in Yugoslavia after 1948, rather than the result of a consensual agreement in favour of civic nationalism. The wars of the Yugoslav succession after the Cold War demonstrated the continuing destructive power of ethnic nationalism in the one country that had successfully resisted subordination to Moscow. Despite such anomalies, the general understanding that gradually emerged after the San Francisco Conference in 1945 was that national self-​determination meant European decolonization, a single act of state-​creation limited in time and space. This new attempt at political cartography drew conflict lines across the world. To take only some of the more prominent examples, at different times conflicts over the meaning of the nation and national rights have raged, and/​or continue to rage, in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine, in South Asia between Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka and between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, in East Asia between the Chinese government and Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and until the 1990s in Southern Africa between white minority regimes and African nationalist movements that were themselves divided along ethnic and other lines. At the same time no serious alternative to the nation-​state has been offered as an organizing principle for the society of states.

Success and Failure in Nationalist Thought One question remains for both History and IR. How is a world ostensibly made safe for nationalism and national self-​determination to differ from the Ancien Régime? The states might now belong to the people, but what were they to do? Nationalist ideology could not tell them. If nationalism was a modernist project it could not fall back on custom and tradition—​it would have to merge with a more activist doctrine. In a way the question answered itself since the nationalism of the leading states was an off shoot of the liberal enlightenment. This tradition, whether in its British economic or French political manifestation was focused on the rights and identity of the individual. The eighteenth-​century world of balance of power realpolitik had provided a nearly perfect fit for what Adam Smith called Mercantilism (Polanyi 1944, numerous editions). Both systems of thought rested on zero-​sum assumptions. What one side won the other lost, an allegedly iron law illustrated by Colbert’s celebrated report to Louis XIV that France had enjoyed a particularly satisfactory year when it succeeded in enriching itself and impoverishing its neighbors. Throughout the nationalist era echoes of this position could be found in the policies of authoritarian and right-​wing nationalist governments. The legacies of mercantilism were prominent in fascist and National Socialist Europe in the interwar period, but they have reappeared from time to time ever since in all parts of the world. For example, the ‘Sinhala alone’ demands of Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism effectively dominated the country’s politics from the mid-​1950s and drove it into a prolonged and disastrous civil war from which it has still not recovered. This example provides a useful insight into the psychology of many nationalist movements. A sense of failure or victim hood is often a more potent force behind their

Nationalism   317 world view than the utopian future which their leaders promise their followers. Serbian nationalists point to their defeat by the Ottomans in modern Kosovo in 1389 as the origin of their national struggle. The siege of Masada reminds Israelis of what they once lost and could lose again. Russian imperialism has been described as a form of defensive nationalism, a hedge against possible invasion from East or West. An analogous logic can be found in Asia. In Sri Lanka, the historian Kingsley de Silva describes the Sinhala as a ‘majority with a minority complex’ and their main rivals, the now defeated Tamils, as ‘a minority with a majority complex’ (Sally 2019). The first of these formulations could apply equally to the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the nationalist party that has ruled India since 2014, and which sees Hinduism under constant threat from the Moslem and other minorities as well as the forces of secularism, despite the fact that Hindus constitute over 85% of the population. Indeed arguably India has always combined the tension between the civic and ethno-​cultural, modernist, and primordialist ideas of the nation more sharply than any other country. After independence in 1947, it was mostly ruled by the Indian National Congress, the party that led the country to independence and which was committed from the start to transforming the country into a modern and secular industrial society. Yet Indian nationalism was and remains riddled with paradoxes. Rabindranath Tagore, one of the leading opponents of British imperialism, who wrote the Indian National anthem, was strongly in favour of Indian civilization but opposed to nationalism, which he thought would lead India to ape the West, and which in any case he believed to be an impossibility in a caste dominated society (Tagore 1917, 1–​47, 95–​130).4 Equally paradoxically, Mahatma Gandhi, who is regarded as the father of the nation, even by the BJP, not only rejected the values of modernity in favour of an Arcadian vision of village India, but also insisted on the multicultural nature of the Indian nation, a commitment that led directly to his assassination by a Hindu fanatic on the grounds that by reluctantly giving in to the demands for partition and the creation of Pakistan, he had sold out to the Muslims, the erstwhile rulers. Despite these granular variations in the nationalist story—​and it would not be difficult to find many other examples—​a collective identity grounded on failure alone, or for that matter on success, is not enough. Once in power, whether they aspire to an inclusive pluralist or an exclusive and ethnic definition of the nation, rulers need policies that promise a better life as a reward for loyalty. Fortunately, those who developed programs for the transformation of society—​the social and liberal democrats who took over from classical liberals as mass society itself developed, on the one side, and the Marxists on the other, discovered that their appeal was to the intelligentsia, not to the population at large. Both nationalists and the ideologically faithful needed one another. The marriage of convenience between nationalism and the two great ideologies that battled for the soul of modern man throughout the twentieth century was foreshadowed, on the liberal side, in Mill’s pragmatic willingness to save democracy by accepting partition in deeply divided societies (Mill 1862, ­chapter 16) and on the other in the contrast between the Bolshevik call to the workers of the world to unite, lifted from The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1969), and Mao Tso Tung’s speech in 1949 after his defeat of the Nationalists, that the Chinese people had stood up. There were thus two models of progressive policy to which nation-​states could aspire, a broadly liberal and a broadly socialist one. In each case, beneath the modernizing rhetoric societies on both sides could be either open and pluralist or closed and ethnic. Both marriages of convenience lasted more or less intact until the end of the Cold War. The

318   James Mayall collapse of one model of modernity in 1989 and the false triumphalism of the other, opened up endless possibilities for communal, religious, and ethnic conflict, and left the future of the nation-​state profoundly uncertain.

Notes 1. In his words, ‘forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation’. 2. This paragraph is based on the author’s personal observation during fieldwork in Tanzania in 1969. 3. The French constitution of 1830 was influenced by Constant’s advocacy of constitutional monarchy as a better guarantor of liberty than republicanism. 4. How could a people, he asked rhetorically, which could not eat together or mix their blood, succeed in bonding into a nation whose members were prepared to die for one another.

References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Aron, R. 1973. The Imperial Republic. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Carr, E. H. 1946. The Twenty Years Crisis. New York: Harper and Row. Churchill, W. S. 1943. ‘The Gift of a Common Tongue’. International Churchill Society. Speeches 1941–​1945. Cobban, A. 1945. National Self-​Determination. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the RIIA. Donelan, M. 1978. ‘The Political Theorists and International Theory’. In The Reason of States, ed. M. Donelan, 74–​92. London: Allen and Unwin. Dunn, J. 1979. Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Gasset, Ortega Y. 1932. The Revolt of the Masses. London: Allen and Unwin. Gellner, E. 1964. Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gellner, E. 1988. Plough, Sword and Book. London: Collins Harvill. Gellner, E. 1997. Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gluck, C. 1985. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gramsci, A. 1999. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. Hinsley, H. 1973. Nationalism and the International System, 11–​15. London, Hodder & Stoughton. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holbrooke, R. 1998. To End a War. New York: Random House. Kedourie, E. 1960. Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, P. 2015. ‘Liberalism and Nationalism’. In Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, ed. S. Wall, 329–​351. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, L. 2017. Talleyrand in London. London: I. B. Tauris. Kinross, P. 2001. Ataturk: The Rebirth of a Nation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Macmillan, M. 2003. 1919, Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House.

Nationalism   319 Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1969. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx/​Engels Selected Works 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mayall, J. 1990. Nationalism and International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazower, M. 2009. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Mill, J. S. 1862. Representative Government. Numerous editions. Mitrany, D. 1943. A Working Peace System. London: RIIA. Nodia, G. 1992. ‘Nationalism and Democracy’. Journal of Democracy 3(4): 3–​22. Polanyi, K. 1957. The Great Transformation.1944. Boston: Beacon Press (numerous editions). Renan, E. 1882. Qu’est-​ce qu’une nation. Paris: Calmann-​Levy. Sally, R. 2019. Return to Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Juggernaut Books. Seton-​Watson, H. 1977. Nations and States, an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. London: Methuen. Shimazu, N. 1998. Japan, Race and Equality. London: Routledge. Smith A. D. 1986. The Ethnic Origin of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Srinivasan, K. 2010. ‘Principles and Practice: Human Rights, the Harare Declaration and the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG)’. In The Contemporary Commonwealth: An Assessment 1966–​2009, ed. J. Mayall, 65–​82. London: Routledge. Tagore, R. 1917. Nationalism. London: Macmillan.

chapter 22

Interp ol i t y L aw Lauren Benton Scholars researching the legal history of empires and the history of international law have broken new ground in recent decades in analysing the role of law in the history of international relations. Studies of empires in world history have documented the layered and uneven qualities of imperial sovereignty, and historians of international law have deconstructed European claims of universalism and placed them in historical perspective (Anghie 2005; Benton 2002, 2010; Burbank and Cooper 2011; Pitts 2018). The new research has prompted a return to the challenge posed several decades ago by Charles Alexandrowicz, who insisted on recognizing the legal qualities of non-​Western interpolitical relations before the rise of a European-​centred interstate order (Alexandrowicz 2017; Armitage and Pitts 2017). How can we write a history of global law that extends beyond the West and that also places pre-​ modern and modern legalities in the same analytic framework? This chapter draws on recent research on the legal history of empires and the history of international law to outline one answer. The perspective introduced here centres on the formative role of widely distributed conflicts and takes as its subject ‘global legal politics’, a phenomenon and field of research defined as encompassing both strategic action and expressions of political and legal thought (Benton 2019). Global legal politics framed ‘interpolity law’, a term more useful and accurate than ‘international law’ in referring to eras before the late nineteenth century since it recognizes the legal character of relations among a range of political communities, including empires, micro-​states, and corporate communities such as merchant diasporas, trading companies, and municipalities (e.g. Stern 2013). In the centuries before the rise of the interstate order, historical actors guiding relations across political communities routinely referenced a set of widely distributed categories of legal action and discourse. We can use these modalities to identify political interactions and clusters of conflicts—​struggles that the editors of this volume might describe as ‘granular’ components of social change—​that in turn shaped patterns of regional and global ordering. The early modern period teemed with pluri-​political formations reflecting this process. Recent research identifies interpolity zones, or regions marked by interpenetrating power and weak or uneven claims to territorial sovereignty (Benton and Clulow 2017a). Such zones often developed within one or more imperial spheres of influence, including some under the sway of non-​European empires, and these formations (sometimes referred to as ‘borderlands’ by historians) were both fluid and surprisingly stable over time. In the long

Interpolity Law   321 nineteenth century, the period from roughly 1780 to 1920, the formations changed in ways that produced conditions conducive to the rise of the interstate order. A handful of ascendant world powers—​with the British Empire as the most influential—​attempted to assert dominance over regional interpolity zones and to construct global prohibition and treaty regimes beginning in the early nineteenth century (Benton and Ford 2016). Polities within or on the edges of empires maneuvered to defend sovereign or quasi-​sovereign rights, as did confederations and other pluri-​political formations that emerged to counterbalance imperial power. Alongside change, global legal politics produced elements of continuity that deserve our attention. In multiple dimensions, interpolity legalities from before the nineteenth century persisted into the twentieth and twenty-​first century and have continued to affect the contours of the international order. Historical research on interpolity law offers more than a search for the origins of ‘modern’ international norms. By uncovering the dynamics of five broad categories of legal action and tracing their global distribution and effects on macro political ordering, the project uncovers shifting frameworks of global law. The key formative categories are protocol, possession, jurisdiction, protection, and legalities of violence. The term ‘protocol’ refers to practices used routinely to locate and show deference to legal authority (Benton and Clulow 2015; Subrahmanyam 2012). References to ‘possession’ were especially salient in European empires, where imperial agents drew on and adapted Roman legal concepts, including occupation and possession, in supporting claims to new territories (Benton and Straumann, 2010; Benton, 2011; Herzog 2015). This chapter will leave aside protocol and possession—​the first because it is very broad and the second because its Roman-​influenced modalities do not fully capture global patterns of territoriality—​and will highlight three elements of interpolity law for which we have abundant evidence across a wide range of polities and regions. Conflicts involving jurisdiction, protection, and legalities of violence played a major role in shaping regional and global political configurations and frameworks of law in the early modern world. Jurisdiction is defined here as the capacity to exercise legal authority over groups of persons, particular places, or specific classes of activities. References to ‘protection’, or analogous terms, typically signified the proffer of security by one polity to another in exchange for tax or tribute. The ‘regulation of violence’ encompasses practices and discourses of warfare and peacemaking, including interpolitical violence short of open warfare. This chapter discusses the way each of these legal modalities operated over vast areas and across historical periods, with special emphasis on their function in early modern European empires. I then turn briefly to their effects on regional and global legal formations, including some in the present. Finally, I consider briefly questions for future research suggested by this perspective.

Jurisdictional Politics Jurisdiction and its history have received extensive attention from early modern scholars. A substantial body of studies of ‘jurisdictional politics’ in empires has emerged in recent years across world regions (Benton 2002; Hussin 2016; Ford 2010). This research provides evidence for three generalizations about the way jurisdiction figures as a component of interpolity law.

322   Lauren Benton The first generalization is that the accelerating long-​distance trade and the global extension of empires tended to exacerbate existing jurisdictional tensions. As composite polities, empires were characterized by jurisdictional complexity. In European empires, historians have traced the signal importance of jurisdictional tensions of two types on the eve of European overseas imperial expansion: between ecclesiastic and secular jurisdictions and between local and imperial jurisdictions. European powers were ‘composite monarchies’ in which royal jurisdiction extended unevenly and in contested ways to subjects of its many territories (Elliot 1992). Ecclesiastics claimed jurisdiction over certain activities, spaces, and subjects, and Europeans both built on these arrangements by analogy and sought to streamline them in overseas imperial settings. For example, ecclesiastic and royal jurisdictional conflicts pervaded the early Spanish empire as the crown made inroads on ecclesiastic authority in the New World, and the British empire’s East India Company deployed analogies to ecclesiastic jurisdiction in designing a plural legal order that applied Hindu and Muslim law—​in truth British representations of Hindu and Muslim law—​to South Asian subjects who were not company agents. Where Europeans had no decisive power advantage, they relied on longstanding routines for dividing jurisdictional authority—​for example operating like other merchant diasporas in asserting limited authority over their own community members. Imperial agents routinely improvised, adjusting to other powers’ demands for justice by helping to devise legal procedures that showed imperfect deference to any one jurisdiction (Benton 2002). Jurisdictional jockeying extended across land and sea. On the sea, ships operated as both islands of law—​floating territories of the realm—​and as vectors of law, carrying sovereigns’ legal authority into the ocean world. Ship captains and military commanders had the authority to conduct inquiries in ships and forts under their command and to mete out certain kinds of punishment. Maritime pass systems thrust jurisdiction into ocean spaces, and privateers recognized the fluidity of jurisdiction at sea by claiming sponsorship of one or another legitimate sovereign depending on the circumstances, often utilizing dubious or even fraudulent documentary support. Even in highly militarized ocean spaces, the maritime legal order was a tangle of jurisdictional nets—​long and thin corridors conforming roughly to sea lanes (Benton 2010). Although Hugo Grotius famously argued in Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) in 1609 that the sea could not be occupied, he also recognized that the presence of ships could allow their sponsors to assert jurisdiction on the seas (Grotius 2009; Benton 2010). On land, typical jurisdictional arrangements in empires recognized the limited legal authority of subordinate political communities. Merchant communities continued to regulate their own affairs, showing deference to host societies for the trial and punishment in cases of serious crimes or threats to order. Such arrangements were on bright display in multi-​ ethnic port cities of the Indian Ocean world, where an array of foreign trading communities retained some juridical power over their own members, creating a jurisdictional patchwork. Even in places like colonial North America, where settlers in coastal colonies moved relatively quickly to dispossess or displace Native American communities, we find evidence of persistent legal pluralism (Benton and Ross 2013). Jurisdictional lines in all such situations were notoriously fluid. They were subject both to pressures brought to bear by distant sponsors and to the effects of legal strategies adopted by actors imbued with considerable sophistication about how to maneuver through multi-​jurisdictional orders. We have many well-​documented examples of these sorts of

Interpolity Law   323 granular conflicts of legal actors, for example by individuals engaged in forum shopping (the search for a favourable venue for a particular legal matter) or in what we might call forum sampling—​bringing a case simultaneously before multiple forums (e.g. Calafat 2019). In some settings, significant institutional effects flowed from such actions. Members of minority religious communities in the Ottoman empire, Native American litigants in the Spanish empire, and subjects in territories controlled by the East India Company (EIC)—​ these and other legal actors indirectly reinforced colonizers’ authority by taking cases to imperial courts (Barkey 2013; Owensby 2011; Benton 2002). A second well-​supported generalization about multi-​centric jurisdictional arrangements is that precisely because they were ubiquitous, it was relatively easy for merchants, imperial agents, soldiers, missionaries, and other sojourners crossing political boundaries to grasp the possibilities of strategic action in newly encountered legal systems. The familiarity of jurisdictional politics itself, in other words, acted to create repeating patterns of legal complexity across polities with substantively different legal systems. The phenomenon also opened possibilities for even the most vulnerable subjects to employ sophisticated legal strategies. The resulting jurisdictional politics exerted transformative pressures on institutions. This third generalization leads historians to search for and analyse clusters of jurisdictional conflicts and their effects in empires across multiple regions. Again, history serves up both variety and surprising synchronicity. In some settings and during some periods, legal conflicts bubbled up without significantly shifting the scaffolding of plural legal orders. Elsewhere the colonial state took shape partly in response to appeals to its enforcement power in legal cases presented by litigants moving strategically across jurisdictional lines. Shifting property regimes also reflected the workings of plural legal orders; markets in land, for example, developed within institutional environments in which layers of regulatory practices gradually thickened in part in response to jurisdictional tensions (Greer 2018). Yet there was nothing automatic or necessarily progressive about such transitions; borderlands histories emphasize the longevity of situations in which there was a marked lack of clarity about jurisdictional arrangements. At the same time, seismic shifts could take place in response to clusters of conflicts as well as in reaction to scandals drawing metropolitan attention to colonial crises of power. In North America and New South Wales, for example, criminal cases on settler-​Indigenous frontiers prompted consequential shifts in the scope and nature of jurisdictional claims and assertions of sovereignty by settler communities (Ford 2010). The importance of jurisdictional tensions to the rise of imperial authority is particularly clear in the legal history of slavery and abolition. In sharpening conflicts over abolition of the slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers sought to shrink the private jurisdictional powers of slaveowners and other colonial elites. As a result, it was often reformers who proposed and defended authoritarian or anti-​revolutionary trends in nineteenth century empires. Rather than implementing humanitarian visions for empire, reformers were acting on their assessment that the power of the imperial government to order inferior jurisdictions was necessary to the drive to regulate slavery. British abolitionists, for example, perceived that the only way to end the trade in slaves was to construct an enhanced imperial jurisdiction with regulatory power over planters, together with a colonial legal administrative order dependent on decisions and appointments made in London (Benton and Ford 2016). For their part, slaves and former slaves interpreted the

324   Lauren Benton imperial legal landscape and pressed for change through revolt and resistance as well as by presenting cases in available legal forums, such as slave protector courts (Rugemer 2018; Browne 2017; Welch 2018; Benton and Ford 2020). Much of this narrative does not fit well with celebratory stories about the circulation of Enlightenment ideas or the triumph of natural rights discourse in empires in the Age of Revolutions. Preoccupations with order tended, in fact, to trump concerns about rights. In the Russian empire, definitions of rights were inseparable from perceptions of imperial bureaucracy because rights were not thought to exist in abstract terms but only as capacities awarded by the imperial government (Burbank 2006). Other powerful empires, including the Ottoman, Chinese, French, British, and Spanish empires, subordinated rights discourse to the pursuit of comprehensive legal reforms in attempts to strengthen imperial authority by creating clearer and more consistent administrative structures. Even Haitian revolutionaries for a time sought ways merely to contain the jurisdiction of plantation owners (Ghachem 2012). In the early nineteenth century British Empire, the consolidation of imperial legal authority unfolded in halting response to a series of decentralized scandals over the arbitrary power of colonial elites. Ceylon’s British Governor, Thomas Maitland labelled the objective of imperial administrative reform as the construction of ‘middle power’; later, his critics put a less favourable gloss on the trend by calling Maitland an agent of ‘constitutional despotism’ (Benton and Ford 2016). Across the political spectrum, observers and participants identified imperial legal reform as integral to multi-​sided jurisdictional struggles among imperial officials, colonial elites, quasi-​sovereign political communities, and subordinate subjects. The last section of this chapter will consider some of the ways that jurisdictional politics worked together with the politics of protection and legalities of violence to produce interpolity formations. The ubiquitous presence of jurisdictional tensions; their special intensity in imperial settings; the role of jurisdictional politics in facilitating cross-​cultural, long-​distance movements and trade; and the institutional effects of such tensions—​these phenomena make jurisdiction a key dimension of interpolity law. Histories of legal pluralism and studies of imperial legal politics have established this much, while also posing new questions about the fit between their findings and new narratives of global ordering.

The Politics of Protection The deep influence of jurisdictional politics is matched in global history by the structuring effects of a pervasive politics of protection. References to protection (or similar terms) appear in the records of treaties and interpolity negotiations in every world region. Many such references involved pacts or mutual protection from shared enemies and reflected efforts to protect subjects travelling in or through foreign territories. As with multi-​centric jurisdictional orders, the first general observation about protection arrangements is their widespread occurrence across the early modern world (Benton, Clulow, and Attwood 2017; Benton and Clulow 2015). Protection arrangements had some common features. Pledges of protection were often secured by the payment of tribute, as for example in the Qing empire’s relations with peripheral polities. The proffer of protection by empires produced fluid networks that could readily expand and contract. Strong rulers enhanced their prestige and legitimacy by positioning

Interpolity Law   325 themselves as the protectors of a diverse and widening array of smaller polities, while weaker rulers sought benefactors and showed themselves ready to trade one protector for another to secure their rule. While the language of mutual security was paramount in protection arrangements, it was also common for mafia-​style protection arrangements to involve payments to prevent violence by would-​be protectors. Such ‘insurance’ arrangements implied a degree of political submission, but they could also preserve at least the appearance of autonomy by weaker parties paying protectors not to harm them. Most protection arrangements involved elements of both mutual security and insurance. The Portuguese sale of safe-​conduct passes (cartazes) to Asian shippers in the Indian Ocean is an example, it is sometimes represented as highly innovative, but the system depended on the familiarity of protection practices throughout the region. In Southeast Asia, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) claimed to be offering protection to local rulers against Iberian empires, and the Japanese shogunate extended its influence by issuing passes to ships and seeking to punish those who violated the ships’ safe conduct protection (Borschberg 2002; Clulow 2013). The logic of protection also provided the framework of so-​called subsidiary agreements that the EIC signed with South Asian polities in which the company promised to protect the princely states from enemies in exchange for payments to support EIC armies directly. Protection payments directly subsidized the expansion of the military apparatus of colonizing powers (Benton and Clulow 2017b). Because protection talk was everywhere, it formed a lingua franca of interpolitical relations across vast regions. A second generalization about protection is even more interesting and has to do with the term’s ambiguity. Protection was not just a language of interpolitical relations and security; it was also the quality that sovereigns owed their subjects in exchange for loyalty. Talk about protection thus always had an inside and outside quality (Brett 2017; Benton and Ford 2016). Its double meaning made it especially attractive as a political discourse in empires, where conquest frequently developed through the making of unstable alliances. In such settings, use of the term allowed both strong and weak parties to adopt studied ignorance about power imbalances. Protection talk accompanied the formation of interpolitical alliances in which everyone knew, but at the same time pretended not to know, that one party was militarily stronger than the other. The discourse helped make it possible for alliances to slide gradually into relations of dominance and subordination. It was not just conquerors who used protection language this way. Subordinate political communities also found the language of protection attractive, and for the same reasons. They could pact with conquering powers without formally submitting, then seek to use the framework of protection to preserve marks of sovereignty—​even while angling to make pacts with alternative protectors. For example, Tlaxcalans, Spaniards’ allies in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, subsequently presented themselves as loyal subjects of the Spanish crown and demanded the crown’s protection from the abuses of conquistador elites and their followers (Baber 2005). Subordinate communities used protection talk to maneuver strategically within imperial legal orders. The convenient ambiguity of protection talk also helps to explain a third generalization about protection: as with jurisdictional conflicts, protection arrangements took on greater salience in later phases of European imperial history and became an increasingly explicit part of international law. Empires had traditionally unified ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection in citing their responsibility to protect vulnerable imperial subjects, including

326   Lauren Benton slaves and convicts. In the long nineteenth century, this capacity became explicitly tied to annexationist projects, as occurred in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where British officials trumpeted the benefits of the protection of British law while pushing for an annexationist war against Kandy in the interior of the island, representing their actions as a response to pleas for protection of the Kandyan population from its ‘tyrannous’ king (Benton and Ford 2016). The dynamic whereby imperial officials used protection both to reference the extension of imperial jurisdiction and to justify new conquests helped to place protection at the heart of emerging international law. In 1815, the Treaty of Paris made Britain the ‘protecting sovereign’ of the Ionian Islands. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca awarded the Russian empire the power to reach within the Ottoman empire to protect Russian subjects. Later in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, protection talk became a formal element of the international order under the rubric of ‘protectorates’ (van Hulle 2017; Lewis 2013). In the twentieth century, the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine grounded new approaches to international intervention (Orford 2011). Yet there was no linear development from earlier to later uses of protection in interpolity relations. In fact, it is a mistake to seek to uncover the history of protection by starting with current doctrine and looking backward in time. That approach has linked protection arrangements to the rise of humanitarian intervention and the early origins of human rights (Simms and Trim 2011; Martinez 2012). As we have seen with the jurisdictional politics of slavery and abolition, such views distort the goals and methods of reformers, most of whom used protection talk in a different way: to preserve or expand collective political access to security and resources. The method also disguises the multiplicity of functions and meanings of protection in earlier periods and the nature of arrangements that frequently produced opposite results for protected peoples, limiting legal rights and exposure to systematic violence. The most important aspects of protection arrangements were their flexibility: their openness to varieties of strategic action or claim making by legal actors and their accommodation of supple representations of political and legal authority.

Regulating Violence The search to establish lucrative protection arrangements depended on the credible threat of violence. Highlighting protection helps to bring into focus legalities of violence as a third regulatory dimension of interpolitical relations. The regulation of violence encompassed much more than a referencing of the laws of war. A great deal of imperial violence involved small wars, from chronic raiding on land and sea to isolated acts of spectacular violence such as civilian massacres (Benton, forthcoming). As with jurisdiction and protection, findings about the legalities of small wars (broadly defined to include not just asymmetric conflicts but a wide range of so-​called quiet wars) support some broad and useful generalizations. The first is that, once again, we find parallel patterns in an array of polities and regions flowing from globally distributed regulatory practices and clusters of conflicts. Across the Eurasian world, one typical pattern of interpolity violence centred on staccato raiding and serial truces. Both sets of practices framed strikingly similar threats and rituals of capitulation involving the choice (if we can call it that) between submission and subjection to extreme violence. Frequent raiding for plunder occurred in the context of long

Interpolity Law   327 phases of interpolity interactions that in many cases came to be grouped under the heading of ‘conquest’. The Arab conquests from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, and the so-​called Reconquista, or reconquest, of the Iberian Peninsula from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries stand as examples. The actual conduct of raids was surprisingly consistent across these and other theaters. Typically, a period of successful raiding and retreat in sparsely inhabited areas set up more organized assaults on larger settlements, and aggressors established fortified footholds from which to launch further raids. The object of most raiding was plunder, and the ideal targets for raiders were weak and rich settlements that were well known to raiders for their commercial, political, or symbolic importance (Benton 2018; Sandberg 2016). Various kinds of ceremonies or warnings could mark the transition from desultory raiding to open warfare. Offers to preserve life and property of town dwellers presented before sieges in the Arab conquests and Mongol ultimatums before attack on towns are examples. Significantly, towns suing for peace or agreeing to aggressor demands to surrender did not consider themselves necessarily conquered. They sought to maintain some autonomy and often negotiated for a greater measure of it if they could offer military assistance to raiders. Capitulation, while saving lives, also preserved the possibility of a power reversal at a later date, whereas surrender after a long phase of resistance could result in more severe treatment by raiders, even if a pact was signed to preserve lives and property. Truces served as the linchpin of this process. Consider the place of truces in the Iberian peninsula. In contrast with older representations of a centuries-​long struggle between Christian and Muslim forces, recent research shows how fighting occurred not just along religious fault lines but also among fragmented polities of co-​religionists, producing a fluid frontier of raiding and negotiation (Fancy 2016). Truces structured the rhythms of violence, a role that emerged with special clarity in the last phase of conflict referred to as the War for Granada. A truce signed by Muhammad I of Granada and Fernando III of Castile in 1246 suspended fighting; it also declared Mohammed to be Fernando’s vassal and committed the Granada ruler to pay annual tribute. Like subsequent truces, this pact had a specific time limit (20 years), though it was broken sooner (in 18 years). That truce was followed by more than 70 other truces signed between Catholic monarchs and rulers of Granada between 1246 and 1492, all with a similar structure of vassalage and tribute payments. Raiding continued alongside these formal periods of peace; not a single year occurred between 1464 and 1481, for example, without at least one raid and counter-​raid, and there were undoubtedly many more raids that went unrecorded. The counterpart of the truce was the politics of capitulation. Muslims in Capilla, Baeza, Úbeda, Córdoba, Jaén, and Sevilla surrendered in exchange for pledges that they might receive safe conduct, and even be allowed to take some property, as they travelled to Muslim territories (Pérez Castañera 2013; Ladero Quesada 2007). By converting subordinate signers and their subjects into vassals of the stronger polity, truces set up the logic for further violence. Vassals could be punished as rebels and traitors for future acts of violence. This widely recognized logic had very real consequences. For example, less than a decade after Catholic forces entered the city of Granada in 1492, the treaty signed with Granada Muslims became a reference point in the punishment of Muslim ‘rebels’ for fighting Christians to prevent forced conversion. As Spaniards established their authority on the other side of the Atlantic, they relied on the same logic of truces and truce breaking in justifying violence against Indian groups. Spanish imperial agents were instructed to read a statement called the requerimiento (requirement) before attacking or

328   Lauren Benton enslaving Indigenous groups who refused to submit to their authority. The statement warned Indigenous communities that if they submitted to Spaniards, their lives would be spared and they would not be enslaved, but if they did not submit, the Spaniards could punish them as rebellious vassals. In the context of Afro-​Eurasian warfare and peacemaking practices, the requerimiento appears to be not an Iberian oddity but a familiar variant of an offer of truce laced with the threat of violence. Across the Americas, other acts of spectacular violence were narrated using the language of truce and betrayal, with conquerors represented as peacemakers and the victims of violence as peace breakers. The structure of conquest as a sequence of explicit or implicit, then broken and rejected, truces was so pervasive in the early modern world that we can comfortably call it a global pattern. A second, related generalization about the regulation of war and peace was that it merged vernacular and written justifications for violence. Participants in violence, in other words, looked to pervasive practices for guidance while selectively referencing written traditions of the laws of war. The history of truces again helps to illustrate this point. Medieval and early modern jurists defined truces as acts to suspend war. In his discussion of truces in Book III of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Rights of War and Peace; Grotius 2004), Hugo Grotius quoted commentaries on Roman law arguing that a state of war continued under a truce. If war continued, but was just suspended, then new declarations of war were not required if one party discovered that a truce had been broken. War simply continued under the rationales for its initial outbreak. But Grotius also observed that Romans had typically gone out of their way to show ‘how much they loved Peace, and how careful they were not to engage in War, unless for just causes’ (Grotius 2004, 717). Combatants breaking a truce thus called on the just war tradition, even though technically they did not have to, to support their decision to resume war. In practice as in theory, there was no clear juridical script to follow. In just war theory and in colloquial commentary, rationales for violence had to be creatively spun each time. With the global militarization of empires in the long eighteenth century, we find a pattern emerging in which imperial forces were operating with blanket authorization for small acts of violence by captains and military commanders far from the centre of power. For example, British naval captains sailed with standing authorization to perpetrate violence to protect British subjects. At the same time, captains were instructed to keep wars small and to prevent the outbreak of major inter-​imperial violence (Benton, 2021). Although not strictly required to do so given their pre-​authorization, military commanders routinely recorded rationales for particular acts of violence. The most common rationale, familiar from just war theory, was self-​defense. An old pattern of regulating imperial violence was turning into a more formal feature of the international order: an emerging idea of limited intervention that underpinned the operation of perpetual wars, including, much later, the ‘war on terror’ (Benton forthcoming). The third generalization about legalities of violence to mark is that, along with jurisdictional politics and protection, the regulation of war and peace became an increasingly explicit part of global ordering with the rise of international law at the end of the nineteenth century (Koskenniemi 2005). The late nineteenth century saw the codification of laws of war in the context of the US Civil War, for example, a process of formalization of the laws of war that continued with mid-​twentieth century international efforts to outlaw war (Witt 2012; Hathaway and Shapiro 2017). Yet, as with jurisdiction and protection, we should not be looking for a linear connection between interpolity and international law. Instead, the earlier

Interpolity Law   329 history calls attention to a broad regulatory environment that encompassed earlier violence as well as twentieth-​and twenty-​first century warfare. Just as in the early modern world we can identify a framework for warfare that crossed vast regions and featured the regulation of raiding and conquest, in the late twentieth century a global legal framework emerged out of parallel policy changes inside nation-​states in connection with the ‘war on terror’ (Scheppele 2006; Dudziak 2012). Across very different periods and legal regimes, the idea of perpetual, undeclared wars formed an integral part of the global legal order.

Spaces of Interpolity Law The patterns we can identify through the study of jurisdiction, protection, and legalities of violence allow us to compose new narratives of regional and global ordering. That is, we can identify key shifts in institutional orders flowing from the practices of interpolity law. Consequential changes in political and legal thought corresponded loosely to such shifts. In the case of jurisdictional politics, we find a discourse of order overshadowing a discourse of rights—​and reinforcing a vision of limited civic rights within a variegated rights regime of empires. With regard to protection and jurisdiction, we encounter a pervasive openness to divisible sovereignty, alongside sharpening notions of sovereignty as territorial and indivisible. With legalities of small wars, we trace a developing vision of war as a perpetual condition, and a corresponding right of powerful empires to use war as punishment, interrupted by unstable and brief episodes of peace. Research on interpolity law goes still further toward revising narratives of global order by providing a way to trace structural continuity and spatial patterns across diverse legal systems. We can identify ‘interpolity zones’—​a more comprehensive label than ‘borderlands’—​comprising intricate systems of political communities, each exercising some degree of legal authority and collectively interacting over long periods of time without a decisive shift toward the hegemony of any one power (Benton and Clulow 2015). Such regional formations were surprisingly extensive and durable in world history, even if they also generated waves of conflict and chronic instability. Examples include North America from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, where the Comanche Empire asserted jurisdiction alongside other indigenous and European polities and alliances depended on rapidly changing patterns of gift-​giving and raiding, without any one power holding a monopoly of violence (Hämäläinen 2008; Richter 2001; White 2010; Rushforth 2012). Other interpolity zones encompassed maritime Southeast Asia; much of South America; the Eurasian steppes; and West Africa, where an interpolity order of successive African empires preceded incursions of European powers (Philips and Sharman 2015; Monteiro 2018; Di Cosmo and Maas 2018; Khodarkovsky 2002; Gomez 2018). Shifts in the structure of some interpolity zones in the nineteenth century were gradual, emerging as before from the pressure of jurisdictional conflicts, protection relations, and violence. In the first part of the century, the most significant change resulted from the ascendance of British global power. This trend linked a sprawling project of imperial legal reform to British ambition to exert influence on regional systems of states—​sometimes even actively calling new sovereignties into existence—​aligned in the protection of British commerce and property (Benton and Ford 2016).

330   Lauren Benton British global hegemony was always incomplete, and even as an ambition of imperial officials, was relatively short-​lived. By mid-​century most plur-​political regions, including those squarely within British spheres of influence, might be better described as operating within an inter-​imperial legal framework, one including the participation of the new empire-​state of the United States and older Ottoman, Russian, and Chinese empires. French and British forces combined to impose a regional order favourable to European commerce in the Río de la Plata, for example, and the Russian, French, British, and Ottoman Empires suspended a fluid regulatory order over the eastern Mediterranean world. In China, the inter-​imperial framework encompassed an array of European powers and the United States asserting privileges in trading ports. An older narrative in the history of international law describes such patterns as part of the export of a European balance of power to the rest of the world (Grewe 2000). But that story missed the ways in which jurisdictional politics, shifting protection arrangements, and small wars generated and altered pluri-​political regional orders that developed under the influence, but not the control, of European powers. Changes in widely distributed regional legal regimes also composed shifts in the structure of the global legal order. Britain’s efforts to construct vast prohibition regimes against the slave trade and piracy brought the domestic policies of significant numbers of states into formal alignment, even as regional results varied dramatically. Reforming visions also served to align institutions for the protection of property and movements of credit and capital across borders. Such trends did not emerge exclusively, or even primarily, through top-​ down politics, but, as in earlier eras, in response to clusters of conflicts and their local and regional effects.

Conclusion The study of interpolity law helps to move international relations beyond its past Eurocentrism to encompass a wide variety of political communities and the analysis of their legal interactions. The approach broadens the scope of what we are defining as ‘law’ beyond sets of rules or normative orders by featuring the effects of a wide-​ranging legal politics centred on representations and assemblages of legal authority. As an amalgam of the politics of jurisdiction, protection, and violence, interpolity law reflected patterns of conflict while also generating new pluri-​political formations, including new regional legal regimes and emerging visions of global order. The study of interpolity law and its changes poses as many new questions as it answers. We have hardly reached the end of the project of uncovering the unstable and variegated histories of sovereignty. Nor have we yet constructed sufficiently nuanced narratives relating regional legal regimes to global ordering. And although recent research has probed the degree to which European political and legal thought reflected knowledge and experience of the world beyond Europe, much of the history of international law remains narrowly focused on European juridical tracts in isolation from wider circles of discourse and practice. Important questions remain, too, about the transitions and interpenetration of interpolity, imperial, and international law. Legal histories of the last two decades have framed these questions in new ways and also helped to make answers possible. A new field of global legal history has become central to the history of international relations and international order.

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chapter 23

Regul ating C omme rc e Eric Helleiner We live in an era when free trade ideology is being deeply contested around the world by neomercantilists who seek to promote their country’s wealth and power through strategic trade protectionism (and other kinds of government economic activism). This ideological contestation over the regulation of international commerce is arguably more extensive than at any time since the end of the Second World War, when a relatively liberal international trading regime was established. To understand contemporary debates between free traders and neomercantilists around the world, it is important to recognize that each side draws on historical lineages of thought. These debates have their origins in the emergence of free trade thought in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a subsequent reaction from thinkers who pioneered core ideas in contemporary neomercantilist thought. International Political Economy (IPE) scholars usually depict this historical debate as one between economic liberals such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Richard Cobden and neomercantilists such as Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List. But recent work by historians has broadened the picture to show how this historical debate had a more global character, including the involvement of many thinkers from regions beyond Europe and America. In this chapter, I build on this recent historical work to provide an overview of global nature of the emergence of the free-​trade-​versus-​neomercantilism debate. I begin with a discussion of the global reach of the early free trade doctrine, showing how this resulted from a complex combination of processes of diffusion, resonance, appropriation, and a multidirectional flow of ideas. I then examine the neomercantilist reaction to free trade thought around the world in more detail because this history is less well known and because of its relevance to the current moment (Helleiner 2021). The analysis reveals many similar processes involved in the global emergence of neomercantilism, but it also highlights that this phenomenon was a more decentralized process. Underlying the free-​ trade-​ versus-​ neomercantilism debate were contrasting views about how countries best modernized their economies in the emerging industrial age. In this sense, the subject of this chapter speaks directly to one of the two core themes of this volume: the modernity problematique. Modernization was interpreted in many different ways in these debates, with disagreements including not just those between free traders and neomercantilists but also within each of these ideological camps. To understand these

Regulating Commerce   335 disagreements, scholars need to embrace analytical lenses that are both more global than in the past but also highly sensitive to the specificity of local contexts. In this sense, my analysis also highlights the other theme, the granularity problem. In the conclusion to the chapter, I briefly summarize some other broader contributions of the chapter to scholarship on ‘Global IPE’, the transnational flow of economic ideas, and contemporary trade debates.

The Global Reach of Free Trade Thought In IPE scholarship, the rise of free-​trade ideology is usually told as a heavily British-​centred story. This tale begins with Adam Smith’s famous 1776 book The Wealth of Nations which critiqued European mercantilism for undermining prosperity, individual liberty, and international peace. Next in the conventional narrative comes David Ricardo’s 1817 Principles of Political Economy which advanced the economic case for free trade with its theory of comparative advantage. The third key thinker usually invoked is Richard Cobden who led British free traders in the mid-​nineteenth century with his passionate arguments linking this trade policy to the spread of peace, prosperity, and ‘civilization’ around the world (quoted in Cain 1979, 235). Most IPE scholars are also familiar with how free trade thought became increasingly influential across Europe, reaching the highpoint of its intellectual dominance during the 1850s and 1860s. Indeed, IPE textbooks even sometimes include Charles Kindleberger’s (2004 [1975]) famous analysis of this process. But less attention has been paid in IPE scholarship to the story of the emergence of free trade ideas to other parts of the world, particularly non-​Western regions. In recent years, historians have begun to fill this gap. They have shown how the free trade movement had quite global reach, with European free trade thought—​ particularly Smith’s ideas—​being embraced in many other parts of the world at various speeds and degrees of intensity. This new historical literature should be welcomed by IPE scholars seeking to build a more ‘Global IPE’ that is less Western-​centric (e.g. Helleiner and Rosales 2017b; Helleiner 2023). This work is also of great relevance to IPE scholars interested in the transnational diffusion of economic ideas. Early work on this latter topic explored the international spread of Keynesianism, while more recent scholarship has focused on the transnational nature of neoliberal ideology (e.g. Hall 1989; Ban 2016). Some of this literature has already drawn parallels to nineteenth century experience of the free trade doctrine. For example, Albert Hirschman (1989) famously compared the export of Keynesianism from the United States after the Second World War to Britain’s promotion of free trade thought in this earlier period. But this new historical literature highlights insights about transnational flow of economic ideas that go beyond just the role of dominant powers. One such insight is about the significance of transnational ideational networks in the diffusion of economic ideas. In the context of intensifying economic and political interconnections, historians have identified the emergence as early as the 1820s of a kind of ‘liberal international’ that linked intellectuals with an interest in many liberal ideas, including free trade. The network included thinkers from not just Europe but also Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Isabella 2009; Bayly 2012, 32; Coller 2015). In the later-​nineteenth century, a similar global network emerged in the more institutionalized form of the Cobden

336   Eric Helleiner Club, created after the British thinker’s death in 1866 (Palen 2016). Historians have also highlighted the role of specific individuals who took leadership roles in promoting the new free trade ideas internationally, such as John Bowring who embraced this task with enthusiasm between 1830 and 1860 across several continents (e.g. Todd 2008). Historians have also shown that the global rise of free trade thought was much more than just a story of diffusion. For example, David Todd (2015, 236) suggests that it would be better to talk of the global ‘resonance’ of free trade ideas after their triumph in Britain. As he puts it, ‘instead of trickling down, concepts are echoed and refashioned, in a constant dialogue with local, regional and national preoccupations’. Alexandre Mendes Cunha and Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak also highlight the need to go beyond the concept of diffusion in order to recognize the ‘profoundly creative process that lies behind the successful adaptation of ideas to historical contexts different than those in which they were conceived, therefore posing problems they were not originally designed to address’. In their words, ‘what is at stake is an act of appropriation, where active and purposeful subjects identify ideas that could serve their intellectual aspirations, and subsequently infuse them with a host of meanings that were not part of their original mark-​up’ (Cunha and Suprinyak 2017, 8–​9). These arguments intersect in important ways with IPE scholarship on the international diffusion of Keynesian and neoliberal ideas. For example, Peter Hall’s (1989) classic volume highlighted how Keynesianism was modified in creative and important ways in various local contexts as it spread from the Anglo-​American powers in the mid-​twentieth century. Cornel Ban (2016) has also shown how global neoliberal scripts in the more recent era have been adapted by local ‘translators’ to generate distinct local varieties or ‘hybrids’ of neoliberalism. Johanna Bockman (2011) and Oddny Helgadóttir (2016) have also explored how neoliberalism emerged endogenously outside the Anglo-​American sphere and spread transnationally in ways that fused global neoliberal intellectual currents. These literatures reinforce broader IR scholarship on global norms examining their ‘localization’ and the multidirectional nature of ideational flows (Acharya 2011, 2016). In the case of the nineteenth century free trade movement, historians have provided some important examples of these dynamics. One example of ‘resonance’ comes from the Latin American context where Cunha and Suprinyak show how early commitments to free trade at the time of independence often emerged as much as a local reaction against the mercantilism of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers as the importation of European theory: the relaxation of trade restrictions had actually been one of the main sources of dispute and unrest in the Iberian colonies during the decades leading to their independence. The teachings of British political economy seemed to corroborate these aspirations. Adam Smith, after all, had offered a thorough critique of all misguided forms of mercantile restriction and economic privilege, of which colonial rule was a glaring example . . . . Under the influence of both colonial experience and political economy, trade restrictions and monopolistic practices came to be naturally associated with the obnoxious remnants of the ancien régime. (Cunha and Suprinyak 2017, 20)

Latin American free traders also often adapted—​or ‘appropriated’, to use Cuhna and Suprinyak’s term—​European liberal economy theory in interesting ways. For example, some combined their embrace of liberalism at the border with support for non-​liberal forced labour regimes domestically in repressive haciendas involved in export commodity production (Rojas 2002). In other instances, free traders backed a very activist domestic economic

Regulating Commerce   337 role for the state in order to try to maximize the local economic gains arising from their country’s commodity exporting role. Particularly dramatic were mid-​nineteenth century Peruvian free traders who ensured that their country’s most important export—​guano—​was owned by a state monopoly that controlled the resource and promoted local entrepreneurs as managers and traders of it. As Paul Gootenberg (1989, 84) notes, the result of this combination of free trade and ‘unique national-​statist and entrepreneurial control’ in the guano sector was that ‘an astonishing share of the final returns—​some estimate more than 70 percent—​remained at home. This record would not be approached again by other export nations until the mid-​twentieth century’. Some early South Asian free traders also found that European liberal theory resonated with their existing frustrations with the East India Company’s (EIC) privileges and monopolistic position. One of the most important was Rammohun Roy whose ideas circulated prominently in the early nineteenth century not just in his region but also to Europe, providing an example of the multi-​directional nature of the flows of liberal ideas in this era. Indeed, Roy saw himself as part of the ‘liberal international’ of that era and even travelled to Britain in the early 1830s where he supported local free traders who were criticizing the EIC (Zastoupil 2010; Ganguli 1977, 41; Bayly 2012, 49, 83). European economic liberalism was also appropriated in interesting ways in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In elite circles, support for free trade policies and ideas was particularly strong in the Tanzimat era (1839–​76). Indeed, the famous British liberal, Nassau Senior, told some Ottoman officials in the late 1850s: ‘As respects your import duties . . . you have nothing to learn. You are the best free traders in the world. I wish that you could give some lessons to France’ (quoted in Özveren 2002, 134). Deniz Kilinçoğlu (2015, 28) also highlights how Ottoman authorities began in the 1860s to try to popularize Smithian economics at the mass level, including through the school system. But Ottoman thinkers did more than just embrace European economic liberalism. They also challenged Eurocentric civilizational narratives, arguing that Islamic thought had earlier pioneered ideas found in European economic liberalism (Aydin 2007; Kilinçoğlu 2015, 29). More than many European liberals, Ottoman thinkers also often saw liberal economic reforms as tools of state-​building that would cultivate the power and wealth of their empire as well as the loyalty of its inhabitants (Anscombe 2010, 179–​186; Kilinçoğlu 2015, 23). Indeed, in the 1830s, the first known turkish language Ottoman treatise on modern economics promoted the new science of European political economy as a key tool for statecraft in an era when the basis of state power was shifting from military might to economic success (Kilinçoğlu 2015, 17, 26). A similar link between state power and economic liberalism was drawn by some Japanese thinkers after their country’s forced economic opening in the 1850s. Before this, Western economic ideas had made few inroads in the country because the government had tightly controlled the inflow of foreign ideas. After the opening, however, some Japanese intellectuals embraced European free trade theory and wider Smithian ideas but often with the heavily instrumental goal of importing ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ in order to bolster the wealth and power of their now vulnerable country (Morris-​Suzuki 1989, 53; Metzler 2006, 285–​286). The same kind of modification of European free trade theory also took place in China several decades later. European economic liberalism became popular much later in China than in most other regions of the world, despite a massive ‘information war’ waged by British

338   Eric Helleiner merchants in the 1830s to convince the Chinese of the virtues of free trade (Chen 2012). The conservative and inward-​looking Chinese intellectual environment at the time left most Chinese intellectuals uninterested in foreign economic ideas in general. After their country’s humiliating defeat to Japan in the mid-​1890s, however, Chinese interest in foreign economic ideas grew more substantially, an interest that finally generated a prominent translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1902 by the well-​known scholar Yan Fu, who became a leading free trade advocate. Yan adapted Smith’s message to China’s perilous geopolitical and economic context of the time, depicting his book as a guide for cultivating China’s wealth and power in the context of a kind of social Darwinian struggle for survival between states (Schwartz 1964).

Hamilton, List, and the Listians Historians have also been widening our understanding of the neomercantilist reactions to the rise of free trade ideology. In the same way that the latter was a global process, they have shown how the neomercantilist reaction to free trade also involved thinkers from around the world. Many of these thinkers were familiar with pre-​Smithian mercantilist thought and drew upon it for inspiration. They deserve the label ‘neomercantilist’, however, because they were reacting to liberal thought in ways that led them to develop new rationales for strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state power and wealth (Helleiner 2021). Although historians have been improving our understanding of the global emergence of neomercantilist thought, the topic remains less well studied than that of the free trade doctrine. Scholars usually begin with the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, whose 1791 report for US Congress developed one of the first sophisticated and politically prominent critiques of Smith’s arguments about trade. Hamilton was concerned that free trade policies could inhibit the growth of US manufacturing because of the difficulties of creating new firms in a context where they faced tough competition from established foreign firms that were often supported by their home governments. Confronting Smith’s arguments directly, Hamilton argued that government assistance was needed to foster manufacturing, whether it took the form of temporary subsidies (which he actually preferred) or moderate tariffs. Hamilton argued that the US needed a strong manufacturing sector to secure the ‘independence and security’ of the country in an uncertain world (Hamilton 1964 [1791], 161). He also noted economic benefits that would result from a more diversified economy, such as increased productivity, reduced transportation costs, more jobs, and more reliable domestic markets for local producers. The figure who usually receives the most prominent place in histories of neomercantilist thought is Friedrich List because of his 1841 book The National System of Political Economy. Like Hamilton, List (1885 [1841], 271) engaged directly with the new Smithian school of political economy, arguing that its critiques of mercantilism were ‘partly correct’ while developing a detailed defense of the need for tariff protection of the manufacturing sector in some circumstances. List outlined similar reasons as Hamilton for why countries needed a strong manufacturing sector, but he wanted to see the industrial sector assume more of a leading role in the economy as part of boosting what he called the deeper ‘productive

Regulating Commerce   339 powers’ of the nation (List 1885 [1841], 137). List also came down more firmly than Hamilton in favour of trade barriers (while also noting a role for government financial support in key strategic industries as well as for education and infrastructure). Still, his endorsement was a cautious one: he insisted that tariffs be only temporary and very targeted to foster specific infant industries that were critical to the growth of the nation’s productive powers. As he put it, ‘[e]‌very exaggeration of protection is detrimental; nations can only obtain a perfect manufacturing power by degrees’ (List 1885 [1841], 324). List also went beyond Hamilton in linking his economic program very explicitly to nationalism. He criticized the Smithian school for taking ‘no account of nations, but simply of the entire human race on the one hand, or of single individuals on the other’ (List 1885 [1841], xxvi). By contrast, he emphasized that the ‘distinguishing characteristic’ of his thought was its emphasis on ‘nationality’ (List 1885 [1841], xxx). In addition to prioritizing the national interest, List invoked the importance of nationalist sentiments for mobilizing the kind of collective action over time that was needed to build up the productive power of the nation: ‘above all things we must have enough national spirit at once to plant and protect the tree, which will yield its first richest fruits only to future generations’. (List 1885 [1841], 194). List’s nationalism also led him to criticize the universal pretentions of British free trade theory. While free trade served Britain’s national interests, List argued that it did not serve those of agricultural exporting countries such as Germany and United States. Indeed, he argued that this policy left those countries subservient to Britain’s power. Political economy, in other words, need to be adapted to specific national circumstances. As part of this line of argument, List famously criticized British free traders for opposing protectionist policies that had served their country well in the past when it was trying to industrialize: It is a very common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith. . . (List 1885 [1841], 368)

Despite List’s insistence on ‘nationality’, he did not reject more cosmopolitan sentiments entirely. Indeed, his book began with an appeal to both ‘la patrie’ and ‘l’humanité’, and he critiqued earlier mercantilist thought for failing to recognize ‘the future union of all nations, the establishment of perpetual peace, and of universal freedom of trade, as the goal towards which all nations have to strive, and more and more to approach’ (List 1885 [1841], 341). Although universal free trade was a laudable final goal, List argued that it was an inappropriate policy in a situation where countries were so unequal and where no universal federation yet existed. Indeed, he argued that industrial protectionism provided a better means for reaching that final end goal because it would usher in great equality between countries that, in turn, fostered peace and political union: as he put it, ‘the system of protection regarded from this point of view appears to be the most efficient means of furthering the final union of nations, and hence also of promoting true freedom of trade’. (List 1885 [1841], 127). IPE scholars have noted the influence of Listian ideas in encouraging rising protectionism in many countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their focus is usually on the Western context. Historians have shown that List’s ideas were also picked up by prominent thinkers and policymakers in non-​Western regions from Latin America to Asia to the Middle East. The networks, individuals, and processes that helped to spread Listian ideas internationally have been much less well studied than those for free trade. One clear

340   Eric Helleiner difference, however, is that the diffusion of Listian ideas was not backed by a dominant state. The various case studies that have been produced of the importation of Listian ideas suggest that his ideas were instead usually embraced because they ‘resonated’ with existing local concerns, particularly nationalists’ concerns about their country’s relative power position vis-​à-​vis the more advanced industrial states (e.g. Metzler 2006, Goswami 2004). The case studies also highlight a number of creative ways in which List’s ideas were appropriated and modified in both Western and non-​Western contexts. Because of List’s emphasis on national distinctiveness, some of these adaptations were not necessarily inconsistent with his general philosophy. But some did challenge his core views. For example, many Listians chose to overlook the fact that he had explicitly argued that his protectionist advice was meant to be relevant only to countries with a ‘temperate’ climate (instead of a ‘tropical’ one) (List 1885 [1841], 162). Listians in ‘tropical’ countries simply ignored this aspect of his argument as well as the fact that he praised colonialism as a vehicle for the ‘regeneration’ of many societies, including those in ‘the whole of Asia’ (List 1885 [1841], 419; see Goswami 2004). There are many other examples where more specific aspects of his ideas were modified. For example, supporters of List in many countries went beyond his focus on industrial protectionism to endorse tariffs on agricultural imports—​a move that List had explicitly opposed. List’s views about the positive links between industrialization and the growth of political liberty were also swept under the rug by some of his prominent followers, such as Sergei Witte (who implemented Listian policies in his role as Russia’s finance minister between 1893 and 1902), Ziya Gökalp (whose Listian ideas inspired economic policy in Turkey after its creation) and Alfredo Rocco (who promoted List’s thought in early twentieth-​century Italy in ways that influenced the Italian fascist movement) (Van Laue 1963; Parka 1985; Gregor 1979). Both Gökalp and Rocco also urged the state to promote industrialization with much more extensive state activism in the domestic economy than List had endorsed. List’s views were also modified in important ways in colonial settings, most notably in India where his writing was invoked prominently by Mahadev Govind Ranade, one of the founders of the Indian National Congress. While citing List’s views about the need for state-​ led industrialization, Ranade decisively rejected the German thinker’s rosy view of colonialism, noting how in India it had led to deindustrialization, forced ‘ruralization’, foreign dominance of internal and external trade, a drain of capital, and a broader ‘dependent’ status (quotes from Goswami 2004, 211–​212). Recognizing that British colonial authorities were unlikely to introduce tariff protection for India, Ranade (1906, 34–​36, 103, 202–​203) urged British colonial authorities to support the growth of Indian industry through other means, such as launching enterprises themselves, using government procurement, and borrowing funds from abroad to be lent on at low interest rates to local entrepreneurs. The most comprehensive modification of List’s ideas was undertaken by Mihail Manoilesco, a Romanian thinker whose 1929 book The Theory of Protectionism became the best-​known protectionist tract of the interwar years. Manoilescu appreciated List’s emphasis on the deep productive powers of the nation and the national interest, but he thought protection had ‘a much wider extension than List believed’ (Manoilesco 1931, 240). In particular, he argued that trade protectionism could be justified in any country, and even if it was longstanding and extensive. At the core of his theory was the idea that national economic progress depended on boosting overall labour productivity in the national economies by shifting workers from agriculture to industry. If trade barriers could encourage the growth

Regulating Commerce   341 of industry which had higher labour productivity than the national average, he argued that they could immediately benefit the national economy, even if they resulted in higher domestic prices and/​or if the local firm never became internationally competitive (Manoilesco 1931, xi). Manoilesco also argued trade between agricultural and industrial countries usually involved ‘invisible exploitation’ because the former exported products that embodied more labour than the ones being imported (Manoilesco 1931, viii). In addition, Manoilesco went beyond List’s ideas in arguing that the international community should support poorer countries’ efforts to industrialize behind tariff barriers. He challenged the League of Nations’ promotion of free trade as an ideal, suggesting instead that the use of protectionism should be recognized as a ‘reasonable and legitimate’ right of nations (Manoilesco 1931[1929], 222). In making this case, he appealed to the broader international interest, arguing that the industrialization of poorer countries would raise their ‘buying capacity’ for the exports of rich countries as well as foster greater equality between countries (Manoilesco 1931 [1929], 200). Manoilesco’s invocation of these international interests emerged from a broader aspiration that he linked to List: the effort of trying ‘to find the supreme road which leads to the conciliation of national interests with the general interest of the Society of Nations’. (Manoilesco 1931 [1929], 250). Manoilesco’s ideas attracted immediate attention internationally. His book was translated into many languages during the 1930s and cited by advocates for protectionism in many countries from East Europe to Brazil, highlighting another example of the diverse directions of the flow of economic ideas (Kofman 1997, 15, 29–​30, 104; Love 1996). It was also reviewed critically by leading economists, including Harry Dexter White who later played a key role in designing the postwar international economic order (Helleiner 2014, 235). Manoilesco’s idea that the international community should accept poorer countries’ right to protect domestic industry anticipated the provisions of the postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime. Manoilesco got little credit for this idea, however, because he became involved in fascist politics in Romania in the late 1930s and even renounced his commitment to industrialization in favour of the Nazi vision for his country as an agricultural exporter (Love 1996, 78, 94–​95).

Wider Neomercantilist Reactions The heavy focus on List in existing IPE and historical literature risks overstating his influence in neomercantilist thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were other influential neomercantilist thinkers—​beyond Hamilton—​whose ideas had quite different content and/​or were developed without engagement with his ideas. In this sense, the global rise of neomercantilist thought was a more decentralized process than that associated with free trade (where most thinkers were inspired by a relatively coherent tradition centered on the European pioneers of economic liberalism) (Helleiner 2021, 2023). Some of these other thinkers also had ideas that enjoyed wide international circulation. The most important of these was the American thinker Henry Carey. Carey outlined his version of neomercantilism most systematically in his Principles of Social Sciences published in 1858–​59. When Carey is mentioned in histories of protectionist thought, he is usually simply lumped together with List. While he echoed List’s advocacy of infant industry

342   Eric Helleiner protectionism and the view that free trade was consolidating British economic power, his views were quite distinct in other areas (Helleiner 2021, ch.5). Particularly significant were Carey’s concerns about the domestic distributional and social consequences of free trade, an issue that was addressed very little in List’s 1841–​44 book (or by Hamilton). In every country where free trade was introduced (including Britain), Carey argued that it empowered a social class of ‘traders’ who found opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of other domestic groups by manipulating prices, creating monopolies, and putting communities across the world in competition with each other (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 210–​213). In his view, workers’ wages were pushed down by global competitive pressures, resulting in a system of ‘slavery’ in which the laborer became ‘that mere instrument to be used by trade’ (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 3, 382). Farmers also lost out as they became more subject to the power of traders and as soil nutrients were depleted by monocrop export agriculture. Carey argued that protectionism would enable a ‘harmony’ of interests to be re-​ established within the country. With infant industry protectionism, manufacturing could grow, and workers’ wages could be raised rather than cut. As manufacturers and farmers were brought closer together, their association would also undermine the power of traders and enable these two groups to realize mutual economic benefits arising from reduced transport costs, reliable domestic markets for their products, and a more diversified and productive economy. Farmers could also restore nutrients to their soils more easily from the human waste of nearby urban manufacturing centers and from cattle manure on more diversified farms that served local markets. Carey’s ideal world was one of small independent proprietors operating interdependently in decentralized markets organized around what he called ‘local centres of attraction’ (a view that contrasted with List’s endorsement large factories and farms) (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 48). In outlining this case for protectionism, Carey did not follow List’s lead in emphasizing that trade barriers had to be very targeted and limited. In contrast to List, he also argued that all countries should embrace a protectionist program, including even Britain. In addition, Carey was a fierce critic of colonialism in contrast to List’s more favourable views on the subject (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 256, 295–​296, 367, 375; Vol. 3, 223, 335). Carey also did not share List’s interest in working towards a long-​term ‘universal confederation of nations’. Carey’s ideas were extremely influential in his own country (much more so than List’s), serving as a key rationale for the introduction of high tariffs during America’s civil war and their maintenance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Goldstein 1993, ­chapters 2–​3; Conkin 1980; Huston 1983; Lee 1957). His work was also translated into a number of languages, and he acquired prominent and influential followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the world (Helleiner 2021, ch.6). Supporters of Carey could even be found in List’s home country, such as the German businessman and politician Wilhelm von Kardorff who was a close colleague of Otto von Bismarck. Kardorff popularized Carey’s views in Germany with an 1875 pamphlet that helped to mobilize support for higher German tariffs. Historians argue that Kardorff ’s ideas were more important than those of List in encouraging Bismarck’s decision to introduce protectionist policies in Germany in 1879 (Lambi 1963, 8–​9, 91–​94, 116, 129, 164–​165, 178, 226; Pflanze 1990, 311, 315, 454–​455, 465–​466, 483). Another example of Carey’s influence came from Canada where his ideas were invoked by Isaac Buchanan, the leading Canadian protectionist thinker in the lead-​up to that country’s

Regulating Commerce   343 introduction of a higher tariff regime in 1879 (Helleiner 2019). In the Australian colony of Victoria, support for rising tariffs between 1866–​80 was also mobilized by a thinker, David Syme (1876), who invoked Carey’s ideas more than List’s. The first Japanese government publication to advocate protectionism after the 1868 Meiji restoration, Wakayama Norikazu’s 1871 On Protective Tariffs, invoked Carey’s work rather than List’s (Braisted 1976, 301–​306; Morris-​Suzuki 1989, 59). Other Careyties included prominent protectionists in Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Boianovsky 2013, 666, 668). Finally, Ethiopia’s most important economic thinker in early twentieth century, Gabrahiwot Baykadagn (1955[1924]), built a case for protectionism around Carey’s thought in a book published posthumously in 1924 with the support of Haile Selassie (who would soon become emperor in 1930). As in the case of List, Carey’s ideas were often modified when they were appropriated outside his home country context. In Germany, for example, Kardorff placed much more emphasis than Carey on the need for both industrial and agricultural protection (Lambi 1963, 136). Both Buchanan and Syme stressed protectionism’s employment benefits more than Carey. Wakayama’s case for Japanese protectionism mixed Carey’s arguments with points that had long been prominent among Japanese opponents of economic opening, such as a concerns about unnecessary luxury imports depleting the country’s metallic supply (Morris-​ Suzuki 1989, 59). While Carey emphasized the decentralization of power, Gabrahiwot (1955 [1924], 74–​80) emphasized the need for a strong centralized Ethiopian government to constrain banditry and civil war, both of which he argued had undermined his country’s economic progress. Although the ideas of List and Carey circulated widely, there were still many important strands of neomercantilist thought that emerged independently of them. Take, for example, the case of Nikolai Semenovich Mordvinov who is sometimes referred to as the ‘Russian List’ (Avtonomov and Burina 2019, 200). His neomercantilist ideas were developed in 1815, before List even began writing on the subject. They helped to encourage a protectionist reaction against free trade in that country in the early 1820s and were invoked again in Russia in the late nineteenth century in the context of Witte’s protectionist policies (Helleiner 2021, 289). The turn to protectionism of many Latin American governments in the first half of the nineteenth century was also inspired by neomercantilist thinkers whose ideas were developed without reference to List or Carey’s work, such as Mexico’s Lucas Alamán, Peru’s Juan Noberto Casanova, and Bolivia’s Julián Prudencio (Helleiner and Rosales 2017a). The same was true of John Rae, who developed one of most sophisticated nineteenth century defenses of infant industry tariffs in an 1834 book while living in the British colony of Upper Canada. Rae’s work was later invoked in Canada at the time of its 1879 protectionist turn as well as elsewhere, including by Gökalp in the early 1920s (Gökalp 1959, 307; Helleiner 2019). A final set of examples came from the East Asian region where many of the key early neomercantilists did not refer to List or Carey. This was true, for example, of some of the most important Japanese advocates of neomercantilist policies in the early Meiji years, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōkubo Toshimichi. Their key intellectual inspiration was a local kokueki intellectual tradition of mercantilist thought dating back to the eighteenth century that had emerged in the context of the inter-​daimyo economic competition of the Tokugawa era (Ravina 1999; Sagers 2006; Brown 1962). Indeed, when Ōkubo was a powerful government minister promoting state-​led industrialization in the 1870s, the publication he made hisemployees read for guidance was not a Western one but an 1827 work of Satō Nobuhiro,

344   Eric Helleiner one of the most famous kokueki thinkers from his home district of Satsuma (Brown 1962, 187). As a result, Japanese neomercantilism had some distinctive features, including a willingness to embrace a larger state role in the domestic economy than either List or Carey endorsed. The thinkers who pioneered Chinese neomercantilism between the 1870s and 1890s—​ notably Zheng Guanying and Wang Tao—​also did not engage with the ideas of List and Carey. Instead, they drew heavily on Chinese intellectual traditions, including a ‘Legalist’ one that dated back to the time of Warring States (453–​221 bce). They creatively updated ancient Legalist ideas about the pursuit of state power and wealth to respond to the distinctive circumstances facing China in this period. Like that of early Japanese neomercantilists, their neomercantilist thought thus differed from Carey’s and List’s. In addition to endorsing a larger state role, they focused on issues such as fighting ‘commercial war’, improving the ‘people’s livelihood’, and defending Chinese firms’ ‘rights to profit’ in the domestic economy (Helleiner and Wang 2018). When later Chinese neomercantilist thinkers began to engage more with Western political economy after the mid-​1890s, they continued to be heavily informed by the ideas of these earlier Chinese thinkers who had pioneered neomercantilist thought independently. This was particularly true of the most politically influential of them all, Sun Yat-​sen who went on to become the country’s first provisional president after the 1911 revolution (Helleiner 2018). The Gaehwa group of Korean thinkers who originated that country’s neomercantilist ideology after the country’s economic opening in the 1870s also did not cite List or Carey. Instead, they drew on Chinese intellectual tradition and Korean silhak reformist thought from the eighteenth century. They were also inspired by Japan’s state-​led economic modernization after 1868. Early Chinese neomercantilists such as Zheng Guanying and Wang Tao also cited Japan’s economic success, but without engaging much with the ideas of specific Japanese thinkers. In the Korean case, however, Japanese thought had more direct influence because of the close relationship developed between Fukuzawa and leading Korean reformers such as Yu Kil-​chun and Kim Ok-​gyun (Chey and Helleiner 2018). The international diffusion of Japanese ideas reveals another example of the multidirectional flow of ideas and of the way that the global rise of neomercantilism was a decentralized process. Indeed, the Japanese economic model was also increasingly invoked by neomercantilists outside of East Asia in the early twentieth century, particularly after Japan’s 1905 military victory over Russia. In most cases, however, knowledge of specific Japanese thinkers was non-​existent; instead, the Japanese ‘model’ held appeal in the more general sense that it showed how a non-​Western country could successfully modernize its economy while preserving its distinct society and culture. For example, in Ethiopia, Gabrahiwot was part of a group known as ‘Japanizers’ but his work contains no reference to any Japanese thinker (Rekiso 2019).

Conclusion Contemporary debates between free traders and neomercantilists have intellectual roots in older ones from the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Although the history of these older debates is usually discussed in a Western-​centric way within the field of IPE, I have built on the work of historians to show how this story can be told from a

Regulating Commerce   345 more global perspective that includes thinkers from other regions of the world. This wider approach helps to support recent initiatives to create a more ‘Global IPE’ that is less Western-​ centric (Helleiner 2023). It also contributes to efforts in both history and IPE to deepen understandings of the transnational flows of economic ideas. In particular, it shows the limitations of simplistic diffusionist models by highlighting the significance of ‘resonance’, ‘appropriation’, and multidirectional flows of ideas. The decentralized nature of the global rise of neomercantilist thought also provides a more general reminder that the significance of cross-​border ideational flows can easily be overstated. The history analyzed in this chapter provides a wider perspective from which to view current debates between free traders and neomercantilists. Participants in these debates often draw on historical lineages of thought. Some invoke the ideas of Western thinkers well-​ known to IPE scholars, but contemporary free traders and neomercantilists—​particularly in non-​Western regions—​are also sometimes inspired by non-​Western historical thinkers that this global history makes more prominent. An important example is the case of contemporary Chinese neomercantilism. Although China’s development model is often described as ‘Listian’ (e.g. Breslin 2011), it bears more resemblance to the ideas of the early Chinese neomercantilists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Helleiner and Wang 2018). Indeed, the current Chinese leadership depicts itself as inspired by the ideas developed by Sun Yat-​sen (e.g. Helleiner 2021, 352). If a more global intellectual history helps us to better understand historical reference points such as this, we will be better placed to interpret our current world.

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chapter 24

Devel op me nt Corinna R. Unger This chapter traces the ways in which notions of development have emerged over the course of the twentieth century, and it analyzes the effects they have had on contemporary efforts to respond to the existence of difference and inequality. It responds to the volume’s interest in modernity by historicizing understandings of modernity through the lens of development. It argues that international development policies have been informed by implicit and explicit understandings of modernity and modernization, and that for this reason we need to contextualize the underlying assumptions that have informed development strategies. The chapter thus addresses an issue of interest to International Relations scholars and to historians of international relations alike: The question in how far ideational, institutional, and political structures define or limit actor capacity, and to which degree different types of actors have the ability to circumvent, challenge, or adapt those structures. With a view to the volume’s focus on the notion of granularity, the chapter discusses how the choice of actors, sources, and the level of analysis produces a particular understanding of development history. In conducting their research, historians are highly dependent upon the availability of source material, especially archival documents. The way in which archival material is organized and administered mirrors the political structures of the time in which it was produced and archived. The archive thus never presents a complete or balanced picture of a phenomenon, and the material available to historians is of a highly selective and, for that reason, normative quality. Reflecting on the ways in which the accessibility and choice of material influences the historian’s perspective is important to acknowledge the potential and the limits of historical explanations.

Development toward Modernity: The Importance of Difference The notion of modernity is deeply anchored in the idea of development. Ideas about development as progress and the possibility of building a better future can be traced far back in history. The expectations as to what would be better about this future varied: it could

Development   349 be more individual freedom, less poverty, a more just social order, higher economic productivity, or national strength, to name just a few. For a long time, a variety of development definitions existed in parallel. Only in the period after the Second World War did the notion of development become narrowly defined as economic development (Arndt 1987, ­chapter 2; Lumsdaine 1993, ­chapter 6; Rist 2014, ­chapters 1 and 2; Unger 2018, 15–​17). Most often, the notion of development was the sum of different ideas about a nation’s, a social group’s, or a region’s characteristics and its respective potential (or lack thereof). For example, bourgeois social reformers in early twentieth-​century European and American industrial cities believed that working-​class women needed to be taught the elemental skills of hygiene, homemaking, and motherhood so that they could live better lives, thereby contributing to the betterment of society at large. European and American missionaries in colonial settings had similar thoughts about the indigenous populations they encountered. Education, training, and moral guidance seemed needed for improvement—​this was the essence of the so-​called civilizing mission. Some believed that the individuals in question possessed the ability to come closer to the ‘Western’ ideal, whereas others rejected this possibility based on an essentialist interpretation of difference. Yet even many of those advocating measures in the interest of ‘uplift’ did not necessarily believe in full equality among ‘races’ or cultures. The modernity they claimed for themselves necessarily relied on others remaining ‘less modern’ (Tricoire 2017; Watt and Mann 2011). A similar logic applied to the late colonial administrations of the European empires in Africa and Asia. In the aftermath of the First World War and, even more so, after 1945, European governments stressed the need for so-​called colonial development to increase the colonies’ economic value. Officially, the European imperial powers supported the League of Nations’ and, later, the United Nations’ call to prepare the colonies for future self-​government. Yet they did so because it allowed them to make their case that their influence was needed until the societies in question could ‘stand on their own feet’ (Wilde 2008; Pedersen 2015; Sinclair 2017). Colonial development was an integral part of this strategy. It ranged from infrastructure projects to health and education measures to improvement schemes in agriculture. Apart from the economic benefits the colonial powers expected, they tried to use development works to maintain control over colonial societies that were becoming more mobile as a result of labour migration and more outspoken in their opposition to colonial rule (Unger 2018, 34–​43). Thus, late colonial development had little to do with the idea of modernity as a situation in which individuals would enjoy more freedom. In many ways it was the exact opposite, namely an instrument to reign in the expressions of ‘modern life’ in the colonies. The anti-​ modern element of development was not unique to colonial rule. The fascist governments in Italy, Germany, and Japan used development to promote a type of modernization that valued technical and scientific progress while preserving ‘traditional’ structures considered characteristic of the ‘nation’. Their modernization projects were based on racial exclusivity: only those considered racially worthy were allowed to participate in and benefit from them, whereas those considered unworthy were excluded by force (Unger 2018, 43–​45). Apart from the category of race that served to distinguish between more and less valuable countries, regions, and social groups, the distinction between industrial and non-​ industrial, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ (in today’s parlance: ‘emerging’) economies became highly influential. The first region to be systematically studied along these lines

350   Corinna R. Unger was Central Eastern Europe, which, to contemporary observers, appeared underdeveloped vis-​à-​vis Western Europe. In the 1930s, economists began to compare the economies of Central Eastern European countries with African, Asian, and Latin American ones, based on the information gathered by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the League of Nations, and national statistical offices (Mazurek 2019; Arndt 1987, 18; Helleiner 2014, 235–​239; McVety 2018, 25–​28). Based on such studies, economists in the 1940s established methods like national income accounting and econometric categories like Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The relative level of economic modernity could now be measured accurately, it seemed, although unpaid work and women’s labor were left out of the equation (Speich Chassé 2013, ­chapter 1; Schmelzer 2016, c­ hapter 1; Lepenies 2016; Macekura 2019; Fioramonti 2017).

Development Globalized: The Postwar Period It was no coincidence that the notion of development gained prominence before and during the Second World War, which was fought over resources as much as over ideologies. After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union began a competition for spheres of influence across the globe, with the former colonies as a key target. The concept of the ‘Three Worlds’ that emerged at the time reflected the new situation. The hierarchical notion the concept entailed mirrored both the dramatic changes in the international order and the political importance contemporary observers granted to the differences in economic development on a global scale. Some used the concept to critique the division of the world and the inequality it epitomized. Others applied it in an affirmative way to make sense of a new reality, even if it meant lumping together societies that had little in common (Pletsch 1981, 567–​572, 575–​578; Westad 2013, 208–​213). To secure allies and to prevent the enemy from gaining in strength, the two superpowers in the postwar years promoted the rapid development and modernization of allegedly underdeveloped regions and countries by presenting their own socioeconomic orders as models: One, symbolized by the United States, promised intensive urban-​based growth in both the private and the public sectors, the import of advanced consumer products and the latest technology through joining the global capitalist market, and an alliance with the world’s most powerful state. The other, that of the Soviet world, offered politically induced growth through a centralized plan and mass mobilization, with an emphasis on heavy industry, massive infrastructural projects, and the collectivization of agriculture, independent of international markets. . . . Both [models] . . . offered a road to high modernity through education, science, and technological progress. (Westad 2005, 92)

The common denominator in the Cold War competition over modernization was the question of levelling the massive socioeconomic differences that existed between different parts of the globe. The strategic need to address inequalities accelerated the establishment of development assistance as a foreign policy approach and as international practice in the postwar period. The government of the United States was the most influential actor in this context.

Development   351

American Visions of Development United States’ development assistance in the framework of the postwar world order gained official status in 1949, when President Truman gave his famous Point Four speech, in which he stressed the responsibility of the United States to share its wealth and technology with less fortunate regions. Spreading liberalism, containing communism, and giving American corporations access to markets and raw materials were central to this rationale. Yet many Americans opposed using tax dollars to take care of what they considered the responsibility of governments abroad. Hence, initially the amounts of US foreign aid remained relatively low. Over the years, they increased in response to the Korean War, the beginnings of decolonization on the African continent, and the growing international presence of the Soviet Union following de-​Stalinization. Initially most of the assistance given out by the United States was military aid. This changed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the understanding gained hold that security and stability depended on socioeconomic factors, too. This belief was at the heart of modernization theory. The most famous synthesis of this professedly political school of thought was presented by economic historian Walt W. Rostow in his 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-​Communist Manifesto (Rostow 1960). According to Rostow, the United States had reached the highest stage of development, the so-​called age of high mass-​consumption, which went hand in hand with a liberal democratic order. Contrastingly, in the socialist world ideology inhibited individual freedom and collective prosperity, and the so-​called developing countries were still caught in the stage of traditionalism. According to Rostow, traditional societies were much more susceptible to ideology than modern ones, and they had much higher birthrates and much lower levels of productivity. Taken together, these deficits presented a geopolitical threat to the American position in the Cold War struggle. Hence, Rostow argued that the process of modernization should be sped up so that traditional societies could skip stages of development and arrive at ‘Western modernity’ within a few decades. Toward this goal, Rostow, together with colleagues like Max Millikan, David Lerner, and Lucian Pye, lobbied for a ‘big push’ in the form of massive financial and technical development assistance (Latham 2000; Gilman 2003). The American social scientists were not the first ones to think about the possibility of accelerating the development process. What distinguished them from their predecessors was that they had the world’s most powerful government on their side. As advisors to the Kennedy administration, they succeeded in translating their arguments into US foreign policy. Under the Kennedy administration, US foreign aid reached its highest level in terms of expenditure, visibility, and confidence (Pearce 2001; Haefele 2003). During the ‘Development Decade’ of the 1960s, public and private actors undertook immense efforts to export what they considered American modernity to countries relevant to US interests. In practice, these efforts ranged from the construction of highway systems and hydroelectric dams to public health campaigns and from university exchanges to train the elites of the new nations to literacy programs on the village level. Architecture, radio programs, newspapers, films, and exhibitions accompanied these efforts, giving a sensual impression of the promise of modernization (Adalet 2018; Ekbladh 2010; Belmonte 2003).

352   Corinna R. Unger However, the high expectations that accompanied these efforts were often disappointed in practice. Very few projects ran according to plan, and the belief that one country’s (idealized) modernity could be transplanted onto another one proved unrealistic. The objects of development projects did not necessarily share the motivation of the aid workers, many of whom had little experience with practical work and little patience with seemingly stubborn individuals. This, in turn, created frustration and contributed to the perception that development was better placed in the hands of governmental and military authorities. The camaraderie American organizations stressed in their policy statements often took a turn toward top-​down approaches and, in some cases, toward coercive measures (Simpson 2008; Connelly 2008, ­chapter 6).

‘Western’ or ‘European’ Development? The difficulty of carrying out development work in a genuinely democratic way weighed especially heavily on those who were, under Cold War terms, part of the Western alliance, which prided itself in being representing the democratic alternative to socialist authoritarianism. Yet the concept of ‘the West’ is much too broad to do justice to the plurality of development interests represented by the countries in the Western sphere of influence. It also hides the tensions between development actors in Washington and Paris, Oslo and Bonn, Lisbon and Brussels about what development was supposed to mean and achieve. Most of the European colonial powers used development assistance to maintain influence on their (former) colonies during the late colonial period and in the aftermath of formal decolonization. Those countries that had lost their overseas colonies much earlier (like Germany and Denmark) or had never had them (like Sweden and Norway) valued the potential of development assistance to establish trade relations with other parts of the world and to improve their international standing. US representatives tried to streamline development assistance approaches and budgets within the Western alliance by establishing the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and by pushing for the set-​up of development consortia for strategically important countries under the auspices of the World Bank. Yet although officially the Western European members of these groups shared Cold War concerns, in practice they prioritized their national interests (Das Gupta 2009; Kröss 2019, ­chapter 3). Financial and economic interests were at the heart of most Western European governments’ development assistance policies. For example, the United Kingdom, in order to maintain its sterling balance, until the late 1950s denied assistance to its former colony India. Only when India’s foreign exchange crisis began to cause geopolitical concern did the British reluctantly change their position. How much aid London granted to New Delhi in the following decades and under which conditions remained dependent on the financial situation of the United Kingdom (Wilven 2019). Furthermore, development aid often served as a door-​opener for European companies trying to sell their products internationally, thereby linking development policy and foreign trade policy. To Western European governments, the corporations’ demands for financial support in investing in so-​called developing countries presented a welcome opportunity to legitimize the use of public funds abroad (Kleinschmidt and Ziegler 2018; Bugow 2019).

Development   353 In terms of foreign policy, many Western European countries employed development assistance to promote their national interests. For instance, the two Germanies carried out an intense competition in the field of development aid to advance their respective positions on the ‘German question’. The Hallstein doctrine, according to which the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) would cut ties with any country that recognized the German Democratic Republic (GDR) diplomatically, determined the practice of West German development aid for decades. Bonn offered technical and financial assistance to newly independent countries in return for their acknowledging the FRG as the sole legitimate Germany, and it took assistance away from those who sided with East Berlin. The GDR countered those efforts by offering assistance to countries that were leaning toward socialism or were in dire need of external support. East Germany presented its assistance simply as ‘German’, which infuriated the West German government (Schmidt 2003; Das Gupta 2004; Lorenzini 2003). For all the Cold War rhetoric that accompanied these interactions, the type of development work representatives of the two sides carried out was in many ways quite similar, from infrastructure projects to training and education to the set-​up of factories and industries, and many of the recipients proved apt at working around the ideological superstructure that was supposed to render it particular (Lorenzini 2019, 48–​49; Trentin 2010). A similar gap between official development labels and actual practice can be observed in the field of joint European assistance. Within the European Economic Community (EEC), Directorate-​General (DG) VIII was responsible for development aid. In its early years, DG VIII was dominated by French personnel who had been active in French colonial development work; they drew on French structures to organize the directorate’s work and continued many of their projects and approaches. Although all EEC members paid into the European Development Fund (EDF), the largest number of projects funded by the EDF were carried out in the former French colonies. The Dutch and the West German governments strongly opposed the French attempt to ‘Europeanize’ France’s national interests and expenditures, and over the years the work and personnel of DG VIII became more diversified in character. Yet what was genuinely ‘European’ about the projects funded by EEC money remained a matter of interpretation (Garavini 2020; Dimier 2014; Rempe 2011). What these cases show is that scholars interested in the history of international relations need to be careful not to confuse the existence of archival documents speaking about development goals and policies with the level of development realities and practices. The fact that a common European directorate produced strategy papers does not mean that a common European development policy was carried out, just as the bipolar nature of the early Cold War did not mean that there were only two possible approaches (one socialist, one capitalist) to development. The case of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries as providers of assistance is telling in this regard.

Socialist Visions of Development For a long time after 1989, the international development work of the socialist countries was buried along with other elements of socialist history that seemingly had lost their

354   Corinna R. Unger relevance. However, as the triumphalist narratives of the 1990s are being historicized and challenged, many historians are rediscovering and reassessing the legacies of ‘global socialism’. Their work has made clear that the socialist world was much more present in the international development arena than previously assumed, and that it would be simplistic to think of socialist assistance as being designed and carried out by Moscow alone. To be sure, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was central to defining and coordinating socialist development aid policies. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev early on recognized the process of decolonization as an opportunity to spread and secure its influence in the world. Drawing on earlier experiences with Soviet development projects in Central Asia, development assistance in the late 1950s and 1960s served as a tool for the USSR to promote the establishment of governmental, administrative, and economic structures in line with socialist beliefs. In many ways, the promise of socialist modernity was similar to its Western equivalent, both conceptually and in terms of presentation. Delegations from the newly independent countries were invited to visit the USSR, travelling exhibitions informed populations abroad about socialism’s technological and cultural achievements, and youth groups established solidarity networks. Whereas the capitalist version of modernity emphasized individual improvement through ambition and achievements, the socialist version prioritized social equality guaranteed by the state (Mark et al. 2020). Socialist development actors systematically drew on the weak spots of Western development assistance while simultaneously advancing their own ideas and models. Criticizing the allegedly neo-​imperial fashion in which Western actors tried to use aid to secure markets and resources, they argued that the development problems the former colonies faced had been caused by the imperial powers. Therefore, the socialist countries would support them in a way that was free of hierarchy and racism (Marung 2017; Lorenzini 2019, c­ hapter 3; Iandolo 2018, 211–​216). To underline this point, they required their aid workers to become acquainted with the recipient countries, to learn the respective languages, and to live and work side by side with the local population—​a stark to contrast to many Western development experts who openly professed to not knowing much about the countries they were working in and who lived in secluded communities. Furthermore, the provision of assistance from socialist countries was not tied to conditions to the degree that Western aid was. At least initially the USSR gave out loans rather than grants to show that development assistance was a transaction between equals, not a paternalistic act of generosity (Rudner 1996, 14; Boden 2008, 122; Lorenzini 2014, 185). Aid-​ in-​kind and barter deals were common practice in socialist development assistance, too. For example, under a credit agreement between the GDR and Guinea signed in 1959, the GDR would carry out construction work and deliver specialized technologies to Guinea, the expenses of which Guinea would repay by delivering fruit to the GDR at prices above world market prices (Lorenzini 2019, 48–​49). For many of the socialist countries, agreements of this type offered an opportunity to circumvent, at least in part, the system put in place by COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, also CMEA), the organization that coordinated economic activities within the socialist bloc (Calori et al. 2020). Being able to negotiate bilateral trade agreements was a clear advantage to the socialist countries—​and notably similar to the ways in the Western European countries used development assistance to promote their economic interests.

Development   355

Adjusting Development to a Changing World Order: The 1970s The Soviet Union’s and the socialist countries’ willingness to provide development assistance to Asian, African, and Latin American countries decreased over the years. Their representatives found themselves confronted with national elites who did not necessarily welcome the ideological baggage that accompanied socialist aid and who insisted on following their own visions of development rather than copying the Soviet (or any other pre-​defined) model (Iandolo 2012, 701–​703; Nunan 2018, 227–​235; Burton 2020). The USSR’s growing financial and economic problems drove the Politburo’s decision to delegate responsibility for development work to its allies. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the GDR used the opportunity to gain more independence from Moscow and to conclude aid agreements, which they hoped would improve their respective economic and trade situations (Lorenzini 2014; Trecker 2020). They, too, were suffering from increasing levels of indebtedness and began to demand repayment of the credits they had granted earlier. In one case, ‘Contract workers from Mozambique had to work off their state’s debts to the GDR in East Berlin like modern indentured labourers’ (Mark 2020, 219). Under such conditions, the promise of solidarity and equality in the framework of socialist modernity quickly lost meaning. In the Western world, too, did established patterns of development work come under increasing pressure. The largest provider of aid, the United States, tried to reduce its expenditures in the context of the Vietnam War. In 1969, US President Nixon, calling for ‘new directions’ in development, argued for a more prominent role of private actors in the field, thereby signaling the partial withdrawal of the US government (Macekura 2015, 150–​ 151). Apart from the financial burden, the Vietnam War had undermined trust in the ability of the United States to promote development in peaceful ways. At the time, the notion of industrial modernity, with its emphasis on technology, urbanity, and individuality, came under fire from the members of counter-​cultural movements in the Western world who questioned the desirability of a modernity that favoured technocracy over the good life. Critics argued that modernization theory’s emphasis on social engineering and big-​push schemes was misguided. Many development projects had unintended side-​effects, ranging from ecological degradation to social conflicts, and the aid often did not reach those who needed it the most (Macekura 2020). For example, in Latin America, where the Kennedy administration had initiated the so-​ called Alliance for Progress in order to contain socialist tendencies, economic growth rates in some cases at least initially surpassed expectations, but the interventionist elements of US aid served as a catalyst to existing domestic conflicts (Latham 2011, 124–​133). Latin American intellectuals and politicians had long argued for a different path toward development, based on a structuralist understanding of the reasons for the region’s economic ‘underdevelopment’ (Love 2019; Fajardo 2019, 55–​60). In the 1940s and 1950s the concept of import substitution industrialization (ISI) had dominated the agenda of many Latin American countries. Although ISI had notable effects, the countries in question were still dependent to a large degree on the world market structures that privileged the North. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s representatives of so-​called developing countries envisioned an adjustment

356   Corinna R. Unger of the global economic system. This idea was at the heart of the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Using the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as their basis, the members of the Group of 77 (representatives of so-​called developing countries, many of which were part of the Non-​Aligned Movement) demanded sovereignty over their natural resources, improved terms of trade, better access to global markets, and large-​scale development assistance to help the ‘peripheral’ economies to industrialize. Importantly, all of these measures were supposed to take place within the framework of the capitalist world economy, as the concept of the NIEO was not about overthrowing the capitalist system but about reforming it (Gilman 2015; Garavini 2015). For a few years, the demands voiced by UNCTAD and others were debated widely. The Soviet Union supported the so-​called developing countries in their critique of Western governments and international organizations for strategic reasons but came to realize that the NIEO was not in line with ideas about a socialist world economy. Meanwhile, most of the Western governments were explicitly opposed to compromises in terms of income, trade conditions, and standards of living. Some, however, argued that the call for a new order was an opportunity to consider alternative ideas of and approaches to development. The enthusiastic ambition that had characterized development work in the previous decades made room for more pragmatic approaches. Critics of mainstream development thinking argued that solving everyday problems should have precedence over grand schemes to build ‘modernity’. Instead of serving the interests of an elite minority, development should be geared at the majority by providing education, health care, and anti-​poverty measures, they believed. The so-​ called basic needs approach that became prominent over the course the 1970s reflected this thinking. According to its proponents, poverty was not merely the expression of a lack of development but the obstacle that kept development from happening. Only if individuals had access to basic resources (material as well as immaterial) could they participate in and contribute to development in a meaningful way. In practice, this meant creating employment opportunities, improving living conditions in rural areas, and paying attention to women, who, for the longest time, had not been regarded as development actors in their own right (Macekura 2020). Concepts such as ‘basic needs’, ‘integrated rural development’, and ‘women in development’ emerged from these efforts. For all their promise, they proved difficult to realize in practice, as they depended on the existence of flexible and responsive administrations, the availability of resources, and the willingness of all parties involved to participate. As long as financial resources were available this was at least a theoretical possibility, but when many of the industrialized countries experienced recessions in the context of the oil crises, development assistance budgets were heavily reduced and ambitious plans shelved. Meanwhile, many of the so-​called developing countries that had acquired cheap credits in the early 1970s in the second half of the decade faced a mounting debt crisis, and authoritarian regimes took power in several African countries. These developments fed the stereotype of corrupt postcolonial elites and added to the notion of ‘failed states’, which implied a normative model of the ‘modern’ state along Western lines (Unger 2018, 144). Under these circumstances, the political support for alternative approaches to development decreased, and those voices gained in strength that called for macro-​economic approaches to dealing with structural inequalities. It was in this context that structural adjustment lending (SAL) rose to prominence in organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Kröss 2019, chapters. 5 and 6; Babb 2009). Importantly, the

Development   357 macroeconomic interventions were to be carried out by international financial organizations rather than by national governments, whose allegedly overbearing presence in public life came under fire from both the left and the right. The partial withdrawal of the state also had the effect of strengthening the position of non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) in the development arena. The European Community (EC) set up the EC-​NGO Liaison Committee in 1976 to coordinate joint development projects, thereby delegating some of its responsibilities to non-​traditional actors (O’Sullivan 2014, 209–​210). Finally, in the context of détente, the use of development aid as a Cold War foreign policy tool lost much of its earlier meaning, and several joint development projects involving representatives from East, West, and South were carried out in the 1970s (Lorenzini 2014, 191–​192). The political downgrading of development assistance created opportunities for new actors to become involved in the field. Already in the 1960s had the governments of Algeria and Cuba begun to carry out what is now called South-​South assistance. Ideologically and politically, this kind of work drew heavily on anti-​imperial and liberationist ideas of armed struggle; hence, military assistance ranked high on the agenda. Though not extensive in quantitative terms, these activities had a strong symbolic effect as they signaled that development was no longer considered a privilege of the North but could be turned into a weapon against it (Hatzky 2015; Byrne 2016, ­chapter 2). Much less overtly political in appearance but no less influential in the long-​term was the People’s Republic of China entry into the development aid field since the 1960s, when the Chinese government began to carry out large-​ scale infrastructure projects on the African continent. The logic behind this work, which continues until the present, was a combination of ideational and geopolitical interests. The Beijing government tried to use development aid to undermine the global color line, and it argued that Afro-​Asian solidarity was a feasible way of bypassing the Cold War dichotomy. At the same time, development assistance gave China an opportunity to strengthen its international position, not the least vis-​à-​vis the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Sino-​Soviet split (Brazinsky 2017, ­chapter 9). A similar interest in international visibility and acknowledgement was the reason for several countries from the Middle East to participate in international development. For example, Kuwait, which had grown rich due to its oil exports, began to pay into multilateral development funds in the 1970s (Garavini 2011, 477). What these phenomena indicate is a trend toward the diversification of the development field that was in line with the Cold War shift from bipolarity to polycentrism, and more generally with the pluralization of international relations in the context of decolonization and accelerating globalization.

Conclusion What can the history of international development ideas and policies in the twentieth century tell us about international relations and vice versa? The most important finding is the existence of interdependence between the development regimes and the international relations regimes in place at different times. Development policies in many instances mirrored the international relations structures characteristic of a specific time period, ranging from the imperial pre-​1945 order to the post-​1945 Cold War order. When imperial powers aimed at maintaining their geopolitical interests abroad, they employed development to achieve this

358   Corinna R. Unger goal. When the superpowers tried to secure their new spheres of influence, they drew on development. At the same time, development shaped the way in which the international system looked and functioned, and in some cases challenged and changed existing structures. Development projects in the late colonial period were supposed to stabilize imperial rule but in practice increased resistance against the colonial powers and contributed to the radicalization of anticolonial politics, thereby at least indirectly accelerating the process of decolonization. Similarly, the superpowers’ efforts to draw the new nations into their alliances by providing development assistance often undermined the power claims of the two sides, which, in the long term, strengthened the polycentric tendencies the Cold War, as a global conflict, had always contained. By looking not only at the political agendas tied to development aid but also at the ways in which those agendas translated into practice it becomes clear that categories like ‘imperialism’, ‘Cold War’, or ‘the West’ do not suffice to explain complex phenomena because they tend to hide the variety of interests, actors, and effects involved. This point relates to the volume’s interest in granularity: Only if we take into account a variety of levels of interaction—​by looking not only at the providers of aid but also at the recipients, not only at the superpowers but also at their (dissenting) allies—​can we arrive at an understanding of the international situation at a given time that does justice to the complexity it was characterized by. Something similar is true of the emergence of the field of development over time, which reflected and, simultaneously, contributed to the pluralization and diversification of international politics. This tendency concerned not only the growing number of nation-​states but also the growing influence of non-​state actors, which underlines the need to understand the prominence of the nation-​state as a historical phenomenon. As the history of development shows, national governments were decisive in establishing the international development system in the early postwar decades, and they remained influential in the following decades. Yet they were never the only type of political actor involved, nor had they ever been. International organizations and NGOs as well as private actors played an influential role in shaping the international development field. To understand the system of development as part of the international system, all of the actors involved need to be accounted for. Doing so is not always easy, given the unequal availability of archival material and the detours this makes necessary in terms of research. Yet the seemingly onerous detours often produce the most valuable insights because they challenge established assumptions and open up fresh perspectives. With regard to the notion of modernity, the study of development in international history and International Relations offers two interrelated insights: It shows how ideas about modernity evolved over time, often in line with or in response to changes in the international order, and it highlights the power of ideas. From today’s point of view, it might seem difficult to understand that the promise of modernization in the mid-​twentieth century could rally voters, politicians, and the public alike, and that extensive administrative structures were set up and immense amounts of expertise and money invested to realize this promise. This was no singular case of real-​existing idealism but a political situation like many others. Yet historically speaking it is notable that the trust in the power of technology, planning, and public commitment to progress and modernization was so large that it became a reality whose structures are still in place today. The rhetoric of and the approaches to development have changed (or at least they are presented as being different

Development   359 from earlier ones), yet the underlying notion that development can be induced and that it must take place remains alive. It continues to shape international relations in manifold ways, from G20 debates about carbon emissions by so-​called emerging economies to the recent trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union. The debates about who is allowed to develop and to modernize under which conditions have not come to an end yet; in fact, no end is in sight.

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362   Corinna R. Unger Speich Chassé. D. 2013. Die Erfindung des Bruttosozialprodukts: Globale Ungleichheit in der Wissensgeschichte der Ökonomie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Trecker, M. 2020. ‘The ‘Grapes of Cooperation’? Bulgarian and East German Plans to Build a Syrian Cement Industry from Scratch’. In Between East and South: Spaces of Interaction in the Globalizing Economy of the Cold War, eds. A. Calori et al., 33–​58. Berlin: De Gruyter. Trentin, M. 2010. Engineers of Modern Development: East German Experts in Ba’thist Syria, 1965–​1972. Padova: Cooperativa Libraria Editrice Università di Padova. Tricoire, D., ed. 2017. Enlightened Colonialism: Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Unger, C. R. 2018. International Development: A Postwar History. London: Bloomsbury. Watt, C. A., and M. Mann, eds. 2011. Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development. London: Anthem Press. Westad, O. A. 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press. Westad, O. A. 2013. ‘The Cold War and the Third World’. In The Cold War in the Third World, ed. R. J. McMahon, 208–​219. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilde, R. 2008. International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilven, S. M. 2019. ‘The Indo-​British Aid Relationship, 1947–​1990’. PhD dissertation, King’s College London.

Chapter 25

Governing Fi na nc e Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young Introduction The international governance of finance is a type of historically unique social relation. If capitalist modernity is characterized by the separation of states and markets as distinct social institutions, financial governance is a negotiation of the political and economic power defined through those forms. In this chapter, our aim is to provide a brief descriptive overview of how financial governance has evolved over time. Rather than a chronological description of major events, we offer a broad sketch of international governance arrangements in finance, from the perspective of two different kinds of governance, formal institutional arrangements on the one hand, and informal governance practices on the other.1 Most human activity is governed in some way. Activity of private exchange between individuals or their cooperative ventures (for example, firms) are always subject to a set of social institutions that generate regularities and constraints on the range of possible choices available to actors. With respect to formal institutional arrangements, we focus on governance arrangements that occurred through recognized, official bureaucratic organizations, such as multilateral bodies and transnational standard-​setting bodies. Economic activity is also governed through informal institutional arrangements of all kinds. A panoply of social institutions act as norms and ‘unofficial’ social structures that nevertheless play a central role in governing finance. Money and finance are influenced by many facets of human life and historical processes; we limit our focus to two specific informal institutional arrangements that have pervaded finance’s historical development and continue to shape its governance today: Anglo-​American relations and gender. Financial governance arrangements are highly complex, but they have generally followed a particular trajectory. Formal governance has been built up over time in three distinct historical phases since the partial dissolution of the liberal imperial arrangements of the nineteenth century. In what follows we detail key developments in this history, and we emphasize that the thread running through it has a particular pattern. We argue that the way to interpret financial governance is that there has been a ‘tethered escalation’ of governance arrangements over time. What escalates is the public-​private regulatory dialectic. The globalization of financial activity has yielded formal governance responses at that level, albeit in

364    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young different forms, over time. This process escalates in that governance responses, even where the intent is to constrain globalization for social purpose, generate new conditions which facilitate the further globalization of financial activity, thereby generating new governance responses, and so on. This process is tethered in two respects. First, the actual content and scope of financial governance responses is conditioned by already existing governance arrangements, in a manner reflecting historical path dependence. Second, the content of financial practices and governance responses are tethered to deeper social norms and discourses about what the scope of appropriate practice and governance might look like. This second form of tethering is just as historical as the first, since social norms and discourses are fundamentally inherited social institutions. For example, the particular ways that gender as a social institution pervades the operation of finance and of financial governance pre-​dates the events it informs. Hegemonic masculinities that operate on Wall Street today or in the City of London take on localized forms, yet were not born exclusively in those locales or in the prime of their ascent, but from other, broader developments rooted in capitalist modernity. In the first section we describe three phases of the tethered escalation of international governance development in finance, with an emphasis on the private-​public dialectic. First, we provide an overview of the nascent efforts to create multilateral institutions throughout the early twentieth century (the first phase), culminating in two and a half decades of financial governance via the Bretton Woods institutions (second phase), followed by its collapse, re-​ purposing, and transformation with the advent of new transnational governance institutions (third phase). In the second section, we shift our approach to granularity to consider how global finance is also governed through two prominent informal social institutions. First, we describe how Anglo-​American relations rooted in settler colonial expansion provide advantages to those states and actors connected by this institution. Second, we examine how financial actors and institutions are tethered by gender, which has historically served to exclude women and make finance a province of hegemonic masculinities, but is in flux in the present era of post-​crisis governance.

Three Phases of International Governance Development To narrate the history of financial governance as an escalating public-​private dialectic begs the question: which form of governance emerged first? Many public-​sector governance arrangements have developed through the transformation of existing private governance arrangements. For instance, historically central banks did not emerge as state-​governed entities that control the monetary supply, but rather often came out of private sector collective governance models that reach back into the Middle Ages (see Munro 2003). In city-​ states such as Venice that were controlled by a merchant oligarchy in the Middle Ages, the payments system was organized through private channels, until around 1282, when control was centralized by what we would now recognize as public authorities. London in the late seventeenth century featured a network of goldsmith bankers who formed a system of mutual acceptance and interbank clearing and monitored one another’s behaviour (Quinn

Governing Finance   365 1997). The United States (US) Federal Reserve system, while established in 1913 through an act of the US Congress, was preceded by a system of private governance arrangements known as the New York Clearinghouse (see Gorton 1985). In addition to central banks, private individuals, and their ‘guild-​like’ systems of organization offered governance solutions for stock exchanges prior to their public regulation (Stringham 2015). While these examples illustrate an eventual transition to public governance, much governance still today happens via private sector activity, including at the international level (Haufler 2001). Private financial market institutions can also be understood as political organizations in their own right. Walter Mattli (2019) takes such a view in recent work that explains how dramatic changes fragmenting financial market structure have been instigated through the private authority of market actors. On the other hand, many accept that public authority has undergirded the historical development and operation of private finance in numerous ways (North and Weingast 1989; Abdelal 2007).2 As North and Weingast (1989) describe, state credibility and accountability as expressed through governance arrangements were necessary precursors for the creation of securities markets in England. Because our focus here is on the international level developments, the starting point for our discussion is the beginnings of formalized international cooperation in public financial governance, which was built on existing frameworks of both public and private governance at the state level and below.

The Origins of International Cooperation in Financial Governance It would be an exaggeration to say that the globalization of private financial activity was only lightly governed by states in the past, because governance structures are always present. But international systems of governance were largely limited to inter-​state norms, understood codes of conduct among financial elites, and quasi-​formal impositions of regulatory authority nested in the (British) hegemon, such as the Gold Standard. Governance as it would come to be understood in the postwar era, as the execution of regulation to not just grease the wheels of capital flows but to constrain and redirect them for social purpose, was not part of liberal-​imperial repertoires. Central banks were very steadfast in their perceived limitations on what they could do, and while there is extensive evidence of networking among private financial actors, central bankers did not themselves organize into clubs until the creation of the Bank for International Settlements in 1930. Even then, governments and existing international organizations lacked the social incentives, or even the mental models among elites, to govern international finance in any systematic way. Social structures also did not demand it, in the sense that ruling elites had other ways to buffer themselves and their fortunes from market fluctuations. Shocks in economic activity could be relatively easily met with labour suppression, and the demands of electorates were a negligible consideration given the legal restraints on suffrage and popular democracy. Governance arrangements in this period were also tethered by informal social structures: a consensus among Northern elites about what finance was for and how it should behave (e.g. it should be unrestricted), who should bear the costs of financial crisis (e.g. the working masses) and what appropriate action might be (e.g. exchange rate manipulation is out of the question).

366    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young The lack of multilateral cooperation in general influenced this dearth of international governance. The interwar period disrupted not only British hegemony in finance, but also the largely informal foundations of liberal imperial order in general. Through new formal multilateral institutions such as the League of Nations, there were initiatives at work to address global financial governance systematically for the first time. This can be seen as a first stage in the private-​public regulatory dialectic: while the League’s Covenant made no reference to economic management, and was concerned with international security issues, it did create Economic and Financial Committees to explore this option. Because countries were unwilling to delegate responsibilities to an intergovernmental body, these committees were made up of private individuals (often, senior civil servants) selected by the League Council (Hale and Held 2012; Clavin and Wessels 2005). As novel as the League’s Economic and Financial committees were at the time for generating some standards, keeping statistics and sorting through international payments systems, they did not generate policy for international economic issues beyond coordination. This weakness was made more evident following the collapse of the League, and thus the transformation in the United Nations endeavored to create new, and stronger, institutions once the opportunity arose (see Hale et al. 2013). After the Second World War and the collapse of the League, the private-​public dialectic witnessed an escalation. Disruption to the institutional frameworks of the liberal international order through both the Depression and the Second World War, combined with enhanced democratic participation under conditions of early welfare states meant that social demands for financial regulation were matched with new organizations that were aligned with these demands. The post-​Second World War settlement through Bretton Woods meant that systems of global financial governance were built up in a specialized, bureaucratic multilateral setting, to encourage the ‘embedded liberal’ approach of that period (Ruggie 1982). Dominant ideas about economic management—​and in particular about the wisdom of free movements of finance—​were emerging. The decolonization efforts under way during the Second World War and in the two decades that followed also called for new, much more interventionist, government policies. As Allied war victory approached, world leaders sought to organize new forms of formal multilateral cooperation that were both an extension of Keynesian ideas to the international realm and part of a wide recognition that better, more formal, multilateral economic governance was necessary to rebuild the postwar economy. The enthusiasm for internationalism and formal rules that would undergird economic management reflected the widespread recognition that multilateral economic cooperation was superior to the kind of interstate disorder and regressive nationalism characterized by the interwar period (Sundaram and Rodriguez 2011). The Bretton Woods conference, formally the United Nations Conference on Monetary and Financial Affairs, was set up in 1944 to establish such a system (Helleiner 2016). Over 700 delegates from all of the Allied countries attended what was an ambitious multilateral move to secure the postwar global economic order on firmer footing. A compromise was struck between liberal economic institutions such as free markets and social protection—​ an ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982) that was to be pursued not only through national economy policies but, importantly, through an international economic policy environment. The effort was not just one of powerful hegemons, the UK and the US, arranging the new global economic system. As Helleiner (2016) has shown, the Bretton Woods architecture was

Governing Finance   367 also a product of many officials and analysts from the Global South who sought to reconcile the existing liberal economic order with their own developmental aspirations. Bretton Woods arrangements became the dominant set of governance institutions for the postwar period. In practice, this amounted to the promotion of economic policies such as exchange rate coordination to generate stability, but also a commitment to freer trade in goods across borders; likewise, financial transactions would be restricted internationally through policies such as capital controls. The new system would be supported by the new hegemon to replace a severely weakened imperial Britain: the US. In the establishment of the new multilateral institutions that came out of the Bretton Woods conference, the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (which became known as the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there were of course institutional design preferences baked in that would favour US interests (Babb 2003; Dreher and Jensen 2007; Broz 2008). The Bretton Woods institutions and their evolution after the Second World War meant a significant ratcheting up of global public authority, and a new phase of the private-​public dialectic was set. However, even before the Bretton Woods collapse in the early 1970s, the antithesis to this cooperative public governance was incipient in the reemergence of global finance. Key to this development was the rise of financial activity related to the Eurodollar market, which illustrated the profitable advantages of deregulated financial centers like the City of London. Not unrelatedly, the capital controls included in Bretton Woods regime became both politically and economically untenable in an interdependent world (Helleiner 1994). In turn, there were two consequences to this rise of private financial activity that propelled further public governance response. First, existing multilateral governance institutions transformed, not to constrain financial market activity but to accelerate it and deepen its globalization. The second consequence of these historical developments—​both the breakdown of the then-​traditional Bretton Woods arrangements and the transformation of the Bank and the Fund—​led to a situation in which new regulatory challenges emerged (Seabrooke 2006; Babb 2003; Babb and Kentikelenis 2019). This dynamic led to the rise of a variety of new transnational financial regulatory bodies, which we describe in the next section.

The Historical Evolution of Transnational Governance Organizations Precisely at the time when the IMF and World Bank were transforming to encourage economic liberalization and increased capital mobility, other, new institutions emerged to fill in the ‘governance gaps’ that were created by the resurgence of global finance in the post-​ Bretton Woods period. While these emerged in a relatively ad hoc way, many of them were coordinated through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which meant that these governance responses were tethered to the historically conditioned choices to keep an international club of central bankers in operation. It was in this way that the private-​public dialectic was ratcheted up again, in the 1970s and 1980s.

368    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young Over the course of this period, highly informal ‘transgovernmental’ bodies such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the International Organization for Securities Commissions (IOSCO) emerged—​new forms of international cooperation that sought to govern financial flows and financial institutions through forms of standard-​setting. In contrast to the large bureaucratic multilateral organizations like the IMF and World Bank, these are often considered ‘transnational’ or ‘trans-​governmental’ (see Keohane and Nye 1977) in character, in the sense that they are rule-​making institutions which are organized above the level of the state but which are not strictly composed of state representatives, and do not possess coercive authority (see Kahler and Lake 2009, 269–​270). These institutions are often relatively small administrative bureaucracies but coalesce as a kind of organized professional network adjacent to formal state authority. These developments of ‘regulatory globalization’ (Macey 2003) meant that governmental authority was extending itself in new ways to ‘match’ what was happening in private financial activity. The increased international banking in the 1970s and 1980s was met by new international banking financial standards. Indeed, international standards—​such as regulatory standards for banking, and sets of procedures for how cross-​border financial calamities were to be worked out—​became an important cornerstone of financial governance (Young 2014). Many transnational bodies have also morphed over time—​most significantly many increased their memberships to include the full Group of 20 (G20) after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008–​09, while previously their memberships were restricted to the more exclusive ‘G10’ (actually 13 countries, composing US, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan). The most dramatic reconstitution also reflects regulatory escalation in the form of the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), which was established in 1999 in the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis as a deliberative forum for big agendas concerning global financial stability. After the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008–​09, the FSF was reconstituted as the Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a stronger mandate from the G20, and changed composition to reflect the G20. The globalization of regulatory public authority was not the only force that emerged in this period. Private financial activity responded to the new environment, as the private-​public dialectic continued. As regulatory globalization escalated, new private financial sector associations sprang up that worked to track and influence the new transnational regulatory organizations that emerged. A prominent example of this is the Institute of International Finance (IIF), which began in 1983 as a result of the international debt crisis of the year before, and sought to develop a specialized business association for internationally active financial institutions, in particular banks. Since then, it has worked to become a major interlocutor with both multilateral institutions such as the IMF and with transnational regulatory authorities such as the BCBS. Another example is the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), which formed in 1985 in direct response to the need for standards and advocacy in derivatives contracts. Aside from acting as a major advocate on behalf of industry, it has also generated its own systems of private governance for the working out of derivatives contracts, called the ISDA Master Netting Agreement. Both the IIF and ISDA have played major roles in financial governance (Young 2012; Underhill and Zhang 2008; Tsingou 2008). The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), formed in 2001, is effectively a private international club of professionals which operates in such as a way as to generate international standards for the industry. All of these private organizations—​the IIF, ISDA, and IASB—​advocate for international standards and attempt to ‘match’ the regulatory

Governing Finance   369 globalization of public authorities with their own activity, in a manner commensurate with regulatory escalation. The international standards that these organizations generate constitute prime examples of international ‘soft law’ arrangements (Abbott and Snidal 2000; Brummer 2011). While most financial regulatory bodies at the global level have no formal legal-​jurisdictional power, there are penalties for non-​ compliance. International financial markets use these standards as benchmarks for quality, encouraging their use, and international organizations deploy them as standards for country-​level monitoring purposes but also (in the case of the IMF) as part of conditionality agreements (see Young 2014). Importantly, transnational financial regulatory institutions exist in interdependent relationships with other institutions.3 The global escalation of financial governance has thus involved both multilateral organizations as well as comparatively informal transnational governance institutions. The particular historical development of these various institutions together, but especially the rise of transnational financial governance bodies, has given rise to a relatively de-​centred structure of governance (see Slaughter 2004; Martinez-​Diez and Woods 2009; Davies and Green 2008; Hale et al. 2013). This characterization is perhaps appropriate most of all because global financial governance is very much a ‘grown’ order, not a ‘made’ one: a product of human action but not of human design (Held and Young 2013). While the emergence of particular institutions at particular times is historically idiosyncratic, the general and long-​run pattern has been that as financial activity escalated in global reach, new institutions emerged to match this process, leading to new organizations to interlocute with them.

Informal Social Institutions As much as formal organizations are key to the development of global financial governance, informal social institutions have also profoundly shaped this history. Formal governance arrangements reflect not just the preferences of actors at a given period of time, and the balance of power among them, but also the social attitudes, norms and routines that comprise shared understandings about how the economy functions. Any governance response toward financial activity may reflect a complex concatenation of demands, arising from functional requirements of governing capitalist development, and social pressures and incentives on the leaderships of organizations, from sovereign states to international organizations. Governance responses are also tethered, in the sense that the range of possible options are constrained. They are constrained by the conditioning choices made in the past and also by broader social norms, ideologies and schematics which shape those making choices. By informal social institutions, here we specifically consider the axiomatic systems of gender, race, and nationality. Though these elements may manifest in official codifications at different times and places, ultimately they overflow the boundaries of the formal. They are thus part of governance in two senses; they both impose constraints on formal institutions, and also structure the transnational practices of finance more broadly. Their analysis requires a different approach to granularity from that taken previously. Whereas in the first section, we focused on key shifts in a dialectic, in the following section we examine both gender and

370    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young Anglo-​American relations as tethering continuities through longer stretches of the history of global financial governance.

