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

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The Oxford Handbook of

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THE OXFOR D H A NDBOOK S OF

INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS General Editors

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

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

The Oxford Handbook of

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Edited by

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

Contents xi

List of Contributors 



PA RT I   I N T RODU C T ION

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



3

PA RT I I   R E A DI N G S

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

21

3. Historical Realism Michael C. Williams

35

4. Liberal Progressivism and International History Lucian M. Ashworth

49

5. Historical Sociology in International Relations Maïa Pal

63

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

79

7. International Relations and Intellectual History Duncan Bell

94

8. Gender, History, and International Relations Laura Sjoberg

111

9. Postcolonial Histories of International Relations Zeynep Gulsah Capan

125

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

137

viii   Contents

11. Global Sources of International Thought Chen Yudan



155

PA RT I I I   P R AC T IC E S

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

173

13. Diplomacy Linda Frey and Marsha Frey

188

14. Empire Martin J. Bayly

202

15. Barbarism and Civilization Yongjin Zhang

218

16. Race and Racism Nivi manchanda

233

17. Religion, History, and International Relations Cecelia Lynch

249

18. Human Rights Andrea Paras

262

19. The Diplomacy of Genocide A. Dirk Moses

277

20. War and History in World Politics Tarak Barkawi

292

21. Nationalism James Mayall

306

22. Interpolity Law Lauren Benton

320

23. Regulating Commerce Eric Helleiner

334

2 4. Development Corinna R. Unger

348

Contents   ix

25. Governing Finance Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young

363

2 6. Revolution Eric Selbin

379



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

27. The ‘Premodern’ World Julia Costa Lopez

395

28. Modernity and Modernities in International Relations Ayşe Zarakol

410

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

424

3 0. The Eighteenth Century Daniel Gordon

439

31. The Long Nineteenth Century Quentin Bruneau

454

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

469

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

483

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

499

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



513

PA RT V   M OM E N T S

36. The Fall of Constantinople Jonathan Harris

531

37. The Peace of Westphalia Andrew Phillips

544

x   Contents

38. The Seven Years’ War Karl Schweizer

560

39. The Haitian Revolution Musab Younis

573

40. The Congress of Vienna Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg

587

41. The Revolutions of 1848 Daniel M. Green

602

42. The Indian Uprising of 1857 Alexander E. Davis

617

43. The Berlin and Hague Conferences Claire Vergerio

631

44. The First World War and Versailles Duncan Kelly

646

45. Sykes–​Picot Megan Donaldson

660

46. World War Two and San Francisco Daniel Gorman

675

47. The Bandung Conference Christopher J. Lee

690

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

705



PA RT V I   C ON C LU SION

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

723

Index

741

List of Contributors

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

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

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

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

PA RT I

I N T RODU C T ION

Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PA RT I I

R E A DI N G S

chapter 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 3

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

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Realism   39

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

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

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

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

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

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

42   Michael C. Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

46   Michael C. Williams

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

54   Lucian M. Ashworth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 5

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

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

Historical Sociology in IR    65

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Sociology in IR    71

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

84    George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chapter 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

104   Duncan Bell

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

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

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chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

118   Laura Sjoberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chapter 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chapter 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pa rt I I I

P R AC T IC E S

chapter 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty    183

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

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chapter 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chapter 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbarism and Civilization    227

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 16

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

Lisa Lowe (2015, 7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

244   Nivi Manchanda

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 17

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

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

Religion, History, and IR    251

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chapter 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

human Rights   275

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chapter 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

286   A. Dirk Moses concurred. The latter concluded that the Nigerians were not like Nazis and the Igbos not akin to Jews. Indeed, critics of Biafran strategy and its international supporters pointed out that prolonging Biafran resistance and the war exacerbated civilian casualties: the conflict was a civil war rather than a genocide (Moses and Heerten 2018). When Western client states killed millions of civilians, like Indonesia in 1965, they too would be shielded from genocide accusations. This situation changed briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The military conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and in the Balkans occurred when fleeting moments o