Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations 0791463230, 9780791463239, 0791463249, 9780791463246

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SUNY series in Global Politics

James N. Rosenau, editor

Imperialism and Internationalism the Discipline o f International Relations

Edited By David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

State University o f New York Press

Published by State University o f N ew York Press, Albany © 2005 State University o f N ew York A ll rights reserved Printed in the United States o f America N o part o f this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. N o part o f this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing o f the publisher. For information, address State University o f N ew York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, N Y 12207 Production by Michael Haggett Marketing by Susan M . Petrie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication D ata Imperialism and internationalism in the discipline o f international relations / edited by David Long and Brian C. Schmidt. p. cm. — (SU NY series in global politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6323-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Internationalism. 2. Imperialism— Philosophy. 3. International relations— History— 20th century. I. Long, David, 1962- II. Schmidt, Brian C., 1 9 6 6 - III. Series. JZ1308.I46 2005 325'.32— dc22

2004029289 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

T h is book is dedicated to our children, A m anda and Sara &c Katy and Chris, w ho keep us focused on the future even as w e delve into the past.

Contents

Preface Introduction D avid Long and Brian C. Schmidt

Chapter 1

Francis Lieber, Imperialism, and Internationalism D avid Clinton

Chapter 2

Paul S. Reinsch and the Study o f Imperialism and Internationalism Brian C. Schmidt

Chapter 3

Paternalism and the Internationalization of Imperialism: J. A. Hobson on the International Government o f the “Lower Races” D avid Long

Chapter 4

“A Liberal in a Muddle”: Alfred Zimmern on Nationality, Internationality, and Commonwealth Jeanne Morefield

Chapter 5

Fabian Paternalism and Radical Dissent: Leonard W oolf’s Theory o f Economic Imperialism Peter Wilson

Chapter 6

Internationalism and the Promise o f Science Jan-Stefan Fritz

C o ntents

Vlll

Chapter 7

Birth o f aDiscipline Robert Vitalis

159

References

183

Contributors

203

SUNY Series in Global Politics

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Index

209

Preface

T his book reflects our common scholarly interest in the disciplinary history of International Relations (IR). As a result o f the w ork that we have previously completed on the history o f the field, we both share the sense that IR as an aca­ demic enterprise seriously undervalues the study o f its own history. A t one level, this is not surprising given the construction o f the discipline as a social science wherein disciplinary history becomes little more than a catalogue of past errors and omissions. There is certainly an abundant literature that chron­ icles the history o f the field w ith the explicit aim o f either noting particular failures or advancing one agenda or another. Yet we believe that many o f these accounts fail to reconstruct the actual disciplinary history o f International Relations. T h e aim o f this volume is to reconstruct in detail some o f the for­ mative episodes o f the early disciplinary history o f the field. W ithin much of the so-called historical literature, there often appears to be more emphasis placed on the present contours o f the field than on recovering its institutional history. Perhaps this is one o f the reasons why the same set o f assumptions about how the field has developed are repeated over and over again. As a result o f the recent upsurge o f interest in the history of IR , we are learning that many o f the commonly held assumptions about the development o f the field are actually incorrect. A number o f articles and books have been w ritten that collectively challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the his­ tory o f the field. This volume is a contribution to what we consider to be a grow­ ing and increasingly sophisticated scholarly conversation not only about the origins o f IR but the character o f theory and theoretical development. C oncom itant w ith the latest interest in various dimensions o f the field’s past has been a growing sophistication in the m anner in which international relations scholars have approached the task o f writing disciplinary history. Greater atten­ tion to historiographical issues on the part o f the newest cohort o f disciplinary IX

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historians has helped to enrich our understanding o f the history o f the field. A t the same time, recent work has helped to legitimate disciplinary history as an im portant area o f research activity. This book is most directly a product o f the collective effort on the part o f the authors and editors who have each played an im portant role in w hat D uncan Bell has described as the “dawn o f a historiographical turn.” W e are particularly grateful to our contributors— David C linton, Jan-Stefan Fritz, Jeanne M orefield, Robert Vitalis, and Peter W ilson— for the quality o f their essays, their professionalism, and their dedication to this project. T h e book has benefited from the input o f a num ber o f other scholars working in the area o f disciplinary history and we are grateful to all o f you. M any o f the chapters in this book were first presented at the Annual Convention o f the International Studies Association held in Los Angeles, California, in M arch 2000. W e would like to thank those who asked questions and provided comments at the panel on Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline o f International Relations. W e also thank two anonymous referees w ho gave us constructive com m entary and im portant suggestions for improvements in the text. W e would like to thank the editorial staff at the State University o f New York Press. M ichael Rinella expressed strong interest in the project from the beginning and we thank him for his assistance and patience throughout the process o f completing the book. W e are very pleased that this book appears in the Global Politics series and we are grateful to James N . Rosenau, Series Editor, for his support and encouragement. W e would each like to acknowl­ edge and thank our respective families for their help and support during the time we were working on this book. M aterial from David C linton’s chapter is reprinted w ith permission o f Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

This volume is a contributions to the growing body o f literature on the discipli­ nary history o f International Relations (IR ).1 T h e underlying goal o f disci­ plinary history is to reconstruct in detail the formative episodes o f IR as an academic discipline. T he chapters that follow examine the work o f a number o f the seminal, though now largely unread, individuals on either side o f the A dantic w ho were responsible for helping to carve out a discrete academic field o f inquiry devoted to the study o f international politics. T he aim o f this volume is not simply to recover some aspects o f the official origins o f IR. Rather, it is to identify and discuss the central themes o f the early conversation about inter­ national relations that were incorporated into the field when it, like many of the other social sciences, began to take an institutionalized form in the late nineteenth and early tw entieth century. T h e critical purpose o f investigating this period o f disciplinary history is to challenge some o f the commonly held assumptions about the early history o f IR that continue to inform the present identity o f the field. By rereading the work o f the field’s forgotten predecessors and reconstructing the key themes that emerge from this work, this book provides a revisionist account o f the emergence o f IR. O n the basis o f our collective research, we argue that the dual themes of imperialism and internationalism were param ount when the field began to take a recognizable form at the beginning o f the tw entieth century. In particular, it was dynamic interaction between imperialism and internationalism and not the much discussed realist-idealist debate that initially drove international theory. In this introduction, we first consider the recent developments in the historio­ graphy o f IR . T h en we set out the centrality and significance o f imperialism and internationalism in international politics, and specifically the place o f these dual concepts in the early IR scholarship. Finally, we provide an overview o f the chapters that follow, and draw some conclusions for contemporary scholarship. In this book, we argue th at the dual themes o f imperialism and interna­ tionalism provide a better framework for understanding the discursive evolution o f the field than does the host o f alternative ones. M ost importantly, imperialism 1

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and internationalism are not retrospective categories th at we have invented for interpreting the history o f the field in order to make some presentist claim about the current contours o f IR . Rather, on the basis o f our research, im peri­ alism and internationalism were determ ined to be two o f the constituent issues in terms o f which the field o f IR originally took form. T his means we should once and for all dispense w ith the outdated, anachronistic, and ideological arti­ fice o f the debate between idealists and realists as the dom inant framework for viewing and understanding the history o f the field. It is an especially appropriate tim e to recover the them es o f imperialism and internationalism since these themes are once again prom inent in the discourse and practice o f international relations. In particular, the discourse o f empire, regarding the global status and policies o f the U nited States as the world’s sole superpower, has regained salience in the popular conversations of the media as well as in the more critical view o f the neo-M arxist literature inspired by H ard t and N egri’s Empire (2000). Unlike the retrospective analyti­ cal categories o f idealism and realism th at cut off the interw ar scholarship from the postwar study o f international relations, the discourse about imperialism and internationalism has the potential to reconnect the development o f IR the­ ory with issues o f contemporary concern and saliency. Critically and theoretically in the extension o f postcolonial discourse and m ost recently and spectacularly in H ardt and N egri’s Empire, empire— and thus its relationship to imperialism and internationalism— is back on the academic agenda. In a more popular vein, imperialism and internationalism are being reinvented, often uncritically, in American and other W estern musings about the benefits and/or necessity for the reestablishment o f empire, such as recreating trust territories or the need for an American imperial role. T h e discourse o f empire is on the rise. W e submit that it is im portant for those involved in this conversation not to neg­ lect and forget the insights that an earlier generation o f IR scholars had on the twin phenom ena o f imperialism and internationalism. Forgetting would not only contribute to the general propensity to reinvent the wheel, but possibly lead to the same embarrassing mistakes that some o f our ancestors unknow ­ ingly made.

D is c ip l in a r y H is t o r y There has been a notable increase in both the quantity and quality o f literature on the intellectual history o f the social sciences in the last decade or so (Bender and Schorske 1998; Ross 1991). A fter years o f neglect, IR scholars have finally begun to follow this trend and are examining the intellectual history o f their scholarly enterprise in a more systematic fashion (Schm idt 2002b). T his is not to suggest that the field has previously been immune to disciplinary introspection. Indeed, when scholars have periodically focused on the “state o f the discipline,”

David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

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they have unavoidably felt compelled to com m ent on its historical develop­ ment. W e intentionally say “unavoidably” because as John D ryzek and Stephen Leonard have argued, in the social sciences generally, and political science specifically, there is “an essential link between disciplinary history and the actual practice o f inquiry” (1988: 1246). T his means that very often both challengers and defenders o f the status quo seek to write the history o f the field in a m anner that is necessarily linked to agendas for disciplinary identity. W hile such a link may have gone unnoticed in the past, the recent plethora o f work on the history o f political science clearly recognizes the connection between establishing the identity o f the field and presenting an image o f its history (D ryzek and Leonard 1988; Farr, Dryzek, and Leonard 1995; G unnell 1991). O ne possible explanation for why there has been such a paucity o f litera­ ture devoted specifically to the history o f IR and the root o f much o f the skep­ ticism that continues to be cast on the research agenda this volume advances derives from a presum ption that we already know the history. T his is repre­ sented in a conventional wisdom that chronicles the history of the field as a series o f phases— idealist, realist, behavioralist, neorealist, rationalist, constructivist— that are punctuated by a series o f “great debates” such as that between idealists and realists, and traditionalists and scientists (Banks 1986; Katzenstein et al. 1999; Lijphart 1974; M aghroori 1982). W ith respect to the orthodox story o f the field’s so-called “great debates,” O le Waever acknowledges that “there is no other established means o f telling the history o f the discipline” (1998: 715). Both Steve Sm ith (1995) and Kjell G oldm an (1996) recognize that the story o f the great debates provides the most dom inant self-image of the field. Yet as well as providing new insights and information regarding the disciplinary history o f IR , the most recent literature has cast doubt on the con­ ventional images o f the development o f the field (Kahler 1997; O ren 2000; Schm idt 1998a, 1998b, 2002b; Sm ith 1995; Vitalis 2000; Waever 1998; W ilson 1998). T his has especially been the case with respect to the interwar period o f the field’s history. W hile the conventional accounts o f the history o f IR have been fairly consistent in establishing an essential link between the interwar period on the one hand and an “idealist” or “utopian” paradigm on the other, the newest cohort o f disciplinary historians have systematically challenged such an interpretation. In an earlier contribution that helped to spark an interest in the history o f the field in general, and the interw ar period in particular, David L ong and Peter W ilson explained th at the impetus for their book Thinkers of the Twenty Years Crisis was the feeling “that the ‘idealists’ were not as naive in their assumptions, as simplistic in their analysis, nor as uniform in their out­ look, as the received wisdom suggests” (1995: vii). L ong and W ilson’s suspicion that the scholars o f the interw ar period had been grossly misrepresented has been widely confirmed by the m ost recent research on the disciplinary history o f IR (Ashw orth 1999, 2002; Baldwin 1995; Kahler 1997; O siander 1998;

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Schm idt 1998a, 1998b, 2002a; Thies 2002; W ilson 1998). M any o f those who have been dubbed “idealists” turn out, upon closer inspection, to be more sophisticated, complex, and hold positions at odds w ith the caricatures in IR ’s secondary literature. By carefully reconstructing the early disciplinary history of IR as a subfield o f Am erican political science, Schm idt’s influential book The Political Discourse of Anarchy (1998) revealed th at not only does the idealist or utopian label misrepresent the nature o f the conversation that was taking place after W orld W ar I, but that there was also a much greater degree o f con­ tinuity between the pre- and post-W orld W ar II study o f international politics than has been conventionally thought to be the case. Schm idt’s work as well as that o f a num ber o f other revisionist disciplinary historians has resulted in a serious challenge to w hat M iles Kahler (1997) has termed the “foundational m yth o f the field”; that is, the notion that a “great debate” took place in the 1930s and 1940s between the rival paradigms o f ide­ alism and realism. According to this “foundational m yth,” W orld W ar II repre­ sented a glaring anomaly to the interwar idealists’ vision o f a peaceful world order that eventually resulted in its replacement by the realist paradigm, which was superior in its ability to explain the persistent struggle for power am ong nations (Hollis and Sm ith 1990; Vasquez 1998). Kahler, however, argues that the ideas o f the interwar scholars have been seriously misrepresented, and he concludes that “international relations was not marked by a clear Kuhnian par­ adigm shift after 1945; the field remained heterogeneous and continued to include a liberal (or at least nonrealist) corps o f practitioners” (1997: 29). Peter W ilson claims that “in the sense o f a series o f exchanges between interlocutors holding opposing ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ points o f view, the first great debate never actually occurred” (1998: 1). Lucian A shw orth concurs w ith Kahler and W ilson, arguing, “although well known and often quoted as a watershed event in IR, there seems little evidence that the realist-idealist debate ever occurred at all in the form in which m odern IR writers suppose” (2002: 35). These new findings about the interwar period and the alleged great debate between “idealists” and “realists” are a source o f inspiration to the w ork under­ taken in this book. T h e first point to stress is that the latest discoveries about the history o f the field are based on detailed historical research. For too long disciplinary history has been regarded as som ething akin to an intellectual hobby; as something to do after the more serious and im portant research is completed. T his is yet another reason for the poor state o f our knowledge about the history o f the field. In order to understand the history o f IR and to correct the erroneous assumptions that have become regarded as essential truths, detailed research, like that done in any other area o f IR , is necessary. T he con­ tributors to this volume have engaged in extensive historical research and have gotten their hands dirty by reading texts, journals, memoirs, and other sources that have been standing dorm ant on library shelves.

David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

5

T he most recent historiographical literature has emphasized the point that the m anner in w hich the history o f the field is constructed matters greatly. Disciplinary history is rarely a neutral or im partial undertaking. Rather, it is often closely tied to intellectual struggles to determ ine and legitimate the con­ tem porary identity o f the field. T his insight helps to account for why the story o f interwar idealism and the first great debate continues to be so essential to the present identity o f the field (Thies 2002). T h e field derives a good deal o f its contem porary identity from the notion that steady scientific progress has been made ever since it shed its idealistic yearnings and embraced realism and science. Yet by establishing that interwar idealism and the first great debate are simply retrospectively constructed myths, new possibilities for understanding the identity o f the field become available. A critical history o f IR is'also a m ethod for recovering numerous theoret­ ical insights and ideas that have been forgotten in the institutional memory of the IR community. T h e tendency to “reinvent the wheel” time and time again and to proclaim som ething new that is actually deeply embedded in the dis­ cursive history o f the field is a consequence o f the less than adequate under­ standing that m ost students have o f the disciplinary history o f IR. W hen the prevailing framework for interpreting the history of IR is informed by the erro­ neous view that a great transform ation took place in the 1930s that resulted in realism eclipsing idealism, many o f the ideas and issues that were o f great con­ cern to the scholars discussed in this book are either unfairly discredited or assumed to belong to the dustbin o f history. Ashw orth, for example, remarks that “the construction o f a realist-idealist debate is im portant because it justi­ fies the marginalization o f liberal internationalism” (2002: 34). N ot only has liberal internationalism been marginalized, but so have other antecedent con­ versations; m ost importantly, the discourse on imperialism. By investigating various elements o f the field’s history that preceded W orld W ar II, conversa­ tions about topics such as internationalism , pluralism, public international unions (regimes), security, race, international cooperation, functionalism, inter­ dependence, and a host o f others have recently been discovered (Baldwin 1995; W ilde 1991; Kahler 1997; Little 1996; Long 1991; M urphy 1994; Navari 1989; O siander 1998; Schm idt 1998a, 1998b, 2002a; Vitalis 2000; W ilson 1998). T he prim ary justification for this volume o f essays on the early history of IR is simply th at we do not know this period very well. This is evident, for example, by lingering controversies over the extent to which there is a welldefined field or discipline o f IR that has a distinct identity (O lson and O n u f 1985; Palmer 1980; W right 1955); the degree to w hich the field is an exclu­ sively Am erican invention and characterized by American parochialism (Crawford and Jarvis 2001; H offm ann 1977; Sm ith 2000); and even about the exact date w hen the field or discipline can be said to have formally come into existence. T h e underlying explanation for why these types o f controversies

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continue to persist is that very little research has been done on the actual insti­ tutional history o f the field. T his, in turn, helps to account for the fact that almost everyone believes that the field did not come into existence until at least 1919. T he standard story o f the birth o f the field, often associated w ith the founding o f the w orld’s first C hair for the study o f international politics, in 1919 at the D epartm ent o f International Politics at the University College o f Wales, Aberystwyth, is characteristically described in terms o f a reaction to the horror o f W orld W ar I. This was the view E. H . C arr put forward in his influ­ ential work The Twenty Yean Crisis, 1919-1939 ([1939] 1964). As C arr explained, the science o f international politics “took its rise from a great and disastrous war; and the overwhelming purpose w hich dom inated and inspired the pioneers o f the new science was to obviate a recurrence o f this disease o f the international body politic” (1964: 8). T his widely accepted account o f the field’s origins has been repeated so many times in countless textbooks and “state of the field” articles that a clear link exists in m ost people’s m inds between W orld W ar I and the genesis o f the field or discipline o f IR . T he basic problem w ith the story that C arr helped to popularize is that it is not entirely accurate. In fact, like the pervasive notion th at a prevailing idealist paradigm dom inated the interwar study o f international politics, it is simply a m yth that a full-blown field or discipline o f IR came into existence in 1919 and that nothing o f the kind had previously existed. Carr, however, was not engaging in the task o f w riting a history o f the field, and difficulties are cre­ ated when his work is mistaken as an actual historical description o f the devel­ opm ent o f lR .2 As the considerations o f the w ork o f Lieber, H obson, DuBois, Reinsch, and the others in this volume dem onstrate, systematic international relations scholarship predates W orld W ar I, even if institutionally separate Departm ents or Chairs o f International Relations or Politics such as were founded at the London School o f Economics, Aberystwyth, and Oxford did not. Furthermore, as Robert Vitalis explains in his chapter, the field’s first journal— Journal o f Race Development— began publication in 1910.

T h e H is t o r io g r a p h y o f I R O ne o f the most significant problems in work on the history o f IR is that these histories have failed to address adequately the question o f how one should write a history o f the field. M uch o f the existing literature fails to display suf­ ficient theoretical and methodological sophistication in approaching the task o f providing an adequate account o f the disciplinary history o f IR (Schm idt 2002b; Waever 1998). T he tendency has been to chronicle the history o f IR as if a complete consensus existed on the essential dimensions o f the field’s evolu­ tion. In the absence o f any significant controversy concerning how the field has developed, there has been little or no attention devoted to historiographical

David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

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issues. O le Waever, after reviewing the literature on the history of IR , concurs w ith our general assessment. H e finds that the literature is “usually not based on systematic research or clear m ethods” and that it amounts to little more than “elegant restatements o f ‘common knowledge’ o f our past, implicitly assuming that any good practitioner can tell the history o f the discipline.” Waever con­ cludes that the field as a whole suffers, because “w ithout looking systematically at the past, we tend to reproduce myths such as the nature o f the idealists in the (alleged) first debate” (1998: 692). D uncan Bell (2001) has added his voice to those who have become dissatisfied w ith the historiography o f IR. Bell argues that mainstream IR has disregarded the essential point that “history, in its var­ ious manifestations, plays an essential, constitutive, role in shaping the present” (2001:116). T his has resulted, he argues, in “the same old story being unproblematically rehearsed and repeated.” T he problem, Bell claims, is that “the common understanding o f the discipline’s history and the actual evidence appear to be in stark contrast” (2001: 120). This is a point that all o f the con­ tributors to this volume fully endorse. Fortunately, the m ost recent work on the history o f the field is much more self-conscious about the theoretical and methodological issues that are involved in approaching the task o f providing an adequate account o f the his­ tory o f IR . There is a growing recognition that the m anner in w hich the his­ tory o f the field is reconstructed is almost as significant as the substantive account itself. Bell (2001) suggests that the latest work on the history o f IR denotes w hat he terms the “dawn o f a historiographical turn.” According to Bell, “[T ]he study o f the history o f political thought, as well as the intellectual history o f the discipline, is now taken far more seriously, studied more carefully and explicitly, and plays a greater role in shaping the theoretical debate, than in the past” (2001: 123). H e does point out, however, that these trends so far appear to be more pronounced in Europe than in the U nited States.3 Gerard H olden (2002) endorses the view that IR is experiencing a “his­ toriographical turn” and, following Kjell G oldm ann (1995), characterizes the type o f w ork undertaken in this book as representing a discrete subfield. According to G oldm ann, it is a subfield th at “reflects on the history, geography, identity, and self-legitimation o f the discipline itself” (H olden 2002: 253). W hile there are grounds for questioning w hether we have reached the point where we can establish that the historiography o f IR is a full-fledged subfield, H olden is, nevertheless, absolutely correct when he states that there are “some reassuringly ‘real’ theoretical issues at stake in disciplinary history, not least o f which are the questions o f how, and to w hat ends, it should be pursued” (2002: 254). A nd to reiterate one o f our main points, these “real theoretical issues” have generally not been addressed in the literature that examines the history of IR . Waever remarks, “[T ]hat the way the discipline usually reflects on its own development falls embarrassingly behind standards developed in sociology of science and historiography” (1998: 689). Exactly w hat standard or approach

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should be used to examine the history o f the field is certainly a contentious matter, but the im portant point is for those doing work in this area to begin to address these types o f issues. In this volume, no one single m ethod o f w riting history has been imposed on the contributors. W e have simply requested that each o f the authors be self-conscious about historiography and to address the issue o f how they are doing disciplinary history. W e believe th at such an effort will likely result in a more adequate understanding o f the history o f the field. T h e approach and focus o f this book is a challenge to the general and widely held assumption that the history o f the field can be explained by refer­ ence to a continuous tradition that reaches back to the writings o f Thucydides and extends forward to the present (Schm idt 1994, 1998b). IR scholars have, for a variety o f reasons, been more inclined to identify the progenitors o f the modern field w ith the writings o f classic political thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Kant, than w ith scholars such as Francis Lieber, Paul S. Reinsch, Alfred Zim m ern, and the others discussed in this book, who, for the most part, understood themselves to be affiliated w ith an institutionalized field o f academic inquiry. T here is a widespread conviction th at classical political thinkers and the traditions they supposedly embody are an integral part o f the field’s past and, therefore, are relevant for understanding the contem porary identity o f the field. O ne could argue th at this conviction has become institu­ tionalized in many o f the leading undergraduate texts. John G unnell (1991) has suggested that one explanation for this deeply embedded assumption stems from the widespread tendency to write the history of the field with the intention of conferring legitimacy on a contem porary research program. Disciplinary histories o f the field are replete w ith references to the idea th at there are epic traditions o f international thought that are relevant for understanding the con­ temporary identity o f the field (Bartelson 1996; D unne 1993; Schm idt 1994). These histories that attem pt to explain the development o f the field by postu­ lating the existence o f a “historical” tradition transm itted from the ancient past to the present are legitimating mechanisms that are often employed to validate present claims to knowledge. W hile we do not wish to convey the impression that the field is devoid o f any authentic traditions, or w ant to suggest that scholars should not study the classic texts o f international relations theory, we do, however, w ant to insist that the widespread practice o f treating an analyti­ cally constructed tradition as an actual historical tradition has inhibited our ability to understand the disciplinary history o f IR . Although discussions o f a tradition o f IR are widespread and, as Rob Walker (1993) has noted, far from monolithic, they tend to refer less to actual historical traditions, that is, self-constituted patterns o f conventional practice through which ideas are conveyed w ithin a recognizably established discursive framework, than to an analytical retrospective construction that largely is defined by present criteria and concerns. IR specialists have generally shown less interest in the actual tradition o f academic inquiry that they are a part o f

David Long and Brian C. Schmidt

than in the myriad o f retrospectively created traditions that animate the dis­ course in the field. W orse yet, these retrospectively constructed traditions are presented as if they represented a self-constituted tradition in the field, and serious problems in understanding the history o f IR result when the former is mistaken for, or presented as, the latter. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that such epic renditions o f the past divert attention from the actual academic prac­ tices and individuals who have contributed to the development and current identity o f the field. M any scholars appear to have a better knowledge of alleged “founding fathers” such as Thucydides or Machiavelli, than o f the work by a host o f individuals who directly contributed to the creation of an institu­ tionalized academic field o f international politics. O ur intention in this book is to direct attention toward those scholars who can legitimately be placed in an actual historical tradition o f academic inquiry th at continues to the present day. T his is, after all, the most relevant tradition for tracing the development of the field.

I m p e r ia l is m a n d I n t e r n a t io n a l is m in I n t e r n a t io n a l R e l a t io n s As we have noted, imperialism and internationalism served as two o f the per­ vasive themes during the early history o f the field. W h en IR first began to assume a recognizable identity at the beginning o f the tw entieth century, nationalism, imperialism, colonization, and various manifestations o f interna­ tionalism were all observable practices taking place in that realm o f activity that was increasingly demarcated as international relations. In an im portant, though largely overlooked, contribution to the disciplinary history o f IR , W illiam C. O lson and A. J. R. G room suggest “that a discipline o f international relations had its real beginnings in studies o f imperialism, not in world order, as has so often been suggested” (1991: 47). M ost o f the chapters in this book support O lson and G room ’s claim that imperialism represented an endogenous dim en­ sion o f the early-tw entieth-century disciplinary history o f IR . W e develop this thesis further and argue that imperialism and internationalism, not idealism and realism, were the dom inant themes when IR first began to take on the characteristics o f a professional field o f inquiry. T he book develops two arguments, one empirical and historical, and the second conceptual and theoretical. First, empirically, the pairing o f imperialism and internationalism provides a more authentic understanding o f the early his­ tory o f IR than the realism/idealism dichotomy. W e recognize that any such pairing o f “isms” is open to attack as a misrepresentation or overgeneralization o f w hat was actually occurring in international relations thinking at the time. Clearly, even if there were grand themes during this period, there were also many different currents in international relations theory, many o f w hich were

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contradictory. Nevertheless, implicitly or explicitly these themes were front and center for many IR scholars o f the time. Im perialism and internationalism ori­ ented much o f the interwar discussions o f international relations. In short, imperialism and internationalism are the key concepts for reconstructing the discipline o f IR during the early decades o f the tw entieth century, as we see in the chapters on individual authors th at follow. Second, we argue that the concepts o f imperialism and internationalism were more deeply embedded in the early discourse o f the field than post-W orld W ar II accounts have commonly recognized. T h e general understanding o f the relationship o f imperialism and internationalism and o f both to international politics has been cast in a specific way conditioned by the growth o f the IR dis­ cipline. C urrent IR scholarship sees imperialism and internationalism as either unconnected and marginal concepts or as conceptual opposites that constitute the upper and lower limits o f relations o f states in the international system. By contrast, many o f the authors considered in this volume viewed the concepts as intimately connected and as central to international politics, even for those who did view them as antinomies. T his volume, then, is a direct challenge to the current “presentist” interpretation (Schm idt 1998b) o f the relationship o f internationalism and imperialism as conceptual opposites in IR . T he chapters in this volume present evidence for the empirical argument. W e take on the second argument more explicitly in this introduction. First of all, we must consider the argum ent th at internationalism and imperialism are either unconnected or are conceptual opposites. In this view, imperialism denotes a hierarchical, often coercive, relationship that is the antithesis o f the political independence o f states that marks the fundam ental basis for inter­ national politics. Internationalism , by contrast, marks equality and harmonious cooperation among nations that go far beyond the estrangem ent o f the tradi­ tional diplomacy and power politics o f interstate relations. Considered in this way, imperialism and internationalism are not merely opposites but can be seen as the upper and lower discursive limits o f the practices o f sovereign states tra­ ditionally understood to constitute the focus for the IR discipline, w ithin which one finds the theoretical scope o f the schools o f realism, various forms o f institutionalism, and the early authors o f the English School. As the conceptual outer limits circumscribing international relations, the terms imperialism and internationalism have progressively disappeared from mainstream IR discourse in the later decades o f the tw entieth century. W hile imperialism and internationalism were subjects for discussion by such IR lum i­ naries as Carr, M orgenthau, and W altz, they became increasingly marginalized and dropped from IR textbooks. W h a t accounts for the disappearance o f im pe­ rialism and internationalism in IR? Certainly, the end o f the era o f formal empire in the course o f the process o f decolonization and the success of national self-determination movements shifted the discourse o f imperialism. O n the one hand, then, the anti-imperialists seemed to have won. O n the

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other, neo-M arxist critiques o f the capitalist world system, studies of neo­ imperialism, and more recently postcolonialism, suggested that imperialism had not ended w ith the end o f empire but rather had simply been transformed or simply transposed. N eo-M arxist and other critical analysts proliferated a bewildering range o f terms to reflect the changed character o f imperialism. W hile the term imperialism went out o f fashion in academic IR, so did the theo­ rizing on imperialism. M ost M arxist and critical analyses o f imperialism and its subsequent incarnations have thus been conducted outside the disciplinary boundaries o f IR .4 In the same period, the cold war context was hardly fertile ground for internationalism . T h e nuclear-tipped standoff between the U nited States and the U SSR prevented the operation o f the internationalist aspects o f the U nited Nations and paralyzed the Security Council. M ore generally, internationalist causes were buffeted by the com petition o f the rival universalist ideologies and the attem pts by each side to co-opt internationalist rhetoric and proposals. A t the same time, both the U nited States and USSR identified themselves as anti­ imperialist powers while accusing the other o f being imperialist. I f inter­ nationalism suffered from cynicism about its prospects, imperialism was an overused piece o f rhetorical hyperbole. Given the international context, it is hardly surprising that cold war international relations theory barely mentions either imperialism or internationalism by name except in a historical reference. W hile the international context m eant that the terms imperialism and internationalism were consigned to the dustbin o f IR theory, this was little more than a terminological disappearing trick. T h e discipline o f IR relied upon the concepts because the world was not simply the interaction o f functionally similar sovereign states, as cold war vintage realism suggested. T hough both imperialism and internationalism suffered rhetorical setbacks in political and academic discourse, the concepts themselves and the limits they expressed, could not simply be om itted. W ith the terms out o f fashion, a constellation of pseudonyms and related concepts emerged to replace them. Thus, while refer­ ence to imperialism declined, structuralism and structural violence, neocolo­ nialism, dependency, or hegem ony rose to prominence in IR scholarship.5 W hile internationalism lay largely dorm ant, international regimes, global gov­ ernance, world order/society/economy, cosmopolitanism, and lately globaliza­ tion in their different ways proposed alternatives to the traditional conception o f IR as nothing more than interstate relations. Thus, imperialism and internationalism are enduring themes at the m ar­ ginalized borders o f IR . T hey are concepts that cannot simply be excised from IR discourse. T heir theoretical significance is instantiated by the constant appearance in contem porary issues, conversations, and debates about interna­ tional politics, such as on hum anitarian intervention and the role o f the U nited States in global politics (Ignatieff 2002; M allaby 2002). A nd imperialism and empire are both back on the post-cold war agenda, specifically in the form o f calls

12

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for the reinvention o f U nited N ations Trusteeships for failed states, as well as in mainstream international relations journals such as the Review of International Studies (2001).6 T h e idea o f a U.S. empire is back in vogue and being openly contemplated in scholarly and popular publications. In the academic context, the ethics o f internationalism has also been given a new lease on life in A ndrew Linklater’s exposition on global dialogic communities as well as the many works by David H eld and Daniele Archibugi. Linklater’s Transformation o f Political Community (1998) is a bold renovation o f internationalist thought that attem pts to embrace difference in order to get past the hom ogenizing tendencies o f cosmopolitanism and the exclusionary models o f political community associated w ith the W estphalian state. D espite their continued relevance, there has been little sustained analysis or theoretical advances on the relationship o f imperialism and international­ ism. Fortunately, this now seems to be changing. Part o f this has to do w ith changes in world politics. Internationalism was briefly revived during the “neo­ idealist m om ent” after the end o f the cold war (Kegley 1993) only for im peri­ alism to raise its ugly head once more in the shape o f postim perial ethnic conflict and even genocide. A t the same time, the postcolonial studies that have followed Said’s pioneering analysis o f Orientalism are beginning to make their way onto the agenda o f IR . M ore significantly, w ork inspired by H a rd t and Negri’s Empire (2000) add to postcolonialism’s rereading o f imperialism and colonialism in IR. For H ard t and Negri, empire is a nonterritorial system o f hegemonic, hierarchical rule th at at once encompasses and surpasses both imperialism and internationalism, both o f w hich they take to be founded on the sovereign territorial state to some extent. T he concept o f empire articulated by H ard t and Negri is deliberately a m odernized version o f that associated w ith the H oly Roman Empire. As such, this m odernized classical view o f empire as a synthesis o f imperialism and internationalism is one that would be familiar to a num ber o f the authors discussed in this volume, such as Zim m ern, H obson, and Woolf. T h e current reworking o f the m eaning o f empire adds another chapter to the story o f imperialism as a term o f political discourse, so ably told by Richard Koebner. Koebner and others have shown how our contem porary understanding o f the meaning o f imperialism and empire owe a lot to the meanings ascribed to them by the early generation o f IR scholars considered in this volume (Koebner and Schm idt 1961). These developments suggest that a reconsideration o f imperialism and internationalism in international politics is required. Com bining postcolonial sensibilities with a deep reading o f the history o f political thought, Uday Singh M ehta (2000) and Barry Hindess (2001) delve into and challenge liberal understandings o f empire. T hey both point out that, far from being an anom ­ aly for liberalism, empire was central to the interests o f liberal political thinkers and integral to the liberal intellectual project. In this volume, Jeanne M orefield (chapter 4) provides a compelling case that this was particularly true with

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respect to Alfred Zim m ern, just as it was for J. A. H obson, as dem onstrated by David Long (chapter 3). N either M ehta nor H indess considers liberal international thought in the tw entieth century, however, or for that m atter deals in any serious way with internationalist thought more generally. T hey are concerned with the rule of, and impacts on, subject populations themselves rather than with the wider implications for thinking about international order. W e believe that it is im por­ tant for IR to engage imperialism and internationalism directly and critically, and this book is one attem pt to bridge the gap between critical studies o f post­ colonialism and the disciplinary history o f IR. Reading imperialism and inter­ nationalism through the prism o f empire, as presented, among others, by H ardt and Negri, M ehta, and Hindess, suggests that an internationalism o f order and peace may be premised on an-imperialism o f hierarchy, violence, and suppres­ sion. W h a t is missing are insights from IR , yet current scholarship in the field has, as we have seen, until very recently ignored imperialism and international­ ism. Failure to build this bridge is tantam ount to an abdication o f responsibil­ ity and a resignation o f self-marginalization for IR not unlike that criticised by Craig M urphy (1996) w ith regard to the relationship o f IR to issues o f gender. T he attention paid to imperialism and internationalism in the interwar period is therefore not only o f historical interest but the starting point for a recon­ struction o f a critical view o f international politics and can be the basis for a critique o f the contem porary revived discourse o f empire. By specifying, challenging, and presenting an alternative to the assump­ tions o f this implicit framework we intend to both recover some o f the forgot­ ten figures and discourse o f the field, and to reconstruct the emergence o f IR as a scholarly discipline. Simply considering the logical relation o f the two con­ cepts we have just outlined suggests a complex theoretical history. A nd the the­ oretical history o f imperialism and internationalism is telling not only for the historical emergence o f the discipline o f IR but for our contemporary under­ standing o f international politics. In the last section o f the introduction, we briefly com m ent on the contem porary implications o f this analysis. Looking to the period up to the m iddle o f the tw entieth century, when the formal empires o f the European great powers still existed and the League o f Nations, though in dire difficulty, had yet to be utterly compromised, imperialism and interna­ tionalism were the major preoccupation o f IR scholarship across the ideologi­ cal, theoretical, and disciplinary spectrum. Indeed, prior to the tw entieth century, the history o f peace proposals is lit­ tered w ith internationalist schemes th at are little more than dressed up apolo­ gias for extending or dividing up imperial rule by the great powers (Hinsley 1963). Given this context, it is not surprising th at the first few decades o f the institutionalized study o f international politics should reinforce the association o f imperialism and internationalism w ithin IR. In addition, the first years o f the tw entieth century see simultaneously the apotheosis and catastrophic

14

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consequences o f imperial rivalry as well as the emergence o f IR as an academic field both w ithin and beyond departm ents o f political science. In this new field, very often imperialism was a driving force o f the relations o f states and particularly the great powers, and internationalism was com m only a proposed solution for the overt conflict th at was so prevalent as a result (see the chapters on Reinsch, Lieber, and Z im m ern that follow). Imperialism and internationalism are at the very foundation, then, both conceptually and historically, o f the discipline o f IR . M any o f the early texts reflect a common preoccupation w ith imperialism and the adm inistration o f empire. A m ong the most im portant examples are Parker T. M oon, Imperialism and World Politics (1926), J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902), and Leonard Woolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa (1919). Yet as the chapters in this book make apparent, there also are a num ber o f equally im portant yet forgotten authors who identified w ith the emerging field o f IR and contributed to the discourse about imperialism and empire. Some o f the prom inent examples that are discussed in the chapters that follow include Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics (1900), W . E. B. DuBois, “T h e African Roots o f W ar” (1915), Raymond Leslie Buell, International Relations (1925), and Alfred Zim m ern, Nationality and Government (1918). Moreover, during the period from 1904 w hen the American Political Science Association (APSA) was formed to the outbreak o f W orld W ar I, the study o f colonial adm inistration occupied a large portion o f the discourse w ithin the field o f IR (see the chapter on Reinsch and Robert Vitalis’s chapter dealing w ith race). A nd a further measure o f the interest in imperial and colonial matters can be found in the reports from the Geneva Institute o f International Affairs and the focus o f discussions at the International Studies conferences held during the 1930s under the auspices of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner o f U N E SC O ). T he formal agenda o f these conferences concerned classically internationalist topics such as collective security and peaceful change. B ut the substance o f discussion was more often about demographic change and the allocation o f colonial dependencies— a war o f words among the so-called have and have-not great powers shortly to descend into the violence o f W orld W ar II. Today, internationalist concerns are often associated w ith or related to interwar “idealism.” T his does a great disservice to the internationalist w riting of the period and conceals discussions o f imperialism altogether. To begin with, the period was much more diverse than the idealist label suggests (Long and W ilson 1995; W ilson 1998; Thies 2002). There was a good deal o f ideological tension in internationalist proposals, and the approach taken was more likely to be institutionalist or materialist analysis than wishful thinking prescription, the prejudice regarding this w riting today. As Fritz shows in his chapter, more recent IR scholarship on international regimes and epistemic communities highlights the importance o f science and technology in international cooperation in ways that parallel the concerns o f interw ar theorists. C urrent IR literature

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draws on many o f the same notions as so-called idealist authors w ith the lineage from the early decades o f the twentieth century through international functionalism to work on interdependence and regimes. M ore pertinently, the anti-im perialist w riting o f the period is all but ignored in the characterization o f 1919-1939 as dom inated by the idealistrealist debate (Ashworth 1999). A nd yet, realist and idealist arguments that are drawn from this tim e are often arguments about imperialism. Key figures in the early development o f IR , such as Leonard Woolf, Parker M oon, Paul Reinsch, J. A. H obson, Alfred Zim m ern, and Raymond Leslie Buell, invariably wrote as m uch about imperial/colonial concerns as they did about the now tra­ ditional IR topics such as the balance o f power and diplomacy.

O v e r v ie w o f t h e B o o k In each o f the chapters that follow, the authors recognize that it is necessary to establish and define the relevant context o f their particular object o f historical investigation while acknowledging the complex interplay o f the social, poli­ tical, and economic milieu w ith more specific disciplinary and departmental contexts. Some give greater weight to institutional factors while others em pha­ size how developments in the day-to-day practice o f international politics im pacted the discourse o f IR. In this book, we consider a series o f authors who, for the most part, were w riting in the decades before W orld W ar II. Each o f the contributors, whether focusing on a specific individual or a particular theme, addresses questions regarding how the disciplinary boundaries o f IR were determined. They attem pt to clarify episodes o f the gradual process by which the field became demarcated and institutionalized as an academic enterprise. T he question o f the extent to which a specific scholar was self-conscious about being a member of, or affiliated with, an institutionalized field o f IR is also addressed. By remaining flexible about the composition and definition o f the field or discipline o f IR, and by questioning the conventional wisdom regarding its origins, we believe that a number o f interesting themes and issues quickly rise to the surface. W hile the chapters do not adopt a single approach to w riting disciplinary history, each addresses imperialism and internationalism as either themes in the work of individual subjects or as a subtext to broader issues in IR. T he first five chap­ ters are devoted to considerations o f individual authors and their writings on imperialism and internationalism. These themes arise in a num ber o f ways but m ost particularly in critiques o f formal empire, proposals for imperial reform, and prescriptions for colonial administration. In the opening chapter, David C linton reaches deep into the disciplinary history o f IR and focuses on the work o f Francis Lieber (1798-1872), who was one o f the pioneering figures that laid the foundation for the eventual formation

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o f the discipline o f political science. Lieber, C linton explains, did not turn his attention directly toward the study o f international politics, specifically international law and organization, until relatively late in his career. Yet when he did, C linton finds that imperialism and internationalism occupied Lieber’s thoughts about international politics. In this regard, C linton argues that although Lieber was w riting well before we can discern the boundaries o f a discrete subfield o f IR , he should nevertheless be viewed as a precursor o f the IR specialists discussed in this volume. As w ith many o f the early Am erican political scientists, Lieber’s ideas about international politics were largely a function o f his particular organic theory o f the state. Clinton devotes attention to explicating Lieber’s organic theory o f the national state and in the process considers his views on race and its relation to the m eaning o f nationhood. H e then goes on to reveal how these views profoundly influenced Lieber’s thoughts about both imperialism and internationalism. W ith respect to imperial expansion, for example, Lieber did not object to territorial adjustments th at resulted in the creation o f authentic national states. H e was, however, sharply opposed to territorial aggrandize­ m ent that threatened the existence o f legitimate national states or th at over­ extended the boundaries o f the properly demarcated national state. A world o f independent national polities, Lieber argued, ultim ately led to a form o f inter­ nationalism that represented the negation o f imperialism. In this manner, Clinton demonstrates the way in w hich rather than being conceptual oppo­ sites, Lieber regarded internationalism as the culm ination o f a vibrant nation­ alism. Lieber’s internationalism, C linton explains, was one that sought to preserve the autonomy o f distinct national states and that was adamantly opposed to any form o f hierarchical or supranational control from above that would restrict the sovereignty o f the state. In chapter 2, Brian Schm idt finds th at imperialism and internationalism were param ount in the w ork o f Paul S. Reinsch, a prom inent political scientist at the University o f W isconsin and a founding mem ber o f the APSA . Reinsch’s first book, World Politics at the E nd o f the Nineteenth Century (1900), was devoted chiefly to an analysis o f the phenom enon o f national imperialism that he viewed as the fundamental factor shaping international politics at the dawn of the tw entieth century. Unlike the older form o f nationalism that Reinsch believed had contributed to a healthful vitality in the relations among states, the transition to national imperialism threatened the very existence o f the states system. In the age o f imperialism, Reinsch argued that the use o f force and the ability to impose one’s will on other peoples had become the conspi­ cuous feature o f international politics. Schm idt reveals that the study o f colonial government and adm inistration within political science comprised a sizable portion o f the early discourse about international politics. H e carefully reconstructs the contours o f this conversation and documents Reinsch’s specific contribution to the task o f creating a science

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o f colonial administration. Before Reinsch left the University o f W isconsin to accept the position o f m inister to C hina in the W ilson administration, he began to detect change in the landscape o f international politics pointing in the direction o f a robust internationalism. T h e best evidence o f this, for Reinsch, was the existence o f numerous public international unions that were being formed by states. Schm idt argues that Reinsch’s Public International Unions Their Work and Organization (1911) was a seminal contribution to the early lit­ erature on international organization, even though it has largely gone unnoticed by contem porary students. Schm idt’s chapter leaves little doubt that Reinsch was an im portant figure in the early development o f IR and that his work was located at the intersection o f the study o f imperialism and internationalism. David Long argues in chapter 3 that J. A. Hobsons famous anti-imperialism is tempered by a paternalistic-attitude. H obson’s proposal for an international arrangement to supersede colonial possessions has been described as a precursor to the League o f Nations system o f mandated territories. Engaging in a close reading o f a num ber o f H obson’s writings on imperialism, especially the later chapters in the classic, Imperialism: A Study, L ong concludes that Hobson does not manage to rid him self o f imperialist assumptions and as a result, his reformist proposal for the international government o f subject peoples is little more than an internationalized version o f imperialism. L ong emphasises the moral and political aspects o f Hobson’s critique over the more notorious economic theory w ith w hich his name is usually associated. Despite the critique o f imperialism, H obson does not advocate the end of imperialism but rather its transform ation. H obson’s qualified defence o f im pe­ rialism is m ounted on certain conditions, that imperial control must contribute to global order and security, that it m ust make for im provement in the living conditions and standards o f the subject people, and that the determ ination of these first two conditions is to be made by an international body rather than the imperialist nation itself. T his third condition is the basis for H obson’s argu­ m ent for an international governm ent to oversee imperialism. However, these arguments for an international governm ent are tempered in several ways and remain in any case generalities. L ong scrutinizes H obson’s paternalist term i­ nology and assumptions in which the peoples o f the developing world are seen as “lower races” for whom the analogy to a child could be applied. H obson’s assumptions regarding “lower races” color his proposals, driving a reformist agenda that arguably would legitimize exactly the sort o f internationalized imperialism that H obson elsewhere condemns. In chapter 4, Jeanne M orefield investigates the relationship between nationalism and internationalism . She explores this relationship by focusing on the work o f Sir Alfred Z im m ern (1879-1970), the first W oodrow W ilson C hair o f International Politics at the University o f Wales, Aberystwyth, whom H ans M orgenthau once described as the m ost influential representative o f the field during the interw ar period. M orefield argues that Zim m ern’s approach to

18

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nationalism and internationalism was fram ed by his liberalism, a liberalism that was both explicitly com m unitarian and, ultimately, paternalistic in its pol­ itics. To understand this approach, M orefield begins her chapter by recon­ structing the liberal intellectual context w hen Z im m ern was a student at Oxford in the late 1800s. She explains th at m any liberal thinkers at Oxford were searching for a more intim ate and authentic sense o f com m unity to over­ come the excessive individualism that they associated with orthodox liberalism. Like other liberals, Z im m ern was profoundly influenced by the ideas asso­ ciated w ith G erm an idealism, especially the spiritual and organic notion o f society found in the writings o f Hegel. Morefield goes on to reveal how Zim m ern’s particular version o f liberalism strongly influenced his own attem pt to achieve a synthesis between the dual forces o f nationalism and internationalism. Like many other liberal thinkers, she finds that Zim m ern’s ideas about international politics were a logical extension of his views o f domestic society. According to Zim m ern, the fundamental problem o f international politics was similar to the problem faced by individuals in domestic society; namely, finding a way to overcome the narrow pursuit o f self­ interest so that a more authentic community that embraced the collective good could be realized. This did not entail the dissolution o f national states— Zim m ern was sharply opposed to cosmopolitanism on the grounds that every individual needed their own national home— but instead required a degree of spiritual harmonization among all o f them. Internationalism was a natural out­ growth o f the spiritual development that took place among the individuals living inside particular “national families.” As to the question o f w hat to do about those living in dependent territories, Zim m ern endorsed a paternalistic type o f politics grounded in a conservative approach to empire. In expounding Zim m ern’s views regarding the composition o f his proposed international commonwealth, M orefield points to some o f the glaring inconsistencies and problems that flow out of his peculiar brand of imperial liberalism. A nd yet, despite the theoretical and prac­ tical shortcomings, M orefield concludes that certain aspects o f Zim m ern’s thinking remain relevant to contem porary IR scholars who are seeking a solu­ tion to nationalist violence by moving away from the sovereign state model, but who nevertheless continue to value distinct national cultures. In chapter 5, Peter W ilson considers Leonard W oolf’s theory o f economic imperialism and his place in IR scholarship. W oolf was a significant figure in IR for much o f the tw entieth century. A long w ith H obson and others, W oolf was integral to creating the climate o f opinion that underm ined the legitimacy o f imperialism and colonialism. W ilson outlines W oolf’s theory and dissects it in terms o f theoretical and methodological consistency. H e also provides an insight into the contem porary reception o f W o o lf’s arguments by examining reviews o f his books. W ilson concludes th at W oolf is best portrayed as a radi­ cal dissenter and Fabian paternalist in his critical attacks on empire.

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W oolf has gone down in IR historiography as an idealist, but this label dis­ torts more than it reveals. W oolf’s writings on imperialism, while they may be open to criticism on various counts, are not especially marked by their idealism. Certainly W oolf had ideals, but he recognized the need to be realistic in pur­ suit o f them . Thus, a careful study o f W oolf’s thought on imperialism adds another nail in the coffin o f the idealist-realist dichotomy, a dichotom y that has had a baleful influence on IR as a serious social science. T he dichotomy implies that to have ideals is impractical. W ilson shows that this putative idealist cer­ tainly did not ignore facts and “reality” when it came to that most im portant of tw entieth-century questipns: imperialism. T he last two chapters shift the focus from specific individual authors to themes that relate closely to imperialism or internationalism or both, that is, the internationalist perspective on the implications o f science, and the imperi­ alist dimensions o f the missing race factor in IR. In chapter 6, Jan-Stefan Fritz analyzes the role a scientific analogy played in shaping thinking about cooperative internationalism in international rela­ tions. T he chapter considers a cross-section o f writers who contributed to the study o f internationalism during the first half o f the tw entieth century. A t that time there was a surge o f interest in ways o f making IR more about coop­ eration than o f com petition, conflict, and conquest. T he question facing these early-tw entieth-century writers was how best to make cooperation work systematically and durably. Fritz argues that science was their answer as it provided an alternative basis for internationalism from the imperialist and state interest-driven international relations o f the nineteenth century. In par­ ticular, scientific knowledge was seen as an invaluable means toward better under­ standing and tackling increasingly im portant economic and social concerns. Fritz compares the w ork o f Paul Reinsch, John H obson, Leonard Woolf, and David M itrany, who were am ong the m ost influential in the development o f IR , and especially in the study and practice o f cooperative internationalism. A comparative analysis shows that despite conflicting views over w hat cooper­ ation and internationalism m eant, these and many other writers looked to the sciences as a basis for their analysis o f the trends in international politics. Fritz argues that the study o f cooperative internationalism as reflected in interna­ tional institutions was shaped from its beginnings by the expectation that sci­ entific knowledge and technological innovation held out the promise o f both deeper and broader cooperation. Assumptions about the link o f science and international cooperation seminally influenced and/or are rehearsed in later theories, including neo-functionalist regional integration theory, as well as var­ ious approaches to complex interdependence theory, regime theory, and the study o f global governance. T his chapter systematically assesses w hat promises were expected from the sciences and how these influenced the study o f IR , and in particular the study o f cooperative internationalism.

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Robert Vitalis’s chapter, “B irth o f a Discipline,” provides additional sup­ port to the claim th at imperialism and empire were central them es w hen the field was initially launched in the early 1900s. T h e main thrust o f his chapter is on the role that race, racism, and w hite supremacy had and continues to have on the evolution o f IR discourse. U tilizing critical m ethods borrowed from African Am erican studies, Vitalis asks, W h a t strategies and anodyne versions o f history have had to be employed in order to make race invisible to m ain­ stream international relations theory? H e provides a wealth o f answers to this provocative question. In order to recover and reconstruct the discourse about race, Vitalis argues that two things are necessary; first, we have to clearly establish the origins o f the field, and second, we have to identify properly the context in w hich IR emerges as a professional field o f inquiry. Vitalis concurs w ith our view that the field’s origins predate the conventional post-W orld W ar I account o f IR ’s birth and he focuses on key developments that were taking place between 1900 and 1910. W ith respect to context, he argues that the context that really m attered to the individuals and institutions that comprised the field in form ation was empire. According to Vitalis, it is the context o f empire that helps to account for the fact that the m ost im portant pioneers in the field, such as Paul Reinsch, Raymond Leslie Buell, Parker T. M oon, W . E. B. D uBois, and others that he discusses in his chapter, were teaching and w riting about nationalism and imperialism, and articulating strategies for adm inistering colonial territories and uplifting “backward” races. Vitalis also focuses on the institutional and university context in w hich IR developed in the U nited States. Strengthening his thesis about the prominence o f race, he finds, for example, that the field’s first academic journal was not Foreign Affairs, as is commonly thought, but rather the Journal o f Race Development, w hich began publication in 1910.