Anglo-​A merican Relations Anglo-​American relations are an informal social institution of collective identity. The bond between the Anglo-​American countries of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is part racialized cultural identity, part cooperative alliance, part infrastructure and distributive flows (Vucetic 2011; Fichtner 2017). Some aspects are formalized, but the full scope is informal. Much security-​oriented scholarship finds the roots of the US-​UK ‘special relationship’ in the Second World War experience and its aftermath, yet the broader Anglo-​American connection is rooted in the earlier period of imperial and settler colonial expansion of Great Britain (Belich 2009). The shared heritage of these five countries begets similar legal and socioeconomic systems, as well as a unique and extensive shared global security alliance. Anglo-​American relations constitute the broader context for the postwar transition of hegemonic order between the UK to the US. Some narratives portray periods of financialization and financial crisis as historically interwoven with a linear series of power transitions between single states (Arrighi and Moore 2001; Lee 2014). However, recent work on Anglo-​America encourages a more transnational and relational view of contemporary US hegemony in finance. Anglo-​American relations are a social institution governing finance that tethers these states to a present position of financial dominance in the global system. This dominance is evident through Fichtner’s (2017) examination of structural power indicators such as the proportion of shares in different financial markets. Key indicators that challenge prevalent decline narratives are the currency composition of foreign exchange reserves, and the share of total global wealth. There are distinct Anglo-​American corporate communities of board interlocks as well as distinct Anglo-​American investment networks (Fichtner 2017, 27; Heemskerk and Takes 2016). The Anglo-​American domination of the financial community imprints also onto the professional habitus of those who work in investment banks and financial firms (Schwartz 2019, 8). The historical institutions of imperialism are an important part of the background conditions that have translated into Anglo-​American financial relations today. Consequently, the situation of dominance described previously does not imply any intrinsic cultural superiority, but rather derives from aspects of historical development of the global economy and its governance. Connections can be made to imperial institutions through a significant body of scholarship on Anglo-​imperial history which takes note that “Finance was a vital element in the power relations that developed between settler societies and the metropole” (Attard and Dilley 2013, 3; others include Belich 2009; Cain and Hopkins 2016; Dilley 2012; Magee and Thompson 2010). Belich (2009) offers a ‘rhythmic’ explanation of cycles of British colonial expansion into the Dominions and the US, followed by economic busts that retrenched ties to the imperial homeland through ‘export rescues’. These ties encompassed what he describes as the economic and cultural unity of Greater Britain, which included a marked degree of US stock availability in London markets, a prevalence of American banks in London, and a society of Anglo-​Saxon elite uniting ‘titled British

Governing Finance   371 spouses’ with prosperous colonial settlers through the institution of heterosexual marriage (480). Settler colonial and financial institutions were thus deeply intertwined. For instance, Belich (463) argues against the idea that protectionism in the Dominions was evidence of their independence, emphasizing instead that it enabled the generation of funds to service financial obligations in London. Dilley (2012) interrogates the ‘empire effect’ that created more favourable terms for British investors in the settler colonies, finding it to be a result of political institutions, social networks, and cultural ties. Further engagement of this historical scholarship by political economists would be welcome to deepen understandings of the historical institutional roots of contemporary Anglo-​American financial relations.4 Examining Anglo-​America as an informal social institution governing finance has implications for many of the conventional narratives of twentieth and twenty-​first century political economy. For instance, it reframes the last major hegemonic transition between economic powers as not only a disruption, but also importantly, as a continuity. Though the global financial system certainly evolved through this transition, its formal governance is nevertheless marked by efforts of the Anglo-​American alliance to shape and preserve its advantages. While many accounts of the Bretton Woods process focus on the differences between US and UK positions, others emphasize the significance of their common ground on many issues of an international monetary system (Andrews 2008; Helleiner 1994); for Helleiner the more striking opposition of the negotiations was that between the official representatives of UK and US on one side, and the private sector on the other, personified by New York bankers who wanted to limit state commitment to capital controls. Manifestations of the Anglosphere are evident also in the institutional history of the transnational club-​ based organizations of financial governance. Oatley and Nabors (1998) convincingly argued that the original Basel Accord, put together by the BCBS mentioned previously, was not straightforwardly a multilateral response to systemic risks of financial globalization, but rather the result of a bilateral power play by the US and UK to impose limits on Japan. The Anglo-​American alliance also arguably translated into the way the private-​public dialectic operated in other, more subtle ways. One example of this is the informal membership criteria of the transnational organizations that have been such an important part of financial governance over the last several decades. Until the early 2000s, they were predominately an informal orchestration of cooperative agreement among only ten–​13 countries—​the ‘G10’ countries. Prior to the 2008–​2009 North Atlantic financial crisis, this meant that Western Europe, Canada, the US, and Japan essentially wrote the regulatory rules, with other public authorities only able to provide feedback in exceptional circumstances. This changed in 2008 when many of the transnational financial governance organizations expanded their memberships—​at the behest of the G20—​to the full G20 (Helleiner and Pagliari 2009; Young 2017). The endurance of the incumbent financial powers over such a long period speaks to a crucial way in which informal institutions, such as the Anglo-​American alliance as well as dominance of the Global North, served to ‘tether’ global financial governance arrangements. The shared racial and cultural context of the Anglo-​American network provides a foundation for the strong transnational elite ties that exist across the North Atlantic (Carroll and Carsons 2003; Carroll and Sapinski 2010). These ties inform the ways in which governance practices work themselves out among North Atlantic states, and especially within Anglo-​ America. Elite sociality is arguably strongest where cultural homophily is strong. Thus it is probably no coincidence that the influence of this region can be seen most clearly in transnational governance, which relies on more informal mechanisms of interaction, than the

372    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young multilateral form of governance, which relies on more formal interactions and a heavier emphasis on administrative bureaucratic procedures.

Gender in Financial Governance Within the Anglo and European contexts that gave rise to modern financial activity, gender is another informal social institution significantly tethering governance. Women’s exclusion from financial markets since at least the seventeenth century to some extent mirrored a broader historical exclusion of women from public life in Europe and later in the US, but finance has also been exceptional in both the extremity and resilience of its underrepresentation of women. This extends also to both the multilateral and transnational governance institutions discussed previously, where in 2011, women’s representation within most organizations was below 10% (Schuberth and Young 2011).5 Exclusion became ‘common sense’ through the strong identification of masculine norms with financial practices embodying sometimes contradictory characteristics, such as risk-​taking and rationality (De Goede 2005; Assassi 2009; Griffin 2013). To analyze gender as a governance institution in finance additionally reveals the ways that financial activities are enabled by a broader social order, and produce social meanings and inequalities within that order. Gender institutions deeply inform the character of capitalist modernity. The centrality of finance within capitalist development thus means that gender has helped establish the norms and routines by which financial operations function. On a very fundamental level, gender difference is integral to the modern separation of public spheres of production via markets in partnership with states, and private spheres of reproduction in the domestic household, as many feminist scholars of social reproduction describe (Bakker 2007; Roberts 2016; Bhattacharya 2017). Assassi (2009, 80) depicts how crucial steps in the development of modern financial markets were enabled by the commodification and privatization of property, which itself ‘required changes in women’s earlier common law rights, which were perceived to be a “clog to alienability” and interfered with the process of capital accumulation through commercial and financial ventures’. Consequently, financial development proceeded through pathways such as the expansion and evolution of financial instruments of Dutch origin that preceded the industrial revolution, as well as the creation of the Bank of England and new avenues linking private credit networks to public paper credit. The liberal political theory that accompanied these transformations advocated equality for some, yet did not significantly challenge ‘enduring pre-​liberal beliefs’ of women’s naturalized inferiority and incapacity for public life (Coole 1986, 139; see also Assassi 2009, 58–​59). Rather, these beliefs and associated norms were integrated into the everyday practices of economies. Here the prior legacy of European gender institutions tethered new financial practices and forms of credit at their inception, and accordingly excluded women across classes. Hegemonic masculinities, while always contingent and negotiated in context, have endured as an institution shaping finance to the present day (Connel 1995; Assassi 2009). Indeed, they have taken some blame for financial crises in the late twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries. This is due in part to the continued associations of masculine power with accumulation; masculine discourses of success in finance ‘appear to encourage particular interests and preoccupations that coalesce around pursuing high salaries and bonuses, both

Governing Finance   373 of which can be seen to have fueled and fired the crisis’ (Knights and Tullberg 2014, 513). It is also the case that hegemonic masculine norms are pervasive through both ‘high finance’ and through the everyday practices of societies, for example in whether distributional effects are politicized or not, or simply in the frames that actors use to see and act in the world (Predmore 2020). For example, Anglo-​American hegemonic masculinities operate very implicitly through ideas about risk and rationality in finance. De Goede (2005, 38) illustrates this when she relates Alan Greenspan’s lament of the ‘irrational exuberance’ behind asset inflation to eighteenth-​century English political debate over credit. In her reading, Greenspan’s phrase evokes depictions by Daniel Defoe and others of Lady Credit as a feminized, unpredictable temptress who must be managed by rational accounting techniques of men in finance. When the rationality of homo economicus fails to sufficiently manage risk, the system does not operate as it should. Similarly, gender lurks in what Griffin (2013, 26) describes as the ‘bipolarity’ of attitudes towards risk in institutional explanations of financial crisis; risk is both a source of profit in finance, but also a factor that may be exploited to detriment. Such depictions of risk and rationality are often closely tied to notions of normatively appropriate and socially-​sanctioned financial behaviours by actors at the micro-​level that have aggregate effects at the macro-​level. For example, Ho (2009) describes the now-​iconic predominantly male Wall Street investors in the early 2000s who ignored potential negative consequences of their financial practices because they believed they could manage risk through financial instruments like derivatives that would allow them to both reap high yields as well as redistribute the potential losses. Predmore (2020) argues that the process of financialization itself reflects masculine hegemony in a number of ways, and produces distinctly gendered distributional effects. Yet gender dynamics in finance have also shifted with recent crises. Previously, the identification of women as relatively “risk-​averse” served to naturalize their lack of access to financial instruments and exclusion from markets; with crises—​particularly the 2008 North Atlantic financial crisis—​Anglo-​American public, professional and academic narratives evolved to portray women’s prudence as a desirable means of reforming the financial sector (Allon 2014; Fisher 2015; Prugl 2016). Thus gender has been an aspect of both private and public governance responses to crisis; the former is evident in the growing institutionalization of diversity and inclusion managers within financial firms, while the latter is apparent in state-​level legislative frameworks like Section 342 of the US Dodd-​Frank Act, which contains voluntary guidelines for both governing entities and firms in the sector to increase the representation of women and racial minorities in their professional ranks. For some observers these developments amount to a co-​optation of feminism in the sense that they may provide access to financial markets and positions in governance for some women, but do not broadly ensure improvement in women’s material and social well-​being, and may serve to legitimate a system in which women’s exposure to financial risks is growing (Hozic and True 2016). Others have tried to distinguish between captured market feminisms and those which might make reform impact (Fisher 2012; Schuberth and Young 2011). On the consumer end, legislative reforms have brought an end to some forms of credit discrimination yet paradoxically enabled a ‘predatory inclusion’ wherein ‘exclusion from lending has been transformed into social exclusion through lending’ (Taylor 2019; Aalbers 2016, 126). With deregulation and securitization of loans that began in the 1970s and continued into the 2000s, ethnic minorities, and particularly female-​headed households, went from being excluded from access to mortgage credit, to overrepresented among subprime loan holders, many of whom faced

374    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young foreclosure during the crisis in American as well as some European contexts (Dymski et al. 2013; Wöhl 2017).

Conclusion We have emphasized that globalization of financial activity has yielded formal governance responses at that level, albeit in different forms over time, resulting in more globalized interactions between public authority and private sector activity. This process escalates in that once financial regulatory activity is globalized, it presents new opportunities for private activity, calling for more regulatory authority to be delegated globally, and so on. We outline this escalation through the formation of Bretton Woods institutions to the ad hoc proliferation of transnational, club-​like organizations governing largely through standard-​setting and with limited accountability to state governments and voting publics. This dialectic process of escalation is also tethered by other, more informal social institutions; we focused on two in this chapter. First, the actual content and scope of financial governance responses is conditioned by already existing governance arrangements, in a manner reflecting historical path dependence. Secondly, the content of financial practices and governance responses are tethered to deeper social norms and discourses about what the scope of appropriate practice might look like, as we have emphasized in the examples of the pervasive social institution of gender on the one hand, and the geopolitical nexus of Anglo-​American relations on the other. The history of formal institutions would be incomplete without also examining the informal; as we have shown, they impact formal governance but also directly generate the regularities and constraints of governance institutions in their own right.

Notes 1. Some recent international relations scholarship has sought to understand the conditions under which formal, organizational global governance responses are pursued either in formal or informal settings (Roger 2020). Our differentiation in this chapter is one of actual formal organizations and informal social institutions. 2. Yet others (Tsingou and Seabrooke (2009)) note that the public/​private distinction is not as significant in a sector such as finance where members of the transnational policy community move frequently between the two realms. 3. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for example produces recommendations for the regulation of illicit financial activities that are meant to guide the behaviour of both state policymakers and financial institutions themselves (see Tsingou (2010)). The IASB produces international accounting standards for listed companies; the BCBS produces international standards for banking; the International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI) generates international standards for the conduct of financial deposit insurance schemes, and so on. However, the standards that these institutions create are themselves utilized as yard sticks of country performance by the IMF. Standards in use are also evaluated by the FSB, which monitors implementation around the world.

Governing Finance   375 4. Some of these arguments, particularly Belich’s (that colonial expansion cycles, rather than British institutions, were responsible for Anglo-​divergence), are meant to challenge institutionalist political economic explanations akin to those we pursue here. But where political economists take expansive notions of institutions that include collective identity, as we do, this work can be fruitfully put in conversation. 5. IOSCO is the standout exception, with 30% female representation in 2011.

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Chapter 26

Revolu ti on Eric Selbin Revolution Revolution as most commonly understood is an essentially modernist formulation, one which perhaps more than most is fundamentally predicated on the marriage of macro, even meta level thinking—​how can we change the world today—​with a profoundly micro approach: the granularity of what actions people take to change the world, us.here.now. today.1 With these crucial heuristics, modernity and granularity, in mind, this essay will endeavor to consider how and where current academic thinking about revolution might be situated and where, if anywhere, it might be going. To do so, a package of perspectives that comprises an entangled, figurative, zone of awkward engagement(s) will be brought to bear on both the (deeply) engrained and to-​date useful ‘generational’ analysis of the scholarly study of revolution but also to how revolution may be evolving outside of that. While what is extant will be attended to, the approach here reflects suspicion of arboreal models predicated on trees—​roots, a trunk, branches—​and a desire to engage with a concept that contains multiplicities, meaning so many things to so many people across so many different times and places. Revolution for several hundred years, in both its grandeur and granularity, is arguably not just a modern concept, but the concept of modernity.2 While academics debate the utility of the term revolution, it seems almost beside the point: billions of people around the world hear, use, and understand the term both broadly and specifically, in ways that have meaning and can be used to make meaning in the context of the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. Here I am guided in part by Gilly (2005, 53–​54), who, considering the 2003 insurrection in Bolivia, suggested that ‘to say that this was not a revolution but rather a big riot, a rebellion, an insurrection . . . which had no leading party, which was only for gas and for the sowers of cocoa, a people’s movement, a big uprising and little more’, is to ‘deny it the name . . . [and] to deny its protagonists—​the Indians, the cholos, the women and men of Bolivia’s subaltern classes—​their difficult victory’. This matters. A lot. This is not to suggest our academic debates over ‘revolution’ do not matter (Beck and Ritter 2021 is an excellent précis). But they may be of less importance as we find ourselves chasing real people in the real world making real choices that really matter. Thus, the goal

380   Eric Selbin is to put that/​those position/​s in conversation with those engaged in and whose lives are affected, inflected, and haunted by revolution. The proposition here is that such tension (perhaps more aptly, ‘friction’, per Tsing 2004, 4) along with entanglements and imaginaries to be developed further, can provide a productive space and place to recuperate revolution. Throughout this text there are the inevitable markings of the capitalist inflected English language, which is also redolent of racist, sexist, classist, gendered patriarchy which should be overthrown. In addition, perhaps inevitably given the nature of the enterprise at hand, I plead guilty to the sin Beck (2020b, 20, 21) refers to as honorific citation. We are disciplined by our disciplines. But his point obtains, and it is no small matter. Such thinking all too commonly reproduces the past with all that is attendant to that. We remain disturbingly in thrall to it as a way to position, situate, and prove we belong; it may obscure more than it illuminates. This rootedness, in its most arboreal sense, is a modernist conceit and one that limits our ability to explore and explicate and reinforces the insufferable euro-​whiteness and maleness of much of the comparative revolutions and related literatures and the stultifying affect we have had.3 Constricted by history (History would be another matter) and oversimplified by mainstream International Relations constructions, the endeavor here is, if you will, as a sort of star chart, a kind of sky map, that seeks to capture the cosmology of revolution.

Modern Times and Micro-​Analyses While it can range widely, ‘modernity’ is generally used to capture the past 250 years, a period which rather neatly contains the advent of the familiar, still extant forms of capitalism, liberalism, and ‘Western’, liberal, bourgeois, democracy. It also tracks with what, borrowing albeit extending Hobsbawm’s famous and felicitous phrase ‘The Age of Revolutions’, which includes the revolutions (not to mention rebellions, revolts, wars of national liberation, uprisings, and related acts of resistance and collective social actions) of the late eighteenth (the revolution in some of Great Britain’s North American colonies, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution), nineteenth (Latin American wars of independence, the 1848 revolutions across Europe, and the Paris Commune), and twentieth century (revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, Cuba, Portugal, Grenada, Iran, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe’s ‘colour’ revolutions, and wars of national liberation and anti-​colonial revolutions across the globe). Foucault famously argued that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries were postmodern (see Mirsepassi-​Ashtiani 1994, 51 and Bayat 2005, 894) and others that Mexico’s contemporary Zapatistas usher in the postmodern era (see Lippens 2003 or McGreal 2006); it is unclear what that means, how much it matters, or why. What seems clearer is that fundamentally, revolution is a modern concept. Consider what we associate with modernity: questioning, change, the emergence of society, and collective behaviour (and action), governmentality and states with institutions, industrialization, secularism, the idea that people can change the material and ideological conditions of their daily lives, liberalism, socialism, communism, the rejection of the old and embrace of the new, and science. Reflect on that list and in every instance—​and more—​revolution lurks. It is implicit and explicit in almost every case. And the study of revolution, from its earliest days, has sought

Revolution   381 to subject seemingly puzzling moments of social disorder to the calming order of ‘scientific’ analysis. The effort to map revolution reflects the determination to control and contain revolution, to inscribe what revolution is and what it is (most decidedly) not. It seems sensible to describe most studies of revolution prior to the early twentieth century as largely historical in nature, cataloging and describing events and populating them primarily with elites and featuring great euro-​w hite men, a modernist perspective evident in the first generation. Yet clearly in an age of high modernity, a shift occurs to a second generational, social science approach one could, borrowing from Tilly (1984), typify as ‘big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons’, before Skocpol (1979) recenters the exercise with three core historical cases considered through a structural lens. This view is unpacked further next; what is germane here is that somewhere, in all these events and processes, real people were lost as well as the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives, the small worlds that are our everyday worlds. Even as one of the defining characteristics of modernism is an almost atomistic individualism, the attention to those individuals' lives and activities and actions was often disregarded. What is to be done? Overly agent-​centric renditions do not seem useful, which has not stopped some of us from trying. But more culturally sensitive undertakings that also consider aspects such as ideology and action—​those real people and what they believe—​may offer recourse. Here, granularity, understood as the constantly shifting adoptions and adaptations in entangled ‘zones of awkward engagement’, to borrow and twist Tsing’s (2004, xi) concept a bit, that shape people imaginaries, their sense of what is possible, seems to offer a way. This is not meant as a sort of kitchen hack where you take deep structures and processes mixed with meta-​theory and then just before serving add a dash of people. Rather it is a call to think seriously about people being present from the start, as ambiguous and contingent as that might seem. We turn our attention to and take seriously what is happening on the ground with an eye and an ear to the tangible and intangible granularity of groups, community, culture, society, and more. What this means is that we must know the stories, the culture and society, the language, in several senses, even as we accept the limitations of translation (a fraught enterprise at best), and we must listen. The role of people’s stories and narratives, so central to their societies and cultures, is easily written off, but as I have argued elsewhere (Selbin 2010), imperative as a means and method to access what is happening at various levels. Listening to people—​aloud and in writing, asking questions, hearing them—​and watching and learning. Similarly, focusing on people’s ideology and culture (Bukovansky 2002; Foran 2005) opens access to actually existing people making actual revolution in the actually existing world; people who see what others have done and realize what is possible, what they can do (Bukovansky 2002, 194; Selbin 2010). There are hazards aplenty in such approaches, the most obvious of which are over-​reading, projection, and ‘just-​so-​stories’. More pernicious yet is overwriting, insisting on telling a story/​our story that has already been told and retold—​Cuba 1959, as Russia 1917, as France 1789. But we can create rigorous and systematic frameworks sensitive to what is actually going on out there and populate it with the people who breathe life into these processes. It is past time to turn around Skocpol’s invocation of abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s portentous declaration that ‘revolutions are not made; they come’ (1979, 17). Revolutions do not simply come; they are intentionally made by people consciously seeking to meaningfully change their world(s) and ours.

382   Eric Selbin This is a lot. But there are means and methods. None proffer nice, neat, or convenient entry points. People’s radical, revolutionary imaginaries are repositories of repertories, instances of ‘friction’. The resultant ‘zones of awkward engagement’ (Tsing 2004, xi; 4) are rich places alive with information; they are spaces of entanglement, a concept derived from entangled histories which recognize ‘the intertwined “processes of constituting one another” ’ (Gould 2007, 766).4 The latest generation of theories of revolution largely see people as an indispensable part of the process from the start; wherever we go from here, we must continue to do the same. Tools such as these will move us beyond modernist conceits and enable us to do so if we dare.

Generations of Revolution The concept of generations, grouping like-​minded individuals together is itself modern (Mannheim 1952). The persuasiveness, parsimony, and power of Goldstone’s generational formulation of revolutionary scholarship (1980; 1982; 2001) reflects a careful and close consideration of the work (see, also, contemporaneous assessments by Goldfrank 1979 and Aya 1979; an earlier example of the genre is Stone 1966). This utility and functionality, beholden to modernity, may prevent movement. Notwithstanding critiques, Goldstone’s genealogy, honed over the years by and alongside the other most important transitional third-​(Foran 1993; 2005, 8–​14), and fourth-​generation (Lawson 2016; 2019a, 55–​59) theorists, remains a useful place to start (but see Beck 2020b; Beck and Ritter 2021). This is not to ignore oversights and omissions (Beck 2020b, 564–​565 is a superb recent example calling this out), sacrificed, perhaps, to a compelling narrative. The genealogy, in brief, is that prior to Russia’s 1917 revolutions (Ellwood 1905 and LeBon 1913), a first-​generation Goldstone (1982, 189) dubs ‘the natural-​history school’ is discernable, dominated by sociologists (Sorokin 1925; Edwards 1927; and Pettee 1938), psychologists, and historians (Brinton 1965). A second generation, awash in the behaviouralist revolution, pursued broader comparisons around violent collective behaviour (Davies 1962; Smelser 1963; Johnson 1966; Huntington 1968; Gurr 1970; Tilly 1975, 1978). A third generation, ‘the structural-​theory school’ (Goldstone 1982, 189), sought more than aggregations of individual behaviour as well as historically grounded cases (Moore 1966; Wolf 1969; Russell 1974; Paige 1975; Eisenstadt 1978, Trimberger 1978) and found its paradigmatic statement in Skocpol (1979), crucially refined by Goldstone (1991), Goodwin (2001) its excellent coda. Goldstone’s formulation, Beck notes, ‘is so familiar . . ., [it] . . . animates nearly all contemporary literature reviews in revolution studies’ (2020b, 564). I have not managed to elude it here. A more far-​flung fourth generation, per Beck (2020b, 564) a ‘basket of approaches’, is extant (first proposed by Foran 1993, codified by Goldstone 2001, embedded by Lawson 2016). This generation is unified primarily by a call for the people, ideology, culture, and more they discern as lacking from the structuralist approach (largely, Lawson laments, ‘additive’, 2016, 107, he sees their ‘advances’, 2019, 60) and an impressive degree of auto-​critique. For at least some, this fourth generation, if it even exists (per Beck 2020b: 565, a “ ‘fourth generation” theory does not cohere as a theory or a generation at all’) has had its run and is done, perhaps none too soon. This is not unreasonable; in profound ways the field remains in thrall

Revolution   383 to Skocpol (1979), who haunts Goldstone’s more recent multi-​faceted work (2014) and even Foran, who sought to bring in culture and ideology but embraced Skocpol’s definition ‘in full as my own’ (2005, 7). And now we are five? Allinson (2019) ascribes to this fifth generation a processual aspect he (curiously) finds missing in the fourth generation approaches and the addition above all of non-​violence; his examples are Bayet (2017), Della Porta (2016), and Ritter (2015). Yet, for Allinson, this fifth generation came and went and we hardly knew it (Ritter 2015, its paradigmatic corpse, is serendipitously resuscitated by Beck 2020b, 585). Abrams (2019, 378), in contrast, reads Allinson’s fifth generation as bagatelle, the ‘death throes’ of the fourth generation that failed, never quite having found its footing, and proposes what a ‘true fifth generation’ might look like. The success of the fourth generation seems codified by Lawson’s recent (2019) realization of his previous laudable ‘aim . . . to extend the insights offered by fourth generation approaches in order to provide more robust theoretical foundations for the study of contemporary revolutionary episodes’ (2016, 107). It is possible to identify the paradigm busters and respected elders and paradigmatic statements, however late it may be (Beck 2020a considers Lawson 2019 akin to a ‘eulogy’). Still, these public disagreements about the demises of the fourth generation, emergence of a fifth generation (and private ones about a sixth) seem to beg a crucial, critical question: is this generational formulation still helpful? Whatever revolution means, seeking to historicize revolution in the abstract seems dicey and historical representations of specific ‘instances’, however contested or fraught, somewhat straightforward; one may prefer one interpretation or rendering more than another, but history/​ies can be cobbled together, and the study of revolution lends itself to historicization, perhaps particularly in a Brechtian sense as ‘a way of seeing’ (Diamond 1988, 87). Goldstone’s generational formulation, then, proffers a sort of naturalized (but not deterministic) history that resonates with many and is convenient as an ordering of an intellectual process. But if revolution is meant, at least in part, to connote not ‘simply’ moments of dramatic change—​a matter to be returned to in the following—​but both a beginning and end of history, what are we to make of the relationship as (re)presented? I do not know. But in this, as in the many studies already referenced and the many more that are not, it is worthwhile and important to problematize our predictable recourse to the creation of coherent narratives that reflect a beginning, middle, and end structure, with chains of circumstances, causes and effects, and climactic moments we all know all too well. Revolutionary imaginaries (linear and not), assemblages, the friction that results, and entangled histories are powerful means to do so.

(Re)Thinking about Thinking about Revolution A decade ago, Goldstone (2009) called on us to rethink revolution and integrate ‘origins, processes, and outcomes’. When we consider the events or process(es), as you like, that began in Tunisia December 2010 and played out across North Africa, the Middle East, and around the Mediterranean (and beyond) across 2011–​14, this seems ever more imperative. And if we understand revolution as ‘struggles for justice, dignity, human rights, labour

384   Eric Selbin rights and collective and engaged governance with representation and resources available to all, premised on a radical inclusivity beyond anything yet realised’ (Selbin 2019, 489), we find ourselves at a moment when and where revolutionary sentiments and moments, even situations, abound (see, also, Desai and Heller 2020, 1269; Kapustin 2019 is a thoughtful meditation on this matter). There are so many instances in so many places and a more granular approach, that takes people and their thoughts and actions seriously, may well be the best way to capture them. If revolution no longer necessarily follows the form or function of past instances and processes—​though to what degree such processes ever did is open to debate—​revolution in a ‘familiar, recognisable sense exists everywhere and anywhere people seek to realise their private dreams and desires in public settings, when they confront the spectacle rather than passively consume it as they fight for social justice and a better world for themselves and others’ (Selbin 2019, 486). Revolution is out there and people are making it, albeit, per Marx (1978, 595) not always under conditions of their own choosing. It is certainly the case that at many times in many places people have suffered greatly—​been hungry and poor, denied health care, housing, land—​and struggles for socio-​political change have not emerged. At the same time, when people’s hopes, dreams, and desires, their anger, resentment, and grievance, as well as fears, promises, and passions come into play, revolutionary imaginations are fired which generate revolutionary sentiments from whence revolutionary situations may emerge. Recent work by historians (Brandon et al. 2021) and the historically minded (Arjomand 2019; Kamrava 2019) has ably rectified earlier omissions and oversights associated with the largely descriptive (Kasprowicz 2020, 423) early ‘natural-​history school’ (Goldstone 1982, 189) on revolution, recentering people as more than elites and undifferentiated masses as well as attending to their places and actions. Similarly, albeit with different means and methods, a focus on nonviolent mobilizations and collective behaviours which may be usefully construed as revolutionary (Schock 2005, 2015; Chenoweth and Stephen 2011; Nepstad 2011, 2015; Ritter 2015; Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017) has also helped bring people and their practices back into focus. Such efforts and others remind us of the people who populate the matters we seek to explore and explicate; revolutionary imaginaries, assemblages, the inevitable friction and zones of awkward engagement, and resulting entangled histories are powerful guides. So, what does revolution look like today? Lawson’s recent, bracing reproach merits mention: ‘there are two main ways of approaching the study of revolution in the contemporary world—​and they are both wrong’ (2015, 453). In his view these two were assemblages simultaneously ‘popular protest, campaign against inequality, and technological breakthrough’ and the ‘apparently contradictory, meme—​that revolutions are irrelevant to a world in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled’. This seems right. One might add that the days of beards, bombs, and bullets seem (mostly) past as well, though there are reasons to think otherwise and there are literally people in mountains, fields, and remote jungles organizing, armed, and fighting. Nor does much seem to be gained by reconceiving ‘failed’ revolutions, reinforcing an unfortunate Eurocentricity/​global northism that haunts the field(s). This is not to deny Lawson’s (2019, 226) point that contemporary revolutions owe a debt to the legacies of 1905, 1848, and 1776 (more, he wagers, than to 1789 or 1917). But there are so many more local legacies that matter more. What merits our attention are the literally innumerable cases around the world where people struggle in various manners for their world, many of which we ‘know’ (intentionally or not) little about in our redoubts but are part of (micro)local, regional, and

Revolution   385 global radical imaginaries. Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Revolution’ (or Dunn’s similar ‘Epoch of Revolution’, Abrams and Dunn 2017, 115, 126–​127; Dunn 2017, 81–​82) may well have ended (but see Slim 2018 could be read as such), but it may also be that matters have shifted. Just as there was once a ‘little ice age’ (c. the sixteenth–​nineteenth centuries), perhaps since 2011 we are in a ‘little revolutionary age’, an age no less profound for those involved. A more expansive view of revolutionary activity in the 1990s and 2000s is Selbin (2010, passim) and Slim (2018). Selbin (2021) notes that cases of varying scale and scope are not hard to find from 1990–​2010: Mexico’s 1994 Zapatista Revolution, the Indonesian Revolution, and Venezuela’s electoral ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in 1998, 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan, and Lebanon’s ‘Cedar Revolution’, Myanmar’s 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’, Iran’s 2009 ‘Green Revolution’, Latvia’s 2009 ‘Penguin Revolution’ (heir to the 2007 ‘Umbrella Revolution’ of 2007), or Iceland’s 2009–​11 ‘Kitchenware Revolution’. That these (and others) happened, matters, and will for years to those who were there, those who they tell the story of what happened, and those who learn about what happened and how and why and perhaps come to enshrine and ennoble these moments. Hence, as Ritter (2019) judiciously suggests, it is our analyses that need to evolve. Revolutions are occurring and new technology will change surprisingly little about how such events or processes ‘begin’, proceed, and ‘end’, concepts that seem oddly out of place in this context. If highly visible, especially in the Global North, the role and impact of social media seems to have often been exaggerated or misunderstood, in particular relative to other means and methods of information sharing and deep-​rooted causes of popular discontent. Many of these uprisings have been multifaceted, with demands ranging from the specific (Algeria’s 2019–​20 Revolution of Smiles) to general (France’s 2018–​today ‘Yellow Vests’ movement) to almost none (Spain’s 2011–​15 indignados). What animate almost all are calls for recognition, respect, and a sweeping change in the relations between elite-​dominated states and the people, what Tarrow (2011) invoking Tilly describes as ‘we are here’ movements. We are here and we matter. In this context, then, people say no, ‘massive, multitudinous No!’s exploding in one country after another’ . . . . provoked directly by the implementation of austerity policies (Athens, Madrid) . . . [or] the plan to destroy a park (Istanbul), the raising of bus prices (São Paolo), or a police shooting (London and more than forty towns in England) . . . .responses quickly spill over into a more general scream of refusal’ (Bonefeld and Holloway (2014, 213)). ‘No’ to situations and situations inimical to their hopes, dreams, and desires. This is powerful; is it revolution? Such movements are conscious and intentional. While they may be read as Zolberg’s (1972) ‘moments of madness’, like Holmes (2014, 382), I believe we must take such moments seriously (Selbin 2010, 192). And if they are fundamentally struggles to rectify injustice, Holmes (2014, 382) offers a salutary reminder: ‘It is never just rage against injustice that leads to mass uprisings, but also the millenarian belief in something better’, indeed, the premise and promise is that ‘better must come’ (Selbin 2010, 13; Cordes and Selbin 2019). These moments, which may flare up, fail to catch fire, or burn brightly, and can quickly fade away, nonetheless remain in people’s individual memories, a consciousness they remember and share with others. A broader and deeper understanding, which begins from revolutionary imaginaries, situates revolution in the world. At the risk of landing somewhere between overdetermined and overwrought, in thinking about revolution we are, perhaps, at Gramsci’s moment where

386   Eric Selbin ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (1971, 276). If this is hardly a crisis in the academy—​whether billions find themselves in crisis in the ‘real’ world is another matter entirely—​nor the old, dying, or morbid symptoms appear, it seems right there is a lacuna. Gramsci’s compelling quip highlights that authority, for want of a better term, is in question. What does ‘revolution’ mean today and who gets to decide? Gramsci implies a processual model of breadth and depth that we might use. And so, the notion here is the creation of an entangled, figurative, zone of awkward engagement(s) created by ‘friction’, Tsing’s ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (2005, 4). Imagining such a location allows for the possibility of a moment, of a relationship(s) where the exchange of thoughts and ideas as they multiply is a place we create together that is mobile, permeable, and operable—​albeit fraught—​by anyone with a passing command of English (a serious, very nearly irredeemable limitation). Such an assemblage is hardly immutable, vulnerable to the depredations and degradations, and easily dismissed. Yet it opens up a space with no beginning or end, no generations, and myriad possibilities to consider.

Revolution Today There are many definitions of revolution; its ‘return’ to academia reminds me of a question Nayak and I posed in a related context: ‘Do you ever wonder if the peasants, farmers, oppressed women, child soldiers, sick and dying, poor—​or others you study, categorize, and write about—​are sitting around somewhere wondering about you . . .?’ (Nayak and Selbin 2010, 3). Are they subjecting our no doubt puzzling analyses to the calming order of their world(s)? If revolutions are ‘social facts’ dependent on human consensus and consciousness to imbue them with meaning (Barnett 2011, 163; Doty 1996, 2), there is a ‘folksonomy’ of revolution, a collective, user-​generated, non-​hierarchical, bottom-​up classification, produced largely by those seeking to change their worlds (and those resisting). Seeking to avoid the hierarchy (and patriarchy) inherent in taxonomy, a folksonomic approach embraces the messiness and complexity of people. The various ‘imaginaries’ which reflect human agency, collective action, ideology, and culture are socially and collectively constructed. People’s revolutionary imaginaries provide the means and methods to struggle for control of the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives in a world hostile to their interests. People’s creativity, verve, and élan—​daring acts of bricolage—​allow them to (re)create and negotiate their world(s), weaving together symbols, songs, tales, rituals, dates, places, memory/​ies, and more as they encounter state and society into a legible, working narrative (Selbin 2010, 75–​76) articulating who they are, what are doing, and where they want to go. It is imperative we resist overwriting these in our image(s), our narrative, as we seek them out to understand revolutionary activity. This sort of formulation at least necessitates a broad definition . . . or perhaps no definition at all, a sense that we know revolution—​meaningful change in the material and ideological conditions of people’s everyday lives—​when we see it. Opening revolution to the everyday and everyone seems fruitful if difficult. By interrogating and interpolating revolutionary imaginaries, assemblages and the predictable friction(s) and hence zones of awkward

Revolution   387 engagement they generate and make legible, and situating these entangled histories are ways to proceed. The power and premise inherent in definitions is profound and there have been myriad efforts to define revolution and related matters over the past hundred years. At a time when revolution(s) seems to have garnered renewed interest in the social sciences (Beck 2018; see also Brandon et al. 2021: 1) and definitions are much in play, it is worth, as noted previously, considering the utility of defining revolution (and related matters) at all. If academic definitions have moved beyond Skocpol (1979) and the supposed fourth generation’s (hapless) efforts to replace her and we are onto the fifth (or beyond), to what end? Grinin (2018, 172) states, ‘there is no generally accepted definition and it will hardly ever appear’ (though Beck’s schemas 2020b, 568 may be an option). Give the extent to which crafting an overarching definition of revolution seems likely to obscure and overwrite the granular diversity of lived revolutionary activity, is such a definition desirable or even necessary? Despite protestations and critiques, and acknowledging Beck’s point that ‘there seems to be almost as many definitions of revolution as there are scholars in the field’ (2020b, 565), there has been movement in and among academic definitions of revolution that merit mention. Foran (2019) has recently called for a shift in terminology: In the 21st Century, the movements for radical social change (a term more apt for this century’s great social movements than revolution) has itself changed, as activists, reformers, dreamers, and revolutionaries globally have increasingly pursued non-​violent paths to a better world, intending to live and act as they would like that world to be (emphases added). Yet Lawson offers, perhaps as the fourth generation’s ultimate statement, revolution as ‘a collective mobilisation that attempts to quickly and forcibly overthrow an existing regime in order to transform political, economic, and symbolic relations’ (2019a, 5). Lawson’s (2019a, 14–​15) intersocial, historicized, multifaceted (succinctly summarized elsewhere as ‘revolution, therefore, is not a single thing’, Lawson 2019b, 1153) version is a comprehensive and powerful academic tool. My version, should we need yet another, is similar: revolution is socio-​political, economic, and symbolic upheaval meant to produce striking, broad, and meaningful change in the material and ideological conditions of people’s everyday lives; real people in the real world making real decisions that really matter. There is another way to think about this. Recently, watching and trying to understand as millions of people seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives, I have wondered if ‘we’ in the academy need a definition at all (Selbin 2021). There is a widely held sense that we know revolution when we see it; those millions of people believe, deeply, that they have participated in and lived it. The short version is that we probably do, though we must develop one(s) that brings in more of these people’s voices and visions. Perhaps, as Bukovansky has astutely suggested, this may look it is less like a definition and more akin to a threshold.5 Revolutionary multiplicities extending infinitely in every possible direction and dimension all at once risks rendering the concept an empty signifier. But there is much to consider and explore. Revolution as a moment when social scientists and other interlopers are offered the opportunity for both wide-​angle, panoramic lens and the microscopic; the profusion of extant symbols and sounds are a kind of text, heuristics that can guide us as we flounder and fumble our way forward. But some matters can perhaps be left aside, and others added on. Academics have often inscribed revolutions as rare and momentous occasions, epic efforts to fundamentally transform all of humanity with an eye to the worth and dignity of

388   Eric Selbin every human being. Today, ‘revolution’ may seem to many scholars (and policymakers, state managers, and their employers) as much less. Even when they are large, such movements or moments can be made to seem (overly) focused on specific grievances with demands that are far more reformist than radical. How can these ‘events’ (note that they are no longer processes) remind us of the all-​encompassing dimensions of the ‘great’ revolutions which sought to change the world? Yet what could be more meaningful than changing the small worlds that are our everyday worlds and hence matter most for most of us most of the time? While states remain powerful important entities, for example, it is past time to deemphasize the seizure of state power. Similarly, the notion that ‘the working class’, an increasingly slippery term in a changing world, or some other similarly defined group will ‘lead’ the revolution seems unlikely to be helpful, though the continuing rise of Austerity Security States (Selbin 2019) might portend otherwise. Finally, there are outdated notions of vanguard parties (of self-​abnegating, professional revolutionaries), requisite levels of violence, and rapidity that seem of little use, though in any given situation any or all may be at play. In their place we need instead to consider multiplicities: multiple methods, multiple fronts, different thinking and thinking of difference. All the means and methods, all the thoughts, all the forms of participation. Our thinking must be inclusive and collective. Without losing sight of the ‘big, large, huge’, it is imperative that we focus on the small, the local, the regional, the granular. Guided by concepts of revolutionary imaginaries, entanglement, and ‘zones of awkward engagement’ produced by the predictable friction, it is possible for interlopers such as ourselves to explore and explicate the everyday revolution that is the reality or goal for so many. Beck (2020b, 585–​586) is right that we must ‘stop relying on musty paradigms to frame our work’ and embrace ‘unrooted innovation’; I am less convinced by his modernist admonition that ‘messiness is as dangerous as abstraction’. It is in that messiness that we can find our way(s), for if it puts our elegant theories at risk, it reflects a reality modernists, chary of postmodern skepticism of what’s ‘real’, would all too happily embrace. So too do I follow Beck and Ritter (2021), who conclude that our century-​long conversation of revolution studies has become repetitive and needs to return to the discussion of ‘ideas and phenomena’. What seems of vital importance is that we listen to and incorporate the voices and visions of real people in the real world making real choices and taking real actions that really matter. It is their definition(s) of actually existing, lived revolution help in their collective revolutionary imaginations and imageries we need to attend to if we hope to better understand such processes in the future.

Notes 1. A construction influenced by the modern-​day Zapatistas: ‘it is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient with making it new. Us. Today’; Marcos, et al. (1998, 19). 2. More modestly, and arguably more accurately, Brown asks ‘If the modality of political transformation in modernity was revolution, what lies beyond it’ (2005, 113). Kapustin (2019, 132) fruitfully ponders the link between revolution and modernization. 3. The first-​and second-​generation scholars are all Euro-​white males. Women are in the third generation, notably Russell (1974); Trimberger (1978); and Skocpol (1979) but Russell listed her initials (D. E. H) and reviewers used male pronouns while Skocpol’s reviewers

Revolution   389 noted she was a student of Barrington Moore and Samuel Huntington. Farhi (1990) and Moghadam (1989, 1997) are important contributors to the fourth generation but operate in a Euro-​white male dominated field(s). Others have found more congenial homes in ‘women’s studies’ or ‘area studies’. Meeks (2001) is a notable, predictably underappreciated, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) scholar of revolution. 4. Bauck and Maier (2015) suggest Werner and Zimmer’s histoire croisée concept (2002; see also 2006) which Gould draws on ‘reflects the entanglement between observer, angle and object’. 5. Indeed, as she noted to me, ‘if the definition is too all-​encompassing it becomes meaningless’. Mlada Bukovasky (2021), personal correspondence.

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PA RT I V

L O C A L E S ( SPAC IA L , T E M P OR A L , C U LT U R A L )

Chapter 27

The ‘ Premode rn’ Worl d Julia Costa Lopez Engagements with the premodern world within disciplinary International Relations (IR) have so far been limited, and focused on specific periods and spaces. Medieval Europe concentrates most of the attention—​as in the standard narrative it is the ‘precursor to the Westphalian order that arose in Europe and was imposed from there onto the rest of the world’ (Buzan and Albert 2010, 332). Beyond that, premodern East Asia and ancient Greece have also captured scholarly focus. Conversely, other places and times have largely been ignored: premodern Africa and America stand as chief examples, but also to a large extent the Islamic World and Central Asia (Watson 1992; and Ferguson and Mansbach 1996 being the most notable exceptions). Rather than examining each locale separately, in this chapter I adopt a systematic approach. Indeed, speaking of ‘the premodern world’ immediately raises the problem of the boundaries and nature of a world that exists as the ‘pre’ of modernity. And yet, the temporal boundaries of the modern international, and particularly its starting point, are fiercely contested. The twelfth century Renaissance, the Italian quatrocento, the fall of Constantinople and invention of the printing press in 1453, Columbus’ 1492 voyage, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the French Revolution or the long nineteenth century are but a few of the moments that have been put forwards as the dividing lines between the premodern and modernity. In these debates the premodern world is less the focus of substantive engagement than the residual category left for ‘international relations before us’—​at least for those of us who believe that modernity is not over yet. The name itself already de-​voids the premodern from all independent standing and analytical power, turning it into a dependent concept for what happened before the modern. And yet, as Kathleen Davis remarks, ‘periodisation is never the simple drawing of a line through time, but a complex process of conceptualising categories, which posited as homogeneous and retroactively validated by the designation of a period divide’ (Davis 2015, 73). In this view, the debates between different benchmark dates are less a matter of factual contestation and more dependent on substantively different ways of understanding premodernity and modernity. In this chapter, I draw on this insight to examine the common conceptual categories through which the premodern international world—​and thus by extension its modern opposite—​has been approached, and interrogate both what types of questions these different (pre)moderns enable us to pose, but also what types of inquiry about history and our present

396   Julia Costa Lopez they preclude. In particular I focus on four common ways of tackling the premodern world that respectively emphasize its religiosity, localism, complexity, and similarity to the present. As is evident from this brief enumeration, these conceptualizations are sometimes contradictory, and yet by no means mutually exclusive. In contrast, I consider what insights it could yield to have an alternative conceptualization of premodern world, one which places plurality, diversity, and global interconnectedness centerstage. Approaching the premodern in this way, however, raises serious questions about concepts and methods and ultimately calls into question the use of the ‘premodern’ itself.

The Religious Premodern: Pluralizing the Premodern A first narrative about the dividing line between premodern and modern concerns religion and secularism, and particularly the characterization of the premodern world as dominated by religion—​and of modernity as correspondingly secular. The centrality of this narrative is given by the preponderance of medieval Europe in disciplinary explorations of the premodern, but is also present in the treatment of other periods and spaces, such as the insistence on the ‘Confucian order’ in the case of premodern China. The focus on religion in the case of medieval Europe starts with the naming itself: both classic and more recent takes refer to the period as ‘International Relations in Christendom’ or ‘Medieval Latin Christendom’ (Brown, Nardin, and Rengger 2002; Latham 2011). In this reading, medieval Europe’s distinctive feature was its religious (Christian) character. Institutionally, this meant the centrality of the Church in the organization of society, in terms of religious rites, but most importantly as a governance structure that paralleled, competed with, and in some cases ruled over secular rulers. This centrality of religion extended also to ideas and identities. In political thought, Christian texts constituted the basis for thinking about the organization of society, and thus IR scholars frequently draw attention to the writings of theologians like Agustin and Aquinas. At the level of identities, Christianity was the main mode of collective identification, which led to a number of structural antagonisms and conflict with other confessionalities (Keene 2005; Alkopher 2005; Latham 2011; Costa Lopez 2016). The focus on the religious Middle Ages also conditions how the passage to modernity is viewed, with the Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia being the main benchmarks. Indeed, the cultural unity of Latin Christendom was shattered at the turn of the sixteenth century with Luther’s rejection of the role of the Latin Church. This was not only a matter of theology, but radically altered the traditional legitimating bases of authority upon which the late-​medieval order rested (Phillips 2010). And even more, it also had a significant impact on political networks and patterns of association and mobilisation. In this reading, the proliferation of confessions fundamentally altered the dynamics between rulers and ruled in composite polities, leading to a system-​wide crisis and subsequent transformation (Nexon 2009). While it is still possible to speak of ‘Christian international society’ well into the seventeenth century (Bull 2012, 26ff.), the Reformation and the Wars of Religion are conventionally seen as a moment of crisis. The resolving moment of this convulse period was

The ‘Premodern’ World    397 the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück instituted the principle of cuius regio eius religio—​whose realm, their religion. Although normally read as a territorializing move (De Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011; Osiander 2001b), the emphasis on the religious Middle Ages turns Westphalia also into a secularizing one by which religion was removed from being a principle for managing international affairs and confined to the internal domain. This conventional story about the religious Middle Ages and their demise has been challenged in a number of ways. Recent works in the tradition of political theology emphasize that this ‘Whig’ narrative of progressive secularization (Davis 2012) hides the fundamental role of medieval theology in the constitution of modern ideas, and thus the fundamental continuities and similarities between medieval and modern internationals (Gillespie 2008; Bain 2017). For example, they convincingly show how the purportedly secular IR imaginary of sovereignty and anarchy rests on fundamentally theological notions (Bain 2014). And yet, it is worth noting that in IR these efforts have been mostly directed at challenging the secular understanding of modernity but have left the religious nature of the medieval unproblematized, particularly when it comes to finding bases for identity and legitimation of political authority. This stands in contrast with a burgeoning historical literature which opens up a variety of alternative avenues of inquiry. On the one hand, there are good reasons to challenge the unimodal understanding of religious constructions that underpin traditional approaches to medieval religiosity (Costa Lopez 2016; Catlos 2014) or even point out to the specific historical construction of the concept of religion itself in a way that challenges the universality with which it is used (Boyarin 2004). Beyond this, however, there is a wide historiographical basis that opens up avenues for the examination of alternative (secular) bases of identification and political action. Starting with Susan Reynolds’ seminal work Kingdoms and Communities, a large literature examines a variety of lay modes of identification, solidarity, and political organization that explicitly draw us away from totalizing understandings of premodern religiosity. Interestingly, this relative dearth of IR scholarship critical of the religious nature of medieval Europe and its effects stands in contrast to the growth in literature challenging the religious-​philosophical view of premodern Asia. The conventional wisdom of a Confucian Sino-​Centric order is well established. Confucianism, straddling the division between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’, is an ancient philosophy understood to have placed emphasis on natural harmony and, politically, on pacifism. As the official ideology of the millennia-​ long Imperial era (221 bce–​1911 ce), this inherent pacifism is credited for having produced long periods of stability in the context of a hierarchical system (Kelly 2011). The so-​called tributary system was a specific international order that placed China in a superior position relative to other Asian polities, which were incorporated into the order through paying tribute and acknowledging the superiority of the imperial polity (Lee 2016). This gave Imperial China specific governing rights over them, even if they conducted most of their affairs autonomously. According to both IR scholarship and historiography, this system was maintained thanks to a Confucian cultural substrate. And it was this substrate that, in contrast to modern notions of sovereign equality, allowed for a hierarchy that maintained a long pax sinica (Kang 2010; Zhang and Buzan 2012). Conversely, —​mirroring in this sense the argument about the externally hostile medieval Christendom—​those polities that were not accepted within the Confucian system were constructed as ‘barbarians’ and subjected to much harsher and violent treatment (Phillips 2018).

398   Julia Costa Lopez However, some recent works which rely on different bodies of sources have sought to challenge this Confucian narrative. First, they have pointed out that Confucianism—​much like any other tradition of thought—​is extremely diverse. As such, reducing its implications for international politics to religious pacifism constitutes an instance of ‘selection bias’ (Hui 2018, 149), that, we may add, makes it fit into a particular modern/​premodern binary. Most importantly, they have pointed out that this is a fundamentally Sino-​Centric view, which takes for granted Chinese representations of the relations but fails to examine the perspective of subordinate polities and in doing so exaggerates the religious-​based peacefulness (Hui 2021). Doing so, they argue, reveals that the Confucian Peace was actually underpinned by coercive mechanisms that ensured compliance of even those subordinate polities that had been traditionally seen as fully integrated into the Sino-​Centric order (Wang 2011).

The Local, Simple Premodern: Globalizing the Premodern A second approach to the premodern world is to emphasize its local, simple, and isolated character. When referring to the period from 3500 bc to 1500 ad, Buzan and Little, for example, claim that ‘there is a certain static quality about this whole gigantic era’ (Buzan and Little 2000, 165). This is not an isolated instance: the claim that premodern—​and especially medieval—​politics took place at a small, local scale is almost a commonplace (Osiander 2001a). This characterization ultimately draws from a long tradition in social theory that sees human evolution as a progressively complexifying process. In its Durkheimian iterations, it puts forward a developmental narrative of societies whereby they evolve from simple segmentary differentiation via premodern stratificatory differentiation into modern, functional differentiation (Buzan and Albert 2010). Functional differentiation is in this view the hallmark of modern society, where progressive specialization creates a variety of separate spheres that require different modes of social integration. Conversely, the premodern appears as either segmentary or stratificatorily differentiated: a realm of the local or regionally specific, of traditional politics, and static orders—​as it is only in modernity that a larger scale of politics becomes possible. When taken from an international perspective, this is a (teleological) story about progressive globalization, whereby societies evolve from localized modes of existence to have increasingly more interaction, culminating in a globalized world (Holmes and Standen 2018). Interestingly enough, there are differing accounts of what constitutes this global modernity. For some, the Columbian exchange in 1492 marks the breaking point (Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017). On the one hand, for the first time it marks the existence of a global-​scale international system through the opening of sea lanes and the development of a global political economy (Buzan and Lawson 2014, 438), but also through the development of new, specific global imaginaries (Lobo-​Guerrero 2019). On the other hand, it also means the inception of modern colonialism and thus the creation of a series of power structures that persist until now (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). For other scholars, however, this move into modernity only took place in the long nineteenth century. In this account, transformations such as industrialization, along with the emergence of new ideologies, meant a fundamental

The ‘Premodern’ World    399 shift in the mode of power that altered the way in which international politics could be conducted, and thus its very nature (Buzan and Lawson 2015). What all these different periodizations have in common is their reliance on a local, static, or restricted notion of the premodern. Against this, a burgeoning literature in history—​ and to a lesser extent in IR—​points to the existence of multiple premodern connections, mobilities, and globalities. Featuring, for example, calls for a Global Middle Ages, the wager behind these approaches is that the features that have commonly been seen as the hallmark of modern dynamism and globalities are not exclusive to the modern period (Holmes and Standen 2018). On the contrary, long-​distance trade, migrations, multi-​ethnic polities, and cultural interconnections were all features of premodern international relations, as much as of modern ones (Bentley 1993). Viewed from this perspective, the claims about the local and simple premodern world are but conceptual straightjackets that prevent us from seeing a variety of phenomena and dynamics. For example, large amounts of literature have been devoted to the Silk Roads. Entirely crossing Eurasia by land, the first traces of established contacts and pathways date back to at least the second century bc. Over the span of almost two millennia, the Silk Roads provided a platform not only for long-​distance trading of goods, but also for intense cultural interactions, diffusion, and innovation among various peoples (Hansen 2012; Beckwith 2011). The point about global premodernity goes beyond developing analytics that make the existence of connections visible. Rather, a global and connected view of premodernity would force us to understand that seemingly local developments cannot be accounted for without paying attention to these larger connections and interactions. International historical sociologists, for example, have repeatedly made the case for the fundamental role of the 'East' in the development of the 'West'. In this reading, the non-​Western premodern civilizations were interlinked into a form of oriental globalization whereby fundamental innovations were first developed in the premodern East and only then came to be appropriated by the West (Hobson 2004). These ranged from technical inventions, such as the printing press, to fundamental conceptual developments, such as the recovery of Aristotelian philosophy through the work of Jewish and Muslim writers. In this sense, the formulation in terms of ‘East’ and ‘West’, while useful for the purpose of challenging the Eurocentrism of some traditional accounts of medieval history, need not obscure the complex webs of relations between polities that facilitated exchange, transmission, and modification: beyond the fundamental role of Muslim polities in the transmission of classical thought, the nomadic Mongol empire, for example, was crucial not only for the circulation of navigational techniques and gunpowder, but also for the transmission of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which had profound repercussions in political and social organization (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015). Abandoning the focus on the static, local premodern is also crucial if we are to develop a better awareness of historical processes of spatialization and territorialization. A consequence of the local assumption that underpins the study of the premodern world is not only that studies tend to stay limited to one geographical area, but also that the notion of what constitutes a relevant geographical locale is not derived from a historicist understanding, but rather from modern conceptualizations that are retrospectively imposed. Consider the notion of the study of medieval ‘Europe’ or ‘Asia’: these are neither neutral terms nor historically informed self-​descriptions, but rather loaded modern spatial imaginaries. As such, they substantially limit what is made visible by creating transhistorical geographical spaces that do not capture the existing patterns of interaction. Against this, an understanding of

400   Julia Costa Lopez the premodern that does not do away with its globalities yields a variety of alternative spatial configurations that were politically relevant and should thus receive analytical attention. Within a Marxist tradition, Janet Abu-​Lughod’s now classic Before European Hegemony already made the case for the existence of at least eight circuits of sustained interaction that escape modern spatial divisions (Abu-​Lughod 1989; in IR see Phillips 2017). More broadly, the focus maritime basins in both IR and historiography also points in the direction of changing spatial understandings (Bentley 1999). Although specifically in IR most attention has been devoted to these spaces since 1500 in the context of examinations of colonial encounters (Phillips and Sharman 2015), there have been a proliferating number of historiographical studies on premodern seas and oceans. Studies of the premodern Mediterranean, for example, have shown how such a focus yields novel insights on trade, interaction, conflict, and coexistence that transform the way in which we think about premodern international relations (Horden and Purcell 2000; Catlos and Kinoshita 2017). Not only this, but they have also shown how a focus on a specific locale such as a sea can help challenge the imagination of the premodern as local and highlight the many global connections and dynamics (Abulafia 2011).

The Complex Premodern: Making the Premodern Intelligible Interestingly, the classical narrative in IR about the emergence of the modern state—​ encapsulated in the ‘Westphalian myth’ (Osiander 2001b)—​presents a diametrically opposed view to those who see the premodern in terms of simplicity. The story is well-​known: the European Middle Ages were characterized by a heteronomous organizing principle: that is, not conforming to the norms of sovereignty and statehood, they were organized around a variety of ‘overlapping authorities and multiple loyalties’ (Bull 2012, 245; similarly, Ruggie 1998). The resulting variety of actors that populated medieval Europe—​from lords to kings, churches to merchants and monks—​interacted with one another on the basis of fundamentally different understandings of social organization; lacking a distinction between public and private, and between political authority and property, they operated by making specific claims under the universalist ideologies of the Holy Roman Empire and the Latin Church. It was not until the Reformation broke the monopoly of this universalisms, and the Renaissance recovered ancient concepts of politics, that this medieval heteronomy was overcome and the modern international emerged (Philpott 2001). This involved a fundamental transformation of the political imagination: political communities were delimited through a territorialized inside/​outside scheme, and all political authority was seen as emanating from a single sovereign point (Walker 1993). Much like in the previous case, this understanding of the premodern, in this case the medieval, presents an evolutionary narrative about the emergence of modernity. And yet, this narrative is very much opposed to the standard complexifying one in social theory, for it sees the transition to modernity as a simplifying move. The change towards an organizing principle of sovereign equality meant the concentration not only of political authority into sovereign hands, but also the establishment of a segmentary mode of differentiation by

The ‘Premodern’ World    401 which all states fulfilled the same functions and were thus regarded as equal to one another and fundamentally distinct from all other actors. Although the ill-​fitting dynamics of imperialism and colonialism would at first sight seem to challenge this, they can nevertheless be reconciled by pointing to their progressive incorporation into the simplified, segmentary order of states (Bull 1985). Interestingly, a number of recent works have challenged some elements of this periodization and relocated the fundamental break to the twelfth century Renaissance (Benson, Constable, and Lanham 1987). Politically, the so-​called Investiture controversy confronted the Church and secular rulers, creating space for the development of alternative political imaginaries (Hall 1997). As a result, from this perspective the era of sovereignty and the state would have begun much earlier than the Reformation, with both the appearance of particularist discourses and the development of bureaucracies (Latham 2012). Doing so opens up the door for thinking beyond the pre/​modern divide, and, for example, think historically about different forms of statehood and nested sovereignty (Canning 2011). At the same time, however, the overarching narrative about politics before the (now relocated) state remains fundamentally the same. Indeed, while both narratives have a distinctive understanding of what constitutes modernity—​an international society of states—​they shed little light on the premodern, as they do not provide much substantive characterization of it beyond its complexity. Highlighting the extent to which periodization is an act of conceptualization that attributes features to the periods on both sides of the line, most characterizations of the medieval in this tradition limit themselves to portraying the mirror opposite of the modern system: where the modern has public authority, the medieval has private; where the modern has territoriality, the medieval has fuzzy borders; where the modern has a system of multiple sovereign polities, the medieval has universalist claims of Church and empire (Hall and Kratochwil 1993; Costa Lopez 2020). This stark opposition, and the superficial engagement with the premodern that ensues, reach sometimes the extreme of completely depriving the medieval of any independent character, by just portraying it as (literally) non-​modern: ‘insofar as medieval politics can be summed up, it was simply a system that lacked sovereignty’ (Philpott 2000, 78). It would seem that, as Buzan and Little claim, ‘existing [IR] concepts simply cannot begin to capture the complexity of medieval political organization’ (Buzan and Little 2000, 244). This contrasts with a wealth of literature not only in History but also in a number of other disciplines that, far from understanding the premodern as irreducibly complex, use it to develop an original conceptual vocabulary that aids with modern and premodern alike. Research on nomadic societies from an IR perspective provides a case in point that can help pluralize the sites of study. Central Eurasian steppe nomads, for example, were agrarian societies that migrated in order to ensure grazing grounds for their flocks and herds. This also meant that they regularly came into contact with a variety of other groups—​nomadic or sedentary—​leading not only to the development of specific raiding capabilities but also a variety of institutionalized ways of managing this plurality of polities. While the gregarious existence itself already challenges one of the more common IR assumptions about sedentarism and, ultimately, territoriality (Agnew 1994), their potential for novel theorization goes well beyond it. The plurality of groups that came into contact meant that rather than basing order and institutionalization in ethnic or linguistic commonality, as is generally the starting point for most IR theorizing (Reus-​Smit 2017), specific forms of authority and

402   Julia Costa Lopez leadership became central in articulating the coexistence of the groups and their belonging to a common polity (Neumann and Wigen 2018). The ensuing polity form—​comprising not only nomadic but also sedentary groups—​was distinctly hierarchical, adaptable, and diverse providing interesting points of connection with current interest in diversity regimes and hybridization (Phillips and Reus-​Smit 2020; Kwan 2015). Finally, nomadic societies challenge our existing frameworks in a different way: we noted in the previous section how a common take on the premodern derives from social theory’s grand narrative of progressive complexity. This is of course a historically embedded narrative that temporalizes differences between human societies and situates nomadism as a primitive ‘condition from which they [nomads] were rescued by the establishment of the state’ (Ringmar 2020, 46). The binary between nomads and the state is also an analytical one that has been productive of the idea of the state itself and with it of a particular understanding if modernity—​even when the modern coexistence and entanglement of states, sedentary polities, and nomads is a well-​documented fact. An unpacking of (pre)modern nomadic societies can help transcend and historicize these binaries, illustrating that an alternative to the complex premodern is not necessarily an exercise in importing historiography but also, advancing some of the reflections in the conclusion, about realizing that the fundamental division between premodern and modern not only hinders our understanding of the former, but also blinds us about the features of the latter.

The Premodern is Us A final way of engaging with the premodern world has been taking to heart Wight’s characterization of the international ‘as realm of recurrence and repetition’ (Wight 1966, 26). As opposed to the previous takes, which were predicated on the notion of a fundamental rupture between premodern and modern, these authors (more or less explicitly) challenge this by emphasizing continuities or, at the very least, the possibility of thinking about the both within one same conceptual scheme. This argument has been made with reference to a variety of locales, from the Middle Ages to the Chinese Warring States (Fischer 1992; Zhang 2003; Hui 2004; Hui 2005). However, it has been most commonly accepted in relation to Ancient Greece during the so-​called Classical era from about 500 to 100 bc. The region at the time was populated by a number of small city-​states, which, although having very different forms of political organization, regularly interacted with one another: they traded, waged wars, or engaged in diplomacy. On the one hand, scholars have focused on the conflict dynamics, both through histories of war but also though an overwhelming attention to Thucydides’ infamous Melian dialogue (Keene 2015). Through this, they have sought to prove how conflict dynamics in Classical Greece paralleled current international politics (Gilpin 1981). On the other hand, these city-​states also exhibited a variety of cooperative interaction patterns, from mediation to third-​party arbitration, that have led some to see this as a first instance of an international society (Watson 1992; Wight 1977). In both these literatures, Ancient Greece ‘stands as one of the great analogues of the modern state system, a familiar world of independent states in which the eternal verities of international politics are thought to have appeared in their most rudimentary and essential form’ (Reus-​Smit 1999, 40).

The ‘Premodern’ World    403 The Italian Renaissance is afforded a similar status. Straddling the conventional periodization for the medieval-​to-​modern transition, the existence of a plurality of polities in northern Italy in the long fifteenth century is taken to have been constituted a distinctive international system. Although constitutionally they differed—​from republican Florence, to absolutist Milan and the Papal states—​these polities shared a common culture and had similar understandings of authority and politics (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996). Over the fifteenth century many of them saw the concentration of political power in the hands of individual families, from the Medici in Florence to the Visconti in Milan. In a context of revival of classical literature and increased wealth, this led a number of political thinkers—​ Machiavelli and Guicciardini being the most commonly cited ones—​to reflect on the power of the ruler and develop a political vocabulary to capture this situation. Moreover, these Italian city-​states also maintained regular interactions through a historically specific diplomatic system that saw the first resident ambassadors. Overall, although the revival of the Habsburg empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century saw the end of the relative independence these polities enjoyed, the distinctive patterns of interaction have allowed IR scholars to speak of a genuine international system (Watson 1992). These two cases exemplify how the claim of the fundamental similarity between modern and premodern international relations rests, surprisingly, on the same international imaginary that we saw in the previous section: that of a number of coexisting states, be it as units under anarchy or as an international society (Waltz 1979; Butcher and Griffiths 2017). This assumption that there is something in common between spaces and times where a number of more-​or-​less independent political communities interact with one another has received severe criticism (for a recent example see Nexon 2017). The debate is not exclusive to IR, but rather echoes broader discussions in a number of socially oriented fields (Davies 2003; Wimmer and Schiller 2003). Ultimately, it boils down to the thorny question of how far our modern concepts can travel. Particularly relevant here is the charge of ahistoricism, that is, that this claim rests on a projection of modern ideas and conceptual schemes unto past times to such an extent that it fundamentally distorts their nature. In the case of the concepts of the state and sovereignty, linchpins of the imaginary of the international, the argument highlights how these concepts cannot be reduced to the appearance of independence or the presence of more-​or-​less supreme authority, but rather they rest on a number of historically specific distinctions such as public and private, or indeed between state and society. As a result, making concepts like the state or sovereignty travel in time beyond their circumscribed historical contexts constitutes an anachronistic exercise (Costa Lopez et al. 2018), insofar as the distinctions upon which they rest were unthinkable. And yet, for all the critiques of ahistoricism, a radical historicism that would maintain the uniqueness of the premodern seems equally untenable. We have already seen that in most of the narratives the distinctiveness of the premodern was not necessarily a matter of historical investigation, but rather an exercise in ex-​ante conceptualization on the basis of a specific assumed narrative about the emergence of modernity. In this sense, they constitute but a variation of a historicism which would start from the premise that each specific premodern time and place ‘exists as such, out there, in the splendid isolation of a past whose essence has nothing to do with our present’ (Fasolt 2014, 86). In other words, the assumption of a fundamental division between premodern and modern, as we have seen, is not a historical given but rather constitutes as much of an assumption as the timelessness of the international.

404   Julia Costa Lopez

Conclusion The previous sections have examined a number of ways in which the premodern is commonly portrayed through the lens of periodization, that is, by unpacking the conceptualizations that are ascribed to specific periods. Doing so has revealed not only common understandings of the premodern as religious, local, complex, and also similar to us, but also some of the alternatives to doing so. However, the point of highlighting these different understandings, and their restrictions, is not to arrive at a ‘true’ characterization of the premodern, nor is it to find the correct periodization. On the contrary, the matter of periodization is such that any attempts at settling it risk drawing one into an ‘interminable rabbit warren of nominalist anxieties’ (Strathern 2018, 317). Where do we go from here? In this concluding section I consider some potential challenges in light of the broad theme of granularity in this volume. To begin with, we may observe that the majority of studies of the premodern in IR operate at a high level of generality. This ‘generality’, however, operates in at least two ways: at the level of research practice, by relying on secondary literature, and at the level of the type of questions that are asked, by inquiring mostly into system-​level features in broad sways of time and space rather than about specific events or interactions. There are some very good reasons for relying on historiography: for one, sources for the examination of premodern processes are—​in broad terms—​scarcer than for contemporary ones. Not only do the evolution of record-​keeping and archiving practices mean that it is comparatively easier to access modern records for a variety of topics, but it is hard to overestimate the impact of the passage of time, disaster, and willful destruction for the loss and damaging of older sources. Thus, more and more frequently, historiographical approaches to a number of premodern topics make use of sources, methods, and approaches with which IR scholars are generally unfamiliar: from archaeology to environmental science, the premodern frequently requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, the number of languages and contexts that it would be necessary to master if we were to follow the suggestions of this chapter and unpack premodern global connections and entanglement is almost insurmountable not only for IR scholars but also for historians. Similarly, there is a priori no reason to eliminate certain types of questions about the premodern nor to discard periodization as a mode of historical knowledge: periodization is always a creation that constrains our knowledge about the past—​and yet, at the same time we cannot know the past without conceptualizing it. And conceptualization, while not being reducible to it, necessarily involves a temporal dimension that creates divisions in time, that is, periodizes. However, taken together the works examined in this chapter reveal an approach operating at a level of abstraction and generality that mostly serves to confirm—​and conform to—​ specific grand evolutionary narratives about the emergence of modernity. Indeed, more than enable specific knowledge, the category of the ‘premodern’ appears to work to preclude any surprises and confirm preconceptions. By creating a division between a previous time and us, it inscribes this binary as foundational to the inquiry—​or alternatively elides all differences. While it is impossible to conduct research on any topic without specific conceptualizations, when this is added to the first dimension of generality—​the reliance on secondary literature—​this sets up a mode of research that leads to subsuming the premodern

The ‘Premodern’ World    405 under pre-​established categories and narratives, rather than allow for a dialogical process between historical data and concepts (Herborth 2017). How could such a dialogical process operate? As a brief illustration, let us confront a quintessentially ‘modern’ dynamic—​colonialism—​against some specific fourteenth-​and fifteenth-​century events, operating at a different level of granularity. IR has remained focused on the singularity of 1492 as the moment that ‘changed the nature of IR’ (Buzan and Lawson 2014, 453). However, starting in the mid-​fourteenth century, expeditions by Mediterranean sailors ventured progressively south along the African Atlantic coast, encountering a number of societies previously unknown to them (Abulafia 2008). Understanding these through the pre/​modern divide poses immediate challenges. The expeditions drew on Mediterranean and Iberian practices, and can thus be inscribed in longstanding medieval traditions (Fernández-​Armesto 1987). At the same time, however, many of the practices of Early Modern colonialism in America and beyond, including the Portuguese Factory system, Black slave circuits, and large-​scale plantations were pioneered in these encounters. Examining some detailed contemporary accounts would not only reinforce these interpretative problems of the pre/​modern heuristic, but also raise interesting possibilities. Venetian sailor Alvise Cà da Mosto, for example, could at once describe different peoples he encountered in his 1455 trip as ‘white moors’, ‘very black’ or ‘brownish . . . wearing hair . . . in German fashion’ (Cà da Mosto 1507, 21r, 30v, 10r, my translation). Given current academic interest in politics of race (Anievas et al. 2015), what could this tell us about notions of collectivities? In what way may it help us develop a different historical account of the emergence of racial structures? The point is thus not to relocate benchmark dates of modernity, nor to adjudicate which dynamics are modern and which ones medieval, not even to bypass the category of the ‘premodern’ altogether. Rather, it is that approaching the premodern with periodization-​ derived preconceptions about its significance prevents us from doing anything but confirming our own prejudices—​whatever those may be. And with that, what we lose is the possibility of being surprised, and thus challenged, in our knowledge about past and present alike. For, as we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, what is at stake in the premodern is not only our historical knowledge but also our knowledge about the present. As Skinner (2002, 6) noted, it is only by being openly confronted with the past that can help us attain a ‘broader sense of possibility’.

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408   Julia Costa Lopez Kang, D. 2010. East Asia before the West. Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. New York: Columbia University Press. Keene, E. 2005. International Political Thought. A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Keene, E. 2015. ‘The Reception of Thucydides in the History of International Relations’. In A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, eds. C. Lee and N. Morley. London: Wiley. Kelly, R. E. 2011. ‘A “Confucian Long Peace” in Pre-​Western East Asia?’ European Journal of International Relations 18(3): 407–​430. Kwan, A. S. C. 2015. ‘Hierarchy, Status and International Society: China and the Steppe Nomads’. European Journal of International Relations 22(2): 362–​383. Latham, A. A. 2011. ‘Theorizing the Crusades: Identity, Institutions, and Religious War in Medieval Latin Christendom’. International Studies Quarterly 55(1): 223–​243. Latham, A. A. 2012. Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics. War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades. New York: Routledge. Lee, J.-​ Y. 2016. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination. La Vergne: Columbia University Press. Lobo-​Guerrero, L. 2019. ‘Novelty and the Creation of the New World in Sixteenth-​Century Spain’. In Imaginaries of Connectivity. The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance, eds. L. Lobo-​Guerrero, S. Alt, and M. Meijer, 13–​38. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Neumann, I. B. and Wigen, E. 2018. The Steppe Tradition in International Relations: Russians, Turks and European State Building 4000 BCE–​2017 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nexon, D. H. 2009. The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires and International Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nexon, D. H. 2017. ‘ISQ Comparing International Systems.pdf ’, Symposium: Comparing International Systems in World History: Anarchy, Hierarchy, and Culture. Available at: https://​doi.org/​10.7910/​DVN/​VDZ​G7L/​ZEV​GJH, Harvard Dataverse, V1. Osiander, A. 2001a. ‘Before Sovereignty: Society and Politics in Ancien Regime Europe’. Review of International Studies 27(5): 119–​145. Osiander, A. 2001b. ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’. International Organization 55(2): 251–​287. Phillips, A. 2010. War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, A. 2017. ‘International Systems’. In The Globalization of International Society, eds. T. Dunne and C. Reus-​Smit, 43–​62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillips, A. 2018. ‘Contesting the Confucian Peace: Civilization, Barbarism and International Hierarchy in East Asia’. European Journal of International Relations 24(4): 740–​764. Phillips, A. and Reus-​Smit, C. 2020. Culture and Order in World Politics: Diversity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, A. and Sharman, J. C. 2015. International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean, Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Philpott, D. 2000. ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’. World Politics 52(2): 206–​245. Philpott, D. 2001. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reus-​Smit, C. 1999. The Moral Purpose of The State. Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Reus-​Smit, C. 2017. ‘Cultural Diversity and International Order’. International Organization 71(4): 851–​885.

The ‘Premodern’ World    409 Ringmar, E. 2020. ‘The Anti-​Nomadic Bias of Political Theory’. In Nomad-​State Relationships in International Relations: Before and after Borders, ed. J. Levin, 45–​62. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruggie, J. G. 1998. Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization. London: Routledge. Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of Politics, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, A. 2018. ‘Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before’. Past & Present (Supplement) 13: 317–​344. Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/​Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, K. N. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw-​Hill. Wang, Y-​K. 2011. Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson, A. 1992. The Evolution of the International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis. London: Routledge. Wight, M. 1966. ‘Why is there No International Theory?’ In Diplomatic investigations. Essays in the theory of international politics, eds. H. Butterfield and M. Wight, 17–​34. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wight, M. 1977. Systems of States. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. 2003. ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’. The International Migration Review 37(3): 576–​610. Zhang, Y. 2003. ‘System, Empire and State in Chinese International Relations’. Review of International Studies 27(05): 43–​63. Zhang, Y. and Buzan, B. 2012. ‘The Tributary System as International Society in Theory and Practice’. The Chinese Journal of International Politics 5(1): 3–​36.

Chapter 28

Moderni t y a nd Moderni t i e s i n In ternationa l Re l at i ons

1

Ayşe Zarakol Introduction International Relations (IR) is a relatively ‘modern’ field of study (see e.g. Schmidt 1998, 2013). It has also been a ‘modernist’ field since its inception,2 in the sense that most IR scholarship takes the sociological conditions3 associated with ‘modernity’ as given: e.g. the territorial nation-​state, the inside-​outside distinction, the purposeful agent (and often their more extreme cousin, the rational actor), the externalization of violence and risk, and so on.4 Let us assume, for a moment, that such a global ‘modernity’ in which both the discipline and the practice of IR were forged exists, at least in a way that is discernibly different from what occupied a similar space in previous eras. The first question such an assumption raises to the fore is: who made that modernity? The next question is how and when that ‘modernity’ became universal, to the extent it did. The reason why these questions are important to the discipline of IR is obvious: because the assumption of ‘modernity’ determines the scope conditions of IR theorizing, the way one answers those questions can also dictate which actors count in IR and who can be safely neglected when theorizing world politics. Unfortunately, getting modernity wrong in IR has seriously damaged our ability to theorize not only about the present but also in ways that can shed light onto the future of IR. This chapter proceeds in three sections. In the first section, it discusses the ways in which the understandings of modernity in both mainstream but also critical IR fall short. Mainstream and critical IR scholarship share the flaw of reproducing a ‘modernization theory’ ontology. This section also argues that unless it is replaced by an alternative (but still grand) narrative, we are doomed to infinitely reproduce ‘modernization theory’ because it is a metahistorical narrative that helps make sense of how IR came to exist in the way IR studies it. These types of metahistorical narratives do not die slow deaths by a thousand cuts. Unless replaced, they continue to live on as ‘common sense’, no matter how much criticism they attract. The second section then more concretely illustrates these arguments through the

Modernity and Modernities in IR    411 more specific example of the ‘emergence of the modern state’ scholarship. The third section concludes the chapter by discussing ways of getting out of this bind by imagining how we can go about formulating alternative metahistorical grand narratives of modernity that do not fall into the pitfall of Eurocentrism.

IR and the ‘Modernization Theory’ Trap In IR, there is more than one way to get ‘modernity’ wrong. Let us start with Wrong Answer 1: what we may call the original ‘modernization theory’ of/​within IR. ‘Modernization theory’ posits a teleology of political development wherein Western societies lead the way and others follow in their footsteps: that is, if they are fortunate enough to do so. This is not an understanding unique to IR either. It has been borrowed from twentieth-​century Social Science, though other social sciences by and large have moved beyond it. It is worth exploring therefore why it persists even more stubbornly in IR than other social sciences. ‘Modernization theory’, explicitly labelled as such, is most closely associated with the American economist W. W. Rostow and the field of development studies of the mid-​ twentieth century. As articulated by Rostow, the theory told ‘a story about how the countries of the West, above all Britain and the United States, limned a path to a universal modernity that all other countries can follow if only they implement a few well-​understood policies and principles’ (Gilman 2018, 133). These days, most textbooks note that ‘modernization theory’ was in vogue in the 1960s but that it came under increasing criticism in the intervening decades, especially from the dependency theorists, and that it was eventually cast aside. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-​Communist Manifesto (1960) ‘has over twelve thousand Google Scholar citations’ but is ‘mainly cited as an emblematic example of a bad idea’ (Gilman 2018, 133). However, as discredited ‘modernization theory’ may be as a theory of developmental economics, as a general worldview, it still lurks as an organizing assumption in many fields: Social Science in general and Political Science in particular have long operated with an assumption that dynamics in the ‘West’ and the ‘non-​West’ are different, and that the non-​West is lagging ‘behind’ the West in all indicators. Consider that the American Political Science Association (APSA), the largest such association in the world (and also a home for IR in that national context), has different sections for ‘Comparative Politics of Developing Countries’ and ‘Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies’. This not only implies an analytical division, but it also establishes an implicit teleology not particularly different from the discredited assumptions of ‘the modernization theory’. Even in the year 2021, APSA implicitly understood ‘advanced industrial societies’ to be temporally ahead of ‘developing countries’. Moving from political science to IR, most IR scholarship is built on the assumption that an international order of sovereign states invented by the very first time by European/​Western actors in the seventeenth century was later exported elsewhere in the world.5 This is yet another way of assuming that Western actors lead the way for others. Nor is that assumption confined to the Westphalian narrative of the ‘modern international order’ in IR. To give another example, much of the scholarship on socialization and norm diffusion also assumes that the West and the non-​West are different, and that only the latter can learn from the

412   Ayşe Zarakol former, and that Western actors are always ‘ahead’ of non-​Western actors.6 In that literature, agents come up with institutional innovations in the core of the system and then teach those norms to others. It could be argued that much of IR thus has made the teleology of ‘modernization theory’ even more Western-​centric in that the non-​West does not even follow naturally along a predetermined path, but has to be always cajoled there (usually via ‘rational persuasion’) by Western actors. Let’s call that more vanguardist version of ‘modernization theory’ Wrong Answer 2 to the question of how we have arrived at a global modernity. If the original modernization theory narrative of everyone following one linear path to modernity is ‘modernization theory 1.0’, the more vanguardist version where the non-​West follows on that path only with the West’s instruction and assistance is ‘modernization theory 1.1’. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the ‘critical’ scholarship in IR also shares a lot of these same assumptions about ‘modernity’ being a Western export in other parts of the world. Let’s call this Wrong Answer 3 or ‘modernization theory 1.2’. Where a lot of this scholarship diverges from the mainstream is seeing the diffusion of modernity outside of the West as mostly a positive development. Such critical approaches also reject the idea that the West was rationally persuading the non-​West to the benefits of modernity, seeing modernization outside of the West as violent, coercive, and forced. As warranted as some of these criticisms may be, however, the critical literature leaves the metahistorical and teleological narrative of ‘modernization theory’ intact. The West acts; the non-​West is only acted upon. The non-​West is still dragged into modernity (in this version against its will) and is not an active agent or participant in its creation. This is not to overlook the fact that decolonial or postcolonial versions of this camp have pointed out that Western modernity would not have been possible without ‘the Other’. Even in such accounts, however, the notion that modernity is owned by the West is not really challenged, partly because modernity is seen as ethically and normatively suspect. In sum, what all of these narratives have in common, despite the differences in their political stances, is the idea that ‘modernity’ is a unique set of developments that was experienced first or only by the West. What they differ on is the normative evaluation and the ease of the journey of non-​Westerners in getting to the same spot. This is why they can all be categorized under the same heading of ‘modernization theory’, which is still the dominant understanding in IR about global history, bridging across paradigmatic, epistemological, or even political divides. If ‘modernization theory’ has been so discredited in developmental economics for decades, why has a version of it animated so much of our thinking in IR, some recent interventions notwithstanding? Gilman argues that even in development studies ‘modernization theory’ never fully went away because it provided ‘a metahistorical narrative that was both easy for the masses to understand and satisfying to elites as an affirmation of the historical inevitability and moral righteousness of their own role in economic and national development’ (2018, 134). Adapting this insight to the IR context, we can observe three things. First, the ‘modernization theory’ narrative has not been eschewed explicitly in IR because its IR version is hardly ever explicitly labelled as ‘modernization theory’. The traditional English School account of the expansion of the European society of states—​i.e. that international society and modern sovereignty was invented in Europe after the Westphalian Peace and was exported elsewhere in the world—​is the closest we come to an explicit argument, and that has attracted its fair share criticism in recent years. Yet, most of the field, at least until recently, has been ahistorical in its discussions of modernity and also coy about

Modernity and Modernities in IR    413 labelling actors as ‘Western’, all the while assuming the agency only of actors that are in this category.7 As a result of this disciplinary sleight of hand, it has been hard to dismantle ‘modernization theory’ narratives in IR despite the fact that they lurk in plain sight. Another way of putting this is that ‘modernization theory’ in development studies was a clear (and therefore ‘falsifiable’) articulation of a certain set of assumptions that permeate most of Social Science, including IR, but such notions are harder to confront and dismantle if they are not explicitly articulated. In any case, most critical approaches are not particularly invested in replacing this Western-​centric arrival at modernity narrative in IR. This brings me to my second observation about the reasons for the durability of ‘modernization theory’ in IR. As noted previously, many of the seeming critiques of IR’s ‘modernization theory’ as Eurocentric actually share a lot of common ground with it. Complaints about ‘Western modernity’ are not that different from praises of ‘Western modernity’ when it comes to the metahistorical narrative they rely on. To attribute everything that is problematic about ‘modernity’ to Western agency reinforces the notion that ‘modernity’ was a Western product that is an inauthentic export in other parts of the world. This is the mirror image of Western triumphalism, not its antidote. There is a third reason, however, why such an understanding of modernization persists in IR. The implicit narrative of the West leading the Rest into an international order works in IR partly because IR, maybe even more than other social science fields and disciplines, needs a metahistorical narrative of how the global or the international came to exist. Without such a narrative, the field itself does not exist as a coherent object of study. In other words, this narrative is also IR’s origin story and the justification for its autonomy from political science and other fields. Without it (or some alternative explanation of how we arrived in the international system we have) the way we do IR would be nonsensical. The narrative of the expansion of the states system to the rest of the world as modernization essentially opens up the whole world to us as a relatively uniform real estate about which we can theorize. This brings up back to the granularity issue raised by the editors in the ‘Introduction’. Problematic metahistorical narratives such as ‘modernization theory’ cannot be dismantled piecemeal. Simply put, scale demands scale. It is not enough to critique the existing metahistorical narratives and assumptions of IR as ‘Eurocentric’, or to ‘decolonize’ the field by adding new narratives from other regions of the world, especially if those additions focus micro-​level analyses and methods, as is the current fashion in IR. If the ‘modernization theory’ of IR is not replaced by alternative metahistorical narratives of modernity, it will simply live on as an unstated truism everywhere except those places where it is directly deconstructed on a micro-​level. It is very difficult to come up with alternative metahistorical narratives, however, both because writing mega histories is considered old-​fashioned nowadays, on the one hand, and hardly anyone has the time or the patience, on the other.8 In order to demonstrate these arguments more concretely, the next section tackles a particular ‘modernization theory’ narrative in IR: that of the emergence of ‘modern state’ sovereignty. It first reviews what is problematic about the traditional narrative, then discusses where and why the existing critiques of this narrative also come up short. The chapter concludes by suggesting a way forward for thinking about IR and modernity: we need to develop alternative metahistorical narratives that restore non-​Western historical agency, but without neglecting the various hierarchies of modernity and their continued impact in present day international politics.

414   Ayşe Zarakol

‘Emergence of Modern Sovereignty’ as a Modernization Theory Narrative within IR Sovereignty is one of the foundational assumptions of IR (Lawson and Shilliam 2009, 658; Krasner 2001), because most of our theories see sovereign states (sometimes also called ‘Westphalian states’) as the primary—​if not the only—​building blocks of the system (see e.g. Krasner 1995–​96, 121). One could even argue that ‘without sovereign states being present in some guise, there can be no modern international system, and hence no meaningful study of international relations’ (Bartelson 2018, 569). Perhaps surprisingly for a social science concept, there is also a considerable degree of consensus9 in the field as to what modern state sovereignty entails: most IR definitions of sovereignty can be reduced to the components of ‘supreme authority’ and ‘territory’ (Bartelson 2018; see also Philpott 1995). For example,10 Krasner (1995–​96, 115) defines ‘the Westphalian state’ as ‘a system of political authority based on territory and autonomy; elsewhere he distinguishes between ‘interdependence sovereignty . . . [i.e.] the ability of states to control movement across their borders’ (Krasner 2001, 19), ‘domestic sovereignty’ which denotes the extent to which political authority can ‘effectively regulate behaviour’; ‘Vattelian sovereignty . . . [i.e.] the exclusion of external sources of authority both de jure and de facto’ (Krasner 2001, 20), and ‘International legal sovereignty [which] refers to mutual recognition’ (Krasner 2001, 20). Yet given enough degrees of abstraction, these are just different ways of answering the question of ‘Is there an exclusive political authority within a(n unified) territory?’. When we think about modern sovereignty, we look for the presence of two factors: 1) the centralization of political authority, i.e. the elimination of rival authority claims, external and internal, 2) territoriality, i.e. the expectation that political authority is claimed over a unified and bounded territory (as opposed to personal networks or symbolic sites such as Jerusalem). Discussions of modern sovereignty also build the assumption of external recognition into both these factors. Because the presence of sovereign states, thus defined, determines ‘the scope conditions’ of most IR theories, IR as a field has been at least obliquely interested when and how modern sovereignty emerged. As Lawson and Shilliam (2009, 660) put it in their introduction to a forum on sovereignty in International Politics, the IR literature is not short of theories about when and how ‘sovereignty appeared: in the cuius regio, eius religio (whose the region, his the religion) clauses instituted at the Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) (Wight 1992); in the inter-​state wars and geopolitical struggles ushered in by the European military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Gilpin 1981; Mann 1988; Tilly 1990); in normative shifts associated with shifting understandings of territoriality (Ruggie, 1983), religious belief (Philpott, 2001, Nexon 2009), and statehood (Reus-​Smit 1999); via fundamental shake-​ups to the constitution of modern subjectivity (Walker 1993; Bartelson 1995; Weber 1995); or in the development of private property rights and other processes associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism (Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003)’. Of course, not all IR paradigms are equally invested in when (or how) the modern system emerged,11 but most at least agree that the modern state has a (Western) European origin, from where it was imported to the rest of the world, i.e. they subscribe to yet another iteration of the ‘modernization theory’ discussed in the previous section.

Modernity and Modernities in IR    415 The prevailing assumption thus is that the modern international system has its origins in Europe and became global for the first time only after it came into its own there, from the nineteenth century onwards. Traditionally, IR scholarship was content to point to the Westphalian Peace as established in 1648 as the date when sovereign states emerged (see e.g. Gross 1948; Morgenthau 1985; Watson 1992; Wight 1992). This is why we still refer to the modern international system also as the Westphalian system and this is why IR textbooks continue to make a big deal about the Treaty of Westphalia (De Carvalho et al. 2011), which is considered to have transformed the world from one dominated by religious divisions to one of territorial sovereign states, thus starting the practice of IR as we understand it today. The relatively recent ‘historical turn’ (see e.g. Lawson and Hobson 2008; Lawson 2012; and other chapters in this volume) in IR developed partly in response to this foundational assumption: increasingly, the more simplistic Westphalian narrative as described previously was challenged in by scholars who saw both Westphalia and the international order we now call Westphalian to be more the culmination of longer term, more complex trends (see e.g. Ruggie 1983, 1993; Gilpin 1981; Spruyt 1994; Reus-​Smit 1999, 2013). As a result, in recent decades the Westphalian narrative and the accompanied dating of the emergence of modern state sovereignty back to the seventeenth century has been under consistent criticism (see e.g. De Carvalho et al. 2011), but not in a way that would fundamentally dismantle the implicit ‘modernization theory’ narrative of state sovereignty. The majority of these criticisms against the Westphalian narrative have come from scholars who disagree that anything resembling the modern state emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia (see also De Carvalho et al. 2011). A small group of scholars argue that the turning point came much earlier (see e.g. Teschke 2003; Latham; Blaydes and Chaney 2013) and a larger group of scholars argue that those longer term trends continued well beyond the seventeenth century, and that modern sovereignty did not emerge until much later, until the long nineteenth century (see e.g. Reus-​Smit 1999; Croxton 1999; Beaulac 2000; Osiander 2001; Krasner 2001; Kayaoglu 2010; Buzan and Lawson 2015; Bartelson 2018; Zarakol 2018b). It is also argued that territoriality in the modern sense did not exist before the nineteenth century; neither did the principle of external recognition (see Zarakol 2018b for an overview). A related line of criticism sees the Westphalian discourse as a project of nineteenth century international jurists, which has been repurposed for yet other political ends in the twentieth century (Schmidt 2011). In the meantime, a few more nuanced defences of the Westphalian narrative/​dating have been advanced as well (see e.g. Philpott 2000, 2001; Nexon 2009).12 Nevertheless, it could be argued that these days the nineteenth-​century argument has become the new orthodoxy (see e.g. Buzan and Lawson 2015), even if the revised dating of the modern international system’s emergence has not quite made its way into all of the introductory textbooks of IR yet. What unites both the old and new narratives of the modern international order, however, is their rootedness in the (Western) European historical experience exclusively. All of this scholarship is almost exclusively focused on Europe for the identification of crucial antecedents of modern order and maintains the belief in the ‘innovation (Europe)—​dissemination (Rest of the World)’ modernization model discussed in the introduction and the first section of this chapter. John Hobson calls this implicit understanding ‘the Eurocentric big bang theory of world politics’ (2012a, 32). Hobson characterizes most explanations of sovereignty as assuming first

416   Ayşe Zarakol that ‘the big bang of modernity explodes within Europe in 1648, having previously unfolded through an evolutionary process that is entirely endogenous to Europe, before the sovereign state is exported to the East through imperialism and proto-​globalization’ (2012a, 32). The Eurocentric big bang theory also demarcates the East from the West, relegating the East ‘to a backward ghetto that endures only regressive and barbaric institutions’, condemned to follow in the West’s shadow, while the West is inscribed with all the progressive properties. It is true that the IR literature dealing with the emergence of sovereignty (or any historical matter) has almost nothing13 to say about what was happening outside of (Western) Europe while the various developments which constitute the subject of their inquiry were unfolding in Europe. In the ‘great powers’ literature, for instance, it has been entirely commonplace to discuss the Holy Roman Empire (or Spain), as a historical example of a ‘great power’, but to do so without even mentioning the Habsburg-​Ottoman-​Safavid rivalry which dominated the sixteenth century.14 As for theorizing the emergence of modern sovereignty, the literature does not make explicit claims about the emergence of sovereignty (or even lack thereof) outside of Europe; it is simply silent about what was going on outside of Europe, which allows the reader to assume that nothing interesting was happening outside of Europe, if not outright assuming that non-​ European polities were just lagging behind. It is very much possible to link the criticisms around Eurocentrism with the criticisms around the dating of the modern system: one of the primary justifications of the social stratification of the international system post-​nineteenth century is the projection of nineteenth century developments back into history (see Zarakol (2022); also Davis 2008). This brings us to the second main line of criticism against the traditional ‘emergence of sovereignty’ literature in IR. This line of criticism goes further in undermining the ‘modernization theory’ narrative, but still not far enough. Within this camp, several remedies have been offered thus far for the problem of Eurocentrism: a number of scholars have been challenging the notion that Europe’s progress was self-​propelling, by offering rich accounts in which they show that developments in Europe were not endogenously driven but very much influenced by developments in what is now called the East (see e.g. Hobson 2009, 2012b; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2013, 2015; Nişancıoğlu 2014; and so on). Yet another remedy has been to fill in missing pieces of global history by adding significant periods from other regions; much of the literature on Chinese history in IR is an example of this approach (see e.g. Kang 2010; Hui 2005). Finally, some have argued that the system of modern sovereignty has been shaped also by the pushback from non-​Western regions (see e.g. Tourinho 2021; Shilliam 2006) and thus should not be understood entirely as a Western product.15 All of these interventions are helpful in their own way, but there is one fundamental issue they do not address when it comes to our understanding of modernization. If other regions are studied only as contributors to Western developments or as entirely separate historical sites for a different kind of regional system, then our understanding of the non-​West still remains in its own silo. As long that remains true, IR conceives of the non-​Western world either as following after (or reacting to) the West (in modernity) or having been important before the ascendance of the West (pre-​modernity), but not ever as existing on the same comparative temporal plane in modernity. The metahistorical narrative of ‘modernization theory’ will not budge until there is an alternative metahistorical narrative.

Modernity and Modernities in IR    417

The way forward: Constructing Alternative Meta-​Narratives of Modernization and Modernity To sum up, when IR aims to explain any significant political development in relation to state sovereignty from the last five hundred years, it looks to the Western European trajectory first. It often looks no further. The non-​Western world has been mostly absent from our theoretical conceptualizations of the modern sovereign state (as well as the system of sovereign states). And while recent attempts to bring in examples from the history of other regions are welcome, existing narratives cannot be upended with piecemeal additions that are unmoored from temporal comparisons and interlinkages. The ‘modernization theory’ approaches thus continue to persist in IR, whether we are talking about the emergence and development of the modern state or some other dynamic such as norm diffusion. Some readers may be tempted to interject here that they do not see much of a problem. What is wrong with keeping the dominant modernization narrative of IR, one may ask, as long as we do our best to add discussions of other regions? Is it not enough to supplement the Westphalian narrative with a discussion of, say, the Chinese tributary system (see Milward 2020 for a critique), if the goal is to overcome Eurocentrism? The solution is not so straightforward. A Eurocentric understanding of modernization within IR as applied to the investigation of any dynamic causes analytical, conceptual, and theoretical problems well beyond issues of representation and inclusion. These problems cannot be overcome by political gestures such as ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ alone for a number of reasons. To begin with, the existing metahistorical narrative of modernization (e.g. the emergence of the modern state) violates—​in a manner of speaking—​social science rules against selection bias. In what is now a classic article, Geddes (1990) summarized this problem for generations of graduate students: studying cases selected on the ‘dependent variable’ can at best give us half the story. Unless we check other cases to make sure supposed crucial antecedents were absent there, we should not try to say anything definitive about what causal role the supposed antecedents we have identified have played in the outcome we are trying to explain. After all, there is always the chance that such antecedents exist in other settings in which the outcome was rather different. Yet, the scholarship on the emergence of the modern sovereign state16 as discussed previously is replete with such selection bias: in seeking to explain what they assume a priori to be a uniquely European development, most of this literature looks also only to Europe in order to generate explanations as to how such a development was possible. To put it another way, the tunnel vision that makes it difficult for IR to see anything of interest in anywhere but Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries has obscured from view the extent to which regions outside of Europe were also experiencing developments thought to be unique to European modernity in parallel in this period.17 To be fair, given that many of its explanations are borrowed from other disciplines, IR is not fully to blame for originating these blindspots. The sovereignty literature discussed previously, for example, relies heavily on History of Political Thought and Historical Sociology, two disciplines which have suffered from a similar tunnel vision.18 Furthermore, until recently,

418   Ayşe Zarakol the same ‘modernization theory’ type of thinking that gave rise to this situation in social sciences had also coloured historical scholarship of non-​Western regions so thoroughly (even in those regions themselves) that even if IR had been more global in its gaze, it might not even have found anything except its worst assumptions confirmed. In recent decades, however, historical scholarship of the non-​West has progressed leaps and bounds, radically revising our understanding of polities of ‘early modernity’19 beyond Western Europe such as the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, not to mention Russia and China in that same period.20 Now the time has come for us to broaden our gaze as well. A more open-​minded survey of global history would indeed show that many elements thought to be unique to early modern Europe are not so: e.g. the development of justifications of political absolutism, subjugation of religious authority under political rule, creation of a centralized bureaucracy, a standing army, a unified currency zone, and the emergence of court society, confessionalization/​homogenization of the dominant group, resistance to and institutionalization of checks on absolutism, treaties of sovereign recognition, and so on. Some, such as the notion of supreme political authority and practices of state centralization, emerged in Europe-​proximate polities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before they did in Europe. Many other developments considered unique to Europe were experienced roughly in parallel: precursors to territorialization such as boundary making treaties (in the manner of Westphalia) and confessionalization; the subsequent development of checks (broadly defined) on absolute sovereignty and so on, indicating systemic patterns (see also Mukoyama 2022). This suggests, at a minimum, that theories which have attributed causality to any of the previously mentioned factors for the supposed emergence of the ‘Westphalian state’ as well the ‘Westphalian System’ in the seventeenth century have to be revisited. In all likelihood, state centralization is not quite the ‘innovation’ the literature believes it to be, but rather one of those trends that are part and parcel of human condition and governance, cyclically encouraged and discouraged by systemic material conditions as well as hindered or helped along by available ideational repertoires. In sum, theories of European state formation (and any other theory that implicitly or explicitly relies on modernization theory to explain its chain of diffusion) need to be probed again with a proper comparative lens that avoids selecting on the ‘dependent variable’. This is especially true for those explanations that locate causality in the period before the eighteenth century; Eurasian polities were equally good or even better state builders between fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need to explain the divergent fates of the East and the West in the nineteenth century given precisely that background, whereas the ‘modernization theory’ of IR has instead insisted on reading present day social and material hierarchies back into history, thus rendering post-​nineteenth-​century hierarchies seemingly transhistorical. The high number of parallel developments in the long sixteenth century throughout Eurasia is also suggestive of the fact that our global system may not be the first of its kind. Parallel developments throughout Eurasia within close temporal proximity to each other could be purely accidental, but what if they are following a pattern? If the latter, we may want to look for structural material explanations—​e.g. the reverberations of the Spanish price revolution—​or ideational ones—​e.g. the spread of millenarian beliefs. Evidence for any of the latter would suggest higher levels of interaction throughout Eurasia than previously imagined, and hence the presence of a relatively globalized international system prior to our current one. At the moment, the discipline is incapable of imaging any kind of system in the

Modernity and Modernities in IR    419 seventeenth century beyond that of Westphalia, so these questions have never been asked or studied in a rigorous manner. We urgently need to reconstruct alternative metahistorical narratives of global modernization and modernity.

Conclusion The previous criticisms about the implicit assumptions of the ‘emergence of the modern state’ literature can easily be transferred to the study of any other ‘modern’ dynamic in IR. Furthermore, arguments about modernities and modernization have serious political import beyond their significant implications for IR scholarship. Let me conclude by underlining three such major observations about the possibilities a truly global history of modernity holds. First, as discussed previously, the historical evidence simply does not support the claim, which—​ironically—​was touted even more vehemently by local modernizers outside the West (Zarakol 2011), that non-​Western regions were significantly lagging behind Europe, at least in terms of their state-​building ability. Second, it is a mistake to see ‘modern sovereignty’ (and by implication, ‘modernity’) entirely as a foreign import outside of Europe. Given the parallel precursors of modernity throughout Eurasia (and likely elsewhere), it is as erroneous to lay the sins of the modern state (and modernity) at the feet of Europe only as it is to attribute all of its achievements. The rejection of the modern state (and modernity) as Western in origin thus may be as Eurocentric as its embrace: both positions are the by-​product of the nineteenth century discourse about the ‘Rise of the West’. Third, reconstructing alternative metahistorical narratives of global modernization will help us not only understand the past better, but also our future. By all accounts, we are in a moment of international transition, but we are only now starting to properly think about how we arrived here in the first place.

Notes 1. This chapter borrows arguments from other published work. See references for a full list. 2. See also the ‘Introduction’ to this Handbook. 3. There are many definitions of ‘modernity’ but almost all emphasize the rise of (notions of) human agency, individualism, rationality, and reflexiveness, along with the increasing speed of social change (‘All that is solid melts into air’). For a start see Bauman (1989, 1991, 2000); Giddens (1991); Harvey (1990). 4. See e.g. Blayney and Inayatullah (2000); Meyer and Jepperson (2000); Meyer et al. (1997); Bartelson (2009); Zarakol (2017a, 2017b). 5. Mainstream American IR assumes this fact indifferently; the English School celebrates it; critical approaches—​especially postcolonialism—​bemoan it. More on this later (and see Zarakol (2018b) and (2022) for a more extended critique). 6. See Zarakol (2014) for a critique. 7. Put another way, the ahistoricism of the field as well as its indifference to identity has obscured (at least until recently) the extent to which the only agents that were ever theorized were Western. For examples, check any mainstream IR journal from the last decades.

420   Ayşe Zarakol 8. For more on this, see Zarakol (2022), ‘Epilogue’. 9. James (1984) claims there is a lot of confusion about the concept, but perhaps intervening years have made a difference. Bartelson (2018) argues for the stability of the concept. 10. Most works cited in the next few paragraphs work with a version of this definition as well. 11. For example, structural realism holds it does not matter what the constituent units of the system are, because the prevailing character is always anarchy. See e.g. the debate between Waltz and Ruggie in Keohane (1986). 12. Also see Zarakol (2022) for a discussion of how the two datings could be reconciled 13. Among the rare exceptions are Goldstone (1987); Blaydes and Chaney (2013); Karaman and Pamuk (2013). More recently Phillips and Sharman (2015) and Sharman (2017, 2019) have made arguments for looking beyond Europe. 14. For an extended critique of the great power literature on the sixteenth century, see Zarakol (2022). 15. A parallel approach also challenges the notion that sovereignty was imported unproblematically to the rest of the world, to be easily replicated. For example, Anghie (2002) has argued that international law and institutions created two different models of sovereignty: European sovereignty and non-​European sovereignty. 16. The problem is not unique to this literature; I am focusing on it as an example of a much broader phenomenon. 17. As I have discussed elsewhere: see especially Zarakol (2018a, 2022). 18. The literature on the history of political thought is probably the worst offender, whereas historical sociology is a bit better than IR in this regard. See e.g. Collins (1997); also Goldstone (1987, 1998). 19. This is not an unproblematic concept—​see Goldstone (1998). I use it here for reasons of intelligibility. 20. Zarakol (2022) develops all of these arguments in the following pages in much more detail, and offers an alternative metahistorical narrative for IR.

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Modernity and Modernities in IR    423 Sharman, J. C. 2019. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shilliam, R. 2006. ‘What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation of Sovereignty Debate’. Review of International Studies 32: 379–​400. Spruyt, H. 1994. The Sovereign State and its Competitors. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Teschke, B. 2003. The Myth of 1648. London: Verso. Tilly, C. 1990. Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–​1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Tourinho, M. 2021. ‘The Co-​Constitution of Order’. International Organization, 75 (2): 258–​281. Walker, R. B. J. 1993. Inside/​Outside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, A. 1992. The Evolution of International Society. London: Routledge. Weber, C. 1995. Simulating Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wight, M. 1992. International Theory: The Three Traditions. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Zarakol, A. 2011. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zarakol, A. 2014. ‘What Made the Modern World Hang Together: Socialisation or Stigmatization?’ International Theory 6(2): 311–​332. Zarakol, A. 2017a. ed. Hierarchies in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zarakol, A. 2017b. ‘States and Ontological Security: A Historical Rethinking’. Cooperation & Conflict 52(1): 48–​68. Zarakol, A. 2018a. ‘Sovereign Equality as Misrecognition’. Review of International Studies 44(5): 848–​862. Zarakol, A. 2018b. ‘A Non-​Eurocentric Approach to Sovereignty’. International Studies Review 3.20, Forum: ‘In the Beginning There was No Word (for it): Terms, Concepts and Early Sovereignty’: 489–​520 (page numbers for entire forum). Zarakol, A. 2022. Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 29

The ‘We st ’ i n Internationa l Re l at i ons Jacinta O’Hagan Introduction The West is at once one of the most important concepts in the history of international relations and one of the most problematic. Whilst the concept is deeply entrenched in the language of world politics, it is highly elusive and contested: there are many different interpretations in academic and political discourses of what defines the West; and multiple responses to the questions who, what, and where is the West? Sometimes the concept is used to refer to a civilizational complex characterized by Judeo-​Christian tradition, at others to a collection of European empires, elsewhere to an alliance of liberal democratic states, or to liberal industrialized economies. Often it is used as a synonym for modernity. Political and popular opinions have also varied starkly about whether historically the West has been a force for the good, nurturing political social and economic progress, or a force of oppression and domination. This lack of consensus about how the West is defined and evaluated make it challenging to understand and explain the role it has played as a historical locale in international relations. Yet it also casts an important light on the complex and multifaceted nature of history in international relations. In this chapter, I argue we should see the history of international relations as a complex intersection of diverse histories premised on a range of different ontologies, narratives, and experiences. Within these, the West is a sweeping historical locale that has functioned as a strategic and normative reference point through which political actors have situated themselves and their communities in the structures of the international order. Representations of the West have played an important role in the constitution of identities and defining the purposes and parameters of agency within those configurations of international order. To understand the role played by the West in the history of international relations, we need to delve into the many different ways the West has been conceptualized and articulated at different historical conjunctures. I do this through exploring different narratives of the West articulated across time and space. The narrative approach provides a method to explore patterns and variations in invocations of the West by different voices at different historical conjunctures;

The ‘West’ in IR     425 to note the tropes, myths, and histories that these narratives draw upon; and to observe the forms of global agency and international order they legitimate. The next section of this chapter discusses the complexity and fluidity of the concept of the West. The chapter then explores different narratives of the West articulated in the context of three different configurations of international order.

Conceptualizing the West The West is a complex and fluid concept. Whilst originally a cosmological and directional concept, from the nineteenth century onward the West became ‘politicized and temporalized’, evolving into a socio-​political concept (Bavaj 2011). The breadth and contested nature of the concept presents analytical challenges that speak to the theme of granularity: what ontological and methodological choices and decisions about scale and focus do we as scholars make, that allow us to capture the complexity of the concept whilst understanding the significance of representations of the West in different historical contexts? In this chapter I treat the West as a social construction. This allows us to see it as a dynamic rather than a fixed entity, constantly in the process of re-​presentation. Representations of the West vary across contexts, and are contingent on the historical and intellectual environment in which they are articulated. To invoke the West is to invoke a broad imagined community within which, or against which, people can locate their values, norms, priorities, and goals. Envisaging the West as a social construction and an imagined community allows us to see it as something more than simply a location, an ideological community or a set of institutions. It shifts our ontological focus away from the West as constituted by a set of fixed properties to the West as ‘constellations and arrangements of fluctuating practices and historical patterns’ (Jackson 2010, 184). One way to study the West in the history of international relations is to explore how representations of the West have been configured, framed, and deployed in different historical contexts and from different historical and political perspectives. This includes unpacking the tropes, myths, and histories particular representations of the West draw upon. I suggest doing this through analyzing different narratives of the West that have been deployed in political and public discourses across time and space. A narrative is a discourse ‘with a clear sequential order that connect[s]‌events in a meaningful way . . . thus offer[ing] insights about the world and/​or people’s experiences of it’ (Hinchman and Hinchman cited in Hagström and Gustafsson 2019, 39). Narratives provide ways of ascribing meaning to particular events, processes, or to the roles and behaviours of particular actors. Narratives are articulated by an array of actors: political leaders, policy makers, intellectuals, and media. They ‘help sculpt the terrain of argument’ by providing political actors with resources to legitimate their preferences and policies (Krebbs 2015, 8). Whilst multiple narratives circulate in political and public domains, a narrative can become a ‘dominant narrative’ when ‘a critical mass of social actors accepts it as “common sense” ’. Alternative or parallel narratives often exist or may emerge but may struggle to be heard or viewed as legitimate (Hagström and Gustaffson 2019, 391). To describe a particular narrative as a dominant narrative is not to suggest it is more authentic or valid than alternative narratives; it is to acknowledge the power it exerts with a particular audience. However alternative or parallel narratives may

426   Jacinta O’Hagan be invoked by political actors as counter-​narratives to resist or challenge the dominant narrative. As Lehti et al. argue, the West can be treated as a narrative concept in so far as it is ‘a social imaginary that enables societies and nations to share particular narratives, myths, and stories on ‘how they fit together with others’, and to imagine ‘the deep normative notions and images that underlie’ common expectations’. Narratives ‘create a sense of global agency and set up a moral background for building and maintaining global order’. (Lehti et al. 2020, 5). The West, however, is not a fixed social imaginary and there is no single narrative of the West. Rather there are a number of competing narratives that ascribe the West different forms of global agency in the context of shifting configurations of international order. In order to capture this historical mutability, I have selected three sets of narratives of the West articulated in the context of three configurations of international order in the history of the international system: the European imperial order; the Cold War order; and the post-​C old War order. The first narrative represents the West as a unique civilization with a deep historical heritage that stands of the forefront of human progress. The second is the narrative of the liberal West, which dominated renderings of the West in the Cold War order. In this narrative the West is closely associated with the ideas of liberal democracy, capitalism, and the liberal international order. The third narrative is the fragmenting West. This has been prominent in renderings of the West in the unsettled post-​C old War order. Whereas the first two narratives frame the West as a progressive and expansionist force in world politics, the fragmenting West narrative focuses on its potential decline. These narratives are layered and interlocking. Each is complex, multifaceted, and incorporates ambiguities and tensions. For each set, I identify an influential narrative that was widely accepted by Western elites and publics, which I treat as the dominant narrative. I also outline a number of contemporary alternative or parallel narratives that vied with, challenged or resisted the dominant narratives. Some of these came from within Western intellectual and political establishments, others were voiced by intellectuals and political leaders who were positioned, or positioned themselves, outside the parameters of the West. Exploring these different narratives of the West elucidates some of the contestation surrounding its role in the history of international relations. It also provides insight into variations in how the West is positioned by intellectuals or political practitioners in relation to the ordering principles of the international system at different historical conjunctures. One theme running through these narratives is the relationship between the West and modernity. The West has been central to the concept of modernity and is often taken as synonymous with it. Classical European theories of modernity represented it as ‘a process begun and finished in Europe, from where it has been exported across ever-​expanding regions of the non-​West’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015). There was an implicit assumption that modernizing societies would follow the pathway to modernity carved by the West: to modernize was to Westernize. But one of the most important and hotly contested aspects of the modernization debate—​both past and present—​is whether there is one single model of modernity, which is represented by the West, or whether there are ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000). This debate is one of the key themes interwoven into the narratives of the West discussed here.

The ‘West’ in IR     427

The Narrative of the Civilizational West The civilizational West is a deep historical narrative that located the West in a lineage stretching from classical Greece and Rome, through Latin Christendom, to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the political and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, and to the construction of a network of global empires. At the heart of the civilizational narrative was the idea that the West’s unique historical heritage placed it at the forefront of human progress and made it the birthplace of modernity. This heritage imbued the West with both the capacity and obligation to guide the progress and development of other societies, a civilizing mission. The idea of civilization in this narrative provided a logic for the global agency of the imperial West and positioned it at the core of a Eurocentric hierarchical international order, structured by gradations of sovereignty premised on ‘standards of civilization’ (Hobson 2012). The term civilization entered European languages during the European Enlightenment. It described ‘a condition of human society marked by an advanced stage of development and social complexity’ (Bowden 2014, 619). It was strongly linked to the idea of a universal history of human progress achieved through the application of reason and rational, empirical thought. Civilization represented ‘both the fundamental process of history and the end of that process’ (Starobinski cited in Jackson 2006, 83). Whilst many Enlightenment thinkers accepted that the universal history of progress encompassed all humankind, they did not see all peoples as at the same stage of development. Montesquieu divided peoples into three categories based on their capacity for civil association: savage; barbarians, and ‘civilized men’, whilst Adam Smith proposed humans progress from hunter–​gatherer, to pastoralist, agricultural and, finally, commercial societies (Pitts 2005, 27; Pagden 2014, 209–​210). At the forefront of human progress were the ‘Enlightened nations of Europe’ (Pagden 2002, 3). This confidence in Europe as at the forefront of civilization was based on the advancements achieved by the late eighteenth century in European societies in arts and sciences, the flourishing of commercial society, and the transformation of political and social institutions. These included shifts in structures of governance based on personalized authority to those based on popular sovereignty and the rule of law derived from conceptions of equality and individual rights. Alongside the idea of private property, these institutions came to be viewed as the benchmarks of civilized societies. The transformation of the economic and social orders in western Europe from agrarian rural economies to urbanized industrialized market economies and the creation by European peoples of global networks of production and exchange were also seen as evidence of European advancement (Mitchell 2000). Scientific and technical advances helped drive European expansion but also created a sense of European superiority based on its capacity to master nature through the application of rational and empirical thought. The narrative of European civilizational superiority was enhanced by European expansion and encounters with peoples with very different laws and customs. Non-​European peoples were increasingly categorized in terms of their levels of civilization—​or savagery—​ based on comparisons of their socio-​political organizations and forms of governance to those of Europeans. The belief that European societies were not only different from but more civilized than other societies gained momentum in the late eighteenth and nineteenth

428   Jacinta O’Hagan centuries as Europe’s comparative material power and capability grew. Even China was increasingly regarded as a stagnant civilization governed by Oriental despotism (Pagden 2014). The pervasive conviction of European cultural, political, and economic superiority formed a crucial foundation of the civilizational West narrative (Hobson 2012; Pitts 2005). It was expressed in the ‘standards of civilization’, which became embedded in international law in the nineteenth century (Gong 1984). The standards generated a legal hierarchy within the international order, premised on whether non-​European peoples were adjudged to have the capacity for self-​governance in accordance with European standards, and could meet the rights and obligations of ‘civilized nations’ (Gong 1984; Bowden 2014). The standards of civilization served to legitimate European colonization and the negotiation of unequal treaties with non-​European peoples. They were a crucial component of a broader narrative that endowed European peoples with a mission to spread progress and civilization. The civilizing mission was a fundamental component of the civilizational West narrative, becoming ‘an ideology by which late nineteenth century Europeans rationalized their colonial domination of the rest of humankind’ (Adas 2004, 1). It was articulated at many levels. The mission civilistrice, for instance, became an official ideology of French foreign policy from 1870s (Conklin 1997). Commerce and missionary activities were also seen as part of the civilizing mission, acting as mechanisms for the diffusion of Western influence and values. Commerce, for instance, was considered both a way to bring non-​European peoples into the global economy, and to inculcate qualities that underpinned Western progress, such as industriousness and efficiency. Whilst the narrative of the civilizational West invoked a singular civilizing process, it also encompassed the idea of Western civilization as a distinct, if loosely bounded community. The idea of a distinct Western civilization coalesced during the nineteenth century alongside more entrenched conceptions of civilizational and racial hierarchies (Jackson 2006; Aydin 2007). The boundaries of Western civilization were inscribed at many different sites. The civilizing mission, for instance, was often articulated through binary oppositions and stereotypes: European peoples were scientific, energetic, disciplined, punctual, rational, whilst other peoples were superstitious, indolent, duplicitous, emotional (Adas 2004; Said 1979). Edward Said (1979) described how this process of essentialization, which he called Orientalism, permeated representations of Islamic societies in European intellectual and political discourses. Drawing on historical tropes and narratives of the antithesis between Latin Christendom and Islam during the medieval Crusades and the threat posed to Europe by Moorish empires, the Orient was constructed as inferior to the Western self, but also a threat. Race was an increasingly important boundary in the narrative of the civilizational West. Scientific racism became a powerful concept in European thought from the 1860s. It located peoples in a hierarchy of capability and development based on their biological attributes. The white races sat at the pinnacle of this hierarchy. Some racialist thinkers believed racial superiority imbued the white races with a responsibility for the tutelage of more ‘backward’ races, helping to rationalize imperial hierarchies. Others feared the racial purity of the white races would be diluted by miscegenation or ‘swamping’ by other races, arguments used to legitimate the containment or even extermination of other races (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Hobson 2012, 21). Here again a belief in Western superiority blended with a sense of threat, a recurrent theme in narratives of the West.

The ‘West’ in IR     429 The narrative of the civilizational West that emerged in European and, increasingly, American intellectual and political discourses was complex and fragmented into different trajectories. Two versions of the narrative emerged during the early twentieth century. One was what David Gress calls the Grand Narrative of Western civilization, which was powerfully articulated in the curricula of American universities from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s. This was the civilizational narrative par excellence, representing the evolution of the West as a story of progress spanning antiquity to the modern era, culminating in the rise of liberal democracy and the spread of prosperity through liberal capitalism, and exemplified by the United States (US). It presented Western civilization as ‘a synthesis of democracy, capitalism, science, human rights, religious pluralism, individual autonomy, and the power of unfettered human reason to solve problems’ (Gress 1998, 39). An alternative version of the civilizational West narrative was the ‘decline of the West’ thesis put forward by the German historian Oswald Spengler. First published in 1918, Spengler’s book Der Untergang des Abendeslandes became a best seller in Germany. Spengler did not see the West as flourishing but in decline. Spengler drew on a German intellectual tradition that both accentuated the Teutonic heritage of the West, and critiqued the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment and alienating impacts of industrialization and mechanization on European societies (Spengler and Atkinson 1932; Gress 1998; Jackson 2006). Spengler painted rationalism, materialism, and secularism as undermining the traditions and spirituality of Western culture. Technological prowess, mechanization, and capitalism were destructive and corrupting forces, and democracy destabilizing power relationships. Spengler represented the cohesion of the West as being undermined by intellectual sterility and fragmenting social structures, making it vulnerable to attack from non-​Western societies, the ‘barbarians at the gate’ (Spengler 1934, 205). Spengler’s narrative of the West radically challenged assumptions about the relationship between the West and modernity expressed in the Grand Narrative, but clung to a belief in Western exceptionalism and superiority. This belief in the superiority of the West was contested by a number of other important alternative narratives, which emerged from intellectual and political discourses in non-​Western societies. These alternative narratives evolved in the context of the rapid expansion of European empires and American colonialism in the late nineteenth century and the entrenchment of ideas of Western superiority in the dogmas of Orientalism, scientific racism, and the civilizing mission (Aydin 2007). In the late nineteenth century, reformists in, for instance, Japan and China had promoted the idea of Western modernization as a way to achieve the status of a ‘civilized state’ (Duara 2001; Aydin 2007). But there was also growing disillusionment with Western civilization and the exclusionary nature of the Eurocentric international order. Japan’s rapid economic growth and victory in with Japanese-​Russian War (1905) demonstrated non-​ Western peoples were also capable of scientific and industrial development. This alongside the experiences of the First World War challenged assumptions of the natural superiority of white or Western societies. For the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, the war’s ‘mechanized slaughter’ undermined the ‘hubris of European racial superiority and civilizing mission’. It also challenged assumptions about the benefits of the industrialization and mechanization of society (Adas 2004, 41). The treatment of non-​Western peoples at the Versailles Peace Conference, including the rejection of Japan’s proposal for a racial equality

430   Jacinta O’Hagan clause in the League of Nations Covenant, furthered disillusionment with the commitment of Western powers to freedom and equality. These factors added momentum to critiques of Western civilization and to alternative conceptualizations of civilization already forming in intellectual, political, and social movements in India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. For instance, ideas of Asian and East Asian civilizations were put forward in Chinese and Japanese intellectual circles. These did not necessarily seek to abandon modernity or science but to revitalize them with elements of ascetic spirituality and moralism drawn from non-​Western philosophies and religions (Duara 2001). In India, Hindu revivalists contrasted an essentialized spiritual ‘East’ to materialist ‘West’, whilst Mohandas Gandhi warned against confusing the material advancement of Western industrial civilization with progress, arguing that India’s destiny lay ‘not along the bloody way of the West . . . but along the bloodless way of peace that comes from a simple and godly life’ (cited in Adas 2004, 55). Another site at which alternative narratives were articulated was in the transnational Pan-​Islam and Pan-​Asian movements. Both entailed the idea of the Asian and Muslim worlds as distinct cultural-​geographic and civilizational entities (Aydin 2007, 4). They invoked a sense of solidarity between Muslim and Asian peoples to counter Western influences and achieve liberation from Western imperialism. These alternative conceptions of civilization challenged the Eurocentric conception of international order and the Orientalist and racialist frameworks that had come to underpin the civilizational West narrative. They provided alternative narratives of the West and the imperial order, representing the expansion of European peoples as not simply a story of progress and emancipation but also one of violence, destruction, and domination. Though some non-​Western narratives shared Spengler’s horror of the West’s mechanized modernity, others endorsed alternative models of modernization.

The Liberal West Narrative The Grand Narrative of Western civilization provided ‘a cultural and historical basis for a liberal consensus about the merits and potential of the West that was unapologetically rationalist, progressive and confident of the benefits of science and industry’ (Gress 1997, 529). These qualities sat at the very core of the liberal West narrative. This narrative became a central feature of political discourse in the Cold War international order. The liberal narrative drew on elements of the civilizational narrative of the West, invoking Enlightenment concepts such as freedom, equality, progress, and individual rights; however, it departed from the civilizational narrative in its rejection of colonial, civilizational, and racial hierarchies. Instead, it championed a liberal international order based on principles of sovereign equality, self-​determination, and human rights. This order has been described as ‘a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity’ (Ikenberry 2018, 7). At one level, the West was represented in the liberal narrative as a bounded community of like-​minded states sharing a common heritage of Western civilization, embodied in physical alliances and institutional networks. The 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Treaty specifically invoked ‘a common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of

The ‘West’ in IR     431 law’ (NATO 1949). Whilst Western Europe remained at the core of this community, its heartland shifted to the United States. The US became the leader and defender of the West, underwriting the NATO alliance and Western European economic recovery as well as key multilateral institutions of the liberal international order. It also became the principal incarnation of Western values and identity, and core reference point for the West in political and public discourses (McNeill 1997). The West in the liberal narrative, however, was not only a bounded community; it was also an ideological community built on shared values and institutions. This meant states such as Japan with quite different cultural heritage could be included in the West. The identity of the West in the liberal narrative was deeply integrated with the liberal internationalist project. Whilst this began as a project for building order amongst Western liberal states, Ikenberry argues (2020), it became a global ordering project led by the West. As in the civilizational narrative, the West in the liberal narrative assumed a mandate for the promotion of ideas, in this case democracy and human rights that, although developed in the context of Western thought and history, were represented as universal. This was a new ‘civilizing mission’. Liberal values and structures not only defined the West in this narrative; they were central to its power and legitimacy. Liberal democratic structures, constitutional government and the rule of law were held up as pathways to freer and more equitable societies. The economic development and wealth achieved by Western states through free trade and the financial liberalization served to validate liberal capitalism as an engine for economic growth. Here again, the narrative of the West overlapped with the classical discourse of modernity. The West was represented as standing at the forefront and heart of modernity and processes of modernization. The concept of modernization became deeply interwoven with the idea of Westernization. Perhaps the principal site at which the West was constituted in the liberal narrative was in antithesis to the communist East. The Soviet-​led bloc stood as both a geopolitical threat and ideological rival to the liberal West. This perception was vividly illustrated in the language of the 1947 Truman Doctrine in which the US president argued the world was faced with a choice between alternative ways of life: One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of the minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedom. (Truman 1947)

Here the Soviet-​led East superseded the savage or heathen as the West’s principal Other. The axis of difference was based not on race, religion or levels of development, but on ideology. As in the civilizational narrative, the West was rendered as simultaneously powerful and superior but also vulnerable in the face of an existential threat. This was not a struggle between tradition to modernity, but a challenge to the West’s pre-​eminence by a rival model of modernity and an alternative vision of international order. The idea of the West as a force for progress and emancipation was central to the liberal narrative. But it was countered by alternative narratives that represented the West as exercising new forms of domination under the auspices of a liberal world order. For instance, US military alliances and force deployments were represented in the liberal

432   Jacinta O’Hagan narrative as the West providing a defensive umbrella for its allies, but alternative narratives highlighted that they also created structures of informal control and dependency. Economic assistance and investments by US corporations in developing countries provided further powerful mechanisms of influence and control. They also provided incentives for the US interventions to protect US interests as happened, for instance, with US-​backed coups in Iran (1953) and Chile (1973) and its direct intervention in the Dominican Republic (1965). Whilst human rights were one of the most fundamental norms of the liberal West, during the Cold War the US and its allies tolerated and supported many repressive regimes because they were anti-​communist and/​or commanded valuable economic or strategic resources. For instance, the US provided ongoing support to the Marcos regime in the Philippines and to the Mobuto regime in resource-​rich Zaire despite their well-​publicized records of human rights abuses. These activities helped sustain an alternative narrative in which the US, the leader of the West, was not necessarily a force for freedom and democracy but an ‘imperial republic’. A second challenge to the liberal West narrative came from the Third World movement. This movement comprised a range of postcolonial states and national liberation movements frustrated with the slow pace of decolonization, and inequalities in the international trading system. Its emergence was marked by the Bandung Conference (1955) and the establishment of the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM). This movement sought to shift the focus of international political discourse from the ‘East-​West’ conflict to the ‘North-​ South’ conflicts. It highlighted two elements of the Cold War international order that fundamentally challenged the liberal West narrative. The first was the persistence until the 1970s of European empires in antithesis to the norms of sovereign equality and self-​ determination that were central to the liberal narrative and liberal ordering project. This alternative narrative highlighted the role played by postcolonial societies themselves in embedding norms of self-​determination and racial equality into the international order. The second challenge was to assumptions that modernization and integration into the Western-​led liberal economic order provided pathways to economic development and political liberalization. The Third World movement argued that integration of colonial and postcolonial economies into the global capitalist system had led not to modernization and growth but exploitation. This was because liberal international economic order continued to reproduce the power structures of the imperial economic order. Western states remained at the core of the order controlling the lion’s share of industrial production, trade, and investment capital as they had done under the imperial order. Emerging economies were positioned at the periphery of the global economy as producers of raw materials or cheap labour, leading not to development but dependency and underdevelopment. This critique culminated in calls for ‘an alternative model to the dominant, exploitative capitalist system’ (Sajed 2020), a ‘New International Economic Order’ that would address the inequalities in the global trade system. These alternative readings of the Cold War international order challenged the narrative of the liberal West at several levels. They challenged the ideas of the West and of Western-​ led modernization as progressive, positing them instead as forces that destabilized other societies by weakening their social, political, and economic structures. They questioned the degree to which the liberal West diverged in practice from the imperial West and whether the projection of the Western model of modernity led not necessarily to growth but to new forms of inequality.

The ‘West’ in IR     433

The Fragmenting West Narrative The narrative of the fragmenting West is one in which narrative and counter-​narrative are closely intertwined. What pervades them is a sense of a West in peril, its cohesion and status threatened not simply by external forces but by internal contests regarding what binds and bounds the West and defined its role in international relations. The narratives began with a sense of confidence found also in the civilizational and liberal narratives of the West, but this was quickly overtaken by a series of crisis narratives that resonated deeply with earlier narratives of decline (Lehti et al. 2020). The crisis narratives challenged both assumptions about the West’s hegemony in the international order, and about the West’s cohesion. They also challenged assumptions about the West as the principal model of modernity and even the desirability of the modernizing project itself. The end of the Cold War initially produced for many in Europe and the US a spirit of triumphalism, captured in Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis. The end of the Cold War, Fukuyama argued, signalled not only the victory of Western powers over the Soviet bloc but also the triumph of the ‘Western idea’. The West was now the unrivalled model of modernity; and a ‘new world order’ of peace and prosperity beckoned as other societies internalized liberal values and norms (Fukuyama 1992; Lehti et al. 2020, 10). This confidence reverberated in US President George Bush’s declaration in the wake of the First Gulf War that a new world order was in view, ‘[a]‌world in which freedom and respect for human rights finds a home among all nations’ (Bush 1991). This confidence was quickly challenged by a complex array of voices and forces within and beyond the West, which rendered the West not as ascendant but fragmenting. One of the most prominent of these was Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. Huntington argued that the qualities and values that made Western civilization unique were not universal (Huntington 1996). He represented the West as a bounded community under threat. It was challenged externally by non-​Western states and societies that resented the West’s cultural hegemony; and internally by intra-​Western rivalries and by forces that threatened to dilute the cohesion of Western society, such as liberal attitudes to multiculturalism and immigration. Huntington’s thesis illustrated two broad themes that ran through the crisis narratives of the fragmenting West: the existence of a complex range of external challenges to the West and its leadership of the international order; and an increasingly internally divided West (Lehti et al. 2020). Some of those external challenges came from non-​Western states. In the 1990s, the hegemony of the Western liberal economic model was challenged by rapid state-​led economic growth in East Asia. This growth, argued Singapore’s Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew, was based on Asian values, such as consensus, rather than Western values, which privileged individualism and competition at the expense of social harmony and order (Zakaria and Lee 1994). The economic dynamism of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS) and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis also deeply unsettled confidence in the robustness of Western liberal market economies. These dynamics created space for challenges not just to the West’s economic hegemony, but the hegemony of the Western model of modernization. China, for instance, put forward an alternative to the neo-​liberal model for economic reform and development, dubbed the Washington Consensus. China’s model, labelled the Beijing Consensus, was based less on economic and political liberalization and

434   Jacinta O’Hagan free market forces and more on gradual economic reform guided by the strong hand of the state. In the early 2000s, Chinese intellectuals also articulated an alternative conception of global order, tianxia, based on harmony and mutual accommodation amongst nation-​states and civilizations in contrast to the Western model of competition and realpolitik (Shiu 2020). The hegemony of the West was also challenged by non-​state actors who rejected not only the political and economic dominance of Western powers over non-​Western societies, but Western political and social values more broadly. One of the most extreme expressions of this counter-​narrative was the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001, which served as graphic symbolic rejection of Western power over the Muslim world. At the same time 9/​11 and subsequent terrorist attacks also acted as a rallying point for the re-​articulation of the narrative of the West as a community that had a mission not only to protect itself, but to uphold universal values of freedom and democracy. This blended an appeal to respond to physical threats to Western societies with a broader, muscular liberal internationalist mission to battle what British Prime Minister Tony Blair called ‘an evil and barbaric ideology’ (Blair 2005). This narrative of the West, which evoked elements of both the civilizational and liberal narratives, served to legitimate US-​led coalitions to pursue wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those protracted military campaigns, however, ultimately fuelled resentment of the West, adding weight to the alternative narrative of the West as a force of domination. The failures of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns also undermined perceptions of a strong West, creating further space for rising powers, such as China and Russia, to challenge the narrative of Western hegemony in the international order (Lehti et al. 2020; Ikenberry 2020). A second theme running through the fragmenting West narrative concerned an internally divided West. This drew on conflicting representations within the West itself of who and what define the West. Two broad representations of the West emerged. The first was the representation of the West as a liberal and cosmopolitan community committed to the promotion of universal values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. Juxtaposed to this was a more communitarian representation of the West as a bounded community faced with an imperative to use its strength and force to protect its peoples, their values, and their way of life from external and internal threats. The tensions between these two renderings of the West became very clear in the fractious debate surrounding the US-​led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a debate that shook the transatlantic relationship. Advocates of the invasion represented the West as an alliance of like-​minded actors who must be willing to act forcefully to defend its peoples and its values. Those opposing the invasion, in contrast, represented the West as a liberal cosmopolitan community, advocating the use of diplomacy, multilateral institutions, and international law rather than force. This was not so much a disagreement about what Western values were than about how they should be interpreted, pursued, and protected. Tensions within the West became more pronounced in the second decade of the twenty-​ first century with the rise of right-​wing populist movements and leaders in Europe and the US. Their vision of the West was very much one of a community of peoples defined by a common heritage and lineage as well as shared values that were unique to it. As noted previously, at this time, Western states faced challenges from the growth of non-​Western rising powers, the Global Financial Crisis, and terrorist attacks on US and European targets. Added to these was the pressure of growing numbers of asylum seekers seeking sanctuary in Western countries. These populist movements vigorously promoted a vision of the West

The ‘West’ in IR     435 besieged by threatening forces, as it had been besieged by the forces of authoritarianism during the Second World War and the Cold War. Those images were blended with old tropes of Christian civilizations under siege from Muslim invaders revived by leaders such as Hungary’s Victor Orbán. This crisis narrative also pointed to threats from within. Religious and racial minorities were depicted as antithetical to Western values and harbingers of forces seeking to destroy them. Moreover, liberal internationalism and cosmopolitanism were cast as exacerbating these threats, weakening the cohesion and integrity of Western society through generous asylum policies and multiculturalism. This rendering of a West under siege acted to justify the construction and reinforcement of increasingly powerful institutional and physical borders around the Western heartland. Contending conceptions of the relationship between the West and liberalism were very much at play in the fragmenting West narratives. For some, such as French President Emanuel Macron, universal liberal values and the pursuit of liberal internationalism formed the very essence of the West. More conservative perspectives echoed older declinist narratives that cast suspicion on cosmopolitanism and liberal internationalism as forces that were undermining the strength and cohesion of a West that is unique but not universal. As Lehti et al. further argue, internal divisions within the West enhanced the opportunities for non-​Western powers ‘to shape and redefine the discussions on the role of the West in the world and on the form of the world order’ (Lehti et al. 2020, 10). These counter-​narratives contested not only the hegemony of the West, but also the viability and even the desirability of the Western liberal model of modernity.

Conclusion There are many different readings of what constitutes the West and starkly different evaluations of its role in the history of international relations. In this chapter, I treat the West as a social construction, an imagined community that has acted as a strategic and normative reference point for the constitution of agency and identities in international relations. It has also functioned to situate political actors and communities in particular configurations of international order. It has been constituted by processes of representation that draw on a range of tropes, myths, and histories. The selection and interpretation of those tropes, myths, and histories has produced different articulations of the West as a global agent and of its role in international order. This chapter has explored how these articulations manifest across different narratives of the West articulated across time and space. These are points of continuity and difference in these narratives; there are also recurrent ambiguities and tensions that demonstrate the complex and contradictory nature of the West as a historical locale. The first of these is the tension between the universal and the particular. Both the civilizational and liberal narratives present the norms, values, and institutions that define the West as universal, situating the West at the forefront of a series of ordering projects structured upon those norms, values, and institutions. But this universality was contested by counter-​narratives that conceptualized the qualities that defined the West as particular to the West. This in turn led to contestation over of legitimacy and wisdom of the West as a global agent for universal values. The second point of tension is whether the West is a force for progress and emancipation or of domination. The civilizational and liberal West

436   Jacinta O’Hagan narratives were deeply informed by a sense of the West as an exceptional political and cultural entity, whose norms, values, and institutions provided pathways for progress, and for freeing humanity from the constraints of traditions. But representations of the West as an emancipatory force have been contested by counter-​narratives that represented the West as force of domination and oppression, which used its power to mould the structures of international orders to sustain its own interests. These representations of the West provided powerful instruments for contesting those orders. A third recurrent point of tension and indeed ambiguity in these narratives is in representations of the West as powerful and superior but also vulnerable to a range of existential threats. This sense of threat was most palpable in the narrative of the fragmenting West but resonated with fears and anxieties laced through the civilization and liberal West narratives. These representations of the West as vulnerable have served different political purposes simultaneously. Whilst they created space for challenges to the hegemony of the West, tropes of threat also provided powerful tools for actors who sought to rally audiences to the defence of particular conceptualizations of the West. A further recurrent theme spanning these narratives is the relationship between the West and modernity. Interpretations of this relationship vary depending on whether modernity was treated as autochthonous to the West or different models of modernity were produced by the dynamics within diverse cultures and societies. This second conceptualization of modernity shifts us from a reading of the history of international relations as driven by the evolution of a particular model of modernity embodied in the West to one in which modernity has multiple roots and diverse expressions. This suggests a final point for reflection: how do we conceptualize and write history? The conception of history that underpins many of the dominant narratives of the West is one in which the unfolding of global events is organized into a singular narrative focused on the West (Mitchell 2000). As Mitchell asks, what alternative histories does such a singular conceptualization of history overlook? Through seeking out and exploring representations of the West in both dominant and alternative narratives we begin to see the history of international relations not as a singular process driven by the West but as the complex intersection of diverse histories, incorporating multiple timelines and a diverse range of historical locales. This better equips us to understand the significant but complex and contested role played by the West in the history of international relations.

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The ‘West’ in IR     437 Bowden, B. 2014. ‘To Rethink Standards of Civilisation, Start with the End’. Millennium 42: 614–​631. Bush, G. H. W. 1991. ‘Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the End of the Gulf War’, 6 March 1991. Available at: https://​mille​rcen​ter.org/​the-​pre​side​ncy/​presi​dent​ial-​speec​hes/​ march-​6-​1991-​addr​ess-​joint-​sess​ion-​congr​ess-​end-​gulf-​war. Accessed 24 August 2021. Buzan, B. and Lawson, G. 2015. The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conklin, A. L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Duara, P. 2001. ‘The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-​Asianism’. Journal of World History 12: 99–​130. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’. Daedalus 129: 1–​29. Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Gong, G. 1984. The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society. New York: Clarendon Press. Gress, D. 1997. ‘The Drama of Modern Western Identity’. Orbis 41: 525–​544. Gress, D. 1998. From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. New York: Free Press. Hagström, L. and Gustafsson, K. 2019. ‘Narrative Power: How Storytelling Shapes East Asian International Politics’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32: 387–​406. Hobson, J. M. 2012. The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, S. P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ikenberry, G. J. 2018. ‘The End of Liberal International Order?’ International Affairs 94: 7–​23. Ikenberry, G. J. 2020. ‘Liberal internationalism and Cultural Diversity’. In Culture and Order in World Politics, eds. A. Phillips and C. Reus-​Smit, 237–​158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, P. T. 2006. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jackson, P. T. 2010. ‘How to Think about Civilizations’. In Civilizations in World Politics Plural and Pluralist Perspectives, eds. P. J. Katzenstein. P. J. Milton Park, 137–​158. Abingdon; Oxon; New York: Routledge. Krebs, R. R. 2015. Narrative and the Making of US National Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehti, M., Pennanen, H.-​R., and Jouhki, J. 2020. ‘Introduction’. In Contestations of Liberal Order: The West in Crisis? eds. M. Lehti, H.-​R. Pennanen, and J. Jouhki, 1–​15. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McNeill, W. 1997. ‘What We Mean by the West’. Orbis 41: 513–​524. Mitchell, T. 2000. Questions of Modernity. Contradictions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. NATO. 1949. NATO—​Official text: ‘The North Atlantic Treaty’, 4 April 1949. Pagden, A. 2002. ‘Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent’. In The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union, ed. A Pagden, 33–​54. Washington, DC: Cambridge; New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge University Press. Pagden, A. 2014. The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, first edn. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Pitts, J. 2005. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Said, E. W. 1979. Orientalism. First Vintage Books edn. New York: Vintage Books.

438   Jacinta O’Hagan Sajed, A. 2020. ‘From the Third World to the Global South’. E-​International Relations. Available at: https://​www.e-​ir.info/​2020/​07/​27/​from-​the-​third-​world-​to-​the-​glo​bal-​south. Accessed 24 August 2021. Shiu, S. P. 2020. ‘Tianxia: China’s Concept of International Order’. Global Asia 15: 2. Available at: https://​www.glo​bala​sia.org/​v15​no2/​cover/​tian​xia-​chi​nas-​conc​ept-​of-​intern​atio​nal-​ord​ er_​s​hiu-​sin-​por. Accessed 23 August 2021. Spengler, O. 1934. The Hour of Decision. Part One: Germany and the World-​Historical Evolution, translated by Charles F. Atkinson. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Spengler, O. and Atkinson, C. F. 1932. The Decline of the West. London: Allen & Unwin. Truman, H. S. 1947. ‘President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress’, 12 March 1947. Available at: https://​ava​lon.law.yale.edu/​20th_​cent​ury/​tru​doc.asp. Accessed 26 April 2021. Zakaria, F. and Yew, L. K. 1994. ‘Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew’. Foreign Affairs 73: 109–​126.

Chapter 30

T he Eighteenth C e nt u ry Daniel Gordon In March and April, 1929, two towering figures in European intellectual life, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, had a debate in Davos, Switzerland at an international conference organized around the question ‘What is Man?’ In their exchanges, the German philosophers offered profoundly different conceptions of the eighteenth century and its legacy. The contest was largely about whether it was necessary to embark on a new path for Western philosophy. Heidegger said yes, for he wished to recover the unity of ancient philosophy against the splintering effects of eighteenth-​century empiricism. Cassirer said no because he believed that eighteenth-​century thought, by legitimizing self-​criticism and intellectual difference, had established a sound basis for modern theory. (On the Davos debate, see Gordon 2003; and Gordon 2012.) Today, we are still arguing about whether the ideas that emerged in the ‘the Enlightenment’ constitute a barrier to overcome or an inheritance to amplify. Cassirer championed the manner in which eighteenth-​century philosophy set aside metaphysical speculation. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Cassirer 1968 [1932]), a book that continued the debate with Heidegger, Cassirer demonstrated how Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and others highlighted the limits of human knowledge: the mind’s inability to seize the constituent units of reality and to assemble them into a unified whole. Cassirer argued that the ‘completely original’ (vi) quality of Enlightenment philosophy was its rejection of the search for unity: a renouncing of the ‘esprit de système’ (vii). The monistic systems of the previous century, the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz, were replaced with a ‘constantly evolving process of thought’ (ix). Reason itself, according to Cassirer, ceased to be understood as a cement holding the world together and became a critical ‘energy’ yielding a ‘clash’ of doctrines (13, 273, 277). Heidegger, for his part, pursued the debate in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1965 [1929]). While agreeing with Cassirer that the Enlightenment demonstrated that human knowledge is limited, Heidegger faulted Kant for stopping there. Heidegger affirmed that Kant should have converted the fact of humankind’s cognitive limits into a new kind of metaphysical exploration: the exploration of our ‘finitude’. Cassirer understood modernity to be the ability to comprehend multiple cultures and competing values; he encouraged philosophers to move in the direction of intellectual history and cultural

440   Daniel Gordon anthropology. But Heidegger viewed this cataloguing of ideas to be fruitless-​-a​ distraction from a direct investigation of ‘being’ by means of intensive reflection on our universal frailty. In recent writing about the eighteenth century, one can observe a breach similar to that between Heidegger and Cassirer. With regards to International Relations (IR), some scholars view the eighteenth century as the breakthrough to modernity. Consistent with Cassirer’s vision of the Enlightenment, historians have observed that the quest for a moral and religious unification of Europe came to an end in the eighteenth century. What emerged was an ideal of dynamic equilibrium among multiple competing units. For Henry Kissinger, who was, like Cassirer, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, ‘the most fundamental problem of politics . . . is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness’ (Kissenger 1973 [1957], 206). Kissinger believed there could be no improvement on the eighteenth-​century concept of balance of power. The eighteenth century created ‘the scaffolding of international order such as it now exists’ (Kissenger 2014, 27). Those who yearn for a radical reconstruction of Western culture, however, portray the eighteenth century as inadequate. As Dorothy M. Figueira (2002, 26) states, much current scholarship reveals ‘a vested interest in dismissing the Enlightenment’. In each of the ‘post’ schools of thought that claim to open a new horizon (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postnormativity, and so on), one finds spokespersons who construe the eighteenth century as the principal thing being posted: a noxious antecedent against which a new kind of theory needs to be imagined.1 One illustration is a review essay, ‘After the Enlightenment’, by Hayward R. Alker. . . . mainstream IR’s ‘discourse’ is founded on the tenants of the Enlightenment era, marked by a dichotomized frame of reference (subject/​object, fact/​value, is/​ought, self/​other, domestic/​international), a linear sense of history (specifically of the West), and universalism. These characteristics effectively detach the analyst from the world ‘out there’ resulting in the abdication of individual social responsibility. The realization that mainstream IR’s epistemology is based on a ‘modernist’ foundation—​which is only a particular meaning of reality, not the reality—​will open discourse space and allow the construction of new epistemologies and ‘realities’. (1996, 150)

Alker calls for the development of a new ‘reconstructive’ theory in IR (151). Many scholars across the humanities and social sciences, for about a century now, have been issuing manifestos for a new kind of theory in their respective fields. Inevitably, this constant search for a fresh start means that nothing enjoys prestige for long. Every new approach claiming to supersede the Enlightenment must be repudiated to make way for the next new beginning. Thus, Alker, who acknowledges that efforts to go beyond the Enlightenment already abound, says that it is urgent to imagine not only post-​ Enlightenment concepts but also ‘post-​Wittgensteinian, [and] post-​Foucaultian theories of objectivity and truth’ (151). We may wonder if this recurrent one-​upping thrives only by simplifying the historical antecedents that are disclaimed. Characterizing the eighteenth century as an era dominated by ‘dichotomized’ and ‘linear’ ideas is a step backward from Cassirer’s complex understanding of eighteenth-​century thought. The discussion that follows is inspired by Cassirer’s

The Eighteenth Century    441 insight that eighteenth-​century thinkers set out to consecrate difference—​the acceptance of competing interests and realities. Cassirer suggested that we would do well not to ‘assume a derogatory air’ toward the eighteenth century. ‘We must take courage and measure our powers against those of the age of the Enlightenment, and thus find a proper adjustment’ (Cassirer 1968 [1932], xi). Yet, it is not so simple. The present author remains haunted by one of Heidegger’s points: metaphysics or the belief that a particular level of reality is more real than others, that it generates all other things, at least all other good things, can be present even when one does not purport to be monistic. Heidegger wrote, ‘An explicit laying of the ground for metaphysics never appears out of nothing, but rather arises from the strength and weakness of a tradition’ (1965 [1929], 5, italics added). The ‘weakness’ of the eighteenth century was the sleight of hand by which capitalist thinkers idealized ‘commerce’ while purporting to only describe it empirically. It was commercial ideology that propped up balance-​of-​power thinking in IR. Emer de Vattel’s magnificent The Law of Nations (1758) will be treated in this essay as a representative text. While embracing the multiplicity of nation states and the competition among them, Vattel portrayed ‘commerce’ as the cement holding modernity together. Commerce would lead to peace among nations; it would be a substitute for religious unification. None of this passed without question. Vattel’s idealization of a dynamic international order held together by commerce became enfolded in a debate about the nature of modern industry and its impact on war and peace. The explosion of contrary visions of commerce and international relations—​including a radical vision of a world purged of war by means of one big war—​and not any one of these visions in particular is what constitutes the modernity of the eighteenth century. This article, it should be noted, is not primarily about the practice of diplomacy in the eighteenth century. It is about the burgeoning of public intellectual debate about the sources of peace and war. The ideas were not without influence. For though the participants were ‘men of letters’, they often served simultaneously as governmental administrators and advisors. Scholarship over the past 30 years has tended to reject Alexis de Tocqueville’s image of eighteenth-​century intellectuals as disconnected from practical politics (Tocqueville 1983 [1856]). A case in point is Richard Whatmore’s book (2012) linking the ideas of David Hume, Adam Smith, and other theorists of international order to British diplomacy in the 1780s. But with one exception, this essay does not attempt to trace such linkages. The exception is the French Revolutionary Wars, which were generative of a horrific level of violence, a military terror that is incomprehensible unless one notes the impact of a radical political ideology that was fashioned in the Enlightenment, i.e. in the sphere of debate that is traced in this essay. Cassirer was absolutely right that the Enlightenment was an ‘energy’ producing a ‘clash of doctrines’. He was right, too, that certain thinkers of the Enlightenment purported to dispense with the ‘esprit de système’. But this does not mean that they actually expunged utopianism from their thinking. Indeed, we must note a paradox. This era of intellectual scepticism, with its emphasis on the limits of our understanding and the need for ‘moderation’ and ‘balance’ in all things, yielded the French Revolution and the practice of unlimited war.

442   Daniel Gordon

Balance of Power and Limited War Historians portray 1648–​1789 as an era of balance-​of-​power politics in Europe—​in contrast to the religious struggles that came before. It was the end of holy war. Ambitions to unite Christendom under a single confession gave way to alliances designed to prevent any power from becoming dominant. As Vattel wrote (2008 [1758], 325): Such is the mode at present pursued by the sovereigns of Europe. They consider the two principal powers, which on that very account are naturally rivals, as destined to be checks on each other; and they unite with the weaker, like so many weights thrown into the lighter scale, in order to keep it in equilibrium with the other.

War did not disappear; in fact, in its new and limited form, war was normalized as part of the mechanics of balance. The war of the Polish Succession (1733–​38), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–​48), and the Seven Years’ War (1754–​63) were not minor affairs; but the scale of conflict and slaughter was small compared to the wars issuing from the Protestant Reformation, especially the Thirty Years’ War (1618–​48), which wiped out a third or more of the population in many parts of Europe. As David Bell observes, in the eighteenth century, war was constant, but ‘armies were relatively small, major battles relatively infrequent’ (2007, 5). ‘The humanity with which most nations in Europe carry on their wars at present cannot be too much commended’, stated Vattel (2008 [1758], 358).

The Debate About the Origins of Balance-​of-​Power Politics Scholars have offered diverse reasons for the transformation just described. We can classify them into four accounts. The first focuses on the 1648 settlement ending the Thirty Years’ War. James Turner Johnson suggests that limited war ‘reflected’ the treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War. No one wanted to go to war for religion any more . . . The Peace of Westphalia ratified the new reality, and from the time of its signing until the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 the wars of Europe were of a sort that reflected this reality. They were, as one writer calls them, ‘sovereigns’ wars,’ wars engaged in by the ruling princes of the various nation-​states for dynastic or national-​interest reasons, fought by relatively small, compact, and highly trained armies of professional soldiers, financed with the limited resources of the sovereigns themselves, and carried out in an increasingly stylized fashion. (1975, 199–​200; on ‘sovereigns’ wars’ citing Fuller 1961, ­chapter 1)

In a similar vein, Kissinger praised the Peace of Westphalia for abolishing the quest for ‘doctrinal or political unity’. ‘The state, not the empire, dynasty or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of the European order. The concept of sovereignty was established’ (2014, 25–​26). Similar formulations, admiring in tone, about the importance of the 1648 settlement can be found in Hans Morgenthau and other twentieth-​century thinkers of the ‘realist’ school of IR. (See Osiander, 2001, for further examples and penetrating criticism of them on the basis of the fact that the Peace of Westphalia did not contain the

The Eighteenth Century    443 principles commonly ascribed to it—​no idea state of sovereignty, no rejection of papal authority, no language of ‘balance’.) A second explanation for the rise of balance-​of-​power politics focuses on another diplomatic settlement, the 1713 Peace of Utrecht. Stella Ghervas (2017, 409) has demonstrated how the terms ‘équilibre des puissances’ and ‘balance de l’égalité’ occur in this treaty, whose primary purpose was to prevent the union of France and Spain into a single kingdom. (Charles II of Spain died childless in 1700 and named Philip of France as his successor.) The fear of a French ‘universal monarchy’ and the successful prevention of it in 1713 produced what J. G. A. Pocock (1999, 113) has termed ‘Utrecht and its Enlightenment’. Voltaire and others heralded the Utrecht settlement as the triumph of a modern commercial civilization over barbarism and religion. Two other explanations for the new ethos of balance focus less on treaties and more on social and cultural factors. For Kissinger, the international system was affiliated with the aristocratic type of society. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-​century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals . . . Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct. (2014, 38)

The argument is developed with nuance by Bell, who points out that since military service was an integral part of the social identity of aristocrats, war was not professionalized; it was embedded in aristocratic custom. Aristocrats conceived of war as an activity with intricate rules, like a duel, and saw enemy forces, led by other aristocrats, as honorable equals. In sum, ‘eighteenth century aristocratic culture helped place surprising limits on war. These limits existed . . . despite the fact that European elites had war as their principal purpose. Indeed, in some ways, they existed because the elites had war as their principal purpose’ (Bell 2007, 44, italics in original; see also 5, 11, 24, 35). The last interpretation, which informs the present essay, construes ‘balance’ primarily as an idea with its own history and influence. In other words, there is no particular treaty or social class that ‘caused’ the commitment to balance of power. The ethos of balance was embedded in a new kind of theory about international law. Martii Koskenniemi characterizes this theory in a manner consonant with Cassirer’s definition of the Enlightenment. ‘Reason connoted a method rather than a metaphysical assumption about the world’ (2009, 50). ‘The law does not emerge from any structure or telos outside the domestic community, but from what natural reason dictates for ‘peoples’ in pursuit of their self-​preservation and self-​ perfection . . .’ (56). Likewise, Richard Devetak (2011) speaks of the intellectual effort in the eighteenth century to emancipate politics ‘from religion and metaphysics’ (114), to ‘conceptualize an anti-​metaphysical version of the law of nature and nations’ (128).

Scepticism as the Stimulus of Balance The basis of anti-​ metaphysical rhetoric was scepticism. Richard Tuck (1993) has demonstrated the wide resonance of sceptical philosophy in early modern European culture. The sceptics wished to avert religious war by loosening up the ground of religious and moral

444   Daniel Gordon self-​assurance. ‘Each man calls barbarous whatever is not his own practice’ (Montaigne 1972 [1580], 152). Natural law theorists, starting with Hugo Grotius (d. 1645), imbibed this scepticism; they accepted the reality of religious and moral pluralism and wished to build international law on top of this pluralism. To arrive at general laws governing international relations, they sought to extricate a small number of ‘cross-​cultural universals’, as Tuck puts it (1993, 347) from the midst of cultural diversity. Under the pressure of scepticism, modern natural law theorists after Grotius realized that the precepts of international law had to be minimized. The principles that were to govern dealings of this kind had to be appropriately stripped down: there was no point in asserting to a king in Sumatra that Aristotelian moral philosophy was universally true . . . The minimalist character of the principles that emerged from this setting caught the imagination of modern Europe, for they seemed to offer the prospect of an understanding of political and moral life to which all men—​the poor and dispossessed and religiously heterodox of Europe as well as the exotic peoples of the Far East or the New World—​ could give their assent. (Tuck 2005, xviii)

The minimalist principles were economic in character: self-​interest and prosperity. The very thinness of these values, as opposed to elaborate theological and moral doctrines, was meant to provide a consensual basis for the formation of the rules of diplomacy and war. But the consensus never emerged. Disagreement about the nature of our basic needs and about the actual effects of capitalism in the international arena was the undoing of balance-​of-​power theory. We will now look at one of its leading spokespersons.

Vattel and the Jus in Bello In the eighteenth century, Vattel’s Le Droit des Gens (1758) was ‘the most important book on the law of nations’ (Kapossy and Whatmore 2008, ix) in terms of its circulation and influence. The work illustrates a brilliant mind engaging with scepticism while attempting to formulate universal doctrines to limit the ravages of war. Vattel’s engagement with scepticism can be analysed under three headings. Religious scepticism is the separation of international affairs from religion. ‘The law of nature alone regulates the treaties of nations: the difference of religion is a thing absolutely foreign to them’ (Vattel 2008 [1758], 221). Grotius (2005 [1625]) had already affirmed provocatively that the laws of nations would be valid ‘though we should even grant, what with without the greatest wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God or that he takes no care of human affairs’. But Vattel went further. For Grotius approved of waging war on non-​European peoples if their religion condoned cannibalism, the mistreatment of one’s parents, or otherwise offended against the laws of nature, even if there was no threat to the interests of Europeans.2 Vattel, in contrast, was sensitive to how such judgments could confer a reciprocal right on non-​Europeans to colonize Europe! The following passage from Vattel is significant in its ironic use of the language of ‘civilization’. Those ambitious Europeans who attacked the American nations, and subjected them to their greedy dominion, in order, as they pretended, to civilise them (pour les civiliser, disoient-​ils), and cause them to be instructed in the true religion,—​those usurpers, I say, grounded themselves

The Eighteenth Century    445 on a pretext equally unjust and ridiculous. It is strange to hear the learned and judicious Grotius assert, that a sovereign may justly take up arms to chastise nations which are guilty of enormous transgressions . . . though they do not affect either his rights or his safety. (2008 [1758],164)

It is worth noting that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the terms ‘civilize’ and ‘civilization’ were associated with a mission civilisatrice—​Europe’s desire to remake the rest of the world according to its own image of advancement. But the language of civilization originated in the eighteenth century and had a different function at that time: it often facilitated self-​criticism (Gordon 2017; Starobinski 1993). Vattel’s ironic usage is typical. The French author who coined the very term ‘civilization’, the Marquis de Mirabeau (father of the famous revolutionary), spoke of ‘false civilization’ and ‘the barbarity of our civilizations’ (Gordon 2017, 109; Starobinski 1993, 7). Linguistic scepticism is the tendency to reflect on the incapacity of discourse to be a mirror of nature. Thoughts on the ‘the imperfection of language’ (2008 [1758], 266) arise recurrently in Vattel’s framing of inter-​state relations, especially in his discussion of disputes over the meaning of treaties. ‘There is not perhaps any language that does not also contain words which signify two or more different things, and phrases which are susceptible of more than one sense. Thence arises ambiguity in discourse’ (272). Vattel observes that treaties are bound to be a locus of such ambiguity. But, as it is extremely difficult wholly to avoid ambiguity in a treaty, though worded with the greatest care and the most honourable intentions,—​and to obviate every doubt which may arise in the application of its several clauses to particular cases,—​recourse must often be had to the rules of interpretation. (443)

Vattel’s rules for interpreting treaties under dispute are mostly procedural—​they are not based on the premise that a ‘true’ meaning can be uncovered. For example, he states that the interpretation of an ambiguous term in a treaty should generally go against the party who prescribed the term in question. ‘Just war’ scepticism is the belief that it is fruitless to argue about which party in a war has the just reason for fighting (in medieval natural law theory, known as the jus ad bellum). Reflections on the moral basis of war had figured centrally in Christian ‘just war’ doctrine. But in Vattel, as a consequence of his sceptical position that moral and religious doctrines are doubtful, the justness of war shifted entirely to the manner in which war is prosecuted (jus in bello). For Vattel, modernity means accepting the reality that justice consists not in the reasons for war but in the rules of conduct during war. This viewpoint would influence IR theory and practice for two centuries—​as evident in the 1949 Geneva Convention’s exclusive focus on the jus in bello. How did the argument work? Vattel adhered to what Johnson has described as the ‘principle of simultaneous ostensible justice’ (1975, 20, 23, 185–​195). While God can discern which side is good, human intellect never can. It may however happen that both the contending parties are candid and sincere in their intentions . . . Wherefore, since nations are equal and independent . . . and cannot claim a right of judgment over each other, it follows, that, in every case susceptible of doubt, the arms of the two parties at war are to be accounted equally lawful, at least as to external effects . . . . (Vattel 2008 [1758], 320)

446   Daniel Gordon ‘The first rule of that law, respecting the subject under consideration, is, that regular war, as to its effects, is to be accounted just on both sides’ (386, italics in original; see also 390). Vattel believed that moral righteousness with regards to one’s title to war is what enflamed the ferocity of violence during wars in earlier times. The locus of justice during wartime pertains to ‘those rights which are to be respected during the war itself, and to the rules which nations should reciprocally observe, even when deciding their differences by arms’ (357). Vattel thus codified the tendency of his era to focus on such things as the rules concerning noncombatant immunity; the prohibition of weapons, such as red-​hot cannon balls, that magnify the damage of war; and the need to avert the destruction of temples and tombs.

The Dispute Over Commercial Society The ‘natural’ laws for international relations that Vattel itemized were abstract principles. But he also claimed that these laws were realized in one place above all others, Europe. Europe forms a political system, an integral body, closely connected by the relations and different interests of the nations inhabiting this part of the world. It is not, as formerly, a confused heap of detached pieces, each of which thought herself very little concerned in the fate of the others . . . The continual attention of sovereigns to every occurrence, the constant residence of ministers, and the perpetual negotiations, make of modern Europe a kind of republic, of which the members—​each independent, but all linked together by the ties of common interest—​unite for the maintenance of order and liberty. Hence arose that famous scheme of the political balance, or the equilibrium of power; by which is understood such a disposition of things, as that no one potentate be able absolutely to predominate, and prescribe laws to the others. (324)

In this image of a Europe united by ‘ties of common interest’, we can discern an unspoken reversal of the sceptical philosophy. For while scepticism meant the rejection of a universal morality, Vattel still needed something to bind together all the parts of the European ‘system’. And what we arrive at by means of a ‘stripped-​down’ set of principles is a thickening of the alleged blessings of commercial development. Richard Whatmore and Béla Kapossy write that ‘Vattel’s vision of a workable European order’ was linked to ‘the importance he attributed to political economy for establishing and maintaining a regime of international justice’ (2008, xiii). Many chapters in The Law of Nations affirm the progressive nature of capitalism and the imperative for everyone to engage in it. He notes that there is a ‘general obligation incumbent on nations reciprocally to cultivate commerce’ (170). International trade tends to create ‘real friendship’ and ‘mutual affection’ among nations. Commerce becomes the essence of what Vattel calls ‘society’. The end or object of civil society is to procure for the citizens whatever they stand in need of, for the necessities, the conveniences, the accommodation of life and, in general, whatever constitutes happiness,—​with the peaceful possession of property, a method of obtaining justice with security, and, finally a mutual defence against all external violence. (41–​42) A substitute for metaphysics has entered the picture through the insertion of ‘commerce’ into the social contract.

The Eighteenth Century    447 But if commerce is such a unifying force, why should there be war at all? Does commercial competition dissolve or inflame national animosities? Hume summed up the liberal doctrine in his 1752 essay on ‘Of Luxury’ (which he renamed ‘Of Refinement of the Arts’ in 1760). ‘Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages’ (1987 [1752], 164; see also Dickey 2001, on commercial humanism). Yet even Adam Smith worried about the corrupting effects of commercial specialization upon the capacity of nations to defend themselves. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become . . . . Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind. (1904, [1776] Vol. 2, 267)

Smith’s Scottish compatriot, John Millar, went further in his criticism of the commercial order. He argued that commerce breeds a taste for luxury which in turn undermines the virtues of industry and frugality, which are the very basis of economic productivity (Hont 2005, 297–​298). Capitalism, in other words, tends to destroy its own moral capital. In France too, economic thinkers worried about the dysfunctional nature of commercial development. The Physiocrats claimed that the preoccupation with urbane and luxurious living would lead to the neglect of agriculture. In their own metaphysical conception of the economic order, agriculture and only agriculture is the source of value creation. Mirabeau (previously cited on the topic of ‘civilization’) described commercial luxury as ‘homicidal’ (Hont 2008, 277). Istvan Hont observes that for a wide range of French thinkers—​including Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, who would influence French Revolutionary ideology—​‘National self-​preservation depended not on fostering more and more commerce and luxury in the vain hope of winning the international trade wars, but on restraining these phenomena’ (Hont 2008, 278). These authors called for ‘virtue’ and ‘public spirit’ to supervise private luxury in order to avert the self-​destruction of rich nations. An even more direct attack on the allegedly innocent nature of commerce came through the international debate triggered by, again, Hume’s essays; in this case ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ and ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ (both 1752). Hume optimistically argued that international commerce tended to flatten out the economic inequalities among nations. Commerce not only humanized but equalized the peoples of the Earth. This was a reversal of the seventeenth-​century mercantilist view, such as one finds in Colbert, which portrayed the international competition for bullion as aggression within a zero-​sum game (Aron 1966, 245–​246). A series of eighteenth-​century authors continued to represent international commerce as warfare by other means. Nicolas Dutot wrote in 1738, in his Reflections on Commerce and Finance, ‘To make peace in order to procure for ourselves all the advantages of a great commerce is to wage war upon our enemies’ (cited by Aron 246). This view did not disappear with the rise of free-​market thinking; it endured through the whole eighteenth century, finding new articulations in what historians of the eighteenth century call the ‘rich country/​poor country debate’. This debate fueled the sentiment that ‘the modern commercial republic would turn out to be even more warlike than its predecessors’ (Hont 2005, 7). It arose when Josiah Tucker

448   Daniel Gordon challenged Hume’s optimism that rich and poor nations tend to converge in their level of economic development. Tucker argued that rich countries can maintain indefinitely their superiority over poor ones. Nations that were already prosperous had the advantages of better transport infrastructure; more capital for investments and innovations; and higher wages which lure skilled workers from poorer countries. Hont notes that the rich country/​poor country debate was tracked very closely by French thinkers and diplomats; it contributed to the perception of a ‘dangerous synergy between economic competition and international power rivalry’ (Hont 2008, 249). In a monograph called Commerce and Government Considered in their Mutual Relationship (1776), Condillac criticized France’s entanglement in international commercial competition. European trade is not an exchange of works in which all nations will each find their advantage; it is a state of war in which they only think of how to plunder each other . . . In perpetual rivalry they only work at hurting each other. There is not one of them that would not wish to destroy all others. (Cited by Hont 2008, 289)

Condillac defended an ideal system of free trade, a system in which every country would have a proper balance of agriculture and industry and no country would be ‘too rich’ for its own good (Hont, 2008, 290). This was a speculative vision of commerce as opposed to the descriptive idealization of commerce such as one finds in Hume and Vattel. Condillac’s ideal was a hope projected into the future, rather than a benign system already unfolding in modernity. His ideal differed in substance but not in its conditional status from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s vision of achieving peace through a closed commercial order: a system in which autonomous republics banned commerce between their respective citizens and those of different states (Nakhimovsky 2011). Fichte and Condillac, in fact, had a similar diagnosis of the actual workings of commerce in their time. The former wrote: This war becomes more and more violent, dangerous, and unjust in its consequences as the world becomes more populous, as the commercial state expands through adventitious acquisitions, as production and the arts increase, and as the quantity of goods that come into circulation increases and diversifies together with everyone’s needs. (Fichte, The Closed Commercial State (1800), cited by Nakhimovsky 2011, 77)

Through the dialectic of debate, the commercial tropes of Vattel and Hume transmuted into futuristic visions of a radically different world order.

From Balance of Power to Perpetual Peace As J. M. Black has trenchently observed, while the language of ‘balance’ proliferated among European thinkers, the European order was actually in ‘a state of collapse’ (1983, 450) by the 1770s. In particular, the partition of Poland in 1772–​73 revealed the weakness of the European system (451). In two essays, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795), Immanuel Kant envisioned

The Eighteenth Century    449 an alternative to the balance model: a united world political community. Pheng Cheah dramatizes the significance of Kant’s vision: Kant’s cosmopolitanism signifies a turning point where moral politics or political morality needs to be formulated beyond the polis or state form, the point at which the ‘political’ becomes, by moral necessity, ‘cosmopolitical’. (1998, 23)

Commercial thinkers maintained that the civilizing of warfare was a byproduct of the trade conducted by nations; there was no need for international political institutions. Cheah is correct to say that in Kant we encounter a separate school of thinking; in fact, an opposite train of thought, focusing on international governance as a prerequisite for peace. The ‘turning point’, however, is not Kant’s own writing. The ‘perpetual peace’ idiom has a history of its own which predates Kant. His two famous essays are, in fact, a series of doubts about its viability. One of the early proposals in this idiom was the Quaker William Penn’s 1693 ‘Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe’, in which he advocated an international parliament, or ‘European Sovereign’. Each nation, in Penn’s plan, was to receive a number of representatives in proportion to its annual economic value. In international conflicts, the nations were to sacrifice their independent action to the decisions of the diet. Other proposals for international governance were written by John Bellers, Cardinal Giulio Alberoni, Pierre-​André Gargaz, and Jeremy Bentham. One of the most widely read plans for international governance was the Abbé de Saint-​Pierre’s ‘Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe’ (1713), described by Ghervas (2017, 405) as ‘an open and direct challenge to the political paradigm [balance of power] of Utrecht’. Many of these proposals for perpetual peace are collected in Early Notions of Global Governance by Aksu (2008). Kant’s essays underscored the difficulty of transitioning to international governance. In ‘Ideal for a Universal History’, he spoke of the ‘chiliastic expectations’ (1991 [1784], 50) underlying the wish for perpetual peace. Rousseau, in his 1756 commentary on Saint-​ Pierre’s proposal had already exposed the perpetual-​peace tradition to criticism. The citizen of Geneva could not imagine that European nations would voluntarily cede all or part of their sovereignty. Kant’s contribution to the discussion was, like Rousseau’s (to which Kant refers: 1991 [1784], 47), a critical one. When it came to commerce, Kant was of two minds. On the one hand, he recognized that ‘unsocial sociability’ (ungesillige Gesilligkeit)—​the selfishness which drives people to encounter others in the marketplace—​tends to soften human relations. According to Kant, history reveals a pattern by which human greed ‘unwittingly’ benefits humankind (41). Nature uses ‘antagonism’ to develop our human capacities (44), ‘and thus a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole’(45, italics in original). But Kant also wished to see humankind transition to a stage of development higher than the commercial stage of Europe at present, a stage in in which unsocial sociability would be replaced by ‘a morally good attitude of mind’ (49). He dreamed of a world in which war will be replaced by cosmopolitan government and fellowship. But his reflections on the chances for such a transition are cautious, to say the least; he states that only a providential conception of history can inspire confidence that economic and national self-​interest will somehow morph into cosmopolitan benevolence. Kant outlines other, equally likely paths that the future may take, one of which is that ‘nothing rational will ever emerge’ from the interplay of

450   Daniel Gordon competitive interests (48). In the end, he opts for faith in providence. We should ‘assume’ that nature has a plan for our full development because we then we can sustain ‘grounds for greater hopes’ (52).

From Perpetual Peace to Revolutionary Violence Authors of the ‘perpetual peace’ line of proposals, from Penn to Kant, contemplated a radical reorganization of IR but never advocated revolutionary action to create a new order. In the 1780s and 1790s, the temper changed. The call was made not for transnational governance but transnational revolution. The cosmopolitan wishful thinking of Kant was displaced by urgent appeals to humanity to rise up against the true cause of war—​not human nature, not commerce, but kings. Once each nation cleansed itself of its domestic tyrants, a unified humanity would arise. According to Thomas Paine, ‘Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false system of government’ (The Rights of Man 1791, cited by Israel 2010, 147). According to Joel Barlow, a professional revolutionary who, like Paine, was an American elected to the French National Assembly, ‘The principle of government must be completely changed; and the consequence of this will be such a total renovation of society, as to banish standing armies, overturn the military system, and exclude the possibility of war’ (Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, 1792, cited by Israel, 146). In this revolutionary vision, peace was natural; social hierarchy and war are unnatural and easily lopped off the body politic. As Jonathan Israel writes about Barlow and other proponents of revolution, ‘Removing kings and substituting democratic republics would, it was thought, of itself cure national animosities’ (2010, 147). Bell has traced the impact of this kind of thinking on the practice of war during the French Revolution. The widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures once condemned as barbaric. (2007, 1)

Revolutionary war was to achieve not only ‘the complete destruction of the enemy’ but also ‘a purifying, even redemptive, effect on the participants’ (3). Individuals suspected of opposing the Revolution were of course targets for terror. But in the Revolution entire populations were also demonized; the language of ‘extermination’ gained currency. Bertrand Barère in 1794 declared, ‘[The English] are a people foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear’ (cited by Bell, 143). Bell provides instances of this rhetoric in action: the killing of a quarter of a million men, women, and children in the Vendée, and the committing of atrocities during the French occupation of foreign countries. War, as an extension of social revolution, led to an ‘abandonment of the regime of restraints’ (138). Vattel’s rules against harming non-​combatants, the jus in bello, were laid aside during the revolutionary revival of the jus ad bellum: the moral right to wage war in order to spread the rights of man.

The Eighteenth Century    451 In this era known as the Enlightenment, an era which displayed so much scepticism, so much nuance in formulating the limits of knowledge, what accounts for the explosion, near the end of the century, of a political idealism that did not doubt itself at all? Hume and Vattel appear to represent a ‘moderate’ Enlightenment in contradistinction to the ‘radical’ thought of the Revolution. But perhaps the two types conditioned each other through debate. Realistic and utopian elements are found on each side. Idealized representations of capitalism lurked inside a sceptical philosophy; and realistic reservations about Europe’s commercial system stimulated dreams of an alternative order. Suggestively for the argument of this essay, Jonathan Israel insists that the philosophy of Spinoza was the inspiration for the ‘monistic’ (2010, 153) ideas of Paine and other revolutionaries—​for their belief in the oneness of humanity, split artificially only by tyrannical rulers. Israel appears to be right: contrary to what Cassirer suggested, metaphysics gained popularity in this period. The consequences for international relations were profoundly disruptive. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Professor John Shovlin of New York University for comments on a draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. For additional examples, see Figueira (2002, 8); and the various essays in Gordon (2000). 2. On this troubling point, see Blom, (section 3B, N. P., N. D .), discussing how Grotius expanded justifications for colonialism. See also Barbeyrac (1729 [1706], 84), criticizing Grotius for neglecting his own ‘first principles’ and indulging in ‘the prejudices of the Schools’.

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The Eighteenth Century    453 Nakhimovsky, I. 2011. The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Osiander, A. 2001. ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’. International Organization 55(2): 251–​287. Pheng, C. 1998. ‘The Cosmopolitical—​Today’. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds. P. Cheah and B. Robbins, 20–​44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pocock, J. G. A. 1999. Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, vol. 1. 1737–​1764. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. 1904 [1776]. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. E. Cannan. London: Methuen & Co. Starobinski, J. 1993. ‘The Word Civilization’. In Blessings in Disguise, or, the Morality of Evil, 1–​34. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tocqueville, A. de. 1983 [1856]. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. New York: Anchor Books. Tuck, R. 1993. Philosophy and Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuck, R. 2005. ‘Introduction’ to Hugo Grotius’. In The Rights of War and Peace, ix-​xxxiii, ed. R. Tuck. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1. 24 March 2020. Available at: https://​oll.libe​rtyf​und.org/​ tit​les/​1425#Groti​us_​01​ 38.01_​52. Vattel, E. de. 2008 [1758]. The Law of Nations, Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, eds. B. Kapossy and R. Whitmore. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008. E-​ book version. Available at: http://​oll-​resour​ces. s3.amazon​aws.com/​tit​les/​2246/​Vat​tel_​1519​_​EBk​_​v6.0.pdf. Whatmore, R. 2012. Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chapter 31

T he L ong Ni net e e nt h Centu ry Quentin Bruneau This chapter is about the international system during the long nineteenth century.1 The beginning and end points of the long nineteenth century are not self-​evident, but its existence is premised on the idea of a number of significant interlocking changes in the one hundred to one-​hundred-​and-​fifty-​year period preceding the First World War (Bayly 2004; Buzan and Lawson 2015; Osterhammel 2014). The French Revolution (1789) is of course a classic dividing line between early modernity and modernity, but it is sometimes replaced with the American one (1776),2 or yet still, the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763); at the end of the period, the beginning or end of the First World War (1914/​1918) often serve as benchmarks, at times replaced with the Russian Revolution (1917). Because of the breadth of the topics covered in this chapter, I do not take a specific position and will move freely between these dates. Following the editors’ proposition that we cannot make sense of the history of the modern world without understanding the history of the international system, the chapter focuses heavily on this latter dimension. In terms of granularity, two choices are therefore ‘built in’ to this chapter: a chronological focus on the long nineteenth century, and an emphasis on the international system as a whole. Specifically, the chapter aims to capture some of the key changes of the period pertaining to nature of the units of this system, its stratification, and its normative and legal structure. My starting point is the existing historical scholarship on the nineteenth-​century international system. This body of work frequently defines the nineteenth century by contrast with the early modern period, outlining a set of differences that can be summed up through two umbrella terms: expansion and transformation. The first refers to the gradual extension of the early modern system of states to the rest of the world. The second term describes a set of alterations in the normative and legal structure of this system. In this chapter, I first briefly discuss the underlying assumption of traditional understandings of the long nineteenth century, namely that there was already a system of states, which then underwent a transformation and expansion. I subsequently offer a critical discussion of the idea that this system expanded to the rest of the world, before moving on to examine two transformations widely associated with the nineteenth century. These

The Long Nineteenth Century    455 are on the one hand, the rise of a great power system, and on the other, the development of two new principles of interaction, contractual international law and multilateralism. In this section, an important part of my argument consists in re-​establishing the central role of monarchical states as the primary engine in the development of these key features of modern international relations, and on correspondingly downgrading the role of liberal and revolutionary states.

The Emergence of a System of States? A tacit assumption that underpins most accounts of the expansion or transformation of the international system in the long nineteenth century is the idea that there was a pre-​ existing system of states, inherited from the early modern period (Philpott 2001; Spruyt 1996; Tilly 1990; Wight 1977). In spite of the powerful attacks on the thesis that a system of states emerged around this time (Nexon 2009; Osiander 2001; Teschke 2009), the idea has endured. There is however a body of evidence, though scattered, that suggests that this epochal shift may in fact belong to the long nineteenth century. First, historians of political, legal, and diplomatic thought broadly understood, have increasingly pushed the rise of the states-​system into the long nineteenth century. Take the very notion of a ‘system of states’ for instance. Though the conceptual history of ‘the state’ begins in the early modern period (see the classic Skinner 2002, 368–​413), the idea of a ‘system of states’ itself did not emerge before the nineteenth century (Devetak 2015; Keene 2002, 22–​29).3 Likewise, a few scholars have displaced the enactment of modern notions of absolute and indivisible sovereignty, usually located in the early modern period, into the long nineteenth century. The early modern period has been recast as one in which sovereignty was widely understood to be divisible. It was conceived as a bundle of rights, which need not be held by one and the same person or body (Benton and Ross 2013; Keene 2002). Many entities possessing only a restricted set of sovereign prerogatives, such as taxation, enjoyed something akin to what lawyers would refer to as international personality. They could enter into treaty relations, make war and peace. This was true both within and outside Europe (for examples see Alexandrowicz 1967, 15–​20; Phillips and Sharman 2015, 16; Wilson 2016, 137–​178). It was only over the course of the long nineteenth century that international jurists identified a clearer category of fully sovereign international actors and designated a specific group of polities as only ‘enjoying’ partial sovereignty, using a variety of prefixes to describe them: demi-​, semi-​, or half-​sovereigns (Donnelly 2006, 145–​146; Haldén, 2013; Learoyd 2018). The emergence of a worldview with sovereign states at its centre can also be observed in diplomatic practice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, especially after the Congress of Vienna (1814–​15). At no point before then did diplomats regularly and systematically use maps to delineate the borders within which sovereign states asserted their authority unencumbered (Branch 2014, 120–​141; for an account with a different type of granularity, see Sahlins 1991). The second reason to locate the emergence of a system of states in the long nineteenth century is that it was in this period that private companies faded as both subjects of international law and central players in European wars. Companies such as the East India Company or the Dutch East India Company had previously been cast as bearers of rights in the law of nations,

456   Quentin Bruneau such that the law of nations was not exclusively for nations (Keene 2002, 40–​59; Koskenniemi 2011; Stern 2012). Over the course of the long nineteenth century, these companies gradually lost their power to make treaties, war, and peace, and the territories they governed were slowly transferred to imperial governments (Thomson 1996). In addition to these types of companies, private actors also played an enormous role in intra-​European warfare up until the French Revolution, constituting up to nearly half of a sovereign’s armed forces in some cases (Scheipers 2015, 1–​68). A corollary is that European armies were truly multinational, being composed of a large number of foreign mercenaries (Thomson 1996, 21–​42). Again, it was over the course of the long nineteenth century that states truly built up standing armies and stopped relying so heavily on private mercenaries and privateers, not before (Lemnitzer 2013; Percy 2007, 2011; on this theme see also Bukovansky 1999). These fragments do not, on their own, sustain a new thesis regarding the emergence of the states-​system in the long nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they point in a more than coincidental way to this period not simply as a time of expansion or transformation of an old system of states, but possibly as its birthplace. While a few works in the history of international relations have pointed in this direction as well (Osiander 2007; Teschke 2009), a full re-​evaluation of the conventional narrative about the emergence of the system of states is still in order. Let me now turn to the questions of expansion and transformation.

The Long Nineteenth Century as Expansion A common way of framing the long nineteenth century is as a moment of expansion of the international system of states inherited from the early modern period (the seminal statement is Bull and Watson 1984). This story is about the gradual inclusion of an increasing number of non-​European states within the international system constructed by Europeans, a process that culminates with twentieth-​century decolonization. Europeans conducted this process of inclusion with a set of discriminatory legal precepts sometimes referred to as the ‘standard of civilization’ (the classic reference remains Gong 1984),4 an inchoate set of legal criteria based on the idea of civilization that early nineteenth century liberals such as Guizot and Mill had developed (Bowden 2009; Keene 2005, 160–​193). As Gong explains, it included such demands as the ability to guarantee foreigners’ rights and property, the possession of an organized bureaucracy and defence force, adherence to international law, and the possession of a clear domestic legal code, the maintenance of diplomatic representation abroad, and acceptance of the norms and practices of civilized international society (Gong 1984, 14–​15). Embracing this standard was the entry ticket to enjoy the benefits of full legal and diplomatic recognition among what diplomats and jurists then frequently called the ‘family of civilized nations’ (Keene 2002, 97–​119; Koskenniemi 2004, 98–​178). Those who did not could not enjoy those benefits and exist as fully independent international actors, being subjected to a variety of legal hindrances. Following this view, scholars have sought to shed light on the timing and nature of processes of entry into the international system of specific states and regions. These have included the United States, Latin America, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Adelman 2009; Hulsebosch, 2018; Schulz 2014; Suzuki 2005; Wigen 2014; Zhang 1991).

The Long Nineteenth Century    457 The reason this expansion story has been so popular is that it provides a powerful account of how the European system of states came to encompass the entire globe and thus, of how we came to live in the world we live in now. In addition, it puts emphasis on the international causes for the development of similar state-​like characteristics among polities across the globe, highlighting the importance of coercion, rather than of the diffusion of ideas about nationalism and statehood. Nevertheless, I think few scholars would accept it without reservations and there have been two main lines of criticism in the literature. The first issue with the expansion thesis is that it misrepresents the legal and normative structure of the international system in the long nineteenth century. In this story, the nature of the system is defined solely with regard to relations between Europeans, which are said to have taken the form of a system of sovereign states (Bull 2002). As a result, the possession of colonies and the control of extra-​European trade are portrayed ‘merely as material ingredients within the European balance of power’ (Keene 2002, 25). On this account, relations between European states and their colonies are excluded from international politics, and no different from domestic political relations. Others have argued, by contrast, that we ought to consider these relations as constitutive of the nature of the international system. They have therefore characterized the long nineteenth century as a bifurcated international system (Keene 2002; Suzuki 2005). There was on the one hand, an order based on a system of sovereign states, and on the other, one based on principles of divisible sovereignty and in which individuals possessed rights, particularly pertaining to property (Keene 2002; on divisible sovereignty and property see Belmessous 2014b; Benton 2009; Benton and Ross 2013; Koskenniemi 2004). The first organized relations between civilized states, and the second, those between Europeans and ‘uncivilized’, ‘barbarous’, or ‘savage’ political communities. Based on this revised account, one need not see the twentieth century as one in which traditional state sovereignty is increasingly under strain due to a radically new emphasis on individual rights imposing limits on sovereignty. Instead, this emphasis simply appears as an extension to the entire world of obligations previously only imposed on polities deemed uncivilized. The second problem with the expansion thesis is its premise that non-​Europeans only entered the international system in the nineteenth century, and that they were therefore not ‘in it’ prior to this time. At issue here is the fact that Europeans had regular diplomatic and legal interactions with non-​Europeans throughout the early modern period (Belmessous 2014a; Fisch 1984; Hébié 2015). In fact, historians of international law have even claimed that non-​European polities stood on a footing of legal equality with Europeans until, in some cases, the early nineteenth century (Alexandrowicz 1967; for a recent foray into this question, see Pitts 2018). How then, can one speak of ‘expansion’ if the long nineteenth century was, for a vast number of polities, defined by the gradual loss of rights and international recognition? One alternative consists in recasting this century precisely as a moment of shrinking of the international system, or yet still as a time period in which new forms of international hierarchy appeared (Alexandrowicz 1967; Keene 2014). On this account, the long nineteenth century constitutes a moment in which many non-​European polities experienced what sociologists might call ‘downward mobility’. When one adopts this view, the real puzzle that arises is to determine why it was in the long nineteenth century specifically that Europeans stripped their non-​European counterparts of their juridical equality. The theme of early modern equality followed by nineteenth-​century demotion dovetails well with a number of recent contributions, which stress that over the course of the period

458   Quentin Bruneau 1400–​1800 ‘no region stood at the apex of world dominion’, and that ‘Europeans did not enjoy any significant military superiority vis-​à-​vis non-​Western opponents in the early modern era, even in Europe’ (Parker 2010, 3; Sharman 2019, 1–​2). Likewise, it chimes in rather well with the argument that the Great Divergence took place on the cusp of the nineteenth century (Pomeranz 2001). It would indeed make sense that non-​Europeans experienced a loss of rights in international law precisely at the moment where they were becoming poorer and weaker. Nonetheless, one should be careful to portray this solely as a power story. In the nineteenth century, many weak European actors, for instance Portugal, were treated with far more respect than powerful non-​European actors, such as China, a fact which can only be adequately explained with reference to the ideational framework of Europeans, and particularly the growing importance of racial ideologies (a good assessment of these alternative explanations is Keene 2007). The other pitfall to avoid is to portray this movement of expulsion from the international system as an exclusively non-​European story. Indeed, many European polities, such as Bavaria and Modena, also ceased to exist as independent entities over the course of the nineteenth century (Fazal 2007, 31–​33). In their case, the reasons did not have much to do with their degree of civilization, but with other factors I address in the next section.

The Nineteenth Century as a Great Power System One of the most important transformations associated with the nineteenth century is the development of a great power system. Two key features differentiate this nineteenth-​ century great power system from the system that characterized the early modern period. The first is that by contrast with the competitive balance of power typically associated with the eighteenth-​century international system, the nineteenth-​century experienced a shift towards an ‘international system of political equilibrium’ managed collectively by great powers (Schroeder 1994; on the earlier period see e.g. Duchhardt 1997).5 International order, instead of being based on the egoistic pursuit by all of the balance of power, came to be sought through collective concertation by great powers. The term ‘political equilibrium’ is meant to stress the fact that great powers pursued more than just a material balance of forces, their aims including far more complex questions of domestic politics, with which counter-​ revolutionary states were critically concerned after the French Revolution (Schroeder 1989). Scholars have attributed the demise of this system, so understood, to nationalism and demands for popular sovereignty that profoundly undermined its legitimacy and ability to enforce a political equilibrium across Europe, especially after 1848 (Bukovansky 2001, 211–​ 215; Schroeder 1994, 803; on this question, see also Mayall 1990). The second major point of contrast with the eighteenth-​century international system is that, from the Congress of Vienna onwards, powerful states laid claim to special international legal prerogatives on the basis of their vast power (Simpson 2004). In other words, it was not so much the existence of five great powers that was new, but the fact that they claimed to lay down the law to the rest of Europe on the basis of their material power, for

The Long Nineteenth Century    459 instance declaring themselves arbiters of lawful interventions (Keene 2013a). The expression ‘great powers’ did not only refer to a material reality, but to a new juridical category. The significance of the nineteenth-​century great power system therefore lies in its creation of a new form of international hierarchy (Clark 1989). In this sense, the great power system has not yet met its end; it endures in the form of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. These two accounts reveal that the nineteenth-​century international system was not a reassertion of the ‘archaic’ ancien régime order (see e.g. Reus-​Smit 1999, 134–​140), but a genuine innovation by admittedly old monarchies. In the next paragraphs, I want to stress one weakness in these accounts however, namely the over-​emphasis on the formal instantiation of the role of great powers in 1815. This focus, I believe, has somewhat obscured the origins of the great power system and its historical significance. The language that consists in calling international actors ‘powers’, Macht, or puissance was old, almost as old as that of ‘sovereignty’. It is possible to find it as early as the fourteenth century, in the work of people such as Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and later on in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century work of Giovanni Botero and Henri de Rohan for instance (Keene 2013b; Wight 2004). Nevertheless, the real breakthrough in terms of the widespread use of this concept, and particularly that of great power, came in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was not a product of the Napoleonic era (Scott 2014, 117–​121). In the mid-​ eighteenth century, the Abbé de Mably devised different grades of power (great, middle, or small), while German cameralists began measuring power with a new tool they called Statistik, as did British journalists (Keene 2013b; Klueting 1986). The reason I am stressing these late eighteenth-​century developments—​which arguably belong to the long nineteenth century—​is to support the idea that the great power system has its roots there, and not primarily as a reaction to revolutionary France. The early days of the long nineteenth century were not simply about the eastward expansion of a great power system, and its growth from three to five members, the so-​called Pentarchie (Duchhardt 1997). What was in fact taking place was the gradual repudiation of a widespread early modern way of structuring the international system on the basis of dynastic precedence and rights.6 The centrality of dynastic hierarchy is evident in the guidelines for courtly ceremonial that the likes of Paris de Grassis and Rousset de Missy developed from the sixteenth to the mid-​eighteenth century (see e.g. Duindam 2003).7 As for the importance of dynastic rights, it can be observed in the centrality of inheritance and marriage for the acquisition of legal titles over new domains (Teschke 2002). Indeed, whereas Charles Tilly claimed that ‘until recently only those states survived that held their own in war with other states’ (Tilly 1990, 63), Osiander has argued that he could not ‘think of any European actors destroyed because they were unable to defend themselves’ before the French revolution (Osiander 2001, 278; 2007).8 It is indeed frankly difficult to see how the numerous minor German princes of the Holy Roman Empire could have survived in a world where even great powers such as Austria depended for their survival on ‘elements of tradition and international law’ (Schroeder 1994, 34). However, this system drastically changed during the final decades of the eighteenth century when, to cite Hamish Scott’s pithy formula, ‘cultural capital decisively gave way to material wealth as the foundation of state power’ (Scott 2014, 6). Thus, although the early nineteenth century was purportedly about the restoration of an old world, it was in fact based on radically new principles. Colourfully described by A. J.

460   Quentin Bruneau P. Taylor with reference to the second half of the long nineteenth century, the practice of acquiring territory and extinguishing international actors through war characterizes the long nineteenth century far more than it does the early modern period (Bukovansky 1999; Fazal 2007; Taylor 1980). The decline of dynastic hierarchy and rights was followed by a novel type of hierarchy and a disintegration of the old framework of rules that governed the acquisition of territory and the extinction of international actors. Material power increasingly became the currency of international relations, which explains the rapid diplomatic side-​lining of previously active minor princes in the last decades of the eighteenth century (Anderson 1993, 103–​148; Scott 2014, 6). In this light, the nineteenth century constitutes a shift towards a world where the ebb and flow of international politics was far more dependent on a material understanding of power than in the early modern period.

The Illiberal Institutions of Modern International Society? Beyond the emergence of a great power system, there was a second important transformation of the international system, often associated with a more ‘progressive’ history of the nineteenth century. This historical narrative is one of ‘liberal ascendency’; it focuses on the impact of liberal states on the legal and normative structure of the international system, emphasizing two key changes. The first is the rise of contractual international law, namely the understanding that the ultimate foundations of the law of nations are treaties, not natural law (Grewe 2000, 503–​516; Neff 2014, 215–​340; Reus-​Smit 1999, 122–​154). The second is the advent of multilateralism, the practice of coordinating ‘relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct’, rather than through sets of individualized bilateral bargains with different benefits and obligations (Reus-​Smit 1999, 122–​154; Finnemore 2004; Ruggie 1992; Vaïsse 2007). These two transformations are considered critical because they still, to varying degrees, form the basis of contemporary international order. And while these changes should certainly be located in the long nineteenth century, current research suggests two major points of contention. The first is that there is strong evidence that both were the result of policies pursued by Continental European monarchies, rather than liberal Britain or the revolutionary American and French states, as is often claimed (Ikenberry 2012, 1–​2, 15–​17, 62–​63; Jouannet 2011, 38, 120, 139; Reus-​Smit 1999, 122–​154; Ruggie 1992, 580–​581). The second is that the importance of both innovations for the entirety of the nineteenth century has been somewhat over-​stated. Let me take each point in turn. The rise of the idea that international law was primarily based on consent (and therefore on treaties and custom) originated in the eighteenth century, though it was only fully embraced over the course of the long nineteenth century. The promotion of this view took place through the publication of treaty compilations, a new type of work that began in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, when Jean Dumont produced the first major work of the kind, the Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (Duchhardt 2004, 50–​51).9 This was rapidly followed by similar works, such as those of the Abbé de Mably and Georg Friedrich von Martens (Mably 1764; Martens 1795).10 The view that treaties and custom were

The Long Nineteenth Century    461 the primary basis of the law of nations was perfectly suited to defend the conservative order of restored European monarchies, relegating law to the role of handmaiden of diplomacy (Grewe 2000, 503–​511; Neff 2014, 215–​259). Indeed, on this view, international law was completely static and procedural; it endowed sovereigns with an enormous power as they could only be bound by treaties they had signed, thereby enshrining the status quo. For this reason, early nineteenth century jurists such as von Martens and Klüber, an ‘unrevolutionary group if there ever was one’, espoused it wholeheartedly (Neff 2014, 221; Koskenniemi 2004, 19–​ 27). This development therefore had very little to do with the diffusion of liberal and revolutionary states’ principles, and far more to do with Continental European monarchies. If anything, the French Revolution was a trigger against which royalists reacted by stressing the supremacy of treaty obligations and the absence of any superior natural law to which they might be bound. By contrast, liberal lawyers of the late nineteenth century adamantly did not think that treaties could be the fundamental source of the law of nations (Koskenniemi 2004, 11–​97). To this, they substituted the intuition of Western international lawyers (themselves), the self-​proclaimed ‘legal conscience of the civilized world’. While they did try to extract general principles of international law from treaties, they largely came to privilege those concluded between civilized nations. This view of international law evidently displaced the strict positivist view by the last third of the nineteenth century, undermining claims to the effect that the nineteenth century ought to be defined exclusively as a positivist century.11 The nineteenth-​century development of multilateralism shares similarities with this story. As explained previously, multilateralism is firmly associated with the rise of new principles of legitimacy in international politics, driven by the French and American revolutions and the rise to global hegemony of a liberal Britain. As in the case of domestic legislation, the legitimacy of international law, so the argument goes, increasingly rested on its homogenous application to all those subject to it, and on their participation in its making. In this context, bilateralism, which essentially created a set of uneven rules for different dyads of states, could not continue to play a central role in the making of international law. The first preliminary point to make here is that multilateralism only truly took off in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that even as this happened, it was declining in importance in relation to bilateral treaty-​making (Keene 2012, 495). One should therefore be wary of holding it as a defining feature of the entire long nineteenth century. The second point I wish to make is that the conventional story largely underplays the leading role of illiberal states in the development of multilateralism. Let me take two examples to explain why. One of the most striking expressions of multilateralism in the nineteenth century is the network of free trade treaties based on the most-​favoured nation (MFN) clause that emerged in the 1860s (Ruggie 1992, 11, 19–​20). The problem here is that the evidence available in existing research actually shows that it was Napoleon III’s France, ‘not Britain, that was the pivot of the MFN treaty network’ (Lazer 1999, 474).12 Unless one feels entirely at ease classifying France under Napoleon III as an exemplar of liberal or revolutionary state, the narrative put forth previously becomes difficult to maintain. Another, less familiar, though equally interesting example is the multilateral conference system developed from the 1850s onwards to organize the economic integration of the world. These conferences pertained to everything from telegraph systems to weights and measurements and statistical standardization. Though they did not always result in treaties, they operated according to principles of multilateralism (Murphy 1994, 71). Crucially, it was by and large continental European princes and a few lower-​ranked aristocrats who convened them and also supported the experimental ‘public

462   Quentin Bruneau international unions’ that emerged from them (e.g. the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the International Criminal Police Organization). Great Britain, the leading nineteenth-​century liberal power ‘played no such role’ and in fact frequently ‘did not wish to be involved in international conferences’ (Murphy 1994, 76–​81). To be clear, with these two examples, I am not trying to suggest that liberal powers were never involved in multilateral initiatives, but that they were rarely in the driver’s seat, and sometimes not even in the car. Thus, while the advent of contractual international law and multilateralism undeniably constitute important changes in the legal and normative structure of the nineteenth-​century international system, their rise appears to owe far more to continental European monarchs than to ascending liberal states. This should lead us to treat the idea that the nineteenth century international system was adopting an increasingly liberal set of rules under the auspices of an unprecedentedly powerful liberal Britain, with great suspicion.

Conclusion Where does this leave us in terms of our historical interpretation of the international system in the long nineteenth century? The first point I made was that students of the history of international relations often refer to the long nineteenth century as a moment of expansion and transformation of the early modern system of states. To state the obvious, this reading begins from the proposition that there was indeed a fully fledged system of states prior to the long nineteenth century. As I have tried to stress, this grounding assumption ought to be scrutinized more closely. From ideas about sovereignty to modern notions of territoriality, there are many reasons to doubt it and to think of the nineteenth century through the idea of emergence, rather than expansion or transformation. Beyond this preliminary remark, I have sought to make three further points. First, while the story of expansion of the international system certainly captures an important dimension of nineteenth-​century international relations, it leaves out two key issues. On the one hand, it defines nineteenth-​century international order solely in terms of the normative and legal order of intra-​European politics, namely as a system of sovereign states. As a result, it omits imperial and colonial relations from its understanding of the constitution of modern international order. On the other hand, the focus on expansion prevents us from capturing the demotion of many polities, both European and non-​European, within the international system. In other words, while some polities, such as those of Latin America, were indeed entering the international system, others were experiencing a sort of downward mobility within it, losing rights and privileges they previously held. Some experienced this because they were deemed uncivilized, while others succumbed to their inability to amass a rising currency in international relations: material power. Second, I sought to shed new light on three key transformations of the international system during the long nineteenth century. The development of a great power system, notably in the form of a European Concert after 1815, has of course attracted much scholarly attention. My main goal with regards to this question was to underline its origins in the decades preceding the French Revolution and to draw attention to the profound cultural shift that underpinned it. In short, this was not only a transformation in the governance of the international system, but a change in the underlying basis of power within it.

The Long Nineteenth Century    463 The exchange rate between dynastic status and rights on the one hand, and material power on the other, was quickly shifting in favour of the latter. States’ life chances were increasingly determined by their ability to win wars, rather than the strength of their legal claims to various domains. The other two key transformations I examined were the rise of multilateralism and contractual international law as legal and normative bases of the international system. These developments are, like the rise of a great power system, well identified in the existing literature. Nonetheless, they have come to be associated, perhaps because of twentieth-​century historical distortion, with the rise of liberal states over the course of the long nineteenth century. And yet, both innovations seem to owe far more to continental European monarchs than they do to these newly powerful states. In other words, illiberal states were the promoters of multilateralism and contractual international law, not the defenders of an archaic system. While there have been recent calls to focus our attention on the early modern period in light of the parallels between the multi-​polar world order of that epoch and the emerging dynamics of the twenty-​first century (Phillips and Sharman 2015; Sharman 2019), there is still much value in examining the long nineteenth century as well, for at least two reasons. The first is that much of the current international system’s legal and normative structure originates in this time period; the long nineteenth century thus remains one of the key places to examine in order to grasp how and why these ordering principles came to be. The second reason to continue studying the long nineteenth century is that it constitutes a powerful antidote to presentism and the widespread tendency to reduce the subject matter of international relations to a set of questions that is in fact barely two hundred years old. What I hope to have shown in this chapter is that the changes that distinguish the nineteenth century international system from those of previous eras, as well as their causes, still remain far from fully understood.

Notes 1. The idea of ‘long’ centuries has been applied to various time periods, the sixteenth most famously by Fernand Braudel. 2. Another key revolution of the period was of course the Haitian one. 3. This growing focus on the state was translated in university textbooks, such as Bluntschli’s seminal The Theory of the State (Bluntschli 1885). Though I do not have sufficient space to discuss this here, it was also in the nineteenth century that ‘the word empire came into official use in western Europe outside the Holy Roman Empire’, and its new sense had far more to do with ‘the conquest of lesser people’ than it did throughout the late medieval and early modern period (Muldoon 1999, 149). 4. For a critique of the antedating of the standard of civilization, see Wallenius, 2019. 5. For an overview of its different purposes from the perspective of nineteenth-​century theorists see Holbraad (1971). Much has been made regarding the importance of the balance of the power in the wake of the Peace of Utrecht (1713). It would seem that this has been somewhat overstated, with dynastic interests rather than balancing continuing to play a critical, if not central, role until at least mid-​century diplomatic revolution (Butterfield 1966; Lesaffer 2014: 34–​35; Reus-​Smit 1999, 118).

464   Quentin Bruneau 6. After 1818, dynastic precedence among ambassadors was replaced by a much simpler ranking based on the date at which an ambassador had presented his credentials to his host country (Anderson 1993, 67). 7. These issues were very much questions of war and peace at the time (Anderson 1993, 63–​68). 8. Thus the powerful Duchy of Burgundy was extinguished as an important participant in European affairs ‘not because of the death of Charles the Bold on the battlefield, but because he left no male heir’ (Osiander 2001, 278). Osiander does note the exception of the Italian city-​states in the late-​Middle Ages and Renaissance. 9. Though see also Leibniz’ earlier Codex Juris Gentium. 10. The emergence of specialized education for diplomats played a key role here (Keene 2009, 138–​139). 11. For a study on positivism strictly understood, see Rovira (2014). 12. Relatedly, John Nye has also argued—​not without controversy—​that France’s tariff levels were on average lower than Britain’s throughout the nineteenth century, further undermining the classic nineteenth-​century story of a liberal free-​trading Britain and protectionist France (Nye 1991).

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Chapter 32

The Pre- C ​ ol onia l A fri c a n State Syst e m John Anthony Pella, Jr Non-​European regions have long played second fiddle to Europe in the study of international relations’ history. Fortunately, over the last 20 years or so, there have been a number of important works published that look beyond Europe in an attempt to understand what different international systems looked like before the European expansion in the nineteenth century (Buzan and Little 2000; Ringmar 2019). Clearly, the present volume fits within this growing body of literature, and it is within this context that the current chapter seeks to develop an understanding of the African state system and its place in the history of international relations. To do so, this chapter will begin by detailing how political scientists and International Relations (IR) scholars have understood Africa in the context of an expanding European system. The principle focus of the chapter, however, will be on the pre-​colonial Africa state system in its own right, including how African states were organized and the practices that made the African continent unique. Finally, the chapter will conclude by looking at how these aspects proper to the African system provided the building blocks for interaction with Europe and the rest of the world from the fifteenth century onwards.

Africa in International Relations History Early accounts that examined the history of international relations depicted Africa as a part of the world that European powers expanded into (Bull and Watson 1984; Wallerstein 1980). For example, in The Expansion of International Society, Bull and Watson aimed ‘to explore the expansion of the international society of European states across the rest of the globe, and its transformation from a society fashioned in Europe and dominated by Europeans into the global international society of today’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 1). In exploring this, Bull and Watson come to argue that a European international society developed, expanded into, and then came to dominate various regional ‘international systems;’ thereafter a global international system emerged which, upon the acceptance of European-​based ‘rules’ and

470    John Anthony Pella, Jr ‘institutions’, became the global international society of today. As such, Bull and Watson were primary concerned with how European states expanded their unique ‘society’. Another account of the history of international relations is Wallerstein’s project on international social change. Wallerstein’s focus, in essence, is on how the course of modern history has been dictated by the continued expansion and consolidation of the capitalist mode of production on a global scale (Wallerstein 1974). He posits that the modern ‘world-​system’—​ a system that was cultivated initially in Europe and through technological developments was able to expand and incorporate the entire globe—​is driven by the need for continued economic growth (Wallerstein 1974, 10–​11). In this way, Wallerstein employs an approach to the study of expansion that is remarkably different from Bull and Watson’s; his concern is a purely economic expansion process, rather than a ‘rules’-​and ‘institutions’-​based one. Taking Bull and Watson and Wallerstein as a backdrop, it follows that there has been a tendency to see other regions as simply part of an expanding European system. The justification, essentially, is that today’s world is made up of European style rules and institutions, and it was Europe that actively spread its rules and institutions—​often by force—​across the globe from the fifteenth century onwards. The unfortunate side effect of this, however, is to effectively leave discussions of non-​European regions unexplored while also marginalizing the non-​European role in the expansion process. From the standpoint of Africa, for example, one might ask: how did African shared practices (e.g. trade and slavery) impact upon the European expansion? The next section will draw out answers to this question, doing so by initially providing an in-​depth look at African political organization before looking at the shared practices that held the African system together.

Understanding the African State System African States It is helpful to note that the variation in environmental conditions was arguably the most important factor that shaped the way African states were organized.1,2,3 During the pre-​ colonial period, from the Gambia south through contemporary Congo, mangrove swamps and rainforests began at the coastline and stretched some 200 miles inland (Mabogunje 1972, 3). There were two notable exceptions to these conditions, the first a portion of coastline from roughly Cape Coast in contemporary Ghana to Ouidah in contemporary Benin, and the second the coastline south of contemporary Equatorial Guinea.4 But it was swamp and rainforest conditions that dominated much of the coast, and this made dense human settlement a near impossibility (Mabogunje 1972, 3). What was possible was the establishment of small ‘stateless’ societies—​mostly fishing and hunting villages—​that were home to small populations numbering under a thousand people.5 These societies were the most common type of political organization along the West-​Central African coast during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Despite sharing cultural, religious and linguistic foundations, as well as interacting regularly across West-​Central Africa, these ‘stateless’ societies did not share a common overarching political structure; instead they remained decentralized, often lacking a central authority (Potholm 1979, 14–​15). Such decentralization was, in part, tied to the principles

The Pre-Colonial African State System    471 upon which these states were organized. Individuals within these societies held a notion of territoriality that would be considered alien in the Western or Eastern traditions: one’s physical presence on a particular piece of territory did not designate membership to a particular society. Territory was thought of in transient terms, and it was lineage and kinship ties that determined membership in these ‘stateless’ societies. Consequentially none of these societies remained tied to a particular piece of land, and this meant that population movement was frequent and widespread (Vansina 1992, 72). In most cases the movement of these societies was linked to a population’s need for new resources. Alternatively, movement could result from the overpopulation of a particular society or from kinship feuds; in both cases portions of the original population would break off and form a new society nearby based on a different lineage. Many of these ‘stateless’ societies are thought to have formed when a lineage broke off from larger inland states and sought out the densely forested coastal area for protection (Alagoa 1971, 287).6 Further north, the savannah, woodlands, and grasslands were wide open, which meant that crops could be harvested, and beasts of burden could be reared (Mabogunje 1972, 5–​7). As such, the dense settlements that were impossible along the coast were more possible inland. While more favourable environmental conditions allowed states in the savannah to be more politically centralized, one nonetheless observes organizational overlap between the coastal and savannah states. Scholars have speculated that this is because these savannah states actually grew out of the forest (Morton-​Williams 1971, 93–​96), and/​or because these states would disband and retreat into the coastal forests for protection in times of conflict (Fage 1978, 105–​106). Either way, it was in the savannah that small groups joined together in a common political process (Potholm 1979, 15). In consequence, these savannah states featured larger populations that were still organized according to lineage, with more extensive political connections branching out from there (Ejiogu 2011, 595).7 There were a variety of ways in which savannah states could form, grow, and join together into such a political organization. Increasing the size of a lineage through inter-​marriage was a particularly common method, for instance in the states of the Akan people, matrilineal lines of descent served to maintain a high level of social organization (McCaskie 1981, 483). Population movement was inherent to the formation of, and changes in, these savannah states. The Yoruba tradition tells, for example, that their land (located in present day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo) was settled by a massive migration that followed the collapse of the Assyrian empire in 605 bc (Lange 2011, 581). In the Central African savannah, the Kimbundu, Kongo, and other peoples formed states such as Benguela, Ndongo, and Loango (Birmingham 1967, 535), increasing their size and reach through inter-​marriage and war (Hilton 1985). Indeed, war was another common method by which to bring people into a common political organization, but it often resulted in the emergence of a more consolidated state. Quite often, a powerful state would emerge in a given area and, after defeating smaller savannah states in war, would reduce them to tributary status and thereby consolidate control over a more expansive area. The political organization of these consolidated savannah states has often been compared to that of European constitutional monarchies (Fadipe 1970, 40). They were centrally organized with a king and council present in the capital state who ruled over the conquered states. Underneath the king were leaders appointed to the provinces (i.e. conquered states), where they had their own councils to deal with matters related primarily to military recruitment and the treasury. Despite this centralized arrangement, the rulers and people of the conquered states remained surprisingly autonomous in their affairs

472    John Anthony Pella, Jr (Potholm 1979, 20). To continue with the Yoruba people for example, conquered Yoruba states paid a yearly tribute to the consolidating state. And so long as this tribute was provided, the consolidating state did not intervene in lineage, ward, or town affairs (Ejiogu 2011). Such consolidation was a common political process across the African savannah, but it is a process that produces a rather confusing political picture for scholars not familiar with the nuances of the region’s history. This is because these consolidated savannah states were regularly transformed by population movement, and/​or undermined by environmental conditions and war. This all meant that boundaries and political organization were continuously in flux, and that when studying the region and even the continent more broadly, one witnesses a continuous succession of consolidating states over the years (Fage 1978, 104). In regard to population movement, it has already been mentioned that smaller Yoruba states would retreat into the forests in times of conflict with consolidating states such as Ife, but there were other possibilities which arose when states broke away. It was also possible that tributary states could switch allegiances, electing to enter tributary relations with a different consolidating state. This process was common along the forest/​savannah boundary, and it resulted in the enlargement of one consolidating state and the shrinking of another, and often shifted the power balance in a particular area. In contrast to these consolidated savannah states, which were undermined by such political processes, there was another type of state which formed in the savannah that was more monarchical in organization, further centralized, more fixed territorially, and significantly larger in population (Mair 1962, 190). These were hinterland states. In terms of political organization, hinterland states featured a king advised by a council and territory divided into provinces that featured their own rulers and administrative centers tied politically to the king and his council (Potholm 1979, 19–​21). In this respect one witnesses a degree of similarity between the hinterland states and the consolidated savannah states, but the fundamental difference was the expansiveness and remarkable durability of those in the hinterland; in particular, hinterland states were less susceptible to the break offs and successions that characterized the savannah states (Harris 1998, 59). So, arguably the most powerful and centralized of these states were those that occupied the area of contemporary Mauritania, Mali, and northern Senegal. Here, kings had extensive courts and councils that provided advice on all matters (Harris 1998, 56). These states were also remarkably strong militarily; the Arab geographer al-​Bakri reported in 1065 that King Tenkaminen of Ghana was able to field 200,000 soldiers for battle, including some 40,000 archers (Harris 1998, 60). A similar type of political organization was found further south, from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Angola. This was the Kingdom of Kongo, arguably the most dominant state in West-​Central Africa from the fourteenth century (Heywood 2009, 3). At its peak, Kongo was divided into six provinces and four vassal states that surrounded it.

Trade and War To understand the pre-​ colonial African state system as a diverse array of political organizations would be misleading, however. These states were joined into a system through shared practices such a war and trade. War was the primary means that power was balanced

The Pre-Colonial African State System    473 across in the system. In trade, on the other hand, each state had a role to play in a more expansive network that connected much of the continent. Later, these trade routes would serve to link African states with the European traders at the coast. Archeological digs suggest that, from the early Iron Age,8 localized trade networks laid the foundation for the wider system of trade that emerged in the subsequent centuries (Gervase 1977, 231). These early networks tended to span from village to village (Curtin 1984, 15). However, evidence has been uncovered suggesting that a wider network of trade was in existence at this early date. In West Africa specifically there was an expansive salt trade carried out through relay (Curtin 1984, 26), and in the interior, archeologists have unearthed glass beads and cowry shells, which indicates that luxury goods also travelled long distances through this same relay method. By and large though, it appears to be the discovery of iron and copper that led to the development of direct trade over longer distances, as opposed to the passing of goods gradually from market to market (Vansina 1962, 376). In Central Africa, a trade network spanned the southern area of contemporary Zambia—​ which was rich in copper and iron—​southwards to the Zambezi—​where salt and ivory were in surplus. There is also evidence of coastal traffic along the shores of the Atlantic, as Jean Barbot, agent-​general of the French Royal African Company, observed in his travels that large canoes were used to bring goods from the Bight of Benin as far as south as contemporary Angola (Barbot 1732). There were also pathways from the interior to the coast. In West Africa gold production and securing an outlet to foreign markets shaped trade; gold was produced by the hinterland states and passed to the savannah states in the Gulf of Guinea, who returned salt to the hinterland (Wilks 1962, 337–​338). It was in such ways that goods were distributed, with traders relying upon relay when environmental conditions prevented extensive travel and travelling direct longer distance routes where possible. Interestingly, such trade shaped the political organization of the different types of states across the region, as well as order the relationships amongst them. With the emergence of a resource-​based trade, a state’s proximity to critical goods such as iron, copper, salt, or gold came to determine its power and significance. The area of contemporary Mauritania, Mali, and northern Senegal demonstrates this. Here, the sequence of Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires was not only tied to favourable environmental conditions, but also to the abundance of trade that ran into and out of the area (Lydon 2009, 9–​10). Indeed, gold was commercialized by these hinterland states for trade purposes, which, it is argued, led to development of the comprehensive political organization described previously (Neumark 1977, 128–​129). The southern trade out of these hinterland states was in the hands of the Wangara people, a corporate-​like group that revolutionized long distance trade in the fifteenth century (Lovejoy 1978, 175–​176). The Wangara were Muslim citizens of Songhai who handled foreign trade for the state, and in doing so, came to dominate the markets in contemporary Benin and Nigeria (Lydon 2009, 64–​65). While hinterland states were located around major trade routes and drew power from them, both the savannah states and ‘stateless’ societies often acted as intermediaries or ‘middlemen’ along these routes; in certain cases, these states actually formed for just such a purpose (Wondji 1992, 388). So, to construct the trade route which ran from Songhai to the Guinea coast in the fifteenth century, a large population of Mande peoples moved from the Upper Niger to the Lower Niger, setting up societies with political links to Songhai along the way at 15 day intervals (Wilks 1962, 337–​338). These migrations and settlements had significant cultural ramifications, as it was these Mande traders who are thought to

474    John Anthony Pella, Jr have introduced Islam to Northern Nigeria. Aside from these societies that were set up along trade routes, savannah states tended to gravitate and form along major trade routes (Vansina 1992), with many consolidated savannah states also found along the borders of hinterlands states (Lydon 2009, 65). Hausaland, for instance, was made up of 14 independent Hausa States all of which emerged in the thirteenth century following the boom in the trans-​Saharan gold trade. For more details about how trade was actually practiced, oral histories are enlightening. They recall that the primary means by which to organize trade and distribute goods was through the market; and these markets were set to correspond with the type of trade that was coming into the state. In contemporary Ghana, home to the Tallensi, daily, weekly and monthly markets were held to accommodate for local, state to state and long-​distance trade, respectively (Dickson 1977, 132–​135). The situation was similar in Central Africa, where oral traditions tell of local markets taking place daily, while markets for trade over greater distances took place on every fourth or eighth day (Vansina 1962, 375). The decision as to where these markets were held is interesting. At times it was environmental conditions that would determine where markets were held, at a place where a river pooled for instance; or it could be a matter of convenience, with markets held on state borders. It was equally plausible, however, that the most powerful state in the area would set the location—​usually in its capital—​so that the state could tax merchants when they entered their borders (Curtin 1984, 29). There was also an array of techniques employed by states and traders to ensure safe passage to and from these markets. States typically had considerations in place to ensure trade could flourish; Richard Jobson, one of the early British explorers of the Gambia River, wrote that traders: have free recourse through all places, so that howsoever the King and Countries are at warres and up in armes, the one against the other, yet still the Marybucke [marabout or learned Muslim] is a privileged person, and many follow his trade or course of travelling, without any let or interruption of either side. (Jobson 1932 [1623], 106)

Beyond such political considerations, in parts of Central Africa traders were linked and protected by ndeko, a blood brother system that enabled traders’ free movement and bound local chiefs to guarantee protection to long distance traders (Bawele 1988, 470). Such practices were common amongst traders in ‘stateless’ societies as well, where it was common to establish false kinship ties to ensure protection (Curtin 1984, 47–​48); sometimes, entire villages were said to move simultaneously to ensure safe transit. In the savannah states, protection could often be purchased from local chiefs, and tolls were collected along established routes for this purpose. In hinterland states, it was not uncommon for established merchants to travel with hired military forces to keep bandits at bay (Curtin 1984, 42). Thus, trade provided for the foundations of an economic system and served to ‘transcend political divisions’ (Vansina 1962, 390). Indeed, trade served to link different types of states together and develop rules amongst them (Diagne 1992, 34). It also meant that both basic and luxury goods were exchanged across the continent. It was not simply trade that these diverse states shared in the workings of however, but wars as well. The nature of warfare was, again, very much dependent upon local environmental conditions. In the savannah, the open environment surrounding hinterland states permitted the fielding of large armies made up of cavalry equipped with spears and arrows

The Pre-Colonial African State System    475 (Thornton 1999, 19–​4 1). The cause of war here, and the reason for such large armies,9 hinged upon state desire to dominate and protect commercial activity in the area; the competition to control trade routes was fierce, and it meant that war in the savannah hinterland was an extensive affair. In Central Africa, hinterland states also fielded large armies; the Kingdoms of Kongo, Loango, and Ndongo were thought to have armies numbering in the tens of thousands, for instance (Thornton 1999, 117). As noted, Central Africa did not have the lucrative trade routes that were present in the West, but war was nonetheless used to bring lesser states under the control of the hinterland states. Kongo is thought to have been a minor village in the thirteenth century, but by the fourteenth century its rulers had embarked on a successful series of military expansions that meant it was the greatest power in the area. Even Ndongo, which had engaged in its own successful military expansion further north, feared the Kongo and entered into tributary relationships in hopes of avoiding war. In the savannah bordering the coastal forests one observes certain similarities in warfare, at least in regard to the attempts to consolidate territory. Like in Central Africa, savannah states also fielded infantry who were equipped with swords, lances, bows and uniquely, large shields. And again, it was common for savannah states to go for war in an effort to consolidate neighbouring states and establish tributary relationships. Unlike the hinterland states though, such consolidation and the tributary relationships they produced were typically fluid; environmental conditions changed quickly from savannah to forest, thus rendering wide-​scale domination virtually impossible (Herbst 2001, 12). Finally, in the ‘stateless’ societies of the forest, armies were small and made up of infantry who reportedly carried swords, lances, and bows (Anonymous 1672, 13). Mercenaries and private armies also played a significant role here (Thornton 1999, 16). By all accounts, war amongst the ‘stateless’ societies was endemic, though these wars tended to be more like skirmishes that lasted a single day. The reasons for war amongst ‘stateless’ societies were complex, generally involving kinship disputes or fluctuating alliances from one group to another. Thus war was rooted in disputes over trade, tributaries, and kinship, and it served to enlarge, shrink, maintain, or establish new political orders. Beyond this however, there was a strong link between war and the institution of slavery, with both practices ‘rooted in deep seated legal and institutional structures’ (Thornton 1992, 74).

Slavery Primary sources make repeated reference to the practice of collecting prisoners of war from a defeated state and reducing them to slavery (Anonymous 1672, 16), and a vast number of historians have uncovered evidence which shows that this was the case throughout the continent (e.g. Curtin 1969; Hair 1965). It is important to note that these wars were not slave raids however, and rather that wars were tied to the political and economic concerns mentioned previously.10 Indeed the very meaning of ‘slave’ in the African context is markedly different from popular conceptions (Lovejoy 2011, 36), and to grasp the nature of slavery, one must erase images of shackles and disregard the notion of slave as a commodity lacking status. In this vein some Africanists have gone as far as to employ terms such as ‘adopted dependent’,

476    John Anthony Pella, Jr ‘captive’, or ‘serf ’ to distinguish African slavery from other types (Cooper 1979, 105), though still others have made it clear that slavery is an appropriate term (Cooper 1979; Lovejoy 2011). Regardless of terminology, African slavery was certainly based upon different norms and values that need to be addressed. First, it is helpful to recall the unique notion of territoriality that was present in many parts of the continent; one’s physical presence in a territory did not necessarily designate membership to a particular state, kinship, and lineage. This carries with it a rejection of private property, and indeed, in African states the concept of private property was alien. Instead, land was communal and the right to cultivate land, which was in abundance, was on a first-​come first-​served basis. This meant that property in Africa was not the vehicle to wealth and influence that it was in other parts of the world (Thornton 1999, 16), and this aspect of life in Africa heightened the importance of slavery significantly. So, because farmers owned the products of their land rather than the land itself, the ownership of slaves meant increased cultivation and increased wealth; in turn, slaves, rather than property, were the way in which to expand one’s social and political power (Cooper 1979, 106–​110). In short, land was not a source of revenue—​people were (Diagne 1992, 26). This meant that slave ownership became intricately tied to politics, war, and trade. In more organized states a tax was levied on the number of slaves owned. Furthermore, slaves were a common form of payment in tributary relationships and the absorption of slaves into a certain lineage could be a means to challenge the existing lineage in power (Cooper 1979, 107). It should come as little surprise, then, that in the aftermath of war people became the spoils. Indeed, a trade in slaves featured across the whole of Africa (Lovejoy 2011, 38). Fage has argued that the idea of a slave as a trade good emerged with Islamic influence in the Western Sudan (Fage 1978, 171), and clearly, from at least the fourteenth-​century, slaves became an important commodity along many trade routes (Neumark 1977, 129–​130). Given the centrality of slavery in African life, enslavement was also a means of punishment in accordance with local rules and laws. For instance, aside from being taken prisoner, an individual could be enslaved for violating ancient customs, committing a grave crime, or being unable (or unwilling) to settle a debt (Hair 1965). Interestingly, an individual could also volunteer to become a slave, seeking the protection that an influential master could provide (Abraham 1962, 74). Enslavement was typically not perpetual, as the enslaved could often be ransomed back to their kin through a slave merchant, and the status of slave was not passed down from generation to generation. Customs also prohibited the separation of families of slaves, and it was not uncommon for subsequent generations of slaves to become free members of the kinship group they once served. In terms of work, customs such as that of the jonya system—​native to the Saharan hinterland—​meant that slaves enjoyed ownership of some of the crops they produced (Diagne 1992, 26). In West Africa more broadly, records indicate that slaves worked in a variety of areas, mostly alongside their owners as administrators, soldiers, royal advisors, farmers, household guards, and trade assistants (Manning 1975, 127). Beyond this, slaves enjoyed free movement in connection with the communal land policy, and were permitted to cultivate any open land (Thornton 1992, 82–​88). By and large, slaves held a distinct social status within society—​a class of loyal, dependent assistants. It was in such ways that the institution of slavery played a part in organizing societies, being integrally

The Pre-Colonial African State System    477 tied to politics, economics, and war, and based upon the mutual expectations among the states involved.

Kinship At the heart of many African cultures was a belief that the person constituted a mere part of a much wider world (Abraham 1962, 46), and the term ‘world’ here reaches beyond the natural into the supernatural. Among the Akan people this world was thought to be hierarchical,11 consisting of non-​living things at the low end, earthly beings associated with spirits in the middle, and spirits themselves at the top (Abraham 1962, 51). A similar belief was held in the Kongo, where the world was constituted by the realm of the living and two spirit realms; in one lived the spirits of past ancestors, in the other remote and powerful spirits—​deities in other terms (Thornton 2002, 75–​76). The Yoruba people also thought the world to be divided into the spirit and the natural, and they believed that ancestral spirits could return to the natural world through successive generations of children (Johnson 1921). Indeed, central to this belief in spirits was that the human form was simply a vehicle for the spirit that was trying to fulfil a certain mission in the natural world (called Okra among the Akan); thus the spirit was eternal, and the individual was a body whose character and destiny was predetermined by the spirit (Abraham 1962, 52). What the Portuguese explorers came to call ‘fetiches’ were intricately linked with the spirit world and African religious beliefs (Kingsley 1897, 231–​232). The earliest European merchants report that fetiches were common across West-​Central Africa, at least from the Akan to the Kongo peoples (Atkins 1737; Barbot 1732; Bosman 1967). The fetiche provided a means by which priests or priestesses could contact the one god, remote spirits, or ancestral spirits, and the ritual attached to the fetiche served as a bridge between the spiritual and material world. Such religious beliefs had significant consequences for the way in which social relationships were structured. As noted previously, the majority of African states were organized according to kinship lines. And while kinship typically refers to a set of blood relations that tied people together into a family, in accordance with African religious beliefs kinship ties reached beyond biology and into the spiritual world. Consider examples from the Akan people. Here the term ntoro referred to an eternal spirit passed down to sons and daughters; while it was thought to leave during teenage years, it was used to explain inherited characteristics which became manifest during childhood. Similarly mogya, a spirit carried by females and bestowed upon subsequent generations, was the basis of an entire kinship group (Abraham 1962, 61). In this sense, being part of a kinship group was tied to these spirits and not simply to biological lines of descent. Amongst the Yoruba, the smallest unit in society was the ebi rather than the individual, given that the family was tied together by a certain group of spirits (Akinjogbin 1967, 16). Such kinship groups often traced their roots to a common ancestor who was, in many cases (and particularly in those which involved a royal lineage), a mythical figure. In creating such a figure, political elites could not only increase the size of their kinship group, but also assure a high degree of loyalty from the people they ruled over given that familial relations

478    John Anthony Pella, Jr bound them all. And, beyond the influence of religious beliefs, kinship, and ancestry upon the structure of social relations amongst people, they also worked to establish and reinforce political hierarchy and state organization. So, the ‘stateless’ societies of the forest were often populated by a single kinship group, which meant that political hierarchy was determined by position in the family. As already noted however, these ‘stateless’ societies were actually connected quite closely in cultural and religious terms, and this connection was precisely because of the norms and values associated with kinship and ancestry. Societies in close proximity to one another would often trace their roots back to the same ancestor and were part of the same kinship group; this meant that strong bonds existed beyond the earthly notion of a shared ruler (Fortes and Evans-​Prichard 1940, 23). State organization and political hierarchy were different in the savannah states remember, but here ancestors and kinship continued to play a central role. Savannah states often traced their foundations back to a mythical ancestor of which the chief claimed to be a direct descendent, and this ancestor also passed down a set of unalterable values with which every member of the state was familiar. These values towered over the chief in terms of importance, and it was these values that determined a savannah state’s uniqueness and policy (Mair 1962, 214). Moreover, because the chief was the guardian of ancestral values and the state was a manifestation of these values, both the position of chief and the significance of the state reached beyond the secular and into the spiritual world. Abraham summarizes this idea well, noting that ‘the Akan state was a sacred state in the sense that it was conceived as falling inside a world inhabited by human beings as well as spirits and gods’, and to these spirits and gods, ‘human beings owed specific duties discharged through appropriate rites, and with whom human beings were in constant communion on the grounds of kinship’ (Abraham 1962, 51). The situation was similar in the consolidated savannah states. Despite a more centralized political hierarchy and a more expansive state organization here, the king was still thought to be a direct decedent of a great ancestor, and the values of this ancestor checked the power and behaviour of the king. Take the Yoruba states under the control of Ife for instance. Here values were passed down from the ancestor Oduduwa, and from there, the state took on a familial analogy; the king was regarded as father, his chiefs regarded as his brothers, and subjects were seen as children. This analogy—​sometimes referred to as ebi social theory (Akinjogbin 1967)—​was inclusive of the tributary states as well, which were seen as interdependent with the father kingdom insofar as reciprocal duties existed between the two (e.g. protection in exchange for tribute). In many cases the history of a tributary state was altered in accordance with this relationship, namely by claiming that a great ancestor migrated from the conquering state to establish the tributary—​this was the case with Kongo’s tributary Ndongo (Thornton 1999, 99). Within the consolidated state, the king’s authority was based upon the natural obedience of his brothers and children, rather than the king’s ability to wield force (Akinjogbin 1967, 16). Violations of such organization and values were thought to offend the spiritual ancestors, and in such circumstances, force would be used to defend the ancestral values and, in some cases, remove the king. While noting that local variations did exist, both primary accounts and contemporary historians comment on the remarkable similarity in these norms and values (e.g. Atkins 1737; Abraham 1962, 114).

The Pre-Colonial African State System    479

The African State System’s Place in International Relations History By developing an understanding of the pre-​colonial African state system, as well as the practices that connected the system, the hope is to allow for discussion of where this places this unique system in international relations history. In the first instance, the argument is that one can meaningfully talk about an African international system. Trade, war, and slavery were patterns of interaction that were shared across the continent, and they were deeply entwined in maintaining and reshaping political order. States had their place in what was a continent-​wide trading network, which could have meant being a trading hub, a middleman, or a peripheral beneficiary. Moreover, slavery was intricately linked to both trade and warfare, and the accumulation of slaves even provided a means to maintain or challenge existing political orders amongst smaller states. Also central to the system were norms and values relating to kinship, which were broadly shared and represented the foundation of a common culture. Secondly, we can see that the defining characteristics of this system would come to have global significance in the fifteenth century. European explorers and traders who first reached Western Africa in 1434 quickly learned from the African practice of slavery, and they engaged with existing patterns of trade and war as a means into the system (Pella 2014). This European integration into Africa produced a fruitful and lengthy relationship that was as much African as it was European, namely, the trans-​Atlantic slave trade. Throughout this relationship the African state system managed to endure. It was not until the mid-​nineteenth century that many of the practices that constituted the African system started being defined as ‘barbarous’ by Europeans. This, in effect, justified the rise of colonialism.

Notes 1. Portions of this chapter appeared earlier in Pella (2014). 2. The concept of states followed in this chapter borrows much from Charles Tilly. More specifically, states may be defined as ‘coercion-​wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories’ (Tilly 1990, 1–​2). 3. The alternative argument rests upon the importance of trade and the location of trade routes, discussed next. 4. In both places savannah grasslands and woodlands extended to the coast, meaning these areas became important once Europeans arrived. 5. Such societies are labeled ‘stateless’ following the logic that their population numbers were relatively small, and the wielding of authority was not a full-​time occupation (Horton (1972, 78)). 6. Given the nature of these ‘stateless’ societies, a tremendous number of them were found along the West-​Central African coast and immediately inland. For example, the Upper Guinea region is thought to have featured over 100 groups that were divided politically according to lineage (Wondji 1992, 368; Barry 1998, 26).

480    John Anthony Pella, Jr 7. The Yoruba people provide a clear example. The lowest level of authority in Yoruba states was the ebi or kinship/​lineage, which consisted of the husband, his wives and their children, all of who lived together in an agbo-​ile or compound (Akintoye (1971, 13)). Several of these lineages were connected to make up the second level of authority, an adugbo or ward, which was connected to other adugbo to make up the ilu or town (Ejiogu (2011, 596–​ 597)). The ilu was the highest level of political authority in these Yoruba states and served as capital of all the adugbo that surrounded it. 8. That is, c. 400 ad. 9. Ghana was thought to be able to field 200,000 soldiers (Harris (1998, 60)). 10. There has been extensive debate on this point, however. For pioneering discussion, see Curtin (1975), where he postulates that war in Africa was either the product of a need for slaves or for wider political considerations, the latter meaning that slave collection was an afterthought. 11. The Akan people resided in what is contemporary Ghana and Ivory Coast.

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482    John Anthony Pella, Jr Neumark, S. D. 1977. ‘Trans-​Saharan Trade in the Middle Ages’. In An Economic History of Tropical Africa, eds. Z. A. Konczacki and J. M. Konczacki, 127–​132. London: Frank Cass, Pella, J. A. 2014. Africa and the Expansion of International Society. London: Routledge. Potholm, C. 1979. Theory and Practice of African Politics. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. European Perspective. Ringmar, E. 2019. History of International Relations: A Non-​ Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Thornton, J. 1992. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–​1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thornton, J. 1999. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–​1800. London: Routledge. Thornton, J. 2002. ‘Religious and Ceremonial Life in Kongo and Mbundu’. In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, eds. Linda M. Heywood, 71–​90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. 1990. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–​1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Vansina, J. 1962. ‘Long Distance Trade Routes in Central Africa’. Journal of African History 3(3): 375–​390. Vansina, J. 1992. ‘Population Movements and the Emergence of New Socio-​Political Forms in Africa’. In General History of Africa, ed. B. A. Ogot, 46–​73. Berkley: University of California Press. Wallerstein, I. 1980. The Modern World-​System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-​1750. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World-​System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-​Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Wilks, I. 1962. ‘A Medieval trade-​route from Niger to the Gulf of Guinea’. Journal of African History 3(2): 337–​341. Wondji, C. 1992. ‘The States and Cultures of the Upper Guinea Coast’. In General History of Africa, ed. B. A. Ogot, 368–​398. Berkley: University of California Press.

Chapter 33

The ‘ Ameri c as ’ i n the History of I nternational Re l at i ons Michel Gobat Since the Americas joined the international order as an independent locale in the nineteenth century, the concept has been defined by three paradoxes. First, the Americas constitute a regional system that has facilitated both the hegemonic aspirations of its most powerful member (the United States) and anti-​hegemonic challenges by the rest. Second, they are home to the world’s oldest international system, yet they are also the world region most identified with modernity. A tension between tradition and modernity thus distinguishes pan-​Americanism. Finally, the identification of the Americas with modernity has spurred state and non-​state actors to globalize pan-​American principles. These three paradoxes guide the following overview of how the Americas evolved as a regional system from the Age of Revolution onward. Such an approach seeks to overcome the Manichean view marking much of the scholarship on inter-​American relations while making the Americas more integral to international history

From America to the Americas Because IR scholars tend to identify the origins of the inter-​American system with the 1890 creation of the Pan-​American movement, the existence of the Americas is usually taken for granted.1 Yet America long existed only in the singular. Moreover, it was not so much a place discovered by Christopher Columbus as a European invention tied to the notion of a new world. If the 1492 ‘discovery’ of America is now identified with the creation of the modern world, Europeans of the time believed the continent’s newness lay in its utopian potential, not in its modern condition. No matter how much they admired America for its natural resources, they denigrated its inhabitants as backward. This was the image upheld by the German Martin Waldseemüller, who coined the term America in a 1507 map that identified

484   Michel Gobat the region, for the first time, as a continent separate from Asia. He named it after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who had just published the influential pamphlet Mundus novus (New World). Over the next centuries, Europeans differentiated among a plurality of Americas, such as Portuguese and Spanish America or North and South America. For the most part, however, America continued to be imagined by Europeans as a unified space subordinate to the Eurocentric international order rooted in the Peace of Westphalia. America’s place in the international arena changed dramatically during the Age of Revolution. The hemisphere not only forged its own international system in opposition to Europe but also became identified with modernity on both sides of the Atlantic. This process was driven by the wars of independence that commenced in British America (1775–​ 83) and ended in Spanish America (1809–​26). Nearly all of the hemisphere’s new states rejected monarchy—​one of the world’s oldest political systems—​in favour of republicanism, which their leaders (and many Europeans) deemed the most modern mode of governance. America’s identification with modernity was reinforced by the campaign its elites waged against European depictions of the New World as degenerate. In refuting the so-​ called theory of American degeneration, they contrasted the Old World’s alleged backwardness with America’s ‘promise of unlimited progress’ (Gerbi 1973, 247). Their crusade for an American modernity—​together with the admiration that anticolonial rebels in British and Spanish America had for each other’s struggles—​helped engender a common identity of Americans. This view of America as an imagined community drove initial attempts to forge a hemispheric system against European colonialism. Such integration efforts were spearheaded by the United States (US). They even shaped its name, for in 1788 Congress dropped the word ‘North’ from ‘The United States of North America’ so that it would reflect its leaders’ dream of creating a US-​dominated union spanning ‘all America, North and South’ (Burnett 1925; Fernández-​Armesto 2003, 10). This dream became viable with the outbreak of the Spanish American wars of independence, which led anti-​colonial rebels from the southern hemisphere to press for a ‘system of America’ uniting the republics between ‘the Mississippi river and the mighty [River] Plate’, which separates Argentina and Uruguay (Barrientos 2009, 94). And American System was precisely the name that Henry Clay gave to the US-​led hemispheric project he promoted as Secretary of State (1825–​29). Clay’s plan coincided in time with the main hemispheric project emerging in Spanish America: the Panama Congress of 1826. This initiative was led by Simón Bolívar, South America’s independence hero and President of Gran Colombia. Although the two initiatives were later seen as antipodes, their similarities outweigh their differences. True, Bolívar hoped that the Panama gathering would produce a confederation capable of resisting US impositions. Most Spanish American leaders, however, sought close ties with the US. They thus ensured that the Panama Congress embraced Clay’s vision of a regional system based on the modern principles of anti-​colonialism and republicanism but also on trade agreements designed to liberate the hemisphere from economic dependence on Britain (Sexton 2011, 75). The failure of Clay’s American System and the Panama Congress accelerated the hemisphere’s division into two opposing Americas. If the Panama Congress succumbed to centrifugal forces prevailing in Spanish America, US slaveholders used Clay’s support for the Panama Congress’s antislavery agenda to sink his American System. The charged US debates over the Panama Congress intensified the nation’s racist views of its southern neighbors,

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     485 thus weakening its imagined ties with Spanish America (Sexton 2011, 76–​80). If many US citizens had previously valorized the hemisphere’s political unity as articulated in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the Panama debates led them to embrace the idea of two Americas marking the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny: a Protestant, white (‘Anglo Saxon’), and modern North that, thanks to its supposed cultural and racial superiority, was destined to dominate a Catholic, non-​white, and backward South. A similar bifurcation of America took hold south of the US border, especially once agents of Manifest Destiny began threatening Mexico in the 1830s.2 Like their US counterparts, Spanish American elites stressed the racial and religious differences separating a menacing ‘Anglo-​Saxon America’ from what they increasingly called Hispano-​América. But because they feared European threats even more, they upheld the hemispheric projects of Clay and the Panama Congress. Their hopes for an inter-​American system were shattered in the 1850s, when thousands of private US expansionists—​the so-​called filibusters—​invaded the southern hemisphere by sea. The filibuster invasions began shortly after the US victory in its 1846-​48 war against Mexico and ended with the 1861 outbreak of the US civil war. All such invasions failed except for the expedition led by William Walker, who ruled Nicaragua between 1855 and 1857. The 1856 decision of US President Franklin Pierce to recognize Walker’s filibuster regime intensified the fears of South Americans that they, too, would fall victim to Manifest Destiny expansionism, thus pushing their governments to forge the continent’s largest-​ever anti-​US alliance. In the process, Spanish Americans discovered ‘Latin America’. The 1856 invention of Latin America sealed America’s transformation into two Americas. According to its proponents, the America in ‘Latin America’ highlighted the continent’s political contrast with Europe. In their eyes, the Old World had become a reactionary bulwark with the squashing of the 1848 revolutions, while the mid-​nineteenth-​ century democratic opening of Spanish American states reinforced the role of ‘America’ as the world’s vanguard of democratic republicanism.3 The Latin in ‘Latin America’, in turn, showcased the continent’s cultural differences with Anglo-​Saxon America. It also highlighted Spanish American elites’ concern with whiteness: if Hispano-​América implied racial mixing with allegedly inferior non-​white groups, Latinity stressed ‘blood’ ties with Europeans who were deemed modern. This concern with whiteness responded to prevailing US views that Spanish American elites belonged to a ‘backward’ white race or were non-​white. Such views perturbed these elites because they themselves upheld racial ideologies that held whites to be superior to non-​whites. Furthermore, the recent rise of scientific racism made whiteness critical to their standing in so-​called civilized international society (Gaffield 2020).4 Even though elite proponents of ‘Latin America’ continued to fear European imperialism, they believed that the Eurocentric international system could help them resist US expansion. This was especially true after Pierce’s recognition of Walker’s short-​lived regime pushed European governments to deem the US a ‘rogue’ state that threatened the international order. The US civil war put an end to overseas Manifest Destiny expansion, yet it did not lessen Spanish America’s reliance on the international system, for it only emboldened France and Spain to intervene in the region. This ongoing imperialist threat to the southern hemisphere made it possible for ‘Latin America’—​and the idea of two Americas—​to persist in the international realm.