C o n c l u s io n O ne o f our aims in this book is to make a case for the relevance o f disciplinary history for contem porary international relations theory. Instead o f considering the history o f the field as little more than a proving ground for contem porary categories o f thought, we should read more closely and devote more attention to the historical context in which an author was w riting rather than simply replaying his or her presumed place in contem porary IR. Im portant insights into the historical development o f IR b u t also about our present condition can be drawn from disciplinary history. Disciplinary historians agree that there is an intim ate link between the present-day identity o f the field and the m anner by which a field chronicles and understands its older identities. In the case o fIR , we argue that many o f the field’s older identities have, for a variety o f factors, been misrepresented. W e believe th at the revisionist project that the

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authors in this volume are engaged in does have im portant implications for the contem porary study o f international politics. In this introduction we have attem pted to indicate that the simple logical relation o f the two concepts o f imperialism and internationalism as the upper and lower limits o f international politics, marking selfish aggressiveness on the one hand and an altruistic morality on the other, hides a different and a more complex and subtle relationship o f the concepts. This more subtle relationship is evidenced in the analysis o f a num ber o f the authors and themes that follow. W e have also argued that the salience o f imperialism and internationalism in the early disciplinary h isto ry p fIR is more than a coincidence or a simple historical curio. Imperialism and internationalism are fundamental to our understanding o f the early development o f the field and a vital component o f understanding the present conjuncture in international relations theory. First o f all, this is because attention to imperialism, and the reliance o f internationalism on impe­ rialism, focuses our view on the continuing importance o f unequal relationships and structures in international affairs. Relationships o f inequality cannot be swept under the carpet by claims o f legal or sovereign equality, or by asserting the natural and unchanging quality o f the uneven distribution o f power in the international system. In short, internationalism and imperialism are not simply limits to real international relations, but rather are integral to our understanding o f international society.

N otes 1. Throughout this book the abbreviation IR refers to the institutionalized aca­ demic field or discipline o f international relations. 2. There recently has been an E. H . Carr revival o f sorts that has shed consider­ able light on his professional career. See, for example, Cox (2000, 2001), Haslam (1999), and Jones (1998). 3.

On this point also see Brown (2000).

4. See, for example, Darby and Paolini (1997) on the call for a reconciliation of IR and postcolonialism. For examples o f the voluminous neo-Marxist literature, see M agdoff (1969) and Amin (1977). 5.

For example, see Gilpin (1981), Galtung (1971), and Gill (1990).

6. Indeed, there has been a general increase in the use o f the terminology o f imperialism in popular discourse in the last several years. See for instance the critical view presented by Maria Misra (2002) that decries the tendency to neglect the ruth­ lessly repressive aspects o f empire in the rush to see the potential benefits for inter­ national order in the face o f failed states.

Chapter 1 Francis Lieber, Imperialism, and Internationalism David Clinton

Francis Lieber (born Franz Lieber in Prussia in 1798) was a naturalized American citizen who found time in a life o f nearly three-quarters o f a century to develop fluency in French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and ancient Greek, as well as G erm an and English; to risk his life at the Battle o f Ligny just prior to W aterloo; to participate in the G reek Revolution against Turkish control; to meet and court his future wife during a year spent teaching in London; to strike up friendships w ith everyone from Tocqueville to Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph; and to teach history and political economy at South Carolina College (now the University o f South Carolina) from 1835 to 1856, history and political science at C olum bia College (now Colum bia University) from 1857 to 1865, and constitutional history and public law at the Columbia School o f Law from 1865 to 1872— all o f w hich subjects he infused with ele­ ments o f w hat today would be term ed comparative politics and international relations. In his own life, then, he displayed a concern for international affairs that would make his views on international politics interesting even if, at a fairly advanced age, he had not turned his talents to international law and organization. To his long-standing advocacy o f free trade, he added a compre­ hensive attention to the law o f war, drafting a code governing the actions o f the U nion A rm y in the Am erican Civil W ar in 1863, and continuing to publish on international topics for the rem aining nine years o f his life.1 Lieber died a full generation before the turn from the nineteenth to the tw entieth century. Yet he can be viewed as a precursor o f many o f the later ana­ lysts treated in this volume, given his im portance in the development o f the new American discipline o f political science (G unnell 1993: 24-25; Farr 1995: 131-67; Schm idt 1998: 47-52). H is works were still commonly employed in college classrooms three decades after his death, and it has been asserted to the author that at least one o f them ( C ivil Liberty and Self-Government) remained a required reading in the graduate seminar on Am erican political thought at one major university into the nineteen fifties— an admirable run for a book 23

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published in 1853.2 As for his reputation am ong policymakers, one may find a suggestion, at any rate, in an account o f the formal reception o f Lieber’s manuscripts by the Johns H opkins University Library on M arch 18, 1884, an event presided over by a garlanded bust o f Lieber and attended by Lieber’s only surviving son. There, “M r. W oodrow W ilson, A .B .,... reported upon the manuscripts relating to the M exican Claims Com m ission o f 1868, in which Dr. Lieber acted as um pire.” W ilson praised “the clear, concise, and altogether admirable decisions o f the um pire,” w ho “w ent w ith few words direct to the core o f each case, clearing the way w ith rapid argum ent and reaching his con­ clusion w ith unhesitating judgm ent”— surely a rare example o f Lieber’s being commended for brevity (Gilm an 1884:13—14,20 -2 1). It is the argum ent o f this chapter th at Lieber, despite his renown, balanced imperialism and internationalism in a m anner different from that arrived at by many o f those who wrote on these subjects a generation later. H e was in fact a critic o f imperialism, in large measure because he was an ardent nationalist and believed that imperial control inevitably came into conflict w ith the self­ government that national states required. By contrast, he held that nationalism and internationalism not only were not in tension, but were in large meas­ ure mutually supporting. A world o f national states was a world in which international society could flourish through voluntary steps o f international cooperation. Large states would “lead,” but this leadership would consist pri­ marily in advancing a set o f international norms that would serve the interests of all. It is also the intention o f this essay to illuminate Lieber’s place in discipli­ nary history. T he rather vain “scholar and publicist” would be gratified by the recent revival o f interest in his contribution to the study o f politics in the U nited States (as evidenced by several o f the works cited below), and particu­ larly his role in supplanting an earlier bloodless social-contract theorizing on the institutions o f government, w ith an interpretation grounded in the con­ cepts o f “the state” and “the nation.”3 These terms were also the building blocks in his conception o f international politics, so th at the Prussian A m erican pro­ fessor represented the introduction o f a line o f continental thought into the Anglo-Am erican world, just as the arrival o f this “Stranger in America” (to take the title o f one o f his early autobiographical publications) marked the beginning o f an ascendancy o f G erm an models and G erm an m ethods in American university life. Lieber was far from systematic in separating his academic work from his other social, poetic, and personal writings, though, and thus this chapter will draw on his letters and essays as well as his longer published scholarly output. Consistent w ith an internal approach to disci­ plinary history, these sources can be construed as representing the discursive artifacts o f the field’s past. T he aim o f the chapter is to reconstruct the contri­ bution that Lieber made to the early academic discourse about international politics.

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L ie b e r a n d I m p e r ia l is m T he first thing th at must be said about Lieber’s attitude toward imperialism is that he lived before its apotheosis. H is death in O ctober 1872 came only four m onths after D israeli’s Crystal Palace speech asking British voters to declare “w hether you will be a great country,— an Imperial country— a country where your sons, w hen they rise, rise to param ount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem o f their countrymen, but com m and the respect o f the world” (W iener 1972: III: 2500), and preceded by twelve years the Berlin Conference that sought to regulate the final phase o f the “great scramble.” To be sure, the British and other European powers had undertaken a good deal o f overseas conquest by the close o f the third quarter o f the nineteenth century, and in the U nited States itself numerous proposals had been heard for the acquisition o f various territories, primarily in C entral America and the Caribbean. Nevertheless, when Lieber used the word “imperialism” he generally did not give it the m eaning im parted by the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century: the large-scale acquisition o f territories far from Europe or N orth America w ith the intention o f ruling into the foreseeable future over their non­ white populations and w ith little prospect o f considerable emigration from the metropole and settlem ent by Europeans or those o f European descent. Rather, Lieber’s usage tended to be o f the m idcentury variety— “Imperialism” w ith a capital “I,” denoting a revival o f Napoleonic methods and imagery in France in place o f royal or republican regimes, and, more broadly, a reliance on auto­ cratic governm ent instead o f the limitations imposed by the rule o f law, both w ithin and am ong states. “Imperialism” in this sense was a synonym for what Lieber also called “imperatorial sovereignty,” or “arbitrary power or centralism” (Lieber 1853). O f the imperialism associated w ith the regime o f Napoleon III, Lieber was a severe critic, as he was o f the idea th at strong states should dictate to weak ones in an arbitrary fashion (o f which more below). N or did he evince interest in overseas territorial expansion, and in fact he vigorously opposed many American territorial acquisitions accomplished or proposed during his life­ time. H is test for both internal and external policies was their effect on the prospects for, or the preservation of, a free, self-governing, national state. W h at allowed a state to be free and self-governing? A close connection between rulers and ruled, and am ong all segments o f the population, was a sig­ nificant element o f strength for those states fortunate enough to rest on it. Lacking such support, autocratic governments were brittle; they could find the ground o f public backing cut from under them at any time, and their ability to continue their foreign or domestic initiatives— and even their capacity to remain in power— would then rest solely on the physical force they could bring to bear in im posing their will on their people. Regimes characterized by the rule o f law and popular representation were stronger, not because they necessarily

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wielded more m aterial power (after all, both the British and the A m erican armies were small compared w ith those o f the continental powers) but because once alin e o f policy had percolated up through the slow process o f widespread discussion and accommodation, it would be supported by the entire society w ith the necessary resources: H ow weak and fragile are the theoretically absolute governments o f the East! A nd where is the state more powerful than in England? W here has it greater resources, where does every individual feel him ­ self more identified w ith it, or rush more readily to its assistance when in danger? ... I mean that the essential attributes o f the state become more distinctly understood, affect more powerfully each individual, unite men into a more closely interlinked community, th at it extends protection and receives stronger support, th at vast, powerful public opinion joins it— in short, th at the intensity o f its action in a thousand different ways increases. (Lieber 1 8 3 8 :1 :163-64) This intim ate sympathy among all members o f the society protected by the state gave rise to Lieber’s Burkean conception o f the organic state. A state, or at least a proper state, was more than a contract among self-interested individ­ uals for their protection: “T h e foundation o f the state lies too deeply in the hum an soul, in man’s whole nature, to be explained simply by selfishness. I t is no accidental mass o f atoms, it is an organism” (Lieber 1838:1 :170). In the circumstances o f the nineteenth century, Lieber held that an organic state was necessarily a national one, and a nation by definition dis­ played an organic connection am ong its members: T he word Nation, in the fullest adaptation o f the term, means, in m od­ ern times, a numerous and homogeneous population ... perm anendy inhabiting and cultivating a coherent territory, w ith a well-defined geographic outline, and a name o f its own— the inhabitants speaking their own language, having their own literature and common institu­ tions, which distinguish them clearly from other and similar groups o f people; being citizens or subjects o f a unitary government, however subdivided it may be, and feeling an organic unity with one another, as well as being conscious o f a common destiny. Organic intellectual and political internal unity, w ith proportionate strength, and a distinct and obvious demarcation from similar groups, are notable elements o f the idea o f a modern nation in its fullest sense. (Lieber 1840: 227-28) A nation was a unique type o f organic state, not found in the ancient world, but peculiarly suited to the requirements o f the modern. In particular, one m ight note Lieber’s attribution to a nation o f “a coherent territory,” by which he

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m eant a territory more extensive than was occupied, for example, by the citystates o f the H ellenic states-system. Elsewhere he spoke o f “a portion o f the earth w ith a dignified geographical character” in contradistinction to “the crowns o f many little kingdoms crowded on one head ...jarrin g and unm ean­ ing sovereignties, th at have not the strength to be sovereign” (Lieber 1860: 96). W h a t could bind together those living in these extensive territories into the organic union that Lieber thought the best states would possess? O ne force that came naturally to the m ind o f Lieber, a student o f philology, was a com­ m on language, leading to a shared literature. Language was necessary to “the com m union o f m ind w ith m ind,” w hich could unite distinct individuals in common understanding and common purpose (Lieber 1850: 443). In turn, it was a sense o f common purpose that gave otherwise disassociated individuals the collective strength and determ ination to undertake action in concert for political and legal ends. It was therefore useless to expect a group lacking this unified resolve to protect its legal rights or to make the sacrifices necessary to establish political freedom. T hrough the m edium o f language, in Lieber’s eyes, freedom and nationalism were closely connected. By contrast, one item that did not appear on Lieber’s list o f defining char­ acteristics o f nations— and a highly significant omission, given the role it came to play in the imperial project— was race. His attitudes on the tortured subject o f race were not always plain, in part because he felt that discretion was neces­ sary to his professional advancement. H e taught for twenty-one years at South Carolina College, and the experience o f living at the center o f pro-slavery sen­ tim ent seems only to have increased his existing dislike for slavery, as evidenced by the private letters he wrote to Senator Charles Sum ner and other friends in the N orth. In a series o f “public” but unsent letters to Senator John C. Calhoun, who had been helpful to Lieber on other matters and w hom he respected, Lieber compared slavery w ith scaffolding that had been necessary to the construction o f a building but now could and should be removed, and warned th at every delay in its peaceful dism antling made it more o f an anachronism: “It is not the North that is against you. It is mankind, it is the world, it is civilization, it is history, it is reason, it is G od, that is against slav­ ery” (Friedel 1947: 241; Friedel 1943). T he Liebers had three sons to rear and a certain social position as a college faculty family to keep up, however; as prop­ erty, slaves could be rented, and Lieber rented a succession o f household ser­ vants over his two decades in Columbia, South Carolina. A fter his move to the N orth in January 1857 when he joined the faculty o f Colum bia College, he made his opposition to slavery public, and in 1865, “w hen the news arrived early one m orning in January that Congress had approved the thirteenth am endm ent [abolishing slavery], he was so excited that he could not shave” (Friedel 1947: 357). Yet in a letter w ritten in 1870 to H am ilton Fish, who was at the tim e not only the president o f the Colum bia board o f trustees but also secretary o f state, he pressed on Fish “an idea, doubtless distasteful to most men

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just now, w hich I have had for many years,” that im mediately after adoption o f the Fifteenth A m endm ent guaranteeing the voting rights o f all Americans regardless o f race, “the U.S. ought to pass a law prohibiting the im m igration o f any but white people. W e would have a right to do it. As the M ongolians, w ith their rat-like procreation, advanced in the m iddle ages as far as Liegnitz in Silesia, so they come now from the W est and invade our country similar to the Norway rat” (Lieber to Fish, A pril 1 5 ,1870).4 In his scholarly publications, he dismissed the idea o f “the pretended Latin race,” but, especially in his w rit­ ings in the 1860s and 1870s, he often employed one o f the m any terms o f his own coinage, the “Cis-Caucasian race” or the “Cis-Caucasian races”— the “white Caucasian races as developed in Europe and the W estern hem isphere”— which included in the parlance o f the tim e such groups as the Slavonic, the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the “Anglican” “races” (Lieber 1838: II: 8; Lieber 1871a: 308-309; Lieber 1872: 311, 320; Farr 1995: 147-48). Because he thought the “Cis-Caucasian race” was leading the way to international understanding, he asserted, “Internationalism is part o f a white man’s religion” (Sears 1928: 61). Such references, however, did not mean th at Lieber accepted notions of unalterable racial superiority. Indeed, particularly in his earlier w ritings, he spoke o f the social problems caused by a narrow exclusivity in sympathy, result­ ing in a tendency to read certain groups out o f full mem bership in the hum an race and deny them the right to justice. “I was walking one day in the streets o f Rome, when I met w ith a nurse who had strung a num ber o f chafers [beetles] on a knitting-needle in order to amuse the infant she held in her arm, by the contortions o f the tortured animals,” he once recalled. “W h en I expressed my horror, the answer was, M a non e roba battizata (but it is unbaptized stuff).” Lieber strongly condem ned a similar inability to sympathize w ith and give jus­ tice to those viewed as belonging to lesser races. “T hose Spanish adventurers, cruel almost w ithout parallel... were vindictive, bloodthirsty, and w ithout any faith towards the Indian__ [because] bigotry and avarice had perverted their judgm ent and moral feeling,” he charged. “T h e Indian was not considered within the pale o f ethic obligation.” T h e case was the same “w ith Christian merchants who smuggle opium into China, though they know it leads to the destruction o f the infatuated buyers.” Lieber continued, “[T]hey may, in their perverted judgm ent, consider the Chinese out o f the pale o f civilization” (Lieber 1838:1: 44-45). N or did Lieber exempt his own country from his cri­ tique. Neatly encompassing both racialist and antiracialist sentiments in one sentence, he called the slave trade “the very worst crime o f the race to which we belong” (Lieber to Allibone, December 3, 1856). Referring to the purported “belief of our Indians that [George W ashington] is the only w hite man who ever w ent or ever will go to heaven,” he granted that the tale was not very complimentary to us, but [was] unfortunately only an exag­ geration o f that for which there is good ground. T he ancient vae victis

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must be changed in the white man’s m odern history into “W oe to a different color.” T he white man has shown little sympathy with the other races, and sympathy is the first basis o f all idea of justice. (Lieber 1864:427) W here all this seems to have left Lieber is a belief that “races” were defined at least as much by culture and history as by blood or physical characteristics. A race was therefore largely synonymous w ith a nation, not a preexisting fact that defined a nation. N o race was by nature superior to any other, but one racial grouping— the “Cis-Caucasian”— had been the first to discover and put into practice the principles o f m odern government that advanced liberty. Over time, the beneficent influence o f interdependence and advancing technology would see that these insights were shared, in the latest instance o f “the rule o f all spreading hum anity th at the full am ount o f w hat has been gained by patience, blood, or fortunate combinations is transferred to other regions and distant tribes” (Lieber 1853: 291-92; Robson 1946: 5 7-59).5 M ore likely, in Lieber’s eyes, than race to bind together an extended nation was a com m on sense o f nationhood. U nderstanding one another through the medium o f a com m on language, identifying with one another through the experience o f sustaining common institutions, citizens would naturally assume “an organic unity w ith one another, as well as being conscious o f a common destiny” (Lieber 1868: 227). Nationalism grew from long-shared historical experience, and then both informed and was strengthened by immediate polit­ ical cooperation. It could elicit from Lieber, who was also a would-be poet, pas­ sages that were almost lyrical in their praise o f the benefits derived from this sense o f national community: [T ]he people have tasted the sweets and securities, the mutual sup­ port and m utual elevation w hich m odern political society, enlarged as it is, yet forming one organized and united thing throughout,— the social guarantee, w hich the m odern state alone affords, and can afford; and because this political form— a nationalized society, and socialized population— stands on an enlarged and broad foundation, is the essential form o f our tim es__ and the only one which can satisfy the many high, great and noble demands, w hich in the course o f civil­ isation, men have come to urge in our present period— demands never made in ancient times, or the middle ages. (Lieber 1838: II: 314) T his ardent nationalism, coupled w ith a conviction that the bonds o f sym­ pathy could and eventually would cross racial divides, m eant that Lieber was certainly prepared to countenance territorial expansion if its object was to unite areas populated by members o f one nation and create one national state. Smaller political units were outm oded, for “th zpatria o f us moderns ought to consist in

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a wide land covered by a nation, and not in a city or a little colony, he pro claimed. “M oderns stand in need o f n a tio n s... for their literatures and law, their industry, liberty, and patriotism ; we w ant countries to w ork and speak, write and glow for, to live and to die for” (Lieber 1858: 333—34). H e was equally dismissive o f m ultinational states. “[T ]he merely agglomerated m onar­ chy” was as unsuited to m odern liberty as the weak and provincial sliver o f a state. Austria, “a monarchy w hich never had any but an artificial and forced existence, and in w hich true greatness or simple and national development was made impossible by its various conglomerated elements,” was a particular bete noire o f the Prussian Am erican professor (Lieber to M itterm aier, June 4, 1849). “But w hat is Austria?” he dem anded. “T h e term is brief, compact, and unitary; the thing, however, term ed A ustria is a vast, heterogeneous conglom­ eration o f numberless different tribes.” Resting uneasily on this unstable mass, the Viennese elite nevertheless had the wealth to purchase the best w orkm an­ ship that European artistry could produce. “T h e sight o f such an article is apt to shed a luster on the whole idea—Austria— as it is in our minds; [but] she counts nearly forty millions o f people, and how m any o f them live in deplorable semi-barbarism, in filth, ignorance, and low bigotry?” (Lieber to the Times (London), November 10, 1851). As long as it rem ained som ething other than a national state— and by its nature it could not do otherwise— it would be hos­ tile to liberty domestically and a hindrance to international progress— “the drag-chain to the chariot o f advancing Europe” (Lieber 1851: 125-26). Supported by ties such as language, institutions, and a sense o f national identity, “the normal type o f m odern governm ent is the N ational Polity,” thought Lieber. In the conditions o f contem porary life in Europe and in areas o f European settlement, the national state was the only legitimate state, and the modern era was “the period o f nationalization.” T he rise o f nationalism could almost be said to be divinely inspired. “T h e instinctive social cohesion,— the conscious longing and revealing tendency o f the people to form a nation” was the result o f “the providential decree o f nationalization.” “M odern patrio­ tism” lay under the injunction o f “a mission imposed by H im w ho willed that there should be n atio n s.... It is sovereign to all else. It is the will o f our M aker— the M aker o f history” (Lieber 1860-61: 96-97, 98, 101, 113). All o f this may not justify the description o f Lieber as “a pre-Bismarckian superna­ tionalist” (Dorfm an and Tugwell 1938a: 159), but it is true that in Lieber, the anxious proponent o f G erm an unity and the determ ined defender o f the American U nion against secession, the nationalist currents o f the nineteenth century ran deep. Expansion that “rounded o u t” a state to its full national dimensions, then, was for Lieber unquestionably justifiable. Lieber all but asserted that the purchase of the Louisiana Territory by the U nited States in 1803, for example, was unconstitutional under then-current understandings o f the national charter. “But there are reasons and circumstances w hich carry along states and nations.

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To be securely and truly master o f the western country it was necessary for the U nited States to possess the m outh o f the M ississippi” (Lieber 1838:1:326). I f France had declined to sell its N orth American possession and the U nited States had m ounted an invasion, “a war would have been the consequence where right would have been on either side,” France appealing to its legal right and the U nited States to necessity. “T his is a dangerous theory,” he admitted, “but danger is not a test o f truth” (Lieber to Bluntschli, M arch 24,1872). Nor was this the only expansion o f American territory that could be so justified. “I ask you as a fellow internationalist,” he wrote to Bluntschli in 1869, “w hether the annexation o f Nova Scotia, not by haggling, cheating or war, but by the manly action o f the people [of Nova Scotia] and the equally manly yielding o f the British G overnm ent, would not be one o f the choicest acts or procedures in all history. W ould it not be unique and one o f the crosses on the breast o f the 19th century” (Lieber to Bluntschli, O ctober 11, 1869). In a similar vein, Lieber strongly argued that the Prussian destiny to unify the G erm an nation was a call o f necessity that overrode the legal rights o f the smaller states that Berlin would be required to absorb. In the afterm ath o f the lightning victory o f Prussia over Austria in 1866, he criticized the N orth G erm an Confederation as insufficient: “A lthough Prussia took possession in a revolutionary way o f Hannover, she has still not been bold and resolute enough” (Lieber to Bluntschli, February 12,1867). W h en Baden and the other small G erm an states endeavored to preserve their independence, he queried, “W h o can blame them? But also, who can blame the friends o f Unity, for w ant­ ing a powerful and revolutionary Emperor?” (Lieber to Bluntschli, O ctober 1, 1867), and he returned to the subject in a letter at the end o f 1867, voicing his dissatisfaction that “G erm any remains w ith ‘the stocking half pulled up’ ” (Lieber to Bluntschli, D ecem ber 8, 1867). Moreover, it was not only the duchies and city-states o f G erm any that stood in the way o f history; it was also the despised empire to the south. U pon receiving a copy o f The Right of Conquest from his G erm an friend Franz von Holtzendorff, Lieber questioned the absence o f “the conquest o f a country if required to fulfill a distinct mis­ sion” from von H o ltzendorff’s list o f justifiable grounds for an expansionist war. I f there were no other way, should G erm any “never have the right to compel the ... Austrians, by conquest, to return again to her dom inion ... ?” (D orfm an and Tugwell 1938b: 292; Perry 1882: 424-25). I f nationalism provided an impetus for expansion, however, it also supplied the strongest reason for self-limitation. Once the bounds o f territory occupied by the national group had been reached, Lieber not only saw no reason to reach farther, he was convinced that continued growth risked great dangers, both to the state involved and to the international system as a whole. H e opposed the M exican War, because he expected it to lead to the addition o f new areas favor­ able to the introduction o f slavery (Sears 1928: 47); he was highly skeptical o f “M r. Seward’s scheme” o f buying Alaska and called it “silly,” because he

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thought that such a noncontiguous and uninhabited territory had no natural connection to the U nion; he feared the annexation o f that black, C atholic Spanish mass” o f C uba and Puerto Rico, because he doubted the feasibility o f their cultural assimilation into Am erican society. “I am no extensionist” he insisted (Lieber to Bluntschli, O ctober 11,1869). “[M ]ere aggrandizem ent indicates no highly organic and intrinsical development o f a n a tio n .... mere extension, inorganic extension always w eakens... mere extension and pure accumulation burthens” (Lieber to W h ite, A pril 12,1867).6 Such extension had been possible, even normal, before the idea o f nation­ alism had obtained such sway. “T h e ancients knew o f no nations, in the m od­ ern acceptation o f the term ,” Lieber recalled. [T]here existed vast empires, but they were only annexations o f coun­ tries over w hich one victorious tribe— the M ede, the Persian, the Arab— ruled, w ithout fusing the many discordant com ponents into one society, one organized thing, one nation which should be ani­ mated and impelled, in some respect or other, by one moral agent, one vital social principle, or impulse extending through all parts and through a series o f periods. (Lieber 1838: II: 314; I: 375) In the modern period, the forces o f cultural and historical dissimilarity that lim­ ited the groups o f people who could be brought to share such a sense o f unity also limited the geographic reach o f a state that could claim to be a legitimate national state. Empires o f the ancient type were as outdated as the Austrian relic; the con­ temporary state perfected civil liberty through institutions established among its population unified through a common nationhood. Certainly, even in advanced states, large sections o f the people could be “misled,” as was the case with those “who seem to believe that the highest destiny o f the United States consists in the extension o f her territory— a task in which, at best, we can only be imitators, while, on the contrary, our destiny is one o f its own, and o f a substantive charac­ ter” (Lieber 1853: 55). T he substantive aim o f advancing liberty and strengthen­ ing the institutions that protected liberty was an ongoing and never-ending task, unlike mere territorial increase, which had a definitive terminus. For Lieber, then, imperialism, when understood as the growth o f the state to reach its natural boundaries as established by the territories populated by its nation, was desirable and in accord w ith the will o f Providence. Imperialism, when understood as the boundless expansion o f the state w ith no regard for the ill-assorted collection o f nations over whom it m ight come to exercise control solely through coercion and not in institutionalized union and liberty, on the other hand, was an outdated idea, contrary to the design o f the M aker of nations. Lieber never ceased to rhapsodize about the former and fulminate against the latter, and on this centrality o f nationalism he remained consistent throughout his career.

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L ie b e r a n d I n t e r n a t io n a l is m Internationalism was also a concern for Lieber— he did, after all, claim to have coined the very word— particularly in the later stages o f his life when inter­ national issues became a prime subject for his scholarship and his political activism (Friedel 1947: 179). As was the case w ith nationalism, international­ ism, too, was a m atter o f destiny, in th at he believed that cooperation among states for ends defined by intrinsic justice was the end toward which the inter­ national system was inevitably tending. Internationalism was in fact the com­ pletion o f nationalism and the negation o f imperialism. “Patriotism in m odern times ... requires a country, to be deep and fruitful” (Lieber 1838: II: 210-11). Such, as we have seen, was Lieber’s starting point. H e was convinced that, under contemporary technological, cultural, economic, and social conditions, the state was the setting in which humans could live best, and he thought it “one o f G o d ’s holiest ordinances ... that man should live in the state” (Lieber 1838: II: 288-89). T he existence o f the state necessarily implied a multiplicity o f states, w ith each one ideally resting on a unified nation and a well-developed network o f societal and governmental institutions. Moreover, it was fortunate that physical capacities limited the growth o f states, preventing any one state from conquering all the rest: M ankind extend over so vast a space, the various countries have char­ acters so different, the several portions o f mankind stand in so differ­ ent degrees o f civilisation, their wants, physical and intellectual, their taste and genius prom oted or retarded by circumstances and events uncontrollable by them , the objects they strive for by joint exertions, their dangers, desires, interests and views, languages and religions, capacities and means, are o f such infinite variety— that hum an society does not, and according to the order o f things, ought not to form one state. T here exist many states; that is, mankind are divided, in conse­ quence o f countless concurring circumstances, into a number o f soci­ eties, in each o f w hich exists the absolute necessity o f forming a state— a necessity w ithout w hich man cannot rise higher. (Lieber 1838:1:245) T he picture is clear and familiar: a world o f many independent units, each equal in its sovereignty and legal rights, and each resting on a society defined by nationality. A nything th at called into question this fundam ental organizing principle o f the international system by introducing a more hierarchical struc­ ture was, for Lieber, a threat to be opposed. “Universal monarchy” was, in all its manifestations, “obsolete” (Lieber 1868: 239-40). It m ight take the form o f “a single leading nation,” w hich overstepped its proper national limits and presumed to dictate to the rest o f international society; such was the foreign

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policy o f Napoleon, w hich “ended alm ost exclusively in conquest” (Lieber 1864: 424). It m ight take the form o f a vestigial supranational authority claimed by the papacy, and Lieber’s biographer has remarked that “[cjertainly Lieber’s anti-Catholicism was largely an outgrow th o f his ardent nationalism” (Freidel 1947: 408). It m ight take the form o f an international organization or tribunal wielding coercive sanctions against its m em ber states. Here, he could not have been more explicit, despite his life-long advocacy o f international cooperation and the spread o f international law, w hen he wrote, “[It] is not puerile jealousy, but the necessity o f autonomy, w hich would prevent a free nation o f any m agnitude joining a perm anent international high court” (Lieber to Dufour, April 10,1872). W hatever m ight have been the necessities o f polit­ ical life in earlier periods, “[ujniversal monarchy would be, in our m odern civ­ ilization, universal slavery” (Lieber 1871b: 652). This demand for autonomy was, for Lieber, both fundamental and norm a­ tive. It in fact defined the state. Lieber argued that, because the state was a soci­ ety among a specific group o f people, it necessarily excluded dictation by those who were not participants in its scheme o f social cooperation; if it did not, then the society would be governed by a force outside the society. “Since the state, then, implies a society which acknowledges no superior, the idea o f self-determi­ nation applied to it means that, as a unit and opposite to other states, it be inde­ pendent, not dictated to by foreign governments, nor dependent upon them any more than itself has freely assented to be, by treaty and upon the principles of common justice and morality, and that it be allowed to rule itself, or that it have what the Greeks chiefly m eant by the word autonomy” (Lieber 1853: 22). T he fact that any state o f the American Union could be bound by a larger majority beyond that state to accept an am endm ent to the Constitution demonstrated that the states were not sovereign, for “[n]o m inority o f sovereigns, however small, can be made subject to a majority o f sovereigns, however large” (Lieber 1868: 237). This definition o f the sovereign state m eant that individual liberty required national liberty, that self-determination o f citizens within the polity would mean nothing if authorities beyond the polity could impose their will on it: It is impossible to imagine liberty in its fullness, if the people as a totality, the country, the nation— whatever name may be preferred— or its government, is not independent on [j/c] foreign interfer­ ence— T his independence or national self-government farther implies that, the civil government o f free choice or free acquiescence being established, no influence from w ithout, besides that o f freely acknowledged justice, fairness, and morality, must be adm itted. (Lieber 1853: 41) It was precisely because Lieber saw international society as a moral order that he believed that any supranational compulsion had no place in it. By definition,

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morality consisted in acting because the action was in itself right, not because o f any threatened punishm ent. H e made this Kantian point at the very outset o f his Political Ethics, as applied to all spheres o f hum an life: “Indeed, it would not be a moral world, if the necessary consequence o f theft were the withering o f the arm that com m itted it; if the tongue that lies were stricken w ith palsy. O n the contrary it would be a non-m oral world, a world o f necessity and not o f freedom o f action__ Fear o f itself is no moral motive” (Lieber 1838:1: 25). M orality entered the world because punishm ent (at least in this life) did not always follow crime; and humans, w hether in their personal or their socialpolitical lives, if they were to act morally had to do so out o f conviction and not out o f the expectation Of reward. A lthough he was more prone to say that moral action would serve the self-interest among states than among individu­ als (Beaumont and Tocqueville: xxv), he held that praiseworthy conduct among states, too, was a m atter o f free choice, not coercion. O ne o f the dangers o f uni­ versal monarchy on which Lieber constantly pounded was that it impaired this unfettered action, shackling it w ith a centralized system o f dictation. Likewise, one o f the evidences o f hum anity’s progress was that international life in the ancient world had been subject to the will o f “one leading state or country at any given period,” an idea that in the m odern world was “an anachronism, bar­ ren in everything except mischief, and always gotten up, in recent times, to sub­ serve ambition or national conceit” (Lieber 1859: 370). Lieber strongly criticized Napoleon III on this score. “H e clings to the idea o f the Roman uni­ versal monarchy,” Lieber told a correspondent, referring to the papacy, and if that device should prove to be “utterly impossible, to the idea o f French pre­ dominance and leadership” (Lieber to Thayer, July 22, 1870). Both a state or other institution that swallowed up other states to become a universal m onar­ chy and a leading state th at laid down the law to other states, making their independence only nominal, removed the element o f free will, and therefore the possibility o f morality, from the world. This centralization o f authority in world politics— even more harmful, in Lieber’s eyes, than the centralization o f governmental power w ithin states, which he also opposed— was destructive o f the fruitful variety among peoples. Nations formed “separate communities, large enough to be, in a degree, their own world, and separated by language, history, law, views, prejudices, desires, [etc.]” (Lieber 1838: II: 664-65). Such disparity in states’ mores and outlooks militated against the effective or just operation o f shared institutions, which would tend to impose uniform rules on highly unlike circumstances: “A congress on the banks o f the Po, or on the Bosphorus, for Asia, Europe and America, would make galling decisions for people near the Rocky M oun­ tains__ T h e difference o f nations, which nevertheless is necessary, must needs lead to very different wants and views” (Lieber 1838: II: 652). This very differ­ ence would impede the working o f any international institution that pretended to direct the actions o f sovereign states, if indeed it did not prevent the creation

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o f such an institution from the outset. Bereft o f sustaining public opinion and sentim ent, cultural ties, and institutions grounded in a national consensus, any “supposed [international] congress” would be either unavailing or tyrannical. It would, in a word, be unnatural. It would also be unnecessary. T h e same providence th at had ordained sep­ arate states resting on organic nations was pressing these states into ever-closer voluntary cooperation based on com mon ideas and shared interests. “I t was a peculiar feature o f antiquity that law, religion, dress, the arts and customs, that everything in fact was localized,” Lieber asserted. By contrast, “M odern civi­ lization extends over regions, tends to make uniform , and eradicates even the physical differences o f tribes and races. T hus made uniform , nations receive and give more freely” (Lieber 1853:250). T h a t extension o f likeness was a m ark o f the ever-widening scope o f “civilization” w ithin which hum an “socialism”— the natural social urge to associate— could express itself fully. Measures, whether technological or legal, that bound peoples together more tightly, enabling them to recognize their underlying similarity, ought to be encouraged; thus his advo^ cacy o f m utual pledges not to take m ilitary actions that would disrupt the international telegraph cables, w hich linked the international com m unity “in the great cause o f intercom m union and intercom m unication” (Sears 1928: 55); and his decades-long effort to secure by domestic legislation and by treaty “the mutual acknowledgment o f international copyright peculiarly necessitated by our common and interwoven civilization, as well as by the most elementary principles and ideas o f individual property” (Lieber 1872: 319; Lieber 1840). These were not simply desirable acts o f public policy; they were duties that nature had dictated. Even war, though peace was hum anity’s natural state, con­ tributed to this drawing together, for, as “[p]aradoxical as it may seem at first glance ... the closest contact and consequent exchange o f thought and produce and enlargement o f knowledge between two otherwise severed nations, is fre­ quently produced by war” (Lieber 1838: II: 649). I f innate sociability drew hum ans toward international cooperation, self­ interest prodded them in the same direction. T h e “all-pervading”— indeed, the “divine”— “law o f interdependence” applied “to nations quite as m uch as to individuals,” and, “like all original principles o f characteristics o f humanity,” was increasing in both scope and power as civilization advanced (Lieber 1868: 242). Further drawing on Kant, Lieber held that, because hum an wants were everywhere the same, while the resources to satisfy those wants were unequally distributed across the earth, sheer necessity dictated economic exchange that would result in constantly increasing and universally profitable m utual depend­ ence. “All men stand in need o f coin, desire silk, are pleased w ith indigo blue; but very limited regions only produce them ,” he noted. “This is the way the Creator enforces inter-dependence. This is the law which necessitates and more and more promotes international good-will and leads to the great Commonwealth o f N ations.” Moreover, the beneficial consequences o f such contacts w ent well

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beyond the purely economic (or the wholly lower-case): “Barter, Division of Labor and Trades, Commerce, the greater portion o f the Law and the whole Law o f Nations, all Politics, and the Spread o f Civilization are based on this Inter-D ependence” (Lieber 1869: 393-94, 399-400). Increasing international contact was providential, both in the sense that it was furthered by transcendent forces over which humans had little control, and in the sense that it was in the long run in accord with hum ans’ social nature and beneficial to their well-being. Because “nations are no more destined for oyster-like seclusion and self­ sufficiency than individuals, but, on the contrary, are made for inter-dependence and inter-com pletion,” the removal o f barriers to their exchange was for Lieber a vital part o f the internationalist creed. H is devotion to the cause o f free trade was a position to w hich he held consistently for half a century and in unequi­ vocal terms. “Free Trade is nothing else than the application o f the gospel of good-will and love to production and exchange, or to the material intercourse o f distant societies w hich always precedes their intellectual intercourse,” he declaimed, and “he w ho interferes w ith free exchange, and consequently with free consumption, interferes w ith the divine law in Inter-D ependence” (Lieber 1869: 394, 410-12, 435; Friedel 1947: 132, 136,191, 223, 344, 410). H e dis­ trusted the very introduction o f terms referring to political entities into the analysis o f economic questions; for him, “the words domestic and foreign have very little m eaning in economy, as they have none whatever in nature,” and he denied that there was any such thing as “national wealth,” declaring that “this is merely a term for the aggregate wealth o f a certain number o f individuals.” If governments would refrain from hindering the free economic exchange of individuals across state borders, they would contribute greatly to “the close of short-sighted international selfishness and unneighborly ill-will” (Lieber 1869: 402, 412; Lieber 1841: 60). In a more positive vein, they should take steps to encourage international economic activity by simplifying the mechanisms o f commerce. Lieber was a determ ined proponent o f a universal currency, decry­ ing “the chauvinism regarding the D ollar” (Lieber to Sumner, January 26, 1872), and predicting that “Universal Coinage would be one o f the greatest ele­ m ents o f all Internationalism ” (Sears 1928: 61). O f lesser importance, but still a beneficial effect, would be the adoption o f a single worldwide system of weights, measures, and time, all o f them taking the logical French standards. These steps would, by easing the way to greater international contact, “hasten the advent o f general peace” (Lieber 1871b). A nd Lieber was certain that the international com m unity would embrace such measures, as he was confident that free trade would inevitably trium ph. “O u r race is now going to enter the period o f International Free Trade,” he wrote, adding, “— that is, of International Peace and G ood-W ill” (Lieber 1869:412). (Lieber expressed this idea o f inevitability more colorfully in a private letter in which he declaimed, “Free Trade is the distinct course o f history.... [A] hundred years hence ... pro­ tection will be looked upon as the exceptional deviation and w ith the same

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surprise as we look upon the beauty-patches o f our great-great-grand-m others” [Lieber to Allibone, June 20,1865]). These political expedients rested on the deeper foundation o f a constantly increasing similarity o f thought and appreciation o f the universal standards o f justice that bound all nationalities. Lieber long favored the “non-political” idea o f gatherings o f experts or “publicists” (another term he claimed to have coined) whose identification o f just rules o f conduct would carry weight sim­ ply due to the disinterested prestige their authors brought to them: T he strength, authority and grandeur o f the Law o f N ations rests on, and consists in the very fact th at Reason, Justice, E quity speak through men, “greater than he who takes the city”— single men, plain Grotius; and that nations, and even Congresses o f V ienna cannot avoid hearing, acknowledging and quoting th e m .... [I]t has ever been and is still a favorite idea o f mine th at there should be a congress o f from five to ten acknowledged jurists, to settle a dozen or two o f im portant yet unsettled points— a private and boldly self-appointed congress, whose whole authority should rest on the inherent truth and energy o f their own proclama. (Lieber to Thayer, M ay 7 , 1869)7 This internationalism o f thought would be the product and constantly strength­ ening manifestation o f an unforced melding o f previously parochial loyalties, local ties o f community, and particular standards o f right conduct. T h e higher the level o f transnational communication, the more readily would general pub­ lic opinion in all countries— first the civilized states inhabited by the “CisCaucasian” race, but eventually all states everywhere— grant to all hum an beings the same rights that had previously been recognized as belonging only to a caste, a town, or a group o f fellow citizens. T hus Lieber’s stress on education as one o f the most im portant public responsibilities, and his devotion to all means o f the diffusion o f knowledge, such as libraries. “W e cannot do now-a-days w ithout large public libraries, and libraries are quite as necessary as hospitals or armies,” he wrote. “Libraries are the bridges over which Civilisation travels from gener­ ation to generation, and from country to country—bridges that span over the widest oceans” (Lieber to Halleck, November 16, 1865). Free trade, interna­ tional protection o f copyright, international congresses o f private persons hold­ ing common interests— all these would advance the sharing o f material and intellectual progress and more clearly reveal the universal rules o f justice that would circumscribe the sovereignty o f force, leavening it w ith laws that applied equally to strong and weak alike. T h e extension o f sympathies and the mutual instruction o f cultures was the defining trait o f the modern age: W ith the ancients everything was strictly national; religion, polity, knowledge, literature, art, acknowledgment o f right, all were local;

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w ith us, the different colors on the map do not designate different dis­ tricts o f religion, knowledge, art, and customs. There are wires of mental telegraphs w hich cross all those red and blue and yellow lines. A nd w ho will say that the time cannot arrive when that broad sea of h isto ry ... this commonwealth o f active and polished nations, shall extend over the face o f our planet? (Lieber 1845: 214-15) For Lieber, then, no contradiction existed between the expansion of states to the fullest extent defined by the territory occupied by their nationalities or necessary to their flourishing— w hat some m ight call imperialism— and his understanding o f internationalism . Indeed, constructive internationalism relied on cooperation am ong states constructed on a solid national basis, which could rely on domestic popular support and had the enlightenm ent to under­ stand their shared interests, as well as the disinterested principles o f justice that would increasingly meliorate their relations as civilization progressed. Lieber accepted th at significant, and perhaps growing, inequalities among states would exist, and he saw in the special rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the great powers the means to further progress. T he fact that several powers of the first rank cooperated w ith and restrained one another was an advance over an international system marked by the overlordship o f one “universal m onar­ chy.” In one o f his favorite and m ost frequently employed similes, he drew the contrast between the ancient world, in which “one government always swayed and led,” and the modern, in w hich the “leading nations— the French, the English, the G erm an, the Am erican— ” would “draw the chariot o f civilization abreast, as the ancient steeds drew the car o f victory” (Lieber 1868:241-42). In this “commonwealth o f nations,” both unity and diversity would thrive, as “there will be no obliteration o f nationalities,” while free and voluntary sub­ mission to principles o f justice would reduce conflict and extend the sway o f law w ithout the danger o f a dictating supranational authority (Lieber 1868: 241-42). Supported by both nationalism and internationalism, Lieber’s vision was one o f optim ism and confidence.

L ie b e r a n d C o n t e m p o r a r y I n t e r n a t io n a l R e l a t io n s W riting at a tim e when a discipline o f political science was just coming into existence in the U nited States and a discipline o f international relations was still decades in the future, Lieber by no means saw himself as a scholar o f international politics as such. In part because o f his own im m igrant background, in part because o f his unquenchable interest in all questions o f contemporary public policy, and in part because o f the subjects on w hich his somewhat peripheral involvement in the m aking o f policy occurred (in drawing up the “Lieber code” during the Civil War, and in serving as an umpire on the U.S.-Mexican

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commission settling claims arising from the M exican W ar), he never excluded international politics from his analysis o f politics in general, and he w rote on international questions increasingly in later life. H ow should he be seen in rela­ tion to the contem porary field and discourse o f IR? First, in contrast to those who seek to problematize the basic concepts that, in their view, have been privileged under the present structure o f power, Lieber saw the nation, nationalism, and the state as entirely unproblematic. H e was preem inently a theorist o f the state and its connection w ith the organic people, and he saw as his great task, and the task o f all students o f politics in the m odern era, the reconciliation o f nation, state, and individual liberty. Just as the sense o f nationalism derived from a providentially inspired longing in all humans for comm unity and marks o f likeness w ith others, so was there an inborn instinct for individuation and sense o f justice that could be satisfied only under the rule o f impartial law— hence Lieber’s liberalism. N o t only were these natural and political phenom ena palpable, they were literally God-given; they were facts, and it was right th at they should be facts. A conscience— a realization that certain things were right and others were wrong—was a uni­ versal facet o f hum an character, and although particular systems o f ethics dif­ fered, the area o f overlap was large. T h e fact th at they differed at all, according to their varying circumstances, did not dem onstrate that such standards were only social conventions. Increasing civilization would bring all such systems into greater uniformity, reflecting the inherent validity o f certain moral and political principles. A lthough cognizant o f the force o f historical contingency, Lieber had drunk deeply at the spring o f G erm an Idealism. A more promising link between Lieber and the discipline o f IR at the out­ set o f the twenty-first century may be found in the significance he attributed to interdependence. W hile he never suggested that higher levels o f economic interaction and mutual dependence would guarantee international peace, he did frequently assert that economic rationality based on these conditions would have the tendency to prom ote a higher level o f peace, as well as a greater will­ ingness by states to bring their relations under predictable and nondisruptive international law. T h e concept o f an international “regime,” w ith its widely accepted formal or informal rules and conventions gaining great sway over the actions o f the participating actors, was one o f the few terms that Lieber did not stake a claim to have invented, but it is a prism through w hich he would have found him self perfectly comfortable viewing the international system. Such norms and procedures were for him a m ark o f m odern internationalism . T he fact that they were frequently mediated through non-state actors— private economic, cultural, scholarly, or other contacts— for him dem onstrated the lim ­ ited role o f the state, as one kind o f society among many. H is contention that free self-government could be carried on only if the domestic institutions sub­ ject to popular control were not themselves dictated to by presum ing foreign authorities presaged by more than a century contem porary concerns over the

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“democratic deficit” in international organizations such as the W T O . (And his assiduous gathering o f statistics on all political and other subjects would prob­ ably have made him sympathetic to quantitative dem onstrations o f the scope and effect o f interdependence.) Nevertheless, states remained the primary political actors in the international system, and their power relations continued to set the terms within which other nonpolitical activities could be carried on. Free trade, as we have seen, was a life­ long objective o f Lieber, who wished governments to exercise as little control as possible over economic exchange, both domestic and international, but if, as he also hoped, belligerents were to respect the sanctity of private goods and ships on the high seas, including those belonging to citizens o f enemy countries, the deci­ sion to accept such a limitation would have to be taken by states. H e connected this expectation o f the vitality o f the state with a realistic appreciation for the inescapable influence o f considerations o f power. “W herever people meet, the most powerful must sway, in politics as in every other sphere,” he pronounced, “and w herever... entire nations meet nominally on terms of parity, it is unavoid­ able that the most powerful must sway the less powerful” (Lieber, 1838: II: 651). A conception o f international society that lay in “spontaneous rapprochement o f ideas and norms, combined with independence o f nations” (Anonymous: 297), a refusal to close his eyes to the perennial competition for power among inde­ pendent states, an equal belief in the increasing authority o f voluntarily accepted rules embodying the common interests o f these states, and an insight into the broader transnational community o f civilization, at least theoretically open to all human beings, regardless o f race or culture— these are terms familiar to any Grotian o f a pluralist bent, to use the language o f Bull (1966) and W heeler (1992). Lieber, the unfailing exponent o f “Anglican liberty,” might well have been pleased to think o f himself as a forerunner o f the English School. W hile Lieber tended to dichotomize political phenomena, his work implicitly relies on the continuum formed by all three o f M artin W ig h t’s tradi­ tions o f international thought. In considering the role that war had played in the construction o f the domestic and international institutions o f his day, and in deriding the pretensions o f international organizations because they lacked instruments o f coercive power, he evidenced a realist appreciation for the inerad­ icableness o f force and conflict from international life. In his wish that contact between Western and non-W estern peoples would bring “civilization” to the latter and his firm belief that over the long run o f history there were no such things as subject and master races, he flirted w ith a revolutionist faith in the ultimate trium ph o f the hum an com m unity over political division. It was in the “broad middle way”— w hat W ig h t called the rationalist tradition— that Lieber would find his clearest intellectual descendants, nonetheless. H is belief in the natural, unforced confluence o f interests among states, his confidence in the inevitable growth o f international law and institutions (properly limited), and his restricting o f the use o f force to just wars m ark an optimistic and progressive, if perhaps

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naive, internationalism th at would be challenged by the imperialist trends in international society in the decades after his death.

N otes 1. The standard life o f Lieber is Freidel 1947. See also the forthcoming collec­ tion o f essays on Lieber’s life and work, to be published by the University o f South Carolina Press. 2. I am indebted for this information to my colleague W illiam Gwyn, who was a student in the graduate program at the University o f Virginia in the early 1950s. 3.

M ost recently, O nuf (2002) has considered Lieber’s work on institutions.

4. Lieber’s extensive correspondence, along with many o f his other papers, may be found in the Francis Lieber Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The letters cited in this essay were addressed to the following parties: Samuel Allibone, Johann Bluntschli, G. H . Dufour, Hamilton Fish, Henry Halleck, Franz von Holtzendorff, Franz Mittermaier, Samuel Ruggles, Charles Sumner, Martin Russell Thayer, the Times (London), and Andrew Dickson W hite. 5. Lieber was even more emphatic in his article denying the existence o f the “Latin Race”: Some great and eminently leading nations— such as the Greek and the English— have been and are a mixture o f varied tribes and races. There are, unquestionably, distinct characteristics belonging to different races; but it must never be forgotten that the tendency o f all our civilization is to the greater and greater assimilation o f these Cis-Caucasian races, and that all the noblest things— religion, truth, and science, architecture, sculpture, and civil liberty— are not restricted to races. To all these the mandate is given: G o into all the world. (Lieber 1871a: 308-309) 6. He urged Sumner in 1871 to send to European scholars copies o f his “Domingo speech” opposing the purchase o f Santo Domingo (Lieber to Sumner, March 29,1871), but a generation earlier, in 1847, he had favored making the cession o f California a con­ dition of any treaty o f peace with Mexico, on the grounds that California, unlike Mexico proper, had no unassimilable population, and the few existing inhabitants were making no proper use of it. Friedel 1947: 227-28, points out the contradictions in which this stand involved Lieber. See also Dorfman andTugwell 1938a: 177. 7. This was a long-standing theme that Lieber sounded frequently. See Lieber to Sumner, January 4, 1870; Lieber to W hite, December 15, 1866; Lieber to Bluntschli, March 24,1872; Lieber to G. H . Dufour, April 10,1872.

Chapter 2 Paul S. Reinsch and the Study of Imperialism and Internationalism Brian C. Schmidt

T he two main themes o f this book, imperialism and internationalism, occupied much o f Paul S. Reinsch’s (1869-1923) scholarly attention. In addition to studying and w riting on imperialism and internationalism, Reinsch was also deeply concerned w ith the closely related issue o f colonialism which, following the Spanish-Am erican W ar o f 1898, engrossed the minds o f American states­ m en and academics alike. It is fair to say that Reinsch was one o f the leading American authorities on the subject o f colonialism in general and colonial administration in particular. T hroughout the early 1900s, he was a central figure in carving out a distinct discourse about international politics. Reinsch pursued this discourse within the institutional context o f the newly formed academic discipline o f political science, a discipline that he prom oted both in his capac­ ity as a professor in the D epartm ent o f Political Science at the University o f W isconsin and in his various administrative roles in the American Political Science Association (APSA), w hich was formally established in 1903. M y main intention in this chapter is to reconstruct in detail the contribution that Reinsch made to the early-tw entieth-century academic conversation about international politics. In reconstructing this episode o f disciplinary history, my purpose is to indicate that the early conversation about international politics among Am erican political scientists was shaped most fundamentally by a focus on the late-nineteenth and early-tw entieth-century practices o f imperialism and colonialism. This revisionist account o f the early disciplinary history o f IR runs counter to the dom inant view that the early discourse was absorbed in the idealist quest to create a pacific world order. I begin the chapter by noting the curious fact that although Reinsch played a prom inent role in the early development o f IR , he is, nevertheless, generally unknown to contem porary students in the field. A fter suggesting a couple of explanations o f why this is the case, I provide a preliminary justification of Reinsch’s im portance to the field. T he remainder o f the chapter is devoted to reconstructing Reinsch’s contribution to the early discourse about international 43

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politics. I first provide a brief sketch o f Reinsch’s professional life as an academic. Next, I turn to his seminal work, World Politics at the E nd o f the Nineteenth Century (1900). T his book is interesting for a num ber o f reasons, but m ost im portant is the insightful analysis o f the phenom enon o f national im perial­ ism, which Reinsch viewed as the fundam ental factor shaping international politics at the dawn o f the tw entieth century. T h e discussion o f national im pe­ rialism w ithin the context o f the late-nineteenth-century scramble for colonial possessions is followed by a focus on Reinsch’s efforts to create a science o f colonial adm inistration that could m eet the twin demands o f the colonized and the colonizer. W hile often ignored, or only given scant attention, the study o f colonial adm inistration within political science comprised a considerable share of the early discourse about international politics. T his conversation is note­ w orthy for revealing the lim itations o f the internationalist ethos that was con­ spicuous in the writings o f those studying the so-called society o f states. T he prevailing view among political scientists and international lawyers at the tim e was that the colonized regions were not full-fledged members o f international society. Consequently, a different set o f political relationships was held to exist between those who were deemed to be “inside” and “outside” o f international society. M artin W ight, one o f the founders o f the English School o f interna­ tional relations, who had an interest in the study o f colonial adm inistration, once remarked that “the question o f relations w ith barbarians was a political problem forming a bridge between international relations and colonial adm in­ istrations” (W ight 1992: 50). Reinsch offered a unique perspective on w hat the proper relationship between the “civilized” members o f international society and the “other” should be, and his view, despite its paternalistic overtones, was, in many ways, consistent w ith the basic tenets o f contem porary international­ ism. In the final section o f the chapter, I turn to the them e o f internationalism that was most apparent in Reinsch’s w ork on w hat was term ed “public inter­ national unions,” w hich today are commonly referred to as “international regimes” or “international institutions.” In this manner, I aim to reveal the way in which Reinsch’s academic work was very much located at the intersection of the study o f imperialism and internationalism.