486   Michel Gobat

Pan-​A mericanism and its Discontents The idea of two Americas shaped the Pan-​American movement and thus the modern inter-​ American system. Pan-​Americanism is often seen as the brainchild of US Secretary of State James Blaine, as he engineered the First Pan-​American Conference of 1889–​1890. Yet its genesis owed much to Latin American statesmen who shared Blaine’s goals of promoting economic integration, curbing European incursions, and spreading US-​style modernity. In their eyes, such ‘Americanization’ would allow their countries to prosper but also better defend their sovereignty against European and US intervention. So even though Latin Americans rooted Pan-​Americanism in the 1826 Panama Congress, they no longer believed in a unified America. The same was true of Blaine, who sought to use Pan-​Americanism to enhance US control over Latin American nations in the name of raising ‘the standard of their civilization’ (Sexton 2011, 184). Although US expansion was now driven more by economic interests than the territorial designs marking Manifest Destiny, this shift hardly assuaged Latin American fears of ‘the northern colossus’. Latin American governments thus viewed Pan-​Americanism as a propitious way to constrain US hegemony, for they believed that engaging Washington in cooperation would ‘discipline US interventionist policies’ (Scarfi 2016, 193). Many Latin American non-​state actors nonetheless denounced Pan-​Americanism as a tool of US imperialism. Among its main detractors was the Cuban émigré José Martí, whose 1891 essay ‘Nuestra América’ (Our America) became a rallying cry against Pan-​Americanism. As the US grew into a global power, Latin Americans challenged its ascendancy within and outside of the Pan-​American framework. Pan-​Americanism is best known for its intergovernmental activities involving all of the hemisphere’s independent states. Most of this work was coordinated by the Washington-​ based Pan American Union, which always had US directors working closely with the State Department. While Pan-​Americanism aimed to promote economic integration, it also addressed issues dear to the era’s international progressive movement such as child welfare, education, labor, public health, scientific exchange, urban housing, and women’s rights. Since Pan-​Americanism’s agenda was set mainly by Washington, it was long deemed by scholars ‘the friendly face of US dominance in the hemisphere’ (Sheinin 2000, 1)—​a view reinforced by the Pan American Union’s support for the post-​1898 spike in US intervention in the Caribbean basin and the post-​First World War (WWI) spread of Dollar Diplomacy to South America. Yet recent studies show that US hegemony within the Pan-​American framework had to be constantly negotiated, thus enabling the system to become ‘more Latin American’ (Petersen 2016, 128). Latin American officials typically used Pan-​American meetings and institutions to press Washington to respect the principles of non-​intervention and sovereign equality their predecessors had been championing since the independence era. By the early 1930s Latin American pressure had become so great that it pushed Washington to implement a policy of non-​intervention known as the Good Neighbor Policy—​one that also led US officials to embrace Latin American concepts of international development (Helleiner 2014, 29–​51). Hence some scholars argue that Pan-​Americanism served Washington as a ‘laboratory for working out more expansive forms of international association’ that it subsequently sought to apply globally (Thornton 2018, 412).

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     487 Another important scholarly trend is to show how Latin American non-​state actors challenged US impositions under the Pan-​American banner. Indeed, the post-​WWI era saw the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations affiliated with Pan-​Americanism. Latin American feminists were especially effective in using the Pan-​American framework to confront their (white) North American counterparts for insisting in their racial superiority, privileging civil and political rights over economic and social rights, and promoting US hegemony (Marino 2019). Non-​states actors, too, helped make Pan-​Americanism more Latin American. Many other Latin Americans challenged US power by fighting for an entirely different regional system. Such counterprojects existed from the birth of Pan-​Americanism but did not flourish until the 1920s. Scholars have long stressed how these projects were fuelled by the ways in which WWI and the 1917 Russian Revolution strengthened anti-​imperialist movements throughout the world. Yet recent studies suggest that their rise in Latin America responded more to the Mexican Revolution (1910–​40). Since Mexico’s revolutionary state faced great US pressure, it waged a diplomatic crusade to forge a Latin American counterweight to Pan-​Americanism (Yankelevich 2003). Its main selling point was the revolution’s project of modernity. Diplomats, cultural ambassadors, and modern media (including film) touted the revolution’s anti-​imperialism, empowerment of peasants and workers, socialist education, social reforms, and struggle for economic sovereignty. Ultimately, revolutionary Mexico failed to establish a viable alternative to Pan-​Americanism. Its efforts nonetheless stiffened the resolve of Latin American officials to make the Pan-​American system more beholden to the continent’s traditions of non-​intervention, social rights, and sovereign equality. The Mexican Revolution also animated transnational movements to attack Pan-​ Americanism. The most prominent was the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), founded by the Peruvian Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Mexico City in 1924. APRA projected Mexico’s modernizing brand of indigenismo at the continental level, championed the idea of an Indoamérica, and was among the first pan-​Latin American organizations to court the Communist International (Comintern). Some scholars deem APRA’s alternative hemispheric vision ‘a powerful precursor to our ideas of localization and pluralistic universalism in Global IR’ (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 105). Other Latin American anti-​ imperialist movements inspired by the Mexican Revolution forged ties with kindred groups in Europe and the US. The largest was the transregional network that supported the 1927–​33 war waged in Nicaragua by Augusto Sandino’s peasant guerrillas against the US occupiers (Carr 2014). Although the pro-​Sandino movement was heterogenous, its pillar was the Anti-​Imperialist League of the Americas, established by the Comintern in 1925. Based in Mexico City and New York, this hemispheric organization also sought to forge a new world order. Hence it attended the 1927 Brussels conference of the League Against Imperialism, which helped to engender the Third World project that blossomed in the post-​1945 era of decolonization (Goebel 2015, 199–​215). While all of these counterprojects failed to dislodge Pan-​Americanism, they underscore how US interventionism of the interwar era pushed non-​state actors to reimagine the hemisphere’s place in the international order.5 Efforts to universalize the inter-​American system were also undertaken by adherents of Pan-​Americanism via the League of Nations, based in Geneva, Switzerland. US Pan-​ Americanists led by President Woodrow Wilson helped create the League in 1920, yet Congress blocked the country from joining it. Latin American states, by contrast, were pillars

488   Michel Gobat of this novel universal organization, constituting about a third of its original membership. As with the Pan-​American system, Latin Americans hoped the League would help them check US power, while furthering ‘their quest for progress and modernity’ (Wehrli 2015, 8). They also used it to promote the Pan-​American principles of economic cooperation, non-​intervention, and sovereign equality on a global stage. If congressional opposition forced Washington to return to a hemispheric-​based Pan-​Americanism, the League provided Latin Americans with a space to promote the Pan-​American framework as a model for a more equitable global governance and economic development. Latin America’s involvement in the League reveals that it was more than just a ‘League of Empires’ (Pederson 2015, 5). Some Latin Americans viewed the League also as a guide for reforming Pan-​Americanism. Its leading promoter was Uruguayan President Baltasar Brum, who in the early 1920s unsuccessfully advocated for an American League of Nations that would include the US (Petersen and Schultz 2018, 116). His proposal was picked up in the 1930s by various governments, to no avail. By then many Latin Americans had soured on the Geneva-​based League: no matter how much they were able to shape its agenda, they could not overcome its Eurocentric and imperialist bent. As a result, most Latin American states withdrew from it. Still, the experiences of Latin American officials with the League reshaped their international outlook and led many to see themselves ‘as belonging to a ‘non-​developed’ world’ (Sánchez 2018, 43). The pan-​American seeds of the Third World project were thus planted not only in anti-​ imperialist forums but also in their antipode. The Latin American retreat from the League was facilitated by the way President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy ushered in the golden age of Pan-​American multilateralism. Capturing this hemispheric idyll was Diego Rivera’s mural ‘Pan American Unity’, made for the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Since the avowed communist was a world-​famous champion of Mexico’s revolutionary modernity, his mural symbolized Pan-​Americanism’s apparent liberation from US hegemony. Yet, the Second World War (WWII) led Pan-​Americanism to be identified with mutual defense treaties that, in the postwar era, reignited US intervention. In addition, Pan-​American economic arrangements of the WWII era laid the foundations for global institutions—​the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—​that upheld the US-​led international order emerging in the shadow of the Cold War (Helleiner 2014; Thornton 2018). Ironically, such arrangements also pioneered ideas of multilateral development that shaped the Global South’s efforts to democratize the international economic order during the Cold War (Helleiner 2014, 273–​276).

Globalizing the Americas Scholars have long emphasized that the Cold War globalized the inter-​American system by showing how the US and the Soviet Union brought their rivalry to the hemisphere, most palpably with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Newer studies, by contrast, stress how Pan-​Americanism shaped the post-​1945 global international system, with no institution facilitating this pivot more than the United Nations (UN). Whatever direction the Cold War globalized the Americas, it entailed a struggle among projects of modernity promoted by the two superpowers—​and by Latin America and the Caribbean.

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     489 The US generally waged its Cold War in the hemisphere by eschewing unilateralism in favour of multilateral intervention. Its main instrument was the successor to the Pan American Union: the Organization of American States (OAS), which was founded in 1948 and came to include all independent states of the hemisphere.6 If Washington had used Pan-​ Americanism to further its economic interests, it envisioned the OAS as a tool to combat Soviet expansion (Connell-​Smith 1966). In consequence, collective security became central to the OAS, thus undermining the utopian promise marking the idea of the Americas (Petersen and Schultz 2018, 103). Initially, the OAS assumed the US crusade against communism would take place beyond the hemisphere. Yet the global campaign quickly came home to roost, for Washington often equated Latin American and Caribbean radical nationalism with international communism. Throughout the Cold War, the OAS contended with numerous US-​led interventions carried out in the name of anti-​communism. The most controversial were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-​orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist government in 1954; the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba; and President Reagan’s undeclared war in Central America during the 1980s. Because the OAS sanctioned Washington’s anti-​ communist crusade, many Latin Americans followed Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in denouncing it as a ‘Yankee Ministry of Colonies’ (Langley 2010, 205). But as was true of its predecessor, the OAS’s relationship with the northern colossus was more tense than commonly thought, especially since Latin American states sought to use its framework to restrain US hegemony. By the 1980s the organization had become sufficiently independent that, to Washington’s dismay, it sought to negotiate a peaceful end to Central America’s revolutionary crisis while condemning the US invasions of Grenada and Panama in 1983 and 1989, respectively (Schifter 2002). As with the Pan American Union, US hegemony at the OAS had to be negotiated. If the OAS was the principal Cold War organization for the Americas, recent studies show how its members also sought to globalize their regional system via the UN, which US and Latin American officials steeped in Pan-​Americanism helped create in 1945. So strongly did Pan-​Americanism shape the deliberations on the UN Charter that it was considered the ‘hottest potato’ at the organization’s founding conference (Marino 2019, 209). Ultimately, Latin American delegates failed to impose the Pan-​American ideal of sovereign equality, as the UN’s main arm—​the Security Council—​came under control of the Great Powers (China, France, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, US). Still, Pan-​American traditions shaped the Charter’s provisions concerning human and women’s rights, non-​intervention, peaceful settlement of international disputes, regional systems within the UN framework, and the right to self-​determination. Latin American delegates often linked these provisions with notions of modernity, as when they deemed social justice ‘a cardinal objective of international relations’ and connected women’s equal rights with sovereign equality (Marino 2019, 196). The UN mainly globalized the Americas in the economic realm. This process was spearheaded by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), which was founded in 1948 against the backdrop of decolonization.7 From the start, ECLA went beyond the OAS’s hemispheric focus by situating the ‘underdevelopment’ of Latin America (and later the decolonized Caribbean) within a global context. ECLA challenged the Cold War’s East-​West framework by linking the underdeveloped Americas with the nascent Third World, which was initially seen to consist solely of decolonized Africa and Asia. ECLA’s stress on ‘the importance of economic sovereignty as the necessary counterpart to territorial

490   Michel Gobat sovereignty’ reinforced decolonization’s North-​South divide (Thornton 2018, 409). But ECLA also reconceptualized this divide by deeming it less a product of colonialism than of the international division of labour, with the North serving as the industrial ‘center’ of global capitalism and the South as the underdeveloped ‘periphery’ that produced primary goods for the North. For ECLA, it was critical that the South break its economic dependency on the North by replacing its traditional export model with import-​substitution industrialization (ISI). ECLA’s championing of ISI as the Global South’s path to modernity drew on revolutionary Mexico’s economic project of the interwar era (Thornton 2018). But it also echoed century-​ long Latin American denunciations of the North Atlantic powers for stymieing their continent’s industrialization by making it dependent on European and US-​manufactured imports. By globalizing such views, ECLA helped engender dependency theory, which is the principal theory to emanate from the Third World and maintains that the center (North) developed only by underdeveloping the periphery (South). Dependency theory quickly spread to Africa and Asia, leading Latin America and the decolonized Caribbean to become more connected with the Third World project. It also inspired Marxist and Latin American international relations (IR) thinking about the place of the Americas in the post-​1945 world (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 161–​162; Tickner 2015). Since ECLA sought to restructure the Cold War’s bipolarity, its vision of modernity clashed with those of the superpowers. While ECLA shared the US goal of capitalist industrialization, it exasperated Washington by insisting that international trade was rigged in favour of the North and that ISI was the only way for the South to become modern. And as much as ECLA valorized the Soviet project of state-​led industrialization, it maintained its faith in capitalist modernity and the ability of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ to lead the South’s struggle for economic sovereignty. This view both echoed earlier Pan-​American developmental strategies and dovetailed with the high modernism then popular in the decolonized world (Helleiner 2014, 271–​273; Westad 2007, 397–​398). If ECLA’s vision of modernity invoked the utopianism marking the idea of the Americas, it also reflected an effort to reclaim development as a project from and for the Global South (Fajardo 2019, 178). While ECLA’s impact on Latin America has been a focus of IR scholars, less known are its efforts to use the UN system to bring modernity to the Global South. ECLA’s first success came with the 1964 creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which was designed as a ‘global version of ECLA’ and was initially led by its longtime director, the Argentine Raúl Prebisch (Zolov 2020, 235). As the largest UN organization of developing nations, the UNCTAD promoted South-​South cooperation. Yet it mainly aimed to forge a ‘new international economic order’—​a term coined by Prebisch—​that would allow the regions of the Global South to realize their own visions of modernization (Getachew 2019, 161). In 1974 the UNCTAD seemingly realized the Third World’s call for a more equitable global governance when, under Mexican leadership, the UN General Assembly overcame Soviet and US opposition to adopt the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The resolution drew on UNCTAD initiatives made at its 1971 and 1972 meetings and that bore the stamp of their Peruvian and Chilean hosts (Garavini 2012, 132–​141, 174–​183). Hence the NIEO echoed pan-​American views of economic sovereignty, non-​intervention, self-​determination, social rights, and sovereign equality. The NIEO arguably represented ‘the twentieth century’s most ambitious vision of global redistribution’

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     491 (Getachew 2019, 3). Although the NIEO quickly unraveled with the economic crisis of the late 1970s, its embrace by the UN reveals how pan-​American ideals of international governance briefly held sway on the world stage. The post-​1945 global pivot of the Americas reverberated elsewhere in the international arena. Perhaps its main manifestation was the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, which took place in Cuba seven years after the triumph of a revolution that embraced communism. The conference brought together about five hundred delegates from the Third World to discuss anti-​imperialism, decolonization, and the creation of a new economic order. Its main outcome was the founding of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Although OSPAAAL hardly lived up to its ambitious goals, it helped connect radical Latin American nonstate actors—​and some US ones such as the Black Panther Party—​with kindred spirits in Africa and Asia. The Tricontinental Conference also enhanced Cuba’s leadership role in the Third World’s main international organization: the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM). Because all other Latin American nations belonged to the US-​aligned OAS, scholars generally dissociate the Americas from NAM. In reality, NAM adopted pan-​American ideas about economic development, conflict resolution, and self-​determination, while some OAS states participated in its meetings as observers. Even before NAM’s founding in 1961, Latin American nonstate actors had called for their governments to embrace the Third Worldism identified with the 1955 Asian-​African Conference in Bandung (Young 2017, 131; Zolov 2020, 119). By 1961 Third Worldism appealed so strongly to Latin Americans that it provoked Washington to carry out its largest-​ever modernization project in the Global South: the Alliance for Progress. Modelled after the Marshall Plan for post-​WWII Europe, the Alliance was a ten-​year program to advance democracy, economic development, and social welfare in Latin America. Most scholars stress how the Alliance simply sought to block the continent from replicating Cuba’s embrace of communism. Newer studies reveal that it also had a global dimension by aiming to halt Latin America’s drift toward Third World nonalignment and to weaken NAM (Gettig 2020, 242). For US officials, NAM’s challenge to the Cold War’s binary was more threatening than ECLA’s as it occurred in a forum outside their influence. To counter nonalignment’s popularity, Washington marketed the Alliance’s project of modernity in Africa and Asia as the best solution to their structural problems, to little avail (Parker 2018, 318–​319). In Latin America, the Alliance successfully averted a ‘second Cuba’ but failed to achieve its main socio-​economic goals while facilitating the rise of military regimes throughout the continent. The Alliance did little to curb the appeal of Third Worldism in the Americas and, following its ignoble end in 1970, more and more OAS states joined NAM. The Cold War globalization of the Americas gained a boost with Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution (1979–​90). Much of the world valorized the socialist-​leaning Sandinistas for creating a ‘new Nicaragua’ against fierce US opposition but also for advancing the pan-​ American traditions of non-​ intervention, self-​ determination, and sovereign equality. Already before their 1979 triumph, the Sandinistas had followed the example of their namesake Augusto Sandino in forging a solidarity network with non-​state actors across the world, including those based in the US. Once in power, they promoted their internationalist ideals in global organizations like NAM; the UN, which defied Washington by electing Nicaragua to its Security Council in 1982; and the Socialist International, which under Willy Brandt’s leadership (1976–​92) shifted its focus toward the Third World and the NIEO (Aviel 2003).

492   Michel Gobat Yet the international environment was no longer propitious to the globalization of the pan-​American ideals underpinning the NIEO. By the early 1980s, Third World solidarity had weakened due to differences between industrializing and nonindustrializing states of the Global South. Aggravating matters was the international debt crisis wreaking havoc across the Third World, especially in Latin America. Ultimately, this crisis ‘assassinated’ the Third World project by fueling the global triumph of market-​oriented policies that stressed a minimal role for the state (Prashad 2007)—​policies that came to be identified with the ideology of neoliberalism. At first, the US-​led North used the carrot of IMF and World Bank loans to push the cash-​ strapped governments of Latin America to implement neoliberal reforms, especially trade liberalization, privatization of state enterprises, and spending cuts. By the late 1980s, however, true believers of neoliberalism had come to power throughout the continent via free elections. Neatly capturing this shift is the term Washington Consensus coined in 1989 by the economist John Williamson. Although Williamson referred to ten specific market-​reforms that ‘the political . . . and technocratic Washington’ agreed were needed in Latin America, the term came to denote how a new generation of Latin American officials embraced the neoliberal agenda of the US government and the Washington-​based IMF and World Bank (Williamson 2008, 15; Margheritis and Pereira 2007, 34–​37) As the Cold War drew to a close, a new idea of the Americas—​encapsulated by the term Washington Consensus—​went global diametrically opposed to the one that had shaped the Third World project rooted in ECLA’s vision of modernity.

Re-​Imagining the Americas The worldwide spread of Washington Consensus policies in the wake of the Cold War is typically linked with ‘globalization’. Yet this process did not significantly strengthen the global pivot of the Americas. To be sure, post-​1990 globalization led the countries of the Americas to join new transhemispheric configurations such as the Asia-​Pacific Economic Cooperation, while Latin American and US multinational corporations increasingly have a global reach. The same goes for transnational social movements linked with the World Social Forums, which since their 2001 founding in Brazil constitute the largest gatherings of the global justice movement. But if the post-​Cold War age brought the Americas closer to other world regions, this era has been marked mainly by efforts to reimagine the inter-​American system—​a process IR scholars often identify with waves of regionalism (Saltalamacchia 2015). Post-​1990 hemispheric reimaginations initially strove to reinforce US-​style modernity. At the forefront of this wave of ‘open regionalism’ was the OAS, which sought to reorient the inter-​American system toward democracy, free trade, and human rights—​the three pillars of the US-​led ‘new world order’ that President George H. Bush proclaimed in 1990. At first sight, the OAS simply fortified pan-​American principles, for democracy and human rights long defined the idea of the Americas while free trade among its member states spoke to age-​old demands for economic integration. In reality, the OAS imagined a new hemispheric order for the post-​Cold War age. Its aggressive promotion of free trade through the elimination of tariffs and government subsidies upended the pan-​American doctrines of economic

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     493 sovereignty and social rights. But above all, the OAS sought to defend democracy and human rights by challenging the pan-​American tradition of state sovereignty. This radical change was rooted in its 1991 resolution that allowed for internal circumstances to serve as grounds for OAS intervention (Schifter 2002, 96). Since then, the organization has often intervened in the affairs of its member states, most recently in the disputed Bolivian elections of 2019. Not coincidentally, the OAS embraced an instrument of US hegemony when Washington became more disengaged from its ‘backyard’. But even if US attention shifted elsewhere, Washington tried to reshape the hemisphere by transforming it into a free-​trade area. This effort was launched in 1990 with President Bush’s Enterprise of the Americas initiative that was to culminate, under OAS auspices, into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—​an initiative embraced by heads of state throughout the hemisphere. Among its greatest promoters was Mexican President Carlos Salinas, who spearheaded the first triumph of Bush’s initiative: the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) involving Canada, Mexico, and the US. In many ways, NAFTA/​ FTAA echoed Clay’s American System of the early nineteenth century by advocating for hemispheric economic integration based on US ideals of capitalist modernity. Although NAFTA famously triggered the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico, few observers doubted the ultimate success of FTAA. It took a whole decade for the next accord—​the Central American-​Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement—​to be signed. By then much of the Americas had soured on such agreements. The FTAA project officially ended at the 2005 OAS meeting, though its death knell had come three years earlier, when it was rejected by 98% of the voters in Brazil. Without Latin America’s economic giant, a modern version of Clay’s American System was deemed to have no future. FTAA’s demise intensified Latin American efforts to revive the counterpart of Clay’s American System: Bolívar’s vision that excluded the US. This wave of ‘post-​hegemonic regionalism’ was driven by the so-​ called Pink Tide, which consisted of left-​ leaning governments that swept to power at the turn of the century by promising a return to state intervention in economic and social affairs. The resurrection of Bolívar’s project was led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who in 2004 established the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA, which means ‘sunrise’ in Spanish). Constructed as the antipode to FTAA, ALBA rekindled ECLA’s vision of modernity by promoting state-​led development and South-​South cooperation. It also sought to realize the Bolivarian dream of a confederation stretching from Patagonia to the US southern border. To do so, it helped design the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Established in 2011, CELAC quickly became the hemisphere’s main alternative to the OAS. Initially, it aimed to unite only the members of ALBA and of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations), an entity founded in 2008 under the leadership of Brazil’s Pink Tide President Lula da Silva.8 But by its founding, CELAC included all of the hemisphere’s states except Canada and the US. That the region’s conservative governments joined forces with their Pink Tide rivals had much to do with the havoc wreaked by the 2007–​08 financial crisis. While CELAC’s agenda overlaps with that of the OAS, it defends more forcefully the pan-​American traditions of social rights and state sovereignty as well as ties with the Global South. But it mainly differs from the OAS by upholding a regional system that excludes the US. CELAC’s efforts to realize Bolívar’s dream have been impeded by the crisis plaguing Venezuela since Chávez’s 2013 death and the demise of many original Pink Tide governments. CELAC also has suffered from

494   Michel Gobat failing to involve non-​state actors in its decision-​making process. No matter how loudly CELAC claims to practice radical democracy, it seems just as state-​centric as the OAS (Saltalamacchia 2015, 303). Pushing back against this state-​centrism are transnational social movements seeking to reshape the Americas. Among the most prominent are the movements affiliated with La Vía Campesina, which is part of the World Social Forum process. Hatched in 1992 in postrevolutionary Nicaragua, Vía Campesina connects around eighty Latin American and Caribbean peasant organizations with some 80 others in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America (including the US). Claiming to represent millions of rural families, it has become arguably the most important transregional social movement of our times, wielding much influence in the UN system (Martínez-​Torres and Rosset 2010). Vía Campesina sees itself as advancing an ‘alternative modernity’ by practicing sustainable small-​scale agriculture and participatory democracy in a transregional context (McMichael 2008, 224–​225). It also introduced the now-​influential concept of food sovereignty in the international arena during the 1996 World Food Summit. Despite its global bent, Vía Campesina remains closely linked with Bolivarian projects and includes key Pink Tide backers, such as Bolivia’s largest peasant union (CSUTB) and Brazil’s influential movement of landless workers (MST). With the withering of the Pink Tide, it remains to be seen whether movements like Vía Campesina can advance a hemispheric project that is more democratic and inclusive of US and Canadian actors than CELAC. Pointing to a radically different hemispheric future are transnational social movements that reject the idea of the Americas and its commitment to modernity—​a vision that echoes Postcolonial IR theory (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 168–​170). This is mainly the case of Indigenous movements seeking to remap the Americas as Abya Yala (or Abiayala), which comes from the cosmogony of the Kuna people and has been ‘adopted by the Indigenous people from Chile to Canada to mean "Continent of Life"’ (Mignolo 2005, 166). Accordingly, the Americas—​and modernity more generally—​are products of Eurocentric coloniality and thus stymie efforts of peoples of Indigenous (and African) descent to democratize the hemisphere. Hence these movements invoke an idea evoking the pre-​colonial past, with some maintaining that ‘for Abiayala to live, the Americas must die’ (Keme 2018). In the international realm, the concept has made its greatest mark with the six Continental Summits of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala held since 2000.9 But if their summits once attracted over six thousand Indigenous delegates from throughout the hemisphere, recent gatherings have become smaller and internal tensions have left their future uncertain. Most important, its members increasingly advocate for the restoration of Abya Yala within the framework of CELAC and the OAS—​the two main regional organizations upholding the idea of the Americas (Wajner and Roniger 2019, 465–​466, ‘La Época . . . ’ 2020).

Conclusion Since the Age of Revolution, the international system has undergone numerous transformations. Yet the Americas have persisted and remained identified with modernity. This continuity gives new meaning to the myth of American exceptionalism, which refers to

The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     495 the US belief that their nation—​not the Americas—​is the redeemer of the world (Tuveson 1968). It also highlights the granularity problem by underscoring how the sovereign state is not the only relevant unit of analysis in understanding the history of the Americas. If members of the inter-​American state system have used its commitment to modernity to promote projects above and below the nation-​state, non-​state actors—​often operating at different spatial scales—​have drawn on the idea of the Americas to advance hemispheric if not global projects, as is true of groups as different as the Anti-​Imperialist League of the Americas, Pan-​American feminists, and Vía Campesina. The Abya Yala project nonetheless raises questions about the future of the Americas. Its rise reflects the shift of the international system toward cultural pluralism—​one that, as Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan argue, is driven by the re-​emergence of ‘cultures subordinated by Western power and Liberalism’ (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 279). However, they insist that this shift hardly represents a ‘back to the future’ moment, for such cultures have modernity ‘woven into their social, economic, and political fabric’. In Latin America, many Indigenous movements have indeed engaged with liberalism and modernity throughout the lengthy postindependence era. With good reason did members of the Abya Yala movement so quickly turn to the pan-​American bulwarks CELAC and the OAS. Two centuries after joining the international order, the Americas seem anything but obsolete.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the editors and Laura Gotkowitz for their helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. Following scholarly convention, pan-​Americanism is used for hemispheric movements or ideas in general, while Pan-​Americanism is used to refer to those specifically linked with the Pan American Union (originally called The Commercial Bureau of the American Republics) and its successor, the Organization of American States. 2. The following three paragraphs are based on Gobat (2013). 3. This mainly explains why Brazil was not deemed part of ‘Latin America’ until 1889, when the monarchy gave way to a republic. On Spanish America’s mid-​nineteenth-​century democratic opening, see Sanders (2014). 4. This concern with whiteness explains why the ‘Black republic’ of Haiti was long excluded from ‘Latin America’. 5. On how these regional visions are a key, if overlooked, source of IR, see Acharya and Buzan (2019, 109). 6. Cuba was expelled in 1962 after becoming a communist state; in 2009 it was invited to rejoin the OAS but has yet to accept re-​admission. 7. In 1984 its name was changed to Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC; its Spanish acronym, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), remained unchanged).

496   Michel Gobat 8. In 2011, ALBA included Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines, and Venezuela; UNASUR consisted of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 9. On their origins, see Becker (2008).

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Chapter 34

‘Asia ’ in the H i story of I nternational Re l at i ons David C. Kang The International Relations of historical East Asia are a prime example of many of the themes identified by the editors in this volume. Studying East Asian history raises questions of where modernity actually began; of how to resolve the ‘granularity problem’ with tensions between overall patterns and specific explanations; and reveals a clear divide between the way historians and International Relations (IR) scholars approach East Asian history. All of these issues tend to arise in particular with respect to East Asia because the IR field remains deeply Eurocentric in its focus. Although it may seem almost cliché to point out the Eurocentrism in IR, scholarship is only recently beginning to become truly global in scope. The current international order is actually a recent phenomenon in the scope of world history, but to date it has generally been studied from within: scholars studied European history to explain how this European model for international relations developed over time. Almost all ostensibly universal and deductive theories in the field of IR are actually inductively derived from the European historical experience (Acharya and Buzan 2007). While IR scholars have begun to move beyond simple notions of ‘states-​in-​anarchy’, the discipline as a whole is not yet taking a truly global view of international order and subjecting it to careful scrutiny (Mattern and Zarakol 2016). Structural analyses based primarily on Western examples are profoundly misleading, particularly because they crowd out a larger universe of cases that show what is possible in international politics. Idealized representation about the West are so ubiquitous that it is almost invariably invoked as the obvious reference point for the East. Indeed, East Asia is constantly being held to account for expectations emerging from Europe, but almost never the opposite. However, learning from East Asian history would likely generate different assumptions about international relations, which probably would lead to different conclusions about how politics work (Khong 2013). For example, Susan Shirk has written that, ‘History teaches us that rising powers are likely to provoke war’, (Shirk 2007, 4) while Graham Allison wrote that ‘war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much

500   David C. Kang more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not’ (Allison 2017, 184). But what historical record are Shirk and Allison referring to? By far, the most commonly examined ‘examples of history’ are European: for example, the Peloponnesian War (431–​404 bce) and the rise of nineteenth century Germany and resulting Anglo-​ German rivalry of the twentieth century. Indeed, there is a cottage industry that uses Europe’s past to predict Asia’s future. Allison may be the most recent scholar to use Greek history to explain the entire China’s future, but he is neither the first nor the only scholar to do so. This is troubling, because historical East Asia and historical Europe were different systems with different international orders. Historical East Asia was a hegemonic order, not a balance of power system. The fundamental organizing principle in historical East Asia was hierarchy, not equality. Had the discipline of IR developed by initially studying East Asian history instead of European history, it would be taken for granted that hierarchy and hegemony was a natural element of international orders, and that status and rank order matters as much as material power. Long understudied by mainstream IR scholars, the East Asian historical experience provides an enormous wealth of new and different cases, patterns, and findings, which promise to enrich our IR theoretical literature largely derived from and knowledgeable about the Western experience. As Kang and Lin (2019, 393) point out, ‘the median American scholar of IR is deeply comfortable with European examples and analogies and has almost no exposure to Asian examples and history. Thus, when faced with Asian examples, they are considered within the context they are taught: through the European lens’. An emerging first wave of social science scholarship has the potential to influence some of the most central debates in IR scholarship, most centrally whether anarchy is a constant element of world politics. This new literature also engages questions about what comprises an international order and whether patterns of war and violence are the same everywhere across time and space. The best of this new scholarship bridges the fields of History and IR, and increasingly uses sophisticated methods and multiple language sources. This literature also directly addresses the themes of modernity and granularity that are the focus of this volume. In this chapter, we examine two areas of scholarship that embody the themes of this volume. The first is the almost universally accepted link between war and state formation. Although it is common to see the modern state as arising in eighteenth-​century Europe, centralized bureaucratic states defined over territory emerged in East Asia in the sixth to eighth centuries ad; furthermore, they emerged under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not a competitive balance of power system with regular existential threats. Widening our literature on state formation and war to include East Asian history challenges some of the most core theories in our field. The second area of scholarship focuses on granularity—​measuring war in historical East Asia. Although careful research is in its initial stages, it appears that patterns of war and other violence were systematically different in East Asian history. In a system dominated by one hegemonic power, the large power may not need to fight, and the small have no desire to fight. In both cases, a careful study of East Asian history leads to many potential insights and is an ideal way to move beyond and widen the interaction between the study all history and international relations.

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    501

Modernity: State Formation in Eighth-​C entury East Asia Although we take ‘modernity’ for granted, it is not clear when the international system and its units actually originated. A key element of modernity is the modern state. Yet the almost universal acceptance of the link between war and state formation is actually much more tenuous when put in comparative context.1 Viewed in the context of East Asia, Charles Tilly’s (1975, 42) famous dictum that ‘war made the state, and the state made war’ is almost certainly not a universal truth that exists across space and time, but rather one particular—​ and partial—​story about Europe. Indeed, state formation in historical East Asia occurred 1,000 years before it did in Europe; and it occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. As Woodside (2006, 1) points out, ‘The eighth century, indeed, would make a good choice as the first century in world history of the politically ‘early modern’. It was in this century that the Chinese court first gained what it thought was a capacity to impose massive, consolidating, central tax reforms from the top down, which few European monarchies would have thought possible before the French Revolution, given their privileged towns, provinces, nobles, and clergy’. There were even more differences with European history: the fundamental organizing principle in historical East Asia was hierarchy, not equality. It was emulation of the hegemon—​not competition for survival—​that drove the rapid institutionalization and formation of centralized, bureaucratically administered, territorial governments in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. IR scholars have not sufficiently investigated how the system affects the units, and in particular how hegemonic systems may differ from balance of power systems. The scant extant research on East Asian state formation generally only considers China and only studies the Qin-​Han era of 221 bc to 220 ad (Kiser and Cai 2003; Zhao 2004). However, what proto-​bureaucratic innovations that arose at that time were nascent and superficial in scope. Rather, as noted previously, the full Chinese state is usually seen to have emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries ad, not 800 years earlier during the Qin. A state’s ability to extract resources is most revealed by the sovereign’s ability to tax, take on debt, create a military, and create institutions that can regulate social life down to the household or even individual level. By the Sui-​Tang era (587–​907), China had the capacity to impose taxes across its country down to the village level. There are three main areas in which we can measure capacity: taxes and debt; the military; and other institutions that allow the state to interact with society. A privileged ‘noble’ class had been eradicated centuries earlier, and China now consisted of citizens and officials, not nobles and serfs. Historians such as Richard von Glahn (2016, 169) tend to characterize this era when the true premodern Chinese state emerged: The might and wealth of the Sui-​Tang empires (618–​907) at their peak deeply impressed China’s neighbors. Japan, the Korean states, and even (briefly) Tibet imitated the Sui-​Tang imperial model, and to a greater or lesser degree adopted the Chinese written language, Sui-​Tang political institutions and laws, Confucian ideology, and the Buddhist religion. It was during this era that East Asia—​a community of independent national states sharing a common civilization—​took shape in forms that have endured down to modern times.

502   David C. Kang Institutions are woven together and do not exist in isolation. State capacity also involves the ability to make and enforce binding rules over the details of everyday life. While scholarship has focused mostly on extraction, historical East Asian states had immense centralized control and reached down to the household level by the eighth century ad. This involved records for entering the civil service, centralized appointment of local officials, and judicial and legal institutions. The Chinese Sui dynasty (583–​618) replaced the distinction between aristocrat and commoner with the distinction between officials and ordinary subjects. Richard von Glahn (2016, 182) observes that the Sui: ‘The emperor strengthened the central government, establishing the Three Departments of the Chancellery, the Secretary, the all-​ powerful Department of State Affairs, and the Six Ministries bureaucracy that would remain the standard structure of central government administration throughout later Chinese imperial history’. State formation occurred regionwide, not just in China. Key events in the Sinicization of Korea and Japan began with the importation of Buddhism to Korea in the early fourth century, and the numerous Japanese tribute missions that travelled to China during the fifth century, both of which most importantly brought back Chinese language and writing systems. Over the next century, the Korean Silla kingdom adopted Buddhism and by the sixth century had begun to use Chinese-​style titles and administrative codes for its government. In the sixth century monks from the Korean kingdom of Paekche introduced Buddhism to Japan, where it quickly became influential. In the seventh century, both Korea and Japan began to use the Chinese calendar and time-​keeping to provide far more precise organization of state activities; and both states increasingly used Chinese-​style administrative and legal codes and engaged in national taxation. Both states created national conscript armies, founded national Confucian Academies to train bureaucrats; and implemented civil service examinations to select officials on the basis of merit, not heredity. Korea began to emerge as a state in the sixth century ad and existed for more than 1,300 years with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax its citizens, field a large military, and provide extensive public goods. It created these institutions not to wage war or suppress revolt—​as will be pointed out in the next section of this chapter, the longevity of Korean dynasties is evidence of both the peacefulness of its neighbourhood and its internal stability. Rather, Korea—​and to a lesser extent, Vietnam, Ryukyus, and Japan—​developed state institutions through emulation of China. These countries developed institutions to craft internal legitimacy and external stability, not to conduct war. Korea should not exist—​at least, it shouldn’t exist according to our dominant theories of state formation that were inductively derived from the European experience. By 503, the Korean Silla Dynasty had adopted Chinese titles such as ‘king’ and abandoned native Korean titles. Ebrey and Walthall (2014, 104) note that ‘Silla kings took steps to institutionalize their governments . . . . they made Buddhism the state-​sponsored religion, and collected taxes on agriculture.’ Under King Pophung (r. 514–​540), Silla adopted Buddhism, and Pophung’s reign also saw the first promulgation of Chinese-​style bureaucratic government and administrative law. Issued in 520, the new laws included a seventeen-​grade official rank system, and names and titles, based on Chinese models. In 517, Pophung established a Ministry of War, which was part of the process of centralizing the military under court control. Within a few decades, by the 570s, Silla was ‘replacing military lords with commissioners dispatched from the capital’ (Ebrey and Walthall 2014, 104).

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    503 Historians call the new, centralized order built in Japan during the fourth to eighth centuries the ritsuryo state, because it was based on Chinese-​style penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryo) codes. Sugimoto and Swain (1989, 1) characterize Japanese borrowing of culture and technology from China in two historical waves: ‘Chinese Wave I’ began circa 600 ce and lasted until 894. They write: Only twice in Japanese history has it been national policy to undertake an overall transformation of the entire social system according to an imported foreign model . . . The first began with the Taika Reforms of AD 646 and continued through the Nara and early Heian eras (seventh-​ninth centuries inclusive) when Japan sought to adopt the Chinese model of Tang society. Japan had been assimilating more elementary material forms of continental culture for several centuries, but the Taika transformation was the first effort consciously based on systematic, large-​scale importation of high culture directly from China.

Batten (2003, 242) observes that, ‘Japan in the eighth century was already a state society with relatively efficient, centralized mechanisms for gathering information, formulating political decisions, and carrying them out’. Indeed, more than 7,000 men staffed the Japanese bureaucracy by the eighth century (Ebrey and Walthall 2014, 121). This dwarfs the level of development achieved in Europe even 500 years later: By the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church legal office, or Curia, contained over 1,000 officials, and Mitterauer (Gryzmala-​Busse 2019, 9) argues that the Curia ‘became the model for the beginnings of state bureaucracies’. The Curia was so advanced compared to fourteenth-​century European royal courts that it became a ‘template for sophisticated administration’ in premodern Europe (Gryzmala-​Busse 2019, 9). Yet the Curia was dwarfed by the complexity and size that the Japanese state bureaucracy had already achieved half a millennium earlier. This state formation occurred through emulation and learning—​there was an extensive epistemic community in historical East Asia that was central to the creation and dissemination of regional civilization that flowed mainly from China outwards, from core to periphery. This epistemic community was composed of Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars. They studied at Buddhist temples and Confucian academies, wrote in a common Chinese language using common styles, and made up the bulk of government officials in each country. These scholar-​officials were also the ones who staffed diplomatic missions to other countries. Holcombe (2011, 109) concludes that through the reunified Sui and Tang dynasties, a degree of shared international aristocratic culture developed throughout East Asia. This was a time when elites in China, Korea, and Japan (as well as northern Vietnam) in some ways had more in common with each other than they did with their own peasants . . . in particular, educated East Asians shared a common written language and literary canon. The glories of Tang poetry were as much admired by contemporary elites in Korea and Japan as they were in China.

Batten writes (2003, 227): ‘At the level of prestige goods and information networks, Japan was fully merged with China and the rest of East Asia no later than the eighth century’. Both Korea and Vietnam copied the six ministries identically from the Tang. Furthermore, it was the Tang dynasty (618–​907 ad) that made perhaps the most direct advances in governance, introducing a key institutional experiment: a government run by talent, not heredity, with civil servants selected through a public competition assessing candidates’ qualification, open (in theory) to all males, and held at regular, fixed intervals. The key institutional

504   David C. Kang innovation in East Asia was the emergence of a civil service based on merit, not hereditary aristocracy, in principle. The key institutional aspect to these states was the emergence of the world’s first civil service: ‘embryonic bureaucracies, based upon clear rules, whose personnel were obtained independently of hereditary social claims, through meritocratic civil service examinations’ (Woodside, 2006: 1). It was the emulation and diffusion of ideas and institutions from the hegemon that gave rise to state formation in East Asia. War and preparations for war were not the cause of state formation. Rather, a relative absence of war was the result of a particular type of state formation within a particular regional civilization centred on China. Indeed, as will be discussed in the next section, patterns of warfare were systematically different between Europe and East Asia. Between the fourth to eighth centuries specifically, there was only one war involving Korea, Japan, and China: the Korean War of Unification from 660–​668. Indeed, for centuries before and after the time period discussed in this chapter, Japan, Korea, and China were not competing with each other for territory, prestige, or authority. Most importantly, during the fourth to sixth centuries, China was divided and posed no military threat to the peninsula or Japan. Indeed, centuries of initial state formation in both Korea and Japan occurred without any threat from China at all and without any war between these countries. Seth (2016, 37) points out that, Chinese culture was introduced to Korea at a time when China itself was politically weak and divided . . . Chinese states were useful sources of cultural ideas and practices, but during this period of political disunity in China they were not in a position to threaten the existence of the Korean states. Nor was there any great empire with universalistic pretensions and the ability to dazzle its neighbors with cultural brilliance or intimidate them with military might. As a result, the process of state building during the Three Kingdoms period was largely an indigenous development, and Chinese cultural borrowing was done on a purely voluntary basis. Vietnam is a particularly instructive case of emulation. Vietnam came into existence not to fight China, but rather to coexist within the shadow of hegemony. There is an anachronistic twentieth-​century nationalist myth of Vietnamese history that tends to be taken at face value by Western scholars and indeed most Vietnamese themselves: that historically, Vietnam feared China and saw China as its main external threat. So deeply has this modern Vietnamese meme of chronic war with China taken root that it is often repeated without reflection by observers and scholars of East Asian security and used uncritically to argue that Vietnam fears China in the twenty-​first century. Yet the historical record suggests that the rulers of the Dai Viet period were usually much more concerned with internal stability than they were with invasion from China. For example, from 1365 to 1789, Vietnam experienced interstate war in only 39 years, or 9% of the time (Kang, Nugyen, Fu, and Shaw 2019, 908). As would be expected in a relationship organized by hierarchy, the Vietnamese court even occasionally sought the Chinese court’s cooperation in putting down rebellions. Liam Kelley (2010, 8) is worth quoting at length: In 968 a man by the name of Dinh Bo Linh became the ruler of the area of the Red River delta. He did this not by fighting off the Chinese and declaring ‘independence.’ Instead, he allied himself with a Cantonese warlord and defeated other warlords in the region, some of whom were undoubtedly Han Chinese, but others who were likely Vietnamese or Tai-​speaking peoples. Two years later, the Song Dynasty dispatched an envoy who granted Dinh Bo Linh the position of commandery prince (quan vuong/​junwang), continuing a long-​running practice of granting titles to powerful individuals in the region. What would be different this time, however, is that

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    505 eventually this title would be elevated to the level of ‘king’ (quoc vuong/​guowang), and this kingdom would maintain its position of as a tributary state for centuries to come.

From that time on, the Vietnamese court explicitly recognized its unequal status in its relations with China through a number of formal institutional mechanisms and norms. James Anderson (2013, 271) observes about Vietnam that, ‘By 1086 a clear border had been mapped out between the two states, the first such court-​negotiated border in China’s history . . . . The existence of a formal border between the two polities was successfully challenged only once in the next eight hundred years’. Centralized bureaucratic states defined over territory with immense extractive capacity developed one thousand years earlier in East Asia than they did in Europe. Indeed, European modernity was influenced by Chinese and East Asian innovations that were borrowed by the West in the nineteenth century. The Northcote-​Trevelyan Report of 1854, which formed the basis of the modern British Civil Service, explicitly drew inspiration from the Chinese imperial examination system, as did the American Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. Furthermore, the idea that popular legitimacy is a Western invention is also a Western conceit. Elizabeth Perry (2008, 38) has shown that the idea that people have a just claim to a decent livelihood and that a state’s legitimacy depends upon satisfying this claim—​goes very far back in Chinese political thought. It has roots in the teachings of Confucius (sixth–​fifth century bc) and was elaborated by the influential Confucian philosopher Mencius (fourth–​third century bc). In sum, deeply institutionalized and territorially defined nations in premodern East Asia emerged and developed under the shadow of a hegemonic international system and through emulation, not competition and war. Rather than being a universal theory, research is increasingly pointing out that the bellicist argument linking war and state making and modernity in Europe is actually a partial explanation based on one particular region and time. Carefully exploring this East Asian experience is not only important for challenging some of the most central theories that populate our IR profession, but also to pointing in exciting theoretical directions that move the field beyond its Eurocentric origins.

Granularity: Measuring War A key element of any international system is war. Identifying different international orders and organizing principles would be uninteresting if patterns of behaviour were not different, as well. One of the most promising areas of new research is the increasingly sophisticated social scientific scholarship that measures war and other forms of violence in historical East Asia. To date, there has been little systematic study of this subject, and almost no attempt to compare patterns of war in historical East Asia and historical Europe (Swope 2009; Andrade 2016; Di Cosmo 2002). Although all wars are different, a first task in taking East Asian history seriously is to engage in careful empirical research that can identify regional patterns of violence. Moving towards more granular explanations requires recognizing that the current conventional wisdom simply extrapolates the European experience of balance of power and assumes that

506   David C. Kang it applies to the rest of the world. The ultimate goal is to have deep specificity, but that begins by identifying whether, in fact, there are different patterns of war around the world. Even ostensible critics of this new empirical IR scholarship agree that the fields of IR and History will benefit from more granular approaches to the study of historical East Asian international relations. This call to move beyond sweeping generalizations and be more specific—​ that is, granular—​in dealing with the historical record, for example, comes from historian James Milward (2020, 73), who criticizes scholars who view an ‘unchanging, continuous China-​centered international order’. Similarly, IR scholar Victoria Hui (2020, 93) criticizes the contrast of Europe with ‘China’s supposedly timeless cultural and political unity.’ Indeed, much of the existing scholarship on East Asian IR has traditionally focused on debates almost exclusively about China and Chinese history, and reflect the preoccupations of Sinologists such as Milward and Hui. For example, with the goal of more careful periodization, Milward (2020) points out that the Qing dynasty (1644–​1911) operated its foreign policies differently than the Ming dynasty (1368–​1644) that preceded it. This type of careful scholarship is exactly what is necessary for increasingly taking seriously the reality of East Asian history. Rephrased in the language of social science, we would say that Milward uses explicit scope and boundary conditions that delineate a particular era and specific participants, and identifies a key causal variable—​ cultural legitimation policy—​that is not related to the distribution of power (Milward 2020, 79). Unsurprisingly, different eras and periods had different key participants and different empirical patterns and dynamics. Yet by only focusing on China, Milward and Hui do not go far enough: Scholars are increasingly focusing not just on Sinocentric preoccupations, but also taking a regional perspective in researching empirical patterns of war and other violence with self-​consciously articulated scope and boundary conditions. East Asian history is, in fact, much more than Chinese history, and a granular approach must acknowledge that. Scholars sometimes write about East Asia as if China as hegemon were the only participant in the system—​‘China without neighbours’—​and contrast Europe and China, rather than Europe and East Asia.2 Yet historical East Asia comprised many political units that often interacted without the involvement of China. Not focusing solely on the hegemon may seem initially odd, but it is crucial if scholarship is going to widen inquiry beyond China and examine both the core—​of which China was often the most influential member—​and also the periphery. The IR literature is, in fact, moving in the direction of more self-​consciously regional research, and more explicit scope and boundary conditions, often using primary sources in multiple languages. This new scholarship is increasingly concluding that, in fact, patterns of warfare were systematically different between Europe and East Asia, and different eras within East Asia also experienced different patterns (Kang 2010; Kang, Shaw, and Fu 2016). As opposed to the recurrent bellicosity of similarly sized multipolar European states, East Asia was a hegemonic system. Threats came not from the strongest or biggest state (China), but from the smallest and weakest actors (peoples from the Central Asian steppe). Dincecco and Wang (2018, 342) are representative of the scholarly consensus that, ‘in centralized China . . . . the most significant recurrent foreign attack threat came from Steppe nomads . . . external attack threats were unidirectional, reducing the emperor’s vulnerability’. Rosenthal and Wong (2011, 162, 168) concur: periodically, the people living beyond the Great Wall mobilized armies that could threaten major disruptions. These types of threats typically brought dynasties to their knees, but they

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    507 occurred very infrequently and were separated by long periods of stable rule . . . rates of conflict were radically different in China and Europe.

Indeed, compared to most European polities, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were remarkably stable internally and externally. Being self-​conscious about measurement includes avoiding selection bias: If one is interested in war, it is natural to look where there is fighting. But that leads to an overweighting of war and a biased assessment for patterns of both conflict and stability. Just as important as explaining why there was war in some areas is to explain why there was peace in other areas. Although it is widely acknowledged that there was endemic skirmishing between China and the peoples of the Central Asian steppes, it is rarely asked why threats were unidirectional and arose mainly from nomads, rather than arising from powerful states such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (Barfield 1989; and Johnston 1995). Indeed, notable was the startling longevity of the main participants in the East Asian world. In stark contrast to the European experience, there were literally centuries when most of these countries did not face existential threats from external powers. Table 1 provides an overview of the causes of the rise and fall of dynasties. What is striking is that only three out of 18 dynastic transitions between 500 and 1900 ad came as a result of war. The three external transitions were the Tang/​Silla alliance that crushed Koguryo in 668, the Mongol conquest of the Song dynasty in 1274–​79, and the Ming intervention in Vietnam in 1407 on behalf of one Vietnamese dynasty against another. Long stretches of stable rule were marked by the occasional disruption. Between 1368 and 1841—​often called the ‘early modern era’ (Lee 2016; Zhang 2015)—​there were 43 years in which China experienced a pirate raid and 166 years in which it experienced a border skirmish along the Central Asian steppe with peoples along its long northern and western frontiers; but only 28 years in which China was at war as typically defined by political scientists (Kang, Shaw, and Fu 2016, 773). Rosenthal and Wong (2011, 189–​90) note that Peaceful economies can provide more public goods than war-​torn ones . . . . in China a combination of low taxes and provision of public goods defined good governance . . . the long periods of quiet in the Chinese empire enabled rulers and subjects to rely heavily on such strategies.

Korea experienced similar stability, with only three dynasties during 1,300 years of existence. For example, Sun Joo Kim (2007, 993) writes about the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–​1910) that: ‘When more than seventy large-​and small-​scale popular uprisings broke out one after the other across the Korean peninsula in 1862, the central court of Chosŏn (1392–​1910) was caught in great alarm and fear because no such widespread revolts had taken place in the more than 450 years since the dynasty had been founded.’ In short, no matter what measure is used, historical Korea and China faced far more benign environments than did their European peers. Another clear pattern marks interactions with the hegemon. Korea and Vietnam, existing in the shadow of China, experienced more conflict with other peripheral actors than they did with China. The stabilization of the Korean border with Ming China in the fourteenth century, regularization of relations with the Jurchen tribes to its north, and the waning of piracy along its coasts, led to a decline in military preparedness. Kenneth Lee (1997, 99) writes that, ‘After two hundred years of peace, Korean forces were untrained in warfare and were scattered all over the country in small local garrison troops. Koreans were totally unprepared on land’.

508   David C. Kang Table 1 Dynastic Changes and their Causes in East Asia, 500–​1900 ad Country

Dynasty

Dates

Cause of fall

Internal or external

Korea

Koguryŏ

37 bc–​668 ad

Tang/​Silla alliance and decade-​long war

External

Silla

57 bc–​907 ad

Aristocratic families, civil war, King was figurehead for last century. Koryŏ eventually conquered

Internal

Koryŏ

907–​1392

Yi Songgye rebelled

Internal

Chosŏn

1392–​1910

Japanese imperialism

External (twentieth century)

Nara

710–​794

Rebellion

Internal

Heian

794–​1185

Minamoto no Yoritomo seized power

Internal

Kamakura Shogunate

1185–​1333

Nitta Yoshisada, conquered them.

Internal

Ashikaga Shogunate

1336–​1573

Sengoku warring states era, Hideyoshi (2nd great unifier), Tokugawa (3rd great unifier)

Internal

Tokugawa Shogunate

1600–​1868

Meiji restoration

Internal

Lý

1009–​1225

Internal

Tran Hồ

1225–​1400

Trần Thu͗ Độ forced Lý Chiêu Hoàng to give the throne to Trần Ca͗nh. Hồ Quý Ly rebellion

1400–​1406

Ming China intervened on behalf of Tran dynasty

External

Later Lê

1428–​1788

Mac rebellion

Internal

Mac, Le, etc.

1527–​1788

Many rival civil wars

Internal

Nguyen

1802–​1945

French imperialism

External (Western)

Tang

618–​907

Zhu Wen rebellion

Internal

Song

960–​1279

Mongol invasions

External

Yuan

1271–​1368

Zhu Yuanzhang rebellion

Internal

Ming

1368–​1644

Li Zicheng rebellion

Internal

Qing

1644–​1912

Empress Dowager Longyu, Yuan Shikai, and Sun Yat-​sen

Internal

Japan

Vietnam

China

Internal

Source: Kang and Ma (2020).

Kirk Larsen (2012, 9) notes that there were ‘critical moments in which the Chinese dynasty possessed both the capability and the momentum necessary to complete aggressive expansionistic designs [against Chosŏn] but decided not to do so’. In fact, the main reason China seems not to have acted is because it deemed that such invasions of Korea were not in its long-​ term strategic interest. Chinese officials recognized the value of having a loyal ally between

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    509 them and the tribes of the northeast and the Japanese and they proved willing to join Korea in meeting these threats when their mutual interests were at stake. Security and friendship seemingly counted for more than adding additional territory to an already vast empire. Vietnamese rulers also displayed very little military attention to their relations with China, which were conducted extensively through the institutions and principles of the tributary system. Rather, Vietnamese leaders were clearly more concerned with quelling chronic domestic instability and managing relations with Champa and other kingdoms to their south and west. New research on Vietnam also reveals similar patterns. Using primary sources from premodern Vietnam, Kang, Nguyen, Fu, and Shaw (2019, 908) find that over a four-​century period, Vietnam experienced border skirmishes in a total of only fifteen years. Interstate war occurred in 39 years, or 9.2% of total years. The Vietnamese court was far more often involved in dealing with internal revolts (56 years) or regime contestation (64 years). As would be expected by a relationship organized by hierarchy, the Vietnamese court even occasionally sought the Chinese court’s cooperation in putting down rebellions. Kelley (2005, 2) observes that ‘Vietnamese envoys passionately believed that they participated in what we would now call the Sinitic or East Asian cultural world, and that they accepted their kingdom’s vassal status in that world’. Again, supposed critics of this approach largely corroborate the importance of taking the reality of East-​Asian history on its own terms. Despite Milward’s (2020, 78) protestation that East Asian history ‘looks a lot like power politics as usual,’ the patterns he himself identify show that ‘the Qing ruling elite functioned in multiple languages and cultural registers simultaneously, legitimizing their rule in different ways for the Manchus as well as the Chinese, Mongol, Turkic-​Muslim and Tibetan domains’ (Milward 2020, 79). Realists in the field of IR would find Milward’s argument about cultural legitimation epiphenomenal to the distribution of capabilities in the region. Milward’s contribution in widening inquiry beyond the umbrella term ‘Confucianism’ is a useful step in the right direction, but one that largely works with this new research, not against it. Indeed Milward’s own argument, as well as the patterns discussed in this chapter, appear to directly challenge a realist, balance of power approach. For example, the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, also known as the Imjin War (1592–​98), was the largest conflict on the globe in the sixteenth century, yet is still barely known outside of East Asia. However, it is a key case for examining different patterns of war and violence. Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–​98) sought to overturn the longstanding Ming order and create a new international system that could have fundamentally altered the course of Asian, if not world history, had it succeeded. The invasion was successfully thwarted by a Sino-​Korean alliance that emerged out of China’s obligations to Korea as part of the tributary system of foreign relations (Swope 2009). Hideyoshi’s defeat preserved the East Asian world order and China’s hegemonic position therein for another 250 years, yet another testament to the viability and malleability of the hierarchical China-​centered international order in East Asia. It is significant that despite being far smaller, Japan invaded Korea in 1592, not the other way around. This was also the only war between China and Japan in over six centuries. The fascinating question is why these states chose not to fight for so long, despite having the logistical and organizational capacity to wage war across water and on a massive scale. East Asian states had the capacity to mobilize extraordinary military forces when necessary. During the Imjin War Korea mobilized up to 84,500 troops along with 22,200 guerilla soldiers (Palais 1996, 82). The Japanese had invaded with a force of 281,840 troops, the initial invading contingent consisting of 158,700 men (Palais 1996, 78). By way of contrast, the Spanish Armada of 1588

510   David C. Kang consisted of 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers. The premodern East Asian states had the logistical and organizational capacity to mobilize and deploy at great distances and across water military power that was ten times greater than was conceivable in Renaissance Europe. Realist approaches that emphasize the causal role of relative capabilities have difficulty explaining these patterns. Realism would predict that the far more powerful state (China) would attack the weaker state (Japan), not the other way around. Realism would further predict that the two weaker states, Korea and Japan, would ally together against China—​yet it was Korea that sought China’s help to counter the Japanese threat, not the other way around. This new research is increasingly concluding that a hegemonic system with different ordering principles functions differently than a multipolar system. These steps to carefully periodize East Asian history, and to identify eras, patterns, participants, and regions are a first step towards the increasingly granular study of war throughout time and across regions. Scholarship is moving beyond the sweeping generalizations about millenia of Chinese history as exemplified in Hui’s work, and increasingly making regional and discrete arguments. And this granular research is raising many fundamental theoretical questions: What is a war? Was war the same in early modern East Asia as it is today? The phenomenon of war predates the modern nation-​state system (Phillips and Sharman 2015, 437). What is interesting about these questions is not that they reveal that fourteenth-​century data might not be the cleanest, or that typologies may benefit from revision, but that there might be problems—​that extend across field and even discipline—​with how scholars think about conflict and state violence (and, by extension, peace) and with how an exceptional marker, war (however defined), plays such an outsized role in scholars’ understanding of presumed desirable outcomes and stability.

Conclusion The recent attention by IR scholars to historical East Asia promises to enrich a range of IR scholarship and challenge some of the most central ideas in the IR discipline. The most important lesson from the study of East Asia is to bring into relief the geographically constrained nature of much of IR theory: the Western liberal order is neither unique nor inevitable. Indeed, this focus on the Western experience so permeates the field of IR, and idealized representation about the West are so ubiquitous, that it is almost invariably invoked as the obvious reference point for the East. East Asia is constantly being held to account for expectations emerging from Europe, but almost never the opposite. One of the most important way forward is to take both European history and East Asian history and to put them in direct conversation with each other. Research on East Asia should not have to refer constantly to Europe; indeed that is the definition of Eurocentrism. But the reality of our field is that Europe is the measure of all things; and most scholars of IR will expect East Asianists to refer to the European experience.

Notes 1. Much of this section is drawn from Huang and Kang (2020). 2. The phrase is from Elisseeff (1963).

‘Asia’ in the History of IR    511

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Chapter 35

T he ‘ Internat i ona l ’ and the ‘ Gl oba l ’ i n International H i story Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka Over the last two decades, historians and scholars of International Relations (IR) have engaged in closer conversations leading to the emergence of Historical IR and to the ‘international turn’ in intellectual history (Bell 2009; Armitage 2014). New scholarship in international intellectual history has underlined the importance of ideas and concepts for the formation of our historical understanding of the international sphere (Armitage 2012; Sluga 2015). In parallel, the development and consolidation of global and world history as innovative approaches to the study of historical phenomena on a larger scale points to a growing interest in the intersection of histories of the international and the global with the study of contemporary international relations.1 The cross-​fertilization between IR and History has produced an extensive and diverse range of perspectives on politics beyond the state that has sharpened our knowledge of the evolution and transformation of political ideas, spaces, and practices (Bayly 2018; Bartelson 2009; Davis et al. 2020; Hall 2015; Keene 2017). In this chapter, we will address two meaningful spatial and conceptual notions in the twentieth century: the international and the global. How were these political spaces imagined and understood by IR scholars, historians, and practitioners? What are the differences and similarities between them? How were they employed in the conceptual analysis of political phenomena beyond the state? Such questions serve as an open invitation to investigate in detail the changing meanings of common terms and to engage in a closer examination of their significance. We will focus mainly on twentieth-​century European and American perspectives on the global and the international. However, this is not to suggest that the thinkers we have chosen provide an exhaustive or conclusive account of interpretations of the international and the global in the previous century; indeed, as this chapter will make clear, there were also comparative articulations of importance outside the West. Our aim, rather, is to use the following examples to highlight some features of the conceptual and spatial locales that continue to be significant in shaping our understanding of these domains today. The domains of the international and the global have important political stakes. During the twentieth century, those stakes were grounded in the seemingly unprecedented political

514    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka challenges of the age: issues of war and peace in the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars; the world’s growing interconnectedness and interdependence in an age of technological innovation; and major transformations in world order, including the end of Empire and the birth of new postcolonial states. Crucially, in the eyes of contemporary observers, these were all developments whose causes and effects seemingly exceeded the boundaries of any given nation-​state. Against such a backdrop, the locales of the international and the global presented alternative spaces for conceptualizing political relations beyond the state. Each locale was moreover conceptualized by its own set of assumptions about 1) the appropriate spatial scale of organizing political life, and 2) the degree to which the state ought to play a central role. As this chapter will make clear, these two domains were open to varying and overlapping interpretations, defying any easy generalizations or black-​ and-​ white distinctions between them. Our hope is that the diverse and ever-​changing nature of political and scholarly debates about the international and global domains as evidenced by our discussion of the twentieth century will provide a starting point for future engagement with these locales by historians, IR scholars, and practitioners alike. So what exactly do the international and the global refer to? At a basic level, the international and the global describe geographical spaces as well as political domains and imaginaries. These spaces—​at once concrete and ideational—​define analytical and normative perspectives of historians, IR scholars, as well as practitioners, commentators, and the general public. The international and the global indicate a discrete scale, a particular set of political relations, and normative assumptions about the scope, aims, and protagonists of politics beyond the state. One way to distinguish between the international and the global is their relation to the state: while the international relies on—​and even assumes—​the centrality of statehood to political order without imposing a strict vision of scale, the global challenges this assumption by prioritizing instead the world-​scale of political order over the specific structure of its composing units. For twentieth-​century intellectuals and practitioners, engaging with the global and the international as locales did not entail a turn away from other conceptual and geographical spheres of political order. To think about political domains beyond the state in the modern era was not necessarily to attempt to abolish the state as a protagonist of political relations. Instead, the international and the global were embedded in a pluralistic vision of politics in which other spatial and political locales, such as the city, the state, the region, the empire, and the continent, could exist and thrive. This multiplicity of spatial and political locales has contributed to the formation of ideas about the international and the global, their scope and scale, as well as their distinct interactions with other dimensions of political action and thought. In particular, the interconnections between the categories of the state, the international and the global, has provided a fruitful arena for the examination of key concepts in politics, such as power, community, order, and democracy. More than a specific geographical location, the locales of the international and the global indicate a particular scale of political interaction. While the international and the global suggest that the spaces of politics may—​and potentially should—​include the whole world, these spheres do not always represent a universalist vision aimed at levelling the differences in favour of a united world order. Instead, the international and the global have represented opportunities to reconsider the links between the different units that compose the world as a whole, generating debates about inequality and the management of diversity. If the international seems to draw attention to the relations between states as the main components

The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     515 of political order, the global moves away from the primacy of statehood and, for some, from territoriality as such. In this view, the global embodies a higher level of abstraction and a lower commitment to the preservation of the existing system of states. Accordingly, ‘thinking globally’ may embody a form of utopianism as well as a stronger reaction against familiar political orders. The global, and to a lesser degree the international, can be seen as exercises in political imagination in pursuit of alternative futures. These debates surrounding the international and the global took on a particular significance in the historical context of the twentieth century. The major political developments of the twentieth century including the decline of the European empires, the two world wars, and the emergence of new international organizations challenged the existing spatial arrangements of politics—​without always generating a clear recipe or consensus for the desirable scale of political order. Accordingly, the period was also one of competing quests for a new world order: a new political system to regulate and direct interactions beyond the boundaries of states. It is in this particular historical context that we find multiple and competing attempts to define and contrast the two locales of the international and the global. As exercises in political imagination, the global and the international can be seen as ideological structures—​as systems of thought that channel abstract ideas about politics and space into concrete practices, institutions, and political relations. Yet in practice, despite the frequent use of these terms in theoretical tracts, historical texts, and political communication, the international and the global have been ambiguous and challenged categories. The components of these ideologies remained blurred or vague, generating confusion and inconsistencies about their meanings and implications. These features in turn make both ideological structures apt for intellectual-​historical study. In this chapter, we attempt to unpack their modern meanings, engage with their ambiguities, and offer critical reflections on their deployment in differing historical contexts. With these aims in mind, the following sections will discuss some interpretations of the international and the global in twentieth-​century American and European thought. Our discussion will be organized around three time periods: 1) the years around the two world wars; 2) c.1960–​80s; 3) contemporary theorizations in the twenty-​first century.

Internationalism and Globalism c.1919 and 1945 Ideationally and practically, the period after each of the two world wars was an important moment for reconfiguring the spatiality of politics. Most notably, the aftermath of the First World War saw the ascendancy of the international as a key alternative to the national space. Although the international remained important after the Second World War, the period was also marked by an emergent interest in the global as a desirable scale for political order. This section will look at each of these developments in turn. In diagnosing the causes of the First World War, many thinkers, practitioners, and commentators advanced a critique of nationalism as a dangerous and belligerent ideology. As the excesses of the great power rivalry made apparent by the war brought into question the desirability of the nation as the primary mode of political organization, postwar

516    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka discussions about alternative world orders placed a new emphasis on the ethics and practices of international cooperation. Such formulations amounted to a viewpoint or ideology broadly known as internationalism that remained influential throughout the twentieth century in varying political and conceptual formulations (Sluga and Clavin 2016). In the specific context of interwar Europe (1918–​39), marred as it was by political fracture and emotional trauma, the devastating consequences of excessive nationalist belligerency fuelled widespread anxieties about European civilizational decay and moral decline, which in turn fostered an espousal of internationalism as an ideology of civilizational progress. The most significant practical consequence of this reorientation was the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919, an international organization equipped explicitly with the task of fostering international peace and cooperation. Yet only a few internationalists advanced a complete rejection of nationalism or envisaged the abolition of states. As Glenda Sluga (2013) has argued, the national and international were closely intertwined and to some extent mutually constitutive categories. This entanglement was typically rooted in liberal notions of progress and citizenship that saw the nation as an essential transitional stage towards internationalism—​ideas that can be traced back to the nineteenth century (Bell 2007a, 2007b; Mazower 2012). The nineteenth-​century outlook survived into the twentieth in various forms, including the very structure and naming of the ‘League of Nations’ which clearly defined the international as a summation of national units. Likewise, the British scholar and internationalist activist Alfred Zimmern was only one of many internationalists who were opposed to parochial and competitive forms of nationalism but nonetheless came to view nation-​states as important building-​blocks for the construction of a collaborative and peaceful international space (Baji 2021). For some internationalists, even the concurrent rise of nationalist movements in the non-​West during this period (galvanized by Woodrow Wilson’s enshrinement of the principle of national self-​ determination) represented welcome evidence of the global diffusion of the nation state as the universal model of political modernity (Manela 2007; Tonooka 2021). As these examples attest, thinking beyond the state reinforced the prevalence and legitimacy of the state as a political form. Nation-​states, however, were not the only models for the conceptual and institutional construction of the international sphere. The historical and political context of empire and imperialism was also central to the understanding of the international space in the twentieth century, the interwar years being no exception. At a conceptual level, some scholars have projected internationalism and imperialism as opposites, suggesting that the emergence of the international should be read as an attempt to overcome the exploitative practices of imperial regimes, and replace them with a cooperation-​based system of states (Long and Schmidt 2005). Yet imperial practices, worldviews and ideologies were not excluded from conceptions of the international that sought to preserve positive elements of the imperial world order whilst rejecting more problematic aspects (Morefield 2004, 2014; Bell 2016; Pitts 2018). In the early twentieth century, as in later periods, conceptions of hierarchy, racial differences, domination, and exploitation permeated ideas of the international derived from imperial discourses (Bell 2019). Indeed, historians of international organizations, especially the League of Nations (and later the United Nations (UN)), have noted the fundamental contribution of the imperial experience to practices and ideas of governing beyond the state. While the foundation of a new international institution like the league might appear as a moment of political and intellectual

The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     517 rupture, a closer look at the actors, the policies, and the institutions reveals important continuities linking the imperial and the international spheres by personal, conceptual, and practical bonds (Mazower 2009). Most notably, the League’s Mandate System, responsible for overseeing the administration of former German and Ottoman (colonial) territories, was established as a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’—​a direct extension of the nineteenth-​century liberal imperialist logic of denying self-​rule and equality to non-​European colonies deemed insufficiently ‘civilized’ (Pedersen 2015). In this way, the ideologies of empire permeated the newly shaped institutions of the international sphere, despite the newly formalized centrality of the nation-​state as the foundational unit of the international. The persistence of an imperial mindset into the twentieth century undermined claims of neutrality, equality, and universality that the new order supposedly represented (Mazower 2012). Finally, while international institutions were instrumental in shaping ideas about the international sphere, they do not encompass the entire range of relations that take place beyond and across state borders. Social forces, and in particular economic relations of investment and production, were often seen as key to the development of the international as a political sphere (Cox 1981; Rosenberg 1994). In the early twentieth century, political thinkers such as J. A. Hobson and V. Lenin sought to highlight the close interplay between the political and the social domains. Embracing liberal idealist or Marxist perspectives, they argued that the international sphere was not made of diplomatic relations alone, but instead founded on a complex network of interests and actions, both public and private. In this view, the international contained state-​based political and economic relations as its necessary and irreducible component, while giving space for the operation of transnational powers such as capitalism. Assumptions about the close interactions between political, social, and economic powers, both within the state and beyond it, were and remain a decisive aspect of materialist and historicist interpretations of power and production. If the international represented the dominant alternative to the national in the years after the First World War, this was less axiomatic at the end of the Second World War. On the one hand, conceptual and structural attempts at re-​ordering the world after 1945 saw the continued importance of the international as a space, epitomized by the newly established UN, which structurally as well as conceptually reinforced state sovereignty. On the other hand, the period was also marked by the conceptual ascendancy of the global, with a growing number of intellectuals now advocating an arrangement of political relations that was more consciously planetary in scope and less explicitly state-​centric in its organization. Put differently, whereas the scope of the international sphere was not clearly defined, the global sphere was by definition related to the whole world: the locale of the global was constructed through representations and practices of the globe as a closed unit. Globalist perceptions of ‘one world’ became particularly dominant in the 1940s, although their roots can be found in earlier ideas (Pemberton 2001; Mazower 2012). At the mid-​ century, American, British, and European thinkers increasingly insisted on the unity of the world as the defining political condition of their age (Rosenboim 2017). Rather than seeing interconnectedness in purely technological, cultural, or economic terms, they highlighted its political implications. The apparent advance of modernity—​through the technological proxies of airplanes, telephones, and after 1945 the atomic bomb—​enhanced the world’s interconnectedness and mutual vulnerability, demanding a new and appropriately global political outlook. It was no longer enough to consider the world from the perspective of a state system; a new and more versatile system was needed to reflect the plurality and

518    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka diversity of the world, while recognizing its inherent unity and interconnectedness. Calls for unity, such as expressed in Wendell Willkie’s bestseller One World (Willkie 1943) resonated with the idea that the global was the desirable scale of postwar politics, replacing the more limited and state-​centric ‘international’. For mid-​century global thinkers in Europe and the United States, the ‘global’ sphere reflected the distinctly different scale in which politics operated after the Second World War. Hence the French sociologist and political commentator Raymond Aron insisted that politics was now conducted on a ‘planetary’ scale (Aron 1949). Similarly, American geopolitical thinkers like Owen Lattimore and Nicholas Spykman imagined a new world order that encompassed the whole world, affecting all political communities, whether states or non-​states (Lattimore 1942; Spykman 1942; Rosenboim 2015). In their eyes, the limits of the international—​in scale and in its state-​centric focus—​were highlighted by the world’s political interconnectedness. London-​based political scientist David Mitrany was also convinced that the age of the ‘international’ was over due to the incapacity of states to address political and economic challenges beyond their borders. In response, he imagined a ‘functional’ system: a global multi-​layered network of agencies and institutions that operated within, across, and beyond state borders to resolve humanity’s ‘concrete needs’, thereby moving beyond warmongering ideologies (Mitrany 1943). By proposing a functional interpretation of global politics, Mitrany sought to challenge existing schemes of international organization by marginalizing the state and its nationalist ideology, viewing them as a danger to peaceful social and economic collaboration. The problem with the international was therefore linked not only to scale or scope, but also to ideational foundations. The international sphere was imbued with divisive nationalisms that should be overcome by a globalist conception of politics in which state and non-​states actors would collaborate to resolve challenges to humanity.

1960–​80s: The International and Global after Empire As the nation—​or the nation-​state—​remained a central part of the international sphere, the debate about the formation and inclusion of new nations was an important aspect of the development of the international in the twentieth century. This debate took on a particular significance in the latter half of the twentieth century in the context of the decline of European empires and the rise of colonial anti-​imperialism. The non-​Western rejection of colonialism translated into new movements for national liberation, but the scope of these movements was not limited to the locale of the nation (Collins 2013). Instead, as with the pre-​Second World War era, the national and international were closely intertwined. New anticolonial nationalist leaders sought to overcome the world order of empire after the Second World War by embracing the founding principles of the international system, first and foremost self-​determination (Getachew 2019). Here, the foundation of new postcolonial states was not merely an act of reinforcing the notion of the nation-​state as the desirable political form after empire, but rather an engagement with the international as a space defined by statehood, autonomy, and mutual recognition. A prominent example is the Third

The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     519 World’s call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) during the 1970s. Postcolonial countries of the Global South used the international forum of the UN to challenge the sovereign economic inequality and racial hierarchy of the postimperial world, making ambitious demands that included resource transfers, stabilization of commodity prices, and regulation of multinational corporations. Given that the NIEO was an attempt to restructure political economy on a global scale, there are conceptual overlaps with globalism, but its underlying assumptions about the arrangement of political relations were international, reinforcing the legitimacy of the sovereign state. The international thus emerged from the age of empire as a space of national interactions, in which hegemonic contestations and power struggles were mitigated by the formation of new non-​Western norms of behaviour. By becoming part of the international sphere, postcolonial nation builders sought to reconfigure it from within, an attempt that, for Getachew, ended in failure. For one, the Third World’s struggle for redistributive justice faced opposition from the Global North. The NIEO was defeated by an alternative vision—​ that of neoliberalism, which advocated a globalist project of trade liberalization centred around General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) reforms to institute a world of unrestrained capital (Slobodian 2018). At stake in this contestation was thus the future of the whole world after empire, fought between the North and South in a battle that was at once geopolitical and ideological. Quinn Slobodian’s neoliberal globalists notwithstanding, globalism encompassed in the twentieth century a range of ideologies and conceptual interpretations of the normative meaning of the global scale of political relations. Not all those who emphasized the importance of the global scale of politics therefore belonged to a particular socio-​economic creed—​ neoliberal or otherwise. Instead, globalists infused their global thinking with a variety of economic and social visions, including welfarism, socialism, or varieties of liberalism. What gave these ideologically disparate visions a common globalist identity was the spatial emphasis they placed on the world scale of politics. Other visions of the global remained attached to a diagnosis of technological change. In his 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy, cultural critic Marshall McLuhan explored the idea of the ‘global village’ as one that reflected the image of the world through new electronic interdependence (McLuhan 1962). The notion of technological interdependence thus continued to be central to the perception of the global and its meanings for human life, as transport technologies apparently cancelled the distance between people and alleviated the physical limits that restricted individuals’ influence over one another. McLuhan also highlighted the importance of the emotional reaction to visions of global rapprochement accompanied by the rise of computer-​based technologies. In this view, not only technology but emotions sustained the ‘global’ domain as a distinct arena from the ‘international’. This assertion echoes earlier sentiments expressed by cultural critics such as Lewis Mumford, who responded to the US dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 with a message of terrified urgency against professional expertise and in favour of spiritual unity (Mumford 1946). The global then, was apparently more than a physical space. It was an emotional, imaginary, and virtual domain that was home to promising or menacing relations between humans and technology. Finally, it is worth noting that many global thinkers have been reluctant to accept the cosmopolitan view that all humans were part of one moral community that could condition political order, moreover rejecting monist universalism that emphasized humanity’s common traits (Lattimore 1942; Mitrany 1943; Aron 1949). Instead, globalists provided a

520    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka wide range of political answers to the main problem of their age, global technological, cultural, and economic interconnectedness. As the examples in this section attest, rather than amounting to a coherent ideology, globalism is best understood as a bundle of perspectives on politics aimed at highlighting the importance of the world scale of political relations (Steger 2002, 2009). For some non-​Western actors, the world dimension of politics more specifically represented an arena of contestation to challenge and undermine the old imperial world; in this view, the global emerged as a call for revolutionary battle rather than as a necessary outcome of technological advances.

Contemporary Theories of the International and Global In recent decades, scholars have continued to theorize the category of the global in ways that are both familiar and innovative. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the rise of globalization as the process of increased social, economic, and cultural interconnectedness led scholars to reimagine the state as a global unit, a hybrid creation between familiar statehood and novel political spaces. In one notable formulation, the global perspective on statehood has been imagined as the ‘Metastate’, a new political domain with global reach though not necessarily all inclusive (Yurick 1995). With its flexible boundaries and multinational elite population, the notion of the Metastate offers a response to the imaginary global arena of modern capitalism that transcends space and place. By imagining the state in this new global context, political thinkers sought to challenge key political categories such as boundaries, community, and sovereignty, as well as the modern state itself. A complementary term advanced to help make sense of the global political space is ‘globality’ (van Munster and Sylvest 2016), defined as ‘the quality of being global; universality, totality; specifically the quality of having worldwide inclusiveness, reach, or relevance; (the potential for) global integration, operation, or influence (especially in business and financial contexts)’. In other words, globality means the circumstances in which the entire world is regarded as a ‘single place’ (van Munster and Sylvest 2016, 2–​3). This interpretation highlights the main normative characteristic of the global: the material perception of the ‘oneness’ of the planet as a significant condition for human action and for political order in particular. In this view, the world scale of political order becomes its defining feature, while the primacy of statehood as a condition for participation and recognition is marginalized. More broadly, thinking globally has induced doubts about the value of a state-​centric notion of sovereignty, leading to a growing recognition of alternative powers that limit and direct political decisions around the world (Ferguson 2006; Rodrik 2010; Piketty 2017). Moreover, by side-​lining the state, scholars have given more dimension to other political associations, such as the notion of the ‘community’, seen as a local and universal reference point for political, cultural, and social allegiance (Bartelson 2009; Aydin 2007). Such scholarly efforts notwithstanding, it is important to note that the global, in practice, has yet to replace the international as a dominant sphere of political life. Instead, scholars have continued to innovate theories pertaining to the international. Eschewing traditional categorizations such as realism and idealism, alternative approaches now include attempts

The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     521 to define the international through the concept of ‘governmentality’. Taking a page from Max Weber , Iver Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending (2007) have interpreted the international as an ‘updated ideal-​type’. The international is viewed not as a concrete space but rather as a historically contingent realm of practices, relations, and ideas of government that is shaped by—​but also constrains—​the state. Looking beyond the state as the main protagonist of the international has precipitated attention to other elements that have shaped this domain of political relations. For example, Cynthia Enloe (2014) has challenged conventional accounts about the composition of the international by arguing that the international is not only made at roundtables of international organizations such as the League of Nations or the UN, nor through trade relations between private and public actors. By proposing the idea of that ‘the international is personal’, Enloe suggests that ‘governments depend on certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs’ (351). The international, in this view, emerges from the realm of abstraction. Its key protagonists are women and men who dwell, work, think, and protest in specific locations with an awareness of the connections that link these places to others. Notably, Enloe resituates women as protagonists of international relations and as creators and shapers of the international sphere who have been excluded from earlier interpretations of the international. Recent efforts have sought to recover some of these hitherto excluded figures. A closer inspection of women international thinkers in the twentieth century has revealed that women had a greater role in fashioning the international sphere than previously recognized (Owens 2018). In addition to Enloe’s emphasis on the role of women as builders of the international beyond formal institutions, it has now become apparent that as professional scholars, librarians, and researchers, women were also part and parcel of the construction of the international (Huber et al. 2021). Women were professional members of international organizations since their inception, including the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the UN, and contributed in important ways to shaping their institutional structures and ideational outlooks. Women also taught IR theory and history at prominent universities and colleges around the world. As international thinkers, women generated a range of interpretations of the international as a sphere of collaboration and innovation. Yet it would be wrong to assume that all of them were progressive or radical; rather, women thinkers also contributed to the formulation of conservative or reactionary visions of the international sphere grounded in imperial experiences, racism, or economic exploitation. The significance of recent attempts to uncover the complex role of women in conceptualizing and creating the international eschews gendered reifications, instead pursuing a richer, more sophisticated, and diverse account of the evolution of ideas about politics beyond the state in the twentieth century (Owens and Rietzler 2021; Owens et al. 2022).

Continuity, Change, and the Challenge of Modernity There is a strand of thinking within IR which associates the international sphere with a condition of ‘anarchy’ viewed as a timeless universal problem (Schmidt 1998). This perspective

522    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka emphasizes continuity over change. But as the examples hitherto examined have shown, both in the realms of practice and ideas, the dynamics of change—​and historical rupture—​ also mattered greatly in the development of the international and global as political spaces during the twentieth century. One such dynamic came from geopolitical developments. As we have seen, the aftermaths of the two world wars saw the rise of new institutional spaces and normative outlooks, at times reinforcing and at times undermining the centrality of the nation state as the foundational unit of politics beyond the state. The end of empire and the rise of postcolonial states also led to the emergence of new articulations of internationalism and globalism, inducing North-​South ideological contestations. In the second half of the twentieth century, discussions of politics beyond the state reflected a European sense of decline and marginalization, at the same time as they reflected a growing recognition of the rise of new political powers like the United States, China, and Russia. Throughout, the political challenges of world order influenced the ways in which the international and the global were interpreted and contested. Technological developments have also been key, especially in making the global scale of politics seem necessary and—​to an extent—​possible. While nineteenth-​century thinkers had already identified the processes that initiated the integration of the world’s cultures, economies, and political orders, many political thinkers in the mid-​twentieth century insisted that the Second World War and the world’s increasing interconnectedness required a distinctly global political vision. Collectively, these dynamics of geopolitical transformation and technological change invite reflections on modernity as a concept and a set of conditions. The rise and diffusion of the nation-​state as the political foundation of the international, as well as innovations in science, communication, and transportation, are all quintessential features of what have come to be known as modernity, whose origins, scholars argue, are to be located in the nineteenth century (Osterhammel 2014). The transformations of the long nineteenth century in the form of industrialization and technological innovation, the rise of rational statehood, and ‘ideologies of progress’, initially generated a hierarchical core-​periphery international society, and over time became the basis of global modernity once the material and ideational conditions of the modern West became globalized. In this view, the transformation of the nineteenth century was the foundational rupture that defined the conditions for and contours of the kinds of international and global configurations we have identified in the twentieth century (Buzan and Lawson 2015). And even in the twenty-​first century, in so far as the international has yet to be rendered obsolete by a ‘post-​national’ global, it is modernity rather than post-​modernity that continues to provide the enveloping condition for politics beyond the state. To the extent that ideas and institutions are human constructions, however, perceptions of modern conditions matter as much as the nature of the conditions themselves. As exemplified by mid-​century globalists’ responses to technological interconnectedness, the intellectual history of the twentieth century reveals recurrent human proclivities for identifying each epoch as unique, perceiving a radical newness in a condition that may in fact have more continuities with the past. Seen in this light, as a driving force behind internationalist and globalist imaginings, modernity might also be understood in Koselleckian terms as a particular temporal sensibility—​as a sense of rupture from what had come before—​which in turn propelled the observer towards a necessary adaptation in the political realm. This

The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     523 modern sensibility originated in the long nineteenth century, and thereafter fostered ever-​ evolving identifications of the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ (Koselleck 2004; Bayly 2004). Such modernist temporal sensibility can also be linked to the role of ideologies and, more specifically, ideologies of progress. The ideologies mentioned in this chapter, notably liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, are examples of ‘ideologies of progress’, which form a constituent element of global modernity (Buzan and Lawson 2015). Whether in the case of interwar League internationalism underpinned by the nation state, or the postwar Third World’s demand for a postcolonial NIEO, such ideological influences as liberalism, nationalism, and socialism have shaped interpretations of the international and the global in the direction that their proponents equated with progress. At various moments in the twentieth century, to work with the categories of the international and the global was to be modern—​to keep up with the times by adapting to the (perceived) latest geopolitical and technological transformations in the world, and to be ahead of the times by conceptualizing alternative futures in the realm of world order. These issues of adaptation and alternative futures bring us back to the question of what is at stake in grappling with these categories today. One answer might be that politics in the twenty-​first century requires adaptation to myriad issues facing the human condition—​ issues whose causes and effects are mercilessly transcending the boundaries of the nation-​ state: climate emergency, health pandemics, financial crises, migratory flows, to name but a few. These challenges posed by modern interconnectedness and interdependence demand on-​going attention to the question of how to organize political authority beyond the state—​ to make choices about spatial scales and the role of the state, whilst being critically sensitive to any hierarchies and inequalities embedded in prevailing and prospective political arrangements. In this context, studying how past thinkers interpreted the domains of the international and global helps to bring into sharp relief the limits of state-​based politics, as well as the diverse range of options available for conceptualizing the international and global, each with their particular strengths and/​or shortcomings. Furthermore, the intellectual history of these domains can elucidate paths not taken—​those alternative visions of world order that were at the time unrealized, but in their aspirations as well as shortcomings may now constitute valuable intellectual resources for reimagining our futures. As will be elaborated, such a task would be enriched by the historical recovery of previously marginalized voices offering alternative perspectives on the modern condition, including those that do not reflect assumptions of a distinctly European model for modern political order.

Conclusion The international and global locales are embedded in well-​worn narratives about the constitution of the modern world. At the same time, however, these notions remain in flux, undergoing continuous theoretical scrutiny, and embodying ever-​changing interpretations. Thinking about—​and with—​these categories remains an important investigation that requires both IR scholars and historians. As fundamental locales for explaining and conceptualizing political relations beyond the state, both the global and the international can serve as an abstraction of political representations and practices, invoking the links between the realm of ideas and the realm of action. While the international has often been interpreted as more limited in scope

524    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka and scale than the global, both have often been used interchangeably to reflect a domain of political knowledge and structures that extends beyond the state. The global and the international remain subjects of historical and conceptual interpretation today, reshaping the vocabulary through which people converse about politics. Future attempts to analyse the international and the global may benefit from the conceptual framework offered by the notion of the ‘intellectual social imaginary’. This perspective, which seeks to overcome the analytical distinction between representations and practices, or between ideas and ‘the real world’, suggests that ‘concepts and language matter, but not cordoned off from the realm of practices’ (Moyn 2014, 116). As an interpretative approach, the social imaginary sheds light on the nature of the human community and the approaches needed to study it by showing the links between elite-​generated theories and social orders. Applied to the international and the global, this perspective may serve to show how ideas about these two ideational locales have pervaded the realm of politics to transform understandings of order beyond the state. The social imaginary of the international and the global can help overcome the gap between intellectual interpretations and political institutions, between representations and practices, and between thinkers and structures within a particular historical context, with the overall goal of tracing patterns of change and continuity in the making of political orders. Future research into the international and the global would also benefit from a closer consideration of the practices and ideas of power relations, exploring absent as well as dominant voices. New histories of women, Black, and non-​Western global and international ideas and practices can shed important light on alternative origin stories for, and alternative possibilities to, the existing world order. Here, a ‘social imaginary approach’ may be particularly beneficial, as the links between ideas and practices remain particularly underdefined for those groups. Recent trends in historical and theoretical studies of the global and international reflect a welcome surge of interest in such previously marginalized figures, laying important ground for the discovery of new social imaginaries of politics beyond the state (Blain 2018; Getachew 2019; Fejzula 2021; Slate 2017; Umoren 2018; Wilder 2015; Cooper 2015). While embracing a pluralistic and diversified interpretation of the rise of the international and the global as meaningful—​and at times competing—​political arenas, future scholarship may benefit from integrating stories of exclusion, absence, and dissent.

Note 1. See the chapter in this Handbook by George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich on ‘Global History and International Relations’.

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PA RT V

M OM E N T S

Chapter 36

The Fal l of C onstant i nopl e Jonathan Harris The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks on 29 May 1453 was, on the face of it, merely another episode in the long saga of Christian-​Muslim confrontation that spanned the Middle Ages. That was certainly how it was understood elsewhere in the Islamic world where there was jubilation as exuberant dispatches, accompanied by hundreds of prisoners, arrived at the courts of the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, the emir of Tunis, and the emir of Granada. In Cairo there was public rejoicing and the streets were decorated for several days (Pertusi 1983, 26; El Cheikh 2004, 215–​216). In the Christian West, by contrast, there was horror and consternation as the tidings spread. A typical reaction was that of the archbishop of Siena, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who the following July lamented that ‘the people who hate our religion will leave there nothing holy, nothing clean’. Christian observers much further from the scene of action than he was agreed that this was an unmitigated disaster, an English chronicler lamenting that it was ‘a gret losse unto all Cristendome’ (Pius II 2006, 310, 313; Bisaha 2004, 43–​93; Harris 1995, 80). It is therefore very tempting to interpret this Western reaction as the last flicker of a waning crusading ethos as the Middle Ages drew to a close. Steven Runciman did so at the end of his History of the Crusades with a poignant account of how Piccolomini, by then Pope Pius II (1458–​64), attempted to gather a crusade fleet at the port of Ancona. Pius was already a dying man as he was carried into the town to take command in July 1464, and his servants drew the curtains of his litter to hide from his eyes the paltry number of ships that had arrived in response to his call. Within a month, the pope had breathed his last and the ships had all sailed home. ‘The crusading spirit’, Runciman concluded, ‘was dead’ (Runciman 1951–​54, iii. 467–​468). Memorable and engaging though Runciman’s version of events is, the European response to the fall of Constantinople can be interpreted in quite a different way. Rather than standing at the end of a long narrative of the expansion of Islam and the preaching of crusades, the diplomatic manoeuvrings that it prompted serve as an instructive example of early modern international relations in a complicated and diverse environment. To some extent it even set the pattern for Western relations with the Ottoman empire and other Islamic powers in the future. This chapter will consider three salient factors that influenced and often dictated those relations. First the sharp tension that existed between religious allegiance

532   Jonathan Harris and economic and political interests. Secondly, the remarkable ability of the Roman Church to promote international dialogue and publicity in a world that was in other respects fragmented and localized. Finally, the role of local issues and national agendas in moulding and sometimes derailing any concerted Christian response.

Accommodation and Resistance The tension between religious allegiance and economic and political interests had begun long before 1453 as the result of the intrusion of a Muslim power into the Balkans. Until the middle of the fourteenth century, originally as part of the Greek-​speaking Byzantine empire, the area had been universally Christian. When the empire spiralled into its final decline in the early fourteenth century, it was initially the surrounding Christian countries that positioned themselves to absorb what was left of its Balkan lands. The most obvious candidate was Serbia which had already seized much of Thessaly and Macedonia during the 1340s. The Italian maritime republic of Venice was also interested and during 1355 was seriously considering taking over Constantinople itself, which was an important trading hub (Ljubić 1868–​72, ii. 326–​327, iii. 174–​179; Nicol 1988, 296). As it happened, neither power fulfilled these ambitions, as a new player unexpectedly entered the scene: the small Turkish Ottoman emirate which had established itself on former Byzantine lands around Bursa across the Bosporus in Asia Minor. In March 1354, the Ottomans took advantage of an earthquake that had levelled the walls of Gallipoli to cross the Dardanelles and occupy the town, thus giving themselves a foothold in Europe. In the years that followed they took over the remaining Byzantine lands in Thrace, making Adrianople their capital. They twice crushed the Serbs, first at the Marica River in 1371 and then at Kosovo in 1389, and so established themselves as the dominant power in the Balkans. In the wake of these victories, any hope that the Christian rulers of the Balkans could unite against the intruders faded. Instead, they purchased their survival by becoming vassals of the Ottoman emir Murad I (1362–​89). From a purely practical point of view the arrangement was an advantageous one to both sides. Murad must have been well aware that the Ottomans were a tiny Muslim minority in the overwhelmingly Christian Balkans so that he was not in a position to annex the lands of his defeated enemies. Instead he used them as a source of revenue and manpower because his vassals paid an annual tribute and provided troops to serve in the Ottoman army when required. For their part, the Serb, Bulgar, Byzantine and other vassals remained in possession of their territories and received the emir’s protection. Nevertheless, practical though it may have been, the difference of religious allegiance made the relationship between overlord and vassals a strained one, with Christian rulers apparently resenting their subordination to an ‘infidel’. That created a rather anomalous climate for international relations over the next century. To take one example, the Byzantine emperor was an Ottoman vassal between 1372 and 1394 and again from 1424. He had little option but to accept this state of affairs because by then he possessed scarcely any territory apart from Constantinople, secure behind its formidable defences, some Aegean islands and part of the Peloponnese. Even so, he was constantly seeking to undermine his Turkish overlord. While outwardly maintaining peace, he engaged in frequent dialogue with the papacy and Western Christian rulers with a view

The Fall of Constantinople    533 to creating an anti-​Ottoman coalition. This was not necessarily a straightforward strategy to pursue because the claims of common religion in the face of infidel aggression were by no means clear cut. The Byzantines as Orthodox Christians had long been in schism with the Catholic Church of Rome, and requests for military support were likely to be met with the response that the Church of Constantinople should accept the authority of the pope before any help could be sent. As the fourteenth century went on, and it became clear that the schismatic Christian regime in Constantinople might be replaced by a Muslim one, the papacy changed its tune and began to preach crusades against the Ottomans. Pope Gregory XI (1370–​78) had attempted to build up an anti-​Ottoman league but he met with a lukewarm response and his death, followed by the papal schism, had put an end to the plan. Later a number of expeditions were launched although none had much success. The last began in 1443 when a joint Hungarian and Serbian army crossed the Danube and a Papal-​Burgundian fleet moved into the Bosporus. This so-​called crusade of Varna was ultimately crushed by the Ottomans in November 1444, but for a short period it had threatened seriously to destabilize their position in the Balkans. The Byzantine emperor also covertly sought to destabilize the Ottoman empire by manipulating dynastic infighting. There was plenty of scope for him to do so, thanks to the Ottoman custom that any son or descendent of a reigning sultan, regardless of age or legitimacy, was equally entitled to succeed. Combined with polygamy, the custom resulted in a plethora of rivals for the throne, and the Byzantine emperor would back one candidate or another with a view to fomenting and prolonging civil war. In the end the policy was instrumental in ending Byzantium’s long twilight. According to one account, Sultan Mehmed II (1451–​81) was outraged by provocation over his second cousin, Orhan, whom the Byzantines were sheltering. That prompted him to lay siege to Constantinople in April 1453, using gigantic cannon to batter the walls, and he took the city six weeks later (Harris 2010, 103–​154). The tension between accommodation and resistance continued after the city fell. When he returned to Adrianople in June 1453, Mehmed II was visited by envoys from Serbia and Trebizond, from the Genoese rulers of the islands of Lesvos and Chios, and from Demetrius and Thomas Palaiologos, the brothers of the now-​dead Emperor Constantine XI, who still administered the Peloponnese. Anxious to avoid the same fate as Constantinople, they all readily agreed to pay an increased annual tribute (Doukas 1975, 241). In the years that followed, in spite of their position as Ottoman vassals, many of these minor Christian followed the example of the late Byzantine emperor and maintained contact with Western powers. Thomas Palaiologos sent envoys to the pope begging for assistance in resisting the sultan, although his brother Demetrius adhered to a pro-​Ottoman stance (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 10–​13). Stefan Tomaš, king of Bosnia (1443–​61), concluded a treaty with Mehmed II in February 1458, accepting vassal status and promising annual tribute, but the following year his envoys were in Italy asking for help from the pope. Such accomplished fence-​sitting inevitably annoyed the sultan, but it did not please fellow Christians either, giving rise to accusations of collusion with the infidel enemy. In the spring of 1459, Stefan’s son married the daughter of the last ruler of Serbia and was entrusted with the fortified town of Smederevo, a strategically vital stronghold that guarded a crossing point on the River Danube. When, three months later, the fortress was surrendered to a large Ottoman army without any resistance it was widely rumoured that the Bosnian prince had accepted a substantial bribe to open the gates. The reports were probably false, but they were symptomatic of a situation where Christian rulers had on the one hand to live with the Ottomans but were supposedly

534   Jonathan Harris compelled by duty to resist them on the other (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 24–​26; Babinger 1978, 153–​ 154, 163–​164; Fine 1994, 74–​76). The dilemma was particularly acute when it came to two other Christian powers in the area, the Italian maritime republics of Genoa and Venice. For centuries, they both had enjoyed an advantageous commercial position in Constantinople thanks to their treaties with the Byzantine emperor which exempted them from paying any customs duty on the goods they imported and exported. They also possessed a string of ports and islands in the region. The Venetians ruled Crete and the long Aegean island of Negroponte (now Evvia), while the Genoese possessed Chios and the town of Pera (or Galata), situated opposite Constantinople across its harbour, the Golden Horn. Consequently both republics had a great deal invested in Constantinople and its hinterland and much to lose, but it was not at all clear how best to defend those interests. They could have followed the other Christian regimes and accommodated themselves to the new dominant power by becoming Ottoman vassals. The Venetians were very reluctant to do so. It would certainly have secured their trade and their territories, but it would also allow their rivals in Italy to ‘play the Turkish card’ and accuse them of being in league with the enemies of Christendom (Abulafia 1997, 247). For both Venice and Genoa, the dilemma became acute when the siege of Constantinople began in April 1453. The Genoese podestà or governor of Pera, Angelo Lomellino, had to make a decision on how to act. A Turkish victory would certainly put an end to the congenial terms under which the Genoese traded from Pera, and the ethics of the time dictated that they should go to the rescue of Christians who were being attacked by Muslims. On the other hand, Constantinople had been besieged many times in the past and had always survived, so it might not be worth provoking the sultan by overtly opposing him. So Lomellino took a middle course. Envoys were sent to the sultan’s camp to pledge Pera’s neutrality in the coming struggle but at the same time Lomellino clandestinely sent troops to assist the defence (Olgiati 1989, 54). This course of action could be seen either as duplicity or simply as an attempt to reconcile the claims of religion and the needs of practical survival. At first sight, the policy paid off. When Constantinople fell, Lomellino handed the keys of Pera over to the sultan and received in return a treaty whose terms seemed generous: Pera would be subject to the Ottoman poll tax on unbelievers but not to any customs duty. The homes, churches and property of its inhabitants were guaranteed, and Mehmed II promised not to destroy the town’s fortifications. The flaw in the fence-​sitting policy soon became apparent, however. When the sultan visited Pera in person two days after the treaty had been signed, he broke one of its clauses by ordering the defensive walls to be demolished. His volte face was prompted by the discovery that troops from Pera had fought against him and in view of this breach of neutrality, Mehmed no longer felt bound on his side (Harris 2010, 217–​218; Pistarino 1986, 63–​64, 66–​67). The Venetians likewise had much to lose when the siege began. War with the sultan would put at risk their commercial treaty which provided generous terms for their merchants in Ottoman Adrianople. It also would expose the republic’s possessions in the Aegean to attack, especially the island of Negroponte, whose position close to the mainland of Greece made it particularly vulnerable. So when in February 1452, an envoy had arrived from Emperor Constantine XI to warn of the build-​up for an Ottoman attack, the senate, a body of about 120 men that was the real decision-​making body in Venice, had temporized. The envoy was assured of Venice’s disapproval of Mehmed’s preparations, but no concrete offer of help was given, and he was advised to go to the other powers in Italy whose response the Venetians

The Fall of Constantinople    535 would need to hear before they committed themselves. When they learned that the siege was imminent in February 1453, the senate did give orders for a fleet to assemble prior to sailing to Constantinople but at the same time it appointed an ambassador to Mehmed II whose task was to assure the sultan that their intentions were entirely peaceful. The fleet finally set sail but was still plodding up the Aegean when it met ships from Constantinople bearing news that the city had fallen (Setton 1976–​84, ii. 138; Melville-​Jones 2009, 201–​202). From a purely practical point of view, Venice’s trading position would now have to be renegotiated with the new masters and within a week of receiving the news, the senate was making preparations for overtures to the sultan. There was, however, a complicating factor. In December 1452, as Ottoman intentions to attack Constantinople had become clear, Girolamo Minotto, the governor of the Venetian colony in Constantinople, and the captains of a number of Venetian merchantmen at anchor in the Golden Horn, had taken their own decision to aid the defence. Several ships’ crews had disembarked and stationed themselves on the Blachernae section of Constantinople’s land walls. In this case, Mehmed could have had no doubt whatsoever about the participation of the Venetians as their standards appear to have been flown from the walls. Once the city was in his hands, the sultan took his revenge and had Minotto executed, along with his son. The Venetians in Constantinople had fulfilled what by the standards of the time was their duty as Christians, but they could well have placed the senate in a very difficult negotiating position (Nicol 1988, 395–​406; Melville-​ Jones 2009, 20–​29). At the end of the day though, commercial and economic reality prevailed over the religious divide. Mehmed doubtless resented what he probably saw as the duplicity of the Venetians as much as he had that of the Genoese, but he needed their commercial expertise if he was to rebuild Constantinople as a fitting capital for his empire. In the months after his victory, he made great efforts to attract Jews, Greeks, and Armenians back into the city with the same end in view (Harris 2010, 241–​243). So when the Venetians opened negotiations in July 1453 by sending their ambassador to Adrianople armed with gifts to the value of 2,400 ducats, the sultan proved receptive, although the senate took the precaution of improving the defences of Negroponte at the same time. By February 1454, the sultan’s terms had arrived in Venice for the senate’s consideration, and they were by no means as draconian as might have been feared. The Venetians could resume their presence and commercial activities in Constantinople although they would now be subject to a 2% customs duty at all ports under the sultan’s jurisdiction. On that basis the treaty was ratified in April 1454 and Venetian merchants returned to Constantinople, although henceforth they were to reside in Pera rather than the city itself (Melville-​Jones 2009, 208–​211; Dursteler 2008, 23–​25). In this way, both Venice and Genoa weathered the storm and preserved their trade and their colonies for the time being. Their survival in the east, however, came at the cost of their reputation in the West. Within weeks of the fall of Constantinople, rumours were circulating that the Genoese had been in league with the sultan during the siege of Constantinople. It was said that those in Pera had aided and abetted him when he moved his fleet overland into the Golden Horn and that they sold him vital war materials. Worst of all, that they had alerted him to a night attack on his fleet, allowing him to put his cannon in place on the shore and blast the Christian ships at close range (Doukas 1975, 217–​219; Olgiati 1989, 48–​49). As in the case of Stefan of Bosnia, there was probably no substance to most of these allegations, but they circulated very widely. The Venetians fared little better, Pius II dismissing them as

536   Jonathan Harris a gang of tradesmen who thought that ‘it was in their interest to maintain peace with the Turks’ (Pius II 2003–​18, ii.100–​101). The one Christian power that did apparently have a record of straightforward hostility to its Ottoman neighbours was Catholic Hungary. It was a large and powerful kingdom that was not tributary to the sultan and frequently waged war on him. Hungary had provided most of the troops for the crusade of Varna of 1443–​44 and in June 1456 the Hungarian general, John Hunyadi, was to inflict a significant defeat of Mehmed II when the sultan laid siege to the fortress of Belgrade on the Danube. Yet even in this case there was ambivalence and accommodation. In September 1451, as regent for the young Hungarian king, Ladislas V, Hunyadi had concluded a three-​year peace treaty with the newly acceded Mehmed II. The agreement was still valid when it became clear that the sultan was planning to attack Constantinople and the Hungarians, like the Genoese and Venetians, did feel pangs of conscience as the Turks closed in. So a delegation was dispatched to Emperor Constantine XI in the autumn of 1452, offering help but requesting access to the Black Sea port of Mesembria. The request was initially turned down, probably because Constantine feared that once the Hungarians were in the port nothing would get them out again. By the time the emperor had changed his mind and dispatched a document handing over Mesembria, it was too late. The siege had already begun and the Hungarian army remained behind the Danube (Sphrantzes 1980, 73; Doukas 1975, 192; Babinger 1978, 99–​100). The inevitable accusations of friendship with infidels soon began to circulate. It was alleged that some Hungarians had fought on the Ottoman side during the 1453 siege, that it was a Hungarian who had built the largest Ottoman cannon, and that a Hungarian envoy had visited Mehmed II outside the walls of Constantinople to offer him helpful advice on how better to position his guns (Leonard of Chios in Melville-​Jones 1972, 16; Doukas 1975, 200, 216–​217). Such rumours were the price that had to be paid for prudence since even as powerful as state as Hungary could not afford perpetual war with its Ottoman neighbour.

International Dialogue and Cooperation The tension between religious allegiance and practical survival described in the previous section was a phenomenon that can be seen most clearly among the governments of states which shared a border with the Ottomans. Further away, everything seemed much more clear cut. Pope Nicholas V reacted in the traditional way and preached a crusade against the Ottoman sultan on 30 September 1453, issuing the bull Etsi Ecclesia Christi. The response was enthusiastic. Several powerful monarchs took public vows to lead an army east against the Ottomans. The duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good (1419–​467) did so with his leading nobles publicly at a banquet at Lille in February 1454. In November 1455, the king of Aragon, Alfonso V (1416–​58), followed suit at a ceremony in the cathedral at Naples which lasted all day. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III (1440–​93), called a council of princes to Frankfurt in October 1454 at which it was proposed to send a force of 40,000 men to reinforce Hungary. We also hear of many ordinary individuals signing up for the war against the Ottomans, such as an otherwise unknown Frenchman called François le Franc in 1454. Some 2,000 people also made a crusading vow at Naples alongside Alfonso V in 1455 (Aloisio 2017, 69–​70; Harris 2010, 233; Harris 2017, 39).

The Fall of Constantinople    537 In spite of all this crusading ardour, as already noted, no expedition to retake Constantinople was ever launched. Even so, the response to the crusading bull and subsequent measures taken to publicize and promote the cause testify to the ability of the Roman Church to promote international dialogue and serve as an early example of transnational cooperation. The ten years after 1453 saw a flurry of activity that included the kind of initiatives that are still familiar: leadership from a supranational institution, an international summit, cross-​cultural diplomatic contact, cross-​border manipulation of public opinion, and orchestrated humanitarian measures. The fact that the papacy was able to play this leading role is all the more remarkable because its prestige had been severely tarnished over the previous century by the schism between Rome and Avignon (1378–​1417) and by the Conciliar Movement which had aimed to replace the authority of the pope with that of a general council. By 1453, the pope had weathered these challenges and was in a position to offer moral and practical leadership. One way he did so was by convening a summit meeting to coordinate an international response. Pius II chose to hold it at the northern Italian town of Mantua in the summer of 1459 to, as he put it, ‘hear the opinions of those whose aid he meant to enlist’ and he summoned all Christian princes to attend. The location was a compromise between holding the meeting in Rome, requiring a longer journey for those coming from beyond the Alps, and having it in France or Germany which would mean a long trek for the pope and Italian leaders. When the congress opened on 1 June, Pius was initially disappointed by the sparse attendance and throughout his account of it he frequently bemoaned the low status of the envoys who were sent and their reluctance to commit their masters to any concrete contribution. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Mantua was a genuine international happening. Sovereigns definitely felt the need to be represented there. Some, like the king of France and the Venetian senate, were initially reluctant to get involved but when they saw that other powers were represented, they hastily dispatched a delegation of their own (Pius II 2003–​18, i. 213–​217, ii. 36–​39, 134–​135). Envoys tended to drift in as the congress proceeded. Not surprisingly, the first to arrive were the envoys of regimes whose lands lay in the path of Ottoman expansion such as the Knights of Rhodes, the Albanian leader Skanderbeg, the king of Bosnia Stefan Tomaš, Thomas Palaiologos of the Peloponnese, and the new king of Hungary, John Hunyadi’s son Matthias Corvinus (1458–​90). Among the Italian states, the dukes of Savoy and Modena, the de facto ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’Medici, the king of Naples, Ferrante I (1458–​94), and the governments of Bologna, Genoa, Lucca, Siena, and Venice all sent representatives. Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan (1450–​66), even attended in person. The congress was also attended by representatives of the powerful transalpine rulers whose military participation was essential if the proposed expedition was to have any chances of success: the Holy Roman emperor, Philip the Good of Burgundy, the king of France, Charles VII (1422–​61) and the king of England, Henry VI (1422–​61, 1470–​7 1). Delegations from some remoter Catholic countries joined the congress at a later stage, sent by the kings of Castile, Poland, and Portugal (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 10–​13, 22–​25, 33–​41, 62–​65, 82–​87, 98–​99, 134–​141, 158–​159, 164–​167, 176–​177; O’Brien 2015, 160–​166). Again regardless of the ultimate outcome, Mantua was an example of genuine international dialogue. Moreover, it is noticeable that although the aim of these discussions was to organize a Christian response to a common enemy, at least one Muslim power participated in the dialogue. Not everyone in the Islamic world rejoiced at the news of the capture of Constantinople. Ibrahim II (1424–​64), who ruled the Turkish Karamanid emirate from

538   Jonathan Harris Konya in Asia Minor, was a bitter enemy of the Ottoman sultan. In 1432, a passing French traveller had noted that although Ibrahim was related to his Ottoman neighbour by marriage, he deeply resented the territory he had lost to him and would gladly attack him in the east if he saw a Christian coalition doing so in the West (Bertrandon de la Brocquière 1988, 34–​35; Ágoston 1995, 267–​274). Pius II assured the delegates at Mantua of the same thing in his closing address. It is even possible that Ibrahim sent representatives to Mantua, those who were described by Pius as coming from Asia. Doubtless they would have kept a low profile to avoid news of their presence leaking out, for collusion with infidels was as bad publicity for Muslims as it was for Christians (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 22–​23, 198–​199). Another way to bring in Muslim allies was to follow in the footsteps of the Byzantine emperor and play off other members of the Ottoman ruling house against the reigning sultan. From 1456, an alleged half-​brother of Mehmed II, Bayezid Osman was living as a papal pensioner in Rome, although his potential as a pawn in Ottoman politics was probably negated when he converted to Catholicism (Babinger 1951, 349–​388). The West was later to acquire a more useful bargaining chip in Mehmed II’s younger son Cem as well as entering into negotiations with other Muslim powers such Persia and the Turkoman Akkoyunlu federation. Thus fifteenth-​century IR were by no means as religiously polarized as might be assumed (Setton 1976–​84, ii. 461–​477; Lacaze 1972, 77–​84). The ability of the papacy and the Catholic Church to facilitate international dialogue is nowhere better illustrated than in its direct communication not only with ruling elites but with a wide section of the general population. Public opinion was systematically manipulated by publicizing the fall of Constantinople, in order to encourage military volunteers and financial contributions. In Dublin, for example, the archbishop organized penitential processions in the streets to bring home to the inhabitants the enormity of what had happened hundreds of miles away. The primary incentive that the Church could offer was the indulgence, a remission of a set number of days in purgatory in return for a meritorious act. Those who fought and died on crusade could expect a plenary remission and immediate entry into paradise. More modest acts, such as the donation of money, normally garnered forty days remission. During 1455, the Jubilee indulgence that had been offered in Rome in 1450, was made available in England and Ireland with the specific aim of raising money that would be passed to the Knights of St John on Rhodes and used for the defence of Christendom (Harris 1999, 26–​27). The dissemination of the message was partly the work of local prelates but great efforts were made to orchestrate it centrally, use being made of the Franciscan order for preachers to carry it across Europe (Housley 2012, 138–​140). In August 1463, Cardinal Bessarion, the papal legate in Venice, drew up a series of instructions for friars who were to preach the Cross in the city and it territories, urging them to make three main points: the need for revenge on the Turks for the atrocities they had visited on Christians, assistance for Christians under the Turkish yoke, and the necessity of fighting the Ottomans because they were clearly making plans to invade Italy and the whole of Christendom (Housley 1996, 147–​ 153). These instructions, though designed specifically for Venice, would have been applicable with a few minor alterations across Western Christendom. When a Byzantine refugee called Frankoulios Servopoulos addressed the English court on behalf of Pius II in 1459, he wisely tailored the message to an audience for whom the likelihood of an Ottoman invasion was remote. Instead he stuck to three indisputable points: ‘one for the faith, the second for peace among Christians, the third that all by one common assent should succour the faith and drive back the infidels’ (Harris 1995, 107). This spreading of a unified message, in an age

The Fall of Constantinople    539 before any kind of mass media, was an impressive achievement. In later decades, technological advances permitted the printing and hence the even wider distribution of letters of indulgence (Housley 2012, 167–​173). A last strikingly familiar feature of the European response to the fall of Constantinople was the international humanitarian initiative that went with it. According to one contemporary estimate, some 50,000 people were taken prisoner and enslaved by the victorious Turks on 29 May. Within weeks, some of them had been released and were heading West. They were mainly male heads of households and they had been set free to raise the ransoms for other members of their families, usually wives and children, who remained in captivity (Harris 1995, 13, 18–​24). Again, the response was coordinated by the Church. The popes and other prelates issued indulgences on behalf of individual refugees, to rally the faithful to give them alms. One of the refugees was Demetrius Leontaris who arrived with his brother Michael in Mantua during Pius II’s congress in 1459 and was provided with a letter of indulgence which he later carried to the duchy of Burgundy and the kingdom of Naples. Local ecclesiastical authorities reacted in the same way. In February 1456, the bishop of Salisbury issued an indulgence for another passing refugee, Demetrius Palaiologos. While it is impossible to gauge how many individuals responded by donating money for ransoms, it is clear that town councils throughout France and Flanders did make gifts to refugees who passed through their gates, like the unnamed elderly man who visited Bruges in 1459 (Harris 2000, 31; Taparel 1987, 51–​58; Harris 1995, 19, 68). While the transportation of the required sum back might seem impractical, a tried and tested process existed for paying ransoms thanks to the European banking system (Wright 2014, 261–​297; Ganchou 2002, 216–​225). This international humanitarian effort was, of course, very religion specific. It was designed to assist Christians who were suffering at the hands of Muslims, in the same way that, during the seventeenth century, Irish Catholics were welcomed in France and French Huguenots in Britain. Even so there was a certain latitude here. In 1439, the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches had officially been resolved by the Union of Florence but the agreement was never widely implemented in Constantinople. Many Byzantines considered acceptance of papal authority to be too high a price to pay for possible Western help against the Ottomans and they bitterly opposed the Union. There is, however, no sign that any questions were asked of the refugees about their exact position on the Union: they were simply accepted as fellow Christians in need. Thus although the Western response to the fall of Constantinople was couched in the medieval language of a crusade against infidels, it was remarkably international and inclusive in scope, and it was supported by a wide consensus across Europe.