D is c ip l in a r y H is t o r y a n d R e in s c h Before proceeding any farther, it is worthwhile addressing the puzzle o f why most contem porary political scientists entirely overlook Riensch’s contribution to the field o f IR , despite his long list o f impressive academic achievements. Part o f the explanation is th at while political scientists have begun to devote much more systematic attention to recovering the history o f the discipline, the historiography o f IR continues to remain in an essentially impoverished condi­ tion (Waever 1998). T he situation, as noted in the introduction, is certainly

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improving; especially with respect to correcting a number o f erroneous assump­ tions about the interwar period o f the field’s history (Kahler 1997; Osiander 1998; Schm idt 1998a, 1998b; W ilson 1998). Yet the period before W orld W ar I, w hich m ight be term ed the “prehistory” o f the field, has received hardly any attention at all. Perhaps the most telling explanation o f why the overwhelming majority o f orthodox histories o f IR have overlooked the contributions o f Reinsch is rooted in the deeply entrenched belief that the field did not come into existence until after W orld W ar I. By unreflectively assuming that the institutional origins o f IR emanate directly from W orld W ar I, earlier periods o f disciplinary history, such as that when Reinsch and his political science col­ leagues were writing, are-almost completely ignored. Reinsch’s work is a testimony to a thriving conversation about international politics that was taking place well before the outbreak o f W orld W ar I. T he sheer volume o f academic literature and variety o f course offerings in interna­ tional relations that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s would not have been pos­ sible w ithout the foundations that had been provided by an earlier generation o f IR scholars.1 T h e existence o f this conversation, w hich I reconstruct in the main body o f this chapter, raises a num ber o f critical issues about the manner in which scholars have approached the task o f chronicling the history o f the field. I argue th at existing histories have tended to exaggerate the significance o f external influences, such as wars or major international crises, on the devel­ opm ent o f the field and underemphasized the im portance o f internal, institu­ tional factors. There is a deeply ingrained assumption that w hat is happening in the field can be directly accounted for in terms o f the external context pro­ vided by “real w orld” political events. W hile I certainly do not w ant to suggest that a great divide exists, or should exist, between the field and the “real world,” I do w ant to argue that the relationship between the two is not as direct as many have tended to assume. From the point o f view o f disciplinary history, the focus should be on describing how the field has perceived and responded to external factors rather than on how these factors can account for the dynamics inside the field. I adopt an approach that can be described as a critical internal discursive history.2 T h e intention o f such an approach is to reconstruct the internal devel­ opm ents and transform ations th at have occurred in the field o f IR by following and describing a relatively coherent conversation among participants in this professional field o f inquiry. T h e term conversation is not employed m etaphor­ ically, for w hat is being reconstructed is an actual conversation among aca­ demic scholars and others w ho self-consciously participated in an institutional setting devoted to the study o f international politics. T his approach in no way discounts the significance o f exogenous factors, but it does give greater weight to endogenous factors in accounting for the specific character o f the academic conversation about international politics. I argue, at least w ith respect to the situation in the U nited States, that the university context from which IR arose

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as a distinct field o f study is the m ost im m ediate and relevant milieu for under­ standing its historical development. Besides failing to recognize th at the intellectual and institutional origins of the field predate W orld W ar I, there are additional reasons why the w ork o f Reinsch and his colleagues has been generally ignored. O ne reason is that m ost people today would be either embarrassed or offended by the perceptions as well as the language o f our political science ancestors. In describing the relations between the “developed” countries and their colonized regions, they referred to the “dark,” “uncivilized,” “backward,” and “barbaric” areas o f the world. A num ­ ber o f racial and prejudicial assumptions were never far from the surface o f w hat at the time were considered intellectually justifiable depictions o f inter­ national politics. John Burgess, for example, w ho played a major role in estab­ lishing the Columbia School o f Political Science in 1880, m aintained that “the Teutonic nations— the English, French, Lom bards, Scandinavians, Germ ans, and N orth Americans— as the great m odern nation builders” were justified in their “tem porary imposition o f Teutonic order on unorganized, disorganized, or savage people for the sake o f their own civilization and their incorporation in the world o f society” (Burgess 1934: 254-55). W hile Burgess’s views m ight fall on the extreme side o f the spectrum, they were not atypical o f the period during which Reinsch was writing. In our present day com m itm ent to a sani­ tized and politically correct social science vernacular, it is perhaps not surpris­ ing that many m ight w ant to forget the early history o f A m erican political science. Yet, I submit, we ignore this history at the peril o f failing to understand the pedigree o f our field. There are a num ber o f reasons why it is im portant for contem porary stu­ dents o f IR to be familiar w ith the contribution that Reinsch made to the early study o f international politics. Part o f Reinsch’s significance stems from his role in helping to institutionalize the study o f international politics w ithin the dis­ ciplinary matrix o f American political science. If, as I argue, institutional con­ text is an im portant variable for understanding the disciplinary history o f an academic field, then Reinsch’s role in helping to demarcate the discursive boundaries o f w hat was, at the beginning o f the tw entieth century, considered to be the subject matter of international politics is crucial. T he fact, for example, that the subject m atter o f the field has come to be largely understood in terms o f the interaction o f states, in which war is regarded as the central dynamic, is a function o f the disciplinary origins o f IR . In his positions both w ithin the A PSA and as professor o f political science at the University o f W isconsin, Reinsch was instrum ental in creating the institutional infrastructure that not only helped to launch the fledgling field o f IR but created the conditions for its subsequent development. O f crucial im portance here is the “Politics” section o f the A PSA that Reinsch chaired from its inception. As I indicate in this chap­ ter, the core o f w hat eventually became the subfield o f IR was carved from the substantive content o f the Politics section.

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In addition to calling into question the link that has been assumed to exist between the origins o f the field and the occurrence o f W orld W ar I, an analysis o f Reinsch’s writings problematizes the dichotom y that has been constructed between the poles o f idealism and realism. T he idealist-realist antinom y is widely regarded as one o f the foundational truths about the history o f IR and it continues to structure the terms o f debate in the field (Booth 1996). According to the conventional wisdom, W orld W ar II represented a glaring anomaly in the prevailing “idealist paradigm” that was the subject of the first “great debate” which took place between the interwar scholars and a new group o f scholars who began to enter the field in the late 1930s and early 1940s under the label o f “realists.”3 M ost accounts o f the history o f the field make it appear as if the approach o f the realists, w ith their claim to focus on w hat “is” rather than w hat “ought” to be, was far superior to previously existing approaches in the field. This judgm ent has contributed to the prevalent view that realism won the first “great debate” and that, consequendy, the ideas o f the interwar scholars have become irrelevant. Even if it is the case that the self-identified realists were responsible for changing the focus o f the field, this does not entail that those w riting before 1945 were necessarily idealists or Utopians. It was, after all, the post-W orld W ar II realists who invented and employed the label o f “idealism” to describe the character o f the scholarship between the two world wars. There were those who early on recognized the dubious nature o f the dichotomy between ideal­ ism and realism. Q uincy W right, who was at the University o f Chicago when H ans J. M orgenthau joined the departm ent in 1943, wrote that “the distinction between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ is o f doubtful value in either political analysis or political philosophy.” H e added that they “have functioned as propaganda terms according to which everyone sought to com m end whatever policy he favored by calling it ‘realistic’” (W right 1952: 119-20). Reinsch’s w ork is intriguing in that it incorporates elements o f both w hat is taken to be “idealism” and “realism” and thereby reveals the difficulties o f understanding the intellectual history o f IR when it is cast in terms of an oppo­ sition between idealism and realism. Reinsch clearly recognized the funda­ mentally im portant role o f power in the political relations among nation-states, which many realists have argued defines the essence o f international politics. C arr’s indictm ent o f the interwar “utopians” rested on his claim that they had ignored the role o f power, and like M orgenthau, he proclaimed that “politics, are, then, in one sense always power politics” (1964: 102). Reinsch was fully cognizant o f the role that power played in politics. H is analysis o f w hat he per­ ceived to be the unrestrained power struggle occurring at the end o f the nine­ teenth century led him to be deeply concerned about the possibility that certain states would rekindle the atavistic ambition to establish a world empire. Reinsch made specific reference to M achiavelli, w ho is almost always portrayed as a hard-nosed realist, and declared him to be the spokesman for the age of national imperialism. According to Reinsch, as well as for “realists” such as Carr,

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Machiavelli’s significance stem m ed from the Florentine diplom at’s recognition that “morality is the product o f power.” Machiavelli’s ideas, Reinsch argued, were particularly relevant in the con­ text o f hyper-nationalism that characterized national imperialism, w hich was the prim ary focus o f World Politics at the E nd o f the Nineteenth Century. Reinsch declared that “in the birth struggle o f national imperialism, ju st as centuries ago in the birth struggle o f nationalism, Machiavellian thought and M achiavellian means are characteristic o f political action” (1900:16). T his illustrates the sig­ nificance o f Reinsch in particular, and disciplinary history in general, namely, that ideas from the past can shed light on our present situation. C ontrary to a recent claim made by Jan Jindy Pettm an (1998) th at IR has, until recently, paid remarkably little attention to nationalism, Reinsch’s work, as well as that o f a host o f other figures in the history o f the field, was directly focused on the phe­ nom enon o f nationalism.4 T he fact th at Pettm an can declare that “nationalism has been so peripheral a concern to International Relations” illustrates the dis­ mal state o f our knowledge about the history o f the field (1998: 149). As nationalism has once again become a divisive force in the world, it is appropri­ ate to tap the wisdom o f those w ho addressed this phenom enon in the past. W hile it is possible to recognize a num ber o f w hat may be term ed “realist themes” in Reinsch’s work, it is also the case that several themes and issues gen­ erally associated w ith liberalism can also be found. T he liberal belief in progress is unmistakably present in Reinsch’s work. H e was convinced o f the possibility that the international system could be gradually reformed, and provided em pir­ ical evidence to indicate that change pointing toward a robust internationalism was indeed taking place. T h e best evidence o f this, for Reinsch, was in the realm o f international organization. Reinsch argued that “the idea o f cos­ mopolitanism is no longer a castle in the air, but it has become incorporated in numerous associations and unions w orld-wide in their operation” (1911: 4). H is detailed analysis o f the increasing num ber o f international public unions, which he argued coincided w ith the growing ties o f interdependence among nations, is strikingly similar to the attem pt o f contem porary neoliberal institu­ tionalists to explain the role that international regimes and institutions perform in facilitating interstate cooperation. T h e contem porary literature, however, for the most part, fails to acknowledge the significant contribution that Reinsch made to the early study o f international organization.5 Finally, Reinsch’s work raises a num ber o f interesting issues for those in the field who recently have begun to emphasize the constitutive role o f inter­ national relations theory, and who are interested in how certain identities are constructed and represented. Steve Sm ith has argued that one o f the main lines o f contention in the field today is “between those theories that seek to offer explanatory accounts o f international relations, and those that see theory as constitutive o f that reality” (Sm ith 1995: 26). T h e argum ent being made by those who accentuate the constitutive role o f theory is not that “reality” does

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not exist, but rather that our cognitive understanding o f w hat is taken to be “reality” is unavoidably mediated through theory and, even more fundam en­ tally, through language. These theoretical insights have begun to be employed by those who are interested in understanding the representational practices that have enabled the “W est” both to discover and know the “other” beginning within the so-called age o f discovery and continuing to the present day.6 A recent example is provided by Roxanne Lynn D oty in her provocative book Imperial Encounters (1996). D oty’s basic argum ent is that the identities o f individuals and places are not simply given, but rather are constructed on the basis o f some theoretical and epistemological claim to know the world that has served the power interests o f the center over the periphery. W ith respect to the categories o f “N orth” and “South,” D oty explains that “thinking in terms o f representational practices highlights the arbitrary, constrticted, and political nature o f these and many other oppositions through w hich we have come to ‘know’ the world and its inhabi­ tants and th at have enabled and justified certain practices and policies” (1996: 3). She describes the process through which the “N orth” has discursively con­ structed the identity o f the “South” as one o f “imperial encounters.” According to Doty, “Im perial encounters is m eant to convey the idea o f asymmetrical encounters in w hich one entity has been able to construct ‘realities’ that were taken seriously and acted upon and the other entity has been denied equal degrees or kinds o f agency” (1996: 3). In her own attem pt to provide a critical genealogy o f N orth-S outh relations, D oty uncovers a number o f representa­ tional practices th at have served to provide an authoritative account o f that region o f the world that has been subsumed under the heading “third world.” Reinsch’s writings on colonial adm inistration provide an especially good case through w hich to explore the representational practices that were at work in the field o f IR . A num ber o f peculiar identities were constructed by IR schol­ ars in order to create a sharp disjuncture between the “civilized” members of international society and the “other.” T h e point o f examining these representa­ tional practices, however, is not to condem n Reinsch and his colleagues for using categories and terminology that are unacceptable by today’s intellectual standards. Rather, the point is to illustrate the m anner in w hich the discourse o f colonial adm inistration constructed a particular representation o f the “other” that, in turn, created the problematic o f w hat the proper relationship should be between the “developed” states and their colonies. T his was the central prob­ lematic that the scientific study o f colonial governm ent attem pted to solve.

B io g r a p h ic a l B a c k g r o u n d Reinsch was born on June 10, 1869, in M ilwaukee, W isconsin, to parents of G erm an descent (Pugach 1970). H e attended the University o f W isconsin,

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where his education consisted o f a broad liberal arts curriculum culm inating in an introduction to history and the social sciences. H e graduated in 1892 w ith a BA and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. Noel Pugach, Reinsch’s principle biographer, describes how Reinsch’s desire to pursue graduate w ork in Germany, which was common among aspiring A m erican intellectuals in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was thwarted by his family’s limited financial means. Reinsch consequently decided to pursue a career in law and graduated in 1894 from the University o f W isconsin law school w ith an LLB. H e was adm itted to the W isconsin bar and began a private practice in Milwaukee. According to Pugach, however, Reinsch increasingly became unhappy and disillusioned w ith his law career. M eanwhile, exciting developments were taking place at the University o f W isconsin that would convince Reinsch to discontinue his law practice and pursue a P h D in history and political science.7 In 1892, the School of Economics, Political Science, and H istory was established under the director­ ship o f Richard Ely, a prom inent Am erican economist who before his arrival at W isconsin was teaching at Johns H opkins University. T he creation o f this school made the University o f W isconsin one o f the leading institutions for the study o f the social sciences. T he reputation o f the school rested on the presti­ gious faculty that, in addition to Ely, included Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles H om er Haskins, W illiam Scott, Charles Bullock, A lbert Shaw, Jerome H . Raymond, and a num ber o f other leading figures in the fields o f economics, history, and sociology. A fter being offered a position as instructor in the D epartm ent o f History, Reinsch enrolled in the fall o f 1895 as a doctoral candidate in history and political science. Having previously completed courses taught by Turner on Am erican history, Reinsch selected him as his dissertation advisor. Reinsch’s dissertation, English Common Law in the Early American Col­ onies, bridged his interests in law and Am erican history, and the thesis, accord­ ing to Pugach, “mirrored the Turnerian influence” (Pugach 1979: 9). Turner, in a famous essay titled “T h e Significance o f the Frontier in A m erican H istory,” attributed Am erican exceptionalism, the peculiarity o f American institutions, and its experiment w ith democracy to the existence o f the western frontier. Yet by the end o f the 1800s, Turner claimed that the frontier was all but closed, which he argued represented a crisis to the health o f American democracy and liberal individualism. A fter completing his P hD , Reinsch left for Europe where he spent a year reading, writing, and attending lectures in Bonn, Leipzig, Berlin, Rome, and Paris. It was during his year abroad, from 1898 to 1899, that Reinsch wrote most o f w hat would become World Politics at the E nd ofthe Nineteenth Century. The manuscript helped him to secure a newly created full-time position, in 1899, at the University o f W isconsin, as assistant professor o f political science. This marked the beginning o f his illustrious career as a political scientist. A t the University o f W isconsin, Reinsch was essentially synonymous w ith the study o f political science. H e was the chair o f the D epartm ent o f Political

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Science from its formal creation in 1901 until he left W isconsin in 1913 after President W oodrow W ilson appointed him minister to China. Beginning in 1899, Reinsch regularly taught a course titled “C ontem porary Politics.” In 1906, the title o f the course was changed to “Contem porary International Politics,” which several intellectual historians have claimed was the first course in the U nited States to concentrate specifically on the subject m atter o f inter­ national politics (H addow 1969: 211; C urti and Carstensen 1949: 630-38). Reinsch was a popular teacher and taught a wide range o f subjects, and regularly offered courses on political theory, law, comparative legislation, diplomacy, and a specialized course, titled O riental Politics, that reflected his interest in China. In recognition o f his stature as one o f the leading American political sci­ entists, Reinsch was appointed to a committee, headed by Jeremiah Jenks, that was assigned the task o f canvassing the level o f support among other likeminded scholars for forming a« independent political science association. O ther disciplines, such as history and economics, already had formed their own asso­ ciations: the Am erican H istorical Association (A H A ) was established in 1884, and the Am erican Econom ic Association (A EA ) in 1885. Sufficient interest in forming a political science association resulted in the Jenks Com m ittee issuing an official announcem ent for an organizational m eeting to take place on Decem ber 30,1903, in N ew Orleans, in conjunction with the A H A and A E A meetings. As one o f the founding members o f the A PSA , Reinsch participated in the drafting o f the association’s constitution. According to the constitution, the objective o f the A PSA was “the encouragement o f the scientific study o f Politics, Public Law, A dm inistration, and Diplomacy” (Reinsch 1904). To carry out the w ork o f the A PSA , seven sections were created, and a committee headed by a chairperson was selected for each one.8 In addition to serving as second vice-president o f the A PSA, Reinsch was appointed chair o f the “Politics” section, which, compared to the other sections, appeared to lack a clearly defined focus. Yet Reinsch’s scholarly interest in imperialism and colonial administration were inevitably carried over to the Politics section. T h e panel topics from the early annual meetings of the A PSA indicate th at the general subject o f colonialism formed the nucleus o f the Politics section. A review o f the A PSA ’s original journal, Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, later changed to the American Political Science Review, indicates th at a fairly significant percentage o f the published articles were w ritten on the topics o f imperialism and colonial administration. Moreover, the index o f recently published literature in the earliest volumes o f the American Political Science Review included a separate section entitled “colonies.” This helps to establish the point that the early generation o f American political scientists, especially those who identified w ith the international field, were deeply interested in the issues o f imperialism and colonial administration. These interests, w hich originally were pursued and discussed in the Politics section, would later form the nucleus o f w hat became the subfield o f IR.

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W o r l d P o l it ic s From the point o f view o f reconstructing the early disciplinary history o f IR , Reinsch’s first book, World Politics at the E nd o f the Nineteenth Century (1900), is o f great importance insofar as it helped to establish a discursive framework for an ensuing conversation centering on the topics o f imperialism and colo­ nialism. M any o f the core features th at are m ost often associated w ith the study o f international politics— the interaction o f states, the ubiquity o f power, the dynamics o f war and peace, the mechanism o f the balance o f power— all can be found in Reinsch’s text. W illiam Olson and A. J. R. G room suggest that “the first glimmerings o f international relations as a discipline had appeared w ith the publication o f Reinsch’s World Politics at the End o f the Nineteenth Century” (1991: 47). A lthough the im m ediate focus o f the book was on the events taking place in China, Reinsch did not in anyway restrict his attention to the “Chinese question.” H e began the book w ith a broad overview o f the major economic, political, and intellectual forces that were currently influencing international politics. In the preface, Reinsch announced th at his intention was “to gather into a harmonious picture the m ultitude o f facts and considerations th at go to make up international politics at the present tim e” (1900: v). A fter providing a perspicuous account o f the forces shaping contem porary international politics, Reinsch turned his attention to the political situation in C hina and concluded w ith an analysis o f G erm an imperialism and A m erican expansionism. T he major force that Reinsch argued was shaping world politics at the end o f the nineteenth century was nationalism. Like m any o f the founding figures o f political science, such as Francis Lieber (1798-1872) and John Burgess (1844-1931), Reinsch described the closing decades o f the nineteenth century as the age o f nationalism. Lieber, who in 1857 was named Am erica’s first pro­ fessor o f history and political science at Columbia College, had described the era in which he lived as the “National Period,” which he argued was distinguished by the existence o f numerous independent national polities. Lieber regarded the national polity, as opposed to all other types o f political arrangements, to be the only one sufficient “for the demands o f advanced civilization” (Lieber 1885: 228). Reinsch m aintained that ever since the lingering aspiration for a univer­ sal world order had come to an end during the course o f the Renaissance, the existence o f independent nation-states, each striving to attain and assert its own national identity in an environm ent consisting o f actors w ith similar goals, had become the most prevalent feature o f world politics. T his particular ontology of world politics is one that subsequent generations o f IR students have endorsed. Reinsch argued that the power struggle that was characteristic o f this early form of nationalism contributed to a productive vitality in world politics that would otherwise be expunged “from the dead uniform ity o f a world empire” (1900: 6). By the beginning o f the tw entieth century, however, it was evident to Reinsch that a qualitatively different and much more dangerous form o f

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nationalism had arisen. Unlike the older form o f nationalism that had been able to coexist within a com m unity o f independent nation-states, an exagger­ ated and expansionistic form o f nationalism was making itself felt by the fact that states now desired “to control as large a portion o f the earth’s surface as their energy and opportunities will perm it” (1900: 14). National identity, Reinsch claimed, was no longer derived endogenously, but now was determined exogenously by juxtaposing the superiority o f one’s own civilization to the inferi­ ority o f others. This, he argued, was what contributed to the desire to extend and spread one’s own civilization upon “barbaric” and “decadent” peoples. This new form o f nationalism, which Reinsch termed “national imperialism,” first made its appearance at the dawn o f the twentieth century. National imperialism was defined by Reinsch as the endeavor “to increase the resources o f the national state through the absorption or exploitation o f undeveloped regions and inferior races, but does not attem pt to impose political control upon highly civilized nations” (1900: 14). Reinsch pointed to the situation unfolding in China, with each of the great powers seeking to carve out their own exclusive sphere o f interest, as a highly representative example o f the phenomenon o f national imperialism. According to Reinsch, each o f the two types o f nationalism, the earlier nineteenth-century version and the newer national imperialist variety, held radically different prospects for world order. W ith respect to the former, not only was the energy associated w ith nationalism primarily directed inwardly, but a num ber o f safeguards existed that contributed to a rough equilibrium between the dual forces o f nationalism and internationalism. Reinsch argued that some o f these safeguards, such as the balance o f power and the role o f interna­ tional law, were institutional and resulted in a “balance between states by pre­ venting any o f the stronger members from unjustly oppressing the smaller civilized nations” (1900: 6). O ther safeguards were largely ideational and worked to foster a reasonable degree o f international harmony. Foremost among these ideas was the notion that individual nation-states could coexist within the larger family o f nations. In this manner, Reinsch, like Lieber, thought that the earlier form o f nationalism was not inimical to the basic tenets o f internationalism. Imperialism, Reinsch argued, negated the beneficial aspects o f nationalism. N ot only did imperialism rupture the compatibility between nationalism and internationalism , but rendered the two forces mutually antagonistic. Reinsch believed th at tw entieth-century nationalism was an “exaggerated” form o f nationalism that led to a dichotomized view o f the world in terms o f friend and foe, civilized and barbaric, and self and other. Reinsch wrote, “[T]he older ideas o f solidarity o f humanity, o f universal brotherhood, have largely lost their force, and have been replaced by a narrow patriotism ” (1900: 20). T he spokesmen o f the age no longer embraced Kant and G rotius, but instead, Hegel, Nietzsche, and especially Machiavelli. Reinsch concluded th at a dangerous precedent was being set in which considerations o f power and allegiance to the state trum ped all other concerns.

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Reinsch m aintained that in the age o f national imperialism, force had come to be “regarded as the index or measure o f fitness: as the strongest, the most resourceful, survive, these m ust be the true agents o f civilization— through them the hum an spirit realizes itself” (1900: 7). H e judged that world politics was being turned into a Nietzschean contest o f im posing one’s will on the “other”; especially on the “backward” and “uncivilized” regions o f the world, a contest that W alter Lippm ann would later describe as the “stakes o f diplomacy” (Lippm ann 1915). T h e great powers, according to Reinsch, were “straining every nerve to gain as large a share as possible o f the unappropriated portions o f the earth’s surface,” and they employed every possible means to achieve this end (1900: 66). O nce again, Reinsch pointed to the situation in C hina as exemplifying the pattern o f behavior whereby each o f the great powers was striving to carve out an exclusive sphere o f interest over extended tracts o f ter­ ritory. Reinsch noted that the irony o f this competitive form o f expansionistic nationalism was that it was actually rekindling dreams o f world empire, which if fulfilled, would result in the dissolution o f independent nation states. In dis­ may, Reinsch wrote “the phantom o f world empire is again beginning to fill men’s minds w ith vague fears and imaginings, and is everywhere a m ost potent agency for the creation o f international animosities” (1900: 68). W hile the possibility that a successful policy o f national imperialism could eventually lead to the absorption o f separate nation-states into a w orld state was something that could not be ignored, the m ost im m ediate concern was that it would eventually lead to a major international conflict. Lippm ann would later express Reinsch’s concerns as he attributed the cause o f W orld W ar I to the failure to find a solution to the struggle between the “strong” developed states and the “weak,” “backward” regions (Lippm ann 1915). Reinsch had, in part, w ritten World Politics as an attem pt to warn o f the dangers that national imperialism posed to world peace and to dissuade those who believed that eco­ nomic gains could be realized through acquiring exclusive control o f the earth’s surface. Like other liberal thinkers such as N orm an Angell, Reinsch thought that greater economic benefits could be achieved through trade than by terri­ torial conquest. H e emphasized th at there was more than enough w ork to be done in “developing and civilizing the primitive regions” and that it was not necessary for the great powers to fight amongst themselves in the process o f spreading “civilization.” T h e liberal strand o f Reinsch’s political philosophy led him to the conclusion that “each o f the leading nationalities can fully develop its own character and impress its best elements on the civilization o f the world, w ithout desiring the downfall and ruin o f other powers” (1900: 70). In other words, economic expansion did not necessarily entail militarism and territorial conquest. T his belief would lead Reinsch to be one o f the chief supporters o f the U nited States O pen D oor Policy in China. In order to appreciate his advo­ cacy o f the O pen Door, we first have to consider the underlying motives that Reinsch attributed to imperial expansion.

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In his search for an explanation for the rise o f national imperialism, Reinsch granted a modicum o f legitimacy to sentimental motivations for increasing national prestige by extending the flag to distant lands as well as to the moral motivation o f spreading W estern civilization to the far corners o f the globe, bu t he argued that the m ost fundam ental factor prom pting states to expand was economic. Reinsch subscribed to the view that capitalist develop­ m ent had reached a stage that required that foreign outlets be found to absorb the surplus goods and capital being produced within the more economically developed nations. In his second book, Colonial Government (1902), Reinsch wrote, “to-day the prim ary object is the search for markets, and the chief pur­ pose o f commercial expansion has come to be the desire to dispose o f the sur­ plus product o f European industry” (1902: 60). Yet while Reinsch recognized that capitalist development in a num ber o f economically advanced states, including the U nited States, had reached a point where foreign outlets o f cap­ ital investment were necessary, this did not settle the question o f the most appropriate means to achieve this end. A lthough Reinsch was generally sym­ pathetic to the analysis that John H obson offered in Imperialism: A Study (1902), he questioned w hether it really was the case, as H obson submitted, that “better social service could be obtained by distinctly improving the income o f the working classes than by using capital for the acquisition of tropical prod­ ucts” (Reinsch 1903: 532). W hile Reinsch agreed w ith H obson that at the present tim e “the highly civilized countries o f Europe and America offer far better markets to each other than could ever be expected o f the colonies,” he still thought that expansion to the far reaches o f the world was not only neces­ sary, but both inevitable and justifiable (1900: 37). W hile he unequivocally rejected national imperialism on the grounds that it jeopardized world peace, unjustly established colonial rule over indigenous populations, and tended to underm ine efforts to achieve domestic reform by diverting attention to external crusades, Reinsch was, nevertheless, an avowed expansionist w ho often couched his justification in terms o f the “white man’s burden.” Reinsch wrote, “[I]t is well, then, to look the facts clearly in the face and to recognize that it is a serious and sad duty w hich the white race is per­ form ing in making way for its own further expansion” (1900: 43). H e claimed the “civilized” states, by dint o f their mastery over the forces o f nature, had come to represent a reserve o f restless energy that could not be contained within national boundaries. It was thus inevitable, according to Reinsch, that this energy would be directed outwardly to regions that, for various reasons, lacked the dynamism found in the “civilized” states. Reinsch was convinced that expansionism, if pursued correctly, could produce positive benefits for hum anity at large. T his, for Reinsch, was the crux o f the justification issue; expansionism not only had to reap economic gains for the “civilized” powers, it also had to bring tangible benefits to the people living in the undeveloped areas o f the world. Optimistically, Reinsch declared, “[H jum anity is one, and

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the members o f the brotherhood w ho through barbarous customs and irra­ tional institutions are kept in a state o f backwardness are to be led out into the light o f freedom and reason and endowed w ith the m ultiform blessings o f civilization” (1906: 399). W hile not everyone shared Reinsch’s view that the fruits o f expansion should be beneficial to all parties concerned, w hich we will see was a central pillar o f his ideas about the appropriate ends o f colonial adm inistration policy, the thought that expansion was inevitable was widely shared by those participating in the early American discourse about international politics. Bernard M oses, for example, a professor o f political science at the University o f California who created one o f the first formal courses in the subject o f political theory, argued that in light o f the interdependent character o f contem porary international politics, which made “every country contiguous to every other country,” it was utopian to believe “th at a rude people should be perm itted to develop its own life w ithout foreign interference.” M oses concluded that “the spirit o f contem ­ porary civilization is intolerant o f barbarian isolation” (Moses 1906: 388). Moses argued that a principal justification for external intervention into the tropical regions was to reap the material benefits, for the world at large, o f the resources that remained unused by the local inhabitants. W hile the prevailing view may have been th at some form o f expansion on the part o f the developed states was inevitable, the relationship between im pe­ rialist expansion and colonization was a much more contentious issue. Reinsch believed that although there was a close association between colonization, which he defined as “the exertion o f influence by a higher civilization upon one of a lower one, or the creation o f civilized life where none had existed before,” and imperialism, the two phenom ena, in his view, were in no way identical (1902: 14). Since Reinsch believed that it was prim arily economic factors that were the driving force behind the latest wave o f expansionism, he remained unconvinced about the alleged necessity o f installing formal political rule over the inhabitants living in these territories. H e felt that in many instances, espe­ cially in the case o f China where the great powers were carving out exclusive spheres o f interest in areas where they had not yet established any commercial or industrial enterprises, the im position o f political control contradicted eco­ nomic logic. Reinsch argued th at there often was an economic loss involved in extending formal political rule over distant territories. H e recognized that the investment o f large sums o f capital by individual entrepreneurs and the increas­ ing movement o f citizens to distant lands was typically accompanied by the demand for political sovereignty to be extended to ever-increasing tracts o f ter­ ritory. Yet these arguments by themselves did not, for Reinsch, provide a solid justification for colonialism. A t the very least, the supposed advantages o f colo­ nialism had to be weighed against all o f the negative aspects associated w ith colonial policy. Moreover, he was sharply critical o f individual entrepreneurs who, in the pursuit o f their own economic interests, tended to exaggerate the

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financial gains to the nation as a whole that were to be achieved through investment in the tropical regions. Both as an academic and in his role as a diplomat, Reinsch thought that the U.S. O pen D oor policy in C hina represented an ideal way in which the imperative o f expansion could be realized w ithout the need to impose direct colonial rule on distant lands. Reinsch was critical o f the imperial m ethod of establishing exclusive spheres o f influence, w hich he believed to “be very dan­ gerous to the w orld’s peace,” since “it encourages a habit o f looking upon the whole world as available territory for partition among civilized powers” (1900: 61). Reinsch was a great supporter o f the O pen D oor policy formally intro­ duced by Secretary o f State John H ay in September 1899. W ith respect to the situation in C hina, the aim o f the O pen D oor policy was for those countries who already had established spheres o f interest to adhere to the principle of free trade and to respect the territorial integrity o f China. W hile it is beyond the scope o f this chapter to deal w ith the complexities of O pen D oor diplo­ macy, it is significant to note th at this policy was later interpreted by the m em ­ bers the “W isconsin School” o f historians to be the basis o f the U nited States’ imperial, anticolonial policy.9 W illiam Applem an W illiams, the most famous mem ber o f the W isconsin School, described Secretary o f State John H ay’s O pen D oor N otes as “a classic strategy o f non-colonial imperial expansion.” According to W illiam s, “[T ]he policy o f the open door was designed to clear the way and establish the conditions under w hich America’s preponderant eco­ nomic power would extend the American system throughout the world w ith­ out the embarrassment and inefficiency o f traditional colonialism” (1972: 50). By embracing, and actually, in his role as minister to China, implementing the O pen D oor policy, Reinsch can be viewed as a participant in the American for­ eign policy tradition o f fostering economic expansion through imperialist means, but w ithout the burden o f a formal colonial empire. In the final analysis, Reinsch was a severe critic o f both national imperial­ ism and colonialism. Together, he argued, they represented a dangerous threat to world peace, and nowhere did Reinsch think this was more apparent than in the case o f China. Yet his objections to national imperialism went beyond the risks that he thought it posed to world peace. As a Progressive-reformer, Reinsch was deeply troubled by w hat he perceived to be the adverse impact that im pe­ rialism had on the domestic home front. Reinsch observed that there was a general tendency am ongst the imperial powers to divert attention away from pressing domestic reform issues to foreign policy concerns. Imperialism, he argued, was a diversionary tactic th at temporarily withdrew public attention away from domestic affairs. Reinsch wrote, “[A]s national attention is centered on the acquisition o f territory and national glory abroad, less attention and energy is left for the national regulation o f home affairs, and that the cause o f good government m ust therefore suffer” (1900: 78). H e concluded that im pe­ rialism represented a threat to the survival o f liberal democracy. In the case o f

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the U nited States, he judged that recent foreign policy developments, particu­ larly those undertaken in the Pacific and the Caribbean, were likely to lead to an enhanced role o f the executive to the detrim ent o f the legislative branch o f government. T his proved to be the case during the course o f the M cKinley administration in w hich the executive branch o f governm ent finally sur­ m ounted the legislative branch (Zakaria 1998). Finally, w ithin the pages o f World Politics, Reinsch provided an additional basis for opposing colonialism th at would figure prom inently in his w ork on colonial administration, namely, the harm ful consequences that the practice had on indigenous populations. H e was aware o f the damage and destruction that usually accompanied contact between “civilized” and “barbaric” peoples, which paradoxically, for Reinsch, was brought about by the dictates o f “advanced civilization.” Poignantly, Reinsch wrote: T he men who, as civilization pushes forward its outposts, come into contact w ith the savages, usually have no ability or desire to under­ stand them . Cruel m ethods o f conquest and subjection are pursued and m ost o f these races would be happier o f they had never seen their civilizers. (1900: 43) Thus, while the argum ent o f spreading civilization was often put forward to defend the practice o f colonialism, Reinsch claimed the reality was that the “promised civilization often consists in a speedy eradication o f the savages from the face o f the earth” (1900: 20). W hile Reinsch cham pioned the O pen D oor Policy and strongly objected to the practice o f colonialism, the spoils o f victory that followed the Spanish American War, which Secretary o f State John H ay described as a “splendid lit­ tle war,” presented the U nited States for the first time w ith several o f its own colonial possessions: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, G uam , and the W ake Islands. Subsequently, the question o f how the U nited States governm ent should administer these territories became a central com ponent o f the public and academic discourse about international politics. Reinsch would emerge as a central voice in this conversation.

C o l o n ia l A d m in is t r a t io n A lthough rarely acknowledged in the orthodox histories o f the field, the study of colonial government and adm inistration w ithin political science comprised a considerable share o f the early discourse about international politics. T he study o f colonial governm ent concerned itself, m ost broadly, w ith a variety o f issues that arose from the political relations existing between the colonial pow­ ers and their dependent territories. A review o f the programs from the early

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annual meetings o f the A PSA reveals that many panels were devoted to the topic o f colonial administration. A t the first annual meeting held in Chicago, it was recom m ended th at the A PSA establish a colonial section to study the problems connected w ith colonization and colonial policy (Morris 1904). M any o f the leading political science textbooks o f the time, such as those by Stephen Leacock (1906) and Raymond G ettell (1910), included a chapter on the topic o f colonial government. G ettell claimed that the governmental prob­ lems involved in colonial rule “are o f prime importance to the student of polit­ ical science” (G ettell 1910: 348). Yet while it was obvious to most political scientists that the problems o f governing and adm inistering distant territories were indeed im p o rtan t,,the question o f the appropriate way to study these problems elicited a variety o f responses. T he study o f adm inistration had originally occupied a central position w ithin the discipline o f political science. M ary Furner has suggested that it was a “common interest in comparative adm inistration that ultimately led to the creation o f a separate national association o f political scientists” (1975: 287). Yet while the study o f adm inistration had achieved a measure o f scientific respectability, the same could not yet be said o f colonial administration. Elevating the scientific stature o f colonial adm inistration became a major desideratum of the early IR scholars. Alpheus H enry Snow, for example, who was an expert on colonial affairs at George W ashington University, raised the possibility o f establishing a “science o f imperial relations.” Snow wrote that just “as there is a recognized science o f international relations and another recognized science of the internal relations o f nations and states, there may yet perhaps be recognized a science o f imperial relations” (1908: 590). Snow’s The Administration of Dependencies (1902) was considered to be a major contribution to the literature devoted to the general topic o f colonization. Unlike much o f the existing liter­ ature, which merely provided a historical narrative o f the past practices o f colo­ nial rule, Snow’s work was an explicit attem pt to draw lessons for the U nited States from the experiences o f the British and French colonial systems. Alleyne Ireland, a leading authority on colonial adm inistration in both the U nited States and G reat Britain, observed that while the subject o f colonial adm inistration increasingly was gaining the attention o f both political scien­ tists and the general public, there were few, if any, professional standards guid­ ing research in this area. H e sarcastically wrote th at “knowledge o f calligraphy is regarded as the only qualification necessary for a writer on colonial topics.” Ireland argued that the “torrent o f ignorant and often violently prejudiced w riting” on the subject had resulted in great damage to “the cause o f a scientific study o f colonial adm inistration” (1906: 210). In a paper that he delivered to the annual m eeting o f the A PSA in 1906, Ireland sought to remedy this situa­ tion. H e argued that one o f the chief defects o f the existing literature was the pervasive tendency to include issues about the morality o f colonization in the analysis o f the adm inistration o f dependencies. H e felt that such concerns did

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not come under the proper purview o f colonial adm inistration. T h e m orality or immorality o f colonialism, Ireland maintained, was an issue th at should be examined and resolved irrespective o f the consequences that it m ight produce. Yet when it came to articulating the m ethod th at should be followed, Ireland argued that the “m ethod o f judging by results, w hich is false and unscientific when applied to the moral principle o f colonization, is precisely the m ethod which m ust be followed when the subject under investigation is an applied sci­ ence o f colonial adm inistration” (1906: 214). As w ith much o f the adm inistra­ tion literature, he argued that efficiency should be the standard used to judge the relative merits o f a specific administrative program. In order to determ ine the efficiency o f a colonial adm inistration policy, Ireland argued that it was im portant to recognize th at there were two conflict­ ing motives or principles from w hich two completely different m ethods o f colonial adm inistration resulted: the principle o f development and the princi­ ple o f exploitation. W ith respect to the first principle, Ireland argued that the aim o f colonial adm inistration was to provide beneficent rule. T he underlying assumption behind this principle was that a prosperous and content native population would, in the long term, yield the best commercial results. Conversely, when the principle o f exploitation was applied to colonial adm inistration, the aim was to extract as many resources as possible from a country in the shortest period o f time. H e maintained that it was im portant to distinguish clearly between these two fundamentally different policies o f colonial administration. W ith this distinction in m ind, the student o f colonial adm inistration could then utilize the historical-comparative m ethod, w hich Ireland argued was the defining element o f a science o f colonial administration. T h e m ethod o f com ­ parison offered the possibility o f providing practical advice to governm ent offi­ cials whose responsibility it was to adm inister efficiently colonial possessions. Instead o f merely providing historical descriptions o f how other countries had administered their colonies, Ireland encouraged the use o f the comparative m ethod in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses o f different colonial policies. This was the m ethod that Ireland followed in both Tropical Colonization (1899) and Colonial Administration in the Far East (1907).

R e i n s c h ’s A p p r o a c h t o C o l o n i a l A d m i n i s t r a t i o n There is little doubt that Reinsch, like Ireland, believed that a scientific study of colonial administration should have the practical effect o f providing policy­ makers with the knowledge to devise better colonial policies. As originally con­ ceived, political science was understood to be a scholarly enterprise devoted to acquiring the authority o f knowledge over its subject so as to be in the position to reform the practice o f politics. D uring the period that Reinsch was writing, the historical-comparative m ethod was viewed as a scientific mode o f investigation,

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similar in form to the natural sciences, that would eventually lead to the discovery o f laws o f political development. As a political scientist at Princeton University, W oodrow W ilson had argued that “nowhere in the whole field o f politics, it would seem, can we make use o f the historical, comparative m ethod more safely than in this province o f administration” (1887: 45). W ilson assured American political scientists that it was im portant to look at foreign systems of administration, because “so far as administrative functions are concerned, all governments have a strong structural likeness” (1887: 45). O n one level, Reinsch thought that now that the U nited States had become a colonial power, it was appropriate that students o f colonial administration make use o f the comparative m ethod in order to derive lessons from those powers th at had a longer historical experience o f colonial rule. In Colonial Government, which was w ritten as a textbook for Richard Ely’s Citizen’s Library o f Economics, Politics, and Sociology series, Reinsch explained that with the U nited States’ unexpected possession o f an extensive colonial domain, “it is the natural, and the only wise, course to turn to the experience o f other nations who have had similar problems to face, and by whose failures and successes we may instruct ourselves” (1902: 13). Unlike some o f his colleagues, Reinsch did not believe that the U nited States could adopt the same methods that were used to “settle” and “subdue” the American continent and apply them to the new insular regions it had acquired. Reinsch claimed that, notwithstanding the unique character o f the U nited States, “it is the part o f wisdom at this juncture to review modes o f action and institutions by which other nations have been for a long time attempting, with varying results, to solve similar problems” (1902: vi). O n another level, however, Reinsch had reservations concerning the extent to w hich the U nited States could derive meaningful lessons about colo­ nial policy from the European powers. W h en he turned his attention to artic­ ulating the sort o f colonial policy th at the U nited States should follow toward the insular regions, no one was more critical o f the methods o f the European powers than Reinsch. Partly as a consequence o f the U nited States’ late entry as a colonial power, as well as his belief in the idea o f “American exceptionalism,” Reinsch concluded that American policymakers could embark on a different path and achieve a truly “enlightened” colonial policy. A t no time, however, did Reinsch suggest that the U nited States simply grant formal political independence to the territories that Spain had ceded. It was sympathy for Cuban independence from Spanish rule that had provided one o f the key justifications for President M cKinley’s decision to declare war on Spain, but C uban independence, and for that matter, Philippine independ­ ence, proved to be just as illusionary under the tutelage o f the U nited States as it had under Spain.10 W hile Reinsch argued that economic motives were the root cause o f the most recent wave o f colonial expansion, he nevertheless argued that “it was a political motive,— the desire to weaken the prestige of Spain,— that led the Am erican government to make an attack upon Spanish

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dom inion in the Philippine Islands, at a time w hen the A m erican nation had as yet no economic interests in the archipelago” (1904a: 116). Reinsch felt that the U nited States had legitimate national interests in the Pacific region, and he personally supported the annexation o f the Philippines. H e argued th at since the U nited States was in possession o f several overseas territories, it would be im proper to abdicate responsibility for governing them . In this manner, Reinsch failed to overcome the prejudicial stereotype o f his day th at held that certain groups o f people were simply unfit for self-rule. A lthough there were inconsistencies and contradictions in Reinsch’s views on expansionism and colonialism, he attem pted to resolve many o f them by advocating w hat he considered to be an enlightened and altruistic adm inistra­ tive policy toward the overseas territories. Reinsch devoted considerable effort to devising the m ost appropriate institutional mechanism for reconciling the indigenous interests o f those who inhabited the undeveloped regions w ith the need for economic expansionism on the part o f the “developed” states. A fter much deliberation and careful thought, Reinsch believed that he had found the proper formula for a successful colonial adm inistration policy: “To foster the cohesion and self-realization o f native societies, while at the same tim e provid­ ing the economic basis for a higher form o f organization,— that should be the substructure o f an enlightened colonial policy” (1906: 412). T he bulk of Reinsch’s ideas concerning the appropriate means and ends o f colonial administration policy were outlined in his third book Colonial Admin­ istration (1905), which was a companion volume to Colonial Government. Reinsch stated that the purpose o f the book was “to furnish a statem ent o f the various problems confronting colonial governments; and to indicate the main lines o f solution that have been attem pted; selecting from the vast am ount o f material the most striking illustrations” (1905: v). T h e historical comparative m ethod was once again invoked as Reinsch surveyed the various m ethods of colonial adm inistration utilized by the D utch, English, French, G erm ans, and Spanish. Individual chapters were devoted to issues such as education and social improvement, colonial finance, colonial commerce, land policy, and the labor question. In the process o f formulating colonial adm inistration policy, Reinsch argued that it was necessary to take two different points o f view into consideration: the needs o f “advanced civilization” and those o f the indigenous inhabitants. T he needs o f the former, according to Reinsch, rested on the fact that the m odernization process had resulted in such a successful m astery over the forces o f nature that there really was no option but to direct this energy to the far corners o f the globe. Confidently, Reinsch declared No other society has achieved so complete a mastery over the productive and impellent powers o f nature. O u t o f these characteristics the expan­ sionist movement has naturally developed. It was impossible to restrict the mobility o f social forces to national boundaries. (1905: 9-10)

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I t was on this basis, and no other, that the needs o f “advanced civilization” should be considered when developing colonial adm inistration policy. T he needs and interests o f the inhabitants in the “backward” regions were the second matter to consider when devising colonial policy. Reinsch took this con­ cern very seriously, and much o f ColonialAdministration was actually written with this in mind. In his review o f Reinsch’s book, Frank J. Goodnow claimed that the title was somewhat misleading, because it was “devoted to a consideration, largely from the view-point o f the dependency, o f the policy which should be followed by the mother country towards its colonial possessions” (1906: 135). Reinsch was well aware o f many of the ill consequences that often accompanied contact between “advanced” and “-backward” peoples. H e was genuinely concerned about the negative impact that modernization often had on traditional societies. H e believed that colonial administration policy should, to the extent that it was pos­ sible, respect local customs and ways o f life. A t the same time, Reinsch also felt that colonial administration policy had a responsibility to improve the basic living conditions and economic opportunities o f the local inhabitants. Possessing supe­ rior scientific knowledge made it incumbent on the colonial powers to foster improvements in the areas o f health, education, sanitation, communication, trans­ portation, and general infrastructure. “A civilizing colonial policy,” Reinsch argued, is one that “improves the general conditions o f life” (1905: 30). Experience has shown that there is often a sharp tension between, on the one hand, respecting local conditions and customs and, on the other hand, working to “improve” and “m odernize” a different people’s way o f life. Quite often, as evidenced by the theory and practice o f the modernization school that was dom inant throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, o f w hich W . W . Rostow’s The Stages o f Economic Growth (1960) serves as an exemplar, it was the former that frequently was sacrificed to the latter. Reinsch was aware o f this tension, and it was on the basis o f his view that colonial policy should satisfactorily rec­ oncile the needs o f both m odern and traditional societies that he emerged as one o f the leading critics o f the colonial policies that the U nited States adopted toward the Philippines. In the case o f the Philippines, Reinsch observed that the U nited States was attem pting to combine two different and antithetical colonial policies. H e argued th at the U nited States was pursuing a policy of assimilation whereby its own institutions were systematically being introduced and adapted to a completely foreign setting. H e maintained that no attention whatsoever had been directed toward ascertaining the local conditions o f the island or the characteristics o f the people living there. Instead, the naive belief prevailed th at w hat was right for the U nited States must certainly be right for other people. Assimilation policy, Reinsch argued, “rests upon the old rationalist doctrine o f the universality o f hum an reason” (1905: 20). Accordingly, all insti­ tutions judged to be rational must also be universal. But this doctrine, according to Reinsch, was fallacious: “Experience seems to show that even those institu­ tions w hich are by us considered the very foundation o f good government may

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have harm ful results w hen introduced into another society” (1905:15). Reinsch felt that the defense o f assimilation policy on the basis o f rationalism was really nothing more than an ideology masquerading as a scientific truth. T h e histor­ ical evidence proved to Reinsch th at the policy o f assimilation was not only unsuccessful, but often disastrous. Yet Reinsch noted th at the second facet o f U.S. colonial policy was geared toward the achievement o f self-government and autonomy for the people o f the Philippines. T his was actually the policy that Reinsch preferred, but he objected to the fact th at it was being pursued concurrently w ith a policy o f assimilation. Reinsch argued that a policy o f autonomy was the exact opposite o f a policy o f assimilation, because the aim o f the former was self-determination. Yet it was self-evident that there were lim i­ tations to the U nited States assimilation policy in that it was never the inten­ tion to grant American citizenship to the people o f the Philippines. Reinsch suggested that the U nited States move away from its tw o-track antagonistic policy and embrace those principles o f colonial adm inistration th at fostered autonomy and that would, consequently, serve the best interests o f humanity. Reinsch claimed that he had found the answer— one that granted the colo­ nial territories the greatest am ount o f autonomy—in the form o f the protectorate. According to Reinsch, the protectorate embraced the flexibility, insight, and imagination that were necessary for a colonial administration policy dedicated to fostering autonomy. T he protectorate, Reinsch explained, “presupposes two sepa­ rate states, the weaker of which places itself, by treaty, under the protection o f the stronger, retaining its internal autonomy, but perm itting the protecting state to exert a guiding influence in its foreign affairs” (1902: 109). Influence could still be exerted, but rather than by imposing one’s own institutions and seeking to modify directly the social institutions and psychology o f “alien races,” it would be done indirectly by modifying the economic structure o f the dependency. There was a delicate balance to be struck between letting the dependency develop autonomously and exerting just the right am ount o f indirect influence to ensure that the blessings o f modernity were enjoyed by everyone. This required a new type o f colonial administrator; one who not only possessed a thorough under­ standing of the local people and territory, but who had the insight and imagina­ tion to construct a colonial policy that could “modify their social evolution in accordance w ith our experience and thus to obtain for them gradually a higher degree o f social well-being and efficiency” (1905,24). To be able to achieve these ends without simultaneously destroying the society and the people living in the dependent territories was the ultimate task of colonial administration policy.

I n t e r n a t io n a l is m W e come full circle when we consider Reinsch’s work in the area o f inter­ national cooperation and his pursuit o f a pacific world order. W hile he had

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argued in World Politics that the end o f the nineteenth century was character­ ized by an extreme version o f nationalism that manifested itself in the form of national imperialism, he later concluded that the beginning o f the twentieth century was marked by a profound sense o f internationalism. Reinsch wrote: [N o tw ith stan d in g the definiteness and energy w ith which the action o f nationalism asserted itself in nineteenth century politics, the force o f its current was all the tim e being dim inished and its direction modified by that other great principle o f social and political combin­ ation which we may call internationalism, and which comprises those cultural and economic interests which are common to civilized humanity. (1911:12) T he national state, Reinsch argued, continued to be the focal point o f interna­ tional politics, but fundam ental changes in the relations among states was con­ tributing to a vibrant internationalism . H e thought that the best evidence of this was to be found in the growing ties o f interdependence that increasingly made it difficult for statesmen to achieve their objectives w ithout acting in concert w ith others. C ertain ends such as economic prosperity and a healthy population were now desired by all states. Yet Reinsch claimed that these ends were only achievable if states mutually cooperated w ith one another. H e argued that the underlying foundations for internationalism were to be found in the recent convergence o f cultural, economic, and scientific interests that were com­ mon to all o f humanity. Reinsch declared, “[I]n our age such bonds o f union have been powerfully supplemented by the growing solidarity o f economic life throughout the world, as well as by the need in experimental and applied sci­ ence to utilize the experience and knowledge o f all countries” (1907: 579). H ere we can appreciate how Reinsch’s ideas about the proper elements of a colonial adm inistration policy were logically consistent with the m anner in which he viewed the world. Growing ties o f interdependence m eant that no state or territory was an isolated island. T he well-being o f hum anity increas­ ingly depended on everyone achieving greater levels o f social and economic efficiency. “O u r destiny is a com m on one,” Reinsch asserted, and “whatever may happen to the nations o f Africa and Asia affects our life” (1911: 3). T he fruits o f m odernization could not, therefore, be restricted to the privileged few, but instead had to be extended to everyone. These arguments are essentially the same as those made by contem porary advocates o f interdependence who insist that the fate o f the developed world is closely tied to th at o f the impoverished masses. T h e condition o f interdependence requires that attention be directed toward the problems plaguing the poorest states in the world; for nothing less than the very survival o f the planet and the hum an race is at stake. Given the pervasive view that the writings o f the earliest IR scholars were idealist or utopian in character, it is im portant to accentuate the fact that

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Reinsch did not consider interdependence and solidarity am ong states to be an abstract or lofty ideal. Rather, he argued that, empirically, they were the defin­ ing characteristics o f international politics in the early decades o f the tw entieth century. Reinsch judged his age to be “realistic and practical,” and its concepts “positive and concrete.” H e stated that “the temper o f the age is positive and con­ structive rather than given to idealism and speculation” (1911: 141). Reinsch claimed th at more than anything else it was economic factors that were uniting people and fostering an interdependent world. T h e underlying unity o f the world, especially in the areas o f economics, science, and technology, m ade it absolutely necessary for states to coordinate their specific national activities and to establish formal mechanisms for achieving international cooperation. G reater cooperation, Reinsch argued, was to be achieved by the formal creation o f international institutions. A lthough Reinsch’s pioneering w ork in the area o f international organiza­ tion has gone almost completely unnoticed, his position was nearly the same as those currently working under the heading o f neoliberal institutionalism .11 Like contem porary students o f international organization, Reinsch argued that it was the traditional conception o f sovereignty that proved to be the greatest obstacle to states realizing their com mon collective interests. H e recognized that independence o f action, the ability to act unilaterally, unfettered by com ­ m itments to other states or multilateral organizations, was erroneously consid­ ered to be the hallmark o f state sovereignty. Yet, in language that appears to be strikingly similar to contem porary arguments, Reinsch found it to be “evident that the old abstract view o f sovereignty is no longer applicable to the condi­ tions in a world where states are becoming more democratic and where the organization o f interests is taking on an international aspect” (1909:10). W h a t was needed, Reinsch believed, was a conceptual shift in the traditional m ean­ ing o f sovereignty that could incorporate the view that acting jointly w ith o th ­ ers to achieve collective aims and interests did not represent a violation o f state sovereignty. Reinsch felt that because o f the circumstances o f m odern life, states were “compelled to international cooperation.” This m eant that the notion of “political sovereignty as enabling a nation to do exactly w hat it pleases to others” was simply no longer tenable (1911: 5). T he best practical example o f a slowly evolving change in the theory and practice o f sovereignty was indicated by the development o f the more than forty or so public international unions that were the focus o f Reinsch’s land­ mark book Public International Unions Their Work and Organization (1911). In this work, Reinsch examined the form ation, composition, activities, and func­ tions o f the numerous public international unions that had arisen in the late 1800s and early 1900s in areas such as trade, health, communications, agricul­ ture, and crime. Public international unions were defined as associations o f states that had common interests in coordinating and regulating specific areas of international politics. In this sense, public international unions were nearly

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identical to w hat are now term ed international regimes or institutions. Examples o f public international unions included the International Telegraph U nion (one o f the earliest examples o f a public union formed in 1865), the International Labor Office, the M etric U nion, the International Institute o f Agriculture, and the Universal Radiotelegraph Union. Once formed, public international unions attem pted to fulfill three o f the core functions typically associated w ith governance: legislative, executive, and judicial (1909: 1). In describing how public international unions arose from the expressed need to fulfill vital functions common to all people, and how, once formed, they ful­ filled a crucial welfare-maximizing function, Reinsch’s work was a precursor o f the theory o f functionalism later developed by David Mitrany. Reinsch argued that the desire o f states to enter formal associations w ith other states provided tangible p roof o f the extent to which their interests and activities were transnational }n nature. In each case he examined, Reinsch attem pted to dem onstrate how common interests among states in specific issue-areas led to the necessity o f forming international public unions. T he existence o f these unions, many o f which possessed executive bureaus, arbitra­ tion tribunals, and legislative assemblies, proved to Reinsch that true interna­ tionalism was taking hold. For those states who were formally members o f a particular public international union, Reinsch wrote, “it is not so much the case that nations have given up certain parts o f their sovereign powers to interna­ tional administrative unions, as they have, while fully reserving their inde­ pendence, actually found it desirable, and in fact necessary, regularly and perm anently to co-operate w ith other nations in the m atter o f administering certain economic and cultural interests” (1907: 581). These ideas are entirely consistent with the modern functional approach to international politics (Mitrany 1966,1975). Reinsch viewed the development o f international public unions in the most favorable light, believing th at a true sense o f internationalism had taken hold and confirming th at international organization was now an accom­ plished fact. M ost importantly, Reinsch thought that these developments were advan­ tageous to world peace. Like almost every liberal proponent o f interdepend­ ence, he reasoned th at as states depended ever more on one another, their incentive to engage in war would dramatically decrease. In an age o f interde­ pendence, particularly economic interdependence, war would prove to be dis­ advantageous to all states. Reinsch argued “the incentive to war will become weaker and weaker as the bonds o f com m unity between nations increase, such as are provided by com m unication agencies, by economic and industrial ties, or by scientific cooperation.” H e added, “[H ]ow intolerably painful will be the ruthless interruption o f all such relations and activities!” (1911: 7). Both in his capacity as a scholar and activist in the early-tw entieth-century peace move­ m ent, Reinsch attem pted to redirect diplomacy in the direction o f achieving greater levels o f cooperation am ong states. A fter the G reat War, Reinsch

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emerged as a strong critic o f secret diplomacy, arguing that “had the decision o f war or no war been laid before the peoples o f Europe in 1914, with full knowledge o f the facts, the terrible catastrophe would have never come about” (1922:178). H e was a strong supporter o f the League o f N ations and openly endorsed the C ovenant’s provision to make all treaties public. T his was consistent w ith his firm belief in democracy and in m aking diplomacy accountable to the people. Before he embarked on his new career as a diplom at, Reinsch was confident that the progressive force o f internationalism had been able to tame the destruc­ tive path that nationalism had assumed at the end o f the nineteenth century. W hen he resigned from his position as professor o f political science at the University o f W isconsin in 1913 to accept President W ilson’s offer to become minister to China, Reinsch could lookback on the formative role he had played in launching the subfield o f IR. His writings on imperialism, colonial administra­ tion, and internationalism formed the nucleus o f the early academic conversation about international politics. T he themes o f imperialism and internationalism were ones that engaged the scholarly attention o f Reinsch and his political science colleagues. Reinsch was an active participant in a thriving discourse about international politics that predated W orld W ar I. H e played an instrum ental role in institutionalizing this discourse w ithin the academic context o f the newly formed discipline o f polit­ ical science. In his various roles w ithin the A PSA and through his career as a prolific scholar and professor at the University o f W isconsin, Reinsch ensured that the subject m atter o f imperialism, colonialism, and internationalism came under the purview o f political science. H is im portant role in helping to launch the field o f IR necessitates that we overcome our collective amnesia and recall the formative period o f the field’s history. M any o f the central features that we associate w ith the study o f international politics are a function o f the discipli­ nary origins o f the field. In this chapter, I have attem pted to reconstruct the early history o f IR in order to indicate the prominence that the study o f im pe­ rialism, colonial administration, and internationalism received w hen the field was being established. Through this examination o f Reinsch’s writings, I have aimed to dem onstrate that the early discourse cannot be construed as simply idealistic or utopian. M any o f Reinsch’s ideas continue to have enduring value. His ideas have been incorporated in the main body o f w ork about international politics, and although he is seldom given credit for his significant contribu­ tions, we should not ignore Reinsch’s profound contributions to the field o f IR .

N otes Authors note: During the course o f writing this chapter, I have benefited greatly from the opportunity to share my thoughts on Paul S. Reinsch and the early history o f the field with colleagues at the University o f Wales, Aberystwyth, where I presented an

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early version o f the chapter at the Cambrian Seminar series in April 2 0 0 0 .1 would like to thank the following colleagues who were in that remarkable Department o f Inter­ national Politics: Ken Booth, Ian Clark, Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, Randall Germain, Steve Smith, Colin W ight, Nicholas Wheeler, Howard W illiams, and Mike Williams. I would also like to thank John G. Gunnell, David Long, Ido Oren, Noel Pugach, and Robert Vitalis for their comments and assistance. 1. Symons (1931) provides a comprehensive survey o f undergraduate instruc­ tion in international affairs at 465 American colleges and universities. 2.

For additional clarification o f this approach, see Schmidt (1994,1998a, 1998b).

3. O n the first great debate see Kahler (1997), Lijphart (1974), Schmidt (1998a), and W ilson (1998). , 4. N ot only was nationalism a central concern o f interwar scholars such as Angell (1912) and Zimmern (1918,1923), but also for some o f the early realists such as Carr (1939,1945) and Morgenthau (1948). 5. Murphy (1994) is the major exception to the general tendency o f contempo­ rary students o f international organization to ignore Reinsch’s contribution to the liter­ ature. The fiftieth anniversary issue o f International Organization, for example, does not include a single reference to Reinsch’s pioneering work in the area o f international organization. 6. Said (1978) and Todorov (1984) represent two important examples o f this undertaking. 7. For a historical account o f the developments taking place at the University o f W isconsin during this period, see Curti and Carstensen (1949). 8. The original seven sections o f the A PSA included: comparative legislation, comparative jurisprudence, international law and diplomacy, administration, constitu­ tional law, political theory, and politics. 9. Prominent work by the W isconsin School includes LaFeber (1963, 1989), McCormick (1989) and Williams (1969,1972). 10. For background on the Spanish-American War, see Foner (1972), Freidel (1958), LaFeber (1963), M ay (1961), W illiams (1969) and Zinn (1980). 11. A good introduction to the work by neoliberal institutionalists can be found in Keohane (1989) and Baldwin (1993).

Chapter 3 Paternalism and the Internationalization of Imperialism J. A. Hobson on the International Government of the “Lower Races”

D av id L o n g

In this chapter, I consider the English liberal and anti-imperialist J. A. Hobson’s defense o f an internationalized form o f imperialism, an international govern­ m ent o f the relations between the so-called developed and less developed world, or as H obson called them , the “backward” peoples or “lower races.” H obson is famous for his critique o f imperialism in his classic work, Imperialism: A Study. It is less well known that in Imperialism and elsewhere, H obson proposes inter­ national governm ent as a solution to the problem o f imperialism. This chapter critically examines H obson’s attem pt to soften W estern imperialism through the development o f global representative institutions. It concludes that Hobson is ultimately trapped in an imperialist and more particularly a paternalist m ind­ set. Paternalist prejudices lim it and skew H obson’s proposals for an equitable solution to imperialism. Far from transcending imperialism, Hobson’s inter­ ventionist liberal prescriptions for international governm ent recast imperialism in a m odern form. T h e chapter concludes that H obson’s flawed proposals for ending imperialism are not anomalous but rather a consequence o f a paternal­ ist reflex o f liberal internationalists in the face o f difference. H obson considered international governm ent to be not only a solution to imperialism, but a prescription for an end to international anarchy and an agent o f global economic redistribution. H obson’s remedies for aggressive imperial­ ism were interventionist both domestically and internationally. T he domestic context is well known and has been criticized by am ong others Kenneth W altz (1959,1979). However, H obson sought international rules for states and some form o f international regulation o f imperial activity by an international gov­ ernm ent, or w hat we today would call an international regime (Hobson 1917: 85-86; for an extended discussion, see L ong 1996).

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Recent w ork by Uday Singh M eh ta (1999) and Barry H indess (2001), combining postcolonial sensibilities w ith a close reading o f the history o f lib­ eral thought, delve into and challenge our understandings o f liberal rationali­ zations and critiques o f empire. T hey both point out that, far from being an anomaly for liberalism, empire was central to the interests o f liberal political thinkers and integral to the liberal intellectual project. Refocusing on political thought and outlook in the cosmopolitan center, M ehta and H indess consider liberal justifications and exclusions at the peak o f nineteenth-century justifica­ tions o f empire. By extension they critique the contem porary rationalization o f continued oppression o f postcolonial peoples. In this chapter, I extend Hindess s and M ehta’s analyses to an examination o f the writings o f a key tw entiethcentury liberal thinker, J. A. H obson. H obson’s attem pt to get past earlier lib­ eral rationalizations o f imperialism does not avoid the paternalist suspension o f liberal principles o f international conduct. H obson’s international government, though putatively a solution to international inequity and ram pant nationalis­ tic imperialism, is still premised on the construction o f “backward” peoples or “lower races.” Though H obson was am ong the great liberal humanists and most progressive reformers o f his time, his paternalism as well as his other liberal principles follow in the liberal tradition. D espite H obson’s challenge to liberal laissez-faire and to liberal defenses and rationalizations o f imperialism, the way in which he suspends his liberal principles is the same and has essentially the same effect as that o f earlier liberals, that is, the paternalist construction ren­ ders non-W estern peoples the defenseless objects o f liberal projects.1 T he m ethod I adopt in my analysis is a close reading o f selected writings o f a liberal theorist as an exemplar o f a phase in the development o f liberal internationalist thinking. In looking at H obson’s arguments and assumptions regarding relations o f the so-called civilized and backward peoples,2 I shall concentrate on his classic study, Imperialism. T h e critique o f liberal thinking on international relations advanced in this chapter comes from w ithin the liberal perspective itself. British liberal thinking sets the parameters for the essay. W ith in this context, I pay attention to ways in w hich the suspension o f liberal principles o f mutual recognition in international relations is justified in the case o f relations between industrialized W estern nations and the African sub­ jects o f W estern imperialism. W h a t I mean by paternalism here is the assumption that the relationship o f the developed and less developed, or in H obson’s terminology, imperial pow­ ers and backward peoples, could be simply viewed as analogous to that o f a par­ ent (father) and child (for continuing examples o f this metaphor, see D oty 1996: 88-90 and Brysk, Parsons, and Sandholtz 2002). H obson was at times explicit about this but more often deployed the terminology w ithout explicitly noting where it came from. In my assessment o f H obson’s use o f the metaphor, I note George L akoff’s argum ent that we think on the basis o f experiential metaphors (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). H obson had not traveled

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a great deal in the areas o f the world he was discussing. South Africa and Canada were the full extent o f his travels in the British Empire. In understanding the relationship, H obson shortcuts the need for empirical and conceptual compre­ hension through the use o f a then common m etaphor that appealed to experi­ ence, that is, parenting.3 W hile some critics have identified a discourse o f disease in W estern approaches to the O ther, H obson relies for both the humanistic and authori­ tarian aspects o f his approach to backward peoples, on a view o f the relation­ ship that suggests liberal peoples as the father and nonliberal peoples as the child. T he equality so venerated by liberals in international relations dissolves into a paternalistic discourse where liberal states need to take care o f backward peoples or lower races. This paternalistic discourse is double-edged. T he metaphor o f the child should conjure up care and responsibility as well as power and superiority such as is inspired by words such as animal, disease, or vermin. As a result paternalist discourse is more ambiguous than the discourse of disease and other biological m etaphors as it applies to imperialism.4 From a fem inist perspective, the m etaphor o f the parent-child relationship is in fact paternalistic in a more specific sense, that is, that the m etaphor is o f a stylized, masculinized father-child relationship, where a more distant and strictly hierarchical teacher-pupil relationship is implied. It m ight indeed be argued that the discourse o f paternalism feminizes as well as infantilizes the O ther in order to create a domesticated context in which the usual rules o f public order and propriety in international relations can be suspended or deferred, and coer­ cive policies justified. T he chapter begins w ith a discussion o f some o f the elements o f Hobson’s new liberalism, especially its interventionist contrast w ith laissez-faire liberal­ ism, as well as briefly noting his critique o f imperialism, emphasizing the moral and political aspects over the more notorious economic theory w ith which his name is usually associated. T h e second section considers H obson’s defense of imperialism on certain conditions, and in the third the role o f international governm ent to oversee imperialism is presented. Fourth, I scrutinize H obson’s paternalist term inology and assumptions in w hich the peoples o f the develop­ ing world are seen as lower races for whom the analogy to a child could be applied. I conclude w ith a b rief discussion o f the implications for contem po­ rary liberal internationalism and for proposals for international reform today.

N e w L ib e r a l is m a n d A n t i - I m p e r ia l is m J. A. H obson is famous for his critique o f imperialism and is also well known as a turn o f the (nineteenth) century new liberal. H obson explicitly followed J. S. Mill in his developm ent o f liberal political economy and his analysis of nationalism and o f international relations. However, when H obson was writing

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his classic, Imperialism: A Study (1902), a generation after M ill, he was able to incorporate a response to the failures o f liberal theory in the face o f social, political, and economic change in w hat has since been described as the Age o f Imperialism (Hobsbawm 1987). T h e key historical developments nationally and internationally were the grow th o f the size o f firms and the increased pace o f imperialism. T h e last few decades o f the nineteenth century saw the em er­ gence o f joint stock companies, and other innovations in industrial organiza­ tion marked a period o f monopolization and cartelization as big firms or groups of firms began to dom inate their markets (M urphy 1994). A t the same time, imperialism was gathering speed as the European states and the U nited States began competing for territorial acquisitions in the less developed regions o f the world. H obson’s liberal internationalism reflected the troubles o f the times, as the world plunged from competitive imperialism in the late nineteenth century into global war early in the tw entieth. For these reasons H obson is a good deal more critical in general regarding liberalism and also more gloomy about the prospects for its im plem entation than m id-nineteenth-century liberals.5 W hile H obson learned his liberalism from his readings o f John Stuart M ill, he was not content merely to apply laissez-faire and free trade principles to international relations (or to politics and economics in general). Though he was never an academic, H obson was an im portant influence in tw entiethcentury liberal thought. H e was one o f a small group o f “new liberals” who argued that liberalism a la Cobden and M ill had run its course. Instead, in the domestic context, these new liberals proposed th at there was a role for govern­ m ent in countering poverty and unemploym ent, and for the liberal values of liberty and justice to be realized through state action. H obson described him self as an economic heretic. H is work in interna­ tional relations is best seen as part o f a wider project to revise economic princi­ ples so that they conformed to social liberal ethics, w hether on national or global questions. H obsons new liberalism translated in international relations into an argum ent that it was tim e to move beyond M ill’s and Cobden’s nineteenthcentury formulation o f liberal internationalism: M odern internationalists are no longer mere noninterventionalists, for the same reason that m odern Radicals are no longer philosophic individualists. Experience has forced upon them the truth that gov­ ernments are not essentially and o f necessity the enemies o f personal or national liberty, but that upon certain conditions they may become its creators, either by removing fetters or by furnishing the instru­ ments o f active co-operation by which both individuals and nations better realise themselves. (H obson 1918: 406) For Hobson, imperialism is the imposition o f foreign rule on subject peoples. H e contrasts imperialism w ith colonialism where there is a significant influx of

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colonists. Imperialism, according to H obson, is not about populating a terri­ tory but rather the dom ination o f less fortunate peoples. Hobson noted that the special characteristic o f modern, industrial imperialism was that it involved the com petition o f rival empires, and the final closing off o f all o f the available territory on the planet. T his new global context was the cause o f many o f the maladies o f imperialism, especially war, that H obson identified. Inter­ nationalism, by contrast, H obson defined as the cooperation o f nations, and here he m eant nations rather than states, but rarely moved beyond generalities in his discussion. Because his analysis was general he was able to avoid the dif­ ficult issues that arise where nation and state are not coincident. Hobson dis­ tinguished internationalism from cosmopolitanism, which he associated with a global mass society o f unattached individuals related by little more than the market. H obson approved o f internationalism and argued that it was built upon the contributions o f various nationalisms. But he strongly disapproved o f cos­ mopolitanism because he saw it as disintegrative and lacking in a social basis. H obson was an interventionist liberal both domestically and internation­ ally. Domestically, he argued for governm ent involvement in the running o f the economy, prim arily through redistributive fiscal policy rather than Keynesianstyle government spending. Internationally, he was an advocate o f a form of international governance. As a result, we m ight expect Hobson to be more inter­ ventionist internationally than his liberal forebears. W here M ill and Cobden were both internationalists and yet strongly against intervention except in par­ ticular limited cases, Hobson was also an internationalist in his belief that nations had no absolute right o f self-assertion.6 However, the emergence o f the new imperialism in late-nineteenth-century international politics conditioned H obson’s views a great deal. In particular, it made him very skeptical and critical o f unilateral state action in international affairs. H obson’s analysis o f imperialism deserves the fame it has subsequently garnered, though it is considerably more nuanced and w ide-ranging than the synopses o f his argum ent in IR texts or his categorization as a theorist o f eco­ nomic imperialism would suggest.7 M ost im portant o f all, H obson’s analysis in a series o f chapters in the second part o f Imperialism is an uncovering o f the reality behind the rhetoric o f empire, w hether this rhetoric saw empire as the inevitable result o f power, the unselfish application o f civilization, or a biolog­ ically determ ined outcome. H e goes behind the principles that M ill and his successors advocated to consider how they were used in practice by various eco­ nomic and political interests. H obson effectively dissects the various misinformed and selfish motives and justifications for the imperial enterprise and details the impacts on the sub­ jugated as well as on the “civilized.” H e is at his most devastating in his critique o f “philanthropy and 5 per cent” (H obson 1988: 201). H obson was critical of the full range o f activities conducted by European peoples and their governments in the extension and maintenance o f their empires. Throughout his critique he

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argued that profiteering and parasitism, as he called it, came at the expense o f the subjugated peoples, up to and often including their extermination. A cou­ ple o f examples will suffice here to give a flavor o f the overall tone: War, murder, strong drink, syphilis and other civilized diseases are chief instruments o f a destruction commonly couched under the euphemism “contact w ith a superior civilization.” (H obson 1988: 258) W h en the settlem ent approaches the condition o f genuine coloniza­ tion, it has commonly implied the exterm ination o f the lower races, either by war or by private slaughter, as in the case o f the Australian Bushmen, African Bushmen and H o ttentots, Red Indians, and M aories, or by forcing upon them the habits o f a civilization equally destructive to th em __ T his is the root fact o f Imperialism so far as it relates to the control o f inferior races; w hen the latter are not killed out they are subjected by force to the ends o f their w hite superiors. (H obson 1988:252-53) In short, says H obson, imperialism is devastating for the so-called lower races/ backward peoples as well as being bad politics and economics for the imperial nation.

H o b s o n ’s D e f e n s e o f “ S a n e ” I m p e r i a l i s m Despite his critique o f imperialism, H obson was not totally opposed to some form o f imperial rule, as long as that rule was subject to conditions and inter­ national oversight. Indeed, Jules Townshend argues th at in H obson’s outline o f “sane” imperialism (as he called it), he “agreed with much o f the imperialist case as advanced by the Fabians, [and the Social Darwinists] Kidd and G iddings.” Hobson was arguing, that is, for imperialism w ith a hum an face (Townshend 1990: 108, 115). Like other liberal critics o f his time, H obson’s apparently uncharacteristic defense o f imperialism derives from his proposals for reform or remedy o f imperialism. Indeed, he fits well with those anti-imperialists who have been criticized for being stronger in their critiques o f the causes o f im pe­ rialism than in their proposals for change in the context o f the actually existing empires (Taylor 1958). According to Hobson, “[A]ll interference on the part o f civilized white nations with ‘lower races’ is not prima facie illegitimate.” Indeed, “civilized Governments may undertake the political and economic control o f lower races— in a word ... the characteristic form o f modern Imperialism is not under all con­ ditions illegitimate” (Hobson 1988: 232; emphasis in the original; see also Hobson 1932: 77). H ow did the strident opponent o f imperialism come to such

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an apparently imperialistic conclusion? In place o f the classical liberal touchstone laissez-faire, H obson sought “a supreme standard o f moral appeal, some concep­ tion o f the welfare o f hum anity as an organic unity” that would give him a “gen­ eral law for the treatment o f lower races” (Hobson 1988: 233). Imperialism was not in principle illegitimate, according to Hobson, if it abided by three conditions. These reflected his new liberalism and also the rhetoric (if not the reality) o f the new imperialism and its relationship to its purported civilizing mission. T he con­ ditions can be seen as Hobson’s way o f guaranteeing that imperial nations lived up to their promises w ith regard to their empires and colonial dependencies. H obson’s three conditions were: Such interference with the government o f a lower race must be directed primarily to secure the safety and progress o f the civilization o f the world, and not the special interest o f the interfering nation. Such inter­ ference must be attended by an improvement and elevation of the char­ acter o f the people who are brought under this control. Lastly, the determination o f the two preceding conditions must not be left to the arbitrary will or judgm ent o f the interfering nation, but must proceed from some organized representation o f civilized humanity. (Hobson 1988:232) Thus, first o f all, “every act o f ‘Imperialism’ consisting o f forcible interfer­ ence with another people can only be justified by showing that it contributes to the ‘civilization o f the w orld’” (H obson 1988: 234). T his is H obson’s ultimate standard, a global utilitarianism. H e w ent as far as to consider the propriety of extinction o f certain subject peoples in the global good. H e ends up rejecting this in significantly lim ited terms: O n the highest ground o f theory, the repression, even extinction, of some unprogressive or retrogressive nation, yielding place to another more socially efficient and more capable o f utilizing for the general good the natural resources o f the land, m ight seem permissible, if we accepted unim paired and unimproved the biological struggle for exis­ tence as the sole or chief instrum ent o f progress. (H obson 1988: 234) H obson rejects this because “in the progress o f humanity, the services o f nation­ ality, as a means o f education and o f self-development, will be recognized as of such supreme im portance that nothing short o f direct physical necessity in self­ defence can justify the extinction o f a nation” (H obson 1988: 235). T he second condition was that the rights o f and benefits to the native pop­ ulation should be o f prim ary im portance in the consideration o f w hether inter­ vention to exploit natural resources m ight take place. As we see from the quote above, in H obson’s view these rights would be upheld not by the backward

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nations themselves but by international agreement o f the “organized represen­ tation o f civilized hum anity” (H obson 1988:232). H obson stressed that im pe­ rial interference w ith a ‘lower race’ must justify itself by showing that it is acting for the real good o f the subject race.” But he assumed rather than dem onstrated that the subjected peoples will be beneficiaries in his internationalized imperial process: “because it seems obvious that the gain to the general cause o f civiliza­ tion will chiefly be contained in or compassed by an im provem ent in the char­ acter or condition o f the nation which is the subject o f interference. . . ” (H obson 1988:235). These two conditions for a “sane” imperialism rest on the inevitability o f W estern intervention. H obson believed it was “beyond a shadow o f a doubt” “that such development will take place, and such compulsion, legitimate or ille­ gitimate, be exercised, more and more throughout this new century in many quarters o f this globe__ It is the great practical business o f the country to explore and develop, by every m ethod w hich science can devise, the hidden natural and hum an resources o f the globe” (H obson 1988: 229). N ational iso­ lation was now impossible because the science and technology o f transporta­ tion and communications had irreversibly transformed the world and made it intimately interconnected. Hobson derived an “ought” from this “is.” Interconnections o f peoples made disinterest under the guise o f laissez-faire “impracticable in view o f the actual forces which move politics” and “ethically indefensible” because “[t]here can no more be absolute nationalism in the society o f nations than absolute individu­ alism in the single nation” (H obson 1988: 225). A nd he suggested as a result that “[cjomplete isolation is no longer possible even for the rem otest island; absolute self-sufficiency is no more possible for a nation than for an individual: in each case society has the right and the need to safeguard its interests against an injurious assertion o f individuality” (H obson 1988: 231). H obson believed that the new international context m eant that the policy choice for W estern nations was no longer between intervention and noninter­ vention, if it ever was. Rather, W estern nations faced the choice o f rationally controlled intervention in the public good or chaotic self-interested exploita­ tion o f backward peoples and their territories. T h e question for H obson was w hether there was a role for governm ent regulation o f private activity that has taken place under the guise/rubric o f imperialism. H is position was clear: “T he contact w ith white races cannot be avoided, and it is more perilous and more injurious in proportion as it lacks governmental sanction and control” (H obson 1988:231). As a new liberal and an internationalist, H obson believed there was a role for government but not national governments deciding for themselves and taking action unilaterally. In the face o f interconnectedness, it was the responsibility o f W estern governments to make sure that the process o f open­ ing up developing countries’ resources was not overtly exploitative, as it would be if it were left to private business interests (H obson 1919:128).T he direction

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was clear: “To abandon the backward races to these perils o f private exploita­ tion ... is a barbarous dereliction o f a public duty on behalf o f hum anity and the civilization o f the w orld” (H obson 1988: 231). A hands-off approach was indefensible because it would let loose a horde o f private adventurers, slavers, piratical traders, trea­ sure hunters, concession mongers, who, animated by mere greed of gold or power, would set about the w ork o f exploitation under no pub­ lic control and w ith no regard to the future; playing havoc w ith the political, economic, and moral institutions o f the peoples, instilling civilized vices and civilized diseases, im porting spirits and firearms as the trade o f readiest acceptance, fostering internecine strife for their own political and industrial purposes, and even setting up private despotisms sustained by organized armed forces. (H obson 1988: 230)

H obson briefly considered but dismissed the idea that backward peoples could defend themselves, that is, a policy o f actually leaving native populations alone. Besides his concern that the military and technological superiority of the imperial nations was overwhelming, H obson was not in any case per­ suaded by nationalist arguments against such international interference. A nti­ interventionist arguments, he reasoned, rested on the absolute right o f nations to do w hat they wanted w ith “their” natural resources. H obson rejected this argum ent on the ground that there was no such absolute right to property. T he criterion for national as well as individual property was, for H obson, a social criterion rather than an individual entitlem ent (Long 1996; Freeden 1988). H obson’s utilitarianism shaped his views here: specifically, he considered that ownership depended on the ability to use the property. In cases where nat­ ural resources that could be exploited for the common good were in less devel­ oped countries populated by peoples unable or unwilling to exploit them, he argued that advanced countries could benefit all o f humanity, and not just themselves, by developing these resources. Accordingly, advanced nations should be allowed to exploit these resources, even if this was against the im m e­ diate wishes o f the inhabitants o f the area whose resources were to be devel­ oped. T he indigenous population had no intrinsic right, according to Hobson, to stand in the way o f a development that would benefit hum anity at large (H obson 1909: 256-57). T his was not just a brute fact resulting from techno­ logical advances but rather was a moral position. According to H obson, “It is our duty to see that [natural resources] are developed for the good o f the w orld” (H obson 1988: 227). It should go w ithout saying that this is an imperi­ alist argum ent th at rests on an unproven and indeed unquestioned assumption that the native occupants o f the land are not making use o f it.

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B ut exploitation o f natural resources was not the only context involving international interdependence that H obson considered. H e presented two per­ suasive hypothetical examples. O ne in w hich a people on the upper reaches o f a river like the Nile or the Niger m ight so damage or direct the [226] flow as to cause plague or famine to the lower lands belonging to another nation. Few, if any, would question some right o f interference from w ithout in such a case. O r take another case w hich falls outside the range o f directly otherregarding actions. Suppose a famine or other catastrophe deprives a population o f the means o f living on their land, while unutilized land lies in plenty beyond their borders in another country, are the rulers o f the latter entitled to refuse an entrance or necessary settlement? (H obson 1988: 225-26) Hobson’s answer was a categorical “no.” T h e persuasiveness o f the examples allows H obson to slip over the fact that there is no justification for lim iting such reasoning to the imperial context.

T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l F o r m o f “S a n e ” I m p e r i a l i s m I f H obson’s first two conditions focused on the benefit to hum anity in general and the local population in particular, the third condition was in fact how Hobson saw the first two being guaranteed. According to Townshend, “O ne o f Hobson’s biggest departures from the Cobdenite tradition o f non-intervention lay in his advocacy o f trusteeship over the ‘lower races’ ... by an ‘organised rep­ resentation o f civilised hum anity’” (Townshend 1988: 26-27). H obson sug­ gested the need o f an international governm ent to supervise the development of natural resources in the backward countries and to manage imperialism more generally. As such, he is rightly regarded as a forefather o f League o f Nations M andates and the U N ’s Trust Territories (Brailsford 1948: 25). Indeed, rhetorically at least, H obson deployed the notion o f trust a good deal more than mandates. O ften, he was critical noting that “[t]he actual his­ tory o f W estern relations w ith lower races occupying lands on w hich we have settled throws, then, a curious light upon the theory o f a ‘trust for civilization.’ ” (Hobson 1988: 252). Against imperialists, he argued that the claim to justify aggression, annexation, and focible government by talk o f duty, trust, or mission can only be made good by proving that the claimant is accredited by a body genuinely representative o f civiliza­ tion, to which it acknowledges a real responsibility, and that it is in fact capable o f executing such a trust. (H obson 1988: 238)

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Following this logic o f the trust, the third o f H obson’s criteria for sane imperi­ alism was its formal internationalization, which was necessary because “[i]t is surely unreasonable to take as proof o f the fulfilment o f the conditions o f sane Imperialism the untested and unverified ipse dixit o f an interested party” (H obson 1988: 237). In other words, imperial countries should not intervene on the basis merely o f their own claim that their self-interest accorded w ith the global good or th at their self-interest had priority over the common good of humanity. Such self-assertion was indeed, for Hobson, the “radical moral defect” o f imperialism (H obson 1909: 259). T he only way o f being sure that the inter­ ests of hum anity and o f the local population were being advanced, according to H obson, was international oversight. In Imperialism, H obson proposed international government as one of the necessary elements o f a just solution to the problem o f imperialism and the development o f less developed countries, as well as an institution to oversee the control o f world population growth and a guardian o f free trade (Hobson 1988: 191-93, 232-39). According to H obson, w hat came to be called M andates in the League o f Nations system would be territories where the international gov­ ernm ent would be the arbiter o f the rival claims o f the great powers. T he inter­ national authority would have the power and duty to m onitor the respective m andated power to ensure that development policies were not prejudicial to the welfare o f the native population or the interests o f other nations or hum an­ ity as a whole (H obson 1988: 232; cf. H . N. Brailsford: 25). International governm ent overseeing imperialism would have a number o f roles, the first o f w hich was preserving insofar as possible nonintervention. H obson argued that states should agree not to come to the aid o f their nation­ als in the latters’ dealing w ith foreign countries, particularly in the case o f less developed societies (H obson 1988: 360). W hile this looks like a return to clas­ sical liberal internationalism , it is not for two reasons. First, H obson believed that nonintervention would not just happen but had to be guaranteed by an international organization. Second, H obson in actual fact here refuted the clas­ sical liberal notion that intervention was indeed justified in the case o f less civ­ ilized peoples (Long 1996b). Such arguments Hobson understood as the pretext for imperialism that they were. Beyond nonintervention, international government fulfilled three functions for Hobson. First, it would arbitrate the claims o f the great powers in order to avoid as far as possible global conflict. Second, it would institutionalize the norms o f an international economic order o f free trade. A nd third, it would supervise the development o f natural resources in the backward countries, and more generally oversee the development o f the “lower races.” As Jules Townshend has contended, Hobson envisaged in outline, a “kind o f international welfare state” (Townshend 1990:108; for a more extensive discussion, see Long 1996: ch. 8). However, Imperialism is also notable for H obson’s worries that any inter­ national governmental structure would be dom inated by the advanced nations

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and used to their benefit. H e suggested th at while “treaties and alliances hav­ ing regard to the political governm ent and industrial exploitation o f countries occupied by lower races may constitute a rude sort o f effective internationalism in the early future,” nevertheless, common international policy on “lower races” more closely approximated a business deal than a m oral trust (1988:241). A fter w riting Imperialism, H obson became increasingly concerned by the possibility o f w hat he called inter-im perialism , “an economic international co-operation of advanced industrial peoples for the exploitation o f the labour and the unde­ veloped natural resources o f backward countries, chiefly in Africa and Asia” (H obson 1930: 115). T his would be a “w orld-order” where “the ruling classes of the most powerful W estern allies undertake in the name o f pacific inter­ nationalism the political governm ent and the economic exploitation o f the weaker peoples and the less developed countries o f the w orld” (H obson 1915: 20; see also H obson 1917:191). W ith the fervor for a new world order during and immediately after W orld W ar I, H obson predicted that the new League o f Nations m ight become a vehicle for inter-im perialism. It would be a League from w hich all non-E uropean States, except perhaps the U nited States and Japan, were excluded, [and] would be exceedingly likely to develop a wide conscious “imperialism” which would in the long run prove not less dangerous to the peace o f the world than the national antagonism o f the past, in that it was the expression o f the joint ambitions and pretensions o f a group o f powerful white nations masquerading as world government. (Hobson 1915: 15) Even if an international council was “representative o f all the Powers,” “collu­ sion o f the dom inant nations [is] the largest and gravest peril o f the early future,” because “[t]here would still be grave danger lest the ‘powers,’ arroga­ ting to themselves an exclusive possession o f ‘civilization,’ m ight condem n to unwholesome and unjust subjection some people causing tem porary trouble to the world by slow growth, turbulence or obnoxious institutions, for which lib­ erty m ight be the most essential condition o f progress” (H obson 1988:239). In addition to the overtly exploitative dimension to this world order, H obson also predicted rather apocalyptically that any such parasitical pax Europoea, as he called it, would fail in the same manner as the pax Romana o f the Roman Em pire (1988:194-95). But these worries about the future o f international governance did not prevent H obson pondering other roles o f an international body in Imperialism. Am ong his more now seemingly outlandish ideas, H obson (1988: 193) pro­ posed a hypothetical international organization for population control because “[effective internationalism is the only sound basis o f com petition and rational selection among nations.” H e argued th at the rational rejection o f “unsound racial stock implies the existence o f an international political organization which

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has put down war and has substituted this rational for the cruder national selec­ tion and rejection o f races”. T he international organization would also protect “weak but valuable nationalities, and can check the insolent brutality o f powerful aggressors” (H obson 1988:191,193). M orality aside, in Imperialism, H obson’s focus is more on the “scientific” arguments and the practicalities than about the hum anity o f the international control o f population. H e was most concerned to refute Pearson’s idea that con­ flict must continue in the society o f nations. A t the same time, he accepted key elements o f the racial selection theory, arguing that “[bjiology demands as a condition o f world-progress that the struggle o f nations or races continue; but as the world grows more rational it will in a similar fashion rationalize the rules of that ring, imposing a fairer test o f forms o f national fitness” (Hobson 1988:188). But H obson applied a domestic analogy claiming that “[a]s in the case of individuals, so now o f nations, the com petition will be keener upon the higher levels; nations having ceased to compete w ith guns and tariffs will compete w ith feelings and ideas” (H obson 1988:185). A nd the conclusions o f this anal­ ogy and the logic o f population control were brutal but clear to Hobson, though he noted that the argum ent derived strictly from the biological, scien­ tific view o f the likes o f Pearson rather than being a moral perspective. I f the ordinary processes o f physical degeneracy within the nation do not suffice for the elimination o f bad stock, but must be supplemented by some direct prohibition o f bad parentage, it must be necessary in the interests o f hum anity that similar measures should be enforced upon the larger scale by the mandates o f organized humanity. As lower individuals w ithin a society perish by contact w ith a civilization to which they cannot properly assimilate themselves, so “lower races” in some instances disappear by similar contact w ith higher races whose diseases and physical vices prove too strong for them. A rational stirpiculture in the wider social interest m ight, however, require a repression o f the spread o f degenerate or unprogressive races, corresponding to the check w hich a nation m ight place upon the propagation from bad individual stock. (H obson 1988: 190-91) International organization o f population would, then, eliminate the pain and misery o f the millions born in poverty. “It is not necessary for the safety and progress o f society that ‘u nfit’ children should die,” he thought, “it is necessary that they should not be born . . . ” (H obson 1988:1964). In short, “Rational hum anity would economize and humanize the struggle by substituting a rational, social test o f parenthood for the destruction o f chil­ dren by starvation, disease, or weakness” (H obson 1988: 163). Such a drastic view o f the role and function o f international governm ent was not one that H obson m aintained throughout his career. Indeed, the authoritarian tone o f

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parts o f Imperialism contrasts w ith other more considered sections, the latter o f which are more readily reflected in his later work. Certainly the w ork w ritten in 1902 reflected the spirit o f the age, w hich was perm eated by a considerable strain o f Social Darwinism , though it m ust be noted that H obson left the third edition o f Imperialism, published more than th irty years later in 1938, substan­ tially unchanged.8 .

H o b s o n ’s P a t e r n a l i s m : “L o w e r R a c e s ” a s C h i l d r e n Re q u ir in g E d u c a t io n In his prescriptions for an international organization to oversee imperialism, H obson looked for “general principles o f guidance in dealing w ith countries occupied by ‘lower’ or unprogressive peoples” (H obson 1988: 225). However, his general principles contain a num ber o f unjustified and undefended assump­ tions about the peoples who were subject to imperialism, the m ost im portant o f which rely on a paternalist view o f the relationship o f the imperial countries and the subject populations. In fact, there are two analogies at work here. First o f all, H obson assumes that one can understand the relations o f nations in much the same way as one m ight understand the relations o f individuals in society. This is the well-known and widely criticized domestic analogy (Suganami 1989). In combination w ith the idea th at nations can be metaphorical persons, the paternalist assumption reads the W estern nations as adults and the many peoples o f the developing world as children. So H obson argues for example that, “[t]he economy o f internationalism is the same as that o f nationalism. As individuality does not disappear, but is quickened and raised by good national government, so nationality does not disappear but is raised and quickened by internationalism — As in the case o f individuals, so now o f nations . . . ” (Hobson 1988:185). However, the paternalist assumption can work alone, as it does above in H obson’s notion o f fitness to be born or in the notions o f educa­ tion that H obson deploys. H obson’s paternalism is most obvious in his use o f terminology. In Imperialism, he is occasionally critical o f the misuse o f the m etaphor o f less developed peoples as children (H obson 1988: 222).9 M ore often, though, he embraces the m etaphor and uses it to advance his arguments about the need for imperial control despite his critique o f the reality o f W estern imperialism. “T he analogy furnished by the education o f a child is prim a facie a sound one,” he argued, “and is not invalidated by the dangerous abuses to w hich it is exposed” (229). In particular, H obson suggested that “[t]he races o f Africa it has been possible to regard as savages or children, ‘backward’ in their progress along the same general road o f civilization in w hich A nglo-Saxondom repre­ sents the vanguard, and requiring the help o f more forward races” (285).10

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H obson’s construction o f imperialized peoples as children clearly underlies his notion o f a trust. In his view o f “sane” imperialism, the imperial power has a trust for civilization in looking after and assisting the dependent people in their development. “[I]t is generally agreed that the progress o f world-civilization is the only valid moral ground for political interference with ‘lower races,’ and ... the only valid evidence o f such progress is found in the political, indus­ trial, and moral education o f the race that is subjected to this interference”. In the trust, the m etaphor o f the parent-child relationship is significantly double-edged, involving both control and responsibility, education and coercion. A good deal o f H obson’s criticisms o f imperialism focus on the lack o f respon­ sibility exhibited by imperial nations because “the true conditions for the exer­ cise o f such a ‘trust’ are entirely lacking.” In fact, imperialism “lacks the first essential o f a trust, viz. security that the ‘trustee’ represents fairly all the inter­ ested parties, and is responsible to some judicial body for the faithful fulfilment o f the terms o f the tru st” (H ohson 1988:237). However, this critique centering on irresponsibility suggests w hat is wrong w ith the relationship between the imperial powers and the subject peoples is the quality o f the relationship— that the imperial nations are bad fathers, so to speak—rather than the unequal relationship itself as such. T he child m etaphor drives the idea o f a trust. This m eant responsibilities for the trust holder, according to Hobson: I f we or any other nation really undertook the case and education o f a “lower race” as a trust, how should we set about the execution of the trust? By studying the religions, political and other social institutions and habits o f the people, and by endeavouring to penetrate into their present m ind and capacities o f adaptation, by learning their language and their history, we should seek to place them in the natural history o f man; by similar close attention to the country in which they live, and not to its agricultural and mining resources alone, we should get a real grip upon their environment. Then, carefully approaching them so as to gain w hat confidence we could for friendly motives, and openly discouraging any premature private attempts o f exploiting companies to work mines, or secure concessions, or otherwise impair our disinterested conduct, we should endeavour to assume the position o f advisers, [sic] Even if it were necessary to enforce some degree o f authority, we should keep such force in the background as a last resort, and make it our first aim to understand and to promote the healthy operations o f all internal forces for progress which we might discover. (Hobson 1988: 243) T his lengthy quotation dem onstrates the hierarchical view o f the relation­ ship that H obson held. Furtherm ore, the construction o f whole populations of

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the world as lower, backward, as children, generates a question th at needs an answer in H obson’s mind: “T h e real issue is whether, and under w hat circum­ stances, it is justifiable for W estern nations to use compulsory governm ent for the control and education in the arts o f industrial and political civilization o f the inhabitants o f tropical countries and so-called lower races” (H obson 1988: 228). “T his real issue” is how one trains the child, which is ultim ately an issue “o f safeguards, o f motives, and o f methods. W h a t are the conditions under which a nation may help to develop the resources o f another, and even apply some element o f compulsion in doing so?” (H obson 1988: 229). In short, because subject peoples are children who require education and thus have to be taught, not only should there be control and a system o f education but in addition certain amounts o f legitimate force m aybe applied. As a consequence o f the metaphor, while education and development are the main aims for Hobson, coercion and violence (compulsion in Hobson’s terms) are not wholly illegitimate. Again using the analogy to the control o f a child, he claimed that “[fjorce is itself no remedy, coercion is not education, but it may be a prior condition to the operation o f educative forces. Those, at any rate, who assign any place to force in the education or the political governm ent of individuals in a nation can hardly deny th at the same instrum ent may find a place in the civilization o f backward by progressive nations” (H obson 1988: 228-29). A nd this then leads inevitably, it seems, to a coercive conclusion with regard to the subject peoples, as “there can be no inherent natural right in a peo­ ple to refuse that measure o f compulsory education which shall raise it from childhood to manhood in the order o f nationalities” (H obson 1988: 229). T his legitimation o f force was not the only way that H obson envisaged the ' : ■ • peoples. I le argued that if under the gradual teaching o f industrial arts and the general educa­ tional influences o f a white protectorate many o f the old political, social, and religious institutions decay, that decay will be a natural wholesome process, and will be attended by the growth o f new forms, not forced upon them , but growing out o f the old forms and conforming to laws o f natural growth in order to adapt native life to a changed environ­ ment. (H obson 1988: 279-80)

Hobson does not tell us how we would discern such a natural development from the encounter w ith “civilized” diseases, habits, and institutions. Given this construction, it may seem somewhat ironic that H obson’s ideal for the future o f the subject peoples was self-government, as he claimed that “[njatural growth in self-government and industry along tropical lines would be the end to which the enlightened policy o f civilized assistance would address itself” (279). So much was he captured by his paternalist assumptions that it

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hardly seems to have occurred to H obson that these peoples would be selfgoverning if they had been left alone! A nd yet elsewhere H obson is utterly clear-sighted about the negative implications o f the international government o f dependencies. H e doubts feasibility o f a “genuine international council which shall accredit a civilized nation w ith the duty o f educating a lower race” (239). But H obson’s problems here are not w ith the notion o f control over sub­ ject peoples but rather the competition am ong the W estern nations for control, that is, as bad fathers or bad teachers. Paternalism is also evident in w hat H obson does not say as much as what he does. In Imperialism and elsewhere, H obson routinely discussed the peoples o f Europe using the idiom o f nationhood, an idiom that clearly makes them members o f the wider international society. By contrast, the so-called back­ ward peoples or lower races are rarely described as nations by Hobson. This is a significant omission since it is clear that for H obson as for M ill before him the rules o f civilized societies only apply to nations. T he paternalism o f H obson’s schema for international government is con­ firmed by his treatm ent o f the political representation o f the mandated territo­ ries. Even in his later work, such as Towards International Government (1915), H obson is vague on this issue, but he does not seem to consider the possibility o f representation. I f m andated territories were not to be represented, it would appear that international governm ent is merely an institutionalization o f the inter-im perialism o f advanced nations H obson hoped to avoid. I f m andated territories were to be represented, interference by other states and by the inter­ national government, justified by whatever means, would give them a lower status than th at o f the rest o f the world. H obson was apparently untroubled by such contradictions and blatant paternalism in his ideas. This is a strange con­ clusion for someone who was supposedly so concerned about questions o f wel­ fare and just peace in the relations o f developed and less-developed peoples (H obson 1929: 391). It is difficult to see how Hobson’s internationalized “sane” imperialism could avoid producing exactly his dreaded inter-im perialism , the collusion o f the W estern nations in the exploitation o f the rest o f the world. H obson foresaw such a development and viciously criticized the League o f Nations for actually instituting it: “[T ]he ruling classes o f the most powerful W estern allies under­ take in the name o f pacific internationalism the political government and the economic exploitation o f the weaker peoples and the less developed countries o f the w orld” (H obson 1915: 20; 1919). M ore generally, H obson did not con­ front the question o f w hat justifies the use o f force. H e assumes that particular interests render the use o f force illegitimate. But he seems to embrace the oppo­ site, that force in the general interest is legitimate. T his is not obvious, espe­ cially if the international body is not truly representative. H obson elides the question o f how international organization legitimizes imperial aggression in the past or present.

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C o n c l u s io n Despite their com m itm ent to equality and liberty, liberals have had little trou­ ble justifying imperialism. For nineteenth-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill, the liberal verity o f nonintervention did not apply to backward peoples (Long 1986b; M ehta 1999). By contrast, at several points in his arguments, H obson implicitly acknowledged the prim a facie case that liberal principles should apply to the so-called lower races too. However, both his intervention­ ist new liberalism and his paternalist assumptions compromised his egalitari­ anism. Thus, he called for the creation o f an international body to control and oversee rather than remove W estern imperialism. Because o f his new liberalism H obson was much more predisposed to international organization and cooperation as a solution to the problems of impe­ rialism. But his paternalism has deep roots in liberal international thought. H obson’s liberal internationalism is based on premises concerning the primacy o f individual liberty, an emphasis on the greatest happiness o f the greatest num ­ ber o f people, the im portance o f democracy, the growth o f civilization, and the development o f peaceful international relations based on these. Yet H obson’s liberal humanism, wherein international relations between liberal, civilized peo­ ples were governed by a set o f mutually agreed and mutually beneficial rules, stopped short o f the international relationship o f so-called civilized peoples w ith those peoples considered less civilized and thus either unable or unwilling to be governed by liberal principles. W here hum anism ends, paternalism begins. Paternalism is manifested in H obson’s writings in the characterization o f the W estern nations as knowledgeable adults, wordly-wise and trustworthy, and of the “backward peoples” or “lower races” as children who required the tutelage o f a benevolent father. I have briefly argued the parent-child m etaphor is not an irredeemably oppressive one: the education and other care o f a child is a serious responsibil­ ity, and H obson is quite clear that he is issuing a moral injunction o f care. Yet, the construction o f the father and child relationship is at best based on a par­ tial understanding o f the imperial relationship. Paternalism justifies the sus­ pension o f those liberal rules o f equality, representativeness, and fairness that are based on the presumption o f the autonom y and agency o f peoples, rules that were also intended to buttress rights o f people and peoples. Because these liberal rules are taken not to apply, serious breaches o f liberal ethics follow, including the justification o f imperial control and aggression. A t the same time, paternalist assumptions legitimize coercive control, and even violence and destruction. H obson differed from earlier liberals in that he was prepared to acknowl­ edge the variability and m ultidimensionality o f civilization, while earlier liber­ als saw civilization as a single absolute standard by which peoples can be measured (see M ehta 1999; Gong 1984). H e argued that “the notion that civilization is a

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beaten track, upon w hich every nation must march, and that social efficiency, or extent o f civilization, can be measured by the respective distances the nations have gone, is a mischievous illusion” (H obson 1988:188). A nd he suggests that it is naive to believe “religion and other arts o f civilization are portable com­ modities w hich it is our duty to convey to the backward nations, and that a cer­ tain am ount o f compulsion is justified in pressing their benefits upon people too ignorant at once to recognize them ” (H obson 1988: 237). I have examined H obson’s arguments regarding the international govern­ m ent o f “lower races.” Admittedly, it is easy to catch H obson’s inconsistencies, unsubstantiated rhetorical flourishes, and the like. A nd given that he wrote so much, it is not difficult to find th at he changed his m ind, very sensibly and rea­ sonably in m ost cases, in fact. H obson was not a rigid thinker. For instance, H obson’s Economic Interpretation o f Investment contradicts many o f the argu­ ments about the value and im port o f foreign investment and international finance th at appeared less than ten years before in Imperialism. As a result, a critical reading must be a balance o f an evaluation o f consistency and analysis o f particular arguments w ith an overall appreciation o f the admittedly flawed yet frequently insightful w ork o f an im portant liberal humanist. Indeed, it is not enough that we criticize the paternalist assumptions in Hobson’s work. T he mere unfamiliarity o f some o f his more extreme statements makes this an easy task. However, the contemporary terms we are left with, most obviously “development” itself, derive from the very same paternalist metaphor: developing nations were (are) expected to develop as the child’s psychology and physical capabilities develop. A t some point, we need to ask if it is possible to escape such metaphors, or as M anning (1975) suggests, whether the best way forward is not to try to avoid them but rather to see them for w hat they are and to create others that may be more appropriate. T h e passage o f time not only shifts the meanings o f words but can also shift attitudes to the notions those words describe. In this case, not only do the metaphors “lower,” “backward,” and “children” strike us as jarring today, but H obson’s ideas w ith regard to the role of force in education and the development o f children reveals a more authoritarian attitude, w hich was prevalent in H obson’s day. Finally, the lessons o f the analysis o f H obson’s rationalizations and the paternalist assumptions behind them can be applied to more recent incar­ nations o f liberal internationalism . For instance, the recently published report o f the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (2001), replicates many o f the liberal and paternalist themes that we have seen in H obson. W here liberal ideals are absent, it is the respon­ sibility o f state leaders to ensure their guarantee, and if this cannot be fulfilled by local leaders, the burden falls to developed W estern states to guarantee human rights, development, and progress to these people. A t the same time, relations o f the so-called advanced W est and the less-developed worlds are, as Hobson argued, unavoidable and a hands-off attitude is not clearly the most ethically

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defensible response. Paternalism is replicated in, for instance, the (less than lib­ eral) discourses o f Russia’s “N ear A broad” and the U.S. attitudes toward inter­ vention globally as well as in the discussion o f w hat the U N should do about “failed states.” These issues suggest two things. First, liberal internationalism evokes paternalism whenever it encounters difference or perceived weakness. Second, the paternalistic construction o f the inequality, and the relationship o f the W est and the rest, generates particular types o f questions leading to a lim ­ ited set o f answers, answers that are usually interventionist, calling on the W est to intervene. T he consideration o f H obson’s paternalism in this chapter suggests we should be very careful w ith such constructions.