Transnational Vision and Local Priorities The failure of this concerted, transnational effort to launch any major counterstrike against the Ottomans, can be connected with the last of the three factors under consideration here:the local issues and particular agendas that governments brought to the discussions. The main sticking point was that the rulers who were supposed to unite their efforts against the Ottomans were often at odds with each other. The obvious example is the kings of England and France. Less than two months after the fall of Constantinople, the French

540   Jonathan Harris destroyed the army of the Earl of Shrewsbury at the battle of Castillon and brought English rule in Gascony to an end. The battle is sometimes used to provide a nominal date for the end of the Hundred Years’ War but at the time neither side considered the issue to be settled. In May 1455, the French royal council told Nicholas Agallon, a Byzantine refugee who had come to urge their participation in the forthcoming crusade, that in view of the persistence of the English in their plans to invade the kingdom of France, they had no choice but to give priority to the defence of their own people. A few weeks earlier, Agallon had received a similarly negative response from the English councillors who declared that they had to keep their army at home to avenge themselves on the French, who had evicted them from their rightful inheritance (Harris 2017, 38–​39). Some of the international tensions went back even further than the Hundred Years’ War. Although the Treaty of Lodi of 1454 had established a lasting peace between Milan, Naples and Florence, there was still a dispute over the kingdom of Naples and Sicily between the French ruler Charles VII and the king of Aragon, Alfonso V. The French claimed the kingdom because it had been granted by the pope to a member of their royal family, Charles of Anjou, in 1265. The Aragonese had seized the island of Sicily by 1302 and the two sides had been in dispute of the ownership of the rest of the kingdom ever since. In 1442, Alfonso V of Aragon had captured Naples and ousted René of Anjou who had ruled there since 1438. Thus when the French delegation arrived at Mantua in 1459, it was determined to put the issue on the agenda. Indeed, ex-​king René sent a delegation of his own. A few days after their arrival, the French delegates requested a private audience with Pius to demand that Alfonso V’s illegitimate son Ferrante be deposed as king of Naples and René reinstated. When the pope failed to comply, they stormed out of the meeting in disgust (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 158–​ 159, 164–​173; Damian 2012, 79–​80; Abulafia 1997, 245–​247). Even what might be called the ‘frontline states’, whose borders were potentially directly threatened by Ottoman expansion, also brought other agendas to Mantua. The envoys of the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, complained about the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick III who had encroached on their lands when they had been at war with the Turks (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 138–​141). As well as interstate rivalry, internal instability played its part in limiting the response of individual rulers. King Ferrante of Naples, who had promised a great deal to Pius II at Mantua, ended up being distracted by a plot hatched against him by Giannantonio del Balzo Orsini, prince of Taranto (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 88–​89; Abulafia 1997, 247). During the two years after the fall of Constantinople, England was sliding into a confrontation between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions that broke into all-​out civil war at the first battle of St Albans in May 1455. Pius was forced to conclude, in his closing address at Mantua, that ‘England, now racked with civil war, holds out no hope’ for participation in the planned crusade (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 196–​97; Harris 2017, 38; Head 1970, 139–​178).

Conclusion: Beyond the Fall of Constantinople This chapter has traced the responses of the rulers of various Christian states to the fall of Constantinople and the tension between the claims of religious solidarity and national

The Fall of Constantinople    541 economic and political interests. Public reactions were expressed in the language of common religion and transnational cooperation, reflecting the polarization of the two religious blocs that had existed throughout the medieval period. Behind those conventional expressions lay all kinds of other considerations. It was not that governments were being insincere or deliberately duplicitous: they were genuinely torn between the claims of perceived duty and evident self-​interest. The policies that they adopted were an uneasy and often clandestine mixture of both. It was a phenomenon that was to distinguish international relations between the Ottoman empire and the West in subsequent centuries. By then Christian rulers had become bold enough to enter into open alliances with the Ottoman empire against a mutual Christian enemy. In 1526, the king of France, Francis I, opened negotiations with Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent with a view to military cooperation against the Holy Roman Emperor (Isom-​ Verhaaren 2013, 24–​48). Elizabeth I of England likewise made a treaty with the sultan in 1580 and although it primarily concerned trading privileges for English merchants in Ottoman ports, it had a military dimension: English ships would supply the tin which was so essential in the founding of cannon (Skilliter 1977, 86–​104). By the mid-​nineteenth century both powers were fighting on the side of the sultan against Christian Russia in the Crimean War. Nevertheless, in spite of the religious fragmentation of western Europe during the Reformation and Counter-​Reformation, the triumph of national agendas and interests and the slow process of secularization stemming from the Enlightenment and scientific discoveries, the perception of religious duty to oppose infidels remained strong within Church hierarchies and among a large section of the population. When the Ottoman siege of Malta was lifted in 1565, Protestant bishops in England ordered prayers of thanksgiving to be said, even though the victory had been achieved by the Catholic knights of St John (Baumer 1944–​55, 31). Protestant Scot Andrew Fletcher took part as a volunteer in the campaigns fought against the Turks in Hungary by the Catholic Duke Charles V of Lorraine in the 1680s (Erskine 1792, 22). Even in 1920, when the first French military governor of Syria, Henry Gouraud arrived in Damascus he exalted in ‘the victory of the Cross over the Crescent’, in spite of the fact that the defeat of the Ottomans had been achieved with the help of the Muslim Arabs (Riley-​Smith 2003, 158). Governments could not ignore this widely held sentiment and so, as in the years after 1453, it had to be acknowledged in public pronouncements. When he made a treaty with the king of England at Calais in 1532, Francis I, already in alliance with Sultan Suleyman, swore to defend the Christian religion against ‘the damnable enterprises of the Turk, the ancient common enemy and adversary of our faith’ (Baumer 1944–​45, 28–​29). Ambivalence thus persisted as a feature of international relations between Muslim and Christian powers. Perhaps it still does.

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542   Jonathan Harris Aloisio, M. 2017. ‘Alfonso V and the Anti-​Turkish Crusade’. In The Crusade in the Fifteenth 74. Abingdon and Century: Converging and Competing Cultures, ed. N. Housley, 64–​ New York: Routledge. Babinger, F. 1951. ‘“Bajezid Osman” (Calixtus Ottomanus), ein Vorläufer und Gegenspieler Dschem Sultans’. Nouvelle Clio 3: 349–​388. Babinger, F. 1978. Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baumer, F. L. 1944–​45. ‘England, the Turk and the Common Corps of Christendom’. American Historical Review 50: 26–​48. Bertrandon de la Brocquière. 1988. The Voyage d’Outremer, translated by G. R. Kline. New York: Peter Lang. Bisaha, N. 2004. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Damian, I. M. 2012. ‘From the “Italic League” to the “Italic Crusade”: Crusading under Renaissance Popes Nicholas V and Pius II’. In Italy and Europe’s Eastern Border, 1204–​ 1669, eds. I. M. Damian, I.-​A. Pop, M. S. Popović, and A. Simon, 79–​94. Frankfurt-​am-​ Main: Peter Lang. Doukas. 1975. Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, translated by H. J. Magoulias. Detroit MI: Wayne State University Press. Dursteler, E. R. 2008. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. El Cheikh, N. M. 2004. Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Erskine, D. S., Earl of Buchan. 1792. Essays on the Lives and Writings of Fletcher of Saltoun and the Poet Thomson: Biographical, Critical and Political. London: Debrett. Fine, J. V. A. 1994. The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Ganchou, T. 2002. ‘Le rachat des Notaras après la chute de Constantinople ou les relations “étrangères” de l’élite byzantine au XVe siècle’. In Migrations et diasporas méditerranéennes (Xe–​XVIe siècles), eds. M. Balard and A. Ducellier, 149–​229. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Harris, J. 1995. Greek Émigrés in the West, 1400–​1520. Camberley: Porphyrogenitus. Harris, J. 1999. ‘Publicising the Crusade: English Bishops and the Jubilee Indulgence of 1455’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50: 23–​37. Harris, J. 2000. ‘Demetrius Leontaris: Constantinople to Otranto’. The Patristic and Byzantine Review 18–​19: 27–​40. Harris, J. 2010. The End of Byzantium. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Harris, J. 2017. ‘Byzantine Refugees as Crusade Propagandists: The Travels of Nicholas Agallon’. In The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures, ed. N. Housley, 34–​46. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Head, C. 1970. ‘Pius II and the Wars of the Roses’. Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 8: 139–​178. Housley, N. 1996. Documents on the Later Crusades, 1274–​1580. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Housley, N. 2012. Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–​1505. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isom-​Verhaaren, C. 2013. Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman-​French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

The Fall of Constantinople    543 Lacaze, Y. 1972. ‘Perse et Bourgogne dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle’. Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique 86: 77–​84. Ljubić, S. 1868–​72. Listine o odnošajih izmedju južnoga Slavenstva i Mletačke republike [Documents on the relations between the South Slavs and the Venetian republic], 3 Vols. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti. Melville-​Jones, J. R. 1972. The Siege of Constantinople: Seven Contemporary Accounts. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Melville-​ Jones, J. R. 2009. ‘Venice and Constantinople, 1450–​ 1454’. In Captain and Scholar: Papers in Memory of Demetrios I. Polemis, eds. E. Chrysos and E. A. Zachariadou, 195–​213. Andros: Kaïreios Library. Nicol, D. M. 1988. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, E. 2015. The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458–​1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-​ Century Papacy. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Olgiati, G. 1989. ‘Notes on the Participation of the Genoese in the Defence of Constantinople’. Macedonian Studies 6(2): 48–​58. Pertusi, A. 1983. Testi inediti e poco noti sulla caduta di Costantinopoli. Bologna: Mondadori. Pistarino, G. 1986. ‘The Genoese in Pera—​Turkish Galata’. Mediterranean Historical Review 1: 63–​85. Pius II. 2003–​18. Commentaries, eds. M. Meserve and M. Simonetta, 3 Vols. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Pius II. 2006. Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), translated by T. M. Izbicki, G. Christianson, and P. Krey. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press. Riley-​Smith, J. 2003. ‘Islam and the Crusades in History And Imagination, 8 November 1898–​ 11 September 2001’. Crusades 2: 151–​167 Runciman, S. 1951–​54. A History of the Crusades, 3 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Setton, K. M. 1976–​ 84. The Papacy and the Levant (1204–​1571), 4 Vols. Philadelphia PA: American Philosophical Society. Skilliter, S. A. 1977. William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–​1582. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sphrantzes, G. 1980. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle by George Sphrantzes, 1401–​1477, translated by M. Philippides. Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Taparel, H. 1987. ‘Notes sur quelques refugies byzantins en Bourgogne après la chute de Constantinople’. Balkan Studies 28: 51–​58. Wright, C. 2014. ‘An Investment in Goodwill: Financing the Ransom of the Leaders of the Crusade of Nikopolis’. Viator 45: 261–​297.

Chapter 37

The Peace of W e st pha l ia Andrew Phillips The Peace of Westphalia is arguably the most pivotal ‘benchmark date’ (Buzan and Lawson 2014) in International Relations (IR). But while scholars have long hailed it for allegedly marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world, more recent scholarship has lambasted the ‘myth of 1648’ (e.g. Nexon 2009; Osiander 2001; Teschke 2003). Despite these revisionist efforts, however, Westphalia remains tenacious as a putative origin point for the advent of the modern state system. In this chapter, I review debates on Westphalia’s historical significance, before offering a qualified defence of Westphalia as a critical inflection point in the development of both European political order, and also of global modernity. Consistent with this volume’s emphasis on the theme of modernity, I argue that the Peace of Westphalia was critically conducive to managing Europe’s cultural diversity following the Wars of Religion. The Westphalian settlement institutionalized a new ‘diversity regime’ (Reus-​Smit 2018, 13–​14) that neutralized confessional difference as a source of inter-​polity conflict. The resulting stability then aided domestic state-​building, while entrenching multipolar anarchy over imperial unipolarity as Europe’s default condition. Turning to the theme of granularity, I maintain that Westphalia’s true significance is best understood through the lens of global history, which considers Westphalia as a regionally particular solution to a more general crisis of political authority that afflicted Eurasia’s main power centres during the seventeenth century. Alongside the Thirty Years’ War, large scale rebellions, wars, and dynastic transitions convulsed most parts of Eurasia in the mid-​ 1600s (e.g. Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014). In most instances, rulers overcame these crises through the consolidation or renovation of regional empires, and through diversity regimes emphasizing the incorporation of cultural diversity under the overarching canopy of imperial rule. Westphalia conversely marked a critical exception to the Eurasian norm of imperial consolidation and regional unipolarity. The Westphalian solution to the seventeenth-​century crisis may not have entailed the wholesale replacement of heteronomy and empire with a modern sovereign state system. But it did institutionalize a distinctive diversity regime that arrested imperial consolidation, and formed an indispensable precursor to a competitive multistate system with few global parallels. The roughly synchronous consolidation of Asian empires meanwhile facilitated revived prosperity as the seventeenth-​century crisis abated, stimulating increased inter-​regional trade. The resulting combination of European

The Peace of Westphalia    545 Westphalian fragmentation and Asian imperial integration together thus laid the foundations for subsequent emergence of history’s first genuinely global international system. This chapter proceeds as follows. Section one offers a précis of the Peace of Westphalia, highlighting its context and core features. Section two surveys the debate within IR, tracing the arguments between defenders of Westphalia as a moment of epochal transition, versus their revisionist critics. Section three finally draws insights from global history to mount a qualified defence of Westphalia’s world-​historical significance.

The Peace of Westphalia as Historical Event The Peace of Westphalia—​comprised of the Treaties of Osnabruck and Munster—​marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War—​one of Europe’s longest and deadliest conflicts prior to the twentieth century (Parker 2014, 211). While centered on the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the war quickly spread from its German epicentre through the intervention of external powers (notably Denmark, Sweden, France, and Habsburg Spain), drawn into the conflict through a combination of confessional affinity and dynastic self-​interest. The Thirty Years’ War comprised a serious of nested crises, encompassing a constitutional crisis of the Holy Roman Empire, a more general crisis of European political order, and finally a regional instance of a more general crisis of political authority afflicting most of Eurasia’s power centres in the mid-​seventeenth century (Phillips 2011, 129). For present purposes, the German and European dimensions of the conflict are most relevant. Turning first to the German dimension of the conflict, the primary tension lay between the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (an elective position, but one held by successive Austrian Habsburgs since the mid-​fifteenth century), and the 1,300 or so feudatories (variously comprised of petty kingdoms, free cities, and the like) over which he held nominal suzerainty (Parker 2014, 212). Conflict centered especially on the level of autonomy (sovereignty) that the landeshoheit possessed in relation to the Emperor. The former asserted extensive claims to autonomy, including the right to form alliances, wage war, and dictate the confessional affiliation of their subjects without restraint (Wilson 2009, 270). The latter conversely sought to preserve a stronger form of suzerainty over his feudatories. Moreover, as the war progressed (especially from the 1629 Edict of Restitution), the Emperor pursued a ‘rollback’ of Protestantism throughout the Empire. This inflamed Protestants’ religious anxieties, motivating external intervention and the conflict’s lateral expansion (Lee 1991, 6). From a European vantage point, the Thirty Years’ War marked the last and largest of Europe’s internationalized Wars of Religion. Throughout this period, confessional polarization inflamed dynastic rivalry. Protestant powers were particularly apprehensive about the spectre of Habsburg hegemony, which threatened both their religious liberty, as well in some cases (e.g. the Dutch) threatening their claims to political independence (e.g. Lee 1991, 6). As the war progressed, however, considerations of raison d’etat increasingly eclipsed confessional allegiances as the protagonists’ primary motivation. These dynastic interests included traditional desires for territorial aggrandizement. But as the conflict persisted, the two most powerful anti-​Habsburg actors, France and Sweden, sought to impose an accommodation on the Empire that would preserve a balance of power, both between the Emperor and the German princes, and also among the latter (Wilson 2009, 254).

546   Andrew Phillips The treaties that comprised the Peace of Westphalia thus aimed both to settle a constitutional crisis within the Empire, as well as to secure a more general European peace. With respect to the former, the Peace confirmed many nominally sovereign powers of the German princes, while preserving the Empire as an overarching political unit. The treaties assured the princes the rights to wage war and to form external alliances, but with the proviso that they could not do so against the Empire itself (Milton et al. 2019, 77). The princes’ religious liberties were also guaranteed within their territories, but with two caveats. First, while princes were free to change their religious affiliation, they no longer enjoyed untrammelled authority to compel their subjects to follow suit (Reus-​Smit 2013a, 100–​101). Second, princes were compelled to tolerate authorized confessional minorities within their territories, rather than enjoying unilateral prerogatives to convert or expel them (Reus-​Smit 2013a, 100–​101). From the outset, then, the Peace institutionalized an uneasy balance of rights and privileges between princely subjects, and between the princes and the emperor. It institutionalized for the princes a suite of powers that are strongly reminiscent of later modern concepts of sovereignty. But the Empire remained intact as a constitutional entity, and princes’ capacities to exercise their ‘sovereign’ rights remained constrained in practice. Crucially, the princes’ rights to compel religious conformity were subordinated in the interests of preserving systemic stability, both within the Empire and throughout Europe. Westphalia institutionalized the first modern minority rights regime—​compromising princely sovereignty from the outset (Krasner 1995). Within its European context, the Peace of Westphalia was notable for its form as well as for its outcomes. While the Protestant and Catholic powers negotiated peace through two separate treaties, Westphalia nevertheless represented the first multilateral effort to secure a general European peace (Parker 2014, 252; Wilson 2009, 753). Negotiators sought to impose a constitutional settlement on the Empire that would support a larger European peace, the seriousness of their intent underwritten by France and Sweden’s role as external guarantors of the peace (Wilson 2009, 753). Besides settling German constitutional questions (at least temporarily), Westphalia further institutionalized Europe’s political pluralism, by affirming Dutch de jure independence from Habsburg Spain, as well as by cementing the Swiss cantons’ de facto independence from the Empire. Finally, it brought an end to hostilities in Germany, as well as to the internationalized Wars of Religion that had convulsed Latin Christendom since the Reformation (Wilson 2009, 754). Westphalia was by no means a general peace settlement—​ the Franco-​Spanish War continued to 1659. Neither did it lead to a demilitarization of dynastic rivalries. Nevertheless, it was undeniably a pivotal moment in European political development. The magnitude and scope of its significance however remains contested, as I now consider.

International Relations Debates on the Peace of Westphalia Before analysing debates on its significance, we must first note that Westphalia’s iconic status—​as a signifier of tectonic transformation in European politics—​is a convention

The Peace of Westphalia    547 peculiar to IR scholars. It is a view that was shared neither by the architects of the peace, nor by specialist historians. Though it ended one of Europe’s most destructive wars, Westphalia gained retrospective significance only from the nineteenth century. During this time, scholars and publicists began to conceptualize Westphalia as a defining moment in Europe’s political development, which guaranteed the traditional liberties of Germany’s princes against overweening Habsburg authority (Keene 2002, 21–​ 22). Subsequent developments, first in international law and then later in the new discipline of IR, then further elevated Westphalia’s importance. The nineteenth-​century shift from natural to positive international law provided a strong fillip to Westphalia’s status. Positive international law anchored its authority in contracting between sovereign states, rather than deriving its status from its supposed concordance with divinely ordained ordering principles and imperatives. For international lawyers, Westphalia marked an important step towards an international order governed by laws spawned from agreement between sovereign states (Kayaoglu 2010, 200). Westphalia eventually also acquired outsized resonance within IR, following the end of the Cold War. As scholars struggled to apprehend the changes convulsing the post-​Cold War world, Westphalia solidified as a convenient temporal demarcation (Schmidt 2011, 616). 1648 came to signify the end of medieval heteronomy, and the transition to a modern world defined by sovereign anarchy (e.g. Ruggie 1993). Affirmed through serial repetition in mainstream IR pedagogy, Westphalia remains synonymous with the advent of modernity for much of the discipline. Below I examine arguments identifying the Peace of Westphalia with modernity, before scrutinizing the most decisive revisionist critiques of this position.

The Peace of Westphalia as the Gateway to Modernity Before considering arguments identifying Westphalia as touchstone of modernity, a definitional note on the latter is needed. Modernity can be understood in two distinct but potentially complementary senses—​institutional and cultural. An institutional approach identifies modernity with a range of generic practices and processes—​for example the shift from so-​called ‘advanced organic’ agrarian societies (Goldstone 1998, 261–​262) to urban industrial capitalism (Gellner 1991), or the transformation of political orders from indirectly ruled sprawling empires, to sovereign states characterized by uniform borders and centralized forms of bureaucratic governance (Giddens 1987; Mann 1986). This perspective privileges modernity’s institutional forms over any specific cultural content, and often conceives of modernity in ‘acultural’, singular, and universal terms (Taylor 1999, 153–​154). Conversely, a cultural understanding of modernity prioritizes transformations in the ideas, norms, identities, and social imaginaries underpinning collective life. Through this lens, modernity can be characterized by phenomena as diverse as the rise of individualism, the shift from dynastic to national modes of legitimizing political authority (Anderson 1991), or even reconceptualization of religion, and the accompanying secularization of the public sphere (Taylor 2007). While earlier cultural conceptions of modernity tended towards Eurocentric universalism, the perspective is arguably better capable of accommodating the simultaneous coexistence of ‘multiple modernities’ than its institutional counterpart (Taylor 1999).

548   Andrew Phillips The distinction between early modernity and high modernity further complicates matters. I understand early modernity to refer to an epoch from c.1500–​1800 ce, characterized by several key developments. These included the rise of more geographically expansive states and empires; the growth of increasingly commercialized agrarian economies; the consolidation of regional international systems; and the development of increasingly dense networks of trade, migration, and war linking these regional systems together (Buzan and Little 2000; Goldstone 1998). High modernity signifies the period immediately following early modernity and extending at least into the mid-​twentieth century, and possibly to the present. It is defined among other developments by the growth of rational state-​building, industrialization, and the rise of ideologies of progress (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 4). Most relevant here, high modernity is also characterized by the consolidation of the first genuinely global international system, as an expanding European international society at last subsumed its non-​European counterparts. The early/​high modernity distinction is relevant here only to the degree that the Westphalian order was initially of parochial significance, being one of multiple regional systems that arose during early modernity. Yet Westphalia’s emergence eventually assumed global significance, its rise being a critical prerequisite for the rise of the genuinely global international system that framed high modernity. Within IR, three grounds for according Westphalia such singular prominence stand out. These respectively emphasize its institutional significance for the sovereign state’s triumph as Europe’s dominant polity form; its institutional centrality for the birth of the modern sovereign state system; and its cultural importance in consolidating the secularization of European international order. A key argument of Westphalia boosters is that the Peace confirmed the sovereign state over its rivals as the dominant polity form in post-​Reformation Europe. Though the sovereign state had critical antecedents dating to the late-​Medieval period (e.g. Strayer 1970), Westphalia confirmed its ascendancy over the rival transnational authority structures of Church and Empire. The Thirty Years’ War thus ended with two sovereign states—​France and Sweden—​ victorious, the former having subordinated its confessional identity to considerations of raison d’etat in the conflict’s last stages. By contrast, by the mid-​seventeenth century, the Church’s political and economic power had declined irreversibly. Likewise, though the Empire survived, 1648 entrenched a constitutional settlement that confirmed princes’ liberties at the Emperor’s expense. The Dutch Republic’s de jure independence, and Switzerland’s de facto independence, apparently further consolidated a transition to a Europe where sovereign states increasingly dominated. Through this lens, Westphalia’s significance lies in its effect on the constitution of the European political order, with the so-​called ‘first face’ of political authority (the principle underwriting which collective actors may legitimately exercise international agency) increasingly favouring sovereign states (Philpott 2001, 15). An implicit assumption in this narrative is that the sovereign state is a key if not the decisive institutional product of modernity, as well as the eventual vanguard for modernity’s worldwide spread. A second, potentially complementary, perspective identifies Westphalia’s modernity through its prominence as the origin moment in the rise of a modern system of sovereign states. In contrast to the historic predominance of imperial international orders, a hallmark of modernity is the organization of relations between sovereign political communities through a reflexively monitored international system of sovereign states (Giddens 1987, 4). Off the back of this conviction, influential English School, liberal, and constructivist

The Peace of Westphalia    549 accounts have argued that the Peace of Westphalia marked a transformative moment in first European and then eventually global politics. Whether through contracting, cultural innovation, or a combination of the two, the Peace of Westphalia supposedly institutionalized a new means of managing Europe’s confessional pluralism and political fragmentation. Following the Peace, and with the twin universalisms of Church and Empire diminished, European rulers turned from heteronomy and hierarchy to sovereignty as the chief principle regulating the recognition and allocation of political authority. Westphalia through this interpretation thus marked the advent of a so-​called ‘anarchical society’ (Bull 1977). The Peace neutralized religious difference as a cause of war between European polities, and established the possibility of institutionalized coexistence between competing independent sovereigns. Successive waves of colonialism and decolonization then diffused the Westphalian system globally, laying the foundations for today’s plural order (Jackson 2000; Ikenberry 2020). For proponents of this view, the sovereign state system is the key interaction field through which relations between political communities are organized globally, with the Peace of Westphalia as its initial epicentre. Admittedly, English School interpretations in particular have varied in their intuitions regarding the importance of (Western) cultural consensus in gestating the Westphalian system and then driving its global spread. This concern for Westphalia’s alleged cultural particularity drove some apprehension regarding its prospective survival in a multicultural world, particularly in decolonization’s immediate aftermath (e.g. Wight 1977, 33). These fears aside, the conception of Westphalia as international society’s ground zero has proved broadly influential, not only among English School theorists, but also among key liberals and constructivists as well (Ikenberry 2020; Philpott 2001). A final claim for Westphalia’s significance stresses its cultural centrality as a key inflection point in the secularization of international order. This interpretation situates Westphalia within a more protracted series of cultural transformations within the West, which recast the relationship between religious and political authority (e.g. Mendelsohn 2012; Philpott 2001). The most conspicuous manifestation of this change was the neutralization of religious difference as a trigger for international conflict. But more broadly, Westphalia served as the capstone of a double domestication of religion. This encompassed the delegation of primary responsibility for organizing religious difference downwards, from the systemic level (Church and Empire) to the unit level (the sovereign state). But it also paradoxically included a curtailment of sovereigns’ authority to dictate subjects’ religious conformity. This is because Westphalia exemplified a recasting of the understanding of religion itself, from a corporal and communal body of believers, to a privately held body of beliefs (Holt 2005, 2). This involved a reimagining of religion as a matter of individual conscience, with authorized confessional minorities accordingly granted limited rights of toleration (Reus-​ Smit 2013a, 101).

Contesting the ‘Myth’ of Westphalia Despite Westphalia’s prominent identification with modernity in mainstream IR, critics have contesting each of the aforementioned claims. Critics of the ‘myth’ of Westphalia have focused particular attention on the post-​1648 persistence of diverse polity forms besides the sovereign state. For the sovereign state’s modern

550   Andrew Phillips territorial configuration was not established by the mid-​seventeenth century; mutually exclusive forms of sovereign territoriality instead came much later (Ruggie 1993, 163; Reus-​ Smit 2013a, 70). Revisionists have also noted dynasticism’s post-​1648 persistence as a key property of Europe’s dominant political units, and the distinct forms of violent transnational conflict that arose from it (e.g. Nexon 2009). The survival of non-​state polities like the Holy Roman Empire, and later the German Confederation, further confounds Westphalia’s identification as a mass extinction event for non-​state actors (Halden 2013; Osiander 2008). In short, the reality of polity diversity after 1648 undermines Westphalia’s identification with the sovereign state’s triumphant ascent, as well as the identification of the sovereign state as the institutional embodiment of modernity. Just as Westphalia did not mark the sovereign state’s definitive triumph over its competitors, revisionists have also critiqued efforts to identify it as heralding the genesis of the modern sovereign state system. Narratives stressing Westphalia’s status as the birth certificate of the international system are susceptible to critique first on grounds of anachronism. This is because many of the most crucial features of the modern sovereign state system arose only incrementally in the centuries following the Peace of Westphalia. The rise of modern border delimitation regimes (Goettlich 2019); the delegitimation of private international violence (Thomson 1994); the entrenchment of norms of non-​intervention and sovereign equality (Reus-​Smit 2013b)—​each are fundamental to the modern international system, and arose long after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. To be fair, even the most ardent Westphalia boosters rarely cast it as a single ‘big bang’ moment heralding the pristine arrival of a modern international system. This nuance blunts the force of charges of anachronism. A more serious criticism focuses on the Eurocentric teleology that pervades influential accounts of the expansion of international society (e.g. Bull and Watson 1984). These accounts strongly endorse international society’s apparent Westphalian origins. Yet there are dangers in this endorsement. Most obviously, it risks sanitizing the colonial violence that accompanied international society’s expansion, as well as downplaying the hierarchical character of international society during the fleeting era of Western dominance (Kayaoglu 2010). Such narratives likewise omit the constitutive role overseas colonial expansion played in shaping the evolution of core institutions and identities within and between European states (e.g. Branch 2012). More fundamentally, in elevating Westphalia as the singular epicentre and origin point for the modern international system, traditional accounts reinforce the idea of modernity as a constellation of institutions that originated from the West, and then propagated with the sovereign state’s amoeba-​like global diffusion. This conception is historically flawed, in that it overlooks the complex dynamics of Western expansion prior to the nineteenth century, which frequently entailed Westerners’ incorporation into powerful Afro-​Asian polities, rather than the outright imposition of Western institutions (Suzuki et al. 2015). Equally, it also obscures the ways in which international society was not only globally extended, but also transformed, through subaltern actors’ struggles for recognition (Dunne and Reus-​ Smit 2017). Turning last to accounts of Westphalia as an exemplar of secularization (e.g. Philpott 2001; Straumann 2008), this claim is vulnerable to the charge that it risks overstating religion’s retreat from public life after 1648. True, religious difference was no longer a catalyst for international war after Westphalia. But rulers’ legitimation strategies remained suffused by religious convictions throughout the Age of Absolutism (Gorski 2003). So too did underlying

The Peace of Westphalia    551 conceptions of the moral purpose of the state, and the accompanying design of European international society’s fundamental institutions (Reus-​Smit 1999). The Westphalian settlement likewise laid a basis for confessional co-​habitation within the Empire, rather than seeking to sublimate religious difference through appeals to alternative forms of collective identity. Westphalia thus is better imagined as an ecumenical rather than a secular peace. The distinction is not merely pedantic, for recognizing Westphalia as an ecumenical rather than secular settlement is key to understanding the distinctive type of diversity regime that it instantiated. Disentangling Westphalia from secularism is also important to avoid conflating modernity with secularization, and to sidestep the Eurocentric conceit that Europe’s Westphalian ‘breakthrough’ might offer a model for emulation for non-​Western regions still hostage to sectarian conflict (c.f. Milton et al. 2019). Finally, identifying Westphalia with secularism is problematic given the mutable and continuously evolving category of ‘secularism’ and ‘religion’ as categories of productive power in world politics (Agensky 2017; Hurd 2009). As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has demonstrated, secularism even in the Western tradition has encompassed both laicist and Judeo-​Christian variants (Hurd 2009). Tellingly, these emerged not from developments endogenous to the West, such as the Thirty Years’ War, but from Western colonial encounters, ranging from the French conquest of Algeria to the American republic’s struggles against the Barbary pirates (Hurd 2009). This complexity reminds us of the centrality of cross-​ cultural encounters in shaping the modern international system’s evolution, and the insufficiency of Westphalia-​centric accounts that consider this evolution through a Eurocentric rather than global lens.

Rethinking Westphalia’s Significance through the Lens of Global History Critiques of the ‘myth’ of 1648 have been extensive and cumulatively influential. In response, IR scholars are increasingly identifying the advent of modern international relations with the nineteenth century, rather than with Westphalia (e.g. Buzan and Lawson 2015, 1–​8; Zarakol 2010, 46). This realignment brings IR into line with cognate disciplines, which have traditionally cast modernity as arising no earlier than the late eighteenth century (e.g. Giddens 1987; Mann 1986). There are however significant dangers in erasing Westphalia entirely from our accounts of the modern international system’s development. This is not least because Westphalia undeniably marked a key inflection point in Europe’s political development. While Westphalia may not have inaugurated a wholesale shift towards a states-​under-​anarchy model, conceptions of seismic discontinuous change are in any case largely unhelpful in conceptualizing international systems change (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 7–​8). Essential features of the conventional narrative—​that the Church and Empire were weakened relative to the sovereign state; that the Peace terminated Europe’s Wars of Religion; that in so doing, the Peace provided breathing space for the state-​building that subsequently gestated a functioning sovereign state system (Burkhardt 2004)—​remain relatively uncontested. That the polities of

552   Andrew Phillips West-​Central Europe did subsequently extend their influence globally—​leading to the ultimate rise of a global sovereign state monoculture—​moreover testifies to Westphalia’s global historical significance. If Westphalia is neither the origin point for the modern international system, nor merely a negative peace of exhaustion lacking any larger global relevance, how can it best be conceptualized? I suggest that Westphalia’s importance can be best evaluated comparatively, alongside contemporaneous crises that convulsed Eurasia’s power centres during the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years’ War played out within a more general convulsion across Eurasia, which resulted in re-​articulations of the relationship between political authority and cultural diversity across multiple regional orders. Westphalia mattered because it entrenched a particular relationship between political authority and cultural diversity—​anchored around an embryonic sovereign state system—​that distinguished it from most Eurasian imperial alternatives. The resulting divergence between European multipolarity and Asian unipolarity established distinct multiple modernities, which later became entangled as they later coalesced into a genuinely global international system. While there is insufficient scope here to develop this argument in detail, I present its broad brushstrokes below.

The Thirty Years’ War and the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century The upheaval wrought by the Thirty Years’ War was far from unique in early modern Eurasia (Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014). On the contrary, the period saw far-​reaching convulsions throughout the Old World. Russia and China both saw widespread conflict and dynastic transitions during this time. The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires conversely proved more resilient, though each faced dramatic challenges to their rule (Dale 2010; White 2013). While the causes of these crises were diverse, their synchronicity was far from serendipitous. A combination of over-​population and climatological oscillations (the so-​called ‘little Ice Age’) made all complex agrarian societies susceptible to strain during this time (Blom 2019; Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014; White 2013). Ecological pressures intensified existing intra-​elite group competition (Goldstone 1991), while the previous Eurasia-​wide diffusion of new military technologies (Lorge 2008) increased the scale and potential destructiveness of conflicts. The resulting conjunction of popular distress, institutional strain, and increasing violence interdependence produced legitimation crises across Eurasia. As rulers responded to these crises, they recalibrated their legitimation strategies accordingly. Across much of Eurasia, this entailed the refurbishment of incorporative diversity regimes, that defined and organized cultural diversity in ways consistent with maintaining imperial power. Thus, in India, the Mughals doubled down on a strategy of syncretic incorporation that legitimized the Emperor as the divine reconciler of the Empire’s otherwise irreducibly heterogeneous faith communities (Phillips 2021). Conversely, following the Manchu conquest, the Qing Dynasty defined cultural diversity largely along ethnic lines, preserving and extending their empire through a diversity regime grounded in the careful segregation of imperial ‘constituencies’ (Crossley 2002, 6) from one another.

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Crises of Legitimacy and the Distinctiveness of Westphalian Diversity Regime Seen through the lens of a Eurasia-​wide crisis of authority, Westphalia presents as a distinct solution to the turmoil that engulfed the Old World in the seventeenth century. In common with Eurasia’s other power centres, Latin Christendom during the Thirty Years’ War experienced a legitimation crisis, as the Habsburgs unsuccessfully sought to strengthen imperial authority against the Empire’s petty rulers in the context of internationalized religious and civil conflict. The intersection of a systemic legitimation crisis with the spread of disruptive military innovations and cultural (especially religious) polarization was not what made Latin Christendom distinctive. By contrast, the Westphalian solution did depart from the imperial consolidation evident elsewhere in Eurasia—​establishing a distinctive developmental pathway that marked Latin Christendom off from its Asian counterparts. The Westphalian solution nudged the Empire towards a distinctive diversity regime, that in turn gradually established sovereignty as Latin Christendom’s dominant organizing principle, while elevating the management of confessional difference as the pivotal focus of order-​building efforts. Following Christian Reus-​Smit, I understand diversity regimes as ‘systemic norms and practices that legitimize certain units of political authority (states, empires, and so on), define recognized categories of cultural difference (religion, civilization, nation and so on), and relate the two (civilization and empire, nation and state, and so on)’ (Reus-​Smit 2018, 13–​14). Westphalia did not mark the pristine advent of a sovereign state system. Nevertheless, it did invest the Empire’s petty rulers with sovereign-​like powers, recognize Dutch de jure and Swiss de facto independence, and curtail both Habsburg power, as well as the transnational authority of the Church. In so doing, it entrenched sovereignty over imperial suzerainty and heteronomy as Christendom’s dominant principle for organizing and allocating political authority. With respect to organizing authorized forms of cultural difference and relating them to units of political authority, Westphalia endorsed a limited ecumenical vision, centered around confessional cohabitation within the Empire between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, and endorsing—​with strict provisions to protect confessional minorities—​ princely rulers’ rights to determine the official faith within their territories (Phillips and Reus-​ Smit 2020, 28–​ 29). Confessional identity—​ rather than nationality or locality—​ emerged as the most salient form of collective identification, and was explicitly tied to the legitimation as well as the limitation of princely rulers’ powers. To the extent that norms of sovereignty were ‘compromised’ (Krasner 1995) through minority rights protections, this was done to preserve a balance of power between the princes and the emperor, and with a view to upholding the general peace of Europe. Westphalia was therefore a sovereign as well as an ecumenical settlement. It entrenched sovereignty over suzerainty or heteronomy as the dominant—​though not the only—​mode for organizing political authority in Christendom. And it recognized Latin Christendom’s permanent confessional division, institutionalizing a system-​stabilizing compromise between the sovereign’s prerogative to determine confessional identity within his territory, and confessional minorities’ rights to exercise individual freedom of religious conscience (Reus-​ Smit 2013a).

554   Andrew Phillips Admittedly, even this revised characterization of Westphalia needs caveats. Notably, we must neither overstate the geographic scope of the Westphalian diversity regime, nor exaggerate its elasticity in accommodating cultural difference. Geographically, the Peace of Westphalia was primarily a means to manage political and religious conflict within the Empire. Westphalia guaranteed continued religious and political pluralism within Latin Christendom’s physical core. Together with the concurrent extension of independence to the Dutch Republic and the Swiss cantons, it foreclosed the consolidation of imperial hierarchy across much of the great cluster of urban settlements that were traditionally West-​Central Europe’s great incubators of wealth and cultural innovation. The resulting mixture of proto-​sovereign and imperial arrangements within the Empire deviated significantly from the ideal of sovereign anarchy. Nevertheless, at a systemic level, Westphalia still indirectly helped entrench the rise of sovereignty in Western Europe over alternative organizing principles, such as heteronomy or suzerainty. This is because it stopped neighbouring state-​builders from being side-​tracked into ruinous entanglement in the Empire’s constitutional and religious controversies. This enabled them to concentrate on consolidating their own sovereign authority over internal rivals at home, even as many concurrently extended imperial hierarchies abroad through overseas expansion. The geographic effects of Westphalia were thus uneven, radiating out in concentric circles from the Empire to Western Europe to the wider world. Paradoxically, Westphalia’s improvised combination of sovereign and suzerain practices in Europe’s core helped consolidate sovereign state-​building projects on its Atlantic periphery (e.g. France, Spain, and England). This then enabled the latter to further pursue trans-​continental expansion, eventually extending imperial hierarchies across large swathes of Afro-​Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. Just as its geographic impact was limited, so too was Westphalia’s fabled ecumenicism. Undeniably, Westphalia entrenched a more stable confessional order than before. Nevertheless, the Westphalian diversity regime remained highly restrictive, especially when compared to its Eurasian counterparts. This is because it continued to tie political authority tightly to confessional allegiance, broadening the bandwidth of toleration within the Empire to encompass only Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Both within and beyond the Empire, Jews, Muslims, and Christian dissident sects remained largely excluded from public life in Westphalia’s wake. This contrasted with the relatively more favourable treatment religious minorities generally enjoyed in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, cautioning against Westphalia’s commemoration as a milestone in the move towards a more tolerant world. These caveats aside, the Westphalian dispensation nevertheless undeniably differed profoundly from its Eurasian counterparts. Elsewhere, the seventeenth-​century crises favoured imperial consolidation, and the subordination or extinction of local sovereignties by centralizing conquest elites. Thus, in South Asia, by the late seventeenth century the Mughal Empire had peaked in size, extending its reach almost throughout the entirety of the sub-​ continent. In East Asia, meanwhile, the Qing Dynasty’s ascendancy foreshadowed vast conquests, the Manchus encompassing huge new territories including Tibet and Xinjiang, and doubling the empire’s size by the end of the eighteenth century. Following the ascent of the Romanov Dynasty, Russia likewise expanded relentlessly, enfolding diverse duchies, kingdoms, khanates and tribal confederacies into a vast patrimony stretching from Finland to Vladivostok. By contrast, Latin Christendom stood out as one of the few major power

The Peace of Westphalia    555 centres where the trend was towards political fragmentation rather than integration, and the institutionalization of pluralism through a sovereign state system. Likewise, early modern Eurasian empire-​builders favoured diversity regimes centered on either syncretism or segregation. The former centered on hybrid elite court cultures that ostentatiously celebrated the heterogeneity of the peoples yoked under imperial rule. The latter self-​consciously balkanized subject peoples into discrete imperial constituencies, each separately tied to the centre through their own customized institutions and legitimating rituals. Despite their differences, syncretic and segregated diversity regimes supported Emperor-​centric strategies of legitimation, the former foregrounding the Emperor as either the divine reconciler of diverse faiths, the latter elevating him as the incarnation of different communities’ distinct and separate collective identities. By contrast, confessional ecumenicism prevented any single imperial figurehead from claiming universal authority through sacred legitimation. Given the confessional identities’ categorical character (e.g. the Emperor could not be both Catholic and Lutheran), the privileging of these identities within the Westphalian diversity regime inhibited imperial consolidation, while legitimizing the dispersal of political authority among a plethora of sovereign polities.

Westphalia’s Significance in the Context of Multiple and Entangled Early Modernities Seen alongside its Eurasian counterparts, the distinctiveness of the Peace of Westphalia is clear. Whereas other regional systems tended towards unipolarity after the mid-​seventeenth century, Latin Christendom evolved in a direction of multipolarity. This trend was already embryonic from the fifteenth century. But from the Peace of Westphalia, the prospects of Latin Christendom coalescing into a unipolar system were meaningfully constrained. Instead, Westphalia established a path dependency for West-​Central Europe, with sovereignty, multipolarity and the balance of power increasingly reinforced as its default condition at all subsequent general peace congresses. Westphalia’s significance moreover is not confined to its importance as a critical juncture in European political development. Rather, it also has a global significance that flows directly from its distinctiveness relative to the norm of Eurasian imperial consolidation, and from the patterns of interaction that emerged as a result of this divergence between European and Asian political development. The fragmentation and competition enshrined by Westphalia solidified Europeans’ predilections to project their rivalries globally, in pursuit of the non-​European resource portfolios they coveted to enhance their wealth and power. Simultaneously, Asian imperial consolidation helped to preserve stability in what were then the world’s wealthiest and most populous power centres. The push of European rivalries under multipolarity, together with the pull of Asian security and prosperity under regional unipolarity, then laid the foundations for expanding inter-​regional trade, and rising global interaction capacity thereafter. The value in considering Westphalia comparatively through the lens of global history is therefore twofold. First, a comparative assessment of Westphalia enables us to see more clearly how Latin Christendom deviated from its Eurasian contemporaries. To acknowledge this European

556   Andrew Phillips exceptionalism is not to reproduce the Eurocentrism of earlier valorizations of Westphalia, which conceived it as a uniquely viable solution to the problem of political and cultural pluralism (e.g. Jackson 2000). On the contrary, a comparative analysis illuminates the limitations of European achievements, by contrasting them with the successful projects of imperial renewal and incorporation of cultural diversity that distinguished most other early modern regional systems (Phillips and Reus-​Smit 2020). More positively, a comparative analysis does invite us to revisit the puzzle of Europe’s persistent political pluralism. Certainly, Westphalia did not make future bids for universal empire impossible. But it did make them more challenging than before, establishing a path dependency for Europe that grew stronger with each successive general peace. This is because Westphalia insulated Europe’s geographic core, and a good chunk of its urban wealth-​ producing heartland, within a constitutional order that survived down to the Empire’s abolition in 1806. The imperial constitution preserved diverse polities that empire-​builders might otherwise have easily devoured, while allowing time for the maturation of other system-​stabilizing mechanisms (notably the idea and practice of the balance of power) that then further entrenched Western Europe’s political fragmentation. Additionally, Westphalia also provided successive anti-​imperial coalitions with a potent propaganda device they could invoke to frustrate would-​be empire-​builders, and to legitimize general peace settlements favouring pluralism over hegemony. Weaponized nostalgia for Westphalia for example proved crucial in solidifying support for the Congress of Vienna. It did so by providing an elongated historical genealogy of Europe’s political pluralism, that the anti-​Napoleonic coalition had successfully defended against imperial conquest (Keene 2002, 21–​22). In this latter sense, then, successive invocations of the ‘myth’ of Westphalia proved cumulatively as important as the initial contents of the settlement itself in reinforcing a trajectory towards sovereignty over empire as West-​Central Europe’s default condition. Second, considering Westphalia comparatively is valuable in helping us to understand the crucial warm-​up period of early modernity that helped to pave the way for a global international system in the nineteenth century. The combination of European fragmentation after Westphalia and Asian imperial consolidation was critical in driving both the European thrust overseas, as well as in shaping regionally diverse patterns of European incorporation into Asia. The resulting thickening of inter-​regional ties was critically conducive to the much later acceleration of European colonial conquest that helped inaugurate a global modern international system. Equally, these colonial entanglements were themselves critical in reshaping European political order, and in giving form to the ‘Westphalian’ sovereign state system in its most mature elaboration. Though Westphalian revisionists are convincing, the case for defining Westphalia down into insignificance is overdrawn. Westphalia was indeed a critical juncture in European political evolution, which nudged Europe down the path to sovereign anarchy, against the Eurasian norm of imperial hierarchy. This seventeenth-​century ‘great divergence’ then drastically shaped the contours of subsequent inter-​civilizational interactions, inaugurating a web of entanglements that then made the nineteenth century advent of a global international system possible. To understand how we became ‘modern’ and how the global international system came to be, it is critical to explore the interactive pre-​histories between different regions that made this development imaginable. Within this context, Westphalia remains vitally important for all who are interested in comprehending the deep historical origins of today’s global order.

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Chapter 38

The Seven Ye a rs ’ Wa r Karl Schweizer Perspectives In its contextualist approach to international politics, the Handbook deploys two key organizing concepts—​‘modernity’ and ‘granularity’—​which are designed to productively integrate the various spatial and temporal dimensions of transcontinental power relationships. They also seek to highlight both the scope for, and the opportunities to be found in, cross-​ fertilization with ideas derived from cognate disciplines. Inherently a defining component of global history, ‘modernity’ gives shape and direction to the discipline as an interactive cognitive system: revisions in the sociology of knowledge arising from changing world dynamics have produced concomitant demands for more inclusive, less narrowly national perspectives on the past. Here, the Handbook’s unique design offers a corrective to those internalist or genealogical versions of historical thinking that view all civilizational development as generated from ‘within’; transformations occurring via diffusions from centres of power (i.e. Europe) to the peripheries. It variously challenges long-​dominant narratives of socio-​cultural change embedded in the lexicon and epistemology of ‘Eurocentrism’, discursively and institutionally restructured in ways tending to obscure the symbiotic cross border exchanges that define our networked/​globalized world (Holsti 1991). In its holistic orientation, moreover, the Handbook is sensitive to transnational connectivities and cross-​ cultural relationships: regular, sustained, and systematically consolidated on a global scale. As such, the ‘global turn’ is not a synonym for ‘macro history’: the contributors do not attempt to replace the established paradigm of ‘national historiography’ with an abstract entity ‘World’, but with an awareness of global networks, connections, and interactions. This helps avoid the growing tendency among cultural historians to depolitize and de-​internationalize international history and so risk becoming atomistic if not solipsistic (Gunn 2003). Essentially global consciousness has evolved within ever expanding contexts, broadening visions of the world reflecting diverse geo/​politico-​cultural realities from the early modern period to the late eighteenth century. Inevitably, this process came to be identified with European/​Western hegemony, leading to concomitant Eurocentric proclivities in history

The Seven Years’ War    561 writing and distinctive notions of ‘modernity’ arising therefrom. The standard variants of the modern/​traditional contrast—​universalism over particularism, scientific rationalism over traditional religious precepts, individualism over group identity—​implied a historical trajectory, indicating that the Western transition to modernity could be repeated elsewhere. The Handbook qualifies this tendency by emphasizing that the global influence of European historiography was not simply the hegemonic export of a pristine ‘Western’ tradition, but more the aggregate of Europe’s world expansion and the interactive transformative developments accompanying it (Sachsenmaier 2011). Focus on the nation, altered conceptions of time based on ideals of progress, novel ideas of motion, matter and planetary orbits challenged European and non-​European societies alike. In the process, this generated forces whose operation and impact depended on their degree of integration into variant patterns of convergence and exchange across a global spectrum. It is here, precisely, that we can appreciate Europe as the progenitor—​despite unmistakable fringe inputs—​of such world-​changing innovations as, inter alia, science, gunpowder technology, imperialism, military, and diplomatic organizations. The latter two in particular, embedded in the very core of international life, are symbiotically reflective of unique historical processes—​political, cultural, and intellectual—​that ultimately more than any other factor energized Europe’s global hegemon (Schweizer 2003). Territorial state formation, political sovereignty, the art of modern war, and mercantile competition all emerged and expanded concurrently with diplomacy and were refracted throughout the same ‘Great Power’ (i.e. Western) matrix, shaped in turn by the ever-​shifting power distributions between the core states it comprised as well as the guiding precepts of prevailing ideological practices and norms. Perhaps the best approach (given our unprecedented knowledge of cultures in more remote regions of the globe) is to see the traditions associated with the West as no longer central in any sense but as crossover manifestations of more universal tendencies. Achievements once counted European were perhaps more the result of interactions and transformations in centres of European power but did not necessarily originate there. Full of unanticipated surprises, violent twists, abrupt punctuations and dramatic reversals, the history of globalization likely involved most, if not all, major regions and cultures of our planet (Levy 1983). The Handbook’s other organizing concept of ‘granularity’ is highly relevant here: a paradigm evolving issues of ‘scope, scale and texture’; alternative notions of space whereby connections of ideas and institutions are embedded not in pure spatial frames that necessarily blend with national/​imperial perimeters, but in transregional processes and multidimensional structures that have shaped societies on a global scale. This entails discarding the focus on origins—​European or otherwise—​for broader intercontinental dynamics, and instead embracing different scales of analyses that recognize the trans-​systemic impact of major locational shifts. In this way, international historians especially will be able to transcend bounded territorialities and expand national visions to supra-​national levels and to explore overlapping spaces—​or put differently, negotiate the intricate patterns of multilateral synergies while remaining attentive to particular sites or regions—​whether in centres of power or on the periphery (Conrad, 2016). The results are analytical correlates that allow global perspectives to be blended on every heuristic level from macro accounts comprising centuries to more short-​term spans, each developing or ‘unfolding’ along discernible patterns, all denoting transformation.

562   Karl Schweizer

Setting This global/​local interface has important implications for the study of Great Power conflicts, the Seven Years’ War in particular. It engulfed the Euro-​Atlantic world from 1756 to 1763 and engaged the energies of European cabinets as never before. More than previous conflicts, the Seven Years’ War entailed a variety of approaches to dynastic rivalries and taxed the military, material, and moral resources of both belligerent and neutral powers. It affected relationships not merely between governments and governed but also, more than previous conflicts, between and within governments themselves. Moreover, the war’s conduct only in part foretold its outcome, as unanticipated changes affected strategy, logistics, finance, and diplomatic networks on a global scale. While the transatlantic sphere served as the central focus, inter-​European dynamics were equally critical: dynastic successions, tactical issues, contests between fiscal, political, and social structures from which land and naval forces derived their legitimacy and their strength. The Seven Years’ War was not merely an exercise in combat and campaigns, but a struggle for survival and hegemony that strained the resources of the greatest European powers in every corner of the globe, and generated a complex web of proposed, theoretical and actual commitments taxing the economic, political, and diplomatic capacities of the most talented ministers and soldiers throughout the Euro-​Atlantic world. New war-​induced social spaces of communication also emerged, expanding across both national and imperial confines, creating sustained reconfigurations of power and space that provide the operative context in which foreign/​military policies were designed and executed (Schweizer and Schumann 2010). As such, the concrete activity of war must be embedded within the deeper causal matrix of ‘structural’ processes: those inherent characteristics of the international system that comprise not only the range of interests/​issues dividing or uniting states, but also the attitudes whose furtherance state policies were designed to obtain. It is both the chain of events and the spatial parameters, in all their complexity, within which events take place that impel ‘Great Powers’—​the dominant actors in international politics—​towards open war. The system approach offers potentially useful insights into the dynamics of large-​scale war and peace, provided it avoids excessive abstractionism and the concomitant danger of eliminating the role of individuals: their views, choices, motivations, and responsibility for paths taken. From this perspective, whatever its immediate causes, the Seven Years’ War represents a deeper structural crisis within the emerging global system, generated by the need to readjust relations among its core members in line with intervening shifts in power ratios and, more generally, to resolve pre-​war ambiguities in the order and status hierarchy of the system as a whole. Hence, Britain, victorious over France, emerged as a world power, wielding transmaritime dominance, while in Europe the war registered the superiority of Prussian absolutism over its Habsburg rival, thereby consolidating Prussia’s rise to major continental influence and prestige. Ancillary campaigns in the Caribbean, Africa, and India shaped the subsequent history of those regions as well. From its origins in the late 1400s, the European international or ‘Great Power’ system had by the early eighteenth century developed into a complex of secular, sovereign states as autonomous centres of power and decision, theoretically equal yet widely divergent in

The Seven Years’ War    563 resources and strength, knitted together by an organized system of contiguous relations: political and economic, diplomacy and commerce, peace and war. The differentially expanding power of these states, aided and accelerated by improvements in political, fiscal, and military organization, had inevitable implications both for the units within the system and for the system per se: as member states increased their productive potential, some portions of this growth and development were transposed to the systemic level consolidating the links between state actions and the dynamics of the system as a whole (Schweizer 1987). Concurrently, the international system was expanding in size and degrees of interaction. By the eighteenth century, hitherto tangentially related states and subsystems to the north and east had become closely integrated into a competitive network of multipolarity. This was the result of two developments: greater activity by the more recent participants, such as Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire; and partly the increasing capabilities and enlarged spheres of activity of the Western and Central European states. States interacted more frequently, in many more contexts with appreciably greater mutual effect through relatively lesser effort, resulting in greater potential for armed conflict in the pursuit of national interests and goals. In addition, simultaneous expansion of armed forces combined with improvements in military technology, and the greater efficiency of bureaucratic and fiscal agencies, better enabled states to mobilize their energies for war and this in turn made warfare more likely both inside Europe and overseas.

Diplomatic Prelude The peace settlement of 1713–​14 embodied in the Treaty of Utrecht was central to the shifting pattern of international politics following the Spanish Succession War. It restrained France’s hegemonial ambitions, strengthened the German states at the expense of imperial authority, embodied significant change of territories and dynasties, and signaled Britain’s rising imperial success. Indeed, from the rivalry with France, emerged the basic structures of British imperialism: a dominant parliament as the nucleus of domestic politics; naval/​fiscal expansion; agro-​industrial transformation; and the Bank of England assuring economic mobilization and control (Schweizer 1987). The French wars also fostered one of the major developments in European politics during the eighteenth century: namely, the increasing role of colonial issues in determining the strategic priorities of European states. Struggles for overseas possessions, hitherto largely separate from inter-​European strife, gradually merged into a wider interactive network of hostilities embracing both colonizing nations and their dependencies. This progressive integration of Europe with the transmaritime realm during the period 1689–​1790, came to provide the transformative context in which British foreign policy, in particular, was executed. Specifically, Britain’s rise to World Empire entailed incessantly shifting alliances and treaties, combined with flexible forms of selective continental intervention designed to check attempted French hegemony and so maintain the European power balance established at Utrecht. This included even alliance with France, negotiated as a bilateral treaty of mutual guarantee in 1716 and broadened the following year into the Triple Alliance of Britain, the United Provinces, and France. The agreement significantly aided the settlement of Austro-​Spanish and later, Anglo-​Spanish conflicts contributed to

564   Karl Schweizer the solution of problems in the Baltic—​a legacy of the Northern Wars—​and assured protection for Hanover, dynastically linked to Britain since 1714. It also fostered the Quadruple Alliance in 1718, thereby effectively establishing a rudimentary system of collective security for western and central Europe. Yet, Anglo-​French cooperation was not to last: although France remained prone to diplomatic isolation and, at different points between 1714–​39, each of the two powers needed the other’s support and had benefitted from it, their respective aims and interests were diverging. Colonial competition began to intrude more once both states recovered from the strains of continental war and as the relative peace within Europe enabled them to devote more attention to naval and imperial expansion. Within Europe, England and France still had no significant reason for conflict, though the alliance preferences of each (aside from or in addition to their mutual relationship) intruded upon entente, first in terms of prestige and subsequently in terms of being drawn into the disputes of leading states on opposing sides. By 1738, the success of French diplomacy in Balkan and in imperial affairs, combined with the revival of French naval/​commercial expansion, reawakened Britain’s traditional gallo-​ phobia. These suspicions were given added force by France’s subsequent support of Spain in the latter’s colonial disputes with Great Britain, support which took the tangible form of military operations against the Dutch, Britain’s ally during the so-​called Austrian Succession War that absorbed the Anglo-​Spanish conflict after 1740 (Baugh 2011). The Peace of Aix-​ la-​Chapelle, which terminated this war, left vital questions of relationships and territory unsettled; all it confirmed were the continuous grievances of major states, the unresolved rivalry between England and France for colonial dominance and, finally, the need to integrate the newly emergent great powers, Russia and especially Prussia, within the European congerie of states—​a complex process of adjustment which would henceforth determine the pace and direction of diplomatic events. Uneasy though the peace was, until 1754 no major conflicts developed. By degrees, Europe assumed its long-​accustomed shape and disposition, the immediate postwar years witnessing no sudden or dramatic rupture in the established patterns of power alignments. Prussia was still allied to France, who in turn wielded controlling influence in Turkey, Sweden, and Poland, her client states in the North and East. This combination was opposed by Britain, the Dutch, and Austria, comprising the historic ‘old system’, based on the Barrier Treaties of 1713 and 1715. Hovering menacingly on the periphery was the daunting state of Russia whose conflicts of interests with Prussia and France, correspondingly cemented its alliance with Vienna and facilitated convivial relations with Great Britain. Yet, behind the scenes, Europe was, all unknowing, beset by forces at once destabilizing and precarious. Barely contained by the fragile facades of stability were subtle transformations in the very structure of power and interest in Europe, a process which would eventually produce a totally altered configuration of alliance groupings. In its widest context, this was due to a long, albeit erratic development dating back to Louis XIV, reflecting the deep-​seated shiftings and diplomatic convulsions which time and statesmanship had wrought (Black 1986). A more immediate precipitant—​triggered by the recent war itself—​was the sudden rise of Brandenburg Prussia as a first-​rate military state. Seizing control of Silesia via repeated breaks of international law, and successfully defending his spoils, Frederick II had solidified his military reputation, confirmed his state’s potential for continued, even accelerated, growth, and substantially offset the fragmentary character of Prussia’s geo-​political identity.

The Seven Years’ War    565 Indeed, it was the very magnitude of his success which signified the beginning of a new epoch—​the period of dualism in German politics—​and determined the postwar direction, or rather, reorientation of Austrian foreign policy priorities. Intent upon reacquiring Silesia and enhancing imperial dignity, Austria set out, after 1748, to prepare for the future conflict with Prussia by strengthening Habsburg dominions through vigorous, far-​reaching programmes of internal reorganization and reform. An inevitable by-​product of this growing preoccupation with the Prussian threat, was Austria’s shifting focus from such traditional spheres of dynastic interest as the Netherlands and Italy to vital areas nearer home. This meant that Vienna’s traditional rivalry with France, dating from the time of Charles V, was losing its validity. To Anton von Kaunitz-​Rittberg—​director of Austrian foreign affairs after 1753—​the recent war and his first-​hand experiences at Aix-​la-​ Chapelle offered ample proof that the old system of power relations was defunct, and led him to the basic premise that, if Austria were ever to recover Silesia, it required a new militarily powerful continental ally: namely, France. The utter inadequacy of existing arrangements with the Maritime Powers to advance Austria’s altered agendas had become patently clear during the war years, 1740–​48. The Dutch, weak and lethargic, were no longer reliable: with but minimal resistance they had relinquished key Barrier forts to the French. Meanwhile, for England, primarily absorbed with transmaritime issues, Austria was simply an auxiliary in the conflict against France. Unwilling to assume extensive continental commitments, the British government had not only shown utter indifference to the fate of Silesia, but also, by threatening to withhold vital support, had repeatedly imposed upon Austria policies exclusively congruent with British interests. Conversely, a rapprochement with France, Kaunitz argued, would provide security for Habsburg possessions in Germany, Italy, as well as the Netherlands, but more importantly, substantially augment Austria’s future military and fiscal strength. As a result, from 1740 onwards, an increasingly influential element within the Austrian government (encouraged by the Empress herself) advocated as eventual policy the idea of systematically detaching France from Prussia, retaining close ties of friendship with the Russian court, and gradually completing Frederick II’s diplomatic isolation without, in the interim, jeopardizing the existing links with England and the Dutch. In 1750, Kaunitz was appointed ambassador to Paris where he aimed to lay the groundwork for this programme. He established several useful and promising contacts, but, overall, his tentative proposals failed to impress the predominantly pro-​Prussian members of Louis XI’s conseil d’état. Despite this impediment, Kaunitz, far from abandoning his convictions, returned to Vienna in 1753 (appointed state chancellor) still seeing Bourbon-​Habsburg cooperation as the key to Austria’s revisionist schemes. Given this integral shift in Austria’s alignment policy and long-​term interests, the ‘old system’, consecrated by time and past success, stood seriously undermined. But until this became recognized, it retained its established reputation, especially in Britain and Holland, as the only effective mechanism, however inadequate, for preserving the balance of power and containing the aggressive aspirations of France (Szabo 2008). A prime and influential exponent of this view was Thomas Pelham-​Holles, Duke of Newcastle and secretary of state (North) from 1748. Convinced that France aimed for a resumption of war at the first opportunity, Newcastle hoped to forestall Bourbon designs through an active continental system, involving the strengthening of the Barrier fortresses, the conclusion of alliances with Denmark and Spain, and subsidy agreements with smaller European states, equally anxious

566   Karl Schweizer to forestall any French threat. As part of the Imperial Election Scheme, two such agreements were concluded—​one with Bavaria in 1750 and another with Saxony a year later—​though in effect neither treaty could eliminate the insuperable differences between Austria and the Maritime Powers, or restore to the Anglo-​Austrian entente that spirit of cordiality and cooperation necessary for concerted action. Increasingly, the policy debates in both London and Vienna occurred in the context of mutual disillusionment, of false hopes and broken promises—​a situation prompting detached reassessments of current opportunities and future needs, together with a pragmatic flexible responsiveness to changing political realities (Middleton 1985). By 1753–​ 54, British diplomacy in Vienna had reached an impasse. Fundamental differences in Anglo-​Austrian positions on such complex issues as the Austrian Netherlands, the reestablishment of the barrier against France, and Austria’s demand for a new, more profitable treaty of commerce could simply not be reconciled. Equally, if not more divisive, was Britain’s adoption and implementation of the ill-​fated Imperial election plan which set Germany in an uproar, further impaired Austro-​British harmony, and, in effect confirmed Kaunitz’s predilection for an alliance with France. This predilection made Austria’s connection with the Maritime Powers an especially dangerous liability since at any moment Franco-​British colonial tensions might impinge on metropolitan Europe, involving Austria in a war with France, the very power Kaunitz hoped to win over.

The Advent of War As these futile proceedings extended into 1754, it soon became evident that the uneasy truce between Britain and France in North America and India was about to end. The activities of the Ohio Company and the gradual westward expansion of British colonial traders alarmed the French who controlled Canada to the North and Louisiana to the South. The aggressiveness of French traders in India alarmed Britain, as did French fortifications of their American holdings along the Ohio frontier, while intensifying disputes over naval prizes and titles to strategic Caribbean islands antagonized both powers. The situation everywhere was explosive (Schweizer and Schumann 2010). More knowledgeable about colonial affairs than is usually assumed, the Duke of Newcastle was determined to defend British interests in America against French transgressions, yet also leave scope for compromise and negotiation in the prevention of further escalation. However, under domestic political pressure, he gradually became committed to an American policy which made French counter-​actions, and hence steady progression from crisis to open conflict, virtually certain. Adopting an expanded plan of operations formulated by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (George II’s favourite son) and Henry Fox, Secretary at War, the cabinet duly dispatched two regiments under General Braddock to attack the French (in conjunction with colonial troops) at four strategic points, although formal declarations of war had not yet been issued by either side. Deterrence diplomacy, gradually intensifying force as a negotiating tactic, was giving way to more direct, accelerated military measures. Apprised of these events, the French government, however reluctantly, had little choice but to send a counter-​expedition; mobilization orders were duly issued for six battalions intended to strengthen the critical outposts on the Great Lakes. By then, however, the

The Seven Years’ War    567 impromptu British offensive had already misfired. An advance into Upper New York failed to take the strategically important Crown Point on Lake Champlain; disaster struck near Pittsburgh, where French forces killed General Braddock and two thirds of his regiment; at sea, a fog-​bound squadron off Newfoundland missed a French fleet conveying reinforcements and supplies to Canada (Fowler 2005). Preeminently, these events required the consolidation of Britain’s defensive arrangements on the continent, partly to distract French attention from British colonial operations and partly to safeguard the security of Hanover, George II’s German domain. One of the prerequisites repeatedly stressed by Kaunitz for Austria’s eventual collaboration in protecting the Netherlands and Hanover had been the conclusion of a subsidy agreement between England and Russia, an agreement designed to neutralize possible Prussian aggression. Still hoping to retain Austrian goodwill, Newcastle accordingly opened negotiations with St. Petersburg in the Spring of 1755. Ever since the days of Peter the Great, Anglo-​Russian political and especially commercial relations had been on a generally close and friendly footing; Russia depended on Britain for vital colonial goods. while Britain in turn obtained from Russia the bulk of her indispensable naval stores: pitch, tar, hemp, timber, and other products essential for her domestic economy, her re-​export trade, and her naval power. In addition, Russian policy ran counter to French interests in Poland, Turkey, and the Balkan states which, combined with the Czarina’s personal and political hostility towards Prussia (France’s chief German ally), offered effective protection for Hanover against suspected Franco-​Prussian designs. Relations between London and Berlin—​with no sound basis for political cooperation—​ had at best remained lukewarm throughout the period 1714–​48. Now, however, with global war in the offing, a tie with Prussia might demoralize France, neutralize Germany, and hence confine hostilities to the New World. Frederick II’s fear of a Russian invasion was well known in London and therefore used as a pressure tactic to make him more amenable, and so create a rift in his connection with France. Unfortunately, Anglo-​Russian subsidy talks repeatedly stalled, owing to disagreements both over Russia’s financial demands and over the casus foederis for the deployment of Russian troops outside Russia per se. Acting energetically, Newcastle replaced his hapless envoy Colonel Guy Dickens with the vibrant Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who was empowered to raise the subsidy by £200,000 and well supplied with bribe money; he managed to complete his mission with the new Anglo Russian agreement, signed on 30 September 1755. From the outset, the treaty provided for action against ‘the common enemy’, which Russia naturally understood to be Prussia, although the negotiations never mentioned that power by name. This unfortunate omission and the ambiguity it created was bound to create difficulties once it came time to identify the target state, especially since by then Newcastle had formulated a radically different scheme for continental defense (Marston 2001). Boscawen’s attack on French shipping had ruptured formal diplomatic relations between London and Paris in July and all-​out war was now certain. Further eleventh-​hour talks with Holland and the Austrians throughout the summer of 1755, conducted by Britain, as a last-​minute attempt to revive the moribund ‘old system’ had been fruitless. Fearful of alienating France and of lowering Austrian defenses, Kaunitz had flatly refused to dispatch reinforcements for the Low Countries and though vaguely promising to defend Hanover, he attached such exorbitant conditions that even Newcastle became convinced of his insincerity. No more satisfactory was the Dutch response. With their dilapidated barrier,

568   Karl Schweizer ill-​disciplined troops, ramshackle navy, and declining economy, the United Provinces were hardly prepared for an impending war. Not only was there a growing movement for all-​out neutrality, but also the influential pro-​French Republican party, centred in Amsterdam, roundly threatened to make terms with France unless Britain took immediate and effective measures for their defense. Realizing that Kaunitz’s demands—​apart from the expense involved—​were clearly directed towards Britain’s ultimate collusion with Austria’s revisionist plans against Prussia, the British cabinet unanimously decided on their rejection. Already, Newcastle’s thoughts were moving in another direction, in response to an unexpected Prussian overture indicating Frederick’s interest in a convention of neutrality, a move revealing his unease with the menacing potential of the recent Anglo Russian subsidy accord. As yet, this treaty had not been ratified and judging by past events it could well take months, following ratification, before the cumbersome Russian military machine sauntered into action. Prussia, conversely, a close neighbor of Hanover, was at once more dangerous, more useful, if not less expensive, than the venal Russians. Thus a defensive arrangement with Frederick for the ‘neutralization of Germany’ would not only safeguard Hanover, but, even more, localize the war with France and so enable Britain to focus exclusively on her primary imperial interests. These objectives were formalized in the Treaty of Westminster (January 1756), by which the contracting parties guaranteed their respective possessions and agreed to resist jointly the entry of all foreign troops into Germany, including those of their current allies. The Anglo-​Prussian convention also damaged Britain’s credibility in St. Petersburg and triggered a shift of Russian interests in favour of France (backed by Austrian influence). Whereas for Britain, once Prussia came to terms, the casus foederis of the Anglo-​Russian agreement had changed, to Russia it always been and still was primarily the instrument for a concerted offensive against the Prussian state only (Schweizer 2001). By the end of July 1756, despite strenuous British attempts to salvage some part of the pending agreement, it became clear that Britain’s influence at the Czarist court was collapsing while that of Austria and France continued to solidify. Russia’s evasive behaviour towards Britain, combined with intelligence indicating mobilization activity in Livonia (not to mention the major build-​up of Russian forces along the Polish border), convinced Frederick that an Austro-​Russian offensive, likely supported by France, was imminent. Not one passively to await the inevitable, he accordingly moved to forestall his enemies with a swift military strike against Saxony on 28 August 1756. The European part of the Seven Years’ War had begun and the ‘reversal of alliances’ or ‘Diplomatic Revolution’, set in train years earlier, was completed. Britain and Hanover were now reconciled with Prussia while the Bourbons and Habsburgs ended a quarter-​millennium of dynastic rivalry, with Russian military might as backup. Although Anglo-​French skirmishes in North America had evolved into the French and Indian War by 1754, the large-​scale conflict that drew in most of the European powers centred around Austria’s revisionist plans against Prussia. Yet, while continental strategists prepared for the next European war, ministers and diplomats from London to St. Petersburg kept at least one eye trained on the transatlantic theater. Thanks to ambitious opportunists and highly placed speculators on both sides of the Anglo-​French frontier, their hopes were not disappointed. Herein, then, lay the real and proximate origins of the Diplomatic Revolution, even more than the rise of Frederician Prussia. Without the opportunities opened by the rising tensions between Westminster and Versailles, the other courts of Europe could go little farther than

The Seven Years’ War    569 the Mittelweg that defined both Austrian and Prussian foreign policy from 1752. With them, it was not only Austria and Prussia, but also all the courts of Europe—​and several political entities in the American frontier zones—​who sensed an opportunity to determine their own fates. Nor was it simply one fault line in North America that adversely impacted Anglo-​ French relations, but several at once, stretching in a gigantic arc from Nova Scotia through New York and at least as far south as the Virginia frontier. Although the root causes may have been the same, various colonial and metropolitan governments identified numerous critical areas of conflict, all of which appeared to call for immediate solution (Baugh 2011). London’s reactions included further American escalation accompanied by defensive arrangements on the continent, designed to isolate France, the centrepiece of which was the alliance with Prussia. Colonial disputes in 1753–​54 had no direct bearing on the Austro-​ Prussian War of 1756, but they did contribute to the ‘reversal of alliances’, which intensified, expanded, and conflated the misperception and misunderstanding that characterized most facets of the Seven Years’ War in its origins, in its conclusion, among diplomats and ministers as well as between commanders and soldiers on campaign and on the battlefield. Reflecting also (and contributing to) changes in the international order, the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’, on a deeper level, was a catalyst, whose repercussions would impact the Euro-​Atlantic world and foster many cross systemic connections between land and sea war, commerce and combat, domestic and foreign politics, and causes and conclusions. In sum, the Seven Years’ War was the consequence of both immediate and long-​term causes: immediate factors such as the ambiguities of crisis decision-​making, diplomatic pressures, the destabilizing dimensions of military escalation and, in a wider context, key processes embedded in the global political system within which all state activity, including conflict and entente, must be viewed. Although the outbreak of war was preceded by extensive alliance and counter-​alliance formations, the evidence indicates that these alignments were more a response to antecedent conditions of instability and the anticipation of imminent conflict than determinants of war themselves. And while polarized alliance structures are often correlated with war, the hostile groupings in existence by 1756, had evolved out of the rapidly shifting diplomatic patterns known as the ‘renversement des alliances’, events that helped precipitate a dynamic process of escalation that could not be halted. It is, of course, possible that the ad hoc and secretive nature of most alliances contributes to international tensions by generating suspicion and mistrust, and that the search for and existence of allies increases the chances of misperception of decision makers, thereby producing a high threat environment equally conducive to war. Thus, in its American setting, the Seven Years’ War—​certainly in its timing—​appears to have resulted from an action/​reaction cycle triggered by concurrent misinterpretations on the part of England and France of their respective intentions. The Anglo-​French response to perceived hostilities was to escalate military/​naval preparations in order to deter aggression and prepare for war in case deterrence failed. Intensifying pressures were the self-​serving, bellicose initiatives of officials and speculators on both sides of the Anglo-​French frontier (Schweizer 1989). Altogether, these actions produced a conflict spiral which, reinforced by psychological repercussions, escalated toward open war. It was similar uncertainty regarding adversarial capabilities and intentions that prompted Frederick II’s agreement with England while still allied to France and which, reinforced by belief in Prussia’s offensive superiority, decided his preemptive strike against Saxony in the summer of 1756. Both measures—​the military

570   Karl Schweizer initiative succeeding the failed diplomatic maneuver—​brought to completion the Austro-​ French-​Russian coalition he had hoped to disrupt and precipitated the war in Europe he had feared all along. Ultimately, alliances, including those operative on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, are not prime determinants of great power conflicts but rather intervening variables in a dynamic pattern of conflict comprising antecedent condition, political tensions, misperceptions, and underlying systemic processes which independently contribute to war. This, in turn, suggests that the significance of specific wars rests not only on the identity and potency of the states involved, the issues in dispute, or even the flexibility or perceptual accuracy of the combatants but also depends upon when these wars occur within the global political system: what W. R. Thompson has called ‘world system time’ (see Thompson 1983 and 1988). In this sense, the Seven Years’ War must be seen in part as a structural crisis in the international system, since it occurred in a period of transition within that system precipitated by imbalances in the distribution of capabilities between the principal world powers, England and France. Once the global system has entered a transition zone, even relatively trivial incidents or seemingly minor crises can serve to tilt the structural imbalance in favour of a global war. Britain’s rise to imperial predominance, based on naval, commercial and fiscal superiority was resisted by France, a power economically less dynamic, resulting in a Euro-​Atlantic conflict fought to resolve the issue of systemic leadership, to reorganize the framework of international economic competition, and to effect a realignment of global systems governance with the new distribution of power as registered by war. Simultaneously, the growth of exchange networks and polarized alliance structure hastened the transition of conflict to Europe, the merging of continental with colonial issues, and the involvement of states with widely divergent motives and aims (Schweizer 1987).

Conclusion Via its organizing precepts (modernity and granularity) the Handbook has encouraged a concentrated theoretically reflective and contextualist approach to the history of thought that innovatively expands the temporal/​spatial perimeters of International Relations (IR) research. Applied to the Seven Years’ War, this more nuanced mode of analysis intersects with and challenges the ‘hegemony of time’, a central component of modernization theory; namely, the primacy of temporal metaphors and the view of history as genealogy and internal development. Transcending the polarity of conventional temporal scales, the contributors are largely agreed that no single time frame is appropriate for all human history or inherently superior. The operative historical trajectory then entails not linear unfolding but ever shifting forms of human contact that, over the centuries, have crossed untold qualitative thresholds. Even ‘tradition’ is shown to be a flexible language of social discourse. Tradition can be adapted to new circumstances, or indeed ‘invented’ to historically legitimate current political practice (Conrad 2016). A wider matrix allows alternate time perspectives to be viewed together, providing more integrative, analytical correlates that allow the deployment of global perspectives within an expansive framework of both agency and contingency. Ultimately, interstate conflicts are not

The Seven Years’ War    571 simply manifestations of rival cultures or contending mindsets, but are deeply embedded in a historical dialectic of mobility and interaction: an amalgam of political, economic, systemic, and military/​diplomatic frictions affecting and shaping commensurate policy responses. In an era such as the mid-​eighteenth century, uniquely predisposed to war, chronically destabilizing was the omnipresence of so-​called ‘windows of opportunity’ arising from systemic instability, uneven distributions of national power, imperialist ambitions, and decision-​making errors in the face of competing priorities. Here, the Handbook’s empirical templates highlight and illuminate the uniquely spatial dimensions of the Seven Years’ War, unfolding within an evolving matrix that correlates human intention with the ever shifting and transformative dynamics of the international system: mobility and interaction extending to the global level. In IR terms, it appears that the British and French might potentially have sorted out their differences and avoided war in 1756 had not ‘first move advantage’ ended talks by precipitating military initiatives during the pre-​war crisis. Typically, such a scenario prompts states to overlook or rush diplomatic solutions or abandon them altogether before they bear fruit. This forecloses on deterrence options and assures that decisions will be made under the purview of uncritically held assumptions. Thus, the Anglo-​French Ohio Dispute of 1755 expanded largely from misperceptions nurtured by faulty intelligence. Soon thereafter, short-​term ‘windows’ triggered military action. Considering war inevitable, French leaders hurried troops to North America before Britain used its superior navy to seal off the Atlantic. Determined to rob France of time to collect her resources, London promptly dispatched a huge squadron under Admiral Boscawen, whose operations, though only partially successful, served to expand the colonial conflict and, in due course, reconfigured Europe’s geo-​political map with the portentous Diplomatic Revolution. Given more time, leaders on both sides might have uncovered and counteracted the misperceptions that ignited their collision, but ‘window’-​driven military deployment duly foreclosed on further diplomatic efforts (see van Evera 1999). Avoiding the mechanistic/​ reductionist tendencies characterizing the ‘world system’ approach, the Handbook uniquely captures the vibrant synergies dominating and determining inter-​state affairs; the mentalities of key decision-​makers at critical conjunctures, diplomatic interventions, the varying cultural contexts of war, the role of structural processes and systemic variables, all integrated into the mainstream of exchange relationships expanded to the global level. This also encompassed the distinctive socio-​ political patterns, ideological precepts, norms, conventions and new conceptualizations of power and space that have determined world historical change to the present day.

Bibliographic Notes This chapter is substantially based on manuscript research among the National Archives in: Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Hanover, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Ottawa. Numerous private and university documentary collections have also been consulted. For reasons of space, none of these have been cited here individually but full details are conveniently accessible in: K. W. Schweizer and M. Schumann, The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History (London 2010, 282–​292). As one might expect, the secondary literature on the

572   Karl Schweizer general history of the Seven Years War is immense, beginning with the now classic narratives by inter alia, Parkman, Gipson, Corbett, and Waddington, concentrating largely on epic military/​naval aspects, with lesser, if any, attention devoted to the tactical/​strategic/​systemic issues reflecting the multi-​theatre dimensions of this Euro-​Atlantic conflict. Important later works published over the last 40 years or so have tended to correct this imbalance giving more due attention to vital primary sources, new theoretical approaches, and expanded temporal scales.

References Baugh, D. 2011. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–​1763. Harlow: Person Education. Black, J. 1986. Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-​French Relations in the 18th Century. London: Duckworth. Conrad, S. 2016. What is Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fowler, W. 2005. Empires at War: The Seven Years War and the Struggle for North America. Vancouver BC: Douglas and McIntyre. Gunn, G. 2003. First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange 1500–​1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Holsti, K. 1991. Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1643–​1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, J. 1983. War in the Great Power System, 1495–​1975. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Marston, D. 2001. The Seven Years War. London: Routledge. Middleton, R. 1985. The Bells of Victory The Pitt-​Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years War, 1757–​1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachsenmaier, D. 2011 Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schweizer, K. 1987. ‘The Seven Years War: A System Perspective’. In The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Black. London: Routledge. Schweizer, K. 1989. England, Prussia and the Seven Years War. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press. Schweizer, K. 2001. War, Politics and Diplomacy Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schweizer, K. 2003. ‘Diplomacy’. In Oxford Dictionary of the Enlightenment, ed. A. Kors, 360–​364. New York: University Press America. Schweizer, K. and Schumann, M. 2010. The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History. London: Routledge. Szabo, F. 2008. The Seven Years War in Europe 1756–​1763. London: Routledge. Thompson, W. 1983. Contending Approaches to World System Analysis. Chicago: Sage. Thompson, W. 1988. On Global War: Historical-​Structural Approaches to World Politics. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Van Evera, S. 1999. Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Chapter 39

The Haitian Revolu t i on Musab Younis Haiti does not enjoy prominence in the study of international relations. It is not a great power, or even adjacent to one: Samuel Huntington (1996, 137) called it a ‘truly kinless country’, apart from every great world civilization. It wields little economic or political influence. It is habitually referred to as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It is wracked by devastating natural disasters. In orthodox narratives about the evolution of the international system—​the emergence of states and empires, the expansion of international society, nationalism, and decolonization—​Haiti is absent, as if it stands aberrantly outside these vast and sweeping world-​historical processes. It does not seem to really possess sovereignty. It is at best a ‘fragile’, at worst an entirely ‘failed’, state, subject to repeated intervention from external powers. It is ‘a political and economic dead man walking’, as one English journalist writes (Gill 2017, 146). He is not the first to see Haiti as a fundamentally ‘primitive and incomprehensible territory’ (Dubois 2012, 3). How can we redress this disastrously skewed picture? There are, broadly, two options. The first is to re-​insert Haiti and the Haitian Revolution into history and international relations: to make a claim for its centrality, as against its putative marginality. The second is to use Haiti as an example that exposes the limitations of the categories we use to measure significance and meaning when we study the international—​in other words, to make a case for abandoning the idea of centrality altogether, drawing on Haiti’s own intellectual history to sketch an alternative view of the international: its forms of power, hierarchies, constraints, and possibilities. Let me begin with the first option. A strong case can be made that the Haitian Revolution (1791–​1804) shaped the trajectory of international politics. Saint-​Domingue, the French colony which became Haiti, produced almost half the world’s sugar and coffee. The uprising started by its enslaved population—​at half a million, the largest such group in the Caribbean—​is one of the three biggest slave rebellions in history (Geggus 2002, 55). It led to the foundation of the second republic in the Americas, nearly doubled the size of the United States, destroyed the world’s most productive colony, and ended French hopes of a Western empire. All this came at enormous cost. The war ended the lives of at least 100,000 of the colony’s residents (20% of the population), mostly Africans and people of color; 50,000 French sailors and soldiers, including 19 generals; and tens of thousands of British troops

574   Musab Younis (Dubois 2005, 302, 298; Trouillot 2015, 99; Geggus 2002, 50). The destruction of the city of Cap Français in 1793 was ‘the most murderous instance of urban conflict in the entire history of the Americas’ (Popkin 2010, 2). Yet the end result was, contrary to every other known slave uprising in history, an independent state led by the formerly enslaved. The historian David Patrick Geggus (2002, 5) justly concludes that ‘few revolutions in world history have had such profound consequences’. What were those consequences? One way of exploring this question is through the calculation of costs and consequences. A number of historians have taken this route (see especially the volume edited by David P. Geggus, 2001). The revolution cauterized a major artery of the Atlantic slave trade. The largest slave insurrections in the Americas all took place in the forty years following the Haitian Revolution (Geggus 2001, xii): one historian has credited the revolution with a substantive shift in the demands made by such rebellions (Genovese 1992). When a planned uprising known as the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba was discovered in 1812, its leader was found with a book of images of Haiti’s generals (Childs 2009). The Louisiana purchase—​a direct result of the revolution—​was a transformative turning-​point in the intra-​ European battle for the Americas, buttressing Anglo hegemony through a vast expansion of the US, which subsequently became the world’s most powerful state (see e.g. Lachance 2001; for another view, see Geggus 2001, 249). To the south, Haiti impacted the course of Latin American nationalism. Alexandre Pétion—​the president of the southern republic of Haiti—​hosted a fugitive Simón Bolívar in 1815–​16 and provided him with vital material support for an expedition to Venezuela. Haiti assisted a number of other attempts to overthrow Spanish rule in the Americas (Dubois 2005, 302; Geggus 2001, xv, 250). And it repeatedly invaded and occupied neighbouring Santo Domingo over a period of five decades—​initially, in 1822, enjoying considerable popular support in the Spanish territory. Haiti also reverberated across nineteenth-​century Western culture: it inspired a verse drama from Lamartine, a sonnet from Wordsworth, and Victor Hugo’s first novel (Geggus 2001, 248). It left a deep imprint on Caribbean and African American literature, most strikingly in a series of plays from Césaire, Walcott, Glissant, and Du Bois (see Figueroa 2015). I have been sketching out some of the key claims that could underwrite a re-​evaluation of the Haitian Revolution according to what we might call a balance-​sheet approach—​ fundamentally empirical in nature. There are conceptual difficulties with this approach, which I will soon outline. But there are difficulties with this argument even on its own empirical terrain. For every example of the revolution’s spread, there is a counter-​argument that the revolution was actually contained. What was the revolution’s true impact on slavery? Enslaved Africans were no longer taken to Saint-​Domingue; but they were taken elsewhere in the Caribbean, strengthening slave-​based production in countries like Cuba (Drescher 2001, 11; Ferrer 2014). Not all the revolution’s reverberations were progressive, and some were plainly reactionary. White exiles from Saint-​ Domingue, for example, discouraged independence movements in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Bryan 1984, 35). And despite Haitian assistance to Venezuela and Colombia in 1816, the northern republics of Latin America refused to recognize Haiti when they became independent. A victorious Simón Bolívar distanced himself from the republic that had sheltered and equipped him, refusing it an invitation to the Pan-​ American Conference in 1826 (Fischer 2004, 4). On the cultural plane, though Haiti gripped

The Haitian Revolution    575 the imagination of several key figures in the Caribbean, it was also seen as more foreign and distant than other islands. When one Trinidadian graduate student, who became a leading scholar of Haiti, organized his first trip to the neighbouring republic in 1969, he remembered ‘the immigration officer in Kingston asking me why I was going there since no one in his experience ever did’ (The Public Archive 2012). If the balance-​sheet approach to the Haitian Revolution gives us a basis for redressing its marginality, it also seems to offer us new grounds for dismissing it. For all the undeniable power of its revolution, Haiti did not destroy the Atlantic system of imperial capitalism. Slavery persisted in neighbouring countries for another eight decades, only to be replaced by legal systems that assiduously maintained regimes of race. And internal difficulties had sapped Haiti’s power beyond its borders by the mid-​nineteenth century. Trapped by the strictures of a strictly empirical approach to the revolution’s consequences, we can find ourselves forced to agree that Haiti’s power and influence were ultimately limited. I want to move now to discussing the second option for redressing misrepresentations of Haiti. This alternative view suggests that debates about Haiti’s impact and significance are flawed conceptually because they try to make a case for Haiti on grounds that are uneven. They are uneven, moreover, in part because they have been constructed to occlude the importance of the revolution. Let me explain. Since the Haitian Revolution took place at the same time as—​and was indivisibly connected to—​the French Revolution, and since it had such far-​reaching consequences, many have followed C. L. R. James (1989) in proclaiming Haiti’s centrality to modernity. But this centrality can be explained in terms of incommensurability rather than by adopting conventional criteria of significance. Following its revolution, Haiti existed as a uniquely ruptural state. A record of resistance to enslavement elsewhere across the Caribbean had led to the formation of breakaway free communities: Jamaica’s Blue Mountain maroons, the palenques in Central and South America, the cumbe of Venezuela (Fick 1990, 55). But while they exercised political power and influence, these communities existed tenuously within slave societies that continued to function around them. Only in Saint-​Domingue was the entire slave system overthrown. This means, as Eugene Genovese (1992) argued, that Haiti cannot simply be understood as a large maroon community. It was incomparable to any threat yet posed to the Atlantic system: not only due to its scale and extent, but also because it constructed the first society ‘in accord with the axiom of universal emancipation’(Nesbitt 2008, 1, 19). Thinking about the Haitian Revolution in this way makes it a different kind of turning point in the history of the international system. Not simply a breakaway state, Haiti became an instantiation of an impossibility. It was what Trouillot (2015, 89) has called ‘unthinkable’, because of the challenge it presented to ‘the ontological order of the West and the global order of colonialism’. A good example of Haiti’s potential to destabilize existing categories is the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty has been central to the study of international relations since the inception of the field. In a fairly typical version of the orthodox narrative, Daniel Philpott (2001, 3) traces sovereignty from a doctrine articulated by Hobbes, Bodin, and Grotius in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through a practice of European states by the mid-​seventeenth century, and finally to a concept that secured global assent through decolonization. ‘Sovereignty has come closer to enjoying universal explicit assent than any other principle of political organization in history’, he concludes. The Haitian Revolution

576   Musab Younis is not mentioned in his book (which is titled Revolutions in Sovereignty.) Haiti is only listed as a hapless member of a group of ‘war-​torn, malnourished, dictatorial, and minority-​ persecuting states’, and an example of a state that is technically sovereign, but subject to international supervision (Philpott 2001, 16). This orthodox conception of sovereignty has been censured for its blindness to the colonial relations that produced both the idea and the practice of sovereignty (Krishna 2001). An analysis of the Haitian Revolution can help to advance this critique. First, Haiti’s ability to be sovereign was qualitatively different from that of other fledgling republics of its era. It was treated as a case apart due to its successful overthrow of slavery and the threat it consequently posed to the Atlantic racial order. The US imposed an embargo on Haiti between 1806 and 1810. In contrast to every other comparable case involving a breakaway republic, no country would recognize Haiti until France, the former colonial power, had done so in 1825. Recognition came in exchange for a crushing indemnity that, among other things, forced Haiti to recognize the legitimacy of the slave system it had overthrown (Knox 2016, 119). Haiti was not, as has sometimes been suggested, totally isolated. The historian Julia Gaffield (2015) has shown that Britain, Spain, and the US generally continued to maintain trade relations with Haiti. While they were concerned about the spread of the revolution, more prosaic interests could prevail. ‘As long as we don’t allow the blacks to possess a ship’, mused Thomas Jefferson in 1801, ‘we can allow them to exist and even maintain very lucrative commercial contacts with them’ (Dubois 2005, 225; see also Brown 2005). But this does not alter the overall picture. Before many European states came into existence, a uniquely contained ‘revolution in sovereignty’ had already taken place in the Caribbean. The Haitian republic was not so much unrecognized as it was subjected to what Karen Salt (2019, 286) has called ‘repeated acts of non-​recognition’. Thinking about non-​recognition as a constructive act brings to our attention the formative exclusions at the heart of sovereignty. When the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, Louis André Pichon, counselled that Haiti could not be recognized because ‘[t]‌he United States could not place herself on a level with Negroes’, he was making a specific argument about the role of race in the operation of sovereignty (Gaffield 2015, 133). Almost two centuries later, Haiti was again implicated in questions of sovereignty when Haitian migrants heading to the US were detained in a space of ‘exceptional sovereignty’ at Guantánamo (Reid‐Henry 2007). Instead of seeing sovereignty as the application of state power across a bounded territory, then, Haiti helps us to think about sovereignty as a process that is necessarily racialized, ‘order[ing] subject populations differentially in pursuit of particular historical agendas’ within a global imperial framework (Wolfe 2015, 25; see also Nisancioglu 2019). Haiti shows how race and sovereignty are indissolubly bound, the one producing the other. In other words, rather than asking about why Haiti has been ‘weak’, ‘fragile’, or ‘failed’, we could ask what Haiti’s struggles with sovereignty reveal about sovereignty’s occluded lineaments and boundaries. I have been suggesting that the concept of sovereignty can be destabilized through an examination of Haiti. This is also true for other ideas. Rather than making claims about the strength and capacity (or otherwise) of the Haitian state, for example, we can use the revolution to interrogate the conception of the unitary state that lies at the core of such arguments. This involves grappling with what Trouillot (2015, 40) called ‘a war within the war’: key divisions in the revolution’s late stages (1802–​03) between ‘Bossales’—​African-​born ex-​ slaves, largely from the Congo—​and Caribbean-​born Black officers. Trouillot (2015, 40–​48) points out that accounts of King Henry Christophe generally fail to mention his murder

The Haitian Revolution    577 of Colonel Jean-​Baptiste Sans Souci, a Bossale former slave, who had, unlike Christophe, resisted French rule for the whole period of the revolution. It is possible to trace this divide into post-​independence Haiti. When the declaration of independence was signed, over two-​thirds of the 37 signatories were of mixed racial descent, and none was African (Geggus 2002, 208—​though this seems to exclude independent Haiti’s first leader, Dessalines, who is increasingly accepted to have been African-​born. See Girard 2011, 248). One analyst thus compares Haiti to Mexico: both countries came, by 1820, to be dominated by criollo elites (Bellegarde-​Smith 1980, 16). But different visions of freedom were articulated by Haitian peasants. While the leaders’ vision, usually a variant on the plantation model, has come to constitute the record of official archives, the alternative—​and more obscured—​peasant vision has been described as ‘counter-​plantation system’: an evasion of the glitter of the world economy, and a stubborn embrace of smallholder egalitarianism (Casimir 2001; see Dubois 2016). Who, then, are we talking about when we talk about ‘Haiti’? The explicitly patriarchal language in the Declaration of Independence, in which the head of state is referred to as the ‘father’, points to the gendered frame through which Haitian nationalism and independence came to represented (Fischer 2004, 267). ‘What happened to actual black women during Haiti’s repeated revolutions’, asks Joan Dayan (1998, 47), ‘as they were mythologized by men, metaphorized out of life into legend?’ (see P. Girard 2009; Braziel 2005; Chancy 1997). Revisionist accounts of other Caribbean uprisings have recently argued for a gendered dynamic at work that complicates ideas of unitary resistance (Kars 2016). Two influential works, by Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (2015) and David Scott (2004), have also centered the question of narrative with respect to the Haitian Revolution. For Trouillot (2015, 27), recognizing the ‘silencing’ of the revolution pushes us to think about how ‘any historical narrative’, even one that may appear to represent subaltern perspectives, is at bottom ‘a particular bundle of silences’. David Scott argues, in a study (2004) exploring C. L. R. James’ classic book The Black Jacobins (1938), that the conceptual frameworks imposed on key anticolonial events must be recognized as constraining our ability to think beyond our postcolonial present. Raising these questions means fracturing the unitary state implicit in the heroic narratives that begin with slavery and end with independence. A focus on internal power struggles, the tergiversations of the revolution and the array of actors involved can lead to a kind of anti-​ theory. One historian implores us to ‘cast aside all attempts at categorization’ (Girard 2011, 9) and embrace these events in all their granularity. But a recognition of the partial ways of theorizing the revolution can also lead to calls for more theory. Robbie Shilliam (2017) has, for example, suggested that we move away from the strictures of colonial science by taking Vodou seriously as a way of knowing the revolution. Showing us the pitfalls of thinking in terms of a unitary state, Haiti also reminds us that fragmenting the state is a politically malleable choice. The occupation of the country by the US from 1915–​34 drew on narratives that deconstructed the Haitian state, representing it as sliding backwards in time and in need of paternalist guidance (and violence) to be dragged back into the modern world (Younis 2022: chap. 5). As well as sovereignty and the unitary state, the Haitian Revolution can unsettle assumptions about time and the condition of postcoloniality. Though standard treatments of postcolonial political thought avoid Haiti entirely (e.g. Kohn and McBride 2011), we might ask whether it should not rather be at the core of theories of postcolonialism. Haiti was after all the first postcolonial state and, as many have argued, the first to be subjected to

578   Musab Younis neo-​colonialism (Nesbitt 2008; Bellegarde-​Smith 1980). Launched with what Sidney Mintz (2007, 263) called ‘the most pessimistic prognosis in modern history’, Haiti was immediately confronted with the pressing dilemmas of the Third World, avant la lettre. Its predicament had preceded independence. Toussaint Louverture, in the period before his capture and exile, had seen no other option than to reconstruct the plantation system. He forced workers back to plantations, the only escape from which was military service: a shattering betrayal of the smallholding hopes of many insurgents (Dubois 2005, 248). His Constituent Assembly included members of the old Saint-​Domingue elite, but no ex-​slaves; to prove his loyalty he betrayed a slave uprising in Jamaica (Dubois 2005, 242.) Other Haitian leaders faced the same problems; they too attempted to reimpose plantation labour. The subsequent tribulations of Haiti—​its inequality, poverty, overdeveloped military, violent transitions of power, civil wars, weak export sector, vulnerability to foreign loans and intervention, and so on—​conform to a familiar pattern: what Naeem Inayatullah (1996, 52) has termed the difficulty of realizing ‘concrete sovereignty in the face of the external authority of the wealth-​ producing global division of labor’. So why is Haiti missing from most postcolonial accounts? Because it happened so early, Haiti’s independence seems impossibly out of time. Inaugurating the postcolonial era in the very midst of the colonial era, Haiti destabilizes standard periodizations. The process of decolonization is commonly represented with an implicit teleology, beginning with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, peaking at the ‘winds of change’ period around 1960, before dragging on through the proxy wars of Salazar’s collapse and the last gasp of White-​minority rule in South Africa. What to make of Haiti, whose intellectuals were theorizing decolonization, in a postcolonial state created through armed struggle, before the birth of Marx? The Saint-​Domingue uprising was historically unique, but it pushed at the limits of a racial order that extended far beyond the colony’s borders. When the French general Rombacheau, attempting to reconquer the country, reinstituted racial segregation in theaters, or when his chief of staff wrote that ‘it is high time the white color dominates everywhere’ (Girard 2011, 251), they were seeking to resolve a material crisis that recurred, in different times and places, across the world, following the collapse of a particular system of colonial governance within a world of empires. The French general Leclerc’s description of the guerrilla campaign waged by Haitian insurgents as a ‘war of Arabs’ is particularly revealing (Girard 2011, 120). So too is Toussaint Louverture’s (2014, 143) insistence from his prison cell that ‘if I were a white man, after serving like I served, all these misfortunes would not have happened to me’. In other words, as Trouillot (1990, 11) has aptly put it: ‘Haiti is not that weird. It is the fiction of Haitian exceptionalism that is weird’. For writers and artists across the Caribbean and Black Atlantic, an interest in Haiti has typically been founded not on the country’s apparent incommensurability, but on its potential comparability with other sites of anticolonial revolution and postcolonial state building. There is another key sense in which Haiti can be seen as prefiguring the postcolonial condition. Choosing the Taíno name ‘Haïti’ and thus emphasizing an indigenous and non-​ European identity for the country, Haiti’s early leaders sought to imagine a route out of the confines of race. The 1805 Haiti constitution thus defined all Haitians as Black, enacting what Fischer (2004, 232–​233) has called a ‘radical resignification’ of the ‘language of the colonizer’: seeking paradoxically to attain the universal by generalizing the particular. Though this article was dropped from later constitutions (Geggus 2002, 209), its importance has rightly

The Haitian Revolution    579 been recognized—​as the first recorded instance of the political reclamation of Black identity (Nicholls 1978, 179); and ‘by far the single most progressive racial ideology of its time’ (Grovogui 2011, 58). All Africans and Indigenous peoples were to be welcomed into the newly established country, an ideal which did involve some concrete attempts to encourage migration, particularly of African Americans under the Haitian President Boyer (Fanning 2015). Such early experimentation buckled under the exigencies of state building. But Karen Salt (2019, 15) has argued that, further into the nineteenth century, Haitian officials ‘performed a form of racial power’ through the use of ‘networks of influence’, seeking to position their state as a ‘a black space steeped in political power’. Any discussion of anticolonial anti-​racism must surely begin with an evaluation of Haiti’s experiments. I suggested earlier that arguments for Haiti’s significance are problematic because the very grounds on which we evaluate significance were partly constructed to occlude the importance of the revolution. Let me elaborate on this point. Beyond destabilizing common understandings of sovereignty, statehood, and postcoloniality, a study of the Haitian Revolution can also subvert the idea of modernity upon which such understandings are themselves based. By historicizing ‘modernity’, we can expose ways in which it was historically articulated in opposition to Haiti. Sybille Fischer (2004) has argued that the formation of Western modernity—​claimed by Europe and North America, and sought by creole Caribbean countries—​was premised upon the denial of Haiti’s revolutionary antislavery. Susan Buck-​Morss (2009) has also suggested that Hegel’s ‘master-​slave dialectic’ was directly influenced by the Haitian Revolution, which took place three years before he published Phenomenology of Spirit, but that the actual events of the revolution were obscured in his work. Though their arguments differ, one key conclusion that can be drawn from both Fischer and Buck-​Morss is that the constitution of modernity cannot be properly understood without taking account of the disavowal of Haiti. From this perspective, it becomes less surprising that Haiti is represented as askance and anomalous, since the very boundaries of normality were drawn around the exclusion of Haiti. A closer look at the events of the intertwined French and Haitian revolutions can help to explain this point. The 1790s in France were ‘experienced by the participants as the start of a future that had never before existed’, as Reinhart Koselleck (2004, 59) has written. They are generally seen as marking the birth of the modern world. But this account ignores contemporaneous events in Haiti, which offered a radically alternative version of that future. Since Saint-​Domingue was a French colony, another outcome of the 1790s in France could have theoretically been the establishment of a new egalitarianism in Haiti that swept away the vestiges of the ancien régime in the colony and implemented The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which had issued by the French National Constituent Assembly on 26 August 1789. This did not happen. By 1802, rather than bestowing the rights of man, the French general Leclerc was reimposing slavery in Saint-​Domingue and contemplating ‘a war of extermination’ (his words) in an attempt to reconquer the colony. Between 1789 and 1802, in other words, the precise manner in which modernity came to be realized—​whose legacy we continue to live with—​was one that deliberately and violently rejected the alternative future of anticolonial egalitarianism offered by Haiti. It did so through a host of revealing compromises and exclusions. When three national civil commissioners were sent from Paris to Saint-​Domingue in 1792 to restore order to the colony, for example, the motto on the flags carried by their ships was changed from ‘Live free or die’ to ‘The Nation, the Law, and the King’. Representatives of plantation owners were

580   Musab Younis seated at the national assembly, which explicitly debarred changes to the slave system ‘unless they were proposed by the slave owners themselves’ (Popkin 2010, 96, 131). As C. L. R. James (1989, 80) argued, it was the colonial question that ultimately ‘demoralized’ the constituent assembly. Little surprise that the slave insurgents initially lacked faith in the revolutionary republic, preferring to pledge allegiance to the deposed king. It is true that the French government, both in Saint-​Domingue and in Paris, ordered that slaves were freed (the decision was overturned under Napoleon). These orders were contained in the emancipation decrees of the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel in 1793, and the emancipation proclamation issued by the French Constituent Assembly in 1794. It could therefore be argued that the French Revolution was indeed extended to Haiti, even if this freedom was later rescinded, and that it is inaccurate to state the metropole-​ colony boundary was always so clearly drawn. But two points must be made about these decrees. First, they took place only in response to the self-​liberation of enslaved people and the consequent civil conflict in the colony. Until the destruction of Cap Français on 20 June 1793, as the historian Jeremy Popkin (2010) has shown, there was no sign of a general emancipation. Even as the commissioners gradually extended freedom to the whole enslaved population of French-​controlled Saint-​Domingue, they did so while ‘determined to show that they were still in control of the black population’; and their proclamations were accompanied with open threats to ex-​slaves carrying arms on their own (Popkin 2010, 258). ‘Who can calculate where our calamities will end, if more than 400,000 slaves who have nothing and who detest work, all become free at once, and if they become free through insurrection and by right of conquest?’ wrote one of the commissioners, Polverel, in a private letter in mid-​1793 (Popkin 2010, 265). Second, official moves towards ending slavery in Saint-​Domingue were bereft of any programme of genuine transformation. ‘This land does not belong to you’, insisted the commissioner Polverel, addressing the colony’s formerly enslaved people in the wake of emancipation (Dubois 2005, 185). Land reform was stalled, then abandoned. The historian Laurent Dubois (2005, 186) explains that the system Polverel instituted in the wake of emancipation was, in fact, ‘eerily prophetic of the social formations that would emerge throughout the Americas in the wake of slavery’. In Paris, the Constituent Assembly’s emancipation proclamation—​overturned by Napoleon on 20 May 1802—​was, while unprecedented and hard won, of little consequence for enslaved people living in France’s colonies. It did not benefit those in Guadeloupe, in Martinique, or in France’s territories the Indian Ocean; and those in French-​controlled parts of Saint-​Domingue had already been liberated, either through their own actions or by the proclamations of the commissioners in the colony. Only a small number in Cayenne (French Guiana) were actually affected by the decree (Popkin 2010, 373). The obdurate reluctance to apply the Rights of Man to Saint-​Domingue can easily be attributed to the interests of the plantocracy and their influence on the Constituent Assembly and the internal politics of the colony. But that view, while accurate in some respects, scants the structurally determinate role played by race in shaping the outcome of the Haitian Revolution. Power in Saint-​Domingue was, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, premised upon race, which structured society and connected it, through this structure, to the colonial economies of Europe. The colony’s free people of colour (the gens de couleur), a group that was mostly of mixed African and European descent, constituted an intermediary class in

The Haitian Revolution    581 Saint-​Domingue. Numbering about thirty thousand at the outbreak of the revolution, it was the largest such group anywhere in the Caribbean. Free people of colour had been subjected to an increasingly harsh system of racial discrimination, embedded in the colony’s law, since the 1750s. Rebellions by some of them—​most famously, Vincent Ogé in 1790—​were viciously suppressed in the years before the slave uprising. In the early days of the uprising, King Louis XVI endorsed a plan to give the colony’s free people of colour full political representation in order to gain their support (Garrigus 2011; Popkin 2010, 44; Geggus 2002, 95). In theory, there is no reason why the uprising of enslaved Africans could not have been suppressed with the assistance of free people of colour in Saint-​Domingue. Many of the latter group were themselves slaveowners; they constituted half the colony’s militia and almost all its rural police, and were generally responsible for capturing fugitive slaves (Geggus 2002, 6). The colony’s social structure was carefully calibrated to give this population incentives in the maintenance of the slave system. Two years into the uprising, by mid-​1793, political leaders of the free population of colour had ‘made no effort to bring about the abolition of slavery’ (Popkin 2010, 196). As David Geggus (2002, 95) points out, while some free people of colour did join rebel slaves, many others fought against them with British, Spanish, and French armies: their choice to side with the self-​liberated population en masse was not made until midway through the 1802 war, a decade after the uprising first began. But the inching forward of political rights granted to the colony’s free people of colour—​ strategically granted to restore order and productivity to a recalcitrant colony—​ was resisted to the end by significant numbers of the colony’s White population, who felt their own status under unacceptable threat by the undermining of White supremacy. For them, ‘[t]‌he distinction between a white man and a man of colour was . . . fundamental’, as C. L. R. James (1989, 34) argued. In this sense, the breakdown of order in Saint-​Domingue was overdetermined: there was no way of suppressing the uprising of enslaved Africans in a way that did not critically undermine the social organization of the colony. By late 1802, when the French general Leclerc wrote that the time had come to ‘wage a war of extermination’, race had taken centre stage. Mass killings began, including those of prisoners gassed with sulphur in the holds of ships. Leclerc ‘openly considered a general massacre of virtually the entire adult Black population of Saint-​Domingue, rebel or not—​what a later age would call a genocide’ (Girard 2011, 209–​210, 220). Such views were not unusual. Hopes for the sterilization, deportation, and eventual extermination of free people of colour on the island could be found in letters sent by Whites to family abroad, and in pamphlets written by colonists (Daut 2015, 99–​100). The seemingly gratuitous targeting of mixed-​race elites by Leclerc’s successor, Rombacheau, must be seen in this context. It was the policy of drowning people of colour in the sea and gassing them in ships that pushed some senior figures of colour on the French side to defect (Girard 2011, 214–​215). Haitian writing after the revolution was replete with references to this violence, not least in its Declaration of Independence, which saw Haitian identity as being founded upon an eternal hatred of the French: who ‘are not our brothers, and never will be’. The contrast with the mild-​mannered Declaration of Independence of the United States—​which generously refers to ‘British brethren’—​is stark, and points to the deeply emotive impact of the racialized violence to which Saint-​Domingue was subjected in its final years (Gaffield 2016, 14). These details are important for an alternative narrative of the Haitian Revolution—​one which rejects the premise of modernity that we might initially use to measure significance.

582   Musab Younis They emphasize how the material fact of colonial slavery and its attendant social formations, organized on the basis of race, continued to underwrite the political transformations in Europe that constitute the advent of modernity. At precisely the same time as those transformations, and connected to them, an act of mass self-​liberation in Saint-​Domingue came to represent an ‘unthinkable’ limit to the promises offered (to some) by that modernity. So rather than measuring significance in terms of state power and capacity, sovereignty and influence—​attributes of states in a situation of modernity—​we might see the Haitian Revolution as significant in that it that exposes the limitations of those very categories. To conclude these reflections, I want to move to asking how Haiti’s own intellectual history can help us to sketch an alternative view of the international. Haiti is remarkable for the depth and venerability of its self-​analysis. At a time when colonial rule was metastasizing across most of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the independent Haitian state was producing its own traditions of historiography, poetry, play-​and novel-​writing, fabulism, political polemic, and satire. The richness and variety of this work militates against any easy conclusions, but we can make three general points here. First, Haiti’s tradition of historiography has left us an unmatched archive: it is the oldest such body of work in any postcolonial state. Thomas Madiou published Histoire d’Haïti in 1847, a multi-​volume work combining archival methods with oral histories; Joseph Saint-​Rémy published, among a number of studies, La Vie de Toussaint Louverture in 1850; and Beaubrun Ardouin published Etudes sur l’historie d’Haïti in 1853. Along with other key nineteenth-​century figures—​the historians Émile Nau and Vergniaud Leconte; the poets Juste Chanlatte, François-​Romain Lhérisson, and Jules Solime Milscent; the playwrights Massillon Coicou, Antoine Dupré, and Vendenesse Ducasse—​their work can help us to explore questions of postcolonial state formation and Caribbean international politics, as well as meta-​historical questions about the relationship between history-​writing and politics in a postcolonial context. Second, Haiti’s political writing occupies a central location in the history of anticolonial thought. Baron de Vastey’s Le Système Coloniale Dévoilé, published in 1815 and recently translated into English as The Colonial System Unveiled, has been described as ‘the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’(Bongie 2016, 7), prefigurative of Fanon and Césaire. Vastey (2016, 144) celebrates his ability to contradict the slanderous writing of Europeans—​‘The friends of slavery, those eternal enemies of humankind’—​with ‘Haytian presses of our own’, allowing him to ‘unveil the crimes of the colonists’: a celebration of anticolonial literacy that resonates emphatically with the work of writers, editors, and journalists across the Black Atlantic a century later (Younis 2022). Marlene Daut’s (2016, 191) masterful analysis of the narrative qualities of Vastey’s text shows how, like the work of other early Haitian writers such as Louis-​Bosrond Tonnerre, The Colonial System Unveiled constructs itself in opposition to the ‘commercial, alienating, and complicit literary genres’ of gothic romance and sentimental abolitionist narrative. As Daut demonstrates, Vastey self-​consciously refuses to employ common literary devices that would ameliorate the intensity of the slaveowner tortures he describes; at the same time, he presents himself as communicating with surviving witnesses and with the voices of the dead, a distant precursor of the Latin American tradition of testimonio. Daut’s analysis gives us a glimpse into the avenues opened up by Haitian political writing for a study of anticolonial thought. If Haiti was the prototype of the postcolonial state, Haitian intellectual culture foreshadowed forms of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural nationalism. This was especially the case during the US occupation of 1915–​34. An influential tradition of indigénisme

The Haitian Revolution    583 developed in the republic, dominated by the work of the anthropologist Jean Price Mars and particularly his work in defence of Haitian peasant culture, Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928). The nativist offshoot of indigénisme—​noirisme—​came to dominate Haitian politics through the dictatorship established by one of its key proponents, François Duvalier. Its roots lie in an earlier period. Sybille Fischer (2004, 50–​51) has highlighted how, in nineteenth-​century Haitian writing, an Egypto-​centrism typically associated with twentieth-​century African-​ American cultural nationalism can be found. I have discussed here only published texts, which, for most of Haiti’s history, have been inaccessible to most Haitians. A fuller account of Haitian intellectual and cultural life and the breadth of its contribution to international thought must take account of Vodou, Catholicism, dance, and music (Dubois 2016; Desmangles 2000; McAlister 2002; Ramsey 2011). But this brief summary gives some indication of an alternative approach to the Haitian Revolution. It is one that does not seek to show direct political (or even cultural) influence, but to think with Haitian writers and artists, and to consider how their view of the international might illuminate our own. My approach to the Haitian Revolution has been theoretical. This means it will not meet with the approval of all historians, some of whom have argued that the revolution should be seen as ‘the sum of hundreds of thousands of individual histories’ (Girard 2011, 9), about which theorizing should be kept to a minimum. There are good reasons to be cautious about making sweeping arguments about the Haitian Revolution without sufficient immersion in historical detail. But it is nevertheless unhelpful to hope that we can cleave Haiti’s history from Haiti’s present. For one thing, interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath continue to animate contemporary political claims, particularly the demand for reparations from France (Forsdick 2015). More generally, Haiti continues to exist in a permanent state of ‘crisis’, between natural disasters and political convulsions; Haitian migrants—​from what Donald Trump called ‘a shithole country’—​are targeted for deportation in the US and the Dominican Republic (Celeste 2018); and crack cocaine is nicknamed, in Kreyòl slang, as ‘viza’ (visa), because for a brief moment it allows its user to escape Haiti (Beckett 2019, 87). A study of Haiti’s history can cast light on the forms of international power and hierarchy that have shaped these present conditions. The alternative—​to evade theory entirely—​is to seek refuge from politics in scholasticism.