N otes 1. That his rationalizations should be so fundamentally similar suggests that it is not a happenstance but rather may be intrinsic to (their) liberalism. Elsewhere (see Long 1996b), I have shown the relationship between Hobson’s ideas and those o f J. S. Mill. Specifically, the changes in liberalism and liberal internationalism in their approach to international institutions are superimposed on this paternalist attitude, cre­ ating different modes o f expression o f liberal paternalism at the historical junctures at which M ill and Hobson were writing. 2. Hobson used quotation marks around the terms backward peoples and lower races very deliberately in most o f his work, being concerned to note that this was a case o f labeling which should not simply be taken for granted. However, while this was a deliberate technique, it was one that Hobson was not entirely consistent in using, creat­ ing some confusion in his actual meaning. 3. Lakoff argues that such metaphorical reasoning usually is at some point “embodied,” that is, it relates to some direct physical experience. 4. See George Lakoff (1987) for the significance and functioning o f metaphor in categorization. Indeed, the negative and authoritarian assumption relating to this metaphor may well reflect as much on contemporary attitudes to children in Western societies as it does to the past o f international relations. 5. For an excellent discussion o f the outlines and development o f new liberalism in the UK, see Michael Freeden 1978. 6. One o f the particular special cases was with respect to the so-called lower races where M ill defended intervention in very strong terms. For a discussion, see David Long 1996b. 7. I cannot consider the various aspects o f Hobson’s analysis o f imperialism. For a deeper analysis, see Long 1996a: chs. 4-5. 8. One might account for this in a number o f ways. Certainly, by this time Hobson was into his eighties, though he was nevertheless healthy enough to write and publish an autobiography and a new introduction to Imperialism.

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9. And at another point (217) he is very critical o f the role o f the school system in imperial countries in fanning imperialist sentiment. 10. Hobson follows this with the comment that “[i]t is not so easy to make a spe­ cious case for Western control over India, China, and other Asiatic peoples upon the same ground” (285). Hobson rated Indian and Chinese civilization highly. For instance, on China, see Hobson 1988: 322-23. Elsewhere (225), Hobson distinguishes between “low-typed unprogressive races, countries whose people manifest a capacity o f rapid progress from a present low condition, and countries like India and China, where an old civilization o f a high type, widely different from that o f European nations, exists.”

Chapter 4 “A Liberal in a M uddle” Alfred Zimmern on Nationality, Internationality, and Commonwealth

Je a n n e M o refield

From the m om ent Alfred Z im m ern’s book Nationality and Government (1918) was first published, fellow liberals found it troubling. How, wondered The Nation in its November 23, 1918, review article entitled “A Liberal in a M uddle,” could a man w ith such liberal credentials place such faith in the inef­ fable qualities o f nationalism? H ad this influential Foreign Office employee and soon-to-be professor o f international relations abandoned liberal individ­ ualism altogether for a hazy internationalism based on the correctly channeled flow o f nationalist sentiment? Ironically, in The Twenty Years’ Crisis ([1939] 1964), E. H . C arr would make precisely the opposite critique. T he problem w ith all o f Z im m ern’s work, according to Carr, was not that Zim m ern had rejected liberalism for nationalism but rather that he was too liberal, that he relied too completely on the thoroughly liberal “harm ony o f interests” doctrine— the notion that when all nations worked to improve their individual circumstances, internationalism would inevitably follow. It was this belief in an expanded liberal vision o f the world, argued Carr, that made Zim m ern’s diagnoses o f world problems seem “almost ludicrously disproportionate to the intensity and complexity o f the international crisis” (Carr 1961: 39). T he inability o f his contemporaries (much less those o f us who study him in retrospect) to summarize Alfred Zim m ern’s politics neatly has, over the years, led m any scholars to throw up their hands, reject him as simply “utopian,” and dismiss his im pact on the discipline o f international relations (IR) and the theory and practice o f internationalism altogether. T he paucity of scholarship on Z im m ern and his legacy, however, is troubling for two reasons. O n a purely historical level, Alfred Zim m ern wielded a considerable am ount of power w ithin international relations circles in Britain both before and after

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W orld W ar I. As a young Fellow at O xford before 1910, he influenced a num ­ ber o f students who would go on to play key roles in the form ation o f IR as a discipline in Britain, including A rnold Toynbee, Reginald C oupland, and sev­ eral future members o f the Round Table Society.1 As the first professor o f international politics in the world (at the University o f Wales, Aberystwyth), the first M ontague Burton professor o f international relations at Oxford, and one o f the founding members o f both the Institute o f International Affairs in L ondon and the Geneva Institute for International Relations, Zim m ern him self was intim ately involved w ith the creation o f the discipline o f IR (Markwell 1986:280). Likewise, as this chapter will discuss further, Z im m ern’s impact on the League o f N ations’ Covenant (and thus on internationalism between the wars) was also considerable. O n a more theoretical level, the intellectual foundations o f Zim m ern’s lib­ eralism were never simply muddled. R ather than merely reflecting a nai've faith in the unifying possibilities o f nineteenth-century liberalism, as C arr contends, or an outright rejection o f liberal individualism, as the editors o f The Nation claimed, they dem onstrated a deep attachm ent to the far more complicated and internally contradictory qualities o f the late-nineteenth-century liberal idealism associated w ith Oxford. T his was a liberalism that, in the tradition o f T. H . Green, struggled to reconcile individualism and collectivism, spirituality and rationality, capitalism and morality, and a deep fear o f the state w ith a belief in limited state intervention. G reen him self addressed these tensions by coupling his liberalism with a Hegelian inspired notion o f “Spiritual Principle.” Later, Zim m ern’s work labored to hold together national and universalist strains in international politics by rooting the impetus to global morality in the “spiritual heritage” o f all nations. It was Zim m ern’s repeated insistence that nationalism provided the key to world peace that made his w ork seem so patently inscrutable and naive to future generations o f IR critics. A nd, in the case o f both nationalist imperial­ ism during W orld W ar I and the rise o f fascism in the 1920s and ’30s, these observations seem perfectly correct. It thus appears almost stunningly counter­ intuitive that Zim m ern would develop a theory based on a com m itm ent to the morality o f nationalism precisely at a tim e w hen nationalists in Europe were behaving in a clearly power-driven, expansionist fashion. A t the same time, it seems equally counterintuitive that he would continue to cham pion the moral­ izing potential o f nationalist passions throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, well after M ussolini’s 1922 march on Rome and the Nazis’ rise to power.2 Perhaps, then, the only way to understand Zim m ern’s com m itm ent to nationalism is to try to make sense o f just how pointedly and powerfully the nation spoke to his internationalist imaginary. T he bulk o f this chapter attem pts to do this by exploring Zim m ern’s faith in the world-unifying possibilities o f nationhood, paying particular attention to the way he organized his nationalist internationalism through the idea o f

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commonwealth. In order to do this, it first looks at the intellectual origins of Zim m ern’s politics, origins rooted in the idealist-inflected liberalism that so permeated Oxford during his undergraduate days. T he second section looks more closely at Z im m ern’s attem pt to reconcile liberalism with the transcen­ dent qualities o f spirit and the “intimacies” o f national life. It was his desire for intim ate and authentic communities, this section concludes, that drove him toward a philosophical reliance on the m etaphor o f the family and, ultimately, toward a paternalistic politics grounded in a conservative approach to empire. T he third section focuses on the effects o f Z im m ern’s imperial vision on his developing theory o f “com monwealth.” In particular, this section examines the way Zim m ern’s notion o f the commonwealth as “voluntary” served to obscure underlying relationships o f imperial power. T h e overall conclusions o f the chapter are twofold. First, at its worst, Zim m ern’s political vision was deeply hierarchical, grounded in an almost pre­ liberal understanding o f the relationship between the familial and the political, between imperial children and the m otherland. Second, despite this, there is still som ething redeemable in Zim m ern’s work that points beyond the lim ita­ tions o f the texts themselves toward an interesting and timely reconception of sovereignty and an understanding o f international ethics that refuses to aban­ don national culture. In other words, Zim m ern’s theory o f commonwealth gives us a glimpse o f a politics that respects the importance o f national culture to individual identity form ation while challenging national sovereignty itself, and a global ethics rooted in both the particularities o f nationhood and a broader concern for world affairs. In its historical capacity, the goal o f this inquiry is not simply to follow the developing strands o f Zim m ern’s thought in order to demonstrate their inter­ nal coherence. Instead, w ith Foucault, this chapter rejects the possibility o f dis­ covering either the presence o f a seamless internationalist discourse in Zim m ern’s works or the reputed “origins” o f such a notion. As Foucault notes, “W h a t is found at the historical beginning o f things is not the inviolable iden­ tity o f their origin; it is the dissension o f other things. It is disparity” (Foucault 1984: 70). A nd disparities run deep throughout the palimpsest o f Zim m ern’s life work. W h a t ultimately emerges from his writings is a constellation o f con­ flicting political visions, some gesturing toward a kind o f enriched liberalism, others toward spiritual idealism, some toward an equality o f nations, others toward the lingering existence o f imperial union. These disparities should not, however, prom pt us to reject Alfred Z im m ern’s work as purely contradictory. Rather, as Uday Sing M ehta cautions w ith regard to John Stuart Mill, the complexities that emerge from the “extended link between liberalism and em pire” should be taken “as an invitation” (M ehta 1992: 8). In Zim m ern’s case, his vacillation between a call to internationalism and a vision o f com m on­ wealth that often appeared as a renewed imperialism should also be taken as an invitation, an enticement to examine the space that lies between these competing

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world visions. In the final analysis, the overlapping political images that inhabit this space have much to tell us about the fractious relationship between liberal internationalism and the politics o f national difference more generally.

Z im m e r n , O x f o r d , a n d L ib e r a l I d e a l is m A ll of us were then deeply under the German spell.

—Gilbert Murray Born in Surbiton in 1879, Alfred Z im m ern began his intellectual career at New College, Oxford, in the late 1890s. H e continued on at O xford as a Classics Fellow until 1909. A lthough he did not return to teach there until 1933 (as the M ontague Burton C hair o f International Relations), he m ain­ tained a close affiliation w ith the institution and his papers were eventually donated to the Bodleian library after his death in 1957. As the place that first inspired Zim m ern to think critically about liberal politics, O xford (and N ew College in particular) remained an im portant ideological focal point for Zim m ern throughout his career. U nderstanding Z im m ern’s approach to both domestic and international politics thus requires a closer examination o f the philosophical and political environm ent that produced him , an environm ent he associated w ith a “discipline and quality o f m ind” that was “precisely w hat is needed most for the study and interpretation o f international relations in the present age” (Zim m ern 1931: 20). From the m om ent he first entered New College in 1897, Alfred Zim m ern was w hat his student A rnold J. Toynbee would later describe as a “whole hearted liberal” (Toynbee 1967: 49). Liberalism at O xford in the 1890s, how ­ ever, carried particular valences. In the decades immediately prior to Zim m ern’s debut as an undergraduate, liberal students and professors were inspired largely by the ethical theory and political reformism o f Balliol profes­ sor T. H . G reen and his followers. W h a t one sees in Zim m ern’s own political writings is, in many ways, a continuation or a working through o f the philo­ sophical and political antinomies produced by these earlier social theorists, antinomies that tended to cluster around their approaches to individualism, spirituality, and organicism. Thinkers such as Green, Edward Caird, Bernard Bosanquet, H enry M uirhead, and David Ritchie were, before all else, critics o f orthodox liberal­ ism (as associated w ith Locke and Ricardo). T hey m aintained that this approach to political and ethical life placed too great an emphasis on the indi­ vidual, resulting in a kind o f social atomism, a general disregard for morality among both politicians and philosophers, and massive economic disparities between rich and poor. A nd yet, as com m itted political liberals and firm believ­ ers in laissez-faire economics, these thinkers intended neither to call the entire

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legacy o f liberalism into question nor to develop a theory that might provide am m unition for Tory politicians and their Burkean longing for tradition (Green 1906: 365-86). A t the same time, Green and his colleagues viewed socialism w ith dread as, in C aird’s words, “the reduction o f the individual under the control o f society” (Boucher 1997: 179). In the end, w hat they hoped to achieve was the creation o f a philosophical “middle way” between these alter­ natives by theorizing a more collectivist liberal society.3 For a variety o f historical reasons, new liberal thinkers turned to G erm an idealism and, most importantly, to the work o f G . W . F. Hegel to help them imagine w hat this theory m ight look like.4 Indeed, as former New College student H . A. L Fisher" remembered the 1880s, “Hegel, as interpreted by T. H . Green ... was the reigning philosopher o f my undergraduate days” (Fisher 1940: 50). “All o f us were then,” concurred G ilbert Murray, “deeply under the G erm an spell” (M urray 1940:'4).T he Hegelian concept o f Geist allowed these scholars to theorize the existence o f an objective good found in both individu­ als and in the universal realm beyond. Green, for instance, argued for the exis­ tence o f a “Spiritual Principle,” an explicitly Hegelian concept that he defined as an “eternal intelligence realized in the related facts o f the world, or as a sys­ tem o f related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence [that] partially and gradually reproduced itself in us” (Green 1884: 146). In addition, because they agreed w ith Hegel th at rights originate within society rather than in an imaginary state o f nature, these liberal idealists shared, to some extent, H egel’s com m itm ent to an ethical state theory. In this context, the state was seen as a moral extension o f society and an expression o f the “public good” or the “Spiritual Principle.”5 Nevertheless, as self-identified liberals whose own philosophical heritage and political experience required a certain level o f wariness toward absolute government, these social theorists were uncomfortable w ith the Hegelian idea that the state alone provided the critical nexus between individuals, society, and Geist. In response to this parting o f ways, many o f the Oxford liberals sought to resolve the contradiction between their liberal discomfort with state power and their belief that the end o f com m unity was the establishment o f the “good life” by turning to an organically conceived notion o f society that was distinct from the state, a “social w hole” whose origins predated the state and whose members constituted the “parts or organs o f a living body” (Bosanquet 1958: 20). T he result was a school o f thought saturated w ith w hat Charles Taylor has referred to as an “oddly transposed variety” o f Hegelianism (Taylor 1975: 537). Ultimately, for Bosanquet and other more organically inclined Oxford lib­ erals, the language o f nature allowed them to theorize a moral community and yet avoid the totalizing implications o f a Hegelian state that was the “ultimate expression o f Spirit in the w orld.” In the process o f focusing on the organic to provide explanations o f social understanding, however, these thinkers also came to place a considerable am ount o f emphasis on natural institutions

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(especially the nuclear family). H ence, for example, M uirhead argued that “society depends for the strength o f its tissue on the health and strength o f the cells that compose it, and especially o f the primeval cell we call the family” (M uirhead 1900: 126). In turn, this emphasis on the family as the prim ary moral “cell” in the social organism led m any new liberals to espouse some quite conservative political stands, on both domestic and international issues. O n a domestic level, these thinkers were largely absent from liberal discussions con­ cerning women’s suffrage and m any o f them saw the m ovem ent o f m iddle- and working-class women into the public realm as a sign o f social collapse.6 O n an international level, many o f them expressed extremely conservative views regarding empire, views that am ounted to a literal replacem ent o f the liberal state w ith a more broadly understood notion o f family (Ritchie 1916: 262; Ritchie 1891: 73). Political liberalism at Oxford at the turn o f the century was dom inated by this form o f paternalist social theory initially inspired by Hegel. By the time Zim m ern was an undergraduate and active in the liberal community, however, Hegelian liberalism was beginning to experience its initial decline w ithin the British academy as the result o f increased tensions between Britain and Germany.7 Zim m ern’s political thought is illustrative o f this transition. From the early tw entieth century onward Zim m ern’s writings were explicitly antiG erm an in character, consistently equating Hegelian state theory w ith “Prussianism.”8 Indeed, his particularly virulent anti-G erm an attitudes during the war largely influenced his attitude toward the benefits o f a world organization based on the commonwealth. “T h e fact is,” he wrote to F. S. M arvin in 1915, “that in my political philosophy the bond between London and Nigeria is closer than the bond between L ondon and D usseldorf” (Stapleton 1994: 104). A nd yet, at the same time, many o f the same “oddly transposed” H egelian ideas that wove their way so conflictingly through the w ork o f thinkers such as Green reemerged with Zimmern’s liberalism. Tutored by liberal idealists while at Oxford, Zim m ern’s philosophical and political thought reverberates w ith the senti­ ments o f an earlier generation o f scholars particularly in its emphasis on the relationship between “spirit” and liberalism and its tendency toward a paterna­ listic politics o f community. T he belief that liberalism was more than a political theory, em bodying a kind o f spiritual and moral force at w ork in the world, was a central feature o f Zim m ern’s political philosophy throughout the course o f his career. As he noted in 1918, “[F]or Liberalism, spiritual forces are the centre o f life; and the supreme aim is the application o f moral and spiritual principles both to politics and to industry (Zim m ern 1918: xix). For Z im m ern, these “moral and spiri­ tual principles” were deeply entwined w ith the “spiritual welfare o f the com­ munity,” or w hat he had referred to in an earlier essay as “hom e spirit” (Zim m ern 1918: 65; Bodl. M s. Z im m ern [136], fol. 127). M em bers o f such a community, Zim m ern m aintained, necessarily understood themselves first in

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terms o f “corporate life, corporate growth, and corporate self respect” (Zim m ern 1918: 65). A t the same time, spiritual liberalism demanded that the individual citizen be ready “to apply his reason to public affairs w ithout fear and prejudice” (Zim m ern 1921: 338). O n a policy level, Z im m ern’s vision combined a liberal appreciation for the individual and the m arket w ith a spiritualized notion o f “corporate life,” result­ ing in a politics that ultim ately contained within it vestiges o f a hesitant sup­ port for the emerging welfare state, a more orthodox liberal discomfort w ith state intervention, and an odd Burkean desire for social order. Thus, Zim m ern described economic activity as fundamentally geared toward the good o f the community. In domestic terms he argued that “[pjolitical economy is not, what M ill and other writers define it to be, the ‘Science o f W ealth.’ It is the art o f com m unity housekeeping... consciously ministering to the real needs o f the com m unity” (Zim m ern 1916:^192). A t the same time, Zim m ern’s economic policy was hardly socialist in its focus. As w ith an earlier generation o f new lib­ erals, Zim m ern was ultimately uncomfortable w ith the idea o f a state redistri­ bution o f wealth, arguing that “elaborate control and direction from above, dislikes the free play o f hum an groupings, and discourages all spontaneous or unauthorized associations” (Zim m ern 1918:13). Simultaneously, Zim m ern’s focus on communal needs and social traditions appeared strikingly pre-liberal in its reverence for tradition and hierarchy. Too much state intervention in the lives o f the poor m ight disrupt both the natural flow o f economic progress and the “parallel progress o f social imitation” by which “class merges into class”( Bodl. M s. Zim m ern [135], fol. 26). For Zimmern, class conflict was a foreign importation, born out o f a continental tradition o f estab­ lishing “social gulfs” between workers, landowners, and the bourgeoisie. In England, by contrast, a shared sense o f values had led to the establishment o f a kind o f spontaneous social order based on universal conceptions o f right conduct. Rigid notions o f hum an equality were not necessary in a society where classes understood their relationship to one another through tradition. In sum, the quintessence o f Z im m ern’s liberalism lay in its conservative appreciation for social order and tradition coupled w ith an understanding of the relationship between spirit and com m unity that was inflected by idealism, an approach he would cling to throughout the Edwardian period and into the 1920s and ’30s. As a whole, Z im m ern’s liberalism was redolent w ith Greenian idealism, despite the absence o f any explicit debt to its “oddly transposed” Hegelianism. Unlike J. A. H obson, L. T. H obhouse, Bertrand Russell, G . Lowes Dickinson, and other Edwardian “new liberals,” Zim m ern never fully rejected the metaphysical, never fully rejected the existence o f a spirit moved to reconcile individual autonom y w ith life in community. This was a liberalism that also tended to stress the capacity o f communal life both to shape the indi­ vidual’s moral conscience and to structure an ethical order. Ultimately, Zim m ern’s belief in the reconciliatory power o f spirit, the moral necessity o f

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social traditions, and the ethical imperative o f life in com m unity would seri­ ously impact his approach to international politics as well.

Z i m m e r n ’s I n t e r n a t i o n a l i s m a n d t h e E m ergence of C om m onw ealth .... the road to Internationalism lies through Nationalism — Alfred Zimmern, Nationality and Government

A fter he left Oxford in 1910, Z im m ern traveled to Greece and then taught sociology at the London School o f Economics (M arkwell 1986: 280). D uring the war he became involved full tim e w ith the intelligence division of the Foreign Office and participated in drafting the then secret British plans for a postwar League o f Nations. In 1919 he was appointed to the first independent professorship o f international relations in the world at the University College o f Wales, Aberystwyth. Scandal propelled him from Wales to Cornell University where he spent two years in 1922-1923. From there, Zim m ern worked profes­ sionally w ith the League o f Nations and eventually ended up back at O xford in 1931 as the university’s first M ontague Burton Professor o f International Relations. H e was knighted in 1936 and served in the Foreign Office again during W orld W ar II (Quigley 1981: 90). As w ith his domestic political theory and, in the tradition o f his intellec­ tual predecessors, Zim m ern crafted his w artim e and postwar internationalism largely in response to the individualism o f orthodox liberal theory. In his words, “Treitschke and Nietzsche may have furnished Prussian am bitions with congenial am m unition,” but it was social theorists such as Bentham , “the high priest o f individualism,” who also contributed to the general atmosphere o f excessive self-indulgence, greed, and a lack o f global, civic consciousness on the part o f states and individuals alike (Zim m ern 1928a: 11). T his move toward universal selfishness, argued Zim m ern, had led to the devastation o f the G reat W ar and would, if given a chance, bring about another general unraveling o f world order. In response Zim m ern argued for a new world politics based on universal, moral principles, a world as truly “interdependent in its spiritual relations just in the same way it is in its m aterial and economic relations” (Zim mern 1926a: 22). D uring the war and in the years that followed, Zim m ern maintained that such an ethical system would require both states and individ­ uals to take the good o f the international whole rather than the competitive principles of orthodox liberalism as their moral compass in world affairs. In this new world order, argued Zim m ern, “government and business must judge both economic and national issues from an ethical standpoint” (Zim m ern 1917: 72). A fter 1919, Zim m ern imagined the League o f N ations itself as

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just one im portant com ponent o f this larger, ethical cosmos, “only enlightening in so far as it points beyond itself to the forces in the m ind o f man upon which its own future and th at o f our present-day civilization depend” (Zim m ern 1917: 72). Above all, Zim m ern believed in the anim ating power o f w hat he and his internationalist colleagues term ed the “international m ind,” a spiritual awareness at w ork in the world that offered to resolve intractably polarized economic and political forces.9 As Green and Bosanquet’s “Spiritual Principle” had embraced both indi­ viduals and the greater social and spiritual good, so too did Zim m ern’s concep­ tion o f “international m ind” encompass both the particularities of citizens and states and a divine engine o f progress— w hat Toynbee referred to as a “higher end”— capable o f uniting the world’s peoples on a more ethical plane (Toynbee 1915: 499). A world shaped by “international m ind” implied the cultivation of a more forthright and reasonable understanding o f international affairs in the minds o f the individual citizens.10 Simultaneously, Zim m ern used the term to describe a kind o f universal, higher power weaving through history, bringing hum anity “into harm ony w ith the great moral forces which rule the destinies of m ankind” (Zim m ern 1928a: 20). T he concept o f “international m ind,” however, in no way implied “inter­ national governm ent” for Zim m ern. Indeed, throughout his internationalist writings, Z im m ern’s aversion to socialism and to all forms o f “statism” shone through in his constantly reiterated discomfort w ith any kind o f centralized power on a domestic or an international level. T h e “great moral forces” at work in the world, according to Zim m ern, had to be allowed to arise spontaneously w ithout the unifying mechanism o f a “super-state.” Internationalism , in other words, m ust base itself on the moral energy o f the “international m ind” while rejecting the potentially coercive powers o f world government. In a political and philosophical move th at was striking in its similarity to an earlier genera­ tion o f Oxford liberal idealists, Zim m ern attem pted this balancing act not only by rejecting the possibility o f a world state but also by rooting his understand­ ing o f moral internationalism in the organic qualities o f the m odern world. For instance, in 1916 Z im m ern stressed that internationalism was possible because “the world has already, in m any respects, become a single organism” (Zim m ern 1916: 164). Ten years later, he compared the League itself not to “a super­ state” but rather, to “a living, organic mechanism” (Zim m ern 1926a: 26). For Zim m ern, the chrysalis o f organic internationalism lay just beneath the surface: o f the contem porary world. H ence, theorizing international politics was, he believed, a m ethod o f discovery, o f unearthing natural processes at work. Zim m ern imagined these processes in distinctly corporeal terms, particularly through his repeated references to an international “nervous system.” In many ways, his use o f the term is a testam ent to the consistency o f his organicism throughout the war and well into the interwar era. Thus, in 1918, Zim m ern described the movem ent o f communications and capital as flowing through a

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“single world nervous system” (Zim m ern 1918: 23). In 1926, he located the dynamics o f a “moving, changing w orld” w ithin “the adequate functioning of this international nervous system” (Zim m ern 1926a: 22). By 1928, this world body had taken on even more biological qualities as “trade and industry” were expected to “respond,” like efficient limbs and organs, to the “reactions o f a sin­ gle, world wide nervous system” (Zim m ern 1928b: 327). In sum, for Zim m ern, the peaceful functioning o f the world depended upon the existence o f a natu­ ral, organic m ovement that, like the processes o f the hum an body in the hands o f the skilled anatomist, awaited discovery and explanation. In the final analysis, it was this faith in the workings o f a living world body that made it possible for Z im m ern to insist, even in the absence o f an interna­ tional organization w ith coercive authority, th at the harm onious and peaceful development o f “organic citizenship” am ongst the w orld’s peoples was not only probable but natural (Zim m ern 1928b: 379). A nd, just as nineteenth-century Oxford liberals had once looked at a similar domestic “social organism” and identified the family as the m ost fundam ental and moral “cell” in the social body, so too did Z im m ern’s naturalist approach to internationalism lead him to identify metaphorically similar families— national families— as the key con­ stituents o f the international body politic. Zim m ern m ost fully elaborated his theoretical understanding o f the rela­ tionship between nationhood and internationalism in Nationality and Govern­ ment, although one can see rudim ents o f this idea in lectures going back as far as 1905.11 T h e theory itself entailed four key assumptions. First, Zim m ern m aintained that “natural” differences between people could only be understood in national terms. Second, he argued that these national differences were necessary for both the creation o f global society and the true progress o f humanity. T hird, Zim m ern identified nations as distinctly fam ilial units; and fourth, Zim m ern assumed that, like families, nations produced the spiritual and moral energy necessary both to animate the social organism and to ensure international cooperation. In notably Hegelian terms, Z im m ern argued that nations perform ed the same functions in the ethical development o f the individual-engaged-withthe-w orld as the family did in the ethical m aturity o f the individual-engagedw ith-the-state. In other words, nations, like families, facilitated that process whereby world citizens recognized other nationalities as both distinct from and inherently similar to themselves by giving them a moral focus, a resting place, a space from w hich to interact w ith the “life o f the w orld” from a position o f safety.12 Although not necessarily ethnically coherent, once a people had reached a certain level o f “corporate self consciousness,” once they had begun to feel particularly intensely and intim ately about their “hom e country,” they took on those natural “sentim ents” and “qualities” that distinguished them from all groups and provided for them all the unquestioning love and security o f hom e (Zim m ern 1918: 52).

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Ultimately, the particular “qualities” produced by the intensity and inti­ macy o f the nation distinguished it from all other social institutions. In addi­ tion, these “qualities”— w hat Zim m ern’s friend and colleague Cecil Burns described as “local and spiritual differences”— made each nation uniquely suited to meet the moral and spiritual needs o f its citizens (Burns 1917). Thus, Zim m ern m aintained that “true internationalism is the contact between nations in their highest and best and most distinctive representatives and m an­ ifestations” (Zim m ern 1929: 93). For Zim m ern, nations at their “most distinc­ tive” were also the most spiritual, and “true internationalism” implied that individuals both engage that spirit in themselves and appreciate it in others. In Zim m ern’s words: " Any fool can book a ticket for a foreign country, just as any fool can learn Esperanto. But contacts so established effect n o th in g ....It is through a deeper exploration and enjoyment o f the infinite treasures o f the w ord’s nationalities, by men and women whose vision has been trained and sensibilities refined because they themselves are intimately bound up with a nation o f their own, that an enduring network o f inter­ nationalism will some day be knit and a harmony o f understanding established in a world o f unassailable diversity. (Zimmern 1929: 93) Zim m ern also argued that nations were natural entities, the most organic, germinal elements o f the international organism. Thus, the sensibilities of nations and states come across as quite different in his work, mirroring almost exactly the enlightenm ent dichotom y between passion and reason, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and civilization.13 Feelings within nations, Zim m ern argued, were based on “instinctive tendencies and prim ary em otions” rooted in “the half-conscious assumptions and dim feelings o f life in a community” (Zim m ern 1918: 348). In Zim m ern’s words, “[N jationalism is not a mere fashion and fo ib le... but springs from deep roots buried in man’s inherited nature” (1918: 99). T his m etaphorical equation between the nation-as-natural-and-subjective and the nation-as-intim ate-and-fam ilial was hardly incidental for Zim m ern. Rather, it was precisely their familial qualities that made nations so uniquely moral. W ith in the nation, w ithin this hom e saturated w ith genuine, natural intimacy, internationally minded individuals first learned to respect themselves and others. For Zim m ern, the nation functioned as “a school o f character and self respect.” W orld citizens, he maintained, learned respect for others in the international com m unity only through their prim a facie awareness o f and respect for themselves as part o f a national com munity (1918: 54). Zim m ern’s internationalism thus necessitated that every person in the world have a place to call home. Likewise, Z im m ern’s internationalism also required that individ­ ual nations have distinct spatial identities, that they occupy “a definite home

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country” (1918: 84). W hile this identity did not necessarily entail sovereignty, it did necessitate “an actual strip o f land associated w ith the nationality, a terri­ torial centre where the flame o f nationality is kept alight” (1918: 52). Just as an earlier generation o f liberal idealists had argued th at any shift in the fundam ental makeup o f the nuclear family would have dire consequences for the morality o f the nation, so too did Z im m ern argue that the loss or rejec­ tion o f one’s national hom eland would lead inexorably to moral decay. For Zim m ern, nothing was quite as disturbing as the “moral degradation the loss o f nationality involves” (1918: 52). To illustrate this point, he w rote extensively in Nationality and Government o f the “drab cosmopolitanism” o f the Levantine merchant whose lack o f a home country rendered him such a potent example “o f the spiritual degradation w hich befalls men who have p u rsu e d ... cos­ mopolitanism and lost contact w ith their own national spiritual heritage.”14 For Zim m ern, nationality was the ultim ate antidote to the “insidious onslaughts” o f a materialist transnationalism (1918: 53). In the end, for Zim m ern, internationalism m eant not a forgoing o f national identity but an “inter-com m unication between the families o f m ankind” (1918: 38). N ot only was cosmopolitanism undesirable, but ulti­ mately, untenable; national sentim ent, like all natural forces, could not be sup­ pressed. Indeed, according to Zim m ern, “[nationalism thwarted, perverted, and unsatisfied ... is one o f the festering sores o f our tim e” (1918:100). Instead, he maintained, nationalism m ust be channeled and guided to take on a more internationalist form. Thus, as Z im m ern saw it, one o f the most im portant missions o f the League o f Nations was the creation o f an institutional fram e­ work wherein the “true” aspirations o f nationalism could flourish. A t the same time, the League o f Nations m ust somehow help discourage individual nations from falling prey to the Mussolinis o f the world, dictators bent on warping the nobility o f national sentim ent to their own ends. In other words, the League, in its educative capacity, was to encourage nationalisms that were consistent w ith the goal o f internationalism. T hus, Z im m ern argued that the League’s educational mission could be “best defined as a process o f harm onization between the inner and the outer,” between the national hom e and the interna­ tional world (Zim m ern 1927: 30). “Nationality,” he insisted, “rightly regarded, is not a political but an educational conception”(Zim m ern 1918: 53). In the internationalist imaginary o f Alfred Zim m ern, nations were moral, life-giving, spiritual entities. “Nationalism rightly understood and cherished,” he argued, “is a great uplifting and life giving force, a bulwark alike against chau­ vinism and against materialism— against all the decivilising impersonal forces which harass and degrade the minds and souls o f m odern men” (1918:100). T he most natural, animating, and spiritual com ponent o f the great global organism thus resided in “living spirit o f patriotism” (Zim m ern 1913: 497). W ithin nations individuals first learned to love, just as wise men throughout the ages have “loved their home land as they loved their parents” (Zim m ern 1918: 100).

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Unfortunately, this equation between parental love and politics also allowed Z im m ern more easily to rationalize a paternalistic world politics based on imperialist understandings o f colonized peoples as children. Thus, the majority o f his prewar writings on commonwealth and empire reveal an almost insouciant assumption that full citizenship rights be denied to nonwhite “dependencies” based on their well-understood immaturity. Democracy, he contended, in Nationality and Government, was not a “magic formula. It is open to lim itation obvious enough to the student o f non-adult races” (1918: 15). Likewise, Zim m ern frequently described the relationship between the “m oth­ erland” and her imperial subjects in terms o f parental responsibility for the “millions o f less civilized -human beings” whose “moral destiny” was entrusted to British hands (Zim m ern 1913: 494). A fter the war, Zim m ern tempered his language w ith regard to race, going so far as to argue at a public lecture in 1926 that the “League o f Nations is'Still too w hite.” A nd yet, during the same speech Zim m ern also restated his position that colonized powers currently unrepre­ sented in the League were by and large weaker economically than W estern nations and thus required more “constructive” action before they could be allowed adm ittance (Zim m ern 1926: 16). In many ways Z im m ern’s approach to the empire appears to almost exactly mirror a long-standing tradition within British liberalism, a tradition that resur­ faces within the works o f thinkers as diverse as John Stuart M ill and J. A. H obson.15 As with these thinkers, Zimmern’s understanding o f nonwhite peoples as morally and politically im mature allowed him to elide some glaring political inconsistencies. In particular, it allowed him to champion a liberal doctrine based on universal equality while denying political autonomy to millions by relocating political power from the realm o f liberal civil equality and positing it in the loving, but deeply hierarchical, shelter o f the family. However, Z im m ern’s own political theory did not have to stretch nearly as far as more radical liberals such as H obson to justify such an exclusionary vision. T h a t is, Z im m ern’s liberalism— in contrast to more mainstream liberal understandings o f the relationship between the public and the private— was already premised on a kind o f m elding o f the political and the familial in all contexts (not just in relation to the empire). Thus, for Zim m ern, the role o f the family in ancient A thenian life made full citizenship possible. Likewise, the nation supplied individuals with the “intim ate” atmosphere necessary to be true world citizens. T h e constant reiteration o f political morality as family morality spilled over into Z im m ern’s understanding o f empire, creating a fairly seamless connection between parental love and extant relations o f imperial power. This emphasis on the connection between the family and politics ulti­ mately had much more in common w ith Green’s Hegelian understanding o f lib­ eralism than w ith the social theory o f “new liberals” such as H obson, Hobhouse, and Lowes Dickinson. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Zim m ern would be drawn to join the Round Table Society, a powerful, pro-imperialist organization

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that was explicit in its debt to G reen and the other Oxford idealists. Established at New College in the mid 1880s by Alfred M ilner, the Round Table Society supplied much o f the intellectual justification for Victorian and Edwardian imperialist expansion. M ilner and his young colleagues (often referred to as “the kindergarten”) were all self-proclaimed disciples o f T. H . Green. In particular, they were drawn both to Green’s simultaneous support for free trade and to his belief that the state could create a moral environm ent for its citizens by expand­ ing educational and economic opportunities. In this sense, they argued that while the market itself was moral the mercantilist impulses o f British imperial­ ism were not always so. Instead, they suggested that Britain should approach its imperial mission in a m anner that set a moral example for colonials. Indeed, Zim m ern him self perhaps best expressed the core tenet o f the Society in his 1913 article for the Round Table in which he argued that if “the British Empire is destined to endure, it will be only as the guardian o f the moral welfare o f its peoples. Faith in this mission alone can justify the effort to further its consoli­ dation” (Zim m ern 1918: 484). Zimmern was a member o f the Round Table Society from 1913 and, along with Lionel Curtis, was one of the leading forces behind a major rethinking o f the Society’s mission in the years just prior to W orld W ar I. D uring this time, Society members such as Curtis, along with other participants in the Society’s “London Group” (including Zimmern, Phillip Kerr, and Ramsey M uir) began working on a number o f papers for circulation focused on something Curtis called the “prin­ ciple o f commonwealth.” T he ideas behind this principle were developed largely in reaction to the statism o f “Prussianism” and Bolshevism. In a classic liberal ide­ alist move, Zimmern, Curtis, and their colleagues, attempted to come up with an alternative vision o f empire that decentered the role o f the state. Thus, in a m an­ ner highly reminiscent o f Bosanquet and Ritchie and their relocation o f moral authority from the state to the social organism, key thinkers o f the Round Table argued that what bound the empire together was not a powerful state, but rather, a sense o f community, a shared existence, in essence, a united “commonwealth” based on higher moral ends (Kendle 1975: 172). Zimmern’s own work on The Greek Commonwealth was o f central importance in the creation o f this idea, par­ ticularly his notion o f Greek citizenship and its relationship to what he claimed were the largely communal, not state-centered, ethics o f Athenian life.16 For the Round Table Society as a whole, the m ost significant result o f this new emphasis was a change in term inology and, from around 1911 on, the use of the word empire in the Society’s publications was largely replaced by com­ monwealth. By contrast, for Zim m ern, the im portance o f “com m onwealth,” as a political ideal, w ent beyond semantics. Rather, as his works during this period demonstrate, it quickly became the central axis around which the rest o f his developing sense o f internationalism would revolve. T he idea o f a “super­ national commonwealth” was, in many ways, the practical manifestation o f Zim m ern’s spiritually rooted internationalism.

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Inherent in Zim m ern’s approach to the commonwealth were two basic principles: voluntarism and diversity. T he former, I argue, worked to obscure the underlying power relations o f the empire. T he latter opened the door to a reconsideration o f national sovereignty that balanced the particularities o f nationhood w ith universal ethics. T he next section and the conclusion follow the threads o f these often conflicting ideas through Zim m ern’s work.

T h e V oluntary C o m m o nw ealth I f the State ... is a body tvhose perfection consists in the variety o f thefunctions o f its several members— there has never been on the earth apolitical organism like the British Empire.... — Alfred Zimmern, The War and Democracy

As the m ost fundam ental assumption o f contract theory, “voluntarism” has long stood at the heart o f liberal approaches to both social institutions and the state. Liberals as diverse as M ill, Locke, and G reen all understood the rela­ tionship between the citizen and the state as essentially “voluntary.” Likewise, “voluntary principles” have historically guided liberal understandings o f the family (Green 1884: 232). Rather than arising from a preordained patriarchal order, liberal thinkers have tended to regard the nuclear family as a voluntary com m itm ent between a man and a woman. In response, feminist theorists argue that it is precisely this notion o f free, voluntary union that has obscured actual relations o f patriarchal power within the liberal family (Butler 1991: 90—91; Eisenstein 1981: 47-49). Im plicit in Z im m ern’s blending o f familial, national, and imperial politics is a similar slippage th at allowed him to continue regarding him self as liberal, while at the same tim e relying so heavily on a conservative, quasi-Hegelian conception o f the social order. As Z im m ern understood it, there was nothing inherently exclusionary about the spiritual bonds th at developed within nations. Rather, he argued that nationality could be voluntarily adopted, not in the liberal sense in w hich a citizen explicitly or tacitly agrees to live under the influence o f a state, but in the familial sense in which parents adopt children or individuals join a family through marriage. It was thus possible, in Zim m ern’s words, to literally m arry the nation and still feel about it as one m ight feel toward one’s biological family: N ational sentim ent is intim ate: w hether it be mainly compounded of influences o f heredity (as in Europe), or o f environment, as in the older Americans, or w hether it be som ething newly acquired and deliberately cherished as am ong the new arrivals, it is something that goes deep down into the very recesses o f the being__ T h e nationality

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o f a European and the nationality o f a recent A m erican may perhaps be compared to a m an’s relation to his parents and his relation to his wife. B oth sentim ents are intim ate; both can legitimately be com ­ pared, in the sphere o f personal relations, to the sense o f nationality in the wider sphere o f corporate relations. B ut the one is hereditary and the other is elective. (Zim m ern 1929: 85) Zim m ern thus actively combined two apparently antithetical notions o f fam ­ ily: the liberal ideal o f the family as a voluntary com m itm ent between a man and a women, and idealist understandings o f the family as a “natural” institu­ tion. A t the same time, Z im m ern also brought together two seemingly contra­ dictory notions o f nationhood: the liberal understanding o f nationhood as something one enters into by choice, and the more G erm an idea o f Volk or a blood nationalism based on a shared ethnic parentage. In this manner, Zim m ern transformed nationhood into both a voluntary and natural— liberal and organic— phenom enon. W h a t gets lost in Z im m ern’s understanding o f nations as voluntary fami­ lies is an analysis o f internal power relationships. For Zim m ern, nationalism was familial and the family was loving. T he more national sentim ent grew within a community, the more loving and inclusive its politics. T hus, Zim m ern argued quite forcefully in Nationalism and Government th at social injustice, racial inequality, and civic strife all found their antidotes in a growing sense o f nationalism. Zim m ern thus lauded the education o f immigrants in Am erica as a testam ent to the salving powers o f nationality. Likewise, he argued that encouraging a sense o f nationality am ong African Americans would eventually speak to “the thorniest o f all the many thorny problems o f American life” (Zim m ern 1918: 81). Never did it occur to Zim m ern to ask w hether membership in a nation, as in a family, m ight be circumscribed by a politics based not on loving inclusion but on an internal form o f exclusion— and m ight be far from voluntary. T he language o f voluntary consent reemerges w ithin Zim m ern’s approach to the Em pire and, later, w ithin the idea o f commonwealth. Early in his career, Zim m ern described the “Im perial Union” as a type o f polity “less rigid than a federation but more intim ate than an alliance” (Bodl. M s. Zim m ern [135], fol. 124). Im plicit in this idea was a notion o f free “union” between “self governing political units.” By 1928, the language o f imperial union had changed and now it was the “commonwealth” that was both intim ate and free, that combined both the characteristics o f an organism and the liberal rule o f law (Zim m ern 1928b: 369). Almost ten years later, the organic qualities o f the commonwealth were still held together, for Zim m ern, by consent, by the actions o f national actors who chose to throw in their lot together (Zim m ern 1936: 282). Such an organization needed no state coercion, according to Zim m ern, because at its heart it was freely cooperative.

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A t the same time, as w ith his conception o f nationhood, Zim m ern’s notion o f the commonwealth as a “free union” o f consenting states obscured many underlying power relations between England, the “white dominions,” and non­ white imperial holdings. W hile Zim m ern maintained that the British C om ­ monwealth was, essentially, a voluntary association o f free and equal nations, the reality o f the commonwealth was something quite different. In actuality, it was only during a brief three-m onth period in 1917-1918 that heads o f state from the “white dom inions” were invited to participate in the creation o f imperial policy (Low 1991: 37). Likewise, nonwhite dominions were easily dismissed from even the pretense o f cooperative politics. Zimmern himself blithely assumed that, because they had not yet reached a stage o f development where they were capable o f voluntary consent, certain national members o f the Empire would not be allowed admittance. “I am not speaking at all o f India or o f our Tropical dependencies,” he argued in 1=905, “but o f the self governing portions o f the Em pire” (Bodl. M s. Zim m ern [135], fol. 153). Yet, at other times, Zim m ern seemed happy to include such imperial “dependencies” in his notion o f commonwealth and argued that one o f its strengths was its flexibility, its capacity to encompass “races and peoples at varying levels o f social progress which is its peculiar task” (Zim m ern 1918:17). In his desire to balance liberal philosophical com m itm ents w ith a hierarchical, idealist politics, Zim m ern maintained that the commonwealth was sometimes voluntary, sometimes familial, and sometimes both, comprised solely o f “white dom inions” able to achieve self-government, and, at other times, leading “non adult races” toward civilization. In essence, the language o f voluntarism (and, indeed, the very language o f “common”-wealth) allowed Zim m ern to have it all: to don the m antle o f liberalism while infantilizing millions; to theorize organic cooperation while centralizing politics in the m otherland; to believe in the impartial rule o f law while cherishing all that was intim ate in family life. Zim m ern’s vision had substantial policy implications for the League of Nations Covenant. A fter his appointm ent to the Political Intelligence D epartm ent o f the Foreign Office, Zim m ern authored w hat came to be known, in late 1918, as the “Foreign Office M em orandum ,” a docum ent that laid the foundations for the famous “Cecil D raft” which the British delegation took to Paris in 1919 (Markwell 1986: 280). Taking the idea o f commonwealth as its intellectual center, Zim m ern’s “Foreign Office M em orandum ” spelled out the official British objection to W oodrow W ilson’s “more ambitious ideas” for a League o f Nations w ith potentially coercive powers, specifically W ilson’s desire to include “guarantees” in the Covenant that would require states to respond in a forceful way to the unlawful actions o f both member and nonmember states (Long and W ilson 1995: 82). Instead, Zim m ern’s report maintained that this international organization should ultimately resemble less a centrally organized bureaucracy and more a loosely associated version o f the existing British Commonwealth. Hence, the “Foreign Office M em orandum ” argued that any

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postwar arrangement o f international relations ought to be purely voluntary, a cooperative society “m aintained by the contributions o f its members, who expect in return to draw from it regular benefits” (Zim m ern 1936: 282). In model Zim m ern style, the mem orandum ultimately reads as a juggling o f compromises, a kind o f complex meliorism that depended more on the assertion o f international commonwealth than on the specific (often conflicting) details of how to bring about this commonwealth. A nd yet despite its lack o f clarity— or maybe precisely because o f it— when Robert Cecil became the head o f the Foreign Office League o f Nations Section in O ctober 1918, he chose Zim m ern’s memorandum as the foundation from which to work and had its various organi­ zational suggestions summarized in a “Brief Conspectus o f League o f Nations Organizations” (Egerton 1978: 99). T his draft, later named the “Cecil D raft” but largely the work o f Zim m ern, went w ith the British delegation to Paris in early 1919, where it was presented to the Americans (Quigley 1981:26). T he m eeting between Cecil’s com m ittee and the American delegation produced the H urst M iller D raft, a com bination o f American suggestions and British concerns w hich substantially reduced the powers o f the League from those originally articulated by W ilson’s Fourteen Points (Zim m ern 1936: 195).17 In particular, the British delegation insisted that the League’s com m it­ m ent to “preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence o f all State members o f the League” be seen as a “principle” rather than an “obligation” (Zim m ern 1936: 242). In this way, Zim m ern’s draft significantly altered the original A m erican plan in a direction favored by the Lloyd George governm ent and the members o f the Round Table Group, a direction favoring w hat the League’s own Inform ation Section would term in 1925 “a sort o f loose, continuous, organic relationship” rather than world government (Inform ation Section 1925: 8). C arr would later refer to this assertion o f political cohesion in the absence o f power as a “body politic w ithout a policy” (C arr 1961: 8).

C o n c l u s io n A?i ordinary old fashioned State may be no more than a Sovereign Authority, but afree State or Commonwealth is and must be invested w ith what may best be described as a moralpersonality. — Alfred Zimmern, The War and Democracy

Despite its limitations and its dampening political effect on the League however, there are aspects o f Zim m ern’s international commonwealth that gesture toward the possibility o f a world politics grounded in an appreciation for the diversity of national and minority cultures and the creation o f an international politics based on shared political goals. In other words, the notion o f commonwealth suggests

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the possibility o f cooperation without coercion and thus, while it might also have obscured the obvious inequalities inherent in the empire, it simultaneously serves as an interesting model for consideration. This is particularly true for contempo­ rary liberal theorists and IR scholars who seek a solution to nationalist violence by challenging the utility o f the sovereign nation-state while, at the same time, honoring national cultures. In sum, at its core, Zim mern’s internationalism con­ tained within it the seeds o f a politics capable o f speaking to nationalist conflicts that emerge out o f a desire for sovereignty while still recognizing the importance o f national cultures to human (and liberal) identity formation. Recall that for Zim m ern, nations were valuable insofar as they molded the individual’s moral vision.Tn this regard, the politics o f internationalism could not develop in the absence o f those initial moral lessons individuals learned first within their nations o f origin. A t the same time, Zim m ern was also clearly aware that the expansionist policies o f nationalists in Europe had played a key role in instigating the violence o f the G reat War. In fact, he not only wanted to free national sentim ent from cosmopolitanism— he also wanted to free it from statehood, from the “vague nineteenth century shibboleth” that “every nation has a right to be a sovereign state” (Zim m ern 1929: 89). Zim m ern argued that only “those who are blind to the true course o f hum an progress can fail to see that the day o f the N ation-State is even now drawing to a close in the W est.” In an expansion o f Lord A cton’s argument, Zim m ern m aintained that uncou­ pling nationality from statehood would direct nationalism, as a political and deeply em otional force, outward toward “a better patriotism than that o f a sin­ gle nation and culture” (Zim m ern 1927b: 8). T his could be done, Zim m ern insisted, by creating global institutions capable o f providing nationhood with “a com m unity more responsive to its true dem ands” (Zim m ern 1928b: 370). From early on in his career Zim m ern argued that his idealized under­ standing o f the British Com m onw ealth— as a kind o f quasi-international governm ent based on a loose, organic confederation o f semi-sovereign nations— provided the world w ith a clear model o f w hat such a community m ight look like. “It is perfectly possible” Z im m ern argued in the 1920s, “for several nations to form a single sovereign state; but as a general rule all such nations will be allowed to manage their own internal affairs.” This composite state would take the form o f a “commonwealth o f nations freely associating together w ithin the confines o f a single sovereign state” (Zim m ern 1928a: 21). Zim m ern claimed th at the commonwealth would simultaneously avoid the specter o f a “w orld-state,” protect local and national cultures, and challenge the potentially endless proliferation o f “self-determ ined” nation states. “I t takes all sorts o f men, says the old proverb,” Z im m ern noted rather whimsically in 1928, “to make a world. It takes all sorts o f nations to make a modern state” (Zim m ern 1928b: 370). Beyond this, the commonwealth was Zim m ern’s answer to what he saw as the ethical limitations o f “sovereign authority” and liberalism itself. Sovereign

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states, argued Zimm ern, had no ethical obligations to one another. Likewise, cit­ izens o f a Lockean state could remain blithely unconcerned w ith the needs o f the social whole. In contrast, membership in a commonwealth that embraced a diversity o f national cultures m eant “more than mere obedience to its laws or a mere emotion o f pride and patriotism, more even than an intelligent exercise o f political duties.” Rather, in their capacity both to revel in and to move beyond their own national experiences, citizens o f the commonwealth could potentially think in terms that were inherently international, centered on a “personal ded­ ication to great tasks and great ideals” (Zim m ern 1929: 59). W h en this hap­ pened, the commonwealth itself would be transformed into a “moral personality” and true internationalism, the kind that looked inward to w hat was unique about national culture and outward to the “life o f the world,” became possible. A t its worst, then, Zim m ern’s approach to commonwealth internationalism took on many o f the same deeply paternalist qualities o f his domestic politics and the domestic politics o f idealist-oriented liberals before him . In particular, his reification o f “the family” as the model upon w hich both domestic and national communities ought to be based spilled over into his understanding o f “non-adult races.” Likewise, his acceptance o f the “voluntary” status o f the commonwealth served to obscure w hat were in effect its nonvoluntary origins. A t its best, however, Z im m ern’s theory was radically unwilling to uncouple the national and the local from the international, to separate domestic from world ethics. Internationalism imagined through the commonwealth would, Zim m ern assumed, speak to both national characteristics that differentiated hum an beings from one another and to those “eternal things w hich unite, to the rock bottom level o f our common hum anity” (Zim m ern 1918:52). Like his nineteenth-century intellectual forebears, Z im m ern refused to acknowledge the “old opposition” between individual and society, or nationalism and inter­ nationalism. Instead, he dem anded the creation o f a “better patriotism ” able to negotiate both o f these hum an concerns. In this regard, Zim m ern’s approach to commonwealth bears a remarkable resemblance to the work o f some contem porary liberal theorists o f nationalism. Both Yael Tam ir and W ill Kymlicka, for instance, argue like Zim m ern that national cultures play an im portant role in both individual personality form a­ tion and in the production o f liberal values. For Kymlicka, the choices that an individual makes as she pursues her vision o f the good life are not produced from within a cultural vacuum but are informed, constrained, and enhanced by her linguistic and social environment, an environm ent that Kymlicka refers to as “societal cultures” that “tend to be national cultures” (Kymlicka 1995: 92).18 Tamir likewise argues that one’s nationality plays an im portant role in the liberal citizen’s process o f identity formation. National societies, she argues, provide the individual w ith the freedom to “develop w ithout repression those aspects o f his personality which are bound up w ith his sense o f identity as a m em ber of his community” (Tamir 1993: 9). In other words, like Zim m ern, Tam ir and

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Kymlicka argue for the centrality o f the nation in nurturing liberal identity. Kymlicka even goes so far as to cite Zimm ern as a progenitor of a now forgotten style o f liberalism that took the issue o f national minorities seriously. Further, because these theorists, like Zim mern, recognize that nationalisms focusing exclusively on the attainm ent o f state sovereignty can, and do, lead to ethnic con­ flict, they each articulate a system o f political organization based on graduated levels o f sovereignty. For Tamir this system would resemble a kind o f expanded idea o f European Union, while Kymlicka’s solution suggests that already multi­ ethnic states relinquish certain sovereign rights to national minorities. Beyond the fact that the approaches o f both o f these authors echo Zim m ern’s systematic vision, however, Zim mern’s own theory continues to sug­ gest ways in which such creative approaches to sovereignty might be expanded in a more explicidy internationalist direction. For instance, while both Tamir and Kymlicka are guided primarily5by a concern to save nationality for liberalism, Zim m ern’s theory consistently brings the international back into the equation. For Zimm ern, internationalism was an inevitable byproduct of rightly structured nationalism and this assumption compelled him to theorize a liberal subject who was both cosmopolitan and culturally situated. Such an approach might help to expand both Tam ir’s and Kymlicka’s theories beyond what is now a more limited concern w ith reconciling liberalism and nationalism toward an understanding of the relationship between nationalism, liberalism, and international ethics. In essence, Z im m ern’s work on internationalism and commonwealth may speak the language o f empire, but it also speaks to a normative question that continues to fire the imagination o f contem porary international ethicists: Is it possible to construct a world politics and a world ethics th at take both the par­ ticularities o f nationality and the universalist claims o f an ethical hum an order into consideration? W hile his approach to nationalism was based, in part, on an outdated, nineteenth-century organicism that relied heavily on the conser­ vative politics o f the family, it also made a valiant effort to theorize the im por­ tance o f nations to the form ation o f the liberal subject. Simultaneously, it was also concerned w ith developing a kind o f international culture that would encourage these same individuals to consider their actions in light o f the “spir­ itual bearings w hich affect each individual living soul born or to be born in the w orld” (Zim m ern 1969: 187). Finally, it maintained that we could challenge sovereignty and respect national diversity by creating an international com m u­ nity through commonwealth. W hile it was precisely Z im m ern’s insistence that the world could have its cake and eat it too that placed him so firmly within the category o f the “utopian” for Carr, this chapter suggests that in an era plagued by nationalist conflict, an ever-expanding corporate culture, and an emerging form o f global governance based on the dictates o f nondemocratic institutions such as the W T O , a utopianism th at refuses to engage the easy dualism between nationality and internationality— or individual and community— offers a refreshing counterbalance to the contem porary debate.

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N otes Author’s Note: The author gratefully acknowledges the Bodleian Library for making the Zimmern papers available. Attempts to obtain permission from the copyright holder were unsuccessful. 1. See Toynbee’s account o f Zimmern in Acquaintances (1967: 48-61). Also, Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Clivenden (1981: 89). 2. For critics such as Konni Zilliacus, it was precisely this refusal to challenge the morality o f nationalist sentiment that ultimately gave the Nazis the green light “for their career of world aggression” (Zilliacus 1946: vii). 3. And in this quest, British liberal idealists were not alone. M any o f their con­ temporary liberal brethren (including John Stuart M ill and the American Progressives) also sought to explain why individuals in a liberal society should care about one another and about their community. 4. The decision o f some English liberals to turn to Germany for idealist solu­ tions to their liberal questions reflects a more general, early- to mid-nineteenth-century, British fascination with German culture and thought. See, for example, Kennedy 1987. 5. In Bosanquet’s words, “[T]he end o f the State ... is the end o f Society and o f the Individual— the best life, as determined by the fundamental logic o f the will” (Bosanquet 1958). 6. Bosanquet went so far as to oppose a free, national school lunch program because it would interfere with family responsibilities (Vincent and Plant 1984: 111). 7. This decline would eventually expand, during and immediately after World War I, to a mass rejection o f all German-inspired theory by most British new liberals. For more on this see Band 1980. Ins move on Zimmern’s part, to distance him self from German theory pre­ cisely at the moment it became least fashionable was most likely due, in no small part, to his own German heritage (Bodl. M s. Zimmern [135], fol. 18). For more on antiforeignism at Oxford in the late nineteenth century see Deslandes 1998.

9. For the origins o f the term international mind see Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument fo r the Juridical Settlements o f International Disputes (1913). 10. Zimmern sometimes defined the “international mind” as the “intellectual integrity, of applying one’s reason to all and not only to selected problems” (Zimmern 1926b: 3). 11. See Bodl. M s. Zimmern (135). This box contains a number o f relevant early lectures given between 1900 and 1905. 12. See H egel’s theory o f “the corporation” in The Philosophy o f Right (Knox 1967). The “life o f the world” was a favorite phrase o f Zimmern’s. 13. “Nationality,” Zimmern argued, “like religion, is subjective; Statehood is objective. Nationality is psychological; statehood is political. Nationality is a condition o f mind; Statehood is a condition in law. Nationality is a spiritual possession__ ” (Zimmern 1918: 51).

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14. The term Levant has historically referred to a nexus o f cultural and economic contact between Europe and the Middle East (Ziring 1992: 19). Zimmern’s use o f the term “Levantine merchant” also had clear associations with anti-Semitic evocations o f the “wandering Jew.” W hile Zimmern’s intentions with regard to this similarity are unclear, both Jews and “Levantines” would have served the same, derisive metaphorical purpose; both were defined by a diasporic, transnational ethnic identity and both were assumed to be driven by material greed. Zimmern’s clearly conflicted relationship to his father’s Judaism further complicates his characterization o f the “Levantine.” 15. See, o f course, J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, Part 11, chapter 4, “Imperialism and the Lower Races.” For an excellent analysis o f John Stuart M ill’s approach to impe­ rialism, civilization, and “savages” see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (1992). 16. As Kendle notes, Curtis referred to Zimmern’s work frequently in his 1915 “The Project o f Commonwealth” (Kendle: 171). 17. A letter to Zimmern frem Eustace Perry with the British Delegation in Paris in 1919 makes it clear that most o f the American representatives at the conference were equally worried about what was seen as a kind o f abstract utopianism on W ilson’s part (Bodl. Ms. Zimmern [16], fol. 2). 18. Unlike communitarian critics o f liberalism, Kymlicka maintains that these cultures do not need to hold any particular, universal vision o f the good.

Chapter 5 Fabian Paternalism and Radical Dissent Leonard Woolf’s Theory of Economic Imperialism

P e te r W ilso n

Leonard W oolf was a remarkable man who achieved many remarkable things. H is report for the Fabian Society on international government (W oolf 1916) was influential on the creation o f the League o f Nations, particularly its economic and social functions. For more than a decade it was essential reading for all seri­ ous students o f the international scene. H is writings on imperialism, and work for such bodies as the Labour Party Advisory Com m ittee on Imperial Questions and the Fabian Colonial Bureau, contributed to the erosion o f the moral and intellectual foundations o f empire, and had a significant impact on the shape of British colonial policy in the 1940s. H e was a central figure o f the Bloomsbury Group, one o f the most influential artistic and intellectual coteries o f the twen­ tieth century (Edel 1981; Bell 1995). H e nurtured the genius o f his wife, Virginia, w hom he adored, and jealously guarded her literary reputation after her prem ature death in 1941. W ith Virginia he founded, in the basement of their house in Richm ond-upon-Tham es in 1917, the innovative and highly successful H ogarth Press, a landmark o f twentieth-century publishing. H e m an­ aged the editorial side o f the press for more than fifty years, finally bowing out shortly after the consum m ation o f its largest project, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in 1966 (Spotts 1990:265-76). In the intervening period he somehow found the tim e to write more than a dozen books, mainly on international issues, co-found and edit the center-left journal Political Quarterly, write literally thousands o f book reviews, work ener­ getically for the U nion o f D em ocratic C ontrol (U D C ) and the League of Nations Society, and occupy w hat today would be called “high-profile” (though W oolf always sought to keep his profile quite low) posts w ith the Contemporary Review, the Nation, and the N ew Statesman. But his crowning achievement was his five volume autobiography w ritten in the last decade o f his life (W oolf 1960,1961,1964,1967,1969), w hich form er U K Chancellor o f the Exchequer

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Denis H ealey described as the “best general introduction to the history o f the early tw entieth century yet w ritten” (Healey 2002). T he argument o f this chapter is simple. Like so many o f his fellow supporters o f the League, W oolf has gone down in International Relations (IR) historio­ graphy as an idealist. B ut this label distorts more than it reveals. W oolf’s w rit­ ings on imperialism, whilfe they may be open to criticism on various counts, are not especially marked by their idealism. Fabian paternalism and radical dissent, rather than idealism or “utopianism ,” characterize W oolf’s thought in this sphere. Certainly W oolf had ideals, but he recognized the need to be realistic in pursuit o f them . T hus, a careful study o f W o o lf’s thought on imperialism adds another nail in the coffin o f the idealist-realist dichotomy, a dichotom y that has had a baleful influence on IR as a serious social science. (Booth 1991; Sm ith 1992; W ilson 1998; A shw orth 1999: ch. 5). T his chapter shows that this putative idealist certainly did not ignore facts and “reality” w hen it came to that most im portant o f tw entieth-century questions: imperialism. In w hat follows I begin by saying a few words on the nature o f the exercise conducted in this chapter, broadly one o f disciplinary history. I then specify the nature o f W oolf’s relationship w ith IR , before moving on to the main body o f the chapter, an account o f his theory o f economic imperialism. Following this, an account is given o f how this work was received at the time. Finally, I assess W oolf’s theory o f economic imperialism as it looks today, concluding w ith some illustrations o f the com ponents o f radical dissent and Fabian paternalism in W oolf’s thought.

D is c ip l in a r y H is t o r y This chapter is an exercise in disciplinary history in the broad sense o f being concerned w ith past thinkers, the way they conceived their subject, the way they went about studying it, the concepts they used, the ideas they considered im por­ tant, and the impact they had on future thought. It is not concerned w ith telling a chronological story so much as correcting certain distortions in current under­ standings o f this past. In the spirit o f E. H . Carr, it sees history as a living sub­ ject; one in which the narration o f a sequence o f past events is o f only secondary importance (being contingent on the historian’s purpose and criteria for deter­ m ining historical significance); one in w hich the processes o f reappraisal and reinterpretation, however at times unsettling, are central to its character. This is because history is about how we understand the past from the viewpoint o f present preoccupations, and how we understand the present from our analysis and understanding o f the past. According to this view, the notion o f history as the study o f an objectively knowable past is rejected as methodologically and epistemologically untenable. H istory is inescapably a product o f perspective. Historical knowledge is always provisional and a product o f dialogue: “an

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unending dialogue,” as C arr put it, “between the present and the past” (Carr 1961:30). I t is very much in these terms that I see the disciplinary history o f IR. It is a product o f debate and dialogue between present scholars o f the subject, and between present scholars and the past. No transhistorical, objective account can be given, but a certain class o f scholar, the “intellectual historian,” sees it as her job to refine past and present judgments, challenge those interpretations she considers unhelpful and/or erroneous, and offer new interpretations based on the discovery o f new facts, or the utilization o f a more rigorous and/or appropriate theoretical framework. To this end, the warnings o f Q uentin Skinner in his much-discussed essay on the subject are apposite (Skinner 1969). A ny satisfactory exercise in disci­ plinary history m ust contain close attention to both text and context. Until recently both have been largely neglected by scholars in the field (Schmidt 1998; Osiander 1998; H olden 2002). T his is mainly because they have not seen themselves as specialists in the history o f IR thought. Rather, their interest in the past has been driven by certain theoretical interests. Thus, W altz delves into the history o f political theory in order to discover patterns o f thought on the causes o f war, and Bull delves into the history o f international political theory in order to retrieve a classical tradition (W altz 1959; Bull 1977). A standard criticism o f W altz is th at his analysis contains a large Procrustean element: the topping and tailing o f a wide range o f thinkers in order to squeeze them into his preferred theoretical framework. Historical accuracy is sacrificed to theo­ retical neatness. A standard criticism o f Bull is that he not so much retrieves a classical tradition as invents one in order to legitimize a particular worldview. A pantheon o f great names is constructed in order to dem onstrate the excellent pedigree o f his preferred concept o f international society. Careful textual analysis o f the depth and rigor recently applied to the thought o f E. H . Carr (Jones 1998; Cox 2000) has been a rare occurrence in IR. But this scarcity cannot be accounted for by a preoccupation with context. Greater atten­ tion to context there has been, but this attention has by and large focused on the general economic and political context o f the times (the Great War, the Depression and the “crisis o f capitalism,” the cold war, detente). T he intellectual context in which an author wrote, considered so important in political theory, has been largely overlooked in international political theory. Yet this intellectual context—why an author was writing, for what purpose, for whom, under what influences— can throw a tremendous amount o f light on the author, her times, and her work. It is for this reason th at in my own w ork I have given a lot o f attention to contem porary reviews. Discovering how any given w ork was received at the tim e and w hat debates it engendered is a vital first step in reconstructing the intellectual milieu in which it was written. Strangely, though a number o f key texts have been m uch debated in IR , com m entators have rarely taken the trouble to ascertain how these works were first received. Again the w ork o f E. H . Carr

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provides a good example. O nly recently has the critical reception o f The Twenty Years’ Crisis been analyzed in detail (W ilson 2000).

W o o l f a n d IR T he problem w ith w riting about the history o f IR prior to the end o f W orld W ar II is that the discipline, in the sense th at th at term is understood today, existed only in embryonic form. By 1930 there were three chairs o f IR in the UK, two university departments, a handful o f lectureships, a dozen or so courses, but no degrees devoted exclusively to the study o f international relations, and only a few score students taking courses in it. It was in all essential respects a m inority field, though one th at was becoming less so. W oolf never held an academic post. Nor, after doing badly in the second part o f the Cambridge Classical Tripos, did he ever aspire to one (Spater and Parsons 1977: 44; Spotts 1990: 8-9). It is difficult to determ ine the nature o f W oolf’s affiliation w ith the discipline o f IR since there is no evidence to sug­ gest that he conceived international relations as a distinct field o f academic enquiry. W h eth er he was aware o f the fact or not, however, there can be little doubt that W oolf was a significant figure in the formative years o f the disci­ pline. H e was a life-long friend and Labour party colleague o f Philip N oelBaker, the first professor o f International Relations (1924—1929) at the University o f L ondon (Lloyd 1995). In his obituary o f Woolf, Noel-Baker emphasized the importance o f International Government in shaping British thinking about international relations in the early postwar years (Noel-Baker 1969). Alfred Zim m ern described the book as “masterly” and borrowed from it extensively in his important, and still valuable, study o f the League o f Nations (Zim m ern 1936: 171-72, 40-60). M artin W ig h t cautioned readers o f the Observer not to read The Twenty Years’ Crisis w ithout W oolf’s “deadly reply” in The Warfo r Peace (W ight 1946). H e included the latter along w ith International Government as “essential reading” in his International T heory syllabus (W ig h t 1991). These examples o f the regard in w hich W oolf was held by three im portant figures in the professionalization o f IR , give some indication o f the nature o f W oolf’s contribution to and relationship with this emerging field. W hile never formally a part o f the field, his w ork was widely read, respected, and influential w ithin it.

W o o l f o n I m p e r ia l is m : A n O u t l in e In the 1920s W oolf became one o f the foremost British critics o f imperialism. Like J. A. H obson, he wrote about the subject in broad theoretical terms com bining the detailed empirical analysis o f the Fabian social investigator w ith the moral passion o f the radical pamphleteer. W oolf’s importance lies in his continuation of

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the Hobsonian tradition (see Long 1996). In many ways he assumed Hobson’s mantle as Britain’s foremost anti-imperialist theorist (Feuer 1989:154). M any o f his ideas developed pari passu w ith his work as secretary o f the Labour Party’s Advisory Com m ittee on Imperial Questions and his work, in various capacities, for the N ew Fabian Research Bureau, and the influential Fabian Colonial Bureau. In the 1920s W oolf was the Labour M ovem ent’s leading anti-im perialist thinker, and his opinions carried weight well into the 1930s (Feuer 1989: 157; Etherington 1984: 177). In 1920 he drafted, with Charles Buxton, the first policy document com m itting the British Labour Party to the “ultimate aim” o f a “political system o f self-government” in Africa. (Labour Party 1920; H etheringtoo 1978:16; Luedeking and Edm onds 1992: 73-76). W oolf was one o f several prom inent men— Olivier and George Orwell am ong them — whose anti-im perial ideas were shaped by personal experience o f empire. H aving fallen out e f love w ith academia, and not yet in love with Virginia, he began his career as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. H e later claimed that it was Ceylon, where he rose rapidly up the ranks from 1904 to 1907, that had turned him into a “political animal.” His first published work was a novel based on these experiences, The Village in the Jungle (W oolf 1981 [1913]). In this w ork W oolf explores the complex relationship between tradi­ tional village society (charming but brutal), its natural jungle environment (beautiful but cruel), and British colonial rule (necessary but perverse). T hough its praises go largely unsung, The Village in the Jungle ranks along­ side Heart o f Darkness and Burmese Days as one o f the great fictional explo­ rations o f the im pact o f the W est upon the non-W estern world (Barron 1977: 57-58). Unlike these works, however, The Village o f theJungle looks at its subject from the inside out rather than the outside in. Loathing the expatriate life, W oolf “w ent native,” imm ersing him self in traditional life and culture, and acquiring fluency in Sinhalese in the process. As vividly recounted in the second volume o f his autobiography, W oolf gained an understanding o f traditional Sinhalese life and village society that was unique (W oolf 1961). T he publication o f The Village in the Jungle was followed a decade later by the publication o f a collection o f shorter fictional works in which the same themes are further explored (W oolf 1924). D uring the intervening period W oolf wrote his major work on imperialism, Empire and Commerce in Africa, the more popular orientated Economic Imperialism, and a num ber o f articles along similar lines (W oolf 1920a; W oolf 1920b). Above all it was W oolf’s voluminous Empire and Commerce in Africa, written for the newly formed Labour Research Departm ent, that established his reputa­ tion as a leading anti-imperialist thinker. T he incorporation o f a vast amount of statistical data— gathered largely from the L SE library—made the book an invaluable work o f reference for anticolonial publicists and campaigners. It soon joined Hobson’s groundbreaking but empirically thinner study as a standard work on the subject (Etherington 1984:182; Luedeking and Edwards 1992:22-23).

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Shortly after the publication o f Empire and Commerce in Africa, W oolf turned his attention away from economic imperialism toward the question o f mandates under the League o f Nations. T his change in focus was accompanied by certain modifications in outlook. T h e predom inantly monocausal thesis o f Empire and Commerce in Africa gave way to the more pluralistic perspective o f Economic Imperialism and Imperialism and Civilization. T he latter book is W oolf’s most mature work on the subject. Its central theme, in contrast to earlier works, is that imperialism is best viewed as a “clash o f civilizations”: as a trem endous conflict between disparate and contending values, ideas, and beliefs. In the kind o f questions it asks it can be seen as a forerunner, albeit in a more populist and radical vein, o f Bull and W atson’s Expansion o f International Society (W oolf 1928; Bull and W atson 1984). T he darkening international scene in Europe dominated W oolf’s thoughts in the 1930s. But he returned to the imperial question in the 1940s, w riting sev­ eral articles on colonial responsibilities and the preparation o f African peoples for self-government. W oolf’s interest in these more practical aspects o f imperialism is a reflection o f the fact that by the mid-1940s the anti-imperialists had largely won the day. T he key political agendum now was no longer the aim or purpose o f colonial rule, but the most appropriate means o f bringing about its dissolution. For the student o f imperialism, therefore, W oolf is an im portant figure. His involvement w ith the subject spanned more than h alf a century; he wrote extensively; he was concerned with both theory and practice; he had a consider­ able impact on progressive opinion; and he was one o f the few critics o f empire who was at one stage involved in running one. H e was, moreover, the only major critic o f W estern imperialism o f the early tw entieth century— among whom I include H obson, Brailsford, Luxemburg, M orel, Olivier, and L enin— who lived to taste the fruits o f victory w ith the dissolution o f the British and French colonial empires in the 1950s and 1960s.

W o o l f ’s T h e o r y o f E c o n o m i c I m p e r i a l i s m W oolf’s analysis o f economic imperialism is divided into two parts: the first concerning the causes o f late-nineteenth-century imperialism; the second, its consequences.

Causes W oolf’s thesis was that the imperialism o f the late nineteenth century, unlike previous imperialisms, was motivated purely by economic factors. T h e cause o f this was the profound change that had occurred in the “structure and sphere o f the State,” the most immediate symptom o f w hich was the “immense and

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almost overwhelming importance” that the state had assumed in economic affairs. T his development was o f relatively recent origin. “In its present form and with its present attributes it [the state] did not exist even in 1820” (W oolf 1920a: 4-5). But the pace o f change had been rapid. By the first decade o f the twentieth century there was hardly a departm ent o f individual life that had not been “subjected to State control or interference” (W oolf 1920a: 8-9). W oolf attributed this change in the structure and sphere of the state to three phenomena that had begun to emerge in the late eighteenth century: democracy, nationalism, and industrialism. Democracy and nationalism ensured that the autocratic state conceived as the personal property and preserve of kings, was replaced by the democratic nation-state organized for the pursuit o f national interests conceived as “the greatest good o f the greatest number,” “the realization o f the best life,” or “the materialization o f the mysterious and sacred general will.” Interacting w ith democracy an d nationalism, the growth o f industrialism ensured that the state became increasingly preoccupied with economic efficiency and commercial well-being. “Nobody in the eighteenth century thought o f asking whether the state was efficient, for the main functions o f the state were not economic: to-day, despite the enormous increase o f patriotic nationalism, we instinctively regard the state as a kind o f super-joint-stock-company” (W oolf 1920a: 6). T he changing role o f the state was part and parcel o f a general shift in ideas and beliefs. Industrialism and commercialism had begun to permeate every walk o f life. In this respect the capitalists o f M anchester were no different to the M ercantilists o f an earlier or the imperialists o f a later era: all assumed that material profit was the main standard o f value and that the chief duty o f the state was to prom ote, or at least not impede, its maximization. D uring the midVictorian era the policies o f free trade, noninterference, and anti-imperialism were held to be the best means o f attaining this end. But with the “intensive growth o f industrial and commercial organization” in the late nineteenth cen­ tury things began to change. “Vast and complicated organizations”— the big factory, the trust, the cartel, the syndicate, and the multiple shop— came into being and were increasingly seen as essential for industrial and commercial effi­ ciency. T he possibility o f using the power and organization o f the state for eco­ nomic ends was not for long overlooked. T his chain o f cause and effect— from the emergence o f nationalism, democracy, and industrialism, through the change in the state, to the “active and aggressive” use o f the “power and organization of the state” for the economic purposes o f its citizens— culminated, around the year 1880, in economic imperialism (W oolf 1920a: 15). So w hat did W oolf m ean by imperialism? Unlike other theorists o f the time, he provided a clear definition: U nder this term I include the international economic policy o f the European States, o f the U.S.A., and latterly o f Japan, in the unexploited

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and non-Europeanized territories o f the world. T h e policy o f Economic Imperialism includes colonial policy and the acquisition by the Europeanized State o f exploitable territory, the policy o f spheres o f influence, and the policy o f obtaining economic control through other political means. These various kinds o f policy are all distin­ guished by one im portant characteristic; they all aim at using the power and organisation o f the European form o f State in the eco­ nomic interests o f its inhabitants in lands where the European form o f state has not developed. I call it imperialism because the policy always implies either the extension o f the state’s territory by conquest or occupation, or the application o f its dom inion or some form o f political control to people who are not its citizens. I qualify it w ith the word economic because the motives o f this imperialism are not defence or prestige nor conquest nor the “spread o f civilization,” but the profit o f the citizens, or o f some citizens, o f the European state. (W oolf 1920a: 19) T he m ethod adopted by W oolf was essentially verstehen, that is, interpretive understanding o f actor behavior. H is evidence was drawn from the writings and speeches o f those statesmen, soldiers, and businessmen to w hom the formulation o f state policy and the control o f state action was entrusted. W oolf cites many passages from the speeches and statements o f such prom i­ nent continental statesmen as Bismarck, Clemenceau, and Etienne in order to prove his contention that the m otivating force o f the new imperialism o f the late nineteenth century was economic gain. B ut he highlights the statem ents o f two British spokesmen: Joseph Cham berlain and Captain, later Sir Frederick, later Lord, Lugard. Cham berlain claimed in 1894 that it was the governm ent’s job to ensure that “new markets shall be created and old markets ... effectively developed.” There consequently existed “a necessity as well as a duty for us to uphold the dom inion and empire w hich we now possess” and “a necessity for using every legitimate opportunity to extend our influence and control in that African continent w hich is now being opened up to civilization and commerce” (W oolf 1920a: 18). Cham berlain explicated this view in more detail in a speech to the Birmingham Cham ber o f Commerce in 1896:

All the great offices o f state are occupied w ith commercial affairs. T he Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and defending old ones. T h e W ar Office and the Admiralty are mostly occupied in preparation for the defence o f those markets and for the protection o f our commerce. ... Com m erce is the greatest o f all political interests. (W oolf 1920a: 7)

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Speaking about his recent expedition to Uganda for the British East Africa Company, W o o lf’s second star witness, Sir Frederick Lugard, claimed: T h e scramble for A fric a ... was due to the growing commercial rivalry, w hich brought home to civilized nations the vital necessity of securing the only rem aining fields for industrial enterprise and expan­ sion. It is well to realise that it is for our advantage— and not alone at the dictates o f duty— that we have undertaken responsibilities in East Africa. It is in order to foster the growth o f the trade o f this country, and to find an outlet for our manufactures and our surplus energy, that our far-seeing statesmen and our commercial men advocate colonial expansion.... I do not believe that in these days our national policy is based on motives o f philanthropy only. (W oolf 1920a: 26) Through such statements W oolf was able to show that economic considera­ tions were o f immense importance in motivating nineteenth-century imperial­ ism. H e was also able to show that these considerations assumed progressively greater im portance as the century unfolded. T he era o f Ferry, Rhodes, and Cham berlain differed markedly from the era o f M etternich, W ellington, and Talleyrand. For this latter group, imperialism was about alliances, the balance o f power, national and international prestige. But by the ninth decade of the nineteenth-century economic imperialism had “fully and finally established itself.” “In the great States o f Europe, now completely industrialized, political power passed from the hands o f birth into the hands o f wealth, and the politi­ cal ideals o f rule and power and prestige gave way to those o f commerce, indus­ try, and finance.” European policy became “dom inated by rival imperialisms, colonial policies, spheres o f influence, commercial treaties, markets, and tariffs” (W oolf 1920a: 2 4 ,5 7 -5 8 ). W oolf’s evidence, however, is not entirely consistent. H e is unable to sus­ tain his initial contention that imperialism was motivated purely by economic factors. Bismarck may have become more interested in economics in the 1880s, but as W o o lf’s own account shows, questions o f strategy and great power com­ petition were never far from the forefront o f his mind. A lthough Bismarck eventually complied w ith the wishes o f G erm an trading and financial interests, thereby initiating G erm any’s imperial policy, W oolf does not prove that he did so for their reasons. T he G erm an chancellor was clearly perturbed by the expansion o f British power in Africa and was eager to check it— as revealed by his involvement in the Congo controversy o f the early 1880s, culminating in his convening o f the 1884 Congo Conference at Berlin (W oolf 1920a: 38-45). But why exactly did he abandon his earlier indifference to colonialism? T he arguments o f those representing economic interests may have been an important factor, but they were not the only, nor necessarily the most im portant one. T he quotations W oolf selects from Bismarck’s speeches do not clinch the m atter in

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quite the decisive way he assumed. T h e following statem ent taken from Bismarck’s public announcem ent o f his new policy could be interpreted as evincing an abiding concern w ith “Power and Prestige” as much as a new desire for “money-m aking and markets”: It is not possible to conquer oversea territories by men o f war or to take possession o f them w ithout further ceremony. Nevertheless the G erm an trader wherever he has settled will be protected, and w her­ ever he has assumed possession o f territory there the A dm inistration will follow him, as England has continually done. (W oolf 1920a: 36) This statem ent contains a tacit acknowledgment o f both Britain’s naval mastery and the im portance Bismarck attached to great power rivalry. It is also significant that W oolf makes a distinction between N orth and Tropical Africa. A fter 1880 European statesmen began to “deal” w ith the latter in terms o f the new policy o f economic imperialism. But w ith respect to the former, the “older policy o f W ellington and de Polignac” never entirely lost its hold (W oolf 1920a: 58). Furtherm ore, the spirit o f the church missionary soci­ eties o f Victorian Britain m ight be said to have also shaped the statesmanship o f Cham berlain and Lugard. Lugard’s references to the “dictates o f duty” and to “motives o f philanthropy” indicate th at the idea o f the “civilizing mission” was not entirely absent in his explanation o f empire. T h e same could be said of Cham berlain’s references to “duty” and “civilization.” In addition, although it may have been correct to say that “all the great offices o f state are occupied w ith commercial affairs,” this does not mean th at they were wholly so occupied. Along with these specific problems with W oolf’s analysis, there are problems of a more general nature. T he determination o f social causation through analysis of public declarations o f social actors is not a hazard-free enterprise. Social pur­ pose and setting invariably condition social pronouncements. T he speeches and statements o f politicians and major political actors are particularly conditioned by the political context in which they are made. T he social investigator, therefore, must always be on her guard. She may be witnessing not social truth but the employment o f an age-old political tool (M anning 1975: xviii-xx, 88-100). Chamberlain in his speech to the Birmingham Cham ber o f Commerce was probably exaggerating for his own political purposes, rather than giving an “objective” account o f w hat he felt to be the raison d’etre o f empire. Such state­ ments often contain as much “ought” as “is.” Similarly, the fact that Lugard was writing in defense o f a m uch-criticized campaign cannot be ignored. H e was at pains to point out to reluctant British ministers the considerable material rewards that could be reaped in East Africa. H e wanted to convince them that official British involvement would not become the financial albatross that many feared. Lugard was not so much concerned w ith explaining and justifying past acts o f imperialism, as making a case for its continuation and reinvigoration.

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A nother problem concerns selection o f evidence. W oolf does supply a large num ber o f quotations, but only ones that corroborate his thesis. T his raises a general question w ith the interpretive m ethod. H ow far should the analyst go in searching for counterinterpretations? As we shall see, a num ber o f critics at the tim e felt that W oolf did not go far enough. There is no evidence to suggest that W oolf was aware o f these short­ comings except for the fact that as Empire and Commerce in Africa unfolds, his determ ination to uphold his monocausal thesis becomes weaker. Claims to the effect that late-nineteenth-century imperialism was notable for “the singleness and purity o f [economic] motive” become less frequent, and claims to the effect that economic factors we/e the “main” motive or the “ultim ate” end o f policy, more so (W oolf 1920a: 18, 22, 44, 58, 323-24). A distinct trend away from monocausalism is clearly evident in later w rit­ ings. In Economic Imperialism W oolf explicitly says that there was no single and simple cause o f the “complex” phenom enon o f imperialism, and he proceeds to examine some o f the explanations commonly advanced. T he “moral” explanation that colonial expansion was motivated by the “white man’s burden”— the duty to spread Christianity, law and order, and other “blessings o f Western civilization” (an ironic reference to the Final A ct o f the 1884-85 Congress o f Berlin)— is dismissed by W oolf as a secondary cause (W oolf 1920a: 43-45; W oolf 1928: 78—79). T his view was frequently used as an argument against withdrawing from a conquest once it had been made, or abandoning control once it had been acquired. Thus, in W o o lf’s view: [T]he connection between imperialism and moral ideas appears to be this: Europeans have acquired their Empires for selfish motives; they, or many o f them , believe that they retain and m aintain their Empires for altruistic motives. T h e white man’s burden becomes a duty only a fte r... he has placed it upon his own shoulders. (W oolf 1920b: 18) T he same could be said o f “sentim ental” reasons, such as the belief that “the acquisition and retention o f imperial possessions and dependencies outside Europe reflects great glory on the European State”. T his explanation, accord­ ing to Woolf, may have been valid as far as the retention o f empire went, but belief in the glory o f empire had done little to set the policy in motion (W oolf 1920b: 20-23). M ilitary and strategic reasons had more weight, especially w ith regard to French and Italian imperialism in N orth Africa. There was also a sense in which imperialism had a strategic logic o f its own. Britain sought to control Egypt not because such control afforded any strategic value for Britain itself, but in order to protect India. Accordingly, “[m ]ilitary reasons are ... not to any great extent a cause o f imperialism, but they are a reason for m aking an empire large, and a large empire larger” (W oolf 1920b: 24).

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A t a glance Imperialism and Civilization seems to m ark a return o f W oolf s initial monocausalism. H e began the book by pointing out th at the relations between civilizations prior to the nineteenth century were largely tolerant and indifferent. “But the new European civilization o f the nineteenth century changed all that. I t was a belligerent, crusading, conquering, exploiting, prose­ lytizing civilization.” Vastly superior technology made this aggressive expan­ sion o f W estern civilization possible. T h e need for new markets and new sources o f raw materials made it necessary. T h e picture was as follows: Behind the capitalist, the trader, the manufacturer, and the financier, who had emerged from the industrial revolution and were now led by blind economic forces to stretch out their hands to the markets and produce o f Asia and Africa, stood the highly organised, efficient, power­ fully armed, acutely nationalist m odern State which had emerged from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Sometimes deliberately and sometimes haphazardly and unconsciously, the power o f this terrific engine o f force and governm ent was invoked by the capitalist to aid him in developing or exploiting the other continents. T he effect was stupendous. (W oolf 1928: 9—11) But elsewhere in the book the picture is far from clear. Thus, the “inevitability” o f the “stretching o u t” and “imposition” o f European civilization on the rest o f the world was “especially” due to economic impulses. T hough these impulses were a primary cause o f imperialism, strategic impulses were a “secondary” cause. T he conquests o f Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance were about glory and domination. In contrast, nineteenth-century imperialism was “primarily” about economic exploitation. T h e forceful control o f the economic life o f C hina by the imperial Powers o f Europe, the U nited States, and later Japan was “exercised primarily in the interests o f the commercial, industrial, and financial classes o f the controlling Power.” Similarly, the evils caused by imperialism were “mainly due to the habit o f European civilization o f subordinating everything to economic ends” (W oolf 1928: 32-47, 63-71; emphasis added). T he phrasing o f these arguments amounts to a significant modification o f W oolf’s initial thesis. It is im portant to stress, however, that although he aban­ doned the notion that late-nineteenth-century imperialism was motivated purely by economic factors, he continued to insist on their primacy. H is label “economic imperialism” remains therefore a valid one.

Consequences W oolf contended that the consequences o f late-nineteenth-century imperialism were almost wholly evil” (W oolf 1920a: 352). Econom ic imperialism was not

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only bad for the colonized, it was bad for the colonizers, too— except for a small band o f traders, financiers, mine owners, and planters who in many cases accumulated great wealth. T he proponents o f economic imperialism genuinely believed that great riches were to be won in the “opening up” o f Asia and Africa. For W oolf this was pure delusion. T h e colonial parties in France and Germany, for example, held “vague and erroneous ideas” about the nature o f the empire they wished to conquer: T his was particularly true o f Africa, the mystery o f whose forests and lakes and rivers was only just being revealed to Europeans. U ndoubtedly a vision o f “many goodly states and kingdoms” swam before the eyes o f patriots, w ho dreamed dreams o f G erm an or French Australias and Canadas rising by the sid€ o f great rivers, or in the tropical forests o f Asia and Africa. (W oolf 1920a: 30) T he Congo, to give one example, was seen as an “Eldorado” o f rubber, precious metals, and— oddly, given W oolf’s original thesis— “savage souls” (W oolf 1920a: 38). Such views were delusory because the historical record showed that the benefits o f economic imperialism had been small. W oolf provided a wealth of data to substantiate this claim. In 1913, for instance, all o f Britain’s tropical possessions in Africa accounted for only 1.04 per cent o f UK imports and 1.4 per cent o f U K exports. T his m eant that tropical Africa was o f no more importance economically to the U K than Chile. In terms o f U K exports, A rgentina was three times more im portant, and six times more im portant in terms o f imports. T h e average value o f food and raw materials im ported from British East Africa between 1909 and 1913 amounted to 0.15 per cent o f the U K ’s total im ports o f these commodities, and British East Africa imported only 0.19 per cent o f total U K exports. It had been claimed in the early 1890s, by Cham berlain, Lugard, the London Times, and others that Britain should colonize U ganda because it would provide a vital market for British exports and vital jobs for British workers. In classic dissenting fashion W oolf responded as follows: Uganda, that country w hich was to secure the British workman from unem ploym ent, actually takes no more than .006 per cent o f the total exports o f British industries. It is clear that the incorporation of U ganda in the British Em pire has had no more and no less effect upon British trade, industry, and employment, than if it had been sunk in the Indian O cean and blotted off the map o f the world. (W oolf 1920a: 334)

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W oolf also pointed out that imperialists assumed that colonial markets would be closed to foreign competition. B ut this was not the case. For the period 1898-1913, for example, the increase in value o f raw materials im ported by British industries from G erm an East Africa was far greater than the increase in value o f those im ported from British East Africa. Similarly, the rate o f increase o f British exports to G erm an East Africa was far greater than the rate o f increase o f British exports to British East Africa. W oolf continued: T h e significance o f this fact is obvious w hen it is remembered that M r. Cham berlain and the economic imperialists o f the British East Africa Com pany argued that the main reason why Britain should seize and retain U ganda and British East Africa was in order to keep the G erm ans out and prevent them from closing these territories to the products o f British industry. (W oolf 1920a: 333) Even at the height o f the empire, W oolf concluded, the im portance o f Britain’s tropical possessions in Africa to the metropolitan economy was at best m ar­ ginal. T h e belief that they provided an im portant market for British manufac­ tures was a delusion. “T he few score inhabitants o f Park Lane,” he exclaimed, “have a far higher purchasing power and are a far better market for British industries than the millions o f Africans in these British possessions” (W oolf 1920b: 59). T he im portance o f British Africa as a source o f raw materials was similarly delusory. British imports from East Africa were negligible. H er im ports from W est Africa were greater but still relatively modest: palm oil, the major export of the region, was a com m odity o f m inor im portance w hen set against cotton, wool, copper, and iron ore; so too was Nigerian tin when set against the much greater amounts o f tin im ported from Bolivia. A lthough not identical, w hat was true o f British possessions was also gen­ erally true o f French and Germ an. For example, the trade between France and her Algerian and Tunisian colonies was not insignificant, these colonies account­ ing for 5.5 per cent o f French exports in 1912. B ut this figure was only m ar­ ginally greater after France established a system o f colonial preference, in 1885, than before. Colonization had resulted in only a marginal increase in trade. Moreover, the value o f French exports to Algeria and Tunisia was two and onehalf times greater than the value o f the exports to all other French colonial pos­ sessions. In 1910 the French Em pire accounted for 8 per cent o f French exports and 7 per cent o f imports. T his m eant that, as trading partners, Germ any and especially Britain were far more im portant to France than her colonies: British imports o f French goods were twice the value of French goods bought by the entire French colonial empire, and Germany imported 15 per cent more. Together Britain and G erm any exported to France three times the total exports o f the whole French Empire. “N othing could show more clearly,”

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W oolf concluded, “that the economic beliefs behind economic imperialism are dreams and delusions” (W oolf 1920a: 330). I f the European side o f the colonial balance sheet made a bleak picture the African side was even more so. T he so-called blessings o f European colonial­ ism amounted to little. “Law and order” had to some extent been established, but only in the wake o f “persistent and ruthless slaughter o f the inhabitants in wars and through ‘punitive expeditions’” (W oolf 1920b: 65). Brutal systems of adm inistration existed in many colonies and especially in the Belgian Congo, the French Congo, and German South W est Africa. Christianity had been spread to some extent but its adoption was more apparent than real. M any o f the nine million Africans (out o f a total population o f 170 million) who had been con­ verted by 1920 were C hristian only nominally. T h e spread o f education had fared little better. Even in British colonies, w hich tended to have a better record on education than the others, jhe provision o f education in any o f its forms was dismal. Local taxation far outstripped local public expenditure. In 1917, for example, the expenditure on schools in Nigeria am ounted to only 1.7 per cent o f taxation raised. In British East Africa the total expenditure on education for the year 1909-1910 was a meager 1,835 pounds while the expenditure on the post office, which served only the interests o f white settlers, was 26,700 pounds, that is, 1,400 per cent more. T he colonial authorities, indeed, spent little o f the revenue they raised on schemes designed to benefit “the native”: Though the native is heavily taxed, the revenue derived from such taxa­ tion is devoted by Government not to native requirements, but mainly to European interests, e.g., the C hief Native Commissioner of Kenya stated that the Kitui Akamba tribe paid 207,749 pounds in taxes in ten years, and that the only Government expenditure in the Kitui Reserve during this time had been on collecting the taxes. (Labour Party 1920:15) Similarly, the attem pt to establish the “Europeans’ economic system” and the “principle o f economic efficiency” had produced few benefits for Africans. T he colonial record in East Africa was particularly appalling. Local economic sys­ tems had been ruthlessly destroyed rather than adapted. No attem pt had been made to improve traditional agricultural techniques. T he best land had been expropriated to white settlers and local populations forced into inadequate “native reserves.” By various means, some direct, others indirect, the native had been compelled to work for poor wages. In many cases the exploitation of African labor by w hite capitalists am ounted to slavery (W oolf 1919: 28-32; Labour Party 1920:12-16). In Asia, although the pattern o f economic imperialism had been different the results were equally grave. Economic imperialism brought corruption, civil war, indebtedness, and foreign intervention. China, for example, had been reduced to “anarchy and economic chaos.”

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Thus, the phenom enon o f economic imperialism stood indicted on all sides: neither Africans, Asians, nor Europeans benefited from it except for a tiny commercial elite.

T h e A s s e s s m e n t o f W o o l f ’s T h e o r y i n C o n t e m p o r a r y O p in io n W oolf’s books on imperialism were published to widespread critical acclaim. A reviewer o f Empire and Commerce in Africa opined that “the labours M r W oolf has undertaken ... put all students o f politics and economics under a great debt. His analysis is thorough, im partial and convincing” (U D C 1920a). A further review in a later issue o f the same journal came to an even more favorable con­ clusion: “A clearer exposition o f the relations between imperialism and finance has never been penned, and the whole book rests on a masterly marshalling o f indis­ putable fact” (U D C 1920b). In the same vein, a reviewer in the Commonwealth remarked: “Great credit is due to the Labour Research D epartm ent and M r W oolf for the issue o f such a well-balanced and exhaustive work” ( Commonwealth 1921). T he founder o f the U D C and fellow anti-im perialist, E. D . M orel, described the book as “a piece o f historical research o f great value... [which should] be widely read and deeply pondered” (M orel 1920). O ne m ight expect such enthusiasm from such eminently Left-leaning pub­ lications. But Empire and Commerce in Africa was also enthusiastically greeted by publications w ithout any obvious Left or radical bent. A Canadian academic journal described it as “a contribution to the literature o f international relations o f cardinal im portance... [one] which all students should familiarize them ­ selves and which statesmen must reckon” (Barnes 1921). T he Nation considered it “masterly,” “thorough,” “powerful,” “courageous,” and “conspicuously honest in the handling o f facts” (Nation 1920). T h e Glasgow Herald declared: W hatever one may think o f the political standpoint o f M r Woolf, there is no doubt that he has given us a m ost fascinating book, packed full o f information, brilliantly w ritten, and sound alike in statistics and ju d g m e n t... we question w hether the whole field has ever been surveyed more boldly or w ith more advantage to the reader. ( Glasgow Herald 1920) Even the imperialist Daily M ail described it as “a penetrating study which no student o f politics or history can afford to leave unread” {Daily M ail 1920). W oolf’s subsequent books on the subject enjoyed less attention, as befit­ ting works more limited in ambition. T hey were nonetheless well received. T h e New Statesman described Economic Imperialism as an “extremely useful little

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b o o k ... admirably w ritten ... [and one which] ought to be in the hands of everyone who wants to understand the underlying causes o f the foreign policy o f the G reat Powers” (New Statesman 1921). A reviewer in economically strait­ ened postwar G erm any similarly concluded: “A ny person who wishes to have in a brief compass the facts about imperialism should consult this cheap and masterly summary” (European Press 1920). O f Imperialism and Civilization the weekly newspaper o f the Independent Labour Party wrote: “Few wiser or more thoughtful books have been w ritten on this problem” (New Leader 1928). A view echoed by an American reviewer who declared: “I know no clearer analysis o f the nature o f nineteenth century imperialism and its difference from previous movements o f conquest than is contained in this little book” (G annett 1928). But the judgm ent o f contem porary critics was not uniformly favorable. M orel, in the review cited above, criticized W oolf for accepting at face value the explanations given by capitalist! and imperialists o f their own actions. In M orel’s view, “sheer individual w ill-to-pow er” as much as greed for gain accounted for a good deal o f w hat w ent on in m odern Africa. T he Economist congratulated W oolf for “brilliantly exposing” the mistakes and iniquities o f empire, but questioned his m ethod o f quotation w ithout reference to context. In their view, Cham berlain, his clever rationalizations notwithstanding, was essentially no different to Disraeli: both regarded commerce not as an end in itself but as a means to national greatness, power, and prestige (Economist 1920). T he Manchester Guardian, while considering the work “really valuable,” nonetheless felt that its author had been arbitrary in his choice o f cases. In addition, W oolf had been selective in his choice o f quotations. Those emphasizing the motivat­ ing force o f new investm ent opportunities were clearly significant, but passages o f equal im port could be found emphasizing native welfare (Manchester Guardian 1920). A reviewer for the TLS reached the same verdict. T he book clearly contained evidence o f much research, but it was always on one side and directed to proving w hat the author wants to prove. ... T h e facts and figures may be accurate, as far as they go, but only one side is given or em phasized.... Authorities are regarded only so far as they square w ith preconceived opinions. ( Times Literary Supplement 1920) Even the N ew Statesman had some critical words to say about the volume. In a lengthy review it praised W oolf for having produced a “very remarkable,” “detailed,” “thoroughly docum ented,” and “fascinatingly readable” book. It also praised him for his “intense intellectual honesty” w hich not only prevented him “from distorting the facts to suit his thesis,” but saved him (pace the TLS) “even from any suspicion o f having overlooked facts which m ight be inconvenient.” It concluded th at it was “far the ablest and most stimulating book that has been w ritten about the subject from the democratic point o f view.”

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Yet although W oolf could not be accused o f unfairly presenting the facts, the standpoint from w hich he did so was “impossibly U topian.” It was im pos­ sible to question on general principles W o o lf’s m oral indictm ent o f European imperialism. But a “purely ethical judgm ent” o f so great an episode seemed “curiously irrelevant.” It was “as if one were to w rite a book showing that Julius Caesar had no moral right to invade G aul or Britain.” Superior civilizations, the N ew Statesman claimed, would always dom inate inferior ones w hen they came into contact w ith them . I t was wrong therefore to put the new imperial­ ism down to economic motives. Such motives were for the m ost part merely camouflage. T h e key factor was “the development o f transport which brought Europe in close contact w ith great areas over w hich an immensely lower civilisation prevailed” (N ew Statesman 1920). Finally, along w ith criticism o f his m ethod and his moral standpoint, more than one skeptical eyebrow was raised at W oolf’s prescriptions. T h e Nation questioned his call for a change in men’s beliefs and desires, from economic imperialism to humanitarianism . Such a change— “so simple, so reasonable, so commonplace”— was difficult enough for an individual to accomplish let alone a nation. To ask for such a change was to ask for nothing short o f a miracle. Indeed, W oolf was in effect requesting “the old change o f heart o f the evangelist” (Nation 1921). From this overview o f the critical reception o f W oolf’s works, three obser­ vations can be made. First, nearly all reviewers praised W oolf for his detailed enumeration o f the facts. T his alone should give us pause before dismissing W oolf’s thought as “utopian.” Second, several reviewers had reservations about W oolf’s methodology, along much the same lines as those generic problems w ith interpretivism identified above. T hird, criticism was leveled at the overtly moral tone o f W oolf’s approach, and his tendency to marshal facts for the purpose o f drawing up a moral balance sheet. T his betrayed an essentially evangelical attitude to political change, the central task being a mass conver­ sion o f hearts and minds. Hence, W oolf’s stark and in some instances dramatic presentation o f the errors o f past ways. To change reality, perhaps a stub­ born, deep-rooted reality, one first had to convince the public o f its utter unacceptability.

A n a l y s is a n d A s s e s s m e n t T he enduring value o f a num ber o f aspects o f W o olf’s theory— his clear defi­ nition, his combination o f interpretive and empirical analysis, his balance sheet of the costs and benefits o f empire— has been reaffirmed by a num ber o f w rit­ ers in the postwar historical literature (H am m ond 1961; Fieldhouse 1984: 30-32; 63-76; Offer 1993). But the cumulative effect o f this literature has been to cast doubt on the validity o f W oolf’s theory as a whole.

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A t the m ost general level, numerous detailed historical studies, based on docum entary evidence not available until the 1950s, have dem onstrated that w hat W oolf and others called the “new imperialism” was in fact an immensely complicated historical phenom enon that cannot be reduced to a single set of factors whether “economic,” “political,” “strategic,” or “technological.” T he issue is still highly controversial. T he weight o f opinion suggests, however, that the causal matrix o f late-nineteenth-century imperialism differed from one colo­ nial power to another and from one part o f the world to another (Fieldhouse 1984: Part III; Eldridge 1984). T he w eight o f historical opinion also suggests that both “peripheral” and “Eurocentric” explanations have their place in any general theory o f why the pace and tem per o f colonial acquisition changed so suddenly in the final decades o f the nineteenth century. T he absolute superiority o f one approach over the other, on which debate raged ip the 1960s and 1970s, is now generally rejected in favor o f a hybrid approach that postulates that crises erupting on the outer reaches o f empire, requiring some kind o f metropolitan response, interacted in various complex ways w ith internal socioeconomic and political changes that were simultaneously occurring in the m etropolitan heartlands. W oolf’s explanation— like H obson’s, Lenin’s, and all the classical theorists’— was exclu­ sively Eurocentric. To that extent, in the eyes o f m odern scholars, it is flawed (Robinson and Gallagher 1953; Robinson and Gallagher 1961; Fieldhouse 1961; Fieldhouse 1984: 3-84). A long w ith these general points a num ber o f more specific points can be made. W oolf contended that the growth o f monopoly— the big factory, the trust, the cartel, the syndicate, the multiple shop— was an im portant factor in generating, “around the year 1880,” the new, “economic” imperialism. It has been shown, however, that this could only have been an im portant factor in two countries— G erm any and the U nited States— and even in these countries the industrial and financial combines that were undoubtedly rising at this time did not reach the level o f dominance suggested by W oolf until the final decade o f the century, th at is, at least ten years after the events they allegedly caused had begun to occur. T h e countries w ith the largest empires— Britain and France— were the countries where the growth o f m onopoly was least advanced (Fieldhouse 1984: 3-38). Secondly, it has been shown that references to the commercial benefits o f the extension o f empire— especially into the tropical zones— in the speeches of leading statesmen and politicians, only became pronounced in the final years of the century. Fieldhouse has shown that references to these benefits by Ferry and Cham berlain in particular were rationalizations o f events that had already taken place, or justifications for keeping hold o f territories that were already under imperial control, having been acquired for quite different reasons. T he issue at stake was escalating administrative costs, and the feeling that newly acquired colonies were placing an intolerable strain on the public finances.