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Chapter 40

T he C ongress of V i e nna Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg Introduction The Congress of Vienna was quite an event. For nine months, from September 1814 through June 1815, the city hosted ‘the most spectacular peace conference in history’ (King 2008, 14). The Congress had it all: monarchs and princes, plenipotentiaries and politicians, financiers and filles de joie. Roughly 215 European principalities and states were represented, as well as many non-​state interest groups (Sluga 2017, 1407; Nicholson 1946, 132–​133). Those assembled danced, ate, paraded, and played, in an unprecedented mixing, symbolically and physically, across class and status (Vick 2014, 12–​13). In many respects, the Congress was one big party—​ a ‘Festivals Committee’ arranged the banquets, dances, performances, and parties (King 2008, 14). Attendees also talked—​formally in committees and diplomatic venues, informally in salons and at dinner tables. Meanwhile, behind closed doors the self-​proclaimed ‘powers of the first order’ crafted the Vienna Settlement, reordering the map of Europe. Because the settlement was negotiated in the shadow of Napoleon’s Hundred Days and signed before his defeat at Waterloo, there was no certainty that its provisions would be implemented. It took the post-​Waterloo Second Treaty of Paris and Quadruple Alliance to set the terms of enforcement. When late-​twentieth-​century International Relations (IR) scholarship (re)discovered the Concert of Europe as a case of great power ‘long peace’, the Vienna Settlement came under particular scrutiny. First, the fact that European great powers avoided war for so long, with neither nuclear weapons nor bipolarity, lent hope to those who wanted a happier answer to the question: in a world of nuclear weapons, does the path to peace rely solely on the capacity to destroy the world? Second, the fact that great power management and humanitarianism—​ principles central to contemporary global governance—​entered inter-​state relations with the Vienna Settlement raised questions about the relationship between liberal ideology and international order, especially since liberal revolution arguably brought the concert down in 1848. The Congress of Vienna itself played a limited role in the IR debates. Indeed, the terms ‘Congress’ and ‘Concert’ are used nearly synonymously. Paul Schroeder’s groundbreaking Transformation of European Politics (1994a) helped fuel all sides of these debates, while igniting a conversation about the relationship between the two disciplines, History and

588    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg IR (e.g. Elman and Elman 1997; Schroeder 1994b). In this inter-​disciplinary conversation, details of the Congress, such as parties or alleged mistresses, when mentioned at all, were included for color and context, not as part of any consequential narrative. The real work was in the negotiating room among the (male) leaders, drawing the map of Europe, facing down the revolutionary threat. In other words, the importance of the event is as the site of the settlement, the importance of which derives from its role—​potentially generalizable—​in the production of international order and liberal global governance. The IR debates rest on an explicit disciplinary consensus: states are the relevant actors; anarchy is the context of their interaction; inter-​state war is the fundamental problem; and the European experience is the basis of and generalizable to contemporary global governance. That consensus is underwritten by a more implicit consensus: the state is characterized by separate spheres, political and economic, domestic and international, private and public. Those binaries, associated with modernity, are treated as if they form the natural basis of politics. As such, the many processes and actors that converged at Vienna have been ‘known’ in IR through the prism of seemingly natural objects (Bukovansky and Keene, 2023). There are stories to tell—​beyond the scope of this chapter—​about the consolidation of the diplomatic profession, the rise of (American) Social Science, the birth of IR as a discipline and the nationalist historiographies of the nineteenth century, all of which condition the memory of the Congress and its seeming potential to speak to today. For now, it is useful to be reminded that, as concatenations of social events, the phenomena that IR scholars and historians study can be disrupted through scholarly intervention. The Congress’ 2014–​2015 bicentennial brought renewed scholarly attention to the nine months at Vienna. Historians such as Glenda Sluga (e.g. 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019) disrupt deeply held aspects of that disciplinary consensus; Stella Ghervas (2015) and Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick (2019) frame their analyses drawing on ideas from IR theory such as security culture and securitization, the latter picking up on Conze (2012). And this is just the scholarship in English (Aaslestad’s 2015 review includes German language contributions). This scholarship also suggests that the Congress of Vienna, while playing a role in modern scholarly debates, was not necessarily a modern event. Such disruptive insights suggest a second wave of generative conversation between the disciplines. With these ideas in mind, in this chapter we revisit the Congress. The first section, the Modern Congress, reviews the Congress as refracted through post-​Cold-​War IR debates, showing that the ‘schisms’ of contemporary IR scholarship converge into a horizon of inquiry shaping disciplinary knowledge of the event. The second section foregrounds dynamics marginalized by those debates, highlighting recent scholarship that, first, widens the lens to look ‘around the Congress’ and second, looks ‘at the Congress’ with a granular orientation. The goal is to provoke a sense of how the IR-​History conversation illuminates the many potentialities of those nine months at Vienna.

The Modern Congress Statesmen, diplomats, and scholars have long mined the Congress for insights about and templates for international diplomacy (discussed in, e.g. Conze 2019; Schulz 2015). While

The Congress of Vienna    589 nineteenth century reflection tended to criticize the Congress for its ‘betrayal of European peoples’ (Aaslestad 2015, 226), twentieth century scholarship focused on its diplomatic accomplishments (e.g. Nicolson 1946; Kissinger 1957). In the 1990s, IR scholars drew on the Congress in debates about collective security (e.g. Lipson 1994; Kupchan and Kupchan 1995), liberal hegemony (Ikenberry 2001), global governance (Mitzen 2013), and/​or concerting (Kupchan 2010; Zelikow 1992). In this section, we review the role of the Congress in two contemporary IR debates: the causes of great power peace and the sources of liberal order. In both, scholars disagree over whether the Congress founded something new or reflected longstanding, even timeless political dynamics. Notwithstanding disagreement, the debates rely on shared assumptions. The results of the Congress, the Vienna Settlement, set the conditions for great power peace in Europe, a peace among states in anarchy. The axis of debate has been about the power of diplomacy, rules, and ideology, on the one hand, versus material power on the other.

The Congress and the Long Peace The Concert of Europe is a data point in debates about great power cooperation and institutions; and the Congress plays a derivate role in the debates. Until roughly the mid-​ 1980s, IR scholars treated the nineteenth century as exemplifying realist, balance of power politics. The debate became more nuanced among historians in the 1990s, with balance being replaced by, for example ‘political equilibrium’ (Schroeder, Kraehe, Gruner, and Jervis 1992; Ingrao 1994). The IR debate evolved in paradigmatic terms, with three principal accounts corresponding to the three central explanatory variables associated with the dominant paradigms: a realist, balance of power approach; a liberal, institutionalist approach; and a constructivist, collective identity approach. The realist approach elevates the Congress over the Concert, interpreting the latter as a fancy name given to the politics resulting from the brilliant territorial balance constructed at Vienna. Axiomatic IR realists treat the Concert of Europe as a ‘myth’ (Kagan 1997/​98), arguing that stability prevailed after 1815 because no great power could gain from war. When they later perceived the balance shifting, the great powers went to war (e.g. Mearsheimer 1994/​95; Slantchev 2005; Rendall 2000). This interpretation is supported by historians, writing in this period and earlier, for whom the Vienna Settlement simply reflected and perpetuated the balance of power. Anderson (2007, 304) links the ‘lull’ in rivalry to post-​ Napoleonic ‘psychological and material exhaustion’ (also Seaman 1955). Webster (1950 [1919], 165) and Taylor (1971, xix, xxi–​xxiii) note continuities between eighteenth century and Concert balancing, even if the latter was more diplomatic than military (also Gulick 1965). Kissinger (1957) stresses the balance of power, albeit emphasizing legitimacy rather than the mere balance in a way that speaks across IR paradigms. Institutionalists and constructivists stress the Congress as not just the site of territorial division but of the inauguration of rules, devised by forward-​thinking statesmen, which made possible the Concert peace. Jervis (1985) and Kupchan and Kupchan (1991) were among the first IR scholars to argue that this case of great power ‘non-​war’ required ongoing self-​restraint, which they attribute to shared rules. From here, some scholars adopted the lens of rationalist regime theory, interpreting the Concert, in Louise Richardson’s (1999) words, as a ‘proto-​institution’ that intervened between preferences and the shared goal of

590    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg European stability, reducing uncertainty and taming the security dilemma (also Lipson 1994; Langhorne 1986; Lindley 2007). Other scholars highlight the role of collective identity or solidarity as the source of these rules. Cronin (1999; also Kupchan and Kupchan 1995) argues that elite transnational solidarity helps account for the choice of this security institution. Osiander (1994, 186–​187) highlights liberal ideas in the terminology used by Vienna statesmen (also Ikenberry 2001, ­chapter 4; Mitzen 2013, 131–​132). Irrespective of paradigm, many of these IR scholars draw on Paul Schroeder’s (1994a) pathbreaking archival work. Schroeder argued that the Vienna Settlement succeeded largely because the previous decade had entailed a messy process among statesmen of learning how to think systemically. He argues against the balance of power view, advancing the notion of a self-​conscious equilibrium—​the Vienna Settlement was not a balance of power settlement, but one aimed at establishing European equilibrium. While his archival work discusses the Pitt model, the statesmen’s education, and the possibility of transnational identities, Schroeder was not arguing, with Cronin, that elites internalized collective norms and then acted on them. Instead, he proposed that a ‘network of ideas’ about the system at the collective level broke through atomistic eighteenth-​century ideas about the balance of power (Schroeder 1994a; cf. Kruger and Schroeder 2002). In the early 1990s, American IR, still smitten with Waltz’s structural theory, was beginning to consider the possibility of systemic social structure (Wendt 1994). Schroeder’s structural, ideational perspective on the nineteenth century both engaged conventional IR on its own terms and provided a counter-​narrative (e.g. Levy 1994). Schroeder himself engaged IR scholars on their ‘turf ’ (e.g. Schroeder 1994b; 1997), making the case both for his specific argument and for more generally for expanding dialogue between IR and history (Elman and Elman 1997). While IR scholars disagree about the power of diplomacy and rules versus intentions and material power, and different stories can be told from the same data, their debates rest on two shared, unmentioned assumptions: nineteenth-​century great powers can be treated as states in anarchy; the European experience is generalizable to the contemporary global experience. These assumptions condition interpretations of processes, people, and events. For example, realists, institutionalists, and constructivists alike treat revolution as a ‘second image’, domestic level phenomenon, important insofar as it can be contagious. It is one of many phenomena that can cause the central problem of world politics: great power war.

The Congress and Liberal Order In debates about the contemporary liberal world order, the Congress often is treated as the origin of a messy but persistent trajectory toward a world order marked by collective security, institutionalized self-​restraint, and liberal global governance. The approach is linear and Euro-​centric, tracing a through-​line from the Congress to the League of Nations to the United Nations, sometimes entailing arguments about the spread of the ‘standard of civilization’ (e.g. Gong 1984). In the early 1990s, Holsti and Ruggie each hinted in this direction. For Ruggie (1992, 578–​ 580), norm-​ driven multilateralism originated in the Concert. Holsti similarly interprets the Congress ‘pentarchy’s’ arrogation of the responsibility for European stability as—​functionally if not formally—​a continental political authority (Holsti 1992, 32–​33; also Dakin 1979, 32).

The Congress of Vienna    591 A subsequent debate homes in on the relationship between liberalism and global governance. Ikenberry (2001) situates the Congress in a narrative of the progressive emergence of a liberal internationalist world order. He stresses Britain’s choice for strategic restraint despite its hegemonic power, rooting this choice in its domestic liberalism. Ikenberry treats the Concert as the first in a trajectory toward increasingly binding postwar orders, linking the success of this strategy to the spread of democracy. Both Kupchan’s (2010; also Kupchan and Kupchan 1995) interpretation of great power management and Mitzen’s (2013) collective intentionality approach to global governance highlight broadly liberal mechanisms, but focus on inter-​state mechanisms rather than the organization of domestic authority or implications for domestic regime type. These IR interpretations find a rough parallel in the debate among diplomatic historians about whether the Vienna Settlement amounted to transformation or restoration (discussed, e.g. in Aaslestad 2015). As Vick (2014, 3, 13) highlights, some scholars, following Habermas, treat the Congress as a transformative moment in the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois public sphere. Jarrett (2013, 3), among others (e.g. Kissinger 1957, 62–​63), cautions against treating the statesmen as direct ancestors of today’s liberal order in his nuanced account of the interplay of aristocratic privilege and enlightened ideas in Congress diplomacy. Others, echoing realists described previously, see restoration not transformation, interpreting the Congress as anti-​modern and thoroughly rebuked by 1848’s liberal revolutions (e.g. Taylor 1971; Seaman 1955). In this line of thinking, the European experience is treated as foundational, not merely generalizable, to contemporary global governance. From here, two points stand out. First, that the Congress may have founded the current international order is a paradox of its own time, the study of which can illuminate tensions in our own. On the one hand, liberalism established the conditions of possibility for the Concert’s greatest accomplishment. The European powers adopted a liberal solution to the problem of war—​acting together according to rules, introducing enlightened liberal values of equality and consultation to international affairs. On the other hand, these values were put in service largely of preserving the old order—​keeping (liberal) revolutions down and lesser and non-​Europeans (e.g. the Ottomans) out. That theme of tension resonates in contemporary global governance, where hierarchy among sovereign equal states is embedded in the framework, and where domestic illiberalism can be overlooked in the name of inter-​state liberal toleration. Second, the Eurocentrism of this line of argument can take on a different normative valence and spur critical reflection, as in Kevin McMillan’s (2010) Foucaultian interpretation of the Congress. For McMillan, the Settlement marked the birth of a ‘new science of European government’, a managerial orientation treating aspects of social life as objects for manipulation. Other scholars traced the rise and use of ‘systemic’ language in the eighteenth century (Osiander 1994; Schroeder 1994); McMillan’s point is that with the Settlement, objectifying Europe in order to manage it became the basis of their interaction. McMillan’s argument is supported by archival work on the novel practices and methods of the ambassadorial level congresses inaugurated through the Settlement, including the Rhine River Committee, the Allied Conference on the Occupation, and the London Conferences on Abolition (e.g. de Graaf, de Haan, and Vick 2019; Vick 2014; Haynes 2018). All of this work treats what began in Europe as the basis of today’s international/​global governmentality.

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The Congress The debates described previously interpret the Congress through a lens characterized by assumptions about actors, context, and the hierarchy of political questions, none of which existed unproblematically at the time of the Congress. At that time, ‘international’ was still a relatively new term; the idea of a states-​system with discrete logics was one of several interpretations of European politics; political, economic, and cultural relations and practices were not understood as wholly separate spheres; and European politics were made possible by domination of non-​European lands and people. That mismatch is the starting point for a wave of scholarship surrounding the Congress’ bicentennial. For example, contributors to a generative, multi-​disciplinary volume edited by de Graaf, de Haan, and Vick (2019b), abjure the common concept terms of prior analyses, such as ‘balance of power’. As the editors put it, ‘it is high time that they be studied as historical concepts, with their own historical trajectories’ (18). Its chapters offer granular accounts of the Congress that draw on and can potentially inform IR scholarship (also see Ghervas 2015; de Graaf 2020; de Graaf and Zwierlein 2013) while encouraging conversations across what Lawson has called ‘the eternal divide’ (Lawson 2012; also Buzan et al. 2016) between the disciplines. This section draws on that and other recent scholarship to pry the Congress loose from assumptions of the IR debates. Without rejecting the premise of a relationship between the Congress and contemporary world politics, we look both ‘around’ and ‘at’ the Congress to shake up the received wisdom. Some of the actors, dynamics, and processes that will be described play a big part in the narrative of the previous section; others remain unseen. The goal is not to fill the previous section’s debates with additional ‘grains’ of detail. Rather, contextualizing the Congress highlights the constructed, contingent nature of IR’s assumptions, potentially spurring new thinking about security, ‘the international’, and liberal global governance.

Around the Congress The early nineteenth century was characterized by revolution and empire, two phenomena that are downplayed in the IR debates. Recent scholarship points to a more complicated interplay of political, economic, and social forces surrounding the Congress that de-​centers the state and Europe without losing focus on the event.

Revolution Lawson (2019) reverses IR’s gaze for thinking about the relationship between revolution and war, arguing that revolution should be treated as a force of its own rather than a ‘second image threat’. Characterizing revolution as ‘inter-​social’ and constituted by ‘transboundary entanglements’, Lawson proposes that revolution is aimed not so much at individual states or regimes as it is aimed at ‘the international’ itself as an overarching structure of oppression (Lawson 2019, 8–​9). Revolutions challenge international order physically through violence

The Congress of Vienna    593 and ideationally through ideas that counter those of the great powers (31–​32). In this context, he draws out how the Vienna Settlement and subsequent Congress meetings were about halting revolution more than limiting great power war. Revolution prompted the Congress and remained salient especially in the 100-​days interlude. The post-​Waterloo treaties and consultation provision were directly addressed at the revolutionary threat—​a threat all leaders felt. Each great power, Britain included, suppressed democracy inside in the post-​ Napoleonic period; liberal revolution was something they worked together to prevent. In other words, the great power cooperative innovations were motivated by and in service of consolidating their position relative to a shared threat. Historians similarly question the ‘levels’ assumptions on which the earlier waves of scholarship rely. De Graaf, de Haan, and Vick’s (2019a) contributors focus on ‘threat management’ through the lens of a developing European ‘security culture’ that was not attentive to the domestic-​international divide (also De Graaf 2020; de Goede 2011; Rothschild 1995). To take one example from this volume, de Haan and van Zanten (2019) show how transnational and national policing co-​emerged in this time, as statemen responded to the perceived need to counter revolutionary conspiracies across the continent. Treating revolution on its own terms and widening the security lens to examine threat construction denaturalizes IR’s central assumptions of the states-​system and anarchy. By privileging inter-​state war as the security problem to solve, IR begs the question of the interests that state-​ness itself privileges. States ‘working together’ may reflect the successful management of inter-​state rivalries, but it also reflects and reproduces state-​ness itself.

Empire Scholarship on empire highlights further limitations of treating nineteenth-​century Europe as a states’ system by blurring Europe’s inside-​outside border and geographically and analytically. The Vienna Settlement bracketed extra-​European imperial holdings. That bracketing becomes a blind spot in IR debates where—​when empire appears at all—​it is treated as a source of (geo)political rivalry among the already-​existing great powers. For example, Schroeder’s discussion of the exclusion of America and the Ottoman Empire from the Vienna Settlement treats it as pragmatic choice, meant to sharpen the powers’ focus on continental stability (Schroeder 1994, 575; also Langhorne 1981/​1982). Bringing empire in shows the limits of that narrative. First, as Osterhammel (2014) argues, hiving off matters outside the continent artificially deglobalized the European system. The status of great powerhood itself made the Congress a global event, insofar as it rested on economic power, which, especially for Britain and France, depended on extra-​European colonial empire. The bracketing ensured that those sources of wealth (and thus status) were not regulated by the Settlement. It also hid any role that colonial empire may have played in the great powers’ post-​Napoleonic peace. IR realist arguments that the Vienna Settlement worked by ‘sating’ territorial appetites with European land borders tell only part of the story. Second, noticing empire prompts a re-​assessment of two Congress innovations that are lauded in the liberal global governance debate: sovereign equality and great power management, two principles that are institutionalized in the current system through, for example, United Nations membership and the constitution of the Security Council. This link from then to now supports the narrative that the Congress ‘seeded’ international liberalism,

594    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg which progressively universalized as informal exclusions of Congress diplomacy give way to formal inclusion with decolonization. But the history of liberal global governance is not merely progressive unfolding. Müller (2020) highlights the non-​fixity of these rules and roles in the Congress period, and the dynamics of institutionalization over time, revealing it to be more complicated than the linear narrative suggests. Additionally, noticing empire highlights that the Vienna innovations were introduced in the context of domination. As the Vienna innovations became assumptions of international law and diplomacy, the role of imperial domination in producing the system receded further from view. Getachew (2016) thematizes the problem. If liberal governance innovations rest on the ability to bracket colonial empire, then it is unlikely that a diplomacy rooted in them can confront the problem of achieving sovereign equality from a starting point of domination. Third, the dynamics of empire highlight the Eurocentrism of IR narratives of the origins of liberal global governance. Much IR scholarship treats Europe(ans) as authors and teachers of the ‘standard of civilization’ to the rest of the world, with overall good effects. For example, scholars analyse the Vienna Final Act’s declaration abolishing the slave trade as a case of successful advocacy by British abolitionists that planted the seeds of contemporary humanitarianism (e.g. Kaufman and Pape 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Rooting humanitarianism in Congress abolitionism in this way positions it as a moral concern emanating from the metropole. Humanitarian concerns may, sometimes, affect or even constitute state political interests, and the question is whether states, guided by the logic and constraints of the political, act on moral values. Humanitarianism is action by international protectors guided by liberal values to help victims of harms, who cannot help themselves. Several scholars have pushed back against the ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of humanitarianism, revealing a more ambivalent narrative that comes into focus as the nineteenth century progressed and hierarchies between the civilized ‘family of nations’ and the barbarous others were institutionalized (e.g. Barnett 2011; Colas 2016; Crawford 2002; Keene 2007; Lowenheim 2003). Vick’s study of the London Committee on Abolition (2014) contextualizes these critical narratives, showing the Committee’s work to entail a complicated interplay of egalitarian moral thinking and hierarchized political practice. Several scholars further deepen the critique by reversing the gaze. Shilliam (2014) focuses on practices of the descendants of slaves. While scholars might dismiss these as remnants of tradition, Shilliam interprets them as rituals of self-​protection. He argues that these forms of protection against dehumanization suggest that former slaves saw themselves not as liberated but as in ‘continuous captivity’. Getachew (2016) highlights that abolition as an international political phenomenon was born through the costly physical actions of those enslaved in Haiti, who took their freedom from colonial rulers, declaring independence in 1804. All of the great powers at the Congress of Vienna knew of the revolution, with some—​Britain and France—​having attempted to undo it at the time. This does not erase the importance of moral action by British abolitionists. But by revealing British moral agency as a partial story, the known fact of Haitian self-​abolition points to an erasure of Haitian political agency—​both at the time and in historical memory. Troulliot (1991) argued that the Haitian revolution—​a revolution by slaves, in the name of liberal values—​was ‘unthinkable as it happened’ and so remained invisible and left out of the nineteenth century revolutionary myths.

The Congress of Vienna    595 Integrating the Haitian revolution into the Napoleonic story would change the way liberalism, and potentially liberal internationalism, are thought. What happened in the Haitian case is not that ‘subaltern actors’ took up ‘already existing universal ideals’ ‘thereby fulfilling the universal intent’ (Getachew 2016, 822). To the extent that the colony is constitutive of metropolitan modernity and liberalism was born in that metropole, then the domination of the colonial relationship needs to be thematized as a problem within liberalism (Getachew 2016; Pitts 2010: 216). In sum, scholarship on empire is a reminder that ‘great powerhood’ rested on colonial extraction, making colonial domination central to its constitution and effects. Empire made possible the ‘hothouse’ environment enabling a European territorial settlement that lasted 40 years and incubating the internationalization of liberal values. While imperial, national, and diplomatic histories have long been studied separately, as Osterhammel (2014) and others (e.g. Mazower 2012) argue, global history requires coming to terms with their mutual constitution.

At the Congress The IR debates and the diplomatic histories of the modern Congress treat only (male) statesmen as the relevant actors and their agency as political—​dividing territory, preventing great power war. But lines between political, economic, and social were not sharply drawn at the Congress or in its time. Recent work blurs the lines between political and economic spheres, male and female agency, and political and cultural milieus.

Bankers Glenda Sluga’s archival work (2017) recovering the role of bankers disrupts the political/​ economic and domestic/​international divides. Sluga ‘follows the money’ rather than the statesmen, to show how capitalists, transnationally managing Europe’s imperial wealth, made possible the Congress event and the re-​integration of France into the great power club. Bankers were not new players in European politics, but the scale and type of their participation at the Congress was noteworthy. Bankers were present informally at salons and festivals. Formally, their services were central to the settlement and the long peace. The central role of transnational capital complicates arguments that either territorial division or diplomatic innovation alone produced the long peace. Consider France’s war debt to its allies—​comparable in magnitude to that of Germany after the First World War (White 2001). After Napoleon’s final defeat, Congress allies stationed troops in France as a guarantee of debt payment. Private financiers and the British government stepped in with transnational loans, the first sovereign debt (De Graaf 2019, 2020; Sluga 2019). Two such loans enabled France to pay enough to remove troops by 1818. It is worth considering the counter-​ factual: but for sovereign debt, would France have successfully re-​integrated? Without repayment, had there been continued economic instability, would there have been a ‘long peace’? From here, it is instructive to note the multilateral cooperation and management of the occupation, with the Allies shepherding France back into the elite group of great powers (De Graaf 2019, 2020). This contribution to the long peace is not a ‘levels’ story, where domestic

596    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg and international, political, and economic are neatly separated. The Congress event and the great power peace afterward were politically and financially a networked production.

Women Sluga (2014, 2015) and others (e.g. Vick 2014; see Aaslestad 2015, 233) have recovered the roles of women at the Congress in ways that upend the common sense of the Congress and Settlement as male accomplishments. This scholarship invites a complex reading of male-​ female roles and the gendering of diplomacy and the political. Sluga shows that women’s political agency was crucial to the run-​up to and agenda of Congress discussions: Duchess Sagan hosted 1813 negotiations among allied partners (Sluga 2014); Germaine de Stael articulated liberal ideas in her salons and her writings, focusing on the transmissibility of liberal ideas into illiberal contexts and international peace-​making (Sluga 2015, 155–​156, 2014, 51). The consultation provision, which characterized the Concert and now is the basis of global governance, drew heavily on women’s political agency symbolized by the salon (Sluga 2015, 156; Vick 2014, 14). Sluga goes further, diagnosing the ‘gender work’ of sidelining and sexualizing women’s political agency as resulting from two dynamics. The nineteenth century brought advances in both the study of geopolitics and the profession of diplomacy, each inflected with male norms. The decline of women’s visibility in historiography tracks also with the consolidation of a discrete international political sphere and the national project. All of these processes ‘confirmed men as the stakeholders of modern political life’ (Sluga 2014, 61; Neumann 2012, 11; Sluga and Jones 2016). By the late-​twentieth-​century IR debates, the Congress event, with its pomp and festivals, was associated with the feminine distraction from the masculine, political, and even scientific work of constructing continental peace. Even in some twenty-​first-​century accounts, women appear (if at all) solely as hostesses and mistresses (Zamoyski 2007; King 2008). In sum, it took work to produce the current common sense of the Congress as male.

Cultural Milieu The Congress was a celebration of the end of 20 years of war, full of festivals, banquets, and parties. The famous quote that ‘the Congress dances but does not progress’ suggests that these were frivolous, non-​political distractions. But that assessment is questionable on its face, and it relies on a separation of politics from culture that did not cleanly exist in the early nineteenth century. Recent scholarship places the Congress in its broader socio-​cultural environment. Brian Vick’s work is central to changing the lens for interpreting the event. What he calls the ‘political universe’ of this transitional time is found in the full Congress milieu not (just) the negotiating room. That universe included multiple locales, diverse actors, and a range of symbols and ceremonies. The latter included many seeming contradictions: religious and secular; military and dynastic; ‘grassroots patriotism’ and national; traditional and novel; court and folk; market, speech act, and spectacle (Vick 2014, 27ff.). Even traditional festivals were marked by something representing the changing times: perhaps a souvenir object, reflecting the market culture, or a story in the press, reflecting the sense of a wider public

The Congress of Vienna    597 attentive to political affairs (Vick 2014, 134; also Rothschild 1995; Mitzen 2013, c­ hapter 4). Vick argues that these are not passive backdrop to the Congress but ‘the very matrix and stimuli’ from which the ideas and motivation for Congress accomplishments sprouted (Vick 2014, 330). Felix Rösch (2020) begins from a similar premise, homing in on the dominant dances of the Congress as part of a theoretical argument relating affective processes and socio-​political change. Rösch argues that affective currents of practice help us understand how people cope with a constantly changing world like that of the early nineteenth century. He analyses the ‘affective dynamics’ of the minuet and waltz, arguing that attendees’ dancing allowed them to imagine and enact alternative political imaginaries, side by side (Rösch 2020, 12; also McSherry 2019). Pulling these together, with its attention to lower-​level diplomacy, transnational finance, and revolutionary, gendered, and colonial agency, the scholarship discussed in this section pries the Congress loose from the assumptions and priorities of IR debates. The blurred boundaries and connections that a wider lens and granular level reveal suggest that the Congress and subsequent Concert of Europe can mean something else.

Conclusion In 1815, those assembled at Vienna knew that but for the Battle of Waterloo, the Vienna Final Act may have amounted to mere words, and the event itself a brief interlude in a longer story of continuous European revolution. They also knew themselves to be in an uncertain and changing socio-​political environment, reflected in the event itself, in which dynasts, nationalists, aristocrats, financiers, and proto-​democrats celebrated alongside each other. This uncertainty, instability, and mixing has not been central to IR’s Congress debates. Indeed, in the IR discipline, the Congress’ importance has not been intrinsic to the event but derivative of other concerns: the long peace, the liberal international order. With this in mind, this chapter has had three aims: to demonstrate the productiveness of the IR debates, to encourage awareness of their limits by articulating their assumptions, and, with the latter in mind, to encourage a return to the event. The Congress was a case of great power diplomacy leading to an agreement. But it was not only that; and widening the scholarly gaze with granular accounts of actors and processes is not meant merely to add richness of detail. Recent, granular archival work of historians in conversation with theoretical lenses in and beyond those of the IR canon, brings into a view a complex, holistic, political-​ economic-​social phenomenon, and a global one that de-​centres Europe. Juxtaposing the two congresses therefore encourages new, inter-​disciplinary conversations to uncover new political potentialities in this event.

References Aaslestad, K. B. 2015. ‘Review: Serious Work for a New Europe: The Congress of Vienna after Two Hundred Years’. Central European History 48(2): 225–​237.

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Chapter 41

T he Revolu ti ons of 184 8 Daniel M. Green The Revolutions of 1848 were an explosion of liberal and nationalist political rebellions, largely confined to Europe, that erupted in Italy in January of that year and quickly spread continent-​wide. They may seem an odd choice to appear here in the ‘Moments’ section of this volume, or in this volume at all, as arguably the least important of the listed topics in terms of carrying turning-​point events for International Relations (IR) scholars. Though marked by transnational demonstration and spread effects, the revolutions in most places were determined by domestic factors, such that 1848 is not one of IR’s typically cited resonant dates (e.g. 1648, 1713, 1789, 1815, 1919, and 1945). Yet, if we shift from events to macro-​ structural changes in unit-​type and political formations, 1848 becomes highly significant, indeed arguably a founding moment, shaping the fundamentals of what we label ‘modernity’ and the modern international system and delivering insights into today’s world and what might be called ‘globalized late modernity’. The Revolutions of 1848 are a topic where IR scholarship connects with and draws from the historical literature fairly well, especially those in IR who adopt social change frameworks concerned with macro-​scale socio-​economic shifts, such as watersheds in state formation and the development of capitalism (Anievas 2014; Hall 1999; Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003). The topic also leads one directly into the sociological literature on modernity and its dimensions, including nationalism and the nation-​state. Indeed, the revolutions of 1848 can only be understood adequately if one takes a multi-​disciplinary approach to them, well beyond the confines of ‘IR’. Similarly, that the locale of events is largely in Europe makes this a Eurocentric topic, yet in shifting out to the macro-​structural, we find insights into globe-​wide experiences. Finally, as historian G. M Trevelyan has noted, they are also ‘the turning point at which history failed to turn’—​all the revolutions were crushed or collapsed, for the most part. Yet here again, the failure of the revolutions, and the way they failed, continues to reverberate through history.

The Events of 1848: A Transnational Narrative The Revolutions of 1848 were ‘a Europe-​wide movement for civil and political citizenship led by whichever social classes lay just below the existing political citizenship line’ (Mann 1993,

The Revolutions of 1848    603 339, quoted in Hall 1999, 166). They hit almost everywhere in Europe simultaneously, but the political stakes varied. The political setting in Western Europe was oligarchic constitutional monarchies with limited suffrage; in the East it was absolutist monarchies (Sperber 2005, 56–​59). In the spectrum of political positions, liberals at the time were the centrists, in favour of constitutional monarchy rather than republicanism, backing property rights, equal treatment and equal opportunity, expanded suffrage, and improved public education. Positions on free trade varied—​in central Europe there was less enthusiasm for it, as Listian economic nationalism was more common. On the conservative side, politics were more of the ‘throne and altar’ variety (Sperber 2005, 76), linking churches, official religions, and conservative, legitimist politics. On the radical side, it was republicanism and anticlericalism. The further East one went the more these were ethnic-​national demands, pressing for some kind of nationality recognition, and not necessarily liberal in character. Because the revolutions were such a transnational phenomenon, the following is a continental-​scale continuous narrative of events from January of 1848 to August of 1849, telling the story of their rise and decline.

Origins and Genesis The Revolutions of 1848 were preceded by a similar wave of liberal outburst in Europe in 1830. The Revolutions of 1830 were also largely crushed, and thus became the seeds for 1848. The difference between 1830 and 1848 would be in elite response afterwards which, as we will see, was much more innovative after 1848. The first revolutionary eruption of a very busy 1848 was in Palermo in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in January, an insurrection that prompted the king to grant a constitution. By way of backstory, large parts of Europe saw very poor agricultural harvests in 1845–​46 (Sperber 2005, 110–​111), and then there were two key elections in June of 1846 which brought a new Whig/​liberal government of Russell and Palmerston in London and the election of a very liberal candidate for the papacy in Rome, Pius IX. A liberal rebellion stirred in occupied Poland, attracting Europe’s sympathies. Excited at having just repealed the Corn Laws months earlier—​viewed as an epochal symbolic victory against aristocratic, landed power, and an embrace of free trade as a panacea for all the world’s troubles—​the new British government set out to encourage liberal reforms on the Continent, even giving the sense to some liberal activists in Italy that they would back them (Matsumoto-​Best 2003; Parry 2006). Thus the first moves of 1848 were in Italy in January, but while things began there, the key catalytic shift for the continent was the upheaval in the still more pivotal Catholic country of France. There the surprise abdication of Louis Philippe came on 24 February after two days of demonstrations; he fled abroad to Britain and a second republic was proclaimed in France. As Queen Victoria wrote in a letter to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, ‘Since 24th February I feel an uncertainty in everything existing, which . . . one never felt before’ (Grenville 1980, 80). Once Paris and its monarchy fell to liberal street rebellions, the revolutions then spread simultaneously to Berlin and Vienna. This social upheaval in the West was for new citizenship recognition, while in the East the plea was more for national identity recognition, destabilizing multi-​ethnic units like the Austrian and Ottoman empires (Hall 1999; Mann 1993).

604   Daniel M. Green

Revolutionary Spring Sperber (2005, 121) notes how amazing was the sheer ‘speed’ with which governments collapsed in these early days. In the Italian peninsula, the problem was the toxicity of very conservative Austrian influence and effective control. Austria held the provinces of Venetia and Lombardy, kept an Austrian archduke in charge in Tuscany, and had great influence over the conservative King of the Two Sicilies. But Austria was profoundly shaken by events in France, as March of 1848 was an even more astounding month of changes in Europe. By 4 March, France had adopted universal male suffrage and a new acting prime minister was installed. To placate fears about a new French revolutionary threat, his first step was to announce that France’s ambitions were modest and inwardly focused. It has been argued that France did actually work behind the scenes for a continent-​wide liberal revolution (Chastain 1988), though not very effectively; it was thus almost a deeper European liberal moment, guided again by France. Also on 4 March, Piedmont-​Sardinia was granted a constitution by King Carlo Alberto. Most momentous of all, in Austria on 13 March the infamous Chancellor Metternich resigned due to public demand—​the godfather of European reactionary politics since 1815 was gone. Two days later the Hapsburg emperor ended censorship and promised to convene a constitutional assembly. On 15 March, Berlin saw the beginning of days of demonstrations and street fighting, leading the King of Prussia to promise a new liberal constitution and to take steps towards German unity. Similar events unfolded in almost all the thirty-​odd other German states in these weeks, now granted new constitutions, press freedoms, and more liberal administrations (Robertson 1967, 142). Yet the revolutions easily went in contradictory directions. Nationalist rebellions were opportunities for constitution-​making and securing new liberties, but also for territorial expansion. The statelets of Italy had a busy month. In mid-​March a series of protests and disturbances roiled Milan, leading to the expulsion of Austrian forces from the area. Seizing the opportunity to annex Milan and Lombardy, on 22 March Piedmont-​Sardinia declared war on Austria, as Carlo Alberto tried to expand in the north and drive Austria out. A republic was declared in Austria-​controlled Venice. In greater Germany, new freedoms also unleashed nationalist expansion. As historian Priscilla Robertson observed, ‘[t]‌he other half of German idealism showed up in the fierce insistence from every section that now, 1848, was the time for Germany to unite, for a German empire to be created’ (1967, 142). This ended in war with Denmark over the Schleswig-​Holstein provinces. The largely German populations of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein revolted, set up a provisional government, and accepted Prussian troops in as protectors (Robertson 1967, 157). By April there was a war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-​Holstein. Similarly, in Austrian Bohemia, Czech and German nationalists were now free to mobilize against each other as well (Sperber 2005, 217). In late March a simultaneous rebellion broke out in the Polish areas of Russia and Prussia. These would be the first losers of the revolutionary days, as they were roundly crushed in April. But there were liberal-​nationalist successes elsewhere. The Belgian parliament quickly expanded the franchise by 70% and cut taxes, calming things there (Sperber 2005, 120). In April, the Habsburg emperor recognized the new Hungarian government and promised a constitution for Bohemia; Hungary gained independence and a new parliament, for a few

The Revolutions of 1848    605 months. 18 May saw the first meeting of the Frankfurt Parliament, to work towards German unity along liberal-​federal lines. As a result of all the previous examples, many first elections were held in April–​June, for new parliaments and constitutional assemblies, with greatly expanded franchises and people voting for the first time in their lives (Sperber 2005, 150–​153). But, ominously, it was mostly elites, the clergy and lesser nobility working on the ground who were able to steer outcomes in a continent-​wide ‘strange discrepancy between advocates of democracy and its beneficiaries’ (152); elections resulting from the revolutions ended up ‘repudiating the revolutionaries’.

Revolutionary Fall and Winter This meant that the second half of the revolutionary year was not a time of consolidating gains, but of ideological polarization and open conflict (Sperber 2005, 208). There wasn’t much of a liberal-​revolutionary summer of success and institution-​building, as the news turned sour quickly. France never stabilized, and in May a low-​grade civil war began there, as radical demonstrators seeking expanded workers’ rights and a war to liberate Poland attempted to storm and dismiss the Constituent National Assembly (Robertson 1967, 80–​81). In 4 June by-​elections to the Constitutional Assembly Louis Napoleon was elected, calling himself a socialist, but a reaction against working-​class demands had begun and a conservative Bonapartist press was unleashed. This led to the so-​called ‘June Days’ in France, days of bloody street fighting in Paris; reactionary forces were on the rise, in what has been called ‘the first real class war of modern times’ (Robertson 1967, 77). Meanwhile the news elsewhere was mostly bad for liberal causes. Austria was not driven from Italy. On 24–​25 July, Radetzky’s Austrian army defeated Piedmont-​Sardinia and its Italian allies at Custozza, and Hapsburg control of Lombardy was re-​established. August and September were crisis days in Greater Germany as well. Prussia conceded to international pressure to conclude the Schleswig-​Holstein War, but German nationalists in Western Germany around the national assembly in Frankfurt were angered at this and wanted the war to continue. Europe was worried that a more united Germany would seize control of the passages between the Baltic and the North Sea (Sperber 2005, 229). In the end, the belligerent democratic forces lost on both counts—​the war did not resume, and national democracy-​ building collapsed. In one of the last enduring achievements for liberal ideals, in September the Austrian Constituent Assembly voted to abolish serfdom (Grenville 1980, 122). But just a month later Prince Windischgrätz of the Prague garrison marched down to besiege Vienna and soon succeeded in wresting it from the liberal anti-​monarchists. A Hungarian army tried to come to the rescue but was driven back (Sperber 2005, 233). Inspired by the outcome in Austria, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV largely re-​established his control of Prussia in November (Sperber 2005, 234–​235). Italy, by contrast, was still in tumult. In late November a popular insurrection in Rome forced Pius IX to flee the city and run south into exile in the Two Sicilies. This proved a bad turning point, as henceforth Pius shifted from cautious liberal reformism to reactionary arch-​conservatism. Days later, 10 December 1848, Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president.

606   Daniel M. Green Overall, 1848 was pivotal for Austria and Prussia (Hall 1999, 166). The Grossdeutsche model that lumped in Austria now ceded place to the Kleindeutsche model of a smaller Germany built around Prussia. The ethnic passions that exploded in the Austrian confederational system decided ‘the issue of the borders of a future all-​German state for the German nationalists’ (166). A short year after it began, the final death blows were dealt to liberal revolution in Europe. In March 1849, the Frankfurt parliament issued a liberal constitution for a Germany united around Prussia, but when they offered the crown of Kleindeutschland to Friedrich Wilhelm, he refused it. The Frankfurt Assembly collapsed; Germany would not be united in a liberal-​ federal manner. A last liberal gasp for Italy came in February 1849, when a Roman Republic was proclaimed. But this was viewed as a dire threat to the papacy and Catholic conservatives everywhere mobilized. In April, Louis Napoleon sent a French army to the papal states and by July the Roman Republic had succumbed to French troops. In February and March, Austria was losing the ground war to Hungarian nationalists on all fronts. In June 1849, the Russian army entered Hungary and crushed Louis Kossuth’s nationalist forces by August. The Hungarian Revolution was defeated, and many Hungarian nationalist rebels fled to the Ottoman Empire.

The International Relations Dimension of the Revolutions In the biggest picture, Britain and Russia sat on opposite sides and did nothing to effect major changes in international relations (Grenville 1980). Britain hoped to see Austria out of Italy but was not willing to intervene or do more than offer supportive words. There were two localized wars—​the war in northern Italy, which Piedmont-​Sardinia mishandled, and the war over Schleswig-​Holstein, to cut Germans there away from the Danes—​but neither resulted in a lasting transfer of territory. And there was no dreamed-​of war to liberate Poland from Russia and Austria (that would have been hugely significant). Nor was there a French intervention in northern Italy in the summer of 1848 to save it from the Austrians, a near thing considered very seriously (Sperber 2005, 221). The revolutions were mildly significant for discomfiting the ancien regime. Some argue that to function well the Concert required a lingering fear of French political ambitions, which slowly faded after 1815. However, this fear was revived somewhat by the Revolutions of 1848, and the fact that they also ‘cut old ties and brought unsocialized leaders to power’ (Jervis 1983, 184). Additionally, the violent suppressions in the East alienated liberals and radicals in Western Europe even further from Russia and Austria, rendering the Crimean War a few years later all the more likely. Outside Europe, the Revolutions of 1848 were weakly connected to and impactful in other regions, inspirational to liberalism in the Americas for example (Roberts and Howe 2000). Many liberal ‘48ers’ moved to the United States (US), especially from Germany, and strengthened the northern, liberal abolitionist element in American politics, enabling the US Civil War (Eyal 2007). Nonetheless, it is quite likely that 1848 would not stand out in the evenementielle narratives of the international relations of the nineteenth century, such as: 1815–​22 (early Concert),

The Revolutions of 1848    607 1822–​53 (Congress years), 1853–​7 1 (interim era of wars), 1871–​90 (Age of Bismarck)—​1848 could go unmentioned. Similarly, 1848 might be discounted because, as one prominent historian has argued, ‘the Vienna system’ survived intact through 1848–​50 and handled the revolutions (Schroeder 1994, 800–​801). The system of 1815 allowed widespread domestic upheaval but contained it and avoided a continental war as governments restrained themselves from lashing out at each other: ‘every treaty still in force, every state boundary unchanged’ (1994, 801). This was ‘inconceivable in any other era’ (1994, 801). In most cases, as soon as the old order was defeated the victors began to fight among themselves, much to the glee of the temporarily weakened conservative forces, who came back months later (Hall 1999, 167; Sperber 2005). Several revolutions shared a common flaw—​they ‘turned into class struggles and failed because they did’ (Robertson 1967, 412). To complete the backlash, in December 1851 Louis Napoleon—​soon to be Emperor Napoleon III—​staged a coup and established his own dictatorship in France. Days later Austria’s constitution was revoked in a return to absolutism there as well. In pivotal locations—​all of Germany, the Austrian Empire—​new freedoms meant freedom to mobilize and fight along ethnonationalist lines, something conservative elites could easily turn to their advantage, and did. What might have been? Some near-​possibilities would have been highly consequential for regional international relations at least, and for general political-​historical trajectories: the break-​up of Austria-​Hungary along national lines, the reemergence of a Poland from pieces of Austria, Prussia and Russia, the merging of Germany and/​or Italy along the lines of a loose liberal-​federal bloc.1 Each would have altered the course of history.

The Global-​Historical 1848 Yet shifting out to think broadly about the revolutions as a ‘Global-​Historical 1848’ reveals momentous shifts on other fronts. The granularity issue, altering our depth of focus, points towards deeper historical-​structural change and reveals a watershed in the development of nationalism. This in turn should inform our understanding of modernity and the ‘modern’ state-​system today in ‘globalized late modernity’. 1848 lingers to the present. Granularity, as the volume introduction states, ‘encompasses questions of texture, of focus, and of scale’, ‘The focus one adopts, whether coarser or finer-​grained, allows one to see different aspects of a phenomenon, and thus offers quite different kinds of knowledge and insight’. Altering the scalar dimension of inquiry brings two such insights to 1848. First, it greatly raises the status of a moment not generally seen as significant in IR: no great war, no one defeated in an epochal struggle, no great peace settlement, no equivalent to analysing statesmen assembled at a Vienna or Versailles, and so on. Second, in spatial terms, a granular shift takes a cluster of events in Europe and makes them far more globally significant, and indeed a constitutive element of modernity itself and of the modern state system. A Eurocentric case becomes globally important. Indeed, 1848 is arguably the origin of the modern international system. It thus sets the agenda for most of the Moments after it in this section of this volume, since it is about nationalism, democracy and class power all at once. This is especially true if the entire era of 1789–​1945 is viewed as being about Europe settling down to institutionalized democracy

608   Daniel M. Green (Meadwell 2001). In the bigger picture of key dates, if 1648 marks the emergence of sovereignty as a principle for ordering an international system, then 1848 tells us a great deal about which units will get sovereignty in the modern era. 1789 raises up the possibility of a new popular sovereignty, and 1848 answers it with specifics, as nations and peoples. It is here that the nation-​state form is endorsed and valorized in Europe (certainly not an outcome in 1648, for example). Judging the historical significance of 1848 in other realms has been taken up, such as the social question and Europe’s stumbling dealings in the nineteenth century with poverty, inequality and new classes. There is also a basic consensus across disciplines on 1848 as a pivotal moment for nationalism. Liberal, more civic nationalism was the driver of events in many places in 1848, but it won lasting victories nowhere in Europe. Nor was ancien regime loyalty to the dynast restored. Instead conservative and ethnic nationalism leapt forward (Grenville 1980), what can be called ‘ethnonationalism’, to juxtapose with civic nationalism. Thus, 1848 marks a giant setback for the liberal, transnationalist dream of human solidarity. Liberal free trade ideas widely espoused in the 1840s, for example, had been premised on the idea that national economic development wasn’t a relevant focus. Before 1848 most liberals were nationalists as well, and most nationalists were liberals, in part because they shared a common enemy in the Metternichian system (Cassels 1996, 56). But after, nationalism went ‘from a revolutionary to a right-​wing ideology’ (Cassels 1996, 64); the ‘Mazzinian phase of nationalism’ ended (Hobsbawm 1992, 102). Because nationalism moved to the right, it became more politically viable in many locales and spread more readily—​it need no longer be resisted by the political establishments in many places. This also enabled a shift from bottom-​up to top-​down patterns of mobilization, and soon gave us the ‘official nationalisms’ of Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and Meiji Japan (Smith 1998), as nationalism became a political tool of conservative political elites. Liberalism had a hard time grappling with this new nationalism at the time (Hobsbawm 1992, 24–​25), and this remains true today. After the 1848 watershed, the shift from cosmopolitanism to the ‘international’ becomes more discernable (Hobsbawm 1992, 25). Ethnonationalism is by definition exclusionary and less cosmopolitan. In sum, liberal civic nationalism suffered major setbacks; ethnonationalism in turn has been enduring. Why this shift in the status of nationalism at this point? First, pressures for an 1848 had been building since 1789, in the parallel growth of liberalism and national self-​ determination ideas, both fueling a related creeping ‘conflation of people and state’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 116). Liberalism had a corrosive effect on aristocratic privilege (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 104), and national self-​determination—​in Greek, Polish, and Romanian nationalisms, for example—​had been percolating since 1815/​1830. Those efforts were the pioneers in establishing national self-​determination as a would-​be norm in Europe. So the preconditions for 1848 had been building for some time. Second, it was largely true that one method for achieving national unity in the important cases of Germans and Italians had now been tried and failed in 1848, so it was on to another. Much of what had been sought would be achieved by the opposite forces, later. ‘Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement’ (Robertson 1967, 412). The Mazzinian route to Italian unification, for example, thwarted (Cassels 1996), was successfully supplanted by Mazzini’s enemies in Piedmont-​Sardinia a decade later. Indeed, ‘no important new freedom was wrested’ in 1848; ‘Instead men lost confidence in freedom and

The Revolutions of 1848    609 imagined they had made a great advance in sophistication by turning from idealism to cynicism’ (Robertson 1967, 419). Thus, while the events of 1848 were not particularly significant in international relations, their impacts in altering macro-​political calculations of strategy and state formation were—​ the shift to conservative ethnonationalism as an elite political weapon. This manifested in warfare a few years later, after the Crimean War: ‘Before the revolutions of 1848 the governments of the continental monarchies avoided war in order to strengthen themselves against their internal enemies; after the Congress of Paris some of them sought war for exactly the same purpose’ (Bridge and Bullen 1980, 81). Ruling elites abandoned their unyielding resistance to domestic change, which had ‘united all their enemies against them’ anyway (1980, 81) and shifted to harnessing nationalism and ‘riding the tiger’ of nationalist sentiment, now a conservative one they had a better chance of controlling. Wars and political upheavals in Europe after 1856 tended to follow the two courses of action dictated by nationalism and the nationality principle—​secession and unification. Nationalism and its political concomitants quickly gained prominence in the international realm. For Hans Morgenthau (1962), the nation-​state became the predominant unit-​form expected: ‘inter-​dynastic relations’ gave way to ‘international’ relations. National self-​determination’s new salience in Europe also meant that: 1) the compensation schemes of the eighteenth century no longer worked in Europe, as national boundaries became rigid, and 2) when national self-​determination led to two major national unifications, the balance of power shifted and nothing could be done about it (Morgenthau 1962). F. S. Northedge (1976, 69–​73) notes two further effects of the national principle: an increase in the number of states, and more ‘organized selfishness’, since the nation is ‘a self-​regarding animal’ (72). The new nationality-​based identity ‘problematized ethnic, linguistic and cultural minorities, territorial integrity and security, migration . . . . and the integrity and identity of polyglot states’ (Hall 1999, 169). Nationalism became ‘a potent new source of legitimacy’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 35), a new political technology with useful ‘stabilizing effects within core states’ (2015, 117) but destabilizing within multi-​ethnic empires. The modal type of unit did not change entirely, but expectations did, and thus so did developmental pressures and tendencies in the international system; over time, this has not been confined to Europe.

Ethnonationalism in Modernity, Coloniality, and After(?) Nationalism is hugely important for further eroding European dynastic international relationsand making the nation-​state a prominent unit-​type. How should 1848 and conservative ethnonationalism fit within our understandings of ‘modernity’ itself and modernity as an account of history? Characterizing modernity in any aspect is inherently fraught, but one can lessen the peril with the simplifying concession that there are at least two well-​developed schools on the subject: Eurocentric ‘modernity’ and postcolonial ‘coloniality/​modernity’ or simply coloniality. What is the place of 1848 in both? Since it is also thought of as ‘a period’, asking when Euro-​centred modernity was makes sense. For many, it begins at the end of the eighteenth century and continues to the present

610   Daniel M. Green (Bayly 2004; Giddens 1990; Osterhammel 2014). Others observe that the origins of modernity are typically said to be around 1500 or 1789, depending on where one is from: observers from the South of Europe choose the former, those from ‘Anglo-​Saxon’ countries and France, the latter (Mignolo 2005). This can be supplemented with the notion of a ‘global early modern’ starting around 1500. Jürgen Osterhammel, for example, sees parallels between the vibrant Braudelian sixteenth-​century Mediterranean and similar developments in Southeast Asia. There is ‘an approximately simultaneous transition to an early modern age’ between 1450 and 1600 all over the world (Osterhammel 2014, 57). The global early modern has also been described as the era of an ‘Oriental globalization’ led by China (Hobson 2004), for the period 1500–​1800 (Phillips 2017; Zhang 2017). After this global early modern era, Osterhammel posits a Sattelzeit of 1750–​1850, the global era of transition to modernity (2014, 59–​63). As to its descriptive content, there is no consensus in IR about what modernity is, but a variety of markers are regularly mentioned: societal complexity and functional social differentiation, capitalism and a division of labour, industrialization, markets, and the modern state (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Go and Lawson 2017; Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003). Osterhammel’s heuristic list of indicators of modernity adds some novelties: ‘the conduct of life involving rational calculation’, ‘the growth of political participation’, ‘destructive capacities of a quite new dimension’, and ‘a shift in the arts away from imitation of tradition to the creative destruction of aesthetic norms’ (2014, 904). While modernity has these multiple dimensions, for IR’s primary purposes the key is the state system. In sharp contrast, postcolonial theorists have introduced the term ‘coloniality’ into the discussion and point to the date of 1492 (Escobar 2004; Mignolo 2005; Quijano 2000). Since imperial exploitation made modernity possible, coloniality brings in colonial experiences and ‘the perspectives of the wretched’, In this approach, modernity is ‘the direction of history that had Europe as a model and a goal’ (Mignolo 2005, 4–​5). Modernity is in effect Europe’s description of its own role in history, whereas coloniality better incorporates the entire world’s experiences and exposes the Europhiliac gloss of ‘modernity’. The momentous calamity of 1492 was to simultaneously generate so much that went wrong and ruined the world after that date: colonialism, the genocide of native peoples, capitalism as commodity production for global markets, the entire institution of slavery to work the fields and mines, and race and racial hierarchy, to justify the exploitation and slavery. Later, 1789 and maturing French nationalism created ‘nationalization’ as a process that is also imposed and became part of the formula (Quijano 2000). Again, the non-​whites in Latin America were excluded in nation-​building efforts directed by Creole elites. The expansive notion of coloniality surfaces the horrendous damage inflicted by the West in the last 500 years, ingeniously obscured by modernity’s narrative. The Eurocentric/​Occi-​centric account of modernity has long been critiqued and years ago the notion of ‘multiple modernities’, that there were and are different modernities in different locales (e.g. Bayly 2004, 10), was offered as an alternative. But many have now moved past multiple modernities, which blossomed with particularisms suggesting that each country effectively had its own modernity. Recent scholarship favours a ‘logic of confluence’ account of modernity in history (Hobson 2017, 230), rejecting the monocultural-​origin narrative. By this reckoning, ‘modernity has always been a transnational and global development’ (Go and Lawson 2017, 7); there is no great discontinuity in time or space, just an ongoing ‘concatenation of social forces’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 7–​8). As Bayly describes the long nineteenth

The Revolutions of 1848    611 century (2004, 11), the ‘changes were so rapid, and interacted with each other so profoundly’. In short, cross-​flows and cross-​influences abound in modernity’s development. Can the modernity and coloniality narratives be reconciled and merged? Not for most of the past. The coloniality argument does not agree that everything was blandly ‘co-​produced’ in confluences. Its narrative has agency, is critical, and assigns blame, identifying the origins of societal change and the damage done. The ‘confluences’ metaphor would hide coloniality’s message. Alternatively, we might be attentive to time periods and realms of life where ‘confluences’ is the appropriate metaphor and those where influences are more unidirectional. Combining ‘when’, ‘what’, and ‘who’ in a periodization narrative would illuminate convergences (and divergences) in the characteristics of human societies over time and might enable merging the narratives in some way. Conservative ethnonationalism, for example, is an instance in which Europe goes through developments which later become more universal, and the charge of Eurocentrism is less problematic. It is relevant to Buzan and Lawson’s idea of the ‘leading edge’ (2015, 22) and historical developments when the origins are uneven, and one locale is more influential. Thus, 1848 is a, perhaps the crucial step on the way to European modernity as nation-​states, but also is raised later as a possible universal turning point.2

1848 and the Two Schools The contributions of the Revolutions of 1848 to Eurocentric modernity are well-​discussed. Many argue that the nineteenth century is the crucial period; indeed, the entire long nineteenth century sees ‘the birth of the modern’ (Bayly 2004, 11; Buzan and Lawson 2015). Nations and nationalism are essential features of modernity, ‘intrinsic to the nature of the modern world and to the revolution of modernity’ (Smith 1998, 3). Nationalism is basically the creator of the state system itself and a key constitutive element of modernity for IR. Historical-​structural longue durée analysis of the emergence of the modern set of social formations (Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003) links this to capitalism and the creation of non-​ politicized markets. The ‘modern international system’ has capitalism, markets and the state; the former requires the separation of the latter two. If one focuses on logics of territoriality and how they change over time (e.g. Teschke 2003), the diversity of early modern types of actors, sustained by a complex, confused dynastic world in Europe, featured a menagerie of unequal actors and was not a modern states-​system. Instead, ‘the formation of the modern states-​system, based on exclusive territoriality operated by a depersonalized state, must be pushed up to the nineteenth century’ (Teschke 2003, 230). 1848 nudged a regional and ultimately the global logic of territoriality in a different direction. The ‘’national-​sovereign’ identity’ in Europe was a new identity and set of interests and caused raison d’état to be replaced with national self-​determination (Hall 1999, 7), introducing the new quandaries of secession and irredentism. Nationalism had immediate political uses in Europe: ‘Aggressive wars of national reconstruction and the identification of victory on the battlefield with national pride and regeneration were the means by which monarchical conservatism gave itself a new lease on life’ (Bridge and Bullen 1980, 81). 1848 triggered the widespread embrace of ethnic nationalism by political elites, catalytic after 1856 in pushing Italian and German unification but also fuelling Japan’s ambitious development. The postcolonial coloniality narrative also, though with regret, sees the nation-​state

612   Daniel M. Green as a model within the coloniality complex and 1848 further cements a new alien process, ‘nationalization’, as part of the European modernity model the rest feel pressure to follow. The nationalization process furthers homogenization and keeps non-​whites subjugated and disempowered. In Latin America, since the early nineteenth-​century Europeanized creoles and mestizos have controlled the nationalization process (Quijano 2000, 222–​225).

1848, Widespread Ethnonationalism, and the Present: Still Relevant? What of conservative ethnonationalism within the conditions of the twenty-​first century? How to describe the present era? Most fundamentally, it is the age of a profound globalization, itself said to be a special moment and opportunity for modernity, a chance for it to spread wildly (Giddens 1990). Indeed, globalization might make modernity truly universal and unavoidable—​‘modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of time’ (Escobar 2004, 212). Building on this, I argue that the present era of post-​2008 global recession has three basic features. First, it is a globalized and inter-​penetrated world, with incredible levels of economic and social inter-​change, as well as refugee flows and migrants, thanks to neoliberal globalization and openness that began in the 1980s. Second, in geopolitical terms, it is a multipolar world both politically and economically, with several large and booming economies across the world, evident in the rise of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) countries. And this is a multicultural multipolarity, in a post-​imperial world where some of the poles are former colonies (Brazil, India, South Africa), or almost were (China). Finally, it is a post-​neoliberal world, of varied reactions to the American neoliberal unipolarity of roughly 1987–​2007, now in decline. Multicultural multipolarity is challenging key aspects of the old neoliberal consensus, which was actually an imposition for many. Neoliberalism’s fueling of economic inequality has also produced a global class of wealthy oligarchs, increasingly exerting their power to hold on to and expand their wealth. Thus, ‘globalized late modernity’ is an apt descriptor for the present era in broad terms—​the contemporary global socio-​political environment. ‘Global’ here is also intended to denote a high degree of socio-​cultural similarity on a global scale, a sizeable set of global socio-​cultural conditions—​in similar technologies, the worldwide web, social media, common issues, inter-​connectivity. And this era is witnessing an explosion of ethnonationalism, like Europe after 1848, but more widely global. Many have noted how ethnonationalism both made the disruptive changes of 1989–​91 possible and then exploded still further after the Cold War itself. In the 1990s ‘the very idea of the ethnic nation’ became dangerous, carrying ‘the seed of traumatic events’ such as ethnic cleansing, population transfers, and new territorial partitioning (Gottlieb 1999, 120). Rodney Bruce Hall concludes his important study of national collective identity through history with a case study of ethnonational identity and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989, a victory over the ‘Proletarian-​Internationalist Identity’ (1999, 285–​293). Many have written on the recent rise of nationalist parties that are ‘populist radical right’ in Europe (e.g. Mudde 2007), but this has now spread to many places: India, Russia,

The Revolutions of 1848    613 Turkey, and the Philippines (Jenne 2018). Both India and China today are ever more deeply embracing a conservative, exclusionary ethnonationalism. Chinese nationalism has taken a ‘strident turn’ after 2008, in which the government has tried to join in with popular nationalism and coopt it into official nationalism, though with mixed success (Zhao 2013). Rising numbers of ‘ethnopopulists’ everywhere are lashing out at global elites, immigrants, and foreigners (Brubaker 2017; Jenne 2018); new exclusionary moves run rampant. Indeed, far from being wiped out by globalization, as some thought likely, nationalism has continued its steady rise and been ‘globally diffused so as to become the dominant operative discourse of modernity’ (Malešević 2018, 555). What was confined to Europe in 1848–​60 is no longer. Of course, there are temporally specific peculiarities in the current conjuncture. One is the mixing-​in of populism with ethnonationalism. A second is the connection to the depoliticizing effects of global and regional integration. Jacques Rupnik (2007), for example, noted years ago how the European Union (EU) invigorates populist ethnonationalism as a reaction to interaction and the EU, after accession. He refers to the ‘emptying’ of party competition of its substance (22) because of the forced acceptance of so much from the EU’s formulaic neoliberal directives. These imply a ‘redefinition of national sovereignty and identity’ that can be hard to stomach (2007, 22). This operates on a global scale as well. Another apparently propitious background condition for ethnonationalism today, alongside the backlash against the hollowing-​out of politics, is the rise of esteem issues, as ‘fear’ and war declines (Giddens 1990; Lebow 2008). Descriptions of late modernity (e.g. Giddens 1990) commonly posit a culture of angst and reflexivity, with traditions no longer available to provide psychic certainty—​this especially describes late modernity on an individual level. If we think in terms of moving between motivations of spirit, fear, and appetite—​spirit being the esteem and shame dimension—​then in late modernity we are back into an era of spirit and the desire for self-​esteem ‘is a universal drive’ (Lebow 2008, 61). This is a ‘post-​fear’ world in which ‘concern with geopolitics and the martial spirit is largely eschewed’ and concerns about esteem and self-​esteem are newly preoccupying (Browning 2015, 200). Richard Ned Lebow observes that in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, when fear of war declined, empire and ‘display’ rose in significance instead (2008, 310). Well, nationalism is precisely about dignity and honor—​‘nationalism is driven by the community’s desire to justify itself ’ (Browning 2015, 199; Greenfeld 1992). Indeed, smaller powers may feel the need ‘to legitimize their very existence and subjectivity’ (Browning 2015, 199; emphasis in original) and can. Today’s eruptions of conservative ethnonationalism and official nationalism thus help chart the context of our globalized late modernity, in contrast with the past. In 1848, European conservative elites took over and coopted a failed liberal civic nationalism. Today, doing so is an old and familiar technique, newly relevant thanks to unfolding conditions in some countries. Today’s widespread incidence of conservative ethnonationalism also raises profound questions. Is this proof of its universality within human experience, confirming that the backers of the ‘modernity’ notion were correct, that this was the natural way forward for all? Or is it simply proof of the success of European culture in forcing more of the world into its image? True, the ethnic nation-​state itself is not a universal phenomenon, since there would be far more countries today than 195 or so. But there does seem to be a near-​universal susceptibility and vulnerability to political/​societal pressures towards the nation-​state form

614   Daniel M. Green and to harnessing ethnonationalism for political purposes. Thus, common processes of socio-​economic development may arise in seemingly different contexts, interacting with factors nonetheless present in all societies. The ubiquity of conservative ethnonationalism today is explained by causes resembling those offered for 1848’s nationalism: unfolding capitalism, new social classes, economic dislocation, new media, urbanization. This suggests important underlying variables identifiable in 1848 and today, such as ethnic-​linguistic identities, the emergence at some point of ‘the middle ranks of society’ (Osterhammel 2014), and spirit—​the desire for social esteem and self-​esteem (Lebow 2008). The tools of conservative ethnonationalism are proving widely useful, perhaps until the counter-​project of the coloniality critics takes off.

Conclusions To understand and describe the past and present of international relations, the task before scholars today is one of periodization—​develop thick, shared understandings of the turning points and watersheds in international history, and why they are such. This means mapping out both regional and system-​wide disjunctures, identifying common and shared social processes, and seeing how they unfold in different places at different times. The Revolutions of 1848 watershed introduced and made common a new political technology: conservative ethnonationalism. It was a propitious time for this to happen in Europe, but this was also a regional development that contributed to an enduring, widely shared script of a ‘modernity’ that continues to the present. For the Eurocentric modernity narrative that is not surprising—​Europe is, and was, always creating social formations that others should imitate. While Eurocentrists may not recognize the damages of this development, postcolonial thought is well aware of it. Conservative ethnonationalism eventually became common across polities in the present era of ‘globalized late modernity’, a second propitious—​this time global—​context. However, now conditions in globalized late modernity—​multicultural multipolarity after homogenizing neoliberalism—​are also seemingly making it possible, perhaps for the first time in centuries, to imagine other worlds and radical alterities. The Revolutions of 1848 thus mark the first explosive emergence of conservative ethnonationalism, while today’s widely spreading ethnonationalism may be the last.

Notes 1. This is the ‘German question’—​the prospect of a more federal merging of Germany, as opposed to the Bismarckian-​Prussian version that happened. The Sonderweg argument is that Germany modernized in an odd, proto-​feudal manner and thus failed to successfully democratize; instead the path to Nazism was laid. 2. Individual cases of ethnonationalism had arguably emerged earlier—​Greek secessionism against the Ottomans in the 1820s, Polish secessionist nationalism around the same time, a form of Egyptian/​Arab ethnonationalism against the Ottomans in the 1830s. These were episodes the actors of 1848 learned from.

The Revolutions of 1848    615

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616   Daniel M. Green Matsumoto-​ Best, S. 2003. Britain and the Papacy in the Age of Revolution, 1846–​1851. Woodbridge, UK: Royal Historical Society/​Boydell Press. Meadwell, H. 2001. ‘The Long Nineteenth Century in Europe: Reinterpreting the Concert System’. Review of International Studies 27(4): 843–​867. Mignolo, W. D. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Morgenthau, H. J. 1962. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, third edn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mudde, C. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Northedge, F. S. 1976. The International Political System. London: Faber & Faber. Osterhammel, J. 2014. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parry, J. 2006. The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, A. 2017. ‘Asian Incorporation and the Collusive Dynamics of Western ‘Expansion’ in the Early Modern World’. In Global Historical Sociology, eds. J. Go and G. Lawson, 199–​220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quijano, A. 2000. ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’. International Sociology 15(2): 215–​232. Roberts, T. M. and Howe D. W. 2000. ‘The United States and the Revolutions of 1848’. In The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–​1849, eds. R. J. W. Evans and H. P. von Strandmann, 157–​180. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, P. 1967. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosenberg, J. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society. London: Verso. Rupnik, J. 2007. ‘Is East-​Central Europe Backsliding? From Democracy Fatigue to Populist Backlash’. Journal of Democracy 18(4): 17–​25. Schroeder, P. 1994. The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–​1848. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Blackwell. Sperber, J. 2005. The European Revolutions, 1848–​1851, second edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teschke, B. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations. London: Verso. Zhang, Y. 2017. ‘Worlding China, 1500–​1800’. In The Globalization of International Society, eds. T. Dunne and C. Reus-​Smit, 204–​223. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zhao, S. 2013. “Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited: The Strident Turn.” Journal of Contemporary China 22(82): 535–​553.

Chapter 42

The Indian U pri si ng of 185 7 Alexander E. Davis The Indian Uprising and Colonial Violence The Indian Uprising, often remembered in India today as the ‘First War of Independence’, and condescendingly referred to by the British as a ‘mutiny’ of ‘native’ soldiers, reverberated around the empire and the world.1 It began on 10 May 1857 and ended on 1 November 1858, with Queen Victoria’s declaration that India had become a Crown Colony. It marked the end of the East India Company’s rule, the fall of the Mughal empire, which had lasted for centuries, and the rule of both being replaced with the British Raj. The event comprised widespread violence committed not only by the British, Indian soldiers (both loyal and rebellious), but also by civilians across much of North India. Although it started with soldiers in Meerut, the resistance to British rule spread through North and Central India, including peasants, artisans, and labourers (Bender 2017, 3). It was a far broader uprising throughout Indian society than the term ‘mutiny’ implies. The rebels killed thousands of Europeans early in the conflict. In response, the British and their numerous Indian allies put down the Uprising through counterinsurgency tactics and massacres. Records for the number of deaths are poor, but descriptions of the violence and census data from after the event, suggest that it was vast, in both brutality and scale. This violence draws our attention to the granularity of history. For the purposes of this chapter, granularity means the grittiness of history, the texture of the event. This texture is all too easily skipped over when we fold events into broader global and political narratives. This often happens with the Indian Uprising. This can be seen in the labels ‘mutiny’ and ‘war of independence’. However, as postcolonial International Relations (IR) scholars have noted, the scope that IR offers, of theorizing about the international across history, brings entrenched risks of oversimplifying such events. IR tends to skip over historical texture, by folding history into progress narratives, telling stories about how our modern states system came to be. For the Indian Uprising, granularity must draw our attention to the scale and intensity of colonial violence.

618   Alexander E. Davis Aside from its historical significance as stand-​alone event, the Uprising was also a crucial formative moment in the creation of the contemporary Indian state and the reorganization of the British empire. Many of the government institutions that are now fundamental to the postcolonial Indian state were built under this more bureaucratized form of control of the Raj. Furthermore, the violent Uprising changed British global colonial governance and the way that the empire was racially and culturally ordered. It revealed to the British the possibility that their growing colonial control around the world could be challenged by colonized peoples. This led to a rethinking of the racialized ideational structure of the empire, which sat alongside defensive structures. This can be seen in debates on imperial federation and a broader rethinking and re-​theorizing of the empire. To understand what a granular reading of colonial violence tells us about history and international relations, this chapter examines the Indian Uprising, its causes, the changes that it produced in global imperial structures, and the ways that it has been interpreted and remembered. Two issues are particularly important: the event itself, its causes, and direct consequences; and the ideas and memories that it generated. I look first at postcolonial IR theory, and its critique of IR’s modernizing historiography. The second part considers the Indian Uprising as an event, focusing first on its origins and context, and then on the ways it transformed India. The third part looks at the international ramifications and the ways in which it provoked a reorganization and thinking of the British empire. In particular, I look at the Australian response to the Uprising, which demonstrates how the Uprising revealed weaknesses in the empire’s defence. I conclude by reflecting on the colonial violence that underpins India’s postcolonial modernity and the way it should inform our understandings of historical international relations.

Colonial Violence, Modernity, and Postcolonial IR Theory IR scholars and theorists, drawing on what postcolonial theorists have referred to as IR’s Eurocentric historiography, have often seen the spread of the states-​system, with its tethering of sovereignty and nation to delineated territory, as the end point of modernization which started in Europe and spread around the world. This narrative has been subjected to considerable postcolonial critique in recent years. As Sanjay Seth (2011, 170–​172) has put it, IR theory and its account of the modern states system suggest that the ‘Westphalian’ system, and the narrative of its spread and expansion, has privileged European history and the expansion of European empires, in ways that sanitize colonial history and violence. When we see Indian history through this frame, colonial violence is obscured. The international system we study today emerged out of interactions between colonizer and colonized. To challenge Eurocentrism, historical IR must be sufficiently linked to global histories of empire. As Pinar Bilgin (2016, 494) put it, ‘addressing the Eurocentric limits of IR involves addressing the Eurocentric historical accounts that students of IR draw upon’. This needs to encompass the ways in which the interactions between European powers and the people they colonized produced differentiated forms of ‘modernity’ around the world, and the process by which interactions during the imperial period structured the international.

The Indian Uprising of 1857    619 This suggests, as Eisenstadt (2000) argued, that modernity is best thought of as differentiated across time and place. India’s postcolonial modernity is different, for example, to that of the United Kingdom (UK). The interaction between colonizer and colonized draws us to look at the imperial origins of our current system. This requires reading seriously and critically the experience of colonized peoples, the process of colonization, and the violence that underpinned it. These Eurocentric historiographies emerged from IR’s unwillingness to deal with, engage with, and/​or theorize imperial histories in detail, particularly after the Second World War, (Guilot 2014). Before the Second World War, much IR scholarship was dominated by imperial questions, but assumed that imperial hierarchy was natural and desirable.2 By taking the starting point for international affairs as the state, IR dramatically narrows its historical and temporal scope, and leaves colonized societies and their experiences of this modernization outside its theoretical models. In this sense, the ‘state as actor’ paradigm dramatically simplifies the processes of both colonization and decolonization, viewing the modern state as beginning in Western Europe with Westphalia and spreading its way around the world (Thakur et al. 2017). A useful example for the relevance of imperial history to IR, with considerable salience here, comes from Andrew Phillips’ work on native soldiers and the empire. Phillips (2016, 62) argues that IR commonly accepts ‘the sovereign states’ ubiquity. . . as the endpoint of a centuries-​long process of modernization, spearheaded by European imperialism’. A key part of this assumption is that European military might and its greater modernization is what enabled it to take colonies and dominate world order. In response, Phillips notes that ‘native’ troops were used in various wars of conquest in South Asia and, indeed, tended to outnumber European soldiers. Elsewhere, various historians have pointed out that, far from modernizing India by building state institutions and railroads, colonizers in many ways looted or even de-​industrialized India. South Asia’s networks for feeding its people were shattered, causing millions to die in regular famines (Davis 2002, 311–​313). The profits created by India’s textile industries were moved from Gujarat and Bengal to the North of England (Misra 2003). These are not the benign actions of a modernizing power. A more granular engagement with the histories of colonization in South Asia, histories which have already been undertaken by historians of empire in recent years, disrupt the narratives of the state and modernity on which IR’s theory and historiography has generally been premised. The Indian Uprising, as a moment in history, reveals the enormous violence that underpins India’s, and with it other colonized societies’, postcolonial modernity. If we are to think of this event as any part of the modernization process of empire, and with it the making of the states-​system, it shows us first and foremost the brutality of this ‘modernization’ process. A granular reading of this history of the rise of modernity in the case of a colonized society like India tells us a great deal about the tendency of IR’s theorizing to sanitize colonial history. This sanitized account is undermined by a granular reading of the Indian Uprising. Reading the Indian Uprising, and emphasizing this moment as a piece of historical IR, forces us to reckon with colonial violence. It leads us to rethink some of the softening and sanitizing concepts to describe world order, such as those critiqued by Seth. If we are to think of the Indian Uprising as part of a process of modernization, or even fold it into a narrative which ends with the creation of the Indian state and its foreign policymaking, then the granularity of this event must draw our attention to the role of extreme colonial violence in maintaining colonial order.

620   Alexander E. Davis

The Indian Uprising of 1857: Causes, Actors, and Outcomes Understanding the events of 1857 requires an understanding of the context of colonial India and the gradual creep of British control across South Asia. The British had been landing on the coasts of India since the early 1600s, initially seeking trade. They had slowly gathered armies, power, and territory in the Indian subcontinent, based on the exploitation of the divisions within the societies they encountered. The East India Company’s dominance had been established incrementally through a series of wars from the mid-​eighteenth century onwards. This was made possible through a private army which numbered 260,000 soldiers by 1803 and which enabled the East India Company to wield tremendous influence across all of South Asia (Dalrymple 2019). The East India Company at the turn of the nineteenth century has been memorably described by historian William Dalrymple as a ‘dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath—​[Robert] Clive’ (Dalrymple 2019). Since the 1820s, the East India Company had seen themselves as having paramountcy over India, suggesting that they had the right to exercise control over India’s politics, its economy, and culture. British power at this stage rested on a thin veneer of violence and coercion. The rule of the East India Company re-​wrote South Asia’s political geography. Three major trading ports were established by the East India Company, around which its political administration was based: the Bombay Presidency in the West, the Madras Presidency in the South, and Bengal Province in the East. Lying alongside these three centres, were hundreds of Princely States, which were key parts of this political patchwork. These small bodies had independence in domestic affairs, but many owed their allegiance to the British. This geopolitical patchwork reflects the enormous divides and diversity within South Asia’s cultural regions. These Princely States maintained their sovereignty despite the transfer of India’s sovereignty to the British Crown. The growth of British racial and cultural arrogance was producing social problems and generating anger in Indian society. Post-​hoc justifications for British rule, based on emergent racialized notions of superiority, were giving shape to divide and rule strategies. This was taking place amid the slow plunder of India’s wealth, with the profits of India’s agricultural production going to the British. Famines were becoming more commonplace. Divide and rule strategies had exploited and worsened division among Indian society, particularly through the British practice of taking a census every ten years (Bhagat 2001, 4352–​4356). Much of the resistance to the slow creep of British rule had been put down by wars with local Maharajahs. For example, in the south of India, significant resistance from Tipu Sultan of Mysore had been brutally put down in 1799. Increasing numbers of Indian Maharajahs now owed their allegiance to the British. The Mughal empire had lost the vast majority of its territory and prestige and its influence had become minimal. Still, there was a nominal Mughal ruler—​Bahadur Shah Zafar II. But by 1857, he was elderly, quiet, and best known for his works as a poet. Historians, broadly speaking, have not been able to agree on whether or not the Indian Uprising was a nationalist Uprising that reflected a growing anti-​colonial nationalism and

The Indian Uprising of 1857    621 the idea of India. However, it did play a role in generating a new consciousness within India about the need for self-​rule. In this sense, the Uprising played a part in the creation of an idea of the nation in India (Srivastava 2018). It would be a vast oversimplification (and anachronistic) to argue it was driven primarily by nationalism; it was both a military Uprising and a civilian Uprising. Elsewhere, it has been thought of as a peasant Uprising, and the death throes of the feudal Mughal empire. The motivations behind the Uprising are made more complicated and difficult to understand when we look at the choices various Sepoys made. Some soldiers chose to go home rather than fight on either side. Those engaged in the Uprising requested that Bahadur Shah Zafar II be reinstalled as ruler, suggesting that the purpose of the Uprising was notionally at least to return the Mughal empire to its previous position. Some of those in revolt, however, did not accept this as the goal of the Uprising, with the return of a previous order not necessarily a shared goal of those involved (Dalrymple 2006). Cultural issues emerging out of the British belief in their inherent superiority also played a significant role in provoking the Uprising. The resistance was premised partly on the sense that the westernization of India was damaging. Control by the East India Company was dispossessing and alienating local populations. One element of this alienation was the commonly reported rumour about the Enfield Rifle. To load the rifle, soldiers had to bite the end off of a lubricated cartridge. Rumours spread throughout the Indian army soldiers that this lubricant was a mix of pig and cow lard. Such a lubricant would have been offensive to both Hindu and Muslim soldiers. There was already, however, a growing and deep sense of economic and cultural dislocation among soldiers in the Indian army before the rumours about the Enfield rifle emerged (Bose and Jalal 1997, 76). The rumours themselves are evidence of this mistrust, regardless of their veracity. The Uprising was also very much a response to British racial arrogance. Whether we call it nationalism or patriotism, a shared sense of ‘loss of country’ brought together Hindus and Muslims in resenting and ultimately rising up against the British (Bose and Jalal 1997, 76). The Uprising began in the cantonment of Meerut, where Indian soldiers turned on their European officers, and led to almost all the 100,000 soldiers in the Bengal Army rebelling against the British (Anderson 2007, 3). The mutinous soldiers marched to Delhi and took control of the city within 24 hours (Bender 2017, 3). The Uprising then spread from Meerut and Delhi, to Agra, Lucknow, and Cawnpore (Kanpur). The rebels quickly took control of most of the north-​ western provinces and Awadh (Oudh). In Delhi, the leaders of the Uprising demanded that Bahadur Shah Zafar be returned to power. In Lucknow, there was a famous siege at the ‘British Residency’ in the centre of the city, the ruins of which are now a tourist attraction. The Uprising did not spread as its leaders had hoped. The British were able to recruit soldiers from the Madras Army, Pathans from the north-​west frontier province and Sikh soldiers from Punjab in large numbers to assist in putting down the Uprising. Much of the fighting then was done by Indians attacking other Indians. This makes it difficult to categorize the Uprising as a ‘war of independence’. The use of native troops was not uncommon. Recruiting local soldiers had been crucial to the consolidation and spread of the British control around South Asia and elsewhere (Phillips 2016). The role of Indian soldiers loyal to the British, however, shows the success of divide and rule strategies. Furthermore, it demonstrates the Eurocentrism of accounts of empire which emphasize the technological and military superiority of colonizing powers. In the case of the Indian Uprising, the vast majority of soldiers loyal to the East India Company were of Indian origin (Bryant 1978).

622   Alexander E. Davis Many Indian Princely States, led by Maharajas who owed their title and territory to the British, also sided with the colonizers. These included Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore in the South, and Kashmir to the North. Numerous smaller Princely States in Rajputana (Rajasthan) also gave the British support. The situation in these regions remained calm. There was no violence in trading cities such as Bombay and Madras. This means that the Uprising was relatively localized to the plains of North and Central India, particularly in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. The support of the Princely States ensured that Indian princes remained a key element of India’s political patchwork until 1948. While Delhi was retaken relatively quickly, it took far longer for the British to retake Jhansi and Lucknow. The Awadh countryside was particularly difficult to pacify, leading to ongoing small outbreaks of conflict and counter-​insurgency. Throughout this one-​and-​a-​half-​year period, both sides accused the other of indiscriminate killings, including the killing of non-​combatants, women, and children. Indeed, there were major acts of violence on both sides of the conflict. One of the first major examples of this violence was carried out by a rebel commander Nana Sahib (Rudrangshu 1990). The British garrison at Cawnpore had surrendered and been offered safe passage down the Ganga to Allahabad. Instead, however, the men were massacred and 200 women and children were taken hostage. When British troops approached two weeks later, the women and children were killed and thrown down a nearby well (Bender 2017, 3). The British remembered the slaughter of women and children as evidence of the savagery and unreliability of Indian soldiers (Bender 2017, 106). It provoked long running and bloody counter-​insurgency campaigns and mass executions (Wagner 2010). The British response was vicious. Bender (2017, 4) describes the British response as: The British, for their part, destroyed entire villages rumored to have ties to the rebels. They hanged Muslims with pork stuffed into their mouths and forced Hindus to lick the bloodstains from various sites, including the Bibighur at Cawnpore.

The British also killed Indian combatants in ways which guaranteed their bodies could not be identified. The violence was done with a purpose: it was seen as the only way to establish and legitimize British control of South Asia (Bender 2017, 4). Control of Delhi was returned to the British by mid-​September 1857. Bahadur Shah Zafar was taken captive, and exiled in Rangoon, Burma, where he later died. Twenty-​one of his sons were executed in Delhi. Crushing the rest of the Uprising was slow. The fighting turned to the Residency in Lucknow, which was not taken until March 1858. The Rani of Jhansi, widely thought of in India as a hero in the conflict, was killed in June 1858; the city and Gwalior fort fell soon after. The British declared the fighting over by July 1858, but occasional guerrilla-​style warfare continued for several months. Consequently, it is difficult to calculate the numbers of dead and injured. Douglas Peers notes that the cost in human lives is poorly recorded and difficult to confirm. He suggests that 6,000 of the 40,000 Europeans in India were killed. The number of Indians who were killed in response is even more difficult to ascertain. Peers (2006, 64) estimates that the number of Indians killed in the reprisals to be 800,000, but possibly more. These numbers were particularly poorly documented, however, and so Peers’ estimate is based on census figures from 1871. Chopra (2003, 118) estimates that 150,000 were killed in Oudh alone, 100,000 of which were civilians. The British press called for reprisals, with one Guardian article stating that ‘these rebels of Delhi must be made an example to all their countrymen for ages to come of the consequences of such

The Indian Uprising of 1857    623 crimes’ (Guardian Research Department 2011). The same editorial also recommended that the administration should be kind in dealing with rumours about forced conversions to Christianity and the use of lard in the Enfield rifle, stating that: ‘In dealing with such a people, it is the duty of a Government administered by a more enlightened race, to be as tender of their superstitions as if it shared them’ (Guardian Research Department, 2011). Overall, brutal reprisals were seen as necessary to maintain order in a supposedly ‘savage’ land. The conflict ended formally on 1 November 1858, with Queen Victoria’s proclamation stating not only that India was now a Crown Colony, but also noting the violence: ‘Our Power has been shewn by the Suppression of that Rebellion in the field; We desire to shew Our Mercy, by pardoning the Offences of those who have been thus misled, but who desire to return to the path of Duty’. This was a thinly veiled threat: the British had perpetrated enormous violence to maintain their colonial possessions in India. They were prepared to repeat their slaughter of any Indians who threatened them (Bender 2017, 143). India’s princes were guaranteed territorial rights and autonomy from 1858 through to India’s independence and were folded partly into intra-​empire diplomacy (Naik 2014 and Thakur 2017). The fear of similar uprisings stayed with the British throughout the rest of their time in India. Indeed, after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, some hailed General Reginald Dyer as a hero for averting another 1857. As Shashi Tharoor (2017, 173) has noted, Dyer was referred to by Rudyard Kipling upon his return to Britain as ‘the man who saved India’. The British public raised £26,317 which was given to him along with a ‘jewelled sword of honour’ (Tharoor 2017, 173). After the Uprising, colonial rule in India was continually based on this threat of reoccurring violence. There were even greater lessons for the British in terms of administration. Gyan Prakash argues that the experience led the British to conclude that ‘India needed to be ruled with a stronger hand, that what the natives required was a productive and secure empire fashioned with modern technologies of rule’ (Prakash 2002, 85). This meant increased surveillance, imprisonment, control of information, and the creation of the Indian Civil Service (ICS)—​as Prakash explained, ‘governance with rationalistic, bureaucratic means’ (Prakash 2002, 85). The idea of ‘the mutiny’, and the memory of it, provoked continual terror in the minds of British colonial governors in India, leading the colonial state to crack-​down upon, imprison, and monitor Indian society (Wagner 2013). The colonial control on information, rationalization and use of information is captured nicely by the Raj’s 1860 report on the control of information suggested the need to centralize power and control information (Government of India 1948). This directly produced a more brutal colonial legal system (Anderson 2007). As Bender (2017) has shown, these changes were later spread to other colonies, a means of governing colonized peoples. The violence committed by Indians was also seen as justifying the rule of the British and set in motion colonial ideas of ‘martial races’ (Sinha 1995). The Uprising had a profound effect on the Indian Army and the way it was deployed globally. While Bengali regiments were almost entirely disbanded, and no longer recruited from, Punjabi and Gurkha troops who stayed loyal were recruited in far larger numbers. This element of the Uprising, as we will see, went well beyond colonial India, with these ‘martial races’ used continually for military and police around the empire. What are we to make of these events for historical IR? The Uprising precipitated significant changes in the way that India and the broader empire were governed. All of this might be placed into a modernizing historiographical narrative. It was indeed the end of the

624   Alexander E. Davis Mughal empire. Instituting the Raj led to the bureaucratizing of India’s governance and politics. Institutions such as the Ministry of External Affairs, the Imperial Records Department (which became the National Archives of India), the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and indeed the secretariat buildings of Lutyens’ New Delhi, were creations of the Raj. These are all associated with modernity in India. C. A. Bayly (1996) has memorably described this anxiety as an ‘information panic’ which informed British policy in India after 1857. Coupled with the fall of the ‘feudal’ Mughal empire, we might see this as ‘modernizing’. Regardless of whether we fold this story into a progressive narrative, however, we must bear in mind the brutality and exploitation of this form of modernity. For subsequent Indian anticolonial nationalists, the 1857 Uprising and the way it was put down showed both the possibilities and the pitfalls of violence as a method of resisting imperialism. Hindu nationalists were also influenced by the memory of the Indian Uprising, in a very direct fashion. Hindutva developed as a response to British ideas of Indian effeminacy and British hypermasculinity. It latched onto this discourse and reinterpreted it as the need to assert India’s masculine strength, drawing on a narrative of the Indian Uprising as a ‘First War of Independence’ by committed nationalists. This narrative of this event was built by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1949), who argued in 1909 that it was a unified and nationalist revolt; and who ignored and underplayed the divisions between those engaged in the Uprising to fit it into his project of provoking a hypermasculine Hindu nationalism. The brutality with which the Uprising was put down led some anticolonial nationalist thinkers to adopt non-​violent tactics, most famously, Mohandas Gandhi. As Priya Chacko (2012) has noted, modernity, in the form of science, large-​scale development projects, and the building of large dams and nuclear reactors, became central to postcolonial India’s state project under Jawaharlal Nehru. Engaging with the scientific trappings of modernity, while also forging its own development path and claiming a peaceful civilizational heritage became India’s interpretation of its postcolonial modernity. Nehru and Gandhi came to see Western modernity as oriented ‘toward exploitation, violence and material betterment at the expense of the community’s moral and cultural values’ (Chacko 2012, 9). Here, we can see the differentiated understandings of modernity generated by the colonial experience. Relying on a singular understanding of what constitutes modernity and modernization creates a risk of missing the ways in which modernity and the violence of empire were interpreted differently by colonizer and colonized.

The Global Indian Uprising: Debates about Race and Ordering the Empire The events of 1857 had a broader meaning for the British empire at large, and with it, international politics of the period. I will now move on to consider the global afterlives of the Indian Uprising, by looking at the way it led the British to reconsider and reshape their empire. This was the case both in terms of the governance structures of the empire, the way the empire was imagined, and how India and Indians fit within it. This affected both specific legal and defence regimes, as well as imperial debates about how the empire should be ordered. The Raj, as shown by Thomas Metcalf (2007), became crucial in governing and

The Indian Uprising of 1857    625 exporting British power around the Indian Ocean region. Those who had stayed loyal to the empire were positioned as culturally and racially superior soldiers, leading them to be used as police and military assets around the region (Metcalf 2007, 102–​135). In Singapore, the Uprising initially led to Indians being seen as a ‘menace’ and a threat, but the so-​called ‘martial races’, particularly Sikhs, were later used as police in Malaya (Rai 2013). They were placed at a higher position in British racial thought, and were able to become agents of colonization, despite being colonized themselves. Australia provides an immediate example which illustrates the flaws of Britain’s global response and the way that the empire was organized and defended. The Australian response was slow and hampered by infighting. Since their foundation, the Australian colonies were deeply dependent on shipping coming via India. Many of the goods that were used to build and furnish the Australian colonies came through ports like Calcutta and Bombay. The debate was between those who wanted to send troops, seeing India as central to the broader security of the empire, and those who saw it as distant and not in the interests of the colony to make a significant contribution. In April of 1858, nearly a year after the original Uprising had started, the Governor of New South Wales, William Denison met with his Legislative Assembly (New South Wales Executive Council, 1858). Word of the Indian Uprising, and the violence of the Indians involved, had reached Sydney, and Viscount Charles Canning (1858) in India had written to Denison to request support. Denison, as an imperial representative, wanted to forward all available troops to India, specifically in the form of the 77th regiment of the British army, along with 100 horses and a regiment of artillery. This was to cost New South Wales (NSW) between £3,500 and £4,000. The fear in the Australian colonies was that the Sikh regiments of the Indian Army, only recently placed under British control, would join the growing Uprising. This, as we know, did not eventuate. Denison had not received word from London to divert all available troops but given the severity of the news reports from India, he felt he had the authority to take drastic action. However, he also believed that to approve this sum of money, there would have to be a vote in the Legislative Assembly. His Executive Council (1858) believed that the Legislative Assembly would ‘gladly devise the opportunity of showing by such a contribution the sympathy which is felt by the people of NSW for their fellow countrymen in India in their time of danger and necessity’. As the oldest of the Australian colonies, New South Wales was the only one to consider sending support to crush the Uprising. Although Denison believed the Legislative Assembly would see that Australia depended on imports from and connections with India, the Assembly instead created a committee to study the necessity of the expense. One Victorian newspaper, The Argus (1858, 5), wrote of the contribution being discussed by NSW and argued for Victoria to make a similar contribution. They asked: What is Victoria prepared to do? Will the 40th regiment be at once despatched to the banks of the Ganges to add fresh laurels to those which that gallant corps has already so copiously won in many a well fought field? . . . what is Victoria to do, in this critical state of India, towards augmenting the British forces in that country?

The article closed with support for Denison’s call ‘to establish a local corps of a colonial character’ (The Argus 1858, 5).

626   Alexander E. Davis As the Legislative Assembly’s study dragged on, word arrived that the Sikh members of the Indian Army had stayed loyal to the empire, and the move was scrapped. The delay meant that the Australian Colonies sent little if any assistance. It was in the Imperial interest to finance a battery of artillery, but not necessarily in the perceived interests of British colonists living in Australia. The Indian Uprising was an early military crisis that revealed the weaknesses in the organization of the empire. The Australian colonies imperial elite slowly became convinced that they required their own, permanent military defence force, rather than relying on visiting British soldiers. These Australian forces could be sent to defend imperial interests abroad if they were needed. Support for imperial conflicts became the centrepiece of Australian foreign policy through to the end of the Second World War, when it was replaced with support for the US (Davis 2019). For the Australian colonies, the event was a reminder of their intense isolation, and the slow and cumbersome administrative practices that connected them to the British empire. Although there was a displayed desire to contribute to imperial defence, the colonies’ ability to do so was limited by infighting and what in Australia has become known as ‘the tyranny of distance’. Yet, the mission to reorganize the empire and its defences remained (Kennedy 1971). Ultimately what this story shows is that the web of connections between the imperial metropole of London and Whitehall and its far-​flung settler colonies populated by vast numbers of colonized peoples was under-​theorized and misunderstood by British imperial elites (Ballantyne 2003, 112–​113). The creation of the British Raj ensured that India became a key node in an already deeply globalized imperial system. The Indian Uprising, which provoked reorganization in the British empire, had global ramifications worth reflecting on for our purposes. It revealed not only the weaknesses of colonial governance, but also Britain’s inability to draw its empire together to defend itself. The creation of the Raj, and the formalization of imperial structures led to debates on imperial federation in the 1860s onwards, with the position of India a key subject of discussion (Davis 2019, 29–​49). Debates on India’s position amongst thinkers calling for an imperial federation to formalize the empire’s structure, led to discussions of whether or not India, and other colonies, could ‘progress’ to the level of British society. For some imperial federationists, India was crucial for its size and attached prestige, but had to remain subjugated. For others, imperial federation had to be racially distinct, and contain only Britain and its loyal settler colonies (Bell 2007, 149). These ideas were connected to debates on social Darwinist ideas of racial progress, and segregationist ideas in which some races were seen as stagnant and some as stuck in the past. Before the 1857 Uprising, it was assumed, broadly, that India was the past of Europe, and needed to be dragged along some kind of evolutionary scale (Inden 1990, 66–​68). The events of 1857 were interpreted and imagined in deeply racialized ways which fed into British racial thought and had implications for global colonial governance. The British press reported on the violence perpetrated by the ‘uncivilized’ rebels who were thoughtlessly massacring their betters. This was used to condone the massive violence in response to the Uprising and fed into the idea that India needed ‘civilizing’. It also led to the broader take-​up of the idea that Indian society and British society did not necessarily share the same path to modernity. After 1857, this was up for debate in imperial circles (Mehrotra 1961, 37). These debates on the ordering of Empire went well beyond India and placed all Asian peoples on the second rung of an imagined racial hierarchy.

The Indian Uprising of 1857    627 As John R. Seely (2009, 176) put it in his musings on the future of the British empire, and the possibility of imperial federation: ‘India is all past and, I may almost say, has no future’. Another influential imperial thinker, Lionel Curtis, one of the strongest proponents of imperial federation, concluded that India needed to be governed through authoritarian structures, but thought that some form of progress was possible. Indians were to be slowly introduced to self-​government (Davis et al. 2021, 35–​39). Notionally, the equality of non-​ Western peoples with their Western counterparts at some far-​off time in the future was recognized. Non-​Western peoples were held in the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty 2000). As Curtis saw it early in the twentieth century, the possibility of India becoming an equal nation in the Commonwealth would take generations (Davis et al. 2021). For colonized peoples, the message was arguably simpler. As Bender (2017, 144) put it, when talking about New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as India, the events of 1857 ‘unleashed intense fear as those in the colonies lived in anticipation of violence’.

Conclusion: The Indian Uprising and the Global Colonial Order Despite the passing of more than a century and a half, the Indian Uprising and the British response to it have not been forgotten or forgiven. In 2007, a group of British tourists seeking to memorialize the 150-​year anniversary of the Indian Uprising and the sacrifices of European soldiers in India were pelted with stones and bottles at The Residency in Lucknow (Wagner 2011, 760). The Indian Uprising still provokes enormous passion, not least for its intensity and violence. Its ongoing significance lies in the causes and direct consequences of the event itself, and in the long-​running ideas it generated. The causes of the Indian Uprising were manifold. It was the culmination of cultural, economic, political, and ideational changes as a result of colonization. Its actors included a sprawling transnational corporation, loyal and disloyal Indian soldiers, villages, a decaying empire, India’s Princely States, and the British Crown. The violence it unleashed contributed to a reinterpretation of global structures of race and empire. The Raj itself led to the creation of many of the institutions and infrastructure that today make up the postcolonial Indian state. But modernity, and its associated institutions and technologies, were interpreted differently by Indians and the British, because of the ways in which this history is read between colonizer and colonized. The Indian Uprising should only be folded into narratives of modernization when we bear in mind both the violence underpinning this development, and the differentiated ideas of modernity that it helped produce. A textured, granular reading of the events leading up to and following from the Indian Uprising reveals not only the extreme violence that underpins India’s postcolonial modernity, but also the process by which it fed into imperial governance and the interpretation of modernity. This analysis also reveals the way that the reorganization of the British empire was based on an increased British anxiety about rebellion, and, indeed, their inability to understand colonized peoples. The global aftermath of the Indian Uprising shows us how global ideational structures were created not only by the event itself, but also by the interpretation of those events both by the colonizers and by the colonized. The ideas and debates

628   Alexander E. Davis that the Indian Uprising generated played key roles in making the international system we live with and study today. Above all, then, the Indian Uprising demonstrates to us the colonial genealogy of the international and the extreme violence that underpins it.

Notes 1. I have chosen to refer to the event in question as ‘the Indian Uprising’ to reflect that those involved were not just mutinous soldiers, and that the event was a far broader uprising within parts of Indian society. Calling it a mutiny masks the extent to which Indians rejected colonial rule. This also avoids framing their motivations as solely rooted in Indian nationalism. 2. On the US case, see Vitalis (2015). On the imperial version of race in the making of IR across the British empire, see: Davis et al. (2021).

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Chapter 43

T he Berlin a nd Hag u e C onferenc e s Claire Vergerio Both the Berlin Conference of 1884–​85 and the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 occupy an important place in narratives about the development of modern international relations and modern international law.1 While the extent of their practical impact remains debated, they have come to symbolize some of the key international developments of the so-​called belle époque (1871–​1914). The Hague Conferences are depicted as a beacon of progressive thinking, embodying the attempt to limit the horrors of warfare through the codification of the laws of war and the establishment of the first permanent court of arbitration, as well as the broader turn towards our modern international system based on multilateralism, codified international law, and the rise of global civil society. The Berlin Conference, by contrast, is considered to represent the darker side of late nineteenth-​century developments in international relations and international law, cementing the centuries-​long love affair between jurists and imperialism as well as the violent subjugation of the African continent. As such, they represent two conflicting understandings of the role of international lawyers—​or publicists—​in the development of our modern world: one progressive and humanitarian, the other brutal and imperialistic. What is striking, however, is that for all the literature on each conference, there is—​to my knowledge—​no piece that explicitly examines the links between the Berlin Conference and the Hague Conferences. Scholars interested in telling a positive story about the development of international law focus on the Hague conferences, while the more critically minded ones intent on highlighting international law’s complicity with empire hone in on Berlin. The few works that mention both of them (mainly Koskenniemi 2001) offer a more nuanced picture of international law and its Janus-​faced past but they do not explicitly relate the conferences to each other. In other words, the literature makes it seem as if the conferences belonged to entirely separate spheres of the development of international law. Our current inability to discuss Berlin and The Hague in the same breath stems at least in part from our presentist tendency to view humanitarianism and imperialism as intuitively opposed. Yet, as many scholars have now shown, liberal humanitarian concerns and the drive towards imperial expansion were in fact eminently compatible in the minds of many intellectuals and practitioners of the period (Bell 2007; Pitts 2009, 2012, 2018). Taking

632   Claire Vergerio stock of this literature, this chapter seeks to challenge the existing, disjointed approach to the conferences, and in doing so, to shed further light on the ambivalent character of belle époque international law. Following a brief overview of the main debates about Berlin and The Hague, I make two core claims about the links between the conferences. First, I argue that a number of the most prominent publicists of the period were involved, either directly or indirectly, in both the Berlin and the Hague conferences. While we know that the Institut de droit international, the first professional organization for international lawyers founded in 1873, was generally invested in both the colonial question and in the issue of limiting the excesses of warfare, the fact that it was actually the same publicists taking leadership roles in both of these areas should give us real pause for thought. Second, I suggest that in light of this overlap, the conferences shared some important similarities that should be further investigated. They were notably all driven by the shift towards a humanitarian and universalist approach to international law, and they gave pride of place to philanthropic concerns and to the participation of private actors. I thus conclude by claiming that we should move away from the siloed study of the Berlin and Hague conferences and examine the two in tandem, since when it comes to the general development of modern global governance, they arguably constitute two sides of the same coin.

The Berlin and Hague Conferences: An Overview While the actual impact of the Berlin and Hague conferences has become increasingly debated, with numerous scholars arguing that they failed to achieve their short-​term goals, they have nonetheless come to be seen as foundational moments for the modern, twentieth-​ century international order. As such, they can both be considered as founding myths of modern IR and International Law: they provide critical benchmarks in our understanding of the development of the modern world, but they appear questionable once one engages with their more granular history. In this section, I provide a brief overview of what the conferences entailed, and what main scholarly debates continue to unfold around them. In doing so, I draw on the works of historians, lawyers, and IR scholars, who have all written about these conferences but have tended to do so in slightly different ways. At one end of the granularity spectrum, the more common approach for historians has been to produce highly detailed works—​often monographs with heavy primary-​source research—​that focus entirely on either the Berlin Conference or the ones in The Hague, and that connect them to individual aspects of modernity, such as the rise of civil society. At the other end of the spectrum, IR scholars have generally discussed these conferences in broader brushstrokes, drawing overwhelmingly on secondary sources, and as part of larger, more holistic narratives about the emergence of the modern world order. Lawyers have fallen somewhere in between, with the conferences being sometimes discussed in passing as part of a broader set of developments (e.g. Miéville 2005, 253) and sometimes examined in much greater depth through primary sources (e.g. Craven 2015). Regardless of their orientation in terms of granularity, scholars working within this area have virtually all sought to connect the conferences with the ‘modernity problematique’.

The Berlin and Hague Conferences    633 Underpinning their various debates, the same question recurs: to what extent did the conferences constitute a watershed in the development of the modern world order? Part of the disagreements pertain to the way we should understand the purpose of these conferences. The other part relates to whether these conferences actually achieved what they sought to do. In both cases, recent contributions to the literatures on Berlin and The Hague have sought to transcend these debates and provide nuanced syntheses of these conferences’ impact.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–​1885 The Berlin Conference took place between November 1884 and February 1885 on the initiative of Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire. It is generally considered to have laid down the legal terms of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, described by Joseph Conrad as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’ (Conrad 1924). The conference, the common story goes, enabled Europeans and a few of their imperial rivals to “peacefully” split the African cake amongst themselves, avoiding the great bloodshed that would otherwise have resulted from inter-​imperial competition. Granular accounts of the conference, however, have put forward a number of much more specific narratives that clash with one another. Most importantly, scholars strongly disagree about what the conference’s true goals were, whether it managed to achieve them, and whether it should be imbued with any real historical importance (for an excellent summary of this debate, see Craven, 2015; for general historical accounts of the conference, see especially Crowe 1942 and the more recent Förster et al. 1988; the best compilation of primary sources is still Gavin 1973). A number of scholars (Anghie 2005, 90–​97; Griffiths 1986; Miéville 2005, 253; Westlake 1894, 129–​189) consider the Berlin conference to have marked a turning point in the history of imperialism and in the trajectory of the African continent. According to them, the General Act of the conference constitutes the point of origin for the contemporary configuration of African borders as it created the legal framework for the formal partition of Africa. The General Act of the conference, they tell us, turned central Africa into terra nullius, successfully placing the African natives under an ‘authoritative framework of positivist jurisprudence’ (Anghie 2005, 91) and legalizing the exploitation of the local African population, with catastrophic consequences for the continent. Other scholars (Bley 2005; Crowe 1942; Katzenellenbogen 1996)2 see these claims as grossly exaggerated and emphasize both the more restricted aims of the conference and the extent to which it failed to achieve them. They argue strongly against taking the Berlin conference as a founding moment for the partition of Africa, pointing out that African borders were fixed in the decades after the conference, not during the conference itself, noting that the famous provisions relating to the acquisition of territory pertained only to already established claims of sovereignty on the coastlines of Africa (Crowe 1942, 4). Ultimately, they contend that the conference’s goals were not colonization and exploitation but the establishment of a free trade regime, the internationalization of territory, and the pursuit of philanthropy. On this basis, these scholars echo the general public sentiment in the aftermath of the conference: Berlin, if anything, was an utter failure. After the conference, in complete opposition with its aims, monopolistic systems of trade were set up, the centre of Africa became

634   Claire Vergerio Belgian, and the Congo basin turned into the scene of some of the most shocking brutalities of colonial history. In recent years, scholars have tried to reconcile these two conflicting accounts of Berlin. Some emphasize that while the conference is not the cornerstone of the partition of Africa, it is nonetheless significant because it established the administrative state as the sole legitimate form of political organization on the continent, forcing it to adapt to one specific understanding of modernity (Eckert 2009). More ambitiously, others (Craven 2015; Epple 2016) claim that we can overcome these tensions between our narratives if we pay closer attention to ‘the relationship between the apparent aspirations embodied in the text [of the General Act] and the modalities of their realization’ (Craven 2015, 35). In other words, many of the existing dichotomies—​between narratives of success or failure, of colonial or anti-​ colonial aspirations, of the pursuit free trade or that of monopolies—​result from the gap between the aspirations and the material implications of the General Act itself (this echoes Crowe 1942). For example, while the aspirations displayed by the conference participants stemmed from a genuine philanthropic belief in civilization’s universal potential, their practical outcome was to draw a line between those who were civilized and those who were not and could thus be forcibly intervened against (Epple 2016). Even more concretely, while participants genuinely sought to avoid colonization by pushing for internationalization and trying to establish a free trade regime, what they promoted in theory was unsustainable and bound to lead to the exact opposite in practice (Craven 2015). Establishing a free trade regime required significant expenses, which could only be covered if a colonial power had the right to levy tariffs and taxes. Thus, the establishment of Leopold’s Congo Free State, widely regarded as the symbol of Berlin’s failure, was actually ‘its most logical extension’ (Craven 2015, 55). These new syntheses show us that Berlin was highly significant even though it ultimately confounded the original expectations of its authors. They provide a more coherent understanding of the past and highlight the numerous contradictions that existed at the heart of what late nineteenth-​century diplomats, lawyers, and intellectuals were trying to achieve. I will return to this point, but before doing so, I will now provide a similar overview of our current understanding of the Hague conferences.

The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 The ‘international peace conferences’ held in The Hague in 1899 and 1907 have not led to quite as much debate as the Berlin conference, though some disagreements do exist, again, regarding their aims and their impact in practice (for in depth histories of the conferences, see Abbenhuis 2018; Abbenhuis, Barber, and Higgins 2017; Dülffer 2007; Eyffinger 1999, 2007a, 2007b; for primary sources, see Rosenne 2001). In the broadest sense, the 1899 conference, which was called by Tsar Nicholas II, marked the culmination of efforts to codify the laws of war on land based on earlier efforts, most notably the Lieber Code of 1863, the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the Brussels Declaration of 1874, and the Oxford Manual of 1880. The 1907 conference built on the achievements of its 1899 predecessor, expanding regulations predominantly in the area of naval warfare (Rindfleisch 2007). A third conference was meant to be held in 1915, but it was cancelled in light of the outbreak of the First World War (for a discussion, see Abbenhuis 2018). The conferences are most commonly

The Berlin and Hague Conferences    635 known for having tried to limit the horrors of warfare through both the codification of the laws of war and the attempt to establish international arbitration as an alternative to the institution of war (see e.g. Best 1999; Hobe and Fuhrmann 2007). For long, the stark contrast between the conferences’ high aspirations and the tragic end they met with the catastrophe of the First World War led them to be dismissed by scholars as events of little consequence (Hucker 2015), even though they had been perceived by public opinion as great successes at the time (Abbenhuis 2018). The literature then developed into two broad camps: works by military and diplomatic historians who read the conferences as a failure, and works by international legal scholars who interpreted the conferences as the starting point for groundbreaking developments in international law (see Abbenhuis et al. 2017 for an overview of this continuing divide). Over the past 20 years, the literature emphasizing the importance of the conferences has grown significantly, and they are now associated with a number of both minor and major themes in the development of modern international relations. While scholars have emphasized their foundational character within specific areas, from disarmament and arms control (Keefer 2007) to the principle of distinguishing between civilians and combatants (Kleffner 2007; for a more critical take, see Nabulsi 1999) and the punishment of war crimes (Segesser 2007), what is even more striking is the place they occupy within broader narratives about the development of the contemporary international order. In the broadest sense, the Hague conferences have been contextualized as an attempt to fill the vacuum left by the declining European Concert as a great power framework at the end of the nineteenth century (Schulz 2007). Since the European states system was under great tension, the argument goes, the conferences were organized as an alternative means of securing peace. In this respect, they can be viewed as an attempt to repair the defects of the dissolving international system, with the efforts of the new internationalist peace movement being eventually sabotaged by militaristic elites (Schulz 2007). More specifically, though, the key in these narratives is to highlight not what the conferences accomplished (its immediate contributions were rather modest), but the process they started (Eyffinger 1999), particularly in terms of the emergence of twentieth-​century global governance: the first Hague conference is seen as ‘undoubtedly a crucial watershed in the development of modern fundamental institutions’ (Reus-​Smit 1999, 141), generally for three main reasons. First, the Hague Conferences are considered to have marked the emergence of core international organizations and set into motion the replacement of a system based on natural law, dynastic diplomacy, and unequal sovereignties, with one based on open multilateral conferences, contractual international law, and sovereign equality (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 85–​89; Hobe and Fuhrmann 2007; Hueck 2004; Reus-​Smit 1999, 140–​145; for a more reserved assessment see Clark 2007, 61–​82).3 Embracing principles of procedural justice, states adopted universalist and legislative ideas including shared governance with universal participation and sovereign equality, as well as diplomatic practices such as one-​ state-​one-​vote that would come to form the basis of the contemporary global governance system. They attempted to organize regular multilateral conferences on that basis, which were only interrupted by the outbreak of the war (see especially Reus-​Smit 1999, 140–​145; though for a critique of the idea that the second half of the nineteenth century marked the triumph of multilateral treaty-​making, see Keene 2012). In terms of formal organizations, the conferences sought to create institutions that would help peacefully resolve international disputes (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 213–​114; Caron 2000; Hayashi 2017) and they created the

636   Claire Vergerio Permanent Court of Arbitration, which is considered to be the precursor of both the League of Nations and its Permanent Court of International Justice, later to become the contemporary International Court of Justice (Abbenhuis 2018; Buzan and Lawson 2015, 89; Davis 1975; McCormack 2001). Additionally, the Hague conferences are closely associated with the expansion of international society, as the charmed circle of countries that were to benefit from these new principles and institutions widened once and for all beyond its European and North American core (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 201). The conferences—​especially that of 1907, where participation expanded massively from 26 to 46 countries—​ were attended by representatives from all around the world (except Africa) including from Japan, Siam, Persia, the Ottoman empire, and several Latin American states, marking a shift from the traditional European ‘Concert of Nations’ towards a more inclusive ‘comity of nations’ based on more universal norms and values (Eyffinger 1999; Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014; Schlichtmann 2003),4 although the divide continued to apply between ‘civilized’ nations who could participate and ‘uncivilized’ ones who could not. Finally, the Hague Conferences are widely discussed as having marked a turning point between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diplomacy due to the rise of global civil society (Clark 2007, 61–​82). They were strongly shaped by peace groups and the media, which had relatively open access to the conferences (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 95; Clark 2007, 61–​82) and exemplified the greater influence of civil society movements and citizens trying to pressure their politicians and diplomats (Eyffinger 2007a), along with the growing role of public opinion both domestically and internationally (Best 1999; Hucker 2015). These new participants in international politics were a particularly important faction during the conference of 1907 (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014; Herren-​Oesch and Knab 2007), and while scholars have debated the impact of their presence (Lesaffer 2013; Rindfleisch 2007)5 the most recent literature has reiterated the extent to which the conferences where as much diplomatic events as events of public agency (Abbenhuis 2018; though for a differing opinion, see Hueck 2004).6 Through the combination of a newly globally connected media and a powerful message regarding peace, disarmament, and conflict resolution, public pressure had a strong effect on the outcomes of the conference, highlighting the new weight of public opinion in global governance (Abbenhuis 2018). Recent works have also noted that the Hague Conferences constituted the moment when states adopted the concept of the ‘international community’ in both diplomacy and in international law, reflecting the increasingly universalist aspirations of the parties involved (Roshchin 2017). Overall, while some disagreements exist regarding the impact of the Hague conferences, they are now widely seen under a positive light as events that brought about some of the most important developments in early twentieth-​century global governance. By contrast with the Berlin conference, which is mainly evoked to deplore international law’s complicity in the darkest hours of European colonialism, the Hague conferences are depicted predominantly as a laudable turning point in international relations, a real beacon of progress whose admirable aims were undermined by the outbreak of the First World War. Yet, since the Berlin Conference and the first Hague Conference were less than 15 years apart, it is remarkable to note that the two sets of events are almost never discussed in relation to each other. In the remainder of the chapter, I attempt to show the extent to which the two sets of events were in fact linked.

The Berlin and Hague Conferences    637

Berlin and The Hague: Two Sides of the Same Coin? The Berlin and Hague conferences were, of course, very different in their content. Yet, they both have to be contextualized within the broader development of the discipline of International Law. As has now been widely discussed (Koskenniemi 2001; Nuzzo and Vec 2012), modern international law emerged over the course belle époque, with an initial flurry of foundational developments in the 1860s and 1870s, and a consolidation of its trajectory from the 1880s onwards. Two core themes were at the heart of the new discipline from the start: the limitation of the horrors of war, through arbitration and the codification of the laws of war, and, soon enough, the application of international law beyond the confines of Europe, both with regards to non-​European sovereigns and in terms of how best to legislate imperial expansion. Not only were the same institutions involved in both endeavours, as has already been shown, but actually, many of the same individuals were either present at or extensively involved with both the Berlin and the Hague conferences.

The Broader Context: The Birth of the Discipline of International Law Following the first attempts to codify the laws of war and the foundation of the first international scientific legal journal, the Revue de droit international et de legislation comparée (1868), the first professional organization for international lawyers, the Institut de droit international, was founded in September 1873, along with the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations (the present-​day International Law Association). The Institut’s purpose, broadly speaking, was to turn International Law into a widely recognized science and a professional field of its own. But more specifically, the creation of the Institut was intimately linked to the conflicts of its time, and particularly to the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​7 1. Indeed, it was the failure of both sides in the Franco-​Prussian War to abide by the terms of the 1864 Geneva Convention that gave Gustave Rolin-​Jacquemyns (1835–​1902) and Gustave Moynier (1826–​1910), with the encouragements of Francis Lieber (1800–​72), the author of the famous Lieber Code of 1863, the impetus to create a conference and eventually a permanent institution or an academy of international law (Koskenniemi 2001, 158–​159). Once these initial institutions were established and efforts to codify the laws of war and promote arbitration as an alternative to warfare were moving forward steadily, the international lawyers of the period—​known as publicists—​turned their attention to the non-​Western world. Two questions formed the core of their agenda: that of the scope of international law and notably its applicability to ‘the Orient’ (Koskenniemi 2001, 132; Pitts 2018, 68), and that of how to manage the process of imperial expansion, which was now in full swing. The Institut was against meddling into the controversial matter of ‘politics’, better left to European diplomacy, but absolutely fine with influencing colonial affairs (Koskenniemi 2001, 62). Most of the publicists thus became extensively invested in both the regulation of warfare and in the legal

638   Claire Vergerio architecture of (mainly) European empires. As is now a well-​established point in the literature on the development of the discipline of International Law, the Institut itself was deeply involved in both the Berlin conference and the Hague conferences via publishing and philanthropy (on Berlin, see Koskenniemi 2001, 98–​178; on The Hague, see Olmstead 2017, 50). What I now wish to show is the extent to which it was in fact some of the same people who were involved in both endeavors and drove both the conferences at Berlin and at The Hague.

A Very Small World Most of the core members of the Institut, including some of its founders, were pillars of the efforts to codify the laws of war, promote arbitration, and legislate imperial expansion, most urgently the situation in the Congo. The following table provides a brief overview of some of the key figures involved and some of their respective duties. Institut member

Involvement in Hague Conferences

o Delegate for The Netherlands to both the 1899 and the 1907 Hague Conferences o Founder and member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1900–​13) o Winner of Nobel Peace Prize (1911) Auguste Beernaert o Delegate for Belgium to both the 1899 and the 1907 Hague Conferences (1829–​1912) o Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1900–​12) o Winner of Nobel Peace Prize (1909) Friedrich Fromhold o Author of famous Martens clause (1899) (Fyodor Fedorovich) o Delegate for Russia to both the 1899 and Martens the 1907 Hague Conferences (1845–​1909) o Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1900–​09) o Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (1902) Gustave Moynier o Key drafter of Geneva Convention (1864) and later amendments (1862–​1910) o Founder and long-​term president of the International Committee for the Red Cross (1868–​1910) o Founding member of the Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix (1868) o Wrote proposal for permanent court of arbitration (1872) o Supported organization of 1899 Hague Conference but unable to attend for health reasons o Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (1901, 1902, 1903, 1905) Tobias Asser (1838–​1913)

Involvement in Congo case and Berlin Conference o Obtained Knighthood in the Order of King Leopold of Belgium for preliminary work on Congo (1883) o Delegate for The Netherlands at Berlin conference (1884–​85) o Belgian prime minister at Berlin Conference o Oversaw creation of the independent State of the Congo as Belgian Prime Minister (1885) o Prepared Russian position at Berlin Conference, emphasizing Russian stakes in light of possible extension of principles to Asia o Delegate for Russia at Berlin conference o Directed the attention of the Institut to the Congo (1878) o Founded monthly magazine ‘L’Afrique explorée et civilisée’ (1879) o Presented essay about Congo to Institut and all European governments (1883) o Consul of Congo Free State (1890–​1904)

Sources: Tobias Asser (Eyffinger 2011; n. a. 1914); Auguste Beernaert (Demoulin 1966; Eyffinger 1999, 133–​134; Mélot 1932); Friedrich Fromhold Martens (Eyffinger 1999, 177–​179; Mälksoo 2014; n. a. 1909); Gustave Moynier (Bugnion 2011).