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I f they were to be retained they must, it was felt, be made to pay. H ence the appeal by imperialists to their untapped economic potential (Fieldhouse 1984: 3-87, 459-77). In this respect W oolf got his prim ary and secondary factors back to front. Economics, rather than being a prim ary factor, were a secondary factor in the sense that they were not so much a cause o f empire as a justification for keeping and extending it. Thirdly, as E therington has shown, W oolf played fast and loose w ith chronology. W h a t is flagged as a more or less discrete historical phenom enon— the new imperialism— becomes indistinguishable, as W oolf’s analysis unfolds, from European colonizing activity in the nineteenth century as a whole. W oolf gives at least five dates for the beginning o f the new imperialism ranging from 1839 to 1890 (E therington 1984:180). Ironically, this im plicit recognition that the so-called new imperialism perhaps did not represent such a sharp break with the past as many at the time believed— W oolf included— is one that finds confirmation in one o f the m ost im portant academic papers in the postwar literature (Robinson and Gallagher 1953). O f all the sins o f which W oolf can be accused, having an idealist or a utopian approach to imperialism is not one o f them . H e cannot be accused o f ignoring facts and analysis o f cause and effect. W oolf’s contribution to theorizing about late-nineteenth-century imperialism largely consists o f the vast am ount o f sta­ tistical data he brought to bear on the subject. T hough W oolf’s theory has clear normative underpinnings (the desire to discredit both commercialism and im pe­ rialism by linking them inextricably together), and though he drew strong moral conclusions from it (that imperialism was an unqualified evil for both the col­ onized and the colonizers), his theory is a causal theory par excellence. It stands or falls not on its normative underpinnings, its normative implications, or its practical usefulness, but on its empirical accuracy, its conceptual clarity, and its internal coherence. N or can it be said th at W oolf was guilty, in C arr’s quasiM arxist sense, o f peddling some kind o f bourgeois ideology, the hidden but real purpose o f which was to prom ote and defend a particular status quo (see Carr 1939: 81-112). T h e whole thrust o f W oolf’s analysis was that the status quo was corrupt and dangerous and needed to be replaced as a m atter o f the first importance. T he only sense in which the charge o f idealism/utopianism might be applied is that in exaggerating the im portance o f economic factors he underestim ated the role o f power: power, that is, in the “realist” sense o f political and military power. T he problem w ith this assertion, however, is that it comes close to sug­ gesting that W oolf was utopian simply because he was not realist. It should also be pointed out that W oolf did not ignore realpolitik and the strategic factor. H e emphasized, for example, that it continued to exercise a powerful influence in N orth Africa long after economic factors had become dom inant elsewhere on the continent. In sum, therefore, although it is probably true— and key works by Langer and Fieldhouse suggest so— that the power-political/strategic factor

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was more im portant in determ ining the European division o f the African con­ tinent than W oolf conceded, it would be unreasonable to cite this as evidence o f utopianism . W oolf did not ignore the power factor in general. N or did he ignore the influence o f the power factor conceived in this particular way (Langer 1935; Fieldhouse 1984: 63-69, 459-77). It is certainly true that this most slippery term utopian!idealist can be defined in a num ber o f different ways. But in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and other central IR texts, these three facets (concerning facts and analysis o f cause and effect, ideological defense o f the status quo, and power) are outstanding (W ilson 1995; W ilson 2003: ch. 2). However pronounced they may have been in other aspects o f W oolf’s political thought, this study reveals that these facets o f idealism were not pronounced in his thought on imperialism.

C o n c l u s io n : R a d ic a l D is s e n t a n d F a b ia n P a t e r n a l is m To label W oolf idealist, period, is to belittle his contribution, and that o f his colleagues in Fabian, Labour, and liberal circles, to the erosion o f the moral and intellectual foundations o f empire. W oolf imbibed from the classics as an earnest pupil, and less earnest student, and from his mentor, the philosopher G . E. M oore, at Trinity, a great love of, and faith in, reason. But it was not blind faith. It was not based on shallow optimism in abstract hum an nature. N or was it a product o f the high-Victorian belief in inevitable progress. Rather, it was a product o f an understanding and appreciation o f w hat the carefully tutored hum an m ind was capable o f achieving. I t was this faith in the capacity o f the tutored mind, along with a dedica­ tion to public service, that made W oolf a natural Fabian. It is the paternalism characteristic o f early Fabianism, allied w ith evangelical zeal o f English radicalism, w hich together most aptly characterize his thought on imperialism.

Radical Dissent By “radical dissent” I have in m ind that tradition o f political thought described by A. J. R Taylor in his masterly The Troublemakers (Taylor 1985). It is united by w hat it is against more than w hat it is for. Dissenters are vehemently critical o f British foreign policy orthodoxy. T hey oppose the use o f force, intervention, and power politics. T hey are deeply skeptical o f the balance o f power. T hey argue that war is little more than the sport o f kings in w hich the vast majority o f people have everything to lose but nothing to gain. T hey see diplomacy as an elitist and undemocratic activity, distant to the needs and interests o f ordi­ nary people. T hey deplore the unprincipled conduct o f international affairs and dem and greater attention to morality. T hey view the military as an oppressive,

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undem ocratic force, and advocate either complete (or very substantial) dis­ arm am ent or the concentration o f armaments in the hands o f a world authority. T h e term dissent m ust be qualified by the term radical for three interrelated reasons. First, orthodox foreign policy is not only criticized but rejected root and branch. Second, the cause o f international ills is located not at the inter­ national level but prim arily at the domestic level. W ar and other forms o f “dysfunctional” political behavior are seen, at root, as products o f corrupt or unjust or obsolete or irrational domestic political structures. T hird, the alternative policies prescribed by dissenters represent a fundam ental challenge to the status quo. Cobden, for example, advocated a policy o f pure nonintervention; M orel recommended open diplomacy and the dem ocratization o f the foreign policy; Wells proposed the abolition o f the wasteful system o f interstate com petition and its replacement by a world society based on rational scientific organization. Taylor rightly cites W oolf as a prominent dissenting voice in early-twentiethcentury British history. T he purpose o f much o f W oolf’s work was to discredit orthodox or conservative policies and ideas. T hroughout his career he arraigned them as variously irrational, myopic, immoral, stupid, deceitful, and im practi­ cable. H is tone was sometimes cool and skeptical but more often impassioned, indignant, sarcastic. T he tone o f these passages and their antiestablishm ent intent clearly m ark out W oolf as a dissenter. T he European w ent into A frica... desiring to exploit it and its inhab­ itants for his own economic advantage, and he rapidly acquired the belief th at the power o f his State should be used in Africa for his own economic interests. O nce this belief was accepted, it destroyed the idea o f individual moral responsibility. T h e State, enthroned in its impersonality and a glamour o f patriotism , can always make a wilder­ ness and call it peace, or make a conquest and call it civilization. T he right o f Europe to civilize became synonymous w ith the right o f Europe to rob or exploit the uncivilized. (W oolf 1920: 352-53) W oolf was at his m ost mischievous when com m enting upon the astonishing arrogance o f the Victorian imperialists: U ntil very nearly the end o f the nineteenth century, E u ro p ean s... regarded ... [their colonial conquests] w ith complacent pride as one of the chief blessings and glories o f W estern civilization. T he white race o f Europe, they held, was physically, mentally, and morally superior to all other races, and G od, w ith infinite wisdom and goodness, had created it and developed it so it m ight be ready, during the reign o f Q ueen Victoria o f England, to take over and manage the affairs o f all other peoples on the earth and teach them to be, in so far as that was

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possible for natives and heathens, good Europeans and good Christians. (W oolf 1928:12-13)

Fabian Paternalism By “Fabian paternalism” I have in m ind that approach to political change, central to early Fabianism, w hich assigned a special role to a highly educated, public spirited, scientifically minded, meritocratic elite. Progressive change would be brought about via a division o f labor between several cadres o f technical, scien­ tific, and administrative “experts.” In this respect social progress was analogous to technical progress. T hrough detached and systematic analysis o f physical facts, the scientific expert was able to discover causes o f physical phenomena and events, and use these discoveries in order to harness and control them. T hrough detached and systematic analysis o f social facts, the social-scientific expert could do the same for the social world. It was to such experts th at the communal good needed to be entrusted. H er special knowledge combined with her highly attuned social conscience made her the standard bearer o f progress. In the m odern world the expert knew best (Pugh 1984; Pim lott 1984: Part I). A further hallmark o f Fabian paternalism was belief in gradual change. T his had both a positive and a normative dimension. O n the one hand, grad­ ual change would inevitably occur if society chose to be governed by reason and “the facts” rather than prejudice and opinion. H ence the Fabian m otto, coined by Sidney Webb: “the inevitability o f gradualness.” O n the other hand, change was best— more perm anent, more just, more beneficial— when gradual. O nly through gradual change could the evils o f social turmoil, social injustice, and political reaction be avoided. Fabian paternalism, in substance and in tone, is strongly evident in W oolf’s thought on mandates (e.g., W oolf 1920c) Improving and extending the League’s m andate system was W oolf’s main recom m endation for dealing w ith the vast problem o f imperialism (W ilson 2003: ch. 5-6). For the most part, W oolf wrote about African peoples as if they occupied a much lower level o f civilization and were helpless in the face o f the superior civilization o f the West. H e accepted the late Victorian assumption th at “the African” was “backward” and “savage.” Such things as war, slavery, mysticism, and cannibalism proved this. H e freely used such dem eaning terms as “non-adult races” and “primitive peoples.” But consistent w ith the self-consciously enlightened and progressive beliefs o f his Fabian and Bloomsbury colleagues, he refused to put the parlous condition o f “the African” down to race or color. Indeed, the main responsibility for his backwardness resided w ith the Europeans since they had failed to introduce a proper system o f education. H e thus fully subscribed to the presum ption o f A rticle 22 o f the League C ovenant that, unassisted, they would not be able to “stand by themselves

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under the strenuous conditions o f the m odern w orld.” T h e native was “no m atch” for the European and was unable to cope w ith the economic and political system that had been imposed upon him. It was consequently the job o f the colonial authorities to “educate the people so that they may gradually take their place as free men both in the economic system and in the govern­ m ent o f their country” (W oolf 1920c: 12). Accordingly: T h e end in view is an African population, w ith its own institutions and civilization, capable o f m aking the m ost economic use o f its land, able to understand W estern civilization and control the forces it has let loose on the world, governing itself through organs o f government appropriate to its traditions and environment. (W oolf 1928: 131) T he paternalism o f all this is clear: it was the job and indeed the duty o f Europeans— with the aid o f expert bodies such as League Com m ittee for Intellectual Co-operation— to work out the general lines o f economic and political development in Africa. T h e paternalism o f the following passage, w ritten as late as 1943, is particularly striking. Responding to the “extreme left” opinion that full inde­ pendence should be granted immediately, W oolf stated: In my opinion to do that would be disastrous— disastrous for the Africans. M ost o f them are ignorant and uneducated, terribly poor, ravaged by tropical diseases. To think th at they are capable o f sud­ denly taking over the government o f their countries under the political and economic conditions o f the m odern world is just nonsense. T hey would fall victims to the first private profiteers and exploiters and the first imperialist government who crossed their path. No, the right way to deal w ith our African colonies ... is to begin at once to educate the Africans to govern themselves. (W oolf 1943:180) African peoples needed the paternal guidance o f enlightened Europeans if they were to achieve real independence. T hey needed to be “gradually trained” in democracy and “the art o f self-government.” O nly w ith such guidance would they ever be capable o f “standing by themselves.”

Chapter 6 Internationalism and the Promise of Science Jan-Stefan Fritz

T his chapter analyzes the influence o f science in shaping thinking about coop­ erative internationalism in International Relations (IR). A t the turn o f the tw entieth century, there was a surge o f interest in ways o f making international relations more about cooperation than o f com petition, conflict or conquest. T he question facing many early-tw entieth-century writers was how best to make cooperation work, systematically and for the long term. Science was the answer they found. It was seen as providing an alternative basis for inter­ nationalism from the imperialist and state-interest-driven international rela­ tions o f the nineteenth century. T h e application o f scientific knowledge to the practice o f international relations was seen by many writers as an invaluable means toward better understanding and tackling increasingly im portant eco­ nomic and social concerns. T h a t is, through scientific knowledge and technol­ ogy, the lives o f individuals could be improved worldwide. In turn, the focus on economic and social issues in the study o f internationalism became equated w ith cooperation. This chapter compares a cross-section o f writers who contributed to the study o f cooperative internationalism in IR during the early twentieth century. This serves to show that despite conflicting views over w hat cooperation and internationalism meant, many writers similarly looked to the sciences as a basis for their work. In particular, a num ber o f Anglo-American writers, well known to students o f IR , were am ong the most influential in the study.1 These are, in approximate chronological order o f their major works, Paul Reinsch, John H obson, Leonard Woolf, and David Mitrany. These writers have been identi­ fied as having been particularly influential on the study and practice o f cooper­ ative internationalism. Paul Reinsch, for example, is often considered the founding father o f the study o f international organization (Potter 1945: 803-806) as well as being a leading international law scholar and senior 141

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U.S. diplomat. John H obson and Leonard W oolf were widely read publicists, who introduced the concept o f international government; moreover, their ideas were influential in the creation o f the League o f N ations.2 David M itrany devel­ oped the concept o f functional international government and influenced the creation o f the U N specialized agencies.3 In addition to referring to these w rit­ ers, this chapter draws on a variety o f sources to illustrate the context in which their ideas were shaped and how in turn these shaped the discipline o f IR . W hile each o f the four writers focused on here has been studied countless times before, little time has been devoted to exploring the particular importance o f the expectations that were held o f the sciences (Cooper 1998 is a rare excep­ tion). It is argued here that these expectations were fundamentally im portant to those individuals listed above, who substantially shaped the discipline o f IR early in the twentieth century. This chapter shows that, in particular, the study of cooperative internationalism as reflected in international institutions was shaped from its beginnings by the expectation that scientific knowledge and technolog­ ical innovation held out the promise o f both deeper and broader cooperation. In fact, it is probably not far-fetched to claim that the relationship between devel­ opments in the sciences and in international relations were not only first high­ lighted by these writers, but also that this aspect o f their work seminally influenced later theories, including neo-functionalist regional integration theory, as well as various approaches to complex interdependence theory, regime theory, and the study o f global governance. This chapter systematically assesses w hat promises were expected from the sciences and how these influenced the study o f IR, and in particular the study o f cooperative internationalism.

T h e P r o m is e s o f S c ie n c e A n im portant assumption in the study o f international cooperation early in the tw entieth-century was that, through the application o f scientific knowledge to the practices o f states and societies, these could learn to develop more pacific relations. According to the writers considered here, peace was all too rare. T he general view held that international relations was dom inated by a small elite, which, under the guise o f national interests, primarily enriched itself through imperial plunder. T his was seen to result in recurring conflict, which, in turn, was justified along D arw inian lines as the survival o f the fittest. In the rare instances where peace was pursued, it was done haphazardly and, in any case, at best tended to find a cure to the problem at hand, rather than seeking a mechanism to prevent future conflict. A m ong these writers, most critical o f imperialism was H obson (1902b), who strongly condemned imperialism as a perverted form o f nationalism. Hobson argued that imperialism prom oted national aggrandizem ent and militaristic competition. Economically, he believed imperialism reinforced an

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exploitative capitalism which, in turn, fostered an unequal distribution of wealth both w ithin societies and between them . Reinsch (1922), too, criticized existing international relations, but focused on diplomatic practices and their, in his view, too secretive nature. H e argued that these practices perpetuated existing inequalities w ithin and between societies, and prevented the achieve­ m ent o f long-term peace. These writers were not, however, pessimists in the Spenglerian sense, that is, that they saw the occidental civilization as being in decline. Instead, they observed developments that seemed to promise lasting cooperation in international relations. Perhaps the m ost im portant o f these developments was the startling accumulation o f scientific knowledge and its application to technological innovation. Before turning to the promises expected o f the sciences, the concept o f science, as it was used by the writers considered here, requires elaboration. W h en Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and M itrany used the term science, the aim was not to make the study but, rather, the practice o f internationalism more systematic. T heir concern was not to make the study of politics more inductive and thus scientific; this was, in fact, a criticism Pitm an B. Potter (1923) levied at other writers o f the time. Q uite simply, there existed a general belief that cooperation on economic and social issues was intrinsically linked to the practices o f scientific discovery and development o f related technological products. In other words, the process o f discovering empirical facts, when rationally applied, invariably supported technological developments, and thus contributed to w hat is commonly referred to as “progress.” In practice, the aim was to have as m uch scientific content and process as possible reflected in political content and practice. Thus, for H obson and Reinsch, scientific knowl­ edge and its application provided a practical basis for exploring the problems of hum an relations, including economic and social ones such as poverty, for con­ taining these problems by defining and managing them , and eventually for solving them systematically. T he height o f expectations o f what science could deliver was paralleled by a breadth in w hat was seen to qualify as “being scientific” or “the sciences.” T he writers considered here tended to refer simultaneously to both the natural or physical sciences and the social or hum an sciences, including sociology, psycho­ logy, and anthropology. Closer to home, there was also some discussion about exactly what political “science” should contribute to the study o f international cooperation and organization (Potter 1923). Beyond this, there was also a ten­ dency to equate the scientific and the practical. T he writers believed that those disciplines often identified as using scientific knowledge for practical ends, such as engineering, medicine and even architecture, had shown that the application o f knowledge to a practical pursuit could yield seemingly boundless results. Because such activities required expertise, the terms scientist and expert were taken to be synonymous. By extension, the writers also assumed an inextricable

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link between basic scientific knowledge and the technological products derived from it. For this reason, the terms science and technical were often used inter­ changeably.4 Furthermore, the terms technical and economic and social were also used interchangeably; an equation that M itrany in particular developed as the basis for his theory. In other words, “science” was conceived o f in extremely loose terms. T his probably stemmed at least in part from the fact that none o f the w rit­ ers considered here had studied in detail the sciences themselves, let alone the history or sociology o f science, or science-technology-policy relations. Perhaps because o f this, the expectations o f w hat science could provide international rela­ tions were seen to be almost boundless. In sum, science was not only taken to be a set o f academic disciplines involving systematic observation and experimenta­ tion, but a quasi-ideology that could serve as the basis for a new means o f artic­ ulating and promoting inter- and intrasocietal cooperation. As suggested above, this worldview gave an im portant place to economic and social issues. T h e term economic and social issues encompassed a variety of specific activities often cited as im portant issues at the heart o f international cooperation, including such diverse m atters as: commerce, policing, railways and transportation networks, sanitation infrastructures, the abolition o f slavery, scientific research, telegraphic communications networks, as well as trade and industry. It is im portant to note that the term served not only to refer to spe­ cific issues, but also to exclude others, such as conflict and war, as well as related concerns w ith diplomacy and international law. As stated earlier, when looking at the use o f science as a leitm otif for shap­ ing the practice o f cooperative internationalism , a num ber o f concrete promises that science was expected to deliver can be identified. First, the thinkers dis­ cussed here saw the promise o f involving scientists in the possibility that such individuals could replace the dom inant state-interest perspective o f inter­ national relations w ith a knowledge-based one. Second, science promised a view o f w hat could constitute a “natural” international com m unity— centered around specific spheres o f cooperation. T h e underlying assumption was that international discord was not the natural state o f things, that under the right conditions, a feeling o f international com m unity could be realized through cooperation in specific economic and social areas. T hird, science promised the possibility o f cooperation w ithout political prejudice. I t was believed that science-based international cooperation could provide a universally acceptable m ethod for organizing international negotiations and tackling the im plem en­ tation o f international agreements. Fourth, science promised more enlightened international governance. Scientific knowledge and interdependence were understood to be two sides o f the same coin. Scientific cooperation was seen to underpin interdependence and interdependence reinforced scientific cooperation. Together they were seen to provide a means o f institutionalizing cooperative internationalism for the long term w ithout a formal, centralized governmental structure.

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The Promise o f Involving Scientists T he four authors each observed in the nineteenth century the emergence of more pluralist international relations. Representative o f this was that individu­ als and groups who had not traditionally been part o f the policymaking elites were beginning to participate in decision making at the international level. C entral to the interests o f these new actors were not traditional concerns such as diplomacy and war, but a concern for increasing wealth and improving social conditions even for many o f the m ost marginalized members o f society. Based upon empirical evidence cited in particular by M itrany, Reinsch, and Woolf, this observation certainly holds true as concerns the expanding role o f techni­ cal experts, scientists, and nongovernmental interest groups in the industrial­ ized, predom inantly European world. In particular the following examples were highlighted: the development o f railways, telegraphic communications networks, sanitation infrastructures, the abolition o f slavery, and the inter­ nationalization o f scientific research. Reinsch was among the first analysts to note the increasing participation o f technical experts in negotiating public agreements. In the case o f such issues as railway expansion and sanitation, experts were often used simply because of the technical character o f international agreements being negotiated. A t other times, experts were involved as advisors to the diplomats. The usual process was for agreements— w hether originally negotiated by technical experts or diplomats— to be in the end subject to the approval o f diplomats or other government rep­ resentatives. Reinsch (1909: 22; 1911: 2) saw the benefit o f technical experts in their tendency to view issues from a more “international” perspective.5 Diplomats, he believed, considered issues from the perspective o f national free­ dom o f action. T he effect o f involving experts both broadened international relations in terms o f participating actors and, more practically, encouraged a “liberal”— meaning more democratic and more sensitive to the needs o f individuals— character to the legislation being passed. Reinsch also saw experts as improving the technical awareness o f international institutions, especially if they were civil servants within those institutions, thereby improving resource alloca­ tion to an effective and efficient im plem entation o f international agreements. Briefly, the relevance o f scientists to international institutions was im por­ tant since these new bodies were observed to take on an ever more influential role in international relations. T he im portance o f international institutions was strengthened by the fact th at there now existed such a variety o f bodies, includ­ ing intergovernm ental and nongovernmental ones. Even many o f the inter­ governmental bodies seemed intrinsically noncontroversial, covering such scientific and technical issues as health, post, telegraph, as well as marine sci­ ences and navigation. In an extensive review o f institutions established during the nineteenth and early tw entieth centuries, Reinsch (1907: 579-623) high­ lighted com m unications and transportation; economic interests (including

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trade and the protection o f labor), sanitation, prison reform, police powers (including over fisheries and the slave trade), and science.6 In short, to Reinsch, these examples o f internationalism had successfully contributed to a broaden­ ing o f international relations into som ething more than conventional diplo­ macy and the foreign policy o f states. To M itrany, the im portance o f technical experts and scientists came in parallel w ith the decline o f w hat he saw as the unitary, territorial state. Above all, M itrany believed states to be overwhelmed by the expanding tasks associ­ ated with more complex international relations.7 M itrany believed the role o f experts to be particularly im portant not only as advisors to diplomats and politicians, but also as public policymakers in their own right. T h e problem o f traditional diplomacy and politics were evident not least in the outbreak of W orld W ar II. M itrany saw the postwar period as an opportunity to change things and during this period the majority o f his w ork focused on illustrating the potential o f knowledge-based and technically driven international bodies. To justify the im portance he attributed to scientists and technical experts, M itrany envisaged th at public decision-making entities needed to be judged by the direct im pact their decisions had on improving standards o f living, and not merely on w hether agreements between states were signed or by the degree o f interaction they prom oted between individuals and social groups. As the bear­ ers o f “objective” data and inform ation, M itrany believed scientists to be ideally placed to identify w hat means were needed to achieve the improvements to the lives o f individuals. T hough M itrany did not elaborate upon the sociology or epistemology of expertise and the specific relations between the technical and the political, his functional theory o f politics provided the first conceptual framework in IR for allowing experts in society a role in policy making. M itrany claimed that his aspiration was not to stop “the public discussion o f issues o f public concern” as a classical definition o f politics m ight suggest, but to take issues o f public con­ cern outside the exclusive jurisdiction o f diplomats and governmental officials and put them in the hands o f w hat he thought were more knowledgeable indi­ viduals. T he attraction o f M itrany’s work to audiences broader than those specifically interested in politics was one substantial reason why his work was so popular even outside IR and political science in the 1950s and ’60s. A n indi­ cation o f M itrany’s popularity w ith scientists during this tim e can be seen in the articles, either w ritten by him or about him, that appeared in the influen­ tial scientific journal Nature.8 For Reinsch and Mitrany, the promise o f involving scientists in interna­ tional relations was im portant in that it held many tangible benefits, and it was symbolic o f what pluralist and enlightened international relations could look like. Though their works certainly contributed to shifting the focus in IR from its traditionally narrow concern with the state and intergovernmental relations, their potential contribution was not as unambiguous as they thought. A t the

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very least, the sphere o f w hat they considered to be “qualified” participants in international relations remained limited. T he writers considered here failed to explain why, for example, scientists and other technical experts would contribute only objective knowledge and not personal or other interests. Underlying the works o f each o f the writers here is the assumption that state interests and the knowledge-led interests o f scientists are somehow mutually exclusive. Similarly, none o f these writers even touched on the question o f why scientific knowledge should be treated as distinct from other types o f knowledge and experience gathered via systematic observation and the carrying out o f long-term practical tasks. For example, the particular knowledge o f farmers certainly drives techno­ logical development and thus— by these writers’ definitions— could influence international relations. Yet neither this, nor other trades, were considered.

The Promise o f Natural Community To Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and M itrany, the knowledge provided by scien­ tists was seen to play an im portant role in shifting emphasis in international relations from confrontation to community. There were two dimensions to this belief. First, scientific research in the nineteenth century had identified a cer­ tain unity in nature through the theory o f evolution. T his was taken by many observers at the tim e to be a plausible basis for believing that cooperative inter­ nationalism was in fact an expression o f this unity among humans. This line of argum ent was used by m ost o f the writers considered here as a basis for specu­ lating that, under the right conditions, cooperation was as, or even more, natu­ ral than the com petition and conflict analogies that had shaped so much o f the imperial and balance-of-power policies o f the nineteenth century. T he second dimension o f natural com m unity was the fact the scientific community itself was seen to lead by example, w ith many international scientific organizations being established during the nineteenth century. T he belief in the link between biological and social unity was particularly prevalent in the works o f H obson (1902a: 460-89). T h e basis o f this approach lies in his criticism o f the use o f D arw in’s theory o f evolution to justify im peri­ alist politics.9 H e argued this was a perverted use o f scientific knowledge. Instead, science had a more positive role as a “normative injunction to guide hum an conduct” (Long 1996: 13). Therefore, politics could learn from science about the “natural” conditions that encouraged cooperation. H obson’s belief in the possibility o f a natural com m unity am ong states and societies in interna­ tional relations rested in part on w hat David L ong (1996: 8-27) has called an “organic analogy.” T his analogy rejected state-centric interpretations o f inter­ national relations in favor o f socially based interpretations. From the natural sciences, H obson extrapolated that, since hum ans were biological organisms and therefore part o f nature, there was necessarily some harm ony in the social

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relations between humans. Equally, he accepted th at competitive behavior was also natural. However, through scientific and thereby rational analysis, H obson believed cooperative behavior could be separated from the competitive and the former given emphasis in public policymaking. As L ong (1996: 8) points out, H obson saw science as providing the basis for linking the concepts o f hum an development and evolutionary theory, w hich H obson specifically applied to the cause o f liberal social reform. H obson was not alone in understanding the concept o f cooperation in such terms; Reinsch and Woolf, too, posited a metaphysical explanation for why individuals and groups would cooperate, given the right circumstances. Reinsch and W oolf believed th at a metaphysical unity existed, or could be cre­ ated, in international relations. For example, Reinsch (1900: 340-51) argued that, in spite o f the pessimistic spirit o f parochial nationalism th at dom inated the nineteenth century, a “new internationalism ” had emerged. T his new inter­ nationalism was supposedly reflected both in an increase in economic and financial cooperation, and in the growth o f a psychological unity through com ­ munications and media. Such communications and media naturally included the exchange o f scientific ideas and their relation to the general public. In short, Reinsch (1911: ch. 1) saw this as “world-wide unity” based on “positive and concrete concepts” and practical enterprise. W h a t Reinsch expressed in terms o f a pychological unity, W oolf (1917: 13) called “international com m u­ nal psychology.” According to this view, institutionalized cooperation was the expression o f scientifically informed behavior that reflected a collective will, collective rewards, and, above all, commonly accepted principles o f w hat the “right relations [between states] ought to be,” as W oolf put it. In contrast to the earlier writers, M itrany sought to articulate a materially based theory o f cooperation, wherein he downplayed the idea that a collective “we”-feeling could bring people actively together. However, like the writers before him, M itrany presumed that international discord was not the natural state o f things; it had to be due to some flaw in understanding and organiza­ tions. H e believed that the international relations o f economic and social issues, for example, were not about how to keep states and societies apart, but how to bring them actively together.10 M itrany argued that it was common sense that, given the appropriate knowledge, people would use it to improve their lives by bettering their economic and social conditions. Using science, one could thus pursue cooperation and com m unity w ithout interfering in the ways people lived their lives privately, culturally, or religiously. T he supranational character and organization o f the international scientific com m unity provided a perfect illustration o f this argument. M itrany argued that as international society learned to cooperate in specifically defined areas, an ever more complex web o f cooperation would emerge. T his was the development o f a “living m ate­ rial international com m unity or w hat he also described as a “way which would make it possible to build up a free world community, one which would have

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room for every country and people and w hich above all, would be liberal in spirit and performance.”11 To claim that all four writers saw the emergence o f international commu­ nity as “natural” does not mean they did not see cooperation also being pursued out o f self-interest. Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and M itrany all pointed out that “enlightened” self-interest was evident throughout the history o f international cooperation. T hey believed that, having experienced cooperation, individuals, social groups, and states would begin to develop shared expectations o f collec­ tive rewards. A collective reward was generally understood to be one that was shared by all equally; exemplified by the belief that everyone benefits from clean drinking water in a similar m anner and to a similar extent. In this sense, the writers all similarly attach their notions o f unity to the growing importance o f scientific and technological expertise. Expertise was to be the basis of “enlightened” self-interest in that it indicated the possible outcomes of cooper­ ation. It enlightened decision makers as to the possible and, indeed, the best outcomes. Introducing scientific knowledge was im portant as a means of building international com m unity w ithout each actor having to compromise their particular interests. Science could show how different interests were rec­ oncilable in practice, thus avoiding potential political disputes. In sum, science represented not only knowledge about the physical world and physical con­ structs, but science was also a leitm otif for how to organize international rela­ tions along more systematic and, as a consequence, more cooperative lines. In the view o f science as a leitm otif for political action, Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and M itrany saw som ething that was almost akin to an antidote to the existing power political relations, dom inated by states and diplomatic elites. T he consequence o f focusing their theories on this aspect o f international rela­ tions was, however, that the issue o f power was altogether om itted from their theories. In other words, by focusing all their attention on how to make coop­ eration work, they failed to provide their own theories o f power in the relations o f states and societies. To M itrany, in particular, the separation between coop­ eration in economic and social areas and conflict in the realm of power politics was an integral tenet in his theory, yet he concerned him self only with the for­ mer. Ultimately, the writers considered here believed that scientists influenced international relations in only the m ost benevolent terms, by improving the capacity o f decision makers to reach higher levels o f consensus. M ore im por­ tant for the purposes here, this bias m eant that, in contrast to the detailed assessment o f the relations between science and cooperation, these writers did not provide a similarly detailed analysis o f the relations between science and imperialism. Beyond H obson, w ho touched on this issue in his analysis of D arwinism , no w riter considered here reflected on why scientific knowledge was necessarily tied to the practice o f cooperation, or w hether it could just as well be used in service o f conflict and conquest. T hough the writers considered here all published on the topic o f imperialism, they failed to connect these two

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strands in their prescriptive work. T h a t is, their theories o f cooperation were developed in such a way as to assume th at imperialism would be relegated to history. In short, science played an integral role in the shift from imperialism to cooperative internationalism . W ith regard to coercive international relations more broadly, a further consequence o f this bias was the inability o f these th e­ ories o f international cooperation to respond to H ans M orgenthau’s criticism that science can play no role in removing power from politics. Som ewhat dra­ matically, he notes that the “Age o f Science has completely lost [the] awareness [of the] tragic sense o f life, the awareness o f unresolvable discord, contradic­ tions, and conflicts which are inherent in the nature of things and which hum an reason is powerless to solve” (M orgenthau 1946: 206).

The Promise o f Cooperation without Political Prejudice T he potential o f natural com m unity required, in the m inds o f Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and Mitrany, some systematic process to structure and institu­ tionalize these communities. In their empirical studies, all four identified the emergence o f a new form o f organizing and managing the process o f interna­ tional cooperation; a form they commonly referred to as “international adm in­ istration.” In international adm inistration, they found a means w ith which international institutions could acquire and develop whole areas o f competence and responsibility. A problem w ith international relations observed by the writers considered here was that states spent too much time searching for consensus at the lowest common denominator. Even after this denom inator had been agreed upon, tra­ ditionally there were no international means to im plem ent, let alone enforce, agreements. By contrast, these writers believed that science could raise the denom inator o f consensus and provide a m ethod for tackling the im plem enta­ tion o f international agreements. T h e practical expression o f this was found in “international adm inistration.” T h e first person to popularize the study o f administration in a comparative political context was W oodrow W ilson (1887). W ilson defined adm inistration as a “practical science,” which had as its object “to discover, first, w hat government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things w ith the utm ost possible effi­ ciency and the least possible cost either o f money or o f energy” (W ilson 1887: 197). As a practical science, adm inistration could be considered in a com para­ tive sense. W ilson argued that various states, w hether democratic or not, shared the same understanding and practice o f administration. Thus, it was not inappropriate for the U nited States to look toward G erm any or France for insights into the better organization o f government. In short, adm inistration promised systematic cooperation w ithout political prejudice.

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Using this same logic, Reinsch and W oolf were among the very first w rit­ ers to take administration to the international level and call it “international administration.” T he value o f administration was that it could be similarly applied at any political level, and this made it seem as objective, and thus scien­ tific, a process as could be defined. As discussed earlier, it was assumed that there were objective similarities worldwide in the material needs and conditions required for living a good life, regardless o f how these needs were phrased in terms o f interests. A lthough perhaps occurring in different places and at differ­ ent times, it was believed that, through administration, a means had been found with which all economic and social issues could be tackled systematically. Reinsch used the term international administration loosely to describe a systematic process o f organizing cooperation necessarily involving “public international unions” (viz. international institutions) and excluding processes o f settling disputes in a judicial manner. In practice, the administrative work of the union normally involved acting as a link between the members and organ­ izing conferences or meetings. However, the im portance o f international adm inistration was that it gave international institutions a seemingly inde­ pendent means to become actors in their own right. Equally, by its very nature, the advent o f adm inistration served to prom ote an increased participation o f technical experts in international relations. Reinsch observed that “in nearly every branch o f [international] administrative activities it is necessary to conduct scientific investigations in order to provide a reliable basis for govern­ mental action” (1911: 67). W oolf continued along the same lines, taking inter­ national adm inistration to include all the “practical steps which from day to day the state takes to maintain law and order, and to regulate health or the despatch o f telegrams or the coinage and issue o f money” (1916:116). D uring the 1930s and through to the end o f W orld W ar II, interest in international administration grew. Numerous prom inent IR scholars, including Norm an H ill (1931), Pitm an Potter (1928), and Frances Sayre (1919), wrote on the subject. However, where W ilson had considered domestic accounts of administration, and Reinsch and W oolf had identified an emerging process in international relations, now the international version had been tried and tested, especially concerning the management o f economic and social issues at the international level. Numerous references were made at the time to the fact that the only bodies o f the League o f Nations to survive W orld W ar I were its eco­ nomic and social ones. In fact, some argued that the truly successful aspect of the League had been its economic and social work (Freeman 1948: 982; Greaves 1931). Concerned w ith similar issues, H arrop Freeman observed that in prac­ tice, over time, “the administrative agency has proved particularly adapted, offering the advantages o f expertness, specialization, combination of private and public action and speedy, cheap and non-technical procedures” (1948: 976). W h en M itrany began w riting on international adm inistration, he likewise espoused its virtues. T h e difference between M itrany and the earlier writers

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was his criticism o f the existing institutions as being subjected to power poli­ tics. In his estimation, the League had failed because o f power politics. Moreover, even before the U nited N ations C harter had been negotiated, M itrany (1946: 49) noted the disproportionate influence o f the “Big Four Powers” over w hat he viewed as an essentially technical agency, namely the U N Relief and Rehabilitation. Agency (U N RRA ). T his worried him , since finding practical consensus in relief-related situations— a perfect example o f w hat was viewed as a scientific and technical “clean-w ater” issue— was being com pro­ mised by power politics. Nonetheless, M itrany believed international adm inistration to be an expanding sphere o f international relations. H e saw the growth o f adm inistra­ tion m ost effectively represented in the numerous unions and bureaus that had been founded, including the International Telegraph U nion, the Universal Postal Union, and the U nited Nations specialized agencies established after 1945. M itrany considered these to be truly global services. These were entities run by scientists and experts, as international civil servants, to serve impartial, practical ends. M itrany’s own view is well reflected in a passage from George Shipman (in M itrany 1945: 458-59) he often quoted: T he trend in international adm inistration during the past twenty-five years has been away from political and diplomatic influence. M ore and more organizations are being set-up on the theory that purely technical problems can be separated from political problems, and that technical co-operation on the part o f national administrative services can be brought about successfully in the international sphere w ithout the interference o f the political departm ents o f the m em ber states. T his statem ent reflects one o f the most im portant biases found in the works o f the writers considered here: namely, that certain ends, such as the im plem entation o f collective decisions, should be achieved as quickly and costeffectively as possible. In itself this may seem desirable. However, a potential problem in this position is that it assumes those ends identified by the scien­ tific community, for example and above all, would be acceptable to all individ­ uals and would thus require no further debate. In fact, the expressed desire o f these writers for more pluralistic, democratically accountable international relations could undoubtedly have implications for institutional efficiency. In short, an international institution whose existence and work is subject to debate among its members is certainly more inefficient than one given clear priorities unanimously agreed upon by its members. Ultimately, science was viewed not as a means o f expanding debate in international relations, but as a means o f spurring quicker, though more well-founded, collective action. N either H obson nor Reinsch considered the possibility that settling w ith an international bureaucracy could be counterproductive to their goals, though

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both advocated the need for transparency and accountability in international relations. In the case o f Mitrany, the consequence o f this desire for technically expedient action, according to Cornelia Navari (1995: 223), was that he replaced earlier emphases on democratically representative methods o f govern­ m ent w ith committees and quangos.

The Promise o f “Enlightened” International Governance Science was not merely seen as a systematic means o f administering interna­ tional agreements, but its-underlying value was seen as a means for strengthen­ ing and reinforcing the interdependence o f states and societies. Scientific knowledge and interdependence were both understood to be desirable and complementary; two sides o f the same coin. In short, scientific cooperation was seen to underpin interdependence and interdependence reinforced scientific cooperation. T h e term often used to describe the institutionalized version of this process was international government— a term closely related to contem ­ porary uses o f the term global governance, as opposed to world government.12 W oolf has been identified as one o f the pioneers o f w riting on complex interdependence (W ilson 1997: 160; also see W ilson 1995: 126-36). H e observed that the chief characteristic o f [international government] was that the existence o f very large communities was recognized, that the existence o f smaller communities o f every variety and kind within the larger was recognized, that communities and parts o f communities were to be left to manage for themselves matters w hich only affected them ­ selves; but that where the relations o f communities or parts of a community were many and intricate, organization and organs o f gov­ ernm ent should be provided for joint regulation— A nd the great m erit o f such a system is that it consciously recognizes that where the units o f a com m unity are through their infinite relations dependent upon one another and not independent, an organized regulation o f those relations reflecting that interdependence, must be provided. (W oolf 1916:220) W h en defining interdependence in these terms, W oolf was principally concerned w ith the increased economic and social exchanges between societies around the world. To the writers considered here, the interdependence of soci­ eties based on economic and social issues was fundam entally different and sep­ arable from cooperation concerning m ilitary or strategic matters or involving foreign office diplomats. N o t only did this belief lead people such as Reinsch

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to write books condem ning secretive diplomacy, but M itrany, for example, developed his functional theory o f politics around this argument. M itrany believed that removing economic and social issues from the domain o f diplomacy was possible since these issues were inherently similar. For example, he assumed that everyone would agree that sanitation was a similar problem in all urban environments and its im provement would lead to an equiv­ alent increase in living standards in all contexts. Moreover, M itrany saw all issues o f this type as technical ones. C ontrary to political problems, he believed technical problems to be less likely to become sources o f strife, since they could be solved by applying a particular technique. I t was merely a question o f decid­ ing which one to use; the question o f who decides, however, was never actually definitively answered by Mitrany. To Mitrany, the scientific-technological revo­ lution provided the basis for the emergence o f truly global issues that could not be governed through traditional international politics. M itrany illustrates his view on the interrelationship between science and his proposals for functional means for governing international relations in the following statement: Functional arrangements are possible because they are necessary; and the necessity is caused by our restless scientific-technological clever­ ness. Every new invention, every discovery is apt to raise a new prob­ lem that needs to be jointly controlled. (1970: 834) M itrany (1946: 41) took the idea that individual activities in international relations could be “selected specifically and organized separately” and form u­ lated it as an essential principle in his theory. Like the natural sciences, inter­ dependence was viewed at once as being reducible to its individual constituent elements, while also being considered in its entirety as a collective set o f processes— a system. By extension, the lessons learned in one area o f coopera­ tion were seen to be applicable in other areas o f potential cooperation. This represented international government. In fact, this idea was first introduced by Reinsch, and later adopted by M itrany. Reinsch predicted that cooperation would expand outward from particular areas “in constantly widening circles” toward w hat would become a universal web o f cooperation in economic and social issues (1911: 2). Fostering this growth were specialized and expert inter­ national institutions: Universal cooperation is the w atch-w ord w hich stands for positive action, for the development o f concrete facts o f hum an life correspon­ ding to the actual needs o f our economic and social order. For this purpose adequate institutions m ust be created to take international action out o f the field o f resolutions and to make it part o f the reali­ ties o f hum an life. (Reinsch 1911: 3)

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W oolf also made some interesting observations on the complementary nature o f scientific cooperation and international government. To Woolf, sci­ ence served to expand international society and internationalize knowledge, thus broadening the concept and practice o f international government. In dis­ cussing the relations between science and international government, W oolf stated that “w hat is not often realized is that though the interests o f science are so obviously international, they cannot be adequately served w ithout organized regulation; in other words w ithout International G overnm ent” (1916: 197). W oolf argued th at a certain m inim um o f uniform ity in standards was needed to ensure th at international transactions could be conducted effectively. To this end, the internationalization o f scientific nomenclature was necessary, and was in fact already happening. Using the medical sciences as an example, W oolf argued th at the first step o f its internationalization began with the simple shar­ ing o f experiences and knowledge across state frontiers. T he second step was to spread scientific knowledge through formal international congresses. Further steps followed, whereby scientific research was jointly pursued through inter­ national government; that is, the scientific agenda was developed and carried out in the international sphere. T his last step ultimately leads to the building of international scientific knowledge. T he standardization o f nomenclature also had another feature o f interest to Woolf. H e viewed it as a process o f unifica­ tion at the international level, to the point that international government was even involved in the standardizing o f chickens and apple breeds (W oolf 1916: 205). For Woolf, this was not an irrelevant or trivial fact since through such occurrences, international government would become a positive reality in the everyday lives o f ordinary people around the world.

T h e P r o m is e s o f S c ie n c e in t h e St u d y o f C o o p e r a t iv e I n t e r n a t io n a l is m T he aim o f this chapter so far has been to dem onstrate how the contributions o f some o f the dom inant writers on cooperative internationalism in IR were substantially influenced by the expectation that the sciences would deliver on a num ber o f promises. T h e assumption that these promises would be delivered m eant that specific assumptions were made about the possibility o f building more cooperative international relations by building international institutions around economic and social issues. By the same token, it was expected th at theories o f cooperation could thus avoid traditional concerns w ith confronting conflict and coercion directly through law and diplomacy. In short, the argum ent here is that this position is largely responsible for giving the study o f international institutions its distinctive emphasis on cooperative internationalism .

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T h e relevance o f this developm ent in the discipline o f IR is twofold. U nderstanding the expectations and theories o f early tw entieth century writers is not only about understanding a historical set o f debates or individuals; above all, it is about understanding both the origins o f IR and its more recent devel­ opments. T hroughout the tw entieth century, various mainstream theories o f IR continue to reflect an expectation that through scientific knowledge and technological development international relations will become more complex and, if governed appropriately, more cooperative. A lthough a comparative analysis between early-tw entieth-century writers and more recent theorists is beyond the scope o f this chapter, it can be claimed that similar views are also shared by neo-functionalist approaches to regional integration, as well as by many writers on complex interdependence, regime theory, and global gover­ nance. M any o f the proponents o f these theories have based their works on the argum ent that, due to developments in science and technology, IR as a disci­ pline was in need o f an “updated” theory o f international cooperation. By way o f example, this claim is perhaps best illustrated in the origins o f regime theory. By their own definition, E rnst Haas and John Ruggie developed regime theory as “a response to the international implications o f the interde­ pendencies forged by science and technology” (Haas 1975: 147). T his was the view o f Haas in an article that is credited w ith introducing the idea o f regimes to IR. Haas continues w ith the observation that “once such interdependencies are experienced by men, they call for the creation o f regimes— collective arrangements among nations designed to create or more effectively use scien­ tific and technological capabilities.” Later that same year, Ruggie edited a spe­ cial issue o f International Organization devoted to the study o f regimes as responses to technological developments. T his issue included articles on collec­ tive responses to such issues as nuclear nonproliferation, research and develop­ m ent problems, oceans and fisheries, as well as w eather modification. This series of articles was compiled in the belief that “technological, ecological, political, economic and social environments are becoming so enmeshed that changes tak­ ing place in one segment o f international society will have consequential reper­ cussions in all others” (Ruggie 1975: 557). Ruggie continues that this process o f change is “outpacing the capacities o f our systems o f international organization to manage them .” This interpretation o f the importance o f science to coopera­ tive internationalism has since become an integral part o f regime theory, espe­ cially as a result o f Peter Haas’s work on epistemic communities as well as Oran Young’s work on environmental regimes and global governance.

C o n c l u s io n s Historical analyses o f the development o f theories o f cooperative internation­ alism are im portant for many reasons. In this chapter, the aim was to show that

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the conceptual links drawn between science as one field o f hum an endeavor and cooperation between states and societies as another, fundamentally shaped the way in w hich certain issues have been and continue to be treated in IR . M ost obviously, the emphasis has been on studying the linkages between sci­ entific knowledge and cooperation, rather than scientific knowledge and im pe­ rialism, coercion, or power politics. Clearly, the study o f IR then and now are not identical and any direct comparison would have to be worked out much more carefully than is possible here. Nonetheless, many mainstream studies of cooperative internationalism are grounded in thinking similar to that o f Reinsch, H obson, Woolf, and M itrany about how international relations work. A substantial part o f this rests on the belief that science can provide objective inform ation to guide the vagaries o f policymaking toward improved outcomes. T his has been the case for students o f IR focusing on economic and social issues, technology and interdependence, and, most recently, environmental concerns. T his is not to say that to look toward the sciences is something neg­ ative. Yet if IR is to provide a better understanding o f the world, the discipline itself must also understand the priorities, as well as biases, o f the theorists and theories that have shaped it over the decades.

N otes 1. Other writers, notably continental European ones, focused mainly on the need to harness power politics through international law. Many o f the major works within this particular tradition tended to focus on the emergence o f international legal frameworks and diplomatic conferences. This can be seen in such overviews as Jakob ter Meulen (1917,1929,1940) as well as Christian L. Lange (1919). 2. John H . Latane (1932) attributes important roles to Hobson, Reinsch, and W oolf in formulating ideas directly influential in the creation o f the League o f Nations in two edited volumes entitled Development ofthe League o f Nations Idea: Documents and Correspondence of Theodore Marburg. This view is still reflected in the website o f the League o f Nations archives (http://www.unog.ch/library/archives/archives.htm), which includes extracts from W oolf (1916). 3. In the past twenty years continuing reference is made to the influence of functionalist thought on U N specialized agencies and its implications. Some more recent examples include: Evan Luard (1983: 677-92); Javed Siddiqi (1995); and Rosemary Righter (1995). 4. For an interesting discussion o f the distinction and relations between science and technology in the context o f a case study set in Victorian England, see Thomas F. Gieryn (1999: ch. 1). 5. A shorted version o f this article reappears in Reinsch’s most popular work, Public International Unions, Their Work and Organization: A Study in International Administrative L aw (1911).

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This article reappears in revised form in Public International Unions.

7. It was not only Mitrany who believed this to be the case, but many other political writers o f the 1930s and ’40s. See Peter W ilson (1996: 49). 8.

One example o f such an article is Anonymous (1943:134).

9. For a more extensive discussion o f this article, see also Brian Schmidt (1998: 145-46). ' 10.

See David Mitrany (1941: 39-43).

11. Mitrany, no date. Political Science Slips and Historical Analysis o f Political Thought. Mitrany archives. 12. For a more detailed comparison o f the terms international government, inter­ national governance, and global governance, see Jan-Stefan Fritz (2000: 187—205). The chapter argues that international government was actually understood in terms that are close to what is understood by “global governance” in the contemporary international relations literature.

Chapter 7 Birth of a Discipline Robert Vitalis

[T]here can be no nonlegitimating or neutral stance from which a discipli­ nary history can be written.,All such histories will be selective, and guided by some commitment (or opposition) to a particular identity. —John Dryzek and Stephen Leonard, “History and Discipline in Political Science” Born and raised in America, the discipline o f international relations is, so to speak, too close to the fire. It needs triple distance: it should move away from the contemporary, toward the past; from the perspective o f a superpower (and a highly conservative one), toward that o f the weak and the revolutionary— away from the impossible quest for stability; from the glide into policy science, back to the steep ascent toward the peaks which the questions raised by traditional political philosophy represent. — Stanley Hoffmann, “An American Social Science: International Relations” W hat parts do the invention and development o f whiteness play in the construction o f what is loosely described as “American”? — Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

A student taking classes in international relations in the U nited States may sometime encounter the “man in the m oon,” one popular way to represent the point o f view o f a profession that defines as its specialized object o f knowledge the state system. I did— at M IT in 1978. T he trope in fact appears in print in 1925 in the first line o f the best-selling American textbook devoted to a new political science o f International Relations, by Raymond Leslie Buell.1 H e had the m an in the moon looking down on the “world Island” and smaller “islands” such as N orth America, intrigued by the social organization o f the ant-like m en “scurrying hither and thither on land and sea.” I f this other-w orld spectator is not color-blind, he would find that these men are o f different hues— in Europe and America, w hat are 159

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called “w hite m en,” but in oriental Asia, 825,000,000 beings who mostly are yellow and brown. Beneath the dense foliage o f the myste­ rious continent o f Africa, he would see the home o f the black m an— I f the M an in the M oon should gaze long enough, he would find that th at these ant-like men differ not only in physical characteristics, but in material and m ental accomplishments. I f the M an in the M oon had a political bent, he would soon learn that m ankind had split itself into a large num ber o f groups, some o f w hich are called states, others, nations, and still others, races. (Buell 1929:3-4) These same groupings, the visitor learns, who act according to a mix of “economic considerations” and “racial factors” but above all “nationalism,” have in turn shaped the new global order o f national imperialism. “[MJodern imperialism does not object to the existence o f separate nation-states o f white men, but looks to the establishment o f autocratic rule by such states over the colored people.” Thus Buell assesses the prospects for an emerging source o f conflict in the world— not in terms o f nationalism but on a broader scale. “Im portant as national groups have been in modern history, their supremacy is being attacked by a new align­ ment based on ‘race’” (Buell 1929: 5, 56-57, 306). W h at Buell calls the principle of W hite Supremacy was being both challenged and consequently reasserted in the post-W orld W ar I world. T he challenge was the rise o f anticolonial national (including the various Pan- African, Islamic, Slavic, etc.) movements. T he reasser­ tion was evident in a flood o f new writings and theorizing in the 1920s on both race and on race war, in a decade said to mark the birth of the discipline o f Inter­ national Relations (IR) (Hannaford 1996: 348-68; Lauren 1996: 50-81). W hile teachers o f IR may still hang on to Buell’s man in the moon or some related trope today, they have long since forgotten Buell. T hey have nothing to say about racism as a force or, in au courant language, an institution in world pol­ itics (Vitalis 2000). W hite supremacy is not generally discussed either as a his­ torical identity o f the American state or an ideological com m itm ent on which the “interdiscipline” o f international relations is founded. N or is empire under­ stood as the context that gives rise to this specialized field o f knowledge. To be a professional IR scholar in the United States today means adopting a particular disciplinary identity constructed in the 1950s and ’60s that rests on a certain will­ ful forgetting. So, in the 1980s, Michael Doyle, the director o f Princeton’s Center for International Studies, could claim that the tradition o f political science in the United States has never shown much interest in empire and imperialism (Doyle 1986: 11). Or, from the early 1990s critical margins o f the field, Roxanne D oty could imagine that it was in the 1960s that IR theorists first began to consider the role o f race in world politics (Doty 1993). Contem porary writing about IR turns out to share along with all other domains o f American culture the power­ ful tendency toward “silence and evasion” about the four-hundred-year presence o f Africans and African Americans in the United States (M orrison 1992).