The Berlin and Hague Conferences    639 This non-​exhaustive table points to the considerable amount of overlap that existed not only in terms of who wrote about the issues raised at the Berlin and Hague conferences, but in terms of who was an active participant and shaped policy at both sets of events. As such, it seems untenable to discuss these events in isolation from each other, as if one could somehow separate the motivations that drove them and assess their legacies independently from each other. With few exceptions, the norm continues to be for scholars writing on the Hague conferences and those working on the Berlin conference not to draw any links between their respective areas of scholarship. And yet, how can one appreciate the full legacy of the Hague conferences, depicted across much of the literature as a crucial turning point in the development of the modern international order, without taking stock of the fact that they were driven in large part by the same individuals who gave us the Congo free state and its notorious atrocities? Publicists such as Asser, Beearnert, Martens, and Moynier, who were either nominees or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in the first decade of the twentieth century, were operating largely on the basis of the same principles that had motivated their involvement in the Congo just two decades earlier. In light of these continuities, it would be well worth further looking into the similarities between Berlin and The Hague. The next section provides a preliminary foray into this question.

Berlin and The Hague: Exploring Commonalities Due to the considerable overlap in terms of who was involved at both the Berlin and Hague conferences, the first element of commonality is, unsurprisingly, the general aspirations of the conferences. Though their immediate goals were substantively different, they were both driven by a strong humanitarian and universalistic spirit. While this may be more obvious in the case of the Hague conferences, which, in addition to their core aim of limiting the horrors of war, explicitly promoted the idea that international society had the obligation to improve conditions of human beings around the world (Clark 2007, 61–​82), it was also a strong impetus in the case of Berlin. In the broadest sense, the publicists viewed their attempt to legislate the situation in the ‘uncivilized’ Congo as a way to ‘illuminate the terms under which European international law might be rendered universal’ (Craven 2012, 37). As the discipline of International Law was taking root, this was their chance to turn European international law into something truly global. Even more explicitly, European powers justified their intervention in large part on philanthropic and humanitarian grounds: they were there to prevent slavery, improve life conditions, and treat cultures and nationalities equally (Epple 2016). It is of course tempting to interpret these grounds, along with the other themes of neutrality and free trade, as ‘mere ideological screening devices that enabled attention to be diverted from the concrete processes of partition and rule that were to occur in their shadow’ (Craven 2015, 49; for instance see Gann’s chapter in Förster et al. 1988; Gathii 2006; Nuzzo 2012). However, a strong case has been made for why this is an oversimplistic reading of the conference (Craven 2015, 49–​59). Most of the publicists involved genuinely believed that they were acting in a humanitarian spirit, and in fact, though many initially failed to denounce the egregious violence on the ground, a number of them also sought to eventually distance themselves from the Congo after the atrocities committed there came to light.7 More often than not, their contradictions were not primarily the product of hypocrisy but of genuine tensions in their predominantly liberal ideology.

640   Claire Vergerio A second and related commonality between the two conferences is the influence of private actors and public opinion, both driven again by a generally humanitarian and philanthropic outlook. As I have noted previously, this has been extensively discussed in the case of the Hague conferences, with much attention paid to the international peace movement, to non-​governmental organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and to the very tangible impact of public opinion. At Berlin, there were of course a number of enterprises, traders, and explorers trying to influence the outcome of the conference, but the most conspicuous private actor was still the scientific and philanthropic organization known as the Association internationale du Congo (AIC), whose ‘flag’ and claims to sovereignty in the Congo had even been recognized by the United States (US) in April 1884 (Craven 2015, 37; on the AIC more broadly, see J. Stengers’ chapter in Förster et al. 1988). While the AIC did not have an official place at the conference (Craven 2012, 10), its role was nonetheless significant: it concluded two ‘side agreements’ appended to the text of the General Act with France and Portugal, it was recognized as a legitimate actor in the Congo by a host of ‘declarations’ and ‘conventions’ finalized during the conference, it was able to adhere to the General Act itself, and it eventually became the administration of the ‘Congo Free State’ (Craven 2015, 41–​42). Public opinion also played a major role in the domestic realms of the main European powers, with the public closely following colonial developments and the press actively relaying information about the Congo (Press 2017, 166–​218). Politicians were highly aware of the stakes involved; shortly before the conference, Bismarck notably warned that ‘public opinion in Germany lays so great a stress on . . . colonial policy that the Government’s position . . . actually depends on its success’ (Press 2017, 184). Thus, at Berlin too, private actors, public opinion, and the press played a significant role in shaping the course of diplomatic developments. A third commonality to note within this preliminary foray is the rather underappreciated role of the US at the conferences. While some work has been done on the US’s role at the Hague conferences (see especially Eyffinger 2007a, 2007b), notably highlighting the US delegation’s impact on the content of various clauses of the conventions, Theodore Roosevelt’s influence on the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and Andrew Carnegie’s financing of the building that would host it, the Peace Palace (Eyffinger 2007a), there seems to be surprisingly little research into its role at Berlin. This lack of attention could perhaps stem from to the fact that the US did not ratify the General Act due to domestic opposition. Yet, the few exceptions (Alexandrowicz 1973, 19; Munene 1990) point us in a fascinating direction, arguing that the US helped King Leopold solidify his claims on the Congo and that it also profoundly shaped Bismarck’s approach. In light of the growing literature on the founding and early years of the American Society of International Law (1906) (see especially Amorosa 2019), it would perhaps be fruitful to place the US’s involvement at both Berlin and the Hague within the broader context of the professionalization of the discipline in the US in order further remedy the siloed approach to these conferences and the tendency to focus predominantly on the major European powers there. Along these lines, a final area for further research is the role of non-​Western actors at the conferences. While there are some works on The Hague (e.g. Schlichtmann 2003 on Japan; Schulz 2017 on Latin American states), the same cannot be said for Berlin. Some research has emerged on, for instance, Sweden and Norway’s roles at the Berlin conference, but there still seems to be a great dearth of information of the role of African actors (though Förster et al.

The Berlin and Hague Conferences    641 1988, 401–​526 provides a starting point; for a more recent foray, albeit in French, see Hébié 2015). Excavating the links between Berlin and The Hague is bound to affect our narratives about the development of the modern world order, if only by decentring what is still often a heavily Eurocentric (and triumphalist) story anchored in the achievements of the peace conferences. Broadening our lens to further recover the agency of African, Asian, and Latin American actors is a logical step further in that direction.

Conclusion The Berlin and Hague conferences occupy a prominent role in narratives about the development of modern international relations and modern international law, one mainly as a story of violence, greed, and empire, the other as an almost exclusively positive tale of humanitarianism and multilateralism. This chapter has attempted to provide a brief overview of the main debates regarding these conferences, and it has argued for the importance of examining these gatherings as two sides of the same coin rather than as entirely separate events. Not only were the main publicists at the conferences part of the same epistemic community, there were in fact a number of them who were directly involved in both Berlin and The Hague. This calls for further engagement with the context out of which both conferences were able to emerge, and, more specifically, it highlights the need to develop accounts of the rise of twentieth-​century global governance institutions that take can stock of both Berlin and The Hague. Any account that builds on one but not the other risks putting forward a truncated understanding of where the modern international order comes from, whether it be of a critical or of a more laudatory bent.

Notes 1. I would like to thank my research assistant, Jelto Makris, for his invaluable assistance with the preliminary research for this chapter. The chapter has also benefitted from funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the context of a VENI grant, VI.Veni.191R.049. 2. See also the heavily criticized but still widely cited (Pakenham 1992). Pakenham fails to engage meaningfully with any of the scholarly literature written by his contemporaries (Low 1994). 3. Clark emphasizes that the conferences did not give rise to these norms per se, but simply gave a stage to many new norms that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. 4. Schlichtmann notably contrasts the attitude of the Japanese, who had high hopes about the conference and were ready to follow binding agreements on disarmament and peaceful settlement of international disputes, with that of the Germans, who were much less cooperative and almost boycotted the conference in the early stage. 5. Rindfleisch claims that they contributed to the collapse of planned agreements because they pushed diplomats to make promises they could not fulfil (contrasting this with the successes of the London Naval Conference), whereas Lesaffer emphasizes their successes, particularly in the case of the peace movement and its dual pursuit of disarmament and arbitration.

642   Claire Vergerio 6. Hueck claims that the voices of peace activists, revolutionary committees, and independence movements were often overemphasized and that they remained a minority among lawyers who, for their part, were mostly guided by national interests. 7. One of the most famous examples is that of the Belgian Prime Minister Auguste Beernaert, whose relationship with King Leopold II was severely strained over the issue.

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The Berlin and Hague Conferences    645 Schulz, M. 2007. ‘Vom Direktorialsystem Zum Multilateralismus? Die Haager Friedenskonferenz von 1907 in Der Entwicklung Des Internationalen Staatensystems Bis Zum Ersten Weltkrieg’. Die Friedens-​Warte 82(4): 31–​50. Schulz, C.-​ A. 2017. ‘Accidental Activists: Latin American Status-​ Seeking at The Hague’. International Studies Quarterly 61(3): 612–​622. Segesser, D. M. 2007. ‘Die Haager Landkriegsordnung in Der Internationalen Wissenschaftlichen Debatte Über Kriegsverbrechen Im Ersten Und Zweiten Weltkrieg’. Die Friedens-​Warte 82(4): 65–​82. Westlake, J. 1894. Chapters on the Principles of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

Chapter 44

T he First Worl d Wa r and Vers a i l l e s Duncan Kelly The Versailles Treaty, signed on 28 June 1919, by the Allied Powers and Germany, formally ended the First World War, but left open as many problems as it tried to solve. France was weaker, Britain and Germany poorer, America alone, and a mandates system of colonial internationalism amplified racial inequalities across the global colour line. The actual proceedings, dominated by diplomatic competition between the Big Four (America, France, Great Britain, and Italy), began with a flurry of optimism as Woodrow Wilson, the first American President to leave his country during office, was feted as the leading figure of a democratic future of national self-​determination following peace without annexations. Nevertheless, proceedings in this image were quickly mired in administrative and political chaos. Decision making worked on an ad hoc basis, amid another virulent wave of influenza affecting three of the big four. With no agenda to speak of, and no credibly settled sense of which issues to raise and which to ignore, the negotiations practiced a sort of hyper-​modern, avant-​garde legalism to cope with earth-​changing decisions that needed quick and novel forms of justification. At the same time, a very archaic and rather shambolic sense of what ‘great power’ politics required, governed attempts to restore an old-​world balance of power to a new world order with American hegemony at its centre. They were both products of, as well as problems for modernity. Indeed, as Nathaniel Berman suggests, the rhetoric of reconstruction across International Law and politics following the First World War, resembled nothing so much as a form of modernism. Forced to confront and incorporate dynamic and often-​irrational passions of nationalism, which had conventionally been side-​lined under the legal fiction of the modern state as the sole source of law and power by virtue of its individual ‘personality’ or sovereignty, international legal practice had to reorient itself. In so doing, hybrid forms of reasoning and practices emerged to deal with the problems of reconstruction through plebiscites, territorial restructuring, and administrative solutions to general questions of justice and (particularly minority) rights. Political reconstruction effectively took place in and through the margins of the modern state (Berman 1992, 362f). That attempts to curate a peace began without a roadmap, should not be too surprising. After its initial furies, the First World War quickly began to unfold without a script

The First World War and Versailles    647 (Stevenson 1991). From nationalist struggles in the Balkans, diplomatic and military escalation rapidly took a European conflict into a global war. Plans and strategies geared around the Western Front had failed, prompting new forms of economic and military cooperation between Britain, France, and America from 1916. In December of that year, German and American ‘Peace Notes’ precipitated a powerful propaganda war for public opinion and sympathy, as to whether Allied ‘democracy’ or German ‘autocracy’ provided the grounds for a victorious peace. As this evolved, novel forms of justification were offered as to what was acceptable in this so-​called war to end all wars. Technical arguments about the legality of economic blockades and unrestricted submarine warfare seemed easier to contemplate, and justify, than large-​scale political compromises. This can be seen in the way that Wilson and the Americans responded to the revolutionary challenges in Russia towards the end of 1917; first, with hope that anti-​imperial and anti-​autocratic politics would be bolstered on the Eastern Front, then turning to horror and affrontery that the Bolsheviks’ really did mean to both take Russia out of the war, all the better to highlight the hypocrisies of imperial politics during their treaty negotiations with the Quadruple Alliance at Brest-​Litovsk in early 1918. The Paris Conference of late 1917 and into 1918 framed an Allied response to these events after another year of massive casualties for minimal gains across the Western Front. But it was quickly overtaken by Wilson’s drafting of the infamous fourteen points, and then four principles (essentially the determination of territorial settlements according to the interests of populations rather than great power politics, and for ‘well-​defined’ national aspirations to be satisfied). Looked at from any angle, the war never simply involved binary choices for its participants. There was neither all out planning for Armageddon, nor unproblematic cooperation; neither sleepwalking towards the inevitable, nor a clear and determinate plan of attack that followed a distinct order and script, perhaps not even in the infamous German plans to quickly overthrow France, having routed their military through Belgium. This latter thought was proffered as an article of faith by numerous military generals and was compatible with the pursuit of German hegemony in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. The point of a military ‘first strike’ had a principally West European focus, and there was a high degree of ideological continuity on these points between national liberals and the radical right. But the extent to which this signalled the primacy of domestic or foreign policy remained opaque (Ferguson 1994, 729ff, 733f, 740f; 1995). The First World War, alongside the peace conference and treaty signed at Versailles, were clearly pivotal moments for history and international relations, parts of what François Hartog terms an evolving ‘regime of historicity’. Hartog’s terminology provides a double heuristic guide for what follows (2015). First, because he claims that the period between 1789 and 1989 was one in which the sense of historical past and the present were geared towards an account of the future as something new and open, my focus is on how contemporaries saw their options during the years of conflict and reconstruction in something like their own terms. These were moments in which future-​oriented plans and projects, utopias even, had become thinkable because they had been temporalized (rendered historical) by modernity itself (Koselleck 2002). Second, however, Hartog suggests that since 1989 something akin to a permanent presentism now holds court, a different dynamic where past and future have merged, and can find meaning only with reference to the present. This has led to a profound ‘crisis’ of historical time. In what follows I adapt this thought, to simultaneously focus on several of the ways in which the war and subsequent peace settlement have continued to be rethought and repurposed as the embodiment of different sorts of historical and political

648   Duncan Kelly crises by later scholars, particularly students of International Law and International Politics. For in their re-​writing and re-​visioning of the origins and implications of wartime crises from the perspective of the present, we see the importance of the other theme of this volume; how granular attention to distinct moments helps to signal the symbiosis between history and International Relations (Ginzburg 1994; Fussell 1975; Reynolds 2013). So, I begin with one way in which discussions of IR, Law, and History immediately following the war, fixed the conflict as a battle between forms of ‘idealism’ or ‘realism’. In 1920 the American journalist and war correspondent George Abel Schreiner published The Craft Sinister, an attack on the delusions of high diplomacy contrasting German Realpolitik with avowedly moral forms of British Idealpolitik (Schreiner 1920, 270ff). The propaganda function of a well-​worn thesis about two German nations was pervasive, and my essay returns to it later. But the standard German response during the war and into the 1920s rebuffed British claims to moral superiority as naïve, given the self-​evident hypocrisies of its imperialist politics and history. Indeed, two of the intriguing aspects of German political thinking about global interdependence during the final years of the war and into the 1920s developed here. The first was an early recognition of the transition toward American geopolitical and financial hegemony, and the way this constrained the choices open to German decision makers (cf. Offer 1989; Clark 2014). The second was the way German writers appealed after 1919 to a very general anti-​ imperialist, or more specifically anti-​colonial nationalist rhetoric. In one way, this chimed with Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with dethroning the ‘old-​world’ empires of Europe in the name of internationalism and democracy. In another, it helped augment Germany’s claim to be a vital constituent part of the world economy and its political architecture, so much so that the imposition of draconian terms after the war would be an economic as well as a political miscalculation. Both arguments required and produced a very discordant set of strategic tonalities. Wilson’s domestic racism and eventual antipathy towards Bolshevism, alongside his imperial ambitions for the United States, became clear; but when overlaid with a moralized language of rights, freedom, and democracy, he offered both a beacon of hope to anti-​colonial movements on the one hand, while fostering equally numerous anti-​colonial rejections of his political presumptions (cf. Manela 2007; Chakrabarty 2000). Among the most significant figures who saw both these sides of the war as part of the dissonant ideas of 1914, was the Germanophile critic of American racism and diagnostician of the global colour line, W. E. B. Du Bois (Troeltsch 1916; Vitalis 2017; Williams 2018). As it became clear that the victorious great powers had no real interest in equalizing citizenship for soldiers of colour returning home, whether in America, France, Britain, or elsewhere, it was not without irony that Du Bois sought possible strategic guidance for his Pan-​African vision through a tactical re-​appropriation of German scholarship (Barkin 2005). He did so by emphasizing its focus on diversity, scale, and the importance of historical perspective, as well as registering the German commitment to fomenting and supporting anti-​imperialist politics in India, Ireland, and the Ottoman Empire in particular. During the 1920s, Weimar Germany was both a European power that might support anti-​ colonial nationalism, while it simultaneously tried to regain a foothold at the table with the other so-​called Great Powers, in the evolving mandate system of the League of Nations. No other major power was more critical of imperialism and colonialism in the immediate postwar years, unsurprisingly perhaps (Wagner 2016; Graf 2016). For while war saw the formal end of some (though not all) empires, and the strengthening of others, in the

The First World War and Versailles    649 Habsburg and Ottoman cases most obviously, such endings nevertheless saw the continuation of legislative and administrative forms of governance that were de facto carried over from well-​established and entrenched imperial practices. In each case, the end of hostilities put issues of racial justice, religious toleration, and equality, back into the domestic policy bailiwick of states and empires (Wilson having infamously vetoed the decision to support a Japanese request for a racial equality clause to be inserted into the treaty). In Germany, for example, provisions in specific areas were advanced and on occasion, as in Article 113 of the Weimar Constitution, combined the so-​called ‘Jewish question’ with a broader defence of minority rights (Linares 2019, 72ff, 137ff). Similarly, the normative justifications that ran through competing, stylized visions of an international order based on right and justice versus might and militarism, seen through the prism of international organizations like the League of Nations, also had a binding force (Sluga 2019; Spanu 2019). The victors presumed a future world order was theirs to frame by right, and that defeated nations would be made to fall into line. This meant the line between ending the war and creating a new international order was ‘blurred from the beginning’, it could not presume equality between victors and vanquished. Even the insertion of a treaty within the treaty to provide a covenant for the League of Nations, was part of this transformed justificatory reality for old-​world power politics, newly fixed at the bar of International Law, according to open criteria of engagement, and the legalistic attribution of responsibility (Payk 2018, 814, 816f). While the Big Four, Wilson especially, had little practical interest in self-​determination meaning the quality of having your own state, as opposed to having a participatory role in democratic self-​government, the new facts of territorial reconstruction in borderland disputes and the parcelling out of colonial ‘possessions’, were justified with recourse to modernist legalisms (Stevenson 2001, 197). The peace settlement permitted the normative contours of such ideas and solutions to problems of reconstruction to frame future international politics, and not the other way around. This laid out a seemingly inevitable path to decolonization at the level of legal right, which great power politics tried to stave off for as long as practically possible, but the tension between legalism and political judgment marked the nature of the peace, just as much as it had framed interpretations of the war. Sometimes the logics of each pushed in contradictory directions. As analysts of economic war aims have noted, while economic objectives were ‘omnipresent’, they too were subordinate to a ‘political vision of international relations’ that was itself transformed by legal languages (Henri-​ Soutou 1989, 847f). Realism and idealism were simultaneously combined and interchanged in theory and practice. And as recent studies show, it is misleading and dangerous to read off either the outbreak of war in 1914, or its seeming end in 1918, in Whiggish fashion as somehow inevitable or necessary (cf. Emmerson 2014, 2019; Gopnik 2014, 17–​18; Otte 2014; Butterfield 1931, c­ hapter 6; Schroeder 2014, 188f). Major international histories of the political economy of stabilization and reconstruction after war suggest the same (Dunn 1985; Maier 1975; MacMillan 2014; Clark 2014; Tooze 2017). However, such stabilization as began to occur did so only as European and international powers were able to build on and entrench the Dawes and Locarno plans, which were themselves required only after the failures of Versailles (Cohrs 2008, 6ff). The temporal relationship between cause and effect, or success and failure, of reconstruction is very complex. Bismarck once symbolized modern German Realpolitik as pragmatic realism about power. The war aims of the Wilhelmine Reich were nevertheless presented by critics as a distorted

650   Duncan Kelly form power politics (Machtpolitik), one without ethical limits—​the irony being that most German military leaders and politicians were worried about the practical weakness, rather than strength, of the German nation-​state. Geopolitical fears of encirclement, an iterated fear from the wars of liberation to the First World War, fixed strategic dilemmas about whether an alliance with England against the Franco-​Russian axis, or a defensive security strategy hedged around the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, would be most advantageous. In related fashion, political and diplomatic historians (in Germany and elsewhere) had begun reworking the structural as well as the intellectual origins of the First World War before the fighting even stopped, setting out claims in documentary sources those interpretations upon which future histories would be written, and new international organizations justified (Rietzler 2014a, 2014b; Clavin 2005). This broad curation of historical evidence by national publics, would eventually fix the popular narrative of war as an opposition between democracy, against autocracy and militarism. (Thiers 2005, 23, 26, 31). Meanwhile in America, although an independent account of Realpolitik (akin to realism) and developed by International Relations theory, came only later, it was also based on a rejection of German war aims. Another journalist, the syndicated columnist Walter Lippman, called for an injection of lower-​case (and thus anti-​Teutonic) realpolitik into the foreign policy shield of the American republic. Earlier, during the First World War, he sought to include a clause in Wilson’s fourteen points about the importance of international organization (Sluga 2019). Such issues then cycled through the century as international history and International Relations repurposed the language. For example, while the ‘Bismarck Debates’ of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the reputation of the wily Prussian statesman, historians from A. J. P Taylor and William Langer to Henry Kissinger, gave new and more granular texture to Realpolitik because the realities of Suez and Soviet threats required responses of greater nuance than the either-​or of realism versus idealism (Bew 2015). For historians of international political thought and international relations, the ambiguities of scale (domestic, international, global), and a sense of the wider structures and the limits placed around individual political agents through such constructs as ‘modernity’, ‘democracy’, and ‘nation state’, seemed to have been fixed following the First World War. These turned into analytical presumptions about the developmental tendencies of nation states within an unequal international system, or a focus on contingently legitimated contexts and intentions that could unmask the intellectual architecture behind political action (Hirschman 1991; Dunn 2014; Gamble 2009; Hont 2010; Runciman 2013; Gopnik 2011, 40–​47). The cognate move in international history was towards what James Joll termed the ‘unspoken assumptions’ lying behind structural conflicts like the First World War, and the extent to which politicians had either time, space, or the ‘freedom to choose’ alternative forms of action in wartime. He asked crucial questions about how far individual agency rather than just macro-​social structuralism could explain the apparent implosion of international orders (Joll 1968, 1979; cf. Kern 1981). Joll was surely inspired by the arguments of John Maynard Keynes about both the constraints upon individual political capacity (exemplified by the fate of Woodrow Wilson after Versailles when back in the United States), and about the power of ideas behind the actions of leaders (cf. Keynes 1920, 35, 1974, 383f; Berg, 2004, 336, 679). His focusing on the ‘unspoken assumptions’ guiding or legitimating action in the past, in turn connects up with cognate debates about method in the history of political thought and International Relations theory since the 1960s (Pocock 2009, 3, 22, 77; Dunn 2001, 28). And for both sets

The First World War and Versailles    651 of disciplines, another crucial intellectual figurehead was Max Weber, whose own political writings evolved during the years of the First World War, out of a period of heightened self-​ consciousness about the challenge of various ‘crises’ of historicism (Goldie 2006;Iggers 1984). As discussions at Versailles were planned, Weber wrote that ‘the politician has a far greater responsibility towards the future, than they do for taking the blame for the past. This responsibility for the future now means a responsibility for the peace, which rests with the victors alone, and about which now is the time to speak’ (Weber [1919] 1988, 242). He offered these sentiments as part of a talk ‘Against France’s Claim to the Palatinate and the Saar Basin’, at the Karl-​Ruprechts Universität in Heidelberg on 1 March 1919, and published as part of a short essay collection later that month. The words conjure tropes familiar to Weber’s political writings—​responsibility, objectivity, and integrity—​while they amplify the long-​standing concern he had with the relationship between political possibilities into the future. It was a theme dating back to his inaugural lecture of 1895, when he took the tasks of national political economy to be concerned with the quality (and perhaps even the breeding) of future populations worthy of a nation whose fate was to be given the ‘chance’ to become a great world power [Weltmachtherstellung] (Weber [1895] 1994). For international historians as well as theorists of International Relations, Weber’s ideas have long held a deep fascination, exemplified in his twin commitment to the major themes of this volume—​macro-​questions of modernity and state development, and granular considerations of the situated quality of political judgments in both domestic and international perspective. For example, when writing about the necessary democratization of German politics in the wake of defeat, where a Prussian-​dominated monarchy was transformed into a Republic almost overnight, Weber mobilized anti-​colonial nationalist rhetoric to both pursue federalism and reject punitive settlements at Versailles. Writing just two months into the discussions that were underway at the Paris Peace Conference, and only a month after his searing lecture on the vocation of politics and the possibilities of institutional reform in Germany, his attempt to connect political responsibility to questions of territorial integrity, constitutional reform, and ecological resources (coal particularly), as the prerequisites for keeping open the chance of world-​power status into the future, signalled a conceptual innovation in his thinking about chance and fate (see Mommsen 2006; on ‘chance’, see Palonen 2011). Prior to the armistice, Weber had offered a thin conception of sovereignty to match his content-​less definition of the modern European state as the body which retains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a given territory. Afterwards, in a series of powerful essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung under the title, ‘Germany’s Future Form of State’ [Deutschlands kunftige Staatsform], we find him writing that in practice, ‘President Wilson and no one else at present is the Reichstag’, and that American power was now a force ‘as unstoppable as the rise of ancient Rome’ (Weber [1919] 1988, 146). From Wilsonian idealism focused on the ‘moral’ conquest of enemies, American hegemony had become the gravitational field around which German politics would now have to orbit (Weber 1917, 117, 123). That German politicians quickly appealed directly to Wilson, to make good on a realistic anti-​imperialist peace without indemnities and annexations in the wake of defeat, is well-​ known (Smith 2018, 19ff). Their strategy continued into the 1920s, resulting in admission to the League of Nations in 1927 (Pedersen 2015). And by adapting wider anti-​colonial languages of critique for a future-​oriented German national politics, Weber constructed a critical topography of which groups had the ‘chance’ for power within the state under such complex circumstances (radicals, revolutionaries, republicans, or true ‘statesmen’).

652   Duncan Kelly Weber was exercised by the extent to which his proposals for the inner democratization of German political structures required what Jörn Leonhard has called the ‘instrumentalising of this constellation of laws’, forcing German democracy to follow a specific path (Leonhard 2019, 60). For if German thinking could not move beyond the idea that there was an opposition between ‘Western’ democracy and German democratization, there would be a perpetual impasse (cf. Plenge 1916; Pick 1999). Weber’s analysis of what peace into the future required from ‘anti-​nationalist’, though not ‘anti-​national’ politics, was a recurrent theme from 1917 onwards, a largely domestic vision nonetheless premised on the presumption of the clear international limits to political choice. For if one thing was abundantly clear following the war and into the reconstruction motivated by the settlement at Versailles, it was that the ‘power’ of public opinion as a judge of the morality of political action had taken on a new level of significance. It was also the moment at which significant numbers of new ‘nations’ were becoming ‘states’, incorporated (with varying degrees of equality or brute force) into the international order. These ‘successor states’ signalled the beginning of a new set of legal and political debates under the aegis of self-​determination in a world both still manifestly powered by, but simultaneously coming after, ‘empire’ (Smith 2018, 35ff; Halévy 1929). Such claims remained vital when re-​purposed and historicized anew in later twentieth-​century moments of decolonization, when the 50-​year ‘rift’ between International Relations and political thought seemed most obvious (Getachew 2019; Armitage 2004). The turn (or re-​turn) to empire in much recent scholarship, might even be a delayed response to what historians of political theory had been claiming for a generation, which is that international relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was effectively a form of political theory, and that it is only the 50-​years’ rift of disciplinary division and specialization, which allowed these subjects to diverge. Putting them back together at precisely the point when modern politics and economics was transformed by war, to see the logics at work anew with reference to property, financial crises, rampant inequality, empire, and ideology, therefore seems entirely Germane today (Piketty 2019; Roberts 2013; Silber 2007, 4, 11, 41). Moreover, thinking this way is not only an exercise in what Weber thought of as intellectual genealogy through the construction of ‘ideal types’, but also an application of the constructivist sensibility outlined in Nelson Goodman’s book, Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman 1978), which has become central to histories of the political theory of empire, decolonization, and International Law (Bell 2014, 254–​279; Getachew 2019; Vadi 2017; Koskenniemi 2001). That latter frame of reference is vital, for it was through the broad prism of International Law, that debates about strategy, reparations, and guilt, were legitimated during the First World War, and it was through international law that the international organizations which so dominated the landscape of the 1920s, were able to shape and transform International Law in turn. When modern historians write about International Law and the First World War, they typically conclude that ‘International Law defined most clearly what was at stake’ in the conflict, namely whether an international system of states grounded in national self-​ determination would retain its primacy, or not (Hull 2014, 317). When modern historians of International Law and humanitarian intervention write about the First World War, they in turn often posit a conflict between state sovereignty, the right of non-​interference, and the construction of an international juridical conscience and conventional set of norms and procedures. This is most apparent in discussion of the rise of humanitarian intervention, and the ways that so-​called ‘civilized’ states claimed to deal with otherwise ‘barbarous’ ones (for example Lorimer, 1883; on which see Heraclides 2014). The related category of

The First World War and Versailles    653 ‘extra-​territoriality’ was also invented by European lawyers, to structure dealings with other sorts of inter-​political federations, such as the Ottoman Empire, or China (Öszu 2016). Such theories of sovereignty dealt with ‘extra-​territorial’ as legal fictions, to mask the messiness of practical experience in imperial sovereignties, and to simplify the otherwise complex policing of international boundaries (Benton 2010, 2018; Pedersen 2019; Pitts 2018). Finally, when practicing international lawyers write about the impact of the First World War upon their discipline, they often prioritize the practicalities of dealing with the ‘enlargement’ of the sphere of law that contemporary observers like Elihu Root discussed as both cause and consequence of the conflict (Root 1917, 289; Brown Scott 1916). A canon of thinkers is standardly reconstructed (say, from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli through Lorimer to Lassa Oppenheim), and a series of more or less new problems curated, particularly as to whether questions of individual and national responsibility during and after the war are best understood in legal or political terms. Many in the US agreed with §227–​228 of the Versailles Treaty, for instance, that the German Kaiser was guilty of crimes against international morality, while also thinking his guilt should be determined by the political judgment of an international community, rather than through the possibility of direct legal sanction (cf. Shinohara 2014, 283). If foundational or common International Law was thought to be based on common consent (the Zeitgeist which Oppenheim proposed), then no agreed upon interest of ‘humanity’ seemed capably of justifying either intervention or sanction across such connected nations (Oppenheim 1921; Rougier 1910). Nevertheless, British and French lawyers had been mulling over possible forms of economic war with Germany for at least a decade, since the Morocco Crisis (Hull 2014, 141, 148). Again, the most obvious and drastic form this sort of economic warfare took was the tight blockade around Germany, from 1915 onwards. But as Hull suggests, Britain modified its blockade strategy in line with the perception it had of developments in International Law. In this way, it both took refuge, at least through Edward Grey, in its awareness of the great dangers ‘doctrinal clarity’ might engender. Or as Attorney General F. E. Smith suggested after March 1915—​what ‘we are trying to do—​I think for good reasons—​is a flagrantly illegal thing. Such matters cannot easily be expressed in a legal form’ (Hull 2014, 195, 198, 206; cf. Smeltzer and Kelly 2021). As Arnulf Lorca outlines in his analysis of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, or Lajpat Rai’s petitioning for Indian independence, contentious juridical politics in the wake of the First World War were part and parcel of wider arguments about whether a standard of ‘civilization’ was a useful or relevant measure with which to judge International Law (Lorca 2011, 2014). The author generates from this a typology of how International Law dealt with three major issues of justification. First, when civilization as a standard had been met, and therefore states could and should be seen as part and parcel of the international community governed by equality under the law. Korea made this case based on historical longevity; Garvey and Rai also made it based on the rights of blood, just as did Clemenceau—​civilization and its benefits were to be shared by all who had fought (cf. Cabanes 2014). Second, where there had been a change of circumstances as a direct consequence of the war, rebus sic stantibus, such as happened in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, recognition of this change in circumstance should permit renewed entry into the international community. Third, several states were keen to ‘destabilize’ this divide, particularly a defeated Germany, which practiced strategic anti-​imperialism (Gerwarth and Kitchen 2015).

654   Duncan Kelly Of course, in Paris at the peace conference none of the ‘semi-​peripheral’ states were granted presence or representation, so the limits of anti-​colonial nationalism against the forces of great power politics, seem unsurprising. But with that defence of traditional state power, there was a correlate transition towards statehood as the new and basic requirement for membership into a community or family of nations governed by International Law. This in turn became a powerful motivating call for such ‘semi-​peripheral’ states to overcome their disappointment from Versailles, by mobilizing demands for ‘sovereign equality . . . in international organizations’ against otherwise restrictive standards of entry, because this required international legal recognition as a sovereign state be given a hearing in the first place. Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century saw yet another replay of the opposition in the basic argumentative structures of International Law, a dialectic pitting statist ‘apology’ for the status quo, against ‘utopia’ concerning the possibility of a more benevolent or universalist model of International Law, one in which the figure of the international lawyer in particular takes on the persona of activist critic or wise counsellor (Koskenniemi 2005). Alternatively, consider once more the propagandistic story about International Law and the Great War—​the thesis that there were two Germany’s, namely the militaristic state inspired by Prussianismus and Hegelian metaphysics, and the good Kantian Kulturstaat, committed to republican peace, whose genealogy ran through the classics of German Enlightenment. Its structure lies behind the claim that Germany fell afoul of International Law from 1914 onwards, precisely because it was the national embodiment of a Prussian-​ inspired Machtsstaat for whom force was destiny (Heller 1921). Nevertheless, since the 1870s, what Isabel Hull calls ‘war positivism’ in German international legal discussion, had prioritized rapid economic and political advance in the face of international competition. This was a means of overcoming political and structural weaknesses (Hull 2014, 318). The synthetic justificatory claims of military (Notwehr) or political forms of necessity (Notstand) or emergency, were then re-​deployed to provide an oppositional conceptual structure to justify action in the First World War. Either military victory would be rapid and total, or collapse and destruction would follow. Resources were not deep enough for lengthy engagements. At the same time, because political and economic advance or development was thought to follow from industrial progress and neo-​mercantilist political economic strategy (including colonial acquisition where possible), without that the German state would similarly decline into mediocrity and retrogression. If the Wilhelmine state had begun to see itself as a ‘singular hegemon’ because of these distinctive presumptions, then the push to war might best be understood as the product of domestic weakness rather than the primacy of foreign policy (cf. Fischer 1968; Petzold 2013; Ferguson 1995). But the resolution of such tensions between domestic weakness and military-​technological prowess, required military victory and economic development to overcome political backwardness, making International Law merely a ‘scrap of paper’ (Otte 2007). Now whether the German nation-​state was guilty of breaking the laws of a family of European nations, and what that family of nations presumed about membership of such a purportedly ‘civilized’ space, structured Allied discussions of International Law. Contemporary French republicans, for example, were quick to challenge German justifications for war, seeing them as flagrantly illegal, an affront to a world governed by questions of right, law, and democracy. Indeed, most memorials of the Great War in parts of France and Corsica as well as in Britain, readily portray the Allies as victorious in a war fought for such ideals (Fox 2015).

The First World War and Versailles    655 The idea of law and its interpretation became a leading trope of resistance to, and critique of, German militarism, especially after the invasion of Belgium. Both British and French institutions took on key public roles in explaining the centrality of law to justify the Allied cause, prompting a move towards the language of law governed by the needs of humanity. In fact, humanity became a ‘political horizon, philosophical and nearly religious’ (Thiers 2005, 38), with a long and newly reconstructed genealogy permitting a defence of the metaphorical Allied city against the barbarians (polemos). This was a view not dissimilar to that outlined by the leading international lawyer Ernst Freund. In his wartime address on ‘living’ constitutional principles to the American Political Science Association, he proposed that legislative values as much as technical expertise had to be fostered in the pursuit of a democratic law for the needs of humanity (Freund, 1916; Nippold 1923, 61). It is a view that still stands behind certain (predominantly French) discussions of modern democracy as akin to a secularized version of a theological promise, one in which the never to be realized hope of equality and liberation of the oppressed is enough to keep the structures of an unequal system broadly moving in a more progressive direction, away from tyranny and towards freedom, even if there is no final end time where freedom is ever actually realized (Lefort 1988). Some more recent Francophone debates around the limits of democracy have tended to re-​focus attention on the structural inequalities of wealth and income across the globe and within states, to show that massively increasing wealth inequalities in Europe and America during the nineteenth century, were only reduced by significant orders of magnitude because of the First World War (Piketty 2019). Now nobody, surely, would wish for catastrophic military conflict on one side, or the terrifying effects of the global climate emergency on the other, to be the only means available for offsetting the renewed rise over the last fifty years of such dramatic levels of inequality as had not been seen since the Belle Epoque. Yet we continue live in a world where powerful democracies entrench fantastical levels of economic and political inequality within their boundaries, often prosecuting endless wars in the name of democracy as an ideal, against avowedly autocratic forms of rule, and which are justified with reference to International Law in the name of humanity. The question remains, then, of whether we have gotten very far past the structures of international politics, economics, and law, that focused the attention of contemporaries in and around the First World War? It is of course important to remember that political choices and options often exhibit path-​ dependent logics. At the same time, the role of historically informed discussions of political choices nonetheless shows that there is nothing natural, or inevitable, about political judgment and international relations. While keeping space for political imagination open remains crucial, whether democratic politics within modern capitalist states today retain the capacity to deal with crises of the order or magnitude facing them in terms of climate, inequality, and war, is more than a little uncertain. The history of international institutions across the twentieth century in dealing with international political questions, offers only fleeting consolation. And the old confidence of those (largely empire-​liberals) who pursued schemes of expert ‘international government’, or ‘imperial federation’ as the safest route out of the First World War, has rightly lost much of the cachet it once held, even in this current period of rampant techno-​populism in many liberal democracies (Toews 1987; Dunn 2018; Woolf 1916). Conversely, the history of roads not taken in the aftermath of war, with numerous species of federationist and pan-​regional options poised to go beyond the confines of an already seemingly defunct model of the nation state, certainly retain their capacity to instruct us

656   Duncan Kelly today. They emerged in a world in which the binary oppositions of democracy (specifically liberal democracy) versus autocracy were not the only ones available, even if that opposition has become fixed in the wake of so much reflection upon the First World War (cf. Burbank and Cooper 2019). Recent scholarly and political turns towards global perspectives in law, politics, and International Relations, cannot yet provide us with secure grounds to be confident about collective futures being secured by their expanded vision. But returning to a more open, and indeed global, intellectual history of World War One and its imperial lineages on its own terms and in its own time, could help revitalize this space in our political imagination in ways that suggest alternatives beyond such either/​or binary choices. If we can do that, there might be sounder reasons for hope that a shared global future need not only exist within the ideological straitjacket of a putatively liberal international order of states. By thinking globally, we might once again learn how best to act locally.

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Chapter 45

Sy kes–​Pi c ot Megan Donaldson The Sykes–​Picot agreement (1916) is often associated with an annotated map signed by the English MP, Orientalist and diplomat Marc Sykes, and the French diplomat François Georges-​Picot (Figure 1), illustrating a proposed Anglo-​French disposition of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire.1 The confident line-​drawing has been taken as exemplary of imperialist diplomacy, attempting to fashion political order from above and afar. Neither the map nor the larger agreement actually determined the post-​First World War settlement in the Middle East. Yet the agreement has retained a central place in the historical and political imagination of this region. It is enmeshed in themes that have been foundational to both history and international relations, including shifting modalities of imperialism; cultural and religious difference; and nationalism and state-​making. As a discrete ‘moment’ it offers a very particular, and partial, avenue into the intersecting histories of European imperialism and the Arab world. Read in this way, for both what it captures and what it obscures, the Sykes–​Picot agreement offers a promising lens on this volume’s organizing themes of ‘modernity’ and ‘granularity’. The first part of the chapter begins with the map, situating the agreement in histories of European imperial vision and wartime strategy. The second part turns to a messier terrain in which Arab and other political actors are pursuing political projects of their own, and traces competing influences on the interwar territorial settlement. The third part takes up the theme of modernity, suggesting that a closer look at Sykes–​Picot poses questions about the affinity in both IR and history scholarship between notions of modernity and the emergence of the (nation-​)state. The fourth part reflects on how a notion of granularity might open new understandings of Sykes–​Picot, but also on how the Sykes–​Picot agreement might challenge what we understand by granularity.

Sykes–​P icot, the ‘Eastern Question’, and European Imperial Visions Though the Sykes–​Picot agreement was on its face an Anglo-​French transaction, the series of letters constituting the agreement was embedded in a longer tradition of thinking about

Sykes–Picot   661

Figure 1   Map as signed by Sykes and Picot, 8 May 1916, UK National Archives MPK 1/​426. the Ottoman territories, in which Russia also had a central role. Since the nineteenth century, ‘the Eastern Question’—​what should become of Ottoman territories after the envisaged collapse of the empire and caliphate—​was a recurring diplomatic preoccupation. The Ottoman Empire had figured in the European balance of power since the sixteenth century, initially as a major military force. By the eighteenth century, the empire posed less of a direct threat, and the nineteenth century saw territorial losses to local struggles for autonomy and European imperial expansion in the Black Sea, the Balkans, and North Africa. Britain and France resisted Russian expansion into Ottoman territories, fighting against Russia in the Crimean War (1854–​56), and restraining Russia’s territorial gains in the Russo-​Turkish War of 1877. Britain itself occupied Egypt in 1882. In the Balkan war of 1912–​13, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro left the Empire with only a tiny foothold in Europe. To the Anglo-​French diplomatic mind, Sykes–​Picot was a continuation of longstanding logics of conquest and rivalry, part of the answer to the question pending in 1914: if the ‘sick man of Europe’ declined further, to whom might the spoils fall, and with what effects for the European balance?

662   Megan Donaldson Britain and France had agreed with Russia in 1915 that Russia was to have Constantinople, and thus control of the Straits, in exchange for French and British spheres of interest in the Middle East (Documents on British Foreign Policy (DBFP), Vol. 4, 635–​638). The Sykes–​ Picot terms complemented this so-​called Constantinople Agreement, giving greater specificity to Anglo-​French claims. The core provisions, agreed in January 1916, were put first to Russia. Russia consented in an exchange of letters of April 1916, subject to annexations of territory on the Black Sea coast and Kurdistan, and on the understanding that each state might maintain pre-​existing religious and educational institutions on the territory of the other (DBFP, Vol. 4, 241–​243). Having secured Russian consent, the French ambassador in London and the British prime minister exchanged letters in May 1916 referring to the signed map (DBFP, Vol. 4, 244–​247). The zones marked ‘A’ and ‘B’ were designated as areas in which France and Britain were ‘prepared to recognise and protect an independent Arab State or a Confederation of Arab States . . . under the suzerainty of an Arab chief ’, with zone A being a French sphere of influence (involving priority of right of enterprise and local loans, exclusive supply of advisers at the request of the Arab State or Confederation), and zone B being a British sphere. Britain and France were referred to as ‘protectors of the Arab State’. In the blue (dark-​shaded, north of A in Figure 1) and red (lighter-​shaded, east of B) zones respectively, France and Britain were to ‘be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and . . . may think fit to arrange with the Arab [State/​Confederation]’, and prohibited from ceding these rights to any third power other than the Arab state. Palestine was to be subject to an ‘international administration’ of a form devised through consultation with Russia, and thereafter other allies, and Sharif Husayn of Mecca. Other provisions dealt in detail with ports, water rights, railways, and customs tariffs. The brief mention of the Sharif links the Anglo-​French plans to parallel correspondence in the preceding months between Henry McMahon (British High Commissioner in Egypt), and Sharif Husayn, guardian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina, in the Hejaz. After the Ottoman government had entered the war and the sultan as caliph had proclaimed a jihad, calling on Muslim subjects of the Entente powers to rebel, the Sharif had emerged as a potential British ally. It was thought he might undermine the religious authority of the sultan’s proclamation, foster revolt against Ottoman forces (increasingly important after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign in January 1916), and ensure that a Young Arab reformist movement in the Ottoman Army would incline towards Britain. In correspondence which may have been drafted by his son, the Sharif invoked the ‘whole of the Arab nation’; and invited Britain to recognize ‘the independence of the Arab countries’ within a certain territory (comprising roughly the Arabian peninsula and the whole of what was later Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq; the only specific exclusion being Aden), and approve the ‘proclamation of an Arab Khalifate’ (that is, supplanting the Sultan as caliph). In return the Sharif offered British priority in economic enterprises and an alliance against foreign powers attacking either party—​most critically, at this point, Ottoman forces. Husayn pressed a reluctant McMahon for precise negotiations on the territorial claims. In a letter of 24 October 1915, McMahon noted that districts of Mersina and Alexandretta, as well as portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, ‘cannot be said to be purely Arab’ and should be excluded from the territory sought. The letter stated that, ‘in regard to those portions of the [remaining] territories . . . in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally, France’, Britain was

Sykes–Picot   663 ‘prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs’ (Cmd 5957, 1939). (This phrasing was mistranslated, and the Arab version suggested that, aside from the specifically excluded areas, Britain was free to act without regard to France (Barr 2007, 312–​313)). Whatever the true nature of the reservation, it was subject to further stipulations, including that this be without prejudice to existing treaties with Arab chieftains (ruling in, e.g. Muscat and Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Nejd); that the new Arab state rely exclusively on British advice and advisers; and that special administrative arrangements be made in Baghdad and Basra to accommodate Britain’s ‘established position and interests’ there. The Sharif in reply insisted that the districts of Aleppo and Beirut—​where Britain accepted French interests—​were ‘purely Arab’ even if Christianized to some extent. He acquiesced to special administrative arrangements in Baghdad and Basra, but for a short time, and subject to compensation. The British response was ambivalent: on Baghdad more detailed consideration would be required, and on Aleppo and Beirut the interests of France were involved, and a further communication was promised. At the same time McMahon urged the Sharif to ‘attach all the Arab peoples to our united cause’. The Sharif was uncompromising in reply: though Beirut and its coastline was left for the present to the French out of the need to protect the Anglo-​French alliance in the current war, ‘it is impossible to allow any derogation that gives France, or any other power, a span of land in those regions’. This was met with further platitudes from the British. The promised British communication concerning Syria was never sent. From the British perspective, the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence and the Sykes–​ Picot agreement were part of the same general design: to offer Husayn prospects sufficient to elicit Arab mobilization against Ottoman forces, while managing potential conflict between Husayn and France (and, to a lesser extent, between Britain and France) over their relative positions. Nevertheless, the McMahon–​Husayn and Sykes–​Picot terms were in tension. Basic concordance was achieved insofar as Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus were excluded from direct French control under Sykes–​Picot, on the basis that they had been promised to Husayn, but there were clearly differences concerning the nature and extent of Anglo-​French control over various tracts of territory earmarked for a future Arab political entity. Some British officials at the time, and historians since, have maintained that the Sykes–​Picot terms were reconcilable with undertakings given to Husayn (Friedman 1970, 87). However, the reluctance to inform Husayn immediately of the Sykes–​Picot terms suggests that contemporaries felt there was tension between the commitments and, by 1919, many officials saw contradictions (Kedourie 2000, 124–​126, 203–​220). The position of Palestine, while not of concern to McMahon or Husayn during the initial exchange, would also be the subject of extensive later controversy. On the official British view in the 1930s, Palestine was excluded from a future Arab state, inter alia because it was part of those portions of Syria lying to the west of the district of Damascus. On the Arab view, the reference to Damascus meant the town itself and immediate surrounds rather than the whole administrative district. As Palestine was not to the west of Damascus in this sense, it was included in the territory of the future Arab state (Cmd 5974, 1939). The Sykes–​Picot agreement reflected the conceptual apparatus of nineteenth-​century imperial diplomacy, seen also in Asia and Africa. The agreement paid close attention not only to borders, the precise location of which was sometimes secondary, but to ports, railways, and sea routes: territorial divisions did not preclude a regional vision informed by military strategy and economic exploitation (Loevy 2016). Categories such as ‘spheres of influence’

664   Megan Donaldson and direct rule were part of a repertoire of imperial governance, as was a certain coyness about the nature of the authority in issue (after the original Anglo-​French exchange of letters concerning the Sykes–​Picot map, the French suggested that the reference to ‘protectors’ be struck out, as possibly suggesting that what was involved was ‘a sort of protectorate’, when the parties had only intended to ‘guarantee the full independence of the new State’ (DBFP, Vol. 4, 248–​249)). The diplomatic form of Sykes–​Picot, too, was in keeping with nineteenth-​century precedent, in its secret, sometimes contradictory, promises (Donaldson 2016, 127–​129; 2017, 578–​ 581). Knowledge of the Sykes–​Picot commitments circulated only slowly and partially, even within European governments. Husayn was not told of the Sykes–​Picot agreement until May 1917, and may still not at that point have seen the text of the letters (Kedourie 2000, 124–​125, 160–​166). The Sykes–​Picot agreement was publicly revealed after the Bolsheviks published a Russian internal memorandum summarizing the transactions, the gist of which was reported in Britain in November 1917, with a full English translation in January 1918 (Manchester Guardian, 19 Jan 1918, 5). The McMahon–​Husayn correspondence was publicly known by 1920 but the British resisted publication, from fear of controversy about whether Palestine had been included in the territory promised, and because British support for an Arab caliphate might have aroused anger among Muslim subjects in India. It was not published officially by the British until 1939 (Cmd 5957, 1939; Kedourie 2000, 249–​266).

Post-​O ttoman Visions of Political Order and Sykes–​P icot in the Postwar Settlement There was a rough continuity between pre-​war British imperial desiderata, the Sykes–​Picot terms, and the settlements of the mid-​1920s, in which French interests were concentrated in Syria, and British in Mesopotamia, each with (formal and informal) influence over new Arab polities. But there was no direct transposition of the Sykes–​Picot terms. The Sykes–​ Picot and McMahon–​Husayn commitments had met with some skepticism even among French and British officials at the time of their making (Barr 2011, 32–​36; Friedman 1970, 93–​94). Subsequent developments, such as the Balfour Declaration, and military and political initiatives in the Middle East, further undermined the plausibility of Sykes–​Picot as a precise blueprint. New articulations of principle among the Allied Powers, particularly on self-​determination and the renunciation of secret diplomacy, weakened the legal and rhetorical authority of the agreement, and the mandate system subjected territorial claims to a new international template. Perhaps most critically, Ottoman forces carved out the territory of modern-​day Turkey, and populations across the region proved resistant to Anglo-​French arrangements. While Sykes–​Picot and other wartime territorial arrangements acknowledged (and tried to instrumentalize) Arab political agency, they assumed that the ultimate resolution of the ‘Eastern Question’ rested with Christian Europe. These transactions combined older European strategic imperatives (Russian acquisition of warm-​water ports and control of the Straits; French expansion in the Mediterranean; British protection of sea routes to India) with new attention to resources like oil (although thinking about oil was often less focused

Sykes–Picot   665 than one might have expected: Fitzgerald 1994). Yet actors within the Ottoman Empire, too, had a dynamic sense of the region’s future. Both ‘Arab nationalists’ (a complex category discussed further below) and the ‘Young Turk’ movement anticipated a future political order distinct from existing Ottoman structures, often looking to the Austro-​Hungarian dual monarchy as a loose inspiration for Turco-​Arab co-​existence on a sort of federal model (Mestyan, 2021; Yenen 2020). Husayn envisaged a new Arab caliphate; and groups such as the Kurds and Armenians had political projects of their own—​visions which would play out in the interwar period and beyond. In a first phase of postwar negotiations, running roughly 1918–​20, something like the Sykes–​Picot design was still in British and French contemplation. The Bolshevik Revolution and peace of Brest-​Litovsk released the Allied Powers from the Constantinople Agreement undertakings to Russia; and Britain occupied Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria (allowing Faysal and his Arab forces to take Damascus). In September 1918 Britain and France agreed three ‘zones’ of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration: South (Palestine, controlled by the British); West (coast of Syria and Lebanon, controlled by France); and East (interior of Syria, controlled by Faysal and his Hijazi Northern Army jointly with the British). These admittedly temporary arrangements reflected readjustment of Franco-​British claims. France, which had played less of a role in the victories in the Levant, relinquished aspirations to a ‘greater Syria’ which would have included Palestine (and some British figures felt that France ought to lose Syria altogether). France also agreed to accord part of the oil-​rich area around Mosul, originally in the French zone of the Sykes–​Picot map, to Britain. Britain and France had to settle for League mandates over Iraq and Palestine (Britain) and Syria (France), rather than bilaterally agreed acquisitions of territory and spheres of influence. However, this scheme still divided Arabic-​speaking peoples (particularly between Syria and Palestine) in a way that was deeply unpopular. The British paid lip-​service to Arab independence. In a declaration of November 1918, Britain and France committed to ‘emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations’ (Cmd 5974, 1939, 50). However, there was little meaningful political consultation with Arab peoples. Faysal attended the Paris Peace Conference as head of the Hejazi delegation, and the British hoped he could appeal to American espousal of self-​determination as a check on French claims. But France in particular rejected Faysal’s claim to speak for a larger Arab population. Though Faysal was allowed to speak in favour of independence and unity for Arabic-​speaking peoples, or at least their power to choose their own mandatory (Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Paris Peace Conference 1919, Vol. 3, 889–​894), he was excluded from negotiations. The ‘King-​Crane Commission’ established on American insistence to investigate the desires of the populations in occupied areas reported in August 1919 that there was no appetite for a French mandate (Faysal having made an effort to distance Maronite Christians and others sympathetic to France from these consultations, to give greater weight to what he claimed was the Arab majority); and recommended that the United States (US), or Britain, would be more welcome. On Anglo-​French insistence, the report was withheld from publication. Faysal was excluded from the San Remo Conference of May 1920, which confirmed the mandate allocations, because he refused to accept the separation of a smaller Syria from Palestine, and the Balfour Declaration.

666   Megan Donaldson In a second phase of negotiations, a strengthening Kemalist campaign in Anatolia forced further divergence from the wartime secret treaties. In August 1920, Britain, France and Italy had signed a treaty of peace with the Ottoman sultan (the Treaty of Sèvres) dictating, among other things, a zone of French influence on the south coast of Asia Minor (over which they had claimed direct control under Sykes–​Picot), north of the French mandate; and virtual control of Turkey’s economy by the Allied Powers. Yet Ottoman forces were still fighting, pushing the French southwards from claimed territory in Asia Minor. There was also widespread armed resistance across the occupied territories to both occupation and partition, inspired in part by the Anatolian example. In March 1920 the Syrian National Congress proclaimed Faysal King of a greater United Syrian Kingdom (including Palestine), and denounced Zionist settlement; and many former Ottoman army officers were actively fighting the French. As the cost of the Middle East occupations rose and the British sought to conciliate France, they abandoned Faysal, and the French took Damascus by force in July 1921, deposing him. There were clashes between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem. In May–​ June 1920, armed opposition to the British erupted in Iraq, and was repressed only by aerial bombardment. By late 1921, it was becoming clear that the Sèvres Treaty was a dead letter. In October 1921 France withdrew from Anatolia and, by the Treaty of Ankara, recognized Kemal’s nationalist government in exchange for Turkish recognition of the French mandate in Syria. By September 1922, Turkish forces had pushed Greek forces out of Smyrna (the Greek initiative having been encouraged by the Allies), and were marching on Allied positions in Constantinople. There was no political will in Britain for enforcement of the Sèvres terms, and negotiations began towards a new peace. Kemal initially demanded that Arab-​majority areas of the former Ottoman Empire be offered a referendum on their futures. But in the final Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923), Turkey renounced claims to former Ottoman lands in exchange for recognition by the powers of Turkish sovereignty, within new borders vastly more favourable than those of Sèvres. As emerges from the foregoing, it was not Sykes–​Picot which determined the borders of the Middle Eastern mandates, and later states (Dodge 2004; Bâli 2016). Even after 1923, many borders remained unresolved. They would be established through negotiation but also conflict with local populations, such as the Kurdish minority around Mosul, territory disputed in the 1920s between Turkey and Britain/​Iraq (on Iraq’s borders, see Pursley 2015b). Nevertheless, broad features of Sykes–​Picot did endure: the political division of Arabic-​ speaking peoples, and imposition of foreign rule. The negotiations of the 1920s left much of the Middle East under mandatory rule, a system which in places was less representative of local populations than late Ottoman governance (Provence 2017, 86–​87). Across the Middle East, mandatory rule elicited a spectrum of opposition among civilian elites, and episodes of armed resistance, inspired in part by Kemalist insurgency, and assisted by a roving generation of former Ottoman army officers. Faysal, deposed from his position in Syria, was installed as King of Iraq, in the face of local suspicion of his closeness to the British. His brother Abdullah was courted by the British (in part to prevent him from joining resistance to the French in Syria); and in May 1923 Britain recognized the Emirate of Transjordan, part of territory administered by the British under the Palestine mandate, under Abdullah. In Iraq, Faysal balanced uneasily between Britain and his own Cabinet members, who were veteran Ottoman army officers and suspicious of British intentions. The proposed mandate text was supplanted by treaties of 1922 and 1924,

Sykes–Picot   667 nominally between independent powers but giving Britain a formal role in government, and allowing Britain access to air bases in the country. These treaties, unpopular in Iraq and forced through, were then accepted by the League Council in lieu of the proposed mandate. An Anglo-​Iraqi treaty of 1930 paved the way for Iraq’s admission to the League of Nations as an independent state, but, given extensive allowance for British air bases and the like, is perhaps better seen as a novel mode of internationally brokered informal empire (Pedersen 2015, 262–​286). A 1928 treaty recognized the existence of an independent government in Transjordan (but did not remove Transjordan entirely from the mandate system). In Hejaz, Britain broke from Husayn: he was increasingly resistant to cooperation, and his proclamation of himself as caliph in 1924—​a status he considered had been acknowledged in the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence—​was a provocation to the Wahhabist ruler of the Nejd, bin Saud, another British ally. Britain ultimately stood back as bin Saud defeated Husayn, ruling as King of Hejaz and of Nejd until the proclamation of a unitary Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Though Faysal and Abdullah both retained pan-​Arab ambitions, Britain’s eagerness to diminish its direct role in the early 1920s meant that military conflict between the populations and installed governments in Iraq and Transjordan was largely averted. In the British Palestine mandate, however, and French Syria, there were major proto-​nationalist and sectarian revolts. In Palestine, long-​standing disputes over access to the Wailing Wall (and underlying Arab fears of growing Jewish predominance) prompted riots in 1929; and in the late 1930s a wholesale revolt against the British mandatory administration, seeking Arab independence and an end to Jewish migration. In Syria, there had been considerable resistance to the French invasion in 1920, much of it focused in urban areas. However, the key military challenge to French rule came with the ‘Druze revolt’ of 1925–​26, which took root in rural areas among the Druze minority and former Ottoman army officers. There was heavy reliance by mandatories on martial rule during periods of crisis, and on aerial bombardment during the Druze revolt in particular. The handling of both the Palestine and Syrian cases, with their asymmetric violence, attracted international criticism from exile groups and humanitarian constituencies. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations offered a novel arena for contestation of this quasi-​imperial administration, but, itself permeated with imperialist expertise and sensibilities, rarely challenged the underlying assumptions, and was guarded in its commentary (Pedersen 2015; Wheatley 2015).

Modernity and the Making of (Post-​O ttoman) States The basic political and territorial structures consolidated during the interwar period had a surprising longevity. The Second World War brought Arab hopes that the ending of the Syrian mandate would presage a fundamental reconfiguration—​the union of Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine. Although variations of pan-​ Arabist confederations were attempted in different moments, Syria and Transjordan emerged to a fragile independence, and have remained independent states since. Palestine, following the failure of a United

668   Megan Donaldson Nations (UN) partition plan, descended into war, with the creation of the state of Israel generating further conflict with Arab territorial claims. The Middle East remains a terrain of sectarian and political conflict, and an object of great power rivalry. The significance of Sykes–​Picot in the trajectory linking 1916 to the present is a matter of contestation. However, Sykes–​Picot has become not only a historical episode in this trajectory, but a shorthand for different arguments about what has shaped the history of the region. It retains a totemic importance in a wide range of political visions. Sykes–​Picot as anathema spanned the rival post-​Second World War pan-​Arabisms of the Hashemite rulers and Nasser, functioning as a shared symbol of foreign imposition and political division. It was cited, for example, in the 1958 creation of a United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria and, it was hoped, Iraq. More recently, it surfaced in some justifications by Al Qaeda of the need for defensive jihad. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) propaganda made much of the ceremonial destruction of a section of the Iraq–​Syria border, presenting this as the triumphant final break with Sykes–​Picot and the re-​founding of a united Arab caliphate (Tinsley 2015). In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sykes–​Picot was revisited in Western discourse, too, as commentators invoked the ‘failure’ and ‘artificiality’ of states in the region as an explanation for continuing instability, and sought to imagine some more viable and stable political map. These invocations of Sykes–​Picot serve political projects in the present as much as they capture the possibilities of the past. For postcolonial Arab states (and, in a different way, groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIL), an ultimately inoperative agreement overriding Arab sovereignty is a more compelling foil than Husayn’s efforts to forge Arab and Muslim unity with and through British sponsorship. Western references to Sykes–​Picot, while castigating European governments for the clumsiness of its territorial allocation (and often, also, Arab leaders for failing to make successful states within these territories), are coupled with new, rationalized proposals for boundaries, reanimating a posture of imperial power (Pursley 2015a; Neep 2015). Many of these invocations of Sykes–​Picot are arguments, fundamentally, about the nature and limits of the states which should have emerged from the Ottoman Empire. What these invocations have in common is a sense of a historical process interrupted, turned from its natural or desirable course. In this regard, discussions of Sykes–​Picot converge with tendencies in IR and history to accord the state an axiomatic importance, and to assume a close relationship—​both chronological and definitional—​between ‘modernity’ and the (nation-​)state. Precisely because it has proved so tempting to understand Ottoman history and post-​Ottoman possibilities through this framework of (interrupted) modernity and state-​making, the Ottoman Empire offers a good ground on which to interrogate the framework itself. The Ottoman Empire’s liminal status—​conceived as in, but not ‘of ’ Europe (Naff 1984, 143)—​has sometimes posed a challenge to the theorization of the international order, and of Europe itself (see, e.g. Dunne and Little 2014, 99; Özsu 2012; Tusan 2010). However, the conceptual linkage in IR and history between modernity and the emergence of states consolidates a picture in which the Ottoman Empire stands apart from Western Europe. The treatment of the Ottoman Empire in a foundational work of English School IR (Naff 1984) emphasizes the way in which the Ottoman Empire, in part because of the conceptual structure of Islam, operated on fundamentally different understandings of the state, law, and government to Western European powers, and the barriers that this created to

Sykes–Picot   669 full participation in diplomatic relations and a (European) law of nations. This parallels a narrative of the Ottoman Empire left out of European scientific and technical progress, trapped in archaism and corruption. The sense of the Empire as a declining relic then gives a certain organic logic to the emergence from it of younger and more vigorous ‘nations’, in the Balkans and elsewhere. Revisions of the basic ‘expansion’ narrative of international order have insisted that Europe was itself shaped in the encounter with extra-​European peoples; and was not a cluster of uniform states but encompassed multiple hybrid forms (Welsh 2017). Nevertheless, the revisionist narrative still assumes a basic modularity in the category of statehood, and does not necessarily complicate the sense of nations as natural components breaking through a moribund imperial edifice. The Ottoman case brings to the surface a recurrent ambiguity spanning IR and history about what exactly is captured in shorthand references to ‘the state’: whether these accounts are stressing the unitary state as a political form (as opposed to, say, composite monarchy, or the layered and differentiated jurisdiction characteristic of empire); or whether they refer rather to various techniques of rule (bureaucratic administration, taxation, and the like) which, while associated with a centralizing impetus, are capable of being operationalized across an array of political forms. This slippage may have substantive consequences. In relation to the Ottoman Empire, the notion that the nation-​state form goes hand in hand with certain techniques of rule, as Buzan and Lawson put it, the nineteenth-​century phenomenon of ‘rational state-​building’ as ‘the process by which many administrative and bureaucratic competences were “caged” within national territories’ (Buzan and Lawson 2013, 621) may entrench assumptions that the endurance of the caliphate as a loosely imperial form went hand-​in-​hand with torpor in techniques of government, whereas Ottoman modernization over the long nineteenth century actually had much in common with wider European trends (Provence 2017, 10–​32). Finally, the Ottoman case puts in question whether nation or state function as universal analytical categories. ‘Nationalism’ was available in the early twentieth century, and today, as a sort of ‘modular’ political category (Anderson 2006, 4). But Antonius’ classic account of a recognizable ‘Arab national movement’ with roots in the late nineteenth century (Antonius 1939) has been criticized. The label of ‘Arab nationalism’ has often been used without any precise account of the extent to which cultural or other affinities have translated to a demand for the political form of a nation-​state (Dawisha 2016, 4–​12). There remain important questions about the relationship between Arab identity and Ottoman loyalty, and the way in which Arab solidarity took shape in response to pressure on Ottoman identity from Turkish self-​assertion, European imperialism, and later Zionist settlement (Khalidi 1991). The task may not be to look for Arab instances of nationalist movements agitating for independence but rather ‘to account, theoretically, for local patriotic ideas that were not premised on a fundamental rejection of [Ottoman] empire’; patriotic ideas which crystallized not across a language group as such but in distinct ways in urban hubs like Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, and Damascus (Mestyan 2017, 7; see also Khoury 1983, 1987). Even by the First World War, to the extent that there was an Arab ‘national’ identity, there was not a neat relation between a sense of nation-​ness and an aspiration for the political form of an independent state. Though the Husayn letters invoked the ‘Arab nation’, this may well have been a translation in more than one sense: a framing of claims in a language intelligible to Europeans, relative to Arabic terms which refer more loosely to community, or region.2 Moreover the question of the caliphate mandated a layered authority in which the state itself would not be a final authority.

670   Megan Donaldson The Ottoman case highlights not only the possible distortions which categories of nation and state impose on Arab political thought, but the way in which these concepts were themselves in flux in the interwar period—​not settled concepts over which Europe enjoyed intellectual mastery. The League in many respects accommodated, rather than challenged, European imperial understandings. Yet, in opening the possibility of statehood brokered by an expanded international community, through newly institutionalized and public processes, the League also revealed considerable uncertainty about what counted as a state, and how to make states (Donaldson 2020). The notion of self-​determination posited that a nation (understood in ethnic, sectarian and historical terms) ought to find expression in a state. Large-​scale population transfers, like that between Greece and Turkey, vindicated an ethnically and culturally essentialist view of nationhood (Robson 2017). In other respects post-​First World War peace-​making in fact veered away from an ethno-​sectarian basis of statehood, seeking through the ‘minorities’ regime basic collective protections for minorities within states (Mazower 1997); indeed, in places like Syria, the idea of the nation-​state and the conception of majority and minority populations evolved together (White 2011). Questions about the relation between ethnic or sectarian identification and statehood remain vexed today. Sykes–​Picot is less a betrayal of primordial ethnic, linguistic or religious identities which might otherwise have found expression in distinct states (Dodge 2016) than an invitation to think about how precarious is the connection—​empirical and conceptual—​between these identities and modern states.

Granularity and Perspective This chapter opened with the 1916 map signed by Sykes and Picot: a choice of scale which foregrounds certain figures and their sense of scale and perspective. In this final section, I explore how the volume’s second organizing theme, granularity, illuminates the agreement as a ‘moment’, and how the agreement might challenge the notion of granularity at stake in history and IR. Across both disciplines, a focus on granularity in the sense of changes of scale offers possibilities for seeing the agreement in different guises. It invites scrutiny of what is lost in moving from one level to another; for example, the difficulty of generalizing, as this chapter has sometimes done, about developments across a highly diverse region. It might open the way for shifts of frame, from global imperial patterns in treaty-​making or approaches to territory, to regionally specific strategic questions, to more localized political resistance. A global frame might advance enlightening comparative work: just as Arab thinkers themselves looked to Austro-​Hungary as a model, we might in history or IR probe further whether there are similarities between the fraying of imperial authority and emergent political identities in Habsburg and Ottoman empires (see, e.g. Reynolds 2011); between the weaknesses of a standard account of nationalism for both the Spanish Americas (Chiaramonte 2012) and the Arab peoples; or between, for example, pan-​Arabist and pan-​Africanist projects of unification or federation post-​Second World War, and their relation to imperial boundary-​drawing. That said, an understanding of granularity as primarily a question of scale would posit an (illusory) vantage point beyond the phenomena being examined. The Sykes–​Picot agreement illustrates the importance also of perspective: the point from which, and how,

Sykes–Picot   671 one apprehends the phenomenon in question. It prompts questions in particular about how mapping and treaty-​making fix actors’ perspectives, and shape later analysis. Colonial-​era cartography seems to have helped shape European and even Ottoman perceptions of Lebanon and Palestine as distinct entities; conversely, the fact that there was no major map of the ‘greater Syria’ to which Arab nationalists aspired may have hindered the prosecution of these claims (Kaufman 2015). On Sykes–​Picot specifically, commentary has often emphasized the abstraction of the ‘line[s]‌in the sand’ (Barr 2011). However, while the diagonal splitting of the ‘A’ and ‘B’ spheres of influence was largely arbitrary, other lines reflected pre-​existing Ottoman administrative divisions and local affiliations, as well as European imperial desiderata. It may be the pseudo-​precision of the lines, rather than their exact location, which warrants critical scrutiny. By contrast, Arab territorial claims remained in looser written formulations (unsurprisingly, given Britain’s reluctance to enter into negotiations). This is not to say that, had the McMahon–​Husayn undertakings been reduced to a map, Britain would necessarily have avoided the conflicting commitments. Certainly, however, the absence of a McMahon–​Husayn map was a factor in the precarity of those undertakings, and the prolonged controversy over the parties’ original intentions regarding Palestine. The ‘agreement’ label attached to Sykes–​Picot arrangements (often in juxtaposition to the McMahon–​Husayn ‘correspondence’) hints at the role of legal discourse in drawing out some acts and actors as important, and marginalizing others. On prevailing legal doctrine, a course of correspondence between ministers or high officials could constitute a treaty binding a state in law, but the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence, still inchoate in key respects, did not enjoy this status, at least to the European legal mind. Of course, by the time the Sykes–​Picot arrangements were being consulted in 1919, their legal force was not the primary issue (Donaldson 2016, 130). Yet whether enjoying legal force or not, or in practical terms superseded by events, agreements have influence simply as points of reference, and they channel contestation about interests or rights. It is striking how much discussion about the future form of the Middle East since 1916—​both within government bureaucracies and in broader public discourse—​has taken the form of readings and re-​readings of the Sykes–​ Picot agreement, Husayn–​McMahon correspondence, and Balfour declaration (although issues like translation, the interrelation of written undertakings and oral explanations, and the parties’ different rhetorical traditions, which bear on the parties’ initial understandings, have received less systematic attention). The centrality of these texts makes them a logical framing for both history and IR, but also tends to foster certain perspectives over others. It directs attention to particular actors, without always acknowledging that their authority might be partly constituted by, rather than merely reflected in, the text: Husayn’s kingship, and certainly the position of his sons in Iraq and Jordan, was perhaps as much a product of the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence than a precondition of it (Mestyan, 2023). The reification of a particular text or transaction can reinforce a disposition to treat the arrangement as punctual, logical and consequential, rather than—​as is the case with Sykes–​Picot—​part of shifting negotiations, somewhat arbitrary in content, and highly contingent in effect. More generally, the focus on texts pulls to the fore those who operate in writing and through recognizably European diplomatic conventions, rather than, say, non-​elite populations, whose conceptions of political order leave few written traces, but whose actions give shape and force to political movements (Provence 2005, 22; Eddé 2004).

672   Megan Donaldson

Notes 1. I am grateful to the editors, and to Adam Mestyan, for comments on a draft, and to Mestyan for exchanges which have sharpened the analysis in the third and fourth parts, in particular. All errors remain my own. 2. I am here indebted to an exchange with Adam Mestyan.

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674   Megan Donaldson Robson, L. 2017. States of Separation. Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oakland: University of California Press. Tinsley, M. 2015. ‘Whose Colonialism? The Contested Memory of the Sykes–​Picot Agreement’. Project on Middle East Political Science (blog). 6 March 2015. Available at: https://​pom​eps. org/​whose-​colo​nial​ism-​the-​contes​ted-​mem​ory-​of-​the-​sykes-​picot-​agreem​ent. Tusan, M. 2010. ‘Britain and the Middle East: New Historical Perspectives on the Eastern Question’. History Compass 8(3): 212–​222. Welsh, J. M. 2017. ‘Empire and Fragmentation’. In The Globalization of International Society, eds. T. Dunne and C. Reus-​Smit, 145–​164. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Wheatley, N. 2015. ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations’. Past & Present 227(1): 205–​248. White, B. T. 2011. The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yenen, A. 2020. ‘Envisioning Turco-​Arab Co-​Existence between Empire and Nationalism’. Die Welt des Islams 60: 1–​41.

Chapter 46

World War T wo a nd San Fran c i s c o Daniel Gorman The Second World War (WWII) was both a global catastrophe and a moment of rebirth. The war and the San Francisco Conference (1945) at which the United Nations (UN) was created were emblematic of a broader mid-​twentieth-​century process that saw ideas of modernity internationalized on a truly global scale. The year 1945 is totemic for both international historians and International Relations (IR) scholars. As IR scholars increasingly incorporate historical contextualism into their work, and international historians become more conscious of the theoretical assumptions guiding their work, it has become possible to draw insights from both disciplines to critically reassess 1945 as an ostensible ‘year zero’ for our present international system (Cello 2017; Lawson 2010; Sluga and Clavin 2017). The 1940s marked the point at which the modernist concepts of territorial sovereignty and a collective awareness of global challenges converged. Granular studies of WWII and the UN that emerged from it reveal how actors around the world became integrated in a single international system, and how legacies from the interwar period shaped this new order. This was not a teleological process, however, but one where produced as much conflict as cooperation. It is only by contextualizing the war and the origins of the UN that we can periodize them within a broader historical context of modernity. Similarly, IR theory can be enriched by interpreting the 1940s as a period where the decline of older political discourses (such as internationalism and imperialism) overlapped with the intensification of modernist norms of sovereignty, multilateralism, and bipolarity. An attention to the concept of granularity underlines that context and periodization matter. They allow us to fully understand the scale, scope, and texture of the war and the norms and structures of international affairs which emerged in its wake. This chapter unfolds in five parts. The first section outlines how international historians and IR scholars have used WWII and the creation of the UN as global moments. The second section examines the convergence of regional international systems in the first half of the twentieth century as a necessary prelude to WWII. The third section assesses WWII as a moment of international transformation, highlighting both changes and continuities in international affairs. The fourth section analyses the San Francisco Conference as a signal moment of closure and creation, both a peace settlement and a blueprint for an emergent

676   Daniel Gorman multilateral international system. The final section identifies legacies of WWII and the San Francisco Conference in International History and IR.

Global Moments? The end of WWII in 1945 is a benchmark date in traditional IR theory. Liberal theorists describe it as the moment when the United States constructed a new cooperative world order organized around multilateral institutions, notably the UN, and its own hegemonic power (Ikenberry 2000). For offensive realists, 1945 demonstrates that great powers like the United States act aggressively in pursuit of hegemony as a response to the endemic insecurity of international politics (Mearsheimer 2001). Constructivists challenge these rationalist assumptions by incorporating International History into broader systemic and unit level analyses of how wartime actors’ interests and values shaped the constitution of the postwar international order. They place WWII and San Francisco within longer-​term, parallel and/​ or interconnected political processes and praxes. Some constructivists problematize rationalist assumptions about 1945 as a singular global transition moment by arguing that states organize hierarchies within the anarchic international system, and that the postwar period witnessed a transition from an imperial world order based on European ‘standards of civilization’ to one where imperialism was delegitimized and replaced by a new international hierarchy (Hobson and Sharman 2005). English School scholars position WWII in a broader historicist analysis of how states use war to regulate norms of international justice and order (Buzan and Lawson 2014). Constructivism shares with Critical IR theory an interest in analysing the moral underpinnings of ideas of international order. Critical IR theory itself was partly a creation of WWII, as some of its central thinkers emigrated from Nazi Germany to the West. Hannah Arendt’s seminal work on the crisis of political rights in an age of barbarism provided a critical theory of modernity. For Arendt, equality ‘is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’ (1958, 301). Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, meanwhile, analysed the war as part of their modernist project of incorporating theories of the internationalization of technology and mass culture into classical Marxism (Yalvaç 2017). These ideas have informed the discourse-​focused work of subsequent Critical Theorists from Jurgen Habermas (2007) to Andrew Linklater (2007). For many international historians, the war and the creation of the UN was the ‘apogee of twentieth century internationalism’ (Sluga 2013, 79). The first generation of UN histories, written by diplomats, activists, and political scientists, were organizational histories. The end of the Cold War (another conventional transition moment in both International History and IR), and the short-​lived triumphalism of the ‘end of history’, prompted several largely adulatory UN histories in the 1990s and 2000s (Meisler 1995; Schlesinger 2003; Kennedy 2006). It is only in the 2010s that historians have treated the UN and international organizations as key historical actors (Kott 2011; Roehrlich 2018). International History has emerged as a capacious sub-​field that draws upon social, cultural, and economic history, and social science concepts, alongside more traditional diplomatic history.

World War Two and San Francisco    677

Modernism, International Convergence, and the Causes of WWII The international system of the nineteenth century consisted of regional orders interconnected by significant but uneven tendrils such as the trade in goods and slaves, migration, war, imperialism, and telecommunication networks. By the early twentieth century the forces of modernism (notably industrialization, capitalism, technological innovation, international law, and the normalization of the nation-​state model) had begun to fuse these regional systems under the portmanteau of European ‘civilization’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015). The global shock of World War One (WWI) cracked the foundations of this European international order, but the postwar peace treaties preserved European international hegemony. What was new was the twin emancipatory influences of Wilsonian and Marxist-​Leninist self-​ determination. Yet while these political visions promised alternate international orders, they belied the spectres of American racism and Soviet mass violence (Smith 2017; Throntveit 2017). Several interwar developments in international cooperation and conflict anticipated WWII and the international system that emerged from its ashes. The League of Nations-​ related international organizations such as the International Labour Organization, and non-​ governmental bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross established a ‘denser’ international political sphere. This new space produced a modern international civil service (Ikonomou and Gram-​Skjoldage 2019), and emergent international norms such as a prohibition against aggressive war embodied in the Kellogg-​Briand Pact (1928) (Hathaway and Shapiro 2017; Gorman 2017). Yet its collective security provisions failed to solve the cascade of international crises in the 1930s, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931) through the Abyssinian crisis (1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–​39) to Hitler’s serial aggression. The very periodization of an ‘interwar’ era indicates how international historians have conventionally divided the 1920s and 1930s from WWII and its aftermath. Yet many interwar developments continued through and after the war. International organizations continued to function (some like the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) even centred in the fascist bloc), while international civil servants who began their careers before the war became important figures in the UN. Imperial powers clung to their empires by tentatively embracing policies of colonial development, and by variously accommodating and repressing colonial nationalists (Burbank and Cooper 2019; Maiolo 2016). However, the marginalization of non-​European societies, from imperial Japan and divided China to colonized communities across the globe, created emancipatory pressures within the international system that were unleashed by WWII. The question of how to periodize WWII is connected to our interpretation of the war within a modernist framework. WWII is positioned as a key moment in the evolution of IR theory, separating the ostensible ‘first Great Debate’ of the interwar years between idealism and realism, and the ‘second Great Debate’ after the war between behaviouralists and traditionalists. To the extent that these retroactively defined debates accurately capture IR’s evolution, they use the ‘real world’ caesura of WWII and its peace settlement to periodize the discipline’s intellectual history. This chronology begs the question of whether the war shaped IR’s theoretical trajectory. E. H. Carr (2001) counselled that both idealism and a

678   Daniel Gorman realist attention to power are necessary components of practical international affairs. While theorists such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr opposed anti-​liberal ideologies, it is not immediately evident that the war itself explains the postwar ascendance of realism and behaviouralism (Williams 2013). Indeed, in contrast to liberal internationalists, the English School, and neo-​Marxists, postwar realists were notably silent on decolonization and self-​ determination (Guilhot 2014; Hall 2011). While the ‘great debates’ periodization of IR’s history has been much criticized, no convincing alternative disciplinary genealogies have replaced it, and it continues to feature as an organizing feature in IR textbooks. International historians have heeded Warren Kimball’s (2001) call to study WWII on its own terms, rather than as a prelude to the Cold War. Amy Sayward (2017) describes the temporal and spatial origins of the UN as a ‘borderland’, spanning the war and postwar years, and national and international political space. For Richard Overy (1994), the causes of WWII constituted a collective crisis of modernity. The war and the creation of the UN was both a symptom of and response to this crisis. Modernity is a slippery historical concept, however. Historians conventionally conceptualize modernity as a condition, an ontology which can lead them to conflate modernity’s temporal and empirical signifiers (Wittrock 2000). Modernity as a ‘package’ of industrialization, democracy, and the centrality of the state is a Eurocentric concept applied to the ‘rest of the world’. It does not map neatly on to the histories of societies outside of Europe, spatially or conceptually, and should be problematized through comparison to alternate ‘modernities’ elsewhere in the world (Conrad 2012). Above all, modernity denotes an awareness of history, and ones’ capacity to either shape it or be shaped by it. This encourages people and organizations to plan, to forecast, and to anticipate. In Susan Sontag’s words (2003, 109), ‘one of the characteristics of modernity is that people like to feel they can anticipate their own experience’. Allied war leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals anticipated continued instability, death, and destruction unless a new international system was created. The formation of the UN was their immediate response to the extraordinary global experiences they had collectively endured. WWII and the San Francisco Conference can thus be understood as part of a longer-​term international history of modernity, and as a crucible in which a new international system emerged, albeit one with important continuities with that it replaced.

World War Two—​Moment of International Transformation (Changes and Continuities) The collapse of the interwar international system is among the most studied subjects in both International History and IR. The failure of the League of Nations (notwithstanding the measured successes of its functional organizations), the rise of totalitarianism and the politics of radical (and racial) ideology, and the ultimate failure of collective security as the bulwark of international system feature prominently in both disciplines’ literature. The ‘German question’ looms at the heart of many international historians’ work on the war and its causes (Steiner 2011; Weinberg 1994). Germany is also central to IR analyses of WWII’s causes, but its role, like that of other actors, tends to be interpreted across various levels of

World War Two and San Francisco    679 analyses, rather than in the holistic analyses of international historians that reveals that texture of historical events. IR scholars interpret WWII within broader conceptual frameworks of international affairs, while international historians produce granular studies (from grand narratives to micro-​histories) of the war’s causes in historical context. Yet, despite these respective epistemologies, there is a long tradition of productive integration between the disciplines in their studies of war and peace. Quincy Wright’s magnum opus A Study of War (1944), Democratic Peace theorists, and the Correlates of War Project are instructive examples of historically based IR studies that contextualize WWII in broader analyses of war in the international system. Structural realists and historians attentive to the politics of power see the causes and conduct of WWII in analogous terms. Some historically informed IR work on WWII and the UN’s creation use methods of process-​tracing and path dependency that provide models for productively blending theoretical and empirical analysis. Also important is the ‘narrative’ turn in IR theory, which recognizes narrative International History ‘not as an adjunct or empirical resource, but as a theoretical perspective in its own right’ (Roberts 2006, 703). The UN’s wartime origins are found in the Atlantic Charter (1941). The Charter is significant for three reasons: it asserted self-​determination, sovereignty, and international collaboration as norms of a postwar international order; it marked America’s abandonment of isolation and embrace of international leadership; and it anticipated the UN through its goal of establishing ‘a wider and permanent system of general security. The Atlantic Charter’s principles were embedded in the Declaration of the United Nations (1 January 1942), the first time the concept of a ‘United Nations’ formulated by Franklin Roosevelt was used in an international agreement. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill next met at Casablanca in January 1943, where they agreed that Germany must be forced to accept unconditional surrender. Their personal relationship has been examined by scholars interested in the role of emotions and friendship in IR. This attention to affective relations parallels the work of international historians on historical actors’ mental imaginaries, subjective internationalism, and personalities and habitus (Hoef 2018; Finney 1997; Jackson 2008). As the war progressed, the Allied Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin) shifted from the ‘peace by dictation’ vision of a Great Power concert evinced in the Atlantic Charter to a cooperative model of international organization which recognized that ‘vertical hierarchies’ between great and lesser powers were also necessary to ensure international peace (Morris 2013; Clark 2011, 48). They met in Tehran later in 1943, where Roosevelt present the plan for a United Nations Organization (UNO) to Stalin. The Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944 resulted in the creation of new institutions to stabilize the world economy (the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [the World Bank]), as well as a detailed plan for a UNO that was subsequently debated at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. In the interim, the Big Three met at Yalta in February 1945, where Roosevelt persuaded Stalin to support the UN and join the war against Japan. Stalin secured Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe. Churchill was largely marginalized, save his proposal for a postwar occupation of Germany. The terms of the Allied occupation of Germany, as well as a proclamation of terms of surrender for Japan, were agreed to at Potsdam in July–​August 1945. Some historians see Potsdam as the opening salvo in the Cold War, yet it can also be interpreted as the last negotiation of the peace settlement, setting out postwar international norms such as the ordering

680   Daniel Gorman of territory, sovereignty, alliances, and balance of power for postwar order (Reynolds 2007; Neiberg 2015). This granular survey of wartime diplomatic debates demonstrates that the war’s end in 1945 was not a singular ‘moment of creation’, but the culmination of a long history of world order thought and politics. Institutions created during the war, such as The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), were key precursors to the UN (Staples 2003; Reinisch 2011). The UN’s framers also drew on the panoply of world order ideas produced by intellectuals, publicists, and politicians in the 1930s and early 1940s (Rosenboim 2017). The United States was the driving force in shaping the postwar world. Roosevelt’s foreign policy advisor Sumner Welles had called for an ‘Association of Nations’ in early 1941. The American State Department planned, hosted, and ran the San Francisco Conference, and the UN headquarters were subsequently placed in New York. Balance of power theory has informed both international historians’ and IR scholars’ analyses of the 1940s. The war marked the emergence of a bipolar world order dominated by American and Soviet hegemony, and hastened the collapse of formal imperialism in world politics. Colonial nationalists used the war opportunistically to advance their individual visions of independence. Studies of the war itself have been left largely to security studies scholars and military historians, rather than IR scholars and international historians. This division of labour has obscured the interconnections between the global war and the emergence of a truly global international order. International historians have paid greater attention than IR scholars to the nature, conduct, and lived experiences of the war itself. This can be seen in the two disciplines’ respective analysis of the Holocaust. International historians have interpreted the Nazi genocide as a crime against humanity, a mass slaughter committed by a state within the context of imperial expansion, and a prototypically modernist crime through broader themes such as statelessness or comparative genocide studies (Hilberg 1961; Snyder 2015; Moses 2008). The comparative absence of the Holocaust in IR scholarship is a symptom of the field’s state-​centrism and neglect of questions of empire (especially by rational choice theorists), the influence of domestic variables (thus the enormous significance of German and European anti-​Semitism is undertheorized in much IR scholarship), and questions of morality (a variable that transcends system or unit analyses). It has been left to post-​ positivist and critical IR scholars to grapple with the influence of the twentieth-​century’s moral abyss on international relations (Levene 2005).

San Francisco Conference—​Birth of a New International System The UN was created at the United Nations Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco from 25 April–​26 June 1945. Unlike at Versailles in 1919, all the Great Powers were committed to building and participating in a new international system in 1945. Fifty states sent a combined total of 260 delegates to San Francisco. The Conference Secretariat, presided over by the American State Department official Alger Hiss, oversaw four conference

World War Two and San Francisco    681 commissions and twelve technical committees which debated the Dumbarton Oaks UNO proposal. The Big Three’s respective foreign policy priorities were reflected in the UN’s eventual design: security for the Soviets; the creation of an international community for the Americans; and international stability for the British. Systemic IR explanations for the UN’s formation stress alliance politics and the nature of international system transition. Historians understand San Francisco within broader wartime contexts. Delegates created a UN with six primary organs. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) was comprised of the five Great Powers (France and China joined the Big Three) plus rotating non-​permanent members. It embodied a realist perspective on international security. The United Nations General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council (each comprised of all member-​ states) reflected liberal visions of international cooperation. The Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat formed the foundation for functional international governance. The UN’s goals were distinctly liberal internationalist: peace; international order through multilateralism; human rights based on natural law; and socio-​economic development. It also pursued the short-​term goal of eradicating Nazi and Japanese imperialism through the United Nations War Crimes Commission (Plesch 2017), an important precursor and adjunct to the postwar International Military Tribunals held at Nuremberg (November 1945–​ October 1946) and Tokyo (May 1946–​November 1948). These liberal goals were balanced by a realist view of security. Power was concentrated in the UNSC, the UN’s ‘executive body’. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had envisioned a limited procedural role for smaller powers. The General Assembly would give voice, but little power, to member states. In the event, as was the case at Bretton Woods (Helleiner 2014), Global South states exerted some influence at San Francisco. They ensured that the secretary-​general would be elected by the General Assembly, and the Latin American delegations lobbied successfully for the inclusion of international human rights language in the Charter. The UN was thus an international organization that provided political space and (limited) resources to confront pressing postwar international problems such as the displaced persons crisis and global hunger, but which ultimately reflected the strategic interests and hierarchical international order of the Great Powers. National sovereignty was the UN’s bedrock principle, co-​equal with but systemically prioritized over visions of international equality and self-​determination. Debates concerning whether the UN should have an independent international police force fell by the wayside, while the UN’s assumption of the League of Nations’ mandates under the Trusteeship Council undermined its rhetorical support for self-​determination. It was not until 1960, when postcolonial states had attained a majority in the General Assembly, that the UN officially embraced decolonization. The UN Charter is a binding legal instrument which sets out its members’ rights, powers, and obligations. Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College, prepared the draft of the Charter’s introductory passage, including the key language ‘We the Peoples’ which spoke to the UN’s universalist vision. So did members’ agreement that Charter obligations superseded other treaty obligations (Article 103). The Charter reflects the tension in international affairs between universalism and cooperation, and state sovereignty and national interest. These tensions were apparent in the debates at San Francisco, including those concerning membership, the UNSC veto, trusteeship and colonialism, and the use of force. Only Allied states were invited to San Francisco, but Latin American states pressed for universal membership, and the Soviets pushed for Ukraine and Byelorussia. All three were admitted

682   Daniel Gorman as members after contentious debate. The veto question, ostensibly settled at Yalta, almost wrecked the San Francisco conference. The Soviets wanted an expansive veto, encompassing the decision to debate an issue as well as its outcome, while the Americans wished a more restrictive veto. Furthermore, most smaller states resented and opposed the veto. Delegates agreed upon a compromise whereby the veto could be used at any stage of debate once an issue was on the UNSC agenda. The colonial agenda was muddled at San Francisco. The British and French opposed any language promising self-​rule (the French even bombed Syria during the conference). The Filipino representative Carlos Romulo was instrumental in securing the inclusion of ‘independence’ in the Charter as a goal for non-​self-​governing peoples. The Great Powers sought to continue their wartime military alliance through a UN Military Staff Committee and the ability to use collective force to maintain international security. The outbreak of the Cold War and the atomic age, however, quickly undermined the UN’s ability to exercise collective force. The exception was during the Korean War, when the UNSC authorized military support for the Republic of Korea, which had been invaded by communist North Korea. While collective security has proved elusive, ­chapters 6 and 7 of the Charter have provided mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes and the enforcement of international peace in the face of aggressors which have become more relevant in an age of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 2012). The UN has supported humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, and international criminal justice in response to the rise of civil wars and domestic crimes against humanity. Humanitarian intervention is justified by its supporters as an application of universal human rights. Human rights were a powerful aspirational goal at San Francisco, yet of minimal practical importance to the Great Powers. The UN’s role in internationalizing human rights is the subject of intense scholarly debate. The decade of the 1940s, rather than San Francisco itself, emerge as a coherent period in the history of human rights. Human rights were on the agenda at The General Assembly’s first session in 1946. The UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, subsequently drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The same year, the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin prepared the draft resolution of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). The Geneva Conventions of 1949 expanded international legal protection for combatants, especially wounded and imprisoned soldiers. This postwar burst of human rights activism was a response to the mass suffering of the war, yet the nascent international human rights regime that emerged lacked enforcement and compliance tools and privileged Western conceptions of rights. While UN human rights deliberations in the 1940s were unquestionably Eurocentric, the principle of self-​determination as a human right had already been taken up by anti-​colonialists for their own purposes during the war years (Borgwardt 2005; Ibhawoh 2014). The creation of a ‘UN system’ or ‘UN world’ was central to the expansion of global governance after 1945, a subject upon which both IR scholars and international historians have converged (Jolly et al. 2009; Mazower 2013). Many of the League of Nations’ international governance functions were transferred to the UN, an example of the continuities in international affairs across the putative 1945 divide. Management theorists (a key early influence was the American organizational theorist and social worker Mary Parker Follett) and functionalist theorists (Huber et al. 2019, 12–​17; Mitrany 1943; Haas 1964) stressed the importance of shared knowledge in this process, anticipating the later work of global governance

World War Two and San Francisco    683 scholars (Murphy 1994). Meanwhile, the UN Information Office, created in 1942 and the first agency to use the ‘United Nations’ moniker, was an incubator for practices of public diplomacy that have become central to modern politics. The UN thus provided the political and conceptual space for states and non-​state actors to collaborate, especially in the fields of economic, cultural, and social policy. The history of transnational networks work encourages historians and IR scholars to immerse themselves in the archives of international organizations, and to see the UN as a site to study the interconnected histories of postcolonialism, social movements, feminism, population studies, and many other subjects (Amrith and Sluga 2008; Duedahl 2016). IR scholars also see the UN as a key element in the history of transnational activism (Davies 2014). The rules-​ based multilateralism embodied in the UN system and other international organizations after WWII operated in parallel to, and sometimes in tandem with, bipolar Cold War politics. While political scientists have not been averse to historicist analyses of the origins and legacies of the UN, IR studies of postwar multilateralism have occurred primarily within the broader paradigms of the Cold War and, more recently, global governance (Gaiduk 2013; Weiss and Roy 2016).

Legacies The postwar international order did not emerge whole in 1945. Rather, the 1940s was a transition period. Cold War relations had not yet ossified, the UN system developed piecemeal into the 1950s, decolonization introduced new Global South ‘non-​aligned’ states as sovereign actors in international relations, and the defeated Axis powers had to be re-​incorporated into the international system. The wartime liberal internationalist ethos that drove the creation of the UN was not universally accepted in either the academy or diplomatic circles. Realist scholars such as Nicholas Spykman (1942) and Morgenthau (1948) faulted wartime ‘idealists’ for ignoring what they saw as the primacy of power in international affairs, holding an uncritical faith in mechanical institution-​building, and conflating politics and law. These views came to dominate both postwar American IR and foreign policy, alongside George Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946). Yet despite realists’ disagreements with liberal internationalists regarding the nature of world order, not all postwar realists were entirely pessimistic about international affairs. Niebhur (1944) shared with liberal internationalists the modernist conviction that moral convictions had a role in foreign policy. Realists, after all, are concerned primarily with the behaviour, rather than the nature, of states, and Cold Warriors opposed the Soviet Union on moral as well as systemic grounds. Critiques of the postwar international order also came from the colonial world. Self-​ determination featured prominently in wartime deliberations of Allied war aims, yet in 1945 self-​determination for colonized societies proved a promise delayed. As the Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe lamented, ‘there is no New Deal for the black man’ at San Francisco (Getachew 2019, 72). For colonized people, WWII was about liberation, not international governance. The war inspired postwar Afro-​Asian collaboration, while the UN’s social and economic organizations and programs provided postcolonial nations a voice in international affairs, material aid, and the normative power to delegitimize colonialism. These subjects have attracted much attention from historians who have taken up Dipesh

684   Daniel Gorman Chakrabarty’s (2000) imperative to ‘provincialize Europe’. The place of the Global South in IR remains undertheorized outside of Dependency, World Systems, and postcolonial theory, but IR theorists have begun to ‘decolonize’ their discipline and recognize the work of Asian, African, Latin American, and other racialized political thinkers (Acharya and Buzan 2019; Vitalis 2017). International History and IR are only beginning to include scholarship by writers from, rather than Global North scholars writing about, the Global South (Beckert and Sachsenmaier 2018). The further development of an emerging ‘Chinese school’ of IR, and the work of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) critical school, are promising loci for such work.

Granularity and Modernity The 1940s witnessed the international convergence of modern concepts of sovereignty, multilateralism, the nation-​state model, international law, and industrial capitalism. Actors were aware of living through a period of global crisis, and turned to the quintessentially modernist concept of planning. This dynamic can be seen in the UN’s aspirational goals. A granular study of WWII and the origins of the UN demonstrates how the two events were interconnected, how the scale and scope of international politics expanded in the 1940s, and how the integration of grand narratives and specific historical studies reveals the significance of multiple global modernities and the convergence of moral and political imperatives. WWII was not analogous to other international wars or their settlements. Its scale and scope, the moral atrocities at its core, and the contested and universal nature of its peace settlement set it apart from its conventional modern analogues: the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna; WWI and the Treaty of Versailles (the other postwar peace treaties are often overlooked by international historians and IR theorists alike); and the end of the Cold War. Attention to the particularity and complexity of WWII and the UN’s origins does not invalidate comparative analysis, but it does suggest that the war and its peace settlement should be understood as particular global events, contextualized within the modernist conditions of the mid-​twentieth century, and incorporated into broader theoretical analyses of war and peace with the recognition that not all wars are alike. The topography of the 1940s looked different from different vantage points. The Western Allies sought collective security through the executive authority of the UNSC. The Soviet Union had suffered the most Allied casualties and chafed at what it perceived as an Anglo-​ American peace treaty. Latin American states, as noted previously, pressed their visions of rights and accountability, while the seeds of dissent from the colonial world, absent and spoken for at San Francisco, were planted in the language of ‘We the Peoples’ and self-​ determination that spoke to the moral narratives that emerged postwar. Such thick description and attention to multiple historical perspectives enables scholars to better understand where specific norms, values, institutions, and practices of the postwar international system came from. They also allow us to avoid the faulty syllogism (prevalent especially in structural realism) that large-​scale international crises ipso facto cause structural changes in the international system, and instead ask why a certain set of conditions, variables, and actions led to specific changes at specific times. If states and other international actors create the

World War Two and San Francisco    685 international system, anarchical or otherwise, within which they exist, we need to understand what tools they use and what blueprints they follow. The structural narrative of the decline of territorial sovereignty (the congruence of identity and decision space) as the organizing principle of international history, and the emergence of a modern moral narrative centred around moral atrocities and struggles against totalitarian barbarity, racism, and colonial oppression converged in the 1940s. This convergence explains why Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism has become a totemic text of the post-​WWII era, fusing these two narratives in an overarching interpretation of our shared ‘modern’ condition. The peace settlement at the end of WWII re-​emerged in the late 2010s as the assumed origin of the rules-​based liberal international order threatened by populists such as the American President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. To avoid simplistic analysis by analogy, it is important to understand the history of the 1940s on its own terms. The UN provided a loose political framework for the conduct of international relations in the postwar era. Its broader historical significance, however, rests in its aspirational and normative values. The UN was founded as both a ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ institution. Its creators hoped that it would provide a bulwark against further international war, with the UNSC and its veto system designed explicitly as a Great Power tribunal. At the same time, the broader UN system, highlighted by the General Assembly, evinced the spirit of universalism and provided an ‘international commons’. The emergence of the postwar international order institutionalized practices of international cooperation, some of which were legacies of both the pre-​war period and the Allies’ wartime alliance. These practices included, but were not limited to, multilateralism, liberal democracy, and free trade. Given the wartime evolution of the UN idea and the immediate postwar years of strife, reconstruction, and institution-​building, we can interpret the 1940s writ large as a succinct global moment. This broader periodization allows for an appreciation and understanding of the specific history of mid-​century international affairs, comparative empirical and theoretical analysis of WWII and its aftermath, and a recognition of the continuities in international relations and ideologies across the 1945 divide. While this periodization does not ignore the many ways in which the war constituted a global caesura, it does encourage historians and IR scholars alike to reconsider conventional views of the war as a conclusion to interwar strife or a prologue to the Cold War. The era of WWII serves as a global and quintessentially modern moment, a view that combines international historians’ attention to the granular complexity of the 1940s with IR scholars’ assessment of the decade as part of a broader pattern of structural shifts in the international system during times of crisis. The latter longue durée view allows us to position the 1940s within a genealogy of collective security (the serial and interconnected crises of WWII) and multilateralism (UN) as fulcrums of the postwar international system. This system emerged from the Western-​based wartime Alliance, and it was organized around the Eurocentric concept of sovereignty. It also contained a moral imperative that gave rise to debates about human rights, enabled non-​governmental actors to expand their political significance, and encouraged colonized societies in the Global South to press for their independence. A temporal framing of WWII and the creation of the UN as part of a broader decade of change reveals the modernist reality of states, political leaders, world order visionaries, and international civil servants being conscious of living through a period of international

686   Daniel Gorman dislocation. They worked with foresight to adapt and systematize existing practices of international governance, and to create new ones, to meet the challenges of the postwar world. The postwar international system was not qualitatively new; it built upon the bones of the interwar system and the lessons of the wartime alliance. What was new was its spatial framework. The scale and scope of postwar international governance was unprecedented, and it revealed a global if contested consensus that there were shared international challenges that could not be ignored. As this chapter has argued, a multi-​level analysis of individuals, states, and systemic factors reveals the 1940s as a world significant moment of convergence when a truly synchronous international system emerged.

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Chapter 47

The Bandung C onfe re nc e Christopher J. Lee In the spring of 1955, the city of Bandung, Indonesia, hosted an international conference of twenty-​nine countries from Asia and Africa. Lasting a week from 18 to 24 April, delegates confronted the task of addressing a range of issues their continents faced during the early Cold War period. These issues included general questions of political sovereignty and economic development for those countries that had achieved independence. For those still under the last vestiges of colonial rule, the political work of liberation and decolonization remained. Not least, the countries that participated encountered a new set of uncertainties introduced by the Cold War and the rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR). These uncertainties not only concerned the growing role of these superpowers in the aforementioned affairs of the postcolonial world, but also the global threat of nuclear weapons and the danger they posed to world peace and the progress of humankind. In sum, the Bandung Conference constituted a pivot point between continents, political eras, and shifting concepts of political community as European empires declined and new forms of transnational alliance and solidarity came into being. This chapter examines these elements of the Bandung Conference in order to establish the meeting’s importance in the history of international relations during the twentieth century. Undertaking a granular approach, this chapter discusses the ambitions of the conference and those who attended, the general importance of the summit in marking the rise of Third World diplomacy, and, finally, the legacies of the meeting in terms of political and economic modernization, which can still be observed today. Formally named the Asian-​African Conference, the Bandung Conference, or simply Bandung as it has come to be known colloquially, was one of the largest diplomatic meetings of its kind, ostensibly representing 1.4 billion people or almost two-​thirds of the world’s population by some estimates, including that by Ceylon Prime Minister John Kotelawala (1897–​ 1980) in his opening speech (Kotelawala 1955; Jack 1955; Lüthi 2020, 278). Only the United Nations (UN), which had 76 members in 1955, was larger in numeric representation and in terms of geographic and political magnitude. However, unlike the UN and its institutional predecessors, such as the League of Nations, the Indonesian conference highlighted the rise of nation-​state diplomacy in the majority world beyond the Euro-​American West. The importance of this fact was not lost on those leaders present, including such prominent statesmen as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–​1964) of India, President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–​70) of Egypt,

The Bandung Conference    691 Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–​1976) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and President Sukarno (1901–​70) of the host country, all of whom promoted personal, national, and international interests. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the historical significance of the meeting did not rest solely on those who attended—​a postcolonial version of ‘great man’ history and its problematic elitism. Its symbolic magnitude was also temporary, given that a number of delegates and new emissaries would participate in later conferences of even greater size and representation due to the continuing expansion of the postcolonial world. Rather, the importance of Bandung resides in its establishment of a lasting idea—​one often referred to as the ‘Bandung Spirit’, but one that can be more forcefully described as a collective argument about the future. Despite internal differences and degrees of competition, the participants at the Bandung Conference and its successors rejected the possibility of Western imperial control returning to Asia and Africa while concurrently embracing a program of postcolonial modernity—​economic, political, and cultural in scope—​at national and intercontinental levels. The Egyptian economist Samir Amin (1931–​2018) referred to this combined effort as the ‘Bandung project’, an expression more concrete in purpose and scope than spirit alone, while additionally noting its eventual failure (Amin 1994). Nonetheless, the promotion and endurance of these mutual positions of spirit and project have contributed to the diverse legacies of the meeting historically, institutionally, and in terms of the new modernity of Third Worldism it introduced. To address these different elements, this chapter is divided into three parts: first, a summary of the event itself; second, an examination of its immediate institutional effects; and third, a discussion of the uses, interpretations, and myths of Bandung that have persisted to the present.

The Event of Bandung ‘Is the original Bandung Conference best understood as merely a postcolonial ideological reaction to the passing age of empire and its excesses, or [as] an ambitious effort to promote a regional idea and an agenda for regionalism?’ Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan ask in the introduction to their edited book on the meeting (Acharya and Tan 2008, 2). ‘Are its principles of peaceful coexistence mere rhetoric, or have these facilitated, if only indirectly, attempts by Asian countries to establish goodwill and improve relations with one another?’ These and other questions by Acharya and Tan point to the main issues that surround Bandung and the debates that have ensued over its meaning and importance. The Bandung Conference is, of course, a singular event, but as a result of its sui generis status it has had numerous meanings attached to it. The Bandung meeting has consequently defied simplistic narration. It is, prima facie, a diplomatic summit, as closely analyzed by Acharya, Tan, and others (Ampiah 2007; McDougall and Finnane 2010; Lüthi 2020). However, it has been further interpreted as a turning point for human rights discourse and international law, a beginning for modernization and international development, a nadir in the global history of political Islam, and a foundational moment for a new epistemology of postcolonial knowledge and history (Afro-​Asian Networks Research Collective 2018; Aydin 2017; Burke 2010; Eslava et al. 2017; Gerits 2016; Phạm and Shilliam 2016; Slaughter 2018). The irreducible

692   Christopher J. Lee character of Bandung has convened a variety of themes and histories in a fashion echoing the range of delegations present at the time. Co-​sponsored by Indonesia, Burma (present-​day Myanmar), Ceylon (present-​day Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan, the Bandung Conference can be situated within several concentric contexts that are local, regional, and intercontinental in scope. In the first instance, the meeting was a vital national occasion for Sukarno and Indonesia that helped cement his power and his country’s prominence in world affairs. But it was correspondingly a political catalyst for the region. The conference was a South and Southeast Asian diplomatic endeavor, as signaled by its five benefactors who formulated the idea of an Asian-​African summit at two preceding organizational meetings held in Colombo, Ceylon (28 April to 2 May 1954), and Bogor, Indonesia (28 and 29 December 1954)—​a group that became known as the ‘Colombo Powers’. From a geopolitical standpoint, the Asian-​African Conference served as a provisional counterpoint to the 1954 Geneva Conference that sought to resolve conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula from the distant vantage point of Europe (Goscha and Ostermann 2009; Prakash et. al. 2018; Simpson 2010). In this regard, the Bandung Conference must be situated in the context of Asia more generally. Of the 29 countries in attendance, 23 total were on the Asian continent. These delegations, in addition to the host countries, represented the PRC, Turkey, Japan, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, North and South Vietnam, and the Philippines. The remaining deputations from Africa were Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (present day Ghana), Sudan, and Liberia. Though instability in Southeast Asia had provided the incentive for holding the conference, the program ultimately involved broader issues regarding American and Soviet influence in Asia and Africa, the consequent importance of postcolonial sovereignty, and remaining questions over the surge of decolonization then occurring, particularly in Africa. Indeed, though the meeting tilted toward Asia in terms of the countries in attendance, the geographic destination of Afro-​Asianism as a diplomatic movement, makeshift ideology, and set of transnational relationships was decidedly Africa, a trend that has continued to evolve up to the present. The origins and purposes of the meeting were therefore multifaceted, geographically and politically, reflective of the expansive continental representation at hand and the political changes then occurring across the world. The complexity of the Bandung Conference subsequently necessitates a granular approach. Its diversity of perspective and ambition can initially be witnessed at the personal level. Nehru and Zhou in particular pursued complementary agendas that reflected the recent Panchsheel Treaty, which was reached on 29 April 1954 and which endorsed the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-​existence that intended to resolve a border dispute between both countries following the PRC’s annexation of Tibet beginning in 1950. These principles included mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-​aggression, mutual non-​interference, beneficial cooperation, and peaceful co-​existence. This treaty would go on to inform the final communiqué of the Bandung meeting. Beyond this recent diplomatic agreement, India and China were also the two largest countries in terms of territorial size, with resources and economic wealth that affirmed their influence in South Asia and East Asia. Combined with this dimension were the remarkable political histories that both countries possessed. India held the distinction of being the first major colony of Great Britain to achieve independence along with Pakistan following partition in August 1947. Nehru and India attained an anti-​imperial symbolism

The Bandung Conference    693 and moral authority widely admired by other countries. Nehru in fact had participated in the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels, Belgium, so he understood well the importance of inter-​colonial connections and the new possibilities that could emerge at Bandung (Louro 2018). Although the Non-​Aligned Movement would not formally take shape until the Belgrade Conference of Nonaligned States in 1961, Nehru promoted the idea of ‘non-​alignment’ from the US and the Soviet Union at Bandung, marking the transformation of a tactic of anti-​colonial resistance (non-​cooperation) to one of diplomatic principle. Questions of political legitimacy also existed. The success and spectacle of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949 had attracted global attention for the PRC, with Maoism—​ the revolutionary thought of China’s communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–​ 1976)—​ inspiring political activism across Africa and Asia. Like Nehru, Zhou perceived Bandung as an occasion to consolidate the PRC’s standing among regional neighbors and globally. Yet, he also sought wider diplomatic recognition for the legitimacy of the PRC, given that Taiwan still retained UN acknowledgment and a formal seat as the Republic of China, a situation that would last until 1971. The Asian-​African Conference provided a vital step toward international acceptance (Gao 2007). Other leaders faced questions of legitimacy of a different type. For Nasser, Bandung offered the prospect of gaining international respect, enabling him to ascend in status despite the ambiguities of the military coup that placed him and the Free Officers in power in 1952 (Aburish 2004; Bier 2011; Gordon 1992). Furthermore, Nasser was concerned with British influence in the Middle East after the signing of the Baghdad Pact in February 1955 between Britain, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan—​the last four, it should be noted, being present at Bandung. Nasser and Nehru had been in dialogue before the Asian-​African Conference regarding the issue of non-​alignment, including mutual diplomatic visits to Cairo and Delhi. The April 1955 meeting solidified this effort, with the elder Nehru assuming a mentorship role. Indeed, Nasser was only 37 years old at the time, whereas Nehru was 65. For Sukarno, the Bandung Conference provided an unparalleled opportunity for the host country. Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo (1903–​75) of Indonesia had spearheaded the effort to convene the meeting, reflecting the country’s ambitions. Bandung was one of the most important cities in Indonesia, and it was where Sukarno had received his university education and had started his political career, helping found the Partai Nasional Indonesia (Prashad 2007; Shimazu 2014). Bandung offered a degree of security being outside of Jakarta, while also being located close enough to the capital to facilitate coordination. Additionally, unlike the other Colombo Powers, Indonesia had not been part of the British Empire and remained something of an outsider within the group. As a result, it delivered a pragmatic alternative to India—​a more likely venue given Nehru’s stature, though India maintained tense relations with its regional neighbors. Sukarno played an indispensable role in setting the tone to ensure the conference’s success along with Sastroamidjojo, who attended to more prosaic organizational matters of scheduling and diplomatic arrivals. Sukarno’s opening address captured the immediate symbolism of the conference. He declared: What can we do? We can do much! We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilise all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the peoples of Asia and Africa, 1,400,000,000 strong, far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilise what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace (Centre for the Study of Asian-​African and Developing Countries 1983, 8).

694   Christopher J. Lee As captured in the photography and media coverage of the event, Bandung provided a diplomatic stage and spectacle for such speeches and global declarations (Shimazu 2014). The final communiqué more firmly established the stated aims of the meeting, namely a broad objective for economic development and cultural exchange, respect for human rights and self-​determination, the condemnation of new and future forms of imperialism, and the pursuit of policies that would promote world peace. The communiqué consisted of seven parts. The first part, Section A, ‘Economic Co-​operation’, prioritized the establishment of cooperative efforts and funds for development assistance, among other items. Second to economic growth was Section B, ‘Cultural Co-​operation’, which recognized the cultural diversity of Asia and Africa and the impact Western colonialism and racism had in suppressing cultural development and progress on these continents. Section C, ‘Human Rights and Self-​Determination’, supported the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and specifically criticized ongoing practices of racial discrimination and segregation in the world, especially apartheid in South Africa. Section D, ‘Problems of Dependent Peoples’, went further to acknowledge the continued existence of colonialism in the world, and Section E, ‘Other Problems’, listed the Palestinian question as well as political situations in Aden and Irian (present day Western New Guinea). The final two parts of the communiqué—​ Section F, ‘Promotion of World Peace and Co-​operation’, and Section G, ‘Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Co-​operation’—​captured the boldest aspirations of the conference. These sections urged the future inclusion of Afro-​Asian states as members of the UN and that global nuclear disarmament be pursued. Section G’s final ten-​point summary, also referred to as the Ten Principles or the Dasa Sila Bandung, concluded with a final argument for human rights, state sovereignty, territorial integrity, racial equality, and the promotion of economic and cultural cooperation, which would help transcend the recent imperial past as well as enhance security in the future (Centre for the Study of Asian-​African and Developing Countries 1983; Kahin 1956; Lee 2009). In sum, as a granular approach toward the meeting reveals, the Asian-​African Conference embraced wide-​ranging aims that reflected the expansive geography and politics of those who attended. Though it originated from a set of regional crises like the conflict between North and South Vietnam, it embraced a broader political vision that perceived the situation in Southeast Asia as emblematic of a new and dangerous Cold War nuclear age. The final communiqué underscored these concerns and indicated that Asian and African countries were committed to future diplomatic efforts regarding the security of their respective continents. Indeed, the Bandung meeting reflected the transformation of anti-​colonialism from a type of insurgent politics to a method of statecraft. This continuity is important to grasp, particularly for the first generation of postcolonial leaders, many of whom, like Sukarno and Nehru, actively led liberation struggles. Anti-​colonialism as a political sentiment and worldview did not quickly subside, but instead took new shape to inform the international politics of the postcolonial period (Lee 2018).

Institutional Legacies of Bandung The Bandung Conference had short-​term and long-​term consequences. As cited before, the meeting took place during a critical period of transition between colonial and postcolonial

The Bandung Conference    695 periods, amid a passing era of modern European imperialism and a new era of Cold War rivalry between the US and the UUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR—​the latter competition resulting in methods of informal imperialism or suzerainty, if often denied as such. Furthermore, global decolonization was an uneven process with many liberation movements, like those in southern Africa, continuing for several decades after the independence of India (1947), Sudan (1956), and Ghana (1957), to pick several early examples. Postcolonial diplomacy and statecraft as political practices consequently emerged during a time of both uncertainty and opportunity, perpetuating the continuation of an anti-​colonial discourse as part of a need for Asian and African countries to secure sovereignty and participate in the global politics then taking shape. International meetings like that at Bandung and global institutions like the UN presented public occasions for reiterating autonomy and the principle of non-​interference (Getachew 2019). They substantiated these claims by enabling interstate networks of trust and community, drawing from and aggregating forms of political and economic capital. Indeed, the proliferation of the conference format among newly independent countries can be understood through these incentives, given the relative weaknesses these countries individually maintained as new nation-​states and the possibility of collective strength through group alignments. Postcolonial diplomatic summits provided new venues for sustaining political status and strengthening relationships among peers beyond the purview of former colonial powers. Routine, institutionalized summitry therefore asserted self-​determination as not simply a right motivating pre-​independence struggles, but as an abiding rule and technique of governance against present and future territorial threats (Feinberg 2013; Groom 2013). This practice affirmed a new political modernity after decolonization that was geographically more expansive and demographically more inclusive than had existed in the past. In this regard, the 1955 Asian-​African Conference was far from isolated. It can be approached as part of a sequence of postwar Asian summits including the preceding Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi (1947), the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Beijing (1952), the Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon (1953), and, shortly after the Bandung meeting, the second Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay (present day Mumbai) (1956). These regional conferences in Asia proved to be generative in scope. As mentioned before, though the geographic balance of the April 1955 meeting tilted toward Asia, the future of Asia-​Africa relations soon shifted to the African continent. Nasser positioned himself as a leader of the Third World, a standing enhanced by the support Egypt garnered during the 1956 Suez Crisis (Louis and Owen 1989). In December 1957, the Afro-​Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was established in Cairo, marking a new inter-​continental endeavor in the wake of Bandung. The AAPSO had wider involvement, incorporating a range of organizations rather than solely official state delegations from Asian and African countries. It also had Soviet support. Nonetheless, the conferences it organized continued the Bandung Spirit through professional exchange, cultural promotion, youth participation, and women’s coalitions (Bier 2011). Furthermore, its meetings were held within an expanding range of geographic locales such as Guinea (1960), Tanzania (1963), and Ghana (1965). Arguably the most significant institutional outcome of these early conferences was the birth of the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM)—​the name itself tacitly indicating an anti-​ colonial stance redefined for the Cold War era. Though non-​alignment was not backed by all of the participants at Bandung or these other meetings, these preceding events still informed

696   Christopher J. Lee the positions and prepared the conditions for the diplomatic lead-​up to the September 1961 founding of the NAM. Key figures at Belgrade included former Bandung participants like Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno, along with new figures such as Kwame Nkrumah (1909–​72) of Ghana and host Josip Broz Tito (1892–​1980) of Yugoslavia. Zhou and the PRC were absent—​ an example of how the tentative political alliances at Bandung did not persist. In this case, the 1962 Sino-​Indian War put an end to stable relations between India and the PRC. A second NAM conference was held in Cairo in October 1964 with delegations from forty-​seven states in attendance, a growth attributed to the momentum of independence in sub-​Saharan Africa. The NAM ultimately superseded the 1955 Asian-​African Conference—​especially after a failed attempt at a ‘second’ Bandung to be held in Algiers in 1965—​by drawing upon it symbolically but marking a different configuration of nation-​states that met routinely in the decades ahead (Jansen 1966). The idea of non-​alignment signaled the fecundity of other solidarities at play. In addition to Afro-​Asianism, ideologies of Pan-​Africanism, promoted by Nkrumah, and Pan-​ Arabism, promoted by Nasser, marked efforts to unite different states under the banner of broadly construed identities, geographic and cultural in scope, which were positioned against the Euro-​American West. The 1963 founding of the Organisation of African Unity (the African Union today)—​started after the All-​African People’s Conferences in Accra (1958), Tunis (1960), and Cairo (1961)—​and the establishment of the United Arab Republic (1958–​61), which unified Egypt and Syria, manifested these ideas institutionally and territorially. But the broader idea of Third Worldism continued to make inroads across continents (Byrne 2016). A series of conferences after Bandung that fostered different versions of Third Worldism include the 1958 Afro-​Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, the 1961 Afro-​Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, and the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana. From an institutional standpoint, the AAPSO was joined by other organizations like the Afro-​Asian Writers Association (AAWA), which located its origins to the 1958 conference in Soviet Uzbekistan, and the Afro-​Asian Writers’ Bureau, a PRC initiative based in Beijing as a competitor to the Soviet-​supported AAWA. These projects drew upon local aesthetic traditions to construct postcolonial national cultures (Yoon 2015). Even more ambitious, the 1966 Havana conference founded the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), which drew upon the energy of the Cuban Revolution (1953–​1959) and supported liberation struggles around the world in the decades ahead (Mahler 2018). A different set of institutional implications relate to how the Bandung Conference redefined the chronology, locations, and meanings of international law. Recent scholarship has argued that the Bandung meeting and its declarations challenged the long-​standing consensus and influence of the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) over understandings of international law and its foundations. Not only did the Asian-​African Conference serve to universalize definitions and claims over nation-​state sovereignty across a much larger geography beyond Europe, but it also introduced themes of race and developmentalism as vital components of legal and political discourse in the decades that followed (Abraham 2008; Gerits 2016). As Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah have co-​written, independence fueled a range of new initiatives for reconfiguring the economic structure of the global landscape; these initiatives are among the most significant Bandungian contributions to international law, both in terms of the ingenuity of the specific proposals, and the inspiration to denormalize the inherited economic order (Eslava et al. 2017, 19).

The Bandung Conference    697 The Economic Committee at Bandung, which was separate from the Political Committee that worked on the final communiqué, undertook a critical position against the International Monetary Fund and other Bretton Woods institutions established in 1945. Though the immediate results of this stance were limited, the discussions at Bandung articulated an ethos of postcolonial national development that informed such varied later efforts as the Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (1962), the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (1974), the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States (1975), and the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986) (Benjamin 2015; Eslava et al. 2017, 19–​22; Higgins et al. 1955; Prashad 2012). The Bandung Conference and its successors therefore constituted a diplomatic counterpoint to earlier European antecedents such as the Concert of Europe, established in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the League of Nations, founded in the aftermath of the First World War. The location of postcolonial conferences in cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America indicated a new political geography and Third World modernity that had emerged from the shadows of Western colonial rule. Indeed, these conferences universalized the ‘conference’ itself as an institutionalized modular form. In his classic study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson argued that twentieth-​century nationalisms possess ‘a profoundly modular character’. They ‘draw on more than a century and a half of human experience . . . . the very idea of “nation” is now nestled firmly in virtually all print-​languages; and nation-​ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness’ (Anderson 2006 [1983], 137). This description of modularity can be applied to the international conference. The international conference as a practice and form must be understood as developing concurrently with the rise of the nation-​state since the early modern era and maturing particularly after 1945. This assertion is not to claim that diplomatic meetings did not occur in premodern historical periods. Rather, by definition, the institutionalization of international conferences could only start once the modern nation-​state form itself gained acceptance and widespread currency. The international conference as a diplomatic format has therefore taken shape over two hundred years. Yet, it is not merely an effect of the rise of the nation-​state. This diplomatic practice helped produce the nation-​state through facilitating recognition of the rights of sovereignty and equal membership within a community of nations, among other tasks. The Asian-​African Conference was a key moment in this global institutionalization after the Second World War (Lee 2015b).

Mythic Legacies of Bandung Against this backdrop of diplomacy and institution building, it is important to underscore other levels of connection and solidarity beyond statist narratives. The political multitude that met in April 1955 involved an assortment of unofficial observers, Richard Wright (1908–​ 60) being the best known of a group that also included African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr (1908–​72) and South African Communist Party leader Moses Kotane (1905–​78) (Bunting 1975; Lee 2015a). These participants contributed to the Bandung Spirit in different ways, underlining how the legacies of Bandung were not solely at the diplomatic level. Wright’s well-​known account The Color Curtain (2008 [1956]) was published only a year after the conference, and it remains one of the most influential perspectives on

698   Christopher J. Lee the meeting despite its subjective limits and biases (Roberts and Foulcher 2016). However, the symbol of Bandung quickly circulated well beyond firsthand participants. James Baldwin (1924–​1987) wrote in his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in September 1956 that Alioune Diop (1910–​80), editor of Présence africaine, referred to their Paris event as a ‘second Bandung’ and that Léopold Senghor (1906–​2001), the future president of Senegal, invoked the ‘spirit of Bandung’ as a source for inspiring a black cultural ‘renaissance’ (Baldwin 1993 [1961], 14, 23). Psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925–​61) argued in a November 1958 essay for El Moudjahid, a periodical of the anticolonial Front de libération nationale (FLN) of Algeria, that the ‘Bandung pact’—​akin to the Warsaw Pact (1955)—​marked ‘the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation’ (Fanon 1988 [1964], 146). In his wide-​ranging ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech delivered in Detroit in November 1963, Malcolm X (1925–​65) named the Bandung Conference as an occasion when Asian and African nations came together against their common enemy: ‘the white man’ (X 1994, 5). Finally, Oliver Tambo (1917–​93), president of the then-​exiled African National Congress (ANC), summoned Bandung during the 1970s to drum up Afro-​Asian solidarity in support of the anti-​apartheid struggle (Tambo 1979). These assorted examples from the mid-​1950s up through the 1970s demonstrate a politics of citation and an evolution of meaning that sustained the idea of Afro-​Asianism and the iconic symbol of Bandung for decades. If Afro-​Asian internationalism began to decline at the diplomatic level by the mid-​1960s, it continued to be reinvented in different ways at the popular level (Lee 2010; Lee 2019). Some scholars have expressed criticism toward these uses of Bandung and simplistic notions of Third World solidarity more generally. Robert Vitalis has examined the factual and interpretive hazards of mythologizing the Asian-​ African Conference, going so far as to argue that the Non-​Aligned Movement was not so much a successor of Bandung, as commonly perceived, as it was its competitor (Vitalis 2013). Lorenz Lüthi has similarly argued that the Afro-​Asianism at Bandung and the ideology of nonalignment promoted by the NAM have too often been confused and taken as synonymous, as have the terms ‘neutralism’ and ‘nonalignment’ (Lüthi 2016). These are important points that highlight the evolving character of these ideas and diplomatic strategies vis-​à-​vis the Third World. Yet, while it is essential for scholars to differentiate such terms as ‘Afro-​Asianism’, ‘nonalignment’, and ‘the Third World’ from one another, it is also important to understand how these terms and the ideologies behind them converged and were creatively reinvented at the grassroots level. A problem with interpreting Bandung, as with many studies of nationalism and diplomatic history, is that political elites can take centre stage. The issue of hierarchy should be accounted for and resisted, particularly with regard to decolonization and its sweeping effects (Munro 2017; Parker 2016; Plummer 2013). Underscoring the importance of popular perspectives, Ali Mazrui has written, ‘The whole concept of the Third World perhaps signified the emergence of a new form of populism—​ global populism’ (Mazrui 1978, 129). Overall, the matter of mythology raises difficult, yet fascinating, questions about the symbolism of Bandung for the postcolonial world and the Global South today. The task of demythologizing Bandung should result in a stronger and more complete factual record. But questions should also be raised as to why a mythology surrounding Bandung emerged in the first place. Mythology is nothing new to modern politics as witnessed with contemporary nationalism, but it is unusual for a one-​time multinational event—​a status that

The Bandung Conference    699 has enabled the political appropriation of the meeting and left it vulnerable to factual inaccuracy. Nonetheless, conference participants had a stake in promoting the ethos of the Bandung Spirit. Many of these promoters were not misinformed messengers but willful agents invested in a specific political vision (e.g. Abdulgani 1981). As described earlier, the mythos of Bandung began swiftly through its rhetorical citation by writers, intellectuals, and the leaders of civil rights movements and liberation struggles during the Cold War. More recently, the notion of Bandung-​as-​method has surfaced in different ways through concepts of ‘Bandung modernism’ and ‘Bandung humanism’—​intellectual projects that have revisited the cosmopolitan conviviality of the conference and the principles charted in the Dasa Sila Bandung to rethink rights, aesthetics, and epistemologies of the postcolonial period (Kalliney 2016, 48–​49; Scott 1999, 144). In a like-​minded gesture, a ‘Bandung historicism’ might be proposed—​a historical methodology that circumvents the conformities and hagiographies of insular nation-​state narratives and instead cultivates an intercontinental sensibility that accounts for layered histories of connection and exchange, as well as for the frictions and unruliness of Cold War internationalisms (Lee 2019, xxi). Bandung’s status as a concept-​metaphor—​an intersectional moment of history and symbolic capital—​can contribute to rethinking understandings of ‘modernity’ and its universality through histories of the Global South.

Conclusion As briefly touched upon earlier, the complexity of the Asian-​African Conference, whether in terms of the ambitions of specific participants or the diverse itineraries of its meaning and uses in the decades after, has resulted in debate as to how to evaluate Bandung as a historic event. The nonconformity of Bandung and its sui generis nature have often rendered it subject to either offhand dismissal or Third World folklore. Taking the former position risks disregarding the innovative agency and motivations of postcolonial states and, more broadly, the importance of diplomatic history beyond the Euro-​American context. Indeed, underestimating the Bandung Conference—​and by extension conferences held in Cairo, Accra, Havana, and elsewhere—​can sustain a Eurocentric view of the Cold War (Prashad 2007; Westad 2007). Yet overdetermining the Bandung moment can also overlook the political magnitude of the Third World with cities such as Algiers, Accra, Cairo, Havana, and Delhi also serving as historically important sites, as well as those that have received less attention, including Beirut, Dar es Salaam, Luanda, and Tashkent (Ahlman 2017; Byrne 2016; Djagalov and Salazkina 2016; Mahler 2018; Markle 2017). These dispersed locales must be understood as interconnected. As metropolitan hubs, they reveal other Afro-​Asianisms that crisscrossed not only the Indian Ocean world, but the Black Atlantic, the Middle East, and Soviet Central Asia. Fanon once referred to ‘the Bandung-​Accra axis’ that united Asian and African countries (Fanon 2018 [2015], 628). The Third World and its inheritor, the Global South, must consequently be approached as geographically noncontiguous, as archipelagoes of identities and interests, like Indonesia itself. As political spaces and configurations, the Third World and the Global South do not conform to any normative geography, hence their powerful capacity for reimagining alternative histories and different aspirational futures.

700   Christopher J. Lee A tension therefore ultimately emerges between highlighting the significance of the Asian-​African Conference while also situating it within a broader political landscape. It is important to not lose track of how many delegations at Bandung had pre-​existing relationships with Cold War superpowers through agreements like the Manila Pact (1954) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), both of which created regional alignments in Southeast Asia and the Middle East that were sympathetic to American interests. Such relations underscore once more the need to avoid oversimplified views that would have members and promoters of the Third World share uniform policies and political consistency. Anti-​ imperial rhetoric continued to be applied to politically fraught situations in South Africa and Israel during the 1970s and 1980s, though the politics of Third Worldism and the Bandung Spirit itself became increasingly rhetorical in scope (Scott 1999). They marked a critical position for creating political solidarity, rather than galvanizing a revolutionary movement or achieving nation-​state sovereignty as such. In sum, when approaching both the potential and limits of the Bandung Conference, the false imperative of singular historical judgment should be avoided, with the variety of understandings that a granular approach can reveal being permitted instead. The Asian-​African Conference demonstrates how international summits were not simply an effect of political conditions like colonialism or decolonization. They could also generate change by fostering and projecting new registers of thought and political imagination. Their modularity and institutionalization, as touched upon before, enabled new interconnected forms of global modernity to take hold. Utilizing conferences as a component for writing world histories can disrupt the conformities of teleological narration defined by the nation-​ state in favour of narratives that display intercontinental convergence and multilateral outcomes. Bandung and its successors insist on a re-​periodization of Cold War timelines, emphasizing chronologies of collaboration and dissent against past and present forms of global power (Parker 2006). International conferences are ultimately ‘good to think with’, to use an expression of Claude Lévi-​Strauss (Lévi-​Strauss 1963 [1962], 89). As events, they hold the potential to step outside national storylines and cast light on contingent political communities. The case of the Bandung Conference is instructive in this regard. The end of the Cold War has witnessed the continuation of this phenomenon and the possibility of reviving past projects, if in revised form. Engagement with China has been among the most significant developments for the African continent thus far in the twenty-​first century (Brautigam 2010; French 2014). Since 2000, the Forum on China-​Africa Cooperation has hosted a series of conferences to encourage investment and trade between China and African countries, with the Asian-​African Conference being a historical reference point for this present-​day endeavor. The BRICS economic bloc—​unifying the economic and political interests of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—​has similarly attempted to challenge the hegemony of Euro-​American economies and financial institutions through escalating economic growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The period since 1955 has therefore been one of maturation for the growth and strength of current Asian-​African relations. This history of the present signals the evolving legacies of the Bandung Conference, as well as the continued vitality of international summits for enabling broader communities of political possibility, as once imagined and initiated in April 1955.

The Bandung Conference    701

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Chapter 48

Facing Nucl e a r Wa r Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas The possibility of thermonuclear war has in many ways shaped the agendas of History and International Relations (IR). To some degree—​but not enough in our view—​it has built connections between these fields of scholarship. The major problem confronting scholars in both fields with an interest in nuclear questions is not empirical but ethical. If thermonuclear war would be the greatest catastrophe humans could inflict upon themselves, avoiding it must become our overarching political objective. For policymakers and scholars alike this means facing up to the possibility of such a war, not denying it (Pelopidas 2020). Admittedly, the scale and unprecedented nature of nuclear war makes it unusually hard to imagine and analyse (Anders 1962; Amis 1987; Pelopidas 2022 c­ hapter 6).1 Most strategic planners and scholars recoil from the prospect of such a war and consider its prevention as the central goal of nuclear weapons and strategy. For their critics this is a political oxymoron. Equally troubling are efforts by military and civilian strategists to reduce the problem of war avoidance to a largely technical one. Efforts to pretend that their scholarship is detached and value free inevitably lead to obfuscations and internal contradictions (Craig 2003 ­chapters 6 and 7; Pelopidas 2016, 327–​328). Perhaps the most direct way to counter strategies of denial of the possibility of nuclear war is to offer evidence that nuclear war has not been as remote as the conventional wisdom supposes. We accordingly turn to counterfactual analysis as a means of exploring alternative pasts. Similar methods can be used to imagine diverse futures (Bernstein, Stein, Lebow, and Weber 2007), and we need to account for the past, present, and future possibility of nuclear war. Rigorous counterfactual analysis can expose illusions of inevitability, control and understanding, and bring to the fore possibilities that did not (yet) materialize (Clarke 2005, ­chapter 2; Lebow 2010, 2015; Pelopidas 2015, 2017, 251–​3; Pelopidas and Verschuren 2023). Thinking about the future is critical because nuclear war planning as well as proposals for arms control and disarmament are based on imagined future scenarios. Current thinking about the future rarely goes beyond extrapolation. We must approach the future with more imagination

706    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas than mere extrapolation of present trends. We also need to study what political actors think about the future. Their imagined futures determine policy choices as much as their imagined pasts (Andersson 2018; Connelly et al. 2012; Pelopidas 2016, 330–​331, 2020, 2021). Counterfactual analysis must rely on the best secondary studies and primary documents. We accordingly act like historians in reconstructing critical events that might have led to nuclear war and discovering why they did not. This is the mirror image of the more common use of counterfactuals to untrack wars that occurred, notably the First and Second World Wars. As Max Weber recognized, so-​called facts never speak for themselves; they are products of our frames of reference. We must make these frames explicit and also the political, ethical, psychological, and technical assumptions on which they rest. They are often superficial, inappropriate, politically motivated, or badly applied. They may rest on historical ‘lessons’ and analogies whose accuracy or relevance is questionable. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an understandable focus of interest as it is generally assumed that it is the closest we have come to nuclear war. Most accounts of the missile crisis are indisputably modernist. They are increasingly at odds with the evidence that has emerged over the course of the last three decades—​as are the dominant narratives about the Cold War. They do not give agency sufficient recognition, and when they do often misattribute motives in their desire to construct a coherent and parsimonious narrative. Even when they downplay agency they fail to recognize the most important and common constraint on agency: loss of control arising from the impossibility of leaders to impose effectively their preferences on the organizations they ‘control’. For all these reasons these narratives present the conflict, its peaks and troughs, and ultimate resolution as reflections of underlying and changing geopolitical or economic conditions. They disregard the prospect that multiple, contradictory narratives about the Cold War can be constructed consistent with the evidence. The first section of our paper focuses on modernist Cold War narratives and their conceptually and empirically questionable conceits. The second addresses the missile crisis and problems of agency and control. We contend that mainstream nuclear scholarship has only learned lessons compatible with its grand narratives. Instances of loss of control over nuclear weapons and their near use are downplayed or ignored as they are inconsistent with these narratives. We conclude with thoughts on how to escape from the intellectual straight-​ jacket of modernity. This involves rejection of reductionist theories in favour of theoretically informed bottom-​up accounts. When investigating the possibility of nuclear war, we must engage not only with events and micro-​dynamics that might trigger such war, but also with the long-​term trends, conceptions, methods, historical analogies, and imagined futures. The latter are important because they produce conditions in which nuclear war becomes possible. Nuclear scholarship must recognize that it confronts uncertainty, not quantifiable risk, embrace rather than decry counterfactual methods, rethink its narrow focus on policy relevance, and engage the wider scholarly world and its practice of accountability.

Grand Narratives Of The Cold War Grand narratives were once considered the pinnacle of historical scholarship. From Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ([1776–​89] 2001) through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital ([1867] 1965) to Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1945) and Winston Churchill’s History

Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    707 of the English-​Speaking People ([1956–​58] 1990) they propagated political and moral lessons by ‘making sense’ of a complex past. These works have lost their sheen, and post-​modernists have done their best to undermine the very project of grand narratives—​despite producing their own (Lyotard 1979). David Hume rightly observed that history is distinguished from chronicles by having a plot. This is a story line that emphases certain developments at the expense of others and even if it involves flash backs and asides tells a linear tale in the sense that it has a beginning, middle, and end. Cold War narratives—​whether grand or petit—​conform to this pattern. Petit narratives tell stories about Cold War events, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and grand narratives embed these events in efforts to make sense of the Cold War as a whole. The very notion that there is such a thing as a Cold War, with a beginning, middle, and end, is another story—​and only one of many that might be told about relations among the victors of the Second World War. The Cold War in turn might be embedded in more embracing narratives about the postwar world, the twentieth century, modernity, or even the Anthropocene. The choice of petit or grand, and the character of the narrative reflect the ideological, political, and psychological projects of their authors—​and often their desire for recognition, status, and material rewards. Narratives differ in their feature of repetition or progress. Until modern times there was little expectation of secular progress. In part for this reason there were few historical narratives. Among the most prominent exceptions are Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War (1996) and Livy’s of the Roman Republic (1976). Both are stories of rise and fall, and Thucydides frames his account of Athens as one instance of a more general phenomenon. Realist accounts of the Cold War follow Thucydides in depicting the Cold War as the latest instance of class of events: a power struggle among leading political units in the aftermath of a struggle against a common enemy. They differ from Thucydides in their greater emphasis on the role of power in causing the conflict, shaping its evolution, and determining its outcome. William Wohlforth (2003) represents this tradition in its purest form. The Cold War ended, in his judgment, because Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that the balance of power was becoming increasingly unfavourable to the Soviet Union and sought an accommodation before his bargaining position deteriorated further. Realist narratives emphasize the rational calculation of actors and the authority and control of leaders. Their leaders are rarely constrained by domestic or organizational politics when it comes to critical questions of national security, and do not entertain grossly inappropriate or inaccurate perceptions of their situation. For both reasons, realists argue, nuclear war during the Cold War was never a very real possibility. John Gaddis’s (1987) account for the so-​called ‘long peace’ is typical. So is its further theoretical elaboration by Kenneth Waltz (1979) with his claim that bipolar worlds were more stable because it was easier to calculate the balance of power than it was in multipolar worlds. Wars are often the result of uncertainty or miscalculation of the balance. Rationalist accounts of war rely on the same assumption (Powell 2006; Fearon 1995; De Mesquita 1981). The most extreme version is Thomas Schelling (1987), who insists he lost no sleep during the missile crisis. If Khrushchev attempted to further challenge the US, he insisted, the generals would have put a gun to his head. The Soviet Union was outgunned conventionally in the Caribbean and at a strategic nuclear disadvantage globally and had no choice but to capitulate. Grand and petit narratives for realists are reinforcing.

708    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas The other dominant Cold-​War narrative had its roots in Christianity and more particularly in the third-​century Mesopotamian apostle Mani, who propagated the philosophy of dualism. There were always opposing sides, as with good and evil, light and dark, god and the devil. Hans Morgenthau (1948, 430), a committed realist, lamented that the Cold War had quickly turned into Manichean struggle. The goal of leaders and peoples was no longer managing an acute conflict but defeating the other side. Protestant evangelicals like Billy Graham, conservative Republicans, many Cold War liberals propagated this narrative (Lahr 2020). President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’ (1983). In Morgenthau’s view this framing made war more likely (1948, 430). To the degree the ‘other’ was regarded as the incarnation of evil, compromise became difficult to impossible. Ironically, it also made the US more like its adversary, as Democratic and Republican leaders increasingly pursued policies at odds with its proclaimed democratic values (e.g. assassinations, coups, interventions, interference in elections, support of right-​ wing dictators) (Lebow 2019). It gave rise to counter-​narratives about the Cold War from the libertarian right and non-​Marxist left, both of which stress the ways in which foreign policy has subverted American society and politics (Paul 2009; Lebow 2019). The liberal narrative of the Cold War arguably begins with George Kennan. His famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1947) portrayed the Soviet Union as a nasty and aggressive dictatorship, but a careful one that could be contained by a prosperous and democratic West and Japan. Sooner or later the Soviets would seek accommodation or collapse by virtue of internal tensions and contradictions. The liberal narrative quickly gave way to a militarized version, symbolized and fostered by NSC-​68, presented to President Truman in 1950. It became a prop of the Manichean narrative. The liberal narrative resurfaced at the end of the Cold War, with liberal intellectuals and academics proclaiming that the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire was proof that the only rational response to modernity was capitalist democracy (Rosecrance 1986; Friedman 1999; Ikenberry 2005). Francis Fukuyama (1992) garnered much attention with his claim that the end of History had arrived. The Marxist narrative never had many adherents in the US and has been more popular in the UK and Western Europe. It reduces the Cold War to economics and, depending on the author, attributes hostility to the Soviet Union to capitalist fear of socialism or the need for markets, raw materials, and foreign investment (Thompson 1982; Brewer 1990; Stephanson 2007; Dunn 2009; Anievas 2010). There is also a political-​ psychological narrative. In the early 1960s psychologists (Bronfenbrenner 2010) explored Cold War stereotypes and the ways in which they had penetrated thinking in the US. Other psychologists emphasized the extent to which major wars of the past, notably the First World War, were the result of misperception (White 1968). Psychologists and political scientists explored crisis decision-​making and how faulty procedures contributed to bad policy decisions and war. This is more petit than grand narrative. It nevertheless constitutes a challenge to realist and rationalist reliance on rationality. New narratives emerged late in the Cold War. The tragic narrative, implicit in the writings of Morgenthau, was made explicit in the writings of Ned Lebow (2003, 216–​256) and his account of what he calls ‘classical realism’. It follows Thucydides—​contra most realists—​ in emphasizing the ways in which so-​called rational calculations are the cause of conflict

Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    709 and war, not means of forestalling or coping with them (Lebow, Erskine, and Lebow 2012; Williams 2022). Then there is a post-​colonial narrative. It is concerned with the periphery (Westad 2017; Lawson and Mulich 2021). It rejects the concept of bipolarity as a justification for neocolonialism and focuses on efforts of colonial peoples, newly independent states, and neutrals to advance their agendas and the ways in which the Cold War affected them. It pays little attention to nuclear weapons and war in isolation (Said 1994; Bhabha 1994; Wilkins 2017). Postcolonial scholarship focuses on denial of access to technology, including nuclear weapons (Mahtur 2020) or crafts a notion of nuclearity (Hecht 2012) that emphasizes the ideological project behind the separation of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (Biswas 2014). For those scholars, the focus on war avoidance should not lead to a neglect of past and present harm caused by the extraction of nuclear materials, production, and reproduction of nuclear control regime (Biswas 2014, 2020). These narratives can be compared along several dimensions. First is the level of analysis. All but the psychological have generated grand and petit narratives, with the latter offered as instantiations or building blocks of the former. Second is the focus of petit narratives. The missile crisis is a primary focus of the realist, tragic, and psychological narratives, in large part because of their interest in nuclear war. They accept the conventional wisdom this crisis raised a serious prospect of war but offer quite different accounts for why it did and why war was averted. The postcolonial narrative suggests a relatively unexplored perspective: analyzing the crisis from the perspective of Cuba, a central player in the crisis, and other unheard voices. The third dimension has to do with nuclear war more generally. It is a principal concern to the realist, Manichean, tragic, and psychological narratives. Works in these several traditions give different estimates of the likelihood of nuclear war, and they reflect different analyses of its causes. For realists, war is least likely because reason is expected to restrain political leaders from committing mutual suicide. For Manicheans it was the most likely because they expected Soviet leaders to launch an attack the moment they thought they could benefit from it, regardless of the absolute cost to both sides. No doubt, there were Soviet officials who thought this way about the US, as the response to the Able Archer exercise in 1983 indicates (Scott 2020; Kaplan 2020, 158–​163). Tragic and psychological narratives put more emphasis on war arising from loss of control, accident, and miscalculated escalation. In contrast to the Manichean narratives, their concern was with acute crisis, although they did not dismiss the possibility of war arising as a result of an accident in periods of lower tension. Liberalism and Marxism are teleological, and their grand narratives expect the ultimate victory of their respective movements (Ashworth 2022). Some realists made claims—​ generally ex post facto—​about the outcomes of individual confrontations on the basis of the balance of power. Tragedy eschews prediction, although understands that people cannot live without making them. Finally we come to the question of modernity. The tragic and Manichean narratives are pre-​modern in origin. Neither puts much emphasis on reason or control, which is why they make no predictions. They are otherwise quite different. Tragedy can be a vehicle for learning the value of caution, self-​restraint, and seeing the world through the eyes of others. Manicheism paints a stark picture of good and evil and discourages empathy. If tragic narratives would see nuclear annihilation as the worst of all outcomes, Manicheism would

710    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas consider it acceptable if evil was destroyed (Cook 2004). Whether he meant it or not, in 1966 Mao Zedong publicly embraced this position (Kennedy 2012, 118–​119). The realist, liberal, and Marxist narratives are squarely within the modernist tradition. They emphasize reason, calculation, control over people and the environment. Liberals and Marxists also believe in progress, which realist narratives do not. Realism straddles pre-​ modern and modern narrative forms, although neo-​realism is distinctly modern in its pretense of being science. Overall, tragic and Manichean grand narratives make the possibility of nuclear war conceivable. On the contrary, defining features of modern grand narratives create what has been called a ‘survivability bias’ derived from a focus on control and predictability (Pelopidas 2020) which makes the possibility of nuclear war inconceivable, while claiming to account for it. The combination of those two claims characterizes the modernist overconfidence when it comes to the possibility and danger of nuclear war. It is illustrated in the treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, luck, and learning, we now turn to.

Cuba, Luck, and Learning There is unanimity on the need to learn lessons from the nuclear age and this crisis in particular (Allison 1971, 1–​2; Lebow 1981, ­chapter 9; Iklé 2006 ­chapter 5; Blight and Lang 2005; Perry 2015). A concept of ‘nuclear learning’ was crafted by IR scholars in the 1980s (Nye 1987; Knopf 2012). Even a critical constructivist/​post-​structuralist take on the crisis such as Jutta Weldes’ Constructing national interests (1999) accepts the need to draw lessons from the crisis. There is no consensus about whether these lessons can make future confrontations more predictable or controllable. There were originally two schools of thought about nuclear war-​avoidance in Cuba. Advocates of compellence claimed US victory and attributed it to military and nuclear superiority (Horelick 1963; Betts 1987; Kroenig 2018, 84–​94). A minority denied there was a winner and argued that nuclear superiority did not affect the outcome (Waltz 2012, 7). Evidence from US and Soviet archives and interviews with crisis participants challenge both interpretations (Blight, Allyn, and Welch 2002 [1993]; Lebow and Stein 1994, Part I; Sagan 1993 c­hapters 2 and 3; Schlosser 2013; Sherwin 2020). They also reveal that policymakers overestimated their degree of control as well as the weapons’ safety and underestimated the danger of the crisis. American and Soviet officials have endorsed these assessments and emphasized the role of luck in resolving the crisis (Ellsberg 2017, 197–​201; Blight and Blanton 2002). Other officials have since then gone public about their longstanding concerns about the limits of control at the time of the crisis and its lucky outcome (Perry 2015, 3). It is now known that such worries had been voiced earlier on by high level US officials (Acheson 1969). Most importantly, we are not aware of any interpreter who changed their mind in the other direction, towards an interpretation of the crisis in terms of control, either deterrence or compellence. In addition, there is a growing awareness that nuclear weapons were a principal cause of the missile crisis (Lebow and Stein 1994, 49; Gavin 2020, 300–​301). Revealing in this connection is the shift in former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s thinking about control, safety, and luck. During the crisis McNamara was hawkish and acted as if he believed in the controllability of the crisis, the validity of his

Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    711 knowledge and the safety of the weapons. At the beginning, he initiated the idea of a quarantine around Cuba and, from 25 October, advocated the use of force and escalation as well as the dropping of practice depth charges near Soviet submarines to enforce the blockade (Stern 2012, ­chapter 4; Kaplan 2020, 67–​73). At the peak of the crisis, on 27 October he is on the record telling Attorney General Robert Kennedy: ‘you need to really escalate this . . . And then we need to have two things ready. . . . a government for Cuba, because we’re gonna need one after we go in with five hundred aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, cause sure as hell they’re gonna do something there’ (Stern 2012, 61). McNamara’s confidence was visible in 1961 during the Berlin crisis. Before safety devices called Permissive Action Links were placed on nuclear weapons he decided to equip US troops on the frontlines with Davy Crockett atomic rifles to counter a Soviet invasion. Those rifles could be used at the will of the soldier (Schlosser 2013, 280). During the missile crisis he insisted that the Navy could drop practice depth charges on Soviet submarines to lead them to surface without damaging them or leading them to respond violently. The President was stunned by his level of confidence (Stern 2012, 61). On 5 December 1962, less than two months after the crisis, McNamara was still advocating for a massive increase in the US arsenal. In other words, uncertainties regarding the estimates of the number of Soviet weapons and the expectation that US Congress would act as a veto player if he would have asked for fewer nuclear weapons trumped considerations of nuclear weapons safety and the fueling of the arms race (Pelopidas 2021). His response to uncertainty was to ‘take whatever any reasonable person would say is required’ and ‘double it’. ‘That would be money well spent’ (Kaplan 2020, 77). For the next thirty years McNamara publicly hailed the crisis as a case of exemplary control and management. In a 1983 special edition of American Broadcasting Company (ABC) news Viewpoint following the screening of The Day After, which depicts a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union resulting in the annihilation of the US. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley cites a character from the movie claiming that ‘we overcame’ the crisis of 1962 because ‘we had a considerable deterrent which was unambiguous’. He then turns to McNamara, who asserts confidently that ‘we have a stable deterrent today’ without correcting the picture of control and safety in the crisis that was painted (McNamara 1983 at 34). McNamara displayed the same confidence in the long interview he gave on 20 February 1986 for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. He called the crisis ‘the most dangerous time’ during his service as Secretary of Defense but only because ‘it was a period of great tension’. ‘And not only was it the most dangerous period in my seven years as Secretary of Defense’, he added, ‘but I think it was also the most expertly handled’. In 1986 McNamara acknowledged the problem of ‘inadequate information, misinformation, emotion’, and the likelihood that ‘in a crisis, you make misjudgments’. He nevertheless mostly applied his caveats about miscalculation and loss of control to the Soviet Union. The reason I felt so concerned Saturday evening, as I say, I wondered whether I’d ever see another Saturday sunset, was that events were moving out of control. There were forces at work in the Soviet Union, in the West, that very possibly would have escalated, perhaps not through initiation or action by the West, I hoped it wouldn’t come that way, perhaps the Soviets would have in some fashion moved. And they had Castro to think of. Perhaps they weren’t entirely in control of his actions. They had the troops to think of perhaps they weren’t entirely in control of them. (McNamara 1986 at 50)

712    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas In classified settings, however, McNamara showed serious concerns about safety and the command and control over the weapons as early as 26 January 1963. He briefed members of the National Security Council about accidents in Texas and North Carolina involving the possibility of accidental explosions of Mark 39 thermonuclear weapons. The declassified summary of this account reports that ‘he went on to describe the crashes of US aircraft, one in North Carolina and one in Texas, where, by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted. He concluded that, ‘despite our best efforts, the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion still existed’ (cited in Schlosser 2013, 301). Eric Schlosser concludes that McNamara was the most concerned about maintaining presidential control over the use of the weapons, not just their safety, and the one who was most scared among those who were briefed on those accidents (Schlosser 2013, 249). In January 1968, when another serious accident took place as a B-​52 bomber carrying thermonuclear weapons crashed near the Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, McNamara immediately—​ the day after the accident—​ discontinued the airborne alert, requiring bombers to fly around the clock with weapons on board. (Sagan 1993, 170–​180; Schlosser 2013, 325; Ellsberg 2017, 314). McNamara’s confidence in the safety of nuclear weapons at the time and in the chain of command was further shattered by the Oral History Conference in Havana in 1992 that gathered remaining participants in the crisis. Alongside the discoveries about the limits of control, of leaders’ knowledge at the time and of weapons’ safety in the 1990s, the face to face encounter with Castro led McNamara to conclude that ‘it was luck that prevented nuclear war’ (McNamara in Blight and Lang 2005, 60). At this conference McNamara learned that Soviet submarines around Cuba each carried a nuclear torpedo. Stalking and dropping depth charges compelled the Soviet attack submarine, the B-​59 to surface in the Caribbean because of low batteries and rising temperatures. Once in sight it was strafed by an ASW S-​2 Tracker aircraft that flew overhead at an altitude of only 10–​15 meters. Machine gun bullets hit the water in front of it and on either side. American destroyers surrounded the submarine, pointed their guns at it and tried to blind the crew on deck with searchlights. Captain Valentin G. Savitsky not unreasonably concluded that they were under attack. Out of contact with his command he reasoned that perhaps war had broken out. His orders compelled him to fire his nuclear torpedo if attacked. Before leaving port, the chief of staff of the Northern Fleet had made it clear to his submarine commanders that if attack was imminent, they should fire first (Sherwin 2020, 22–​26; Plokhy 2021, 257–​274). Savitsky and his fellow commanders made a pact among themselves that they would go down fighting rather than disgrace their country. Savitsky ordered an urgent dive and the readying and loading of their nuclear-​tipped torpedo. His descent into the submarine was blocked temporarily by the stocky signaling officer, who had become stuck in the conning tower. Also on board and on deck the B-​59 was Captain Vassily A. Arkhipov, representing the brigade commander. He observed that the American destroyers were firing over, not at, their submarine and that one of the destroyers was trying to signal to them. He yelled at Savitsky to cancel the dive (Sherwin 2020, 26–​28; Plokhy 2021, 257–​274). The US Navy came within a hair’s breadth of starting a nuclear war because its dropping of grenades to make Soviet submarines surface, and subsequent harassment by destroyers and aircraft, made at least one Soviet Captain convinced that war had broken out and that he should retaliate before being sunk. It seems almost certain that this would have happened

Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    713 had Captain Arkhipov not been on deck and if the signalling officer had not blocked access to the conning tower (Plokhy 2021, 257–​274). The submarine’s torpedo would have sunk at least one ship, if not more, and—​with or without authorization from the White House—​the US Navy would have attacked all the submarines they were tracking. There would have been a shooting war in the Caribbean involving nuclear weapons. It is anyone’s guess what would have happened next. McNamara later acknowledged that the Excomm also knew nothing about this or of the 90 Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba (McNamara 2005, 33). Listening to Castro in 1992, he realized that the hawkish course of action he had initially advocated during the crisis could have invited Soviet escalation: Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a U.S. invasion, and if so, how he thought the United States would respond. “We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt,” Castro replied. “We were certain of that . . . . [W]‌e would be forced to pay the price that we would disappear.” He continued, “Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons.” And he added, “If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going to be occupied . . . I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons.” I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro suggested we would have. (McNamara 2005, 33; see also Ellsberg 2017, 210)

In spite of this compelling evidence many historians and IR scholars remain reluctant to acknowledge the role of luck and the limits of safety and control—​even though they maintain the need to learn from the past and use the missile crisis as a crucial reference point. Ariel Colonomos noted astutely in 2013 that ‘the “science” of international politics does not like “luck” ’ (2013, 190). In 2018, Milton Leitenberg (2018, 249) concluded his study of nuclear weapons during the Cold War with the observation that ‘luck is a term one rarely finds in an academic study’. Most strikingly, scholars have not incorporated this new knowledge in their interpretation of the event (Waltz 2012, 7; Kroenig 2018). French interpreters have shown similar inflexibility (Pelopidas 2017, 258–​260). Mark Bell and Julia Macdonald are an exception. They write that ‘luck was required to peacefully negotiate the Cuban Missile Crisis’ after fully acknowledging the limits of control, knowledge, and weapons safety (Bell and Macdonald 2019, 55–​57, quote on 60). So too does Lebow (1987). Mainstream IR requirements of structured predictions and policy relevance understood as advice to future nuclear crisis managers make recognition of the limits of knowledge, control and the role of luck a priori unacceptable (Pelopidas 2016; 2017, 248–​251) As a result, even Bell and Macdonald (2019, 59), in spite of their acknowledgment of the role of luck, end up quantifying the risk of nuclear use in the crisis, assess it as ‘moderate’ and conclude that ‘the brinkmanship model accurately captures the key dynamic—​the manipulation of risk—​of the Cuban Missile Crisis’. Frank Sauer admits his uneasiness with the notion of luck: ‘This is not only an unsettling notion’, he writes. ‘It is also hard to believe’ (Sauer 2015, 2). He excludes it from his analysis without providing any good reason. Gavin (2020, 306–​307) does the same. For a thorough critique of nuclear crisis management, see Lebow (1987). Among historians, the impediment is resistance to counterfactual methodology, which makes it almost impossible to examine possibilities that did not materialize and therefore any assessment of the role of luck (Lebow 2015, 406; Pelopidas 2017, 251–​253). There is not a word on the possibility of nuclear war or luck in avoiding it in the chapter on ‘the Cuban

714    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas Missile Crisis’ in the 2010 Cambridge History of the Cold War or the 2013 Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Hershberg 2010; Immerman and Goedde 2013). One exception is Ruud van Dijk who writes that the crisis ‘demonstrates that individual actors are capable of taking irresponsible risks (while fortuitously also being able to choose the opposite course of action at key moments’ (van Dijk 2014, 275). In the face of a wealth of supporting evidence and the ability of at least some of the policymaking elite to take it aboard, the world of social science remains reluctant or unable to learn the most important lesson of nuclear crisis.

Conclusion The July 1914 crisis triggered the First World War. Historians described it as inevitable, and this remained the conventional wisdom until quite recently (Afflerbach and Stevenson 2007, Lebow 2010; Macmillan 2013; Clark 2012). If the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to war—​ conventional or nuclear—​historians would have constructed a causal chain leading ineluctably to this outcome (Lebow 2015, 406). Instead they have done the opposite. Because the crisis was peacefully resolved they have assumed the equal inevitability of this outcome and the narratives we have analyzed provide different reasons why this is so. Cognitive psychologists would look to the hindsight bias to explain efforts to portray the past as overdetermined. We think more fundamental processes are at work. In the First World War powerful political and psychological reasons were mutually reinforcing. Those in power in 1914 had strong incentives to deny to themselves and their publics any responsibility for the catastrophe. Just the reverse happened with the missile crisis, and for equally powerful political and psychological reasons. Belief in the ability of deterrence and compellence to prevent nuclear war was immensely reassuring to everyone. Downplaying uncertainty, denying loss of control and miscalculated escalation, exaggerating rationality, risk management, and control over nuclear weapons and the military, buttressed presidential authority and justified Kennedy’s nuclear arms buildup and the off-​scale military budget (Sherwin 2020, 465–​469). Diverse political and economic constituencies had strong interests in propagating this fairy tale. The realist narrative provided the vehicle for this reading of the crisis and its widespread acceptance is hardly surprising. The crisis also gave a boost to the Manichean narrative as Khrushchev and the Soviet Union could readily be portrayed as aggressors only held in check by superior power. The Marxist narrative suffered, and the liberal narrative accommodated. The crisis was the catalyst for the psychological narrative, but it took a decade to develop and had relatively little traction, even in the academy. These political and psychological defenses have important implications. One of the reasons the July crisis was not resolved was the belief, among so many leaders and diplomats in Russia, France, and Britain, that it would be resolved peacefully as had earlier European crises. The realist narrative of Cuba created similar expectations about the ability of superpowers leaders to manage their relationship. This optimism has carried over into the post-​Cold War era and conflicts between the US and China and Russia. It has also provided the justification for even more disproportionate military spending, new generations of nuclear weapons, and corresponding strong reasons to resist all the evidence from Cuba

Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    715 and other crises that luck had played a very large role in their peaceful resolution. Rather than enhancing conflict management and prevention, dominant narratives make crises, accidents, and war more likely. The tragic narrative suggests that the realist narrative and the nuclear policies based on it are what made luck necessary. The missile crisis and the Cold War accordingly offer a broader lesson about modernity, and one that is the central theme of Sophocles’ exploration of the fate of Oedipus. In his desire to escape the prophecy that he will kill his father and bed his mother, he fulfills it. Oedipus’ power and reason—​and commitment to avoid murder and incest—​are responsible for this outcome. So too, the tragic narrative asserts, have overreliance on power and reason in the modern world brought about undesired outcomes, and not infrequently the very ones people were trying to avoid. It is possible that a sincere commitment to avoid nuclear war could make it more likely. What should be done? We in the academy, government, and media must recognize how lucky we have been. We cannot blindly count on good fortune and must make the possibility of nuclear war imaginable. We need to identify pathways that lead to war other than a conscious decision by an evil adversary to start one. We must take seriously problems of miscalculated escalation through fear, flawed estimates and judgments, and loss of control. We need to broaden the audience for this new sensitivity and analysis beyond the narrow community of nuclear crisis managers. Ideally, we should combat the organizational, corporate, and political interests that want to maintain the dominant narrative. To do so, we need to become able to distinguish a sincere commitment to avoid nuclear war grounded in the belief that it is possible from lack of imagination or refusal to believe in its possibility (Anders 1962, 496–​497). Tragedy may apply to the former but should not be misused as an excuse for the latter. We scholars must continue archival research on cases of near nuclear use through decisions or accidents. We must embrace counterfactual analysis as a means of probing the contingency of important political outcomes and further develop this method. We need to embrace the Knightian distinction between risk and uncertainty, and develop a more sophisticated understanding of luck. Above all we must avoid the survivability bias.

Note 1. Anders’ concept of ‘promethean discrepancy’ captures the gap between the human possibility to destroy and imaginatively and morally relate to.

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PA RT V I

C ON C LU SION

Chapter 49

History a nd t h e Internati ona l

Time, Space, Agency, and Language Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-​S mit Introduction This is a Handbook on History and International Relations, on the complex relationship, first, between temporality and a domain of political life, and second, between two fields of scholarly inquiry. We have avoided, however, cleaving to any particular definition of international relations, either as a realm of human interaction or a discipline or sub-​discipline. This is partly because we accept Raymond Aron’s astute observation that ‘ “International Relations” have no frontiers traced out in reality, they are not and cannot be materially separable from other social phenomena’ (1966, 4). The ‘international’, from this perspective, is best understood as a conceptual category, one that social and historically located actors—​scholars, practitioners, activists, citizens, and so on—​have used to define and order a particular sphere of human life, a sphere they imagine and construct through their practices. It is also because the field of International Relation (IR)has shifted over time, as social and political conceptions of the international have changed. Indeed, in important respects, its intellectual and professional contours have been shaped by debates about its proper subject domain: relations between sovereign states, transnationalism, or ‘world’ or ‘Global Politics’. For these reasons, although it might seem strange in a Handbook on History and International Relations, we have sought to decentre the international and its representations. Not because it is unimportant to our project, but because we wanted to treat it as a historically emergent and variable concept (and field of inquiry). The same logic applies to our treatment of history, as both a temporal process and disciplinary project. What history is, in the former sense, has long been debated by historians and philosophers of history, and the discipline of History has itself been a contested intellectual project, as current debates about ‘Global History’ demonstrate. To avoid reifying ‘history’ and ‘international relations’ we have sought to read their shifting contours and relationships through the organizing themes of modernity and

724    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit granularity. Modernity, as our fellow editors explain in Chapter 1, is a central yet contested concept in accounts of history an international relations, framing debates about distinctions between past and present and about trajectories of development. Importantly, these debates cut across the fields of History and IR, disrupting the often-​ritualized lines of disciplinary debate. The theme of granularity shifts the focus to ‘questions of scope, scale, and closeness of association when classifying or bundling phenomena together in posited relationships’ (Bukovansky and Keene, Chapter 1). It asks our contributors to probe ‘the tension between the richness, specificity, and individuality of a social phenomenon within its immediate chronological and geographical context on the one hand, and the desire to tease out general patterns and shifts across the longue durée and the global on the other’ (Bukovansky and Keene, Chapter 1). Our contributors have engaged, at times favourably and at others more critically, with the themes of modernity and granularity in chapters relating to ‘Readings’ (the narrative framing of history and international relations), ‘Practices’ (which either reinforce or destabilize fixed agentic identities and interests), ‘Locales’ (that reveal the importance of perspective in constituting understandings of both history and the international), and ‘Moments’ (the choice of which is commonly informed by assumptions about modernity and granularity). This approach to history and international relations not only constitutes a fresh engagement with the subject, but it has also prompted thought-​provoking and richly varied contributions from our authors. In this final chapter, however, we have decided to recentre the international and its history. Our goal is not to distil from our authors’ writings overarching ‘umbrella’ conceptions of the international. Rather, we seek to draw out—​in general and in relation to our authors’ arguments—​some of the challenges of locating key concepts and practices that have characterized the international historically. In saying that such key concepts and practices are historically contingent, we are making the case that they have carried multiple meanings, that they have been defined and deployed at different points in time, in diverse global contexts, serving often contradictory ends. Moreover, as the preceding chapters testify, conceptions of our political life have been imagined, discursively constructed, and mobilized by diverse actors, often in contestation. With this in mind, the following discussion focuses on four topics that help us access the multiple origins, understandings, and deployments of the international (and the global), and of the many practices, conceptions, and moments that accompany them. These are, respectively, time, agency, space, and language. One advantage of these foci is that they enable us to trace, through the writings of our contributors, how conceptions of the ‘international’ blend into the ideas of the ‘global’, a concept that appears frequently in preceding chapters. Moreover, they demonstrate not only Aron’s point that ‘ “International Relations” have no frontiers traced out in reality’, but also the historical instability of the very category of the international.

Time Perhaps the most straightforward of all our four points for a Handbook on History and International Relations is that variations in conceptions (and constructions) of time matter. For much of the post-​1945 period, IR scholars approached history by flattening out time,

History and the International    725 either by seeing international history as a temporal realm of ‘recurrence and repetition’ (Wight 1966, 26), characterized by enduring processes and persistent rhythms, or as a temporal realm characterized by progressive change. Our contributors have shown, however, that the relations between time and the international are far more complex. In particular, they draw attention to six issues: how variations in time matter for how actors have understood key processes or phenomena in international relations, the importance of non-​linear processes of change across time, the significance of temporally specific contradictions (both at the level of social processes and structures and within beliefs of individual actors), the impact of how we link or separate events in time on how we read their distinctiveness and significance, and the need, in all of this, to remain sensitive to continuities (as well as the political, epistemological, and methodological risks associated with their identification and emphasis). The terms ‘international’, ‘global’, ‘sovereignty’, as much as other key concepts of our political life, have existed within spans of time. This, however, does not equate with their meaning being unchanging. For instance, as several of our chapters show, with one century separating them, how the Paris Peacemakers thought about the postwar world order in 1919 (Kelly, Chapter 44) was different from how their predecessors thought about relations among states in 1815 (Mitzen and Rogg, Chapter 40), and from how their successors would think, only a few decades later, about world order in 1945 San Francisco (Gorman, Chapter 46). Agents, be these political actors or thinkers, are embedded in specific environments of shared values, ideas, and norms and these environments shape the way they think and act. Let us take, here, the trajectory of empire in the twentieth century. For centuries empire was a legitimate form of political authority. It still was in 1919 and 1945, as the Allies who won both world wars arranged organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations accordingly, by formalizing internationally stratifications of power, territories, and people (see Chapters 4, 16, 35, 45). Yet, only two decades later, in the 1960s, the practice of formalizing stratifications in the name of supposed degrees of civilization, race, or advancement was no longer possible as colonial rule was formally delegitimized thanks to the efforts of a constellation of colonized and postcolonial actors (Lee, Chapter 47; Mayall, Chapter 21). This does not mean, though, that from one day to the other empire and hierarchies ended, leading all the way to formal equality. For instance ‘development’ became a widespread keyword to accompany stratifications of territories, populations, and economies (Unger, Chapter 24). With the end of colonial rule, hierarchies and inequalities were not dismantled. As Martin Bayly (Chapter 14) discusses, since then the ‘return to empire’ has taken different and more ambiguous forms that are still echoed in today’s practices and arguments about ‘the war on terror’, in Brexit’s imperial nostalgia, and in Russia’s violent attempt to reestablish a claimed historical unity of Russia and Ukraine. Claiming that variations in time matter, however, as several our contributors argue, is not the same as suggesting that conceptions change in linear or progressive ways. Julia Costa Lopez (Chapter 27) writes about the plurality, diversity, and global interconnectedness of the ‘premodern world’, and suggests that because of its very appellation, the ‘premodern’ is often turned into a dependent concept for what happened before ‘modernity’ and is thus devoid of independence, and specificity. This can also lead to the often unspoken assumption that the organized ‘modern’ had to inevitably stem from a less organized ‘premodern’ (Yudan, Chapter 11). As both Costa Lopez and Chen Yudan show, how the two intertwine is more complex than largely assumed. Writing on the history of rights in the international system,

726    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit Andrea Paras (Chapter 8) also calls into question progressivist accounts of history, focusing on the ‘evolution’ of rights (and human rights specifically). Paras reminds us that struggles for expanding rights are accompanied by attempts to control, at times perpetuating structural hierarchies. For Paras, narratives about legal or moral progress attached to the expansion of rights can erroneously lead to simplified visions of the past and the future in which rights continue to mobilize peoples to fight for ‘positive’ change or in which global solidarity is the norm. As several of our authors attest, macro-​history in IR and longer term perspectives in History are particularly interesting testing grounds to question evolutionary and progressivist narratives about world order. As Ayse Zarakol (Chapter 28) argues, modernization theory in particular posits a teleology of development wherein the ‘West’ led the way to major historical transformations, and others followed. Despite strong normative critiques, Zarakol suggests that such an understanding has not being entirely rejected within scholarship. This, for instance, is visible in the dominant scholarship in political science and IR on the ‘emergence of the modern state’. For Zarakol, however, these types of evolutionary (and Eurocentric) metahistorical narratives about the birth and evolution of the modern state in Europe cannot be dismantled by critiques that are too micro and that touch one or another specific aspect or moment in the history of international relations.. They need to be replaced by alternative macro-​histories of global modernity in which all spaces and agents are equally considered. Echoing Zarakol’s call, Yongjin Zhang’s chapter on ‘Barbarism and Civilization’ offers an alternative vision of how the two concepts (and ensuing practices) have been invoked and used across time and space (Chapter 15). Zhang shows how this conceptual duo has carried across time and space complex historical memories and highly conflicting relationships in intercultural encounters and socio-​ political interactions. Through explorations of moments of their articulation across both Western and Chinese history, Zhang demonstrates that barbarism and civilization are assuredly not evolutionary markers, but intersubjective constructions of opposition that have served different political actors to order, each in their own way, international and domestic politics. Even though concepts and practices navigate across time, contradictions and inconsistencies characterize their understandings and applications in a multitude of ways and forms. Most notably, these tensions can exist across time. Yet they can also co-​exist at given moments in time. Two chapters in the Handbook on specific revolutions speak directly to this point. In the chapter on the 1848 revolutions, Daniel Green (Chapter 41) explains how these revolutions were an explosion of liberal-​nationalist political rebellions which were concurrently accompanied by forms of repression and control on the side of European governments. Musab Younis (Chapter 39) writes about the (largely understated) centrality of the Haitian revolution (1791–​1804) for international relations, for postcolonial struggles, and for rights struggles globally at the time and then later. Yet, as Younis also demonstrates, a granular look at this moment clearly shows the coexistence of radical and more conservative forces, leading to regressions and not just advancements. For instance, while after the Haitian revolution enslaved Africans were no longer taken to Saint-​Domingue, they were taken elsewhere in the Caribbean, strengthening slave-​based production in other places like Cuba. Hence, we may argue that any close look at moments of deep transformation involves the coexistence of movements towards greater liberty and emancipation, with repression and violence.

History and the International    727 Claire Vergerio (Chapter 43) adds an interesting level of analysis to the way tensions are historically constructed and presented, whether at given points in time or a posteriori. In the chapter on the Berlin (1884/​85) and Hague conferences (1899, 1907), Vergerio tells us that the Berlin Conference to partition Africa and regulate European trade and colonialism is depicted as the epitome of European imperialism. In contrast, the Hague Conferences on the regulation of warfare are often celebrated as departures from the past: moments of greater inclusion, progressive thinking, and embodying the attempt to limit the horrors of wars through international law. As such, scholarship largely views these conferences as representing two conflicting understandings of the role of international law in the development of our modern world: one brutal and imperialistic, the other progressive and humanitarian. Yet, by showing how many of the same individuals were actually involved in both Berlin and the Hague, Vergerio stresses the imperialistic and hierarchical foundations of these conferences whilst revealing the coexistence of two visions of order. This does not mean that tensions at a given point in time ought to be viewed necessarily as contradictions. For instance, while at the turn of the twentieth century empire and Eurocentrism were still the norm, nationalist movements, and other contestation forces were at play in the ‘West’ and globally. Progressive voices calling for more equality and inclusion were also being increasingly heard, from women’s movements (Sjoberg, Chapter 8) to people of colour’s representatives and associations (Manchanda, Chapter 16). The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century was therefore also a period that many, in Europe, in urbanized parts of empires, in Latin American states, and in parts of Asia such as Japan saw as being more liberal and more ‘modern’ than the past—​a period characterized by many technological advancements in urban planning, in communication networks (telegraph, telephone), transportation, and, finally, in the organization of multilateral events at which delegates from different parts of the globe would participate (Bruneau, Chapter 31). Those ‘Western’ delegates involved in conferences, congresses, and international draft-​making inevitably had to confront different conceptions stemming from this greater internationalism. This also mean that, at times, tensions would be present in the visions held by a single individual. For instance, for a long time, numerous historians and IR scholars described United States (US) president Woodrow Wilson’s conceptions of international relations as liberal and idealist. Yet, we see in Wilson’s decision after the First World War to maintain a racial line along which self-​determination would be recognized, and the construction if the League’s Mandate system, a close alignment to racist conceptions of order (Manchanda, Chapter 16). The example of Wilson’s contradicting views may not come as a surprise once we relocate the trajectory of this individual in the socio-​political context of the time. Yes, Wilson might have thought differently and more inclusively than their predecessors and of many of their contemporaries about world order but he also deemed that racial segregation in the US was a totally legitimate way of organizing domestic society. Wilson held what we now see a conflicting vision of order that encompassed inclusive components in terms of recognition of some people and states whilst supporting older racial and civilizational hierarchies. So far, we have discussed tensions and variations at given points in time or across larger time spans. Several of our contributors also identify patterns of continuity in history. The contributions in the third section of the Handbook speak precisely to this point, by underscoring practices that have endured across history, from sovereignty (Branch and Stockbruegger, Chapter 12) to diplomacy (Frey and Frey, Chapter 13), from religion (Lynch,

728    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit Chapter 17) to war-​making (Barkawi, Chapter 20), from regulating commerce (Helleiner, Chapter 23) to governing finance (Predmore and Young, Chapter 25). While this may seem a straightforward point to make for more contemporary times, there may also be continuities and similarities in times and places that are often overlooked. Going back to the notion of the ‘premodern’, Costa Lopez suggests that recent works in political theology emphasize that a ‘Whig’ narrative of progressive secularization from the ‘premodern’ to the ‘modern’ hides the role of medieval theology in the constitution of modern ideas. As Costa Lopez (Chapter 27) suggests, it also overlooks the fundamental similarities between medieval and modern internationals. Searching for similarities and for patterns of continuity across time, however, requires several caveats. Taken together, several of our contributors identify three ‘risks’ attached to this intellectual exercise—​the instrumentalization of the past, what can be an inaccurate search for ‘origins’, and presentism—​thus identifying three points of caution. The first relates to how today’s political actors instrumentalize the past to advance political arguments about the present. For instance, in the chapter on Sykes–​Picot, Megan Donaldson (Chapter 45) suggests that different invocations of the agreement today serve different political projects in the present. For postcolonial Arab states (and, in a very different way, for groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL)), Sykes–​Picot is described as an inoperative agreement overriding Arab sovereignty. This account is more appealing than one stressing a different historical reality, that is, Arab leader Sharif Husayn’s efforts to forge Arab and Muslim unity with and through British sponsorship. In turn, Western references to Sykes–​ Picot, often castigate European governments for the clumsiness of the agreement’s territorial allocation and they are coupled with new, more or less explicit, proposals for boundaries, reanimating a posture of imperial power. While the first point is highly political, the two other ‘risks’ are more closely related to disciplinary reflections on how history is written and studied. The second risk that both historians and IR theorists share has to do with the search for the origins of concepts and practices across time (and space). The ‘politics of origins’, as R. B. J. Walker (Chapter 2) argues, are thus characterized by three biases. Firstly, IR scholars in particular tend to view benchmark dates as points of origin and change, overlooking wider contexts (Walker, Chapter 2). The Peace of Westphalia is a typical case in point. As Andrew Phillips shows, the Peace of Westphalia instantiated a distinctive diversity regime that tied legitimate political authority to the recognition of authorized forms of confessional religious difference. Yet, this does not mean that from one day—​or year—​to the other, Westphalia definitively signified the sovereign state’s triumph, the birth of the modern state system, or the secularization of European international society. Transitions, indeed, are longer than often thought. Secondly, despite the importance of postcolonial accounts and global histories, Eurocentrism still strongly marks mentalities. David Kang (Chapter 34) and Anthony Pella (Chapter 32) both argue that although it is common to see the modern state as arising in Europe, state systems existed both in Asia and Africa well before imperial encounters. More ‘anti-​Western-​centric’ metahistorical narratives and finer methodological devices are therefore essential to question myths and assumptions about world order. Thirdly, the tendency to search for points of origins is tightly connected to those previously mentioned teleological accounts of the international system. Going beyond this linear vision is therefore an essential task. The third risk, which preoccupies IR scholars working on macro-​history more than historians, who, in turn, have developed over time fine methodological tools, has to do with

History and the International    729 the tendency to introduce present-​day perspectives into interpretations of the past. Writing on realism, Michael Williams (Chapter 3) tells us that in its ‘best forms’ this theory is both deeply engaged with history and a means of drawing on history to meet the challenges of the present. Yet, how are we to do it? Should we look at history as a set of ‘lessons for the present’? Branch and Stockbruegger (Chapter 12) hold that recent scholarship appears less concerned with studying history to generate insights for today, but they argue that it remains important to seek appropriate generalizable findings across time—​balancing the identification of specificities with the generalization about social phenomena. Maïa Pal (Chapter 5) cautions us about the scope of historical comparison, reminding us that in social sciences comparisons are never neutral, objective, and predictable exercises. Hiding behind comparisons, one always finds theoretical and analytical assumptions. How, then can we best advance nuanced claims about the history of the international system and about key concepts and practices that characterize it? One possible way to do so, that we have sought to translate in the very structure of this Handbook, is to combine a diachronic with a synchronic approach. This coupled approach can help uncover what changes and what persists when examining one analytic referent—​‘the state’, ‘nationalism’, ‘genocide’, ‘the international’, and so on—​over time. Focusing on specific contexts while examining broader spans of time allows uncovering the historical presence of notions, the content of which has shifted over time, stressing change but also pointing at the persistence/​existence of broadly defined ideas and specific patterns of action throughout history. Such a perspective implies operating with the understanding of one idea—​say the ‘international’—​inclusive enough to identify certain discursive and behavioural practices within a meaningful span of time, reflective, in turn, of that given idea. This twofold approach also sheds light on how an idea—​for instance ‘the international’—​is understood in more contemporary times, by specifically unearthing the conflicting grounds upon which current understandings may lie. If historical variation matters and if, at the same time, it is a compelling phenomenon in political life that some practices and concepts have navigated over time, then we need a way to look at it that is both conceptually inclusive and analytically clear. In this Handbook, we have tried to respond to this challenge by providing large-​scale histories of given practices and concepts, meta-​readings of history and international relationsIR, and have combined them with the study of specific moments and locales. It is to the latter that we shall now turn.

Space Our second point relates to the importance of space. Assumptions about space have long structured historical enquiries. Traditional national histories assume the spatial boundaries of the sovereign state, conventional international histories have assumed the spatial division of the globe into territorially demarcated, politically centralized states, and global history today assumes the interaction of politically constitutive local, regional, and transnational social forces. Contrasting spatial assumptions such as these lie at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature of the international and its history, or histories. The heat in such debates often derives from the close connection between spatial assumptions and normative commitments. Spatial assumptions, for example, inform Eurocentric accounts of international society and its expansion, as well as the connection between such accounts and

730    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit notions of civilizational hierarchy and the progressive march of history. Differences in spatial assumptions, and the contests they infuse, feature prominently in preceding chapters, especially those addressing ‘locales’. Althought the international order may now be globalized, our contributors largely agree that it is not universal. It is varied, and it is essential to acknowledge this complexity when historicizing it. Postcolonial scholars in law and history have made this a leitmotiv of their work from the 1970s, if not earlier. However, as many of our contributors remind us, historical accounts in international relations and works in international history have for a long time suffered—​and to some extent many still do today—​from both Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism—​namely, the tendency to view the nation-​state as the sole unit of analysis and container of all social processes. Scholars would apply one ontological prism—​ the international made of nation-​states and originating in Europe—​ending up with very problematic accounts of the making of the international system. An emblematic example of this vision of history, often cited in this volume, is Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s book The Expansion of International Society (1984). TheseEnglish School scholars sought ‘to explore the expansion of the international society of European states across the rest of the globe, and its transformation from a society fashioned in Europe and dominated by Europeans into the global international society of today’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 1). Over time, the inclination to view the European experience as a universal one has been consistently called into question, first by historians then by IR scholars (Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017)—​including English School scholars—​and as well by the contributors to this volume. First and foremost, our contributors remind us that the making of the current international system is not just a progressivist story of diffusion of European norms and values. Instead, it is a story that resonates across time and space in different regional orders (Chapters 32, 33, 34) and is deeply interconnected with empire (Chapters 4, 7, 14, 35, 43). Many of our contributors show in their own ways how non-​Western resistance has been as central a pattern as European domination in the making of the international system (Chapters 8, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 29, 36, 39, 42, 45, 47). Yet, as Kang (Chapter 34) reminds us, moving beyond Eurocentred histories and understandings of the international system does not simply equate with replacing a Eurocentric analytical referent with, say, a Sinocentric one. These are not universal referents from which to look at world politics and their transformations. They are one part of the broader story of the making—​and thinking—​of the ‘international’, ‘the global’, and other key concepts and practices that have accompanied them historically. Focusing specifically on political thought, Yudan (Chapter 11) suggests that to constitute truly encompassing visions, we need to move beyond the dualism between West and non-​ West and look instead, as the author does, for ‘global’ sources. What is more, contestation may well emerge within dominant regional and cultural orders themselves. These different locales thus all need to be considered. These postulations bear at least two implications for how we look for concepts and practices across space and for the types of frames we employ to historicize them. First, as much as conceptions and practices vary across time, they also vary across space. For example, ‘statehood’ looks different from different standpoints across the globe. Geography and material conditions matter for how agents see the world and identify priorities, alliances, and interactions within it. Pella argues in Chapter 32 that variation in environmental conditions was arguably the most important factor that influenced how African states were organized and interacted until the fifteenth century. As Schweizer (Chapter 38) shows us, in the case of

History and the International    731 the Seven Years’ War, structural features including size, power distribution, alliance patterns, issues of territory, and dynastic rivalries were central to the various interests and visions at stake in the conflict. As much as material aspects, values, ideational factors, and cultural differences fundamentally shape agents’ perceptions of practices, concepts, and events. Writing on the 1857 Indian rebellion, Alexander Davis (Chapter 42) shows how the uprising was foundational to the creation of the colonial state in India, and changed imperial governance structures globally, with the British forever aware of the possibility of anti-​colonial resistance and governing with greater brutality as a result. Yet, in India this same event is remembered today as the ‘first war of independence’, a moment of resistance to imperial forms of domination and control. In demonstrating the colonial genealogy of the international (and the violence that accompany it), Davis also shows how the same event can be viewed differently accordingly to varying standpoints, and how it bears different social, political, and symbolical implications locally and internationally. Second, as much as the agents we study are embedded in specific contexts, we, as scholars, are also. The material and ideational context we are located in affects the intellectual choices we make, the questions we ask, and the disciplinary or theoretical frames we adopt. This may seem like a straightforward point, but it is also a crucial one for how we then search for the ‘international’ or the ‘global’, their points of ‘origin’, and transformations across time and place. A clear case in point comes from Pal’s discussion (in Chapter 5) of the complex knowledge production about politics and international relations in UK universities. Pal reminds us that the contemporary context of twenty-​first-​century academia in Western and Northern universities is a complex and contradictory one where critical thinking is rich and vibrant. Yet it remains simultaneously hooked into deeply unequal and hierarchical systems of funding and education (as well as, we may add, political and social contexts) that inevitably condition the choices of topics researched and methodologies chosen. It thus seems essential to keep questioning scholarly assumptions ontologically and methodologically for how they are both taught and experienced, and to compare varying assumptions across different places of learning, whether in the Global North, Global South, or somewhere other locale. What, are the frames and tools that can be developed, as well as the methodological standpoints, required to incorporate different experiences into one’s intellectual and analytical resources to historically investigate the local, the international and the global? Two interconnected propositions emerge from several of the Handbook’s contributions. The first proposition relates to the importance of further investigating the richness of global history, for historians, political thinkers, and IR scholars (Chapters 6 and 7). Though a single definition of such history does not exist—​and this is perhaps what makes it so vigorously debated—​Lawson and Mulrich (Chapter 6) present ‘global history’ as being ‘concerned with the role and effect of a variety of global forces’. It is thus the history of the impact or development of global processes relating to globalization and modernity, the spread of ideas, flows and connectivity, space and scale. Global history thus does not represent one single approach. As the two authors suggest, it allow us to uncover transboundary movements of different kinds, allied to a critique of approaches that are confined by methodological nationalism or (largely European) geographies. Second, stemming from this first point, comes the invitation from a number of our contributors to think more creatively about forms and sources of interconnectedness across space. As several of the Handbook’s chapters suggest, these locales can take multiple

732    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit scales: from micro to macro, from local to regional and ‘global’. Looking at what happened in a village, close to a river, or in the discussions of political activists—​or looking at what happened at junctures of different spaces—​such as borders, oceans, or ‘interpolity zones’ (Benton, Chapter 22)—​may reveal interactions of actors, exchanges of ideas and discussions that would otherwise go unnoticed or that may simply show us that the ‘origins’ of concepts and practices are not necessarily where we may think. Yet, these are aspects that we cannot fully grasp if restricting our studies to those (certainly essential) internationally recognized (and thereby legitimized) forms of organization and authority. Still on this second point, another interesting element that emerges from a number of our contributions has to do with the type of sources taken into account. As Tarak Barkawi (Chapter 20) and Duncan Bell (Chapter 7) both suggest, a thicker understanding of historical realities has also to do with the sources chosen for scholarly analyses. In terms of political thought, Bell tells us that scholars focus largely on written materials, overlooking visual arts, cinema, architecture, or music. Yet, as the author claims, these are fertile sites for historical investigations as they produce visions of global order too. In the specific domain of warfare and military history, Barkawi argues that militarized popular culture can inform us on the identities of peoples and polities in world politics. For instance, as much as traditional battle histories, Hollywood war films often reproduce narratives of how a few Western soldiers successfully fight much larger numbers of brown or black soldiers. One consequence of such ‘military orientalism’—​as the author calls it—​in history writing and other genres is a tendency by Western publics to underestimate non-​European opponents. Overall, enlarging our vision (and comparison) of locales and sources can thus help us comprehending historical realities with greater nuance. The next section, then, relates to who are the agents we consider.

Agency If conceptual constructs such as ‘sovereignty’, ‘empire’, the ‘international’, and the ‘global’ define our ontological focus and methodological assumptions about the world, they are also constitutive of and constituted by a field of human practice. As our contributors show, they are—​like other concepts that have navigated throughout history and that are studied in this Handbook—​constructs imagined and mobilized by diverse actors, variously connected to evolving fields of practice. In this volume, several of our contributions ask who these actors have been, how they have been located and related in a shifting field of debate, and how their imaginings, discourses, and practices have shaped domains and aspects of human interaction. Accordingly, our chapters have a focus on both intellectuals and political actors. Several our contributions focus on the historical study of international relations by looking at the thought of intellectuals—​scholars and publicists—​and the field of debate within their networks. For instance, Duncan Kelly (Chapter 44) writes about ‘the problem of the First World War and Versailles as part of a regime of historicity’. The author looks at how these two events are fixed in postwar intellectual thought as pivotal moments, as an origin story about the rise of an opposition between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ in politics, and between what Kelly terms ‘statist positivism’ and ‘utopianism’ in law. Kelly highlights the intellectual complexities and tensions between ‘archaism’ and ‘radical modernism’ that underpinned

History and the International    733 various intellectual positions and their attempts at legitimizing specific forms of politics and law. In the chapter on liberal internationalism, Luke Ashworth (Chapter 4) explores liberal narratives held by different Anglo-​American intellectuals at two points in time—​the First World War and the Second World War. Ashworth shows that although confronted with common problems of ‘industrial modernity’, thinkers of liberal internationalism positioned themselves differently in their field, taking different lessons from their readings of their place in history. Using the Handbook’s theme of granularity as a methodological device, Ashworth identifies in the thought of individuals working in the same intellectual tradition similarities but also important differences and disagreements. Importantly, a smaller number of our chapters specifically look at the connections between political thought and practice. Not only do these chapters stress the context in which thinkers and their ideas evolved (as do all our contributions on intellectual history and political thought). They also look at the intended and unintended implications that specific intellectuals and ideas had on given fields of practice. Writing on the spatial and conceptual notions of the international and the global, Rosenboim and Tonooka (Chapter 35) show how these domains that extend beyond the state have had political stakes grounded in issues of war and peace and growing global interconnectedness. The authors examine different theorizations of the international and the global at various moments of the twentieth century—​the interwar years, the postcolonial decades, the early twenty-​first century—​ uncovering how these political spaces were imagined and experienced by IR scholars, historians, and practitioners. Focusing primarily on European and American perspectives, their chapter traces continuities and changes in international and global thinking that help us comprehend current visions of world politics. Another example comes from Jacinta O’Hagan (Chapter 29), who looks at three different narratives about the West across time and space: the civilizational West, the liberal West, and the fragmenting West. The exploration of these narratives allows two things. First, it gives the possibility of investigating patterns of continuity and change in invocations of the West by different voices at different historical conjunctures. Second, it leads to the identification of the practices and forms of international order that these very same invocations legitimate. Yet, as much as public intellectuals and thinkers have written and shaped ideas at key points in time, other agents have played critical roles in shaping the evolving meaning of the international, the global, and other key notions of our social and political life, both through their discourses and their practices. The importance of political and social agents comes sharply into focus in this Handbook when considering moments of resistance and change around the ‘anti-​colonial’ across time and space. The long overlooked Haitian revolution made key contributions to the fight against colonial oppression in the late eighteenth century and after, if only, as Musab Younis (Chapter 39) observes, because Haiti became the first black postcolonial state, created at a highpoint of European colonialism. As Younis explains, the Haitian revolution has been absent from most accounts of postcolonialism for two reasons. First, because it destabilizes the standard periodization about colonial rule and decolonization. Second, because local agency and paths of resistance were for a long time occluded by dominant scholarly and political narratives. Other important moments of colonial resistance are identified in this volume: the mid-​nineteenth-​century Indian uprising against the rule of the British East India Company in the form of mutinies and civilian rebellions (Davis, Chapter 42); the efforts of Sharif Husayn in constituting a unity for the Arab and Muslim world in the context of the First World War’s Franco-​British Middle-​Eastern dominance and

734    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit Sykes-​Picot (Donaldson, Chapter 45); the Bandung conference and the consolidation of a postcolonial and, later, non-​aligned consciousness based on notions such as postcolonial sovereignty and economic modernization (Lee, Chapter 47). These moments reveal the importance of individual and collective agency in both resisting and transforming dominant norms, imperial and patriarchal conceptions, and practices relating to sovereignty, imperial governance, territoriality, or trade. Whether local or global, these moments also highlight specific logics of power in terms of who were the agents supporting change that ought to be recognized: politicians, activists, highly educated individuals, but also, importantly, wider social movements and leaders, and, very often, a mix of both, supporting each other. In citing the previous historical examples, we have sought to stress the importance of non-​Western agency in histories of resistance to forms of domination and control. This poses more broadly a methodological question on the identification and recovery of marginalized agency across time and space beyond recognized moments of transformation and debate. We have distilled in this Handbook four propositions that, we believe, may help recovering agency across time and space beyond dominant analytical frames in History and IR, and may shed light over long-​time marginalized agency. The first is a call to focus scholarly attention on all actors equally, by shifting our focus beyond the West. This, though, does not imply just replacing one regional focus with a different one. It also does not imply assuming simply that non-​Western agency emerges either in alignment with or (most often) in opposition to Western norms and practice. Instead, it means that the non-​West is viewed as fully active, and not just reactive. As Zarakol (Chapter 28) discusses with respect to modernization theories, even postcolonial and decolonial approaches largely assume—​because of its normative ambiguity—​that modernity is a concept primarily ‘owned’ by the West. Yet, this deprives the rest of the world of much active agency, since much of human practice seems to be defined in response to the West’s normative projects. Particularly in IR, this problematic vision fits into a wider disciplinary history of the ‘evolution’ of international systems that, as Zarakol suggests, legitimizes the very existence of IR as a field of study and international relations as an object of inquiry. Evolutionary narratives that have been the common in IR need to be replaced thanks to the development of alternative metahistorical narratives that restore non-​Western historical agency, but without neglecting macro-​and micro-​hierarchies. As Gulsah Capan puts it (Chapter 9), identifying the temporal and chronological boundaries of alternative spaces, the relationships between such spaces and diverse beginnings remains a scholarly challenge. The second and third propositions can be viewed in continuity with the previous point. They both relate to the need to shift our attention to analytical frames and concepts that have been marginalized both in History and in IR. Two themes emerge from several of our contributions: gender and race. Let us begin with gender. As Bell discusses (Chapter 7), intellectual history has largely ignored voices and experiences of women and members of minorities, as the discipline has focused (and, we could add, has been for a long time dominated by) white Western men. Over the past two decades, intellectual history’s scope has been broadened. Yet, as Bell rightly indicates, much still needs to be done. Women are absent from scholarly monographs and textbooks in the field and this absence has been addressed systematically only very recently (Owens and Rietzler 2021). Because women were excluded from educational and career opportunities, it is important to enlarge the canon by going beyond the traditional disciplinary focus on scholars and publicists. Laura Sjoberg (Chapter 8) reminds us that solving the problem of the absence of women from intellectual,

History and the International    735 disciplinary, or political histories is not simply a matter of adding more names to the list of scholars, thinkers, or activists that have participated in specific intellectual or political projects. As Sjoberg writes, histories of global politics are histories of gender relations, and vice-​versa, gender relations are histories of global politics. What is more, gender relations are much more complex than a binary distinction between ‘males’ and ‘females’. As Sjoberg argues, ‘the project of demasculinizing histories’ is a transformative process, which requires rethinking disciplines, their politics and methods. Despite important contributions to such ‘de-​masculinization’, much remains to be done both to further include women and feminism and to adopt methodological and ontological devices that allow going beyond heteronormative assumptions about society and history which exclude other gender and sexual groups as well as other minorities. Our third proposition calls for a focus on race. Many of our contributors stress the importance of recovering race, racism, and race relations in the histories we write in order to enlarge our visions about the making and shaping of world politics and order. Indeed, if white men and their views have been central to the writing of history, intellectual history, and international relations, these disciplines are witnessing a surge of efforts to expand the scope of political thought and practice to people of color. These efforts directly speak to the need of opening disciplinary boundaries to critical voices within the Global North itself and, importantly (as related to what we previously argued) outside of it. Bell (Chapter 7) discusses the numerous intellectual contributions that have been made in recent years to the history of political thought: from the mapping of black internationalisms to the transnational tracing of anti-​colonial, anti-​fascist, and feminist ideas in the mid-​twentieth century. In the chapter on ‘Race and Racism’, Nivi Manchanda (Chapter 16) shows how race has been subject to a systematic neglect in IR. Through a comparison of two political and intellectual figures—​ Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Du Bois—​Manchanda also shows, first, how different visions of race gave way to certain practices of racialization; second, how IR’s privileging of the Wilsonian racialized view of order has led to the discipline’s disengagement with key issues of social and racial justice until today. This also bears responsibilities for us, as scholars and citizens. As Manchanda reminds us, if IR has neglected race thus leading to blinkered understandings of histories of global politics, this now ought to change. The fourth proposition relates to the ‘type’ of agency considered. We have already mentioned that intellectual history and the history of political thought examine single individuals, their paths, conceptions (as these were largely thinkers), and possible interconnectedness with other intellectuals. In turn, IR along with other disciplinary branches of History, have largely focused on social and political groups, rather than single individuals. In IR, the assumption is that while individuals produce subjective knowledge and experiences, groups are a more relevant object of study to understand social and political interactions across time and space. This is so because groups produce and shape intersubjective understandings about the world which then have a direct and practical impact on it. IR in particular has remained centred on corporate (rather perhaps than collective) understandings of agency, at the level of organizations, states, and other institutions. This might well be the result of the field’s long-​standing preoccupation to generate ‘big’ structural arguments and to generalize knowledge. Yet, as Manchanda (Chapter 16) shows, by confronting the visions of self-​determination and race of two contemporaries—​Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Dubois—​a focus on individual agency does not equate with dismissing larger or structural arguments. On the contrary, it can enrich some of these arguments

736    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit by moving beyond standard views of the system and by showing how certain choices and perspectives on world order were privileged (Wilson’s in this case) and had greater political and disciplinary influence (because, in this case, of power inequalities and structural racism at the time and later). Looking at specific paths not just of intellectuals but of agents ‘beyond the text’ may, we believe, be helpful in comprehending broader structures, norms, and phenomena. As Manchanda’s chapter attests, this can help to identify logics of contestation as much as domination, revealing the darkest parts of the history of our order.

Language What indicators should we use to plot the history of the international and its complex relation to ideas of time, space, and agency? The most common answer to this question is ‘language’, the way that actors define, narrate, and construct the international through written words and public speech acts. Yet our reliance on language is fraught with complications, not the least being the complex relationship between words and meanings, the complicated interplay between meanings and practices, the interpretive problems associated with using words as guides to motives, and the difficulties associated with translating meanings across diverse languages. Of all the factors implicated in writing and interpreting the history of the international, this receives the least explicit attention from our contributors. Yet it does feature in significant ways in particular chapters, and it is an issue of critical importance that we would be remiss not to address, however briefly, in this final chapter. When seeking to understand how historically located actors understood aspects of international relations it is common for scholars to use tell-​tale language—​often specific words—​ as a guide. This approach suffers from two problems, however. The first, which scholars are now well attuned to, is that words can, and commonly do, carry different meanings in different contexts. What the Ancient Greeks meant by ‘democracy’, and the normative assessments they made of it, differ from how modern liberals understand the word. And as Branch and Stockbruegger (Chapter 12) show, the way state, territory, and sovereignty have been understood across time and space varied greatly. Contemporary scholars who follow terminology historically are not only aware of this issue, they see it as an advantage. A good example is Martha Finnemore’s study of intervention in world politics. Rather than formulate an abstract definition of intervention and then operationalize it empirically, Finnemore focuses on ‘activities that participants [in real world politics] describe as intervention and ask inductively, What is it?’ (2013, 10). In other words, her goal is to excavate the varied, historically specific meanings that have attached to ‘intervention’. This leaves a second, arguably more challenging, problem unattended, however. Just as the meanings that attach to words can vary over time, similar meanings can inhere in different words. As Reus-​Smit argues elsewhere, actors can be talking and arguing about rights even when they are not using the specific term. Here meanings are to be found in forms of moral argument and political justification, not discrete words alone (Reus-​Smit 2013, 11). In this volume, Rosenboim and Tonooka (Chapter 35) show how the global and the international are best seen as systems of thought that channel abstract ideas about politics and space into concrete practices, institutions, and political relations. Despite the frequent use of these terms in theoretical tracts, historical texts, and political communication, the international and the global have

History and the International    737 been ambiguous and challenged categories, not always explicitly mentioned—​as the two authors discuss for the postcolonial decades—​yet implicitly referred to in multiple ways. Added to this complexity there is the equally complex interplay between meanings and practices. Indeed, all of what has been said previously reinforces Wittgenstein’s point that any attempt to understand meanings has to look beyond individual words to the word games in which they are embedded. Wittgenstein illustrated this with the use of the term ‘five slabs’ on a building site. In one context, these words might be an instruction: ‘get me five slabs’. In another context they might be part of a report: ‘I counted five slabs’ (Wittgenstein 2009, 34). And of course, on an Australian building site ‘five slabs’ might refer to pieces of concrete or packs of beer. While Wittgenstein’s argument here can be read narrowly, as endorsing the previous point about meanings inhering in wider linguistic constructions, his point is broader than this. The meaning of ‘five slabs’ on the building site is embedded not just in language but in social practices, the things builders do. This point is developed in the recent work of practice theorists in IR, who caution against an exclusive reliance on language as an indicator, or even generator, of meanings. Their work shows how meanings—​including values and norms—​very often evolve not through processes of linguistic construction, but through the practices actors undertake: the things they do (Adler and Pouliot 2011). For example, it is common today for states in the United Nations (UN) Security Council to abstain from votes. Yet in the UN Charter’s rules governing the Security Council, there is no such thing as an ‘abstention’: it is a voting status that has evolved through the practices of Council members, and through these practices it has evolved accepted normative standing. Two of our chapters engage this relation between language and practices in interesting, if divergent, ways. Dirk Moses (Chapter 20) asks whether if genocide was a term coined in the 1940s can we legitimately talk about genocidal practices much before then? The issue goes well beyond international law’s retroactivity or legal precedent here, speaking precisely to the very construction of meaning through practices. Interestingly, Moses also discusses how today’s international criminal law seems to be privileging the language of ‘atrocity prevention’ focusing specifically on crimes against humanity and war crimes and how this has made genocide more difficult to prove in courts. Does this mean, one might ask, that genocide was not present before the mid-​twentieth century or that it has disappeared from human practice today (neither of which seem plausible)? Eric Selbin (Chapter 26) calls for an approach that bridges the study of meanings in language and in practices, arguing that while academics debate the utility and boundaries of the term ‘revolution’, this seems almost beside the point when considering the greater picture. Indeed, billions of people around the world hear, use, and understand the term, both broadly and specifically, in ways that have meaning and can be used to make meaning in specific contexts. For Selbin, then, the goal for researchers should be to put in conversation the production of meaning in scholarly debates and in the practices of those engaged in, and whose lives are affected by, revolutions. Selbin’s position is that the tensions that may emerge from this confrontation can provide a productive space to recover the meanings of revolution. A third complication associated with a focus on language as an indicator of meaning concerns the methodologically challenging relation between words and motives. While this is barely touched upon by our contributors, it has figured prominently in debates among IR scholars about how one explains actors’ behaviour. On the one hand, the words actors use to justify their actions are sometimes seen as revealing their true motives. On the other hand, such claims are often rejected on the grounds that talk is cheap, and that often the words

738    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit actors invoke are just rhetoric: linguistic shields behind which their true motives lie. But as Quentin Skinner argues, both of these positions miss the point. Sometimes the language actors employ—​how they describe and justify their actions—​does reveal their animating motives. But even when it does not, language remains powerfully implicated in their actions. When actors use speech to justify their actions they are commonly appealing to ideas and values that already have normative standing in the social context in which they seek to act, and when their justifications are successful, language has played an important role in facilitating their actions (Skinner 2002,149–​155). If this is true, then rhetoric, far from being cheap talk, is a politically enabling linguistic craft. Finally, while the rhetorical use of language is the now object of much scholarly attention, how this functions, and how it can be interpreted, in different linguistic domains is seldom probed explicitly in English-​speaking IR scholarship, and to some extent in the international history literature as well. There is no doubt, as Lawson and Mulich (Chapter 6) remind us, that there is immense value in multi-​archival research, even if this is also immensely difficult. And it is obvious that speaking multiple languages is a decided advantage when undertaking comparative historical research. It allows us to move beyond the English-​speaking world (with, of course, all its variations) so that when we talk, for instance, about ‘big’ concepts such as ‘Empire’, we might be able to grasp variations in understandings of it (Bayly, Chapter 14). The relevance of linguistic knowledge for historical research is therefore twofold. First, it enables researchers to look at different contexts and, crucially, different sources. Second, it gives a stronger sense of what it is that specific individuals, or groups, meant when using certain words. Not only multiple languages may have something to tell on the emergence of specific ideas, but they can help in making sense of visions, concepts, and practices that change or that are in conflict one with another. This all having been said, though, as Bell argues in Chapter 7, even if speaking multiple languages the viability of comparing ideas across languages, especially when doing comparative contextual work, is not at all straightforward and has led to many scholarly disagreements. These challenges are amplified when it comes to the writing of global histories, or when looking at international relations from a global perspective. Here very few scholars—​including the most celebrated global historians—​command more than a small sample of relevant languages. Moreover, even the best work of this kind becomes ever more reliant on secondary sources, as well as translations of primary sources. Interestingly, this is an area where the challenges facing IR scholars and global historians have converged, and significant opportunities exist for dialogue about methodological strategies that can reconcile global approaches to the history of the international with persuasive recoveries of the meanings that inhere in diverse languages and practices.

Conclusion In engaging the relationship between history and international relations, both as temporal and social domains and fields of inquiry or disciplinary projects (History and IR), we have sought in this Handbook to differ from two existing approaches. The first is the long-​ standing practice of raking over the tensions between—​and incompatibilities of—​History and IR: their contrasting, and perhaps incommensurate, methodological, theoretical, conceptual, and stylistic commitments. This is well-​ploughed ground, and debates in this space

History and the International    739 have over time become ever more ritualized. The second is less a tendency than a new departure: the effort to identify, construct, and celebrate a burgeoning new sub-​field of IR, ‘Historical International Relations’. The focus of another recent handbook (Carvalho et al. 2021), this new wave of historical scholarship in IR represents one of the field’s most significant recent developments, one warranting sustained recognition, analysis, and engagement. Our project has been different, however. Without reengaging the identity politics and territorial disputes that have separated History and IR, we have sought to explore the complex ways that both historians and IR scholars have encountered and narrated the relationship between history and international relations. Decentering the international, we have asked our authors—​historians and IR scholars—​to engage the themes of modernity and granularity, and to write chapters that discuss one of four cross-​cutting foci: readings, practices, locales, and moments. The result, we believe, is a refreshing new perspective on the relationship between history and international relations, and the multiple ways—​contradictory and compatible—​that this relationship is comprehended, ways that do not map neatly onto the disciplinary divide between History and IR. This final chapter has recentred the international, but not by distilling a common conception from the diverse perspectives offered by our authors. Rather, we have sought to problematize this concept by examining, however briefly, the ways in which the meaning of the international has, over time, been conditioned by intersecting assumptions about time, space, agency, and language.

References Adler, E. and V. Pouliot, eds. 2011. International Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aron, R. 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Bull, H. and A. Watson, eds. 1984. The Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carvalho, B. D., J. C. Lopez, and H. Leira, eds. 2021. Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations. London: Routledge. Dunne, T. and C. Reus-​ Smit, eds. (2017). The Globalization of International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finnemore, M. 2013. The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Owens, P. and K. Rietzler, eds. 2021. Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reus-​Smit, C. 2013. Individual Rights and the Making of the International System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wight, M. 1966. ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ Diplomatic Investigations, eds. H. Butterfield and M. Wight, 17–​34. London: George Allen and Unwin. Wittgenstein, L. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number   Abraham, W.  478 Organization of American States  489, Abya Yala  494, 495 492–93 Acharya, A.  691–92 Pan-Americanism  486–88, 489 Achcar, G.  228–29 ‘re-imagining’ the Americas  492–94 Africa UN Economic Commission for Latin history of international relations, and  469– America 489–90 70, 479 ancient Greece  189–90, 402 kinship 477–78 ancient Near East slavery 475–77 diplomacy 189 state-system 470–72 Anderson, B.  312–13, 697 trade 472–74 Anderson, J.  505 warfare  472–73, 474–75 Anglo-American relations Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization financial governance  370–72 (AAPSO) 695 Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas  487 Agallon, N.  540 Arendt, H.  676, 685 Alikhani, A.  164 Argus 625 Alker, H.  440 aristocratic culture  443 Alliance for Progress  491 Arkhipov, V.  712–13 Alston, P.  270, 274 Asian-African Conference see Bandung Conference American Political Science Association (APSA) 411 Assassi, L.  372 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Association Internationale du Congo (AIC)  640 (APRA) 487 Atlantic Charter  679 Americas atrocity 277 Abya Yala  494, 495 diplomacy of atrocity  279–82 Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas reviving the diplomacy of atrocity  288–89 (ALBA) 493 see also genocide Australia Community of Latin American and Caribbean States  493–94 response to Indian Uprising  625–26 Free Trade Area of the Americas  493   globalizing the Americas  488–92 balance-of-power ‘Latin America’  485 limited war  442 La Vía Campesina  494 origins of balance-of-power modernity 494–95 politics 442–43

742   Index Bandung Conference  690–91 context 692 final communiqué  694 institutional effects  694–97 legacies 697–98 meanings, purposes and importance  691–94 modernity 698–99 mythology 698–99 ‘spirit of Bandung’  697–99 ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’  218–19, 229–30 ‘civilization’ as a modern European construction 223–26 conflict between ‘civilization’ and culture 229 resurrection of the discourse of ‘civilization’ versus ‘barbarism’  227–29 standard of ‘civilization’  456, 653 battle histories  299–301 Becker, C.  263 Belich, J.  370–71 Bell, D.  450 Benton, L.  205–6 Berger, P.  249–50 Berlin and Hague Conferences Berlin Conference (1884–85)  631, 633–34 Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907)  631, 634–36 humanitarian and universalist approach 639 non-Western actors, role of  640–41 private actors and public opinion  640 purposes and impacts of the conferences 633–36 role of the US  640 similarities between the conferences 639–41 Berman, N.  646 Bevir, M.  96 Bhabha, H.K.  128–29 Blaine, J.  486 Bleiker, R.  165 Bob, C.  269 Bolívar, S.  484, 574–75 Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) 493 Bosanquet, B. liberal internationalism, and  51–53

Bourdieu, P.  257–58 Bowman, I.  54 Bretton Woods system  366–67 Brown, W.  242 Bull, H.  469–70, 730   Carey, H.  341–43 Carr, E.H.  39–40, 57 Casanova, J.  249–50, 251 Cassirer, E.  439–41 Castro, F.  713 Césaire, A.  227 Chakrabarty, D.  128–29 Cheah, P.  448–49 China 220–21 Bandung Conference, and  701 international thought  158–59, 162–63, 223 state formation  501–2 chronofetishism 68 Churchill, W.  679–80 Citino, R.  298, 299 ‘civilization’, see ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’ ‘classical’ realism  41 Clausewitz, K. von  298–99 Clay, H.  484 Cold War modernity 710 narratives of  706–10 ‘colonial discourse analysis’  128–29 communal mind  51 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)  493–94 Condillac, A. de  448 Confucianism 397–98 Congress of Vienna  587–88, 597 abolition of slavery  594 great power peace  589–90 IR scholarship on  588–89 liberal order  590–91 socio-cultural environment  596–97 women 596 Constantinople, fall of  531 ‘accommodation and resistance’  532–36 international dialogue and cooperation 536–39 role of local issues and national agendas in Christian response  532

Index  743 tension between religious allegiance and economic and political interests  532–36, 540–41 contractual international law  460–61, 462, 463 Correlates of War (CoW)  295–96 Cox, R.  39 Cuban Missile Crisis  706 control, safety, and luck  710–14 narratives of  714–15 ‘nuclear learning’  710 theories of nuclear war-avoidance  710 cultural genocide  283 culture conflict between civilization and culture 229 Cunha, A.M.  336 Curtis, L.  140, 627   Da Silva, D.F.  242 Daut, M.  582–83 Davis, A.  100 Davis, K.  395 decolonization  238–39, 308, 692–99 Haitian Revolution, and  578 international economic order, and  489–92 religion 251–52 De Goede, M.  372–73 democracy realism 44 Denison, W.  625 dependency theory  490 development 348 interdependence between the development regimes and the IR regimes  357–58 postwar period  350 socialist countries’ visions of development 353–54 the 1970s  357 US visions of development  351–52 Western / European development  352–53 Dilley, A.  370–71 Dillon, M.  257 diplomacy 188 ancient world  189–92 Early Modern era  195–97 French Revolution  197–98 Middle Ages  192–93

Modern Era  198–99 preliterate societies  188–89 Renaissance 193–95 resident embassies  193–94, 195 disciplinary history  99–100 Donnelly, J.  272 Du Bois, W.E.B  240–42, 648 global colour line  241 letter to Wilson  239–40 Duroselle, J.-B.  146–47 Dyer, R.  623   Eagleton, T.  229 Early Modern era diplomacy 195–97 East Asia  500 absence of war  504 dynastic transitions  507, 508t granularity 505–10 modernity 501–5 patterns of war  505–10 state formation  501–5 East India Company  203–4, 322–23, 337, 620, 621 Ebrey, P.  502 Edelman, L.  119 eighteenth century  439–41, 560 balance-of-power and limited war  442 disputes over commercial society  446–48 origins of balance-of-power politics 442–43 ‘perpetual peace’  448–50 revolutionary action  450–51 scepticism as the stimulus of balance-of-power 443–44 Vattel and scepticism  444–46 Eisenstadt, S.N.  254–55 Elden, S.  178–79 empire  98–99, 202, 203, 236, 462, 516–17 ‘boomerang’ effects of imperialism  206 British Empire  624–27 Congress of Vienna  593–95 Eurocentrism 207 imperial systems  204–5 IR discipline  100, 130–32 jurisdiction 321–24 protection, politics of  324–26

744   Index empire (cont.) ‘relational’ conception of empire  209–12 ‘re-turn’ to empire  202–3 standard of ‘civilization’  225–26 empire history  98–99 Engberg-Pedersen, A.  300–1 English School  8, 25, 84–85, 145–46, 412–13, 549 Enloe, C.  521 Eslava, L.  696 ethnonationalism 612–14 ‘Eurocentric big bang theory of world politics’ 415–16   fascism 43 Faysal I  665, 666–67 federalism  55–56, 57 fetials 190–91 Fichte, J.G.  448 Figueira, D.  440 filibusters 485 financial governance  363–64, 374 Anglo-American relations  370–72 Bretton Woods system  366–67 evolution of transnational governance organizations 367–69 gender 372–74 informal social institutions  369–70, 374 international standards  369 origins of international cooperation 365–66 public-sector governance arrangements 364–65 Finnemore, M.  736–37 First World War (WWI)  646–47, 652–53, 654 battle between forms of ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ 648–49 justifications for war  654–55 ‘war guilt’ question  143 see also Versailles Treaty Follett, M.P.  53 Foran, J.  387 Foreign Affairs 241 Forrester, K.  95–96 Frederick II  564–65, 567, 568, 569–70 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)  493 free trade-versus-neomercantilism debate 344–45

decentralized nature of neomercantilism  341, 344–45 global reach of free trade thought  335–38 neomercantilist reaction to free trade thought 338–44 French Revolution diplomacy 197–98 Haitian Revolution, and  579 Freund, E.  655 Fukuyama, F.  120, 433   Gandhi, M.  430, 624 Gellner, E.  311–12 gender 111–12 de-masculinizing histories  114–16 exclusion of women and feminism in the study of IR  112–14 financial governance  372–74 Haitian revolution  577 histories of the state and histories of gender 116–17 problematizing history  118–20 ‘right side of history’ and ‘wrong side of history’ 120–22 role of women in conceptualizing and creating the international  521 general will  51 genocide 277 ‘crime of crimes’  287, 288–89 cultural genocide  283 diplomacy of genocide  285–88, 289 exclusion of political groups  283 foundations of the new diplomacy  282–84 intervention 286 limitations of the UNGC  284–85 political and non-political categories  278 Responsibility to Protect norm  286 Secretariat Draft convention (1947)  283 struggle for post-genocide recognition 286–89 UN definition  284 see also atrocity Germain, R.  40 Getachew, A.  99 Gilly, A.  379 Gilman, N.  239, 412 Gilmore, R.W.  234 global history  79, 130–31, 156, 418

Index  745 empire, and  204, 324 flows and connectivity  82 gaps in the scholarship  83 globalization and modernity  81 Peace of Westphalia, and  551–52 regional histories  82 space and scale  81–82 spread of ideas  83 Goldstone, J.  382 Gong, G.  456 Gootenberg, P.  336–37 Gramsci, A.  385–86 granularity  4–6, 12–14, 723–24 development 358 East Asia  505–10 human rights  262–63, 268–73, 274 intellectual history  97 intersection between modernity and granularity 14 relationship between IH and IR  137–38 religion 254–56 ‘re-turn’ to empire  205–9 revolution 381–82 Revolutions of 1848  607 Second World War  685 Sykes–Picot agreement  670–71 ‘great divergence’  81 ‘Great Power’ System  562–63 Grotius, H.  85–86, 322, 328, 444 Grovogui, S.  131 Guha, R.  126–27 Guilhot, N.  44–45   Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907) see Berlin and Hague Conferences Haitian Revolution  296–97, 594–95 consequences 574–75 ‘counter-plantation system’  576–77 free people of colour  580–81 gender 577 intellectual culture  582–83 modernity  579–80, 581–82 political writing  582–83 postcolonialism 577–79 significance  573–74, 575 sovereignty 576 tradition of historiography  582 Hall, W.E.  225, 280–81

Hamilton, A.  338 Hartog, F.  647–48 Hayek, F. von ideas of global order  56–59 Heidegger, M.  439–40, 441 heralds 189–90 Herodotus 27 Hinsley, F. H.  25–26 hinterland states  472 historical apocalypse  45 historical sociology in international relations (HSIR)  63–64, 73–74 comparative exercises  71–73 Eurocentric problem  67–68 granularity 65 internalism 69–70 methodology in pedagogy  71–73 methodology in research  67–70 modernity 65 relevant specificities  65–67 uneven and combined development 66–67 ‘historicist’ realism  39–41 Hobbes, T.  28, 29, 30–31 Hobhouse, L. T.  52–53 Hobson, J.  67–68, 415–16 Hoffmann, S.  143–44, 295 Holocaust  300–1, 680 see also genocide Holsti, K.  590 Hont, I.  447–48 Hopgood, S.  267–68 Hôtel Majestic  140–41 Howard, M.  300 ‘humanitarian intervention’  280–81 human rights  262, 273–74, 682 actors 270–71 definitions 269–70 demise of human rights  267–68 different historical narratives  264–68 geography 271–72 granularity  262–63, 268–73, 274 long (or short) history of progress  264–66 modernity  262–63, 274 relevance of historiography  263–64 shadow side of rights  266–67 timescales 272–73 Hume, D.  447

746   Index Huntington, S.  227–28, 433 Husayn, Sharif  662–63, 671   Ibrahim II  537–38 ‘ideologies of progress’  523 Ikenberry, G.  591 imperialism and the ‘international’  516–17 see also empire Indian Uprising  617–18, 627–28 Australian response to the Uprising  625–26 consequences of  623–24 differentiated understandings of modernity generated by the colonial experience  624, 627 divide and rule strategies  620, 621 levels of violence  622, 623 ‘martial races’  623, 624–25 native troops, use of  621 numbers killed  622–23 origins and context  620–22, 627 reorganization and thinking of the British empire  624–25, 626–27 support of the Princely States  622 inequalities of wealth and income  655 Institut de Droit International 637–38 Institute of International Finance (IIF) 368–69 intellectual history  103 disciplinary history  99–100 empire history  98–99 global history  156–57 granularity 97 marginalized themes and expanding the scope of  101–3 modernity 98 source materials  103 trends and trajectories  98–101 interdependence between history and international relations  3, 6–9, 15–16 internalism 69–70 ‘international, the’ agents, role of  732–36 language 736–38 space, importance of  729–32 time, relations with  724–29 International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) 368–69

‘international’ and ‘global’  513–15, 523–24 contemporary theories  520–21 continuity and change  521–22 future research  524 modernity 522–23 international conferences  697, 700 international law, birth of the discipline of 637–38 International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA)  368–69 international thought  98–101, 155–56 benefits of a global vision  156–57 concept-centred approach  160 global sources  157–61 strategies to connect the premodern ‘global’ and modern ‘international’ 161–65 true ‘global’ study of  165–66 interpolity law  320–21, 330 interpolity zones  329–30 jurisdiction 321–24 possession 321 protection  321, 324–26 protocol 321 regulation of violence  321, 326–29 Ishay, M.  264–65, 269, 272 Israel, J.  451   James, C.L.R.  296–97 Japan state formation  502, 503 Jobson, R.  474 Johnson, J.T.  442 Joll, J.  650 jurisdiction interpolity law  321–24   Kant, I.  25–26, 31, 53, 60, 448–50 Kardorff, W. von  342 Kaunitz-Rittberg, A. von  565, 566, 567–68 Kedourie, E.  311–12 Kelley, L.  504–5, 509 Kerber, L.  273 Keynes, J.M.  650–51 Kim, S.J.  507 kinship 477–78 Kissinger, H.  440, 443 Klu Klux Klan (KKK)  238–39

Index  747 Korea state formation  502 Koskenniemi, M.  443 Krasner, S.  414 Krüger, P.  147   Labelle, M.  237 las Casas, B. de  279 ‘Latin America’  485 see also Americas La Vía Campesina  494 Lawson, G.  384, 387, 592–93 League of Nations  53, 309–10, 315, 487–88, 515–17 Economic and Financial Committees  366 Lebanon 236–37 Lebow, N.  613, 708–9 Leclerc, General  578, 579, 581 Lee, K.  507–9 Lehti, M.  426, 435 Lemkin, R.  282, 283 Lenin, V.  238–39 liberal internationalism  49–51, 53, 59–60 debates over the possibilities of international government  51–53 development of  50 Hayek and ideas of global order  56–59 League of Nations, and  53 Mitrany’s functional approach  55–56, 59 progressive form of  49, 50 liberalism 49–50 Congress of Vienna, and  591 ‘embedded liberalism’  366–67 free trade, and  335–38 globalism, and  519 imperialism, and  98–99 realism, and  44–45 Revolutions of 1848  608–9 liberty 30 List, F.  338–39 Listians 339–41 Loew, L.  233, 237–38 Lomellino, A.  534 long nineteenth century  454, 462–63 contractual international law  460–61, 462, 463 emergence of a system of states 455–56

expansion of the international system of states  456–58, 462 multilateralism  460, 461–62, 463 rise of a great power system  458–60 Love, H.  118–19 Lustick, I.  144 Lynn, J.  298–99   Machiavelli, N.  28–30, 31 Maier, C.  145 Maiolo, J.  143 mandate system  236–38, 664–55 Mani, L.  127–28 ‘Manifest Destiny’  484–85 Manoilescu, M.  340–41 Mantena, K.  99 Mantua 537–38 Martens, F.  281 Maza, S.  296 McLuhan, M.  519 McMahon, H.  662–63, 671 McMillan, K.  591 McNamara, R.  710–13 McQueen, A.  45 Mearsheimer, J.  37–38 Mehmed II, Sultan  532–34, 535 ‘metastate’ 520 Mexican Revolution  487 MFN clause  461–62 Middle Ages diplomacy 192–93 Mignolo, W.  230 military historiography  294, 298–99 Milward, J.  506, 509 Minotto, G.  535 Mitrany, D.  518 functional approach  55–56, 59 modern international system origins of  21–22, 23, 24–33 spatialities and temporalities  22–23 system of inclusions and exclusions  22–23, 27–28 modernity  3–4, 5–6, 9–12, 723–24 alternative metahistorical narratives  417–19 Americas 494–95 Bandung Conference  698–99 coloniality, and  610 cultural understanding of  547

748   Index modernity (cont.) development  348–50, 358–59 differentiated understandings of modernity generated by the colonial experience  624, 627 early modernity  548 East Asia  501–5 ‘emergence of the modern state sovereignty’ literature 414–16 ‘global early modern’  609–10 ‘globalized late modernity’  612, 614 Haitian revolution  579–80, 581–82 high modernity  548 human rights  262–63, 274 institutional approach to  547 intellectual history  98 ‘international’ and ‘global’  522–23 intersection between modernity and granularity 14 ‘logic of confluence’  610–11 ‘modernization theory’ trap  411–13 realism, and  42–44 relationship between IH and IR  137–38 religion  249–50, 254–55 ‘re-turn’ to empire  203–5 revolution 380–81 Revolutions of 1848  611 Second World War  677–78, 684–85 Sykes–Picot agreement  667–70 timing modernity  10–11 Morefield, J.  99 Morgenthau, H.  40, 43, 45, 57–58, 609, 708 Moses, W.  102 most-favoured nation (MFN) clause 461–62 Moyn, S.  95–96, 267, 269–70 multilateralism  460, 461–62, 463, 488 narratives 425–26 dominant narrative  425–26 Nasser, G.A.  693 nationalism 306 evolution of nationalism  311–13 legacy of Western hegemony  307–10 nationalism and the development of international society  313–16 nature and content of nationalist thought 316–18

Nayak, M.  386 Nehru, J.  624, 692–93 neo-liberalism  49, 50–51, 336 neomercantilism see free trade-versusneomercantilism debate New International Economic Order (NIEO)  355–56, 490–91, 518–19 nomadic societies  401–2 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)  432, 491, 695–96 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 430–31 Norton, M.  209–10 nuclear war  45, 705–6 lessons to be learnt  715 see also Cold War; Cuban Missile Crisis ‘nursery history’  300 Nyerere, J.  309   Oedipus 715 Okubo Toshimichi  343–44 Organization of American States (OAS)  489, 492–93 Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) 491 Orientalism  126, 296–97, 428 Osterhammel, J.  609–10 Owens, P.  101, 113   Palmerston, H.J.T.  226 Panama Congress  484–85 Pan-Americanism  486–88, 489 partition 26–27 Pasha, M.  163 Peace of Utrecht (1713)  443 Peers, D.  622–23 Pelham-Holles, T.  565–66, 567 Penn, W.  449 ‘perpetual peace’  448–50 Perry, E.  505 Peterson, V.S.  115–17 Phillips, A.  619 Philpott, D.  575–76 Pink Tide  493–94 Pius II, Pope  531, 537–38, 540 Plato 27–28

Index  749 Polverel, E.  580 Posner, E.  268, 271 possession interpolity law  321 postcolonial theory  125–26, 132, 618–19 construction of bodies of knowledge and who is the subject of history  126–29 construction of bodies of knowledge and who is the subject of IR  132 Prakash, G.  623 preliterate societies diplomacy 188–89 premodern world  395, 404–5 complexity 400–2 localism 398–400 religion 396–98 similarities to the present  402–3 principalities 29–30 protection interpolity law  321, 324–26 protectionism see free trade-versusneomercantilism debate protocol interpolity law  321   race and racism  233 avenues for future research  244–45 definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’  234–35 Du Bois, W.E.B  240–42 elision of race in IR  242–43, 245 hierarchy of races  428 mandate system  236–38 ‘modernity’ 239 racialization 234 ‘responsibility to protect’  236–37 ‘trusteeship’ 236–37 war and racial identities  301–3 Wilsonianism  235–37, 238–40 Rae, J.  343 Ranade, M.G.  340 Ranke, L. von  138 realism  7, 35–36, 46, 57–58, 649–50 ‘classical’ realism  41 democracy 44 historical apocalypse  45 historical sociology, and  68 ‘historicist’ realism  39–41

liberalism, and  44–45 modernity, and  42–44 structural realism  36–38 regulation of violence interpolity law  321, 326–29 religion 258–59 alleged demise of religion  251 decolonization 251–52 founding mythology of modernity  249–50 granularity 254–56 ‘multiple modernities’  254–55 post-Cold War ‘resurgence’  252–54 practices 256–58 premodern world  396–98 secularism 249–50 ‘secularism studies’  253–54 Weberianism 254–55 Renaissance diplomacy 193–95 Rengger, N.  160 resident embassies  193–94, 195 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm  236–37, 286 Reus-Smit, C.  97 revolution 379–80 ‘Age of Revolutions’  380 Congress of Vienna  592–93 definitions of  386–87 eighteenth century  450–51 generational scholarship  382–83 granularity 381–82 ‘little revolutionary age’  384–85 modernity 380–81 multiplicities 387–88 people’s narratives  381–82, 383–85, 386, 388 Revolutions of 1848  602, 614 ‘death blows’ to revolution in 1849  606 Europe-wide movement for civil and political citizenship  602–3 fall and winter, events in  605 granularity 607 international relations dimension  606–7 modernity 611 nationalism  608–9, 611–12 nationalization 611–12 origins 603 spring, events in  604–5 summer, events in  605

750   Index Rietzler, K.  101 Romans diplomacy 190–92 Roosevelt, F.  679–80 Rorke’s Drift  302–3 Rosch, F.  597 Rosenthal, J.-L.  506–7 Rostow, W.  351, 411 Roy, R.  337 Runciman, S.  531 Rwanda 287–88   Said, E.  126, 428 Sandinista Revolution  491 San Francisco Conference (1945)  680–81 Sarkar, B.K.  162 Sastroamidjojo, A.  693 sati, abolition of  127–28 Sauer, F.  713 savannah states  471–72, 478 Savitsky, V.  712 Schmidt, B.  100 Schmitt, C.  41 Schroeder, P.  7, 147–49, 590 Schweller, R.  37 Scott, J.  115 Second World War (WWII) convergence of regional international systems 677 global moments  676 granularity 685 legacies of  683–84 modernity  677–78, 684–85 moment of international transformation 678–80 secularism 249–50 ‘secularism studies’  253–54 selection bias  417, 507 Seth, M.  504 Seven Years’ War  571 advent of war  566–70 diplomatic prelude  563–66 ‘first move advantage’  571 setting 562–63 ‘windows of opportunity’  571 Shahi, D.  164 Shilliam, R.  131–32, 594 Sikkink, K.  270–71, 272

Silk Roads  399 Siu Tchoan Pao  162 Skinner, Q.  96, 737–38 slavery abolition of  323–24, 594 Africa 475–77 Slobodian, Q.  56, 58 Sluga, G.  595, 596 Smith, A.  447 Smith, N.  117 ‘social imaginary’  524 Sophocles 715 Sorel, A.  138 sovereignty  455, 575–76 critiques and avenues for future research  180–82 Haitian revolution  576 literature on  176–78 Peace of Westphalia  546 racialized process  576 uneven nature  320 Spengler, O.  429 Stalin, J.  679–80 standard of ‘civilization’  456, 653 state capacity  501, 502 critiques and avenues for future research 180–82 literature on state formation  174–76 structural realism  14, 36–38, 68 Sugimoto, M.  503 Sukarno, President  693 Suprinyak, C.E.  336 Swain, D.  503 Sykes–Picot agreement  660 competing influences on the interwar territorial settlement  664–67 ‘Eastern Question’ and European imperial visions 660–64 granularity and perspective  670–71 map  660, 661f modernity and the emergence of the nation-state 667–70 publication of  664   Tadjbakhsh, S.  163, 164 Talleyrand, C.M.  314 Tan, S.S.  691–92 Taylor, A.J.P.  7, 146

Index  751 Temperley, H.  142 tempocentrism 68 territory critiques and avenues for future research 180–82 literature on  178–80 Thirty Years’ War  545 see also Westphalia, Peace of Thucydides  27, 138, 402, 707 Tianxia 158–59 Tickner, J.A.  112, 113 Todd, D.  336 Todorov, T.  228–29 Toynbee, A.  141 Trachtenberg, M.  148–49 trade Africa 472–74 see also free trade-versus-neomercantilism debate Trouillot, M.-R.  296–97, 576–77 truces 327–28 True, J.  112, 113 Truman, H.  431 ‘trusteeship’ 236–37 Tuck, R.  444 Tucker, J.  447–48   United Nations (UN)  489, 680–83, 685 aims of  681 Charter 681–82 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) 489–90 humanitarian intervention  682 human rights  682 origins of  679–80 veto question  681–82 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)  490–91 Group of 77  310, 355–56 United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of Genocide (UNGC) limitations of the UNGC  284–85   Vastey, Baron de  582–83 Vattel, E. de  441, 442, 444, 446 ‘just war’ scepticism  445–46 linguistic scepticism  445 religious scepticism  444–45

Versailles Treaty  646, 651 Vick, B.  596–97 Vitalis, R.  100, 130 Voltaire 223–24 von Glahn, R.  502   Wallerstein, I.  470 Walthall, A.  502 Waltz, K.  36–38 war 292–93 Africa  472–73, 474–75 battle histories  299–301 East Asia, patterns of war in  505–10 historiography  294, 296–97 history  293, 295–96 knowledge about war  294–95 literature on  293 military historiography  294, 298–99 racial identities, and  301–3 ‘war guilt’ question  143 Washington Consensus  492 Watson, A.  469–70, 730 Watt, D.C.  146 Weber, C.  121 Weber, M.  252–53, 254–55, 651, 652 Webster, C.  142–43 ‘West’, the  424–25 ‘civilizational West’ narrative  427–30 conceptualizing the West  425–26 ‘fragmenting West’ narrative  433–35 ‘liberal West’ narrative  430–32 relationship between the West and modernity 436 tensions in the narratives of the West 435–36 Westad, A.  350 ‘Western Christiandom’  28–29 Westphalia, Peace of  415, 544–45 contesting the ‘myth’ of Westphalia  549–51 context and core features  545–46 diversity regimes  552, 553–55 gateway to modernity, as  547–49 global historical significance  551–52, 555–56 IR debates on historical significance  546–51 legitimation crises  552, 553 multipolarity 555 Thirty Years’ War and the general crises of the seventeenth century  552

752   Index Wight, M.  21, 24–25, 27, 28–29, 31–32, 33 Williamson, J.  492 Wilson, W.  235–37, 238–40, 309–10, 314, 315, 648, 727 Wittgenstein, L.  737 Wong, R.  506–7 Woodside, A.  501 Wright, R.  697–98

WWI see First World War WWII see Second World War   Yan Fu  337–38   Zhao Tingyang  163 Zimmern, A.  141, 142 Žižek, S.  228–29