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This chapter begins to trace the contours o f the twentieth-century color line in the American social science o f IR, using critical methods pioneered in AfricanAmerican studies. I show that these institutions need to be understood in a particular sociocultural context o f racism in American life. In Work of Democracy, a study o f popular representations o f Lorraine Hansberry, Kenneth Clark, and ex-A PSA president Ralph Bunche in post-W orld W ar II America, Ben Keppel calls the dialectic o f avoiding and coming to grips w ith this racism the most im portant theme in the history o f the United States (Keppel 1995:1). American IR has so far made the choice to avoid it. Bunche, a political scientist who wrote w hat is still one o f the m ost im portant theoretical statements on racism, empire, and international relations, A World View o f Race (1936), goes unread and unrecognized along w ith all other African American and Caribbean intel­ lectuals w ithin the tradition o f IR today. O ne need not have turned to Toni M orrison or to any particular theoreti­ cal claim about A m erican society and culture to see that white supremacy has a central place in the origins and development o f IR . It is enough for any reasonably inform ed student o f African-Am erican studies and o f the country’s herrenvolk democracy simply to glance at the names o f social science’s found­ ing founders in order to conclude the obvious— as D u Bois had done long ago. John Burgess who created the School o f Political Science at Colum bia (1880) and began publishing Political Science Quarterly (1885) and H erbert Baxter Adams w ho had hoped to follow Burgess and turn his famous seminary at H opkins into another “great school o f H istory and Politics,” were the country’s preem inent theorists o f the race state. These institution builders were also the teachers respectively of, am ong dozens o f other “historico-political scientists,” W illiam D unning and W oodrow W ilson. Paul Reinsch (1869-1923), author o f World Politics published in 1900, probably the m ost renowned political sci­ entist after W ilson himself, who taught the first courses on international rela­ tions in the U nited States, was America’s first expert in colonial administration. Reinsch participated alongside D u Bois in the Universal Races Congress in 1911. For these “founders” and countless other students o f a new American sci­ ence o f IR , races and states were the discipline-in-form ation’s most im portant twin units o f analysis, as our scientists m ight put it today. In the years before the opening salvos o f the G reat War, G . Stanley Hall, the country’s distinguished theorist o f the race children, and his colleague at Clark, George H ubbard Blakeslee, who would head its new departm ent o f his­ tory and international relations, began publishing the Journal of Race Development (1910). T his was the first IR journal in the country, renamed the Journal of International Relations in 1919. Three years later it became Foreign Affairs, the house publication o f the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Following the war, Raym ond Leslie Buell, whose man in the m oon surveyed the course of race development in political science’s first textbook w ith the name International Relations, also undertook the first field research by a political scientist in Africa,

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under the auspices o f Harvard University and the Rockefeller Foundation. H is two-volume work, The Native Problem in Africa (1928), w ould become a light­ ening rod for anticolonial critics in the post—W orld W ar II era, although Buell, who became research director and later head o f the N ew York Foreign Policy Association, was an ally d f and an influence on people such as Rayford Logan and a mem ber o f the board o f Paul Robeson’s Council on African Affairs. T he individualistic and ahistorical assumptions o f liberal exceptionalism continue to shape the project o f social science in America. T here is no more relevant an example o f these tendencies than the now canonical M yrdalian account o f white supremacism as a vestigial prejudice o f “the hinterland” and “backward areas o f Anglo-Saxon N orth A m erica.” O ne can find an early ver­ sion o f this argument in the second edition o f Frederick Schuman’s International Politics (1937), where theories ofTeutonism and Anglo-Saxonism are traced to “psuedoscientific apologists” rather than, more accurately, to the leading lights in his own profession. But Schuman had also been ousted in Chicago as a leftwing ideologue and spent the rest o f his career in exile at A m herst College. In the American Political Science Review, Charles M erriam, the chief advocate of the break with historical and evolutionary theories o f institutions and prophet for a new science o f behaviorism at Chicago, where Schuman earned his PhD , claimed political science itself as “a precious asset o f the race” (Merriam 1921:176). Today, the embrace o f scientism that M erriam dreamed was the solution for the race’s ills reinforces his descendants’ myopia about their discipline’s past. Practitioners are most likely to operate under the assumption that know­ ing the history o f political science has no bearing on doing political science. Each new generation is socialized into the profession w ith the help o f reliably W higgish accounts o f the epochs through w hich it has passed on its way to the present. Like all other organized fields o f inquiry, and not just those that aspire to the status o f natural science, political science has at particular m om ents revisited its history to legitimate a particular identity— “the present theoretical consensus”— or else perhaps to underm ine the consensus. Because that aspira­ tion to be just like physics remains unfulfilled, however, political scientists now typically tell stories o f growing methodological sophistication and rigor rather than o f cumulative lawful knowledge w ith predictive value as proof o f true advance (D ryzek and Leonard 1988: 1255). Finally, the discipline’s characteristic sociology o f knowledge works to constrain the historical imagination and fix the gaze o f successive generations o f expert observers in a way th at makes not noticing natural. IR theorists are able to protect the stance o f the detached, neutral observer, w hich is the essence of the social science profession’s contem porary identity, w ith layers o f distanceenhancing effects. T h e shared core is o f course the fiction o f occupying a posi­ tion outside culture from which to observe the social world (Campbell 1998). Critics o f scientism within the profession have offered more complex accounts o f the development o f Am erican political science than those o f the

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self-identified scientists. A gainst such alternatives, the W h ig histories learned by most practitioners appear especially clumsy and contrived. Recent efforts to reconstruct the foundations o f IR make the contrivances that much more obvi­ ous (Schm idt 1998). Still, the discipline’s new in-house historians have no answer to the challenge posed by Toni M orrison: “W h a t intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critics to erase me from a society seething w ith my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work? W h a t are the strategies o f escape from knowledge? O f willful oblivion?” (M orrison 1996:24). I f we are to see these “feats,” trace these “effects,” and lay bare these “strate­ gies” in the case o f American international relations, we first need a reliable account o f institutional origins. Stanley Hoffm an is correct, IR “was born ... in Am erica,” but we have got the date— and thus much else—wrong. W e need to move the date o f the founding back to 1900-1910, midway in the era that was coming to be defined as a tim e o f “increasing political and economic interde­ pendence” or w hat now some say is the first round o f globalization. W e also have to establish the context that actually matters to the ideas and institutions that comprise the field-in-formation. For lack o f a better term I call it empire, the process whereby the northeast consolidated its control o f the southern and western states and territories, and began to exert dominion over peoples and resources beyond the formal boundaries o f the Republic. Gerstle (2001) calls this the founding o f the Rooseveltian Republic, Lind (1995) the creation o f the second Euro-A m erican N ation. T his period is also the m om ent o f consolidation zones o f dom ination and dependency worldwide. Context clarifies for us why a com m unity o f scholars understood itself as focused prim arily on accounting for the dynamics o f imperialism and nation­ alism, and seeking practical strategies for better ways o f administering territo­ ries and uplifting backward races, using w hat were seen as the progressive tools o f racial science. T h e professors o f the A PSA depicted themselves as occupy­ ing a new intellectual space by right o f the failure o f the international legal scholars and antiquo-historians to deal adequately w ith the problems posed by empire. New race development and eugenics advocates vied and intersected with practitioners o f rassenpolitik and w ith visionaries who predicted the inevitability o f war between the Anglo-Saxons and one or more competing racial alignments. T his account complicates the standard view o f the external events that typically m atter to a field o f knowledge that we imagine is exclusively con­ cerned w ith spaces beyond the territorial boundaries o f the U nited States. It forces us to think about boundaries we take for granted and to ask: events exter­ nal to what? T he lead article o f the premier issue o f the country’s first IR journal, the Journal o f Race Development, raises precisely this kind o f question in m ak­ ing the case for a research agenda on the progress o f backward races and states. T he United States “has as fundamental an interest in races o f a less developed civ­ ilization as have the powers o f Europe. T h e key to the past seventy-five years of

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American history is the continuing struggle to find some solution for the negro problem— a problem still unsolved” (Blakeslee 1910: 2). Fifteen years later, when Lord Zim m ern, the first holder o f the W oodrow W ilson C hair at Aberystwyth, the first ever created in the new field o f international relations, lectured at Colum bia in 1926 he would raise the stakes, insisting that the “race question” was “the most urgent problem o f our tim e” and a “prim ary cause o f war in the w orld” (Zim m ern 1926: 81). Fifty years later, in analyzing the “malaise” that was prom pting govern­ ment, foundations, and scholars to rethink international studies, James Rosenau ended up back where forgotten ancestors such as G . Stanley H all, George Blakeslee, Raymond Leslie Buell, and W . E. B. D u Bois had started (and where we still seem to be today): with the surfacing o f many new types o f international issues— ranging from ecology to racial conflict to political kidnapping to traffic in drugs— which reflect the world’s growing interdependence and which, consequently do not fall neatly or logically into any o f the established disciplines. T h e new issues o f the 1970s— the very issues that have brought on the economic, urban, and ecological crises— span the dis­ ciplines and work on them m ust perforce be interdisciplinary. A nd this means interdisciplinary not only am ong the social sciences, but among all the sciences, biological and physical as well as social. Finally, the m ounting interdependence o f the world and the em er­ gence o f new issues have been accompanied by a waning o f the “Cold W ar” and a confounding o f old issues. W here the main cleavages o f the past stemmed from considerations o f ideology and divided East from W est, today they derive as much, if not more, from a stress on equality and divide rich from poor and black from white. L ong­ standing models o f the world and its politics thus seem increasingly obsolete. (Rosenau 1973:18-19) Excavating this history is the necessary first step in answering Toni M orrison’s challenge, since it allows us to see when the escape from knowledge o f the supremacist origins o f the field and the still-intact com m itm ent to an apartheid o f benign neglect takes shape. W h eth er one prefers to see America’s postwar hegemony as vindication o f the liberal creed or as a com m unity in defense o f a common heritage and civilization, the fact remains that it is a hierarchical, exclusionary caste order o f superior and inferior states (Goldberg and Vitalis 2002). Before W orld W ar II it was conceived as a natural order am ong races. Now it is more common to find international inequality explained as a natural order among states, where “the strong do w hat they will, the weak do w hat they must.” For others, it is common to write as if hierarchy did not exist.

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M orrison’s challenge ultimately leads here. O u r time is one when it is hard for practitioners to imagine black people ever w riting anything o f relevance to the field, and when the “intercultural and transnational formation” that Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic, where some o f the most im portant critiques of empire and hegem ony are found, is subject to strict quarantine by all but a handful. W ere we to consider the institutional origins and norms of an equiva­ lent intellectual project in any other settler colonial society at the exact m om ent when an apartheid system was being consolidated, we would be able to guess the history I am about to tell without much trouble. This story would not need to be told. As we know all too well, however, use the term colonial settler state to describe the U nited States today and objections will automatically be lodged. Such is the power o f the exceptionalist m yth that is so central to w hat Rogers Smith calls the Am erican liberal tradition and G ary Gerstle calls civic nationalism. A critical disciplinary history o f IR is a part o f the larger project, obviously, of exposing the competing and contradictory currents that they say animates culture, politics, state, and society. Empire exposes the cross-currents o f liberal and exclu­ sionary conceptions o f the nation, as we now know, but it also points to problems in coming to grips with hierarchy and privilege in the world system. Both Smith and Gersde have little difficulty in demonstrating that American progressivist thought was deeply entangled in the contradictory liberal/civic, republican, and racist visions o f the American nation. O ne could reject imperialism on the grounds that it threatened what was most vital about the republican or liberal ideal or one could sound the alarm against miscegenation and race suicide. Defenders o f empire made the opposite case. T he health o f the republic’s institutions depended on expansion, and in that sense one might call them civic nationalists. Yet empire requires rather than simply allows the making o f invidious distinctions. O ne conventional understanding o f the discipline o f IR is that it is a system or tradition o f justification for one set o f practices “inside” and another “outside” the boundaries o f the nation, and, famously, liberal theory is not easily adaptable to such a project. M any arguments mustered today for democracy promotion, institution building, and economic aid echo older ones about civilizing missions, tutelage, and uplift. I f I read Sm ith and Gerstle correctly, these old arguments were no less rooted in beliefs about the naturalness o f hierarchy than were argu­ ments about the futility o f trying to redeem the subject races. It may be that the approach taken in American Crucible and Civic Ideals gives way at “the water’s edge” and in Gerstle’s case, leads as well to misrepresenting D u Bois and others whose work was increasingly focused on global rather than national exclusions.

E m p ir e , Ra c e , a n d A c a d e m ia T he fact o f a continuing silence and evasion within the tradition o f American IR m ight lead us to appreciate anew D orothy Ross’s Origins of the American

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Social Sciences (1988). In contrast to the way practitioners reconstruct their own past, Ross’s book is more reliable in its grasp o f nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society and culture, and, not surprisingly, less compelled than are political scientists by the idea th at their own discursive evolution is w hat m at­ ters to history above all else.2 Ross instead sees in this discursive evolution the unmistakable stamp o f the national ideology o f American exceptionalism and the experience o f civil war and rapid industrialization. T h e irony and flaw in a book dedicated to turning away from ideological national history and loosen­ ing the hold that exceptionalism has over the national im agination is its blind spot when it comes to empire, imperialism’s relationship to the social questions of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and its consequences for the A m erican social sciences (Kramer 1998: 380-83). To observe that American imperialism shaped the course o f institutional change in the professions should strike one as banal as my suggestion that white supremacism was at the core o f w hat professors thought and wrote about empire, save that the history o f the professors is much less studied than the his­ tory o f racism. As Franklin N g notes, few people today know that the University of Chicago once listed a “Colonial Com m issioner for the University” (Ng 1994:141) on its staff: Alleyne Ireland, journalist and author o f the influential program for research in political science, “O n the N eed for a Scientific Study of Colonial A dm inistration” (1906). Ireland failed in his bid to create the coun­ try’s first department o f colonial study at Chicago, but APSA’s second vice presi­ dent Paul Reinsch pressed for the profession’s first organized subfield in colonial administration as American territorial expansion led after 1900 to a wave o f new courses, publications, popular and scholarly journals, and the first oppor­ tunities for social scientists to assist in the development o f the state’s interven­ tionist capacity. T h e real institutional origins o f IR are to be found here, rather than the 1920s or 1940s, as generations o f cold war W higs would later claim. Brian Schm idt makes the point in slightly different terms, borrowing from Olson and G room to argue, after patient reconstruction o f the discourse’s first decades, that IR “had its real beginning in studies o f imperialism, not world order, as has so often been suggested” (Schmidt 1998: 72). Em pire is, as M ichael Doyle shows, a particular type o f world order, but the thrust o f the point stands. To see the truth in it that later generations would w ork hard to forget, one can simply pull Buell’s 1925 textbook International Relations off the shelf once more. T his textbook, like any other one before and since, represents the accumulation o f knowledge in circulation for one or two decades, presented, argued, refuted, and reformulated in books, journals, conferences, and seminar­ ies, as they were then known. Its representation o f the state o f knowledge and debate is mirrored exactly in Syllabus on International Relations by Colum bia University’s Parker M oon, a book published the same year, organized concep­ tually around the three themes or units o f nationalism and war, imperialism, and militarism and armaments.^ M oons own m ost famous work, Imperialism and

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World Politics, appeared two years later, followed by Buell’s Native Problem and a massive w ork on the future o f colonialism by Chicago’s Quincy W right, Mandates Under the League o f Nations, in 1930. Two points in particular about this remarkable, thirty-year-long record o f scholarship on race and empire deserve highlighting. O ne is the defensiveness in the perception o f racial threats, which produces theories o f race war and, more com m only after W orld W ar I, projects o f world racial uplift on the part of states, foundations, and their university clients. T h e defensiveness suggests that resistance in both theory and practice needs to be brought back in to view. T he second point is th at not one but two unstable boundary lines— between states and between races— were at play as scholars attempted to define the domain o f international/race studies. American debate on empire turned on questions o f race— race purity, mis­ cegenation, white right and duty, and the threat posed to fundamental institu­ tions. Race was itself the source or germ o f these institutions, or so a founding generation o f self-identified political scientists told us. This debate had gener­ ated fiercely productive ideas about the natural development o f and struggle among races, about geopolitics, the need to end open immigration, about AngloSaxon and Teutonic genius, black disfranchisement, eugenics or race science, and about hum anitarian norms o f elim inating inferior races. T he most im por­ tant political scientist o f the generation, W illiam Burgess, founder o f the School o f Political Science at Columbia, taught these ideas (Gunnell 1993: 49-53). Against the so-called Social D arw inist strands o f imperialist thought, var­ ious counter-strands o f strategic or defensive white supremacism may have been even more productive between 1865 and 1898. A rgum ents about the unrecuperable character o f those who inhabited the peripheral zones and, thus, o f the folly o f hum anitarian uplift were joined to warnings that overseas expansion­ ism threatened the country, increasing the dangers o f race war, the devolution o f the Anglo-Saxon stock and the breakdown o f republican institutions. Against these appeals to safeguard the national racial security, which mobilized many (not all) workers, Catholics, westerners, and southern anti-imperialists, expan­ sionists found racial imperialist rationalizations a liability in the political arena (Trubowitz 1998:68-75; Lasch 1958; Patterson, ed. 1973; Love 1997; Jacobson 1998: 205-13). Strands o f racial realpolitik and o f a coming-clash-of-civilizations had emerged as well as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Akira Iriye singles out Alfred Thayer M ahan’s 1897 essay in Harper’s Monthly, “A TwentiethC entury O utlook,” which predicted a tw entieth-century race war with a rising East, in a pointed comparison with Samuel H untington’s late-twentieth-century variant on the same them e (Iriye 1997: 44-45, 70). T h e successful resistance to the Italian invasion o f E thiopia in 1896, followed by the fierce fighting in the A m erican conquest o f the Philippines in 1898 and the Boxer Rebellion in C hina in 1900, may have discomfited some intellectuals. T he Japanese victory

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in the Russo-Japanese W ar in 1905, however, presented w hite supremacy the­ ory w ith a serious empirical problem. Sir Alfred Zim m ern recalled having walked into his classroom at Oxford the m orning the news broke about the sinking o f the Russian fleet, and reluctantly putting aside his lecture on G reek history. H e told the class,'“I feel I m ust speak to you about the m ost im portant historical event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime: the victory o f a non-w hite people over a w hite people” (Zim m ern 1926: 82). Intellectual work inside and outside the university elaborated on and popu­ larized this account o f a critical juncture and apocalyptic reading o f contemporary history. H enry Adams, an ex-president o f the American Historical Association, was warning o f the last struggle for power in Asia and the end o f the white race by 1950 (LaFeber 1995). M adison Grant, the M anhattan patrician who was chair­ man o f the New York Zoological Society and a trustee the National Geographic Society, published The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, which argued against education and environm ent as forces that shaped races and that m ight amelio­ rate differences among them. G rant wrote the introduction to Revolt Against Civilization (1922) by T. Lothrop Stoddard, who received a P hD in history from Harvard under Archibald Cary Coolidge, the first editor o f Foreign Affairs. T he anxieties that were betrayed by Z im m ern and Adams could be found in other neighborhoods as well. For example, on July 4,1910, w hite Americans were stunned when Jim Jeffries, who was billed as the “H ope o f the W h ite Race,” betrayed the predictive power o f Anglo-Saxonism by losing to the first black world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson. Violence followed in a dozen states, police thwarted an attempt at lynching a black man on the streets o f M anhattan, and the U.S. Congress passed a law th at forbid movie theaters to show films o f the fight (Bederman 1995:1-3). Birth of a Nation (D. W . Griffiths, dir., 1915), the movie that M ichael Rogin argues “founded m odern A m erican mass culture,” the first ever shown in the W h ite H ouse, drew millions into the­ aters for the first time where they were treated to an epic account o f im m inent race suicide and salvation by the invisible empire o f the Klan in a struggle w ith “black political and sexual revolution” (Rogin 1987:191-92). T he Klan’s resurgence in 1915 is a reminder that conflict was not confined to boxing rings and movie screens. Violence broke out repeatedly in the cities o f the North, where 250,000 African Americans had fled between 1915 and 1917, m ir­ roring the pattern o f riot and lynching in the South. T he new NAACP, founded in 1911, and its im portant journal, the Crisis, under D u Bois’s editorship, drew increasing attention to the struggle for self-determination at home and, by the time o f the war, abroad (Painter 1987). N or would violence be confined to American cities. In 1915, the W ilson regime launched its invasion and fifteenyear occupation o f Haiti. T he N A A C P sought to expose the record o f atrocities that was left in the wake (Weston 1972; Plum m er 1982; Schmidt 1995). T he same N A A C P and its indefatigable intellectual D u Bois fought bravely over the architecture o f the future in Paris in 1919 but the defenders of

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a normative world ascriptive order and an expanded and reinforced color line would win the day. D u Bois had poured his energies into reviving the PanAfrican Congress as a means to represent worldwide black peoples’ interests in the peace process. T he W oodrow W ilson adm inistration had joined the other European great powers in hindering the organization o f the congress and W ilson him self was the pivotal actor in defeating a proposed article on racial equality in the founding covenant o f the League o f Nations. To black Am erican observers it must have seemed very much as if this racist visionary, who in 1913 had extended the American apartheid regime known as Jim Crow to federal agencies and throughout the District of Columbia, was now enlarging the global reign o f white supremacy. To the Japanese sent to negotiate in Paris, the course o f diplomacy confirmed their worst fears o f sub­ ordination to an Anglo-Saxon hegemony. A m ong the American white work­ ing class and more generally am ong the denizens o f the W est and South, the proposed racial equality clause had become the critical rallying point for oppo­ sition to the League (Shimazu 1998: 138-48). A nd the popular defense o f privilege on the basis o f race, which was fundam ental to anti-imperialism in the U nited States, echoed similar currents elsewhere, for example, the “W hite Australia” plank which Labour and its breakaway faction the Nationalists had championed inside the dom inions o f the British Empire. W hen Japan’s emis­ sary reintroduced the equality am endm ent, with the word “races” removed and “nations” inserted in its place, a majority of the League’s future members voted to include the principle in the preamble. W ilson, chairing the session, instead declared the proposal defeated because the vote had not been unanimous— a condition never applied before or again at the peace conference! W ith equal rights once more denied to Africans at home and in the dias­ pora at w ar’s end, a theorist such as D u Bois could perhaps console him self w ith seeing the prediction o f a war o f the Color Line, which climaxed his remarkable 1915 analysis “T h e African Roots o f W ar,” come true. In 1919 in Asia (the M ay Fourth M ovem ent in China, and in Japanese occupied Korea), in the Western imperial domains (Afghanistan, Egypt, the Punjab, and Palestine), and across N o rth America, rising protest and violent repression provided the sharp counterpoint to the peace negotiated at Versailles. It was “the greatest period o f interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed,” according to histo­ rian John H ope Franklin (Lauren 1996:106). States and their reigning parties and organic intellectuals meanwhile all redoubled their efforts to buttress this white supremacist Anglo-Saxon order.

T h e C o n s o l id a t io n o f I R As American scholars began for the first tim e to identify themselves as experts in som ething called IR and began to introduce their students to the workings

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o f contem porary history or world politics, as universities began to raise m oney to support these experts and institutionalize this expertise, as the philanthropies paid out, and as a canon was gradually accumulated and transm itted in profes­ sional association meetings, in classrooms, and in the first textbooks, this process was bound up w ith pressing issues o f the day. A short list o f such issues may be assembled, as viewed from the departm ents and chairs-in-form ation in places such as Harvard, Columbia, Clark, Johns H opkins, and Chicago. T here were the “high” politics o f conquest and transform ation o f the western, Mexican, and Indian territories; the reconstruction o f the South; expansion into the Caribbean; the conquest of the Philippines; the prospects for the clash o f national imperialisms; and the waves o f m igration th at marked the industrial transfor­ mation o f the country as indelibly as the factory, the mine, and the electric power station. In places such as W isconsin, where Reinsch taught, or the new Leland Stanford College, where its president tried to woo Reinsch away in 1902 (Chicago had tried too), Asian races, markets, and migrants m attered a bit more than they did on the eastern seaboard. T h e end result was nonetheless the same on both coasts. A n interesting innovation at the University o f California is the estab­ lishm ent by vote o f the academic senate o f a university com m ittee on international relations. T his action has been taken in pursuance o f a resolution adopted in 1915 to the effect th at the university should “give increased emphasis to the w ork o f instruction and research in problems o f international and inter-racial relations; and that a com ­ m ittee o f the senate be appointed to formulate a plan for the organi­ zation and expansion o f instruction and research having the definite purpose o f assisting in the prom otion o f amicable world relations.” (O gg 1917: 373) To make a contextualist claim about knowledge is not in itself controversial, presumably, save now in the narrow sense o f contesting one or another account of precisely how ideas and environm ent are related. Certainly, we find plenty of other practitioners-turned-disciplinary-historians m aking this move, as I have already noted. E. H . C arr’s canonical 1939 critique o f idealism is one example. H offm an’s 1971 essay is another. These more familiar contextualist arguments however all share a distinctive, truncated sense o f the past that supposedly matters, corresponding roughly to the tw enty years before the writers themselves appear on the scene. P ut another way, presentism’s account o f disciplinary institutional origins invariably lacks depth. In order to reduce the likelihood that readers in 2005 will misconstrue what follows by imposing their contem porary understanding o f w hat it is that constitutes and distinguishes history from political science and international relations from comparative politics, area, and development studies, some basic

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points should be kept in m ind. First, as D orothy Ross makes clear, political sci­ entists circa 1910-1920 wrote w hat she calls “historico-politics” that looks more like w hat is published today in Studies in American Political Development and Diplomatic History than in the American Political Science Review. M embers o f A PSA , founded in 1903, who were university faculty were as apt to have P hD s in history (or in law) as in political science. T he distinctiveness that its adherents claimed was the concern w ith the contemporary. Second, as the publication o f the premier volume o f the Journal o f Race Development makes clear, the boundaries we draw today between w hat is inside and outside the national territorial space and that are now distinct domains of expertise were not made in the same way in 1910. Perhaps more accurately, who is inside and who is outside the national space was not so much a territo­ rial question as it was a biological one. So it was possible to imagine an inter­ disciplinary field o f expertise and a journal to support it that would bring together men such as George H ubbard Blakeslee (1871-1954), the country’s most famous scholar o f U.S. relations w ith Latin American and Asia once Reinsch had left M adison for China; G . Stanley Hall, the country’s most im portant psychologist after W illiam James and the first president o f the new graduate institution Clark University (the second one after Johns Hopkins); the great Franz Boas o f Columbia; Ellsworth H untington, the geographer at Yale who was a close colleague o f Stoddard and G rant and a future president o f the American Eugenics Society; and W . E. B. D u Bois (Kuehl, ed. 1983: 80-82; Ross 1972; M artin 1973). T hird, then, it m ust also be kept in m ind that, as Victoria H attam shows, the discursive terrain we now take for granted, in which one routinely distin­ guishes race from nation, nation from ethnicity, and ethnicity from race, was scarcely recognizable to m ost people in the first decade o f the tw entieth cen­ tury (H attam 2000). T he differences that a reader today will insist are real and significant ones were only coming into play at the end o f the period 1910-1920. Boas was o f course a central figure in this process, as was D u Bois, and one is able to see the outline o f these shifts as well as the first questioning o f the sci­ entific validity o f race as a concept in their writings from this period, including papers presented at and discussions o f the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911. T h e arguments were tentative and, needless to say, completely unac­ ceptable w ithin the neo-Lam arckian orthodoxy that H all helped to create. T he argum ents in support o f a new interdisciplinary field called IR were, by contrast, bold, clear, and in retrospect obvious ones. A new world order of national imperialism had emerged, producing new pressing practical political administrative problems for the state and the sections, w hich begged for scien­ tific study and solutions. Buell coined the term (in 1925!) complex interdepend­ ence to characterize this new order am ong the natural and historic races. Traditional approaches in political history, theory, and international law could not recognize let alone solve the problems introduced by this new form of

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imperialism. C h ief am ong these problems was th at o f “race progress” and ‘ how best to aid the progress o f the undeveloped” (Blakeslee 1910). New, combined, and interdisciplinary forms o f expertise were thus necessary, chief am ong them the social sciences o f geography, eugenics, anthropology, contem porary history or political science, colonial adm inistration, and so on. O ne way to think o f the Journal o f Race Development/Journal of International Relations is that it was an early version o f w hat World Politics is today, spanning the overlapping fields we now call comparative, development, and interna­ tional studies. T he first two 1910-1911 and 1911-1912 volumes included arti­ cles on the “French Scheme o f Em pire in Africa,” the “Political Situation o f Finland,” the “Pacific Ocean in the Racial H istory o f M ankind,” “Islam as a Factor in W est African C ulture,” the “Indian N ational Congress,” “Turkey and the U nited States,” “Physical Environm ent as a Factor in the Present Condition o f Turkey,” the “Contribution o f the Negro to H um an Civilization,” “Constitution M aking in C hina,” “Japanese A dm inistration in Formosa,” “Bulgaria: T h e Dynamics in the Balkan Situation,” “Relations o f Japan and the U nited States,” the “Japanese in America,” “T he Future o f the Japanese in H awaii,” and the “Anglo-Saxon in India and the Philippines.” Two differences between World Politics and the Journal of Race Development/ Journal of International Relations are also important to keep in mind. World Politics, first published in 1948 under the auspices o f Yale’s Institute o f International Studies, reflects a different m om ent in American expansionism, a m om ent when issues o f European reconstruction and the cold war had moved to the top o f the research agendas o f a new generation of, m ost prominently, emigre theorists from Europe. T he world looked different to an earlier generation, w riting when American national imperialism was a project o f lim ited rather than lim ­ itless geographic scope. A second, less-marked difference is that where in World Politics one typically does not find articles on the domestic politics o f the U nited States as we now phrase it, in the Journal of Race Development/Journal of International Relations one did not find articles on the Anglo-Saxon race and its branches, but would find articles on the lower or undeveloped races, as was noted, on the “Japanese in America,” and on interracial relations, such as the “Anglo-Saxon in India and the Philippines.” W hen W orld W ar I erupted in 1914, the new field-in-form ation found its national imperialism perspective confirmed in the first structural accounts o f the war’s origins. O ne variant or another o f the war as outcome o f the “European system o f nationalism, imperialism, secret diplomacy and militarism which sprang into full bloom from 1870-1914,” reigned in A m erican “new” progres­ sive historians’ circles for the next decade (Novick 1988: 210). O ne o f the first and most im portant statements is D u Bois’s “African Roots o f W ar” (1915), which appeared in revised form as “H ands o f Ethiopia” in Darkwater (1920) where he turns seriously to study o f the world system. It appeared two years before Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lewis 1993:503—504).

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D u Bois ends his account w ith a prediction that if national elites continued to buy the allegiance o f white working classes through exploitation o f the periph­ ery, a new more brutal W ar o f the Color Line would follow. M any restatements o f this them e by others would follow in the years to come. A nother institution founded at the same time as the Journal of Race Development reinforced these trends and laid the ground for w hat only later will come to be known as area and international studies centers and institutes. A t Clark, Blakeslee began a regular series o f summer conferences— seven were held between 1909 and 1920— focused on different world areas. T he first dealt w ith Turkey and the N ear East. In subsequent years they studied Latin America, the Far East, and problems generated by the war in Europe. Papers at the conferences were then published in the journal. A fter the war, the series resumed, first in WiliamstQwn under the auspices o f the newly created Institute o f Politics at W illiam s College, and later at the University o f Chicago, under the auspices o f the Norm an W ait Harris M emorial Foundation. Chicago’s new Com m ittee on International Relations, led by Quincy W right, who also ran the foundation, would dom inate the intellectual horizon more generally by the 1930s. In N ew York, a mix o f millionaire lawyers, bankers, including M organ’s Thom as Lam ont, and professors w ho had served on W ilson’s Inquiry founded the Council o f Foreign Relations (C FR ) in 1921 and began publication o f the now famous quarterly journal Foreign Affairs in 1922. T h e trustees o f the finan­ cially strapped Clark University sold the Journal o f International Relations to the C FR . T h e links between the old and new journals were clear at first, as was originally intended by Archibald C ary Coolidge the new editor. Coolidge was H arvard’s first professor o f Russian history, a mem ber o f the Inquiry, and the m entor and close friend o f Blakeslee. H e lobbied for keeping the name to m aintain the connection w ith “Blakeslee’s magazine.” W hen council leaders looked for a more sellable title, Coolidge came up w ith American Quarterly Review. A nother Harvard man and founding member, the economics professorturned-editor o f the N ew York Post, Edwin Gay, said American Review of Foreign Affairs was better, which was ultimately shortened to Foreign Affairs. T he question o f the name aside, when it came time to develop a roster for the first issues, Coolidge turned to Blakeslee and others in the Cambridge-W orcesterW illiam stow n circuit, w ith Barnes w riting the first book reviews, followed by a second Clark professor. Blakeslee joined the new editorial board, and another Race Development editor, W . E. B. D u Bois, published the first of several famous Foreign Affairs articles in 1925.4 T he C F R itself became the vanguard o f the Atlanticist or Anglo-Saxon current in American internationalism . Certainly, the outlook o f this group resembled bondholders more than it did missionaries. Coolidge was frank about “the plutocrats” who steered it and who o f course had millions o f dollars more at stake in Europe than in the undeveloped areas, Mexico excepted.5

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The C F R ’s private study groups were modeled in part on the Clark-Williamstown area studies and foreign policy conferences, although they were intended as well to recreate the intensive atmosphere o f the Inquiry’s w ork at Versailles. In the study groups, even more than in Foreign Affairs, “Europe, especially Germany, stood at the center o f the Council’s thinking during the tw enties” (Schulzinger 1984:22). Six o f the council’s original eight study groups dealt w ith consequences o f W orld W ar I in Europe and a post-Versailles U.S. foreign policy. O ne dealt w ith the Far East and another w ith Latin America. N one dealt w ith the European colonies or the mandates created at Versailles. Virtually all post-W orld W ar II histories o f IR begin the story at this point, believing Foreign Affairs to be the field’s first journal and adopting the bankers’ view o f internationalism as the normative one. Thus, one data point anchors beliefs about Paris in 1919 as the galvanizing m om ent (rather than the gatherings o f activists and scholars at the Lake M ohonk Conferences, near New Paltz, beginning in the 1880s, devoted at first to Indian policy and gradually expanding to include “O th er D ependent People” o f the U nited States, to the Pan-A m erican Conferences, to the Berlin Conference, to the Universal Races Congress held in L ondon in 1911). Developm ent studies can be told as a story about models o f European reconstruction exported to L atin America. Em pire is made to disappear. A nd the central m yth o f a race-blind analytical tradition can continue to be propagated. Given the divisions that erupted at Versailles, the fierce domestic struggles over participation in the League o f Nations, the infamous Red and race scares at the war’s end, and, above all, the weight o f big finance in the new ventures, the shift from the missionary to the m onied view o f internationalism and, thus, away from race development in the first U.S. journal o f international relations across the 1920s and ’30s would seem to have been overdetermined. Such a shift did nothing to change the first paradigm o f the new field-in-form ation, which W oodrow W ilson him self advanced in the course o f the peace conference. “We, Anglo-Saxons, have our peculiar contribution to make towards the good of humanity in accordance w ith our special talents. T he League o f Nations will, I confidently hope, be dom inated by us Anglo-Saxons; it will be for the unques­ tionable benefit o f the w orld” (W alw orth 1986: 313). T he bankers and others attended to the business o f strengthening the bonds among the pan-A tlantic and -Pacific branches o f the race through w hat they called interdependence. U nder Coolidge’s direction, the revitalized journal advanced the intellectual project first mapped out in the campuses, clubs, and conference smokers along w hat we now think o f as the M ass Pike and 195 corridors. Coolidge solicited most o f the pieces for the journal. His student, the arch-racist Lothrop Stoddard, by then one o f the most popular writers in the country, was too expensive for the financially shaky Foreign Affairs.6 A young and unknown although prolific Harvard tutor such as Raymond Leslie Buell, teaching summer courses in IR in California, was much more eager to write for it, churning out pieces on oil

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interests and diplomacy and another one calling for civil rights for Japanese migrants in California, both o f w hich were rejected.7 Before leaving Cambridge for Africa, Buell had tried one more time to sell Coolidge on a piece for Foreign Affairs. H e proposed a piece analyzing the grave threat posed by growing numbers o f white settlers in Kenya. H e offered a critique o f present British colonial policy and argued that the Conservative governm ent was laying “the foundation in East Africa for the state o f affairs which exists in South Africa today.” But Coolidge turned him down once more, politely, arguing that it was not a topic o f much interest “to the majority o f our readers.”8 Coolidge remained quite concerned w ith the international race issues of the m om ent, notably, Pan-Asianism , and he collaborated with Blakeslee’s group in 1925 in organizing wljat became the Institute of Pacific Affairs, where he pressed for inclusion o f Pacific-bordering Latin American countries against “the danger o f a cat and dog fight between the Anglo-Saxon and the M ongolian.”9 Similarly, in 1927 he w anted council member and head o f the American Geographical Society Isaiah Bowman (another mem ber o f the Inquiry), to write up a precis o f the project he had launched w ith SSRC support on “Pioneer Belts,” that is, on the vital significance o f white settler movements in history.10 Coolidge’s biographer insists that the ideas o f Stoddard “and others like them ” were “flatly rejected, by Coolidge” citing such evidence as the lack o f cor­ respondence between the two men and the absence in Coolidge’s work o f a concern w ith Anglo-Saxonism (Byrnes 1982: 75-86). Nonetheless, as I have shown, there had been contact between them . A nd since Coolidge was a stu­ dent o f the Slavic race he was not apt to have much to contribute to AngloSaxonism theory, but he knew well enough who he was and w hat he stood for. H e held blacks to be an inferior race. H e was convinced that “cross-breeding” o f races was dangerous and advocated bans on Asian migration to the United States. Above all, he feared the likelihood o f a long-term decline in the white race globally and the rise o f colored races because o f different rates o f repro­ duction— which was the central them e in Stoddard’s work. W h a t distinguishes the two is Coolidge’s rejection o f the idea o f an inevitable clash o f civilizations. H e believed th at internationalism in the form o f empire and expansionism worked against such an outcome.

P r o g r e s s iv is t C u r r e n t s Progressives founded an alternative research and education organization to the C F R in N ew York in the 1920s, the Foreign Policy Association (FPA). Buell, the author o f International Relations, moved to M anhattan after two years o f field work in Africa (the first by a U.S. political scientist) to become research director

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in 1927. T h e FPA had grown out o f a study group, the Com m ittee on American Policy in International Relations, which began to meet in the sum m er o f 1918. Charles Beard designed a course for them th at focused on the nature and extent o f future racial antagonisms, control o f international waterways, the sta­ tus o f backward countries, control o f natural resources, the place o f nationality in world organizations, and, finally, the idea o f a League o f N ations.11 By the m id-1920s a research departm ent had been set up and the first o f many local branch organizations were built, although we now know them as the W orld Affairs Councils. O ne o f the first projects funded by the FPA was a study o f the “policy and operation o f the League o f Nations w ith respect to African peoples,” which sent Alain Locke to Geneva in the summer o f 1927. Locke was a forty-threeyear-old professor o f philosophy at Howard who had just published the remark­ able N ew Negro, the book that nam ed the “H arlem Renaissance” and situated this m om ent o f racial awakening “on a national and perhaps even a world scale.” H e argued for comparing H arlem to “those nascent movements o f folkexpression and self-determ ination which are playing a creative part in the world to-day.... As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence o f a people” (Locke 1992: xxvii). T h e N ew Negro ends w ith a revised version o f “W orlds o f Color,” the essay that D u Bois had just published in Foreign Affairs. Essentially, Locke was pursuing the research program D u Bois lays out at the conclusion o f the New Negro\ T h e Labor Problem in the “trem endous and increasingly intricate world-em bracing industrial machine th at our civilization has built” and its relationship to the Color Problem. “But despite our concern and good will, is it not possible that in its consideration our research is not directed to the vital spots geographically?” (Locke 1992: 385). Locke had proposed to go beyond the question o f the political adminis­ tration o f the mandates to study the labor and education policies and their impact on native peoples. Locke argued for funding on the grounds that the results would be o f particular interest to African Americans, and could serve as the basis for future FPA outreach efforts, because o f “their relationship to the African peoples under mandate control and because o f similarity o f some o f the problems to those o f race relations in the U S.” Buell had m et Locke, discussed the project with him, and loaned him sections o f his soon-to-be-published two volumes on the m andate system in Africa. A year later, he would tell the FPA board that Locke’s work was not fit for publication.12 D id Buell know that Coolidge said the same about him? T he apogee o f this progressivist and social gospel-inflected two decades in American international studies that W illiam T. R. Fox and other cold war W higs would later lam ent (“the inter-w ar period saw international govern­ m ent and various ‘devil’ theories o f international relations— w ith m unitionsmakers, imperialists and capitalists variously cast as devils— flourish”) is found

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in the creation o f the Institute o f Pacific Relations. T he IP R is actually the first formal regional studies center in the U nited States. Businessmen, educators, and disciples o f the Y M C A in H onolulu founded it in Hawaii in 1925. Led by James Carter, it was set up to “study the conditions o f the Pacific peoples” using the “Y M C A idea of bringing leaders o f different racial communities together for frank discussions o f differences” (Thom as 1974: 3-4; Rosenberg 1982: 110; H ooper 1993). M em bership was composed o f various national councils (United States, Canada, Australia, N ew Zealand, China, and Japan), which partially supported the secretariat, and members convened in a biannual series o f conferences. T he U.S. national council, the Am erican Institute o f Pacific Relations, dom inated the organization, and the secretariat was moved to New York in 1930. O w en Lattim ore at Johns Hopkins became editor o f the insti­ tute’s journal Asian Affairs, ajid the IP R grew into the preem inent research organization on East Asia, supported by Blakeslee, W right, and dozens of other IR scholars. T he Social Science Research Council’s first Advisory Com m ittee on International Relations was established in 1926, according to its first staff member, James T. Shotwell, “in order to deal w ith the projects o f research pre­ sented to it by the Institute o f Pacific Relations. By reason o f these requests, the earliest program o f the SSRC in this field had to do w ith relations w ith the O rient.”13 W riting in World Politics in 1949, W illiam T. R. Fox was either igno­ rant o f the history or convinced that his understanding o f the field was the only true one because he claimed as a sign o f its early “confused” state that the SSR C ’s comm ittee was funding research on land use patterns in the Far East.” (Fox 1968: 6). I would argue th at we instead see the continuation o f a clear and by then twenty-year-old research program in race development. T he IP R model, an original form o f the boundary-crossing Indian Ocean, Pacific Rim, A tlantic W orld approach we saw take off in the 1990s, reflected the intense interests in im migration issues, race conflicts, white settler move­ ments, and so on through the interwar years. Shotwell, a professor o f political science at Columbia and a director o f the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had tried but failed to secure funding for a parallel Institute o f A tlantic Affairs (Josephson 1975: 188-91). T h e SSR C ’s IR committee secured some resources in the 1930s for research on Latin America in support o f institutions such as the new Institute o f Inter-A m erican Affairs at the University o f Florida, but another early effort o f the com m ittee to organize an IP R clone for Central and Eastern Europe also failed for lack o f funding. A lthough never discussed w ithin this context, the creation in 1937 o f the International Com m ittee on African Affairs (later the African Affairs Council) was another effort at building an IP R -type institute, dedicated in this case to the cause o f decolonization and to educating the U.S. public on Africa. Its founder, M ax Yergan, had spent twenty years in the Y M C A m ovement in South Africa. T he council brought together white progressives such as Buell and

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M ary Van Kleeck, who headed the research arm o f the Russell Sage Foundation, and black scholars and activists such as Ralph Bunche, M ordecai Johnson (president o f H ow ard University), and, more controversially, Paul Robeson. T he organization’s rapidly evolving left-w ing identity (“radical, black-led, and interracial”) left Yergan searching in vain for established foundation support. Com m unists in the leadership ranks drove out people such as Buell and took the C A A down the road th at led, as w ith the IP R , to governm ent harrassm ent and collapse (Lynch 1978:17; Von Eschen 1997). D uring and ju st after W orld W ar II there were at least two more attem pts to build IPR -like programs. T h e first, sponsored by the Princeton-based American Com m ittee for International Studies, which also included Carter, the IP R head, began planning for a Conference on A tlantic Relations in 1941. T he organizers also clashed over the design. Progressives such as C arter and Quincy W right pressed for inclusion o f representatives from the entire A tlantic world, including Brazil, the Caribbean, and Africa, but they also had a fallback position. Howard University’s Ralph Bunche, the African A m erican political scientist who had recent field w ork experience and expertise in colonial poli­ cies, could represent the A tlantic dependencies. T hey lost this battle, unfortu­ nately. Raymond Leslie Buell, by then editor o f Fortune magazine, continued to press for inclusion o f African American intellectuals such as Bunche and his Howard colleague Rayford Logan in the wartim e planning w ork o f the com­ m ittee.14 H e failed to move the Princeton group as well, and the “N orth A tlantic” became the organizing framework and took on the peculiar cast that we associate w ith the early cold war era. Melville Herskovits’s correspondence w ith Carnegie in the 1940s and Ford in the 1950s for a Black A tlantic-m odel o f combined “African and A froAmerican Studies” program at N orthw estern University is a final example o f the old progressivist current in American international race/relations/studies. T he documents were unearthed in the 1990s by Jane Guyer, who, given the now familiar story about the founding o f area studies after W orld W ar II and the relative insignificance o f Africa to it, depicts Herskovits as an exception, “who did not support the area studies m odel” but instead was proposing a model that “reflected a disciplinary rather than a political division o f the world” (Guyer 1998). As we have seen, however, forty years earlier his teacher, Boas, had pio­ neered a new, interdisciplinary and quite explicitly political enterprise at the dawn o f the twentieth century, to which Herskovits’s thinking owed a great deal, obviously. International relations in America placed great emphasis originally on Africa and Asia as part o f a “new” racial world order o f increasing complex­ ity, interaction, simultaneous fragm entation and integration, and above all interdependence. As Buell and others taught, complex interdependence had brought a host o f new policy issues to the fore, for which the old, Europeanfocused international legal theories and antiquo-historiography provided little

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guidance. These problems included drug trafficking, white slavery, the envi­ ronm ent as a factor in future colonization projects, and miscegenation or, in other words, the “race question,” as Lord Zim m ern had put it in 1926.

C o n c l u s io n M uch remains to be done before we can claim to understand the history o f international relations in America. There were two unstable boundary lines at play in the scholarship o f the interwar era— between states and between races— but I have no good account yet o f the way this is worked out. A few international relations scholars in the 1930s adopted the position that M yrdal would in 1944. T hey depicted, racism as an atavistic, irrational prejudice found mainly in the traditions o f lower-educated whites o f the backward areas o f the deep South, and, somewhat contradictorily, in the books on everyone’s IR read­ ing lists that represented the products o f pseudoscientific apologists for hierar­ chy. A few others, beginning w ith Ralph Bunche, identified racism as a world capitalist class strategy o f divide and rule. These liberal and M arxian counter­ arguments notw ithstanding, racialism in theory and practice can be traced across the divide o f the war. Enough is known to be confident that practitioners are unreliable guides to the history o f international relations, for a num ber o f reasons. T he one I want to highlight is the line they continue to draw that ostensibly defines a unique dom ain o f expertise. T hus, where in the Journal o f Race Development/Journal of International Relations one did not find articles on the Anglo-Saxon race and its branches, so in World Politics and every other international studies journal today one does not find articles on the domestic politics and culture o f the U nited States. W e sustain the fiction o f occupying a position outside culture from w hich we observe the social world. H ere the postcolonial studies critique matters a great deal. T his blind spot in our definition o f the field will be hard to overcome.

N otes Author’s Note: This chapter is based on ongoing research in the private papers o f scholars (Blakeslee, Buell, Corwin, Curti, Friedrich, Merriam, Reinsch, Wright) and institutions (Foreign Policy Association, Council on Foreign Relations) from about 1900-1960.1 am grateful for criticisms or ideas suggested by Lee Baker, Tom Bierstecker, Cathy Boone, Fred Cooper, Bryan Coutain, Neta Crawford, Lee Ann Fujii, Avery Goldstein, Jane Gordon, Debi Harrold, Steve Heydemann John Ikenberry, John Isacoff, Janice Mattern, Anne Norton, Ido Oren, Paul Wapner, David Rousseau, Nicole Sackley, Brian Schmidt, Rogers Smith, Ed Webb, Wes Widmaier, and Kent Worcester. Four scholars, Kevin Gaines, Janette Greenwood, Vicky Hattam, and

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Adolph Reed Jr., took on the added formal burden o f reeducation. The American Political Science Association, Clark University’s Provost’s Office and Higgins School o f the Humanities, and U. Penn’s Christopher Browne Center for International Politics all provided research funds, for which I am grateful. A fellowship from the SSRCMacArthur International Peace and Security Program bought me the time to begin this essay and finish its companion piece, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture.” 1. Buell 1929. The volume was part o f the prestigious American Political Science Series, edited by Edward Corwin (1878-1963), the constitutional law scholar hired by Woodrow W ilson at Princeton who assumed W ilson’s chair, the M cCormick Professor o f Jurisprudence, in 1918. Buell (1896-1946) studied with Corwin, and taught at Occidental and Harvard. His textbook was one o f approximately ten such works pub­ lished in the period 1916-1925. Only one other was by an American, and Buell’s is also the only one written from the emerging American social science perspective, “from the viewpoint o f political science— to begin where international law leaves off. The hypoth­ esis upon which I have proceeded is that a field o f international relations exists which is almost as distinct from international law as the study o f American government is from constitutional law” (vii). The text was also the only one to be reprinted in the decade. See Groom (1991: 80,130). 2. See in particular Gunnell (1993:9-13) and his student Schmidt (1998: 32-39). One might reconsider the adequacy o f the “internalist” method, centrally concerned with recovering “older identities” (Schmidt 1998: 10) and yet unable to parse white supremacy in the extended disciplinary conversation among the leading theorists o f the Herrenvolk democracy and Jim Crow empire. 3. The Institute for International Education commissioned a model syllabus that might encourage the creation o f courses on international relations on more American college campuses. M oon worked in consultation with other Columbia faculty and Isaiah Bowman, director o f the American Geographical Society. Three shorter and longer versions o f the basic course o f study were developed. The published syllabus includes lists o f popular and academic texts, which provide a useful guide to the intel­ lectual savior-faire o f the time. I draw attention to the Syllabus in anticipation o f the objection that Buell’s text was possibly not representative o f the ideas that actually formed the emerging core o f the field. 4. For the history detailed here I have relied on the correspondence between Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Blakeslee, Box 8, and between Armstrong and Coolidge, Box 2, Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers, 1893-1973, M C 0 0 2 , Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. Armstrong, a journalist, was managing editor under Coolidge and, after the latter’s death in 1928, Foreign A ffair’s editor for the next forty years. 5. For his description o f the “plutocratic character” o f the council see Coolidge to Armstrong, Sept 9,1922, Box 17, Armstrong Papers. 6. “Lothrop Stoddard called in on me yesterday pretty well satisfied with the world in general and with his own fortunes in particular. H e referred with good natured tolerance to Barnes’s criticism on his book. H e is going to Europe and is to write twelve articles for the Saturday Evening Post for which he will received $1,000 a piece. That

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shows the financial competition that we are up against.” Coolidge to Armstrong, Nov 2, 1922, Box 17, Armstrong Papers. 7. See Coolidge to Armstrong, Dec 9 and 11,1922, in Box 17, and June 13 and 14,1923 in Box 18; and Buell to Coolidge, N ov 15,1922 and April 12,1923, in Box 21, Armstrong Papers. Armstrong complained that Buell was uncomfortable writing, and when Coolidge corrected him, since Buell had already published a book on the Washington Disarmament Conference (his dissertation) and another on Contemporary French Politics, the critique was changed to that he published too much. Nonetheless, I would guess that Buell’s reading o f the world, close to that o f the Nation in the 1920s, was not wel­ comed at FA in this period. 8. Buell to Coolidge, Sept 1,1927, and Coolidge to Buell, N ov 4 ,1927, Box 21, Armstrong Papers. 9. Coolidge to Blakeslee, J^in 23,1925, and Blakeslee to Coolidge, D ec 17,1926, Box 21, Armstrong Papers. 10. “A highly interesting as well as important subject. It also seems to me a many sided one, and as you are a many sided person, I am wondering whether you could not be persuaded to take one particular side for our benefit.... Pioneer Belts have played a great role in history.... Their role is not over today, as you can point out.” Coolidge to Bowman, April 5,1927, Armstrong Papers. See as well Bowman 1927. 11. Edwin Bjorkman “The League o f Free Nations Association o f the United States,” ms., FPA, Board Minutes and other Official Records o f the Executive Committee, N ew York, Microfilm Reel 1, Foreign Policy Association Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton N ew Jersey. 12. For Locke’s proposal, see “Memorandum; Foreign Policy Association: Alain Locke re African Mandates Study Project” n.d. [1927]; for Buell’s rejection o f the final report, see Minutes o f M eeting o f Board o f Directors, NY, Nov 14, 1928, p. 6, micro­ film reel 1, FPA Papers. 13. See “A Preliminary Draft o f a Survey o f the Study o f International Relations in the United States,” prepared in connection with the Program o f Research in International Relations o f the SSRC under the direction o f Dr. James T. Shotwell, June 1933, p. 20, Box 133, Folder 7, Charles E. Merriam Papers, Regenstein Library, University o f Chicago. 14. “Confidentially, they feel somewhat offended that they have been over­ looked. I believe they should be included in their own right; also because the Negro population o f this country holds the political balance o f power in many Northern states, and is now torn between traditional hostility against Britain and a growing fear o f the consequences o f Fascism to the American Negro. I certainly hope they can be included in any work o f the American Coordinating Committee.” Buell to Edward M. Earle, April 15,1941, Box 2, Folder 5, Quincy Wright Papers.

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